by Anna Elliott
I HAVE THOUGHT, and often, on how easy it is—too easy by far—to forget the suffering at the heart of so many harpers’ tales. To forget that real men and women once earned the telling of those stories, in grief and pain and tears.
And yet this I will say: that I wish that I had a harper’s words to tell of the scene that met my eyes within the fortress walls.
I had glimpsed, in vision, Merlin fighting twenty and more of Vortigern’s guards with a stolen sword. I had relived the memory of it with every beat of my heart on the journey here. And yet no vision could have matched up to the reality before me as I pushed open the gate with all my strength and stepped inside.
He wore still the ragged breeches, but fought bare chested, like some blood and flesh vision sprung from the old warriors’ tales. Bron’s swirling blue whorls and spirals still marked his skin.
He fought on the open square of churned and muddied ground where Vortigern’s warriors daily sparred with spears and swords. The light of surrounding torches turned his loosened hair to a gleam of gold amongst the leather helms of Vortigern’s men, showed the patch of sticky scarlet from a gash in his side.
And I can say that he wielded the sword like harnessed lightning. Or that he fought like a striking eagle, screaming out of the sky. But no words—perhaps not even a harper’s—can match up to the reality of how he spun and slashed and beat back attack after attack from the surrounding men, all the while with his own death plain in his gaze.
All around him were littered the bodies of those who had fallen to his blade, leaking their blood out onto the soil, some crying and dragging their own spilled guts behind as they tried to crawl away; that is one part of battle the harpers do not often sing.
Vortigern stood back and to one side, hurling curses at his own men, urging them onward, to attack, to kill the prisoner where he stood that the walls might stand. And they tried, the Goddess knew they tried, tripping over the bodies of the fallen, slipping and sliding in spilled blood.
One man here or there would get close enough to strike a blow, to open another gash in Merlin’s arm or his side. But then Merlin’s blade would spin and lash out, deadly-swift as a biting snake, and another of Vortigern’s warriors would fall.
His death was inevitable, of that there could be no mistake. For every man he killed, another pressed forward to take the fallen man’s place, and sooner or later he would be too slow to strike away one of their blows. But he would take twenty and more with him into Annwn, the Lord of the Dead’s, great feasting hall.
I made no sound; I would swear to it. I made no sound, nor even moved from where I stood, pressed against the fortress’s outer wall. And yet Merlin’s head came up, and his eyes looked straight into mine.
Only for an instant, no more than a split heartbeat of time.
And yet it was too much. Or enough. Enough to make him falter and lose the rhythm of parry and thrust with his sword, enough to form a crack in his guard.
A hard swing from an attacker’s blade made him stagger, momentarily off balance, and I saw another of Vortigern’s men close in, like a wolf scenting the kill, his sword upraised.
What had I planned when I left Bron? Scarcely anything, really. Nothing of use, now.
I had expected to find Merlin bound and in chains, awaiting the triple death of drowning, strangling, and the knife. And I had thought, in Bron’s absence, that I might come forward myself and claim knowledge of the rites. Then stall and spin out the performance until—the Goddess willing—Bron could lead my father’s men over the unguarded walls.
Now, in the instant Merlin faced his death—a death I had brought him for the second time, I had no time for plans, nor even for thought.
I screamed, long and piercing and loud, loud enough to be heard even above the roar and shouts of the warriors.
A dozen and more heads turned to me. Several more of the warriors took a few steps towards me, faces angry, blades drawn.
But the killing blow aimed at Merlin never fell. And I would have screamed again, and gone on until the entire crowd’s attention was drawn to me, if it bought Merlin a few precious seconds more.
I had no chance.
As though my thought had in that instant crackled between us, Merlin leapt forward, straight into the crowd of his attackers. I heard a voice cry out, and realized only a moment later that it had been my own. My vision shivered at the edges, and I expected at every moment to see him fall under strikes from a dozen and more swords.
