Faithful
I sit, resting my ancient bones on the plain wooden chair. The atmosphere is warm and dry inside this cavern, luminescence seeps from the wall casting soft shadows across the young man on the rock slab next to me.
His skin is losing the waxy pallor of death but I don't take that as a sign anymore; such things have happened many times before. Every time the quickening had left him again, before he had even drawn a breath, to sink back into the torpor of waiting. And how long we've been waiting, he and I.
Absently I take hold of the triangular shaped piece of burnished metal which hangs on a leather cord around my scraggy neck and lose myself in memories.
It had taken me two hundred and sixty three years to find this chamber and a further eleven years for me to persuade the Sidhes gatekeeper, Gia, to allow me entry.
The Sidhes had taken Arthur off the boat and laid him in this cavern. Why would they have helped a human? A dead human at that. Because they had been bound to this task from the beginning of time. Who had bound them? They wouldn't say but they took their oath seriously. Arthur hadn't aged a day since I had placed him on his makeshift death barge and sent it across the water to the Isle of Avalon.
In my grief and ignorance I had simply assumed the Goddess would take Arthur to herself and keep him safe until his time came again. But over the years I heard a few whispers of a human warrior, a future King, preserved by the Sidhes. I couldn't find anyone who had ever seen this future King though neither could I find solid information, when I chased the stories they evaporated like morning mist.
My heart was too frozen with grief to even allow myself to imagine Arthur may have been taken in by the Sidhes in spite of Kilgharrah's last words to me. I didn't dare believe, hope would wound me, as mortally as Mordred's sword had killed Arthur.
For a long time I didn't comprehend why I was living so long. I expected to do as other men; marry, beget children and then die. Instead I found myself stepping straight into Giaus' shoes when my surrogate father succumbed to old age less than two years after Arthur died. A death which added another layer of ice to my heart.
Since then I had watched all my friends from Camelot either die from accident, or from disease or old age would claim them. It was only when Sir Leon's great grandson, Sir Pellas, came running to me holding his own son for me to treat his broken leg that I realised just how long I had been doing the work of a physician.
I had tended Sir Leon who had died a very old man. He had married Gwen some years after she lost her husband. It was a marriage between friends but they were happy, their two sons and daughter cementing that contentment. The Queen never really recovered after giving birth to her last son. She slipped away when her youngest child was just learning to walk; dignified to the end whilst I made sure she wasn't in any pain. Many years later I was attending that child on his own deathbed at the end of his equally long life now here I was tending Leon and Gwen's great, great grandson.
Splinting that little boy's leg left me feeling restless and ill at ease. There were more physicians within the walls of the castle than just me, I wouldn't be leaving the people without medical help if I left. And that is what I was going to do. I decided to set out and see some of the world.
I travelled and increased my knowledge as I did so. Through countries where the sun shone bright and hot nearly all the time and made men's skin as dark as their hair and eyes, I found many different treatments for wounds and the many different ills which plague mankind. Then onto places where philosophers discussed life and politics and wore bands of woven leaves in their hair; here I discovered much about the inner workings of a man. Further East still where mountains touched the sky and wore coats of snow winter and summer, where the holy people practised the control of their own bodies in worship to their gods. Pushing across great tracts of land I found a country where the people's skin was golden and their eyes were slanted. These people were both warlike and learned. Their physicians shared knowledge eagerly. It appeared that through the practise of war they had learned much about the human body. Some of their facts overturned the ideas of my friends the Greeks while others backed up that knowledge. They also made a black powder which could explode and kill many people at once but which was also a favourite at celebrations, where it could be made to light up the darkness with many hued sparks of light. I never grew tired of seeing the black powder in this form.
After a time though, I grew homesick for the sight of my own country and the sound of my own language.
Albion was a changed land when I returned. A new King was talked of now, a man who had died on a cross in Palestine and had risen from the dead three days later. I had heard of this Jesus of Nazareth in my travels. Dependant on who was speaking he was either a Jewish insurgent, out to foment rebellion against the Roman occupying forces, or a mighty God King who would punish the wicked and save the pious.
I had been gone for so long Camelot was only a memory now, a name to conjure tales around a winter's fireside.
The Isle of Avalon wasn't such an isolated place now. The waters were receding, becoming a marshland of dangerous bogs and sudden depths.
But the whispers of a Warrior King who had lain in the depths of the Isle were very strong now. I could almost feel the presence of Arthur; it seemed to be stamped on the very air. The closer I got to the Isle the stronger the feeling.
