He went swiftly to his own quarters and put aside the bard’s robes. Those white lengths made him too conspicuous. He pulled on a simple tunic over breeches, picked up a hooded cloak. Thus garbed, he found a fresh mount, filled saddlebags with bread and cheese from the kitchens where the servants muled about doing the same for the troops gathering at the King’s orders. But Merlin rode out first, and in the direction of the mountains.
It had been several years now since he had taken this way, but he could never forget each twist and turn of its going. And the time he had spent living wild in the woods never departed from his mind either, so that he made small camps at night without fire, and was able to hide his going well, which had become habit with him.
The ruins of Nyren’s hold showed now only as a single tumbled outer wall overgrown with bramble and bush. There were no longer any ghosts left there to trouble him. But Merlin halted for a long moment as he came near it, trying wistfully to remember how it had been when that was the clan home for one Myrddin.
Then came the upward slope. There he stripped his mount of bridle and saddle, hobbled it and turned the horse loose to graze while he went to the mirror. He picked free the stones of his door to go inside. The cave was very dim. Not one of the cubes showed any light, and he did not approach the mirror. This time he had no question to ask. He knew well what must be done.
Edging along the wall he came to a cylinder as tall as his forearm, as big around as a circle his two hands could make, thumb touching thumb, little finger against little finger. Stooping he gathered that up. Long ago the mirror voice had told him of this, of how it must be used. The instructions were as clear in his mind now as if they had been issued within the hour. This was the full purpose of his life. There must be no more hesitation, no more trying to work through men whose natures betrayed over and over the win of the Star Lords.
The beacon was lighter than he thought it would Be as he carried it out into the open. He set it to one side, reclosed the door with the stones. He was not finished with the mirror. Arthur would come sooner or later, even as had been planned. There would be time for that. How long it might take for his message to reach the ships, he had no idea. Months, years … it was his task to keep Arthur king until that hour when those others would come.
Holding the cylinder close against him as one embraces a longed-for treasure, Merlin started down the slope.
12.
There was no light this time when Merlin reached the Place of the Sun. The year was late, harvest was well in and cold bit fiercely at a man in the frost-tinged early mornings, the long dark nights. And the stones seemed to stand bleakly aloof now, as if they had withdrawn from all possible contact with the men of this earth.
If he still had the shining sword his task would have been comparatively easy. But now that was Arthur’s, and Merlin must make do as best he could with his knowledge alone. As he penetrated the pillared circles he shivered with more than the reaching fingers of the cold wind. The kinship which he had always felt waiting for him here was missing, closed off like a door to shut out the unwanted in the dark of night.
Nor did Merlin lift his hand to caress any of the stones as he had been wont to do on his earlier visits here. Necessity drove him directly to the task. So he approached the King Stone where it lay, flanked on either side by the rude arches in all their strength.
Carefully putting down on the ground what he had carried through these days of travel from the cave in the mountains to this site, Merlin considered the stone.
It was plain that he could not merely set his burden out, enthroned on the stone, as he had once naively thought to do. Anyone passing here, shunned though the site generally was, might be moved by curiosity to inspect the beacon. No, it must be well hidden and his training told him exactly where: under the massive block of stone itself.
He had moved the rock once to prove his strength, therefore he could move it again, though the task was a formidable one without the sword. He had only the short blade of his belt knife and that was not fashioned from the wondrous metal. Nevertheless he must use it.
It was dusk when he had reached the stones. Their shadows cut deep, and there was something about those shadows. He found himself jerking his head around now and then to stare intently at one or another of the pools of dark. Though he knew that Nimue had previously used only such illusions as he himself could call up at command, still there remained a residue of the uncanny, the not-to-be-known in this place.
Merlin recalled what Lugaid had once said, that a temple where the worship of certain forces had continued for a long time absorbed into itself the power of belief rising from those worshipers. That power, too, could be drawn on by the men who know how to awaken it.
Only this was not a place of the night. It needed dawn or the full beams of the sun, which had long been honored here as a source of life, to bring forth its full energy. He must wait out the hours of the night. But he could use that time to prepare himself for what would be the greatest effort he had yet made, greater even than the parade of illusions which had brought about Arthur’s fathering.
Picking up the beacon once again, he moved over to the tumbled mound which had been Lugaid’s dwelling. There he made his rude camp, drinking from a small spring, now almost silted up again since the Druid had not come to clear passage for the water, eating the last of the provisions he had carried from Camelot.
Merlin settled then with his back against the half-toppled wall of rough stones and looked back over the Place of the Sun. As the light fast faded the wind came. When that blew around and over the pillars there rose a weird wailing sound; the imaginative might well read into it the lament of men and women now long vanished from the earth, yet still somehow alive and longing for a safe return.
Not for the first time Merlin wondered about the Sky Lords. What did they seek here that they were so determined to come again? If they were mighty enough to travel from one of those stars now shining above him to another, why could they not have found another world which would welcome them?
Was there some quality found only here which they must have in order to endure as a race? Did they need mankind in order to survive? The mirror had been evasive whenever he had tried to probe into that. He had often been overwhelmed, when it poured forth information, with much he could not begin to understand because his world had no names for the strange artifacts, the complicated machines those others used with ease. But some of the most simple questions appeared in turn to silence the voice, as if it in turn were baffled by such searching on his part.
Though he did not close his eyes now, but continued to watch night engulf the Place of the Sun, Merlin was at work inside himself, drawing out scraps of knowledge, summoning energy to buttress all his power. This would be no fashioning of an hallucination, it would be a real act.
He was a general as supreme as Arthur, but his troops were not men. Down and down he delved into his own memory and mind. And then, with a sudden start, he recognized a picture which that memory supplied. There was Nimue in this place, her body white, her hair tossed by the wind. He could hear the honey smoothness of her voice, almost reach out to touch the hand she extended to him.
No!
Resolutely Merlin fought that memory which was so troubling. He was a little apprehensive … could he perhaps actually touch Nimue now by recalling her too plainly? Out of his mind—he must thrust her safely away.
The mirror, he must concentrate on the mirror, as if it stood full-length before him now. He grew calmer and his turmoil faded as he visualized the mirror. And its voice was in his ears so that he could sort out words, phrases, fit such together to reinforce his knowledge of what must be done here at sunrise.