Sometime later, I was aware that the people in the room were different. Two were the same, a man and an old woman, but two were much younger. I knew none of them.
On another occasion the man, thin and dark-faced, leaned close to me, looking into my eyes. His hair was receding at the temples leaving a pointed peak, and as I looked at him I saw tiny holes high above his forehead where hair had once grown. Then his face wavered and became two faces, alternately overlapping then drifting apart. Pain pounded behind my eyes. I closed them again.
There came a time when I heard sounds before I opened my eyes. When my lids rose, I was looking at the ceiling of the white room, and the same thin, dark-faced man hovered above me, looking down. His mouth moved and I heard the sound of his voice. I knew it was his voice, but the sounds meant nothing. I became aware of movement to one side of me, but when I tried to look in that direction I could not move my head. It was fixed. Immobile.
I was aware of long passages of time, and of the pain either lessening or simply becoming more bearable.
Once I heard a bird singing somewhere and the sound of a heavy tread approaching me. I opened my eyes and found I could move my head as a large, dark-haired, broad-shouldered, heavily moustached man with blue eyes came to a stop beside me, looking down at me with a frown on his face.
"Merlyn," he said. "Caius Merlyn Britannicus, are you in there?"
I felt my throat swell and wanted to weep. I had understood what he said! He remained there watching me for some time, and I made no effort to communicate with him. I did not know that I could. Eventually he left, and as he passed from my sight, I continued to wonder what he had been trying to say. Who was Merlyn Caius Merlyn Britannicus? And who was I? The sudden knowledge that I could not answer that question in my own mind filled me with a terror that was all the more frightening because I could not remember ever having felt that way before.
I learned very soon afterwards that / was Caius Merlyn Britannicus. The old woman told me, the woman in blue who was always nearby. I watched her as she passed my bed one day, and she saw me watching her. She stopped in her tracks, motionless, and looked at me for a long time, and then she approached me and picked up one of my hands, holding it between her own.
"Caius?" she whispered. I looked at her more closely than I ever had before, taking in the whiteness of her hair, the smoothness of the skin stretched over her high cheekbones, and the deep blue of her lovely eyes. I felt her hand squeezing my own.
"Caius, can you hear me?" I gazed at her.
"Caius, can you understand me?" There was a different tone to her voice now. "I know you can see me, and I know you can hear me, so if you understand my words, squeeze my hand the way I am squeezing yours." Again I felt the pressure of her hands. "Squeeze my hand, Cay." I tried, and she felt it, and her eyes filled with tears. She moved even closer to me, sitting on the edge of my bed.
"You can understand. I knew you could!" She smiled now, and such was the warmth of that smile, the love and the tolerance in it, that I felt my own face respond and my lips move to form an answering smile. Her face grew radiant.
"Do you know me? Do you know where you are?" No response. I didn't know how to respond. Undeterred, she went on, "If you do know me, or if you know where you are, squeeze my hand again." She waited until she was sure that I was not responding, then she tried again. "Very well, if you do not know me, squeeze my hand." I squeezed, and she sat back with a short cry, but only for a moment. Then she was leaning forward again.
"Now listen to me, Cay. I am your aunt. My name is Luceiia. Can you say that?" Again, I understood her words and knew what she wanted, but I did not know what she wanted me to do. She moved again, so that she sat with her hip against me, her body twisted so she could look directly into my face. She moved her mouth slowly, speaking clearly: "Lu-cei-ia. Loo-chee-ya. Say that, Cay."
I felt my tongue move but my lips were gummed together. They would not open. She was watching my mouth closely now and she rose and moved away quickly, returning with a moist cloth which she used to clean my lips, running her cloth-wrapped finger end into my mouth and around my gums. It felt wonderful. She tried again, and this time I repeated what she had said. "Luceiia." It meant nothing to me, but it was obviously very important to her. I had learned my first word.
I learned very quickly after that, as a child does and, like a clever child, I had many willing teachers. The thin, dark- faced man told me that his name was Lucanus and that he and I had once been friends, but that I had lost my memory. He told me that my memory loss was complete, that I was an empty vessel, but that I might one day remember everything. In the meantime, he said, I could relearn all that I had forgotten. He was encouraged in this belief, he told me, because I was not a completely empty vessel. I could still speak and understand what was being said to me, which meant that, somehow, the damage done to me had not been unlimited. I remember that today, his way of phrasing that. He did not say the damage had been limited; it had not been unlimited. Even though that subtlety escaped me at the time, I also remember that I wondered what he meant, and asked him. He blinked at me, then paused for a time before saying, "You were hit very hard on the head with a large metal ball.. .a club with a swinging head." That meant nothing to me, so he continued, watching my eyes closely all the time. "We thought you had been killed. Uther found you being guarded by young Donuil, your tame Celt"
"Uther?" I searched my empty mind, seeking for a meaning. "Who is Uther?"
"Uther is your cousin and your closest friend. He has been here several times to visit you. A big, dark-haired fellow with blue eyes and a long moustache." I smiled, remembering: Merlyn Caius Merlyn Britannicus. That had been Uther.
"Anyway, Uther had been tracking the invaders who ambushed you up in the hills, but he had not expected you or anyone else to come along, so you surprised him as much as your attackers surprised you. He had been plotting a trap of his own when you and your troopers sprung the trap in which you were hurt. By the time he was able to organize his forces and attempt a rescue, it was almost too late. He and his men drove off your attackers and brought you back here to Camulod. Do you remember Camulod?"
I shook my head, only then becoming conscious of the extent of things I could not remember. Thinking back to that time now, I see many things that I failed to grasp, let alone remember. When Lucanus told me, for example, of how he had bored a hole in my skull with an auger to relieve the pressure of blood built up in there and pressing on my brain, all the while fearing the attempt might kill me but blowing that I would inevitably die if he did not do something, I listened without surprise or disbelief, utterly oblivious that such things were not supposed to happen. Haematoma, he had called the pressure. He had relieved me of a haematoma by drilling a hole into my head while I lay unconscious, and the operation had been successful.
I spent many hours talking to Lucanus, and to many others throughout the years that have lapsed since then, about the phenomenon known to physicians as amnesia, although no one has known more about it than he did. I learned that it is a surprisingly common occurrence, stemming from a wide variety of causes, but that its very commonness of occurrence is the only common thing about it. No two cases that he had ever encountered, Lucanus told me long afterward, had ever been the same, or even comparable, apart from the single common point of memory loss. Some people lost only parts of their memories and never regained them. Others lost all memory, then regained it in a very short time. Some people's memories returned to them slowly, over years, while others regained theirs in their entirety within moments. Some amnesiacs retained familiarity with their surroundings but lost all knowledge of their own identities; still others knew perfectly well who and what they were but lost all awareness of limited periods in their past. Mine was the most drastic case Lucanus had ever encountered. I had lost everything, including self-awareness, and had become tabula rasa, as he termed it: an empty slate.