Short Story

Originally published in When the Hero Comes Home (Dragon Moon Press, 2011)

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The first thing that Arthur Pendragon, the Once and Future (well, Now-ish) King did upon his rebirth into the world at the moment of Albion’s greatest need, was to open his shrivelled red mouth and squall out: “Oh hell, no.”

Which startled his Mother quite badly, you’ll understand, as she had just put him to her breast for his first little feeding. She shook her head and glared balefully at the IV needle in the bend of her elbow, ignored her new son’s outburst, and went about her task.

The second thing that Arthur Pendragon, the Once and Now-ish King did upon his rebirth into the world at the moment of Albion’s greatest need, was to consume his body weight in breast milk. After which, he soiled his nappy, burped quite dramatically, and took a wee bit of a nap.

Getting born was hard work, you know.

The next thing that Arthur Pendragon, the Once and Now-ish King, did upon his rebirth was to wake up and ask to where that good for nothing senile git of a wizard had gotten. Nobody else was in the hospital room with Arthur and his new mother, so he had to repeat it a few times to convince her that she was not, in fact, hearing things. “Great ancient sorcerer with the beard?”

“What, Gandalf?” his mother asked, trying to make her eyes the size of regular eyes again, rather than saucers. She wasn’t quite succeeding. “Or, um, Merlin?”

“Yes, Merlin!” Arthur shrilled, then frowned because his voice hadn’t been that high since, well, since the last time he was a baby. In a more sedate, and what he hoped was a more kingly tone, he went on to clarify: “Who the hell else would I mean?”

“I, uh, I’m sure I don’t know, dearest,” his mother said, and started to cry.

Arthur felt quite bad about that, because she seemed a nice lady, especially since she had just put up with him in her womb for nine months. He resolved to be a bit gentler with her thereafter.

Were Guinevere here, she would surely have clipped him round his ears already.

Arthur was quiet on the way home, watching with utter fascination as his new father manhandled the strange metal carriage in which they rode. The motion of the vehicle made him nod off, soothing and quite like being tucked up safe and sound in a caring person’s arms. His only grievance with this was that he had hoped to see more of the strange and wonderful world outside of the vehicle’s windows. There were tall buildings and everything was covered in glass. Some great king must have been very wealthy to afford to give his subjects a whole city of glass.

The thought caused his tiny tummy to burble with foreboding, because perhaps this wealthy king was the very person he had been brought back to defeat. Shoving thoughts of his destiny aside for now – it was not as if he had Excalibur, or was yet strong enough to even lift her – he let the rocking motion lull him into a doze.

Once they arrived home, Arthur made a point of vocally admiring the shade of green on the walls of his nursery, and complimented his mother on her pretty coming-home dress. He had, after all, promised himself to be nicer.

She started crying again, and Arthur, who had never really been all that good with girls and who probably wouldn’t have ever been able to attract a wife had he not had a crown weighing on his forehead, looked at his father and said, “What did I do?” He really wished Guinevere was here. His father only plopped down into the rocking chair and stared in horror at his little face.

“What?” Arthur said.

“I… don’t think this was in the baby books, hon,” his father said, all the blood draining from his face. If the man was going to swoon, Arthur hoped to at least be set down somewhere first. But the man stayed upright. He gulped on the air for a bit, then when his colour had mostly come back, he stood and lay Arthur in the middle of the crib and grabbed his wife’s wrist. They left. Arthur heard the footsteps pad across the carpeting, tracking them as they traversed the hallway and then descended the stairs and went out the front door.

Oh, dear.

For a long, long time, Arthur lay still, listening. There was no shouting, no noisy roar of an unhappy lynch mob or of the metal vehicles. There was only Arthur and the inadequate swaddling blanket and the boring white ceiling. There were also five fuzzy white sheep that kept going around and around above his head, hypnotic and really sort of …marvellous.

Right around when his stomach started to cramp with hunger, but after the King of Albion had suffered the indignity of losing control of his own bowels and soiling his nappy, his mother came back.

