Guinevere’s Merlin
by Catherine Hartley
She held her skirts balled up inside her left fist, watching her feet pick lightly across the cracked ground, careful to keep her right hand steady and high. Here and there flowers were breaking through. They danced a little, her movements creating the breeze that caused them to shiver slightly. Her breathing was heavier now as she neared the top of the hill but she didn’t slow.
The stargazer had arrived that morning. He was days ahead of the king but the preparations had made it seem like this man was royalty himself. She’d watched the girls in the kitchens, preparing the birds for the feast; plucking feathers, trussing and skewering; exposing plump, translucent flesh. They stole reverential, fearful glances at the doors whenever they could, as though he might be watching them, this stranger, this sorcerer.
But the seeds of the future are sown in the past, she thought. To be surprised by the crops or the flowers that grow – that was foolishness. There is no magic in paying attention.
Cresting the hill, she inhaled in the landscape’s sounds. For this single hour, she’d escaped the quiet, held breath of the house: she had always been good at slipping away, unnoticed.
Sensing the cessation of movement, the bird in her gloved right hand shifted its weight and rotated its sightless head, as if taking in the view. It knew where they were, she was certain of it: it lifted its wings, gently testing the air, feeling the sun, and then folded them and let a shudder of impatience run down its body. Its beak opened and closed.
Carefully, she teased the hood off and unwound the leather strap from the bird’s feet, dropping both into the pouch at her hip. In a deft movement she briefly lowered her right hand and, lifting it again, felt the pressure of the bird’s feet as it pushed away, beating its wings hard and pressing itself into the air. It climbed, until, with a pause that always made her heart stop, it seemed for a moment to fall, wings outstretched, then turned impossibly and dived again in the direction it had come. She had pulled out the lure and begun its rhythmic swing. The bird stooped, climbed, turned, stooped again; she, the circle’s anchor, threw her arm to tempt and evade, playing with height and speed. Controlling the spin that directed the flight. The bird called once as it flew, long and sharp. She thought it sounded like a laugh, sometimes, but today it was too high and too frantic.
That evening, she felt herself observed by the stargazer as closely as if she were the heavens themselves, her movements read like the night sky. Only once, her eyes met his – piercing and black, like her bird, his namesake – and she imagined how it would feel to pull the leather hood over his head, leaving only his hooked nose and thin lips visible. To throw the lure and watch him stoop for it.
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Catherine Hartley: I am an English teacher from Oxfordshire; this is the first time I’ve ever submitted my writing anywhere!
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Our Reader said:
I think this is a very thoughtful concept, and I also love how the stargazer is compared to the bird at the end, which brings forth cohesion in the story.
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