Merlin's Booke (23 page)

There were low murmurs around the room.

“It is a hollowed-out oak,” Stewart said. “At first glance the bark seems all in one piece, but in fact part of it is not bark at all.”

A new slide, an extreme close-up of the bark, replaced the last.

“The coffin was intricately locked and the lock was of incredibly wrought iron set in wood that was so carved it
looked
like bark.” Using a light pointer, Stewart outlined the lock on the screen.

“I see it now,” Pritzkau whispered, pointing. “Do you?”

Stevens leaned forward and shook his head.

“To the left of the pointer is a line, and that is the outermost edge of the lock and—”

“Got it.”

The lights went on again. Squinting, the reporters scribbled notes to themselves in a variety of languages.

Stewart continued. “I mapped the route back to the room carefully and, when I emerged blinking in the bright light of a morning three days after I had first entered the cave, I was afire with the discovery. I was also tired, hungry, and extremely rank smelling.”

“That he was!” It was the Prince of Wales. His timing was perfect, as the laughter from the audience proved.

Stewart stretched slightly and then continued. “We knew that the first thing to do was to make accurate maps of the entire catacombs. Then we needed to set lights and photograph the doors, rooms, the coffin, even before attempting to open the casket. It took me about six hours to assemble my team, with His Royal Highness' help, and it was only my long years of training that kept me from levering open the casket at once.”

There was not a sound in the room as Stewart went on.

“We felt that it would be best to remove the tree to a laboratory and open it under better conditions. We had no idea what might be inside, you see, or in what shape. And ever mindful of the folklore surrounding such discoveries …” he hesitated, then added. “There is an old story about the opening of a tomb reputed to belong to Arthur and Guinevere which had long lain under a stone in Glastonbury marked
HIC JACET ARTHURUS, REX QUONDUM, REXQUE FUTURUS.
For those of you whose Latin remains a bit rusty, that translates as Here lies Arthur, the once and future king.”

“I'm sure glad he translated it for us,” said Stevens.

“Actually,” Mac said, “that plays a little cute with the translation. Literally it means Here lies Arthur, king way back when and also king in the future.”

Chuckling, Patti said, “Latin still intact, Mac? You are a surprise.”

“Parochial school,” he answered. “Sister Maria Lucia and her famous ruler. You'd be even more surprised at the rest of the stuff locked up in my head.”

Stewart had continued over the buzz of the reporters. “And when the monks opened the tomb, trying to make a bit of twelfth century tourist money on the event, all they discovered were bones and—so the story goes—a tress of hair.”

“As ‘yellow as golde'!” said the Prince of Wales suddenly.

“Yes. As ‘yellow as golde.' But it turned to dust the moment it was touched.
Sic transit Guinevere.”

Pritzkau sighed loudly and fluttered her lashes madly at Mac. “I so love a romantic story.”

He laughed.

“We didn't want that or anything equally as tragic to happen to our remains,” said Stewart. “So we decided to have everything trucked under the most careful conditions imaginable to a laboratory we had devised in a nearby town, Godney. Brought the mountain to Muhammad, so to speak.”

A hand raised in the second row was recognized.

“Stemple, sir, of
Newsday.
You mean you actually brought all your instruments to Godney?”

“Actually,
Mr. Stemple.”

The room rocked with laughter, for that was the latest in-word brought over from America.

“We brought a portable X-ray machine for the bones and—if we were lucky—any soft tissue that might be revealed. And an electron microscope. Everything we need these days is portable. There was a big push in the nineties to make everything easy to carry so that actual field work—I use the word
actual
in its original sense—can be done
in situ.
But the grotto, analysis told us, was in danger of collapsing. The geological study indicated that serious cracks were developing hourly in the tomb room brought about by modern pollution and radical changes the draining had produced. We were forced to move to a stable site at once.”

The prince was nodding his head vigorously.

