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

  I put out my hands still rotten in death. In them was the last rust of Excalibur.

  “Has everything I’ve done come to this?” I cried.

  I dropped the rust and clapped hands to my face to weep but I had no face.

  Arthur pulled his toga hem away from the falling rust and said, “Bedivere, has she made the sword?”

  “That’s it, King.”

  “But has she named it?”

  “She’s named it ‘Excalibur,’ King.”

  “‘Daughter of Caliburn!’”

  Arthur reached to pick up the rust.

  “Hold, King,” said Bedivere, now beside me.

  Another shift of light brought two hundred Round Tablers clustering around us.

  Bedivere said, “The sword is not for you to touch, Arthur.”

  “The World Sword is mine,” said the King. “Its spirit was made for me before the beginning of the world.”

  “But not in this dead life.”

  “Galahad!” Arthur shouted.

  The pure knight who, alone of the Table, was granted a vision of the Holy Grail appeared in a shift of light between Arthur and the fallen rust.

  “Pick up my sword.”

  Galahad put his hands into the rust and picked up the gleaming blade.

  The sword sang Excalibur!

  “Is it time to live again?” cried Galahad.

  “Not yet,” said Arthur. He called, “Lucan!”

  Lucan was there, in a shift of black light.

  “She’s made my sword, Lucan,” Arthur said, “but has she made herself?”

  “I? Make myself?” I said.

  Lucan said to me, “Have you made yourself the merlin to save a kingdom and a king or must we all wait dreaming here for more ages to pass before we can ride out of death into life?”

  “You’ve made me all I can be,” I said to my foster father. “Tell me what more I’m to do and I’ll do it!”

  “Make the quest,” said Lucan.

  “What quest?”

  “Become!” said Arthur.

  The glitter faded that was king and throne, revel and revelers.

  The sounds of feasting drifted away.

  I was alone in a forgotten cavern in Hades.

  “How do I become?” I cried to the emptiness.

  “I’m with you,” a voice said out of the gloom.

  “Who’s there?”

  Artyr.

  “The King – my father?”

  “Look at us!”

  Darkness rolled back. I was on flat, desolate land beneath a sky whose rain never touched Earth to create flowers and birds. Around the horizon were the pillars and plinths of a monstrous henge. From each of the stones walked a man. Each man was Arthur. Twelve-times-twelve Arthurs. All the history of Arthurs.

  “These many lives I’ve lived and am,” said the King. “These many times I’ve failed to become what you must make me!”

  He was gone.

  Once more from the stones came human figures. These were not identical. They were Druids and magicians, Greek philosophers and Arab princes, but of all sizes, shapes, and colors. Warrior magi, African lords, book-scholars, men and women, able and crippled, horrific and beautiful.

  “These many times,” they cried in their many voices, “we’ve failed to become the merlin who can make the king!”

  The merlins stood ranked around me, breathing on me their fetid breath, men and women parting their forked beards and snaky hair. They pointed to Earth and Heaven, shouting, “Free us to die!”

  They were gone.

  I was alone, surrounded by the great henge.

  The sky stormed but no rain touched the ground. There was no mark to tell me east from west or if in Pluto’s kingdom there is east and west.

  I trudged across ground as hard as in winter’s frost. Nothing grew here. My feet touching that soil were the boney feet of a corpse. I came to a henge stone. How had I got here so fast? Or had days passed, weeks, centuries?

  I looked out across the barren land and saw another henge at another horizon. Beyond that I knew I would find another and another.

  “Is this endless misery the quest that’s to make me become?” I cried.

  I stood under the plinth and wept. Rain fell in my face. I was startled. There was no rain under the open sky but beneath this plinth rain came thick as tears for the dead.

  I stripped naked and lay under the rain, sleeping, forgetting, until each of the merlins came into my dreamless sleep, whispering, “Learn this! Do that! Think! Try! Become!”

  I dreamed the history of the world from the beginning of all things and all spirits. I accepted the infection of one hundred and forty-four sets of dreams, hopes, and despairs. I was infused with the merlinic power to know, to use, and to hunger for the vast story of each thing that is or was or could be.

