I watched her savaging that swan and after a while she continued, ‘Merlin is not the man I thought he was. I have spoken with him. He claims that the gods have abandoned him, that they no longer speak to him, nor can he read the signs they send in the flight of birds or in the entrails.’ She shrugged.
‘And Guinevere? Did he know?’ I asked.
‘He says he would have come sooner had he known.’
‘Do you believe him, that he has lost his powers?’
Iselle’s dark brows came together. ‘Why would he say it otherwise?’
‘But he will try? To bring the lady back?’
‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘He’ll try.’
I looked at the carcass on her knees. Most of the top coat feathers were out now, but the body was still white with downy fluff and I knew that by the time Iselle had finished, it would look as if there had been a spring snowfall around that apple tree.
‘What is it, Galahad?’ She was looking up at me as she ripped the feathers out. ‘This?’ She gestured at her work.
I asked why she wasn’t saving the feathers, for on Ynys Wydryn we would use them for pillows or else Father Yvain would take them to sell at the lake village.
‘We won’t be here long enough to need more soft bedding,’ she said, and so those swan feathers lay in the mud. ‘I asked Merlin if he thought it was an omen. If we should have left the bird alone or given it back to the water.’ She looked down at the carcass, her lips pursed. I could not help but think of Guinevere when I imagined that beautiful bird trapped in Iselle’s snare. Iselle shrugged again. ‘He said it was not for him to know such things. Not any more. But Gawain said only a fool would waste so much meat. That the gods would not have let the bird trap itself if it was so special.’
‘It will be delicious,’ I said, and I saw the corners of Iselle’s lips tugged upwards just a little. The ghost of a smile.
But the truth was I had not been thinking about the swan or omens, but rather about Iselle being Lord Arthur and Guinevere’s daughter and not knowing it. If Merlin would not tell her, then I would, for she deserved to know. I would tell her tomorrow. When I had finished learning my weapons with Gediens, Iselle and I would go into the marsh to hunt birds and I would tell her.
But the next day we did not go hunting, nor did I learn my weapons. Instead, we clung to the roundhouse like elder smoke, Gediens and Parcefal invoking gods in ale beakers or touching iron for luck. Iselle keeping her hands busy by re-fletching a sheaf of arrows which she had found in Arthur’s barn but whose flights had been chewed by mice. Gawain wearing his mood like a dark cloak, his thoughts his own but his fears lying upon us all. Oswine mixing herbs, grinding roots, setting dried leaves to smoulder in dishes, warming wine and pouring draughts into cups. Arthur building up the fire before it needed it, stacking peat turves and splitting willow logs for the long night to come; busying himself with any unnecessary task. And I, scrubbing the last journey from my father’s armour, greaves and cloak, working the nub ends of old tallow candles into the metal scales and buffing each with a linen cloth until Arthur’s overfed fire blazed in the bronze.
Because Merlin was attempting to bring Guinevere back to the world.
Merlin began before sunrise, making the lady drink from a seashell a potion mixed of three substances not procured by human means nor made by the hand of man. These being honey, milk and salt which, combined, created a well-known cure for possession by malevolent spirits, so Merlin muttered as he put the shell to Guinevere’s lips, cursing into his beard at every spilled drop. The next draught was worse, being the heart of a crow, beaten up with the bird’s blood and drunk still warm. ‘She will take this for the next eight days,’ Merlin announced, and with the edge of his finger lifted a scarlet drop from beneath Guinevere’s mouth and pushed it between her lips, ‘providing Oswine and Iselle between them can catch enough crows.’ At least I knew now why there had been four of the birds strung up by the legs above the smokehouse door, turning in the breeze, their dead eyes black as curses.
After some mumbled incantations, the druid took a bone needle and, trying to fight the years which shivered in his hands, pierced the shell of a living snail. Then, making Oswine take hold of Guinevere’s head and tilt it backward – for Arthur would not do it – he held the snail over the lady, making sure that the fluid which exuded from the creature’s shell dripped on her eyes. She blinked. Once. Twice. Then stared as before.
