The Last Enchantment

1

SO, TOWARD THE END OF MY life, I found a new beginning. A beginning it was in love, for both of us. I had no skill, and she, vowed from childhood to be one of the Lake maidens, had hardly thought of love. But what we had was enough and more than enough. She, for all she was many years younger than I, seemed happy and satisfied; and I, calling myself in private dotard, old fool, wisdom dragged at mockery's chariot wheels, knew that I was none of these: between myself and Nimuë was a bond stronger than any between the best-matched pair in the flower of their age and strength. We were the same person. We were part of each other as are night and daylight, dark and dawn, sun and shadow. When we lay together we lay at the edge of life where opposites fuse and make new entities, not of the flesh, but of the spirit, the issue as much of the ceaseless traffic of mind with mind, as of the body's pleasure.

We did not marry. Looking back now, I doubt if either of us even thought of cementing the relationship in this way; it was not clear what rites we could have used, what faster bond we could have hoped for. With the passing of the days and nights of that sweet summer, we found ourselves closer and yet more close, as if cast in a common mould: we would wake in the morning and know we had shared the same dream; meet at evening and each know what the other had learned and done that day. And all the time, as I believed, each of us harboured our own private and growing joy: I to watch her trying the wings of power like a strong young bird feeling for the first time the mastery of air; she to receive this waxing strength, and to know, with love but without pity, that at the same time the power was leaving me.

So the month of June flew by, and then high summer was with us. The cuckoo vanished from the brakes, the meadow-sweet was out with its heavy honey smell, the bees droned all day in the blue borage and the lavender. Nimuë called to Varro to set a saddle on the chestnut — Arthur had made her a present of him — then she kissed me and rode off towards the Lake. It was, of course, known now that the former servant of the Goddess was with Merlin at Applegarth. There must have been speculation and gossip, some of it no doubt malicious — and (I was sure) all of it amazed at the impulse that had taken a young and lovely girl into the ageing enchanter's bed. But the High King had stated publicly, and had moreover made it clear by gifts and visits, that our relationship had his approval; so even the Lady of the shrine had not attempted to close her doors against Nimuë; she had, rather, made her welcome, in the hope (Nimuë suggested with amusement) that the shrine might fall heir to some of Merlin's secrets. Nimuë herself did not often leave Applegarth, either for the Island or the court at Camelot. But she was hardly to be blamed if she was a trifle flown with the power and excitement of these first months, and as a young bride enjoys showing off her new status among her maiden colleagues, so, I guessed, Nimuë was eager to revisit her friends among the Goddess's ancillae. She had not yet been to the court of Camelot without me; I guessed what she did not say, that even with the King's support she was doubtful of her reception there. But on three occasions she had been back to the Island, and this time, she told me, she would see about the promise of some plants from the garden near the holy well. She would be back at dusk. I saw her off, then checked over my bag of medicines, put on a straw hat against the sun, and set out across the hill to visit the house of a woman who was recovering from a bout of fever. I went blithely. The day was fine but fresh, and lark-song poured down from a clear sky like rillets of bright water. I reached the hilltop and followed the track between gorse bushes ablaze with flowers. A flock of goldfinches fluttered and dipped through a patch of tall, seeding thistles, making the sweet, plaintive call that the Saxons call "chirm," or "charm." The breeze smelled of thyme.

That is all I remember. Next — it seemed all in a moment — the world was dark, and the stars were out, with that clear sparkle that one can feel pricking down into the eyes and brain. I was lying on my back, flat on the turf, staring up at them. The gorse bushes were all round me, humped and dark, and gradually, as if sense were coming back from a limitless distance, I felt the stab of their prickles biting into hands and arms. Starlight sparked from the dew. Everywhere there was a great silence, like a held breath. Then above me, high in the black sky, another point of light began to grow. The darkness lit. Into this single, waxing point of light the smaller stars, like metal dust to a lodestone, like a swarm into the hive, fled, till in all the sky there was no other light. My eyes dazzled. I could not move, but lay there, it seemed alone on the curve of the world, watching the star. Then, intolerably bright, it started from its place, and swiftly, like a brand flung across the sky, it arched from the zenith to the earth's edge, trailing behind it a great train of light shaped like a dragon.

I heard someone call out: "The Dragon! The Dragon! See where the Dragon falls!" and knew the voice was my own.

Then lights, and hands, and Nimuë's face, white in the lantern light, with Varro behind her, and a youth I vaguely recognized as the shepherd who watched his flock on the down. Then voices. "Is he dead?" "No. Come, quickly, cover him. He's cold." "He's dead, mistress." "No! Never! I'll never believe it! Do as I say!" Then, with anguish: "Merlin, Merlin!" And a man's voice, fearfully: "Who will tell the King?"

After that a gap of time, and my own bed, and the taste of hot wine with herbs infused in it, and another long gap, this time of sleep.

Now we come to the part of my chronicle that is the most difficult to tell. Whether or not (as the popular belief went) the falling comet with the dragon's tail betokened the true end of Merlin's greater powers, I know that, looking back at the days and nights — more, the weeks and months — that followed, I cannot tell for certain whether what I remember was reality, or a dream. It was the year of my journeying with Nimuë. Looking back now, I see it, scene after scene, like reflections sliding past a boat, blurred and repeated, and broken, as the oars stir the water's glass. Or like the moments just before sleep, when scene after scene swims up into the mind's eye, the true memories like dreams, and the dreams as real as memory.

I still only have to close my eyes to see Applegarth, serene in the sun, with the silver lichen thick on the old trees, where, the green fruit, slowly swelling, shone like lamps, and in the sheltered garth lavender and sage and sweet briar breathed their scent into the air as thickly as smoke. And on the hill behind the tower the thorn trees, those strange thorns that flower in winter and have small flowers with stamens like nails. And the doorway where the girl Nimuë first stood shyly, with the light behind her, like the gentle ghost of the drowned boy who might have been a greater enchanter than she. And the ghost itself; the "boy Ninian" who still haunts my memories of the garth, alongside the slender girl who sat at my feet in the sun.

For perhaps a week after my falling fit on the hilltop, I spent most of my time sitting on the carved seat in the garth. Not from weakness, but because Nimuë insisted, and I needed time to think.

Then one evening, in the warm dusk, I called her to me. She nestled down in her old place, on a cushion at my feet. Her head was against my knee, and my hand stroked the thick hair. This was growing now, and had reached her shoulder-blades. I wondered daily at my old blindness that had not seen the curves of her body, and the sweet lines of throat and brow and wrist.

"You've been busy this week."

"Yes," she said. "Housewife's jobs. Cutting the herbs and bunching them to dry."

"Are they done?"

"Just about. Why?"

"I've been idle all this time while you have been working, but I have been thinking."

"About?"

"Among other things, Bryn Myrddin. You have never been there. So before the summer ends, I think we must leave Applegarth, you and I —"

"Leave Applegarth?" She started away from me, looking up in dismay. "Do you mean live at Bryn Myrddin again... both of us live there?"

I laughed. "No. Somehow I don't see that happening. Do you?"

She subsided against my knee, her head bent. She was silent for a while, then she said, muffled: "I don't know. I've never glimpsed even a dream of it. But you have told me that you will die there. Is that what you mean?"

I put out a hand again and touched her hair. "I know I have said that that will happen, but I've had no warning of it yet. I feel very well, better than for many months. But look at it like this: when my life does end, yours must begin. And for that to happen you must do one day as I did, and enter the crystal cave of vision. You know this. We've spoken of it before."

"Yes, I know." She did not sound reassured.

"Well," I told her cheerfully, "we shall go to Bryn Myrddin, but at the end of our journey. Before we get there we shall have travelled widely, and seen many places and many things. I want you to visit the places where I have passed my life, and see the things I have seen. I have told you as much as I can; now you must see as much as I am able to show you. Do you understand?"

"I think so. You are giving me the sum of your life, on which to build my own."

"Exactly that. For you, the stones on which to build the life you want; for me, the crown and harvest."

"And when I have it all?" she asked, subdued.

"Then we shall see." Amused, I caressed her hair again. "Don't look like that, child, take it lightly. It's a wedding journey, not a funeral procession. Our travels may have a purpose, but we'll take them for pleasure, be sure of that. I've had this in mind sometime; it wasn't just suggested by this last sick turn of mine. We've been happy here in Applegarth, and no doubt we shall be happy here again, but you are too young to fold your wings here year after year. So we'll go travelling. I have a suspicion that my real object is just to show you the places I've known and loved, for no more serious reason than that I have known and loved them."

She sat up, looking easier. Her eyes began to sparkle. She was young. "A kind of pilgrimage?"

"You could call it that."

"Tintagel, you mean, and Rheged, and the place where you found the sword, and the lake where you laid it to wait for the King?"

"More than that. God help us both, we must sail to Brittany. My story and the High King's has been bound up — as yours will be, too — in that great sword of his. I have to show you where the god himself first came to me, with the first sign of the sword. Which is why we should go soon. The seas are calm, but in another month or so the gales will start."

She shuddered. "Then by all means let us go now." Then, suddenly, all uncomplicated pleasure, a young woman setting out on an exciting journey, with no other thought in her head: "And you'll have to take me to Camelot. I really haven't got anything fit to wear..."

So next day I spoke with Arthur's courier, and not very long after that Arthur himself came to tell me that escort and ship were ready, and that we could go.

We set sail from the Island at the end of July, and Arthur and the Queen rode down to the harbour to see us on our way. Bedwyr was with us, his face a mixture of relief and misery: he had been sent to escort us across the sea, and he was like a man released from the torment of a drug which he knows will kill him, but for which, night and day, he craves. He was charged with dispatches from Arthur to his cousin King Hoel of Brittany, and would escort us as far as Hoel's court at Kerrec.

When we came to the quay the ship was still loading, but soon all was ready, and Arthur bade us farewell, with an admonition to Nimuë to "take care of him" which brought forcibly back to me memories of the voyage I had made with Arthur himself a squalling baby in his wet-nurse's arms, and King Hoel's escort scowling at the noise, and trying to give me due greeting through it all. Then he kissed Bedwyr, with nothing apparent in his look save warm affection, and Bedwyr muttered something, holding him, before turning to take his leave of the Queen. Smiling by the King's side, she had command of herself; her light touch of Bedwyr's hand, and the serene "Godspeed" she wished him showed barely more warmth than that given to Nimuë, and rather less than to me. (Since the Melwas affair, she had shown a pretty gratitude and liking, such as a girl might have for her elderly father.) I said my goodbyes, cast a wary eye at the smooth summer sea, and went on board. Nimuë, already pale, came with me. It needed no prophetic vision to foretell that we would see nothing of one another until the ship docked in the Small Sea.

It is no part of this tale to follow our travels league by league. Indeed, as I have explained, I cannot do so. We went to Brittany, that I know, and were welcomed there by King Hoel, and spent the autumn and winter in Kerrec, and I showed Nimuë the roads through the Perilous Forest, and the humble inn where Ralf, my page, guarded the child Arthur through the dangerous hidden years. But here already the memories are confused; as I write I can see them all, crossing each other like ghosts that crowd, century by century, into an old dwelling house. Each is as clear as the others. Arthur as a baby, asleep in the manger straw. My father watching me in the lamplight, asking, "What will come to Britain?" The druids at their murderous work in Nemet. Myself, a frightened boy, hiding in the cattle-shed. Ralf riding post-haste through the trees with messages for Hoel to send to me. Nimuë beside me in the budding woods of April, lying on green turf in a forest glade. The same glade, with the white doe fleeing like magic, to draw danger away from Arthur. And across this, confusedly, other memories or other dreams: a white stag with ruby eyes; the deer fleeing through the dusk under the oaks at Nodens' shrine; magic on magic. But through all, like a torch relit for another quest, the stars, the smiling god, the sword.

We stayed away till summer, this much I know for certain. I can even record the day of our arrival back in Britain. Cador, Duke of Cornwall, died that year, and we disembarked in a country deep in mourning for a great soldier and a good duke. What I cannot recall is which of us — Nimuë or myself — knew that it was time to be gone, or which harbour to sail for. We landed in a little bay a league or so from Tintagel, on Dumnonia's northern coast, two days after Cador's death, to find Arthur there already, with all his tram. Having seen our sail, he came down to the wharf to meet us, and before ever we landed we saw the covered shields, the lowered pennons, and the unadorned white of mourning, and knew what had brought us home.

Scenes like these swim up, brightly lit with hardly a shadow. But then comes the candlelit chapel where Cador's body lay in state, with monks chanting; and the scene dislimns, and once again I am standing at the foot of his father's bier, waiting for the ghost of the man I had betrayed. Even Nimuë, when once I spoke to her of this, could be no help to me. For so long now we had shared thought and dream alike that she herself could not (she told me) separate the sight of Tintagel in the summer, with the gentle wind lifting the sea against the rocks, from my stormy tales of time past. Tintagel mourning for Duke Cador recently dead seems less real to either of us than the storm-beaten stronghold where Uther, lying with Gorlois' wife Ygraine, begot Arthur for Britain.

And so it was with the rest of the time. After Tintagel we went north. Memory, or dream here in the long darkness, shows me the soft hills of Rheged, the hanging clouds of forest, the lakes ringing with fish, and, reflected in the glass of its own lake, Caer Bannog, where I hid the great sword for Arthur to find. Then the Green Chapel, where later, on that legendary night, Arthur lifted it at last into his hand.

So, as I had done in earnest years ago, we lightly followed the sword, but something — some instinct I could no longer be sure was prophetic, or even wise — bade me keep silence about the other quest which, sometimes, I had glimpsed in the shadows. It would not be for me; it would come after me; and the time was not yet. So I said nothing of Segontium, or the place where still, deep in the ground, lay buried the other treasures that had come back with the sword to the West.

At last we came to Galava. It was a happy end to a pleasant journey. We were welcomed by Count Ector, an Ector grown stout with age and good living since the peace, who presented Nimuë to the lady Drusilla (with a wink at me) as "Prince Merlin's wife, lass, at long last." And beside him was my faithful Ralf, flushed with pleasure, proud as a peacock of his pretty wife and four sturdy children, and avid for news of Arthur and the south.

Nimuë and I lay together in the tower room where I had once been carried to recover from Morgause's poison. It was some time after midnight, as we lay watching the moon touch the hilltops beyond the window, that she stirred, turning her cheek into the hollow of my shoulder, and said softly:

"And what, after this? Bryn Myrddin and the crystal cave?"

"I think so."

"If your own hills are as beautiful as these, perhaps I shan't mind, after all, deserting Applegarth..." I heard a smile in her voice... "at least in summer."

"I promised you that it wouldn't come to that. Tell me this: for the last stage of your wedding journey, would you rather travel down the western roads, or take ship from Glannaventa, and go by sea to Maridunum? I'm told the seas are calm."

There was a short pause. Then she said: "But why ask me to choose? I thought —"

"You thought?"

Another pause. "I thought you had something still to show me."

It seemed that her instinct was as true as my own. I said: "What, then, my dear?"

"You have told me all the story of the sword, and you have shown me now all that happened to it, this wonderful Caliburn that is the symbol of the King's power, and by which he holds his kingdom. You have showed me the places of vision which led you to find it; where you hid it until Arthur should be ready to raise it, and where at last he did raise it. But you have never told me where you yourself found it. I had thought that this would be the last thing you would show me, before you took me home."

I did not reply. She raised herself in the bed, and lay on an elbow, looking down at me. The moonlight slid over her, making her a thing of silver and shadow, lighting the lovely lines of temple and cheekbone, throat and breast.

I smiled, tracing the line of her shoulder with a gentle finger. "How can I think and answer you when you look like that?"

"Easily." She answered the smile, not moving. "Why have you never told me? It's because there's something else there, isn't it, that belongs to the future?"

So: instinct or vision, she knew. I said slowly: "You spoke of a 'last thing.' Yes, there is still one mystery, the only one; and yes, it is for the future. I haven't seen it clearly myself, but once, before he was King, I made a prophecy for Arthur. It was between the finding and the raising of the sword, when the future was still hedged around with fire and vision. I remember what I said..."

"Yes?"

I quoted it: " 'I see a settled and shining land, with corn growing rich in the valleys, and farmers working their fields in peace as they did in the time of the Romans. I see a sword growing idle and discontented, and the days of peace stretching into bickering and division, and the need of a quest for the idle swords and the unfed spirits. Perhaps it was for this that the god took the grail and the spear back from me and hid them in the ground, so that one day you might set out to find the rest of Macsen's treasure. No, not you, but Bedwyr... it is his spirit, not yours, which will hunger and thirst, and slake itself in the wrong fountains.' "

A long silence. I could not see her eyes; they were full of moonlight. Then she whispered: "The grail and the spear? Macsen's treasure, hidden again in the ground, to be the objects of a quest as great as that of the sword? Where? Tell me where?"

She looked eager; not awed, but eager, like a runner in sight of the goal. When she does see the chalice and the spear, I thought, she will bend her head before their magic. But she is only a child, and still sees the things of power as weapons in her own hand. I did not say to her: "It is the same quest, because what use to anyone is the sword of power without the fulfilment of the spirit? All the kings are now one King. It is time the gods became one God, and there in the grail is the oneness for which men will seek, and die, and dying, live."

I did not say it, but lay for a while in silence, while she watched me, unmoving. I could feel the power coming from her, my own power, stronger now in her than in my own hands. For myself, I felt nothing but weariness, and a kind of grief.

"Tell me, my darling," she said, whispering, intent.

So I told her. I smiled at her, and said, gently: "I will do better than tell you. I shall take you there, and what there is to see, I shall show you. What is left of Macsen's treasure lies below the ground in the ruined temple of Mithras at Segontium, that is called Caer-y-n'a Von, below Y Wyddfa. And now that is all that I can give you, my dear, except my love."

I remember that she said: "And that would have been enough, even without the rest," as she stooped to put her mouth on mine.

After she slept I lay watching the moon, full and bright, becalmed, it seemed for hours, full in the center of the window-frame. And I remembered how, long ago, as a child, I had believed that such a sight would bring me my heart's desire. What that had been in those days — power, prophecy, service, love — I could barely remember. Now all that was past, and my heart's desire lay here, sleeping in my arms. And the night, so full of light, was empty of the future, empty of vision; but still, like breathing ghosts from the past, came the voices.

Morgause's voice, the witch's voice spitting her curse at me: "Are you so sure you are proof against women's magic, Prince Merlin? It will snare you in the end."

And across it, Arthur's voice, vigorous, angry, full of love: "I cannot bear to see you hurt." And then: "Witch or no witch, lover or no lover, I shall deal with her as she deserves."

I held her young body close against my own, and kissed her sleeping eyelids, very gently. I said to the ghosts, to the voices, to the empty moonlight: "It was time. Let me go in peace." Then, commending myself and my spirit to God who all these years had held me in his hand, I composed myself for sleep.

This was the last thing that I know to be truth, and not a dream in darkness.

2

WHEN I WAS A SMALL CHILD at Maridunum I had slept with my nurse in a room in the servants' wing of my grandfather's palace. It was a ground-floor chamber, and outside the window grew a pear tree, where at evening a thrush would sing, and then afterwards the stars would come pricking out into the sky behind the branches, looking for all the world as if they were lights entangled in the tree. I used to lie watching them in the quiet of the night, and straining my ears to hear the music which, I had been told, the stars make as they move along the sky.

Now at last, it seemed, I heard it. I was lying, warmly shrouded, on — I thought — a litter, which must, from the swaying motion, be being borne along under a night sky. A great darkness wrapped me in, and far above me arched a night sky teeming and wheeling with stars, which rang like small bells as they moved. I was part of the ground that moved and echoed to my pulses, and a part of the enormous darkness that I could see above me. I was not even sure if my eyes were open. My last vision, I thought, feebly, and my heart's desire. My heart's desire was always this, to hear, before I died, the music of the stars...

Then I knew where I was. There must be people near me; I could hear voices talking softly, but seemingly at a great distance, like voices when one is sick with fever. Servants were carrying the litter; their arms brushed me with warmth; the beat in the ground was the soft tread of their sandals. This was no vision lighted by the singing spheres; I was only a sick old man, earth-bound, being carried home by stages, in the helpless silence of my malady. The music of the stars was no more than the bells on the harness of the mules.

