The Last Enchantment

1

MUCH AS I WOULD HAVE LIKED to do so, I did not leave Dunpeldyr straight away. Arthur was still in Linnuis, and would want my report, not only on the massacre itself but on what happened afterwards. Ulfin, I think, expected to be dismissed, but, reckoning that to lodge in Dunpeldyr itself would hardly be safe, I stayed on at The Bush of Broom, and so kept Ulfin with me to act as messenger and connecting-file. Beltane, who had been understandably shaken by the night's events, went south straight away with Casso. I kept my promise to the latter: it had been a promise made on impulse, but I have found that such impulses commonly have a source which should not be denied. So I talked with the goldsmith, and easily persuaded him of the advantages of a servant who could read and write; I made it clear, besides, that I was letting Casso go to him for less than his cost to me on condition that my wish was met. I found I had not needed to insist; Beltane, that kindly man, promised with pleasure to teach Casso himself, and then they both took leave of me and went south, aiming once more for York. With them went Lind, who, it seemed, had met a man in York who might protect her; he was a small merchant, a respectable fellow who had spoken of marriage, but whom, for fear of the queen, she had rejected. I took leave of them, and settled down to see what the next few days would bring.

Some two or three days after the terrible night of Lot's return, the wreckage of the boat began to come ashore, and with it the bodies. It was apparent that the boat had driven on rock somewhere and had been broken up by the tide. The poor women who went down to the beach fell to a kind of dreadful squabbling as to which baby was which. The shore was haunted by these wretched women. They wept a great deal and said very little; it was apparent that they were accustomed, like beasts, to take what their lords handed out to them, whether alms or blows. It was also apparent to me, sitting in the alehouse shadows and listening, that in spite of the tale about Arthur's responsibility for the massacre, most folk laid the blame squarely where it belonged, with Morgause, and with Lot, befooled and angry about it. And because men are men everywhere, they were inclined not to blame their king overmuch for his hasty reaction to that anger. Any man, they were soon saying, would have done the same. Come home to find your wife delivered of another man's boy, and small blame to you if you lost your temper. And as for the wholesale slaughter, well, a king was a king, and had a throne to consider as well as his bed. And speaking of kings, had he not made kingly reparation? For this, wisely, Lot had done; and however much the women might still weep and mourn, the men on the whole accepted Lot's deed, along with the golden recompense that followed it, as the natural action of a wronged and angry king.

And Arthur? I put the question one evening, casually, into one such conversation. If the rumours that were being put about were true, of the High King's involvement in the killing, was not Arthur himself similarly justified? If the child Mordred was indeed his bastard by his half-sister, and a hostage to fortune with King Lot (who had not always been his keenest friend), surely it could be said that policy could justify the deed? What more likely way could Arthur find of keeping the great King of Lothian his friend than to ensure the death of the cuckoo in the nest, and take the responsibility for its killing?

At this there were murmurs and head-shakings, which resolved at length into a sort of qualified assent. So I threw in another thought. Everyone knew that in matters like this of policy — and high and secret policy, with a great country like Lothian concerned — everyone knew it was not the young Arthur who made the civil decisions; it was his chief adviser, Merlin. Depend upon it, this was the decision of a ruthless and tortuous mind, not of a brave young soldier who spent his every waking moment in the field against Britain's enemies, and who had little time for bedroom politics — except, naturally, those that every man could find time for...

So, like a seed of grass, the idea was sown, and as quickly as the grass it spread and grew; so that by the time the news came of Arthur's next victorious engagement the facts of the massacre had been accepted, and the guilt for it, whether of Merlin, Arthur, or Lot, almost condoned. It was plain that the High King — may God preserve him against the enemy — had had little to do with it except see its necessity. Besides, the babies, most of them, would have died in infancy of one thing or another, and that without any gifts of gold such as Lot had handed to the bereaved fathers. Moreover, most of the women were soon bearing again, and had perforce to forget their tears.

The queen, also. King Lot was now seen to have behaved in a truly kingly fashion. He had swept home in anger, removed the bastard (whether by Arthur's orders or his own), then got a true heir in the dead boy's place, and ridden off again, his loyalty to the High King undiminished. Some of the bereaved fathers, being offered places in the troop, rode with him, confirmed in their own loyalty. Morgause herself, far from appearing cowed by her lord's violence, or apprehensive of the people's anger, looked (on the one or two occasions when I saw her riding out) sleek and pleased with herself. Whatever the people may have believed about her part in the massacre, she was safe from their ill-will now that she was said to be carrying the kingdom's true heir.

If she grieved for her lost son, she gave no sign of it. It showed, the people said, that she had in truth been seduced by Arthur, and could never have wanted the bastard she had been made to bear. But to me, watching and waiting in drab anonymity, it began to mean something quite different. I did not believe that the child Mordred had been in that boatload of slaughtered innocents at all. I remembered the three armed men, sober and purposeful, who had gone back into the castle by the postern entrance before Lot's return — and after the coming of Morgause's messenger from the south. The woman Macha, too, lying dead in her cottage beside the empty cradle with her throat cut. And Lind, running out into the dark without Morgause's knowledge or sanction, to warn Macha and take the child Mordred to safety.

Piecing it together, I thought I knew what had happened. Macha had been chosen to foster Mordred because she had borne Lot a bastard boy; it might even have pleased Morgause to watch the baby killed; she had laughed, Lind had told us. So, with Mordred safe, and the changeling ready for the slaughter, Morgause had waited for Lot's return. As soon as she had news of it, her men-at-arms had been sent with orders to dispatch Mordred to yet another safe foster-home, and to kill Macha, who, if her own baby were to suffer, might be tempted to betray the queen. And now Lot was pacified, the town was quiet, and somewhere, I was sure, the child who was Morgause's weapon of power grew in safety.

After Lot had ridden to rejoin Arthur, I sent Ulfin south again, but myself stayed on in Lothian, watching and waiting. With Lot out of the way, I moved back into Dunpeldyr, and tried, in every way I could, to find some clue to where Mordred could now be hidden. What I would have done if I had found him, I do not know, but the god did not lay that burden on me. So I waited for fully four months in that squalid little town, and though I walked on the shore by starlight and sunlight and spoke to my god in every tongue and with every way I knew, I saw nothing, either by daylight or in dream, to guide me to Arthur's son.

In time I came to believe that I might have been wrong; that even Morgause could not be so evil, and that Mordred had perished with the other innocents in that midnight sea.

So at length, as autumn slid into the first chills of winter, and news came that the fighting in Linnuis was done, and Lot would soon be on his way home once more, I thankfully left Dunpeldyr. Arthur would be at Caerleon for Christmas, and would look for me there. I paused only once on my journey, to spend a few nights with Blaise in Northumbria and give him the news, then I travelled south, to be there when the King came home.

He came back in the second week of December, with frost on the ground, and the children out gathering the holly and ivy for decking the Christmas feast. He barely waited to bathe and change from the ride before he sent for me. He received me in the room where we had talked before we parted. This time the door to the bedroom was shut, and he was alone.

He had changed a good deal in the months since Pentecost. Taller, yes, by half a head — it is an age when youths shoot up like barley-stalks — and with breadth to go with it, and the hard lean brownness got from the soldier's life he was leading. But this was not the real change. That was in authority. His manner showed now that he knew what he was doing and where he was going.

But for that, the interview might have been an echo of the one I had had with the younger Arthur, on the night of Mordred's begetting.

"They say that I ordered this abominable thing!" He had hardly troubled to greet me. He strode about the room, the same strong, light lion's prowl of a walk, but the strides were a hand-span longer. The room was a cage restraining him. "When you know yourself how, in this very room, I said no, leave it to the god. And now this!"

"It's what you wanted, isn't it?"

"All those deaths? Don't be a fool, would I have done it like that? Or would you?"

The question needed no reply, and got none. I said merely: "Lot was never remarkable for his wisdom and restraint, and besides, he was in a rage. You might say the action was suggested to him, or at least encouraged, from without."

He threw me a quick, smouldering look. "By Morgause? So I understand."

"I gather Ulfin has told you all the story? Did he also tell you of his own services in the matter?"

"That he tried to mislead you, and let fate overtake the children? Yes, he told me that." A brief pause. "It was wrong, and I said so, but it's hard to be angry at devotion. He thought — he knew that I would have been easy at the baby's death. But those other children... Within a month of vows I made to protect the people, and my name a hissing in the streets..."

"I think you can comfort yourself. I doubt if many men believe that you had anything to do with it."

"No matter." He almost snapped it over his shoulder. "Some will, and that is enough. As for Lot, he had an excuse of a kind; an excuse, that is, that common men can understand. But I? Can I publish it abroad that Merlin the prophet told me the child might be a danger to me, so I had it murdered, and others along with it for fear it should escape the net? What sort of king does this make of me? Lot's sort?"

"I can only repeat that I doubt if you are held to blame. Morgause's women were there within hearing, remember, and the guards knew where their orders came from. Lot's escort, too — they would know he was riding home bent on revenge, and I cannot imagine that Lot remained silent as to his intentions. I don't know what Ulfin has told you, but when I left Dunpeldyr most people were quoting Lot's orders as responsible for the massacre, and those who thought you ordered it think you did so on my advice."

"So?" he said. He really was very angry. "I am the kind of king who cannot even decide for myself? If there is to be blame allotted for this between us, then I should take it, and not you. You know that well enough. You remember as well as I do exactly what was said."

There was no reply to that, either, and I made none. He prowled up the room and back again before he went on:

"Whoever gave the order, you can say if you like that I feel guilt in this. You would be right. But by all the gods in heaven and hell, I would not have acted like that! This is the kind of thing that lives with you, and after you! I shall not be remembered as the king who beat the Saxons out of Britain, but as the man who played Herod in Dunpeldyr and murdered the children!" He stopped. "What is there in that to smile at?"

"I doubt if you need trouble yourself about the name you will leave behind you."

"So you say."

"So I said." The change in tense, or something about my tone, arrested him. I met his look, and held it. "Yes, I, Merlin, said so. I said so when I had power, and it is true. You are right to be distressed at this abomination, and you are right, too, to take some of the blame to yourself. But if this thing goes down in story as your act, you will still be absolved of blame. You can believe me. What else is to come will absolve you of anything."

The anger had died, and he was thinking. He spoke slowly. "Do you mean that some danger will come of the child's birth and death? Something so terrible that men will see the murder as justified?"

"I did not mean that, no —"

"You made another prophecy, remember. You hinted to me — no, you told me — that Morgause's child might be a danger to me. Well, now the child is dead. Could this have been the danger? This smear on my name?" He paused, struck. "Or perhaps some day one of the men whose sons were murdered will wait for me with a knife in the dark? Is that the kind of thing you had in mind?"

"I told you, I had nothing specific in mind. I did not say that the child 'might' be a danger to you, Arthur. I said he would. And, if my word is to be trusted, directly so, and not by a knife in another man's hand."

He was still now as he had been restless before. He scowled at me, intent. "You mean that the massacre failed of its purpose? That the child — Mordred, did you say? — is still alive?"

"I have come to think so."

He drew a quick breath. "Then he was saved, somehow, from that wreck?"

"It's possible. Either he was saved by chance, and is living somewhere, unknowing and unknown, as you did through your childhood — in which case you may encounter him some day, as Laius did Oedipus, and fall to him in all ignorance."

"I'll risk that. Everyone falls to someone, some time. Or?"

"Or he was never in the boat at all."

He gave a slow nod. "Morgause, yes. It would fit. What do you know?"

I told him the little I knew, and the conclusions I had drawn. "She must have known," I finished, "that Lot's reactions would be violent. We know she wanted to keep the child, and why. She would hardly have put her own child at risk on Lot's return. It's clear enough that she engineered the whole thing. Lind gave us more details later on. We know that she goaded Lot into the furious anger that dictated the massacre; we know, too, that she started the rumour that you were to blame. So what has she done? She has put Lot's fears to rest, and made her own position secure. And I believe, from watching her, and from what I know of her, that at the same time she has contrived —"

"To keep her hostage to fortune." The flush had died from his skin. He looked cold, his eyes like slates with cold rain on them. This was an Arthur that other men had seen, but never I. How many Saxons had seen those eyes just before they died? He said bitterly: "I have been well paid already for that night of lust. I wish you had let me kill her then. That is one lady who had better never come near me again, unless she comes on her knees, and in sack-cloth." His tone made a vow of it. Then it changed. "When did you get back from the north?"

"Yesterday."

"Yesterday? I thought... I understood that this abomination took place months ago."

"Yes. I stayed to watch events. Then after I began to make my guesses, I waited to see if Morgause might make some move to show me where the child was hidden. If Lind had been able to go back to her, and had dared to help me... but that was impossible. So I stayed until the news came that you had left Linnuis, and that Lot would soon be on his way home again. I knew that once he came home I could do nothing, so I came away."

"I see. All that way, and now I keep you on your feet and rail at you as if you were a guard caught sleeping on duty. Will you forgive me?"

"There's nothing to forgive. I have rested. But I should be glad to sit now. Thank you."

This as he pulled a chair for me, and then sat himself in the big chair beyond the massive table. "You've said nothing in your reports about this idea that Mordred was still alive. And Ulfin never mentioned it as a possibility."

"I don't think it crossed his mind. It was mainly after he had gone, and I had time to think and watch, myself, that I thought back and reached my own conclusion. There's still no proof, of course, that I am right. And nothing but the memory of an old foreboding to tell me whether or not it matters. But I can tell you one thing: from the idle contentment that the King's prophet feels in his bones these days, any threat from Mordred, direct or otherwise, will not show itself for a long time to come."

He gave me a look where no shadow of anger remained. A smile sparked deep in his eyes. "So, I have time."

"You have time. This was bad, and you were right to be angry; but it is already barely remembered, and soon will be forgotten in the blaze of your victories. Concerning them, I hear talk of nothing else. So put this aside now, and think about the next. Time spent looking back in anger is time wasted."

The tension broke up at last in the familiar smile. "I know. A maker, never a breaker. How often have you told me? Well, I'm only mortal. I break first, to make room... All right, I'll forget it. There is plenty to think about and plan for, without wasting time on what is done. In fact" — the smile deepened — "I heard that King Lot is planning a move northward to his kingdom there. Perhaps, in spite of laying the blame on me, he feels uncomfortable in Dunpeldyr...? The Orkneys are fertile islands, they tell me, and fine in the summer months, but tend to be cut off from the main all winter?"

"Unless the sea freezes."

"And that," he said, with most unkingly satisfaction, "will surely be beyond even Morgause's powers. So distance will help us to forget Lot and his works..."

His hand moved among the papers and tablets on the table. I was thinking that I should have looked farther afield for Mordred: if Lot had told his queen his plans for taking the court northward, she might have made some arrangement for sending the child there. But Arthur was speaking again.

"Do you know anything about dreams?"

I was startled. "Dreams? Well, I have had them."

A glint of amusement. "Yes, that was a foolish question, wasn't it? I meant, can you tell me what they mean, other men's dreams?"

"I doubt it. When my own mean something, they are clear beyond doubt. Why, has your sleep been troubled?"

"For many nights now." He hesitated, shifting the things on the table. "It seems a trivial thing to trouble over, but the dream is so vivid, and it's always the same..."

"Tell me."

"I am alone, and out hunting. No hounds, just myself and my horse, hard on the track of a stag. This part varies a bit, but I always know that the chase has been going on for many hours. Then, just as we seem to be catching up with the stag, it leaps into a brake of trees and vanishes. At the same moment my horse falls dead beneath me. I am thrown to the turf. Sometimes I wake there, but when I go back to sleep again, I am still lying on the turf, by the bank of a stream, with the dead horse beside me. Then suddenly I hear sounds coming, a whole pack of them, and I sit up and look about me. Now, I have had the dream so many times that even while dreaming, I know what to expect, and I am afraid... It is not a pack of hounds that comes, but one beast — a strange beast, which, though I have seen it so many times, I can't describe. It comes crashing through the bracken and underbrush, and the noise it makes is like thirty couple of hounds questing. It takes no heed of me or my horse, but stops at the stream and drinks, and then goes on and is lost in the forest."

"Is that the end?" I asked, as he paused.

"No. The end varies, too, but always, after the questing beast, comes a knight, alone and on foot, who tells me that he also has killed a horse under him in the quest. Each time — each night it happens — I try to ask him what the beast is, and what is the quest, but just as he is about to tell me, my groom comes up with a fresh horse for me, and the knight, seizing it without courtesy, mounts and prepares to ride away. And I find myself laying hands on his rein to stop him, and begging him to let me undertake the quest, 'for,' I say, 'I am the High King, and it is for me to undertake any quest of danger.' But he strikes my hand aside, saying, 'Later. Later, when you need to, you may find me here, and I shall answer for what I have done.' And he rides away, leaving me alone in the forest. Then I wake, still with this sense of fear. Merlin, what does it mean?"

