Legacy: Arthurian Saga (153 page)

Arthur let out a long breath, and some
of the color came back into his face. He looked as I had never seen
him look before. His eyes were shadowed with fatigue, and the flesh
had fallen in below his cheekbones. The last of his youth had
vanished; here was a hard-living man, sustained by a will that
daily pushed himself and his followers to their very limits and
beyond.

He was kneeling beside the bed. As I
moved my eyes to look at him, his hand fell across my wrist in a
quick grip. I could feel the calluses on his palm.

"Merlin? Do you know me? Can you
speak?"

I tried to form a word, but could not.
My lips were cracked and dry. My mind felt clear enough, but my
body would not obey me. The King's arm came round me, lifting me,
and at a sign from him the servant came forward and filled the
goblet. Arthur took it from him and held it to my mouth. The stuff
was a cordial, sweet and strong. He took a napkin from the man,
wiped my lips with it, and lowered me back against the
pillows.

I smiled at him. It must have shown as
little more than a faint movement of muscles. I tried his name,
"Emrys." I could hear no sound. I fancy that it came as a breath,
no more.

His hand came down again over mine.
"Don't try to speak. I was wrong to wake you. You are alive, that's
all that matters. Rest now."

My eye, wandering, fell on something
beyond him: my harp, set on a chair beside the wall. I said, still
without a thread of sound: "You found my harp," and relief and joy
went through me, as if, in some way, all must now be
well.

He followed my glance. "Yes, we found
it. It's unharmed. Rest now, my dear. All is well. All is well,
indeed..."

I tried his name again, and failing,
slid back into darkness. Faintly, like movements from the
Otherworld of dream, I remember swift commands, softly spoken, the
servants hurrying, slippered footsteps and the rustle of women's
garments, cool hands, soft voices. Then the comfort of
oblivion.

When I awoke again, it was to full
consciousness, as if from a long, refreshing sleep. My brain was
clear, my body very weak, but my own. I was conscious, gratefully,
of hunger. I moved my head experimentally, then my hands. They felt
stiff and heavy, but they belonged to me. Wherever I had been
wandering, I had come back to my body. I had quitted the world of
dream.

I could see, from the change in the
light, that it was evening. A servant -- a different one -- waited
near the door. But one thing was the same: Arthur was still there.
He had pulled the stool forward, and was sitting by the bed. He
turned his head and saw me watching him, and his face changed. He
made a quick movement forward, and his hand came down on mine
again, a gentle touch like a doctor's, feeling for the pulse in the
wrist.

"By God," he said, "you frightened us!
What happened? No, no, forget that. Later you'll tell us all you
can remember...Now it's enough to know that you are safe, and
living. You look better. How do you feel?"

"I have been dreaming." My voice was
not my own; it seemed to come from somewhere else, away in the air,
almost outside my control. It was as feeble as the pigling's pipe
when I mended its broken leg. "I have been ill, I
think."

"Ill?" He gave a crack of laughter
that held nothing of mirth. "You have been stark crazy, my dear
king's prophet. I thought you were gone clean out of your wits, and
that we should never have you back with us again."

"It must have been a fever of a kind.
I hardly remember..." I knitted my brows, thinking back. "Yes. I
was traveling to Galava with two of Urbgen's men. We made camp up
near the Wolf Road, and...Where am I now?"

"Galava itself. This is Ector's
castle. You're home."

It had been Arthur's home, rather than
mine; for reasons of secrecy I had never lived in the castle
myself, but had spent the hidden years in the forest, up at the
Green Chapel. But as I turned my head and caught the familiar
scents of pine forest and lake water, and the smell of the rich
tilled soil of Drusilla's garden below the tower, reassurance came,
like the sight of a known light through the fog.

"The battle I saw," I said. "Was that
real, or did I imagine it?"

"Oh, that was real enough. But don't
try to talk about it yet. Take it from me, all is well. Now, you
should rest again. How do you feel?"

"Hungry."

This, of course, started up a new
bustling. Servants brought broth, and bread, and more cordials, and
the Countess Drusilla herself helped me to eat, and then once more
disposed me for welcome and dreamless sleep.

Morning again, and the bright, clean
light to which I had first woken. I felt weak still, but in command
of myself. It seemed that the King had given orders that he was to
be fetched as soon as I woke, but this I would not allow until I
had been bathed and shaved and had eaten.

When he came at length he looked quite
different. The strained look about his eyes had lessened, and there
was color in his face under the brown of weather. Something of his
own especial quality had come back, too; the young strength that
men could drink from, as at a spring, and be strengthened
themselves.

I had to reassure him about my own
recovery, before he would let me talk, but he eventually settled
down to give me news. "The last I heard," I told him, "was that you
had gone into Elmet...But that's past history now, it seems. I
gather that the truce was broken? What was the battle I saw? It
must have been up these parts, in the Caledonian Forest? Who was
involved?"

He eyed me, I thought strangely, but
answered readily enough. "Urbgen called me in. The enemy broke
across country into Strathclyde, and Caw didn't manage to hold
them. They would have forced their way down through the forest to
the road. I came up with them, and broke them up and drove them
back. The remnants fled south. I should have followed straight
away, but then we found you, and I had to stay...How could I leave
again, till I knew you were home, and cared for?"

"So I really did see the fighting? I
wondered if it was part of the dream."

