The Third Magic (31 page)

Merlin looked abashed. "No, of course not. It's just that the chiefs..."

"The chiefs are like children, Merlin. Foolish, unruly children who have to be kept entertained and distracted every moment, or they'll get into mischief." Arthur coughed. "If they don't have a foreign enemy to fight, they'll fight each other."

Merlin tried to smile at the King's fractiousness, but he was worried. Arthur's cough had become chronic. In recent months, he had complained of pain in his gums, which were red and swollen with infection. His stomach bothered him whenever he ate. As a result, he had grown gaunt and gray-faced, and his once glossy hair that had glinted red in the sun now hung, dull and thinning, around his shoulders.

He was thirty-six years old.

And alone. He had sent Guenevere away, in accordance with the wishes of the petty kings, who insisted that he take another wife in order to beget an heir.

When informed of her rejection and approaching exile, the queen had said nothing. She had not spoken a single word of recrimination or outrage against Arthur or the petty kings.

Arthur felt as if he were tearing out his own heart.

THE THREE GIFTS

S
he was barren, the
Merlin had argued. There was nothing else to be done, despite what the peasants thought.

The problem revolved around her name; or rather, her namesake,
Gwenhwyfar,
the ancient Welsh goddess of the sea. It was said that no King could rule a nation of islands without her by his side. To the common people, sending a queen—particularly one who bore the name of one of the most powerful goddesses in creation—into exile among the wicked Christians was an act of despicable folly.

Of course the crops would be affected, and the catch of fish, and the very weather! Of course the Wheat King would grow sick and die! Arthur Pendragon was the best of the best, but he was still a mortal. Only the Goddess could help him, She who had given him the cup of immortality and the sword of invincibility. Without her, even the great gifts of the ancient gods would not help. Did these modern men know nothing?

But no one consulted the peasants. To the petty kings it was all quite clear. For an ordinary man, a wife who could not bear children was a burden; but for a High King, such a woman was a danger. Because of Guenevere, Arthur had no successor. That in itself virtually assured the Kingdom of large-scale civil war after the High King's death.

It had only made sense, the Merlin reasoned now, watching warily as Arthur spat blood onto a cloth.

There were already a hundred legends about the boy who had pulled the fabled sword of Macsen from the stone. Arthur had been meant to be King from the moment of his birth. He had conquered the Saxons, and had brought the first peace in a thousand years to a free Britain. With Arthur, the improvements advanced by the Romans could be duplicated, or even bettered. The great King would wrest Britain from the darkness and bring her, shining as a jewel, into the light.

Such a man needed an heir. A dynasty must be established. Even Guenevere's father, King Leodegranz, understood that. His daughter had been required to do only one thing, produce a son, and she had been given eighteen years to do so. Eighteen years of marriage, with only one pitiful miscarriage to show for it. No other King would have waited so long or given the woman so many chances.

In the end, the chiefs had insisted that Arthur put her aside.

Leodegranz announced publicly that he would not wage war on the King or on any of the chiefs as a result of this decision, or even reclaim the land given as Guenevere's dowry. Compared with such weighty matters as the succession of the High King, he agreed, a wife was nothing.

All Leodegranz requested as compensation was that the seat of the High King always remain at Camelot. The chiefs acquiesced at once. Of course Leo should remain close to the seat of power, they agreed. After all, he'd no idea that his daughter would prove to be a useless mate for the King.

Besides, they knew, all the rules would change once Arthur chose a new queen.

The chiefs were in a state of high excitement, despite the failed crops. After all, the weather was bound to improve, and when it did, the first great crop would be attributed to the new queen. Already some of the petty kings were putting about talk that Guenevere's barrenness had brought barrenness to the land. The peasants were superstitious; they would believe that, and it would keep them from putting too much pressure on their tribal chiefs.

