10

There was once a quietness between ridings
When Arthur sat at ease in Camelot
Slouching in his chair, content for once
To hear tales told of Burgundy and Spain,
Of Claudius who stuttered and Constantine,
York-born with lion's eyes, or hear
The ragged minstrels who once had trailed the legions
Salving the soldiers' pains with whining pipes
And tambourines, and jigging by the fires
In Tuscan dances otherwise forgot.
Then Arthur, hearing mouthed Rome's praises
By pipers who had been to Sicily,
Nodded in joy and said to all, "Rome lives,"
And called for the Latin tongue and heard read,
by Illtud, who with ease could read, the lives
Of all those Caesars who had built the world.

At one such time a marbled Caesar's bust
with wreaths of roses hanging from his neck
Was set up tipsy on a side-board near
To be saluted in foaming cups of wine
With Arthur joining. A tale of deeds then followed,
And then contentment.
But Merlin darkened, listening, and then arose
And turned from Arthur to transfix the captains
With adder's gaze.
          "Rome, the world's great queen,
Is no more a nurse to us who British are.
Albion is our world, and only Albion,
An oceanic mother, fairer than Rome.
Caithness to Lyonesse, end points of fame
And homes of slipping seals and bursting foam,
Chalk cliffs and sucking fens -- this our world
With all the verdancies that lie within.
Here is our mystery; our lot to keep her shores.
Forget the Roman presence and the iron shouts.
Forget the dreary and the endless shuffle
Of legions marching to their clumsy deaths.
Rome boasted of her strength and wit, then left,
A paralytic shade, without farewell.
And what we hear of her beyond the Channel
Is naught, the suspiration of a child,
No eagle's cry, no tearing kestrel's shriek.
Behold! Rome now calls us to succor her."

He finished, shouting, and his beard trembled.
He rocked upon his feet as in a storm.
But Arthur, joyous still and still content
And even laughing, to those there seated
Spread his palms upward, "And who will speak for Rome?"

And Illtud said, tensing in his belief,
Sweating, closely fashioning each word,
Spreading his long arms out, importuning:
"All of us are kith and kin, all brothers.
Not all our kin are here for some have died.
My brothers, do you know what it may be like
To be no Roman -- Christian not to be?
Look close at hand to the Saxon foe for that
And where is anything you see there good?
Of what worth Albion, its virtues blunted,
If the headlands seethe with foam as yesteryears
And Britons be not in a happy law,
Greeting the other soft in civil speech?
What if the Thames seats many a swan, lovely,
And along its banks the children are not taught
The scrolls of urban thought and kept to hand?
What is the civil life if it be not Roman?
And if Roman, then where our mother but in Rome?"

And silence followed, trickling away. Talk died
And ran like a silver spool across the floor
And by each man's chair, and each watched its rolling
Squinting his eyes in thought, in deep thought.
And all looked at Arthur of the veiled eyes.
And he said,
          "My cousin Illtud speaks for me.
The ringed finger of the past, and glory,
Point us to the target. Surely we
Who here sleep and from here ride forth
Yearly against the Saxon, are Roman sons.
Do not forget Rome. She is eternal,
Archbishopric, and citadel, and house of power.
None doubt it. What we do here is right
If in the cause of Rome, wrong if we forget her
And diminish all by raging out
In mindless fury against a world in skirmish --
Causeless men are men without a future.
What I have said is true. And now hear this
For I am of Albion, and this is not the same.

"This valley and this Camelot are mine.
The neat villas that once abounded here,
Farms of British plenty, houses of our kin,
Are now dry and burning; the Saxon torch
Arches nightly over us and, rich
In meteoric falls, spills out its sparks
In showers horrid. This we shall prevent
So that peace may come to dwell in Albion.
And on that day of peace, perhaps far off,
Then only will our lances tushing turn
Their points to undertake the cause of Rome
Beyond the Channel and in the Roman sea".

