The Memory of Trees

A storm was coming, but the winds were still.(1)

Time ceased to have any meaning. Existence was swallowed up in the blackness of waiting.

It began immediately, involuntarily, the moment that Arthur's funeral ship vanished from his sight in the mist rising from the water.

Once and future. Future. How long? It didn't matter. He waited.

Percival found him on the grass, hugging his knees to his chest, dry-eyed and calm. Waiting. He was aware of the biggest knight addressing him, crouching next to him, speaking gentle and slow, a worried wrinkle between his brows. He was aware that Percival sat next to him on the grass for some time – it didn't matter how long – before speaking again.

Camelot, he heard.

Yes, Camelot. He protected Camelot for Arthur, they both protected Camelot, he loved Camelot for itself – the idea the people the home the friends – and for Arthur's sake.

It made sense, he supposed, to wait in Camelot. Arthur, when he returned, would be pleased to find him there. The king's last order – I don't want you to change. I want you always to be you.

So he went with Percival, back to Camelot. He didn't know how long it took them, it didn't matter. In the great courtyard, filled with people curious busy hopeful tearful and yet so empty, he met his friends.

The queen. The court physician. The knight.

There were tears on their faces, as they came down the stairs – Gwen in a rush of lavender color and scent, Gaius stiffer slower, Leon grave and sedate. He was aware of arms around him – his own were so empty – aware of Leon taking Percival's hand.

He heard two words. Gwaine. Dead.

The ache was distant, a drop at the edge of his heart, rolling down to join the lake of agony at his core, tiny ripples disturbing the surface – placidity disguising unfathomably black depths.

Gwaine might have pestered and bullied and teased and laughed and drank until something spilled forth of that deep undisturbed lake of pain inside him. But Gwaine was gone. Another failure. Killed by Morgana. Another failure.

Brought peace at last.

He turned to look over his shoulder, past the faces of the people in the empty courtyard, expecting the clatter of hooves at the drawbridge, the golden-haired king's return. Because he never came home without Arthur.

Not yet. He waited, watching, until someone took his arm and led him away.

Then fell on Merlin a great melancholy;

He walked with dreams and darkness, and he found

A doom that ever poised itself to fall.(1)

He kept his old room, though he'd been offered better quarters by his queen. His own tower, if it pleased him. But he instinctively resisted change, preferring a sanctuary small and familiar and guarded by a fiercely protective dragon of a physician when he needed it.

I don't want you to change. I want you always to be you.

He tried.

He woke. He ate. He exchanged worn clothes for clean ones and washed and shaved. When he remembered. He listened and he responded. He performed duties for Gaius – gathering herbs and mixing recipes and cleaning equipment and fetching and carrying and accompanying and treating and binding and studying. When he remembered. He adapted his duties as manservant to Arthur's wife Queen Guinevere Gwen – carrying laundry and straightening bedclothes and scrubbing floors and supplying food trays and water for drinking and washing and firewood and ink and parchment…

When he remembered.

Gaius kept talking about a mourning period. As if it was something that could be gotten over. A time with an end. He found it surprising, a little, the idea of mourning. He was waiting, why couldn't anyone understand that? The point of his life was Arthur.

Yes, and Camelot and Guinevere and the knights and Gaius. He made sure, always, that they were safe. But they didn't need him, not in the same way. He didn't need them, not as he needed Arthur.

That was what his magic was for, after all.

He was aware that Gaius was worried. And Gwen was sweetly troubled, when she was not consumed with the affairs of the kingdom. And Leon and Percival would stop him in the corridors, or approach him at the edge of the training field to speak to him, greet him. Are you all right?

He'd pull his gaze back from a distant edge and realize his hands were empty and he had no purpose there. Or anywhere.

He didn't lie anymore. Perhaps that was ironic, but truth or lies didn't matter as time didn't matter. He didn't say I'm fine or I'm all right. He said, I will be. And that was the truth. Someday.

The great secret, his greatest fear and his greatest pride, had dissolved like mist in sunlight, or like the falling of dusk to darkness.

Magic.

It was rumor or it was proclamation, his magic power accomplishment sacrifice salvation. It was free, now. And that was ironic – now that he not longer had any purpose for it, any desire for it, he was free to use magic whenever and wherever and whatever.

He did, of course. He did whatever was asked of him by whoever had the courage to ask – the queen going on a diplomatic mission or receiving foreign guests, the knights hunting down a particularly vicious bandit, Gaius researching a curse inflicted on an outlying village. A child in the streets of the lower town, daring to ask for help finding a lost belonging or retrieving a plaything flung and stuck out of reach.

He was aware in a vague, detached way that a reputation was building – mystery and power and eccentricity. It amused him because he knew it would amuse Arthur. Someday.

