Merlin's Mirror (8 page)

“Thereafter, when the child is born, you must take him, telling the King that he will be in danger, for there are those who want their ruler to have no true heir. And you must hide the child carefully, as a fosterling, with a lord to the north, one Ector. Let that one believe that you have fathered the babe. For he is one who knows of the Old Race and you shall give to him the sign of recognition. In his veins, though much thinned by time and many
generations, is a portion of our blood and like will greet like.

“Be ready when the King’s messenger comes, that you may do this thing. For this child shall be the hope of your land, and our hope also. Only when a king of our kin reigns here in peace will the bonds be strong enough to bring about our return.”

“When shall this happen?” Myrddin dared to ask.

“With the coming of spring. Use now your powers of illusion, work with them day after day, until you can use them as easily as a well-trained warrior can wield his sword. For such are your weapons and only by them can you fashion what we must have.”

So Myrddin woke from the dreamy acceptance of passing days, one so like another that he could not have said that was yesterday, this is today, this tomorrow. And he flexed his powers as a fighter flexes his muscles before a contest.

He created his illusions on the nearby hillside, making them as lifelike as he could. One day he had a dark and foreboding forest around the entrance to the cave. The next he banished the darkness to lay down a fair meadow in which the flowers of early summer swayed beneath the caress of the wind. Then he fashioned people. Nyren walked there, his war cloak swept back, the chain mail rings of bronze sewn on his leather jerkin, shining brightly. He smiled as he came, raising his hand in friendly salute.

The struggle to hold such an image so that it did not appear as a shadow but as a living thing was the hardest task Myrddin had yet to learn. It tired him more than had his ordeal of raising the King Stone in the Western Isle. But the more he used that power, the more his strength grew, the more solid and lifelike became his illusions. Yet he could not be sure that he could hold them as well for others as he was able to do for himself.

Then he used Vran, who fluttered back to him as the spring advanced. He pictured a sheep butchered and skinned on the ground and the raven, with an ear-splitting shriek, settled on it, strove to tear the flesh. Then, giving a honk of surprise, the raven wheeled upward again when the sheep faded into a bush.

Daily Myrddin tested and wrought his illusions until the morning when, climbing to his point of vision, he at last saw smoke rising from the destroyed clan house. Waiting
only to take up the bark-wrapped sword, he strode quickly down the faint path he had never wanted to travel again, to see through the gap of the smashed outer gate the men who stood by the signal fire. One of them he knew—Credoc, Uther’s own shield man. That he should be sent on such an errand made Uther’s great desire obvious. And Myrddin realized that the time had come of which the voice had warned him.

He knew that to these men in their rich cloaks, their fine linen tunics, their wealth and ornaments, he must look like a beggar of the wilds, a woodwose or some strange thing out of the hill legends. But he came proudly, knowing that only he could foster the King’s desire, even though he would do it by trickery.

“You are Myrddin?” Credoc’s disdain was plain to read.

“I am. And the High King wishes my services,” Myrddin answered composedly. “The life in the hills, my lord, is not a soft one.”

“So it would seem!” Credoc did not quite sneer openly, but his eyes and tone condemned what he saw, though Myrddin cared nothing for that.

But he was more suitably clad, in fresh tunic, cloak and trousers of clan check when he rode into the King’s city. Years of neglect, other years of Saxon raiding, had done much to reduce to ruin what had once been a goodly port. But certain buildings had been repaired and the largest of these was snug-walled. It even had a look of splendor on the inside, where hangings of needlework covered most of the deficiencies.

Myrddin was taken to an inner chamber. Uther sat on the end of a bed whose tumbled coverings had not yet been straightened, as if the ruler had just risen from sleep, though the morning was well advanced.

“Ho, prophet.” Uther drank from a silver-mounted horn cup and then passed that to a waiting boy, signaling him to refill it from a jar of foreign wine. “You spoke the truth on the day of our last meeting. I have indeed found a use for you. And if you serve me well in this, you may name your own reward. You,” he said, turning on the others in the chamber, “get you hence, all of you. I would speak in private to this prophet.”

“Lord King, he is a self-confessed dealer in magic,” Credoc protested.

“I care not! Such magic as he has wrought to my knowing
has been for the good of this land. Not notably so, of course, but at least to no one’s hurt. Now leave me.”

They obeyed, with visible reluctance. But the High King waited until they had gone before he spoke, and then only in a low voice which would not carry to the walls of the chamber.

“Myrddin, you dealt once in illusion, as you told my brother. Saying that men see what they want to see. Have women also this failing?”

“It is my belief that they do, Lord King.”

