ONE

The following morning, after Grundo had pigged out on bacon and eggs—well, I did, too; the bacon was marvelous—Olwen brought us two heavy little knapsacks loaded with sandwiches. If I’d been on my own, I’d have asked to leave some of them behind. There were so many. As it was, I peered in at the several loaf-sized packages, thought of Grundo, and wondered if there was enough.

Then my grandfather came in with a map and showed us how to go. “The place you are making for,” he said, “is a ruined village where people lived before History began. You may recognize it by the small wood below it where a river runs. It is there they went to wash. The place itself is on the bare shelf just below the top of the hill. You will see the remains of the houses quite clearly. Be sure to visit each one.”

He gave Grundo the map and went away to his study, to his mysterious work.

We set off, as he had told us, straight ahead from the front door. This took us round the top of the hanging scoop where the valley that led to the manse ended. We looked down as we walked on the gray road zigzagging up the green mountainside toward us. Beyond that, the valley coiled into blue-green distance without a house in sight.

“I wonder where his congregation comes from,” Grundo said.

“Springs out of the earth, obviously,” I said.

For some reason, this made us both shiver, and we went a long way after that without speaking. It was a hot, blue day with only the faintest wind even up on the mountains where the map took us, the kind of day where there is a haze at the bottom of the sky, hiding the distance. It was quite hard to see the green and dun peaks as they wheeled slowly about us. The blue-black distance was only a suggestion. And it grew hotter and hotter.

“Dad must have forgotten to put the clouds back,” I said. I was a little puzzled because Dad is usually very particular to restore the weather systems to where they were before he moved them. I knew the King had wanted continuing fine weather, but there should have been signs by now—small clouds, gusts of wind—that Dad was beginning to bring the old weather back.

“The King probably ordered a heat wave until he’s met the Pendragon,” Grundo said. His mind was chiefly on the map. It was not like maps usually are. It was more like a little drawing of hills and mountains. Woods were put in as small trees, and marshes were drawn as pools grown with rushes. I found it easier to follow than a real map, but Grundo kept grumbling about it. “How am I expected to follow an artwork?” he kept saying.

It took us the whole morning to get to the place—or maybe longer than that, I suspect. We trudged slantwise across hillsides where dark gorse stood above us, blazing with yellow flowers smelling of vanilla, and beside crags, and up long slopes among pine trees, where the smell was sad and spicy. The only real incident was in a marsh strewn with black pools, where midges came out like smoke from a bonfire every time we trod on a tussock. Grundo got sick of the midges and went through an acre of fine emerald grass instead. The grass was growing on sucking mud. Grundo lost both shoes. We had to crawl for them and got very silly and laughed a lot and ended up covered with black, coaly slime. The slime flaked off in the sun as we walked on. By the time we reached the place, we had almost flaked back to normal again.

“It’s unmistakable, really,” Grundo said, staring uphill at it.

It was like an accidental garden strewn with heaps of regularly piled stones. Small rowans and hawthorns had grown up among the stones, along with heather and gorse, big bushes of broom and small shrubs of bilberry. In between, there was every kind of wildflower, from foxgloves and poppies and yarrow, through buttercups, down to speedwell and tiny heartsease. I was particularly enchanted with some flowers like dark blue trumpets nestling in sunny spaces and by the drifts of frail, wiry harebells. Blue is always my favorite color. Grundo discovered ripe bilberries and was squatting eating them almost at once, while butterflies flitted across him in all directions but straight. Bees murmured everywhere, and grasshoppers grated away all around.

“Let’s have lunch before we explore,” I said.

“Yes!” said Grundo, with his mouth all purple.

We sat down on the nearest sunny tumble of wall, just beside what looked like the ruins of a front door with very civilized steps up to it, where we ate an improbable quantity of sandwiches in peace and contentment filled with insect sounds. I said the people who once lived here must have been very well organized.

“But what a long way they had to go for water,” Grundo said, pointing to the little rustling wood down the hill, where you could just hear the distant trickling of the river.

“It didn’t matter if they were used to it,” I said. I had a sudden strongly imagined vision of that wood full of small pathways, some of them where children ran and laughed, others where sweaty men strode down to bathe, and others where women walked with baskets of washing, chatting and arguing. The part where the privet and blackthorn grew thickest and darkest, up near the waterfall, would have been—well—secret somehow. I didn’t know if this idea was correct or not, so I didn’t mention it to Grundo. I said, “If you’ve quite finished pigging, we have work to do.”

Grundo got up, groaning a little, and we went in among the houses. They were all just heaps of stone in rings or ovals, but you could see they had been houses because some of them were divided into rooms, and there were big slabs of stone in some that might have been tables. Or stairs. As we went from house to house in the hot, dreamy sunlight, with the butterflies darting and flitting about us, I kept seeing them all as well-built cottages, with stone walls downstairs and the upper walls neatly plastered. Each one would have had sliding shutters for windows and a round, thatched roof like a hat on top. Most of them had small walled gardens at one side. But again, I was afraid I was being overimaginative, and I didn’t tell Grundo this either.

