The Stones of Camelot, page 5
“Is it true that the food in the future is sweeter than honey?” a greedy Martha might ask.
“Yes,” I say. “Sweeter than sweet, and more delicious than the most perfect apple you can imagine.”
“Is it true that the people of the future can fly?” a wide-eyed John might inquire.
“Yes,” I say. “On wings of steel, wider than those of the vastest bird you can imagine.
“Is it true that the people of the future dance with the devil, and let him do worse to them than twirl them in the dance?” someone might whisper, in the silence of the night.
“Oh yes,” I say. “And you cannot imagine how wild the dances are, or how much worse are the things they let him do to them.”
“But have you ever found a portal in the new world?” a tremulous Teresa might ask—and here the game must end, because in spite of all my adventures, and all my lies, I haven’t.
8
When Merlin did come for me he arrived without forewarning, in the same glorified haycart as before, pulled by the same lumpen horses. I was collecting water at the time, from the stream in the forest, and was so bowed down by the yoke across my back that I didn’t catch sight of the cart until I was within a dozen yards of the horses.
The driver was waiting in his seat, with a burly guardsman beside him; they looked at me as I looked at them, but there was no curiosity in their eyes. They hadn’t been speaking to one another; having found themselves with nothing to do for a while, that was exactly what they were doing.
I couldn’t imagine that they would be willing or able to fight like heroes should their king’s magician happen to be attacked by brigands, but I couldn’t imagine, either, why brigands would bother attacking such an ill-stocked cart when there were others on the road fully-laden with wurzels or barrels of bitter ale.
I drew myself up as straight as I could, to pretend that two leather buckets fully charged with water was no burden at all to one such as me. I carried the buckets to the kitchen and set them down without spilling more than I could have spit, and then I went to Mother Leocadia’s room—which she called a cell, although it had far more room in it than any of the sisters had in the alleys between their pallets, let alone the children who slept three or four to a mattress.
Merlin was waiting there, sitting in the only chair that the convent possessed, except for the mercy-seats in the chapel. A stout staff lay across the wizard’s lap, but it was a walking-stick, not a magic wand. Mother Leocadia didn’t seem to mind that the magician had usurped her petty throne; she was probably glad of the opportunity to tower over him.
“Amory,” the magician said, hoarsely. “Your time here is done. Have you possessions to gather?”
“None,” I told him. “Everything I use in my work belongs to the convent.”
“The clothes in which you stand belong to the convent,” Mother Leocadia pointed out, “but I doubt that your master thought to bring you fitments of your own.”
She was right about that—but Merlin had a pouch tied to his girdle, into which he reached a claw-like hand. He plucked out a copper coin, and placed it in Mother Leocadia’s hand. He didn’t ask about the silken sheet that had been wrapped around me when I was abandoned at the door, or the basket in which I’d been set. They’d been sold long ago, and nothing was reckoned to be owed to him or me on that score.
“Well then,” he said. “Better help me to my cart, boy. My hands are still steady but my legs have begun to creak.”
I lent him my arm to pull himself upright, and my shoulder on which to lean.
He was less of a burden than I’d feared, for he’d grown a little thinner as well as a little weaker since I’d seen him last. We walked slowly and awkwardly, but not without a certain pride.
“You’re smaller than Harl,” the great magician observed, “but you fit more neatly under my arm. You’ll do, on that score.”
By the time we reached the road there were twenty people gathered in front of the convent to watch us go. Perhaps I should have bid them some formal farewell, or offered them my thanks, but I only looked at them as coldly and as indifferently as the driver and his companion had looked at me—as if their interchangeable names were nothing to me, and that once they were out of sight I would never think of them again.
