Legacy: Arthurian Saga (100 page)

But as the days passed, I thought
better of my decision to approach the brothers. To begin with, I
was forced to inaction, and given time to think.

I buried the old man's body, and just
in time, as the next day the snow came, falling thick, soft and
silent, to shroud the forest deep, and island the chapel and block
the tracks. To tell the truth I was glad to stay; there was enough
food and fuel, and both the mare and I needed the rest.

For two weeks or more the snow lay; I
lost track of days, but Christmas came and went, and the start of
the year. Arthur was nine years old.

So perforce I kept the shrine. I
supposed that whoever came as keeper would, like the old man, fight
to keep the place clear for his own God, but in the meantime I was
content to let what god would take the place. I would open it again
to any who would use it. So I put away the altar cloth, and cleaned
the three bronze lamps and set them about the altar and lighted the
nine flames. About the stone and the spring I could do nothing
until the snow melted. Nor could I find the curving knife, and for
this I was thankful; that Goddess is not one to whom I would
willingly open a door. I kept the sweet holywater in her bowl of
sacrifice, and at morning and evening burned a pinch of incense.
The white owl came and went at will. By night I shut the chapel
door to keep out the cold and the wind, but it was never locked,
and all day it stood open, with the lights shining out over the
snow.

Some time after the turn of the year
the snow melted, and the tracks through the forest showed black and
deep in mire. Still I made no move. I had had time to think, and I
saw that I must surely have been led up to the chapel by the same
hand that had guided me to Segontium. Where better could I stay to
be near Arthur without attracting attention? The chapel provided
the perfect hiding-place. I knew well enough that the place would
be held in awe, and its guardian with it. The "holy man of the
forest" would be accepted without question. Word would go round
that there was a new and younger holy man, but, country memories
being long, folk would recall how each hermit as he died had been
succeeded by his helper, and before long I would simply be "the
hermit of the Wild Forest" in my turn and in my own right. And with
the chapel as my home and my cure, I could visit the village for
supplies, talk to the people, and in this way get news, at the same
time ensuring that Count Ector would hear of my installation in the
Wild Forest.

About a week after the thaw started,
before I would risk taking Strawberry down through the knee-deep
mud of the tracks, I had visitors. Two of the forest people; a
small, thickset dark man dressed in badly cured deerskins, which
stank, and a girl, his daughter, wrapped in coarse woollen cloth.
They had the same swarthy looks and black eyes as the hill men of
Gwynedd, but under its weather-beaten brown the girl's face was
pinched and grey. She was suffering, but dumbly like an animal; she
neither moved nor made a sound when her father unwrapped the rags
from her wrist and forearm swollen and black with
poison.

"I have promised her that you will
heal her," he said simply.

I made no comment then, but took her
hand, speaking gently in the Old Tongue. She hung back, afraid,
until I explained to the man -- whose name was Mab -- that I must
heat water and cleanse my knife in the fire; then she let him lead
her inside. I cut the swelling, and cleaned and bound the arm. It
took a long time, and the girl made no sound throughout, but under
the dirt her pallor grew, so when I had done and had wrapped clean
bandages round the arm I heated wine for both of them, and brought
out the last of my dried raisins, and meal cakes to go with them.
These last I had made myself, trying my hand at them as I had so
often watched my servant do at home. At first my cakes had been
barely eatable, even when sopped in wine, but lately I had got the
trick of it, and it gave me pleasure to see Mab and the girl eat
eagerly, and then reach for more. So from magic and the voices of
gods to the making of meal cakes: this, perhaps the lowest of my
skills, was not the one in which I took least pride.

"Now," I said to Mab, "it seems that
you knew I was here?"

"Word went through the forest. No, do
not look like that, Myrddin Emrys. We tell no one. But we follow
all who move in the forest and we know all that passes."

"Yes. Your power. I was told so. I may
need its help, while I stay here keeping the chapel."

"It's yours. You have lighted the
lamps again."

"Then give me the news."

