Merlin's Beard!

“Are you sure about this?” asked Tiffin as he peered all around at the foreboding trees. Trees that probably hid all manner of ferocious monsters. Granted, these would be quite small monsters, but they were the worst kind. At least you could see a dragon from a mile off. That level of visibility gave you a fighting chance, not that Tiffin would fight a dragon. Tiffin was small and had a lot of hiding options. His thinking was that given that amount of hiding options it was obvious that hide was exactly what he should do. In a similar vein, coming out to the woods in the light of a silvery moon was not something he would ever think of doing and volunteering for such an escapade was also beyond him. Unfortunately Arthur wasn’t one for discussion, there had been no get out clause. Arthur had grabbed his friend and they had headed out in the dead of night.

Now Arthur would not describe it as the dead of night. Tiffin was prone to the over dramatisation of anything that he perceived to have a dangerous aspect and this included pretty much everything barring perhaps mash potato, even then, given the right set of conditions, mash potato could be potentially lethal and so Tiffin approached all things with a degree of caution.

Some would say that the gung-ho bravado that Arthur was prone to was tempered by Tiffin’s aversion to any type of danger. Some people say these things, but very little thought goes into their words. These same people begin conversations with words like “wouldn’t it be nice…” and they are to be avoided at all costs.

Interestingly, Tiffin, for all his aversions, did not avoid people like that. He found them to be rather nice. Let’s not get started on people who are nice. 

Arthur responded in his customary manner to a question such as the one that Tiffin had posed, which was to say that he thoroughly ignored it other than to grit his teeth in an even more determined manner, and put his shoulder into his next strides. This was a manly, heroic and future-kingly thing to do and Arthur had been practicing. Leading with a shoulder helped remove problems. He’d seen Ser Bernard do this to great effect when he was late to a feast. Ser Bernard always had a spot at the feasting table come what may and Arthur reckoned it was all down to that shoulder first stride of his. That shoulder was like the prow of a ship. Now if Arthur could build his own shoulder up to a point that it no longer hurt when he barged through obstacles, he would be a powerful stride closer to being a bally great king!

“Arthur!” cried Tiffin, struggling to keep up with his friend, “it’s really dark!”

Arthur scoffed and mumbled his friend’s words under his breath, “it’s really dark!”

“That’s mean!” Tiffin said in a tone of reprimand that would never work with anyone. Ever.

To his credit, Arthur did not repeat those words, tempted as he was to do so. He took a goblet of pity on his friend and reassured him instead, “nearly there, Tiffin!”

“Where’s there!?” wailed Tiffin.

Arthur stopped, casually placing his hands on his hips so that he looked bigger and damn well magnificent to boot, “you mean you don’t know?”

“No!” confirmed Tiffin.

“You followed me, your king, into the woods with no care towards the pending danger!?” asked a very impressed Arthur.

Tiffin opened his mouth to deny that this was the case. The truth of it was so far from what Arthur had said that there was no way Tiffin could leave him in that state of misapprehension, but then he saw the look Arthur was giving him, ‘twas a look of something like pride. Arthur really was impressed. 

Given this once in a lifetime opportunity, Tiffin went with it, “what else was there to do?” he said as nonchalantly as he possibly could.

“Good man!” boomed Arthur, with a boom that was pretty good for a young boy, “now where was I?”

“Nearly there?” ventured Tiffin.

“Ah yes!” said Arthur and with that he stepped forth and they were there.

“You weren’t kidding, were you?” said Tiffin.

“About what?” asked Arthur.

“Being nearly there,” Tiffin told him.

“Well no,” said Arthur, “why would I kid?”

Tiffin shrugged. In his experience, people said nearly there when nothing could be further from the truth. Nearly there was a white lie that people automatically trotted out because it was just a bit kinder than yelling SHUT UP!

Tiffin looked around him and seeing nothing of note he asked his friend the most natural of questions in the circumstances, “why are we here?”

He could have enquired as to where they were or what the point of all of this was. His point was that he didn’t have a clue what was going on. He could have confessed to that state of bewilderment, but generally people don’t like admitting that they don’t have a clue, unless they do so in an ironic manner that’s actually quite rude.

Arthur looked around him as though he’d mislaid the answer to Tiffin’s question, “it’s got to be around here somewhere,” he muttered to himself.

“To what do you refer?” asked Tiffin, but he already had a bad feeling about this and the bad feeling was tugging at his tunic and telling him he already knew what was going on here and now was a good time not to be here. Tiffin was feeling an urge and the urge was to run away. Running away seemed like the best of ideas right now.

“Aha!” cried Arthur, and then he was leaning forward and tossing a pile of moss and other greenery to one side, “there it is! I knew he kept it around here somewhere.”

“Erm Arthur,” said Tiffin, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

Arthur turned and grinned at Tiffin, “of course you wouldn’t, but you’re not me!” 

With that, he turned his back on his friend and tugged at an object that lay before him.

