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

  He touched my training scars.

  “Are these trophies from some gentle soldier rite? The guarantee you will free more souls to feed greedy Death?”

  Llew spat. Sudden wind carried his mess away out of the castle.

  “Show me more than the coin,” he said to Galabes, fiercely, “or this slave from Carbonek Castle gets none of my swords.”

  “I’ll send her to Armenia, Prince, to bring back the prize iron ore you want for all your swords. Will that do?”

  Sunlight flashed on the thin white covering over Prince Llew’s eyes, picking out the spots of blue, and he said, with fierce glee, “Oh, that may solve the problem. Yes, yes! She may die on the road and free us both of her. Let’s hope so.”

  I began to shout my anger but the hound demanded silence.

  Llew said to me, “You, brat, may find the holy ore. Some do. You may have the strength to haul it on your back out of the mountains all the weary distance back to me. Some do. You may have the skill to fight your way here through all that dying Roman world out there. Occasionally one or two manage. But will you choose the right ore from the black rock?”

  “Could there be so many black gems in a mine filled with ore that I would miss any of them, Lord Prince, or do you mean to make me laugh?” I said.

  The dog wanted me silent again but I ignored him.

  Llew said to Galabes, “Oh, yes, she’s Arthur-arrogant enough to try. But did you tell her it’s only in the soul that a man or woman may identify the ore I want for my swords?”

  I cut in, saying, “I need a special kind of soul for digging out filthy rock?”

  I wanted to laugh, it so absurd, and I did.

  Galabes and the silent hound watched me. Llew watched them.

  Surprise came into Llew’s cataracted eyes. I almost saw the blue pupils burst out.

  “So there’s love in you still, Old Thief,” he said to Galabes, “that you’d put this raw child to such a test. Or do you really think, after one hundred and forty-four of your failures, this wretched creature is the one to bring us back our king?”

  “I’m old and weary,” said Galabes. “Old enough and weary enough to be allowed to die and let my ashes scatter to the old battlefield. To let the world find Arthur without me. She must be the one because she’s my last. I can try no more, amen!”

  Galabes began to weep in his self-fury.

  The startled and unhappy prince said to me, “Then I’ll make your sword, Brynn-daughter-of-Arthur. You’ll make it with me because you and the sword must become more than you both are. Do you understand me?”

  I was as rattled as the prince by Galabes’ distress but managed to say, “Of course I do. I think I do. I’ll try!”

  “We begin the making when you bring me the ore. Not bog iron. Not the trash you find in British fields and holes. Iron from the mountains of Armenia. The good iron…”

  “It’ll take me a year to tramp there and back!” I cried, horrified.

  “Only if you survive,” said Galabes, a sudden sorrow in his voice, as of a father sending his daughter on a hideous quest.

  The prince said, “We’ll make the sword in its roughness with your raw iron. We’ll let it rest in the Earth to leach out its imperfections and absorb the spirits of the world while you work my blades for others…”

  “I’m to make blades for other men and women?” I cried. “This is an outrage! I paid Arthur’s coin…”

  “Make my blades first,” said the prince, angry. “Make them cut through iron and flesh and bone. Invest them with the holy spirits inside you…”

  “What holy spirits in me? I’m a slave from Carbonek Castle. The drippings from a dead king. The kidnapped child of a beggar-knight and his voiceless hound. Now enslaved to a lunatic prince who sleeps away winter on a bed of coals. I’ve no holy spirits in me. I barely have the power to hold my flesh to my bones!”

  Prince Llew said, hot and fierce, “Find the spirits in you. Fail and I let your sword rot in the Earth and your Fate with it. Whatever is left of you will drift through the hollow places between the stars, cold and despised, forever.”

  “Great Jesu!” I cried, trembling.

  Now Prince Llew spoke, in his young man’s voice, like a sword-tailor measuring a client. “The blade meant for you will have to be exceptional. You’ve short arms, the arms of a merlin. No great swordswoman has short arms. The blade I make you will learn to compensate.”

  “How will it do that?” I said.

