The Oak above the Kings

by Patricia Kennealy-Morrison

  Even Merlynn's name did not stir me where I sat huddled, and after a moment Birogue continued the tale.

  "No other mortal has ever died beneath the roof of Dun Aengus, Talyn, and only one other ever shall… So Medeni took care of you, loved you well, owned you publicly as hers; then when you were not yet two, she also died, of a plague of Edeyrn's."

  I glanced up, but Seli's face did not change.

  "Then it was," Birogue went on evenly, "that your father required his other children to take a vow that they should never, on pain of dan, speak of this to you until he himself had told you first. But he died when you were short of six; and they kept their vow to him."

  "And now you tell me—" My daze and dullness had been overcome by some feeling I have no name for: not anger, not frustration, not resentment—it was all nots, and questions bristled in me like fire-arrows, but all came down to one: Tell me! Tell me everything! Now! Sooner! Forever! TELL!

  But there would be time for all that; now, here, I had one question, one only…

  "If not Medeni—how was she called? What was my mother's name?"

  Again Birogue smiled, a smile born of loving memory. "I cannot say it in the tongue of Earth—it is graven on the rock in the place where she wished to be laid, you shall see it if such is your wish—but your father gave her a new name when she came away with him. Like to her Terran name, but Keltic—as she chose to become for love of him. He called her Cathelin."

  And when I heard Birogue pronounce my mother's name, all the strain and struggle and hardship, all the hammer blows I had taken in the past quarter-hour and all those in my life before, came together and somehow took flight; sorrow left me, and as I felt it take wing, and peace come in its place to nest in my soul, I wept.

  * * *

  * * *

  Chapter Thirty-one

  WHEN AT LAST I raised my face from my hands, my sobbing done with, it was to see an empty chamber; Seli and Birogue had left me alone with my grief, and I was grateful for their tact.

  I poured myself another cup of ale, then another, with a shaking hand, and began as the bard I was and ever would be to sort out my feelings. The revelations concerning my mother, my true mother, had shaken me to my soul; and not least for that in the moment of learning of her I had lost her. Though Kelts look on death in a manner different to most folk, the actual losing is no less difficult for us than for any other race. No one who has stood in those winds ever forgets it, the chill goes never from his bones or from his soul.

  Nor should it: We should live with our losses, not strive to forget them as if they had not been; must make them part of ourselves, weave the black strand into the rest of the looming that is our lives—all our lives, for we do not think in Keltia of one only. My mother, this Cathelin I had never known, would be part of my life again, and I of hers: perhaps we would be given to know the reasons things had been as they were in this particular go-around, perhaps not. It made no differ; the living it was what mattered, then, now, ever.

  When I found my way to that truth again, I stood up, a little shaky still, splashed some water on my face from the fountain that bubbled in a corner of the chamber and went out to seek those of whom I was guest here. They were not far: Seli and Birogue were in the next chamber but one, a spacious open gallery,—and they were plainly waiting on my coming, for they stood up at once.

  "How is it with you, Taliesin?" asked Birogue. "Shall we leave you to yourself a while longer?"

  "Nay, lady, it is well with me now." And the amazing, the incredible thing was that it was: I was suffused by a feeling of joy and light and peace after storm that I had never before known, and I was unspeakably weary, and strangest of all I was suddenly ravenously hungry.

  "But I would see my mother's resting place," I added after a pause in which neither woman spoke. "And after that—"

  "You would see Merlynn Llwyd," said Birogue, and I started to find myself so easily kenned, though I was not much surprised. "It is for that too that you have come, and then there is a thing we must speak of, a word you must carry back to Arthur and Gweniver. But another than Seli or I shall give it you."

  My curiosity was twigged; but even that was overshadowed by what she had just spoken of Merlynn. Was it possible? The last I or any mortal Kelt had seen of Merlynn Llwyd had been on the battlefield of Nandruidion, when Edeyrn's magic had caught him up in so strange and terrible a way …

  But after I had been fed—good plain wholesome food, fare as solid and real as you would find in any cookplace in Keltia—and felt myself restored at least in body, I gave thanks for my meal and went with Birogue to the place where my mother rested. Seli did not go with us, but remained behind, and Birogue assured me we would see her again before I left the Dun.

