Legacy: Arthurian Saga (13 page)

"That you let me go now. He never
would, but I think you will."

"To St. Peter's?"

She bent her head. "I told you nothing
here concerned me any more. It has not concerned me for some time,
and less than ever now, with all this talk about invasion, and war
in the spring, and the rumors about shifts of power and the death
of kings...Oh, don't look at me like that; I'm not a fool, and my
father talked to me. But you need not be afraid of me; nothing I
know or can do can ever harm your plans for yourself, brother. I
tell you, there is nothing I want out of life now except to be
allowed to go in peace, and live in peace, and my son
too."

"You said 'one thing.' That makes
two."

For the first time something came to
life in her eyes; it might have been fear. She said swiftly: "It
was always the plan for him, your plan, even before it was my
father's. Surely, after the day Gorlan went, you knew that even if
Merlin's father could come riding in, sword in hand and with three
thousand men at his back, I would not go to him? Merlin can do you
no harm, Camlach. He will never be anything but a nameless bastard,
and you know he is no warrior. The gods know he can do you no harm
at all."

"And even less shut up as a clerk?"
Camlach's voice was silky.

"Even less, shut up as a clerk.
Camlach, are you playing with me? What's in your mind?"

"This slave who spilled the oil," he
said. "Who was he?" That flicker in her eyes again. Then the lids
dropped. "The Saxon. Cerdic." He didn't move, but the emerald on
his breast glittered suddenly against the black as if his heart had
jumped. She said fiercely: "Don't pretend you guessed this! How
could you guess it?"

"Not a guess, no. When I rode in the
place was humming with whispers like a smashed harp." He added, in
sudden irritation: "You stand there like a ghost with your hands on
your belly as if you still had a child there to protect."
Surprisingly, she smiled. "But I have." Then as the emerald leapt
again: "No, don't be a fool. Where would I get another bastard now?
I meant that I cannot go until I know he is safe from you. And that
we are both safe from what you propose to do."

"From what I propose to do to you? I
swear to you there is nothing --"

"I am talking about my father's
kingdom. But let it go now. I told you, my only concern is that St.
Peter's should be left in peace...And it will be."

"You saw this in the
crystal?"

"It is unlawful for a Christian to
dabble in soothsaying," said Niniane, but her voice was a little
over-prim, and he looked sharply at her, then, suddenly restless,
took a couple of strides away into the shadows at the side of the
room, then back into the light. "Tell me," he said abruptly. "What
of Vortimer?"

"He will die," she said indifferently.
"We shall all die, someday. But you know I am committed to him now.
Can you not tell me what will happen this coming
spring?"

"I see nothing and I can tell you
nothing. But whatever your plans for the kingdom, it will serve no
purpose to let even the smallest whisper of murder start, and I can
tell you this, you're a fool if you think that the King's death was
anything but an accident. Two of the grooms saw it happen, and the
girl he'd been with."

"Did the man say anything before they
killed him?"

"Cerdic? No. Only that it was an
accident. He seemed concerned more for my son than for himself. It
was all he said."

"So I heard," said Camlach. The
silence came back. They stared at one another. She said: "You would
not."

He didn't answer. They stood there,
eyes locked, while a draught crept through the room, making the
torches gutter.

Then he smiled, and went. As the door
slammed shut behind him a gust of air blew through the room, and
tore the flames along from the torches, till shadow and light went
reeling.

The flames were dying, and the
crystals dim. As I climbed out of the cave and pulled my cloak
after me, it tore. The embers in the brazier showed a sullen red.
Outside, now, it was quite dark. I stumbled down from the ledge and
ran towards the doorway.

"Galapas!" I shouted. "Galapas!" He
was there. His tall, stooping figure detached itself from the
darkness outside, and he came forward into the cave. His feet,
half-bare in his old sandals, looked blue with cold.

I came to a halt a yard from him, but
it was as if I had run straight into his arms, and been folded
against his cloak.

