by Jay Ruud
“Free rein,” the old man responded. “Nothing should hinder me in questioning any witness I deem important until I’ve gotten to the bottom of these events. For that I need your guarantee that people will cooperate with my questioning. Otherwise the investigation is simply sham.”
“Of course, you shall have a letter from me to present to anyone you need to question which will make it clear that you conduct this investigation with my approval.” Kaherdin nodded to Melias, who dutifully sat back down at the simple desk where a small candle burned, and pulled out a scrap of parchment and a bottle of ink. “Write it in Breton,” Kaherdin insisted. “None of your Church Latin here. People whom they talk to are going to need to understand what they’re reading.”
“If they can read at all,” Melias muttered as the clerk quickly scribbled something onto the scrap. “The only thing that really matters is that they recognize your seal.” With a flourish Melias finished his task, looked to Kaherdin with an air of a dog who, having done a trick for his master, desires a treat, and then dripped a splotch of the candle’s wax onto the bottom of the parchment. Kaherdin made a fist and punched his signet ring into the wax, making a sharp impression. Then he snatched the note from the desk and handed it to Merlin.
“There it is then, old man. You have what you’ve come for. And now if you will excuse us, we have pressing matters of state to discuss.”
“No doubt, no doubt,” Merlin said, carefully placing the sealed letter in an inner pocket of his long robe. “But I have a few questions first. As part of my investigation, I need to speak with the three of you, and of course your sister Isolde.”
Three jaws dropped open at once, then the two flanking heads turned inward to see what Kaherdin’s reaction would be. Andred’s face looked dark and angry. Melias looked more concerned, as if he wanted to reach out and comfort his master. But as might have been expected, Kaherdin exploded. “You presume to question the royal family, you old fool? I should have you thrown into the river! Get out of here and be grateful I don’t have your nose and ears cut off for your effrontery!”
That was enough for me. Patience is one of my great virtues, but Job himself would not have stood for this abuse. I stepped in front of Merlin as Sir Andred moved toward him. “Who does he think he is? He is the lord Merlin, most powerful wizard in all of Europe. He is the one whose magic brought King Uther to the Duchess Igraine and conjured the birth of Arthur. He is the one who made Arthur King of Logres through the device of the sword in the stone. He is the chief adviser to the king during the Orkney wars, the Irish wars, the Scandinavian Wars and the Gaulish Wars that gave Brittany its freedom. He is the necromancer that brought the great blocks of Stonehenge from the Irish wastes to the plains of Salisbury. You think you are dealing with some peasant here? Know when you deal with Merlin you deal with the right hand of King Arthur himself.”
Captain Jacques, fortunately the only person in the room wearing an actual sword, tried with little success to assuage the prickly Kaherdin and the hackles his prickliness had raised among the rest of us. “My lords, my lords,” he soothed, “let us have civil words. There is no need here for anger…”
Kaherdin sputtered in impotent rage, at which point Sir Dinadan stepped in to throw his own particular kind of oil on the waters. “And what was that exactly about ‘royal family’? Uh…wouldn’t it be ‘ducal family’—unless you’ve got some kind of ambitions we don’t know about? See, the actual ‘royal family’ are the ones that sent my lord Merlin here. So you’re the one disobeying a direct command from the king. Now what do you suppose will be the reaction of King Arthur, slayer of the Giant of Saint Michael’s Mount, when he learns how you’ve greeted his representative? I can see it now: ‘Gosh, I wonder what’s happened to my faithful and beloved Merlin in Brittany? Lancelot, old boy, why not take a hundred and fifty knights or so and take a look. Oh, and if you find one hair on that dear old man’s head has been disturbed, raze the city of Saint-Malo to the ground and grind the bones of its leaders into the dust. Right then? All right, cheers.’”
Sir Kaherdin sputtered some more, finally proclaiming, “My liege Lord is Duke Hoel of Brittany!” to which Sir Dinadan added “And his is King Arthur of Logres. Do you really think the duke is likely to thank you for these shenanigans you’ve been engaging in today?”