As long as they can blame the woman, they won't blame Arthur, Merlin thought. The only problem was Arthur himself. He did not seem to grasp that he was walking on thin ice with the chiefs, that he should be grateful to them for their continued loyalty after nearly two decades without a successor to the throne. These were warrior-kings; sooner or later, one of them—and Merlin could guess who among them would be the first—would make a move to seize the High King's crown for himself.

They all had sons. Sons and grandsons and nephews, literal armies of men who would stand shoulder to shoulder with them in battle. All except Arthur. Arthur had only the Knights of the Round Table, most of whom were unmarried, and a growing number approaching old age. And the King was even turning his back on them, it seemed.

How could the loss of a barren wife affect him so?

T
he chiefs had demanded
that Arthur wash his hands of Guenevere and take another wife to his bed.

Well, he had complied with the first demand, Arthur thought bitterly. Now Merlin had come mewling again about the second, as if the High King of Britain were some sort of stud horse in high rut.

He had never been unfaithful to Guenevere. It had not been a boast of his, surely; men did not put great stock in fidelity to women. And with the business of Morgause's son, Mordred... well, half the Kingdom was convinced that the whelp really was his, and it would do no good to go on objecting.

He had refused to recognize the boy as his son. That was all he could do. Even the High King did not have the power to still the wagging tongues of gossips. What had shocked him was that some of the chiefs had even suggested that he should claim Mordred, just so he would have an heir.

Imagine, Morgause's son as his heir! The petty kings would stoop to anything, it seemed.

He was lonely, lonelier than he had ever been in his life. His one consolation was that Guenevere might not find life in the abbey where he had sent her to be too difficult, since she was such a devout follower of Christianity.

But it did not alleviate his loneliness, or his guilt at sending away a wife who had done no harm. Oh, there were the rumors of Guenevere's adultery with Launcelot. Rumors... and perhaps not rumors.

He would never admit to the chieftains that he had harbored suspicions of the queen's faithlessness, of course: To their accusations he railed and raged, and strongly suggested that the evil-minded among them would be justly dismissed from the High King's company; but secretly, silently, almost guiltily, he wondered if they were right.

The legends already springing up about him claimed that the Goddess had given him two gifts, the Holy Grail of Christ, and Excalibur, the great sword of Macsen. The one had allowed him to achieve immortality, and the other, invincibility.

But in truth he had also been given a third gift, perhaps the most precious of all. In the Goddess's wisdom, She had bestowed upon him the gift of love. Guenevere was that most wondrous of wives—a woman who was both friend and lover, easy to be with yet exciting, sensible but fascinating. What had passed between them from the first had been not only a passion, although that had been a part of it, but something deeper as well, a current of knowing, a recognition that the two of them had been meant to be together from the beginning, and perhaps before the beginning.

Yet he had spent almost no time with her. Indeed, during the early years, their nights of intimacy had been so few in number that neither of them even thought that the reason for their childlessness might be physical.

The worst of it was that it had never been his choice to neglect her. He had thought of it as a sacrifice, a sacrifice of his time, so that he might attend to more pressing matters. How ironic, then, that after all these years, the most pressing matter in the Kingdom appeared to be the lack of issue from their union!

Had she given herself to Launcelot? Could he blame her if she had?

In the end, he had sacrificed two of his three gifts. The first, the cup, he had relinquished willingly. Arthur had no wish to live forever, because to do so would diminish the precious time he had. The other was the love, which he had not considered precious enough to fight for. In every choice between the throne and the woman, he had chosen the throne.

That was, after all, what kings did. It had been the only choice possible.

And because of his choice, he had never had to give up the third gift. The sword had always been his. The sword, Excalibur the Voracious, and all the death it brought, was all that remained.

"D
o you think we
live more than once, Merlin?" the King asked suddenly.

The old man looked up with a start. Arthur suspected that the Merlin had dozed off. "I beg your pardon? Live... Oh. Oh, yes. At least that's what I was taught among the druids. I don't have any personal recollections of living before now, of course." He made an attempt at a laugh. "Why, Arthur? Are you thinking about coming back?"