‘I would, of course, rub her eyes with the tail of a black cat,’ Merlin said, ‘but Oswine being a useless Saxon swine could not find me one.’ I exchanged raised eyebrows with Gediens, for who would expect to find any cat, black or otherwise, out here in the marsh? And I wondered why Oswine, a Saxon, had remained so loyal to Merlin all these years, when he could surely have slipped away from the druid at any time to rejoin his own people. It seemed to me that Merlin was lucky to have him, though I knew he would never admit as much.
Merlin raised a hand into the hearth smoke. ‘Still, we cannot be sure that the lady does not see into this world now and then, just because she cannot tell us as much.’
Kneeling by Banon near the fire, Lord Arthur grunted. ‘Do not feel you have to share every part of your scheme,’ he said, his mouth slack as though to avoid a bad taste. He was picking burs from Banon’s black fur while she sat still and content, her eyelids falling closed now and then. ‘Did I tell you each detail of my battle plans?’ he asked the druid. ‘Which of my cataphracts would form my vanguard? Whether Parcefal, Bedwyr or Cai would circle to attack the enemy’s rear? Or when I’d have my men skirmish, when charge and break my opponent’s line?’
‘You are not the one trapped in here, Arthur.’ Merlin dismissed his lord with a flap of his hand. ‘Go and pick me some hemlock and willow herb if you don’t want to learn something. I am not saying it for you in any case, but rather for me because I have not attempted such an arduous healing for some years, and speaking it aloud helps me to recall the lore.’ He gestured to Oswine, who took two handfuls of herbs and threw them into the hearth flames, where they blackened and curled, some bursting to flame and all belching thick smoke, white and yellow like an old man’s dirty beard. He had already tied a bunch of mint around the lady’s right wrist. ‘Go and fetch more wood, Arthur. We will not be finished here until dawn tomorrow.’ He picked up a leather flask and poured some dark liquid into a cup and I wondered what he would make Guinevere drink next, but he put that cup to his own lips and drained it in three deep gulps. ‘Come here, Galahad,’ he beckoned me, ‘take the lady in your arms and walk with her three times around the hearth, keeping her face turned towards the smoke. She must breathe it in.’
I felt a fluttering in my stomach and looked at Iselle, who nodded that I should do as Merlin instructed. I had not imagined I would play any part at all in the proceedings, nor did I want to.
Arthur looked up at me, something like suspicion in his grey eyes, and I think he saw my father standing before him. I believed he hated the idea of my participating in Merlin’s rites, for though he had escaped from men and from the world, he had never escaped his own memories. Still, he gave a slight nod and so I walked across to where the lady sat, thinking how best to lift her without hurting her, for she was very frail. And when I turned around with Guinevere cradled in my arms, her head resting on my shoulder so that I could smell the iron of the crow’s blood on her breath, I saw Arthur walking out of the door, his black shadow, Banon, at his heel.
I walked with Guinevere around the hearth, slowly so as to let the musky, herb-sweetened smoke envelop us, Merlin all the while waving a wooden trencher up and down at the fog to make it chase us. She weighed nothing. My father’s scale armour coat was heavier, and yet perhaps she felt my arms trembling under her. For my blood shook with the sin of my trespass; of bearing this woman in my arms, who had been my father’s earth, sea and sky. Her warm cheek, once wet with tears of their shared despair, now against my neck. Her soft breath on my skin, that same breath which had
whispered my father’s name in the dark.
After the third time around the fire, burdened more by the eyes upon me than by Guinevere, I returned the lady to the chair and retreated back across to the other side of the hearth, hoping the druid would ask no more of me.
‘Girl, do you have the skull?’ Merlin turned to Iselle, who nodded and fetched a bowl from Arthur’s table. From what I could see, that bowl contained a mound of fine, grey-white powder and I shuddered to think that it had been a man’s skull before Iselle smashed it into fragments and ground it as one might grind flour to make bread. ‘Good,’ Merlin nodded, as he took the offered bowl and a cup from Oswine and poured a green-tinged liquid onto the powder. He took up a spoon and began to mix it. ‘Nine pieces of a man’s skull,’ he said, and I wondered where Iselle had found a man’s skull, but it did not seem the time to ask, ‘mixed with a decoction of wall-rue.’ He looked up at Gawain. ‘It’s a fern,’ he explained, at which Gawain shrugged as if to say he didn’t care what it was so long as it worked. ‘As with the crow’s hearts, she will have to drink this every morning until it is all gone.’ He raised a finger in warning. ‘None must be left, unless we want the dead man to come looking for the pieces of his skull.’