I walk the maze of moments

but everywhere I turn to

begins a new beginning

but never finds a finish

I walk to the horizon

and there I find another

it all seems so surprising

but then I find I know(2)

He found himself in the library, sometimes. He found himself in the kitchen in the forest in the armory in the cells in the prince's room, sometimes, wondering how he'd gotten there or why he'd come, unable to remember why it mattered. But there were no eyebrows raised and no questions asked when he found himself in the library.

His reading was erratic and desultory. Without rational intent or planned system. His feet wandered and his hands selected and his eyes read. As he waited.

One book, however, drew his attention to a focus. It was an ancient thing, scarcely more than a couple-dozen-page treatise. But the sketch on the cover was a tree so intricate, so alive, it seemed to grow as he gazed on it, to flutter beneath his fingertips, to creak and sigh in the dusty silence of the room.

The printed text was small and square in the center of each page, the strokes of the figures impossibly tiny. He thought of Gaius' magnifying disk and took the slender volume with him when he left the library.

…..*…..

Awake.

The voice – lady goddess destiny time – invades his consciousness like a drop of water on a still pool. Where he has lain caught petrified preserved in sweet amber opacity. The ripples spread, cross, join, oppose.

Awake.

You must fight again. You must be free. It is the time of the once and future king, again. You are needed. It is TIME.

…..*…..

One day, he heard something. In the middle of Are you all right and Why don't you and Shouldn't you and Try not to and Please could you, someone said something different.

"Teach me."

He stopped right where he was. Somewhere, going – somewhere. To do something that could – wait.

Her hair was golden, thick and long. Her mark of magic was small and dark on the inside of her wrist, the identification of a druid. She looked at him with hope and anticipation and he saw himself in her green eyes. Not a foolish clumsy servant. Not a legendary powerful sorcerer.

A man. An ordinary man – with something to offer that was of lasting value to someone. Not tricks or spells for a specific task, there and done. The knowledge of magic, the realm of possibility, seeking and learning.

"Teach me?" she said.

And he did. Slowly and sporadically, at first, then with growing confidence and clarity. She didn't question, she didn't criticize, she absorbed and thrilled and glowed.

His four friends had reservations at first. For his sake or for his first student's, he didn't know. But it didn't matter anyway, it was a pass-time that held some meaning for someone. Gaius said, it'll be good for him. Guinevere was happy for the proof of open acceptance of druidic peoples. Leon and Percival, he overheard one day, speculated about the involvement of his heart. That amused him also.

…..*…..

It is dark; he cannot see. He cannot move, his limbs are enclosed in a gentle relentless prison. Where he is, he cannot breathe – his respiration is accomplished for him, the benefit of air granted him without its touch on his face, in his lungs.

Fight, he remembers. Yes, he remembers the struggle. For freedom, for escape. His body may be incapable of liberating motion, but his mind and heart and will belong to one who does not easily give up. Had he given up?

Maybe. But now it is time. To fight. His will is energized by the feeling of another's need.

…..*…..

"What's this?" she asked one day, moving a stack of larger tomes and uncovering the strange tree-book.

Together they studied and examined, her bright gold hair at the edge of his vision as they bent over the pages, her scent fresh wildflowers, her arm and her leg touching his own, so close they were on the bench.

He considered the arrangement curiously. He had been touched – embraced, shaken, poked, patted, caressed – by many, since his return. But he hadn't been touched since the king had put his hand in his hair and said, Thank you.

"Do you know this language?" she said. "Can you read this?"

Not the text of the book, no. But in the generous margin were scrawled annotations in many hands, comments and corrections and additions and many of these he could decipher.

One, in particular, intrigued him. Concerning the memory of trees. The pace of growth, the life chronicled in the rings the whorls the blemishes the eyes… all the imperfections that smoothed made the wood beautiful and interesting. Postulated: that a spell could be devised to enable a sorcerer of considerable power to hear the story of a tree, to understand its history back to roots, through seed or nut to the parent tree, and on and on through time.

Trees, it seemed to him, had mastered patience, the art of waiting without pain, the agony of remembrance that so took him by surprise and fractured his days and nights. Of absorbing the worst tragedies and turning them into beauty and strength.

It startled him, the longing that struck, to understand just how this was done. It brought tears to his eyes that had not known that extra spillage of moisture since one morning by an empty lake.

She was captivated also. Having lost her parents at an early age and raised communally by the druids, she wondered whether such a spell might not work with the body and blood of a human as on the sap and pulp of a tree. To read a person's history, and then step back to read the parents' history – grandparents great – as well.

They burned their candles at both ends, researching scrutinizing refining rephrasing. They were short with questions asked of them by friends, they disregarded caution. Because what, after all, was the purpose of life or magic but to answer these vital kinds of question and alleviate the sort of permeating ache that irrevocable loss brought to a person's soul?

"It's ready," she told him finally. "Let's go. It must be tried, it must be tested."

…..*…..

The thrum of his pulse is not two-fold. Lub-dub. It comes in fours like seasons. Winter-spring. Summer-fall. The flow of life through his being a rhythm more subtle than a beat. A wash, like the moon-pull on tides. He doesn't remember being aware of this before.

