Merlin (2 page)

He forced himself to remain calm. "Do not," he whispered, "rise to the lure." Turning carefully about, he noted that the closest line of trees lay ahead of him rather than behind. Without another thought, he began to plunge through the high grass toward them.

What had seemed so beautiful and jewel-like moments before now proved stubborn and treacherous. He could make little time through the grass, and the sound of the dogs' bellings seemed closer and closer with each difficult step. But the cries only forced him into greater effort; he swam agonizingly, through the pinks and yellows and purples and blues that topped the green waves.

He was about twenty steps away from the safety of the trees when he heard the dogs close at his heels, no longer baying but snarling. Not being the kind of lad to give up, he kept on running, his breath coming in shorter and shorter gasps, an awful red-hot ache in his chest.

And then something burst through the grass in front of him, something shaggy and hairy and big as a bear. It reached out and grabbed him up, and though he had not the breath to scream, he screamed.

THE CREATURE TOOK FIVE STEPS
, NO more, and leaped up into an old oak, the boy now snugged under its arm. Behind it, the dogs were snarling and yelping in equal measure, but they were too late. The creature was already into the tree, scrambling upward with such quickness, it reached the third branching of the tree trunk before the pack had ringed the oak below.

All the while the boy kept screaming, a high, horrible sound that he had not known he could make. At each scream, the dogs set up an echoing wail.

The creature set the boy down next to its side and put a shaggy finger over his mouth.

"Hush ye," it said.

And the boy realized all at once that it was not in fact a creature that had rescued him, but a man. An enormous, ugly, hairy, one-eyed man. A wild man, a
wodewose.

The boy stopped screaming.

The two sat across from one another on the thick branch in silence while below, the dogs—now equally silenced—circled and circled. The boy was still hot and cold with fright; the wild man's ugly, ridged, scarred face with its bulbous nose and one blind eye did nothing to reassure him. But as the wild man made no move to harm him, the boy finally understood that the wodewose had, for whatever reasons, risked his own life to rescue him. So at last the boy relaxed. He even tried to smile at the wild man. However, the gapped grin he got in return did not help his sense of dis-ease.

The boy stared down at the circling pack and the dogs returned his stare. There were seven dogs in all, the largest a brindled mastiff, the smallest a stubby-legged rathound. None looked particularly well fed, and the ones with the heavy coats were matted with burrs. He could not tell which one was the leader of the pack, though he guessed it to be the mastiff by its size. He was startled by the liquid shine of their eyes.

Dogs
, his conscious mind told him. But as he continued to gaze down, he became mesmerized by them, and suddenly he found himself shoulder to shoulder, nose to nose with the dogs under the shadowy canopy of leaves.

Now he understood it was
not
the mastiff who led the pack, for while it had the mass, it was not particularly intelligent. The leader was a smaller, broad-chested bulldog with large, yellowing teeth.

The dogs looked at him quizzically and sniffed him over: nose, neck, legs, rear. He sniffed them back; their familiar rank smell spoke of hunger and fear/not fear. He found to his surprise that he could read each dog by its stink.

The bulldog lifted its leg against the oak, marking the tree, then turned to speak in a high tenor voice. "Take your place."

The others answered in short, sharp agreement. "Place ... place ... place."

The boy sang along with them, as if he had no ideas of his own, only the single mind of the pack. "Place!" he cried out.

As if pleased with this response, the bulldog turned its back and started off across the green meadow, the others trailing behind. Soon all the boy could see of them was the swath they had cut through the grass. He took one step after them, then another, blinked, and found himself sitting once more in the oak tree, the wild man across from him.

"Place," the boy whispered.

The wodewose shook his head. "Packs got no reason, lad," he said. "Thee must not run with them. Place be what is wrong with the world." Then he leaped from the tree and headed into the deeper woods.

"Wait!" the boy cried out.

But the wild man was gone.

