Read The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) Online
Authors: Kit Maples
The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy)
THE SWORD AND THE QUEST
Lady Merlin’s Sa
ga
Epic Fantasy
In dying Camelot,
a Druid princess is reborn
to save King Arthur
by Kit Maples
The Sword and The Quest
Copyright © 2016 by Kit Maples
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.
For more by Kit Maples, visit
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Cover design by KittyPixels at
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Cover images by Depositphotos, Inc., at
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STEVENS & MARLIN PUBLISHING, LLC
Sarasota, Florida
20160117
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE – At the Ending of the World
Chapter 10 – The Screaming Shield
Chapter 2 – The Birth of Death
Chapter 3 – Gurthrygen the Undying
Chapter 5 – The Monastery of Fleem
If I could, like a merlin, live backward through time, romance, war, and love, I would confirm for you everything I have written here. All the details of those terrifying years when the Roman Empire collapsed in chaos and war and abandoned on its bleak imperial frontier a place called Ynys Prydein. And the women and men there who had to grab up swords and spin magic to defend Britain against invasion and ruin as they searched for the greatest of merlins to make for them the true king who could save their world. But digging out and writing down this chronicle from the oldest Roman, British, and Saxon histories is the best I can do. Until Merlin tells me more. I wait to hear from her. As we all must wait for the next cycle of battle, love, and hope as we dream of Camelot.
Kit Maples
tŵr Carreg, Llandarcy, Wales
In this Julian Year 6729
After the fall of Camelot
the Britons lost the crown, kingdom, and sovereignty of their Island
and made no effort to recover these glories but one,
and that in the person of the last Druid princess of Camelot
whom some said was Queen Boadicea reborn
and some said Lady Merlin
and some said the Demon.
– The Last Chronicle of Camelot
Atomos of water bumping each to the next carried the story of the High King’s death across the lake to Avalon. The White Druid striding on the water read the message glittering on the lake surface. Black streaks of tears diminished the silver gleam of his face and forked beard and he began to sink into the water. He cried to Merlin, “You’ve failed and must live again!”
“I can’t,” said the desolated old man squatting on the shore.
He was splashed with the blood of too many others. His forked beard splotched with the bits of flesh of the warriors he had killed. He flung his shattered sword into the lake and spat after it.
“I’ve lived twelve-times-twelve lives, you bastard,” the old man said, “and want to die and peace and be damned with Arthur and Camelot and you.”
“Once more!” the Druid said as the lake drew him down. “Teach Arthur. Make him a holy king. Give men his justice.”
Merlin shouted to his gods for salvation. No reply. “Oh, damn me,” he groaned.
Merlin splashed after the Druid sinking into the water. “If I must try once more, give me the power to remember all that’s gone before so I can correct my errors and breed up the king you want.”
“I can’t give you that, but in Arthur’s youth I’ll make you wise,” said the Druid.
“What’s that?” cried Merlin. “How will you make me wise if I must forget everything when I’m reborn every new cycle?”
“I’ll make you old.”
“But I am old – I can be no older.”
“Now is your cycle to be the Lady Merlin,” said the Druid, “and to be old before you are young.”
“Nonsense!” cried Merlin. “Gibberish! Find another fool to raise your blockheaded king. Find a better Arthur!”
“Live again!” The silver face flashed out as the grieving Druid went under the water.
Black night, black lake, black shore closed around Merlin. A uniform emptiness without up or down, left or right, good or not-good. He splashed stumbling and cursing to shore, wringing water and blood from his forked beard.
He sat on the mud of the shore, among the night demons laughing behind his shoulder. He clapped hands over his peaked ears to shut them out. He waited for whatever was to come.
“Oh, damn me,” he said, because she was damned.
“Damn Arthur, damn Camelot, damn Guenevere, damn all cycles and all human stupidity. Damn all men, damn all women. Damn everything!” Merlin shouted.
At the first flash of dawn, Merlin saw that the sprig of a plant had grown out of the mud between her feet. By the first hour, the sprig was a sapling thrusting out miniature branches to wind around her legs and climb her body and wrap her head. By the third hour, Merlin understood this rebirth would be far more dreadful than any that had gone before.
Merlin shouted, “Let it come!”
The sapling drove its branches into her mouth and nose and out her ears and eyes and swelled into a young merlin oak tree. In the bark, Merlin grieved for death and dreamed of Arthur king once more.