"You must have seen it all. We fought
through the forest, along the river there. You know what it's like,
good open ground with thin woodland, birch and alder, just the
place for a surprise with fast cavalry. We had the hill at our
backs, and took them as they reached the ford. The river was full;
easy for horsemen, but for foot-soldiers a trap...Afterwards, when
we came back from the first pursuit, people came running to tell me
that you were there. You'd been found wandering among the dead and
wounded and giving directions to the doctors...Nobody recognized
you at first, but then the whispers started that Merlin's ghost was
there." A wry little smile. "I gather that the ghost's advice was
good, as often as not. But of course the whispers set up a scare,
and some fools started throwing stones to drive you away. It was
one of the orderlies, a man called Paulus, who recognized you, and
put a stop to the ghost stories. He followed you back to where you
were living, and then sent to me."

"Paulus. Yes, of course. A good man.
I've worked with him often. And where was I living?"

"In a ruined turret, with an ancient
orchard round it. You don't remember that?"

"No. But something is coming back. A
turret, yes, ruinous, all ivy and owls. And apple
trees?"

"Yes. It was little more than a pile
of stones, with bracken for bedding, and piles of apples rotting,
and a store of nuts, and rags hung to dry on the apple boughs." He
paused to clear something from his throat. "They thought at first
you were one of those wild hermits, and indeed, when I first saw
you myself..." His smile twisted. "You looked the part better than
you ever looked it at the Green Chapel."

"I can imagine that." And so I could.
My beard, before they had shaved me, had grown long and grey, and
my hands, lying weakly on the bright blankets, looked thin and old,
bones held together with a net of knotted veins.

"So we brought you here. I had to go
south again soon after. We caught them up at Caer Guinnion, and
fought a bloody engagement there. All went well, but then a
messenger came down from Galava with more news of you. When we
found you and brought you here, you were strong enough on your
feet, but crazy; you didn't know anyone, and you talked about
things that made no kind of sense; but once here, and in the
women's care, you relapsed into sleep and silence. Well, the
messenger came after the battle to tell me that you had never
woken. You seemed to fall into a high fever, still talking in the
same wild way, then finally lay so long unconscious that they took
you for dead, and sent the courier to tell me. I came as soon as I
could."

I narrowed my eyes at him. The light
from the window was strong. He saw this, and signed to the slave,
who pulled a curtain across. "Let me get this clear. After you had
found me in the forest and brought me to Galava, you went south.
And there was another battle? Arthur, how long have I been
here?"

"It is three weeks since we found you.
But it is fully seven months since you wandered off into the forest
and lost yourself. You were gone all winter. Is it any wonder that
we thought you were dead?"

"Seven months?" Often, as a doctor, I
have had to give this kind of news to patients who have been long
feverish, or lying in coma, and I always see the same sort of
incredulous, groping shock. I felt it now myself. To know that half
a year had dropped out of time, and such a half year...What, in
those months, might not have happened to a country as torn and as
embattled as mine? And to her King? Other things, forgotten till
now in the mists of illness, began to come back to me.

Looking at him, I saw again, with
fear, the hollowed cheekbones and the smudge of sleepless nights
beneath his eyes: Arthur, who ate like a young wolf and slept like
a child; who was the creature of gaiety and strength. There had
been no defeat in the field; his glory there had not suffered even
the smear of a shadow. Nor could his anxiety for me have brought
him to this pass. There remained his home.

"Emrys, what has happened?"

Once more, in that place, the
childhood name came naturally. I saw his face twist as if the
memory were a pain. He bent his head and stared down at the
blankets.

"My mother, the Queen. She
died."

Memory stirred. The woman lying in the
great bed hung with rich stuffs? I had known, then. "I am sorry," I
said.

"I heard just before we fought the
battle at Caer Guinnion. Lucan brought the news, with the token you
had left with him. You remember it, a brooch with the Christian
symbol? Her death came as no surprise. We had expected it. But I
believe that grief helped to hasten her death."

"Grief? Why, has there been --?" I
stopped dead. It had come back clearly now, the night in the
forest, and the flask of wine I had opened to share with the
troopers. And why. The vision stirred again, the moonlit chamber
and the blowing curtains and the dead woman. Something closed my
throat. I said, hardly: "Guenever?"

He nodded, not looking up.

I asked, knowing the answer: "And the
child?"

He looked up quickly. "You knew? Yes,
of course you would...It never came to term. They said she was with
child, but shortly before Christmas she began to bleed, and then,
at the New Year, died in great pain. If you had been there -- " He
stopped, swallowed, and was silent.

"I am sorry," I said again.

He went on, in a voice so hard that it
sounded angry: "We thought you were dead, too. Then, after the
battle, there you were, filthy and old and crazy, but the field
surgeons said you might recover. That, at least, I had saved from
the shambles of the winter...Then I had to leave you to go to Caer
Guinnion. I won it, yes, but lost some good men. Then on the heels
of the action Ector's courier came to tell me you were dead. When I
got here at dawn yesterday I expected to find your body already
burned or buried."

He stopped, put his forehead hard down
on a clenched fist, and stayed so. The servant, rigid by the
window, caught my eye, and went, softly. In a moment or two Arthur
raised his head and spoke in his normal voice.

"Forgive me. All the time I was riding
north, I kept remembering what you said about dying a shameful
death. It was hard to bear."

"But here I am, clean and whole, with
my wits clear, and ready to become clearer when you tell me all
that has happened in the last seven months. Now, of your kindness,
pour me some of that wine, and go back, if you will, to your
journey into Elmet."

He obeyed me, and in a while talk
became easier. He spoke of his journey through the Gap to Olicana,
and what he had found there, and of his meeting with the King of
Elmet. Then of his return to Caerleon, and of the Queen's
miscarriage and death. This time, when I questioned him, he was
able to answer me, and in the end I could give him the chilly
comfort of knowing that my presence at court beside the young Queen
could have been no help. Her doctors were skilled with drugs, and
had saved her the worst of the pain; I could have done no more. The
child was ill-conceived; nothing could have saved it, or its
mother.