The Last Enchantment - Mary Stewart [166]
After that a gap of time, and my own bed, and the taste of hot wine with herbs infused in it, and another long gap, this time of sleep.
***
Now we come to the part of my chronicle that is the most difficult to tell. Whether or not (as the popular belief went) the falling comet with the dragon's tail betokened the true end of Merlin's greater powers, I know that, looking back at the days and nights -- more, the weeks and months -- that followed, I cannot tell for certain whether what I remember was reality, or a dream. It was the year of my journeying with Nimuë. Looking back now, I see it, scene after scene, like reflections sliding past a boat, blurred and repeated, and broken, as the oars stir the water's glass. Or like the moments just before sleep, when scene after scene swims up into the mind's eye, the true memories like dreams, and the dreams as real as memory.
I still only have to close my eyes to see Applegarth, serene in the sun, with the silver lichen thick on the old trees, where, the green fruit, slowly swelling, shone like lamps, and in the sheltered garth lavender and sage and sweet briar breathed their scent into the air as thickly as smoke. And on the hill behind the tower the thorn trees, those strange thorns that flower in winter and have small flowers with stamens like nails. And the doorway where the girl Nimuë first stood shyly, with the light behind her, like the gentle ghost of the drowned boy who might have been a greater enchanter than she. And the ghost itself; the "boy Ninian" who still haunts my memories of the garth, alongside the slender girl who sat at my feet in the sun.
For perhaps a week after my falling fit on the hilltop, I spent most of my time sitting on the carved seat in the garth. Not from weakness, but because Nimuë insisted, and I needed time to think.
Then one evening, in the warm dusk, I called her to me. She nestled down in her old place, on a cushion at my feet. Her head was against my knee, and my hand stroked the thick hair. This was growing now, and had reached her shoulder-blades. I wondered daily at my old blindness that had not seen the curves of her body, and the sweet lines of throat and brow and wrist.
"You've been busy this week."
"Yes," she said. "Housewife's jobs. Cutting the herbs and bunching them to dry."
"Are they done?"
"Just about. Why?"
"I've been idle all this time while you have been working, but I have been thinking."
"About?"
"Among other things, Bryn Myrddin. You have never been there. So before the summer ends, I think we must leave Applegarth, you and I -- "
"Leave Applegarth?" She started away from me, looking up in dismay. "Do you mean live at Bryn Myrddin again...both of us live there?"
I laughed. "No. Somehow I don't see that happening. Do you?"
She subsided against my knee, her head bent. She was silent for a while, then she said, muffled: "I don't know. I've never glimpsed even a dream of it. But you have told me that you will die there. Is that what you mean?"
I put out a hand again and touched her hair. "I know I have said that that will happen, but I've had no warning of it yet. I feel very well, better than for many months. But look at it like this: when my life does end, yours must begin. And for that to happen you must do one day as I did, and enter the crystal cave of vision. You know this. We've spoken of it before."
"Yes, I know." She did not sound reassured.
"Well," I told her cheerfully, "we shall go to Bryn Myrddin, but at the end of our journey. Before we get there we shall have travelled widely, and seen many places and many things. I want you to visit the places where I have passed my life, and see the things I have seen. I have told you as much as I can; now you must see as much as I am able to show you. Do you understand?"
"I think so. You are giving me the sum of your life, on which to build my own."
"Exactly that. For you, the stones on which to build the life you want; for me, the crown and harvest."