I took my breath in painfully, and spoke again. "If you could drain this pool, King Vortigern, to find what lay beneath it —"
I stopped. The light had changed. Nobody had moved, and the air was still, but the torchlight wavered as men's hands shook. I could no longer see the King: the flames ran between us. Shadows fled across the streams and staircases of fire, and the cave was full of eyes and wings and hammering hoofs and the scarlet rush of a great dragon stooping on his prey...
A voice was shouting, high and monotonous, gasping. I could not get my breath. Pain broke through me, spreading from groin and belly like blood bursting from a wound. I could see nothing. I felt my hands knotting and stretching. My head hurt, and the rock was hard and streaming wet under my cheekbone. I had fainted, and they had seized me as I lay and were killing me: this was my blood seeping from me to spread into the pool and shore up the foundations of their rotten tower. I choked on breath like bile. My hands tore in pain at the rock, and my eyes were open, but all I could see was the whirl of banners and wings and wolves' eyes and sick mouths gaping, and the tail of a comet like a brand, and stars shooting through a rain of blood.
Pain went through me again, a hot knife into the bowels. I screamed, and suddenly my hands were free. I threw them up between me and the flashing visions and I heard my own voice calling, but could not tell what I called. In front of me the visions whirled, fractured, broke open in intolerable light, then shut again into darkness and silence.
11
I WOKE IN A ROOM SPLENDIDLY lined with embroidered hangings, where sunlight spilled through the window to lay bright oblongs on a boarded floor.
I moved cautiously, testing my limbs. I had not been hurt. There was not even a trace of headache. I was naked, softly and warmly bedded in furs, and my limbs moved without a hint of stiffness. I blinked wonderingly at the window, then turned my head to see Cadal standing beside the bed, relief spreading over his face like light after cloud.
"And about time," he said.
"Cadal! Mithras, but it's good to see you! What's happened? Where is this?"
"Vortigern's best guest chamber, that's where it is. You fixed him, young Merlin, you fixed him proper."
"Did I? I don't remember. I got the impression that they were fixing me. Do you mean they're not still planning to kill me?"
"Kill you? Stick you in a sacred cave, more like, and sacrifice virgins to you. Pity it'd be such a waste. I could use a bit of that myself."
"I'll hand them over to you. Oh, Cadal, but it is good to see you! How did you get here?"
"I'd just got back to the nunnery gate when they came for your mother. I heard them asking for her, and saying they'd got you, and were taking the pair of you off to Vortigern at cocklight next day. I spent half the night finding Marric, and the other half trying to get a decent horse — and I might as well have saved myself the pains, I had to settle for that screw you bought. Even the pace you went, I was near a day behind you by the time you'd got to Pennal. Not that I wanted to catch up till I saw which way the land lay... Well, never mind, I got here in the end — at dusk yesterday — and found the place buzzing like a hive that's been trodden on." He gave a short bark of a laugh. "It was 'Merlin this', and 'Merlin that'... they call you 'the King's prophet' already! When I said I was your servant, they couldn't shove me in here fast enough. Seems there isn't exactly a rush to look after sorcerers of your class. Can you eat something?"
"No — yes. Yes, I can. I'm hungry." I pushed myself up against the pillows. "Wait a minute, you say you got here yesterday? How long have I slept?"
"The night and the day. It's wearing on for sunset."
"The night and the day? Then it's — Cadal, what's happened to my mother? Do you know?"
"She's gone, safe away home. Don't fret yourself about her. Get your food now, while I tell you. Here."
He brought a tray on which was a bowl of steaming broth, and a dish of meat with bread and cheese and dried apricots. I could not touch the meat, but ate the rest while he talked.
"She doesn't know a thing about what they tried to do, or what happened. When she asked about you last night they told her you were here, 'royally housed, and high in the King's favour.' They told her you'd spat in the priests' eyes, in a manner of speaking, and prophesied fit to beat Solomon, and were sleeping it off, comfortable. She came to take a look at you this morning to make sure, and saw you sleeping like a baby, then she went off. I didn't get a chance to speak to her, but I saw her go. She was royally escorted, I can tell you; she'd half a troop of horse with her, and her women had litters nearly as grand as herself."
