The Knight With Two Swords Read online

  The Knight With Two Swords

  Edward M. Erdelac

  The Knight With Two Swords

  Copyright © 2018 by Edward M. Erdelac. All rights reserved.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or fictitious recreations of

  actual historical persons. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not

  intended by the authors unless otherwise specified. This book or any portion thereof may not

  be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of

  the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Illustration: Chris Yarbrough

  Cover Design: STK•Kreations

  Editor: Gwen Nix

  Worldwide Rights

  Created in the United States of America

  Also By Edward M. Erdelac

  Novels

  Buff Tea

  Coyote’s Trail

  Andersonville

  Monstrumführer

  Mindbreaker (in Bond Unknown)

  Perennial (in Humanity 2.0)

  The Merkabah Rider Series

  High Planes Drifter

  The Mensch With No Name

  Have Glyphs Will Travel

  Once Upon A Time In The Weird West

  The Van Helsing Papers

  Terovolas

  Collections

  With Sword And Pistol

  Angler In Darkness

  To Aunt Vicky,

  For always being there and for lending me those Mary Stewart books.

  Author’s Note:

  This is a tale of that long-ago kingdom of faraway Albion which exists only in dreams; of the shining Camelot of Malory, White, and Boorman, which is as far from 6th century England as the Emerald City of Oz is from modern day Topeka. It’s a story of the greatest earthly ruler ever known, King Arthur, the magic Isle of Avalon, of Merlin the enchanter, the Holy Grail, and the Lady of The Lake. It is pretense, not historicity. While I find Arthurian scholarship endlessly intriguing, I’m a storyteller, and this is a fantasy, so the reader must expect nothing more…or less.

  Special Thanks to Nightbringer and Christopher W. Bruce.

  Table of Contents:

  First Part: The Adventurous Sword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Second Part: The Dolorous Stroke

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Third Part: The Waste Land

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  The ESPLUMOIR

  First Part:

  The Adventurous Sword

  CHAPTER ONE

  The stone cottage at the edge of the forest had seen the Roman wall that crossed the emerald field in its bare and austere prime, patrolled by grumbling legionaries far from home.

  Now, the wall was a gathering place for long grass, leafy Solomon’s seal, and sun-yellow cinquefoil blossoms. People came to pick wild chives and spignel from its overgrown base. Dandelions drifted back and forth over its top, as heedless of the boundary it had once stolidly denoted as the idle clouds in the sea-blue sky overhead.

  The works of great men rose and fell, except for the cottage, which had been erected long ago by a forgotten woman’s hands.

  Chickens scratched at the tamped earth surrounding it, and a red-haired woman with callused palms sat on a rude wood bench outside mending a pair of boy’s trousers, a nest of brown thread piled in a basket beside her. An old white wolfhound dozed at her feet.

  A rough, brown dirt roadpath meandered out to the cottage door from the forest, its wild appearance indicative of the self-reliance of the homestead. There was a cool well, there were chickens, there were bright yellow apples from the tree growing on the hill. What need of travel? Visitors were infrequent.

  In the upper reaches of the apple tree, a pied raven alit and preened. It was not wholly black, but splashed with an array of patchwork hues. Its long black beak poked like a scholar’s nose, and its black and brown feathers showed as if beneath a threadbare coat of stark white. It was an oddity unnoticed by the two rough-garbed dark-headed boys fighting a ferocious stick duel below. Each boy was the mirror of the other, down to their hands, for one favored the left and the other the right. They disengaged at the sight of a tall woman seated on a long-maned white horse when she appeared at the edge of the wood.

  The woman wore a seamless garment of sugar-white samite, and her unbound white-gold hair spilled over the rump of her barebacked mount. The woman sat regal and aright, and though her pale fingers were entwined in the mane of the horse, its mouth bore no bit, its face no bridle. She guided it with her knees alone.

  It clopped down the narrow path to the cottage.

  The white wolfhound picked up its head, but after focusing its failing eyes on the rider, laid back down, unconcerned.

  The two boys raced down the hill, shoving each other the whole way, reaching their mother’s side at the same time as the newcomer on the horse.

  The fleeter of the two had won the right to speak, and announced breathlessly to their mother, who had not yet raised her attention from her work:

  “Mother! A visitor!”

  The red-haired woman looked up, unsurprised at the radiant woman towering above her. She nodded her head in greeting.

  “Lady Lile,” she said.

  “Eglante,” the woman replied.

  “Balin, Brulen,” Eglante said to the boys, “go back to your play.”

  Brulen looked disappointed, and his dark eyes lingered on the Lady Lile, but his brother, Balin, nudged him roughly and stomped off, apparently deciding that if his mother had deemed to exclude them from the visitation, then the visitor was not worth his attention.