He was poking around, grunting, wondering if people could stand up inside the buildings, and muttering that all the rooms were so tiny. “What does your grandfather expect us to find here?” he demanded. “Buried treasure?”

By this time we were coming to the last and smallest house in the place. It was a ring of stones only a couple of feet high, off at the bottom end of the village, slightly aside from the other ruins. The grass inside the ring of stone was green even for this country, and there were more flowers growing there than in any other spot. But I was thinking there were no dividing walls—this must have been a very humble cottage—when we were suddenly inside a perfect cloud of butterflies. They swept around us, all kinds, white, blue, small and brown, large yellow, big tortoiseshell, orange-tipped, some almost red, and whirled on into the small ruin, where they sank in a quivering crowd toward the bank of yellow flowers to one side.

“Go with them,” Grundo said with utter certainty. “They mean something.”

We stepped inside onto the green, moist grass. And there the thing happened that my grandfather must have sent me for. It seemed to last for a second and to go on for a century—Grundo says a minute, I stood there like a statue for a minute, he says—and it is horribly hard to describe. So many things seemed to happen at once.

The first thing was that, as if someone had dealt me a thumping blow, I felt a terrible pain in my right hip. It hurt so that I could hardly stand up. And then, though I knew I was all the time standing in the sun in a ruin, I was in the house as it once had been. It was fairly dark, but extremely civilized and orderly, if you allowed for most things being on the floor, like knives and pots and cups and knitting, all laid neatly on the carpet. The reason it was arranged like that was because the woman lying on the low bed where the butterflies were had difficulty standing up. It hurt her to stand or walk. She had been ritually injured when she was fifteen because she was a powerful witch. A very powerful witch. She greeted me with dreadful, bitter joy. The village chief had smashed her right hip so that he could control her. She had never forgiven him. She had vowed never to pass on the knowledge her gifts had given her to anyone from the village. But the law is that you have to pass your knowledge on to someone. So, instead, she had searched the centuries and the millennia for the right person to pass her magic to. And she had found me.

She gave me her knowledge.

It was devastating. I had the knowledge all at once in a bundle—all she knew, all she could do, and her entire life with it. I felt like Mam’s little laptop into which someone had suddenly downloaded fifty years’ dealings in the world’s stock exchanges. I staggered and limped and hobbled away from the small ruin, hardly able to see. All I remember is that the butterflies flew away as suddenly as they had come, spreading out as they went into a hundred different flight paths. The only other thing I knew was that my hip hurt dreadfully.

I think Grundo was very frightened. He says my face was gray and my eyes like bright holes. He said, “Are you all right?” in the calm, quivery voice people use instead of screaming. When I didn’t answer, and I couldn’t—all I could make was a queer, buzzing moan—he took a violent hold on my wrist and dragged me out of the long-ago village. He had to drag very slowly because I almost couldn’t walk. My right thigh felt broken.

Down the flowery field we crept to the wood with the river in it. Grundo had to carry both our bags. He was probably wondering how we were going to get back to the manse. His first idea was to sit me down in the wood to recover, but that didn’t work because my leg hurt too much to bend. So he cut through the dark corner past the waterfall and dragged me across the stepping-stones and out onto the hillside beyond.

There it was as if we had passed an invisible boundary. The hurt in my hip stopped. It was just not there anymore. “Oh, thank goodness!” I said. “Fancy being in that kind of agony all the time, Grundo!”

“Are you all right now?” he asked rather desperately.

“No,” I said. My head seemed to be bursting, as if it had two brains in it. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shall have to lie down and go to sleep for a bit.” And I flopped down on the grass and heather and more or less passed out.

Grundo says I slept for at least two hours. He sat anxiously beside me the entire time, not knowing what had happened to me and wondering what he would do if I never woke up again. He says I hardly seemed to be breathing most of the time. He told me very calmly, but I think he had been pretty brave.

I woke up suddenly—pop, like that—and sat up with all sorts of strange new knowledge still sorting itself out madly in my mind, to find the sun quite low and both of us under a cloud of midges.

“Are you better now?” Grundo asked with great calmness. He was trying to scratch both legs, one arm, and his hair at once, and he looked unusually pink and sweaty.

“Yes,” I said. “Starving. Is there any food left?”

Grundo scrambled to tip sandwiches, cake, and apples out of our bags. “Tell me what happened,” he implored me.

I tried to tell him, while eating passionately. The odd thing was that I couldn’t tell him what it was really like. I could only tell him what I’d learned. “The woman who used to live in that house,” I explained, “was a wizard and a priestess and a healer, a very strong one, very clever. She understood more about magic than anyone I’ve ever met. And—”

“But you didn’t meet her,” Grundo objected. “There was no one but us in that ruin.”

“Yes, I did,” I said. “She was lying in the place where the butterflies were.” I saw her in my mind’s eye as I said this, even though I knew Grundo was right and she had not been there. She was quite small and thin, very brown and rather wrinkled, and I could tell she thought of herself as old—but she wasn’t, not even as old as Mam, and Mam is thirty-two, which is not old for people these days. She had hair like mine, black and curly, but hers was long and wild and a little greasy. And she stared up at me in bitter gladness, from the biggest, darkest, most vivid eyes I have ever seen. Her dry brown mouth smiled, in spite of her pain. I felt as if I had known her for years and talked to her for months. She was that strong.

