Merlin Read online

  STEPHEN R. LAWHEAD

  MERLIN

  Book Two of

  THE PENDRAGON CYCLE

  To the memory of James L. Johnson

  Map

  MERLIN PRONUNCIATION GUIDE

  While many of the old British names may look odd to modern readers, they are not as difficult to pronounce as they seem at first glance. A little effort, and the following guide, will help you enjoy the sound of these ancient words.

  Consonants—as in English, but with a few exceptions:

  c:

  hard, as in cat (never soft as in cent)

  ch:

  hard, as in Scottish Loch, or Bach (never soft, as in church)

  dd:

  thas in then, (never as in thistle)

  f:

  v, as in of

  ff:

  f, as in off

  g:

  hard, as in girl (never gem)

  ll:

  a Welsh distinctive, sounded as “tl” or “hl” on the sides of the tongue

  r:

  trilled, lightly

  rh:

  as if hr, heavy on the “h” sound

  s:

  always as in sir (never his)

  th:

  as in thistle (never then)

  Vowels—as in English, but with the general lightness of short vowel sounds:

  a:

  as in father

  e:

  as in met (when long, as in late)

  i:

  as in pin (long, as in eat)

  o:

  as in not

  u:

  as in pin (long, as in eat)

  w:

  a “double-u,” as in vacuum, or tool; but becomes a consonant before vowels, as in the name Gwen

  y:

  as in pin; or sometimes as “u” in but (long as in eat)

  (As you can see, there is not much difference in i, u, and y—they are virtually identical to the beginner)

  Accent—normally is on the next to the last syllable, as in Di-gán-hwy

  Dipthongs—each vowel is pronounced individually, so Taliesin=Tally-éssin

  Atlantean—Ch=kh, so Charis is Khár-iss

  Ten rings there are, and nine gold torcs

  on the battlechiefs of old;

  Eight princely virtues, and seven sins

  for which a soul is sold;

  Six is the sum of earth and sky, of

  all things meek and bold;

  Five is the number of ships that sailed

  from Atlantis lost and cold;

  Four kings of the Westerlands were saved,

  three kingdoms now behold;

  Two came together in love and fear,

  in Llyonesse stronghold;

  One world there is, one God, and one birth

  the Druid stars foretold.

  S. R. L.

  Oxford, 1987

  Contents

  E-Book Extra:

  Stephen R. Lawhead on…

  Dedication

  Map of Britain

  Merlin Pronunciation Guide

  Epigraph

  “Ten rings there are, and nine gold torcs…”

  Prologue

  They were going to kill Arthur.

  BOOK ONE: King

  1 Many years have come and gone since I awakened…

  2 “The boy has the eyes of a preying bird,”

  3 In the spring of my eleventh year,

  4 At Garth Greggyn we camped for two days,

  5 Finding a nest among the rocks,

  6 I thought that when we returned to the rath I would be set free.

  7 The snow came to the north country.

  8 I traveled south and east,

  9 “It is a shameful business,”

  10 Maelwys was better than his word,

  11 Pendaran Gleddyvrudd, King of the Demetae and Silures in Dyfed,

  12 So it was that I found myself once more in the saddle—this…

  13 I will say nothing of the journey north to Goddeu,

  14 That autumn, when the weather finally broke toward winter,

  BOOK TWO: Forest Lord

  1 Black is the hand of heaven, blue and black,

  2 Oh, Wolf, happy Wolf, monarch of the green-clad hills,

  3 The ravens croak at me from the treetops.

  4 No…no, listen, Wolf, my mind is calm. I will continue:

  5 The heavenly star-host wheels through the sky,

  6 How long, Wolf? How long, old friend,

  7 They say Merlin slew a thousand thousand,

  8 Ganieda! What do you here, my soul?

  9 If I am crazed, if I am mad, if I am mad…mad I am,

  10 Deep in the black heart of Celyddon,

  11 The first drops splattered over us,

  12 Thunder boomed in my head. Voices like angry hornets buzzed loud in my ears.

  13 I raised my head and looked out across the night-filled valleys.

  14 I did not have long to wait,

  15 Vortigern, he of the thin red beard and narrow,

  BOOK THREE: Prophet

  1 Vortigern had gone to ground in the west,

  2 I found Aurelius and Uther on the road returning from the battle…

  3 I arose early the next morning for Tewdrig’s decision.

  4 I cannot say Uther was overjoyed to hear what the lords of the north had decided:

  5 Uther awakened the camp early.

  6 When the cheering was over,

  7 Londinium had changed much with the years.

  8 Among the warriors lolling outside,

  9 I should have seen more clearly.

  10 Aurelius left the church and the throng pushed after him,

  11 Tell me what I could have done?

  12 When the false-hearted Lord Dunaut heard of Aurelius’ death,

  13 In the time between times,

  14 If it had not been for the babe,

  15 In the black month, the bleak month,

  16 We stayed at Caer Myrddin,

  17 Strange to tell, two years had passed me…

  18 “Well, Merlin Ambrosius—Myrddin Emrys,”

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  By Stephen R. Lawhead

  Praise for

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  They were going to kill Arthur. Can you imagine? They would have killed him too, but I put a stop to it. The arrogance! The stupidity!

