by Jane Yolen
It was two days later when a special messenger came to the green wagon with a small casket filled with coins and a small gold dragon with a faceted red jewel for an eye.
“Her ladyship sends these with her compliments,” said the soldier who brought the casket. “There was indeed a hidden pool beneath the foundation. And the pipes, which were as gray and speckled and grained as eggs, were rotted through. In some places they were gnawed on, too, by some small underground beasts. Her lady begs you to stay or at least send the boy back to her for yet another dream.”
Ambrosius accepted the casket solemnly, but shook his head. “Tell her ladyship that—alas—there is but one dream per prince. And we must away. The fair here is done and there is another holy day fair in Londinium, many days journey from here. Even with such a prize as her lady has gifted us, Ambrosius the Wandering Mage and his company can never be still long.” He bowed.
But Ambrosius did not proffer the real reason they were away: that a kind of restless fear drove him on, for after the performance when they were back in the wagon, Merlin had cried out against him. “But that was not the true meaning of the dream. There will be fighting here—the red dragon of the Britons and the Saxon white will fight again. The tower is only a small part—of the dream, of the whole.”
And Ambrosius had sighed loudly then, partly for effect, and said, “My dear son, for as I claimed you, now you are mine forever, magecraft is a thing of the eye and ear. You tell me that what you dream comes true—but on the slant. And I say that to tell a prince to his face that you have dreamed of his doom invites the dreamer’s doom as well. And, as you yourself reminded me, it may not be all the truth. The greatest wisdom of any dreamer is to survive in order to dream again. Besides, how do you really know if what you dream is true or if, in the telling of it, you make it come true? We are men, not beasts, because we can dream and because we can make those dreams come true.”
Merlin had closed his eyes then, and when he opened them again, they were the clear vacant blue of a newborn babe. “Father,” he had said, and it was a child’s voice speaking.
Ambrosius had shivered with the sound of it, for he knew that sons in the natural order of things o’erthrew their fathers when they came of age. And Merlin, it was clear, was very quick to learn and quicker to grow.
“Sir,” said Merlin, “this is my desire: the first night that ye shall lie by Igraine ye shall get a child on her, and when that is born, that it shall be delivered to me for to nourish there as I will have it; for it shall be your worship, and the child’s avail as mickle as the child is worth.”
“I will well,” said the king, “as thou wilt have it.”
“Now make you ready,” said Merlin, “this night ye shall lie with Igraine in the castle of Tintagil; and ye shall be like the duke her husband. …”
—Le Morte D’Arthur
by Sir Thomas Malory
The Annunciation
Do not hate me,
sweet Igraine,
for the likeness
who has lain
this cloudy night
belly to back,
for he has what
dead men all lack.
He has the passion
and the seed,
and shadows can
no longer breed.
Love goes in motley
and in mask
and, counterfeit,
completes the task
that I have set him
for this night.
So love plays love
without the light.
Do you think I am
passion’s Fool
to simulate
the lover’s tool?
I am the man
masked by your side,
you are my all
unwitting bride.
Touch him sweetly,
sweet Igraine,
that this knight
might prove again
that love lasts longest
where love longs most.
Your womb will house
a mighty host.
I swear—and do not
take it light—
to bear the burden
of this night,
and in my arms
the child shall live
that has the greatest
gift to give:
this god’s son will
redeem the land.
All this, this night,
I have long planned.
So sleep and sweetly,
sweet Igraine,
such loving will not
come again
when man and mage
are so entwined
in hand and heart
and loin and mind.
“It is well done,” said Merlin, “that ye take a wife, for a man of your bounty and noblesse should not be without a wife. Now is there any that ye love more than another?”
“Yea,” said King Arthur, “I love Guenever the king’s daughter, Leodegrance of the land of Cameliard, the which holdeth in his house the Table Round that ye told he had of my father Uther. And this damosel is the most valiant and fairest lady that I know living, or yet that ever I could find.”
—Le Morte D’Arthur
by Sir Thomas Malory
The Gwynhfar
THE GWYNHFAR—THE WHITE one, the pure one, the anointed one—waited. She had waited every day since her birth, it seemed, for this appointed time. Attended by her voiceless women in her underground rooms, the gwynhfar’s limbs had been kept oiled, her bone-white hair had been cleaned and combed. No color was allowed to stain her dead-white cheeks, no maurish black to line her eyes. White as the day she had been born, white as the foam on a troubled sea, white as the lilybell grown in the wood, she waited.
Most of her life had been spent on her straw bed in that half-sleep nature spent on her. She moved from small dream to small dream, moment to moment, hour to hour, day to day, without any real knowledge of what awaited her. Nor did she care. The gwynhfar did not have even creature sense, nor had she been taught to think. All she had been taught was waiting. It was her duty, it was her life.