  “Come on, Brulen,” he said, swiping the back of his hand across his nose, a calculated show of dismissal.

  Brulen walked in the shadow of his brother, glancing back curiously.

  The Lady Lile never looked at them but kept her blue gaze fixed on their mother as they tromped off, finally breaking into a run halfway up the hill. Their makeshift stick swords clacked in the distance.

  “Your sons?”

  Eglante held up her work to inspect it, then broke off the thread and laid it aside.

  “Your nephews,” she said. “You might have acknowledged them.”r />
  “You endanger them,” said the Lady. “King Detors has turned from the old ways. He is ambitious, and sees in the crucified king a means of wresting the hearts of the people from the spirits of tree and stone.”

  “Detors is a small man,” said Eglante, smiling thinly. “Hardly a king at all. Your Uther Pendragon will bring him to heel soon enough.”

  “Uther is temperamental and a lustful brigand,” said the Lady. “He will not be the one to unite the land. Already he has sown his own undoing.”

  “Has he bucked under your measured guidance, Lile?” Eglante asked with a hint of slyness.

  “I am here for your benefit, not to hear your disapproval of my methods,” Lile snapped. “How can you remain here? You are a daughter of Avalon. You should pack your things and come with me. It’s the only safe haven for our kind. Even those who can find their way through the mists cannot stand against the Red Knight.”

  “And what of my sons? Shall I leave them to fend for themselves, or has the Isle rescinded its ridiculous prohibition against men?”

  “They are boys; they may thrive in this world of men.”

  “And there is my answer,” said Eglante, rising from the bench and picking up her sewing.

  “How long can you continue to play the part of a wise woman, doling out love potions and cure-alls to the ignorant?” Lile said, as Eglante went to the cottage door. “Detors’ holy men have declared you an outlaw. You are a priestess of Avalon! How long will the love of a dead man keep you from your sacred duties?”

  Eglante stood in the doorway and looked back with a kind of pity in her eyes.

  “Look at you on your horse. My sister. The Lady of The Lake. Privy to the Great Mystery. No one, perhaps not even the Merlin, is more learned in the magic of the land or versed in the Sight. And yet,” she said, her eyes going to the two boys on the hill. “What price have you paid? You are yet a girl. You hold your duty above all else, but you think my duty to my sons is somehow less. How very little you see.”

  “Shall I tell you what I see, sister?” Lile said, her face coloring. She wheeled the horse about and thrust one finger at the road through the forest. “Shall I tell you what is coming down that path for you?”

  “Nothing that does not come for us all, in the end,” said Eglante, turning back to the cottage.

  “I will have need of a successor someday,” Lile called.

  Eglante disappeared inside.

  “I am sure you will find her, milady.”

  Lady Lile sat atop her horse, with the foraging chickens orbiting her. As if self-conscious, but more likely in imitation of their industry, the horse pawed the earth with one hoof.

  The wolfhound roused itself and followed Eglante inside.

  The white rider glanced toward the forest road, then nudged the horse in the opposite direction and loped for the edge of the field.

  The pied raven squawked in the tree.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The brothers Balin and Brulen sat upon the hill, their backs to the trunk of the apple tree between them.

  Their boy hearts still thundered from the race, and their lungs burned.

  Brulen watched the woman depart from their home. “Do you know who that was?” he asked.

  Balin shrugged. He stared up at the sky through the branches at the strangely colored raven near the top. He had been imagining the tall masts of sailing ships until the bird had raised its cry and sunk the imagined vessels in their daydream sea. He had never before seen a raven that was not completely black.

  “The Lady Lile,” said Brulen. He twisted and looked at his brother.

  Balin showed no reaction, but yawned and smacked his lips.

  “The Lady of The Lake?” Brulen prodded.

  Balin looked after the shrinking woman at that and narrowed his eyes, the raven forgotten. He reached into his tunic, brought out a small wooden cross hanging from a bit of leather, and twisted it between his fingers thoughtfully. The Lady of The Lake, he knew. The mistress of cursed Avalon, that ensorcelled island hidden by shifting mists and infernal guile where witches did secret spells at the behest of their demon patrons.

  “The priest in the village says she’s the Devil’s wife,” he muttered.

  Brulen scoffed.

  “He says that about Mother too.”

  “He does not!” Balin said, appalled.

  “Does,” Brulen insisted.

  Balin turned toward his brother and knelt on one knee dramatically, striking his chest with his fist.

  “Oh Heavenly Father!” he intoned to the sky. “This day let the truth be known! For no knight who is false may stand against one who is true!”

  It was an old saying which they had both committed to heart, as their mother had told them their father had often repeated it.

