The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) Page 2

“Then I won’t deplete my kingdom for you. I give you nothing.”

  “No one can deny me what the High King promised.”

  “Where’s the paper on which it’s written? Where’s the contract now?” said Lupus. “Guards! Whip this madman out of Britain.”

  Lupus hauled from beneath his twelve-part cloak his massive wand of office and with the guards beat Galabes. But their club blows merely burrowed into the fur and cloth thickly wrapped around the beggar’s body. The guards shouted in frustration.

  Lupus, astonished, cried, “He’s armored with fur! Strip him! Beat him!”

  “If you want blood from me,” said Galabes, “take all the blood of Camlann!”

  He pulled open the wrappings over his chest on a breastplate of black metal. Out of the old armor gouted hot blood, drenching the queen and her magician and the slave girl and boy, steaming on them, sweeping aside the howling guards, overturning the queen’s divan, driving the queen and Lupus across the rampart and battering them against the stone wall until Morgause shrieked, “Hold! Enough!”

  The black hound, silent, watched.

  Morgause, staggering beneath the weight of drenching blood, choking in its reek like a decayed battlefield, cried, “Someone find him a boy! Rid me of this monster!”

  But she said to Lupus, “Give him something we can spare. Nothing that could make a soldier for Cadwallader.”

  Lupus smeared the blood on his face in a furious wiping away. He shouted, “Find me a child!”

  He saw the blood drenched slave children who had brought him wine and the greatsword. “You, there, which of you is the boy? Then, you, boy, get away from here. Go become a soldier. Here, Woodsman, take this one and go away from us.”

  “Is he Arthur’s son?”

  “Arthur’s bastard, I swear. Half the children of the castle are the High King’s. But this one’s female. That’s all the queen will give you. Take her and get away, you monster.”

  Galabes and Caval looked at the girl-child in its blood drenched hodgepodge of ragged clothes. She was the correct age to be Arthur’s last bastard – fourteen years old, withered by winter’s starvation, hardened by life digging roots and hauling castle stone. But with the unexpected ink stained fingers of a student.

  “She’ll do,” said Galabes.

  “I’ll do for what, sir?” the girl cried.

  “For whatever I please to make you.”

  Galabes grabbed the girl by her bloody, tick-hopping hair and flung her toward Caval. “Say your name.”

  “Brynn!” the girl cried.

  The silent black dog looked from the child to Galabes. That was assent.

  “You depend on the opinion of your dog?” said Lupus. “Queen, this man’s too strange to leave in the kingdom.”

  Morgause said, “Have I paid Arthur’s debt?”

  “I’ll take her,” said Galabes.

  “Then take her to Hell. Get away!”

  “Queen, spare me!” shouted the child. “Father, Mother, save me!”

  Galabes whipped the girl down the stone stairs and through the castle gate.

  A woman screamed from an alley door.

  Brynn cried, “Mama!”

  The queen shouted, “Seal the gate! Keep her out!”

  * * *

  In the barren trees where the snow lay in ice-hard patches, Galabes saddled his hound with leather packs and said to me, “Girl, take that pack.”

  I was horrified, the drenched blood freezing my rags to my skin, and cried, “Is this the end of life for me? Am I to be your wretched slave forever?”

  “Look!” said Galabes, gesturing toward the castle.

  Its gate moaned shut, its bars dropped down.

  I was Outside, abandoned, alone, trembling with cold and fear.

  But Galabes shouted in sudden fury, “You see? Carbonek’s gate closed against me and what am I? A beaten soldier with his thin-blooded hound the spawn of the spawn of the High King’s dog. What are you? The last forgotten drip from the High King’s loins. You were just a lump beneath your mother’s belt when Arthur died – a shameful, prideful lump. So why should anyone care that I, a ruined man, should claim you from a dead king? Or care what becomes of you? Why should you care yourself, born the careless leaving of a dead man, raised a slave in the house of a witch-queen whose powers have so withered that a beggar frightens her into submission?”

