There is a traditional belief, seldom spoken of, but widely held,
that age brings wisdom, and that wisdom, once achieved by some arcane
epiphany, continues to grow inexorably with increasing age. Like most
people, I accepted that throughout my life, until the day I found that
I had somehow grown old enough to be considered wise by others. The
discovery frightened me badly and shook my faith in most of my other
beliefs.
Now that I have survived everyone I once knew, I grow more
aware each day of how unwise I have been throughout my life. Unwise
might even be too mild a euphemism for this folly of persistence I
betray in clinging to a life of solitude and pain. The pain is
unimportant and, in a total absence of sympathy, it has become a form
of penance I gladly accept and endure in expiation of my sins of
omission and unpreparedness. The solitude, however, grows unbearable at
times and I am now accustomed to talking to myself merely to hear the
sound of a human voice. Sometimes I argue with myself. Sometimes I read
aloud what I have written. Sometimes I speak my unformed thoughts
aloud, shaping them audibly to give myself a beacon in the darkness of
my efforts to write down a clean, coherent chronicle of what once
flourished proudly in this land but has now ceased to be.
I find it strange nowadays to think that I may be the only one
alive in all this land who knows how to write words down, and because
of that may be the only one who knows that words, unwritten, have no
value. Set down in writing, words are real; legible, memorable, exact
and permitting recollection, imaginings and wonder. Otherwise, sung or
spoken, whispered to oneself or shouted to the winds, words are
ephemeral, perishing as they are uttered. That, at least, I have
learned in my extreme age, and might have taken that awareness as a
sign of the beginnings of wisdom, had I been able to believe that any
remain alive who might someday read my words.
And so I write my chronicle, and in the writing of it I
maintain the life in my old bones, unable to consider death while yet
the task remains unfinished. For I believe this story must survive.
Empires have risen in this world and fallen, and history takes note of
few of them. Those that survive in memories of men do so by virtue of
the faults that flawed their greatness. But here in Britain, in my own
lifetime, a spark ignited in the breast of one strong man and became a
clean, pure flame to light the world, a beacon that might have outshone
the great lighthouse of Pharos, had a sudden gust of willful wind not
extinguished it prematurely. In the space of a few, bright years,
something new stirred in this land; something unprecedented; something
wonderful; and men, being men, perceived it with stunned awe and then,
being men, destroyed it without thought, for being new and strange.
When it was over, when the light was snuffed out like a candle
flame to permit darkness to descend, a young man, full of hurt and
bewilderment, once asked me to explain how everything had happened. He
expected me to know, for I was Merlyn, the dread Sorcerer, Fount of all
Wisdom. And in my folly, feeling for the youth, I sought to tell him.
But I was too young. Too young at sixty-four to know what had occurred
and why it had been inevitable. That was a decade and a half ago. I
doubt that I could answer that young man today, with spoken words, so
little do I know even now, after years of solitary thought and
questioning. I only know that, at the start of Arthur's life, I had no
thought of being who I am today, nor had I any thought of how I would
presume to teach a child to be the man, the King, the potent Champion
he would become. In those years, I had far too much to learn, myself,
to have had time for thoughts on teaching. Yet teacher I became,
eventually, unknowing, after a spell of learning in ignorance.
I know that by the rules of random chance Arthur should never
have been born, but was; and then, being born, he should have died in
infancy, yet lived. Feared and despised by men who had no knowledge of
his nature, he should not have survived his early boyhood, yet escaped
to grow. I know that, reared by men who scarcely knew the title or the
meaning of kingship, he should never have emerged to be the High King
he became, the culmination of a dream dreamed long before, by men long
dead before his birth. I know he was my challenge and my pride, my
pupil and my life's sole, crowned success. And I know the dream he
fostered and made real deserves to live forever; hence this task of
mine.
