Legacy: Arthurian Saga (189 page)

"Some might say too much." Sula spoke
sharply, and with such patent fear that Brude, startled, took a
stride to the doorway, jerked the curtain aside, and peered
out.

"What ails you? There's no one there.
And if there were, they'd hear nothing. The wind's getting up, and
the tide's well in. Listen."

She shook her head. She was staring at
the child. Her tears had dried. When she spoke, it was barely above
a whisper.

"Not outside. There's no folk could
get near enough without we heard the sea-pies screaming. It's here
in the house we need to watch. Look at him. He's not a baby now. He
listens, and sometimes you'd swear he understood every
word."

The man trod to the cradle's side and
looked down. His face softened. "Well, if he doesn't, he soon will.
The gods know he's forward enough. We've done what we've been paid
for -- and more, seeing what a sickly wean he was when we took him
first. Now look at him. Any man might be proud of a son like him."
He turned away, reaching for the staff that stood propped beside
the doorway. "Look you, Sula, if any ill had been coming, it would
have come before this. If harm was meant to him, the payments would
have stopped, wouldn't they? So stop your fretting. You've no call
now to be fearful."

She nodded, but without looking at
him. "Yes. It was simple of me. You're right, I dare
say."

"It's a few years yet before young
Gawain will be troubling his head about kingdoms, and king's
bastards, and by that time this one might well be forgotten. And if
that means they stop the payments, who cares for that? A man needs
a son to help him, in my trade."

She looked up at him then, and smiled.
"You're a good man, Brude."

"Well," he said gruffly, pushing aside
the curtain, "let's have an end to this. I'm going up to the town
now, to hear what other news the sailors brought."

Left alone with the child, the woman
sat for a while without moving, the fear still in her face. Then
the boy's hand reached towards her, and she smiled suddenly, a
smile that brought youth back, bright and pretty, to her cheeks and
eyes. She leaned to lift him from the cradle, and set him on her
knee. She picked up a crust of the black bread from the table,
sopped it in a beaker of goat's milk, and held it to his lips. The
boy took the bread and began to eat it, his dark head cuddled into
her shoulder. She laid her cheek against his hair, and put a hand
up to stroke it.

"Men are fools, so they are," she said
softly. "They never see what's staring them in the eye. You'll be
no fool, though, my bonny, not with the blood that's in you, and
the way those eyes look and see right through to the back of
things, and you only a baby still...." She gave a little laugh, her
mouth against the child's hair, and the boy smiled at the
sound.

"King Lot's bastard, is it? Well, so
they say, and better so. But if they saw what I see, and knew what
I guessed at, ah, these many months past..."

She rocked the child closer, calming
herself, sending her mind back to those summer nights two years ago
when Brude, with a gift of gold ensuring his silence, had put out,
not to his accustomed fishing ground, but farther west, into deeper
water. For four nights he had waited there, grumbling at the loss
of his catch, but kept faithful and silent by the gift of gold and
the queen's promise. Then on the fifth night, a calm, twilit night
of the Orkney summer, the ship from Dunpeldyour had stolen into the
sound and dropped anchor, and a boat put out from her side with
three men, queen's soldiers, rowing it. Brude answered their soft
hail, and presently the thwarts of the two craft rubbed together. A
bundle passed. The larger boat dipped away and vanished. Brude
turned his own boat landward, and made all speed to the cottage
where Sula waited by the empty cradle, holding on her lap the shawl
that she had woven for her own dead child.

A bastard, that was all they had been
told. A royal bastard. And as such a danger, somewhere, to someone.
But someday, perhaps, to be useful. So keep silent, and nurture
him, and your reward may one day be great....

The reward had long since ceased to
matter to Sula. She lived with the only reward she needed, the
child himself. But she lived, too, with the constant fear that
someday, when it became expedient to one or the other remote and
royal personage, her boy would be taken from her.