She had been the firstborn of a dour landholder and his wife. Pulled silently from between her mother’s thighs, bleached as bone, her tiny eyes closed tight against the agonizing light, the gwynhfar cried only in the day—a high, thin, mewling call. At night, without the sun to torment her, she seemed content; she waited.
They say now that the old mage attended her birth, but that is not true. He did not come for weeks, even months, till word of the white one’s birth had traveled mouth to ear, mouth to ear, over and over the intervening miles. He did not come at first, but his messengers came, as they did to every report of a marvel. They had visited two-headed calves, fish-scaled infants, and twins joined at the hip and heart. When they heard of the white one, they came to her, too.
She waited for them as she waited for everything else.
And when the messengers saw that the stories were true enough, they reported back to the stone hall. So the Old One himself came, wrapped in his dignity and the sour trappings of state.
He had to bend down to enter the cottage, for age had not robbed him of the marvelous height that had first brought him to the attention of the Oldest Ones, those who dwell in the shadows of the Circle of Stones. He bent and bent till it seemed he would bend quite in two, and still he broke his head on the lintel.
“A marvel,” it was said. “The blood anointed the door.” That was no marvel, but a failing of judgment and the blood a mere trickle where the skin broke apart. But that is what was said. What the Old One himself said was in a language far older than he and twice as filled with power. But no one reported it, for who but the followers of the oldest way even know that tongue?
As the Old One stood there, gazing at the mewling white babe in her half sleep before the flickering fire, he nodded and stroked his thin bear
d. This, too, they say, and I have seen him often enough musing in just that way, so it could have been so.
Then he stretched forth his hand, that parchment-colored, five-fingered magician’s wand that could make balls and cards and silken banners disappear. He stretched forth his hand and touched the child. She shivered and woke fully for the first time, gazing at a point somewhere beyond his hand but not as far as his face with her watery pink eyes.
“So,” he said in that nasal excuse for a voice. “So.” He was never profligate with words. But it was enough.
The landholder gladly gave up the child, grateful to have the monster from his hearth. Sons could help till the lands. Only the royals crave girls. They make good counters in the bargaining games played across the castle boundary lines. But this girl was not even human enough to cook and clean and wipe the bottoms of her sisters and brothers to come. The landholder would have killed the moon-misbegotten thing on its emergence from his child-bride’s womb had not the midwife stayed him. He sold the child for a single gold piece and thought himself clever in the bargain.
And did the Old One clear his throat then and consecrate their trade with words? Did he speak of prophesy or pronounce upon omens? If the landholder’s wife had hoped for such to ease her guilt, she got short shrift of him. He had paid with a coin and a single syllable.
“So,” he had said. And so it was.
The Old One carried the gwynhfar back over the miles with his own hands. “With his own hands,” run the wonder tales, as if this were an awesome thing, carrying a tiny, witless babe. But think on it. Would he have trusted her to another, having come so far, across the years and miles, to find her? Would he have given her into clumsier hands when his own could still pull uncooked eggs from his sleeves without a crack or a drop?
Behind him, they say, came his people: the priests and the seers, a grand processional. But I guess rather he came by himself and at night. She would have been a noisy burden to carry through the bright, scalding light; squalling and squealing at the sun. The moon always quieted her. Besides, he wanted to surprise them with her, to keep her to himself till the end. For was it not written that the gwynhfar would arise and bind the kingdom:
Gwynhfar, white as bone,
Shall make the kingdom one.
Just as it had been written in the entrails of deer and the bloody leavings of carrion crow that the Tall One, blessed be, would travel the length of the kingdom to find her. Miracles are made by hands such as his, and prophesies can be invented.
And then, too, he would want to be sure. He would want time to think about what he carried, that small, white-haired marvel, that unnature. For if the Old One was anything, he was a planner. If he had been born better, he would have been a mighty king. So, wrapped in the cloak of night, keeping the babe from her enemy light, which drained even the small strength she had, and scheming—always scheming—the Old One moved through the land.
By day, of course, there would have been no mistaking him. His height ever proclaimed him. Clothes were no disguise. A mask but pointed the finger. At night, though, he was only a long shadow in a world of long shadows.
I never saw him then, but I know it all. I can sort through stories as a crow pecks through grain. And though it is said he rode a whirlwind home, it was a time of year for storms. They were no worse than other years. It is just that legend has a poor memory, and hope an even worse.
The Old One returned with a cough that wracked his long, thin body and an eye scratched out by a tree limb. The black patch he wore thereafter gave rise to new tales. They say he had been blinded in one eye at his first sight of her, the gwynhfar. But I have it from the physician who attended him that there was a great scar on his cheek and splinters still in the flesh around the eye.
And what did the Old One say of the wound?
“Clean it,” he said. And then, “So!” There is no story there. That is why words of power have been invented for him.
