The Old Magic (26 page)

“Why won’t the tower stand?” Vortigern demanded. And at last the moment Mab had been waiting for came: Vortigern consulted
his soothsayer.

It had been years since Mab had managed to put into the king’s mind the notion that he should have a soothsayer, but even
the Queen of the Old Ways could not influence Vortigern to consult him. But what magic could not do, desperation could, providing
you had enough patience.

And Mab had patience . . .

“I’m a soothsayer, Your Majesty. Not an architect,” Lailoken quavered. His eyes darted desperately from side to side, searching
for an escape that didn’t exist. Mab smiled, awaiting her moment.

“So tell me,” Vortigern growled, taking a step closer to the old man, “why is it that every time I try to build this tower
it collapses?”

Lailoken wrung his hands in terror. “Ah, well. Yes, indeed. Hmmm …” None of the delaying tactics worked. “You think I should
know that?” he asked tentatively.

“Yes!”
Vortigern roared.

Goaded beyond patience, the king grabbed his seer by the throat, dragging the man up on his toes. The king’s face was purple
with rage—a terrifying sight for a brave man, let alone for a lifelong coward like Lailoken. Mab stepped up behind the old
Druid and put an invisible hand on his shoulder.

“Tell him you’ll read the runestones,”
she whispered in his ear.
“If you don’t say something to placate him he’ll kill you now, just as he did Gwennius. Come to me at Sarum, old man—call
upon Queen Mab to save you. …”

“Ah—!” Lailoken choked and struggled against the crushing grip upon his throat. His mind spun frantically, searching for the
words that would save his life, and suddenly he found them.

“I’ll—I’ll read the stones!” he burst out. “I will,” he added, as if he were convincing himself. “That’s something I do well.”

Vortigern released him with a shove that sent the old man sprawling. “Then read them!” he shouted.

Several people turned to look, then turned away quickly lest the king catch them looking at him. Lailoken felt himself all
over as if to convince himself that he was still alive, then turned and began to shuffle as fast as he could from Vortigern’s
sight.

Mab smiled and wished herself back to her underground palace. Her work here was finished. And the trap to catch Merlin was
about to be sprung.

Vortigern gazed around himself—from the ruin on the hill, to the retreating figure of the soothsayer, to the figures of all
the people trying so very hard not to catch his attention. A great weariness possessed him. Everything he touched turned to
discord and destruction.

“Why? Why?” He stared into the heavens, as if he could call old King Constant’s god to account. “
Why
am I surrounded by incompetent fools?”

He might be incompetent and ineffectual, but he was no fool. Lailoken hurried to his tent and hid himself inside.

The Royal Soothsayer’s tent was much smaller than the king’s—a single room with thick walls of double-hung canvas. It smelled
strongly of herbs and incense and was filled with everything his predecessors had thought might placate the king or gain themselves
a longer life—amulets, talismans, carved totems, and several trunks full of ornate costumes and other odds and ends. There
was a compass, an astrolabe, and a half-finished horoscope spread out upon the table, and a stuffed owl looked down glassily
from the center pole of the tent.

Lailoken ignored the gaudy clutter of the tent’s interior with the ease of long practice, flinging open the lid of the nearest
trunk and rooting through it hastily. Almost the first thing his hand touched was a sack of runestones, but he tossed it aside
without heed. Runes wouldn’t save him now—he needed a hooded cloak and his secret horde of gold coins, and then to get out
of the king’s camp unnoticed as quickly as possible. He had no intention of trying any divination—he didn’t need to read the
future to know that the only thing that could guarantee Vortigern’s soothsayer a long life was a great deal of distance from
Vortigern.

Of course he knew
how
to tell fortunes. Every aspirant to the Druid’s Grove was taught several forms of magic and divination—but it had been years
since he’d done any magic. Read the stones? Where had that idea come from? And what if Vortigern didn’t like the answer?

Finally Lailoken found the items he was searching for. He swirled the thick black cloak around himself and tucked his coins
into a sack around his neck. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do. He certainly didn’t dare take any of the costly artifacts
strewn about the tent. They could be easily traced, and the last thing Lailoken wanted was to be accused of theft and brought
back to face the king’s justice. It was the king’s justice he was trying to escape in the first place.

