He was-
‘Lassair?’ Gurdyman prompted. ‘Mercure needs your help.’
I hurried inside to the kitchen, lowering the pot of water closer to the fire in the hearth and then quickly mixing honey with pinches of the soothing, calming herbs for a comforting drink. So that was Mercure. Gurdyman had said he was powerful, capable of looking after himself, but he didn’t appear so now. He looked as if he’d just suffered some frightful attack.
It didn’t take much imagination to work out who had attacked him. He was Gurdyman’s friend, and I was in no doubt that he performed the same sort of work. So had Osmund, Morgan and Cat, and all three were dead. And that horrible line of rips in Mercure’s robe could easily have been done by a set of sharp claws.
The water was boiling and I quickly made the drink. Hurrying back out to the court, I handed it to the old man, who thanked me with a nod.
Silence fell. Mercure sipped at his drink, but made no sound. I was just thinking idly that it was unusual for somebody to consume almost boiling liquid without slurping at it when I became aware of a low, soft humming. I was going to make some comment – to ask Gurdyman what it was, to question, perhaps, if it was some strange bird – but then the impulse, and the curiosity, left me. It was a nice sound. I smiled, and the humming intensified. My legs felt weak – what a lot I’d done recently! No wonder I was so weary – and I moved backwards so that I could lean against the wall.
I was looking at one of the late-flowering blooms in the little flower bed, thinking how pretty it was, how intense the colour, when Gurdyman said, his voice oddly strangled, ‘Lassair!’
‘It’s no good, you know, my dear friend.’ Mercure’s voice was like liquid silver, and I thought it was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.
‘Lassair!’ Gurdyman’s, by contrast, sounded like the coarse croaking of a hideous bird. ‘You must- aaaah!’ Abruptly his words choked off, and he put both hands to his throat.
Oh, dear. He seemed to be in some sort of distress.
That flower was so pretty!
Somebody else was humming now, in a higher octave. It was quite sweet, and blended well with the deep, powerful vibration now flooding the inner court and bouncing off the walls. With faint surprise I realized the new sound was coming from me.
Mercure and I were humming together, and the music was quite enchanting.
I turned to face him. It wasn’t a conscious move; I had no choice. I looked right into his deep, dark eyes. They were like wells in the pale face. I straightened up into a long, thin reed and poised to dive right down into them.
But at the very last moment, something held me back. I could see Gurdyman, still trying and failing to call my name and capture my attention, but the enchantment held him mute.
It must, then, have been another’s voice that yelled, over and over again, Lassair! Lassair!
It was the voice of a man in his prime, loud, vibrant with strength, desperate with fear for me and full of terrible warning.
It was enough – just – to make me pause.
Mercure laughed softly, a sound so sweet that I yearned towards him. ‘Ah, but you resist!’ he said gently. ‘I am pleased to see it, Lassair, for it demonstrates, if demonstration were needed, that I am right in my choice.’
His choice?
He stood up and moved closer to me. He was no longer stooped and cowed. He was straight and tall, and it occurred to me that he wasn’t an old man after all…
He reached out a long, graceful hand and touched my cheek. I leaned towards him, yearning, longing. His raised arm had parted the neck of his robe a little, and I saw he wore beneath it a medallion on a gold chain. My eyes were drawn to it and I saw the image etched into the gold.
A human figure composed of man and woman, half and half, wearing a single crown.
I managed to pull my gaze away from it and met his stare. For an instant, before he changed, I saw right into his eyes, and they were black holes that opened into a pit. But then he smiled, his eyes were human again and compelling me, drawing me, towards him.
‘I see you recognize the symbol,’ he said, his breath like a soft, fragrant breeze against my cheek. ‘The male and female must both be there, and I have striven to achieve union within myself, without the aid of pupil or Soror Mystica. Morgana had her Cat, Gurdyman has you’ – for a moment his gaze seemed to reach right inside me, as if fine cords emanated out of his eyes to enter into mine – ‘but I believed I could manage fusion alone.’
He winced and slumped briefly, as if in memory of some awful pain. Then, recovering, once more he focused himself on me. ‘I have been working these many long months – years – to bring full life to both sides of myself, the female and the male, but I have not succeeded, and I must conclude that what I have striven for cannot be achieved.’ He made a strange gesture then: he wrapped both arms around himself, at the level of his ribs, and squeezed very hard.
It looked as if he was trying to hold himself together.
‘It is not meant to be, I think,’ he said ruefully. ‘My experiments have made a great rift, and although I try to put my two selves together again, I am no longer myself.’
I ought to have been curious. I ought to have been bursting with frightened questions, for he spoke – in that calm smooth voice – of things that were far beyond anything I’d ever learned; far beyond, surely, what men should even think of attempting.
But I stood, silent and docile, like a lamb awaiting the blade.
‘We who do the great work allow the fools who share this precious earth with us to believe what they see as our goal,’ Mercure went on. ‘For them to view us as covetous men and women seeking to make gold out of lesser metals suits us well, for it disguises our true aim. Not that we expect outsiders to see the huge importance of this aim, for who but we value the refinement of the soul?’
He kept his eyes on me, holding me as if I were in chains.
Then suddenly he clutched at himself, and my healer’s experience told me he was in dreadful pain. At the same instant, I had a slight disturbance in my sight; it seemed, in the space of a blink, that he altered. That the guise of a benign old man tore, and something else looked out.
Before the terror could burst out in a long scream, he had me – and perhaps whatever lurked inside him – back under his control.
‘I have erred, Lassair,’ he whispered, and the agony made his voice shake. ‘I tried to suppress my dark side; to bring it under my own control and then release it back into myself. But dark sides are not amenable to our control. Mine, at least, is not.’ He sighed, and now I could detect that his breath reeked; that it was foul and corrupt with some dread matter.
‘I have altered my soul’s true nature by what I have done to myself,’ he murmured – I noticed that he was trembling, his whole body shaking as if he was in the grip of some sort of fit – ‘and I am forced to admit, at the last, that I cannot achieve my uttermost desire alone.’
Now he turned on the full force of his glamour, and I felt it descend on me like a glittering cloak. ‘You shall come with me,’ he said – it was more like a chant – ‘and we shall go to my house on the island, and I shall destroy the causeway so that we are for ever alone, my Soror Mystica and I, and we shall unite our bodies and our different essences – our very souls – into the ultimate.’
He raised his hand, began to back away, and I followed.
But our route to the door was blocked. Somebody stood in the passage.
Hrype said calmly and firmly, ‘She will not go with you, Mercure.’
Mercure spun round and, again, I had that glimpse of something terrible beneath the disguising robes.
But his voice was still sweet and so seductive.
‘Oh, I think she will,’ he said.