Very Best of Charles de Lint, The (8 page)

Myrddin. That was another name for Merlin. She remembered reading somewhere that Robin Hood was actually a Christianized Merlin, the Anglo version of his name being a variant of his Saxon name of Rof Breocht Woden—the Bright Strength of Wodan. But if you went back far enough, all the names and stories got tangled up in one story. The tales of the historical Robin Hood, like those of the historical Merlin of the Borders, had acquired older mythic elements common to the world as a whole by the time they were written down. The story that their legends were really telling was that of the seasonal hero-king, the May Bride’s consort, who, with his cloak of leaves and his horns, and all his varying forms, was the secret truth that lay in the heart of every forest.

“But those are European heroes,” she remembered telling Gregor. “Why would the trees in our forest be crying for them?”

“All forests are one,” Gregor had told her, his features serious for a change. “They are all echoes of the first forest that gave birth to Mystery when the world began.”

She hadn’t really understood him then, but she was starting to understand him now as she made her way to the fountain at the center of the garden where the old oak tree stood guarding its secrets in the heart of the Mondream Wood. There were two forests for every one you entered. There was the one you walked in, the physical echo, and then there was the one that was connected to all the other forests, with no consideration of distance, or time.

The forest primeval. Remembered through the collective memory of every tree in the same way that people remembered myth—through the collective subconscious that Jung mapped, the shared mythic resonance that lay buried in every human mind. Legend and myth, all tangled in an alphabet of trees, remembered, not always with understanding, but with wonder. With awe.

Which was why the druids’ Ogham was also a calendar of trees.

Why Merlin was often considered to be a druid.

Why Robin was the name taken by the leaders of witch covens.

Why the Green Man had antlers—because a stag’s tines are like the branches of a tree.

Why so many of the early avatars were hung from a tree. Osiris. Balder. Dionysus. Christ.

Sara stood in the heart of the Mondream Wood and looked up at the old oak tree. The moon lay behind its branches, mysteriously close. The air was filled with an electric charge, as though a storm was approaching, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

“Now I remember what happened that night,” Sara said softly.

* * *

Sara grew to be a small woman, but at nine years old she was just a tiny waif—no bigger than a minute, as Jamie liked to say. With her diminutive size she could slip soundlessly through thickets that would allow no egress for an adult. And that was how she went.

She was a curly-haired gamine, ghosting through the hawthorn hedge that bordered the main path. Whispering across the small glade guarded by the statue of a little horned man that Jamie said was Favonius, but she privately thought of as Peter Pan, though he bore no resemblance to the pictures in her Barrie book. Tiptoeing through the wildflower garden, a regular gallimaufry of flowering plants, both common and exotic. And then she was near the fountain. She could see Merlin’s oak, looming up above the rest of the garden like the lordly tree it was.

And she could hear voices.

She crept nearer, a small shadow hidden in deeper patches cast by the fat yellow moon.

“—never a matter of choice,” a man’s voice was saying. “The lines of our lives are laid out straight as a dodman’s leys, from event to event. You chose your road.”

She couldn’t see the speaker, but the timbre of his voice was low and resonating, like a deep bell. She couldn’t recognize it, but she did recognize Merlin’s when he replied to the stranger.

“When I chose my road, there was no road. There was only the trackless wood; the hills, lying crest to crest like low-backed waves; the glens where the harps were first imagined and later strung. Ca’canny, she told me when I came into the Wood. I thought go gentle meant go easy, not go fey; that the oak guarded the Borders, marked its boundaries. I never guessed it was a door.”

“All knowledge is a door,” the stranger replied. “You knew that.”

“In theory,” Merlin replied.

“You meddled.”

“I was born to meddle. That was the part I had to play.”

“But when your part was done,” the stranger said, “you continued to meddle.”

“It’s in my nature, father. Why else was I chosen?”

There was a long silence then. Sara had an itch on her nose but she didn’t dare move a hand to scratch it. She mulled over what she’d overheard, trying to understand.