He picked up a knife—its purpose was to sacrifice animals, so that omens could be read in their entrails, but it would serve
his purpose equally well—and carefully slit the fabric at the back of his tent. All he needed was a few hours’ head start,
and no one would ever find him. …

“Going somewhere?” the captain of Vortigern’s guard said from the doorway of the tent.

Lailoken jumped back from his labor and dropped the knife. He turned around, looking up into the stony countenance of Vortigern’s
chief enforcer and swallowing painfully. Sir Rhys was built like a granite cliff and was just as compassionate. The captain’s
well-used armor—and well-used weapons—gleamed in the pale autumn sunlight that shone in over his shoulder.

“Sarum,” Lailoken croaked, driven to invention by sheer panic. “Sacred stones. Place of power. Very magical.”

“Your eagerness to be about the king’s business does you credit,” Sir Rhys said, gazing from the cloaked soothsayer to the
new slit in the back wall of the tent. “But the king isn’t going to make you walk all the way to Sarum all by yourself. No,
he’s sending me and a dozen soldiers with you, just to make sure nothing happens to you. We wouldn’t want you to get lost
and not find your way back here, now, would we? Now let me help you pack for your journey, soothsayer.”

Sir Rhys smiled.

The followers of the Old Ways had called this the last day of the old year and the first day of the new: Samhain, the night
on which the gate between the worlds was flung open and the spirits of living and dead, past and future, mingled together.
Lailoken shivered in the autumn cold. Sir Rhys’s campfire was a small and lonely speck half a mile away. Lailoken had said
he needed privacy for his devotions, and Vortigern’s soldiers weren’t any too eager to involve themselves with the spirits
he might conjure, but Lailoken didn’t fool himself into believing this meant he would be able to escape. Sir Rhys would have
guards patrolling every escape route.

No, his only hope lay in the Old Ones, little help though they’d ever been to him yet. He gazed apprehensively about him at
the towering stones of Sarum. It had been a long time since Lailoken had come here. The ancient sarcen stones brought back
too many sorrowful memories. Ambrosia and all the others who had shared his faith—dead.

As he would be dead, if he did not find some way to divert Vortigern’s anger and make Pendragon’s walls stand.

Quickly he made his preparations: the white bull’s hide laid out upon the ground, the libations of milk and beer poured at
the four cardinal points, the balefire kindled of the nine sacred woods. It was amazing how easily the Old Ways came back
to him, though he’d tried his best to forget them in the course of a lifetime’s persecution. Though he’d tried to skimp on
his preparations—who would ever see them?—a strange reluctance had held him back, and so to make his petition this Samhain
night Lailoken was barefoot and crowned in mistletoe, wearing a robe of pure new wool that had been worked without any seam,
belted with a pony-skin girdle dyed with scarlet cochineal and studded with gold—the immemorial trappings of an observance
that was vanishing in his own lifetime.

He knelt upon the bullhide and took the runestones in his hand. He did not know where his predecessor had gotten them, but
they were very old. The ivory they were carved of was yellowed almost to the color of amber by time, and the stark angular
symbols incised into each were worn nearly smooth with uncounted decades of handling.

“Oh, Mab—
dear
Mab—”

Lailoken closed his eyes and muttered almost to himself as he flung out the runestones upon the white bull’s hide.

“I’ve been a worshipper of the Old Ways all my life, and now that life is in danger—and it’s a precious life; it’s mine—oh,
Mab, I’ve never had any real help—no, never—oh, what am I going to do? I don’t know why his blasted tower keeps falling down!”
He didn’t really expect an answer, but he got one.

“The land is cursed!” Mab hissed, stepping out from behind a stone. Her black finery glittered in the firelight.

Lailoken fell back with a yell of terror, his eyes fixed on the apparition before him. His eyes glittered with tears, and
unfamiliar emotions lifted his heart as he gazed at her.

Hope. Grief.

“You’ve appeared,” he said in a trembling voice. “You’ve appeared after all these years! It
is
Queen Mab?”

