The Old Magic

by James Mallory

  “So tell me,” Vortigern growled, taking a step closer to the old man, “why is it that every time I try to build this tower it collapses?”

  Lailoken wrung his hands in terror. “Ah, well. Yes, indeed. Hmmm …” None of the delaying tactics worked. “You think I should know that?” he asked tentatively.

  “Yes!” Vortigern roared.

  Goaded beyond patience, the king grabbed his seer by the throat, dragging the man up on his toes. The king’s face was purple with rage—a terrifying sight for a brave man, let alone for a lifelong coward like Lailoken. Mab stepped up behind the old Druid and put an invisible hand on his shoulder.

  “Tell him you’ll read the runestones,” she whispered in his ear. “If you don’t say something to placate him he’ll kill you now, just as he did Gwennius. Come to me at Sarum, old man—call upon Queen Mab to save you. …”

  “Ah—!” Lailoken choked and struggled against the crushing grip upon his throat. His mind spun frantically, searching for the words that would save his life, and suddenly he found them.

  “I’ll—I’ll read the stones!” he burst out. “I will,” he added, as if he were convincing himself. “That’s something I do well.”

  Vortigern released him with a shove that sent the old man sprawling. “Then read them!” he shouted.

  Several people turned to look, then turned away quickly lest the king catch them looking at him. Lailoken felt himself all over as if to convince himself that he was still alive, then turned and began to shuffle as fast as he could from Vortigern’s sight.

  Mab smiled and wished herself back to her underground palace. Her work here was finished. And the trap to catch Merlin was about to be sprung.

  Vortigern gazed around himself—from the ruin on the hill, to the retreating figure of the soothsayer, to the figures of all the people trying so very hard not to catch his attention. A great weariness possessed him. Everything he touched turned to discord and destruction.

  “Why? Why?” He stared into the heavens, as if he could call old King Constant’s god to account. “Why am I surrounded by incompetent fools?”

  He might be incompetent and ineffectual, but he was no fool. Lailoken hurried to his tent and hid himself inside.

  The Royal Soothsayer’s tent was much smaller than the king’s—a single room with thick walls of double-hung canvas. It smelled strongly of herbs and incense and was filled with everything his predecessors had thought might placate the king or gain themselves a longer life—amulets, talismans, carved totems, and several trunks full of ornate costumes and other odds and ends. There was a compass, an astrolabe, and a half-finished horoscope spread out upon the table, and a stuffed owl looked down glassily from the center pole of the tent.

  Lailoken ignored the gaudy clutter of the tent’s interior with the ease of long practice, flinging open the lid of the nearest trunk and rooting through it hastily. Almost the first thing his hand touched was a sack of runestones, but he tossed it aside without heed. Runes wouldn’t save him now—he needed a hooded cloak and his secret horde of gold coins, and then to get out of the king’s camp unnoticed as quickly as possible. He had no intention of trying any divination—he didn’t need to read the future to know that the only thing that could guarantee Vortigern’s soothsayer a long life was a great deal of distance from Vortigern.

  Of course he knew how to tell fortunes. Every aspirant to the Druid’s Grove was taught several forms of magic and divination—but it had been years since he’d done any magic. Read the stones? Where had that idea come from? And what if Vortigern didn’t like the answer?

  Finally Lailoken found the items he was searching for. He swirled the thick black cloak around himself and tucked his coins into a sack around his neck. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do. He certainly didn’t dare take any of the costly artifacts strewn about the tent. They could be easily traced, and the last thing Lailoken wanted was to be accused of theft and brought back to face the king’s justice. It was the king’s justice he was trying to escape in the first place.

  He picked up a knife—its purpose was to sacrifice animals, so that omens could be read in their entrails, but it would serve his purpose equally well—and carefully slit the fabric at the back of his tent. All he needed was a few hours’ head start, and no one would ever find him. …

  “Going somewhere?” the captain of Vortigern’s guard said from the doorway of the tent.

