Legacy: Arthurian Saga (195 page)

He was hers again, she noted. Pleased,
nattered by her confidence, eager. "Back to Dunpeldyr, do you
mean?"

"Not Dunpeldyr, no. To Camelot
itself."

"To the High King."

"Why not? He has no legitimate son,
and from all accounts is unlikely to get one. Mordred is my pass to
Arthur's court...And after that, we shall see."

"You sound very sure," he
said.

"I am sure. I have seen it." At the
look in his eyes she smiled again. "Yes, my dear, in the pool. It
was clear as crystal -- a witch's crystal. I and my sons, all of
them, at Camelot, dressed as for a feast, and bearing
gifts."

"Then surely -- not that I'm
questioning it, but -- couldn't that mean you would have been safe,
even without what was done tonight?"

"Possibly." Her voice was indifferent.
"We cannot always read the signs aright, and it may be that the
Goddess knew already what would be done tonight. Now I am sure that
I am safe. All I have to do is wait for Merlin's death. Already,
more than once, we have heard rumors of his disappearance, or
death, and each time I have rejoiced, only to find that the rumor
was false, and the old fool lived still. But the day must soon come
when the report will be true. I have seen to that, Gabran. And when
it is, when he is no longer at Arthur's side, then I may go in
safety, and Mordred with me. I can deal with my brother...If not as
I dealt with him before, then as a sister deals who has some power,
and a little beauty still."

"Madam -- Morgause--"

She laughed gently, and stretched a
hand to him. "Come, Gabran, no need for jealousy! And no need to
fear me, either. All the witchcraft I ever use against you, you
know well how to deal with. The rest of this night's work will be
more to your taste than what is past. Come to bed now. All is safe,
thanks to you. You have served me more than faithfully."

And so did they. But Gabran did not
voice the thought aloud. And soon, stripped of his damp clothing,
and lying in the great bed beside Morgause, he forgot it, and
forgot, too, the two dead bodies he had left in the smoking shell
of the cottage on the shore.

4

Mordred woke early, at his usual
time.

The other boys still slept, but this
was the hour when his foster father had always roused him for work.
For a few moments he lay, unsure of his surroundings, then he
remembered. He was in the royal palace. He was a king's son, and
the king's other sons were here, sleeping in the same room. The
eldest of them, Prince Gawain, lay beside him, in the same bed. In
the other bed slept the three younger princes, the twins, and the
baby, Gareth.

He had had no speech with them yet.
Last evening after Gabran had brought him to the palace, he had
been taken in charge by an old woman who had been nurse to the
royal boys; she was still, she told him, nurse to Gareth, and
looked after the boys" clothes and to some extent their welfare.
She led Mordred to a room full of chests and boxes, where she
fitted him out with new clothing. No weapons yet; he would get
those tomorrow, she told him sourly, soon enough, and then no doubt
he would be about his killing and murdering like the rest of them.
Men! Boys were bad enough, but at least they could be controlled,
and let him mark her words, she might be an old woman, but she
could still punish where punishment was due...Mordred listened, and
was silent, fingering the good new clothes, and trying not to yawn
as the old woman fussed about him. From her chatter -- and she was
never silent -- he learned that Queen Morgause was, to say the
least, an erratic parent. One day she would take the boys riding,
showing them mainland customs of hunting with hawk and hound; they
would ride all day, and she would feast them late into the night,
then the next day the boys would find themselves apparently
forgotten, and be forbidden even to go to her rooms, only to be
summoned again at night to hear a minstrel, or to entertain a bored
and restless queen with talk of their own day. Nor were the boys
treated alike. Possibly the only Roman principle held to by
Morgause was the one of "divide and rule." Gawain, as the eldest
and the heir, was given extra freedom and some privileges forbidden
to the others; Gareth, the posthumous youngest, was the favorite.
Which left the twins, and they, Mordred gathered from old Ailsa's
pinched lips and headshakings, were difficult enough without the
constant rubbings of jealousy and frustrated energies.