Some thought Arthur right, and in the ceaseless turnings
Of moons and suns, and after the long,
The slow, phosphoric dance of morning star
And dawn -- many stars and many dawns --
Peace of a kind did come, a weariness with war
Though in the lack of it few took delight.
Some had quaffed the wine of war too long
And sat now in a stupor, strangers to action,
Drumming with their fingers on the oaken board.
To others the sword cried softly in the scabbard.
And the stabled war horse shook his head and neighed.

11

Came a day of revels long waited for.
Hawthorn boughs waved from the battlements
In the spring rain, giving to the wet world
Camelot's greenest and most jocund greeting.
Briton's had waited to see the living Arthur,
Pious, Christian, heroic, Roman,
As he reached down from the walls, showering
His world with guerdons and his kin with praise.

Arthur seemed happy, his face alight.
He had put good things in train. So, pleased with that,
For the present moment he needed not the sun,
And in the voice of Stentor he shouted down
Through the hollows in the chilly mist
As though tunnels.
          "All you down there below me,
Turn your faces to the raindrops, if you
Would hear me. Without you I was nothing.
In kindness listen while I say my say."

He raised his hands with fingers spread and shook
His dripping locks, defiant of all Saxons.
His lance he brandished and then without a pause
He threw it in the air and whirling caught it.
And his eyes burned as they were sapphires.
He turned to claim the gratitude of all.
And to captains each he spoke his mind.

"Kay, sturdy beyond others, and holder
Of the heavy shield, the hard-gripped hilt, bless you
For your battles -- uncounted I well believe --
And your muscles knotted like the great waves of ocean.
And Bedivere, whose rapier words and lance
Can strike the gaudiest friend, the bitterest foe,
My thanks for time's wings clipped, when what you did,
Pointing your horsemen far and fast, performed
Each day in spite of odds a miracle --
More like a raging windstorm than a man.

"And you, Gawain, commander, it should be you
To stand here at this wall all stung with roses,
Tossed at you by the maids of Camelot,
And the lovely grey flowers of the rain.
Gladiator of the lightning, you bore the burden
Bringing victory from out of naught.

"Mordred, dark scholar of the ways of war,
Owner of strange engines and hawkish sleights,
Young prince, your ways too are good. Young prince,
My thanks."
          And Arthur seemed to catch himself
In scowling.

"And now you, Illtud. I know you well
And not at all. Often you checked my plans
And so, well counseled, I could turn around
When turning hunt our self conceit the most.
I do not pretend that at all times I loved you,
But I acknowledge that, if I was wise,
What wisdom I had was mine and yours together.
My cousin, thanks, but presume not overmuch.

"More could be named; others many sleep
And their bright bones make greener our island's grass.
Cleanly at peace they are; they rest for now
Hooded in the dreamland of the brave.
Yet nothing of praise today is heard by them --
This is a sadness that seems to have no meaning.

"And this leaves you, old Merlin. What to say
I know not. It seems that there was not
A time ever when you were not here beside me.
Bright lord of the past, you counseled war
Against the Saxons and their Pictish friends
With many a promise and many an eerie word.
I did those things you counseled -- and we won.
But always strangely.
Darkly always.
Almost not.
There was always a touch of jet in the diamond
And a dead pit in the ripened peach.
Illtud said, 'Accept the Saxon, teach him the Cross'.
You said, 'Take back our British lands
And bless the elder gods, Nodens, Lud, and Sulis.
Let go the Roman Christ and her called Mary'.
There comes a time when I should ask you plain,
Can it be wrong to be a British king
Girt with a Roman sword and a Christian heart?
But today it is best to thank you for the past
And not to press you straitly."

And all those present looked across at Merlin
As if the whole world hung upon his saw
And would from then forever. Each one knew
That from his vision -- in his reply to Arthur --
Finally would spring the future, ill or good.
Partly in jest Arthur had taunted Merlin
As he began his reading, but ending lamely
He put his hand upon his sword and waited.

