Arthurian
Trilogy
(Set in ERB's universe)
By Peter Coogan
Preface: (The trilogy as a whole needs a name -- or a name for the
series.)
While working on my master's thesis in Arthurian Literature at the
University of Wales in Bangor, I came across a history of Sir Yvain written
by his son, St. Kentigern. This history tells of Yvain's Grail Quest, which
took him to the ancient kingdom of Midia in Africa, to Avalon, and to a
land which Kentigern claimed lay inside the hollow Earth. Filed alongside
Kentigern's history, but uncataloged, was a packet of notes written by
Tarzan's grandson, the current Earl of Greystoke. These notes expanded
and supplemented Kentigern's history, explaining how Yvain and his party
passed through the land
of the Mangani -- the great apes who raised Tarzan -- and the ruins
of an outpost of Opar, the lost Atlantean colony discovered by Tarzan,
and ultimately to Pellucidar, the inner-earth world described by Edgar
Rice Burroughs in a series of novels. I tracked down Lord Greystoke, who
agreed to let me publish the tale as fiction, an agreement similar to the
one his grandfather had reached with Burroughs. I augmented the saint's
history and the earl's notes with my own research, and this is the story,
largely true, that I put together.
Book 1: The Quest of the Holy Grail (working title, need a real title)
Near the end of the Quest of the Holy Grail, King Arthur sends a quartet
of his subjects, under the guise of a diplomatic mission to Rome, to investigate
a legend he came across years before during his pilgrimage to the Holy
Land. That story, told in a book reported to be the secret history of Joseph
of Arimathea, recounted how Joseph fled Jerusalem with the Holy Grail and
instead of going west towards Rome and his imperial enemies, he went south
along the Nile to Midia, a kingdom founded by Nathan, a son of David, near
the headwaters of the Nile. From there, St. Joseph proceeded across to
Africa and thence to Britain to found the abbey at Glastonbury. Arthur
believed that Joseph may have left the Grail in Midia and concocted the
legend of bringing it to Britain in order to safeguard the Grail and its
true location. The four on the mission are: Sir Yvain, a knight who was
too young to be called to the Grail Quest at its inception, but one perhaps
worthy to achieve it; Sir Dagonet, publicly Arthur's fool, but in reality
a key operative in Arthur's secret intelligence organization, the Order
of Aurelius; Lady Vivian, a Lady of the Lake and daughter of Nineve and
Merlin; and Lady Alyne, a nun well-versed in ancient languages and literature
and adept in the arts of alchemy.
They sail from Britain accompanied by Sir Grimmace, a member of Mordred's
diplomatic service and ostensibly the leader of the mission to Rome. After
stops along the pilgrimage route through Brittany and Gaul, they cross
to Carthage from the Mediterranean coast, intending to go from there to
Alexandria, Jerusalem, and finally to Rome. Arthur publicly declared that
the mission was intended to reestablish contacts between his kingdom
and the holy sites along the pilgrimage route, ending with a reconciliation
with the emperor at Rome. On the passage to Carthage, Sir Dagonet, following
secret instructions from Arthur, kills Modred's spy Sir Grimmace, explains
the true nature of the expedition to the rest of the party, fakes a ship
wreck, and sails for the west coast of Africa to follow Sir Joseph's map
to Midia.
Shortly after landing, they observe the Dum Dum -- the ritual hunting
dance of the Mangani, or great apes. Skirting the exhausted apes, who collapse
at the end of their orgiastic frenzy, they are ambushed by Gozan, an African
native who has been raised by the Mangani, as Tarzan would be centuries
later. Before anyone is seriously injured, Vivian recognizes Gozan's language
as one she learned from Merlin, her father, who traveled extensively in
his youth. Gozan agrees to lead the party east as he was planning to explore
in that direction to investigate a legend he has heard about a city of
whites who have been interbreeding with the Mangani in their area. Led
by Gozan, they come to the edge of a large settlement, where they accidentally
kill a cow while hunting for game. While butchering the cow, they are discovered
and taken into custody by a party of minotaurs, who charge them with the
murder of a close cousin of their king.