I shook my head. "That I can't tell you. I might be glib with you, and say that this was a lesson in humility: that even the High King does not need to take all responsibility —"

"You mean stand back and let you take the blame for the massacre? No, that's too clever by half, Merlin!"

"I said I was being glib, didn't I? I have no idea what your dream meant. Probably nothing more than a mixture of worry and indigestion. But one thing I can tell you, and it's the same one that I keep repeating: what dangers lie in front of you, you will surmount, and reach glory; and whatever has happened, whatever you have done, or will do, you will die a worshipful death. I shall fade and vanish like music when the harp is dead, and men will call my end shameful. But you will live on, in men's imagination and hearts. Meanwhile, you have years, and time enough. So tell me what happened in Linnuis."

We talked for a long time. Eventually he came back to the immediate future.

"Until the ways open with spring, we can get on with the work here at Caerleon. You'll stay here for that. But in the spring I want you to start work on my new headquarters." I looked a query, and he nodded. "Yes, we spoke of this before. What was right in Vortigern's time, or even in Ambrosius', will not serve in a year or so from this. The picture is changing, over to the east. Come to the map and let me show you... That man of yours now, Gereint, there's a find. I've sent for him. He's the kind of man I need by me. The information he sent to Linnuis was beyond price. He told you about Eosa and Cerdic? We're gathering what information we can, but I'm sure he is right. The latest news is that Eosa is back in Germany, and he's promising the sun, moon, and stars, as well as a settled Saxon kingdom, to any who will join him..."

For a while we discussed Gereint's information, and Arthur told me what had newly come from those sources. Then he went on: "He's right about the Gap, too, of course. We started work up there as soon as I got your reports. I sent Torre up... I believe the next push will come from the north. I'm expecting word from Caw and from Urbgen. But in the long run it will be here, in the southwest, that we have to make the stand for good and all. With Rutupiae as their base, and the Shore behind them, call it 'kingdom' or not, the big threat must come this way, here and here..." His finger was moving on the relief map of clay. "We came back this way from Linnuis. I got an idea of the lie of the land. But no more now, Merlin. They're making new maps for me, and we can sit over them later. Do you know the country thereabouts?"

"No. I have travelled that road, but my mind was on other things."

"There's little haste yet. If we can start in April, or May, and you work your usual miracle, that should be soon enough. Think about it for me, and then go and look when the time comes. Will you do that?"

"Willingly. I have already looked... no, I meant in my mind. I've remembered something. There's a hill that commands this whole tract of country here... As far as I remember, it's flat-topped, and big enough to house an army, or a city, or whatever you want of it. And high enough. You can see Ynys Witrin from it — the Isle of Glass — and all the signal chain, and again clear for many miles both to south and west."

"Show me," he said sharply.

"Somewhere here." I placed a finger. "I can't be exact, and I don't think the map is, either. But I think this must be the stream it lies on."

"Its name?"

"I don't know its name. It's a hill with the stream curling round it, and the stream is called, I think, the Camel. The hill was a fortress before the Romans ever came to Britain, so even the early Britons must have seen it as a strategic point. They held it against the Romans."

"Who took it?"

"Eventually. Then they fortified it in their turn and held it."

"Ah. Then there is a road."

"Surely. This one, perhaps, that runs past the Lake from the Glass Isle."

So I showed him on the map, and he looked, and talked, and went on the prowl again, and then the servants brought supper and lights and he straightened, pushing the hair back out of his eyes, and came up out of his planning as a diver comes up out of water.

"Well, it will have to wait till Christmas is past. But go as soon as you can, Merlin, and tell me what you think. You shall have what help you need, you know that. And now sup with me, and I'll tell you about the fight at the Blackwater. I've told it already so many times that it's grown till I hardly recognize it myself. But once more, to you, is not unseemly."

"Obligatory. And I promise you that I shall believe every word."

He laughed. "I always knew I could rely on you."

2

IT WAS ON A SWEET, STILL DAY of spring when I turned aside from the road and saw the hill called Camelot.

That was its name later; now it was known as Caer Camel, after the small stream that wound through the level lands surrounding it, and curved around near its base. It was, as I had told Arthur, a flat-topped hill, not high, but high enough over the surrounding flatlands to give a clear view on every hand, and steep-sided enough to allow for formidable defenses. It was easy to see why the Celts, and after them the Romans, had chosen it as a stronghold. From its highest point the view in almost every direction is tremendous. To the east a few rolling hills block the vision, but to south and west the eye can travel for miles, and northward also, as far as the coast. On the northwest side the sea comes within eight miles or so, the tides spreading and filtering through the marshy flatlands that feed the great Lake where stands the Isle of Glass. This island, or group of islands, lies on its glassy water like a recumbent goddess; indeed it has from time immemorial been dedicated to the Goddess herself, and her shrine stands close beside the king's palace. Above it the great beacon top of the Tor is plainly visible, and, many miles beyond that, right on the coast of the Severn Channel, may be seen the next beacon point of Brent Knoll.

The hills of the Glass Isle, with the low and waterlogged levels surrounding them, are known as the Summer Country. The king was a man called Melwas, young, and a staunch supporter of Arthur; he gave me lodging during my first surveys of Caer Camel, and seemed pleased that the High King should plan to form his main stronghold at the edge of his territory. He was deeply interested in the maps I showed him, and promised help of every kind, from the loan of local workmen to a pledge of defense, should that be needed, while the work was in progress.

King Melwas had offered to show me the place himself, but for my first survey I preferred to be alone, so managed to put him off with civilities of some kind. He and his young men rode with me for the first part of the way, then turned aside into a track that was little more than a causeway through the marshlands, and went cheerfully off to their day's sport. That is a great country for hunting; it teems with wildfowl of every land. I saw a lucky omen in the fact that almost as soon as they left me, King Melwas flew his falcon at a flock of immigrant birds coming in from the southeast, and within seconds the hawk had killed cleanly and come straight back to the master's fist. Then, with shouting and laughter, the band of young men rode off among the willows, and I went on my way alone.

I had been right in supposing that a road would lead to the once-Roman fortress of Caer Camel. The road leaves Ynys Witrin by a causeway which skirts the base of the Tor, spans a narrow arm of the Lake, and reaches a strip of dry, hard land stretching toward the east. There it joins the old Fosse Way, then after a while turns south again for the village at the foot of Caer Camel. This had originally been a Celtic settlement, then the vicus to the Roman fortress, its occupants scraping some sort of living from the soil; and retiring uphill within walls in times of danger. Since the fortress had decayed, their lives had been hard indeed. As well as the ever-present danger to the south and east, they even had, in bad years, to beat off the people of the Summer Country, when the wetlands around Ynys Witrin ceased to provide anything but fish and marsh birds, and the young men craved excitement beyond the confines of their own territory. There was little to be seen as I rode between the tumbledown huts with their rotting thatch; here and there eyes watched me from a dark doorway, or a woman's voice called shrilly to her child. My horse splashed through the mud and dung, forded the Camel knee-deep, then at last I turned him uphill through the trees, and took the steep curve of the chariot-way at a plunging canter.

Even though I knew what to expect, I was amazed at the size of the summit. I came up through the ruins of the southwest gateway into a great field, tilted to southward, but sloping sharply ahead of me toward a ridge with a high point west of center. I walked my horse slowly toward this. The field, or rather plateau, was scarred and pitted with the remains of buildings, and surrounded on all sides by deep ditching, and the relics of revetments and fortified walls. Whins and brambles matted the broken walls, and mole-hills had heaved up the cracked paving-stones. Stone lay everywhere, good Roman stone, squared in some local quarry. Beyond the ruined outworks the sides of the hill went down steeply, and on them trees, once lopped to ground level, had put out saplings and thickets of suckers. Between these the scarps were quilted with a winter network of bramble and thorn. A beaten pathway through sprouting fern and nettle led to a gap in the north wall. Following this, I could see where, half down the northern hillside, a spring lay deep among the trees. This must be the Lady's Well, the good spring dedicated to the Goddess. The other spring, the main water supply for the fortress, lay halfway up the steep road to the northeast gateway, at the hill's opposite corner from the chariot road I had taken. It seemed that cattle were still watered there: as I watched, I saw a herd, slow-moving, come up through the steep gap, and spread out to graze in the sunshine, with a faint, off-note chiming of bells. Their herd following them, a slight figure whom at first I took for a boy, then saw, from the way he moved, using his staff to lean upon, that it was an old man.

I turned my horse's head that way, and walked him carefully through the tumble of stonework. A magpie got up and flew, scolding. The old man looked up. He stopped short, startled, and, I thought, apprehensive. I raised a hand to him in a sign of greeting. Something about the solitary and unarmed horseman must have reassured him, for after a moment he moved to a low wall that lay full in the sun, and sat down to wait for me.

I dismounted, letting my horse graze.

"Greetings, father."

"And to you." It was not much more than a mumble, in the strong blurring accent of the district. He peered at me suspiciously, through eyes clouded with cataract. "You're a stranger to these parts."

"I come from the west."

This was no reassurance. It seemed that the folk hereabouts had had too long a history of war. "Why'd you leave the road then? What do you want up here?"

"I came on the King's behalf, to look at the fortress walls."

"Again?"

As I stared at him in surprise, he drove his stick into the turf, as if making a claim, and spoke with a kind of quavering anger. "This was our land before the king came, and it's ours again in spite of him. Why don't 'ee let us keep it so?"

"I don't think — " I began, then stopped, on a sudden thought. "You speak of a king. Which king?"

"I don't know his name."

"Melwas? Or Arthur?"

"Maybe. I tell you I don't know. What do you want here?"

"I am the King's man. I come from him —"

"Aye. To raise the fortress walls again, then take away our cattle and kill our children and rape our women."

"No. To build a stronghold here to protect your cattle and children and women."

"It did not protect them before."

There was silence. The old man's hand shook on his stick. The sun was hot on the grass. My horse grazed delicately round a thistle head growing low and circular, like a splayed wheel. An early butterfly alighted on a purple head of clover. A lark rose, singing.

"Old man," I said gently, "there has been no fortress here in your lifetime, or in your father's. What walls stood here and looked south and north and westward over the waters? What king came to storm them?"

He looked at me for a few moments, his head shaking with the tremor of age. "It's a story, only a story, master. My granda told it to me, how the folk lived here with cattle and goats and sweet grazing, and wove the cloth and tilled the high field, until the king came and drove them down through yon road into the valley bottom, and there was a grave for them all that day, as wide as a river and as deep as the hollow hill, where they laid the king himself to rest, and his time coming soon after."

"Which hill was that? Ynys Witrin?"

"What? How should they carry him there? It's a foreign country there. They call it the Summer Country, for all it's a sheet of lake water all the year round save through the dry time of midsummer. No, they made a way into the cave and laid him there, and with him the ones who were drowned with him." A sudden, high crackle. "Drowned in the Lake, and the folk watched and made no move to save him. It was the Goddess took him, and his fine captains along with him. Who could have stopped her? They say it was three days before she gave him back, and then he came naked, without either crown or sword." The crackling laugh again, as he nodded. "Your King had best make his peace with her, tell him that."

"He will. When did this happen?"

"A hundred years ago. Two hundred. How would I know?"

Another silence, while I assessed it. What I was hearing, I knew, was a folk memory that had come down tongue to tongue in a winter's tale by some peasant's hearth. But it confirmed what I had been told. The place must have been fortified time out of mind. "The king" could have been any one of the Celtic rulers, driven eventually from the hilltop by the Romans, or the Roman general himself who had stayed here to invest the captured strongpoint.

I said suddenly: "Where is the way into the hill?"

"What way?"

"The door to the king's tomb, where they made the way for his grave."

"How do I know? It's there, that's all I know. And sometimes, on a night, they ride out again. I have seen them. They come wi' the summer moon, and go back into the hill at dawning. And whiles, on a stormy night, when dawn surprises them, one comes late, and finds the gate shut. So he is doomed for the next moon to wander the hilltop alone till..." His voice faltered. He ducked his head fearfully, peering. "A king's man, you said you were?"

I laughed. "Don't be afraid of me, father. I'm not one of them. I'm a king's man, yes, but I have come for a living king, who will build the fortress up again, and take you and your cattle, and your children, and their children, into his hand, and keep you safely against the Saxon enemy from the south. And you will still get sweet grazing for your herd. I promise you this."

He said nothing to that, but sat for a while, nid-nodding in the sun. I could see that he was simple. "Why should I be afraid? There has always been a king here, and always will be. A king is no new thing."

"This one will be."

His attention was leaving me. He chirrupped to the cows: "Come up, Blackberry, come up, Dewdrop. A king, and tend the cattle for me? Do you take me for a fool? But the Goddess looks after her own. He'd best tend to the Goddess." And he subsided, mumbling his stick, and muttering.

I gave him a silver coin, as one gives a singer the guerdon for his tale, then led my horse off toward the ridge that marked the summit of the plateau.

3

SOME DAYS LATER THE FIRST party of surveyors arrived, to begin their measuring and pacing, while their leader was closeted with me in the temporary headquarters that had been made for us on the site.

Tremorinus, the master engineer who had taught me so much of his trade when I was a boy in Brittany, had died some time ago. Arthur's chief engineer now was a man called Derwen, whom I had first met years back, over the rebuilding of Caerleon in Ambrosius' time. He was a red-bearded, high-coloured man, but without the temper that often goes with that colouring; indeed, he was silent to the point of surliness, and could prove sullen as a mule when pressed. But I knew him to be competent and experienced, and he had the trick of getting men to work fast and willingly for him. Moreover, he had taken pains to be master himself of all trades, and was never above rolling up his sleeves and doing a heavy job himself if time demanded. Nor did he appear to mind taking direction from me. He seemed to hold my skills in the most flattering respect; this was not, I knew, because of my especial brilliance I had shown at Caerleon or Segontium — they were built to pattern on the Roman model, on lines laid down through time, and familiar to every builder — but Derwen had been an apprentice in Ireland when I had moved the massive king-stone of Killare, and subsequently at Amesbury, at the rebuilding of the Giants' Dance. So we got along tolerably well together, and understood each what the other was good for.

Arthur's forecast of trouble in the north had come true, and he had gone up in early March. But during the winter months he and I, with Derwen, had spent many hours together over the plans for the new stronghold. Driven by my persistence, and Arthur's enthusiasm, Derwen had finally been brought to accept what he obviously thought of as my wild ideas about the rebuilding of Caer Camel. Strength and speed — I wanted the place ready for Arthur by the time the campaign in the north should near its close, and I also wanted it to last. Its size and force had to fit his state.

The size was there: the hill's summit was vast, some eight acres in area. But the strength... I had had lists made of what material was already there, and, as best I could among the ruins, I had studied how the place had been built before, the Roman stonework on top of layer after layer of earlier Celtic wall and ditching. As I worked I kept in mind some of the fortifications I had seen on my travels abroad, strong-points thrown up in wilder places than this, and on terrain as difficult. To rebuild on the Roman model would have been a formidable, if not impossible, task; even if Derwen's masons had had the knack of the Roman type of stonework, the sheer size of Caer Camel would have forbidden it. But the masons were all expert at their own dry-stone kind of building, and there was plenty of dressed stone to hand, and a quarry nearby. We had the oak-woods and the carpenters, and the sawyers' yards between Caer Camel and the Lake had been packed all winter with maturing timber. So I had made my final plans.

That they were carried out magnificently everyone can see. The steep, ditched sides of the place they now call Camelot stand crowned with massive walls of stone and timber. Sentries patrol the battlements, and stand guard over the great gates. To the northerly gate a wagon-road climbs between its guarded banks, while to the gate at the southwest corner — the one they call King's Gate — a chariot-way curves up, true-cambered to the fastest wheels, and wide enough for a galloping troop of horse.

Within those walls now, as well kept in these times of peace as in the troubled days I built them for, a city has arisen, gay with gilding and the fluttering of banners, and fresh with gardens and orchard trees. On the paved terraces walk women in rich dresses, and children play in the gardens. The streets are crowded with folk, and full of talk and laughter, the chaffering of the market-place, the quick hoofs of Arthur's fleet and glossy horses, the shouts of the young men, and the clamour of the church bells. It has grown rich with peaceful commerce, and splendid with the arts of peace. Camelot is a marvellous sight, and one which is familiar now to travellers from the four corners of the world.