“The reason we were able to move so quickly from the moment I found my way out of the cave was that His Royal Highness had also been in the area, leading the marchers against the draining program. We had had a luncheon date which I, lost in the caves, missed. His initial anger at my standing him up turned to concern when I could not be found. When I emerged several days later, it was into the arms of a rescue party he had mounted. It was he who secured us the place at Godney and the equipment in record time.” Dr. Stewart nodded at the prince, who smiled through this recitation with the patient royal smile he had learned at his mother's knee.

“Our findings with the X-ray machine and the microscope I shall now sum up for you. If you have further technical questions, I shall be available to you all this week, either immediately following the conference or in the Godney laboratory.”

Stevens said in an undertone to McNeil, “I can't see this being more than a couple of paragraphs at best. What a waste of time.”

“You have no soul, Stevens,” Mac said, laughing.

“I have no stomach—for long-winded dons.”

“What we found was that inside the coffin was a mummy of an extremely tall, slim man. There were no appreciable Harris lines, or scars that showed interrupted growth on the bones, so the child who had grown into the man in the casket had been an unnaturally healthy child. Later on, under ultraviolet, the bones displayed the characteristic yellow fluorescence that reveals the mummy to contain a high level of naturally produced tetracycline. We sometimes find that in grain-reliant societies in damp climates a microbe called
streptomyce
is common. Nubian skeletons, for example, show high levels. If a person ingested enough of the microbe-infested grain, the natural tetracycline would confer a certain immunity to common diseases.

“We also discovered through X-rays that much soft tissue was still readable and, for those of you with a higher prurient interest in Merlin and his love life, the man was uncircumcised. Of course circumcision was not common in England, except perhaps as a punishment to fit certain crimes. And then the cuts were made … well, rather further up.”

The laughter that greeted this was rather subdued.

“We also discovered from the mummy's teeth and the residue of fecal material that he was most probably a vegetarian.”

“Are you sure?”

“Mr. McNeil, isn't it?” Dr. Stewart said, his hand shading his eyes as he looked out into the audience.

“That's right.”

“Well, Mr. McNeil, we are
pretty
sure. The scanning electron microscope can reveal typical patterns of wear on the teeth, wear that points to meat eating or bone gnawing or to habitual vegetarianism. As far as we can tell, for at least a good portion of his life, Merlin was a vegetarian. It is an educated guess, of course.”

“Interesting,” Mac said as he sat down.

“And the bones had one further wonderful surprise for us,” Dr. Stewart continued. “The coccyx showed a strange elongated piece. It seems our mummy had a vestigial tail.”

“Satan!” McNeil said. “They called him a devil.”

“One of the many rumors of Merlin's birth,” Stewart continued, “had been that he was an imp born of the mating between an incubus and a nun.” He paused. “A man with a pronounced caudal appendage in that day and age would certainly be suspect. His own body fueled the stories.”

The audience broke into spontaneous applause and McNeil turned, smiling, to Patti. “I
love
it!”

She smiled back.

“The scanning microscope also enables us to identify blood types within a given cell. Merlin—as we were already calling him with perfect equanimity—was AB negative which means he may well have killed his mother at birth. At the very least it was a difficult delivery, and given medical care at those times … He certainly comes from a different genetic type than the folk around him. And as he grew, with that extreme height and what seems, from the skull measurements we took, to be an elegant sloping forehead reminiscent of Chinese mandarin types, and the vestigial tail, coupled with his strange immunity to childhood disease, he must have appeared to his companions and neighbors both strange and wonderful. A miracle. And an alien.”

Having said all this, Stewart reached over and unscrewed the microphone from its stand and walked with it toward the long table at which the Prince of Wales sat. For the first time the reporters noticed a wooden box about the size of a jewel casket on top of the table. The Prince's hands were cupped around each end. He was so obviously focused on the box that the audience responded in kind.