Ensued another silence,
A quiet in the very throat of stillness,
A moment of this world muffled in quiet
Belonging, not to Arthur, but to Merlin.

Merlin spoke at last -- out of time
And in some mazy land his own -- a murmur
Like overthrown and broken thunders.

"Long have the years been since your father Uther.
None are left over from his time save me.
I am alone, a cloud that has sailed beyond its home
In some forgotten dawn, in some fiery rising,
And now, irresolute, swings from east
To west, travels no more among the hills,
Drops no more healing rain at sky's threshold.
I have not done what I came to do.
A mission mine, to raise a giant up,
To name him and belt a sword about him,
Instruct him how to serve the British folk,
How to regain our land and live our dream.
I chose Arthur, the tall, keen son of Uther,
A splendid youth who learned from all about him,
Sometimes laughing but never unaware,
And I gave him Caliburn, two edged and sharp
And tempered to slit the thickest Saxon throat.
Arthur has done proud things; there is no wrong
Adduced against him; misfeasance none.

"One only thing this Arthur has forgot -- his kin.
We saw him as one who could reclaim for us
The cool, blue days before the Caesars came,
But he preferred the step-down bath to springs,
The metaled road to trackways through the thicket,
The marble altar to ancestral rings,
And the Roman curia to the British clan.
He weighed our wealth with bags of clinking coins
Stamped with the bull-necked emperors of Rome.
He hoped to conjure Britain, charming it
At last into another Italy.

"Gone the magic and our gods who reckoned time,
The spirits in our hills who raised the stars
Nightly on their spearpoints and marched with them
In smooth, majestic convoys through the skies.
This was our dream and our expectancy.
Instead" -- and Merlin paused to pinch the air
And squeeze his eyes in sign of littleness --
"Instead, a dwindling world, our prince a Roman
Thinking the alien thoughts of Romanness,
Himself an emperor, the world his toy.

"Arthur, you are ours and one of us --
Be with us now. I will ask no more again."

A Jovian calm encased the king; he seemed
A shining through fine rain, a trembling.
He seemed to be a shimmering as of the moon through rain.
And all feared him -- except Merlin.
          He said,
"Old Merlin, you were my father's man
And so I kept you. Can you not give up
Your homilies of once-upon-a-time,
The tailings from a mine of long ago,
Ore from other days, now tumbled scree?
Give up what can no longer be. Come down
And live a while with us, small children
In the present. It is hard enough
To lose the name of Roman, for a Roman's life
Was one he lived and did not throw away.
Cities and walls and towers stand and last;
It is perhaps not good but still the best of little
In life, and better far than naught at all.
I do not harm our folk by being Roman.
I honor them. It is time that you did too.
Surely you do not befriend the Saxon
Who breaks both British urn and Roman pot?

And Merlin answered,
"So it is to be then, Arthur, king.
No more the quarrelsome thought. No more the pipe
Of disarray shrilling to Land's End
From Camelot. All must now agree And hands are clasped. Let me say only this
Before I leave. Beware one thing;
Bewale the toad that sits beside your throne;
The day will come it vomits up its gore.

"And you, lord Illtud, of whom I have grown fond,
Beware you too of service under Arthur.
Leave while you can."

Never again was Merlin seen by Arthur.
He melted away as if dissolved in rain.
He passed up into the Mendip country
Lugging with him a wicker cage, said some,
Wherein he kept his cat, but others said
An imp, though both agreed the beast was black.
Tenderly he left and much bent over
Slipped down the coast unseen by anyone
Like a trickling song from the lips of a singer,
Merging the last bars with a mellow sadness,
That left the listener's heart to feel betrayed.

Some said they saw him in the years that followed,
White bearded, counting cobbles on the shingle
Under the tide-washed rock Tintagel, caught
In the flapping winds like a broken bird, at last
His flying over.
Each stone he studied with pathetic care.
He saved only the pebblestones of crystal,
Congealed from the blowing brine and the bitter cold,
For those, he said, were the tears of things.

