Hollow Hills (20 page)

"No, after my father Ambrosius, as I was called." I tried the names over to myself, in Latin and then in the Celtic tongue. "Artorius Ambrosius, last of the Romans...Artos Emrys, first of the British..." Then aloud to Moravik, smiling: "Yes, call him so. Once, long ago, I foretold it, the coming of the Bear, a king called Arthur, who would knit past and future. I had forgotten, till now, where I had heard the name before. Christen him so."

She was silent for a few minutes. I saw her quick eyes searching my face. "In trust to you, you said. A king such as there hasn't been before. He will be King, then? You swear he will be King?" Then suddenly: "Why do you look like that, Merlin? I saw you look the same way a while back when the girl put the child to her breast. What is it?"

"I don't know..." I spoke slowly, my eyes on the last glimmer of fire where the burned logs hollowed round a red cave. "Moravik, I have done what I have done because God — whichever god he is —

drove me to do it. Out of the dark he told me that the child which Uther begot of Ygraine that night at Tintagel would be King of all Britain, would be great, would drive the Saxons out of our shores and knit our poor country into a strong whole. I did nothing of my own will, but just for this, that Britain might not go down into the dark. It came to me whole, out of the silence and the fire, and as a certainty. Then for a time I saw nothing and heard nothing, and wondered if, in my love for my father and my father's land, I had been led astray, and had seen vision where there was nothing but hope and desire. But now, see, there it lies, just as the god told me." I looked at her. "I don't know if I can make you understand, Moravik. Visions and prophecies, gods and stars and voices speaking in the night...things seen cloudy in the flames and in the stars, but real as pain in the blood, and piercing the brain like ice. But now..." I paused again. "...now it is no longer a god's voice or a vision, it is a small human child with lusty lungs, a baby like any other baby, who cries, and sucks milk, and soaks his swaddling clothes. One's visions do not take account of this."

"It's men who have visions," said Moravik. "It's women who bear the children to fulfill them. That's the difference. And as for that one there" — she nodded towards the corner — "we shall see what we shall see. If he lives — and why should he not live, he's strong enough? — if he lives he has a good chance to be King. All we can do now is see that he makes a man. I'll do my part as you've done yours. The rest is with the good God."

I smiled at her. Her sturdy common sense seemed to have lifted a great weight from me. "You're right. I was a fool ever to doubt. What will come, will come."

"Then sleep on that."

"Yes. I'll go to bed now. You have a good man there, Moravik. I'm glad of it."

"Between us, boy, we'll keep your little King safely."

"I'm sure of that," I said, and after we had talked a little longer I climbed the ladder to bed.

That night I dreamed. I was standing in a field I knew near Hoel's town of Kerrec. It was a place of ancient holiness, where once a god had walked and I had seen him. In my dream I knew that I had come in the hope of seeing him again.

But the night was empty. All that moved was the wind. The sky arched high, bright with indifferent stars.

Across its black dome, soft through the glitter of the fiercer stars, lay the long track of light they call the Galaxy. There was no cloud. About me stretched the field, just as I remembered it, bitten by the wind and sown by the sea's salt, with bare thorn trees hunched along the banks, and, solitary in the center, a single giant stone. I walked towards it. In the scattered light of the stars I cast no shadow, nor was there a shadow by the stone. Only the grey wind blurring the grass, and behind the stone the faint drifting of the stars that is not movement, but the heavens breathing.

Still the night was empty. My thoughts arrowed up into the shell of silence, and fell back spent. I was trying, with every grain of skill and power which I had fought and suffered for, to recall the god whose hand had been over me then, and whose light had led me. I prayed aloud, but heard no sound. I called on my magic, my gift of eyes and mind that men called the Sight, but nothing came. The night was empty, and I was failing. Even my human vision was failing, night and starlight melting into a blur, like something seen through running water...

The sky itself was moving. The earth held still, but heaven itself was moving. The Galaxy gathered and narrowed into a shaft of light, then froze still as a stream in the bite of winter. A shaft of ice — no, a blade, it lay across the sky like a king's sword, with the great jewels blazing in the hilt. Emerald I saw, topaz, sapphires, which in the tongue of swords mean power and joy and justice and clean death.

