The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (19 page)

“Stop!” Uther cried.  “All that happens if I lose this fight?  Then I won’t fight!  I’ll sit the day here.  Let the Saxons come to me.  On this stone I can kill them by legions.”

“It happens whether you fight or not.  It’s the Fate of this cycle of life.”

“Nothing can be done?”

“I’m here to do what can be done.”

“You?  A merlin, a fraud-Christian, a monster of time, a baby-eating, blood-sucking Druid? 
You
will save the world?”

“Not I but the things I create,” I said.

“What things?”

“Better not to tell you.  You’d destroy them.”

“I’d make them tools to fight the Saxons tomorrow!  To break the Saxon Weird on the British Fate.”

“That’s right, you’d waste them.”

“You won’t save me, old friend?  Is it because one time I tried to shove my hands up your skirts?”

“One time?  A hundred!  But I’ve only one mission and you aren’t it.”

“You’ve never loved me as I’ve loved you, Old Woman!” Uther cried.  He began to weep again.

He was suddenly drunker than before, more cunning and dangerous.

“Oh, you’re fond of me, I know,” he said, “but it was never love.”

I was startled.  Had I, and all the merlins in me, lived a lifetime with this half-Romanized savage not to see that Uther loved antique and wrinkled me, along with all the other women he loved?

“My love is saved for someone else,” I said.

“Now I know I’ll die!”

Uther wept into his beard in high fashion.

“I’ve given you all I could,” I said.

Uther grunted, almost a laugh.

“Strange,” he said, “but my father said the same to me before I cut his throat and took his ducal crown.”

He looked at me as though measuring my throat.

Then he said, “Oh, Hell, give your love to pretty Arthur.  He’ll have little else in life after I’m gone.  Three years old and hasn’t spoken a word or pissed on target once.  Too long in the birth canal without air, I suppose.  He’s a born fool and needs his own merlin to teach him how to squat and crap.  What I wanted and waited for and expected from you is what you give so freely to pathetic idiots like Arthur – the power of a merlin to become a bird or bear to dodge and destroy my enemies.”

He began to weep again.

“Bless my ragman’s army for my sake, Merlin!” he cried.  “Let it smash the Saxons! Drive the Pagans back to their dank Saxon forests!”

“You’re stupid with beer.”

“It’s a fair request.  If you were a Christian, you’d be a saint.  If a Saxon, Thor.  I name you my god, Merlin.  Here, I prostrate myself before you” – he did, face down on the stone – “and pray that you make loaves and fishes of my army.”

“Make what?”

“A multitude!  An army fit for Joshua and forget the trumpets.”

I said nothing.  What’s the point of saying anything sensible to a drunk?

“Is that it?” the king cried.  “My goddess answers my prayer by not answering?  Do I go unblessed into battle?”

“You do.”

Uther got up and drew his greatsword.

“This was made from the metals of three heroic swords that my fathers broke in battle for the emperors.  It has an antique charm in it that, the sword claims, makes it a merlin-eater.  Have you heard the story?”

“I’m hearing it now.  It amazes me that you, who love to repeat stories to the utter boredom of everyone else, never told me this one before.”

“I saved telling it for a moment like this.”

With the sword’s point, Uther flicked open my cloak and put the point over my heart.  “This merlin-eater can pluck you from life and your mission.  Do you believe me?”

“I believe what the sword can or can’t do isn’t what you want to tell me.”

“Come with me to battle, Merlin.”

“I’m bred on battles.  Why would I quail from one more?”

“Because this time you see the fruit of a lifetime without love.  You see me die.”

“I’ll come but not in your war band.”

“I don’t ask that.  I’ll demand it of every one of them, of course, they’ll all die if I die.  Uther Pendragon won’t fall into Annwn without a company of warriors to prove his worth to Gwynn.  Wear your stone armor, Lady.”

“It’s going to be that sort of a brawl?”

“You’ll be happy to wear it tomorrow.  Carry the two-handed ax they call Pagan Eater.  But leave your glass shield in your tent.  Hey, you may love me yet for what I give you.”

Uther scraped back the ivy that covered part of the Brutus stone and pulled out a shield wrapped in rag.

“Morgause made this for you.  Six years old and a lover of arms and armor.  She dreams of nothing but slaughter.  A fine British princess!”

I unwrapped the shield in the moonlight.  Round and heavy, laminated wood, the iron hand-boss a red heart, the field one hundred and forty-four green and white checks.