I did think of them again, far more often than I had expected. I think of them still, though only collectively, as a peculiar crowd. I rarely pronounced their names—except, I suppose, for Mother Leocadia’s—and I rarely pictured their faces. I forgot by far the greater number of them, as individuals, but I never forgot them as a company. They live on in my thoughts as a kind of swarm, ceaselessly at labor, humming all the while about their wooden hive: gathering, gathering, gathering, utterly preoccupied the while with wax and honey...but they did live on, and have never left me. I’ll know the children’s names as long as I know the names of Christ’s disciples and a handful of virgin martyrs, even though I can’t fit the names to faces.
Mother Leocadia felt obliged to put on a show for the sake of the others.
“Goodbye, Amory,” she said. “Always remember the legend of Saint Syncletica. There’s work for you to do in Camelot, if you care to put your mind to it.”
“There’ll be plenty of work for him to do in Camelot without spreading the gossip of the Church,” Merlin told her. “You’ve done your work, Leocadia. It’s time for Amory to do mine, now.”
“If Amory does the Lord’s work well,” Mother Leocadia observed, craftily, “your work and his will one day be the same.”
Did she really hope that I would become a missionary in Camelot, charged with the conversion of the king’s wizard—and then no doubt, the king himself? Of course not—but she couldn’t resist the temptation to pretend that one as humble as she might have launched a chain of causes that could transform a kingdom. Perhaps, in her way, she did; and perhaps she would not have been entirely displeased with the eventual result.
“Goodbye, Mother Leocadia,” I said to her, more for fear of being left out of the conversation than in obedience to any sense of duty. “Remember me in your prayers.”
“I shall,” she promised, severely. “Have no fear of that.”
I climbed up into the cart, and sat down. I raised my hand in a final salute.
They all saluted me in return as the cart pulled away. I told myself that they were only glad to see me go, hopeful that they would never see another like me. It was probably true, but just for a moment, I would have been glad to be wrong.
Interlude
The Road to Camelot
1
Merlin’s cart wasn’t handsome, but it was solid of construction, and its wheels spun tolerably smoothly. The road helped in that, having endured very well since the last of the legions marched eastwards along it, never to return. The awning that provided shade from the summer sun was ragged at the edges, but it served its purpose, and the interior was comfortably padded, at least in the place where Merlin sat, with his back supported by the wagon’s high flank. I had taken up a position opposite to his, so that I could meet his eye.
“The old witch was right,” he growled, when the convent passed out of sight behind us. “I should have thought to bring you a shirt and britches—and a hat and belt. You’re as mangy in your coat as a rat-catcher’s dog.”
“The fellow who had these clothes before me looked only a little better, master,” I assured him. “I’ve done my best to cherish them.”
He gave me a wry smile then—I was still new to him, still interesting. “I suppose they’ll think they trained you well, to call me master without being told,” he said. “Can you count and calculate well?”
“I can,” I told him, “and I can tell a lie with a straight face, too, though that isn’t one of them.”
His eyes narrowed slightly and the ghost of the smile faded into uncertainty. “That’s good,” he said, “but the art of lying has little to do with keeping a straight face—the art of lying is knowing when not to do it, and how to mingle truth and lies effectively. I can teach you that, but you’ll have to be honest with me if you intend to learn.”
“I do, master,” I told him. “I’ve waited a long time for you to take me away. I wish you’d done it when you were last here.”
“You weren’t ready,” he told me. “You’re a handswidth taller now, and a good deal broader in the shoulders. You’ll need that muscle, to fetch and carry up and down the steps to my garret. You’ll soon be cursing the day I took you away from the soft Earth and the level land to place you in a world of cold stone steps—but a magician must have his lonely tower, filled with mysteries, lest other men should not look up to him, and tremble in awareness of his nearness to the lowering stars.”
He sounded contemptuous, not only of those “other men” but also, more than a little, of himself. He obviously found the weakness of his flesh offensive—and I understand why, now that I know how robust even human flesh becomes while it abides in Cokaygne. That summer was the eighteenth of Arthur’s reign, and Merlin had been ten years out of Cokaygne before he put his boy-king on the throne, so twenty-eight years had passed since Merlin had come back through the gate of Avalon. For twenty of those twenty-eight years he had been a superman, full of the magic of the Land of Light, but for the last eight he had deteriorated at the same rate as any man of his advanced age. What a fall it must have seemed, to a man of his bold and future-fixated kind!
