The Old Magic

by James Mallory

  This time, however, matters were different. This time, his marriage would last, and secure his northern border from invasion into the bargain. Vortigern’s new intended was Ganeida, Queen of the Border Celts. She was a warrior from a sorcerous lineage, and he was holding her entire army hostage for her good behavior.

  Ganeida and her men had surrendered to his army at Badon after weeks of heavy fighting, but Vortigern had no intention of ransoming an enemy army back to their norther kinfolk to cause him more trouble. He’d proposed an alternative to the queen who led them: Marry him, or he’d execute every one of her men.

  Ganeida had been a good general with proper concern for her troops. She’d agreed to his terms at once. And today they would wed, cementing an alliance that would defeat, once and for all, Uther’s hopes of retaking the throne.

  Deep under the Fairy Hill, Mab watched Vortigern in one of her scrying crystals. She’d kept her eye on him down through the years; he’d been a huge disappointment to her, but she did have to admit that he had certain uses.

  For one thing, he occupied the throne until her Merlin would be ready to claim it as a ruler of spirit as well as flesh who would lead her people back to the Old Ways. After Vortigern’s rule, the people would greet Merlin with tears of joy. So Vortigern had his uses.

  But meanwhile the Saxon despot would take careful handling. She didn’t want to get rid of him before she was finished with him, but she had no intention of allowing Vortigern to found a dynasty whose successors would trouble Merlin after his death. Unfortunately, kings took a real interest in having heirs, so Mab had been forced to keep a close watch on matters.

  She’d been pleased when Brede had jumped from the highest tower of Winchester Castle, and it had taken very little manipulation to get the Lady Argante’s father to raise his standard against Vortigern at that very opportune moment, but Ganeida was another matter entirely.

  Queen Ganeida was no flighty young girl, but a warrior princess used to ruling her Border Celts with pitiless efficiency. She was pragmatic enough to wed Vortigern for power, and the two of them together would pose a serious obstacle to Mab’s ambitions for Merlin and Britain.

  This time, Mab mused, she would have to intervene more directly. …

  The wedding festivities had gone on all day, and the wedding feast would continue for some hours yet, but the Lady Ganeida, now Queen of England, had already retired to the royal bedchamber to await her eager groom.

  He was not what she’d looked for in a husband, but Ganeida doubted very much that she was exactly what Vortigern had looked for in a bride. Past her first youth, hard and battle-scarred as the men she led, Ganeida was more a warrior than a queen.

  But perhaps, she thought, gazing into the mirror as she brushed out her long red hair, one needed to be both to rule Britain. And for a share in Vortigern’s power, she would gladly wed the Devil himself, did that bogeyman of the New Religion really exist. And as for the King himself, well, she’d had worse. She was still young enough to bear him strong sons to rule Britain and the Border after he was dead. And so long as Vortigern kept his promises, she would keep hers.

  Unseen by any mortal eyes, Mab flickered into existence in a corner of the chamber. This Ganeida was trouble—she could smell it. Best to get rid of her at once, before she could pose too great a threat to Merlin. For the throne must be his, as soon as his training was complete.

  Invisibly, Mab appeared at Ganeida’s side. “Are you sure you can trust Vortigern to keep his word?” Mab whispered soundlessly in Ganeida’s ear. “You know how ruthless he is. What if this is all some sort of trap? Perhaps he has already slain your men … and will kill you as well, when he’s done with you. There’s no escape from his castle. There’s no one you can turn to. Everyone within these walls is his ally, and what of the future? When Uther returns you will be branded a traitor to Britain, your children slain before your eyes, and your lands put to the sword. That is your future. There is no hope at all. …”

  On and on Mab whispered into the new Queen’s ear, as Ganeida gradually grew pale and still, staring into her mirror with wide grey eyes.

  Vortigern was accompanied to his bedchamber by several of his more trusted barons, as well as some he simply wanted to keep a particular eye on. There were a large number of steps in the winding staircase that led to his tower bedroom, but Vortigern didn’t mind. He would only have to traverse them in one direction.

