The lady Morgana was roused from her meditations by a sudden chill. She felt as though someone had stepped on her grave.
A crescent moon hung in the evening sky, bright and curved as a Druid's sickle, but glowing silver instead of golden. The weak light slanted into Morgana's chamber, where she sat in the midst of a circle. At four points the circle's circumference had been marked by the four elements: a burning candle, a bowl of water, soil from holy ground, and a feather from a blackbird's wing.
She sensed that Arthur and Emrys were nearby. She wished she could use magic to spy out others - it was a skill Morgause had never taught her.
"Your visions are special, sister," Morgause had said. "Fewer than one sorceress in a hundred has the gift of true prophecy. The Sight is so strong in you, unbidden and untaught. The rest of us may scry in the elements, and make them show us other points in space, but you see through time… "
But Morgana could not experience visions at will. Nimueh had been so attuned to the element of Water, that she could command it to show her whatever she wished. Morgause had preferred the Earth. She had drawn forth the earth's bones, precious crystals, and they had yielded visions to her. Yet Morgana had never been able to see such images, neither in Water nor Earth nor Fire.
Impatience, and fear, gripped her. She moved forward, crawling to the edge of the circle like a child. She seized the bowl of consecrated water and shook it, churning it into ripples.
"Show me Arthur and Emrys!" she shouted. "Show me! By the Triple Goddess I command you! By all the elements I conjure you! By my right as the last priestess of the Isle of the Blest, I bid you show me!"
The surface of the bowl smoothed, and glowed with light. Suddenly she saw Merlin, striding through a formless landscape, a place of alien darkness, shifting with geometries and angles that offended the eye. She saw Arthur as she had never seen him before, naked, wounded, yet outlined with fire, bursting with rays of light even as a god.
Then the images faded, and the figure of an old woman, hooded and hunched, appeared in the bowl of water. Morgana recoiled as she recognised the Cailleach.
"He is your destiny!" the old crone whispered, in a voice that cut through the worlds, chilling Morgana to the bone. "And your doom!" The Cailleach swooped towards Morgana, and her wrinkled, wizened hand burst from the surface of the bowl. Dripping wet, the hand seized Morgana's wrist. Morgana looked down in terror, and saw that the image of the Cailleach in the mirror had become her own reflection, that she herself, aged beyond recognition, was the guardian of death's veil.
She shouted and struck at the bowl, which overturned, spilling its contents over the floor.
The visions faded.
She was alone.
"For the belief of Pythagoras prevails among [the Gauls], that the souls of men are immortal and that after a prescribed number of years they commence upon a new life, the soul entering into another body."
- Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica, c. 60-30 BC.
When Merlin passed through the door, he found himself on a strip of shore surrounded by immense blackness. There were no stars in the inky sky, and the only light came from a torch thrust into the white sand. Around him was nothing but the ocean. He could not see the water, except for specks of light glinting on the waves closest to him, but he could hear the massive weight of the sea as it stirred, hungry to swallow the earth.
On the opposite side of the sandbar was a door hewn of luminous coral and studded with pearls. Between this door and Merlin was a tumble of rocks, rough-cut boulders strewn across the sand, like pebbles scattered by giant children at play. On the highest rock Merlin saw a female figure bound by chains. She turned her face when he took a step, and he recognised the high cheekbones and malevolent eyes.
It was Sophia, the woman of the Sidhe who had sought to drown Arthur. When Merlin had last seen her, she had been standing in the waters of the fairy lake, chanting words to offer Arthur's soul to her kin. Merlin had struck her with her own magic staff, and her ashes had scattered into the rippling pool.
Gone was Sophia's ethereal beauty. Her features were bloated, distorted like those of a wax figure held to flame. Her eyes were bloody red, and her lank hair was plastered to her face. Her pallid body shivered, and her joints were raw where the manacles dug into them. When she saw Merlin, she opened her mouth and retched, coughing up water.
