The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (28 page)

We ran at each other in a howling fury.  Our horses collided in an up throwing of blood and brains, horse skulls crushed one against the other, we two knights crashing down into the thrashing of animal legs and the mud.

* * *

I hauled myself out of the mire and chopped apart the dead horse crushing King Lot.  The berserk had possession of me.  “Stand, King, to die!” I shouted.  I swung Urien.

Lot caught the blow on his greatsword and deflected it as he staggered to his feet, his shattered helmet falling from his head, his shield pinned beneath the fragments of his horse.  He slapped on his winged red crown.

“Be a woman of valor!” he shouted.  “Give me shield and helmet to fight you!”

I threw him my glass shield.  “Take mine,” I said.

I threw him my stone helmet.  “Take this.”

I drove my sword at Lot, crying, “Eat this steel!”

Lot shielded off the blow and the counterblow and the re-counter and the blow that followed, staggering back toward his army as I beat him across the field beneath the view of York and Arthur’s army.

Lot was a great defensive fighter, deflecting or slipping past my anvil-cutting Urien.  But I was Merlin and a merlin’s rage was in me.  I beat him back, back, cutting and bruising him, jeering at him, fever hot in me, until Lot found good ground and threw up the glass shield to fend off the last blow he would take.

A cheer from his army! Clash of drums and of swords on shields!

Lot counterattacked, swinging low and high in Orkney style, driving me left and right and back, forcing me into the mud, forcing me to sweat to save my life, our swords clattering and sparking, whining through the air, he chipping off my stone armor, me shattering his red raven breastplate, striking for blood.

I swung anti-sun-wise, surprising the Orkneyman, bringing Urien inside Lot’s shield and snapping it off his arm.  On the return swing, I crushed his red armor and his ribs and drove out of him the breath that kept him alive.

I raised my sword in both hands to stab it through the king’s throat as Lot writhed gasping in the mud.

I heard an alien horn-cry.

Arthur and his war band running to save Lot from me stopped in their charge.

Lot’s war band running to save Lot from Arthur stopped.

The last bloody remnants of Hengist’s Saxons ceased their fighting on York walls.

We all looked north at an immense army of Saxons, Picts, and Scots coming out of the trees, clean steel flashing, swords and axes unchipped by use, every man and woman of them fresh and bloody-minded.

Arthur with his armored shoulder clubbed me away from Lot.  He fisted me in the stone breastplate with his mailed hand.  Tripped me into the mud.  Grabbed up my Urien and said, “Shall I break your Anvil Eater or use it to spit you for Saxon meat, Mother?”

“Spit me!  Save the sword!” I shouted.

“I’ll do both,” he said.

Arthur broke the blade over his knee and threw the two pieces of Urien into the mud.

I screamed at the horror of it all.

The new Saxon army came running out of the trees, a herald and pennant trying to outrun the vanguard so that terms could be negotiated on the fly before the warriors of three armies smashed together.

One-armed Bedivere stood over me.  “Let a country boy spit your pig, Arthur!”  He couched his bloodied spear to stab it through me.

Kay cried, “Hold!  We need every sword-hand now, especially a merlin’s.”

Arthur shoved Kay toward the new Saxon army, shouting, “Go talk to them!”

“I’ll buy you an hour, Duke.  Get to the city and behind the walls.”

Kay shoved a startled Orkneyman off his horse and galloped toward the enemy herald.

Percival said, “Merlin’s crime is she loves a dream Arthur more than the real Arthur.  Let her live, Duke, but cage her like the unpredictable beast she is.”

“Fetch me an iron cage on an iron leash,” Arthur said to his slaves.  “That works to cage magicians.  Put wheels on it.  Put her in it.  Never let me see her face again.”

“Arthur!” I cried where I was pinned in the mud under Bedivere’s boot.

The boy knight Lucan ran up leading his war band.  He’d fought himself naked.  He wore only bruises, boots, and his father’s greatsword.

“That’s Duke Horst over there, Arthur!” he cried. “He has two legions he calls a ‘British army’ blessed by Gurthrygen.  How do we fight an army blessed by the king?”

“We fight it and worry about the king’s curse afterward,” said Arthur.  “Armor up.  Put on this” – he hauled from the mud the glass shield and gave it to Lucan – “and let’s kill more Saxons.”

Lucan looked back at his ruined city of York, at the battle-ruin of dead in the field all around him, and vomited.

“One more fight,” he said, wiping his mouth and strapping on the shield, “and then I want no more war.  I want peace.  I want children.  I want green York, blue skies, and a yellow sun forever!”

