The Sorcerer and The Pie
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Once upon a time, in a land of myth and a time of magic, there lived a young, strong King who had a beautiful wife, a wise counsellor and a group of stalwart knights. This King also a had a manservant who was immensely loyal, but even better, was a warlock who secretly protected the King and his realm, despite the fact that having magic could also get him killed.
Unfortunately, the King was also rather spoiled. Raised as the golden Prince, celebrated as a hero, and given almost everything else by the power of his manservant/secret protector, he was not noted for ever having learned humility. In fact, he was - at times - a rather loutish fellow.
Or, not to put too fine a point on it, a prat.
Still, his manservant almost always overlooked it, in spite of usually being the one who bore the brunt of his master's overbearing manner, and life went on as it had for many years. That is, until the King and his closest knights began asking rather hard to answer questions of the manservant.
They started off innocently at first. "How did you get my washing done so swiftly, Merlin?" (For Merlin was the servant's name.) "How did you get the fire started so easily with the wood so wet?" "How did you find my gauntlet and get back so quickly? You've hardly been gone a moment!"
The servant would shrug and look away. He hedged and stammered. He offered the first lame excuse that came to mind and tried desperately to hide the way he tensed at each query, his stomach gripping with anxiety. The King and the knights would smirk at each other, but Merlin didn't see, so eager was he to rush away or change the subject.
Then the questions grew more frequent, and more difficult to answer. "How did you get away from the slavers, Merlin?" "How did you survive falling through the ice?" "That fire surged at just the right moment to save you, Merlin! Did you see?" "My word, but an awful lot of tree limbs seem to break and fall when you're around, Merlin - how is it you've never been hit by one?"
The beleaguered servant would glance at his feet or hurry off to do some chore for the King while the knights would elbow each other and snicker. But they were getting less and less subtle about their mocking and many nights, as he lay awake after being thrust from sleep by a nightmare, poor Merlin would bite his lip and question how much they knew.
But what burned in his chest was the realization that he could not voice, even to himself: that they were mocking him. Taunting him for having to hide, for his fears, for his sacrifices - in their oafish insensitivity, they were unknowingly torturing him with all of the things that pained him the most.
Still, when mornings came, he would put a smile on his face and go about his day just as always.
However, the questions soon turned to "tests". At first it was nothing too worrying - they would hide an object Merlin needed or cared about and would watch, guffawing, from the shadows as he covertly used his magic to find it. But as time went on, the tests grew more dangerous. They hit him extra hard at training, swinging their swords just a little too close, or threw things at his head with only the slightest warning, all in an attempt to make him use his magic to save himself.
Finally, one day, they boasted about their prowess as knights until Merlin was forced to scoff and state that he had never seen such awful braggarts. Grinning amongst themselves, the King and the knights then rebutted, arguing that a simple servant like Merlin could never survive the Round Table's secret initiation.
Merlin snorted, replying without thinking that he had never heard of such a thing, but was at the same time deeply saddened to think that perhaps the initiation truly did exist and it had been kept from him because he was nothing but an outsider.
"What do you say then, my friends?" King Arthur asked his companions, "Should we let Merlin take the initiation?"
All the knights said, "Aye!"
Merlin was torn, his inner scepticism cautioning him not to touch what-could-possibly-be-a-trick-and-even-if-it-isn' t-it's-sure-to-be-stupid "initiation" with a hundred-foot lance, but he was a young man the same as any other in wanting to prove himself, and more than that, he was terribly lonely at times and did not like being barred from their full fellowship.
Therefore it came to pass that Camelot's secret protector was stripped naked and lowered into a deep pit. He was told that to pass his initiation, he had to find a way out and make his way back to Camelot with no aid from anyone.
Merlin tried to climb out of the pit, but the walls were too smooth. He fell and twisted his ankle. He tried to brace himself with his hands against one wall and feet against the other and, pushing against each, edge his way up, but the walls were too far apart.
The King and his knights departed, leaving the servant to picture them eating their dinner and making merry around their warm campfire, while hunger gnawed at his belly and thirst clawed at his throat.
It rained and he huddled dejectedly in the corner, growing chilled.
Insects came and pestered him nearly senseless, their bites stinging and itching.
The sun came the next day and beat down on his poor head until it was throbbing and his skin was burnt red. When it finally moved far enough across the sky that it's light was no longer striking the bottom of the pit, it left in its wake a man sick with misery.
If I use magic, then they'll ask how I got out and I won't have an answer for them. Visions of pyres screamed through his mind and he shook with fear.
If I wait for them to rescue me, I'll have failed. Taunts would be awful, he felt, but what the servant really wanted to run away from was the despair of knowing he would always be seen as lesser than they. It was hole in his heart created not so much from pride, but from knowing he would never be one of them, for men like that would never see a victim as equal.
