Mordred, Bastard Son

by Douglas Clegg

  “It’s the curves of the vessel that bring back a tincture of voice,” he said. Then, he added, “You may put the bowl down.”

  I passed it back to him. “Is this about an art of speaking in bowls?”

  His eyes flashed with that distant lightning that I knew might end up with a slap to my face, as Merlin did not hesitate from hitting and slapping or boxing ears when I was slow to understand him.

  “For the love of Jove, will you be patient? The bowl’s an example,” he said, keeping his temper. “Now, look at the air between us.”

  Again, I felt foolish, but I watched his face and then tried to imagine the air between us.

  “It’s curved, like a bowl. But not just the air. We’re actually touching now, you half-wit dragonfly. I’m sitting here and you there, but the aura around each of us touches and mingles together. It’s like when one pours water and wine into a vessel and it becomes one thing together. Somewhere between where I sit and where you sit, our essence has been poured into a vessel.”

  As was the custom for Merlin’s teachings, when not accompanied by a Greek or Latin or Ogham text, he grew frustrated with my inability to grasp his meanings. Colorful cursing followed, none of it bothering me in the least.

  He spoke in such riddles half the time, the way the Druids often did. His face seemed to brighten with an idea.

  “Watch. Just watch. ”

  He reached into that large leather pouch that rarely left his side and drew out a curl of parchment.

  Using a bit of red chalk-rock, he scratched out an oval on its face.

  “This is your head.” Then, he drew another oval. “This is mine.”

  He drew a series of swirls around his oval and then around mine, and somewhere between them, these swirls intersected and his swirls reached as far as mine. “

  When I speak to you, my voice carries to your ears. But when I vessel…” and here he closed his mouth and began speaking even without the movement of his lips: I pour my thoughts into you, using these paths that are invisible to us. You hear the echoes of my thoughts, like so.

  I sat there, stunned. I understood that Merlin had great power, and the raveling itself was a sign of it, but this vesseling seemed even more remarkable to me, for it did not involve the absorbing of a vision from one to another, but of the voice, as if he spoke clearly. As if others might hear them, if they had sat near us.

  You see? I am speaking but without my tongue. I am using this aura field between us to move the sound of my voice into your brain without my mouth and without your ears. I could not do this if we did not have sympathy to each other, boy.

  “Sympathy?”

  If you and I weren’t as…understanding of each other.

  I tried to speak to him. Can you hear me?

  He did not respond.

  “I tried, just now, to speak to you. Did you hear it?”

  “No,” he said. “Look, this isn’t a trick of some traveling wizard, wolfling whelp. It takes years for it to work. Your training in the vessel has just begun. And it is not to be used for sport. In the ancient days, when men had not yet been given the gift of language by the birds, they spoke through their vessels. You hear the echo of my vessel, for it is into it that I speak.”

  “How do I do this?” I asked, excited by the prospect of a new trick. I had learned the secret calendar that predicted the rains and the stars and the moons for years to come. I had spent three summers with Merlin learning of the many numbers and their mystical uses; I could cipher as well as any Druid. But this speaking into the mind of another seemed like a wonderful new magick, and I loved the very idea of magick, let alone its uses. “Please. Is there something I can do now? I want to.”

  “It’s not a game!” he shouted. “You arse-end of woodcock. It will take you years to master it.”

  “Do you know what I’m thinking? Is that what it’s like?”

  “I don’t go into your mind,” he said, snorting as if I were an idiot. “As much of a whelp as you are, I have too much respect for you. Mordred, this is important. Get your hands out of your mealy trousers and wake up your mind. I want you to focus on this. I may go away for a while, perhaps a long time. But I want you to be able to call to me, wherever I am.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I might leave,” he said. “Whether I leave or stay is not the point.” Then he began cursing, using the words for rutting and the various male and female anatomy that he liked to cry out when he was angry. The words “prick,” and “ball-sack” flew from his mouth like summer greenflies from a dead man’s mouth. “Whelp, you will need this Art. And you are reaching a point where you might lose the ability to learn it at all.”

  “Lose? But there are many arts, my lord, that I do not yet know.”

  “When you become a man—when all youth turned to manhood—much is lost. Those arts and wisdoms not yet imparted are often waylaid.” He chuckled as he said this as if something about the word “waylaid” had been a particularly clever turn of phrase for him.

  “Why? Why would it change? What will happen when I become a man that has not already come to pass?”

  “I’ve told you before about the energies?”

  I nodded. “The points of the body that hold the expression of the soul.”

  “Six points along the body. Six points of energy and of expression. The mind, the heart, the solar plexus, the snake of devouring, the organs of the seed in men and of the womb in women, and the fundament. But manhood stops the energies of the upper body from reaching the lower, unless as a boy and youth the man has kept this open.”

  “But my mother learned the raveling when she was older.”

  “Women do not lose the ability to learn the Art. Only men.”

  “And not boys?”

  “I will speak plainly, Mordred,” he said, squinting , as he looked me over. “You have not yet known a woman. Or a man?”

  I felt my face burn a bit on the inside. “I have not.”

