The Mammoth Book of Merlin

by Mike Ashley

  “The shoes?” murmured Lorn.

  “Every shoe still firm in its place,” Peter assured him.

  “Is the King awake yet?” asked Lorn.

  “He was combing essence of lavender into his beard when I saw him last,” said Peter.

  Gervis laughed and said: “A dash of the same, and a touch of the razor, would not be amiss with you, my Peterkin.”

  Peter nodded, stepped close to his fellow squire, took the razor of Damascus from unresisting fingers, and a little vial of crystal from Gervis’ wallet with his other hand, and knelt and stooped to the mirror of the pool – all without a word or a smile. Merry young Gervis laughed again.

  “But that’s not lavender, my Peterkin! ’Tis essence of laylock.”

  “Anything will serve but essence of horse,” muttered Peter.

  Gervis winked at Sir Lorn.

  “There’s sorcery in it, by my halidom!” he cried, and laughed again. “And sorcery more potent than any of old Duke Merlin’s hocus-pocus. When did our Peterkin ever before prefer lavender or laylock to honest horse?”

  “I don’t agree with you,” Lorn said gravely. “I think all this babbling of witchcraft is childish – in this case. It is all quite human and natural – especially for Peter to become more particular about his toilet, no matter how suddenly. As for your faery wine – it was good wine, pure and old, that’s all. There’s no sorcery here.”

  “I but joked, sir,” Gervis replied. “But you cannot deny enchantment. There was enchantment last night of more than the juice of earthy grapes, else how did the King come to make that song, and sing it like an angel, without knowing anything about it?”

  “Inspiration – as he told us himself,” said the knight; but his tone was more troubled than assured. “He is, in truth, a great poet. I admit that the wine he drank made him forget the performance when we told him of it last night – but I think we shall find that he can recall it now, and even the words and air of the song.”

  They returned to the pavilion, leaving Peter still splashing and scraping.

  “Look there!” gasped Gervis, gripping his master’s arm.

  They stood and looked. The curtains of the pavilion’s doorway were drawn back to right and left, and King Torrice sat smiling out at them across a table bright with napery and silver dishes and polished horns and flagons. Behind him stood the manikin Jospeh and one of the ancient footmen.

  “Fried trout and hot scones!” he cried. “Strawberries and clotted cream. Brown ale and dandelion wine. Lady Clara sent it over. Come and eat, dear lads. No time to spare. Where’s Peter?”

  “No time to spare?” Lorn echoed. “What d’ye mean, sir? You cannot possibly intend to take the road today, dear sir – and that parlous rogue I spared, foul Drecker, still at large?”

  “Certainly not!” retorted the King, fretfully, with a quick change of countenance for the worse. “We recognize our responsibilities, I hope. I said nothing of taking to the road again.” His merry smile flashed again. “We are to attend Lady Clara on a tour of inspection of her demesne, to see what damage it has suffered. She sent word of it with our breakfasts. Half-armor and swords. All six of us mounted.”

  Both Sir Lorn and Gervis looked their relief. They took their places at the table and ate and drank as if for a wager. Peter arrived, smelling like a spring garden, and with his face shining like a summer apple; and upon hearing the King’s news, he sat down and fairly gobbled and guzzled.

  They paraded in the forecourt of the great house within the hour. Sir Lorn was up on his white stallion, but the King rode the black charger from which he had so recently hurled the late Sir Barl. The squires were on black warhorses too, and the grooms Goggin and Billikin forked the squires’ lively hackneys. All six wore breastplates and long swords, but there was not a helmet among them. The King’s, Lorn’s, Peter’s and Gervis’ caps were of crimson velvet, and the grooms’ were of leather. The gentlemen sported long feathers in theirs, the knights’ fastened with gold brooches and the squires’ with silver. The Lady Clara appeared from the gloom within and paused under the arch of the doorway, with the Damosel Mary, seemingly old enough to be her grandmother, blinking over her shoulder. The King and Sir Lorn and the squires came to earth and louted low, caps in hand, like one man. The lady blushed like a rose and curtseyed like a blowing daffodil. She was encased in samite of white and gold, and from the white wimple which framed her face soared a pointed hat like a steeple with veils of golden gauze floating about it like morning clouds.