The minotaur city, Minopolis, had been settled several centuries earlier
by a band of minotaurs, raised by Minos of Crete to be an invincible army.
For several years prior to the coming of Theseus and the slaying of the
original minotaur, King Minos had bred his monster with both human and
bovine mates. Shortly after Theseus' escape, Minos met his death in a steam
bath designed by Daedalus. As part of the peace treaty between Crete and
Athens, the minotaur tribe was to be loaded on to a ship and sunk far out
at sea. A few of the minotaurs discovered the scheme and forced the human
navigator to sail the ship to Egypt, where they expected to be welcomed
as the children of Hathor, the cow goddess who gives birth to the sun each
morning. But the Egyptians had at one time sent their children every
year to their deaths in the labyrinth as tribute to Minos, and so drove
the hated minotaurs, symbol of their past subservience to Crete, into the
desert. Eventually they wandered into the interior and settled in a ruined
outpost of Opar, thought to be a lost colony of Atlantis. Here they lived,
intermarrying with Africans taken in war. And their cattle.
In punishment for their crime, the Britons and Gozan are sentenced to
die in the arena as bull dancers, an element of Cretan heritage preserved
by the minotaurs. After a series of engagements, in which Dagonet invents
bullfighting using a cape, they escape from Minopolis. Gozan goes his way,
off to discover Opar, forging Tarzan's trail to the lost city centuries
ahead of the ape man.
Several days' march to the East, they come upon another set of Oparian
ruins that marks the end of their map. In these ruins lives Piscatorus,
Latin for fisherman, a Roman soldier who served under Julius Caesar, nearly
500 years before. Piscatorus was a common soldier in an expedition sent
by Caesar to rediscover the lost colonies of Atlantis and the last survivor
of a battle between his legion and the remnants of the Atlantean colony.
Severely wounded in the foot and nearly lame, Piscatorus found a temple
with a fountain whose waters flowed into a stone bowl, placed there centuries
earlier by the Atlanteans, the continual drinking of which kept him in
a state of stasis, neither aging nor healing. Dagonet and the rest are
unsure whether to continue, as their map only leads this far, and because
Vivian asserts that Piscatorus and the carved stone bowl may represent
the mythic origins of the Fisher King and the Grail, following the Celtic
tradition of the Grail as a cauldron of rebirth. Piscatorus denies all
knowledge of the Fisher King and the
Grail and their Christian origins, having never heard of Christianity,
since he left Rome long before the birth of Christ. After spotting some
hieroglyphs carved into the wall of the temple, Alyne matches them with
a passage from Joseph's history, which indicates that he passed through
this area on his journey. They find the underground river that supplied
the waters of the fountain and that the saint had taken in his journey
from Midia.
Traveling the slow-flowing underground river, they come out in Midia,
a city hidden by a ring of mountains. St. Joseph escorted ______ , Mary's
niece, to Midia so that she could marry David, the descendent of David's
son Nathan who founded the lost city. They married and bore _______, again
uniting the two great houses of the Jews, as Mary had done when she married
Herod's son ______ and gave birth to Jesus (explained in detail by Robert
Graves in King Jesus). The history of the second child, the second coming
of the messiah, is explained to the Britons who also learn that Joseph
did take the Grail to Britain. The Midians have lived in peace for half
a millenium, impervioius to death by age or disease due to an elixer later
discovered by Tarzan, practicing a pure Christianity based on Christ's
two commandments: Love thy God and Love thy Neighbor. Their mission ended,
the Britons find their way to the Nile and thence to Rome. At Rome they
are greeted with the news that Arthur is dead and Camelot fallen. There
is also a message from Arthur, delivered by the secret Order of Aurelius,
"Go West."