Once I set foot upon that sacred ground I was attacked and told in no uncertain terms that I was not welcome. Explaining myself didn't help. The gatekeeper, a tiny warrior Sidhes, with a bad temper and a lot of strong magic, would not allow me to stay. So I made my way back to the shoreline, waited until the next morning then crossed back to the Isle.
After the first moon cycle I knew this was going to take a while, so I bartered my knowledge of medicine for food and supplies, constructed myself a shelter and settled down to try and outwait the Sidhes gatekeeper. Every morning for eleven years I went across to the Isle to petition and every day I was turned down.
The people around thought I was a holy man of the new faith who went across to the Isle every morning to pray. I neither agreed with them nor disagreed. I could cure them, their children, parents and their livestock so they kept me fed and clothed and I kept them healthy in return and they left me alone with my prayers.
After the first year the gatekeeper no longer attacked me when I got to the Isle. After two years I knew her name and she knew mine. After four years we were swapping comments on the weather, after seven years we had progressed to light discussions on politics. At ten and a half years Gia seemed, well, a little off colour. She radiated red sparks when I asked if I could help her and curtly informed me her commander would be with her from the next dawn. And so he was. Thereafter it was her commander, Dorus, who met me each morning. When I asked about Gia he grinned at me, wolfishly, saying she would be back when she had done her duty and would say no more.
Sometimes during those eleven years I dreamed of Arthur. Arthur who was calling out to me, to come to him, to talk to him. My heart was bursting with brotherly love then the dream Arthur would end with,
'I'm bored, Merlin!'
A let-down, but very Arthur.
Three moon cycles passed before Gia returned, a small Sidhes trailing behind her, who was introduced to me as Tienas, her son. I expressed all that was proper on such an occasion which she accepted then told me the news I had been longing to hear. Dawn the next day, I would be allowed into the chamber.
The first time I saw him, laid out on this stone, I'd fallen to my knees and sobbed like a child.
Gia had flitted around me in alarm until finally she had gone to find Dorus who had assured her that this was something humans do, on a fairly frequent basis.
I barely left the chamber for the next several years.
Finding out why I was living so long was almost an anti-climax. I'd fallen asleep after I had exhausted myself crying on that first day. Sleeping was the best part, I decided, as I dreamed again of Arthur, an Arthur who was hale and hearty and desperate for news of the outside.
'Tell me everything you've done, and where you've been. I need to know how the world is changing.'
Even in my dreams I worried about him, asking if he'd been awake since he had been on the Isle.
'No,' he assured me, 'But I know when you're nearby so we can talk.'
Of course! It was as clear as crystal. Arthur would need to know about the changes outside this place if he was to be of use in the future and that appeared to be my task. Gathering the information and bringing it back to him. My ongoing destiny, to ever serve my King and friend.
He mourned for Gwen and Leon when I told him, but was happy she had had children and a contented life before she died.
Eventually we found we could communicate without me having to be asleep. Using the techniques of the holy men and women who could stay motionless for many hours at a time, whilst hardly breathing, I would descend into that special kind of quiescence then Arthur and I could talk and discuss for hours at a time. He was most interested in my travels to far continents and the discoveries from those far off lands.
Leaving after that first time was a special kind of hell. The further away I moved from the Isle and Arthur the more empty I would feel. I would leave and stay out in the world for as long as I could, until the loneliness settled in my bones and made me ache then I would know it was time to return.
At first not a lot changed between each visit outside. Kings raising armies and going to fight 'Crusades' in the land of Palestine, over a city called Jerusalem, the land of the God King, Jesus of Nazareth. As Arthur remarked,
'A religion which teaches forgiveness but persecutes each other and any other religion seems very odd to me.'
I couldn't help but agree with him.
I could keep up easily with events outside, then the men from across the sea, the Normans, over ran Albion. This was the first time Arthur sensed his body trying to wake. 'Quickening' he called it. Gia and myself did notice his colour change slightly, but it faded after a few weeks.
Many, many changes arose in the world outside. The building of very fine churches and stone castles after laying waste the lands and wholesale slaughter of the Northern peoples of Albion.
