The Ages Of Merlin: Origins Read online

  Merlin: Origins

  Christina Duncan Stewart

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. Before The Armies

  2. The Meeting

  3. How Old Are You

  4. How Did You Learn Magic?

  5. Really? Is Magic Real

  6. Have You Ever Been Married?

  7. How Long Will You Live?

  8. What Else Have You Done?

  9. You’ve Been A Soldier

  10. The Seventh Council

  Afterword

  Introduction

  Normally, this section is reserved for the details of publication. You know - the copyright notice, the publication date, etc.

  If you have friends who may enjoy this - suggest they get their own copy by subscribing at my website here. ChristinaDuncanStewart.com

  Should you have a question about Merlin that's not answered, I encourage you to write and ask it. I'll pass it along and hopefully, Merlin will take the time to answer. I'll modify this project accordingly.

  And yes, the words here are under copyright.

  CDS

  Before The Armies

  Before the armies of the the Egyptians, Greeks, Babylonians, Medes, and even centuries before the great Assyrian Empire, the human melting pot on the Eurasian steppes was a churning mass of small tribes struggling for survival.

  These small tribes would become known to the Assyrians, who created the first massive human empire, as Umman Manda - the savages beyond.

  We've learned about these peoples through their funeral mounds that dot the steppes. These mounded-up earthen structures (called Kurgans) have yielded a treasure trove of information about the early history of man.

  In the more northerly regions, an interesting thing happen.

  After the dirt mound was constructed, the burial rites completed with the human bodies and everything they'd need in the afterlife interred, the entrance holes were plugged solid with dirt.

  But then, the roof would leak in the summer rains and that water would freeze during the long winters.

  Because the kurgans were well insulated with soil, some of the ice wouldn't thaw during the next short summer season. But it would continue leaking, absorbing water and freezing, until it turned into a mass of ice that exists to this day.

  Archeologists have thawed some of these frozen mounds to discover undisturbed and perfectly preserved remains. And what we know from the archeologists and these remains, is this area was the first true melting pot of humanity.

  Before the blond, blue-eyed peoples moved into northern Europe, they lived here. Before the red-haired peoples who'd become known as Celts and Goths occupied central Europe, their ancestors were part of this greater mix. Before the shorter, swarthy peoples with epicanthic folds marking their eyes moved further east - some as far as North America - they lived here.

  And in this melting pot, all aspects of humanity mingled. For example, we know that Ghengis Khan was a redhead. We know of short, swarthy Kings with much taller, blue-eyed wives. We know of…

  We know a great many stories of the peoples who've left records of their interactions in the mounds that we can study.

  But there are other peoples who wandered far and wide and left no trace of their passing for regular archeologists to find. They've left their histories in the stories and legends that have survived to be told and retold. From the telling around campfires to the illustrated manuscripts of early literature, their stories have survived. Some are still passed down today, or modified for our entertainment on television or the Net.

  Some of these tales, thoroughly discounted by modern science you understand, suggest some of the people from this time have survived.

  These are their stories.

  You'll have to be the judge of truth or fiction.

  The Meeting

  It was your average cheap hotel room, with fading paint and a dirty window overlooking an industrial parking lot. The room boasted a small bathroom with a working toilet that didn't trickle water all night. However, the only sign of acceptable hygiene was a single, paper-wrapped bar of lavender-scented soap perched precariously on a small shelf in the shower stall.

  The requisite fake-wood-topped desk and chest of drawers occupied the wall at the foot of the queen-sized bed while a faded picture of some mountains and lakes hung at the head of the bed. The chest of drawers supported an ancient but still working television while a myriad of cables spidered out from the single wall plug below the desk lending the room an air of electrical caution.

  There were only two pillows on the bed and the bed spread had obviously seen better days. But it was cheap and it was private and while only one of them wanted a cheap room, the other insisted on privacy.

  Merlin sat in one of the two typically uncomfortable arm chairs supplied with most hotel rooms. He had his boots up on the bed and was leaning back in the chair with only its two back legs remaining on the carpeted floor. With his back to the door, his staff disguised as a cane leaning against his chair, he faced the only window in the room. The view out the window showed the blank wall of the warehouse across the hotel parking lot.

  "Well, I'll give you that. It's private for sure. Nobody in their right mind would grace that front door and I'll need to fumigate my clothes before allowing them into the house tonight," said Merlin. His tone of voice suggested he wasn't kidding about the fumigation. "I shouldn't have worn my favorite jeans," he grumbled.

  The other person in the room, a reporter named Jeff (Merlin never did ask his last name) was furiously taking notes on Merlin's replies to his questions. He looked up, grunted and then returned to his notes. Merlin had refused to allow electronics into the room. British security continued to hunt him with the AI surveillance video network and he didn't want to give them voice recognition data as well. His staff had neutralized all electrical devices in the room, including the reporter's cell phone and small voice recorder he'd hidden in his front pants pocket. Merlin wasn't overly upset by the reporter's efforts to record his voice, he'd have done the same thing.