  “Our jennets were stabled beyond the wall – and carried off to the forest, saddles and all; so Mary and I must go afoot,” she cried in pretty distress.

  “Nay, our horses are at your service,” the King told her. “Choose any two that take your fancy, my dear.”

  “Gramercy!” she laughed. “But the saddles?”

  “Hah!” Torrice exclaimed; and he regarded the great war saddles with baffled looks.

  Then Gervis spoke up, in dulcet tones.

  “If I may venture a suggestion, Your Majesty and Your Ladyship, I suggest pillions. And may I add that this newly acquired steed of mine is as gentle and easy-gaited as a jennet for all his size and strength, and is therefore peculiarly suited to the task of carrying double.”

  Torrice eyed him dubiously, then turned a glance of doting inquiry upon Dame Clara.

  “The very thing!” she cried, with a swift widening and half-veiling of her multi-colored eyes; and she turned her head and called for two pillions.

  (Lorn thought: “I can’t make out their color, even by daylight; and they are not always black by candlelight.” Something with a sharp, hot edge stirred in his brain. Memory? A thin splinter of it from that lost time by which he was haunted night and day, and yet of which nothing remained to him save the sense of loss? He tried, fearfully yet hopefully, to remember. He racked brain and heart cruelly but in vain. He sighed.)

  Two of the ancient footmen brought two pillions and followed their mistress and the Damosel Mary down the steps. Dame Clara, moving very slowly because of the attentions of King Torrice and the squires, inspected and seemed to consider each of the four chargers, and spared gentle glances even for the hackneys upon which Goggin and Billikin sat like seasoned men-at-arms.

  “May I sit behind you?” she asked the King.

  His eyes shone, and his lavender-scented whiskers rippled. He strapped a pillion to the back of his saddle with his own hands, mounted with but little apparent effort, leaned and held down his right hand. A hand touched his, a foot touched his stirruped foot, and she came up to the pillion like a white bird. From that soft perch she pointed at Sir Lorn’s saddle with her left hand, while holding fast to the King’s belt with her right. And so it was that the Damosel Mary had a higher seat than the lady of the manor, by half a hand. Lorn’s face wore a polite smile which was entirely muscular. His eyes were blank. Gervis looked dismally dashed, and Peter grinned derisively. As the little cavalcade moved off, the manikin Joseph leaped up behind Peter.

  “What else would happen to me?” Peter grumbled.

  “Worse might have happened to you, my friend,” said the dwarf. “Would you liefer it was the big damosel gripping you about the middle, as she even now grips the young knight? You might do far worse than ride double with poor Joseph.”

  “I am glad to hear it, since I seem to have no choice in the matter,” said the squire. “But will you be so kind as to tell me why?” he added.

  “There are many reasons why,” the dwarf replied. “One is, I was born with seven wits, whereas you and your grand friends have only five – and those somewhat deranged in the cases of your old King and your young knight. But I was born with seven, but at a sad cost to flesh and bone. If I had your stature, King Arthur Pendragon would be taking his orders from me.”

  “I believe it,” said Peter, with mock solemnity. “I feel your power and see it in your eye, but I don’t quite understand it. I never before met a person possessed with seven wits. Is
it the power of knowledge or wisdom or cunning?”

  “Of all three,” the dwarf answered, complacently. “I know everything; I understand everything; and I can think as quick and crooked as any witch or wizard.”

  “In that case, you would know Duke Merlin if you saw him.”

  “Yes, it was that old warlock brought you here, though he pretended to be a holy palmer. But he didn’t fool me. He drank two quarts of wine and took the road to Camelot. He said he was going to Tintagel, but I knew better.’

  “You are wonderful, Master Joseph. Now tell me why you and Merlin brought us to this place?”

  “To rid the lady of her oppressors.”

  “So they are friends – your mistress and Merlin?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Joseph said: “No, it was old Sir Gayling, the stargazer, who was Merlin’s friend.”

