"I made it for Morgeu." She kneels beside him in the bed. "You won't feel anything in it—but she will. Alas, it's exhausted me. I won't have the strength to make rinses well into the winter. And I can't help Wray Vitki, either. We are going to lose him."
Uther places the charm back in his wife's hand and
clasps his hand over hers consolingly. "You've a mother's love for Morgeu. But will it work?"
"If I can get it to her. She dwells in a ghoulish community in Caledonia with her Y Mamau."
"Among the savage Picts?"
"They call her the Doomed One. It is the demon in her that makes her wicked. Morgeu is not evil. Arrogant, yes, even belligerent like her father, but not evil. That is the demon's influence."
"The demon that tried to possess you."
"Ethiops. I have never felt such pure evil."
"And this rock can stop such a demon?"
"If it touches my daughter, my hope is that the magic concentrated here may purge that gruesome thing. I have put all my power into this—this mother's selfishness."
Uther brings his face up close and whispers, "I am proud of you."
She brushes the hair from his face to better gauge
his sincerity in the dark. "You are not disappointed, my king? I might have used this magic for our island, for our people."
"What you have done, my wife, is very Christian.
You forsake the herd for the one lost sheep. You love the
one who hates you." He smiles reassuringly at her. "She is your daughter. She is yours to care for. How will you get the charm to her?"
"Falon."
"To Caledonia?" Uther frowns at this. "He is our key strategist among the fiana. How can we spare him?"
"He knows Morgeu best of my circle. And I know
him. He alone of my fiana has the mettle for this quest."
Uther slumps backward onto the bed's cushions. He
does not want to lose Falon. His wife's magic, whose
power he has no way to gauge, does not figure in his
military calculations. But the chief commander of the fiana—he is a crucial warrior, and the king loathes losing him.
"Perhaps Merlinus—"
"No," Ygrane says, and lowers her head, burdened by her shameful selfishness. "Ethiops wants that. We must protect Myrddin from the demons he has betrayed to serve us. And with my magic diminished, we will require his power all the more."
"I will miss Falon." A hollowness widens in Uther.
Since riding Wray Vitki up from the underworld, a haunted feeling has saturated him. For long spells, his love for Ygrane mutes the feeling, and he lives contentedly, even enthusiastically. At hours such as this, however, the Piper's green music and the feverish loveliness of the phantom woods stir an immutable longing in him. When he catches himself suspended in the beauty of this internal sunset, he forces himself to focus on his surroundings. Invariably, emptiness opens between the actual world and his longing.
He feels faithless to his wife. She does not want him to accept her god's offer. Behaving more as a Christian than a Celt, she has told him time and again she wants to trust in God to deliver them a worthy soul. He remembers the supreme Druid's warning: If you do not drink from the Raven Spring, Ygrane will mother yet another Morgeu.
He wonders if that is so bad. Morgeu can be loved
and saved, as Ygrane shows with her charm. Why, then, not love whatever child God delivers to them? Is it not a sin to believe they can engender a savior, an office only God can appoint?
The truth snarls in him. He is not afraid of offending God. He holds back from accepting the elk-king's offer, because he desires it. The Church has taught him to fear desire, and, apart from the untamed years of his
adolescence, he has obeyed that fear. Never before,
however, has he experienced such a flood of his heart's desire as he feels for the glamorous woods of dancing souls.
Ygrane, numb with weariness and worry, does not feel her husband's conflict. She accepts his acquiescence as more of the spacious love they share, and she kisses him with gratitude.
*
Ygrane and Uther, both eager to finish the move, set
up their house quickly. The war room, bedchambers, and officers' quarters are established in a morning. The fiana commanders and the Roman field officers of the Saxon
Coast have all worked and fought together before, under the late duke, and by noon they agree upon the military protocol between them and their field responsibilities for the winter.
More gradually, yet inevitably in the flurrying days
when the officers' compound and barracks are established, the king behaves as he imagines his brother would. He meets daily with fiana and Romans alike, including them together in several joint banquets and hunting forays, until they feel at ease in his company.
Merlinus is proud of Uther's willingness to serve the living after having beheld the greater joy of the dead. The wizard suspects that the queen's glamour inspires him but says nothing. He does not want to disturb the hope of a lasting alliance with his personal troubles, and he keeps to himself the unhappiness he feels at the absence of the unicorn.
Often Merlinus glimpses Uther and Ygrane holding
hands, sharing meaningful looks, even cooing to each
other. Their obvious happiness together, displayed before Druids and Britons alike, has done more for the morale of the alliance than any speech or war plan. And the wizard begins to worry that his sadness might affect their shared moments of joy and, in a cascade of linked accidents, doom the whole enterprise.
The wizard decides to find the table he has seen in
his visions with Raglaw and the Nine Queens. No chant he can devise proves useful in guiding him. He wanders the region in search of the destined tree, the fallen oak of his strong eye visions, and more days fly by like windy heaven in the treetops.
