Merlin's Harp (8 page)

  Whining, his hound crawled toward him.

  I said, "I will take you out of the forest."

  He never blinked. Maybe he did not know the rule I was breaking. He said, "Tell me something."

  "What do you want to know?"

  "Outside this forest, is it today, or a hundred years from now?"

  I did blink.

  "Harpers sing of men who pass a night in…such forests. When they return to earth, a hundred years have passed."

  I had never heard that good story! "Would that matter?"

  "Well. In a hundred years without me, the Saxons might have won."

  He took himself seriously, this maybe-chief. "Perhaps you would prefer to stay here?"

  "Give me the Saxons."

  I laughed, glad of my decision. He deserved to live. "I will take you out; but first you must eat."

  To allay any suspicion, I ate with him. We shared Aefa's stolen bread and cheese; but he alone ate Grand Mushroom, enough to bewilder three giants. Dizzying, he said to me, "Ask me a boon, Lady. Ask what you wish."

  "You must have enjoyed the night."

  "Ask quickly…I cannot keep awake…"

  "You have given me my boon already." (I knew not then that I spoke but the truth.)

  He tore the red-gleaming ring off his finger and pushed it down onto mine. It rolled around on my small finger, around and up and down. To save it I dropped it into my pouch with Gwen's hair and Mellias's crystal.

  The giant's aura winked and shrank. The dog saw this and whined.

  "He will do very well," I told the dog. "If you could tell what you know, I would feed you Grand Mushroom too." The man was now too mazed to hear me.

  Once in the coracle—half-stumbling, half-dragged—he slumped against the rim. His eyes slid shut. I climbed in, took up the pole and pushed off. Downriver we rode, the hound swimming behind us. In the same opening, thinning woods where Elana and I had dressed Gwen, I pulled the coracle ashore and heaved my hero to firm ground. He sprawled. His dog pattered up, shook himself, and stretched out beside him. My Human was well guarded.

  I hesitated. This was a man of real power. Suppose, when he woke, he remembered!

  Unlikely. He might remember one or more details of the night, but it would all seem like a dream. I felt sure that what he might remember could do us no harm. So I left him.

  Standing, poling upstream, I laughed aloud. There was one hero who would chase no more white deer! I laughed richly, savoring the joke, and the joy of the night just past; and that was good, for I was not to laugh again soon.

  Flocks of ducks rose, clapping their wings, before the coracle. Air was loud with bird cries, water loud with rushing, morning light beamed and sparkled. Among tall reeds my white doe drank, her little white kid at heel. "We did well, sister," I told her. "You brought me my first lover. I saved your life. Be well now, you and your children." So I blessed her, not knowing I had the true power to bless, and poled on by.

  Near my clearing I paused to lift my tunic and trousers from the overhanging branch where Aefa had hung them. For this service I would teach her the warts-off song.

  I poled on toward Apple Island, Avalon, my home. I had made a hard peace with my brother's loss and my friend's weakness. I had cast aside virginity and known deep pleasure. I felt strong, gifted, fit. I hummed a poling song.

  The river narrowed and flowed faster. Ducks thundered up before an unmanned coracle bobbing downstream.

  Two swans glided beside the boat. One on each side, they pecked at greenery that trailed over the rim. The coracle was mounded with greenery and flowers. Gods, it was a floating garden!

  Curious, I poled to intercept the drifting coracle. The boats bumped midstream. With one hand I leaned on the pole, with the other I gripped the floating garden's rim.

  Down there, under flowers, on flowers, Elana lay asleep.

  She was dressed for the dance in a bleached linen gown. Buttercups crowned her sunny brown hair that trailed on the sunny brown water. Her aura, pale already in the daylight, was a narrow, diminishing quiver of gray. "Elana? Elana!" My friend must have consumed six times the Grand Mushroom I had fed my man. When she floated past East Edge and into the kingdom, Elana would be dead.

  Lugh had left her behind. So she had left him behind, forever. She had gone farther from him than he had gone from her. And she had made sure he would not forget her. Even if Lugh never saw her floating garden, he would hear of it. Harpers would sing this tale for years to come.

  I said, "Elana. Lugh will forget you. At first he will wonder and grieve, but then he will turn back to his new life and forget. Do you think a little of Lugh's grief worth your life?" (And all the seasons ahead, Flowering Moons, babies, friends, lovers, feasts, and fasts!)

  Elana sighed.

  "Elana." My arms ached, holding both coracles still in the current. "Elana," I said, "I will forget you too. I must forget you. But I will always remember what you have shown me. Never, never, will I love any being the way you have loved Lugh!" I reached to touch her hand; my exhausted arms let the coracle slip. I muttered, "Elana, next time be born Human. You would make a much better Human."

  And in my head I heard Elana answer,
I was.

  "Elana?"

  Then I knew. Some Child Guard once leaned over a Human bed and lifted a sleeping infant away, and ran to sell it in our forest for a new shirt, or maybe a boar-tooth necklace. Or maybe the bereaved Fey mother herself came gliding out from the trees at midnight to snatch away the baby. Or maybe the Human mother, herself, bore her child secretly at a forest edge and left it there. Humans normally have warm, commanding hearts, but I have heard tales. Elana was a changeling.

  The revelation stunned me.

  I knew from Merlin's tales that Humans sometimes lay their dead in flower-cloaked coffins. Elana's boat was just such a coffin. I leaned on my pole and watched the coffin and its attendant swans ride downriver.

  Very soberly, then, I poled on home to Apple Island. Much had come to pass in a few days. But that morning, poling strongly upriver, I did not even know all that had come to pass.

