The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) Page 4

  “Give the sword the thousand year quest.”

  “The what?”

  “You will quest to make the sword come alive or you’ll be flung back to the void before the beginning when there was noworld and who knows if you will ever get out of there.”

  “Jesu, Woden, and Morgana!” I cried.

  I turned to jump out of the citadel and tumble down the mountainside and flee anywhere away from these two mad men and that awful hound.

  The dog clamped its jaws around my leg and held me there, me writhing and pleading with the beast, the hound staring at me in its ghastly silence.

  Prince Llew said to Galabes, in a boy’s scorning voice, “Is this the best of Arthur’s leavings you could find for me? She’s weak and filthy and a coward and unwilling.”

  Galabes said, “You’ll see her in the spring clean, hard-muscled, and fit for swordmaking.”

  He swatted me but the dog held me upright and I could not fall.

  “Bathe the creature, too,” said the prince. “She stinks and reeks. I don’t want my steel blades to absorb her filth.”

  “I bathed twice this year,” I said, appalled. “More water can let demons into me!”

  “She’ll have her bathing,” said Galabes.

  He swatted me again.

  I opened my mouth to shout at him but the hound tightened its grip on my leg to make me silent.

  “Pledge the prince,” Galabes said to me. “Say it aloud so all the world can hear you.”

  “I’m not pledging any thousand year quest! I don’t what that is…”

  Galabes clubbed me across the head and knocked me to the stone floor. The hound’s grip nearly ripped my leg out of me as I fell.

  The dog released me and stood watching, waiting.

  I got up, trembling with fury, but said to Llew, as humbly as I could, “I pledge, Lord Prince.”

  “Sobeit!” said Llew, and the contract was made out into the world and before the eyes of all the gods and demons and the spirits of the dead.

  I was terrified of this withered old man with the unnatural voice of a boy. But I was greedy for the steel sword that could make me a power in the world. I would pledge anything to get that sword. But I did not know what I had pledged.

  Fresh wind howled past me and out the citadel and across the mountains. I should have gone with it, and damn the sword and its quest.

  * * *

  Galabes and I climbed out of the sword factory following the hound Caval along a trail that carried onto an ice-matted ledge pointing through a gap in the mountains where I could see another valley opening to a sprawling plain. Out there, rising from the snow like the marker of a tomb, were three stone columns holding up a broken pediment, the leavings of the Giants who had lived in the Island before the Britons. The columns were cold, distant, and ruined, like the rest of the country. They made me want to weep.

  Galabes said, “Out there you see Llew’s kingdom, the last bits of it. He was born a prince among those old stones and fell to misery when his father’s kingdom was obliterated by the Saxons. Me, I was raised from nothing to greatness by Arthur and plunged back to nothing by Camlann. Llew is hopeful, I am bitter. There is the roiling difference between us.”

  “What does any of that mean to me?” I said, before I remembered the good manners that kept me from another swatting and added, “My dear father.”

  The beggar-knight turned his face from the broken columns to me. He had a frightening dreamy frenzy in his eyes. I staggered back. The hound was there at my back, buttressing me, and fear fled from me, leaving only wonder that this monster man could have such feeling in him for everything that was dead and past.

  Galabes said out of his sudden frenzy, “Prince Llew believes only a holy man or woman can swing the finest of his prize blades. Bah! I’d give them all to the demons if demons would do my work returning Arthur to us!”

  He put his face very close to mine, so close I could smell the meat-rot and sour wine on his breath, and said, “But Llew and I agree that only a woman with the courage to be obedient to a queen’s way in the universe – a woman who has killed an enemy and has no more fear of death – can wield a tempered sword.”

  He clutched my furs and jerkin and cried, “Before I give you to him, I’ll make you a soldier or you’ll never survive what Prince Llew will do with you.”

  Send me back to Carbonek! I wanted to scream. I’ll clean the privies forever to get away from you two lunatics!

  But I said, “Out there, Father?” as I goggled at the three broken columns and the dreary snow plain.

