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

“It is in this cycle of the world. This sword must triumph, Lady, or we will never know how to make the world-commanding sword that brings us back our king. Have you named this sword?”

  “I can’t name it until it’s proofed, you know that.”

  “Name it now, before the final test, if you and I and the world are to have any chance to save ourselves.”

  “Then I name it ‘Urien,’ for the one privileged to come before.”

  The sword had its soul-name.

  “To come before what?” said the prince.

  “Before the even greater sword that will call the High King back to us.”

  “Urien!” said the knight, addressing the sword. “The world will end or live in this one stroke. Decide!”

  He swung the sword and crashed it into the stolid anvil.

  The blade sank into the heavy iron and stuck.

  Urien did not shatter. Did not break. Did not scream.

  The sword drove through the anvil without making a wound, like a knife sinking into a Roman custard, until its tip beaked out of the solid block of metal.

  “Great God,” said the prince. “What monstrous thing have you made, Lady?”

  “Draw the sword.”

  Llew hauled on the hilt. The blade would not draw out of the iron.

  “It can’t be pulled!” cried the prince.

  He braced his foot against the anvil and hauled again. Still no movement.

  “What use is a sword in an anvil?” he cried.

  I shoved him aside, put out my hand toward the sword’s hilt, and spoke the sword’s soul-name: “Urien!”

  The sword rose from the anvil into my hand.

  “What have you made?” said the prince, greed sparking in his eyes.

  I thrust the sword toward the gong in the vaulted ceiling. The charge from the blade slapped the gong and it rang once to announce the birth of the mightiest of battle swords.

  Prince Llew, rapidly graying and withering into old age as stiffening winter wind howled across the forge, said, “Can you make more, Lady? More with this kind of power? What did you do to make this sword?”

  “I burnt the merlin of the last cycle and ate alive his spirit,” I said.

  “This is a Druid blade? A few merlin ashes in your mouth and you make a wonder like this? Where do I eat these ashes?”

  “A Druid blade cut by Arthur’s daughter at the song of the gnome,” I said.

  “Only you can make another?”

  “I’ll make one more and no more.”

  “But the fortunes we could reap with this wonder!” cried the prince, greed flashing in his cataracting eyes. “The kingdoms we could conquer! The Saxon hordes we could slaughter! Make a thousand, Lady, make…”

  “One more,” I said. “Made with my perfect rods of steel and bars of iron there, in that wine-frozen trough. The sword that’s been waiting in spirit for me to forge.”

  “Just one more?” said the withering prince, groaning, kicking at the stone trough with the frozen metal inside. “But we can be emperor and empress of all the sprawling Earth with just a dozen swords like Urien.”

  “It’s not half the sword you promised me my first day at the forge.”

  “What’s incomplete about this wonder?” cried the prince, stabbing the sword into the anvil again. I drew it out for him.

  “It cuts but it will not reach out to my enemies.”

  “I promised you a reaching sword and you’ll have it. But I can’t make a sword that will cleave anvils without a cut and stick into them until a wizard of your power calls it to come out. A mouthful of Druid ash is enough?”

  Llew made to swing the sword again to drive it into the iron block but I took the blade from him as a parent must take a toy from a boisterous child.

  “Then make my reaching sword for me,” I said.

  “Oh, I can,” said the prince. “I’ll give your sword power to stretch across a dozen battlefields. You give the sword the power to cut anvils without wounding them. Our powers combined can make a blade to sweep the Saxons out of this world, to make us gods on Earth...”

  “But what’s the promise of power without the soul-name to bring my sword alive?” I said.

  That stopped Prince Llew’s greedy dreams.

  “But the perfect name is everything,” he cried. “The name is the power. The name is life. Haven’t you chosen a name?”

  “Where do I find this perfect name?”

  “Dream,” said the prince. “Where else? Dream the name that can draw the sword to the High King and the king to the sword to open a new world.”

  Withered Prince Llew flung his leathers and furs onto the hot coals of the forge and bundled himself there for his winter’s dreaming. He – the squire, the knight, the withered old man – became ash.

