The Merlin Conspiracy

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “Lunch will be ready any moment,” my grandfather said, “and you will wish to wash and tidy yourselves first. But if you want a bath …” He opened the next door along and showed us a huge bathroom, where a bath stood on clawed animal feet in the middle of bare floorboards. “I hope you will give warning when you do,” he said. “Olwen has to bring up buckets from the copper.” Then he went away downstairs again.

  “No taps,” said Grundo. “As bad as the bath tent.”

  We washed and got ready quickly. When we met in the corridor again, we discovered that we had both put on the warmest clothes we had with us. We would have laughed about it, but it was not the kind of house you liked to laugh in. Instead we went demurely downstairs, to where my grandfather was waiting in a tall, chilly dining room, standing at the head of a tall black table.

  He looked at us, pointed to two chairs, and said grace in Welsh. It was all rolling, thundering language. I was suddenly very ashamed not to understand a word of it. Grundo looked on calmly, almost as if he did understand, and sat quietly down when it was finished, still looking intently at my grandfather.

  I was looking at the door, where a fat, stone-faced woman was coming in with a tureen. I was famished by then, and it smelled wonderful.

  It was a very good lunch, though almost silent at first. There was the leek soup, enough for two helpings each, followed by pancakes rolled round meat in sauce. After that, there were heaps of little hot griddle cakes covered in sugar. Grundo ate so many of those that the woman had to keep making more. She seemed to like that. She almost had a smile when she brought in the third lot.

  “Pancakes,” my grandfather said, deep and hollow, “are a traditional part of our diet in this country.”

  I was thinking, Well, at least he didn’t starve my mother! But why is he so stiff and stern? Why doesn’t he smile at all? I’m sure my mother used to ask herself the same things several times a day. I was sorrier for her than ever.

  “I know this is an awkward question,” I said, “but what should we call you?”

  He looked at me in stern surprise. “My name is Gwyn,” he said.

  “Should I call you Grandfather Gwyn then?” I asked.

  “If you wish,” he said, not seeming to care.

  “Might I call you that, too, please?” Grundo asked.

  He looked at Grundo long and thoughtfully, almost as if he was asking himself what Grundo’s heredity was. “I suppose you have a right to,” he said at last. “Now tell me, what do either of you know of Wales?”

  The truthful answer, as far as I was concerned, was, Not a lot. But I could hardly say that. Grundo came to my rescue—I was extremely glad he was there. Because Grundo has such trouble reading, he listens in lessons far more than I ever do. So he knows things. “It’s divided into cantrevs,” he said, “each with its lesser kings, and the Pendragon is High King over them all. The Pendragon rules the Laws. I know you have a different system of laws here, but I don’t know how they work.”

  My grandfather looked almost approving. “And the meaning of the High King’s title?” he asked.

  It felt just like having a test during lessons, but I thought I knew the answer to that. “Son of the dragon,” I said. “Because there is said to be a dragon roosting in the heart of Wales.”

  This didn’t seem to be right. My grandfather said frigidly, “After a fashion. Pendragon is a title given to him by the English. By rights, it should be the title of the English King, but the English have forgotten about their dragons.”

  “There aren’t any dragons in England!” I said.

  He turned a face full of stern disapproval on me. “That is not true. Have you never heard of the red dragon and the white? There were times in the past when there were great battles between the two, in the days before the Islands of Blest were at peace.”

  I couldn’t seem to stop saying the wrong thing somehow. I protested, “But that’s just a way of saying the Welsh and the English fought one another.”

  His black eyebrows rose slightly in his marble face. I had never known so much scorn expressed with so little effort. He turned away from me and back to Grundo. “There are several dragons in England,” he said to him. “The white is only the greatest. There are said to be more in Scotland, both in the waters and in the mountains, but I have no personal knowledge of these.”

  Grundo looked utterly fascinated. “What about Ireland?” he asked.

