The Last Enchantment

  "No."

  "You were right before, of course. As ever. What she wanted was power, and it did not matter to her how she took it. Or, indeed, where she looked for it. I can see that now. I can only be glad to feel myself absolved of any claim she might make on me." A small movement of his hand brushed Morgause and her plots aside. "But two things remain. The most important is that I still need Lot as an ally. You were right — again! — in not telling me of your dream. I would certainly have quarrelled with him. As it is —"

  He paused, with a lift of the shoulders. I nodded.

  "As it is you can accept Lot's marriage to your half-sister, and count it as sufficient affiance to hold him to your banner. Queen Ygraine, it seems, has acted wisely, and so has Morgan, your sister. This is, after all, the match that King Uther originally proposed. We may safely ignore the reasons for it now."

  "All the more easily," he said, "because it seems that Morgan is not ill pleased. If she had shown herself slighted... That was the second problem I spoke of. But it seems to be no problem after all. Did the Queen tell you in her letter that Morgan showed nothing but relief?"

  "Yes. And I have questioned the courier who brought the letters from York. He tells me that Urbgen of Rheged was at York for the wedding, and that Morgan hardly saw Lot for watching him."

  Urbgen was now King of Rheged, old King Coel having died soon after the battle at Luguvallium. The new king was a man in his late forties, a notable warrior, and still a vigorous and handsome man. He had been widowed two or three years ago.

  Arthur's look quickened with interest. "Urbgen of Rheged? Now that would be a match! It's the one I'd have preferred all along, but when the match was made with Lot, Urbgen's wife was still living. Urbgen, yes... Along with Maelgon of Gwynedd, he's the best fighting man in the north, and there has never been any doubt of his loyalty. Between those two, the north would be held firmly..."

  I finished it for him. "And let Lot and his queen do what they will?"

  "Exactly. Would Urbgen take her, do you think?"

  "He will count himself lucky. And I believe she will fare better than she could ever have done with the other. Depend upon it, you'll be receiving another courier soon. And that is an informed guess, not a prophecy."

  "Merlin, do you mind?"

  It was the King who asked me, a man as old and wise as myself; a man who could see past his own crowding problems, and guess what it might mean to me, to walk in dead air where once the world had been a god-filled garden.

  I thought for a little before I answered him. "I'm not sure. There have been times like this before, passive times, ebb after flood; but never when we were still on the threshold of great events. I am not used to feeling helpless, and I own that I cannot like it. But if I have learned one thing during the years when the god has been with me, it is to trust him. I am old enough now to walk tranquilly, and when I look at you I know that I have been fulfilled. Why should I grieve? I shall sit on the hilltops and watch you doing the work for me. That is the guerdon of age."

  "Age? You talk as if you were a greybeard! What are you?"

  "Old enough. I'm nearly forty."

  "Well, then, for God's sake — ?"

  And so, in laughter, we passed the narrow corner. He drew me then to the window table where my scale models of the new Caerleon stood, and plunged into a discussion of them. He did not speak of Morgause again, and I thought: I spoke of trust, what sort of trust is this? If I fail him, then I shall indeed be only a shadow and a name, and my hand on the sword of Britain was a mockery.

  When I asked leave to go to Maridunum after Twelfth Night, he gave it half absently, his mind already on the next task to hand for the morning.

  * * *

  The cave I had inherited from Galapas the hermit lay some six miles east of Maridunum, the town that guards the mouth of the River Tywy. My grandfather, the King of Dyfed, had lived there, and I, brought up as a neglected bastard in the royal household, had been allowed by a lazy tutor to run wild. I had made friends with the wise old recluse who lived in the cave on Bryn Myrddin, a hill sacred to the sky-god Myrddin, he of the light and the wild air. Galapas had died long ago, but in time I made the place home, and the folk still came to visit Myrddin's healing spring, and to receive treatment and remedies from me. Soon my skill as a doctor surpassed even the old man's, and with it my reputation for the power that men call magic, so now the place was known familiarly as Merlin's Hill. I believe that the simpler folk even thought that I was Myrddin himself, the guardian of the spring.

