Free The King Arthur Trilogy by Rosemary Sutcliff Page A

Arthur said, seeing the man beside him as tall and upright as ever, his eyes as brightly golden, the darkness of his hair only beginning to be streaked with ash colour.
    ‘My kind do not grow old according to the passing years – not as you understand growing old. But I am tired and the life grows thin within me, and I shall be glad to rest. And there are things that I have to do first. For many years I have shared your fate and your father’s before you. Now I go to follow my own.’
    Arthur said, ‘Tell me at least what it is.’
    ‘The lady who rode into your Hall yesterday after the white hart, and was herself dragged away by the knight in black armour – did you not know her?’
    ‘Why should I?’ Arthur said. ‘Never did I see her before.’
    ‘That was Nimue, the Lady of the Lake who gave you your sword.’ Merlin saw the astonishment on Arthur’sface, and smiled. ‘She is of the Lordly People, and has powers of shape shifting beyond even my own, for I am half mortal. Yet even I have come to you often enough in the guise of an aged beggar or a child gathering blackberries and you have not known that it was I.’
    ‘But what has she to do with you?’
    ‘She has my love,’ Merlin said simply, ‘all of it that is not yours. She has had it a long time. Now I go with her a while, to give her my wisdom and my powers to add to her own, as a gift of love, and so that she may use them in your service, when I can do so no more. And when she has them all, she will lock me with one of my own spells into a magic sleep … A quiet, long sleep, in a cave beneath roots of a certain hawthorn tree …’
    ‘Then she is wicked,’ Arthur cried out. ‘Wicked, even though it was she who gave me Excalibur! And with Excalibur I will kill her before she does this to you!’
    ‘Nay, she is not wicked,’ Merlin said, looking out over the forest into the dim blue distance. ‘She is of the Lordly Ones, did I not say? The Lordly Ones are neither wicked nor good, just as the rain is neither wicked nor good, that can swell the barley or wash away the field. They simply
are
.’
    ‘But even so – with your powers, surely there is something that you can do to escape this fate?’ Arthur cried in desperate misery.
    ‘Oh, yes; and so I would remain with you – with my powers beginning to fail. But to do so would be to turn aside from the road appointed for me. She is my fate; and in some sort she is yours also … She will be with Pellinore when he returns, and when she leaves the court again, I shall go with her.’
    ‘So soon?’ said Arthur.
    ‘So soon,’ said Merlin.
    Arthur was silent a moment, watching the swallows darting sickle-winged about the battlements. Then he said, ‘This sleep – will it be for ever?’
    ‘Not for ever, no. We shall both come again, you and I, when the time and the need call for us.’
    Arthur went on watching the swallows. He felt the warmth of the evening sunshine on his face, and Cabal’s muzzle thrust lovingly into the palm of his hand, and thought of Guenever’s face, and the faces of men who were his friends. ‘What will they be like, the people we come back to? What will it all be like?’ he whispered suddenly in anguish.
    But before Merlin could answer, a little group of figures rode out from the woodshore towards the bridge; and he saw that they were Sir Gawain and Sir Lamorack and King Pellinore; and that Gawain carried something that looked like a woman’s body across his saddlebow, and Sir Lamorack was followed by a mounted dwarf with a white brachet on a long leash, and beside KingPellinore rode a damosel on a palfrey as white as hawthorn blossom.
    That evening in the Great Hall, before the knights sat down to supper, Arthur bade the three returned knights to give account of their quests. The Queen and her ladies had come in to listen, and when the three stories were told, Guenever said, ‘Oh, King Pellinore, it is a sorry tale you tell, for though you succeeded in your