"My, my," she said. "That sounds terribly important."
Taliesin took a deep breath and spoke from the depth of his soul. "It is, Innocent. It is the most important spell I have ever undertaken, to bring Arthur Pendragon back from the dead, along with all his knights." He shook his head slightly, as if to emphasize the gravity of the matter. "It was, in fact, one of the Three Great Magics."
"Ah," the Innocent said, appropriately impressed.
On the druid island of Mona, the Great Magics were introduced to fledgling magicians almost as soon as they were accepted as students, yet after the required two decades of study, it was rare for any of them to have mastered the skill to perform even one.
They were difficult feats, to be sure: The First Great Magic, known as Walking Through the Rock, required the ability to be so still that the very atoms of one's body could merge with—and therefore pass through—solid objects.
The Second Great Magic, or Bringing the World into Being, was far more advanced. It involved no less than creating physical reality from thought.
This was what had brought the knights back from the Summer Country to take on human flesh. It was what had connected Hal, who had waited for centuries, with a recently-born Arthur. It had all been orchestrated sixteen centuries before, when the spell was begun.
This was the stunning achievement that was the Merlin's masterwork, the last spell of his earthly life, an accomplishment so extraordinary that when he awoke to spin the final threads of the spell, he found he was no longer a human being, but a true wizard.
The Third Magic, which, as far as Taliesin knew, no one had ever tried, carried the chilling subtitle of The End of the World. This Magic was discussed, but not taught, and students were strongly advised not to spend their lives conjuring a spell that would ultimately destroy everything they knew.
On Mona, the Three Magics were likened to the Fates of ancient Greek mythology: Clotho, who spun the thread of life, Lachesis, who determined the thread's length, and Atropos, who cut it when it was time. Walking Through the Rock was the initiation that created a magician out of a man; Bringing the World into Being allowed the magician, now fully formed, to practice his art and ascend to a higher level of knowledge; and The End of the World... Well, Taliesin thought, one didn't have to worry about that much.
The Innocent patted his leg. "Ah, well, don't feel too badly. You were doing your best."
Taliesin felt his blood rise. "My best! I beg your pardon, Innocent, but I have fulfilled—singlehandedly—the ancient prophecy about the return of the King."
She fixed him with her blank eyes. "And he was doing so well here in the Summer Country. The knights, too. I checked up on them from time to time." She winked at him. "Perhaps you ought to have spent more time practicing the First Magic, and left the Second until you had attained a bit more maturity."
Taliesin sputtered. "I... how ..."
"Walking Through the Rock is always the beginning," she said.
"Walking Through the Rock is about transportation!" he shouted.
"Oh, you're wrong, little bard," the old woman went on gently. "To walk through the rock, you have to become the rock before you can move through it. You must, wholly and truly, become one with objects, other beings, with the very gods themselves. It takes nothing less, Taliesin. That is why it is one of the Three Great Magics: because all of the wonders of all the wizards in creation can be distilled into one of these three, and of the three the first, Walking Through the Rock, is the most necessary."
Talisin felt unappreciated and unfairly judged. No one else in all of history had ever brought a King back from the Summer Country.
"The second great Magic, Bringing the World into Being, grows out of the first. To create, to manifest the tangible from an idea, to bring form to pure energy, to bring to new life a man who had been dead... These come also from becoming. From understanding deeply." She cocked her head. "Do you understand deeply, O Merlin?"
"Yes, yes," he said, bored. Sometimes the Innocent worried an idea to death, like a dog with a bone.
"Then you understand why the boy does not want to live the life you gave him."
"He doesn't know any better."
"I see. And you do."
"Well, naturally I do," he said, puzzled. "I know the nature of the life he had—"
"But you talk as if Arthur lived only one life before this current one. That simply isn't true. He has lived many times, Taliesin."
"But his life as High King was the only one that mattered!"
The Innocent was silent.
"Oh, I know what you're saying," he admitted crankily. "Human beings are very attached to their lives, even if they're quite ordinary. They all like to believe that their trivial experiences are important." He stifled a yawn.
"Everything that happens is important," the Innocent said. "I wish you’d understood that, little bard."
She stretched on the bench, a frail woman, impossibly old, and then leaped into the air on powerful haunches. When she alighted, twenty feet away, she had again taken the form of the she-wolf.
"Innocent, please," Taliesin said, but the wolf sauntered away without a backward glance.
"She treats me like a dunce," he muttered as he propelled himself back to Puma Mountain. He landed in the ashes of the previous night's fire. "Damn, damn, damn!" he said, brushing the soot off his robe. "Becoming the rock. Pah!"
In his rage, he nearly stepped on the scrying mirror that he had been using with Arthur before the boy had stormed off so unreasonably.
In it, Arthur came into view almost immediately. "Hmmph," the old man said. He had half a mind to forget the ungrateful brat. "Hmmph," he said again as his gaze slid toward Arthur's image in the mirror.
The boy was still in the Black Hills, in what was called the Needles area of the rolling forest, where tall, slender rocks jutted skyward like daggers. He was hiking determinedly beneath the summer sun, wiping the sweat off his brow.
