Arthur turned abruptly to Merlinnus. “Gawaine could not possibly have—”
“I would guess his mother forbade the match and—to be certain of it—sickened the girl with a spell,” Merlinnus said.
“Oh.” Gwen could think of nothing more to say. But it fit with what she knew now—of Gawaine, of his mother.
“Well, I shall immediately command the match,” Arthur said. “It is the least I can do. Gawaine shall marry your sister, and he shall be glad for it.” This time he smiled completely. “What is her name?”
“Mariel, my lord,” Gwen whispered. She suddenly felt exhausted and yet wonderfully free of the burden she had carried for so long.
“It will not be that easy, my king,” Merlinnus warned him, holding up a finger. “The North Witch will not agree.”
“Oh,” Arthur said slyly, “I think she will. In fact, I know she will. For then Gawaine and I shall be brothers.”
‘“Brothers’?” Both Gwen and Merlinnus spoke as one.
“For I shall be married to his bride’s sister.”
After a moment of stunned silence, Gwen said, “It is customary, my lord, to ask what the woman wills.”
Arthur looked chastened and his cheeks turned splotchy with embarrassment. He cleared his throat twice before speaking again. Then he said simply, “Gawen... Gwen, surely you see this was meant to be. The sword has chosen not just a king—but a queen as well. The only one deserving to be on the throne by my side. After all, you are already one of my chiefest advisers, for all your youth.”
“Not so young as you think, my lord,” she said, blushing.
“Oh?” It was Merlinnus, not the king, who asked.
“Twenty-one this Solstice day. My father thinks me unmarriageable and is glad of it, for until I left home, I managed his household.”
“‘Unmarriageable’? You?” Arthur looked deeply puzzled, even offended.
“Short utterances,” Gwen explained, keeping her tone light, “are not on my list of accomplishments, as Merlinnus has so rightly witnessed.”
All three of them laughed.
“Will you, then?” Arthur asked.
“Not much of a proposal,” said the mage. “Surely, Arthur, I have taught you better than that.”
Never taking his eyes off Gwen, Arthur said, “You have never spoken of any such, you old fraud, and you know it. So, Gawen... er, Gwen—will you?”
Gwen smiled at him. “I will, Majesty, as long as I can have my sword back.”
Arthur looked longingly at the sword, hefted it once, and then put it solemnly in her hand.
“Oh, not this one,” Gwen said. “It is too heavy and unwieldy for me. It does not sit well in my hand. I mean the other—the one that you pulled last night.”
“Oh, that!” Arthur said, the splotchiness returning to his cheeks. “With all my heart.”
40
Weddings
IT WAS A YEAR and a day before the actual wedding of Arthur and Gwenhwyvar, though Gawaine and Mariel had been married six months before in a ceremony held in Carohaise, her beauty restored by Merlinnus and by love. Gawaine’s mother, the North Witch, did not come, though everyone else did. Mariel’s father had complained of the expense.
By the time of her own wedding, as Merlinnus had predicted, Gwen’s fair hair had grown out to near shoulder length, at least long enough to be pulled up with ribands and combs and fastened with a golden circlet. At her insistence, she was carried from Carohaise to Cadbury in style, riding in a covered wagon bedecked with garlands of vervain and rose. Behind came the wagons bearing her dowry, her books, her clothing, and her mothers jewelry—or at least that which had not gone to Mariel on her wedding.
Merlinnus met Gwen at the gate and brought her through, with much more ceremony than he had done the first time. He acted more like a father than her own. In fact Leodogran of Carohaise trailed behind them, looking sour over the upcoming loss of his brilliant daughter, who had run his own castle with such efficiency, though he had never thought to tell her so. He ground his teeth with the knowledge that much of her mothers lands went with her as well.
The guards all nodded at Gwen, and more than a few felt themselves moved by her undisguised beauty. In a white linen dress embroidered at the hem with blue bears, a gold torque at her neck, and gold-and-blue-enameled arm bracelets, she was as fetching a woman as had been seen in the castle for months.
However, the boys Ciril and Geoffrey and Mark kept glancing at the bride under lowered lids, unable to believe it was actually Gawen come to court again.
“I knew she was a girl the whole time,” Ciril whispered.
“Me, too,” said Mark.
“Did not,” Geoffrey retorted, then glanced again as the bride passed him by. He could scarcely remember how his old friend had looked.
