The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) Read online

  “Greed!” said the Great Merlin, reading the thought in my liver. He swelled from a midget to his nine foot height. Behind his shoulder was the shadow image of the laughing sphinx.

  “Greed,” he said, “is the destruction of the merlin, our only sin. Everything in the world is ours. We have only to take it. We have no need to be greedy for more than everything.”

  He and his sphinx began to shrivel into the grave.

  “But her sword,” tittered the sphinx, “won’t kill Saxons in her dreams!”

  The Great Merlin groaned. The sphinx laughed. Both withered to bone dust.

  I said to the closing grave, “Tell me what to do!”

  Arms thrust up from the earth, past snaking roots and hopping spiders, and clutched me screaming, dragging me into the grave beneath the suffocating dust, the chest-crushing stones, the plants whose roots sought my eyes and ears and nose to suck my life juices, to enwrap the sword.

  I heard behind my shoulder the laughter of a sphinx and a merlin’s breath warm on my ear, saying, “Become!”

  “Become what?” I cried, suffocating, struggling to get out, subsiding into dreaming death.

  “Become all of us!”

  The sphinx in its tittering voice said, “Tell us the name of the sword!”

  Excalibur! the sword replied.

  The sphinx vanished.

  The Great Merlin’s arms withered to atomos around my chest.

  The creature and his sphinx drifted away into the future. I drifted into the past.

  “Sobeit!” the Earth said around me and around Excalibur.

  We dreamed together of Arthur and Camelot.

  “But what am I to do?” I cried out.

  * * *

  “Does this earth talk?” said a girl, startled, crossing my grave.

  Her voice woke me.

  I looked up out of the dirt as though I lay beneath a glass coffin lid. Unlike Morgause, whom I had seen how many years ago, this woman wore no armor. She wore Persian silk and bangles of Jerusalem coins.

  She was alive in a more civilized era, I thought with delight, before the endless Saxon wars. She was alive in an age when Arthur’s peace was like the old pax romana, perfect and everywhere. When universities were stuffed with dozens of books and even more scholars. When a girl could dance fearless on a merlin’s grave.

  But the young man for whom she danced would not take her invitation.

  “Can this ground really speak?” he said, puzzled.

  He was as beautiful and dressed as beautifully as the girl. This was their countryside picnic, two slaves holding their feast, but he had a gladius in a jeweled scabbard on his belt.

  The young man kneeled above me. I saw him as a fish looking up from clear water sees a fisherman looking down from his boat. The youth put his ear to my grave and listened into the earth.

  “What did it say?” he said to the girl. It was a casual command but a command.

  The girl laughed. “It said, ‘What am I to do now?’”

  “It said that?”

  “I’ve told you, Mordred.”

  I trembled with excitement and fear. I looked up at Mordred! Arthur’s bastard son out of Morgause. The sin put on the high king by trickery so poisonous that Mordred, heir to Camelot and Orkney, led the Saxon kings against Arthur and plunged his own sword into the High King to win Guenevere for Lancelot already dead on that same battlefield and to conquer the ruins of Camelot for himself.

  Was this the moment for which I had made Excalibur? To thrust the blade out of this grave through the ear now listening for my dream shout?

  I looked at the girl – her veil open, summer sweat on her forehead, her eyes, skin, and hair all golds and blues. Was this sweet beauty the queen – Guenevere, child of Cator, Duke of Brittany, who had brought as dowry the Round Table made for her father by the Great Merlin?

  “Is that Guenevere the whore up there?” I cried in rage.

  Mordred staggered back from the grave.

  The girl said, “You heard it, too?”

  But she laughed, that sound also blue and gold to my ears.

  “What brave soul is buried there to so frighten the great Prince Mordred?” she teased.

  Mordred said to her, in grim fury, “I bear frights other men die to hear. I’ve scars that to see them cause strong men to weep. Nothing frightens me.”

  “I’ve wept for your scars, too,” she said, no more merriment in her voice.

  She kneeled on the grave and put her ear to the earth. I nearly screamed as I felt a welling of surprise merlinic love for her as Arthur’s queen. If it were she who was Guenevere and ruined Camelot, how could I love her? No, I should kill this monster of adultery!

