The Broken Sword (35 page)

T
he dark gods had
won.

When Taliesin had seen enough of what they had done to his country, to the people whose wild purity had once repelled the mighty Roman legions, he bade farewell to Nimue and traveled on foot to the hill country of Wales where he had spent his boyhood, there to perform his final task as the Merlin.

It was Nimue who had given him the idea for it.
Isn't everything possible?
she had asked in her patience-stretching way while the two of them were taking Arthur's body to Mona.

She had been right, of course; everything
was
possible, if one knew how to accomplish what needed to be done.

In this case, what was required was the Merlin's very life, and even that might not be enough.

But he would try.

For you, my King.
Those had been Galahad's last words.
Let them he mine, too.
Merlin thought.
I
shall make this magic for you, and for the forgotten gods who made you.

T
aliesin did not wish
to die on Mona. It would have been unfitting to lay his lowly bones beside those of the Innocent and the King. He chose instead a cave on the Welsh mainland, near a stream just above the shrine of the ancient god Mithras. He had been there before, on the night he had first heard the music of the druids wafting on the wind from Mona.

There would be no more music, he knew, and no old gods to bring him the visions he had seen in his youth. But there was still magic here—enough, at least, to ready him for the long journey into eternity.

He began by picking the mushrooms which had been sacred to the druids. No one ate them now, and they grew in profusion all over the countryside. He painted his body with woad and anointed his eyelids with fragrant oil, just as he had for the ritual of Beltane so many years ago.

Then he fasted. From one full moon to the next, he took nothing into his body except water from a nearby stream. He sat naked outside the cave for every moment of that time while the rain purified him and the wind scrubbed clean his soul. Like a toad, he luxuriated in the warm sun when it came. The cold he welcomed as well, shivering with life like a new blade of grass. He watched the moon wane and wax while the stars beyond it travelled in their endless voyage, their light burning hotter than fire through the void of space.

Among those who chanced to see him—a few superstitious old people still brought offerings to Mithras at his derelict shrine—some thought Taliesin to be the god himself, with his blue-stained body and his windblown white hair. Others recognized him as the King's great sorcerer, who had spirited away Arthur's body to an enchanted island where a fairy queen would watch over it until the High King's spirit returned to call him back to the world.

"The Merlin has gone mad," they whispered, staring at the grizzled old hermit who sat naked and unblinking before them.

Perhaps they were right. He knew he was changing, although he was uncertain as to what he was in the process of becoming.

He had been transformed once before, during his early years on Mona, from an ordinary man into an initiate into the mysteries. He had never thought about what state of being lay beyond that, but whatever it was, he was experiencing it.
Light
might best describe how he felt. Light—weightless, insubstantial, luminescent, fragmentary. He felt as if he were made of moonbeams; his emotions were in a constant state of detached, unwarranted joy. He danced in the high grass, his spindly limbs strutting gaily. He sang loud and clearly the bawdy ballads he had learned in his youth. He spent hour after hour looking at stars through the spaces between his splayed fingers.

When the moon sat full again in the sky, he bathed by its glow in the cold water of the stream. "Gods of my spirit," he called out at the top of his voice. "Gods of the earth and the universe, thank you!" He ducked his head beneath the bracing, fast-flowing stream and came up sputtering and laughing. "Thank you for giving me so much pain and so much ecstasy. This life has been a glorious gift. Thank you!"

Then he went into the cave and walled the entrance closed with rock. He lit a single candle and ate the mushrooms, one by one, until the bowl was empty.

I
n the candle's flame
he saw Arthur die again, but this time his heart did not break with the sight, for it was beyond breaking. With the eyes of the ancient ones he watched Lugh fall, and Kay and Gawain. He saw the other Knights of the Round Table as they met their fates, going each to the Summer Country of the dead.

Agravaine and Geraint Lightfoot, returning from their failed Quest, were captured by Lot's men and tortured, the skin flayed from their bodies as a mob cheered. Dry Lips was also captured. He was taken to Rheged and imprisoned there, but cheated Lot out of a third execution by selling a gold ring to a guard in exchange for a dagger, which he plunged into his own heart.

Bedwyr, the young Master of Horse, went back to his family's estates, only to find they had been confiscated during the civil war which raged for decades after Arthur's death. Bedwyr died defending the turnip field of one of his former tenant farmers during a raid by some of Lot's soldiers looking for sport.

