Legacy: Arthurian Saga (201 page)

"Listen to me. If you do as I bid you,
now and always, you will come to no harm. There is power in the
stars, Mordred, and some of it is for you. That much I have seen.
Ah, I see that you like that?"

"Madam?" Had she guessed, with her
witch's powers, at his dreams, at his ignorant plotting? He held
himself in, quivering. She saw his head go up and his fists clench
again on the belt at his waist. Watching out of her enveloping
darkness, she felt interest and a kind of perverted pride. He had
courage. He was her son, after all...The thought brought another in
its wake.

"Mordred."

His eyes sought her in the shadows.
She held them for a few moments, letting the silence draw out. He
was her son, yes, and who knew what fragment of her power had gone
down to him while she held him in her body? None of Lot's sons,
those sturdy earthmen, had inherited so much as a flicker of it;
but Mordred could be heir not only to the powers she had drawn from
her Breton mother, but to some sidelong glimmer of the greater
power of the arch-mage, Merlin. The dark eyes raised to hers and
held steady there were Arthur's, but they were, too, like the
enchanter's hated eyes that had held her own and beaten them down
not once but many times before the last.

She asked suddenly: "Have you never
wondered who your own mother was?"

"Why, yes. Yes, of course.
But--"

"I ask only because there were, in
Dunpeldyr, many women who boasted of having the Sight. Was your
dam, I wonder, one of those? Do you have dreams,
Mordred?"

He was shivering. Through his brain
went all the dreams, dreams of power and nightmares of the past:
the burned cottage, the whispers in the gloom, fear, suspicion,
ambition. He tried to close his mind against her probing
magic.

"Madam, lady, I have never -- that
is--"

"Never known the Sight? Never had a
dream of foreknowledge?" Her voice changed. "When the news came
before of Merlin's death, with the Meridaun , you knew it was not
yet true. You were heard to say so. And events proved you right.
How did you know?"

"I -- I didn't know, madam. I -- that
is--" He bit his lip, thinking back confusedly to the wharfside
crowd, the shouting, the jostling. Had Gawain told her? No, Gabran
must have overheard him. He licked his lips and tried again,
patently struggling for the truth. "I didn't even know I had spoken
aloud. It meant nothing. It's not the Sight, or -- or what you
said. It might have been a dream, but I think it was something I'd
heard a long time ago, and it turned out then that it wasn't true,
either. It makes me think of darkness, and someone whispering,
and--" He stopped.

"And?" she demanded sharply. "Well?
Answer me?"

"And a smell of fish," Mordred
muttered, to the floor. He was not looking at her, or he would have
seen the flash of relief, rather than mockery, in her face. She
drew a long breath. So, no prevision there; merely a cradle memory,
a half-dream from babyhood when those stupid peasants discussed the
news that came from Rheged. But it would be better to make
sure.

"A strange dream, indeed," she said,
smiling. "And certainly this time the messengers are right. Well,
let us make sure. Come with me." Then, when he did not move, with a
touch of impatience: "Come when I bid you. We shall look into the
crystal together now, and maybe we shall find what the future holds
for you."

She left the moonlit window and went
by him with a brush of velvet on his bare arm, and a faint
disbreath of scent like night-flowers. The boy drew an unsteady
breath and followed her, like someone drugged. Outside the doorway
the guards stood motionless. At the queen's gesture Mordred lifted
a lamp down from the wall, then followed her as she led the way
through the silent rooms and into the antechamber, where she paused
before the sealed doorway.

During his years at the palace the boy
had heard many tales about what lay beyond the ancient door. It was
a dungeon, a torture chamber, a place where spells were woven, the
shrine where the witch-queen spoke with the Goddess herself. No one
knew for sure. If anyone but the queen had ever passed through that
doorway, it was certain that only the queen had ever come out
again. He began to tremble again, and the flame shook in the
lamp.