"So," she said, when the spasm had passed, in an old woman's voice. "You have come to gloat, Merlin."
"I have done no such thing," said Merlin. "Believe me, I had no desire to see you again. I thought you were gone forever."
"Things are not so simple for mortals, it seems." She raised her head and looked out to sea. "If you're here, I suppose that means it will come soon…"
"What will?"
"The beast."
All of a sudden, Merlin felt a shiver of fear. He followed Sophia's gaze, looking in the direction of the water, but he could still see nothing except the very closest waves. He felt vulnerable and exposed on this tiny bank of sand in the endless blackness.
"What beast?" he said.
"I cannot say," Sophia went on, "how long I have been here. Since that day you struck me down, I have been chained to this stone. Each day the tide comes in, flooding this shore, and I drown… but I never die. When I was mortal, I would have done anything to return to eternal life. But now I would do anything to pass into oblivion. You can end this, Merlin."
Merlin felt sick.
"One day, years or weeks ago - time never seems to pass here - a sea-woman came out of the water. I told her I didn't know what happened to mortal souls after they died - we had no need to learn of it in Avalon - and I begged her to tell me when this life would end. She told me the Nazarin prophets believe a great beast will come out of the sea. A beast with seven heads, each head having ten horns wearing ten crowns, and upon those heads the name of blasphemy." She looked at Merlin. "Perhaps you are the herald of the beast."
"I don't know what you mean," said Merlin. "You shouldn't believe everything magical creatures say. You know better than anyone how deceitful they are."
He began to move, but Sophia called out to him.
"Wait," she said. "This door won't open for you, Merlin, not yet. You must show command over Water to gain the key. I can tell you how."
Merlin stopped.
"You don't understand do you?" Sophia went on. "Power great enough to eclipse that of my kind, who live for centuries, and yet you have the understanding of an unlettered boy. Power without wisdom, such a poor combination."
"And I suppose you have the wisdom I need?" Merlin said. "I don't think so. You were poorly named. There was nothing in you but the desire to kill others to further your own life."
"I wanted," said Sophia, "to save my life, and that of my father. Was that such a wrong? Have you never killed to preserve the life of Arthur? You struck down my father and me..."
"I have only killed for Arthur in self-defence. What you tried to do was murder. Arthur never did you any harm."
"Arthur is a murderer himself! Do you know how many followers of the Old Religion he's killed?"
"You care nothing for those people' deaths. What did the Sidhe do to protect the innocent from Camelot's wars? Arthur's guilt tortures him every day. He feels the burden of every life he's taken on his conscience. Something you could never relate to."
Sophia opened her mouth as if to speak again, but suddenly she became even paler, and she slumped back in her chains as if cowering from something. She was staring beyond Merlin, at the dark ocean.
Merlin became aware that a light was shining from behind him. A thrill of fear advanced along his spine, but he ignored it, and turned.
A man was striding towards them over the surface of the water, as if the ocean were nothing more than a field of grass. Golden light enveloped his body and spread outwards from him, driving back the darkness, and where his booted feet trod on the black sea, the waves were turned for an instant into wildflowers, as if the man passed through many worlds at once. He held a golden spear in his right hand like a king's sceptre.
When the man stepped onto the shore, Merlin was transfixed by his features. He was beautiful, his skin pale as sea-foam, his hair dark and curling like ocean currents, his eyes black pearls, his lips red corals. He wore a coronet of beaten gold set with sapphire, and a cloak of mist trailed from his shoulders, merging into the sea, as if the waves were his train-bearers. His lower body was encircled by a garment of rippling turquoise, but his upper body was bare. His neck and arms were clasped by golden bracelets, and blue sinuous tattoos clung to his limbs, but he needed no ornament. For his body was as perfectly proportioned as those of the sculptured angels atop the cathedrals, every line and form proclaiming a divine harmony.