How long it took I cannot tell. At length the litter levelled at the head of a long climb, and an archway of warm firelight met me, and more people, and voices everywhere, and someone weeping, and I knew that somehow, out of another falling-fit of the malady, I had been brought home to Bryn Myrddin.

More confusion after that. Sometimes I thought that Nimuë and I were still on our travels; I was showing her the streets of Byzantium, or walking with her on the heights above Berytus. She brought me the drugs she had made, and held them to my mouth. It was her own mouth that was on mine, tasting of strawberries, and her lips murmured sweet incantations above me, and the cave filled with smoke from handfuls of the precious frankincense. There were candles everywhere: in their mellow wavering light my merlin perched on the ledge by the cave's entrance, waiting for the god's breath on his feathers. Galapas sat by the brazier, drawing my first maps for me in the dust, and beside them, now, knelt the boy Ninian, poring over them with his grave and gentle eyes. Then he looked up, and I saw that it was Arthur, vivid and impatient, and ten years old... and then Ralf, young and sullen... and then at last the boy Merlin, going at his master's bidding up into the crystal cave. And so came the visions; I saw them again, the dreams that had first stormed into my child's brain here in this very cave. And this time Nimuë held my hand, and saw them with me, star for star, and held the cordial afterwards to my lips, while Galapas and the child Merlin, and Ralf and Arthur and the boy Ninian, faded and vanished like the ghosts they were. Only the memories remained, and they, now, were locked in her brain as they had been in mine, and would be hers for ever.

Through it all, though I had no sense of it, time was passing, and the days wore through, and still I lay in that strange limbo of helpless body and vividly working mind, while gradually, as a bee sips the honey from a flower, Nimuë the enchantress took from me, drop by drop, the distillation of all my days.

Then one early dawn, with the sound of birds singing outside, and the warm summer breeze bringing the scent of flowers and summer hay into the cave, I woke from a long sleep, and found that the malady had left me. Dream time was over; I was alive, and fully awake.

I was also alone, in darkness, save where a long quill of sunlight drilled through a gap left where they had pulled the tumble of rocks down across the cave mouth, and had gone away, leaving me in my tomb.

I had no way of knowing how long I had lain in the waking death. We had been at Rheged in July, and it was still apparently high summer. Three weeks, or at most a month...? If it had been longer, I would surely be weaker. As it was, until the last profound sleep, which must have been taken for death, I had been cared for and fed with my own cordials and medicines, so that, though stiff, and very weak, I had every chance of life. There was no hope of my being able to move any of the stones that sealed my tomb, but there was a good chance that I might be able to attract the attention of someone passing this way. The place had been a shrine, time out of mind, and the folk came regularly up the valley with offerings for the god who watched the sacred spring beside the cave. It was possible, now, that they would hold the place even more holy, knowing that Merlin, who had held the High King in his hand, but who had been their own enchanter, giving his time and skill to tend their hurts and those of their animals, was buried here. They had brought gifts daily, of food and wine, while he was alive; surely they would come with their offerings, to appease the dead?

So, stifling my fear, I raised myself and tried, through the swirling weakness of my new waking state, to judge what I must do.

They had laid me, not in the crystal cave, which was a small hollow high in the wall of the main cavern, but in the main cavern itself, on my own bed. This had been draped in some stuff that felt rich and stiff, and gave back, to the same probe of light, the glimmer of embroidery and precious gems. I fingered the pall that covered me; it was of some thick material, soft and warm, and beautifully woven. My fingers traced the pattern worked on it: the Dragon. And now I could see, at the four corners of the bed, the tall, heavily wrought candlesticks that gave off the gleam of gold. I had been left, apparently, with pomp and with royal honours. Had the King been here, then? I wished I could remember him. And Nimuë? I supposed I had my own prophecies to thank that this was all the burial they had accorded me, and that they had not given me to the earth, or to the fire. The thought was a shiver over the skin, but it prompted me to action. I looked at the candles. Three of them had burned down almost to lumps of shapeless wax, and then died. The other, blown out perhaps by some chance draught, was still a foot or so tall. I put a finger to the nearest, where the wax had run down; it was still soft. Twelve hours, I calculated, or at most fifteen, since they had been lighted, and I had been left here. The place was still warm. If I was to keep alive, it must be kept that way. I leaned back against the stiff pillow, drew the pall with its golden dragon up over my body, fixed my eyes on the dead candle, and thought: We shall see. The simplest of magics, the first I ever learned here in this very place; let us see if this, too, has been taken from me. The effort sent me, exhausted, back into sleep.

I woke to see the sunlight, dim now and rosy, lighting a far corner of the cave, but the cave itself was full of light. The candle burned steadily, with a warm golden flame. It glimmered on two gold coins lying on the pall; I remembered, vaguely, the weight of them tumbling from my eyes as I woke and moved. It also showed me something more to the purpose: the ritual cakes and wine that had been left beside the bier as offerings to the dead. I spoke aloud to God who kept me, then, sitting on the bier, with the grave-clothes round me, ate and drank what had been left.

The cakes were dry, but tasted of honey, and the wine was strong, running into me like new life. The candlelight, dealing its own faint warmth, dispelled the last wisps of fear. "Emrys," I found myself whispering, "Emrys, child of the light, beloved of kings... you were told that you would be buried quick in darkness, your power gone; and look, here it has come to pass, and it is not fearful after all; you are buried, and quick, but you have light and air and — unless they have rifled the place — food and drink and warmth and medicines..."

I lifted the candle from its heavy sconce and carried it into the inner caves which were the storerooms. Everything was just as I had left it. Stilicho had been a more than faithful steward. I thought of the wine and honey-cakes left beside the "bier," and wondered if, besides, the caverns had been scoured and garnished, then carefully furnished for the dead. Whatever the reason for leaving things as they were, there, row on row, box on box, were the precious stores, and in their places the flasks and jars of drugs and cordials, all that I had not taken with me to Applegarth. There was a real squirrel's hoard of food, dried fruit and nuts, honeycombs gently seeping into their jars, a barrel of olives in oil. No bread, of course, but in a crock I found, bone-hard, some thick oatcake made long ago by the shepherd's wife and given to me; it was still good, being dry as board, so I broke it up and put some of it to sop in wine. The meal garner was half full, and with oil from the olive-barrel I could make meal cakes of a sort. Water, of course, I had; soon after I had come to take up residence in the cave I had had my servant lead a pipe of water from the spring outside to fill a tank; this, kept covered, ensured clean water even through frost and storm. The overflow, channelled to run down to a fissured corner of a remote inner chamber, served as a privy. There were candles aplenty in store, and tinder with the flints on the ledge where I had always kept them. There was a sizable pile of charcoal, but I hesitated, for fear of smoke or fumes, to light the brazier. Besides, I might need the warmth in the time ahead. If my reckoning of time was right, in a short month the summer would be over, and autumn setting in with its chill winds and its killing damp.

So at first, while the warm airs of summer still breathed through the cave, I used light only when I needed to see to prepare my food, and for comfort sometimes, when the hours dragged in darkness. I had no books, all having been taken to Applegarth. But writing materials were to hand, and as the days went by and I gained strength and began to fret in the idleness of captivity, I formed the idea of trying to set down in some kind of order the story of my boyhood and the times I had lived through and helped to mould. Music, too, would have been something to be made in darkness, but the standing harp had gone with my books to Applegarth, and my own small harp had not been brought with the other riches, to furnish the house of the dead.

Be sure that I had given thought to escaping from my grave. But those who had laid me there and given me, in honour, the sacred hill itself, with all that lay within it, had used the hill itself to seal me in; half the mountainside, seemingly, had been levered down to fall across the cave's entrance. Try as I would I could not shove or scrape a way through. No doubt someone with the right tools might have done it in time, but I had none. We kept spades and axes always in the stable below the cliff.

There was another possibility, which I considered time and again. As well as the caves that I used, there were other, smaller chambers which opened off one another, branching deep into the hill. One of these inner caves was little more than a chimney, a rounded shaft running up through the rock levels, to reach the air in a little corrie of the hill above. Here a low cliff, many years back, had, under the pressure from tree-roots and storms, split open to let light, and sometimes small rocks and rain-water, down into the hollow below. Through this fissure now the cave-dwelling bats made their daily flights. In time the pile of fallen stones in the cave had built up into a kind of buttress, reaching perhaps a third of the way up toward the "lantern," as I might term the hole above. When, hopefully, I looked to see if this rough stair had been extended, I was disappointed: above it, still, lay a sheer pitch three times the height of a man, and above that the same again, sloping at first steeply, and then more gently, to reach the gap of daylight. It was just possible that a fit and agile man could have climbed out unaided, though in places the rock was damp and slimy, and in others manifestly unsafe. But for an ageing man, recently in his sickbed, it was impossible. The sole comfort of the discovery lay in the fact that here, literally, was a "chimney"; in the cold days to come I could light the brazier there with safety, and savour warmth and hot food and drink.

I did think, naturally, about making a fire of some kind, in the hope that the smoke might attract the attention of the curious, but there were two things against this. First, the country people who lived within sight of the hill were used to seeing the bats go up daily from the hillside, looking for the world like plumes of smoke; the second was that I had little to spare of fuel. All I could do was conserve the precious stores I had, and wait for someone to make a way up the valley to visit the holy well.

But nobody came. Twenty days, thirty, forty, were notched on my tally stick. I recognized with reluctance that where the simple folk had come to pray to the spirit of the well, and offer gifts to the living man who healed them, they were afraid of the enchanter lately dead, and of the new haunting of the hollow hill. Since the valley led nowhere but to the cave and the spring, no travellers used it. Nothing came into the high valley, except the birds (which I heard) and, I supposed, the deer, and once a wolf or a fox that I heard snuffling in the night at the tumble of stones that blocked the cave's entrance.

So the tallied days dragged by, and I stayed alive, and — what was harder — kept fear at bay in every way I knew. I wrote, and wrestled with plans for escape, and did what domestic tasks the days demanded; and I am not ashamed to remember that I drugged the nights — and sometimes the desperate days — with wine, or with opiates that stupefied the senses and dulled time. Despair I would not feel; through all that long life in death I held to one thing, as to a ladder let down from the light above me: throughout my life I had obeyed my god, had received power from him, and rendered it back again; now I had seen it pass to the young lover who had usurped me; but though my life was apparently done, my body had been kept — I could not tell how or why — from either earth or fire. I was alive, and had regained both strength and will, and, prison or no, this was the hollow hill of the god himself. I could not believe that there was not some purpose still to be fulfilled.

I think it was with this in mind that I nerved myself at length to climb into the crystal cave.

All this while, with my strength at low ebb and the power (I knew) gone from me, I had not been able to face the place of vision. But one evening when, with my store of candles running low, I had sat too long in darkness, I brought myself at last to climb the ledge at the back of the main cavern, and, bent double, to creep into the crystal-lined globe.

I went, I believe, for nothing more than the comfortable memories of past power, and of love. I took no light with me, and looked for no vision. I simply lay, as I had done when a boy, belly down on the rough crystals of the floor, letting the heavy silence enclose me, and filling it with my thoughts.

What they were I cannot now remember: I suppose I was praying. I do not think I spoke aloud. But in a while I became conscious — as, in a black night, a man realizes, rather than sees, the coming dawn — of something that answered to my breathing. Not a sound, only the faintest echo of a breath, as if a ghost was waking, taking life from mine.

My heart began to thud; my breathing sharpened. Within the darkness the other rhythm quickened. The air of the cave hummed. Round the crystal walls ran, echoing, a whisper that I knew.

I felt the easy tears of weakness start into my eyes. I said aloud: "So, after all, they brought you back to your own place?" And, from the darkness, my harp answered me.

I groped forward towards the sound. My fingers met the live, silken feel of wood. The carved fore-pillar nestled into my hand as I had seen the hilt of the great sword slide into the King's grip. I backed out of the cave, silenced the harp's faint plaining against my breast, and picked my way carefully down again into my prison.

This was the song I made. I called it "Merlin's Song from the Grave."

No song comes brand-fire-new and finished from the first playing, so that now I cannot recall just on which occasion, as I was singing it, I became conscious of an unusual sound that had been, as it were, tapping at the door of my brain for several staves. I let the chords die, laid a hand along the strings, and listened.

The beating of my heart sounded loud in the still, dead air of the cave. Below it went another throbbing, a distant beat coming seemingly from the heart of the hill. I can hardly be blamed, shut as I had been for too long from the ordinary traffic of the world, if the first thoughts that came crowding were winged with instinct born of ancient beliefs — Llud of the Otherworld, the horses of the Wild Hunt, all the shadows dwelling in the hollow hills... Death for me at long last, on this still evening at the end of summer? Then, in less time than it takes for two short breaths, I had arrived at the truth — and it was already too late.

It was the traveller I had waited for, and at length despaired of; he had ridden up above the cave, and halted by the cliff where the lantern opened on the air, and had heard the music. There was a pause, broken only by the sharp strike of nervous hoofs on stone as the horse fretted, held and sidling. Then a man's voice, calling out:

"Is there anyone there?"

I had already laid the harp aside and, with what speed I could, was scrambling through the half-dark toward the cave below him. As I went I tried to call out, but it was a moment or so before my thudding heart and dry throat would let me answer. Then I cried out:

"It is I, Merlin! Don't be afraid, I'm no ghost. I'm alive, and trapped here. Break a way out for me, in the King's name!"

My voice was drowned by the sudden confusion of noise from above. I could guess what had happened. The horse, sensing, as beasts do, some strangeness — a man below ground, the unnatural sounds coming apparently from the fissure in the cliff, even my anxiety — gave a long, pealing whinny and plunged, scattering stones and small gravel and setting other echoes rattling. I shouted again, but either the rider did not hear or he took the horse's fear for an instinct truer than his own; there was another sharp clatter of hoofs and cascading stones, then the beating gallop retreated, faster than it had come. I could not blame the rider, whoever he was; even if he did not know whose tomb lay beneath him, he must have known the hill was sacred, and to hear music from the ground, at dusk, on the crest of such a hill...

I went back to pick up the harp. It was undamaged. I put it aside, and with it the hope of rescue, then set myself grimly to prepare what could, for want of a worse word, be called my supper.

3

IT WAS PERHAPS TWO NIGHTS after this, or maybe three, when something woke me in the night. I opened my eyes on total darkness, wondering what had disturbed me. Then I heard the sound. Stealthy scrapings, rattlings of stone, the patter of earth falling. They came from the lantern, high in the inner cave. Some beast, I thought, badger or fox or even wolf, scratching its way toward the smell of food. I drew the covers round me, and turned over and shut my eyes again.

But the sounds went on, stealthy, persistent, and now impatient, a fierce scrabbling among the stones that spoke of more than animal purpose. I sat up again, taut with sudden hope. Perhaps the horseman had come back? Or he had told his story, and some other, braver soul had come to investigate? I took breath to shout, then paused. I did not want to scare this one away like the first. I would wait for him to speak to me.

He did not; he was intent merely on scraping his way in through the opening in the cliff. More stuff fell, and I heard the chink of a crowbar, and then, unmistakably, a smothered curse. A man's voice, rough-spoken. There was a pause, as if he was listening, then once again the sounds began, and this time he was using some sort of heavy tool, a mattock or a spade, to dig his way in.

Not for worlds would I have shouted now. No one bent simply on investigating a strange story would do so in such stealthy secrecy; the obvious thing to do would be what the horseman had done, to call out first, or to wait quietly and listen, before attempting to force a way into the lantern. What was more, no innocent man would have come, for choice, alone and at night.

A few moments' reflection brought me the probable truth. This was a grave-robber; some outlaw, perhaps, who had heard rumours of a royal grave in Merlin's Hill, and who had doubtless had a look at the cave mouth, decided it was too thoroughly blocked, and had settled on the shaft as being the easier and less conspicuous way of entry. Or perhaps a local man who had watched the rich procession pass, and who had known for years of the cliff and its precarious entry to the hill. Or even a soldier — one of those who, after the ceremonies, had helped to block the cave mouth, and who had been haunted since by recollections of the riches there entombed.

Whoever he was, he must be a man of few nerves. He would be fully prepared to find a corpse laid here; to brave the stench and sight of a body some weeks dead; even to lay hands on it and rob it of its jewels before he tumbled it from the gem-encrusted pall and gold-fringed pillow. And if he should find, instead of a corpse, a living man? An old man, weakened by these long days underground; a man, moreover, whom the world believed to be dead? The answer was simple. He would kill me, and still rob my tomb. And I, stripped of my power, had no defenses.

I rose silently from the bed, and made my way through to the shaft. The digging sounds went on, steadily now, and through the widened opening at the top of the shaft I could see light. He had some sort of lantern there, which dealt him light enough. It would also prevent him from noticing the faint glimmer of a rush-light from below. I went back to the main chamber, kindled a light carefully behind a screen, then set about the only preparations I could make.

If I lay in wait for him with a knife (I had no dagger, but there were knives for preparing food) or with some heavy implement, it was by no means certain that I would be quick enough, or powerful enough, to stun him; and such an attack would make my own end certain. I had to find another way. I considered it coldly. The only weapon I had was one that in times past I had found to be more powerful than either dagger or cudgel. The man's own fear.

I took the blankets off the bed and folded them out of sight. I spread the jewelled pall over, smoothed it, and set the velvet pillow in place. The gold candlesticks still stood where they had been put, at the four corners of the bed. Beside the bed I set the gold goblet that had held the wine, and the silver platter studded with garnets. I took the gold coins, the ferry man's fee, from where I had laid them, wrapped myself in the king's mantle that they had left for me, blew out the light, and lay down on the pall.

A rending sound from the shaft, a scatter of rubble onto the cavern floor, and with it a rush of fresh night air, told me that he was through. I shut my eyes, placed the gold coins on the lids, smoothed the long folds of my mantle, then crossed my arms on my breast, controlled my breathing as best I could, and waited.

It was perhaps the hardest thing I have ever done. Often before I had faced danger, but never without knowing one way or the other what the risks were. Always before, in times of stress or terror — the fight with Brithael, the Ambush in the Wild Forest — I had known there was pain to face, but in the end victory and safety and a cause won; now I knew nothing. This stealthy murder in the dark, for a few jewels, might indeed be the ignominious end which the gods, with their sidelong smiles, had showed me in the stars as my "burial quick in the tomb." It was as they willed. But, I thought (not coolly at all), if I have ever served you, God my god, let me smell the sweet air once more before I die.

There was a soft thud as he landed in the shaft. He must have a rope with him, tied to one of the trees that grew from the cliff. I had been right; he was alone. Faintly, under the weight of the gold on my eyelids, I could see the warming of the dark that meant he had brought his lantern with him. Now he was feeling his way, carefully, across the uneven floor toward the chamber where I lay. I could smell his sweat, and the reek of the cheap lantern; which meant, I thought with satisfaction, that he would not catch the lingering odours of food and wine, or the smell of the recently doused rush-light. And his breathing gave him away; with even greater satisfaction I knew that, bravado or no, he was afraid.

He saw me, and stopped in his tracks. I heard his breath go in as a death-rattle. He had nerved himself, one would guess, to face a decaying corpse, but here was a body like that of a living or newly dead man. For seconds he stood, hesitating, breathing hard, then, remembering perhaps what he had heard of the embalmers' art, he cursed again softly under his breath, and tiptoed forward. The light shook and swung in his hand.

With the smell and sound of his fear my own calmness grew. I breathed smoothly and shallowly, trusting to the wavering of his lantern and its smoking light not to let him see that the corpse moved. For an age, it seemed, he stood there, but at last, with another sharp rattle of breath and an abrupt movement like a horse under the spur, he forced himself forward to my side. A hand, unsteady and damp with cold sweat, plucked the gold coins off my eyelids.

I opened my eyes.

In that one brief flash, before movement or blink or breath, I took it all in: the dark Celtic face lit by the horn lantern, the coarse clothing of some peasant levy, the pitted skin slithering with sweat, the greedy slack mouth and the stupid eyes, the knife in his belt, razor-sharp.

I said, calmly: "Welcome to the hall of the dead, soldier."

And from its dark corner, at the sound of my voice, the harp whispered something, on a sweet, fading note.

