Crystal Cave (7 page)

I waited, poised warily.

He spoke again, in the same tone. "Put up your dagger and come down."

"When I see your right hand," I said.

He showed it, palm up. It was empty. He said gravely: "I am unarmed."

"Then stand out of my way," I said, and jumped. The cave was wide, and he was standing to one side of it. My leap carried me three or four paces down the cave, and I was past him and near the entrance before he could have moved more than a step. But in fact he never moved at all. As I reached the mouth of the cave and swept aside the hanging branches I heard him laughing.

The sound brought me up short. I turned.

From here, in the light which now filled the cave, I saw him clearly. He was old, with grey hair thinning on top and hanging lank over his ears, and a straight growth of grey beard, roughly trimmed. His hands were calloused and grained with dirt, but had been fine, with long fingers. Now the old man's veins crawled and knotted on them, distended like worms. But it was his face which held me; it was thin, cavernous almost as a skull, with a high domed forehead and bushy grey brows which came down jutting over eyes where I could see no trace of age at all. These were closely set, large, and of a curiously clear and swimming grey. His nose was a thin beak; his mouth, lipless now, stretched wide with his laughter over astonishingly good teeth.

"Come back. There's no need to be afraid."

"I'm not afraid." I dropped the boughs back into place, and not without bravado walked towards him. I stopped a few paces away. "Why should I be afraid of you? Do you know who I am?"

He regarded me for a moment, seeming to muse. "Let me see you. Dark hair, dark eyes, the body of a dancer and the manners of a young wolf...or should I say a young falcon?"

My dagger sank to my side. "Then you do know me?"

"Shall I say I knew you would come some day, and today I knew there was someone here. What do you think brought me back so early?"

"How did you know there was someone here? Oh, of course, you saw the bats."

"Perhaps."

"Do they always go up like that?"

"Only for strangers. Your dagger, sir."

I put it back in my belt. "Nobody calls me sir. I'm a bastard. That means I belong to myself, no one else.

My name's Merlin, but you knew that."

"And mine is Galapas. Are you hungry?"

"Yes." But I said it dubiously, thinking of the skull and the dead bats.

Disconcertingly, he understood. The grey eyes twinkled. "Fruit and honey cakes? And sweet water from the spring? What better fare would you get, even in the King's house?"

"I wouldn't get that in the King's house at this hour of the day," I said frankly. "Thank you, sir, I'll be glad to eat with you."

He smiled. "Nobody calls me sir. And I belong to no man, either. Go out and sit down in the sun, and I'll bring the food."

The fruit was apples, which looked and tasted exactly like the ones from my grandfather's orchard, so that I stole a sideways glance at my host, scanning him by daylight, wondering if I had ever seen him on the river-bank, or anywhere in the town.

"Do you have a wife?" I asked. "Who makes the honey cakes? They're very good."

"No wife. I told you I belonged to no man, and to no woman either. You will see, Merlin, how all your life men, and women too, will try to put bars round you, but you will escape those bars, or bend them, or melt them at your will, until, of your will, you take them round you, and sleep behind them in their shadow...I get the honey cakes from the shepherd's wife, she makes enough for three, and is good enough to spare some for charity."

"Are you a hermit, then? A holy man?"

"Do I look like a holy man?"

"No." This was true. The only people I remember being afraid of at that time were the solitary holy men who sometimes wandered, preaching and begging, into the town; queer, arrogant, noisy men, with a mad look in their eyes, and a smell about them which I associated with the heaps of offal outside the slaughter-pens. It was sometimes hard to know which god they professed to serve. Some of them, it was whispered, were druids, who were still officially outside the law, though in Wales in the country places they still practiced without much interference. Many were followers of the old gods — the local deities

— and since these varied in popularity according to season, their priests tended to switch allegiance from time to time where the pickings were richest. Even the Christian ones did this sometimes, but you could usually tell the real Christians, because they were the dirtiest. The Roman gods and their priests stayed solidly enshrined in their crumbling temples, but did very well on offerings likewise. The Church frowned on the lot, but could not do much about it. "There was a god at the spring outside," I ventured.