After hearing of the outcome at the Battle of Camlan, Curoi MacDaire headed back toward Ireland, but was waylaid by thieves. He bled to death by the side of a road.

Tristan, the beautiful one, found his way home to his family's lands in the northeast where, through careful politics and heavy bribes, his father had managed to keep an uneasy peace with the new king. Seeking to keep his son out of Lot's reach, he sent Tristan to Ireland by sea as the escort of a young noblewoman named Iseult, who was betrothed to one of the Irish kings. Tristan accomplished his mission, but drowned on the voyage home.

Gareth Beaumains, called Fairhands, entered a monastery. He succumbed three years later to the plague.

Launcelot died a madman in the land of the Picts, unable to serve the King to whom he had sworn his lifelong allegiance, yet unable to forgive himself for deserting that King. After years of living like a beast in the forest, he ran to the top of a high cliff one morning in summer and hurled himself onto the boulders below.

And Galahad. Galahad had been the first of them. And the best.

Gone, all gone.

"For now, perhaps," Merlin said softly. He held out his arms to gather in the forces of energy inside the cave. Then, clearing his mind of thought, he shot that energy out again.

The crystals within the limestone walls glowed faintly. Their color dimmed as the wizard drew their power from them once again, and brightened as he released it. Each time he sent the cave's energy back the power grew stronger, augmented by Merlin's own life force. And each time it returned to him, the cave's living spirit brought with it more of the power of All That Is.

The power came from the rock of the cave and from the trees beyond it, from the green grass and the soil and the air; from the sun and moon and streaking comets and galaxies too far distant to see. From the black void of space it came, crackling through his bony fingers. From beyond the void, from places too dense and secret to belong even to the universe, and to other places yet deeper, reaching, reaching past the gods, past time, past being, reaching to the source itself, energy without matter, infinity, nothingness, All.

Reaching to the Mother.

"Mother, bring us life from death," the Merlin prayed.

The cave glowed with white light. It burned him blind; it turned his body to ash. His soul was all that was left, glowing with the light and dispersed into it.

Pure spirit now, Merlin traveled to the realm of the dead, to the Summer Country where long ago a fisherman had told him he had seen a city made of glass. Merlin had not believed him then, but he saw it now, a city not of glass but of dreams made real. And before his eyes which were not his eyes but something else, as the Innocent had tried to explain, a perception of the soul, the city became a field of flowers, a shining lake, a planet of exotic beauty, a grandmother's lap, an angel's enfolding wings. There was music here, and silence, and joy in the sky like a rainbow.

The fisherman's soul passed through him with perfect understanding. So did the spirit of his father, Ambrosius, and his brother Uther. He experienced the essence of his mother and his old nurse and the druid priestess on whom he had fathered a child after the rite of Beltane. The child was lost, doomed to the dark regions, but Thanatos would cheat his gods and live once more, and the Merlin would know him.

He ranged through the realm of the dead, searching for the Innocent, before he realized that this place, wonderful as it was, served merely as an entranceway to somewhere else. It led to dimensions where his primitive soul could not venture. The Innocent was an ascended master, and between the lives of her choosing, she rested with her own kind.

Merlin possessed no magic strong enough to find her, but she had taught him enough to complete his task alone. Reaching out with tentacles of thought, he plucked the spirits of eleven men who had served King Arthur—Launcelot and Kay, Gawain and Bedwyr and Dry Lips, Tristan, Agravaine, Geraint, MacDaire, Lugh, Fairhands—and placed them into a vision of Camelot which he constructed on the infinite plains of the Summer Country. When they were in place, he found Galahad, whose shining soul had led him to the Holy Grail in the service of his King.

"You, faithful one, shall protect him in time to come," Merlin said, the words pouring into a silver thread from his spirit. That thread would forever connect Galahad to his King.

He was filled with warmth. A thousand jumbled memories buzzed through him—a boy in the forest, the sword in the stone, the building of Camelot, the marriage to Guenevere... It was Arthur's soul, entering his own. Arthur, who had waited so long to be born, and who would have to wait again.

"Your time will come once more," he said, catching the silver thread emanating from Galahad's spirit as he spoke. "Perhaps then, your light will not shine alone in the darkness."

He bound the King and the pure knight together with the thread so that they would never be parted, not in the life to come, nor the ones after that. "It may take a while. You both have lessons to learn. But Arthur the King will live again, and Galahad shall ride by his side."

