“When ye know that I meditate a thing inconvenient, or that hath a peril in it, why do you not warn me to cease from that project?”
It was a startling question, and a puzzler. I didn’t quite know how to take hold of it, or what to say, and so, of course, I ended by saying the natural thing:
“But, sire, how can I know what your thoughts are?”
The king stopped dead in his tracks, and stared at me.
“I believed thou wert greater than Merlin; and truly in magic thou art. But prophecy is greater than magic. Merlin is a prophet.”
I saw I had made a blunder. I must get back my lost ground. After a deep reflection and careful planning, I said:
“Sire, I have been misunderstood. I will explain. There are two kinds of prophecy. One is the gift to foretell things that are but a little way off, the other is the gift to foretell things that are whole ages and ———————————————————————— Page 258
centuries away. Which is the mightier gift, do you think?”
“Oh, the last, most surely!”
“True. Does Merlin possess it?”
“Partly, yes. He foretold mysteries about my birth and future kingship that were twenty years away.”
“Has he ever gone beyond that?”
“He would not claim more, I think.”
“It is probably his limit. All prophets have their limit. The limit of some of the great prophets has been a hundred years.”
“These are few, I ween.”
“There have been two still greater ones, whose limit was four hundred and six hundred years, and one whose limit compassed even seven hundred and twenty.”
“Gramercy, it is marvelous!”
“But what are these in comparison with me? They are nothing.”
“What? Canst thou truly look beyond even so vast a stretch of time as — mdash; ”
“Seven hundred years? My liege, as clear as the vision of an eagle does my prophetic eye penetrate and lay bare the future of this world for nearly thirteen centuries and a half!”
My land, you should have seen the king’s eyes spread slowly open, and lift the earth’s entire atmosphere as much as an inch! That settled Brer Merlin. One never had any occasion to prove his facts, with these people; all he had to do was to state them. It never occurred to anybody to doubt the statement.
“Now, then,” I continued, “I could work both ———————————————————————— Page 259
kinds of prophecy — mdash; the long and the short — mdash; if I chose to take the trouble to keep in practice; but I seldom exercise any but the long kind, because the other is beneath my dignity. It is properer to Merlin’s sort — mdash; stump-tail prophets, as we call them in the profession. Of course, I whet up now and then and flirt out a minor prophecy, but not often — mdash; hardly ever, in fact. You will remember that there was great talk, when you reached the Valley of Holiness, about my having prophesied your coming and the very hour of your arrival, two or three days beforehand.”
“Indeed, yes, I mind it now.”
“Well, I could have done it as much as forty times easier, and piled on a thousand times more detail into the bargain, if it had been five hundred years away instead of two or three days.”
“How amazing that it should be so!”
“Yes, a genuine expert can always foretell a thing that is five hundred years away easier than he can a thing that’s only five hundred seconds off.”
“And yet in reason it should clearly be the other way; it should be five hundred times as easy to fore-tell the last as the first, for, indeed, it is so close by that one uninspired might almost see it. In truth, the law of prophecy doth contradict the likelihoods, most strangely making the difficult easy, and the easy difficult.”
It was a wise head. A peasant’s cap was no safe disguise for it; you could know it for a king’s under a diving-bell, if you could hear it work its intellect.
I had a new trade now, and plenty of business in it. The king was as hungry to find out everything that ———————————————————————— Page 260