  There is a mill set on the Tywy, just where the track for Bryn Myrddin leaves the road. When I reached it I found that a barge had come up-river, and was moored there. Its great bay horse grazed where it could on the winter herbage, while a young man unloaded sacks onto the wharf. He worked single-handed; the barge master must be withindoors slaking his thirst; but it was only one man's job to lift the half-score of grain sacks that had been sent up for grinding from some winter store. A child of perhaps five years old trotted to and fro, hindering the work, and talking ceaselessly in a weird mixture of Welsh and some other tongue familiar but so distorted — and lisping besides — that I could not catch it. Then the young man answered in the same tongue, and I recognized it, and him. I drew rein.

  "Stilicho!" I called. As he set the sack down and turned, I added in his own tongue: "I should have let you know, but time was short, and I hardly expected to be here so soon. How are you?"

  "My lord!" He stood amazed for a moment, then came running across the weedy yard to the road's edge, wiped his hands down his breeches, reached for my hand, and kissed it. I saw tears in his eyes, and was touched. He was a Sicilian who had been my slave on my travels abroad. In Constantinople I had freed him, but he had chosen to stay with me and return to Britain, and had been my servant while I had lived on Bryn Myrddin. When I went north he married the miller's daughter, Mai, and moved down the valley to live at the mill.

  He was bidding me welcome, talking in the same excited, broken tongue as the child. What Welsh he had learned seemed to have deserted him for the moment. The child came up and stood, finger in mouth, staring.

  "Yours?" I asked him. "He's a fine boy."

  "My eldest," he said with pride. "They are all boys."

  "All?" I asked, raising a brow at him.

  "Only three," he said, with the limpid look I remembered, "and another soon."

  I laughed and congratulated him, and hoped for another strong boy. These Sicilians breed like mice, and at least he would not, like his own father, be forced to sell children into slavery to buy food for the rest. Mai was the miller's only daughter, and would have a fat patrimony.

  Had already, I found. The miller had died two years back; he had suffered from the stone, and would take neither care nor medicine. Now he was gone, and Stilicho was miller in his stead.

  "But your home is cared for, my lord. Either I or the lad who works for me ride up every day to make sure all is well. There's no fear that anyone would dare go inside; you'll find your things just as you left them, and the place clean and aired... but of course there'll be no food there. So if you were wanting to go up there now..." He hesitated. I could see he was afraid of presuming. "Will you not honour us, lord, by sleeping here for tonight? It'll be cold up yonder, and damp with it, for all that we've had the brazier lit every week through the winter, like you told me, to keep the books sweet. Let you stay here, my lord, and the lad will ride up now to light the brazier, and in the morning Mai and I can go up —"

  "It's good of you," I said, "but I shan't feel the cold, and perhaps I can get the fires going myself... more quickly, even, than your lad, perhaps?" I smiled at his expression; he had not forgotten some of the things he had seen when he served the enchanter. "So thank you, but I'll not trouble Mai, except perhaps for some food? If I might rest here for a while, and talk to you, and see your family, then ride up into the hill before dark? I can carry all I shall need until tomorrow."

  "Of cours
e, of course... I'll tell Mai. She'll be honoured... delighted..." I had already caught a glimpse of a pale face and wide eyes at a window. She would be delighted, I knew, when the awesome Prince Merlin rode away again; but I was tired from the long ride, and had, besides, smelled the savoury stew cooking, which no doubt could easily be made to go one further. So much, indeed, Stilicho was naively explaining: "There's a fat fowl on the boil now, so all will be well. Come you in, and warm yourself, and rest till suppertime. Bran will see to your horse, while I get the last sacks off the barge, and it away back to town. So come your ways, lord, and welcome back to Bryn Myrddin."

  * * *

  Of all the many times I had ridden up the high valleyside toward my home on Bryn Myrddin, I do not quite know why I should remember this one so clearly. There was nothing special to mark it; it was a home-coming, no more.

