Jim Baen’s Universe
Page 45
The king turned his head, and, with some effort, twitched his mouth into a smile for his wife. His too-bright gaze lingered on her white, taut face, and then drifted down to her belly swollen with child beneath her ochre red gown. “I will do that soon enough, beloved. I would talk until then.” He swallowed. His beard was flecked with spit, and with blood. “Tell me of my son, Merlin,” he croaked, and the sentence ended in a racking cough. Ygraine reached for him, but Uther lifted two fingers and she let her hands fall. “Tell me what you see for the child she carries,” he said.
Merlin twisted his staff in his hands, remembering Sister Agnes, and how she twisted her hands, not wanting the truth to be what it was, wishing he had never come to make her speak the words she held within her. How he understood that now. “He will complete all that you have begun,” said Merlin to his king. “He will fight twelve battles that will become legend. His reign will be called a golden age, and his name will be on the tongues of men for generations to come. He will rule surrounded by loyalty and love, and he will be deserving of all.”
Again, haltingly, the king’s mouth spread into a smile. He lifted one gaunt hand, and Ygraine, despite the fullness of her belly dropped to her knees beside him and gripped that hand. “There,” whispered Uther. “There, you see Ygraine? It has not been in vain. Not if it brings such a life into the world.”
But Ygraine made no answer. She only clutched her lord’s hand and stared at Merlin with her hatred blazing in her eyes. Men spoke of rape and treachery and the inconstancy of women when Ygraine’s back was turned, but a few knew the truth. Ygraine and Uther had loved strongly since Goloris had paraded his new war-bride before his fellow lordings. They buried their secret deep lest Goloris doubt the parentage of her twin daughters. But Ygraine flew to Uther’s arms when he came to her. Despite all Merlin’s disguises, which fooled soldier, lord, and keen-eyed mercenary, Ygraine had known exactly who came to free her from the prison of Tintagel.
And it seemed to Merlin that she knew now exactly who had failed him so badly this time.
“You should rest now, lord king,” Merlin said, and his voice cracked. He stood. “Let your lady wife comfort you.”
Turning swiftly, Merlin all but stumbled out of the tent and past the guard. Outside, he drew in a deep breath of night air, filled with the scents of forge and fire, of men and horses. The whole of the army had encamped on the plain; a city’s worth of men and horses making a defensive ring within the fence of the great stones. This place was meant to be the answer for Uther’s only fear. Poison could not be brought here, nor heart of evil intent. This was a sacred place, a fortress for the true man and true heart. This was the place where the mind of Heaven might be plainly seen if one had but sharp enough eyes.
Even the light of so many torches and fires could not dim the diamond brilliance of the stars overhead, each one a messenger of Heaven carrying its own spark of destiny. These million sparks spread out from around the waning moon and looked down upon him. The mind of Heaven, seeing as well as being seen.
Merlin had known his error. He had known since the child began to quicken within Ygraine, whom he had helped Uther to rescue from Goloris. Until then, he had thought this place built on wisdom, but it was built only on the cold foundation of a destiny he had failed to see. Failed to see because he had not wanted to. Oh, he could gain all the answers that man could have, but only if he asked the right questions, and in that asking, in seemed he was as vain and as blind as any other mortal.
Forgive me, he said to the darkness, the stars, but who it was he begged forgiveness from he did not know. There were so many wronged. Forgive me.
But the stars had no answer. Neither did the stones that cast their long shadows in the light of moon and fire. And yet, nothing had changed. All the reading found in the ethereal and the invisible was as it had been ten years ago. It was only his failed understanding that had changed.
“Merlin.”
The sorcerer winced at the sound of his own name and turned. There stood Ygraine. She was stark white. Grief had all but washed the beauty from her. Her strength remained though, honed sharp by love.
Ygraine laid her hand against her belly. “Is it as you said? Of our son?”
Merlin bowed his head. “I have done many things my lady, but I have not lied to him, or to you.”
She stood there for a long moment. He could not make himself look into her face, but he could not fail to hear her breathing, ragged, harsh and filled with the pain she would not let herself release. You should cry, my lady. Set that pain free. Do not push it into your child.
Ygraine drew in one more deep breath and let it out again slowly. “Then, I have a command from our king to lay before you.”
These words lifted Merlin’s gaze and Ygraine met it stonily. He could see nothing past the surface of her blue eyes. Nothing at all. “What command, my lady?”
She took a deep breath again, stroking her own belly, calming the child within her. “You will kneel before me,” she said, her voice was as cold and final as a curse. “You will take an oath to the child in my belly that you will be beside him always. Never will you leave him. All you do will be to guide and protect him until he rises to the kingship his father must now abandon.”