  My fear became terror of whatever was to come next and then misery, all the miseries – of being flung out of the castle into the Saxon cold, of separation from my mother and father, separation from the children with whom I slaved and called “sister” and “brother,” of everything I ever had been and might become, as much as a slave can become anything.

  I wept in fright and unexpected rage. “Yes, yes! In a world of mad queens and beggar-knights, what am I?”

  Galabes and Caval turned to me.

  “Is that fear or courage or poetry that I hear?” said the beggar-knight. “Do you actually have an intelligence?”

  He grabbed my ink-stained fingers as though he could measure my liver of thought in their spatters of ink.

  I pulled them away and said, “If I’m nothing, then I’m free. Free of queens, free of beggars, free of their dogs. Free of everything!”

  Galabes laughed a rich laugh surprising to come out of a creature in rags and half-treated fur. “How, child, will you keep this freedom?”

  I broke off a twig and thrust it sword-like toward Galabes and Caval. “You’ve made me outcast from Carbonek. What am I to do but live the freedom of an outcast?”

  I backed through the trees and across the snow, wiping from my face freezing tears.

  Galabes said in sudden anger, “I could love you for courage if your courage had brains.”

  He slapped down the twig and grabbed me by the back of my jerkin and coat and I thought he was going to smash me to death on the crusted snow. I began to scream.

  He swung me over his head and held me face-up to the sky.

  “What do you see, brat?”

  Above the bare points of treetops, I saw falcons dive and shriek, darting after lesser birds. The sun began to sink below the rim of the world, spraying the sky with orange and red. The sound it made as the sun shrank away from day was the sound of swords clattering on shields, of an army that has come to its battlefield and cries out hungry for its enemy. Across the red shot a single great eagle. As it dived, the falcons shrieked and scattered.

  Galabes lowered me into the icy mud and I fell to my knees trembling before the beggar who had made me see a miracle.

  Galabes flicked away the lice on my head, spat in his hands, and put them on my head as if claiming ownership of me.

  “You’re my daughter and no other man’s daughter. No queen’s slave. No man’s vassal. I’ve chosen you to be the thing you’ve seen.”

  “An eagle?” I cried, confused.

  “If you’ve the heart to be so great a creature, then you’ll be the woman who restores the world!”

  I shouted in fright and confusion.

  The dog turned its silent head toward the trees. My father in his scholar’s patched cloak made from Morgause’s faded curtains stood there trembling in the cold.

  “That child was once my daughter,” he said.

  “Father!” I cried.

  “Who’s your father?” said the beggar-knight, slapping me.

  The old man held out a shaking hand with a single gold coin.

  “Sir Knight, her mother will weep for her until she dies unless you take from me the only patrimony I have to give the child.”

  “What’s this?” Galabes snatched the foreign coin with its Jerusalem cross.

  “All I own,” said my father. “A coin given me by the High King.”

  “This is Arthur’s gold?” Galabes’ hand trembled holding the coin.

  “Brought by him from Holy Jerusalem and so doubly sacred,” said the old man. “It’s no coin I’d ever give in trade even for winter gruel to feed my family. It�
��s a coin the elves and fairies covet. With that coin, I could buy their blessing against Annwn and postpone my death another lifetime. I give it to you to accept the charge of it for my former daughter, and with it” – the old man sucked in the cold air for courage – “I charge you to buy the girl a tempered blade.”

  “What?” roared Galabes. “A steel sword for a slave’s child?”

  The old man cowered but cried, “It’s to be bought of magicians or witches! Whichever you believe best. You’re to find her a life-preserving charm to be blended with the metal so the sword brings her home safe to her mother, who weeps for her.”

  “By what right do you claim a sword for this gutter-thing?” Galabes said, raising me by my collar and shaking me until my bloody rags flapped around me.

  “By the law of patrimony, Sir! As firm in the land as the law that compels the queen to pay debts for a dead king. She’s the last child of Arthur. Hers is pendragon blood. Camlann’s blood! No gutter-thing in Britain so much deserves a steel blade as that gutter-thing.”