  But up to this moment, so much later, when I write of it, every detail of that ride remains vivid. The hollow sound of the horse's hoofs on the iron ground of winter; the crunch of leaves underfoot, and snap of brittle twigs; the flight of a woodcock and the clap of a startled pigeon. Then the sun, falling ripe and level as it does just before candle-time, lighting the fallen oak-leaves where they lay in shadow, edged with rime like powdered diamond; the holly boughs rattling and ringing with the birds I disturbed from feeding on the fruit; the smell of damp juniper as my horse pushed through; the sight of a single spray of whin flowers struck to gold by the sunlight, with the night's frost already crisping the ground and making the air pure and thin as chiming crystal.

  I stabled my horse in the shed below the cliff, and climbed the path to the little alp of turf before the cave. And there was the cave itself, with silence, and the familiar scents, and the still air stirring only to the faint movement of velvet on velvet, where the bats in the high lantern of the rock heard my familiar step, and stayed where they were, waiting for the dark.

  Stilicho had told me the truth; the place was well cared for, dry and aired, and though it was colder by a cloak's thickness even than the frosty air outside, that would soon mend. The brazier stood ready for kindling, and fresh dry logs were set on the open hearth near the cave's entrance. There was tinder and flint on the usual shelf; in the past I had rarely troubled to use them, but this time I took them down, and soon had a flame going. It may be that, remembering a former, tragic home-coming, I was half-afraid to test (even in this tranquil after-time) the least of my powers; but I believe that the decision was made through caution rather than through fear. If I still had power to call on, I would save it for greater things than the making of a flame to warm me. It is easier to call the storm from the empty sky than to manipulate the heart of a man; and soon, if my bones did not lie to me, I should be needing all the power I could muster, to pit against a woman; and this is harder to do than anything concerning men, as air is harder to see than a mountain.

  So I lit the brazier in my sleeping chamber, and kindled the logs at the doorway, then unpacked my saddlebags and went out with the pitcher to draw water from the spring. This trickled out of a ferny rock beside the cave mouth, and lisped through the hanging lace of rime, to drip into a round stone basin. Above it, among the mosses, and crowned with icy glitter, stood the image of the god Myrddin, who keeps the roads of the sky. I poured a libation to him, then went in to look to my books and medicines.

  Nothing had taken harm. Even the jars of herbs, sealed and tied as I had taught Stilicho to do it, seemed fresh and good. I uncovered the great harp that stood at the back of the cave, and carried it near the fire to tune it. Then, having made my bed ready, I mulled some wine and drank it, sitting by the leaping fire of logs. Finally, I unwrapped the small knee-harp that had been with me on all my travels, and carried it back to its place in the crystal cave. This was a small inner cave, with its opening set high in the rear wall of the main cavern, and so placed behind a jut of rock that in the normal way the shadows hid it from sight. When I was a boy it had been my gate of vision. Here, in the inner silence of the hill, folded deep in darkness and in solitude, no sense could play except the eye of the mind, and no sound come.

  Except, as now, the murmur of the harp as I set it down. It was the one I had made as a boy, so finely strung that the very air could set it whispering. The sounds were weird and sometimes beautiful, but somehow outside the run of music as we know it, as the song of the grey seal on the rocks is beautiful, but is the sound of the wind and the waves rather than of a beast. The harp sang to itself as I set it down, with a kind of slumbrous humming, like a cat purring to be back on its own hearthstone.

  "Rest you there," I told it, and at the sound of my voice running round the crystal walls it hummed again.

  I went back to the bright fire, and the stars gemming the black sky outside. I lifted the great harp to me and — hesitating at first, and then more easily — made music.

  Rest you here, enchanter, while the light fades,

  Vision narrows, and the far

  Sky-edge is gone with the sun.

  Be content with the small spark

  Of the coal, the smell

  Of food, and the breath

  Of frost beyond the shut door.

  Home is here, and familiar things;

  A cup, a wooden bowl, a blanket,

  Prayer, a gift for the god, and sleep.

  (And music, says the harp,

  And music.)

  6

  WITH THE SPRING CAME, INEVITABLY, trouble. Colgrim, sniffing his way cautiously back along the eastern coasts, landed within the old federated territories, and set about raising a new force to replace the one defeated at Luguvallium and the Glein.

  I was back in Caerleon by that time, busy with Arthur's plans for the establishment there of his new mobile cavalry force.