But then, on that raw hilltop, and among the mess of abandoned buildings, it was no more than an idea, and an idea sprung out of the hard necessities of war. We would start, of course, with the outer walls, and here I planned to use the broken stuff that lay about; tiles from the old hypocausts, flagstones, bedding from the floors, even from the old road-work that had been laid in the Roman fortress. With these we would throw up a revetment of hard rubble which would retain the outer wall, and at the same time support a broad fighting platform laid along the inner side of the battlement. The wall itself would, on the outer side, rise straight out of the steep hillside, like a crown on a king's head. The hillside we stripped of its trees, and seamed with ditches, so that it became, in effect, a steep of breakneck minor crags, to be topped with a great wall faced with stone. For this we would use the dressed tufa found on site, along with materials quarried afresh by Melwas' masons and our own. Above this again I planned to set a massively smooth wall of wood, tied into the stonework and the rubble of the revetment by a strong timber frame. At the gateways, where the approach-roads ran uphill sunk between rocky banks, I designed a kind of tunnel which would pierce the fortified wall, and allow the fighting platform to run unbroken across, above the gates. These gated tunnels, high and wide enough to let horse-drawn traffic through, or riders three abreast, would be hung with huge gates which could fold back against the oak-lined walls. To do this we would have to sink the roadways still farther.

This, and much else besides, I had explained to Derwen. He had been skeptical at first, and only his respect for me had kept him, I could tell, from flat and mulish disagreement — especially about the gates, for which he could see no precedent; and most engineers and architects work, reasonably enough, from well-proved precedent, especially in matters of war and defense. At first he could see no reason to abandon the well-tried model of twin turrets and guard-rooms. But in time, sitting hour by hour over my plans, and conning the lists I had had drawn up of the materials already available on the site, he came to a qualified acceptance of my amalgam of stone and woodworking, and thence to a sort of guarded enthusiasm over all. He was enough of a professional to find excitement in new ideas, especially since any blame for failure would be mine and not his.

Not that blame was likely. Arthur, taking part in the planning sessions, was enthusiastic, but — as he pointed out when deferred to over some technical point — he knew his own business, and he would trust us to know ours. We all knew what the place's function would be; it was up to us to build it accordingly. Once we had built it (he concluded with the brevity of total and unconscious arrogance) he would know how to keep it.

Now, on site at last, and with good weather come early and looking settled, Derwen started work with keenness and dispatch, and before the old herdsman had called the cows home for the first evening's milking, the pegs were driven in, trenches had been started, and the first wagon-load of supplies was groaning uphill behind its straining oxen.

Caer Camel was rising again. The King was coming back.

He came on a bright day of June. He rode up from the village on his grey mare Amrei, accompanied by Bedwyr and his foster-brother Cei and perhaps a dozen others of his cavalry captains. These were now commonly known as the equites or knights; Arthur himself called them his "Companions." They rode without armour, like a hunting-party. Arthur swung from his mare's back, threw the reins to Bedwyr, and while the others dismounted and let their horses graze, he trod up the slope of blowing grass alone.

He saw me, and lifted a hand, but did not hurry. He paused by the outer revetment, and spoke to the men working there, then walked out onto the planking that bridged a trench, while the labourers straightened from their tasks to answer his questions. I saw one of them point something out to him; he looked that way, and then all about him, before he left them to mount the central ridge where the foundations for his headquarters had been dug. From there he could command the whole area, and make some sense, perhaps, out of the maze of trenching and foundations, half hidden as it was beneath the web of ropes and scaffolding.

He turned slowly on his heel, until he had taken in the full circle. Then he came swiftly over to where I stood, drawings in hand.

"Yes," was all he said, but with a glowing satisfaction. And then: "When?"

"There will be something here for you by winter."

He sent his eyes round again, a look of pride and vision that could have been my own. I knew that he was seeing, as I could see, the finished walls, the proud towers, the stone and timber and iron that would enclose this space of golden summer air, and make it his first creation. It was the look, too, of a warrior who sees a strong weapon being offered to his hand. His eyes, full of this high and fierce satisfaction, came back to me.

"I told you to use a miracle, and I think you have. That is how I see it. Perhaps you are too much of a professional to feel that way, when you see what was only a drawing on clay, or even a thought in your mind, being built into something real that will last for ever?"

"I believe all makers feel this way. I, certainly."

"How fast it has moved! Did you build it with music, like the Giants' Dance?"

"I used the same miracle here. You can see it. The men."

A quick glance at me, then his gaze went across the mess of churned ground and toiling labourers to where, as orderly as in an old, walled city, the workshops of the carpenters and smiths and masons rang with hammering and voices. His eyes took a faraway and yet inward look. He spoke softly. "I'll remember that. God knows every commander should. I use the same miracle myself." Then, back to me: "And by next winter?"

"By next winter you shall have it complete inside, as well as safe to fight from. The place is everything we had hoped for. Later, when the wars are done, there will be space and time to build for other things, comfort and grace and splendour, worthy of you and your victories. We'll make you a veritable eagle's eyrie, hung on a lovely hill. A stronghold to hunt from in war, and a home to breed in times of peace."

He had half turned from me, to make a sign to the watching Bedwyr. The young men mounted, and Bedwyr approached us, leading Arthur's mare. Arthur swung back to me, brows up.

"So you know? I might have known I could keep no secrets from you."

"Secrets? I know nothing. What secret were you trying to keep?"

"None. What would be the use? I would have told you straight away, but this came first... though she wouldn't like to hear me say so." I must have gaped at him like a fool. His eyes danced. "Yes, I'm sorry, Merlin. But I really was about to tell you. I am to marry. Come, don't be angry. That is something in which you could hardly guide me to my own satisfaction."

"I am not angry. What right have I? This is one thing you must decide for yourself. It seems you have, and I'm glad. Is it concluded?"

"No, how could it be? I was waiting to talk to you first. So far it's only been a matter of letters between Queen Ygraine and myself. The suggestion came from her, and I suppose there'll be a lot of talking to do first. But I warn you" — a glint — "my mind is made up." Bedwyr slipped from his saddle beside us, and Arthur took the mare's reins from him. I looked a query, and he nodded. "Yes, Bedwyr knows."

"Then will you tell me who she is?"

"Her father was March, who fought under Duke Cador and was killed in a skirmish on the Irish Shore. Her mother died at her birth, and since her father's death she has been under Queen Ygraine's protection. You must have seen her, but you would not notice her, I expect. She was in waiting at Amesbury, and then again at the crowning."

"I remember her. Did I hear her name? I forget."

"Guenever."

A plover winged overhead, tumbling in the sun. Its shadow floated over the grass between us. Something plucked at the chords of memory; something from that other Me of power and terror and bright vision. But it eluded me. The mood of tranquil achievement was unruffled as the Lake.

"What is it, Merlin?"

His voice was anxious, like a boy's who fears censure. I looked up. Bedwyr, beside him, was watching me with the same worried look.

"Nothing at all. She's a lovely girl, and bears a lovely name. Be sure the gods will bless the marriage when the time comes."

The young faces relaxed. Bedwyr said something quick and teasing, then followed it with some excited comment about the building work, and the two of them plunged into a discussion in which marriage plans had no part. I caught sight of Derwen over near the gateway, so we walked that way to talk with him. Then Arthur and Bedwyr took their leave, and mounted, and the other young men turned their fretting horses to ride downhill after their King toward the road.

They did not get far. As the little cavalcade entered the sunken gateway they came head on against Blackberry and Dewdrop and their sisters, making their slow way uphill. The old herdsman, tenacious as goosegrass, still clung to his grazing rights on Caer Camel, and brought the herd daily up toward the part of the field as yet unspoiled by the workings.

I saw the grey mare pause, veer, and start to curvet. The cattle, stolidly chewing, shouldered by, udders swinging. From somewhere among them, as suddenly as a puff of smoke from the ground, the old man appeared, leaning on his staff. The mare reared, hoofs flailing. Arthur pulled her aside, and she turned back hard against the shoulder of Bedwyr's black colt, which promptly lashed out, missing Dewdrop by inches. Bedwyr was laughing, but Cei shouted out angrily:

"Make way, you old fool! Can't you see it's the King? And get your damned cattle out of the way. They've no business here now!"

"As good business as yourself, young master, if not better," said the old man tartly. "Getting the good of the land, they are, which you and your likes can do naught but spoil! So it's you should take your horses off and get your hunting done in the Summer Country, and let honest folks be!"

Cei was never one to know when he should curb his anger, or even save his breath. He pushed his horse past Arthur's mare, and thrust his red face down toward the old man. "Are you deaf, old fool, or just stupid? Hunting? We are the King's fighting captains, and this is the King!"

Arthur, half laughing, began: "Oh, leave it, Cei," then had to control the mare sharply once more as the old goblin bobbed up again at his bridle-hand. The dim eyes peered upward.

"King? Nay, but you can't fool me, masters. 'Tis only a bit of a lad. The king's a man grown. Besides, 'tis not yet his time. He'll come at midsummer, wi' the full moon. Seen him, I have, with all his fighting men." A gesture with his staff that set the horses' heads tossing again. "These, fighting captains? Boys, that's all they be! Kings' fighting men have armour, and spears as long as ash trees, and plumes on them like the manes on their horses. Seen them, I have, alone here on a summer's night. Oh, aye, I know the king."

Cei opened his mouth again, but Arthur put up a hand. He spoke as if he and the old man were alone in the field. "A king who came here in the summer? What are you telling us, father? What men were they?"

Something in his manner, perhaps, got through to the other. He looked uncertain. Then he caught sight of me, and pointed. "Told him, I did. Yes. King's man, he said he was, and spoke me soft. A King was coming, he said, who would tend my cows for me, and give me the grazing for them..." He looked about him, as if taking in for the first time the splendid horses and gay trappings, and the assured, laughing looks of the young men. His voice faltered, and he slid off into his mumbling. Arthur looked at me.

"Do you know what he's talking about?"

"A legend of the past, and a troop of ghosts that he says come riding out of their grave in the hill on a summer's midnight. It's my guess that he's telling an old tale of the Celtic rulers here, or the Romans, or maybe both. Nothing to trouble you."

"Not trouble us?" said someone, sounding uneasy; I think it was Lamorak, a brave and high-strung gentleman who watched the stars for signs, and whose horse's trappings rang with charms. "Ghosts, and not trouble us?"

"And he has seen them himself, on this very spot?" said someone else. Then others, murmuring: "Spears and horsehair plumes? Why, they sound like Saxons." And Lamorak again, fingering a piece of coral on his breast: "Ghosts of dead men, killed here and buried under the very hill where you plan to build a stronghold and a safe city? Arthur, did you know?"

There are few men more superstitious than soldiers. They are, after all, the men who live closest to death. All laughter had vanished, quenched, and a shiver went across the bright day, as surely as if a cloud had passed between us and the sun.

Arthur was frowning. He was a soldier, too, but he was also a king, and, like the King his father before him, dealt in facts. He said with noticeable briskness: "And what of it? Show me any strong fortress as good as this which has not been defended by brave men, and founded on their blood! Are we children, to fear the ghosts of men who have died here before us, to keep this land? If they linger here at all, they will be on our side, gentlemen!" Then, to the herdsman: "Well? Tell us your story, father. Who was this king?"

The old man hesitated, confused. Then he asked, suddenly: "Did you ever hear of Merlin, the enchanter?"

"Merlin?" This was Bedwyr. "Why, do you not know — ?"

He caught my eye, and stopped. No one else spoke. Arthur, without a glance in my direction, asked into the silence: "What of Merlin?"

The filmed eyes went round as if they could see every man clearly, every listening face. Even the horses stood quiet. The herdsman seemed to take courage from the attentive silence. He became suddenly lucid. "There was a king once who set out to build a stronghold. And like the kings of old, who were strong men and merciless, he looked for a hero, to kill and bury beneath the foundations, and hold them firm. So he caught and took Merlin, who was the greatest man in all Britain, and would have killed him; but Merlin called up his dragons, and flew away through the heavens, safely, and called a new king into Britain, who burned the other one to ashes in his tower, and his queen with him. Had you heard the tale, master?"

"Yes."

"And is it true that you are a king, and these your captains?"

"Yes."

"Then ask Merlin. They say he still lives. Ask him what king should fear to have a hero's grave beneath his threshold. Don't you know what he did? He put the great Dragon King himself under the Hanging Stones, that he did, and called it the safe castle of all Britain. Or so they say."

"They say the truth," said Arthur. He looked about him, to see where relief had already overlaid uneasiness. He turned back to the herdsman. "And the strong king who lies with his men within the hill?"

But here he got no further. When pressed, the old man became vague, and then unintelligible. A word could be caught here and there: helmets, plumes, round shields, and small horses, and yet again long spears "like ash trees," and cloaks blowing in the wind "when no wind blows."

I said coolly, to interrupt these new ghostly visions: "You should ask Merlin about that, too, my lord King. I believe I know what he would say."

Arthur smiled. "What, then?"

I turned to the old man. "You told me that the Goddess slew this king and his men, and that they were buried here. You told me, too, that the new young King would have to make his peace with the Goddess, or she would reject him. Now see what she has done. He knew nothing of this story, but he has come here with her guidance, to build his stronghold on the very spot where the Goddess herself slew and buried a troop of strong fighters and their leader, to be the king-stone of his threshold. And she gave him the sword and the crown. So tell your people this, and tell them that the new King comes, with the Goddess's sanction, to build a fortress of his own, and to protect you and your children, and let your cattle graze in peace."

I heard Lamorak draw in his breath. "By the Goddess herself, you have it, Merlin!"

"Merlin?" You would have thought the old man was hearing the name for the first time. "Aye, that's what he would say... and I've heard tell how he took the sword himself from the depths of the water and gave it to the King..." For a few minutes then, as the others crowded close, talking again among themselves, relieved and smiling, he went back to his mumbling. But then, my final, incautious sentence having got through, he came suddenly, and with the utmost clarity of speech, back to the matter of his cows, and the iniquity of kings who interfered with their grazing. Arthur, with one swift, charged glance at me, listened gravely, while the young men held in their laughter, and the last wisps of trouble vanished in mirth. In the end, with gentle courtesy, the King promised to let him keep the grazing for as long as the sweet grass grew on Caer Camel, and when it did no longer, to find a pasture for him elsewhere.

"On my word as High King," he finished.

It was not clear whether, even now, the old herdsman believed him. "Well, call yourself king or not," he said, "for a lad you show some sort of sense. You listen to them that knows, not like some" — this with a malevolent glance in Cei's direction — "that's all noise and wind. Fighting men, indeed! Anyone who knows aught about fighting and the like knows there's no man can fight with an empty belly. You give my cows the grass, and we'll fill your bellies for you."

"I have said you shall have it."

"And when yon builder" — this was myself — "has got Caer Camel spoiled, what land will you give me then?"

Arthur had perhaps not meant to be taken so quickly at his word, but he hesitated only for a moment. "I saw good green stretches down by the river yonder, beyond the village. If I can —"

"That's no manner of good for beasts. Goats, maybe, and geese, but not cattle. That's sour grass, that is, and full of buttercups. That's poison to grazing."

"Indeed? I didn't know that. Where would be good land, then?"

"Over to the badgers' hill. That's yonder." He pointed. "Buttercups!" he cackled. "King or not, young master, however much folks know, there's always someone as knows more."

Arthur said gravely: "That is something else I shall remember. Very well. If I can come by the badgers' hill, it shall be yours."

Then he reined back to let the old man by, and with a salute to me, rode away downhill, with his knights behind him.

Derwen was waiting for me by the foundations of the southwest tower. I walked that way. A plover — the same, perhaps — tilted and side-slipped, calling, in the breezy air. Memory came back, halting me...

... The Green Chapel above Galava. The same two young faces, Arthur's and Bedwyr's, watching me as I told them stories of battles and far-off places. And across the room, thrown by the lamplight, the shadow of a bird floating — the white owl that lived in the roof — guenhwyvar, the white shadow, at whose name I had felt a creeping of the flesh, a moment of troubled prevision which now I could scarcely recall, except for the fear that the name Guenever was somehow a doom for him.

I had felt no such warning today. I did not expect it. I knew just what was left of the power I had once had to warn and to protect. Today I was no more than the old herdsman had called me, a builder.

"No more?" I recalled the pride and awe in the King's eyes as he surveyed the groundwork of the "miracle" I was working for him now. I looked down at the plans in my hand, and felt the familiar, purely human excitement of the maker stir in me. The shadow fled and vanished into sunshine, and I hurried to meet Derwen. At least I still possessed skill enough to build my boy a safe stronghold.

