Legacy: Arthurian Saga (167 page)

So I stayed solitary, busying myself
with the garden and my medicine, writing and sending long letters
to Blaise in Northumbria, and being cared for well enough by the
girl Mora, whose cooking was from time to time enriched by some
gift from Arthur's table. Gifts went back from me, too; a basket of
some especially good apples from one of the young trees; cordials
and medicines; perfumes, even, that I concocted for the Queen's
pleasure; herbs for the King's kitchen. Simple stuff, after the
fiery gifts of prophecy and victory, but somehow redolent of peace
and the age of gold. Gifts of love and contentment; now we had time
for both. A golden time indeed, untroubled by foreboding; but with
the prickling sense I recognized of some change to come; something
undreaded, but ineluctable as the fall of the leaves and the coming
of winter.

What it was, I would not allow myself
to think. I was like a man alone in an empty room, contented
enough, but listening for sounds beyond the shut door, and waiting
with half a hope for someone to come, though knowing in his heart
of hearts that he would not.

But he did.

He came on a golden evening, in about
the middle of the month. There was a full moon, which had stolen,
like a ghost, into the sky long before sunset. It hung behind the
apple boughs like a great misty lantern, its light slowly waxing,
as the sky around it darkened, to apricot and gold. I was in the
stillroom, crumbling a pile of dried hyssop. The jars stood clean
and ready. The room smelled of hyssop and of the racks of apples
and plums laid on the shelves to ripen. A few late wasps droned,
and a butterfly, snared by the room's warmth, flattened rich wings
against the stone of the window-frame. I heard the light step
behind me, and turned.

Magician they call me, and it is true.
But I neither expected his coming nor heard him until I saw him
standing there in the dusk, lit by the deepening gold of the moon.
He might have been a ghost, so did I stand and stare, transfixed.
The meeting in the mist on the Island's shore had come back to me
frequently, but never as something real; with every effort of
recall it became more and more of a dream, something imagined, a
hope only.

Now the real boy was here, flushed and
breathing, smiling, but not quite at ease, as if unsure of his
welcome. He held a bundle which, I supposed, must contain his
goods. He was dressed in grey, with a cloak the color of
beech-buds. He had no ornaments, and no weapons.

He began: "I don't suppose you
remember me, but --"

"Why should I not? You are the boy who
is not Ninian."

"Oh, but I am. I mean, it is one of my
names. Truly."

"I see. So when I called you
--"

"Yes. When you spoke first, I thought
you must know me; but then -- when you said who you were -- I knew
you were mistaken, and -- well, I was afraid. I'm sorry. I should
have told you straight away, instead of running away like that. I'm
sorry."

"But when I told you that I wanted to
teach you my art, and asked you to come to me, you agreed to do so.
Why?"

His hands, white on the bundle,
clenched and twisted in the fold of the cloth. He hung still on the
threshold, as if poised to run. "That was...When you said that he
-- this other boy -- had been the -- the kind of person who could
learn from you...You had felt it all along, you said, and he had
known it, too. Well -- " he swallowed, " -- I believe that I am,
too. I have felt, all my life, that there were doors in the back of
the mind that would open on light, if one could only find the key."
He faltered, but his eyes did not waver from mine.

"Yes?" I gave him no help.

"Then when you spoke to me like that,
suddenly, out of the mist, it was like a dream come true. Merlin
himself, speaking to me by name, and offering me the very
key...Even when I realized that you had mistaken me for someone
else, who was dead, I had a wild thought that perhaps I could come
to you and take his place...Then of course I saw how stupid that
was, to think I could deceive you, of all people. So I did not dare
to come."

"But now you have dared."

"I had to." He spoke simply, stating a
fact. "I have thought of nothing else since that night. I was
afraid, because...I was afraid, but there are things that you have
to do, they won't let you alone, it's as if you were being driven.
More than driven, hounded. Do you understand?"

"Very well." It was hard to keep my
voice steady and grave. There must have been some note in it of
what my heart felt, because, faint and sweet from the upper room, I
heard the answer of my harp.

