The Last Enchantment (28 page)

He had. That was all he knew. Young Emrys had gone into Elmet, and the lass he'd wedded was with child. The word he used was "yeaning," at which the troopers were disposed to be merry, but I thanked him and gave him a coin, and he turned back to his sheep well satisfied, with only a lingering look at me, half recognizing, I suppose, the hermit of the Green Chapel.

That night we were still well away from the roads, or any hope of a lodging, so when the dusk came down early and dim with mist, we made our camp under tall pines at the forest's edge, and the men cooked supper. I had been drinking water on the journey, as I like to do in mountain country where it is pure and good, but in celebration of the shepherd's news I broke open a new flask of the wine I had been supplied with from Urbgen's cellars. I planned to share this with my companions, but they refused, preferring their own thin ration-wine, which tasted of the skins they carried it in. So I ate and drank alone, and lay down to sleep.

I cannot write of what happened next. The Old Ones know the story, and it is possible that somewhere else some other man has set it down, but I remember it only dimly, as if I were watching a vision in a dark and smoking glass.

But it was no vision; they stay with me more vividly, even, than memory. This was a kind of madness that took me, brought on, as I now know, by some drug in the wine I had taken. Twice before, when Morgause and I had come face to face, she had tried her witch's tricks on me, but her novice's magic had glanced off me like a child's pebble off a rock. But this last time...I was to recall how, at the wedding feast, the light thickened and beat around me, while the smell of honeysuckle loaded memory with treachery, and the taste of apricots brought back murder. And how I, who am frugal with food and wine, was carried drunken to bed. I remembered, too, the voice saying, "Drink, my lord," and the green, watching eyes. She must have tried her wiles again, and found that now her magic was strong enough to trap me in its sticky threads. It may be that the seeds of the madness were sown then, at the wedding feast, and left to develop later, when I was far enough away for there to be no blame cast on her. Her servant had been there at the river bridge to see me safely out of the city. Later, the witch had implemented the drug with some other poison, slipped into one of the flasks I carried. There she had been lucky. If I had not heard the news of Guenever's pregnancy, I might never have broached the poisoned flask. As it was, we were well away from Luguvallium when I drank the poison. If the men with me had shared it, so much the worse for them. Morgause would have swept a hundred such aside, to harm Merlin her enemy. There was no need to look further for her motive in coming to her sister's marriage.

Whatever the poison, my frugal ways cheated her of my death. What happened after I had drunk and lain down I can only piece together from what I have since been told, and from the whirling fragments of memory.

It seems that the troopers, alarmed in the night by my groans, hurried to my bed-place, where they were horrified to find me obviously sick and in great pain, twisting on the ground, and moaning, apparently too far gone to be sensible. They did what they could, which was not much, but their rough help saved me as nothing could have done had I been alone. They made me vomit, then brought their own blankets to augment mine, and wrapped me up warmly and made up the fire. Then one of them stayed beside me while the other set off down the valley to find help or lodging. He was to send help back to us, and a guide, then ride on himself down to Galava with the news.

When he had gone the other fellow did what he could, and after an hour or two I sank into a sort of sleep. He hardly liked the look of it, but when at last he dared leave me, and took a step or two away among the trees to relieve himself, I neither moved nor made a sound, so he decided to take the chance to fetch water from the brook. This was a scant twenty paces off, downhill over silent mosses. Once there, he bethought himself of the fire, which had burned low again, so he crossed the brook and went a bit farther — thirty paces, no more, he swore it — to gather more wood. There was plenty lying about, and he was gone only a few minutes. When he got back to the camping-place I had vanished, and, scour the place as he might, he could find no trace of me. It was no blame to him that after an hour or so spent wandering and calling through the echoing darkness of the great forest, he took horse and galloped after his fellow. Merlin the enchanter had too many strange vanishings to his name to leave the simple trooper in any doubt as to what had happened.

The enchanter had disappeared, and all they could do was make their report, and wait for his return.

