The Merlin Conspiracy Read online

  “Hmm,” my father said again. “Not as bad as I feared. Everything is setting northward, but only very slowly. I shall have to speed things up.”

  He set to work, rather as a baker might roll dough along a board, pushing and kneading at clumps of cloud, steering ocean wisps with the flat of his hands, and shoving mightily at the weathers over Ireland and Wales. The dimness over Wales broke apart a little to show more green, but it didn’t move away. My father surveyed it with one hand to his chin.

  “Sorry, everyone,” he said. “The only way with this is a well-placed wind.”

  We watched him moving around, sometimes up to his shoulders in land and cloud, creating winds. Most of them he made by blowing more or less softly, or even just opening his mouth and breathing, and they were never quite where you thought they ought to be. “It’s a little like sailing a boat,” he explained, seeing Grundo frowning. “The wind has to come sideways onto the canvas to make a boat move, and it’s the same here, except that weather always comes in swirls, so I have to be careful to set up a lighter breeze going the opposite way. There.” He set everything moving with a sharp breath that was almost a whistle and stood back out of the table to time it.

  After a few minutes of looking from his big, complicated watch to the movements on the table, he walked away and picked up his robe. Weather working is harder than it looks. Dad’s face was streaming with sweat, and he was panting slightly as he fetched his portable far-speaker out of a pocket in the robe. He thought a moment, to remember that day’s codes, and punched in the one for the Waymaster Royal’s office.

  “Daniel Hyde here,” he told the official who answered. “The rain will stop at twelve-oh-two, but I can’t promise any sunlight until one o’clock.... Yes … Almost exactly, but it couldn’t be done without a wind, I’m afraid. Warn His Majesty that there may be half a gale blowing between eleven-thirty and midday. It’ll drop to a light wind around half past.... Yes, we should have fine weather for some days after this.”

  He put the speaker away and smiled at us while he put on his robe. “Fancy a visit to the Petty Viands bus?” he asked. “I could do with a cup of something hot and maybe a sticky cake or two.”

  TWO

  It was just as Dad predicted. We turned out for the Meeting of Kings in wet, howling wind that flapped velvet skirts and wrapped robes around legs. Those with headdresses held them in their hands until the last possible moment and then got very uncomfortable because, like the rest of us, they were trying to eat prettybread or pasties in one hand as we all went to our places. Sybil looked more disheveled than anyone. Her yellow hair was streaming from her head, and her hat was streaming green ribbons in her hand while she rushed about wailing cantrips and shouting at bad-luck carriers to get away behind the buses. She was barefoot, being an Earth wizard, and she had kilted her velvet skirts up to her knees because of the wet in the grass. She had extremely thick legs.

  “Looks just like a sack of sweet corn balanced on two logs,” Dad said unkindly as he passed me on the way to the King’s tent. He disliked Sybil as much as I did. He used to say that it didn’t surprise him that Sybil’s husband had run away. And then he usually added, “They wanted the poor fellow to be the next Merlin, too. If it had been me, I’d have run away long before. Sybil and the worst job in the kingdom! Imagine!”

  Unfortunately, Dad’s remark threw Mam into one of her rare fits of laughter, and she breathed in a crumb of pastry. I was still thumping her back for her when word came round that the Scots were on their way. I had to run to my place beside Grundo. We were lined up with all the other children who weren’t pages in a row in front of the Royal Guards.

  By this time most of the tents were down except for the Royal Pavilion, and all the buses, vans, lorries, and limousines were drawn up on three sides of an enormous square with the north-facing side left empty. The air was loud with the clapping of the Household flags hoisted over them. The Royal Guards were drawn up inside that—poor fellows, they had been polishing kit and whitening belts since dawn, but they looked magnificent, a living line of scarlet and white. We of the Court were inside that again, like a bed of flowers in our Court clothes, shivering in the wind. Grundo said he envied the Household servants. They were allowed to stay in the buses and keep warm, and they had a much better view. They must have been able to see the Scottish Court advancing long before we could.