THE WEDDING PARTY came into the Great Hall, where rose petals had been strewn over the rushes and birch limbs, and fennel and orpine bedecked the torches. Fresh herbs had been thrown into the hearth fires: chamomile, pennyroyal, mugwort, and thyme. The room was redolent with their aroma.
Arthur met them midway and took Gwen’s hand.
“My lady,” he said stiffly.
“My lord.” She was just as uncomfortable.
They walked a few steps in silence. She looked everywhere but at him, noticing that the Round Table Companions were in their full armor. Noticing that the ladies of the castle were dressed in colorful linens and wearing spring flowers in their hair. Noticing that Lancelot looked unhappy, his hands wrangling together like an old farmwife’s.
This is a mistake, Gwen thought miserably. We scarce know each other as man and woman, only as king and boy. How will I speak to him? How will he respond? She longed to be back in her boy’s clothes, her hair cropped short and out of her eyes. That boy—that hidden creature—had known how to talk to Arthur. How to cozen him and correct him. Boys, she thought, have the easier time of it. She wished at that moment that she were a boy again.
Arthur pulled them both to a stop and turned to face her. “Did you bring the sword back with you?”
“I said I would,” she told him.
“We will practice every day.” He smiled at her.
“And practice your writing, too,” she reminded him.
His mouth twisted around. “I hate writing.”
“You promised.”
He grinned suddenly, and she could see the boy he once had been. When she grinned back, he remembered the mages boy who had been his friend.
“You had doubts?” she whispered, suddenly solemn again.
He nodded. “And you?”
“Every night. Every day. But more so today than in all those nights and days together. I feared I was alone in this.”
“Not alone,” he told her. “Never alone again. Do you trust me?”
She tried to smile and could not, so nodded instead. “I do, my lord.”
“And you will tell me when such doubts assail you again?”
This time she smiled a little. “I will tell you. I will never lie to you.”
MERLINNUS SLIPPED AWAY, to go up to his tower. There, in his stone basin filled with fresh water gathered the night before from a nearby stream, he scryed a garden. It was a place far to the north, across the dark sea. There, with a ceaseless wind tangling elf knots into her shiny black hair, Morgause paced. He could see her face clearly. She looked discomfited, angry, soured—and suddenly old.
It made the mage smile.
The churchyard was crowded with merrymakers. Wine spilled out from the stone’s open slot. Overhead, larks sang and doves cooed from the rafters of the church. A sword had been pulled, a peace descended, a marriage consummated. Surely an heir would soon follow.
It was an old story but a good one.
Chatting with Jane Yolen
Question: How long have you been writing?
Jane Yolen: Since I was a child. My parents were both writers, so it seemed to me that writing was something all adults did. I wanted to
get started early. But my first poems weren’t published until I was in high school. I sold my first book on my twenty-second birthday.
Q: What is your writing process? Do you write every day? Do you write for a certain number of hours?
JY: I write every day, but sometimes that means ten hours of writing and zero hours of business related to my writing. Business meaning reading contracts, going over galleys, planning book tours, and the like. Sometimes that ratio is reversed. Most times it is more evenly distributed.
Q: What are some of the books that were very important for you?
JY: Anything about King Arthur, the Andrew Lang color fairy-tale collections, Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Burnett’s The Secret Garden, Thurber’s White Deer, Alcott’s Little Women, and every horse and dog book ever written.
Q: Do personal experiences ever end up in your books? Even in your fantasy novels?
JY: Of course, but usually artfully disguised. My children, however, sometimes object to finding themselves exposed in books. Or they did when they were young. Now as adults they find it funny. And as writers themselves, they are starting to get back at me by putting me in their books and stories.
Q: You have written several books about King Arthur and Merlin. What is it about this era and these characters that draws you back again and again?
JY: I am an Arthurholic. If a story is about Camelot, I am there! Quite simply, I think it is the greatest story ever told, or more accurately, the greatest collection of stories ever told.
Q: This is the story of King Arthur and yet not the story of King Arthur. Many of the place-names are different (Cadbury instead of Camelot, for instance), and characters have names that are slanted just a degree from the familiar (such as Merlinnus). Why have you worked these small changes? What do they mean for your story?
JY: They are a signal that this telling may be different from what the reader is expecting. In some cases—very different. However, you will find Cadbury and Merlinnus as alternative names in some of the older tales. I didn’t make them up, just borrowed them.
Q: You transform the well-known image of the sword in the stone into a simple bit of legerdemain, as Merlinnus puts it. Is this a cynical view of how we choose our leaders? Or something else?
