by Mary Stewart
"Yes," said Nimue, "he is."
I started out of my thoughts. She was watching me, her head on one side, her eyes alight once more with laughter.
I laughed with her, then put out my arms. She came into them, and lifted her mouth. I kissed her, once with passion, and once with love, and then I let her go.
10
Christmas at Caerleon. Pictures came crowding back to me, sun and snow and torchlight, full of youth and laughter, of bravery and fulfillment and time won back from oblivion. I have only to shut my eyes; no, not even that; I need only glance into the fire and they are here with me, all of them.
Nimue, bringing Pelleas, who treated me with deference, and her with love, but who was a king and a man. "She belongs to the King," he said, "and then to me. And I -- well, it's the same, isn't it? I am his before ever I can be hers. Which of us, in the sight of God and King, is ever his own man?"
Bedwyr, coming on me one evening down beside the river, which slipped along, swollen and slate-grey, between its winter banks. A fleet of swans were proving the mud at the water's edge among the reeds. Snow had begun to fall, small and light, floating like swansdown through the still air. "They told me you had come this way," said Bedwyr. "I came to take you back. The King stays for you. Will you come now? It's cold, and will get colder." Then, as we walked back together: "There's news of Morgause," he said. "She has been sent north into Lothian, to the nunnery at Caer Eidyn. Tydwal will see to it that she's kept fast there. And there's talk of Queen Morgan's being sent to join her. They say that King Urbgen finds it hard to forgive her attempt to embroil him in treachery, and he's afraid that if he keeps her by him the taint will cling, to him and to his sons. Besides, Accolon was her lover. So the talk goes that Urbgen will put her away. He has sent to Arthur for permission. He'll get it, too. I think Arthur will feel more comfortable with both his loving sisters safely shut up, and a good long way away. It was Nimue's suggestion." He laughed, looking at me sideways. "Forgive me, Merlin, but now that the King's enemies are women, perhaps it is better that he has a woman to deal with them. And if you ask me, you'll be well out of it..."
Guinevere, sitting at her loom one bright morning, with sun on the snow outside, and a caged bird singing on the sill beside her. Her hands lay idle among the colored threads, and the lovely head turned to watch, down beside the moat, the boys at play. "They might be my own sons," she said. But I saw that her eyes did not follow the bright heads of Lot's children, but only the dark boy Mordred, who stood a little way apart from the others, watching them, not as an outcast might watch his more favored brothers, but as a prince might watch his subjects.
Mordred himself. I never spoke with him. Mostly the boys were on the children's side of the palace, or in the care of the master-at-arms or those set to train them. But one afternoon, on a dark day drawing to dusk, I came on him, standing beside the arch of a garden gateway, as if waiting for someone. I paused, wondering how to greet him, and how he might receive his mother's enemy, when I saw his head turn, and he started forward. Arthur and Guinevere came together through the dead roses of the garden, and out through the archway. It was too far away for me to hear what was said, but I saw the Queen smile and reach out a hand, and the King spoke, with a kind look. Mordred answered him; then, in obedience to a gesture from Arthur, went with them as they moved off, walking between them.
And, finally, Arthur, one evening in the King's private chamber, when Nimue brought the box to show him the treasure from Segontium.
The box lay on top of the big marble table that had been my father's. It was of metal, and heavy, its lid scored and dented with the weight of the stuff that had fallen on it when the shrine crumbled to ruin. The King laid hands to it. For a few moments it resisted him, then suddenly, light as a leaf, it lifted.
Inside were the things just as I remembered them. Rotten canvas wrappings, and, gleaming through them, the head of a lance. He drew it out, trying the edge with a thumb, a gesture as natural as breathing.
"For ornament, I think," he said, rubbing the jewels of the binding with his hand, and laying it aside. Then came a flattish dish, gold, with the rim crusted with gems. And finally, out of a tumble of greyed linen fallen to dust, the bowl.
It was the type of bowl they call sometimes a cauldron, or a grail of the Greek fashion, wide and deep. It was of gold, and from the way he handled it, very heavy. There was chasing of some sort round the outside of the bowl, and on the foot. The two handles were shaped like birds' wings. On a band round it, out of the way of the drinker's lips, were emeralds and sapphires. He turned and held it out to me with both hands.
"Take it and see. It is the most precious thing I have ever seen."
I shook my head, "It is not for me to touch."
"Nor for me," said Nimue.
He looked at it for a moment longer, then he put it back in the box with the lance-head and the dish, gently wrapping the things away in the linen, which was worn thin, like a veil. "And you won't even tell me where to keep such splendor, or what I am to do with it?"
Nimue looked across at me, and was silent. When I spoke, it was only a gentle echo of what I had said before, long ago. "It is not for you, either, Arthur. You do not need it. You yourself will be the grail for your people, and they will drink from you and be satisfied. You will never fail them, nor ever leave them quite. You do not need the grail. Leave it for those who come after."
"Then since it is neither mine nor yours," said Arthur, "Nimue must take it, and with her enchantments hide it so that no one can find it except that he is fitted."
