Legacy: Arthurian Saga (197 page)

"I will, madam."

"Then go now, and begin."

So Mordred was absorbed into the life
of the palace, a life in its own way as harsh and uncompromising as
his previous peasant existence, and rather less free.

The Orkney stronghold boasted nothing
that a mainland king would have recognized as a military
training-ground. Outside the palace walls the moor sloped up gently
to landward, and this wild stretch, flat enough, and in good
weather dry enough for soldiers to maneuver on, served as parade
ground, practice ground, and playground, too, for the boys when
they were allowed the freedom of it. Which was almost daily, for
the princes of Orkney had to suffer no such formal lessons in the
arts of war as disciplined the sons of the greater, mainland
chiefs. Had King Lot still lived, and kept his state at Dunpeldyr
in his mainland kingdom of Lothian, he would no doubt have seen to
it that his elder sons, at least, went out daily with sword or
spear or even the bow, to learn the bounds of their home country,
and to see something of the lands that marched with theirs, from
which threats or help might come in time of war. But in the islands
there was no need for this kind of vigilance. All winter long --
and winter lasted from October until April, and sometimes May --
the seas kept the shores, and often even the neighboring isles were
seen only as clouds floating behind the other clouds that scudded,
laden with rain or snow, across the sea. In some ways the boys
liked winter best.

Then Queen Morgause, snugged down in
her palace against the incessant winds, spent her days by the
fireside, and they were free even of her spasmodic interest. They
were free to join the hunts for deer or boar -- no wolves were to
be found on the island -- and enjoyed the breakneck rides when,
armed with spears, they followed the shaggy hounds over wild and
difficult country. There were seal-hunts, too, bloody, exciting
forays over the slippery rocks, where a false step could mean a
broken leg, or worse. Their bows they were soon expert with; the
island abounded in birds, which could be hunted at any time. As for
swordplay and the arts of war, the queen's officers saw to the
first, and the second could be picked up any evening round the
supper fires of the soldiers in the courtyard. Of formal learning
there was none. It is possible that, in the whole of the kingdom,
Queen Morgause herself was the only one who knew how to read. She
kept a box full of books in her room, and sometimes, by the winter
fire, she would unroll one of these, while her women looked on,
awed, and begged her to read to them. This she did only rarely,
because the books were for the most part collections of the old
lores that men called magic, and the queen guarded her skills with
jealousy. About these the boys knew nothing, and would have cared
less. Whatever the power -- and it was genuine enough -- that had
come down through some trick of the blood to Morgause, and to
Morgan her half-sister, it had quite passed by every one other five
sons. Indeed, they would have despised it. Magic, to them, was
something for women; they were men; their power would be that of
men; and they pursued it eagerly.

Mordred, perhaps, more eagerly than
any. He had not expected to be received easily and at once into the
brotherhood of the princes, and indeed, there were difficulties.
The twins were always together, and Gawain kept young Gareth close
by him, protecting him against the rough fists and feet of the
twins, and at the same time trying to stiffen him against the
over-indulgence of his mother.

It was through this that, in the end,
Mordred broke into the charmed square of Morgause's legitimate
children. One night Gawain woke to hear Gareth sobbing on the
floor. The twins had thrown him out of bed onto a the cold stone,
and then laughingly fought off the child's attempts to climb back
into the warmth. Gawain, too sleepy to take drastic action, simply
pulled Gareth into his own bed, which meant that Mordred had to
move out and bed down with the twins. They, wide awake and spoiling
for trouble, did not move to make way for him, but, each to his
edge of the wide bed, set themselves to defend it.

Mordred stood in the cold for a few
minutes, watching them, while Gawain, unaware of what was going on,
comforted the youngest boy, paying no heed to the stifled giggles
of the twins. Then, without attempting to get into bed, Mordred
reached suddenly forward, and, with a swift tug, dragged the thick
furred coverlet away from the boys' naked bodies, and prepared to
bed down with it himself, on the floor.

Their yells of fury roused Gawain, but
he merely laughed, his arm round Gareth, and watched. Agravain and
Gaheris, goosefleshed with cold, hurled themselves, all fists and
teeth, at Mordred. But he was quicker, heavier, and completely
ruthless. He flung Agravain back across the bed with a blow in the
belly that left him retching for breath, then Gaheris's teeth met
in his arm. He whipped up his leather belt from the chest where it
lay, and lashed the other boy over back and buttocks till he let go
and, howling, ran to protect himself behind the bed.

Mordred did not follow them. He threw
the coverlet back on the bed, dropped the belt on the chest, then
climbed into bed, covering himself against the brisk draught from
the window.

"All right. Now that's settled. Come
in. I won't touch you again, unless you make me."

Agravain, sulky and swallowing, waited
only a minute or two before obeying. Gaheris, hands to his
buttocks, spat furiously: "Bastard! Fisher-brat!"

"Both," said Mordred equably. "The
bastard makes me older than you, and the fisher-brat stronger. So
get in and shut up."

Gaheris looked at Gawain, got no help
there, and, shivering, obeyed. The twins turned their backs to
Mordred, and apparently went straight to sleep.

From the other side of the chamber
Gawain, smiling, held up a hand in the gesture that meant
"victory." Gareth, the tears drying on his face, was grinning
hugely.

Mordred answered the gesture, then
pulled the coverlet closer and lay down. Soon, but not before he
was certain that the twins were genuinely asleep, he allowed
himself to relax into the warmth of the furs, and drifted off
himself into a slumber where, as ever, the dreams of desire and the
nightmares were about equally mingled.