  I threw a blanket over his ashes to keep them from blowing away across the world.

  With my anvil-stabbing sword across my knees, I squatted as guardian beside my steel pieces in the stone trough. There I waited vigil, dreaming through winter. Waiting for spring and the perfect dream name for the perfect sword I was to make.

  * * *

  I dreamed that I stepped out of time and into the momentary world.

  Into a storm of night beside the Brutus stone. The foundation rock of Britain given us by Troy drips with blood. Overhead, howling war ravens and whistling arrow swarms. Around me, vaguely seeable, tripping heaps of metal and shattered bone slippery with slaughtered flesh.

  My trembling hand reaches out for the blood on the stone to clutch the souls of the dead who had shouted grim “Peace!” as their hearts and throats were cut in defense of the stone of the race.

  I taste it. The blood of Britons!

  The blood speaks to me, crying, “Hail, Lady Merlin!”

  “Merlin?” I cry.

  I feel my face age. I feel two writhing, hissing snakes thrust out of my cheeks into a merlin’s forked beard. I feel the rusty armor beneath my merlin’s robe of thirteen patches. I feel the peaking of my ears. Jesu and Gwynn, am I become the old Druid of legend?

  I am soul-frightened of the name the blood of the Britons calls me.

  I see in my dreaming eye the scores of lives that throbbed out on this rock fighting the Saxon hordes.

  But what strange bright armor do these warriors wear? There’s none so fine in my own age. What griffins and pentangles are these on their shields? I can name none of these warriors because none was alive in my day except in legend.

  What is this awful place of dying? I nearly cry aloud.

  I hear the words as though shouted into my brain from a distance by another voice that no more belongs to me than does my hand still clutching at the British heart-blood dripping from the Brutus stone.

  All is different here, all is strange. But I have my sword Urien slung over my back.

  Across the night with its reek of blood and choking cries of dying I hear the wail of Roman flutes, a hollow sound so terrible and true.

  There is just one man for whom those flutes will cry on any field – the High King Arthur.

  This horrible place of dying is Camlann!

  This awful moment is the end of the world.

  Night parts. The arrowstorm descends around me riveting to earth Arthur’s men and Arthur’s horses, their screams like a rending of the great cloth of the black sky. A sky pricked by the glittering eyes of the heartless godlets who make the world a misery for men and women.

  I see Arthur’s legions trampled by barbarians, Saxon axmen cutting down swordsmen, Britons disarmed using their shields to batter Saxon princes before the Britons are crushed beneath the next howling downflight of arrows and spears. By barbarian horse charges. The hellish shrieking of Saxon women falling upon the half-dead Britons to scalp and castrate them and strip their armor to fortify the Saxon horde.

  I see Bedivere – Great Jesu, it’s the greatest hero of the Round Table himself! – clamp his hand over his death wound and shout for strength to the spirits of his sword and shield and
, standing with his greatsword as brace, raise up the headless Lucan from the dead and clap his head and helmet on his shoulders.

  I cry, “Mercy!” for the hideous cut throat of Lucan and for the evil wounds inflicted on his black armor and glass shield.

  The two crippled knights stagger toward the sound of the flutes and dying Arthur.

  I ate the ashes of the merlin of the last cycle. Am I to be recreated a merlin? Is that why I’m here at this moment of disaster? To haul out my Urien and drive the Saxon horde from Arthur’s near-ruined army and preserve the king who can keep Eden for the Britons?

  I draw Urien and sweep away Morrigu’s ravens darting to peck out my eyes. I run into the Saxon horde berserk with desperation to save the world. I cut heads and arms and chop though iron and steel.

  Each swing of Urien causes the blade to grow until at its most immense length it swoops through the pagan horde by troops, by regiments, by divisions.

  I stand in the center of the Saxon army whipping the blade around my head, seeing it bite through Saxon armor and helmet as easily as it bites through anvils, cutting necks by scores, hacking open ribs in hundreds, through legs, through horse and shield, through ax blade, through spear. My Urien can kill armies, tribes, nations.

