"Ninian. Yes, it was."
"And you yourself saw nothing?"
"Yes," I said. "Nothing."
"So you told me. I still find that strange. Don't you?"
"I suppose so. But if you remember, I wasn't well that day. I suppose I had not fully recovered from that chill I caught."
"He's been with you — how long?"
"He came in September. That makes it, what? Nine months?"
"And you have taught him all you know?"
I smiled. "Hardly. But I have taught him a good deal. You need never lack a prophet, Arthur."
He did not smile in response. He was looking deeply troubled. He walked on across the flinty turf, with the mare's nose at his shoulder, and the hound running ahead. It was quartering the acres of furze with their loads of scented yellow blossom. Wherever it went it dislodged the tiny blue butterflies in clouds, and scattered the glossy scarlet of the ladybirds. There had been a plague of them that spring, and the furze bushes held them in their hundreds, like berries on the thorn.
Arthur was silent for a space, frowning at his thoughts. Then he came, apparently, to a sudden decision. "Do you trust him?"
"Ninian? Of course. Why not?"
"What do you know about him?"
"As much as I need to," I said, perhaps a little stiffly. "I told you how he came to me. I was certain then, and I am still certain, that it was the god who drew us together. And I could not have an apter pupil. Everything I have to teach him he is more than eager to learn. I don't have to drive him; I have to hold him back." I glanced at him. "Why I would have thought you had seen the proof of his aptitude. His vision was true."
"Oh, I don't doubt his aptitude." He spoke dryly. I caught the faintest of emphasis on the last word.
"What then? What are you trying to say?" Even I was not prepared for the degree of cold surprise in my voice.
He said quickly: "I'm sorry, Merlin. But I have to say this. I doubt his intentions toward you."
Though he had signalled the blow, it still struck with paralyzing force. I felt the blood leave my heart. I stopped and faced him. Around us the scent of the gorse rose, sweet and strong. With it, unconsciously, I recognized thyme and sorrel and the crushed fescue as the bay mare put her head down and tore at a mouthful of grass.
I am not lightly made angry, least of all by Arthur. It was only a moment or two before I could say, levelly: "Whatever you have to say, you had certainly better say now. Ninian is more than my assistant, he bids fair to be my second self. If I have ever been a staff to your hand, Arthur, he will be such another when I am dead. Whether or not you like the boy — and why should you not, you hardly know him? — you may have to accept him so. I shall not live for ever, and he has the power. He has power already, and it will grow."
"I know. That is what troubles me." He looked away from me again. I could not judge if it was because he could not face me. "Don't you see, Merlin? He has the power. It was he who had the vision. And you did not. You say you were tired, you had been ill. But when did your god ever take that into account? This was no trivial 'seeing'; it was not something that normally you would have missed. Because of it I was already there, on the borders of Rheged, when Caw died, and was able to support Gwarthegydd and prevent God knows how much trouble among those warring princes. So why did no vision come to you?"
"Must I keep repeating it? I —"
"Yes, you were ill. Why?"
Silence. A breeze came across the miles of downland, smelling of honey. Under it, through the immense stillness of the day, the grasses rustled. The mare cropped eagerly; the hound had come back to its master's feet and sat there, tongue lolling. Arthur stirred, and began to speak again, but I forestalled him.
"What are you saying?... No, don't answer. I know quite well what you are saying. That I have taken in this unknown boy, become infatuated, opened to him all the secret lore of drugs, and something of magic, and now he schemes to take my place and usurp my power. That he cannot be acquitted of using my own drugs against me. Is that it?"
Something of a smile touched his lips, though without lightening his grim look. "You never did deal in ambiguities, did you?"
"I never hid the truth, least of all from you."
"But then, my dear, you do not always see the truth."
For some reason the very gentleness of the reply touched me with foreboding. I looked at him, frowning. "I am willing to accept that. So now, since I hardly imagine that all this springs from some vague suspicion, I must assume that you know something about Ninian that I don't. If that's so, why not tell me, and let me be the judge of its importance?"
