Merlin's Booke (22 page)

Stewart continued smoothly above the sounds of rustling papers. “What I am going to tell you today may astound some of you, baffle others, and make the cynics among you laugh.
At first.
But I think that by the time I have shown you everything, you will believe, as I believe, that Merlinnus Ambrosius, aka Myrddin the bard of Gwythheyrn, aka Myrddn Wyllt, aka Merlin the arch-mage, was more than an ordinary run-of-the-mill Celtic soothsayer out of the folk tradition but was rather an unusual, perhaps even extraordinary man who lived in sixth century England.”

There was little reaction to this introduction, for word of the find had already slipped out in bits and pieces over the long, hot, essentially newsless summer.
People
magazine had carried a gossipy piece on Dr. Stewart's love life (estranged wife once his student, no mistresses). The British yellow sheets had had a field day with the prince's special interest in the discovery of the tomb. And there had been a lot of speculation in the American news weeklies, as well as long think-pieces in the Italian, French and, surprisingly, Yugoslavian papers. An hour's special on American television was planned.

Stevens folded the handout into halves over and over until the paper was no bigger than his thumb. “My sisters would love this,” he muttered to McNeil. “They all read science fiction. But what am I doing here? I'm an economics reporter.”

“Wait till you see the Merlin the Magician dolls that will come out this year,” McNeil told him. “It will make yoyos, Hula Hoops, Rubik's Cube, and Cabbage Patch dolls seem like nothing.
That's
economics.”

The lights went out and a screen was lowered by some unseen but cranky mechanism. A slide map of Great Britain suddenly appeared before them.

Dr. Stewart's voice floated effortlessly above them. “Was there really a Merlin? It is the very first question we have to ask ourselves. Some authorities hold that the story of Merlin began with a blunder: the mistaken interpretation of the place name ‘Carmarthen' as
caer
or town of Myrddin. And because this view was so persuasive, for many years the figure of the arch-mage Merlin has been seen as a folkloric counterpart of Puck and Queen Mab and Robin Goodfellow, merely the result of spurious etymology.

“But I grew up near the site of ancient Carmarthen, and we boys all took turns standing on a great old tree stump and reciting the local rhymed prophecy:
When Merlin's tree shall tumble down, then shall fall Carmarthen town.
Well, tree and old town were gone, we knew not when or how. So if that was true, then in our boys' hearts, all the rest was true, too.”

A light rod pointed to the small dot marked Carmarthen on the map.

“I studied Arthurian literature at the university, a choice probably informed by boyhood dreams, but …”

“Which university, sir?” someone called out into the dark.

“Oxford,” came the reply.

“Score one,” McNeil replied.

Pritzkau giggled. She didn't like the fact; it seemed to rebound on her professionalism. But she giggled.

“And the dons, though lovers of literature, were at the same time great debunkers of myth. They were careful to place Merlin in the Scottish or Welsh or Breton woods as purely a product of the uncultivated folk mind.

“I, however, did not. To me it did not matter if much that was credited to Merlin—for example the prophesies for King Vortigern about the red and white dragons, or the mysterious three laughs the magician made at court—were straight out of traditional tales. Such embroideries always attach themselves to any figure of power. Look what has happened to figures closer to us in time: Napoleon, Lincoln, Churchill, Hitler. All have gathered in their wake a folklore fed by both their followers and their victims.

“No, I was not deterred by the folk additions. I was
encouraged
by them. Just as Heinrich Schliemann was convinced of the core truth of the
Odyssey
and found the fabled treasure of Troy that proved it, I was convinced that in the stories of Arthur's court, the figure of Merlin had been real.”

A new slide replaced the map, a montage of wizards as drawn by a variety of artists.

“Well, I recognize Burne-Jones, I think,” said Pritzkau.

“There's a Frazetta there. A Tom Canty. A Brian Froud. And the Brothers Hildebrandt,” whispered Stevens. Into the stunned silence that followed, he added to his two companions, “Well, my sisters collect the stuff. …”

From the front of the room, oblivious to the whisperings of reporters trying to identify the artists, Stewart continued. “There was a lot of material to sift through. Stories, poems, ballads, folklore …”

“Bull droppings,” Stevens muttered in Spanish.

