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I dreamed I had some kind of magic
I have not yet read Rebecca Stott's Dark Earth (2022), but the mention of a female smith in a frame of Arthuriana made me think of Jane Yolen's "Evian Steel," which I have to hand at the moment in her collection Merlin's Booke (1986). Of course I re-read the entire collection to get to it and in the process was struck by a line in "Dream Reader" wherein Merlin's second sight is explained as an inheritance from his mother, more political and more perilous than her woman's dreams bounded by love and domesticity; it is a lie in Yolen, but the truth in Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave (1970), in consequence of which I have just begun on The Hollow Hills (1973). I can remember reading these books for the first time; they were not my first Arthuriana—I can't even remember what was—but they mapped themselves so firmly to the inside of my head that I still have to remember sometimes that whatever shifting mosaic is called the Matter of Britain does not always feature the son of Aurelius Ambrosius or the sword of Macsen Wledig. Post-Roman Britain as a kind of post-apocalyptic landscape follows naturally on the notion of the Dark Ages, but it interests me that it seems to feature as sfnally in Stott as in Stewart and Sutcliff, even in Tanith Lee, cf. "Draco, Draco" (1984): "But since the Eagles flew, there are kingdoms everywhere, chiefs, war-leaders, Roman knights, and every tide brings an invasion up some beach. Under it all, too, you can feel the earth, the actual ground, which had been measured and ruled with fine roads, the land which had been subdued but never tamed, beginning to quicken. Like the shadows that come with the blowing out of a lamp." Perhaps she too grew up on The Lantern Bearers (1959). The other day I met a kid who told me that he loves science fiction, but is bored with history. I told him that history is often taught boringly, as a laundry list of dates rather than any kind of structure, the scaffolding of how we got here. (Isn't the house you were born in the most interesting house in the world for you?) I did not tell him, because it really wasn't what he was saying, that the idea of a future slashed entirely free of the past frightens rather than appeals to me because I don't associate it with visionaries and reinvention, it reminds me of control and denial and fantasies intended to overwrite fact, how little time it takes to build on falsehood like foundation sacrifice. Because I haven't read the book, I don't know if Stott's Arthuriana figures river-decaying Londinium itself as the tower that will not stand, but if not, then I hope someone's does. It sounds like a job for M. John Harrison or Iain Sinclair. I just write about fisher kings. Yolen closes her book of changes on the myth of Merlin with a familiar image which in the last quarter of the twentieth century is less clear-cut in its prophecy than the failing cressets of Roman civilization, besides which it is healthy to be skeptical of narratives that claim that darkness flooded in when empire moved out: "Light . . . I saw light. And darkness coming on." And we light candles for memory and keep writing about times that no one remembers except the dead, which is all of them, eventually, and I hope I am not returning to these stories now because they are about shoring fragments, even when the dream always splinters in the end.
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Who will bear stars of ice and fire to the ending of the age?
This is a comic, but have you read Kieron Gillen and Dan Mora's Once and Future by any chance?
No! Tell me about it. (I hope it sticks the landing.)
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I guess I should say, if you haven't read any of his work, Gillen is obsessed with stories and narrative and what telling them does to us as humans. And Once and Future is one part the story of the Matter of Britain as a horror story, rex quondam rexque futurus as a literal threat, because Arthur comes back as a semi-revenant monster and it's up to a monster-hunting granny, her grandson who plays Percival (and other people, later on, because it draws in more stories too, like Beowulf), and others to try to stop him, and Merlin, and everyone else who is stuck in the story and can't stop it.