Читать «Cup of Gold (Золотая чаша)» онлайн - страница 10

Once Merlin had been a fine poet, the old people said, and might have been a greater. They would softly sing "The Sorrow of Plaith" or "The Spear Song," to prove it. Several times he had taken the chief prize of the Eisteddfod, and would have been chosen First Bard if an aspirant of the House of Rhys had not entered against him. Then, without known cause, and Merlin a young man, too, he had shut up his song in the stone house on Crag-top and kept it a strict prisoner there while he grew old and old-and those who had sung his songs forgot them, or died.

The Crag-top house was round like a low gray tower with windows letting sight on the valley and on the mountains.

Some said that it was built by a beleaguered giant, centuries ago, to keep his virgins hidden while they were in that state; and others, that King Harold had fled there after Hastings to live out his life ever watching and peering, with his one eye, down the valley and over the mountains for the coming of Normans.

Merlin was old now; his hair and long, straight beard were white and soft as spring clouds. There was much about him of an ancient Druid priest with clear, far-seeing eyes which watched the stars.

The pathway narrowed on young Henry as he climbed.

Its inward side was a stone wall cutting into the heavens knife-like, and the misshapen, vague images along the way made it seem the rock temple of some old, crude god whose worshipers were apes.

There had been grass at first, and bushes, and a few brave, twisted trees; but upward all living things died of the rock loneliness. Far below, the farmhouses huddled like feeding bugs and the valley shrank and drew into itself.

Now a mountain closed in on the other side of the trail, leaving only a broad chasm to the sky. A fierce, steady wind poured out of the blue heavens and shrilled toward the valley. Upward, the strewn rocks were larger and more black and dreadful-crouched guardian things of the path.

Henry climbed tirelessly on. What could old Merlin have to tell him, or, perhaps, to give him? A lotion to make his skin tough and proof against arrows? Some charm? Words to protect him from the Devil's many little servants? But Merlin was to talk and he to listen; and what Merlin said might cure young Henry of his yearnings, might keep him here in Cambria for always. That could not be, for there were outland forces, nameless foreign ghosts, calling to him and beckoning from across the mysterious sea.

There was no desire in him for a state or a condition, no picture in his mind of the thing to be when he had followed his longing; but only a burning and a will overpowering to journey outward and outward after the earliest risen star.

The path broke on a top of solid stone, semispherical like the crown of a hat; and on thepeak of its rise was the low, round house of Merlin, all fitted of irregular rough rocks, and a conical roof on it like a candle-snuffer.

The old man met him at the door before he could knock.