The Merlin Conspiracy Read online

  I giggled a bit and took another look at my flame. It seemed to have settled down quite snugly by this time, enough that it didn’t seem to mind being moved across to my left hand so that I had my right hand free. I waited a bit to make absolutely sure it was going to go on burning; then I set off down the path again.

  That part wasn’t nearly so bad. It was such a help to be able to see. I got on quite fast. And when the drizzle stopped and the noises started again, I held the flame up toward where I’d heard them from, and its blue light showed me that there was nothing there. It was all done to frighten people. So I began to stride on and even whistle a bit—and I was a bit more in tune than the old drunk, too—and my flame seemed to like the whistling. It grew bigger. After that I got a lot less nervous of it and began to play about with it, sliding it up my arm and then up past my ear to the top of my head. It burned a lot brighter on my head. I had an idea that I could probably slide it off into the air and have it floating in front of me, but I didn’t quite dare do that in case I lost it. I kept it on my head and had both hands free. I even put my hands in my pockets to try to warm them and really strode out, whistling.

  I strode round a corner and met my first person.

  She was standing facing me in the path, but she wasn’t really in the path at all. She was in a pale patch of light with scenery in it. The patch was just sort of there. It didn’t light up any of the rocks around or the ground in front of it. She was my age, or perhaps a bit younger, and … well, you know how you have an idea of your ideal girl in your mind. She was mine. She had dark, curly hair that was blowing about in a wind I couldn’t feel and really big blue-gray eyes with nice eyelashes round them. Her face was thin, and so was the rest of her. I remember noticing she was wearing an old-looking gray knitted sweater and leggings that went tight below her knees, but mostly I noticed she was much better-looking than I’d expected my ideal girl to be. But the chief thing about her was that she was one of those girls who look as if they’ve just grown, as naturally as … as a tree or … a hollyhock or something … as if she’d just happened somehow. I always fancy girls like that, even if they’re older than me. It’s my type.

  I slowed right down and came up to her step by step. When I was near enough, I saw she was holding a scruffy bunch of flowers in one hand. They were not flowers picked for their looks. I don’t know what most of them were, but I did see that one was a tall thing with blobby yellow flowers in steps down its stalk, and furry leaves. I noticed because a caterpillar dropped off it as I walked up.

  By then I was near enough to see that inside the patch of light she was standing somewhere quite high on a hillside. There was low blue distance behind her. And nearer than that, but still behind her, just on the edge of the slope, I could see a much younger kid—a boy—sitting sort of hunched over so that all I could see was his back. He didn’t move, or speak, or even seem to know that I was there.

  She knew I was there, though. She watched me walking up to her. Her eyes went to the flame sitting on my head.

  “Oh, good,” she said. “You’re a wizard. I asked for a wizard particularly.”

  “I’m not really,” I said. It was all so strange that I didn’t feel shy or awkward, the way I would if I’d met her anywhere else. “I’m only just beginning to learn.”

  “Well, that may be all right,” she said. “I asked for someone who could help in this situation, so you must be able to do what’s needed. What’s your name?”

  “Nichothodes,” I said. It seemed important to tell her my real name. “Nick, usually.”

  “I’m Arianrhod,” she said. “A mouthful, just like your name. But I prefer people to call me Roddy.”

  I wanted to say that Arianrhod sounded much nicer than Roddy, but that seemed—I don’t know—likely to annoy her, or—now I think back on it—more as if the conversation had to go another way. I went with the way it had to go and said, “What kind of help do you want?”

  Her eyebrows came together anxiously. When I think back, I can see she was massively anxious the whole time. “That’s the problem,” she said. “I don’t know how you can help. It almost seems hopeless. Our whole country is probably in horrible danger, and nobody seems to know except me. And …” Her hand went back to point at the younger kid. “Grundoon, of course. Sir James seems to have the Merlin completely under his thumb somehow. Or else the Merlin’s turned bad. Sybil’s in it, too. I mean, I know the Merlin’s quite new, and young, and a bit weak—”

  “Hang on,” I said. “Merlin is from King Arthur’s time. An old man with a long white beard. He got locked away by a girl called Nem—Nemesis or something—”

  “I daresay one was,” she interrupted me. “A lot of the Merlins have had long white beards. But this one’s young. He’s only just been appointed.”

  “No, Nemuë,” I said. “That was her name. You mean to tell me there’s more than the one Merlin?”

  “Yes, of course. It’s an official post,” she said impatiently. “The Merlin rules magics the way the King rules the country, except that it looks as if the Merlin’s trying to rule the country, too, now. Or Sir James is, and he’s got hold of the Merlin somehow. Sir James is a really vile man, but the King never seems to notice, and he’s got the King and the Prince doing what he says now.”

  “Okay,” I said. I couldn’t really follow all that. “You want me to come and help sort your country out for you.” I heard myself say this, sounding quite cool and efficient, and I thought, Who are you kidding, Nick? You are going to end up with this Merlin and this Sir Someone jumping up and down on your face! But what I thought didn’t make any difference. The old drunk had told me the rules. I had to help Roddy in order to get out of this place. So I put out my hand and sort of pushed at the patch of light around the girl. And somehow it didn’t surprise me that I seemed to hit solid rock just about the place where her odd bunch of flowers was. I was quite relieved actually. “No luck,” I said.

