Legacy: Arthurian Saga (150 page)

"If I can. We'll speak of this again.
I'll give you messages, and of course you will carry my gifts to
Urbgen." He signed to Ulfin, who went to the door. The others came
in then -- his knights and the men of the Council and certain of
the petty kings who had come to Caerleon for the wedding. Cador was
there, and Gwilim, and others from Powys and Dyfed and Dumnonia,
but no one from Elmet, or the north. This was understandable. It
was a relief not to see Lot. Among the younger men I saw Gereint.
He greeted me with a smiling gesture, but there was no time for
talk. The King spoke, and we sat over our counsels until sunset,
when food was brought in, and after that the company took their
leave, and I with them.

As I made my way back to my own
quarters, Bedwyr fell in beside me, and with him Gereint. The two
young men seemed to know one another tolerably well. Gereint
greeted me warmly. "It was a good day for me," he said, smiling,
"when that traveling doctor came to Olicana."

"And, I believe, for Arthur," I
replied. "How is the work going in the Gap?"

He told me about it. There was, it
seemed, no immediate danger from the east. Arthur had made a clean
sweep in Linnuis, and meantime the King of Elmet held watch and
ward for him. The road through the Gap had been rebuilt, right
through from Olicana to Tribuit, and both the western forts had
been brought to readiness. From talking about this he came to Caer
Camel, and here Bedwyr joined him in plying me with questions.
Presently we came to where our ways parted.

"I leave you here," said Gereint. He
glanced back the way we had come, toward the King's apartments.
"Behold," he said, "the half was not told me." He spoke as if
quoting from something, but it was something I had not heard.
"These are great days for us all."

"And will be greater."

Then we said good night, and Bedwyr
and I walked on together. The boy with the torch was a few paces
ahead. At first we talked, with lowered voices, about Ygraine. He
was able to tell me more than he had said in front of Arthur. Her
physician, not wishing to commit anything to writing, had entrusted
Bedwyr with information for me, but nothing about it was new. The
Queen was dying, waiting only -- this was from Bedwyr himself --
until the two young women, crowned and in due splendor, had taken
their places, and thereafter it would be a strange thing (Melchior
had said) if she lasted till Christmas. She had sent me a message
of goodwill, and a token to be given to Arthur after her
death.

This latter was a brooch, finely made
of gold and blue enamel, with an image of the mother-goddess of the
Christians, and the name, Maria, inscribed around the edge. She had
already given jewels both to her daughter Morgan and to Guenever;
these had come in the guise of wedding gifts, though Morgan already
knew the truth. Guenever, it seemed, did not. The girl had been as
dear, and lately almost dearer, to Ygraine than her own daughter,
and the Queen had carefully instructed Bedwyr that nothing must
spoil the marriage celebrations. Not that the Queen, said Bedwyr
(who obviously held Ygraine in the greatest respect), had any
illusions about Arthur's grief for her; she had sacrificed his love
for that of Uther and the kingdom's future, and she herself was
resigned to death, secure in her faith; but she was aware how much
the girl had come to love her.

"And Guenever herself?" I asked at
length. "You must have come to know her well on the journey. And
you know Arthur, none better. How will they suit? What is she
like?"

"Delightful. She's full of life -- in
her own way as full as he is -- and she is clever. She plied me
with questions about the wars, and they were not idle ones. She
understands what he is doing, and has followed every move he has
made. She was head over ears in love with him from the first moment
she saw him in Amesbury...in fact, it's my belief that she was in
love with him even before that, like every other girl in Britain.
But she has humor and sense with it; she's no greensick girl with a
dream of a crown and a bedding; she knows where her duty will lie.
I know that Queen Ygraine planned this and hoped for it. She had
been schooling the girl all this while."

"There could hardly be a better
preceptress."

"I agree. But Guenever has gentleness,
and she is full of laughter, too. I am glad," he finished,
simply.

We spoke of Morgan then, and the other
marriage.

"Let us hope it suits as well," I
said. "It's certainly what Arthur wants. And Morgan? She seems
willing, even happy about it."