4

THREE MONTHS LATER ARTHUR married Guenever at Caerleon. He had had no chance to see the bride again; indeed, I believe he had had no more speech with her than what slight formalities had passed between them at the crowning. He himself had to go north again early in July, so could spare no time to travel into Cornwall to escort her to Guent. In any case, since he was High King, it was proper that his bride should be brought to him. So he spared Bedwyr for one precious month to ride down to Tintagel and bring the bride to Caerleon.

All through that summer there was sporadic fighting in the north, mostly a business (in that forested hill country) of ambush and running skirmish, but late in July Arthur forced a battle by a crossing on the River Bassas. This he won so decisively as to create a welcome lull that prolonged itself into a truce through harvest-time, and allowed him at length to travel to Caerleon with a quiet mind. For all that, his was a garrison wedding; he could afford to sacrifice no sort of readiness, so the bridal was fitted in, so to speak, among his other preoccupations. The bride seemed to expect it, taking everything as happily as if it had been some great festive occasion in London, and there was as much gaiety and gorgeousness about the ceremony as I have ever seen on such occasions, even though men kept their spears stacked outside the hall of feasting, and their swords laid ready to lift, and the King himself spent every available moment in counsel with his officers, or out in the exercise grounds, or — late into the night sometimes — poring over his maps, with his spies' reports on the table beside him.

I left Caer Camel in the first week of September, and rode across country to Caerleon. The work on the fortress was going well, and could be left to Derwen to carry out. I went with a light heart. All I had been able to find out about the girl was in her favour; she was young, healthy, and of good stock, and it was time Arthur was married and thinking of getting himself sons. I thought about her no further than that.

I was in Caerleon in time to see the wedding party arrive. They did not use the ferry-crossing, but came riding up the road from Glevum, their horses gay with gilded leather and coloured tassels, and the women's litters bright with fresh paint. The younger of the ladies wore mantles of every colour, and had flowers plaited into their horses' manes.

The bride herself disdained a litter; she rode a pretty cream-coloured horse, a gift from Arthur's stables. Bedwyr, in a new cloak of russet, kept close by her bridle-hand, and on his other side rode the Princess Morgan, Arthur's sister. Her mount was as fiery as Guenever's was gentle, but she controlled it without effort. She appeared to be in excellent spirits, as excited, one gathered, over her own approaching marriage as over the other, more important wedding. Nor did she seem to grudge Guenever her central role in the festivities, or the deference she received for her new state. Morgan herself had state and to spare: she had come, in Ygraine's absence, to represent the Queen, and, with the Duke of Cornwall, to place Guenever's hand in that of the High King.

Arthur, being still ignorant of the seriousness of Ygraine's illness, had expected her to come. Bedwyr had a quiet word with him on arrival, and I saw a shadow touch the King's face, then he banished it to greet Guenever. His greeting was public and formal, but with a smile behind it that she answered with a demure dimple. The ladies rustled and cooed and eyed him, and the men looked on indulgently, the older ones approving her youth and freshness, their thoughts already turning toward an heir to the kingdom. The young men watched with the same approval, coloured with simple envy.

Guenever was fifteen now. She was a shade taller than when I had last seen her, and more womanly, but she was still a little creature, with fresh skin and merry eyes, patently delighted with the fortune that had brought her out of Cornwall as bride of the land's darling, Arthur the young King.

She gave the Queen's excuses prettily, with no hint that Ygraine suffered from anything other than a passing ailment, and the King accepted them smoothly, then gave her his arm, and himself escorted her, with Morgan, to the house prepared for them and their ladies. This was the best of the town houses outside the fortress walls, where they could rest and make ready for the marriage.

He came back to his rooms soon after, and while he was still some way down the corridor I could hear him talking busily to Bedwyr. Nor was the talk of weddings and women. He came into the room already shedding his finery, and Ulfin, who knew his ways, was there ready to catch the splendid cloak as it was flung off, and to lift the heavy sword-belt and lay it aside.

Arthur greeted me gaily.

"Well? What do you think? Has she not grown lovely?"

"She is very fair. She will be a match for you."

"And she isn't shy or mim-mouthed, thank God. I've no time for that."

I saw Bedwyr smiling. We both knew he meant it literally. He had no time to trouble with wooing a delicate bride; he wanted marriage and bedding, and then, with the elder nobles satisfied at last, and his own mind free, he could get back to the unfinished business in the north.

So much he was saying now, as he led the way into the anteroom where the map table stood.

"But we'll talk of that in a moment, when the rest of the Council comes. I've sent for them. There was fresh news last night, by courier. Incidentally, Merlin, I told you, didn't I, that I was sending for your young man Gereint, from Olicana? He got here last night — have you seen him yet? No? Well, he'll be coming with the rest. I'm grateful to you; he's a find, and has proved his value already three times over. He brought news from Elmet... But leave that now. Before they come, I want to ask you about Queen Ygraine. Bedwyr tells me there was no question of her coming north for the wedding. Did you know she was ill?"

"I knew at Amesbury that she was ailing, but she would not talk about it, then or later, and she never consulted me. Why, Bedwyr, what's the news of her now?"

"I'm no judge," said Bedwyr, "but she looked gravely ill to me. Even since the crowning I could see a change in her, thin as a ghost, and spending most of her time in bed. She sent a letter to Arthur, and she would have written to you, she said, but it was beyond her strength. I was to give you her greetings, and to thank you for your letters, and your thought of her. She watches for them."

Arthur looked at me. "Did you suspect anything like this when you saw her? Is this a mortal sickness?"

"I would guess so. When I saw her at Amesbury, the seeds of the sickness were already sown. And when I spoke to her again at the crowning, I think she knew herself to be failing. But to guess at how long... even had I been her own physician, I doubt if I could have judged of that."

He might have been expected to ask why I had kept my suspicions from him, but the reasons were obvious enough so he wasted no breath on them. He merely nodded, looking troubled. "I cannot... You know that I must go north again as soon as this business is done." He spoke as if the wedding were a council, or a battle. "I cannot go down into Cornwall. Ought I to send you?"

"It would be useless. Besides, her own physician is as good a man as you could wish for. I knew him when he was a young student in Pergamum."

"Well," he said, accepting it, and then again, "Well..."

But he moved restlessly, fidgeting with the pins that were stuck here and there in the clay map. "The trouble is, one always feels there is something one should be doing. I like to load the dice, not sit waiting for someone else to throw them. Oh, yes, I know what you will say — that the essence of wisdom is to know when to be doing, and when it is useless even to try. But I sometimes think I shall never be old enough to be wise."

"Perhaps the best thing you can do, both for Queen Ygraine and for yourself, is to get this marriage consummated, and see your sister Morgan crowned Queen of Rheged," I said, and Bedwyr nodded.

"I agree. From the way she spoke about it, I got the impression that she lives only to see both marriage-bonds safely tied."

"That is what she says in her letter to me," said the King. He turned his head. Faintly, from the corridor, came the sound of challenge and answer. "Well, Merlin, I could ill have spared you for a journey into Cornwall. I want to send you north again. Can Derwen be left in charge at Caer Camel?"

"If you wish it, of course. He will do very well, though I should like to be back myself in good time for the spring weather."

"There's no reason why you shouldn't be."

"Is it Morgan's wedding? Or — perhaps I should have been more cautious? Is it Morgause again?... I warn you, if it's a trip to Orkney, I shall refuse."

He laughed. He certainly neither looked nor spoke as if Morgause or her bastard had been on his mind. "I wouldn't put you at such risk, either from Morgause or the northern seas. No, it is Morgan. I want you to take her to Rheged."

"That will be a pleasure." It would, indeed. The years I had spent in Rheged, in the Wild Forest which is part of the great tract of land they call the Caledonian Forest, had been the crest of my life; they had been the years when I had guided and taught Arthur as a boy. "I trust I'll be able to see Ector?"

"Why not, once you've seen Morgan safely wedded? I must admit it will ease my mind, as well as the Queen's, to see her settled there in Rheged. It's possible that by spring-time there will be war in the north again."

Put like that, it sounded strange, but in the context of those times it made sense. Those were years of winter weddings; men left home in spring to fight, and it was as well to leave a secure hearth behind them. For a man like Urbgen of Rheged, no longer young, lord of great domains, and a keen fighting man, it would be foolish to put off the proposed marriage any longer. I said: "Of course I will take her there. How soon?"

"As soon as things are done here, and before winter sets in."

"Will you be there?"

"If I can. We'll speak of this again. I'll give you messages, and of course you will carry my gifts to Urbgen." He signed to Ulfin, who went to the door. The others came in then — his knights and the men of the Council and certain of the petty kings who had come to Caerleon for the wedding. Cador was there, and Gwilim, and others from Powys and Dyfed and Dumnonia, but no one from Elmet, or the north. This was understandable. It was a relief not to see Lot. Among the younger men I saw Gereint. He greeted me with a smiling gesture, but there was no time for talk. The King spoke, and we sat over our counsels until sunset, when food was brought in, and after that the company took their leave, and I with them.

As I made my way back to my own quarters, Bedwyr fell in beside me, and with him Gereint. The two young men seemed to know one another tolerably well. Gereint greeted me warmly. "It was a good day for me," he said, smiling, "when that traveling doctor came to Olicana."

"And, I believe, for Arthur," I replied. "How is the work going in the Gap?"

He told me about it. There was, it seemed, no immediate danger from the east. Arthur had made a clean sweep in Linnuis, and meantime the King of Elmet held watch and ward for him. The road through the Gap had been rebuilt, right through from Olicana to Tribuit, and both the western forts had been brought to readiness. From talking about this he came to Caer Camel, and here Bedwyr joined him in plying me with questions. Presently we came to where our ways parted.

"I leave you here," said Gereint. He glanced back the way we had come, toward the King's apartments. "Behold," he said, "the half was not told me." He spoke as if quoting from something, but it was something I had not heard. "These are great days for us all."

"And will be greater."

Then we said good night, and Bedwyr and I walked on together. The boy with the torch was a few paces ahead. At first we talked, with lowered voices, about Ygraine. He was able to tell me more than he had said in front of Arthur. Her physician, not wishing to commit anything to writing, had entrusted Bedwyr with information for me, but nothing about it was new. The Queen was dying, waiting only — this was from Bedwyr himself — until the two young women, crowned and in due splendour, had taken their places, and thereafter it would be a strange thing (Melchior had said) if she lasted till Christmas. She had sent me a message of goodwill, and a token to be given to Arthur after her death. This latter was a brooch, finely made of gold and blue enamel, with an image of the mother-goddess of the Christians, and the name, MARIA, inscribed around the edge. She had already given jewels both to her daughter Morgan and to Guenever; these had come in the guise of wedding gifts, though Morgan already knew the truth. Guenever, it seemed, did not. The girl had been as dear, and lately almost dearer, to Ygraine than her own daughter, and the Queen had carefully instructed Bedwyr that nothing must spoil the marriage celebrations. Not that the Queen, said Bedwyr (who obviously held Ygraine in the greatest respect), had any illusions about Arthur's grief for her; she had sacrificed his love for that of Uther and the kingdom's future, and she herself was resigned to death, secure in her faith; but she was aware how much the girl had come to love her.

"And Guenever herself?" I asked at length. "You must have come to know her well on the journey. And you know Arthur, none better. How will they suit? What is she like?"

"Delightful. She's full of life — in her own way as full as he is — and she is clever. She plied me with questions about the wars, and they were not idle ones. She understands what he is doing, and has followed every move he has made. She was head over ears in love with him from the first moment she saw him in Amesbury... in fact, it's my belief that she was in love with him even before that, like every other girl in Britain. But she has humour and sense with it; she's no greensick girl with a dream of a crown and a bedding; she knows where her duty will lie. I know that Queen Ygraine planned this and hoped for it. She had been schooling the girl all this while."

"There could hardly be a better preceptress."

"I agree. But Guenever has gentleness, and she is full of laughter, too. I am glad," he finished, simply.

We spoke of Morgan then, and the other marriage.

"Let us hope it suits as well," I said. "It's certainly what Arthur wants. And Morgan? She seems willing, even happy about it."

"Oh, yes," he said, and then, with a smiling shrug, "you'd think it was a love-match, and that all the business with Lot had never been. You always say, Merlin, that you know nothing of women, and can't even guess at what moves them. Well, no more can I, and I'm not a born hermit, like you. I've known plenty, and now I've spent a month or so in daily attendance on them — and I still don't begin to understand them. They crave for marriage, which for them is a kind of slavery — and dangerous at that. You could understand it with those who have nothing of their own; but here's Morgan: she has wealth and position, and the freedom they give her, and she has the protection of the High King. Yet she would have gone to Lot, whose reputation you know, and now goes, eagerly, to Urbgen of Rheged, who is more than three times her age, and whom she has hardly seen. Why?"

"I suspect because of Morgause."

He shot me a look. "That's possible. I spoke to Guenever about it. She says that since news came of Morgause's latest lying-in, and her letters about the state she keeps —"

"In Orkney?"

"She says so. It does seem true that she rules the kingdom. Who else? Lot has been with Arthur... Well, Guenever told me that lately Morgan's temper had been growing sharp, and she had begun to speak of Morgause with hatred. Also, she had begun to practise what the Queen called her 'dark arts' again. Guenever seems afraid of them." He hesitated. "They speak of it as magic, Merlin, but it is nothing like your power. It is something smoky, in a closed room."

"If Morgause taught her, then it must be dark indeed. Well, so the sooner Morgan is a queen in Rheged, with a family of her own, the better. And what of yourself, Bedwyr? Have you had thoughts of marriage?"

"None, yet," he said cheerfully. "I have no time."

On which we laughed, and went our ways.

So the next day, with a fine sun blazing, and all the pomp and music and revelry that a joyous crowd could conjure up, Arthur married Guenever. And after the feasting, when torches had burned low, and men and women had eaten and laughed and drunk deep, the bride was led away; and later, escorted by his companion knights, the bridegroom went to her.

That night I dreamed a dream. It was brief and cloudy, a glimmer only of something that might be true vision. There were curtains drawn and blowing, and a place full of cold shadows, and a woman lying in bed. I could not see her clearly, or tell who she was. I thought at first that it was Ygraine, then, with a shift of the blowing light, it might have been Guenever. And she lay as if she were dead, or as if she were sleeping soundly after a night of love.

5

SO ONCE AGAIN I HEADED NORTHWARD, keeping this time to the west road all the way to Luguvallium. It was truly a wedding journey. The good weather held all through that month, the lovely September month of gold that is best for travellers, since Hermes, the god of going, claims it for his own.

His hand was over us through all that journey. The road, Arthur's main way up the west, was repaired and sound, and even on the moors the land was dry, so that we did not need to time our journey to seek for stopping-places to suit the women. If, at sunset, no town or village was near, we made camp where we halted, and ate by some stream with trees for shelter, while plovers called in the dusk, and the herons flapped overhead back from their fishing-grounds. For me, it would have been an idyllic journey, but for two things. The first was the memory of my last journey northward. Like all sensible men, I had put regret out of my mind, or thought I had; but when one night someone petitioned me to sing, and my servant brought the harp to me, it seemed suddenly as if I only had to look up from the strings to see them coming into the firelight, Beltane the goldsmith, smiling, with Ninian behind him. And after that the boy was there nightly, in memory or in dreams, and with him the most poignant of all sorrows, the regret for what might have been, and was gone for ever. It was more than simple grief for a disciple lost who might have done my work for me after I was gone. There was with it a wounding self-contempt for the helpless way I had let him go. Surely I should have known, in that moment of stinging, involuntary protest at Cor Bridge, why the protest was made? The truth was that the loss of the boy went far deeper than the failure to win an heir and a disciple: his loss was the very symbol of my own. Because I was no longer Merlin, Ninian had died.

The second wasp in the honey of that journey was Morgan herself.

I had never known her well. She had been born at Tintagel, and had grown up there through the years when I had lived in hiding in Rheged, watching over Arthur's boyhood. Since then I had only seen her twice, at her brother's crowning and at his marriage, and had barely spoken with her on either occasion.

She resembled her brother in that she was tall for her age and dark-haired, with the dark eyes that came, I think, from the Spanish blood brought by the Emperor Maximus into the family of the Ambrosii; but in feature she resembled Ygraine, where Arthur favoured Uther. Her skin was pale, and she was as quiet as Arthur was ebullient. For all this I could sense in her something of the same kind of force, a power controlled, fire banked under cool ash. There was something, too, of the subtlety that Morgause, her half-sister, showed in such abundance, and Arthur not at all. But this is mostly a woman's quality; they all have it in some degree or another; it is too often their only weapon and their only shield.