  We went together through a maze of galleries and corridors; the palace of Dun Aengus was the chiefest stronghold of the Sidhe in Keltia, the oldest established and to my thinking by far the fairest. We passed through exquisite chambers rich with tapestries of every description, all most skillfully worked; through arcades of armor where the walls were hung with helms and swords and shields and loricas, wrought of silver and findruinna and gold; along balconies and balustrades; past feasting-halls and dancing-floors and places set aside for study or contemplation. And in all our passage I saw not one other of those here residing; not soldier nor faery-bard nor handmaid nor lord—not even a faerie beast, no cu-sith, nor one of the great tawny hunting-cats—and did not dare to ask.

  After what seemed a long time—hard it is to measure hours under the HollowMountains, a day can be a moment, a year a century, an hour the rest of your life—we came to a place unlike all the rest of the Dun. It was a cavern where the hand of the Sidhe artificers had been stayed, for sheer loveliness of the untouched place: It minded me at once of our dens on Gwynedd, the beauty we had lived amid at Llwynarth.

  From where we stood, a pool spread out at our feet, and round to one side was a ledge overlooking the silver water. At the far end of this ledge, a flat plate of polished stone had been made of the cavern's natural rock, and upon this had been carved words in Gaeloch and in Englic and in runes, and in what I guessed to be the written script used by the Sidhe among themselves. My heart began a slow pounding, and I moved forward as if I walked in dreams.

  I came to a halt before the carven stone, and put out a trembling hand to touch the incised letters. This was where my mother lay for all time,—or rather, I corrected myself, where her mortal form was harrowed, for she herself was long gone from here, on her own road. But the bones that lay behind that stone seal had been bones that had borne me, that flesh now dust had been flesh that had made my own… I did not weep,—it did not seem a thing for tears. But I smiled, and drew my fingers over the letters of her name. So far from her home—had she thought, when she went with Gwyddno for love and fate, that she would one day come to leave her body behind in such a place as this? Than which there could be no fairer in all Keltia; but still it was not her home, not hers by birth… Cathelin: My fingers moved on, to rest on the unfamiliar Earth rendering of that most familiar Keltic name. But I would not say it would not pronounce it as surely my father had in the moment of her going out. It was not for me to say her name; but looking on the stone, touching the letters, I said the name it was my right to say, the name I had never been able to say to her in life.

  "Mathra," I said to the woman who had waited so long to hear it. "Mamaith." And she sighed, and touched my hand, and went on, though she was ever with me.

  Birogue had waited at the cavern entrance, again to honor my privacy; and when I rejoined her it was with a new certainty.

  She smiled to see it. "You are strong now with the truth; my friend is proud of her son. She came to tell me so."

  "She told me too," I said, and it was no more than truth, and also no less. "I have learned the truth of my mother,—now I would learn that of my teacher."

  And she conducted me once more through the halls beneath the hill.

  But
this time we went a different way, back to the builded regions, and came at length to what seemed, incredibly, to be a small annat or fane, set apart from other chambers,—a place of power and peace. Glancing at my guide for permission, I stepped inside, making the reverence that as Druid I had been taught long since to make on holy ground.

  Though my mother's grave had been imbued with much the same feeling, still had that been a grave, a resting-place for the cast-off form,—sanctified, but a place of ending, where the voyaging spirit leaves the body as easily and instinctively as a snake leaves the shedded skin it has outgrown,—for new and greater garb awaits both soul and serpent, and it would be against all laws of dan and nature to stay clad in the old. But this was not the same—it was more a place of holding, of rest and abeyance, of a matter that although suspended for the moment was by no means concluded… At the center of the fane there was a niche in the back wall, and it was there I was drawn as in another dreaming, an ashling—and knew it was no dream.

  Within the niche glittered the crystal tree of Edeyrn's magic that had taken my teacher; and within the sparkling lattices, half veiled by pellucid milky swirls that ran like frosty galaxies through the trunk of the sorcerous tree, lay Merlynn Llwyd.

