Chapter V:
An Inspiration

AS ON THAT first day more than a millennium ago, a clamor arose among King Henry’s court for the stranger’s execution. True to my original part in the proceedings, I remained silent,—not plotting anyone’s demise this time, but curious as to how the event would unfold. The expected debate ensued regarding the enchanted nature of the stranger’s clothing as to whether the garments would deliver him from execution.

I paid close heed to this discussion, given my knowledge in all matters magical. I did not doubt that such a powerful and useful enchantment could be wrought, provided the one performing the incantation possessed skill enough and will enough to bring it to pass. Excalibur’s scabbard was imbued by such an enchantment by the Lady of the Lake, which is why I had removed it from Arthur’s possession; he never could have been killed otherwise, and his chroniclers would have had to dub him “The Once and Forever King.”

What I did begin to doubt on this day, watching these players in general and the stranger in particular, was whether the stranger himself believed in the power—or even the very existence—of an enchantment upon his clothing. While knights and ladies argued this way and that, with King Henry and Queen Anne and the faux sirs Kay and Launcelot interjecting their opinions from time to time, the stranger first stared at the monarchs and the court in surprise and confusion, reached his own conclusion regarding the debate, and then proceeded to adopt an attitude of casual indifference.

A gray-bearded old man, dressed in elaborate midnight robes embroidered with innumerable stars and other symbols and wearing a similarly caparisoned pointed hat surmounted by a gray feather—clearly the “Merlin” player of this drama, though the real Merlin never would have worn such fanciful garments—rose to speak. Everyone else fell silent.

His sage gaze traversed the assembly, his visage bearing amusement and disdain in equal measures. “Are you so dull?” he asked the court in a tone and pitch surely everyone could hear. Beside me, Queen Anne shifted in her seat. “Strip off the ogre’s enchanted raiment and be done with him!”

The stranger’s indifference evaporated as knights seized his arms and tore off his clothing. Most of his clothing, I should amend for the record, unlike on the original day, when the man fated to become The Boss stood as naked before King Arthur’s court as in the hour of his birth, though far cleaner.

That deviation from the proceedings was a tremendous disappointment to me. Ever I welcome the opportunity to admire the male form in its full splendor, whether said male be prince, knight, ogre, or otherwise. Still, my recollection of the true event served me well. If this player had been chosen for his likeness to the stranger of my era, then it stood to reason that the similarities extended to the rest of him.

Queen Anne remarked, with admiration and none too discreetly, that she had never seen anyone with legs like the stranger’s. Queen Guenever had said something similar to me, which at the time I dismissed as sheer foolishness coming from someone who was interested in only one pair of legs in the whole of England, and those not belonging to her husband.

This time I gave the stranger’s legs a second look.

In truth they appeared comely enough, tanned and hard-muscled, protruding at a goodly length below the knee cuffs of tight-fitting trousers that enhanced the rest of his glory. It occurred to me, then, that perhaps Queen Anne—as with Queen Guenever before her—had not in fact been referring to the appendages upon which the stranger walked.

Languidly I licked my lips. The fabric comprising the trousers did not look sturdy enough to last long when subjected to the rigors of dungeon internment.

However, in yet another departure from the proceedings, when Sir Kay’s prisoner was led, bound and fully naked, to the dungeon, thence to languish for two days while the stake and viewing area were prepared, the stranger began at once to shout his threat to visit a terrible calamity upon the entire kingdom on account of his being the “Supreme Grand High-yu Muckamuck” of all magicians.

King Henry, visibly shaken, stood ready to release the prisoner with all haste; but the faux Merlin made a few dramatic passes through the air with his hands, mumbled a few garbled yet dramatic-sounding syllables, and addressed the stranger.

“I have wrought a spell about you of the most potent kind, binding your magic for to protect the king and queen and all the court. Spout what words you may; you can wreak no harm upon us.”

The nearly naked stranger grinned. “Merlin, you cheap old humbug! You maundering old ass! You claim to have protected your king and court? Bosh is what it is, pure bosh, the silliest bosh in the world!”