  “Virginity among males is a state in which learning of the hidden arts may occur. It is not well thought-of, this state of existence, but anyone who practices the Art understands. It is not so with the female, who may learn the arts into their hundredth year. You must remain in this state for as long as you can, for it will allow me to pass you this knowledge and this Art. Once you are a doorway for the magick itself, you may cross the rites of manhood and continue to gain a few of the other secret wisdoms. There are other arts of manhood that will come later for you, but to learn these particular ones, the raveling and its twin, the unraveling, you must approach them with energy untarnished by the unsheathing of the sword. Do you understand?”

  “I’ve heard that some virgins see the faeries.”

  He wrinkled his face up, from chin to forehead, as if he had just smelled a fart. “Those blasted elfin faerie revels of the superstitious mind. Those pretty little people? No better than gas and hallucinations, Mordred. Have you not drunk mead and seen spirits dancing? The elementals exist, though they do not have the wings of butterflies nor do they rein and saddle rabbits for their steeds. They invade the mind through scent and the invisible boundaries that exist in the world though men do not see them. They are energies of the forest that play with our minds when we come near these areas. Many are weak when near them, but the strong will resist this manipulation which is but the forces of the rock and water and air and flame.”

  “Are these elementals as powerful as the gods?”

  He thought a moment, calming from his tirade. “The gods are masks of an eternal truth, Mordred. The elementals are very different. In that ancient city where Jason left on his ship, the Argos, the priests of the stars wrote of great energies called the magnes, documented there many centuries ago. These are the elementals of which we speak, and of the cause of the magick of the faerie realm. Rocks and water, and gas produced from them as well, combine with this to create feelings in us, ignite senses, and cause these visions. You must never let this sort of thing overpowe
r you.”

  I was not sure if I had angered him or not, but I pressed further. “May I learn the raveling? If I remain untouched?”

  He ignored this question, which was as good as him yelling at me for asking it. Instead, he said, “I want your word that you will keep your studies sacred. That you will not break a vow I ask this of you. You will remain chaste, though all other youths you know follow their lusts. Will you do this? For I have much to teach you, and not as much time left to do it, as the nature of man takes you from me.”

  “Yes, my lord,” I said.

  He spoke within my mind. I will give you the greatest gift I know, little frog. I'll bring ancient secrets that only a handful of mages have learned. These are mysteries of the Otherworld from which most men are forbidden. We will, one day, speak together, and vessel within each other from great distances. And if you keep true to this promise, you will become greater than even your father. You will one day speak with the gods themselves.

  We spent many long days sitting across from one another, whether in the world above, on the flat altar stones in the Groves, or upon the boat in the lake, or, on the warmer nights, under the stars, upon the cliffs overlooking the distant hills, turned blue-gray in the misty darkness.

  After many months, he said to me, Yes. I can hear you now, whelpling prince. You are pouring yourself into my vessel. You have broken through the wall that has separated my mind from yours. Welcome to this, my boy, for it will protect you in dark times and in places of shadow, and will prove its use to you in ways you do not now know or anticipate. When I see you next, if you keep your vow to me, I will train you in the raveling, for you are ready for its thorny path.

  4

  Merlin spent six weeks with me in isolation, out in the desolate lands where there was little food and less water. I lost weight on a diet of roots and berries, and drank but a few sips of water every few hours. I was asked to chew on the stag-thistle when my hunger became overwhelming, and he spent one boiling-hot day of summer spreading a salve made of a mixture of belladonna and foxglove, and while I felt my body floating as if to the sky from this, he began to press himself to me. It was in a way that was nothing like my dreams of mating, but even more intimate, for I felt him move through me, as if he were in my blood, and I were in his, and our eyes were so close together I could not even blink, and our skin pressed tight for more than an hour as I felt that salve on my body heat both of us until I thought we would burst into a funeral pyre.

  And then, the raveling began, and I unraveled into him, and he into me. I knew then what real power was, for the union of two minds in the raveling was nearly god-like.

  I went with Merlin through his past, and saw my father as a boy, and saw the great towers of the world, and Morgan, but three years old, in my grandmother Ygrain’s arms, and watched Viviane at fourteen, riding a great black horse along the Cornish coast.

  I began to fly within his memory and see even the edges of things and nearly touch what was before me.

  Through his direction, I was even able to move back before his birth at this incarnation, and for a moment that seemed as if I’d gone underwater, I saw the world through the eyes of a previous Merlin, as the great Roman armies lit the forests of Britain with cages of prisoners of our people, burning.

  I reached the exhaustion point with the raveling, but it was like a delicious drug, and I wanted more, I wanted to suck at his memories, through his thousand lives, that I might see the making and unmaking of the world itself. I awoke one night, lying on a blanket while he sat beside me. Blood had poured from my mouth and nose, and he had begun calling to the gods for healing that I might not pass into Annwn before my time.

  In that time, I traveled to the realms of the gods, though these were merely dreams and hallucinations, a side effect of the raveling and of the poisons rubbed upon my body to heighten my senses during this time. I saw the hounds of Annwn hunting the souls of knights and chieftains along a battlefield blanketed with the torn bodies of the dead, behind them a wine-dark sunset, and a man upon a low hill, a spear raised, a large round shield glinting in that unnatural light. He wore the bloodstained armor of a prince of distant lands, and upon his head, a helmet as none I had ever seen, with the antlers of Cernunnos upon it, and a crown upon the helmet, encircling the antlers. He faced another warrior who held up a sword that seemed to be on fire.

