The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) by Kit Maples Page A

life’s quest.
    “Seek Arthur!” I say to Excalibur.  “Bring him back to us.  Make him the pure king.”
    Excalibur! shouts the sword.
    The sword rises from the Earth into my hand and I step back into time.
     
     

Chapter 5 – The World Sword
     
     
    “Wake!” shouted Prince Llew.  “The moment’s here.  I can see it in your closed eyes, Lady!”
    The gnome, curled up high in the vaulted ceiling of the citadel, rapped the gong once for the first day of spring and the beginning of the swordmaking season.  The sound echoed out over the valley, hurrying on the knights and ladies already scrambling up the mountainside to demand their swords.
    It was my nineteenth birthday though what do years mean to me now?
    I woke still squatting in vigil beside the stone trough that held the iron bars and steel rods meant to make the greatest sword in the world.  The metal shimmered through the thawing wine bath.
    The young man nearly nose to nose with me and shouting, “Wake!  Wake!” was the beautiful Prince Llew, clean-limbed, clean-cheeked, and filled with boyish energy.
    He was ready to smelt and hammer great swords with me in this wind-howling forge.  Prepared to age with his work through the season until he returned to withered old age and then ash on his bed of coals.  Hungry now to read my winter dreaming.
    “What did you see in your dreams?” he cried.
    “I’m to be Merlin,” I said.
    “All the lords!”
    I reached my hands cracking through the crusty ice on the wine trough and hauled out the bars and rods.
    “This,” I said, “will be Arthur’s sword.”
    Llew shouted to his apprentices and slaves climbing into the citadel, “Fire!  Charcoal!  Bellows!  Hammers!  Ring the gong again!  We have the world sword to make!”
    The warrior lords and ladies raising their tents on the mountain slope heard the unaccustomed second bang of the gong and knew that a great sword was about to be born.  They cheered and roared, their howls muffling the gong’s echo among the mountain peaks.
    I still had Urien across my knees.  I stabbed the sword into the stone wall.  Let it be the hanger for my tools.
    The prince and I hauled on our leather aprons, gloves, and boots.  We drove up the fire in the forge.  We fed it and encouraged it.  We prayed over it every incantation of every language and god, even the filthy Woden for who knows from which god comes the gravest power in a sword?
    By late afternoon, the fire in the coals had settled to a searing yellow-white, pumped by the bellows and the wind howling through the citadel.  Llew and I, awash in our sweat, shoved the bars and rods into the fire and watched them spit off the last of the wine bath, hissing and glowing.
    It was a marvel to see the fierce fire detach itself from the coals and sink into the bars and rods.  To see the components of the sword absorb the spirit of fire.  To watch the iron suck heat so much out of the coals that the slaves at the bellows had to pump furiously and the wind to howl more wildly to keep the spitting fire alive.
    At last the prince cried, “Now!” and we hauled the bars and rods out of the fire.
    All of us, slaves and prince and merlin, hammered the gleaming hot metal, slaking off the last impurities and the threats of visiting demons.  We hammered the bars into five long, rectangular bars of steely iron.  We welded them together with heavy hammer blows on the yellow iron, the blows clattering in rhythm like a wagon wheel on a stony Roman road.
    The gnome, curled in at the peak of the ceiling, sang the twisting song.  We gripped the welded yellow bar with tongs at each end and twisted sun-wise to flake out the last corruption in the iron and to give the metal its spring strength.
    We worked again on another welding of another set of five iron bars, heating and hammering and twisting, but turning this bar anti-sun-wise for a balancing of strength in the heart of the sword.
    We did it all again and again until we