Merlin's Booke

by Jane Yolen

  He framed a third question in his mind. What wood?

  The answer came with a laugh. Whitethorn, old one. And now you have had your three. A magic number for a magic maker. The laugh died away as quietly as a breeze quits the tops of trees.

  Woods. Whitethorn. Dark. But she had given away more than that. He raised his hands once again, bringing them to his useless eyes. Dark only met dark.

  Old one, she had said. Was he old? He did not feel old, but then he was not sure he felt anything at all. He touched himself, having no memory of age or time’s noisy passage in this silent place. There was only the dark and this now. His hands traveled down his face, feeling a beard that fell, a waterfall of hair, twixt nipples and waist. It must have taken a lifetime to grow such a beard.

  A tale came to him suddenly: Dead men’s hair grows long in the casket. And here he was casked up, old dead wine in a tun. But she had not called him dead—merely old. How long, then, must a man live for such hair to measure him? He could not guess how long.

  His hands traveled back up to his face, two friends on a familiar journey. They traced the lines around his mouth, around his eyes. The mouth lines bespoke tragedies, the eye lines laughter. Which were the greater? In the dark it was impossible to tell.

  He guided the faithful hands on their journey over his clothes. The jerkin was simply made, but the stitches were tiny and carefully done. The cloth of his shirt was fine. Was he such a master tailor, then, that he could sew such a seam? Or had he had servants at his command?

  The hands, like withered leaves in the fall, fell away. Sorrow overrode him. He could not remember. All that was left to him was a kiss and a spell, and a name that began with a murmur. He wept.

  He woke again and had no more than the list of wood, dark, whitethorn, old. But then he thought: There was something more she had said. And then he had it, as if a taper had suddenly been lit in the dark. He closed his eyes against the sudden illumination.

  Magic. No—magic maker. That was what she called him. He snapped his fingers then to see if he could spark magic from them. The only light was the mind’s taper and the name she had given him so unwittingly. Magic maker.

  He thought to himself: What is a magic maker but a mage? A mage deals in images, the prestidigitation of the mind: imagination. Mage, magic, image, imagination. It was all the same. Well, then, if he was a magic maker—and an old one at that—surely he had buried inside him, deeper even than the amnesia in which her dark sorceries had buried him, some small bright images of his past. He would force them up, like buds the gardeners brought to blossom in early spring, past the strictures of her ensorcelment, past the fierce bindings of the whitethorn wood.

  The unlucky whitethorn, the maytree, it came to him now. It was the tree of forced chastity and what could be chaster than he, dryadlike, bound up in a tree. His hands went to his face again and he wept.

  No! The despair he felt was too black to be real, for it was blacker than even the dark of his wood tomb. It was more enchantment, then, and knowing this, he fought it; he fought with the only magic he still had, the buried images of his past.

  Like a fisher lad with a new line, he hooked a berry to the thread and dropped it into the stream of memory. First it floated, bobbing in the current, then suddenly disappeared. He hauled on it and pulled up a picture.

  It was of a child, still red with birth blood, lying in his arms. A child with a star that burned on his forehead for a moment, then faded into a birthmark like a faceted jewel.

  Was I this child? he asked himself. But the image was too sharp to be a construct. He would not have known himself as a babe. It was a child, then, that he had carried.

  Yet he knew himself to be neither mother nor father. Neither, yet both. More riddles.

  He looked again at the picture of the babe he had carried, but the picture had dried up around the edges; unsapped, it vanished slowly like dew drawn up from the grass.

  A babe. The dark. In the whitethorn wood. Old magic maker. And a name that murmured like a spell. He fought sleep but it overpowered him, and in the sleep there came a dream.

  A bear walked by a cleft rock. From behind that rock slipped an asp. The asp wound itself around the bear’s legs, touched its genitals, slipped over its back, circled its head like a crown. The bear rose on its hind legs and slapped at the viper. It broke the serpent’s back but the poisoned fangs buried in the bear’s paw. Bear and asp fell backward into the rock’s cleft and disappeared. The rock clanged shut with a knell that woke the dreamer.

