The Third Magic (32 page)

"Is my life so important?" the King asked quietly. "For what am I known? For driving the Saxons out of Britain, preparing the stage for a full and permanent invasion by a greater power. In the end, my legacy will have been that of a shortsighted warlord who sacrificed the future of his country for a momentary victory." He shook his head bitterly. "No, wizard. It is better that I leave behind none of my blood."

Merlin's anger was such that he could barely breathe. "If that's how you feel, then you might as well give the throne over to Lot now and be done with it—"

At that moment, the young knight named Perceval entered the room. Seeing Merlin's furious countenance, he stepped back a pace.

The old man threw up his arms in exasperation. "What do you want?" he shouted. The young man's cheeks blazed.

"I sent for him," Arthur said. He looked pointedly at the Merlin. "Do you mind? The last time I checked, this was my residence."

The wizard sighed. "Forgive me," he said for the benefit of the knight. Inwardly, he wished he could push the fellow back out the door so that he could hammer some sense into Arthur's head.

"Perceval, come here," the King commanded.

As the young knight approached, Arthur opened a wooden casket inside which lay a single, shining object: the sword Excalibur.

He lifted it gently from its silk casing. The light from the candles in the ceiling wheel danced in its silvery depths. The jewels in its hilt shone.

"Macsen's sword," he said with a faint smile.

The old man watched him as he held the sword to the light. Even now, sick and middle-aged, there were times when Arthur still looked like a boy. It was the clarity of his eyes, perhaps, a completely unselfconscious directness that lent his face an air of youthful ingenuousness. Merlin's heart broke, remembering the thoughtful, sensitive boy who had never possessed the ruthlessness of a Celtic tribal chief.

And yet he had been chosen by the ancient gods to rule.

That boy. This self-doubting King, crushed and dying.

But there was still Excalibur. The sword Arthur held was his badge of office more than any crown. It was the proof of his having been chosen by the Gods themselves. Macsen's sword was what made Arthur the King, the true King, the once and future, Forever King.

He handed the sword to Perceval. "I want you to cast this into the lake," he said.

The young knight's face registered such shock that it seemed he would faint on the spot.

With a low moan, the Merlin sank into a chair, his knuckles white and trembling on its arms.

Perceval looked to him, and then to the King. "My Lord—"

"Do as I say. If I am killed, I will not leave the sword for Lot of Rheged—or any of the attacking Saxons—to take. I owe old Macsen that much."

"And if you are not killed?" the Merlin asked hoarsely.

Arthur ignored him. "Take it," he said gently, pressing Excalibur into Perceval's hands. "Make sure it is sunk in the deepest part of the lake. And tell no one. Swear it."

"I... I will tell no one, my Lord. I swear it."

The King nodded once, dismissing him. The knight's gaze, as stricken and helpless as that of an animal caught in a trap, flickered toward the Merlin in search of some other, better counsel.

But for once, the old man had no idea what to do. He closed his eyes and his shoulders moved slightly, as if too weary even to shrug in resignation.

The young man swallowed once, then backed out of the room.

"He's a good young knight," Arthur said conversationally after a moment. "Reminds me of Galahad, even down to the dubious parentage. For all I know, Launcelot may have sired him, as well. Funny, for such a devout Christian, Lance seems to have found his way into all sorts of forbidden beds."

The Merlin looked out the slitted window at the waning moon.
Was that why
, he wondered, feeling leaden in the pit of his stomach. Was Gueneveres's petty trifling with some hot-lipped soldier the reason why Arthur was throwing away the sword of the gods as if it were garbage? Was this man, this man who was to have been the greatest ruler in history, really so weak as that?

"Galahad was a fine knight, though. As good a fighter as his father, and loyal beyond question. Why, do you remember—"

"Excuse me," the Merlin said. "I find I am very tired. Perhaps we might continue our discussion at another time."

"Of course," Arthur answered.

The old man hadn't moved from his seat. His knotty fingers still clutched the chair arms like the talons of a vulture. For what may have been the first time in all his long life, he finally looked his age, and more. His eyes were rheumy, his lips cracked and dry, his skin ashen.

Arthur was silent as the wizard slowly rose and then moved with difficulty toward the door.

