Merlin and Nimuê, the fantasy novel I’m presently writing, takes place in 8th century Wales two hundred years after Camelot fell. Merlin has aged backward to a lanky 16-year-old with freckles and hair dull as straw. (Gemini AI provided the image.) Profoundly depressed that he failed Arthur, he turned his magic on himself and erased his name, so that in the text Merlin is [▬▬]. Since then, he’s been calling himself Jack. Then I found out that the name Jack is a Middle English diminutive of John, from the 12th – 13th century. This name is clearly load-bearing in my story, so I’m wondering if Merlin, I mean [▬▬], selected it from a future he glimpsed. Or should I give up Jack in favor of a solid 8th century Brythonic male name like Caradog, Idwal, Hywel, Grifud or Cadwaladr? For now, I’ll stick with [▬▬]’s future vision. Jack recently tried to exorcise the ghost of King Arthur so necromancers wouldn’t abuse it. That failed, and the “blood-memory” of Arthur wanders the countryside. In this scene, I’m trying out an encounter of the king’s ghost and his wizard, to see what they might say to each other. (Play nice, you two.)
The boy-wizard ambled across the champaign beneath scarlet twilight. At the edge of the woods, he sat on the stone face of a large sundial, his back against the gnomon. From under his big hat, he watched fathomless indigo deepen into dusk above reefs of maroon clouds. The hour had a sulky feeling in it.
Breezes sliding out of the forest’s blind tunnels crossed the field with a scent of melancholy. The wraith, his final face vivid, appeared among the trees. He came as the king who had gone down at Camlann – bareheaded, red cuirass split at the ribs, blood dried black in the brindled beard – and he walked as if the ground were unsure. A wounded gait.
Jack watched closely to see if this revenant carried an ominous portent. He relaxed when he noticed that the shade approached alone in the twilight’s expanse.
The king stopped ten paces from the sundial. He had no shadow. The last of the light went through him and lay on the grass before him.
“You’ve come a long way,” Jack said in Brythonic. The mind of ghosts ill-fitted the present, and the wizard could feel the king’s confusion.
Jack felt the wraith wondering: Who was this lad, sitting before him high and solitary atop the sun-table? Young yet – somehow not. The blue night so vibrant around him, filling the measure of the moment with such soft force, he appeared ageless.
The ghost of Arthur Rex fixed a hard stare on Jack and whispered, “I see you, [▬▬].”
The wizard’s name chiseled silence.
“I am not misled,” Arthur insisted. Frightful intelligence possessed that harrowed face streaked in blood. “This stripling I see is you, wizard. How do I know? I see you, [▬▬]. I am awake and shorn of flesh. And I see you in this child.”
By the very softness of the wraith’s hollow voice, Jack sensed panic. He restrained an impulse to soothe the apparition with a spell. Sitting up straighter, he answered the ghastly semblance of the king frankly, “I am your wizard, my lord. Not a child. A young man is my guise.”
The pressure of the ghost’s stare eased. “Am I dead?”
Jack met the blood-raddled gaze steadily. “You are not dead. You fell at Camlann, and fey queens carried you from the field. They tend your wounds on the Isle of Apples.”
“Fey?” The wraith backed away, and the ravaged length of him flickered like a lamp. “What will become of my Christian soul?”
“You are not dead, lord. Your living body on Avalon holds safe your Christian soul.”
The specter steadied and canted his head. “Yet, I drift through fields I do not know, past people who cannot see me. Do not deceive me, wizard. Am I dead?”
“The king lives on Avalon,” Jack repeated firmly. “You are only a blood-memory of the king. I raised you from the soil that drank your blood two hundred years ago.”
That news droned with horror in the wraith. “You did this to me?”
Jack could hear the ghost’s thoughts as he realized: Centuries have passed. Centuries! And that old devil has aged backward to a young devil.
The king’s phantom, wobbly as a reflection in water, quailed before the centuries of distance. “You disjointed me from my body – from my kingdom.”
“A body alive on Avalon. A kingdom undone from within. I’ve visited no harm on your person, my lord. But I will remove from this world your self.”
The wraith of Arthur Rex staggered a step forward, then back, bewildered. “What casuistry is this, wizard?”
Jack took off his hat and set it on the stone beside him. “I tried to send you to a world adjacent to ours, an everlasting summer of splendid hunting. Well out of reach of necromancers or anyone who might abuse you.”
“Abuse me?” The wraith laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. It had no breath in it. “You raised me from the ground. You abused me. And then you lost your grip. Do you understand what you have done? I was nothing. Now I am nothing remembering everything.”
“I know.”
“You know.” Arthur came closer. His outline smeared as he moved, colors trailing him like a child’s crayon dragged across a page. “You knew at Camlann too. You knew before Camlann. Tell me you did not see it.”
Jack said nothing.
“Tell me.”
“I saw it,” Jack said. “Years before. I saw the blow, and I saw who gave it, and I saw your face when you knew him. I saw all of it.”
“And you let me ride.”
“What I see, I cannot change. You know that. I told you that a hundred times.”
“You told me a hundred things a hundred times.” The wraith’s voice dropped. “You told me God had chosen me. You told me the sword came out of the stone because I was worthy of it. You told me the Virgin’s hands were on me. I believed you. I lived for it. I killed for it.” He held up a hand and looked at it, at the dusk showing through the palm. “Was any of it true?”