Morgause did not speak. She lifted a
key that hung on a chain from her girdle, and unlocked the door. It
opened in silence on its greased hinges. At a gesture from her,
Mordred held the lamp high. Before them a flight of stone steps led
steeply downwards into a passageway. The walls glimmered in the
lamplight, sweating with damp. Walls and steps alike were of rough
rock, unchiseled, the living rock into which the Old People had
burrowed for their burial chambers. The place smelled fresh and
damp, and salty from the sea.

Morgause pulled the door shut behind
them. The lamp guttered in the draught and then burned strongly.
She pointed, in silence, then led the way down the steps and along
a passageway, straight and smoothly floored, but so low that they
had to stoop to avoid striking their heads on the roof. The air of
the place was dead, and one would have said still, but all the
while there was a sound that seemed to come from the rock itself: a
murmur, a hum, a throb, which Mordred suddenly recognized. It was
the sound of the sea, echoing through the passageway more like a
memory of waters that had once washed there, than like the sound of
the living sea without. The two of them seemed to be walking into
the corridors of a vast sea-shell whose swirling echo, straight
from the depths, was breathed now by the air. It was a sound he had
heard many a time, as a child, playing with shells on the beach of
Seals' Bay. Momentarily, the memory dispelled the darkness and the
drug of fear. Soon, surely, thought the boy, they would come out
into a cave on the open shore?

The passage twisted to the left, and
there, instead, was another low door. This, too, was locked, but
answered to the same key. The queen led the way in, leaving the
door open. Mordred followed her.

It was no cave, but a small room, its
walls squared and smoothed by masons, its floor made of the
familiar polished slabs. There was a lamp hanging from the rocky
ceiling. Against one wall stood a table, on which were boxes and
bowls and sealed jars with spoons and pestles and other instruments
of ivory and bone, or of bronze bright with use. Stone slabs had
been set into the walls to make shelves, and on them stood more
boxes and jars, and bags of leather tied with lead wire and stamped
with some seal he did not recognize, of circles and knotted snakes.
A high stool stood by the table, and against another wall was a
small stove, with beside it a skep of charcoal. A fissure in the
roof apparently served to lead the fumes away. The stove must be
lit frequently, or had been very recently. The room was
dry.

On a high shelf glimmered a row of
what Mordred took to be globes or jars made of a strange, pale
pottery. Then he saw what they were: human skulls. For a sickening
moment he imagined Morgause distilling her drugs, here in her
secret stillroom, and making her magic from human sacrifices, the
dark Goddess herself shut away in her subterranean kingdom. Then he
saw that she had merely tidied away the original owners of the
place, when the gravechamber had been converted to her
use.

It was bad enough. The lamp quivered
in his hand again, so that the sheen on the bronze knives trembled,
and Morgause said, half smiling: "Yes. You do well to be afraid.
But they do not come in here."

"They?"

"The ghosts. No, hold the lamp steady,
Mordred. If you are to see ghosts, then be sure to be as well armed
against them as I."

"I don't understand."

"No? Well, we shall see. Come, give me
the light."

She took the lamp from him and walked
towards the corner beyond the stove. Now he saw that there, too,
was a door. This one, of rough driftwood planks, was narrow and
high, shaped irregularly like a wedge; it had been made to fit
another natural fissure in the rock walls. It came open with the
creak of warped wood, and the queen beckoned the boy
through.

This at last was the sea-cave, or
rather, some inner chamber of it. The sea itself drove and
thundered somewhere near at hand, but with the hollow boom and suck
of a spent force whose power has been broken elsewhere.

This cavern must be above all but the
highest tides; the floor was flat, and dry, its slabs tilted only
slightly towards the pool that stood at the cavern's seaward side.
The only outlet must be deep under the water. No other was
visible.

Morgause set the lamp down at the very
edge of the water. Its light, still in the draughtless air, glowed
steadily, down and down into the inky depths of the water. It must
be some time since the pool had been disturbed by any stray pulse
of the tides. It lay still and black, and deep beyond imagination
or sight. No light could penetrate that black liquid; the lamplight
merely threw back, sharp and small, the reflection of the rock that
overhung the water.

