Merlin's Harp (9 page)

  "Well." Bent under his net Mellias paused beside me. "That was a rough first night away! But that is how boys like it, you know. Niviene," he added kindly, "you are distressed. You have wept."

  "Tell, and I'll turn you into a toad!"

  Mellias laughed. He dumped his net, took my hand, and turned with me toward the villa. He smelled of fish and mud and rain. I leaned against him.

"Don't take it so hard. Boys go free younger than girls."

"Not this young!" Bran was barely five.

  "Well, you have a bright one. My first night out it was snowing. Wolf tracks all around me in the morning." Mellias led me along gently, steadying me with an arm around my waist.

  A wet greenness ahead was the villa back wall. He let me go. "I'll wager you'll find your nestling drying his feathers at the fire. Be calm with him, Niviene."

  "Well, naturally!"

  "If he's not there, talk to your mother. She raised two of you. She knows."

  I looked away. "I fear her scorn."

  Mellias said, "Perhaps you misunderstand the Lady." Then he left me.

  My nestling was not by the fire. I found the Lady in our room, searching through his pile of clothes. Many of these she had made herself, taught by a Human woman whose sick child she had healed.

  She looked up almost guiltily as I entered. "I wondered if he took his cloak. He took so little, I think he will come back today. Enjoy your freedom. Remember how you longed for it?"

  "Yes." Well did I remember the foolish girl-mother who ground her teeth at the hounding cry of "M-Ma!" I tried to enjoy my freedom that day and the next and the next.

  On the fourth morning, a glad golden autumn morning, I crouched by the courtyard fire-stones, warmed my palms, and lit a small scrying fire. Kneeling over it I intoned,
Bran! Bran! Bran!
Snapping, the fire spoke of sun and rain, wind, snow, cool earth. "Bran!" I cried; and dropped tears into the fire.

  Now the fire spoke briskly of several things. I saw three children in invisible cloaks swing through yew trees. I saw a boar splash into the lake and swim toward Avalon. I saw a winter-wise serpent slither into his hole under a rock.

  The fire faltered.

  Feet came softly about me. I looked up at the Lady, Mellias, and Aefa. Aefa said, "The ravens told me to come."

  I snatched at hope. What one could not see, maybe another could. I cried, "Aefa! Scry for Bran!"

  She sank on her heels beside me. "You know, Niviene, he is at that age when children disappear."

  "Not this suddenly! Not for four days at a time! Scry for Bran!"

  The Lady stood over us, absently combing her hair with her fingers. Her eyes were red from crystal-gazing. "With all our scrying we should have seen him by now," she murmured. "Niviene, calm yourself. Excitement wastes power."

  The little fire died.

  Aefa sat back. "I saw him in the flesh, Niviene, not two days ago."

  "Gods! Where? Why did you not tell me?"

  "I did not know you sought him. He was passing under my tree house, oh so skillfully, almost invisible. I thought, 'There goes a future Mouse Spy!' "

  I stared at Aefa. Her tree house was across the water. Had my little one swum the lake, like the boar scried in the fire? He was too small to pole a coracle.

  She said, "He was headed north when I saw him. Then later, I heard talk about the north edge."

  I leaped to my feet. "What talk?"

  "Some sort of…power…had moved into that part of the forest and cast a shield around itself."

  The Lady and I exchanged appalled glances. "Birds and animals were seen to avoid the shield. Common Fey with no magic felt it and stayed away. It was there a day and night; then it lifted."

  "But…Bran would stay away too!"

  The Lady murmured, "Not if the power called him."

  Mellias shifted uneasily. He was ready to beat the forest bush by bush, but this talk of powers and shields disturbed him. Mellias was young, then, as Aefa and I were young.

  The Lady had not left Avalon for a season, except to visit the Human woman who taught her skills. Now she put on shirt and trousers, braided her hair and came with us. In two coracles we crossed the lake and poled up the north channel.

  Mellias, poling ahead, cried out softly and dropped his pole.

  Beside him, Aefa said, "Here's the shield."

