by Lavie Tidhar
They’ve come down to watch. Pellinore gives Merlin a reproachful sideway glance.
‘After this, me and the old girl were thinking of retiring. All this questing, it’s hard on the knees.’
The Questing Beast croons affectionately. The sound, terrible as it is, does not even distract the watchers from the final fight.
‘Oh? Where to? Somewhere nice?’
‘Ever hear of a place called Avalon? They say the air is good there and the hot springs are most conducive to one’s health.’
Merlin shakes his head. ‘Sounds good,’ he says distractedly.
He watches the two men fight. He and the other fae can taste the power arcing through the air here. It’s like a cocktail, an intoxicating scent and taste and tingle all rolled into one. They’re getting high on it. Arthur’s weakening, though he doesn’t outwardly show it. It’s only really there in the slight tightening round his shoulders.
But Mordred, too, is slowing down. He’s ill-accustomed to this type and length of battle. He has been trained, but this is the sort of street fighting as they do in Londinium, and the only rule is that two men go in and only one can come out.
He’s tiring.
And slash and hack and stab and hurt.
Mordred stares in horror at the blood dripping onto his hands. Excalibur has slashed him savagely across the left side of the face, cutting through skin to expose the bones beneath. What is a man? How does this thing, a skeleton clothed in blood and skin, move and live and think? It’s so improbable.
They fight back and forth; back and forth.
When it finally ends, it happens quickly. At first the onlookers don’t even register. There’s a surprised look in Mordred’s young eyes. He sits down, heavily, on his ass, and his booted legs stretch out in front of him.
The sword, Excalibur, sticks out of his ruptured stomach.
It’s gone right through, and to the other side.
‘Fuck you, Dad—’
Then the light of reason in his eyes fades. Whatever mystery takes place in that moment, that cessation – it happens. The heart stops beating and the pain is gone and the brain no longer thinks or feels or knows. There’s nothing so very miraculous about it all. And as for souls? Try catching those like butterflies in your net. Merlins can taste power; but when something dies it’s just… no more.
Arthur pulls out the sword, bloodied with the other’s guts. He stares around him, bewildered. It’s so very quiet on the plain of Camlann then. The wind has picked up and it ruffles his short-cropped hair. Somewhere in the distance, a gull cries. On the edge of the battlefield, far away, someone sobs.
Arthur turns and turns. He looks at them all: Merlin and Lancelot and Kay, Agravain of the Hard Hand, the Questing Beast. He stares at the Ladies of Water and the ladies stare back at him.
He looks around him at the battlefield, and what remains: dead men, dead horses, fallen swords. Already some scavengers have snuck into Camlann to loot the corpses. Impish figures, clad in rags, going through the pockets of the dead. Kay, eventually, will have to hire some work gangs to pile up all the corpses and cart them away. The profits and the loss.
Arthur turns and turns.
He’s bleeding from the side. They can all see it now. And the dirty knife that went in, and the blade that broke inside the wound.
It doesn’t look like much.
It’s so quiet there. From somewhere in the distance, the sound of the waves against the shore. A hint of moisture in the air. A chance of rain.
Then the king falls.
They stare at him. Nobody moves. He falls to his knees and the great sword drops at last from his fingers. He stares at them all in disbelief. Falls down on his side, and shudders. That open wound in his side, it gushes blood.
He tries to crawl. He pulls himself, like a sick dog, across the ground. Leaves a smear of blood in his wake. Still nobody moves. No one comes to his aid. The Ladies of Water watch and some lick their lips. Arthur’s body shakes with pain. He turns on his side, slowly and painfully brings himself into the foetal position.
He cries.
Then they run to him. Lancelot and Merlin and Kay. The Questing Beast howls fear and rage and despair into the air, her mouths open in a terrible scream, her tongues clicking. Then she departs from there, goes haring away into the distance, and the old knight, Sir Pellinore, rides after her, tears in his eyes. He would not watch another king of his shit himself to death.
Kay sits by Arthur’s head. He strokes his hair. He murmurs soothing words. Merlin examines the wound, but he already knows what he’ll find.
It’s bad.
‘Lancelot, help me carry him.’
‘Carry him where?’
The Ladies of the Water stand watching. Nimue quietly melts away. She’ll wait with her mermaids at sea. A deal’s a deal, and she would not be cheated of her bargain.
‘You and Agravain. Fashion a litter. Just do it!’
Merlin stands up. He stalks to the Ladies of the Water. They look at him in amused contempt.
‘Took your best shot, you shouldn’t feel bad,’ Morgause says insincerely.
‘You should fucking talk! Your horse barely made it out of the gate.’
‘Poor Mordred,’ Morgause says, and wipes a tear. ‘He almost made it. It was worth a go.’
‘So what’s it now? What will it be?’
