Legacy: Arthurian Saga (186 page)

It was already past the time of
lamp-lighting. I went over to the window, where the sky was
deepening slowly from red to purple, and sat down to wait for the
pages to come back.

I did not look round when the door
opened. The flickering light of a cresset stole into the chamber,
sending the evening sky receding, darkening beyond its weak young
stars. The page moved softly round the room, touching lamp after
lamp with flame, until the chamber glowed.

I felt tired after the ride, and heavy
with reaction. It was time I roused myself, and let myself be made
ready for the feasting tonight. The boy had gone out to set the
cresset back in its iron bracket on the corridor wall. The chamber
door was ajar.

I got to my feet. "Thank you," I
began. "Now, if of your goodness --"

I stopped. It was no page. It was
Nimue who came swiftly in, then stood backed against the door,
watching me. She was clad in a long gown of grey, stitched with
silver, and there was silver in her hair, which was loose, and
flowing down over her shoulders. Her face was white, and her eyes
wide and dark, and while I stood gazing, they suddenly brimmed over
with tears.

Then she was across the room and had
me fast in her arms, and was laughing and crying and kissing me,
with words tumbling out that made no sense at all except the one,
that I was alive, and that all the time she had been grieving for
me as dead.

"Magic," she kept saying, in a
wondering, half-scared voice, "it's magic, stronger than any I
could ever know. And you told me you had given it all to me. I
should have known. I should have known. Ah, Merlin,
Merlin..."

Whatever had passed, whatever had kept
her from me, or blinded her to the truth, none of it mattered. I
found myself holding her close, with her head pressed against my
breast, and my cheek on her hair, while she repeated over and over,
like a child: "It's you. It's really you. You've come back. It is
magic. You must still be the greatest enchanter in all the
world."

"It was only the malady, Nimue. It
deceived you all. It was not magic. I gave all that to
you."

She lifted her head. Her face was
tragic. "Yes, and how you gave it! I only pray that you cannot
remember! You had told me to learn all that you had to tell me. You
had said that I must build on every detail of your life; that after
your death I must be Merlin...And you were leaving me, slipping
from me in sleep...I had to do it, hadn't I? Force the last of your
power from you, even though with it I took the last of your
strength? I did it by every means I knew -- cajoled, stormed,
threatened, gave you cordials and brought you back to answer me
again and again -- when what I should have done, had you been any
other man, was to let you sleep, and go in peace. And because you
were Merlin, and no other man, you roused yourself in pain and
answered me, and gave me all you had. So minute by minute I
weakened you, when it seems to me now that I might have saved you."
She slid her hands up to my breast, and lifted swimming grey eyes.
"Will you tell me something truthfully? Swear by the
god?"

"What is it?"

"Do you remember it, when I hung about
you and tormented you to your death, like a spider sucking the life
from a honey-bee?"

I put my hands up to cover hers. I
looked straight into the beautiful eyes, and lied. "My darling
girl, I remember nothing of that time but words of love, and God
taking me peacefully into his hand. I will swear it if you
like."

Relief swept into her face. But still
she shook her head, refusing to be comforted. "But then, even all
the power and knowledge you gave me could not show me that we had
buried you living, and send me back to get you out. Merlin, I
should have known, I should have known! I dreamed again and again,
but the dreams were full of confusion. I went back once to Bryn
Myrddin, did you know? I went to the cave, but the door was blocked
still, and I called and called, but there was no sound
--"

"Hush, hush." She was shivering. I
pulled her closer, and bent my head and kissed her hair. "It's
over. I am here. When you came back for me, I must have been
drugged asleep. Nimue, what happened was the will of the god. If he
had wanted to save me from the tomb, he would have spoken to you.
Now, he has brought me back in his own time, and for that, he saved
me from being put quick into the ground, or given to the flames.
You must accept it all, and thank him, as I do."

She shivered again. "That was what the
High King wanted. He would give you, he said, a pyre as high as an
emperor's, so that your death would be a beacon to the living the
length and breadth of the land. He was wild with grief, Merlin. I
could hardly make him listen to me. But I told him I had had a
dream, and that you yourself had said that you wished to be laid in
your own hollow hill, and left in peace to become part of the land
you loved." She put a hand up to brush tears from her face. "And it
was true. I did have such a dream, one of many. But even so, I
failed you. Who did what I should have done, and helped you to
escape? What happened?"

"Come over here, to the fire, and I'll
tell you. Your hands are cold. Come, we have a little time, I
think, before we need go into the hall."

"The King will stay for us," she said.
"He knows I am here. He sent me to you."

"Did he?" But I put that aside for the
present. In a corner of the room a brazier burned red in front of a
low couch covered with rugs and skins. We sat side by side in the
warm glow, and, to her eager questions, I told my story yet
again.

By the time I had finished her
distress was gone, and a little color had crept back into her
cheeks. She sat close in my arm with one of my hands held tightly
in both her own. Magician or mortal man, there was no shadow of
doubt in my mind that the joy she showed was as real as the glow of
the brazier that warmed us both. Time had run back. But not quite:
mortal man or magician, I could sense secrets still.

Meantime she listened and exclaimed,
and held my hand tightly, and presently, when I had done, she took
up the story.

"I told you about the dream I had. It
made me uneasy: I began to wonder, even, if you had been truly dead
when we left you in the cave. But there had seemed no doubt; you
had lain so long without movement, and seemingly without breath,
and then all the doctors declared you dead. So in the end we left
you there. Then, when the dreams drove me back to the cave, all
seemed normal. Then other dreams, other visions, came, which
crowded that one out and confused it..."

She had moved away from me while she
was speaking, though she still held my hand between her own. She
lay back against the cushions at the end of the couch, looking away
from me, into the heart of the glowing charcoal.