"Merlin..." he said hesitantly, as if he were about to share a secret.

The old man held up a waxy hand. Whatever the King wanted to say now, it was too late.

Too late for everything.

"Good night, Majesty," the Merlin said.

He walked out of the chamber and out of the castle. For a long lime he ambled aimlessly in the darkness, numb to the cold and wind of the night. At last he found a cave, one of many carved into the side of the hills at the base of the great Tor, and entered it.

Inside, the smell of moss and bat droppings was strong, and the chill dampness oppressive. On the druids' island where he had been trained, such a cave would have been used as a test of his firestarting abilities. In his first year there, he had been able to create a blaze from nothing but two stones and some leaves.

But he made no fire now. Feeling his way through the blackness, he found a wall of rock, sat down on the cold earth with his back against it, and wept.

THUNDER

A
rthur Blessing sat in
the room that had been assigned to him, staring out the window at the darkening night. Emily lived in a small house down the same street. He could see its red door illuminated by the streetlamp outside. She had called—nearly everyone in the world, it seemed, had called— but he hadn't wanted to talk just yet.

The knights understood. They allowed him the privacy of his room, knowing, perhaps, that privacy would be a rare luxury for him in the future.

He looked at his hands. What had they done, he asked himself. How had they acquired the power to take the scars from Emily's face and heal Hal's wound?

No, no,
another part of him answered.
It wasn't me. It was the cup.
What he had felt was the cup, its vibrance coming up through his hands, power surging through his hands...

He ran his fingers through his hair. Had it been the cup? Had the accident on the road been only that, an accident filled with coincidence? Or was he becoming something he had never guessed at, something different, not quite human, perhaps, something...
other.
..

And, too, there was the girl in the crowd, the one he had recognized not only from his memories of Guenevere, but also from the inexplicable visions of an ancient priestess named Brigid. She had said her name was Gwen, and she had known him, just as he had known her.

The moon shone dimly through thickening clouds. He felt sick. This burden of unwelcome gifts felt nauseatingly, dangerously familiar. The memory of it danced around the outskirts of his consciousness. He knew that this gift, like that other, would destroy him. But first, which was so much worse, it would destroy his dreams. It had before.

T
he King had thought
that discarding Excalibur would save him from his destiny. He had no wish to be known as a warrior who led his people into battle against an unbeatable foe, the Celtic King who had brought about the extinction of the Celts.

He did everything he could to get the tribal chiefs to listen to reason, but they were as voracious as Excalibur. They hungered for blood, even if it was their own, spilled in battle.

When they learned of what Arthur had done with the sword, they despised him. This was not the same King who had led them bravely into battle against the Saxons, they said among their clans, but a weakling who would go begging to his enemies with nothing in his scabbard but talk.

Before long, even the speculation about a royal marriage ceased. It was no longer important that this coward King bear a son.

Mordred began to travel. He visited each of the petty kings, making promises, sealing alliances, assuring them that he would not permit Lot's power to grow unbounded should he, Mordred, come to rule.

The Saxons, meanwhile, aware and amused at Britain's self-destructive unraveling, sat back and waited. The inevitable civil war among the Celts would decimate their number so much that in a year or two, the army of Saxony would be able to take the entire island without losing a thousand men.

Merlin went into seclusion. He was no longer needed.

And then the final stone dropped into the glass, causing it to overflow: Lot of Rheged died, suddenly and with a black tongue.

Mordred, his heir, now ruler of Rheged, Orkney, and part of Dumnonia, was solidly in power. Urged by his mother, he called the petty kings to arms and challenged the High King's forces to face them in combat on the field behind a village known as Camlan.

It was the thirty-eighth year of Arthur's life. On the night before the battle, he received a message from the abbey where Guenevere had taken the veil.

It read:

Please come tonight.

Guenevere

 

Nuns were not required to confess the contents of their dreams. Nevertheless, Guenevere was so bothered by hers that at times she believed she would burst.

Some of them, understandably, were of Launcelot, naked beside her on the grass while Arthur looked on brokenhearted. These had occurred from the beginning of her stay in the abbey, and had brought on such guilt and shame that she had felt compelled to flog herself for the remainder of the night afterward.