Merlin heard these words and they rooted him to the ground. He wanted to cry out against her lie. This was no command of Uther’s. This was hers alone. He could not see it, but he knew it. Those words of confrontation would not come to him. He could only plead. “No, my lady. Do not so condemn your son.”
Grim faced, she came toward him. “Merlin Ambrosius, you do not get to abandon us in your guilt and fear. You will stay, and you will do this thing, or I will go and proclaim it through this camp that it was your hand that poisoned Uther Pendragon, for no other could break the blessing of the stones. Then, I will stand back and let the mob have you.”
He looked into her eyes, and saw there the rage born of grief. She was near to breaking, Ygraine had already endured so much. She knew that it was only her body that protected Uther’s son. She surely knew that the hand which poisoned the king would easily do as much to this son, who bore no name yet, but already had a destiny written over the future in lines of fire.
There, caught between the flickering torchlight and midnight’s darkness, with the doomed camp going blindly about its business, Merlin knelt. He laid his crooked hand on Ygraine’s warm belly.
“I swear,” he whispered. “I swear that all my life shall be to protect and aid the son of Uther Pendragon. I swear that he shall have nothing but the best of my service as long as I walk this earth, and afterwards if it is so permitted.”
As he spoke, visions flashed before him, as swift and sharp as memory; the stripling boy leaping up on the stone, holding aloft the shining sword; the flash and fury of battle with that boy riding through it proud as a ship on the storm-tossed sea; the grey-eyed woman on her white horse dismounting to take th
e hands of the young king; the black-haired sorceress; the warrior who shone like bronze, the cup of iron, the sound of harps, the clash of swords. Too much to hold in one mind, too much to be compassed by a single age, all the years of mankind, and through them all he rode.
Merlin rose shaking. He turned away from Ygraine and walked into the darkness. When he stood beneath the square arch of stones and could no more feel the heat of the fires on his back, he bowed his head.
Hoarsely, hesitantly, Merlin Ambrosius began to weep.
And in his weeping he did not know that Ygraine’s labors had begun, nor did he see the comet arching overhead to herald the birth of the new king.
Classic Stories
The Light of Other Days
Bob Shaw
Leaving the village behind, we followed the heady sweeps of the road up into a land of slow glass.
I had never seen one of the farms before and at first found them slightly eerie-an effect heightened by imagination and circumstance. The car’s turbine was pulling smoothly and quietly in the damp air so that we seemed to be carried over the convolutions of the road in a kind of supernatural silence. On our right the mountain sifted down into an incredibly perfect valley of timeless pine, and everywhere stood the great frames of slow glass, drinking light. An occasional flash of afternoon sunlight on their wind bracing created an illusion of movement, but in fact the frames were deserted. The rows of windows had been standing on the hillside for years, staring into the valley, and men only cleaned them in the middle of the night when their human presence would not matter to the thirsty glass.
They were fascinating, but Selina and I didn’t mention the windows. I think we hated each other so much we both were reluctant to sully anything new by drawing it into the nexus of our emotions. The holiday, I had begun to realize, was a stupid idea in the first place. I had thought it would cure everything, but, of course, it didn’t stop Selina being pregnant and, worse still, it didn’t even stop her being angry about being pregnant.
Rationalizing our dismay over her condition, we had circulated the usual statements to the effect that we would have liked having children-but later on, at the proper time. Selina’s pregnancy had cost us her well-paid job and with it the new house we had been negotiating and which was far beyond the reach of my income from poetry. But the real source of our annoyance was that we were face to face with the realization that people who say they want children later always mean they want children never. Our nerves were thrumming with the knowledge that we, who had thought ourselves so unique, had fallen into the same biological trap as every mindless rutting creature which ever existed.
The road took us along the southern slopes of Ben Cruachan until we began to catch glimpses of the gray Atlantic far ahead. I had just cut our speed to absorb the view better when I noticed the sign spiked to a gatepost. It said: “SLOW GLASS-Quality High, Prices Low-J. R. Hagan.” On an impulse I stopped the car on the verge, wincing slightly as tough grasses whipped noisily at the bodywork.
“Why have we stopped?” Selina’s neat, smoke-silver head turned in surprise.
“Look at that sign. Let’s go up and see what there is. The stuff might be reasonably priced out here.”
Selina’s voice was pitched high with scorn as she refused, but I was too taken with my idea to listen. I had an illogical conviction that doing something extravagant and crazy would set us right again.
“Come on,” I said, “the exercise might do us some good. We’ve been driving too long anyway.”
