But the boat was drifting helplessly, and he knew just enough about such things to know that a boat adrift was a boat in danger.
Frustrated, he flung himself around again to face the beach, only to find that the boat had swung about, and the land now lay behind him to his right. Muttering a curse, he crossed the deck and leaned on that side, where he discovered that the beach had changed into a shoreline while his back was turned. His horse had disappeared from view now, and even the strewn bodies that remained were barely visible, shrunken to tiny coloured patches against the now narrow, dun strip of sand.
Merlyn felt the boat tilt alarmingly beneath him, caught by a wave, and his stomach heaved so that he had to fight off a surge of nausea. He gazed mutely at the water stretching between him and the land, noting the dark green of its depths and estimating the distance he had drifted. Even by the time he had first pulled off his armour after climbing aboard, he had been too far from land to risk swimming back, especially with a burden in his arms.
He turned and looked again towards the motionless black bundle by the mast, and keeping his eyes fixed on the bearskin, he shrugged out of his wet tunic and spread it over the rail of the boat. Then, naked, enjoying the heat of the sun on his skin, he sank slowly down to the deck, stretching out his legs and leaning back against the sun-warmed wood of the sloping side and allowed himself to think deliberately about what had happened that afternoon.
He had been ill prepared for the surprises that awaited him there on that beach—less ready to face them than he had been to face anything in his life—and their arrivals had smashed him like a succession of hurled boulders.
First, the sight of Uther stripping away his armour to violate the last surviving woman, inspiring in him a furious anger and a white-hot lust for vengeance: vengeance for his own dead wife and for all the other countless, screaming souls who had been so mindlessly slaughtered and condemned by Uther's lust for war and rapine. Incapable even of raising his voice, Merlyn had put spurs to his exhausted horse and begun to make his way laboriously forward through yielding, shifting sand to where he could face and kill his treacherous cousin.
Uther's six surviving horsemen, surprised by Merlyn's unexpected appearance, had judged his intent easily and come cantering towards him, intent on killing him. He was barely aware of them, even as he stood in his stirrups with an icy fury and slaughtered them one after the other with lethal, arm-long arrows from his enormously powerful African bow, according them only the time it took him to take aim. almost casually, before dispatching each of them with a single murderous missile.
Uther had seen him coming, finally, and he abandoned the woman on the ground, hauling himself hurriedly up into his own saddle and then swinging his mount awkwardly around to confront Merlyn, preparing to meet his death.
Even now, remembering, Merlyn's mind could not encompass the stunned incredulity that had made him reel in the saddle when he discovered that the man facing him, riding Uther's horse and wearing Uther's armour, was not Uther Pendragon, and that the running fight he had observed from the distant cliffs had been the opposite of what it had appeared to be. It seemed to him now that his mind, his entire awareness, had simply rebelled at the impossibility of everything and stopped functioning for a while, causing what he could only think of now as a featureless and frightening blankness within him—a strange and noise-filled emptiness that he could still recall but could not define.
When Merlyn's mind had begun to work again, the fellow facing him had still not moved. And yet something within Merlyn had moved within that time; something deep inside him had shifted and rearranged itself and changed him forever.
When the man removed Uther's huge helmet, Merlyn recognized him as an enemy he had once met and almost befriended, a giant of a fellow from the far northwest of Britain who called himself a King, Derek of Ravenglass. Merlyn stared in stupefaction, but no shock of recognition could combat the shock that had preceded it: the absence of Uther.
Dazed and still uncomprehending, Merlyn sat silent and empty- hearted as Ravenglass told the tale of how lie had met and killed Uther, then robbed him of his armour, horse and weapons before hurrying to catch up with the fleeing group of women whom Uther had been protecting. The King's surprise at learning that the man he had killed was Uther Pendragon was too real to be doubted. He had seen only an enemy whose armour would fit his own giant frame.
Any interest that he might have had in the stranger's identity had been blotted out by the newly received tidings that he and his own men were within a short, hard ride of capturing a group of high-born women.
The northern King had no desire to fight Merlyn, for he believed him from past experience to be some kind of sorcerer. But he was prepared to fight and die then and there if the gods required it. And Merlyn, for his part, looking at the world through altered eyes, hardly knew whether or not his cousin deserved to be avenged. Sickened by all the violent death he had seen in the previous few days, he did not wish to add to it.
And so the two parted without fighting, Ravenglass riding off in Uther's armour and leaving Merlyn alone on the beach.
A heavy flail, still flaked with an ancient coat of dark-red paint, had been hanging from the saddle-bow of Uther's horse, and Merlyn asked Derek of Ravenglass to leave it with him. It was the flail he was once sure he had found close by the spot in which his wife, Deirdre, had been murdered. So how could it be here now. hanging from its former owner's saddle'.' Merlyn took the weapon and hung it from his own saddle to replace the one he himself had lost in the Mendip Hills on the day he lost his memory, driven from his head by his own flail.
The flail's existence here changed nothing, he told himself now. Uther could easily have made a new one after killing Deirdre and throwing away the murder weapon. But even as he thought that, he remembered what Mucius Quinto had told him on the battlefield that he had ridden through mere days before: Uther's fearsome weapon, easy to make, had been widely copied for years by his admiring soldiers, and then copied again by others. The things were commonplace today—brutal, uncomplicated instruments of death. A sudden vision of his father's face sprang into Merlyn's mind, and he heard again Picus Britannicus's words on granting the benefit of doubt as his beloved face gave way to a vision of Uther, gleaming teeth bared in a laugh of pure exuberant joy.
A sound over by the mast brought Merlyn's head up quickly, and he listened intently for several moments until he was sure that it would not come again.
Ygraine. The last surviving woman on the beach had been Deirdre's sister. Ygraine, and that recognition, too, had shaken Merlyn to the core of his being, showing him a ghostly image of the face of his beloved, long-lost wife one more agonizing time.
Merlyn had noticed only by accident that Ygraine was still alive, and he had gone to her assistance immediately, only to find that she was close to death. She had been trampled and kicked in the head by Derek's enormous warhorse as it had surged and stamped, fighting for balance and scrambling to accommodate the immense, ungainly weight of Derek's armoured bulk as he mounted.
Merlyn had cradled her in his arms, unable to do anything other than support her shattered head with his hand while she died, begging him frantically to look to her child, Uther's son, Arthur.
Mystified, Merlyn had assumed that she was raving, her mind unhinged with the pain of what had happened to her, for there was neither sight nor sign of any infant on the deserted beach. And then water from the incoming tide had swirled around his knees, and from the once-beached boat, now miraculously afloat and drifting out to sea, had come the wail of a child.