  Brulen’s face broke into a grin and he picked up a rotten apple and flung it at Balin. It burst on his shoulder.

  Balin grimaced and jumped to his feet. He put one boot to Brulen’s arm and kicked him over with a laugh, then sprang for the lowest hanging branch and began to scale the tree like a mountaineer.

  The first shock of weight on the tree sent the piebald raven flapping away with an annoyed cawing.

  Brulen jumped after his brother, at first following his path up the tree, and then leaping for more daring handholds.

  It became a vertical race for the highest bough, and the boys interspersed their huffing breaths with agonizing bursts of uncontrollable laughter.

  Brulen got a hold of Balin’s heel and tried to pull him down but came away with only a boot.

  Heavy apples shook free and rained to the ground like conquered defenders plummeting from a high tower besieged.

  At last Balin rose triumphant above the leafy corona of the tree and hunkered on the solitary high perch, grinning down. He seized the topmost golden apple as a prize and bit into it loudly.

  “Cheat,” Brulen grumbled up at him.

  Balin let the apple fall. It bounced off Brulen’s head and tumbled down beside Balin’s discarded boot.

  The boys sat quiet as finches in the tree for a while, delighting in their unprecedented vantage of the land. Balin closed his eyes. In his mind, trumpets blared and maidens called out his name.

  They were fatherless, but it was the war between King Uther and the Saxons which had made them so. As sons of a martyred knight, they were welcome to bear their father’s red boar crest in the service of the High King as knights themselves, should they so choose, but their mother had discouraged their training. She taught them to be peaceful, to take sustenance from the land and thus serve no one, and to respect all life as sacred.

  Balin accepted all that his mother taught him, which was practical, but in his heart, he suspected that as a short-sighted woman, she gave herself over to much that was impractical. His father had been a follower of Jesus Christ, he knew, though Balin had no real memory of him. He thought that as his father had been a hero, then there must be something in the faith that had borne him through so many battles. He knew that the Saxons were evil heathens that had slaughtered women, children, and the family of the King, as well as murdered his predecessor and brother King Ambrosius by poison. He felt great pride that Christian men like his father had opposed them.

  He talked as much as he could with the village priest about the God of his father and came to understand that the goddess his mother sometimes referred to was a lie; at best a woman’s fancy, at worst a fell deity in league with angels cast from heaven and very likely an agent of the Devil, if not the Devil himself in woman-form.

  Yet he loved his mother dearly, and as he had no tongue for debate, tolerated her sinful ways. He knew well that some thought her a witch, and she did nothing to disprove them, selling charms and unctions to the peasants that came under cover of night to her door with their heartaches and ailments. He prayed fervently that she should see some bright light and come to Jesus as the Jew killer Saul had on the road to Damascus.

  In contrast, Brulen listened
rapt to the tales their mother told them of mystic, timeless Avalon and the enchanter, Merlin. His favorite story though, was of old King Llud of the Silver Hand, who had defended Albion against plagues of dwarves and giants, and how he had trapped two dragons beneath Dinas Emrys on Mount Erith in a stone pit full of mead in the very center of the land. Years later, when King Vortigern had tried to build a fort there, he discovered that each night the masonry his builders had erected would shake apart. Young Merlin revealed the dragons to Vortigern, telling him their endless battle was indicative of the clash of the Welsh and the Saxon invaders, and that the Welsh would win.

  But, their mother had told them Merlin had misinterpreted the meaning of the two warring beasts. Vortigern had brought the Saxons to Albion as mercenaries to help wipe out the Old People, the Picts, who revered the Goddess, and the dragons were a reminder of the war he had set in motion: the war in the heart of the land, between the Old and the New.

  “Because,” she had told them, “to every land there is an appointed spirit, a set Way of honoring that spirit. When the Way of another is forcibly brought to a place it does not belong, there is always conflict, until one Way defeats the other. Sometimes the old prevails, sometimes the new. In the meantime, we balance between the shifting meanings of what is sacred and what is profane, like a person standing on a narrow log across a deep ravine.”

  She talked of lighter things, too, of fairy circles and half-glimpsed unicorns, and of the Lady of The Lake, the queen of the apple orchard isle of hidden Avalon, who granted the chosen rulers of Albion their authority by bestowing upon them the indomitable sword of power, Excalibur, the Steel-Cutter, one of the thirteen sacred treasures.

  This was a story that intrigued both boys, though in different ways.

  At the end of such tales, Balin would say, “I should like to have a sword like that.”

  And Brulen would say, “I should like to visit Avalon someday.”

  But Avalon, their mother said, was a hidden place that no man could set foot on, save two: Merlin, who was more than a man; and The Red Knight, the mysterious, ageless, and undefeatable defender of the Lady and her followers. The only man who could reside in Avalon.