She shrugged in a way that hurt me and got out of the car. We walked up a path made of irregular, packed clay steps nosed with short lengths of sapling. The path curved through trees which clothed the edge of the hill and at its end we found a low farmhouse. Beyond the little stone building tall frames of slow glass gazed out towards the voice-stilling sight of Cruachan’s ponderous descent towards the waters of Loch Linnhe. Most of the panes were perfectly transparent but a few were dark, like panels of polished ebony.
As we approached the house through a neat cobbled yard a tall middle-aged man in ash-colored tweeds arose and waved to us. He had been sitting on the low rubble wall which bounded the yard, smoking a pipe and staring towards the house. At the front window of the cottage a young woman in a tangerine dress stood with a small boy in her arms, but she turned disinterestedly and moved out of sight as we drew near.
“Mr. Hagan?” I guessed.
“Correct. Come to see some glass, have you? Well, you’ve come to the right place.” Hagan spoke crisply, with traces of the pure highland which sounds so much like Irish to the unaccustomed ear. He had one of those calmly dismayed faces ones finds on elderly road-menders and philosophers.
“Yes,” I said. “We’re on holiday. We saw your sign.”
Selina, who usually has a natural fluency with strangers, said nothing. She was looking towards the now empty window with what I thought was a slightly puzzled expression.
“Up from London, are you? Well, as I said, you’ve come to the right place-and at the right time, too. My wife and I don’t see many people this early in the season.”
I laughed. “Does that mean we might be able to buy a little glass without mortgaging our home?”
“Look at that now,” Hagan said, smiling helplessly. “I’ve thrown away any advantage I might have had in the transaction. Rose, that’s my wife, says I never learn. Still, let’s sit down and talk it over.” He pointed at the rubble wall then glanced doubtfully at Selina’s immaculate blue skirt. “Wait till I fetch a rug from the house.” Hagan limped quickly into the cottage, closing the door behind him.
“Perhaps it wasn’t such a marvelous idea to come up here,” I whispered to Selina, “but you might at least be pleasant to the man. I think I can smell a bargain.”
“Some hope,” she said with deliberate coarseness. “Surely even you must have noticed that ancient dress his wife is wearing? He won’t give much away to strangers.”
“Was that his wife?”
“Of course that was his wife.”
“Well, well,” I said, surprised. “Anyway, try to be civil with him. I don’t want to be embarrassed.”
Selina snorted, but she smiled whitely when Hagan reappeared and I relaxed a little. Strange how a man can love a woman and yet at the same time pray for her to fall under a train.
Hagan spread a tartan blanket on the wall and we sat down, feeling slightly self-conscious at having been translated from our city-oriented lives into a rural tableau. On the distant slate of the Loch, beyond the watchful frames of slow glass, a slow-moving steamer drew a white line towards the south. The boisterous mountain air seemed almost to invade our lungs, giving us more oxygen than we required.
“Some of the glass farmers around here,” Hagan
began, “give strangers, such as yourselves, a sales talk about how beautiful the autumn is in this part of Argyll. Or it might be the spring, or the winter. I don’t do that-any fool knows that a place which doesn’t look right in summer never looks right. What do you say?”
I nodded compliantly.
“I want you just to take a good look out towards Mull, Mr…”
“Garland.”
“… Garland. That’s what you’re buying if you buy my glass, and it never looks better than it does at this minute. The glass is in perfect phase, none of it is less than ten years thick-and a four-foot window will cost you two hundred pounds.”
“Two hundred!” Selina was shocked. “That’s as much as they charge at the Scenedow shop in Bond Street.”
Hagan smiled patiently, then looked closely at me to see if I knew enough about slow glass to appreciate what he had been saying. His price had been much higher than I had hoped-but ten years thick! The cheap glass one found in places like the Vistaplex and Pane-o-rama stores usually consisted of a quarter of an inch of ordinary glass faced with a veneer of slow glass perhaps only ten or twelve months thick.
“You don’t understand, darling,” I said, already determined to buy. “This glass will last ten years and it’s in phase.”
“Doesn’t that only mean it keeps time?”
Hagan smiled at her again, realizing he had no further necessity to bother with me. “Only, you say! Pardon me, Mrs. Garland, but you don’t seem to appreciate the miracle, the genuine honest-to-goodness miracle, of engineering precision needed to produce a piece of glass in phase. When I say the glass is ten years thick it means it takes light ten years to pass through it. In effect, each one of those panes is ten light-years thick-more than twice the distance to the nearest star-so a variation in actual thickness of only a millionth of an inch would…”