Merlin's Booke: Stories of the Great Wizard

by Jane Yolen

  A new slide replaced the map, a montage of wizards as drawn by a variety of artists.

  “Well, I recognize Burne-Jones, I think,” said Pritzkau.

  “There’s a Frazetta there. A Tom Canty. A Brian Froud. And the Brothers Hildebrandt,” whispered Stevens. Into the stunned silence that followed, he added to his two companions, “Well, my sisters collect the stuff. …”

  From the front of the room, oblivious to the whisperings of reporters trying to identify the artists, Stewart continued. “There was a lot of material to sift through. Stories, poems, ballads, folklore …”

  “Bull droppings,” Stevens muttered in Spanish.

  Pritzkau elbowed him in the side.

  “And there were many places identified as Merlin’s burial ground. Merlin Wyllt—Merlin the Wild Man—was said to have been buried at Bardsey, the island of Welsh saints in North Wales. Another tradition was that he was buried where he had been born, on the Ile de Sein off the Breton coast. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s idea was that Merlin had been buried in a cave at Tintagel. Another popular guess was Drummelzier on the Tweed.” A new map marked with all the sites slid into view.

  “And another legend, which we dismissed out of hand, was that Merlin had been seen by Irish monks sailing westward in a skiff of crystal. That seemed to me more an advertising campaign for Waterford than a reasonable explanation for Merlin’s disappearance.”

  “We all know how tricky it is to sail a glass boat in the Atlantic,” called out a reporter in front of Stevens.

  The entire auditorium broke into laughter, led by Stewart.

  Letting the laughter the down naturally, Stewart took a moment to shuffle his notes. When it was quiet again, he said, “The two most persistent stories—rumors if you will—were that Merlin had been ensorceled or bound up in a tree and that he had been bewitched under a stone. I took that to mean burial in a wooden, probably oak, casket or interment in a cave. I had great hopes for the latter. In temperate climates such as ours the cool dryness of caves has often accidentally but quite efficiently embalmed the dead. Such natural mummies have been found in widely divergent places—Kiev, Vienna, Venzone (there were two dozen natural mummies discovered in vaults beneath the church). In Palermo, in catacombs under the town, thousands of such remains have been found.”

  Pritzkau was scribbling frantically in the dim light, as was Stevens. But McNeil sat listening intently, a small, admiring smile on his face.

  The slides went by in quick succession now. Dr. Stewart pronounced the names of towns and cities where natural mummies had been unearthed, and the grotesque but oddly unmoving pictures flashed one after another. “Kiev (click), Vienna (click click), Venzone (click click click), Palermo (click click click click click), Chile (click), Wyoming (click).” The last slide remained, a close-up of a mummified face, grinning toothily.

  “We know that Venzone owes its mummies to something more than just the cooling action of the crypts. There is a local fungus in the cave that also serves to dehydrate. And in some of the American caves, where the remains of Indians have been found, the mummification process was helped along by sodium salts and other compounds in the soil.”

  The lights came on abruptly.

  “Are there any questions so far?” Stewart asked, looking carefully over the crowd.

  McNeil raised his hand.

  “Yes—the gentleman in the fifth row.”

  Standing, McNeil nodded. “McNeil. Of Reuters,” he said. “Is there evidence of mummification being a process common in Britain at the time of Arthur?”

  “Thank you, Mr. McNeil. I am glad you asked that. It leads right into my next point.”

  “Shill!” Pritzkau said loudly, and the reporters chuckled.

  “By the time of Arthur, the early Bronze barrows and cairns had given way to stone vaults and wooden caskets. The idea of true mummification, as practiced by the Egyptians, was unknown to the British tribes. In fact, the word mummy did not even enter into English writing until nearly the fourteenth century. It comes from the Latin mummia meaning ‘mummy powder’ which itself came from the Egyptian word for ‘pitch.’ Within two centuries, mummy powder was being used in Britain and the Continent for curing everything from wrinkle lines to TB, and reputed to be an aphrodisiac besides.”

  “Great if you’re into dead bodies!” hissed Stevens.

