The Crystal Cave

  The servant pulled the curtain aside and showed me the blankets folded across the mattress, and the good pillows stuffed with fleece, then left me and went to attend Ambrosius.

  I took off my borrowed tunic and folded it carefully. The blankets were thick, new wool, and smelled of cedarwood. Ambrosius and the slave were talking, but softly, and their voices came like echoes from the far end of a deep, quiet cave. It was bliss only to be in a real bed again, to lie, warm and fed, in a place that was beyond even the sound of the sea. And safe.

  I think he said "Good night," but I was already submerged in sleep, and could not drag myself to the surface to answer. The last thing I remember is the slave moving softly to put out the lamps.

  6

  WHEN I AWOKE NEXT MORNING it was late. The curtains had been drawn back, letting in a grey and wintry day, and Ambrosius' bed was empty. Outside the windows I could see a small courtyard where a colonnade framed a square of garden, at the center of which a fountain played — in silence, I thought, till I saw that the cascade was solid ice.

  The tiles of the floor were warm to my bare feet. I reached for the white tunic which I had left folded on a stool by the bed, but instead I saw that someone had put there a new one of dark green, the colour of yew trees, which fitted. There was a good leather belt to go with it, and a pair of new sandals replacing my old ones. There was even a cloak, this time of a light beech-green, with a copper brooch to fasten it. There was something embossed on the brooch; a dragon, enamelled in scarlet, the same device I had seen last night on the seal-ring he wore.

  It was the first time that I remember feeling as if I looked like a prince, and I found it strange that this should happen at the moment when you would have thought I had reached the bottom of my fortunes. Here in Less Britain I had nothing, not even a bastard name to protect myself with, no kin, not even a rag of property. I had hardly spoken with any man except Ambrosius, and to him I was a servant, a dependant, something to be used, and only alive by his sufferance.

  Cadal brought me my breakfast, brown bread and honeycomb and dried figs. I asked where Ambrosius was.

  "Out with the men, drilling. Or rather, watching the exercises. He's there every day."

  "What do you suppose he wants me to do?"

  "All he said was, you could stay around here till you were rested, and to make yourself at home. I've to send someone to the ship, so if you'll tell me what your traps were that you lost, I'll have them brought."

  "There was nothing much, I didn't have time. A couple of tunics and a pair of sandals wrapped in a blue cloak, and some little things — a brooch, and a clasp my mother gave me, things like that." I touched the expensive folds of the tunic I wore. "Nothing as good as this. Cadal, I hope I can serve him. Did he say what he wanted of me?"

  "Not a word. You don't think he tells me his secret thoughts, do you? Now you just do as he says, make yourself at home, keep your mouth shut, and see you don't get into trouble. I don't suppose you'll be seeing much of him."

  "I didn't suppose I would," I said. "Where am I to live?"

  "Here."

  "In this room?"

  "Not likely. I meant, in the house."

  I pushed my plate aside. "Cadal, does my lord Uther have a house of his own?"

  Cadal's eyes twinkled. He was a short stocky man, with a square, reddish face, a black shag of hair, and small black eyes no bigger than olives. The gleam in them now showed me that he knew exactly what I was thinking, and moreover that everyone in the house must know exactly what had passed between me and the prince last night.

  "No, he hasn't. He lives here, too. Cheek by jowl, you might say."

  "Oh."

  "Don't worry; you won't be seeing much of him, either. He's going north in a week or two. Should cool him off quickly, this weather... He's probably forgotten all about you by now, anyway." He grinned and went out.

  He was right; during the next couple of weeks I saw very little of Uther, then he left with troops for the north, on some expedition designed half as an exercise for his company, half as a foray in search of supplies. Cadal had guessed right about the relief this would bring me; I was not sorry to be out of Uther's range. I had the idea that he had not welcomed my presence in his brother's house, and indeed that Ambrosius' continued kindness had annoyed him quite a lot.

