The Merlin Conspiracy (2 page)

The only person at Court that I dislike more than Alicia is Sybil's manfriend. His name is Sir James Spenser. He is very unpleasant. The astonishing thing is that the whole Court, including Sybil,
knows
he is nasty, but they pretend not to notice because Sir James is useful to the King. I don't understand about this. But I have noticed the same thing happening with some of the businessmen who are useful to the King. The media are constantly suggesting these men are crooks, but nobody even thinks of arresting them. And it is the same with Sir James, although I have no idea in what way
he
is useful to the King.

He gave me a leer. “Checking that I haven't eaten your sweetheart?” he said. “Why do you bother, Arianrhod? If I had your connections, I wouldn't look twice at young Ambrose.”

I looked him in the face, at his big, pocky nose and the eyes too near on either side of it. “I don't understand you,” I said in my best Court manner. Polite but stony. I didn't think my connections were particularly aristocratic. My father is only the King's weather wizard and much further down the order than Sybil, who is, after all, Earthmistress to England.

Sir James did his hissing laugh at me.
Hs-ss-szz
. “The aristocracy of magic, my dear child,” he said. “Look at your grandparents! I should think at the very least you'd be setting your sweet young adolescent cap at the next Merlin.”

Sybil said sharply,
“What?”
and Alicia gave a gasp. When I looked at her, she was speckled pink with indignation. Alicia has even more freckles than Grundo. Sybil's long, jowly face was furious. Her pale blue eyes were popping at me.

I didn't understand what made them so angry. I just thought, Bother! Now I shall have to be very polite—and rather stupid—and pretend I haven't noticed. This was typical of Sir James. He loved making everyone around him angry. “But we've got a perfectly good Merlin!” I said.

“An old man, my dear,” Sir James said gleefully. “Old and frail.”

“Yes,” I said, truly puzzled. “But there's no knowing who'll be the next one, is there?”

He looked at me pityingly. “There are rumors, dear child. Or don't you listen to gossip with your naïve little ears?”

“No,” I said. I'd had enough of his game, whatever it was. I turned, very politely, to Sybil. “Please would it be all right if I took Grundo to watch my father work?”

She shrugged her thick shoulders. “If Daniel wants to work in front of a staring child, that's his funeral, I suppose. Yes, take him away. I'm sick of the sight of him. Grundo, be back here to put on Court clothing before lunch or you'll be punished. Off you go.”

“There's motherly love for you!” I said to Grundo as we hurried off into the rain.

He grinned. “We don't need to go back. I've got Court clothes on under these. It's warmer.”

I wished I'd thought of doing the same. It was so chilly that you wouldn't have believed it was nearly Midsummer. Anyway, I'd got Grundo away. Now I just had to hope that Dad wouldn't mind us watching him. He doesn't always like being disturbed when he's working.

When I cautiously lifted the flap of the weather tent, Dad was just getting ready. He had taken off his waterproof cape and was slipping off his heavy blue robe of office and rolling up his shirtsleeves. He looked all slim and upright like that, more like a soldier preparing for a duel than a wizard about to work on the weather.

“Over in that corner, both of you,” he said. “Don't distract me or you'll have the King after us in person. He's given me very exact instructions for today.” He turned a grin on us as he said this, to show he didn't at all mind having us there.

Grundo gave him one of his serious, deep looks. “Are we allowed to ask questions, sir?”

“Most probably not,” said my father. “That's distracting. But I'll describe what I'm doing as I go along, if you want. After all,” he added, with a wistful look at me, “one of you might wish to follow in my footsteps someday.”

I love my dad, though I never see very much of him. I think he really does hope that I might turn out to be a weather worker. I'm afraid I am going to be a great disappointment to him. Weather does fascinate me, but so does every other kind of magic, too. That was true even then, when I didn't know more than the magic they teach you in Court, and it's more true than ever now.

But I loved watching Dad work. I found I was smiling lovingly as he stepped over to the weather table. At this stage it was unactivated and was simply a sort of framework made of gold and copper wires resting on stout legs that folded up for when we traveled. The whole thing folded away into a worn wooden box about four feet long, which I had known for as long as I could remember. It smelled of ozone and cedarwood. Dad and that box went together somehow.

He stood beside the table with his head bent. It always looked as if he were nerving himself up for something. Actually, he was just working the preliminary magics, but when I was small, I always thought that weather working took great courage, and I used to worry about him. But I've never lost the queer amazement you feel when the magic answers Dad's call. Even that day, I gasped quietly as mistiness filled the framework. It was blue, green, and white at first, but almost at once it became a perfect small picture of the Islands of Blest. There was England in all its various greens, except for the small brown stains of towns, with its backbone of the Pennines and its southern hills as a sort of hipbone. All the rivers were there, as tiny blue-gray threads, and dark green clumps of woodlands—very important each of these, Dad tells me, because you bring the picture into being by thinking of water, wood, and hill—but it still defeats me why I could even see the white cliffs in the south. And Scotland was there, too, browner, with traveling ridges of gray and white cloud crossing the brown. The fierce grayness at the top was a bad storm somewhere near John O' Groats. Wales lurked over to one side, showing only as dim greens under blue-gray clouds. But Ireland was entirely clear, living up to the name of Emerald Isle, and covered in big moving ripples of sunlight.

Dad walked round it all, bending over to look at the colors of the seas particularly. Then he stood back to see the patterns of the slanting, scudding clouds. “Hmm,” he said. He pointed to the northeast of England, where the land was almost invisible under smoky, whitish mist. “Here's the rain that's presently being such a pest. As you see, it's not moving much. The King wants it cleared up and, if possible, a blaze of sunlight when the Scottish King arrives. Now, look at Scotland. There's very little clear sky there. They're having sun and showers every ten minutes or so as those clouds ripple. I can't get any good weather from there, not to make it last. Quite a problem.”

He walked slowly in among the green landscapes and the moving clouds, passing through the wires of the framework underneath as if they were not there. That part always gave me a shudder. How
could
a person walk through solid gold wire?

He stopped with his hand over dim, green Wales. “
This
is the real problem. I'm going to have to fetch the weather from Ireland without letting this lot drift in across us. That's really appalling weather there in Wales at the moment. I shall have to try to get it to move away north and out to sea. Let's see how the bigger currents are going.”

Up to his waist in moving, misty map, he gestured. The whole picture humped up a little and moved away sideways, first to show a curve of heaving gray ocean, ribbed like a tabby cat with strips of whitish cloud, and then, giddily, going the other way to show green-brown views of the Low Countries and the French kingdoms and more stripes of cloud there.

“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.”

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.