Legacy: Arthurian Saga (39 page)

I had to bend my head now to get in
under the lintel. I stooped and entered, with the torch held out in
front of me.

I had remembered the cave as being
huge, and had been prepared to find that this, like other childhood
memories, was false. But it was bigger even than I remembered. Its
dark emptiness was doubled in the great mirror of water that had
spread till it covered all the floor save for a dry crescent of
rock six paces deep, just inside the mouth of the adur. Into this
great, still lake the jutting ribs of the cave walls ran like
buttresses to meet the angle of their own reflections, then on down
again into darkness. Somewhere deeper in the hill was the sound of
water falling, but here nothing stirred the burnished surface.
Where, before, trickles had run and dripped like leaking faucets,
now every wall was curtained with a thin shining veil of damp which
slid down imperceptibly to swell the pool.

I advanced to the edge, holding the
torch high. The small light of the flame pushed the darkness back,
a palpable darkness, deeper even than those dark nights where the
black is thick as a wild beast's pelt, and presses on you like a
stifling blanket. A thousand facets of light glittered and flashed
as the flames caught the sliding water. The air was still and cold
and echoing with sounds like birdsong in a deep wood.

I could hear them scrambling along the
adur after me. I thought quickly.

I could tell them the truth, coldly. I
could take the torch and clamber up into the dark workings and
point out faults which were giving way under the weight of the
building work above. But I doubted if they would listen. Besides,
as they kept saying, there was no time. The enemy was at the gates,
and what Vortigern needed now was not logic and an engineer; he
wanted magic, and something -- anything -- that promised quick
safety, and kept his followers loyal. He himself might believe the
voice of reason, but he could not afford to listen to it. My guess
was that he would kill me first, and attempt to shore up the
workings afterwards, probably with me in them. He would lose his
workmen else.

The men came pouring in at the dark
mouth of the adur like bees through a hive door. More torches
blazed, and the dark slunk back. The floor filled with colored
cloaks and the glint of weapons and the flash of jewels. Eyes
showed liquid as they looked around them in awe. Their breath
steamed on the cold air. There was a rustle and mutter as of folk
in a holy place, but no one spoke aloud.

I lifted a hand to beckon the King,
and he came forward and stood with me at the edge of the pool. I
pointed downwards. Below the surface something -- a rock, perhaps
-- glimmered faintly, shaped like a dragon. I began to speak
slowly, as it were testing the air between us. My words fell clear
and leaden, like drops of water on rock.

"This is the magic, King Vortigern,
that lies beneath your tower. This is why your walls cracked as
fast as they could build them. Which of your soothsayers could have
showed you what I show you now?"

His two torch-bearers had moved
forward with him; the others still hung back. Light grew, wavering
from the walls, as they advanced. The streams of sliding water
caught the light and flowed down to meet their reflections, so that
fire seemed to rise through the pool like bubbles in sparkling wine
to burst at the surface. Everywhere, as the torches moved, water
glittered and sparked, jets and splashes of light breaking and
leaping and coalescing across the still surface till the lake was
liquid fire, and down the walls the lightfalls ran and glittered
like crystals; like the crystal cave come alive and moving and
turning round me; like the starred globe of midnight whirling and
flashing.

I took my breath in painfully, and
spoke again. "If you could drain this pool, King Vortigern, to find
what lay beneath it --"

I stopped. The light had changed.
Nobody had moved, and the air was still, but the torchlight wavered
as men's hands shook. I could no longer see the King: the flames
ran between us. Shadows fled across the streams and staircases of
fire, and the cave was full of eyes and wings and hammering hoofs
and the scarlet rush of a great dragon stooping on his
prey...

A voice was shouting, high and
monotonous, gasping. I could not get my breath. Pain broke through
me, spreading from groin and belly like blood bursting from a
wound. I could see nothing. I felt my hands knotting and
stretching. My head hurt, and the rock was hard and streaming wet
under my cheekbone. I had fainted, and they had seized me as I lay
and were killing me: this was my blood seeping from me to spread
into the pool and shore up the foundations of their rotten tower. I
choked on breath like bile. My hands tore in pain at the rock, and
my eyes were open, but all I could see was the whirl of banners and
wings and wolves' eyes and sick mouths gaping, and the tail of a
comet like a brand, and stars shooting through a rain of
blood.