Uther nodded vigorously. He was smiling, taking small sips from the refilled horn. “Then I wish you to create an illusion for me, prophet Lately was I crowned here before the host of those who have long followed me. And not the least of those lords is Goloris out of Cornwall. But he is a man of age, still sturdy enough to answer the war horn most likely, but yet not one to satisfy a young wife as he should. And he has such a wife, the Lady Igrene, near a daughter to him by years. This lady—she is the fairest I have ever seen. Though I have bedded many women—and all of them came to me willingly enough—yet never have I seen her like! When I tried to speak her fair she would have none of me, but rather tattled to her lord so that he most rudely withdrew from my court, saying no farewells, in such a manner as to put shame on me!” Now Uther’s face flushed and he spoke with his lips tight against his teeth in anger.

“No man or woman shall so shame the High King, that others may titter behind their hands! I have already sent my guard into Cornwall to make that plain to Duke Goloris. But his lady—aye, that is another matter. I would hold her within my arms so that she may know how a king can love. The Duke has been enticed from his stronghold but the lady is safe, he deems, within. Now tell me, prophet, how can I come to her bower or she to my chamber?”

“You spoke of illusions, Lord King. There could perhaps be woven an illusion so secure—for perhaps the space of a night—that the lady would think her lord had returned to comfort her. Yet it would only be the outer semblance of the Duke. . . .”

Uther threw back his head to utter a roar of laughter. He was, Myrddin saw, well heated with the wine. “A famous jest, prophet! And one which pleases me. You swear this can be done?”

“For a short time, Lord King. And we would have to be close to the Duke’s hold. . . .”

“No matter!” Uther waved his hand. “In my stable are the fleetest horses in this land. If need be we can run the hearts out of them.”

As the High King commanded, so might it be done. Myrddin found himself clinging to the back of a larger steed than he had ever known, riding at a reckless pace through the twilight; they passed on even through the night, for the moon swung high enough to give them wan light. He did not consider the good or ill of what he would do, but rather what could come of this if he was successful. Another Sky Son would be born, one like himself, always in half exile in this land. And at that he knew joy, for he had learned the bitterness of loneliness throughout his years.

Let the child be born and taken to Ector—then perhaps he himself would be free. He longed as fiercely for that freedom as any slave wished his chains to be loosed.

Thus in three days they came to a fortress by the sea and found hiding places in a copse. Myrddin pushed forward alone to look down on the keep Uther wished to invade and, in the silence of the spot on which he sheltered, he began to ready his powers for the greatest feat of illusion he had ever tried.

8.

The night was cold, unusually chill for Beltane Eve. There was a crisp wind off the sea, whose thunder-break of waves Myrddin could hear even through the thick walls of the fortress. He himself was feverish as if some rheum of winter troubled him as he crept along the passage, unsure of his powers even yet.

Uther and his men slept back in that bidden camp. It had been easy enough to introduce the herb powder into their single bottle of heather mead, for the strong flavor of the drink covered the lighter taste of the sleep herb. And he had implanted the illusion dream in Uther’s mind with all the skill the mirror had taught him.

But now he traversed passages where twice he had to raise screens of illusion to distort sight and leave him free. The strain was telling on him. In the chamber ahead . . . He paused within hand-touching distance of the curtain that cloaked its entrance, began once more to create his dream weaving.

When it was as strong as he could summon, he drew a deep breath and walked forward, lifting the right edge of the curtain and stepping boldly through. If he worked his magic correctly, the woman within would see only what she looked to see, the unexpected return of her lord.

In his hand was the tiny packet holding the rest of the sleep draft. Get her to swallow that on some pretext and his task was done.

A lamp of the old Roman design flickered beside a bed fashioned like a richly carved wooden box with its lid removed. However it held no occupant. Instead the woman stood looking out of the window at the storm-roiled sea, a cloak about her slim shoulders covering only part of her nudity. She turned swiftly as Myrddin’s boot rasped on the stone.

Her startled look was gone in an instant. She smiled hesitantly, as if not sure in what mood the intruder came.

“My lord! But . . . how come you here?”

Myrddin gave an inner sigh of relief. So the illusion held—she saw whom she might expect, the Duke Goloris.

“Where else would I be?” he asked. “Fair lady, this is no night for wars or sword-dealing.”

She came away from the window, dropping the edge of her cloak. Now he could see that indeed this one was fashioned for the joys of bedding, although he could look on her without that stir of confusion he had felt when Nimue unveiled her body in invitation. She was indeed beautiful, this Duchess Igrene, but it was a beauty one might view in the Roman images of their goddesses. Now she regarded him with a small, almost secret smile, and he guessed that in some things she could rule her old lord as completely as Uther wished to rule Britain.

Make an end to this play, something within Myrddin bade him. In this room, which was scented with woman and a life he knew nothing of, he was as uncertain as a stag who suspected a trap. His hand went out to a small side table on which there providentially stood a tall bottle of glass brought from overseas and two beautifully decorated goblets.