I looked at Iselle, but she was watching Merlin intently. Parcefal muttered something under his breath and said he had to feed the horses.
‘I cannot tell you that any of this will work,’ Merlin confessed, taking a spoon and waving it in our direction before dipping it into the bowl. ‘It has been so long since the lady was first afflicted.’ He pushed a spoonful of the skull mixture between Guinevere’s lips. ‘Such a long, long time she has been lost to us,’ he mumbled. ‘As I have tried to explain to Arthur, the will of the gods is no more known to me than it is to you.’ He gestured at the leather flasks, cups and bowls, the bundles of herbs and tangles of roots and the overturned dishes in which creatures that crawled or slid or scuttled were trapped. ‘These cures are for the more common maladies. Blindness. The falling sickness. That sort of thing.’ He grimaced, with his knuckle wiping a drop of the mixture from Guinevere’s chin. ‘But that which troubles the lady is more grievous and will require intervention by higher powers.’
‘Just bring her back, Merlin,’ Gawain said.
Merlin’s eyes flicked to the door, as if he feared someone walking in at that very moment. Arthur, no doubt. Then he looked up at Gawain. ‘In all the years, have you ever considered that perhaps she does not want to come back?’ he asked. It was clear from the way Gawain and Gediens looked at each other that they had not considered this. ‘Still,’ he turned back to the lady, ‘I will do what I can, because Arthur is my friend. And because I owe it to him to try.’
‘And because if you don’t, I’ll give you to Morgana and her Saxon king as a wedding gift,’ Gawain threatened.
And so Merlin worked throughout the day while we came and went, helpless as men at a birth. Come dusk, when the herons swept eastward above us to their roosts, and the first bats to emerge from their winter hiding places flitted above the reed-beds, Merlin asked me to lift Guinevere from her chair again. This time, I was to put her on the bed in preparation for what he said was the most important part of his rites.
Again, I could hardly believe how little she weighed. I thought of Arthur doing the same thing as I did now, but every night for the last ten years. Carrying her through the nearly dark, laying her amongst the bed furs and climbing in beside her, listening to her breathing and the soft murmur of the hearth flames, and the thought of his loneliness was terrible.
‘Thank you, Galahad,’ Merlin said.
It was just the three of us then, and I looked over at Guinevere where she lay, and I could not help but wonder what my father would have thought to look at her now, had he still lived.
‘When did they … when did it happen?’ I said, my voice low so that anyone outside would not hear.
‘Ah, I wondered when you’d ask,’ Merlin said. ‘You are slow, like your father was. You might be even slower than he was.’ He frowned up at me. ‘I haven’t decided yet.’ He was sitting on a stool, a pile of deadnettle on the table beside him, easing the small flowers from each calyx one by one and putting them to his mouth to suck out the sweet nectar.
‘Believe it or not, it was after Arthur had almost burned her alive,’ he said. The sound of his old mouth suckling the tiny cuplike flowers was sickening to me. He looked at Guinevere. ‘Your father turned the world upside down to save her and, after it all, she slunk off back to Arthur.’ He bent an eyebrow. ‘The gods told her to do it, I think. What else would explain it?’ He picked up another stem of deadnettle and examined it. ‘She was trying to set things right in her way.’ He plucked another flower and held it up to me. ‘Look inside, Galahad,’ he said.
I frowned at him but he pushed the flower towards me and so I took it from him.
‘Inside,’ he said again.
It was dark and I could see nothing much, so I turned the flower towards the firelight and peered inside.
‘You see the stamens?’ the druid asked.
‘Stamens?’
‘The threads, boy. Two of them. One black, one golden.’
‘I see them,’ I said.
Merlin nodded. ‘Don’t they look to you like two figures sleeping side by side in a bed of white furs?’
I frowned again and looked again and said nothing, putting the flower back down on the table in case the old man wanted to suck out its sweetness.