My lord Merlin, who through all of this was unfazed, now bowed his head slightly to Kaherdin. “My lord,” he began, “I regret that I am required by my charge to question you on these matters. I do so,” he said as he reached into his robe, “on the authority of the commander of the city garrison at Saint-Malo, as this letter attests. If there is power in his seal, then you must give me audience.”
“Conniving old cozener,” Kaherdin muttered under his breath. His face was crimson with rage and with shame—the two seemed to battle to see which could redden him more. “In the name of the Protector of this city, ask your questions,” he ended with some loud bravado.
“I shall not trouble you long, my lord,” Merlin said, his mouth twitching up at the corner. “It’s just that there are some details that only you can provide. First, for example, can you tell us briefly about the mission Sir Tristram sent you on to Cornwall?”
Kaherdin looked annoyed. “But you know all this, surely. He pleaded with me to take ship to Cornwall to bring back Mark’s queen. He believed her healing powers could save him, as they had once before in Ireland. He told me to carry two sails, and to display the white sail if the queen was aboard, and the black one if she was not.”
“This is all well known, my lord,” Merlin nodded. “But some details are not. For instance: did you discuss any of these things with your sister before you left?”
“My…” Kaherdin’s mood began to darken again. “And why would I do that? Isolde was already feeling the coldness of Sir Tristram’s heart and of his bed. Why would I tell her that in his final days her husband was thinking only of seeing once more the adulterous queen who had brought about his exile from Cornwall?”
“Thank you my lord,” Merlin nodded as if this was just what he had expected to hear. “Tell me, then, what happened upon your arrival in Cornwall? You went to the king’s court?”
“I sought immediate audience with King Mark and his queen, and was soon granted it in the throne room. I addressed the king, and told him that his nephew Sir Tristram lay near death in Brittany, and had asked me to come there in the hope that his queen would return with me and save his life, as she had once before.”
“And what was King Mark’s response to this?” Merlin inquired.
“Far calmer than mine would have been, I can tell you,” Kaherdin responded, with more truth than he may have realized. “His expression did not change a whit, until his queen suddenly knelt down beside him in a semblance of humility and begged him to return with me. He finally murmured his assent, and the queen leapt to her feet. ‘I will go now,’ she said. ‘If the poison is so far along there is no time to lose. Please wait here for me, Sir Kaherdin, while I put together some traveling clothes and my medicinal kit. Of course I will want Brangwen to come along.’ And the king accepted that as well. So within two hours, the queen and her lady-in-waiting, the loyal Brangwen, stood before me dressed for a journey and trailed by a large page carrying a small sea-trunk for the two of them. We left from there.”
“Now, my lord, could you tell me how long it takes to sail from Saint-Malo to Cornwall?”
“Usually no more than a full day and night, in one of our new ships, assuming you have favorable winds...”
“So,” Merlin mused. “Less time than it took us to sail here from Southampton.”
“Indeed,” Kaherdin conceded, now backing off a bit from his original comments. “King Mark abides at Restormel Castle, high above the River Formey near the Cornish capital of Lostwithiel. It’s some miles from the coast, but is on the tidal estuary of the river and so it has a port. But it is not an easy thi
ng maneuvering into that harbor from the coast.”
I felt obliged here to assert my own Cornishness. “It is as he says, my lord Merlin. The new, larger ships draw more water than perhaps is safe traveling up that river.”
“We lost a good twelve hours in that pursuit,” Kaherdin agreed. “Still, I know what you are thinking. A day and a half to Restormel Castle, a mere few hours with the king, the entire trip should have taken perhaps three days—four at the most accounting for unforeseen weather delays and the like.”
“And how long, in fact, did the journey take?” Merlin asked innocently.
Sir Kaherdin cast down his eyes, his lips pursing and unpursing with his tension. “Seven days,” he admitted. “A full week.”
“A full week,” Merlin nodded. “What caused this unusual delay, my lord?”
Kaherdin was roused again. “Do you suggest I was less than zealous in pursuing my charge?”
