I shot a hand out and gripped his horse's bridle above the bit. "-- But you will do exactly as I tell you."
A silence. Then his voice, gentle and stubborn: "I shall kill him, of course."
"You will do no such thing. You will save the High King's name and hers. This is Arthur's business, not yours. Let him deal with it."
Another silence, a long one. "Very well. I will be ruled by you."
"Good." I turned my horse quietly into the cover of a clump of alder. His, perforce, followed, with me still gripping the bit. "Now wait. Look yonder."
I pointed to the northeast, the way we had come. Far away in the night across the flat marshlands a cluster of lights showed, high up, like stars. Melwas' stronghold, alight with welcome. Unless the king himself was there, home from hunting, it could only mean one thing: Arthur had come back.
Then, the sound so magnified by the water that it made us start, came the click and creak of a door opening nearby, and the soft ripple of a boat moving through the water. The sounds came from behind the house, where something invisible to us took to the water and moved away into the mist. A man's voice spoke once, softly.
Bedwyr moved sharply, and his horse flung up its head against my restraining hand. His voice was strained. "Melwas. He's seen the lights. Damn it, Merlin, he's taking her --"
"No. Wait. Listen."
Light still showed from the house. A woman's voice called something. The cry had in it some kind of entreaty, but whether of fear, or longing, or sorrow at being left alone, it was impossible to tell. The boat's sound dwindled. The house door shut.
I still held Bedwyr's bridle. "Now, go across and bring the Queen, and we will take her home."
4
Almost before I had finished speaking he was off his horse, had dropped his heavy cloak across the saddle, and was in the water, swimming like an otter for the grassy slope before the door. He reached it, and began to draw himself up from the water. I saw him check, heard a grunt of pain, a stifled gasp, an oath.
"What is it?"
He made no reply. He got a knee to the bank, then pulled himself slowly, with the aid of a hanging willow, to his feet. He paused only to shake the wet from his shoulders, then trod up the slippery slope to the house door. He went slowly, as if with difficulty. I thought he was limping. As he went, his sword came rasping from the sheath.
He hammered on the door with the hilt. The sound echoed, as if from an empty house. There was no movement; no reply. (So much, I thought sourly, for the lady who waits for rescue.)
Bedwyr hammered again. "Melwas! Open to Bedwyr of Benoic! Open in the King's name!"
There was a long pause. It could be felt that someone within the house was waiting withheld breath and beating heart. Then the door opened.
It was opened, not with a slam of defiance or bravery, but slowly, a crack only, which showed the small light of a taper, and the shadow of someone peering out. A slight figure, lissom and straight, with loose hair flowing, and a long gown of fine stuff with a creamy sheen.
Bedwyr said, and it came strangled: "Madam? Lady! Are you safe?"
"Prince Bedwyr." Her voice was breathless, but low, and apparently composed. "I thank God for you. When I heard you coming I was afraid...But then, when I knew it was you...How did you come here? How did you find me?"
"Merlin guided me."
I heard the swift intake of her breath clear from where I stood holding the horses. The taper lit the pale shape of her face as she turned her head sharply, and saw me beyond the water. "Merlin?" Then her voice was once more soft and steady. "Then I thank God again for his art. I thought no one would ever come this way."
That, I thought, I can well believe. I said aloud: "Can you make ready, madam? We have come to take you back to the King."
She did not answer me, but turned to go in, then paused, and said something to Bedwyr, too low for me to catch. He answered, and she pushed the door wide, and gestured him in after her. He went, leaving the door standing open. Inside the room I saw the pulsing ebb and flow of light that meant a fire. The room was softly lit by a lamp, and I caught glimpses through doorway and window of a room more richly furnished than any long-neglected hunting lodge could have shown, with gilded stools and scarlet cushions, and, through another half-open doorway, the corner of a bed or couch, with a coverlet thrown across a tumble of bed-linen. Melwas had prepared the nest well for her, then. My vision of firelight and supper table and the friendly game of chess had been accurate enough. The words that would tell Arthur moved and raced and re-formed in my brain. The mist smoked up round the house like white ghosts, white shadows...