  Then I thought in fresh horror, Drive the World Sword through her woman’s heart, this queen who loves Arthur? How can I do that?

  She said to Mordred, disappointed, “Nothing more to hear.”

  “You heard something before,” Mordred said.

  He dragged the two slaves from their picnic, each with a shovel.

  “Before I kill you, say your name!” I said to the girl.

  “It speaks again!” She put her ear to the grave, curious.

  Confess your name, I wanted to warn her, and the merlin in this grave will kill you, Guenevere!

  “It thinks me the queen,” the girl said, rising, confused.

  “Say your name!” I shouted.

  “I hear it!” cried a slave.

  The slaves flung down their shovels and ran back to the picnic.

  “What did it say to you?” said Mordred, hot and demanding.

  He pulled the scabbard from his gladius and straddled the grave to stab the blade into my dirt.

  “No!” the girl said to him. She went to her knees an arm’s reach above my chest and looked down into the grave as though looking into my eyes.

  She said to my grave, “My name is Flavia, child of Agravain Hard Hand of the Round Table.”

  “Flavia! Oh, perfect Flavia! Then I won’t have to kill your beauty!”

  “Would you kill me?” Flavia cried.

  She ran from my grave.

  Mordred shouted his war cry and drove his gladius into the earth, plunging it through soil transparent to me, driving it down until I saw the metal point coming at me seeking heart and liver, steel courageous against the demons that protect the dead.

  I shouted when the metal cut searing into my body that I thought already dead.

  The girl cowered from my shout with her cringing slaves.

  Mordred stabbed and gouged and dug at the grave in a lip-lathering fury.

  “There’s nothing here!” he cried. “No bone, no iron. Nothing that can speak!”

  “What did it say to you, Lady?” a slave asked Flavia.

  “It mistook me for the queen.”

  “Ill-omened,” whispered the slave. “If Guenevere suspects an empty grave calls you queen, you must run for your life, Mistress!”

  “Queen after Guenevere?” said Mordred. He stopped hacking at my grave.

  “She’s a bitterly jealous queen,” the slave whispered to Flavia, cowering from Mordred, “with more jealous friends – like him.”

  Mordred shouted at the slave, “Go!”

  The slaves fled, crying, “Lady, come with us!”

  “But what have I done?” Flavia cried.

  Mordred stood on my grave watching Flavia, ghastly calculation coming into his face.

  Flavia cowered from him, saying, “I’ve done nothing against the queen.”

  Mordred watched her narrowly.

  I watched him.

  “A piece of earth spoke to me and I reported what it said,” Flavia cried. “You asked me. The guilt is yours, too.”

  “This grave,” said Mordred, “said you were to be queen?”

  “It asked me if I’m the queen. No more than that. What’s going to happen to me?”

  “What does it mean?” Mordred shouted at her.

  “Is this the lesson of love you
promised me?” Flavia said, backing from Mordred, putting up her silk-covered arm for defense.

  He took one great stalking step toward her.

  “No, this is your lesson of life in Camelot,” he said, raising his gladius.

  “My father’s the Hard Hand – he’ll revenge me!” she screamed.

  “I’ll kill him, too. Another traitor to my dear queen almost-mother and my dearer throne.”

  He gripped the gladius to stab it through her.

  She was transfixed with terror.

  I shouted, “Halt, Murderer!”

  Mordred started.

  “Even the dirt cries out against you!” said Flavia.

  I shoved myself up out of my grave, sweeping Excalibur from under my cloak, swelling to the nine foot size of the Great Merlin I had become, rising over Mordred and Flavia.

  The reverse-running sunlight gleamed to a dawning yellow on my blade. The steel and the sun together were too beautiful not to use in killing this monster.

  I thrust the sword into Mordred, the blade seeking the blood-heart of the bastard prince.

  Instead of piercing his soul, Excalibur drove through Mordred’s arm and hand and into the steel of Mordred’s gladius blade and together the two swords cut into the breast of the girl and into her heart and burst it open.

