The Last Enchantment by Mary Stewart Read Free Book Online Page B

the valley's foot. There was a ripe autumn moon that showed me my way. The chestnut leaves, already loosened and drifting, fell here and there quietly to the grass, but the oaks still held their leaves, so that the air was full of rustling as the dry boughs stirred and whispered. The land after the rain smelled rich and soft, ploughing weather, nutting weather, the squirrel-time for winter's coming.
    Below me on the shadowed slope something moved. There was a stirring of grasses, a pattering, then, like the sound of a hail-storm sweeping past, a herd of deer went by, as swiftly as swallows flying. They were very near. The moonlight struck the dappled coats and the ivory tips of the tines. So close they were that I even saw the liquid shine of their eyes. There were pied deer and white, ghosts of dapple and silver, scudding as lightly as their own shadows, and as swiftly as a sudden squall of wind. They fled by me, down to the valley foot, between the breasts of the rounded hills and up round a curve of oak trees, and were gone.
    They say that a white deer is a magical creature. I believe that this is true. I had seen two such in my life, each one the herald of a marvel. These, too, seen in the moonlight, scudding like clouds into the trees'
    darkness, seemed things of magic. Perhaps, with the Old Ones, they haunted a hill that still held an open gate to the Otherworld.
    I crossed the stream, climbed the next hill, and made my way up toward the ruinous walls that crowned it. I picked my way through the debris of what looked like ancient outworks, then climbed the last steep rise of the path. There was a gate set in a high, creeper-covered wall. It was open. I went in.
    I found myself in the precinct, a wide courtyard stretching the full width of the flat hilltop. The moonlight, growing stronger every moment, showed a stretch of broken pavement furred with weeds. Two sides of the precinct were enclosed by high walls with broken tops; on the other two there had once been large buildings, of which some portions were still roofed. The place, in that light, was still impressive, roofs and pillars showing whole in the moonlight. Only an owl, flying silently from an upper window, showed that the place had long been deserted, and was crumbling back into the hill.
    There was another building set almost in the middle of the court. The gable of its high roof stood up sharply against the moon, but moonlight fell through empty windows. This, I knew, must be the shrine.
    The buildings that edged the courtyard were what remained of the guest-houses and dormitories where pilgrims and suppliants had lodged; there were cells, walled in, windowless and private, such as I had known at Pergamum, where people slept, hoping for healing dreams, or visions of divination.
    I went softly forward over the broken pavement. I knew what I would find; a shrine full of dust and cold air, like the abdicatedtempleofMithras at Segontium. But it was possible, I told myself, as I trod up the steps and between the still-massive doorposts of the central cella, that the old gods who had sprung, like the oak trees and the grass and the rivers themselves — it was possible that these beings made of the air and earth and water of our sweet land, were harder to dislodge than the visiting gods of Rome. Such a one, I had long believed, was mine. He might still be here, where the night air blew through the empty shrine, filling it with the sound of the trees.
    The moonlight, falling through the upper windows and the patches of broken roof, lit the place with a pure, fierce light. Some sapling, rooted high up in the masonry, swayed in the breeze, so that shadow and cold light moved and shifted over the dimness within. It was like being at the bottom of a well-shaft; the air, shadow and light, moved like water against the skin, as pure and as cold. The mosaic underfoot, rippled and uneven where the ground had shifted beneath it, glimmered like the floor of the sea, its