  The idea, though startling, was not altogether new. With Saxon Federates already settled, and by treaty, in the south-eastern districts of the island, and with the whole eastern seaboard continually at risk, it was impossible to set up and effectively maintain a fixed line of defense. There were, of course, certain defensive ramparts already in existence, of which Ambrosius' Wall was the greatest. (I omit Hadrian's Great Wall here; it was never a purely defensive structure, and had been, even in the Emperor Macsen's time, impossible to keep. Now it was breached in a score of places; and besides, the enemy was no longer the Celt from the wild country to the north; he came from the sea. Or he was already, as I have explained, within the gates of southeast Britain.) The others Arthur set himself to extend and refurbish, notably the Black Dyke of Northumbria, which protects Rheged and Strathclyde, and the other Wall that the Romans originally built across the high chalk downlands south of the Sarum plain. The King planned to extend this wall northward. The roads through it were to be left open, but could be shut fast if any attempt was made by the enemy to move toward the Summer Country to the west. Other defensive works were planned, soon to be under way. Meanwhile, all the King could hope to do was fortify and man certain key positions, establish signal stations between these, and keep open the communicating roads. The Kings and chiefs of the British would keep each his own territory, while the High King's work would be to maintain a fighting force that could be taken at need to help any of them, or be thrown into whatever breach was made in our defenses. It was the old plan with which Rome had successfully defended her province for some time before the withdrawal of the legions: the Count of the Saxon Shore had commanded just such a mobile force, and indeed Ambrosius, more recently, had done the same.

  But Arthur planned to go further. "Caesar-speed," as he saw it, could be made ten times as speedy if the whole force were mounted. Nowadays, when one sees cavalry troops daily on the roads and in the parade grounds, this seems a normal enough thing; but then, when he first thought of it and put it to me, it came with all the force of the surprise attack he hoped to achieve with it. It would take time, of course; the beginnings, perforce, would be modest. Until enough of the troops were trained to fight from horseback, it wo
uld have to be a smallish, picked force drawn from among the officers and his own friends. This granted, the plan was feasible. But no such plan could be put into being without the right horses, and of these we could command relatively few. The cobby little native beasts, though hardy, were neither speedy enough nor big enough to carry an armed man into battle.

  We talked it over for days and nights, going into every detail, before Arthur would put the idea before his commanders. There are those — the best, too, often among them — who are opposed to any kind of change; and unless every argument can be met, the waverers are drawn to cast with the noes. Between them Arthur and Cador, along with Gwilim of Dyfed and Ynyr from Caer Guent, hammered the thing out over the map tables. I could contribute little to the war-talk, but I did solve the problem of the horses.

  There is a race of horses that are said to be the best in the world. Certainly they are the most beautiful. I had seen them in the East, where the men of the desert prize them more than their gold or their women; but they could be found, I knew, nearer than that. The Romans had brought some of these creatures back from North Africa into Iberia, where they had interbred with the thicker-bodied horses from Europe. The result was a splendid animal, fast and fiery, but strong with it, and supple, and biddable as a war-horse should be. If Arthur would send across to see what might be bought, then as soon as the weather would allow safe transportation, the makings of a mounted force could be his by the following summer.

  So when I got back to Caerleon in the spring, it was to put in motion the building of big new stable-blocks, while Bedwyr was dispatched overseas to do the horse-trading.

  Caerleon was already transformed. Work on the fortress itself had gone quickly and well, and now other buildings were springing up nearby, of sufficient comfort and grandeur to grace a temporary capital. Though Arthur would use the commandant's house inside the walls as battle headquarters, another house (which the folk called "the palace") was being built outside, in the lovely curve of the Isca River, by the Roman bridge. When finished this would be a large house, with several courtyards for guests and their servants. It was well built, of stone and brickwork, with painted plaster and carved pillars at the doors. Its roof was gilded, like that of the new Christian church, which was on the site of the old Mithras temple. Between these two buildings and the parade ground to the west of them, houses and shops were springing up, making a bustling township where before there had only been a small village settlement. The folk, proud of Arthur's choice of Caerleon, and willing to ignore the reasons for it, worked with a will to make the place worthy of a new reign, and a king who would bring peace.