Crystal Cave (24 page)

"Aye." He turned his head as if to spit on the floor, recollected himself, and made the sign against the evil eye. "Well, when I got back here, and no sign of you, I knew you must've gone straight down to see what was going on. High-handed little fool. Might have got yourself killed, meddling with that lot."

"So might you. But you went back."

"What else could I do? You should've heard what I was calling you, too. Proper little nuisance was the least of it. Well, I was about half a mile out of town when I saw them coming, and I pulled aside and waited for them to pass. You know that old posting station, the ruined one? I was there. I watched them go by, and you at the back under guard. So I guessed he knew. I followed them back to town as close as I dared, and cut home through the side streets. I've only just got in. He found out, then?"

I nodded, beginning to unfasten my cloak.

"Then there'll be the devil to pay, and no mistake," said Cadal. "How did he find out?"

"Belasius had put his robe in my saddle-bag, and they found it. They think it was mine." I grinned. "If they'd tried it for size they'd have had to think again. But that didn't occur to them. They just dropped it in the mud and rode over it."

"About right, too." He had gone down on one knee to unfasten my sandals. He paused, with one in his hand. "Are you telling me Belasius saw you? Had words with you?"

"Yes. I waited for him, and we walked back together to the horses. Ulfin's bringing Aster, by the way."

He ignored that. He was staring, and I thought he had lost colour.

"Uther didn't see Belasius," I said. "Belasius dodged in time. He knew they'd heard one horse, so he sent me forward to meet them, otherwise I suppose they'd have come after us both. He must have forgotten I had the robe, or else chanced their not finding it. Anybody but Uther wouldn't even have looked."

"You should never have gone near Belasius. It's worse than I thought. Here, let me do that. Your hands are cold." He pulled the dragon brooch off and took my cloak. "You want to watch it, you do. He's a nasty customer — they all are, come to that — and him most of all."

"Did you know about him?"

"Not to say know. I might have guessed. It's right up his street, if you ask me. But what I meant was, they're a nasty lot to tangle with."

"Well, he's the archdruid, or at least the head of this sect, so he'll carry some weight. Don't look so troubled, Cadal, I doubt if he'll harm me, or let anyone else harm me."

"Did he threaten you?"

I laughed. "Yes. With a curse."

"They say these things stick. They say the druids can send a knife after you that'll hunt you down for days, and all you know is the whistling noise in the air behind you just before it strikes."

"They say all sort of things. Cadal, have I another tunic that's decent? Did my best one come back from the fuller? And I want a bath before I go to the Count."

He eyed me sideways as he reached in the clothes-chest for another tunic. "Uther will have gone straight to him. You know that?"

I laughed. "Of course. I warn you, I shall tell Ambrosius the truth."

"All of it?"

"All of it."

"Well, I suppose that's best," he said. "If anyone can protect you from them —"

"It's not that. It's simply that he ought to know. He has the right. Besides, what have I to hide from him?"

He said uneasily: "I was thinking about the curse...Even Ambrosius might not be able to protect you from that."

"Oh, that to the curse." I made a gesture not commonly seen in noblemen's houses. "Forget it. Neither you nor I have done wrong, and I refuse to lie to Ambrosius."

"Some day I'll see you scared, Merlin."

"Probably."

"Weren't you even scared of Belasius?"

"Should I be?" I was interested. "He'll do me no harm." I unhooked the belt of my tunic, and threw it on the bed. I regarded Cadal. "Would you be afraid if you knew your own end, Cadal?"

"Yes, by the dog! Do you?"

"Sometimes, in snatches. Sometimes I see it. It fills me with fear."

He stood still, looking at me, and there was fear in his face. "What is it, then?"

"A cave. The crystal cave. Sometimes I think it is death, and at other times it is birth or a gate of vision, or a dark limbo of sleep...I cannot tell. But some day I shall know. Till then, I suppose I am not afraid of much else. I shall come to the cave in the end, as you — " I broke off.

"As I what?" he said quickly. "What'll I come to?"

I smiled. "I was going to say 'As you will come to old age.'"