"And you?" Arthur asked. "What of you, old friend?"

Merlin felt himself disintegrating. The magic was leaving him. "I cannot chart my own fate, my King. That is for a power greater than mine. But the love I bear you has no end. No end …"

"No end," he spoke into the flickering candle's light.

It was burned nearly to the end. He was back in the cave, his body wrinkled and white with age, but alive.

The task he had set for himself was done. The last task, the Merlin's final service to the King. Now he could die in peace.

The candle guttered and went out. In the darkness, the old man lay down upon his back and closed his eyes.

Then the crystals in the wall began to glow. Through the wall of rock came the form of an animal. It was a she-wolf, its blind eyes filled with light.

"Master," he said, feeling his heart leap. "Have you come to lead me to the Summer Country?"

But you only came back a moment ago. Do you not remember the way?

"You saw me?"

Certainly. I was beside you most of the time.

"I looked for you there."

Yes, but you do not yet know how to see the ethereal things.

"With the perception of the soul."

Indeed. It must he developed. But you've made a good start.

The wolf lay down beside him. Its fur felt warm against his bare skin. "Was I right to do what I did?" he asked, stroking the thick pelt. "To put the knights away on their own plane, to tell Arthur?"

It was the will of the gods that you help them.

"I thought the gods were dead."

Am I dead?

"Well, yes and no... I don't know how to answer that."

Ah
, she said.

"Are you a god?"

You can see for yourself that I am a wolf.

"Then how..." Taliesin sighed. "I never could get you to answer me directly," he grumbled.

The Innocent laughed, her voice as lilting and gay as he remembered.
Sleep
, she said.
I will awaken you when it is time.

"Am I not to die, then?"

Death, life, waking and dreaming, the black in the white… Have you not yet learned that it is all the same?

"Oh, bother with you."

The wolf licked his face.
You have done well, little bard
.

He harrumphed and turned on his side. His eyes brimmed with tears of joy.

He had done well.

Filled with hope, with a heart as light as a child's, he slept.

 

 

 

 

THE LEGACY

"T
hanatos!" the dark magicians
chanted. The ritual was almost complete.

"Help me," Kate moaned, coming to in agony. She raised her arms. They dripped with blood from the wound in her belly. "Oh, God, help me."

The cuts Aubrey had made were deep; the segments of the pentagram his knife had drawn were already shrinking, pulling away from one another.

"Thanatos!"

He held the knife high over her.

"Please kill me," she whispered.

"Yes," he answered, his eyes gleaming. "Yes, my darling. I will." He bent low to kiss her lips. Then with one massive swoop, he thrust the blade into the center of the pentagram and up, deep into her heart.

Kate shuddered once, then was gone.

Taliesin closed his eyes in pity. His tears fell onto the dirt floor, and he had not the strength to wipe them away.

"Thanatos!" the priests boomed. "The power is yours!"

Using the ceremonial knife, Aubrey opened Kate's mouth wide. From it issued a vapor dark as woodsmoke. "Take the spirit of the sacrificed one, O demon gods," he intoned. "Use it to destroy the last of your enemies."

Slowly the magician withdrew the blade and pointed it toward Taliesin. The foul vapor trailed after the knife, then snaked of its own will in a circle around the old man.

Taliesin felt himself choking, strangling on the thickening vine of Kate's tainted spirit. Images of the druid priestesses hanging from Mona's charred oaks spun dizzily in his mind. Kate was one of them now, one of the dead whose souls had been taken by magic, twisted into evil by the magician named Thanatos and his dark gods.

Those gods had won once before, and now, Taliesin knew, they would win again. Arthur would not have a third chance to live out his destiny. Even the Merlin did not have enough magic for that.

But there is Galahad, bound to the King by a silver thread.

The old man looked up, his breath catching.

Galahad.

Hal might still find the boy. Even with Taliesin dead, Hal might yet be able to keep Arthur out of the magician's snare.

"Hal..." he said weakly. He could not focus. The spell Thanatos had produced was growing stronger, the vapor now spinning, sucking the old man's life force into it like a vortex.

"Hal!" he called out with all his strength, but his voice could not be heard above the whirling wind that surrounded him. He tried to clasp his hands to work what energy remained in his body into them, but they would not move.

"I cannot," he whispered in despair. "I cannot do this alone."

You are not alone.