“The night is cold,” he said. “I would have wine for the warming.”

Igrene laughed low and sweetly. “There are other ways of warming one, lord.” Slyly she motioned toward the bed.

He forced a laugh of his own. “Well enough. But first, pledge me in a cup, lady. Then we shall perhaps try your way to see which is best”

She pouted, but waited until he had poured a measure of wine into each goblet, then docilely accepted the one he held out to her. He pretended to drink, but she emptied her cup in a couple of swallows.

“My lord, you are not usually so behind in such matters.” She came closer so that the flower scent which clung to her skin grew stronger. Making nothing of her nakedness, she raised her hands to unbuckle his cloak. “Lord, you are not yourself this night. . . .”

Myrddin wanted to jerk back, away from her reaching hands. By sheer will he kept still. Setting aside his goblet, he caught her hands and held them tightly clasped within his own, watching her with an anxious eye.

Now he caught and held her gaze. The playfulness faded from her expression. Her face smoothed, as if she no longer saw him in truth, but some vision which stood between them.

Gently, after a long moment of that locked gaze, Myrddin drew her to the side of the bed, settled her within it. Her eyes were still on what only she saw. Lying back among the pillows, she made no move as Myrddin left her.

The window was already well open to the night; the curtain of hide and the shutter meant to keep out the chill were both pushed far back. He made sure they would remain so. The woman on the bed muttered drowsily, her words not meant for him but for the vision he had planted in her mind.

Outside there was a fluttering sound. Myrddin averted his head and went swiftly from the chamber, threading his way, his heart beating fast in spite of his struggle for control. A guard stood at the postern and yet did not see the slight man who flitted by.

When he reached his previous observation point, a height above Goloris’ hold, Myrddin turned. The moon was bright and clear. Some distance away flames leaped, where the lesser folk were celebrating Beltane. His night had been well chosen: only a small fraction of the keep’s inhabitants would be within the walls tonight.

He could not see the window which lay to the seaward side of the tower. What happened there now was not his affair, he must only preserve the hallucination with Uther. With a heavy burden of weariness resting on him, Myrddin made his way back again to the hidden camp and sat for long hours there by the sleeping men.

With dawn Uther stirred. Though he opened his eyes he did not look about him with any recognition. Instead he got to his feet like a dazed man, his hands reaching forth to grasp something which was not there.

Myrddin scrambled up quickly. With the very tip of a finger he touched the king’s uplifted head, directly above and between the eyes. And from his mind flashed the signal he had waited so long to give.

“Awake!”

Uther blinked, looked about him in the gray light. He yawned and then saw Myrddin. A frown knotted between his eyebrows.

“So, sorcerer, it would seem your magic works!” He spoke with a sour note in his voice. “You have done as you promised.” There was no triumph or satisfaction in his tone. Instead his eyes avoided Myrddin’s and he turned his shoulder to the younger man, shutting him out, or hoping to.

And Myrddin realized that, having slaked his lust, as he believed, Uther now felt shame for the act. He would not welcome in his sight the one who had aided him to an action he wished to repudiate.

“If I have done as I promised, and to your satisfaction, Lord King, then let me depart. For I have no liking for courts,” Myrddin wearily made answer. He had half expected that Uther would turn on him, but not so suddenly. And he did not want to lose the High King’s favor entirely, for this night’s work was not yet complete and his further part required some thread of connection with the court.

“Well enough.” Uther had turned completely away. He did not even glance in the other’s direction, but regarded his sleeping men. “Ride where you will, when you will.”

Myrddin accepted the dismissal with a dignity of his own, not bowing his head in any courtesy he did not feel, but rather walking back to where their mounts had been tethered. There he loosed his pony—for that means of returning to his own place he believed Uther owed him—and he rode away, without a single glance toward the King, nor beyond to where that keep rose beside the sea. But he was no more than over the crest of a small hillock when he heard the thud of hooves, saw a man riding at the best speed to which he could push his foam-bespattered mount.

“The High King?” he shouted at Myrddin. “Where is Uther?”

That anyone would know of this secret expedition was a vast surprise to the youth. Yet so certain seemed this rider that Uther was in the neighborhood that obviously whatever message he bore was of the utmost urgency, enough to break the veil of secrecy.

“Why do you seek the High King?” Myrddin demanded. Any change in the state of affairs was of importance for his plans also. “Have the Saxons sounded their war horns?”

The man shook his head. “Duke Goloris—he was slain in battle yesterday. The King must know—”

Myrddin pointed to the way he had come. “You will find the High King thereabouts—”

The messenger spurred on before he had even completed his sentence. As Myrddin kicked his own horse into a steady trot, he considered the importance of what he had just heard. Duchess Igrene would learn only too soon that her lord had been dead before that hour she would remember on Myrddin’s implanted orders. And Uther would now find his way clear to take openly the woman he had professed to find desirable above all others. What bearing would such a marriage have on the life Myrddin was certain Igrene now bore within her body?