She hovered in the doorway for a moment, and Arthur gummed his bottom lip and tried to decide if he should say anything. It was, after all, what had gotten him into this mess. Before he could, she darted across the floor like a war charger and scooped him close and pressed his cheek against her neck and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t, you’re my son and you’re perfect and I love you.”

Arthur reached up and patted her cheek gently. “I understand,” he said, and sort of thought that he did.

Then his mother offered him a bottle, and he tried not to be disappointed. He wouldn’t want to nurse a baby with the thought processes and memories of an adult man either, really, but the bottle meant she was rejecting him, if only a little. Arthur’s stomach swooped in fear, and he realized it was because he didn’t want to lose those tender, affectionate moments when he was wrapped in his mother’s arms, head against her breast and the sound of her heart soothing him. He supposed he couldn’t blame her. It had to be weird, having a fully articulate, fully cognizant child latching to your breast.

🗡️

Arthur was doing his damndest to stay asleep and not let the little hunger cramps or the haunting sense that he wasn’t bundled up enough wake him every few hours. It was uncomfortable and odd, but he was determined. He was absolutely capable of letting his parents get a full night’s sleep, and perhaps to do the same himself. Having always been a man of strong will, he managed to do just that.

Somewhere in the middle of all of it, Arthur also managed to dream.

He was standing on a battlefield and he knew Mordred was behind him, but he couldn’t turn around fast enough. He hadn’t been fast enough in real life, either. Then there was Guinevere’s big liquid eyes, and Lancelot’s guilty frown, and something Merlin whispered in his ear about coming back one day, about the future of the kingdom resting upon his soul, about being called forth again like the pagan gods from their barrows…

And then there was a shrill screaming, the likes of which Arthur hadn’t heard since once of his horses had fallen into a pit dug in the road by his enemies and snapped its foreleg. He’d killed the stallion for pity. It wasn’t until someone’s big warm hands were on his back and he felt himself tucked protectively against his father’s soft, sloping chest that he realized he was awake and the shrill, plaintive sounds were coming from him. He, the Once and Now-ish King, was sobbing hysterically.

“Shhhh, buddy,” his father said, and jogged him a few times, bumping him closer to wakefulness. “You’re safe, you’re safe. Daddy’s here.”

Arthur snuffled closer and let himself cry out the rest of his residual fear, because what his father said was true. He was safe here. At least for now. There were no dragons to slay, no traitors to rout, no scheming and politics to navigate, no affair to untangle. There was only Arthur, and his father’s warm assurance, the sound of his mother’s soft snores in the other room, and the woolly sheep spinning in a calm, slow circle, blown by the cool breeze of the night time air slipping past the gap in the endearingly crooked windowsill.

“Daddy,” Arthur said, curling chubby fists into the collar of the man’s sleep shirt, and didn’t feel ridiculous at all for using such a juvenile term. King Uther would have boxed young Arthur’s ears for daring to utter it, but here, now, it felt right. “I’m Arthur,” he breathed.

“I know,” the man said, and dropped a soft, dry kiss on his son’s cheek. “That is what we put on the birth certificate.”

The open affection of the gesture shocked Arthur into more tears, though these ones were soft, quiet, and grateful.

🗡️

A few days later, Arthur’s father was comfortable enough with his verbosity to hold complete, if distracted, conversations. Which was good, because the nightmare of his death had been subtly shifting each time Arthur fell asleep; he still stood on a field, but instead of being behind him with a sword, Mordred now stood before him on a broad grassy plain, and unlike the battlefield of his memory it was free of blood and the fallen. Instead of being alone on that knoll, he now had the vague impression of being watched on all sides, and of the tension that crackled between him and his traitorous nephew. They both wanted—coveted—something, and Arthur wondered if it was a crown again, or something more vital. Something more dangerous.

He stood and stared at Mordred and Mordred stood and stared at him, hands out as if prepared to grapple, weaponless and ready to strike. Arthur wished he had Excalibur so he could wallop the whelp down before the ungrateful snake could do him in a second time.

But then the dream ended; it always ended before either of them made a move.