At the time, though, I could only take note of his dissatisfaction, and wonder whether I would take the brunt of it. “Stone steps must be hard on your slippered feet, Master,” I observed, carefully.
“They would be,” the old man agreed. “That’s why they’ll be harder on yours than you’d like, as you relieve me of the necessity of climbing them. But there are compensations. You’ll discover soon enough that of all the apartments in Camelot, mine is the only one that offers no opportunities at all to spies and eavesdroppers. You and I, Amory, are the only men in Britain who have the privilege of privacy.”
I couldn’t help replying to that by glancing at the broad backs of the taciturn driver and his silent companion.
“Not here,” Merlin agreed. “We cannot speak of secrets here—but when we are at home, we shall have secrets a-plenty between us, and abundant time to talk them over. Can you keep a secret, Amory? That’s an art more precious than lying, and harder by far to master.”
“I hope so, master,” I told him. “So far, I’ve had none to keep—except, of course, for the sad truth that I had none to keep, which I was careful not to betray.”
I hoped to make him smile again, but he frowned instead. “Perhaps I should have given you one to keep,” he muttered. “I could have done that, when I was here before.”
I had no answer to that, and he didn’t brood on it for long. “Mother Leocadia tells me that you got lost in the forest five times,” he said. “That speaks of a certain carelessness, does it not?”
“I was never lost, master,” I told him. “I stayed away on purpose.”
“Searching for portals to Faerie?”
“Perhaps I was, master,” I told him. “But I knew how unlikely it was that I’d find one, just as I know that if Morgana le Fay wanted to change her mind again, she could find me wherever I might be.”
His eyes narrowed to mere slits then—but he was facing southwards, and the sun was moving ever westwards, and it’s not impossible that its harsh light had pierced a hole in the awning to make him squint.
“What do you know about Morgana le Fay?” he asked, his voice slurred into a croak by phlegm in his throat.
“What everybody knows, master,” I told him. “That she is queen in Faerie, or at least that part of it that borders Britain. It must have been by her command, must it not, that I was left at Mother Leocadia’s door twelve summers ago? It was twelve, wasn’t it, master? Several passed before I learned to count.”
“This is Arthur’s kingdom,” Merlin retorted, ignoring my request for confirmation of the length of time I’d passed in the convent, “but that doesn’t mean that he gives the order every time a babe is abandoned to the charity of the wilderness.”
“Yes, master,” I said, humbly. “What I meant to say is that I know nothing whatsoever about Morgana le Fay, except what people say about her—and that everything they say is very probably a lie. I wouldn’t trust any man’s word on such a matter—except, of course, for yours.”
He was still watching me from behind his eyelids. It didn’t seem to me that there was any mischievous ray of sunlight playing on his face now. He was watching me, studying me, weighing me up. I realized, for the first time, that there was a puzzle in me that he had not quite solved. He had no idea why I had been abandoned at the convent, or by whom.
“If we are to share secrets, Amory,” he said to me, eventually, “we must trust one another. I could have found a servant in Camelot to replace Harl, very easily indeed. There are a thousand boys in the remoter parts of Britain who’d happily leave their homes for a chance to be my apprentice—but I chose you. I chose you a long time ago, knowing that I would have to wait for you to grow into the job. Do you know why I chose you?”
“No, master,” I said. It seemed simpler, and far safer, than hazarding a guess.
“Because you’re older than you look,” he said. “Perhaps only a few hours older, but perhaps far longer. I too am older than I look. Much older. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes, master,” I told him. “You were in Faerie. You know Morgana le Fay. I don’t know how long you were there, but the stories I’ve heard say that you were born when the Romans were at the height of their power in England—that you’ve traveled with their legions, and conversed with at least one emperor. Some say Claudius, some Hadrian, and some say both.”