  “Oh, it’s worth the pain of what you have to face to feel in your grip a great sword, to possess it and be possessed by it,” said Galabes. “To feel the need and hunger of the sword and to know you must fulfill them. A glorious sword makes you glorious yourself. Or it makes you die in pain and infamy.”

  “I don’t want to die in pain and infamy!” I cried, struggling in his grip.

  But he could not hear me, he was so wrapped in his vision.

  “A sword is destiny!” he cried. “The Lady of the Lake made Caliburn. Caliburn made Arthur. Arthur made Camelot. You see it, don’t you? You must! To learn the destiny that a sword dreams – or to invest a sword with your own dream – is to control Fate and to win the power to remake the world!”

  “Yes, Father,” I said, to please him, knowing now that he was completely mad.

  “‘Yes, Father?’” said Galabes, startled out of his reverie.

  Caval turned his face to me.

  Galabes said, “Say what you think! So I know how to fashion you to be what I want.”

  “You’ll beat me for it.”

  He glanced at the hound watching him.

  “I may,” he said, with a curious uncertainty in his voice.

  “Then I’ll keep silent.”

  “I’ll beat you for that.”

  “It’s absurd,” I cried. “That’s what I think. A sword’s a tool, nothing more. A defunct prince incants moldy rhymes over a piece of cold metal. You teach me antique philosophies. None of that changes the world or the sword. I’ve seen too much of princely fraud and false religions in the back alleys of Carbonek, and of lying magicians and mind-diseased old queens and foolish scholars like my foster father, to have faith in things that don’t live and crawl before my own eyes.”

  “You mean in Brutus stones and Caliburns? You have no faith in those?”

  “In all dead things!” I shouted, cowering from the blow I expected.

  The hound watched Galabes. Its great body was behind my back, buttressing me, but the beast seemed to stand between us in spirit, the war hound protecting me as the last progeny of dead Arthur.

  “Oh, well,” said Galabes in a sudden twist of tone that startled me and proved him madder still. “You’ve your own mind, I suppose. Better and better! But I’m here to teach you of the ‘dead things’ that must live again through you. Unless you believe the spirit of Arthur is another fraud?”

  “I’m Arthur’s child. That much of his spirit I believe.”

  “A very practical answer. A greedy answer. A knightly and royal answer. The answer I might hear from the High King himself. So that’s a start.”

  Galabes said all that with a growing satisfaction.

  “Yes, I can make you a warrior, I see that now,” he said, “because you have the royal greed in you. Then I’ll make you a magician. But you’ll have to make yourself what you must be.”

  “What’s that?” I said, cringing, waiting for his blow.

  “I want you to know Arthur as I knew him. I want you to have the power to recall him to his kingdom. I want you to have the courage to quest after a dead king. The courage to win back the king from Morrigu, Pluto, and Satan. Make the sword that Arthur needs to heal him. Then, make me an Arthur!”

  “Great gods, Father, you are mad,” I whispered, but the hound made my whisper into a silence and Galabes did not hear me.

  * * *

  “Your warrior�
�s school begins now,” Galabes said to me. “You sleep outside my cave door through the winter, drink only cold water, and make your weapons from the stones I show you.”

  I cried, “You make me a knight by making me a slave?”

  Galabes struck me and knocked me down. “Obey me now,” he said, “and one day you can command me.”

  This time I would not bleed for him.

  The silent dog watched. So much for the hound’s protecting his old master’s progeny.

  “Yes, Master,” I said. “I obey.”

  For now.

  My life became harsh routine. I slept outside the cave, wrapped in reeking, half-cured hides, and woke dreaming of suffocation to find myself buried in snow. I got up before the sun, fed on cold gruel, quarried stone to make my day’s weapons – a mace, club, dagger, and spear – while Galabes and Caval huddled in furs by the fire I had struck for them.

  Then I trekked with the beggar-knight – who was well-fed, well-dressed, well-armed thanks to my labors – into a valley where the snow had not drifted and we could practice fighting on hard soil. Or we roared and rallied with club and shield among the spires and peaks of the mountain.

