Legacy: Arthurian Saga (171 page)

For some reason the very gentleness of
the reply touched me with foreboding. I looked at him, frowning. "I
am willing to accept that. So now, since I hardly imagine that all
this springs from some vague suspicion, I must assume that you know
something about Ninian that I don't. If that's so, why not tell me,
and let me be the judge of its importance?"

"Very well. But -- " Some change in
his expression made me turn and follow his gaze. He was looking
past me, away beyond the shoulder of the down, where a little
valley held a stream fringed with birch and willow. Beyond this
rose the green hill that sheltered Applegarth. Among the willows I
caught a glint of blue, and then saw Ninian, who must have been up
early after all, stooping over something at the edge of the stream.
He straightened, and I saw that his hands were full of greenstuff.
Watercress grew there, and wild mint among the king-cups. He stood
for a moment, as if sorting the plants in his hands, then jumped
the stream and ran away up the far slope, with his blue cloak
flying out behind him like a sail.

"Well?" I said.

"I was going to say, let's go down
there. We have to talk, and there must be more comfortable ways of
doing it than standing face to face on top of the world. You
unnerve me still, you know, Merlin, even when I know I'm
right."

"That wasn't my intention. By all
means let us go down."

He tugged the mare's head up from the
grass, and led the way downhill to where the little wood crowded
along the stream's edge. The trees were mostly birches, with here
and there a twisted trunk of alder, overgrown with bramble and
honeysuckle. One birch tree lay newly fallen, clean with silver
bark. The King loosened a buckle from the mare's bit, tied one end
of the rein to a sapling, then left her to graze, and came back to
sit beside me on the birch trunk.

He came straight to the point. "Has
Ninian ever told you anything about his parentage? His
home?"

"No. I never pressed him. I suspected
base origins, or at any rate bastardy -- he hasn't the peasant look
or way of speech. But both you and I know how little those
questions can be welcomed."

"I have not had your scruples. I have
wondered about him since that day when I met him with you at
Applegarth. Since I came home I have asked about him."

"And found out what?"

"Enough to know that he has been
deceiving you from the beginning." Then, striking a fist to his
knee, with a sudden violence of exasperation: "Merlin, Merlin, are
you so blind? I would swear that no man could be so deceived,
except that I know you...Even now, a few minutes ago, watching him
down here by the stream, you saw nothing?"

"What should I see? I imagine he had
been collecting alder bark. He knew we needed more, and you can see
where that tree has been stripped. And he was carrying
watercress."

"You see? Your eyes are good enough
for that, but not to see what any other man in the world would have
seen -- if not straight away, then within days of meeting him! I
suspected it in those first few minutes there in your courtyard,
while you told me the 'true dream,' and then when I made inquiries
I found that it was true. We both watched the same person running
uphill just now. You saw a boy carrying watercress, but what I saw
was a girl."

I cannot recall at what point during
his speech I knew what he was going to tell me; before he got
halfway it came like a truth already known; the heat before the
lightning strikes, the silence after the lightning that is filled
with the coming thunder. What the wise enchanter with his god-sent
visions had not perceived, the young man, versed in the ways of
women, had seen straight away. It was true. I could only marvel,
dumbly, that I had been so easy to deceive. Ninian. The dim-seen
figure in the mist, so like the lost boy that I had greeted her and
put the words "boy" and "Ninian" into her head before she could
even speak. Told her I was Merlin; offered her the gift of my power
and magic, gifts that another girl -- the witch Morgause -- had
tried in vain to prise from me, but which I had hastened eagerly to
lay at this stranger's feet.

Small wonder that she had taken time
to think, to arrange her affairs, to cut her hair and change her
dress and gather her courage, before coming to me at Applegarth.
That she had refused to share the house, preferring the rooms off
the colonnade with their separate stair; that she had taken no
interest in Mora, but that the two of them were so easy together.
Mora had guessed, then? I swept the thought aside as others
crowded. The speed with which she had learned from me; the power,
with all its suffering, already accepted with dread, with
resignation, and finally with willing joy. The grave, gentle look,
the gestures of a worship carefully offered, and as carefully
constrained. The way she had gone from me when I spoke so lightly
of women disturbing men's lives. Her swift condemnation of
Guinevere, rather than of Bedwyr, for giving way to a hurtful love.
Then, with quickening memory, the feel of her dark hair under my
hand, the sweet bones of her face, and the grey eyes watching in
the firelight, and the disturbing love that had so troubled me, and
now need trouble me no more. It came to me, like the sunlight
breaking through the birch trees on the forgotten bluebells of the
copse where, long ago, a girl had offered me love, then mocked me
for impotence, that this time no jealous god need come between us.
At last I was free to give, along with all the rest of the power
and effort and glory, the manhood that until now had been the god's
alone. The abdication I had feared, and feared to grudge, would not
be a loss, but rather a new joy gained.

I came back to the sunshine and a
different birch-wood and the faded bluebells of June, to see Arthur
staring.

"You don't even look surprised. Did
you guess?"

"No. But I should have done; if not by
any of the signs that were obvious to you, then by the way I
felt...and feel now." I smiled at his look. "Oh, yes. An old fool
if you like. But now I know for certain that my gods are
merciful."

"Because you think you love this
girl."

"Because I love her."

"I thought you were a wise man," he
said.

