A thousand years ago and more, there lived in Brittany an Enchanter whose name was Merlin.
He was young and handsome, with a quick, cunning eye, a mocking smile and delicate hands. He was as graceful as a dancer, as carefree as a cat and as swift as a swallow. Time passed him by without touching him, and he had the eternal youth of the forests.
He had powers,
which he only used for people’s good, or what he thought was their good, but
sometimes he made mistakes, for although he was no ordinary human being, he was
after all human.
For men, he was
a friend and a comfort, sharing their joys and their sorrows; he was a helpmeet
who never claimed his dues and who was loyal without fail.
For women, he was a dream. Women who liked fair-haired men came across him with golden hair that shone with the rays of the sun, while those who preferred dark-haired men met him with the dusky hair of the night. They were not in love with him; that was not possible; he was too handsome and inaccessible – he was like an angel. Vivianne was the only woman who loved him, to her joy, or perhaps her sorrow, and to the joy and sorrow of both of them, but that we cannot know, for we are not enchanters.
For everyone,
he was unique; no one wanted him to leave, but one day, he would depart.
When he left
the world of men, he left behind a sense of loss that never healed. We forget whom it is we are missing and
endlessly waiting for, we know only that there is an emptiness in our hearts.
The white hart came out of a hawthorn thicket without stirring a single leaf. His coat was like freshly fallen snow, and as he crossed the glade, his antlers swayed like the sails of a ship.
Merlin liked to appear in this guise when he moved about the forest. He stopped noiselessly at the end of the path that led to the Pool of the Eye, so-called because, on clear days, the sky was reflected in the surface of the hollow it had dug in the sand and fine gravel, and then it looked like a big blue eye between lashes of mint and forget-me-not.
A girl was bathing at the pool; she was fair and naked. The hart watched her through the foliage. She was very young, twelve or perhaps thirteen. Standing knee-deep in the pool, she scooped up the water in her cupped hands and sprinkled it over herself, laughing so as not to shiver, uttering exclamations and singing snatches of wordless tunes. The sun played on her short, dancing hair and on the water droplets that rolled down her rose-coloured, golden skin. Her breasts were not yet rounded, and the cold water made them stand out and look pointed. When she laughed, her teeth shone with the white of new almonds. Her long thighs had ceased to be the thin reeds of a child, but they were not yet the fully-formed branches of a young woman. She was no more than an exquisite sketch of womanhood, a hint of promises that would be kept, and when she moved, her barely perceptible curves suggested the perfection of Creation’s greatest masterpiece, that is, the body of woman fashioned by God’s hands from a piece of man.
And the fountain laughed with her, covering her feet with fresh sand while bubbles burst between her toes. A green and gold salamander swimming about her ankles came out of the water to stick its tongue out at her. A baby blackbird, the colour of tree bark, settled on her head and started to sing with the voice of a full-grown bird. Her delicate hands danced in the sun and water like two flowers quivering in the wind.
In the white hart’s body, Merlin felt his soul tremble. He knew he would never see her again as she appeared at this moment. Tomorrow, in the next instant, she would already be different. She had that heart-rending beauty of things that change on the instant, and then are lost forever. Later, in memory of this meeting, he created a rose whose shape and colour changed from hour to hour and which only lived for a day. It still grows in England. The English call it ‘Yesterday’, for its present is already past.
The forest was nothing but silence and birdsong, the song of the pool and the girl, and the song of the leaves and branches as they stretched in the arms of the warm air. Not a murmur reached it of the harsh noise of battle from the plains outside Carhaix. Merlin had left it at the point when the defenders of the little town were starting to get the upper hand and no longer needed him. He had heard his father’s voice warning him that King Arthur was about to face fresh danger. It rang in his head in the thick of the battle, strident and mocking as it usually was.
‘Poor, benighted son,’ it said. ‘Here you are helping this young fool to fight the Saines, Romans and Alemans, while an enemy that is a danger of a totally different order awaits him at the Pool of the Eye …’
And with a grating burst of laughter, the voice fell silent.
Merlin immediately crossed the forest to see who this unknown enemy was that was going to confront the young King Arthur.
And when he discovered this miraculous child, he knew that his father had laid a trap for him worse than any he had ever set before. He fell into it completely, and he doubted that he would ever get out.
Merlin’s father was the Devil.
Merlin was God’s work, and he served Him with his whole being, but he was spawned by the Devil, and the Devil never gave up hope of reclaiming him. He took every opportunity to try to trip him up, and in the absence of opportunities, he engineered them himself.
He had not created this girl, but he had conspired to make her meet Merlin, and probably, to meet Arthur, too. The Enchanter wanted to know who she was, and he knew. Her name was Viviane. She was the daughter of a lowly gentleman with hardly any lands but with a highly prestigious ancestry, for he was descended from the goddess Diana to whom the forest belonged. The blood and power of the ancient queen of the forest who had disappeared from the world ran in Viviane’s veins and in her youthful and innocent exuberance. If this magical child ensnared Arthur, he would be lost for the quest to find the Holy Grail.
Merlin had taken Arthur’s fate in hand before his birth. He wanted him to become the best knight in the world, one who would be capable of finding the Grail, for its absence was the cause of man’s unhappiness, and he gave Arthur as much help as he could. This did not involve removing the obstacles from his path, but rather of placing them there and making them increasingly difficult to overcome, for that way, Arthur would grow up. The boy was valliant, pure, joyful and full of love; when he fought, it was without hatred but with the strength of a Spanish bull and he had never yet been outdone. On this very day, he had just laid low the chief of the Romans, Pontius Anthony, running him through till his lance came half way out of his back. And with his sword he had hacked a bloody path to Duke Frolle, chief of the Alemans, whose disbanded men had deserted him, and who had turned tail and fled the field of battle.
In three days, Arthur would be seventeen. At sixteen, he had ascended the throne of the Kingdom of Logres. He had vanquished the strongest and most talented knights and beaten the most savage chiefs of war. The time had come to set him on the path to Adventure. Merlin saw only one way of preventing the Devil and Vivianne from tripping him up.
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