Legacy: Arthurian Saga (131 page)

I laughed. "They were not always so
clear, by all accounts! Old women, or witless girls mumbling in the
smoke. If I've been sure of myself during these past weeks, it's
because the advice I have been asked for concerns my professional
skills, no more."

"'No more?' Enough, one would think,
for any king to call on, if that were all he had known from
you...But yes, I think I see. It's the same for you as for me; the
dreams and visions have gone, and now we have a life to live by the
rules of men. I should have understood. You did, when I went myself
after Colgrim." He walked over to the table where Ygraine's letter
lay, and rested a fist on the marble. He leaned on it, frowning
downward, but seeing nothing. Then he looked up. "And what of the
years that are to come? The fighting will be bitter, and it will
not be over this year, or the next. Are you telling me that I shall
have nothing from you now? I'm not talking about your engines of
war, or your knowledge of medicine; I'm asking you if I am not to
have the'magic' that the soldiers tell me about, the help that you
gave to Ambrosius and to my father?"

I smiled. "That, surely." He was
thinking, I knew, of the effect my prophecies, and sometimes my
presence, had had on the fighting troops. "What the armies think of
me now, they will go on thinking. And where is the need for further
prophecies concerning the wars you are embarked on? Neither you nor
your troops will need reminding at every turn. They know what I
have said. Out there in the field, the length and width of Britain,
there is glory for you, and for them. You will have success, and
success again, and in the end -- I do not know how far ahead -- you
will have victory. That is what I said to you, and it is still
true. It is the work you were trained for: go and do it, and leave
me to find a way to do mine."

"Which is, now that you've flown your
eagle chick, and yourself stay earthborne? To wait for victory,
then help me build again?"

"In time." I indicated the crumpled
letter. "But more immediately, to deal with such things as this.
After Pentecost, with your leave, I shall go north to
Lothian."

A moment of stillness, while I saw the
flush of relief color his face. He did not ask what I meant to do
there, but said merely: "I shall be glad. You know that. I doubt if
we need to discuss why this happened?"

"No."

"You were right before, of course. As
ever. What she wanted was power, and it did not matter to her how
she took it. Or, indeed, where she looked for it. I can see that
now. I can only be glad to feel myself absolved of any claim she
might make on me." A small movement of his hand brushed Morgause
and her plots aside. "But two things remain. The most important is
that I still need Lot as an ally. You were right -- again! -- in
not telling me of your dream. I would certainly have quarreled with
him. As it is --"

He paused, with a lift of the
shoulders. I nodded.

"As it is you can accept Lot's
marriage to your half-sister, and count it as sufficient affiance
to hold him to your banner. Queen Ygraine, it seems, has acted
wisely, and so has Morgan, your sister. This is, after all, the
match that King Uther originally proposed. We may safely ignore the
reasons for it now."

"All the more easily," he said,
"because it seems that Morgan is not ill pleased. If she had shown
herself slighted...That was the second problem I spoke of. But it
seems to be no problem after all. Did the Queen tell you in her
letter that Morgan showed nothing but relief?"

"Yes. And I have questioned the
courier who brought the letters from York. He tells me that Urbgen
of Rheged was at York for the wedding, and that Morgan hardly saw
Lot for watching him."

Urbgen was now King of Rheged, old
King Coel having died soon after the battle at Luguvallium. The new
king was a man in his late forties, a notable warrior, and still a
vigorous and handsome man. He had been widowed two or three years
ago.

Arthur's look quickened with interest.
"Urbgen of Rheged? Now that would be a match! It's the one I'd have
preferred all along, but when the match was made with Lot, Urbgen's
wife was still living. Urbgen, yes...Along with Maelgon of Gwynedd,
he's the best fighting man in the north, and there has never been
any doubt of his loyalty. Between those two, the north would be
held firmly..."

I finished it for him. "And let Lot
and his queen do what they will?"

"Exactly. Would Urbgen take her, do
you think?"

"He will count himself lucky. And I
believe she will fare better than she could ever have done with the
other. Depend upon it, you'll be receiving another courier soon.
And that is an informed guess, not a prophecy."