"That's a lie," he said roughly. "I saw your eyes. When you're seeing things, your eyes go queer; I've noticed it before. The black spreads and goes kind of blurred, dreaming-like — but not soft; no, your whole look goes cold, like cold iron, as if you neither saw nor cared about what's going on round you.

And you talk as if you were just a voice and not a person...Or as if you'd gone somewhere else and left your body for something else to speak through. Like a horn being blown through to make the sound carry. Oh, I know I've only seen it a couple of times, for a moment, but it's uncanny, and it frightens me."

"It frightens me, too, Cadal." I had let the green tunic slide from my body to the floor. He was holding out the grey wool robe I wore for a bedgown. I reached absently for it, and sat down on the bed's edge, with it trailing over my knees. I was talking to myself rather than Cadal. "It frightens me, too. You're right, that's how it feels, as if I were an empty shell with something working through me. I say things, see things, think things, till that moment I never knew of. But you're wrong in thinking I don't feel. It hurts me. I think this may be because I can't command whatever speaks through me...I mean, I can't command it yet. But I shall. I know this, too. Some day I shall command this part of me that knows and sees, this god, and that really will be power. I shall know when what I foretell is human instinct, and when it is God's shadow."

"And when you spoke of my end, what was that?"

I looked up. Oddly enough it was less easy to lie to Cadal than it had been to Uther. "But I haven't seen your death, Cadal, no one's but my own. I was being tactless. I was going to say 'As you will come to a foreign grave somewhere...' " I smiled. "I know this is worse than hell to a Breton. But I think it will happen to you...That is, if you stay as my servant."

His look lightened, and he grinned. This was power, I thought, when a word of mine could frighten men like this. He said: "Oh, I'll do that all right. Even if he hadn't asked me to, I'd stay. You've an easy way with you that makes it a pleasure to look after you."

"Have I? I thought you found me a high-handed little fool, and a nuisance besides?"

"There you are, you see. I'd never have dared say that to anyone else your class, and all you do is laugh, and you twice royal."

"Twice royal? You can hardly count my grandfather as well as my — " I stopped. What stopped me was his face. He had spoken without thought, then, on a quick gasp, had tried to catch the words back into his mouth and unspeak them.

He said nothing, just stood there with the soiled tunic in his hand. I stood up slowly, the forgotten bedgown falling to the floor. There was no need for him to speak. I knew. I could not imagine how I had not known before, the moment I stood before Ambrosius in the frosty field and he stared down in the torchlight. He had known. And a hundred others must have guessed. I remembered now the sidelong looks of the men, the mutterings of the officers, the deference of servants which I had taken for respect for Ambrosius' commands, but which I saw now was deference to Ambrosius' son.

The room was still as a cave. The brazier flickered and its light broke and scattered in the bronze mirror against the wall. I looked that way. In the firelit bronze my naked body showed slight and shadowy, an unreal thing of firelight and darkness shifting as the flames moved. But the face was lit, and in its heavily defined planes of fire and shadow I saw his face as I had seen it in his room, when he sat over the brazier waiting for me to be brought to him. Waiting for me to come so that he could ask me about Niniane.

And here again the Sight had not helped me. Men that have god's-sight, I have found, are often human-blind.

I said to Cadal: "Everybody knows?"

He nodded. He didn't ask what I meant. "It's rumoured. You're very like him sometimes."

"I think Uther may have guessed. He didn't know before?"

"No. He left before the talk started to go round. That wasn't why he took against you."

"I'm glad to hear it," I said. "What was it, then? Just because I got across him over that business of the standing stone?"

"Oh, that, and other things."

"Such as?"

Cadal said, bluntly: "He thought you were the Count's catamite. Ambrosius doesn't go for women much.

He doesn't go for boys either, come to that, but one thing Uther can't understand is a man who isn't in and out of bed with someone seven nights a week. When his brother bothered such a lot with you, had you in his house and set me to look after you and all that, Uther thought that's what must be going on, and he didn't half like it."

"I see. He did say something like that tonight, but I thought it was only because he'd lost his temper."

"If he'd bothered to look at you, or listen to what folks were saying, he'd have known fast enough."