But he never did. He moved like a bright jet of flame, like a burning brand through the sea of Vortigern’s warriors, ducking, weaving, striking out and parrying blows with his sword, spinning and weaving under their guard. My teeth were clenched to keep from screaming again. But he fought in a blur of movement, and with such swift savagery that I would scarce have had time to draw breath before he had carved out a path to the other side of the crowd where Vortigern stood.
I believe it was shock, as much as anything, that made Vortigern’s men stand back for another frozen heartbeat of time. Only a moment, but time enough for Merlin to seize hold of Vortigern and drag him backwards, the blade of his sword at Vortigern’s throat.
“Stop!” The shouted command rose above the roar of the crowd. “Stop or he dies!”
Vortigern’s hands had come up, reflexively, to grasp at the still-dripping blade that bit into his neck. Merlin must have tightened his hold enough to pierce the skin, though, for a fresh trickle of red slid down to stain the fur-trimmed collar of Vortigern’s cloak. Vortigern went still, eyes contracting, lips drawing back over his teeth in the snarl of a wolf at bay.
“Do as he says!”
The warriors might have rushed him, even still, and even at the cost of Vortigern’s life. Merlin was but one man, and had shamed and slain their comrades. And many of those assembled had small love for Vortigern after his last few months of rule.
But in the moment’s hesitation, the moment’s stillness that Vortigern’s order had won, Merlin leapt backwards, onto the platform of an upturned and half-rotted frame of a wagon that had stood behind him at the edge of the practice yard.
It was an astonishing feat; I measured it afterwards and found the wagon to be more than half the height of a well-grown man, and Merlin was dragging Vortigern’s weight up with him, besides. And yet he kept his footing, kept his hold on Vortigern and the hilt of his stolen sword.
“Keep back!” Merlin’s face glistened in the flickering torchlight with sweat and spatters of blood. His unbruised eye looked bleak and shadowed, and his mouth was set in a hard, grim line. That look I had seen before, many times, on the faces of those in my care: the look of a man suffering almost unbearable pain. And I wondered of a sudden what he saw when he looked at the field of the dead and dying: children growing up fatherless, wives weeping for the men he had just killed?
Still, his voice rang out again, a furious shout, biting as steel. “Any man comes a step nearer, and your king’s head rolls at your feet!”
One or two of the warriors had taken a step nearer, but stilled at that, hovering undecided a handful of paces from the wagon’s rim, blades upraised.
The battle hunger of the crowd was almost palpable, a buzzing, crackling presence that made itself known in eager faces and clenched hands, in uneasily shifting feet and warm, panting breath. A thousand tiny signs that in an instant, Merlin’s hold on the warriors could snap and they could close in for the kill.
“Listen!” His voice sounded hoarse with shouting, but his balance on the unstable platform of the wagon bed never faltered, no more than his grip on the sword at Vortigern’s throat. “Listen to me! Your druids have claimed that my blood will make the building stones of this place stand. But I tell you now, that is a lie!”
A hiss, a sullen, angry mutter went round the crowd at that, and one or two more of the warriors shifted from foot to foot where they stood. Merlin’s voice cut off the murmur of sound.
“Where is he? Wh
ere is the druid now, who claimed the soil here must needs be sprinkled with the blood of a fatherless child?”
Another stir of voices and shifting movement went round the crowd of fighting men—but a different one, this time. From where I stood, pressed back in the shadows of the fort’s outer wall, I thought that for the first moment a thread of doubt, fine as a hair, might have wound its way through the furious lust for blood.
In the glow of torches, Merlin’s eyes gleamed almost red, and the smokey firelight gilded his face like the hammered metal face guard of some warrior of old, made an aureole of his wheat colored hair. “Vortigern’s druid is not here. But I am! And I will tell you why these towers fall time and time again! Dig!” He made a violent stab with his free hand towards the ground where the fighting men stood. “Dig, I tell you! Dig down into the soil if you would know the reason no building walls will stand. Dig. Or”—he tightened his hold on Vortigern—“Or your king dies now!”