Jack stood. It seemed wrong to sit for this.
“The sword came out because I made the stone let go of it,” he said. “The men fell to their knees because I put the kneeling in them. You were fifteen. You were an orphan with a temper and a good sword arm and no one behind you, and I needed a king, and I made one. The faith was yours. The Virgin was yours. You brought her with you from whatever hedge-priest raised you. I only fed her.”
“Fed her.”
“Every time you doubted, I took the doubt away. That was my gift to you. Certainty. You never had a sleepless night that I did not smooth for you.”
The wraith stood very still. “So when I burned the groves at Celliwig,” he said slowly. “When I put the hob-shrines to the torch and hanged the wild people from their own oaks and called it the cleansing of the land – you smoothed that.”
“I told you it was necessary. I believed it was necessary.”
“Was it?”
“No.” Jack held the king’s stare. “I misled myself.”
The wraith made a noise like laughter. “Your devil tricked you.”
“Yes. Lailoken moved me to believe a Christian mystery justified those purges.” The boy shrugged with disbelief at his gullibility. “A divine promise that slaying infidels assured peace for all. A millennium of turned cheeks.”
In the deepening dark, the ghost’s voice hovered like a fume. “You inflamed me against the pagans.”
Jack slumped to recall that awful time. And he gave voice to his dark intelligence: “Your purges made the land hate you, Arthur. They made the land hate me. It’s why there are no more kings in Britain who can hold more than a valley. The ground itself will not carry them. I did that. I taught you that God wanted blood, because you already thought so, and it was easier to steer a man who was certain than to argue with one who was not.”
“And Camelot?”
“Camelot was mine.” Jack’s expression changed to something inconsolable. “Not the stones – the idea. A thousand years of peace. A fellowship of equals. Reason on the throne and valor in the field. I had the whole shape of it before you could grow a beard, and I built it around you the way a wasp builds around a grub.”
The wraith’s features filled with sorrow. “They loved me,” he said. “At the Table. Gawain. Bedwyr. Cai, who never loved anyone. They would have died for me. They did die for me.”
“Some of them loved you.”
“Some.” The king’s bold eyebrows lifted.
“The fellowship needed to hold. When it frayed, I mended it. A word here. A dream there. A man wakes up and finds he no longer resents his king. He thinks it is grace.” Jack’s voice had gone flat. “I do not know anymore which of them came to you freely and which I brought. That is the truth, Arthur. That is the whole rot of it. Your court was the finest thing in the world and half of it was my hand up its back.”
For a long moment, neither spoke. A nightjar started up in the woods and stopped.
“And her,” the wraith asked, not looking at the wizard.
Jack waited.
“My sister. You knew what she was. You knew what she wanted. You knew wickedness was in her, and you let her cozen me.” King Arthur’s woeful countenance with its intricate sorrows fixed on Jack. “You watched Mordred grow up in her house and said nothing to me. Twenty years, wizard. Twenty years you looked at that boy and knew.”
A scream pushed into the wizard’s closed mouth. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I had seen it,” Jack said, “and what I have seen I cannot change.” The withheld scream collapsed to a sigh. “And I was a coward. Both. You can have both. I told myself that if I kept the shape of Camelot whole for one more year, and one more, the peace would root deep enough that even Camlann could not pull it up. I was wrong. I put men on that field who were not men. Did you know that? Half the second line. Shapes I made to swell your numbers and frighten Mordred’s scouts. When his horse broke through, they went out like candles. Your own knights saw the men beside them vanish and thought God had left the field. Perhaps He had.”
A penetrating chill from the ghost passed through the wizard. “You are an unholy fool, [▬▬].”
Jack nodded. He looked out across the dark champaign toward the night forest.
“The other one, your demon,” the ghost of Arthur Rex said, quieter. “The one who lives under your face. I would not say his name as freely as you, but I knew him. I had felt him at my shoulder my whole life. In the burning. In the hanging. I thought it was my own zeal.” He turned back. “Was it ever mine? Any of it?”
“The zeal was his,” Jack said. “The grief afterward was yours. He has never grieved for anything.”
“And you, wizard?”
“I am what is left when you and he are done arguing.”
Arthur looked at him for a long time – at the freckled boy’s face, trying to imagine the gaunt old man he had known.
“I should hate you,” he said.
“You should.”
“I cannot find it. Whatever you are, you took that too, I think. When you lifted me from the earth.” He shook his ruined head. “I would ask you to put me back in the ground. But you cannot, can you? You are too weak.”
“Not now,” Jack muttered. “Not yet.” His will felt flimsy as a sheet stripped from a sickbed, but he vowed anyway, “I shall restore you to your place of rest. I swear it.”
“You have sworn things before.” The wraith was already fading, the colors going thin and separating, the red of the cuirass hanging a moment in the air after the rest had gone. “Do not think to…”
The vaporous voice vanished, and he was not there.
Jack sat down on the face of the sundial. His hands were shaking, and he watched them shake until they stopped. Then he put on his hat and looked back at the dense woods, and the dim hour, which had been sulky, was now something else – the unlit, waiting dark of a place that had been listening.