"You say I 'prophesied'? 'Spat in the priests' eyes'?" I put a hand to my head. "I wish I could remember... We were in the cave under King's Fort — they've told you about that, I suppose?" I stared at him. "What happened, Cadal?"
"You mean to tell me you don't remember?"
I shook my head. "All I know is, they were going to kill me to stop their rotten tower from falling down, and I put up a bluff. I thought if I could discredit their priests I might save my own skin, but all I ever hoped to do was to make a bit of time so that maybe I could get away."
"Aye, I heard what they were going to do. Some people are dead ignorant, you'd wonder at it." But he was watching me with the look that I remembered. "It was a funny kind of bluff, wasn't it? How did you know where to find the tunnel?"
"Oh, that. That was easy. I've been in these parts before, as a boy. I came to this very place once, years ago, with Cerdic who was my servant then, and I was following a falcon through the wood when I found that old tunnel."
"I see. Some people might call that luck — if they didn't know you, that is. I suppose you'd been right in?"
"Yes. When I first heard about the west wall cracking above, I thought it must be something to do with the old mine workings." I told him then, quickly, all that I could remember of what had happened in the cave. "The lights," I said, "the water glittering... the shouting... it wasn't like the 'seeings' I've had before — the white bull and the other things that I've sometimes seen. This was different. For one thing, it hurt far more. That must be what death is like. I suppose I did faint in the end. I don't remember being brought here at all."
"I don't know about that. When I got in to see you, you was just asleep, very deep, but quite ordinary, it seemed to me. I make no bones about it, I took a good look at you, to see if they'd hurt you, but I couldn't find any sign of it, bar a lot of scratches and grazes they said you'd got in the woods. Your clothes looked like it, too, I can tell you... But from the way you were housed here, and the way they spoke of you, I didn't think they'd dare raise a finger to you — not now. Whatever it was, a faint, or a fit or a trance, more like, you've put the wind up them proper, that you have."
"Yes, but how, exactly? Did they tell you?"
"Oh aye, they told me, the ones that could speak of it. Berric — he's the one that gave you the torch — he told me. He told me they'd all been set to cut your throat, those dirty old priests, and it seems if the King hadn't been at his wits' end, and impressed by your mother and the way the pair of you didn't seem frightened of them, he never would have waited. Oh, I heard all about it, don't worry. Berric said he'd not have given two pennies for your life back there in the hall when your mother told her story." He shot me a look. "All that rigmarole about the devil in the dark. Letting you in for this. What possessed her?"
"She thought it would help. I suppose she thought that the King had found out who my father was, and had had us dragged here to see if we had news of his plans. That's what I thought myself." I spoke thoughtfully. "And there was something else... When a place is full of superstition and fear, you get to feel it. I tell you, it was breathing goose-pimples all over me. She must have felt it, too. You might almost say she took the same line as I did, trying to face magic with magic. So she told the old tale about my being got by an incubus, with a few extra flourishes to carry it across." I grinned at him. "She did it well. I could
have believed it myself if I hadn't known otherwise. But never mind, go on. I want to know what happened in the cavern. Do you mean I talked some kind of sense?"
"Well now, I didn't mean that, exactly. Couldn't make head or tail of what Berric told me. He swore he had it nearly word for word — it seems he has ambitions to be a singer or something... Well, what he said, you just stood there staring at the water running down the walls and then you started to talk, quite ordinary to start with, to the King, as if you was explaining how the shaft had been driven into the hill and the veins mined, but then the old priest — Maugan, isn't it? — started to shout 'This is fools' talk,' or something, when suddenly you lets out a yell that fair froze the balls on them — Berric's expression, not mine, he's not used to gentlemen's service — and your eyes turned up white and you put your hands up as if you was pulling the stars out of their sockets — Berric again, he ought to be a poet — and started to prophesy."