  Each brawl was the same. I, bloodied and bruised. Galabes shouting taunts. My poor weapons shattered. My makeshift armor dented and pierced. My head so clubbed and knocked about that, at night dreaming under my hides as snow fell on me, I saw an awful vision of a bleeding king holding out to me a sword, saying, “Take Caliburn and return to the Lady of the Lake that which I was privileged to borrow so little time…”

  I would wake from the dream shouting in fright, hear the groaning of wind from the rear of Galabes’ cave, smell the peculiar scent of oak in springtime on that wind, and lapse into shivering sleep once more.

  That was my life. Only with the spring equinox when all the world aged a year and I, at fifteen, had become a woman, did I realize what I had been taught by the beggar-knight and his watching hound:

  I knew the herbs and flowers, those to eat and cure and those to poison, those to make miracles with the right prayers.

  I knew the mountains and the rivers of Wales in snow, rain, and heat.

  I could ride, run, jump, swim, and fight in all weathers, all seasons, night or day, with lance, spear, arrow, javelin, dart, with British greatsword or Roman gladius or Saxon scramasax, with club, mace, chain, dagger, battle ax.

  Despite the fright of it, I had learned to write the soul-names of Arthur and Guenevere, of all two hundred Round Tablers, chief among them Bedivere, Galahad, and Lancelot the Holy Traitor.

  I knew to call them up by soul-names in my dreams where I tried to speak to them through the crash and batter of Camlann.

  But Galabes would not teach me the spelling of his own soul-name or even its sound.

  At last, with winter nearly passed and the crusty edges of the mountain snow beginning to dribble away in the first warmth of early spring, Galabes brought me for the first time into the comfort of his cave. It was a shambles of rotted leather and antique fur, rusted steel weapons and armor, moldy helmet feathers and rotted boots. It looked like the leavings of a Legion slaughtered uncountable years before I was born.

  In a far corner, beneath black drapery, I spotted the edge of a glass shield glowing dimly in the dank cave light. Who carried a glass shield in Arthur’s day? Galabes had taught me the names of all the Round Tablers. Think, think. Yes, it was Lucan, the king’s great adjutant, the man who shaped a Table of two hundred boisterous men and women into a fighting war band. Why that one shield undamaged by age and rot in all this heap of rubble?

  Galabes was proud of these ruins. He named each warrior at Camlann who was saved by this bit of twisted mail or broke that ax on a Saxon skull and which fighting princess skewered which of Mordred’s knights with that splintered spear over there.

  The stories were wonderful to hear but, after my winter’s exhaustion of training and learning, eating lean and sleeping rough, I was warm for the first moments in all that season and collapsed asleep among his lice-hopping furs.

  Galabes in sudden fury grabbed me up and awake and hauled me deep into the rear of his cave and shouted, “There, you fool! Name this creature!”

  “What creature?” I said, struggling in the darkness to see anything at all, grabbing for my stone weapons to defend myself against monsters, hearing the sighs and groans of some creature’s misery.

  He threw me against a tree. I felt its bark and leaves. I heard its moans of agony.

  A tree there in the rear of his cave? There was no light here but the tree gleamed faintly, like the Three Sisters in Orion’s sword belt in the night sky.

  I could see it was immense and leafy even in the absence of sunshine, water, and earth. Growing up out of the cave’s stone floor. Spreading up the wall and ceiling and carrying its faint glow into the farthest gloom, where leaves and branches moaned and sighed.

  “Name it!” roared Galabes.

  “Tree, tree!” I shouted. “It’s only a tree. A merlin oak.”

  “You fool,” he said, swatting at me. “Not you. The tree.”

  I looked into the glow of the tree and heard nothing but its miserable groans.

  “What’s a tree supposed to say? Let me strike a flame.” I reached into my purse for flint and punk.

  The tree shrieked in terror.

  Galabes grabbed me by the collar, hauled me away from the tree and through the cave and flung me like old soup bones into the melting snow, the silent hound watching.