  “Economics,” McNeil reminded him.

  As if to prove McNeil’s point, Dr. Stewart added, “Newly dug-up mummies were soon being shipped all over Europe by enterprising Alexandrian merchants. There was also at that time a brisk trade in local cadavers for somewhat the same purpose, though a woman writing to a friend in 1587 said that ‘nue is not soe good as olde.’” He chuckled and the crowd, enjoying the display of wide-ranging knowledge and wit, chuckled with him.

  At a signal from Stewart, the lights went out again and a new series of slides began. “So we had hopes of finding a tomb or burial site with at least partial mummification in a cave. Merlin was not supposed to be Christian, so he was less likely to have been in a churchyard or under a cathedral apse. We especially hoped for a mummy because in the last hundred years the science of paleopathology had been steadily advancing. We knew with a mummy we would have good chances of discovering from tissue remains what parasites and bacteria had afflicted Merlin during his lifetime and how he had died. We would read messages in his bones, the simplest and most basic being how big a man he had been, what kind of physique he had had, how long he had lived. But there were also ways to read between the lines: for example, was this a person from a violent society? Had he lived through a cruel childhood? What mistakes or accidents or diseases had he survived?” The grisly parade of mummy pictures continued.

  “But first you needed the tomb!” called out Stevens.

  The lights went on again.

  “Exactly, Mr.—”

  “Stevens. Latin American Herald.”

  “Ah, yes, Mr. Stevens. Good to have the Third World press here as well because what we eventually found affects all peoples, not just the English speaking. And we found the tomb!”

  This was no surprise, though the hush the reporters fell into spoke more about their admiration for Stewart’s ability to orchestrate. After all, the press conference had been called because the tomb had been discovered. Or at least something that Stewart claimed to be Merlin’s tomb.

  “I had been searching several possible sites for over ten years,” Dr. Stewart said. “And then the unexpected occurred. If I were a religious man, I might venture to attach the word miracle to it. But we shall say, rather, that it was serendipity. I was on holiday in the fen country near a small marshy tidal river that bleeds off into the Bristol Channel. It was a working holiday, because I was on a picket line. Those particular fens were being drained and as an active member of the Royal Society for The Preservation of Birds, I was protesting the destruction of habitat. We had enough pickets and power and press reports to have extracted a promise from the government that the fens would be rebuilt once some system of proper drainage could be managed, for the river had become a breeding place of mutated tropical diseases since the influx of whole Ethiopian communities fleeing a half century of famine and war.”

  Stevens was scribbling madly now, his notes a hodgepodge of Spanish and English. Pritzkau, though, was sketching Stewart’s head, emphasizing the bone structure until the drawing took on a kind of dark, wild, manic look.

  “There was a local hill called the Tor which had figured in some of the early Arthurian material and, of course, the marsh was one of the possible sites of Ynis Avalonia, the Isle of Avalon. But when the draining began, the Tor, which had been partially under water on and off for centuries, rose up over that now bleak and blasted landscape like a great mountain. And at its foot, well below what had been the waterline, was a cave, a grotto. When I heard that news, I was there before sunrise with my cameras and a backpack of portable lights.

  “The cavern entrance was small but the cave inside huge, as
if it had been hollowed out. It was a virtual catacombs with small passages turning into large vaulted rooms, one after another. So mazelike was the whole thing, I was forced to chalk numbers and letters in the passages to guide myself. In fact, despite my precautions, I was lost for two days and nights, existing on the candy bars and apples I had fortunately carried with me.

  “And then, almost as if by magic, on the third day I came upon a set of wooden doors ornately carved with runes. The doors had been so warped by the years of damp, it was easy to slip through them. But before I did, I managed to decipher the Latin motto carved in the upper arch.”

  The lights went out and a new slide came onto the screen. It took a second for the operator to focus it. When it was clear, the reporters could read the script around the lintel:

  HIC JACET MERLINNUS

  “Bingo!” whispered McNeil.