She had long ago formed her own
guesses as to the identity of these personages, though she knew
better than to speak of them, even to her husband. Not King Lot; of
that she was certain. She had seen his other children by the queen;
they had Morgause's red-gold hair and their father's high color and
sturdy build. No such signs identified her foster child. The dark
hair and eyes might, indeed, have been Lot's, but their setting,
with the line of brow and cheek-bone, was quite different. And
something in the mouth, the hands, the slender build and warm,
clear skin, some elusive way of moving and looking, marked him, to
Sula's constantly watching eyes, as the queen's child, but not the
king's.

And, this once granted, other things
became clear: the queen's men who had hurried the child out of
Dunpeldyour before King Lot arrived home there from the wars; the
subsequent massacre of all the town's infants in an attempt to
catch and destroy that one child, a massacre attributed by Lot and
his queen to King Arthur and his adviser Merlin, but instigated in
fact (it was whispered) by King Lot himself; and the regular
payments, in cash and kind, that came secretly from the palace,
where, during the child's lifetime, King Lot had rarely set foot.
From the queen, then. And even now that King Lot was dead, she paid
still, and still the child was safe. This, to Sula, was all the
proof that was needed. Queen Morgause, a lady not renowned for
gentleness, would hardly so have nurtured her husband's bastard; a
bastard, moreover, older than the eldest legitimate prince, and as
such, arguably, with a prior claim to the kingdom.

Queen's bastard, then. By whom? To
Sula's mind there was no doubt there, either. She had never laid
eyes on Queen Morgause's half-brother, Arthur the High King of
Britain, but like everyone else she had heard many tales of that
wonder-working young man. And the first of those tales was that of
the great battle of Luguvallium, where the boy Arthur, appearing
suddenly at King Uther's side, had led his troops to victory.
Afterwards -- so the tale went, told with pride and indulgence --
he had gone, still ignorant of his true parentage, to lie with
Morgause, who was Uther's bastard daughter, and so Arthur's own
half-sister.

The timing was right. The child's age,
and looks, and ways were right. And those rumors about the massacre
at Dunpeldyour, whether ordered by Lot or by Merlin, were accounted
for, and even -- such were the ways of the great --
justified.

Now Lot was dead, and Merlin, too.
King Arthur had other and greater matters on his mind, and besides
-- if all the tales that reached the taverns were true -- by the
time he had other bastards by the score, and had shut this shameful
begetting from his mind, or else forgotten it. As for Morgause, she
would not kill her own son. Never that. But with King Lot gone, and
Merlin gone, and the High King far away, why should she leave him
here any longer? Why any more need to keep him secret in this
lonely place?

She clutched the child closer, her
fear cold and heavy in her. "The Goddess keep you safe, make her
forget you. Make her forget you. Leave you here. My bonny, my
Mordred, my boy from the sea." The child, roused by the sudden
movement, tightened his arms round her and said something. It was
inaudible, muffled against her neck, but she caught her breath and
fell silent, rocking, staring over the child's head at the cottage
wall.

After a while the small, ordinary
sounds of the room, and the long hush of the sea outside, seemed to
calm her. The child drowsed in her arms. Softly, she began to sing
him back to sleep.

From the sea you came, my prince, my
Mordred. You escaped the fay with the long hair that tosses on the
waves. You came from her sister, the sea-queen who eats drowned
sailors, who draws the boats Down into deep waters. You came to the
land, to be prince of the land, And you will grow, grow,
grow...

Queen Morgause did not make a feast
that night.

When the fresh news was brought of the
hated enchanter's death she sat for a long time very still, then,
taking a lamp in her hand, she left the bright hall where the talk
was still going noisily round, and made her way to the sealed
chambers underground where she worked her dark magic, and waited
for such glimmers of Sight as came to her.

In the first chamber, her stillroom, a
half-empty flask stood on the table. In it was the remains of the
poison she had mixed for Merlin. Smiling, she passed through
another door, and knelt by the pool of seeing.

