The Seeing Stone (22 page)

A
RTHUR-IN-THE-STONE IS RIDING PIP AND SIR ECTOR'S
riding Anguish and Kay's riding Gwinam. Merlin's traveling with us too. He's riding Sorry.

“I can't promise to keep you company all the way,” Merlin says. “But I'll ride as far as Oxford.”

I've never seen Kay so happy. “These are the last miles of my life as a squire,” he tells me. “Our father says that, in London, he'll knight me.”

“What's London like?” I ask.

“It's not like anything,” my father says. “You'll see.”

“What do you want it to be like?” asks Merlin. “That's the first question.”

There are one hundred and sixty long miles between Ludlow and London Bridge, and I have never seen any of them before. This mile is flat, and it looks as though the next one will be too. Some way down the track, three elms are signaling, but there are no other trees here, only bushes and scrub.

Behind Sir Ector and Kay and Merlin and me, a large dark cloud pours upwards. It's like a grey tower, with turrets and a pinnacle; a charcoal tunnel, slowly revolving in the air.

We travelers ride on, but the cloud gallops faster. Soon it overtakes us.

Enormous drops like blisters burst on the track, and kick up little puffs of dust.

Sir Ector and Kay and I pull down our caps and wind our cloaks around us. And Merlin pulls up his floppy hood.

I
AM LIVING IN TWO WORLDS.

In my seeing stone, I'm riding east. Hundreds of knights are on their way to London. Kay is going to be knighted. And in Saint Paul's churchyard, ten knights are standing guard by night and day over the sword in the stone.

But here at Caldicot, it is Christmastide!

I can't write down everything, sweet and sour, that has happened during the last three days or Oliver will complain I'm wasting too much parchment; and anyhow, it's colder than ever up here in my writing-room. Even my left hand feels cold and stiff.

After Mass on Christmas morning, Hum strutted into the hall, blowing the pipe and banging the tabor. Slim followed him, holding up the boar's head on a silver dish, and everyone stood up and sang:

“Bring on the first dish of meat!

A boar's head. That's what you'll eat…”

Well, not everyone sang! There were forty-nine of us, and some bawled, some warbled, and the very little ones just went on crying.

On Christmas Eve, my mother and Ruth and Sian and I cut as much holly and yew and ivy and mistletoe as we could carry, and decorated the hall with it. All the rusty old hanging nails were still
waiting up on the walls, jammed into the mortar, and I hadn't noticed one of them since last Christmas. Then each tenant hauled a huge Yule log up to the hall to keep our fire burning for twelve days and twelve nights. Brian and Macsen stacked them all outside the hall door, and my father helped them.

Oliver told us at Mass that our hearts are like waiting cradles, and that Jesus must be born in each of us this Christmastide. I've heard him say that before and I like it. Then he reminded us about the new crusade, and he began to denounce the Saracens, and kept driving his right fist into the socket of his left palm.

I could feel my father growing impatient, and then I saw him look at my mother and roll his eyes. Sian saw him, too, and she rolled her eyes at me, and I know I shouldn't have done but I turned round and rolled my eyes at Gatty, and when I turned round for a second time, just about everyone in church was rolling their eyes and laughing.

Yes, everyone in the family, even Nain, had a warm bath in the chamber before Christmas—for three days, Ruth and Martha were busy carrying water into the kitchen, and heating it over the fire. Yes, my father gave a white loaf to each man who sat at our feast. And yes, at the end of the feast, my father and Giles and Joan exchanged riddles, new and old, as they always do.

“What's most like a stallion?” my father asked.

“A mare,” said Joan. “What grows with its root upward and its head downward?”

“An icicle,” said my father. “What do I keep in my pocket but you throw away?”

“Snot!” said Giles. “Your snot in your kerchief. Who goes round and round this hall and leaves his gloves on the ledges?”

“Snow does,” said Joan. “What about this? Which beast has its tail between its eyes?”

My father and Giles frowned and looked at each other.

“Its tail between its eyes…” repeated my father. “Does anyone know?”