  Lailoken jumped back from his labor and dropped the knife. He turned around, looking up into the stony countenance of Vortigern’s chief enforcer and swallowing painfully. Sir Rhys was built like a granite cliff and was just as compassionate. The captain’s well-used armor—and well-used weapons—gleamed in the pale autumn sunlight that shone in over his shoulder.

  “Sarum,” Lailoken croaked, driven to invention by sheer panic. “Sacred stones. Place of power. Very magical.”

  “Your eagerness to be about the king’s business does you credit,” Sir Rhys said, gazing from the cloaked soothsayer to the new slit in the back wall of the tent. “But the king isn’t going to make you walk all the way to Sarum all by yourself. No, he’s sending me and a dozen soldiers with you, just to make sure nothing happens to you. We wouldn’t want you to get lost and not find your way back here, now, would we? Now let me help you pack for your journey, soothsayer.”

  Sir Rhys smiled.

  The followers of the Old Ways had called this the last day of the old year and the first day of the new: Samhain, the night on which the gate between the worlds was flung open and the spirits of living and dead, past and future, mingled together. Lailoken shivered in the autumn cold. Sir Rhys’s campfire was a small and lonely speck half a mile away. Lailoken had said he needed privacy for his devotions, and Vortigern’s soldiers weren’t any too eager to involve themselves with the spirits he might conjure, but Lailoken didn’t fool himself into believing this meant he would be able to escape. Sir Rhys would have guards patrolling every escape route.

  No, his only hope lay in the Old Ones, little help though they’d ever been to him yet. He gazed apprehensively about him at the towering stones of Sarum. It had been a long time since Lailoken had come here. The ancient sarcen stones brought back too many sorrowful memories. Ambrosia and all the others who had shared his faith—dead.

  As he would be dead, if he did not find some way to divert Vortigern’s anger and make Pendragon’s walls stand.

  Quickly he made his preparations: the white bull’s hide laid out upon the ground, the libations of milk and beer poured at the four cardinal points, the balefire kindled of the nine sacred woods. It was amazing how easily the Old Ways came back to him, though he’d tried his best to forget them in the course of a lifetime’s persecution. Though he’d tried to skimp on his preparations—who would ever see them?—a strange reluctance had held him back, and so to make his petition this Samhain night Lailoken was barefoot and crowned in mistletoe, wearing a robe of pure new wool that had been worked without any seam, belted with a pony-skin girdle dyed with scarlet cochineal and studded with gold—the immemorial trappings of an observance that was vanishing in his own lifetime.

  He knelt upon the bullhide and took the runestones in his hand. He did not know where his predecessor had gotten them, but they were very old. The ivory they were carved of was yellowed almost to the color of amber by time, and the stark angular symbols incised into each were worn nearly smooth with uncounted decades of handling.

  “Oh, Mab—dear Mab—”

  Lailoken closed his eyes and muttered almost to himself as he flung out the runestones upon the white bull’s hide.

  “I’ve been a worshipper of the Old Ways all my life, and now that life is in danger—and it’s a precious life; it’s mine—oh, Mab, I’ve never had any real help—no, never—oh, what am I going to do? I don’t know why his blasted tower keeps falling down!” He didn’t really expect an answer, but he got one.

  “The land is cursed!” Mab hissed, stepping out from behind a stone.
Her black finery glittered in the firelight.

  Lailoken fell back with a yell of terror, his eyes fixed on the apparition before him. His eyes glittered with tears, and unfamiliar emotions lifted his heart as he gazed at her.

  Hope. Grief.

  “You’ve appeared,” he said in a trembling voice. “You’ve appeared after all these years! It is Queen Mab?”

  The woman nodded regally. “Yes, old man,” she said. When she looked up again, the old Druid could see that her eyes glowed in the dark like a wolf’s or an owl’s—proof that she was what she said she was.

  Not that he’d doubted. No, not him. Never.

  “The land is cursed!” Mab said again, her voice like the hissing of wind through winter branches. “Neither tower nor castle will stand.”