Merlin could feel raw magical power radiating from the man, greater than any he had felt before, even from the Dragon Queen. What was this being? If he were a sorcerer, he must be the most powerful in the world.
"Well met, Emrys," the man bellowed, in a voice like the breaking of waves on rocky shores. "How strange to behold ye here. Are ye returnin' to us?"
Merlin bowed his head. "Who are you, Master?" he said. "I cannot recall meeting you before."
"What?" said the man. "I forget your soul is still bound to the Great Wheel! Ye have been clothed in the flesh of men for too long, that ye forget even me, old friend!
"As for who I am, every fisherman's wife knows me. I'm the Sailor's Friend, the storm-bringer! I am the last face drownin' men see, the watcher at the gates of life and death. I scatter enemy fleets, I bring the good catch, I fill sails, I find safe harbour for seals! The gods fear to offend me, but every fishwife makes bold to curse me when her husband's boat is sea-lost…"
The man's titles, and his appearance, stirred something in Merlin's memory. He had seen certain scrolls of the Old Religion, rare and badly preserved as they now were.
"I know you," Merlin said. "Or rather, I've heard tell of you. You're… the sea king. Mannanan Mac Lyr, they call you."
"Aha," said Mannanan. "So learnin' has not disappeared completely from the world of Men. I had been wonderin' what they teach in those church schools. Every soul who washes up on the shores of my country these days is uneducated. Always singin' some pretty hymns in Italic, then askin' for the saints to save them. They have no Druidlore, no bards' songs, no knowledge of the Old Ways. Too much book learnin' they have, and not enough remembrance of the bards' wisdom, which cannot be put down in words.
"But why came ye here, Emrys, if not to walk in the land of the Ever-Livin'?"
"I'm looking for the shade of my father. I need to find the Dragonlords, to learn their art."
"Ah now," said the Sea-King. "Dragonlords are a tricky race of men. Not many mortals can swallow the powers of a beast so magical as the dragon. They became somethin' else afterwards, never quite one thing nor the other. Well, ye are on the right track. Pass through yon door, it'll take ye closer to your goal."
"I don't know how to open it."
"Have ye forgotten everythin'? Well, I suppose ye are as a babe now, with no Druids left in Camelot to guide sorcerers in the Old Wisdom. I'll show ye the key. That's no difficult thing. Walk with me."
They approached the door together, and when they had drawn close, Merlin saw there was a small, deep rock-pool set in the floor of the sandbank. The liquid within was so clear and pure that he could see straight to the bottom. Something glinted down there, half buried within it.
"Is that all?" said Merlin. "I thought it would be more difficult. I just have to get the key out of the pool?"
"'Tis not quite so easy as that. Ye cannot take this key by magic, nor remove the water. Ye must enter the pool, and bring the key up yer own self."
"I can't hold my breath that long," said Merlin.
"Bless ye, child," said the Sea-King, "ye'll not go in your own shape, but take the form of a creature proper to Water."
Merlin stared at the being beside him. For a moment he was taken aback, once again, by the Sea-King's otherworldly beauty. He had heard that dwellers in the magical realms had no substantial existence, that they were beings of illusion and shadow, who stole the forms and offspring of men, precisely because they had no solid shape of their own. But now it seemed to Merlin that, if anything, the opposite was true. The being beside him seemed more real than anything Merlin had witnessed before, and his form was so radiantly perfect that, beside him, Merlin felt that he was the unreal one, that his own humanity was a mere thing of daydream and mist, melting before the sunny rays of the Fey's presence.
"Why do ye hesitate, lad?"
"Good master," said Merlin, "I have no skill in changing my shape. I thought such abilities were beyond mankind. People say the magicians of old could do it, even the bear-men of the Vykings, and the gods of the Old Religion, but I have never been taught such a thing."
"Then how do ye propose to learn the Art of the Dragonlords? Ye who cannot even shed your human skin?"
