Legacy: Arthurian Saga (152 page)

We rode out over the bridge, and along
the pleasant green valley where the river winds, bordered with
alder and willow. Though my headache had gone, and I felt well
enough, a certain lassitude still hung about me, and I breathed the
sweet, familiar air, full of pine scents and bracken scents, with
gratitude.

One small incident I remember. As we
left the city gates, and crossed the river bridge, I heard a shrill
cry, which at first I took to be a bird's, one of the gulls that
wheeled about the refuse on the river's banks. Then a movement
caught my eye, and I glanced down to see a woman, carrying a child,
walking on the shingle near the water's edge below the bridge. The
child was crying, and she hushed it. She saw me, and stood quite
still, staring upward. I recognized Morgause's nurse. Then my horse
clattered off the bridge, and the willows hid woman and child from
view.

I thought nothing of the incident, and
in a short while had forgotten it. We rode on, through villages and
farms rich in grazing cattle. The willows were golden, and the
hazel groves a-scamper with squirrels. Late swallows gathered along
the rooftops, and as we approached that nest of mountains and lakes
that marks the southern limits of the great forest, the lower hills
flamed in the sun with ripe bracken, rusty-gold between the rocks.
Elsewhere the forest, scattered oaks and pines, was gold and dark.
Soon we came to the edge of the Wild Forest itself, where the trees
crowd so thickly in the valleys that they shut out the sun. Before
long we crossed the track that led up to the Green Chapel. I would
have liked to revisit the place, but this would have added hours to
the journey, and besides, the visit could be made more easily from
Galava. So we held on our way, staying with the road as far as
Petrianae.

Today this hardly deserves the name of
town, though in Roman times it was a prosperous market center.
There is still a market, where a few cattle and sheep and goods
exchange hands, but Petrianae itself is a poor cluster of
daub-and-wattle huts, its only shrine a mere shell of stonework
holding a ruinous altar to Mars, in his person of the local god
Cocidius. I saw no offering there, except, on the mossed step, a
leathern sling, such as shepherds use, and a pile of sling-stones.
I wondered what escape, from wolf or wild man, the shepherd was
giving thanks for.

Beyond Petrianae, we left the road and
took to the hill tracks, which my escort knew well. We traveled at
ease, enjoying the warmth of the late autumn sun. As we climbed
higher the warmth still lingered, and the air was soft, but with a
tingle to it that meant the first frosts were not far
away.

We stopped to rest our horses in one
high, lonely corrie where a small tarn lay cupped in stony turf,
and here we came across a shepherd, one of those hardy hillmen who
lodge all summer out on the fell tops with the little blue-fleeced
sheep of Rheged. Wars and battles may move and clash below them,
but they look up, rather than down, for danger, and at the first
onslaught of winter take to the caves, faring thinly on black bread
and raisins, and meal cakes made on a turf fire. They drive their
flocks for safety into pens built between the rocky outcrops on the
hillsides. Sometimes they do not hear another man's voice from
lamb-time to clipping, and then on to autumn's end.

This lad was so little used to talking
that he found speech hard, and what he did say came in an accent so
thick that even the troopers, who were local men, could make
nothing of it, and I, who have the gift of tongues, was hard put to
it to understand him. He had, it seemed, had speech with the Old
Ones, and was ready enough to pass on his news. It was negative,
and none the worse for that. Arthur had stayed in Caerleon for
almost a month after his wedding, then had ridden with his knights
up through the Pennine Gap, heading apparently for Olicana and the
Plain of York, where he would meet with the King of Elmet. This was
hardly news to me, but at least it was confirmation that there had
been no new war-move during the late autumn's peace. The shepherd
had saved his best titbit till last. The High King (he called him
young Emrys, with such a mixture of pride and familiarity that I
guessed that Arthur's path must have crossed his in times past) had
left his queen with child. At this the troopers were openly
skeptical; maybe he had, was their verdict, but how, in a scant
month, could anyone know for sure? I, when appealed to, was more
credulous. As I have said, the Old Ones have ways of knowing that
cannot be understood, but deserve to be respected. If the lad had
heard this through them...?