He drank, and wiped his mouth. "The
winter has been quiet. The coasts are bound with storms. There was
fighting in the south, but it is over and the borders are whole.
Cissa has taken ship to Germany. Aelle stays, with his sons. In the
north there is nothing. Gwarthegydd has quarreled with his father
Caw, but when did that breed ever rest quiet? He has fled to
Ireland, but that is nothing. They say also that Riagath is with
Niall in Ireland. Niall has feasted with Gilloman, and there is
peace between them."

It was a bare recital of facts, told
through with neither expression nor real understanding, as if
learned by rote. But I could piece it together. The Saxons,
Ireland, the Picts of the north; threats on all sides, but no more
than threats: not yet.

"And the King?" I asked.

"Is himself, but not the man he was.
Where he was brave, now he is angry. His followers fear
him."

"And the King's son?" I waited for the
answer. How much did these folk really see?

The black eyes were unreadable. "They
say he is on the Isle of Glass, but then what do you do here in the
Wild Forest, Myrddin Emrys?"

"I tend the shrine. You are welcome to
it. All are welcome."

He was silent for a while. The girl
crouched beside the fire, watching me, her fear apparently gone.
She had finished eating, but I had seen her slip a couple of the
meal cakes into the folds of her clothes, and smiled to
myself.

I said to Mab: "If I should need to
send a message, would your people take it?"

"Willingly."

"Even to the King?"

"We would contrive that it should
reach him."

"As for the King's son," I said, "you
say that you and your people see all that passes in the forest. If
my magic should reach out to the King's son in his hiding-place,
and call him to me through the forest, will he be safe?"

He made the strange sign that I had
seen Llyd's men make, and nodded. "He will be safe. We will watch
him for you. Did you not promise Llyd that he would be our King as
well as the king of those in the cities of the south?"

"He is everyone's King," I
said.

The girl's arm must have healed
cleanly, for he did not bring her back. Two days later a freshly
snared pheasant appeared at the back door, with a skin of the honey
mead. In my turn I cleared the drifted snow from the stone, and put
a cup in the place made for it above the spring. I never saw anyone
near either, but there were signs I recognized, and when I left
part of a new batch of meal cakes at the back door they would
vanish overnight, and some offering appear in their place -- a
piece of venison, perhaps, or the leg of a hare.

As soon as the forest tracks were
clear I saddled Strawberry and rode down towards Galava. The way
led down the banks of the stream, and along the northern shore of a
lake. This was a smaller lake than the great stretch of water at
whose head Galava lay; it was little more than a mile long, and
perhaps a third of a mile wide, with the forest crowding down on
every hand right to the water. About midway along, but nearer the
southern shore, was an island, not large, but thickly grown with
trees, a piece of the surrounding forest broken off and thrown down
into the quiet water. It was a rocky island, its trees crowding
steeply up towards the high crags which reared at the center. These
were of grey stone, outlined still with the last of the snow, and
looking for all the world like the towers of a castle. On that day
of leaden stillness there was about them a kind of burnished
brightness. The island swam above its own reflection, the mirrored
towers seeming to sink, fathoms deep, into the still center of the
lake.

From the other end of this lake the
stream flowed out again, this time as a young river, swollen with
snow water, cutting its way deep and fast through beds of pallid
rushes and black marshland seamed with willow and alder, towards
Galava. In a mile or so the valley widened, and the marsh gave way
to the cultivated land and the walls of small farms, and the
cottages of the settlement crowding close under the protection of
the castle walls. Beyond Ector's towers, jutting grey and
uncompromising through the black winter trees, was the great lake
which stretched as far as the eye could see, to merge with the
sullen sky.

The first place I came to was a farm
set a short way back from the riverside. It was not the kind of
farm we have in the south and south-west, built on the Roman plan,
but a place such as I had become used to seeing here in the north.
There was a cluster of circular buildings, the farmhouse and the
sheds for the beasts, all within a big irregular ring protected by
a palisade of wood and stone. As I passed the gate a dog hurtled to
the end of his chain, barking. A man, the owner by his dress,
appeared in the doorway of a barn and stood staring. He had a
billhook in his hand. I reined in and called a greeting. He came
forward with a look of curiosity, but with the wariness that one
saw everywhere in the country nowadays when a stranger
approached.