The faux Merlin appeared unfazed. To King Henry, he said, “This is simply the bravado of the condemned. Do with him what you will, Sire. My enchantment shall stand proof against any test of his devising.”

Whereupon King Henry ordered the immediate commencement of the stranger’s execution.

“No! You cannot!” cried the stranger as minions carried in an already assembled platform and stake, along with bundles of faggots, which they began piling onto the platform’s planks. “Continue no further, or I will rain down upon you the most severe calamity imaginable!”

All activity stopped. Merlin crossed his arms and gave the stranger a severe look. “Very well, ogre. Name the calamity.”

The stranger, with a stupefied look not unlike the deer that sees the arrow winging to kill it, remained silent.

“You see, Sire?” Merlin said to the king. “The ogre does not name this calamity because he cannot. He is no magician, supreme, grand, mucky, or otherwise.”

King Henry ordered the work to recommence.

A slow, hopeful glint lit the stranger’s eyes. “Wait! If you do not desist at once and spare my life, I will smother the whole world in the dead blackness of midnight; I will blot out the sun, and he shall never shine again; the fruits of the earth shall rot for lack of light and warmth, and the peoples of the earth shall famish and die to the last man!”

Queen Anne heaved a gasping sigh and swooned in her throne. The other ladies did likewise; lacking thrones, they left it for their noble menfolk to catch them lest they topple backward off their benches and injure themselves. It had transpired thus during my era, although the reactions had been prompted by a page’s announcement of the prisoner’s dire message rather than being pronounced by the prisoner himself. Said thrice-cursed page, Amyas le Poulet, was later fated to become The Boss Hank Morgan’s closest confidant and deputy, whom it pleased The Boss to call Clarence; had I known it then, I would have dispatched that little chicken, too, and no one of consequence would have dared say nay.

I did not swoon, either then or now, being both times more interested in seeing whether this self-proclaimed mucky-muck magician could bring such a calamity to pass.

Understand, fair reader, that I write this account armed with the accumulated wisdom of the ages, having since learned that the event to which the stranger referred is a natural phenomenon called an eclipse, when the moon—not any magician, of any rank or strength of powers or degree of muckyness—casts its mantle of shadow in the semblance of having obliterated the sun. I know now what I did not know then: that the real Hank Morgan could no more have caused the earth to fall under a doom of darkness than this man pretending to be him could on this day.

I held no sway over the shining of the sun itself, either; but I did note well that there existed in the sky not even the remotest hint of the birth of a single cloud, and so I conceived a plan to show these pretenders that there indeed stood among them someone who wielded genuine power.

Long have I practiced the art of weather magic, it being useful to influence the outcome of battles with the presence or absence of fog, glare, torrential rains, ice storms, and the like. Bending the weather to my will also proves useful if I wish to speed or hinder a courier, increase the yield of my lands, or engender a certain ambience when entertaining guests.

Later chroniclers have vaunted Camelot as possessing perfect weather; believe them not. Silver-footed unicorns did live there, I warrant, but the climate claim was a ruse invented by Arthur to lure in the families of the Round Table knights, that their presence in Camelot might encourage more seemly behavior among the men. A bachelor knight, even one so called because his wife resides in a faraway land, is a knight vulnerable to temptation. This I know for a personal fact; in the early days I kept a tally, but the list grew so long that it ceased to be a point of interest to me.

Nay; ’tis Gore, through the exercise of my weather magic, that stands—stood—most blessed of all the blessed lands of all the blessed British Isles.

This day I resolved to summon a thunderhead from a cloudless sky, creating an illusion of darkness perhaps not as deep as a total eclipse, but near enough for my purposes, and watch the social downpour caused by my magical display fall where it might.

As King Henry and his knights remained distracted by their swooning ladies, and with the Lady Jane Seymour—who, to her credit, did not swoon—and the not-an-ogre stranger watching me intently, each wearing an expression of unabashed curiosity, I stood, closed my eyes, and began marshaling my power.