  We all felt it. My hair tried to rise and I shivered. A power struck through my body as lightning once struck Counsel Oak.

  The shield was disintegrating, lifting away like shreds of fog. Poling hard we pushed through and left it behind. Behind us we left ducks and swans feeding; before us, no bird swam or dabbled. No fish rose to the surface. Yet in the shield-misted silence, something moved. Mellias whistled like a blackbird and indicated with his head.

  Among tall brown reeds moved something small and white. A white fallow kid poked his head from the reeds as though to greet us. Behind him a second white kid splashed in the shallows.

  I jammed my pole into mud, stopping the coracle. I said, "I'll follow those twins."

  The Lady nodded. "Take Aefa. Mellias and I will go on by water, search the banks."

  Aefa and I splashed ashore and pulled my coracle in among the reeds. The kids scrambled up the bank and seemed to wait for us. They circled each other, looking at us over their shoulders and switching their tails. As soon as we joined them on the bank they moved away, still looking back; and we followed, almost within touching distance.

  The northern edge of the forest had not been much lived in of late. We passed hidden abandoned huts and tree houses and one dancing ring where young trees were beginning to take root.

  The kids trotted and skipped before us. In the dancing ring they paused to play, bounding about aimlessly, as though forgetting their mission. Aefa called softly, "Pretty children! Guide us now, please.'' And they froze between one bound and the next, looking at us astonished. We walked slowly toward them; and when they were almost within our reach they leaped and trotted away single file, slowly enough for us to follow.

  The north channel swings in a great arc around that edge of forest. The Lady told us later that it is not easy poling, what with shallows and falls and rocks. The twins led us more or less straight overland to rejoin the channel at the tip of its arc; there, in the first mud of the first swamp by the channel, they paused. Small heads high, ears a twitch, they watched us come, skipping back just before we reached them.

  There in the mud a clear footprint had sunk deep and almost solid. A clear, small footprint.

  I sank to my knees beside it. I said, "His boots are wearing very thin." I stared into the footprint as though I could scry it, while Aefa cast about like a hound for more.

  "No more," she said at last. "You'd think he had stepped once in the mud, then been snatched up by an eagle." But Bran was not quite that small. She added, "It may not even be Bran."

  I shook my head. "I was looking for new boots for him. I knew they were thin."

  I stood up, took a great breath and screeched, breaking the forest law for the first time since I was Bran's age. Aefa looked shocked. The kids leaped high and disappeared in a thicket, not to be seen again. "Bran!" I yelled, waking echoes from the old swamp trees. "Bran, come to me! Bran, come here!"

  Somewhere in the dim swamp a disturbed owl hooted.

  Aefa and I camped near the northern edge for several days. We scried and searched and found nothing, not so much as a thread from Bran's tunic.

  Worn-out and heartsick, I went home to the villa. The Lady said, "I do not feel our Bran is dead, Niviene."

  I looked at her wearily.

  She continued, "To make sure, we two will call the dead."

  I went cold. "Call the dead? We do that?"

  "Indeed we do, when there is need. I will show you."

  That night—a cold, windy night—we sat cross-legged in the courtyard holding hands. A small lamp burned between us. The Lady taught me a chant that we chanted softly, endlessly, while leaves and twigs blew out of the dark around us. "Chant," the Lady had told me, "until a ghost comes by. Look and see if it is the ghost you want. If not, do not move, do not speak to it, give it no power. Once you move or speak, the spell is broken."

  We chanted till the maiden moon rose over the wall and the lamp burned low and we froze stiff where we sat. I had forgotten what we were doing; I think I thought I was dreaming when a new, sharper cold pierced my frozen bones and a dim, white shape drifted near.

  I looked up at it almost incuriously, noting that it was not Bran. It was a hefty, Human-sized maiden in a Roman-style gown. I thought,
Dana!
This was the spirit I myself had created in the villa in my childhood, my imaginary friend. I had not thought a secondary spirit, created by my thought, would endure so long.

  Dana turned toward me then and I noticed flowers caught in her hair, which was drenched, and she seemed to drip water; and I thought again.
Elana!

