At first I thought the crude cage was some kind of shelter, and that when I got close I would find an entrance between the bars, but there was no door. The cage barred the last few yards of the gorge, and the promised food was waiting under one of the hawthorns. I found stale bread, dried mutton and a jar of water. I sat, broke the loaf, and suddenly something moved inside the cage and I twitched with alarm as a thing scrabbled towards me.

At first I thought the thing was a beast, then I saw it was a man, and then I saw that it was Merlin.

‘I shall be good,’ Merlin said to me, ‘I shall be good.’ I understood the second clay figure then, for Merlin was blind. No eyes at all. Just horror. ‘Thorns in my feet,’ he said, ‘in my feet,’ then he collapsed beside the bars and whimpered. ‘I shall be good, I promise!’

I crouched. ‘Merlin?’ I said.

He shuddered. ‘I will be good!’ he said in desperation, and when I put a hand through his bars to stroke his tangled filthy hair, he jerked back and shivered.

‘Merlin?’ I said again.

‘Blood in the clay,’ he said, ‘you must put blood in the clay. Mix it well. A child’s blood works best, or so I’m told. I never did it, my dear. Tanaburs did, I know, and I talked to him once about it. He was a fool, of course, but he knew some few tawdry things. The blood of a red-haired child, he told me, and preferably a crippled child, a red-haired cripple. Any child will do at a pinch, of course, but the red-haired cripple is best.’

‘Merlin,’ I said, ‘it’s Derfel.’

He babbled on, giving instructions on how best to make the clay figure so that evil could be sent from afar. He spoke of blood and dew and the need to mould the clay during the sound of thunder. He would not listen to me, and when I stood and tried to prise the bars away from the trees, two spearmen came grinning from the cleft’s shadows behind me. They were Bloodshields, and their spears told me to stop my efforts to free the old man. I crouched again. ‘Merlin!’ I said.

He crept nearer, sniffing. ‘Derfel?’ he asked.

‘Yes, Lord.’

He groped for me, and I gave him my hand and he clutched it hard. Then, still holding my hand, he sank onto the ground. ‘I’m mad, you know?’ he said in a reasonable voice.

‘No, Lord,’ I said.

*I have been punished.’

‘For nothing, Lord.’

‘Derfel? Is it really you?’

‘It is me, Lord. Do you want food?’

‘I have much to tell you, Derfel.’

‘I hope so, Lord,’ I said, but he seemed incapable of ordering his wits, and for the next few moments he talked of the clay again, then of other charms, and he again forgot who I was for he called me Arthur, and then he was silent for a long while. ‘Derfel?’ he finally asked again.