  Not that Uther was ever one for a scholar’s cope. I expected more from Ygerna, though; she at least had the canny sense of her people. But she was afraid. Yes, frightened of the whispered voices, frightened of her suddenly exalted position, frightened of Uther and desperate to please him. She was so young.

  So Arthur had to be saved, and at no little expense to myself. I had heard about their sordid plan in the way I have, and made it my affair to confront Uther with it early on. He denied all, of course.

  “Do you think me mad?” he shouted. He was always shouting. “The child could be male,” he said, suppressing a sly smile. “It could well be my heir we are talking about!”

  Uther is a warrior and there is an honesty about that: steel does not lie. Lucky for him, he was a man born to his time. He would never have made a decent magistrate, let alone governor—he is a sorry liar. As High King he ruled with a sword in one hand and a bludgeon in the other: the sword for the Saecsen, the bludgeon for the petty kings below him.

  Ygerna was just as bad in her own way. She said nothing, but stood wringing those long white hands of hers, and twisting her silken mantle into knots, staring at me with those big, dark doe eyes that had trapped Uther. Her stomach had just begun to swell; she could not have been more than four or five months pregnant.
/>   Still, she was pregnant enough to begin having second thoughts about the nasty work ahead. I do not think any mother could coldly kill her own child, or stand by and see it done. I am not so sure about Uther…he of the strong arm and wandering eye. Pendragon of Britain. Capable of anything—which was the better half of his power where the small kings were concerned—he was not one to shrink from any course set before him.

  Outside on the black rocks the waves crashed and the white gulls cried. Ygerna touched a hand to her stomach—a brushing touch with fingertips—and I knew she would listen to reason. Ygerna would be an ally.

  So it did not matter what Uther said or did not say, admitted or did not admit. I would have my way…

  My way. Was it? Was it ever my way? There’s a thought.

  Ah, but I am getting ahead of myself. I always am. This is to be Arthur’s story. Yes, but there is more to Arthur than his birth. To understand him, you have to understand the land. This land, this Island of the Mighty.

  And you have to understand me, for I am the man who made him.

  BOOK

  ONE

  KING

  1

  Many years have come and gone since I awakened in this worlds-realm. Too many years of darkness and death, disease, war, and evil. Yes, very much evil.

  But life was bright once, bright as sunrise on the sea and moonglow on water, bright as the fire on the hearth, bright as the red-gold torc around my Grandfather Elphin’s throat. Bright, I tell you, and full of every good thing.

  I know that every man recalls something of the same golden sheen in life’s beginning, but my memories are not less real or true for that.

  Merlin…a curious name. Perhaps. No doubt my father would have chosen a different name for his son. But my mother can be forgiven for her lapse. Merlin—Myrddin among my father’s people—suits me. Yet, every man has two names: the one he is given, and the one he wins for himself.

  Emrys is the name I have won among men, and it is my own.

  Emrys, Immortal…Emrys, Divine…Emrys Wledig, king and prophet to his people. Ambrosius it is to the Latin speakers, and Embries to the people of southern Britain and Logres.

  But Myrddin Emrys am I to the Cymry of the hill-bound fastness of the west. And because they were my father’s people, I feel they are my own as well. Although my mother long ago taught me the folly of this belief, it comforts me—much, I suppose, as it must have comforted my father in his times of doubt.

  And as there is much evil in the world, there is much doubt also. This is not the least of the Adversary’s servants. And there are so many others…

  Well, and well, get on with it, Mumbler. What treasures from your plundered store will you lay before us?

  I take up my staff and stir the embers, and I see again the images of my earliest memory: Ynys Avallach, the Isle of Avallach. It is the home of my grandfather, King Avallach, the Fisher King, and the first home I ever knew. It was here in these polished halls of his palace that I took my first faltering steps.

  See, here are the white-blossomed apple groves, the salt marshes and mirror-smooth lake below the looming Tor, the white-washed shrine on the nearby hill. And there is the Fisher King himself: dark and heavy-browed like a summer thunderstorm. Stretched on his pallet of red silk, Avallach was a fearful figure to a child of three, though kind as the heart within him would allow.

  And here is my mother, Charis, tall and slim, of such regal bearing as to shame all pretenders, and possessing a grace that surpasses mere beauty. Golden-haired Daughter of Lleu-Sun, Lady of the Lake, Mistress of Avalon, Queen of the Faery—her names and titles, like my own, proliferate with time—all these and more men call her, and they are not wrong.