The gold coins fell, ringing, and rolled away into darkness. The lantern followed, to be smashed into smoking oil on the floor. He let out a yell of fear such as I have not often heard in my long life, and once again, from the darkness, came the mockery of the harp. Yelling again, he took to his heels and ran, stumbling blindly out of the cave and making for the shaft. He must have made a first vain attempt to climb his rope; he cried out again as he fell heavily back to the rock-strewn floor. Then fear lent him strength; I heard the sobbing breaths of effort receding upward as he swarmed to the top. His footsteps ran and slipped down the hillside. Then the sounds died, and I was alone again, and safe.

Safe, in my grave. He had taken the rope. In fear, perhaps, that the enchanter's ghost could swarm after him and follow, he had dragged it up after him. The gap he had made showed a ragged window of sky, where a star shone, remote and pure and indifferent. Cool air blew in, and the cold, unmistakable smell of dawn coming. I heard a thrush from the cliff-top.

God had answered me. I had smelled the sweet air again, and heard the sweet bird. And life was as far from me as before.

I went back into the inner chamber and, as if nothing had happened, began my preparations for another day.

And another. And a third. On the third day, having eaten and rested and written and calmed my mind as far as I could, I once more examined the chimney shaft. The wretched grave-robber had left me a shred of new hope: the pile of fallen stones was higher by almost three feet, and though he had pulled his rope up after him, he had left me another, which I found lying, loosely coiled, at the base of the shaft. But the hopes that this raised were soon proved false; the rope was of poor quality, a cord no more than four or five cubits in length. I could only assume that he had intended to tie his spoils together — he could never have hoped to carry even one of the candlesticks out with him on his climb — fasten them to the main rope's end, and draw them after him. I calculated that even to bear away the four candlesticks, the thief would have had to make four journeys up and down the shaft. The cord would never, even had it been long enough to throw and loop over some rocky projection, have been strong enough to bear my weight. Nor could I — scanning yet again the damp and crumbling side of the chimney — see any such safe projection or foothold. It was possible that a young man or an agile boy might have managed the climb, but although I had been a strong man all my life, with a strong man's endurance, I had never been an athlete, and now, with age and illness and privation, the climb was beyond me.

One other thing the thief had done: where, before, I would have had to reach the high lantern and then set to work to dig and scrabble a way through — an impossible task without tools and ladder — now the way lay open. All I had to do was get to it. And I had a length of good cord. It would come hard, I thought, if I could not contrive some kind of scaffolding which would take me as far as the sloping section of the chimney, and from there, perhaps, I might be able to rig some kind of makeshift ladder. Much of the cave's furnishing had gone, but there was still the bed, a stool or two, and a table, the casks, and a stout bench forgotten in a corner. If I could find some way to break them up, fasten the pieces together with cord, or with torn strips of blanket, wedge them with sherds from the storage jars...

All the rest of that day, and the next following, working directly under the light thrown down from above, I toiled at my makeshift scaffold, bearing a wry thought for Tremorinus, my father's chief engineer, who had first taught me my craft. He would have laughed to see the great Merlin, the engineer-artificer who had outpaced his master, and had lifted the Hanging Stones of the Giants' Dance, cobbling together a structure of which the sorriest apprentice would have been ashamed. All I needed to do, he would have said, was to take my harp like Orpheus, and play to the fragments of the broken furniture, and watch it build itself like the walls of Troy. This had been his theory, stoutly held in public, about the way I had managed the lifting of the great trilithons of the Dance.

By nightfall of the second day I had rigged a sort of rough scaffolding roofed with the stout plank of the bench, which might serve as a base for a ladder. It was nine feet high, and fixed firmly enough with a pile of stones holding it in place. I had only, I reckoned, another twenty-five feet to build.

I worked until dusk, then lighted the lantern and made my wretched meal. Then, as a man turns to the comfort of a lover, I lifted the harp into my arms and, without thoughts of Orpheus or Troy, played until my eyelids drooped, and a false chord warned me that it was time to sleep. Tomorrow would be another day.

Who could have guessed what kind of day? Tired from my labours, I slept deeply, and woke later than usual to the light of a bright thread of sunshine, and the sound of someone calling my name.

For a moment I lay still, thinking myself still caught in the mists of a dream that had mocked me so often before, but then I came fully awake to the discomfort of the cavern floor (I had broken my bed up for use) and the voice again. It came from the lantern, a man's voice, over-pitched with nerves, but with something familiar about the queerly accented Latin.

"My lord? My lord Merlin? Are you there, my lord?"

"Here! Coming!"

In spite of aching joints, I was on my feet as swiftly as any boy, and ran to the foot of the shaft.

Sunshine was pouring down from above. I picked my way, stumbling, to the foot of the rude structure that almost filled the base of the shaft. I craned upward.

Framed in the gap of brilliant sky was a man's head and shoulders. At first I could distinguish little against the brightness. Me, he must be able to see clearly, unkempt, bearded, no doubt pale as the ghost he must have feared to see. I heard his shivering gasp of breath, and the head drew back.

I cried out: "Stay for me, for God's sake! I'm no ghost! Stay! Help me out of here! Stilicho, stay!"

Almost without thinking, I had identified his accent, and him with it. My old servant the Sicilian, Stilicho, who had married Mai the miller's daughter, and kept the mill on the Tywy at the valley's foot. I knew his kind, credulous, superstitious, easily afraid of what they did not understand. I leaned against the upright of the scaffolding, gripped it with shaking hands, and fought for a composure that would reassure him. His head came cautiously back. I saw the black eyes staring, the sallow pallor of his face, the open mouth. With a self-control that shook me with another wave of weakness I spoke in his own language, slowly and with apparent calm:

"Don't be afraid, Stilicho. I was not dead when they left me here in error, and all these weeks I have been trapped here in the hill. I am not a ghost, boy; it truly is Merlin, alive, and very much in need of your help."

He leaned nearer. "Then the King — all those others who were here — ?" He stopped, swallowing painfully.

"Do you think that a ghost could have built this scaffolding?" I asked him. "I hadn't despaired of escaping. I've lived here in hope, all through these weeks, but by the God of all gods, Stilicho, if you leave me now without helping me from here, I swear I shall be dead before the day is out." I stopped, ashamed.

He cleared his throat. He sounded shaken, as well he might, but scared no longer. "Then it really is you, lord? They said you were dead and buried, and we have been mourning you... but we should have known that your magic would keep you from death."

I shook my head. I forced myself to go on talking, knowing that with every word he was coming nearer to accepting my survival as true, and nerving himself to approach the tomb and its living ghost. "Not magic," I said, "it was the malady that deceived you all. I am no longer an enchanter, Stilicho, but I have God to thank that I am still a strong man. Otherwise these weeks below the earth would surely have killed me. Now, my dear, can you get me out? Later we can talk, and decide what's to be done, but now, for God's sake, help me out of here and into the air..."

It was a grim business, and it took a long time, not least because, when he would have left me to go for help, I begged him, in terms of which I am now ashamed, not to leave me. He did not argue, but set himself to knotting the long, stout rope which he had found still attached to an ash sapling in the rock above the lantern. He finished it with a loop for my foot, then lowered it carefully. It reached the platform, with some length to spare. Then he let himself down into the shaft, and in a short space of time was beside me at the foot of the scaffolding. I think he would have gone on his knees, as his habit had been, to kiss my hands, but I gripped him so tightly that instead he held me, supporting me with his young strength, and then helped me back into the main cavern.

He found the one remaining stool for me, then lit the lantern and brought me wine, and after a while I was able to say, with a smile: "So now you know that I am a solid body, and no ghost? It was brave of you to come at all, and braver still to stay. What on earth brought you to this place? You're the last person who I'd have thought would go visiting a tomb."

"I wouldn't have come at all," he said frankly, "but that something I heard made me wonder if you were not dead after all, but living here alone. I knew you were a great magician, and thought that perhaps your magic would not let you die like other men."

"Something you heard? What was that?"

"You know the man I have to help me at the mill, Bran, he's called? Well, he was in town yesterday, and brought home some tale of a fellow who'd drunk himself silly in one of the taverns, and the story was going about that he had been up to Bryn Myrddin, and that the enchanter had come out of the tomb and spoken to him. People were standing him drinks and asking for more, and of course the tale as he told it was plainly lies, but there was enough to make me wonder..." He hesitated. "What did happen, lord? I knew someone had been here, because of the rope on the tree."

"It happened twice," I told him. "The first time it was a horseman riding over the hill... you can see how long ago, I marked it on the tally yonder. He must have heard me playing; the sound would carry up through the hole in the cliff. The second time was four — five? — days since, when some ruffian came to rob the tomb, and opened the cliff as you saw it, and let himself down with the rope." I told him what had happened. "He must have been too scared to stop and untie his rope. It's a mercy you heard his story, and came up before he got his courage back, and came back for it — and perhaps dared the tomb again."

He gave me a sidelong, shamefaced look. "I'll not pretend to you, lord. It's not right you praising me for courage. I came up yesterday evening. I didn't want to come alone, but I was ashamed to bring Bran, and Mai wouldn't go within a mile of the place... Well, I saw the mouth of the cave was just as it had been, and then I heard the harp. I — I turned and ran home. I'm sorry."

I said, gently: "But you came back."

"Yes. I couldn't sleep all night. You remember when you left me once to guard the cave, and you showed me your harp, and how it played sometimes by itself, just with the air moving? And how you gave me courage, and showed me the crystal cave and told me I would be safe there? Well, I thought of all that, and I thought of the times you were good to me, how you took me out of slavery and gave me freedom and the life I have now. And I thought: Even if it is my lord's ghost, or the harp playing by magic, alone in the hollow hill, he would never harm me... So I came again, but this time I came by daylight. I thought: If it is a ghost, then in sunlight it will be sleeping."

"And so I was." The thought touched me, like a cold dagger's point, that if I had drugged myself last night, as I had so often done, I might have heard nothing.

He was going on: "I walked over the hill this time, and I saw the new broken stones showing white in the corrie where the little air-shaft comes out. I went to look. I saw the rope then, tied to the ash tree, and the big gap in the cliff, and when I looked down the shaft, I saw the — " he hesitated, " — the thing you built there."

I had not thought to feel amusement ever again. "That is a builder's scaffold, Stilicho."

"Yes, of course. Well, I thought, no ghost made that. So I shouted. That's all."

"Stilicho," I said, "if ever I did anything for you, be sure you have paid me a thousand times over. In fact, you have saved me twice over. Not only today; if you hadn't left the place the way I found it, I should have died weeks back, from starvation and cold. I shall not forget it."

"We've got to get you out of here now. But how?" He looked around him at the stripped cave and the broken furnishings. "Now we've spoken, and you're feeling stronger, lord, shall I not go and bring men and tools, and open the doorway for you? It would be the best way, truly it would."

"I know that, but I think not. I've had time now to consider. Until I know how things stand in the kingdoms, I can't suddenly 'come to life.' That is how the common people will see it, if Prince Merlin comes back from the tomb. No part of the story must be told until the King knows. So, until we can get a private message to him —"

"He's gone to Brittany, they say."

"So?" I thought for a moment. "Who is Regent?"

"The Queen, with Bedwyr."

A pause, while I looked down at my hands. Stilicho was sitting cross-legged on the floor. In the lantern's light he looked still much like the boy I had known. The dark Byzantine eyes watched me.

I wetted my lips. "The Lady Nimuë? Do you know who I mean? She —"

"Oh, yes, all the world knows her. She has magic, as you used to — as you have, lord. She is always near the King. She lives near Camelot."

"Yes," I said. "Well, I am sorry, my dear, but I cannot have it known before the King comes back from Brittany. Somehow, between us, we shall have to get me out of the shaft. I have no doubt that if you will bring the tools up out of the stable, we'll manage something."

And so we did. He was back in something under half an hour with nails and tools and the small stock of timber that had been left in the stable. It was a bad half hour for me: I had no doubts that he would return, but the reaction was so intense that, left alone again, I sat there on the stool, sweating and shaking like a fool. But by the time the stuff was pitched down the shaft, with himself following it, I had myself in hand, and we set to work and, with me sitting idly on the stool watching and directing, he put together a ladder of a sort and fixed it to the platform I had made. This reached the sloping section of the chimney. Here, as an adjunct to the knotted rope, he cut pieces of wood which with the help of cracks and protuberances of rock he wedged at intervals against the side of the chimney to act, if not as steps, then as resting-places where one could set a knee.

When all was done he tested it, and while he did so I wrapped the harp in the remaining blanket, and with it my manuscripts and a few of the drags that I might need to restore my strength fully. He climbed out with them. Finally I took a knife and cut the best of the jewels off the pall, and dropped them, together with the gold coins, into a leather bag which had held herbs. I slipped the thong of the bag over my wrist, and was waiting at the scaffold's foot when at last Stilicho reappeared at the top, laid hold of the rope, and called for me to begin my climb.

4

I STAYED A MONTH WITH STILICHO at the mill. Mai, who had held me formerly in trembling awe, once she saw that this was no terrifying wizard, but a man sick and in need of care, looked after me devotedly. I saw no one besides these two. I kept to the upper chamber they gave me — it was their own, the best, they would hear of nothing else. The hired man slept out in the granary sheds, and knew only that some ageing relative of the miller's was staying there. The children were told the same, and accepted me without question, as children will.

At first I kept to my bed. The reaction from the recent weeks was a severe one; I found daylight trying, and the noises of every day hard to bear — the men's voices in the yard as the grain barges came in to the wharf, hoofs on the roadway, the shouts of the children playing. At first the very act of talking to Mai or Stilicho came hard, but they showed all the gentleness and understanding of simple folk, so things gradually became easier, and I began to feel myself again. Soon I left my bed, and began to spend time with my writing, and, calling the elder of the children to me, began to teach them their letters. In time I even came to welcome Stilicho's ebullience, and questioned him eagerly about what had happened since I had been shut away.

Of Nimuë he knew little beyond what he had already told me. I gathered that her reputation for magic, in the weeks since my going, had grown so quickly that the mantle of the King's enchanter had fallen naturally upon her shoulders. She spent some of her time at Applegarth, but since the Lady's death had gone back to the Island shrine, to be accepted without question as the new Lady of the place. One rumour seemed to indicate that the status of the Lady would change with her. She did not remain on the Island, a maiden among maidens: she paid frequent visits to the court at Camelot, and there was talk of a probable marriage. Stilicho could not tell me who the man was said to be, "But of course," he said, "he will be a king."

With this I had to be content. There was little other news. Most of the men who came up-river to the mill were simple workmen, or barge masters, whose knowledge was only local, and who cared for little beyond getting a good price for the goods they carried. All I could gather was that the times were still prosperous; the kingdom was at peace; the Saxons kept to their treaties. And the High King, in consequence, had felt free to go abroad.

Why, Stilicho did not know. And this did not, for the moment, matter to me, except that it must mean my own continued secrecy. I thought the matter over again, after my return to health, and the conclusions I came to were the same. No purpose could be served by my public return to affairs. Even the "miracle" of a return from the grave would do no more for the kingdom and its High King than my "death" and the transfer of power had done. I had no power or vision to bring him; it would be wrong to indulge in a return which would tend to discredit Nimuë as my successor, without bringing anything fresh or even valid to Arthur's service. I had made my farewells, and my legend, such as it was, had already begun to gather way. So much I could understand from the tales that, according to Stilicho, had already added themselves to the grave-robber's tale of the enchanter's ghost.

As for Nimuë, the same arguments applied. With what wisdom I could command in the matter, I saw that the love we had had together was already a thing of the past. I could not go back, expecting to claim again the place I had had with her, and to tie jesses to the feet of a falcon already in flight. Something else held me back, something I would not recognize in daylight, but which mocked me in dreams with old prophecies buzzing around like stinging flies. What did I know of women, even now? When I remembered the steady draining of my power, the last, desperate weakness, the trancelike state in which I had lain before the final desertion in darkness, I asked myself what that love had been but the bond that held me to her, and bade me give her all I owned. And even when I recalled her sweetness, her generous worship, her words of love, I knew (and it took no vision to do so) that she would not lay her power down now, even to have me back again.

It was hard to make Stilicho understand my reluctance to reappear, but he did accept my desire to wait for Arthur's return before making plans. From his references to Nimuë he was obviously not yet aware that she had been more to me than a pupil who had taken up the master's charge.

At length, feeling myself again, and not wanting to impose any longer on Stilicho's little household, I prepared to set off for Northumbria, and set Stilicho to make arrangements for me. I decided to go north by sea. A sea voyage is something I never willingly undertake, but by road it would be a long, hard journey, with no guarantee of continued fine weather, and besides, I could hardly have gone alone; Stilicho would have insisted upon accompanying me, even though at this time of year he could ill be spared from the mill. Indeed, he tried to insist on going with me by ship, but in the end let himself be overruled; this not only by expedience, but because I think he believed me still to be the "great enchanter" whom he had served in the past with such awe and pride. In the end I had my way, and one morning early I went quietly downstream on one of the barges, and embarked at Maridunum on a north-bound coastal ship.

I had sent no message to Blaise in Northumbria, because there was no courier I could trust with the news of "Merlin's return from the dead." I would think of some way to prepare him when I came near the place. It was even possible that he had not yet heard news of my death; he lived so retired from the world — held to the times only by my dispatches — it was conceivable that he had only just unrolled my last letter from Applegarth.

This, as it turned out, was the fact; but I did not find out yet for a while. I did not get to Northumbria, but travelled no farther north than Segontium.

The ship put in there on a fine, still morning. The little town sunned itself at the edge of the shining strait, its clustered houses dwarfed by the great walls of the Roman-built fortress that had been the headquarters of the Emperor Maximus. Across the strait the fields of Mona's Isle showed golden in the sun. Behind the town, a little way beyond the fortress walls, stood the remains of the tower that was known as Macsen's Tower. Nearby was the site of the ruined temple of Mithras, where years ago I had found the King's sword of Britain, and where, deep under the rubble of the floor and the ruined altar of the god, I had left the rest of Macsen's treasure, the lance and the grail. This was the place I had promised to show Nimuë on our way home from Galava. Beyond the tower the great Snow Hill, Y Wyddfa, reared against the sky. The first white of winter was on its crest, and its cloud-haunted sides, even on that golden day, showed purple-black with scree and dead heather.

We nosed in to the wharf. There were goods to unload, and this would take time, so I went thankfully ashore, and, after a word at the harbour-master's office, made for the wharfside inn. There I could have a meal, and watch the unloading and loading of my ship.

I was hungry, and likely to get hungrier. My idea of any voyage, however calm, is to get below and stay below, without food or drink, until it is over. The harbourmaster had told me that the ship would not sail before the evening tide, so there was ample time to rest and make ready for the next dreaded stage of the journey. It did cross my mind to wish I might have time to make my way up once again to the temple of Mithras, but I put the thought aside. Even if I were to revisit the place, I would not disturb the treasure. It was not for me. Besides, the privations of the journey had tired me, and I needed food. I made for the inn.

This was built round three sides of a court, the fourth being open to the wharf, for the convenience, I suppose, of carrying goods straight from the ships into the inn's storerooms, which served as warehouses for the town. There were benches and stout wooden tables under the overhanging eaves of the open courtyard, but fine though the weather was, it was not warm enough to persuade me to eat out of doors. I found my way into the main room, where a log fire burned, and ordered food and wine. (I had paid my passage with — appropriately — one of the gold coins which had been the "ferryman's fee"; this had left me change besides, and caused the ship's master to accord me a respect which my apparent style hardly called for.) Now the servant hastened to serve me with a good meal, of mutton and fresh bread, with a flask of rough red wine such as seamen like, then left me in peace to enjoy the warmth of the fire and watch through the open door the scene at the quay-side.

The day wore through. I was more tired than I had realized. I dozed, then woke, and dozed again. Over at the wharf the work went on, with creak of windlass and rattle of chain and straining of ropes as the cranes swung the bales and sacks inboard. Overhead the gulls wheeled and cried. Now and again an ox-cart creaked by on clumsy wheels.

There was little coming and going in the inn itself. Once a woman crossed the courtyard with a basket of washing on her head, and a boy hurried through with a batch of bread. There was another party staying, it seemed, in chambers to the right of the court. A fellow in slave's dress hurried in from the town, carrying a flat basket covered with a linen cloth. He vanished through a doorway, and a short while later some children came running out, boys, well dressed but noisy, and with some kind of outlandish accent I could not place. Two of them — twins by their look — settled down on the sunlit flagstones for a game of knucklebones, while the other two, though ill-matched for size, started some kind of mock fight with sticks for swords, and old box lids for shields. Presently a decent-looking woman, whom I took to be their nurse, came out of the same doorway and sat down on a bench in the sun to watch them. From the way the boys, now and then, ran to gaze toward the wharf, I guessed that their party was perhaps waiting to join my ship, or continue its voyage on another vessel that was tied up a few lengths away along the quay.