  “Ireland,” said my grandfather, “is in most places low and green and unsuitable for dragons. If there were any, Saint Patrick expelled them. But to go back to the Laws of Wales. We do not have Judges, as you do. Courts are called when necessary....”

  He went into a long explanation. Grundo was still fascinated. I sat and watched their two profiles as they talked, Grundo’s all pale, long nose and freckles, and my grandfather’s like a statue from classical antiquity. My grandfather had quite a long nose, too, but his face was so perfectly proportioned that you hardly noticed. They both had great, deep voices, though where Grundo’s grated and grunted, my grandfather’s voice rolled and boomed.

  Soul mates! I thought. I was glad I’d brought Grundo.

  At the same time, I began to see some more of my mother’s problem. If my grandfather had been simply cold and strict and distant, it would have been easy to hate him and stop there. But the trouble was that he was also one of those people you wanted to please. There was a sort of grandness to him that made you ache to have him think well of you. Before long I was quite desperate for him to stop talking just to Grundo and notice me—or at least not disapprove of me so much. Mam must have felt exactly the same. But I could see that, no matter how hard she tried, Mam was too softhearted and emotional for her father, and so he treated her with utter scorn. He scorned me for different reasons. I sat at the tall table almost in pain, because I knew I was a courtier born and bred, and that I was smart and good-mannered and used to summing people up so that I could take advantage of their faults, and I could see that my grandfather had nothing but contempt for people like me. It really hurt. Grundo may have been peculiar, but he was not like that, and my grandfather liked him.

  It was an enormous relief to me when we were allowed to get up from the table and leave the tall, cold room. My grandfather took us outside, through the front door, into a blast of sunlight and cold, clean air. While I stood blinking, he said to us, “Now, where would you say the red dragon lies?”

  Grundo and I looked at one another. Then we pointed, hesitating a bit, to the most distant brown mountains, lying against the horizon in a misty, jagged row.

  “Correct,” said my grandfather. “That is a part of his back. He is asleep for now. He will only arouse in extreme need, to those who know how to call him, and he does not like to be roused. The consequences are usually grave. The same is true of the white dragon of England. You call him, too, at your peril.” The way he said this made us shiver. Then he said, in a much more normal way, “You will want to explore now. Go anywhere you like, but don’t try to ride the mare, and be back at six. We have tea then, not the dinner you are used to. I’ll see you at tea. I have work to do before then.”

  He went back into the house. He had a study at the back of the hall, as we learned later, though we never saw inside it. It was a bit puzzling, really. We never saw him do any religious duties or see parishioners—there were no other houses for miles anyway—but as Grundo said, dubiously, we were not there on a Sunday or any other holy day, so how could we know?

  We did find the chapel. It was downhill to the left of the house, very tiny and gray, with a little arch of stone on its roof with a bell hanging in it. It was surrounded in green, and there was a hump of green turf beside it, like a big beehive, that had water trickling inside it. The whole place gave us an awed, uncertain feeling, so we went uphill again and round to the back of the house, where we came upon a stone shed with the car inside it. Beyond that, things were normal.

  We found a kitchen garden there, fringed with those
orange flowers that grow in sprays, and a yard behind the house with a well in it. The water had to be pumped from the well by a handle in the kitchen. Olwen, the fat housekeeper, showed us how to do that. It was hard work. Then we went out beyond the yard to a couple of hidden meadows. One meadow had a pair of cows and a calf in it, and the other had a placid, chunky gray horse.

  By this time our feelings of strangeness had worn off. We were used to being in new, unknown places, and we began to feel almost at home. We leaned on the gate and looked at the placid mare, who raised her chalky white face to look back at us and then went calmly on with grazing.

  I think her lack of interest irritated Grundo. He went into one of his impish moods. “I’m going to try riding her,” he said, grinning at me.

  “Your funeral,” I said. To confess the truth, I almost looked forward to seeing Grundo in trouble with my grandfather. I was feeling mean and depressed about my personality.

