Legacy: Arthurian Saga (38 page)

Vortigern frowned in indecision,
glancing from Maugan to the warriors, then at the grey arches where
the rain fell. "Now?"

"Better now," they said. "There is not
much time."

"No," I said clearly, "there is not
much time." Silence again, all eyes on me. "The rain is heavy,
Vortigern. What kind of king is it whose fortress is knocked down
by a shower of rain? You will find your walls fallen yet again.
This comes of building in the dark, with blind men for counselors.
Now take me to the top of your crag, and I will tell you why your
walls have fallen. And if you listen to me instead of to these
priests of darkness, I will tell you how to rebuild your stronghold
in the light."

As I spoke, like the turning off of a
tap, the downpour stopped. In the sudden quiet, men's mouths gaped.
Even Maugan was dumb. Then like the pulling aside of a dark
curtain, the sun came out.

I laughed. "You see? Come, King, take
me to the top of the crag, and I will show you in sunlight why your
walls fell down. But tell them to bring the torches. We shall need
them."

10

Before we had fairly reached the foot
of the crag I was proved right. The workmen could be seen crowded
to the edge of the rock above, waiting for the King, and some of
them had come down to meet him. Their foreman came panting up, a
big man with rough sacking held gripped round his shoulders like a
cloak, still sluicing with wet. He seemed hardly to have realized
that the rain had stopped. He was pale, his eyes red-rimmed as if
he had lacked sleep for nights. He stopped three paces away, eyeing
the King nervously, and dashing the wet back of a hand across his
face.

"Again?" said Vortigern
briefly.

"Aye, my lord, and there's no one can
say that it's a fault of ours, that I'll swear, any more than last
time, or the times before. You saw yesterday how we were laying it
this time. You saw how we cleared the whole site, to start again,
and got right down to solid rock. And it is solid rock, my lord,
I'll swear it. But still the wall cracks." He licked his lips, and
his glance met mine and slid away from it, so that I knew he was
aware of what the King and his soothsayers planned. "You're going
up now, my lord?"

"Yes. Clear the men off the
site."

The man swallowed, turned and ran up
the twisting track. I heard him shouting. A mule was brought and
the King mounted. My wrist was tied roughly to the harness.
Magician or no, the sacrifice was to be given no chance of escape
until he had proved himself. My guards kept close to my side. The
King's officers and courtiers crowded round us, talking in low
voices among themselves, but the priests held back, aloof and wary.
I could see that they were not much afraid of the outcome; they
knew as well as I did how much their magic was the power of their
gods and how much illusion working on faith. They were confident
that I could do no more than they; that even if I were one of their
own kind they could find a way to defeat me. All I had to put
against their smooth-worn rites was, they thought, the kind of
bluff they were familiar with, and the luck that had stopped the
rain and brought the sun out when I spoke.

The sun gleamed on the soaked grasses
of the crag's crest. Here we were high above the valley where the
river wound like a bright snake between its green verges. Steam
rose from the roofs of the King's camp. Round the wooden hall and
buildings the small skin tents clustered like toadstools, and men
were no bigger than wood-lice crawling between them. It was a
magnificent place, a true eagle's eerie. The King halted his mule
in a grove of wind-bitten oaks and pointed forward under the bare
boughs.

"Yesterday you could have seen the
western wall from here."

Beyond the grove was a narrow ridge, a
natural hog's back or causeway, along which the workmen and their
beasts had beaten a wide track. King's Fort was a craggy tower of
rock, approached on one side by the causeway, and with its other
three sides falling steeply away in dizzy slopes and cliffs. Its
top was a plateau perhaps a hundred by a hundred paces, and would
once have been rough grass with outcropping rock and a few stunted
trees and bushes. Now it was a morass of churned mud round the
wreck of the ill-wished tower. On three sides the walls of this had
risen almost to shoulder height; on the fourth side the wall, newly
split, sagged out in a chaos of piled stones, some fallen and half
buried in mud, others still precariously mortared to outcrops of
the living rock. Heavy poles of pine wood had been driven in here
and there and canvas laid across to shelter the work from the rain.
Some of the poles had fallen flat, some were obviously newly
splintered by the recent crack. On those which were whole the
canvas hung flapping, or had stretched and split with the wet.
Everything was sodden, and pools stood everywhere.

The workmen had left the site and were
crowded to one side of the plateau, near the causeway. They were
silent, with fear in their faces. I could see that the fear was not
of the King's anger at what had happened to the work, but of the
force which they believed in and did not understand. There were
guards at the entrance to the causeway. I knew that without them
not one workman would have been left on the site.

The guards had crossed their spears,
but when they recognized the King they drew them back. I looked up.
"Vortigern, I cannot escape from you here unless I leap off the
crag, and that would sprinkle my blood just where Maugan wants it.
But neither can I see what is wrong with your foundations unless
you lose me."

He jerked his head, and one of my
guards freed me. I walked forward. The mule followed, stepping
delicately through the thick mud. The others came after. Maugan had
pressed forward and was speaking urgently to the King. I caught
words here and there: "Trickery...escape...now or
never...blood..."

The King halted, and the crowd with
him. Someone said, Here, boy," and I looked round to see the
greybeard holding out a staff. I shook my head, then turned my back
on them and walked forward alone."

Water stood everywhere, glinting in
soggy pools between the tussocks, or on the curled fingers of young
bracken thrusting through the pallid grass of winter. The grey rock
glittered with it. As I walked slowly forward I had to narrow my
eyes against the wet dazzle to see at all.

It was the western wall that had
fallen. This had been built very near the edge of the crag, and
though most of the collapse had been inwards, there was a pile of
fallen stuff lying right out to the cliff's edge, where a new
land-slip showed raw and slimy with clay. There was a space in the
north wall where an entrance was to be built; I picked my way
through this between the piles of rubble and workmen's gear, and
into the center of the tower.

