Places are clear, and ideas, which came to me so new and shining then, but not always the people: sometimes now as I search my memory I wonder if here and there I have confused them one with another, Belasius with Galapas, Cadal with Cerdic, the Breton officer whose name I forget now with my grandfather’s captain in Maridunum who once tried to make me into the kind of swordsman that he thought even a bastard prince should want to be.

But as I write of Ambrosius, it is as if he were here with me now, lit against this darkness as the man with the cap was lit on that first frost-enchanted night in Brittany. Even without my robe of power I can conjure up against the darkness his eyes, steady under frowning brows, the heavy lines of his body, the face (which seems so young to me now) engraved into hardness by the devouring, goading will that had kept his eyes turned westward to his closed kingdom for the twenty-odd years it took him to grow from child to Comes and build, against all the odds of poverty and weakness, the striking force that grew with him, waiting for the time.

It is harder to write of Uther. Or rather it is hard to write of Uther as if he were in the past, part of a story that has been over these many years. Even more vividly than Ambrosius he is here with me; not here in the darkness—it is the part of me that was Myrddin that is here in the darkness. The part that was Uther is out there in the sunlight, keeping the coasts of Britain whole, following the design I made for him, the design that Galapas showed to me on a summer’s day in Wales.

But there, of course, it is no longer Uther of whom I write. It is the man who was the sum of us, who was all of us—Ambrosius, who made me; Uther, who worked with me; myself, who used him, as I used every man who came to my hand, to make Arthur for Britain.

*   *   *

From time to time news came from Britain, and occasionally with it—through Gorlois of Cornwall—news of my home.