  Grundo looks soft, but he is surprisingly wiry, and this makes him a much better rider than I am. I have never got much beyond the basics. In a softhearted way that is annoyingly like Mam’s, I am sorry for the horse for having me sit on its back making it do things. Grundo says this is silly. It’s what horses are bred for. He can make most horses do what he wants.

  He nipped over the gate and went across to the mare. She took a quick glance at him and lost interest again. She took no notice at all when Grundo put his hands on her. She was not very tall. Grundo had no difficulty hoisting himself onto her back, where he sat and clicked his tongue at her to make her go. She swung her head round then and looked at him in astonishment. Then … I have no idea what she did then, and Grundo says he doesn’t know either. She sort of walked out from underneath him. I swear that for one moment Grundo was sitting on her back, and for another moment Grundo was sitting up in the air, on nothing, looking absolutely stunned, and the next moment the mare was ten feet away and going back to grazing. Grundo came down on the grass on his back with a thump.

  He picked himself up and came hobbling over to the gate, saying seriously, “I don’t think I’ll try again. You can see by all the white on her that she’s very old.”

  That made me scream with laughter. Grundo was very offended and explained that the mare was old enough to have learned lots of tricks, which only made me laugh more. And after a bit Grundo began to see the funny side of it, too. He said it felt very odd, being left sitting on nothing, and he kept wondering how the mare did it. We went scrambling up to the top of the hill behind the manse, laughing about it.

  There were mountains all round as far as we could see up there. The peaks we had thought might be a dragon were lost among all the others.

  “Do you think they really are part of a dragon?” I asked, while we went sliding and crouching down the other side of the summit. “It was rather mad, the way he said it.” The thought that my grandfather might be mad really worried me. But it would certainly explain why my mother was so terrified of him.

  “He’s not mad,” Grundo said decidedly. “Everyone’s heard of the Welsh dragon.”

  “Are you sure?” I said. “He doesn’t behave at all the way people usually do.”

  “No, but he behaves like I would behave if I hadn’t been brought up at Court,” Grundo said. “I sort of recognized him. He’s like me underneath.”

  This made me feel much better. There was a huge, heathery moor beyond the manse hill, and we rushed out into it with the wind clapping our hair about and cloud shadows racing across us. There was the soft smell of water everywhere. And no roads, no buses, no people, and only the occasional large, high bird. We found a place where water bubbled out of the ground in a tiny fountain that spread into a pool covered with lurid green weeds. Neither of us had seen a natural spring before, and we were delighted with it. We tried blocking it with our hands, but it just spouted up between our fingers, cold as ice.

  “I suppose,” Grundo said, “that the well in Sir James’s Inner Garden must fill from a spring like this. Only I don’t think this one’s magic.”

  “Oh, don’t!” I cried out. “I don’t want to remember all that! It’s not as if we can do a thing about it, whatever they’re plotting to do.” I spread my arms into the watery-smelling wind. “I feel free for the first time in a hundred years!” I said. “Don’t spoil it.”

  Grundo stood with his feet sinking into squashy marsh plants and considered me. “I wish you wouldn’t exaggerate,” he said. “It annoys me. But you do look better. When we’re with the Progress, you always remind me of an ice puddle someone’s stamped in. All icy white edges. I’m afraid of getting cut on you sometimes.”

  I was astonished. “What should I be like, then?”

  Grundo shrugged. “I can’t explain. More like—like a good sort of tree.”

  “A tree!” I exclaimed.

  “Something that grew naturally, I mean,” Grundo grunted. “A warm thing.” He moved his feet with such appalling sucking noises that I had to laugh.

  “You’re the one who’s rooted to the spot!” I said, and we wandered on, making for a topple of rock in the distance. When we got there, we sat on the side that was in the sun and away from the wind. After a long time I said, “I didn’t mean that about not wanting to remember Sir James’s garden. It’s just I feel so helpless.”

  Grundo said, “Me, too. I keep wondering if the old Merlin might have been killed so that the new one could take over in time to go to the garden.”