Book 2: The Search for Excalibur (working title, need a real title)
Alyne and Vivian decipher Arthur's message, "Go West," to mean
that they should follow him to his resting place, traditionally thought
to be Avalon. But as a Lady of the Lake, Vivian knows that Arthur would
not refer to Avalon, the axis mundi, or world navel, as "west" because
it's a world "center." Through agents of the Order of Aurelius, they find
Barinthus, the pilot who took Arthur to his resting place across the sea
to the west. Barinthus also led the famous St. Brendan to his "fair isle,"
which in fact was the American continent. Barinthus is dying, but he is
able to provide them with sea maps and directions, which the quartet follows,
eventually landing on the American shore. There they find a rune stone
carved by Morgan directing them to Arthur's location.
At the close of the Battle of Camlan, Arthur had lain dying. Morgan
and Bedevere helped him into Barinthus' boat and they set off for Turtle
Island, leaving Bedevere behind to set up a false grave for Arthur on the
Isle of Man, otherwise known as Avalon. Morgan had foreseen the fall of
Corbenic in the year 800 as the final victory of the Anglo Saxons over
the British Isles and so knew that Arthur's sleep would have to be elsewhere.
Bedevere's son, also named Arthur, was supposed to accompany them as sword-bearer,
but he has been murdered and replaced by Mordred's son Morgos, who so closely
resembles Bedevere's son that no one notices the switch in all the haste
to leave. Arthur's wound largely heals on the voyage, but he is still dying
slowly, kept alive only by Morgan's magic and the life-maintaining properties
of Excalibur's scabbard.
During their first night on the American shore, Morgos steals off with
Excalibur, leaving Arthur with a false copy of the sword forged years earlier
by Mordred. Morgos makes his way south to the kingdom of the Olmecs in
Mexico and plants the sword into a stone, knowing that Arthur is the only
one who can withdraw it and that, in his weakened and dying state, he will
never survive the journey. Mordred planned this separation of king and
sword because he foresaw his own death and resurrection and Arthur's return
as king in Avalon centuries later and sought to prevent that return by
denying Arthur his sword, following the proverb: "The king without a sword,
the land without a king."
Unaware, at first, of the theft of Excalibur and unable to wait for
Morgos' return, Morgan takes Arthur to the land of the mound builders near
the Ohio River and establishes him in a temnos, or magic circle, built
by the Native Americans there. It will keep him alive until Excalibur is
returned to him. She heads west, leaving a message about where she is heading
for Vivian and the others, whom she knows to be following. The four Britons
locate Arthur, but he does not know where Morgos has taken the sword. Vivian
uses egeomancy to locate Excalibur, as the sword has been stuck into a
stone resting on a ley point, the meeting point of several ley-lines, which
are the "channels" the Earth's energy flows in. The Earth's ley-energy
prevents any but Arthur from drawing it forth. To make it possible for
Yvain, Arthur's closest relative of the four, to draw the sword from the
stone, the king shaves his head and has Vivian knit the hair into a glove
for Yvain to wear, incorporating magic knots and charms into the weaving.
To further ensure that the young knight will be able to withdraw the sword,
Arthur cuts off his own right pinkie and forces Yvain to do the same, thus
ensuring that part of Arthur's hand will be in the glove for the drawing.
The quartet follows the leylines south, traveling on the Ohio and Mississippi
rivers.
They arrive in Olmeca to find the Olmecs being ruled by a vampire, who
has come from Egypt and set himself up as a divine king. This vampire,
________, committed the ultimate sin of killing the vampire who made him.
He fled Egypt and the vengence of his vampire kin on a cargo ship bound
for the land of the Olmecs, with whom the Egyptians had traded for many
years and who are, in fact, the true Atlanteans, but not the founders of
the Oparian colonies, which have a separate origin. Using his supernatural
powers to establish himself as a god and king, ________ instituted the
blood rituals that were later adopted by the Mayans and Aztecs. He has
also transformed Morgos into a vampire to aid him in his rule of the Olmecs.
