Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  As she walked toward the caves, the deer looked up, startled, and bounded away, their white tails bobbing. Nimue frowned. No wild animal had ever been frightened by her presence before. Had her life in the world of men taken away her ability to live among the animals? Did they somehow know that she had become one of them, the enemy?

  She called to them. The big doe stopped for a moment and looked back at her, then turned and leaped into the forest.

  "It's afraid of me, not you," a voice behind her said.

  She whirled around, gasping. "Saladin!"

  He smiled at her sadly. "I thought you might have forgotten me."

  "Forgotten? Never!" She wrapped her arms around him, but he offered no response. She drew back, embarrassed. "Have you been waiting for me?"

  "Every day for more than a week."

  "I'm sorry. Time seems to go by so fast."

  He smiled, but there was no joy in it. "Yes," he said. "I know."

  It was an awkward moment. "Where have you been?" Nimue asked finally to ease the tension.

  "I've traveled," Saladin said. He looked older, although only two months had gone by since they had parted company. "I went back to Rome. Everything's dying there. The fountains are filled with algae and the bloated carcasses of dogs." He stared at an indefinable point for some time, then closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. "Have you done what I asked of you?"

  Nimue frowned, puzzled. "I've gone to live with Merlin," she said.

  "Good."

  "He's not in love with me, though." She laughed. "Actually, he's become like a father to me."

  "That's good, too," Saladin said. His big stallion stepped out of the bushes. "Call him."

  She looked back at the cottage across the lake. "I think he's still asleep. We could go there."

  "To a wizard's home? No."

  "Oh, it's nothing like that," Nimue said gaily. "He's really just an ordinary person—"

  "Call him!" Saladin demanded. She heard the edge in his voice. "Stand on the rock. He can see you from there." He prodded her toward the big outcropping of boulders above the caves, then climbed up after her.

  "Merlin?" she called tentatively. There was no answer. "I can go back and bring him to you," she offered. "I'll swim over—"

  But Saladin was not disposed toward more conversation. He drew a long dagger from his belt and, swift as an adder striking, slashed across her face. "Call him!"

  Nimue was too stunned to cry out. Blood dripped onto her wet clothes as Saladin yanked her arms behind her. "Merlin!" he shouted, and his voice echoed across the water. "Come see what I have, sorcerer!"

  The old man came out of the cottage and froze.

  "Bring the cup," Saladin commanded. "I am ready to negotiate with you."

  Merlin arrived on horseback within minutes. His expression was grim. "The girl will bleed to death," he said.

  "A facial wound is never as serious as it looks," Saladin answered. He jammed Nimue's arms higher on her back.

  She winced. "Why are you doing this to me?" she asked plaintively.

  "It's nothing to do with you," Merlin said. "Your friend wants something that I possess. He's using your life to bargain with."

  Nimue tried to look behind her at the man who had first brought her back into the world. "Is it true?" she asked.

  Saladin said nothing.

  "It's true," Merlin said. "That was why he sent you to me. He knew I would love you." He added softly, "And I do."

  From the folds of his robe he took the small metallic sphere. Saladin inhaled sharply.

  "Surprised that I have it?" Merlin said, holding it up to catch the sun.

  "Why, you even kept it from the king," Saladin said with a smile.

  "I offered it to him. I begged him to take it. But Arthur wouldn't have it. He knew, more than I, what it might do to a man. But now, looking at you, I see for myself what sort of monster one's dreams can make." He closed his fingers over the ball. "Release Nimue, and the cursed thing is yours."

  Saladin pushed the girl away, but kept his dagger trained on her as she sprawled onto the rocks. "Give it to me!" he whispered raggedly.

  Merlin threw the cup on the rocks. "Get away!" he hissed to Nimue.

  The young woman sprang to her feet. But instead of scrambling off the rock, she turned instead and dived for the cup.

  "What are you doing?" Merlin screeched. The young woman paid him no attention.

  "Your greed has just cost you your life, child," Saladin said calmly as he raised the dagger over her back.