  Roddy sighed. “I was afraid of that,” she said. “When will you get here?”

  “Um,” I said. “Where are you?”

  She looked surprised that I didn’t know. “I’m in the Islands of Blest, of course. How long do you think you’ll be, getting here? It’s urgent.”

  “I have to help two more people first,” I said. “Then I’ll ask Romanov what to do and be right along. That’s all I can promise.”

  She wasn’t very pleased, but there didn’t seem to be much either of us could do about that. “I’ll see you soon, then,” she said.

  “See you soon,” I agreed.

  I turned sideways and squeezed past her patch of light. It was odd. The thing was like a flat disk with her inside it. When I was level with her, side on, all I could see was a curved line of daylight. When I was past that line, it was all gone. I looked back, and there was nothing. I even went back to where I had been standing, but there was nothing there now, just black rocks.

  “Oh, well,” I said. I still don’t know whether I was more disappointed or more relieved. It would have been wonderful to meet Roddy properly, in the flesh. But if I did, it would seem to mean having to deal with magic and politics in a place I knew nothing about, and I didn’t feel up to doing that. So I went on, not knowing if I should chalk up one failure and try to help three more people, or if I really had agreed to help Roddy. And if so, did that count toward getting out of here? Perhaps, I thought hopefully, it was the thing I was going to do in the future that Romanov had been sent to stop me doing. Perhaps I could wait until I was grown up and then go to these Islands of Blest and sort them out then. Roddy would be grown up, too, then, and that struck me as a very good thing. I sort of smiled to myself and decided that I probably had promised to help her, and it probably did count toward getting out of here, and I only had to put it off a few years and everything would be fine.

  I think this made me careless. I was thinking so hard about it all that I almost walked straight past the place where the path forked.

  Two st
eps further on, I replayed what I’d just seen: the light on my head glistening off a high promontory of rock with a dark path winding away on either side of it. I stopped. I backed up the two steps, and there, sure enough, was the promontory and the two paths. I’d simply gone off down the left-hand fork without thinking about it. It had seemed to me that Romanov had gone that way. But when I stood in front of the promontory, I sort of knew he’d gone down both paths, both quite recently.

  Since I didn’t think even Romanov could be in two places at once, I reckoned he must have been along one of the paths first, then the other, and it was the one he’d used last that I needed. But I couldn’t really tell which it was. I stood and dithered. And in the end I decided that I must have gone into the left-hand path because I’d known unconsciously which was the right one. So I went that way.

  This turned out to be a truly colossal mistake.

  5

  RODDY

  ONE

  The following morning, after Grundo had pigged out on bacon and eggs—well, I did, too; the bacon was marvelous—Olwen brought us two heavy little knapsacks loaded with sandwiches. If I’d been on my own, I’d have asked to leave some of them behind. There were so many. As it was, I peered in at the several loaf-sized packages, thought of Grundo, and wondered if there was enough.

  Then my grandfather came in with a map and showed us how to go. “The place you are making for,” he said, “is a ruined village where people lived before History began. You may recognize it by the small wood below it where a river runs. It is there they went to wash. The place itself is on the bare shelf just below the top of the hill. You will see the remains of the houses quite clearly. Be sure to visit each one.”

  He gave Grundo the map and went away to his study, to his mysterious work.

  We set off, as he had told us, straight ahead from the front door. This took us round the top of the hanging scoop where the valley that led to the manse ended. We looked down as we walked on the gray road zigzagging up the green mountainside toward us. Beyond that, the valley coiled into blue-green distance without a house in sight.

  “I wonder where his congregation comes from,” Grundo said.

  “Springs out of the earth, obviously,” I said.

  For some reason, this made us both shiver, and we went a long way after that without speaking. It was a hot, blue day with only the faintest wind even up on the mountains where the map took us, the kind of day where there is a haze at the bottom of the sky, hiding the distance. It was quite hard to see the green and dun peaks as they wheeled slowly about us. The blue-black distance was only a suggestion. And it grew hotter and hotter.

  “Dad must have forgotten to put the clouds back,” I said. I was a little puzzled because Dad is usually very particular to restore the weather systems to where they were before he moved them. I knew the King had wanted continuing fine weather, but there should have been signs by now—small clouds, gusts of wind—that Dad was beginning to bring the old weather back.

  “The King probably ordered a heat wave until he’s met the Pendragon,” Grundo said. His mind was chiefly on the map. It was not like maps usually are. It was more like a little drawing of hills and mountains. Woods were put in as small trees, and marshes were drawn as pools grown with rushes. I found it easier to follow than a real map, but Grundo kept grumbling about it. “How am I expected to follow an artwork?” he kept saying.

