The Broken Sword (34 page)

Peace, he thought, was a fragile thing, perhaps too fragile to be entrusted to men.

The chieftains whose honor and lands Arthur had preserved had forgotten his gift to them. Kings have short memories. But the common people would remember. After war engulfed the land, when the farmers were reduced to eating their dairy cows and the women of the nobility forced to sell their jewels for bread, they would remember Arthur of Britain, the warrior who had been, above all, a man of peace.

Arthur was killed shortly after the battle joined. A sword seemed to snake through the King's Guard to reach its mark between the slats of armor shielding Arthur's heart. It was Mordred's sword, forged years before in magic to perform its single and unique task.

Mordred dealt the blow with cold resignation.
To kill a man—any man, even the High King—all you need is an assassin who is willing to die,
Thanatos once told Morgause, and her son had known this from his earliest years. The throne of the High King was never meant for him. Nor was it meant for Lot, though the king of Rheged was too arrogant ever to have seen the truth. Even Morgause, with all her knowledge of the dark forces, had never guessed in what manner her true wish would be granted.

But Mordred knew. He was the child of the demon gods, and he knew that he was their tool and nothing more. After he struck the mortal blow to the High King he waited, because his job, like his sword's, was done. He waited for the void that was his home to claim him.

Lugh Loinnbeimionach, whom not even the King's soldiers could dissuade from fighting in Arthur's personal guard, was beside the King when he fell. With a sound like the roar of a wild beast, Lugh leapt off his horse and onto Mordred.

With his huge hands wrapped tightly around Mordred's neck, Lugh tumbled to the ground. His thumbs pierced through the very flesh of his King's murderer, so that Mordred's blood spurted into his face with every beat of his heart, strongly at first, then feebly as his life ebbed away.

Lot's soldiers slashed at Lugh with their broadswords; still, he would not release his quarry, though Mordred was already dead. By the time Lugh finally gave up his spirit, his body had been butchered beyond recognition.

Nearby lay the sword Excalibur, the gods' sword which Arthur had pulled from a block of stone thirty-eight years before. It had not a drop of blood upon it.

"The King has fallen!" someone shouted.

For a moment, an eerie silence fell over both armies. The horses whinnied and stamped; the very air seemed suddenly to still with the weight of that news.

Then, from the second rank of Arthur's men, two aging knights, their gray hair shining like silver in the sunlight, galloped forward screaming their ancient war cry, and the rest of the King's army followed them into the bloodiest battle ever held on Britain's soil.

Kay and Gawain killed more than fifty of Lot's soldiers before they were cut down. The rest of the King's troops fought almost until the last man, even after the armies of Arthur's allies defected to fight with Lot against them.

When it was done, when the field ran red with blood and Lot's men cheered in victory as they put the wounded remnants of Camelot's army in chains, Merlin remembered Arthur's words.

This is all we know of glory.

He made his way down the far side of the hill, toward the place where he would wait for the judgment of whatever gods were left.

"Glory," he whispered.

T
aliesin performed two final
tasks before disappearing into the mists of time. The first he accomplished straightaway: He buried Arthur.

Lot had not shown the High King even the respect of burial, but had left him on the battlefield with the other corpses as food for the crows. Knowing this, the Merlin sent a student of his, a young woman named Nimue, with the first wave of women come to search among the dead for their husbands and fathers.

Nimue was clever and quick, and not at all squeamish about picking her way through a bloody field strewn with fly-covered corpses. To avoid any notice, she removed the thin circlet of gold that Arthur wore over his brow and tossed it into a coarse bag, then threw a ragged tunic over him to cover his clothing. Through sheer luck she also found his sword, which had been trampled into the mud during the heat of battle.

While Taliesin prepared the King's body for burial, Nimue polished Excalibur until it shone. "There," she said. "Now it shall be buried with Great Arthur."

"No, no, that won't do," Taliesin said wearily. "I plan to take every precaution to see that Arthur's grave is not disturbed, but if that should happen... Well, it won't happen."

After nightfall, just as they were about to leave the cottage disguised as a farmer and his granddaughter going to market with a cartload of vegetables, the old man brought the sword outside.

"Is that going with us?" Nimue asked, tossing some pumpkins into the wagon.

Gently he stroked the burnished steel. "No," he said. "I'm going to take it to the middle of the lake and drop it there."

"The King's sword?" She put her hands on her hips, leaving black fingermarks on her apron. "I don't think he'd have liked that, wizard. It'll get all rusty." She shook her head in censure. "No, not the lake."

Taliesin sighed. The girl could be quite exasperating at times. "Well, what do you propose I do with it, then?"

"You must put it back where it belongs. In the stone."