"Very well. But — " Some change in his expression made me turn and follow his gaze. He was looking past me, away beyond the shoulder of the down, where a little valley held a stream fringed with birch and willow. Beyond this rose the green hill that sheltered Applegarth. Among the willows I caught a glint of blue, and then saw Ninian, who must have been up early after all, stooping over something at the edge of the stream. He straightened, and I saw that his hands were full of greenstuff. Watercress grew there, and wild mint among the king-cups. He stood for a moment, as if sorting the plants in his hands, then jumped the stream and ran away up the far slope, with his blue cloak flying out behind him like a sail.
"Well?" I said.
"I was going to say, let's go down there. We have to talk, and there must be more comfortable ways of doing it than standing face to face on top of the world. You unnerve me still, you know, Merlin, even when I know I'm right."
"That wasn't my intention. By all means let us go down."
He tugged the mare's head up from the grass, and led the way downhill to where the little wood crowded along the stream's edge. The trees were mostly birches, with here and there a twisted trunk of alder, overgrown with bramble and honeysuckle. One birch tree lay newly fallen, clean with silver bark. The King loosed a buckle from the mare's bit, tied one end of the rein to a sapling, then left her to graze, and came back to sit beside me on the birch trunk.
He came straight to the point. "Has Ninian ever told you anything about his parentage? His home?"
"No. I never pressed him. I suspected base origins, or at any rate bastardy — he hasn't the peasant look or way of speech. But both you and I know how little those questions can be welcomed."
"I have not had your scruples. I have wondered about him since that day when I met him with you at Applegarth. Since I came home I have asked about him."
"And found out what?"
"Enough to know that he has been deceiving you from the beginning." Then, striking a fist to his knee, with a sudden violence of exasperation: "Merlin, Merlin, are you so blind? I would swear that no man could be so deceived, except that I know you... Even now, a few minutes ago, watching him down here by the stream, you saw nothing?"
"What should I see? I imagine he had been collecting alder bark. He knew we needed more, and you can see where that tree has been stripped. And he was carrying watercress."
"You see? Your eyes are good enough for that, but not to see what any other man in the world would have seen — if not straight away, then within days of meeting him! I suspected it in those first few minutes there in your courtyard, while you told me the 'true dream,' and then when I made inquiries I found that it was true. We both watched the same person running uphill just now. You saw a boy carrying watercress, but what I saw was a girl."
I cannot recall at what point during his speech I knew what he was going to tell me; before he got halfway it came like a truth already known; the heat before the lightning strikes, the silence after the lightning that is filled with the coming thunder. What the wise enchanter with his god-sent visions had not perceived, the young man, versed in the ways of women, had seen straight away. It was true. I could only marvel, dumbly, that I had been so easy to deceive. Ninian. The dim-seen figure in the mist, so like the lost boy that I had greeted her and put the words "boy" and "Ninian" into her head before she could even speak.
Told her I was Merlin; offered her the gift of my power and magic, gifts that another girl — the witch Morgause — had tried in vain to prise from me, but which I had hastened eagerly to lay at this stranger's feet.
Small wonder that she had taken time to think, to arrange her affairs, to cut her hair and change her dress and gather her courage, before coming to me at Applegarth. That she had refused to share the house, preferring the rooms off the colonnade with their separate stair; that she had taken no interest in Mora, but that the two of them were so easy together. Mora had guessed, then? I swept the thought aside as others crowded. The speed with which she had learned from me; the power, with all its suffering, already accepted with dread, with resignation, and finally with willing joy. The grave, gentle look, the gestures of a worship carefully offered, and as carefully constrained. The way she had gone from me when I spoke so lightly of women disturbing men's lives. Her swift condemnation of Guinevere, rather than of Bedwyr, for giving way to a hurtful love. Then, with quickening memory, the feel of her dark hair under my hand, the sweet bones of her face, and the grey eyes watching in the firelight, and the disturbing love that had so troubled me, and now need trouble me no more. It came to me, like the sunlight breaking through the birch trees on the forgotten bluebells of the copse where, long ago, a girl had offered me love, then mocked me for impotence, that this time no jealous god need come between us. At last I was free to give, along with all the rest of the power and effort and glory, the manhood that until now had been the god's alone. The abdication I had feared, and feared to grudge, would not be a loss, but rather a new joy gained.