It was a long dream. I remember nothing about the beginning of it, but I suppose that, buoyed up by some kind of delirious strength, I crept from my bed-place and wandered off across the deep mosses of the forest, then lay, perhaps, where I fell, deep in some ditch or thicket where the trooper could not find me. I must have recovered in time to take shelter from the weather, and of course I must have found food, and possibly even made a fire, during the weeks of storm that followed, but of this I remember nothing. All I can recall now is a series of pictures, a kind of bright and silent dream through which I moved like a spirit, weightless and bodiless, borne up by the air as a heavy body is borne up by water.

The pictures, though vivid, are diminished into an emotionless distance, as if I were looking on at a world that hardly concerns me. So, I sometimes imagine, must the bodiless dead watch over the world they have left.

So I drifted, deep in the autumn forest, unheeded as a wraith of the forest mist. Straining back now in memory, I see it still. Deep aisles of beech, thick with mast, where the wild boar rooted, and the badger dug for food, and the stags clashed and wrestled, roaring, with never a glance at me. Wolves, too; the way through those high woods is known as theWolf Road , but though I would have been easy meat they had had a good summer, and let me be. Then, with the first real chill of winter, came the hoar glitter of icy mornings, with the reeds standing stiff and black out of curded ice, and the forest deserted, badger in lair and deer down in the valley-bottom, and the wild geese gone and the skies empty.

Then the snow. A brief vision this, of the silent, whirling air, warm after the frost; of the forest receding into mist, into dimness, breaking into whirling flakes of white and grey, and then a blinding, silent cold...

A cave, with cave-smells, and turf burning, and the taste of cordial, and voices, gruffly uncouth in the harsh tongue of the Old Ones, speaking just out of hearing. The reek of badly cured wolfskins, the hot itch of verminous wrappings, and, once, a nightmare of bound limbs and a weight holding me down...

There is a long gap of darkness here, but afterwards sunlight, new green, the first bird-song, and a vision, sharp as a child's first sight of the spring, of a bank of celandines, glossy as licked gold. And life stirring again in the forest; the thin foxes padding out, the earth heaving in the badger-setts, stags trotting by, unarmed and gentle, and the wild boar again, out foraging. And an absurd, dim dream of finding a pigling still with the stripes and long silky hair of babyhood, that hobbled about on a broken leg, deserted by its land.

Then suddenly, one grey dawn, the sound of horses galloping, filling the forest, and the clash of swords and the whirl of bright axes, the yelling and the screams of wounded beasts and men, and, like a flashing, intermittent dream of violence, a day-long storm of fighting that ended with a groaning quiet and the smell of blood and crushed bracken.

Silence then, and the scent of apple trees, and the nightmare sense of grief that comes when a man wakes again to feel a loss he has forgotten in sleep.

"Merlin!" said Arthur in my ear. "Merlin!"

I opened my eyes. I was lying in bed in a room which seemed to be built high up. The bright sunlight of early morning poured in, falling on dressed stone walls, with a curve in them that told of a tower. At the level of the sill I caught a glimpse of treetops moving against cloud. The air eddied, and was cool, but within the room a brazier burned, and I was snug in blankets, and good linen fragrant with cedarwood.

Some sort of herb had been thrown into the charcoal of the brazier; the thin smoke smelled clean and resinous. There were no hangings on the walls, but thick slate-grey sheepskins lay on the floor, and there was a plain cross of olive-wood hanging on the wall facing the bed. A Christian household, and, by the appointments, a wealthy one. Beside the bed, on a stand of gilded wood, stood a jug and goblet of Samian ware, and a bowl of beaten silver. There was a cross-legged stool nearby, where a servant must have been sitting to watch me; now he was standing, backed up against the wall, with his eyes not on me, but on the King.

Arthur let out a long breath, and some of the colour came back into his face. He looked as I had never seen him look before. His eyes were shadowed with fatigue, and the flesh had fallen in below his cheekbones. The last of his youth had vanished; here was a hard-living man, sustained by a will that daily pushed himself and his followers to their very limits and beyond.

He was kneeling beside the bed. As I moved my eyes to look at him, his hand fell across my wrist in a quick grip. I could feel the calluses on his palm.

"Merlin? Do you know me? Can you speak?"