  Flavia died crying, “Mother! Father!” with Mordred’s sword in her body and the ghost of Excalibur there, too.

  The sword that would not kill dream Saxons killed a living Briton.

  I howled in fury. I swung Excalibur through Mordred’s body, slicing flesh and bone. But the murderer would not fall to bits.

  Mordred stood staring down at my grave, feeling nothing, sensing nothing as Excalibur sliced through him.

  He heard only the rolling anguished cry that came from me.

  Mordred looked into the sky for thunderclouds and saw there no evidence of any Pagan gods watching him.

  “Then it’s a merlin down there,” he said to my grave. “But what’re you to a power like me?”

  He laughed a bitter, biting laughter.

  With Flavia’s veil, he wiped her blood from his gladius.

  Mordred crouched by my grave and said, “Who’s in this hole? Not the Great Merlin, surely. No, whatever monster lies here is too weak to be him. But I’ll kill it anyway and scatter its atomos.”

  Mordred grabbed up a shovel and dug into the grave until he uncovered the marks of my corpse.

  I saw myself as he saw me – a layer of dust and scrap in dark earth, a red stain marking the place Excalibur had lain rusting in hands.

  Mordred kicked at my scraps and said, “Not enough dust to punish. Too bad.”

  He flung aside the shovel in disgust.

  “Have I missed my moment in time again?” I cried aloud.

  “What moment?” Mordred said to my dust, startled. “Who’s there?”

  He snatched up the shovel as his weapon.

  “Have I wasted my purpose?” I howled.

  He was startled again. “Can you have a purpose, Old Monster?”

  Mordred drove the shovel into my grave to scatter my dust in the wind.

  I heard funeral weeping. Mordred heard the same.

  “Who weeps here on this empty hill?” he and I cried together.

  Was it me weeping for the waste of my Fate, for the twelve-times-twelve lives I had failed?

  The roaring sound of a hundred and forty-four weepers!

  Mordred jumped away from the grave. “What’s here?” he cried in terror. He hauled up shovel and gladius to defend himself.

  The lamentations stopped.

  A murderous rage shook me, gripping heart and liver, life and thought. I shouted, “When I come into the world, I’ll seek you out, Prince. I’ll kill you. However I find you, I’ll kill you. If you’re lord king of Camelot or an infant in swaddling, I’ll kill you for the evil you will do.”

  “How can old dust speak?” cried Mordred.

  He drove his gladius into my open grave.

  “Nothing there!” he said, hauling up dirt and worms on the tip of his blade.

  I saw the fright go out of him.

  “I’m a fool to hear you, Old Bones,” he said.

  Mordred laughed, hugging his gladius to his chest.

  He shouted, “I’m Arthur’s blood, prince of Camelot, the next Pendragon! What’ve I to fear in all the wide world? Let the world fear me!”

  He picked up a shard of my bone like the browned and crumbling bark of a dead tree. He broke it in his fingers, letting its dust shower into my grave.

  “Here, Old Monster,” he said to my dust, “I gift you a maiden for your eternity’s play.”

  He threw Flavia’s corpse into the grave.

  “One toy more or less, what’s she to me? If Lancelot has the queen for his tart, I’ve the blood – the crown will come to me in the time I make it come.”

  Mordred kneeled over my bone fragments and over the corpse of the girl. He dipped his fingers in her wound, dabbed the blood on my bone-shards and waited for the change. Nothing happened.

  “What, a virgin’s blood can’t bring you back to life, Old Horror? Then science is wrong! Or perhaps you’re too foul to be restored by ordinary means. Sobeit and I’m glad of it.”

  Mordred shoveled earth over Flavia and me.

  “But I’ll come back, Old Bones, to dig you up to burn your ruins on Pluto’s altar so there’s no chance you’ll ever trouble me again.”

  Mordred stamped the earth flat over my grave.

  “Now I’ve one more toy to crush,” he said, as much to himself as to me. “Agravain Hard Hand. I’ll kill her father to free me of his dagger in my back.”

  Mordred ran away to his horse and was gone.