“So do I,” said Arthur.  “But war has come to us and we must fight it.  Go to your army.  Stand ready to attack Horst on my signal.”

Naked Lucan ran to his gathering troops.

I looked out of my iron cage.  Saxons, Picts, and Scots to the north.  King Lot and his Orkney army fleeing away to the east, abandoning us.  Hengist’s last few Saxons raising a cheer from the broken city walls in the south as they scrambled to find weapons to fight us again.

I felt my blood freeze in its channels.  My heart shivered trying to pump red ice.  I had not felt fear fighting through York when the kill-craze was on me.  Now I was sober, caged, my broken armor falling off, and everyone was my enemy, including Arthur.  Mordred had escaped me.  I was filled with sudden terror.  How could I make Camelot now?

Worse, I thought, is there no better way than awful war to make Camelot?

Rufus was there outside my cage, peering in at me, cleansing his gladius of Saxon meat.  “Why have you caged your mother?” he said to Arthur.

Arthur wrapped around his shield arm the chain hooked to my cage.

“What are you doing with that?” said Rufus.  “You’ll fight Horst and Hengist with a slave cage on your arm?”

“Until she or I is dead,” Arthur said.

“You Britons treat your mothers worse than barbarians!”

“Go to your cohorts, Roman, and drive those last Saxons out of York.”

Rufus jumped into his chariot and drove off to collect his Roman captains and the Cornish army.  I watched him break into the city and fling Saxons from the walls until once again blond braids flapped in air as Saxon warriors scrambled across the fields to escape Cornish steel.

Kay brought Duke Horst’s herald to Arthur standing in the mud by my cage.

The Saxon herald was a giant, at least six feet tall, with yellow braids springing from all parts of his scalp.  He had thrown back his four-horned helmet and draped blue silk across his gilt breastplate.  The blue cloth made his blue eyes seem to start from his yellow beard and brows, all of which had grown together.  He had slung from his armor the circlets of the dozen British chiefs and kings he had slaughtered in single combat.

“Was heil!” the Saxon cried from atop his equally immense horse.

He jerked his head around to look first east at the runaway Orkney army and then south toward the cries of the twice-defeated Saxons in York.

Then he spoke in careful Latin, saying, “Which is the prince?”

“I’m Duke Arthur.”

The huge Saxon leaned down from his saddle to say, “I won’t insult you by calling you a little man with little hopes and ambitions and probably a very little saxa between your thighs, although those are the insults I’m instructed to make.”

“Thanks for your courtesy,” Arthur said.

“Nor will I notice publicly that half your army is dead or bruised to uselessness, that only a fool fights two battles in a year and certainly not two in one day, and that the fresh army of Orkney was your only hope of relief and they are running to their piss-ant little island like children fleeing from forest-frights.”

The Saxon herald sucked in an immense amount of wind to fill his huge chest after that long speech.  The blue silk veil hiding the arms on his breastplate naming him shivered in the sucking.

“Thanks again,” said Arthur.  “I hadn’t expected so fine a courtesy in a Saxon.”

“Well, there you have it.  I’m a man of many finenesses.”

The giant leered around at Arthur’s war band of three, as though measuring them for his stew pots.  He looked at me in my cage and the chain linking me to Arthur.  He was startled.

“Do you mean to fight the Lord Duke Horst chained to a slave cage?” he cried.

“If we fight, that’s how I’ll fight.”

“By all my gods, are you insane?”

“I’ll fight you as I am for my sin in having this monster” – Arthur rattled my chain – “as my mother.”

“Your mother?” cried the Saxon.  “You Britons cage your
mothers?
”

The Saxon turned away his face to not look into that part of the landscape that held me in my cage and mumbled, “How do we defeat a race that cages its own mothers?”

Behind the herald, the vanguard of the new Saxon army began to shout threats at the outriders of Arthur’s army.  Arthur’s Cornishmen banged swords on shields in counter threat.

“Before our armies decide to fight,” said Arthur, “you better tell us the names of all your lords so we can seek them in this field to carve them out of life.”

“Do all you mother-cagers have such gaudy mouths?” said the herald.  “All right.  My lords are Duke Horst – you can see his blue banner over there – and Duke Hengist who is or was over there” – he gestured at York where the only Saxons left to be seen were those being spitted on spears above the city walls – “and Dukes Baldaf and Cheldric, trotting up from the coast with sixty thousand or so.”

“This island is too light to hold ten legions of giants like yourself,” said Arthur.  “You better get off it before we all sink into the sea.”

“I like that!” said the herald, laughing.

“Oh, he means just a tenth that number, Duke,” said Bedivere to Arthur, “as everyone knows Saxons can’t count past fingers and toes.”

