She was satisfied. “As soon as may be. I'll see him right with the dear Lord and his saints, trust me for that. And I've hung the vervain charm over his crib, and seen the nine prayers said. The girl says his name's Arthur. What sort of a name is that?”
“You would say Artos,” I told her. This is a name meaning “Bear” in Celtic. “But don't call him by that name here. Give him some other name that you can use, and forget the other.”
“Emrys, then? Ah, I thought that would make you smile. I'd always hoped that one day there'd be a child I could call after you.”
“No, after my father Ambrosius, as I was called.” I tried the names over to myself, in Latin and then in the Celtic tongue. “Artorius Ambrosius, last of the Romans...Artos Emrys, first of the British...” Then aloud to Moravik, smiling: “Yes, call him so. Once, long ago, I foretold it, the coming of the Bear, a king called Arthur, who would knit past and future. I had forgotten, till now, where I had heard the name before. Christen him so.”
She was silent for a few minutes. I saw her quick eyes searching my face. “In trust to you, you said. A king such as there hasn't been before. He will be King, then? You swear he will be King?” Then suddenly: “Why do you look like that, Merlin? I saw you look the same way a while back when the girl put the child to her breast. What is it?”
“I don't know...” I spoke slowly, my eyes on the last glimmer of fire where the burned logs hollowed round a red cave. “Moravik, I have done what I have done because God — whichever god he is — drove me to do it. Out of the dark he told me that the child which Uther begot of Ygraine that night at Tintagel would be King of all Britain, would be great, would drive the Saxons out of our shores and knit our poor country into a strong whole. I did nothing of my own will, but just for this, that Britain might not go down into the dark. It came to me whole, out of the silence and the fire, and as a certainty. Then for a time I saw nothing and heard nothing, and wondered if, in my love for my father and my father's land, I had been led astray, and had seen vision where there was nothing but hope and desire. But now, see, there it lies, just as the god told me.” I looked at her. “I don't know if I can make you understand, Moravik. Visions and prophecies, gods and stars and voices speaking in the night...things seen cloudy in the flames and in the stars, but real as pain in the blood, and piercing the brain like ice. But now...” I paused again. “...now it is no longer a god's voice or a vision, it is a small human child with lusty lungs, a baby like any other baby, who cries, and sucks milk, and soaks his swaddling clothes. One's visions do not take account of this.”
“It's men who have visions,” said Moravik. “It's women who bear the children to fulfill them. That's the difference. And as for that one there” — she nodded towards the corner — “we shall see what we shall see. If he lives — and why should he not live, he's strong enough? — if he lives he has a good chance to be King. All we can do now is see that he makes a man. I'll do my part as you've done yours. The rest is with the good God.”
I smiled at her. Her sturdy common sense seemed to have lifted a great weight from me. “You're right. I was a fool ever to doubt. What will come, will come.”
“Then sleep on that.”
“Yes. I'll go to bed now. You have a good man there, Moravik. I'm glad of it.”
“Between us, boy, we'll keep your little King safely.”
“I'm sure of that,” I said, and after we had talked a little longer I climbed the ladder to bed.
That night I dreamed. I was standing in a field I knew near Hoel's town of Kerrec. It was a place of ancient holiness, where once a god had walked and I had seen him. In my dream I knew that I had come in the hope of seeing him again.
But the night was empty. All that moved was the wind. The sky arched high, bright with indifferent stars. Across its black dome, soft through the glitter of the fiercer stars, lay the long track of light they call the Galaxy. There was no cloud. About me stretched the field, just as I remembered it, bitten by the wind and sown by the sea's salt, with bare thorn trees hunched along the banks, and, solitary in the center, a single giant stone. I walked towards it. In the scattered light of the stars I cast no shadow, nor was there a shadow by the stone. Only the grey wind blurring the grass, and behind the stone the faint drifting of the stars that is not movement, but the heavens breathing.
Still the night was empty. My thoughts arrowed up into the shell of silence, and fell back spent. I was trying, with every grain of skill and power which I had fought and suffered for, to recall the god whose hand had been over me then, and whose light had led me. I prayed aloud, but heard no sound. I called on my magic, my gift of eyes and mind that men called the Sight, but nothing came. The night was empty, and I was failing. Even my human vision was failing, night and starlight melting into a blur, like something seen through running water...
The sky itself was moving. The earth held still, but heaven itself was moving. The Galaxy gathered and narrowed into a shaft of light, then froze still as a stream in the bite of winter. A shaft of ice — no, a blade, it lay across the sky like a king's sword, with the great jewels blazing in the hilt. Emerald I saw, topaz, sapphires, which in the tongue of swords mean power and joy and justice and clean death.
For a long time the sword lay there, still, like a weapon newly burnished, waiting for the hand which will lift and wield it. Then, of itself, it moved. Not as a weapon is lifted in battle, or in ceremony, or sport. But as a blade slides home to its housing it slid, how gently, down towards the standing stone, dropping into it as a sword slips resting into its scabbard.
Then there was nothing but the empty field and the whistling wind, and a grey stone standing.
I woke to the darkness of the inn room, and a single star, small and bright, showing through a gap above the rafters. Below me the beasts breathed sweet breath, while all around were the snores and stirrings of the sleepers. The place smelled warmly of horses and peat smoke and hay and mutton stew.
I lay unmoving, flat on my back, watching the little star. I hardly thought about the dream. Vaguely, I remembered that there had been talk of a sword, and now this dream...But I let it pass me. It would come. I would be shown. God was back with me; time had not lied. And in an hour or two it would be morning.
BOOK II — THE SEARCH
1
The gods, all of them, must be accustomed to blasphemy. It is a blasphemy even to question their purposes, and to wonder, as I had done, who they were or if they even existed is blasphemy itself. Now I knew my god was back with me, that his purpose was working, and though I still saw nothing clearly, I knew that his hand would be over me when the time was right, and I would be guided, driven, shown — it did not matter which, nor in what form he came. He would show me that, too. But not yet. Today was my own. The dreams of the night had vanished with the stars that made them. This morning the wind was only the wind, and the sunlight nothing but light.
I do not think I even looked back. I had no fear for Ralf or the child. The Sight may be an uncomfortable thing to possess, but foreknowledge of catastrophe relieves the possessor of the small frets of day to day. A man who has seen his own old age and bitter end does not fear what may come to him at twenty-two. I had no doubts about my own safety, or the boy's whose sword I had seen — twice now — drawn and shining. So I was free to dread nothing worse than the next sea voyage, which took me, suffering but alive, to the port of Massilia on the Inland Sea, and landed me there on a bright February day which, in Britain, we would have called summer.