by Andre Norton
The sun had gone; twilight was creeping in. Lugaid stood within the trench they had cut.
“Light! A torch! For we cannot leave this to the night!”
Myrddin straightened, his earth-stained dagger in his hand. He tossed aside another bowl of earth. Inwardly he knew that the Druid was right—they must not leave the opened barrow during the night—though the human part of him shrank from invading a place of the dead during the hours of darkness.
Yet he laid aside his clumsy tools and hurried back across the end of the blue stone circle, dodging among the megaliths until he reached the hut. The fire, well covered, still had its coals alive. The boy thrust two torches into the embers, then swung them around his head, letting the air feed their flames into life.
One in each hand, he hastened back intent only on reaching the barrow. But his concentration was suddenly broken by a sensation of alarm. Though he looked from right to left and back again, he saw no movement among the stones whose shadows were beginning to reach like groping fingers over the earth. This wariness might only be because of what they were going to do. He went more slowly, however, and, as he went, he kept careful look around him.
Once more at the digging, he drove the pointed ends of the torches into the earth. By their flickering he could see that Lugaid had not been idle during his absence, for the end of the stone block had been reached, and now the Druid was cutting his way down deeper to reveal whatever door might once have existed.
There was another stone set there, smaller but upright, and it yielded to their combined leverage with the ax, though the tool’s metal broke into two pieces as the stone moved. Myrddin squatted down, his smaller body better fitted to the opening. Lugaid grasped the nearer of the torches and brought the fire closer to give him light.
There were things within: jars, a brace of spears and something wrapped in a covering which puffed into dust when the air reached it. But Myrddin did not want to look at that. Instead he searched for the gleam of metal, and the fire suddenly revealed it.
With infinite care the boy thrust his arm in the opening and groped until his fingers closed on something cold and solid. He drew it toward him, bringing a sword out into the light of the torches.
The blade could only be of the same alloy as that scrap Lugaid treasured. Unpitted by time, straight and smooth as if it had been forged within a year, it answered the flames with a rippling of rainbow light. The hilt was wound around with wire and a great dull jewel crowned the pommel. Carefully Myrddin passed it to the Druid and then began pushing back the sealing rock with frantic haste.
“We must hide this,” he panted. “Out there”—he did not turn his head above the trench they had tunneled—“from out there, we are watched!”
He heard the hiss of Lugaid’s breath.
“Then take you this, boy, and go! Leave me the light. I shall close the barrow. But this must not be risked!”
He held out the sword and Myrddin took it once more, wishing he had his cloak to wrap that length of blade, for it seemed to gather light from the torches and reflect it again like some kind of lamp.
Holding the weapon tight against him, he ran down the side of the barrow, heading for the hut. And the knowledge that one watched among the stones was so clear that he expected, every step of his flight, to have a challenge hurled at him.
It could be some wandering tribesman, even a scout from a far-roving party of Saxons. And what he carried now, had they caught clear sight of it, would be booty enough to bring them down upon him. Yet he inwardly believed that the watcher was not any ordinary enemy.
He had left the door curtain looped up when he had gone for the torches. And that fire he had stirred to life was still flickering, making a well-marked oblong to guide him.
Myrddin was within ten paces of the doorway when a figure separated itself deliberately from one of the standing stones and ran fleetly toward him. The boy swung around to face that apparition. The hilt of the sword fitted into his hand as if the weapon had been forged for him alone. Its blade was far longer than the swords the Romans used, which he had seen among Ambrosius’ host, more slender than those of any tribal making.
As he swung the sword before him the length gleamed, seemed to drip light and color. With it in his hand, Myrddin at long last knew what it meant to be a warrior, the fierce excitement that could grip a man with battle hunger. He did not realize he had bared his teeth, that he uttered a low cry.
But if he was prepared to blood the sword he had taken from the dead, he did not cut down that shadow unheedingly. For she stood within the full light of the doorway. And he knew her.
“Nimue!”
This time he not only saw her laugh but heard the ripple of that sound.
“Merlin!” There was mockery in the name as she said it.
6.
* * *
“Brave warrior.” The girl’s light mockery stung, setting him, in his startlement, a little off guard. “What would you now do, strike me to earth with that weapon of yours after the manner of fighting men in this dark land?”
Myrddin lowered the sword. She made him feel foolish, childlike. Since he knew her to be what she was, though, he must not let her remain in control of their meeting.
“Those who flit in the dark,” he returned, “and come secretly so, must expect to see a bared blade awaiting them.”
“Do you believe that iron will master me, Merlin? Do you still cling to the superstitions of your kind?” Her eyes glistened like a cat’s in the light from the door. And she smiled. “Better waste your strength on such as them!” Nimue whirled and pointed back toward the stones from which she had come.
Things moved behind the rocks, things from a crazed man’s nightmares. But Myrddin knew that they were not really there. Just as he had drawn on his own dawning powers to make the High King see dragons at war, so was she now striving to frighten him with illusions. As he looked at them and away again, they faded and were gone.