“Spitfire!” said Sian unexpectedly. “Spitfire did! I saw her like that when she licked herself.”

“Sian!” exclaimed my mother.

Then everyone laughed, and Dutton went lolloping along the benches, walloping everyone with poor Stupid's bladder which he'd half-filled with rattling peas.

“One more,” said Giles. “How many calves' tails do you need to climb from earth to heaven?”

“One,” shouted Joan. “One if it's long enough.”

“And this is the last one,” my father said. “What was the most precious burden ever borne, and who carried it?”

But before Joan or Giles or anyone else could answer my father, the door burst open, and a wodwo stumbled into the hall. He had a garland of rosemary around his neck, and clumps of black hair flapped against his chest and back. It grew in tufts on the back of his hands and forearms and below his knees. He was wearing a sheepskin—I wondered whether it was poor Matty's—and as he lumbered across the hall, pointing at my mother, he shouted out strange words and half-words: “I, I, glim, glim-gleam, you, breast bitty-breast, you, unna, tinna, I, you, Henna, Helen, dara, dick!”

My mother pretended not to know the wildman was Wat Harelip. She screamed as he clambered right over the table towards her, reaching out with his hairy hands. Then my father put his arms right round her, and Dutton smacked Wat with his bladder until he fell over backwards, right into Johanna's lap, and everyone cheered.

Yes, we prayed all the prayers and ate the sweetmeats and told the jokes and played the games and sang all the songs that link Christmases like a chain of winter flowers—golden stars and stinking hellebore, paradise plants and rosemary: so that here, in our hall on the Welsh Marches, we were all part of the story that began when Jesus was born and will not end until Domesday.

“I know that answer,” Oliver suddenly bellowed.

“But what is the question?” Merlin asked. “Do you know what the question is, Oliver?”

“I know the precious burden,” said Oliver. “The answer should be baby Jesus and his mother Mary when they fled to Egypt. Baby Jesus and Mary and the ass who carried them. That's what the answer should be.”

“It is the answer,” said my father, smiling.

“Ah!” said Oliver, and he beamed.

“What about the god, then?” demanded Nain.

“What was that, Nain?” my father asked.

“Carried away by boat from this middle-world.”

“God?” said Oliver.

Nain sniffed and shook her head. “Knowing little is worse than knowing nothing,” she said.

Now that I'm thirteen, I realize that although Christmas was the
same as it has always been, it was not the same. And I want to write down the three things that have made this Christmas different.

Saint Stephen's Day was fine and quite mild, so almost everyone in the manor came to the Yard for the games, but I wasn't allowed to compete because my right arm is still rather sore.

There were three cockfights, and Will's cock was the winner. Cleg the miller won the wrestling contest as he did last year, and I'm not surprised because he's a whole head taller than anyone else, and his chest's as broad as a carthorse's.

Then it was the leaping contest. My father stretched out a length of rope and everyone had to jump from behind it, and Gatty and I pushed little sticks into the hard ground to mark the jumps. Johanna was first, and she leaped rather less than one of my father's strides, and everyone started to laugh. Sian leaped five feet and Serle leaped thirteen feet, and for a while Hum was the leader with sixteen feet, and Oliver lifted his frock and ran up to leap, but then he stopped because his knees hurt.

“Well then, Merlin,” my father called out.

“No,” said Merlin.

“Yes,” shouted Sian.

“A leap of faith!” said Oliver.

“Come on, Merlin!” said my mother, smiling and clapping her hands.

“All right,” said Merlin. And everyone laughed and called out encouragement and insults.

It happened so quickly. As if it were over before it began. Merlin stepped ten paces back from the rope and then, on his light feet, he bounded up to the rope and sprang into the air.

Forty-seven feet! Merlin leaped forty-seven feet. Some people hid their eyes; and some began to yell and cheer.

“Again!”

“Do it again, Merlin!”

“Impossible!”

“Magic!”

“Again!”

“Once is quite enough,” said Merlin quietly. “One sip from the chalice of feats.”

“Feats?” I said.