When at length, with his new clothes
carefully folded over his arm, Mordred followed, her to the boys'
bedchamber, he was thankful to find that all four were there before
him, and already sound asleep. Ailsa lifted Gareth out of Gawain's
bed, then pushed the twins over and tucked the younger boy in
beside them. None of them so much as stirred. She pulled the
coverlets up close round them, and pointed Mordred silently to the
place beside Gawain. He stripped, and slipped into the warmth of
the bed. The old woman tut-tutted round the room for a few more
minutes, picking up discarded clothing and laying it on the chest
between the beds, then went out, shutting the door gently behind
her. Mordred was asleep before she even left the room.

And now it was daylight, a new day,
and he was wide awake. He stretched luxuriously, with excitement
running through his body. He could feel it in his very bones. The
bed was soft and warm, and smelled only slightly of the dressed
furs that covered it. The room was big, and to his eyes very well
furnished, with the two wide beds and the clothes-chest and a thick
woven rug hanging over the door to keep out the worst of the
draughts. Floor and walls alike were made with the flat, local
stone slabs. At this early hour, even in summer, the room was very
cold, but it was cleaner than Sula's hut could ever be, and
something in the boy recognized and welcomed this as desirable.
Between the beds, above the clothes-chest, was a narrow window
through which the early morning air poured, cool and clean and
smelling of the salt wind.

He could lie still no longer. Gawain,
beside him, still slept, curled like a puppy in the welter of furs.
In the other bed little could be seen of the twins save the tops of
their heads; Gareth had been pushed to the bed's edge, and lay
sprawling half out of it, but still deeply asleep.

Mordred slid out of bed. He padded to
the clothes-chest, and, kneeling upon it, looked out of the window.
This faced away from the sea; from it, by craning, he could see the
courtyard and the main outer gateway of the palace. The sound of
the sea came muted, a murmur under the incessant calling and mewing
of the gulls. He looked the other way, beyond the palace walls,
where a track ran green through the heather towards the summit of a
gentle hill. Beyond that curved horizon lay his foster home. His
father would be breaking his fast now, and soon would be gone about
his work. If Mordred wanted to see him (to get it over with, said a
small voice, quickly stifled in the dark and barely heeded rearward
of his mind) he must go now.

On the chest lay the good tunic that
he had been given last night, with a cloak, a brooch, and a leather
belt with a buckle of copper. But in the very moment of reaching
for the prized new clothing he changed his mind, and with something
like a shrug picked up his old garment from the corner where he had
thrown it, and slipped it on. Then, ducking past the door curtain,
he let himself out of the room, and padded barefooted along the
chill stone corridors to the hall.

The hall was still full of sleepers,
but guards were changing duty for the morning shift, and servants
were already moving. No one stopped him or spoke to him as he
picked his way across the cluttered floor and out into the
courtyard. The outer gate was open, and a cart of turfs was being
dragged in by a couple of peasants. The two guards stood watching,
at ease, eating their breakfast bannocks and taking turn and turn
about to drink from a horn of ale.

As Mordred approached the gate one of
the men saw him, nudged the other, and said something inaudible.
The boy hesitated, half expecting to be stopped, or at any rate
questioned, but neither of the men made a move to do so. Instead,
the nearest one lifted a hand up in a half-salute, and then stood
back to let the boy go by.

Perhaps no other moment of royal
ceremony in Prince Mordred's life was ever to equal that one. His
heart gave a great bound, right into his throat, and he felt the
color rush into his cheeks. But he managed a calm enough "Good
morning," then ran out through the palace gate and up the green
track into the moor.

He ran along the track, his heart
still beating high. The sun came up, and long shadows streamed away
ahead of him. The night's dew shivered and steamed on the fine
grasses, on the rushes smoothed by the light wind, till the whole
landscape thrilled and shimmered with light, a softer repetition of
the endless, achingly bright shimmer of the sea. Overhead, the
clouds wisped back, and the air filled with singing as the larks
launched themselves from their nests in the heather. The air
rippled with song as the land with light. Soon he reached the
summit of the moor, and before him stretched the long, gentle slope
towards the cliffs, and beyond them again the endless, shining
sea.