He had. That was all he knew. Young
Emrys had gone into Elmet, and the lass he'd wedded was with child.
The word he used was "yeaning," at which the troopers were disposed
to be merry, but I thanked him and gave him a coin, and he turned
back to his sheep well satisfied, with only a lingering look at me,
half recognizing, I suppose, the hermit of the Green
Chapel.

That night we were still well away
from the roads, or any hope of a lodging, so when the dusk came
down early and dim with mist, we made our camp under tall pines at
the forest's edge, and the men cooked supper. I had been drinking
water on the journey, as I like to do in mountain country where it
is pure and good, but in celebration of the shepherd's news I broke
open a new flask of the wine I had been supplied with from Urbgen's
cellars. I planned to share this with my companions, but they
refused, preferring their own thin ration-wine, which tasted of the
skins they carried it in. So I ate and drank alone, and lay down to
sleep.

I cannot write of what happened next.
The Old Ones know the story, and it is possible that somewhere else
some other man has set it down, but I remember it only dimly, as if
I were watching a vision in a dark and smoking glass.

But it was no vision; they stay with
me more vividly, even, than memory. This was a kind of madness that
took me, brought on, as I now know, by some drug in the wine I had
taken. Twice before, when Morgause and I had come face to face, she
had tried her witch's tricks on me, but her novice's magic had
glanced off me like a child's pebble off a rock. But this last
time...I was to recall how, at the wedding feast, the light
thickened and beat around me, while the smell of honeysuckle loaded
memory with treachery, and the taste of apricots brought back
murder. And how I, who am frugal with food and wine, was carried
drunken to bed. I remembered, too, the voice saying, "Drink, my
lord," and the green, watching eyes. She must have tried her wiles
again, and found that now her magic was strong enough to trap me in
its sticky threads. It may be that the seeds of the madness were
sown then, at the wedding feast, and left to develop later, when I
was far enough away for there to be no blame cast on her. Her
servant had been there at the river bridge to see me safely out of
the city. Later, the witch had implemented the drug with some other
poison, slipped into one of the flasks I carried. There she had
been lucky. If I had not heard the news of Guenever's pregnancy, I
might never have broached the poisoned flask. As it was, we were
well away from Luguvallium when I drank the poison. If the men with
me had shared it, so much the worse for them. Morgause would have
swept a hundred such aside, to harm Merlin her enemy. There was no
need to look further for her motive in coming to her sister's
marriage.

Whatever the poison, my frugal ways
cheated her of my death. What happened after I had drunk and lain
down I can only piece together from what I have since been told,
and from the whirling fragments of memory.

It seems that the troopers, alarmed in
the night by my groans, hurried to my bed-place, where they were
horrified to find me obviously sick and in great pain, twisting on
the ground, and moaning, apparently too far gone to be sensible.
They did what they could, which was not much, but their rough help
saved me as nothing could have done had I been alone. They made me
vomit, then brought their own blankets to augment mine, and wrapped
me up warmly and made up the fire. Then one of them stayed beside
me while the other set off down the valley to find help or lodging.
He was to send help back to us, and a guide, then ride on himself
down to Galava with the news.

When he had gone the other fellow did
what he could, and after an hour or two I sank into a sort of
sleep. He hardly liked the look of it, but when at last he dared
leave me, and took a step or two away among the trees to relieve
himself, I neither moved nor made a sound, so he decided to take
the chance to fetch water from the brook. This was a scant twenty
paces off, downhill over silent mosses. Once there, he bethought
himself of the fire, which had burned low again, so he crossed the
brook and went a bit farther -- thirty paces, no more, he swore it
-- to gather more wood. There was plenty lying about, and he was
gone only a few minutes. When he got back to the camping-place I
had vanished, and, scour the place as he might, he could find no
trace of me. It was no blame to him that after an hour or so spent
wandering and calling through the echoing darkness of the great
forest, he took horse and galloped after his fellow. Merlin the
enchanter had too many strange vanishings to his name to leave the
simple trooper in any doubt as to what had happened.