"And because I am a wise man, I know
too well that love cannot be gainsaid. It's too late, Arthur.
Whatever comes of it, it is too late. It has happened. No, listen.
It has all come clear now, like sunlight on water. All the
prophecies I have made, things in the future that I have foreseen
with dread...I see them approaching me now, and the dread has gone.
I have said often enough that prophecy is a two-edged sword; the
gods are delphic; their threats, like their promises of fortune,
turn in men's hands." I lifted my head and looked up through the
gently moving leaves. "I told you that I had seen my own end. There
was a dream I had once, a vision in the flame. I saw the cave in
the Welsh hillside, and the girl my mother, whose name was Niniane,
and the young prince my father, lying together. Then through and
over the vision I saw myself, grey-haired, and a young girl with a
cloud of dark hair, and closed eyes, and I thought that she, too,
was Niniane. And so she was. So she is. Do you see? If she has any
part in my end, then it will be merciful."

He got to his feet so abruptly that
the hound, curled there, jumped aside, ridge-backed and looking
round for danger. Arthur took three steps away from me, and three
back to stand in front of me. He drove one fist into the other palm
with such violence that the mare, a dozen paces away, startled and
then stood, ears erect, trembling. "How do you expect me to sit
here and listen to you talking of your death? You told me once that
you would end in a tomb, alive, you thought it would be in Bryn
Myrddin. Now, I suppose, you will ask me to let you go back there
so that this -- this witch can leave you there
entombed!"

"Not quite. You have not understood
--"

"I understand as well as you do, and I
think that I remember more! Have you forgotten Morgause's curse?
That women's magic would snare you at the end? And what was
promised you once by the Queen Ygraine, my mother? You told me what
she said. That if Gorlois of Cornwall died, then she would spend
the rest of her life praying to any gods there are that you would
die betrayed by a woman."

"Well?" I said. "And have I not been
snared? And have I not been betrayed? And this is all it
is."

"Are you so sure? Forgive me for
reminding you yet again that you don't know women. Remember
Morgause. She tried to persuade you to teach her your magic, and
when you would not, she took power another way...the way we know
about. Now this girl has succeeded where Morgause failed. Tell me
one thing: if she had come to you as herself, as a woman, would you
have taken her in and taught her your skills?"

"I can't tell you that. Probably not.
But the point is, surely, that she did not? The deception was not
hers in the first instance; it was forced on her by my error, and
that error in its turn was forced on me by the chance that led me
first to meet and love the boy Ninian who was drowned. If you
cannot see the god at work there, I am sorry."

"Yes, yes -- " impatiently, " -- but
you have just reminded me that this is a delphic god. What you see
now as a joy may be the very death you have dreaded."

"No," I said. "You must take it the
other way. That a fate long dreaded can prove, in the end,
merciful, like this 'betrayal.' My long nightmare of entombment in
the dark, alive, may prove to be such another. But whatever it is,
I cannot avoid it. What will come, will come. The god chooses the
time and the form. After all these years, if I did not trust in
him, I would be the fool you think me."

"So you'll go back to this girl, keep
her by you, and go on teaching her your art?"

"Just that. I could hardly stop now. I
have sown the seeds of power in her, and as surely as if it were a
tree growing, or a child I had begotten, I cannot stop it. And the
other seed has been sown, for good or ill. I love her dearly, and
were she ten times an enchantress, I can only thank my god for it,
and take her to me more nearly than before."

"I cannot bear to see you
hurt."

"She will not hurt me."

"If she does," he said evenly, "witch
or no witch, lover or no lover, I shall deal with her as she
deserves. Well, it seems there is no more to be said. We had better
go back. That basket looks heavy. Let me take it for
you."

"No, a moment. There is one more
thing."

"Yes?"

He was standing straight in front of
me where I still sat on the birch log. Against the delicate boughs
of the birches and the shifting of the leaves in the soft breeze he
looked tall and powerful, the jewels at shoulder and belt and
sword-hilt glittering as if with their own life. He looked, not
young, but full of the richness of life, a man in the flower of his
strength; a leader among kings. His face was contained. There was
nothing to tell me what he would say, what he might do, after I had
spoken.

I said slowly: "Since we have been
talking of last things, there is one other thing I have to tell
you. Another vision, which it is my duty to bring to you. It's
something that I have seen, not once but several times. Bedwyr your
friend, and Guinevere your Queen, love one another."

I had been looking away from him as I
spoke, not wanting to see how the wounding stroke went home. I
suppose I had expected anger, an outburst of violence, at the very
least surprise and furious disbelief. Instead there was silence, a
silence so drawn out that at length I looked up, to see in his face
nothing of anger or even surprise, but a kind of sternly held
calmness that tempered only compassion and regret.

I said, not believing it: "You
knew?"

"Yes," he said, quite simply, "I
know." There was a pause, while I looked for words and found none.
He smiled. There was something in the smile that did not speak of
youth or power at all, but of a wisdom perhaps greater, because
more purely human, than is ascribed to me. "I do not have vision,
Merlin, but I see what is before my eyes. And do you not think that
others, who guess and whisper, have not been at pains to tell me?
It sometimes seems to me that the only ones who have given no hint
by-word or look have been Bedwyr and the Queen
themselves."

"How long have you known
this?"

"Since the Melwas affair."

And I had never guessed. His kindness
to the Queen, her relief and growing happiness, had told me
nothing. "Then why did you leave Bedwyr with her when you went
north?"

"To let them have something, however
little." The sun was in his eyes, making him frown. He spoke
slowly. "You have just been telling me that love cannot be ruled or
stopped. If you are prepared to accept love, knowing that it may
well bring you to your death, then how much more should I accept
this, knowing that it cannot destroy friendship or
faith?"

"You believe that?"

"Why not? Everything else you have
ever told me has been true. Think back now over your prophecies
about my marriage, the 'white shadow' that you saw when Bedwyr and
I were boys, the guenkwyvar that touched us both. You said then
that it would not blur or destroy the faith we had in one
another."