Legacy: Arthurian Saga (175 page)

Through it all, though I had no sense
of it, time was passing, and the days wore through, and still I lay
in that strange limbo of helpless body and vividly working mind,
while gradually, as a bee sips the honey from a flower, Nimue the
enchantress took from me, drop by drop, the distillation of all my
days.

Then one early dawn, with the sound of
birds singing outside, and the warm summer breeze bringing the
scent of flowers and summer hay into the cave, I woke from a long
sleep, and found that the malady had left me. Dream time was over;
I was alive, and fully awake.

I was also alone, in darkness, save
where a long quill of sunlight drilled through a gap left where
they had pulled the tumble of rocks down across the cave mouth, and
had gone away, leaving me in my tomb.

I had no way of knowing how long I had
lain in the waking death. We had been at Rheged in July, and it was
still apparently high summer. Three weeks, or at most a month...?
If it had been longer, I would surely be weaker. As it was, until
the last profound sleep, which must have been taken for death, I
had been cared for and fed with my own cordials and medicines, so
that, though stiff, and very weak, I had every chance of life.
There was no hope of my being able to move any of the stones that
sealed my tomb, but there was a good chance that I might be able to
attract the attention of someone passing this way. The place had
been a shrine, time out of mind, and the folk came regularly up the
valley with offerings for the god who watched the sacred spring
beside the cave. It was possible, now, that they would hold the
place even more holy, knowing that Merlin, who had held the High
King in his hand, but who had been their own enchanter, giving his
time and skill to tend their hurts and those of their animals, was
buried here. They had brought gifts daily, of food and wine, while
he was alive; surely they would come with their offerings, to
appease the dead?

So, stifling my fear, I raised myself
and tried, through the swirling weakness of my new waking state, to
judge what I must do.

They had laid me, not in the crystal
cave, which was a small hollow high in the wall of the main cavern,
but in the main cavern itself, on my own bed. This had been draped
in some stuff that felt rich and stiff, and gave back, to the same
probe of light, the glimmer of embroidery and precious gems. I
fingered the pall that covered me; it was of some thick material,
soft and warm, and beautifully woven. My fingers traced the pattern
worked on it: the Dragon. And now I could see, at the four corners
of the bed, the tall, heavily wrought candlesticks that gave off
the gleam of gold. I had been left, apparently, with pomp and with
royal honors. Had the King been here, then? I wished I could
remember him. And Nimue? I supposed I had my own prophecies to
thank that this was all the burial they had accorded me, and that
they had not given me to the earth, or to the fire. The thought was
a shiver over the skin, but it prompted me to action. I looked at
the candles. Three of them had burned down almost to lumps of
shapeless wax, and then died. The other, blown out perhaps by some
chance draught, was still a foot or so tall. I put a finger to the
nearest, where the wax had run down; it was still soft. Twelve
hours, I calculated, or at most fifteen, since they had been
lighted, and I had been left here. The place was still warm. If I
was to keep alive, it must be kept that way. I leaned back against
the stiff pillow, drew the pall with its golden dragon up over my
body, fixed my eyes on the dead candle, and thought: We shall see.
The simplest of magic, the first I ever learned here in this very
place; let us see if this, too, has been taken from me. The effort
sent me, exhausted, back into sleep.

I woke to see the sunlight, dim now
and rosy, lighting a far corner of the cave, but the cave itself
was full of light. The candle burned steadily, with a warm golden
flame. It glimmered on two gold coins lying on the pall; I
remembered, vaguely, the weight of them tumbling from my eyes as I
woke and moved. It also showed me something more to the purpose:
the ritual cakes and wine that had been left beside the bier as
offerings to the dead. I spoke aloud to God who kept me, then,
sitting on the bier, with the grave-clothes round me, ate and drank
what had been left.