In the Julian Year 5265 and of Our Lord 552
At the magic dying of the year, when the world is reborn out of winter’s starvation, a fresh young waterfall broke through the gray stone of a mountain face and plunged into the winter-brown tangle of a Cornish valley strewn with snow. Falcons shrieked and dived through the mist and the constant roar of impact. It was a portent equal to the wild cries that had been heard in the Theater, the groans witnessed in the baths and the spontaneous shattering of the old Victory monument at Caerleon-upon-Usk but no one knew what to make of it. Was it fair or foul or more of Fate’s weary grinding down of the Britons who had lost the larger share of their country to the Saxon pirates and who now were losing themselves to hunger, disease, and despair?
Below the falls was the castle of Carbonek, built in the style the Britons had learned from the Romans. The young king who had built Carbonek and the old queen who infested it claimed pridefully that it was modelled after The Antonia in Jerusalem. But the fortress was only part Roman and part Briton and wholly something monstrous.
Its outer rampart was earth eleven feet tall behind a ditch nine feet deep. The king raced chariots here two abreast in the games dating back to Queen Boadicea and her naked blue warriors who had fought and beaten the First Caesar. Behind the rampart stood ranks of stone and plaster buildings, white-washed walls and red tile roofs gleaming despite the gray-cast afternoon. They were grouped around a very British man-made hill as irregular, stark and weird as the strange purposeless hillocks created by the Old Ones who had erected Stonehenge. Who knew what marvels those hills contained? Who dared open them to see? Was Arthur in one of them buried, propped upright with his knights at a round table?
On Carbonek’s hill were sacred oaks – not saplings but huge, full-grown trees transported here by slaves and the witchly power of a dying queen. Out of this Druidic copse rose the glittering palace of Queen Morgause, its walls neatly cut and cemented Roman stone, its floors concrete or stone and mosaic, its timbers cedar from Lebanon, its carpets from Persia, silks from India, perfumes from Arabia. The wine in its cellars was from Burgundia and Mosella. Its antique statues of gods and heroes were Greek. Its library the twelve books that survived the Great Fire of Alexandria. In its great hall hung Arthur’s battered Round Table.
These wonders were the paltry remnants of the Camelot that Arthur had made, the memories with which the dying queen surrounded herself. Beneath the halo of the Table, Morgause had put a fragment of the sacred stone that Felix Brutus had brought from Troy when Trojan refugees came here to found the Kingdom of the Brutés, the sons and daughters of Brutus. On this she had carved a gigantic marble bust of Arthur, crowned with gold, where she kept vigil against the immense loneliness of a dead world.
Morgause had no comfort from Cadwallader her husband, the young man she made king after Arthur’s regent had fallen, slaughtered by the Saxons. At twenty, the age when Arthur was the just servant of dying Rome and lord of the Britons, Cadwallader was still a boy, galloping his war horse and swinging his sword. He loved the spectacle of war, its blood and plumes, and believed himself a hero. But he was destroying the Britons in piecemeal attacks on the Saxon hordes.
Old Morgause stood on the earth rampart two chariots broad and gazed over the stone wall and bare trees.
“There he comes,” the queen said to her merlin.
The magician in his cloak of twelve patches, his hairless blue-painted head sword-scarred from crown to chin, his peaked ears dangling rings, squinted fiercely at the horizon. “What do you see, Queen, what
can
you see out there?”
He belched wine gas and cuffed away the ragged slave girl who had brought him more drink. But he kept the wineskin.
The queen raised an old woman’s trembling hand to mark a hilltop where the falcons dived and twisted and fled away like sparrows pursued by a hawk.
“There!” she said.
Over the crest came a man and a huge dog.
“This old witch hasn’t lost all her powers to age. Come, lead me to him. Open the gate!”
The magician threw the empty wineskin at the slave girl. He seated the queen on her divan over The Gate of The World’s End. He laid the ermine on her shoulders, greedily petting the marvelous fur.
“Bring the queen’s sword!” he roared, even though a slave boy was then dragging the heavy weapon across the pavement to him.
The merlin put into the queen’s hands the Orkney greatsword that had been King Lot’s, her first husband, and which she had recovered from Camlann’s wreckage by ransom to the thieving elves. There had been elves then. Where were they now?
“Stranger,” the queen called down to the beggar and his black dog standing before The World’s End, “have you forgotten to salute your queen?”
The man in his layers of tattered leather and wool wound around his body and legs, tied over his feet for boots, tied around his head as helmet or crown, stinking even at the queen’s distance of half-treated, half-rotted fur, turned his face up toward the queen and his black dog with him.
He cried, “I recognize the sword of Orkney.”
His was a voice thinned by age and desperate disappointment. He slapped his fist to his breast in an old soldier’s salute to the queen.