"No one shall," she said, and shut the lid on the treasure.
After that, another year dawned cold, and drew slowly into spring. I went home at April's end, with the wind turning warm, and the young lambs crying on the hill, and catkins shivering yellow in the copses.
The cave was swept and warm again, a place for living, and there was food there, with fresh bread and a crock of milk and a jar of honey. Outside, by the spring, were offerings left by the folk I knew; and all my belongings, with my books and medicines, my instruments and the great standing harp, had been brought from Applegarth.
My return to life had been easier than I had anticipated. It seems that to the simple folk, as indeed to the people in distant parts of Britain, the tale of my return from death was accepted, not as plain truth, but as a legend. The Merlin they had known and feared was dead; a Merlin lived on in the "holy cave," working his minor magic, but only a ghost, as it were, of the enchanter they had known. It may be they thought that I, like so many pretenders of the past, was some small magician merely claiming Merlin's reputation and his place. In the court, and in the cities and the great places of the earth, people looked now to Nimue for power and help. To me the local folk came to have their sores or their aches healed; to me Ban the shepherd brought the sickly lamb, and the children from the village their pet puppies.
So the year wore on, but so lightly that is seemed only like the evening of a quiet day. The days were golden, tranquil and sweet. There was no call of power, no great high clean wind, no pain in the heart or picking of the flesh. The great doings of the kingdom seemed no longer to trouble me. I did not hunger or ask after news, for when it came, it was brought by the King himself. Just as the boy Arthur, racing up to see me in the shrine of the Wild Forest, had poured out all the doings of every day at my feet, so did the High King of Britain bring me all his acts, his problems and his troubles, and spread them out there on the cave floor in the firelight, and talk to me. What I did for him I do not know; but always, after he had gone, I found myself sitting, drained and silent, in the stillness of complete content.
The god, who was God, had indeed dismissed his servant, and was letting him go in peace.
One day I drew the small harp to me, and set myself to make a new verse for a song sung many years ago.
Rest here, enchanter, while the fire dies. In a breath, in an eyelid's fall, You will see them, the dreams; The sword and the
young king, The white horse and the running water, The lit lamp and the boy smiling.
Dreams, dreams, enchanter! Gone With the harp's echo when the strings Fall mute; with the flame's shadow when the fire Dies. Be still, and listen. Far on the black air Blows the great wind, rises The running tide, flows the clear river. Listen, enchanter, hear Through the black air and the singing air The music...
I had to leave the song there because a string broke. He had promised to bring me new ones, next time he came.
He came again yesterday. Something had called him down to Caerleon, he said, so he had ridden up, just for an hour. When I asked him what the business was in Caerleon, he put the question aside, till I wondered -- then dismissed it as absurd -- if the journey had been made merely to see me. He brought gifts with him -- he never came empty-handed -- wine, a basket of cooked meats from his own kitchen, the promised harp-strings and a blanket of soft new wool, woven, he told me, by the Queen's own women. He carried them in himself, like a servant, and put them away for me. He seemed in spirits. He told me of some young man who had recently come to court, a noble fighter, and a cousin of March of Cornwall. Then he spoke of a meeting he was planning with the Saxon "king," Eosa's successor, Cerdic. We talked till the dark drew in, and his escort came jingling up the valley track for him.
Then he rose, lightly, and, as always now when he left me, stooped to kiss me. Usually he made me stay there, by the fire, while he went out into the night, but this time I got up and followed him to the cave entrance, and waited there to watch him go. The light was behind me, and my shadow stretched, thin and long, like the tall shadow of old, across the little lawn and almost to the grove of thorn trees where the escort waited below the cliff.
It was almost night, but over beyond Maridunum in the west, a lingering bar of light hinted at the dying sun. It threw a glint on the river skirting the palace wall where I was born, and touched a jewel spark on the distant sea. Near at hand the trees were bare with winter, and the ground crisp with the first frost. Arthur trod away from me across the grass, leaving ghost-prints in the frost. He reached the place where the track led down to the grove, and half turned. I saw him raise a hand.
"Wait for me." It was the same farewell always. "Wait for me. I shall come back."
And, as ever, I made the same reply: "What else have I to do but wait for you? I shall be here, when you come again."
The sound of horses dwindled, faded, was gone. The winter's silence came back to the valley. The dark drew down.
A breath of the night slid, like a sigh, through the frost-hung trees. In its wake, faintly, like no sound but the ghost of a sound, came a faint sweet ringing from the air. I lifted my head, remembering, once more, the child who had listened nightly for the music of the spheres, but had never heard it. Now here it was, all around me, a sweet, disembodied music, as if the hill itself was a harp to the high air.
Dark fell. Behind me the fire dimmed, and my shadow vanished. Still I stood listening, with the calmness over me of a great contentment. The sky, heavy with night, drew nearer the earth. The glimmer on the far sea moved, light and following shadow, like the slow arc of a sword sliding back to its sheath, or a barge dwindling under sail across the distant water.
