Bantam Books of Related Interest
Bantam Books of Related Interest
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FIRELORD by Parke Godwin
GUINEVERE by Sharon Newman
LORD VALENTINE’S CASTLE by Robert Silverberg
MERLIN by Robert Nye
MOCKINGBIRD by Walter Tevis
JEM by Frederik Pohl
Firelord
Parke Godwin
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BANTAM BOOKS TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON • SYDNEY
AH of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This low-priced Bantam Book
has been completely reset in a type face
designed for easy reading, and was primed
from new plates. It contains the complete
text of the original hard-cover edition.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMTTTEO ffRELORD
A Bantam Book I published by arrangement with Doubleday A Company, Inc.
PRINTfNG HISTORY
Doubleday edition published October 1980
Bantam edition I May I9S2
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1980 by Parke Godwin.
Cover an copyright © 1982 by Bantam Books. Inc.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in pan, by
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A Kind of Dedication
To Quackenabush and Diavolo, who suffered with this, believed in it, read, cared, cheered and encouraged, stuck pins in sinister dolls, heard confessions, gave absolution and usually paid for lunch. With Love.
Acknowledgments
Firelord is a fantasy, though I’ve attempted to stretch an elastic legend over the bone of historical fact regarding the reigns of Vortigern, Ambrosius and Arthur. For this, I’m deeply indebted to John Morris’s lucid and fascinating The Age of Arthur (Scribner’s, 1973) and Jean Markale’s unorthodox King Arthur, King of Kings (Gordon & Cemonesi, 1976), translated by Gordon Cremonesi.
For the picture of Morgana and her people, I drew heavily on the pioneering work of Dr. Margaret Murray, whose books The Witch-Cult in Western Europe and God of the Witches (Oxford University Press, 1971, 1973) retrieved the fairy folk from moonlit legend and restored them to history where they belonged.
Arthur is as historical as Lincoln or Julius Caesar, merely less documented. Almost certainly he succeeded Ambrosius as overlord of the Britons. .Geraint was indeed Prince of Dyfneint, Marcus Conomori was overlord of Cornwall. Trystan appears to have been his son, though I have kept the usual form of the legend. Peredur was actually a prince who ruled at York. Guenevere is probably as historical as the rest; like diem, she is remembered with kindness or severity, depending, as Arthur notes, on who is telling the tale.
That they didn’t all live at the same time is beside the point. Very likely some of them did. Assembled on one stage in one drama, they make a magnificent cast. It should have happened this way, it could have, and perhaps it did.
P.O.
Contents
The King Lies at Avalon
Merlin and a Sword
The Earth Is a Woman
Guenevere
To Wear the Crown
Wheel of Shadow, Wheel of Sun
The Ghost Dancers
King of a Hundred Battles
Modred and a Grail
Rest You Gentle, Sleep You Sound
1
3
39
91
138
192
229
273
320
360
Celtic/Roman Site Modern Site or Vicinity (where known}
Astolat
Avalon
Caer Legion
Caerieon
Cair Daun
Camelot
Camlann
Camulodunum Castle Dore Cathanesia Cilumum
Corstopitum
Dyfneint
Eburacum
Kaelcacaestir
Leinster
Mount Badon
Neth Dun More
Taixali, Venicones and Votadini
Verulamium The Wall of Hadrian
Ynnis Witrin
Imaginary seat of power, Dyfneint Imaginary Chester, Flintshire
Southern Wales, near Llandaff and Cardiff Doncaster, Lincolnshire Imaginary
Near Carlisle, Cumberlandshire. No precise site. Legend says Arthur received death wound here. Colchester, Suffolk Southern Cornwall, near St. Ives Caithness, Scotland
West of Corbridge, Northumberland. No precise site.
Corbridge, Northumberland Modern Devonshire Modern city of York About seven miles southwest of York Territory of southeast Ireland No precise site
Imaginary. On the River Neth between Cornwall and Devon.
Pictish tribes inhabiting the centra! and eastern lowlands of Scotland. The Atteconi were inhabitants of Cathanesia (Caithness). The Faerie (Prydn) were nomads with no fixed home.
St. Albans, Buckshire Erected by the Emperor Hadrian in the second century; it stretched across Britain from Soiway Firth in the west to Tynemouth on the North Sea. Glastonbury, Somerset
n
The King Lies at Avalon
Damn it, I haven’t time to lie here. Whatever comes, there’s more for a king to do than squat like a mushroom and maunder on eternity.