  “That’s an awful thing to think!” I said. But now Grundo had said it, I found I was thinking it, too. “But the Merlin’s supposed to be incorruptible,” I said. “Grandad found him.”

  “He could have been deceived,” Grundo said. “Your grandfather Hyde’s only human, even if he is a Magid. Why don’t you try telling this grandfather?”

  “Grandfather Gwyn?” I said. “What could he do? Besides, he’s Welsh.”

  “Well, he made a fair old fuss to the Chamberlain’s office just to get you here,” Grundo replied. “He knows how to raise a stink. Think about it.”

  I did think about it as we wandered on, but not all that much because, after what seemed a very short while, we saw that the sun was going down and looked at our watches and realized it was after five o’clock. We turned back and got lost. The moor was surrounded by green knobs that were the tops of mountains, and they all looked the same. When we finally found the right knob and slid down the side of it to the manse, there was only just time to get cleaned up before tea was ready.

  “I love this food!” Grundo grunted.

  The table was crowded with four different kinds of bread, two cakes, six kinds of jam in matching dishes, cheese, butter, and cream. Olwen followed us into the dining room with a vast teapot, and as soon as my grandfather had thundered out his grace, she came back with plates of sausage and fried potatoes. Grundo beamed and prepared to be very greedy. I had to stop before the cakes, but Grundo kept right on packing food in for nearly an hour and drinking cup after cup of tea. While he ate, he talked cheerfully, just as if my grandfather was a normal person.

  My grandfather watched Grundo eat with a slightly astonished look, but he did not seem to mind being talked to. He even answered Grundo with a few deep words every so often. I was fairly sure Grundo was being this chatty so that I could join in and tell Grandfather Gwyn what we had overheard in Sir James’s Inner Garden. But I couldn’t. I knew he would give me that look with his eyebrows up and not believe a word. I seemed to curl up inside just thinking of speaking.

  I was wondering how often my mam had sat silent like this at meals when Grundo helped himself to a third slice of cake, seriously measuring off the exact amount. “I have room for twenty-five degrees more cake,” he explained, “and then I shall go back to soda bread and jam. Does Olwen do your cooking for you because you’re a widower?”

  At this my grandfather turned to me. I could tell he was not pleased. It breathed off him like cold from a frozen pond. “Did Annie tell you I was a widower?”
he asked me.

  “She said she had never known her mother,” I said.

  “I am glad to hear her so truthful,” my grandfather replied. I thought that was all he was going to say, but he seemed to think again and make an extra effort. “There has been,” he said, and paused, and made another effort, “a separation.”

  I could feel him hurting, making the effort to say this. I was suddenly furious. “Oh!” I cried out. “I hate all this divorcing and separating! My grandfather Hyde is separated from his wife, and I’ve never even seen her or the aunt who lives with her. And that aunt’s divorced, and so’s the aunt who lives with Grandad, which is awfully hard on my cousin Toby. Half the Court is divorced! The King is separated from the Queen most of the time! Why do people do it?”

  Grandfather Gwyn was giving me an attentive look. It was the sort of look you can feel. I felt as if his deep dark eyes were opening me up, prizing apart pieces of my brain. He said thoughtfully, “Often the very nature of people, the matter that brought them together, causes the separation later.”

  “Oh, probably,” I said angrily. “But it doesn’t stop them hurting. Ask Grundo. His parents are separated.”

  “Divorced,” Grundo growled. “My father left.”

  “Now that’s one person I don’t blame!” I said. “Leaving Sybil was probably the most sensible thing he ever did. But he ought to have taken you with him.”

  “Well now,” said Grandfather Gwyn. He sounded nearly amused. “The ice of Arianrhod has melted at last, it seems.”

  I could feel my face bursting into a red flush, right to the top of my hair and down my neck, because my grandfather had so obviously seen me the same way as Grundo did. So I was a puddle of ice, was I? I was so wrought up by then that I snapped at him, just as if he had been Alicia. “You can talk! If ever I saw a marble iceberg, it’s you!”