  It was all timed perfectly. Hard-worked officials had been talking to one another on far-speakers all morning to make sure it was. The Scots appeared first. They seemed to come over the horizon and get larger and brighter as they came. They had pipers walking on both sides, solemnly stepping and skirling. I love the sound of bagpipes. It is the most exciting noise I know. I was quite sorry when our band started up and trumpets drowned the pipes out.

  This was the signal for our King to come out of his tent and walk toward the Scots. When we stop in towns long enough for me to get talking to people, they always say enviously, “I suppose you see the King every day!” No. Actually, I don’t. He is nearly always away in the front of the Progress, and I often don’t set eyes on him for weeks. When I do see him, it is usually like this, at a distance, as a tall figure in dark clothes, and the main way I recognize him is by his neat brown beard—and a sort of shiver of majesty he brings with him.

  On this occasion he had Prince Edmund, the Prince Heir, with him, too, also in sober, dark clothes. The Prince is eighteen now, and he was traveling with his father that year to learn his duties. With them came the Merlin on one side and the Archbishop of York on the other, both old and stately in stiffly flapping robes, and after that a mixture of bishops and high officials and the wizards who are priests and priestesses of older powers. I’m supposed to know the order of them, but I keep forgetting. All I really know is that Sybil walked behind the Archbishop—with her skirts let down and her hat on by then—and my father was near the back, not being a priest.

  I was looking at the Scots mostly anyway. Their King was quite young, and he wasn’t the one I’d seen before. They have dozens of people who have claims to the throne of Scotland. Every so often the clans back a new claimant, or three, and have a war and the King gets changed. This one, though he was new, didn’t look as if he’d get changed easily. He had a strong, eager look, and he walked as if he owned the earth, not just Scotland. He was wearing plaids, which made him stand out from the crowd of courtiers with him. They were very dressy. I have never seen so many styles and colors and French fashions. Their King looked like a hawk among parrots.

  He left them behind and strode to embrace our King. For a brief minute it was the friendliest possible Meeting. Prince Edmund was beckoned forward and introduced, and then a young woman in glorious rose pink silk who may have been the Scottish Queen—anyway, the Scottish King grinned at her as if he knew her very well—and then it was the turn of the Archbishop and the Merlin to step forward and bless everyone. This was when the awful thing happened.

  The Merlin spread his arms to call down benign magics. Dad says you don’t really need to spread your arms or do anything else physical to work magic. This is why he found Sybil so irritating, because she always acted about so, doing magic. But he says the Merlin had to show people what he was doing. So the poor old man held his arms up wide. His face, which was always rather pale, turned a strange color. Even from where I was, I could see that the Merlin’s lips were sort of lilac-colored where they showed through his white beard. He took his arms in hurriedly and hugged at himself. Then he slowly folded up and flopped down on the wet grass.

  Everybody simply stared for an instant. And this was the instant that Dad’s fine weather arrived at last. The sun blazed out. It was suddenly damply, suffocatingly warm.

  Dad got to the Merlin first. Dad had been spread out to the side when the two groups met, and it only took him two strides to get there and kneel down. He swore to me afterward that the Merlin was alive at that point, even though he had clearly had a bad heart attack. But Dad had to give
way to Prince Edmund, who got there next. Prince Edmund put his hand out toward the Merlin’s chest and then snatched it back, looking aghast. He turned to the King and started to say something. Then he stopped, because Sybil swooped in almost at once and pulled the poor old man over onto his back. By that time he was definitely dead. I got a glimpse of his staring face among everybody’s legs, and as Grundo said, you couldn’t mistake it.

  “Dead!” Sybil screamed. “My mentor and my master!” She put her head back so that her hat fell off and screamed again, toward the Scottish King. “Dead!”

  She didn’t say any more. She just stood up with wet black patches on her velvet gown where she had knelt in the grass and stared at the Scottish King with her hands clasped to her chest.

