Merlin's Booke (3 page)

Opening his eyes, Blaise cried out, “I am not done. I swear to you I will not the before I have told it all.”

“Then be done with it,” said the abbot. He said it quickly but gently.

“Speaking to the king was easy. Speaking to his shrewish wife was not. She screamed and blamed me for letting the girl go into the convent, and her husband for permitting Ellyne to stay. She ranted against men and devils indiscriminately. But when I suggested it would be best for Ellyne to return to the palace, the queen refused, declaring her dead.

“And so it was that I fostered her to a couple in Carmarthen who were known to me as a closemouthed, devoted, and childless pair. They were of yeoman stock, but as Ellyne had spent the last ten years of her life on the bread, cheese, and prayers of a convent, she would not find their simple farm life a burden. And the farm ran on its own canonical hours: cock's crow, feed time, milking.

“So for the last months of her strange pregnancy, she was—if not exactly happy—at least content. Whether she still dreamed of the devil clothed in sunlight, she did not say. She worked alongside the couple and they loved her as their own.”

Blaise struggled to sit upright in bed.

“Do not fuss,” the abbot said. “Geoffrey and I will help you.” He signaled to the infirmarer who stood, quickly blotting the smudges on his hands along the edges of his robe. Together they helped settle Blaise into a more comfortable position.

“I am fine now,” he said. Then, when Geoffrey was once more standing at the desk, Blaise began again. “In the ninth month, for the first time, Ellyne became afraid.

“‘Father,' she questioned me day after day, ‘will the child be human? Will it have a heart? Will it bear a soul?'

“And to keep her from sorrow before time, I answered as deviously as I could without actually telling a lie. ‘What else should it be but human?' I would say. ‘You are God's own; should not your child be the same?' But the truth was that I did not know. What I read was not reassuring. The child might be a demon or a barbary ape or anything in-between.

“Then on the night before All Hallow's, unpropitious eve, Ellyne's labor began. The water flooded down her legs and the child's passage rippled across her belly. The farmer came to my door and said simply, ‘It is her time.'

“I took my stole, the oil, a Testament, candles, a crucifix, and an extra rosary. I vowed I would be prepared for any eventuality.

“She was well into labor when I arrived. The farm wife was firm with her but gentle as well, having survived the birth of every calf and kitten on the place. She allowed Ellyne to yell but not to scream, to call out but not to cry. She kept her busy panting like a beast so that the pains of the birth would pass by. It seemed to work, and I learned that there was a rhythm to this, God's greatest mystery: pain, not-pain, over and over and over again.

“Before long the farm wife said, ‘Father Blaise, the child, whatever it be, comes.' She pointed—and I looked.

“From between Ellyne's legs, as if climbing out of a blood-filled cave, crawled a child, part human and part imp. It had the most beautiful face, like an ivory carving of an angel, and eyes the blue of Our Lady's robe. The body was perfectly formed. Up over one shoulder lay a strange cord, the tip nestling into the little hollow at its neck. At first I thought the cord was the umbilicus, but when the farm wife went to touch it, the cord uncoiled from the child's neck and slashed at her hand. Then I knew it was a tail.

“The farm wife screamed. The farmer also. I grabbed the babe firmly with my left hand and, dipping my right finger into the holy oil, made the sign of the cross on its forehead, on its belly, on its genitals, and on its feet. Then I turned it over and pinned it with my left forearm, and with my right hand anointed the tail where it joined the buttocks.

“The imp screamed as if in terrible pain and its tail burst into flames, turning in an instant to ash. All that was left was a scar at the top of the buttocks, above the crack.

“I lifted up my left arm and the child rolled over, reaching up with its hands. It was then I saw that it had claws instead of fingers and it scratched me on the top of both my hands, from the mid finger straight down to the line of the wrist. I shouted God's name and almost dropped the holy oil, but miraculously held on. And though I was now bleeding profusely from the wounds, I managed somehow to capture both those sharp claws in my left hand and with my right anoint the imp's hands. The child screamed again and, as I watched, the imp aspect disappeared completely, the claws fell off to reveal two perfectly formed hands, and the child was suddenly and wholly human.”