Arthur felt that it was perhaps a warning, a vision of the future or the battle to come, and Arthur wanted to be certain he knew what it meant when the time arrived. He needed to understand, and the only way he could do that was to ask questions, to discuss.

But he couldn’t do that until his father, so far the only other person besides his mother he trusted enough with this information, understood what was at stake.

“I feel the need to clarify,” Arthur said as his father closed the bedroom door behind them. Downstairs were his mother’s parents and his father’s sister, all of whom had come to coo at the new baby and who, Arthur’s father had patiently explained that morning, probably didn’t need to know that their shiny new grandson and nephew could speak like a functional adult. Arthur, therefore, had spent the morning making gurgling sounds and being as adorable as he could manage and was really starved for some honest adult interaction.

“Clarify what?” Arthur’s father asked, holding Arthur away from his body as if to ensure that the slight smell wouldn’t travel through the nappy and into his own clothes.

“My name,” Arthur said. “I’m not just any old Arthur – though I am thrilled that the name has gained such popularity. I am Arthur, King of the Britons, Uniter and Ruler of the land of Albion. And put me down already, man, you look ridiculous. Honestly, it’s not going to explode.”

Arthur’s father chuckled and put Arthur on the change table and began the lengthy process of preparing to change his nappy.

“You do know me, don’t you?” Arthur asked worriedly, when his father hadn’t immediately been shocked, or gone into raptures, or at least made a leg and called him “your majesty.” Perhaps he was forgotten.

“Hm, what?” his father asked, rooting around under the table for the wet wipes and dry powder. “Right, yes, King Arthur, quest for the Holy Grail, Sean Connery, myths to make the Welsh feel better about themselves, all that.”

Arthur furrowed his chubby brow as best he could. All of him was chubby right now and it actually was slightly annoying. It was hard to be taken seriously when one was so damnably cute. “Sean who?”

“Actor. Played King Arthur in the films.”

The thought that he had passed into history had been certain to Arthur; he had already been a great historical figure while he had lived. That he would pass into legend was a possibility, though he didn’t enjoy the idea that he might have been forgotten as a real person. To find that he had become a myth hurt in ways that Arthur couldn’t directly pinpoint, but he thought that it might have something to do with the idea that all of his bloody and hard work had been reduced to the sphere of an epithet, and all the people he had known and loved had been distilled into archetypes and clichés, ghosts of themselves.

But to find that there had been a film…horrifying.

Arthur had already seen two films in his admittedly young life – one that made his mother weep and smile as the man declared his love for the unattractively thin woman with a wide face (arms like toothpicks, she’d never be able to raise a blade to defend herself or her children from invaders), and one filled with great balls of fire and fast chases in those metal vehicles he now knew were called “cars” – and wasn’t sure he had any great love for this bastardization of the bardic tale-weaving he had known in his last life. Though, he had to admit, the television was a remarkable invention.

To take his mind off it, he asked, “What exactly is wrong with Albion, anyway?”

“Pardon?” his father asked again, concentrating on his task and perhaps watching Arthur’s willy with more apprehension than was strictly polite. After all, Arthur hadn’t weed on him on purpose, and he had apologised besides. “What’s an Albion?”

“This land. I united it. I ruled the whole island once, you know. Don’t tell me somebody let it get all split up into different kingdoms again after all the hard work I did.”

“It was for, oh, a thousand or so years,” his father said, reaching for the fresh nappies, eyes still on Arthur. “But then Scotland and Wales and part of Ireland got sucked back in, wars for a few centuries about all of that, too, and so it’s all mostly united again. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We just say the ‘UK’ now, son. Oh, but, uh, I guess there’s the colonies, too, only they’re not colonies any more as we’ve become a commonwealth state and –”

Arthur coughed and his father trailed off, concentrating on getting the nappy under his son. Not a Kingdom anymore but a whole Empire; Arthur felt overwhelming responsibility pressing strangely on his little shoulders. Perhaps it would mean that he would be less prepared when the hour of need came, but right now Arthur wished that he could have had a childhood like the last one: oblivious of his destiny and happy in his innocence.

After a short silence, Arthur prompted: “So, Albion’s greatest hour of need?”