The enchanter had disappeared, and all
they could do was make their report, and wait for his
return.

It was a long dream. I remember
nothing about the beginning of it, but I suppose that, buoyed up by
some kind of delirious strength, I crept from my bed-place and
wandered off across the deep mosses of the forest, then lay,
perhaps, where I fell, deep in some ditch or thicket where the
trooper could not find me. I must have recovered in time to take
shelter from the weather, and of course I must have found food, and
possibly even made a fire, during the weeks of storm that followed,
but of this I remember nothing.

All I can recall now is a series of
pictures, a kind of bright and silent dream through which I moved
like a spirit, weightless and bodiless, borne up by the air as a
heavy body is borne up by water. The pictures, though vivid, are
diminished into an emotionless distance, as if I were looking on at
a world that hardly concerns me. So, I sometimes imagine, must the
bodiless dead watch over the world they have left.

So I drifted, deep in the autumn
forest, unheeded as a wraith of the forest mist. Straining back now
in memory, I see it still. Deep aisles of beech, thick with mast,
where the wild boar rooted, and the badger dug for food, and the
stags clashed and wrestled, roaring, with never a glance at me.
Wolves, too; the way through those high woods is known as the Wolf
Road, but though I would have been easy meat they had had a good
summer, and let me be. Then, with the first real chill of winter,
came the hoar glitter of icy mornings, with the reeds standing
stiff and black out of curded ice, and the forest deserted, badger
in lair and deer down in the valley-bottom, and the wild geese gone
and the skies empty.

Then the snow. A brief vision this, of
the silent, whirling air, warm after the frost; of the forest
receding into mist, into dimness, breaking into whirling flakes of
white and grey, and then a blinding, silent cold...

A cave, with cave-smells, and turf
burning, and the taste of cordial, and voices, gruffly uncouth in
the harsh tongue of the Old Ones, speaking just out of hearing. The
reek of badly cured wolfskins, the hot itch of verminous wrappings,
and, once, a nightmare of bound limbs and a weight holding me
down...

There is a long gap of darkness here,
but afterwards sunlight, new green, the first bird-song, and a
vision, sharp as a child's first sight of the spring, of a bank of
celandines, glossy as licked gold. And life stirring again in the
forest; the thin foxes padding out, the earth heaving in the
badger-setts, stags trotting by, unarmed and gentle, and the wild
boar again, out foraging. And an absurd, dim dream of finding a
pigling still with the stripes and long silky hair of babyhood,
that hobbled about on a broken leg, deserted by its
land.

Then suddenly, one grey dawn, the
sound of horses galloping, filling the forest, and the clash of
swords and the whirl of bright axes, the yelling and the screams of
wounded beasts and men, and, like a flashing, intermittent dream of
violence, a day-long storm of fighting that ended with a groaning
quiet and the smell of blood and crushed bracken.

Silence then, and the scent of apple
trees, and the nightmare sense of grief that comes when a man wakes
again to feel a loss he has forgotten in sleep.

7

"Merlin!" said Arthur in my ear.
"Merlin!"

I opened my eyes. I was lying in bed
in a room which seemed to be built high up. The bright sunlight of
early morning poured in, falling on dressed stone walls, with a
curve in them that told of a tower. At the level of the sill I
caught a glimpse of treetops moving against cloud. The air eddied,
and was cool, but within the room a brazier burned, and I was snug
in blankets, and good linen fragrant with cedarwood. Some sort of
herb had been thrown into the charcoal of the brazier; the thin
smoke smelled clean and resinous. There were no hangings on the
walls, but thick slate-grey sheepskins lay on the floor, and there
was a plain cross of olive-wood hanging on the wall facing the bed.
A Christian household, and, by the appointments, a wealthy one.
Beside the bed, on a stand of gilded wood, stood a jug and goblet
of Samian ware, and a bowl of beaten silver. There was a
cross-legged stool nearby, where a servant must have been sitting
to watch me; now he was standing, backed up against the wall, with
his eyes not on me, but on the King.