Crystal Cave (25 page)

"You know about it?" I said, surprised. Then as he did not answer, waiting in cold silence for me to speak, I went on: "I told you Cadal and I took a short cut through the forest. If you know the island, you'll know the track we followed. Just where the path goes down to the sea there's a pine grove. We found Ulfin — that's Belasius' servant — there with the two horses. Cadal wanted to take Ulfin's horse and get me home quickly, but while we were talking to Ulfin we heard a cry — a scream, rather, from somewhere east of the grove. I went to see. I swear I had no idea the island was there, or what happened there. Nor had Cadal, and if he'd been mounted, as I was, he'd have stopped me. But by the time he'd taken Ulfin's horse and set off after me I was out of sight, and he thought I'd taken fright and gone home — which is what he'd told me to do — and it wasn't until he got right back here that he found I hadn't come this way. He went back for me, but by that time I'd come up with the troop." I thrust my hands down between my knees, clutching them tightly together. "I don't know what made me ride down to the island. At least, I do; it was the cry, so I went to see...But it wasn't only because of the cry. I can't explain, not yet..." I took a breath. "My lord —"

"Well?"

"I ought to tell you. A man was killed there tonight, on the island. I don't know who he was, but I heard that he was a King's man who has been missing for some days. His body will be found somewhere in the forest, as if a wild beast had killed him." I paused. There was nothing to be seen in his face. "I thought I should tell you."

"You went over to the island?"

"Oh, no! I doubt if I'd be alive now if I had. I found out later about the man who was killed. It was sacrilege, they said. I didn't ask about it." I looked up at him. "I only went down as far as the shore. I waited there in the trees, and watched it — the dance and the offering. I could hear the singing. I didn't know then that it was illegal...It's forbidden at home, of course, but one knows it still goes on, and I thought it might be different here. But when my lord Uther knew where I'd been he was very angry. He seems to hate the druids."

"The druids?" His voice was absent now. He still fidgeted with the stilus on the table. "Ah, yes. Uther has no love for them. He is one of Mithras' fanatics, and light is the enemy of darkness, I suppose. Well, what is it?" This, sharply, to Sollius, who came in with an apology, and waited just inside the door.

"Forgive me, sir," said the secretary. "There's a messenger from King Budec. I told him you were engaged, but he said it was important. Shall I tell him to wait?"

"Bring him in," said Ambrosius. The man came in with a scroll. He handed it to Ambrosius, who sat down in his great chair and unrolled it. He read it, frowning. I watched him. The flickering flames from the brazier spread, lighting the planes of the face which already, it seemed, I knew as well as I knew my own. The heart of the brazier glowed, and the light spread and flashed. I felt it spreading across my eyes as they blurred and widened...

"Merlin Emrys? Merlin?"

The echo died to an ordinary voice. The vision fled. I was sitting on my stool in Ambrosius' room, looking down at my hands clasping my knees. Ambrosius had risen and was standing over me, between me and the fire. The secretary had gone, and we were alone.

At the repetition of my name I blinked and roused myself.

He was speaking. "What do you see, there in the fire?"

I answered without looking up. "A grove of whitethorn on a hillside and a girl on a brown pony, and a young man with a dragon brooch on his shoulder, and the mist knee-high."

I heard him draw a long breath, then his hand came down and took me by the chin and lifted my face.

His eyes were intent and fierce.

"It's true, then, this Sight of yours. I have been so sure, and now — now, beyond all doubt, it is true. I thought it was, that first night by the standing stone, but that could have been anything — a dream, a boy's story, a lucky guess to win my interest. But this...I was right about you." He took his hand from my face, and straightened. "Did you see the girl's face?"

I nodded.

"And the man's?"

I met his eyes then. "Yes, sir."

He turned sharply away and stood with his back to me, head bent. Once more he picked up the stilus from the table, turning it over and over with his fingers. After a while he said: "How long have you known?"

"Only since I rode in tonight. It was something Cadal said, then I remembered things, and how your brother stared tonight when he saw me wearing this." I touched the dragon brooch at my neck.

