Legacy: Arthurian Saga (20 page)

He nodded. "Where did you intend to
go?"

"I didn't know. It was true, what
Marric said to me in the boat, that I'd have to go to someone. I'm
only twelve, and because I can't be my own master, I must find a
master. I didn't want Vortigern, or Vortimer, and I didn't know
where else to go."

"So you persuaded Marric and Hanno to
keep you alive and bring you to me?"

"Not really," I said honestly. "I
didn't know at first where they were going, I just said anything I
could think of to save myself. I had put myself into the god's
hand, and he had sent me into their path, and then the ship was
there. So I made them bring me across."

"To me?"

I nodded. The brazier flickered, and
the shadows danced. A shadow moved on his cheek, as if he was
smiling. "Then why not wait till they did so? Why jump ship and
risk freezing to death in an icy field?"

"Because I was afraid they didn't mean
to bring me to you after all. I thought that they might have
realized how -- how little use I would be to you."

"So you came ashore on your own in the
middle of a winter's night, and in a strange country, and the god
threw you straight at my feet. You and your god between you,
Myrddin, make a pretty powerful combination. I can see I have no
choice."

"My lord?"

"Perhaps you are right, and there are
ways in which you can serve me." He looked down at the table again,
picked up a pen, and turned it over in his hand, as if he examined
it. "But tell me first, why are you called Myrddin? You say your
mother never told you who your father was? Never even hinted? Might
she have called you after him?"

"Not by calling me Myrddin, sir.
That's one of the old gods -- there's a shrine just near St.
Peter's gate. He was the god of the hill nearby, and some say of
other parts beyondSouth Wales. But I have another name." I
hesitated. "I've never told anyone this before, but I'm certain it
was my father's name."

"And that is?"

"Emrys. I heard her talking to him
once, at night, years ago when I was very small. I never forgot.
There was something about her voice. You can tell."

The pen became still. He looked at me
under his brows. "Talking to him? Then it was someone in the
palace?"

"Oh, no, not like that. It wasn't
real."

"You mean it was a dream? A vision?
Like this tonight of the bull?"

"No, sir. And I wouldn't have called
that a dream, either -- it was real, too, in a different way. I
have those sometimes. But the time I heard my mother...There was an
old hypocaust in the palace that had been out of use for years;
they filled it in later, but when I was young -- when I was little
-- I used to crawl in there to get away from people. I kept things
there...the sort of things you keep when you're small, and if they
find them, they throw them away."

"I know. Go on."

"Do you? I -- well, I used to crawl
through the hypocaust, and one night I was under her chamber, and
heard her talking to herself, out loud, as you do when you pray
sometimes. I heard her say 'Emrys,' but I don't remember what
else." I looked at him. "You know how one catches one's own name,
even if one can't hear much else? I thought she must be praying for
me, but when I was older and remembered it, it came to me that the
'Emrys' must be my father. There was something about her
voice...and anyway, she never called me that; she called me
Merlin."

"Why?"

"After a falcon. It's a name for the
corwalch."

"Then I shall call you Merlin, too.
You have courage, and it seems as if you have eyes that can see a
long way. I might need your eyes, someday. But tonight you can
start with simpler things. You shall tell me about your home. Well,
what is it?"

"If I'm to serve you...of course I
will tell you anything I can...But -- " I hesitated, and he took
the words from me: "But you must have my promise that when I invade
Britain no harm will come to your mother? You have it. She shall be
safe, and so shall any other man or woman you may ask me to spare
for their kindness to you."

I must have been staring. "You are --
very generous."

"If I take Britain, I can afford to
be. I should perhaps have made some reservations." He smiled. "It
might be difficult if you wanted an amnesty for your uncle
Camlach?"

"It won't arise," I said. "When you
take Britain, he'll be dead."

A silence. His lips parted to say
something, but I think he changed his mind. "I said I might use
those eyes of yours someday. Now, you have my promise, so let us
talk. Never mind if things don't seem important enough to tell. Let
me be the judge of that."

So I talked to him. It did not strike
me as strange then that he should talk to me as if I were his
equal, nor that he should spend half the night with me asking
questions which in part his spies could have answered. I believe
that twice, while we talked, a slave came in silently and
replenished the brazier, and once I heard the clash and command of
the guard changing outside the door. Ambrosius questioned,
prompted, listened, sometimes writing on a tablet in front of him,
sometimes staring, chin on fist, at the table-top, but more usually
watching me with that steady, shadowed stare. When I hesitated, or
strayed into some irrelevancy, or faltered through sheer fatigue,
he would prod me back with his questions towards some unseen goal,
as a muleteer goads his mule.

"This fortress on the River Seint,
where your grandfather met Vortigern. How far north of Caerleon? By
which road? Tell me about the road...How is the fortress reached
from the sea?"

And: "The tower where the High King
lodged, Maximus' Tower -- Macsen's, you call it ... Tell me about
this. How many men were housed there. What road there is to the
harbor"

Or: "You say the King's party halted
in a valley pass, south of the Snow Hill, and the kings went aside
together. Your man Cerdic said they were looking at an old
stronghold on the crag. Describe the place...the height of the
crag. How far one should see from the top, to the north, the
south...the east."

Or: "Now think of your grandfather's
nobles. How many will be loyal to Camlach? Their names? How many
men? And of his allies, who? Their numbers...their fighting
power..."

And then, suddenly: "Now tell me this.
How did you know Camlach was going to Vortimer?"

"He said so to my mother," I told him,
"by my grandfather's bier. I heard him. There had been rumors that
this would happen, and I knew he had quarrelled with my
grandfather, but nobody knew anything for certain. Even my mother
only suspected what he meant to do. But as soon as the King was
dead, he told her."

