The flute still drowsed in my ears, teasing and familiar, then thrilled in an old little run. Who’d be tootling in this fog? A shepherd lulling his flock, keeping them near? This can’t be the right direction. This way. No, this. No, you’re going uphill, that’s not it. Bedivere, where are you?

“Back there, Arthur.”

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The voice was near and far at the same time. “Who’s that? Who are you?”

Another run on the flute. “Forgetful man, didn’t I say I’d meet you here?”

Frightened now, whirling about: “Damn you, where are you?”

“At the top of the hill, at the ring of stones. Come up, Arthur, to Cnoch-nan-ainneal.”

The music rose and fell in its quavering song, and far away, I heard a woman calling someone, keening with a sob in her voice as if she knew the loved would never come back.

The great stones stood like ghosts in the fog as I passed into their circle. The music was very near, but now I knew who played it.

“Merlin, where are you?”

“Here, Tribune.”

The tall figure leaned against a strangely carved stone, wrapped in a travel-stained cloak, as dull and worn now as he had been incandescent long ago, but a man grown like myself. I felt no wonder or friendliness. A boy has time for miracles and magic, but a man has other things to do.

“You again, Merlin.”

He breathed one half-sour note of finality through the flute and put it away. “Merlin will do for a name. I’m called that and other things, a part of things. That midge that deals with the mite of Arthur. Welcome to the hill of the fires.”

I could see a fire; the fog was damp and chill. I shivered and felt empty. “Let me wake, Merlin. This is no time for games. I fell asleep bone weary. I could be taken.”

Merlin pointed. “You have been taken.”

To the right, the left, all around me among the upright stones squatted small figures, dim in the fog. I swung about, sword at guard.

“You devil, am I out of time?”

“Fora time.”

“Let me wake, really wake. Why do you mock me with riddles and magic?”

Merlin’s lean, fatigue-lined features registered a kind of sadness. “There is no mockery.”

“No? Don’t I know I’m mad, seeing tomorrows for yesterdays, sleeping with a hundred ghosts at my ear? I saw Bedivere full grown before he was. I knew Ancellius.”

“And he will betray you, Arthur—” . “Stop!”

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“—as the Christ-man’s Peter.”

My fear poured out in anger. “You boucca\ You air-thing, playing on my sickness like your flute. I could put this blade through the nothing of you—”

Quick as I was, Merlin parried my swing with a subtle twist of his body that hurled me forward off balance to sprawl against the stone. My muscles bunched to move—and froze, unable. I could only stare up at his narrow, watchful face. Behind him the circle of watchers waited. They were not all men. The small woman-figure rested her head against the shoulder of a huge dog, still as herself. They could all have been smaller stones in the fog.

Merlin smiled a little. “And still you don’t know me. No wonder, there’s little you have learned for sure. Why me, why this place, why the vision you call madness? Have I not shown you the king you will be?”

I shivered against the cold stone. “That is mad.”

“If it is, so are you.”

The whispering laughter of the watchers, like a rustle of leaves.

“You will be king, Arthur. There will be victories at first and a kind of defeat in the end, but that won’t last. You’ll be remembered. They’ll sing your name through long, dark nights and darker centuries. They’ll conjure with it, make you a legend and a god and sacrifice you as all god-kings are sacrificed. Ave, Imperator.”

Merlin’s eyes softened with some of the long-ago warmth. “You’ve learned to read men’s failings, but not the heart that chums them out. A little imperfection, Tribune, a little human weakness. A love, a loss, and then how will the world look when this fog lifts?”

“What love? Guenevere?”

“In time,” said Merlin. “When you’ve learned to love. She’s only an ambition now, a reflection of you.”

Merlin laid his fingertips on my damp forehead. “The carpenter had a bard’s flair for poetry: ‘Thou art Peter, a rock.’ You are Druith, a fool, and upon this fool, I will carve something like a heart.”

He beckoned to the female figure in the fog. “Morgana.”

The tiny woman glided closer to kneel beside me, skin the same coppery hue as Cador’s prisoner, cheeks marked with the same ritual scars. Her sheepskin shawl covered only her shoulders, the short, fringed skirt very little at all. Her flat brown belly, veined with stretch marks, had borne child. She studied

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me with bold gray eyes, and I knew her from the last moments of dreams before waking, from the shadows beyond Cilurnum’s watchfires, glimpsed as she slid around the corner of imagination, over the shoulders of other women whose faces were not half so well remembered even in my arms. A strong face that knew sorrow, joy and rage. But not beautiful.

