Julia made a sound close to a snort. She bustled about caring for the child, who did not cry, but lay looking about him. In those few moments after his entrance into the world, he seemed far more aware of his surroundings than any infant should rightfully be. And the nurse, noting that odd awareness, made a certain sign before she gathered him up. Brigitta slept heavily.
It would seem that in Myrddin’s early childhood Julia had the right measurement of the feeling within the kin house. He was indeed “son of-no man,” but since the chief accepted—outwardly at any rate—Lugaid’s assurance that his daughter had been impregnated by a Sky Lord, the boy was not openly shamed. Neither did he find any ready acceptance among those of his own generation, however.
In the first place he was oddly slow to learn. The women of the house looked on his backwardness as a fitting answer to the mystery of his conception. Nor was he forward in walking either. Had it not been for the fierce championship of Julia he might have been neglected, allowed to fade away into early death. For within six months of his birth Brigitta had been given in marriage to a widowed clan leader old enough to have fathered her. She left Nyren’s fortress and her son behind.
She had made no protest over his separation for, from the hour of his birth, after she had awakened from the swoon into which she was always sure Lugaid had sent her, she had had no feeling of tenderness toward the baby. Rather the Druid appeared to have taken her place, with Julia to supply those comforts of physical existence Myrddin needed most at his age. And it was Julia who became most fiercely maternal when comments about the child’s slowness were voiced aloud. It was to Lugaid that Julia appealed when her own faith in Myrddin’s intelligence wavered.
“Leave him be.” Lugaid had taken the child on his knee, was locking eyes with eyes. “He lives by another time, this one. You shall see. When he talks it will be clearly and with purpose; when he walks it will be straightaway walking, not crawling about after the manner of the animals. His heritage is not ours, so we cannot judge him by the actions of those wholly of this world.”
Julia sat quiet for a “moment, glancing from Druid to child and back again.
“I have thought sometimes,” she confessed, “that the tale you told was to save my young lady from shame. But that is not so. What you say you believe. Why?”
Now he looked from the child to her. “Why, woman? Because on the night he was conceived I felt the coming of the Power which was to bring him into being. We have lost so much.” He shook his head regretfully. “So very much of the knowledge which made men great enough to challenge the stars themselves. We gabble odd tags of legend and are not sure which is truth, which the embroidery of some later man. But there is enough remaining that he who is trained can sense the Power when it is at work.
“This ‘son of no man’ shall be great enough to make and unmake kings. Yet I believe that was not what he was sent to do. No, he is an opener of gates. And when he comes to his full strength he will speak the High Language and we shall see the beginning of a new world.”
The passion in his voice awed Julia and she took the child back from Lugaid’s hold, regarding the boy strangely. For she knew that the Druid believed what he had said. And from that moment she watched for any sign of coming greatness in Myrddin, not knowing how that might first manifest itself.
Myrddin walked when he was four and, as Lugaid had said, he stepped out strongly from the first moment he found his feet, not wavering or crawling as was normal. A month later he spoke, and his words were as well pronounced as those of a grown man.
But he made no attempt to join the other children at their games. Nor did he ever show interest in sword play, or hang about listening to the lounging warriors telling their battle tales. Instead he tailed Lugaid whenever the Druid was in sight. And it became accepted that Myrddin would become a bard, or one of those learned in the law and the descent of houses. Nyren agreed to this on one of the rare intervals when he was at home.
For the chief had made his choice. He and his men rode with Ambrosius, harrying both the High King who had betrayed them and the Saxons he had brought in as allies and who were now nearly his masters. The war band was often gone from the mountain-hidden kin house, leaving only a token force of defenders, with women and slaves to work their few fields and herd the sheep which were their small wealth.
In Myrddin’s fifth year, when he was pressed into aid as a shepherd, the clan being nearly bereft of men, he found the cave. He had gone higher among the lichen-tinted rocks of the uplands than he had ever ventured before, mainly because the older lads had left him to scramble up the roughest way. But as he rounded one pinnacle he forgot the sheep he sought and those waiting below.
Like a sleepwalker he veered to the right where there was a small opening, hardly large enough for his small, wiry body to wedge into. The fall of rock which had half sealed the cave had occurred not too long ago, but it was an effective screen and Myrddin might not have discovered the crevice at all if that sudden compulsion had not taken charge of his mind, drawn his body toward it.
He wriggled through the hole to find himself in a much larger passage whose outer limits were dim, because the only light came from the crack through which he had squirmed. No sense of fear touched him; he was filled instead with a strange and growing excitement, as if something wonderful lay just beyond, meant only for him.
So he marched on into the dark unafraid, only impatient to find what he knew must lie there. But, as he drew away from the entrance, he was surprised to discover that there was a pale sort of radiance around him, stretching three or four of his short strides ahead, as if he were wearing a giant cloak of light. Nor did that discovery seem in the least strange. Something deep in his mind welcomed it as a nearly forgotten bit of knowledge.
He knew the tale about him, that his father was of the Sky People. And from Lugaid he had learned more, that far, far back in time men had often come from the sky and the women of earth had borne sons and daughters to them. Those sons and daughters had had certain gifts and knowledge which men had never had and which had been forgotten when the Sky People came no more and their blood thinned through earth interbreeding. Few men believed in them anymore, and Lugaid had cautioned Myrddin that this was a story which he must keep to himself, until by his deeds he could indeed prove his heritage. Lugaid also said that unless the boy could learn by himself what the Old Ones knew he would be helpless, for nowhere on earth was there now any teacher of more than vague shadows of this forgotten lore.
There remained a part of Myrddin that was of Brigitta’s giving and that shrank within him, lonely and lost, unable to make contact with those about him. He thought a lot about what would happen to him if he could never discover what he must know. For here even Lugaid failed him, saying that those who might once have taught him were long dead, and only small fragments, probably much distorted, remained in the trained memories of such as the Druid himself. But the priest promised that when the time was ripe, he would give what he could to this one who was truly like a fosterling of his own.
The grayish light which accompanied the boy grew stronger. Now he believed that it was given off by the walls, rather than gathered around his own person. And, when he rubbed an investigating finger along the stone, he discovered something else: a vibration within the rock. Quickly he put his ear flat against that wall to listen, but it was a feeling rather than a sound, a beat like from a creature’s own heart.
All the tales of monsters lairing within caves swirled into his mind then and he hesitated. But the excited feeling drew him and he went on. So he came through an opening into a larger area where a light winked into flaring brilliance. Myrddin shrank back, his hands over his eyes, blinded by that glare. The vibration was a steady hum which he could hear now as well as feel.