It was quite dark. Quite still. A chill brushed my skin, like the cold touch of crystal.
I left the night, with its remote and singing stars, and came in, to the glow of the fire, and the chair where he had been sitting, and the unstrung harp.
The Wicked Day by Mary Stewart
The Wicked Day
Copyright 2009 Mary Stewart
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, places, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Book IV The Wicked Day
"Merlin is dead."
It was no more than a whisper, and the man who breathed it was barely at arm's length from the woman, his wife, but the walls of the cottage's single room seemed to catch and throw the sentence on like a whispering gallery. And on the woman the effect was as startling as if he had shouted. Her hand, which had been rocking the big cradle beside the turf fire, jerked sharply, so that the child curled under the blankets woke, and whimpered.
For once she ignored him. Her blue eyes, incongruously pale and bright in a face as brown and withered as dried seaweed, showed a shifting mixture of hope, doubt and fear. There was no need to ask her man where he had got the news. Earlier that day she had seen the sail of the trading ship standing in towards the bay where, above the cluster of dwellings that formed the only township on the island, the queen's new house stood, commanding the main harbor. The fishermen at their nets beyond the headland were wont to pull close in to an incomer's course and shout for news.
Her mouth opened as if a hundred questions trembled there, but she asked only one. "Can it really be true?"
"Aye, this time it's true. They swore it."
One of the woman's hands went to her breast, making the sign against enchantment. But she still looked doubtful. "Well, but they said the same last autumn, when--" she hesitated, then gave the pronoun a weight that seemed to make a title of it, "--when She was still down in Dunpeldyr with the little prince, and expecting the twin babies. I mind it well. You'd gone down to the harbor when the trader put in from Lothian, and when you brought the pay home you told me what the captain said. There'd been a feast made at the palace there, even before the news came in of Merlin's death. She must have 'seen' it with her magic, he said. But in the end it wasn't true. It was only a vanishing, like he'd done before, many a time."
"Aye, that's true. He did vanish away, all through the winter, no one knows where. And a bad winter it was, too, the same as here, but his magic kept him alive, because they found him in the end, in the Wild Forest, as crazy as a hare, and they took him up to Galava to nurse him. Now they say he took sick and died there, before ever the High King got back from the wars. It's true enough this time, wife, and we've got it first, direct. The ship picked it up when they put in for water at Glannaventa, with Merlin lying dead in his bed not forty miles off. There was a lot else, news about some more fighting down south of the Forest, and another victory for the High King, but the wind was too strong to catch all they said, and I couldn't get the boat in any nearer. I'll go up to the town now and get the rest." He dropped his voice still further, a thread of hoarse sound. "It isn't everyone in the kingdom will go into mourning for this news, not even those that were tied in blood. You mark my words, Sula, there'll be another feast at the palace tonight." As he spoke he gave a half-glance over his shoulder towards the cottage door, as if afraid that someone might be listening there.
He was a small, stocky man, with the blue eyes and weather-beaten face of a sailor. He was a fisherman, who all his life had plied his trade from this lonely bay on the biggest island of the Orkney group, the one they called Mainland. Though rough-seeming and slow-witted, he was an honest man, and good at his trade. His name was Brude, and he was thirty-seven years old. His wife, Sula, was four years younger, but so stiff with rheumatism and so bent by heavy toil that she already looked an old woman. It seemed impossible that the child in the cradle could have been borne by her. And indeed, there was no resemblance. The child, a boy some two years old, was dark-eyed and dark-haired, with none of the Nordic coloring that appeared so often among the folk of the Orkney Islands. The hand that clutched the blankets of the cradle was fine-boned and narrow, the dark hair thick and silky,
and there was a slant to the brows and the long-lashed eyes that might even indicate some strain of foreign blood.
Nor was the child the only incongruous thing about the place. The cottage itself was very small, little more than a hovel. It was set on a flat patch of salty turf a little way back from the shore, protected to either side by the rise of the land towards the dins that enclosed the bay, and from the tides by the rocky ridge that bordered the shore and held back the piled boulders of the storm beach. Inland lay the moors, from which a tiny stream came trickling, to splash in a miniature waterfall down past the cottage to the beach. Some way in from the tide-line it had been dammed to form a makeshift reservoir.
The cottage walls were built of stones gathered from the storm beach. These were flat slabs of sandstone, broken from the cliffs by wind and sea, and weathered naturally, making a simple kind of dry-stone walling, easy to do, and reasonably close against the weather. No mortar was used, but the cracks were caulked with mud. Each storm that came washed some of the mud away, and then more had to be added, so that from a distance the cottage looked like nothing more than a crude box of smoothed mud, with a thatch of rough heather-stems capping it. The thatch was held down by old, patched fishing nets, the ends of which were weighted with stones. There were no windows. The doorway was low and squat, so that a man had to bend double to enter. It was covered only with a curtain of deerskin, roughly tanned and as stiff as wood. The smoke from the fire within came seeping in sullen wisps round the edges of the skin.