Dignity be damned, it’s a tedious bore.
Even when he was wounded, Ambrosuis told me he hated being carried in a litter like a silly bride. Slow, uncomfortable, and the wounds open up anyway. Mine are rather bad. The surgeons tell me to prepare for their ministrations—Jesus, spare me professional gravity—and that priest looks so solemn, I think God must have caught him laughing and made him promise never again.
So tired. So many miles from Camlann, where nobody won but the crows. And some time to spend here at Avalon listening to the monks chant in chapel. No complaint, but one does^wish the love of God guaranteed an ear for music. They do not speed the hours.
So, this testament.
Young Brother Coei who writes it for me is very serious about life, but then no one ever told him it was a comedy. He thinks I should begin in a kingly manner at once formal, dignified and stirring. I was never all three at once, but to take a fling at it:
I, Arthur, King of the Britons, overlord of the Dobunni, Demetae, Dumnonii, Silures, Parisi, Brigantes, Coritani, Catuvellauni—
—am disgusted and out of patience, being up to my neck in bandages like a silly Yule pudding. I’d write myself if I had an arm that worked.
\
2 Firelord
Let’s be simple, Coel, let’s write as it was. Then there’s a letter you may deliver for me.
Why, to Guenevere, lad. To my queen.
A king should write his own story, especially a Briton. We are a race of musicaJ liars, and who you are may depend on who’s singing your song. Many’s the tree-spirit come tripping out of yesterday to find itself a saint today and rudely surprised by the change. I’ve been called Artos and Artorius Imperator, but it seems to stick at Arthur, the way the monks write and the bards sing. That’s unimportant; what matters is who we were and what we did. I want to write of us the way we Were before some pedant petrifies us in an epic and substitutes his current ideal for ours. As for poets and bards, let one of them redecorate your life and you’ll never be able to find any of it again.
It’s an insult to freeze men like Bedivere and Trystan, Gareth, Geraint and Lancelot into a legend. How Tryst would laugh at that and send an epigram searing down the centuries more potently than anything I could write. We were never that still or complete, always moving between the end of one thing and the beginning of another. Guenevere wouldn’t sit still while Time painted her in serenity, and God knows—Morgana? Catch the lightning, friend. Chain the wind.
No legend then. I give them their world as it was and let them stride.
From my casement, I can see the apple orchard blossoming and remember another May. Let me begin with spring, then. Spring in the earth, in the blood, young and green as new grass that knows nothing of winter.
Spring at home and being ten years old. The spring when I met Vortigern and the mad boy called Merlin.
Merlin and a Sword
The hills near our villa were long and low and made for children to run over. So we ran that day, Kay and Bedivere and I, up one rounded height and down the other, straining for the highest ridge where we could see east and west for miles and the flash of sunlight on the eagle standards of the approaching cohort. We panted up to the topmost rocks and hung there gasping, me and my half-brother Kay, while Bedivere scrambled up onto the crag edge, shoved the sweat-lank red hair out of his eyes and pointed to the east.
“There he is! Ambrosius!”
When we climbed up beside him, Kay gasped: “He’s brought a whole legion!”
“Only a cohort,” I corrected him. “I heard father say so.”
Bedivere pointed again, to the west this time. “And there’s old Vortigern.”
We didn’t understand much of what was to happen that day, only the rough shape of it. The Emperor Vitalinus was come to give up the imperial sword to Ambrosius Aurelianus, commander of the Roman legions in Britain. Vitalinus was his real name, but in the west where his support was strongest he was called Vortigern, the over-king. I rarely heard him named anything else. And yet that picture stuck in my mind, Ambrosius coming like a god with the flash and thunder of horses and the blare of horns—and the old emperor slipping down the valley with a few men and a little dust tike a tired memory. That seems the way with kings: we go out quieter than we come in!
They were to meet at the villa of my father, Uther, chief magistrate of the Dobunni. We were boys and didn’t understand
4 Firelord
much. We saw the great shimmering force and the little cloud of dust and called (Hie strength, one weakness and let it go at that. Bedivere and I were ten. Kay was nine.
“It’s time he gave up the sword,” Bedivere growled.
“Why?” asked cautious little Kay.
“Why? Isn’t he the cause of all the troubles? Didn’t he bring the foreigners in? My da says he sold us out.”