The crystal cave - Mary Stewart [92]
"I can tell you something straight away: that's been tried, and it doesn't work." He was looking at the pulley I had rigged to lift the model. "That might do for the uprights, but only the lighter ones, and it doesn't work at all for the cap-stones."
"No. I'd found that out. But I'd had an idea...I was going to tackle it another way."
"You're wasting your time. Let's see you getting down to something practical, something we need and can use. Now, that idea of yours for a light mobile crane might be worth developing..."
A few minutes later he was called away. I dismantled the model, and sat down to my new calculations. I had not told Tremorinus about them; he had more important things to think about, and in any case he would have laughed if I had told him I had learned from a poet how to lift the standing stones.
It had happened this way.
One day about a week before this, as I walked by the water that guarded the town walls, I heard a man singing. The voice was old and wavering, and hoarse with over-use -- the voice of a professional singer who has strained it above the noise of the crowd, and through singing with the winter cold in his throat. What caught my attention was neither the voice nor the tune, which could hardly be picked out, but the sound of my own name.
Merlin, Merlin, where art thou going
He was sitting by the bridge, with a bowl for begging. I saw that he was blind, but the remnant of his voice was true, and he made no gesture with his bowl as he heard me stop near him, but sat as one sits at a harp, head bent, listening to what the strings say, with fingers stirring as if they felt the notes. He had sung, I would judge, in kings' halls.
Merlin, Merlin, where art thou going
So early in the day with thy black dog?
I have been searching for the egg,
The red egg of the sea-serpent,
Which lies by the shore in the hollow stone.
And I go to gather cresses in the meadow,
The green cress and the golden grasses,
The golden moss that gives sleep,
And the mistletoe high on the oak, the druids' bough
That grows deep in the woods by the running water.
Merlin, Merlin, came back from the wood and the fountain!
Leave the oak and the golden grasses
Leave the cress in the water-meadow,
And the red egg of the sea-serpent
In the foam by the hollow stone!
Merlin, Merlin, leave thy seeking!
There is no diviner but God.
Nowadays this song is as well known as the one of Mary the Maiden, or the King and the Grey Seal, but it was the first time I had heard it. When he knew who it was who had stopped to listen, he seemed pleased that I should sit beside him on the bank, and ask questions. I remember that on that first morning we talked mostly of the song, then of himself; I found he had been as a young man on Mona, the druids' isle, and knew Caer'n-ar-Von and had walked on Snowdon. It was in the druids' isle that he had lost his sight; he never told me how, but when I told him that the sea-weeds and cresses that I hunted along the shore were only plants for healing, not for magic, he smiled and sang a verse I had heard my mother sing, which, he said, would be a shield. Against what, he did not say, nor did I ask him. I put money into his bowl, which he accepted with dignity, but when I promised to find a harp for him he went silent, staring with those empty eye-sockets, and I could see he did not believe me. I brought the harp next day; my father was generous, and I had no need even to tell him what the money was for. When I put the harp into the old singer's hands he wept, then took my hands and kissed them.
After that, right up to the time I left Brittany, I often sought him out. He had travelled widely, in lands as far apart as Ireland and Africa. He taught me songs from every country, Italy and Gaul and the white North, and older songs from the East -- strange wandering