He saw Avallach’s head swing around as words were spoken to his father and Elphin’s wide smile dwindle into a look of bewildered dismay. Then the Fisher King turned stiffly and disappeared into the darkness. A moment later a call for the king’s horses sounded. Maildun appeared beside Charis and took her by the arm. He saw Charis’ frantic look over her shoulder as she was pulled away.
Taliesin saw all this as he might have seen it in a dream-each detail sharp and clear and dreadful in its finality. Then his legs were moving and he was running around the circle of the fire. He caught Charis as she was being handed into the saddle. Her face in the firelight showed anxiety and confusion. “What happened?” she asked in a harsh whisper. “Avallach is angry.”
“We must talk,” said Taliesin urgently, stepping close when Maildun moved to his own mount.
“Charis!” Maildun shouted from his horse. “Come away.”
“We must talk, Charis!” insisted Taliesin.
“Meet me in the orchard,” she whispered, turning her horse in line with the others. “At sunrise.”
CHAPTER NINE
Taliesin rose just before dawn the next morning and rode to the Glass Isle to meet Charis. The night had been cool and the night vapors still lay on the marsh, rising from the narrow streams of open water to drift in undulating waves through the land, waiting for the warm rays of the morning sun to melt them with their touch.
Upon reaching the orchard, Taliesin dismounted and tied his horse to a branch, and then walked among the blossom-bound trees. The night’s dew on leaves and flowers glittered in the early light like little stars late to leave the sky. The long grass was wet, and water seeped down the smooth, charcoal-dark trunks of the apple trees and dripped from the branches in a slow, incessant rain to vanish in the soft green Below. The air, though cool, was already thick with the scent of the blossoms.
As Taliesin strolled the wide pathways of the grove, he gradually became aware of a sound winding through the trees, faint but clearly audible. On strands of liquid melody, a wordless song was weaving itself around branch and bole-as much a part of the grove as the pale pink blossoms themselves. He followed the sound, hoping to discover the singer, thinking that perhaps Charis had come after him and entered the orchard by another way.
The source of the sound proved elusive, however, and it was some time before he could locate it, searching first this way and then another, only to have it disappear and come at him from another way. Finally, stooping beneath a low branch, he saw a fresh-made beech bower erected in the center of the orchard and before it a maid with hair like morning light, dressed all in green and sitting on a three-legged stool beside a tripod. Suspended from the tripod was a cauldron over a small, smokeless fire. The caldron was round and made of a strange metal with a deep red luster, and its sides were etched with the figures of fantastic animals.
The maid sang softly to herself as she dispersed the rising steam with a fan made of blackbird wings. Every now and then she would reach into a bowl at her feet and bring out a leaf or two which she dropped lightly into the boiling pot. Taliesin watched her for a little while before she turned her head to regard him, coolly and without the least hint of surprise in her green eyes or in her honeyed voice when she said, “Greetings, friend! You are early to the grove this morning. What brings you here?”
Taliesin lifted the branch and stepped forward. “I have arranged to meet someone,” he replied.
“And so you have.” The maid smiled, but whether with satisfaction or at some privately amusing thought he could not tell. “Come close, singer,” she said, dropping another leaf into the pot. “Let us talk together.”
The maid bore an uncanny resemblance to Charis and was just as beautiful-although her beauty hinted at something cold and inhuman: the icy lacework of autumn frost on a summer rose perhaps, or the frozen elegance of a spring snowfall. “I had no wish to disturb you,” he said.
“Yet, having done so, would you compound your trespass by refusing my invitation to sit a while?” She did not look at him when she spoke but at the caldron.
Taliesin noticed there was no place to sit save the ground and that was wet with dew. “I will stand, lady,” he said, adding, “Would it greatly add to my offense to ask your name?”
“You may ask,” the maid replied. She smiled again and this time Taliesin saw that she was laughing at him.
“I will not,” he told her. “I would rather you think me rude.”
“Oh? Can you tell what I think?” she asked, observing him from beneath her lashes. Taliesin noticed that the pulse quickened its beating at the base of her throat. “You must be a most profound fellow. For if you can discern my thoughts, my name will present no obstacle to you.”
“Indeed I can think of several things to call you,” replied Taliesin. “But which would suit you more, I wonder?”
She gave a flick with the fan and sent steam rolling into the air, and it suddenly seemed to Taliesin as if this maid had created the mists and fog with her boiling cauldron and blackbird fan. “Call me whatever you like,” she answered. “A name is only a sound on the air after all.”
“Ah, but sounds have meaning,” Taliesin said. “Names have meaning.”
“What meaning will you give me?” she asked almost shyly. As she spoke these words, something about the maid changed-a subtle shift in her manner, in the way she held herself under his scrutiny-and Taliesin felt as if he were addressing a diiferent person entirely. “Well? Have you no name for me?”
She did not wait for an answer but went on hurriedly, “You see? It is not so simple to discover meaning as you suggest. Better a sound on the air, I think, than a troublesome striving after dead purpose.”
“What an extraordinary creature you are,” laughed Taliesin. “You pose a question and answer it yourself. That is hardly fair.”
The lady colored at this, her cheeks burning crimson as if touched by a flame. She turned on him quickly, a fierce and feral light flashing in the green depths of her eyes. For an instant she was a wild, untamed thing ready to flee to the dark safety of a deep forest den. Taliesin felt the heat of anger and alarm lick out at him across the space between them. “Have I said something to upset you, lady? I meant no harm.”
The expression vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and the maid smiled demurely. “Sounds in the air,’” she said. “Where is the harm?”
She turned her attention to the pot, reached down, and took up a handful of leaves, dropping them one by one onto the surface of the boiling water. “My name is Morgian.”
Morgian…
He stared at the maid before him, her name resounding like an echo in his ears. Slippery darkness flowed around him like the steamy vapor from the caldron, and Taliesin’s spirit was seized and lifted like a coracle tossed on the ocean swell and thrown toward the rocks. He all but staggered with the effort of holding himself upright.
It was power he had touched, raw and unreasoning as the wind that drives the waves onto the shore. He had encountered it before-once long ago-in the face of Cernunnos, the Forest Lord. It had shaken him then too. And he had fled from it.
He was older now and had learned much about the power of the old gods. It was a natural power, elemental and earth-born, linked with the trees and hills and stones and stars and sun and moon. There was a good deal of darkness in it, but it was not totally given to evil. It was, therefore, not to be overly feared and fled but respected-in the same way that an adder must be respected when it rears its scaly head and bares its fangs.
Taliesin did not flee this time but stood his ground. He had never sought the earth power, though many druids did. Haf-gan had always said it was unnecessary, that such seeking was foolish and dangerous, that no one could hope to tame the power, nor discover the ways in which it was used of old, and that those who tried lived to regret it bitterly-if they lived at all.