  Mab saw the old man’s eyes fill with despair at her pronouncement, and waited for the emotion to run its course. Of course he would not simply accept that answer. He wanted to live far too much. She’d chosen him for just that fact, preserved him from untimely execution, kept her eye on him through all the long years of watching and waiting, as Merlin grew to manhood in his forest, thinking himself safe.

  “So what do we do?” the old man said at last.

  “We.” How arrogant these mortals are!

  “You must find a man with no mortal father and mix his blood with the mortar,” Mab said oracularly. I have him, I have him, she gloated inside. Merlin will never deny such an accusation when they question him—he has too much taste for the truth. And he wants to live too much to let Vortigern slit his throat. He’ll use his magic to escape. He must!

  She watched as Lailoken digested her words. “Ooh, ah … splendid,” the old seer said doubtfully.

  Bumbling old fool! He was cowardly and half-senile, but senile old cowards had uses to which brave young men could not be put. And they could defeat brave young men in the end—with her help.

  Say it, you old fool! Ask the question I have waited to hear for longer than you can imagine!

  “But … a man who has no mortal father?” Lailoken asked, grovelingly, torn between hope and despair. “Er, where can I find a man like that?”

  Mab smiled and came close enough to lay her hand atop his head. “I’ll show you. …”

  EPILOGUE

  THE COURTS OF THE MOON

  Years had passed as Merlin lived the lessons of the Lady of the Lake, learning to live always in the stillness that was the mystic center of all things, to become a focus for the loving power that came from being and not from doing. Each day he passed following her path and not Mab’s, made him stronger and more at peace, until even thoughts of Nimue and what might have been between them did not trouble him much.

  He lived quietly in the forest as the magic he had learned from Mab and Frik dropped from his mind unused, and in its place the Lady’s gift—the knowledge of prophecy—grew. The seasons turned, and Merlin was content to wait, dreaming his dreams, for he knew that Mab was not finished with him or with Britain, and that his greatest battles for the Good still lay in his future.

  In his dreams he saw the future of Britain—battles he did not understand, kings who were not yet born. He was content to forget each of these dreams when he woke, for there was no one yet to tell them to. The dreams Merlin remembered, and acted upon, were simple homely ones, of a farmer’s plow that slipped and injured him, of a ewe needing help to give birth.

  And from these small kindnesses his reputation grew, until all the North knew that deep in the wild forest lived a great wizard. Soon, Merlin knew, that fame would call him into battle, but he did not yet know how dearly that fight would cost him, or how soon it would begin.

  The day, it seemed, came far too soon.

  As soon as he woke that morning, he knew his fate would find him today. It was a few weeks past Samhain—unconsciously, Merlin had expected the trouble to come then, and when it had not, he had let down his guard a little, thinking that in the dark half of the year, when even kings stayed close to their own hearthsides, he would have a certain amount of shelter. But this morning, the senses that had told him even in childhood that strangers trespassed in his beloved forest told him that there was danger afoot.

  As he had learned to over the years, Merlin awaited it calmly. He went about his usual morning routine, preparing his simple breakfast of herbal tea and acorn bread, and then went to the clearing in the forest to meditate.

  All around him the circle of young trees stood like the pillars of a cathedral—a cathedral of the Old Ways, growing from the living earth, and not made of dead stone as the Christians built. As soon as the thought came to him, Merlin pushed it away. To think in terms of the Old Ways versus the New Religion was to fall into the same trap that Queen Mab had, a trap made of hatred and distrust. Merlin chose to walk a third path, neither of Black Magic nor White Light, a path grey as mist, where everything must be judged upon its own merits. He would not hate the New Religion; neither would he follow the Old Ways. He would simply be as he had always been: Merlin the Wizard.

  At midday he finally heard them—a troop of mounted soldiers crashing through the winter-killed underbrush. They wore the white dragon of King Vortigern upon their surcoats, and riding at their head was an old man dressed as a Druid, though the reigns of two draconian kings had managed to nearly wipe the priesthood from the face of Britain.