“Morgause made me this?” I cried.

“She’s invented your arms, Princess Merlin,” Uther said, buffing the shield, pleased with his daughter’s handiwork.  “You’ve had nothing to identify yourself in battle except that old glass shield which no one can see.”

He saw the checked shield tremble in my hands.

Uther said, “Has Morgause discovered your secret?”

“I’ve thousands of secrets!”

“Then has she revealed hers to you?”

“What does she say is the meaning of all these signs?”

“It’s simple enough for a child to read.  The heart is the love-god you’ve always told us you were in some absurd previous and unChristian existence.  The green and white checks are from her dreams.”

“What dream?”

“I don’t read her dreams.  That’s for your kind.”

“So it was only a dream?”

I read the blank face of the checked shield and laughed.

“I’ll finish her fantasy,” I said.

I wiped night-mist from the shield, each brush of my hand birthing from the checks the bulging faces of my predecessor merlins, faces of all shapes and colors, of warriors, princes, scholars, men and women, able and crippled, horrific and beautiful.

The faces cried out from the shield, “These many times we’ve failed to become the merlin who can make the king! Free us to die!”

Uther recoiled gagging from their fetid breath, raising his sword to strike them.  “All gods, what are these things?”

“These,” I said, “are all the merlins before me.”

“That many?  How they stink, the dirty beasts.”

“They’re inferior merlins, even the greatest of them” – I tweaked the nose of the Great Merlin – “a thousand times lesser in power and knowledge than I, but they kept me in stone a thousand years, the bastards.”

“What’re you going to do with them?”

“Wear them into battle,” I said.

The shield screamed in terror.

False dawn.  Icy cold.  Uther went through the shivering forest using his greatsword to slap awake his captains.  Who slapped awake their sergeants.  Who slapped awake their knights.  Who slapped awake the peasants dozing after a night trembling in fright of this dawn.

With Urien slung over my back, I tramped behind Uther, both of us grinding and clattering in mail and armor and with all the extra spears, knives, and clubs we carried.  I had the ax Pagan Eater slung across my stone breastplate, my stone helmet pushed back on my head, my reddening gray hair braided with green and white ribbons.  My checkered shield wept aloud for its sufferings to come.

Uther’s army surged forward through damp forest, scratching butts, complaining, pissing, digging roots for breakfast, kicking out campfires, carrying hot wands to warm their hands enough to close around ax handles and sword hilts.

At the forest’s edge was yellow-morning-and-green-field Britain where dawn’s frost had dripped away.

“I have to weep for leaving this beautiful place!” Uther said to me.

So he wept, wiping tears with his beard.

His war band closed around him in winged helmets, Roman armor, Syrian swords, heart-of-oak war hammers, breastplates decorated with holly and mistletoe, jangling chains of charmed coins from Jerusalem and Carthage, flowers behind their ears, bearskins draped over their shoulders.

Uther lied to them – he always lied to them before battle and they never remembered his lies after their victories – saying, “See me weep for the Saxon women who will howl to their puny gods for the souls of their menfolk tonight!”

His war band roared a cheer, slapping their swords on their shields, the clatter in the dank trees terrifying the peasant soldiers.

The cheering knights surged out of the forest into the morning-lit grassland and looked around for the enemy.

“No Saxons?” Uther said to me.  “Is this some wonderful surprise you’ve made for me, Old Lady?”

“There are always Saxons in this world,” I said.

“Then I’ve time for strategy.  Alexandrian, wouldn’t you say?”

“It’s hard to say without knowing where the enemy is.”

“But you’d know.”

“I remember.”

“Small difference, Princess Merlin,” said a warlord.  “Point us at them and we’ll kill them!”

When I said nothing, Uther said to me, “Are you counting away my last heartbeats to clear the world for the wonders to come after me?”

“You surprise me, King, for understanding anything at all.  But for understanding me now, I’d make you a god in the next life.”

“Can you do that?” Uther asked, urgent and earnest.

“I’ve enemies in the Underworld,” I said.  “Better if you pretend you don’t know me there.”

“We’ve all enemies in Hell.”

“Mine is their prince.”

“Pluto?  What a beast you are!  A lifetime in my employ and I know nothing at all about you, except that you grow younger every day.  What did you do to him?”

“Robbed his treasure and stole princes out of death.”

“Yes, yes, I remember that,” Uther said.  “Or I ought to remember it, in the past or the future or somewhere.”

