Legacy: Arthurian Saga (168 page)

All the practical side of healing, the
study of anatomy, and the use of drugs, he was interested in, and
good at. He could also, as I never could, draw with real skill. He
began, that first winter, for sheer delight in the work, to compile
a local herbal of his own, though most of the seeking and
identifying of the plants, which is more than half the doctor's
art, would have to wait till spring. But there was no hurry for it.
He had, he told me, forever.

So the winter passed in deep
happiness, each day too short for all it could be filled with. To
be with Ninian was to have everything; my own youth again, eager
and quick to learn, with life unfolding full of bright promise; and
at the same time the pleasures of quiet thought and of solitude. He
seemed to sense when I needed to be alone, and either withdrew
physically from my presence to his own room, or fell silent, and
apparently into some deep abstraction, which left my thoughts free
of him. He would not share the house with me, preferring, he said,
to have rooms of his own where he need not disturb me, so I had
Mora get ready the upper rooms that would have housed the servants,
had any lived with me. The rooms were above the workshop and
storeroom, facing west, and though small and low under the rafters,
were pleasant and airy. I did wonder at first if Mora and he had
come to some sort of understanding; they spent a lot of time
talking together in the kitchen, or down by the stream where the
girl did some of the washing; I would hear them laughing, and could
see that they were easy together; but there was no sign of
intimacy, and in time I realized that Ninian, from things he let
fall in talk, knew as little about love as I myself. Which, from
the way the power grew in him, palpably week by week, I took to be
only natural. The gods do not give two gifts at once, and they are
jealous.

Spring came early the next year, with
mild sunny days in March, and the wild geese going overhead daily,
toward their nesting sites in the north. I caught some kind of
chill, and kept to the house, but then one fine day went outside to
sit in the little garth, where the doves were already busy about
their love-making. The heated wall made the place as pleasant as a
fireside; there were rosy cups of quince against the stone, and
winter irises full out at the wall's base. In the gardens beyond
the stable buildings I could hear the thud of Varro's spade, and
thought idly of the planting I had planned. Nothing was in my mind
beyond vague, pleasant plans of a domestic sort, and the sight of
the pink sheen on the breast feathers of the doves, and the sleepy
sound of their cooing...

Later, looking back, I wondered if for
a brief hour my malady had blanketed me from consciousness of the
present. It would have pleased me to think so. But it seems
probable that the malady that overtook me was age, and the weakness
left by the chill, and the lulling drug of contentment.

Quick footsteps on a stone stair
startled me awake. I looked up. Ninian came hurrying down from his
room, but with uncertain steps, as if it were he, not I, who was
half-drugged, or even ill. He kept a hand on the stone wall, as if
without its guidance he would have stumbled. Still unsteadily, he
crossed the colonnade, and came out into the sunshine. He paused
there, with a hand to one of the pillars for support. His face was
pale, his eyes enormous, the black pupils swimmingly overspreading
the iris. His lips looked dry, but there was damp on his forehead,
and two sharp lines of pain gouged down between his
brows.

"What is it?" I began in alarm to get
to my feet, but he put out a hand to calm me, then came forward. He
sank down on the flags at my feet in the sun.

"I've had a dream," he said, and even
his voice was unlike itself. "No, I wasn't asleep. I was reading by
the window. There was a spider's web there, still full of drops
from last night's rain. I was watching it as it shook in the
sunlight..."

I understood then. I put a hand down
to his shoulder and held it steadily. "Sit quiet for a moment. You
will not forget the dream. Wait there. You can tell me
later."

But as I got to my feet he shot a hand
out and grabbed at my robe. "You don't understand! It was a
warning! I am sure of that! There's some sort of danger
--"

"I understand quite well. But until
the headache goes, you will remember nothing clearly. Now wait.
I'll be back soon."