“I’m more than Orkney and less,” said Morgause. She made a bitter laugh. “But tell me, Stranger, do you see here only Lot’s crone whose hair’s no longer red or can you see something more?”
“I can’t read the future, Queen, or give you an answer.”
“A true answer!” she said, even more bitterly. “And from a man who stinks like a corpse.”
The queen turned to the magician. “Reveal this to me, Lupus, my necromancer – is this beggar the last honest man in my shrunken kingdom or is he a fool not to know that in this hard world to speak honestly to
this
unhappy queen is death?”
The merlin heard the queen but said, with a drunken startle in his face, watching the stranger, “Ask him his name, Queen. Judge yourself. Ask!”
She said to the beggar, “Oh, say your name.”
“Galabes, Queen, a woodsman.”
She said to the magician, “Now I know his name, Lupus. What other wonderful magic can you work for me?”
Lupus’ drunken surprise paled toward fright as he watched the stranger. He said, hoarsely, to the queen, “Ask where you met him before. Do it, Queen, ask!”
She turned puzzled from her merlin and said, “Galabes, where have we met before?”
“In Avalon, Queen.”
“Another miracle, Lupus!” she said, with growing irritation. “You’ve proved him a vagrant traveler as well as an honest man and a fool.”
Lupus said nothing, goggling at the stranger.
“Come up here,” the queen said to Galabes.
He and the dog climbed the worn stones to the top of The World’s End.
Morgause reached out her greatsword to Galabes’ scarred neck, the blade steady despite her age, and said with sudden fury, “In Avalon! The day I came searching for Arthur and his whore to stop the world from ending! I remember you. Tell me why I shouldn’t I kill you now, Honest Woodsman?”
“Ask him, Queen,” groaned Lupus, “to name his hound.
“Name the damned dog!” she shouted at Galabes.
“Caval.”
The hound turned its great square head toward the queen.
“Arthur’s dog!” she cried.
“Grandson of the High King’s dog,” said Galabes.
The queen laughed. “Lupus! You prove yourself a true merlin and mock my hope. You bring me the dog of the dog of Arthur’s dog when the whole world knows I sit here awaiting Arthur.”
“Ask him,” said Lupus, barely able to speak, “what he wants from you.”
“Galabes, Honest Man, Woodsman, master of the last of the canine bloodline of dead Camelot, tell me what you want here,” said the queen.
“I’ve come to claim from the High King what’s mine.”
Lupus was startled out of his fright.
“You’re a fool or a madman!” he shouted at Galabes. “There’s no more a high king in Briton. Get away! Get away!”
“I have a debt from the High King,” said Galabes. “His sister must pay it.”
“What can anyone claim from a dead man?” cried Lupus.
The magician scooped up pebbles and flung them at the beggar, raising the jeers of the sentries and the slave girl and boy.
“Get away from the queen!” they all shouted.
The beggar and his dog stood in the pelting of stones. “Do I speak to the last pendragon?”
“I am she,” said the queen. “A title as antique and useless as I am.”
“Then I’ve a debt from Arthur Pendragon and a pendragon must pay it.”
The beggar pulled from his swaddling a letter sealed with a red dragon and eagle.
Morgause’s hands that had held the sword steady at Galabes’ throat trembled in taking the paper.
“Open it,” Lupus said to the queen.
“Don’t you know it already, Magician?” she said. “Or are you less a merlin than you make me believe?”
“Open it!”
Morgause broke the seal, flattened the old paper, and read the message.
“A child!” she cried. “Arthur promised you a child? The High King’s debt is a
child?
”
“Why claim a debt-child,” said Lupus, puzzled, “when you can make one yourself on any peasant woman? Let me see the letter, Queen, it must have a secret.”
Morgause’s trembling hands released the paper. Wind took it across the rampart. Lupus shouted for the guards to catch it. The letter went over the wall into the snow and vanished.
“The High King promised me more than a child,” said Galabes. “He gave me his blood, his son.”
Lupus, angry, said, “Are you such a fool you don’t know Arthur’s only son was Mordred who died on Arthur’s spear at Camlann? This man’s a fraud, Queen. Guards, beat him from the neighborhood!”
Morgause put up her hand to stop the guards.
“A high king is a great man who goes through his kingdom in a great way,” Galabes said to her. “Arthur made many bastards. Give me one of them. A boy.”
“You’ve no other message for me of Arthur?” said Morgause. “Nothing for me? No words to his sister from where he dreams in the Otherworld?”
“You know I haven’t,” said Galabes.
“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.