Legacy: Arthurian Saga (7 page)

I stood quite still, wondering if it
was these that had made the curious musty smell. I thought I could
smell them as they passed, but it wasn't the same. I had no fear
that they would touch me; in darkness or light, whatever their
speed, bats will touch nothing. They are so much creatures of the
air, I believe, that as the air parts in front of an obstacle the
bat is swept aside with it, like a petal carried downstream. They
poured past, a shrill tide of them between me and the wall.
Childlike, to see what the stream would do -- how it would divert
itself -- I took a step nearer to the wall. Nothing touched me. The
stream divided and poured on, the shrill air brushing both my
cheeks. It was as if I did not exist. But at the same moment when I
moved, the creature that I had seen moved, too. Then my
outstretched hand met, not rock, but metal, and I knew what the
creature was. It was my own reflection.

Hanging against the wall was a sheet
of metal, burnished to a dull sheen. This, then, was the source of
the diffused light within the cave; the mirror's silky surface
caught, obliquely, the light from the cave's mouth, and sent it on
into the darkness. I could see myself moving in it like a ghost, as
I recoiled and let fall the hand which had leapt to the knife at my
hip.

Behind me the flow of bats had ceased,
and the cave was still. Reassured, I stayed where I was, studying
myself with interest in the mirror. My mother had had one once, an
antique from Egypt, but then, deeming such things to be vanity, she
had locked it away. Of course I had often seen my face reflected in
water, but never my body mirrored, till now. I saw a dark boy,
wary, all eyes with curiosity, nerves, and excitement. In that
light my eyes looked quite black; my hair was black, too, thick and
clean, but worse cut and groomed than my pony's; my tunic and
sandals were a disgrace. I grinned, and the mirror flashed a sudden
smile that changed the picture completely and at once, from a
sullen young animal poised to run or fight, to something quick and
gentle and approachable; something, I knew even then, that few
people had ever seen.

Then it vanished, and the wary animal
was back, as I leaned forward to run a hand over the metal. It was
cold and smooth and freshly burnished. Whoever had hung it -- and
he must be the same person who used the cup of horn outside -- had
either been here very recently, or he still lived here, and might
come back at any moment to find me.

I was not particularly frightened. I
had pricked to caution when I saw the cup, but one learns very
young to take care of oneself, and the times I had been brought up
in were peaceful enough, at any rate in our valley; but there are
always wild men and rough men and the lawless and vagabonds to be
reckoned with, and any boy who likes his own company, as I did,
must be prepared to defend his skin. I was wiry, and strong for my
age, and I had my dagger. That I was barely seven years old never
entered my head; I was Merlin, and, bastard or not, the King's
grandson. I went on exploring.

The next thing I found, a pace along
the wall, was a box, and on top of it shapes which my hands
identified immediately as flint and iron and tinderbox, and a big,
roughly made candle of what smelled like sheep's tallow. Beside
these objects lay a shape which -- incredulously and inch by inch
-- I identified as the skull of a horned sheep. There were nails
driven into the top of the box here and there, apparently holding
down fragments of leather. But when I felt these, carefully, I
found in the withered leather frameworks of delicate bone; they
were dead bats, stretched and nailed on the wood.

This was a treasure cave indeed. No
find of gold or weapons could have excited me more. Full of
curiosity, I reached for the tinderbox.

Then I heard him coming
back.

My first thought was that he must have
seen my pony, then I realized he was coming from further up the
hill. I could hear the rattling and scaling of small stones as he
came down the scree above the cave. One of them splashed into the
spring outside, and then it was too late. I heard him jump down on
to the flat grass beside the water.

It was time for the ring-dove again;
the falcon was forgotten. I ran deeper into the cave. As he swept
aside the boughs that darkened the entrance, the light grew
momentarily, enough to show me my way. At the back of the cave was
a slope and jut of rock, and, at twice my height, a widish ledge. A
quick flash of sunlight from the mirror caught a wedge of shadow in
the rock above the ledge, big enough to hide me. Soundless in my
scuffed sandals, I swarmed on to the ledge, and crammed my body
into that wedge of shadow, to find it was in fact a gap in the
rock, giving apparently on to another, smaller cave. I slithered in
through the gap like an otter into the river-bank.