He glanced, then nodded. "Is this the first time you have had this — vision?"

"Yes. I had no idea. Now, it seems strange to me that I never even suspected — but I swear I did not."

He stood silent, one hand spread on the table, leaning on it. I don't know what I had expected, but I had never thought to see the great Aurelius Ambrosius at a loss for words. He took a turn across the room to the window, and back again, and spoke. "This is a strange meeting, Merlin. So much to say, and yet so little. Do you see now why I asked so many questions? Why I tried so hard to find what had brought you here?"

"The gods at work, my lord, they brought me here," I said. "Why did you leave her?"

I had not meant the question to come out so abruptly, but I suppose it had been pressing on me so long that now it burst out with the force of an accusation. I began to stammer something, but he cut me short with a gesture, and answered quietly.

"I was eighteen, Merlin, with a price on my head if I set foot in my own kingdom. You know the story

— how my cousin Budec took me in when my brother the King was murdered, and how he never ceased to plan for vengeance on Vortigern, though for many years it seemed impossible. But all the time he sent scouts, took in reports, went on planning. And then when I was eighteen he sent me over myself, secretly, to Gorlois of Cornwall, who was my father's friend, and who has never loved Vortigern. Gorlois sent me north with a couple of men he could trust, to watch and listen and learn the lie of the land. Some day I'll tell you where we went, and what happened, but not now. What concerns you now is this...We were riding south near the end of October, towardsCornwall to take ship for home, when we were set upon, and had to fight for it. They were Vortigern's men. I don't know yet whether they suspected us, or whether they were killing — as Saxons and foxes do — for wantonness and the sweet taste of blood.

The latter, I think, or they would have made surer of killing me. They killed my two companions, but I was lucky; I got off with a flesh wound, and a knock on the head that struck me senseless, and they left me for dead. This was at dusk. When I moved and looked about me it was morning, and a brown pony was standing over me, with a girl on his back staring from me to the dead men and back again, with never a sound." The first glimmer of a smile, not at me, but at the memory. "I remember trying to speak, but I had lost a lot of blood, and the night in the open had brought on a fever. I was afraid she would take fright and gallop back to the town, and that would be the end of it. But she did not. She caught my horse and got my saddle-bag, and gave me a drink, then she cleaned the wound and tied it up and then

— God knows how — got me across the horse and out of that valley. There was a place she knew of, she said, nearer the town, but remote and secret; no one ever went there. It was a cave, with a spring —

What is it?"

"Nothing," I said. "I should have known. Go on. No one lived there then?"

"No one. By the time we got there I suppose I was delirious; I remember nothing. She hid me in the cave, and my horse too, out of sight. There had been food and wine in my saddle-bag, and I had my cloak and a blanket. It was late afternoon by then, and when she rode home she heard that the two dead men had already been found, with their horses straying nearby. The troop had been riding north; it wasn't likely that anyone in the town knew there should have been three corpses found. So I was safe. Next day she rode up to the cave again, with food and medicines...And the next day, too." He paused. "And you know the end of the story."

"When did you tell her who you were?"

"When she told me why she could not leave Maridunum and go with me. I had thought till then that she was perhaps one of the Queen's ladies — from her ways and her talk I knew she had been bred in a king's house. Perhaps she saw the same in me. But it didn't matter. Nothing mattered, except that I was a man, and she a woman. From the first day, we both knew what would happen. You will understand how it was when you are older." Again the smile, this time touching mouth as well as eyes. "This is one kind of knowledge I think you will have to wait for, Merlin. The Sight won't help you much in matters of love."

"You asked her to go with you — to come back here?"

He nodded. "Even before I knew who she was. After I knew, I was afraid for her, and pressed her harder, but she would not come with me. From the way she had spoken I knew she hated and feared the Saxons, and feared what Vortigern was doing to the kingdoms, but still she would not come. It was one thing, she said, to do what she had done, but another to go across the seas with the man who, when he came back, must be her father's enemy. We must end it, she said, as the year was ending, and then forget."

