Merlin's Booke (9 page)

Merlin, startled, looked at Viviane. She rolled her eyes up to stare at the broad beams of the ceiling and held her mouth still.

“His mother was a dream reader, too?” asked the duke.

“She was, though being a woman, dreamed of more homey things: the names of babes and whether they be boys or girls, and when to plant, and so forth.”

The Lady Renwein leaned forward. “Then say, mage, what this dream of towers and dragons means.”

“I will, my lady. It is not unknown to us that you have a house that will not stand. However, what young Merlin has dreamed is the reason for this. The house or tower of snow sinks every day into the ground; in the image of the dream, it melts. That is because there is a pool beneath it. Most likely the Romans built the conduits for their baths there. With the construction, there has been a leakage underground. The natural outflow has been damaged further by armies fighting. And so there has been a pooling under the foundation. Open up the work, drain the pool, remove or reconstruct the Roman pipes, and the building will stand.”

“Is that all?” asked the duke, disappointment in his voice. “I thought that you might say the red was the Lady Renwein's soldiers, the white mine or some such.”

“Dreams are never quite so obvious, my lord. They are devious messages to us, truth …” he paused for a moment and put his hands on Merlin's shoulders, “truth on the slant.”

Lady Renwein was nodding. “Yes, that would make sense. About the drains and the Roman pipes, I mean. Not the dream. You need not have used so much folderol in order to give us good advice.”

Ambrosius smiled and stepped away from Merlin and made another deep bow. “But my lady, who would have listened to a traveling magician on matters of … shall we say … state?”

She smiled back.

“And besides,” Ambrosius added, “I had not heard this dream until this very moment. I had given no thought before it to your palace or anything else of Carmarthen excepting the fair. It is the boy's dream that tells us what to do. And, unlike his mother of blessed memory, I could never guess a baby's sex before it was born lest she dreamed it. And she, the minx, never mentioned that she was carrying a boy to me, nor did she dream of him till after he was born when she, dying, spoke of him once. ‘He will be a hawk among princes,' she said. So I named him Merlin.”

It was two days later when a special messenger came to the green wagon with a small casket filled with coins and a small gold dragon with a faceted red jewel for an eye.

“Her ladyship sends these with her compliments,” said the soldier who brought the casket. “There was indeed a hidden pool beneath the foundation. And the pipes, which were as gray and speckled and grained as eggs, were rotted through. In some places they were gnawed on, too, by some small underground beasts. Her lady begs you to stay or at least send the boy back to her for yet another dream.”

Ambrosius accepted the casket solemnly, but shook his head. “Tell her ladyship that—alas—there is but one dream per prince. And we must away. The fair here is done and there is another holy day fair in Londinium, many days journey from here. Even with such a prize as her lady has gifted us, Ambrosius the Wandering Mage and his company can never be still long.” He bowed.

But Ambrosius did not proffer the real reason they were away: that a kind of restless fear drove him on, for after the performance when they were back in the wagon, Merlin had cried out against him. “But that was not the true meaning of the dream. There
will
be fighting here—the red dragon of the Britons and the Saxon white will fight again. The tower is only a small part—of the dream, of the whole.”

And Ambrosius had sighed loudly then, partly for effect, and said, “My dear son, for as I claimed you, now you are mine forever, magecraft is a thing of the eye and ear. You tell me that what you dream comes true—but on the slant. And I say that to tell a prince to his face that you have dreamed of his doom invites the dreamer's doom as well. And, as you yourself reminded me, it may not be
all
the truth. The greatest wisdom of any dreamer is to survive in order to dream again. Besides, how do you really know if what you dream is true or if, in the telling of it, you make it come true? We are men, not beasts, because we can dream and because we can make those dreams come true.”

Merlin had closed his eyes then, and when he opened them again, they were the clear vacant blue of a newborn babe. “Father,” he had said, and it was a child's voice speaking.

Ambrosius had shivered with the sound of it, for he knew that sons in the natural order of things o'erthrew their fathers when they came of age. And Merlin, it was clear, was very quick to learn and quicker to grow.

“Sir,” said Merlin, “this is my desire: the first night that ye shall lie by Igraine ye shall get a child on her, and when that is born, that it shall be delivered to me for to nourish there as I will have it; for it shall be your worship, and the child's avail as mickle as the child is worth.”

“I will well,” said the king, “as thou wilt have it.”

“Now make you ready,” said Merlin, “this night ye shall lie with Igraine in the castle of Tintagil; and ye shall be like the duke her husband. …”

—Le Morte D'Arthur

by Sir Thomas Malory

“It is well done,” said Merlin, “that ye take a wife, for a man of your bounty and noblesse should not be without a wife. Now is there any that ye love more than another?”

“Yea,” said King Arthur, “I love Guenever the king's daughter, Leodegrance of the land of Cameliard, the which holdeth in his house the Table Round that ye told he had of my father Uther. And this damosel is the most valiant and fairest lady that I know living, or yet that ever I could find.”