From where I was sitting I could see the master of my ship, and at his elbow some sort of tallyman with stilus and wax. The latter had written nothing for some time, and on board the activity seemed to have ceased. It would soon be time to get back to my uneasy bed below decks, and wait miserably until the light breezes carried us northward on the next stage of the journey.

I got to my feet. As I did so I saw the master raise his head, with a movement like that of a dog sniffing the air. Then he swung round to look upward at the inn roof. Straight above my head I heard the long creak of the weathervane swinging round, then whining to and fro in small uneasy arcs as the suddenly rising breeze of evening caught it. To and fro it went, then settled into silence in front of a steady wind. The wind went across the harbour like a grey shadow over the water, and in its wake the moored ships swayed, and ropes sang and rattled against the masts like drumsticks. Beside me the fire flickered and then roared up the open chimney. The master, with a gesture of impatient anger, strode for the ship's gangway, calling out orders. Mingled with my own annoyance was relief; the seas would roughen quickly in this wind, but I would not be on them. With the fickle violence of autumn, the wind had veered. The ship could not sail. The fresh wind was blowing straight from the north.

I walked across to speak to the master, who, watching the sailors stow and rope the cargo against the new weather, glumly confirmed that there was no question of sailing until the wind blew our way again. I sent a boy to bring up my gear, and went back to bespeak a room at the inn. That there would be one vacant I knew, for the ill wind had apparently blown good for the other lodgers in the place. I could see sailors making ready on the other ship, and back at the inn there was a rush and bustle of preparation. The children had vanished from the courtyard, and presently reappeared, cloaked and warmly shod, the smallest boy holding his nurse's hand, the others frolicking around her, lively and noisy and obviously excited at the prospect of the voyage. They waited, skipping with impatience, while the slave I had seen, with another to help him, came out loaded with baggage, followed by a man in the livery of a chamber-groom, sharp-voiced and authoritative. They must be people of consequence, in spite of their strange speech. About the tallest of the boys, I thought, there was something vaguely familiar. I stood in the shadow of the inn's main doorway, watching them. The innkeeper had bustled up now, to be paid by the chamber-groom, and then a woman, his wife, perhaps, came running with a package. I heard the word "laundry," then the two of them backed away from the doorway with bow and curtsy, as the principal guest at length emerged from the chamber.

It was a woman, cloaked from head to foot in green. She was slightly built, but bore herself proudly. I caught the gleam of gold at her wrist, and there were jewels at her throat. Her cloak was lined and edged with red fox fur, deep and rich, and the hood, too. This was thrown back on her shoulders, but I could not see her face; she was turned away, speaking to someone behind her in the room.

Another woman came out carefully, carrying a box. This was wrapped in linen, and seemed heavy. She was plainly dressed, like a waiting woman. If the box contained her mistress's jewels, these were persons of consequence indeed.

Then the lady turned, and I knew her. It was Morgause, Queen of Lothian and Orkney. There could be no mistake. The lovely hair had lost its rose-gold glimmer, and had darkened to rose-brown, and her body had thickened with child-bearing, but the voice was the same, and the long slant of the eyes, and the pretty, folded mouth. So the four sturdy boys, ruddy and clamorous with the outlandish accent of the north, were her children by Lot of Lothian, Arthur's enemy.

I had no eyes for them now. I was watching the doorway. I wondered if, at last, I was going to see her eldest son, her child by Arthur himself.

He came swiftly out of the doorway. He was taller than his mother, a slim youth who, though I had never seen him before, I would have known anywhere. Dark hair, dark eyes, and the body of a dancer. Someone had once said that of me, and he was like me, was Arthur's son Mordred. He paused beside Morgause, saying something to her. His voice was light and pleasant, an echo of his mother's. I caught the words "ship" and "reckoning," and saw her nod. She laid her pretty hand on his, and the party started to move off. Mordred glanced at the sky, and spoke again, with what looked like a hint of anxiety. They went by within feet of where I was standing.

I drew back. The movement must have caught her attention, for she glanced up, and for the merest fraction of a moment her eyes met mine. There was no recognition in them. But as she turned to hurry for the ship I saw her shiver, and draw the furred cloak about her as if she felt the wind suddenly cold.

The train of servants followed and Lot's children: Gawain, Agravaine, Gaheris, Gareth. They trod over the gangplank of the waiting ship.

They were going south, all of them. What Morgause purposed there I could not guess at, but it could be nothing but evil. And I was powerless to stop them, or even to send a message ahead of them, for who would believe a message from the dead?

Then the innkeeper and his wife were beside me, wanting to know my pleasure.

I did not, after all, ask to sleep in the rooms that the Queen of Orkney and her train had just vacated.

The wind still blew from the north next day, cold, strong, and steady. There was no question of my own ship's continuing north. I thought again of sending some message of warning to Camelot, but Morgause's ship would easily outpace a horseman, and to whom, in any case, could I send? To Nimuë? To Bedwyr or the Queen? I could do nothing until the High King was back in Britain. And by the same token, while Arthur was still abroad, Morgause could do him no evil. I thought about it as I made my way out of the town, and set off along the track that led below the fortress walls toward Macsen's Tower. It would be an ill wind indeed if I could get no good of it at all. Yesterday's rest had refreshed me, and I had the day in hand. So I would use it.

When I had last been in Segontium, that great military city built and fortified by Maximus whom the Welsh call Macsen, it had been all but a ruin. Since then, Cador of Cornwall had repaired and re-fortified it against attackers from Ireland. That had been many years ago, but more recently Arthur had seen to it that Maelgon, his commander in the west, kept it in repair. I was interested to see what had been done, and how; and this, as much as anything else, took me along the valley track. Soon I was well above the town. It was a day of sunshine and chilly wind, and the city lay bright and washed with colour below me in the arm of the dark-blue sea. Beside the track the fortress walls rose stout and well kept, and within them I could hear the clash and bustle of an alert and well-maintained garrison. As if I had still been Arthur's engineer, proposing to report to him, I marked all that I saw. Then I came to the south side of the fortress, where ruin and the four winds had been allowed their way, and paused to look up the valley slope toward Macsen's Tower.

There was the track, once trodden by the faithful legionnaires, but probably now used only by sheep or goats and their herds. It led up the steep hillside to the swell of stony turf that hid the ancient, underground shrine of Mithras. For more than a hundred years the place had been ruinous, but when I had been there before, the steps that led down to the entrance had still been passable, and the temple itself, though patently unsafe, still recognizable. I started slowly up the track, wondering why, after all, I had come to see it again.

I need not have wondered. It was not there. There was no sign either of the mound that had hidden the roof or of the steps that had led downward. I did not need to look far to find the cause. At the head of the slope where the temple had lain, the restorers of Segontium, levering away the great stones of the fortress wall for their rebuilding, and quarrying here and there for smaller metal, had set half the hillside rolling in a long slope of scree. In this had seeded and grown half a hundred small trees — thorn and ash and blackberry — so that even the track of the fallen scree was hard to trace. And everywhere, like the weft of a loom, the narrow sheep-trods, white with summer dust, criss-crossed the hillside.

I seemed to hear again, faintly, the receding voice of the god.

"Throw down my altar. It is time to throw it down."

Altar, shrine and all, had vanished into the locked depths of the hill.

There is something not quite believable about any change of this kind. I stood there for some time, casting about for the bearings I knew. There was no question of the accuracy of my memory; a line straight from Macsen's Tower on the hill above to the southwest corner of the old fortress, and another, from the Commandant's house to the distant peak of Y Wyddfa, would intersect one another right over the site of the shrine. Now, they intersected one another right in the middle of the scree. I could see where, almost at that very point, the bushes were sparse, and the boulders showed gaps between, as of a space below.

"Lost something?" asked a voice.

I looked round. A boy was sitting perched above me, on a fallen block of stone. He was very young, perhaps ten years old, and very dirty. He was tousled and half-naked, and was chewing a hunk of barley bread. A hazel stick lay near him, and his sheep grazed placidly a little way up the hill.

"A treasure, it seems," I said.

"What kind of treasure? Gold?"

"It might be. Why?"

He swallowed the last bit of bread. "What's it worth to you?"

"Oh, half my kingdom. Were you going to help me find it?"

"I've found gold here before."

"You have?"

"Aye. And once a silver penny. And once a belt buckle. Bronze, that was."

"It seems your pasture is richer than it looks," I said, smiling. This had once been a busy road between fortress and temple. The place must be full of such trove. I looked at the boy. His eyes were clear and lively in the dirty face. "Well," I added, "I don't actually want to dig for gold, but if you can help me with some information, there's a copper penny in this for you. Tell me, have you lived here all your life?"

"Aye."

"Kept sheep in this valley?"

"Aye. Used to come with my brother. Then he got sold to a trader and went on a ship. I keep the sheep now. They're not mine. Master's a big man over to the hill."

"Do you remember — " I asked it without hope; some of the saplings were surely ten years grown. "Do you remember when this landslide came? When they were rebuilding the fort, perhaps?"

A shake of the tousled head. "It's always been like this."

"No. It wasn't always like this. When I was here before, many years ago, there was a good track along the hillside here, and deep in the side of the hill, just over yonder, was an underground building. It had once been a temple. In old times the soldiers used to worship Mithras there. Have you never heard tell of it?"

Another shake.

"From your father, perhaps?"

He grinned. "Tell me who that is, I'll tell you what he said."

"Your master, then?"

"No. But if it's under there" — a jerk of the head toward the scree — "I know where. There's water under. Where the water is, that'll be the place, surely?"

"There was no water when I — " I stopped. A prickling ran over my flesh, like a cold draught. "Water under where?"

"Under the stones. There. Way under. Twice a man's height, by the feel of it."

I took in the small dirty figure, the bright grey eyes, the hazel stick at his feet. "You can find water under the ground? With the hazel?"

"It's easiest wi' that. But I get the feeling sometimes, just the same, on my own."

"And metal? Is that the way you found gold here before?"

"Once. It was a nice bit of a statue or something. A dog, sort of. The master took it off me. If I found some more now I wouldn't tell him. But mostly it's copper, copper coins. Up there in the old buildings."

"I see." I was thinking that when I found the shrine it had already been a deserted ruin for a century or more. But when it was built, no doubt it would have been beside a spring. "If you will show me where the water lies below the stones, there will be silver in it for you."

He did not move. I thought he looked wary. "That's where it is, this treasure you're looking for?"

"I hope so." I smiled at him. "But it's nothing that you could find for yourself, child. It would take men with crowbars to shift those stones, and even if you led them to the place, you would get nothing of what they found. If you show me now, I promise that you will be paid."

He sat still for a moment or two, scuffling his bare feet in the dirt. Then, groping inside the skin kilt that was his only garment, he produced, flat on a dirty palm, a silver coin. "I was paid, master. There's others knew about the treasure. How was I to know it was yours? I showed them where to dig, and they lifted the stones and took the box away."

Silence. Here in the lee of the hill the wind had no way. The bright world seemed to spin far away, then steady, and come back. I sat down on a boulder.

"Master?" The boy slipped from his perch and padded downhill. He stopped near me, peering, but still poised warily, as if for flight. "Master? If I did wrong —"

"You did no wrong. How could you know? No, stay, please, and tell me about it. I shan't hurt you. How could I? Who were they, and how long ago did they take the box away?"

He gave me another doubtful look, then appeared to take me at my word. He spoke eagerly. "Only two days since. It was two men, I don't know them, slaves they were, and they came with the lady."

"The lady?"

At something in my face he stepped back half a pace, then stood his ground. "Aye. Came two days ago, she did. She must have had magic, I think. Went straight to it, like a bitch to the porridge-pot. Pointed almost to the very place, and said, 'Try there.' The two fellows started shifting the rocks. I was sitting up there. When they'd been at it for a bit, they were moving the wrong way, so I went down. Told her what I told you, that I could find things. 'Well,' she says, 'there's metal hid somewhere hereabout. I've lost the map,' she says, 'but I know it's here. The owner sent me. If you can show us where to dig, there's a silver coin in it for you.' So I found it. Metal! It took the hazel clean from my hand, like a big dog snatching a bone. A powerful kind of gold there must have been there?"

"Indeed," I said. "You saw them find it?"

"Aye. I waited for my pay, see?"

"Of course. What was it like?"

"A box, so by so." Gestures sketched the size. "It looked heavy. They never opened it. She made them lay it down, then she laid her hands right across it, like this. I told you she had magic. She looked right up there, right into Y Wyddfa, as if she was talking to the spirit. You know, the one that lives there. It made a sword once, they say. The King has it now. Merlin got it for him from the King of the hills."

"Yes," I said. "Then?"

"They took it away."

"Did you see where they went?"

"Well, yes. Down toward the town." He shuffled his toes in the dirt, regarding me with clouded eyes. "She did say the owner sent her. Was that a lie? She was very sweet-spoken, and the slaves had badges with a crown on. I thought she was a queen."

"So she was," I said. I straightened my back. "Don't look like that, child, you have done nothing wrong. In fact, you have done more than most men would have done in your place: you told me the truth. You could have earned another silver coin if you had kept your mouth shut, showed me the place, and gone on your way. So I shall pay you, as I promised. Here."

"But this is silver, master. And for nothing."

"Not for nothing. You gave me news that must be worth half the kingdom, or even more. A king's ransom, don't they call it?" I got to my feet. "Don't try to understand me. Stay here in peace, and watch your sheep and find your fortune, and the gods be with you."

"And with you too, master," said he, staring.

"It may be," I said, "that they still are. All they have to do now is to send another ship in the wake of the first one, and take me south."

I left him looking wonderingly after me, with the silver coin clutched tightly in the dirty hand.

A south-bound ship docked next day at noon, and sailed again with the evening tide. I was on board, and stayed prostrate and suffering until she came, five days later, safely into the Severn Channel.

5

THE WINDS STAYED STRONG, BUT variable. By the time we reached the Channel, the weather had settled to fair, so we did not put in at Maridunum, but held straight on up the estuary.

Enquiries had told me that the Orc, Morgause's ship, had been bound for Ynys Witrin, putting in at least twice on the way. It was possible, since by good luck mine was a fast ship, that Morgause and her party might not be too far ahead of me. I suppose I might have bribed the master of my ship to put in at the Island also, but nothing could have saved me there from recognition, with the consequent uproar that I had striven to avoid. Had I known when I saw Morgause that she had the things of power with her from the Mithraeum, and had still (since the boy's judgement seemed good) some magic in her hands, I would have felt bound, whatever the risks, to sail with her in the Orc, though I might never have survived the voyage.

I had no means of knowing when Arthur was expected home, and if I had to stay in hiding until he came, Morgause would probably be able to reach him before I did. What I was hoping for, as I travelled south so closely in her wake, was that I could somehow reach Nimuë. I had faced what might be the result of that. A return from the dead is rarely a success. It was very possible that she might herself want to stop me from reaching Arthur again, and reclaiming my place in his affection and his service. But she had my power. The grail was for the future, and the future was hers. Warn her I must, that another witch was on the way. The rape of Macsen's treasure had sounded some note of danger which I could not ignore.

To my relief my ship passed the mouth of the estuary that led to the Island's harbour, and held on up into the narrowing Severn Channel. We put in at length at a small wharf at the mouth of the Frome River, from which there is a good road leading straight to Aquae Sulis in the Summer Country. I had paid my passage this time with one of the jewels from my grave-clothes, and with the change from this I bought myself a good horse, filled the saddlebags with food and a change of clothing, and set off at once along the road toward the city.

Except in those places where I was very well known, I thought there was small chance now of my being recognized. I had grown thinner since my entombment, my hair was now quite grey, and I had not shaved my beard. For all that, I planned to skirt towns and villages if I could, and lie at country taverns. I could not lie out; the weather was turning colder every day, and, not much to my surprise, I found the ride exhausting. By the evening of the first day I was very ready to rest, and put up thankfully at a small, decent-looking tavern still four or five miles short of Aquae Sulis.

Before I even asked for food, I sought news, and was told that Arthur was home, and at Camelot. When I spoke of Nimuë they answered readily, but more vaguely. "Merlin's lady," they called her, "the King's enchantress," and elaborated with one or two fanciful tales, but they were not sure of her movements. One man said she was in Camelot with the King, but another was sure she had left the place a month back; there had been, he said, some trouble in Rheged; some tale about Queen Morgan, and the King's great sword.

So Nimuë, it seemed, was out of touch; and Arthur was home. Even if Morgause did land on the Island, she might not hasten straight to confront the King. If I made all haste, I might reach him before she did. I hurried with my meal, then paid my shot, had them saddle up once more, and took again to the road. Though I was tired, I had come a scant ten miles, and my good horse was still fresh. If I did not press him, I knew that he could go all night.

There was a moon, and the road was in repair, so we made good time, reaching Aquae Sulis well before midnight. The gates were locked, so I skirted the walls. I was stopped twice, once by a gate guard calling to know my business, and once by a troop of soldiers wearing Melwas' badge. Each time I showed my brooch with its Dragon jewel, and said curtly, "King's business," and each time the brooch, or my assurance, told, and they let me by. A mile or so after that the road forked, and I turned south by southeast.

The sun came up, small and red in an icy sky. Ahead, the road led straight across the bleak hill land, where the limestone shows white as bone, and the trees are all racked northeastward away from the gales. My horse dropped to a walk, then to a plod. Myself, I was riding in a dream, gone in exhaustion beyond either stiffness or soreness. Out of mercy to both weary animals, I drew rein by the next water-trough we passed, tossed hay down from the net that hung at the saddle bow, and myself sat down on the trough's edge and took out my breakfast of raisins and black bread and mead.

The light broadened, flashing on the frosty grass. It was very cold. I broke the cat-ice on the trough, and laved my face and hands. It refreshed me, but made me shiver. If the horse and I were to stay alive we must soon move on. Presently I bitted up again, and led him to where I might mount from the edge of the trough. The horse threw up his head and pricked his ears, and then I heard it, too; hoofs approaching from the direction of the city, and at a fast gallop. Someone who had left the city as soon as the gates had opened, and was coming in a hurry, on a fresh horse.

He came in sight: a young man riding hard, on a big blue roan. When he was a hundred paces off, I recognized the insignia of the royal courier, and, clambering stiffly down from the trough's edge, moved into the road and held up a hand.

He would not have stopped for me, but here the road was edged on the one side by a low ridge of rock, and the other by a steep drop, with the trough blocking the narrow verge. And I had turned my horse so that he stood across the way.

The rider drew rein, holding the restless roan, and saying impatiently: "What is it? If you're fain for company, my good man, I can't provide it. Can't you see who I am?"

"A King's messenger. Yes. Where are you bound?"

"Camelot." He was young, with russet hair and a high colour, and (as his kind have) a kind of prideful arrogance in his calling. But he spoke civilly enough. "The King's there, and I must be there myself tomorrow. What is it, old man, is your horse gone lame? Your best plan is —"

"No. I shall manage. Thank you. I would not have stopped you for a triviality, but this is important. I want you to take a message for me, please. It is to go to the King."

He stared, then laughed, his breath like a cloud on the icy air. "For the King, he says! Good sir, forgive me, but a King's messenger has better things to do than take tales from every passer-by. If it's a petition, then I suggest you trot back to Caerleon yourself. The King's to be there for Christmas, and you might get there in time, if you hurry." His heels moved as if he would set spurs to his horse, and ride on. "So by your leave, stand aside and let me by."

I did not move. I said quietly: "You would do well to listen, I think."

He swung back, angry now, and shook his whip free. I thought he would ride over me. Then he met my eyes. He bit back what he had been going to say. The roan, anticipating the whip, bounded forward, and was curbed sharply. It subsided, fretting, its breath puffing white like a dragon's. The man cleared his throat, looked me up and down doubtfully, then fixed his eyes on my face again. I saw his doubt growing. He made a concession and a face-saver at the same time.

"Well — sir — I can listen. And be sure I'll take any message that seems up to my weight. But we're not supposed to act as common carriers, and I have a schedule to keep."