Arthur smiled. "I was thinking about Guenevere," he said quietly. "We didn't really… Oh, I don't know,
succeed
might be the right word. I never wanted another woman in my life, and yet..." He shrugged miserably.

"That's only because she was barren," the Merlin said quickly, then instantly regretted it. "I meant that the queen—"

"It was more than that."

The old man looked abashed. "I'm sure it was."

"If I hadn't been King, things may have been different."

"No doubt," Merlin said. "But you are King."

"Yes," Arthur said abstractedly. He wondered if Guenevere's initial desire for him had ever blossomed into total abandon. She had always been beautiful, to be sure, lovely and accommodating. But there had also been something else in her manner, a certain pagan wildness that Arthur had perceived and even loved, but had never been able to tap. It was as if Guenevere were as constricted by their royalty as he was.

Had Launcelot known that wildness, touched the inner heart of the girl named for the Welsh goddess to whom the commoners still made secret sacrifice before sowing their fields? Had he tasted the salt of her armpits, felt the smooth, hard longing of her tongue between his legs?

The King's glass fell out of his hands and crashed onto the stone floor.

"Majesty!" the Merlin said, rushing to summon a servant.

Arthur waved him away. "It's nothing," he said irritably. His voice was hoarse.

I
n the early days
of their marriage, Guenevere had hosted elaborate festivals at Beltane and Samhain, the biggest holidays in the Old Religion, at which time the miracles of birth and death were celebrated. For weeks before the feast of Beltane at the beginning of May, the peasant women would gather bunches of herbs and wildflowers and then bury them in the earth with a wish for the beautiful young queen to conceive a child. And at Samhain, when the spirits of the dead were summoned on the coming winter winds, those same women asked their departed ancestors to release the soul of the queen's babe so that it might at last be born.

But Guenevere never bore a child to the King, and in time the festivals stopped. The queen had become a Christian, the villagers heard. She had been converted by the handsome foreign knight named Launcelot.

And from then on, Arthur remembered, she had slowly withdrawn.

It had been nothing notable or obtrusive—just a bit less disappointment when Arthur had to leave, not quite as much effort to converse with him when he returned. She had always been willing to accept his lovemaking, of course, although that, too, changed with time. Along with her Christianity, Guenevere developed a sort of prudishness about her body. And once, when pressed, she had admitted to feeling shame at indulging in physical congress when it was unlikely to produce an heir.

Arthur had been furious with that, so furious that he'd thrown on his clothes and ridden to his hunting lodge, where he remained for the rest of the night. Now he wondered if he had been angry with her for her lack of enthusiasm, or for her words that so echoed the sentiments of the petty kings.

Or perhaps it was because he had known even then, in some inner, hidden way, about Launcelot.

The queen's champion left Camelot shortly after Guenevere's retirement to the abbey. He traveled to a wild place, to the northern lands of the Picts, or so the stories told, where he had lived as a hermit for the remainder of his life. A life that had ended in that most undesirable of Christian states, suicide.

Suicide! Arthur shifted his aching, thinly fleshed bones in the hard chair. It was as if Launcelot were consciously turning his back on his faith. Or else ejecting himself from it in shame.

The two of them had felt so much shame!

Yes, the queen and her champion must have loved each other, Arthur decided. And though it hurt him, he could feel no real bitterness toward Guenevere for it. After all, he had had his chance with her, and thrown it away. If, after a lifetime of disappointment and neglect, she had managed to find some small share of happiness with another man, then he would not begrudge her that.

But neither he nor Launcelot had ever touched the real Guenevere, the goddess from the sea. And she had withered away in the waiting.

The King wiped his eyes. Was he weeping, or only sick? He could no longer discern the difference.

THE BROKEN SWORD

"D
o you see, little
bard?"

With a pained expression, Taliesin looked around at the bland clouds surrounding him. He had been immersed in the agonies of the King in his castle. On his lap the Amazonian infant spoke animatedly. "How they all suffered and struggled, the High King whose sense of duty had cost him everything, the banished queen, driven by guilt to become a desiccated shell..."