‘They were together one night. Just one.’ He looked at Guinevere in her and Arthur’s bed, the flame flicker now and then illuminating her pale cheek as she lay so perfectly still. ‘But it only takes one night.’
I stared at Guinevere, wanting to hate her. Wanting to feel the pain that my father must have felt knowing that she had returned to Arthur.
‘Oh, I doubt your father knew, if that’s what’s bothering you. Or maybe he did.’ The druid shrugged. ‘It was all too late by then, anyway.’
It must have been around the same time that my father met my mother, I knew. And though I was born soon after, I had no doubt that my father must have carried Guinevere in his heart still.
Merlin stood, took the ravaged nettle stems and tossed them into the fire, where they smoked and glistened with droplets of water which burst from them like sweat.
‘Now I must rest awhile and dream to the gods if I can,’ he said. He looked tired, the skin around his eyes tinged blue and so thin it might easily tear. The tremor which I had seen earlier in his hands had spread through his old bones now so that his whole body, and even his face, quivered like heather with a breeze in it. He looked down at Guinevere. ‘Keep an eye on her,’ he commanded, ‘and wake me if she brings anything back up, though the mint should settle her stomach.’
‘If she fouls herself?’ I asked, for it was not unlikely after all that Merlin had poured into her.
‘Then clean her, Galahad,’ the druid said with a roll of his eyes, and with that he left us and went to find a quiet place to dream to the gods, or perhaps simply to sleep. And when next we saw him, he was not the same man.
Like most of the others, I had fallen asleep by Lord Arthur’s hearth, lulled by the soft flicker of flame and the warm bloom of strong mead in my stomach. My bladder being full, though, I woke and saw Lord Arthur sitting on a stool beside the bed, watching Guinevere sleep. He nodded to me and I nodded back, before looking at the others who were lying on furs or leaning against the walls. Gawain and Parcefal were snoring so loudly it was a wonder anyone was still asleep.
Iselle was awake, watching the fire, but feeling my eyes on her she looked up and I mouthed Merlin? to her. She shrugged. The screech of an owl and the heaviness of the world beyond the wattle and mud walls told me that we were in the depths of the night, and yet where was the druid? Why was he not neck-deep in his mysterious rites, trying to draw Lady Guinevere from this living death which would not let go its grip on her? I thought to wake Oswine and tell him to fetch
the druid from the byre, if that was where he lay sleeping still, for perhaps, being old, Merlin could no longer wake at will, and I feared him ruining the work he had already done this day if he did not proceed as planned.
But then the door clunked open, creaking back on its hinges and waking Gediens, whose hand found the sword in the dry reeds beside him. Silver moonlight washed the darkness, for a heartbeat illuminating waking faces, iron, fur, hearth stones. Then shadow bled in again and with it a great weight pressed upon me so that I could not move, for I thought a god had come down to the marsh and meant to claim Guinevere once and for all, or else challenge us for our meddling in things beyond our understanding.
The god creature stepped over the threshold, black as pitch, shapeless, wanting for arms, and I saw Iselle grab the fire iron beside her to ward off ill luck, and Parcefal half draw a knife, pressing his fingers against the blade. For, like me, they thought that the Morrigán, goddess of strife, had swept down in the form of a great crow, dark as night, sheened purple and green in terrifying beauty. And even Gawain, who was not a man who saw omens in the patterns which cream makes in a pail, or in a flight of rooks, or saw gods in doorways, widened his eyes as he cast off his furs and stood.
It was not the Morrigán who had come, but Merlin, swathed in his cloak of crow and raven feathers; as many feathers, it seemed, as there were scales on my father’s coat of bronze. We were all standing now, but I was the nearest to him and it was me he was looking at, though there seemed to be no recognition in his face. I tried to speak. To greet him. To make some show of respect, for here was a druid clothed in his ritual robes, invested with the ancient power of our people. But a heavy foot seemed to be treading down my tongue. No one spoke, and Merlin, the last of the druids, swept past me and went to the small table where were gathered the potions and cups from earlier. Without a word, he picked up two beakers, sniffed them both, put one down and drank from the other. Then he went over to where Guinevere lay, seeming not even to see Lord Arthur, who gave way, almost reluctantly, stepping back into the shadows against the wall.
Camelot Page 29