by Mike Ashley
“I see it now,” said Raven, gently removing her mother’s hands. The old woman’s skin was papery soft, like the petals of a dying briar rose. Strands of gray hair escaped the loose confinement of her woolen mantle, green as the distant sea. Once, her hair had been a golden net to snare and bind. Now she used other means.
“Then find it, my love. I am tired.”
Raven replaced her mother’s ringless hand on her shoulder. A stray shaft of sun pierced the leafy canopy to dance and die along the polished length of the old woman’s staff. Black and thick, a ring of silver crowned it, and the hand holding it wore a ring whose stone had been wrenched from the living heart of a wave. “Come,” said Raven. “We’re almost there.”
The oak tree stood ageless. Red deer came to drink from a crystal spring welling at its roots. Gray squirrels and their quarrelsome red cousins darted in and out among its branches, and the white ghost eyes of mistletoe glowed faintly from between its leaves. Raven stopped, taking in the tree with her eyes, trying to read its secrets. Patiently the older woman waited. A sigh shook Raven’s shoulders. All she could see was a large oak, matching the image her mother’s magic had planted in her brain; for Raven, alone, only a tree like many other trees.
“We are here,” breathed Nimuë. She released her daughter and began to feel out the terrain with her staff. “Yes, yes, here is the spring – I hear the water bubbling! And here the roots should surge up suddenly, like a giant’s knee – ah! So they still do, after all this time. Now come here, my child. Come and tell me, do you see a place where the moss doesn’t grow? Look near the roots on the far side of the bole and tell me.”
The younger woman looked and found a slab of stone. Wood violets fringed its steely edge, but its surface was bare; nothing dared grow there.
“I see it, Mother. Does it mark – his place? Was it here—?” Raven faltered. Old, old tales told to her in the cradle returned, stories of when her mother was still young and hungering for the power. Remembered firelight danced in Nimuë’s eyes as she leaned close to breathe secrets to her child.
“His place, aye, the place where I lured and left him. He was a husk, sucked dry of all magic. I was ripe with it. I could feel it swelling my blood, throbbing beneath my skin. You have many sisters, Raven, but not one of all my brood ever strained so strongly, ever demanded birth so urgently as the magic I drank from that sad old man.” She sighed and brushed memories away from her sightless eyes. “I will raise the stone now,” she said.
The silver-crowned staff touched the rock almost casually. The older woman murmured words in strange cadence, her rod scraping an answering music from the stone. The violets trembled, and their scent filled Raven’s head as the stone yawned back, crushing them, releasing darkness.
“Old man! Come out, old man!” called Nimuë. Echoing blackness replied. “Merlin awake! The sleep I laid on you is done. Come out into the daylight again and take back what I would give you freely.”
Raven edged closer to the lip of the pit. Shallow steps cut from the earth itself descended into lightlessness. Drafts of air from below blew strangely dry and warm, without a trace of mold or corruption. Nothing answered Nimuë’s call. The women waited.
At last the old woman lost patience. She flailed her staff high overhead and brought it down hard on the tilted stone. Blue-white lightnings arched and crackled.
“Merlin, come!’’ Her summons was a treble shriek. “By every power I or you ever held, I command you!” The lightnings wreathed themselves around her silver head, then plummeted into the crypt, filling it with a momentary flash of starfire.
Raven thought it was a bat. Its wings were gray as ashes, but their leathery shape was more proper to a monstrous butterfly. Wisps of snowy hair trailed its flights as it rose out of the shadows. “Well, Nimuë,” its voice creaked, “how long?”
“Long enough,” replied the old woman. “Long enough for me to have all I wanted from your magic. Now I return it to you. I release you from the spell of sleeping. Now it is my turn to sleep.”
The gray creature chuckled, a musty sound that made Raven feel winter’s chill early, even under summer branches. “Ever the same, eh Nimuë? Age cannot change us that much. Still you see no desires beyond your own. But this time, my love, you shall not have them. You cannot force magic back, once drawn off. It is yours, my magic; yours until time’s end!” The nightmare wings flapped wide in exultation. Raven cried out, revolted as they caressed her cheek in passing flight.
