Passager (6 page)

 

 

 

 

 

Light.

Morn.

“Mother, I think often of my lost one, my hawklet, my Merlin.”

“Do not say his name here, my daughter. Do not summon up the past.”

“But, Mother, he is not just past, but future as well. As are all children.”

“You must think upon the Lord God, my daughter.”

“Will He think upon my child?”

“God watches over all wild things, my daughter, for they neither worry about nor pity their own con
dition. Perhaps your son is the greater for this exile in the woods.”

“Perhaps, Mother, he is dead.”

“Then he is with God the sooner. And we are still here, laboring away at our daily rounds. To your prayers now. Think no more of what has been, but what shall be.”

The bells ring for matins, like the sound of a tamed hawk's jesses, like the voices of angels making the long and perilous passage between heaven and earth.

The story of Merlin, King Arthur's great court wizard, is not one story but many, told by different tellers over nearly fifteen centuries. In some of the tales he is a Druid priest. In others, a seer. In still others he is a shape-shifter, a dream-reader, a wild man in the woods.

And in some of the old tales, Merlin is a child born of a princess in a nunnery, his father a demon.

I have taken some of the bits and pieces of those old stories and woven them into a story that incorporates some history and some hawking. In the Middle Ages, because of wars or famine or plague, many children were actually abandoned in the woods. There they were left to—in the Latin ecclesiastical phrase
—aliena misericordia
—the kindness of strangers. Historically, until the eighteenth century, the rate of known abandonments in some parts of Europe was as high as one in four children, an astonishing and appalling figure.

Hawking, or falconry, is the art of using falcons, hawks—even eagles and owls—in hunting game. It is a very ancient pastime, practiced by humans even before they learned to write. Falconers have their own special words: a male hawk (which is smaller than the female) is called a
tercel.
The larger female hawk is called
a falcon.
An
eyas
is a hawk taken from the nest when fully fledged but as yet unable to fly. But the wild-caught immature bird is a
passager.

A
merlin
is a small falcon, sometimes called a pigeon hawk in America. It was once much used in English falconry.

—J. Y.

J
ANE
Y
OLEN
is a highly acclaimed children's author who has written hundreds of books for adults and children and has won numerous awards. She and her husband divide their time between Massachussetts and Scotland.

www.janeyolen.com