Each nun kept as one of her few possessions a small flail used to flagellate herself as discipline against thoughts of the flesh. Guenevere still had the Launcelot dreams, but no longer minded them. She viewed them, rather, as an opportunity for penance. Whenever Guenevere used the flail as an antidote for her memories of lust, she felt, in her pain and humiliation, that her great sin was being in some measure expiated.

But it was another dream that worried her now, a dream that had come to her now and again since childhood, but which had increased markedly in frequency over the past few years. It occurred with such frequency now, in fact, that she feared sleeping, and kept herself awake long after Compline, reciting prayers until her legs grew numb from kneeling upon the cold stone floor and her hands shook with fatigue. But then in time she would invariably collapse into sleep—usually on the floor—and she would be caught up in it again, feeling the old woman's voice rasping out of her own throat:

"Will you choose the sword or the woman?"

It was not even a particularly terrifying dream, except for the fact that she knew the answer: Arthur had chosen the sword. One look around at her surroundings verified that.

No, Arthur,
she moaned as she drifted, bodiless, beside him. She was not Guenevere, but someone else, a priestess who had loved Arthur when he was not yet Arthur Pendragon, but another version of Arthur, as she was a version of herself. They were both dream-people, dreams of visions of imaginings, unreal beings whom Guenevere remembered only while she slept, and with such deep sorrow.

Throw away the sword!
Guenevere's ghost-self called to him. Throw it away and find your life again....

But the only sound made by her warnings was the soughing of the wind scented with the stench of spilled blood.

Throw away the sword.
....

In the dream, that had become impossible. The sword Arthur carried would follow him through death and into another existence. It was the Goddess's ironic gift to him, a sword that would bring him victory through lifetime after lifetime. Victory and loneliness, forever. In the end, the sword would be all Arthur possessed. And it would never leave him.

No one knew this better than Guenevere. Her isolation in the Christian abbey had sharpened her senses and opened her soul. Had she been younger when she had entered this place, she might have eschewed the pagan fancies of her youth as mistaken forays down a path of error.

But she did not come to this place as a young woman. She came as a disgraced queen, barren, ashamed, but fully cognizant that the events of her life, however tragic, had not occurred as a result of having followed the wrong gods.

She had, in fact, been a full-fledged, practicing Christian at the time of her fall. No one had talked her into anything; no serpent had lured her into Launcelot's arms.

She regretted the loss of the child, of course. For that she would either burn in the Christian hell or return, in the pagan manner, in a way that would make amends to the unborn child. She might herself become an unborn child, she thought. She seemed to recall a dream in which she met two other women, both of whom were herself. The one had been a priestess of the ancient Hag Goddess. The other had been a young girl wearing leg coverings, like a man's. Both had been dead, as Guenevere herself was dead. A prophetic dream, perhaps.

Ah, of course,
she thought without surprise. The young girl had died before she had the chance to bear children. That would be Guenevere's penance in that other, future, life.

So she would lose Arthur again, she thought. The pattern was set; it was not likely to end. Excalibur, the voracious one, the gift of the Goddess, exacted a high price.

The sword was what made Arthur a King. It was as a King that Arthur had chosen the sword over Guenevere. He had not wanted to put her aside; she knew that. Despite her failings, her faithlessness, her barrenness, her ruination as a woman and as a human being, he had loved her. Perhaps, in his way, he loved her still.

But he had given her up. And not for the crown. Arthur Pendragon was not a man who lived for power, or even desired it. But power came to him, always, because he had been chosen by the Goddess to carry out Her will.

He had been a hero and a King. What would he be in the future, Guenevere wondered. A prophet? A worker of miracles? He had found greatness, but at the cost of his human happiness. He had never found any of that. Happiness was not in the fabric of Arthur's destiny. He had been meant to live not a mortal life, but an immortal one, to be a legend rather than a man.

"Goddess, haven't you had enough?" Guenevere whispered into her silent cell. To have lost the love of her life once was a tragedy; but to lose him three times, knowing that for all eternity he would be lost and lost again ... this was more than the former queen could bear.

She wished with all her heart that Perceval had not come to her with the sword that night. He had promised Arthur that the thing would be tossed into the lake.