Nothing came clearly. A bedchamber,
with a curved wall; a tower room, then? The bed with a man in it,
still as death. And he looked like death: a very old man, gaunt as
a skeleton, with grey hair straggling on the pillow, and a matted
grey beard. She did not recognize him.

He opened his eyes, and it was Merlin.
The dark, terrifying eyes, set in that grey skull, looked straight
across the miles, across the seas, into hers where she knelt by the
secret pool.

Morgause, crouching there with her
hands to her belly, as if she would guard Lot's last, unborn child,
knew then that once more the reports were false. Merlin lived
still, and, prematurely aged as he was, with his health wrecked by
the poison, he still had power enough to bring her and her plans to
nothing.

Kneeling there, she began a frantic,
frightened spell that, in the old man's weakened state, might serve
to protect herself and her brood of sons from Arthur's
vengeance.

2

The boy was alone in the summer world
with the singing of the honey bees.

He lay flat on his back in the heather
at the head of the cliff. Not far from him was the straight-cut
line of dark turf where he had been working. The squared peats,
stacked like slices of black bread along the ditched gash, were
drying in the hot sun. He had been working since daybreak, and the
line was a long one. Now the mattock lay idle against the peats
while the boy drowsed after his midday meal. One hand, outflung on
the heather, still held the remains of a barley bannock. His
mother's two hives -- crude skeps of barley straw -- stood fifty
paces in from the brink of the cliff. The heather smelled sweet and
heady, like the mead that would be made from the honey. To and fro,
sometimes within a finger's breadth of his face, the bees hurtled
like slingshot. The only other sound in the drowsy afternoon was
the crying, remote below him, of the seabirds at their nests along
the cliff.

Something changed in the note of that
crying.

The boy opened his eyes, and lay
still, listening. Underneath the new, disturbed screaming of
kittiwakes and razorbills, he heard the deeper, four-fold alarm
note of the big gulls. He himself had not moved for half an hour or
more, and in any case they were used to him. He turned his head, to
see a flock of wheeling wings rise like blown snow above the
cliff's edge some hundred paces away. There was a cove there, a
deep inlet with no beach below. Hundreds of seabirds nested there,
guillemots, shags, kittiwakes, and with them the big falcon. He
could see her now, flying with the gulls that screamed to and
fro.

The boy sat up. He could see no boat
in the bay, but then a boat would hardly have caused such a
disturbance among the high-nesting colonies on the cliff. An eagle?
He could see none. At the most, he thought, it might be a predatory
raven after the young ones, but any change in the monotony of the
day's work was to be welcomed. He scrambled to his feet. Finding
the remains of the bannock still in his hand, he made as if to eat
it, then saw a beetle on it, and threw it away with a look of
disgust. He ran across the heather towards the cove where the
disturbance was.

He reached the edge and peered down.
The birds flung themselves higher, screaming. Puffins hurtled from
the rock below him in clumsy glide, legs wide and wings held
stiffly. The big black-backed gulls vented their harsh cries. The
whitened ledges where the kittiwakes sat in rows on their nests
were empty of adult birds, which were weaving and screaming in the
air.

He lay down, inching forward to peer
directly down the cliff. The birds were diving in past a buttress
of rock where wild thyme and sea-pink made a thick carpet splashed
with white. Clumps of rose-root stirred in the wind of their wings.
Then, among all the commotion, he heard a new sound, a cry like the
cry of a gull, but somehow subtly different. A human cry. It came
from somewhere well down the cliff, out of sight beyond the rocky
buttress where the birds wheeled most thickly.

He moved carefully back from the edge,
and got slowly to his feet. There was no beach at the foot of the
cliff, nowhere to leave a boat, nothing but the steadily beating,
echoing sea. The climber had gone down and there could only be one
reason for trying to climb down here.

"The fool," he said with contempt.
"Doesn't he know that the eggs will all be hatched now?" Half
reluctantly he picked his way along the cliff top to a point from
which he could see, stranded on a ledge beyond the buttress,
another boy.