  He was not, the King assured himself silently, drunk. He had perhaps had a few more horns of mead than was strictly wise, but if a man couldn’t celebrate on his own wedding day, when could he celebrate? And this alliance would put an end to those whispers from across the Channel that his days were numbered. Uther was still only a boy, and if the people of Britain had to choose between the unknown quantity of Uther and their own prince, born and raised in Britain, Vortigern knew which they’d choose—assuming they knew what was good for them.

  I shall name him … Vortigern. It’s a good name for a king. He shall be Vortigern II, and Uther will not even be a memory. …

  His thoughts made Vortigern smile, and he was smiling when he opened the door to his bedchamber.

  The sight that he saw then made him stop dead, but the men behind him had quite as much to drink as he had, and their momentum jostled him on into the room, before the man at his back—Ardent, it was—saw what Vortigern had seen and stopped short with a strangled cry.

  The curtains of the royal bed were pulled back, and Ganeida lay in the middle of it, dressed in her wedding-night finery. The small gold-and-pearl dagger that had been, by Saxon custom, Vortigern’s wedding present to her was buried to its hilt in her heart, and her hands were still clasped about it.

  There was blood everywhere. Blindly, Vortigern turned away from the sight, shoving through the press of men at his back until he was past them. He ran down the stairs, shouting for his personal guard. By the time the night was through, no man in Ganeida’s army would be left alive.

  And in the bedchamber above, Mab surveyed her night’s work … and smiled.

  After his adventure in the Forest of the Night, Merlin felt as though he were seeking the answer to a question without knowing what the question was. That impulse drove him onward, through ever more esoteric books and ancient scrolls. He studied harder than ever before, though at times his studies made him feel as if he were wading through quicksand, working very hard but making little progress. He enjoyed the pure knowledge, but more and more the study of magic made him feel as if he were doing something unfair, something that could lead only to trouble. Slowly Merlin was coming to the realization that if he were to become a full wizard and Mab’s champion, he might be forced to do things that he despised.

  He wished that Blaise or Herne were here for him to talk to; the only people he saw were Mab and Frik. The pixies, trolls, and small fluttering sprites who were Mab’s court, elvenkind diminished by time and human disbelief, hardly counted as conversational companions, and Merlin had seen no other creatures here in the Land of Magic. And while Merlin still trusted Mab and Frik to have his best interests at heart, a seed of doubt had been planted in his soul by what he had seen in the Forest of the Night, and slowly, day by day, the seed was growing.

  “Good morning, Master Merlin,” Frik said, sweeping into the room in his cap and gown.

  Over the passing weeks, the library had come to take on the look of an old-fashioned schoolroom. There was now a lectern at one end of the long table before the fire, and a chalkboard behind it, its surface covered with detailed drawings of pentagrams, sigils, and magic circles. In one corner of the room an athanor bubbled furiously, the result of Merlin’s dabbling in alchemy. A worried-looking frog wearing a tiny gold crown sat atop a shelf in a deep glass bowl, slowly blinking its bulging eyes.

  Merlin trudged into the room with a book under his arm, his hair still damp from his morning wash. He sat down in his seat and opened his book with a sigh.

  “Is something wrong?” Frik asked
archly.

  Merlin shrugged. “It’s just that …” he stopped. He wasn’t certain what was bothering him. He only knew that something was.

  “Well, do go on, Master Merlin. I’m certain that all of us are terribly interested in your deliberations,” Frik said cuttingly.

  “All of who?” Merlin demanded with sudden unpent intensity. “The two of you are the only ones I ever see; is anyone else left? You and Mab talk about the Old Ways—but I’m not sure what they are or even if any of them are left! I just—”

  “Oh, dear,” Frik said quietly. “A certain person did neglect your education, didn’t she? You’d suppose that a bit of gratitude would have been in order after all that Madame did for her, but I suppose long association counts for nothing. Well. I can see that certain reparations must be made. Master Merlin, what do you know about the true nature of the world?”