"Oh, yes," he said, and then, with a
smiling shrug, "you'd think it was a love-match, and that all the
business with Lot had never been. You always say, Merlin, that you
know nothing of women, and can't even guess at what moves them.
Well, no more can I, and I'm not a born hermit, like you. I've
known plenty, and now I've spent a month or so in daily attendance
on them -- and I still don't begin to understand them. They crave
for marriage, which for them is a kind of slavery -- and dangerous
at that. You could understand it with those who have nothing of
their own; but here's Morgan: she has wealth and position, and the
freedom they give her, and she has the protection of the High King.
Yet she would have gone to Lot, whose reputation you know, and now
goes, eagerly, to Urbgen of Rheged, who is more than three times
her age, and whom she has hardly seen. Why?"

"I suspect because of
Morgause."

He shot me a look. "That's possible. I
spoke to Guenever about it. She says that since news came of
Morgause's latest lying-in, and her letters about the state she
keeps --"

"In Orkney?"

"She says so. It does seem true that
she rules the kingdom. Who else? Lot has been with Arthur...Well,
Guenever told me that lately Morgan's temper had been growing
sharp, and she had begun to speak of Morgause with hatred. Also,
she had begun to practice what the Queen called her 'dark arts'
again. Guenever seems afraid of them." He hesitated. "They speak of
it as magic, Merlin, but it is nothing like your power. It is
something smoky, in a closed room."

"If Morgause taught her, then it must
be dark indeed. Well, so the sooner Morgan is a queen in Rheged,
with a family of her own, the better. And what of yourself, Bedwyr?
Have you had thoughts of marriage?"

"None, yet," he said cheerfully. "I
have no time."

On which we laughed, and went our
ways.

So the next day, with a fine sun
blazing, and all the pomp and music and revelry that a joyous crowd
could conjure up, Arthur married Guenever. And after the feasting,
when torches had burned low, and men and women had eaten and
laughed and drunk deep, the bride was led away; and later, escorted
by his companion knights, the bridegroom went to her.

That night I dreamed a dream. It was
brief and cloudy, a glimmer only of something that might be true
vision. There were curtains drawn and blowing, and a place full of
cold shadows, and a woman lying in bed. I could not see her
clearly, or tell who she was. I thought at first that it was
Ygraine, then, with a shift of the blowing light, it might have
been Guenever. And she lay as if she were dead, or as if she were
sleeping soundly after a night of love.

5

So once again I headed northward,
keeping this time to the west road all the way to Luguvallium. It
was truly a wedding journey. The good weather held all through that
month, the lovely September month of gold that is best for
travelers, since Hermes, the god of going, claims it for his
own.

His hand was over us through all that
journey. The road, Arthur's main way up the west, was repaired and
sound, and even on the moors the land was dry, so that we did not
need to time our journey to seek for stopping-places to suit the
women. If, at sunset, no town or village was near, we made camp
where we halted, and ate by some stream with trees for shelter,
while plovers called in the dusk, and the herons flapped overhead
back from their fishing-grounds. For me, it would have been an
idyllic journey, but for two things. The first was the memory of my
last journey northward.

Like all sensible men, I had put
regret out of my mind, or thought I had; but when one night someone
petitioned me to sing, and my servant brought the harp to me, it
seemed suddenly as if I only had to look up from the strings to see
them coming into the firelight, Beltane the goldsmith, smiling,
with Ninian behind him. And after that the boy was there nightly,
in memory or in dreams, and with him the most poignant of all
sorrows, the regret for what might have been, and was gone forever.
It was more than simple grief for a disciple lost who might have
done my work for me after I was gone.

There was with it a wounding
self-contempt for the helpless way I had let him go. Surely I
should have known, in that moment of stinging, involuntary protest
at Cor Bridge, why the protest was made? The truth was that the
loss of the boy went far deeper than the failure to win an heir and
a disciple: his loss was the very symbol of my own. Because I was
no longer Merlin, Ninian had died.

The second wasp in the honey of that
journey was Morgan herself.

