The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (10 page)

I stepped out on the road.  A voice called, “Stand!”

Rising up from his squat by the road as a shaft of evening found him, a figure threw back its cloak and stood there in full armor.  A knight with a glass shield, black breastplate and mail, black helmet, and veil.  The warrior raised his sword over his head and it too was black.

I knew all these marks as Galabes had taught them to me.  Here was Lucan, the fabled last knight of Camelot.  I nearly shouted in my joy and fright at seeing him.

Above, the hermits squatted in the steaming mouths of their caves to watch.

Caval stepped out of the glooming evening to take station at the roadside.

I threw down my travel packs and blanket-cloak.  “Lord Lucan!” I shouted.  “Show me the way to the king!  I bring him his sword!”

I drew Excalibur from its fleece bed.  I felt the electric charge of the steel.  I heard a whistle as the evening breeze sliced across the blade.

I cheered and shouted, “We stand, Merlin and Excalibur with Lucan, in quest for the king!”

“Know the man you fight.”

Lucan dropped his veil – he was Galabes.

“Father!”  I dropped guard and ran across the road to him.

“Stand and fight!” Lucan said.  “Prove Excalibur by killing me back to Camlann.  Restart the epic.  Bring us Arthur!”

“I can’t kill you…”

“Then die!”

Lucan smashed his sword into my shield and split the feeble wood and iron.

I stumbled back, confused, shaking off the broken shield, only the fighting boss around my fist.

Lucan swung his great black sword to slice my legs from their body.

I parried and fell back again, more confused, ready to panic.

Lucan shouted, “I’ll kill you if you don’t kill me!”

He attacked.  I dodged.  I parried and boss-shoved him away from me.

In all that whistle of steel and rattle of armor, our blades did not cross.  We banged one another with mailed fists, head-butted, jostled and clubbed, sweated, stumbled, spun and counterattacked.  But we avoided the challenge of steel.  He was my father and I his daughter.

Lucan stood back gasping for breath, leaning on his black sword.

I said, “We can’t fight like this, Father.  Let’s have peace and go through the world together as father and daughter champions...”

“That’s not why I created you.  Lay on!”

Lucan charged and drove his sword cutting into my makeshift armor, shearing away metal and leather until I was stripped to jerkin, leggings, boots, Urien over my back, Excalibur in my hands, cold night wind whistling through my sweat-wet hair.

Lucan shouted a sobbing victory cry and swung the killing blow.

I threw up Excalibur to stop my killing.

Our two blades clashed and spat sparks streaking across the night.

Lucan’s great black sword shattered.

With the automatic backstroke to which I had been trained by Galabes-Lucan, I lopped off my father’s head.

The corpse stood upright a moment, stiffened by its armor.  I caught the body and lowered it into the dust.  The corpse did not bleed.  The mark Excalibur had made through Lucan’s neck was laid on the scar he had carried away from Camlann.

I wept picking up his head to kiss my father farewell.

Lucan said to me in his fading soul’s voice, “I’ve made you Merlin now.  Live again!  Find Arthur, make him a true king, create Camelot…”

* * *

Lucan’s shriveling head fell from my hands.  I saw him thrown backward in time through a suffocating arrowstorm onto Camlann’s bloody field.  He lay beside his dying king, the last of Arthur’s war band to join the High King in death.

Out of that furious battle night, Lucan’s black armor swept toward me from the desiccating corpse and clapped itself to my body.  His battle cloak whirled around my shoulders.  The glass shield fitted itself over my arm.  Caval was there with me, too.

I bent down to the silent hound for its comfort but it became a strange beast rushing from hound to pup to embryo to shoot of its father’s essence as though it had lost the proper direction of life.

Caval hound was running away from death toward birth.  Then running past birth toward the birth of its father and its father’s father, the famous Cabal that belonged to Arthur.

The hound was not alone in its strange backwards rush through life.  All around me I saw people and cities, animals, armies, roads, nations, take the wrong course through time, driving not toward death but toward birth.  Burrowing deeper into time to become their own ancestors.  All as though the course of life were reversed everywhere.

I saw myself in the gleam of Excalibur’s steel.  I alone on Earth was not living backwards.  I was ageing forward through the seven stages of man.  Death rushed toward me as fast as birth ran toward everyone else.

I saw that my black armor was no longer a perfection.  It was as rusted as an armor left to dream in a tomb, its mail age-split, its leather and padding rotted.  The glass shield was hazed with age.  Urien slung over my shoulder was rotted, too.

I had a Druid’s forked beard of snakes on my woman’s face!

I was becoming an old woman, already triple the fourteen years I had been when Lucan as Galabes had taken me from Carbonek and Queen Morgause.

I began to scream at the wildness of the world, the crazed senselessness of time.  What was happening to me?  What was happening to the world around me?

I thrust Excalibur toward heaven and shouted the sword’s name and time stopped.

* * *

In the Julian Year 5250 and of Our Lord 537

The world ceased to grow younger.

I ceased to grow older.

Time stopped its wild backward flight and I was there in the golden age of Arthur and Camelot where I was meant to begin my merlin’s life.

I saw no more of the flower that shrinks in seconds to a seed that infects its parent with birth pangs.  Life once more moved in its slow, stately cycles, but cycles that were backwards to my perception, with sons and daughters the fathers and mothers to their own parents.

Despite this strangeness, I recognized the world had not changed fundamentally.  It still was a world in which a daughter or son could expect the same life led by a mother or father with the same duties to village, lord, and king.  Life led toward the completion of a world cycle after which, for the Children of the Fighting Woden, it all would begin again just the same.  For the Children of Peaceful Jesu, it would lead to the narrow doors of Heaven and the wide doors of Hell.

