Legacy: Arthurian Saga (83 page)

My thoughts went back to the baby
sleeping in the straw. I lifted the harp again, and when they
hushed for me, sang them another song:

There was a boy born, A
winter king.

Before the black
month.

He was born, And fled in
the dark month

To find shelter.

With the poor.

He shall come.

With the spring.

In the green
month.

And the golden month And
bright Shall be the burning Of his star.

"And did you earn your supper?" asked
Moravik.

"Plenty to drink, and three copper
coins." I laid them on the table and put the leather bag containing
the King's gold beside them. "That's for your care of the child.
I'll send more when it's needed. You'll not regret this, you and
Brand. You've nursed kings before, Moravik, but never such a king
as this one will be."

"What do I care for kings? That's
nought but a bonny bairn, that should never have been set to such a
journey in this weather. He should be home in his own nursery, and
you can tell your King Uther that from me! Gold, indeed!" But the
leather bag had vanished into some fastness of her skirt, and the
coins with it.

"He's come to no harm on the journey?"
I asked quickly.

"None that I can see. That's a good,
strong boy, and like to flourish as well as any of my children.
He's abed now, and those two young things with him, poor children,
so keep your voice down and let them sleep."

Branwen and the child' lay on a pallet
in the far corner of the room, away from the fire. Their bed was
underneath the flight of rough wooden steps which led up to a
platform, like a small loft such as they use for hay in kings'
stables. Indeed there was hay stacked there, and our beasts had
been led in from the yard at the back, and were tethered now under
the loft. A donkey, which I suppose was Brand's own, stood near
them in the straw.

"Brand brought yours in," said
Moravik. "There isn't much room, but he daren't leave them outside
in the byre. That sorrel of yours with the white blaze, someone
might know it for King Hoel's own, and there'd be questions asked
that weren't too easy to answer. I've put you up above, and the
boy. It's maybe not what you're used to, but it's soft, and it's
clean."

"It'll be fine. But don't send me to
bed yet, please, Moravik. May I stay up and talk to
you?"

"Hm. Send you to bed, indeed! Aye, you
always did look meek and talk soft, and you doing exactly as you
wanted all the time..." She sat down by the fire, spreading her
skirts, and nodded to a stool. "Well, now, sit down and let me look
at you. Mercy me, and here's a change! Who'd ever have thought it,
back there in Maridunum, with hardly a decent rag to your name,
that you'd turn out a son of the High King himself, and a doctor
and a singer...and the sweet saints only know what else
besides!"

"A magician, you mean?"

"Well, that never surprised me, the
way I heard you'd been running off to the old man at Bryn Myrddin."
She crossed herself, and her hand closed on an amulet at her neck.
I had seen it glinting in the firelight; it was hardly a Christian
symbol. So Moravik still hedged herself around with every talisman
she could find. In this she was like most of the folk bred in the
Perilous Forest, with its tales of old hauntings, and things seen
in the twilight and heard in the wind. She nodded at me. "Aye, you
always were a queer lad, with your solitary ways, and the things
you'd say. Always knew too much, you did. I thought it was with
listening at doors, but it seems I was wrong. 'The King's prophet,'
they tell me you're called now. And the doings I've heard about, if
the half of them's to be believed, which I doubt they're
not...Well, now, tell me. Tell me everything."

The fire had burned low, almost to
ash. There was silence from the next room now; the drinkers had
either gone home, or settled to sleep. Brand had climbed the ladder
an hour since, and snored softly beside Ralf. In the corner beside
the dozing beasts, Branwen and the child slept,
unmoving.

"And now here's this new start," said
Moravik softly. "This baby here, you tell me he's the son of the
High King, Uther himself, that won't own to him. Why do you have to
take it on yourself to look after him? I'd have thought there's
others he might ask, that could do it easier."

"I can't answer for King Uther," I
said, "but for myself, you might say the child was a trust left to
me by my father, and by the gods."

"The gods?" she asked sharply. "What
talk is this for a good Christian man?"

"You forget, I was never
baptized."

