Merlin remembered King Henry, so full of strange potions and drinks he sometimes had trouble standing and often couldn’t remember who Merlin was.
The young wizard had tried not to show how bedazzled he was by the magic of that court, lights that came and went with the wave of a hand, cold air that seeped out of walls to cool a kingdom where it was always hot outdoors, unseen musicians who beat drums, sang, played harps of incredible variety through the day and night without tiring.
The king’s entourage was so amazed by Merlin’s spells of invisibility and the way he could turn them into frogs and back into courtiers that they lost any interest in their monarch and flocked around him.
They persuaded Merlin to surrender his own rough robes and gave him shorts, Tshirts, and soft shoes like everyone else in the kingdom. He had never worn clothes with legs or felt fabric as light.
All he knew for certain was that he didn’t want to return to the Crystal Cave and the Hermit. He spent some amazing days and light-filled nights in the court of 2159.
Victoria, everyone agreed, seemed more cheerful since the appearance of her strange relative. The two of them took walks together and he showed her nixies riding in on the morning waves and sprites dancing by moonlight. He turned her pug dog into a trained bear and turned it back again.
Merlin didn’t understand this world in which palaces and castles all looked utterly indefensible, ruins had been built just to be ruins, and the queen’s knights seemed an unlikely band of warriors without a missing eye or gouged out nose among them.
On their walks Victoria sometimes ran on about wanting to create a court full of art and poetry like King Arthur at Camelot. It amazed her that he understood none of this. So she told him the bits and pieces she had learned over the years about the Badon Oath and Arthur’s kingdom. The young mage was fascinated.
Once she made Merlin sit through a chamber music concert and talked afterward about “The melodies of the wonderful Herr Mendelssohn to whom I could listen forever.” He told her about the court of her descendent Henry X where invisible musicians played all day and all night.
He could have told her more about the future of her kingdom, but out of respect and even affection he never much mentioned her descendant. Never described seeing King Henry in a false crown, armor, and broadsword quaff “Royal English Ale” from a horn cup and signify his approval. Never said how he’d sampled the ale and found it so vile he spat it out.
When he finished that endorsement, the king had turned and seen the shocked expression on young Merlin’s face. He said, “I’m the last, you know. I’m preserved in so many formats that they’ll never need another king for their ads. I’ve no children that I know of and no one is interested in succeeding me. I’m sorry I let you see all this.” He started to cry great drunken tears.
Merlin walked away as quickly as he could. He strode into the room where his majesty’s greatest promotional moments played on a screen. He didn’t know where he was going but he headed for a door and the blazing-hot outdoors.
When some of his majesty’s courtiers tried to stop him he froze them in place with a spell. At that moment of his magic Victoria’s summons rescued him.
For that and her stories he would always be grateful. But he was young, male, and a wizard and this was a queen’s court with many young women attached to it.
Merlin had a fine rumpus of a rendezvous in a linen closet with an apprentice maid of the wardrobe and another more leisurely meeting with a young lady-in-waiting in her chamber.
Spells to blank the memories of passersby didn’t quite dispel the stories. The queen steadfastly refused to hear this gossip.
But she understood how keeping him there was as unnatural as imprisoning a wild animal. She ordered certain clothing to be made. One day Merlin returned to his rooms and found on the bed robes and a cloak with the moon in all its phases and fine leather boots like the ones her majesty had noticed older Merlin’s wearing.
The youth had never seen anything so splendid. He changed and went to her private rooms where she was waiting. “Sir Merlin, you have fulfilled and more the tasks for which you were summoned,” she said and he saw how hard this was for her. “You are dismissed with our thanks and the certainty we will meet again.”
Merlin bowed low. And before the royal tears came, or his own could start, he found himself hurtling backward through the centuries to the hermit Galapas and the Crystal Cave.
Merlin didn’t linger there but immediately set out across Wales, finding within himself the magic to cover miles in minutes. One story Victoria had told was of a king trying to build a castle before his enemies were upon him.
