The Third Magic (13 page)

THE SUMMER COUNTRY

I
t was known to
the ancient Celts as the doorway to the dwelling place of the gods, the Summer Country, with its endless flowering meadows and streams running with clear water.

Most entered the Summer Country through death. It was the place where the soul journeyed after it was freed from the constraints of the body. But there have always been those who knew how to get there without dying.

"Innocent! Innocent!" the old man called. He was awash in clouds, which he swatted away to reveal a green hillside dotted with shining white rock. He stumbled over one, stubbing his toe. "Damn!" he shouted. With a handkerchief, he blotted perspiration off his forehead. That was the trouble with keeping one's body. It persisted in doing living things like sweating and hurting. "Innocent!"

Shhh.

"What?" Taliesin looked around. He didn't see anyone. And then, far off, nearly at the crest of the hill, he spotted a large she-wolf.

"Innocent!" he shouted, breaking into a pitiful, loping run.

Calm yourself, little bard. I'll come to you.

The wolf sauntered down the hill. When she reached him, her fur was decorated with snowdrops as white as her sightless eyes.

How do I look?
she asked. Which is to say, Taliesin divined what the wolf was thinking. There was no sound.

"Er... Very festive," he answered. "I hope I'm not disturbing you, Innocent, but—"

Not at all.
She sat down on her haunches.
Would you rather I were human?

"Oh, I don't... Well, actually, yes. That would be rather nicer." He sat on a smooth rock and rubbed his toe. When he looked up, the Innocent had transformed into a wraithlike old woman with wispy white hair festooned with flowers.

"Oh. Oh, my." Taliesin smiled. She had looked just so when she was his teacher and he a young bard learning the magic of the druids. "Thank you," he said.

"And how is the great Merlin?" she asked, patting his knee.

He blushed. Taliesin was able to accept accolades for his power from anyone else. But with the Innocent, he still felt like a foolish boy dressing in his father's clothes. "I'm well," he said.

"The knights?"

"The usual," he said with equanimity.

"Ah." She smiled. "Tell me, then, little bard, what brings you here."

"Well…" He looked into her eyes. They were milk-white. As far as he knew, the Innocent had always been blind. In death, of course, she could have chosen to have eyesight, but she remained blind even here, in the Summer Country.

And why not, Taliesin thought. She saw everything anyway. Even now she was looking through him, not through her comforting, blank eyes, but through a thousand other avenues, through the very pores of her skin, it seemed to him.

"It's Arthur."

"Of course."

"He's... Well, it's difficult to put into words."

"Meaning it bruises your ego to say the plain truth."

"No, that's not..." He felt himself flushing and sputtering. "Oh, hang it all, he's run away!" He wrung his hands. "It's his age, I suppose. You know that in areas of the Far East, all teenagers are considered to be demented. Beloved but insane. Makes life easier for the families, no doubt..."

"Do stop babbling, Taliesin."

Downhearted, he forced his hands to be still. "I was explaining that he was nearly ready to begin—"

"Begin what?" the Innocent asked.

"Why ... Whatever his destiny demands," Taliesin said. “His work.”

"You mean cutting ribbons, opening factories, that sort of kingly thing? And that only if some existing monarch is willing to turn over a throne to the boy—"

"No," he said, astonished by his teacher's obtuseness. "He is King Arthur, the once and future King, cut down in his prime but destined to return to live out his glorious reign." He leaned forward as he spoke, enunciating each word clearly, as if it had been written in stone.

"My, my," she said. "That sounds terribly important."

Taliesin took a deep breath and spoke from the depth of his soul. "It is, Innocent. It is the most important spell I have ever undertaken, to bring Arthur Pendragon back from the dead, along with all his knights." He shook his head slightly, as if to emphasize the gravity of the matter. "It was, in fact, one of the Three Great Magics."

"Ah," the Innocent said, appropriately impressed.

On the druid island of Mona, the Great Magics were introduced to fledgling magicians almost as soon as they were accepted as students, yet after the required two decades of study, it was rare for any of them to have mastered the skill to perform even one.

