Legacy: Arthurian Saga (162 page)

"All the more reason why you can't
swim back, then. How do you propose to get her over here? There
must be some place where I can land the horses safely. Ask
her."

"I have. She doesn't know. And there's
no boat."

"So?" I said. "Has Melwas any gear
that will float?"

"That's what I was thinking. There's
sure to be something we can use; and the costlier the better." A
shadow of amusement lightened the grim voice. But neither of us
cared to comment on the situation across twenty feet of echoing
water with Guinevere herself within earshot.

"She's dressing herself," he said
shortly, as if in answer to my thought. He set the lamp down at the
water's edge. We waited.

"Prince Bedwyr?"

The door opened again. She was in
riding dress, and had braided her hair. Her cloak was over her
arm.

Bedwyr limped up the bank. He held the
cloak for her, and she drew it close and pulled the hood to cover
the bright hair. He said something, then vanished indoors to
reappear in a short while, carrying a table.

I suppose the next few minutes, if
anyone had been in the mood to appreciate it, would have been rich
in comedy, but as it was, Queen Guinevere on one side of the water,
and myself on the other, stood in silence and watched Bedwyr
improvising his absurd raft, then, as an afterthought, pitching a
couple of cushions into it, and inviting the Queen to board
it.

This she did, and they came across, an
undignified progress, with the Queen crouched low, holding on to
one carved and gilded table leg, while the Prince of Benoic poled
the contraption erratically across the channel.

The thing came to the bank, and I
caught a leg and held it. Bedwyr scrambled ashore, and turned to
help the Queen. She came gracefully enough, with a little gasp of
thanks, and stood shaking out her stained and crumpled cloak. Like
her riding dress, it had been soaked and roughly dried. I saw that
it was torn. Something pale shook from the folds and fell to the
muddy turf. I stooped to pick it up. It was a chessman of white
ivory. The king, broken.

She had not noticed. Bedwyr pushed the
table back into the water, and took his horse's bridle from me. I
handed him his cloak and said formally to the Queen, so formally
that my voice sounded stiff and cold: "I am glad to see you well
and safe, lady. We have had a bad day, fearing for you."

"I am sorry." Her voice was low, her
face hidden from me under the hood. "I took a heavy toss when my
mare fell in the forest. I -- I don't remember much after that,
until I woke here, in this house..."

"And King Melwas with you?"

"Yes. Yes. He found me lying, and
carried me here. I was fainting, I suppose. I don't remember. His
servant tended me."

"He would have done better, perhaps,
to have stayed by you till your own people came. They were
searching the forest for you."

A movement of the hand that held the
hood close about her face. I thought it was trembling. "Yes, I
suppose so. But this place was near, just across the water, and he
was afraid for me, he said, and indeed, the boat seemed best. I
could not have ridden."

Bedwyr was in the saddle. I took the
Queen's arm, to help her up in front of him. With surprise --
nothing in that small composed voice had led me to suspect it -- I
felt her whole body shaking. I abandoned the questioning, and said
merely: "We'll take this ride easily, then. The King is back, did
you know?"

I felt the shudder run through her,
like an ague. She said nothing. Her body was light and slender,
like a girl's, as I put her up in front of Bedwyr's
saddle.

We went gently on the way back. As we
neared the Island, it could be seen that the wharf was ablaze with
lights, and milling with horsemen.

We were still some distance off when
we saw, lit by their moving torches, a group of horsemen detach
themselves from the crowd, and come at the gallop along the
causeway. A man on a black horse was in the lead, pointing the way.
Then they saw us. There were shouts. Soon they came up with us. In
the lead now was Arthur, his white stallion black with mud to the
withers. Beside him on the black horse, loud with relief and
concern for the Queen, rode Melwas, King of the Summer
Country.