  I had expected to see very little of the Count after that first night when I had told him all I knew, but thereafter he sent for me on most evenings when he was free, sometimes to question me and to listen to what I could tell him of home, sometimes — when he was tired — to have me play to him, or, on several occasions, to take a hand at chess. Here, to my surprise, we were about even, and I do not think he let me beat him. He was out of practice, he told me; the usual game was dice, and he was not risking that against an infant soothsayer. Chess, being a matter of mathematics rather than magic, was less susceptible to the black arts.

  He kept his promise, and told me what I had seen that first night by the standing stone. I believe, had he told me to, I would even have dismissed it as a dream. As time went on, the memory had grown blurred and fainter, until I had begun to think it might have been a dream fostered by cold and hunger and some dim recollection of the faded picture on the Roman chest in my room at Maridunum, the kneeling bull and the man with a knife under an arch studded with stars. But when Ambrosius talked about it, I knew I had seen more than was in the painting. I had seen the soldiers' god, the Word, the Light, the Good Shepherd, the mediator between the one God and man. I had seen Mithras, who had come out of Asia a thousand years ago. He had been born, Ambrosius told me, in a cave at midwinter, while shepherds watched and a star shone; he was born of earth and light, and sprang from the rock with a torch in his left hand and a knife in his right. He killed the bull to bring life and fertility to the earth with its shed blood, and then, after his last meal of bread and wine, he was called up to heaven. He was the god of strength and gentleness, of courage and self-restraint. "The soldiers' god," said Ambrosius again, "and that is why we have reestablished his worship here — to make, as the Roman armies did, some common meeting-ground for the chiefs and petty kings of all tongues and persuasions who fight with us. About his worship I can't tell you, because it is forbidden, but you will have gathered that on that first night I and my officers had met for a ceremony of worship, and your talk about bread and wine and bull-slaying sounded very much as if you had seen more of our ceremony than we are even allowed to speak about. You will know it all one day, perhaps. Till then, be warned, and if you are asked about your vision, remember that it was only a dream. You understand?"

  I nodded, but with my mind filled, suddenly, with only one thing he had said. I thought of my mother and the Christian priests, of Galapas and the well of Myrddin, of things seen in the water and heard in the wind. "You want me to be an initiate of Mithras?"

  "A man takes power where it is offered," he said again. "You have told me you don't know what god has his hand over you; perhaps Mithras was the god in whose path you put yourself, and who brought you to me. We shall see. Meanwhile, he is still the god of armies, and we shall need his help... Now bring the harp, if you will, and sing to me."

  So he dealt with me, treating me more as a prince than I had ever been treated in my grandfather's house, where at least I had had some sort of claim to it.

  Cadal was assigned to me as my own servant. I thought at first he might resent this, as a poor substitute for serving Ambrosius, but he did not seem to mind, in fact I got the impression that he was pleased. He was soon on easy terms with me, and, since there were no other boys of my age about the place, he was my constant companion. I was also given a horse. At first they gave me one of Ambrosius' own, but after a day on that I asked shamefacedly if I might have something more my size, and was given a small stolid grey which — in my only moment of nostalgia — I called Aster.

  So the first days passed. I rode out with Cadal at my side to see the country; this was still in the grip of fros
t, and soon the frost turned to rain so that the fields were churned mud and the ways were slippery and foul, and a cold wind whistled day and night across the flats, whipping the Small Sea to white on iron-grey, and blackening the northern sides of the standing stones with wet. I looked one day for the stone with the mark of the axe, and failed to find it. But there was another where in a certain light you could see a dagger carved, and a thick stone, standing a little apart, where under the lichen and the bird droppings stared the shape of an open eye. By daylight the stones did not breathe so cold on one's nape, but there was still something there, watching, and it was not a way my pony cared to go.

