Page 76 of Warrior Queen
He shook his head. “They abandoned me in a monastery as a baby. Well, I saythey, but most likely it was my mother who did it. She’d have been unwed, and I’d have been her shame, I imagine. That was what the monks told me, anyway. Nearly every day. But they might have been lying out of spite. You never know.”
The sadness of this statement washed over me. I’d never really imagined Merlin as having had a childhood– he seemed more likely to have sprung ready-formed into existence as he was today. “When was that? Where was the monastery?” If he was going to open up, then I was going to ask him questions while I could.
He shrugged. “I don’t know when. And I couldn’t tell you where, either. All I remember is being a small child in a cold monastery on a windswept cliff, and being punished. Every day.”
“Punished? How old were you?” Alezan took a sideways swipe at Merlin’s horse, and I had to shorten one rein to keep her head turned away. She could be such a cow with other horses.
He shrugged again. “I don’t know. Pretty young. The circuitor didn’t like me much.”
“The what?”
“The circuitor. He was in charge of discipline. He particularly took it upon himself to instill discipline in me.” He grinned. “Didn’t work.”
“Is that where you learned to read and write?”
He nodded. “I was a precocious child, advanced for my years. They put me with boys much older than me, and, amongst other things, they didn’t like me being better at the lessons than them.”
“Like Gildas?”
He wrinkled his nose. “I suppose so. But he’s not like me. They didn’t dislike me for who I was– I was no one, and some of them were nobly born, just as Gildas is– or even just for how clever I was. They disliked me because I had the Sight.”
“Even as a small child?”
He heaved a sigh. “From birth, I suppose. Perhaps my unknown mother had it too. The circuitor liked to tell me I’d been begotten on her by a demon, as he tried to beat the Sight out of me. Maybe I was. Maybe that’s where the Sight comes from– evil. Although that circuitor had plenty of evil in him.” He rubbed his chin ruefully. “I fixed him, though.”
Fascinated, I leaned on the horns of my saddle, eager to hear more. “Go on.”
He chuckled. “At every meal someone had to stand on a platform and read from the Bible on a lectern. I worked out when it would be the circuitor’s turn. That night, I sneaked from the boys’ dormitory and loosened or removed every nail in the platform and on the lectern. He stepped onto it, opened his mouth to speak, and the whole thing collapsed. He landed on his skinny arse.” He laughed out loud. “We boys had such trouble not laughing we got belly aches. Even some of the monks were stifling their laughter.”
“Did he know it was you?”
He nodded. “No one else would have dared, but the beating was worth it. The next night I ran away. I’ve never been back there since.”
Rust-red leaves carpeted the path ahead of us, others drifting down to join them. A smell of autumn forest filled the air, of mushrooms, damp earth and the sharp scent of a fox who must have passed through here a while ago. “And how did you find your way to Guorthegirn’s court?” I asked.
“By a twisted route. I traveled alone for a few days, but as a monastery boy I wasn’t much good at fending for myself. My luck held, though, and a band of traveling players found me before I starved to death. They soon discovered my skills and turned them to good use– Merlin Emrys, the Child Seer. That was how they marketed me in every village we stopped at. But people don’t really want to know the truth. I learned that very quickly.”
He shook his head, eyes faraway as though conjuring the scene in his mind’s eye. “I saw a woman heavy with child. A black cloud hung over her. I saw her dying as she gave birth. And the child, too. I was a child myself and lacked the experience to hide what I’d seen. Telling her wasn’t a good idea. We were chased out of that village by her angry family. After that, Herne the Giant, who led the troupe, advised me not to tell people anything bad. To stick to seeing tall dark strangers coming into the lives of single girls, to profit for farmers and merchants, long life and happiness for all.”
I smiled. “That’s pretty much what fortune tellers tell people in my old world. All good things and everything generalized. I doubt any of them truly have the Sight, like you. Maybe it’s died out because they don’t need it any longer.”
“That would be a sad thing because it has its uses.” He smiled as well, shaking his head, perhaps at the thought of a world without magic. “But what you want to know is how I ended up nearly being sacrificed by Guorthegirn, isn’t it?”
Mind reader.
I’d heard this story before, but not all of it could be true– after all, it involved dragons, and they weren’t real. Were they? It would be interesting to hear the truth. “Yes please.”
“Years had passed and I wasn’t so much the child seer anymore. Still half a boy, but growing fast. We’d been working our way around Gwynnedd, aware that trouble was brewing between the High King and his Saxon allies, but as it didn’t affect us, we didn’t care. Until we came to the fortress Guorthegirn was trying to build so he could hide from Hengest, his wife’s father.
“Then it wasn’t called Dinas Emrys as it is now. Then it was just a hill where the walls of a fortress kept falling down overnight. He had his wise men all around him: long robes, dirty white hair and beards, mad eyes, all of them. They told him the walls would stand if he sacrificed a boy with no human father. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, performing in the village at the foot of the hill. His guards’ attention fixed on me.”
He swatted a late-season fly away from his face. “Someone had told them I had no known father. Herne liked to give his audience a hint that I wasn’t of this world. It brought him more money. The guards seized me and dragged me before the king.”
I had to find out. “What was Guorthegirn like? You must be one of the only people living who’s met him.”
He chuckled. “Nothing special, but he was a beaten man when I clapped eyes on him, running from the men he’d made his allies, whom he’d come to fear. Scared, old… friendless.”
“And what did you do?”