I rode home alone. There was nothing
to be gained, and too much to be lost, by confronting Arthur and
Melwas now. So far, by Melwas' quick thinking in leaving the marsh
house by the back way, and being present to greet Arthur as his
ships put in to the wharf, the affair was saved from scandal, and
Arthur would not be forced, whatever his private feelings when he
found or guessed at the truth, into a hasty public quarrel with an
ally. It was best left for the present.

Melwas would take them all into his
firelit palace and give them food and wine, and perhaps lodge them
for the night, and by morning Guinevere would have told her story
-- some story -- to her husband. I could not begin to guess what
the story would be. There were elements in it which she would be
hard put to it to explain away; the room so carefully ready for
her; the loose robe she had worn; the tumbled bed; her lies to
Bedwyr and myself about Melwas. And more than all, the broken
chessman and its evidence of a true dream. But all this would have
to wait until, at the very least, we were off Melwas' land, and no
longer surrounded by his men-at-arms. As for Bedwyr, he had said
nothing, and in the future, whatever his thoughts, his love for
Arthur would keep his mouth shut.

And I? Arthur was High King, and I was
his chief adviser. I owed him a truth. But I would not stay
tonight, to face his questions, and perhaps evade them, or parry
them with lies. Later, I thought wearily, as my tired horse plodded
along the shore of the Lake, I would see more clearly what to
do.

I went home the long way round,
without troubling the ferryman. Even if he were willing to ply so
late, I did not feel equal to his gossip, or that of the troops who
might be making their way back. I wanted silence, and the night,
and the soft veils of the mist.

The horse, scenting home and supper,
pricked his ears and stepped out. Soon we had left the sounds and
lights of the Island behind us, the Tor itself no more than a black
shape of night, with stars behind its shoulder. Trees loomed, hung
with mist, and below them lake water lapped on the flattened
shingle. The smell of water and reeds and stirred mud, the steady
plod of hoofs, the ripple of the Lake, and through it all, faint
and infinitely distant, but tingling like salt on the tongue, the
breath of the sea-tide, turning to its ebb here at its languid
limit. A bird called hoarsely, splashing somewhere, invisible. The
horse shook his damp neck, and plodded on.

Silence and still air, and the calm of
solitude. They drew a veil, as palpable as the mist, between the
stresses of the day and the night's tranquility. The god's hand had
withdrawn. No vision printed itself on the dark. About tomorrow,
and my part in it, I would not think. I had been led to prevent
trespass by a prophetic dream; but what "high matters" the sudden
renewal of the god's power in me portended I could not tell, and
was too weary to guess at. I chirruped to the horse, and he
quickened his pace. The moon's edge, above a shaw of elms, showed
the night black and silver. In a short half-mile we would leave the
Lake shore, and make for home along the gravel of the
road.

The horse stopped, so suddenly that I
was jerked forward on his neck. If he had not been so far spent, he
would have shied, and perhaps thrown me. As it was he balked, both
forefeet thrust stiffly in front of him, jarring me to the
bone.

Here the way ran along the crest of a
bank that skirted the Lake. There was a sheer drop, half the height
of a man, down to the water's surface. The mist lay thickly, but
some movement of air -- perhaps from the tide itself -- stirred it
faintly, so that it swirled and rose in peaks like cream in a tub,
or flowed, itself like water, thickened and slow.

Then I heard a faint splashing, and
saw what my horse had seen. A boat, being poled along a little way
out from shore, and in it someone standing, balancing as delicately
as a bird balances on a rocking twig. Only a glimpse I had, dim and
shadowlike, of someone young-seeming and slight, in a cloak-like
garment that hung to the thwarts and over the boat's edge to trail
in the water. The boy stooped, and straightened again, wringing the
stuff out. The mist coiled and broke round the movement, and its
pallid drift reflected, briefly, the starlight. I saw his face. I
felt shock thud under my heart like an arrow to its
target.

"Ninian!"

He started, turned, stopped the boat
expertly. The dark eyes looked enormous in the pale
face.

"Yes? Who's that?"

