Hollow Hills (35 page)

"I promise."

He lay quietly, with trouble still in his face, and his eyes intent on something distant and long ago. Then, imperceptibly but as definitely as a man stepping into a cold stream to cross it, he made a decision. "Is the cloth still off the altar?"

"Yes."

"Then light the nine lamps and fill the bowl with wine and oil, and open the doors to the forest, and carry me where I can see the sword again."

I knew that if I lifted him, he would die in my hands. His breath laboured harshly in the thin chest, and the frail body shook with it. He turned his head on the pillows, feebly now.

"Make haste." When I hesitated, I saw fear touch his face. "I tell you I must see it. Do as I say."

I thought of the shrine scoured and swept of all its ancient sanctities; and then of the sword itself, hidden with the King's gold in the roof-beams of the stable outside. But it was too late even for that. "I cannot lift you, father," I said, "but lie still. I will bring the altar here to you."

"How can you — ?" he began, then stopped with wonder growing in his face, and whispered: "Then bring it quickly, and let me go."

I knelt beside the bed, facing away from him, looking at the red heart of the fire. The logs had fallen from their blaze into a glowing cave, crystals glimmering in a globe of fire. Beside me the difficult breathing came and went like the painful beat of my own blood. The beat surged in my temples, hurting me. Deep in my belly the pain grew and burned. The sweat ran scalding down my face, and my bones shook in their sheath of flesh as, grain by grain and inch by shining inch, I built that altar-stone for him against the dark, blank wall. It rose slowly, solid, and blotted out the fire. The surface of the stone was lucent against the dark, and ripples of light touched it and wavered across it, as if it floated on sunlit water. Then, lamp by lamp, I lit the nine flames so that they floated with the stone like riding-lights. The wine brimmed in the bowl, and the censer smoked. INVICTO, I wrote, and groped, sweating, for the name of the god. But all that came was the single word INVICTO, and then the sword stood forward out of the stone like a blade from a splitting sheath, and the blade was white iron with runes running down it in the wavering water-light, below the flashing hilt and the word in the stone, TO HIM UNCONQUERED...

It was morning, and the first birds were stirring. Inside, the place was very quiet. He was dead, gone as lightly as the vision I had made for him out of shadows. It was I who, stiff and aching, moved like a ghost to cover the altar and tend the lamp.

When I had promised the dying man to see that the chapel was cared for, I had not thought of doing this myself. There was a monastery in one of the little valleys not far from Count Ector's castle, and it should not be hard to find someone from there who would live here and care for the place. This did not mean I must hand over the sword's secret to him; it was mine now, and the end of its story was in my hands.

But as the days passed, I thought better of my decision to approach the brothers. To begin with, I was forced to inaction, and given time to think.

I buried the old man's body, and just in time, as the next day the snow came, falling thick, soft and silent, to shroud the forest deep, and island the chapel and block the tracks. To tell the truth I was glad to stay; there was enough food and fuel, and both the mare and I needed the rest.

For two weeks or more the snow lay; I lost track of days, but Christmas came and went, and the start of the year. Arthur was nine years old.

So perforce I kept the shrine. I supposed that whoever came as keeper would, like the old man, fight to keep the place clear for his own God, but in the meantime I was content to let what god would take the place. I would open it again to any who would use it. So I put away the altar cloth, and cleaned the three bronze lamps and set them about the altar and lighted the nine flames. About the stone and the spring I could do nothing until the snow melted. Nor could I find the curving knife, and for this I was thankful; that Goddess is not one to whom I would willingly open a door. I kept the sweet holy-water in her bowl of sacrifice, and at morning and evening burned a pinch of incense. The white owl came and went at will. By night I shut the chapel door to keep out the cold and the wind, but it was never locked, and all day it stood open, with the lights shining out over the snow.