The voice that spoke was clear and loud. Its very sound, if it had even been a sound at all, pushed the whirlwind's core away from Taliesin, leaving him in an eye of calm space.

We are never alone.

In the old man's mind appeared a gossamer thread of silver, shining, stretching like a river from the sprawling city to the rolling hills beyond.

"Come, Hal," he commanded softly. "Come in service to your King."

T
he truck was a
lost cause. With a final kick at the tire, Hal walked into the gathering twilight.

Ten minutes later he heard the sound of marching behind him. It was the knights. Kay, the Master of Drill, counted out time.

"No," Hal said, sweeping the air with his hands. "Absolutely not, guys. From here on in, I'm on my own."

"We serve the King," Launcelot said, running ahead of the others. "All of us, together."

Hal shook his head. "I can't look for Arthur and keep you out of jail at the same time."

Launcelot moved up next to him. "Their behavior was my fault," he said, his eyes haunted. "I was their leader once, but I left them. If you must punish someone, let it be me. Cast me out, and complete the Round Table with another. But do not forsake the others, for they have already given their lives once for their King, and would give them again without hesitation."

"No," Hal said adamantly. "They don't know how to act like civilized people."

"They can learn," Launcelot persisted. "For their sovereign, they would consent even to be slaves." He looked back at the approaching knights. "Take them back, Galahad. They have waited an eternity for you to lead them to Arthur."

"Arthur." Hal exhaled. "Yeah."

"Together you can find him, mayhap more easily than you alone. We have already come so far, nearly to the New York—"

"There are ten million people in New York," Hal said. "How are we going to find him there? Hell, I don't even know if we can get there. The truck's dead, our money's almost gone, we're lost..." He jumped. "What the hell's this?"

From the center of his chest sprouted a thin silver thread that stretched for miles down the road. Hal tried to touch it, but his hand went right through it, as if it were made of light. "Can you see this thing?" he asked.

"Aye. 'Tis a wonder." The thread flickered and dimmed, like a faulty string of Christmas bulbs. "Methinks it is a sign for you to follow. From the Merlin."

Hal nodded slowly. He tried to gauge the distance to the farthest point where he could see its light. "Wherever it's going, it's damn far for twelve guys on foot."

"Twelve?" Launcelot asked. "Not eleven? Then you will have me stay?"

Hal laughed. "It'd take a better man than me to kick Sir Launcelot out of the Round Table."

The knights strolled up to them. "Ho, Galahad!" MacDaire called. "This marching is getting to be thirsty work. I say we set about finding a pub for a taste of grog, to keep off the chill of evening."

Hal gave Launcelot a black look. "If I'm stuck with them, then you are, too." Launcelot smiled as a motorcyclist on a fat Harley zoomed past.

"Did you see that?" Bedwyr asked in astonishment.

"I'll eat my balls, it's a headless horse," Kay said.

The motorcyclist made a right turn just beyond them. His rear lights flashed, then went out. In the silence, Hal could hear party sounds.

He jogged ahead. In a copse just off the road were parked a dozen motorcycles.
Thank you, God
, he thought, although he realized that getting these people to part with their hogs would not be easy.

The cyclist who had just pulled in was popping open a can of beer. He wore a sleeveless denim vest with a patch on the back reading
no fear
in lightning bolt lettering. On his head was a World War I German officer's parade helmet with a pointed spike on top. Nearby, fiddling with a boombox that poured out heavy metal music, was a woman with chalk-white hair arranged into eighteen-inch projectiles around her head. She wore a pair of skin-tight jeans and a bikini top. Above her ample breasts was tattooed the legend
hot mama.

The others in the group were equally unorthodox in appearance. One man sported a bushy, grizzled beard that reached to the middle of his chest and ended in two points over his nipples. Another had a bright red tattoo of a tongue running the entire length of his back.

A woman with pendulous armpit hair and a ring through her nose pointed at Hal with a cigarette. "What-cha looking at, Slick?"

Hal moved forward uncertainly. "Well, I know this is going to sound like an odd request, but..."

"In the name of the King, we are requisitioning your headless horses!" Launcelot boomed.

The woman made a face. "Come again?"

"What about the king?" a red-eyed man in chaps asked. "Somebody seen Elvis?"

The other knights walked quietly into the copse behind Launcelot, gazing with awe at the colorful assemblage. "What do they want?" the man in the pointy helmet growled.