The smile vanished from her face and her lips flattened against her teeth. She hissed like a serpent or an angry cat
“Do you think,” she cried, “that you have all the learning of the Older Ones within you? You fool, it would take years upon years to even begin such studies. You are but a boy—”
“And you are a girl,” he made steady answer. “No, I do not claim more learning than I have. But such play as that is for those who are totally ignorant”
She flung her head, so that her hair moved on her shoulders.
“Look on me,” she commanded. “Look on me, Merlin!”
Her ivory skin shone with a glow of its own, her features altering subtly. Beauty flowed about her like a cloak. Suddenly there was the flowering wreath of the Midsummer Maiden on her head, the perfume of the blossoms reaching his nostrils. Her garment of green was gone, her slender body fully revealed to his eyes.
“Merlin . . .” Her voice was honey-sweet and low; it promised much. She came closer to him hesitatingly, as if she would touch him and yet some maiden fears kept her aloof. “Merlin,” she crooned. “Put down that drinker of dead men’s blood, come with me. There is more in this world than you have dreamed of. It awaits you. . . . Come!” She held out her hand.
Manhood stirred in him for the first time, hot and eager. He knew sensations he had never experienced before. The perfume of her flowers, the enticement of her body—his grip on the hilt of the ancient sword was not so tight. All of him which was of the earth wanted her.
“Merlin, they have deceived you,” she said softly. “This is life, not what they would make it for you, shutting you apart from everything within you, straining now for freedom. Come to me, learn what it is to be truly alive! Come, Merlin!”
She raised both her arms, held them out to him, inviting his embrace. Her eyes were slumberously heavy, her mouth curved, waiting for his kiss.
“Merlin . . .” Her voice faded to a whisper, a promise of things he only dimly understood.
It was the sword which saved h
im. Its cold length brushed against his leg as he nearly dropped it. From that touch came a kind of shock which alerted him to her enchantment. He spoke only one word:
“Witch!”
Once more her eyes glittered. The flower wreath disappeared and she was again covered by her rough green robe. Now she stamped her foot and the hands she had reached out to him became claw-like, extended to rip the flesh from his bones.
“Fool!” she cried loudly. “You have made your choice and you must abide by it from this hour forth. Between us there is only war, and do not think that I will be a weakling as a foe! At each triumph you shall find me waiting, and if my strength does not prevail tonight, there will be other days . . . and nights. Remember that, Merlin!”
As she had come out of the night, so did she mesh back into it, mingling so quickly with the shadows that he could not truly have said where she went. And with her went that feeling of being watched. Now he knew that he was free, for a while at least, so he drew a deep breath of relief.
But he waited for a long moment, listening, testing with that other sense the mirror had taught him to use. No, she was gone. There was nothing here but that sensation of long-ago Power which was the nature of the Place of the Sun. For where men have worshipped with their whole hearts—where they have wrought things that are unseen, unheard and cannot be grasped in hand, only in mind and heart—there remains forever the breath of that Power, diminished perhaps by the long passing of time, yet nonetheless abiding.
Holding the sword with both hands, Myrddin entered the hut, set about building up the fire. He kept the weapon ever by his side as he sought out food, put some of the coarse porridge which was Lugaid’s principal food in the pot to boil. As he worked he listened for the coming of the Druid, eager not to be left alone.
Not that he feared Nimue. He did not believe she could call up any strength to outweigh what he himself could summon. But her first attack was one he had not foreseen. He fought resolutely now against the picture which memory kept presenting of Nimue ivory pale in the night, of that slumberous, beguiling voice. Not for him was any woman, that he understood. He must have no ties such as were the right of his human heritage, lest those ties blind him to the purpose which was meant to fill all his days.
“Who has been here?”
Myrddin was startled out of his inner turmoil by that sharp demand. Lugaid had looped back the door curtain, stood tall and frowning within the opening.
“How did you . . . ?” the boy began.
“How did I know? By what Power I have learned! There is a hostile force awake this night. Yet it is not any guardian aprowl.” The Druid’s nostrils expanded as he turned his head slightly, half looking over his shoulder. The skirts of his robe were heavily plastered with earth, his hands battered and bruised, soil caked under the nails.
“She was here, Nimue,” Myrddin said.
“Ah, that is evil hearing! Did she see the sword?”
“Aye. She—she strove to bind me to her.” Myrddin felt ill at ease, yet to share this with the Druid was to lighten somehow the burden of that memory, help to banish it from his mind.
“Like that, was it?” Lugaid nodded. “Aye, that would be the beginning with her. Perhaps if you had been older . . . No, I do not think she could reach you so. But be warned, now that she is on your trail you will not find her easy to put aside. The Dark Ones have their own Power and the beguiling of men is a large part of it. Yet I do not think she can come nigh or weave her spells too well when you have a hand on that.” He pointed to the sword.
“But as you have said, time may be growing short. I had not realized it. Thus I shall do as you have asked of me—I shall go to Ambrosius.”
Myrddin knew a sudden surge of relief. He sensed how dangerous it would be to linger too long here where Nimue had tracked him. Yet this was partly his own place. He felt a strange kinship with the stones, as if they had once possessed some life of their own and had given him some heritage with them.