"Merlin, do you mind?"

It was the King who asked me, a man as
old and wise as myself; a man who could see past his own crowding
problems, and guess what it might mean to me, to walk in dead air
where once the world had been a god-filled garden.

I thought for a little before I
answered him. "I'm not sure. There have been times like this
before, passive times, ebb after flood; but never when we were
still on the threshold of great events. I am not used to feeling
helpless, and I own that I cannot like it. But if I have learned
one thing during the years when the god has been with me, it is to
trust him. I am old enough now to walk tranquilly, and when I look
at you I know that I have been fulfilled. Why should I grieve? I
shall sit on the hilltops and watch you doing the work for me. That
is the guerdon of age."

"Age? You talk as if you were a
greybeard! What are you?"

"Old enough. I'm nearly
forty."

"Well, then, for God's sake
--?"

And so, in laughter, we passed the
narrow corner. He drew me then to the window table where my scale
models of the new Caerleon stood, and plunged into a discussion of
them. He did not speak of Morgause again, and I thought: I spoke of
trust, what sort of trust is this? If I fail him, then I shall
indeed be only a shadow and a name, and my hand on the sword of
Britain was a mockery.

When I asked leave to go to Maridunum
after Twelfth Night, he gave it half absently, his mind already on
the next task to hand for the morning.

The cave I had inherited from Galapas
the hermit lay some six miles east of Maridunum, the town that
guards the mouth of the River Tywy. My grandfather, the King of
Dyfed, had lived there, and I, brought up as a neglected bastard in
the royal household, had been allowed by a lazy tutor to run wild.
I had made friends with the wise old recluse who lived in the cave
on Bryn Myrddin, a hill sacred to the sky-god Myrddin, he of the
light and the wild air. Galapas had died long ago, but in time I
made the place home, and the folk still came to visit Myrddin's
healing spring, and to receive treatment and remedies from me. Soon
my skill as a doctor surpassed even the old man's, and with it my
reputation for the power that men call magic, so now the place was
known familiarly as Merlin's Hill. I believe that the simpler folk
even thought that I was Myrddin himself, the guardian of the
spring.

There is a mill set on the Tywy, just
where the track for Bryn Myrddin leaves the road. When I reached it
I found that a barge had come up-river, and was moored there. Its
great bay horse grazed where it could on the winter herbage, while
a young man unloaded sacks onto the wharf. He worked single-handed;
the barge master must be withindoors slaking his thirst; but it was
only one man's job to lift the half-score of grain sacks that had
been sent up for grinding from some winter store. A child of
perhaps five years old trotted to and fro, hindering the work, and
talking ceaselessly in a weird mixture of Welsh and some other
tongue familiar but so distorted -- and lisping besides -- that I
could not catch it. Then the young man answered in the same tongue,
and I recognized it, and him. I drew rein.

"Stilicho!" I called. As he set the
sack down and turned, I added in his own tongue: "I should have let
you know, but time was short, and I hardly expected to be here so
soon. How are you?"

"My lord!" He stood amazed for a
moment, then came running across the weedy yard to the road's edge,
wiped his hands down his breeches, reached for my hand, and kissed
it. I saw tears in his eyes, and was touched. He was a Sicilian who
had been my slave on my travels abroad. In Constantinople I had
freed him, but he had chosen to stay with me and return to Britain,
and had been my servant while I had lived on Bryn Myrddin. When I
went north he married the miller's daughter, Mai, and moved down
the valley to live at the mill.

He was bidding me welcome, talking in
the same excited, broken tongue as the child. What Welsh he had
learned seemed to have deserted him for the moment. The child came
up and stood, finger in mouth, staring.

"Yours?" I asked him. "He's a fine
boy."

"My eldest," he said with pride. "They
are all boys."

"All?" I asked, raising a brow at
him.

"Only three," he said, with the limpid
look I remembered, "and another soon."

I laughed and congratulated him, and
hoped for another strong boy. These Sicilians breed like mice, and
at least he would not, like his own father, be forced to sell
children into slavery to buy food for the rest. Mai was the
miller's only daughter, and would have a fat patrimony.