The queen sank to her knees at the
pool's edge, drawing Mordred down beside her. She felt him
trembling.

"Are you still afraid?"

Mordred said, through shut teeth: "I
am cold, madam."

Morgause, who knew that he was lying,
smiled to herself. "Soon you will forget that. Kneel there, pray to
the Goddess, and watch the water. Do not speak again until I bid
you. Now, son of the sea, let us learn what the pool has to tell
us."

She fell silent herself at that, and
bent her gaze on the inky depths of the pool. The boy stayed as
still as he could, staring down at the water. His mind still swam
in confusion; he did not know whether he hoped more, or dreaded
more, to see anything in that dead crystal. But he need not have
feared. For him, the, water was only water.

Once he stole a glance sideways at the
queen. He could not see her face. She was bowwed over the water,
and her hair, unbound, flowed down to make a tent of silk that
reached and touched the surface of the pool. She was so still, so
entranced, that even her breathing did not stir the surface where
her hair trailed like seaweed. He shivered suddenly, then turned
back and stared fiercely down into the water. But if the ghosts of
Brude and Sula and of the score of murdered babies that lay to
Morgause's account were present in that cave, Mordred saw no hint
of them, felt no cold breath. He only knew that he hated the
darkness, the tomb-like stillness, the held breath of expectation
and dread, the slight but unmistakable emanations of magic that
breathed from Morgause's trance-held body. He was Arthur's son, and
though the woman, with all her magic, could not know it, this short
hour when he was made privy to her secrets was to sever him from
her more completely than banishment. Mordred himself was not aware
of this; he only knew that the distant suck and thunder of the sea
spoke of the open air, and wind, and light on the tide's foam, and
drew him irresistibly away in spirit from the dead pool and its
drowned mysteries.

The queen moved at last. She drew a
long, shuddering breath, then pushed back her hair, and stood up.
Mordred jumped thankfully to his feet and hurried to the door,
pulling it open for her and following her through the wedge-shaped
gap with a sense of relief and escape. Even the stillroom, with its
gruesome watchers, seemed, after the silence of the cave, the
entranced breathings of the witch, as normal as the palace
kitchens. Now he could catch the smell of the oils that Morgause
blended to make her heavy perfumes. He latched the door thankfully,
and turned to see her setting the lamp down on the
table.

It seemed that she already knew the
answer to her question, because she spoke lightly.

"Well, Mordred, now you have looked
into my crystal. What did you see?"

He did not trust himself to speak. He
shook his head.

"Nothing? Are you telling me that you
saw nothing?"

He found his voice. It came hoarsely.
"I saw a pool of sea-water. And I heard the sea."

"Only that? With the pool so full of
magic?" She smiled, and he was surprised. Foolishly, he had
expected her to be disappointed.

"Only water, and rock. Reflections of
rock. I -- I did think once that I saw something move, but I
thought it was an eel."

"The fisherman's son." She laughed,
but this time the epithet held no mockery. "Yes, there is an eel.
He was washed in last year. Well, Mordred, boy from the sea, you
are no prophet. Whatever power your true mother may have had, it
has passed you by."

"Yes, madam." Mordred spoke with
patent thankfulness. He had forgotten what message she had bidden
him look for in the crystal. He was wishing violently that the
interview was over. The acrid smell of lamp oil mingling with the
heavy scents of the queen's unguents oppressed him. His head swam.
Even the sound of the sea seemed a whole world away. He was trapped
in this shutaway silence, this ancient and airless tomb, with this
sorceress of a queen who puzzled him with her questions, and
confused him with her strange and shifting moods. She was watching
him now, a strange look that made him shift his shoulders as if all
at once he felt himself a stranger to the body inside his clothes.
He said, more to break the silence than because he wanted to know:
"Did you see anything in the pool, madam?"