"He knows now." I spoke with sudden, complete certainty. "He saw it, back there on the road, when he saw the dragon brooch the Count gave me. I'd never thought about it, but of course he would realize the Count would hardly put the royal cipher on his catamite. He had the torch brought up, and took a good look at me. I think he saw it then." A thought struck me. "And I think Belasius knows."

"Oh, yes," said Cadal, "he knows. Why?"

"The way he talked...As if he knew he daren't touch me. That would be why he tried to scare me with the threat of a curse. He's a pretty cool hand, isn't he? He must have been thinking very hard on the way up to the grove. He daren't put me quietly out of the way for sacrilege, but he had to stop me talking somehow. Hence the curse. And also — " I stopped.

"And also what?"

"Don't sound so startled. It was only another guarantee I'd hold my tongue."

"For the gods' sake, what?"

I shrugged, realized I was still naked, and reached for the bedgown again. "He said he would take me with him to the sanctuary. I think he would like to make a druid of me."

"He said that?" I was getting familiar with Cadal's sign to avert the evil eye. "What will you do?"

"I'll go with him...once, at least. Don't look like that, Cadal. There isn't a cat's chance in a fire that I'll want to go more than once." I looked at him soberly. "But there's nothing in this world that I'm not ready to see and learn, and no god that I'm not ready to approach in his own fashion. I told you that truth was the shadow of God. If I am to use it, I must know who He is. Do you understand me?"

"How could I? What god are you talking about?"

"I think there is only one. Oh, there are gods everywhere, in the hollow hills, in the wind and the sea, in the very grass we walk on and the air we breathe, and in the bloodstained shadows where men like Belasius wait for them. But I believe there must be one who is God Himself, like the great sea, and all the rest of us, small gods and men and all, like rivers, we all come to Him in the end. — Is the bath ready?"

Twenty minutes later, in a dark blue tunic clipped at the shoulder by the dragon brooch, I went to see my father.

The secretary was in the anteroom, rather elaborately doing nothing. Beyond the curtain I heard Ambrosius' voice speaking quietly. The two guards at the door looked wooden.

Then the curtain was pulled aside and Uther came out. When he saw me he checked, hung on his heel as if to speak, then seemed to catch the secretary's interested look, and went by with a swish of the red cloak and a smell of horses. You could always tell where Uther had been; he seemed to soak up scents like a wash-cloth. He must have gone straight to his brother before he had even cleaned up after the ride home.

The secretary, whose name was Sollius, said to me: "You may as well go straight in, sir. He'll be expecting you."

I hardly even noticed the "sir." It seemed to be something I was already accustomed to. I went in.

He was standing with his back to the door, over by the table. This was strewn with tablets, and a stilus lay across one of them as if he had been interrupted while writing. On the secretary's desk near the window a half-unrolled book lay where it had been dropped.

The door shut behind me. I stopped just inside it, and the leather curtain fell closed with a ruffle and a flap. He turned.

Our eyes met in silence, it seemed for interminable seconds, then he cleared his throat and said: "Ah, Merlin," and then, with a slight movement of the hand, "Sit down."

I obeyed him, crossing to my usual stool near the brazier. He was silent for a moment, looking down at the table. He picked up the stilus, looked absently down at the wax, and added a word. I waited. He scowled down at what he had done, scored it out again, then threw the stilus down and said abruptly:

"Uther has been to see me."

"Yes, sir."

He looked up under frowning brows. "I understand he came on you riding alone beyond the town."

I said quickly: "I didn't go out alone. Cadal was with me."

"Cadal?"

"Yes, sir."

"That's not what you told Uther."

"No, sir."

His look was keen now, arrested. "Well, go on."

"Cadal always attends me, my lord. He's — more than faithful. We went north as far as the logging track in the forest, and a short way along that my pony went lame, so Cadal gave me his mare, and we started to walk home." I took a breath. "We took a short cut, and came on Belasius and his servant. Belasius rode part of the way home with me, but it — it didn't suit him to meet Prince Uther, so he left me."

"I see." His voice gave nothing away, but I had the feeling that he saw quite a lot. His next question confirmed it. "Did you go to the druids' island?"