Merlin Read online

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  I did not see the searchers again, and soon after the fire of Samhain the fhain left for their winter pastures in the north. It made no sense to me why they should come south for the summer and travel north to winter, but that is what they did.

  At the time, I did not know that certain regions of the north country can be as mild as anyplace in the south. But I soon learned that not all the land above the Wall is the bleak, rock-strewn and windblown wasteland that most people think it is. There are corners as lush and comfortable as the best land in all Britain. It was to one of these corners that we came, riding our shaggy ponies and driving our tough little sheep before us.

  A crannog is not much different than a rath, save that it is actually hollowed into the heart of the hill. It is also larger; it had to be, for we shared it with our ponies and sheep on the coldest days. Ideally placed in a secluded glen, the crannog appears, to tallfolk eyes, as just another hill among many. There was good grazing for the sheep and ponies, and a stream which emptied into a nearby sea estuary.

  The crannog was dark and warm, and though the winter wind whined at night as it searched the rocks and crannies for places its cold fingers could reach, we lay wrapped in our furs and fleeces around the fire, listening to Gern-y-fhain tell of the Elder Days, before the Roman-men came with their swords and built their roads and fortresses, before the bloodlust came on men to make them war with one another, before ever the tallfolk came to the Island of the Mighty.

  Listen, she would say, I will tell you of the time before time when the world was new-made and the Prytani ran free and food was plentiful to find and our Parents smiled on all their child-wealth, when the Great Snow was shut up in the north and troubled Mother’s firstborn not at all…

  And she would begin reciting her tale, repeating in her tone and cadence and inflection the ages-old memory of her people, linking them with a past impossibly remote, but alive in her words. There was no telling how old the story was, for the Hill Folk spoke of all events the same simple, immediate way. What a Gern described might have taken place ten thousand summers ago, or it might have happened yesterday. Indeed, it was all the same to them.

  One moon waxed and waned, and another, and one day just before dusk it began to snow. Elac and Nolo and I went down to the valley with the dogs to herd the livestock back to the crannog. We had just begun when I heard Nolo shout; I turned to see him pointing off down the valley at riders approaching through the swirling snow.

  Elac made a flattening motion with his hand, and I saw Nolo notch an arrow to his bowstring, crouch, and…disappear. He simply vanished, becoming one more rock or turvey hillock beside the stream. I crouched too, in the way they had taught me, wondering whether I might be as easily mistaken for a stone. The dogs barked and Elac whistled, silencing them instantly.

  Three tallfolk riders clopped up on leggy, starved-looking mounts. Their leader said something, Elac replied, and then they began speaking in a much abused approximation of the Hill Folk tongue. “We come to ask Hill Folk magic,” the rider explained in his halting, broken speech.

  “Why?” asked Elac placidly.

  “Our chieftain’s second wife dies. She has the fever and will keep no food.” He looked at Elac doubtfully. “Will your Wise Woman come?”

  “I will ask her.” He shrugged, adding, “But likely she will not find it worthwhile to make healing magic for a tallfolk woman.”

  “Our chief says he will give four bracelets of gold if the Gern will come.”

  Elac frowned disdainfully, as if to say, “Such trinkets are horse manure to us”—although I knew the Prytani valued tallfolk gold and prized it when they could get it. “I will ask,” he repeated. “Do go now.”

  “We will wait.”

  “No. You go now,” insisted Elac. He did not want the tallfolk to see which hill our crannog was in.

  “It is our chief!” replied the rider.

  Elac shrugged again and turned away, making a pretense of going back to his sheep gathering. The riders whispered among themselves for a moment and then the leader said, “When? When will you tell her?”

  “When tallfolk go back to their huts.”

  The riders wheeled their horses and rode away. Elac waited until they were gone and then motioned us forward. Nolo replaced his arrow in the quiver, and we herded the sheep together and drove them back to the crannog. The others had already brought the horses in, so Elac wasted no time in speaking to Gern.

  “The tallfolk chief’s wife is fevered,” he told her. “Four gold bracelets if you will heal her.”