  "But we wouldn't have been caught, would we?" the voice of his staff whispered into Merlin's ear. Merlin grunted in agreement.

  "Sorry, did you say something?" asked the reporter.

  "No, just shifting positions," said Merlin. "But let's get on with it. What else can I tell you?"

  How Old Are You

  "Merlin one of the questions that everybody is going to want to know is, how old are you?" asked Jeff.

  Merlin paused and looked thoughtful for a second before answering. "That's a very good question. And the short answer is I simply cannot tell you exactly how old I am. Remember, there were no recorded dates, there were no years assigned to those early days. I can also tell you that there were no large cities. There were no civilized nations - it was well before the Assyrians formed the first human empire - and we were simply hunter-gatherers wandering across the steppes."

  Merlin reached over to the small wooden table beside him and took a swig out of a plastic bottle of water he'd brought with him. He continued.

  "But as far as I've been able to determine, I'm 4000 years or so older than Jericho. That was the very first walled city and that wall went up around 8000 BC. I was in the neighbourhood around the time they were building it so dropped in - so to speak - to see what they were doing," said Merlin.

  "So if I understand, you're 14,000 years old. Seriously?" said Jeff. His eyes widened in disbelief.

  "Well, as I said, that's my best guess, but I could be out by a few hundred years here or there," said Merlin.

  "Can I come back to Jericho?" asked Jeff.

  Merlin raised an eyebrow and nodded.

  "W
hat were you doing around Jericho?" asked Jeff. "Did you live there?"

  Merlin laughed out loud but the laugh wasn't one of joy. "Those were different days, Jeff. Looking back on it from a historian's point of view, there was a growing conflict between those who chose to stop wandering as hunter-gatherers to farm and those who continued that nomad life.

  Frankly, we nomads looked down at the city people as just another flock of sheep to be raided for food. And we did. Regularly and brutally. Jericho raised the wall to stop us from raiding their homes. It wasn't much of a wall but then again, we weren't much of an invading army either."

  "So you were a raider?" asked Jeff.

  "That and more," said Merlin. But you have to be a historian to understand the life back then and what was going on between the two groups. It's been fairly consistent in that part of the world right to the present day. Ask any righteous Bedouin today what he thinks of those who live in the alleys of the nearest city. Same thing. Town people were simply there as another resource for us to harvest."

  "Was there violence?" asked Jeff.

  Merlin didn't answer but simply stared back at the reporter.

  "I'll take that for a yes," said Jeff.

  Merlin didn't move or acknowledge his statement.

  "Let me change the subject. What do you remember about your early life?" asked Jeff. "How did you fill your days?"

  Merlin nodded slightly acknowledging the change of subject and began, "I was born into a small tribe of wandering hunter gatherers and we lived in what is now the middle east and Eurasian steppes. It was the typical melting pot of all races and peoples, but all we had were small tribes." He paused for a few seconds of silence, and a thin smile played at the corner of his mouth.

  "Let me let me try to explain how humanity developed. It may help you and your readers to understand why things were quite different back then," said Merlin.

  He continued, "We assume that groups of humans started somewhere in Africa. As they consumed the resources in their immediate neighbourhood and grew in population to a point where that area couldn't support them. Small groups would break off and travel to a new area. That new area would have an abundance of animals and food sources of all kinds that had not been consumed by humans. And when that group grew in numbers and reduced the local resources, the tribe would split again."

  Merlin raised an eyebrow in an unspoken question and hesitated as Jeff was still writing furiously.

  "Got it, go on," said Jeff.

  "In this way, tribes grew and multiplied. Slowly but surely humans moved northward and up out of Africa into the easily accessible Eurasian steppes. One of the reasons that the steppes were easily reached first was because the rest of Africa was surrounded by big oceans that made it difficult to cross without any serious ocean-going technology. And they were also important because they contained several animals that could be, and were, domesticated. It wasn't easy using the technology of those days to create sailboats or large rafts - that was something we never considered doing. We looked at water as a foreign element and as something to drink. We fished from the shore but never considered actually going into or over top of that water. It was something we needed for our lives but it was certainly not something that we were going to travel on.

  We were able to cross narrow bands of water by lashing logs together to form crude rafts and we would float across the narrow parts of rivers. Or we would ford them in the shallowest sections.

  But human expansion eventually brought people to the steppes and at some undetermined time after we had arrived there, I was born."

  Merlin looked at Jeff who simply nodded and waved him on.

  "Understand, there were numerous small tribes. Our numbers were somewhere between 50 and 75 people in our tribe and we wandered in a hunter-gatherer kind of existence across the steppes," said Merlin.