From this point he could see, clear
across the sea in the early light, the hills of the High Island.
Beyond them lay the mainland -- the real mainland, the great and
wonderful land that the islanders called, half in jest, half in
ignorance, "the next island." Many times, from his father's boat,
he had seen its northern cliffs, and had tried to imagine the rest;
its vastness, its forests, its roads and ports and cities. Today,
though hidden from view, it had ceased to be a dream. It was the
High Kingdom, to which he would one day travel, and where he would
one day matter. If his new status was to mean anything, it would
mean that. He would see to it.

He laughed aloud with joy, and ran
on.

He came to the turf cutting. He
paused, deliberately lingering by the ditch he had dug only
yesterday. How long ago, already, it seemed. Brude would have to
finish it now -- alone, too, though lately he had been complaining
about pains in his back. Perhaps, thought the boy, since they were
apparently going to leave him free to come and go from the palace,
he could come down early each day for an hour before the other boys
were up, and finish the digging. And if he were given real princely
status, with servants, he could maybe set them to the task, or to
the collecting of the lichens for his mother's dyestuffs. The
basket was still standing there by the diggings, where he had left
it yesterday, forgotten. He snatched it up, and ran on down the
track.

The gulls were up, and screaming. The
sound met him, raw on the wind from the sea. Something else was on
that wind, a strange smell, and in the gulls' screaming a high
shiver of panic that touched him like the edge of a knife. Smoke?
There was usually smoke from the cottage, but this was a different
smoke, a sour, chilled and sullen emanation, carrying with it a
smell that mocked the good scent of roasting meat on the rare days
when Sula had meat in the pot. This was not a good smell; it was
sickening, an ugly mockery, making the morning foul.

Mordred's breeding, perverse though it
was, had made him the child of one fighting king, and the grandson,
twice over, of another. This combined with his hard peasant
upbringing to make fear, for him, something to be faced
immediately, and found out. He flung the basket of lichens down and
ran full tilt along the cliff path, to where he could see down into
the bay that had been his home.

Had been. The familiar cottage, with
its clay oven, its lines of pegged fish, the hanging festoons of
drying nets -- all had vanished. Only the four walls of his home
still stood, blackened and smoking with the sluggish, stinking
smoke that befouled the sea-wind. Most of the outer roof slabs
still lay in place, held as they were by stone supports built into
the walls, but those in the center were thinner, and here and there
had been pegged into place by driftwood. The thatch of the roof,
dry with summer, had burned fiercely, and, with the pegs destroyed,
the slabs had sagged, tilted, and then cracked, sliding down with
their blazing load of thatch into the room below, making a pyre of
what had been his home.

It must be, in very truth, a pyre. For
now, retchingly, he recognized the smell that had reminded him of
Sula's cooking pots. Sula herself, with Brude, must be inside --
underneath that pile of burned rubble. The roof had fallen directly
over their bedplace. To Mordred, groping, dazed, for the cause of
disaster, there was only one explanation. His parents must have
been asleep when some stray spark from the unwatched embers, blown
by the draught, had lodged in the wind-dried turfs of the roof, and
smoldered to a blaze. It was to be hoped that they had never woken,
had perhaps been rendered unconscious by the smoke, to be killed by
the falling roof before the fire even touched them.

He stood there so long, staring,
unbelieving, sick, that only the sharp wind, piercing the shabby
tunic to the skin, made him shiver suddenly and move. He squeezed
his eyes shut, as if in some silly hope that when he opened them
the place would be whole again, the horror only a nightmare dream.
But the horror remained. His eyes, wide again, showed wild like a
nervous pony's. He started slowly down the path, then suddenly, as
if some invisible rider had applied whip and spur, he began to
run.