  “She must be very fevered,” replied Gern. “But I will go to her.” And she rose and made her way out of the crannog at once. Nolo, Elac, Vrisa, and I followed.

  By the time we arrived at the tallfolk settlement on the estuary, it was almost dark. The chief’s house stood on timber stilts amidst a handful of lesser dwellings built at the very edge of the reeking mudflats. Vrisa, Elac, and Nolo accompanied Gern; I had come to hold the ponies, but once we arrived and Gern looked around, she indicated that I was to join them in the chief’s house.

  A filthy skin hung over the door. At Elac’s whistle this door-flap was drawn back and the man who had come to us in the valley emerged to motion us in. The round timber hut contained a single large room with a fire stone in the center. Wind sifted through the poorly-thatched roof and the unfilled gaps in the wattle, making the room damp and chill. The shells of mussels and oysters, and fishbones and scales lay trampled on the floor. The chieftain sat beside the sooty dried-dung fire with two women, each clutching a dirty, squawling infant to her breast. The chief grunted and gestured across the room where a woman lay on a pallet of rushes piled high with furs.

  Gern clucked when she saw the woman. She was not old, but the dubious honor of producing heirs for the chief had aged her beyond her years. And now she lay in her bed aflame with fever, eyes sunken, limbs trembling, her skin pale and yellow as the fleece under her head. She was dying. Even I—who at the time lacked any knowledge of healing—could see that she would not last the night.

  “Fools!” Gern said under her breath. “They ask magic too late.”

  “Four bracelets,” Elac reminded her.

  Gern sighed and squatted down beside the woman, studied her for a long moment, and then dipped her fingers into the pouch at her belt and brought out a small pot of ointment which she began applying to the sick woman’s forehead. The woman shivered and opened her eyes. I could see the death-look in them, although under Gern’s touch she seemed to revive somewhat. Gern spoke to her softly, using the soothing words of the healer’s tongue to ease the fever’s grip.

  Dipping back into her pouch, Gern withdrew her hand and extended it to me. Into my open palm she dropped a small mass of dried matter—bark shavings, roots, leaves, grass, seeds, then nodded toward the iron caldron hanging over the fire by a chain from the roofbeam. I understood that she wished me to put the mixture into the caldron, which I did. I poured water into the pot and waited until it boiled. Then Gern motioned for me to bring it to her; under the foul mutterings of the chief, I dipped out a gourd.

  Gern lifted the woman’s head and gave her to drink. The woman smiled weakly as she lay back. A few moments later she closed her eyes and slept. Gern then went to the chief and stood before him.

  “Will the woman live?” asked the chief. He might have been speaking about one of his hounds.

  “She lives,” answered Gern-y-fhain. “See she does keep warm and drinks the potion.”

  The chieftain grunted and removed one of his bracelets. He handed the golden object to his man, who dropped it gingerly into Gern’s palm lest he touch her. The slight did not go unnoticed. Elac stiffened. Nolo’s hand already had an arrow in it.

  But Gern looked at the bracelet and hefted it in her hand. Likely there was much tin in the thing and little enough gold. “You promised four bracelets.”

  “Four? Take what you are given and get out!” he growled in his sorr
y speech. “I will not hear your lies!”

  The Hill Folk drew their weapons.

  Gern raised a hand in the air. Elac and Nolo froze. “Chief thinks to cheat Gern-y-fhain?” She spoke softly, but the threat was undeniable. Her hand weaved a strange motion in the air, and something fell from her fingers. The fire suddenly became a fountain gushing bright sparks.

  The women screamed and threw their hands over their faces. The chieftain quickly reconsidered, glaring with red-eyed anger. He muttered and removed three more bracelets, throwing them into the flaming embers of the fire at his feet.

  Quick as a flick, Gern reached into the fire and scooped up the bracelets, to the astonishment of the tallfolk. The gold disappeared into a fold in her clothing and, straight-backed, she turned and walked from the hut. We followed her, mounted our ponies, and together returned to the crannog in the winter twilight.