Each day the walls would be raised and each night they would be thrown down. All were in despair until a bold youth in a cloak of moons appeared. He tamed two dragons that fought every night in the caves below the castle and made the walls collapse. Merlin knew he was that youth.
4.
“Queen Victoria,” a commentator said at her Golden Jubilee, “inherited a Britain linked by stagecoach and reigned in a Britain that ran on rails. She ruled over a quarter of the globe and a quarter of its people.”
At Balmoral Castle in the Highlands late in her reign the queen went into high mourning because a gamekeeper, John Brown, had died.
“Mrs. Brown mourns dead husband,” was how a scurrilous underground London sheet put it.
In fact, Brown, belligerent, hard-drinking, and rude to every person at court except her majesty, was the only one on Earth who spoke to her as one human being to another.
He died unmourned by anyone but the queen. But she mourned him extravagantly. Memorial plaques were installed; statuettes were manufactured.
He was gone but the court’s relief was short-lived. To commemorate becoming Empress of India, Victoria imported servants from the subcontinent. Among them was Abdul Karim who taught her a few words of Hindi. For this the queen called him “the Munshi” or teacher and appointed him her private secretary.
Soon the Munshi was brought along to state occasions, allowed to handle secret government reports, introduced to foreign dignitaries. He engaged in minor intrigue and told her majesty nasty stories about his fellow servants.
The entire court wished the simple, straightforward Mr. Brown was back. Victoria’s children, many well into middle age, found the Munshi appalling. The government worried about its state secrets.
“Indian cobra in queen’s parlor,” the slander sheets proclaimed.
The queen would hear nothing against him. But she knew he wasn’t what she wanted.
“Oh the cruelty of young women and the folly of old men,” Merlin cried as he paced the floor in the tower of glass that was his prison cell.
Nimue the enchantress who beguiled his declining years had turned against him, used the skills he’d taught her to imprison him.
When he was a boy, Queen Victoria had told him about King Uther Pendragon, whose castle walls collapsed each night. Solving that, young Merlin won the confidence of Pendragon. The birth of the king’s son Arthur, hiding the infant from usurpers, the sword in the stone, the kingdom of Britain, and all the rest had followed from that.
But Victoria never told Merlin about Nimue. She thought it too sad.
“Sired by an incubus, baptized in church, tamer of dragons, advisor to kings, I am a cambion turned into a cuckold,” he wailed.
Most of his magic had deserted him. He hadn’t even enough to free himself. Still he did little spells, turned visiting moths into butterflies, made his slippers disappear and reappear. Merlin knew he had a reason for doing this but couldn’t always remember what it was.
Then one morning while making magic he found himself whisked from the tower and summoned to a room crammed full of tartan pillows and with claymore swords hung on the walls as decoration. Music played in the next room and an old lady in black looked at him kindly.
The slump of his shoulders, the unsteadiness of his stance, led the Queen of England, the Empress of Ind
ia, to rise and lead him over to sit on the divan next to her.
“That music you hear is a string quartet playing a reduction of Herr Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish Symphony,’ ” she said. “Musicians are on call throughout my waking hours. You told me long ago this was how things were arranged at the Royal Court in 2159.”
It was a brisk day and they drank mulled wine. “The sovereign of Britain requires a wizard to attend Her,” she said, “for a period of time which She shall determine.”
Merlin realized he was rescued. And when the Munshi walked into the room unannounced, the Wizard stood to his full height. Seeing a white-bearded man with flashing eyes and sparks darting from his hands, the Munshi fled.
Everyone at Balmoral marveled at the day her majesty put aside her secretary and gave orders that he was not to approach her. All wondered if someone else had taken his place but no evidence of that could ever be found.
People talked about the eccentricities of Queen Victoria’s last years: the seat next to hers that she insisted always be kept empty in carriages, railroad cars, at state dinners, the rooms next to hers that must never be entered.
At times the queen would send all the ladies and servants away from her chambers and not let them in until next morning.
