In a little glade under a great oak, whose roots gripped the ground like talons, Uther told to Merlin the vision that had come to him in the watches of the night. He had stood late at his window, looking over Caerleon shimmering white under the moon, and had seen a star of transcendent glory smite sudden through the blue vault of the heavens. A great ray had fallen from the star, and from the ray had risen a vapour, a golden mist that had shaped itself into a dragon of gold, and from the dragon’s mouth had proceeded two smaller rays that had seemed to compass Britain between two streams of fire. Then, like smoke, both star and dragon had melted out of the heavens, and only the moon had looked down on Usk and the sleeping woods about Caerleon.
When Uther had spoken his whole soul in this mystery of the night, Merlin withdrew himself a little and looked long into the sky, his tall figure and strong face clear as chiselled stone in a slant gleam of the sun. For fully the third part of an hour he stood thus like a pillar of basalt, neither moving nor uttering a sound, while the sky fainted over the tree tops and flashed red fire from the armour of the King. Suddenly, as though he had caught inspiration from the heavens, prophecy came upon him like a wind at sunset. He stretched his hands to the sky. His body quivered; his eyes were as rubies in a mask of marble.
“I have seen, O King! I have looked into the palpitating web of the stars, into the glittering aisles of the infinite.”
Uther strode out from the tree trunk where he had leant watching the man’s cataleptic pose grow into the quick furor of prophecy.
“Say on,” he said.
Merlin swept a hand towards him with a magnificence of gesture.
"Thou art the star, the dragon is thy son. He shall compass Britain with a band of steel, beat back the wolves of heathendom, and cast stupendous glory over Britain’s realm. His name shall shine in history, sun-bright, magnificent, and pure; his name shall be Arthur. Thus, O King! Uther of the Dragon, read I this vision of the night."
Uther, a gradual lustre in his eyes, looked long at the sun behind the swart pillars of the forest. He seemed to gather vigour from the glow. Prophecy was in his thought, a prophecy that tempted the inmost dreamings of the heart, and linked up the past with promise of the future. To love, to be loved, to win the woman among women! To beget a son, a warrior, a king; to harden his body like to an oak, temper his heart like steel; to set the cross in his hands and send him forth against the beast and the barbarian like a god! Such, indeed, were the idyls of a King!
“Merlin, I have no wife, and you speak to me of a son,” was his sole answer.
The retort echoed from the man.