The cakes were dry, but tasted of
honey, and the wine was strong, running into me like new life. The
candlelight, dealing its own faint warmth, dispelled the last wisps
of fear. "Emrys," I found myself whispering, "Emrys, child of the
light, beloved of kings...you were told that you would be buried
quick in darkness, your power gone; and look, here it has come to
pass, and it is not fearful after all; you are buried, and quick,
but you have light and air and -- unless they have rifled the place
-- food and drink and warmth and medicines..."

I lifted the candle from its heavy
sconce and carried it into the inner caves which were the
storerooms. Everything was just as I had left it. Stilicho had been
a more than faithful steward. I thought of the wine and honey-cakes
left beside the "bier," and wondered if, besides, the caverns had
been scoured and garnished, then carefully furnished for the dead.
Whatever the reason for leaving things as they were, there, row on
row, box on box, were the precious stores, and in their places the
flasks and jars of drugs and cordials, all that I had not taken
with me to Applegarth. There was a real squirrel's hoard of food,
dried fruit and nuts, honeycombs gently seeping into their jars, a
barrel of olives in oil. No bread, of course, but in a crock I
found, bone-hard, some thick oatcake made long ago by the
shepherd's wife and given to me; it was still good, being dry as
board, so I broke it up and put some of it to sop in wine. The meal
garner was half full, and with oil from the olive-barrel I could
make meal cakes of a sort. Water, of course, I had; soon after I
had come to take up residence in the cave I had had my servant lead
a pipe of water from the spring outside to fill a tank; this, kept
covered, ensured clean water even through frost and storm. The
overflow, channeled to run down to a fissured corner of a remote
inner chamber, served as a privy. There were candles aplenty in
store, and tinder with the flints on the ledge where I had always
kept them. There was a sizable pile of charcoal, but I hesitated,
for fear of smoke or fumes, to light the brazier. Besides, I might
need the warmth in the time ahead. If my reckoning of time was
right, in a short month the summer would be over, and autumn
setting in with its chill winds and its killing damp.

So at first, while the warm airs of
summer still breathed through the cave, I used light only when I
needed to see to prepare my food, and for comfort sometimes, when
the hours dragged in darkness. I had no books, all having been
taken to Applegarth. But writing materials were to hand, and as the
days went by and I gained strength and began to fret in the
idleness of captivity, I formed the idea of trying to set down in
some kind of order the story of my boyhood and the times I had
lived through and helped to mold. Music, too, would have been
something to be made in darkness, but the standing harp had gone
with my books to Applegarth, and my own small harp had not been
brought with the other riches, to furnish the house of the
dead.

Be sure that I had given thought to
escaping from my grave. But those who had laid me there and given
me, in honor, the sacred hill itself, with all that lay within it,
had used the hill itself to seal me in; half the mountainside,
seemingly, had been levered down to fall across the cave's
entrance. Try as I would I could not shove or scrape a way through.
No doubt someone with the right tools might have done it in time,
but I had none. We kept spades and axes always in the stable below
the cliff.

There was another possibility, which I
considered time and again. As well as the caves that I used, there
were other, smaller chambers which opened off one another,
branching deep into the hill. One of these inner caves was little
more than a chimney, a rounded shaft running up through the rock
levels, to reach the air in a little corrie of the hill above. Here
a low cliff, many years back, had, under the pressure from
tree-roots and storms, split open to let light, and sometimes small
rocks and rain-water, down into the hollow below. Through this
fissure now the cave-dwelling bats made their daily flights. In
time the pile of fallen stones in the cave had built up into a kind
of buttress, reaching perhaps a third of the way up toward the
"lantern," as I might term the hole above. When, hopefully, I
looked to see if this rough stair had been extended, I was
disappointed: above it, still, lay a sheer pitch three times the
height of a man, and above that the same again, sloping at first
steeply, and then more gently, to reach the gap of daylight. It was
just possible that a fit and agile man could have climbed out
unaided, though in places the rock was damp and slimy, and in
others manifestly unsafe. But for an ageing man, recently in his
sickbed, it was impossible. The sole comfort of the discovery lay
in the fact that here, literally, was a "chimney"; in the cold days
to come I could light the brazier there with safety, and savor
warmth and hot food and drink.