Some small adventures befall the wizard on those
gusty moors, and he uses his skills to help lost pilgrims and to cure what ailments he can among the impoverished
hamlets that host him. Mostly, he travels alone,
accompanied by the wind's cattle, the bulky clouds of autumn piling toward a gray winter.
The wizard finds the living tree of his visions in an
aboriginal forest north of Tintagel, in a region called Hartland. He recognizes it at once. A huge, lightning-mammocked oak has fallen across a stream, undercut by the sliding water.
Its roots wall off the sky, tall as two men. Merlinus parts the brown shag of dead vines that has thrived on the upturned loam and listens to the slow bass voice of
circulating sap. The behemoth is alive. The horizontal tree has spent the summer surviving on the rill water that has toppled it, waiting for Merlinus. Clearly, for the wizard, this is the vital symbol of the age—the toppled oak of Rome alive only because the rich loam of the island will not let it die.
The wide girth of the tree defeats all of Merlinus'
attempts to section it. No matter how gently he whispers his barbarous spells, the power comes through him too quickly, too strongly. The smaller logs he uses to test his skill break jaggedly. No magic he possesses can cut wood with the smooth precision he needs to fulfill his vision. The wizard requires a carpenter.
Among the master boat builders in the sea towns,
Merlinus locates the best craftsman, a lanky monkey of a man, bald, ginger-whiskered, with small, round eyes like blue opals. Surfeited with work building battleships for a local warlord, he wants nothing to do with Merlinus, or the high king and his Celtic queen.
The wizard could speak a word to the carpenter and
beckon him along. The thought of such coercion feels
wrong to Merlinus. He wants nothing less from this master builder than the emblem of the kingdom itself. He balks at using unwilling laborers for that holy task.
Why not? the demonic portion of him asks. This carpenter is the best in the region, and the str
ong eye vision demands the table.
Merlinus speaks a word that makes the whole
shipyard fall silent. Mallets hold back, saws relent, adzes pause, and there in the broad skeleton of an unfinished boat, twenty workmen wait like statuary.
Before Merlinus can organize a chant that will get
the workers to gather their tools and follow him, the master builder drops the mallet he holds and smacks the toe of his sandaled foot. An accident? The wizard casts anxious looks to all sides, sweeping the Stave of the Storm Tree to reveal gods, elves or fairies and sees none.
Pain winces the master carpenter free of the
enchantment, and he dances about and stops almost at
once. A single glance at the silent yard, and he knows what has happened. When he faces Merlinus again, his freckled, snub-nosed features shift rapidly, from amazement to
abject fear and then back again to gleeful wonder.
"No more magic!" the carpenter begs, holding up both palms. "Free my men, master wizard! Lift your spell, and we will do as you say. To the forest, to cut a table from a fallen oak? Fine, my lord. Consider it done."
Merlinus liberates the men at once and thanks the
carpenter for his cooperation in so sacred a task. "Double wages for everyone!" the royal wizard promises.
The master builder shakes his bald head. "No
money, wizard. We've enough coin from the warlords who buy our ships." His small eyes get smaller. "I want a wish."
"A wish?"
"Yes." His monkey face gaups happily. "As in the hearthside stories. You are a powerful wizard. And I am a man who values your magic more than coin. I don't want your money. I want one wish."
Merlinus frowns sternly, holding back his impulse to
speak magic and force their labor. "What is your wish, master builder?"
"Not now, master wizard, not now." The carpenter happily displays his crooked teeth. "First, we cut and dress the table. If you are satisfied, then you will give me leave to come to you when I need, to seek your help. Will you
agree?"
"If it's the stars and the moon you want, man, forget such grandiosity. You'd best take the gold. Triple wages."
The carpenter thrusts his gingery beard at Merlinus
in a grin of joyful defiance. "Keep your gold. I want your wizardry when I need it, and it won't be for the likes of the moon and the stars, that I assure you, master magus. That I assure you."
"One wish within my power, then—but no act
against the king or queen or any who sit at this table. And no wickedness. Is that understood?"
The master builder's broad smile fits his sharp face
snugly. "Show me the tree."
Merlinus makes the crew work hard for the master
builder's one wish. Two wagonloads of tools must be
carted by hand, because the wagons cannot penetrate the primeval forest. Then the rains begin. Tents flap gustily as measurements are taken, plans discussed.
At the first break in the downfall, the men clear the forest around the fallen behemoth and erect a workshop over the trunk. The table is cut; then, with the bark peeled and the wood handsomely shaped and prepared to the
wizard's instructions, the enormous disk is lacquered with an occult mix of resins, saps, distillates, and pigments that dry to a dark, smoky veneer.
Around the rim, attached with removable pins, a
felly-band of iron encloses the table and makes of it a wheel. Merlinus guides it with magic commands, rolling it out of the forest along trails the workers cut. On the muddy market roads south to Tintagel, nothing short of a gale can stop the juggernaut. Farmers come running from their
harvests and herdsmen turn away from their flocks to
watch the giant wheel pass.
The task makes Merlinus feel better, redeemed
somehow. He returns to court almost triumphantly. At the seacliff citadel of Tintagel, Ygrane and Uther touch the giant iron band and gaze at their amazed faces in the mirror-polished surface of the wood hub. "What is it, Merlinus?"
