by Jack Whyte
Dazed and still uncomprehending, Merlyn sat silent and empty- hearted as Ravenglass told the tale of how lie had met and killed Uther, then robbed him of his armour, horse and weapons before hurrying to catch up with the fleeing group of women whom Uther had been protecting. The King's surprise at learning that the man he had killed was Uther Pendragon was too real to be doubted. He had seen only an enemy whose armour would fit his own giant frame.
Any interest that he might have had in the stranger's identity had been blotted out by the newly received tidings that he and his own men were within a short, hard ride of capturing a group of high-born women.
The northern King had no desire to fight Merlyn, for he believed him from past experience to be some kind of sorcerer. But he was prepared to fight and die then and there if the gods required it. And Merlyn, for his part, looking at the world through altered eyes, hardly knew whether or not his cousin deserved to be avenged. Sickened by all the violent death he had seen in the previous few days, he did not wish to add to it.
And so the two parted without fighting, Ravenglass riding off in Uther's armour and leaving Merlyn alone on the beach.
A heavy flail, still flaked with an ancient coat of dark-red paint, had been hanging from the saddle-bow of Uther's horse, and Merlyn asked Derek of Ravenglass to leave it with him. It was the flail he was once sure he had found close by the spot in which his wife, Deirdre, had been murdered. So how could it be here now. hanging from its former owner's saddle'.' Merlyn took the weapon and hung it from his own saddle to replace the one he himself had lost in the Mendip Hills on the day he lost his memory, driven from his head by his own flail.
The flail's existence here changed nothing, he told himself now. Uther could easily have made a new one after killing Deirdre and throwing away the murder weapon. But even as he thought that, he remembered what Mucius Quinto had told him on the battlefield that he had ridden through mere days before: Uther's fearsome weapon, easy to make, had been widely copied for years by his admiring soldiers, and then copied again by others. The things were commonplace today—brutal, uncomplicated instruments of death. A sudden vision of his father's face sprang into Merlyn's mind, and he heard again Picus Britannicus's words on granting the benefit of doubt as his beloved face gave way to a vision of Uther, gleaming teeth bared in a laugh of pure exuberant joy.
A sound over by the mast brought Merlyn's head up quickly, and he listened intently for several moments until he was sure that it would not come again.
Ygraine. The last surviving woman on the beach had been Deirdre's sister. Ygraine, and that recognition, too, had shaken Merlyn to the core of his being, showing him a ghostly image of the face of his beloved, long-lost wife one more agonizing time.
Merlyn had noticed only by accident that Ygraine was still alive, and he had gone to her assistance immediately, only to find that she was close to death. She had been trampled and kicked in the head by Derek's enormous warhorse as it had surged and stamped, fighting for balance and scrambling to accommodate the immense, ungainly weight of Derek's armoured bulk as he mounted.
Merlyn had cradled her in his arms, unable to do anything other than support her shattered head with his hand while she died, begging him frantically to look to her child, Uther's son, Arthur.
Mystified, Merlyn had assumed that she was raving, her mind unhinged with the pain of what had happened to her, for there was neither sight nor sign of any infant on the deserted beach. And then water from the incoming tide had swirled around his knees, and from the once-beached boat, now miraculously afloat and drifting out to sea, had come the wail of a child.
He clearly remembered splashing through the shallows and leaping out to clutch the side of the vessel, the ground already lost beneath his feet, knowing that if he lost his hold the dead weight of his armour would plunge him straight to the bottom. After hanging there for an age, feeling himself grow ever heavier, he had managed finally to twist his lower body upwards in one last, mighty effort and hook his right leg over the side of the boat, lodging his spur beneath the wood of the rail. He hung there quietly for a long time after that, collecting himself until he could rally his strength one more time and haul himself up and to safety.
Recalling what he had found after that, he focused his gaze on the black bearskin by the mast, and then stood up and moved towards it.
The child was awake, it’s strange, gold-flecked eyes gazing solemnly up at the shape that stooped over it. Cautiously, filled with awe, Merlyn knelt, then sat on the deck, supporting his weight with one hand while he reached out with the other to stroke the infant's smooth, warm cheek with one bent, tentative knuckle. The golden eyes, strangely ageless, shifted to gaze into his own. The child would be . . . what, how old? Merlyn had no idea, but he knew that it could be no more than a month or two. He felt his throat close up unexpectedly, and his vision dissolved into a film of tears as his breast filled with grief. He hooked his little finger, and the infant seized it in its tiny hand, and he could tell that its sturdy little legs were kicking beneath the bearskin covering. Tears ran down his face and dripped from his chin, and he sat motionless, allowing all the pain and the hurl inside him to well up into the light of day.
By the time he realized that he had stopped weeping for long enough that the crusted salt of his tears felt stiff on his cheeks, much of the burning pain he had felt was gone, but the infant still lay staring up at him, its impossibly small hands now bunched at its mouth.
"Well," he whispered hoarsely, swallowing to moisten his aching throat. "We are well met, young Arthur Pendragon. But how am I to get you off this cursed boat?" The child gazed back at him as though listening. He nodded. "I'm your Cousin Merlyn . . . Merlyn Britannicus . . . But I'm your Uncle Merlyn. too, because your mother was my wife's sister. I knew your father all his life. He's not here now, but he and I were . . . We were friends, the best friends men can be . . . for a long time."
His throat swelled up again and he looked away, blinking fresh tears from his eyes, and when he eventually spoke again, his eyes remained fixed on some distant spot.
"We had our differences, he and I. And I was stupid . . . stupid and . . ." He stopped, and then looked back at the child. "Arrogant. That's what I was. Arrogant and unyielding. But that was then, and this is now, and we have to get off this boat and back to Camulod. I don't know how we're going to do it, but we will, because you have a grandmother there, young man, who is going to love the sight of you. You'll grow up there in Camulod, because I am going to see to it." He paused, cocking his head to one side and gazed down at the child with a tremulous but warm smile. The great, gold Necked eyes gazed back at him.
"You know, I was angry not too long ago when I found out that people were calling your father Uther of Camulod, because he really wasn't from Camulod at all. He lived in Cambria, and he was a King. But you, you will live in Camulod, and it will be your home, and by the time you grow to be a man, people might not remember that there ever was an Uther of Camulod—or even a Merlyn of Camulod." His smile grew wider, and he reached to touch the child's face again, caressing the smooth skin.
"But you, young eagle, with those golden eyes . . . I'll wager here and now that everyone will know and remember Arthur of Camulod."
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Document creation date: 23.3.2013
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Jack Whyte
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