The man shrugged. “Rotter in Downing Street? War in the Middle East? Decline of social niceties in direct correlation with the rise of texting and tweens?”

“Maybe it hasn’t happened yet,” Arthur ventured. Then he sighed, because baby powder? Best. Feeling. Ever.

“You’d be born before the thing that would make you need to be born has happened?” his father said, and finally looked up.

“Magic works in strange ways; besides, Merlin lived his life backwards. He always knew what was going to happen before it did.” Arthur wanted to grin, but a wave of melancholy swept over him instead. “It was always frustrating, though, because he never remembered the day before. It was…difficult. Having a friend who never shared the same memories, I mean. Who never…shared anything you loved. Except your friendship.” Arthur swallowed. “And the in-jokes never worked. Anyway. He’d know when I had to be born again. So that means whatever it is, it probably hasn’t happened yet.”

“That’s a comfort,” his father allowed. “I guess. None of us can choose his destiny.”

Arthur frowned. “No; but some of us have it chosen for them.” Arthur let this percolate for a bit as his father tamped down the sticky tabs on the side of his new nappy and picked him up. “By the way… surprisingly insightful, old man,” Arthur said, snuffling and burrowing close to his father’s warmth and the comfortable, safe smell of his neck.

His father smiled. “Thanks, kiddo. You get your brains from me.”

Arthur felt that a good gummy yawn was probably agreement enough, and proceeded to put thought into action.

🗡️

Arthur dreamed again. He dreamt of the great grassy plain, and of thousands of millions pairs of eyes watching him from stands erected all around him, hemming him in. But it was getting more detailed, the more he experienced it; or maybe it was just that he was familiar enough with the skeleton of the dream that he could allow his mind to take in the other, seemingly less important details.

It was a tourney field of some sort, but it was bisected at its narrowest, rather than with a rail across the length. This was not a jousting field, nor did Arthur wear any mail or armour. That it was a place for fighting, he knew, but what kind escaped him.

Mordred just crouched before him, a flapping swatch of white suspended on a metal frame behind his head, smirking and horrible and waiting.

They were both dressed in a ridiculously flimsy pair of uniforms, with thin boots and shin guards. The material was so slight that it would not block any blade, and it was in a colour so bright and garish that they would never be able to hide from their enemies. Perhaps that was the point; to prove that the knight wearing it was firm enough of mettle and strong enough of arm to not require armour.

The people in the stands around him blasted their disproval of his inaction into short, obnoxious trumpets and the sound filled the grounds with the angry buzz of disturbed hornets. They looked at him with such eager expectation, and Arthur had no idea how to give them what they wanted. He had always feared not being able to satisfy his subjects, but their now gazes were positively hungry. Arthur wondered what could be at stake should he fail this test that would make them so desperate.

A golden club sat in the middle of the tourney field. It was cup-shaped and large, with a great ball cradled between the carven swaths of its base. Arthur knew it was not the Grail. Beyond that, he had no idea why it might be significant, and his ignorance annoyed him as much as the anxiety in the audience’s eyes ate away at his confidence.

A sharp cry woke him and he was chagrined to discover that once more it had come from him. Imagine, King Arthur, the strongest arm at the Round Table and the firmest of grip on the crown, unable to contain his own whimpers. Or bowels, for that matter. He shifted once in the darkness, but no tell-tale dampness announced its presence and he sighed. He was getting better at controlling that, at least.

When his mother came into the room a few minutes later with his bottle, Arthur peered up at her from his crib and said, “I’m sorry, Mother.”

“Babies are like ink cartridges; low capacity and need to be refilled often,” his mother said with a strained smile. There were dark smudges under her eyes and Arthur felt so guilty that he couldn’t help the involuntary squirm.

“I didn’t mean the night feedings, though I appreciate that, too,” Arthur admitted, waving his hands happily at the bottle as his mother held it in his direction. She didn’t like to pick him up to feed him anymore. Arthur missed the feel of the beat of her heart next to his cheek, the soft warm milk-and-rose-water-smell she had, the gentleness of her long fingers on the back of his neck, but he didn’t dare say as much. He felt he was imposing on the poor woman enough. “I meant for… well… everything else.”