Blaise had become so agitated during this recitation that the bed itself began to shake. Geoffrey had to leave off writing and come over to help the abbot calm him. They soothed his head and the abbot whispered, “Where is the sin in all this, Blaise?”

The monk's eyes blinked and with an effort Blaise calmed himself. “The sin?” His voice cracked. Tears began to course down his cheeks. “The sin was not in baptizing the babe. That was godly work. But what came after—was it a sin or not? I do not know, for the child spoke to me.
Spoke.”

“A newborn cannot speak,” said Geoffrey.

“Jesu!
Do you think I do not know that? But this one did. He said,
‘Holy, holy, holy,'
and the words shot from his mouth in gouts of flame. ‘You shall write this down, my uncle,' he said, ‘Write down that my mother, your half sister, was sinless. That her son shall save a small part of the world. That I shall be prophet and mage, lawgiver and lawbreaker, king of the unseen worlds and counselor to those seen. I shall the and I shall live, in the past and in the future also. Many of those who shall read what you write or who shall hear it read will be the better for it and will be on their guard against sin.' And then the flames died down and the babe put its finger in its mouth to suck on it like any newborn and did not speak again. But the sin of it is that I did
not
write it down, nor even speak of it save to you now in this last hour, for I thought it the devil tempting me.”

Abbot Walter was silent for a moment.
It was so much easier,
he thought,
for a man to believe in the Devil than in God.
Then he reached over and smoothed the covers across Brother Blaise's chest. “Did the farmer or his wife hear the child speak?”

“No,” whispered Blaise hoarsely, “for when the tail struck the woman's hand, they both bolted from the room in fear.”

“And Ellyne?”

“She was near to death from blood loss and heard nothing.” Blaise closed his eyes.

Abbot Walter cleared his throat. “You have done only what you believed right, Blaise. I shall think more on this. But as for you, you may let go of your earthly life knowing that you shall have absolution, that you have done nothing sinful to keep you from God's Heaven.” He anointed the paper-thin eyelids.
“Per sitam sanctam Unctionem, et suam piissimam misericordiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus quid quid per visum deliquisti. Amen.”

“Amen,” echoed Geoffrey.

The abbot added the signs over the nose and mouth, and Blaise murmured in Latin along with him. Then, as the abbot dipped his fingers once more into the jar of oil, Geoffrey took Blaise's hands in his and lay them with great gentleness side by side on top of the covers, and gasped.

“Look, father.”

Abbot Walter followed Geoffrey's pointing finger. On the back of each of Blaise's hands was a single, long, ridged scar starting at the middle finger and running down to the wrist. The abbot crossed himself hastily, getting oil on the front of his habit.
“Jesu!”
he breathed out. Until that moment he had not quite believed Blaise's story. Over the years he had discovered that old men and dying men sometimes make merry with the truth.

Geoffrey backed away to the safety of his desk and crossed himself twice, just to be sure.

With deliberate slowness, the abbot put his fingers back into the oil and with great care anointed Blaise's hands along the line of the scar, then slashed across, careful to enunciate every syllable of the prayer. When he reached the end, “…
quid quid per tactum deliquisiti. Amen,”
the oil on Blaise's skin burst into flames, bright orange with a blue arrow at the heart. As quickly, the flames were gone and a brilliant red wound the shape of a cross opened on each hand. Then, as the abbot and Geoffrey watched, each wound healed to a scab, the scab to a scar, and the scar faded until the skin was clean and whole. With a sigh that seemed a combination of joy and relief, Blaise died.

“In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus sancti
…” intoned the abbot. He removed the covers from the corpse and completed the anointing. He felt better than he had all winter, than he had in years, filled with a kind of spiritual buoyancy, like a child's kite that had been suddenly set free into the wind. If there was a Devil, there was also a God. Blaise had died to show him that. He finished the prayers for absolution, but they were only for the form of it. He knew in his inmost heart that the absolution had taken place already and that Blaise's sinless spirit was fast winging its way to Heaven. Now it was time to forgive himself his own sins. He turned to Geoffrey who was standing at the desk.

