"Shall we come with you?" they asked me.
I shook my head. "No. Stay and see the road cleared. In the morning, if you wish, come to the shrine. There will be a place there for you all."
The moonlit space at the forest's center was as still as a painted picture, and as unreal as a midnight dream. Moonlight edged the chapel roof and silvered the furred tops of the surrounding pines. The doorway showed an oblong of gold, where the nine lamps shone steadily round the altar. As I rode softly round to the back the door opened there, and the servant peered fearfully out. All was well, he told me; no one had been by. But his eyes stretched wide when he saw the state I was in, and he was obviously glad when I handed the bridle to him and told him to leave me. Then I went in thankfully to the firelight to tend my hurts and change my clothing. Slowly the silence seeped back. A brush of soft wind over the treetops swept the last sound of retreating hoofs away; it crept in through the chapel, thinning the lamp flames and drawing thin lines of smoke which smelled like sweet gums burning. Outside in the clearing the moon and stars poured their rare light down. The god was here. I knelt before the altar, emptying myself of mind and will, till through me I felt the full tide of God's will flowing, and bearing me with it.
The night lay silver and quiet, waiting for the torches and the trumpets.
11
They came at last. Lights and clamor and the trampling of horses flowed nearer through the forest, till the clearing was filled with flaring torchlight and excited voices. I heard them through the waking sleep of vision, dim, echoing, remote, like bells heard from the bottom of the sea. The leaders had come forward. They paused in the doorway. Voices hushed, feet shuffled. All they would see was the swept and empty chapel, deserted but for one man standing facing them across the stone altar. Round the altar the nine lamps still dealt their steady glow, showing the carved stone sword and the legend MITHRAE INVICTO, and lying across the top of the altar the sword itself, unsheathed, bare on the bare stone.
"Put out the torches," I told them. "There will be no need of them."
They obeyed me, then at my signal pressed forward into the chapel.
The place was small, the throng of men great. But the awe of the occasion prevailed; orders were given, but subdued; soft commands which might have come from priests in ritual rather than warriors recently in battle. There were no rites to follow, but somehow men kept their places; kings and nobles and kings' guards within the chapel, the press of lesser men outside in the silent clearing and overflowing into the gloom of the forest itself. There, they still had lights; the clearing was ringed with light and sound where the horses waited and men stood with torches ready; but forward under the open sky men came lightless and weaponless, as beseemed them in the presence of God and their King. And still, this one night of all the great nights, there was no priest present; the only intermediary was myself, who had been used by the driving god for thirty years, and brought at last to this place.
At length all were assembled, according to order and precedence. It was as if they had divided by arrangement, or more likely by instinct. Outside, crowding the steps, waited the little men from the hills; they do not willingly come under a roof. Inside the chapel, to my right, stood Lot, King of Lothian, with his group of friends and followers; to the left Cador, and those who went with him. There were a hundred others, perhaps more, crowded into that small and echoing space, but these two, the white Boar of Cornwall, and the red Leopard of Lothian, seemed to face one another balefully from either side of the altar, with Ector four-square and watchful at the door between them. Then Ector, with Cei behind him, brought Arthur forward, and after that I saw no one but the boy.
The chapel swam with color and the glint of jewels and gold. The air smelled cold and fragrant, of pines and water and scented smoke. The rustle and murmuring of the throng riled the air and sounded like the rustle of flames licking through a pile of fuel, taking hold...
Flames from the nine lamps, flaring and then dying; flames licking up the stone of the altar; flames running along the blade of the sword until it glowed white hot. I stretched my hands out over it, palms flat. The fire licked my robe, blazing white from sleeve and finger, but where it touched, it did not even singe. It was the icecold fire, the fire called by a word out of the dark, with the searing heat at its heart, where the sword lay. The sword lay in its flames as a jewel lies embedded in white wool. Whoso taketh this sword...The runes danced along the metal: the emeralds burned. The chapel was a dark globe with a center of fire. The blaze from the altar threw my shadow upwards, gigantic, into the vaulted roof. I heard my own voice, ringing hollow from the vault like a voice in a dream.
"Take up the sword, he who dares."
Movement, and men's voices, full of dread. Then Cador: "That is the sword. I would know it anywhere. I saw it in his hand, full of light. It is his, God witness it. I would not touch it if Merlin himself bade me."
There were cries of, "Nor I, nor I," and then, "Let the King take it up, let the High King show us Macsen's sword."
Then finally, alone, Lot's voice, gruffly: "Yes. Let him take it. I have seen, by God's death, I have seen. If it is his indeed, then God is with him, and it is not for me."