  “Wash yourself, you filthy beast, and put on cleaner rags,” he commanded. “We go to make your sword despite your ignorance, you savage, and may every goddamn god grant you some sort of blessing out of your stupidity because I won’t.”

  “What have I done now?” I cried, flailing upright in the dripping snow. “All of this fresh misery because I can’t name one stinking tree?”

  “Take this,” Galabes said, flinging out to me a worn scramasax. A Saxon sword longer than a Roman gladius but shorter than a British battle sword. Single-edged for better hacking through helmets and armor.

  “It’s chipped and rusted,” I said. “What do I want with this wretched thing?”

  “It won the battle of Camlann. What more honor do you want in a weapon?”

  I threw it aside. “It’s all iron, barely any steel in it. I don’t want it, battle-winner or not. I want my promised greatsword.”

  “Take it up,” commanded Galabes, his voice again like a sword slamming on a shield.

  I did, hastily.

  “Wipe it dry.”

  I wiped it on my furry cloak.

  “Bless the damn thing.”

  “It’s Saxon. I don’t want to bless it.”

  “It’s in your hand to save your life. Bless it.”

  I blessed it, for whatever good my blessing could do this old iron.

  “Is this foreign garbage all you’ll give me?” I said. “After a winter’s misery sleeping in the snow warmed only by that voiceless hound and eating the muck you allow me and making my weapons and armor from stone? For all the gods’ sake, I want more. I paid Arthur’s coin for more.”

  “Shut up,” said Galabes. “Grind and polish the blade and slide it under your belt.”

  “What belt? You never granted me a belt.”

  He threw me a moldy old belt from his collection of ruined armor.

  Why not ask for more? I thought.

  “You never gave me a shield, either,” I said.

  “There’s a shield waiting for you at the end of all this.”

  “That checkered shield with my face on it?”

  “Shut up and grind the sword. Then follow me.”

  “When am I no longer a slave?” I cried in fury.

  “When you are something else.”

  “What something else?”

  Galabes and the hound stared at me in silence.

  I ground the blade. I honed the blade. I polished the blade. I sewed a scabbard and belted it across my back. It
is astonishing how fast one can work when a madly murderous beggar-knight and his insolent silent hound stare at you.

  “I’m ready,” I said to them.

  “I’ll know you are when Llew tells me,” said Galabes.

  The hound led across the still ice-crusted mountains toward Prince Llew’s swordmaking factory in its citadel.

  The first warmth of spring sun splashed in my face. I breathed in the freshening air and expanded my chest. I felt the rush of hot blood through my arms and legs. I was fifteen and full of the energy of youth. I swung my gleaming scramasax, slicing in half invisible monsters in the air.

  I suddenly felt I was truly on my way to freedom, power, and my promised destiny, whatever that was.

  * * *

  I was strong. I was powerful. I was ready for the future.

  I stood before the withered old Prince Llew in his wind-blown citadel on the first day of spring and the swordmaking season. The wind no longer carried into the forge the howling cold. It brought the scent of spring grass.

  “She’s grown,” said Llew, in a startled, young man’s voice. “She has a certain first toughness of spirit, all right, but her muscles” – he grabbed and squeezed my thighs and arms – “are still wiry and light.”

  He peered at me out of cataracted eyes. I was startled to see in them two bright blue spots of pupil I had not noticed when I first met him a half year ago.

  “She’s still a skinny barbarian,” Llew said to Galabes, suddenly angry. “What have you taught her but the making of war and the feeding of her narrow belly?”

  The prince thumped my flat stomach and reminded me of my hunger for food and everything else.

  “This half-woman-thing is not fit to have my sword. Take her away! Find another and start over again, you fool.”

  “You know I can’t do that,” said Galabes. “I won’t do it.”

  I said, “Show him the coin again, Father.”

  “Ah, the voice of knightly arrogance,” Llew said. “Yes, this is Arthur’s brat. But tell me, brat, now you’ve had my dreaming season to make something of yourself, what is it you’ve made? Another killing monster like Galabes ready to slake Morrigu with more blood of innocents?”