  After several weeks of study, Merlin knew the answer to this question by rote.

  “The world is composed of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. Each of these realms is ruled by its Elemental King: the Sylph for Air, the Undine for Water, the Salamander for Fire, and the Gnome for Earth.” Frik bowed to acknowledge this truth. Merlin continued. “The world is composed of three realms for men, three for the Dark Forces, and three for the Bright. The three worlds of men are Anoeth, the Land of the Dead; the mortal world which we know; and the Land of Magic, which lies within the Hollow Hills beyond the Enchanted Lake. …”

  “Yes, yes, yes, very good,” Frik said, unimpressed by his pupil’s recitation. “But don’t you wonder why Anoeth and the Land of Magic are counted as part of the world of Men when mortals only go to one of them after they die and never go to the other one at all?”

  Merlin stared at him blankly. Frik had never spoken to him this way before.

  “Think, Master Merlin!” the gnome begged him. “They’re called the Three Realms of Men.”

  “Is it … because mortals used to travel through all three?” Merlin asked hesitantly.

  “Yes!” Frik said in delight. “What’s the point of having a space-time continuum if you never use it? But of course as Magic began to leave the world, this sort of travel became less popular. Anoeth is not without its dangers, and it takes great craft and cunning to reach the Land of Magic at the best of times. As they began to forget us, mortals became fearful and unwilling to seize their opportunities, and now, well, I suppose nobody travels much at all. But you must know all three realms well, Master Merlin. Only think how awkward it would be if Lord Idath didn’t recognize you!”

  “Who’s Lord Idath?” Merlin asked.

  “That is precisely what I mean,” Frik said firmly. “What are they teaching children in the schools these days? I shall have a private word with Her Majesty, dash off a letter of introduction or two …”

  “Are you sure this is the right direction?” Merlin asked hesitantly.

  Frik had roused him early that morning. The gnome had bundled Merlin into his Aunt Ambrosia’s warm cloak and urged him to eat a hearty breakfast. Then, with a great air of importance, he had led Merlin out through the doors of Mab’s palace, down the grand staircase, and back into the boat which had brought Merlin to the Land of Magic. They carried lanterns containing captive sprites for light, but Frik had refrained from using the occasion to don one of his peculiar costumes. He scuttled along in his own persona, a dark and faintly twisted figure whose long pointed ears cast a shadow on the cave walls as if of horns.

  They sailed across the dark lagoon, but instead of breaking out into the open air and the Enchanted Lake, as Merlin half-expected, they sailed to a shore still within the vast cavern. The beach upon which Frik grounded the boat was of bright blue sand, blue as the October sky, and Merlin paused for a moment to admire it.

  “No time … no time,” Frik said quickly. “We’ve miles to go before we reach our destination, young Merlin, and it wouldn’t do to be late. He’s a very timely person, is Lord Idath.”

  Obediently Merlin had followed Frik through the caverns. He became lost instantly, but Frik always seemed to know where he was going, even when the cavern opened out into that same sunless, moonless landscape that Merlin had seen before in the Forest of the Night.

  He looked around apprehensively, but the only trees he saw were small stunted ones, their trunks and branches as black and glistening as if they’d been in a fire. Though the light was fairly bright, the diffuse, silvery radiance cast no shadows, and gave everything a curious flat appearance. Try as he might, Merlin could not see the sun anywhere in the silvery sky.

  Beneath his feet, the ground rang as hard as if it were frozen in the depths of winter, and wisps of mist blurred the ground and the horizon, until it was difficult to see anything at all, but the air was only chilly, and not really cold. A thin cool wind seemed to blow from no particular direction, and sniffing it, Merlin caught the faint, far-off scent of the sea.

  Though this was obviously outdoors—at least in comparison to the Land of Magic—Merlin didn’t feel as if he were much freer. The earth, for all its flat vistas, seemed cramped, and the sky had no sense of depth to it, as if it were merely a piece of painted canvas. Though he knew they were covering a great deal of ground, the landscape did not change, and they didn’t seem to have gotten anywhere.