"You always were a stubborn child," Taliesin said.
Arthur scanned the horizon, trying to find his way.
"It won't do any good, you know," the old man said. "The knights will find you."
As if hearing what Taliesin had said, Arthur found a shady spot beneath an outcropping of rock and sat down. "Jolly good," Taliesin whispered. "Now let me in, Arthur. Let me see what you're thinking."
The scene in the mirror was the same one that Arthur had conjured when the two of them had sat together on Puma Mountain. Taliesin recognized the lush terrain of the land on which Camelot had once stood. But again, they were seeing Camelot before Camelot, when the flattened summit of the hill on which Arthur's great castle would come to stand was still the ancient burial ground of heroes long forgotten even during the Middle Ages.
"Why do you keep going there?" the old man wondered aloud, though he knew Arthur could not hear him. "You're in the wrong time, lad! You need to move a few hundred years forward!"
This time, he noticed, the shimmering specter of Excalibur was not present in the vision. There was only a big yellow rock in a clearing, with a young woman walking by.
"I say," Taliesin said, bewildered. "Who the devil is that?"
The young woman ran her hand over the smooth, barley-colored stone. She was dressed oddly, in a rough woolen shift tied at the hip by a cord of vine, but beautiful. Tall and slender, her long legs strode with an authority far beyond her years. The sensual features of her face were framed by a cascade of wavy red-gold hair held in place by a band of white moonstones across her forehead.
"The girl," Arthur whispered. The girl who had come to him so often in his dreams. She was back.
"What girl?" Taliesin growled agitatedly. "I've never seen her before in my life."
"Brigid." the boy said as he fell deeply into trance. "Brigid, yes. Yes."
What he felt for her was love, pure, strong, aching love, in his body, his thoughts, his heart, a love so deep it seemed to him that he had loved her for a thousand years.
<
br /> He had, in fact, loved Brigid for as long as he could remember. They had been children together. He had carried her across the river when it had been too deep for her to cross. He had made her gifts all his life: armloads of flowers picked at night and left in a dried pumpkin shell filled with water in front of her family's hut. Fish he had caught, still wriggling on the line.
And jewelry. He had always collected stones, wood, amber. Pretty things that he could string onto vines, cord, bone, things for her hair, her waist, her neck. He had learned how to forge metal, and though most of what he made were weapons, there was always enough time and material left over to make something beautiful for her.
The circlet she wore over her brow had been a gift from him. Three strands of milk-colored stones were mounted on thin wires of copper, with a larger stone hanging between her eyes, in the place of the Second Sight, which she had. It had taken him nearly a year to refine the copper to the point where he could make wire from it, but the time had been worth it. The stones shone against her skin like light made of water. Like moons.
As he strode near her, she held out her arms to him. Her lips parted in a smile of welcome. He met them with his own, entwined his arms with hers, touched her body with his. He felt whole now, as if he had been walking around with only isolated pieces of himself, and the rest of him had just grown in place to make him complete.
Yes, he thought, I have known you forever....
"I've brought you something," he said. He took a long leather bag that hung over his shoulder by a strap and removed its contents.
What it held was a sword, although the word did not adequately serve to describe the object. It was a sword in the way that a diamond was a stone. In truth, although its shape was that of a sword, it looked like nothing else on earth.
Its hilt, crafted of gold and silver and bronze and copper, was fashioned into the form of a coiled snake. Over the body of the snake were embedded gemstones which he had polished over the course of many months: lapis, rose quartz, onyx, malachite, spotted jasper, bloodstone. For the eyes of the snake, he had placed two rubies, very rare, for which he had traded a fine iron sword to a traveler from a distant land.
Unlike most swords, which were made of bronze, or even the new, famous black swords invented by Macsen's grandfather on the hilltop known as the Tor where they lived, this sword's blade was silver-colored, and light as wood. Anyone wielding it would not be swinging a heavy iron bludgeon, but a precision edge designed to function like a sharp knife.
"Macsen," Brigid breathed, running her slender hands above the deep, perfect metal of the blade. "You have made something wonderful."
"My grandfather helped," Macsen said, smiling. His grandfather had been the greatest swordmaker in Britain. Until his death, he had worked with his grandson to perfect what he had called the sword of the gods, this sword, Excalibur.
1275 B.C.E.
The old man first got the idea for it during his travels. "Travels" was how old Macdoo referred to the seventeen years he spent in slavery.
He had been taken during some long-forgotten foreign incursion, and put on a ship to a faraway city called Mycenae in a land so highly advanced and so alien that Macdoo might as well have been on another planet. He was set to work in a foundry, at first burning his hands and lungs at the filthy task of smelting the raw ore that was to be made into bronze for the weapons that were produced in huge quantity for the use of the Mycenaean army.
During the nearly two decades that Macsen's grandfather spent in this place, his owner, the armorer, grew old. He came to rely on the sturdy and pleasant young fellow more and more. Eventually he taught Macdoo everything he knew about making swords.
Toward the end of the armorer's life, with his own sons long dead in battle and no one to tend him except for the slave who had served him for so long, he shared with Macdoo a secret he had guarded jealously for many years: the secret of iron.