  “Grow and shrink, as every great sword must when it finds its champion. I’ll pour the iron thick. I’ll weld the iron and steel in the hottest wind. I’ll cut a fuller deeper than most, for lightness, flex, and power. I’ll hammer the blade long. But what I do for the sword is nothing. You must mine its ore yourself, smelt it, pour it with me, beat it with me, cut it with me, and beat it again until we have pounded hot, raw, waiting spirit into the metal. I’ll make the first cut in the steel but you’ll have your hands on mine as I do it. At the moment of tempering I’ll lay on the clay and speak the ritual but you’ll speak the name to be given the blade. This sword must have a great name for a great character. The name will tell me in which part of the universe I can find you to bless or curse you as I in my death await the turning to the next world.”

  I was stunned by all this astonishing news. The digging, the melting, the shaping, the cutting, the inspiriting. The curse.

  “I’ll do it all, Lord Prince, I swear by every god and goddess!” I cried, terrified.

  “Swear by all the stones you want,” said Llew, “but if you don’t give the sword the name it was born to have, the moment you put hands to the hilt I’ll destroy you and the sword and there’ll be a hole in the universe where your Fate once waited!”

  Galabes shouted, “Great Lord Prince, I’ve never heard you set a curse like that!”

  “It’s succeed or die, Old Thief, for your last try to bring us back the High King, and that demands a great blessing and a greater curse.”

  Llew said to me, “Tell me, Arthur’s brat, what will you have from me? Say it into the world so the contract cannot be changed.”

  “The sword!” I gasped.

  Galabes in fury and Caval in silence turned to face the old man. “Now you name your own tests, Monster,” said Galabes. “Speak them into the world so they can’t be changed.”

  “First, quest for the blackest and purest ore. Second, cut the raw steel with me. Third, name the finished blade. A trinity for the world’s most perfect sword.”

  “What do you say to that, my daughter?” Galabes said to me.

  “Agreed,” I said. “All of it.”

  What else could I say? I had no past to return to and my future without a sword would be despair and a drowning death in the Saxon flood.

  “Turn your cheek to me,” the prince commanded, pulling a singed ironworker’s glove over his fighting hand.

  I did. He smashed his gloved and withered fist into my cheek. It was not much of a blow but I was so surprised I nearly tumbled. Who was this defunct prince to dub me knight with a slap?

  “Now the kiss!” he cried, with a hungry slobber.

  He kissed me on the lips. It was like a young man’s kiss struggling to escape ghastly withered lips. It was awful.

  “The world now knows you as Lady Brynn,” said Llew, “knight and princess. When you’ve earned the sword, I’ll knight you again with a blade unlike any ever made, a sword worthy of the greatest woman in Britain!”

  The spring sun was bright in his white eyes. The blue of the pupils gleamed through the cataracts, as though the first film of diseased flesh had peeled back on eyes youthful as the breathy boyishness of the old man’s voice.

  Llew called to a female servant, a twisted-back gnome with an infant’s cheery face, and said, “Take this lady-knight to the iron mines, and see that she survives, if she can.”

  Chapter 3 – The Iron Mines

  For months, I scrambled over most of the world. Splashing across the Sea of
Brittany to Europa, the gnome dry on my back. Across icy mountain peaks, boggy plains, dim forests. Seeing no city or town. Seeing nothing of the supposed wonders of Gaul, Italy or Greece. Seeing no other human creature or fairy, elf, unicorn or any other of those strange things other men and women claim to see. Seeing nothing at all in a continent that seemed to me perfectly deserted. Because the meaning of my quest had sealed me off from life. My quest for ore had become my life.

  The gnome, silent as Caval yet always smiling, led me on to smell the flowers, laugh at the joyful kick of a mountain goat or the whistle of a bird in a wind-twisted tree. So empty was my world and the gnome the only other two legged walking creature in it that I began to follow the little beast in its pursuit of flowers, bees, worms, spiders, fishes, all those other creatures sharing the world with warrior men and women.