Pritzkau elbowed him in the side.

“And there were many places identified as Merlin's burial ground. Merlin Wyllt—Merlin the Wild Man—was said to have been buried at Bardsey, the island of Welsh saints in North Wales. Another tradition was that he was buried where he had been born, on the Ile de Sein off the Breton coast. Geoffrey of Monmouth's idea was that Merlin had been buried in a cave at Tintagel. Another popular guess was Drummelzier on the Tweed.” A new map marked with all the sites slid into view.

“And another legend, which we dismissed out of hand, was that Merlin had been seen by Irish monks sailing westward in a skiff of crystal. That seemed to me more an advertising campaign for Waterford than a reasonable explanation for Merlin's disappearance.”

“We all know how tricky it is to sail a glass boat in the Atlantic,” called out a reporter in front of Stevens.

The entire auditorium broke into laughter, led by Stewart.

Letting the laughter the down naturally, Stewart took a moment to shuffle his notes. When it was quiet again, he said, “The two most persistent stories—rumors if you will—were that Merlin had been ensorceled or bound up in a tree and that he had been bewitched under a stone. I took that to mean burial in a wooden, probably oak, casket or interment in a cave. I had great hopes for the latter. In temperate climates such as ours the cool dryness of caves has often accidentally but quite efficiently embalmed the dead. Such natural mummies have been found in widely divergent places—Kiev, Vienna, Venzone (there were two dozen natural mummies discovered in vaults beneath the church). In Palermo, in catacombs under the town, thousands of such remains have been found.”

Pritzkau was scribbling frantically in the dim light, as was Stevens. But McNeil sat listening intently, a small, admiring smile on his face.

The slides went by in quick succession now. Dr. Stewart pronounced the names of towns and cities where natural mummies had been unearthed, and the grotesque but oddly unmoving pictures flashed one after another. “Kiev (click), Vienna (click click), Venzone (click click click), Palermo (click click click click click), Chile (click), Wyoming (click).” The last slide remained, a close-up of a mummified face, grinning toothily.

“We know that Venzone owes its mummies to something more than just the cooling action of the crypts. There is a local fungus in the cave that also serves to dehydrate. And in some of the American caves, where the remains of Indians have been found, the mummification process was helped along by sodium salts and other compounds in the soil.”

The lights came on abruptly.

“Are there any questions so far?” Stewart asked, looking carefully over the crowd.

McNeil raised his hand.

“Yes—the gentleman in the fifth row.”

Standing, McNeil nodded. “McNeil. Of Reuters,” he said. “Is there evidence of mummification being a process common in Britain at the time of Arthur?”

“Thank you, Mr. McNeil. I am glad you asked that. It leads right into my next point.”

“Shill!”
Pritzkau said loudly, and the reporters chuckled.

“By the time of Arthur, the early Bronze barrows and cairns had given way to stone vaults and wooden caskets. The idea of true mummification, as practiced by the Egyptians, was unknown to the British tribes. In fact, the word
mummy
did not even enter into English writing until nearly the fourteenth century. It comes from the Latin
mummia
meaning ‘mummy powder' which itself came from the Egyptian word for ‘pitch.' Within two centuries, mummy powder was being used in Britain and the Continent for curing everything from wrinkle lines to TB, and reputed to be an aphrodisiac besides.”

“Great if you're into dead bodies!” hissed Stevens.

“Economics,”
McNeil reminded him.

As if to prove McNeil's point, Dr. Stewart added, “Newly dug-up mummies were soon being shipped all over Europe by enterprising Alexandrian merchants. There was also at that time a brisk trade in local cadavers for somewhat the same purpose, though a woman writing to a friend in 1587 said that ‘nue is not soe good as olde.'” He chuckled and the crowd, enjoying the display of wide-ranging knowledge and wit, chuckled with him.