  I was, I knew, the sole treasure of my mother’s life; she was never at any pains to disguise the fact. Good Dafyd, the priest, gave me to know that I was a beloved child of the Living God, and his stories about God’s Son, Jesu, kindled my soul with an early longing for paradise, just as Hafgan, Chief Druid, wise and true, faithful servant in his own way, taught me the taste of knowledge, awakening a hunger I have never satisfied.

  If there was want in the world, I knew nothing of it. Neither did I know fear or danger. The days of my childhood were blessed with peace and plenty. On Ynys Avallach, at least, time and the events of the wider world stood off, remote; trouble was heard merely as a muted distant murmur—soft like the wailing of the bhean sidhe, the Little Dark People, the Hill Folk, in the stone circles on the far hilltops; distant as the roar of a winter storm cresting mighty Yr Widdfa in the rock-bound north.

  Trouble there was, make no mistake. But in those sun-sweet days of my earliest remembrance we lived as the gods of an older time: aloof and unconcerned with the squabbles of the lesser beings around us. We were the Fair Folk, enchanted presences from the Westerlands living on the Glass Isle. Those who shared our waterworld of marsh and lake held us in great esteem and greater dread.

  This had its uses. It served to keep strangers at a safe distance. We were not strong in the ways men respect strength, so the web of tales that grew around us served where force of arms did not.

  If that sounds to you, in the age of reason and power, a weak, ineffectual thing, I tell you it was not. In that age, men’s lives were hedged about with beliefs old as fear itself, and those beliefs were not easily altered, nor less easily abandoned.

  Ah, but look! Here is Avallach standing before me on a dew-spangled morning, hand pressed to his side in his habitual gesture, smiling through his black beard as he would always smile when he saw me, saying, “Come, little Hawk, the fish are calling—they are unhappy. Let us take the boat and see if we might liberate a few of them.”

  And hand in hand we go down the path to the lake to fish: Avallach working the oar, little Merlin holding tight to the gunwale with both small hands. Avallach sings, he laughs, he tells me sad stories of lost Atlantis and I listen as only a child can listen, with the whole of my heart.

  The sun climbs high over the lake, and I look back toward the reedy shore and there is my mother, waiting for me. When I look she waves and calls us back, and Avallach turns the boat and rows to meet her and we return to the palace. Although she never speaks of it, I know that she grows uneasy when I am too long from her sight.

  I did not know the reason for it then; I know it now.

  But life to a child of three is a heady daze of pleasures spinning through a universe too impossibly rich to comprehend or experience except in frenzied snatches—not that it is ever comprehended or experienced in any other way—an unimaginable wealth of wonders displayed for instant plunder. Tiny vessel though I was, I dipped full and deep in the dizzy flood of sensation to collapse at the end of each day drunk with life and exhausted in each small limb.

  If Ynys Avallach was all my world, I was given the freedom of it. There was no nook too small, no corner too forgotten, but that I knew it and made it my own. Stables, kitchens, audience hall, bedchambers, gallery, portico, or gardens, I wandered where I would. And if I had been king I could not have commanded more authority, for every childish whim was honored with unthinking deference by those around me.

  Thus, I came to know early the substance and use of power. Great Light, you know I have never sought it for myself. Power was offered me and I took it. Where is the wrong in that?

  In those days, however, power was seen differently. Right and wrong were what men conceived in their own minds and hearts. Sometimes in truth, more often in error. There were no judges in the land, no standard men could point to and say, “You see, this is right!” Justice was that which issued from the steel in a king’s hand.

  You would do well to remember this.

  But these ideas of justice and right came later, much later. There was living to be done first, a foundation to be erected on which to build the man.

  The Island of the Mighty, in those days, lay in a welter of confusion which is common enough now, but was seldom seen then. Kings and princes vied for position and power.
Did I say kings? There were more kings than sheep, more princes than crows on a battlefield, more ambitious little men than salmon in season; and each prince and princeling, chief and king, each jumped-up official with a Roman title seeking to snatch what he could from the slavering jaws of onrushing Night, to squirrel it away, thinking that when the Darkness finally came he could sit in his den and gloat and preen and gorge himself on his good fortune.

  How many of those choked on it instead?

  * * *

  As I say, they were times of confusion, and the spirit may become as confused as the mind and heart. The central fact of my early life was the deep love and peace that enfolded me. I knew, even then, that this was extraordinary, but children accept the extraordinary with the same facile assent as the dreary commonplace.

  Was I conscious of the things that set me apart from other men? Did I know I was different? An incident from those far-gone days stands out in my mind. Once, when at my daily lessons with Blaise, my tutor and friend, a question occurred to me.

  “Blaise,” I asked, “why is Hafgan so old?” We were sitting in the apple grove below the Tor, watching the clouds race westward. I could not have been more than five summers old myself, I think.

  “You think him old?”

  “He must be very old to know so much.”

  “Oh yes, Hafgan has lived long and seen much. He is very wise.”

  “I want to be as wise one day.”

  “Why?” he asked, cocking his head to one side.