It seemed that he had heard nothing.
The light was cut off again as the boughs sprang back into place
behind him, and he came into the cave. It was a man's tread,
measured and slow.

If I had thought about it at all, I
suppose I would have assumed that the cave would be uninhabited at
least until sunset, that whoever owned the place would be away
hunting, or about his other business, and would return only at
nightfall. There was no point in wasting candles when the sun was
blazing outside. Perhaps he was here now only to bring home his
kill, and he would go again and leave me the chance to get out. I
hoped he would not see my pony tethered in the hawthorn
brake.

Then I heard him moving, with the sure
tread of someone who knows his way blindfold, towards the candle
and the tinderbox.

Even now I had no room for
apprehension, no room, indeed, for any but the one thought or
sensation -- the extreme discomfort of the cave into which I had
crawled. It was apparently small, not much bigger than the large
round vats they use for dyeing, and much the same shape. Floor,
wall and ceiling hugged me round in a continuous curve. It was like
being inside a large globe; moreover, a globe studded with nails,
or with its inner surface stuck all over with small pieces of
jagged stone. There seemed no inch of surface not bristling like a
bed of strewn flints, and it was only my light weight, I think,
that saved me from being cut, as I quested about blindly to find
some clear space to lie on. I found a place smoother than the rest
and curled there, as small as I could, watching the faintly defined
opening, and inching my dagger silently from its sheath into my
hand.

I heard the quick hiss and chime of
flint and iron, and then the flare of light, intense in the
darkness, as the tinder caught hold. Then the steady, waxing glow
as he lit the candle.

Or rather, it should have been the
slow-growing beam of a candle flame that I saw, but instead there
was a flash, a sparkle, a conflagration as if a whole pitch-soaked
beacon was roaring up in flames. Light poured and flashed, crimson,
golden, white, red, intolerable into my cave. I winced back from
it, frightened now, heedless of pain and cut flesh as I shrank
against the sharp walls. The whole globe where I lay seemed to be
full of flame.

It was indeed a globe, a round chamber
floored, roofed, lined with crystals. They were fine as glass, and
smooth as glass, but clearer than any glass I had ever seen,
brilliant as diamonds. This, in fact, to my childish mind, was what
they first seemed to be. I was in a globe lined with diamonds, a
million burning diamonds, each face of each gem wincing with the
light, shooting it to and fro, diamond to diamond and back again,
with rainbows and rivers and bursting stars and a shape like a
crimson dragon clawing up the wall, while below it a girl's face
swam faintly with closed eyes, and the light drove right into my
body as if it would break me open.

I shut my eyes. When I opened them
again I saw that the golden light had shrunk and was concentrated
on one part of the wall no bigger than my head, and from this,
empty of visions, rayed the broken, brilliant beams.

There was silence from the cave below.
He had not stirred. I had not even heard the rustle of his
clothes.

Then the light moved. The flashing
disc began to slide, slowly, across the crystal wall. I was
shaking. I huddled closer to the sharp stones, trying to escape it.
There was nowhere to go. It advanced slowly round the curve. It
touched my shoulder, my head, and I ducked, cringing. The shadow of
my movement rushed across the globe, like a wind-eddy over a
pool.

The light stopped, retreated, fixed
glittering in its place. Then it went out. But the glow of the
candle, strangely, remained; an ordinary steady yellow glow beyond
the gap in the wall of my refuge.

"Come out." The man's voice, not loud,
not raised with shouted orders like my grandfather's, was clear and
brief with all the mystery of command. It never occurred to me to
disobey. I crept forward over the sharp crystals, and through the
gap. Then I slowly pulled myself upright on the ledge, my back
against the wall of the outer cave, the dagger ready in my right
hand, and looked down.

6

He stood between me and the candle, a
hugely tall figure (or so it seemed to me) in a long robe of some
brown homespun stuff. The candle made a nimbus of his hair, which
seemed to be grey, and he was bearded. I could not see his
expression, and his right hand was hidden in the folds of his
robe.

I waited, poised warily. He spoke
again, in the same tone. "Put up your dagger and come
down."