  It was still dark and his eyes, like hollows, filled with tears.

  He set out the pieces he had; counters in a riddling game, moving them around in his mind to force the associations: the deathlike dark, the unlucky whitethorn, old magic maker, the star child, the slotted rock, the bear, and snake. Like the tarot, corrupted by charlatans and played by fools, the images danced busily in his head. He could make no more of them. The riddle, it seemed, was too knotted for his unraveling.

  What—he asked himself—did the king of Phyrgia do with such a knot? for the story, first told to him by an old centurion made friendly by wine, came unbidden to his mind. Did the king hope to unwind the knot? No, rather he struck it with his sword, severing the strands forever.

  Sword! And with that final image, the answer came to him, as riddle answers always do, in a final bright shout. Sword bridged babe and rock, contained both bear and asp. It was made of earth and air, fire and water; it was human magic far greater than his own small feats of the mind.

  He knew now who he was and who had kissed him and what the spell. The bonds of the whitethorn no longer held him. He spoke the name of the mistress of this magic and severed their ties for all time.

  “Nimue,” he cried out, and shut his eyes against the sudden light.

  “Old man, silly old riddler,” came the throaty, laughing voice. “You certainly are persistent. It has taken you centuries to find me out and by now you are surely as shriveled and as chaste as any maytree stick. I fear your advances no longer. In the years between, my magic has o’ergrown yours. Silly old man, do you still want a kiss as your reward?”

  She laughed again. Then, puzzled by his continued silence, pulled aside her cloak and was visible at once.

  On the ground by the ancient whitethorn that was shriven apart as if by lightning, was a pile of fine white bones. As she watched, the bones sorted themselves into the most complicated magical pattern of all: that of a small man, hands crossed over his chest. The bones were touched suddenly by a light as brilliant as that of starshine, and then in a moment light and bones were gone.

  Yet some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of our Lord Jesu into another place; and men say that he shall come again, and he shall win the holy cross. I will not say it shall be so, but rather I will say: here in this world he changed his life. But many men say that there is written upon his tomb this verse: HIC JACET ARTHURUS, REX QUONDAM, REXQUE FUTURUS.

  —Le Morte D’Arthur

  by Sir Thomas Malory

  Epitaph

  PUSHING THROUGH THE MUDDLED lines of protesters was the easy part, but the noise of their chanting was deafening. It was part English, part some other older language.

  The three reporters ran up the marble stairs, leaving the crowds of (mostly) young banner wavers behind a solid police line. But the sound of the chants bounced off the stone stairs and the towering pillars of the courthouse.

  McNeil of Reuters laughed as he ran. He smoked too much and was two dozen pounds overweight, but women always seemed to find him attractive. The Irish charm, his great intensity when talking about things that mattered to him, and the slight odor of danger he emitted were inescapable. “Haven’t heard that much pure animal noise since Zimbabwe in ’93,” he shouted at his companions when he reached the top of the stairs.

  Patti Pritzkau, “Pretty Patti” as she was known by her Newsweek colleagues, was waiting for him. She put her hand on
his arm. “I especially like the boy carrying the sign Let’s Keep the Myth in Mystery,” she said.

  “Rhodes scholars no doubt,” mumbled McNeil, aware of her hand.

  Last up was the dark-haired Stevens of the Latin American Herald. Though Jewish and a New Yorker, he affected a Latino mustache in the hopes of improving both his Spanish and his standing among Third World correspondents. “I liked Remember That Mage is in the Middle of Imagination. Good sentiment.”

  “But lousy mathematics,” said Pritzkau. “Mage is nowhere near the middle.” She looked at McNeil. “I thought you Brits prided yourselves on your classical educations.” Leaning against one of the pillars she watched the crowd.

  Stevens snapped a few quick pictures.