I had never known her well. She had
been born at Tintagel, and had grown up there through the years
when I had lived in hiding in Rheged, watching over Arthur's
boyhood. Since then I had only seen her twice, at her brother's
crowning and at his marriage, and had barely spoken with her on
either occasion.

She resembled her brother in that she
was tall for her age and dark-haired, with the dark eyes that came,
I think, from the Spanish blood brought by the Emperor Maximus into
the family of the Ambrosii; but in feature she resembled Ygraine,
where Arthur favored Uther. Her skin was pale, and she was as quiet
as Arthur was ebullient. For all this I could sense in her
something of the same kind of force, a power controlled, fire
banked under cool ash. There was something, too, of the subtlety
that Morgause, her half-sister, showed in such abundance, and
Arthur not at all. But this is mostly a woman's quality; they all
have it in some degree or another; it is too often their only
weapon and their only shield.

Morgan refused to use the litter
provided for her, and rode beside me for some part of each day. I
suppose that when she was with the women, or among the younger men,
the talk must have turned on the coming wedding, and the times to
come; but when she was by me she spoke mostly of the past. Again
and again she led me to talk of those of my deeds which had passed
into legend, the story of the dragons at Dinas Emrys, the raising
of the king-stone at Killare, the lifting of the sword of Macsen
from the stone.

I answered her questions willingly
enough, keeping to the facts of the stories, and (remembering what
I had learned of Morgan from her mother and Bedwyr) trying to
convey to her something of what "magic" meant. As these girls see
it, it is an affair of philters, and whispers in darkened rooms,
spells to bind a man's heart, or bring the vision of a lover on
Midsummer Eve. Their main concern, understandably, is the
aphrodisian lore -- how to bring, or to prevent, pregnancy, charms
for safety in childbirth, predictions about the sex of a child.
These matters, to do her justice, Morgan never broached with me; it
was to be expected that she was versed in them already. Nor did she
seem interested, as the young Morgause had been, in medicine and
the healing arts. Her questions turned all on the greater power,
and mainly as it had touched Arthur. All that had passed from
Uther's first wooing of her mother, and Arthur's conception, to the
raising of the great sword of Macsen, she was avid to know. I
answered her civilly, and fully enough; she was, I reckoned,
entitled to the facts, and (since she was going to be Queen of
Rheged, and would almost certainly outlive her husband, and live to
guide the future king of that powerful province) I tried to show
her what Arthur's aims were for the settled times after the war,
and to imbue her with the same ambitions.

It was hard to tell what sort of
success I had. After a time I noticed that her talk turned more and
more frequently to the hows and wherefores of the power I had
owned. I put her questions aside, but she persisted, at length even
suggesting, with an assurance as cool as Arthur's own, that I
should show some demonstration of it, for all the world as if I
were an old wife mixing spells and simples over the fire, or a
soothsayer crystal-gazing on market day. At this last impertinence
my answer was, I imagine, too cold for her to stomach. Soon
afterwards she drew rein and let her palfrey lag back, and
thereafter rode the rest of the way with the young
people.

Like her sister, Morgan was rarely
content with the company of women. Her most constant companion was
one Accolon, a splendidly dressed, florid young man with a loud
laugh and a high color. She never let herself be alone with him
more than was decent, though he made no secret of his feelings; he
followed her everywhere with his eyes, and, whenever he could,
touched her hand, or brought his horse sidling so close to her that
his thigh brushed hers, and their horses' manes tangled together.
She never seemed to notice, and never once, that I could see, gave
him other than the same cool looks and answers that she gave to
everyone. I had, of course, a duty to bring her unharmed and virgin
(if virgin she still was) to Urbgen's bed, but I could have no
present fears for her honor. A lover would have been hard put to it
to come to her on that journey, even if she had beckoned him. Most
nights when we camped, Morgan was attended by all her ladies to her
pavilion, which was shared by her two elderly waiting women, as
well as her younger companions. She gave no hint that she wished it
otherwise. She acted and spoke like any royal bride on her way to a
welcome bride-bed, and if Accolon's handsome face and eager
courtship moved her she made no sign.