Merlin by Jane Yolen Read Free Book Online Page B

commanded Merlin, "do your duty to this King Bear."
    Inexplicably, the dog stopped and bowed its head. Then, when Artus laughed delightedly, and clapped his berry-stained hands, the dog turned and ran back down the path as if to scout the long, perilous way.

Light.
    Morn.
    "How can I continue, how can I rule now that he is gone?"
    "
You are king, my lord. He was just an old mage. And he lacked all humility. "
    "Hush. He was my father. He was my teacher. He was my friend. "
    "A king has no friends, my lord. "
    "
Not even you, Gwen?"
    "
Not even me, Arthur."
    "
You are wrong, you know. He was my friend from the first moment I saw him. Though I did not
know then—or ever—what he truly was. Sometimes he seemed to me to he as fierce as a wild dog, sometimes as husy as an ant, ofttimes as slippery as a trout. He was a hawk, a hobby, a merlin. "
    "
He was a man, my lord."
    "
Not a man like me, Gwen."
    "
No one is like you, Arthur."
    "
No one?"
    "
You are the king.
"
    "
So am I powerful?
"
    "
Very powerful. "
    "
That is good. If I am powerful, then no one can hurt me. Or mine. So why do I hurt so now that he is gone?
"
    And he calls his servants to him with a bell that sounds like a tamed hawk's jesses, like the sound of spears clashing on earth, that place perilously juxtaposed between heaven and hell.

Author's Note
    The story of Merlin, King Arthur's great court magician, is not one story but many. Tales about him have been told in England, in Scotland, in Ireland, in Wales, in Brittany, France, Germany, and beyond. In some of the stories he is a Druid priest, in others a dream-reader, a shape-shifter, a wild man in the woods.
    In Geoffrey of Monmouth's twelfth-century
Vita Merlini—The Life of Merlin
—the great magician goes insane and runs off into the woods for a while where he lives as a wild man and only music can soothe him.
    Wild men were popular figures in medieval literature and art. Known also as wodewose, they were sung about in French romances, found in sophisticated paintings, woven into enormous tapestries, carved onto ornamented weapons. There was even a famous set of fifteenth-century German playing cards that had a suit called "wild men." But the wold man or wild man was outside of the strictly ordered medieval society, a kind of jester, preternaturally wise. Often he became mixed up in the folk mind with the ancient gods of the woods: Silvanus, the Green Man, Robin o' the Wood, Robin Hood.
    In the old stories of Merlin and Arthur, Merlin's roles were various. In some he was there at Arthur's conception, helping Arthur's father, Uther Pendragon, and Arthur's mother, Ygraine, get together by supernatural means. In other stories he is Arthur's teacher, patient and wise. In others he is the architect of Arthur's Camelot, of Stonehenge, of the round table. In all, he is a figure of magic, of mystery, his own history beguiling, a fatherless (and perhaps even motherless) figure who helps raise Arthur the child.
    I have taken bits and pieces of these stories, reworked them extensively, and added to them information about the wodewose societies where the men were often pictured as one-eyed monsters (like the Greek Cyclops) dressed in bearskins with shaggy, bristly, ugly wives. That there were outlaw groups living in the vast forests of old Britain, we know. Whether Merlin—boy or man—ever encountered any such is the realm of the storyteller.
    â€”J. Y.