Bedwyr emerged from the house. His sword was back in its sheath, and in one hand he carried a lamp; the other held a pole such as marsh-men use to push their flat-bottomed craft through the reeds. He approached the water's edge, moving cautiously. "Merlin?"
"Yes? Do you want me to swim the horses over?"
"No!" sharply. "There are knives set below the water. I had forgotten that old trick, and drove a knee straight into them."
"I thought you were limping. Are you badly hurt?"
"No. Flesh wounds only. My lady has dressed them for me."
"All the more reason why you can't swim back, then. How do you propose to get her over here? There must be some place where I can land the horses safely. Ask her."
"I have. She doesn't know. And there's no boat."
"So?" I said. "Has Melwas any gear that will float?"
"That's what I was thinking. There's sure to be something we can use; and the costlier the better." A shadow of amusement lightened the grim voice. But neither of us cared to comment on the situation across twenty feet of echoing water with Guinevere herself within earshot.
"She's dressing herself," he said shortly, as if in answer to my thought. He set the lamp down at the water's edge. We waited.
"Prince Bedwyr?"
The door opened again. She was in riding dress, and had braided her hair. Her cloak was over her arm.
Bedwyr limped up the bank. He held the cloak for her, and she drew it close and pulled the hood to cover the bright hair. He said something, then vanished indoors to reappear in a short while, carrying a table.
I suppose the next few minutes, if anyone had been in the mood to appreciate it, would have been rich in comedy, but as it was, Queen Guinevere on one side of the water, and myself on the other, stood in silence and watched Bedwyr improvising his absurd raft, then, as an afterthought, pitching a couple of cushions into it, and inviting the Queen to board it.
This she did, and they came across, an undignified progress, with the Queen crouched low, holding on to one carved and gilded table leg, while the Prince of Benoic poled the contraption erratically across the channel.
The thing came to the bank, and I caught a leg and held it. Bedwyr scrambled ashore, and turned to help the Queen. She came gracefully enough, with a little gasp of thanks, and stood shaking out her stained and crumpled cloak. Like her riding dress, it had been soaked and roughly dried. I saw that it was torn. Something pale shook from the folds and fell to the muddy turf. I stooped to pick it up. It was a chessman of white ivory. The king, broken.
She had not noticed. Bedwyr pushed the table back into the water, and took his horse's bridle from me. I handed him his cloak and said formally to the Queen, so formally that my voice sounded stiff and cold: "I am glad to see you well and safe, lady. We have had a bad day, fearing for you."
"I am sorry." Her voice was low, her face hidden from me under the hood. "I took a heavy toss when my mare fell in the forest. I -- I don't remember much after that, until I woke here, in this house..."
"And King Melwas with you?"
"Yes. Yes. He found me lying, and carried me here. I was fainting, I suppose. I don't remember. His servant tended me."
"He would have done better, perhaps, to have stayed by you till your own people came. They were searching the forest for you."
A movement of the hand that held the hood
close about her face. I thought it was trembling. "Yes, I suppose so. But this place was near, just across the water, and he was afraid for me, he said, and indeed, the boat seemed best. I could not have ridden."
Bedwyr was in the saddle. I took the Queen's arm, to help her up in front of him. With surprise -- nothing in that small composed voice had led me to suspect it -- I felt her whole body shaking. I abandoned the questioning, and said merely: "We'll take this ride easily, then. The King is back, did you know?"
I felt the shudder run through her, like an ague. She said nothing. Her body was light and slender, like a girl's, as I put her up in front of Bedwyr's saddle.
We went gently on the way back. As we neared the Island, it could be seen that the wharf was ablaze with lights, and milling with horsemen.
We were still some distance off when we saw, lit by their moving torches, a group of horsemen detach themselves from the crowd, and come at the gallop along the causeway. A man on a black horse was in the lead, pointing the way. Then they saw us. There were shouts. Soon they came up with us. In the lead now was Arthur, his white stallion black with mud to the withers. Beside him on the black horse, loud with relief and concern for the Queen, rode Melwas, King of the Summer Country.
