Legacy: Arthurian Saga (188 page)

Dark fell. Behind me the fire dimmed,
and my shadow vanished. Still I stood listening, with the calmness
over me of a great contentment. The sky, heavy with night, drew
nearer the earth. The glimmer on the far sea moved, light and
following shadow, like the slow arc of a sword sliding back to its
sheath, or a barge dwindling under sail across the distant
water.

It was quite dark. Quite still. A
chill brushed my skin, like the cold touch of crystal.

I left the night, with its remote and
singing stars, and came in, to the glow of the fire, and the chair
where he had been sitting, and the unstrung harp.

The Wicked Day by Mary
Stewart

The Wicked Day

Copyright 2009 Mary
Stewart

All rights reserved. No part of this
book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic,
or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any
information storage retrieval system without the written permission
of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
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Because of the dynamic nature of the
Internet, any Web addresses or links contained in this book may
have changed since publication and may no longer be
valid.

This is a work of fiction. All of the
characters, names, incidents, places, organizations, and dialogue
in this novel are either the products of the author's imagination
or are used fictitiously.

Book IV The Wicked
Day

"Merlin is dead."

It was no more than a whisper, and the
man who breathed it was barely at arm's length from the woman, his
wife, but the walls of the cottage's single room seemed to catch
and throw the sentence on like a whispering gallery. And on the
woman the effect was as startling as if he had shouted. Her hand,
which had been rocking the big cradle beside the turf fire, jerked
sharply, so that the child curled under the blankets woke, and
whimpered.

For once she ignored him. Her blue
eyes, incongruously pale and bright in a face as brown and withered
as dried seaweed, showed a shifting mixture of hope, doubt and
fear. There was no need to ask her man where he had got the news.
Earlier that day she had seen the sail of the trading ship standing
in towards the bay where, above the cluster of dwellings that
formed the only township on the island, the queen's new house
stood, commanding the main harbor. The fishermen at their nets
beyond the headland were wont to pull close in to an incomer's
course and shout for news.

Her mouth opened as if a hundred
questions trembled there, but she asked only one. "Can it really be
true?"

"Aye, this time it's true. They swore
it."

One of the woman's hands went to her
breast, making the sign against enchantment. But she still looked
doubtful. "Well, but they said the same last autumn, when--" she
hesitated, then gave the pronoun a weight that seemed to make a
title of it, "--when She was still down in Dunpeldyr with the
little prince, and expecting the twin babies. I mind it well. You'd
gone down to the harbor when the trader put in from Lothian, and
when you brought the pay home you told me what the captain said.
There'd been a feast made at the palace there, even before the news
came in of Merlin's death. She must have 'seen' it with her magic,
he said. But in the end it wasn't true. It was only a vanishing,
like he'd done before, many a time."

"Aye, that's true. He did vanish away,
all through the winter, no one knows where. And a bad winter it
was, too, the same as here, but his magic kept him alive, because
they found him in the end, in the Wild Forest, as crazy as a hare,
and they took him up to Galava to nurse him. Now they say he took
sick and died there, before ever the High King got back from the
wars. It's true enough this time, wife, and we've got it first,
direct. The ship picked it up when they put in for water at
Glannaventa, with Merlin lying dead in his bed not forty miles off.
There was a lot else, news about some more fighting down south of
the Forest, and another victory for the High King, but the wind was
too strong to catch all they said, and I couldn't get the boat in
any nearer. I'll go up to the town now and get the rest." He
dropped his voice still further, a thread of hoarse sound. "It
isn't everyone in the kingdom will go into mourning for this news,
not even those that were tied in blood. You mark my words, Sula,
there'll be another feast at the palace tonight." As he spoke he
gave a half-glance over his shoulder towards the cottage door, as
if afraid that someone might be listening there.

He was a small, stocky man, with the
blue eyes and weather-beaten face of a sailor. He was a fisherman,
who all his life had plied his trade from this lonely bay on the
biggest island of the Orkney group, the one they called Mainland.
Though rough-seeming and slow-witted, he was an honest man, and
good at his trade. His name was Brude, and he was thirty-seven
years old. His wife, Sula, was four years younger, but so stiff
with rheumatism and so bent by heavy toil that she already looked
an old woman. It seemed impossible that the child in the cradle
could have been borne by her. And indeed, there was no resemblance.
The child, a boy some two years old, was dark-eyed and dark-haired,
with none of the Nordic coloring that appeared so often among the
folk of the Orkney Islands. The hand that clutched the blankets of
the cradle was fine-boned and narrow, the dark hair thick and
silky, and there was a slant to the brows and the long-lashed eyes
that might even indicate some strain of foreign blood.

Nor was the child the only incongruous
thing about the place. The cottage itself was very small, little
more than a hovel. It was set on a flat patch of salty turf a
little way back from the shore, protected to either side by the
rise of the land towards the dins that enclosed the bay, and from
the tides by the rocky ridge that bordered the shore and held back
the piled boulders of the storm beach. Inland lay the moors, from
which a tiny stream came trickling, to splash in a miniature
waterfall down past the cottage to the beach. Some way in from the
tide-line it had been dammed to form a makeshift
reservoir.