HE FOLLOWED THE WODEWOSE FOR SEVERAL
hours, stopping only to gather late brambleberries to quiet the rumbling of his stomach. It was not until nearly the very end of his journey that he understood that the wild man had left him a readable trail on purpose: a broken branch here, a bit of fur caught on briar there, a scuffed footprint. As long as he looked carefully, there were signs.

He had no doubt the wild man could have gone through the woods leaving no sign at all. He had heard the stories. How the wodewose lived in the company of serpents and wolves and the mam
moth forest bulls. How their strength lay in their shaggy locks which if shorn left them pitiful and weak. How they lived on water and flesh, the water from the streams and the raw flesh of wild beasts. How like kings in their castles, they ruled a great domain, but their vassals were stag and doe, boar and sow, he-bear and she-bear, all the inhabitants of the wood.

As he remembered the tales, he lost the thread of the wild man's trail and stumbled—as if by chance—into another meadow that was small and manageable and ringed by tall beech trees. And there, in tented dwellings, like the Hebrews of old, was an entire town of wild men. And wild women. And wild children as well.

Astonished, he stood for a moment, unmoving.

It was one of the wild children who first spotted him, calling out in a high, thin voice, the accent almost masking meaning, "Look, 'ee, wha' cum'ere."

Alerted, the rest of the wild folk looked up from their chores. Some had been stretching hides, some cutting great logs, still others turning spitted meat over small cookfires. But at the child's warning—for warning it seemed to be—they stared at the intruder and cried out as with a single voice some kind of wild ululation.

Slowly, hands out to show he meant them no harm, the boy came into their midst and they all arose, ringing him round. The men were in the front, women and children behind.

He tried not to stare at them but could not help himself. They were to a man shaggy, dressed in leather skins and jackets of fur, with unkempt beards and long, straggly locks; their faces were all horribly scarred and scored as if with fire or brands. The women were more civilized looking, their hair less matted, many carefully braided. The skin clothing the women wore was decorated with feathers and quills. One woman, with bright red hair, had even plaited flowers in her hair.

The children were indistinguishable boys from girls in their deerskin clothing and unbound locks. He did not think he could tell any of them apart, except that some were more delicately featured and these he took to be girls. He was to discover later on that this was not always true.

"Where ... is ... the ... one ... who ... found ... me?" he asked, spacing his words out carefully and gesturing broadly, as if talking to an infant or to a person from another land. He was not sure if they could understand his dialect.

A babble of voices surrounded him, their language like water over stone. The children laughed, hiding their mouths behind their hands.

"They laugh at the slowness of thy tongue," came a familiar low voice.

The boy turned and saw the one-eyed wodewose.

"The children laugh at thy clothing, never having seen any like it. Thee art a strange sight to them," the wodewose continued.

The soft laughter came again.

"Never"?"

"We keep ourselves to ourselves," the wodewose said, and the adults nodded in agreement. "'Tis better that way. We who are grown have seen too much o' the world outside our woods. War and plague and the branding of those who be taking from the overfull larders of the rich to feed their own starving children. The slander of innocents, the burning of witches, the beating of women. We be having enough o' that."

There was a low murmur that ran around the circle, a dark complement to the light childish laughter.

The boy nodded.

"Best we bring thee food," the wild man said. "Thee hath made long passage to find us." He started to turn. "Come!" he said, looking over his shoulder.

The crowd broke apart to let the boy through and he followed the wodewose, needing two steps to the wild man's one. He could feel the wild folk behind him staring silently. But one small child, whose white-blond shoulder-length hair fairly glowed in the sunlight, followed right at his heels, crying out, "'Oo be thee? 'Uht be thee?" till he turned suddenly and stared down at the child. With a delighted gasp, the child scampered away and hid behind a tent.

"Do not let our Cub affright thee," the wodewose said.

The boy found that funny and he laughed out loud. "I think rather I affrighted the Cub."

"Aught affrights that one," the wodewose said, but with such affection, the boy wondered if the child were the wild man's own. "'Tis all a game for that one. Dogs, wolves, even bears. He comes home with them, one and all. They follow him and do us no harm. He be growing up a king o' these woods."