“I suggest nothing! I merely want to know: why did it take you seven days to make the journey, while your friend was lying here dying of poison?”
“It was the winds!” Sir Kaherdin cried out in a kind of anguish. The shame and guilt that he felt at his inability to bring La Belle Isolde back to his friend in time to save his life was now manifest even to me. It explained some of his behavior. “There was a storm in the Narrow Sea the first two days, with winds blowing almost straight out of the south, and we holed up on the lee shore of the mouth of the estuary. But as it turned out, we may have been wiser to have braved the storm, because what followed were endless days of absolute calm. We could get no breeze at all. We sent the crew down each day to use two rowboats and try to row us into a wind, but it was futile, and after the first two days of exhausting labor, they balked at the idea of trying again. We were becalmed and there seemed no relief in sight. I despaired of achieving my purpose.”
“He is right about those days,” came support from the unexpected direction of Sir Dinadan. “From here we surveyed the sea hourly. Nothing moved on it. We could see nothing but the empty sea hour by hour, day by day.”
“Of course he is right. Do you mean to suggest that my lord would ever tell a falsehood?” Melias rose to the defense of his master, but yielded the floor when Sir Kaherdin continued:
“Late on the fifth day, the weather finally broke. A breeze began from the northwest that caught our sail and brought us off the shore. We sped before it as quickly as we could, knowing that our delay may already have cost Sir Tristram his life. Finally, some seven days after our departure, we arrived back in Saint-Malo. I rushed the queen and her lady off the quay and through the gate and the city square, into the sick room which was in this palace complex. You know what we found.”
“Indeed,” said Merlin, with a slight raise of the eyebrows. “And…the queen? What was her demeanor all this time? How exactly did she react? When did you know she was…”
Surprisingly, it was the young Melias who took up the story here. “She was breathing heavily and seemed overheated as we hurried from the ship,” he said, then cast his eyes down as we all looked with some wonder in his direction. “I…uh…I was the one assigned to escort her while Sir Kaherdin led the way.”
“So you were along on this quest, young squire. And, I take it Sir Kaherdin, that your advisor Sir Andred made the trip as well?”
“Oui,” the loquacious Andred grunted.
“So,” Merlin continued, “to what did you attribute the queen’s…fragility?”
“I assumed she was anxious about her lover. Wouldn’t any of us be? Love is the most powerful of motives,” the squire answered somewhat poetically. “And,” he admitted in more mundane tones, “I knew that she had had some difficulties with mal de mer on the trip across. I knew her lady Brangwen had concocted some kind of herbal remedy for her that she had drunk a little earlier.”
“The lady Brangwen is a healer as well as her mistress?” I asked.
“Of course,” Sir Dinadan reminded me. “Have you forgotten the story? Where do you think the famous love potion came from?”
Merlin looked at him askance from under his great swath of eyebrow, and continued: “What had she been like on the ship itself? Did she speak to anyone?”
“Not to me,” Kaherdin answered. “Just the occasional ‘my lord’ or some such greeting when we passed on the deck.”
“She really did not speak with anyone,” Melias agreed. “She and her maid remained together constantly. Sometimes she would pace the deck nervously as long as we were bound onshore. Most of the time she and the faithful Brangwen sat huddled together in the room in the After Castle we had given them as their quarters on the ship, Brangwen holding onto the queen and whispering comforting words in her ear.”
“Did you ever hear what they were saying?” Merlin asked, curiously.
“Well, no…” Melias admitted.
“Hmmph,” was Merlin’s response. “I just wish I could find something about Isolde’s…the queen’s…state of mind before her own death. So Melias, you were saying that she was already feeling somewhat faint when you entered the sick room? And there you found…”
“That Sir Tristram had already died. She knelt down and took him in her arms, then saw that it was hopeless. Upon seeing that, she stood up straight, raising her face to the sky, then her eyes went back in her head and she fell like a stone to the floor. She was dead before she hit the ground.”
“You have what you need then, old man,” Kaherdin snapped with an air of finality. “You’ll forgive us if we don’t show you out, but I believe you know where the door is.”