  Merlin ran toward her, screaming, as Saladin brought the blade savagely down.

  It struck rock.

  For an instant the two men froze in place, Saladin clutching the dagger, Merlin with his arms outstretched. No one was there. The girl had disappeared.

  It was Merlin who first saw the bit of scrub bush bob over the spot where Nimue had vanished. The hole, he remembered. When Nimue had run away from him inside the crystal cave, she had escaped through an opening in the rocks above. This was the opening.

  "What sorcery have you taught her, wizard?" Saladin demanded hoarsely.

  Merlin smiled. "Who could teach her anything?" he said softly.

  "I'll hunt you to the ends of the earth, old man," Saladin said. "And after you're gone, I'll kill her. And your king. And everyone else on this on this island, if need be. But I will get what I want."

  Merlin knew that the man spoke the truth. "Does life mean so much to you?" he asked quietly.

  "Don't try your foolish philosophizing with me, Merlin. You would do the same to keep the cup. And the girl, your . . . incubus, or whatever she is, is gone. Now that she has the treasure of life, you'll not see her again."

  At that moment, Nimue burst out of the mouth of the cave like a bird in flight. With a raucous laugh, she leapt upon Saladin's waiting stallion and kicked it into a run. "Catch me if you can, traitor!" she called out behind her.

  Saladin scrambled off the rocks, his dignity forgotten. The girl was riding toward the lake, where the shore was covered with boulders. Even a good horse—and Saladin's stallion was the best—would have to slow to a near crawl. He would have time to catch up with her. And when he did, he would savor each moment that it took to kill her.

  Merlin, too, saw the danger. "Nimue!" he shouted. "Get off the rocks! Head into the woods!"

  But to his dismay, she continued on her way until the stallion was balanced precariously on a mound of stone rubble. Then she stopped completely.

  "Swim it!" Merlin called desperately. "Swim the horse."

  Nimue appeared not to have heard him, or to notice that Saladin was approaching dangerously close. The dagger was still in his hand. He would not hesitate to kill the animal, Merlin knew, to get to the girl and the precious object she was now flaunting.

  She held both hands high above her head, palms flat, as if offering the cup to the sun. A series of loud, shrill shrieks poured from her lips.

  This is some kind of incantation, Merlin realized with wonderment. One of her animal sounds. But what was she calling? There was the occasional wolf in the forest, but the noises she was making in no way resembled the howl of a wolf. Besides, surely she knew that the presence of a predator would cause the horse to bolt on the slippery rocks.

  Saladin had nearly reached her. The stallion sensed his rage and skittered a little, but Nimue held him steady with her legs, all the while chirping her strange sounds.

  And then Merlin saw it: A flock of birds, thick as a cloud, screaming down from the trees. They were birds of all varieties, from tiny brown wrens to brilliant red cardinals. There were crows and sparrows and elusive bluebirds that rarely left the dark safety of the forest. There were scarlet tanagers and wood finches and bluejays, all of them converging on one point at the side of the lake.

  Merlin could only watch in amazement as they came, their wings making a sound like thunder, their calls melding into one high, piercing, terrifying scream.

  A few pecked at Saladin. He
swatted them away, dropping his dagger, covering his face. But most of them flew directly to Nimue. They covered her with their soft, moving bodies for a moment, then rose into the sky above the lake.

  Saladin peered over the torn sleeve of his robe. The girl’s eyes were closed. Her lips were silent and parted in a gentle smile. And her hands were empty.

  High above, a flash of light glinted off a metal object in the midst of the flying birds.

  "No!" Saladin screamed. "Come back!"

  Nimue laughed. "Your treasure will be where the wild birds go," she said.

  "And where is that, sorceress?" Saladin spat.

  "I didn't ask." With that, she reared the stallion up on its hind legs. It kicked out toward Saladin, who backed away and fell.

  "Whatever it was, I doubt your prize could bring you anything greater than the love of a true friend," Nimue said. "You've lost that with me, Saladin. You will not find such a friend again."

