The Last Enchantment (42 page)

"The lamp?" I said. "You've not seen the fire called before? Well, that's one of the first things you'll learn; it was the first my own master taught me. Or was it the jars? You're looking at them as if you thought I was bottling poison. I was packing the garden herbs for winter's use."

"Hyssop," he said. I thought there was a glint of mischief, which in a girl I might have called demure. "

'To be burned with brimstone for inflammations of the throat; or boiled with honey to help pleurisy of the lungs.'"

I laughed. "Galen? Well, it seems we have a flying start. So you can read? Do you know — ? No, it must wait till morning. For the present, have you had supper?"

"Yes, thank you."

"You said that Ninian was 'one of your names.' What do you like to be called?"

"Ninian will do...that is, unless you would rather not use it. What happened to him, the boy you knew? I think you said he was drowned?"

"Yes. We were at Corstopitum, and he went swimming with some other boys in the river beside the bridge where the Cor flows into theTyne . They came running back to say he had been swept away."

"I'm sorry."

I smiled at him. "You will have to work very hard to make good his loss. Come, then, we must find you a place to sleep."

That was how I acquired my assistant, and the god his servant. He had had his hand over both of us all that time. It seems to me now that the first Ninian was but a forerunner — a shadow cast before — of the real one who came to me later, from the Lake. From the start it was apparent that instinct had deceived neither of us; Ninian of theLake , though knowing little of the arts I professed, proved a natural adept. He learned quickly, soaking up both knowledge and art as a cloth soaks up clear water. He could read and write fluently, and though he had not, as I in my youth had had, the gift of languages, he spoke a pure Latin as well as the vernacular, and had picked up enough Greek to be able to read a label or be accurate about a recipe. He had once, he told me, had access to a translation of Galen, but knew nothing of Hippocrates beyond hearsay. I set him to reading in the Latin version I had, and found myself, in some measure, sent back to school by the score of questions he asked, of which I had taken the answers so long for granted that I had forgotten how they were reached. Music he knew nothing of, and would not learn; this was the first time I came face to face with that gentle, immovable stubbornness of his. He would listen, his face full of dreaming light, when I played or sang; but sing himself, or even try to sing, he would not; and after a few attempts to teach him his notes on the big harp, I gave it up. I would have liked it if he had had a voice; I would not have wanted to sit by while another man made music with my harp, but now with age my own voice was not as good as it had once been, and I would have liked to hear a young voice singing the poems I made. But no. He smiled, shook his head, tuned the harp for me (that much he could and would do), and listened.

But in everything else he was eager and quick to learn. Recollecting as best I could the way old Galapas, my master, had inducted me into the skills of magic, I took him, step by step, into the strange and misty halls of art. The Sight he had already in some degree; but where I had surpassed my master from the start, Ninian would do well if in time he could equal me, and he was still a stranger to the flights of prophecy. If he went half as far as I, I would be content. Like all old men, I could not believe that that young brain and gentle body could withstand the stresses that I myself had withstood many times. I helped him, as Galapas had done me, with certain subtle yet safe drugs, and soon he could see in the fire or the lamp, and wake from the vision afterwards no more than weary, and, at times, disturbed by what he had seen. As yet he could not put truth together with vision. I did not help him to; and indeed, in those peaceful months of his apprenticeship there was little happening of enough moment to set prophecy stirring in the fire. Once or twice he spoke to me, in a kind of confusion, about the Queen, and Melwas and Bedwyr and the King, but I put the visions aside as obscure, and pursued them no further.

He steadfastly refused to tell me about himself or whence he came. He had lived most of his life, he said, on or near the Island, and allowed me to gather that his parents had been poor dwellers in one of the outlyingLake villages. Ninian of theLake , he called himself, and said it was enough; so as such I accepted him. His past, after all, was nothing; whatever he was going to be, I would make. I did not press him; I had had enough, as a bastard and a child with no known father, of the shame of such questioning; so I respected the boy's silences, and asked no more than he would tell me.

