by Jack Whyte
"Now listen to me, Cay. I am your aunt. My name is Luceiia. Can you say that?" Again, I understood her words and knew what she wanted, but I did not know what she wanted me to do. She moved again, so that she sat with her hip against me, her body twisted so she could look directly into my face. She moved her mouth slowly, speaking clearly: "Lu-cei-ia. Loo-chee-ya. Say that, Cay."
I felt my tongue move but my lips were gummed together. They would not open. She was watching my mouth closely now and she rose and moved away quickly, returning with a moist cloth which she used to clean my lips, running her cloth-wrapped finger end into my mouth and around my gums. It felt wonderful. She tried again, and this time I repeated what she had said. "Luceiia." It meant nothing to me, but it was obviously very important to her. I had learned my first word.
I learned very quickly after that, as a child does and, like a clever child, I had many willing teachers. The thin, dark- faced man told me that his name was Lucanus and that he and I had once been friends, but that I had lost my memory. He told me that my memory loss was complete, that I was an empty vessel, but that I might one day remember everything. In the meantime, he said, I could relearn all that I had forgotten. He was encouraged in this belief, he told me, because I was not a completely empty vessel. I could still speak and understand what was being said to me, which meant that, somehow, the damage done to me had not been unlimited. I remember that today, his way of phrasing that. He did not say the damage had been limited; it had not been unlimited. Even though that subtlety escaped me at the time, I also remember that I wondered what he meant, and asked him. He blinked at me, then paused for a time before saying, "You were hit very hard on the head with a large metal ball.. .a club with a swinging head." That meant nothing to me, so he continued, watching my eyes closely all the time. "We thought you had been killed. Uther found you being guarded by young Donuil, your tame Celt"
"Uther?" I searched my empty mind, seeking for a meaning. "Who is Uther?"
"Uther is your cousin and your closest friend. He has been here several times to visit you. A big, dark-haired fellow with blue eyes and a long moustache." I smiled, remembering: Merlyn Caius Merlyn Britannicus. That had been Uther.
"Anyway, Uther had been tracking the invaders who ambushed you up in the hills, but he had not expected you or anyone else to come along, so you surprised him as much as your attackers surprised you. He had been plotting a trap of his own when you and your troopers sprung the trap in which you were hurt. By the time he was able to organize his forces and attempt a rescue, it was almost too late. He and his men drove off your attackers and brought you back here to Camulod. Do you remember Camulod?"
I shook my head, only then becoming conscious of the extent of things I could not remember. Thinking back to that time now, I see many things that I failed to grasp, let alone remember. When Lucanus told me, for example, of how he had bored a hole in my skull with an auger to relieve the pressure of blood built up in there and pressing on my brain, all the while fearing the attempt might kill me but blowing that I would inevitably die if he did not do something, I listened without surprise or disbelief, utterly oblivious that such things were not supposed to happen. Haematoma, he had called the pressure. He had relieved me of a haematoma by drilling a hole into my head while I lay unconscious, and the operation had been successful.
I spent many hours talking to Lucanus, and to many others throughout the years that have lapsed since then, about the phenomenon known to physicians as amnesia, although no one has known more about it than he did. I learned that it is a surprisingly common occurrence, stemming from a wide variety of causes, but that its very commonness of occurrence is the only common thing about it. No two cases that he had ever encountered, Lucanus told me long afterward, had ever been the same, or even comparable, apart from the single common point of memory loss. Some people lost only parts of their memories and never regained them. Others lost all memory, then regained it in a very short time. Some people's memories returned to them slowly, over years, while others regained theirs in their entirety within moments. Some amnesiacs retained familiarity with their surroundings but lost all knowledge of their own identities; still others knew perfectly well who and what they were but lost all awareness of limited periods in their past. Mine was the most drastic case Lucanus had ever encountered. I had lost everything, including self-awareness, and had become tabula rasa, as he termed it: an empty slate.