He had made only one such sword in his life, and given it as a gift to the King of Mycenae; but the King was sickly and frail, and could barely lift the heavy black sword. Embarrassed by his own weakness, he had dismissed the armorer with little fanfare. Afterward, the sword had been relegated to a storehouse somewhere, never to be used again.
But the armorer knew its value. To those who could wield it, the heavy but nearly indestructible iron sword would vanquish every enemy. As a dying gift to his faithful slave, he passed on the process of the iron sword's manufacture before setting him free. The generous Greek had thought to provide Macdoo, who was no longer young, with a way to earn a living in his adopted homeland, but the Briton had no intention of remaining in the complex, cosmopolitan atmosphere of urban Attica. He was going back to the Tor on the island he would always call home.
It took him another six years to reach his destination. By then he was nearly forty, an age seldom attained by anyone, let alone a slave who had spent a lifetime at hard labor. There were few in his village on the Tor who remembered him. His wife had died of fever many years before. His daughter, who had only been one year old when he was taken into slavery, was now a widow herself, with an eight-year-old son and two younger daughters to raise alone. She had been glad to take in the old man, especially because he possessed a skill prized among all, the ability to make weapons of war.
Throughout the sparsely populated island of Britain, metalworking had been in a primitive state before Macdoo's arrival. Daggers and short, thrusting-type longer weapons were made by various methods here and there, but their hilts came apart from the blades easily, and in many cases the blades themselves broke on impact the first time they were used.
Macdoo's bronze swords, with their sophisticated tangs and rivets, changed all that. Demand for them was so great that men would often travel great distances in order to barter for one of the prized weapons. But his masterpieces were the iron swords he developed during his twilight years. The "black swords of the Tor," as they came to be known, became so prized that none of the precious blades were permitted outside the settlement. If a man wanted to own a sword of iron, he would have to move with his family onto the Tor.
By the time old Macdoo could no longer work the forge himself, he had taught his grandson everything he himself had learned about swordmaking, and one thing that he had not yet learned.
"There is something beyond iron," he confided to Macsen one winter night as he felt the chill of death breathing in the room. "I know it to be true, though I have not had time to try it."
"Try what, grandfather?" Macsen had asked.
"To purify the metal. To burn away everything in the ore that is not perfect, and use only what is left. It would be a perfect sword, Macsen. A sword of the gods."
"What... what would we call it, this sword made of a metal beyond iron?"
"Call it Excalibur," old Macdoo had commanded. "It means 'voracious.' "
"Voracious?" Macsen asked, smiling. "A hungry sword?"
"Hungry for blood." The old man's eyes twinkled. "Men like their women sweet, but their swords vicious."
And from that day, Macsen worked to create, from his mind and his sweat and the strength of his arm, the sword of the gods, which he now presented to the woman he loved.
The Black Hills, South Dakota
Arthur gasped as the vision of Brigid vanished from his mind. "Hal!" he cried, looking around helplessly at the silent hills. Hal was in danger. Arthur did not know how he knew that. Nor did he know where he was, how to reach Hal, or who might help him.
There was only one person who could, of course. To summon him, Arthur would have to swallow his pride and admit his weakness. And betray his location.
But it would be for Hal. The premonition had been strong; he knew Hal would die unless he was taken from where he was.
Standing erect, Arthur opened his arms wide and shouted a cry of supplication that rang through the swordlike rocks of the sacred hills:
"Merlin!"
With a small smile, the old man touched two fingers to
his forelock as he began to fade away. "At your service, Highness," he whispered.
Chapter Eighteen
FACE-OFF OVER MOUNT RUSHMORE
Rapid City, South Dakota
Taliesin materialized in the boiler room of St. Francis Hospital, grateful to all the old gods that the Innocent had not been present to see him.
Somewhere along the line his concentration had wavered. The problem with magic was that it was so bloody exact. The focus required was such that it would literally kill most people. Why, he thought, if it hadn't been for his training on Mona...
What am I thinking? he realized as he made his way through the basement toward the elevator, feeling with his senses for Hal's presence in the building.
It did kill me. I spent sixteen hundred years being dead.
His thoughts drifted to the Innocent and her unenthusiastic comments about his accomplishments. "Some people appreciate nothing," he sniffed.
Hal was in room 503. He was sitting up in bed, watching television and eating the waxy yellow flesh of a chicken. Taliesin shuddered.
"What are you doing here?" the old man demanded, his hands on his hips. "Besides fattening yourself up, that is."
"Glad to see you, too," Hal said, turning up the volume on the TV news.
"No broken bones? No addled brains? I thought this was an emergency."
"I took a bullet. Flesh wound. I should be well enough to leave by tomorrow. Who told you I was here, anyway?"
"Arthur."
Hal looked over, frowning. "Arthur? How'd he know?"
"By using his mind for something other than staring at an inanimate object," he said irritably, snatching the remote control out of Hal's hand. He pressed several buttons to no effect. "How the devil—Oh, my."
The remote fell out of his hand.
Suddenly the old man looked as if he had eaten a worm. Hal followed his gaze to the television screen.
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