  I’ll have it kill the world to save Arthur!

  Exhausted with killing, I stand in a lather of sweat, my hissing, snaky beard sweat-matted to my old armor.

  I hold out the huge sword for the Saxons to run themselves upon.

  It is now I see I have killed no one. The barbarians run through my blade as through phantom steel. Urien passes through their chests but their hearts still beat. Through their necks and they keep their heads. They scream their hideous gabbling Saxon war cries and overrun Urien stretched the length of their army’s front and they fall upon the Britons and mangle and slaughter them.

  “What sword have I made that betrays Arthur in his need?” I cry.

  I drive the blade into the Earth, searing the soil, mud and blood steaming and gouting from the Earth’s wound, the earth thrown back from the gouge polluted with a rubble of metal and stone weapons and the broken bones of all the armies of every kind that fought on this field from the hurling out from Eden of Adam and Eve.

  I stumble away from the traitor sword, spitting at it, cursing it. I shout into the warstorm of night, “Woden! Jesu! Mithras! What will you do with me? My sword betrays the world!”

  I hear the flutes.

  I stumble across the wreck of battle walking on all those cut off legs and heads and broken shields of my countrymen, so thick is the ruin, shoving aside Morrigu’s biting ravens and the thieving Saxon and weeping British women.

  I come to the muck of the lakeshore. Across this black water is Avalon and the promise of peace for the wounded king.

  I see a great oar-less galley hung with black silk, torches like comets, and a Roman funeral bed. There lies gray-bearded Arthur, stripped of mail and winged helmet, holding a silver crucifix and a holy Jupiter stone.

  Morgan le Fey, the black-haired Queen of Elves, standing at Arthur’s head motions me, weeping and raging, to silence.

  “The spell is cast,” she whispers.

  “Spare him, Morgana! Spare me my father-king!”

  Cold wind sweeps across the lake. The galley’s black sail booms in filling. The ship drifts away toward gloom.

  “Where do you take my king?” a voice cries.

  I see Sir Lucan with Bedivere beside him, Bedivere leaning dying on his greatsword.

  “To Avalon,” Morgana says.

  “Spare him!” cries Bedivere.

  We all see her put into the king’s mouth an obolos to pay his soul’s journey to Paradise.

  “It’s done!” she says.

  The galley fades into blackness.

  Bedivere has a second sword in his hand, a scimitar. “Only for love of Arthur do I return Caliburn to the Lady of the Lake.”

  He throws Arthur’s great battle sword Caliburn into night’s blackness. Out of the water, a flash of white. A woman’s hand thrusts up to catch the sword and haul it down into the lake.

  Lucan cries, “How lonely it is just us two against the world!”

  “We are three!” I say to them. “A trinity to make the world whole again.”

  Lucan turns to the sound of my voice. “What speaks to me?”

  “I don’t see anything,” says Bedivere.

  “I speak,” I say. “Brynn, the king’s last daughter.”

  “Witch! Druid! Satan!” Lucan cries. “Make yourself physical. Let me kill the monster that laughs to mourn King Arthur!”

  “There’s nothing there,” says Bedivere, “because there’s no more world. The world is done.”

  Bedivere shouts to Jesu and to Gwynn to take his soul and drops heavily into the black water, dying in the lake in which he buried Caliburn and over which Arthur traveled to his tomb.

  “By St. Mary,” I say to Lucan, “don’t you leave me, too. Don’t abandon Britain!”

  Lucan says to the blank air from which he heard my cry, “Spirit of Scorn, I’ll seek you in the next dead days, seek you to torment you as you torment me now.”

  He staggers and falls to hands and knees. I see the blood still coming out of his neck wound. Cured of death by Bedivere, delivered once more into the world as the last of the Round Table, Lucan is still a mortal man chopped and bruised by battle, weary to be the last of his kind left alive, stunned to be the man on whom falls the whole burden of regaining Camelot for Britain.