  The gnome twisted the heads off flowers and showed them to me and the names of the flowers came into my head. The gnome shoved the flower heads into my mouth to eat. It snatched fish from streams and their names came to me, too, before the gnome fed them to me raw. It cut open birds with its flint knives and showed me their pumping hearts and bleeding veins and all those names appeared in my mind before we cooked and ate the creatures. The gnome chased down deer, I used the old scramasax to cut them apart, and we feasted on venison and lay hours burping in flowered fields.

  I was becoming a warrior who understood not merely how to fight and which grasses and beasts to eat to feed my sword arm, but how to cultivate and farm and herd and cook. How to be a woman who commanded not merely the joyous berserk rage of a fighter but the happy seasonal drift of the Earth.

  At last, tramping across the last cold mountain range, we looked down on a bleak brown plains land and the gnome sang her first word, “Armenia!”

  I goggled at this place as far from Britain as the Moon. Armenia, the first Christian kingdom in the world, and the mine from which the finest ore was dug to arm Rome’s legions.

  The gnome led down into the country and I sank into the mines, lost to light, hope, and the world.

  The mines were foul, reeking pits with monsters for their masters. Slaves from all Rome’s subject peoples dug iron for pitiful little to eat and smaller wages. Among them I was the strange one, a volunteer sent by a swordmaker to mine ore with my own hands for my own blade. I was a slave with the blood of pendragons. A dilettante among miners, envied and hated.

  The gnome crouched on a ledge above my head as I worked, smiling, watching my pick-swinging labor, counting my strokes to report them to Prince Llew.

  The gnome examined each chip of ore I made. With a happy smile, she rejected the inferior stones, tossing them aside for other miners to scramble to add to their daily required harvest of ore.

  With a face of sad surprise, she accepted a few bits, mumbling what I thought must be her singing prayers over them, or perhaps just fighting down the urge to vomit out a bad morning meal.

  In the first days or weeks or months of work – I cannot say for certain because time means nothing in the bottom of a black hole in the ground – I fought two dozen fights, each over the prize ore the gnome had chosen for me to keep. The gnome watched my battles with a dreamy smile, clutching to her chest my sack of prize stones.

  I fought with my fists and feet and loved it all. I did not use the scramasax slung over my back. That was too great a power against even these savage miners. I wanted to test myself alone against them.

  I fought with clubs, I fought with shovels, I fought with picks. I smashed them away, battered them, trampled them. I shrieked my pleasure at every blow I gave and every one I took. Finally, the miners scrambled back into the gloom of deeper mine shafts, horrified at me and my berserker power.

  The last man who dared fight me I slashed using a hastily chipped flint stone. I sliced open his arm and roared my victory cheer. Then, with an equally fast-made needle of bone, I stitched the wound shut with sinew. I victory-cheered again.

  I felt in me the manic hunger for blood that Prince Llew had scorned. I rejoiced in the feeling! What a wonder to feel that power and that madness! What else is there for a warrior, woman or man, with a weapon in hand?

  The gnome above me on the rock wall of the mine began to mumble a singing prayer. I felt myself beginning to wonder if blood is all there is to a knight. If blood is all there should be to me.

  But I reveled in the independence and knightly power Galabes had given me. I could live, fight, and survive in any place on Earth with any tools or weapons. The gnome had taught me I could feed myself from the fields, raking in the harvest, or even deep in the pit of a mine, stealing food from miners now too terrified of me to resist.

  There was nothing I would not fight, nothing I could not command, nothing I could not choose to make mine. Whatever awful Fate and mission Galabes had planned for me, I could make it a victory, I was sure, and then swagger across the Earth with a world-beating steel sword, hauling in riches, power and glory.

  The mine lord saw the healing wound in the arm of the man I had slashed and called me out of the pit, the smiling gnome following me.

  “What do you want from me?” the mine lord said, anger and fright in his voice. “Great gods, are you a witch?”

  “I want my ore for a sword.”

  “Who makes herself a slave for a sword? Buy the metal, woman. Ask me to give it you. No more lies!”

  The mine lord snapped his three-tailed whip.

  “Tell me who sent you and why?”