Some time after the turn of the year the snow melted, and the tracks through the forest showed black and deep in mire. Still I made no move. I had had time to think, and I saw that I must surely have been led up to the chapel by the same hand that had guided me to Segontium. Where better could I stay to be near Arthur without attracting attention? The chapel provided the perfect hiding-place. I knew well enough that the place would be held in awe, and its guardian with it. The "holy man of the forest" would be accepted without question. Word would go round that there was a new and younger holy man, but, country memories being long, folk would recall how each hermit as he died had been succeeded by his helper, and before long I would simply be "the hermit of the Wild Forest" in my turn and in my own right.

And with the chapel as my home and my cure, I could visit the village for supplies, talk to the people, and in this way get news, at the same time ensuring that Count Ector would hear of my installation in the Wild Forest.

About a week after the thaw started, before I would risk taking Strawberry down through the knee-deep mud of the tracks, I had visitors. Two of the forest people; a small, thickset dark man dressed in badly cured deerskins, which stank, and a girl, his daughter, wrapped in coarse woollen cloth. They had the same swarthy looks and black eyes as the hill men of Gwynedd, but under its weather-beaten brown the girl's face was pinched and grey. She was suffering, but dumbly like an animal; she neither moved nor made a sound when her father unwrapped the rags from her wrist and forearm swollen and black with poison.

"I have promised her that you will heal her," he said simply.

I made no comment then, but took her hand, speaking gently in the Old Tongue. She hung back, afraid, until I explained to the man — whose name was Mab — that I must heat water and cleanse my knife in the fire; then she let him lead her inside. I cut the swelling, and cleaned and bound the arm. It took a long time, and the girl made no sound throughout, but under the dirt her pallor grew, so when I had done and had wrapped clean bandages round the arm I heated wine for both of them, and brought out the last of my dried raisins, and meal cakes to go with them. These last I had made myself, trying my hand at them as I had so often watched my servant do at home. At first my cakes had been barely eatable, even when sopped in wine, but lately I had got the trick of it, and it gave me pleasure to see Mab and the girl eat eagerly, and then reach for more. So from magic and the voices of gods to the making of meal cakes: this, perhaps the lowest of my skills, was not the one in which I took least pride.

"Now," I said to Mab, "it seems that you knew I was here?"

"Word went through the forest. No, do not look like that, Myrddin Emrys. We tell no one. But we follow all who move in the forest and we know all that passes."

"Yes. Your power. I was told so. I may need its help, while I stay here keeping the chapel."

"It's yours. You have lighted the lamps again."

"Then give me the news."

He drank, and wiped his mouth. "The winter has been quiet. The coasts are bound with storms. There was fighting in the south, but it is over and the borders are whole. Cissa has taken ship to Germany. Aelle stays, with his sons. In the north there is nothing. Gwarthegydd has quarrelled with his father Caw, but when did that breed ever rest quiet? He has fled to Ireland, but that is nothing. They say also that Riagath is with Niall in Ireland. Niall has feasted with Gilloman, and there is peace between them."

It was a bare recital of facts, told through with neither expression nor real understanding, as if learned by rote. But I could piece it together. The Saxons, Ireland, the Picts of the north; threats on all sides, but no more than threats: not yet.

"And the King?" I asked.

"Is himself, but not the man he was. Where he was brave, now he is angry. His followers fear him."

"And the King's son?" I waited for the answer. How much did these folk really see?

The black eyes were unreadable. "They say he is on the Isle of Glass, but then what do you do here in the Wild Forest, Myrddin Emrys?"

"I tend the shrine. You are welcome to it. All are welcome."

He was silent for a while. The girl crouched beside the fire, watching me, her fear apparently gone. She had finished eating, but I had seen her slip a couple of the meal cakes into the folds of her clothes, and smiled to myself.

I said to Mab: "If I should need to send a message, would your people take it?"

"Willingly."

"Even to the King?"

"We would contrive that it should reach him."

"As for the King's son," I said, "you say that you and your people see all that passes in the forest. If my magic should reach out to the King's son in his hiding-place, and call him to me through the forest, will he be safe?"

He made the strange sign that I had seen Llyd's men make, and nodded. "He will be safe. We will watch him for you. Did you not promise Llyd that he would be our King as well as the king of those in the cities of the south?"

"He is everyone's King," I said.