It was all so confusing. From what they were saying it seemed that her Merlin
was
the Merlin in the stories. But if that was true, then why did he look like a boy her own age? How could he even still be alive? Living in a tree in Jamie’s garden and talking to his father…

“I’m tired,” Merlin said. “And this is an old argument, father. The winters are too short. I barely step into a dream and then it’s spring again. I need a longer rest. I’ve earned a longer rest. The Summer Stars call to me.”

“Love bound you,” the stranger said.

“An oak bound me. I never knew she was a tree.”

“You knew. But you preferred to ignore what you knew because you had to riddle it all. The salmon wisdom of the hazel wasn’t enough. You had to partake of the fruit of every tree.”

“I’ve learned from my error,” Merlin said. “Now set me free, father.”

“I can’t. Only love can unbind you.”

“I can’t be found, I can’t be seen,” Merlin said. “What they remember of me is so tangled up in Romance, that no one can find the man behind the tales. Who is there to love me?”

Sara pushed her way out of the thicket where she’d been hiding and stepped into the moonlight.

“There’s me,” she began, but then her voice died in her throat.

There was no red-haired boy standing by the tree. Instead, she found an old man with the red-haired boy’s eyes. And a stag. The stag turned its antlered head towards her and regarded her with a gaze that sent shivers scurrying up and down her spine. For a long moment its gaze held hers, then it turned, its flank flashing red in the moonlight, and the darkness swallowed it.

Sara shivered. She wrapped her arms around herself, but she couldn’t escape the chill.

The stag…

That was impossible. The garden had always been strange, seeming so much larger than its acreage would allow, but there couldn’t possibly be a deer living in it without her having seen it before. Except… What about a boy becoming an old man overnight? A boy who really and truly did live in a tree?

“Sara,” the old man said.

It was Merlin’s voice. Merlin’s eyes. Her Merlin grown into an old man.

“You…you’re old,” she said.

“Older than you could imagine.”

“But—”

“I came to you as you’d be most likely to welcome me.”

“Oh.”

“Did you mean what you said?” he asked.

Memories flooded Sara. She remembered a hundred afternoons of warm companionship. All those hours of quiet conversation and games. The peace that came from her night fears. If she said yes, then he’d go away. She’d lose her friend. And the night fears… Who’d be there to make the terrors go away? Only he had been able to help her. Not Jamie nor anyone else who lived in the house, though they’d all tried.

“You’ll go away…won’t you?” she said.

He nodded. An old man’s nod. But the eyes were still young. Young and old, wise and silly, all at the same time. Her red-haired boy’s eyes.

“I’ll go away,” he replied. “And you won’t remember me.”

“I won’t forget,” Sara said. “I would never forget.”

“You won’t have a choice,” Merlin said. “Your memories of me would come with me when I go.”

“They’d be…gone forever…?”

That was worse than losing a friend. That was like the friend never having been there in the first place.

“Forever,” Merlin said. “Unless…”

His voice trailed off, his gaze turned inward.

“Unless what?” Sara asked finally.

“I could try to send them back to you when I reach the other side of the river.”

Sara blinked with confusion. “What do you mean? The other side of what river?”

“The Region of the Summer Stars lies across the water that marks the boundary between what is and what has been. It’s a long journey to that place. Sometimes it takes many lifetimes.”

They were both quiet then. Sara studied the man that her friend had become. The gaze he returned her was mild. There were no demands in it. There was only regret. The sorrow of parting. A fondness that asked for nothing in return.

Sara stepped closer to him, hesitated a moment longer, then hugged him.

“I do love you, Merlin,” she said. “I can’t say I don’t when I do.”

She felt his arms around her, the dry touch of his lips on her brow.

“Go gentle,” he said. “But beware the calendaring of the trees.”

And then he was gone.

One moment they were embracing and the next her arms only held air. She let them fall limply to her sides. The weight of an awful sorrow bowed her head. Her throat grew thick, her chest tight. She swayed where she stood, tears streaming from her eyes.

The pain felt like it would never go away.

But the next thing she knew she was waking in her bed in the northwest tower and it was the following morning. She woke from a dreamless sleep, clear-eyed and smiling. She didn’t know it, but her memories of Merlin were gone.