But if I don't free myself soon, or if they don't come for me, then I'll die.
In his despondency, that almost seemed like the most welcome choice.
-x-
A muddy, naked man approached the gates to Camelot on bloody feet. Needless to say, there was some commotion and the King was informed. He and his knights could hardly hold back their chortles as they led the stumbling, dazed man to the physician's chambers while all of the rest of the castle's occupants gawped and pointed.
Not one bothered to lend the manservant their cloak.
Merlin's guardian, Gaius the physician, was away treating a plague some leagues distant, and so did not see the condition of his ward, which was a pity, for he might have spotted the dangers of the man's emotional state.
"So how did you escape the pit?" the King asked his servant once the man had sat down on his foster father's bed.
The servant said nothing.
"Come on, Merlin, tell us," one of the knights said, poking at him.
The servant continued to stare at a mark on the wall.
"Well, I don't think he did it then," another knight joked. "He must have got someone to help him."
"Lightning hit a nearby tree during the storm and a branch broke off and fell in the pit," Merlin said dully.
The room roared with the laughter of the King and his knights. "My word, Merlin," the King exclaimed around soft snickers, "I think it's been remarked on before, but tree branches do seem to break with the most astonishing convenience around you."
The servant's stomach roiled with hate.
"An almost magical convenience, one might say," the King added pointedly.
Sadly for them, the King and his knights were too busy howling again to notice the dangerous glitter in Merlin's eyes.
The servant stood. His gaze locked on his King. "And you know why, don't you?" he asked.
"Of course I do, Merlin, you idiot!" the King brayed. "We've known for ages! Did you really think you were that good at hiding it?"
Merlin smiled. "Well, now that the cat's out of the bag, would you like to see a display?"
The King rolled his eyes. "Oh, very well then."
Outside, a sudden burst of thunder cracked loud enough to make the people of Camelot think the sky had been broken in half. The King and his knights backed away from the manservant, no longer laughing - somehow the gold that swirled in the warlock's eyes looked so terribly, terribly cold.
They were clothed and armed, the warlock bare and vulnerable, but when he stood tall and a voice deeper than any they had ever heard before asked "Are you certain?", the King and his knights finally realized they had made quite the strategic mistake.
"Well now," the servant pronounced, "if compassion can't lead you to respect, perhaps fear will."
In less than a heartbeat, a scene of madness reigned in the physician's chambers. A naked demon, encrusted with mud and leaves, with his hair sticking up in bizarre angles, cackled gleefully as he swatted at five scurrying, squealing rats with a broom.
Swoosh, and he batted one knight against the wall. Thump, and another was kicked hard enough to go flying into a table leg. Stomp, and he caught a third's tail under his heel.
"I'm sorry, did that hurt?" he asked with mocking plaintiveness as he ground his heel against the stone, pulling and squishing the rat's tail. "Bet it didn't hurt as much as a serket sting!"
Then the servant spotted his master. Lifting his foot from the tail of the caught rat, who skittered away, he grabbed a heavy boot of Gaius's from where it lay under his bed and whipped it his King. The boot struck with a satisfying squelchy thud and Merlin pouted. "Oh, a sudden blow out of nowhere? Like on the training field?" He threw the other boot. "Or taking a goblet to the head? Or getting a pummelling from a lot of oafish Lords when your master hands you over to serve them like you were some kind of trinket to be passed around?" He chuckled wickedly and swung the broom. "Poor Kingy Ratkins! And you without your armour!"
The manservant danced and leapt all around the room like a fool, swinging left and right while the rats all squeaked and scrambled frantically in terror. He had never had such a wild time!
"Maybe I should let you stay like this!" Merlin declared, still laughing out loud like a boy playing a raucous game with his friends. "Then you can know what it's like to be thought of as vermin! Wouldn't you like that?"
The rat-who-once-was-King raced to bite the warlock's toes.
"Oh, oh, none of that now!" the servant said jubilantly, picking the perpetrator up by the tail and swinging him around. "No, I think it's an excellent idea for you lot to live as vile gutter rats! Admittedly, it's a pity you won't go without sleep after a night of wracking nightmares and fighting off monsters, only to have to get up early to bring breakfast to a fat Prince while missing your own, and then have that selfsame clot pole call you clumsy when you're stumbling with exhaustion and hunger, but we can't have everything, now can we? But at least this way, you can know what it's like to have people talk about you with disgust and revulsion! To know what it's like to practically kill yourself trying to save your thick-witted companions from danger when you're so small and "weak". Now you can spend your days hiding in the shadows and having people hunt you for no reason! And, all the while,
"You."
"Can."
"Watch."
"Me."
"Laugh!"
All right, Merlin, you've had your fun, the King ordered with a squeak, instinctively knowing his servant would be able to hear him.