Arthur came slowly forward. Behind him the place was dim, the crowd shrunk back into darkness, the shuffle and murmur of their presence no more than the breeze in the forest trees outside. Here between us, the white light blazed and the blade shivered. The darkness flashed and sparkled, a crystal cave of vision, crowded and whirling with bright images. A white stag, collared with gold. A shooting star, dragon-shaped, and trailing fire. A king, restless and desirous, with a dragon of red gold shimmering on the wall behind him. A woman, white-robed and queenly, and behind her in the shadows a sword standing in an altar like a cross. A circle of vast linked stones standing on a windy plain with a king's grave at its center. A child, handed into my arms on a winter night. A grail, shrouded in moldering cloth, hidden in a dark vault. A young king, crowned. He looked at me through the pulse and flash of vision. For him, they were flames only, flames which might burn, or not; that was for me. He waited, not doubtful, nor blindly trusting; waiting only.
"Come," I said gently. "It is yours."
He put his hand through the white blaze of fire and the hilt slid cool into the grip for which, a hundred and a hundred years before, it had been made.
Lot was the first to kneel. I suppose he had most need. Arthur raised him, speaking without either rancour or cordiality; the words of a sovereign lord who is able to see past a present wrong to a coming good.
"I could not find it in me, Lot of Lothian, to quarrel with any man this day, least of all my sister's lord. You shall see that your doubts of me were groundless, and you and your sons after you will help me guard and hold Britain as she should be held."
To Cador he said simply: "Until I get myself another heir, Cador of Cornwall, you are he."
To Ector he spoke long and quietly, so that no man could hear save they two, and when he raised him, kissed him.
Thereafter for a long span of time he stood by the altar, as men knelt before him and swore loyalty on the hilt of the sword. To each one he spoke, directly as a boy, and grandly as a king. Between his hands, held like a cross, Caliburn shone with his own light only, but the altar with its nine dead lamps was dark.
As each man took his oath and pledged himself, he withdrew, and the chapel slowly emptied. As it grew quieter, the encircling forest filled with life and expectation and noise, where they crowded, clamorously excited now, waiting for their sworn King. They were bringing up the horses out of the wood, and the clearing filled with torchlight and trampling and the jingling of accoutrements.
Last of all Mab and the men of the hills withdrew, and save for the bodyguard ranged back against the shadowed wall, the King and I were alone.
Stiffly, for pain still locked my bones, I came round the altar till I stood before him. He was almost as tall as I. The eyes that looked back at me might ha
ve been my own.I knelt in front of him and put out my hands for his. But he cried out at that, and pulled me to my feet, and kissed me.
"You do not kneel to me. Not you."
"You are High King, and I am your servant."
"What of it? The sword was yours, and we two know it. It doesn't matter what you call yourself, my servant, cousin, father, what you will -- you are Merlin, and I'm nothing without you beside me." He laughed then, naturally, the grandeur of the occasion fitting him as easily as the hilt had fitted his hand. "What became of your state robe? Only you could have worn that dreadful old thing on such an occasion. I shall give you a robe of gold tissue, embroidered with stars, as befits your position. Will you wear it for me?"
"Not even for you."
He smiled. "Then come as you are. You'll ride down with me now, won't you?"
"Later. When you have time to look round for me, you will find that I am beside you. Listen, they are ready to take you to your place. It's time to go."
I went with him to the door. The torches still tossed flaring, though the moon had set long since and the last of the stars had died into a morning sky. Golden and tranquil, the light grew. They had brought the white stallion up to the steps. When Arthur made to mount they would not let him, but Cador and Lot and half a dozen petty kings lifted him between them to the saddle, and at last men's hopes and joy rang up into the pines in a great shout. So they raised to be king Arthur the young. I carried the nine lamps out of the chapel. Come daylight, I would take them where they now belonged, up to the caves of the hollow hills, where their gods had gone. Of the nine, all had been overturned, the oil spilled unburned along the floor. With them lay the stone bowl, shattered, and a pile of dust and crumbled fragments where the cold fire | had struck. When I swept these away, with the oil that had soaked into them, it could be seen that the carving had gone from the front of the altar. These were the fragments that I held, caked with oil. All that was left of the carving on the altar's face was the hilt of the sword, and a word.
I swept and cleaned the place and made it fair again. I moved slowly, like an old man. I still remember how my body ached, and how at length, when I knelt again, my sight blurred and darkened as if still blind with vision, or with tears.
The tears showed me the altar now, bare of the nine-fold light that had pleasured the old, small gods; bare of the soldier's sword and the name of the soldiers' god. All it held now was the hilt of the carved sword standing in the stone like a cross, and the letters still deep and distinct above it. TO HIM UNCONQUERED.
The Last Enchantment by Mary Stewart
The Last Enchantment
Copyright 2009 Mary Stewart
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, places, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
BOOK I Dunpeldyr
Not every king would care to start his reign with the wholesale massacre of children. This is what they whisper of Arthur, even though in other ways he is held up as the type itself of the noble ruler, the protector alike of high and lowly.
It is harder to kill a whisper than even a shouted calumny. Besides, in the minds of simple men, to whom the High King is the ruler of their lives, and the dispenser of all fates, Arthur would be held accountable for all that happened in his realm, evil and good alike, from a resounding victory in the battlefield to a bad rain-storm or a barren flock.
