The Merlin Conspiracy (16 page)

I overshot them a little. I was not used to floating about bodiless. There was a tiny flickering among the bushes up beyond the first lopsided pool, and I assumed that was where the riders would be. But what I found there was a double ring of lighted candles. Sybil, Sir James, and the Merlin were standing in strange attitudes inside it. The Merlin had his arms raised and bent as if he were pushing against a low ceiling.

“It's coming—coming at last!” he panted.

Sybil, who seemed to be heaving at an invisible rope, gasped, “I hope it's quick, then. It's all I can do to hold it!”

Sir James didn't speak. His was the weakest magic, and it was clearly all he could do to keep up his part of the working. The candles glistened on his sweaty face and clutching hands.

The gray mare climbed the bank beside me and stopped. My grandfather sat on her back, staring at the three magic workers with his face blank as marble and utterly scornful. “I am here,” he said.

The three inside the ring of candles relaxed and puffed out great thankful breaths. “It's here,” said the Merlin.

“Thank goodness!” said Sybil. “It took its time!”

Sir James, bent over, with his hands on his knees, gasped out, “They do, the big ones. Owe it to their pride, you know.”

None of them looked toward my grandfather. I realized that they were unable to see him.

“You have summoned me,” said my grandfather, “and had the temerity to bind me to your will. I hereby warn you that you are permitted to summon me three times only. You can bind me no further than that.”

“It may be speaking,” the Merlin said, with a strained, listening look. “Wasn't that some kind of protest?”

“Oh, they always grumble, these strong Powers,” Sir James cut in irritably. “Not used to bending their heads. Get on and instruct it, Sybil. I'm whacked.”

I suppose I should have stayed to hear what Sybil was going to say. I wish I had now. But a great disgust took me. I felt quite sick that these three unpleasant people should summon my grandfather and call him “it” and give him orders, when they couldn't even see him and could barely hear him either. Besides, there was quite a bit of noise coming from the greensward near the gate where the other riders were, and I was curious to know what they were doing. I swooped back there.

They seemed to be enjoying themselves. Some of them were standing with their horses' reins hitched on one arm, chatting cheerfully while they prepared some kind of torches and lit them from their little glimmering lanterns. The rest of them were quite deliberately making footprints in the grass. One man in a tight dark hood was stamping hard, over and over. Another was tramping round and round in a clockwise ring, chuckling as the marks in the grass showed deeper and darker. Most of the others were encouraging their mounts to stamp or rear in order to leave hoofprints, and one man was leading two of the strange beasts back and forth in the moist ground near the pool, coaxing and whistling as grooms do to horses. The creatures hissed and rattled their wings and a peculiar smell came off them, but they obediently placed their two splayed feet over and over in the same places.

“Those are wyverns,” my grandfather said, coming down beside me on foot, leading the gray mare. He did not seem in the least surprised or annoyed to see me there.

“And what are the rest of them doing?” I asked.

He actually chuckled. “Leaving prints. We are not allowed to lie, but we can mislead. Wait here.” He unhitched the white standard from the mare's saddle and strode up the rise beyond the trickling pool—surprisingly nimble for the father of my mother—where he rammed the thing upright in the soft turf. It went in a good foot and stood there, fluttering. As far as I could see in the gloom, it was a long skull shape on a stake, round which strips of leathery stuff were flapping. “I shouldn't look too closely if I were you,” my grandfather said as he came back and gathered up the mare's reins. “It is there as a mark and a warning.” And he mounted the mare as nimbly as he had climbed the rise.

I did look. I stared at the thing, even though it was queer and horrible. It seemed a desecration to plant it in this garden of gentle magics. But then, Sybil had already spoiled the magic by bespelling its waters, and I supposed Sir James deserved it.

While I was staring, all my grandfather's people gave a great shout and rode at the mound where the warning was planted, whirling the flaring torches they had been preparing. It was as if each torch set fire to the very air around it. The whole mound was a great roaring bonfire in instants, with the standard in its blazing heart. It only lasted for seconds. I had a second's clear sight of what the standard really was. It was a stake that had been pushed through the rotting skull of a horse, and then through the skull of a human above that, and the flapping pieces were skin, raw and bloody, flayed from horse and human. I had to turn away.

More of the knowledge from the woman with the smashed hip came to me and helped me while I was gagging. My grandfather was not a wizard. He was a Great Power, and great ones are governed by strange rules. Power and pain go together, as the woman had learned herself. And every fine, kindly thing is incomplete without a side that is less than pleasant.

“Fine, kindly thing!” I said aloud. “Grandfather Gwyn is fine all right, but
kindly
?” At that moment I thought I never wanted to speak to my grandfather again.

Then I came to myself to see that the garden was filling with the white mist of dawn. Sir James was coming striding down the side of the mound, holding a bottle and a wineglass. The other two followed him, sipping out of glasses as they came. None of them seemed to see the hideous standard rearing up by their shoulders, but they saw the lawn by the gate well enough. The dew of the grass there was smudged green and trampled brown with footprints, hoofmarks, and the shapes of huge three-clawed paws.

They rushed there and stared. After a moment they actually danced with delight. “We've
real
power to draw on now!” I heard Sybil say.

The Merlin positively giggled. “Yes, and we can use it to lay in even more!” he said.

I was disgusted again, and I left....

I woke up in bed. It was bright morning, and I was really worried. If Sybil and her friends could enslave Grandfather Gwyn, there seemed no reason why they should ever stop. No one and nothing was safe. I tried to convince myself I had merely had a peculiar dream, but I couldn't. I was sure it had all really happened.

