Myrddin’s companion to his left was in contrast to the other. He was a lean lath of a man, his chest covered by a dented, poorly mended cuirass. A helmet that had lost its crest was jammed well down on his narrow head, for it had been originally fashioned for a much larger man. His weapons were also a sword and a spear with a wickedly barbed point. And he did not ride lumpily, half asleep as did the tribesman, but rather sat stiffly upright in the saddle and kept glancing from side to side, as if he expected some force to burst upon them out of ambush at any moment.
Myrddin was so weary that he weaved back and forth in the saddle, but neither of his captors appeared to take notice of him. Nothing he had learned in his cave retreat told him what to expect now, except that the future these men intended for him held nothing good. And he no longer tried to imagine what that future might be. Nor did he attempt to take any interest for the moment either in his escort or his surroundings. This land, to one born and bred in the mountains, with no personal knowledge of the countryside below, was’ strange enough.
By noon they no longer traveled a deserted road. Parties of armed clansmen and three bands of Saxons grudgingly gave way to allow them quicker passage. Before them now rose buildings of stone, dressed and set after another fashion than that of a clan house wall.
Myrddin was both hungry and thirsty but he would not beg from those he rode among. When they stopped at a spring to drink and then water their mounts, however, one of the lesser clansmen filled a small wooden cup and held it to the boy’s lips. Myrddin drank thirstily and his wits somewhat recovered. He studied this man who seemed less hardened than his companions.
He was much younger than the rest, a fair down on his chin in patches. And the eyes he raised to Myrddin’s were a pale, washed blue; his expression, sullen and heavy.
Myrddin swallowed and swallowed again. His throat felt swollen and sore. When he tried to speak his voice came as a croak.
“My thanks—“ he got out before the man in the helmet swung around.
“Hold your tongue. Devil’s brat, or we’ll clip a wood splint on it.” He edged his horse closer, crowding against Myrddin’s weary mount. “Aye, your magics we do not need either.” He reached over and jerked up the hood of the cloak, dragging that down to form a loose blindfold. “You fool”—he must be speaking now to the clansman who had brought the water—“do you want to be demon-haunted! This one, they say, young as he is, can well call up all ghosts!”
Myrddin heard a gasp, probably from his late benefactor, and was only glad that he had taken those mouthfuls of water before the second leader of the band had interfered. That bounty, small as it had been, had served to rouse him somewhat from the trance of pain and fear in which he had ridden for most of this night. He could hope for no more aid within this party, yet he was beginning to think again. It was as if the shock of his capture after his long visit to the cave had shut off in some strange fashion his ability to reason clearly, until the small gesture of feeling on the part of the hulking boy had roused him out of that daze.
What could he draw to his aid now? The bedazzlement which he had been able to use with the clan boys in order to conceal his visits to the cave? Young as he was, Myrddin’s knowledge now far outran his years. And there was something beginning to loom in his mind—no, rather in a part of him which did not truly think, but rather sensed that this adventure was part of the future which he was destined to face.
They had called him “Devil’s brat”, a name he had heard before, though it had never been said to his face. Nyren’s blood had certain rights no clansman—or woman—could deny. But that his father was not one of the fabled Sky Men, but rather a demon, that was an old accusation. Was it not true that he had been conceived on Samain Eve when all manner of evil spirits roamed free? If he had not found the cave of the mirror, he might even have accepted that reasoning himself, it fitted so well the facts which most knew. But the cave was surely of the vanished Sky People, and he had already learned there that he had been born to a certain task; he must dedicate his lifetime to its accomplishment.
Still, he had no enemies he knew about. Gwyn ruled the clan and he himself would never protest that for he was pledged to a different life than a battle leader. And it was already accepted among his kin that he would go to Lugaid’s kind when the time came, to be taught such of the mysteries as survived.
To what other man could he possibly be a threat? His mind played with that puzzle as they came into the town which claimed Vortigen as ruler. For, as they rode, his captors now talked a little, and the boy speedily discovered that this was their goal. Was he then to be hostage for his people? But with Nyren gone Myrddin’s kin were not of such account as to make a hostage worth maintaining.
He roused from his thoughts to look around him, though the hood was drawn down so far on his head that what he could see was limited mainly to the road underfoot, with here or there an edge of stone wall. Though half blind, he could listen. At first his ears, in the past only attuned to the noises of what was a very small clan settlement, were almost deafened. He found it hard to separate one noise from the other.
At last their lagging mounts came to a stop and the rope which held Myrddin’s feet twitched, fell away. A heavy hand swept him out of the saddle, shoving him roughly ahead as his feet nearly buckled under him. So he entered a confined place of vile smells where the cloak was whipped away. He could see that he stood in a stone-walled cubby of a room which had only a length of pitted stone against one wall for a bench or bed, and only a slit high in that same wall for a window.
The bonds fell in turn from his wrists, but his arms were leaden, his hands numb from the hours of their lashing. It was the man in the helm who had cut him free; now he gave the boy a last shove toward the bench.
“You wait on the High King’s pleasure,” he grunted. And he was gone, slamming the door behind him, immediately plunging Myrddin into a gloom as deep as the twilight in which he had first been taken.
The King. Myrddin shaped those words but did not say them aloud. There was only one king here, though his rule rested mainly on the will of those Saxons he had invited overseas to bolster his armies, first against the raiding Scotti, and then against those of his own blood who might be rivals. Vortigen, Myrddin had been taught from the time he could understand, was a traitor, a nothing man who now listened to the orders of the Winged Hats and cut down his close kin at their pleasure.
And what did Vortigen want of him, Myrddin?
Thinking made his headache worse. He sat on the stone of the bench, rubbing one hand against the other, striving to keep from whimpering as the pain of the returning circulation in his puffed hands was almost more than he could silently bear.
He tried now to call to mind all he had lately heard concerning the High King. The last rumor to reach as far into the mountains as the House of Nyren had been that Vortigen was planning a great fortress tower, one which would rival anything the Romans had built in their day.
But the drifting one-armed trader who had brought the story had also said that there were difficulties in that building, that what was carefully laid stone upon stone on one day was discovered the next morning to be broken away, or set awry enough to be useless. It was said that magic overcame all the efforts of man in constructing the fortress.
Myrddin leaned his head back against the wall. He was so tired that, uncomfortable as he was, sleep pressed upon him until finally be could answer no more to the searching of his thoughts, but rather subsided into a darkness heavier than that of the cell which imprisoned him.