I came back to the sunshine and a different birch-wood and the faded bluebells of June, to see Arthur staring.
"You don't even look surprised. Did you guess?"
"No. But I should have done; if not by any of the signs that were obvious to you, then by the way I felt... and feel now." I smiled at his look. "Oh, yes. An old fool if you like. But now I know for certain that my gods are merciful."
"Because you think you love this girl."
"Because I love her."
"I thought you were a wise man," he said.
"And because I am a wise man, I know too well that love cannot be gainsaid. It's too late, Arthur. Whatever comes of it, it is too late. It has happened. No, listen. It has all come clear now, like sunlight on water. All the prophecies I have made, things in the future that I have foreseen with dread... I see them approaching me now, and the dread has gone. I have said often enough that prophecy is a two-edged sword; the gods are delphic; their threats, like their promises of fortune, turn in men's hands." I lifted my head and looked up through the gently moving leaves. "I told you that I had seen my own end. There was a dream I had once, a vision in the flame. I saw the cave in the Welsh hillside, and the girl my mother, whose name was Niniane, and the young prince my father, lying together. Then through and over the vision I saw myself, grey-haired, and a young girl with a cloud of dark hair, and closed eyes, and I thought that she, too, was Niniane. And so she was. So she is. Do you see? If she has any part in my end, then it will be merciful."
He got to his feet so abruptly that the hound, curled there, jumped aside, ridge-backed and looking round for danger. Arthur took three steps away from me, and three back to stand in front of me. He drove one fist into the other palm with such violence that the mare, a dozen paces away, startled and then stood, ears erect, trembling. "How do you expect me to sit here and listen to you talking of your death? You told me once that you would end in a tomb, alive, you thought it would be in Bryn Myrddin. Now, I suppose, you will ask me to let you go back there so that this — this witch can leave you there entombed!"
"Not quite. You have not understood —"
"I understand as well as you do, and I think that I remember more! Have you forgotten Morgause's curse? That women's magic would snare you at the end? And what was promised you once by the Queen Ygraine, my mother? You told me what she said. That if Gorlois of Cornwall died, then she would spend the rest of her life praying to any gods there are that you would die betrayed by a woman."
"Well?" I said. "And have I not been snared? And have I not been betrayed? And this is all it is."
"Are you so sure? Forgive me for reminding you yet again that you don't know women. Remember Morgause. She tried to persuade you to teach her your magic, and when you would not, she took power another way... the way we know about. Now this girl has succeeded where Morgause failed. Tell me one thing: if she had come to you as herself, as a woman, would you have taken her in and taught her your skills?"
"I can't tell you that. Probably not. But the point is, surely, that she did not? The deception was not hers in the first instance; it was forced on her by my error, and that error in its turn was forced on me by the chance that led me first to meet and love the boy Ninian who was drowned. If you cannot see the god at work there, I am sorry."
"Yes, yes — " impatiently, " — but you have just reminded me that this is a delphic god. What you see now as a joy may be the very death you have dreaded."
"No," I said. "You must take it the other way. That a fate long dreaded can prove, in the end, merciful, like this 'betrayal.' My long nightmare of entombment in the dark, alive, may prove to be such another. But whatever it is, I cannot avoid it. What will come, will come. The god chooses the time and the form. After all these years, if I did not trust in him, I would be the fool you think me."
"So you'll go back to this girl, keep her by you, and go on teaching her your art?"