I went into the stillroom. As I busied
myself mixing the cordial I had only one thought in my mind. He,
sitting reading and thinking, had had vision brought to him in a
dewdrop's spark of light; I, waiting idly and with passive mind in
full sunlight, had seen nothing. I found that my hand shook a
little as I poured the cordial for him; it would take love, I
thought, to stand peacefully aside and watch the god lift his wing
from over me, and take another into its shadow. No matter that the
power had brought pain and men's fear and sometimes hatred; no one
who has known power like that has any wish to abdicate it to
another. Not to anyone.

I carried the goblet out into the
sunlight. Ninian, still curled on the flagstones, had his head
down, a fist pressed tightly against his brow. He looked very
slight and young. He raised his head at my step, and the grey eyes,
swimming with tears of pain, looked at me blindly. I sat down, took
his hand in mine, and guided the goblet to his mouth. "Drink this.
It will make you feel better presently. No, don't try to talk
yet."

He drank, then his head went down
again, this time against my knee. I laid a hand on his hair. For
some time we sat like that, while the doves, disturbed by his
coming, flew down again onto the coping of the wall, and once more
took up their gentle courtship. Beyond the stables the monotonous
sound of Varro's spade went on and on.

Presently Ninian stirred.

I lifted my hand. "Better?"

He nodded and raised his head. The
lines of pain had gone. "Yes. Yes, it's quite gone. It was more
than a headache; it was like a sharp pain right through the brain.
I've never felt anything like that before. Am I ill?"

"No. You are merely a seer, an eye and
a voice for a most tyrannous god. You have had a waking dream, what
men call a vision. Now tell me about it, and we shall see if it is
a true one."

He drew his knees up, clasping them
with both hands. He spoke, looking past me at the wall with the
black branches and red cups of the quince. His eyes were still
dark, dilated with vision, and his voice was low and even, as if
reciting something learned by rote.

"I saw a stretch of grey sea, whipped
with storm winds, breaking white over rocks like wolves' fangs.
There was a beach of pebbles, grey too, and streaming with rain.
The waves came in over the beach, and with them came broken spars
and casks and torn sails -- pieces of wreckage. And people; drowned
bodies of men and women. One of the men's bodies rolled near me,
and I saw he had not been drowned; there was a deep wound in his
neck, but the blood had all been washed away by the sea. He looked
like an animal that has been bled. There were dead children, too,
three of them. One was naked, and had been speared. Then I saw, out
beyond the breakers, another ship, a whole ship, with sails furled
in the wind, and with oars out, holding her steady. She waited
there, and I saw that she was low in the water as if heavily laden.
She had a high, curved prow, with a pair of antlers fastened to it;
I couldn't see if they were real, or carved in wood. I could see
her name, though; it was King Stag. The men in the ship were
watching the bodies tumbling on shore, and they were laughing. They
were a long way off across the sea, but I could hear what they
said, quite clearly...Can you believe that?"

"Yes. Go on."

"They were saying, 'You were guided,
by God! Who could have told that the old scow was so richly found?
Luck like yours, and a fair division of the spoils, and we'll all
make our fortunes!' They were speaking to the captain."

"Did you hear his name?"

"I think so. They called him
Heuil."

"Was that all?"

"No. There was a sort of darkness,
like a mist. Then the King Stag had gone, but near me on the shore
there were horsemen, and some of them had dismounted and were
looking at the bodies. One man lifted a piece of broken planking
with something on it that might have been the name of the wrecked
ship, and carried it across to where another was sitting on his
horse. He was a dark man, carrying no device that I could see, but
he was obviously their leader. He looked angry. He said something,
and the others got to their horses again, and they all galloped up
off the beach, through the dunes and the long grasses. I was left
there, and then even the dead bodies were gone, and the wind was
blowing into my eyes and making them water...That was all. I was
looking at the spider's web, and the drops had melted in the
sunlight. A fly was caught there, shaking the web. I suppose that
was what woke me. Merlin --"

He stopped abruptly, and cocked his
head to listen. Now I could catch, from the road below, the sounds
of a troop of horsemen, and a distant command to halt. A single
rider detached himself, and approached at a rapid
canter.

"A messenger from Camelot?" I said.
"Who knows, perhaps this is your vision coming home."