"Is that possible?" the boy asked, but in a quiet, respectful voice, because suddenly it seemed to him that with these wild folk anything was possible. Anything at all.

DINNER WAS LIKE—AND NOT LIKE—DINNERS
the boy had had before. Not only did the wild folk roast spit meat on open fires, but they cooked leeks and wild garlic, mushrooms and dark root vegetables in earthenware vessels buried in the coals. At the end of the meal there was even a pudding of wild plums flavored—so the wodewose told him—with sweet cicely. The boy had not been so full except for dining in Duke Vortigern's kitchen the one time.

"Do you always eat this way?" he asked.

"This way ... that way..." Cub said. He sat snugged up 'twixt boy and wodewose.

The wodewose laughed, his good eye closing to a slit. "In wintertide it be sparer. But we know the woods and we know where the food be. We build no stone houses for we must go where needs send. But all the forest be our place." He cuffed Cub good-naturedly; the child giggled at the soft blow and settled under the man's arm.

"Does he stay then?" asked one of the women, pointing to the boy. She had bristly black hair and something like a brand on her cheek.

A second woman, the redhead, added, "Thems that eats, works."

The women set up a babble of agreement until the wild man held up his hand. They silenced at once.

"He be abandoned in the woods," the wodewose said. "He be one of ours."

The black-haired woman spat to one side. "He be too old for abandoning. Like as not he's run off."

"Run away or thrown away," the wodewose said, "he be ours. Can thee honestly say
thee
did not run off?"

The dark-haired woman gave the wodewose an unreadable look and walked away. After a moment, the other women followed her.

The boy was uneasy with what he had just heard. "I do not mean to stay with you more than this one night," he said. "I do not intend to be a..

"A wild man?" The wodewose laughed, but this time his eye did not become a slit. "Art thee not one already?"

The boy did not answer. He had meant to say he did not intend to be a trouble to them. He feared that his trail might yet lead Fowler to this quiet camp. And if Fowler, why not Vortigern and his men? But the wodewose's question bothered him so much, he knew he would have to give it thought. Once he had, indeed, lived in the woods on his own, thrown away by someone whose face he had never been able to recall, not even in dreams. But this time he was in the woods because he had willed it himself. Was there a difference? And if there was, what should be his response to it?

"Come," the wodewose said, breaking through the boy's reverie. "I will show thee where to sleep the night."

They walked to one of the hide tents and the wild man gestured to it. "This be the tent for boys. Till thee has a name."

"But I already have a name," the boy said. "Two actually. Hawk. And Hobby." He did not give his true name, Merlin, which was another kind of hawk altogether. For some reason, it suddenly seemed important to him to keep that name hidden.

"Woods name be one thing, town name an other," said the wodewose.

The boy nodded. He had always known names were powerful, so it did not surprise him that the wild man knew it, too.

"Now, Hawk-Hobby, thee must make thy own bed. No one serves an other here. No one rules an other here. As the Greenwitch says, if thee eats with us, thee must work with us."

"What do I make the bed of?" Hawk-Hobby asked. When he had lived in the woods before, he had had no regular bed but had lain in trees for safety, a different tree each night. When he had lived at Master Robin's farm, Mag and Nell had stuffed his mattress with dried grasses and his comforter with feathers from the geese. When he had traveled with the players Ambrosius and Viviane, he had slept in a box bed in their cart. He had actually never made a bed for himself.

"Thy place, thy choice," the wodewose said, holding up the tent flap for the boy to enter. "So thee must choose with care." Then he dropped the flap and was gone.

Looking around the tent, the boy saw there were already several beds—hide pallets actually—but they were clearly spoken for. The imprint of bodies was on them and there were yew bows and arrows by the side of two of the beds, a stick dolly by another. He went over to one of the hides and put his hand inside, drawing out a bit of the bedding. It consisted of dried grasses and was musty smelling; not at all sweet, like Mag's stuffing.

The wodewose was gone and there was no one in the tent to ask, so he lifted up the flap and looked about the camp. There seemed to be only women working for the moment, and frankly they all frightened him.