"Galapas, they've killed Cerdic." He
said nothing, but his silence was like words or hands of comfort. I
swallowed to shift the ache in my throat. "If I hadn't come up here
this afternoon...I gave him the slip, along with the others. But I
could have trusted him, even about you. Galapas, if I'd stayed --
if I'd been there -- perhaps I could have done
something."

"No. You counted for nothing. You know
that."

"I'll count for less than nothing
now." I put a hand to my head: it was aching fiercely, and my eyes
swam, still half-blind. He took me gently by the arm and made me
sit down near the fire.

"Why do you say that? A moment,
Merlin, tell me what has happened."

"Don't you know?" I said, surprised.
"He was filling the lamps in the colonnade, and some oil spilled on
the steps, and the King slipped in it and fell and broke his neck.
It wasn't Cerdic's fault, Galapas. He spilt the oil, that's all,
and he was going back, he was actually going back to clean it up
when it happened. So they took him and killed him."

"And now Camlach is King." I think I
stared at him for some time, unseeing with those dream-blinded
eyes, my brain for the moment incapable of holding more than the
single fact. He persisted, gently: "And your mother? What of
her?"

"What? What did you say?" The warm
shape of a goblet was put into my hand. I could smell the same
drink that he had given me before when I dreamed in the cave.
"Drink that. You should have slept till I wakened you, then it
wouldn't have come like this. Drink it all."

As I drank, the sharp ache in my
temples dulled to a throb, and the swimming shapes round me drew
back into focus. And with them, thought. "I'm sorry. It's all right
now, I can think again, I've come back...I'll tell you the rest. My
mother's to go into St. Peter's. She tried to make Camlach promise
to let me go too, but he wouldn't. I think..."

"Yes?" I said slowly, thinking hard
now: "I didn't understand it all. I was thinking about Cerdic. But
I believe he's going to kill me. I believe he will use my
grandfather's death for this; he'll say that my slave did it...Oh,
nobody will believe that I could take anything from Camlach, but if
he does shut me up in a religious house, and then I die quietly, a
little time after, then by that time the whispers will have worked,
and nobody will raise a voice about it. And by that time, if my
mother is just one of the holy women at St. Peter's, and no longer
the King's daughter, she won't have a voice to raise, either." I
cupped my hands round the goblet, looking across at him. "Why
should anyone fear me so, Galapas?" He did not answer that, but
nodded to the goblet in my hands. "Finish it. Then, my dear, you
must go."

"Go? But if I go back, they'll kill
me, or shut me up. Won't they?"

"If they find you, they will try." I
said eagerly: "If I stayed here with you -- nobody knows I come
here -- even if they found out and came after me, you'd be in no
danger! We'd see them coming up the valley for miles, or we'd know
they were coming, you and I...They'd never find me; I could go in
the crystal cave." He shook his head. "The time for that isn't
come. One day, but not now. You can no more be hidden now, than
your merlin could go back into its egg."

I glanced back over my shoulder at the
ledge where the merlin had sat brooding, still as Athene's owl.
There was no bird there. I wiped the back of a hand across my eyes,
and blinked, not believing. But it was true. The firelit shadows
were empty.

"Galapas, it's gone!"

"Yes."

"Did you see it go?"

"It went by when you called me back
into the cave."

"I -- which way?"

"South." I drank the rest of the
potion, then turned the goblet up to spill the last drops for the
god. Then I set it down and reached for my cloak.

"I'll see you again, won't
I?"

"Yes. I promise you that."

"Then I shall come back?"

"I promised you that already. Someday,
the cave will be yours, and all that is in it." Past him, in from
the night, came a cold stray breath of air that stirred my cloak
and lifted the hairs on my nape. My flesh prickled. I got up and
swung the cloak round me and fastened the pin. "You're going,
then?" He was smiling. "You trust me so much? Where do you plan to
go?"