He had heard nothing. He was still
braced, braving me, forcing himself into the role of suppliant.
"Now you know the truth. I'm not the boy you knew. You know nothing
about me. Whatever I feel, here in myself" -- a hand moved as if to
touch his breast, but clenched itself again on the bundle -- "you
may not think I'm worth teaching. I don't expect you to take me in,
or spend any time on me. But if you would -- if you would only let
me stay here, sleep in the stableplace, anything, help you with --
well, with work like that" -- a glance at the pile of hyssop --
"until perhaps in time you would come to know..." His voice wavered
again, and this time died. He licked dry lips and stood mute,
watching me.

It was my gaze that faltered, not his.
I turned aside to hide the joy that I could feel mantling my
cheeks. I plunged my hands wrist-deep in the fragrant herbs, and
rubbed the dry fragments between the fingertips. The scent of
hyssop, clean and pungent, rose and steadied me.

I spoke slowly, to the herb jars.
"When I called to you by the Lake, I took you for a boy with whom I
traveled north many years ago, and who had a spirit that spoke to
mine. He died, and ever since that day I have grieved for his
death. When I saw you, I thought I had been mistaken, and that he
still lived; but when I had time to think about it, I knew that now
he would be a boy no longer, but a grown man. It was, you might
say, a stupid error. I do not commonly make such errors, but at the
time I told myself it was an error bred of weariness and grief, and
of the hope that was still alive in me, that he, or such another
spirit, would one day come to me again."

I paused. He said nothing. The moon
had moved beyond the window-frame, and the door where the boy stood
was almost in darkness. I turned back to him.

"I should have known it was no error.
It was the hand of the god that crossed your path with mine, and
now has driven you to me, in spite of your fear. You are not the
boy I knew, but if you had not been just such another, you can be
sure I would not have seen you, or spoken to you. That night was
full of strong magic. I should have remembered that, and trusted
it."

He said eagerly: "I felt it, too. You
could feel the stars like frost on the skin. I'd gone out to catch
fish...but I let them be. It was no night for death, even for a
fish." Dimly, I saw that he smiled, but when he drew breath, it
came unsteadily. "You mean I may stay? I will do?"

"You will do." I lifted my fingers
from the hyssop, and let it trickle back onto the cloth, dusting my
fingertips together. "Which of us, after this, will dare to ignore
the god who drives us? Don't be afraid of me. You are very welcome.
No doubt I'll warn you, when I have time to be cautious, of the
heavy task you're undertaking, and all the thorns that lie in the
way, but just at this moment I dare say nothing that will frighten
you away from me again. Come in, and let me see you."

As he obeyed me, I lifted the unlit
lamp from the shelf. The wick caught flame from the air, and flared
high.

In full light I knew that I could
never have mistaken him for the goldsmith's boy, but he was very
like. He was taller by a thumb's breadth, and his face was not
quite so thin in outline. His skin was finer, and his hands, as
fine-boned and clever-looking as the other boy's, had never done
slave's work. His hair was the same, a thick dark mane, roughly cut
just short of his shoulders. His mouth was like, so like that I
could have been deceived again; it had the gentle, dreaming lines
that -- I suspected -- masked a firmness, even obstinacy, of
purpose. The boy Ninian had shown a quiet disregard of anything
that he did not want to notice; his master's discourses had gone
unheeded over his head while he took refuge in his own thoughts.
Here was the same soft stubbornness, and in these eyes, too, the
same half-absent, dreaming look that could shut the world out as
effectively as dropped eyelids. They were grey, the iris rimmed
with black, and had the clarity of lake water. I was to find that
like lake water they could reflect color, and look green or blue or
black-stormy as the mood came. Now they were watching me with what
looked like a mixture of fascination and fear.

"The lamp?" I said. "You've not seen
the fire called before? Well, that's one of the first things you'll
learn; it was the first my own master taught me. Or was it the
jars? You're looking at them as if you thought I was bottling
poison. I was packing the garden herbs for winter's
use."