Some at court hinted that all this had shaded over into madness and attributed it to heredity. Most thought it was just old age, harmless and in its way charmingly human.
In fact a few members of her court did see things out of the corners of their eyes. Merlin could conjure invisibility but his concentration was no longer perfect.
Her majesty walking over the gorse at Balmoral in twilight, on the shore on a misty day at Osborne, in the corridors of Windsor Castle would suddenly be accompanied by a cloaked figure with a white beard and long white hair. When the viewer looked again he would have disappeared.
She talked to Merlin about their prior meetings and how she cherished each of them. The wizard would once have sneered at the picturesque ruins and the undefendable faux castles that dotted the landscape near any royal residence. Now he understood they had been built in tribute to the sage who’d saved the young princess, the handsome magician who had helped choose her husband, the quicksilver youth of her widowhood.
When she finally became very ill at Windsor, Queen Victoria had ruled for more than sixty years. Merlin remembered that this was the time when she would die.
He stayed with her, put in her mind the things he knew she found pleasing, summoned up music only she could hear. He wondered if, when she was gone, he would be returned to Nimue and the tower.
“She assumed the throne in the era of Sir Walter Scott and her reign has lasted into the century of Mr. H. G. Wells,” the Times of London said.
In the last days when her family came to see her, Victoria had the glass with the parchment inside it under her covers. Merlin stood in a corner and was visible only to the queen.
When her son who would be Edward VII appeared, Merlin shook his head. This man would never summon him. It was the same with her grandson who would be George V.
A great-grandchild, a younger son who stammered, was brought in with his brothers. Merlin nodded: this one would summon him to London decades later when hellfire fell from the skies.
The boy was called back after he and his brothers had left, was given the parchment, and shown how to hide it.
“You are my last and only friend,” Victoria told Merlin. He held her hands when she died and felt grief for the first time in his life. But he wasn’t returned to his glass prison.
Uninvited, invisible, utterly alone at the funeral, he followed the caisson that bore the coffin through the streets of Windsor, carried the only friend he’d ever had to the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore.
“We say of certain people, ‘She was a woman of her time,’ ” an orator proclaimed. “But of how many can it be said that the span of their years, the time in which they lived, will be named for them?”
“A bit of her is inside each one of us,” said a woman watching the cortege. “And that I suppose is what a legend is.”
In the winter twilight with snow on the ground, Merlin stood outside the mausoleum. “I don’t want to transfer my mind and soul to another human or beast, and I won’t risk using that magic and getting summoned. There’s no other monarch I wish to serve.”
He remembered the Hermit of the Crystal Cave. Old Galapas hadn’t been much of a teacher, but Merlin had learned the Wizard’s Last Spell from him. It was simple enough and he hadn’t forgotten.
Merlin invoked it and those who had lingered in the winter dusk saw for a moment a figure with white hair and beard, wearing robes with the moon in all its phases.
The old wizard waved a wand, shimmered for a moment, then appeared to shatter. In the growing dark what seemed like tiny stars flew over the mausoleum, over Windsor, over Britain and all the world.
Sleep of Reason
Halli Villegas
Allison wondered if she had enough time to phone Owen before lunch. She stared at the picture of the two of them pinned above her phone, right under the Anne Traynor card that said Domestically Disabled. This is my kingdom, she thought, where she kept her heels under the desk in case she had to go into a meeting, and where a locked drawer held granola bars, a hairbrush, and an extra pair of nylons, just as recommended in Marie Claire. Allison hated granola bars and the nylons were seconds from Winners that she had thought were basic black, but turned out to be black with a sheer lace pattern and no control top. She’d never wear them. No, she decided, stuffing her paperback into her purse, she’d call Owen when she got back from lunch, or on her cell after she ate, depending on how energetic she felt. At the block of elevators Janey Joon was standing there, Janey had pushed the down button, but Allison gave it another push for good measure.
“Hey, Allison, how’s it going?” Janey asked in a dispirited way. Her team had just lost the Kellogg’s account, a really important account, so now Janey had to work on the Depends account, which was in no way as sexy as the Kellogg’s account which had meant free cereal and breakfast bars in the break room. No one wanted free Depends.