"And the evil magician who orchestrated everyone's downfall," Taliesin said flatly. "I say, you're not going to wet on me or anything like that, are you?"

"That depends on how annoyed I become with you." Laughing heartily, the baby grabbed his long beard. "Actually, you don't come off half bad. You were only following your reason."

He felt himself warming to her, despite himself.

"That's the point, you see. You were all three following scripts that you'd written for yourselves. Guenevere could have run off with Launcelot and become his puritanical mistress. Or she could have embraced paganism entirely, and made herself into the wild woman of the wood."

"The queen?" Taliesin asked, incredulous.

"Well, I know that seems odd, but only because she didn't make those choices. All the great queens after her were influenced by her reticence and powerlessness."

"Hmmph," the old man said. "And the King?"

"Good heavens, the King might have done all manner of things. He could have kept Guenevere, and told the chiefs to go hang themselves."

"But he wouldn't have been a good King if he'd done that!"

"What difference would it have made? The Saxons would have invaded again, anyway, and eventually conquered Britain, as they did."

"He was obligated to please the chiefs," Taliesin explained. "That was his unspoken pact with them."

"Which sealed his doom right from the beginning," the baby said. "Actually, the only really good idea he had during those dreadful days was to talk with the Saxons."

"How can you say that?" Taliesin answered, his body twitching defensively. "The Saxons couldn't have been stopped at that stage. Perhaps earlier—"

"I didn't say the idea was effective. I said it was good. It was good because it was outside the King-mold he had forced himself to conform to in every other area of his life. He was creating a new destiny for himself."

"Hell's bells, Innocent, that's what got him killed! Because he couldn't get the petty kings to support him, he ended up on the losing end of a civil war! Don't you see, that was what went wrong! That was what should never have happened!"

"But it did," she said, waving her fat little arms in the air. "It happened because he wanted it to." She squirmed. "How uncomfortable your bony knees are becoming!"

The Innocent vanished from his lap and reappeared a moment later as an elderly blind woman seated demurely beside him. She was dressed in finely woven white silk, with a diadem of clear stones in her wispy white hair.

"Oh," Taliesin said. "You're lovely."

"Thank you," she answered with an ethereal nod of her head. In the next instant she was standing in front of him, dressed in a filthy gown and corset, her hair streaming long and wild behind her. She was wearing an eye patch and scratched her belly with gusto. "Do you see, you motherless blighter?" she roared. "Do you see we can do anything we want?"

"Good gods," the old man said, his nostrils flaring. "You smell abominable."

"Arrgh," she roared.

"Innocent, please..."

"But we don't!" she shouted, hitting her chest and belching. "We almost never do what we want, because we're afraid that what happened to Arthur will happen to us, that we'll be thrust out of the great scheme of destiny and go floating about—"

"Innocent, I must protest in the strongest terms—"

"Shut your flap, arsewipe, and show me your ball."

Taliesin's mouth formed an outraged O. "I say, I have never—" The glass globe struck him in the head. Moaning, he staggered backward. "Why, you horrid old beast!"

"Back at ya." She farted. "Take another look, matey, and tell me if I'm not right."

"I
need to speak
with the Saxon king," Arthur announced.

The Merlin whirled around to face him. "What? Surely you're not going to try for a treaty again. Not after what happened to the forest settlers."

"That's why I have to do it. They're angry, and justified in their anger. Even now the Saxons are massing along their shores, with dozens of good ships at the ready. We'll have another invasion before long."

"Then call the chiefs—"

"For another round of battles," Arthur said flatly.

"By Mithras, yes!" The old man moved toward him with a speed he had not exhibited in months. "Don't you see, this could be your chance to consolidate your power among the petty kings. Unite them once more against a familiar enemy—"

"And meanwhile marry the daughter of the strongest among them—"

"The strongest is Lot, of course, but—"

"To save my reign at the expense of all Britain."

