Merlin's Kin [Paperback]

It had not been crafted with loving care or with an eye to beauty. There was a certain ugly purpose in its shape that came straight from ancient books on sieges and engines of war.
It had no pretensions; a battering ram is what it was and a battering ram is what it looked like. A twenty-metre long tree trunk bristling still with the remains of branches and twigs and at the business end, a metre wide glacial boulder had been strapped into the roughly hewn cleft.
A bearded man dressed in a red cape shouted orders as the contraption of lesser logs and stout slings was manoeuvred into its pre-marked position. Sweating men rushed to do his bidding, hastening in order to avoid the sting of the lash the other carried. Groaning with effort, the ram was aligned, a gap of three metres or so separating it from the cave wall of sheered and cracked blue slate.
Hardwood wedges were driven into the cavern floor to hold the engine in place, men collapsed where they stood. They had worked without ceasing for the better part of a day, they were exhausted and even under the urgings of the whip, they could move only far enough for a fresh group of men to work the ram.
Treading over the bodies of the exhausted, the new gang reached for the ropes fastened to the back of the ram and took up the slack. Back, they strained and back and back, muscles bulging, tendons straining and as one, still they heaved. At last the cry came: ‘Release’ and they let go the ropes.
The ram moved forward, arcing down to the bottom of its swing, swinging forward to crash against the cave wall. It came to a stop with a stupefying impact. Somehow, the sound was far more than the solid impact that had been expected. The boom was magnified by the rock, assaulting the ears of overseer, of guards and workmen alike. Everyone clapped hands to their ears in a vain attempt to shut out the appalling noise that reverberated on and on as though the rocky face was a huge drum.

Behind the cavern wall were other caverns – voids in the stone which had formed millions of years before when the rock had been heated to near melting. The totally enclosed chambers resonated with the vibrations and channelled them, amplifying them, guiding them onward to reach another deep cavern, one where – had there been light – quartz intrusions spilled from fissures like frozen waterfalls and filled deep hollows like beds of diamond.
The cavern was a unique place. The quartz, in sheets and pillars and great boulders, shielded the space from outside interference. Thus it had been for millions upon millions of years and thus it had been when Merlin first happened on the place. The sorcerer had found a way for those same glittering pillars to become the resting places for the souls of the knights and their descendants. From here, some would eventually pass on to whatever afterlife there might be but others would rest here, perhaps until Merlin himself might wake and furnish them with new bodies and re-establish a world of chivalry.
Merlin had not planned on the desires of men, however, the desire that drove them on in search of wealth. The huge and growing vibrations from the excavation reached the cavern, crystal columns shook and cracked. Some shattered into glittering showers, the souls that rested within sent on their way prematurely.
At the second explosion of sound and vibration, enough of the protected quartz was destroyed to allow the intrusive power of ley lines into the cavern. The raw power woke Myrddin, known also as Merlin and his soul stretched like a bear in sudden spring sunshine.
Had the time come already? He wondered and cast his consciousness outward beyond the crashing crystal of his cavern. He became aware of the ill-planned invasion of his rocky domain.