For a long time the sword lay there, still, like a weapon newly burnished, waiting for the hand which will lift and wield it. Then, of itself, it moved. Not as a weapon is lifted in battle, or in ceremony, or sport. But as a blade slides home to its housing it slid, how gently, down towards the standing stone, dropping into it as a sword slips resting into its scabbard.

Then there was nothing but the empty field and the whistling wind, and a grey stone standing.

I woke to the darkness of the inn room, and a single star, small and bright, showing through a gap above the rafters. Below me the beasts breathed sweet breath, while all around were the snores and stirrings of the sleepers. The place smelled warmly of horses and peat smoke and hay and mutton stew.

I lay unmoving, flat on my back, watching the little star. I hardly thought about the dream. Vaguely, I remembered that there had been talk of a sword, and now this dream...But I let it pass me. It would come. I would be shown. God was back with me; time had not lied. And in an hour or two it would be morning.

The gods, all of them, must be accustomed to blasphemy. It is a blasphemy even to question their purposes, and to wonder, as I had done, who they were or if they even existed is blasphemy itself. Now I knew my god was back with me, that his purpose was working, and though I still saw nothing clearly, I knew that his hand would be over me when the time was right, and I would be guided, driven, shown —

it did not matter which, nor in what form he came. He would show me that, too. But not yet. Today was my own. The dreams of the night had vanished with the stars that made them. This morning the wind was only the wind, and the sunlight nothing but light.

I do not think I even looked back. I had no fear for Ralf or the child. The Sight may be an uncomfortable thing to possess, but foreknowledge of catastrophe relieves the possessor of the small frets of day to day. A man who has seen his own old age and bitter end does not fear what may come to him at twenty-two. I had no doubts about my own safety, or the boy's whose sword I had seen — twice now — drawn and shining. So I was free to dread nothing worse than the next sea voyage, which took me, suffering but alive, to the port of Massilia on the Inland Sea, and landed me there on a bright February day which, in Britain, we would have called summer.

Once there, it did not matter who saw me and reported meeting me. If it should be noised abroad that Prince Merlin had been seen in Southern Gaul, or Italy, then perhaps Uther's enemies would watch me for a while, hoping for a lead to the vanished prince. Eventually they would give up and search elsewhere, but by that time the trail would be cold. In Kerrec the visit of the inconspicuous singer would be forgotten, and Ralf, quietly anonymous in the forest tavern, would be able to come and go without fear between Coll and the castle at Kerrec, with news of the child's progress for Hoel to transmit to me. So, once landed in Massilia, and recovered from my voyage, I set about making open preparations for my journey eastwards.

With no need this time for disguise, I travelled in comfort, if not in princely style. Appearances had never troubled me; a man makes his own; but I had friends to visit, and if I could not do them honour, at least I must not shame them. So I hired a body-servant and bought horses and baggage mules and a slave to look after them, and set off for my first destination, which was Rome.

The road out of Massilia is a straight, sun-beaten ribbon of white dust running along the shore where the villages built by Caesar's veterans crouch among their carefully tended olive groves and vines. We set out at sunrise with our horses' shadows long behind us. The road was still dewed, and the air smelled of dung and peppery cypress and the smoke of the early fires. Cockerels crowed and curs ran out yapping at our horses' heels. Behind me the two servants talked, low voiced, not to intrude on me. They seemed decent men; the freeman, Gaius, had seen service before, and came to me well recommended. The other, Stilicho, was the son of a Sicilian horse-dealer who had cheated himself into debt and sold his son to pay it. Stilicho was a thin, lively youth with a cheerful eye and unquenchable spirits. Gaius was solemn and efficient, and more conscious of my dignity than I had ever been myself. When he discovered my royal status he took on an aura of pomp which amused me, and impressed Stilicho into silence for almost twenty minutes. I believe that thereafter it was continually used as a threat or a bribe for service.

Certainly, whatever means the two of them employed, I was to find my journey almost a miracle of smoothness and comfort.