  “And yet Sir Gayling was stabbed to death in a rose-garden, while his friend the powerful magician played his hocus-pocus elsewhere,” sneered Peter.

  “As to that, my friend, I could enlighten you if I would, but I know without trying that it would be too much for your five poor wits,” the dwarf replied, in a voice so insufferably supercilious that Peter was hard put to it to control an impulse to reach a hand behind him and brush the little man to the ground. “However,” Joseph resumed, “I shall satisfy your curiosity concerning the Dame Clara.”

  But, at that very moment, King Torrice drew rein at a word from his passenger; whereupon Sir Lord drew rein, and Peter drew rein, and the dwarf slid to the ground, and every rider drew rein. Peter and Gervis fairly flung themselves from their saddles in desperate competition for the honor of dismounting Dame Clara from the King’s pillion. Gervis won. The lady descended to earth like a feather, and the King followed her down smartly.

  All were down now save Sir Lorn and his passenger from the back of the mighty Bahram. The knight could not dismount in the orthodox manner while Damosel Mary remained up behind him; and he was not in the mood to sacrifice his own dignity, not to mention proud Bahram’s, by quitting the saddle with a forward, instead of a backward, swing of the right leg. His grandfather and the squires were too intent upon Lady Clara to perceive his difficulty; and it was not until the dwarf had pinched both the squires, and Peter had come – however ungraciously – to his rescue, that he dismounted.

  Afoot, they inspected a farmstead in which the farmer had been murdered and from which five beeves had been driven into the forest by the Drecker gang and there handed over to confederate but less daring outlaws, and a bag of silver pieces taken and pouched by that rogue knight himself; a second farm from which a dairymaid and cheeses and barrels of ale had been carried off after the murder of a stubborn cowherd; and a third in which the master had been tickled with knives – he was still in bandages – until he had handed over all his life’s hoardings of ducats and crowns. And all this was no more than a representative fraction of the villainies perpetrated by the scoundrel Drecker.

  “I don’t understand this,” said King Torrice, who had suffered more footwork and more emotional strain than he could endure with manly resignation. “Are your people mice? Nay, for mice will fight. Then why didn’t the rogues make a job of it, instead of only killing and thieving a little every here and there? Why didn’t he put your own house and household to the torch and sword? Hah! – now I recall what the manikin told me – that the foul Drecker aspired to your hand!”

  He leaned against his horse and clapped a hand to his brow. The lady hung her head and touched a very small handkerchief to her eyes. Sir Lorn moved close to her; and if he thought, it was sub-consciously. Without a word, and with a dazed, far-away look in his eyes, he laid a hand on her nearer arm and propelled and guided her, gently but firmly a few paces aside to where his great white stallion stood watching them. King Torrice lowered his hand from his fretful brow and blinked after them, but before he could utter a word of inquiry or protest, his squire Peter spoke at his shoulder.

  “Sir, I’ve but now heard it all from her dwarf. Let us mount and ride into the fields, and I’ll tell you the whole story.’

  There was no argument. The King mounted with alacrity, though a trifle stiffly. He was eager to hear what trusty Peter had heard from the lady’s dwarf, and even more eager to get his weight off his poor feet.

  The Dwarf Told Peter and Peter Told the King

  The Dame Clara (so Peter told King Torrice) was one of four daughters of a gentleman of remote kinship with the late rich and star-struck old philosopher of Joyous Vale. The father, when young and single, had cut a dash in the train of old King Uther Pendragon for a few years, but had been cheated out of all his patrimony by certain fashionable companions; and too hot of head to retire from court gracefully, he had brawled with, and mortally wounded, one of the cheaters in the King’s own hall; and so he had fled for his very life and not stayed his flight save to sleep, and to eat when he could find food, until he was across the Marches of Wales.