The boy slept with the sword against his body that night, one hand lying on its hilt. And if the girl who had come to him in the dark strove to weave any spell about his dreams, she did not succeed, for he did not dream at all. Instead he awoke with the day not only refreshed but more confident that what he must do would indeed be done.
Lugaid rode away on the pony Myrddin had brought out of the hills. The boy saw him go before visiting two of the snares the Druid had set. He was lucky; both held game. He toasted meat on an improvised spit and ate lustily.
Later he fashioned a rude scabbard from sections of tree bark bound together with rags torn from his cloak and so wore the sword constantly in the daytime. Its marvelous blade hidden from view, he slept beside it at night. For hours he wandered among the stones, setting his hands at times to one or another, feeling a kind of renewal of spirit rise in him from that touch.
For the first time he thought objectively about the training of the mirror. Much of what he had been told by that bodiless voice he could not use, for the metal wonders of the Sky People could no longer be made on his own world. These required too much in the way of special learning. What he had absorbed was, he guessed, only a very small portion of the knowledge which had once been common to his kind.
He could summon illusions as he had for Vortigen, hold them for a short space. He knew a little of healing, not only through the use of herbs from the fields and woods, but also by the laying on of hands and an ability to “see” the source of others’ ills of mind or body. Thereafter, he might concentrate on rebuilding that which had been injured or harmed through sickness. But such an art required in return the belief of the victim that he could so be healed. And Myrddin doubted whether many now living could retain that belief. It was too close to what men looked down on, naming it sorcery.
He had been given the magic of tongues so that he could listen to the speech of a stranger and, by concentrating on the sounds, sort out in part the thoughts which bad given birth to the words. He knew the magic of weightlessness—he had briefly applied it in this very place to the fallen stone—and he would have to draw on it in full if he was going to complete the task set him.
Now, as he wandered among the stones, he evaluated his learning critically. Perhaps he had more than Lugaid, but his knowledge was far less than it might have been had his race not fallen so far back into barbarism. He knew this, and it created a feeling of frustration within him. It was like standing in the door of a hall rich in treasure, knowing that the treasure was freely given to any man who might lay a hand on it, yet not having the power to cross the barrier between himself and the hall.
Yet he drew comfort from the stones, anticipation from the sword he wore with its bark concealment well lashed about it. And he often wondered for whom that weapon of the Sky metal had actually been forged. Had that other been one like himself, the son of no father? For the voice had shown him enough of the wonders of that other age to let him know that the Sky People did not fight so, man against man, face to face. Rather they commanded lightning flash and thunderbolt to slay horribly from a distance. He had shuddered and been vilely ill when the mirror had once reflected a clear picture from the final days when the world itself, so deeply injured by the wrath of being against being, had burst forth with inner flames. Seas boiled, mountains and land rose and fell as Myrddin himself might now idly toss a clod of soil about.
The boy longed to try the power of the sword and the chant, to return to its upright base one of the fallen stones. However, caution held him from such a trial. He did not know whether using his gift could recall Nimue, so he waited with a patience he schooled into himself for the return of the Druid.
It was spring now, though he had lost the strict measurement of days. The grass about the stones took on a new greenness, as fresh blades pushed up to hide the brittle skeletons of those frost had killed. He found small flowers budding, some already in bloom. Birds were in song, and twice he watched quietly as fox and vixen leaped and played among the stones. I
n himself there was a restlessness he tried to subdue. Twice he dreamed of Nimue, and awoke with a feeling of shame that his own self wished to betray what was the most steadfast in him. And always he watched the faint trace of path down which Lugaid had gone.
He counted off the days by putting small stones in a line from the hut door. And it was when he had put down the fifteenth of those that the Druid returned. He did not ride alone but headed a company of six spearmen of the tribes, who lagged behind as they approached the Place of the Sun, sending glances of uneasiness at the standing stones.
Lugaid gave a grunt of relief as he slid from the back of the pony. He raised a hand in greeting as Myrddin ran toward him, for that moment all boy in his excitement and relief.
“It is well?” he demanded as he neared the Druid. But there was no lighting of the other’s face and Myrddin slowed, looking uncertainly beyond at the men who clustered now together, not dismounting, but rather looking like they would boot their horses into a gallop to be free of this place at the slightest excuse.
“Only in part,” Lugaid returned. “Ambrosius is dead.”
Myrddin came to an abrupt stop. “How did he die—in battle?”
“Not so. He died by the will of that she-wolf from overseas, though her hand reached from the grave to do it. For she and her High King had perished in the flames of their clan tower only one day earlier. The fate she had sent to her enemy still reached him through the hands of one of her maids. The truth was known too late.”
A death in battle, Myrddin thought, like his clan kin, would have been fitting. Such an ending as this was a blackness for Ambrosius, who had deserved a clean severence of his life’s cord with good sword steel.
“Peace on him,” said the boy softly. “He was one whose like we shall not see again.” Something stirred in him which was perhaps a fragment of memory. But it was not yet time for that to ripen into action and it was quickly gone.