Earth's Magic by Pamela F. Service Page A

good as mine.”
    “Maybe. But think about it. The Lady said you could tell
me
and no one else about this side quest of yours. There must be a reason. Why don’t I work with the horses in a new way, try to get them to understand something of what we’re looking for? It’d mean you opening yourself to them, though. I mean deep. They’d have to get a feel for who and what you are, your ancestry. Horses are very conscious of that sort of thing. They can sense a distant cousin three fields away.”
    Merlin chuckled.
    “What’s funny? It might help.”
    “No, I was just remembering old what’s-his-name, our science teacher back at Llandoylan School, how he used to drone on and on about DNA, as if there were any hope of studying that sort of thing these days. So what you’re wanting these horses to do is test for my spiritual DNA?”
    “Something like that, I suppose.”
    “Worth a try.”
    He got off his mare and walked to stand before both horses. At Heather’s instruction, he put a hand on both of the horses’ foreheads. Then she crawled between them and put an arm around both of their necks. They stood that way for a long time. After a while, Merlin stopped feeling foolish and had to admit he had an odd tingling sensation all over his body, like tiny bubbles were bursting in his blood. Then it was gone.
    “Well,” Heather said, “we’ve done what we can. And it may have made some difference.”
    They got on their horses and then saw the two dragons and one dog sitting on their haunches watching them with all four heads cocked in curiosity. “Come on,” Merlin grumbled. “Show’s over. So where to
now?”
    Immediately, both horses took the road to the left and ambled along it. “Well, at least we’ve got a decision,” Heather said hopefully.
    As they rode along, Merlin tried stretching out all his powers to sense as much as he could in the environment. It was a strain, but he was surprised to find that after his experience with the underground people and delving into the earth, some of it came more easily. One thing that staggered him was the age, the incredible age of things. The rocks and soil they were passing over felt vastly old.
    He realized after an exhausting time that he had to pull back. If Arawn had changed someone into a rock or clod of earth, it would have been done only two thousand years ago, not two hundred thousand. The rock he might be looking for couldn’t feel that old.
    Once he managed to pull his senses closer in time, the age of human activity struck him with equal strength. Its traces wereeverywhere. Where people had lived, where they’d died, where they had farmed generation after generation. And intermingled with it all were different centers of power, some overlapping for centuries. All around were smaller versions of what he had sensed on Salisbury Plain. Places that people over the centuries had repeatedly recognized as sacred. A shrine to some prehistoric forest spirit might be covered over by a Bronze Age burial mound and that topped by a Christian chapel. A sacred well had offerings dropped into it from earliest times to last week.
    By the end of the first day, his mind was so overloaded that he practically fell off his horse at their camp and was too tired to do more than nibble at their provisions.
    The next day, Heather suggested he try her approach, which was to reach out to living animals and sense if in their minds or their ancestral memory they detected any entrapped beings nearby. Merlin was less adept at this than she, but at least it was not as painful as his previous efforts, and he marveled at how many living things he could sense about him when he tried. Insects and worms crawling in the soil, things scurrying through the grass and scrubby bushes, creatures he seldom saw or even heard. But when he did sense them, he wasn’t as good at communicating with them as Heather was.
    Instead, he found himself slipping again into thoughts about how many more creatures