Dr. Stewart stopped in front of the table and half sat on it, gesturing with one hand toward the prince. “There was one last thing in Merlin's coffin, lying next to the mummy. It was a box, the box His Royal Highness is holding. As the box is small and hard to see from where you sit, let me describe it to you. It is made of oak and covered with high relief carvings that are a blend of Celtic knotwork, pictures, and runes. The pictures include a number of plants that are known for their magical or healing properties. On the left side, in the front, there is a sprig of mistletoe, on the right a picture of an acorn. On either end of the box is an apple tree—or at least a fruit tree of some sort. We are still trying to identify the other flora. On the back panel, lying down, is the skeleton of a man. As far as can be made out, the runes spell out an old Celtic saying, supposedly given as an answer to Alexander: ‘I fear nothing lest the earth should split under me and the sky above me.' It is in keeping with the kind of prophetic utterances attributed to Merlin.

“When we X-rayed the box, it seemed to contain a fist-sized mass of soft tissue. The mummy itself had given us little clue to the reason for its death except perhaps the bones which indicated the man might have simply died of extreme old age. There remained, though, the matter of the curious long scar in the upper left quadrant of the chest. So we hypothesized that
after death
whoever laid out the body cut open the dead man's chest and removed his heart and that this was the mass we found in the carved box. Such a thing might have been a perfectly ordinary but—to us—unknown and unrecorded part of Celtic or Druidic ritual. Or it may have been that those who buried the man so feared his power that they felt separating his heart from his body was the only way in which they could be sure that he was truly dead. However, this thesis is complicated by the fact that instead of burning the heart or staking it or otherwise destroying it—as might be done to a true creature of the Dark—the sixth century morticians encased the heart in a special oak box carved with powerful runic devices.

“And they buried the casket next to the mummy and around the mummy's neck was hung a golden chain and a key.

“We do not know what it means.”

As if on cue, the Prince of Wales stood and, holding the box, moved around to the front of the table. He cradled the box against his chest, and Dr. Stewart held the microphone before his mouth.

“It is our intention,” the prince began, “to open the box in front of all of you so that whatever else we find in it will be seen as well by a hundred impartial and trained observers. We want you to report exactly what you see and hear. I suspect—
I
personally—not Dr. Stewart or any of the other scientists who have worked on this project, that something quite marvelous, quite extraordinary, quite unscientific or rather quite
beyond
science is about to happen.”

Stevens leaned over and whispered to Pritzkau. “Isn't it true that he's the head of the Royal Theosophist Society?”

She nudged him into silence.

Stewart moved the microphone back to his own mouth. “I do not necessarily disagree with the prince. Our definitions of what constitutes scientific have always been somewhat—” he smiled at the prince who smiled back broadly, “—somewhat at odds with one another. But we both agree that what we have discovered about Merlin is already beyond our expectations. Now, before we open the casket containing the heart, are there any questions?”

Looking around, Stewart waited for hands to be raised but no one, it seemed, wished to hold up the show. There would be plenty of time for questions afterward.

“Then,” the prince said and, when Stewart moved the microphone back so that he could be heard throughout the room, “then let us begin.”

Holding the box with his left hand, he slipped a chain from around his neck with his right. Then he took the key attached to the chain and put it into the lock. With a
snick
amplified till it sounded like a gunshot, the key turned in the lock. As the audience watched in hushed anticipation, the lid of the box slowly creaked open by itself and a strange bone white light filled the room.

“Well, I'm still not sure what it all means beyond a couple of paragraphs. Maybe it belongs in the Arts and Leisure section,” said Stevens moments later as they stood in line to leave the hall.

“What did you see?” asked McNeil carefully, his voice scarcely above a whisper.

“What we all saw,” Stevens said. “A funny light coming from the back of the room and then the prince dropping the box and putting his hands up to his face. Then the lights going off for a second, then coming back on. Comic book stuff. And badly done at that.
We are not amused.”

“Well, that's not what
I
saw,” Pritzkau said.