"I know. I would not trouble you, except that it is urgent that I reach the King, and as you have pointed out, you will get there rather more quickly than I. The message is this: that you met an old man on the road who gave you a token, and told you that he is on his way to Camelot to see the King. But he can only make his way slowly, so if the King wishes to see him he must come to him by the way. Tell him which road I am taking, and say that I paid you with the ferryman's guerdon. Repeat it, please."

These men are practised at remembering word for word. Often the messages they take are from men who cannot write. He began to obey me, without thought: "I met an old man on the road who gave me a token, and told me that he is on his way to Camelot to see the King. But he can only make his way slowly so if the King wishes to see him, he must — Hey, now, what sort of a message is that? Are you out of your mind? The way you put it, it sounds as if you're sending for the King, just like that."

I smiled. "I suppose it does. Perhaps I might phrase it better, if it will make a more comfortable message to deliver? In any case, I suggest you deliver it in private."

"I'll say it had better be in private! Look, I don't know who you are, sir — and it's my guess you're somebody, in spite of, well, not looking it — but by the god of going, it had better be a powerful token, and a good guerdon, too, if I'm to take a summons to King Arthur, however privately."

"Oh, it is." I had wrapped my Dragon brooch in linen, and fastened it into a small package. I handed him this, and with it the second of the gold coins that had sealed my eyelids in the tomb. He stared at the gold coin, then at me, then turned the package over in his hand, eyeing it. He said doubtfully: "What's in it?"

"Only the token I spoke of. And let me repeat, this is important, and it's urgent that you should give it to the King in private. If Bedwyr is there with him, no matter, but no other person. Do you understand?"

"Ye-es, but..." With a movement of knees and wrist he wheeled the roan horse half away from me, and with another movement too fast for me to prevent, he broke open the package. My brooch, with the royal Dragon glinting on the gold ground, fell into his hand. "This? This is the royal cypher."

"Yes."

He said, abruptly: "Who are you?"

"I am the King's cousin. So have no fear of delivering the message."

"The King has no cousin, other than Hoel of Brittany. And Hoel doesn't rate the Dragon. Only the..." His voice trailed away. I saw the blood begin to drain from his face.

"The King will know who I am," I said. "Don't think I blame you for doubting me, or for opening the package. The King is well served. I shall tell him so."

"You're Merlin." It came out in a whisper. He had to lick his lips and try twice before he could make a sound.

"Yes. Now you see why you must see the King alone. It will be a shock to him, too. Don't be afraid of me."

"But... Merlin died and was buried." He was perfectly white now. The reins ran slack through his fingers, and the roan, deciding to take advantage of the respite, lowered its head and began to graze.

I said quickly: "Don't drop the brooch. Look, man, I'm no ghost. It is not every grave that is the gate of death."

I had meant that as a reassurance, but he went, if possible, more ashen than before, "My lord, we thought... Everybody knew..."

"It was thought that I had died, yes." I spoke briskly, keeping it matter-of-fact. "But all that happened was that I fell into a sickness like death, and I recovered. That is all. Now I am well, and will re-enter the King's service... but secretly. No one must know until the King himself has had the news, and spoken with me. I would have told no one but one of the King's own couriers. Do you understand?"

This had the effect, as I had hoped, of bringing back his self-assurance. The red came back into his cheeks, and he straightened his back. "Yes, my lord. The King will be — very happy, my lord. When you died — that is, when you — well, when it happened, he shut himself up alone for three days, and would speak to no one, not even to Prince Bedwyr. Or so they say."

His voice came back to normal while he was speaking, warming, I could see, with pleasurable excitement at the thought of the good news he would have to carry to the King. Gold was the least of it. As he came to an end of telling me how Merlin had been missed and mourned "the length and breadth of the kingdom, I promise you, sir," he pulled the roan's head up from the frosty grass, and set it dancing. The colour was back bright in his face, and he looked excited and eager. "Then I'll be on my way."

"When do you expect to reach Camelot?"

"Tomorrow noon, with good fortune, and a good change of horses. More probably, tomorrow at lamp-lighting. You couldn't give my horse a pair of wings while you're about it, could you?"

I laughed. "I should have to recover a little further before I could manage that. One moment more, before you go... There's another message that should go straight to the King. Perhaps you bear it already? Did you get any news in Aquae Sulis of the Queen of Orkney? I heard that she was travelling south by ship to Ynys Witrin, no doubt on her way to court."

"Yes, it's true. She's arrived. Landed, I mean, and on her way now to Camelot. There were those who said she wouldn't obey the summons —"

"Summons? Do you mean that the High King sent for her?"

"Yes, sir. That's common knowledge, so I'm not talking out of turn. As a matter of fact I won a small wager on it. They were saying she wouldn't come, even with the safe-conduct for the boys. I said she would. With Tydwal sitting tight in Lot's other castle, and Arthur's sworn man, where could she look for refuge if the High King chose to smoke her out?"

"Where, indeed?" I said it absently, almost blankly. This I had not foreseen, and could not understand. "Forgive me for detaining you, but I have been a long time without news. Can you tell me why the High King should summon her — and apparently under threat?"

He opened his lips, shut them again, then, obviously deciding that telling the King's cousin and erstwhile chief adviser was no breach of his code, nodded. "I understand it's a matter of the boys, sir. One in particular, the eldest of the five. The queen was to bring them all to Camelot."

The eldest of the five. So Nimuë had found Mordred for him... where I had failed. Nimuë, who had gone north on "some business for the King."

I thanked the man, and stood back, moving my horse out of his way. "Now, on your way, Bellerophon, as best you can, and 'ware dragons."

"I've got all the dragons I need, thanks." He gathered the reins, and raised a hand in salute. "But that's not my name."

"What is it, then?"

"Perseus," he said, and looked puzzled when I laughed. Then he laughed with me, flourished his whip, and sent the roan past me at a gallop.

6

THE NEED FOR HURRY WAS PAST. It was likely that Morgause would reach Arthur before the courier, but about that I could do nothing. Though it still disturbed me to know that she had with her the things of power, the sharpest of my worries was gone: Arthur was forearmed; she was there by his orders, and her hostages with her. It was also probable that I myself would be able to see and talk with him before he had dealt with Morgause and Mordred. I had no doubt at all that Arthur, the moment he saw my token and heard the message, would be on the road to find me. Meeting the courier had been a stroke of excellent fortune; even in my prime I could not have ridden as these men ride.

Nor was it urgent, now, that I should get in touch with Nimuë. Of this, in an obscure way, I was glad. There are some tests that one shrinks from making, and some truths that one would rather not hear. I think that if I could have concealed my existence from her I would have done so. I wanted to remember her words of love and grief at my passing, not see in fresh daylight her face of dismay when she saw me living.

For the rest of that day I went slowly, and, well before sunset on a still, cold afternoon, came to a wayside inn, and stopped there. There were no other travellers staying, for which I was glad. I saw my horse stabled and fed, then ate the good supper provided by the innkeeper's wife, and went early to bed, and a dreamless sleep.

All the next day I stayed indoors, glad of the rest. One or two folk passed that way: a drover with his flock, a farmer with his wife on their way home from market, a courier going northwest. But again, at nightfall, I was the only guest, and had the fire to myself. After supper, when the host and his wife withdrew to their own place, I was left alone in the small, raftered room, with my pallet of straw drawn near the fire, and a stack of logs nearby to keep the place warm.

That night I made no attempt to seek sleep. Once the inn was sunk in silence, I pulled a chair near to the hearth and fed fresh wood to the flames. The goodwife had left a pot of water simmering at the edge of the fire, so I mixed hot water with the remains of the supper's wine, and drank it, while around me the small sounds of the night took over: the settling of the logs in the fire, the rustle of the flames, the scuttle of rats in the thatch, the sound, far away, of an owl hunting in the icy night. Then I set the wine aside and closed my eyes. How long I sat there I have no idea, or what form the prayers took that brought the sweat to my skin and set the night noises whirling and receding into a limitless and stinging silence. Then at last, the light of the flames against my eyeballs, and through the light the darkness, and through the darkness, light...

It was a long time since I had seen the great hall at Camelot. Now it was lit against the dark of an autumn evening. An extravagance of waxlight glittered on the gay dresses of the women, and the jewels and weapons of the men. Supper was just over. Guinevere sat in her place at the center of the high table, lovely in her gold-backed chair. Bedwyr was on her left. They looked happier, I thought, high of heart and smiling. On the Queen's right, the King's great chair was empty.

But just as the chill had touched me, of not seeing him who was all I desired to see, I saw him. He was walking down the hall, pausing here and there to speak to a man as he passed. He was calm, and smiling, and once or twice set them laughing. A page led him; some message, then, had been sent up to the high table, and the King was answering it himself. He reached the great door, and, with a word to the sentries, dismissed the boy and stepped outside. Two soldiers — guards from the gatehouse — waited for him there, with, between them, a man I had seen before: Morgause's chamber-groom.

The latter started forward as soon as the King appeared, then stopped, apparently disconcerted. It was obvious that he had not expected to see Arthur himself. Then, mastering his surprise, he went down on a knee. He started to speak, in that strange northern accent, but Arthur cut across it.

"Where are they?"

"Why, at the gate, my lord. Your lady sister sent me to beg an audience of you tonight, there in the hall."

"My orders were that she should come tomorrow to the Round Hall. Did she not receive the message?"

"Indeed, my lord. But she has travelled far, and is weary, and in some anxiety of mind about your summons. She and her children cannot rest until she knows your will. She has brought them — all — with her tonight, and begs you of your grace that you and the Queen will receive them —"

"I will receive them, yes, but not in the hall. At the gate. Go back and tell her to wait there."

"But, my lord — " Against the King's silence, the man's protests died. He got to his feet with a kind of dignity, bowed to Arthur, then withdrew into the darkness with the two guards. More slowly, Arthur followed them.

The night was dry and still, and frost furred the small clipped trees that lined the terraces. The King's robe brushed them as he passed. He was walking slowly, head down, frowning as he had not let himself frown in the hall full of men and women. No one was about except the guards. A sergeant saluted him and asked a question. He shook his head. So with neither escort nor company he walked alone through the palace gardens, past the chapel wall, and down the steps by the silent fountain. Then through another gate with its saluting sentries, and onto the roadway which led down through the fortress to the southwest gate.

And, sitting by the blaze in the faraway tavern, with the vision driving its nails of pain through my eyes, I cried out to him with a warning as plain as I could make it:

Arthur. Arthur. This is the fate you begot on that night at Luguvallium. This is the woman who took your seed to make your enemy. Destroy them. Destroy them now. They are your fate. She has in her hand the things of power, and I am afraid. Destroy them now. They are in your hand.

He had stopped in the middle of the way. He raised his head as if he could hear something in the night sky. A lantern hanging from a pole threw light on his face. I scarcely knew it. It was somber, hard, cold, the face of a judge, or an executioner. He stood for a few minutes, quite still, then moved as suddenly as a horse under the spur, and strode down towards the main gate of the fortress.

They were there, the whole party. They had changed and robed themselves, and their horses were fresh and richly caparisoned. Torchlight showed the glint of gold tassels and green and scarlet harness. Morgause wore white, a robe trimmed with silver and small pearls, and a long scarlet cloak lined with white fur. The four younger boys were to the rear, with a pair of servants, but Mordred was beside his mother, on a handsome black horse, its bridle ringing with silver. He was looking around him curiously. He does not know, I thought; she has not told him. The black brows, tipped like wings, were smooth; the mouth, a still mouth, folded like Morgause's, kept its secrets. The eyes were Arthur's, and my own.

Morgause sat her mare, still and upright, waiting. Her hood was thrown back, and the light caught her face. It was expressionless and rather pale; but the eyes glittered green under the long lids, and I saw the kitten's teeth savaging her underlip. I knew that, under the cool exterior, she was disconcerted, even afraid. She had ignored Arthur's messenger, and deliberately brought her little train to Camelot at this late hour, when all would be assembled in the great hall. She must have reckoned on bringing her royal brood to the steps of the high throne, and perhaps even presenting Arthur's son in public, so forcing the King's hand before his Queen and all the assembled nobles and their ladies. These, she could be sure, would have stood the allies of a lonely queen with a brood of innocents. But she had been stopped at the gate, and now, against all precedent, the King had come out alone to see her, with no witness but his soldiers.

He came down now under the torchlight. He stopped a few paces away, full in the light, and said to the guards: "Let them come."

Mordred slid from his horse's back, and handed his mother down. The servants took the horses and withdrew to the gatehouse. Then Morgause, with a boy to either side of her, and the three younger ones behind, went forward to meet the King.

It was the first time they had met since the night in Luguvallium when she sent her maid to lead him to her bed. Then he had been a stripling, a prince after his first battle, gay and young and full of fire; the woman had been twenty years old, subtle and experienced, with her double web of sex and magic to entrance the boy. Now, in spite of the years of child-bearing, there was still something left of whatever had drawn men's eyes and sent them mad for her. But she was not now facing a green and eager boy; this was a man in the flower of his strength, with the judgement that makes a king, and the power to enforce it, and with it all something formidable, dangerous, like a fire banked down that needs only a breath of air to set it blazing.

Morgause went down to the frosty ground in front of him, not in the deep curtsy that one might have expected from a suppliant who had need of his forgiveness and grace; but kneeling. Her right hand went out and forced the young Mordred, likewise, to his knees. Gawain, on her other side, stood, with the other children, looking wonderingly from his mother to the King. She left them so; they were Lot's, self-confessed, big-boned and high-coloured, with the fair skin and hair bequeathed by their mother. Whatever Lot had done in the past, Arthur would visit none of it on his children. But the other, the changeling with the thin face and the dark eyes that had come down through the royal house from Macsen himself... she forced him to his knees, where he stayed, but with his head up, and those dark eyes darting round him, looking, it seemed, all ways at once.

Morgause was speaking, in the light, pretty voice that had not changed. I could not catch what she said. Arthur stood like stone. I doubt if he heard a word. He had hardly glanced at her; his eyes were all for his son. Her voice took an edge of urgency. I caught the word "brother," and then "son." Arthur listened, still-faced, but I could feel the words flying like darts between them. Then he took a step forward, and put out a hand. She laid hers in it, and he raised her. I saw among the boys, and in the men who waited at the gate, a subtle relaxation. Her servants' hands did not drop from their hilts — they had studiously not been near them — but the effect was the same. The two older boys, Gawain and Mordred, exchanged a look as their mother rose, and I saw Mordred smile. They waited now for the King to give her the kiss of peace and friendship.

He did not give it. He raised her, and said something, then, turning, led her a little way aside. I saw Mordred's head go round like a hunting dog's. Then the King spoke to the boys:

"Be welcome here. Now go back to the gatehouse, and wait."

They went, Mordred with a backward look at his mother. For a moment I saw terror in her face, then the mask of calm came down again. Some message must have passed, for now the chamber-groom came forward, in a hurry, from the gatehouse, bearing in his hands the box that they had brought from Segontium. The things of power... unbelievably, she had brought them for the King. Unbelievably, she hoped to buy her way to his favour with the treasure of Macsen...

The man knelt at the King's feet. He opened the box. The light shone down on the treasure that lay within. I saw it all, as clearly as if it lay at my feet. Silver, all silver; cups and bracelets, and a necklet made of silver plaques, designed with those fluid and interlocking lines with which the northern silversmiths invoke their magic. There was no sign of Macsen's emblems of power, no grail studded with emeralds, no lance-head, no dish crusted with sapphire and amethyst. Arthur gave it barely a glance. As the chamber-groom scuttled back into the shelter of the gatehouse, the King turned again to Morgause, leaving the gift lying on the frosty ground. And as he had ignored the gift, so he ignored all that, until now, she had been saying. I heard his voice quite clearly.

"I sent for you, Morgause, for reasons which may not be clear to you. You were wise to obey me. One of my reasons concerns your children; you must have guessed this; but you need not fear for them. I promised you that none of them should be harmed, and I shall keep my promise. But for yourself, no such promise was made. You do well to kneel and sue for mercy. And what mercy can you expect? You killed Merlin. It was you who fed him the poison that in the end brought him to his death."

She had not expected this. I saw her gasp. The white hands fluttered, as if she would have put them to her throat. But she held them still. "Who has told you this lie?"

"It is no lie. When he lay dying, he himself accused you."

"He was always my enemy!" she cried.

"And who is to say he was wrong? You know what you have done. Do you deny it?"

"Of course I deny it! He hated me, always! And you know why. He wanted no one to have power over you but himself. We sinned, yes, you and I, but we sinned in innocence —"

"If you are wise, you will not speak of that." His voice was dry and icy. "You know, as well as I do, what sins were committed, and why. If you hope for any mercy now, or ever, you will not speak of it."

She bowed her head. Her fingers twisted together. Her pose was humble. When she spoke, she spoke quietly. "You are right, my lord. I should not have spoken so. I will not encumber you with memories. I have obeyed you, and brought your son to you, and I leave your heart and conscience to deal rightly with him. You will not deny that he is innocent."

He said nothing. She tried again, with the hint of her old sideways, glinting look.

"For myself, I admit that I stand accused of folly. I come to you, Arthur, as a sister, who —"

"I have two sisters," he said stonily. "The other one has just now tried to betray me. Do not speak to me of sisters."

Her head went up. The thin disguise of suppliant was shed. She faced him, a queen to his king. "Then what can I say, except that I come to you as the mother of your son?"

"You have come to me as the murderer of the man who was more to me than my own father. And as nothing else. You are no more to me, and no less. This is why I sent for you, and what I shall judge you for."

"He would have killed me. He would have had you kill your own son."

"That is not true," said the King. "He prevented me from killing you both. Yes, I see that shakes you. When I heard of the child's birth, my first thought was to send someone up to kill him. But, if you remember, Lot was before me... And Merlin, of all men, would have saved the child because he is mine." For the first time passion showed through a crack in his composure. "But he is not here now, Morgause. He will not protect you again. Why do you think I refused to receive you in the open hall tonight, in the presence of the Queen and the knights? That is what you hoped for, is it not? You, with your pretty face and voice, your four fine boys by Lot, and this youth here with those dark eyes, and the look of his royal kindred..."

"He has done you no harm!" she cried.

"No, he has done me no harm. Now listen to me. Your four sons by Lot I will take from you, and have them trained here at Camelot. I will not have them left in your care, to be brought up as traitors, to hate their King. As for Mordred, he has done me no wrong, though I have wronged him sorely, and so have you. I will not add sin to sin. I have been warned of him, but a man must do right, even to his own hurt. And who can read the gods accurately? You will leave him with me also."

"And have you murder him as soon as I am gone?"

"And if I do, what choice have you but to let me?"

"You've changed, brother," she said, spitefully.

For the first time, something like a smile touched his mouth. "You might say so. For what comfort it is to you now, I shall not kill him. But you, Morgause, because you slew Merlin, who was the best man in all this realm —"

He was interrupted. From the gatehouse came a clatter of hoofs, the quick challenge from the sentries, a breathless word, then the creak and crash of the gates opening. A horse, tagged with foam, clattered through, and came to a halt beside the King and stood. Its head went down to its knees. Its limbs trembled. The courier slid down from the saddle, grabbed at the girth to keep his own limbs from folding under him, then went carefully on one knee, and saluted the King.

It was hardly a comfortable interruption. Arthur faced about, his brows drawn, and anger in his face. "Well?" he asked. His voice was even. He knew that no courier would have got through to him at such a moment, and in such a state, unless his business drove him. "Wait, I remember you, don't I? Perseus, is it not? What news can you possibly bring from Glevum that makes it worth your while to kill a good horse, and break in on my private councils?"

"My lord — " The man cleared his throat, with a glance at Morgause. "My lord, it is urgent news, most urgent, that I must deliver privately. Forgive me." This half to Morgause, who was standing like a statue, hands to her throat. Some wisp of forgotten magic, trailing, may have warned her what the news might be.

The King regarded him in silence for a moment, then nodded. He called out an order, and two of the guards came forward, halting one on either side of Morgause. Then he turned, with a sign to the courier, and walked back up the roadway with the man following him.

At the foot of the palace steps he paused and turned.

"Your message?"

Perseus held out the package I had given him. "I met an old man on the road who gave me this token, and told me that he is on his way to Camelot to see the King. But he can only make his way slowly, so if the King wishes to see him, he must come to him. He is travelling by the road that runs over the hills between Aquae Sulis and Camelot. He told me —"

"He gave you this?" The brooch lay in the King's hand. The Dragon winked and glittered. Arthur looked up from it, his face colourless.

