Sleepless Knights (39 page)

When at last his patience had expired, Merlin employed a light offensive, pushing me back to the very brink of the outcrop. I quickly expended my remaining energy in maintaining a feeble defence, until every movement of my sword felt like trying to lift a tree trunk with one hand.

“You can never defeat me, Lucas,” said Merlin.

The blade started to slip from my numb fingers. “Nevertheless, I will die trying,” I said.

“Yes,” said Merlin. He pulled down his hood. “You will.”

I looked fully into the face of Merlin. I dropped my blade and stumbled backwards to the edge of the outcrop. The noxious fumes wafting up from the pool were like a draught of smelling salts, bringing me to my senses. For at last, deep in the bowels of the earth and at the end of all things, I understood.

I understood everything.

And it was too late.

I accepted my fate, and stepped off the edge of the precipice.

 

Today being Initiation Day, I rose an hour earlier than usual, to pay particular attention to the preparations for my successor. I was up to meet the sunrise, and sat in the study window seat with my morning cup, the wash of the waves below the cottage a pleasant soundtrack to the reviewing of yesterday's final amendments. I took a sip of tea, noting that, as ever, she had brewed it to perfection, and considered my speech.

It was true that my words did not possess the narrative sweep of a
Chronicles
, or the authoritative clout of a
History
. But what my address lacked in literary flourishes, it more than made up for in practical application. Plus, as I knew better than anyone, in our line of work practical application is everything. With that in mind, I decided to heed the advice my dearest had given me only last night, and get it to the person it was intended for. I finished my tea, picked up the first page, and sent my mind strolling through time and space.

Every human consciousness that has ever existed spread out before me like stars in the night sky. I needed no map to guide me, for only a handful of souls in every generation gleam as brightly as ours. Stepping softly, lest I tread on his dreams, I stood in the corner of his consciousness and
uttered a small cough — just enough to make him aware of my presence. Then I spoke the following words:

Gwion. Gwion? Do not be alarmed. This is indeed the voice of Sir Lucas, your old employer. Speaking into your head. Hello there. Please, calm down, you are not possessed. No no, do not get Geraint, he will only add to your confusion. Just lie back and take a deep breath.

There.

Better?

Good.

Now, I want you to do something for me. I want you to remember all those times recently when you've heard my voice in your head, and put it down to a trick of the imagination. ‘It cannot be him,' you have told yourself. ‘He is long gone.' Well, yes and no, but more of that later.

You will, I know, have heard me speaking to you, either in fragments, or as if from a very great distance. You will have heard my voice during moments of high stress. Or perhaps on those absent-minded occasions when you entered a room and forgot what you came in for. Maybe you have heard me in the hinterland between sleeping and waking, a still small voice in the corner of your consciousness. Such moments were often accompanied by certain episodes, weren't they? Alarming occurrences, such as the ability to manipulate the minds of others, or of time slowing down and even stopping around you for apparently random intervals.

Well, I am here to tell you that there is nothing alarming or indeed random about any of this. My voice is speaking within you now as a sort of welcome address, to help you find your feet and take those first steps over the threshold of a new life. I will explain everything that you need to know, in a way that it was never explained to me. This was partly the fault of my predecessor, who preferred puzzles and tests, such as so-called amulets of teleportation, which have no power in
themselves, but serve as a means of focusing and honing our latent abilities. But a great deal of the blame also lies with me, for misunderstanding the true nature of my life's work.

True service, as practised by the best in our profession, is about fluctuation and change. So much of the business of butlery and housekeeping has to do with maintenance and preservation that it is very easy to overlook this fact. Indeed, once such a truth is overlooked, avoiding it can become something of a life's work. When that happens, you risk destroying the very thing you are seeking to preserve. It was in such a way that I turned my back on magic, as on a black sheep of the family, little realising (as I should have done from the example of my then-Master, who had some experience in the matter of troublesome family members) that a black sheep shunned only bleats louder.

But I digress. I have promised myself that I will be a better mentor than I was a novice, and to that end I have composed this address to help you along the way. Not to do all the work for you, you understand. The quest — and it
is
a quest, make no mistake about that — is yours alone. Think of these as guidelines. With that in mind, the best way to guide you is to tell you about the end of my own working life and the start of my new one, so that you might learn from my mistakes. For I made a lot of them, Gwion, enough to fill a thousand years with their telling. But we are butlers, to the end and beyond. And as you shall see, butlers always find a way of getting the job done, often in the most trying of circumstances, and with precious little time for a sit down.

So, without further ado, let's get started, shall we?

 

In the bottommost point of the lowest pit of Hell, I hit the water with a crack that felt like the breaking of every bone in my body. As I sank beneath the scalding waters, I saw that the pool itself was also breaking, water pouring out and flooding the cavern as the rocky bed beneath me split wide open. The water level subsided around me, and I had a brief moment in which to gasp for air. In that split second the entire cavern was filled with a mighty rumble, before the cracks in the bottom of the pool opened wide and I fell through them, swallowed up by the earth. I was surrounded by detritus, small rocks, big rocks, earth and rubble, worms and mulch, and me no more than a speck among all that thundering firmament, a single mote of dust in a vacuum cleaner bag.

Then came the settling. The swift accumulation of an incredible weight. Squeezing my lungs empty, pressing down on me with immense power, a pure push of pain on every inch of my body. And with the settling of the earth came the realisation of what was actually happening.

I was being buried alive.