Morgan refused to use the litter provided for her, and rode beside me for some part of each day. I suppose that when she was with the women, or among the younger men, the talk must have turned on the coming wedding, and the times to come; but when she was by me she spoke mostly of the past. Again and again she led me to talk of those of my deeds which had passed into legend, the story of the dragons at Dinas Emrys, the raising of the king-stone at Killare, the lifting of the sword of Macsen from the stone. I answered her questions willingly enough, keeping to the facts of the stories, and (remembering what I had learned of Morgan from her mother and Bedwyr) trying to convey to her something of what "magic" meant. As these girls see it, it is an affair of philters, and whispers in darkened rooms, spells to bind a man's heart, or bring the vision of a lover on Midsummer Eve. Their main concern, understandably, is the aphrodisian lore — how to bring, or to prevent, pregnancy, charms for safety in childbirth, predictions about the sex of a child. These matters, to do her justice, Morgan never broached with me; it was to be expected that she was versed in them already. Nor did she seem interested, as the young Morgause had been, in medicine and the healing arts. Her questions turned all on the greater power, and mainly as it had touched Arthur. All that had passed from Uther's first wooing of her mother, and Arthur's conception, to the raising of the great sword of Macsen, she was avid to know. I answered her civilly, and fully enough; she was, I reckoned, entitled to the facts, and (since she was going to be Queen of Rheged, and would almost certainly outlive her husband, and live to guide the future king of that powerful province) I tried to show her what Arthur's aims were for the settled times after the war, and to imbue her with the same ambitions.

It was hard to tell what sort of success I had. After a time I noticed that her talk turned more and more frequently to the hows and wherefores of the power I had owned. I put her questions aside, but she persisted, at length even suggesting, with an assurance as cool as Arthur's own, that I should show some demonstration of it, for all the world as if I were an old wife mixing spells and simples over the fire, or a soothsayer crystal-gazing on market day. At this last impertinence my answer was, I imagine, too cold for her to stomach. Soon afterwards she drew rein and let her palfrey lag back, and thereafter rode the rest of the way with the young people.

Like her sister, Morgan was rarely content with the company of women. Her most constant companion was one Accolon, a splendidly dressed, florid young man with a loud laugh and a high colour. She never let herself be alone with him more than was decent, though he made no secret of his feelings; he followed her everywhere with his eyes, and, whenever he could, touched her hand, or brought his horse sidling so close to her that his thigh brushed hers, and their horses' manes tangled together. She never seemed to notice, and never once, that I could see, gave him other than the same cool looks and answers that she gave to everyone. I had, of course, a duty to bring her unharmed and virgin (if virgin she still was) to Urbgen's bed, but I could have no present fears for her honour. A lover would have been hard put to it to come to her on that journey, even if she had beckoned him. Most nights when we camped, Morgan was attended by all her ladies to her pavilion, which was shared by her two elderly waiting women, as well as her younger companions. She gave no hint that she wished it otherwise. She acted and spoke like any royal bride on her way to a welcome bride-bed, and if Accolon's handsome face and eager courtship moved her she made no sign.

We halted for the last time just short of the limits that are governed by Caer-luel, as the British call Luguvallium. Here we rested the horses, while the servants busied themselves over the burnishing of the harness and the washing of the painted litters, and — among the women — some furbishing of clothes and hair and complexions. Then the cavalcade reformed, and we went on to meet the welcoming party, which met us well beyond the city limits.

It was headed by King Urbgen himself, on a splendid horse which had been a gift from Arthur, a bay stallion decked with crimson and cloth of gold. Beside it a servant led a white mare, bridled with silver and tasselled with blue, for the princess. Urbgen was as splendid as his steed, a vigorous man, broad-chested and strong-armed, and as active as any warrior half his age. He had been a sandy-coloured man, and now his hair and beard, as is the way with sand-fair men, had gone quite white, thick and fine. His face had been weathered by the summers of warfare and the winters of riding his cold marches. I knew him for a strong man, a stout ally, and a clever ruler.

He greeted me as civilly as if I had been the High King himself, and then I presented Morgan. She had dressed herself in primrose and white, and plaited the long dark hair with gold. She gave him a hand, a deep curtsy, and a cool cheek to kiss, then mounted the white mare and rode on beside him, meeting the stares of his retinue, and his own assessing looks, with unruffled composure. I saw Accolon drop back with a hot, sulky look, as Urbgen's party closed round the three of us, and we rode on at a gentle pace to the meeting of the three rivers where Luguvallium lay among the reddening trees of autumn.

The journey had been a good one, but its end was bad indeed, fulfilling the worst of my fears. Morgause came to the wedding.

Three days before the ceremony a messenger came galloping with the news that a ship had been sighted in the estuary, with the black sail and the badge of the Orcadians. King Urbgen rode to meet it at the harbour. I sent my own servant for news, and he was back with it, hotfoot, before the Orkney party could well have disembarked. King Lot was not there, he told me, but Queen Morgause had come, and in some state, I sent him south to Arthur with a warning; it would not be hard for him to find some excuse not to be present. Mercifully, I myself had no need to look far for a similar excuse: I had already arranged, at Urbgen's own request some days before, to ride out and inspect the signal stations along the estuary shore. With some dispatch, and perhaps a slight lack of dignity, I was gone from the city before Morgause's party arrived, nor did I return until the very eve of the wedding. Later I heard that Morgan, too, had avoided meeting her sister, but then it had hardly been expected of a bride so deep in preparations for a royal wedding.

So I was there to see the sisters meet, at the very gate of the church where, with the Christian rites, Morgan was to be married. Each of them, queen and princess, was splendidly dressed and magnificently attended. They met, spoke, and embraced, with smiles as pretty as pictures, and as fixedly painted on their mouths. Morgan, I thought, won the encounter, since she was dressed for her wedding, and shone as the bright center-piece to the feast-day. Her gown was magnificent, with its strain of purple sewn with silver. She wore a crown on her dark hair, and among the magnificent jewels that Urbgen had given her, I recognized some that Uther had given Ygraine in the early days of their passion. Her slim body was erect under the weight of her rich robes, her face pale and composed and very beautiful. To me she recalled the young Ygraine, full of power and grace. I hoped, with fervour, that the reports of the sisters' dislike of one another were true, and that Morgause would not manage to ingratiate herself, now that her sister stood on the threshold of position and power. But I was uneasy; I could see no other reason for the witch to have come to see her sister's triumph and be outshone by her both in consequence and beauty.

Nothing could take from Morgause the rose-gold beauty which, with her maturity, was, if anything, richer than ever. But it was whispered that she was once again with child, and she had brought with her, besides, another child, a boy. This was an infant, still in his nurse's arms. Lot's son; not the one for whom, half in hope, half in apprehension, I was looking.

Morgause had seen me looking. She smiled that little smile of hers as she made her reverence, then swept on into the church with her train. I, as Arthur's vicar in this, waited to present the bride. Obedient to my message, the High King was busying himself elsewhere.

Any hopes I had had of being able to avoid Morgause further were dashed at the wedding feast. She and I, as the two princes nearest to the bride, were placed side by side at the high table. The hall was the same one where Uther had held the victory feast that led to his death. In a room of this same castle she had lain with Arthur to conceive the child Mordred, and the next morning, in a bitter clash of wills, I had destroyed her hopes, and driven her away from Arthur's side. That, as far as she knew, had been our last encounter. She was still in ignorance — or so I hoped — of my journey to Dunpeldyr, and my vigil there.

I saw her watching me sideways, under the long white lids. I wondered suddenly, with misgiving, if she could be aware of my lack of defense against her now. Last time we had met she had tried her witch's tricks on me, and I had felt their potency, closing on the mind like a limed web. But she could no more have harmed me then than a she-spider could have hoped to trap a falcon. I had turned her spells back on herself, bearing her fury down by the sheer authority of power. That, now, had left me. It was possible that she could gauge my weakness. I could not tell. I had never underrated Morgause, and would not now.

I spoke with smooth civility. "You have a fine son, Morgause. What is he called?"

"Gawain."

"He has a strong look of his father."

Her lids drooped. "Both my sons," she said gently, "have a strong look of their father."

"Both?"

"Come, Merlin, where is your art? Did you believe the dreadful news when you heard it? You must have known it was not true."

"I knew it was not true that Arthur had ordered the killing, in spite of the calumny you laid on him."

"I?" The lovely eyes were wide and innocent.

"Yes, you. The massacre may have been Lot's doing, the hot fool, and it was certainly Lot's men who threw the babies into the boat and sent them out with the tide. But who provoked him to it? It was your plan from the first, was it not, even to the murder of that poor child in the cradle? And it was not Lot who killed Macha, and lifted the other child out of the blood and carried him into hiding." I echoed her own half-mocking tone. "Come, Morgause, where is your art? You should know better than to play the innocent with me."

At the mention of Macha's name I saw fear, like a green spark, leap in her eyes, but she gave no other sign. She sat still and straight, one hand curved round the stem of her goblet, turning it gently, so that the gold burned in the hot torchlight. I could see the pulse beating fast in the hollow of her throat.

It was a sour satisfaction, at best. I had been right. Mordred was alive, hidden, I guessed, somewhere in the cluster of islands called the Orkneys, where Morgause's writ ran, and where I, without the Sight, had no power to find him. Or, I reminded myself, the mandate to kill him if found.

"You saw?" Her voice was low.

"Of course, I saw. When could you hide things from me? You must know that everything is quite clear to me, and also — let me remind you — to the High King."

She sat still, and apparently composed, except for that rapid beat under the creamy flesh. I wondered if I had managed to convince her that I was still someone to be feared. It had not occurred to her that Lind might have come to me; and why should she ever remember Beltane? The necklet he had made for her jumped and sparkled on her throat. She swallowed, and said, in a thin voice that hardly carried through the hubbub of the hall: "Then you will know that, even though I saved him from Lot, I don't know where he is. Perhaps you will tell me?"

"Do you expect me to believe that?"

"You must believe it, because it is true. I don't know where he is." She turned her head, looking full at me. "Do you?"

I made no reply. I merely smiled, picked up my goblet, and drank from it. But, without looking at her, I sensed in her a sudden relaxation, and wondered, with a chill creeping of the skin, if I had made a mistake.

"Even if I knew," she said, "how could I have him by me, and he as like to his father as one drop of wine to another?" She drank, set the goblet down, then sat back in her chair, folding her hands over her gown so that the thickening of her belly showed. She smiled at me, malice and hatred with no trace of fear. "Prophesy about this, then, Merlin the enchanter, if you won't about the other. Will this be another son to take the place of the one I lost?"

"I have no doubt of it," I said shortly, and she laughed aloud.

"I'm glad to hear it. I have no use for girls." Her eyes went to the bride, sitting composed and straight beside Urbgen. He had drunk a good deal, and the red stood in his cheeks, but he kept his dignity, even though his eyes caressed his bride, and he leaned close to her chair. Morgause watched, then said with contempt: "So my little sister got her king in the end. A kingdom, yes, and a fine city and wide lands. But an old man, rising fifty, with sons already..." Her hand smoothed the front of her gown. "Lot may be a hot fool, as you termed him, but he is a man."

It was bait, but I did not rise to it. I said: "Where is he, that he could not come to the wedding?"

To my surprise she answered quite normally, apparently abandoning the malicious game of chess. Lot, it seemed, had gone east again into Northumbria with Urien, his sister's husband, and was busying himself there overseeing the extension to the Black Dyke. I have written of this before. It runs inland from the northern sea, and provides some sort of defense against incursions along the northeastern seaboard. Morgause spoke of it with knowledge, and in spite of myself I was interested, and in the talk that followed the atmosphere lightened; and then someone asked me a question about Arthur's wedding and the new young Queen, and Morgause laughed and said, quite naturally:

"What's the use of asking Merlin? He may know everything in the world, but ask him to describe a bridal, and I'll wager he doesn't even know the colour of the girl's hair or her gown!"

Then talk around us became general, with a lot of laughter, and speeches were made, and pledges given, and I must have drunk far more than I was accustomed to, because I well remember how the torchlight beat and swelled, bright and dark alternately, while talk and laughter surged and broke in gusts, and with it the woman's scent, a thick sweetness like honeysuckle, catching and trapping the sense as a limed twig holds a bee. The fumes of wine rose through it. A gold jug tilted, and my goblet brimmed again. Someone said, smiling, "Drink, my lord." There was a taste of apricots in my mouth, sweet and sharp; the skin had a texture like the fur of a bee, or a wasp dying in sunlight on a garden wall... And all the while eyes watching me, in excitement and wary hope, then in contempt, and in triumph... The servants were beside me, helping me from my chair, and I saw that the bride had gone already, and King Urbgen, impatience barely held on a tight rein, was watching the door for the sign that it was time to follow her to bed.

The chair beside me was empty. Round my own the servants crowded, smiling, to help me back to my rooms.

6

NEXT MORNING I HAD A HEADACHE as bad as anything that the aftermath of magic used to inflict on me. I kept to my rooms all day. On the day following I took leave of Urbgen and his queen. We had sat through a series of formal discussions before Morgause's arrival, and now I could leave the city — how thankfully, it may be guessed — and make my way southwest through the Wild Forest, at the heart of which stood Count Ector's castle of Galava. I took no leave of Morgause.

It was good to be out again, and this time with two companions only. Morgan's escort had been formed mainly of her own people from Cornwall, who had remained with her in Luguvallium. The two men who rode with me were deputed into my service by Urbgen; they would go with me as far as Galava, then return. It was vain for me to protest that I would rather go alone, and would be safe; King Urbgen merely repeated, smiling, that not even my magic would avail against wolves, or autumn fogs, or the sudden onslaught of early snow, which in that mountainous country can trap the traveller very quickly among the steep valley-passes, and bring him to his death. His words were a reminder to me that, armed as I was now with only the reputation of past power, and not the thing itself, I was as subject to outrage from thieves and desperate men as any solitary traveller in that wild country; so I accepted the escort with thanks, and in so doing I suppose I saved my life.

We rode out over the bridge, and along the pleasant green valley where the river winds, bordered with alder and willow. Though my headache had gone, and I felt well enough, a certain lassitude still hung about me, and I breathed the sweet, familiar air, full of pine scents and bracken scents, with gratitude.

One small incident I remember. As we left the city gates, and crossed the river bridge, I heard a shrill cry, which at first I took to be a bird's, one of the gulls that wheeled about the refuse on the river's banks. Then a movement caught my eye, and I glanced down to see a woman, carrying a child, walking on the shingle near the water's edge below the bridge. The child was crying, and she hushed it. She saw me, and stood quite still, staring upward. I recognized Morgause's nurse. Then my horse clattered off the bridge, and the willows hid woman and child from view.

I thought nothing of the incident, and in a short while had forgotten it. We rode on, through villages and farms rich in grazing cattle. The willows were golden, and the hazel groves a-scamper with squirrels. Late swallows gathered along the rooftops, and as we approached that nest of mountains and lakes that marks the southern limits of the great forest, the lower hills flamed in the sun with ripe bracken, rusty-gold between the rocks. Elsewhere the forest, scattered oaks and pines, was gold and dark. Soon we came to the edge of the Wild Forest itself, where the trees crowd so thickly in the valleys that they shut out the sun. Before long we crossed the track that led up to the Green Chapel. I would have liked to revisit the place, but this would have added hours to the journey, and besides, the visit could be made more easily from Galava. So we held on our way, staying with the road as far as Petrianae.

Today this hardly deserves the name of town, though in Roman times it was a prosperous market center. There is still a market, where a few cattle and sheep and goods exchange hands, but Petrianae itself is a poor cluster of daub-and-wattle huts, its only shrine a mere shell of stonework holding a ruinous altar to Mars, in his person of the local god Cocidius. I saw no offering there, except, on the mossed step, a leathern sling, such as shepherds use, and a pile of sling-stones. I wondered what escape, from wolf or wild man, the shepherd was giving thanks for.

Beyond Petrianae, we left the road and took to the hill tracks, which my escort knew well. We travelled at ease, enjoying the warmth of the late autumn sun. As we climbed higher the warmth still lingered, and the air was soft, but with a tingle to it that meant the first frosts were not far away.

We stopped to rest our horses in one high, lonely corrie where a small tarn lay cupped in stony turf, and here we came across a shepherd, one of those hardy hillmen who lodge all summer out on the fell tops with the little blue-fleeced sheep of Rheged. Wars and battles may move and clash below them, but they look up, rather than down, for danger, and at the first onslaught of winter take to the caves, faring thinly on black bread and raisins, and meal cakes made on a turf fire. They drive their flocks for safety into pens built between the rocky outcrops on the hillsides. Sometimes they do not hear another man's voice from lamb-time to clipping, and then on to autumn's end.