  I stopped chanting and took a breath to speak.

  The Lady gripped my numb hands so hard they hurt, and I quieted. Once you speak, the spell is broken. So Elana drifted past, shifting and changing and disappearing as she went, and we chanted on for a while.

  My throat hurt. I could hardly mumble the chant, when from behind me floated the burdened old woman-ghost I had met in the villa before. She had not changed. Her thin face was still crumpled, her white hair bound back with a rag. On her bent shoulders she carried a load of…wash? I longed to speak to her, to say, "Poor ghost, you do not have to wash clothes here anymore. Your life here was finished long ago. Be off, find yourself a new life, a better one! You are free to go." I bit my tongue so as not to speak.

  Then came the child.

  At sight of the small, flying form I would have started up; but the Lady held my hands. He flew slowly past, smiling, waving his plump, small arms like wings. His curls bounced on his shoulders. He rolled around once in the air, flying upside down.

  He was not Bran. I had seen this ghost before, too, in my childhood. He was not Bran.

  He fluttered by and the lamp burned out.

  The Lady mumbled, "Our night is over." The maiden moon stood high in the sky.

  Grabbing each other, leaning on each other, we staggered into the Lady's warm, smoky room, where a brazier burned. We stretched out together under her deerskins, and slowly we came back to life. Warmth crept back into our blood, intelligence into our eyes. We looked at each other. The Lady's face—still beautiful, very little lined—was wet with tears. She said, "You know, children can be lost at this age. It happens almost every year."

  "I know." But till now, the lost ones had not been mine.

  "You are young," my mother said. "You can have another."

  "No."

  "No?"

  "I will never sacrifice to the Goddess again."

  "Niviene!" Shock stiffened the Lady's face. "Quickly, take that back! Before She hears."

  "It's too late." The Goddess had heard. I felt Her presence in the room with us.

  The Goddess is always with us and in us. She breathes through us, sees through our eyes, hears with our ears…feels with our hearts. But we are only aware of Her with effort. When we feel Her presence like this, unasked, She means to speak to us. I listened.

  
Little One,
I almost heard Her say,
You did not refuse the joys I sent
you. Why do you refuse grief?

  I said aloud, "Because I would die of it."

  
Yes,
She assented,
you will surely die. Love life while I live you,
Little One; love summer and winter, joy and grief.

  Her presence faded like a sweet scent. I said quietly to the Lady, "From tonight I sacrifice no more. I live for myself alone. In the morning I will take my heart down to the lake and drown it, like a deformed child."

  And so, in truth, I did.

  Naked under my "invisible" cloak I came down to the lake shore, bare feet squishing cold mud, rain like tears on my face. I picked fallen leaves and twigs and vines, and from these I fashioned a coracle the size of my hand, and I breathed my living heart into this boat. Then I shrugged off my cloak and waded into the lake, freezing feet sunk in frozen mud. I waded till the near-icy water reached my thighs and stood there, breathing my power.

  Slowly, power warmed my face, neck, shoulders, and breasts. More slowly it warmed my hips and legs, and mud-sunk feet. At last I no longer felt the freezing water, but only the blazing glow of power.

  Then I raised the little coracle, breathed into it once more and said, "Take my heart, with all its sorrow. Carry it away. Drown it." The leaf boat quivered in my cupped hands, and a dim gray aura rose around it, as of a living being. I set the little boat on the water and pushed it away.

  I stood glowing in the lake as long as I could see the coracle ride the current. Quickly it disappeared among small, choppy waves; but I could see its gray aura twirling along. I stood there till it was completely gone, disappeared and swallowed up.

  Then power faded and intense cold rushed into my body. I scrambled out of the lake, seized my cloak, and rubbed myself warm before slinging it on. Only then did I pause to listen to my heart.

  I heard nothing, not a gurgle, whimper or sigh, because I had no heart. I had a softly beating drum in my chest that marked the moments of my life; but the heart that felt and remembered, grieved and rejoiced, was gone. I had drowned it.