This sent me into a flurry of panic, pushing against a load I could never hope to lift, hands flailing and fingers digging even as they became stuck fast. It did not last long; it could not. It was time to gasp my last. Time to give up the ghost in a Hell of my own making. My final thoughts
were of Beaumains. Of how I would like to see her just one more time, back as she was, not the foul travesty I had just confronted.

My body shuddered with a final burst of life. The dying spasm reached my right hand. My index finger found a little pocket of space, a tiny recess in which to stretch itself out, as my mind narrowed to a single dark point, towards death, towards nothingness.

But not quite yet. For there was still something remaining. Something within me, but also without. My finger touched that something. It was cold and hard. It was not made of earth. In those last fleeting seconds of my life, the feel of it reminded me of the Grail, and I felt a rush of empathy for that magical artefact. A lifetime of unquestioning service. I wondered if it had ever felt tired. I wondered if anybody had ever thought to ask the Grail what it wanted out of all this. If it could choose, who did it really
want
to serve? I even tried to say it aloud, but my mouth filled with soil even as I spoke the words:

“Whom does the Grail serve?”

Well, Gwion my boy, as it turned out, that was quite the question.

†

I felt myself being pulled up towards a bright light. Not softly and in spirit as I have heard it said of the soul at the moment of death, but physically
hoiked
up, the weight of all that earth no greater than a clump of soil on a gardener's trowel. The light was all around me, and next to me was the Grail. There it had been, awaiting my arrival at the lowest point of Hell, just as it had been awaiting my arrival back then, all those years ago in the Glass Fortress when I had failed to claim it. But the light was not coming from the Grail, as it had done
when Arthur first instructed it with the terms and conditions of the Eternal Quest. The light was coming from me. Pouring off me like water, as I forged upstream on my unstoppable journey towards new life.

I held out both my hands, a sunrise in each palm. And as I raised my arms, all the earth of Lower Annwn rose up and separated, scattering around me. I ascended into the cavern and back up to the outcrop, stopping in mid-air so that I was facing the spot where the wizard Merlin still waited for me. Still with his hood down, and still with the same face that had so surprised me only moments ago, but now seemed as natural as my own reflection. For that is exactly what it was.

“Whom does the Grail serve, Sir Lucas?” said the Merlin me. “That is the question. The Grail serves a servant. A butler like you. A butler like me.”

“Hello, Sir Lucas,” I said.

“Hello, Sir Lucas,” he said. “I expect that there are some matters that need clarifying at this point.”

“There is nothing worse than a loose end,” I agreed.

“I would be happy to answer any questions you may have,” he said.

“Thank you, Sir Lucas. Firstly, you are not the previous Merlin, are you?”

“No, Sir Lucas. I am you. A foreshadow of you, sent by the old Merlin to help you achieve your somewhat delayed destiny.”

“So when the Master summoned Merlin back from the Otherworld, he was actually summoning forth you. That is to say, me.”

“That is correct. Your predecessor ‘Merlin' is now in retirement and could not be recalled for love nor money. He keeps bees, I believe.”

“Was my predecessor also a butler, before he became Merlin?”

“Yes. You even worked under him, briefly, in the household of King Uther, Arthur's father.”

“Master Blaise? But he went away.”

“On his own Grail Quest to the Otherworld, to the Glass Fortress. He came back as Merlin, just in time to arrange Arthur's conception and help him with the early days of his reign.”

“His
own
Grail Quest?”

“Different to yours, but in essence the same. A magical object, a catalyst for a coming of age. For him it was a rather fine hamper. The Grail cauldron was yours. For your successor, the last of the butler-magicians, it will be something else.”

“So King Arthur was never meant to take the Grail?”

“Good gracious me, no! Treasures as powerful as that should never be removed from the Otherworld by the uninitiated. If anyone else takes a magical object away, it upsets the balance and seals off the Otherworld, allowing the likes of Le Fay to turn it into Hell. No, King Arthur's destiny was at Camelot.”

“And at the Last Battle,” I said, shuddering at the memory of Camlann.

“Well, it's difficult to say for sure. If you'd got the Grail when you were supposed to, and then returned as a wizard to advise Arthur, perhaps there never would have been a Last Battle. Then again, maybe it was for the best that there was. That's the funny thing about Golden Ages: they only really work when they never last. No quest was ever meant to be eternal.”

“I must say, all this seems rather a lot of information for someone to figure out on their own.”

“You were never supposed to. Every magician has his other half. They become part of his transition, eventually
passing on with him to live beyond the Otherworld, on a far flung shore.”

“Beaumains,” I said. “Am I too late to save her?” I gestured to her monstrous form, still standing on the outcrop with the other living dead, my loyal staff of Lower Camelot who fought and died so bravely.

“That I cannot say. Certainly, now that you are a butler-magician, nothing is ever too late. Or too early.”

“Well, as pleasant as this interval has been, I can't stay here talking forever,” I said.

“No,” said Sir Lucas. “You certainly can't.”

And with that, he passed into me. Or rather,
I
passed into me; my destined Merlin-self, followed by the ever-obedient Grail. And as I absorbed the Grail, it unlocked the full extent of its power, next to which the uses Arthur had put it to on the Eternal Quest were mere sundries.

And so Sir Lucas the Butler became Lucas the Magician, Lucas the Merlin. Transfigured and suspended in Lower Annwn, the manifestation of all the power at my disposal blazed with the light of a thousand stars. I knew that I had only to desire it, and all knowledge, all of space and time, was mine for the taking. And frankly, it was all a bit much. All that radiance and omnipotence is suitably impressive, no doubt, but something of a distraction when trying to focus one's mind on the tasks in hand. No, what I really needed was to concentrate all that power, to pour it into a manageable mould. Something that I could work with.