CHAPTER 5
HUNTED
Merlin stood, handed his staff and dirk to his father, and stepped forward. The guards grabbed him by the arms and thrust him across the great hall toward the light of the open front door. As he was pushed outside, a few raindrops fell on his cheeks. Dark clouds had thickened over the moor, and a shadow soon covered the mountainside.
Behind him, Prontwon’s footsteps caught up to his father’s. “This is not necessary —”
Merlin’s father spat. “My son can make his own daft decisions.”
Years of working the bellows in the blacksmith shop had added strength to Merlin’s frame, and he could break free from the grip of the guards if he wanted to. He could tell Tregeagle he’d changed his mind. But he forced himself to remember Garth’s plight and his own stupidity, and so he submitted as they led him away from the house.
Garth hung on to Merlin until someone dragged him away. “You needn’t do it. Run!”
The guards roped Merlin’s hands to a six-foot post and tore off his tunic to expose his back. His muscles tensed as he waited in the coolness of the evening breeze.
Merlin set his jaw and tried to brace his body.
Behind him, Erbin test-snapped the whip as he chatted with Tregeagle.
Dear God, help me, Merlin prayed.
Crack!
Merlin let out a painful cry, then shut his mouth. A great welt burned from his left shoulder blade down to the middle of his back.
Crack!
Merlin lurched but held his tongue as the gash crisscrossed the previous one.
Ca-chack!
Merlin let out a ragged breath. Another blazing welt, this time lower down. He imagined Erbin leering as he swished the whip around.
Crack!
The whip opened up a long cut straight down the middle of his back, and Merlin’s body recoiled, his legs trembling. All of the other welts opened, and blood wept down his back.
“Lord Jesu … help,” he whispered.
Crack!
Ca-tchow!
Crack!
The strikes felt like hot knives slicing open his flesh, and his knees buckled. Blood flowed down his breeches, and he cried out in great gasps.
Through the haze of a light rain, he heard Prontwon call on God’s mercy.
He could hear his father yelling for Tregeagle to stop.
Tregeagle’s cold voice answered, “You think I am harsh? Count him lucky. The tally will be nine. Do not tempt me to raise it.”
His father said no more.
Merlin shook his head to clear it and pulled himself up. The rain slicked the rope, and he gripped it tighter for the final two strikes. “Father in heaven,” he called, but he kept imagining an adder behind him ready to strike.
Crack!
Ca-wrack!
He dropped to his knees, all his muscles in a spasm. Vaguely, he heard the sobbing of a girl.
Dybris rushed to untie him. “So sorry …”
Merlin fell to his side, and his father wiped the blood that leaked from his wounds. Merlin felt his head lifted from the ground, and Garth was there.
Tregeagle’s voice echoed through the air. “Get your rabbling son out of here. My coach must be fixed and in perfect condition before it is returned to me. You have two weeks.”
Merlin fought to sit up, the world shifting and swirling around him.
His father’s voice faded until just a sigh remained, flitting away on the wind. His blurred sight exploded with light and colors, all hurtling toward him and pouring into his head. There was green and darker green and blue above that. His vision sharpened until he could see everything perfectly.
Strangely, his back didn’t hurt, and the whipping post had disappeared.
He gaped in shock at the clear sight of tall weeds growing among grayish-red cabbages, whose pungence filled his senses. Sharply defined bees floated on thrumming wings, and a delicately feathered robin chirruped as she paraded through … garden paths? Merlin’s trousers were rolled up, and his knees were pressed into the coolness of the soil.
This was his family’s garden. He had sat here for hours on end throughout the last many years, weeding by touch. The smithy stood to his left, and oaken roof timbers jutted out from its conical thatched roof. The granite rock wall was lichened green. Beyond the smithy squatted his family’s house, smaller, with its low door closed and silent.
Where had everyone gone? How had he come to be here?
The sun rolled across the sky and fled away. Stars appeared, so bright that Merlin gazed upward in wonder. And he could focus on them.
But how can I see?
Then clouds rolled in, hiding the stars. Searing light flashed before his startled eyes. Deafening thunder struck at his ears.
Wolves howled in the distance, and Merlin jerked his head to look at the dark woods across the road — but no creature could be seen through the trees. He put a hand on his dirk and prepared to get up and run.
Then he smelled smoke. Hearing a crackling roar, he turned to see flames leaping from the roof of the smithy. Heat rolled over him and stung his face and arms. He started to rise, pushing off the ground with his hands, but his knees and fingers pressed into a sticky, dark liquid, which clung to him along with clods of dirt. He tried rubbing it off, but he could see now that it was blood.