At a signal from Stewart, the lights went out again and a new series of slides began. “So we had hopes of finding a tomb or burial site with at least partial mummification in a cave. Merlin was not supposed to be Christian, so he was less likely to have been in a churchyard or under a cathedral apse. We especially hoped for a mummy because in the last hundred years the science of paleopathology had been steadily advancing. We knew with a mummy we would have good chances of discovering from tissue remains what parasites and bacteria had afflicted Merlin during his lifetime and how he had died. We would read messages in his bones, the simplest and most basic being how big a man he had been, what kind of physique he had had, how long he had lived. But there were also ways to read between the lines: for example, was this a person from a violent society? Had he lived through a cruel childhood? What mistakes or accidents or diseases had he survived?” The grisly parade of mummy pictures continued.

“But first you needed the tomb!” called out Stevens.

The lights went on again.

“Exactly, Mr.—”

“Stevens.
Latin American Herald.”

“Ah, yes, Mr. Stevens. Good to have the Third World press here as well because what we eventually found affects all peoples, not just the English speaking.
And we found the tomb!”

This was no surprise, though the hush the reporters fell into spoke more about their admiration for Stewart's ability to orchestrate. After all, the press conference had been called because the tomb had been discovered. Or at least something that Stewart claimed to be Merlin's tomb.

“I had been searching several possible sites for over ten years,” Dr. Stewart said. “And then the unexpected occurred. If I were a religious man, I might venture to attach the word
miracle
to it. But we shall say, rather, that it was
serendipity.
I was on holiday in the fen country near a small marshy tidal river that bleeds off into the Bristol Channel. It was a working holiday, because I was on a picket line. Those particular fens were being drained and as an active member of the Royal Society for The Preservation of Birds, I was protesting the destruction of habitat. We had enough pickets and power and press reports to have extracted a promise from the government that the fens would be rebuilt once some system of proper drainage could be managed, for the river had become a breeding place of mutated tropical diseases since the influx of whole Ethiopian communities fleeing a half century of famine and war.”

Stevens was scribbling madly now, his notes a hodgepodge of Spanish and English. Pritzkau, though, was sketching Stewart's head, emphasizing the bone structure until the drawing took on a kind of dark, wild, manic look.

“There was a local hill called the Tor which had figured in some of the early Arthurian material and, of course, the marsh was one of the possible sites of Ynis Avalonia, the Isle of Avalon. But when the draining began, the Tor, which had been partially under water on and off for centuries, rose up over that now bleak and blasted landscape like a great mountain. And at its foot, well below what had been the waterline, was a cave, a grotto. When I heard that news, I was there before sunrise with my cameras and a backpack of portable lights.

“The cavern entrance was small but the cave inside huge, as if it had been hollowed out. It was a virtual catacombs with small passages turning into large vaulted rooms, one after another. So mazelike was the whole thing, I was forced to chalk numbers and letters in the passages to guide myself. In fact, despite my precautions, I was lost for two days and nights, existing on the candy bars and apples I had fortunately carried with me.

“And then, almost as if by magic, on the third day I came upon a set of wooden doors ornately carved with runes. The doors had been so warped by the years of damp, it was easy to slip through them. But before I did, I managed to decipher the Latin motto carved in the upper arch.”

The lights went out and a new slide came onto the screen. It took a second for the operator to focus it. When it was clear, the reporters could read the script around the lintel:

HIC JACET MERLINNUS

“Bingo!” whispered McNeil.

“As I entered the tomb, my torchlight dimmed and then went out as if being drained by some superior force, though probably the constant use over the two days had put paid to the batteries. I also carried a small wick lamp with me, and when I lit it and held it aloft, this is what I saw.”

The next slide clicked quietly into place. The picture was of the well-lit interior of a cave, but even with all the lighting, the strange wooden casket in the center seemed a shadow.

McNeil mumbled something and Patti moved closer to him. “What did you say?” she asked.

“Just something, some gnomic saying I heard from somewhere.”

“Which is …”

“To light a candle is to cast a shadow.”

The casket was not a boxy, planed wood coffin but was an entire tree trunk lying on its side, the bark still in place. A second slide was a closer shot of the coffin. It filled the screen.