“She had bad teeth,” I added. “The point is that her village tried to own her. The headman broke her hip to keep her and her magic with them when she was fifteen and wanted to marry a man from over the hill. So she never married. She could hardly walk. And she hated them for it. And, although she did her duty strictly, and cured their diseases and warded them with magic and made their crops flourish and dealt with their enemies, she made a vow to herself that she would learn more magic than anyone else in the world and not tell anyone else in the village one syllable of what she learned. Her assistants were all stupid anyway. They couldn’t understand any magic deeper than wart charming if they tried. But the trouble was, the rule is that you have to hand on your magical knowledge to someone or it stays around and destroys things. So she learned and kept everything in her head, and when she knew enough, she searched all through the future to find someone to give the knowledge to. That’s what Grandfather Gwyn sent me here for. So that she could find me.”

“And do you know everything she knew?” Grundo asked. He sounded so disbelieving that I knew he was deeply impressed.

“Not yet,” I said. It was unfolding in my head as I talked. I had a notion that I would be unfolding more of it for the rest of my life. “She gave it to me in a lump, you see, along with her bad hip for a while. It’s all in lists, like files in a computer. Each file goes under a different flower. I think I’m supposed to learn which flower means which sort of magic and then access them when I need them. Lots of them are going to just sit there folded into a lump until I call them up. But I know some. Purple Vetch is the first file, and that has all the time magic in it, the stuff she needed to be able to search the future. And some really strange things!” I stared at these things, while Grundo stared at me staring into distant universes and huge, peculiar ideas I’d never thought of before. It was like looking down a whirlpool.

“Why did she choose you?” he growled. It was almost a complaint. Grundo felt left out.

“I think my brain matches hers,” I said. “That’s what she looked for, a brain, not a person. But she was glad I was well intentioned, too. She was going to die soon. Her hip had gone bad inside. And she really didn’t tell anyone in the village her magic, I know. I’m pretty sure the place didn’t last very long after she died. But I remembered to thank her. I told her that her knowledge was going to save more than just a village in this time.”

“And will it?” Grundo asked eagerly. “Can you out-magic the Merlin now?”

I wondered. There was certainly stuff in my head that would do that, but you had to learn what it was and how to work it first. “If I think very hard …” I said. “Let’s walk back to the manse now. I still have to sort out just what I do know.”

All the way back, in the mild evening sun, I was thinking, thinking. I kept discovering new flower files I hadn’t noticed before, each with more knowledge stacked inside it than I had ever dreamed existed. Once or twice I annoyed Grundo by bursting out laughing. The first time was when I realized that all the magic we had learned at Court was small and one-sided and incomplete. The reality was huge, and all the things our teachers said were complicated were really quite simple. And the other way round.

“Oh, good!” Grundo grunted when I told him. “I’ve always thought that.”

Another time I laughed, I had to explain to him, “It was the kind of woman she is! Almost all the flower headings are dry, twisty kinds of plants, like thistles or brambles or teasels. Or gorse. That’s a big file. There’s not a juicy dandelion or a lily or a forget-me-not anywhere! She was so dry and bitter!”

“It’s not evil magic, is it?” Grundo said anxiously.

“No,” I said. “That’s the odd thing! You’d think the way she hurt and hated, she might use bad magic, but she didn’t. There are several evil files—privet, yew, ivy—but they’re made like read-only. For reference, so you know what to do when someone uses black magic against you, and they all have the counterspells with them, which are the only active ones. All the rest is just, well, clean knowledge. I don’t know how she did it, considering the life she had!”

I kept having memories of that pain she’d lived with, like long, blunt teeth clamped on the top of her leg, and she still did her duty and kept her magic white. It was enough to make me swear to be worthy of her gift, to use it properly or not at all.

My grandfather was outside the manse when we came round the last bend in the way, like a stick of charcoal on the grass in front of the house, watching for us. He did not move as we came across the top of the valley, except to take down the hand that was shading his eyes. When we came up to him, he said, “There is no need to tell me. I see you found what you went for. Tea is ready.”

As we followed his upright black back into the manse, it came to me that Mam must often have been hurt or offended when he behaved like this. I wondered if I was. And I found I wasn’t. It was his way. He had shown he was anxious by waiting outside for us. When he saw we had succeeded and that we were all right, he felt words were unnecessary because we all knew anyway. I wondered if I would ever be able to explain this to Mam. Or if she would believe me if I did.

Tea was magnificent again. I let Grundo enjoy himself and chat to Grandfather Gwyn and did not speak much myself. My head was still heavy and fuzzy with all that had been packed into it. Afterward I left Grundo looking at books in the tall, damp-smelling parlor and toiled away to bed. I suppose I undressed. I was in nightwear next morning. But all I remember is plunging into sleep.