The twisted body of a man lay facedown before Merlin. He wore a green robe, and a deep wound had been sliced between his neck and shoulder. The man’s blood still seeped from the gash and into the soil around the now-crushed cabbages.
Merlin stiffened. He tried to shout but barely managed to rasp.
The sky lit up. Between him and the corpse, another man appeared, this one dressed in cloth that shimmered like pearl. His hair lay bright as silvered frost, and his eyes smoldered like melted bronze.
The man opened his mouth, and his voice rang in Merlin’s head. “Servant who has suffered, the Lord greets you!”
Merlin tried to stand but fell back, dazed.
The man raised his hand, and a fountain of sweet-scented water flowed from his palm. “The Glorified One has ordained that a prophecy concerning your homeland would be fulfilled over ten weeks of years. For eight sevens, the power of dark fire has slept, clad in deathless cold, and for two sevens, it has grown under the mortal sky. This day it has awakened and is revealed in woe to the inhabitants of the earth.”
“W-who are you?” Merlin stammered.
“I am a servant of the Most High. Fear not, for His mighty hand has chosen you.”
Merlin felt his teeth begin to chatter. “I-I don’t understand.”
#x201C;FEAR NOT, MERLIN! The Lord has sent me to warn you. This day a man has come who has found and awakened Death and Hell. Beware him. BEWARE WHAT HE REVEALS. But fear not. Trust in God!”
The angel disappeared in a folding, collapsing cloud. And with him faded the vision.
Merlin’s eyesight blurred even as the flesh on his back screamed in pain again. He cried out. The pale form of the whipping post appeared once more, and he leaned upon it.
An hour later, after a painful journey back to his straw bed in the smithy, Merlin shifted onto his other side and tried to keep his food down. His face felt hot, and his back throbbed as if thousands of wasps continuously stung him. A few embers in the forge cast their light to the roof thatch, but everything else lay in shadow as the last light of the setting sun blinked and died through the shuttered window.
He remembered again the vision he had seen and wondered what it meant. He rubbed his hands to make sure the bloody soil was gone. Then his hands shot to his cheeks and eyelids, confirming the old scars still marred his features. Opening his eyes again, he saw the familiar smears marring his sight.
How had he been able to see clearly — even for that brief moment? The smell of fresh straw filled his senses. The smithy certainly wasn’t on fire, and therefore a dead man wearing a green robe wasn’t lying in their garden. He wondered if it had just been a strange dream.
His father banged open the double doors at the front of the smithy and brought a sloshing bucket in. He filled a ceramic jar and set it on a small table next to Merlin’s bed. “I’m glad we got you home.”
Merlin drank, but his throat still felt dry.
Sitting in a nearby chair, his father folded his arms and said nothing for a while. When he spoke, anger tinted his voice. “You’re going to take a long time to heal. How am I supposed to get my work done without you pumping the bellows? I’ll have to run back and forth.”
“Is that all you care about?”
“If I don’t fix the wagon —”
“Let Tregeagle flog the anvil next.”
His father pushed his stool back. “I told you not to do it.”
Merlin sat up, and the pain made him regret it. “You think I deserved nothing?”
“Seizing Garth’s bagpipe was unfair. Whipping you was worse.”
“So save the bagpipe but flog Garth?” His father was full of nonsense.
His father stood. “When I was young, my father gave me a bow and quiver. One day I practiced with a friend, and he shot one of my father’s hounds.”
“On purpose?” Merlin touched one of the stinging welts, amazed at how much it had swollen.
“I don’t know. But the dog died with the arrow lodged in its side.”
“Did your friend get in trouble?”
“Yes, but I did too,” his father said. “Both his bow and mine were taken from us, and I’ll never forget the injustice of that day.”
Merlin said nothing, waiting for his father to continue.
“Garth’s only token of his dead father is his bagpipe, and it’s cruel to take it away.” Merlin’s father raised his voice. “But you shouldn’t have been whipped. You never would’ve taken Tregeagle’s horses and —”
Merlin turned away and said in a soft voice, “You mean I’m not capable.”
“I did my best when the wolves came —”
“You saved me —”
“Not enough!” His father’s words were muffled by his hands as his voice broke. “You were so young …”
Merlin lay down on his side again. “This has nothing to do with my blindness.”
“You don’t know what it’s like for a father. I lived it all over again … Watching you get whipped brought back the memory of how the wolves scratched your face. It was too much.”
“I didn’t think about that. I —”
“There you stood, your flesh being torn, and again I couldn’t help. Again.”