"I… was gifted the Dragontongue by my father. He never told me the Dragonlords were shape-changers. I can speak the tongue of Dragons. Are you saying… the Dragonlords could take the forms of any beasts they tamed?"
"Much has been lost from your awareness, Emrys. One cannot speak the tongue of dragons without havin' a soul of equal temper to theirs. And when one's soul has expanded to contain all things, it is not so difficult to change one's outer form to correspond to one's inner nature."
"Then may you teach me this skill?"
"Indeed I may not. But I may help ye to remember it."
The Sea-King pulled a small flask from somewhere in his cloak. He unstopped it, and a wisp of vapour twined from the flask's mouth, and condensed into a single drop of clear liquid on Mannanan's fingertip. The Sea-King stretched out his hand, offering the liquid to Merlin, but Merlin hesitated.
"One drop," said Mannanan, "will restore enough of your power for this. Take it."
Merlin did not move.
"How now," said Mannanan, "do ye mistrust me? I know well ye have taken the Host from those Nazarin priests, for I can smell their rituals on your breath. Will ye eat the flesh of the Italic god from a befrocked necromancer of the Church, but scorn the magic food of your own ancestors? Have ye so little regard for the Old Religion, ye who are meant to be its prophet and its protector?"
"Beg pardon, Master," said Merlin, "but not all I have met from the Old Religion have been kindly disposed towards me. Nimueh, Morgause, the witch Morgana…"
"They were all human," said the Sea-King, "for all their pretensions to divinity, and they had more than their share of human weakness. That is what Uther achieved, by destroyin' the priesthood of the Old Religion. Power hates a vacuum, and with their sages gone, the sorcerers resorted to weak and wicked leaders. I came to the aid of Morgana and Nimueh when they called upon me by the proper rites. But that does not mean I bear them love, or ye malice. For the sea is partial to none, and the storm falls upon the just and the unjust also. I have come to your aid now, Merlin, and if ye have wisdom, ye will not scorn me."
Still Merlin hesitated.
"If ye had no faith in me," said the Sea-King, "why did ye entrust the body and soul of the Druid girl Freya to me?"
Merlin stared at Mannanan's face. "What do you mean?" he asked. "I didn't entrust her to you."
"The Druids bury their dead by Fire or Earth. But you buried the Druid girl in Water, though she was no fallen warrior…"
"There was a lake she loved. A place surrounded by wildflowers…"
"And know ye not that all the dead who pass through the gates of Water are watched over by me? And did she come to a bad end for it?"
That settled it for Merlin. He knelt instinctively, as if he were receiving the Host, even though the Sea-King had mocked him for accepting it. Wasn't this magical food reckoned just as holy by the people of the Old Faith? The hand of the elder being stretched towards him, like that of the priest offering the flesh and blood of the Living God. The finger of Mannanan touched Merlin's lips, and it tasted of salt winds and perfumed meadows, and Merlin's own skin felt as insubstantial as mist against it. Then Merlin's lips parted, and he tasted of the sacred water.
For an instant, the sky opened around him, and he felt he could see into and hear many worlds at once. Flashes of memory erupted in his mind like leaping fire. He saw a naked woman dancing before him, tattooed with blue striated lines, with heavy gold jewels adorning her body. He saw soldiers dressed in the old Palatine fashion, with short skirts and crested helmets, cutting down sacred groves, putting priests to the sword. He heard the voices of animals, understood the stag as it fled before him, heard the lullaby the doe sang to her fawn. He saw the Druid elders butchered, the Palatine Empire collapsed, the barbarian Saxons darkening the shores of Brython.
He remembered how to change. Hadn't his soul already passed through many, many forms, countless times before? There was no new thing under the sun.
He rose, and went to the pool, and dived into it. Before he struck the surface, his body rippled, taking on silvery scales, and he plunged into the cool water, breathing it like air. He kicked his tail, powering straight down to the bottom, grasping the golden key in his mouth, tugging it out of the sand. Then he rose like an arrow, breaking through the surface, and coming to rest in his human form beside the Sea-King.