As time progressed, I found out everything about myself. I met all my old friends and renewed many friendships. Their assistance and the good will they accorded me made the process easy. And yet it was never complete, because the relationships, old as they might be, had no personal significance to me beyond the point at which they began again.
I identified with whatever it was that had occasioned these friendships originally, but I recalled nothing and no one. They brought the young Erse prince Donuil to see me and he spoke to me in his Celtic tongue and I understood him. He talked of the fight and how he had thought me dead after seeing me felled by my own flail. The man who swung it had been set to hit me again when Donuil killed him. I listened, responded politely in the young prince's own tongue and invited him to visit me again, but I did not remember him. They told me of my father, Picus Britannicus, and I had no recollection of him. They showed me my grandfather's books, and my great-uncle Varrus's books, but to me they were meaningless, because, although I could speak my own Latin language and the Celtic tongue, I could no longer read and the names of the writers meant nothing to me.
They told me that Cassandra was dead, with her unborn child, killed by persons unknown while on a visit to her secret home, and I accepted the information without comment since it had no relevance to me, even when they told me she had been my wife and the unborn child was mine. I was not callous; I was unknowing. My mind was empty of knowledge of her name, her face or her appearance. I relearned the facts, but I could not resurrect the emotional involvements.
Finally I moved out of my sick room and into the life of the fort they called Camulod. Uther, who should have been my teacher, I was told, was away on campaign in the south somewhere, fighting an extended war against King Lot of Cornwall—another meaningless name, although I understood its implicit menace. In his stead, therefore, Donuil the Hibernian prince and the Legates Flavius and Titus began to teach me to ride again and to handle weapons. I took to these activities immediately and instinctively, mastering each of the tasks I was set as quickly as they were presented, but none of them occasioned any further or deeper awareness. I simply had a natural aptitude for such things.
The spring of the second year of my new life arrived and lengthened into a summer that was followed lazily by an autumn in which I was plagued with formless, gradually worsening headaches. Then, after the onset of an early winter, Uther finally returned to Camulod. I had been anticipating his return, because apart from the recurring headaches, of which I had informed no one, by this time I was almost wholly back to being the man I had been before, according to everyone who knew me, and there were many who believed that meeting Uther would be the final step in my regaining my sense of self.
He arrived at nightfall on the second to last night of November, and I remember how glad he was to see me waiting for him with the others in the great courtyard. He leaped from his horse and ran to me, his face split in a great, joyful grin, and swung me off my feet in an enormous hug. I smiled back at him and returned his embrace, but inside myself, where I had learned to conceal my confusion, I felt devastated. The sight of him brought no memories, and my head began to ache again.
I had made two solid, honest friends since my homecoming, starting afresh with each, although they both assured me we had been friends before. These were Lucanus and young Donuil. They accepted me now as I had become, not as I had formerly been, and I loved them both for that. Almost everyone else treated me as they did because of what, or who, I had been. I could see through that pretence instantly and no one was ever able to fool me
. Only with these two did I feel whole, because neither made any attempt, ever, to prod me back towards being the Caius Merlyn everyone else was seeking. Their friendship, abetted by the wholehearted and unequivocal love of my great- aunt Luceiia, enabled me to survive a long and brutal winter with a degree of equanimity, enjoying what I had, rather than pining uselessly for whatever it was that I had lost.
Uther, however, laboured hard at accepting me as I was now. His treatment of me was at all times straightforward, open and considerate—sometimes, I felt, too much so. He was scrupulous in his efforts to treat me as his equal and his lifelong friend, but I could sense an awkwardness in him. It came to a head on a sunny morning in March the following year when, during a hard-fought bout with me, he suddenly sprang away from me and grounded the point of his sword. I grounded mine, too, but watched him narrowly; this cousin of mine was a doughty and crafty opponent. He wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his tunic, his breath heaving in his chest from the exertions we had been sharing, and I was astonished to see tears standing in his eyes.