  “My mentor my foster father sent me, a beggar-knight called Galabes. I mine metal for a sword bought for me with a Jerusalem coin paid by my stepfather, the servant of Queen Morgause. The coin is a legacy from my blood-father, Arthur.”

  “You’re a fortunate young woman to have so many fathers. Or a liar. There’s no ‘Galabes’ in The Chronicle of Camelot. I never heard the name read to me.”

  “He fought at Camlann. Even the queen calls him ‘knight.’”

  “Then he’s a fraud and your queen is a fool. It’s a Galabes who’s no knight or a knight who’s not Galabes who sent you for my metal. Tell me which or I flay you to the bone.”

  The mine lord rattled his whip again.

  I watched it with interest, wondering how the three-tailed lash would feel.

  The smiling gnome watched me.

  “He sent me,” I said.

  The mine lord struck me with the whip, a biting blow, but it pleased me to discover I could not feel the pain for all the training scars Galabes had given me and the hardness I had learned in the mines. I would not use the scramasax on him.

  “Enough!” said the cheery gnome, peering around my leg and smiling up at the mine lord, only the second word I had ever heard from the creature.

  The gnome caught the next whip blow in her smiling mouth and began to eat up the length of the thongs until the mine lord dropped the whip to save his arm.

  “That beast is the possession of a great witch!” cried the mine lord. “Name her or I’ll give you both to the Romans for crucifixion!”

  “Not a witch,” I said, “but the servant of Prince Llew the Swordmaker.”

  “You’ve three fathers, this leering monster for a pet, and a prince to make your sword? Would that I prayed to Ahriman for my safety and not the Gentle Christ! Only the devil can stand between me and a thing like you. Go into my mine. Fill your packs with ore and get away from me!”

  “I can take from you only what I’ve dug myself,” I said, “and only what the gnome decides is rich enough for me to haul away to Ynys Prydein.”

  “To Island Britain? There is no more such place. Rome abandoned it to sink into the sea!”

  “Morgause is queen there, and Cadwallader her king,” I said.

  “Arthur’s half-sister?” cried the mine lord. “She’s the greatest witch of the age! Yes, yes, that island will never sink with her in command, despite the weight on it of all the world’s Saxons.”

  The mine lord gazed worried at the gnome. “If you mine
my rock, what is this foul-tempered beast meant to do?”

  “I can take nothing but the watching of it all,” said the gnome, singing the first sentence I heard from her.

  “Then dig!” cried the mine lord in sudden panic. “Dig it all. Empty my mine. But get away from me!”

  I finished my digging in two months and had a sack of prize ore three times my weight, each piece chosen and sung over by the happy gnome.

  The gnome and I swung on our packs and tramped up the mountain path that led by the power of months and the gnome’s magic back to Britain and Prince Llew’s forge.

  * * *

  Early spring again and the old prince’s windy citadel was full of clamoring, clanging action, shaking off winter’s freeze and preparing for the swordmaking season.

  Men and women, boys and girls hauled cutting tools, hammers, clay jugs of wine. They scoured out the stone wells for the tempering oils and waters. Loaded the forge with charcoal and burnt it down to the essence of fire needed to melt the brave metals required by steel swords.

  The old prince had a dozen rich orders to fill early in the season. But he and his retainers waited on their rampart with hot impatience to watch for my return. Making my sword would be their first of the season.

  Camped on the mountainside below Prince Llew’s citadel were the hide tents of the impatient retainers of the great, the rich, the royal, and the brave men and women who had ordered his famous steel blades. But the gnome and I with our packs of ore shoved through all this mob to carry my stones into the forge and lay them before the antique prince and Galabes with his watching hound.

  As the prince grabbed the rocks out of my packs, his fingers that had seemed to me a year ago so blunted and scarred now appeared longer and finer than I recalled. Startling patches of blue gleamed out through the cataracts on his eyes. The heavy age lines checkering his face seemed fading away.

  “But this ore isn’t fine enough by half!” the prince cried in his boyish voice, flinging a black rock at the smiling gnome.