"Not even yet? Aye, I remember the old
King would have none of it. Well, that's no concern of mine now,
only of your own. But this child here, is he
christened?"

"No. There's been no time. If you want
to, then have him christened."

"'If you want to'? What way is that to
talk? What 'gods' were you talking of just now?"

"I hardly know. They -- he -- will
make himself known in his own good time. Meanwhile have the boy
christened, Moravik. When he leaves Brittany he's to be reared in a
Christian household."

She was satisfied. "As soon as may be.
I'll see him right with the dear Lord and his saints, trust me for
that. And I've hung the vervain charm over his crib, and seen the
nine prayers said. The girl says his name's Arthur. What sort of a
name is that?"

"You would say Artos," I told her.
This is a name meaning "Bear" in Celtic. "But don't call him by
that name here. Give him some other name that you can use, and
forget the other."

"Emrys, then? Ah, I thought that would
make you smile. I'd always hoped that one day there'd be a child I
could call after you."

"No, after my father Ambrosius, as I
was called." I tried the names over to myself, in Latin and then in
the Celtic tongue. "Artorius Ambrosius, last of the Romans...Artos
Emrys, first of the British..." Then aloud to Moravik, smiling:
"Yes, call him so. Once, long ago, I foretold it, the coming of the
Bear, a king called Arthur, who would knit past and future. I had
forgotten, till now, where I had heard the name before. Christen
him so."

She was silent for a few minutes. I
saw her quick eyes searching my face. "In trust to you, you said. A
king such as there hasn't been before. He will be King, then? You
swear he will be King?" Then suddenly: "Why do you look like that,
Merlin? I saw you look the same way a while back when the girl put
the child to her breast. What is it?"

"I don't know..." I spoke slowly, my
eyes on the last glimmer of fire where the burned logs hollowed
round a red cave. "Moravik, I have done what I have done because
God -- whichever god he is -- drove me to do it. Out of the dark he
told me that the child which Uther begot of Ygraine that night at
Tintagel would be King of all Britain, would be great, would drive
the Saxons out of our shores and knit our poor country into a
strong whole. I did nothing of my own will, but just for this, that
Britain might not go down into the dark. It came to me whole, out
of the silence and the fire, and as a certainty. Then for a time I
saw nothing and heard nothing, and wondered if, in my love for my
father and my father's land, I had been led astray, and had seen
vision where there was nothing but hope and desire. But now, see,
there it lies, just as the god told me." I looked at her. "I don't
know if I can make you understand, Moravik. Visions and prophecies,
gods and stars and voices speaking in the night...things seen
cloudy in the flames and in the stars, but real as pain in the
blood, and piercing the brain like ice. But now..." I paused again.
"...now it is no longer a god's voice or a vision, it is a small
human child with lusty lungs, a baby like any other baby, who
cries, and sucks milk, and soaks his swaddling clothes. One's
visions do not take account of this."

"It's men who have visions," said
Moravik. "It's women who bear the children to fulfill them. That's
the difference. And as for that one there" -- she nodded towards
the corner -- "we shall see what we shall see. If he lives -- and
why should he not live, he's strong enough? -- if he lives he has a
good chance to be King. All we can do now is see that he makes a
man. I'll do my part as you've done yours. The rest is with the
good God."

I smiled at her. Her sturdy common
sense seemed to have lifted a great weight from me. "You're right.
I was a fool ever to doubt. What will come, will come."

"Then sleep on that."

"Yes. I'll go to bed now. You have a
good man there, Moravik. I'm glad of it."

"Between us, boy, we'll keep your
little King safely."

"I'm sure of that," I said, and after
we had talked a little longer I climbed the ladder to
bed.

That night I dreamed. I was standing
in a field I knew near Hoel's town of Kerrec. It was a place of
ancient holiness, where once a god had walked and I had seen him.
In my dream I knew that I had come in the hope of seeing him
again.