"By God, Cay, I can't stand this! You're you, and yet you are not. It's like playing with a ghost. You are complete sometimes, and I love the fight in you, and you were ever thus, and yet...and yet, much of the time now you are too different. My boyhood friend Cay simply is not here."
I felt a lump swell in my own throat at the sight of the tears in his fierce eyes, and I stepped forward, arms spread wide to embrace him. Our breastplates clashed together as our arms went round each other and he snorted into my ear, half laugh, half sob, before pushing me away to arm's; length and looking me in the eye.
"I leave tomorrow, Cay. Back to the south. Lot is still alive and fighting fit in spite of all my prayers to the ancient gods to blast his benighted soul to smoke and ashes, and I won't rest until I've cut the head, with my own sword, from his stinking neck. I wish you could come with me, but I doubt it would be wise. You are too gentle nowadays,; Cousin. Stay here, and train, and try to find yourself. I hope when I return you will know me again."
Four days later, missing him already and knowing I was unfit company for any of my friends, I mounted my horse and rode off alone, taking care to avoid being seen by Donuil, who dogged me everywhere, to the little valley my aunt told me I had called Avalon. There, I stood by the banks of the tiny lake, close to the wall of the small stone hut, looking down at the grave that they told me held my lost love and my unborn child. I had come here several times—once with Luceiia and once with Donuil; other times alone. And each time I came I felt guilt, crushing and hopeless, over my inability to grieve for what must once have been most dear to me.
Today my head ached abominably, throbbing so fiercely that I almost felt as though it moved rhythmically in time to the surging of my blood. I knelt by the foot of the grave and began the prayers I had been taught for the souls of the two people beneath me. How long I knelt there I have no idea, but the pain in my head swelled unbearably, and I eventually rose to my feet with great effort, knowing that the time had come to seek out Lucanus and tell him what had been happening to me. As I stood, my head seemed to spin and a dark, reddish mist swirled in front of my eyes. I thought I turned towards my horse, but instead I found myself facing the front of the hut, with its hanging, ruined door. My knees gave way and I felt myself pitch forward, seeing the edge of the door rushing towards my face.
I did not lose consciousness, and as I lay there with my face in the cool grass the excruciating pain inside my skull began to recede, to be replaced by a different, external pain. Eventually I was able to get up again, and then I discovered the source of my new pain. In falling, I had grazed my forehead against the door's edge and gouged a cut that was slowly leaking blood down my face and stinging painfully. Moving with great caution lest I renew the agony in my head, I went to the water's edge and knelt among the reeds there, scooping up the cold water to wash the blood from my face. The water felt wonderful, almost icy, and my head quickly began to clear, so to aid the process I leant forward gracelessly, bracing myself on my bent arms, and ducked my head completely beneath the surface, enjoying the sudden shock as the enveloping coldness chilled my scalp instantly and snatched my breath away. Feeling much better, I knelt erect again and began to flick the excess water from my short hair with my hands, and as I did so, I remember, I froze, motionless, my heart filling up with some enormous, nameless dread, my eyes dazzled by the brightness of the sunlight shimmering upon the waters ahead of me. I heard a drumbeat echoing somewhere, and only after long moments recognized it as the beating of my own heart. The sensations that swirled through me now were different from those caused by my aching head. These held the nausea of terror and the fear of turning my head to look at what I had no wish to see. I heard a ghostly, whooshing sound, the sound of ravens' wings, and then my mind filled with the surging image of a prancing shadow horse, its death-grey, shrouded rider standing in the stirrups, swinging a weapon round his head, splitting the air with the same sound of wings until he swung it at me, hurling me, shattered, into the waters of the mere.
Donuil, my faithful hound, rescued me before I could drown. He had followed me, of course, but knowing I wished to be alone, he had remained hidden, content to watch me, concerned as ever for my welfare and safety; Almost recovered I might be, but to him I was far from myself and therefore I bore watching at all times. He pulled me out, lifted me across my horse and bore me back to Camulod unconscious.