  “As I entered the tomb, my torchlight dimmed and then went out as if being drained by some superior force, though probably the constant use over the two days had put paid to the batteries. I also carried a small wick lamp with me, and when I lit it and held it aloft, this is what I saw.”

  The next slide clicked quietly into place. The picture was of the well-lit interior of a cave, but even with all the lighting, the strange wooden casket in the center seemed a shadow.

  McNeil mumbled something and Patti moved closer to him. “What did you say?” she asked.

  “Just something, some gnomic saying I heard from somewhere.”

  “Which is …”

  “To light a candle is to cast a shadow.”

  The casket was not a boxy, planed wood coffin but was an entire tree trunk lying on its side, the bark still in place. A second slide was a closer shot of the coffin. It filled the screen.

  There were low murmurs around the room.

  “It is a hollowed-out oak,” Stewart said. “At first glance the bark seems all in one piece, but in fact part of it is not bark at all.”

  A new slide, an extreme close-up of the bark, replaced the last.

  “The coffin was intricately locked and the lock was of incredibly wrought iron set in wood that was so carved it looked like bark.” Using a light pointer, Stewart outlined the lock on the screen.

  “I see it now,” Pritzkau whispered, pointing. “Do you?”

  Stevens leaned forward and shook his head.

  “To the left of the pointer is a line, and that is the outermost edge of the lock and—”

  “Got it.”

  The lights went on again. Squinting, the reporters scribbled notes to themselves in a variety of languages.

  Stewart continued. “I mapped the route back to the room carefully and, when I emerged blinking in the bright light of a morning three days after I had first entered the cave, I was afire with the discovery. I was also tired, hungry, and extremely rank smelling.”

  “That he was!” It was the Prince of Wales. His timing was perfect, as the laughter from the audience proved.

  Stewart stretched slightly and then continued. “We knew that the first thing to do was to make accurate maps of the entire catacombs. Then we needed to set lights and photograph the doors, rooms, the coffin, even before attempting to open the casket. It took me about six hours to assemble my team, with His Royal Highness’ help, and it was only my long years of training that kept me from levering open the casket at once.”

  There was not a sound in the room as Stewart went on.

  “We felt that it would be best to remove the tree to a laboratory and open it under better conditions. We had no idea what might be inside, you see, or in what shape. And ever mindful of the folklore surrounding such discoveries …” he hesitated, then added. “There is an old story about the opening of a tomb reputed to belong to Arthur and Guinevere which had long lain under a stone in Glastonbury marked HIC JACET ARTHURUS, REX QUONDUM, REXQUE FUTURUS. For those of you whose Latin remains a bit rusty, that translates as Here lies Arthur, the once and future king.”

  “I’m sure glad he translated it for us,” said Stevens.

  “Actually,” Mac said, “that plays a little cute with the translation. Literally it means Here lies Arthur, king way back when and also king in the future.”

  Chuckling, Patti said, “Latin still intact, Mac? You are a surprise.”

  “Parochial school,” he answered. “Sister Maria Lucia and her famous ruler. You’d be even more surprised at the rest of the stuff locked up in my head.”

  Stewart had continued over the buzz of the reporters. “And when the monks opened the tomb, trying to make a bit of twelfth century tourist money on the event, all they discovered were bones and—so the story goes—a tress of hair.”

  “As ‘yellow as golde’!” said the Prince of Wales suddenly.

  “Yes. As ‘yellow as golde.’ But it turned to dust the moment it was touched. Sic transit Guinevere.”

  Pritzkau sighed loudly and fluttered her lashes madly at Mac. “I so love a romantic story.”

  He laughed.

  “We didn’t want that or anything equally as tragic to happen to our remains,” said Stewart. “So we decided to have everything trucked under the most careful conditions imaginable to a laboratory we had devised in a nearby town, Godney. Brought the mountain to Muhammad, so to speak.”

  A hand raised in the second row was recognized.

  “Stemple, sir, of Newsday. You mean you actually brought all your instruments to Godney?”

  “Actually, Mr. Stemple.”

  The room rocked with laughter, for that was the latest in-word brought over from America.