"He announced this straight away? Then
how was it that Marric and Hanno heard nothing, apart from the
rumors of the quarrel?"

Fatigue, and the long relentless
questioning had made me incautious. I said, before I thought: "He
didn't announce it. He told only her. He was alone with
her."

"Except for you?" His voice changed,
so that I jumped on my stool. He watched me under his brows. "I
thought you told me the hypocaust had been filled in?"

I merely sat and looked at him. I
could think of nothing to say.

"It seems strange, does it not," he
said levelly, "that he should tell your mother this in front of
you, when he must have known you were his enemy? When his men had
just killed your servant? And then, after he had told you of his
secret plans, how did you get out of the palace and into the hands
of my men, to 'make' them bring you with them to me?"

"I -- " I stammered. "My lord, you
cannot think that I -- my lord, I told you I was no spy. I -- all I
have told you is true. He did say it, I swear it."

"Be careful. It matters whether this
is true. Your mother told you?"

"No."

"Slaves' talk, then? That's all?" I
said desperately: "I heard him myself."

"Then where were you?" I met his eyes.
Without quite realizing why, I told the simple truth. "My lord, I
was asleep in the hills, six miles off."

There was a silence, the longest yet.
I could hear the embers settling in the brazier, and some distance
off, outside, a dog barking. I sat waiting for his anger. "Merlin."
I looked up.

"Where do you get the Sight from? Your
mother?" Against all expectation, he believed me. I said eagerly:
"Yes, but it is different. She saw only women's things, to do with
love. Then she began to fear the power, and let it be."

"Do you fear it?"

"I shall be a man."

"And a man takes power where it is
offered. Yes. Did you understand what you saw tonight?"

"The bull? No, my lord, only that it
was something secret."

"Well, you will know someday, but not
now. Listen." Somewhere, outside, a bird crowed, shrill and silver
like a trumpet. He said: "That, at any rate, puts paid to your
phantoms. It's high time you were asleep. You look half dead for
lack of it." He got to his feet. I slid softly from the stool and
he stood for a moment looking down at me. "I was ten when I sailed
for Less Britain, and I was sick all the way."

"So was I," I said. He laughed. "Then
you will be as exhausted as I was. When you have slept, we'll
decide what to do with you. He touched a bell, and a slave opened
the door and stood aside, waiting. "You'll sleep in my room
tonight. This way.

The bedchamber was Roman, too. I was
to find that by comparison with, say, Uther's, it was austere
enough, but to the eyes of a boy used to the provincial and often
makeshift standards of a small outlying country, it seemed
luxurious, with the big bed spread with scarlet wool blankets and a
fur rug, the sheepskins on the floor, and the bronze tripod as high
as a man, where the triple lamps, shaped like small dragons,
mouthed tongues of flame. Thick brown curtains kept out the icy
night, and it was very quiet.

As I followed Ambrosius and the slave
past the guards -- there were two on the door, rigid and unmoving
except for their eyes which slid, carefully empty of speculation,
from Ambrosius to me -- it occurred to me for the first time to
wonder whether he might be, perhaps, Roman in other
ways.

But he only pointed to an archway
where another of the brown curtains half hid a recess with a bed in
it. I suppose a slave slept there sometimes, within
call.

The servant pulled the curtain aside
and showed me the blankets folded across the mattress, and the good
pillows stuffed with fleece, then left me and went to attend
Ambrosius.

I took off my borrowed tunic and
folded it carefully. The blankets were thick, new wool, and smelled
of cedarwood. Ambrosius and the slave were talking, but softly, and
their voices came like echoes from the far end of a deep, quiet
cave. It was bliss only to be in a real bed again, to lie, warm and
fed, in a place that was beyond even the sound of the sea. And
safe.

I think he said "Good night," but I
was already submerged in sleep, and could not drag myself to the
surface to answer. The last thing I remember is the slave moving
softly to put out the lamps.

6

When I awoke next morning it was late.
The curtains had been drawn back, letting in a grey and wintry day,
and Ambrosius' bed was empty. Outside the windows I could see a
small courtyard where a colonnade framed a square of garden, at the
center of which a fountain played -- in silence, I thought, till I
saw that the cascade was solid ice. The tiles of the floor were
warm to my bare feet. I reached for the white tunic which I had
left folded on a stool by the bed, but instead I saw that someone
had put there a new one of dark green, the color of yew trees,
which fitted. There was a good leather belt to go with it, and a
pair of new sandals replacing my old ones. There was even a cloak,
this time of a light beech-green, with a copper brooch to fasten
it. There was something embossed on the brooch; a dragon, enameled
in scarlet, the same device I had seen last night on the seal-ring
he wore.

It was the first time that I remember
feeling as if I looked like a prince, and I found it strange that
this should happen at the moment when you would have thought I had
reached the bottom of my fortunes. Here in Less Britain I had
nothing, not even a bastard name to protect myself with, no kin,
not even a rag of property. I had hardly spoken with any man except
Ambrosius, and to him I was a servant, a dependent, something to be
used, and only alive by his sufferance.

Cadal brought me my breakfast, brown
bread and honeycomb and dried figs. I asked where Ambrosius
was.

"Out with the men, drilling. Or
rather, watching the exercises. He's there every day."

"What do you suppose he wants me to
do?"

"All he said was, you could stay
around here till you were rested, and to make yourself at home.
I've to send someone to the ship, so if you'll tell me what your
traps were that you lost, I'll have them brought."

"There was nothing much, I didn't have
time. A couple of tunics and a pair of sandals wrapped in a blue
cloak, and some little things -- a brooch, and a clasp my mother
gave me, things like that." I touched the expensive folds of the
tunic I wore. "Nothing as good as this. Cadal, I hope I can serve
him. Did he say what he wanted of me?"