"Just that. I could hardly stop now. I have sown the seeds of power in her, and as surely as if it were a tree growing, or a child I had begotten, I cannot stop it. And the other seed has been sown, for good or ill. I love her dearly, and were she ten times an enchantress, I can only thank my god for it, and take her to me more nearly than before."
"I cannot bear to see you hurt."
"She will not hurt me."
"If she does," he said evenly, "witch or no witch, lover or no lover, I shall deal with her as she deserves. Well, it seems there is no more to be said. We had better go back. That basket looks heavy. Let me take it for you."
"No, a moment. There is one more thing."
"Yes?"
He was standing straight in front of me where I still sat on the birch log. Against the delicate boughs of the birches and the shifting of the leaves in the soft breeze he looked tall and powerful, the jewels at shoulder and belt and sword-hilt glittering as if with their own life. He looked, not young, but full of the richness of life, a man in the flower of his strength; a leader among kings. His face was contained. There was nothing to tell me what he would say, what he might do, after I had spoken.
I said slowly: "Since we have been talking of last things, there is one other thing I have to tell you. Another vision, which it is my duty to bring to you. It's something that I have seen, not once but several times. Bedwyr your friend, and Guinevere your Queen, love one another."
I had been looking away from him as I spoke, not wanting to see how the wounding stroke went home. I suppose I had expected anger, an outburst of violence, at the very least surprise and furious disbelief. Instead there was silence, a silence so drawn out that at length I looked up, to see in his face nothing of anger or even surprise, but a kind of sternly held calmness that tempered only compassion and regret.
I said, not believing it: "You knew?"
"Yes," he said, quite simply, "I know." There was a pause, while I looked for words and found none. He smiled. There was something in the smile that did not speak of youth or power at all, but of a wisdom perhaps greater, because more purely human, than is ascribed to me. "I do not have vision, Merlin, but I see what is before my eyes. And do you not think that others, who guess and whisper, have not been at pains to tell me? It sometimes seems to me that the only ones who have given no hint by-word or look have been Bedwyr and the Queen themselves."
"How long have you known this?"
"Since the Melwas af
fair."
And I had never guessed. His kindness to the Queen, her relief and growing happiness, had told me nothing. "Then why did you leave Bedwyr with her when you went north?"
"To let them have something, however little." The sun was in his eyes, making him frown. He spoke slowly. "You have just been telling me that love cannot be ruled or stopped. If you are prepared to accept love, knowing that it may well bring you to your death, then how much more should I accept this, knowing that it cannot destroy friendship or faith?"
"You believe that?"
"Why not? Everything else you have ever told me has been true. Think back now over your prophecies about my marriage, the 'white shadow' that you saw when Bedwyr and I were boys, the guenkwyvar that touched us both. You said then that it would not blur or destroy the faith we had in one another."
"I remember."
"Very well. When I married my first Guenever you warned me that the marriage might be unwholesome for me. That little girl 'unwholesome'?" He laughed, without mirth. "Well, now we know the truth of the prophecy. Now we have seen the shadow. And now we see it falling across Bedwyr's life and mine. But if it is not to destroy our faith in one another, what would you have me do? I must give Bedwyr the trust and freedom to which he is entitled. Am I a cottager, with nothing in my life but a woman and a bed I am to be jealous of, like a cock on his dunghill? I am a king, and my life is a king's; she is a queen, and childless, so her life must be less than a woman's. Is she to wait year by year in an empty bed? To walk, to ride, to take her meals with an empty place beside her? She is young, and she has a girl's needs, of companionship and of love. By your god or any god, Merlin, if, during the years of days that my work takes me from court, she is ever to take a man to her bed, should I not be thankful it is Bedwyr? And what would you have me do, or say? Anything I say to Bedwyr would eat at the root of the very trust we have, and it would avail nothing against what has already happened. Love, you tell me, cannot be gainsaid. So I keep silent, and so will you, and by that token will faith and friendship stay unbroken. And we can count her barrenness a mercy." The smile again. "So the god works for us both in twisted ways, does he not?"