His mother let him latch onto the plastic nipple of the bottle and stayed silent as he sucked. The formula didn’t taste as wonderful as the breast milk had, but the fake bottle also wasn’t giving him strangely twisted feelings of both young security and old lasciviousness.

When he was done, his mother rubbed his full belly in gentle circles until the little burp of swallowed air bubbled out of his mouth. Kaye had always outdone him at banquets, but Arthur was becoming increasingly impressed with his own manful belches.

Normally after the bottle, Arthur’s mother left his nursery immediately. She was never inattentive or neglectful, not after that first time, but she wasn’t comfortable around her son, either. He left himself drift back in the direction of sleep. If she wanted to watch him do so, he was happy enough to oblige.

“Why don’t you talk to me as much as your father?”

Arthur blinked his way back towards consciousness and debated what his answer should be, or if indeed he should answer at all. But then, he never had been all that good at keeping his mouth shut when he should have – the sword in his back in the middle of a battlefield from the man who should have been his heir was proof enough of that.

“It seemed to make you happy,” Arthur replied softly.

His mother jerked back, then leaned over the rail of the cradle and pressed her lips to his forehead. “I have a son who is healthy and content. I am happy.”

“Then why do you look so sad all the time?” Arthur asked as she pulled away. Her eyes were sparkling again, like she was about to cry, ready to prove him right.

“I didn’t ask to have a son who is the reborn Rightwise King of All England,” his mother said softly.

“I didn’t ask to be reborn,” Arthur replied softly. “So I guess we both got the short end of that stick.”

“I’m scared,” she admitted. “I’m scared of what this means for the world. I’m scared that you’re going to be hurt. That you’re going to die.”

Arthur kicked his feet for a few moments, looking up in the darkness at his mother’s sad, dark eyes, the halo of woolly sheep that circled her head obliviously.

“What’s your name?” Arthur asked.

“Evangeline,” she said. “My friends call me Iggy.”

Arthur tried to smile, but all he managed was a gummy lip purse. “Iggy,” he said. “I’m scared too, Iggy.”

She put down the bottle and picked up her son and sat with him in the rocking chair and cuddled him close. “I’ll protect you, for as long as I can,” she whispered into the faint reddish wisps of his hair. “And I guess you should call me ‘Mummy.'”

“Do you want me to?”

Iggy pulled Arthur away from her stomach and met his eyes seriously.

“Yes,” she said softly, and smiled. It was tentative, but it also felt like a victory, if only a very small one.

“Very well,” Arthur sighed, content for the moment. “Mummy.”

She pulled him close again and rocked him slightly. She hummed a snatch of a lullaby that Arthur was surprised to realize he remembered from his first childhood. Then she told him a soft, sad story about the Lady of the Lake. Arthur didn’t have the heart to point out to her that he already knew this story with a bit more familiarity than he really would have liked, considering how it ended.

🗡️

Every night for the next few weeks, Arthur dreamt of the tourney grounds and the golden cup and the buzzing, expectant, hungry eyes of his audience. There were other knights with him. Though they, like him, wore new faces, he knew them for Owain, and Cai, Gwalchmai, Peredur, the golden Geraint, the frightened Trystan, bold Bedwyr, Cilhwch, Edeyrn, Cynon, and even that bastard Lancelot. They, like him, wore the flimsy white uniform quartered with red bands, the ineffectual shin armour, and the shoes with spiked bottoms. Opposite them stood other knights in fierce red, Mordred at their head with his customary, bloody smirk. Between them stood the gold cup, the new grail for which Arthur had realized across the course of his nightly dreams they fought on this flat, green battlefield.

“If you can make this kick,” Lancelot said behind his shoulder, “it’s ours. The whole world.”

“No pressure, then,” adult Arthur said in his dream. And then he began to run towards Mordred and the strange limp net that hung like a shredded battle flag behind him.

He could feel himself wind up for something, to make some sort of move, felt his focus narrow to a single prick of white and black that lay stark against the lush green grass.

But then he woke.

Again.