"Yes. Myrddin. He lends me his spring, and his hollow hill, and his heaven of woven light, and in return I give him his due. It does not do to neglect the gods of a place, whoever they may be. In the end, they are all one."

"If you're not a hermit, then, what are you?"

"At the moment, a teacher."

"I have a tutor. He comes from Massilia, but he's actually been toRome . Who do you teach?"

"Until now, nobody. I'm old and tired, and I came to live here alone and study."

"Why do you have the dead bats in there, on the box?"

"I was studying them."

I stared at him. "Studying bats? How can you study bats?"

"I study the way they are made, and the way they fly, and mate, and feed. The way they live. Not only bats, but beasts and fish and plants and birds, as many as I see."

"But that's not studying!" I regarded him with wonder. "Demetrius — that's my tutor — tells me that watching lizards and birds is dreaming, and a waste of time. Though Cerdic — that's a friend — told me to study the ring-doves."

"Why?"

"Because they're quick, and quiet, and keep out of the way. Because they only lay two eggs, but still though everybody hunts them, men and beasts and hawks, there are still more ring-doves than anything else."

"And they don't put them in cages." He drank some water, regarding me. "So you have a tutor. Then you can read?"

"Of course."

"Can you read Greek?"

"A little."

"Then come with me."

He got up and went into the cave. I followed him. He lit the candle once more — he had put it out to save tallow — and by its light lifted the lid of the box. In it I saw the rolled shapes of books, more books together than I had ever imagined there were in the world. I watched as he selected one, closed the lid carefully, and unrolled the book.

"There."

With delight, I saw what it was. A drawing, spidery but definite, of the skeleton of a bat. And alongside it, in neat, crabbed Greek letters, phrases which I immediately, forgetting even Galapas' presence, began to spell out to myself.

In a minute or two his hand came over my shoulder. "Bring it outside." He pulled out the nails holding one of the dried leathery bodies to the box-lid, and lifted it carefully in his palm. "Blow out the candle.

We'll look at this together."

And so, with no more question, and no more ceremony, began my first lesson with Galapas.

It was only when the sun, low over one wing of the valley, sent a long shadow creeping up the slope, that I remembered the other life that waited for me, and how far I had to go. I jumped to my feet.

"I'll have to go! Demetrius won't say anything, but if I'm late for supper they'll ask why."

"And you don't intend to tell them?"

"No, or they'd stop me coming again."

He smiled, making no comment. I doubt if I noticed then the calm assumptions on which the interview had been based; he had neither asked how I had come, nor why. And because I was only a child I took it for granted, too, though for politeness' sake I asked him:

"I may come again, mayn't I?"

"Of course."

"I — it's hard to say when. I never know when I'll get away — I mean, when I'll be free."

"Don't worry. I shall know when you are coming. And I shall be here."

"How can you know?"

He was rolling up the book with those long, neat fingers. "The same way I knew today."

"Oh! I was forgetting. You mean I go into the cave and send the bats out?"

"If you like."

I laughed with pleasure. "I've never met anyone like you! To make smoke signals with bats! If I told them they'd never believe me, even Cerdic."

"You won't tell even Cerdic."

I nodded. "That's right. Nobody at all. Now I must go. Goodbye, Galapas."

"Goodbye."

And so it was in the days, and in the months, that followed. Whenever I could, once and sometimes twice in the week, I rode up the valley to the cave. He certainly seemed to know when I was coming, for as often as not he was there waiting for me, with the books laid out; but when there was no sign of him I did as we had arranged and sent out the bats as a smoke signal to bring him in. As the weeks went by they got used to me, and it took two or three well-aimed stones sent up into the roof to get them out; but after a while this grew unnecessary; people at the palace grew accustomed to my absences, and ceased to question them, and it became possible to make arrangements with Galapas for meeting from day to day.