  So Vortigern has discovered he now has some use for magic? Merlin thought. This should be interesting. He got to his feet and turned to face the soldiers just as they entered the clearing.

  “Seize that man!” the old Druid blustered, pointing an accusing finger at Merlin.

  Merlin tried his most disarming smile. “Welcome to my home, sir,” he said mildly. “How can I help you?”

  To live in perfect trust was the first lesson that magic taught. As the years had passed here in his forest home, Merlin had learned to live and act as if he expected goodness from all men, and such was the power of expectation that he had rarely been disappointed. Even now such humble sorcery worked its subtle magic; the old Druid dismounted from his horse, and when he spoke again, his tone was very different

  “Well, er, the king wants to see you,” he said in apologetic tones.

  Now that he had come closer, Merlin could see how the old man’s face was marked by lines of care and worry—though who didn’t have such distress with Vortigern on the throne? At least, living here in the north, Merlin had been spared most of the concerns that ordinary people faced in their daily lives. But now the king was asking for him, and Merlin knew that somewhere, somehow, Queen Mab must be involved.

  “You have only to ask,” he said gently.

  “You’ll come voluntarily?” The old Druid did his best to conceal his surprise. “Ah, that’s good. Most people are reluctant to meet King Vortigern. In fact, they’re usually dragged in screaming. Not that I blame them,” he added. The last of the pretense of command seemed to leave him now; as he sighed, his shoulders drooped and he suddenly looked like what he was: a frail, frightened old man.

  “I’m the King’s Soothsayer,” he admitted.

  Even Merlin in his isolation had heard of Lailoken. The poor man was hated by the Christians for his supposed wizardry and despised by the Pagans for serving Vortigern. No wonder the old man looked so weary. It was a hard life when you fit in nowhere, and no one knew that better than Merlin, who was himself half-fay, half-mortal.

  By now the rest of the soldiers had spread out around the clearing, surrounding him. Merlin saw that they had come well-prepared: All of them were armed to the teeth, and more to the point, they’d brought a spare horse.

  “An important position?” he asked Lailoken.

  “And a fragile one,” the old man said. “I’m the third Royal Soothsayer this year.”

  Merlin frowned to himself. His visions had promised him great danger ahead, but he could not believe that this frail old man meant him any harm.

  “He must get through them at an alarming speed,” Merlin s
aid politely.

  “He gets through everything at an alarming speed,” Lailoken said sadly. He glanced at the ring of soldiers surrounding them both, and then, as if remembering his duty, said: “You are Merlin, the man without a mortal father?”

  “Yes,” Merlin answered. There was no point in denying it. He was only a thread in a pattern that forces greater than himself had the weaving of, and long ago Merlin had learned to save his strength for the most important battles.

  “I’m afraid the king wants you urgently,” Lailoken sighed. Without being asked, one of the soldiers led forth the riderless horse. His expression said clearly—though silently—that Merlin would mount the animal one way or the other. Bowing to the inevitable, Merlin vaulted gracefully into the saddle, and from that vantage point took a last look around his forest home. Something within him told him that it would be a very long time before he saw it again.

  Before he was finished looking, the soldier who had brought him the horse mounted his own animal and began leading Merlin’s mount away. In moments, Merlin and Lailoken were surrounded by mounted soldiers, whose horses were moving at a brisk trot along the road that led out of the forest, the road that led west … toward Pendragon, and the King.

  THE STORY CONTINUES IN

  MERLIN

  Part 2: The King’s Wizard

  Coming in November 1999 from Warner Aspect

  FURTHER READING

  If you want to delve deeper into the story of Merlin, King Arthur, and the matter of Britain, here are some places to start:

  For Young Readers

  King Arthur by Howard Pyle and Jerry Tirtitilli, Troll Books, 1989. Adapted for readers ages four through eight, from the Howard Pyle original.