Nimuë’s lips went thin. She clutched her staff with both hands and ground it into the soil. “You will take it back, Merlin,” she said fiercely. “I had powers of my own before yours. I can compel—”
“Nothing,” answered the thing. “I am beyond your world of spells and conjurings. Only the willing vessel can hold magic to the brim. Oh, I waited long for you, sweet Nimuë! I waited long for one fool enough to desire my powers. Little by little I fed them to you, and you were proud, thinking you tricked a doting old man. But who is the trickster now? Who – seeing the marks of sorcery on your face – will ever believe magic is a prize? Farewell, Nimuë! Rest will never come to your bed.” It soared once, then fell like a comet into the dark.
And Nimuë wept by the side of Merlin’s tomb. She sat among the violets and wept like a poor, tired old woman. The dark staff lay beside her as her hands caught the tears.
“Mother?” Raven’s arms were around her. “Mother, don’t cry.”
“I will never rest. Never!” wailed the sorceress, pulling away from her daughter’s embrace. “He said what I have suspected for many ages. I am the power’s slave, now and forever. Who but a fool would ever enter slavery half so willingly as I?”
“Don’t cry,” said Nimuë’s daughter. “You will rest.” She stroked her mother’s hair. “I will accept the power.”
Nimuë’s hand fluttered for her child’s face. Raven took it and pressed it to her cool lips. “No.” The old woman shook her head violently. “Not you.”
“Give it to me, Mother. I can bear it. And I will be wise enough, when the time comes, to rid myself of the burden.” She held her mother’s hand more tightly. “Mother, give me what I was born to have!”
The sorceress’s hands broke free to trace the contours of Raven’s face, while in her rheumy eyes there seemed to glow a spark of long-lost sight. The squirrels, frightened by the stone slab’s strange rising, returned to their branches. At last, Nimuë said only, “Yes,” and with a dry kiss she breathed all magic into her daughter’s body.
“Now I can go,” she said. She left her staff, her green mantle, and her emerald ring in the grass. Her steps were firm as any sighted woman’s. She descended the earthen stair with the grace of a queen newly come into her inheritance. Raven watched until the gray head was no more than a lone star, floating down into the heart of the world.
Then the power took her. Ring and staff leaped into her hand like living things, and the blue mantle wrapped itself around her. She screamed with the burning of it, the green balefire now invading her. Merlin was there, branding her inner eye with his image, wresting from a hellspawn the same powers she now controlled and contained. Nimuë was there, still young, still beautiful, drinking the magic greedily from Merlin’s body. And the chain of power stretched back, back, each possessor eager to tear it from its former vessel, each eager to add his own measure of ambition to the hoard. Raven’s eyes burned. She struck out against the ghosts with her silver-tipped staff, and they scattered. Then she sank down beneath the oak tree.
The grove was quiet.
They came to her there. They came, the small voices. The slab of gray stone drifted softly back into place, the crushed wildflowers bloomed unharmed, and the voices came. She heard them singing, whispering, welcoming, and the fire inside her was gone. A sweetness of cool waters filled her, healed her eyes. The magic stirred inside her; she smiled a waiting mother’s smile.
On her hand the ring glowed pure and white as the luster of a unicorn’s hor
n. The staff she took up rivaled it for whiteness. Her black hair gleamed against the filmy blue of her mantle, and in her eyes she held all the mysteries of birth and renewal, life, and creation out of love. She sang, and the voices answered.
Raven knelt on the slab and gently stroked the seamed rock, seeking a face she loved. “Sleep well, Mother,” she whispered. “If you – if any before you – had come into the power as I have, you would never have come to see magic as a curse. You saw its shine and wanted it as a child wants every shiny thing it sees. But I heard its music. Farewell.”
And the song on her lips was the song of true enchantment as Nimuë’s daughter retraced her steps to the sea.