"Actually, Cornwall has a daughter… What?" Merlin frowned at the King, puzzled. "What are you talking about?"

"How much longer do you think we can keep the Saxons at bay?"

"Why, indefinitely, I should think. They haven't attacked us for nearly ten years."

"That was before the slaughter of the forest Saxons."

The Merlin was silent.

"So. Ten years, then? Is that what we'll get if we trounce them again? And that's a big
if
, Merlin. You see, while we've been using up men and weapons killing unarmed men hiding in the forests, the warriors of Saxony have been busy training and building ships. They may win this time."

The old man sputtered. "Pfft... Saxons defeat Britain! Sometimes you talk like a madman, Arthur."

"Really? I don't find the possibility at all mad. There are more of them, they've got more weapons, and since we haven't been willing to consider any alternative to all-out warfare, we're virtually inviting them to invade us." He shrugged. "If I were the Saxon king under those circumstances, I'd attack, too."

Merlin crossed his arms over his chest. "I suppose you're going to tell that to the chiefs."

"Why not?"

"Because they'll turn against you!" the old man shouted. "You said it yourself, Arthur—the Celts are a fighting people—"

"They've got to stop fighting," Arthur said quietly. "If we are ever to establish ourselves as a nation—as a civilization—we have to look beyond the costly thrill of bloodshed and toward a lasting peace."

"Yes, yes." Merlin tried not to sound exasperated at the King's adolescent idealism. "Those are fine sentiments, and I agree with them. But your problem right now is not to achieve a lasting peace with the Saxons. Your problem is to keep the petty kings in line."

"So that I can go on being High King?" Arthur said stridently. "Is that all it's about?"

"Yes, yes, it is!" The Merlin's eyes blazed. "Because you are Britain, Arthur. Don't you understand? If you aren't King, someone else will be. Why, already Mordred is courting the chiefs. And some of them are taking him seriously."

"That's Lot's doing," Arthur said dismissively.

"Of course it is. And the chiefs know it. Lot's power and wealth, behind a legitimate male heir—"

"Mordred is not legitimate!" the King railed. "There is not even a possibility that he can be my son!"

"His mother says otherwise."

“To gain the crown for him!"

Merlin held out his hands in a calming gesture. "A King is what the chiefs need," he said softly. "That is all I am saying. A King who can provide an heir—"

At that, Arthur stood up and walked out of the room.

A
rthur called upon the
petty kings to meet outdoors, so that they would see him mounted upon a stallion, rather than sitting like an invalid in a too-warm room. But the day was wet and dark, and his voice barely carried in the cold drizzle. He began to shiver with fever even before he finished his speech.

"And so," he said, trying to stifle the cough that threatened to wrack his chest with pain, "you must see that the only way to a lasting peace is through treaties of trade and homesteading—"

"Am I also to let the bastards tup my daughter?" shouted the king of Cornwall.

"And your wife as well," someone else chimed in.

Lot of Rheged stepped forward. The crowd parted deferentially to let him pass. Always a threat to the other chiefs, Lot had been kept in line solely through the laws created and enforced by King Arthur, which ensured equality among them all. But after his invasion of Dumnonia and subsequent marriage to Morgause, who still effectively controlled Orkney, Lot's power slowly swelled. It had all been perfectly legal. Much of it, in fact, was purely psychological: Lot was a strong man who would be a fearsome adversary. But the result was the same. Any balance that may have once existed among the petty kings had been destroyed long ago.

It left the chiefs with a difficult choice: to remain faithful to a weakened, childless King in ill health, or to side with Lot, who would surely wipe them all out, one by one, to rule Britain as a tyrant.

"With respect to my High King, Sire," Lot snapped, "and to the oath of loyalty I have taken as one of ten kings, to defend my country against all who would harm her…" He paused and looked around, lest anyone miss the intention of his words. "I swear by all that is holy that I shall not suffer a Saxon invasion upon Britain's shores without a fight!"

The petty chiefs hesitated for only the briefest moment, then cheered in support.