I tried to form a word, but could not. My lips were cracked and dry. My mind felt clear enough, but my body would not obey me. The King's arm came round me, lifting me, and at a sign from him the servant came forward and filled the goblet. Arthur took it from him and held it to my mouth. The stuff was a cordial, sweet and strong. He took a napkin from the man, wiped my lips with it, and lowered me back against the pillows.

I smiled at him. It must have shown as little more than a faint movement of muscles. I tried his name,

"Emrys." I could hear no sound. I fancy that it came as a breath, no more.

His hand came down again over mine. "Don't try to speak. I was wrong to make you. You are alive, that's all that matters. Rest now."

My eye, wandering, fell on something beyond him: my harp, set on a chair beside the wall. I said, still without a thread of sound: "You found my harp," and relief and joy went through me, as if, in some way, all must now be well.

He followed my glance. "Yes, we found it. It's unharmed. Rest now, my dear. All is well. All is well, indeed..."

I tried his name again, and failing, slid back into darkness. Faintly, like movements from the Otherworld of dream, I remember swift commands, softly spoken, the servants hurrying, slippered footsteps and the rustle of women's garments, cool hands, soft voices. Then the comfort of oblivion.

When I awoke again, it was to full consciousness, as if from a long, refreshing sleep. My brain was clear, my body very weak, but my own. I was conscious, gratefully, of hunger. I moved my head experimentally, then my hands. They felt stiff and heavy, but they belonged to me. Wherever I had been wandering, I had come back to my body. I had quitted the world of dream.

I could see, from the change in the light, that it was evening. A servant — a different one — waited near the door. But one thing was the same: Arthur was still there. He had pulled the stool forward, and was sitting by the bed. He turned his head and saw me watching him, and his face changed. He made a quick movement forward, and his hand came down on mine again, a gentle touch like a doctor's, feeling for the pulse in the wrist.

"By God," he said, "you frightened us! What happened? No, no, forget that. Later you'll tell us all you can remember...Now it's enough to know that you are safe, and living. You look better. How do you feel?"

"I have been dreaming." My voice was not my own; it seemed to come from somewhere else, away in the air, almost outside my control. It was as feeble as the pigling's pipe when I mended its broken leg. "I have been ill, I think."

"Ill?" He gave a crack of laughter that held nothing of mirth. "You have been stark crazy, my dear king's prophet. I thought you were gone clean out of your wits, and that we should never have you back with us again."

"It must have been a fever of a kind. I hardly remember..." I knitted my brows, thinking back. "Yes. I was travelling to Galava with two of Urbgen's men. We made camp up near theWolf Road , and...Where am I now?"

"Galava itself. This is Ector's castle. You're home."

It had been Arthur's home, rather than mine; for reasons of secrecy I had never lived in the castle myself, but had spent the hidden years in the forest, up at the Green Chapel. But as I turned my head and caught the familiar scents of pine forest and lake water, and the smell of the rich tilled soil of Drusilla's garden below the tower, reassurance came, like the sight of a known light through the fog.

"The battle I saw," I said. "Was that real, or did I imagine it?"

"Oh, that was real enough. But don't try to talk about it yet. Take it from me, all is well. Now, you should rest again. How do you feel?"

"Hungry."

This, of course, started up a new bustling. Servants brought broth, and bread, and more cordials, and the Countess Drusilla herself helped me to eat, and then once more disposed me for welcome and dreamless sleep.

Morning again, and the bright, clean light to which I had first woken. I felt weak still, but in command of myself. It seemed that the King had given orders that he was to be fetched as soon as I woke, but this I would not allow until I had been bathed and shaved and had eaten.

When he came at length he looked quite different. The strained look about his eyes had lessened, and there was colour in his face under the brown of weather. Something of his own especial quality had come back, too; the young strength that men could drink from, as at a spring, and be strengthened themselves.

I had to reassure him about my own recovery, before he would let me talk, but he eventually settled down to give me news. "The last I heard," I told him, "was that you had gone into Elmet...But that's past history now, it seems. I gather that the truce was broken? What was the battle I saw? It must have been up these parts, in theCaledonianForest ? Who was involved?"