This lad was so little used to talking that he found speech hard, and what he did say came in an accent so thick that even the troopers, who were local men, could make nothing of it, and I, who have the gift of tongues, was hard put to it to understand him. He had, it seemed, had speech with the Old Ones, and was ready enough to pass on his news. It was negative, and none the worse for that. Arthur had stayed in Caerleon for almost a month after his wedding, then had ridden with his knights up through the Pennine Gap, heading apparently for Olicana and the Plain of York, where he would meet with the King of Elmet. This was hardly news to me, but at least it was confirmation that there had been no new war-move during the late autumn's peace. The shepherd had saved his best titbit till last. The High King (he called him young Emrys, with such a mixture of pride and familiarity that I guessed that Arthur's path must have crossed his in times past) had left his queen with child. At this the troopers were openly skeptical; maybe he had, was their verdict, but how, in a scant month, could anyone know for sure? I, when appealed to, was more credulous. As I have said, the Old Ones have ways of knowing that cannot be understood, but deserve to be respected. If the lad had heard this through them...?

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 the Wolf 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.

7

"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 the Wolf 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 the Caledonian Forest? Who was involved?"

He eyed me, I thought strangely, but answered readily enough. "Urbgen called me in. The enemy broke across country into Strathclyde, and Caw didn't manage to hold them. They would have forced their way down through the forest to the road. I came up with them, and broke them up and drove them back. The remnants fled south. I should have followed straight away, but then we found you, and I had to stay... How could I leave again, till I knew you were home, and cared for?"

"So I really did see the fighting? I wondered if it was part of the dream."

"You must have seen it all. We fought through the forest, along the river there. You know what it's like, good open ground with thin woodland, birch and alder, just the place for a surprise with fast cavalry. We had the hill at our backs, and took them as they reached the ford. The river was full; easy for horsemen, but for foot-soldiers a trap... Afterwards, when we came back from the first pursuit, people came running to tell me that you were there. You'd been found wandering among the dead and wounded and giving directions to the doctors... Nobody recognized you at first, but then the whispers started that Merlin's ghost was there." A wry little smile. "I gather that the ghost's advice was good, as often as not. But of course the whispers set up a scare, and some fools started throwing stones to drive you away. It was one of the orderlies, a man called Paulus, who recognized you, and put a stop to the ghost stories. He followed you back to where you were living, and then sent to me."

"Paulus. Yes, of course. A good man. I've worked with him often. And where was I living?"

"In a ruined turret, with an ancient orchard round it. You don't remember that?"

"No. But something is coming back. A turret, yes, ruinous, all ivy and owls. And apple trees?"

"Yes. It was little more than a pile of stones, with bracken for bedding, and piles of apples rotting, and a store of nuts, and rags hung to dry on the apple boughs." He paused to clear something from his throat. "They thought at first you were one of those wild hermits, and indeed, when I first saw you myself..." His smile twisted. "You looked the part better than you ever looked it at the Green Chapel."

"I can imagine that." And so I could. My beard, before they had shaved me, had grown long and grey, and my hands, lying weakly on the bright blankets, looked thin and old, bones held together with a net of knotted veins.

"So we brought you here. I had to go south again soon after. We caught them up at Caer Guinnion, and fought a bloody engagement there. All went well, but then a messenger came down from Galava with more news of you. When we found you and brought you here, you were strong enough on your feet, but crazy; you didn't know anyone, and you talked about things that made no kind of sense; but once here, and in the women's care, you relapsed into sleep and silence. Well, the messenger came after the battle to tell me that you had never woken. You seemed to fall into a high fever, still talking in the same wild way, then finally lay so long unconscious that they took you for dead, and sent the courier to tell me. I came as soon as I could."

I narrowed my eyes at him. The light from the window was strong. He saw this, and signed to the slave, who pulled a curtain across. "Let me get this clear. After you had found me in the forest and brought me to Galava, you went south. And there was another battle? Arthur, how long have I been here?"

"It is three weeks since we found you. But it is fully seven months since you wandered off into the forest and lost yourself. You were gone all winter. Is it any wonder that we thought you were dead?"

"Seven months?" Often, as a doctor, I have had to give this kind of news to patients who have been long feverish, or lying in coma, and I always see the same sort of incredulous, groping shock. I felt it now myself. To know that half a year had dropped out of time, and such a half year... What, in those months, might not have happened to a country as torn and as embattled as mine? And to her King? Other things, forgotten till now in the mists of illness, began to come back to me.

Looking at him, I saw again, with fear, the hollowed cheekbones and the smudge of sleepless nights beneath his eyes: Arthur, who ate like a young wolf and slept like a child; who was the creature of gaiety and strength. There had been no defeat in the field; his glory there had not suffered even the smear of a shadow. Nor could his anxiety for me have brought him to this pass. There remained his home.

"Emrys, what has happened?"

Once more, in that place, the childhood name came naturally. I saw his face twist as if the memory were a pain. He bent his head and stared down at the blankets.

"My mother, the Queen. She died."

Memory stirred. The woman lying in the great bed hung with rich stuffs? I had known, then. "I am sorry," I said.

"I heard just before we fought the battle at Caer Guinnion. Lucan brought the news, with the token you had left with him. You remember it, a brooch with the Christian symbol? Her death came as no surprise. We had expected it. But I believe that grief helped to hasten her death."

"Grief? Why, has there been — ?" I stopped dead. It had come back clearly now, the night in the forest, and the flask of wine I had opened to share with the troopers. And why. The vision stirred again, the moonlit chamber and the blowing curtains and the dead woman. Something closed my throat. I said, hardly: "Guenever?"

He nodded, not looking up.

I asked, knowing the answer: "And the child?"

He looked up quickly. "You knew? Yes, of course you would... It never came to term. They said she was with child, but shortly before Christmas she began to bleed, and then, at the New Year, died in great pain. If you had been there — " He stopped, swallowed, and was silent.

"I am sorry," I said again.

He went on, in a voice so hard that it sounded angry: "We thought you were dead, too. Then, after the battle, there you were, filthy and old and crazy, but the field surgeons said you might recover. That, at least, I had saved from the shambles of the winter... Then I had to leave you to go to Caer Guinnion. I won it, yes, but lost some good men. Then on the heels of the action Ector's courier came to tell me you were dead. When I got here at dawn yesterday I expected to find your body already burned or buried."

He stopped, put his forehead hard down on a clenched fist, and stayed so. The servant, rigid by the window, caught my eye, and went, softly. In a moment or two Arthur raised his head and spoke in his normal voice.

"Forgive me. All the time I was riding north, I kept remembering what you said about dying a shameful death. It was hard to bear."

"But here I am, clean and whole, with my wits clear, and ready to become clearer when you tell me all that has happened in the last seven months. Now, of your kindness, pour me some of that wine, and go back, if you will, to your journey into Elmet."

He obeyed me, and in a while talk became easier. He spoke of his journey through the Gap to Olicana, and what he had found there, and of his meeting with the King of Elmet. Then of his return to Caerleon, and of the Queen's miscarriage and death. This time, when I questioned him, he was able to answer me, and in the end I could give him the chilly comfort of knowing that my presence at court beside the young Queen could have been no help. Her doctors were skilled with drugs, and had saved her the worst of the pain; I could have done no more. The child was ill-conceived; nothing could have saved it, or its mother.

When he had heard what I had to tell him, he accepted this, and himself turned the subject. He was eager to hear what had happened to me, and impatient of the fact that I could remember little after the marriage feast at Luguvallium.

"Can you not remember anything of how you came to the turret where we found you?"

"A little. It comes clear bit by bit. I must have wandered about in the forest and kept myself alive somehow until winter. Then it seems to me as if some rude folk of the hill forest must have taken me in and cared for me. Without that, I doubt if I could have survived the snow. I thought they might be some of Mab's people, the Old Ones of the mountain country, but if so, they would surely have sent word to you."

"They did. Word came, but only after you had vanished again. As is usual, the Old Ones were snowed up in their high caves all winter, and you with them. They went hunting when the snow melted, and came back to their caves to find you gone. It was from them that I first heard that you had run mad. They had had to tie you, they said, but afterwards, at such times, you would be calm and very weak, and so it was at the time when they left you. When they got home, you had gone."

"I remember being bound. Yes. So after that I must have made my way downhill, and ended up in the ruin near the ford — I suppose, in my crazed way, still making for Galava. It was spring; I remember a little of that. Then the battle must have overtaken me, and you found me there in the forest. I recall nothing of that."

He told me again how I had been found, thin and filthy and talking no kind of sense, hiding in the ruined turret, with a kind of squirrel's hoard of acorns and beechnuts, and dried windfall apples put by, and a pigling with a splinted leg for company.

"So that part of it was real!" I said, smiling. "I can remember finding the creature, and healing the leg, but not much else. If I was as sharp set as you say, it was good of me not to eat Master Piglet. What happened to it?"

"It's here in Ector's sties." The first glimmer of humour touched his mouth. "And marked, I think, for a long and dishonourable life. There's not one of the boys would dare lay a hand on the enchanter's personal pig, which looks like growing up into a good fighting boar, so it will end up as king of the sty, which is only proper. Merlin, you've told me all you can remember of what happened after making camp up there on the Wolf Road; what do you remember before that? What made you ill? Urbgen's men said it came on suddenly. They thought it was poison, and so did I. I wondered if the witch had had you followed, after the wedding feast, and one of her creatures had dragged you from your bed that night while the trooper's back was turned. But if that had happened, surely they would have killed you? There was no suspicion of foul play from those two men; they were Urbgen's own, hand-picked."

"None at all. They were good fellows, and I owe them my life."

"They told me that you drank wine that night, from your own flask. They did not share it. They say, too, that you were drunk at the marriage feast. You? I have never seen you the worse for wine. And you sat beside Morgause. Have you any reason to believe that she drugged your wine?"

I opened my mouth to answer him, and to this day I swear that the word on my lips was "Yes." This, as far as I knew it, was the truth. But some god must have forestalled me. Instead of the Yes that my mind had framed, my lips said, "No."

I must have spoken strangely, because I saw him staring, arrested with narrowed eyes. It was a discomforting look, and I found myself elaborating. "How can I tell? But I don't think so. I have told you that I have no power now, but the witch would not know that. She is still afraid of me. She had tried before, not once but twice, to snare me with her woman's spells. Both times she failed, and I think she would not have dared try again."

He was silent for a while. Then he said, shortly: "When my Queen died, there was talk of poison. I wondered."

At this I could protest truthfully. "There always is, but I beg you will not regard it! From what you have told me, I am certain there was no such thing. Besides, how?" I added, as convincingly as I could: "Believe me, Arthur. If she were guilty, can you see any reason why I should want to protect Morgause from you?"

He still looked doubtful, but did not pursue it further. "Well," was all he said, "she'll find her wings clipped now for a while. She is back in Orkney, and Lot is dead."

I took this in silently. It was another shock. In these few months, how much had changed. "How?" I asked him. "And when?"

"In the forest battle. I can't say that I mourn him, except that he had that rat Aguisel under his fist, and I believe that I shall have trouble there soon."

I said slowly: "I have remembered something else. During the fighting in the forest I heard them calling to one another that the king was dead. It struck me with helpless grief. For me, there is only one King... But they must have been speaking of Lot. Well, yes, at least Lot was a known evil. Now, I suppose, Urien will have it all his own way in the northeast, and Aguisel with him... But there's time enough for that. Meanwhile, what of Morgause? She was carrying a child at Luguvallium, and should have been delivered by now. A boy?"

"Two. Twin sons, born at Dunpeldyr. She joined Lot there after Morgan's wedding. Witch or no witch," he said, with a trace of bitterness, "she is a good breeder of sons. By the time Lot joined us here in Rheged, he was bragging that he had left yet another in her before he quitted Dunpeldyr." He looked down at his hands. "You must have had speech with her at the wedding. Did you find anything out about the other boy?"

There was no need to ask which boy he meant. It seemed that he could not bring himself to say "my son."

"Only that he is alive."

His eyes came up quickly to mine. There was a flash in them, suppressed instantly. But I was sure that it was one of joy. So short a time ago, and he had looked for the child only to kill it.

I said, schooling my voice to hide the pity I felt: "She tells me that she does not know where he is to be found. She may be lying, I'm not sure of that. It must be true that she kept him hidden away from Lot. But she may bring him into the open now. What has she to fear, now that Lot has gone? Except, perhaps, from you?"

He was looking at his hands again. "She need not fear me now on that score," he said woodenly.

That is all I can remember of that interview. I heard someone saying, but the words seemed to go round the curved tower walls like a whispered echo, or like words in my head alone: "She is the falsest lady at this time alive, but she must live to rear her four sons by the King of Orkney, for they will be your faithful servants, and the bravest of your Companions."

I must have shut my eyes then, against the wave of exhaustion that broke over me, for when I opened them again it was dark, and Arthur had gone, and the servant knelt beside the bed, offering me a bowl of soup.

8

I AM A STRONG MAN, AND heal fast. I was on my feet again soon after this, and, some two or three weeks later, thought myself fit enough to ride south in Arthur's wake. He had gone the next morning, riding down to Caerleon. Since then a courier had brought news that longships had been sighted in the Severn estuary, so it looked as if the King would soon have another battle on his hands.

I would have liked to stay a while longer at Galava, perhaps to pass the summer in that familiar country, and to revisit my old haunts in the forest. But after the courier's visit, though Ector and Drusilla tried to keep me, I thought it high time to be gone. The battle now imminent would be fought from Caerleon: indeed, it was possible (the dispatch had said) that the invaders were attempting in force to destroy the war-leader's main stronghold and supply center. I had no doubt that Arthur would hold Caerleon, but it was time I got back to Caer Camel to see how Derwen had been doing in my absence.

It was high summer when I saw the place again, and Derwen's team had done wonders. There it stood on its steep, flat-topped hill, the vision made real. The outer works were complete, the great double wall, of dressed stone topped with timber, running along the rim of the slope to crown the whole crest of the hill. Piercing it at their two opposing corners, the vast gateways were finished, and impressive. Great double doors of oak, studded with iron, stood open, pulled back to wall the tunnels that led in through the thick rampart. Above them went the sentry-way behind its battlements.

Moreover, there were sentries there. Since winter, Derwen told me, the King had had the place invested, so that the work of finishing could proceed inside defended walls. And finished it soon would be. Arthur had sent word that, come July or August, he wanted to be there with the knights-companions and all his cavalry.

Derwen was all for pressing on with the headquarters buildings, and with the King's own rooms, but I knew Arthur's mind better than that. I had given instructions that the men's barracks, and the horse-lines, the kitchens and service quarters must be completed first, and this had been done. A good start had been made, too, on the central buildings: the King, certainly, must lodge under skins and temporary timber, as if he were still in the field, but his great hall was built and roofed, and carpenters were at work on the long tables and benches within.

There had been no lack of local help. The folk who lived nearby, thankful to see a strong place going up near their settlements, had come whenever they could to fetch and carry, or to lend their skills to our own workmen. With them came many who were willing, but too old or too young to labour. Derwen would have sent them away, but I set them to clearing the nettle-grown trenches of a site not far from headquarters where formerly there must have been a shrine. I did not know, and nor did they, to what god it had been consecrated; but I know soldiers, and all fighting men need some center-point, with a light and an offering, to tempt their god down among them for a moment of communion, when strength can be received in return for hope and faith.

Similarly, the spring on the northern embankment, which was enclosed within the outer works of the fortification, I set the women to clearing. This they did eagerly, for it was known that, time out of mind, the spring had been dedicated to the Goddess herself. For many years now it had been neglected, and sunk in a tangle of thorny growth that prevented them from making their offerings and sending up the sort of prayers that women send. Now the woodmen had hacked the thickets down, so I let the women make their own shrine. They sang as they worked; they had been afraid, I think, that their sacred place would be shut away in an enclave of men. I told them not so: when once the Saxon power was broken, it was the High King's plan that men and women should come and go in peace, and Caer Camel would be a fair city set on a hill, rather than a camp of fighting men.

Finally, on the lowest part of the field, near the northeast gate, we cleared a place for the people and their cattle, where they could take refuge, and live, if need be, till danger was past.