  “Don’t blame me for British education,” Mac said. “Remember—I’m Irish!” He smiled, part imp, part innocent.

  Patti held up her hands. “Okay, Mac, just don’t shoot that charm at me.” They had been flirting for three months but not gotten past the public stage.

  “Come on,” Stevens urged. “The conference is scheduled for noon and it’s a few minutes past that now. We’re the last.”

  “Typical British attention to time,” Patti said over her shoulder as she pushed open the heavy wooden doors. “Be punctual—and a hundred years behind the times.”

  Behind her the two men laughed and then followed her through the doors into the long, cold, high-ceilinged hall. As they walked toward the Hatfield Room, where the press conference was to take place, Mac reached out for Patti’s hand. She let him hold it for a moment, then drew it away.

  “Now, now, Mac,” she whispered. “That’s not professional.”

  “Your profession—or mine?” he asked with a big grin.

  Stevens smothered a laugh. He’d been watching the slow progress of their romance since Pritzkau had arrived from the States. In fact the entire foreign press corps had a bet on it. Stevens’ money was on Patti. She reminded him of his oldest sister.

  “If we don’t hurry,” Stevens interrupted, “it will be like coming into a movie halfway through. We’ll recognize the actors but have to reconstruct the plot.”

  They started to trot down the hall and Patti, even in a skirt and low heels, took the lead.

  And that, Stevens thought to himself, is why my money is on her. She’s a reporter first and a lover second.

  Mac reached the door last. Between puffs, he said to them, “Relax. Don’t hurry so. King Arthur will wait. He’s waited all these years, and Merlin, too, to return when we need him. That’s the way the story goes. And I, for one, believe it.”

  “The Irish are great believers,” said Stevens.

  “And great lovers, too,” added Mac with a wink. He laughed and opened the door, bowing low, to let both Pritzkau and Stevens precede him.

  In fact the conference had only just begun, with some minor dignitaries standing up for recognition: Oppenheim who headed Arts and Monuments, Turner who ran the Oxbridge Archeology Consortium, and Kotker whose domain was the Bodleian Ancient Manuscripts Section. McNeil pointed them out, adding, “Heavy academic canons.”

  “Oh, lord,” Stevens muttered in a fair imitation of the current prime minister’s high-pitched esthete’s voice. “And I thought this was going to be words of one syllable.”

  The trio of scholars sat down in the front row, and the Prince of Wales stepped forward to take the microphone. “It is my great pleasure to introduce a man who has made a discovery that has raised England once again to the glory of its past. A man who …”

  McNeil’s voice overtook the prince’s so that the three or four reporters closest to him missed HRH’s next few sentences. “I hear Wales underwrote the expedition. Seems he fell under Stewart’s spell at Cambridge. Friends of mine there say the man’s a genius at converting undergraduates.”

  “And the prince being a perennial undergraduate …” added Pritzkau.

  “He may have a tougher bunch here today,” Stevens said.

  “Look around you,” Patti stage-whispered, “and then repeat that!”

  McNeil smothered a laugh.

  The prince had just finished his introduction and the other man at the table stood. He was extremely tall and elegant-looking with thick straight white hair almost to his shoulders. Leonine was the word that sprang into the minds of a half-dozen reporters simultaneously. His head seemed almost too large for the long thin body, and when he walked to the microphone, it was with the slight stoop that men affect who grow too quickly in adolescence.

  “What great cheekbones,” Pritzkau said as the two men shook hands.

  “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen of the press. And thank you, Your Royal Highness, for that introduction. My fellow scholars, please forgive me if I step on your illustrious toes or borrow some of your words without full credit in the story that follows. In my printed version, things will be liberally sprinkled with the proper citations and footnotes.” He smiled broadly and was rewarded with a friendly wave of chuckles.

  “You will all have been handed a sheet of paper as you entered with the historical and literary data on King Arthur and the Matter of Britain as we now know it. That should help any of you who are a bit far away from your school or university courses, and a quick trot for those of us who think we have it all down pat in an easily recallable form.”