Now, as my horse pricked his ears at the morning sun, I felt my mood lift to meet the growing brilliance.

It was as if the griefs and doubts of the last year streamed back from me like my horse's shadow. As I set off eastwards with my little train I was for the first time in my life free; free of the world in front of me, and free of the obligations at my back. Until this moment I had lived always towards some goal; I had sought for and then served my father, and after his death had waited in grief until, with Arthur, my servitude might start again. Now the first part of my work was done; the boy was safe and, as my gods and my stars could be trusted, he would remain so. I was still young, and facing the sun, and, call it solitude or call it freedom, I had a new world in front of me and a span of time ahead when at last I could travel the lands of which as a boy I had been taught so much, and which I had longed to see.

So in time I came to Rome, and walked on the green hills between the cypresses, and talked with a man who had known my father when he was the age I was now. I lodged in his house, and wondered how I had ever thought my father's house in Kerrec a palace, or seen London as a great city, or even a city at all. Then from Rome to Corinth, and overland through the valleys of the Argolid where goats grazed the baked summer hills, and people lived, wilder than they, among the ruins of cities built by giants. Here at last I saw stones greater even than those in the Giants' Dance, lifted and set just as the songs had told me, and as I travelled farther east I saw lands yet emptier with giant stones standing in desert sunlight, and men who lived as simply as roving wolf-packs, but who made songs as easily as the birds, and as marvellously as the stars moving in their courses. Indeed, they know more about the movements of the stars than any other men; I suppose their world is made up of the empty spaces of the desert and the sky.

I spent eight months with a man near Sardis, in Maeonia, who could calculate to a hair's breadth, and with whose help I could have lifted the Giants' Dance in half the time had it been twice as great. Another six months I spent on the coast of Mysia, near Pergamum, in a great hospital where sick men flock for treatment, rich and poor alike. I found much that was new to me there in the art of healing; in Pergamum they use music with the drugs to heal a man's mind through dreams, and his body after it. Truly the god must have guided me when he sent me to learn music as a child. And all the time, on all my journeys, I learned smatterings of strange tongues, and heard new songs and new music, and saw strange gods worshipped, some in holy places, and some in manners we would call unclean. It is never wise to turn aside from knowing, however the knowing comes.

Through all this time I rested, steady and secure, in the knowledge that, back there in the Perilous Forest in Brittany, the child grew and thrived in safety.

Messages from Ralf came occasionally, sent by King Hoel to await me at certain prearranged ports of call. This way I learned that, as soon as might be, Ygraine was pregnant again. She was delivered in due time of a daughter, who was called Morgian. By the time I read them, the letters were of course long out of date, but as far as the boy Arthur was concerned I had my own more immediate source of reassurance. I watched, in the way I have, in the fire.

It was in a brazier lit against the chill of a Roman evening that I first watched Ralf make the journey through the forest to Hoel's court. He travelled alone and unremarked, and when he set out again in the misty dark to make for home he was not followed. In the depths of the forest I lost him, but later the smoke blew aside to show me his horse safely stabled, and Branwen smiling in the sunlit yard with the baby in her arms. Several times after that I watched Ralf's journey, but always smoke or darkness seemed to gather and lie like mist along the river, so that I could not see the tavern, or follow him through the door. It was as if, even from me, the place was guarded. I had heard it said that the Perilous Forest of Brittany was spellbound land; I can affirm that this is true. I doubt if any magic less potent than mine could have spied through the wall of mist that hid the inn. Glimpses I had, no more than that, from time to time. Once, fleetingly, I saw the baby playing among a litter of puppies in the yard while the bitch licked his face and Brand looked on, grinning, till Moravik burst scolding out of her kitchen to snatch the child up, wipe his face with her apron, and vanish with him indoors. Another time I saw him perched aloft on Ralf's horse while it was drinking at the trough, and yet again astride the saddle in front of Ralf, hanging on to the mane with both hands while the beast trotted down to the river's edge. I never saw him closely, or even clearly, but I saw enough to know that he thrived and grew strong.