The woman nodded regally. “Yes, old man,” she said. When she looked up again, the old Druid could see that her eyes glowed
in the dark like a wolf’s or an owl’s—proof that she was what she said she was.

Not that he’d doubted. No, not him. Never.

“The land is cursed!” Mab said again, her voice like the hissing of wind through winter branches. “Neither tower nor castle
will stand.”

Mab saw the old man’s eyes fill with despair at her pronouncement, and waited for the emotion to run its course. Of course
he would not simply accept that answer. He wanted to live far too much. She’d chosen him for just that fact, preserved him
from untimely execution, kept her eye on him through all the long years of watching and waiting, as Merlin grew to manhood
in his forest, thinking himself safe.

“So what do we do?” the old man said at last.

“We.”
How arrogant these mortals are!

“You must find a man with no mortal father and mix his blood with the mortar,” Mab said oracularly.
I have him, I have him,
she gloated inside.
Merlin will never deny such an accusation when they question him—he has too much taste for the truth. And he wants to live
too much to let Vortigern slit his throat. He’ll use his magic to escape. He must!

She watched as Lailoken digested her words. “Ooh, ah … splendid,” the old seer said doubtfully.

Bumbling old fool! He was cowardly and half-senile, but senile old cowards had uses to which brave young men could not be
put. And they could defeat brave young men in the end—with her help.

Say it, you old fool! Ask the question I have waited to hear for longer than you can imagine!

“But … a man who has no mortal father?” Lailoken asked, grovelingly, torn between hope and despair. “Er, where can I find
a man like that?”

Mab smiled and came close enough to lay her hand atop his head. “I’ll show you. …”

Y
ears had passed as Merlin lived the lessons of the Lady of the Lake, learning to live always in the stillness that was the
mystic center of all things, to become a focus for the loving power that came from
being
and not from doing. Each day he passed following her path and not Mab’s, made him stronger and more at peace, until even
thoughts of Nimue and what might have been between them did not trouble him much.

He lived quietly in the forest as the magic he had learned from Mab and Frik dropped from his mind unused, and in its place
the Lady’s gift—the knowledge of prophecy—grew. The seasons turned, and Merlin was content to wait, dreaming his dreams, for
he knew that Mab was not finished with him or with Britain, and that his greatest battles for the Good still lay in his future.

In his dreams he saw the future of Britain—battles he did not understand, kings who were not yet born. He was content to forget
each of these dreams when he woke, for there was no one yet to tell them to. The dreams Merlin remembered, and acted upon,
were simple homely ones, of a farmer’s plow that slipped and injured him, of a ewe needing help to give birth.

And from these small kindnesses his reputation grew, until all the North knew that deep in the wild forest lived a great wizard.
Soon, Merlin knew, that fame would call him into battle, but he did not yet know how dearly that fight would cost him, or
how soon it would begin.

The day, it seemed, came far too soon.

As soon as he woke that morning, he knew his fate would find him today. It was a few weeks past Samhain—unconsciously, Merlin
had expected the trouble to come then, and when it had not, he had let down his guard a little, thinking that in the dark
half of the year, when even kings stayed close to their own hearthsides, he would have a certain amount of shelter. But this
morning, the senses that had told him even in childhood that strangers trespassed in his beloved forest told him that there
was danger afoot.

As he had learned to over the years, Merlin awaited it calmly. He went about his usual morning routine, preparing his simple
breakfast of herbal tea and acorn bread, and then went to the clearing in the forest to meditate.

All around him the circle of young trees stood like the pillars of a cathedral—a cathedral of the Old Ways, growing from the
living earth, and not made of dead stone as the Christians built. As soon as the thought came to him, Merlin pushed it away.
To think in terms of the Old Ways versus the New Religion was to fall into the same trap that Queen Mab had, a trap made of
hatred and distrust. Merlin chose to walk a third path, neither of Black Magic nor White Light, a path grey as mist, where
everything must be judged upon its own merits. He would not hate the New Religion; neither would he follow the Old Ways. He
would simply be as he had always been: Merlin the Wizard.