HE WOKE TO WOOD and the underside of bark. There had been no death, at least none that he remembered. Just a long, final breath, part kiss and part spell. A name formed on his mouth, a name he could not quite shape, though he was sure it began with an n.
“Nnnnn,” he murmured tentatively.
Reaching upward, his hands touched wood. He felt wood on all sides, a coffin of it, rounded without the square, hammered pegs. Pushing desperately against it, he was surprised that it had a give to it, as of a living thing. He scratched it with his fingernails and a soft, meaty substance peeled downward.
“Where am I?” he cried out, his words strangely muffled.
In the dark. It was a woman’s voice that answered him, but not aloud. In the dark.
Where is this dark? he thought to himself, hesitating to frame the question with his mouth.
It did not matter. The woman’s voice, low and throaty, still answered him. In the wood.
In the dark. In the wood. Bottled up like a cask of wine. They were answers that meant nothing to him. But remembering little else, he knew he was a man used to riddles. They had been—of this one thing he was sure—his lifework. He had moved from riddle to answer, from answer to riddle down through his days. In this dark and in this wood he would unravel this final riddle. And then, like a weaver woman with a fleece, skirting the bad parts and spinning out the thread, he would wind it up again.
He framed a third question in his mind. What wood?
The answer came with a laugh. Whitethorn, old one. And now you have had your three. A magic number for a magic maker. The laugh died away as quietly as a breeze quits the tops of trees.
Woods. Whitethorn. Dark. But she had given away more than that. He raised his hands once again, bringing them to his useless eyes. Dark only met dark.
Old one, she had said. Was he old? He did not feel old, but then he was not sure he felt anything at all. He touched himself, having no memory of age or time’s noisy passage in this silent place. There was only the dark and this now. His hands traveled down his face, feeling a beard that fell, a waterfall of hair, twixt nipples and waist. It must have taken a lifetime to grow such a beard.
A tale came to him suddenly: Dead men’s hair grows long in the casket. And here he was casked up, old dead wine in a tun. But she had not called him dead—merely old. How long, then, must a man live for such hair to measure him? He could not guess how long.
His hands traveled back up to his face, two friends on a familiar journey. They traced the lines around his mouth, around his eyes. The mouth lines bespoke tragedies, the eye lines laughter. Which were the greater? In the dark it was impossible to tell.
He guided the faithful hands on their journey over his clothes. The jerkin was simply made, but the stitches were tiny and carefully done. The cloth of his shirt was fine. Was he such a master tailor, then, that he could sew such a seam? Or had he had servants at his command?
The hands, like withered leaves in the fall, fell away. Sorrow overrode him. He could not remember. All that was left to him was a kiss and a spell, and a name that began with a murmur. He wept.
He woke again and had no more than the list of wood, dark, whitethorn, old. But then he thought: There was something more she had said. And then he had it, as if a taper had suddenly been lit in the dark. He closed his eyes against the sudden illumination.
Magic. No—magic maker. That was what she called him. He snapped his fingers then to see if he could spark magic from them. The only light was the mind’s taper and the name she had given him so unwittingly. Magic maker.
He thought to himself: What is a magic maker but a mage? A mage deals in images, the prestidigitation of the mind: imagination. Mage, magic, image, imagination. It was all the same. Well, then, if he was a magic maker—and an old one at that—surely he had buried inside him, deeper even than the amnesia in which her dark sorceries had buried him, some small bright images of his past. He would force them up, like buds the gardeners brought to blossom in early spring, past the strictures of her ensorcelment, past the fierce bindings of the whitethorn wood.
The unlucky whitethorn, the maytree, it came to him now. It was the tree of forced chastity and what could be chaster than he, dryadlike, bound up in a tree. His hands went to his face again and he wept.
No! The despair he felt was too black to be real, for it was blacker than even the dark of his wood tomb. It was more enchantment, then, and knowing this, he fought it; he fought with the only magic he still had, the buried images of his past.
Like a fisher lad with a new line, he hooked a berry to the thread and dropped it into the stream of memory. First it floated, bobbing in the current, then suddenly disappeared. He hauled on it and pulled up a picture.
It was of a child, still red with birth blood, lying in his arms. A child with a star that burned on his forehead for a moment, then faded into a birthmark like a faceted jewel.
Was I this child? he asked himself. But the image was too sharp to be a construct. He would not have known himself as a babe. It was a child, then, that he had carried.
Yet he knew himself to be neither mother nor father. Neither, yet both. More riddles.
He looked again at the picture of the babe he had carried, but the picture had dried up around the edges; unsapped, it vanished slowly like dew drawn up from the grass.
A babe. The dark. In the whitethorn wood. Old magic maker. And a name that murmured like a spell. He fought sleep but it overpowered him, and in the sleep there came a dream.
A bear walked by a cleft rock. From behind that rock slipped an asp. The asp wound itself around the bear’s legs, touched its genitals, slipped over its back, circled its head like a crown. The bear rose on its hind legs and slapped at the viper. It broke the serpent’s back but the poisoned fangs buried in the bear’s paw. Bear and asp fell backward into the rock’s cleft and disappeared. The rock clanged shut with a knell that woke the dreamer.
It was still dark and his eyes, like hollows, filled with tears.
He set out the pieces he had; counters in a riddling game, moving them around in his mind to force the associations: the deathlike dark, the unlucky whitethorn, old magic maker, the star child, the slotted rock, the bear, and snake. Like the tarot, corrupted by charlatans and played by fools, the images danced busily in his head. He could make no more of them. The riddle, it seemed, was too knotted for his unraveling.
What—he asked himself—did the king of Phyrgia do with such a knot? for the story, first told to him by an old centurion made friendly by wine, came unbidden to his mind. Did the king hope to unwind the knot? No, rather he struck it with his sword, severing the strands forever.
Sword! And with that final image, the answer came to him, as riddle answers always do, in a final bright shout. Sword bridged babe and rock, contained both bear and asp. It was made of earth and air, fire and water; it was human magic far greater than his own small feats of the mind.
He knew now who he was and who had kissed him and what the spell. The bonds of the whitethorn no longer held him. He spoke the name of the mistress of this magic and severed their ties for all time.
“Nimue,” he cried out, and shut his eyes against the sudden light.
“Old man, silly old riddler,” came the throaty, laughing voice. “You certainly are persistent. It has taken you centuries to find me out and by now you are surely as shriveled and as chaste as any maytree stick. I fear your advances no longer. In the years between, my magic has o’ergrown yours. Silly old man, do you still want a kiss as your reward?”
She laughed again. Then, puzzled by his continued silence, pulled aside her cloak and was visible at once.
On the ground by the ancient whitethorn that was shriven apart as if by lightning, was a pile of fine white bones. As she watched, the bones sorted themselves into the most complicated magical pattern of all: that of a small man, hands crossed over his chest. The bones were touched suddenly by a light as brilliant as that of starshine, and then in a moment light and bones were gone.