"Yes?"
"That's what they all say. All wrapped up, it was, with eagles and wolves and lions and boars and as many other beasts as they've ever had in the arena and a few more besides, dragons and such — and going hundreds of years forward, which is safe enough, Dia knows, but Berric said it sounded, the lot of it, as true as a trumpet, and as if you'd have given odds on it with your last penny."
"I may have to," I said dryly, "if I said anything about Vortigern or my father."
"Which you did," said Cadal.
"Well, I'd better know; I'm going to have to stick by it."
"It was all dressed up, like poets' stuff, red dragons and white dragons fighting and laying the place waste, showers of blood, all that kind of thing. But it seems you gave them chapter and verse for everything that's going to happen; the white dragon of the Saxons and the red dragon of Ambrosius fighting it out, the red dragon looking not so clever to begin with, but winning in the end. Yes. Then a bear coming out of Cornwall to sweep the field clear."
"A bear? You mean the Boar, surely; that's Cornwall's badge. Hm. Then he may be still for my father after all..."
"Berric said a bear. Artos was the word... he took notice, because he wondered about it himself. But you were clear about it, he says. Artos, you called him, Arthur some name like that. You mean to tell me you don't remember a word of it?"
"Not a word."
"Well look, now, I can't remember any more, but if they start coming at you about it, you could find some way of getting them to tell you everything you said. It's quite the thing, isn't it, for prophets not to know what they were talking about? Oracles and that?"
"I believe so."
"All I mean is, if you've finished eating, and if you really feel all right, perhaps you'd better get up and dress. They're all waiting for you out there.'"
"What for? For the god's sake, they don't want more advice? Are they moving the site of the tower?"
"No. They're doing what you told them to do."
"What's that?"
"Draining the pool by a conduit. They've been working all night and day getting pumps rigged up to get the water out through the adit."
"But why? That won't make the tower any safer. In fact it might bring the whole top of the crag in. Yes, I'm finished, take it away." I pushed the tray into his hands, and threw back the bed-covers. "Cadal, are you trying to tell me I said this in my — delirium?"
"Aye. You told them to drain the pool, and at the bottom they'd find the beasts that were bringing the King's Fort down. Dragons, you said, red and white."
I sat on the edge of the bed, my head in my hands. "I remember something now... something I saw. Yes, that must be it... I did see something under the water, probably just a rock, dragon-shaped... And I remember starting to say something to the King about draining the pool... But I didn't tell them to drain it, I was saying 'Even if you drained the pool, it wouldn't help you.' At least, that's what I started to say." I dropped my hands and looked up. "You mean they're actually draining the place, thinking some water-beast is there underneath, rocking the foundations?"
"That's what you told them, Berric says."
"Berric's a poet, he's dressing it up."
"Maybe. But they're out there at it now, and the pumps have been working full blast for hours. The King's there, waiting for you.'"
I sat silent. He threw me a doubtful look, then took the tray out, and came back with towels and a silver basin of steaming water. While I washed he busied himself over a chest at the far side of the room, lifting clothes from it and shaking out the folds, while he talked over his shoulder. "You don't look worried. If they do drain that pool to the bottom, and there's nothing there —"
"There will be something there. Don't ask me what, I don't know, but if I said so... It's true, you know. The things I see this way are true. I have the Sight."
His brows shot up. "You think you're telling me news? Haven't you scared the toe-nails off me a score of times with what you say and the things you see that no one else can see?"
"You used to be scared of me, didn't you, Cadal?"
"In a way. But I'm not scared now, and I've no intention of being scared. Someone's got to look after the devil himself, as long as he wears clothes and needs food and drink. Now if you're done, young master, we'll see if these things fit you that the King sent for you."
"The King sent them?"
"Aye. Looks like the sort of stuff they think a magician ought to wear."