"Yes, my lord." The clipped recital hurried. "I was to tell you that he paid me for my service with the ferryman's guerdon." He held out his hand with the gold coin in the palm.

The King took it like a man in a dream, glanced at it, and handed it back. In his other hand he was turning the brooch this way and that, so that the Dragon flashed in the torchlight. "You know what this is?"

"Indeed, my lord. It's the Dragon. When I saw it first I asked what his right to it was, but then I knew him. My lord, yes..." The King, his face quite bloodless now, was staring. The man licked his lips, and somehow got the rest of the message out. "When he stopped me, yesterday, he was near the thirteenth milestone. He — he didn't look too good, my lord. If you do ride to meet him, it's my guess he won't have got much beyond the next inn. It stands back from the road, on the south side, and the sign's a bush of holly."

"A bush of holly." Arthur repeated it with no expression at all, like a man talking in his sleep. Then, suddenly, the trance that held him shattered. Colour flooded his face. He threw the brooch up in the air, flashing and turning, and caught it again. He laughed aloud. "I might have known! I might have known... This is real, at any rate!"

"He told me," said Perseus, "he told me he was no ghost. And that it wasn't every tomb that was the gate of death."

"Even his ghost," said Arthur. "Even his ghost..." He whirled and shouted. Men came running. Orders were flung at them. "My grey stallion. My cloak and sword. I give you four minutes." He put out a hand to the courier. "You will stay here in Camelot till my return. You have done more than well, Perseus. I'll remember it. Now go and rest... Ah, Ulfin. Tell Bedwyr to bring twenty of the knights and follow me. This man will direct them. Give him food, and tend his horse and keep him till I come again."

"And the lady?" asked someone.

"Who?" It was plain that the King had forgotten all about Morgause. He said indifferently: "Hold her until I have time for her, and let her speak to no one. No one, do you understand me?"

The stallion was brought, with two grooms clinging to the bit. Someone came running with cloak and sword. The gates crashed open. Arthur was in the saddle. The grey stallion screamed and climbed the torchlit air, then leaped forward under the spur, and was out of the gate with the speed of a thrown spear. It went down the steep, winding causeway as if it had been a level plain in daylight. It was the way the boy Arthur had once ridden through the Wild Forest, and to the same assignation...

Morgause, her virgin white spattered with thrown turf and sods, stood stiffly between her guards, as men-at-arms clattered past her. The boys were in their midst, and Mordred among them. They vanished towards the palace without a backward look.

For the first time since I had known her, I saw her, no more than a frightened woman, making the sign against strong enchantment.

7

NEXT MORNING THE INNKEEPER and his wife, to their alarm and distress, found me lying on the cooling hearth, apparently in a faint. They got me into bed, wrapped winter-stones to warm me, piled blankets around me, and got the fire going once more. When, in time, I wakened, the good folk looked after me with the anxious care they might have accorded their own father. I was not much the worse. Moments of vision have always to be paid for; first with the pain of the vision itself, then afterwards in the long trance of exhausted sleep.

Reckoning out the distances, I let myself rest quietly for the remainder of that day, then next morning, putting my hosts' protests aside, had them saddle my horse. They were reassured when I told them I would not ride far, but only a mile or so down the road, where a friend could be expected to meet me. I further allayed their fears by asking them to prepare a dinner "for myself and my friend."

"For," I said, "he loves good food, and the goodwife's cooking is as tasty as any, I'll swear, at the King's court of Camelot."

At that the innkeeper's wife laughed and bridled, and began to talk of capons, so I left money to pay for the food, and went my way.

After the spell of hard frost, the weather had slackened. The sun was up, and dealing some warmth. The air was mild enough, but still everywhere was the hint of winter's coming; in the bare trees of the heights, the fieldfares busy in the berried holly, redwings flocking on the bushes, nuts ripe in the hazel coppices. The bracken was fading gold, and there were still flowers out on the gorse.

My horse, after his long rest, was fresh and eager, and we covered the first stretch of road at a fast canter. We met no one. Soon the road left the high crest of the limestone hills, and slanted downward along a valley-side. All along the lower reaches of the valley the slopes were crowded with trees in the flaming colours of autumn; beech, oak and chestnut, birch in its yellow gold, with everywhere the dark spires of the pine trees and the glossy green of holly. Through the trees I caught the glint of moving water. Down by the river, the innkeeper had told me, the way forked. The road itself held straight across the river, which here was paved in a shallow ford, and just beyond the water another way led off to the right, through the forest. This was a little-used track, and a rough one, which cut off a corner to rejoin the gravelled road some miles farther toward the east.

This was the place I was making for. It was a full mile since I had seen any sort of dwelling; the ford was as private for our meeting as a midnight bedchamber. I dared not go farther to meet him. Whenever Arthur had to ride, he made all speed, and cut all corners. Not knowing the forest track, I could not count on his using it, so might miss him if I took one way or the other.

It was a good place to wait. Down in the hollow the sun shone warmly, and the air was mild but fresh. It smelled of pines. Two jays wrestled and scolded in a shaw of hollies, then flew low across the road with a flash of sky-blue in their wings. Distantly, in the woods to the southeast, I heard the long rasping noise that meant a woodpecker at work. The river whispered across the road, running gently, no more than a foot deep across the Roman setts of the ford.

I unsaddled my horse and slacked his bit, then unbuckled an end of the rein, tied it to a hazel stem, and left him to graze. There was a fallen pine a few paces from the river's edge, full in the sun. I set the saddle down by the tree trunk, then sat down beside it to wait.

My timing had been good. I had waited there barely an hour when I caught the sound of hoofs on the gravel road. So he had kept to the high road, not cutting the corner through the forest. He was not hurrying, but riding easily, no doubt resting his horse. Nor was he alone. Bedwyr, hard on his heels, had perhaps been allowed to come up with him.

I walked out into the road and stood waiting for him.

Three horsemen came trotting through the forest, and down the gentle slope leading to the far side of the ford. They were all strangers; moreover, they were a kind of man who nowadays was rare enough. In times past, the roads, especially those in the wilder lands to the north and west, were rife with danger for the lonely traveller, but Ambrosius, and Arthur after him, had swept the main posting-roads clear of outlaws and masterless men. But not quite, it seemed. These three had been soldiers; they still wore the leather armour of their calling, and two of them sported battered metal caps. The youngest of them, sprucer than the others, had stuck a sprig of scarlet berries behind one ear. All three were unshaven, and armed with knives and short-swords. The oldest of them, with streaks of grey in a heavy brown beard, had an ugly-looking cudgel strapped to his saddle. Their horses were sturdy mountain cobs, cream, brown and black, their hides thick with dirt and damp, but well fed, and powerful. It did not need any prophet's instinct to know that here were three dangerous men.

They halted their horses at the river's brink and looked me over. I stood my ground and returned the look. I had the knife at my belt, but my sword was with the saddlebags. And flight, with my horse stripped and tethered, was out of the question. If truth be told, I was still no more than faintly apprehensive; there had been a time when no one, however wild and desperate, would have dared lay a finger on Merlin; and I suppose that the confidence of power was still with me.

They looked at one another, and a message passed. It was danger, then. The leader, he with the greying beard and the black horse, walked the beast forward a pace, so that the water swirled past its fetlocks. Then he turned, grinning, to his fellows.

"Why, look you, here's a brave fellow, disputing the ford with us. Or are you the Hermes, come to wish us Godspeed? I must say, you're not what one expects of the Herm." This with a guffaw in which his fellows joined.

I moved aside from the center of the road. "I'm afraid I can't claim any of his talents, gentlemen. Nor do I mean to dispute the way with you. When I heard you coming I took you for the outriders of the troop that is due this way very soon. Did you see any sign of troopers on the road?"

Another glance. The youngest — he of the cream cob and the woodbine spray — set his horse at the water and came splashing out beside me. "There was no one on the road," he said. "Troopers? What troopers would you be expecting? The High King himself, maybe?" He winked at his companions.

"The High King," I said equably, "will be riding this way soon, by all accounts, and he likes the law of the roads looked to. So go your ways in peace, gentlemen, and let me go mine."

They were all through the ford now, ranged round me. They looked relaxed and pleasant enough, good-tempered even. Brown Beard said: "Oh, we'll let you go, won't we, Red? Free as air to go you'll be, good sir, free as air, and travelling light."

"Light as a feather," said Red, with a laugh. He was the one with the brown horse. He shifted the belt round from his thick thighs, so that the haft of his knife lay nearer to his hand. The youngest of the three was already moving toward the fallen pine where the saddlebags lay.

I began to speak, but the leader kicked his horse in closer, dropped the reins on its withers, then suddenly reached down, catching hold of me by the neck of my robe. He gathered the stuff in a choking grip, and half lifted me toward him. He was immensely strong.

"So, who were you waiting for, eh? A troop, was it? Was that the truth, or were you lying to scare us off?"

The second man, Red, thrust his horse near on the other side. There was no faintest chance of escaping them. The third one had dismounted, and, without troubling to undo them, had a long knife out and was slitting the leather of the saddlebags. He had not even glanced over his shoulder to see what his fellows did.

Red had his knife in his hand. "Of course he was lying," he said roughly. "There were no troops on the road. Nor any sign of them. And they wouldn't be coming by the forest track, Erec, you can be sure of that."

Erec reached back with his free hand and slipped the knobbed cudgel from its moorings. "Well, so it was a lie," he said. "You can do better than that, old man. Tell us who you are and where you're bound for. This troop you're talking about, where are they coming from?"

"If you let me go," I said with difficulty, for he was half choking me, "I will tell you. And tell your fellow to leave my things alone."

"Why, here's high crowing from an old rooster!" But he relaxed his hold, and let me stand again. "Give us the truth, then, and maybe do yourself a bit of good. Which way did you come, and where's this troop you were talking about? Who are you, and where are you bound?"

I began to straighten my clothes. My hands were shaking, but I managed to make my voice steady enough. I said: "You will do well to loose me, and save yourselves. I am Merlinus Ambrosius, called Merlin, the King's cousin, and I am bound for Camelot. A message has gone before me; and a troop of knights is riding this way to meet me. They should be close behind you. If you go west now, quickly —"

A great guffaw of laughter cut me off. Erec rocked in his saddle. "Hear that, Red? Balm, did you get it? This is Merlin, Merlin himself, and he's bound for the court at Camelot!"

"Well, he might be, at that," said Red, shaking with mirth. "Looks a proper skeleton, don't he? Straight from the tomb, he is, and that's for sure."

"And straight back to it." Suddenly savage, Erec seized me again and shook me violently.

A shout from Balin gave him pause. "Hey! Look here!"

Both men turned. "What have you got?"

"Enough gold to get us a month's food and good beds, and something to go in them, forby," called Balin cheerfully. He threw the saddlebag down to the ground, and held up his hand. Two of the jewels glinted.

Erec drew in his breath. "Well, whoever you are, our luck's in, it seems! Look in the other one, Balin. Come on, Red, let's see what he's got on him."

"If you harm me," I said, "be sure that the King —"

I stopped, as if a hand had been laid across my mouth. I had been standing there, perforce, hemmed between the two horses, staring up at the bearded face bent down over me, with the high bright sky behind him. Now, across that sky, with the sun striking bronze from its black gloss, went a raven. Flying low, silent for once, tilting and sidling on the air, went the bird of Hermes the messenger, the bird of death.

It told me what I had to do. Till now, instinctively, I had been playing for time, as any man will play, to ward off death. But if I succeeded, if I made the murderers pause and hold their hands, then Arthur, riding alone, and on a weary horse, with nothing in his heart but the thought of meeting me, would come on them there, three to one, in this lonely place. In a fight I could not help him. But I could still serve him. I owed God a death, and I could give Arthur another life. I must send these brutes on their way, and quickly. If he came across my murdered body here, he would go after them, no doubt of that; but he would know what he was doing, and he would have help.

So I said nothing. Balin started on the other saddlebag. Erec seized me again, dragging me close. Red came behind me, tearing at the belt that held my wallet, with the rest of my gold stitched into its lining. Above me the knotted bludgeon swung high.

If I reached for my own weapon, they might kill me sooner. My hand went back for the knife in my belt. From behind, Red's hard hand caught and held my wrist, and the knife spun to the ground. The bones of my hand ground together. He thrust his sweating face over my shoulder. He was grinning. "Merlin, eh? A great enchanter like you could show us a thing or two, I'm sure. Go on then, save yourself, why don't you? Cast a spell and strike us dead."

The horses broke apart. Something flashed and drove like light across the sky. The cudgel flew wide and fell. Erec's hand loosed me, so suddenly that I staggered, and fell forward against his horse. Bending above me still, the brown-bearded face wore a look of surprise. The eyes stared, fixed. The head, severed cleanly by that terrible, slashing blow, bounced on the horse's neck in a splatter of blood, then thudded to the ground. The body slumped slowly, almost gracefully, onto the cob's withers. A gush of blood, bright and steaming, flooded over the beast's shoulder and splashed down over me where I reeled, clinging to the breast-band. The horse screamed once, in terror, then reared and slashed out at the air, tore itself free, and bolted. The headless body bobbed and swayed for a bound or two before it pitched from the saddle to the road, still spouting blood.

I was thrown hard down on the grass. The cool dampness struck up through my hands, steadying me. My heart thumped; the treacherous blackness threatened, then withdrew. The ground was thudding and shaking to the beat of hoofs. I looked up.

He was fighting the two of them. He had come alone, on his big grey horse. He had outstripped Bedwyr and the knights, but neither he nor the stallion showed any trace of weariness. It was a wonder to me that the three murderers had not broken and fled at the very sight of him. He was lightly armed only — no shield, but a leather tunic stitched with metal phalerae, and a thick cloak twisted round his left arm. His head was bare. He had dropped the reins on the stallion's neck, and controlled him with knee and voice. The great horse reared and wheeled and struck like another battle-arm. And all around horse and King, like a shield of impenetrable light, whirled the flashing blade of the great sword that was mine and his: Caliburn, the King's sword of Britain.

Balin flung himself on his horse, and spurred, yelling, to his fellow's aid. A ribbon of leather flying from Arthur's tunic showed where one of them had slashed him from behind — while he was killing Brown Beard, probably — but now, try as they might, they could not pass that deadly ring of shining metal, or close in past the stallion's lashing hoofs.

"Out of the way," said the King, curtly, to me. The horses plunged and circled. I started to drag myself to my feet. It seemed to take a long time. My hands were slimy with blood, and my body shook. I found that I could not stand, but crawled instead to the fallen pine, and sat there. The air shook and clashed with battle, and I sat there, helpless, shaking, old, while my boy fought for his life and mine, and I could not summon even the mortal strength of a man to help him.

Something glinted near my foot. My knife, lying where Red had struck it from my hand. I reached for it. I still could not stand, but threw it as hard as I could at Red's back. It was a feeble throw, and missed him. But the flash of its passing made the brown horse flinch and swerve, and sent its rider's blow wide. With the slither and whine of metal, Caliburn caught the blade and flung it wider, then Arthur drove the great stallion in and killed Red with a blow through the heart.

There was a moment when the sword jammed and could not be withdrawn, and the body, falling, made a dead weight on the King's sword arm. But the grey stallion knew about that, too. Balin, trying to wheel the cream cob to take the King in the rear, met teeth and armed hoofs. An upward slash laid the cream's shoulder open. It swerved, screaming, and turned against rein and spur to flee. But Balin — brave ruffian that he was — wrenched its head back by main force, just as the King dragged his sword clear of Red's body and wheeled back, right-handed, into fighting range.

I believe that in that last moment Balin recognized the King. But he was given no time to speak, much less beg for mercy. There was one more vicious, brief flurry, and Balin took Caliburn's point in his throat, and fell to the trampled and bloody grass. He writhed once, gasped, and drowned on a gush of blood. The cob, instead of running, now that it was no longer constrained, simply stood with head hanging and shaking legs, while the blood ran down its shoulder. The other horses had gone.

Arthur leaped down, wiped his sword on Balin's body, shook the folds of his cloak from his left arm, and came across to me, leading the grey. He touched my bloodstained shoulder.

"This blood. Is any of it yours?"

"No. And you?"

"Not a scratch," he said cheerfully. He was breathing only a little faster than usual. "Though it wasn't quite a massacre. They were trained men, or so it seemed to me, when there was time to notice... Sit quietly for a moment; I'll get you some water."

He dropped the stallion's reins into my hand, reached to the pommel for the silver-mounted horn he carried there, then trod lightly towards the river. I heard his foot strike something. The quick stride stopped short, and he exclaimed. I turned my head. He was staring down at the wreck of one of my saddlebags, where, in the scatter of spilled food and slashed leather, lay a strip of torn velvet, heavily stitched with gold. One of the jewels that Balm had torn from it lay winking beside it in the grass.

Arthur swung round. He had gone quite white.

"By the Light! It's you!"

"Who else? I thought you knew."

"Merlin!" Now he really was trying for breath. He came back to stand over me. "I thought — I hardly had time to look — just those murdering rascals butchering an old man — unarmed, I thought, and poor, by the look of the horse and trappings..." He went on both knees beside me. "Ah, Merlin, Merlin..."

And the High King of all Britain laid his head down on my knee, and was silent.

After a while he stirred and lifted his head.

"I got your token, and the message from the courier. But I don't think I really quite believed him. When he first spoke and showed me the Dragon it seemed right... I suppose I'd never thought you could really die, like mortal men... but on the way here, riding alone, with nothing to do but think — well, it ceased to be real. I don't know what I pictured; myself ending up again, perhaps, in front of that blocked cave mouth, where we buried you alive." I felt a shiver go through him. "Merlin, what has happened? When we left you for dead, sealed in the cave, it was the malady, of course, giving the appearance of death; I realize that now. But afterwards? When you woke, alone and weighed down with your own grave-clothes? God knows, that would be enough to bring another death! What did you do? How survive, locked alone in the hill? How escape? And when? You must have known how sorely I was bereft. Where have you been all this while?"

"Not so great a while. When I escaped, you were abroad. They told me you had gone to Brittany. So I said nothing, and lodged with Stilicho, my old servant, who keeps the mill near Maridunum, and waited for your return. I'll tell you everything soon — if you will get me that drink of water."

"Fool that I am, I was forgetting!" He jumped up and ran to the river. He filled the horn and brought it, then went down on one knee to hold it for me.

I shook my head and took it from him. "Thank you, but I'm quite steady now. It's nothing. I was not hurt. I am ashamed to have been of so little help."

"You gave me all I needed."

"Which was not much," I said, half laughing. "I could almost feel sorry for those wretches, thinking they had an easy kill, and bringing Arthur himself down on them like a thunderbolt. I did warn them, but who could blame them for not believing me?"

"You mean to tell me they knew who you were? And still used you like that?"

"I told you, they didn't believe me. Why should they? Merlin was dead. And the only power I have now is in your name — and they didn't believe that, either. 'An old man, unarmed and poor.' " I quoted him, smiling. "Why, you didn't know me yourself. Am I so much changed?"

He considered me. "It's the beard, and, yes, you are quite grey now. But if I had once looked at your eyes..." He took the horn from me and got to his feet. "Oh, yes, it is you. In all that ever mattered, you are unchanged. Old? Yes, we must all grow old. Age is nothing but the sum of life. And you are alive, and back with me here. By the great God of heaven, I have you back with me. What should I fear now?"

He drained the horn, replaced it, and looked around him. "I suppose I had better tidy up this mess. Are you really all right now? Could you tend my horse for me? I think he could be watered now."

I led the stallion down to the water, and with it the cream cob, which was grazing quietly, and made no attempt to escape me. When they had drunk I tethered them, then got some salve from my pack and doctored the cut on the cob's shoulder. It rolled an eye back at me, and the skin of its shoulder flickered, but it showed no sign of pain. The cut bled still, but sluggishly, and the beast was not walking lame. I loosed the girths of both horses, and left them grazing while I retrieved the scattered contents of my saddlebag.

Arthur's way of clearing up the "mess" — three men violently dead — was to haul the bodies by their heels to a decent hiding-place at the forest's edge. The severed head he picked up by the beard and slung it after. He was whistling while he did it, a gay little tune I recognized as one of the soldiers' marching songs, which was frank, not to say over-explicit, about the sexual prowess of their leader. Then he looked around him.

