Merlin (6 page)

"Robin ... I want..." and then Cub began to wail, a sound so alien in the woods that it sent a terrible shiver down Hawk-Hobby's spine.

He gathered the child up in his arms and soothed him until the tears stopped. "Come," he said. "I will hold thee." The deliberate use of the word
thee
had a salutary effect on the child.

"Thee must take
me
now," Cub said.

The track took a slow turning and then they were in the meadow ringed with beech trees. Not a blade of grass stirred between the bodies. The busy, scurrying ants were gone.

The oddest thing,
he thought,
is that there is not much hlood. Not a flood of it. Not a meadowful.
just bodies strewn about as though they were dollies flung down by a careless child.

They found the dark-haired scar-faced woman first, lying on her back, her arms spread wide as if welcoming her death. Near her were two of the boys, side by side. Close by them, a third boy and one of the wild men.

He held the child against his shoulder. "Do not look," he cautioned, though he knew from the rigid body that the child was taking it all in. "Do not look."

He wandered across the field of death until he heard an awful sound. It was a dog howling, the cry long and low. He wondered that he had not heard it before. Following the thread of it, he came to the meadow's edge and there was the wodewose and, with him, Fowler. They were locked in an awful embrace. It was Fowler's dog, Ranger, who was howling, his muzzle muddied with blood. When he saw the boys, he shut up and lay down miserably, head on paws, following their every movement with liquid eyes.

"Stay, Ranger," Hawk-Hobby said, trying to put iron in his command.

The dog did not move toward them and, after a minute, Hawk-Hobby put the child down, and examined the dead men.

It was clear to see how it had happened. The wodewose's hands were tightly wrapped around Fowler's neck, so tightly the traitor's eyes bulged and his tongue protruded from his mouth. Out of the wild man's back stuck the haft of a soldier's spear, and around that wound were bite marks. Which of the two of them had died first hardly mattered.

"Make him live, Dreamer," the child whispered. "Make him live."

Hawk-Hobby took the wodewose by the shoulder and brought the ruined head close to his own. The wild man was stiff with death, his lips parted in a final agony. It was all the boy could do to touch him.

"Give him breath, Dreamer," the child whispered again.

Bending over, though he shook with the horror of it, Hawk-Hobby blew the breath of life into the grimace of a mouth.

Once, twice, three times he blew. Then waited. Then blew again.

He closed his eyes and remembered his dream of breath, remembered how it had felt when he had given life to the little bird. He prayed, sudden tears running down his cheeks.

He blew again.

And again.

And nothing happened.

Nothing at all.

"Make him live, Dreamer," the child begged.
Let him live
, the boy prayed.

But his magic—capricious, wanton, unpredictable—did not come at his calling.

HOW LONG THEY SAT THERE BY THE DEAD
men, Hawk-Hobby did not know. But eventually the dog came over to him and licked his hand several times as if learning the taste.

The boy stood. "Come," he said. "It is time for us to go." And the three of them—boy, child, dog—walked together to the edge of the meadow, leaving the dead behind.

"Why did he not live?" Cub asked.

Hawk-Hobby shook his head. "I do not know," he said. "I do not know near enough yet. But I will learn." He looked into the child's face, now streaked with dirt and tears. "I promise you I will learn."

"I will learn, too," the child said to him confidently. "And ee will teach me."

They went down the path, but in the opposite direction than the soldiers had taken. The dog ranged ahead, then returned, over and over and over again, as if to satisfy himself the two were safe.

They did not stop until the sun was well overhead.

In a little glade, where berries grew in profusion, they had a meal. In between one juicy handful and the next, Cub turned to the boy. "Are thee my father now?" he asked.

Startled, Hawk-Hobby smiled slowly. The idea was new to him. All this while he had been seeking a father for himself. Now, it seemed, he had a son. "If you wish it."

In answer, the child put his hand in the boy's. "Then perhaps," Hawk-Hobby said, "if we are to be a family, we need to tell one another our true names."

"But—'ee are Dreamer," the child said. "Robin o' the Wood."

"No," the boy answered, kneeling before the child. "I am a dreamer, true, but that is not my true name. My name..." He took a deep breath. "My name is Merlin."