  * * *

  I in my grave wept for the girl who lay on my dust and splinters, the suffocating earth around us both. I wept for myself gone to atomos too soon to save Arthur and Camelot. Wept for the sword that would never feel Arthur’s grip. Wept even for Urien rusting in its crumbled scabbard on my back. Wept for not knowing what I was to do.

  The girl opened her eyes and looked into mine. What eyes had I? Where could she find eyes in my scattered dust?

  Branwynn, she said to me – an alien word I recognized as my soul-name, with the power to draw together my atomos, shaping them into body and soul.

  “Branwynn, I love you for your pity of me.”

  “What kind of thing are you to live in death?” I cried through the dirt clogging my mouth.

  “I live through death as do you, Mother Merlin.”

  She glanced up through the grassy earth at the trees above us, the road with carts and horses, a knight passing on foot and, beyond, the glittering spires of Camelot, pennants and crosses, music, books, laughing children, teasing ladies, and the throbbing jewel that made it all alive – Arthur on his throne.

  It was so wonderful I tried to gather together my atomos to leap out of my grave to join this perfect world.

  But she said, “I’ve no yearning to return to Camelot and I cannot take you there.”

  “Take me there?” I cried. “Take me!” I shouted.

  “You’ll join me there soon enough in your death-dream.”

  “I’m dead already. When do I dream of Camelot?”

  “What’s time to me to care?” she said, content. “What’s time at all?”

  “Who are you?” I cried.

  She took my hand – in calling my soul-name she had assembled enough of my dust to make a hand to grasp.

  “I’m the virgin sent to fetch you to Artyr,” she said, using his soul-name.

  I held her hand and clutched to myself the red dust of Excalibur.

  We sank through the Earth, drifting through stone until I heard through the mud in my ears the feasting horns! The cheers for a champion! The merry clash of wine cups!

  I put my face to a glassy wall misted with chill and looked into a cavern beneath a hollow hill. In there was a palace of colored glass and exhalations of mist
. A great hall where light from all angles threw onto the cheering crowd a Greek prism of red, blue, yellow, and green.

  Arthur reclined on his Roman bed howling a toast from his wine-filled helmet. He was deep-chested from a life of sword and shield. His beard trimmed short. His hair the Pendragon red he shared with his half-sister Morgause. He was unarmed and dressed in the purple-edged white toga of his Roman rank, his library of the only twelve books saved from the fire of Alexandria as a prop under his elbow.

  Around him were his champions – Percival, Kay, Bedivere, Lucan, and the other two hundred of the Round Table. The gold Table was hung above the throne, immense and brooding.

  Guenevere was there among the princesses of Camelot but Morgause was not. I saw Lancelot with his mother, the Lady of the Lake. Mordred with his Druidic witches. All the chief soldiers of Arthur’s last army. Plus the temple priests and priestesses of half-mad pagan gods and of Jupiter, Mars, and Bellona. All of them the men, women, and children dead at Camlann or in the Saxon sack of Camelot after Arthur was slaughtered by Mordred.

  “What is this place?” I said to Flavia.

  “Annwn – the Otherworld. Pluto’s Endless Empire.”

  Flavia started, turning away. “My new lover calls me.”

  “Who in this place can be your lover?”

  “The Lord Pluto.”

  Flavia drifted away into a shimmer.

  I was no longer staring into the palace through its glass walls but I was there, in the middle of the wild revelry of Arthur’s dead knights, drunk with my own happiness.

  I pushed through the mob to the throne, shouting in joy, “Arthur! King!”

  The King said to me, “Ah, there you are! Have you come at last, Mother Merlin, or is this one more shattered dream?”

  I climbed up beside Arthur lying on his throne. The King was not a man but the image of a man. He was color and light. A conjunction of the many-colored rays of light focused through the glass walls onto this spot.

  I put my hands into his light and cried in agony, “Fraud! Deceit! Lies!”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” said the King. “And no. We here are subjects of the lord of the dead. I’m king of the shadows of Camelot until you make me live again.”

  A shifting of light and one-armed Bedivere appeared. “Have you brought the sword?”