“Very beautiful,” Merlin answered the thought, “when you have eyes to see. And you, Morgana, what do you see?”

“One of the People,” she said. “But it wears tallfolk clothes and smells of them.”

“The fool needs you.”

Morgana touched my cheek. “A’s been too long for me. Only a child.”

“Teach it, then.”

She cupped my face in brown hands. “Mariy days did watch thee and want thee. Be thee so far or far, do know our own. Hear of the Prydn, the First People. Your people. The beasts cut in these stones be elk and reindeer and others thee’s never seen. When this land was half ice, the People were here, Earth’s favored children who knew her secret names. Then tallfolk brought bronze to break our flint. Did learn the name of bronze and how to make it. Then more came, the redhairs and yellow-hairs, with iron to break bronze.”

Her voice compelled as the music of the flute. Most of her words I knew, a kind of British, but some were mere idea-sounds, as flutter describes the bird’s beating wing.

“Iron took the land,” said Morgana. “Iron hated our gods and called them devils, nibbed out our true name to steal our strength. Iron called us Faerie, made us part of the dark beyond their fires. When tallfolk are bigger, when they have iron-magic and all the good valley land, where can the People go but under the hill?”

Morgana raised her head to Merlin. “What does thee call it?”

“Druith,” said Merlin softly. “A fool.”

“And what must a see?”

“Too far and too much, A god-king who must burn for his people.”

She flinched a little. “Cruel, even for tallfolk. Then know the way of things, Druith. All names go under the hill, stone before flint before bronze before iron, like waves on a shore.”

Then Merlin asked, “What one thing can you teach it, one lesson to mark it a true man and your own forever?”

Her lips brushed across my cheek. “Poor Drurth. New green

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leaf in a dry old world. Do know my own and what I’ll teach thee.”

She kissed my mouth, a long kiss that pressed the magic and the memory into me. The scent of her was sweet in my nostrils, and there were tears in her eyes and on my cheek where hers pressed against it so that 1 couldn’t tell were they her tears or mine, so mixed with the joy and sorrow of her magic. I felt my chest go suddenly hollow with a vast, soft ache, an empty space that had to be filled with Morgana. Then I was— Free!

Loosed, i

feel

myself

waking—

unfettered, returning to true self inside Artos-tallfolk. My Prydn soul throws off its bonds like a frayed rope and thrusts Artos into the prison where he’s kept me so long. Free, stretching out my arms to my brothers, who come out of the fog and lift me high on their shoulders like a prize to take me home under the hill.

Just the four of us. My^Ticm-brothers, Nectan and Cunedag. Morgana and me, Druith. Ears sharp for danger above. We stay in the crannog under the stone circle while the Briton-men search for the Artos I’ve locked inside me and bidden be still. Sometimes at dusk we peep above ground. Redhair is still about, sniffing like a dog on a cold scent. Finally he goes away, and it’s time to go home to theftiain.

Nectan and Cunedag treat me well on our journey north. They tie me between the ponies only because the Artos in me is not yet to be trusted. Fettered, I have to run and stumble after them, but Morgana hovers close every step of the way, and anyway tallfolk feel less pain than humans or they wouldn’t hurt others so carelessly. So the Prydn always thought, but it’s not true. I suffered from the scrapes and dragging. My whole body was a lump of misery, and I know that, deep inside me, Artos bled and suffered too.

Now and then we have to hide, but that’s not hard. Tallfolk are big but stupid. When we vanish on the open moor, tallfolk forget a man can look like the moor. They forget the old lesson of hunting, that game will only see you if you move. If you’re

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still as a stone, tallfolk will take you for a stone. And this is a difference between the People and tallfolk. With their iron-magic and their fine looms to make rich cloth, they’ve forgotten that Earth is their mother. No longer are they brothers to wolf and marten. It happened long ago, and this is how we tell it to our children.

One day Earth went to her mate, Lugh Sky God, and said, “Man, our youngest child, is forgetting me. He’s prideful and won’t even speak to his brother animals. Do you go and give him a swift kick since he’s grown too full of himself to listen to me.”

So Lugh called all of his children, the men, the fish, the birds and the animals, to stand before him, and he said to Man: “Now listen to your mother Earth.”

They tried, but had truly forgotten her language. Then Lugh said, “Speak to your brother animals.” But all had forgotten how except a few of the smallest men, who were among Earth’s favorites because she made them first. Only these were able to speak to their mother and brothers.