"Where are you bound, stranger? For
the Count's castle of Galava?"

"No. Only to the nearest place where I
may buy food -- meat and meal and perhaps some wine. I've come from
the chapel up there in the forest. You know it?"

"Who doesn't? How does the old man up
there, old Prosper? We've not seen him since before the
snow."

"He died at Christmas."

He crossed himself. "You were with
him?"

"Yes. I keep the chapel now." I gave
no details. If he liked to assume I had been there for some time,
helping the chapel's keeper, that was all to the good. "My name is
Myrddin," I told him. I had decided to use my own name, rather than
the "Emrys." Myrddin was a common enough name in the west, and
would not necessarily be connected with the vanished Merlin; on the
other hand, if Arthur was still known as "Emrys," it might provoke
questions if a stranger of that name suddenly appeared in the
district, and began to spend time in the boy's company.

"Myrddin, eh? Where are you
from?"

"I kept a hill shrine for a time in
Dyfed."

"I see." His eyes summed me, found me
harmless, and he nodded. "Well, each to his task. No doubt your
prayers serve us in their way as much as the Count's sword when
it's needed. Does he know of the change up yonder?"

"I've seen no one since I came. The
snow fell just after Prosper died. What sort of man is this Count
Ector?"

"A good lord and a good man. And his
lady as good as he. You'll not lack while they hold the
forest."

"Has he sons?"

"Two, and likely boys both. You'll see
them, I dare say, when the weather loosens. They ride in the forest
most days. No doubt the Count will send for you when he comes home;
he's away now, and the elder son with him. They expect him back at
the turn of spring." He turned his head and called, and a woman
appeared in the doorway of the house. "Catra, here's the new man
from the chapel. Old Prosper died at midwinter: you were right he
wouldn't last the new year in. Have you bread to spare from the
baking, and a skin of wine? Good sir, you'll take a bite with us
till the fresh batch comes from the oven?"

I accepted, and they made me welcome,
and found me all I needed, bread and meal and a skin of wine,
sheeps' tallow to make candles, oil for the lamps and chopped feed
for the mare. I paid for them, and Fedor -- he told me his name --
helped me pack my saddlebags. I asked no more questions, but
listened to all he told me of local news, and then, well content,
rode back to the shrine. The news would get to Ector, and the name;
he would be the one person who would immediately connect the new
hermit of the Wild Forest with the Myrddin who had vanished with
the winter from his cold hilltop in Wales.

I rode down again at the beginning of
February, this time to the village itself, where I found that the
folk knew all about my coming and, as I had guessed, accepted me
already as part of the place. Had I tried to find a niche in
village or castle I would still, I knew, have been "the foreigner"
and "the stranger" and a subject of ceaseless gossip, but holy men
were a class apart, and often wanderers, and the good folk took
them as they came. I had been relieved to find that they never came
up to the chapel; there was too much of its ancient awesomeness
still hanging about the place. They were most of them Christians,
and turned for their comfort to the community of brothers nearby,
but old beliefs die hard, and I was regarded with more respect, I
believe, than the abbot himself.

The same image of ancient holiness
clung, I had found, about the island in the lake. I had asked one
of the hill men about it. It was known, he told me, as Caer Bannog,
which means the Castle in the Mountains, and was said to be haunted
by Bilis the dwarf king of the Otherworld. It was reputed to appear
and disappear at will, sometimes floating invisible, as if made of
glass. No one would go near it, and though people fished on the
lake in summer and animals were grazed on the flat grassland at the
western end where the river flowed into the valley, no one ventured
near the island. Once a fisherman, caught in a sudden storm, had
had his boat driven onto the island, and had passed a night there.
When he came home next day he was mad, and talked of a year spent
in a great castle made of gold and glass, where strange and
terrible creatures guarded a hoard of treasure beyond man's
counting. No one was tempted to go and look for the treasure, for
the fisherman was dead, raving, within the week. So no man set foot
now on the island, and though (they said) you could see the castle
clearly sometimes of a fine sunset evening, when a boat rowed
nearer it vanished clear away, and it was well known that if you
set foot on the shore, the island would sink beneath
you.