Then my visits with Arthur became shorter and my time away longer. The feuding House of Plantagenet, ending with Henry, the seventh of that name, were to blame for this. The rise of the merchant classes. His son, the long lived, and much married, Henry VIII. Huge persecutions on the grounds of religious adherence until finally Albion, or England as she had become then, enjoyed a good measure of prosperity when the first Elizabeth acceded to the throne. It was around this time when Gia passed on to the great beyond. I missed her and Arthur and I mourned for her. Tienas didn't understand this concept. He was pleased his mother had passed on to her time of rest, with honour, as befitting a Warrior Sidhes.
We'd shared many conversations over the millennia, Gia and myself. She couldn't join me when I spoke to Arthur in that in-between place. All she ever saw was an old man, barely breathing, and a young man, preserved by her magic, his essence prevented from journeying on to the great beyond, leaving him in a gentle kind of limbo, long after his life had ended. I would tell her what we discussed and his comments when I finally awoke in need of sustenance or rest then she and I would talk about the news from the world of men.
As the world outside turned and changed, and man developed, Gia was ever at her post looking after Arthur, replenishing the magic when needed, ensuring he would never age and his body would be strong and able against the time when he was needed again.
Between us we even drew out the tip of Mordred's sword, that tiny piece of magically enhanced metal which had cut short Arthur's life. Since we'd removed it, I always wore it. It served two purposes; reminding me, as if I needed to be reminded, exactly why I was doing this, and, paradoxically, keeping me close to my friend. It had lain within his body for more than three hundred years, was almost part of him. All he had to show for the mortal wound now was a neat, pale pink scar. That piece of metal now also served as a memorial to a loyal and faithful Sidhes Warrior Woman.
Rampant disease ran throughout Europe, decimated the population and brought about the end of feudalism. Arthur took that rather badly, if I remember correctly.
The execution of a King and yet another civil war. I did find the Puritans a rather dour lot, they reminded me of Uther; set against anything which smacked of sorcery.
I'd thought the pace of change to be getting rather speedy up to this point but with the advent of the late 1700's I knew I had been so wrong! I was reduced to quick forays outside then reporting back with much news. Industrial change, agricultural change, social change, mass emigration, political change. By the time we got another long-lived Queen on the throne, Victoria by name, I was feeling every one of my rather considerable years of age but I couldn't stop. Now there was even more to see and understand.
Nineteen thirteen was the first time Arthur's body began to awake in this century. The quickening had lasted a little longer this time, perhaps six months. It faded though as it had every other time. It wasn't long before the outbreak of another round of hostilities. It happened again in nineteen thirty-eight and again six years later. Now I had to report on radio, radar, aircraft and a couple of rather odd ones, first of all the mechanical calculating machines then the electronic brain. A pity my gift of prophecy isn't that well developed or I could have foreseen how this last one would save me such a lot of legwork.
Slowly I surface from the centuries of information I have gathered and look around. Tienas has gone off on Sidhes business, so it's just Arthur and myself. Despite the electronic information I can access at the click of a button, even in here, I know I need to leave again soon.
I still go out because it's the only way to get a real sense of events but that aching loneliness comes over me so quickly these days, I have to head back after just a few weeks now. At least with modern technology I can cover more ground in this age.
This trip out I have the overwhelming need to return after just ten days. However it is more than enough to see how bad is the civil unrest caused by food and services shortages. The tumultuous weather which has been affecting not just this land but the whole planet for some years now, is to blame for crop failures and poor harvests, even in this temperate English island.
I take off my soaking coat, hat and shoes, and use magic to dry those items and the rest of me then I sit back on the plain wooden chair preparing to fall into a trance. For some reason though it isn't happening. Maybe I'm tired? I did have a long cold walk from where my rather elderly automobile broke down. I exhale, going back to basics; slowing my breathing and getting ready to concentrate. My eyes snap open. I can hear more than my breathing in here. Quickly I check for intruders but, with the Sidhes on guard, that's going to be unlikely. No, just me and Arthur. I look at him, then look again.
I lean over him, brushing an errant blonde lock off his forehead, the contrast between his creamy skin and my crabbed, age spotted, wrinkled hand could not be greater. His eyes are open and he's staring at the roof of the cavern then his gaze shifts and his mouth crooks up into a half smile as his hand comes up to cup my cheek, his other hand reaching for mine.
The hand that receives his grasp is pale and strong, the skin taut and young. However, I don't notice that until a lot later, I'm far too busy at that moment trying to master my overflowing tear ducts and an overpowering urge to wrap my arms around him and never let go. Arthur has no such inhibitions, he sits up and holds me tightly, as touch starved as I am.
'Merlin. My faithful Merlin.'