  Our King said icily to the Scottish King, “I believe Your Majesty was trained as a wizard?”

  The Scottish King looked at him. After a moment he said, “I think this is the end of any friendship between us. I bid you good afternoon.”

  He swung round in a swirl of tartan and walked away with all his people. He didn’t have to walk far. Vehicles came roaring over the brow of the hill almost at once, most of them military transports, and the royal party was scooped up into some of them, leaving the rest sitting in a threatening row on the Scottish border.

  “We’ll move back a few miles,” our King said.

  The rest of that week was a hot, moist chaos. Grundo and I, along with most of the children, were bundled here and there and sent about with messages because the royal pages were run off their feet, and it took us several days to find out what was happening.

  It seemed that the media people had been filming the whole Meeting from their bus, and they broadcast it as they filmed it. The Merlin’s death caused an outcry all over the country. The King had to go to the bus and assure people in another broadcast that it was an unfortunate accident and that no one was accusing the Scottish King of anything. It didn’t help the situation that he said this in a grim way that made everyone think the opposite. At the same time, the whole Progress packed up double quick and moved south to the borders of Northumberland. The media bus was actually on the road while the King was grimly broadcasting. The rest of the buses had to keep drawing up onto the verges to make way for the army units rushing to take up defensive positions along the Scottish border, so all we knew of things were tilted views of hedges while green lorries thundered by in the road.

  It turned out that the Scottish King broadcast, too. He talked about an insult to Scotland, and he sent army units to the border as well.

  “But he must know it was simply an accident,” my mam said worriedly when I did manage to see her and ask what was going on.

  This was when we were finally camped around a village where the King could stay in a manor house that was big enough for the wizards to perform an autopsy on the Merlin. There Grundo and I were sent hurrying with messages to other wizards, to the army HQ bus, the media tent, to the Waymaster’s office and the Chamberlain’s, and, after a day or so, to the village hall, where the judicial inquiry was being held. So much was going on. There was a nationwide hunt for a new Merlin, with most of the wizards involved, while the rest were busy with the inquiry. It seemed that the postmortem had shown that there were traces of a spell hanging round the Merlin, but no one could tell what kind. It could even have been one of the Merlin’s own spells.

  Dad was called into the inquiry. For a whole day it looked as if he might be accused of murder. My heart seemed to be filling my ears and drumming in my chest that entire time. Mam went around white as a sheet, whispering, “Oh, they can’t blame him, they can’t!” The trouble was, as she pointed out to me, everybody else who was close to the Merlin when he died was either royal or very important, so poor Dad got the full blast of the suspicion.

  I can’t tell you how frantic everything was that day.

  Then everything calmed down.

  As far as I could tell, it was Grandad’s doing. He turned up that evening, shortly after Dad had come out of the village hall looking as if he had spent several sleepless weeks on a bare mountain. Grandad brought the new Merlin with him, and they went straight to the King together. We didn’t see Grandad until quite late that night, when they all came out onto the village green: Grandad, the King, the Merlin, the judges, Prince Edmund, and a whole string of the wizards who had been tearing about and fussing over finding the new Merlin. The new Merlin was a skinny young man with a little pointed chin and a big Adam’s apple, who looked a bit stunned about his sudden jump to fame. Or maybe he was in a trance. Prince Edmund kept looking at him in an astonished, wondering way.

  Meanwhile, the Waymaster’s office had acted with its usual efficiency and cordoned off a big space on the green, while the Royal Guards jumped to it and built a bonfire in the center of it. We were standing watching, waiting, wondering what was going to happen, when Grandad came up to us. Mam flung herself on him, more or less crying.

  “Oh, Maxwell! It’s been so awful! Can you help?”

