Merlin

by Jane Yolen

  Opening his eyes, he stared at each woman in turn. Two he was already familiar with: the branded woman and the redhead. They seemed to be the leaders. But soon he found he could distinguish the others as well. In the tales, the wild women were ugly. Mag had said they were covered with bristles and Nell that their black hair was spotted with moss and lichen. But in fact several of the women of this camp were flaxenhaired and none, as far as he could tell, had bristles. As for being ugly, two or three of them were surprisingly good-looking. And the redhead—though she had a tendency to scowl at him, which wrinkled her forehead—was quite beautiful. Not, he reminded himself, as beautiful as Viviane, the lady of the green castle-cart. But close.

  Neither his staring nor his silence seemed to bother the women. Theirs was a genius for long patience. So after a while, Hawk-Hobby forced himself to look down at the ground to avoid their accusing eyes.

  Organy, he thought. Even the smell of it would ever after remind him of their stares and the sun beating down on his uncovered head.

  On the ground there were hundreds of ants scurrying between the blades of grass. He was startled by their purposefulness in the midst of his own forced idleness.

  Ants, his conscious mind told him. But as he continued staring at the hurrying insects, he became mesmerized by them and suddenly he found himself head to abdomen with them as they threaded their way between towering grasses.

  The ants were all yellowish-brown and their elbowed feelers swayed before them to a rhythm he could almost grasp. The sound of the many pairs of marching feet was thunderous. Plodding through the arcade of grass, they marched as if a single thread connected them. They sang as one: "Go the track, don't look back. Go the track. Don't look back." The words repeated over and over. It was hypnotic.

  He opened his mouth to sing with them, blinked, and found himself once more sitting on the hide. But the song of the ants was still so compelling, he found himself singing it. "Go the track. Don't look back."

  He was interrupted by the women crying out: "The Dreamer. The Dreamer is here."

  "But..." he tried to say, "that was no dream." However, he did not know what it was, so he forced himself to silence. If the women thought him this Dreamer, and that got him off the hide, allowed him to stretch his legs, or relieve himself, he would agree to anything.

  He thought he had been on the hide for hours and hours but when he looked up at the sun, it was not quite noon.

  9. DREAMER

  THEY FED HIM THEN, EVEN MORE THAN they had at dinner, a strange porridge and a stew that left an odd aftertaste. They made him eat every bite.

  He ate steadily and then, when he thought he could not eat anything more, they brought him a sweet honey drink which they insisted he finish. He tried to turn it down but they would not let him. To silence them, he drank it all. At last, with aching, taut belly, he tried to stand and found his legs would not hold him up.

  "I feel..." he began, not knowing what he was feeling. And turning his head to one side, he was suddenly and quite efficiently sick.

  When he was done, the women helped him stand and guided him to a place somewhere on the edge of the camp. Through slotted eyes he tried to make it out, but could not. His head was swimming about and he was afraid he might be sick again.

  "This be thy place now," the black-haired woman with the cheek brand was saying, her voice remarkably similar to the bulldog's.

  Place. That was good, he thought drowsily. He needed a place.

  The woman gave him a little push in the small of his back and he fell, rather than walked, into it.

  The place was small and dark and closely covered. There was some sort of mattress, thin and old smelling. He did not care. He curled up on it and fell instantly to sleep.

  This time he dreamed.

  He dreamed of the bear again, but now he was in the dream as well, holding a sword in one hand, a large stone in the other. The bear took off its crown and flung it onto the sword. At that, sword and crown dissolved and he woke sweating and ill.

  It did not help that his small, closed-in tent seemed to be swaying. It did not help that the air stank of his sickness. He tried to get to his feet and banged his shoulder painfully against something. His head hurt. His belly ached. The slightest noise hammered at his temples like a blacksmith's hammer on an anvil.

  Heavily he fell again onto his pallet where he slept, dreamed, woke, slept again. The dream images all blended into one great dream of kings and kingdoms.