All the practical side of healing, the study of anatomy, and the use of drugs, he was interested in, and good at. He could also, as I never could, draw with real skill. He began, that first winter, for sheer delight in the work, to compile a local herbal of his own, though most of the seeking and identifying of the plants, which is more than half the doctor's art, would have to wait till spring. But there was no hurry for it. He had, he told me, for ever.

So the winter passed in deep happiness, each day too short for all it could be filled with. To be with Ninian was to have everything; my own youth again, eager and quick to learn, with life unfolding full of bright promise; and at the same time the pleasures of quiet thought and of solitude. He seemed to sense when I needed to be alone, and either withdrew physically from my presence to his own room, or fell silent, and apparently into some deep abstraction, which left my thoughts free of him. He would not share the house with me, preferring, he said, to have rooms of his own where he need not disturb me, so I had Mora get ready the upper rooms that would have housed the servants, had any lived with me. The rooms were above the workshop and storeroom, facing west, and though small and low under the rafters, were pleasant and airy. I did wonder at first if Mora and he had come to some sort of understanding; they spent a lot of time talking together in the kitchen, or down by the stream where the girl did some of the washing; I would hear them laughing, and could see that they were easy together; but there was no sign of intimacy, and in time I realized that Ninian, from things he let fall in talk, knew as little about love as I myself. Which, from the way the power grew in him, palpably week by week, I took to be only natural.

The gods do not give two gifts at once, and they are jealous.

Spring came early the next year, with mild sunny days in March, and the wild geese going overhead daily, toward their nesting sites in the north. I caught some kind of chill, and kept to the house, but then one fine day went outside to sit in the little garth, where the doves were already busy about their love-making. The heated wall made the place as pleasant as a fireside; there were rosy cups of quince against the stone, and winter irises full out at the wall's base. In the gardens beyond the stable buildings I could hear the thud of Varro's spade, and thought idly of the planting I had planned. Nothing was in my mind beyond vague, pleasant plans of a domestic sort, and the sight of the pink sheen on the breast feathers of the doves, and the sleepy sound of their cooing...

Later, looking back, I wondered if for a brief hour my malady had blanketed me from consciousness of the present. It would have pleased me to think so. But it seems probable that the malady that overtook me was age, and the weakness left by the chill, and the lulling drug of contentment.

Quick footsteps on a stone stair startled me awake. I looked up. Ninian came hurrying down from his room, but with uncertain steps, as if it were he, not I, who was half-drugged, or even ill. He kept a hand on the stone wall, as if without its guidance he would have stumbled. Still unsteadily, he crossed the colonnade, and came out into the sunshine. He paused there, with a hand to one of the pillars for support.

His face was pale, his eyes enormous, the black pupils swimmingly overspreading the iris. His lips looked dry, but there was damp on his forehead, and two sharp lines of pain gouged down between his brows.

"What is it?" I began in alarm to get to my feet, but he put out a hand to calm me, then came forward.

He sank down on the flags at my feet in the sun.

"I've had a dream," he said, and even his voice was unlike itself. "No, I wasn't asleep. I was reading by the window. There was a spider's web there, still full of drops from last night's rain. I was watching it as it shook in the sunlight..."

I understood then. I put a hand down to his shoulder and held it steadily. "Sit quiet for a moment. You will not forget the dream. Wait there. You can tell me later."

But as I got to my feet he shot a hand out and grabbed at my robe. "You don't understand! It was a warning! I am sure of that! There's some sort of danger —"

"I understand quite well. But until the headache goes, you will remember nothing clearly. Now wait. I'll be back soon."

I went into the stillroom. As I busied myself mixing the cordial I had only one thought in my mind. He, sitting reading and thinking, had had vision brought to him in a dewdrop's spark of light; I, waiting idly and with passive mind in full sunlight, had seen nothing. I found that my hand shook a little as I poured the cordial for him; it would take love, I thought, to stand peacefully aside and watch the god lift his wing from over me, and take another into its shadow. No matter that the power had brought pain and men's fear and sometimes hatred; no one who has known power like that has any wish to abdicate it to another.