THE KNIGHT OF PALE COUNTENANCE
DARRELL SCHWEITZER
Darrell Schweitzer (b. 1952) is an American writer and critic and the award-winning former editor of Weird Tales. His books include We Are All Legends (1981), The White Isle (1990) and Transients and Other Disquieting Stories (1992). For this book Darrell tackled the very difficult area of the birth and death of Merlin. One legend relates that Merlin was born an old man and throughout life grew younger until, as a babe, he was reborn again as an old man. Darrell succeeded admirably in translating that into a story. Until the last moment I had planned for this story to open the anthology, but somehow that threw us deep into the mystical legend of Merlin a little too early. So instead here we are in Merlin’s final days.
When the Saxons came to burn the church and school, I had only a moment’s warning. I awoke in darkness. The other boys were already shoving one another and shouting in panic, but I kept my head and ran to the scriptorium to save the most precious thing in the world: my book. I shoved it into a bag with a handful of pens and a stoppered jug of ink. It seemed a crazy thing to do, even at the time, considering that this “book” was only a few pages of used parchment onto which I had painstakingly transcribed a passage of Seneca I didn’t understand, but Father Bernard had complimented me on my letters and said I would be a fine scribe some day; and the book was mine, something I had created, the only beautiful thing I had ever owned and I wasn’t going to let it perish.
So I saved it and ran outside into the night. The church was already aflame. I almost tripped, and jumped clumsily over something which I only half recognized as a corpse in a priest’s robe. It might even have been Father Bernard. I never knew.
The darkness was filled with screaming, racing figures, Saxons on horseback and on foot, already beginning to round people up; like devils behind the gleaming face-masks of their helmets, laughing as they forced the priests to kneel in a row and chopped off their heads with great war-axes.
Someone had an arm around me, but I wriggled, bit hard, kicked, and was free. I ran across the muddy, half-frozen fields, rattling against old stalks. Only then did I realize how desperately ridiculous was my predicament. I’d saved my book, yes, but it was winter and I might have to run and hide for days and I had no provisions or cloak or even shoes.
The monastery’s thatched roof went up with a whoosh. I turned to watch, shivering, gasping for cold, hard breath, clutching my bag as sparks spread across the sky like stars.
Someone bumped into me. I screamed and flailed. Then I saw it was a priest. He had blood on his face, but I knew him, Father Caius, our stern teacher of rhetoric. He didn’t seem to know me, though. He staggered around in circles.
I caught him by the arm. “Father! It’s me, Perry!”
He shook his head. “Peregrinus, we are judged. It is the end of the world!”
“No! We have to get away!”
“We are weighed in the balance and found wanting—”
“Come away! Please!”
I dragged him and he allowed himself to be led. I think we ran for hours, across the empty fields, into the forest which in the terror of that night became as trackless and impenetrable as some forest at the world’s edge. We splashed through a frigid stream, then emerged briefly into the open to cross a road. I glanced fearfully one way, then the other, and hauled Father Caius across into the woods on the other side, and the darkness closed around us for what seemed like forever.
“It is the end of the world!” said Father Caius, raving like someone in a deep fever. I supposed it was his wound.
An ancient, crescent moon was rising as we came to the shore of a lake. The water rippled, silver, then dark, then silver again. I pulled Father Caius down to sit on a rock while I tried to tell where he was hurt. I set my book-bag down carefully, then dipped the corner of my sleeve into the water and washed the Father’s face.
He brushed me away. “I’m all right.”
I dropped to my knees then, trembling violently, resting my face in his lap as if I were a small child, clinging to him. It was a kind of release. Only then could I allow myself to acknowledge how cold and tired I was, how scared. My feet were burning, almost numb. I gasped hoarsely for breath, trying to hold back sobs.
Father Caius held onto my shoulders and rocked gently back and forth, saying nothing.
Then I chanced to look up and gaze along the lake shore. For just an instant, I thought it was a huge, gleaming fish beached there, but, no, it was a man.
“Father, look!”