  Suddenly an enormous light—like the light of heaven itself—flooded into his dream. He opened his eyes and found that he was lying in an open space. The tent had been lifted away and the light was the new day.

  Only then did he see what his place really was. He was in some sort of large wicker cage hanging from a tree limb some five feet off the ground. When he tried the cage door, it would not open. Not that this was exactly a surprise. It was tied shut with a complicated knot on the outside that he could not reach, no matter how hard he tried.

  A cage. Like a criminal hung up at the crossroads to starve. Or like the sacrifice of the Druid priests.

  "Or like," he whispered to himself, "a beast in a trap." He thought wildly: They are fattening me for a feast.

  He gazed about. He seemed to be alone. Once more he tried to reach the knot, straining his arm as far as it could go. He could touch it ... but just. There was no way he could get it untied. What a fool I have been, he thought. Stuffing myself when I should have been starving. He sat back down heavily on the pallet. The movement caused the cage to sway and his stomach to heave.

  "Dreamer!" A woman's voice called and reluctantly he looked toward the sound. It was the redheaded woman. How could he ever have thought such a witch beautiful? "Dreamer!" Her voice made his head ache the more. "Here be herbs for thy sickness. For thy stomach, cuckoo's meat; it will strengthen thy belly and procure thy appetite. And this other..." she pointed to a smaller vessel, "bruisewort. That thee must sniff up into thy nostrils and it will purge thy head. We apologize for the ruse. But it be necessary to take thee, unprotesting, to thy place."

  "Go away, witch," he mumbled. His own voice hurt his head as well.

  "Once thy sickness be gone, we will hear thy dreams."

  "I will take nothing from your hands. Nothing. I will starve myself before I take something from you. Then what kind of a meal will I make?" It was, he thought, a strong speech. That was why he was stunned when she began to laugh. It was a pretty laugh, soft, tinkling.

  "Eat thee? Eat another human soul? What does thee take us for?"

  Was this a trick? He could not think, his head hurt so.

  "All we want from thee are thy dreams. Come, take these herbals. They will cure what ails thee." She held out the vessels again.

  He did not have the will to argue longer. And, he reminded himself, to escape he would need a clear head.

  "Give them here," he said, and she put the vessels into his hand. He took the stuff as ordered, drinking the one, sniffing the other, which made him sneeze five times in a row. The sneezing did not help his hurting head.

  But within the hour, almost miraculously, he felt quite bright-headed, and his stomach no longer ached. This time when he looked out from the cage, the scene below him took on a serene beauty. The wild men were stretching hide skins between saplings; the women, in a cluster, pushed bone needles through deerskin, gossiping happily. Throughout the camp the children played games that he recognized: beggar-thy-neighbor, leap-frogs, hide-then-seek, and tag.

  It looked like any country village. Like a home.

  Except ... he thought ... except their houses were tents, there were no streets, and he was stuck up in a wicker cage, suspended in the air, while his captors were waited for him to read his dreams.

  What else they might want of him, should his dreaming fail, he was too afraid to ask.

  10. DREAM CAGE

  HE HAD NO IDEA HOW MANY DAYS HE REMAINED in the cage. He tried to keep them separate in his mind, but they
tended to run together. Each time he woke, the women gave him an herbal draught, then listened to his latest dreams. He never lied about the dreams, nor made one up. Indeed, he could not have, even had he wanted to.

  He dreamed of a table round as a wheel that rolled across the land leaving great wide ruts. He dreamed of huge stones walking across the ocean. He dreamed of a giant, green as May, who threw his head in the air like a child with a ball. He dreamed of a man and a woman asleep in one bed, a sword between them sharper than any desire.

  He told the wild women all these dreams.

  At each telling, they listened politely, then debated among themselves the meanings of the dreams. The table, they said, was the year, sometimes winter and sometimes summer. The stones, they said, were the Saxon army come across the sea. The giant, they said, was the Green Man come to save them. The man and woman and sword, they said, were of no consequence, having naught to do with them, but with the nobles in their fancy houses.

