The Last Enchantment - Mary Stewart [145]
What it was, I would not allow myself to think. I was like a man alone in an empty room, contented enough, but listening for sounds beyond the shut door, and waiting with half a hope for someone to come, though knowing in his heart of hearts that he would not.
But he did.
He came on a golden evening, in about the middle of the month. There was a full moon, which had stolen, like a ghost, into the sky long before sunset. It hung behind the apple boughs like a great misty lantern, its light slowly waxing, as the sky around it darkened, to apricot and gold. I was in the stillroom, crumbling a pile of dried hyssop. The jars stood clean and ready. The room smelled of hyssop and of the racks of apples and plums laid on the shelves to ripen. A few late wasps droned, and a butterfly, snared by the room's warmth, flattened rich wings against the stone of the window-frame. I heard the light step behind me, and turned.
Magician they call me, and it is true. But I neither expected his coming nor heard him until I saw him standing there in the dusk, lit by the deepening gold of the moon. He might have been a ghost, so did I stand and stare, transfixed. The meeting in the mist on the Island's shore had come back to me frequently, but never as something real; with every effort of recall it became more and more of a dream, something imagined, a hope only.
Now the real boy was here, flushed and breathing, smiling, but not quite at ease, as if unsure of his welcome. He held a bundle which, I supposed, must contain his goods. He was dressed in grey, with a cloak the colour of beech-buds. He had no ornaments, and no weapons.
He began: "I don't suppose you remember me, but -- "
"Why should I not? You are the boy who is not Ninian."
"Oh, but I am. I mean, it is one of my names. Truly."
"I see. So when I called you -- "
"Yes. When you spoke first, I thought you must know me; but then -- when you said who you were -- I knew you were mistaken, and -- well, I was afraid. I'm sorry. I should have told you straight away, instead of running away like that. I'm sorry."
"But when I told you that I wanted to teach you my art, and asked you to come to me, you agreed to do so. Why?"
His hands, white on the bundle, clenched and twisted in the fold of the cloth. He hung still on the threshold, as if poised to run. "That was...When you said that he -- this other boy -- had been the -- the kind of person who could learn from you...You had felt it all along, you said, and he had known it, too. Well -- " he swallowed, " -- I believe that I am, too. I have felt, all my life, that there were doors in the back of the mind that would open on light, if one could only find the key." He faltered, but his eyes did not waver from mine.
"Yes?" I gave him no help.
"Then when you spoke to me like that, suddenly, out of the mist, it was like a dream come true. Merlin himself, speaking to me by name, and offering me the very key...Even when I realized that you had mistaken me for someone else, who was dead, I had a wild thought that perhaps I could come to you and take his place...Then of course I saw how stupid that was, to think I could deceive you, of all people. So I did not dare to come."
"But now you have dared."
"I had to." He spoke simply, stating a fact. "I have thought of nothing else since that night. I was afraid, because...I was afraid,