After that there was no real trouble.
Agravain, in fact, conceived some kind of reluctant admiration for
Mordred, and Gaheris, though in this he would not follow his twin,
accorded him a sullen neutrality. Gareth was never a problem. His
sunny nature, and the drastically swift revenge that Mordred had
taken on his tormentors, ensured that he was Mordred's friend. But
the latter took good care not to come between the little boy and
the object of his first worship. Gawain was the one who mattered
most, and Gawain, having in his nature something of the Pendragon
that superseded the dark blood of Lothian and the perverse powers
of his mother, would be quick to resent any usurper. As far as
Gawain was concerned, Mordred himself stayed neutral, and waited.
Gawain must make the pace.

So autumn went by, and winter, and by
the time summer came round again, Seals' Bay was only a memory.
Mordred, in bearing, dress, and knowledge of the arts necessary to
a prince of Orkney, could not be distinguished from his
half-brothers. The eldest by almost a year, he was necessarily
matched with Gawain rather than with the younger ones, and though
at first Gawain had the advantage of training, in time there was
little to choose between them. Mordred had subtlety, call it
cunning, and a cool head; Gawain had the flashing brilliance that
on his worse days became rashness and sometimes savagery. On the
whole they met equal to equal with their weapons, and respected one
another with liking, though not with love. Gawain's love was still
and always for Gareth, and, in a strained and often unhappy way,
for his mother. The twins lived for each other. Mordred, though
accepted and seemingly at home in his new surroundings, stood
always outside the family, self-contained, and apparently content
to be so. He saw little of the queen, and was unaware of how
closely she watched him.

One day, after autumn had come again,
he went down to Seals' Bay. He came to the head of the cliff path
and stood as he had so often stood, looking down into the green dip
of the bay. It was October, and the wind blew strongly. The heather
was black and dead-looking, and here and there in the damp places
the sphagnum moss grew golden green and deep. Most of the seabirds
had gone south, but still out over the gray water the white gannets
hovered and splashed like sea-spirits. Down in the bay the weather
had so worked on the ruined cottage that the walls, washed clear of
the mud that had bound their stones together, looked more like
piles of rock thrown there by the tide than like part of a human
dwelling. The burned and blackened debris had been long since
dispersed by wind and sea.

Mordred walked down the slope and trod
deliberately over the rain-washed grass to the door of his foster
home. Standing on the sill, he looked about him. It had rained hard
during the past week, and pools of fresh water stood here and
there. In one of them, something white showed. He stooped to it,
and his hand met bone.

For a shrinking second he paused, then
with a sudden movement grasped the thing, and lifted it. A fragment
of bone, but whether animal or human he could not tell. He stood
with it in his hand, trying deliberately to let it conjure up
emotion or memory. But time and weather had done their work; it was
cleansed,, sterile, indifferent as the stones on the storm beach.
Whatever those people, that life, had been, it was over. He dropped
the bone back in the flooded crevice, and turned away.

Before he climbed the path again he
stood looking out to sea. Free he was now, in one sense; but what
his whole being longed for was the freedom that lay beyond that
barrier of water. Still something in his spirit beat itself against
the space of air that lay between the Orkneys and the mainland
kingdoms that were the High Kingdom.

"I'll go there," he said to the wind.
"Why else did it all happen as it did? I'll go there, and see what
can be made of a bastard prince from Orkney. She can't stop me.
I'll take the next ship."

Then he turned his back on the cove,
and went home to the palace.

It was not with the next ship, or even
in the next year, that the chance came. In the event Mordred, true
to his nature, was content to watch and bide his time. He would go,
but not until something was assured for him. He well knew how
little chance there was in the world beyond the islands for an
untried and untrained boy; such a one would end -- king's bastard
or no -- in penniless servitude or slavery. Life in Orkney was
better than that. Then, in his third summer in the palace, a
certain ship from the mainland put into harbor, and it became,
suddenly, interesting.

The Meridaun was a small trader newly
come from Caer Von, as people now called the old Roman garrison
town of Segontium in Wales. She carried pottery goods and ores and
smelted iron and even weapons for an illegal market run by the
small smithies back of the barracks in the fortified
port.

She also carried passengers, and to
the islanders who crowded to the wharf to meet her, these were of
more interest even than the much-needed goods. Ships brought news,
and the Meridaun , with her mixed cargo of travelers, brought the
biggest news for many years.

"Merlin is dead!" shouted the first
man off the gangplank, big with the news, but before the crowd,
pressing eagerly nearer, could ask him for details, the next
asserted loudly: "Not so, good folk, not so! Not when we left port,
that is, but it's true he's very sick, and not expected to see the
month out...."

Gradually, in response to the crowd's
clamor for details, more news emerged. The old enchanter was
certainly very ill. There had been a recurrence of the falling
sickness, and he had been in a coma -- "a sleep like death itself"
-- and had neither moved nor spoken for many days. The sleep might
even now have passed into death.

The boys, with the townsfolk, had gone
down to the wharf for news. The younger princes, eager and excited
at the commotion and the sight of the ship, pressed forward with
the crowd. But Mordred hung back. He heard the buzz of talk, the
shouted questions, the self-important answers; noise surrounded
him, but he might have been alone. He was back in a kind of dream.
Once before, dimly in shadows somewhere, he had heard the same
news, told in a frightened whisper. He had forgotten it till now.
All his life he had heard tales of Merlin, the King's enchanter,
along with tales of the High King himself and the court at Camelot;
why, then, somewhere deep in a dream, had he already heard the news
of Merlin's death? It had certainly not been true then. Perhaps it
was not true now....

"It's not true."

"What's that?"

He came to himself with a start. He
must, he realized, have spoken aloud. Gawain, beside him, was
staring.

"What do you mean, it's not
true?"

"Did I say that?"

"You know you did. What were you
talking about? This news of old Merlin? So how do you know? And
what's it to us, anyway? You look as if you were seeing
ghosts."

"Maybe I am. I -- I don't know what I
meant."