Conspiracies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,59

Addie put in.

Spirit shook her head. “He bought it as the same oak that Merlin was imprisoned in by Nimue,” she told them. “The Merlin. Merlin the Magician. King Arthur’s Merlin. He believed it, too. It was on some farm in Cornwall near Tintagel and was struck and brought down by lightning in a huge storm; that was how he was able to buy it. He had the whole thing transported by steamship to New York, then put on its own flatcar and brought here via rail.”

They stared at her. “Uh … he was a sucker?” Burke said, finally.

“Oh I don’t believe it, either,” she assured them. “I mean, King Arthur’s a myth. And ‘The Merlin’ was supposed to just be a title for a major Druid priest, so there would have been hundreds of Merlins. But I do believe there is a lot of magic in that tree, and we’ve seen the evidence of it.”

The rest nodded. “There’s probably a hundred Merlin’s Oaks, too,” Addie added. “It’s like pieces of the True Cross, you go around collecting those from all the churches in the world and you’ll have enough wood to build the Italian navy.”

Muirin’s eyes had lit up, and she had a strange, eager expression on her face. “Well, the runes on the trunk really are runes, only not the Norse kind,” she said, her voice getting that lilt that meant she was excited. “They’re Celtic ogham. I haven’t been able to translate them yet, but they match perfectly to the ogham symbols I’ve found. It might not have been the Merlin’s Oak, but it was a Merlin’s Oak, I bet!” Spirit looked at her askance. She sounded as if she’d uncovered a cache of double chocolate chocolate-dunked brownies. “I bet it was used for human sacrifices! The Druids would do that with their sacred oaks, tie a victim to it and—”

“More likely some farmer found the tree down, didn’t want to go to the work of cutting it up for firewood, knew Tyniger was in the neighborhood, and decided to make a lot of money,” Loch said cynically. “Probably found a picture of an ogham inscription in some book, then burned the runes into the tree himself and got all the villagers to agree to some story that it really was Merlin’s Oak if he bought them all a round at the pub.”

Burke grinned and Addie chuckled. “That’s a very likely story,” she said. “At the turn of the century people manufactured hundreds of those sorts of things. Petrified giants, baby mermaids…”

“I don’t know why it couldn’t be a real Druid oak,” Muirin replied, sullenly. “It’s just as likely a story. And how do you explain the magic in it? We all felt it, the way we can’t look at the oak without working really hard.”

“Oh, it’s almost certainly a spell carved into it,” Loch replied. “That’s how Druidic spells were cast in the first place. Written language was so sacred you weren’t supposed to use it for anything but magic and prayers. For that matter, spoken language was sacred, too, and bards were also magicians. That’s where the word ‘enchantment’ came from—you chanted at something and that worked magic. Just because some farmer carved something he found in a book into that tree, that doesn’t make the inscription itself phony. If he copied something faithfully enough, it would be real magic all right. For all we know, it really is the sort of spell you’d find carved into a sacrificial oak.”

Muirin didn’t look mollified, but finally she shrugged. “There’s definitely magic going on there,” she repeated.

“Definitely,” Loch agreed, and the rest of them nodded.

“It might have been even more powerful when it was fresh,” Addie pointed out. “Probably protective. Tyniger lived to be awfully old, and his fortune managed to pass through the Great Depression pretty much intact. That’s what’s been in my scrapbooks. He made his fortune in the 1880s, and built mansions with it in San Francisco, Denver, New Orleans, and New York City. But instead of building a vacation home in the Catskills or the Hamptons like everyone else did, he built Oakhurst out here. He started construction around 1900 and it took ten years to finish. It was a real showplace; for the first couple of years he was bringing people here all the time by his private rail line to show it off. Then, about the time World War I started, he gradually stopped spending any time in any of his