I went over to look. "Not long white robes with stars and moons on them, and a staff with curled snakes? Oh, really, Cadal —"
"Well, your own stuff's ruined, you've got to wear something. Come on, you'll look kind of fancy in these, and it seems to me you ought to try and impress them, the spot you're in."
I laughed. "You may be right. Let me see them. Hm, no, not the white, I'm not competing with Maugan's coven. Something dark, I think, and the black cloak. Yes, that'll do. And I'll wear the dragon brooch.'"
"I hope you do right to be so sure of yourself." Then he hesitated. "Look, I know it's all wine and worship now, but maybe we ought to make a break for it straight away, not wait to see which way the dice fall? I could steal a couple of horses —"
" 'Make a break for it'? Am I still a prisoner, then?"
"There's guards all round. Looking after you this time, not holding on to you, but by the dog, it comes to the same thing." He glanced at the window. "It'll be dusk before long. Look, I could spin some tale out there to keep them quiet, and maybe you could pretend to go to sleep again till dark —"
"No. I must stay. If I can get Vortigern to listen to me. Let me think, Cadal. You saw Marric the night we were taken. That means the news is on its way to my father, and if I'm any judge, he will move straight away. So far, lucky; the sooner the better; if he can catch Vortigern here in the West before he gets a chance to join again with Hengist... "I thought for a moment. "Now, the ship was due to sail three — no, four days ago —"
"It sailed before you left Maridunum," he said briefly.
"What?"
He smiled at my expression. "Well, what did you expect? The Count's own son and his lady hauled off like that — nobody knew for sure why, but there were stories going about, and even Marric saw the sense in getting straight back to Ambrosius with that tale. The ship sailed with the tide the same dawn; she'd be out of the estuary before you'd hardly ridden out of town."
I stood very still. I remember that he busied himself around me, draping the black cloak, surreptitiously pulling a fold to cover the dragon brooch that pinned it.
Then I drew a long breath. "That's all I needed to know. Now I know what to do. 'The King's prophet,' did you say? They speak truer than they know. What the King's prophet must do now is to take the heart out of these Saxon-loving vermin, and drive Vortigern out of this tight corner of Wales into some place where Ambrosius can smoke him out quickly and destroy him."
"You think you can do this?"
"I know I can."
"Then I hope you know how to get us both out o
f here before they find out whose side you're on!"
"Why not? As soon as I know where Vortigern is bound for, we'll take the news to my father ourselves." I settled the cloak to my shoulders, and grinned at him. "So steal those horses, Cadal, and have them waiting down by the stream. There's a tree fallen clear across the water; you can't miss the place; wait there where there's cover. I'll come. But first I must go and help Vortigern uncover the dragons."
I made for the door, but he got there ahead of me, and paused with his hand on the latch. His eyes were scared. "You really mean leave you on your own in the middle of that wolfpack?"
"I'm not on my own. Remember that; and if you can't trust me, trust what is in me. I have learned to. I've learned that the god comes when he will, and how he will, rending your flesh to get into you, and when he has done, tearing himself free as violently as he came. Afterwards — now — one feels light and hollow and like an angel flying... No, they can do nothing to me, Cadal. Don't be afraid. I have the power."
"They killed Galapas."
"Some day they may kill me," I said. "But not today. Open the door."
12
THEY WERE ALL GATHERED AT THE foot of the crag where the workmen's track met the marshy level of the corrie. I was still guarded, but this time — at least in appearance — it was a guard of honour. Four uniformed men, with their swords safely sheathed, escorted me to the King.
They had laid duckboards down on the marshy ground to make a platform, and set a chair for the King. Someone had rigged a windbreak of woven saplings and brushwood on three sides, roofed it, and draped the lot with worked rugs and dyed skins. Vortigern sat there, chin on fist, silent. There was no sign of his Queen, or indeed of any of the women. The priests stood near him, but they kept back and did not speak. His captains flanked his chair.