‘You know what’s what.’
‘So why are you grinning, Morgan?’
Morgan is more glamorous than ever. She’s dressed anew, he sees. New, unfamiliar gold bracelets on her arms. A pendant round her neck.
Continental designs: savage, sophisticated.
‘You didn’t.’
‘The Angles and the Saxons are here to stay, dear Merlin. And so are we. In time they will forget they ever came here as invaders. They’ll tell this story and think it is about themselves it’s told. This Golden Age of yours could never last. You can’t preserve the past. Embrace the new! Accept the change. There will be plenty of new kings to come – among the Angles.’
‘You made a deal?’
She laughs delightedly. ‘Thitis thought she had them, but I undercut that stupid bitch!’
Merlin feels so tired then.
‘What will you do with him?’ Morgan asks.
‘Give him an ending fit for a king.’
‘Alright, little man. Alright.’
She melts away and, one by one, they all go.
Perhaps, he thinks, they were never there at all.
He directs the knights. The king is in his litter. He is delirious in pain. They carry him across the plain of Camlann and past the countless dead he’d fashioned.
It is a benefit of the dead that they feel nothing.
Or what would they say?
He was a good man? He was a righteous man?
What would they say, that it was all worth it?
Would they quote Horace, and exclaim that dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori? That it is sweet and glorious to die for one’s country? That old lie?
What would they say? Would they cry bullshit?
Who knows. Who cares. They’re dead.
The knights carry the king in his litter through that sea of death until they come to the ocean shore.
A boat with white sails, sedately approaching. Clouds on the horizon. The wind picks up, has a tang of salt.
Merlin sees the ferryman, Haros. Somewhere a flute is playing the old Greek melody, the Seikilos epitaph, and Merlin whispers the words along with the music, ‘Life exists only for a short while and time takes its toll…’
‘What will happen to him?’ Lancelot says.
Kay’s eyes are wet with tears.
Agravain, Owain, they stare at Merlin mutely, like lost children.
He has to tell them something.
‘There’s, like, a magical island I can take him to,’ he tells them. ‘Where he’ll be healed of all his wounds. He’ll rest, there. Time flows differently there. He will be gone, perhaps a long while. But
when the land needs him, he’ll return.’
Oh, he can see the look Lancelot’s giving him! Lancelot’s heard worse bullshit than this in Judea, where they specialise in this sort of crap. But Owain, Agravain, even Kay – they want to believe in the story. They want their happy ending, the warmth and comfort of a lie well told.
‘Just put him in the boat,’ he tells them tiredly.
*
They watch from the shore. They see the king ferried away. White sails and dark clouds, a storm on the horizon. Sea spray and crying birds, and a single boat, sailing on the sea towards a distant shore.
‘Merlin?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
He grips his hand. Below them, the mermaids sing, and bare their teeth in shark smiles as they wait their turn.
‘I don’t feel so good.’
‘Yes, my lord.’
Then it is done. The grip slackens and the eyes go blank.
The king is dead.
They’re far into the open sea by then. Merlin stares down at the depths, sees Nimue and her mermaids. He drops the useless sword down to the depths.
Then he rolls Arthur’s corpse over the side until it hits the water with a splash and sinks.
Afterword
Some time in the twelfth century, a man called Geoffrey of Monmouth sat down with the purpose of writing an imagined history of Britain. The resultant manuscript – the Historia Regum Britanniae – is a wildly inventive fantasy text.
It is only in the second part of the book that Geoffrey introduces his greatest creation. Uther Pendragon makes his entrance much as is described here. Arthur is born, rises, and eventually dies at the hands of Mordred at Camlann. The first outline of a new story is given life – though in an overall shape often unfamiliar to the modern reader.
The manuscript proved popular. It was widely copied and translated, and led to the creation of a new genre of Arthurian romances on the continent. Each subsequent writer sought to expand on the tale. Each added new elements, characters and plots. It is thanks to the otherwise-obscure Norman poet, Wace, for instance, that we get Excalibur and the Round Table. An unknown English poet in the fourteenth century gives us Gawain and the Green Knight.
But it is three European writers – two of them French and one a German – who give us much of the Matter of Britain as we know it today. Indeed, it is one of the greatest ironies of the material that the stories of Britain were mostly made up by those on the continent.
Chrétien de Troyes, a poet working in the court of Marie of France, first gives us Lancelot. Even more importantly, he then introduces the grail, though it is not yet the Holy Grail of later versions.
The German writer Wolfram von Eschenbach took de Troyes’ work and elaborated it. His grail is a Lapis Exilis, or fallen stone, and it is thanks to him that we first have the structure of the quest for the grail.
Finally, Robert de Boron creates the backstory of the grail as – explicitly – the Holy Grail we know now. He then invents the story of Joseph of Arimathea as the keeper of the grail and, along the way, also gives us the Lady of the Lake.
