The Crystal Cave Page 37

  "And now," I said, "we carry it a little more painfully back to Britain."

  He laughed. "I would have thought the great magician that's yourself would have picked it up in one hand."

  "I'm no Fionn," I said. "And now if you are wise, poet, you will go back to your home and your harp, and make no more wars, but make a song about the stone, and how Merlin the enchanter took the stone from the Dance of Killare and carried it lightly to the Dance of the Hanging Stones at Amesbury."

  He saluted me, laughing still, and went. And indeed he did walk safely down through the camp and away, for in later years I heard the song he made.

  But now his going was hardly noticed. There was a pause while Uther frowned down at the great stone, seeming to weigh it in his mind. "You told the King that you could do this thing. Is that true?"

  "I said to the King that what men had brought here, men could take away."

  He looked at me frowningly, uncertainly, still a little angry. "He told me what you said. I agree. It doesn't need magic and fine words, only a team of competent men with the right engines. Tremorinus!"

  "Sir?"

  "If we take this one, the king-stone, there will be no need to trouble overmuch with the rest. Throw them down where you can and leave them."

  "Yes, sir. If I could have Merlin —"

  "Merlin's team will be working on the fortifications. Merlin, get started, will you? I give you twenty-four hours."

  * * *

  This was something the men were practiced at; they threw down the walls and filled in the ditches with them. The palisades and houses, quite simply, we put to the flame. The men worked well, and were in good heart. Uther was always generous to his troops, and there had been goods in plenty to be looted, arm-rings of copper and bronze and gold, brooches, and weapons well made and inlaid with copper and enamel, in a way the Irish have. The work was finished by dusk, and we withdrew from the hill to the temporary camp which had been thrown up on the plain at the foot of the slope.

  It was after supper when Tremorinus came to me. I could see the torches and the fires still lit at the top of the hill, throwing what was left of the Dance into relief. His face was grimy, and he looked tired.

  "All day," he said bitterly, "and we've raised it a couple of feet, and half an hour ago the props cracked, and it's gone back again into its bed. Why the hell did you have to suggest that stone? The Irishman's altar would have been easier."

  "The Irishman's altar would not have done."

  "Well, by the gods, it looks as if you aren't going to get this one either! Look, Merlin, I don't care what he says, I'm in charge of this job, and I'm asking you to come and take a look. Will you?"

  The rest is what the legends have been made of. It would be tedious now to relate how we did it, but it was easy enough; I had had all day to think about it, having seen the stone and the hillside, and I had had the engines in my mind since Brittany. Wherever we could we took it by water — downriver from Killare to the sea, and thence to Wales and still as far as possible by river, using the two great Avons, with little more than a score of dry miles to cross between them. I was not Fionn of the Strong Arm, but I was Merlin, and the great stone travelled home as smoothly as a barge on an untroubled water, with me beside it all the way. I suppose I must have slept on that journey, but I cannot remember doing so. I went wakeful, as one is at a death-bed, and on that one voyage of all those in my life, I never felt the movement of the sea, but sat (they tell me) calm and silent, as if in my chair at home. Uther came once to speak to me — angry, I suppose, that I had done so easily what his own engineers could not do — but he went away after a moment, and did not approach me again. I remember nothing about it. I suppose I was not there. I was watching still between day and night in the great bedchamber at Winchester.

  The news met us at Caerleon. Pascentius had attacked out of the north with his force of German and Saxon allies, and the King had marched to Carlisle and defeated him there. But afterwards, safely back at Winchester, he had fallen ill. About this, rumours were rife. Some said that one of Pascentius' men had come in disguise to Winchester where Ambrosius lay abed of a chill, and had given him poison to drink. Some said the man had come from Eosa. But the truth was the same; the King was very sick at Winchester.

  The king-star rose again that night, looking, men said, like a fiery dragon, and trailing a cloud of lesser stars like smoke. But it did not need the omen to tell me what I had known since that night on the crest of Killare, when I had vowed to carry the great stone from Ireland, and lay it upon his grave.