  By some trick of the swirls his face was but half-hidden; I stepped closer, but was halted by the light touch of Birogue's hand upon my arm. This was my beloved teacher, but he had also been her beloved mate; and was still, if what I sensed had any validity: For Merlynn was not dead as we had thought.

  "Nay," said Birogue with a smile of the most piercing tenderness, "he does but slumber. Even Edeyrn could not destroy him, and did not study to try; the magic was meant to take Merlynn out of time awhile, and Edeyrn acted but in accord with dan, his and my lord's and Keltia's all in one."

  I stared at the face I knew so well: Merlynn it was, and yet not so—or maybe more so, aye, perhaps that was it, a kind of refining and reducing of the essential soul that here indwelled…

  "Not dead," I breathed wonderingly. "What, then?"

  Birogue put out a hand, but did not touch the crystal of the tree. "He will sleep until he wakes. And wake he shall, Talyn, when he is needed: a year, a hundred years, a thousand years from now. And I shall be here to greet him when he does." She laughed at the look on my face. "Oh, we are not gods! Even the Shining Folk have a set span to their days, though our fate is not your own after. But I shall have days enough, I think, for that; to be with him again, and to help him help those he will wake to meet."

  I was adrift in dazzled possibility. "Who will they be? What like shall they be?"

  "Not even the Sidhe can answer that. They will be Kelts, right enough; more than that I know not. But he foretold this long since, you know: what would befall him, and Edeyrn, and Keltia. So far it has spun out in accordance with his foretelling."

  I stepped nearer again, though like her I did not touch the surface of the crystal. So close as I was, I could feel what radiated off it: not cold, precisely; more a sort of frozen energy, a kind of charge that made me slow and sleepy, hot and angry, all at once.

  "I miss him so much," I said then. "And so does Artos—May I tell him of this? So that he can know too—"

  "Aye, Artos, aye," said Birogue, laughing. "I would not keep him in sorrow any longer, I love him too dearly, and any road he will need to know the truth of it, sometime down along. Gwennach too, she is Ard-rian; and Morgan and Ygrawn, for that they three will be the three who—" She broke off suddenly, as if she had said too much.

  But I was only half-listening, nodded in absent promise. I was recalling a long trudge through mountains in autumn, this man my protector and more a father to me than my real father had ever been, me on my short sturdy not-yet-six-year-old legs; and that only the beginning… But what would the ending be! As a bard I was caught up in a web of words and glory,—my fingers itched for my harp, for a song of a crystal tree and a sleeping guardian—I glanced anxiously at Birogue, struck by my own presumption. But that is how artists think in times even of pain and loss; nay, especially in such times. It is how we do our work, for ourselves and for the rest of the world.

  "Aye, it is permitted," Birogue assured me. "Songs too will be needed, must be part of it; and who better to make them than a onetime student, now the Pen-bardd of Keltia himself?"

  She stood there a moment longer, in a silence that was as loving and as palpable as a kiss; then she smiled again, and drew my arm through hers, and we went back to the chambers where others lived their lives.

  As we walked I said no word to my companion, but reflected on what I alone of Kelts now knew, what I had been given to know this day. I had come to know two paired truths: One was that the woman who was my mother, though dead, was with me, and the other was that my teacher, thought dead, yet lived. Cathelin I should not come to know save in a life to come; but with Merlynn it was a different tale. Perhaps a many-times-great-grandchild would live in the time of his returning, would know him, even be taught by him as I had been. Perhaps even I myself, in a future life… But my task just now was to make sure that every child born in Keltia for the next ten thousand years should know of Merlynn Llwyd. My future descendants should know too of Morgan and of me, should be able to speak to Merlynn of us, when he came again; and would hear from him in turn of Arthur and Gweniver, and the Company, and of us. All the great tales should be kept alive, and the breach of years be mended…

  Caught up in my ashling, I did not realize that we had come again to Seli's chambers. She was waiting for us this time, seated in her high-backed chair, and this time she did not wait alone.