He was silent for a minute, looking down at his hands.

I said: "And you never knew she had borne a child?"

"No. I wondered, of course. I sent a message the next spring, but got no answer. I left it then, knowing that if she wanted me, she knew — all the world knew — where to find me. Then I heard — it must have been nearly two years later — that she was betrothed. I know now that this was not true, but then it served to make me dismiss it from my mind." He looked at me. "Do you understand that?"

I nodded. "It may even have been true, though not in the way you'd understand it, my lord. She vowed herself to the Church when I should have no more need of her. The Christians call that a betrothal."

"So?" He considered for a moment. "Whatever it was, I sent no more messages. And when later on there was mention of a child, a bastard, it hardly crossed my mind that it could be mine. A fellow came here once, a travelling eye-doctor who had been through Wales, and I sent for him and questioned him, and he said yes, there was a bastard boy at the palace of such and such an age, red-haired, and the King's own."

"Dinias," I said. "He probably never saw me. I was kept out of the way...And my grandfather did sometimes explain me away to strangers as his own. He had a few scattered around, here and there."

"So I gathered. So the next rumour of a boy — possibly the King's bastard, possibly his daughter's — I hardly listened to. It was all long past, and there were pressing things to do, and always there was the same thought — if she had borne a child to me, would she not have let me know? If she had wanted me, would she not have sent word?"

He fell silent, then, back in his own thoughts. Whether I understood it all then, as he talked, I do not now recollect. But later, when the pieces shook together to make the mosaic, it was clear enough. The same pride which had forbidden her to go with her lover had forbidden her, once she discovered her pregnancy, to call him back. And it helped her through the months that followed. More than that; if — by flight or any other means — she had betrayed who her lover was, nothing would have stopped her brothers from travelling to Budec's court to kill him. There must — knowing my grandfather — have been angry oaths enough about what they would do to the man who had fathered her bastard. And then time moved on, and his coming grew remote, and then impossible, as if he were indeed a myth and a memory in the night. And then the other long love stepped in to supersede him, and the priests took over, and the winter tryst was forgotten. Except for the child, so like his father; but once her duty to him was done, she could go to the solitude and peace which — all those years ago — had sent her riding alone up the mountain valley, as later I was to ride out alone by the same path, and looking perhaps for the same things.

I jumped when he spoke again. "How hard a time of it did you have, as a no-man's-child?"

"Hard enough."

"You believe me when I say I didn't know?"

"I believe anything you tell me, my lord."

"Do you hate me for this, very much, Merlin?"

I said slowly, looking down at my hands: "There is one thing about being a bastard and a no-man's-child.

You are free to imagine your father. You can picture for yourself the worst and the best; you can make your father for yourself, in the image of the moment. From the time I was big enough to understand what I was, I saw my father in every soldier and every prince and every priest. And I saw him, too, in every handsome slave in thekingdomofSouth Wales ."

He spoke very gently, above me. "And now you see him in truth, Merlin Emrys. I asked you, do you hate me for the kind of life I gave you?"

I didn't look up. I answered, with my eyes on the flames: "Since I was a child I have had the world to choose from for a father. Out of them all, Aurelius Ambrosius, I would have chosen you."

Silence. The flames leapt like a heartbeat.

I added, trying to make it light: "After all, what boy would not choose the King of allBritain for his father?"

His hand came hard under my chin again, turning my head aside from the brazier and my eyes from the flames. His voice was sharp. "What did you say?"

"What did I say?" I blinked up at him. "I said I would have chosen you."

His fingers dug into my flesh. "You called me King of allBritain ."

"Did I?"

"But this is — " He stopped. His eyes seemed to be burning into me. Then he let his hand drop, and straightened. "Let it go. If it matters, the god will speak again." He smiled down at me. "What matters now is what you said yourself. It isn't given to every man to hear this from his grown son. Who knows, it may be better this way, to meet as men, when we each have something to give the other. To a man whose children have been underfoot since infancy, it is not given, suddenly, to see himself stamped on a boy's face as I am stamped on yours."