  “Have you spoken enough?” Galabes shouted, angry.

  The old man straightened his back and said, “The High King knows the future and gave me that coin to buy a blade for the child. You cannot refuse. You dare not.”

  The old man scuttled away through the trees. At a safe distance, he shouted, “Farewell, Brynn, your mother and foster father love you! Good life to you!” Then my father ran away.

  Galabes held the Jerusalem coin in one hand and me in the other, weighing me against the coin.

  “Who would’ve thought the High King could have so provided for you and given me his mark?” he said.

  Galabes flashed the coin in sunlight. “It’s Arthur the King speaking to me as I’ve not heard him speak in fifteen years!”

  He carefully fitted the coin into his purse and dropped me into the mud.

  “Will you obey the law of patrimony and give me my sword?” I said, as frightened and angry as I was suddenly gluttonous for the kind of rich future I could make with a steel sword.

  “Are you as brave as your foster father to make demands on me? What a sturdy fool!” Galabes slapped me again and knocked me down, but happily this time.

  He squatted over me in the mud and said, “Or are you just another greedy creature who sees that she can go through the world in a great way if she owns a steel sword?”

  “I believe that! I want it. What other chance have I against beggar-knights and Saxon pirates?”

  “I’m almost pleased that I got you,” said Galabes. “You speak as well as any child I could find. Maybe you’re also capable of rational thought.”

  Galabes said to Caval, “What does Queen Morgause call honest creatures such as this girl? ‘Miracles’ and ‘fools!’”

  Galabes and Caval turned to me. He said, “You’ve Arthur’s steel in you already. But you must love me and through me Arthur. You know the Brutus stone?”

  “Of course I know it,” I said, wiping blood from my cracked lips.

  “Show me the way.”

  I looked back at the castle gate, bolted. Felt the bloody rags freezing to my back and belly. I was lost to my family and cast out of Britain. I was as helpless Outside as a brat nosing around for its mother’s teat. I would die if this man did not take care of me. Until I could find an escape.

  I led him through the trees to a thorny hillside beside the new waterfall.

  Here was the boulder that Felix Brutus had brought from Troy to establish the Kingdom of the Brutés. It was massive, table flat, and seamless. The perfection of its upper surface was always an invitation to me to wonder. A stone on which triumphant words should be carved but none had been because Arthur had never won his war against the Pagans. It was too massive for men alone to carry here. After Camlann, Morgause witched it to this wild place.

  Galabes drew his black sword from a sheath of fur.

  “This is the sword with which I defended Arthur,” he said. “The sword that I took from Camlann. The sword that’s followed me in my search for a child.”

  He raised it over his head.

  “Great Sir!” I cried, “you won’t kill me?”

  “You are my sword now. This one I return to Camlann where it was meant to die with its king!”

  Galabes drove the sword into the stone and the steel shattered, its bright bits chipping up into the light, tumbling and sparkling, singing like steam from a pot lid. The fragments vanished.

  The black dog turned its silent face toward the wild north and plodded through the patchy snow.

  “By Jesu and Mother Don, what demon are you that’s claimed me?” I cried.

  “The vassal of your blood-father, girl,” said Galabes, hands trembling with the exertion of breaking the sword. “Look how my hands shiver!”

  He threw back his sword-pocked face until I could see the white scar around his throat – as though in some past epoch his head had been cut off and then slapped back on his shoulders – and he howled his laughter.

  At what, the vanished sword?

  I cowered from his laughter.

  The sparkling bits of his broken sword, still tumbling in the air, became a metal wind storm that leaped from the Brutus stone ringing with a sound that seemed to be Excalibur!

  The alien word terrified me.

  The beggar-knight saw my fear. He laughed louder. He father-hugged me to his rotting furs. That was even more frightening.

  Galabes shoved me toward the wild north, to follow the silent hound with its packs.

  He said, “Come, meet Arthur.”

  * * *

  We tramped across snow-patched fields and black mountains, through bare, sky-stabbing woods, until we were in a part of Britain that seemed utterly dead. No shrieks of falcons, no chop of ax on wood, no cook smoke, no scuttling animals.

