The crystal cave - Mary Stewart [24]
"A map."
I had never seen a map before. At first I could not see how it worked, but in a while, as he talked, I saw how the world lay there as a bird sees it, with roads and rivers like the radials of a spider's web, or the guidelines that lead the bee into the flower. As a man finds a stream he knows, and follows it through the wild moors, so, with a map, it is possible to ride from Rome to Massilia, or London to Caerleon, without once asking the way or looking for the milestones. This art was discovered by the Greek Anaximander, though some say the Egyptians knew it first. The map that Galapas showed me was a copy from a book by Ptolemy of Alexandria. After he had explained, and we had studied the map together, he bade me get out my tablet and make a map for myself, of my own country.
When I had done he looked at it. "This in the center, what is it?"
"Maridunum," I said in surprise. "See, there is the bridge, and the river, and this is the road through the market place, and the barrack gates are here."
"I see that. I did not say your town, Merlin, I said your country."
"The whole of Wales? How do I know what lies north of the hills? I've never been further than this."
"I will show you."
He put aside the tablet, and taking a sharp stick, began to draw in the dust, explaining as he did so. What he drew for me was a map shaped like a big triangle, not Wales only, but the whole of Britain, even the wild land beyond the Wall where the savages live. He showed me the mountains and rivers and roads and towns, London and Calleva and the places that cluster thick in the south, to the towns and fortresses at the ends of the web of roads, Segontium and Caerleon and Eboracum and the towns along the Wall itself. He spoke as if it were all one country, though I could have told him the names of the kings of a dozen places that he mentioned. I only remember this because of what came after.
Soon after this, when winter came and the stars were out early, he taught me their names and their powers, and how a man could map them as one would map the roads and townships. They made music, he said, as they moved. He himself did not know music, but when he found that Olwen had taught me, he helped me to make myself a harp. This was a rude enough affair, I suppose, and small, made of hornbeam, with the curve and fore-pillar of red sallow from the Tywy, and strung with hair from my pony's tail, where the harp of a prince (said Galapas) should have been strung with gold and silver wire. But I made the string-shoes out of pierced copper coins, the key and tuning-pins of polished bone, then carved a merlin on the sounding-board, and thought it a finer instrument than Olwen's. Indeed it was as true as hers, having a kind of sweet whispering note which seemed to pluck songs from the air itself. I kept it in the cave: though Dinias left me alone these days, being a warrior while I was only a sucking clerk, I would not have kept anything I treasured in the palace, unless I could lock it in my clothes-chest, and the harp was too big for that. At home for music I had the birds in the pear tree, and Olwen still sang sometimes. And when the birds were silent, and the night sky was frosted with light, I listened for the music of the stars. But I never heard it.
Then one day, when I was twelve years old, Galapas spoke of the crystal cave.
7
It is common knowledge that, with children, those things which are most important often go unmentioned. It is as if the child recognizes, by instinct, things which are too big for him, and keeps them in his mind, feeding them with his imagination till they assume proportions distended or grotesque which can become equally the stuff of magic or of nightmare.
So it was with the crystal cave.
I had never mentioned to Galapas my first experience there. Even to myself I had hardly admitted what came sometimes with light and fire; dreams, I had told myself, memories from below memory, figments of the brain only, like the voice which had told me of Gorlan, or the sight of the poison in