“I didn’t want to be helped.” Merlin reached out painfully and clutched his father’s shoulder. Sliding his hand down, he brushed against the cold metal of the marriage-covenant band on his father’s arm.
Owain patted him on the head. “You’re braver than is good for a blind lad.”
“Tas … Father … I know I’ve asked before, but when I’m better, would you please come to chapel?”
Even as Merlin asked the question, the armband grew warm. And then hot.
His father jerked away and stood. “Had enough of monks. The troubles they cause.”
The gem on the armband gleamed red in the smithy flames. It reminded Merlin of the glowing eyes of the wolves from his nightmares, and he turned away.
Why did his father never want to go to chapel? Ever since Merlin started visiting four years earlier, his father had never approved. Sure, he’d blacksmith tools for the monks, but always grudgingly. And Mônda, Merlin’s stepmother, treated the monks with open derision. She would yell at Merlin in Eirish if he even mentioned them.
His father filled in the silence by changing the subject. “How’s your back? Your tunic’s bloody, and you’re sweating.” He wiped Merlin’s forehead with a dank-smelling cloth.
In truth, Merlin felt tired and weak. The darkness had crept into the smithy, and he yawned, hoping for sleep and the chance to forget his father’s stubbornness, as well as his own painful welts.
“You get some sleep, and we’ll talk more in the morning.” His father slipped out the back door, and the iron latch clicked shut.
Merlin lay awake long into the night, unable to sleep, hot and in pain. Wondering if he had a fever, he felt his own forehead with little result. He tried to doze but couldn’t get comfortable.
Outside, a wolf howled.
Then another. And close to the smithy. Too close. Were they after the goats? He lay perfectly still, straining his ears for any additional hints of the wolves’ location. One breath became twenty, then thirty. Nothing. As he began to relax, he heard it: low growling, just outside the smithy’s walls. A wolf began tearing at the slats of the window near the bellows, claws and teeth raking through the old wood.
They weren’t after the goats.
“It can’t be,” he whispered. After seven years, they were hunting him again.
His trembling fingers traced the scars running from his eyelids as he forced himself to sit up on the bed. Finding the tin box of char, he slid off the lid, blew on the coals until they glowed, and finally held the tip of the rush lamp to it. The oil-soaked reed began to smoke but didn’t light.
The wolf snarled now, and chunks of wood splintered and fell to the ground.
The wick flared, lighting the room with a pale shimmer. Barely enough for his feeble vision to guide him.
More wood cracked away as the wolf ripped at the shutter.
Why hadn’t his father mounted an iron grate in the window? Merlin fumbled next to his pallet and found his dirk. At least his father had made this for him.
Other wolves scratched at the double doors facing the road, and the hinges groaned.
Merlin’s eyes searched for details, fear making his hands numb. Had he fastened the bar before bed? Leaping from his pallet, ignoring the pain, he ran barefoot across the blacksmith shop. The rush lamp gave enough light for Merlin to avoid the blur of workbenches between him and the doors.
The wolves clawed at the heavy doors and pushed them open a crack.
Merlin slammed his body into the oak timbers, sending pain shooting through the wounds on his back. Grimacing, he lifted the bar from the floor and banged it into place. He slumped down and sucked in a mouthful of air.
Beyond the bellows, the wolf at the window grunted as it scrambled through.
Merlin’s heart pounded as he found his footing and ran toward the wolf. But he tumbled over a stool and sent his knife skittering into the darkness.
Weaponless, he jumped at the workbench, hoping to find his father’s latest sword, but instead his panicked hands found hammers … rasps … chisels … and scrap iron. Where’s the sword? If only his eyes could show him. His mind sped over the previous day. Maybe his father had left it on the forge.
He turned. The wolf’s dark shadow tracked nearer, now blocking his path. Its eyes lit up in the rush light: bright blurs of hunger, malice, and death.
Oh, God, please, he prayed. It was going to happen a second time. He hefted a hammer and threw it at the wolf, which yelped in anger. Merlin’s escape lay over the workbench. He planted both hands and vaulted up, but — still stiff from his flogging — his foot caught one of his father’s smaller anvils. He flipped to the ground, falling on his side. His wounds screamed, and pain ripped across his back.
Sucking air through his teeth, he reached to the top of the forge and groped for the sword.
The stink of rotting flesh sickened the air as the wolf rounded the corner. It snapped its teeth and lunged at him.
In one swift motion, Merlin found the sword’s makeshift wooden handle and leveled the blade’s point at the wolf. With a force that knocked the breath from Merlin’s lungs, the creature impaled itself on the blade, yet it still tore at Merlin’s forearm, snarling and thrashing as it died.