“Even better!”  The herald laughed again.

“Who else do you promise us for sport?” said Kay.

No more laughter from the Saxon.

He said, in a different and strained voice, “Colgrin comes.”

“Who or what is ‘Colgrin?’” said Percival.

The herald said, “You all think yourselves the mighty, Saxon-killing princes and princesses of Britain, don’t you?  But I tell you are about to be displaced.  We
all
are about to be displaced.  Colgrin comes next.”

“Is he another of those Saxon gods that never learned to wash their own rumps?” cried Bedivere, laughing.

“Nearly that,” said the herald, grimly.

Arthur said, “What’s his title?”

“What title can you give the thing he is?” said the Saxon.  “It’s Colgrin with his hundred-thousands who will sweep this beautiful land clean of you pitiful lumps and probably clean of us, too, and give it over to his own strange race of humans.”

The Saxon gazed around at the silent Britons.

“No more jokes?” he asked.  “Have I converted you to terror?  Oh, yes, I nearly forgot to give you our terms.”

The herald rose up in his saddle to make this speech formal.  He straightened the blue silk hiding the badge on his breastplate

“Duke Horst says, ‘To keep us from killing you all, give us a little piece of land.’”

“How little?” said Arthur.

“Humber to Caithness with York.”

“You’ve the southeast of what was our grandfathers’ kingdom,” said Arthur, “and now you want the northeast, too?”

“‘Yes,’ says Duke Horst, ‘and then we can all be Britons together and stand against Colgrin.’”

“Tell your duke he can have the whole Island when he drives a spear through each of our hearts!”

“I told him you’d say that.  You gaudy-mouthed, mother-cagers couldn’t say less.  Too bad.  Now Colgrin will kill us all.”

The Saxon saluted Arthur with his spear.  “Good battle to you, Duke!”

He yanked off the blue silk over his breastplate.  There were his arms naming him Duke Horst.

He spun his horse around and bolted across the field toward his army.

“Give me a bow!” Arthur shouted.

Arthur nocked a first arrow and fired at Horst, the Saxon army cheering their duke’s galloping escape from us.  Before the first arrow made half the distance to Horst, Arthur had fired a second and a third.  Fifteen arrows in the minute Horst galloped through the mud, the arrows falling around him like Thor’s bolts.  Horst whacked them away with his sword, caught them on his shield, laughed to hear them bang off his armor.  Until four of them drove one after the other into his horse, riveting the animal from head to tail, and the giant Saxon went down over his thrashing, dying mount.

But Horst had reached his vanguard.  The Saxons closed around their prince, raising their shields in the Turtle to save him from Arthur’s arrow-rain.

Rufus on the walls of York began firing arrows and stones into the flank of the advancing Saxons, killing them in dozens as the great stones bounced and ricocheted among them.

Bedivere shouted for the cavalry and took them howling – feathers whipping, spear points glittering – around the far flank of the Saxons to make Mark Antony’s famous pincer.

Arthur, Kay, Percival, and Lucan led the foot warriors forward to cut out the heart of the Saxon force pinched by Bedivere.

Arthur ran hauling my wheeled cage, shouting encouragement to his warriors, arrows falling around him and shielding them off, spears falling around him and cutting them apart in flight, cutting and stabbing yellow-haired giants until they swirled around him in a ghastly dying dance, spilling their guts on his boots, heads rolling across his path, their scalps torn off and flung into the air for any Briton to staple to his shield.

I in my cage dodged arrows and sword blows until Lucan was beside me, fighting behind the glass shield.

I said, “Lucan, give me a sword!  Let me die with steel in my hands!”

Lucan sliced the arm off a Saxon and flung to me the dead hand holding the single-edged scramasax.

“Let the slaughter begin!” I shouted, happy war-craze coming over me.

I fought Saxons through the bars of my cage as I was dragged along behind Arthur, me collecting axes and spears, shield, helmet, breastplate until I was armed and dressed and looked like a Saxon in my cage and Britons attacked me, too, and I fought them off through cage bars.

Lucan and I fought side-by-side with the same fury we had, in a future life cycle, fought one another.

Rufus with his Romans rode through the melee, swinging a massive battle ax made for cutting down Saxons, shielding off leaping giants.

He shouted to Arthur, “The army’s spent!  We shouldn’t have accepted a second battle today!”

“We’ve begun, we’ll finish!” cried Arthur.

“Then fall back on the city, Duke!  Take siege to heal our bruises!”

Arthur pointed across the field.  “How do I fall back through that?”

The bulk of the Saxon army had wandered between Arthur and York.