The Old One had a great warren built for the child under the ground so the light would not disturb her rest. Room upon room was filled with things for a growing princess, but nothing there to speak to a child. How could he know what would interest a young one? It was said he had never been a babe. This was only partly a lie. He had been raised by the Oldest Ones himself. He had been young but he had never had a youth. So he waited impatiently for her to grow. He wanted to watch the unfolding of this white, alien flower, his only child.
But the gwynhfar was slow. Slow to sit, slow to crawl, slow to eat. Like a great white slug, she never did learn speech or to hold her bowels. She had to be kept wrapped in swaddling under her dresses to keep her clean, but who could see through the silk to know? She grew bigger but not much older, both a natural and unnatural thing. So she was never left alone.
It meant that the Old One had to change his plan. And so his plan became this. He had her beaten every day, but never badly. And on a signal, he would enter her underground chambers and put an end to her punishment. Again and again he arrived just as blood was about to be drawn. Then he would send away her tormentors, calling down horrid punishments upon them. It was not long before the gwynhfar looked only to him. She would turn that birch-white face toward the door waiting for him to enter, her watery eyes glistening. The over-big head on the weak neck seemed to strain for his words, though it was clear soon enough that she was deaf as well.
If he could have found another as white as she, he would likely have gotten rid of her. Perhaps. But there have been stranger loves. And only he could speak to her, a language of simple hand signs and finger plays. As she grew into womanhood, the two would converse in a limited fashion. It was some relief from statecraft and magecraft and the tortuous imaginings of history.
On those days and weeks when he did not come to see her, the gwynhfar often fell into a half sleep. She ate when fed, roused to go out into the night only when pulled from her couch. The women around her kept her exercised as if she were some exotic, half-wild beast, but they did take good care of her. They guessed what would happen if they did not.
What they did not guess was that they were doomed anyway. Her raising was to be the Old One’s secret. Only one woman, who escaped with a lover, told what really happened. No one ever believed her, not even her lover, and he was soon dead in a brawl and she with him.
But I believed. I am bound to believe what cannot be true, to take fact from fancy, fashion fancy from fact.
The plan was changed, but not the promise.
Gwynhfar, white as bone,
Shall make the kingdom one.
The rhyme was known, sung through the halls of power and along the muddy country lanes. Not a man or woman or child but wished it to be so: for the kingdom to be bound up, its wounds cleansed. Justice is like a round banquet table—it comes full circle, and none should be higher or lower than the next. So the mage waited, for the gwynhfar’s first signs of womanhood. And the white one waited for the dark prince she had been promised, light and dark, two sides of the same coin. She of the old tribes, he of the new. She of the old faith and he of the new. He listened to new advisers, men of action, new gods. She had but one adviser, knew no action, had one god. That was the promise: old and new wedded together. How else can a kingdom be made one?
How did the mage tell her this, finger upon finger? Did she understand? I only know she waited for the day with the patience of the dreamer, with the solidity of a stone. For that was what she was, a white pebble in a rushing stream, which does not move but changes the direction of the water that passes over it.
I know the beginning of the tale, but not yet the end. Perhaps this time the wisdom of the Oldest Ones will miscarry. Naught may come of naught. Such miracles are often barren. There have been rumors of white ones before. Beasts sometimes bear them. But they are weak, they die young, they cannot conceive. A queen without issue is a dreadful thing. Unnatural.
And the mage has planned it all except for the dark prince. He is a young bear of a king an
d I think will not be bought so easily with handwrought miracles. His hunger for land and for women, his need for heirs, will not be checked by the mage’s blanched and barren offering. He is, I fear, of a lustier mind.
And I? I am no one, a singer of songs, a teller of tales. But I am the one to be wary of, for I remake the past and call it truth. I leave others to the rote of history, which is dry, dull, and unbelievable. Who is to say which mouth’s outpourings will lift the soul higher—that which is or that which could be? Did it really flood, or did Noah have a fine storymaker living in his house? I care not either way. It is enough for me to sing.
But stay. It is my turn on the boards. Watch. I stride to the room’s center, where the song’s echo will linger longest. I lift my hands toward the young king, toward the old mage, toward the gwynhfar swaddled in silk who waits, as she waits for everything else. I bow my head and raise my voice.
“Listen,” I say, my voice low and cozening. “Listen, lords and ladies, as I sing of the coming days. I sing of the time when the kingdom will be one. And I call my song, the lay of the dark King Artos and of Guinevere the Fair.”
“Well,” said Merlin, “I know a lord of yours in this land, that is a passing true man and a faithful, and he shall have the nourishing of your child; and his name is Sir Ector, and he is a lord of fair livelihood in many parts in England and Wales; and this lord, Sir Ector, let him be sent for, for to come and speak with you, and desire him yourself, as he loveth you, that he will put his own child to nourishing to another woman, and that his wife nourish yours. …”
—Le Morte D’Arthur
by Sir Thomas Malory