I did think, naturally, about making a
fire of some kind, in the hope that the smoke might attract the
attention of the curious, but there were two things against this.
First, the country people who lived within sight of the hill were
used to seeing the bats go up daily from the hillside, looking for
the world like plumes of smoke; the second was that I had little to
spare of fuel. All I could do was conserve the precious stores I
had, and wait for someone to make a way up the valley to visit the
holy well.

But nobody came. Twenty days, thirty,
forty, were notched on my tally stick. I recognized with reluctance
that where the simple folk had come to pray to the spirit of the
well, and offer gifts to the living man who healed them, they were
afraid of the enchanter lately dead, and of the new haunting of the
hollow hill. Since the valley led nowhere but to the cave and the
spring, no travelers used it. Nothing came into the high valley,
except the birds (which I heard) and, I supposed, the deer, and
once a wolf or a fox that I heard snuffling in the night at the
tumble of stones that blocked the cave's entrance.

So the tallied days dragged by, and I
stayed alive, and -- what was harder -- kept fear at bay in every
way I knew. I wrote, and wrestled with plans for escape, and did
what domestic tasks the days demanded; and I am not ashamed to
remember that I drugged the nights -- and sometimes the desperate
days -- with wine, or with opiates that stupefied the senses and
dulled time. Despair I would not feel; through all that long life
in death I held to one thing, as to a ladder let down from the
light above me: throughout my life I had obeyed my god, had
received power from him, and rendered it back again; now I had seen
it pass to the young lover who had usurped me; but though my life
was apparently done, my body had been kept -- I could not tell how
or why -- from either earth or fire. I was alive, and had regained
both strength and will, and, prison or no, this was the hollow hill
of the god himself. I could not believe that there was not some
purpose still to be fulfilled.

I think it was with this in mind that
I nerved myself at length to climb into the crystal
cave.

All this while, with my strength at
low ebb and the power (I knew) gone from me, I had not been able to
face the place of vision. But one evening when, with my store of
candles running low, I had sat too long in darkness, I brought
myself at last to climb the ledge at the back of the main cavern,
and, bent double, to creep into the crystal-lined globe.

I went, I believe, for nothing more
than the comfortable memories of past power, and of love. I took no
light with me, and looked for no vision. I simply lay, as I had
done when a boy, belly down on the rough crystals of the floor,
letting the heavy silence enclose me, and filling it with my
thoughts.

What they were I cannot now remember:
I suppose I was praying. I do not think I spoke aloud. But in a
while I became conscious -- as, in a black night, a man realizes,
rather than sees, the coming dawn -- of something that answered to
my breathing. Not a sound, only the faintest echo of a breath, as
if a ghost was waking, taking life from mine.

My heart began to thud; my breathing
sharpened. Within the darkness the other rhythm quickened. The air
of the cave hummed. Round the crystal walls ran, echoing, a whisper
that I knew.

I felt the easy tears of weakness
start into my eyes. I said aloud: "So, after all, they brought you
back to your own place?" And, from the darkness, my harp answered
me.

I groped forward towards the sound. My
fingers met the live, silken feel of wood. The carved fore-pillar
nestled into my hand as I had seen the hilt of the great sword
slide into the King's grip. I backed out of the cave, silenced the
harp's faint plaining against my breast, and picked my way
carefully down again into my prison.

This was the song I made. I called it
"Merlin's Song from the Grave."

Where have they gone, the bright ones?
I remember the sunlight And a great wind blowing; A god who
answered me, Leaning out from the high stars; A star that shone for
me, A voice that spoke to me, a hawk that guided me, a shield that
sheltered me; And a clear way to the gate Where they wait for me,
Where surely they wait for me?