Tiffin could’ve cried. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but this turn of events was truly bad. It was actually the worst thing that could have happened in his life, but beyond the horrible sick feeling he was experiencing, he had nothing. He just had this extraordinary feeling that this was going to be the worst day of his life, and yet he’d done nothing other than follow his wilfully wayward friend into the woods.

“Behold!” bellowed Arthur.

But Tiffin really didn’t want to do any beholding.

“It’s deceptively heavy,” said Arthur in an interesting conversational tone, “but you can feel the balance. I’d say the balance is actually nigh on perfect.”

Tiffin watched the back of his friend with a heavy heart thinking, what have you done, Arthur? What have you done?

“Look, here,” said Arthur, the boy who would be king, and with a SWISH he turned around.

“Ouch!” cried Tiffin, “that hurt!”

Arthur looked on in fascinated horror as Tiffin clutched at the side of his head and blood seeped out from between his fingers, “whoops,” said the boy with the large, shiny sword in his hand, “it’s a bit longer than I’m used to.”

Tiffin was looking down at the woodland floor with wide, unblinking eyes, “you’ve cut my bloody ear off!”

And his ear was indeed bloody.

And then it was gone.

“Oy! That squirrel just took my ear!” cried Tiffin, “come back here with my ear you furry bugger!”

The squirrel seemed to understand Tiffin’s plaintive cry, it ceased it’s eary retreat, stood there mocking him for a moment and then legged it with his hearing appendage.

“You don’t see that every day,” said Arthur, “must be the magicality of the woods or something.”

“Magicality?” asked Tiffin, “is that even a word?”

Arthur nodded, “we’re in magic woods, in a time of myth and legend, so we pretty much make shit up as we go along.”

“Whilst also speaking in a suspiciously modern way, peppering our language with expletives as we go?” queried Tiffin.

“Fecking too right, buddy!” grinned Arthur.

“Are you trying to deflect attention from the fact that you hacked my ear right off just now?” asked Tiffin.

Arthur kicked at some leaves sheepishly, “it was an accident…”

“Never mind,” sighed Tiffin, “it’ll grow back. Ears grow back don’t they?”

“I expect so,” said Arthur confidently, “I mean ears must be one of the first things to go in the midst of battle and you don’t see any of Dad’s knights with missing ears do you?”

“Not now you come to mention it,” said Tiffin who was not trying all that hard to think of earless knights lest he came up with a legion of them and upset himself any further.

“Righto,” said Arthur, “shall we go then?”

“Yes, I think we probably should,” agreed Tiffin.

Then they began the walk back.

This beginning was a very short beginning what with it being cut short. Thankfully, this was a cut that did not involve a wickedly sharp blade, but it was uncomfortable all the same.

“What is the meaning of this!?”

The words were barked imperiously and they stopped both boys in their tracks. They were stunned and in no doubt that they were in trouble. Big, regal and powerful trouble for the purveyor of these words was none other than Arthur’s father, King Uther.

“Hi Dad!” said Arthur gayly.

“Don’t you pull that gay and cheery shit upon my regal personage you cheeky git!” barked Uther.

“Sorry Dad,” Arthur averted his eyes and made with an act of remorseful intensity.

“And you!” challenged Uther, “I thought you knew better!”

Tiffin’s eyes went wide. So did he. Tiffin had been born sensible and had never been one for mischief. 

“Here,” said Uther, “let me see.” The king grabbed Tiffin’s hand and pulled it away, “that’s nasty,” he told the boy, “ear wounds never look like much, but I’ve never seen a knight survive such a wound. Best make your peace with the dragon under the hill, you’ll likely not see another Summer.”

Tiffin gave himself over to silent tears, having a care not to sob. Sobbing in front of the king was a gibbet sort of offence.

“And what do you have behind your back, boy?” Uther had turned his attention back to Arthur.

“Nothing,” said the boy in a manner that would have won the Unconvincing Lie Championship at the next Summer Festival, an event Tiffin was unlikely to attend.

“I can see it,” Uther told Arthur, and he could, as a large proportion of the sword was poking up above the boy’s tousled hair, “hand it over.”

Reluctantly, Arthur brought the sword around to the front of his body.

“Bloody hell, boy!” Uther cried as he threw his head back and away from the hellishly sharp blade of the swishing sword, “careful with your blade, you’ll have someone’s head off!”

A dread silence befell the wood in the wake of Uther’s words. The boys fell silent at the sudden, cold expression on Uther’s face. Uther was locked in a bitter struggle with a distant memory. The memory was of a prophecy told long ago. A prophecy of his death in circumstances that he had vowed to avoid at all costs. 

The problem was that prophecies were ten a penny. Literally. So the Prophecy Makers Guild had gone into overdrive in order to make ends meet. Uther had prophecies coming out of his ears, and various other holes, and he was sick to the back teeth of them, but he couldn’t afford to make light of them and gods forbid should he ignore them.

It didn’t help that there was a prophecy that foretold dire consequences thanks to Uther disregarding a prophecy. The Prophecy Makers Guild liked to throw that one in to help with prophecy sales. Uther had outlawed prophecies and chained the Guild Leader in the deepest of his dungeons in the end, but he could have sworn there were fresh prophecies coming out on a weekly basis. If he ever found whoever was responsible, they were going to have a very long sit on an extremely pointy stick.