A moment later someone pounded on the double doors. “Open up!”
Merlin heaved the dead wolf away, slid the blade from its body, and limped over to the doors. Shaking, his back in agony, he unbarred the entrance.
His father burst into the room, the bright smear of a torch in his left hand and a spear in his right. “Wolves outside. Scared them off, and the goats are fine. What’s —” His father stopped speaking and surveyed the smithy. “By the High King’s justice, what happened?”
“A wolf … the window,” Merlin said. The bloody sword trembled in his hand.
Small footsteps interrupted his father’s stunned silence as Merlin’s nine-year-old half sister, Ganieda, padded into the smithy with a dark shawl over her head. She flew around the workbench and knelt before the great wolf’s body.
She stroked its head. “Poor wolf.”
Merlin touched the deep scars that emanated from his eyes and flinched as he remembered the wolves of seven years ago. “Get away from there, Ganieda!”
“She’s my friend, and you murdered her.” She began to sob.
Her wolf? Merlin knew the girl had an imagination, but this?
His father examined the wolf’s body and whistled. “You killed it with one blow, and with my new blade, I see.”
“I lost my dirk.”
“You almost lost your life. Look at its teeth.”
“She was just defending herself,” Ganieda said between sobs.
These words stung Merlin worse than his wounds. Had his sister ever shed a tear over his scars, or the loss of his eyesight? Never. Had she expressed her thanks to him for saving her? Not that he could remember. And with each of her sniffles and cries for the wolf, the bile rose higher in his throat. Angry words were on the tip of his tongue when his father interrupted.
“You’re a foolish girl. Now get up and wash your brother’s arm while I put some planks in the window.”
Merlin sat down on his bed, his head a little dizzy, and the slashes on his back beginning to burn.
Ganieda brought a wet rag from the washbucket and quietly began washing the blood from Merlin’s forearm. “I’m sorry,” she finally said. “I didn’t know she bit you.”
The rag dabbed lightly across his wounds, and he winced as the cold water stung.
“I forgive you,” he said, but his heart wasn’t in it. Did she really care for him? He didn’t know.
“You didn’t have to kill her.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Across the smithy, his father finished sawing a plank and began pounding it in place using an iron peg.
Ganieda wrung out the rag, the water dripping and splashing into the bowl, and then ran over to their father. “Can I help?” she asked, and he directed her to hold the planks in place.
When the window was boarded up, he asked Ganieda to hold a torch while he dragged the wolf’s body outside.
“Are you going to build a cairn over her?”
“It’s a dead animal, Ganieda.”
“I know what you’re going to do,” she said, her voice rising in timbre. “You’re going to throw her in the ditch!”
“Merlin, I know you’re not feeling well, but I need you to hold the torch.”
Ganieda ran shrieking from the smithy.
Merlin rose, ignoring the pain, and held the torch while his father dragged the wolf’s body out past their stacked stone wall, through their iron gate, and to a ditch at the edge of their land.
“I know I’ve blocked up the window, but I wouldn’t blame you for joining us in the house tonight.”
“I’m fine.”
“Have it your way.”
Despite the attack, the smithy was Merlin’s place, and he wouldn’t leave it. From the fresh smell of his straw bed tucked against the eastern wall to the well-worn handles of the bellows near the forge — this was his home, his life. Here he could find comfort in the feel of his father’s tools. The shape and coolness of the great anvil. The spinning sound of the grinding wheel. Even the acrid reek of the quench barrel.
His father left to go back to bed, and for the rest of the night, Merlin had terrible dreams about wolves. They surrounded his bed, and their claws ripped at his bloodied back. They scratched at his face, destroying the remnant of his sight. And no matter how many wolves he killed, they kept climbing through the window, each with sharper teeth and more evil eyes than the last.
Even the dawn and the rhythmic clanging of Merlin’s father at the anvil didn’t remove the specter. Each blur and shadow resembled a wolf.
Near midmorning, Owain completed the installation of iron bars in the window and went back to the house, leaving the smithy quiet.
Merlin hoped to get some proper sleep and was just dozing off when a knock came at the front door, which his father had left propped open.
“Excuse me … young man?” The deep, lilting voice had a slight Eirish accent.
Merlin lifted his head. “I’m here. May I help you?”
“I assume this is the smithy?”
“The shop’s here. I’ll get my tas to assist you. Do you need something forged?”
“No, no … thank you, but no. I am not here for the services of the notorious blacksmith.” His voice was like cream, but there was something sour hiding in it. “We are here to receive, shall we say, a visit with our kin.”