  “Where are we?” Merlin finally asked, after they’d been walking for a long time. Having been used to living an outdoor life, the walk was no trouble to him, but Frik seemed to be laboring a little, and when Merlin spoke, the gnome took it as an excuse for a rest.

  “Why … we’re nowhere in particular,” Frik answered, sounding rather surprised to have been asked. “This is the World Between the Worlds,” he said, as if that were an answer to Merlin’s question. He sat down on a rock, brandishing a fan he suddenly produced out of nowhere. “It’s quite a long and twisted path, but at all costs we must be there by dark.”

  “Why are we going this way, then?” Merlin asked. “You and Mab can appear anywhere you like in the twinkling of an eye. Why don’t we just go that way?”

  “Well, for one thing, Lord Idath does not appreciate it when people drop in unannounced. For another, you must learn all the landmarks to the Land of Winter. Someday you may need to go there by yourself—and get back again, too.”

  Herne had told Merlin ghost stories when Merlin had been much younger. They’d given him nightmares until Aunt Ambrosia had told him firmly that they were only stories, and nothing that could hurt him. Discovering now that the shades of the dead were real and present was an experience Merlin didn’t care for.

  “I suppose so,” Merlin said doubtfully. He plucked up a weed that had been growing by the roadside. It looked like a yellow flower he saw at home, but here the leaves and petals were both grey, as though the soil in which it grew had leached all the color out of it.

  “Now come along, Master Merlin,” Frik said, as though it were Merlin who had been dawdling.

  The path into Anoeth angled sharply uphill after that, becoming so steep that in some places Merlin ended up hauling Frik along after him like a sack of laundry. As the land rose, Merlin could see for a great distance, but all there was to the grey landscape was mist and rock and the sparse vegetation that was as grey as the earth it sprouted from. He could not even see the cave-mouth through which he and Frik had entered this realm.

  For some time, Merlin had been conscious of a vast roaring sound. As they came closer to the source, Merlin had recognized it as the sound of a rushing stream, but he was not prepared for what he saw when he and Frik reached its banks.

  Alone in all this grey land, the river had color. Its waters were the bright crimson of flowing blood, ranging from dark ruby to pale vermilion, rushing and foaming along its narrow bed with furious speed. Anyone who fell in would be carried along faster than a horse could run, his body battered against the black rocks that thrust up from the stream bed like rotted teeth. There was a sharp tang of copper in the air, and the river steamed as it flowed, as if it reall
y were fresh blood.

  “Ah,” Frik said. “We’ve reached the halfway point. There’s a bridge a few yards upriver. We can cross after lunch.” He seated himself and raised his hands, preparing to gesture their meal into existence.

  “Uh,” Merlin said, feeling slightly queasy.

  It was not that he was any stranger to death. Life in the forest was an ongoing dance between hunter and prey, where one died so that the other might live. The wolf killed the deer, and the wolf’s body, in death, became the grass that fed the deer. All life was a circle, each creature taking its turn to die so that Life could go on. But though Merlin accepted that fact intellectually, the thought of eating lunch on the banks of a river that looked and smelled like fresh blood was a little too much for his stomach.

  “I think I’d rather go a little farther first,” he said hastily.

  After a few minutes’ walk along the bank, they reached the place where the path they were following crossed over the river. The river cut deeper into its bed, until they were walking along the edge of a cliff high above it. Spanning the torrent was a bridge the likes of which Merlin had never imagined. The gleaming lacelike structure arched high over the water, and was made of interwoven sword-blades, their steel gleaming in the pearly light of the Otherworld day. Through the roadbed of the bridge, in the open spaces left by the latticework of swords, the red river could be seen racing turbulently below. There were no side-rails. One slip, and the slashed and bleeding body of the luckless traveler would be cast into the torrent.

  Merlin stopped and stared. Frik noticed his mystification and assumed a lecturing stance.