  My predecessor merlins guided me tramping through the hollow places between the stars, past the glowing eyes of demons, and into the seed-mysteries of flowers, birds, and babies. I saw lords and peasants wax and wane, ladies flaunt, wines mix, gods fling gold dust on a breeze, worms groove through the Earth.

  I touched The Book of Fate where it had my name half-written, the seed-mystery, the newest merlin, waiting for my quest to complete the writing.

  I woke laughing with Excalibur in my hands. I knew what I must do.

  I had to begin at the beginning of time.

  Chapter 7 – Raiding Hell

  My naked body was no longer bone and rot but clean flesh. I was trapped in the Underworld but alive. In my heart and liver was the fullness of understanding my Fate, and a new happy hope. I laughed. Something laughed with me.

  “Who laughs with me?” I said aloud.

  The woman’s voice I heard come out of me was my voice but a voice of command. A princely voice. The voice of the holder of all the world’s important knowledge.

  The unexpected sound of it did not surprise me. But it made in me a churning, frightened wonder, as of unsettled butter with the curds and whey tumbling over and over. I felt in myself the power and knowledge of all the merlins who preceded me. But mine was a dormant power because I did not know its key.

  My churning hunger for understanding was threat and hope together.

  The thing that laughed was a child. A boy. An infant in swaddling cradled in a cleft of stone out in the rainy center of the ring of henge stones.

  “Have you my sword?” the laughing child asked me.

  The same question Arthur in his shimmering light had asked me.

  Chill rain water ran down into the stone cradle. I took the child out of the puddle and into my arms.

  “I’ve a sword for the High King,” I said. “Are you the king?”

  “I’m what you make me, Mother Merlin. Begin!”

  The child vanished.

  Yes, begin.

  I, still curds and whey, reached under my grave-rotted cloak and hauled out Excalibur in its lamb’s wool sheath, Urien in its scabbard, and Lucan’s old, black armor. I bundled all this together in my cloak and flung it over my back.

  Naked out of death, I trod out into the cold, beating rain and sucking mud toward the far henge to begin my quest to learn how to create Arthur.

  * * *

  Light ahead! Grass underfoot. Flowers, trees, birds. New life in the Underworld? A warm, sunny day. I looked across rolling hills, streams, and sky. Was this still Annwn or had I tramped up into the living world?

  In the center of the far horizon was a copse of merlin oaks. Out of it light pulsed in varied colors. The pulses were rainbows and wherever they fell was new life – flowers, bees, skittering field mice, roebuck to hunt, and falcons to dive. The life-making rainbows played across the whole of the Two Worlds, Death here and Life beyond the horizon.

  I stopped astonished. Was this copse the true source of all life and all physic? Does it make metaphysic false? Or was there in the center of the copse the great World Tree that had mothered the Earth and all its life?

  I sh
oved aside a drapery of mistletoe and pushed into the heart of the copse. There stood a ruined Druidic altar, grass worn to bare earth around it, black-spattered from human sacrifice. The place was empty. But beside the altar was a pit that pulsed out rainbows.

  What gives life from a hole in the ground in Hades? I used Excalibur to prod into the pit.

  Excalibur bit flesh in the hole. The sword’s sticking into something surprised me as much as the pain of fear that ran through my body.

  I pulled out the blade. Pronged on its point was a dwarfess. Withered, wrinkled, with shining cheeks and bright, manic eyes. The sword was stabbed into her belly. The creature bled rainbows.

  “Don and Jupiter, what are you?” I shouted, hauling up the impaled dwarfess, causing rainbows to spatter creation through the treetops – birds, bears, grapes, children.

  The dwarfess cried, “Don and Jupiter, what are you?”

  With my bare foot I shoved the dwarfess from Excalibur’s point.

  She stood gasping beside her pit, feeling her belly for hurts. A fresh spray of rainbows radiated from the air around the creature.

  The fright that had arrowed through me faded away. I squatted to eye level with the dwarfess. “Who are you and where am I – in the living world or the dead?”

  “Who are you and where am I?”