  She brought the stallion back from the shore to where Merlin stood. "Mount your horse, old man," she said, "and travel with me. For I will not leave your side, now or ever, and will love you well until the end of my days."

  Saladin closed the draperies against the harsh sun. "Who would have thought the creature capable of such loyalty?" he mused aloud.

  Nimue had been as good as her word. She remained with Merlin until his death—or what was believed to be his death—until whatever call had alerted his sorcerer's spirit that Arthur had returned after almost seventeen centuries.

  How had it felt to wake after so long, he wondered. To live, knowing that everyone you had known and loved in the past was long dead, their bones rotted into nothingness?

  How had it felt? But of course, Saladin already knew. He had outlived everyone. Everyone on earth, the great and the small. The Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Macedonians, the Romans, even the invincible Persians whom he himself had led during the twelfth century, in one of the most stunning reigns on earth: He had outlived them all. He had been a king and a pauper and a merchant and an artist and a physician, and done all manner of work to pass his endless days. He had watched history unfold and reform and repeat again and again, because human beings never learned from their short pasts. He had met millions of people, so many that they blurred in his memory like dots of color on a spinning pinwheel. Some of them remained, whole and intact, in his memory: Kanna and Merlin; the fool of an innkeeper in Jerusalem; handsome Alexander of Macedon; and Nimue . . .

  She might have been mine, he thought, and the vision of her face stirred in him an actual physical pain. In all his years of life, only Nimue had truly loved him.

  Nimue. The Lady of the Lake. When Merlin died, she lay his body inside the crystal cave and had it sealed shut. The legends sprang up instantly, of course: Everything connected with Arthur managed to reach the realm of myth before long. The locals, who had thought the great sorcerer Merlin incapable of such an ordinary act as dying, claimed that Nimue had stolen the old man's magic and used it to imprison him.

  In her old age, the common folk came to her to cure their fevers and poxes, although they never quite forgave her for banishing the king's royal wizard.

  It was only decades after King Arthur's death that a few of the more imaginative among them began to perceive Nimue's role in the whole fantastic history: that she had preserved Merlin for the time of the Great King's return. For of all the legends, the belief that Arthur would come back to reign again was the most persistent and universal. "The Once and Future King," they called him; Arthur, the man even death could not destroy.

  "And here you are," Saladin said, lightly touching the young boy's red hair. "You really did come back."

  Arthur Blessing had been asleep for hours. Several times servants had peered into the room, worried about their master who had sat hour after hour with the unconscious child, but each time Saladin waved them away impatiently. The boy who lay before him was a living miracle, just as his other life had been filled with miracles, and he wanted to be alone with him.

  How ironic, he thought. Only two people in the whole history of mankind—the Jew named Jesus who had risen from his very grave and this boy who had somehow been restored to his identical past self—had overcome the finality of death. And they had both rejected the cup of immortality.

  "Why did you not take it while you had the chance?" Saladin whispered.

  In the end, Arthur had been slain by an inexperienced boy, the puppet of an ambitious petty tyrant. His death had been agonizing, humiliating. More than half of his supporters had deserted him when he refused to take another wife. Of those who remained loyal, only a handful had been present during the battle in which Mordred's sword inflicted its mortal wound. The rest, the best of the Round Table, had gone hunting for the cup.

  The Grail, they called it by then, Christ's holy cup. Some of the knights claimed to have received instructions to find it from the ghost of Merlin himself. Personally, Saladin believed that Arthur must have told some of the older knights about the miraculous properties of the sphere after it was irretrievably lost, and the Great Quest was, for many of them, a search for personal treasure which ended in faraway places long before Arthur's death.

  Of them all, only one knight pursued the Quest wholeheartedly for the full twelve years of its loss: Galahad, the newest knight, reputed to be the son of Launcelot and the one that rumor said was allowed to sit in the Siege Perilous.

  At the outset, Saladin had not intended to follow the young knight. But wherever he went with his questions, he found that another had come just before him seeking the same answers. It seemed, he conceded at last, that Galahad's mind worked much like his own. During the final years they saw one another frequently, though they never spoke together.