Uther carefully removed the large and incredibly sharp sword from Arthur’s hand and examined it, turning it this way and that in the silvered moonlight, “it’s surprisingly heavy, but almost perfectly balanced” he said as he hefted it appraisingly.

“I said the same thing!” said Arthur.

Uther shook his head grimly and Arthur knew not to utter another word, “this is a sword of power and magic, you can tell because it has writing on it. They do that you know.”

Arthur nodded, but he hadn’t known they did that. He also didn’t know that Uther couldn’t read. This was going to be a problem.

“You drew blood with a magical blade boy,” Uther said to his son.

“It was an accident…” Arthur said.

“I thought as much,” said Uther sadly, he had needed to know that it was indeed Arthur who had wielded the sword that had cut Tiffin’s ear clean off. He thought it unlikely that Tiffin’s ear amputation was self-inflicted, but you never could tell with the almost-youth of today.

SWISH!

LOP!

THUD!

THUD!

These sounds were the unexpecting wielding of the large and really very sharp sword, the connection of that razor edged blade with Tiffin’s neck and then the thud of his very surprised head on the thankfully soft woodland floor. That floor was so soft that Tiffin suffered literally no bruising to his stricken head or to his body as it followed suit and landed next to his head.

 Interestingly, his head didn’t roll away. This was so rare that would it to have happened just three hundred years later, Tiffin would have been burned as a witch. Just to make sure he didn’t use a spell to reconnect his head and then turn everyone present into sex crazed frogs. Witches did that quite a lot in that particular part of history. Horny toads or sex frogs. The land was awash with them. Best not to mention the tadpoles.

Dark ages indeed.

“You cut off Tiffin’s head!” cried Arthur.

Uther nodded grimly, he wasn’t going to deny it.

“Is he dead?” asked Arthur.

Uther sighed a disappointed sigh, “I swear you get more stupid each time you come back.”

“What do you m…” said Arthur.

But his question was cut short by the sword he had found in the woods. The sword he had pulled from the bone. A large and impressive thigh bone from a long dead dragon.

Only now did Uther notice the bone and the sword sized aperture atop it.

“The sword in the bone,” he uttered to himself. That didn’t quite sound right, “MERLIN!”

There was a dainty sound that almost sounded like poof and a faint mist that smelt of lavender, as though a lady of thorough breeding had trouser coughed near a small quantity of talcum powder. Not that this would ever happen, what with ladies of good standing never emitting windy pops and talcum powder being a banned substance from another time.

“You called,” said Merlin in a disaffected and urbane manner, “oh dear,” he added as he noticed the disembodied heads of Arthur and his chum, “what happened this time, Uther?”

“He found, ahem… Excalibur again…” coughed and splutter Uther, “and the blighter drew blood with it before I could take it from him. You know the prophecy…”

“Which one?” asked Merlin.

“Bah!” said an annoyed, frustrated and somewhat embarrassed Uther, “there’s so many that it gets quite confusing! There’s one about Excalibur and drawing blood and blah, blah, blah… I die horribly.”

Merlin ran a very long nail along the writing on the blade of the sword in Uther’s hand, “this isn’t Excalibur. This says Property of Ser Boris, the goodly Knight of Brexita.”

“Blimey! It says all that?” asked Uther.

Merlin nodded and took the sword from Uther, “best we put this back, eh?”

Uther nodded meekly and watched Merlin replace the sword in the bone, “that will remain there for a very long time and I pity the poor sod that retrieves it. Sometimes you really do have to be careful what you wish for.”

Uther shook his head, not really understanding what Merlin was on about.

Merlin put a reassuring arm around the kingly shoulder and led Uther away, with his free hand he made three interesting shapes and there appeared a flock of squirrels who spirited the corpses and heads of the two slain boys to an undisclosed location where they were respectfully lain to rest. 

Or, they were eaten by small feral creatures who, now accustomed to human flesh, would run amok and lay waste to many a village. 

These things can go either way.

“Listen,” Merlin said as the two made their way out of the woods, “you really are going to have to stop killing Arthur, OK?”

Uther nodded, “but you can bring him back though right? That’s what you do. And Arthur has to exist because of Camelot and all that jazz.”

“That’s not the point though is it?” countered Merlin.

“Isn’t it?” asked Uther.

“No!” Merlin said quite loudly, “you can’t go around killing children! You have a reputation to think of!”

“But you bring them back…” protested Uther.

“At a cost,” Merlin groaned, “haven’t you noticed that each subsequent Arthur is a bit more dim?”

“I had,” admitted Uther, “this last one was as thick as mince.”

Merlin chuckled, “what chance has the next one do you think?”

Now Uther chuckled, “less chance than those before him!”

“You’re not to kill him!” 

“What about the prophecies?”

“They’re all bollocks!”

“That’s easy for you to say, you’re not a king..!”

“You say that…”