"Something about the headless horseman. Hey!" She waved a green fingernail at Bedwyr, who was looking over the dials on one of the motorcycles. "Spike don't like anybody screwing with his Harley."

"Somebody messing with my machine?" Spike roused himself enough to turn his head toward the newcomers. He threw an empty beer can at Bedwyr. "Yo, numbnuts."

Kay strode up to him. "And who be ye calling my young brother numbnuts, thou peckerless fiend?"

Spike winced. Then slowly, deliberately, he stood up to face Kay. The two men were built exactly alike.

"Wait a minute," Hal said. "We don't want any trouble, okay?"

"Then maybe you shouldn't have crashed our party," Spike said, twisting a steel chain around his knuckles.

"Yeah," chirped the platinum blonde. "What do youse want, anyway?"

''Well, actually, we came to see if we could, um... borrow your motorcycles."

The man in chaps laughed so hard he sprayed beer all over himself. The blonde popped her gum, smiling.

"Why, sure," Spike said. "We're neighborly folks." With that, he smashed his chain-covered fist into Kay's face.

Kay went down momentarily, then got up grinning through the blood that flowed from his nose. "Ah, I thought you had not the look of a truthteller about you," he said before smashing his knee into Spike's groin.

"Here we go," Hal said flatly.

The man with a tongue tattooed on his back came at him with a tire iron.

"Launcelot spoke with us," Agravaine said somberly into Hal's ear. "Would it be considered ill-disciplined if we fought with you, Galahad?"

"By all means, be my guest," Hal said, ducking out of the way of the tire iron. He chopped his assailant at the knees while Agravaine knocked out one of the man's teeth with his hook.

"Well, what are the rest of you waiting for?" Hal shouted, shaking the pain out of his knuckles.

With a ululating battle cry, the knights threw themselves on the charging motorcyclists. For a full ten minutes the forest copse rang with curses, groans, and the thud of flesh pounding flesh. A tree was felled by the weight of Dry Lips' flying body crashing into it, and Gawaine lost a fistful of hair to a dagger; but otherwise, the Companions took the day. While the cyclists lay sprawled on the grass, Hal gave a crash course on motorcycle riding.

"This is the key," he said, turning it in the ignition. "Make sure it's on. Then you squeeze the clutch with your left hand while you shift gears with your left foot." He demonstrated. The Harley purred. "To go faster, turn the throttle—right hand." The motor revved. The knights listened appreciatively. "The right foot's for the brake. The brake makes you stop, got it? That's very important."

"Right foot, brake," Bedwyr said. "Makes you stop." The knights nodded.

Hal looked nervously over at the heap of unconscious men. No one had been seriously wounded, so it would just be a matter of time before they came around. With their vehicles stolen, they weren't going to be happy when they did.

"Okay, Bedwyr, give this one a try."

"Left hand, clutch," Bedwyr said intently. "Left foot, gear. Right hand, throttle." He wobbled off slowly down the lane.

"Shift up to second gear!" Hal shouted. Bedwyr's motorcycle responded with a satisfying roar.

"Ah, that one's the master of horse, and no mistake," Fairhands said.

"The rest of you are going to have to learn this, too. Where's Lugh?"

An obscene laugh came from the direction of the campsite. Lugh was stepping over the bodies toward them. Over his shoulder was slung the woman with the octopus-shaped hair. Spike's pointy helmet was perched on his head.

"Put her down," Hal said irritably.

"But she's the spoils of war," MacDaire objected. Leaning closer in, he added, "The other one's too much of a dog, even for Lugh."

"This isn't a war, and we're not taking prisoners." Hal pulled the woman down. She popped her gum in his face. "When your friends come to, tell them we're going to bring the bikes back."

"Sure," she said. She winked at Lugh.

"Okay, guys, mount. Just remember that—" He was interrupted by a scream as Bedwyr flew over the front handlebars of the Harley. "—the brake makes you stop."

He stuck a helmet on his head and mounted another bike. "I'll meet you at the end of the road," he said, and peeled away.

While he waited for the others to accustom themselves to their new steeds, he tried to follow the silver thread that mapped out his route like a string in a maze. In the darkness of the moonless night, the thread was at times very pronounced, and sometimes barely visible. A sign from the Merlin.

"Hold tight, old man," he whispered as the knights came rumbling up behind him. "We're coming."

At a signal from Hal, all twelve of them laid rubber onto the two-lane highway.