To prove me right, there were only Grundo and me at breakfast and only two places set. “Isn't my grandfather here?” I asked Olwen when she came in with boiled eggs.

“He's away on business,” she said, “riding the mare.”

“So much for your idea of asking Grandfather Gwyn for help,” I said glumly to Grundo when Olwen had gone.

“Well, he said he wouldn't be able to,” Grundo answered, placidly tapping the tops of three eggs. “What's the matter? Why are you looking so desperate?”

I told him about what I thought had happened in the night. It can't have been pleasant for Grundo, hearing such things about his mother. He looked depressed. But he is used to Sybil. He ate his third egg in a resigned way and said, “There must be someone else you can ask for help. That's why he sent you to get all that knowledge. Think about it.”

“You're right,” I said. “I will.” I sat watching him eat toast while I tried to open file after file in my head.
Teasel, Thistle, Ivy, Gorse, Bramble, Dog Rose, Goose Grass
I went through, and several other prickly or dour-looking plants that I didn't know the names of and only had pictures of in my head. It was odd. I knew each flower file was crammed full of magical facts. I even knew roughly what was in each one, but it all stayed misty to me. Even the one I had used last night without realizing what I was using—
Red Artemis: out-of-body experiences
—had gone misty to me now.

In the end I just ran through the scores of file headings one by one, until one appeared that
didn't
stay misty.
Harebells: dealings with magical folk who are visible
. And a whole list of these magical folk:
dragons, Great Powers, gods, Little People, kelpies, boggarts, haunts, elves, piskies
… on and on. I hadn't realized there were so many. And there was, I realized, another whole file—
Mullein
—about dealing with magical folk who were
not
visible, which put itself alongside
Harebells
in case I needed that, too. But the picture of a harebell was the one that was clearest in my mind's eye. For a moment I distrusted it. It didn't seem as dry and thorny as the rest of the hurt woman's herbs. But though the pale blue bells of the flowers seemed almost juicy, I saw they grew on dry, wiry stems, as dry as anything in the other files. It seemed to be right. What we needed was one of the magical folk who could give us advice—someone
wise
.

I ran through the list of folk again. I expected the file to come up with
dragon
or
god
, but it didn't, and when I thought about it, I realized that someone big like that would make an enormous magical disturbance coming to talk to us. If Sybil didn't notice, the Merlin would. Realizing that made me feel almost hopeful, in a way. None of the three conspirators had the least idea that Grundo and I knew they were up to something, and we needed to keep them from knowing until we knew enough to stop them. The list ran through my head and stopped.
Little People
. It was obvious, really.

Grundo put the last piece of toast regretfully back in the toast rack. “Got it?”

“Yes,” I said. “Where do harebells grow?”

“There were lots in that ruined village,” Grundo said, “but that's miles away. Wasn't there a sort of bank of them on that slope across the valley? I thought I saw some just before we saw your grandfather waiting for us.”

“Let's go and see!” I said, leaping up. I was so pleased that I rushed out to the kitchen with the teapot and a pile of plates. Olwen looked very surprised. “We'll be back for lunch,” I told her, and went racing off after Grundo, who was already trotting out along the way we had taken yesterday.

But things are never that easy. There were only a few harebells growing by the head of the valley, and I knew I needed thick drifts of them. It took us half the morning to find the right kind of sloping, sheltered hilltop where harebells grew in quantities. By that time we were well into the hills on the chapel side of the manse. But at last we found the place, a small, warm dip full of a great bank of fluttering, pale blue bells. We sat down on the sunny edge of them, and I carefully picked five of the harebells and wound their wiry stems among the fingers of my left hand in the correct pattern. Then I called out the correct words from the file, three times.

And waited.

Our shadows had moved on the hillside over the dry grass quite noticeably before anything happened. Grundo had stretched out on the turf and then gone to sleep by that time. This was hard on him, because when a section of the harebell-covered hillside shifted gently to one side, he woke up with a jump and then didn't dare move. I could see him staring sideways across the freckles on his nose all through the rest of what happened.

As I said, a piece of the hillside shifted. It was as if there had been an invisible fold in it up to then, which now straightened out to let a small person slip around the edge of it. The person had one hand up, pushing at the fold, and he was dreadfully out of breath.

“Your pardon, wise lady,” he panted. His voice was husky and high. “You patient. Wait long.”

I looked from him to the hillside.
Space is as a folding screen to the Little People
, said the knowledge in my head, and it seemed to be right. There was obviously twice as much of the hill, folded to keep the place where the person lived out of sight. I tried not to stare at the fold, or at the person, too hard. If I had been standing up, he would have come about to my knees. Up to then I had always thought that apart from their size, the Little People would be like small humans. This was not so. He was covered with soft, sandy hair, which grew thicker on his head and around his pointy ears. Being so hairy probably accounted for the fact that he was wearing almost no clothes, just crossed belts on his long top half and cheerful red drawers on his lower part. I found it really hard not to stare at his legs. They bent the other way from human legs. But his hands and arms were very like mine, though hairy, and he had an anxious little face rather like a cat's, except that his eyes were brown. He wore a gold earring in one ear and kept flicking at it nervously. I expect I seemed horribly huge to him.

I didn't want him to think I had come just to stare. I greeted him politely in what the file said were the right words.

“You know
old
talk,” he said respectfully. “Not necessary. Old talk hard for us these days. You wait, for they fetch me. I only one know speak your talk.”

I looked at the harebells drooping from my fingers. “These are supposed to make me able to understand your language,” I told him. “Why don't you just speak the way you usually do?”

He was very put out. “But I need learn! Practice,” he protested. “I hear, I know more than I know to
say
. Please use own talk.”