  McNeil whispered to Patti, “Nicely put.”

  “You mean, not bad for an Englishman?” She said it without turning toward him, but she knew it amused him because he snorted.

  After waiting a beat, McNeil whispered directly into her ear, “Scots, actually.”

  Stewart continued smoothly above the sounds of rustling papers. “What I am going to tell you today may astound some of you, baffle others, and make the cynics among you laugh. At first. But I think that by the time I have shown you everything, you will believe, as I believe, that Merlinnus Ambrosius, aka Myrddin the bard of Gwythheyrn, aka Myrddn Wyllt, aka Merlin the arch-mage, was more than an ordinary run-of-the-mill Celtic soothsayer out of the folk tradition but was rather an unusual, perhaps even extraordinary man who lived in sixth century England.”

  There was little reaction to this introduction, for word of the find had already slipped out in bits and pieces over the long, hot, essentially newsless summer. People magazine had carried a gossipy piece on Dr. Stewart’s love life (estranged wife once his student, no mistresses). The British yellow sheets had had a field day with the prince’s special interest in the discovery of the tomb. And there had been a lot of speculation in the American news weeklies, as well as long think-pieces in the Italian, French and, surprisingly, Yugoslavian papers. An hour’s special on American television was planned.

  Stevens folded the handout into halves over and over until the paper was no bigger than his thumb. “My sisters would love this,” he muttered to McNeil. “They all read science fiction. But what am I doing here? I’m an economics reporter.”

  “Wait till you see the Merlin the Magician dolls that will come out this year,” McNeil told him. “It will make yoyos, Hula Hoops, Rubik’s Cube, and Cabbage Patch dolls seem like nothing. That’s economics.”

  The lights went out and a screen was lowered by some unseen but cranky mechanism. A slide map of Great Britain suddenly appeared before them.

  Dr. Stewart’s voice floated effortlessly above them. “Was there really a Merlin? It is the very first question we have to ask ourselves. Some authorities hold that the story of Merlin began with a blunder: the mistaken interpretation of the place name ‘Carmarthen’ as caer or town of Myrddin. And because this view was so persuasive, for many years the figure of the arch-mage Merlin has been seen as a folkloric counterpart of Puck and Queen Mab and Robin Goodfellow, merely the result of spurious etymology.

  “But I grew up near the site of ancient Carmarthen, and we boys all took turns standing on a great old tree stump and reciting the local rhymed prophecy: When Merlin’s tree shall tumble down, then shall fall Carmarthen town. Well, tree and old tow
n were gone, we knew not when or how. So if that was true, then in our boys’ hearts, all the rest was true, too.”

  A light rod pointed to the small dot marked Carmarthen on the map.

  “I studied Arthurian literature at the university, a choice probably informed by boyhood dreams, but …”

  “Which university, sir?” someone called out into the dark.

  “Oxford,” came the reply.

  “Score one,” McNeil replied.

  Pritzkau giggled. She didn’t like the fact; it seemed to rebound on her professionalism. But she giggled.

  “And the dons, though lovers of literature, were at the same time great debunkers of myth. They were careful to place Merlin in the Scottish or Welsh or Breton woods as purely a product of the uncultivated folk mind.

  “I, however, did not. To me it did not matter if much that was credited to Merlin—for example the prophesies for King Vortigern about the red and white dragons, or the mysterious three laughs the magician made at court—were straight out of traditional tales. Such embroideries always attach themselves to any figure of power. Look what has happened to figures closer to us in time: Napoleon, Lincoln, Churchill, Hitler. All have gathered in their wake a folklore fed by both their followers and their victims.

  “No, I was not deterred by the folk additions. I was encouraged by them. Just as Heinrich Schliemann was convinced of the core truth of the Odyssey and found the fabled treasure of Troy that proved it, I was convinced that in the stories of Arthur’s court, the figure of Merlin had been real.”

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