The quartet arrives and eventually helps the Olmecs to kill _____ and Morgos
and to free themselves from this foreign rule. They return Excalibur to
Arthur, who is then entombed in a mound, and set off on the trail of Morgan
Le Fey.
Book 3: The Golden Apple of Troy (working title, need a real title)
Following Morgan's trail, the quartet makes its way to the land of
the Anasazi Indians. Morgan has gone there to be buried sleeping in the
Anasazi caves so that she can rise again when Arthur and Mordred return.
Morgan is very weak, having been wounded by the Jibbenainosay, the "spirit
who walks." The Jibbenainosay is a British spirit of evil conjured by Mordred
to ensure the death of Arthur and Morgan. It took over the body of a knight
of Avalon and followed Arthur's funeral barge to America. It tracked them
to the mound builders, but could not enter Arthur's temnos and could not
take possession of any Native Americans, and so the Jibbenainosay began
to kill Indians, hoping to deprive Arthur of all aid and support. Quickly
discovered by the mound builders, the Jibbenainosay was driven away and
it went in search of Morgan, whom it found and wounded before she could
set up a temnos. The Anasazi protected her and the Jibbenainosay entered
into total war with them. The quartet arrives and helps the Anasazi to
eradicate the Jibbenainosay, who now has to wait for another Briton to
arrive on the continent before he can have corporal existence again.
Following the defeat of the Jibbenainosay, Morgan sets the quartet on
the trail of the Golden Apple of Troy, the last bit of unfinsihed business
from the Trojan War. The Golden Apple is an Apple of Discord originally
thrown by Eris, the spirit of strife, at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis,
parents of Achilles, because she alone of all the gods had not been invited.
The Apple led to the Trojan War because Paris awarded it to Aphrodite when
she promised him the world's most beautiful woman, Helen, in exchange for
awarding it to her as the most beautiful goddess. When Paris took his lovely
reward, with the help of a love arrow from Eros' bow, Helen's husband Menelaus
followed the lovers to Troy and began the decades-long siege. After the
fall of Troy, a Greek warrior, ________, took the Apple from its temple
in Troy and fled south, eventually entering Pellucidar, the world inside
the hollow Earth.
Morgan charged the quartet to return the Apple to its rightful owners,
the Trojans, who are the anscestors of the Britons through Pryam's son
Brut, the founder of Britain. Morgan knows that the crime of the theft
of the Apple has to be avenged to let the ghosts of Troy rest.
They sail down the coast to Antarctica, where they find an entrance
to Pellucidar. The Apple has caused a war between two great powers of Pellucidar
that has gone on since its arrival, shortly after the Trojan War some 1700
years before. The four Britons steal the apple and help to settle the war.
While sailing for Troy, a storm wrecks their ship off the coast of Australia.
The aborigines, the Real People, will not help them to build a boat nor
allow them any materials. The four have lessons to learn and need to walk
across Australia with the Real People. Gradually the Britons abandon their
possessions, with the exception of the Golden Apple and the copy of Excalibur
Yvain has been wielding. Each learns a lesson about him or herself: Yvain
to give up leadership and to trust others' decision-making; Dagonet to
give up all his hidden tools and tricks; Vivian that her magic lies within
herself and not solely within the goddess she relies on; and Alyne learns
to lead. Once across Australia they build a ship with the help of the Real
People and sail for Troy.
They find that the waves of invasions that followed the fall of Troy
have left no Trojans to receive their heritage.