To the north, the Orkney army had drawn up out of arrow range to watch and wait, ready to fall on whichever army survived and so claim York for Orkney.

Somewhere toward the coast were the sixty thousand, or six thousand, men and women of Dukes Cheldric and Baldaf, promising a third great battle today.

“We’re winning glory today, Arthur!” Bedivere cried, wading through combat, swinging his mace one-handed.

“Glory is victory,” Percival said from her saddle, arrows clattering on her shield, pinning it, until the weight of them was too much.  She threw off the shield and called to a slave for a fresh target.

Rufus said, “Victory for Britain is survival of this army, Duke.  Retreat to York!”

Kay, his body bruised and his armor battered, weary, leaned on his sword and cried, “Gurthrygen never made a fight like this, Arthur!  You’re the truer son of Uther.  Let me hail you Pendragon!”

Kay saluted with his sword and fainted with exhaustion into the mud.

Rufus said, “There’s my argument, Arthur.”

Arthur shouted to his calling horns, “Fall back on York!  Fall back!”

The horns blew until the battle-frenzied Britons understood them and began a grudging retreat to the city walls.

It was then, with the Saxons caught between the wings of the British army and with Arthur’s vanguard thrust deep into the Saxon middle, that Horst, flapping his blue silk, turned away his war horse and began the stampede of Saxons, Scots, and Picts back into the forest from which they had come.

The Britons stopped their retreat to the city, cheered, and ran after the Saxons.

Rufus shouted, “Fall back!  Back!  It’s a fraud!”

Arthur, hauling my cage, said, “We’ll double their trick by killing them with their backs turned!”

He ran ahead, dragging the cage, swinging his sword to shatter the shields the Saxons had swung over their backs.

He ran into the forest and met another enemy – the dark.  In the forest gloom, the Saxons in their natural environment turned on the Britons and slaughtered them, heaving their corpses up into the tree tops, breaking their shields around tree trunks, trampling their broken weapons into the roots.

With a wild shout the Saxons hurled Arthur and his army out of the forest, Britons groveling in surprise in the bloody mud, Arthur railing at them, tramping around their lines hauling my cage, slapping them into order, his war band doing the same, until I said, “Burn them.”

“Are you still alive in there?” Arthur cried, not turning to see me.

“Fire the woods,” I said.  “Burn them all!”

Arthur slapped his sword on the cage.  “Silence, dead woman!”  But he called to his war band, “Torch the woods!”

Flames rose up like a new York of yellower walls, towered with black smoke, red sparks for banners.

Out of the crack and fall of trees came the satisfying screams of burning Saxons.  They ran out, helmets melting down their faces, bodies on fire, feet blackened.  Arthur’s army killed them, singing and jeering, drinking ale and wine, calling for meat and bread, the Saxon-raped women of York coming out to cheer on the fire and drive their knives into the wounded.

In the north, the banners of the Orkney army dipped shuddering at the sight.  The Orkneymen drew away across the hills, homeward, trembling with horror at what they had seen Arthur do to his enemies.

* * *

Nightfall.  Was it night already?

The forest was burnt back.  Stubs of trees hung with the skeletons of Saxon giants.  The promised arrival of the sixty thousand, or six thousand or six, under Cheldric and Baldaf was still just a promise.

The Britons were exhausted and happily drunk.  York was saved.

Arthur, worn and chilled with the day’s sweats and still hauling my cage, kicked through the ashes to search for the big bones of Duke Horst.

Behind a last wall of flame they saw too many Saxons on horseback and foot with good arms and armor, unmailed to move faster, run out of the forest toward the south, the blue-silk banner of Duke Horst in their lead, Horst himself riding a fresh, spark-spitting, iron-hooved war horse.

He turned to Arthur across the flames that separated them and fired Arthur a salute – the Roman insult with the middle finger – and rode south.

Arthur shouted in fury.

Rufus said, wearily, “We have to march again.”

Arthur in his rage screamed, “You told me before to fall back!  Now the army’s dead tired and dead drunk and it must fall back on York but you say go on.  Are you insane, Roman?”

“What I said an hour ago was in another age, Arthur.  Horst moves south.  He’s running for Kaerlindcoit.”

“Gurthrygen’s there with his army.  He can keep the town.”

“The king’s ‘army’ is two thousand warriors.  Horst has the force to take the city and the king and Britain in his first charge.  We have to march south.”

Arthur leaned heavily on his shield furred with broken arrow shafts.  He said, in the voice of exhaustion, “Am I to fight thirteen battles before the week’s out?”

“You may have to if you want to be king of anything still called ‘Britain.’”