But so were her night fears.

* * *

The older Sara, still not a woman, but old enough to understand more of the story now, fingered a damp leaf and looked up into the spreading canopy of the oak above her.

Could any of that really have happened? she wondered.

The electric charge she’d felt in the air when she’d approached the old oak was gone. That pregnant sense of something about to happen had faded. She was left with the moon, hanging lower now, the stars still bright, the garden quiet. It was all magical, to be sure, but natural magic—not supernatural.

She sighed and kicked at the autumn debris that lay thick about the base of the old tree. Browned leaves, broad and brittle. And acorns. Hundreds of acorns. Fred the gardener would be collecting them soon for his compost—at least those that the black squirrels didn’t hoard away against the winter. She went down on one knee and picked up a handful of them, letting them spill out of her hand.

Something different about one of them caught her eye as it fell and she plucked it up from the ground. It was a small brown ovoid shape, an incongruity in the crowded midst of all the capped acorns. She held it up to her eye.

Even in the moonlight she could see what it was.

A hazelnut.

Salmon wisdom locked in a seed.

Had she regained memories, memories returned to her now from a place where the Summer Stars always shone, or had she just had a dream in the Mondream Wood where as a child she’d thought that the trees dreamed they were people?

Smiling, she pocketed the nut, then slowly made her way back into the house.

The Stone Drum

There is no question that there

is an unseen world. The problem

is how far is it from midtown and

how late is it open?

—attributed to Woody Allen

It was Jilly Coppercorn who found the stone drum, late one afternoon. She brought it around to Professor Dapple’s rambling Tudor-styled house in the old quarter of Lower Crowsea that same evening, wrapped up in folds of brown paper and tied with twine. She rapped sharply on the Professor’s door with the little brass lion’s head knocker that always seemed to stare too intently at her, then stepped back as Olaf Goonasekara, Dapple’s odd little housekeeper, flung the door open and glowered out at where she stood on the rickety porch.

“You,” he grumbled.

“Me,” she agreed, amicably. “Is Bramley in?”

“I’ll see,” he replied and shut the door.

Jilly sighed and sat down on one of the two worn rattan chairs that stood to the left of the door, her package bundled on her knee. A black and orange cat regarded her incuriously from the seat of the other chair, then turned to watch the progress of a woman walking her dachshund down the street.

Professor Dapple still taught a few classes at Butler U., but he wasn’t nearly as involved with the curriculum as he had been when Jilly attended the university. There’d been some kind of a scandal—something about a Bishop, some old coins and the daughter of a Tarot reader—but Jilly had never quite got the story straight. The Professor was a jolly fellow—wizened like an old apple, but more active than many who were only half his apparent sixty years of age. He could talk and joke all night, incessantly polishing his wire-rimmed spectacles for which he didn’t even have a prescription.

What he was doing with someone like Olaf Goonasekara as a housekeeper Jilly didn’t know. It was true that Goon looked comical enough, what with his protruding stomach and puffed cheeks, the halo of unruly hair and his thin little arms and legs, reminding her of nothing so much as a pumpkin with twig limbs, or a monkey. His usual striped trousers, organ grinder’s jacket and the little green and yellow cap he liked to wear, didn’t help. Nor did the fact that he was barely four feet tall and that the Professor claimed he was a goblin and just called him Goon.

It didn’t seem to allow Goon much dignity and Jilly would have understood his grumpiness, if she didn’t know that he himself insisted on being called Goon and his wardrobe was entirely of his own choosing. Bramley hated Goon’s sense of fashion—or rather, his lack thereof.

The door was flung open again and Jilly stood up to find Goon glowering at her once more.

“He’s in,” he said.

Jilly smiled. As if he’d actually had to go in and check.

They both stood there, Jilly on the porch and he in the doorway, until Jilly finally asked, “Can he see me?”

Giving an exaggerated sigh, Goon stepped aside to let her in.

“I suppose you’ll want something to drink?” he asked as he followed her to the door of the Professor’s study.