  I prodded the creature with Excalibur. “Answer me sensibly.”

  “Answer me.”

  Without surprising myself, I heard my mind running through the catalog of knowledge given me by all the merlins who had incorporated themselves into me.

  She said, “Found nothing to answer me, have I?”

  “Do you read minds?”

  “Do you? How I despise you.”

  “Your first own words!” I put the sword’s point on her round belly. “Why do you hate a woman you’ve never met?”

  “Better her than any other.”

  “More of your own words! Repeat me again, I dare you. Say, ‘Kill me.’”

  “Kill me!” she said. “But nothing you possess can kill you.”

  “This is the World Sword. It can eat your spirit as a Druid eats hearts.”

  “Is this Excalibur?” she cried. “Have you made Excalibur?”

  “Taste her!” I stabbed the sword into the dwarf’s round belly.

  It was as though Excalibur had been driven into my own gut. A long, hot pain of cutting and separation of intestines and flesh, the shock to the heart. I screamed!

  Rainbows wilted around the dwarfess. “Save us!” she said, thrashing on the sword’s point.

  I pulled Excalibur from her, the blood on the blade a smear of colors radiating rainbows until the color evaporated.

  I felt my abdomen with my hands. No wound! But there was in my belly a line of fright the steel had cut. And a new fright in my soul.

  The dwarfess stood panting, new rainbows coming from the air around her. “We share an iron belly, you and I,” she said. “That’s our common Weird.”

  “A Saxon word! What are you to do these things to me?”

  “What are you to do these things to me?”

  A merlin’s rage filled me from my hot heart, the heat of it rolling out until the cold blood of my lower body hissed with the heat of the upper body.

  “Insolence from a monster!” I cried. “Give me the pain – I’ll slice you to birds’ meat!”

  I swung Excalibur.

  She said, “Live, Branwynn, Arthur’s daughter, the Greatest Merlin who will be – maybe!”

  My soul-name stopped my blow. I could not kill her.

  “You know me now, Monster?”

  “I know those I have to know.”

  “Name yourself.”

  “Name yourself.”

  I shouted in frustration and put the sword’s cutting edge against her neck.

  “I may not kill you,” I said, “but I’ll give Excalibur the freedom to cut you out of life.”

  “Kill me with the sword that couldn’t slay the Saxon legions in your dreams and couldn’t avenge Flavia against Prince Mordred?”

  The dwarfess laughed a laugh like the chittering of birds. It called up from the trees falcons and peacocks. It was in sound what a rainbow is in light.

  As her laughter touched trees, they blossomed. As it touched animals, they birthed. As it touched Excalibur, the sword multiplied until the ground around the Druidic altar was grassed with Excaliburs.

  She put her hand to the sword’s point and said, “Is this the blade that rusted in the Earth all the backward generations of time to bring me a great merlin? Or has the sword merely brought me an ordinary woman?”

  She pulled the blade through her neck and across her collarbone and swirled it cutting through her bowels and belly, spewing rainbow-blood, laughing rainbows to see me writhing in my own pain as a phantom of the blade cut me too, slicing from neck down breastbone through my spirit-heart and into thinking liver.

  I screamed in terror, “What are you doing to me?”

  She screamed, “What are you doing to me?”

  “Spare me!”

  “Spare me! Name myself!”

  “I’m Brynn!”

  “Name, name!”

  “Branwynn the merlin!”

  “Name, name, name!”

  “Merlin! I am Merlin!”

  “Thus begins!” cried the dwarfess.

  Excalibur ceased to cut the two of us. The grassy swords vanished. The dwarf’s rainbow wounds sealed, peacocks fluttering away from the evaporating puddles of blood at her feet.

  The dwarfess said, sweetly manic and reasonable, “Do you recognize me now, Sister Merlin?”

  I, the Merlin, collapsed to my knees in relief at the pain’s end. I used Excalibur to push myself upright. I was trembling with exhaustion and fright.

  “Who are you for me to recognize?” I said. “I don’t even know your type and kind. Am I on Earth or in Annwn or some more desperate place?”