  Two days later, Elac and Nolo took the sheep back down to the pasture and were there when the tallfolk came upon them: three riders as before and the chief with them. I was halfway down the hill and saw the riders sweep down on my fhain-brothers, scattering the sheep. I stopped and hunched myself into a motionless shape, blending instantly into the hillscape.

  When the riders halted, I hurried forward.

  “Give back the gold!” the chief shouted.

  Elac’s knife appeared in his hand. Nolo’s bowstring stretched taut. The tallfolk were not unprepared. Each held a sturdy sword and a small, well-made wood-and-oxhide shield. I wondered about the weapons. Where had these men come by them? Trading with the Scotti?

  “Give it back, thief.”

  Elac may not have understood the word, but he knew the tone. His muscles tensed, ready to leap to the fight. The only thing that checked him was the horses. Had the Hill Folk been astride their own ponies they would have been nigh invincible to the rogues before them. But it was four against two, and the two were afoot.

  The tallfolk chieftain meant to have his gold back, or the heads of those who had it on sharpened stakes outside his house. Perhaps both. As I watched, I felt the same quickening in the air around me as I had felt the day the stones danced. I knew something would happen, but did not know what it might be.

  But the moment I stepped between Elac and the chieftain, I saw that the tallfolk felt it too.

  “Why have you come here?” I asked, trying to imitate Gern-y-fhain’s unassailable authority.

  The tallfolk started as if I had sprung full-grown from the turf at their feet. The chieftain tightened his grip on his sword and grumbled, “The woman is dead and lies cold in the mud. I have come for my gold.”

  “Go back,” I told him. “If you think to avenge yourself on those who helped you, then you deserve what will happen to you. Turn back; there is nothing for you here.”

  A fierce and ugly glee twisted his stupid face. “I will have the gold, and your flapping tongue as well, bastard!”

  “You have been warned,” I told him, then looked at the others. “You have all been warned.” They were not as brave as their chief, or else they were not as stupid. They muttered and made the sign against evil with their hands.

  The chief opened his mouth in a rude laugh. “I will gut you like a herring and strangle you with your own entrails, boy!” he boasted, lowering his sword to my throat.

  Elac tensed, ready to strike. I held up a hand to stay him. The chief’s sword, the blade black with caked blood, came nearer. I turned my eyes to the length of jagged iron and imagined the heat that had forged it, imagined it red-hot from the forge fire.

  The sword-tip began to glow—duskily at first, but brightening rapidly, the fireglow spreading along the blade toward the hilt.

  The chief held the weapon as long as he could, and burned his hand badly for his stubbornness. His shriek echoed in the valley. “Kill him!” he shouted; the red welt on his palm was already blistering. “Kill him!”

  His men made no move, for their own weapons had become too hot to hold, and indeed the iron in their belt buckles, knives, and arm rings was growing uncomfortably warm.

  The horses jigged nervously, showing the whites of their eyes. “Take yourselves from here and do not trouble us again,” I said levelly, although my heart was beating furiously.

  One of the men turned his horse and made to ride away, but his leader was a bullheaded man. “Stay!” Rage and frustration blackened his face. “You!” he roared at me. “I will kill you! I will—”

  I had never seen a man carried away by such hate. And although I have seen it once or twice since, at the time I did not know that it could kill.

  The chief gagged and his words stuck—like fishbones in his throat—and he choked, making a hideous sound. Clawing at his neck, eyes bulging, he pitched from the saddle. He was dead when his body struck the ground.

  The men stared at their fallen leader only for an instant, then wheeled their horses and fled back the way they had come, leaving their chief where he lay.

  When they had gone, Elac turned to me and looked long into my eyes. He did not speak, but the questions were there. Who are you? What are you?

  Nolo squatted beside the body. “This one is dead, Myrddin-wealth,” he said softly.

  “We will put him back on his horse and send him home to his own,” I told him.

  With some difficulty, the three of us lifted the body and slung it across the saddle, tying the wrists and ankles together to keep it from sliding off. We turned the horse and gave the unhappy beast a slap on the rump, and it trotted after the others. I breathed a prayer for the man—I did not have it in me to despise him. We watched the horses out of sight and then returned to the crannog, Elac and Nolo running on ahead in their eagerness to tell what they had seen.