  "When we met other tribes, at least at the beginning, everyone was friendly. We would exchange stories, romances would blossom or trades would be made. We'd trade our young people between tribes to keep the genetic pool well mixed and also as a form of treaty and non-aggression. Life was good. It was a time where there were abundant numbers of both animals for prey and fruits and wild vegetables. We gathered ripe wild grains as we walked and we always made sure, of course, to leave a few seeds for both the animals and for reseeding. We understood that much about seeds. But, like everything else, when humans got the resources they needed, their populations grew," said Merlin.

  And the thing you have to understand about the tribes in the steppes is we were a mixture of humanity. We had tall, blonde blue-eyed peoples. We had short, swarthy tribesmen. We had redheads, of which I was one before I went grey. We had those with green eyes and brown eyes. We had every branch of humanity, every shape, every size, colour and temperament. And we were all mixed into one giant melting pot in every tribe across the steppes." Merlin paused to take a sip of water.

  "Later, as our population grew and small groups of individuals started moving away from the steppes, a natural kind of affinity grew. Those who were tall, with blonde hair and blue eyes tended to congregate together. The shorter, darker folk felt more comfortable living with others that looked like them. It's the old story of wanting to hang out with people who are similar to you.

  And so the blonde, blue-eyed peoples wound up moving north as a group. The shorter groups, including those with epicanthic eye folds moved further east and some even crossed what we now call the Bering Strait into North America and began the settlement there," said Merlin.

  Merlin stood, stretched out both arms to loosen up his shoulders and continued his monologue while standing.

  "But what you have to understand is that this was not a fast process. Each group expanded in numbers while slowly consuming the resources that were in the area. Then the tribe would divide again and one of the groups would, again, be further away from the steppes.

  So if you imagine a very flat table and you slowly drip water onto the middle of the table drop by drop, it will eventually flow towards the edges in a very slow, methodical way covering the table as it goes. And that's how humanity expanded.

  A tribe would get a little too large, some would split off and move to a new territory, leaving the others behind. And this was all done on foot," said Merlin.

  Merlin laughed out loud. "The horses of those days were very short and it took centuries to breed them larger. As you can appreciate, with my size – I'm 6'6" tall - I was not suited to be a horseman, my feet dragged on the ground when I rode." He shook his head at the memory of his feet dragging along beside the pony.

  "Some of my friends in the later periods did become excellent horseman and as you know, the area produced some of the finest cavalry in the history of man. But I was destined to use shank's mare rather than the real thing," said Merlin with a wry grin.

  "At some point, a group of friends decided that it was time to travel. They invited me along and we split up to settle in what is now France, Belgium and parts of Germany. Old even then, I became an advisor and tribesman to those who would become known as Celtic races.

  And from there of course, I wound up in the U.K. But that''s a very long story all by itself," he said.

  He took another sip of water and continued, "But, I am not really answering your question am I? As I said, my best guess is that I was born approximately 4000 years before the walled city of Jericho was built.

  And I lived through those 4000 years in a variety of ways as a nomad, as a warrior, a trader and in fact almost anything that you can imagine, I did."

  Merlin turned to Jeff and said, "That's the long way of saying I'm the oldest living person on this planet but I was born so long ago, I don't remember nor celebrate my birthday.

  Maybe someday an archeologist will discover something I left behind and we'll get a better sense of it. But for now, I'm the oldest person you'll ever meet and I'm over 14,000 years old."

  How Did You Learn Magic?

  Marlin, how did you learn y
our magic?

  "That's a very good question," said Merlin. The short answer is that I am still learning. The magic arrived, or perhaps I should say the ability arrived, all at once because of the special event that happened in our tribe when I was a young man. That event actually created the world - the entire world - of magic and fae.

  Some members of fae may have been active or alive back then, but I have not been able to find a trace of them in the ancient stories, legends or the real world.

  All we have in our world of Fae starts at one single, powerful moment in our history.

  Can you tell us about this? Asked Jeff.

  Merlin hesitated for a few seconds while he thought about it, and then said "Yes. Here are the basics of what happened." He paused for a second to organize his thoughts.

  "Our entire tribe was celebrating one evening after a very successful hunt. We had managed to knock down a rather large wild bull. This was an unusual event because the cattle were able to move much faster than we could and I think we probably surprised an older, less mobile animal. After we had stunned it by throwing stones with our slings, we were able to overpower it as a group and slit his throat. As you can imagine, this left the fifty of us with a significant amount of meat for a massive feast that evening.

  With the meat roasting over the fire and all of the people celebrating with song and dance, we were in a very very good mood. What happened next, was something far out of the ordinary, and to this day I do not know how it happened, who created it, or what its intent was.