And so it goes on. By the mid-thirteenth century the various stories add up to several cycles (The Lancelot-Grail, the Post-Vulgate, and so on), incorporating a whole range of new additions (including the story of Tristan and Isolde, only briefly hinted at here) – but then they fall out of fashion again.
These texts, of course, make no attempt at historical accuracy. They transpose twelfth- and thirteenth-century notions of knighthood and chivalry to the Dark Ages, much as Geoffrey’s original text bears no relation to actual history.
Geoffrey’s intention was most likely political. He wanted to provide a unifying story for the new Norman masters of Britain. And de Boron’s, certainly, was religious – the grail becomes a Christian symbol in his hands. But mostly, I suspect, people enjoyed the tales for simply being rousing stories of magic, adventure and bloodshed (just as they were fond of a good public hanging).
In 1485, a man by the name of Thomas Mallory brought the story back to life. His Le Morte d’Arthur was one of the first books printed by William Caxton on his new press, during a time when Britain was once more unified – the Wars of the Roses would end a year later. This Mallory was, by all accounts, as reprehensible as any character depicted in this book: a murderer, robber and rapist, he was eventually buried near Newgate Prison.
Mallory first brought together, and gave final shape to, the various and often conflicting stories of the Arthurian romances. He incorporated Geoffrey’s Arthur with the later grail sections; added Lancelot and his romance with Guinevere – and so on and so forth.
The book was popular. Once more, it provided mass entertainment while serving an essentially political purpose: giving the people of Britain a shared (if entirely made up) past, made of glory.
But the tales sooner or later fell into obscurity once more. It was not until the nineteenth century and the Victorian era that Arthur was called again from Avalon: as the new British Empire spread across the globe, the stories of King Arthur and his knights found a new, enthusiastic audience. The tale’s nationalistic sentiments had never been more appropriate.
Since then, of course, Arthuriana only flourished. The twentieth century saw an explosion of new material, from books to films, and the story’s underlying structure and motifs inform much of twentieth-century fantasy from Tolkien onwards. Its Merlin, originally a waif-like youth who changes his appearance to a bearded old man just to be taken seriously by Arthur, has since become the stock character of the wise wizard – proving that Merlins, truly, are everywhere.
And the debate, improbably, still rages on in the newspapers of this day: was Arthur real? Well, to accept that we must go back to Geoffrey’s History, in which the isle of Britannia was first inhabited by savage giants before Brutus of Troy came, slaughtered them, and built New Troy, which we now call London…
The true history of Britain looks much different. The island – a part of Europe until the Doggerland sank under the rising seas some 8,000 years ago – was inhabited for nearly a million years by various humans. The Romans arrived in 54 BC. By the second century, and after the failure of Boudicca’s revolt, the Romans had conquered much of the island. They built cities and roads, mined for silver, exported slaves, and generally kept Britain as what it was – a distant, dismal part of the great empire that had its seat in Rome. The Romans built London, Bath, York and Newcastle. The roads they constructed are still being used today.
Then they left.
With the fall of the Roman Empire, Britain became susceptible to a wave of new arrivals from the continent. Those tribes – Angles, Saxons, Jutes – had no doubt different motivations. Some were driven from their homes by rising sea levels and floods. Others might have come in search of fortune. The new arrivals established their own kingdoms and principalities, and slowly pushed at the borders of the Britons.
Little is known for certain of that time. Christianity had come to Britain with the new missionaries from Rome, but it was not widely accepted by the new arrivals until well into the seventh century. By the tenth century the Kingdom of England was formed by King Athelstan, and in the eleventh century the Norman conquest of Britain arrived in full force.
It is in those Dark Ages that the tales of Arthur and his court flourish. Though there really was an extreme weather event in 535 AD, which led to global famine, and which I’ve used as the marker for the appearance of Uther’s dragon in this book.
As much as possible, I drew on original sources. The Nine Sisters appear in Geoffrey’s History, and I opted, similarly, to keep Merlin in something of his original form. The monstrous cat, Cath Palug, has long plagued the Arthurian romances in various disguises. For the grail I could not resist but incorporate more than one of the early versions.
In no source to my knowledge, however, does Lancelot know kung-fu.
The attentive reader will no doubt find a great many and various references scattered throughout this n
ovel. To them, my congratulations.
About the author
LAVIE TIDHAR is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Osama (2011), The Violent Century (2013), the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winning A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), and the Campbell Award-winning Central Station (2016), in addition to many other works and several other awards. He works across genres, combining detective and thriller modes with poetry, science fiction and historical and autobiographical material. His work has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick by the Guardian and the Financial Times, and to Kurt Vonnegut by Locus.
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