  They never asked him what he thought of the dreams, and here they erred. For they were mistaken in every particular about the dreams, this he knew. The dreams were each a slantwise reading of his own future. He was sure of it. They had nothing to do with the wild folk at all.

  None of the men or children came near the cage. Dreaming, it seemed, was the provenance of women. None, that is, but the child Cub, who stood back a ways to be able to see into the cage, but did not speak. It was not that the child was shy, lest he had been made shy by Hawk-Hobby's elevation to Dreamer. But the distance he had to stand made conversation awkward. He was only a small child, after all.

  One morning—perhaps it was the third or fourth—desperate for information or even a more human encounter, Hawk-Hobby called out to the child: "How is that Poppet of yours?"

  Cub opened his mouth to answer, thought better of it, and scampered away. But he appeared again soon after with the dolly in hand. Throwing it with careful aim up into the cage, he cried out, "Poppet will guard ee." Then he ran off again and this time did not come back.

  "Poppet didn't do such a good job last time," Hawk-Hobby mused, but he kept the doll, tucked up under his pallet. Indeed, the child did not come close again so he could not return the toy.

  A day or so later, when he had been taken from the cage by the women to cleanse himself in a nearby stream, he suddenly realized why he had had trouble counting off the days in the cage.

  "They have put something in my food," he whispered to himself. "Something to make me sleep. Something to encourage me to dream." The sound of the river hid his words from the wild women guarding him on the shore.

  He wondered that it had taken him so long to figure it out, then guessed that the draughts themselves had kept him from the knowledge. He realized, too, that anyone so drugged would dream. "Which is why," he whispered, "the wild folk would ordinarily only use the old ones, the ones past hunting or harvesting. The old ones whose bones are too brittle to carry them through the woods. It would be a mercy, really, for them to be so employed; a mercy to dream away the tag ends of their lives." He remembered how surprised they had been that he admitted to being a dreamer.

  But, he thought, I am a dreamer even without the draughts. And for the first time he wondered—really wondered—what good this dreaming was to him. As a warning, a dream was all but useless if it could not be properly read. How was he to learn, beyond his instinctive guesses, the language of his dreams? Who was he to tell what he discovered therein? Such dreams might guide kings and kingdoms. Such dreams might prophesy the movements of armies. Such dreams might direct the marriage of princes, the death of queens, and the birth of royal babes. But what good were they here in the wild amongst the wodewose?

  "And what good are they," he said to himself, "in the hands of a boy like me?"

  He was still puzzling it out when they returned him to the wicker cage. He refused to eat or drink. "I do not need this to dream," he told them.

  They did not believe him. But they no longer had the power to compel.

  They brought him food in the small clay bowls and he refused it all. For two days he was the captive of bad dreams.

  He slept curled over an aching belly, Poppet clutched in his arms. He woke sweating and hollow. He shook. He shivered. His bones felt like fire, then ice. Many times he was on the verge of crying out for one of the draughts. But Poppet would caution him in Cub's voice. "Do not rise to the lure," the dolly said. "This is not your place. Go the track. Don't look back." In his true waking moments he knew that Poppet did not talk. But deep in his dreams he was not so sure.

  "Dreamer," other voices, women's voices, cozzened him. "Eat. Drink. This will cure what ails thee." But he continued to resist, saying, "I do not need that to dream. I do not need that to dream."

  The women did not believe him, of course, but they watched as his body cleansed itself of all their herbs. And when he finally sat up without shaking, the only one to see him was Cub, who watched silent and still.

  "Here," Hawk-Hobby called to the child. "Take Poppet. It has guarded me well. Now it must guard you."

  The child shook his head, but came over anyway and Hawk-Hobby held the doll out to him.

  The moment Cub's hand touched the dolly, something odd and wild and strange seemed to bond them. It was as if a spark of lightning shot from one hand, through the poppet, to the other.

  And Hawk-Hobby dreamed.