There was a moment, another heartbeat of time where the armed and helmeted warriors, the very currents of air that whipped the torches and blew back Merlin’s hair seemed to still, waiting. And then, slowly, doubtfully, and with more than one sullen, wary glance, the men-at-arms started to dig. With their sword blades—for they had nothing else at first—they stabbed and scrabbled at the soil.
A few of the men stumped off, after a short while of this, to drag out proper shovels and picks, and began shifting and hauling the dirt away with those. Merlin stood throughout on the upturned wagon, stance sure, gaze unfaltering; Vortigern, still pinned in his grasp, was as one turned to stone, his breaths coming in short, panting huffs.
And I stood frozen as well, the outer wall of the fortress solid and rough at my back, strangely grateful for the pain of a dozen and more scratches and bruises from the journey here that now made themselves felt. The pain gave me an anchor, a hard core of glowing ember that kept the fury in my chest from burning away to powdered ash.
All the time I had labored, this last day and more, trying to win Merlin’s trust, and it had not occurred to me—not even once—that he might not be worthy of mine.
I had Seen, as he did, the soil of the fortress stained red with blood. But it might as easily be my father’s men bleeding their lives away into Dinas Ffareon’s muddied ground. Would be, when Vortigern’s warriors found the beams and bracing of the tunnel beneath their feet, and were forewarned and ready when my father’s men attacked with Bron.
Merlin’s head came up with a jerk and turned, as though the thought had been an arrow strike, tugging his gaze to my patch of shadow. For an endless instant, his eyes looked into mine, twin pools of gleaming torchlight in the copper and gold mask of his bruised face.
And then he turned back to the laboring men. “Look down!” His voice rang out again, a hoarse war cry over their grunts and the scrape and thud of shovels biting into the earth. “Look down into the pit you’ve dug. You will find a pool. A pool of water beneath the soil here.”
The crowd stirred again, and then a voice came out of the deepening pit in the ground, “He’s right.” And then—a second voice, this time: “He’s right! There’s water here!”
The muscles of Merlin’s throat contracted as he swallowed. Both throat and chest were streaked with tracks of drying sweat, silver, as though the gold warrior’s face guard had begun to melt and run. “A pool lies deep within that soil!” he shouted. “And beneath and within that pool lie two dragons. One white, the other red. You—you have all heard the tales. You know I speak true. Llud of the Silver Hand buried two dragons, beneath the ground, in the days before the rocks themselves began keeping time. I tell you these dragons—these two warring dragons—lie here, beneath Dinas Ffareon! It is they who cause the tower walls to fall with their eternal struggles. One white dragon, for the Saxon hordes. One red dragon, the dragon of Uther, Britain’s rightful king. And I tell you now, dig up these dragons, let them crawl from the soil and have their final battle here, before our eyes! I swear to you, the red dragon—Uther Pendragon’s dragon—will triumph in the end!”
I do not know, of a truth, whether they would have believed him or no. One thing to tell a harper’s tale to a man when he lies wounded in the depths of fear and pain. Another to ask him to believe the story true, and on the words of a man who has battled and slaughtered his comrades.
And yet Merlin had struck among them like a thunder storm, battled single-handed and slain a dozen and more of Vortigern’s finest warriors. If anyone could talk of wonders and be believed, it was surely he, backlit by the glow of torchlight, body bruised and bloodied and yet still painted with the blue woad that had guarded warriors from days long passed into story.
Vortigern’s men held back, uncertain, looking wildly from one to the other, faces awed and suspicious and angry by turns in the patched shadows of moon and torchlight.
From the stables at the far side of the fortress, one of the horses whickered, low and nervous. And then, as the very air seemed to thicken and press in all around, my father’s men erupted from all sides: screaming through the unguarded gate, boiling over the half-completed northern wall. A tide of armed and shouting men waving spears and axes and swords.
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