The crystal cave - Mary Stewart [11]
I turned my head. My uncle Camlach was coming down through the orchard.
He mounted the three shallow steps to the terrace, soft-footed in his elegant laced sandals, and stood looking down. I looked away. The moss between the stones had tiny white flowers no bigger than the lizard's eyes, each one perfect as a carved cup. To this day I remember the design on them as well as if I had carved it myself.
"Let me see," he said.
I didn't move. He crossed to the stone bench and sat down facing me, knees apart, clasped hands between them.
"Look at me, Merlin."
I obeyed him. He studied me in silence for a while.
"I'm always being told that you will not play rough games, that you run away from Dinias, that you will never make a soldier or even a man. Yet when the King strikes you down with a blow which would have sent one of his deerhounds yelping to kennel, you make no sound and shed no tear."
I said nothing.
"I think perhaps you are not quite what they deem you, Merlin."
Still nothing.
"Do you know why Gorlan came today?"
I thought it better to lie. "No."
"He came to ask for your mother's hand. If she had consented you would have gone with him to Brittany."
I touched one of the moss-cups with a forefinger. It crumbled like a puff-ball and vanished. Experimentally, I touched another. Camlach said, more sharply than he usually spoke to me: "Are you listening?"
"Yes. But if she's refused him it will hardly matter." I looked up. "Will it?"
"You mean you don't want to go? I would have thought..." He knitted the fair brows so like my grandfather's. "You would be treated honourably, and be a prince..."
"I am a prince now. As much a prince as I can ever be."
"What do you mean by that?"
"If she has refused him," I said, "he cannot be my father. I thought he was. I thought that was why he had come."
"What made you think so?"
"I don't know. It seemed -- " I stopped. I could not explain to Camlach about the flash of light in which Gorlan's name had come to me. "I just thought he must be."
"Only because you have been waiting for him all this time." His voice was calm. "Such waiting is foolish, Merlin. It's time you faced the truth. Your father is dead."
I put my hand down on the tuft of moss, crushing it. I watched the flesh of the fingers whiten with the pressure. "She told you that?"
"No." He lifted his shoulders. "But had he been still alive he would have been here long since. You must know that."
I was silent.
"And if he is not dead," pursued my uncle, watching me, "and still has never come, it can surely not be a matter for great grief on anyone's part?"
"No, except that however base he may be, it might have saved my mother something. And me." As I moved my hand, the moss slowly unfurled again, as if growing. But the tiny flowers had gone.
My uncle nodded. "She would have been wiser, perhaps, to have accepted Gorlan, or some other prince."
"What will happen to us?" I asked.
"Your mother wants to go into St. Peter's. And you -- you are quick and clever, and I am told you can read a little. You could be a priest."
"No!"
His brows came down again over the thin-bridged nose. "It's a good enough life. You're not warrior stock, that's certain. Why not take a life that will suit you, and where you'd be safe?"
"I don't need to be a warrior to want to stay free! To be shut up in a place like St. Peter's -- that's not the way -- " I broke off. I had spoken hotly, but found the words failing me. I could not explain something I did not know myself. I looked up eagerly: "I'll stay with you. If you cannot use me I -- I'll run away to serve some other prince. But I would rather stay with you."
"Well, it's early yet to speak of things like that. You're very young." He got to