  “We brought a portable X-ray machine for the bones and—if we were lucky—any soft tissue that might be revealed. And an electron microscope. Everything we need these days is portable. There was a big push in the nineties to make everything easy to carry so that actual field work—I use the word actual in its original sense—can be done in situ. But the grotto, analysis told us, was in danger of collapsing. The geological study indicated that serious cracks were developing hourly in the tomb room brought about by modern pollution and radical changes the draining had produced. We were forced to move to a stable site at once.”

  The prince was nodding his head vigorously.

  “The reason we were able to move so quickly from the moment I found my way out of the cave was that His Royal Highness had also been in the area, leading the marchers against the draining program. We had had a luncheon date which I, lost in the caves, missed. His initial anger at my standing him up turned to concern when I could not be found. When I emerged several days later, it was into the arms of a rescue party he had mounted. It was he who secured us the place at Godney and the equipment in record time.” Dr. Stewart nodded at the prince, who smiled through this recitation with the patient royal smile he had learned at his mother’s knee.

  “Our findings with the X-ray machine and the microscope I shall now sum up for you. If you have further technical questions, I shall be available to you all this week, either immediately following the conference or in the Godney laboratory.”

  Stevens said in an undertone to McNeil, “I can’t see this being more than a couple of paragraphs at best. What a waste of time.”

  “You have no soul, Stevens,” Mac said, laughing.

  “I have no stomach—for long-winded dons.”

  “What we found was that inside the coffin was a mummy of an extremely tall, slim man. There were no appreciable Harris lines, or scars that showed interrupted growth on the bones, so the child who had grown into the man in the casket had been an unnaturally healthy child. Later on, under ultraviolet, the bones displayed the characteristic yellow fluorescence that reveals the mummy to contain a high level of naturally produced tetracycline. We sometimes find that in grain-reliant societies in damp climates a microbe called streptomyce is common. Nubian skeletons, for example, show high levels. If a person ingested enough of the microbe-infested grain, the natural tetracycline would confer a certain immunity to common diseases.


  “We also discovered through X-rays that much soft tissue was still readable and, for those of you with a higher prurient interest in Merlin and his love life, the man was uncircumcised. Of course circumcision was not common in England, except perhaps as a punishment to fit certain crimes. And then the cuts were made … well, rather further up.”

  The laughter that greeted this was rather subdued.

  “We also discovered from the mummy’s teeth and the residue of fecal material that he was most probably a vegetarian.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Mr. McNeil, isn’t it?” Dr. Stewart said, his hand shading his eyes as he looked out into the audience.

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, Mr. McNeil, we are pretty sure. The scanning electron microscope can reveal typical patterns of wear on the teeth, wear that points to meat eating or bone gnawing or to habitual vegetarianism. As far as we can tell, for at least a good portion of his life, Merlin was a vegetarian. It is an educated guess, of course.”

  “Interesting,” Mac said as he sat down.

  “And the bones had one further wonderful surprise for us,” Dr. Stewart continued. “The coccyx showed a strange elongated piece. It seems our mummy had a vestigial tail.”

  “Satan!” McNeil said. “They called him a devil.”

  “One of the many rumors of Merlin’s birth,” Stewart continued, “had been that he was an imp born of the mating between an incubus and a nun.” He paused. “A man with a pronounced caudal appendage in that day and age would certainly be suspect. His own body fueled the stories.”

  The audience broke into spontaneous applause and McNeil turned, smiling, to Patti. “I love it!”

  She smiled back.

  “The scanning microscope also enables us to identify blood types within a given cell. Merlin—as we were already calling him with perfect equanimity—was AB negative which means he may well have killed his mother at birth. At the very least it was a difficult delivery, and given medical care at those times … He certainly comes from a different genetic type than the folk around him. And as he grew, with that extreme height and what seems, from the skull measurements we took, to be an elegant sloping forehead reminiscent of Chinese mandarin types, and the vestigial tail, coupled with his strange immunity to childhood disease, he must have appeared to his companions and neighbors both strange and wonderful. A miracle. And an alien.”