  We had marched I thought many score Roman miles across Cornwall but it was still that same waning afternoon, the black dog Caval still leading with his packs, the shadows not changed from where they had been below the walls of Carbonek.

  “Where are we going and how far have we traveled?” I said, nearly exhausted.

  The hound turned its square head to Galabes. The beggar said, “It’s there,” and waved his arm to the north. “Look. See!”

  I looked ahead at the grim, gray horizon and saw a sudden parting in the mountains there. I saw a cliff face punctured with smoky caves and the faces of derelicts and hermits leering out at me.

  I looked back south and saw the forest part itself at a distance beyond my true ability to see and yet I could see. There stood Carbonek Castle, its gate bolted against me.

  “We’ve crossed half of Cornwall!” I said.

  “Half of Wales yet to cross,” said Galabes.

  We plunged down a wooded hillside to the Little Sea. The hound trod across the water. I gawked. But it was no less than I should have expected of the grandson of Arthur’s battle hound.

  Galabes followed across the water, too.

  I shouted from land, “Do I cross this on foot?”

  Galabes and the hound stopped where they stood on the sea to watch me. “You’re Arthur’s daughter. Prove it to yourself.”

  I put out a foot to test the water. Firm! Hard as a Roman road. I ran across Neptune’s back to outdistance the grip of the water demons who suck sailors down to death, almost giddy in my delight.

  But, in the middle of the sea where Galabes and Caval stood, where I could not see either shore, I stopped to breathe and I was suddenly terrified. I cried out to the wrong gods for protection. I felt the many little hands of water devils clawing up my legs to drag me down and I sank.

  Galabes pulled me out, exasperated, saying, “Don’t be a fool, you fool. Keep faith with Destiny and that will keep you alive.”

  I came hauled up out of the sea sputtering and choking, shaking off the water devils, rinsed at least of all that soak of blood I’d gotten on the rampart of Carbonek Castle.

  Nearly drowning away my short life made me as e
xasperated as this mad knight and I cried in fury, “But what destiny will I become?”

  Galabes stood there silent in the whip and splash of the sea, watching me wring out my clothes into the water.

  Then he said, “Now you’ll eat the dreaming spirit and become the woman who saves Camelot and Arthur.”

  “Me? What do I eat? How do I save anything? Great Lord, how do I save a dead man? Is this a witchcraft – am I damned to Hell already? Jesu Christ, Woden, and Morgana, save me from this monster!”

  I ran from Galabes across the water and fell on the Welsh shore, exhausted with terror and fright-dreams.

  The beggar-knight and his awful, silent dog stood beside me.

  “There’s no escape from Fate,” Galabes said, “except failure and cycling back to try it all again.”

  “Do it all again? Why can’t I just fail and be done with all this misery?” I cried.

  He said, with a calmness that made his words even more terrifying, “Because the lamentations of men and women hungry for Arthur’s return to the world will rip your soul forever.”

  “Great Jesu, is all that on my head? You should have let me drown. At least then I’d go to Heaven unspoiled and be free of the pain of whatever it is you mean to torture me into trying.”

  The awful hound stared at me in its profound silence.

  I wanted to scream but what good would it do me?

  I shivered in my fright. I dripped sea water. Galabes pulled off half his rotting furs and wrapped me in them. They reeked of blood and age. They had in them the faint memory of a lost battlefield. But they were warm from his body heat.

  Galabes dug into the packs strapped on the dog.

  “Here’s the beginning for you. Your first lesson in a new life – the rule of three. The Triune God by whom I swear has three characters to feed a human being’s three parts of life, body, and spirit. I have three bits between my legs to prove it. You have two breasts and a mound for three. The human body, for the good swordsman, can be cut into three pieces – head, trunk, girdle with legs. Eat three bits of this heart. Do it now.”

  Galabes held out to me a heart in a bloody bowl.

  “Eat that muck? Is that an ox heart?”