  Upon his head, a helmet encircled with a crown. Surrounding these two, a yellow wind of spirits, like locusts whirling about them, even as the two men seemed frozen in their battle.

  The sky itself darkened, and, as if from the clouds, the black swans of Arawn’s flock descended from the sky, and as they touched down upon the battle-scarred earth, they transformed into beautiful maidens, with the black-feathered wings of angels.

  My visions turned to darkness, and I fell ill for days. I found myself on my hands and knees throwing up those berries I’d ingested before the raveling had begun. My fever broke.

  Merlin squatted beside me. “You have learned it, I think.” He rubbed my back, and that night we slept at the edge of a river so that I might bathe and rest. He told me that it had to be used sparingly. “The raveling takes much out of us. It may damage the mind, and pain the soul, for it is not a game. The soul has a substance, Mordred. You must understand that the raveling also unravels the one who practices its Art. But you have withstood it, twice, and while you were within its realm, I brought you the strength you would need for its use that you might not die from it.”

  He did not have to worry about me using it ever again, I thought at that moment, for I felt sick to my stomach for weeks, and fought a fever that left me no good for anything but the simplest of chores for the remainder of that summer.

  5

  My lessons with Merlin only now and then took my mind off the problems with my mother.

  I loved her dearly, but she had begun hurting herself—and me—in small and large ways since I’d been a child. I had grown less patient with her drinking too much of the barley ale during the winter festivals, and bringing home men that I had not known before, though I did not begrudge her lust, for I felt it at times for men, though only in my imagination. But living with her, in those seasons when Merlin or Morgause and her sons did not visit, I felt unprotected in some way when it was just she and I in our rock chambers along the cavern cliffs. She had her happy times, as well, and she did not drag me through her many miseries, I will give her that. And worse, I understood her unending fury. I had heard her cry out in the night during a dream that my father still came for her, that terrible night when I was conceived. I covered my ears that I would not hear the whimpers and cries she made as her dream carried her back into that nightmarish event. I knew of how her brothers and father had been killed to make way for Uther pen-Dragon to take Ygrain and to bring Arthur into being. I knew the tale, told me by Viviane, of how Arthur had tricked Merlin into helping him retrieve the sword of the ancient kings, called Excalibur, stolen from the rock outcroppings of the Lady of the Lake, meant to remain buried in that watery stone for centuries, an amulet of our tribes, not to be held by any human hand without bringing power and glory and destruction to all. “The Lady tried to drown Arthur as he left in his boat, clutching the sword as if it were his birthright. Her waters boiled that day, and the fish within it died, and was poisoned for five years until we had appeased her with our atonement.”

  “And does the sword hold so much sway in the world of men?”

  “It is a sword of terror and retribution, and though it brings peace to one land, it brings suffering to another,” she said. “For there is no peace without many wars in the world of men, and while a war may save a kingdom and exalt its king and his knights, it will leave many dead in their fields and blood will run in rivers beneath the highest of castle walls.”

  The Lake had suffered greatly by my father’s action as a boy, as had Merlin, as had my mother, and when I think on it much, my life also had been a suffering from his actions though I
did not wish my own undoing in order to make it right.

  I wished for a better world, and for peace to come into my mother’s heart, and for her to recognize my love for her, because I put her above all other women. I held her as the finest of our tribe, and I saw her as the Queen of the Lake, as did many. Without saying a word about it, she had been silently abdicating her throne there, beginning to lose her grasp on daily living, forgetting to meet with the wise women at council, leaving the stews on the fire too long while muttering words that sounded like spells to me, though I could not understand them, and avoiding her responsibility of the Groves during the festivals. My heart broke often when she spoke harshly to me over minor offenses, and I felt renewed hope each season that she seemed to regain her spirits.

  My mother’s mind had always had both a strong and yet fragile nature to it. When I had been younger, I had not thought unusual those periods of winter when she had, like a bear in its cave, gone to her bedchamber for days at a time, drawing the woolen blankets across her body, and covered her head with her pillows—one of the few luxuries she’d brought with her from Cornwall—as if she didn’t want to even hear a human voice. I was used to her sudden anger at me if I had misplaced the bowls, or if I had not drawn enough water for the stew. When Gawain had been there, in my first few years of memory, he had complained loudly of her constant punishments of the two of us for the minor crimes of childhood (bringing frogs into our chamber and leaving them among the hay, or lighting a fire when we weren’t supposed to have stolen kindling from the communal fire pit). “Your mother is mean,” he wailed to me once. “I don’t know if I can stand to be here another summer.” He regaled me with tales of the castle at Orkney. “It is a long hall, full of dogs and knights, and the smell of honey-beer all around us and the kitchen is always warm and full of freshly baked bread. Someday, Mordred, you should come back with me.” He told me that his mother was sweeter than mine, and that she did as her husband told her to do. “All women are meant for that,” he said.