His heartbeat quickens, to his perception.

He hears, then, a soft susurration like blood in his veins or a breeze among leaves or gentle waves breaking upon a forerunner's retreat.

The moon upon the ocean

is swept around in motion

but without ever knowing

the reason for its flowing

in motion on the ocean

the moon still keeps on moving

the waves still keep on waving

and I still keep on going (2)

Everything you've done… I know now… for me… for Camelot, for the kingdom you helped me build.

I have been lost, and someone is waiting for me somewhere. Someone needs me.

…..*…..

He went, as he went anywhere, without permission, without explanation. He knew the tree, and led her to it.

An oak, so hollow, huge and old

It looked a tower of ivoried masonwork.(1)

It was an ancient thing, split by lightning in some bygone age, its two halves sundered. How did it grow, how did it thrive, with one half dead and one half alive? Did one half ever stop yearning to be reunited? Did it ever feel itself whole, on its own? Could such a thing be accomplished, in time, or would the waiting extend into eternity?

They arrived after sundown. She advocated the immediate implementation of their researched magic.

No. It was not something to be rushed, hastily, mistakes could be made. He knew she intended to try the spell on herself, to discover her heritage, to learn her parents and family as she had been denied in her young life, but the only magic they would involve themselves with was that specifically to learn this tree. One simply did not experiment with unknown magic on human subjects.

He accomplished the campsite – fire, tent, bedroll, wood, seating – while she accomplished their meal, and they ate in a silence companionable as always.

But when he stretched himself out in his bedroll at the base of the lightning-cracked tree, she surprised him by stepping close, kneeling beside him, shyly slipping beneath his blanket, beneath his arm. He surprised himself by accepting.

Once again, he was curious to note the sensation of touch. Her body was warm and soft, her hair light against his shoulder, her breath warm on his neck and ear. Her hand caressed his chest in an exploring way, warming his blood to life in a way he had thought long gone forever.

"Emrys," she said. That was odd, and caught his attention. Though she was a druid, she had never called him that. "It is all your fault, you know. Emrys." Her voice was whisper-soft, brushing sensitive skin. He did not understand her, but it did not seem to matter much.

…..*…..

And if one thing always motivated him, it was a need that he was responsible to fulfill.

The once and future… king.

Determination pushes against his prison. He has nothing else to fight with. But his will – and that call.

Come, the voice says. Calm comfort, reassuring confidence. It is TIME.

…..*…..

Somewhere in the distance, thunder rumbled. That did not matter, he could protect them both from inclemency if need be.

She whispered again, and he recognized the words too late. He had not expected a need to counter a sleeping enchantment.

"Emrys." He still heard her, as his eyes drifted shut and his limbs dragged to stillness, still felt her hand. "The most powerful. The once foretold, the long awaited. The long… awaited." The voice took on an edge that the hand gently smoothed out. "Waiting be damned. My father and my mother were slaughtered waiting for Emrys. So many were slaughtered waiting for Emrys. I know you know how that feels. Waiting. While people die. Knowing you will never get them back. I curse you, Emrys, do you hear me? Damn you to an eternity of useless tormented waiting!"

Then, in one moment, she put forth the charm

Of woven paces and of waving hands,

And in the hollow oak he lay as dead,

And lost to life and use and name and fame.(1)

Lightning cracked, split, healed the oak, sealed away the magic and the man. Time – meaningless cruel impatient endless excruciating – ceased entirely to exist.

The man so wrought on ever seemed to lie

Closed in the four walls of a hollow tower,

From which there was no escape for evermore…

Then crying, "I have made his glory mine,"

And shrieking out, "O, fool!" the harlot leapt

Adown the forest, and the thicket closed

Behind her, and the forest echoed, "Fool."(1)

A/N: I have got to stop telling people, I don't do (fill in the blank). No sooner do I make a claim like, I don't write short stories, inspiration perversely sets out to prove me wrong. I've split this into two chapters, partly for the sake of tension. Partly because of the reason I wrote it at all.

I love Tennyson's Idylls of the king (all verses marked "1" are taken from his "Merlin and Vivien") but one of the stories that always bothered me was this one. I have always felt it wrong to end with the wicked witch winning out over mighty Merlin, and him being lost to the world this way.

I have also, recently, changed my mind in part about this outcome. That very last scene in ep 5.13, modern Merlin walking the road by Avalon, bothers me in a different way. I can't imagine someone like him living – waiting! – for fifteen hundred years. People – lovely people and fantastic writers – have envisioned different ways to make this 'all right' for him… but it occurred to me, locked in the prison of a cave or tree – if he does not sense time passing at the same rate – might be a blessing in disguise.

PS. I had this idea in the back of my mind before reading "The Beguiling of Merlin" by Penelope-Jane-Avalon, which is also an awesome version of this particular legend!