  He dreamed that in the meadow a fountain of blood burst through the grass. It covered the feet of the wild folk, rose to their ankles, kept rising till it covered their shoulders, necks, heads. They cried out for help, but there was no sound. And Poppet alone escaped, sailing over the river of blood in the wicker cage, the sails powered by its own breath.

  It was his first dream about the wild folk themselves.

  And his last.

  11. MAGIC

  IT WAS AN AWFUL DREAM. TERRIBLE. HE woke from it screaming.

  Cub grabbed Poppet and stumbled back from the force of the scream, then turned and ran screaming himself into the midst of the women.

  Hawk-Hobby could not hear what the child said. He was too far away for that. But clearly whatever Cub said startled the women, shocking them into action. They all came toward the cage at a run, and the men—a bit more tentatively—behind them.

  "What was thy dream, Dreamer?" the blackhaired woman asked.

  He told it all: the meadow, the blood, the doll, the boat, the breath.

  There was much consternation among them as they discussed the dream. Though they did not ask him what it meant, much they could read on their own. The meadow filled with blood was too obvious to ignore. Arguments over, they turned as one to begin the work of packing up the camp.

  "Ask me," he called after them. He thought he knew more than they had found in the dream. He was, himself, the doll; a toy in the wrong hands, a magic creature in the right. With his breath he could work magic. Magic more powerful than the spilling of blood. Surely that is what the dream meant. But someone needed to ask before he could answer. He understood that much about his ability to read dreams.

  It was as though they had forgotten him completely. They were much too busy with their move. Striking the tents, the men rolled them into tight bundles. The women covered the campfires with dirt, then sorted through the drying herbs and strips of meat. Even the children worked, placing clothes and other small belongings into packs. If they all seemed to agree on one thing, it was that the meadow was a place of coming destruction. Blood. They were best gone from it. And quickly.

  Only Cub was oblivious to the activity, intent, instead, on something on the ground.

  From so far away Hawk-Hobby could not see what fascinated the child. But when a woman, noticing the idle child, cuffed him roughly, both Cub and Hawk-Hobby cried out at the same time: Cub because his ear rang with the blow and the caged Dreamer because his own ear ached in sympathy, as if he and the child were now one.

  Cub turned slowly at the sound of the Dreamer's voice, his hand still cuppe
d over his aching ear. Then his face lit up and he bent down to pick up the thing from the ground. Running over, he smiled up at Hawk-Hobby. There were streaks on his cheeks where tears had run down but he was no longer crying.

  "Look!" he said, holding up a grubby hand. There was a robin in his open palm, its head hanging to one side as if its neck were broken. "Make robin sing, Dreamer. Make robin fly."

  Hawk-Hobby took the bird without hesitation, not quite knowing why. The child's request was gentle enough. More a plea than a demand. But for some reason it seemed as strong as a geas, a magic compulsion. He took the bird and looked down at it. Its orange breast was already dulled in death and there was not so much as a murmur beneath its feathers. Its eyes were cloudy and its little feet stiff.

  " 'Ee must fix it, Dreamer," the child said.

  "And you must get me Poppet. To guard the bird," Hawk-Hobby said. He said it more to gain time than because he thought it might be any help.

  The child ran off to fetch his dolly. Hawk-Hobby sat down in the cage, his legs swinging over the side. He remembered the magician Ambrosius bringing flowers out of his sleeves and coins from behind a man's ear. Such magicks, he had soon found out, were but sleights of hand. One needed to have flowers up one's sleeve to bring them down. One needed a coin hid in the palm to make it appear at a man's ear. What the child was asking of him was more than that, was the very breath of life.

  Breath.

  That was one component of the dream. The poppet's breath powering the sails of the wicker boat.

  He brought the little bird up even with his face. Close it was even more pathetic, already cooling. Parting its beak with two careful fingers and then closing his eyes, he remembered the exact feeling in the dream and blew three short breaths into the bird. They were small breaths—of air, of life. He did not know what else to do.

  For a long moment nothing happened. Nothing at all. Except that the clearing and the woods stilled around him.