  A Welsh chieftain of the lesser and wilder sort – not one of the nine princes – had befriended and practically adopted him; and so, in due course, he had married a beautiful daughter of the chieftain. Married, as single, they had continued to live with her family in her parental home, which was a confusion of stone and timber towers and halls, and bowers and byres, overlooking a glen of crofts and huts, and itself overhung by a great forest of oaks. Strange to say, the life had suited him better than it had his mountain-bred wife. This had not been so in the first year, but with the arrival of the first daughter, and increasingly so with the arrival of each of the following three, the mother had bemoaned the lack of social opportunities for young ladies in those parts. But the exiled courtier had laughed at her – for he preferred his present to his past and looked to the future with gusto. In hunting wolves and bears and wild boars, in occasional armed clashes with encroaching neighbors or invading savages, and in less frequent but even more exciting raids into the Marches under the banneret of his father-in-law and the banner of Prince Powys, he had found life very much to his taste and nothing to worry about. But he had died in the course of one of those battles of the disputed Marches, leaving hundreds of mourners, chief of whom were his widow and four daughters.

  Now for a jump of time and space to Sir Gayling of Joyous Vale. Hearing from a wandering soothsayer that the most knowledgeable of all living stargazers, and the one possessed of the finest astrolabe and cross-staff in the world, inhabited a high tower atop the highest mountain of Wales, Sir Gayling had set out to find him, accompanied by his squire and lifelong friend Master John of Yarrow (who was as old and almost as stargazy as himself) and a few servants. It was a most other-worldly and untraveled company, for the gentlemen had never before been farther afield than Salisbury, where both of them, as youths, had studied astrology and kindred sciences under the famous Friar Gammish; and the servants had never been out of the Vale.

  But they went unmolested, day and night, league after league. Some took them for holy men, others for mental cases (and so equally under divine protection), and yet others for magicians or worse. Their innocence was their armor. Jinking thieves and all manner of roving, masterless knaves, shared the best of their stolen meats and drinks with them, and honest farmers and lords of castles alike entertained them honorably. They came into Wales in due course, unscathed and in good health, and Sir Gayling and Master John still keen in their pursuit of knowledge.

  There they asked the way to the highest mountain in the world of everyone they met, and at every door, but the answers were mostly conflicting. One point which all their informants agreed upon, however, was that it was somewhere in Wales. In most cases, the person questioned simply pointed to the highest summit within his range of vision. Up and down, up and down and around, toiled the questers after stellar wisdom. They found the people hospitable but inconveniently scattered. They were glad when they came at last, after weeks of fruitless mountaineering, upon a narrow valley full of crofts. The crofters regaled them with st
range and potent liquors and collops of venison, but it was not long before a little man in green came to them and requested them to follow him to his master.

  It was the manikin Joseph himself; and his master was the father of the widow with four beautiful daughters. The chieftain was an old man by then, and the widowed daughter had silver in her black hair, and only one of the beautiful girls remained unmarried and at home. She was the youngest and the most beautiful – and, as you may have guessed, her name was Clara. The travelers were so well treated that they almost lost sight of their reason for being so far from home; and when the mountain lord himself had assured them, after mental searchings, that he had never heard of an outstanding Welsh stargazer in all his life, nor of an astrolabe, whatever that might be, but could name the world’s twenty greatest bards and harpers and ten greatest warriors, and all of them Welshmen, Sir Gayling decided to let the matter rest – and himself with it – for a few days. The cushion of the chair he sat in was softer than his saddle, and the bearskins underfoot did not cut and bruise like rocky mountain tracks.

  Lapped in comfort, he drowsed while the widow told her romantic story, which was always in her heart and never far from her tongue. She began by telling him that her husband had been an English fugitive like himself, only larger and much younger. He protested sleepily that he was not a fugitive. She continued with a glowing description of her lamented partner, and a dramatic account of his career at King Uther’s court, his justifiable slaying of a false friend in the royal presence, and his subsequent flight. Sir Gayling, who had heard rumors of an affair of the kind a long time ago, bestirred himself sufficiently to inquire as to the gentleman’s name and style.

  “Roland of Fenchurch, the Earl of Fenland’s third son,” the lady informed him proudly.

  “I heard something of it at the time,” he replied; and he went on, though reluctantly, for he was still drowsy, to say that the Fenland family was distantly related to him on the spindle side.