"The next rain will clear some of the blood away. And even if I had a spade or mattock, I'm damned if I'd spend the time and trouble in digging that carrion in. Let the ravens have them. Meanwhile, we might as well impound their horses; I see they've stopped to graze away up the road there. I'll have to wash the blood off first, or I'll never get near them. You'd better abandon that cloak of yours, it'll never be the same again. Here, you can wear mine. No, I insist. It's an order. Here."

He dropped it over the pine log, then went down to the river and washed. While he remounted and went cantering up the road after the other horses, I stripped off my cloak, which was already stiffening with blood, and washed myself, then shook out Arthur's cloak of royal purple, and put it on. My own I rolled up and pitched after the dead men into the undergrowth.

Arthur came back at a trot, leading the thieves' horses.

"Now, where is this inn with the bush of holly?"

8

THE INNKEEPER'S BOY WAS OUT in the road, watching for me. I suppose he had been posted there to give the goodwife warning of when the "meal fit for the King's court" would be wanted. When he saw us coming, two men and five horses, he stood staring awhile, then went with a skip and a jump back into the inn. When we were still seventy paces short of the place, the innkeeper himself came out to see.

He recognized Arthur almost straight away. What drew his eye first was the quality of the King's horse. Then came a long, summing look at the rider, and the man was on his knee out on the road.

"Get up, man," said the King cheerfully. "I've been hearing good things of the house you keep here, and I'm looking forward to trying your hospitality. There's been a little skirmish down by the ford — nothing deadly, just enough to get up a bit of an appetite. But that will have to wait a little. Look after my friend here first, will you, and if your goodwife can clean his clothes, and someone can tend to the horses, we'll cheerfully wait for the meal." Then, as the man began to stammer something about the poverty of his house, and the lack of accommodation: "As to that, man, I'm a soldier, and there've been times when any shelter from the weather could be counted a luxury. From what I've heard of your tavern, it's a haven indeed. And now, may we come in? Wine we cannot wait for, nor fire —"

We had both in a very short time. The innkeeper, once he had recovered himself, came to terms quickly with the royal invasion, and very sensibly set all aside except the immediate service that was needed. The boy came running to take the horses, and the innkeeper himself piled logs on the fire and brought wine, then helped me out of my soiled and blood-splashed robes, and brought hot water, and fresh clothes from my baggage roll. Then, at Arthur's bidding, he locked the inn door against casual passers-by, and got himself off to the kitchen, there, one imagined, to instill a panic frenzy into his excellent wife.

When I had changed, and Arthur had washed, and spread his cloak to the blaze, he poured wine for me, and took his place at the other side of the hearth. Though he had travelled fast and far, and with a fight at the end of it, he looked as fresh as if he had newly risen from his bed. His eyes were bright as a boy's, and colour sprang red in his cheeks. Between the joy of seeing me again and the stimulus of the danger past, he seemed a youth again. When at length the goodwife and her husband came in with the food, making some ado about setting the board and carving the capons, he received them with gay affability, so easily that, by the time we had done, and they had withdrawn, the woman had so far forgotten his rank as to scream with laughter at one of his jests, and cap it herself. Then her husband pulled at her gown, and she ran out, but laughing still.

At last we were alone. The short afternoon drew in. Soon it would be lamp-lighting. We went back to our places one on either side of the blaze. I think we both felt tired, and sleepy, but neither of us could have rested until we had exchanged such news as could not be spoken of in front of our hosts. The King had, he told me, ridden the whole way with only a few hours' respite for sleep, and to rest his horse.

"For," he said, "if the courier's message, and the token he brought, told a true tale, then you were safe, and would wait for me. Bedwyr and the others came up with me, but they, too, stopped to rest. I told them to stay back and give me a few hours' grace."

"That could have cost you dear."

"With that carrion?" He spoke contemptuously. "If they hadn't caught you unarmed and unawares, you could have dealt with them yourself."

And time was, I thought, when without even a dagger in my hand I could have dealt with them. If Arthur was thinking the same, he gave no sign of it. I said: "It's true that they were hardly worth your sword. And talking of that, what have I been hearing about the theft of Caliburn? Some tale about your sister Morgan?"

He shook his head. "That's over, so let it wait. What's more to the point now is that I should know what has been happening to you. Tell me. Tell me everything. Don't leave anything out."

So I told my story. The day drew in, and beyond the small, deep-set windows the sky darkened to indigo, then to slate. The room was quiet, but for the crack and flutter of the flames. A cat crept from some corner and curled on the hearth, purring. It was a strange setting for the tale I had to tell, of death and costly burial, of fear and loneliness and desperate survival, of murder foiled and rescue finally accomplished. He listened as so many times before, intent, lost in the tale, frowning over some parts of it, but relaxed into the warmth and contentment of the evening. This was another of the times that comes vividly back to me in memory whenever I think of him; the quiet room, the King listening, the firelight moving red on his cheek and lighting the thick fall of dark hair, and the dark watching eyes, intent on the story I was telling him. But with a difference now: this was a man listening with a purpose; summing up what he was told, and judging, ready to act.

At the end he stirred. "That fellow, the grave-robber — we must find him. It shouldn't be hard, if he's cadging drinks from that story all over Maridunum... I wonder who it was who heard you the first time? And the miller, Stilicho; I've no doubt you'll want me to leave that to you?"

"Yes. But if you could ride over that way some time, perhaps when you're next in Caerleon? Mai will die of terror and ecstasy, but Stilicho will take it as no more than his due, who served the great enchanter... and then boast about it for the rest of his days."

"Of course," he said. "I was thinking, while I was on the road; we'll go straight on from here to Caerleon now. I imagine you're not yet ready to go back to court —"

"Not now, or ever. Or to Applegarth. I have left that for good." I did not add "to Nimuë"; her name had not been mentioned by either of us. So carefully had we avoided it that it seemed to ring through every sentence that was spoken. I went on: "I've no doubt you'll fight me to the death over this, but I want to go back to Bryn Myrddin. I'll be more than glad to stay with you in Caerleon until it can be made ready again."

Of course he objected, and we argued for a while, but in the end he let me have my way, on the (very reasonable) condition that I did not live there alone, but was cared for by servants. "And if you must have your precious solitude, then you shall have it. I shall build a place for the servants, out of your sight and below the cliff; but they must be there."

" 'And that is an order?' " I quoted, smiling.

"Certainly... There'll be time enough to see about it; I'll spend Christmas at Caerleon, and you with me. I take it you won't insist on going back there till the winter is past?"

"No."

"Good. Now, there's something in your story that doesn't agree with the facts... that business you described in Segontium." He glanced up, smiling. "So that was where you found Caliburn? In the soldiers' shrine of the Light? Well, it tallies. I remember that you told me, years ago, just before we left the forest, that there were other treasures there still. You spoke of a grail. I still remember what you said. But the gift Morgause brought to me was no treasure of Macsen's. It was silver goods — cups and brooches and torques, the sort of thing they fashion in the far north. Very handsome, but not as you described the treasure to me."

"No. I did catch a glimpse of it, there in the vision. It was not Macsen's treasure. But the shepherd boy was certain that it was taken, and I believe him."

"You don't know?"

"No. How could I, without power?"

"But you had this vision. You watched Morgause and the boys accost me at Camelot. You saw the silver treasure she gave me. You knew the courier had come, and that I was on my way to you."

I shook my head. "That was not power, not as you and I have known it. That is Sight only, and that, I think, I shall have until I die. Every village sibyl has it, in some degree or another. Power is more than that: it is doing and speaking with knowledge; it is bidding without thought, and knowing that one will be obeyed. That has gone. I don't repine now." I hesitated. "Nor, hope, do you? I have heard tales of Nimuë, how she is the new Lady of the Lake, the mistress of the Island's shrine. I am told that men call her the King's enchantress, and that she has done you service?"

"Indeed, yes." He looked away from me, leaning forward to adjust a log on the burning pile. "It was she who dealt with the theft of Caliburn."

I waited, but he left it there. I said at length: "I understood she was still in the north. She is well?"

"Very well." The log was burning to his satisfaction. He set his chin on a fist, and stared at the fire. "So. If Morgause had the treasure with her when she embarked, it will be somewhere on the Island. My people saw to it that she did not go ashore between Segontium and her landing there. She lodged with Melwas, so it should not be beyond me to have it traced. Morgause is being held under guard until I get back. If she refuses to speak, the children will hardly be proof against questioning. The younger ones are too innocent to see any harm in telling the truth. Children see everything; they will know where she left the treasure."

"I understand that you're going to keep them?"

"You saw that? Yes. You would also see that your courier came just in time to save Morgause."

I thought of my own effort to reach him with my dreaming will, when I thought she would use the stolen grail against him. "You were going to kill her?"

"Certainly, for killing you."

"Without proof?"

"I don't need proof to have a witch put to death."

I raised a brow at him, and quoted what had been said at the opening of the Round Hall: " 'No man nor woman shall be harmed unjustly, or punished without trial or manifest proof of their trespass.' "

He smiled. "Well, all right. I did have proof. I had your own word that she tried to kill you."

"So you said. I thought you said it to frighten her. I told you nothing."

"I know. And why not? Why did you keep it secret from me that it was her poison that sent you to your death in the Wild Forest, and then left you with the sickness that was almost your death again?"

"You've answered that yourself. You would have killed her, after the Wild Forest. But she was the mother of that young son, and heavy with another, and I knew that one day they would come to you, and become, in time, your faithful servants. So I did not tell you. Who did?"

"Nimuë."

"I see. And she knew — how? By divination?"

"No. From you. Something you said in your delirium."

Everything, she had taken from me; every last secret. I said merely: "Ah, yes... And do I take it that she also found Mordred for you? Or did Morgause bring him into the open, once Lot and I were dead?"

"No. He was still hidden. I understand that he was lodged somewhere in the Orkney Islands. Nimuë had nothing to do with that. It was by the purest chance that I heard of him. I got a letter. A goldsmith from York, who had done work for Morgause before, travelled that way with some jewels he hoped to sell her. These fellows, as you know, get into every corner of the kingdom, and see everything."

"Not Beltane."

His head came up, surprised. "You know him?"

"Yes, He's as good as blind. He has to travel with a servant —"

"Casso," said the King. Then, as I stared: "I told you I got a letter."

"From Casso?"

"Yes. It seems he was in Dunpeldyr when — ah, I see, that was when you met them? Then you will know they were there on the night of the massacre. Casso, it appears, saw and heard a good deal of what went on; people talk in front of a slave, and he must have understood more than he was meant to. His master could never be brought to believe that Morgause had anything to do with events so dreadful, so went up to Orkney to try his luck again. Casso, being less credulous, watched and listened, and managed at length to locate the child who went missing on the night of the massacre. He sent a message straight to me. As it happened, I had just heard from Nimuë that it was Morgause who caused your death. I sent for her, and saw to it that she brought Mordred with her. Why are you looking so dumbfounded?"

"On two counts. What should make a slave — Casso was a quarryman's labourer when I first found him — write 'straight to' the High King?"

"I forgot I had not told you: he served me once before. Do you remember when I went north into Lothian to attack Aguisel? And how hard it was to find some way of destroying that dirty jackal without bringing Tydwal and Urien down on my head, swearing vengeance? Some word of this must have got around, because I got a message from this same slave, evidence — with facts that could be proved — of something he had seen when he was in Aguisel's service. Aguisel had misused a page, one of Tydwal's young sons, and then murdered him. Casso told us where to find the body. We found it; and others besides. The child had been killed just as Casso had told us."

"And afterwards," I said dryly, "Aguisel cut out the tongues of the slaves who had witnessed it."

"You mean the man is dumb? Well, that might account for the free way men seem to talk in front of him. Aguisel paid dearly for failing to make sure he could not read or write."

"Neither he could. When I knew him in Dunpeldyr he was both dumb and helpless. It was I who, for a service he had done me — or rather, for no reason that I remember, except perhaps the prompting of the god — arranged to have him taught."

Arthur, smiling, raised his cup to me. "Did I call it 'pure chance'? I should have remembered who I was talking to. I rewarded Casso after the Aguisel affair, of course, and told him where to send any other information. I believe he has been useful once or twice. Then, over this last thing, he sent straight to me."

We spoke of it for a while longer, then I came back to present matters. "What will you do with Morgause now?"

"I shall have to settle that, with your help, when I get back. Meanwhile I shall send orders that she is to be kept under guard, at the nunnery at Amesbury. The boys will stay with me, and I'll have them brought down to Caerleon for Christmas. Lot's sons will be no problem; they're young enough to find life at court exciting, and old enough now to do without Morgause. As for Mordred, he shall have his chance. I will do the same for him."

I said nothing. In the pause, the cat purred, suddenly loud, and then stopped short on a sighing breath, and slept.

"Well," said Arthur, "what would you have me do? He is in my protection now, so — even if I could ever have harmed him — I cannot kill him. I haven't had time to think this thing through, and there'll be time enough later to discuss it with you. But it has always seemed to me that once the boy had survived Lot's murderous purge, I would sooner have him near me, and under my eye, than hidden somewhere in the kingdom, with the threat that that might entail. Say you agree with me."

"I do. Yes."

"So, if I keep him by me, and grant him the birthright that he must have thought he would never see —"

"I doubt if that has crossed his mind," I said. "I don't think she has told him who he is."

"So? Then I shall tell him myself. Better still. He'll know that I needn't have accepted him. Merlin, it might be well. You and I both remember what it was like to live our youth out as unfathered bastards, and then to be told we were of Ambrosius' blood. And who am I to take on me yet again the wish for my son's death? Once was too much. God knows I paid for it." He looked away again into the flames. There was a bitter line to his mouth. After a while he lifted a shoulder. "You asked about Caliburn. It seems that my sister Morgan took herself a lover; he was one of my knights, a man called Accolon, a good fighter and a fine man — but one who could never say no to a woman. When King Urbgen was here with Morgan, she cast her eyes on Accolon, and soon had him at her girdle, like a greyhound fawning. Before she came south she had got some northern smith to make a copy of Caliburn, and while she was here in Camelot she managed to get Accolon to exchange this for the sword itself. She must have reckoned, in a time of peace, on getting herself free of the court and back to the north before the loss was discovered. I don't know what favours she granted Accolon, but certainly when she went north again with King Urbgen, Accolon took leave and went with them."

"But why did she do this?"

His quick, surprised look made me realize how rarely I had had to ask such a question. "Oh, the usual reason: ambition. She had some idea of putting her husband on the high throne of Britain with herself as his queen. As for Accolon, I'm not sure what she promised him, but whatever it was, it cost him his life. It should have cost hers, too, but there was no proof, and she is Urbgen's wife. Her being my sister should not have helped her, but he knew nothing of the plot, and I cannot afford to have him as my enemy."

"How did she hope to get away with it?"

"You had gone," he said simply. "She must have had word from Morgause that you were ailing, and she was making ready for her time of greatness. She reckoned that any man who held the sword could command a following, and if the King of Rheged were to raise it... Before that, of course, I was to have been killed. Accolon tried. He picked a quarrel and fought me. It was the substitute sword, of course; the metal was brittle as glass. As soon as I tested it for use, I knew there was something wrong, but it was too late. At the first clash it broke off short below the hilt."

"And?"

"Bedwyr and the rest were shouting 'treachery,' but they hardly needed to. I could see from Accolon's face that treachery was there. For all that his sword was still whole, and mine was broken, I think he was afraid. I drove the hilt into his face, and killed him with my dagger. I don't think he made any resistance. Perhaps he was a true man, after all. I like to think so."

"And the true sword? How did you know where it was?"

"Nimuë," he said. "It was she who told me what had happened. Do you remember that day, at Applegarth, when she told me to beware Morgan and the sword?"

"Yes. I thought she must mean Morgause."

"So did I. But she was right. All the time Morgan was at court, Nimuë hardly left her side. I wondered why, because it was obvious there was no love lost between them." He gave a rueful little laugh. "I'm afraid I took it as a women's quarrel... she's not overly fond of Guinevere, either... but she was right about Morgan. The witch corrupted her when she was no more than a girl. How Nimuë got the sword back I don't know. She sent it down from Rheged with an armed escort. I haven't seen her since she went north."

I started to ask something more, but he suddenly raised his head, listening.

"And here comes Bedwyr, if I'm not mistaken. We've had little enough time together, Merlin, but there will be other times. As God is good, there will be other times." He got to his feet, put his hands down, and raised me. "Now we have talked enough. You look exhausted. Will you go to your rest now, and leave me to face Bedwyr and the others, and give them the news? I warn you, it won't be a quiet party. They're likely to clean our good host out of anything drinkable he has in his cellars, and take the night to drink it..."

But I stayed with him to receive the knights, and afterwards to drink with them. Nobody, all through the long, noisy celebration, mentioned Nimuë to me, and I did not ask again.

9

WE SPENT ANOTHER FULL DAY resting at The Bush of Holly. A party went back to the ford to bury the dead men, and from there on to Camelot with messages from the King. Another party was sent to Caerleon to give warning of the King's approach. Then, while I rested, the young men went hunting. Their day's sport provided an excellent dinner, and their servants and pages, who came up with us that day, helped the innkeeper and his wife cook and serve it. Where everyone slept that night, I have no idea; I suspect that the horses were turned out, and that the stable was even fuller than the inn. On the following day, to our hosts' evident regret, the royal party moved off for Caerleon.

Even after the building of Camelot, Caerleon had kept its status as Arthur's western stronghold. We rode in on a bright, windy day, with the Dragon standards snapping and rippling from the roofs, and the streets leading up to the fortress gates crowded with people. At my own insistence, I rode cloaked and hooded, and to the rear of the party, rather than beside the King. Arthur had finally been brought to accept my decision not to take my place near him again; one cannot go back on an abdication, and mine had been complete. He still had not mentioned Nimuë's part in that, though he must have been wondering (along with others, who also avoided mentioning her name to me) just how much of my power she had managed to assume. Of all people, she should have "seen" that I was above ground again, and with the King; should have known, in fact, that I had been put still living into my tomb...

But no one asked questions, and I was not prepared to supply what I believed to be the answers.

In Caerleon they had allotted royal chambers to me, next to Arthur's own. Two young pages, eyeing me with the liveliest curiosity, conducted me to the rooms through corridors crowded with bustling servants. Many of them knew me, and all had obviously heard some version of the strange story; some merely hurried past, making the sign against strong enchantment, but others came forward with greetings and offers of service. At last we reached my rooms, sumptuous apartments where a chamberlain awaited me, and showed me a splendid array of clothing sent by the King for me to choose from, with jewels from the royal coffers. A little to his disappointment I set aside the cloth of gold and silver, the peacock and the scarlet and the azure, and chose a warm robe of dark-red wool, with a girdle of gilded leather, and sandals of the same. Then, saying: "I will send light, my lord, and water for your washing," he withdrew. A little to my surprise he signed to the two boys to leave the chamber with him, and left me there unattended.

It was already past the time of lamp-lighting. I went over to the window, where the sky was deepening slowly from red to purple, and sat down to wait for the pages to come back.

I did not look round when the door opened. The flickering light of a cresset stole into the chamber, sending the evening sky receding, darkening beyond its weak young stars. The page moved softly round the room, touching lamp after lamp with flame, until the chamber glowed.

I felt tired after the ride, and heavy with reaction. It was time I roused myself, and let myself be made ready for the feasting tonight. The boy had gone out to set the cresset back in its iron bracket on the corridor wall. The chamber door was ajar.

I got to my feet. "Thank you," I began. "Now, if of your goodness —"

I stopped. It was no page. It was Nimuë who came swiftly in, then stood backed against the door, watching me. She was clad in a long gown of grey, stitched with silver, and there was silver in her hair, which was loose, and flowing down over her shoulders. Her face was white, and her eyes wide and dark, and while I stood gazing, they suddenly brimmed over with tears.

Then she was across the room and had me fast in her arms, and was laughing and crying and kissing me, with words tumbling out that made no sense at all except the one, that I was alive, and that all the time she had been grieving for me as dead.

"Magic," she kept saying, in a wondering, half-scared voice, "it's magic, stronger than any I could ever know. And you told me you had given it all to me. I should have known. I should have known. Ah, Merlin, Merlin..."