  The first time Galahad heard Saladin's voice was when the dark Saracen thanked him for leading him to the cup, a moment before he sliced into the young knight's neck.

  Even then, Saladin remembered with irritation, the myths had sprung up like weeds. Upon seeing the Grail, the legends insisted, Galahad's spirit was lifted to heaven by a host of angels.

  Not by angels, but by the blade of my sword, Saladin thought pettishly. Why was it that everything connected with Arthur took on dimensions of grandeur? Every small fact associated with his life had become so interwoven with the fabric of history that it would never be forgotten.

  Yet what had Arthur done, really? The nation over which he ruled was savage and sparsely populated. He had not given it glory, nor improved the sorry lot of its inhabitants. In the end, he had not even been able to stem the tide of the invading Saxons, who eventually overran Britain.

  Mordred, the dubious "heir" to the Pendragon dynasty, was himself killed in the same battle in which Arthur died—by Arthur's own sword, the legends said. The petty kings who had fought so long among themselves were all wiped out or displaced within a decade or two by the Saxons. Camelot itself was taken over as a Saxon stronghold. Nothing about Arthur, king of the Britons, endured for long after his death.

  And yet the legends were told again and again.

  "He will come back," they said. "The king will come again."

  "What was your destiny?" Saladin whispered. What was the imperative so overwhelming that this failed king was not permitted to pass into obscurity?

  Saladin had thought about the magic surrounding Arthur for centuries. For a time, he had become a king himself. His reign had been longer, his feats more glorious than any of Arthur's accomplishments. And yet he was not remembered as Arthur was. He had never been considered immortal.

  And now, Arthur was back. To try again, to fulfill the mission interrupted by his death so long ago.

  "I wish I didn't have to kill you," Saladin said.

  But he would kill him, of course. The boy, his aunt, the American . . . all of them would have to die before the whole world found out about the cup.

  It was a pity. Saladin stroked the child's forehead. "You might have made a glorious king," he said.
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  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The constabulary in the village of Wilson-on-Hamble had not seen anything quite so exciting since the time Davey McGuinness, the local veterinarian, had gone to old Eamon Carpenter's farm to treat two sick milk cows and found that they had been poisoned.

  "One of them rolled over and died right in front of Davey," Constable James ("Call me Jack") Nubbit explained as he escorted Hal and Emily to their car. Though the boy who had come upon Hal in the meadow had called the police immediately and reported that a man was bleeding half to death near Lakeshire Tor, Nubbit had been unable to come until his assistant arrived back with the village's only police vehicle. By that time, Emily had already found their way to the doctor, who had stitched and bandaged Hal's shoulder.

  They met Nubbit on their way out. With the constable was the young officer who had questioned the bus passengers the day before, while Nubbit had gone fishing. "Hooked a three-pound speckled trout," he'd told them proudly before launching into the saga of Mr. Carpenter's dead cow. Nubbit was a red rubber ball of a man, with a beet-colored nose, florid round cheeks, and a bald, sunburned head. He wore the expression of a lapdog lusting to have his throat tickled. His companion stood stolidly behind him as Nubbit regaled Hal and Emily with the criminal history of Wilson-on-Hamble.

  Hal saw the despair on Emily's face as they parked the borrowed car at the inn. The aging police cruiser pulled in beside them. "We'll find Arthur," Hal said.

  "It's been more than two hours," Emily said flatly.

  "Ah, the Inn of the Falcon," Constable Nubbit exclaimed as all four doors slammed at once. "Good choice. Katie Sloan always made a fine apple tart. Have you met Mrs. Sloan?"

  "She lent me her car," Emily said with a sigh.

  "Well, it's just like her. Salt of the earth, Katie is. Why, when that cow of auld Carpenter's died on Davey McGuinness—oh, it was a terrible thing, vomiting something fierce—it was Katie sent her husband, God rest his soul, to go help clean up the mess. Had to bury the cow, don't you know. Can't send a poisoned cow to the knackerman. Why, the hole they dug for the beast must have been—"