He pointed with his greatsword down the line of his army, past peasants kicking clods and staring at singing birds, toward a pavilion at the forest edge in the shelter of Badon Hill.  “I have a little magic of my own, Merlin, and it’s in that tent.  I brought Igerne and her brat Arthur.”

“Arthur’s there?”

“Your pet is over there, Lady, as speechless as ever.  In the lee protection of Badon Hill but within easy range of Saxon arrows and spears.  I wonder, if my army’s crushed today, will the Saxon king break Arthur’s bones for sweet marrow or merely stew his giblets in his mother’s milk?”

“You fool!  In none of the histories was Arthur here!”

“So I rewrite history, this illiterate, barbaric king of the Britons.”

Uther leaned on his sword, looking across the fields toward the pavilion.  Then he said to me, “Does this give you incentive, Old Fright, to do something for your king?”

I ripped Pagan Eater from its bindings.  “Incentive to cut off your head!”

The war band closed around their lord.

I shouted, filling with a merlin’s rage, “Do you think a thousand warriors could keep me from crushing one wretched little king?”

A warlord said, “We invite you to try, Old Woman!”

He banged his sword on his shield, sending birds chittering up from the trees and driving wandering peasants to cower behind their sergeants.

Uther said, “Make this last battle a good one for me, Merlin.  Send me swooping down on the Saxons.  Let me drench myself in their blood before I die.  Show them to me, give me the first advantage!  Refuse and you let me fail and your pretty Arthur is dead.”

“Where’s Gurthrygen?” I said, nearly frantic.

“Where my heir should be.  Back home safely among the council of elders ready to be elected my successor if need be.”

This stupid barbarian had cornered and trapped me.

“I’ll fight to give you what you want, King,” I said.  “But I choose where I’ll fight.”

“You always do, Lady.”

“On the windward side of the hill.  To protect Arthur.”

A warlord said, “What’s a second son to any man or woman, least of all you, Princess Merlin, childless and godless and withered as you are?  Is the boy enchanted or a godlet?  Should we kill him now for good luck in the battle ahead, Uther?”

I said to Uther, “Alexandrian!”

“Excellent,” said the king.  “I knew you couldn’t resist giving me a subtle hint.”

“There,” I said, pointing northeast, “is the Saxon army coming at you with the morning sun at their backs.”

Uther squinted that way, shading his eyes with the blade of his greatsword.  “So I let them pass Badon Hill.  When I’ve the sun at
my
back, I attack out of these trees.”

“On Alexander’s model,” I said.  “That’s what the chronicles report.”

“As modified by Marc Antony against Octavian.”

“But he lost that battle, King,” said a puzzled warlord.

“He was an inferior general drunk on Cleopatra’s charms.  I’m the Pendragon and my wife has no charms that Lady Merlin doesn’t give her for me.”

The warlords laughed and shouted to their captains to drive the army into the trees to lie among the roots and wait in ambush.

* * *

The Saxon army came across the land in dust and smoke from burning British farmsteads and villages.  The lead elements were not scouts but young warriors anxious to get in the first heroic blows of the battle.

These young men ran down into the field beyond the trees and looked around for Britons.  They saw none.  They threw themselves on the grass to catch breath.  Behind them came the outrunners of the Saxon army shouting in their gargling language at the lazy young warriors ahead.

The young men jumped up, hauling their spears and their cruel, single-bladed scramasaxes for hacking through metal, and jogged ahead of the scouts.

Nothing more happened for a time.  Then the van of the Saxon army wandered into the field, soldiers staring at the birds and trees, stopping on the trail to piss, kicking clods, chasing each other for sport.

The number of these wanderers increased.  Captains with war bands, banners, and standards came into the field and trudged past Badon Hill, none bothering to look what may be in the trees behind the hill.

Now came stragglers and blond-braided Saxon women driving caravans of supplies, and Uther saw he had the Saxons in his pincer trap.

The king howled his war cry and ran out to slaughter the caravaneers.

Uther led his van cheering across the field and past the pavilion with Arthur and Queen Igerne.  Uther saluted her with his bloody sword, this woman my predecessor merlin had helped him rape in a fog to make Arthur.

He ran into the Saxon flank, pounding and cutting.  His war band hacked at Saxons in poorly copied Roman armor, shattering their wooden shields, prodding out their eyes, slashing off their legs, tossing cut hands and heads spinning into the air.

