The Creatures of Man (21 page)

Raedulf replied, "The ancient scamp seems capable of that—or of most anything."

The friar uttered an unchristian oath. "I am shamed to have been awed! A fraud!"

"It is perhaps well you were," said Raedulf. "This ancient may travel like a bull both crazed and lost, but like the bull he has horns with which to gore."

After proper farewells, Raedulf turned his mare and rode westward along the road, watchful for a good way trending more to the south. By and by he found a side road that proved well-frequented, with a fair scattering of villages and farm stockades along the way.

Through the afternoon he rode at a comfortable pace, having no need for hurry if the magician were indeed making for the Old Stones. The magician traveled afoot and would easily be outpaced to the destination by Raedulf's mare.

The chronicler found a comfortable inn for the night, and there obtained clearer information on the location of the Old Stones and how they might best be reached. He was also warned that the Stones were in outlaw-infested country, to which he nodded solemnly, thinking of how many times he had received similar warnings during this quest, and of how he had yet to meet a brigand who cared to challenge a man who was mounted and wearing a sword.

If he rode in fear of any man, Raedulf mused, that man might best be the very one he was seeking.

Late the following afternoon he reached the Old Stones. They rose above the thick brush of the deserted heath like some primitive colonnade. Raedulf stared at them in wonder. Here was surely a thing that should be better chronicled. Who had raised these great stone slabs on end along a circling line, and had spanned many of their tops with massive lintels?

Certainly they were not the work of the Romans. They had not the style of Roman structures. And they appeared far too old.

Allowing his mare to stroll along what paths she could find through the brush, Raedulf explored the place at length, but found nothing enlightening. Here and there were ashes of campfires, some quite fresh, left by outlaws or outcasts or whoever, but nothing to indicate what the Stones might have once been.

And no sign of the magician. The old man would not reach the place until the morrow, he guessed.

With that thought, he turned his mount back the way he had come, toward the stockade of a peasant-squire he had passed half a league to the north.

He met the magician on the way.

Raedulf had never seen him before, but descriptions made his identity certain. He was a huge man, a head taller than even King Lort, with a heavy beard of gray and frowning brown eyes. Strapped to his shoulders was a backpack of peculiar design.

The magician halted in the middle of the path, and Raedulf stopped his mare.

"Hail, thou of renowned wisdom!" he called out.

The magician's right hand stole out of sight under his cloak. "Who the hell are you?" he growled.

Taken aback by the strangeness and vehemence of the magician's words, he replied, "Raedulf of Clerwint, good sire, a chronicler in the service of God and His Majesty, Lort."

"Huh! A damned newspaper reporter! Of a sort, anyway. You know who I am?"

"Thou art he who is called Merlin," replied Raedulf, wondering if it would be safe as well as courteous to dismount.

The magician said, "I'm Wilmoth T. Aberlea of Maryland, and if you hayseeds make 'Merlin' out of that, what the hell's the difference to me?" He paused. "Is this a chance meeting, what's-your-name, or were you laying for me?"

"Raedulf of Clerwint," the chronicler supplied, feeling miffed. "I confess to having sought you out, good magicker."

"Okay, Roddy," the magician said brusquely, "let's hear what you want. I'm a busy man."

"In behalf of my liege, sire, I would have of you circumstantial knowledge of the lamented King Arthur."

Merlin stared at him, then chuckled. Raedulf took heart from this display of good humor and dismounted.

"This Lort of yours . . . isn't he the bully boy over in the Leicester neighborhood? What's his interest in Arthur?"

"There is a likeness in the names, Lort and Arthur," Raedulf explained. "My lord wishes to know if there is a tie of blood; if, indeed, he might be heir to the kingdom of Camelot. And if so, he would have me enquire the whereabouts of that kingdom."

The magician bellowed a gust of laughter, then soured abruptly. "Tell him no," he grunted. "Now pull your pony aside so I can get by, boy."

Raedulf began moving his mare slowly out of the way, hesitant to let the magician move on but fearful of disobeying. "Frankly, renowned magicker," he entreated, "that is not the answer my liege wishes to hear."