“God’s mercy, we have work to do yet.”
We both got up and hurried over to where an armored man lay on his back in the moonlight, only halfway out of the water. His helmet had fallen off and I could see that his face was very pale.
“Is he dead?” I asked.
Father Caius knelt and examined him. “No, but he will be soon.”
“Can’t we do anything for him?”
“Only convey his soul into the next world.”
Suddenly the man’s eyes snapped open and he grabbed me by the ankle with surprising strength, so hard it hurt.
“You, boy! You! I have seen you in the magic glass! You are the one who is to hear my tale!”
I struggled but couldn’t get loose. I looked to Father Caius. “What’s he talking about?”
The priest shook his head. “I don’t know. He must be delirious.”
“You must hear my tale!“
I broke free. The man seemed to have fainted.
“Help me drag him out of the water,” said Father Caius, and we two dragged the stranger into the shelter of the trees to hide him in case any Saxons came this way. I ran back into the open once, to recover my bag.
We prayed over the wounded man that night, then slept a little, clinging to him and to one another for warmth. I dreamt of the world going up in flames, and of red and white dragons writhing in those flames, the red devouring the white.
In the morning twilight, the air was a little warmer, but I could still see my breath.
“Father Caius?”
Suddenly the wounded man was awake. He caught me by the arm.
“You, boy. I know you are the one I saw. How old are you?”
“Thirteen . . . I think.” In truth I did not know, because I did not remember my birth any more than I remembered my parents, and so was guessing.
“Good enough. You are almost a man, but will live for a long time yet. And you are a learned clerk. You must write my tale in a book so that all men may know it. This is very important.”
I gulped and looked down at my bag, which contained, indeed, sufficient materials to write the man’s tale. I was terrified then, for I knew some great force was at work, but I didn’t know if this was God’s doing or the Devil’s.
Father Caius stirred beside us. He examined the man’s wound again in the light. The warrior’s mail-shirt was torn and broken. The whole of the garment underneath was soaked in blood.
“I think you had better confess your sins and be absolved,” Father Caius told him, “and forget about telling stories.”
But the man rolled away from him, dragging me.
“No! It can’t wait!’’ he said. Father Caius crossed himself, shocked. The man strained to grab my bag with his free hand, as if he knew what was in it. When I reached
for it, he let go of me, and I got it. I opened my precious book in my lap and got out my pens and the jug of ink. I would have to scribble in the margins and between the lines of Seneca, ruining the effect of my calligraphy. So be it.
“Make it true,” the man said. “Make it real and . . .” His head fell back and he uttered a long sigh “. . . and make it beautiful. Please do this for me.”
“I’ll try.”
Father Caius looked on disapprovingly.
The wounded man began to speak rapidly, sometimes incomprehensibly, his tale filled with strange names and turns of language, and I could only approximate, almost guess, sometimes make up what I thought he meant; but he didn’t seem to care. If I tried to read something back to him he just went on, his torrent of words like water rushing over rocks. Somehow it felt, and he knew, that the act of writing made it all true:
What was his name and what was his quest?
Merlin knew.
And how got he his terrible wound?
Merlin knew that too, but wasn’t telling.
Call him the Knight of Pale Countenance. I never knew his name, but pale he was indeed during those long months, or perhaps years, as the poison seeped slowly through his body and he knew that he was dying; yet he could not die, not yet, for Merlin had a task remaining for him to perform.
In dream or delirium or both, he beheld Merlin, greatest of all magicians, seated on the stone lip of a pool in some ruined garden, reaching into the stagnant water to touch the reflection, not of Merlin, but of the Knight of Pale Countenance.
And the knight cried out at the touch as if he had been branded with an iron. Merlin, in the dream, jerked back, startled. He raised his hand, and a huge black bird swooped down to alight on his wrist. You’d expect a merlin, the kind of falcon after which he is named, but no, it was a raven, battlefield feaster, harbinger of death. The magician whispered into the bird’s ear, then heaved the creature aloft.