  It took us the whole morning to get to the place—or maybe longer than that, I suspect. We trudged slantwise across hillsides where dark gorse stood above us, blazing with yellow flowers smelling of vanilla, and beside crags, and up long slopes among pine trees, where the smell was sad and spicy. The only real incident was in a marsh strewn with black pools, where midges came out like smoke from a bonfire every time we trod on a tussock. Grundo got sick of the midges and went through an acre of fine emerald grass instead. The grass was growing on sucking mud. Grundo lost both shoes. We had to crawl for them and got very silly and laughed a lot and ended up covered with black, coaly slime. The slime flaked off in the sun as we walked on. By the time we reached the place, we had almost flaked back to normal again.

  “It’s unmistakable, really,” Grundo said, staring uphill at it.

  It was like an accidental garden strewn with heaps of regularly piled stones. Small rowans and hawthorns had grown up among the stones, along with heather and gorse, big bushes of broom and small shrubs of bilberry. In between, there was every kind of wildflower, from foxgloves and poppies and yarrow, through buttercups, down to speedwell and tiny heartsease. I was particularly enchanted with some flowers like dark blue trumpets nestling in sunny spaces and by the drifts of frail, wiry harebells. Blue is always my favorite color. Grundo discovered ripe bilberries and was squatting eating them almost at once, while butterflies flitted across him in all directions but straight. Bees murmured everywhere, and grasshoppers grated away all around.

  “Let’s have lunch before we explore,” I said.

  “Yes!” said Grundo, with his mouth all purple.

  We sat down on the nearest sunny tumble of wall, just beside what looked like the ruins of a front door with very civilized steps up to it, where we ate an improbable quantity of sandwiches in peace and contentment filled with insect sounds. I said the people who once lived here must have been very well organized.

  “But what a long way they had to go for water,” Grundo said, pointing to the little rustling wood down the hill, where you could just hear the distant trickling of the river.

  “It didn’t matter if they were used to it,” I said. I had a sudden strongly imagined vision of that wood full of small pathways, some of them where children ran and laughed, others where sweaty men strode down to bathe, and others where women walked with baskets of washing, chatting and arguing. The part where the privet and blackthorn grew thickest and darkest, up near the waterfall, would have been—well—secret somehow. I didn’t know if this idea was correct or not, so I didn’t mention it to Grundo. I said, “If you’ve quite finished pigging, we have work to do.”

  Grundo got up, groaning a little, and we went in among the houses. They were all just heaps of stone in rings or ovals, but you could see they had been houses because some of them were divided into rooms, and there were big slabs of stone in some that might have been tables. Or stairs. As we went from house to house in the hot, dreamy sunlight, with the butterflies darting and flitting about us, I kept seeing them all as well-built cottages, with stone walls downstairs and the upper walls neatly plastered. Each one would have had sliding shutters for windows and a round, thatched roof like a hat on top. Most of them had small walled gardens at one side. But again, I was afraid I was being overimaginative, and I didn’t tell Grundo this either.

  He was poking around, grunting, wondering if people could stand up inside the buildings, and muttering that all the rooms were so tiny. “What does your grandfather expect us to find here?” he demanded. “Buried treasure?”

  By this time we were coming to the last and smallest house in the place. It was a ring of stones only a couple of feet high, off at the bottom end of the village, slightly aside from the other ruins. The grass inside the ring of stone was green even for this country, and there were more flowers growing there than in any other spot. But I was thinking there were no dividing walls—this must have been a very humble cottage—when we were suddenly inside a perfect cloud of butterflies. They swept around us, all kinds, white, blue, small and brown, large yellow, big tortoiseshell, orange-tipped, some almost red, and whirled on into the small ruin, where they sank in a quivering crowd toward the bank of yellow flowers to one side.

  “Go with them,” Grundo said with utter certainty. “They mean something.”

  We stepped inside onto the green, moist grass. And there the thing happened that my grandfather must have sent me for. It seemed to last for a second and to go on for a century—Grundo says a minute, I stood there like a statue for a minute, he says—and it is horribly hard to describe.
So many things seemed to happen at once.

  The first thing was that, as if someone had dealt me a thumping blow, I felt a terrible pain in my right hip. It hurt so that I could hardly stand up. And then, though I knew I was all the time standing in the sun in a ruin, I was in the house as it once had been. It was fairly dark, but extremely civilized and orderly, if you allowed for most things being on the floor, like knives and pots and cups and knitting, all laid neatly on the carpet. The reason it was arranged like that was because the woman lying on the low bed where the butterflies were had difficulty standing up. It hurt her to stand or walk. She had been ritually injured when she was fifteen because she was a powerful witch. A very powerful witch. She greeted me with dreadful, bitter joy. The village chief had smashed her right hip so that he could control her. She had never forgiven him. She had vowed never to pass on the knowledge her gifts had given her to anyone from the village. But the law is that you have to pass your knowledge on to someone. So, instead, she had searched the centuries and the millennia for the right person to pass her magic to. And she had found me.

  She gave me her knowledge.

  It was devastating. I had the knowledge all at once in a bundle—all she knew, all she could do, and her entire life with it. I felt like Mam’s little laptop into which someone had suddenly downloaded fifty years’ dealings in the world’s stock exchanges. I staggered and limped and hobbled away from the small ruin, hardly able to see. All I remember is that the butterflies flew away as suddenly as they had come, spreading out as they went into a hundred different flight paths. The only other thing I knew was that my hip hurt dreadfully.