I rode home alone. There was nothing to be gained, and too much to be lost, by confronting Arthur and Melwas now. So far, by Melwas' quick thinking in leaving the marsh house by the back way, and being present to greet Arthur as his ships put in to the wharf, the affair was saved from scandal, and Arthur would not be forced, whatever his private feelings when he found or guessed at the truth, into a hasty public quarrel with an ally. It was best left for the present.
Melwas would take them all into his firelit palace and give them food and wine, and perhaps lodge them for the night, and by morning Guinevere would have told her story -- some story -- to her husband. I could not begin to guess what the story would be. There were elements in it which she would be hard put to it to explain away; the room so carefully ready for her; the loose robe she had worn; the tumbled bed; her lies to Bedwyr and myself about Melwas. And more than all, the broken chessman and its evidence of a true dream. But all this would have to wait until, at the very least, we were off Melwas' land, and no longer surrounded by his men-at-arms. As for Bedwyr, he had said nothing, and in the future, whatever his thoughts, his love for Arthur would keep his mouth shut.
And I? Arthur was High King, and I was his chief adviser. I owed him a truth. But I would not stay tonight, to face his questions, and perhaps evade them, or parry them with lies. Later, I thought wearily, as my tired horse plodded along the shore of the Lake, I would see more clearly what to do.
I went home the long way round, without troubling the ferryman. Even if he were willing to ply so late, I did not feel equal to his gossip, or that of the troops who might be making their way back. I wanted silence, and the night, and the soft veils of the mist.
The horse, scenting home and supper, pricked his ears and stepped out. Soon we had left the sounds and lights of the Island behind us, the Tor itself no more than a black shape of night, with stars behind its shoulder. Trees loomed, hung with mist, and below them lake water lapped on the flattened shingle. The smell of water and reeds and stirred mud, the steady plod of hoofs, the ripple of the Lake, and through it all, faint and infinitely distant, but tingling like salt on the tongue, the breath of the sea-tide, turning to its ebb here at its languid limit. A bird called hoarsely, splashing somewhere, invisible. The horse shook his damp neck, and plodded on.
Silence and still air, and the calm of solitude. They drew a veil, as palpable as the mist, between the stresses of the day and the night's tranquility. The god's hand had withdrawn. No vision printed itself on the dark. About tomorrow, and my part in it, I would not think. I had been led to prevent trespass by a prophetic dream; but what "high matters" the sudden renewal of the god's power in me portended I could not tell, and was too weary to guess at. I chirruped to the horse, and he quickened his pace. The moon's edge, above a shaw of elms, showed the night black and silver. In a short half-mile we would leave the Lake shore, and make for home along the gravel of the road.
The horse stopped, so suddenly that I was jerked forward on his neck. If he had not been so far spent, he would have shied, and perhaps thrown me. As it was he balked, both forefeet thrust stiffly in front of him, jarring me to the bone.
Here the way ran along the crest of a bank that skirted the Lake. There was a sheer drop, half the height of a man, down to the water's surface. The mist lay thickly, but some movement of air -- perhaps from the tide itself -- stirred it faintly, so that it swirled and rose in peaks like cream in a tub, or flowed, itself like water, thickened and slow.
Then I heard a faint splashing, and saw what my horse had seen. A boat, being poled along a little way out from shore, and in it someone standing, balancing as delicately as a bird balances on a rocking twig. Only a glimpse I had, dim and shadowlike, of someone young-seeming and slight, in a cloak-like garment that hung to the thwarts and over the boat's edge to trail in the water. The boy stooped, and straightened again, wringing the stuff out. The mist coiled and broke round the movement, and its pallid drift reflected, briefly, the starlight. I saw his face. I felt shock thud under my heart like an arrow to its target.
"Ninian!"
He started, turned, stopped the boat expertly. The dark eyes looked enormous in the pale face.
"Yes? Who's that?"
