THIS LITTLE ROOM, UP HERE UNDER THE THATCH.
This is where I looked out through the wind-eye and spied the world. Where I looked into my stone, and saw King Arthur born. Where I looked into my own head and heart, and prepared parchment and mixed ink, and tried to find the fitting words.
And this is the slice of the old apple tree Gatty and I carried up here, so I could perch my inkwell on it.
Gatty! Yes, we’ll go upstream when you come home. If you want, I’ll bring you to Catmole.
Four years have gone by since Merlin gave me my obsidian on the top of Tumber Hill. My seeing stone. This is where I used to hide it, in this gap between these two blocks of stone.
Up here, it seems so quiet. I can hear my own breathing. If I rub my forefinger against the soft wall, I can hear the tiny white flakes fluttering to the floor.
But there was something scratching under the floorboards until I stamped on them. Now it’s listening, as I am. April puts her mouth to the wind-eye and blows very gently. In the thatch, I can hear soft purring: the house-martins, maybe, home again and nesting.
Is there anything on this middle-earth better than waking in this little room on a chill April morning, and lying warm under my sheepskin, and listening to one uncertain whistler, then ten, then a thousand, the whole parliament of birds singing to high heaven?
That’s what I did this morning.
Slowly I unrolled the filthy cloth. You can still see it was once saffron.
Ice and fire. With my fingers I pressed the stone against my palm. I looked into its eye.
“The stone’s not what I say it is. It’s what you see in it.” That’s what Merlin told me.
Sir Bedivere is carrying King Arthur on his back.
As if he were a little child.
He plows across the foreshore to the very place where he hurled Excalibur into the waves. Below the shingle-bank, a barge is waiting. Many women wearing black hoods are sitting in it, and as soon as they see the king, they wail and shriek.
“Put me in the barge,” King Arthur says.
Sir Bedivere slithers down the shingle-bank with King Arthur on his back.
The women reach out for him. A crowd of white hands. A cradle of arms. They wrap King Arthur in scarlet and gold cloth and lay his head in the lap of one lady.
“Arthur,” she whispers. “Why have you taken so long? My dear son!”
Her son?
Ygerna! It’s Ygerna! I saw her place her hands over her unborn baby, and embrace the whole world. Arthur was taken away from her when he was two days old, and at last he has returned to her.
“Your head wound is so cold,” Ygerna murmurs.
“My lord Arthur!” cries Sir Bedivere. “My king! Without you, what will become of me?”
The king gazes at Sir Bedivere. His eyes are dim.
“Here and alone?”
“I can no longer help you,” the king says quietly. “You must trust in yourself.”
Again, all the women in the boat keen. With their fingernails they shred their gowns.
“If Sir Lancelot sails home, tell him of my need of him when I fought Sir Mordred. Tell him I always loved him.”
Sir Bedivere grips the gunwale. He cannot let the king go.
“I will cross the water, and go into the hill,” says Arthur-in-thestone. “I will sleep a long sleep, and many knights will sleep there with me. I will sleep and heal. I will heal and wake, and march out of the hill, and drive all my enemies back into the sea. I am Arthur, son of Uther and Ygerna. The king who was and will be.”
Now the oarsmen lean forward. They pull.…
Sir Bedivere’s fingers loosen their grip.
Away across the stabbing silver wavelets the barge glides.
Ahead of it now, a hill begins to rise. First grey-blue and misty, like something in the mind long forgotten. Now green, grass-green and growing.
It humps its back. High!
Tumber Hill!