"A legend," the wizard decrees proudly. "It shall be known through history as the Wheel-Table."
"Is that where you've been all these many days?"
Ygrane asks. She mingles her worried look with the king's, who complains, "You left without so much as a farewell, Merlinus."
"For the good of the kingdom," he defends himself.
"My rude absence buys this headless table that we may keep our heads in council."
Uther has accrued doubts about his wizard's well-
being since his separation from the unicorn. Merlinus sulked for days when his counsel was most needed. And now that the important decisions have been taken, he
returns frantic with happiness about a ludicrous rolling table.
"And, best of all, I've contrived this table to travel—
designed for a kingdom with no fixed capital."
"There is Camelot," Uther interjects.
"Oh, yes, when it is finally built, the Wheel-Table may rest there permanently," Merlinus allows. "That is years away—crucial years in which you will anneal your kingdom. Think on this: With the Wheel-Table, your war room, your banquet, your place of assembly goes with you, even as you tour the coloniae. "
King and queen flick concerned looks between
them, and Ygrane attempts to hide her skepticism by
congratulating him. "Ingenious," she says, meeting her husband's dubious expression with an elated smile. "And it is beautiful."
"Yes," the king concedes, running his fingers over the burled surface with its depths of smoke. "The craftsmanship is extraordinary. How much has it cost our treasury?"
Merlinus wonders that himself. The master builder
parted ways with him after the table rolled out of the forest.
"No cost at all, my lord," the wizard tells the king, which
remains, for the time being, the truth. "It was built by free hands that would not take coin for their labor. Consider it a gift to you, from your people."
That wins Uther's acceptance, and forthwith he and
Ygrane scout about for the proper place to set it in the citadel. They settle on the western terrace and a portico above the seacliffs. With the iron felly-band removed and the giant wheel laid flat atop four marble posts, the round table has an authoritative presence, a look of weight and timelessness.
That very first night that it stands as a table, with the fiana commanders, the king's field officers, the Druids, the bishop of Britain, and Merlinus seated in attendance, Ygrane announces that she is pregnant. Cheers greet the hope of their future.
Merlinus bows his head and weeps silently,
remembering his time in Optima's womb, that buoyant time of unalloyed bliss, and his promise to fulfill the destiny he has inherited. Like a deep chord of music, his mother's presence— the mother's presence—sounds in him, answering his secret prayer.
All is well. For now. The people of this circle have won a victory with small things in a dark world. They have triumphed with prayers and a hope carried by an unborn child.
Afterward, when the revelers have departed and
stars glimmer over a moonless sea, Merlinus sits alone with Ygrane and Uther. "Who is this soul you carry?" the wizard asks.
"Whomever God sends us," Ygrane answers.
"Good." Merlinus reaches out and takes Uther's hand, recalling the joyful splendor he once witnessed in the Otherworld. The wizard is still angry at the elk-king for showing Uther that hint of heaven. Few mortals exposed to such ecstatic abandon can stay satisfied long with this paltry world. "You have decided to reject the arrangement offered you by King Someone Knows the Truth?"
"We have decided to trust a higher authority," the king confirms. "We insist only that the soul God sends us to lead our united people shall be Christian—and so, the elk-king will have no part of our marriage."
Merlinus puts his other hand out for Ygrane, and
"Your love encompasses a natural union that binds these gods of desert and forest, of south and north, my lady." The wizard sends the royal couple to their bed with
more assurances than perhaps they deserve. What choices do they have, actually? The devilish side of him knows full well that their decisions—to serve their peoples as fate has decreed, to marry as duty demands, to love as their hearts require—these things are regulated by a far greater pride than their own.
Standing alone before the large round table, before
the black sea and the star-whorled night, Merlinus is tempted to open his strong eye. The future lies dormant in this table, like ore in the silences of rock. Treaties will be forged here, disputes settled, pledges sworn. Kings and their warriors will gather at this table to shape kingdoms.
Here, on this night when the conception of the
foretold defender is announced, a beginning has been
made. To where will it lead? Across what battlefields? And at the end of its turning, will all those battlefields have become farms? Or is Earth foredoomed the perpetual battlefield between demons and angels?
Such thoughts stymie the wizard's desire to see the
future of this table. The future is an illusion; the past a dream. Only the present is real. And Merlinus is tired. Not for sleep. He is tired of the striving, of the dark magic necessary to ignite this bright destiny. He wants to feel again the joy of the unicorn, the blessing of Optima, the wholeness of heaven that, deep within each heart,
breathes soft as the stars.
*
Falon bestrides his best horse in high morning
outside the narrow north gate of Tintagel. He wears a traveler's sturdy mantle and his sword lashed to his back for a long journey. Restless to do something for the
alliance other than pace the misty halls of Tintagel talking battle strategies, he has gratefully assumed the quest to find Morgeu. "Will the charm heal her at once, older sister?"
"The moment it touches her," the queen says and reaches up to hand him the gem.
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