Arthur, the Always King

I
 
| ARTHUR’S CHILDHOOD |
 
Murk. Mud.
   Flecks and pads of salt foam whisked up from the roaring ocean. They flew over the jagged sea cliff.
   In the almost dark, a man who may have been young, maybe old, and probably both carefully picked his way along the path leading from the castle on the cliΩtop toward the little village of Tintagel. Just one slip or trip and he’d have been food for the fishes. Then the man tramped up the path from the village leading to the manor of Sir Ector, two miles inland.
   Look! This man—his name is Merlin—is carrying something very, very small. Wrapped in a cloth of gold.
   A swaddled baby no more than two or three days old.
   A baby called Arthur.
 
 
But Arthur’s story begins nine months and a few days before this.
   It begins when Merlin used magic to trick Arthur’s mother, Ygerna, Duchess of Cornwall, into the arms of King Uther, who was passionately in love with her. The magician changed the king so that Uther looked and felt exactly like Ygerna’s own husband, Gorlois.
   So King Uther and Ygerna were spellbound, and Arthur was their son.
   And what was the price Merlin agreed with Uther? Nothing less than this: Ygerna was to give her baby to Merlin as soon as he was born. She would entrust him to the magician without knowing where Merlin was taking him, or who was looking after him, or even whether the child was still alive.
   Merlin spirited the baby away from sobbing Ygerna and carried him, pink and small as a shrimp, to his foster parents.
   So that is how this story really begins.
   Or did it begin long before that? Was it a gleam in the magician’s eye?
   Merlin tramped through the dark hours when nightmares galloped through the starless sky, snorting and neighing.
   Outside Sir Ector’s gate, a lantern swung in the wind, like a shining truth assailed by the swarming dark.
   A trustworthy knight, Sir Ector, with a capable wife, Margery, and a little son, Kay. A chunk of a farming man with an open smile who had a way of whistling back at the whistling choughs and curlews. A man who had learned to read and loved nothing more than to surround himself with candles and open a manuscript across his lap and tease out an old story.
   The magician made a fist of his right hand and knocked at the hefty oak door.
   Sir Ector and Lady Margery were ready. They had been waiting for this hour. Lady Margery herself swung open the door. At once, Merlin passed her the little parcel, and she cradled it and hurried away to Kay’s nursery. She had decided not to farm the new baby out to a wet nurse in the village but to feed him herself.
   But a world away, in a drafty castle room overlooking the welling and snatching sea, a voice was singing and sobbing:
   “My son! My son! Almost unbegun.”
   Little Arthur didn’t know that. As he began to grow up, what he knew was that he was Sir Ector and Lady Margery’s second son. Kay’s younger brother.
 
 
Sir Ector’s manor sat at the top of a tight valley between two hills, late to see the sunlight, quick to lose it. Sometimes the mist had a way of wrapping around it and clinging to it all day.
   A stranger could strain his eyes, unsure whether or not he could make out the manor.
   “We’re in this world and out of it,” Sir Ector pronounced with satisfaction.
   “Or in this world and in  another,” his friend Merlin suggested with a smile.
   “Between worlds,” said Sir Ector.
   “If I really had to live in any single place and time,” Merlin told him, “I would choose your manor.”
   Outside roamed the huge black dog who howled at night and galloped away over the moorland, yes, and screeching night-hags, and the prowling ghost who patrolled the cliΩ path beyond the castle: beings living between times, and between waking and dreams.
   But inside the manor house, with its mighty oak beams and moorstone walls, Arthur and Kay felt safe, and the magician often visited them there.
   “What’s what,” the cook Jolly often told the two boys before they understood what she meant. “Yes, you two need to know what’s what.”
   But as soon as they could understand anything, Arthur and Kay learned the difference between can and can’t and do and don’t, and the rules and rhythms of the manor.
   When Arthur was six and his brother almost eight, Sir Ector told his sons, “What I want is to see you two working at your skills so that you’ll become well-trained squires. Your fencing. Your tilting. Your wrestling. You haven’t even ridden to hounds yet. And your archery. Most of your arrows not only miss the bull; they miss the target altogether. And talking of bulls, I want you both to share the work of everyone here in this manor and in our village.”
   “Like blacksmithing,” said Arthur.
   “Cooking,” said Kay, sucking in his cheeks.
   “Shearing.”
   “Mucking out the stables.”
   “Felling.”
   “Wringing the necks of chickens,” said Kay. “I know—and if we hear a cock crowing, after noon, it’s a death-omen and we have to kill him at once.”
   “Why?” asked Arthur. “Why do we have to do diΩerent kinds of work?”
   “I’ll tell you,” said Sir Ector. “Think of a row of seven people with five people standing on their shoulders and three people standing on their shoulders, and—”
   “I see,” Arthur said. He flexed his knees and began to bounce.
   “We all depend on each other,” their father continued, wagging his finger at them. “And God assigns to each of us our responsibilities. You must learn what they are if you want to be squires, and that includes understanding what other people have to do.”
   “When will I become a squire?” Kay asked.
   “When I see that you’re ready to be,” his father replied. “And Arthur too. When you’ve improved your skills and learned your duties. When you’re fit in body and mind.”
   “When I’m eleven?” Kay pressed him.
   “Maybe.”
   “Is it true,” Kay asked his father, “that your sister, Lady Laudine, owns a townhouse in the City of Lon-don?”
   “It is.”
   Then the boys started to yap around Sir Ector and beg him to take them to see her and the house and all the sights of London, but he would have none of it.
   “Enough!” he said. “Now, then. Have either of you seen Merlin today? I need to speak to him.”
   No one ever knew where Merlin was. Not for long, anyhow. He had a way of entering or leaving a room without anyone noticing, and his idea of time was not the same as anyone else’s.
   “Time is what you make it,” he told Arthur. “You can speed it up. Slow it down.”
   “You can’t delay the sun rising,” said Arthur. “Can you?”
   Merlin just smiled.
   Once, the boys asked Merlin whether he had ever ridden to London and met Lady Laudine.
   “Have you really?”
   “You’ve never told us.”
   “Are the streets made of gold?”
   “Did you see a dancing bear?”
   “Is it true some houses are five
levels high?”
   “What were you doing there?”
   When the boys sang in tune—instead of getting in each other’s way, as they often did—Merlin felt as if he were being pelted with snowballs so thick and fast that he had no time to throw one himself.
   He held up his hands.
   “London shall mourn the death of twenty thousand and the Thames will be turned to blood,” he announced in a loud solemn voice.
   Arthur and Kay looked up at him, startled.
   “What is the Thames?” Arthur asked.
   “I will tell you about the giant hedgehog loaded with apples, and the heron, and the snake encircling London with its long tail. I will, but not today.”
   “Merlin!” cried the boys.
   “You know your father,” Merlin said. “He needs to see me, and he believes time never waits.”
   “But what do you mean? Twenty thousand . . . a giant hedgehog.”
   “I can tell you old prophecies,” Merlin replied. “I can’t tell you meanings. If you need to know meanings, you’ll have to find them out for yourselves.”