"The stone? Are you mad? Lot owns Camelot now. We can't very well have Excalibur's hilt poking out of a rock right in front of his nose. He would burn it, or break it, or—"

"Then cover it over so he can't see it." Nimue bit her grimy fingernails, thinking. "But then, would King Arthur find it when he comes back?"

Taliesin stared at her, uncomprehending. "Arthur's dead, child," he said quietly. "He's not coming back."

"Why not? You've told me yourself that the life we know is rarely our last."

"Confound it, Nimue!" His eyebrows bushed out in irritation. "Haven't you learned anything? One doesn't return to live the same life over again. We grow through different existences. We... Oh, bother." He slapped the sword against his thigh, then stomped off toward the lake.

"How do you know?" she called out rudely to his retreating back. "You've never been dead. Why, I don't think you have any more idea about this sort of thing than I do."

His shoulders hunched near his ears. The girl was a horror, simply a horror.

"Isn't everything possible?" she asked.

Taliesin stopped in his tracks. He turned around to face her.

"Well, isn't it?"

The wizard held the sword up to the moonlight.
This is Excalibur,
he thought,
forged by the ancient gods for the use of one man alone.
It would take more than death to separate them.

"Good heavens, she's right," he whispered.

Nimue cupped her hands behind her ears. "What did you say?"

"I said you should get a bucket and clean yourself up," he snapped. "We're not trying to pass ourselves off as pig farmers!''

Then he ran down the rutted dirt road toward Camelot, the great sword gleaming in his hands.

T
he sun had just
set two days later, when they reached the western shore of Wales. "What is that?" Nimue pointed to an island barely visible in the evening mist.

"Mona," Taliesin said. He listened to the silence, remembering the music from the isle of the gods. "The druids once lived there."

"Druids? You mean they were real? I thought they were imaginary creatures, like fairies and goblins."

He turned away. Nimue was very young; she had no idea how much her innocent words had hurt him.

"They were real," he said.

The ferrymen recognized him. After that first terrible night when he found the island a burned and desecrated ruin, Merlin had returned many times over the years to wipe away the traces of Mona's destruction. He had buried the dead, felled the charred trees, and cleaned the marks of evil from the rocks with sand and ash. Now, more than thirty years after the massacre, the island looked as if no human foot had ever trod upon its shores.

None of the mainlanders had, surely. They had feared Mona even while the druids had made it their home; after the slaughter, no one except Merlin—whom the ferrymen knew to be the King's wizard, and therefore impervious to the powers of spirits—had ever ventured there.

"Will you wait till morning, my lord?" the boatman whom Taliesin had selected for the journey to Mona asked.

"No. We must leave now."

The ferryman blew air between his teeth. "All right. Seeing it's you."

If he thought anything of the long wooden box that Nimue and Taliesin struggled to carry between them to the ferry, he did not mention it. Nor would he tell any brigands looking to rob a king's tomb about it. The ferrymen and their families were a close-mouthed lot, aloof and suspicious of strangers. They would guard the Merlin's secret well.

Taliesin dressed in his best robes for the short journey to Mona, as did Nimue, who wore a gown of shimmering silk. To accommodate the casket, they stood on the prow, still as statues, as the boat floated on the moonlit water toward the island shrouded in mist.

"Mama, look at Father's boat," a small girl whispered, pointing through a window at the vessel and its strange passengers.

"Shh." Her mother's arms encircled her protectively. "That is the wizard Merlin and the queen of the fairies, bearing the body of our King to the enchanted isle."

The little girl blinked. "Did he die, then, good King Arthur?"

"Aye. But don't you worry, he'll live again. The Merlin will see to that."

Taliesin and Nimue buried the King beside the Innocent, inside the sacred circle of the druids, and covered the grave with seedlings. By summer, the place would be grown over. Within ten years, it would be filled with trees. Oaks, infused with the magic of the ancient gods.

"Mother, bring us life from death," Taliesin sang, his voice hoarse with grief.

Uncomprehending, Nimue repeated the refrain.

They sang the long-forgotten words of the druids through the night, ten thousand times and more until, at daybreak, the very woods rang with their music.

M
erlin himself did not
decide to die for several more years, during which he witnessed the destruction of everything Arthur had worked so hard to build.

The ten kingdoms disintegrated almost at once. Lot ordered the executions of all his allied kings, and declared their lands forfeit to him. The ones who managed to escape before their arrest made open war on Lot in retribution for his betrayal. The families of the petty kings who were killed rallied what forces they could from among their troops. With the annexation of so much new land, Lot's original two kingdoms became unmanageable as well. Many of the old chiefdoms, melded together temporarily to form the kingdoms of Rheged and Dumnonia, now splintered off to become autonomous, as they had been in the years before Arthur the High King came to power.