Moravik had let me go more and more my own way since Olwen's baby had been born at the end of May, and when Camlach's son arrived in September she established herself firmly in the royal nursery as its official ruler, abandoning me as suddenly as a bird deserting the nest. I saw less and less of my mother, who seemed content to spend her time with her women, so I was left pretty much to Demetrius and Cerdic between them. Demetrius had his own reasons for welcoming a day off now and again, and Cerdic was my friend. He would unsaddle the muddy and sweating pony without question, or with a wink and a lewd remark about where I had been that was meant as a joke, and was taken as such. I had my room to myself now, except for the wolfhound; he spent the nights with me for old times' sake, but whether he was any safeguard I have no idea. I suspect not; I was safe enough. The country was at peace, except for the perennial rumours of invasion from Less Britain; Camlach and his father were in accord; I was to all appearances heading willingly and at high speed for the prison of the priesthood, and so, when my lessons with Demetrius were officially done, was free to go where I wished.

I never saw anyone else in the valley. The shepherd only lived there in summer, in a poor hut below the wood. There were no other dwellings there, and beyond Galapas' cave the track was used only by sheep and deer. It led nowhere.

He was a good teacher, and I was quick, but in fact I hardly thought of my time with him as lessons. We left languages and geometry to Demetrius, and religion to my mother's priests; with Galapas to begin with it was only like listening to a story-teller. He had travelled when young to the other side of the earth, Aethiopia andGreece andGermany and all around theMiddleSea , and seen and learned strange things.

He taught me practical things, too; how to gather herbs and dry them to keep, how to use them for medicines, and how to distil certain subtle drugs, even poisons. He made me study the beasts and birds, and — with the dead birds and sheep we found on the hills, and once with a dead deer — I learnt about the organs and bones of the body. He taught me how to stop bleeding, how to set a broken bone, how to cut bad flesh away and cleanse the place so that it heals cleanly; even — though this came later —

how to draw flesh and sinews into place with thread while the beast is stunned with fumes. I remember that the first spell he taught me was the charming of warts; this is so easy that a woman can do it.

One day he took a book out of the box and unrolled it. "Do you know what this is?"

I was used to diagrams and drawings, but this was a drawing of nothing I could recognize. The writing was in Latin, and I saw the words Aethiopia andFortunateIslands , and then right out in a corner, Britannia. The lines seemed to be scrawled everywhere, and all over the picture were trails of mounds drawn in, like a field where moles have been at work.

"Those, are they mountains?"

"Yes."

"Then it's a picture of the world?"

"A map."

I had never seen a map before. At first I could not see how it worked, but in a while, as he talked, I saw how the world lay there as a bird sees it, with roads and rivers like the radials of a spider's web, or the guidelines that lead the bee into the flower. As a man finds a stream he knows, and follows it through the wild moors, so, with a map, it is possible to ride fromRome to Massilia, orLondon to Caerleon, without once asking the way or looking for the milestones. This art was discovered by the Greek Anaximander, though some say the Egyptians knew it first. The map that Galapas showed me was a copy from a book by Ptolemy of Alexandria. After he had explained, and we had studied the map together, he bade me get out my tablet and make a map for myself, of my own country.

When I had done he looked at it. "This in the center, what is it?"

"Maridunum," I said in surprise. "See, there is the bridge, and the river, and this is the road through the market place, and the barrack gates are here."

"I see that. I did not say your town, Merlin, I said your country."

"The whole ofWales ? How do I know what lies north of the hills? I've never been further than this."

"I will show you."

He put aside the tablet, and taking a sharp stick, began to draw in the dust, explaining as he did so.

What he drew for me was a map shaped like a big triangle, notWales only, but the whole ofBritain , even the wild land beyond the Wall where the savages live. He showed me the mountains and rivers and roads and towns,London and Calleva and the places that cluster thick in the south, to the towns and fortresses at the ends of the web of roads, Segontium and Caerleon and Eboracum and the towns along the Wall itself. He spoke as if it were all one country, though I could have told him the names of the kings of a dozen places that he mentioned. I only remember this because of what came after.