"We'll not have the blood of Saxon dogs running through the veins of our families!" someone chimed in.

"The only Saxon blood on my land will be what's spilled in battle!"

"And good riddance to them!" Lot finished.

More cheers.

Arthur put up his hands for silence, but he had already lost his audience. Inadvertently, today's meeting had made the chiefs' choice easier. Arthur had not only grown weak himself, many of them felt, but was actually willing to give the country over to the Saxons. Lot, on the other hand, had begun to make it clear that he would not claim the crown for himself, as the chiefs had once feared, or even give it to one of his own sons. Rather, his petition was for Mordred, a young man whom his own mother—Lot's new wife—proclaimed to be the bastard son of the High King himself.

Mordred was, it seemed, the perfect compromise between the great but failing Arthur and the powerful, ambitious Lot.

He appeared now, as if on cue, riding a magnificent black stallion, and came to a halt a short distance away from the crowd. In the chill October air, the horse stamped impatiently, steam rising from its flared nostrils. Its rider, too, dark and close-faced, was a picture of restrained strength. The contrast between the two men was stunning: The chiefs looked from the battle-ready young man seated high on his virile mount to the sickened, gray-faced King shivering beneath a cloak that looked too heavy for his shoulders to support.

Almost imperceptibly, the group shuffled away from Arthur to assemble loosely around Mordred.

Lot did not make a move to stand beside him. He did not have to.

Far away, it seemed, isolated and alone, the King doubled over in a paroxysm of coughing.

Lot cocked his head, like a vulture observing a lion in its death throes.
Take your time,
his eyes seemed to say.
I
can wait. I can wait.

E
ven Arthur's own men
were embarrassed.

By the time the King dismissed the meeting, almost no one was even listening. Only the Knights of the Round Table were still gathered about him.

"It was a failure," he said quietly to Merlin. The shame and despair in his heart felt like an actual, physical weight in his chest.

"Of course it was!" the old man rasped. He wanted to add that the debacle on the moor could not have been more damaging if Lot had planned it himself, but he restrained himself from rubbing salt into Arthur's wound. "The idea of getting the chiefs to consider peaceful negotiation with a longstanding enemy was perhaps too bold," he said diplomatically.

"No." Arthur shook his head. "That's not it. A year ago I could have commanded them. It was I who lost them— myself, my bearing, my health... my weakness. They smelled it, and turned away from me as if I were offal."

Merlin looked down at his hands helplessly. As usual, the King had perceived the situation perfectly. The man who had once been the nation's savior, the King who would reign forever, had become, in the eyes of his subordinates, a useless fool.

"Who will make the first move against me?" he asked quietly.

The old man sniffed. "It's too early to think that way. For Mithras's sake, Arthur, you can still turn this around. Marry Cornwall's daughter—"

"It will be Lot," Arthur said flatly, as if Merlin hadn't spoken. "Lot, with Mordred as a figurehead. He'll need Mordred at first, because of the boy's claim to be my heir. But unless Mordred so endears himself to the other chiefs that his position becomes unassailable, Lot will be rid of him before long."

"Then ally with Lot," Merlin urged. "Bring him to our side. Neutralize Mordred."

The King laughed mirthlessly. "All that, just by marrying? My, my, wizard, for a pagan, you apparently set great store by the institution of wedlock."

The old man could no longer contain himself. "No, marriage might not accomplish all that without any additional effort," he said slowly, "but it may mitigate some of the damage you've done by proposing to bring Saxons back to Britain and insisting that the chiefs live cheek by jowl alongside them!"

"I've told you, we have to move beyond those days of constant war. The chiefs must learn that peace—"

"Yes, yes," the Merlin said impatiently. "They must. And they will, under a wise ruler who will first ensure their safety by begetting a son to take his place!" He finished with a roar, then brought himself under control. "Under the circumstances, Arthur," could you not at least consider marriage? It doesn't seem like such an onerous task, in exchange for saving your crown, your dynasty, your future, your country, perhaps your very life—"