They were difficult feats, to be sure: The First Great Magic, known as Walking Through the Rock, required the ability to be so still that the very atoms of one's body could merge with—and therefore pass through—solid objects.

The Second Great Magic, or Bringing the World into Being, was far more advanced. It involved no less than creating physical reality from thought.

This was what had brought the knights back from the Summer Country to take on human flesh. It was what had connected Hal, who had waited for centuries, with a recently-born Arthur. It had all been orchestrated sixteen centuries before, when the spell was begun.

This was the stunning achievement that was the Merlin's masterwork, the last spell of his earthly life, an accomplishment so extraordinary that when he awoke to spin the final threads of the spell, he found he was no longer a human being, but a true wizard.

The Third Magic, which, as far as Taliesin knew, no one had ever tried, carried the chilling subtitle of The End of the World. This Magic was discussed, but not taught, and students were strongly advised not to spend their lives conjuring a spell that would ultimately destroy everything they knew.

On Mona, the Three Magics were likened to the Fates of ancient Greek mythology: Clotho, who spun the thread of life, Lachesis, who determined the thread's length, and Atropos, who cut it when it was time. Walking Through the Rock was the initiation that created a magician out of a man; Bringing the World into Being allowed the magician, now fully formed, to practice his art and ascend to a higher level of knowledge; and The End of the World... Well, Taliesin thought, one didn't have to worry about that much.

The Innocent patted his leg. "Ah, well, don't feel too badly. You were doing your best."

Taliesin felt his blood rise. "My best! I beg your pardon, Innocent, but I have fulfilled—singlehandedly—the ancient prophecy about the return of the King."

She fixed him with her blank eyes. "And he was doing so well here in the Summer Country. The knights, too. I checked up on them from time to time." She winked at him. "Perhaps you ought to have spent more time practicing the First Magic, and left the Second until you had attained a bit more maturity."

Taliesin sputtered. "I... how ..."

"Walking Through the Rock is always the beginning," she said.

"Walking Through the Rock is about transportation!" he shouted.

"Oh, you're wrong, little bard," the old woman went on gently. "To walk through the rock, you have to become the rock before you can move through it. You must, wholly and truly, become one with objects, other beings, with the very gods themselves. It takes nothing less, Taliesin. That is why it is one of the Three Great Magics: because all of the wonders of all the wizards in creation can be distilled into one of these three, and of the three the first, Walking Through the Rock, is the most necessary."

Talisin felt unappreciated and unfairly judged. No one else in all of history had ever brought a King back from the Summer Country.

"The second great Magic, Bringing the World into Being, grows out of the first. To create, to manifest the tangible from an idea, to bring form to pure energy, to bring to new life a man who had been dead... These come also from becoming. From understanding deeply." She cocked her head. "Do you understand deeply, O Merlin?"

"Yes, yes," he said, bored. Sometimes the Innocent worried an idea to death, like a dog with a bone.

"Then you understand why the boy does not want to live the life you gave him."

"He doesn't know any better."

"I see. And you do."

"Well, naturally I do," he said, puzzled. "I know the nature of the life he had—"

"But you talk as if Arthur lived only one life before this current one. That simply isn't true. He has lived many times, Taliesin."

"But his life as High King was the only one that mattered!"

The Innocent was silent.

"Oh, I know what you're saying," he admitted crankily. "Human beings are very attached to their lives, even if they're quite ordinary. They all like to believe that their trivial experiences are important." He stifled a yawn.

"Everything that happens is important," the Innocent said. "I wish you'd understood that, little bard."

She stretched on the bench, a frail woman, impossibly old, and then leaped into the air on powerful haunches. When she alighted, twenty feet away, she had again taken the form of the she-wolf.

"Innocent, please," Taliesin said, but the wolf sauntered away without a backward glance.

"She treats me like a dunce," he muttered as he propelled himself back to Puma Mountain. He landed in the ashes of the previous night's fire. "Damn, damn, damn!" he said, brushing the soot off his robe. "Becoming the rock. Pah!"

In his rage, he nearly stepped on the scrying mirror that he had been using with Arthur before the boy had stormed off so unreasonably.