“Juggling nine apples, and the spurt of speed, and the snapping mouth, and the stepping on a flying lance, the stunning-shot, and this —this salmon-leap.”

Oliver rubbed his red mouth with the back of his hand, and said nothing.

“You can do these things?” my father asked. “These feats?”

“Oh yes!” said Merlin, quite modestly.

“But I've never heard of them,” I said.

“No,” said Merlin. He thought for a moment. “Well! Just as you're learning swordplay and tilting and archery here, I learned these feats. Once upon a time.”

“But that leap!” I said. “It's magic.”

“Is it?” asked Merlin.

In the autumn, Oliver asked Merlin whether he denied Christ, and Merlin said he did not, not for a moment, but that we'd all do well to call on the nine spirits, each with a bottomless chalice.

“Cow dung!” That's what Oliver replied. “There's no room in the house of Christ for nine spirits.”

But what if there is? What if it's possible to believe in the nine spirits as well as in Christ? Merlin does. Or is he a heretic? Is it true that he'd be burned if my father didn't protect him?

I know it's Christmastide, and Jesus must be born again in my waiting heart, but I think Merlin understands more than anyone else in this manor, and part of what he knows is very old, and as magic as my seeing stone. Or at least it seems miraculous. The hooded man told the archbishop that “Many things seem miraculous until you understand them— and some are so marvelous you could call them miracles.”

So the first thing that made this Christmas different was Merlin's salmon-leap. And the second was the red roses.

Yesterday, we had three visitors. Two musicians first, a man with a five-string fiddle and his daughter. She was my age. Her face was very white, and she had dark shadows under her eyes, but her voice was clear and piercing.

“Love without heartache, love without fear
Is fire without flame and flame without heat.

Dulcis amor!

Love without heartache, love without fear
Is day without sunlight, hive without honey.

Dulcis amor!

Love without heartache, love without fear
Is summer without flower, winter without frost.

Dulcis amor!
”

That's what this girl sang, and while she was still singing, our third visitor arrived. It was Thomas, Sir William and Lady Alice's messenger, with gifts for us.

For my mother, an ivory comb with thirty-five white teeth, one for each year of her life; for my father, a linen kerchief with a scarlet
J
stitched by Grace in one corner; for Serle a studded belt and for Sian a little silver ring with a blue stone set into it. And for me, six long-stemmed red roses, just opening.

“Lady Alice says they need water—water from the fountain in the middle of the forest,” said Thomas.

“Which forest?” demanded my father. “What does she mean?”

“It's because I told her about a magic fountain,” I said.

“All your fancies!” said my father rather testily.

Christmas is like an enclosing wall. A fold. We're inside it, eating and drinking and keeping warm and singing, but we know all the year's hungers and terrors and lessons and anxieties and opportunities and sorrows are still there on the outside. We know they're all waiting for us, just as the Knight of the Black Anvil lies in wait for anyone who rides to the forest fountain, and we haven't forgotten them.

I've never thought about this before, the way in which Christmastide is the one and only stopping-place in the long dance of the year. So this is the second thing which has made this Christmas different.

The Christmas fold: Most of us are inside it, but not all of us. Not Tanwen. Poor Tanwen. She didn't come to our feast; she didn't come to the Yard. I haven't even seen her since she ran out of the hall. No mother; no father. Who will look after her? Has Serle gone
to see her? Has he taken meat and a white loaf and ale for her and her baby?

Not Lankin. He's not inside the fold. Since the trial, he has stayed inside his hut, and only Jankin and Johanna have seen him.

Will Jankin and Gatty still be betrothed? Will Hum and Lankin ever agree to it? And will Lankin's wound fester, and will he die?

For that matter, what will become of Serle? He prayed at Mass and sat at the feast and competed in the Yard, but he was very quiet and everyone is talking behind his back.

Poor Serle. This Christmastide, he has been inside and outside the fold.

As we sat near the fire, sipping ale, I grasped his right elbow. “Serle,” I said, very quietly.

“What?” said Serle in a dull, flat voice.

Slowly he turned and looked at me, and I looked straight back at him, and smiled.

Serle lowered his eyes.