  I would have been even more sober had I known that even as I tricked and trapped my human lover, the Goddess tricked and trapped me. Her power flowed into my body on the tide of his seed. Now at this moment She sat in my center, spinning her dark, holy thread like a deeply satisfied spider.

The Goddess and I were one.

When the Goddess within me announced Her dark power and presence, I pretended I did not understand. I ignored Her, and sought some other, more acceptable explanation for my bodily symptoms and my dreams. I was yet very young, not ready to sacrifice to the Goddess. So I guarded Her secret from myself until it became obvious to the world.

  Then said the Lady, "You pay your life-debt early! Well, that is good. Birthing is easy when you are young." (Birthing, easy? If that birth was easy, I never wish to see a hard one!) Naturally, she thought I had made deliberate sacrifice to the Goddess. After all, I was intelligent and well-taught. I should never have been "caught" pregnant, like an ignorant Human girl.

  But caught I was. In my excitement, at the height of my adventure, I had simply been careless. I never confessed that awful truth to a soul, nor the worse truth, that my child's Human father yet strode the green earth!

  My child! My dark, tiny boy! His skin was so soft, his smell so sweet, I wanted to eat him. His gray eyes, innocent as a fawn's, were his father's. His even-lengthed fingers and toes were mine. I bore him in a low sapling-tent near the lake, half-hoping that he would prove deformed or feeble. If he missed so much as a fingernail, I could drown him. I never expected the world to thrill and shake and reform itself at his first cry! I never expected to carry him home to the villa as the Goddess's finest gift to me, and my finest gift to Her world.

  Proud after pain, delighted after bewilderment, I brought him home and treasured him, and named him Bran. Delighted, the Lady received him.

  We laughed with him at the villa fire when every gesture, every gurgle fed laughter. We conversed brilliantly with him before he could talk. One bright morning, crawling across the Dana mosaic, Bran rose up and stood on soft feet.

  The Lady gasped and crowed. My heart rose and bloomed, a tall flower. And again we laughed.

  Bran learned to walk on the tiled villa floors where I had learned. He named his colors from the Dana mosaic where I had named them. Once walking, he followed me everywhere, reeling, falling, rolling down hillocks, scrambling among rocks. "M-Ma," he yelled constantly, like a lost lamb.

  He trapped me. I despaired of invisibility or speed. With Bran at heel I walked for all the world like a Human woman, obvious as a tree, turtle-slow. Angrily I counted the moons that must pass before he could go free in the forest, and leave me free.

  But then his cry of "M-Ma!" would tear at my heart and I would go back and pick him up, kiss him, smell his sweetness, devour him with love. So have I seen a bear cuff her cub head over heels, then embrace and nurse and kiss him.

  Bran became a fine child, brown and leggy and bright, like a red deer calf. He was never ill. (Because we Fey live alone or in very small groups, illness is rare with us. Merlin taught me later that sickness is not a God's curse, as Humans believe. It is in truth a living being, an unseen child of the Goddess, who hunts his meat as we hunt ours. But we are his meat.)

  Bran ran and learned faster than most Fey children. Earlier than most, he struck out on his own. No more did he struggle after me, calling "M-Ma!" like a lost lamb. He left me free to hunt eggs, braid reeds or invite visions. Little Bran pranced off by himself, eager, competent, nearly invisible as I had taught him to be, under the apple trees of Avalon.

  In the evening he would skip across the Dana mosaic into our courtyard, swinging a duck by the neck or a rabbit by the ears. Still he crept under my cloak, stolen long ago off an aged Human's feet, to sleep with me on a cold night.

  But I knew of the shelters Bran had built for himself around the island. Otter Mellias had shown me. (Since he never had Lugh's passion for the Human world, but only a yen for occasional adventure, the Otter spent as much time in Avalon as he did playing "Squire." He watched my son grow.)

  "He builds well," Mellias declared, proud as though the child were his own. "Back to the wind, feet dry. Look, can you see that hut in the willows?" I shook my head. Mellias had to lead me to it and place my hand on it. It looked exactly like the surrounding thicket.

  I should have rejoiced. In truth, I smiled proudly at Mellias, as though the child
were
his, but my heart sank. In truth, I felt abandoned. Bran did not really need me or my cloak at night. He came home now only from habit.

  That night he was late coming home, and I watched the door anxiously.

  The Lady said, "Let the child go, Niviene!"

  "He is so small!"

  "He is not a baby." She peered at me sharply. "Have yourself another baby."

  Watching the door, I shook my head.

  "If you do not want to sacrifice again so soon, steal one."

  That brought my eyes back to her. "Steal?"

  "Certainly. Human children often turn out quite well."

  Several nights after that Bran did not come home at all. I could not sleep. Heavy autumn rain dripped through a new hole in the roof. I pictured my little one rain-swamped, maybe sitting in an apple tree soaked through, rain and tears mixed on his small face, waiting for daylight so he could slosh home.

  Then I pictured him curled up squirrel-fashion in the tiny willow shelter Mellias had shown me or in one of several I had found myself. One leaned against a beech like a fallen branch. One humped in the lee of a big rock. Bran was most likely as safe and warm as I was myself, I thought, and I had better sleep, then go seek him in the morning. How far could a small boy go, after all? He was somewhere on the island. I turned over and felt his empty, cold space under our cloak, and wept.

  At first damp light I visited Bran's shelters. Slipping and stumbling toward home I met Mellias returning from a good night's fishing.
Bran is gone,
I signaled him.