As time progressed, I found out everything about myself. I met all my old friends and renewed many friendships. Their assistance and the good will they accorded me made the process easy. And yet it was never complete, because the relationships, old as they might be, had no personal significance to me beyond the point at which they began again.
I identified with whatever it was that had occasioned these friendships originally, but I recalled nothing and no one. They brought the young Erse prince Donuil to see me and he spoke to me in his Celtic tongue and I understood him. He talked of the fight and how he had thought me dead after seeing me felled by my own flail. The man who swung it had been set to hit me again when Donuil killed him. I listened, responded politely in the young prince's own tongue and invited him to visit me again, but I did not remember him. They told me of my father, Picus Britannicus, and I had no recollection of him. They showed me my grandfather's books, and my great-uncle Varrus's books, but to me they were meaningless, because, although I could speak my own Latin language and the Celtic tongue, I could no longer read and the names of the writers meant nothing to me.
They told me that Cassandra was dead, with her unborn child, killed by persons unknown while on a visit to her secret home, and I accepted the information without comment since it had no relevance to me, even when they told me she had been my wife and the unborn child was mine. I was not callous; I was unknowing. My mind was empty of knowledge of her name, her face or her appearance. I relearned the facts, but I could not resurrect the emotional involvements.
Finally I moved out of my sick room and into the life of the fort they called Camulod. Uther, who should have been my teacher, I was told, was away on campaign in the south somewhere, fighting an extended war against King Lot of Cornwall—another meaningless name, although I understood its implicit menace. In his stead, therefore, Donuil the Hibernian prince and the Legates Flavius and Titus began to teach me to ride again and to handle weapons. I took to these activities immediately and instinctively, mastering each of the tasks I was set as quickly as they were presented, but none of them occasioned any further or deeper awareness. I simply had a natural aptitude for such things.
The spring of the second year of my new life arrived and lengthened into a summer that was followed lazily by an autumn in which I was plagued with formless, gradually worsening headaches. Then, after the onset of an early winter, Uther finally returned to Camulod. I had been anticipating his return, because apart from the recurring headaches, of which I had informed no one, by this time I was almost wholly back to being the man I had been before, according to everyone who knew me, and there were many who believed that meeting Uther would be the final step in my regaining my sense of self.
He arrived at nightfall on the second to last night of November, and I remember how glad he was to see me waiting for him with the others in the great courtyard. He leaped from his horse and ran to me, his face split in a great, joyful grin, and swung me off my feet in an enormous hug. I smiled back at him and returned his embrace, but inside myself, where I had learned to conceal my confusion, I felt devastated. The sight of him brought no memories, and my head began to ache again.
I had made two solid, honest friends since my homecoming, starting afresh with each, although they both assured me we had been friends before. These were Lucanus and young Donuil. They accepted me now as I had become, not as I had formerly been, and I loved them both for that. Almost everyone else treated me as they did because of what, or who, I had been. I could see through that pretence instantly and no one was ever able to fool me. Only with these two did I feel whole, because neither made any attempt, ever, to prod me back towards being the Caius Merlyn everyone else was seeking. Their friendship, abetted by the wholehearted and unequivocal love of my great- aunt Luceiia, enabled me to survive a long and brutal winter with a degree of equanimity, enjoying what I had, rather than pining uselessly for whatever it was that I had lost.
Uther, however, laboured hard at accepting me as I was now. His treatment of me was at all times straightforward, open and considerate—sometimes, I felt, too much so. He was scrupulous in his efforts to treat me as his equal and his lifelong friend, but I could sense an awkwardness in him. It came to a head on a sunny morning in March the following year when, during a hard-fought bout with me, he suddenly sprang away from me and grounded the point of his sword. I grounded mine, too, but watched him narrowly; this cousin of mine was a doughty and crafty opponent. He wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his tunic, his breath heaving in his chest from the exertions we had been sharing, and I was astonished to see tears standing in his eyes.
"By God, Cay, I can't stand this! You're you, and yet you are not. It's like playing with a ghost. You are complete sometimes, and I love the fight in you, and you were ever thus, and yet...and yet, much of the time now you are too different. My boyhood friend Cay simply is not here."
I felt a lump swell in my own throat at the sight of the tears in his fierce eyes, and I stepped forward, arms spread wide to embrace him. Our breastplates clashed together as our arms went round each other and he snorted into my ear, half laugh, half sob, before pushing me away to arm's; length and looking me in the eye.
"I leave tomorrow, Cay. Back to the south. Lot is still alive and fighting fit in spite of all my prayers to the ancient gods to blast his benighted soul to smoke and ashes, and I won't rest until I've cut the head, with my own sword, from his stinking neck. I wish you could come with me, but I doubt it would be wise. You are too gentle nowadays,; Cousin. Stay here, and train, and try to find yourself. I hope when I return you will know me again."
Four days later, missing him already and knowing I was unfit company for any of my friends, I mounted my horse and rode off alone, taking care to avoid being seen by Donuil, who dogged me everywhere, to the little valley my aunt told me I had called Avalon. There, I stood by the banks of the tiny lake, close to the wall of the small stone hut, looking down at the grave that they told me held my lost love and my unborn child. I had come here several times—once with Luceiia and once with Donuil; other times alone. And each time I came I felt guilt, crushing and hopeless, over my inability to grieve for what must once have been most dear to me.
Today my head ached abominably, throbbing so fiercely that I almost felt as though it moved rhythmically in time to the surging of my blood. I knelt by the foot of the grave and began the prayers I had been taught for the souls of the two people beneath me. How long I knelt there I have no idea, but the pain in my head swelled unbearably, and I eventually rose to my feet with great effort, knowing that the time had come to seek out Lucanus and tell him what had been happening to me. As I stood, my head seemed to spin and a dark, reddish mist swirled in front of my eyes. I thought I turned towards my horse, but instead I found myself facing the front of the hut, with its hanging, ruined door. My knees gave way and I felt myself pitch forward, seeing the edge of the door rushing towards my face.