"I don't know. Home, I suppose, to
start with. I'll have time to think on the way there, if I need to.
But I'm still in the god's path. I can feel the wind blowing. Why
are you smiling, Galapas?" But he would not answer that. He stood
up, then pulled me towards him and stooped and kissed me. His kiss
was dry and light, an old man's kiss, like a dead leaf drifting
down to brush the flesh. Then he pushed me towards the entrance.
"Go. I saddled your pony ready for you."

It was raining still as I rode down
the valley. The rain was cold and small, and soaking; it gathered
on my cloak and dragged at my shoulders, and mixed with the tears
that ran down my face.

This was the second time in my life
that I wept.

11

The stableyard gate was locked. This
was no more than I had expected. That day I had gone out openly
enough through the main yard with the merlin, and any other night
might have chanced riding back the same way, with some story of
losing my falcon and riding about till dark to look for it. But not
tonight.

And tonight there would be no one
waiting and listening for me, to let me in.

Though the need for haste was
breathing on the back of my neck, I kept the impatient pony to a
walk, and rode quietly along under the palace wall in the direction
of the bridge. This and the road leading to it were alive with
people and torches and noise, and twice in the few minutes since I
had come in sight of it a horseman went galloping headlong out over
the bridge, going south.

Now the wet, bare trees of the orchard
overhung the towpath. There was a ditch here below the high wall,
and over it the boughs hung, dripping. I slid off the pony's back
and led him in under my leaning apple-tree, and tethered him. Then
I scrambled back into the saddle, got unsteadily to my feet,
balanced for a moment, and jumped for the bough above
me.

It was soaking, and one of my hands
slipped, but the other held. I swung my legs up, cocked them over
the bough, and after that it was only the work of moments to
scramble over the wall, and down into the orchard
grasses.

There to my left was the high wall
which masked my grandfather's garden, to the right the dovecote and
the raised terrace where Moravik used to sit with her spinning.
Ahead of me was the low sprawl of the servants' quarters. To my
relief hardly a light showed. All the light and uproar of the
palace was concentrated beyond the wall to my left, in the main
building. From even further beyond, and muted by the rain, came the
tumult of the streets.

But no light showed in my window. I
ran.

What I hadn't reckoned on was that
they should have brought him here, to his old place.

His pallet lay now, not across the
door, but back in the corner, near my bed. There was no purple
here, no torches; he lay just as they had flung him down. All I
could see in the half-darkness was the ungainly sprawled body, with
an arm flung wide and the hand splayed on the cold floor. It was
too dark to see how he had died.

I stooped over him and took the hand.
It was cold already, and the arm had begun to stiffen. I lifted it
gently to the pallet beside his body, then ran to my bed and
snatched up the fine woollen coverlet. I spread it over Cerdic,
then jerked upright, listening, as a man's voice called something
in the distance, and then there were footsteps at the end of the
colonnade, and the answer, shouted: "No. He's not come this way.
I've been watching the door. Is the pony in yet?"

"No. No sign." And then, in reply to
another shout: "Well, he can't have ridden far. He's often out till
this time. What? Oh, very well..."

The footsteps went, rapidly.
Silence.

There was a lamp in its stand
somewhere along the colonnade. This dealt enough light through the
half-open door for me to see what I was doing. I silently lifted
the lid of my chest, pulled out the few clothes I had, with my best
cloak, and a spare pair of sandals. I bundled these all together in
a bag, together with my other possessions, my ivory comb, a couple
of brooches, a cornelian clasp. These I could sell. I climbed on
the bed and pitched the bag out of the window. Then I ran back to
Cerdic, pulled aside the coverlet, and, kneeling, fumbled at his
hip. They had left his dagger. I tugged at the clasp with fingers
that were clumsier even than the darkness made them, and it came
undone. I took it, belt and all, a man's dagger, twice as long as
my own, and honed to a killing point. Mine I laid beside him on the
pallet. He might need it where he had gone, but I doubted it; his
hands had always been enough.