  So it was that we brought the stone again to Amesbury, and I raised the fallen circles of the Giants' Dance into their places for his monument. And at the next Easter-time, in the city of London, Uther Pendragon was crowned King.

  BOOK V — THE COMING OF THE BEAR

  1

  MEN SAID AFTERWARDS THAT THE GREAT dragon star which blazed at Ambrosius' death, and from which Uther took the royal name of Pendragon, was a baleful herald for the new reign. And indeed, at the start, everything seemed to be against Uther. It was as if the falling of Ambrosius' star was the signal for his old enemies to rise again and crowd in from the darkened edges of the land to destroy his successor. Octa, Hengist's son, and Eosa his kinsman, counting themselves freed by Ambrosius' death from their promise to stay north of his borders, called together what force they could still muster for attack, and as soon as the call went out, every disaffected element rose to it. Warriors greedy for land and plunder crowded over afresh from Germany, the remnants of Pascentius' Saxons joined with Gilloman's fleeing Irish, and with whatever British thought themselves passed over by the new King. Within a few weeks of Ambrosius' death Octa, with a large army, was scouring the north like a wolf, and before the new King could come up with him had destroyed cities and fortresses clear down from the Wall of Hadrian to York. At York, Ambrosius' strong city, he found the walls in good repair, the gates shut, and men ready to defend themselves. He dragged up what siege engines he had, and settled down to wait.

  He must have known that Uther would catch up with him there, but his numbers were such that he showed no fear of the British. Afterwards they reckoned he had thirty thousand men. Be that as it may, when Uther came up to raise the siege with every man he could muster, the Saxons outnumbered the British by more than two to one. It was a bloody engagement, and a disastrous one. I think myself that Ambrosius' death had shaken the kingdom; for all Uther's brilliant reputation as a soldier, he was untried as supreme commander, and it was already known that he had not his brother's calmness and judgement in the face of odds. What he lacked in wisdom, he made up in bravery, but even that would not defeat the odds that came against him that day at York. The British broke and ran, and were saved only by the coming of dusk, which at that time of year fell early. Uther — with Gorlois of Cornwall, his second in command — managed to rally his remaining force near the top of the small hill called Damen. This was steep, and offered cover of a kind, cliffs and caves and thick hazelwoods, but this could only be a temporary refuge from the Saxon host which triumphantly circled the base of the hill, waiting for morning. It was a desperate position for the British, and called for desperate measures. Uther, grimly encamped in a cave, called his weary captains together while the men snatched what rest they could, and with them thrashed out a plan for outwitting the huge host waiting for them at the foot of the hill. At first nobody had much idea beyond the need to escape, but someone — I heard later that it was Gorlois — pointed out that to retreat further was merely to postpone defeat and the destruction of the new kingdom: if escape was possible, then so was attack, and this seemed feasible if the British did not wait until daylight, but used what element of surprise there was in attacking downhill out of the dark and long before the enemy expected it. Simple tactics, indeed, that the Saxons might have expected from men so desperately trapped, but Saxons are stupid fighters, and as I have said before, lacking in discipline. It was almost certain that they would
expect no move till dawn, and that they slept soundly where they had lain down that night, confident of victory, and with any luck three parts drunken on the stores they had taken.

  To do the Saxons justice, Octa had posted scouts, and these were wide enough awake. But Gorlois' plan worked, helped by a little mist which crept before dawn up from the low ground and surrounded the base of the hill like a veil. Through this, twice as large as life, and in numbers altogether deceiving, the British came in a silent, stabbing rush at the first moment when there was light enough to see one's way across the rocks. Those Saxon outposts who were not cut down in silence, gave the alarm, but too late. Warriors rolled over, cursing, snatching their weapons up from where they lay beside them, but the British, silent no longer, swept yelling across the half-sleeping host, and cut it to pieces. It was finished before noon, and Octa and Eosa taken prisoner. Before winter, with the north swept clear of Saxons, and the burned longboats smoking quietly on the northern beaches, Uther was back in London with his prisoners behind bars, making ready for his coronation the following spring.