12

Consider the goings of time
In the final days of Arthur --
Consider how the moments ran
Like braided rivulets in arabesques,
And sunbursts, and fountains wasting of their sparkle.
Consider how time ran turbid, torrentia1, foul,
And how there lowered over him a cloud
Livid, shaped like a fetal form of death.

Arthur, unskilled in the management of time
With war bought peace, yet could not know
Their strange entwinings and clasped beings --
The wholeness of things, the sly retributions.
Arthur pronounced that peace had finally come,
A golden age, a lustrum of the years,
And he exalted Rome and praised Saint Michael.
To him the Saxon had seemed to bend his neck;
His numbers having ceased their westward flowing,
He paused to open fields, to live a while
While seed was planted and grain began to grow.

But little in all had changed, and few were they
Who looked upon the peace to nurture it.
The men of Mars were restless, the great ones.
They pined for the boisterous deed and the fell act.
Scowling they watched their world grow thinner, greyer,
Packing down into a suffocating felt.
Their joy was gone.
They looked out and down into the pastures
And saw their mounts standing with manes uncombed,
Bearing no riders now but sun and rain,
And all unbridled, clink and rattle stilled.

So they began to talk. Screened were their words
So meanings could be many -- though all were edged --
And their signals flew in slyly coded ways
North to the restless gods on Glaston's hill,
West to the green and throaty Irish breakers,
East to Thames mouth with its empty flats,
And south to the deep harbors of the Channel.
And the burden of their signal was a low
And murmurous tremor in the peace.
So gushed the hidden springs in Camelot --
For Arthur, hard to hear.

But far down river Saxon elders heard,
And Mordred among them, nimble and evasive,
He heard too -- and he wafted.
He waited like a poisoned dragon-fly
Tip toe on his leaf,
Prey swirling below him on the stream's surface,
Until would follow the flicker of stiff wings,
And the gripping and the biting.

Gawain, the leading count, the accomplished captain,
Saw the coals smouldering and warned Arthur
Whose whole heart was in the carefree peace,
Whose ears could hear but did not. He spoke to Arthur.

"King and nephew, go not to sleep,
And guard yourself. Deep are the hellish pits
Dug by devils and a sleek man's enemies --
But dangerous too the tunnelings of friends
All unwitting, not able to understand
That one word creates another and so a third.
Allegiance that way dies, by increment
Unnoticed.
          Why should not your captains ride?
Let them tighten girths and ride against the Picts.
Busyness is the medicine for these times,
Idleness a brew of mordant herbs
That twists the bowels of any understanding."

Arthur smiling said, "Gawain, uncle,
Friend and foremost, rather should we let
Our magnates go, back to the enterprise of peace,
Back each one to his parental farm,
Back to the towns, their aqueducts repaired,
With new porticos in which to stroll at will.
All is not well I know, but the worst is over.
The rollinq waters of spring have leaped the weirs
And passed beyond to sweetly flood the meadows
That soon in early summer will drain and green.
Violence has left; my work is almost done."

"You will not listen to the words of truth,
Will you then hear the reading of a dream?"
Said Gawain.
           Arthur swept a hand aside
Wrathfully as at a cloud of gnats.
"Dreams are not uncommon; who believes
A dream must forfeit then that part of life
Where man's identity is seen and known.
The colors of a dream are blacks and reds,
And unreal blues as in Egyptian glass,
None with semblance to the greys of living,
The more vivid then the more untrue.
Do not speak to me of dreams."

Gawain spoke as if he had not heard,
"So will I speak, Arthur. So must I speak
For I hear behind me Uther urging me.
Listen to your father if not now to me.