The smile dropped off the servant's face. He shook the King by his ratty tail. "Fun, Arthur? Fun? Is that what you think this is?" he asked bitterly.
Magically, the servant pulled all of the knight-rats to him. Reaching down, he quickly tied all of their tails together and watched with amusement as they furiously tried to pull apart. "Trapped by being tied to another?" the servant said, "Why, how very familiar!" Picking them up by their joined tails like a carrying a pair of skates by their tied laces, he then roughly flung the clump of them into a chest and closed the lid, keeping them trapped until he had cleaned and dressed himself. Once that was finished, he spelled the inhabitants of the castle to sleep - except of course, for the rats - and then headed off towards the kitchens, swinging his prizes with each step and merrily reciting a little rhyme.
"Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye.
A King and Ugly Knight-rats,
Baked in a pie.
When the pie is cooked,
The rats begin to sing;
Isn't that a dainty dish,
To make of such a King?"
But, when the warlock tied them to the spit so that they dangled precariously over the cooking fire, all traces of humour vanished. Taking hold of the handle, he began to turn, causing the rats to screech and claw at each other as they struggled to escape the heat.
"This is what my nightmares are like, Arthur," the warlock said as heartbroken tears finally began to course down his cheeks. "Do you feel it? Do you feel the suffocating heat? The flames reddening your skin? Do you see your friends screaming for help? This is the fear I lived with every day of my existence. This is the fear you could have alleviated, but instead decided to play with. To mock me for. Is it funny now, Arthur?"
Merlin, I swear by all the Gods, you're going in the stocks for a year for this! the King "shouted" in rage.
Everything stopped.
-x-
On that fine sunny morning, the former servant of the King calmly sat on a rock several leagues down the road from Camelot and waited for the person whom he knew was watching from the woods.
"A good day to you, Morgana!" he finally called out.
The witch made her way cautiously from out behind the trees. With her power she felt she had little to fear, but she was wary of a trap.
"And what can I do for you this fine day?" Merlin asked. "Wait, let me guess: die horribly after watching my precious master destroyed in front of my eyes?"
The witch lifted an eyebrow. "Am I to expect that you will be so obliging, Merlin?" she asked wryly.
The warlock smirked. "I do hate to disappoint you, but I'm afraid not. I don't intend to die, and as for Arthur… well, there's really no need to dispose of him now."
"Your intentions are besides the point, servant. As are your oh-so-considerate decisions as to what I need and don't need."
"Ah yes, you always were just as unobservant as the prat, Morgana. And, judging by the rat's nest on top of your head, just as incapable of washing and dressing yourself without help."
"You DARE to insult me?" the witch howled. "I am a priestess of the Old Religion!" With this she flung her arm in the warlock's direction and her eyes flashed gold.
And then she gasped as the spindly, tatty-looking servant continued to sit there as if nothing had happened, still irritatingly eating his breakfast. The warlock saw what she was looking at and proffered the plate. "Oh, my apologies," he said, "Would you like some?"
"What would I want with a servant's paltry meal?" the witch sneered, trying to hide her worry at the failure of her magic.
The warlock licked the crumbs from the corner of his mouth and chuckled softly. "Perhaps, Morgana, it's time you started using my proper name. I am Emrys, and I AM the Old Religion."
Morgana's eyes widened, but true to form, she did not shrink back in fright. She raised her arm again and threw all of her magic might at the warlock -
Who batted it casually away like a pesky insect.
"Now, now, Morgana. We both know the prophecy. At best, this can only end in a stalemate for you. You might kill me, true, but most certainly I am your doom. But I propose something different."
Curiosity got the better of the witch, who figured at least to stall the warlock before her until she could think of a plan. "Such as?" she asked.
"You take over Camelot. In return, we let each other go."
The witch blinked. "That is all?"
"Yes."
"You'll just let me have the Kingdom?"
"Of course, as long as you leave me, my mother and Gaius alone," the warlock agreed.
"You don't want power for yourself?" The witch could barely fathom such a thing.
"Gods, no. The land is full of bigoted oafs and I am more than sick of looking at the place. No, it's time for something new."
"And how do I know I can trust you?" the witch asked.
Merlin brushed the pastry flakes from his sleeve. "Well, as a show of good faith, I've already dealt with the castle's rat problem," he said with a jaunty grin and whistled as he walked away.
-x-
The witch Morgana did indeed take over Camelot, and, in a strange twist of fate, ruled quite well.
Gaius the physician and Merlin's kindly guardian, was waylaid by the warlock on his way home and told of Arthur's "disappearance" and Morgana's takeover. At the warlock's urging, the physician went to live out his days with his beloved sister Hunith, both believing till the end that Merlin was devotedly searching the world for his King.
As for the sorcerer himself, he was never heard from again.
And he lived happily ever after.
THE END
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Oh, isn't that sweet? Merlin finally got enough to eat!