Then Arthur came. In the night the Tor flamed suddenly, and beyond the flame could be seen the point of light that was the beacon hill behind. In the early morning sunlight he came riding along the Lake's edge, at the head of his knights. White was still his colour; he rode his white war-horse; his banner was white, and his shield also, too proud for a device such as the others wore. He shone out of the misty landscape like a swan on the pearled reaches of the Lake. Then the cavalcade was lost to sight beyond the trees that crowded the base of the hill, and presently the beat of hoofs came steadily on, and up the new curling road to the King's Gate.

The double gates stood open to receive him. Inside them, lining the newly paved road, waited all those who had built the place for him. So for the first time Arthur, duke of battles, High King among the other kings of Britain, entered the stronghold which was to be his own fair city of Camelot.

Of course he was pleased with it, and that night a feast was held, to which everyone — man, woman or child — who had lent a hand to the work was bidden. He and his knights, with Derwen and myself and a few others, sat in the hall, at the long table so newly sanded that the dust still hung in the air and made haloes round the torches. It was a joyous occasion, without form or solemnity, like a feast on a victory field. He made some kind of speech of welcome — of which I now remember no single word — pitching his voice so that the people pressing outside the doors could hear him; then, once we in the hall had started eating, he left his place at the table's head, and, with a mutton bone in one hand and a goblet in the other, went the rounds of the place, sitting with this group or that, dipping into a pot with the masons or letting the carpenters ply him from the mead-barrel, all the time looking, questioning, praising, with all his old, shining way. In a short while, their awe of him melting, they pelted their questions like snowballs. What had happened at Caerleon? In Linnuis? In Rheged? When would he settle here? Was it likely that the Saxons could press this far and get across the downs? What was Eosa's strength? Were the stories — of this, that, and the other thing — true? All of which he answered patiently: what men knew they must face, they would face; it was the fear of surprise and the arrow in the dark that unmanned the hardiest.

It was all in the style of the old Arthur, the young King I knew. His looks matched it, too. The fatigue and despair had gone; grief had been laid aside; this was once again the King who held all men's eyes, and whose strength they felt they could draw on for ever, and never weaken him. By morning there would be no one there who would not willingly die in his service. That he knew this, and was fully aware of the effect he made, did not detract one whit from his greatness.

As usually happened, we had a word together before sleep. He was housed simply, but better than in a field tent. A roof of leather had been stretched across the beams of his half-finished sleeping chamber, and rugs laid. His own camp bed had been put against a wall, with the table and reading lamp he worked with, and a pair of chairs and the clothes chest and the stand with the silver bowl and water-jug.

We had not spoken privately since Galava. He asked after my health, and spoke of the work I had done at Caer Camel, and then of what still remained to do. What had happened in the Caerleon fighting I had heard already, in the talk at table. I said something about the change in him. He looked at me for a moment or two, then, apparently, came to a decision.

"There's something I wanted to say to you, Merlin. I don't know if I have any right, but I shall say it all the same. When you last saw me, at Galava, sick as you were, you must have seen something of what I was feeling. In fact, how could you help it? As usual, I laid all my troubles on you, regardless of whether you were fit to bear them or not."

"I don't remember that. We talked, yes. I asked you what had happened, and you told me."

"I did indeed. Now I am asking you to bear with me again. This time, I hope, I am laying nothing on you, but..." A brief pause, to gather his thoughts. He seemed oddly hesitant. I wondered what was coming. He went on: "You once said to me that life divided itself into light and dark, just as time does into day and night. It's true. One misfortune seems to breed another, and so it was with me. That was a time of darkness — the first I had suffered. When I came to you I was half-broken with weariness, and with the weight of losses coming one on the other, as if the world had turned sour, and my luck was dead. The loss of my mother, by itself, could be no great grief to me; you know my heart about that, and to tell you the truth, I would grieve more over Drusilla's death, or Ector's. But the death of my Queen, little Guenever... It could have been a good marriage, Merlin. We could, I believe, have come to love. What made that grief so bitter was the loss of the child, and the waste of her young life in pain, and with it, besides, the fear that she had been murdered, and by my enemies. Added to that — and I can admit this to you — was the weary prospect of having to start all over again to look for a suitable match, and going once more through all the ritual of mating, when so much else lies waiting for me to do."

I said quickly: "You surely do not still believe that she was murdered?"

"No. You have set my mind at rest there, as you have about your own sickness. I had the same fear about you, that your death had been my fault." He paused, and then said flatly: "And that was the worst. It came as the final loss, overtopping all the others." A gesture, half-shamefaced, half-resigned. "You have told me, not once but many times, that when I looked for you in need, you would be there. And always, until then, it was true. Then suddenly, at the dark time, you were gone. And with so much still to do. Caer Camel just begun, and more fighting expected, and after that, the settlements and the law-giving, and the making of civil order... But you were gone — murdered, I thought, through my fault, like my little Queen. I could not think past it. I did not kill the children at Dunpeldyr, but by God, I could have killed the Queen of Orkney, had she crossed my path during those months!"

"I understand this. I think I knew it. Go on."

"You have heard, now, about my victories in the field during this time. To other men it must have seemed as if my fortunes were rising to their peak. But to me, mainly because of your loss, I felt life at its blackest depth. Not only for grief at the loss of what lies between us, the long friendship — guardianship — I would say love — but for a reason I don't have to remind you of again. You know I have been used to turn to you for everything, except in matters of warfare."

I waited, but he did not go on. I said: "Well, that is my function. No one man, even a High King, can do it all. You are young still, Arthur. Even my father Ambrosius, with all his years behind him, took advice at every turn. There is no weakness in this. Forgive me, but it is a sign of youth to think so."

"I know. I don't think it. This is not what I am trying to say. I want to tell you of something that happened while you were sick. After the battle in Rheged, I took hostages. The Saxons fled into a thick wood on a hill — above the turret where we found you just after. We surrounded the hill, and then drove in on all sides, killing, until the few who were left surrendered. I believe they might have yielded sooner, but I gave them no chance. I wanted to kill. At the last, those few who were left threw down their arms and came out. We took them. One of them was Colgrim's former second-in-command, Cynewulf. I would have killed him then and there, but he had yielded his arms. I loosed him on the promise to take his ships and go; and I took hostages."

"Yes? It was a wise try. We know it did not work." I said it without expression. I guessed what was coming. I had heard the tale already, from others.

"Merlin, when I heard that, instead of going back to Germany, Cynewulf had turned in again to our coasts, and was burning villages, I had the hostages killed."

"It was not your choice. Cynewulf knew. It was what he would have done."

"He is a barbarian, and an outlander. I am not. Granted Cynewulf knew. He may have thought I would not carry out the threat. Some of them were no more than boys. The youngest was thirteen, younger than I was when I first fought. They were brought to me, and I ordered it."

"Rightly. Now forget it."

"How? They were brave. But I had threatened it and so I did it. You spoke of the change in me. You were right. I am not the man I was before this past winter-time. This was the first thing I have done in war that I knew to be evil."

I thought of Ambrosius at Doward; of myself at Tintagel. I said: "We have all done things that we could like to forget. It may be that war itself is evil."

"How could it be?" He spoke impatiently. "But I'm not telling you about it now because I want either your advice or your comfort." I waited, at a loss. He went on, picking his words: "It was the worst thing I have had to do. I did it, and I will abide by it. What I have to say now is this: if you had been there, I would have turned to you, as always, and asked for your counsel. And though you have said that you no longer have the power of prophecy, I would still have hoped — been sure — that you could see what the future held, and would guide me in the path I ought to take."

"But this time your prophet was dead, so you chose your own path?"

"Just so."

"I understand. You offer me this as comfort, that both act and decision can be safely left to you, even though I am here again? Knowing, as we both do, that your 'prophet' is still dead?"

"No." He spoke quickly, strongly. "You have mistaken me. I am offering you comfort, yes, but of a different kind. Do you think I don't know that it has been a dark time with you, too, ever since the raising of the sword? Forgive me if I am meddling in matters I don't understand, but looking back at what has passed, I think... Merlin, what I am trying to tell you is this, that I believe your god is with you still."

There was silence. Through it came the flutter of the flame in the bronze lamp, and, infinitely far away, the noises of the camp outside. We looked at one another, he still in early manhood, myself aged and (as I knew) sorely weakened by my recent sickness. And subtly, between us, the balance was changing; had, perhaps, already changed. He, to offer me strength and comfort. Your god is with you still. How could he think so? He had only to recall my lack of anything but the most trivial tricks of magic, my want of defense against Morgause, my inability to find out anything about Mordred. But he had spoken, not with the passionate conviction of youth, but with the calm certainty of a judge.

I thought back, for the first time pushing aside the apathy that, since my sickness, had succeeded the earlier mood of tranquil acceptance. I began to see which way his thoughts had gone. One could say they were the thoughts of a general who can lift a victory out of a planned retreat. Or a leader of men who is able, with a word, to give or withhold confidence.

Your god is with you, he had said. With me, perhaps, in the poisoned cup, and the suffering months that had withdrawn me from Arthur's side, and forced him into solitary power? With me (though this he did not know) in the still whisper that had led me to deny the poisoning, and so save from his vengeance Morgause, the mother of those four sons...? With me in the losing of Mordred, whose survival had brought that glow of joy to Arthur's eye? As he would be with me, even, when at length I went to the living burial I feared, and left Arthur alone on middle-earth, with Mordred his fate still at large?

Like the first breath of living wind to the sailor becalmed and starving, I felt hope stir. It was, then, not enough to accept, to wait on the god's return in all his light and strength. In the dark ebbtide, as much as in the flow, could be felt the full power of the sea.

I bowed my head, like a man accepting a king's gift. There was no need to speak. We read one another's minds. He said, with an abrupt change of tone: "How long before this place is complete?"

"In full fighting order, another month. It is virtually ready now."

"So I judged. I can transfer now from Caerleon, foot, horse, and baggage?"

"Whenever you please."

"And then? What have you planned for yourself, until you are needed again to build for peace?"

"I've made no plans. Go home, perhaps."

"No. Stay here."

It sounded like an order. I raised my brows.

"Merlin, I mean it. I want you here. We need not split the High King's power in two before the time comes when we must. Do you understand me?"

"Yes."

"Then stay. Make a place for yourself here, and stay away from your marvellous Welsh cave for a while longer."

"For a while longer," I promised him, smiling. "But not here, Arthur. I need silence and solitude, things hard to come by within reach of such a city as this will become, once you are here as High King. May I look for a place, and build a house? By the time you are ready to hang your sword up on the wall over your chair of state, my marvellous cave will be here, nearby, and the hermit installed, ready to join your counsels. If, by that time, you remember to need him."

He laughed at that, and seemed content, and we went to our beds.

9

NEXT DAY ARTHUR AND HIS Companions rode back to Ynys Witrin, and I went with them. We were going by invitation of King Melwas and his mother, the queen, to attend a ceremony of thanks for the King's recent victories.

Now, although there was a Christian church on Ynys Witrin, and a monastic settlement on the hill near the holy well, the ruling deity of that ancient island was still the Goddess herself, the Mother whose shrine has been there time out of mind, and who is served still by her priestesses, the ancillae. It is a cult similar to, but I believe older than, the keeping of the Vestal fire of old Rome. King Melwas, along with most of his people, was a follower of the older gods; and — which was more important — his mother, a formidable old woman, worshipped the Goddess, and had been generous to her priestesses. The present Lady of the shrine (the high priestess, as representing the Goddess, took this title) was related to her.

Though Arthur himself had been brought up in a Christian household, I was not surprised when he accepted Melwas' invitation. But there were those who were. As we assembled near the King's Gate, ready for the ride, I caught one or two looks thrown at him by his Companions, with, here and there, a hint of uneasiness.

Arthur caught my eye — we were waiting while Bedwyr had some word with the guard at the gate — and grinned. He spoke softly. "Do I have to explain to you?"

"By no means. You have bethought yourself that Melwas is to be your near neighbour, and has helped you considerably in the building here. You also see the wisdom of pleasing the old queen. And naturally you are remembering Dewdrop and Blackberry, and what you were told about placating the Goddess."

"Dewdrop and — ? Oh, the old man's cows! Yes, of course! I might have known you would get straight to it! As a matter of fact I had a message from the Lady herself. The folk of the island want to give thanks for the year's victories, and call a blessing on Caer Camel. I'm living in fear in case someone tells them that I wore Ygraine's token through the fighting at Caer Guinnion!"

He was speaking of the brooch with the name MARIA engraved around the rim. This is the name of the Christians' goddess. I said: "I doubt if it need trouble you. That shrine is as old as the earth it stands on, and whichever Lady you speak to there, the same one will hear you. There is only one, from the beginning. Or so I think... But what will the bishops say?"

"I am High King," said Arthur, and left it at that. Bedwyr joined us then, and we rode out through the gateway.

It was a gentle, grey day, with the promise of summer rain somewhere in the clouds. We were soon clear of the woodland, and into the marsh country. To either side of the road the water stretched, grey and ruffled, as the lynx-paws of the breeze crossed and recrossed it. Poplars whitened in the wayward gusts, and the willows dipped, trailing, in the shallows. Islets and willow-groves and tracts of marshland lay seemingly afloat on the silver surface, their images blurred with the breeze. The paved road, mantled with moss and fern as most roads soon are in that low-lying land, led through this wilderness of reeds and water toward the ridge of high ground that lay like an arm half-encircling one end of the Island. Hoofs rang suddenly on stone, and the road topped a gentle rise. Ahead now was the Lake itself, lying like a sea moating the Island, its waters unbroken save for the narrow causeway that led the road across, and here and there the boats of fishermen, or the barges of the marsh-dwellers.

From this shining sheet of water rose the hill called the Tor, shaped like a giant cone, as symmetrical as if hand-built by men. It was flanked by a gentler, rounded hill, and beyond that by another, a long, low ridge, like a limb drawn up in the water. Here lay the wharfs; one could see masts like reeds beyond a dip in the green. Beyond the Island's triple hill, stretching into the distance, was a great shining level of water, sown with sedge and bulrush and the clusters of reed thatch among the willows where the marsh people lived. It was all one long, shifting, moving glimmer, as far as the sea. One could see why the Island was called Ynys Witrin, the Isle of Glass. Sometimes, now, men call it Avalon.

There were orchards everywhere on Ynys Witrin. The trees crowded so thickly along the harbour ridge and up the lower slopes of the Tor that only the plumes of wood-smoke, rising among the boughs, showed where the village lay. (King's capital though it was, it could earn no grander title.) A short way up the hill, above the trees, could be seen the cluster of huts, like hives, where the Christian hermits lived, and the holy women. Melwas left them alone; they even had their own church, built near the Goddess's shrine. The church was a humble affair made of wattle and mud, and roofed with thatch. It looked as if the first bad storm would blow it clean out of the ground.

Far different was the shrine of the Goddess. It was said that with the centuries the land itself had slowly grown up around it, and possessed it, so that now it lay beneath the level of men's footing, like a crypt. I had never seen it. Men were not normally received within its precincts, but today the Lady herself, with the veiled and white-clad women and girls behind her, all bearing flowers, waited to welcome the High King. The old woman beside her, with the rich mantle, and the royal circlet on her grey hair, must be Melwas' mother, the queen. Here she took precedence of her son. Melwas himself stood off to one side, among his captains and young men. He was a thickset, handsome fellow, with a curled cap of brown hair, and a glossy beard. He had never married: rumour had it that no woman had ever passed the test of his mother's judgment.

The Lady greeted Arthur, and two of the youngest maidens came forward and hung his neck with flowers. There was singing, all women's voices, high and sweet. The grey sky parted and let through a glint of sunlight. It was seen as an omen; people smiled and looked at one another, and the singing grew more joyous. The Lady turned, and with her women led the way down the long flight of shallow steps into the shrine. The old queen followed, and after her Arthur, with the rest of us. Lastly Melwas came, with his followers. The common folk stayed outside. All through the ceremony we could hear the muttering and shifting, as they waited to catch another look at the legendary Arthur of the nine battles.

The shrine was not large; our company filled it to capacity. It was dimly lit, with no more than half a dozen scented lamps, grouped to either side of the archway that led to the inner sanctuary. In the smoky light the white robes of the women shone ghostly. Veils hid their faces and covered their hair and floated, cloudy, to the ground. Of them all, only the Lady herself could be seen clearly: she stood full in the lamplight, stoled with silver, and wearing a diadem that caught what light there was. She was a queenly figure; one could well believe that she came of royal stock.

Veiled, too, was the inner sanctuary; no one save the initiated — not even the old queen herself — would ever see beyond that curtain. The ceremony that we saw (though it would not be seemly to write of it here) would not be the customary one sacred to the Goddess. It was certainly lengthy; we endured two hours of it, standing crowded together; but I suspect that the Lady wanted to make the most of the occasion, and who was to blame her if thoughts of future patronage were in her mind? But it came to an end at last. The Lady accepted Arthur's gift, presented it with the appropriate prayer, and we emerged in due order into the daylight, to receive the shouts of the people.