“Geoffrey, my dear son, you
shall
write this down and in your own way. Then we will all be the better for it. The babe, imp or angel, magician or king, was right about that. Only, perhaps, you should not say just
when
all this happened, for the sake of the Princess Ellyne. Set it in the past, at such a time when miracles happened with
surprising
regularity. It is much easier to accept a miracle that has been approved by time. But you and I shall know when it took place. You and I—
and God
—will remember.”

Surprised, Geoffrey nodded. He wondered what it was that had so changed the abbot, for he was actually smiling. And it was said at Osney that Abbot Walter never smiled. That such a thing had happened would be miracle enough for the brothers in the monastery. The other miracle, the one he would write about,
that
one was for the rest of the world.

“He entered the wood and rejoiced to lie hidden under the ash trees; he marvelled at the wild beasts feeding on the grass of the glades; now he chased after them and again he flew past them; he lived on the roots of grasses and on the grass, on the fruit of the trees and on the mulberries of the thicket. He became a sylvan man just as though devoted to the woods. For a whole summer after this, hidden like a wild animal, he remained buried in the woods, found by no one and forgetful of himself and of his kindred.”

—Vita Merlini

by Geoffrey of Monmouth

H
E HAD BEEN A
long time in the wood, and what speech he still had was interspersed with bird song and the grunting warning of the wild boar. He knew his patch of woodland, every bush of it, and had marked it as his own by letting go short streams on the jumbled, over-ground roots of the tallest trees. Oaks were his favorites, though he had his own name for them.

He caught fish by damming up the little stream, bright silvery fish with spotted backs, scarce a hand's span long. And he spied on rabbits and baby squirrels when he could find their hidey-holes, and badgers in their setts. At night he could call down owls. Once he had scared a fox off its kill by growling fiercely but he could not eat the remains. And several times a pack of wild dogs forced him off his own dinner to the safety of a tree. They scattered his cache but did not eat it.

Mostly he existed on mushrooms and sweet roots and grasses and wild berries and raw fish which, by some miracle, never made him sick. He was very thin with knobs for knees and elbows like arrow points and scratches all over his body, which was brown everywhere from the sun. His thatch of straight dark hair fell across his face, often obscuring his woods-green eyes.

He had never made a fire and was even a little afraid to, for he thought fire a poor relation to the lightning that felled trees and left glowing embers over which he had several times roasted his fish. He feared fire, but he did not worship it. If he worshipped anything, it was the trees that sheltered him, fed him, gave him a high resting from the fiercest beasts.

He was eight years old.

The whole time he had lived alone in the woods came to one easy winter, one very wet spring, one mild summer, and one brilliant fall, but for an eight year old that is a good portion of a lifetime. It is certainly a long part of memory. What he could recall of his past life and how he had come to the forest made him uneasy, and he remembered it mostly at night in dreams.

He remembered a smoky hearth and a hand slapping his because he was holding a large joint of meat. However hard he tried, he could not recall who had slapped him. That was not a bad dream though. He remembered the taste of the meat before the slap and it was good.

He remembered sitting atop a great beast, so broad his legs stuck out straight to either side. And he could still feel three or four hands holding him up, steadying him on the animal's back. Each hand had a gold band on the next-to-last finger. And that was a good dream, too. He could still recall the animal's musty smell, especially if the tree he slept in held the memory of its previous occupant strongly.

But the other dreams were bad.

There was the dream of the two dragons, one red and one white, sleeping in hollow stones, who woke when he looked at them. That dream ended horribly in fire, and he could hear the screams of someone being slowly burned to death. The smell was not so different from the smell of the small hare he had found charred under the roots of a lightning-struck tree.

There was the dream of lying within a circle of great stones that danced around him, faster and faster, until they made a blurry gray wall that held him in. Awake, he avoided rocky outcroppings, preferring to sleep in trees rather than in caves. The hollow of an oak was safer than the great, dark, hollow mouths that opened into the hills.