With no place to return the Apple, they decide to take it to safety
in Midia, since they are relatively close to the lost kingdom. Midia is
almost empty when the arrive, with only a few guardians left. The population
has been systematically destroyed by a vampire werewolf, Evingolis, who
had been serving the emporer as a minstrel and overheard Dagonet's report
on the outcome of their Grail quest in the city of Midia to the Order of
Aurelius' Pendragon in Rome. Evingolis is ancient, having been born a werewolf
and later transformed into a vampire while in his human form. The idea
of drinking rich immortal blood excited Evingolis and he arrived in Midia
just in front of his wolf pack, which he pretended to be escaping. He posed
as a minstrel and began to suck the city dry. At first the Midians thought
that the deaths were attributable to wolf attacks, to which they put up
a good defense. By the time they realized their error and discovered the
true culprit, few Midians were left and Evingolis took to hiding and hunting
down the survivors. The besieging wolves killed off the few who attempted
to leave the city to get help, their immortality elixer preventing death
only by disease or age, not injury or accident.
At first the wolves and Evingolis hunt the quartet and the remaining
Midians, but gradually the tide turns and Evingolis is tricked into following
one of the few remaining Midians, doused in the intoxicating menstral blood-scent
of the virginal Alyne, into an airtight tomb, which they seal with alchemy
and magic. Midia is now nearly a ghost town and not a safe place to leave
the Apple, so they travel to Rome and thence to the shattered Britain to
help put the pieces back together and deposit the apple in Merlin's tomb.
Character profiles:
Sir Yvain: Son of Sir Owein, whom ChrŽtien de Troyes made famous
as the Knight of the Lion; grandson to Morgan le Fey and King Uriens. He
was too young to be a Grail Knight when the quest started, but he proved
to be one of the best knights that remained. Forthright and honest. Built
like a bull with legs like oak trees and iron thewed arms. An excellent
swordsman, rider, and jouster. He's Christian, but not deeply so. Tall
with reddish-blond hair. About 18 years old.
Sir Dagonet: Son of Sir Dynaden, Arthur's satirist. Dagonet is
Arthur's fool and jester but this is just a cover for his real activities
as a secret agent, a dragon, in the Order of Aurelius, Arthur's secret
intelligence service. For years he has cleaned up Arthur's dirty business
and engaged in covert activities, including assassination and overthrowing
Arthur's enemies. He frequently saves knights while in disguise, either
as Kay, or in blank armor, so the rescued knights think that they've been
saved by Lancelot. He keeps all sorts of weapons, lock picks, pins, and
poison hidden on his person, braided into his hair, etc. He is tall and
thin with a knife-edged face. Very good with his throwing knives and a
bow, but a mean swordsman too. Not afraid to fight dirty, use poison, or
set traps for his enemies. Puts forward a carefree and clever face, but
is deadly serious about the king's business. About 28 years old, he's been
working as a dragon since his early teens.
Lady Vivian: Daughter of Nineve and Merlin. She was conceived
on Merlin's last night before his sleep. Nineve kept her pregnancy hidden
by gaining weight and keeping Vivian in the womb by dint of magic and drugs
for three years. She makes contradictory claims about who her father is,
and will claim anyone as a father if it furthers a point she is making.
Her eyes change color, an after-effect of the pregnancy drugs taken by
Nineve. She learned a great deal of magic in the womb directly from Nineve
and also spent three years in Merlin's cave coaxing all sorts of lore from
Merlin's sleeping brain. She is good with geomancy, bad with weather magic,
and very good at speaking with the dead. Arthur sent her on the mission
because of her magical abilities and her overall knowledge of hidden things.
Tall and redheaded, like a British battle-queen. About 24 years old.
Lady Alyne: Daughter of Lamorak and granddaughter of Sir Pellinore.
She is a nun, a scholar of ancient and contemporary languages, and a student
of alchemy. She has been raised in a nunnery, but was generally left to
pursue her studies by herself because of a large grant of land her grandfather
gave to
the church. Arthur sends her on the mission because of her knowledge
of languages and history. She often acts as an interpreter for the group
when dealing with peoples of the Mediterranean, Near East, and Northern
Africa. She is rather small and elfin looking, dark-haired. She is not
given to physical confrontation, but voracious about knowledge. About 21
years old.
END
Copyright 1997 by Pete Coogan