"Like the hawk?" the child asked. "I like hawks."

"Like the hawk. And someday I shall teach you how to tame them as I was taught," Merlin said. "But now I have many other things to teach you. Such as what your place is in this world. And that you must not rise to the lure. And..."

"But
my
name, Merlin. What be ee calling me?"

"Cub."

"Can I be bigger than a cub?"

"You will be in time."

"As big as ... as big as a bear? Then no one could kill what is mine. If I be big and powerful as a bear."

Merlin smiled. "As big as a bear, certainly," he said. "But if you are a bear, Cub, then we shall call you Artus, for that means bear-man." As he said it, he suddenly remembered his dream of the bear. Perhaps, perhaps this was meant, after all.

"Artus. Artus. Artus," the child cried out, twirling around and around until he was quite dizzy with it.

At the sound of the child's name, the dog burst out of the woods and ran about the two of them, barking.

"Ranger," commanded Merlin, "do your duty to this King Bear."

Inexplicably, the dog stopped and bowed its head. Then, when Artus laughed delightedly, and clapped his berry-stained hands, the dog turned and ran back down the path as if to scout the long, perilous way.

Light.

Morn.

"How can I continue, how can I rule now that he is gone?"

"
You are king, my lord. He was just an old mage. And he lacked all humility. "

"Hush. He was my father. He was my teacher. He was my friend. "

"A king has no friends, my lord. "

"
Not even you, Gwen?"

"
Not even me, Arthur."

"
You are wrong, you know. He was my friend from the first moment I saw him. Though I did not
know then—or ever—what he truly was. Sometimes he seemed to me to he as fierce as a wild dog, sometimes as husy as an ant, ofttimes as slippery as a trout. He was a hawk, a hobby, a merlin. "

"
He was a man, my lord."

"
Not a man like me, Gwen."

"
No one is like you, Arthur."

"
No one?"

"
You are the king.
"

"
So am I powerful?
"

"
Very powerful. "

"
That is good. If I am powerful, then no one can hurt me. Or mine. So why do I hurt so now that he is gone?
"

And he calls his servants to him with a bell that sounds like a tamed hawk's jesses, like the sound of spears clashing on earth, that place perilously juxtaposed between heaven and hell.

The story of Merlin, King Arthur's great court magician, is not one story but many. Tales about him have been told in England, in Scotland, in Ireland, in Wales, in Brittany, France, Germany, and beyond. In some of the stories he is a Druid priest, in others a dream-reader, a shape-shifter, a wild man in the woods.

In Geoffrey of Monmouth's twelfth-century
Vita Merlini—The Life of Merlin
—the great magician goes insane and runs off into the woods for a while where he lives as a wild man and only music can soothe him.

Wild men were popular figures in medieval literature and art. Known also as wodewose, they were sung about in French romances, found in sophisticated paintings, woven into enormous tapestries, carved onto ornamented weapons. There was even a famous set of fifteenth-century German playing cards that had a suit called "wild men." But the wold man or wild man was outside of the strictly ordered medieval society, a kind of jester, preternaturally wise. Often he became mixed up in the folk mind with the ancient gods of the woods: Silvanus, the Green Man, Robin o' the Wood, Robin Hood.

In the old stories of Merlin and Arthur, Merlin's roles were various. In some he was there at Arthur's conception, helping Arthur's father, Uther Pendragon, and Arthur's mother, Ygraine, get together by supernatural means. In other stories he is Arthur's teacher, patient and wise. In others he is the architect of Arthur's Camelot, of Stonehenge, of the round table. In all, he is a figure of magic, of mystery, his own history beguiling, a fatherless (and perhaps even motherless) figure who helps raise Arthur the child.

I have taken bits and pieces of these stories, reworked them extensively, and added to them information about the wodewose societies where the men were often pictured as one-eyed monsters (like the Greek Cyclops) dressed in bearskins with shaggy, bristly, ugly wives. That there were outlaw groups living in the vast forests of old Britain, we know. Whether Merlin—boy or man—ever encountered any such is the realm of the storyteller.

—J. Y.