The cottage walls were built of stones
gathered from the storm beach. These were flat slabs of sandstone,
broken from the cliffs by wind and sea, and weathered naturally,
making a simple kind of dry-stone walling, easy to do, and
reasonably close against the weather. No mortar was used, but the
cracks were caulked with mud. Each storm that came washed some of
the mud away, and then more had to be added, so that from a
distance the cottage looked like nothing more than a crude box of
smoothed mud, with a thatch of rough heather-stems capping it. The
thatch was held down by old, patched fishing nets, the ends of
which were weighted with stones. There were no windows. The doorway
was low and squat, so that a man had to bend double to enter. It
was covered only with a curtain of deerskin, roughly tanned and as
stiff as wood. The smoke from the fire within came seeping in
sullen wisps round the edges of the skin.

But inside, this poorest of poor
dwellings showed some glimpses of simple comfort. Though the
child's cradle was of old, warped wood, the blankets were soft and
brightly dyed, and the pillow was stuffed with feathers. On the
stone shelf that served the couple for a bed was a thick, almost
luxurious coverlet of sealskin, spotted and deep-piled, a quality
of skin which would normally go by right to the house of one of the
warriors, or even the queen herself. And on the table -- a
worm-ridden slab of sea-wrack propped on stones, for wood was
scarce in the Orkneys -- stood the remains of a good meal: not red
meat, indeed, but a couple of gnawed wings of chicken and a pot of
goose-grease to go with the black bread.

The cottagers themselves were poorly
enough dressed. Brude had on a short, much-mended tunic, with over
it the sleeveless coat of sheepskin which, in summer and winter,
protected him from the weather at sea. His legs and feet were
thickly wrapped in rags. Sula's gown was a shapeless affair of
moss-dyed homespun, girdled with a length of rope such as she wove
for her husband's nets. Her feet, too, were bound up in rags. But
outside the cottage, beached above the tidemark of black weed and
smashed shells, lay a good boat, as good as any in the islands, and
the nets spread to dry over the boulders were far better than Brude
could have made. They were a foreign import, made of materials
unobtainable in the northern isles, and would normally be beyond
the means of such a household. Brude's own lines, hand-twisted from
reeds and dried wrack, stretched from the cottage's thatch to heavy
anchor-stones on the turf. On the lines hung the split carcasses of
drying fish, and a couple of big seabirds, gannets, Sula's
namesake. These, dried and stored, and eked out with shellfish and
seaweeds, would be winter food. The promise of better fare,
however, was there with the half-dozen hens foraging along the
tide-mark, and the heavy-uddered she-goat tethered on the salt
grass.

It was a bright day of early summer.
May, in the islands, can be as cruel as any other month, but this
was a day of sunshine and mild breezes. The stones of the beach
looked grey and turquoise and rosy-red, the sea creamed against
them peacefully, and the turf of the ridge behind was thick with
sea-pink and primrose and red campion. Every ledge of the cliffs
that bounded the bay was crowded with seabirds claiming and
disputing their nesting territory, and nearer, on shingle or turf,
the pied oystercatchers brooded their eggs or flew, screaming, to
and fro along the tide. The air was loud with their cries. Even had
there been a listener outside the cottage doorway, he could have
heard nothing for the noise of the sea and the birds, but inside
the room the furtive hush persisted. The woman said nothing, but
apprehension still showed in her face, and she put up a sleeve to
dab at her eyes.

Her husband spoke
impatiently.

"What is it, woman? You're never
grieving for the old enchanter? Whatever Merlin was to King Arthur
and to the mainland folks with his magic, he's been naught to us
here. He was old, besides, and even though men said he'd never die,
it seems he was mortal after all. What's there to weep for in
that?"

"I'm not weeping for him, why should
I? But I'm afeared, Brude, I'm afeared."

"For what?"

"Not for us. For him." She gave a
half-glance towards the cradle where the boy, awake but still
drowsy from his afternoon's sleep, lay quietly, curled small under
the blankets.

"For him?" asked her husband,
surprised. "Why? Surely all's well for us now, and for him, too.
With Merlin gone, that was enemy to our King Lot, and by all
accounts to this boy of his as well, who's to harm him now, or us
for keeping him? Maybe we can stop watching now in case other folks
see him and start asking questions. Maybe he can run out now and
play like other children, not hang on your skirts all day, and be
babied like you've had him. You'd not keep him in much longer,
anyway. He's long since grown beyond that cradle."

"I know, I know. That's what I'm
feared of, don't you see? Losing him. When the time comes for her
to take him back from us--"

"Why should it? If she didn't take him
away when the news came of King Lot's death, why should she do it
now? Look, wife. When the king her husband went, you'd have thought
that was when she'd see to it that his bastard went, too,
quietly-like. That was when I was afeared, myself. When all's said,
it's the little prince, Gawain, that's king of the Orkneys now, by
right, but with this boy, bastard or not, nearly -- what? -- nearly
a year older, there's some might say -- "