Arthur had known exactly what he was doing. By ridding himself of the sword, he was turning his back on the old gods and their plan for him once and for all. He would sacrifice no more lives to them.

But those gods, the ancient ones, the storm gods and the nameless elementals too old for men to understand, and the Great Hag known only as the Cailleach, the Goddess, had made him King, and they were not so easily fooled. The sword had come to Guenevere for safekeeping, while the King slept easily, deluding himself into thinking he had bested the immortals.

"Please, my lady, tell me I have done right in coming here!" young Perceval begged. And he had been so hopeful in his innocence that she had not had the heart to scold him. "You have," she had said, and closed her eyes to the silent sound of the Goddess's laughter.

Oh, yes, the Hag was exacting her revenge. On Launcelot, for giving in to his weakness, on Guenevere, to be sure, for killing the child that had come as a gift to all Britain, and on Arthur, for accepting the great hungry sword as his master.

A sadness of such force overtook her that for a moment she could barely breathe. Launcelot was dead along with his son Galahad, his perfection lost forever to mankind. Arthur was a sickly monarch besieged by ambitious men determined to take away his crown and his life.

And she herself, Guenevere...
Well, look at me,
she thought, not without a certain bitter humor. A forgotten woman, stripped of all her queenly finery, locked in a nun's cell like some drab orphan without possibility of marriage. I suppose it was my particular penance to end up here, among the joyless Christians. The Goddess had given me her favor, and I threw it away.

Just like Arthur.

She reached beneath her narrow bed of fragrant straw and pulled out the sword Excalibur. "Well, here you are again," she said, her voice heavy with irony. "Come to take him for good, I suppose."

For she could not keep it from him, she knew. The Goddess was using Guenevere as Her tool, it was true, but if she refused, the Hag would find another way.

Arthur would possess the sword until he himself chose to make the sacrifice that would remove it forever from the world of men. And with it, himself.

W
hen he arrived, she
held it out to him wordlessly.

He stared at the sword for a moment, then smiled slightly, the corners of his mouth barely lifting. "I thought that was long gone," he said.

"It's been here." She smiled in return. Her eyes were rueful and compassionate.

"Why are you giving it to me now?"

She shrugged. The gesture struck Arthur as almost unbearably pretty. "I thought it might be useful to you."

He grunted. "I doubt if even Excalibur can bring me victory against that one. He's got a bigger army. Not to mention a younger one." He allowed her to place the blade reverently into his hands. "Since Lot died, a lot of the fence-sitters have gone over to Mordred. He's offering some of Lot's lands as spoils of war. Not to mention Morgause."

Even the name was repugnant to Guenevere. "What can she do?"

Arthur smiled. "Oh, quite a lot. She'll marry anyone who's advantageous."

"What about you? Marry her and make Mordred your heir. It will avert a civil war."

"And I'll be poisoned on my wedding day."

"Two can play at that," Guenevere said. "Clap her in irons immediately after the ceremony."

Arthur shrugged. "Then Mordred will finish the job. Don't you see?" He spoke softly. "It's time." They both knew what he meant.

After a long silence, she nodded. "In that case, you should have Excalibur with you," she said.

He smiled. True to her blood, Guenevere understood just what it meant to be a warrior. "I wish I'd spent more of my life with you," he blurted out.

Guenevere bowed her head.

"The young think that there will be time to right every wrong," Arthur mused. "They believe, contrary to everything they know, that they will live forever."

"And so you will," she said. "In your way."

"I love you, Guenevere."

"I love you, Arthur."

And in the glance that passed between them, all the regret and anguish of their wasted lives stood between them like a stone monolith.

At last Arthur put the sword under his arm and turned blindly, his eyes swimming and burning with tears that he refused to shed.

"Godspeed," Guenevere said to his retreating back. "Perhaps we shall meet again."

He hesitated for a moment, the muscles of his back tensing. Ah, yes, the thought passed between them. The Goddess always gives another chance.

Then he stepped through the small stone doorway and was gone.

T
he air outside was gusting
. Arthur Blessing smelled the coming storm. The moon had disappeared, and the first wave of thunder rolled in.