"Morgan," I suggested, "and the theft
of the sword?"

She gave me a quick glance. "I suppose
the King told you about that? Yes. You heard how the sword was
stolen. I had to leave Camelot, and follow Morgan, and take back
the sword. Even there, the god was with me. While I was in Rheged a
knight came there from the south; he was traveling to visit the
queen, and at night, in Urbgen's hall, he told a strange tale. He
was Bagdemagus -- Morgan's kinsman, and Arthur's. You remember
him?"

"Yes. His son was sick a while back,
and I treated him. He lived, but was left with an inflammation of
the eyes."

She nodded. "You gave him some salve,
and told him to use the same if the eyes troubled him again. You
said it was blended with some herb you had at Bryn
Myrddin."

"Yes. It was wild clary, that I
brought back from Italy. I had a supply at Bryn Myrddin. But how
did he think he was going to get it?"

"He thought you meant that it grew
there. He may have thought you had planted a garden, as we did at
Applegarth. Of course he knew that you were buried there in the
hill. He didn't admit to us that he was afraid, but I think he must
have been. Well, he told us his story, how he had ridden across the
hilltop, and heard music coming seemingly up out of the earth. But
then his horse bolted in terror, and he didn't dare go back. He
said he hadn't told anyone his story, because he was ashamed of his
flight, and afraid of being laughed at; but then, he said, just
before he came north, he had heard some tale in Maridunum about a
fellow who had seen and spoken with your ghost...Well, you know who
that was, your grave-robber. Taken both together, and along with my
persistent dreams, the story spoke aloud to me.

You were alive, and in the cave. I
would have left Luguvallium that night, but something else happened
that forced me to stay."

She glanced across at me, as if
waiting for me to nod, knowing what was to come. But I said merely:
"Yes?"

There was the same brief flash of
surprise that Arthur had shown, then she bit her lip, and
explained.

"Morgause arrived, with the boys. All
five. I was hardly a welcome guest, as you may guess, but Urbgen
was civility itself, and Morgan was afraid of what she had done,
and almost clung to me. I believe she thought that as long as I was
there Urbgen's anger wouldn't be vented on her. And of course, I
suppose, she hoped that I might intercede with Arthur. But
Morgause..." She lifted her shoulders as if with cold.

"Did you see her?"

"Briefly. I could not stay there with
her. I took my leave, and let them think I was going south, but I
did not leave Luguvallium. I sent my page, secretly, to speak with
Bagdemagus, and he came to see me at my lodgings. He's a good man,
and he owed you his son's life. I did not tell him that I believed
you were still living. I told him merely that Morgause had been
your enemy, and your bane, and that Morgan had showed herself a
witch also, and the enemy of the King. I begged him to spy, if he
could, on their counsels, and report to me. You can be sure that I
had already tried to reach Morgause's mind myself, and had failed.
All I could hope for was that the sisters might talk together, and
something could be learned from that about the drug that had been
used on you. If my dream was right, and you still lived, the
knowledge might help me save you yet. If not, I would have more
evidence to give the King, and procure Morgause's death." She
lifted her hand to my cheek. Her eyes were somber. "I sat there in
my lodgings, waiting for him to come back, and knowing all the time
that you might be dying, alone in the tomb. I tried to reach you,
or even just to see, but whenever I tried to see you, and the hill,
and the tomb, light would break across the vision and dash it
aside, and there, moving down the light, floated a grail, clouded
like a moon hidden in storm or mist. Then it would vanish, and pain
and loss would break through the dream till I woke distracted, and
crying, through the longing and the sorrow, to dream
again."

"So you were warned of that? My poor
child, left to guard such a treasure...Did Bagdemagus warn you that
Morgause had heard of it, and meant to steal it?"

"What?" She looked at me blankly.
"What do you mean? What had Morgause to do with the grail? It would
have soiled the god himself if she had even looked at it. How was
she to know where to find it?"

"I don't know. But she took it. I was
told so, by someone who watched her do it."

"Then you were told a lie," said Nimue
roundly. "I took it myself."

"It was you who took Macsen's
treasure?"

"Indeed it was." She sat up, glowing.
In her eyes two little braziers, reflected, shone and glittered.
The candid grey eyes looked, with the red points of light, like
cat's eyes, or witch's. "You told me yourself where it lay buried;
do you remember that? Or were you already gone into your own mists,
my dear?"

"I remember."

She said soberly: "You told me that
power was a hard master. It was the hardest thing I have ever done,
to go to Segontium, instead of traveling south again to Bryn
Myrddin. But in the end I knew I had been bidden to do it, so I
went. I took two of my servants, men I could trust, and found the
place. It had changed. The shrine had gone, under a landslip, but I
took the bearings you had given me, and we dug there. It might have
taken a long time, but we had help."

"A dirty little shepherd boy, who
could hold a hazel stick over the earth, and tell you where the
treasure was hidden."

Her eyes danced. "So, why do I trouble
to tell you my story? Yes. He came and showed us, and we dug down,
and took the box away. I went up into the fortress then, and spoke
with the Commandant, and slept there that night, with a guard on my
room. And during the night as I lay in my bed, with that box
beneath it, the visions came teeming. I knew that you were alive,
and free, and that you would soon be with the King. So in the
morning I asked for an escort to take the treasure south, and set
off for Caerleon."

"And so missed me by two days," I
said.

"Missed you? Where?"

"Did you think I 'saw' the shepherd
boy in the fire? No, I was there." I told her then, briefly, about
my stay in Segontium, and my visit to the vanished shrine. "So when
the boy told me about you and your two servants, like a fool I
assumed it was Morgause. He didn't describe the woman, except that
she --" I paused, and looked across at her with raised brows. "He
said she was a queen, and the servants had royal badges. That was
why I assumed --"