  I put out my arms to comfort him and hear from out of the atomos of water bumping each to the next across all the distance from Avalon, “You’ve failed, Merlin, and must live again!”

  I see in the water the reflection of the White Druid striding on the lake, black streaks of tears diminishing the silver gleam of his face and forked beard.

  The Druid says to me, “Why have you stopped time in this ghastly place? You must live again. Find Arthur. Teach him to be a holy king. Grant men his justice.”

  I hear come out of myself another voice that is not mine but a part of me, the male voice of the merlin who preceded me in this quest, the merlin of the last cycle, a voice terrifying to find living inside me: “If I must try one more time, give me to remember all that’s gone before.”

  “I can’t give you remembrance,” says the Druid, “but in Arthur’s youth I’ll make you wise.”

  “How will you make me wise?” I cry in my own voice.

  “I’ll make you old. Start time, Lady Merlin. Live again. Awaken!”

  The Druid’s silver face flashes out and he’s gone from the night.

  Black night, black lake, black war-field.

  All around me is a uniform emptiness without up or down, left or right, good or not-good.

  I stagger away from the water and the special emptiness that marks the absence of the eye-piercing vision of the White Druid. I stumble across the dead, slapping away the ravens sniping at my hissing, snaky beard. I weep in bitterness and rage.

  Am I to be Merlin? Must it fall to me to dig out of his dreaming hollow hill the purest king since Adam and Holy Jesu? Or will failure blast me into the hollow spaces between the stars to drift and grieve forever?

  But I cry out into the world, “I accept!”

  There can be no other merlin to save the world but me, with my power to fashion the world sword for Arthur.

  I stumble along through the black-blood night and the last arrowfall, following Urien’s distant beacon of gleaming white. I grip the hilt to lift the sword from the Earth into which I’d driven it. Urien sword will not come.

  “You’re the sword I made,” I say. “You’ll come at my command.”

  But Urien refuses to draw.

  I hear it whisper a single alien word, speaking from its soul to mine.

  “What language is that? What’s that word?” I say, astonished to have heard the word like a bite of lightning in my soul.

  I realize with dreamy fright that the
glowing sword I’d stabbed into the battle mire is no longer Urien. It has become another sword. The world sword.

  Excalibur! the sword says to me.

  Here, here is the sword of justice whose spirit existed with the Hero Jesu before the making of all other things.

  I stand stunned to hear the name. But as hungry to hear it again as a desperate lover yearns to hear a sweetheart’s whispered name over and over.

  My hand reaching for the sword handle cannot close around the hilt.

  I know in my dream this sword will not come alive and draw from the mud until I give it a life’s quest.

  “Seek Arthur!” I say to Excalibur. “Bring him back to us. Make him the pure king.”

  Excalibur! shouts the sword.

  The sword rises from the Earth into my hand and I step back into time.

  Chapter 5 – The World Sword

  “Wake!” shouted Prince Llew. “The moment’s here. I can see it in your closed eyes, Lady!”

  The gnome, curled up high in the vaulted ceiling of the citadel, rapped the gong once for the first day of spring and the beginning of the swordmaking season. The sound echoed out over the valley, hurrying on the knights and ladies already scrambling up the mountainside to demand their swords.

  It was my nineteenth birthday though what do years mean to me now?

  I woke still squatting in vigil beside the stone trough that held the iron bars and steel rods meant to make the greatest sword in the world. The metal shimmered through the thawing wine bath.

  The young man nearly nose to nose with me and shouting, “Wake! Wake!” was the beautiful Prince Llew, clean-limbed, clean-cheeked, and filled with boyish energy.

  He was ready to smelt and hammer great swords with me in this wind-howling forge. Prepared to age with his work through the season until he returned to withered old age and then ash on his bed of coals. Hungry now to read my winter dreaming.

  “What did you see in your dreams?” he cried.

  “I’m to be Merlin,” I said.

  “All the lords!”

  I reached my hands cracking through the crusty ice on the wine trough and hauled out the bars and rods.

  “This,” I said, “will be Arthur’s sword.”