Not to anyone.

I carried the goblet out into the sunlight. Ninian, still curled on the flagstones, had his head down, a fist pressed tightly against his brow. He looked very slight and young. He raised his head at my step, and the grey eyes, swimming with tears of pain, looked at me blindly. I sat down, took his hand in mine, and guided the goblet to his mouth. "Drink this. It will make you feel better presently. No, don't try to talk yet."

He drank, then his head went down again, this time against my knee. I laid a hand on his hair. For some time we sat like that, while the doves, disturbed by his coming, flew down again onto the coping of the wall, and once more took up their gentle courtship. Beyond the stables the monotonous sound of Varro's spade went on and on.

Presently Ninian stirred.

I lifted my hand. "Better?"

He nodded and raised his head. The lines of pain had gone. "Yes. Yes, it's quite gone. It was more than a headache; it was like a sharp pain right through the brain. I've never felt anything like that before. Am I ill?"

"No. You are merely a seer, an eye and a voice for a most tyrannous god. You have had a waking dream, what men call a vision. Now tell me about it, and we shall see if it is a true one."

He drew his knees up, clasping them with both hands. He spoke, looking past me at the wall with the black branches and red cups of the quince. His eyes were still dark, dilated with vision, and his voice was low and even, as if reciting something learned by rote.

"I saw a stretch of grey sea, whipped with storm winds, breaking white over rocks like wolves' fangs.

There was a beach of pebbles, grey too, and streaming with rain. The waves came in over the beach, and with them came broken spars and casks and torn sails — pieces of wreckage. And people; drowned bodies of men and women. One of the men's bodies rolled near me, and I saw he had not been drowned; there was a deep wound in his neck, but the blood had all been washed away by the sea. He looked like an animal that has been bled. There were dead children, too, three of them. One was naked, and had been speared. Then I saw, out beyond the breakers, another ship, a whole ship, with sails furled in the wind, and with oars out, holding her steady. She waited there, and I saw that she was low in the water as if heavily laden. She had a high, curved prow, with a pair of antlers fastened to it; I couldn't see if they were real, or carved in wood. I could see her name, though; it was King Stag. The men in the ship were watching the bodies tumbling on shore, and they were laughing. They were a long way off across the sea, but I could hear what they said, quite clearly...Can you believe that?"

"Yes. Go on."

"They were saying, 'You were guided, by God! Who could have told that the old scow was so richly found? Luck like yours, and a fair division of the spoils, and we'll all make our fortunes!' They were speaking to the captain."

"Did you hear his name?"

"I think so. They called him Heuil."

"Was that all?"

"No. There was a sort of darkness, like a mist. Then the King Stag had gone, but near me on the shore there were horsemen, and some of them had dismounted and were looking at the bodies. One man lifted a piece of broken planking with something on it that might have been the name of the wrecked ship, and carried it across to where another was sitting on his horse. He was a dark man, carrying no device that I could see, but he was obviously their leader. He looked angry. He said something, and the others got to their horses again, and they all galloped up off the beach, through the dunes and the long grasses. I was left there, and then even the dead bodies were gone, and the wind was blowing into my eyes and making them water...That was all. I was looking at the spider's web, and the drops had melted in the sunlight. A fly was caught there, shaking the web. I suppose that was what woke me. Merlin —"

He stopped abruptly, and cocked his head to listen. Now I could catch, from the road below, the sounds of a troop of horsemen, and a distant command to halt. A single rider detached himself, and approached at a rapid canter.

"A messenger from Camelot?" I said. "Who knows, perhaps this is your vision coming home."

The horse stopped. There was the jingle of the bridle being thrown to Varro. Arthur came in through the archway.

"Merlin, I'm glad to see you about. They told me you had been ill, and I came to see for myself." He paused, looking at Ninian. He knew, of course, that the boy was with me, but they had not met before.

Ninian had refused to go with me to Camelot, and whenever the King had visited me, had made some excuse and retired to his rooms. I did not press him, knowing the awe that the people of theLake villages felt for the High King.