JY: Sometimes people have to find a reason to believe passionately in their leaders, and Merlinnus knows this.
Q: Do you have any plans to tell the rest of Arthur’s story? Why or why not?
JY: The rest of the story is about betrayal and death and I don’t want to write that. I liked ending happily ever after. Besides, now that the big secret of this telling is out, what is there to do?
The Whole of the Sword Poem
Originally I had written Sword of the Rightful King in eleven quite long chapters, with a poetic opening or prose poem for each chapter and a twelfth prose poem to finish the whole. These openings were each a metaphoric way of looking at the sword in the stone.
My editor wisely told me that this slowed all the action down. And though he loved all twelve poems, he thought it better to use fewer.
I made the chapters shorter (and added several new chapters with action in them, because Arthur is a man of action), and then broke everything into four sections, with one of the poems fronting each section. I wrote three new prose poems that depended on the original writing but spoke more truly to the now-changed novel. But here are all twelve of the original prose poems. I think they really do work together as a whole piece.
—J.Y.
1
Midnight by the bell. The churchyard was deserted and in darkness. By the front door, which was but a black rectangle in a blacker mass, a large square was marked off on the ground. In the square’s center stood an enormous stone, which—if the moon had been shining—would have reminded any onlooker of a sleeping bear. A dead bear, obviously. For in the bear’s back was thrust a great sword its haft pointing slantwise toward the night sky.
2
The churchyard was deserted, but dawn was beginning to light the sullen square. The stone in the center blushed with the rising of the sun, and the sword in the stone’s middle sprang to uncertain life. The sword’s shadow was a long stain along the bulge of the stone.
3
No one was in the churchyard, but the early morning light promised that soon it would be crowded, the front door of the church opened by the priest. Before the door, but not so close as to obscure it, was a small square of stone where a forgotten anvil sat, as if waiting for a smith to take it back to his fire. In the anvil’s center was an old sword, long finished, long needing refinishing. Only the morning light brightened its dull steel for a moment. Only a moment.
4
The churchyard was deserted. By the front door, a large open square of marble, the color of sunrise, seemed an invitation. An enormous stone humped up in the center of the marble square, with a large, unsightly sword thrust down in its center, put the lie to that invitation. “Do not enter,” said the sword.
5
At the third hour of the day, clouds kept moving in front of the sun so that the chapel yard became a place of shadows. The shadows danced about in the center of the forecourt, and the shadow of the stone with its steel arm seemed to caper obscenely.
6
At the fourth hour of the day, a flock of blackbirds flew in to perch on the single tree in the churchyard. There were nearly a hundred birds, and they made the tree look as if it were heavily laden with black buds. Beneath them, the stone with its steel burden beckoned. Three of the blackbirds flew over the stone, widdershins. When they returned to the flock, their droppings decorated the sword hilt like opaque white gems.
7
The sun had passed its zenith and no longer stood directly above the churchyard. The sword had a new shadow now, slicing down the far side of the stone like a black wound. A single dog walked stiff legged near the stone, lifted a leg, and left another shadow on the stone.
8
Across the deserted courtyard waddled three ducks, a male and two females. They made soft cackings as they passed the stone. The male beat his wings suddenly and rose into the air, as high as the sword. He perched on it and preened his feathers. The two females took no notice and walked on. When he realized he was alone, the male sailed down and hurried to catch up to them, calling plaintively. They did not answer.
9
Evening struck, over the churchyard with a blunt fist. Everything looked squashed, smaller than before. Only the stone—with the sword stuck in it like a knife in bread—looked the same.
10
Now night was a surround of blacky The stone was black, too, and only the hilt of the sword held any light, as if a sliver of silver pin pierced a coarse material. And day arrived: the stone, sword, and sky going bright like the philosopher’s mercury that stands still and yet runs.
11
The churchyard was silent. The stone was a beached craft, rudderless, empty. Like waves, the shadows ebbed. Along the horizon that was the castle wall, a thin ribbon of dawn began to appear.
12
The churchyard was crowded with merrymakers. Wine spilled out from the stone’s open slot. Overhead, larks sang and doves cooed from the rafters of the church. A sword had been pulled, a peace descended, a marriage consummated. Surely an heir would soon follow.
It was an old story but a good one.
About the Author
JANE YOLEN is a highly acclaimed children’s author who has written hundreds of books for adults and children and has won numerous awards. She and her husband divide their time between Massachussetts and Scotland.
www.janeyolen.com
Jane Yolen, Sword of the Rightful King
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