Had already, I found. The miller had
died two years back; he had suffered from the stone, and would take
neither care nor medicine. Now he was gone, and Stilicho was miller
in his stead.

"But your home is cared for, my lord.
Either I or the lad who works for me ride up every day to make sure
all is well. There's no fear that anyone would dare go inside;
you'll find your things just as you left them, and the place clean
and aired...but of course there'll be no food there. So if you were
wanting to go up there now..." He hesitated. I could see he was
afraid of presuming. "Will you not honor us, lord, by sleeping here
for tonight? It'll be cold up yonder, and damp with it, for all
that we've had the brazier lit every week through the winter, like
you told me, to keep the books sweet. Let you stay here, my lord,
and the lad will ride up now to light the brazier, and in the
morning Mai and I can go up --"

"It's good of you," I said, "but I
shan't feel the cold, and perhaps I can get the fires going
myself...more quickly, even, than your lad, perhaps?" I smiled at
his expression; he had not forgotten some of the things he had seen
when he served the enchanter. "So thank you, but I'll not trouble
Mai, except perhaps for some food? If I might rest here for a
while, and talk to you, and see your family, then ride up into the
hill before dark? I can carry all I shall need until
tomorrow."

"Of course, of course...I'll tell Mai.
She'll be honored... delighted..." I had already caught a glimpse
of a pale face and wide eyes at a window. She would be delighted, I
knew, when the awesome Prince Merlin rode away again; but I was
tired from the long ride, and had, besides, smelled the savory stew
cooking, which no doubt could easily be made to go one further. So
much, indeed, Stilicho was naively explaining: "There's a fat fowl
on the boil now, so all will be well. Come you in, and warm
yourself, and rest till suppertime. Bran will see to your horse,
while I get the last sacks off the barge, and it away back to town.
So come your ways, lord, and welcome back to Bryn
Myrddin."

Of all the many times I had ridden up
the high valleyside toward my home on Bryn Myrddin, I do not quite
know why I should remember this one so clearly. There was nothing
special to mark it; it was a home-coming, no more.

But up to this moment, so much later,
when I write of it, every detail of that ride remains vivid. The
hollow sound of the horse's hoofs on the iron ground of winter; the
crunch of leaves underfoot, and snap of brittle twigs; the flight
of a woodcock and the clap of a startled pigeon. Then the sun,
falling ripe and level as it does just before candle-time, lighting
the fallen oak-leaves where they lay in shadow, edged with rime
like powdered diamond; the holly boughs rattling and ringing with
the birds I disturbed from feeding on the fruit; the smell of damp
juniper as my horse pushed through; the sight of a single spray of
whin flowers struck to gold by the sunlight, with the night's frost
already crisping the ground and making the air pure and thin as
chiming crystal.

I stabled my horse in the shed below
the cliff, and climbed the path to the little alp of turf before
the cave. And there was the cave itself, with silence, and the
familiar scents, and the still air stirring only to the faint
movement of velvet on velvet, where the bats in the high lantern of
the rock heard my familiar step, and stayed where they were,
waiting for the dark.

Stilicho had told me the truth; the
place was well cared for, dry and aired, and though it was colder
by a cloak's thickness even than the frosty air outside, that would
soon mend. The brazier stood ready for kindling, and fresh dry logs
were set on the open hearth near the cave's entrance. There was
tinder and flint on the usual shelf; in the past I had rarely
troubled to use them, but this time I took them down, and soon had
a flame going. It may be that, remembering a former, tragic
home-coming, I was half-afraid to test (even in this tranquil
after-time) the least of my powers; but I believe that the decision
was made through caution rather than through fear. If I still had
power to call on, I would save it for greater things than the
making of a flame to warm me. It is easier to call the storm from
the empty sky than to manipulate the heart of a man; and soon, if
my bones did not lie to me, I should be needing all the power I
could muster, to pit against a woman; and this is harder to do than
anything concerning men, as air is harder to see than a
mountain.