Would the High King, relying on his own memory, accept the child to come as his own? And what would happen if and when Uther discussed this happening with the Duchess? Myrddin had read the King’s self-disgust clearly in the few words they had exchanged. What would come out of that shame?

There would be more than half a year to pass before he could learn that. His own task had been made clear. The child born of this night’s work was to be hidden—hidden in the north with one who still had a fraction of the Old Ones’ blood and who would be alerted with certain words Myrddin could utter. He saw no reason why he should not make his preparations now, so he did not turn back by hidden tracks to the cave and his solitude, but rode north.

The Ector he sought, he discovered some weeks later, was lord of a small holding which lay high among crags and steep valleys. He was esteemed by his neighbors, but never mixed much with them except in times when they must unite for mutual defense. And his people were noted as being extraordinarily averse to letting strangers settle among them. Ector had taken his own cousin to wife, for his line was ever known to wed within certain bonds of kinship, and he was a young man.

Myrddin pieced together this fragmentary information from hints and bits he heard from traveling merchants, now beginning to venture forth again as the Saxon menace was kept under control: from a smith who had spent the winter season working in Ector’s hold but was now on the road that he might go to his ailing mother, from a bard traveling for the mere pleasure of finding new places. He was pleased with what he heard.

Ector was accorded by all with a keen wit and battle
wisdom which had aided in keeping the district free of raiding Picts down from the north. His wife was a follower of the overseas faith, one of those they now termed Christians, and she had given refuge to an elderly priest of that god who was a noted healer. Though Ector kept his territory jealously inviolate, he was not one to draw sword without good cause, and those within his small holding were as prosperous as any could be in these troubled days.

When Myrddin at last came to the narrow pass which gave opening into Ector’s domain he found guards there. They were civil enough, though they detained him in their camp while one of their number rode on to the clan house with a message. Myrddin had drawn on a scrap of skin the spiral which was the sign of the older days and said he had private words for their lord.

He waited until nearly sundown before the rider returned, giving him free passage within Ector’s land and ready to be his guide. He found the lord of the holding waiting for him as he came into the central courtyard of the clan house. For a single moment of painful memory it was as if he had come home again and all the heavy years had been erased.

Just so had Nyren stood, his head bare, his features welcoming, to greet a guest in the times past. As a servant led away his weary horse, Ector’s hand touched his arm tightly. And Myrddin, seeing that they were nearly alone, repeated his words in a whisper.

Ector’s hair was as night-dark as his own. And his lips were clear cut, his nose narrow and high-bridged, his face long, shaping a pointed chin. It was like seeing his own countenance, somewhat older, and with slight differences; Ector’s face was enough like his own, even to the curiously marked eyelids which made the eyes appear almost triangular, so that they could be close kin.

“Welcome, brother,” was Ector’s reply, nor did he appear startled in the least at Myrddin’s whispering of words so old their real meaning had long since passed from the minds of men. “The kin house opens to you.”

In this part of his planning Myrddin’s path was made easy. Though neither Ector nor his lady had had any contact with the Sky People, yet the tradition of such folk had lingered strongly in their clan history. They accepted without question what Myrddin could tell them. Though be did not explain the circumstances surrounding the babe
he would find a refuge for, yet they were ready to aid him. Trynihid, even if she might follow in truth the new faith as preached by Nuth—a gentle, middle-aged man who tried to heal bodies as well as lighten minds with his teaching—was still of the kin clan and nodded her own head when Myrddin spoke of the importance of keeping the child safe.

She moved slowly, her own belly swelling with the long-wanted and hoped-for heir to Ector’s holding. And she rested her hands on that swelling as Myrddin spoke of the safekeeping, nodding her head.

Seeing her in her quiet happiness made Myrddin uncomfortable, and he kept from the upper apartments where she sat when there was any leisure in the clan house. He had never been attracted to any of the ladies he had seen at the High King’s court, nor to any girl of the clan house. Only once had desire stirred in his body: when he fronted Nimue in the night and she had challenged him to be a man to her woman, young though they were then.

The happiness of Trynihid and the care her lord wrapped now about her was a new thing to him. Because there were traces of the old inheritance in both of them, he felt more deeply akin to them than he had in any under his grandfather’s lordship. There was a warmth of belonging between these two which was like the life-giving fire of winter—yet to him such comfort was denied.

He grew restless and yet somehow he was tied to this place, and to leave it for the gaunt loneliness of the land about the cave was more than he could face. He went with Ector into the fields and helped to number the flock, doing all a smallhold lord would. And he worked steadily with his hands, tiring himself as much as he could, so that, exhaused, he fell into deep sleep at night.