  “Know me now! Have you the gem, Lady Merlin?”

  “What gem? Is that more trial? More pain?”

  “Have you the green gem from the World Tree?” she said, swiveling her bright, manic eyes to look deeper into the copse.

  I followed her gaze and that was a mistake. She escaped laughing and tumbling into her pit beside the altar and drew the Earth over herself and was gone.

  A last rainbow bubbled up out of the grass and sprang across the treetops, scattering birdlings.

  A merlinic rage filled me. I shouted at the sealed Earth, “Is the Dead World peopled with lunatics? Is Death more riddles and mazes than Life and nothing to come of it?”

  In my shouting fury, I dug into the earth with the sword. No dwarfess there. No scar of a pit. Nothing but old roots and older stones that had lain there from the beginning of the world.

  I slumped down into the dirt by the pit, wearied beyond weariness, frightened beyond fright. I had no idea how to continue my quest. How to interpret a king made of light, a laughing infant in a puddle of cold rain, and a rainbow-spewing dwarfess. How were these to show me the way?

  The one hundred and forty-four merlins who were in me screamed at my confusion, shaking my soul in its bone-cage with their desperation and fury.

  They terrified me, boiling inside me, but I in my rage shouted back, “Tell me, all my mothers and fathers and selves! Am I just one more merlin like each of you and a trivial piece of Nature” – they growled in fury – “or the Greatest Merlin, a force of Nature, to make Camelot?”

  They screamed to deafen my soul.

  I said, “Oh, shut up.”

  They were startled into silence.

  A blow of wind brought the sound of the chop of an ax.

  A human-like creature with a woodward’s ax shoved out of the dense branches of a fig tree. He was as startled to see me as I to see him.

  “Hey, hey, what are you?” he cried.

  “I’m Merlin. Name yourself.”

  “Oh, well, but are you human or other? Male or female? Old or youn
g? Naked or clothed? I don’t know the kinds of your species or their types.”

  I reached to take a fig from the tree to taste.

  The woodward raised his ax in warning.

  “We’re at a place where there’s no other thing,” he said. “What you take shrivels a branch forever. What would be born from that branch is never born.”

  “Is that where I am? At the beginning of everything?”

  “That’s where I always am,” said the woodward. He threw down his ax. “Oh, well, take. Eat it all! Free me of an eternity of tending this one wretched tree when I see over there so much more that needs me.”

  The woodward gestured across the boundary line of the Two Worlds. Across the line was a rolling green Earth covered with trees he yearned to tend. But he could not cross the line.

  “Take, whatever you are, human or not, male or female, priest or king or merlin or peasant. Take!” he cried, grabbing up his ax.

  “Take!” he shouted.

  He cut down with the ax.

  “Take! Take! Take!”

  I reached over my shoulder for Urien but Excalibur leaped into my hand. I parried the ax, expecting the blade to play phantom again and let the ax kill me.

  Excalibur stopped the ax.

  The woodward’s heavy blow drove me to my knees beneath the sword’s protection, him shouting, “Take, take!”

  I put Excalibur to the woodward’s throat. “Hold or I kill you.”

  “Kill me! Become me!”

  The woodward swung his ax again.

  I jinked out of the way and jumped back. The woodward stalked me across the meadow.

  “What are you that I’d become you if I kill you?” I said.

  “I’m gardener of the World Tree, the god before all other gods, the loneliest creature of Creation.”

  “What ‘god’ could you be, Greek, Roman or Egyptian, that I’ve never heard of you?”

  There was in my liver a rumbling of hunger to see what power this creature might possess that a merlin could steal.

  “Oh, you’ve a merlin’s arrogance,” he said. “I’ll stop that when I kill you, damn me.”

  I dodged the swinging ax.

  “I kill you and I become woodward of the World Tree?” I said, wondering at the astonishing power that might give me.

  “You do,” said the woodward, exhausted by his pursuit of me and leaning on his ax. “Along with all the fortunes of Pluto. Everything sunk in the sea, buried on land and forgotten, lost between the cracks in a wall, dropped down wells, slipped from a purse into a field.”