Yet it was not death that separated the living from these other worlds but birth.

So I continued to live against the ordinary course of time.  Cause and effect were reversed for me.  This seemed normal because I knew that life is all a cycle, the future as fixed as the past unless a hero changes it.

But, in all this crisscrossing of time, where should I begin to put the future right?

Dawn crept over the grim field of Camlann.  The corpses had been picked clean by Saxons, Britons, elves, fairies, and rats.  The barbarians had set their stew pots in the carnage and heaped into the pots the brains, offal, and thinking livers of Arthur’s dead.  Saxon women whooped a bizarre song for their giant naked king to dance as he spattered himself with British blood and juggled British skulls.

I turned away from this horrid scene, stirring my own inner stew of terror and Saxon-hate.  So that when I was challenged by Saxon guards drunk on their mead, I in my rage beat them with the British bones they had been gnawing and left them as the last victims of Camlann and their unholy war for possession of the golden Empire of the Britons.

But I was wrong.  This battlefield was not Camlann at its end.  Time was running backwards for me.  I was a witness of the morning after the second day of battle, not the fatal third.  Arthur was alive! The Round Table stood united!

I looked across the field toward the sound of brass trumpets and saw – Great Jupiter! – the glittering passage of Arthur and two hundred of the Table, flags and pennants, scalps and ladies’ ribbons on shields, winged helmets, horses hooves sparking on the arrowheads left in the sod from yesterday’s battle.

Arthur with his red dragon and eagle shield that was frightful to the superstitious Saxons.  The scimitar Caliburn on his buckler.  The world was whole and for one day more still belonged to Arthur and Camelot and I was part of it!

I ran across to Arthur and cheered.

Arthur hailed me, laughing out of his battle fatigue, “Father-Mother Merlin, which sex are you today?  What do you say – will Camelot be Saxon or Briton tomorrow?”

The king dropped down from his saddle as a man exhausted and bone-bruised by the banging on his armor and shield of Saxon battle axes.

“Whoever since the lying Greeks thought to fight a battle of three days, Mother Merlin?” he said.  “We’re making a glittering page in the
Chronicles,
aren’t we?  If we survive to write them.”

Arthur leaned against his war horse Llamrei and said, “Merlin, damn you, old woman, tell me what happens tomorrow!”

I clutched around my rusted armor and rotted Urien, and the gleaming Excalibur, the old woolen battle cloak I had taken from Lucan’s body in the future, and eagerly looked at this man who was my blood-father dead in my own time.

The high king was a small man compared to the Saxon king but taller than any other Briton I’d known.  He was broad-shouldered from a lifetime swinging sword and club.  His face had a beauty that was manly and feminine – the face of the heroic Crucified Jesu and of the Virgin Mary who looked out at Arthur from the inside of his shield.

His face also had the character of an Old Roman, the mark of his bloodline that had begun, so legend said, between a god and a Roman princess.

Arthur clutched my snaky beard, saying, “I’m desperately old, Mother, forty-three in the spring.  Nearly the oldest man in my kingdom.  Certainly older than my merlin who grows younger and more beautiful as I wither.  My son’s with the Saxons.  My queen and her lover by their sin have poisoned my army.  What’s to become of Camelot?  Tell me!”

I felt a welling of despair for this damaged hero.  But this Arthur’s world would go on to the end of its cycle.  I had no power over it.  I would have no power for any Arthur until I learned the key to allow me to change the future.

“My king!” I cried, but Arthur was swept from me, backwards in time, sliding down the road away from Camlann and toward Camelot from which he had marched to battle.

I found myself marching in the crowd of camp followers.

“Is this backwards confusion to be my life forever?” I cried in despair.

“Ignore the old fool,” a woman said to another.

This woman thought she was marching to Camlann when I saw her walking backwards to Camelot.

She said to her companion, “Old Merlin forgets this is the world into which she was born!”

The women laughed and told the joke to more.

I trudged in the dust, the pebbles thrown at me by the women tapping on the armor under my cloak.  None dared drive me away – not with two battle swords slung over my back – but none loved a merlin.  Who loves the witch who foretells the poisoned future?

Hope and despair!  I stepped out of the march and spread myself on the warm earth to watch the sun go from sunset to sunrise and the Moon from wane to wax.  What was I to do in this place and in this backward time?

I had made the World Sword for Arthur but how was I to discover the merlin in me who could save Camelot?

At brightening sunset I heard the words, “Stand clear of that patch of ground, boy!  Something wicked’s buried there.”

I opened my eyes. A princess with bound red hair and the green hex in her eyes that drives off demons.  No crown but a jeweled cloth band around her forehead.  Veil open.  She wore a silver gilt Roman breastplate over her silk skirts.  Her horse snorted and backed from where I lay on the earth.

I saw the boy, her son, with the Orkney red raven crest on his tunic.  This was Gawain! The warrior who would fight the Green Knight and die at Camlann with Arthur’s war band.

From that I knew the young woman to be King Lot’s wife, half-sister of Arthur, and in my own childhood at Carbonek the crazed witch-queen Morgause.

I got up startled by her youth and beauty, the contrast of her red and green on white, and the gleaming purity of her armor.

The boy pissing against the tree that was me screamed seeing a merlin oak leap up.  Seeing
me
leap up.

The young Queen Morgause shouted her war cry and drew her Orkney greatsword with its hissing red blade.

I felt myself like a woman buried alive!

Where was I?  What was I?

What had I become?  A tree, again?

What could I become?

I sneezed out tree dust.

Morgause laughed.  The boy fled from me to his mother.