"Merlin. Prince Merlin. Do you not remember me?" I caught at myself. Shock had made me stupid. I had forgotten that when I fell in with the goldsmith and his assistant on the road to Dunpeldyr I had been in disguise. I said quickly: "You knew me as Emrys; that is my name. Myrddin Emrys from Dyfed. There were reasons why I couldn't travel under my own name. Do you remember now?"
The boat rocked. The mist thickened and hid it, and I knew a moment's blind panic. He had gone again. Then I saw him, still there, head on one side. He thought and then spoke, taking time about it, as always.
"Merlin? The enchanter? That is who you are?"
"Yes. I am sorry if I startled you. It was a shock seeing you like this. I thought you were drowned, that time at the Cor Bridge when you went swimming in the river with the other boys. What happened?"
I thought he hesitated. "I am a good swimmer, my lord."
There was some secret here. It did not matter. Nothing mattered. I had found him. This was what the night had been moving towards. This, not the Queen's trespass, was the "high matter" towards which the power had driven me. Here was the future. The stars flashed and sparkled as once they had flashed and sparkled on the hilt of the great sword.
I leaned forward over the horse's neck, speaking urgently. "Ninian, listen. If you don't want to answer questions, I'll ask none. All right, so you ran away from slavery; that doesn't matter to me. I can protect you, so don't be afraid. I want you to come to me. As soon as I saw you first, I knew what you were; you're like me, and, by the Sight that God has given me, I think you will be capable of the same. You guessed it, too, didn't you? Will you come to me, and let me teach you? It won't be easy; you're young yet; but I was younger still when I went to my master, and you can learn it all, I know. Trust me. Will you come and serve me, and learn as much of my art as I can give you?"
This time there was no hesitation at all. It was as if the question had been asked and answered long ago. As perhaps it had. About some things there is this inevitability; they were in the stars from the last day of the Flood.
"Yes," he said, "I'll come. Give me a little time, though. There are things to -- to arrange."
I straightened. My rib-cage hurt from the long breaths I drew. "You know where I live?"
"Everyone knows."
"Then come when you can. You will be welcome." I added, softly, as much to myself as to him: "By God himself, you will be welcome."
There was no reply. When I looked again, there was nothing but the white mist with the starlight on it, bitter-white, and fro
m below, the lap of the lake water on the shore.
Even so, it took me till I got to my own house to realize the very simple truth.
When I had seen the boy Ninian, and yearned to him as to the one human being I had known who could go with me wherever I had gone, it had been years ago. How many? Nine, ten? And he had been perhaps sixteen. Between a youth of sixteen and a man in his middle twenties there is a world of change and growing: the boy I had just recognized with such a shock of joy, the face I had remembered a score of times with grief -- this could not be the same boy, even had he escaped the river all those years ago, and lived.
As I lay that night in bed, wakeful, watching the stars through the black boughs of the pear tree, as I had done when a child, I went through the scene again. The mist, the ghostly mist; the upward starlight; the voice coming as an echo from the hidden water; the face so well remembered, dreamed over these ten years; these, combining suddenly to waken a forgotten and futile hope, had deceived me.
I knew then, with tears, that the boy Ninian was truly dead, and that this encounter in the ghostly dark had only mocked my weariness with a confused and cruel dream.
5
He did not come, of course. My next visitor was a courier from Arthur, bidding me to Camelot.
Four days had passed. I had half expected to be summoned before this, but, when no word came, assumed that Arthur had not yet decided what move to make, or that he was bent on hushing the affair up, and would not force a public discussion even in council.
Normally a courier passed between us three or four times a week, and any messenger whose commission took him past my house had long since formed the habit of calling at Applegarth to see if I had a letter ready, or to answer my questions. So I had kept myself informed.
I heard that, unbelievably, Guinevere was still on Ynys Witrin, where some of her ladies had joined her as guests of the old queen. Bedwyr, too, was still lodged in Melwas' palace; the knives had been rusty, and a couple of the wounds they made had become inflamed; added to this, he had taken a chill from wet and exposure, and was ill now with fever. Some of his own men were there with him, guests in Melwas' hall. Queen Guinevere herself, so said my informant, visited him daily, and had insisted on helping his nurses.