  His battle with the Saxons, his near defeat and subsequent sharp, brilliant victory, was all that the reign needed. Men forgot the bale of Ambrosius' death, and talked of the new King like a sun rising. His name was on everyone's lips, from the nobles and warriors who crowded round him for gifts and honours, to the workmen building his palaces, and the ladies of his court flaunting new dresses like a field of poppies in a colour called Pendragon Red.

  I saw him only once during these first weeks. I was at Amesbury still, superintending the work of raising the Giants' Dance. Tremorinus was in the north, but I had a good team, and after their experience with the king-stone at Killare, the men were eager to tackle the massive stones of the Dance. For the raising of the uprights, once we had aligned the stones, dug the pits and sunk the guides, there was nothing that could not be done with rope and shear-legs and plumb-line. It was with the great lintels that the difficulty lay, but the miracle of the building of the Dance had been done countless years before, by the old craftsmen who had shaped those gigantic stones to fit as surely one into the other as wood dovetailed by a master carpenter. We had only to find means to lift them. It was this which had exercised me all those years, since I first saw the capped stones in Less Britain, and began my calculations. Nor had I forgotten what I had learned from the songs. In the end I had designed a wooden crib of a kind which a modern engineer might have dismissed as primitive, but which — as the singer had been my witness — had done the task before, and would again. It was a slow business, but it worked. And I suppose it was a marvellous enough sight to see those vast blocks rising, stage by stage, and settling finally into their beds as smoothly as if they had been made of tallow. It took two hundred men to each stone as it was moved, drilled teams who worked by numbers and who kept up their rhythms, as rowers do, by music. The rhythms of the movement were of course laid down by the work, and the tunes were old tunes that I remembered from my childhood; my nurse had sung them to me, but she never sang the words that the men sometimes set to them. These tended to be lively, indecent, and intensely personal, and mostly concerning those in high places. Neither Uther nor I was spared, though the songs were never sung deliberately in my hearing. Moreover, when outsiders were present, the words were either correct or indistinguishable. I heard it said, long afterwards, that I moved the stones of the Dance with magic and with music. I suppose you might say that both are true. I have thought, since, that this must have been how the story started that Phoebus Apollo built with music the walls of Troy. But the magic and the music that moved the Giants' Dance, I shared with the blind singer of Kerrec.

  Towards the middle of November the frosts were sharp, and the work was finished. The last camp fire was put out, and the last wagon-train of men and materials rolled away south back to Sarum. Cadal had gone ahead of me into Amesbury. I lingered, holding my fidgeting horse, until the wagons had rolled out of sight over the edge of the plain and I was alone.

  The sky hung over the silent plain like a pewter bowl. It was still early in the day, and the grass was white with frost. The thin winter sun painted long shadows from the linked stones. I remembered the standing stone, and the white frost, the bull and the blood and the smiling young god with the fair hair. I looked down at the stone. They had buried him, I knew, with his sword in his hand. I said to him: "We shall come back, both of us, at the winter solstice." Then I left him and mounted my horse, and rode towards Amesbury.

  2

  NEWS CAME OF UTHER IN DECEMBER; he had left London and ridden to Winchester for Christmas. I sent a message, got no reply, and rode out once more with Cadal to where the Giants' Dance stood frostbound and lonely in the center of the plain. It was the twentieth of December.

  In a fold of the ground just beyond the Dance we tethered our horses and lit a fire. I had been afraid that the night might be cloudy, but it was crisp and clear, with the stars out in their swarms, like motes in moonlight.

  "Get some sleep, if you can in this cold," said Cadal. "I'll wake you before dawn. What makes you think he'll come?" Then, when I made no reply: "Well, you're the magician, you should know. Here, just in case your magic won't put you to sleep, you'd better put the extra cloak on. I'll wake you in time, so don't fret yourself."