“The stories exaggerate,” Merlin said. “I certainly never supped with Claudius, although I had some slight acquaintance with one of his skilled engineers. I never marched with any Roman legion, although I was offered the opportunity—and I labored in the building of a Roman road in consequence of my refusal. I was considerably older than you are now when I was taken into Faerie. When I came out again, I seemed only a little older than that—but centuries had passed, for the inner world was very quiet at the time.”
He paused, but I said nothing, so he went on. “I was in Morgana’s company for seven years, but I aged far less than that, in physical terms. Mentally, on the other hand, and magically... when I say that I am older than I look, I do not simply mean that time moved swiftly while I was away. I came back a very different man. More different than anyone knew or understood—including Morgana, who only acquired the surname le Fay and the rank of queen when I decided to build her a reputation. I think you may be a good deal older than you look, Amory, and a good deal older than you feel, but you mustn’t flatter yourself with delusions about the queen of Faerie, for the land of Cokaygne has no monarch. They do things differently there. I think you might be an exceptional child, even though you have kept the secret well—from Mother Leocadia and her sisters, perhaps even from yourself—but if you are exceptional, it’s not because you were rocked in your cradle by an elvish noblewoman.”
I wanted to believe him. I wanted him to be right. I wanted to be more exceptional than Mother Leocadia had ever been able to imagine. I wanted to be more exceptional than I had ever dared to dream—but I was, as Merlin had judged, a secret even to myself. It was one that he never managed to penetrate, and proved far more difficult for me to unravel than I could ever have imagined.
2
I suppose that if he had suspected the truth about my secret, Merlin might have killed me rather than taking me into his household. Mercifully, there was no way he could learn the truth from me, no matter how hard he tried, because all I wanted, at the time, was to join my fate with his. I wanted to learn from him, and play my part in his schemes as cleverly and as honestly as I could. I wanted to be a good servant to a good master, and I expected Merlin to be the best master in the world. He was, after all, supposed to be the greatest magician in Britain, and the greatest there had ever been.
“I shall be as good a servant to you as I can be, master,” I assured him, in all sincerity. “I hope, and believe, that I might be a very good servant indeed, for I have always felt that the land of Cokaygne has left its mark on me, even though I have no memory of anything that happened to me there.”
Merlin nodded, pensively. “Good,” he said. “We shall do our best. We shall continue my work, together. If you can add more to my art than an ordinary boy, so much the better. If not—well, you’ve a strong pair of legs and a keen wit. Even at worst, you’ll do.”
I never saw him in such a good mood again. Perhaps I had a premonition of that, or perhaps I was merely too eager to have the question answered, but either way, I mustered all my courage to say: “Master, there is one thing I have always wondered.” I left off there, in the hope that he might be intrigued. If he asked me what my question was, I thought, he would be far more likely to feel an obligation to answer it.
“What?” he asked.
“All my life,” I said, “I’ve been told that I must have been expelled from Faerie because I was taken for a changeling, and then found wanting. But that isn’t the only possibility, or so it seems to me. It seems to me that if you spent seven years in Faerie, and were not the only human there, then human children might be born in Faerie, to human parents. Perhaps, in that case, I was never stolen, and never rejected. Perhaps I was cast out for another reason entirely. Perhaps...”
I stopped than, having said more than enough. I waited for his answer, which was slow in coming.
“There is no childbirth in the Land of Light,” he said, eventually. “The fair folk are exceedingly long-lived, and none bear children, even to replace one of their company who dies. They allow themselves the occasional luxury of stealing children from our world, most of which they hold for a while and then give back. Those who grow to adulthood in Cokaygne become as sterile as the fair folk. Even those who stay for seven years... no, Amory, I cannot tell you what you want to hear. I dare not say that it is utterly impossible, but I think it extremely unlikely that you were born in Cokaygne.”