  Of course I explored the town. King Budec's castle was in the center, on a rocky outcrop which had been crowned with a high wall. A stone ramp led up to the gate, which was shut and guarded. I often saw Ambrosius, or his officers, riding up this ramp, but never went myself any nearer than the guard post at the foot of it. But I saw King Budec several times, riding out with his men. His hair and his long beard were almost white, but he sat his big brown gelding like a man thirty years younger, and I heard countless stories of his prowess at arms and how he had sworn to be avenged on Vortigern for the killing of his cousin Constantius, even though it would take a lifetime. This, in fact, it threatened to do, for it seemed an almost impossible task for so poor a country to raise the kind of army that might defeat Vortigern and the Saxons, and gain a footing in Greater Britain. But soon now, men said, soon...

  Every day, whatever the weather, men drilled on the flat fields outside the town walls. Ambrosius had now, I learned, a standing army of about four thousand men. As far as Budec was concerned they earned their keep a dozen times over, since not much more than thirty miles away his borders ran with those of a young king whose eye was weather-lifted for plunder, and who was held back only by rumours of Ambrosius' growing power and the formidable reputation of his men. Budec and Ambrosius fostered the idea that the army was mainly defensive, and saw to it that Vortigern learned nothing for certain: news of preparations for invasion reached him as before only in the form of rumours, and Ambrosius' spies made sure that these sounded like rumours. What Vortigern actually believed was what Budec was at pains that he should believe, that Ambrosius and Uther had accepted their fate as exiles, had settled in Less Britain as Budec's heirs, and were concerned with keeping the borders that would one day be their own.

  This impression was fostered by the fact that the army was used as a foraging party for the town. Nothing was too simple or too rough for Ambrosius' men to undertake. Work which even my grandfather's rough-trained troops would have despised, these seasoned soldiers did as a matter of course. They brought in and stored wood in the town's yards. They dug and stored peat, and burned charcoal. They built and worked the smithies, making not only weapons of war, but tools for tilling and harvesting and building — spades, ploughshares, axes, scythes. They could break horses, and herd and drive cattle as well as butcher them; they built carts; they could pitch and mount guard over a camp in two hours flat, and strike it in one hour less. There was a corps of engineers who had half a square mile of workshops, and could supply anything from a padlock to a troop-ship. They were fitting themselves, in short, for the task of landing blindfold in a strange country and maybe living off it and moving fast across it in all weathers. "For," said Ambrosius once to his officers in front of me, "it is only to fair-weather soldiers that war is a fair-weather game. I shall fight to win, and after I have won, to hold. And Britain is a big country; compared with her, this corner of Gaul is no more than a meadow. So, gentlemen, we fight through spring and summer, but we do not retire at the first October frost to rest and sharpen our swords again for spring. We fight on — in snow, if we have to, in storm and frost and the wet mud of winter. And in all that weather and through all that time, we must eat, and fifteen thousand men must eat — well."

  Shortly after this, about a month after my arrival in Less Britain, my days of freedom ended. Ambrosius found me a tutor.

  Belasius was very different from Galapas and from the gentle drunkard Demetrius, who had been my official tutor at home. He was a man in his prime who was one of the Count's "men of business" and seemed to be concerned with the estimating and accounting side of Ambrosius' affairs; he was by training a mathematician and astronomer. He was half Gallo-Roman half Sicilian, a tallish olive-faced man with long-lidded black eyes, a melancholy expression and a cruel mouth. He had an acid tongue and a sudden, vicious temper, but he was never capricious. I soon learned that the way to dodge his sarcasms and his heavy hand was to do my work quickly and well, and since this came easily to me and I enjoyed it, we soon understood one another, and got along tolerably well.

  One afternoon towards the end of March we were working in my room in Ambrosius' house. Belasius had lodgings in the town, which he had been careful never to speak of, so I assumed he lived with some drab and was ashamed to risk my seeing her; he worked mainly in headquarters, but the offices near the treasury were always crowded with clerks and paymasters, so we held our daily tutorials in my room. This was not a large chamber, but to my eyes very well appointed, with a floor of red tiles locally made, carved fruitwood furniture, a bronze mirror, and a brazier and lamp that had come from Rome.