Lot himself lived less than a year after his victory over Arthur. He died in his bed, poisoned, his black tongue lolling between his lips.

Queen Morgause—for she was, after Lot's death, ruler of Britain—waged a campaign to force the chiefdoms into submission, but they would not give in to a woman, even if it meant the death of every last member of the clans. A number of Rheged's soldiers found their allegiance torn between the queen and the tribal chiefdom to which their families belonged. Usually the chiefdoms won, especially when Morgause ordered her troops to destroy the seats of their own ancient clans. Desertion became commonplace, and what remained of the queen's army turned into an undisciplined mob that fed itself by raiding the farms of its own people, and sometimes of its queen.

And then the Saxons came.

They arrived in droves, their incursions into Britain now unchecked. They fought the chiefdoms, the petty kings, and Queen Morgause's army without discrimination. In the eastern part of the country they settled in homesteads and built rough villages which the warring Britons seldom bothered. To supply themselves with tools and food, the Saxons looted whatever they needed from their hosts, riding off with the horses and women that were now theirs for the taking.

Fires raged in the villages after each Saxon raid. The fields, once ripe with grain, now grew nothing but weeds. Medicine of any kind ceased to exist. Cloth for bandages was no longer woven. Soon it became impossible even to bury the dead. Corpses lined the roads. Whole families lay butchered in their homes, left for predators to eat. The rivers clogged with rotting human bodies; the wells became poisoned with the putrefaction of the dead.

Then, on the heels of the civil war and the Saxons, came the plague.

It was called the Yellow Plague because of the color of its victims after death. Thousands dropped from the disease, their skin bubbling with yellow lesions, their bodies wasted; but by then, no one was counting the dead any longer.

Queen Morgause became infected. When her once-beautiful face grew hideous and misshapen and her luxuriant hair fell out by handfuls, one of her physicians suggested a treatment of warm salt water to heal her pustule-covered skin. For this she traveled to the ruined Roman city of Aquae Sulis with a contingent of royal guards, whom she ordered to repair one of the old public baths for her use. Here she spent her days trying to soak away the vile odor of her sores while she exhorted the demon gods to restore her beauty.

Some people who lived in the debris of the city's fallen stone buildings came out of curiosity to see the woman who called herself a queen. Most of them had the plague themselves. After a brief scuffle with the soldiers who had been ordered to guard her, they poured inside the ruined building to squat along the sides of the large tiled pool.

"Guard!" she shouted. "Where is my guard?"

The onlookers pointed at her, cackling. A woman found her cloak, made of velvet, and rubbed it over her face until someone cut her with a knife for the garment.

"Don't touch my things, do you hear me, you filthy offal!" Morgause tried to pull herself out of the bath, but the crowd pushed her back in. Someone threw a rat at her. It clawed her chest, drawing blood and pus down her body before it fell in the water and drowned.

"I am the Queen of Britain!" Morgause screamed. "Don't you understand, I am your queen!"

Another rat swam toward her. The crowd was amused. Several children scurried outside to find more.

It didn't take long; rats were the only things in Aquae Sulis that were not in short supply.

"Guard! I command you to attend me! Guard!"

"They're dead, poppet," a woman said, shaking her head sweetly.

"Those what didn't ride off," another added.

The children returned shrieking with glee, holding fat, squirming rats which they flung into the water. Morgause was the only other object in the pool, and the vermin all rushed toward her.

Screaming, she slapped them away. The spectators surrounding the pool laughed at the naked woman bobbing up and down in the water trying to force the creatures away. They splashed to propel the rats back toward her, cheering them on.

"Go get her, Whip! Attaboy!"

"Mine's named Lightning. See how fast he's going?"

"Well, let's give old Lightning a hand, eh? There you go—the wave'll push him."

"Hey! You're drowning Whip! Quit it!" Soon everyone was soaked, the water churning white under their busy hands, the domed building echoing with coarse laughter.

Morgause looked at their faces in despair. These people were the dregs of the world. She did not want to die here, among such creatures.

Yet these, these ugly, mindless animals, this wreckage of humanity, were what now populated the land that she ruled. There was no more civilization. There was no law. There were no boundaries, no ethics, no order, no aspirations for a better world. There were only these grinning, lice-covered ghouls.

These were her people.

"I am your queen," she whispered.

When she finally understood the truth of her words, she sank beneath the surface of the water and breathed it in. She convulsed once, twice. Her eyes bulged out. She swallowed her tongue.

I
wish to rule Britain,
she had told Thanatos.
All of it.

Her last thought was that her wish had come true.

"Looks like Whip's dead," someone said.

"Where's the lady?"

Some time after they had all left, Morgause's body floated to the surface. It spun idly around the pool for a while, then came to rest in a corner, with the bloated carcasses of the rats.