"Nuts to your puny liege!" grumbled Merlin as he stomped forward. Raedulf quickly yanked the mare aside as the magician went past, and stood looking helplessly after him.

But a few steps later the magician halted and turned, frowning unhappily. "This Lort of yours . . . he doesn't know his own genealogy?"

"Not precisely, sire," Raedulf replied. "Like the great Arthur himself, my king's origins are confused. Since the departure of the Roman legions, our land has been rife with disorder and civil strife to a degree that families are uprooted and—"

"Okay," snorted Merlin, "I get the picture. What the hell, your boy Lort might even
be
Arthur on some other timeline. Look, tell him what he wants to hear. Tell him he's the third son of Arthur's only child, a daughter named . . . named Merlinette, after me. Say his elder brother was slain in battle and the other has taken Church vows. So that makes him heir. As for Camelot . . ." The magician shrugged. "Tell him it sank, that it was lost in The Wash."

Raedulf bowed stiffly "I extend His Majesty's thanks, gracious magicker."

Merlin was grinning. "You don't believe a word I said, do you?"

"I have obeyed my king's command," retorted Raedulf, "in seeking out and questioning he whose knowledge of Arthur is fullest and most direct of all men still alive. It remains for me to report accurately your words on the subject."

Merlin chuckled. "Spoken like a true newspaperman!" He applauded. "You ought to go far, although you don't get a mention in any history book I ever read. You know how to lie honestly, and that's a big step toward civilization as I knew it. Maybe that's what I should have encouraged around here, instead of chattering about Arthur and Company. But I suppose it wouldn't have led to a convergence at this early date, and wouldn't have caught on."

The magician fell silent, seemingly lost in speculations beyond Raedulf's ken. Indeed, nearly all the magician had said was mystifying to the chronicler, and rankling as well. There was the insulting suggestion that the accurate recounting of the words of an authority was not necessarily honest. What else was a faithful chronicler to do? And the strange comment that Arthur might be Lort in some other . . . other here-and-now? How could Lort be his own grandfather? But, no, that was Merlin's fabrication . . .

It was much too confusing. To change the subject in his own mind, Raedulf asked, "Does the good magicker seek the Old Stones?"

Merlin frowned down at him. "I
go
to the Old Stones," he corrected. "I seek nothing, because I know the location of all things."

Raedulf gathered his courage and said sharply, "I believe the good magicker shares my ability to lie honestly."

Merlin blinked, then chortled in surprised delight. "Aha! Hoisted by me own petard! You're a clever lad, Roddy. Okay, I know Stonehenge is somewhere on Salisbury Plain, but how the hell to find it in all this damned brush is something else."

"Five furlongs down this path," said Raedulf boredly, "you will be in sight of the top of the Stones."

Merlin studied him in amusement, then said, "I have a recently seized fowl in my sack, along with other foodstuffs fit for a magician. Come along to the rocks and dine with me, lad. Else I might wind up talking to myself."

"I'm honored, sire," said Raedulf, bowing. "Perchance you would accept the use of my mount, to rest your limbs after so long a journey."

Merlin snorted. "Not on your life! You have to grow up with those stupid animals to understand them. Besides, I'm a jogger from way back. Keeps me in shape."

So Raedulf led his mare and walked at the magician's side. He was less awed now, having bested Merlin in one verbal exchange. Also, he found a touch of comic absurdity in someone exercising (if he had understood correctly), to stay in good walking form . . . the way knights exercised with lance and sword.

"The Old Stones have not a Romish look," he offered.

"They're not Roman," said Merlin. "I'm going to study them, find out what they really are."

"Mayhap I can be of some assistance in this undertaking," Raedulf hinted.

The magician glanced at the younger man. "Think you might pick up some of my magic, boy?"

"You might choose to reward me in that manner, sire. Or perhaps with more of the history of Arthur the King."

Merlin spat a word that was strange to Raedulf, but that sounded obscene nonetheless. "I've shot all the Arthurian bull I intend to," he snapped.

The remark had puzzling implications. But they made it clear the magician did not want to tell more of the great king. "Then perhaps of your own history, good magicker."

"My history you wouldn't believe. Or be a fool if you did. We magicians lead strange lives."