"Merlin. Prince Merlin. Do you not
remember me?" I caught at myself. Shock had made me stupid. I had
forgotten that when I fell in with the goldsmith and his assistant
on the road to Dunpeldyr I had been in disguise. I said quickly:
"You knew me as Emrys; that is my name. Myrddin Emrys from Dyfed.
There were reasons why I couldn't travel under my own name. Do you
remember now?"

The boat rocked. The mist thickened
and hid it, and I knew a moment's blind panic. He had gone again.
Then I saw him, still there, head on one side. He thought and then
spoke, taking time about it, as always.

"Merlin? The enchanter? That is who
you are?"

"Yes. I am sorry if I startled you. It
was a shock seeing you like this. I thought you were drowned, that
time at the Cor Bridge when you went swimming in the river with the
other boys. What happened?"

I thought he hesitated. "I am a good
swimmer, my lord."

There was some secret here. It did not
matter. Nothing mattered. I had found him. This was what the night
had been moving towards. This, not the Queen's trespass, was the
"high matter" towards which the power had driven me. Here was the
future. The stars flashed and sparkled as once they had flashed and
sparkled on the hilt of the great sword.

I leaned forward over the horse's
neck, speaking urgently. "Ninian, listen. If you don't want to
answer questions, I'll ask none. All right, so you ran away from
slavery; that doesn't matter to me. I can protect you, so don't be
afraid. I want you to come to me. As soon as I saw you first, I
knew what you were; you're like me, and, by the Sight that God has
given me, I think you will be capable of the same. You guessed it,
too, didn't you? Will you come to me, and let me teach you? It
won't be easy; you're young yet; but I was younger still when I
went to my master, and you can learn it all, I know. Trust me. Will
you come and serve me, and learn as much of my art as I can give
you?"

This time there was no hesitation at
all. It was as if the question had been asked and answered long
ago. As perhaps it had. About some things there is this
inevitability; they were in the stars from the last day of the
Flood.

"Yes," he said, "I'll come. Give me a
little time, though. There are things to -- to arrange."

I straightened. My rib-cage hurt from
the long breaths I drew. "You know where I live?"

"Everyone knows."

"Then come when you can. You will be
welcome." I added, softly, as much to myself as to him: "By God
himself, you will be welcome."

There was no reply. When I looked
again, there was nothing but the white mist with the starlight on
it, bitter-white, and from below, the lap of the lake water on the
shore.

Even so, it took me till I got to my
own house to realize the very simple truth.

When I had seen the boy Ninian, and
yearned to him as to the one human being I had known who could go
with me wherever I had gone, it had been years ago. How many? Nine,
ten? And he had been perhaps sixteen. Between a youth of sixteen
and a man in his middle twenties there is a world of change and
growing: the boy I had just recognized with such a shock of joy,
the face I had remembered a score of times with grief -- this could
not be the same boy, even had he escaped the river all those years
ago, and lived.

As I lay that night in bed, wakeful,
watching the stars through the black boughs of the pear tree, as I
had done when a child, I went through the scene again. The mist,
the ghostly mist; the upward starlight; the voice coming as an echo
from the hidden water; the face so well remembered, dreamed over
these ten years; these, combining suddenly to waken a forgotten and
futile hope, had deceived me.

I knew then, with tears, that the boy
Ninian was truly dead, and that this encounter in the ghostly dark
had only mocked my weariness with a confused and cruel
dream.

5

He did not come, of course. My next
visitor was a courier from Arthur, bidding me to
Camelot.

Four days had passed. I had half
expected to be summoned before this, but, when no word came,
assumed that Arthur had not yet decided what move to make, or that
he was bent on hushing the affair up, and would not force a public
discussion even in council.

Normally a courier passed between us
three or four times a week, and any messenger whose commission took
him past my house had long since formed the habit of calling at
Applegarth to see if I had a letter ready, or to answer my
questions. So I had kept myself informed.