It was a small incident, which might have left no mark in my memory, but for what came later. As it is, I can still recall the soft, lively feel of the day, the first drops of rain that blew in our faces as we left the shrine, and the thrush's song from the thorn tree standing deep in summer grass spiked with pale orchis and thick with the gold of the small flower they call the Lady's Slipper. The way to Melwas' palace lay through precincts of summer lawn, where among the apple trees grew flowers that could not have come there in nature, all with their uses, as well I knew, in medicine or magic. The ancillae practised healing, and had planted the virtuous herbs. (I saw no other kind. The Goddess is not the same whose bloody knife was thrown, once, from the Green Chapel.) At least, I thought, if I have to live hereabouts, the country is a better garden for my plants than the open hillside at home.

With that, we came to the palace, and were welcomed by Melwas into his hall of feasting.

The feast was much like any other, except (as was natural in that place) for the excellence and variety of the fish dishes. The old queen occupied the central position at the high table, with Arthur to one side of her and Melwas to the other. None of the women from the shrine, not even the Lady herself, was present. What women there were, I noticed with some amusement, were far from being beauties, and were none of them young. Rumour had perhaps been right about the queen. I recalled a glance and a smile passing between Melwas and a girl in the crowd: well, the old woman could not watch him all the time. His other appetites were well enough; the food was plentiful and well cooked, though nothing fanciful, and there was a singer with a pleasant voice. The wine, which was good, came (we were told) from a vineyard forty miles off, on the chalk. It had recently been destroyed by one of the sharp incursions of the Saxons, who had begun to come closer this summer.

Once this was said, it was inevitable which way the talk would go. Between dissection of the past and discussion of the future, time passed quickly, with Arthur and Melwas in accord, which augured well.

We left before midnight. A moon coming toward the full gave a clear light. She hung low and close behind the beacon at the summit of the Tor, marking with sharp shadows the walls of Melwas' stronghold, a fort rebuilt on the site of some ancient hilltop fastness. It was a place for retreat in times of trouble: his palace, where we had been entertained, stood below, on the level near the water.

We were none too soon. A mist was rising from the Lake. Pale wreaths of it eddied across the grass, below the trees, smoking to our horses' knees. Soon the causeway would be hidden. Melwas, escorting us with his torch-bearers, guided us across the pale fog that was the Lake, and up into clear air, onto the ringing stone of the ridge. Then he made his farewells, and set off for home.

I drew rein, looking back. From here, of the three hills that made the island, only the Tor was visible, rising from a lake of cloud. From the shrouding mist near its foot could be seen the red torchlit glow of the palace, not yet quenched for the night. The moon had sailed clear of the Tor into a dark sky. Near the beacon tower, on the rising spiral of the road to the high fortress, a light flickered and moved.

My flesh crept, like a dog's at the sight of a specter. A wisp of mist lay there, high, and across it a shadow strode, like a giant's. The Tor was a known gate to the Otherworld; for a flash I wondered if, with the Sight come back to me, I was watching one of the guardians of the place, one of the fiery spirits who keep the gate. Then my sight cleared, and I saw that it was a man with a torch, running up the steep of the Tor to light the beacon fire.

As I set spurs to my horse I heard Arthur's voice, lifted in quick command. A rider detached himself from the cavalcade and leaped forward at a stretched gallop. The others, silent all at once, followed him, fast but collected, while behind us the flames went up into the night, calling Arthur of the nine battles to yet another fight.

10

THE INVESTING OF CAER CAMEL saw the start of the new campaign. Four more years it took: siege and skirmish, flying attack and ambush — except during the midwinter months he was never at rest. And twice more, towards the end of that time, he triumphed over the enemy in a major engagement.

The first of these battles was joined in response to a call from Elmet. Eosa himself had landed from Germany, at the head of fresh Saxon war-bands, to be joined by the East Saxons already established north of the Thames. Cerdic added a third point to the spear with a force brought by longboat from Rutupiae. It was the worst threat since Luguvallium. The invaders came swarming in force up the Vale, and were threatening what Arthur had long foreseen, to break through the barrier of the mountains by the Gap. Surprised and (no doubt) disconcerted by the readiness of the fort at Olicana, they were checked and held there, while the message was sent flashing south for Arthur. The East Saxon force, which was considerable, was concentrated on Olicana; the King of Elmet held them there, but the others streamed westward through the Gap. Arthur, heading fast up the west road, reached the Tribuit fort before them and, re-forming there in strength, caught them at Nappa Ford. He vanquished them there, in a bloody struggle, then threw his fast cavalry up through the Gap to Olicana, and, side by side with the King of Elmet, drove the enemy back into the Vale. From there a movement beyond countering, right back, east and south, until the old frontiers contained them, and the Saxon "king," looking round on his bleeding and depleted forces, admitted defeat.

A defeat, as it turned out, all but final. Such was Arthur's name now that its very mention had come to mean victory, and "the coming of Arthur" a synonym for salvation. The next time he was called for — it was the clearing-up operation of the long campaign — no sooner had the dreaded cavalry with the white horse at its head and the Dragon glinting over the helmets showed in the mountain pass of Agned than the enemy fell into the disarray of near panic, so that the action was a pursuit rather than a battle, a clearing of territory after the main action. Through all this fighting, Gereint (who knew every foot of the territory) was with the calvary, with a command worthy of him. So Arthur rewarded service.

Eosa himself had received a wound in the fighting at Nappa. He never took the field again. It was the young Cerdic, the Aetheling, who led the Saxons at Agned, and did his best to hold them against the terror of Arthur's onslaught. It was said that afterwards, as he withdrew — in creditable order — to the waiting longboats, he made a vow that when he next set foot on British territory, he would stay, and not even Arthur should prevent him.

For that, as I could have told him, he would have to wait till Arthur was no longer there.

It was never my intention here to give details of the years of battle. This is a chronicle of a different kind. Besides, everyone knows now about his campaign to free Britain and cleanse her shores of the Terror. It was all written down in that house up in Vindolanda, by Blaise, and the solemn, quiet clerk who came from time to time to help him. Here I will only repeat that never once during the years it took him to fight the Saxons to a standstill was I able to bring prophecy or magic to his aid. The story of those years is one of human bravery, of endurance and of dedication. It took twelve major engagements, and some seven years' hard work, before the young King could count the country safe at last for husbandry and the arts of peace.

It is not true, as the poets and singers would have it, that Arthur drove all the Saxons from the shores of Britain. He had come to recognize, as Ambrosius did, that it was impossible to clear lands that stretched for miles of difficult country, and which had, moreover, the easy retreat of the seas behind. Since the time of Vortigern, who first invited the Saxons into Britain as his allies, the southeast shore of our country had been settled Saxon territory, with its own rulers and its own laws. There was some justification for Eosa's assumption of the title of king. Even had it been possible for Arthur to clear the Saxon Shore, he would have had to drive out settlers of perhaps the third generation, who had been born and bred within these shores, and make them take ship back to their grandfathers' country, where they might meet as harsh a welcome as here. Men fight desperately for their homes when the alternative is to be homeless. And, while it was one thing to win the great pitched battles, he knew that to drive men into the hills and forests and waste places, whence they could never be dislodged, or even pinned down and fought, was to invite a long war which could have no victory. He had before him the example of the Old Ones: they had been dispossessed by the Romans and had fled into the waste places of the hills; four hundred years later they were still there, in their remote mountain fastnesses, and the Romans themselves had gone. So, accepting the fact that there must be still Saxon kingdoms lodged within the shores of Britain, Arthur set himself to see that their boundaries were secure, and that for very fear their kings would hold to them.

So he passed his twentieth year. He came back to Camelot at the end of October, and plunged straight away into council. I was there, appealed to sometimes, but in the main watching and listening only: the counsel I gave him I gave in private, behind closed doors. In the public sight the decisions were his. Indeed, they were his as often as mine, and as time went on I was content to let his judgement have its way. He was impulsive sometimes, and in many matters still lacked experience or precedent; but he never let his judgement be ridden by impulse, and he maintained, in spite of the arrogance that success might be expected to bring with it, the habit of letting men talk their fill, so that when finally the King's decision was announced, each man thought that he had had a say in it.

One of the things that was brought up at length was the question of a new marriage. I could see he had not expected this; but he kept silent, and after a while grew easier, and listened to the older men. They were the ones who knew names and pedigrees and land-claims by heart. It came to me also, watching, that they were the ones who, when Arthur was first proclaimed, would have nothing to do with the claim. Now not even his own companion knights could show more loyal. He had won the elders, as he had won all else. You would have thought each one of them had discovered him unknown in the Wild Forest, and handed him the sword of the Kingdom.

You would also have thought that each man was discussing the marriage of a favourite son. There was much beard-stroking and head-wagging, and names were suggested and discussed, and even wrangled over, but none met with general acclaim, until one day a man from Gwynedd, who had fought right through the wars with Arthur, and was a kinsman of Maelgon himself, got to his feet and made a speech about his home country.

Now when you get a black Welshman on his feet and ready to talk, it is like inviting a bard; the thing is done in order, in cadence, and at very great length; but such was this man's way, and such the beauty of his speaking voice, that after the first few minutes men settled back comfortably to listen, as they might have listened at a feast.

His subject seemed to be his country, the loveliness of its valleys and hills, the blue lakes, the creaming seas, the deer and eagles and the small singing-birds, the bravery of the men and the beauty of the women. Then we heard of the poets and singers, the orchards and flowery meadows, the riches of sheep and cattle and the veined minerals in the rock. From this there followed the brave history of the land, battles and victories, courage in defeat, the tragedy of young death and the fecund beauty of young love.

He was getting near his point. I saw Arthur stir in his great chair.

And, said the speaker, the country's wealth and beauty and bravery were all there invested in the family of its kings, a family which (I had ceased to listen closely; I was watching Arthur through the light of a badly flaring lamp, and my head ached) — a family which seemed to have a genealogy as ancient and twice as long as Noah's...

There was, of course, a princess. Young, lovely, sprung from a line of ancient Welsh kings joined with a noble Roman clan. Arthur himself came from no higher stock... And now one saw why the long-drawn panegyric, and the eye slightly askance at the young King.

Her name, it seemed, was Guinevere.

I saw them again, the two of them. Bedwyr, dark and eager, with eyes of love fixed on the other boy; Arthur-Emrys, at twelve years old the leader, full of energy and the high fire of living. And the white shadow of the owl drifting overhead between them; the guenhwyvar of a passion and a grief, of high endeavour and a quest that would take Bedwyr into a world of spirit and leave Arthur lonely, waiting there at the center of glory to become himself a legend and himself a grail...

I came back to the hall. The pain in my head was fierce. The fitful, dazzling light struck like a spear against my eyes. I could feel the sweat trickling down beneath my robe. My hands slipped on the carved arms of the chair. I fought to steady my breathing, and the hammer-beat of my heart.

No one had noticed me. Time had passed. The formality of the Council had broken up. Arthur was the center now of a group, talking and laughing; about the table the older men sat still, relaxed and easy, chatting among themselves. Servants had come in, and wine was being poured. The talk was all around me, like water rising. In it could be heard the notes of triumph and release. It was done; there would be a new queen, and a new succession. The wars were over, and Britain, alone of Rome's old subject lands, was safe behind her royal ramparts for the next span of sunlit time.

Arthur turned his head and met my eyes. I neither moved nor spoke, but the laughter died out of his face, and he got to his feet. He came over as quickly as a spear starting for the mark, waving his companions back out of earshot.

"Merlin, what is it? This wedding? You cannot surely think that it —"

I shook my head. The pain went through it like a saw. I think I cried out. At the King's move there had been a hush; now there was complete silence in the hall. Silence, and eyes, and the unsteady dazzle of the flames.

He leaned forward, as if to take my hand. "What is it? Are you ill? Merlin, can you speak?"

His voice swelled, echoed, was whirled away. It did not concern me. Nothing concerned me but the necessity of speech. The lamp-flames were burning somewhere in my breast, their hot oil spilling in bubbles through my blood. Breath came thick and piercing, like smoke in the lungs. When I found words at last they surprised me. I had seen nothing beyond the chamber long ago in the Perilous Chapel, and the vision which might or might not have meant anything. What I heard myself saying, in a harsh and ringing voice that brought Arthur up like a blow, and startled every man to his feet, had a very different burden.

"It is not over yet, King! Get you to horse, and ride! They have broken the peace, and soon they will be at Badon! Men and women are dying in their blood, and children cry, before they are spitted like chickens. There is no king near to protect them. Get you there now, duke of the kings! This is for you alone, when the people themselves cry out for you! Go with your Companions, and put a finish to this thing! For by the Light, Arthur of Britain, this is the last time, and the last victory! Go now!"

The words went ringing into total silence. Those who had never before heard me speak with power were pale: all made the sign. My breathing was loud in the hush, like that of an old man fighting to stave off death.

Then from the crowd of younger men came sounds of disbelief, even scoffing. It was not to be wondered at. They had heard stories of my past deeds, but so many of these were patently poets' work, and all, having gone already into song, had taken the high colour of legend. Last time I had spoken so had been at Luguvallium, before the raising of the sword, and some of them had been children then. These knew me only as engineer and man of medicine, the quiet counsellor whom the King favoured.

The muttering was all around me, wind in the trees.

"There has been no signal; what is he talking about? As if the High King could go off on his bare word, for a scare like this! Arthur has done enough, and so have we; the peace is settled, anyone can see that! Badon? Where is it? Well, but no Saxon would attack there, not now... Yes, but if they did, there is no force there to hold them, he was right about that... No, it's nonsense, the old man has lost his senses again. Remember, up there in the forest, what he was like? Crazy, and that's the truth... and now moon-mad again, with the same malady?"

Arthur had not taken his eyes off me. The whispers blew to and fro. Someone called for a doctor, and there was coming and going in the hall. He ignored it. He and I were alone together. His hand came out and took me by the wrist. I felt, through the whirling pain, his young strength forcing me gently back into my chair. I had not even known I was standing. His other hand went out, and someone put a goblet into it. He held the wine to my lips.

I turned my head aside. "No. Leave me. Go now. Trust me."

"By all the gods there are," he said, from the back of his throat, "I trust you." He swung on his heel, and spoke. "You, and you, and you, give the orders. We ride now. See to it."

Then back to me, but speaking so that all could hear: "Victory, you said?"

"Victory. Can you doubt it?"

For a moment, through the stresses of pain, I saw his look; the look of the boy who had braved the white flame at my word, and lifted the enchanted sword. "I doubt nothing," said Arthur.

Then he laughed, leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek, and, with his Companions following, went swiftly out of the hall.

The pain lifted. I could breathe and see. I got up and walked after them, out into the air. Those left in the hall drew back and let me through. No one spoke to me, or dared to question. I mounted the rampart and looked outward. The sentry on duty there moved away, not like a soldier, but sidling. The whites of his eyes showed. Word had gone round fast. I hunched my cloak against the wind and stayed where I was.

They had gone, so small a troop to throw against the might of the final Saxon bid for Britain. The gallop dwindled into the night and was gone. Somewhere in that darkness to the north the Tor was standing up into the black sky. No light, nothing. Beyond it, no light. Nor south, nor east; no light anywhere, or warning fires. Only my word.

A sound somewhere in the blowing darkness. For a moment I took it for an echo of that distant gallop; then, hearing in it, faintly, the cry and clash of armies, I thought that vision had returned to me. But my head was clear, and the night, with all its sounds and shadows, was mortal night.

Then the sounds wheeled closer, and went streaming overhead, high in the black air. It was the wild geese, the pack of heaven's hounds, the Wild Hunt that courses the skies with Llud, King of the Otherworld, in time of war and storm. They had risen from the Lake waters, and now came overhead, flighting the dark. Straight from the silent Tor they came, to wheel over Caer Camel, then back across the slumbering Island, the noise of their voices and the galloping wings lost at length down the reaches of the night toward Badon.

With the dawn, beacon lights blazed across the land. But whoever led the Saxon hordes to Badon must hardly have set foot on its bloody soil when, out of the dark, more swiftly even than birds could have flown or fire signalled, the High King Arthur and his own picked knights fell on them and destroyed them, smashing the barbarian power utterly, for his day, and for the rest of his generation.

So the god came back to me, Merlin his servant. Next day I left Caer Camel, and rode out to look for a place where I could build myself a house.