So, although a witch plotted the massacre, and another king gave the order for it, and though I myself tried to shoulder the blame, the murmur still persists: that in the first year of his reign Arthur the High King had his troops seek out and destroy some score of newly born babies in hope of catching in that bloody net one single boy-child, his bastard by incest with his half-sister Morgause.
Calumny, I have called it, and it would be good to be able to declare openly that the story is a lie. But it is not quite that. It is a lie that he ordered the slaughter; but his sin was the first cause of it, and though it would never have occurred to him to murder innocent children, it is true that he wanted his own child killed.
So it is just that some of the blame should rest on him; just, too, that some of it should cling to me. For I, Merlin, who am accounted a man of power and vision, had waited idly by while the dangerous child was engendered, and the tragic term set to the peace and freedom which Arthur could win for his people. I can bear the blame, for now I am beyond men's judgment, but Arthur is still young enough to feel the sting of the story, and be haunted by thoughts of atonement; and when it happened he was younger still, in all the first white-and-golden flush of victory and kingship, held up on the love of the people, the acclamation of the soldiers, and the blaze of mystery that surrounded the drawing of the sword from the stone.
It happened like this. King Uther Pendragon lay with his army at Luguvallium in the northern kingdom of Rheged, where he was to face a massive Saxon attack under the brothers Colgrim and Badulf, grandsons of Hengist. The young Arthur, still little more than a boy, was brought to this, his first field, by his foster-father Count Ector of Galava, who presented him to the King. Arthur had been kept in ignorance of his royal birth and parentage, and Uther, though he had kept himself informed of the boy's growth and progress, had never once seen him since he was born. This because, during the wild night of love when Uther had lain with Ygraine, then the wife of Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall and Uther's most faithful commander, the old duke himself had been killed. His death, though no fault of Uther's, weighed so heavily on the King that he swore never to claim for his own any child born of that night's guilty love. In due course
Arthur had been handed to me to rear, and this I had done, at a far remove from both King and Queen. But there had been no other son born to them, and at last King Uther, who had ailed for some time, and who knew the danger of the Saxon threat he faced at Luguvallium, was forced to send for the boy, to acknowledge him publicly as his heir and present him to the assembled nobles and petty kings.
But before he could do so, the Saxons attacked. Uther, though too sick to ride at the head of the troops, took the field in a litter, with Cador, Duke of Cornwall, in command of the right, and on the left King Coel of Rheged, with Caw of Strathclyde and other leaders from the north. Only Lot, King of Lothian and Orkney, failed to take the field. King Lot, a powerful king but a doubtful ally, held his men in reserve, to throw them into the fight where and when they should be needed. It was said that he held back deliberately in the hope that Uther's army would be destroyed, and that in the event the kingdom might fall to him. If so, his hopes were defeated. When, in the fierce fighting around the King's litter in the center of the field, young Arthur's sword broke in his hand, King Uther threw to his hand his own royal sword, and with it (as men understood it) the leadership of the kingdom. After that he lay back in his litter and watched the boy, ablaze like some comet of victory, lead an attack that put the Saxons to rout.
Afterwards, at the victory feast, Lot headed a faction of rebel lords who opposed Uther's choice of heir. At the height of the brawling, contentious feast, King Uther died, leaving the boy, with myself beside him, to face and win them over.
What happened then has become the stuff of song and story. Enough here to say that by his own kingly bearing, and through the sign sent from the god, Arthur showed himself undoubted King.
But the evil seed had already been sown. On the previous day, while he was still ignorant of his true parentage, Arthur had met Morgause
, Uther's bastard daughter, and his own half-sister. She was very lovely, and he was young, in all the flush of his first victory, so when she sent her maid for him that night he went eagerly, with no more thought of what the night's pleasure might bring but the cooling of his hot young blood and the loss of his maidenhood.
Hers, you may be sure, had been lost long ago. Nor was she innocent in other ways. She knew who Arthur was, and sinned with him knowingly, in a bid for power. Marriage, of course, she could not hope for, but a bastard born of incest might be a powerful weapon in her hand when the old King, her father, died, and the new young King took the throne.
When Arthur found what he had done, he might have added to his sin by killing her, but for my intervention. I banished her from court, bidding her take horse for York, where Uther's true-born daughter Morgan was lodged with her attendants, awaiting her marriage to the King of Lothian. Morgause, who like everyone else in those days was afraid of me, obeyed me and went, to practice her woman's spells and nourish her bastard in exile. Which she did, as you will hear, at her sister Morgan's expense.
But of that later. It would be better, now, to go back to the time when, in the breaking of a new and auspicious day, with Morgause out of mind and on her way to York, Arthur Pendragon sat in Luguvallium of Rheged, to receive homage, and the sun shone.
I was not there. I had already done homage, in the small hours between moonlight and sunrise, in the forest shrine where Arthur had lifted the sword of Maximus from the stone altar, and by that act declared himself the rightful King. Afterwards, when he, with the other princes and nobles, had gone in all the pomp and splendor of triumph, I had stayed alone in the shrine. I had a debt to pay to the gods of the place.