In it, Arthur came into view almost immediately. "Hmmph," the old man said. He had half a mind to forget the ungrateful brat. "Hmmph," he said again as his gaze slid toward Arthur's image in the mirror.

The boy was still in the Black Hills, in what was called the Needles area of the rolling forest, where tall, slender rocks jutted skyward like daggers. He was hiking determinedly beneath the summer sun, wiping the sweat off his brow.

"You always were a stubborn child," Taliesin said.

Arthur scanned the horizon, trying to find his way.

"It won't do any good, you know," the old man said. "The knights will find you."

As if hearing what Taliesin had said, Arthur found a shady spot beneath an outcropping of rock and sat down. "Jolly good," Taliesin whispered. "Now let me in, Arthur. Let me see what you're thinking."

T
he scene in the
mirror was the same one that Arthur had conjured when the two of them had sat together on Puma Mountain. Taliesin recognized the lush terrain of the land on which Camelot had once stood. But again, they were seeing Camelot before Camelot, when the flattened summit of the hill on which Arthur's great castle would come to stand was still the ancient burial ground of heroes long forgotten even during the Middle Ages.

"Why do you keep going there?" the old man wondered aloud, though he knew Arthur could not hear him. "You're in the wrong time, lad! You need to move a few hundred years forward!"

This time, he noticed, the shimmering specter of Excalibur was not present in the vision. There was only a big yellow rock in a clearing, with a young woman walking by.

"I say," Taliesin said, bewildered. "Who the devil is that?"

The young woman ran her hand over the smooth, barley-colored stone. She was dressed oddly, in a rough woolen shift tied at the hip by a cord of vine, but beautiful. Tall and slender, her long legs strode with an authority far beyond her years. The sensual features of her face were framed by a cascade of wavy red-gold hair held in place by a band of white moonstones across her forehead.

"The girl," Arthur whispered. The girl who had come to him so often in his dreams. She was back.

"What girl?" Taliesin growled agitatedly. "I've never seen her before in my life."

"Brigid." the boy said as he fell deeply into trance. "Brigid, yes. Yes."

W
hat he felt for
her was love, pure, strong, aching love, in his body, his thoughts, his heart, a love so deep it seemed to him that he had loved her for a thousand years.

He had, in fact, loved Brigid for as long as he could remember. They had been children together. He had carried her across the river when it had been too deep for her to cross. He had made her gifts all his life: armloads of flowers picked at night and left in a dried pumpkin shell filled with water in front of her family's hut. Fish he had caught, still wriggling on the line.

And jewelry. He had always collected stones, wood, amber. Pretty things that he could string onto vines, cord, bone, things for her hair, her waist, her neck. He had learned how to forge metal, and though most of what he made were weapons, there was always enough time and material left over to make something beautiful for her.

The circlet she wore over her brow had been a gift from him. Three strands of milk-colored stones were mounted on thin wires of copper, with a larger stone hanging between her eyes, in the place of the Second Sight, which she had. It had taken him nearly a year to refine the copper to the point where he could make wire from it, but the time had been worth it. The stones shone against her skin like light made of water. Like moons.

As he strode near her, she held out her arms to him. Her lips parted in a smile of welcome. He met them with his own, entwined his arms with hers, touched her body with his. He felt whole now, as if he had been walking around with only isolated pieces of himself, and the rest of him had just grown in place to make him complete.

Yes,
he thought,
I
have known you forever.
...

"I've brought you something," he said. He took a long leather bag that hung over his shoulder by a strap and removed its contents.

What it held was a sword, although the word did not adequately serve to describe the object. It was a sword in the way that a diamond was a stone. In truth, although its shape was that of a sword, it looked like nothing else on earth.

Its hilt, crafted of gold and silver and bronze and copper, was fashioned into the form of a coiled snake. Over the body of the snake were embedded gemstones which he had polished over the course of many months: lapis, rose quartz, onyx, malachite, spotted jasper, bloodstone. For the eyes of the snake, he had placed two rubies, very rare, for which he had traded a fine iron sword to a traveler from a distant land.