—Le Morte D'Arthur

by Sir Thomas Malory

T
HE
GWYNHFAR—
THE WHITE
one, the pure one, the anointed one—waited. She had waited every day since her birth, it seemed, for this appointed time. Attended by her voiceless women in her underground rooms, the
gwynhfar's
limbs had been kept oiled, her bone-white hair had been cleaned and combed. No color was allowed to stain her dead-white cheeks, no
maurish
black to line her eyes. White as the day she had been born, white as the foam on a troubled sea, white as the lilybell grown in the wood, she waited.

Most of her life had been spent on her straw bed in that half-sleep nature spent on her. She moved from small dream to small dream, moment to moment, hour to hour, day to day, without any real knowledge of what awaited her. Nor did she care. The
gwynhfar
did not have even creature sense, nor had she been taught to think. All she had been taught was waiting. It was her duty, it was her life.

She had been the firstborn of a dour landholder and his wife. Pulled silently from between her mother's thighs, bleached as bone, her tiny eyes closed tight against the agonizing light, the
gwynhfar
cried only in the day—a high, thin, mewling call. At night, without the sun to torment her, she seemed content; she waited.

They say now that the old mage attended her birth, but that is not true. He did not come for weeks, even months, till word of the white one's birth had traveled mouth to ear, mouth to ear, over and over the intervening miles. He did not come at first, but his messengers came, as they did to every report of a marvel. They had visited two-headed calves, fish-scaled infants, and twins joined at the hip and heart. When they heard of the white one, they came to her, too.

She waited for them as she waited for everything else.

And when the messengers saw that the stories were true enough, they reported back to the stone hall. So the Old One himself came, wrapped in his dignity and the sour trappings of state.

He had to bend down to enter the cottage, for age had not robbed him of the marvelous height that had first brought
him
to the attention of the Oldest Ones, those who dwell in the shadows of the Circle of Stones. He bent and bent till it seemed he would bend quite in two, and still he broke his head on the lintel.

“A marvel,” it was said. “The blood anointed the door.” That was no marvel, but a failing of judgment and the blood a mere trickle where the skin broke apart. But that is what was said. What the Old One himself said was in a language far older than he and twice as filled with power. But no one reported
it,
for who but the followers of the oldest way even know that tongue?

As the Old One stood there, gazing at the mewling white babe in her half sleep before the flickering fire, he nodded and stroked his thin beard. This, too, they say, and I have seen him often enough musing in just that way, so it could have been so.

Then he stretched forth his hand, that parchment-colored, five-fingered magician's wand that could make balls and cards and silken banners disappear. He stretched forth his hand and touched the child. She shivered and woke fully for the first time, gazing at a point somewhere beyond his hand but not as far as his face with her watery pink eyes.

“So,” he said in that nasal excuse for a voice. “So.” He was never profligate with words. But it was enough.

The landholder gladly gave up the child, grateful to have the monster from his hearth. Sons could help till the lands. Only the royals crave girls. They make good counters in the bargaining games played across the castle boundary lines. But this girl was not even human enough to cook and clean and wipe the bottoms of her sisters and brothers to come. The landholder would have killed the moon-misbegotten thing on its emergence from his child-bride's womb had not the midwife stayed him. He sold the child for a single gold piece and thought himself clever in the bargain.

And did the Old One clear his throat then and consecrate their trade with words? Did he speak of prophesy or pronounce upon omens? If the landholder's wife had hoped for such to ease her guilt, she got short shrift of him. He had paid with a coin and a single syllable.

“So,” he had said. And so it was.

The Old One carried the
gwynhfar
back over the miles with his own hands.
“With his own hands,”
run the wonder tales, as if this were an awesome thing, carrying a tiny, witless babe. But think on it. Would he have trusted her to another, having come so far, across the years and miles, to find her? Would he have given her into clumsier hands when his own could still pull uncooked eggs from his sleeves without a crack or a drop?

Behind him, they say, came his people: the priests and the seers, a grand processional. But I guess rather he came by himself and at night. She would have been a noisy burden to carry through the bright, scalding light; squalling and squealing at the sun. The moon always quieted her. Besides, he wanted to surprise them with her, to keep her to himself till the end. For was it not written that the
gwynhfar
would arise and bind the kingdom:

Just as it had been written in the entrails of deer and the bloody leavings of carrion crow that the Tall One, blessed be, would travel the length of the kingdom to find her. Miracles are made by hands such as his, and prophesies can be invented.

And then, too, he would want to be sure. He would want time to think about what he carried, that small, white-haired marvel, that unnature. For if the Old One was anything, he was a planner. If he had been born better, he would have been a mighty king. So, wrapped in the cloak of night, keeping the babe from her enemy light, which drained even the small strength she had, and scheming—always scheming—the Old One moved through the land.

By day, of course, there would have been no mistaking him. His height ever proclaimed him. Clothes were no disguise. A mask but pointed the finger. At night, though, he was only a long shadow in a world of long shadows.

I never saw him then, but I know it all. I can sort through stories as a crow pecks through grain. And though it is said he rode a whirlwind home, it was a time of year for storms. They were no worse than other years. It is just that legend has a poor memory, and hope an even worse.

The Old One returned with a cough that wracked his long, thin body and an eye scratched out by a tree limb. The black patch he wore thereafter gave rise to new tales. They say he had been blinded in one eye at his first sight of her, the
gwynhfar.
But I have it from the physician who attended him that there was a great scar on his cheek and splinters still in the flesh around the eye.