The man’s voice was strangely familiar to Merlin, but he couldn’t remember from where. As far back as he remembered, not a single relative had ever visited them. Certainly none from Erin, though surely he must be a relation of his stepmother, Mônda.
Yet why did Merlin recognize the voice?
The man stepped inside the smithy and walked over to him. Behind, another man followed. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Mórganthu mab Mórfryn, and this is my son, Anviv. You must be … Merlin?” He bent down and waved his fingers in front of Merlin’s eyes.
Suppressing a spark of annoyance, Merlin ignored the fingers, sat up painfully, and placed the back of his hand to his forehead in a show of respect. “My father and I live here. Are you related to Mônda and my sister?”
“I am Môndargana’s father. I have been away for a long time, but now I have been called here once more … I should say … to this somnolent village, specifically.”
Again, the voice was familiar to Merlin.
The man waved his fingers for a second time in front of Merlin, and they smelled moldy, as if he’d been digging at the rotten innards of some tree. Merlin wanted to swat them away. He turned instead to greet the son by reaching out both hands. “Anviv … Then you’re sort of an uncle.”
Anviv let his hands be shaken for a moment, and they were like two marsh eels after their heads had been hit on a stone.
Merlin wiped his palms on his tunic. Still needing to greet the agitating old man, Merlin reached out toward the dark form. “Welcome, Mórganthu. Our home is yours.”
Mórganthu grasped Merlin’s hands but quickly tried to pull away. Merlin decided to test the man’s character and held on. Mórganthu’s fingers were thick and strong, but why didn’t they have calluses? Even the monks had coarse hands from labor. Who is this man?
Mórganthu grunted, but still Merlin wouldn’t let go.
Finally, Mórganthu twisted a jagged fingernail into each of Merlin’s palms.
Merlin jerked his hands away.
“Enough impudence,” Mórganthu said darkly. “Enough. We will take our —”
“Excuse me if I continue resting.” Merlin lay down again. Somehow his bed felt colder than before. “I’m sure Mônda will be happy to greet you after so long. The house is that way.” He pointed and hoped they’d go away.
Their feet crept toward the back door, which Merlin’s father had also left open. Merlin lay quietly, hoping to catch the conversation.
Mórganthu rapped on the door to their house, just a few yards away.
Merlin heard footsteps and metal clicking and scraping. Then the door creaked open. “May I help you?” Mônda said. “Do you need something smithed?”
A short moment later, she screeched in joy.
“Yes, yes, it is I. And here is your brother grown into a man. Do not hold me thus, my daughter. I am not a mound spirit that will disappear with the mist.”
Merlin had never heard Mônda so giddy. “Come in … please! We’ll have food ready soon, and you must join us.” The three entered, and the heavy oak door shut.
The sounds muffled, and Merlin wished he’d followed to learn more about these strange relatives.
But in a moment it didn’t matter, for the voices changed to shouting. The door opened again, and someone ran from the house, presumably Anviv, since his strange father’s low voice yelled as he came, cursing and struggling. “Owain! Owain, let go, you insolent son of a devil …”
Ignoring the pain as best he could, Merlin stood and hobbled outside, where he could hear better and maybe see a little.
“Eat dirt for your meal,” Merlin’s father yelled.
Mórganthu crashed to the ground and shouted as Owain kicked him.
Merlin was in awe. Nearly every day his father’s simmering anger boiled over, but this kind of rage was unusual. To get away from the quarrel, Merlin backed up until his feet hit one of the cabbages at the edge of the garden.
Merlin’s father pushed a sobbing Mônda back into the house, where her weeping was muffled.
“Get up, druid.”
Mórganthu unbent himself and stood.
“Never enter my house again,” Owain said. “Never step on my land. You lost your welcome ten years ago, so stay out!”
Mórganthu’s hand struck quickly toward the low thatch of the roof and seized what appeared to be an unwary red squirrel. It chattered frantically but could not escape. With a deliberate motion, Mórganthu drew a knife that flashed golden in the sunlight. “Heed. Take heed, Owain An Gof. If you ever lay hands on me or my kin in the future … I promise to slit you like a rodent!”
He held up the squirrel, which squealed as he plunged in the knife. Mórganthu flung the carcass away. With a sickening sound, it landed next to Merlin, and its red blood spilled and seeped into the garden.
And that was when Merlin remembered where he had heard the man’s voice. It had been in the woods with Garth. These two were the men who had been carrying that strange, dark object that burned with a blue fire.