  Vrisa and Gern-y-fhain regarded me knowingly as they heard what had happened. Gern-y-fhain raised her hands above my head and sang the victory for me; Vrisa showed her appreciation in another way. She put her arms around me and kissed me. That night I sat beside her at supper, and she fed me from her bowl.

  7

  The snow came to the north country. Through cold, grey days of little light and long, black nights of howling wind, I sat at Gern-y-fhain’s feet beside the peat fire and she taught me her craft—the ancient arts of earth and air, fire and water that men in their ignorance call magic. I learn quickly, but Gern-y-fhain was a good teacher, as adept in her own way as Dafyd or Blaise in theirs.

  It was at this time that I began to See, and it started with the peat fire, which glows so beautifully, all cherry-red and gold. Not all gerns have this ability, but Gern-y-fhain could look into the fire and see the shapes of things there. And once she awakened the ability in me, we would sit there for hours together, firegazing. Afterward, she would ask me what I had seen and I would tell her.

  I soon learned that my vision was more clear than her own.

  As my skill improved, I could almost summon the images I chose—almost. Nevertheless, one night I saw my mother. This occurrence was as pleasant as it was unexpected. I was staring into the flames, emptying my mind for the images that would come while at the same time reaching out for them—an act more difficult to describe than to do. Gern-y-fhain likened it to drawing water from a stream, or coaxing shy, winter-born colts down from the hills.

  As I stared into the fire that cold night, I saw the form of a woman flicker before me and I drew it in, held it—much as a man might cup his hand around a candle flame—coaxed it to take shape, willed it to remain. It was Charis, and she was sitting in a chamber beside a brazier glowing with charcoal. At the moment I apprehended her, she raised her head and looked around as if someone had spoken her name. Perhaps I did; I cannot say.

  The image was strong, and I could see from her contented expression that she was at peace—which could only be, I reasoned, if my message had been received and understood in the way I had intended. At least she was not sick with worry over me.

  As I watched, the door behind her opened and she half-turned in her chair. The visit
or approached and she smiled. I could not see who it was, but as the other came near she reached out…

  With one hand in hers, he put the other on her shoulder and settled himself on the arm of the chair. She turned her head to the hand at her shoulder and brushed it with her lips. I knew then who it was: Maelwys.

  This so unnerved me that I lost the image. It dissolved back into the flames and was gone. I was left with a throbbing head and a question: What did it mean?

  It was not the shock of seeing my mother with Maelwys—that was logical enough; indeed, it made perfect sense that she should return to winter in Maridunum while the search for me went on. Rather, it was seeing her affection for another, affection which heretofore had been reserved for me alone. This too was logical, after all; but that did not make it easier to accept.

  It is always a humbling thing to discover your own insignificance in the grand design.

  I puzzled on the meaning of what I had seen for several days before giving it up. The important thing was that my mother was cared for, and that she was not overwrought for me.

  I saw other things, other places. More and more often now, I recognized what I saw: Blaise wrapped in his cloak and sitting on a hill, staring up at the night sky; priest Dafyd and my Grandfather Avallach hunched head-to-head over a chessboard; Elphin stropping a new sword. Other times I did not know what I saw: a narrow, rocky glen with a spring bubbling out of a cleft in a hill; a girl with raven-dark hair lighting a rushlamp with a reed; a noisome smoke-dark hall filled with glowering, drunken men and snarling dogs…

  Always it ended the same way: the image dissolving in the flames, fading into red heat and white ash. I had no idea whether what I saw was happening, had already happened, or was yet to happen. Ah, but that would come. In time, that too would come.

  Gern-y-fhain taught me other things in those dark winter days. She was pleased to have someone to tell the things she had stored up over a lifetime, and I was happy to mine that rich store. She must have known that her work was impermanent, that I would leave one day, taking all with me. Still, she gave freely. Perhaps she also knew the value I would one day place on the knowledge I was given.