"Hyssop," he said. I thought there was
a glint of mischief, which in a girl I might have called demure.
"‘To be burned with brimstone for inflammations of the throat; or
boiled with honey to help pleurisy of the lungs.'"

I laughed. "Galen? Well, it seems we
have a flying start. So you can read? Do you know --? No, it must
wait till morning. For the present, have you had
supper?"

"Yes, thank you."

"You said that Ninian was 'one of your
names.' What do you like to be called?"

"Ninian will do...that is, unless you
would rather not use it. What happened to him, the boy you knew? I
think you said he was drowned?"

"Yes. We were at Corstopitum, and he
went swimming with some other boys in the river beside the bridge
where the Cor flows into the Tyne. They came running back to say he
had been swept away."

"I'm sorry." I smiled at him. "You
will have to work very hard to make good his loss. Come, then, we
must find you a place to sleep."

That was how I acquired my assistant,
and the god his servant. He had had his hand over both of us all
that time. It seems to me now that the first Ninian was but a
forerunner -- a shadow cast before -- of the real one who came to
me later, from the Lake. From the start it was apparent that
instinct had deceived neither of us; Ninian of the Lake, though
knowing little of the arts I professed, proved a natural adept. He
learned quickly, soaking up both knowledge and art as a cloth soaks
up clear water. He could read and write fluently, and though he had
not, as I in my youth had had, the gift of languages, he spoke a
pure Latin as well as the vernacular, and had picked up enough
Greek to be able to read a label or be accurate about a recipe. He
had once, he told me, had access to a translation of

Galen, but knew nothing of Hippocrates
beyond hearsay. I set him to reading in the Latin version I had,
and found myself, in some measure, sent back to school by the score
of questions he asked, of which I had taken the answers so long for
granted that I had forgotten how they were reached. Music he knew
nothing of, and would not learn; this was the first time I came
face to face with that gentle, immovable stubbornness of his. He
would listen, his face full of dreaming light, when I played or
sang; but sing himself, or even try to sing, he would not; and
after a few attempts to teach him his notes on the big harp, I gave
it up. I would have liked it if he had had a voice; I would not
have wanted to sit by while another man made music with my harp,
but now with age my own voice was not as good as it had once been,
and I would have liked to hear a young voice singing the poems I
made. But no. He smiled, shook his head, tuned the harp for me
(that much he could and would do), and listened.

But in everything else he was eager
and quick to learn. Recollecting as best I could the way old
Galapas, my master, had inducted me into the skills of magic, I
took him, step by step, into the strange and misty halls of art.
The Sight he had already in some degree; but where I had surpassed
my master from the start, Ninian would do well if in time he could
equal me, and he was still a stranger to the flights of prophecy.
If he went half as far as I, I would be content. Like all old men,
I could not believe that that young brain and gentle body could
withstand the stresses that I myself had withstood many times. I
helped him, as Galapas had done me, with certain subtle yet safe
drugs, and soon he could see in the fire or the lamp, and wake from
the vision afterwards no more than weary, and, at times, disturbed
by what he had seen. As yet he could not put truth together with
vision. I did not help him to; and indeed, in those peaceful months
of his apprenticeship there was little happening of enough moment
to set prophecy stirring in the fire. Once or twice he spoke to me,
in a kind of confusion, about the Queen, and Melwas and Bedwyr and
the King, but I put the visions aside as obscure, and pursued them
no further.

He steadfastly refused to tell me
about himself or whence he came. He had lived most of his life, he
said, on or near the Island, and allowed me to gather that his
parents had been poor dwellers in one of the outlying Lake
villages. Ninian of the Lake, he called himself, and said it was
enough; so as such I accepted him. His past, after all, was
nothing; whatever he was going to be, I would make. I did not press
him; I had had enough, as a bastard and a child with no known
father, of the shame of such questioning; so I respected the boy's
silences, and asked no more than he would tell me.