Here the floor was a thick mess of
churned mud, with standing puddles struck to blinding copper by the
sun. This was setting now, in the last blaze of light before dusk,
and glared full in my eyes as I examined the collapsed wall, the
cracks, the angle of fall, the tell-tale lie of the
outcrops.

All the time I was conscious of the
stir and mutter of the crowd. From time to time the sun flashed on
bared weapons. Maugan's voice, high and harsh, battered at the
King's silence. Soon, if I did nothing and said nothing, the crowd
would listen to him.

From where he sat his mule the King
could see me through the gap of the north entrance, but most of the
crowd could not. I climbed -- or rather, mounted, such was my
dignity -- the fallen blocks of the west wall, till I stood clear
of the building that remained, and they could all see me. This was
not only to impress the King. I had to see, from this vantage
point, the wooded slopes below through which we had just climbed,
trying, now that I was clear of the crowd and the jostling, to
recognize the way I had taken up to the adur, all those years
ago.

The voices of the crowd, growing
impatient, broke in on me, and I slowly lifted both arms towards
the sun in a kind of ritual gesture, such as I had seen priests use
in summoning spirits. If I at least made some show as a magician it
might keep them at bay, the priests in doubt and the King in hope,
till I had had time to remember. I could not afford to cast
falteringly through the wood like a questing dog; I had to lead
them straight and fast, as the merlin had once led me.

And my luck held. As I raised my arms
the sun went in and stayed in, and the dusk began to
thicken.

Moreover, with the dazzle out of my
eyes, I could see. I looked back along the side of the causeway to
the curve of the hill where I had climbed, all those years ago, to
get away from the crowd round the two kings. The slopes were
thickly wooded, more thickly than I remembered. Already, in the
shelter of the corrie, some early leaves were out, and the woods
were dark with thorn and holly. I could not recognize the way I had
gone through the winter woods. I stared into the thickening dusk,
casting back in memory to the child who had gone scrambling
there...

We had ridden in from the open valley,
along that stream, under the thick trees, over that low ridge and
into the corrie. The kings, with Camlach and Dinias and the rest,
had sat on that southern slope, below the knot of oaks. The cooking
fires had been there, the horses there. It had been noon, and as I
walked away -- that way -- I had trodden on my shadow. I had sat
down to eat in the shelter of a rock...

I had it now. A grey rock, cleft by a
young oak. And on the other side of the rock the kings had gone by,
walking up towards King's Fort. A grey rock, cleft by a young oak
beside the path. And straight from it, up through the steep wood,
the flight-path of the merlin.

I lowered my arms, and turned.
Twilight had fallen quickly in the wake of the grey clouds. Below
me the wooded slopes swam thick with dusk. Behind Vortigern the
mass of cloud was edged sharply with yellow, and a single shaft of
misty light fell steeply on the distant black hills. The men were
in dark silhouette, their cloaks whipping in the wet breeze. The
torches streamed.

Slowly I descended from my viewpoint.
When I reached the center of the tower floor I paused, full in the
King's view, and stretched my hands out, palms down, as if I were
feeling like a diviner for what lay below the earth. I heard the
mutter go round, and the harsh sound of contempt from Maugan. Then
I dropped my hands and approached them. "Well?" The King's voice
was hard and dry with challenge. He fidgeted in the
saddle.

I ignored him, walking on past the
mule and heading straight for the thickest part of the crowd as if
it was not there. I kept my hands still by my sides, and my eyes on
the ground; I saw their feet hesitate, shuffle, move aside as the
crowd parted to let me through. I walked back across the causeway,
trying to move smoothly and with dignity over the broken and sodden
ground. The guards made no attempt to stop me. When I passed one of
the torch-bearers I lifted a hand, and he fell in beside me without
a word.

The track that the workmen and their
beasts had beaten out of the hillside was a new one, but, as I had
hoped, it followed the old deer-trod which the kings had taken.
Halfway down, unmistakable, I found the rock. Young ferns were
springing in the crevice among the roots of the oak, and the tree
showed buds already breaking among last year's oak-galls. Without a
moment's hesitation I turned off the track, and headed into the
steep tangle of the woods.

It was far more thickly overgrown than
I remembered, and certainly nobody had been this way in a long
time, probably not since Cerdic and I had pushed our way through.
But I remembered the way as clearly as if it had still been noon of
that winter's day. I went fast, and even where the bushes grew more
than shoulder height I tried to go smoothly, unregarding, wading
through them as if they were a sea. Next day I paid for my wizard's
dignity with cuts and scratches and ruined clothes, but I have no
doubt that at the time it was impressive. I remember when my cloak
caught and dragged on something how the torch-bearer jumped forward
like a slave to loosen and hold it for me.

Here was the thicket, right up against
the side of the dell. More rock had fallen from the slope above,
piling between the stems of the thorn trees like froth among the
reeds of a backwater. Over it the bushes crowded, bare elderberry,
honeysuckle like trails of hair, brambles sharp and whippy, ivy
glinting in the torchlight. I stopped.

The mule slipped and clattered to a
halt at my shoulder. The King's voice said: "What's this? What's
this? Where are you taking us? I tell you, Merlin, your time is
running out. If you have nothing to show us --"

"I have plenty to show you." I raised
my voice so that all of them, pushing behind him, could hear me. "I
will show you, King Vortigern, or any man who has courage enough to
follow me, the magic beast that lies beneath your stronghold and
eats at your foundations. Give me the torch."

The man handed it to me. Without even
turning my head to see who followed, I plunged into the darkness of
the thicket and pulled the bushes aside from the mouth of the
adur.

It was still open, safely shored and
square, with the dry shaft leading level into the heart of the
hill.