The Saxons, surprised, sun now in their eyes, surged around Uther, gathering strength as their roaming elements came running to the sound of battle, and the real fight began.

I found Igerne standing in her pavilion dressed in armor and sword surrounded by her Cornish lifeguards with bundles of throwing and stabbing spears.  She was frightened but firm.  She had been through battle before.

Little Arthur, three years old and never having spoken a word, was dressed in gleaming toy armor with a gold headband naming him Duke of Cornwall.  Uther’s oldest son, Gurthrygen, stood there with his personal war band of youths, stamping their boots, rattling their shields, calling out to the Saxons to attack the queen’s pavilion so they could fight them.

“What are you doing here?” I said to Gurthrygen.  “You’re meant to be safe with the council of elders.”

“And miss my father’s last fight, damn him?” cried the boy, swinging his sword over his head in his excitement.  “Do they make me king today, Merlin, or what?”

Igerne cried, “Merlin, is this the end?”

“Of Lord Uther’s cycle, it is.”

“Sobeit!”  She made the Sign of the Cross.  “Thanks to God!”  She spat toward Uther’s army.

Gurthrygen interrupted, shouting at me, “Old Mother, answer me!  Do I survive to become king today?”

“If you’re elected, boy, you’ll be king.  If you keep your toy warriors and your little spears here to defend your stepmother and your half-brother.  If I stand here between you and the Saxons.”

“An age-raddled wreck like you protecting
me
from the Saxons?”  Gurthrygen laughed his father’s explosive laugh.  “Better you cower here with the queen, Old Woman, and let us march out to win this little brawl.”

“Stand here with Arthur or this cycle won’t play out as it must,” I said, “and you and the world are ruined.”

Gurthrygen paled.  “I’ll stand.  I’ll stand and wait.  But only to be king tonight.  Promise me that, Merlin!”

“You’ll be king if you keep yourself and Arthur alive today.”

“Who cares about Arthur?” said Gurthrygen, puzzled.

I ran up Badon Hill to gauge the course of battle.  I could see the animal in-swarm of the Saxon troops, their infantry and a few horsemen, the stabbing whores, the howling priests, the mail-suited witches.  I could tell the Saxon Christian priests by their war clubs that would not spill blood from Thor’s priests with their brain-spattering battle hammers.

I saw Uther’s van drive deep into the Saxon horde just as Marc Antony had attacked Octavian on Cleopatra’s field.  I saw the Saxon king order his wings to close around Uther, cutting him off from the main body of the British army just as Octavian had cut off Marc Antony.

I saw Uther fall, his armor hacked through a dozen times, and the war band, howling its battle cries, fight to the last man and die with their chief in the old blood oath.  Alexandrian strategy always ends that way, if you’re not Alexander.

I saw Druids and British captains rally the remnants of their army and charge again and again at the Saxons to recover the king’s body.

I saw the Saxons set up their cannibal pots in the middle of the battle and begin their human stews.

Queen Igerne was beside me, her shield stabbed with Saxon arrows.  More arrows hissed past us.  I unslung the checkered shield that had hung over my back and held it up to deflect arrows from us both.  The hundred and forty-four faces screamed for mercy and terror.

Igerne’s lifeguards came running at the awful sound of my shield and surrounded queen and merlin with their shield wall.

Igerne looked down from Badon Hill at the place where the Saxons made ready to eat her king.

“Most men’s lives are a confusion of self-doubt and indecision.  Not his,” she said of Uther.  “He knew what he wanted from the moment his mother told him his father stood between him and a dukedom.  He was a murderer and a barbarian.  Still, he was a king and a king of the Britons.  There’s no more wonderful thing than that.  But he won’t be the last Pendragon.  I won’t have the country given over to Pagans.”

Igerne slapped her sword on my shield and the faces screamed again.  “Merlin,” she cried, “you’re my creature now.  I take you from the hands of the dead king.  Do you fight with me?”

“I fight as I always fight – for the king hereafter.”

“For Gurthrygen!” Igerne shouted.

Her lifeguards took up the war cry, screaming, “For Gurthrygen!”

Igerne and her Cornishmen ran down off the hill and into the Saxon horde and I with them, all of us battering and slamming Saxon armor, smashing enemy swords and spears, me swinging Pagan Eater in great slaughtering arcs, Saxon spears shattering on my stone armor, scramasaxes breaking on my stone helmet, arrows piercing the faces of my screaming shield but not piercing me.