  Today, the lamp was lit even in the afternoon, for the day was dark and overcast. Belasius was pleased with me; we were doing mathematics, and it had been one of the days when I could forget nothing, but walked through the problems he set me as if the field of knowledge were an open meadow with a pathway leading plain across it for all to see.

  He drew the flat of his hand across the wax to erase my drawing, pushed the tablet aside, and stood up.

  "You've done well today, which is just as well, because I have to leave early."

  He reached out and struck the bell. The door opened so quickly that I knew his servant must have been waiting just outside. The boy came in with his master's cloak over his arm, and shook it out quickly to hold it for him. He did not even glance my way for permission, but watched Belasius, and I could see he was afraid of him. He was about my age, or younger, with brown hair cut close to his head in a curled cap, and grey eyes too big for his face.

  Belasius neither spoke nor glanced at him, but turned his shoulders to the cloak, and the boy reached up to fasten the clasp. Across his head Belasius said to me: "I shall tell the Count of your progress. He will be pleased."

  The expression on his face was as near a smile as he ever showed. Made bold by this, I turned on my stool. "Belasius —"

  He stopped halfway to the door. "Well?"

  "You must surely know... Please tell me. What are his plans for me?"

  "That you should work at your mathematics and your astronomy, and remember your languages."

  His tone was smooth and mechanical, but there was amusement in his eyes, so I persisted. "To become what?"

  "What do you wish to become?"

  I did not answer. He nodded, just as if I had spoken. "If he wanted you to carry a sword for him, you would be out in the square now."

  "But — to live here as I do, with you to teach me, and Cadal as my servant... I don't understand it. I should be serving him somehow, not just learning... and living like this, like a prince. I know very well that I am only alive by his grace."

  He regarded me for a moment under those long lids. Then he smiled. "It's something to remember. I believe you told him once that it was what you were, not who you were, that would matter. Believe me, he will use you, as he uses everyone. So stop wondering about it, and let it be. Now I must go."

  The boy opened the door for him to show Cadal just pausing outside, with a hand raised to knock.

  "Oh, excuse me, sir. I came to see when you'd be done for the day. I've got the horses ready, Master Merlin."

  "We've finished already," said Belasius. He paused in the doorway and looked back at me. "Where were you planning to go?"

  "North, I think, the road through the forest. The causeway's still goo
d and the road will be dry."

  He hesitated, then said, to Cadal rather than to me: "Then keep to the road, and be home before dark." He nodded, and went out, with the boy at his heels.

  "Before dark?" said Cadal. "It's been dark all day, and it's raining now, besides. Look, Merlin" — when we were alone we were less formal — "why don't we just take a look along to the engineers' workshops? You always enjoy that, and Tremorinus ought to have got that ram working by now. What do you say we stay in town?"

  I shook my head. "I'm sorry, Cadal, but I must go, rain or no rain. I've got the fidgets, or something, and I must get out."

  "Well, then, a mile or two down to the port should do you. Come on, here's your cloak. It'll be pitch black in the forest; have a bit of sense."

  "The forest," I said obstinately, turning my head while he fastened the pin. "And don't argue with me, Cadal. If you ask me, Belasius has the right ideas. His servant doesn't even dare to speak, let alone argue. I ought to treat you the same way — in fact I'll start straight away... What are you grinning at?"

  "Nothing. All right, I know when to give in. The forest it is, and if we lose ourselves and never get back alive, at least I'll have died with you, and won't have to face the Count."

  "I really can't see that he'd care overmuch."

  "Oh, he wouldn't" said Cadal, holding the door for me to go through. "It was only a manner of speaking. I doubt if he'd even notice, myself."

  7

  ONCE OUTSIDE, IT WAS NOT AS dark as it had seemed, and it was warm, one of those heavy, dull days fraught with mists, and a small rain that lay on the heavy wool of our cloaks like frost.

  About a mile to the north of the town the flattish salt-bitten turf began to give way to woodland, thin at first, with trees sticking up here and there solitary, with veils of white mist haunting their lower boughs or lying over the turf like pools, which now and then broke and swirled as a deer fled through.