Read The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) for Free Online Page B

the Lady of the Lake that which I was privileged to borrow so little time…”
    I would wake from the dream shouting in fright, hear the groaning of wind from the rear of Galabes’ cave, smell the peculiar scent of oak in springtime on that wind, and lapse into shivering sleep once more.
    That was my life.  Only with the spring equinox when all the world aged a year and I, at fifteen, had become a woman, did I realize what I had been taught by the beggar-knight and his watching hound:
    I knew the herbs and flowers, those to eat and cure and those to poison, those to make miracles with the right prayers.
    I knew the mountains and the rivers of Wales in snow, rain, and heat.
    I could ride, run, jump, swim, and fight in all weathers, all seasons, night or day, with lance, spear, arrow, javelin, dart, with British greatsword or Roman gladius or Saxon scramasax, with club, mace, chain, dagger, battle ax.
    Despite the fright of it, I had learned to write the soul-names of Arthur and Guenevere, of all two hundred Round Tablers, chief among them Bedivere, Galahad, and Lancelot the Holy Traitor.
    I knew to call them up by soul-names in my dreams where I tried to speak to them through the crash and batter of Camlann.
    But Galabes would not teach me the spelling of his own soul-name or even its sound.
    At last, with winter nearly passed and the crusty edges of the mountain snow beginning to dribble away in the first warmth of early spring, Galabes brought me for the first time into the comfort of his cave.  It was a shambles of rotted leather and antique fur, rusted steel weapons and armor, moldy helmet feathers and rotted boots.  It looked like the leavings of a Legion slaughtered uncountable years before I was born.
    In a far corner, beneath black drapery, I spotted the edge of a glass shield glowing dimly in the dank cave light.  Who carried a glass shield in Arthur’s day?  Galabes had taught me the names of all the Round Tablers.  Think, think.  Yes, it was Lucan, the king’s great adjutant, the man who shaped a Table of two hundred boisterous men and women into a fighting war band.  Why that one shield undamaged by age and rot in all this heap of rubble?
    Galabes was proud of these ruins.  He named each warrior at Camlann who was saved by this bit of twisted mail or broke that ax on a Saxon skull and which fighting princess skewered which of Mordred’s knights with that splintered spear over there.
    The stories were wonderful to hear but, after my winter’s exhaustion of training and learning, eating lean and sleeping rough, I was warm for the first moments in all that season and collapsed asleep among his lice-hopping furs.
    Galabes in sudden fury grabbed me up and awake and hauled me deep into the rear of his cave and shouted, “There, you fool!  Name this creature!”
    “What creature?” I said, struggling in the darkness to see anything at all, grabbing for my stone weapons to defend myself against monsters, hearing the sighs and groans of some creature’s misery.
    He threw me against a tree.  I felt its bark and leaves.  I heard its moans of agony.
    A tree there in the rear of his cave?  There was no light here but the tree gleamed faintly, like the Three Sisters in Orion’s sword belt in the night sky.
    I could see it was immense and leafy even in the absence of sunshine, water, and earth.  Growing up out of the cave’s stone floor.  Spreading up the wall and ceiling and carrying its faint glow into the farthest gloom, where leaves and branches moaned and sighed.
    “Name it!” roared Galabes.
    “Tree, tree!” I shouted.  “It’s only a tree.  A merlin oak.”
    “You fool,” he said, swatting at me.  “Not you.  The tree. ”
    I looked into the glow of the tree and heard nothing but its miserable groans.
    “What’s a tree supposed to say?  Let me strike a flame.” I reached into my purse for flint and punk.
    The tree shrieked in terror.
    Galabes grabbed me by the collar, hauled me