The girl's arm must have healed cleanly, for he did not bring her back. Two days later a freshly snared pheasant appeared at the back door, with a skin of the honey mead. In my turn I cleared the drifted snow from the stone, and put a cup in the place made for it above the spring. I never saw anyone near either, but there were signs I recognized, and when I left part of a new batch of meal cakes at the back door they would vanish overnight, and some offering appear in their place — a piece of venison, perhaps, or the leg of a hare.

As soon as the forest tracks were clear I saddled Strawberry and rode down towards Galava. The way led down the banks of the stream, and along the northern shore of a lake. This was a smaller lake than the great stretch of water at whose head Galava lay; it was little more than a mile long, and perhaps a third of a mile wide, with the forest crowding down on every hand right to the water. About midway along, but nearer the southern shore, was an island, not large, but thickly grown with trees, a piece of the surrounding forest broken off and thrown down into the quiet water. It was a rocky island, its trees crowding steeply up towards the high crags which reared at the center. These were of grey stone, outlined still with the last of the snow, and looking for all the world like the towers of a castle. On that day of leaden stillness there was about them a kind of burnished brightness. The island swam above its own reflection, the mirrored towers seeming to sink, fathoms deep, into the still center of the lake.

From the other end of this lake the stream flowed out again, this time as a young river, swollen with snow water, cutting its way deep and fast through beds of pallid rushes and black marshland seamed with willow and alder, towards Galava. In a mile or so the valley widened, and the marsh gave way to the cultivated land and the walls of small farms, and the cottages of the settlement crowding close under the protection of the castle walls. Beyond Ector's towers, jutting grey and uncompromising through the black winter trees, was the great lake which stretched as far as the eye could see, to merge with the sullen sky.

The first place I came to was a farm set a short way back from the river-side. It was not the kind of farm we have in the south and south-west, built on the Roman plan, but a place such as I had become used to seeing here in the north. There was a cluster of circular buildings, the farmhouse and the sheds for the beasts, all within a big irregular ring protected by a palisade of wood and stone. As I passed the gate a dog hurtled to the end of his chain, barking. A man, the owner by his dress, appeared in the doorway of a barn and stood staring. He had a billhook in his hand. I reined in and called a greeting. He came forward with a look of curiosity, but with the wariness that one saw everywhere in the country nowadays when a stranger approached.

"Where are you bound, stranger? For the Count's castle of Galava?"

"No. Only to the nearest place where I may buy food — meat and meal and perhaps some wine. I've come from the chapel up there in the forest. You know it?"

"Who doesn't? How does the old man up there, old Prosper? We've not seen him since before the snow."

"He died at Christmas."

He crossed himself. "You were with him?"

"Yes. I keep the chapel now." I gave no details. If he liked to assume I had been there for some time, helping the chapel's keeper, that was all to the good. "My name is Myrddin," I told him. I had decided to use my own name, rather than the "Emrys." Myrddin was a common enough name in the west, and would not necessarily be connected with the vanished Merlin; on the other hand, if Arthur was still known as

"Emrys," it might provoke questions if a stranger of that name suddenly appeared in the district, and began to spend time in the boy's company.

"Myrddin, eh? Where are you from?"

"I kept a hill shrine for a time in Dyfed."

"I see." His eyes summed me, found me harmless, and he nodded. "Well, each to his task. No doubt your prayers serve us in their way as much as the Count's sword when it's needed. Does he know of the change up yonder?"

"I've seen no one since I came. The snow fell just after Prosper died. What sort of man is this Count Ector?"

"A good lord and a good man. And his lady as good as he. You'll not lack while they hold the forest."

"Has he sons?"

"Two, and likely boys both. You'll see them, I dare say, when the weather loosens. They ride in the forest most days. No doubt the Count will send for you when he comes home; he's away now, and the elder son with him. They expect him back at the turn of spring." He turned his head and called, and a woman appeared in the doorway of the house. "Catra, here's the new man from the chapel. Old Prosper died at midwinter: you were right he wouldn't last the new year in. Have you bread to spare from the baking, and a skin of wine? Good sir, you'll take a bite with us till the fresh batch comes from the oven?"