He resisted the childish urge to howl in frustration.

🗡️

“A babysitter?” Arthur said dubiously from his quilt on the living room floor. Those fantastic little woolly sheep were dangling above his head, suspended on a yellow plastic frame patterned with dragons. He loved those sheep – they were so entertaining. He tore his attention away to attempt to raise an eyebrow askance.

“You forget, your majesty,” his father said kindly, “you can’t even sit up on your own yet.”

Arthur, who couldn’t exactly prove the statement wrong, said grudgingly, “Okay. I guess. Enjoy your night out, Dad, Mum.”

“Thanks, darling,” his mother said, and smiled. It was one of those real smiles, one of the ones where she realized that maybe everything was going to be okay and that her life hadn’t turned out all strange and terrifying. She was smiling like that more often, lately, and Arthur was proud of himself to be part of why that kind of smile was ending up there.

Then the doorbell rang. His mother went to answer and his father gave him the thumbs up. Arthur tried to roll his eyes. Then he tried not to think about what they might be doing out alone tonight. And then he tried not to think about what it would be like to have a sibling.

The young girl came in ahead of his mum, blonde and probably about fourteen or so. Arthur wasn’t so good at estimating people’s ages any more – back in his first life, this girl would have been a woman already, preparing to marry or perhaps with children of her own. In this life, kids this age seemed stuck in a strange limbo between childhood and adulthood, irresponsible and yet filled with a coltish sexuality and raging libido that had no direction, and instead exploded all over the media.

There was something different about this one, though. Something in her that Arthur had never seen in the hundreds that were splashed all over the television that he watched with his father while cuddled on his tummy, or that his mother read about from the tabloids to help Arthur get sleepy enough for his naps. Her eyes looked old. Her bearing was comfortable, as if she completely inhabited her skin, was used to being in there.

It wasn’t until his mum had kissed him on the cheek and reminded him quietly that normal babies didn’t speak in fully articulate sentences, his parents had left, and the girl had come to sit on the floor beside him and tweaked his toes that Arthur finally clicked.

“Merlin?” Arthur squawked.

The girl scowled, a little wrinkle forming between her eyebrows that Arthur knew quite well. “What the hell do you think, your majesty?” she said, and though her voice was high and sweet, the old sorcerer’s tone hadn’t changed at all in the few thousand years since the king had last been chastised by Merlin. It very clearly said: you are my king and I respect you and love you in a brotherly way, but by all the dragons that once roamed Albion, are you a frigging idiot. “It’s not as if I planned this. The universe and Albion chose, not me. Besides,” she said, and took a moment to pop her hideously pink bubble gum with an obnoxious snap, “You should see Lancelot.”

“Ugly?”

“Very.”

“Awesome,” Arthur said, trying out one of the new words that the people around here seemed to like so much. “I hope his vanity is wounded. About time.” Arthur, understandably, had little love for a man who poached other people’s queens.

Merlin snorted indelicately.

“Well,” Arthur conceded, waving his chubby toes in her direction, then put them in his mouth because, well, he could. Around his toes he added: “I guess I don’t feel so cheated after all.”

Merlin looked at her wristwatch, snapped her gum again, and said, “The football final is on. Mind if we watch?”

“Football?” Arthur asked. “I don’t know football. Is it a sport?”

Merlin snorted again, that mannish sound that was so wrong coming from lips slick with gloss. “It’s a religion. This is a nation obsessed, your majesty. Even you won’t resist for long.”

Merlin propped Arthur up on her lap and Arthur leaned back into the warmth of her stomach and the reassuring patter of her heart. He watched with interest as Merlin explained the rules, and the work and passion the various nations of the world invested in the FIFA tournament.

It wasn’t until partway through the second half that Arthur realized that while he had never watched football before, he recognized the pitch and the stadium. And when the game was over and the blokes in orange were declared the tourney winners, Arthur immediately recognized the golden cup being hoisted aloft.

“The saviour of Albion, indeed,” he murmured.

Merlin just snapped her gum.

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If you enjoyed this story, you can find more like it in my short story collection Hero is a Four Letter Word.