"When I see your right hand," I said.
He showed it, palm up. It was empty. He said gravely: "I am
unarmed."

"Then stand out of my way," I said,
and jumped. The cave was wide, and he was standing to one side of
it. My leap carried me three or four paces down the cave, and I was
past him and near the entrance before he could have moved more than
a step. But in fact he never moved at all. As I reached the mouth
of the cave and swept aside the hanging branches I heard him
laughing.

The sound brought me up short. I
turned. From here, in the light which now filled the cave, I saw
him clearly. He was old, with grey hair thinning on top and hanging
lank over his ears, and a straight growth of grey beard, roughly
trimmed. His hands were calloused and grained with dirt, but had
been fine, with long fingers. Now the old man's veins crawled and
knotted on them, distended like worms. But it was his face which
held me; it was thin, cavernous almost as a skull, with a high
domed forehead and bushy grey brows which came down jutting over
eyes where I could see no trace of age at all. These were closely
set, large, and of a curiously clear and swimming grey. His nose
was a thin beak; his mouth, lipless now, stretched wide with his
laughter over astonishingly good teeth. "Come back. There's no need
to be afraid."

"I'm not afraid." I dropped the boughs
back into place, and not without bravado walked towards him. I
stopped a few paces away. "Why should I be afraid of you? Do you
know who I am?" He regarded me for a moment, seeming to muse. "Let
me see you. Dark hair, dark eyes, the body of a dancer and the
manners of a young wolf...or should I say a young falcon?" My
dagger sank to my side. "Then you do know me?"

"Shall I say I knew you would come
someday, and today I knew there was someone here. What do you think
brought me back so early?"

"How did you know there was someone
here? Oh, of course, you saw the bats."

"Perhaps."

"Do they always go up like
that?"

"Only for strangers. Your dagger,
sir."

I put it back in my belt. "Nobody
calls me sir. I'm a bastard. That means I belong to myself, no one
else. My name's Merlin, but you knew that."

"And mine is Galapas. Are you
hungry?"

"Yes." But I said it dubiously,
thinking of the skull and the dead bats.

Disconcertingly, he understood. The
grey eyes twinkled. "Fruit and honey cakes? And sweet water from
the spring? What better fare would you get, even in the King's
house?"

"I wouldn't get that in the King's
house at this hour of the day," I said frankly. "Thank you, sir,
I'll be glad to eat with you."

He smiled. "Nobody calls me sir. And I
belong to no man, either. Go out and sit down in the sun, and I'll
bring the food."

The fruit was apples, which looked and
tasted exactly like the ones from my grandfather's orchard, so that
I stole a sideways glance at my host, scanning him by daylight,
wondering if I had ever seen him on the river-bank, or anywhere in
the town.

"Do you have a wife?" I asked. "Who
makes the honey cakes? They're very good."

"No wife. I told you I belonged to no
man, and to no woman either. You will see, Merlin, how all your
life men, and women too, will try to put bars round you, but you
will escape those bars, or bend them, or melt them at your will,
until, of your will, you take them round you, and sleep behind them
in their shadow...I get the honey cakes from the shepherd's wife,
she makes enough for three, and is good enough to spare some for
charity."

"Are you a hermit, then? A holy
man?"

"Do I look like a holy
man?"

"No." This was true. The only people I
remember being afraid of at that time were the solitary holy men
who sometimes wandered, preaching and begging, into the town;
queer, arrogant, noisy men, with a mad look in their eyes, and a
smell about them which I associated with the heaps of offal outside
the slaughter-pens. It was sometimes hard to know which god they
professed to serve. Some of them, it was whispered, were druids,
who were still officially outside the law, though in Wales in the
country places they still practiced without much interference. Many
were followers of the old gods -- the local deities -- and since
these varied in popularity according to season, their priests
tended to switch allegiance from time to time where the pickings
were richest. Even the Christian ones did this sometimes, but you
could usually tell the real Christians, because they were the
dirtiest. The Roman gods and their priests stayed solidly enshrined
in their crumbling temples, but did very well on offerings
likewise. The Church frowned on the lot, but could not do much
about it. "There was a god at the spring outside," I
ventured.