Lucanus took one look at me, it seems, and drilled his hole into my skull again, quickly this time, since the original aperture was plugged only with beeswax. Once again I awoke to find myself immobilized and bound to my bed for months.
This time, however, no further damage had been done. No tabula rasa greeted them on my awakening. My memory was as it had been—complete but incomplete. I mended quickly, but had to swear an oath to Lucanus that I would inform him immediately in future of any aches or pains within my head. Even when I had promised him, he looked gravely concerned and warned me that he had only ever performed his haematoma surgery once on anyone. He had never heard, he said, of the procedure being conducted twice on the same person. He was obdurate in refusing to allow me from my bed before he was convinced that I was, in fact, healing normally. It took six more weeks to convince him of that, and each day and night of those six weeks I was haunted by the death-grey vision that had assailed me by die lakeside. In vain I told myself it had been caused by the deep-seated pressure in my skull, but I could not rid myself of the conviction that something important had occurred there.
Within two weeks of being allowed to leave my bed, Lucanus permitted me to mount a horse, and from that moment on I fretted impatiently, waiting for Donuil to ride off on an errand to some neighbouring farm. As soon as he did so, I made my way directly to the valley again, dreading what I might find, but fearing even more the burden I would bear if I allowed my fear to stop me from going back.
Nothing had changed. The tiny grave was there, grown over now with weeds, since Donuil had been held in Camulod, tending to me. I walked to the water's edge and found the spot where I had knelt that day, and I knelt there again, waiting to be assailed afresh, but nothing happened. I gazed across the surface of the tiny lake and saw only the trees on the other bank. My logic had been correct, I realized; the phantasms that had plagued me had sprung from the pressures in my head.
I became aware of the anomaly before I actually looked at it. It was merely there, present, a strangeness that attracted me by its very difference. Even when I focused on it, I could not see what it was. It lay just out of reach, a stick of some description, short and thick and absolutely straight, hanging vertically in the clear water between two clumps of reeds. I looked more closely, then realized it was too short. It did not reach all the way to the bottom but merely hung there vertically, waterlogged in some strange fashion. Idly, I splashed my hand towards it, trying to make it move. The water churned around it, but it hung there almost motionless, as though anchored
. And then I saw the loop, floating almost invisibly just below the surface. I stood up and stepped into the water, sinking almost to the knees in the muddy bottom as I reached out and grasped the thing. It was slick and greasy in my grip, covered in algae, but it came to me easily as I pulled and lifted it. It was a man-made shaft, not a stick, and it ended in a fitted iron butt from which depended a length of chain and a heavy iron ball, rusted to the colour of the mud on the bottom. My flail! And yet I knew immediately it could not be, for mine was lying somewhere up in the Mendip Hills, wrapped around the skeletal wrist of the man who had last swung it.
If you don't hit me with yours... The words rang clearly in my head and the voice was mine, but to whom had I said that? I looked at the dripping weapon in my hand and heard more words.
Can't you imagine what that thing would do to a man on foot if you swung it round your head?
It would impress him.
Aye, helmet, skull and all...
I promise not to hit you with mine if you don't hit me with yours.
Uther! The other voice was Uther's! But when had we said those words? I promise not to hit you with mine if you don't hit me with yours...And then it came to me. It had been the morning of the day we set out against Lot's first invasion, the last time I saw my father alive. And suddenly my father's face was there in my mind, twisted in death as he sprawled in rigor mortis across his bed, and I felt a stab of agony as I remembered, not yet aware that I was remembering. Then, incongruously, I heard Aunt Luceiia's voice: Her injuries were awful, as though she had been battered to death, her skull completely crushed... Then Uther's voice again: The bitch! I'll find her later and teach her a lesson she won't soon forget...
The voice I heard screaming then was my own, as all the agony and grief, the sudden realization of my lost love, crashed down on me at once and I staggered round to look at—and this time really to see—the piteous, weed-strewn little grave that contained my beloved, my dreams and my life.