The horse stopped. There was the
jingle of the bridle being thrown to Varro. Arthur came in through
the archway.

"Merlin, I'm glad to see you about.
They told me you had been ill, and I came to see for myself." He
paused, looking at Ninian. He knew, of course, that the boy was
with me, but they had not met before. Ninian had refused to go with
me to Camelot, and whenever the King had visited me, had made some
excuse and retired to his rooms. I did not press him, knowing the
awe that the people of the Lake villages felt for the High
King.

I was on my feet, just beginning,
"This is Ninian," when the boy himself interrupted me. He came to
his feet in one swift movement, as fast as a snake uncurling, and
cried out: "That's the man! That's the one! It was a true dream
then, it was true!"

Arthur's brows shot up, not, I knew,
at the lack of ceremony, but at the words. He looked from Ninian
back to me. "A true dream?" He said it softly. He knew the phrase
of old.

I heard Ninian gasp as, through the
dregs of the vision, he came back to the present. He stood there
blinking, like someone thrust suddenly into bright light. "It's the
King. So it was the King."

Arthur said, sharply now: "So what was
the King?"

Ninian, flushing, began to stammer.
"Nothing. That is, I was just talking to Merlin. I didn't know you
at first. I --"

"Never mind. You know me now. What is
this about a true dream?"

Ninian looked appealingly at me.
Telling me his dream was one thing; making his first prophecy to
the King's face was quite another. I said across to him, to the
King: "It seems that an old friend of yours is indulging in piracy,
or some villainy uncommonly like it, somewhere in his home waters.
Murder and robbery, and peaceful traders looted and then wrecked,
and no one left alive to tell the story."

He frowned. "An old friend of mine?
Who, then?"

"Heuil."

"Heuil?" His face darkened. Then he
stood for a few moments in thought. "Yes, it fits. It fits. I had
news a while back from Ector, and he said Caw was failing, and that
wild brood of his looking around them like idle dogs for something
to tear. Then three days ago I heard from Urbgen, my sister's lord
in Rheged, of a village on the coast attacked and looted, and the
folk killed or scattered. He was inclined to blame the Irish, but I
doubted that; the weather's been too rough for anything but local
raiding. Heuil, is it? You don't surprise me. Shall I
go?"

"It seems you had better. My guess is
that Caw is dead, or dying. I can't believe that Heuil would dare,
otherwise, to do anything to provoke Rheged."

"Your guess?"

"That is all."

He nodded. "It seems likely. In any
case, it will answer very well. I had been almost ready to invent
some pretext for a foray to the northward. With Caw's grip
slackening, and that black dog Heuil collecting a following that
could contest his brother's claim to the rulership of Strathclyde,
I would like to be there to see things for myself. Piracy, eh? You
did not see where?"

I glanced at Ninian. He shook his
head. "No," I said, "but you'll find him. You will be there, on the
shore, while the wreckage and the bodies still lie there. The
raiders' ship is King Stag. That's all we know. You should be able
to fasten the guilt where it belongs."

"I'll do that, never fear." He was
grim. "I'll send north to Urbgen and Ector tonight to expect me,
and I'll ride myself in the morning. I'm grateful. I've been
looking for an excuse to cut my lord Heuil out of the pack, and now
you give me this. It may be just the chance I need to get another
agreement ratified between Strathclyde and Rheged, and throw my
weight in behind the new king. I don't know how long I shall be
away. And you, Merlin? All is really well with you?"

"All is very well."

He smiled. He had not missed the
glance that had gone between Ninian and myself. "It seems you have
someone to share your visions with, at last. Well, Ninian, I am
glad to have met you." He smiled at the boy, and said something
kind. Ninian, staring, made some sort of answer. I had been wrong,
I saw, about him; he was not awed by the presence of the King, and
there was a quality in the way he looked at Arthur, something I
could not quite put a name to; none of the worship that I was used
to seeing in men's eyes, but a steady appraisal. Arthur saw it,
looked amused, then dismissed the boy and turned back to me, asking
for messages for Morgan and Ector. Then he said his goodbyes and
went.