  “Steady,” Grandad said. “All’s well. Dan’s in the clear now. Had to tackle it from the top, you see, on account of the family relationship.” He slapped Dad on the shoulder and gave me one of his quick, bony hugs. “Roddy. Hallo, Grundo,” he said. “I think I’ve got the whole mess sorted. Have to wait and see, of course, but I think they’ll end up deciding it was nobody’s fault. Lord! Poor old Merlin Landor must have been in his eighties at least! Bound to drop dead at some point. Just chose a bad moment to do it. No need for national hysteria about that.”

  You know that marvelous moment when your mind goes quiet with relief. Everything was suddenly tranquil and acute with me. I could smell the trampled grass and motor fuel that I had not noticed before this, and the sweet, dusty scent of hay from beyond the village. I could hear the crackle of the bonfire as it caught and the twittering of birds in the trees around the green. The small yellow flames climbing among the brushwood seemed unbelievably clear and meaningful, all of a sudden, and my mind went so peaceful and limpid that I found myself thinking that yes, Grandad could be right. But Sir James had known the old Merlin was going to die. I looked round for Sir James, but he was not there. When I thought, I realized I had not seen him for some days, though Sybil was there, in among the other wizards.

  As soon as the bonfire was blazing properly, the senior wizard stepped forward and announced that we were here to present the new Merlin to Court and country. Everyone cheered, and the young Merlin looked more dazed than ever. Then one of the judges said that the question of the late Merlin’s death was now to be settled. He bowed to the King and stepped back.

  The King said to the Merlin, “Are you prepared to prophesy for us?”

  “I—I think so,” the Merlin said. He had rather a weak, high voice.

  “Then,” said the King, “tell us who, or what, caused the death of the last Merlin.”

  The young man clasped his hands together with his arms pointing straight down, rather as if he were pulling on a rope, and he began to sway, round and round. The bonfire seemed to imitate him. It broke into long pennants of orange flame that roared and crackled and sent a great spiral of smoke and burning blobs high into the evening sky. The extra light caught and glistened on tears pouring down the Merlin’s small, pointed face. He started to give out big, gulping sobs.

  “Oh, Lord! He’s a weeper!” Grandad said disgustedly. “I wish I’d known. I’d have stayed away.”

  “A lot of the Merlins have cried when they prophesied,” Dad pointed out.

  “I know. But I don’t have to like it, do I?” Grandad retorted.

  The Merlin started to speak then, in high gasps, but what with the roaring and snapping from the bonfire and the way he was sobbing, it was hard to hear what he was saying. I think it was “Blame is—where blame lies—blame rests—where dragon flies.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?” my grandfather muttered irritably. “Is he accusing Wales now or what?”

  While Gr
andad was mumbling, the King said in a polite, puzzled way, “And, er, then, have you any words that might guide us for the future?”

  This brought on a new bout of weeping from the Merlin. He bent this way and that, choking and sobbing, still with his hands clasped in that odd way. The bonfire gusted and swirled, and golden sparks rained upward. Eventually the Merlin began gasping out words again, and I found these even harder to catch. They sounded like “Power flows—when Merlin goes—world sways—in dark ways—a lord is bound—power found—land falls—when alien calls—nothing right—till dragon’s flight.”

  “I suppose this means something to him,” Grandad grumbled.

  Several of the wizards were writing the words down. I believe they all wrote different versions. I can only put down what I thought I heard—and the creepy thing is that the prophecy was quite right, now that I understand what it was about.

  After that, it seemed to be finished. The Merlin unclasped his hands, fetched out a handkerchief, and dried his eyes on it in a most matter-of-fact way. The King said, “We thank you, Merlin,” looking as mystified as the rest of us. The bonfire fell back to burning in a more normal way.

  The Household staff came around with glasses of warm spiced wine. I do take my hat off to these people. They have an awful job obeying all the instructions for camping that come from the Waymaster and the Chamberlain, or setting up house if the King decides to stay under a roof somewhere, and then providing meals fit for a King at all times and in all weathers, and they nearly always get it exactly right. That wine was exactly what everyone there needed. The fine weather that Dad had provided was still with us, but it came with a chilly wind and heavy dews at night.