“Busy. Are you going into that meeting in Superstar this afternoon?”
“No.” Janey paused and looked at Allison mournfully. “Team leaders only.”
The elevator doors pinged open and Allison felt a little guilty because she had forgotten that Janey was not a team leader. Allison hadn’t really meant to remind Janey that she, Allison, was a team leader, of the newly formed digital team, which was handling all digital media accounts, she felt bad if it had been seen that way. But in another way she didn’t really feel bad because Allison believed that Asian women had it easier, and Janey with her perfect black hair, and flat stomach was no exception. Janey had had a meteoric rise until the Kellogg’s debacle. Everyone always thought that Asian women were smarter, something about the eyes. Allison suspected thinking like this made her a racist, but she never said anything out loud, so maybe it didn’t count.
On the elevator both Allison and Janey busied themselves reading text messages real or nonexistent. When they got to the lower level where the food court and shops were, they went opposite directions. Usually Allison went to lunch with one or two other people from the office. Sometimes they went to the Italian restaurant across the street and had a naughty glass of wine with their pasta and talked too loudly, but today she was having her lunch a lot later then usual. As a new team leader she had all sorts of responsibilities that hadn’t been there before.
She waited in line at Starbucks for her venti latte and one of those yogurt things with granola in the plastic cup. She stared at the white and green logo. What or who was that image with the implacable eyes, the flowing hair, and the star on her forehead? From an advertising perspective Allison wondered what it symbolized and tried to think about how it was affecting her and her desire for a coffee.
“Nice shoes.”
Allison turned around. There was a man sitting a
t a table near where she was in line. Was he talking to her? She looked down at her shoes to see which ones she was wearing. They were her red suede wedges, they were nice shoes. They were sexy shoes. She looked up at him and he was smiling at her. He had been talking to her. Allison wondered how she had missed him when she came in. The man was so handsome it was almost ridiculous. Dark hair, blue eyes, white shirt with the sleeves rolled up over the forearms and black suspenders. Who wore suspenders in this day and age? Allison smiled at him. The line moved forward, she threw off what she hoped was a nonchalant “thanks” and turned back around. God, he was gorgeous. She debated whether or not to turn around again, to look at him once more. No, too desperate, hey wait, she wasn’t desperate, she had a boyfriend, in fact maybe she would call Owen right now. She turned so that she could see the man under the guise of getting the best light for her contact list. The man was still sitting at the table, staring moodily out of the window. His profile was amazing.
She started scanning her list, squinting as if she was having trouble seeing it, looking up occasionally as if to remember the number. The man was looking directly at her now. He smiled once more—his teeth were so white, and there was a dimple that flicked in and out. And then he winked at her. Allison smiled back again, blushing at the little flame of desire that had leapt up when he winked, and turned to face the wide suited shoulders of the man in line ahead of her. Then she pretended to check the heel on her shoe. The man was still there, still watching her. She tossed her hair. What would she say to him when she got out of line? Would he approach her? She needed a clever funny approach, quick. The damn efficient baristas had gotten through the line already and Allison was up. Why couldn’t she come up with a goddamn quip? She ordered her latte and her yogurt, and came out of line pretending not to look. She glanced up, smiling and the man, the beautiful man, was gone. Gone. How had he left, thrown out his cup, and made it out the door without her noticing?
All day in the office she thought about the man, even through the meeting, which she allowed Aaron the web geek to lead because she was the team leader and could do things like that. It was called empowering your team members. She wondered how to find the man again. Maybe he would be back in Starbucks tomorrow. What had the suspenders been about? She bet he was a waiter, she hadn’t seen a suit jacket. Well, she would look in all the local restaurants. Maybe he owned a restaurant. That was more likely. But wouldn’t you get coffee in your own restaurant in that case? Some people were addicted to Starbucks, she’d heard they put something in the coffee, or was that Tim Hortons?
Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction Page 15