With that he turned and made as if to engage Melias and Sir Andred in other business, but, as Merlin had not moved, he had no choice but to come back to the interview. Rolling his eyes, he turned back to the old necromancer with an impatient gesture. “What is it?” He asked, not invitingly.
“There is one other matter, my lord,” the mage began. “What can you, or either of your colleagues here, tell us about the skirmish that you had with the Norsemen on the day that Sir Tristram was wounded?”
“Well, your stooge the jester was there, can’t he tell you about that?”
Sir Dinadan grinned at Kaherdin’s characterization of him, but mentioned politely that he had already told what he could. “But as you may recall, I was near the fringe of the battle, and not in the thick of the fighting where Tristram was wounded. I did not see the wound, nor even know about it until the skirmish was over.”
“Hmph,” Kaherdin said. Then he thought for a moment. “Well, I took the garrison cavalry out that morning in pursuit of a band of Vikings who had been raiding country churches around the city during the night. They were on foot, so we were able to ride them down without a great deal of difficulty, up the coast toward Mont St.-Michel.”
“How many in the garrison cavalry?”
“Twenty-four knights,” Kaherdin answered. “There were perhaps thirty in the raiding party.”
“And how were you armed?” Merlin asked.
“We all wore helmets and shields, and long chain mail shirts, belted with swords, and carried our war lances,” Kaherdin responded.
“And the Norsemen? How were they armed?”
“They were a raiding party, and therefore needed to move stealthily and strike quickly,” Kaherdin began. “They wore no armor, other than helmets. Each carried a sword or battle-axe, each to his taste. And of course each of them carried one of their Viking spears. It was one of those spears that did for Tristram.”
“But how? Did Tristram fail to block a thrust with his shield? Did the spear puncture the chain mail?”
“The spear point apparently was thrust at Tristram from behind, while he sat on his horse, so that it wounded him in the thigh from beneath the mail shirt. A truly cowardly act,” Sir Kaherdin answered, while Melias, and Sir Andred nodded their assent; apparently they had both been part of the skir
mish as well.
“I see,” Merlin said thoughtfully. “So without the poison, the wound would not have been life-threatening at all.”
“True,” Kaherdin agreed. “Making the act all the more onerous. Anything else, old man?”
“Just one thing,” Merlin paused. “Did any one of you three actually see the wound occur that felled Sir Tristram?”
Kaherdin shook his head. “No, more’s the pity. He was at my right hand as we rode down the Norsemen in a battering assault, lances proffered, horses galloping. We crushed most of them in that first charge, and most of the others in the melee that followed. Only those who ran away survived, and I assume got to their transport ship a bit farther up the strand. By then Tristram had got his wound, but I never saw how it happened.”
“Nor did I,” Melias concurred, looking toward Kaherdin as if for approval. Sir Andred simply grunted.
“Well, gentlemen,” Merlin pronounced, in a voice that sounded like conclusion, “I have asked what I came here to ask. I appreciate your information, you have been most helpful. With your permission, we will be on our way now. Have a pleasant afternoon, and I assume that, should I have additional questions, I can call again?”
“With my permission and my intense pleasure, you may leave. I hope never to see you again, old man. However,” he added with a dark look in Dinadan’s direction, “if you find an additional audience necessary for your investigation, my door is open to you. Or at least, it is not locked. Good day to you.” This time when Sir Kaherdin turned away, Merlin did as well, and the rest of us followed him silently through the back door and past the two guards, who seemed a bit unnerved, having heard some lively exchanges from within. Sir William was scowling after us, a thoughtful expression on his cautious face.
“Well!” I began as we started in the direction of the town square. “Old Kaherdin was certainly the paragon of hospitality, wasn’t he?” Merlin gave me a meaningful look—the meaning of which was pretty clearly “shut your yammering trap, you fool of a Cornishman”—and then raised his eyebrows and shifted his eyes in the direction of Captain Jacques. Ah, I realized, I had been indiscrete. The captain, however friendly, was in the employ of the commander of the city, and it would not do to be too free and easy with my opinions while he was our guide.