Well, I didn’t feel like a good daughter. I felt angry at him. If he loved me so, why had he never said? Why had he never said something till now? Why had he never told me till it was too late? I could have done with a father, but I’d always thought him just my master. I’d thought I was a servant, and a feckless one at that. I hadn’t realized that love was part of the arrangement.
I wasn’t even sure I believed his tale. I wanted to. But what if it was just another story, one to make sure I stayed by him, nursing him? That’s the trouble with a story-spinner. You never know what’s real and what’s made up. Even when they are telling the truth, they can’t stop themselves from spinning it into something better; something prettier, with more of a pattern to it.
And as I sat there, thinking on all this, I started to notice how quiet it was in the room. How even the rusty saw of Myrddin’s breath had stopped. And I looked at him, and I saw that death had stolen him away from me.
I felt flat and quiet as the sand when the tide goes out. I knelt beside Myrddin and held his hand until it was quite cold, wishing my hard words of earlier could be unsaid. “I didn’t mean it,” I told him. “About the stories. They’ll last, even if nothing else does. They’ll be like a light in the dark, and they’ll burn as long as the dark lasts and go on out the far side of it into the morning.”
Which I didn’t believe, but I thought his ghost might be lingering close by, and I didn’t want it to linger in a foul mood.
Morning came. Snow on the hill-tops. I woke the boy Cadwy and told him what had happened, and together we set out to dig a grave for our master. In the overgrown gardens the dead grass was grey with frost, matted and shaggy like an old badger. The ground beneath was frozen stone-hard. I broke a spade on it, and blistered my hands on a mattock shaft, and didn’t make a scratch.
So I carried Myrddin to the woods, which clustered closer to the house each year. Light as a linnet he was, with all the words gone out of him. I took him to the great old oak, the ancient oak which had stood outside his house before it was a house, before the Romans even came to Britain. Its trunk was hollow, and the deep loam inside had been sheltered from the winter winds and had not frozen. I used my hands and the broken spade to shovel it out. While Cadwy watched, I laid Myrddin inside, and wrapped my own cloak round him, and I piled the loam back over him, heaping it over him with my hands and whispering what prayers I knew.
And there I left him, in the hollow oak. Littler trees will have grown up round it now, and the brambles tangled thick, and the nettles and the dock grown deep and green. And I suppose he lies there still, and will for ever.