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 tranquillity. 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 chirrupped 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 from 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.
Another fragment of information I gathered for myself. The Queen's merlin had been found dead, hanging from its jesses in a high tree, near the place where Bedwyr had dragged the channel.
On the fifth day the summons came, a letter bidding me to confer with the High King about the new council hall, which had been finished while he was in Gwynedd. I saddled up and left immediately for Camelot.
Arthur was waiting for me on the western terrace of the palace. This was a wide paved walk, with formal garden beds wherein some of the Queen's roses bloomed, and pansies and the pretty summer flowers. Now, in the chilly spring afternoon, the only colour came from the daffodils, and the pale dwindling heads of the fair-maids.
Arthur stood by the terrace wall, looking out toward the distant, shining line that was the edge of the open sea. He did not turn to greet me, but waited until I was beside him. Then he glanced to make sure that the servant who had brought me to him had gone, and said abruptly:
"You will have guessed that it's nothing to do with the council hall. That was for the secretaries. I want to talk with you privately."
"Melwas?"
"Of course." He swung round with his back to the parapet, half leaning against it. He regarded me frowningly. "You were with Bedwyr when he found the Queen, and when he brought her back to Ynys Witrin. I saw you there, but when I turned to find you, you had gone. I am told, moreover, that it was you who told Bedwyr where to find her. If you knew anything about this affair that I do not, then why did you not wait and speak with me then?"
"There was nothing I could have told you then that would not have stirred up trouble that you could well do without. What was needed was time. Time for the Queen to rest; for you to talk with her; time to allay men's fears, not inflame them. Which you seem to have done. I am told that Bedwyr and the Queen are still on Ynys Witrin."
"Yes. Bedwyr is ill. He took straight to bed with a chill, and by morning was in a fever."
"So I heard. I blame myself. I should have stayed to dress those cuts. Have you talked with him?"
"No. He was not fit."
"And the Queen?"
"Is well."
"But not yet ready to make the journey home?"
"No," he said shortly. He turned away again, looking towards the distant gleam of the sea.
"I take it that Melwas must have offered some sort of explanation?" I said at length.
I expected the question to strike some kind of spark, but he merely looked tired, grey in a grey afternoon.
"Oh, yes. I talked with Melwas. He told me what had happened. He was fowling in the marshes, himself with one servant, a man called Berin. They had taken their boat into the edge of the forest, up the river that you saw. He heard the commotion in the forest, and then saw the Queen's mare plunge and slide in the mud of the bank. The Queen was thrown clear into the water. Her own people were nowhere to be seen. The two men rowed to her and pulled her out. She was unconscious as if she had struck her head in the fall. While they were doing this they heard her people go by at some distance, without coming near the river." A pause. "No doubt at this point Melwas should have sent his man after them, but he was on foot and they were mounted, and besides, the Queen was drenched and fainting, and very cold, and could hardly have been carried home, except by boat. So Melwas had the servant row to his lodge, and make a fire. He had food there, and wine. He had expected to go there himself to pass the night, so the place was ready."
"That was fortunate."
I kept the dryness from my voice, but he gave me a flick of a glance, sharp as a dagger. "Indeed. After a while she began to recover. He sent the servant with the boat to Ynys Witrin to bring help, and women to tend her, with either horses and a litter, or else a barge that could carry her in comfort. But before he had gone far the man returned to say that my sails were in sight, and that it looked as if I would land with the tide. Melwas judged it best to set off at once himself for the wharf to meet me, as his duty was, and to give me the news of her safety."
"Leaving her behind," I said neutrally.
"Leaving her behind. The only craft he had was the light skin boat that he used for his fowling trips. It was not fit for her — certainly not in the state she was in. You must have seen that for yourself. When Bedwyr brought her to me, she could do nothing but weep and shiver. I had to let the women take her straight away and put her to bed."
He pushed himself away from the parapet, and, turning aside, took half a dozen rapid steps away and back again. He broke off a sprig of rosemary, and pulled it to and fro in his hands. I could smell its peppery, pungent scent from where I stood. I said nothing. After a while he stopped pacing and stood, feet apart, watching me, but still pulling the rosemary in and out between his fingers.
"So that is the story."
"I see." I regarded him thoughtfully. "And so you spent the night as Melwas' guest, and Bedwyr is still there, and the Queen is lodged there as well... until when?"
"I shall send for her tomorrow."
"And today you sent for me. Why? It seems that the affair is settled, and your decisions have been made."
"You must know very well why I sent for you." His voice had a sudden rough edge to it that belied his previous calm. "What do you know that 'would have stirred up trouble' if you had spoken to me that night? If you have something to say to me, Merlin, say it."
"Very well. But tell me first, have you spoken with the Queen at all?"
A lift of the brows. "What do you think? A man who has been away from his wife for the best part of a month? And a wife who was in need of comfort."
"But if she was ill, being nursed by the women —"
"She was not ill. She was tired, and distressed, and she was very frightened."
I thought of Guinevere's composed, quiet voice, the careful poise, the shaking body.
"Not of my coming." He spoke sharply, answerin
g what I had not said. "She feared Melwas, and she fears you. Are you surprised? Most people do. But she does not fear me. Why should she? I love her. But she was afraid that some evil tongue might poison me with lies... So until I went to her, and listened to her story, she could not rest."
"She was afraid of Melwas? Why? Was her story not the same as his?"
This time he did answer the implication. He sent the mangled sprig of rosemary spinning out over the terrace wall. "Merlin." It came quietly, but with a kind of hard-held finality. "Merlin, you do not have to tell me that Melwas lied to me, and that this was a rape. If Guinevere had been so badly hurt when she fell that she lay fainting for most of the day, then she could hardly have ridden home with you, or been as whole and sound as she was when I lay with her that night. She had sustained no hurt at all. Nothing but fear."
"She told you that his story was a lie?"
"Yes."
If Guinevere had told him a different tale, I thought I knew what she had not made clear. I said slowly: "When she spoke with Bedwyr and myself, her story was the same as Melwas'. Now you say that the Queen herself told you it was a rape?"
"Yes." His brows twitched together. "You don't believe either story, do you? Is that what you are trying to tell me? You think — by God, Merlin, just what do you think?"
"I don't yet know the Queen's story. Tell me what she said."
He was so angry that I thought he would leave me then and there. But after a turn or two along the terrace he came back to where I waited. He had almost the air of a man approaching single combat.
"Very well. You are my counsellor, after all, and it seems I shall be in need of counsel." He drew in his breath. The story came in brief, expressionless sentences. "This is what she says. She did not take a fall at all. She saw her falcon stoop, and catch its jesses in a tree. She stopped her mare, and dismounted. Then she saw Melwas, in his boat by the bank. She called to him for help. He came up the bank to her, but did nothing about the merlin. He started to talk to her of love; how he had loved her since the time they had travelled up from Wales together. He would not listen when she tried to stop him, and when she made to mount again he took hold of her, and in the straggle the mare broke free and bolted. The Queen tried to call out for her people, but he put a hand over her mouth, and threw her down into the boat. The servant thrust it off from the bank, and rowed them away. The man was afraid, she says, and made some sort of protest, but he did as Melwas bade him. He took her to the lodge. It was all ready, as if he expected her... or some other woman. You saw it. Was it not so?"