Whatever had passed, whatever had kept her from me, or blinded her to the truth, none of it mattered. I found myself holding her close, with her head pressed against my breast, and my cheek on her hair, while she repeated over and over, like a child: "It's you. It's really you. You've come back. It is magic. You must still be the greatest enchanter in all the world."

"It was only the malady, Nimuë. It deceived you all. It was not magic. I gave all that to you."

She lifted her head. Her face was tragic. "Yes, and how you gave it! I only pray that you cannot remember! You had told me to learn all that you had to tell me. You had said that I must build on every detail of your life; that after your death I must be Merlin... And you were leaving me, slipping from me in sleep... I had to do it, hadn't I? Force the last of your power from you, even though with it I took the last of your strength? I did it by every means I knew — cajoled, stormed, threatened, gave you cordials and brought you back to answer me again and again — when what I should have done, had you been any other man, was to let you sleep, and go in peace. And because you were Merlin, and no other man, you roused yourself in pain and answered me, and gave me all you had. So minute by minute I weakened you, when it seems to me now that I might have saved you." She slid her hands up to my breast, and lifted swimming grey eyes. "Will you tell me something truthfully? Swear by the god?"

"What is it?"

"Do you remember it, when I hung about you and tormented you to your death, like a spider sucking the life from a honey-bee?"

I put my hands up to cover hers. I looked straight into the beautiful eyes, and lied. "My darling girl, I remember nothing of that time but words of love, and God taking me peacefully into his hand. I will swear it if you like."

Relief swept into her face. But still she shook her head, refusing to be comforted. "But then, even all the power and knowledge you gave me could not show me that we had buried you living, and send me back to get you out. Merlin, I should have known, I should have known! I dreamed again and again, but the dreams were full of confusion. I went back once to Bryn Myrddin, did you know? I went to the cave, but the door was blocked still, and I called and called, but there was no sound —"

"Hush, hush." She was shivering. I pulled her closer, and bent my head and kissed her hair. "It's over. I am here. When you came back for me, I must have been drugged asleep. Nimuë, what happened was the will of the god. If he had wanted to save me from the tomb, he would have spoken to you. Now, he has brought me back in his own time, and for that, he saved me from being put quick into the ground, or given to the flames. You must accept it all, and thank him, as I do."

She shivered again. "That was what the High King wanted. He would give you, he said, a pyre as high as an emperor's, so that your death would be a beacon to the living the length and breadth of the land. He was wild with grief, Merlin. I could hardly make him listen to me. But I told him I had had a dream, and that you yourself had said that you wished to be laid in your own hollow hill, and left in peace to become part of the land you loved." She put a hand up to brush tears from her face. "And it was true. I did have such a dream, one of many. But even so, I failed you. Who did what I should have done, and helped you to escape? What happened?"

"Come over here, to the fire, and I'll tell you. Your hands are cold. Come, we have a little time, I think, before we need go into the hall."

"The King will stay for us," she said. "He knows I am here. He sent me to you."

"Did he?" But I put that aside for the present. In a corner of the room a brazier burned red in front of a low couch covered with rugs and skins. We sat side by side in the warm glow, and, to her eager questions, I told my story yet again.

By the time I had finished her distress was gone, and a little colour had crept back into her cheeks. She sat close in my arm with one of my hands held tightly in both her own. Magician or mortal man, there was no shadow of doubt in my mind that the joy she showed was as real as the glow of the brazier that warmed us both. Time had run back. But not quite: mortal man or magician, I could sense secrets still.

Meantime she listened and exclaimed, and held my hand tightly, and presently, when I had done, she took up the story.

"I told you about the dream I had. It made me uneasy: I began to wonder, even, if you had been truly dead when we left you in the cave. But there had seemed no doubt; you had lain so long without movement, and seemingly without breath, and then all the doctors declared you dead. So in the end we left you there. Then, when the dreams drove me back to the cave, all seemed normal. Then other dreams, other visions, came, which crowded that one out and confused it..."

She had moved away from me while she was speaking, though she still held my hand between her own. She lay back against the cushions at the end of the couch, looking away from me, into the heart of the glowing charcoal.

"Morgan," I suggested, "and the theft of the sword?"

She gave me a quick glance. "I suppose the King told you about that? Yes. You heard how the sword was stolen. I had to leave Camelot, and follow Morgan, and take back the sword. Even there, the god was with me. While I was in Rheged a knight came there from the south; he was travelling to visit the queen, and at night, in Urbgen's hall, he told a strange tale. He was Bagdemagus — Morgan's kinsman, and Arthur's. You remember him?"

"Yes. His son was sick a while back, and I treated him. He lived, but was left with an inflammation of the eyes."

She nodded. "You gave him some salve, and told him to use the same if the eyes troubled him again. You said it was blended with some herb you had at Bryn Myrddin."

"Yes. It was wild clary, that I brought back from Italy. I had a supply at Bryn Myrddin. But how did he think he was going to get it?"

"He thought you meant that it grew there. He may have thought you had planted a garden, as we did at Applegarth. Of course he knew that you were buried there in the hill. He didn't admit to us that he was afraid, but I think he must have been. Well, he told us his story, how he had ridden across the hilltop, and heard music coming seemingly up out of the earth. But then his horse bolted in terror, and he didn't dare go back. He said he hadn't told anyone his story, because he was ashamed of his flight, and afraid of being laughed at; but then, he said, just before he came north, he had heard some tale in Maridunum about a fellow who had seen and spoken with your ghost... Well, you know who that was, your grave-robber. Taken both together, and along with my persistent dreams, the story spoke aloud to me. You were alive, and in the cave. I would have left Luguvallium that night, but something else happened that forced me to stay."

She glanced across at me, as if waiting for me to nod, knowing what was to come. But I said merely: "Yes?"

There was the same brief flash of surprise that Arthur had shown, then she bit her lip, and explained.

"Morgause arrived, with the boys. All five. I was hardly a welcome guest, as you may guess, but Urbgen was civility itself, and Morgan was afraid of what she had done, and almost clung to me. I believe she thought that as long as I was there Urbgen's anger wouldn't be vented on her. And of course, I suppose, she hoped that I might intercede with Arthur. But Morgause..." She lifted her shoulders as if with cold.

"Did you see her?"

"Briefly. I could not stay there with her. I took my leave, and let them think I was going south, but I did not leave Luguvallium. I sent my page, secretly, to speak with Bagdemagus, and he came to see me at my lodgings. He's a good man, and he owed you his son's life. I did not tell him that I believed you were still living. I told him merely that Morgause had been your enemy, and your bane, and that Morgan had showed herself a witch also, and the enemy of the King. I begged him to spy, if he could, on their counsels, and report to me. You can be sure that I had already tried to reach Morgause's mind myself, and had failed. All I could hope for was that the sisters might talk together, and something could be learned from that about the drug that had been used on you. If my dream was right, and you still lived, the knowledge might help me save you yet. If not, I would have more evidence to give the King, and procure Morgause's death." She lifted her hand to my cheek. Her eyes were somber. "I sat there in my lodgings, waiting for him to come back, and knowing all the time that you might be dying, alone in the tomb. I tried to reach you, or even just to see, but whenever I tried to see you, and the hill, and the tomb, light would break across the vision and dash it aside, and there, moving down the light, floated a grail, clouded like a moon hidden in storm or mist. Then it would vanish, and pain and loss would break through the dream till I woke distracted, and crying, through the longing and the sorrow, to dream again."

"So you were warned of that? My poor child, left to guard such a treasure... Did Bagdemagus warn you that Morgause had heard of it, and meant to steal it?"

"What?" She looked at me blankly. "What do you mean? What had Morgause to do with the grail? It would have soiled the god himself if she had even looked at it. How was she to know where to find it?"

"I don't know. But she took it. I was told so, by someone who watched her do it."

"Then you were told a lie," said Nimuë roundly. "I took it myself."

"It was you who took Macsen's treasure?"

"Indeed it was." She sat up, glowing. In her eyes two little braziers, reflected, shone and glittered. The candid grey eyes looked, with the red points of light, like cat's eyes, or witch's. "You told me yourself where it lay buried; do you remember that? Or were you already gone into your own mists, my dear?"

"I remember."

She said soberly: "You told me that power was a hard master. It was the hardest thing I have ever done, to go to Segontium, instead of travelling south again to Bryn Myrddin. But in the end I knew I had been bidden to do it, so I went. I took two of my servants, men I could trust, and found the place. It had changed. The shrine had gone, under a landslip, but I took the bearings you had given me, and we dug there. It might have taken a long time, but we had help."

"A dirty little shepherd boy, who could hold a hazel stick over the earth, and tell you where the treasure was hidden."

Her eyes danced. "So, why do I trouble to tell you my story? Yes. He came and showed us, and we dug down, and took the box away. I went up into the fortress then, and spoke with the Commandant, and slept there that night, with a guard on my room. And during the night as I lay in my bed, with that box beneath it, the visions came teeming. I knew that you were alive, and free, and that you would soon be with the King. So in the morning I asked for an escort to take the treasure south, and set off for Caerleon."

"And so missed me by two days," I said.

"Missed you? Where?"

"Did you think I 'saw' the shepherd boy in the fire? No, I was there." I told her then, briefly, about my stay in Segontium, and my visit to the vanished shrine. "So when the boy told me about you and your two servants, like a fool I assumed it was Morgause. He didn't describe the woman, except that she — " I paused, and looked across at her with raised brows. "He said she was a queen, and the servants had royal badges. That was why I assumed —"

I stopped. Her hand, holding mine, had clenched suddenly. The laughter in her eyes died; she looked at me fixedly, with a strange mixture of appeal and dread. It did not need the Sight to guess the part of the story that she had not told me, or why Arthur and the rest had avoided speaking of her to me. She had not usurped my power, or had a hand in trying to destroy me: all she had done, once the old enchanter had gone, was to take a young man to her bed.

I seemed to have been expecting this moment for a very long time. I smiled, and asked her, gently: "Who is he, this king of yours?"

The red rushed into her cheeks. I saw the tears sting her eyes again. "I should have told you straight away. They said they hadn't told you. Merlin, I didn't dare."

"Don't look like that, my dear. What we had, we had, and one cannot drink the same draught of elixir twice. If I had still been half a magician, I should have known long ago. Who is he?"

"Pelleas."

I knew him, a young prince, handsome and kind, with a sort of gaiety about him that would help to offset the haunted somberness that sometimes hung around her. I spoke of him, commending him, and in a while she grew calmer, and began, with growing ease, to tell me about her marriage. I listened, and watched, and had time, now, to mark the changes in her; changes, I thought, due to the power that she had had so drastically to assume. My gentle Ninian had gone, with me into the mists. There was an edge to this Nimuë that had not been there before; something quietly formidable, a kind of honed brightness, like a weapon's edge. And in her voice, at times, sounded a subtle echo of the deeper tones that the god uses when, with authority and power, he descends to mortal speech. These attributes had once been mine. But I, accepting them, had taken no lover. I found myself hoping, for Pelleas' sake, that he was a strong-minded young man.

"Yes," said Nimuë, "he is."

I started out of my thoughts. She was watching me, her head on one side, her eyes alight once more with laughter.

I laughed with her, then put out my arms. She came into them, and lifted her mouth. I kissed her, once with passion, and once with love, and then I let her go.

10

CHRISTMAS AT CAERLEON. PICTURES came crowding back to me, sun and snow and torchlight, full of youth and laughter, of bravery and fulfillment and time won back from oblivion. I have only to shut my eyes; no, not even that; I need only glance into the fire and they are here with me, all of them.

Nimuë, bringing Pelleas, who treated me with deference, and her with love, but who was a king and a man. "She belongs to the King," he said, "and then to me. And I — well, it's the same, isn't it? I am his before ever I can be hers. Which of us, in the sight of God and King, is ever his own man?"

Bedwyr, coming on me one evening down beside the river, which slipped along, swollen and slate-grey, between its winter banks. A fleet of swans were proving the mud at the water's edge among the reeds. Snow had begun to fall, small and light, floating like swansdown through the still air. "They told me you had come this way," said Bedwyr. "I came to take you back. The King stays for you. Will you come now? It's cold, and will get colder." Then, as we walked back together: "There's news of Morgause," he said. "She has been sent north into Lothian, to the nunnery at Caer Eidyn. Tydwal will see to it that she's kept fast there. And there's talk of Queen Morgan's being sent to join her. They say that King Urbgen finds it hard to forgive her attempt to embroil him in treachery, and he's afraid that if he keeps her by him the taint will cling, to him and to his sons. Besides, Accolon was her lover. So the talk goes that Urbgen will put her away. He has sent to Arthur for permission. He'll get it, too. I think Arthur will feel more comfortable with both his loving sisters safely shut up, and a good long way away. It was Nimuë's suggestion." He laughed, looking at me sideways. "Forgive me, Merlin, but now that the King's enemies are women, perhaps it is better that he has a woman to deal with them. And if you ask me, you'll be well out of it..."

Guinevere, sitting at her loom one bright morning, with sun on the snow outside, and a caged bird singing on the sill beside her. Her hands lay idle among the coloured threads, and the lovely head turned to watch, down beside the moat, the boys at play. "They might be my own sons," she said. But I saw that her eyes did not follow the bright heads of Lot's children, but only the dark boy Mordred, who stood a little way apart from the others, watching them, not as an outcast might watch his more favoured brothers, but as a prince might watch his subjects.

Mordred himself. I never spoke with him. Mostly the boys were on the children's side of the palace, or in the care of the master-at-arms or those set to train them. But one afternoon, on a dark day drawing to dusk, I came on him, standing beside the arch of a garden gateway, as if waiting for someone. I paused, wondering how to greet him, and how he might receive his mother's enemy, when I saw his head turn, and he started forward. Arthur and Guinevere came together through the dead roses of the garden, and out through the archway. It was too far away for me to hear what was said, but I saw the Queen smile and reach out a hand, and the King spoke, with a kind look. Mordred answered him; then, in obedience to a gesture from Arthur, went with them as they moved off, walking between them.

And, finally, Arthur, one evening in the King's private chamber, when Nimuë brought the box to show him the treasure from Segontium.

The box lay on top of the big marble table that had been my father's. It was of metal, and heavy, its lid scored and dented with the weight of the stuff that had fallen on it when the shrine crumbled to ruin. The King laid hands to it. For a few moments it resisted him, then suddenly, light as a leaf, it lifted.

Inside were the things just as I remembered them. Rotten canvas wrappings, and, gleaming through them, the head of a lance. He drew it out, trying the edge with a thumb, a gesture as natural as breathing.

"For ornament, I think," he said, rubbing the jewels of the binding with his hand, and laying it aside. Then came a flattish dish, gold, with the rim crusted with gems. And finally, out of a tumble of greyed linen fallen to dust, the bowl.

It was the type of bowl they call sometimes a cauldron, or a grail of the Greek fashion, wide and deep. It was of gold, and from the way he handled it, very heavy. There was chasing of some sort round the outside of the bowl, and on the foot. The two handles were shaped like birds' wings. On a band round it, out of the way of the drinker's lips, were emeralds and sapphires. He turned and held it out to me with both hands.

"Take it and see. It is the most precious thing I have ever seen."

I shook my head, "It is not for me to touch."

"Nor for me," said Nimuë.

He looked at it for a moment longer, then he put it back in the box with the lance-head and the dish, gently wrapping the things away in the linen, which was worn thin, like a veil. "And you won't even tell me where to keep such splendour, or what I am to do with it?"

Nimuë looked across at me, and was silent. When I spoke, it was only a gentle echo of what I had said before, long ago. "It is not for you, either, Arthur. You do not need it. You yourself will be the grail for your people, and they will drink from you and be satisfied. You will never fail them, nor ever leave them quite. You do not need the grail. Leave it for those who come after."

"Then since it is neither mine nor yours," said Arthur, "Nimuë must take it, and with her enchantments hide it so that no one can find it except that he is fitted."

"No one shall," she said, and shut the lid on the treasure.

After that, another year dawned cold, and drew slowly into spring. I went home at April's end, with the wind turning warm, and the young lambs crying on the hill, and catkins shivering yellow in the copses.

The cave was swept and warm again, a place for living, and there was food there, with fresh bread and a crock of milk and a jar of honey. Outside, by the spring, were offerings left by the folk I knew; and all my belongings, with my books and medicines, my instruments and the great standing harp, had been brought from Applegarth.

My return to life had been easier than I had anticipated. It seems that to the simple folk, as indeed to the people in distant parts of Britain, the tale of my return from death was accepted, not as plain truth, but as a legend. The Merlin they had known and feared was dead; a Merlin lived on in the "holy cave," working his minor magics, but only a ghost, as it were, of the enchanter they had known. It may be they thought that I, like so many pretenders of the past, was some small magician merely claiming Merlin's reputation and his place. In the court, and in the cities and the great places of the earth, people looked now to Nimuë for power and help. To me the local folk came to have their sores or their aches healed; to me Ban the shepherd brought the sickly lambs, and the children from the village their pet puppies.

So the year wore on, but so lightly that is seemed only like the evening of a quiet day. The days were golden, tranquil and sweet. There was no call of power, no great high clean wind, no pain in the heart or picking of the flesh. The great doings of the kingdom seemed no longer to trouble me. I did not hunger or ask after news, for when it came, it was brought by the King himself. Just as the boy Arthur, racing up to see me in the shrine of the Wild Forest, had poured out all the doings of every day at my feet, so did the High King of Britain bring me all his acts, his problems and his troubles, and spread them out there on the cave floor in the firelight, and talk to me. What I did for him I do not know; but always, after he had gone, I found myself sitting, drained and silent, in the stillness of complete content.

The god, who was God, had indeed dismissed his servant, and was letting him go in peace.

One day I drew the small harp to me, and set myself to make a new verse for a song sung many years ago.

I had to leave the song there because a string broke. He had promised to bring me new ones, next time he came.

He came again yesterday. Something had called him down to Caerleon, he said, so he had ridden up, just for an hour. When I asked him what the business was in Caerleon, he put the question aside, till I wondered — then dismissed it as absurd — if the journey had been made merely to see me. He brought gifts with him — he never came empty-handed — wine, a basket of cooked meats from his own kitchen, the promised harp-strings and a blanket of soft new wool, woven, he told me, by the Queen's own women. He carried them in himself, like a servant, and put them away for me. He seemed in spirits. He told me of some young man who had recently come to court, a noble fighter, and a cousin of March of Cornwall. Then he spoke of a meeting he was planning with the Saxon "king," Eosa's successor, Cerdic. We talked till the dark drew in, and his escort came jingling up the valley track for him.

Then he rose, lightly, and, as always now when he left me, stooped to kiss me. Usually he made me stay there, by the fire, while he went out into the night, but this time I got up and followed him to the cave entrance, and waited there to watch him go. The light was behind me, and my shadow stretched, thin and long, like the tall shadow of old, across the little lawn and almost to the grove of thorn trees where the escort waited below the cliff.

It was almost night, but over beyond Maridunum in the west, a lingering bar of light hinted at the dying sun. It threw a glint on the river skirting the palace wall where I was born, and touched a jewel spark on the distant sea. Near at hand the trees were bare with winter, and the ground crisp with the first frost. Arthur trod away from me across the grass, leaving ghost-prints in the frost. He reached the place where the track led down to the grove, and half turned. I saw him raise a hand.

"Wait for me." It was the same farewell always. "Wait for me. I shall come back."

And, as ever, I made the same reply:

"What else have I to do but wait for you? I shall be here, when you come again."

The sound of horses dwindled, faded, was gone. The winter's silence came back to the valley. The dark drew down.

A breath of the night slid, like a sigh, through the frost-hung trees. In its wake, faintly, like no sound but the ghost of a sound, came a faint sweet ringing from the air. I lifted my head, remembering, once more, the child who had listened nightly for the music of the spheres, but had never heard it. Now here it was, all around me, a sweet, disembodied music, as if the hill itself was a harp to the high air.

Dark fell. Behind me the fire dimmed, and my shadow vanished. Still I stood listening, with the calmness over me of a great contentment. The sky, heavy with night, drew nearer the earth. The glimmer on the far sea moved, light and following shadow, like the slow arc of a sword sliding back to its sheath, or a barge dwindling under sail across the distant water.

It was quite dark. Quite still. A chill brushed my skin, like the cold touch of crystal.

I left the night, with its remote and singing stars, and came in, to the glow of the fire, and the chair where he had been sitting, and the unstrung harp.