"A good shape," observed Mannanan. "Do ye know why the salmon is wise?"
Merlin took the key out of his mouth, staring at his human hand as though seeing it for the first time. He shook his head mutely.
"Because most fish live either in fresh water, or the sea. They can know but one life or the other. But the salmon is born and nurtured in the rivers, and when it has grown strong enough, it escapes to the vast ocean. And afterwards it returns to fresh water to die and spawn new life. So it passes between two states of being, and no barrier holds it. So ye, too, Emrys, must pass back and forth between the worlds many times, though ye will fight bitterly against the current all the while. We shall see how far ye get in the end…
"Now unlock the door. Ye have earned it."
And Merlin stepped around the pool, placed the key into the coral door, and twisted it. The lock clicked.
He turned, and looked the Sea-King. "Thank you," he said.
"Do not thank me yet," said Mannanan gravely. "Ye may not like what lies beyond this door. But ye have regained the power of transformation. And that is no small feat. Before ye pass through, however, one task remains…"
Mannanan turned, and looked back towards the rock tower, where the prone figure of Sophia was slumped back in her chains.
"What will become of her?" Merlin asked.
"Ye will decide that, Emrys. Ye have the power to alter her fate now, if ye wish."
So Merlin went back to the rock, and stood before Sophia. She opened her eyes and looked at him, her expression dead.
"I am going to end your torment, now," said Merlin. "Not because I owe you anything, but because I would not be alive myself without the kindness of strangers. And I have been reminded today that to give help with no expectation of reward is its own virtue. And I would not lose that part of myself. Therefore I free you, with the power of transformation I have gained."
Merlin stretched forth his hand, and the great boulder to which Sophia was chained rose into the air. Merlin turned with a smooth motion, and the rock flew across the sand and hovered over the sea. The chains binding Sophia shattered, and both she and the stone fell, plunging into the dark water.
Instantly, the surface of the black ocean changed, rippling with light, becoming translucent aquamarine. The boulder resurfaced, floating on the tides, and Sophia was reclined upon it.
She was healed, restored to her formed beauty. Her disfigurement, the bloated face, the dead drowned skin, were all changed into smooth and living flesh. Her hair fell in honey-coloured locks. From her waist down, she was a sea-creature, with a finned tail, whose scales flashed and winked in every colour of the rainbow.
"Thank you, Emrys," she said, her voice no longer ravaged, but as pure as bell's chime.
The Sea-King came to Merlin's side.
"What will become of her now?" asked Merlin.
Mannanan said, "I will open the way for her to the oceans of Men. She will join my escort of sea-nymphs, who live for centuries. If she performs good deeds, sendin' favourable currents to the distressed, preservin' the drowning and shipwrecked, she may yet earn an immortal soul. Through her own merits, and without havin' to sacrifice another livin' thing."
"Emrys," said Sophia, "because you have given me another chance at life, I will spend it in penance for what I did to Arthur. Full nets will the fishermen of Camelot have to feed their children, and the sea will cast up pearls and corals for Camelot's merchants to trade. Enemy fleets who come against your shores will be slowed and turned away by the currents I send. I will do this for Arthur, and his children, and his children's children, until the end of my days, when the gods take me, and I become no more than sea-foam on the waves."
"So be it," said Merlin.
Mannanan turned to Merlin, and grasped his hand.
"Ye may have forgotten your wisdom," he said, "but your kindness remains unchanged. Now go, and know we shall meet again."
And Merlin left the Sea-King and the sea-nymph behind, and went to the door, which opened before him.
A/N: Hi everyone, sorry for the delay. I have gotten extremely busy, so updates will probably slow down for a while. I decided to publish this, although it's only the first half of what I intended. The second half of this chapter will be a bit shorter so hopefully the next update won't take quite so long.