  From the facing chair across the hearth—at least I think it was a hearth, though I could not tell you if the Sidhe even had need of such to warm their halls—Gwyn son of Nudd rose up at our entrance, and smiled upon me.

  I was halfway across the room to him, glad greeting tumbling over my tongue in haste, before I recalled that he was after all Prince of the Sidhe, and I but brother to a mortal monarch. I tried to recover my dignity, made him the reverence I had made Seli, but it was no good; we were both laughing, and he met me with the embrace of two friends long parted.

  But when we drew apart, I could see something in his face that I had never before seen upon the countenance of any of his race, and I was suddenly afraid.

  "So, Taliesin," said Seli then, "you have seen."

  I bowed, and took the seat she indicated. "Aye, and thanks to all in this Dun that it was granted me… There will be more questions," I added after the briefest of pauses, almost as much in query as in statement; or in warning.

  But Seli only laughed. "Very like! Well, they shall all be answered in the Goddess's good time, as many and as often as you will. I am glad you had peace of the seeing. But now we must speak of something that touches more Kelts than the House of Glyndour only." Turning to Gwyn: "My son?"

  Gwyn bowed deferentially to his mother before he spoke, and such was his beauty, there in the silver-walled room with the golden light upon his face, that I all but forgot to listen to his words. But when I remembered, and listened, all else was soon forgotten…

  "You will remember, Taliesin," he said, in a voice of a deep-mouthed musicality that even Plenyth First-bard would have envied, "the night that the Cup came to Caerdroia."

  "How not! But—you say 'Cup' as if—Was it not Olwen's quaich, that Marguessan used to try her tricks?"

  Gwyn's eyes rested on me; or perhaps not on me, who can say what he saw sitting there in my chair—was it I, Talyn, or who, that the night-dark gaze rested on?

  "Aye and nay," he said after a while. "That cup of Olwen's was never found, not so?"

  "We searched for many days," I admitted. "Marguessan had it not when she left Turusachan, nor did Mordryth her son; and it was not to be found in the hall, nor anywhere in the palace, nor had any of the others present taken it. It was gone."

  "In a way. In another way, not so."

  Awestruck as I was, still was I beginning to lose patience with th
e riddling replies I had so far been given; I knew well that the Sidhe move to another measure than do the rest of us, but I was a creature of time, and the glass was running down.

  "Speak plainly, then!" I heard myself snapping, and was appalled to hear it. But Gwyn only smiled.

  "Even as a lad, you were ever impatient to get to the heart of the thing," he said. "Perran saw that straightway, back at Daars, in the lane near the city walls."

  "Aye, well, my sorrow," I muttered gracelessly, for I remembered well that day whereof he spoke. "But still, lord—"

  "If I seem to speak in fancies, hear me out. It is a tremendous thing I must tell you, and you have already been whelmed with strain and strangeness twice this day."

  I subsided, and now all my attention was fixed on what he had to tell me; even Seli and Birogue were forgotten, so caught up was I with Gwyn.

  "Well, then," he said. "The cup Marguessan used to try to trap Gweniver and the Yamazai queen—whose acquaintance we must make, I think, another time; we shall have more than a few things to speak of—was indeed the cup of Olwen White-track, that she passed on to her grandniece Llariau,—you know all that tale. But what perhaps you have not known, what not even many of the Pheryllt have known, is where such vessels—and Olwen's is by no means the only such in Keltia—draw upon for the power they bear."

  I stared blankly at him, for what seemed a week; and which, given the way of the Sidhe with time, may well have been. Then:

  "Pair Dadeni! The One Cup—but that is here! We saw it, Artos and Morgan and I, when we came here before the King your father; you yourself held up the Cup for us to see, the other Treasures also—"

  I was remembering that day, that sight: Nudd enthroned, Gwyn revealing to us one by one the Thirteen Treasures that had come from Earth with Brendan and Nia; and chief among the Thirteen were the Four. The Spear Birgha, that roars for blood; the Sword Fragarach, that now hung by Arthur's side in Turusachan; the Stone of Fal, that is the gaze of death itself; and Pair Dadeni, the great Cup, the Graal as some have called it, that can restore the dead—the newly dead—to life.