Pain went through me again, a hot
knife into the bowels. I screamed, and suddenly my hands were free.
I threw them up between me and the flashing visions and I heard my
own voice calling, but could not tell what I called. In front of me
the visions whirled, fractured, broke open in intolerable light,
then shut again into darkness and silence.

11

I woke in a room splendidly lined with
embroidered hangings, where sunlight spilled through the window to
lay bright oblongs on a boarded floor.

I moved cautiously, testing my limbs.
I had not been hurt. There was not even a trace of headache. I was
naked, softly and warmly bedded in furs, and my limbs moved without
a hint of stiffness. I blinked wonderingly at the window, then
turned my head to see Cadal standing beside the bed, relief
spreading over his face like light after cloud.

"And about time," he said.

"Cadal! Mithras, but it's good to see
you! What's happened? Where is this?"

"Vortigern's best guest chamber,
that's where it is. You fixed him, young Merlin, you fixed him
proper."

"Did I? I don't remember. I got the
impression that they were fixing me. Do you mean they're not still
planning to kill me?"

"Kill you? Stick you in a sacred cave,
more like, and sacrifice virgins to you. Pity it'd be such a waste.
I could use a bit of that myself."

"I'll hand them over to you. Oh,
Cadal, but it is good to see you! How did you get here?"

"I'd just got back to the nunnery gate
when they came for your mother. I heard them asking for her, and
saying they'd got you, and were taking the pair of you off to
Vortigern at cocklight next day. I spent half the night finding
Marric, and the other half trying to get a decent horse -- and I
might as well have saved myself the pains, I had to settle for that
screw you bought. Even the pace you went, I was near a day behind
you by the time you'd got to Pennal. Not that I wanted to catch up
till I saw which way the land lay...Well, never mind, I got here in
the end -- at dusk yesterday -- and found the place buzzing like a
hive that's been trodden on." He gave a short bark of a laugh. "It
was 'Merlin this', and 'Merlin that'...they call you 'the King's
prophet' already! When I said I was your servant, they couldn't
shove me in here fast enough. Seems there isn't exactly a rush to
look after sorcerers of your class. Can you eat
something?"

"No -- yes. Yes, I can. I'm hungry." I
pushed myself up against the pillows. "Wait a minute, you say you
got here yesterday? How long have I slept?"

"The night and the day. It's wearing
on for sunset."

"The night and the day? Then it's --
Cadal, what's happened to my mother? Do you know?"

"She's gone, safe away home. Don't
fret yourself about her. Get your food now, while I tell you.
Here."

He brought a tray on which was a bowl
of steaming broth, and a dish of meat with bread and cheese and
dried apricots. I could not touch the meat, but ate the rest while
he talked.

"She doesn't know a thing about what
they tried to do, or what happened. When she asked about you last
night they told her you were here, 'royally housed, and high in the
King's favor.' They told her you'd spat in the priests' eyes, in a
manner of speaking, and prophesied fit to beat Solomon, and were
sleeping it off, comfortable. She came to take a look at you this
morning to make sure, and saw you sleeping like a baby, then she
went off. I didn't get a chance to speak to her, but I saw her go.
She was royally escorted, I can tell you; she'd half a troop of
horse with her, and her women had litters nearly as grand as
herself."

"You say I 'prophesied'? 'Spat in the
priests' eyes'?" I put a hand to my head. "I wish I could
remember...We were in the cave under King's Fort -- they've told
you about that, I suppose?" I stared at him. "What happened,
Cadal?"

"You mean to tell me you don't
remember?"