  I obeyed him, rolling myself in the double thickness of wool, and lying near the fire with my head on my saddle. I dozed rather than slept, conscious of the small noises of the night surrounded by the immense stillness of that plain; the rustle and crack of the fire, the sound of Cadal putting new wood on it, the steady tearing sound of the horses grazing at hand, the cry of a hunting owl in the air. And then, not long before dawn, the sound I had been expecting; the steady beat of the earth beneath my head which meant the approach of horses.

  I sat up. Cadal, blear-eyed, spoke morosely. "You've an hour yet, I reckon."

  "Never mind. I've slept. Put your ear to the ground, and tell me what you hear."

  He leaned down, listened for perhaps five heartbeats, then was on his feet and making for our horses. Men reacted quickly in those days to the sound of horsemen in the night. I checked him. "It's all right. Uther. How many horses do you reckon?"

  "Twenty, perhaps thirty. Are you sure?"

  "Quite sure. Now get the horses saddled and stay with them. I'm going in."

  It was the hour between night and morning when the air is still. They were coming at a gallop. It seemed that the whole of the frozen plain beat with the sound. The moon had gone. I waited beside the stone.

  He left the troop some little way off, and rode forward with only one companion. I did not think they had yet seen me, though they must have seen the flicker of Cadal's dying fire in the hollow. The night had been bright enough with starlight, so they had been riding without torches, and their night sight was good; the two of them came on at a fast canter straight for the outer circle of the Dance, and at first I thought they would ride straight in. But the horses pulled up short with a crunch and slither of frost, and the King swung from the saddle. I heard the jingle as he threw the reins to his companion. "Keep him moving," I heard him say, and then he approached, a swift striding shadow through the enormous shadows of the Dance.

  "Merlin?"

  "My lord?"

  "You choose your times strangely. Did it have to be the middle of the night?" He sounded wide awake and no more gracious than usual. But he had come.

  I said: "You wanted to see what I have done here, and tonight is the night when I can show you. I am grateful that you came."

  "Show me what? A vision? Is this another of your dreams? I warn you —"

  "No. There's nothing of that here, not now. But there is something I wanted you to see which can only be seen tonight. For that, I'm afraid we shall have to wait a little while."

  "Long? It's cold."

  "Not so long, my lord. Till dawn."

  He was standing the other side of the king-stone from me, and in the faint starlight I saw
him looking down at it, with his head bent and a hand stroking his chin. "The first time you stood beside this stone in the night, men say you saw visions. Now they tell me in Winchester that as he lay dying he spoke to you as if you were there in his bedchamber, standing at the foot of the bed. Is this true?"

  "Yes."

  His head came up sharply. "You say you knew on Killare that my brother was dying, yet you said nothing to me?"

  "It would have served no purpose. You could not have returned any sooner for knowing that he lay sick. As it was, you journeyed with a quiet mind, and at Caerleon, when he died, I told you."

  "By the gods, Merlin, it was not for you to judge whether to speak or not! You are not King. You should have told me."

  "You were not King either, Uther Pendragon. I did as he bade me."

  I saw him make a quick movement, then he stilled himself. "That is easy to say." But from his voice I knew that he believed me, and was in awe of me and of the place. "And now that we are here, and waiting for the dawn, and whatever it is you have to show me, I think one or two things must be made clear between us. You cannot serve me as you served my brother. You must know that. I want none of your prophecies. My brother was wrong when he said that we would work together for Britain. Our stars will not conjoin. I admit I judged you too harshly, there in Brittany and at Killare; for that I am sorry, but now it is too late. We walk different ways."

  "Yes. I know."

  I said it without any particular expression, simply agreeing, and was surprised when he laughed, softly, to himself. A hand, not unfriendly, dropped on my shoulder. "Then we understand one another. I had not thought it would be so easy. If you knew how refreshing that is after the weeks I've had of men suing for help, men crawling for mercy, men begging for favours... And now the only man in the kingdom with any real claim on me will go his own way, and let me go mine?"