But the night was empty. All that
moved was the wind. The sky arched high, bright with indifferent
stars. Across its black dome, soft through the glitter of the
fiercer stars, lay the long track of light they call the Galaxy.
There was no cloud. About me stretched the field, just as I
remembered it, bitten by the wind and sown by the sea's salt, with
bare thorn trees hunched along the banks, and, solitary in the
center, a single giant stone. I walked towards it. In the scattered
light of the stars I cast no shadow, nor was there a shadow by the
stone. Only the grey wind blurring the grass, and behind the stone
the faint drifting of the stars that is not movement, but the
heavens breathing.

Still the night was empty. My thoughts
arrowed up into the shell of silence, and fell back spent. I was
trying, with every grain of skill and power which I had fought and
suffered for, to recall the god whose hand had been over me then,
and whose light had led me. I prayed aloud, but heard no sound. I
called on my magic, my gift of eyes and mind that men called the
Sight, but nothing came. The night was empty, and I was failing.
Even my human vision was failing, night and starlight melting into
a blur, like something seen through running water...

The sky itself was moving. The earth
held still, but heaven itself was moving. The Galaxy gathered and
narrowed into a shaft of light, then froze still as a stream in the
bite of winter. A shaft of ice -- no, a blade, it lay across the
sky like a king's sword, with the great jewels blazing in the hilt.
Emerald I saw, topaz, sapphires, which in the tongue of swords mean
power and joy and justice and clean death.

For a long time the sword lay there,
still, like a weapon newly burnished, waiting for the hand which
will lift and wield it. Then, of itself, it moved. Not as a weapon
is lifted in battle, or in ceremony, or sport. But as a blade
slides home to its housing it slid, how gently, down towards the
standing stone, dropping into it as a sword slips resting into its
scabbard.

Then there was nothing but the empty
field and the whistling wind, and a grey stone standing. I woke to
the darkness of the inn room, and a single star, small and bright,
showing through a gap above the rafters. Below me the beasts
breathed sweet breath, while all around were the snores and
stirrings of the sleepers. The place smelled warmly of horses and
peat smoke and hay and mutton stew.

I lay unmoving, flat on my back,
watching the little star. I hardly thought about the dream.
Vaguely, I remembered that there had been talk of a sword, and now
this dream...But I let it pass me. It would come. I would be shown.
God was back with me; time had not lied. And in an hour or two it
would be morning.

BOOK II THE SEARCH
1

The gods, all of them, must be
accustomed to blasphemy. It is a blasphemy even to question their
purposes, and to wonder, as I had done, who they were or if they
even existed is blasphemy itself. Now I knew my god was back with
me, that his purpose was working, and though I still saw nothing
clearly, I knew that his hand would be over me when the time was
right, and I would be guided, driven, shown -- it did not matter
which, nor in what form he came. He would show me that, too. But
not yet. Today was my own. The dreams of the night had vanished
with the stars that made them. This morning the wind was only the
wind, and the sunlight nothing but light.

I do not think I even looked back. I
had no fear for Ralf or the child. The Sight may be an
uncomfortable thing to possess, but foreknowledge of catastrophe
relieves the possessor of the small frets of day to day. A man who
has seen his own old age and bitter end does not fear what may come
to him at twenty-two. I had no doubts about my own safety, or the
boy's whose sword I had seen -- twice now -- drawn and shining. So
I was free to dread nothing worse than the next sea voyage, which
took me, suffering but alive, to the port of Massilia on the Inland
Sea, and landed me there on a bright February day which, in
Britain, we would have called summer.

Once there, it did not matter who saw
me and reported meeting me. If it should be noised abroad that
Prince Merlin had been seen in Southern Gaul, or Italy, then
perhaps Uther's enemies would watch me for a while, hoping for a
lead to the vanished prince. Eventually they would give up and
search elsewhere, but by that time the trail would be cold. In
Kerrec the visit of the inconspicuous singer would be forgotten,
and Ralf, quietly anonymous in the forest tavern, would be able to
come and go without fear between Coll and the castle at Kerrec,
with news of the child's progress for Hoel to transmit to me. So,
once landed in Massilia, and recovered from my voyage, I set about
making open preparations for my journey eastwards.