The sound brought me up short. I turned.

From here, in the light which now filled the cave, I saw him clearly. He was old, with grey hair thinning on top and hanging lank over his ears, and a straight growth of grey beard, roughly trimmed. His hands were calloused and grained with dirt, but had been fine, with long fingers. Now the old man’s veins crawled and knotted on them, distended like worms. But it was his face which held me; it was thin, cavernous almost as a skull, with a high domed forehead and bushy grey brows which came down jutting over eyes where I could see no trace of age at all. These were closely set, large, and of a curiously clear and swimming grey. His nose was a thin beak; his mouth, lipless now, stretched wide with his laughter over astonishingly good teeth.

“Come back. There’s no need to be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid.” I dropped the boughs back into place, and not without bravado walked towards him. I stopped a few paces away. “Why should I be afraid of you? Do you know who I am?”

He regarded me for a moment, seeming to muse. “Let me see you. Dark hair, dark eyes, the body of a dancer and the manners of a young wolf . . . or should I say a young falcon?”

My dagger sank to my side. “Then you do know me?”

“Shall I say I knew you would come some day, and today I knew there was someone here. What do you think brought me back so early?”

“How did you know there was someone here? Oh, of course, you saw the bats.”

“Perhaps.”

“Do they always go up like that?”

“Only for strangers. Your dagger, sir.”

I put it back in my belt. “Nobody calls me sir. I’m a bastard. That means I belong to myself, no one else. My name’s Merlin, but you knew that.”

“And mine is Galapas. Are you hungry?”

“Yes.” But I said it dubiously, thinking of the skull and the dead bats.

Disconcertingly, he understood. The grey eyes twinkled. “Fruit and honey cakes? And sweet water from the spring? What better fare would you get, even in the King’s house?”

“I wouldn’t get that in the King’s house at this hour of the day,” I said frankly. “Thank you, sir, I’ll be glad to eat with you.”

He smiled. “Nobody calls me sir. And I belong to no man, either. Go out and sit down in the sun, and I’ll bring the food.”

The fruit was apples, which looked and tasted exactly like the ones from my grandfather’s orchard, so that I stole a sideways glance at my host, scanning him by daylight, wondering if I had ever seen him on the river bank, or anywhere in the town.

“Do you have a wife?” I asked. “Who makes the honey cakes? They’re very good.”

“No wife. I told you I belonged to no man, and to no woman either. You will see, Merlin, how all our life men, and women too, will try to put bars round you, but you will escape those bars, or bend them, or melt them at your will until, of your will, you take them round you, and sleep behind them in their shadow . . . I get the honey cakes from the shepherd’s wife, she makes enough for three, and is good enough to spare some for charity.”