Bedivere, Kay, Percival, and the boy Lucan rode up with a war horse for Arthur.

“Unchain yourself,” Bedivere said to him.  “Leave the cage.”

“No,” said Arthur, “we’re chained together until one of us dies.  Lucan, stay here.  Hold the city.”

Lucan saluted the duke and me in my cage and, glass shield over his back, rode out of the heaped ashes to call the remnants of his father’s army back to York.

Arthur turned his war horse south, tugging my wheeled cage behind.  “To Kaerlindcoit,” he said.  “And more battle.”

Our fight-battered army, drunk and exhausted, stumbled south through the night, following the jeers and taunts of the rearguard of the Saxon army ahead of us marching toward Kaerlindcoit.

* * *

“Great Jesu, what’ve they done?” cried Kay, waking me in my cage.

It was not dawn but it looked like dawn.  The fourth watch of the night.  The southern sky as bright as though the sun had chosen to rise there.

Scouts came out of the trees to shout, “They’ve torched the city, Duke Arthur!  Horst burned the king as you burned Horst!”

Arthur, dragging my cage, galloped into the town.  It was a jumble of burnt timbers, smoke-stinking wattle, and the crack-bang of heat-shattered roof tiles.  The dead were everywhere – Saxons thrown down beside Britons, women and children, boy-warriors, girl-warriors.  How had Horst done so much horror with Arthur at his heels?

“Stand and name yourself!” a warrior cried, rising from an ash heap, tears streaking through to the blood on his cheeks.

The warrior held up the emerald-studded greatsword Uther had stolen from an Irish king, its gilt blade honed through to the steel.  He stood ready to fight Arthur’s army single-handed.  But the language he had used was our own.

“Are you Briton or Saxon?” Arthur said, hauling out his sword.  “Name yourself and your tribe!”

“Gurthrygen the King.  Who or what are you?”

Arthur wiped battle mire from his own face.  “Arthur your brother!” he cried.

He tried to leap from his saddle with shield and sword to land on his feet but in his exhaustion fell floundering at the king’s feet, dragging my cage with him.

“Oh, get up, you fool.”  Gurthrygen whacked Arthur upright with the flat of his sword.  “Is caging them up how you keep your war band loyal?”  He slapped his blade on my cage.

“My enemy-foster mother,” said Arthur, “who wants to kill my son.”

“Our mother-queen Igerne killed most of her sons.  Why shouldn’t Lady Merlin kill a few grandsons?  What other merry men and women do you bring me?”

“The army of the Britons, the victors of York.”

Five hundred warriors straggled out of the dawn gloom, each as bedraggled and ash-faced as Gurthrygen.

“Is this ruination my army?”  The king was astonished and horrified.

“Bedivere, where’s the army?” Arthur cried.

“This is it, Duke, five centuries of us and lucky to have so many standing.”

“What of my six thousand?” said Gurthrygen.

“Some left wounded with Lucan at York, King,” said Bedivere.  “Two thousand more straggling through the forest behind us.”

Kay said, “I counted more hundreds fleeing away home after the first battle to avoid the second.  Others fled from the second to avoid this third.”

Percival, weaving in her saddle from exhaustion, said in her best herald’s voice, “We may be few, King and Duke, but we are the hard nub of the Island, proud and victorious...”

She fell out of her saddle and snored in the mud.

Gurthrygen used his boot to turn Percival’s face out of the slime so she would not drown.

The king turned limping through ruined Kaerlindcoit, using the Irish sword as a crutch.  “The Saxons torched the villas, the old Legionary fortress, the cathedral, such as it was, a pathetic thing, and rode through the flames like salamanders rejuvenating, shouting, ‘Thus Arthur burned us, so we burn Gurthrygen!’  Is that what you did, Brother, you burnt him?  Good for you!”

Gurthrygen helped Arthur haul along my wheeled cage.  “I’ve decided to give Horst the first ministership of the kingdom anyway.”

“For killing my thousands?” cried Arthur.

“For survival,” said the king.  “The first rule of kingship.”

We came to the last line of town rubble where the king’s war band sprawled unmoving in the dirt like living dead.  Beyond were farm fields churned to mud by horse hooves.  Beyond that, a glitter of spear points moved hectic in the far trees.  Another Saxon army readying to fight us.

The king said to his calling horns, “Sound.  Call in Duke Horst.”

Arthur cried, “Is this surrender?”

“It’s survival.  Didn’t I tell you that?  Horst wants Britain from Humber to Caithness and I’ll give it to him.  If I don’t end this fighting before seeding-time, the whole North will starve.  I want him my ally against the even wilder Saxons out there.”