The Last Enchantment by Mary Stewart Page B

burial and Arthur's plans to hold Caerleon in readiness for the spring campaigning.
    My host upended the bottle and shook it. "It's out. And a better night's work it never did. Thank you, sir, for your news. We live our own ways up here, but you'll know, being down in the press of affairs, that even things happening out yonder in Britain" — he spoke of it as if of a foreign land, a hundred miles from his quiet refuge — "can have their echoes, in pain and trouble sometimes, in the small and lonely places. We'll pray you're right about the new King. You can tell him, if ever you get near enough to have speech with him, that as long as he's loyal to the true land, he has two men here who are his servants, too."
    "I shall tell him." I rose. "Thank you for the welcome, and the drink. I'm sorry I disturbed your sleep. I'll go and leave you to it now."
    "Go now? Why, it's getting on for the dawning. They'll have locked you out of your lodging, that's for sure. Or were you in the camp down yonder? Then no sentry'll let you through, without you've got the King's own token. You'd best stay here. No," as I started some sort of protest, "there's a room still kept, just as it was in the old days, when they came here from far and wide to have the dreams. The bed's good, and the place is kept dry. You'd fare worse in many a tavern. Do us the favour and stay."
    I hesitated. The boy nodded at me, eyes bright, and the dog, which had risen when I rose, wagged its tail and gave a wide, whining yawn, stretching the stiff forepaws.
    "Yes. Stay," begged the boy.
    I could see that it would mean something to them if I complied. To stay would be to bring back some of the ancient sanctity of the place; a guest in the guest-house, so carefully swept and aired and kept for the guests who no longer came.
    "I shall be glad to," I said.
    Constant, beaming, thrust a torch into the ashes and held it till it kindled. "Then come this way."
    As I followed him his father, settling himself once more in his blankets by the hearth, said the time-honoured words of the healing-place.
    "Sleep soundly, friend, and may the god send you a dream."
    Whoever sent it, the dream came, and it was a true one.
    I dreamed of Morgause, whom I had driven from Uther's court at Luguvallium, with an escort detailed to take her with safe ceremony across the high Pennines, and then southeast toYork , where her half-sister Morgan lay.
    The dream came fitfully, like those hilltop glimpses one gets through blowing cloud on a dark day.
    Which, in the dream it was. I saw the party first on the evening of a wet and windy day, when fine rain blowing downwind turned the gravel of the road into a slippery track of mud. They had paused on the bank of a river swollen by rain. I did not recognize the place. The road led down into the river, in what should have been a shallow ford, but now showed as a racing tumble of white water which broke and foamed round an island that split the flood like a ship sailing. There was no house in sight, not even a cave. Beyond the ford the road twisted eastward among its sodden trees, and up through rolling foothills toward the high fells.
    With dusk falling fast, it seemed that the party would have to spend the night here, and wait for the river to go down. The officer in command of the party seemed to be explaining as much to Morgause; I could not hear what was said, but he looked angry, and his horse, tired though it was, kept on the fret. I guessed that the choice of route had not been his: the normal way from Luguvallium is by the high moorland road that leaves the west highway at Brocavum and crosses the mountains by Verterae. This last, kept fortified and in fine repair, would have offered the party a staging post, and would have been the obvious choice for a soldier. Instead, they must have taken the old hill road which branches southeast from the five-way crossing near the camp on the River Lune. I had never been that way. It was not a road that had been