Annoyed at the patronizing tone, Raedulf replied tartly, "You may try me, sire."

"Okay, boy. How about this for a starter: I come from thirteen hundred years in the future."

Raedulf nodded thoughtfully, although he would have guessed that, possessor of the wisdom of the ancients, Merlin had come from the distant past. "Your time must be one of inspired magicianship," he flattered.

Merlin grunted in disdain. "Mediocre. I was the greatest of the lot. Got damned little credit for it, of course. A prophet without honor in my own time," he muttered bitterly. "Not that I gave a damn. I was never one of those security-blanket organization scientists who can't function without coddling and praise. And the lousy Swedes know where they can shove their stupid Nobel Prize, for all I care."

"You are highly honored here, good sire," placated Raedulf, wondering what the old man was raving about.

"Oh, sure! But not understood," snapped Merlin. "A magician with some impressive tricks, but not a brilliant physicist whose discoveries surpassed those of Einstein! Those dolts called me
'simplistic'
!"

"Which dolts, good sire?" Raedulf inquired.

"My damned so-called colleagues! Those biddy-brained idiots who sat in judgment on my work, those referees who insulted my discoveries and kept them from being published!

"That's the way they buried my theory of subatomic structure, in which I demonstrated that there is only one kind of particle, the neutron. All the other kinds that have multiplied like rabbits in the minds of bought scientists are merely reactions to neutron configurations of flows and counterflows of energy.

"You want to know what the referee said about that? He said I chose to ignore numerous phenomena that failed to fit my scheme. A damned lie! But those party-lining journal jacklegs believed him.

"After that disaster, I didn't even
try
to publish my finding of the equivalence of gravitation and nuclear binding force. What a laugh some idiot would have had with that one! Everybody
knows
the two forces can't be the same. Gravity's the weaker by too many orders of magnitude to make a relationship thinkable. So nobody but a trouble-maker like me would see a parallel between the neutron stars, in which gravity is so concentrated as to be almost totally self-confining, and the atomic nucleus where binding force is similarly concentrated. Oh, no, I wasn't about to announce that one! I was enough of a joke or a fraud without that hanging over my reputation. Instead, I carried on alone, and brought a consideration of time into the light thrown by my earlier discoveries. And I learned how to time-travel."

He paused, slamming fist into palm.

"That was exactly what I needed. I was a man ahead of my own time, trying to mingle with people far too stupid and backward to appreciate my work or myself. The future was where I belonged, so . . ."

Merlin broke off his angry recital in midsentence, glowering at the path ahead. "How much farther till we see the stones, boy?" he demanded.

"Around yon turning of the path."

"Good. I'm getting hungry. Keep an eye out for firewood."

"Very well, good sire." After a hesitation, Raedulf asked timidly, "But, sire, if you sought the future, how is it that you journeyed into the past?"

Merlin snorted. He strode on in silence, and Raedulf concluded he had asked about a matter that vexed the magician sorely. He was casting about for a graceful change of subject when his companion began muttering, "Even I fell in the intellectual trap. Even I."

He looked at the chronicler and spoke more audibly. "We believe what our society believes, boy, whether we mean to or not. We're tricked, because there are so damned many beliefs and they come at us in so many shapes and disguises. You believe I'm a great magician, but in my own time no intelligent young man would accept that. He would look for the mirrors, or the sleight-of-hand. Or the scientific explanation. When I tell you I come from the future, you accept that as powerful magic and ask no explanations. But a young man of my era would say, 'Impossible!' Or he might be sharp enough to ask, 'How does it work?' Both reactions would be based on accepted assumptions of the times. They would be proper."

Raedulf nodded slowly. "Even within one time, that is true. The deeds of the Romans oft were senseless to my greatfathers."

"Right!" approved Merlin. "Now, you see that any society's set of beliefs will contain falsehoods, beliefs that contradict the natural scheme of things."

This was a difficult point. In accepting it, Raedulf saw that he would be admitting that his own deepest convictions could be in error . . . along with the rulings of his king and the teachings of the Church. He was not prepared for that. But he could pretend in order to stay on pleasant terms with the magician. "It would seem that each group of beliefs would contain its share of truth and its share of falsity."