"A dream I had last night, a dream to tell
And not to keep.
          Caught in a ring of voices,
The voices those of gods preceding Christ,
I dreamed they yammered, discordant, all urgent.
Those former gods pounded the earth in uproar.
Whining they gave me to look north and signalled
The hill that long ago was theirs, the Tor,
Now Michael's. And in that hill you lay supine
And yet you slept not, for another you,
Pallid, arose waking, acknowledging the gods,
Trying to laugh with them as all were friends,
And jocular the times, a feast perhaps --
Or a marriage!
           One form, a lovely goddess,
Matrona, lay in the earth and called to you
And she lifted a bowl of golden awakenings,
The chalice of Gwyn, and you drank and your cheeks flushed
With living, and you knew more then than ever.
And then you slept with her while storms of ash
And fire rained down to consummate your love.
And the other gods, the great ones, now clapped their hands
And shouted, and then made off with the wondrous chalice,
Rushing along with a hilarious clamor
Arms linked and leaping in the air like kids:
LLyr with shaggy kelp for hair, and eyes
Made pale of pearls, a fish's gaping mouth,
And Bran the Blessed, only a boisterous head
That rattled its teeth and tongueless laughed at me
As it zigzagged dashing through the smoky air,
And others many, Arthur, all egregious,
Fantoms of fright supernal, a horrid world.
Surely a dream like this deserves the telling!
It is for you to say the meaning."

In the pause that followed Arthur stood aside
His head cocked sideways as he were gathering up,
For further remembering come winter,
The liquid last cries of cranes dispersing
Down the stepped ways of the southern sky.
He tried to speak and the words in his throat stuck
And he placed one hand at his throat and with the other
Motioned toward Glaston Tor, leagues far away,
And for a bit said nothing. Came at last
His words, heavy, comatose, a monody.

"Now I will tell another dream, my uncle,
And you may judge what choices are mine to make.
One might guess the universe was sinking,
Stabbed to death in this winter's solstice
By the thud and impact of dilemma's arrow.

"My cousin Illtud has gone away; he told none
But me, and left me with his dream -- like yours
A thing of wonder, and one ending his life of war
Forever. I grieve. Illtud the perfect warrior,
The peerless lancer who in battle brayed
Like a beast in rut has gone from Camelot.
He asked me to dismiss him.

He now has gone away, but not with weeping.
And he walked with bare feet out of Camelot
Leading Wind his mare. He vowed that never
Would he ride again but only walk.
And he kissed me and signed me with a cross.
His leather casque, his lance, his sword,
All these he left with me in surety.
Wind alone he kept. He loved the mare
Yet would not ride her. Some bundles now she bore
Inglorious. And in the frosty air of dawn
She snuffled and pawed the ground as if for war;
She was hard to lead at that slow pace of his.

"And I asked him what the dream was he had dreamed.

"This was the dream that moved him. He had seen,
Grandly and terribly in sleep a vision
That circling round him, in a pirouette
Like grief in motley dissolved into a frame
Of joy, a triptych of a traveler, Joseph,
Escorted by two angels, and in his hands
He bore a cup of healing, a grail of love,
Sweetly shining ever, and ever lancing out
Sparkels vying with the Angels' eyes.
'Illtud died,' he said, 'A Christian lives.'
And the traveler Joseph singing songs of joy
Moved through meadows that grew with hollyhocks
And bluebells and heavenly herbs beneath his feet,
And he passed to the marsh of the Tor, and there met him,
Standing apart in the rushes in a small boat
A wondrous woman with white hands and eyes
Of lapis fire and heavy braids of hair,
And she took the grail of healing, and she kissed
The traveler saying, 'Now is the grail come
Brimming with sick souls' medicine.
Now are sad loves passed and sweet loves come.

"So Illtud preached the grail to me, a soul's search,
And he seemed to think that it was meant for me.

"So I have two dreams," said Arthur, "And something hangs
Upon my choice -- I know not what. Leave me
To mill finer this visionary corn
And sift its flour and taste the bread it makes.
I am near the end of things, my uncle."