I shook my head. "All I know is, they
were going to kill me to stop their rotten tower from falling down,
and I put up a bluff. I thought if I could discredit their priests
I might save my own skin, but all I ever hoped to do was to make a
bit of time so that maybe I could get away."

"Aye, I heard what they were going to
do. Some people are dead ignorant, you'd wonder at it." But he was
watching me with the look that I remembered. "It was a funny kind
of bluff, wasn't it? How did you know where to find the
tunnel?"

"Oh, that. That was easy. I've been in
these parts before, as a boy. I came to this very place once, years
ago, with Cerdic who was my servant then, and I was following a
falcon through the wood when I found that old tunnel."

"I see. Some people might call that
luck -- if they didn't know you, that is. I suppose you'd been
right in?"

"Yes. When I first heard about the
west wall cracking above, I thought it must be something to do with
the old mine workings." I told him then, quickly, all that I could
remember of what had happened in the cave. "The lights," I said,
"the water glittering...the shouting...it wasn't like the 'seeings'
I've had before -- the white bull and the other things that I've
sometimes seen. This was different. For one thing, it hurt far
more. That must be what death is like. I suppose I did faint in the
end. I don't remember being brought here at all."

"I don't know about that. When I got
in to see you, you was just asleep, very deep, but quite ordinary,
it seemed to me. I make no bones about it, I took a good look at
you, to see if they'd hurt you, but I couldn't find any sign of it,
bar a lot of scratches and grazes they said you'd got in the woods.
Your clothes looked like it, too, I can tell you...But from the way
you were housed here, and the way they spoke of you, I didn't think
they'd dare raise a finger to you -- not now. Whatever it was, a
faint, or a fit or a trance, more like, you've put the wind up them
proper, that you have."

"Yes, but how, exactly? Did they tell
you?"

"Oh aye, they told me, the ones that
could speak of it. Berric -- he's the one that gave you the torch
-- he told me. He told me they'd all been set to cut your throat,
those dirty old priests, and it seems if the King hadn't been at
his wits' end, and impressed by your mother and the way the pair of
you didn't seem frightened of them, he never would have waited. Oh,
I heard all about it, don't worry. Berric said he'd not have given
two pennies for your life back there in the hall when your mother
told her story." He shot me a look. "All that rigmarole about the
devil in the dark. Letting you in for this. What possessed
her?"

"She thought it would help. I suppose
she thought that the King had found out who my father was, and had
had us dragged here to see if we had news of his plans. That's what
I thought myself." I spoke thoughtfully. "And there was something
else...When a place is full of superstition and fear, you get to
feel it. I tell you, it was breathing goose-pimples all over me.
She must have felt it, too. You might almost say she took the same
line as I did, trying to face magic with magic. So she told the old
tale about my being got by an incubus, with a few extra flourishes
to carry it across." I grinned at him. "She did it well. I could
have believed it myself if I hadn't known otherwise. But never
mind, go on. I want to know what happened in the cavern. Do you
mean I talked some kind of sense?"

"Well now, I didn't mean that,
exactly. Couldn't make head or tail of what Berric told me. He
swore he had it nearly word for word -- it seems he has ambitions
to be a singer or something...Well, what he said, you just stood
there staring at the water running down the walls and then you
started to talk, quite ordinary to start with, to the King, as if
you was explaining how the shaft had been driven into the hill and
the veins mined, but then the old priest -- Maugan, isn't it? --
started to shout 'This is fools' talk,' or something, when suddenly
you lets out a yell that fair froze the balls on them -- Berric's
expression, not mine, he's not used to gentlemen's service -- and
your eyes turned up white and you put your hands up as if you was
pulling the stars out of their sockets -- Berric again, he ought to
be a poet -- and started to prophesy."

"Yes?"

"That's what they all say. All wrapped
up, it was, with eagles and wolves and lions and boars and as many
other beasts as they've ever had in the arena and a few more
besides, dragons and such -- and going hundreds of years forward,
which is safe enough, Dia knows, but Berric said it sounded, the
lot of it, as true as a trumpet, and as if you'd have given odds on
it with your last penny."