Legacy: Arthurian Saga (202 page)

"Indeed, yes. It was still there, the
vision that I saw yesterday, and before that, before Arthur's
messenger ever came here." Her voice went deep and level, but found
no echo in that deadened air.

"I saw a crystal cave, and in it my
enemy, dead and on his bier between the candles, and no doubt
rotting away into the forgetfulness I once cursed him with. And I
saw the Dragon himself, my dear brother Arthur, sitting among his
gilded towers, beside his barren queen, waiting for his ship to
come back to Ynys Witrin. And then myself, with my sons, and with
you, Mordred, all of us together, bearing gifts for the King and
within the gates of Camelot at last... at last...And there the
vision faded, but not before I saw him coming, Mordred, the Dragon
himself... a dragon wingless now, and ready to listen to other
voices, try other magic, lie down with other
counselors."

She laughed then, but the sound was as
discomforting as her look. "As he did once before. Come here,
Mordred. No, leave the lamp alone. We will go up in a minute. Come
here. Nearer."

He approached and stood in front of
her. She had to look up to meet his eyes. She put up her hands and
took him by the arms. "As he did once before," she repeated,
smiling.

"Madam?" said the boy
hoarsely.

Her hands tightened on his arms. Then
suddenly she drew him to her, and before he could guess at what she
purposed she reached up and kissed him, lingeringly, upon the
mouth.

Bewildered, half-excited, aroused by
her scent and the unexpectedly sensual kiss, he stood in her grip,
trembling, but not this time with either cold or fear. She kissed
him again, and her voice was honey-sweet against his lips. "You
have your father's mouth, Mordred."

Lot's mouth? Her husband's, who had
betrayed her by lying with his mother? And she kissed him? Wanted
him, perhaps? Why not? She was a lovely woman still, and he was
young, and as experienced sexually as any boy of his age. There was
a certain lady of the court who had taken pleasure in teaching him
pleasure, and there was also a girl, a shepherd's daughter who
lived a few miles from the palace, who watched for him when he rode
that way across the heather, with the evening wind blowing in from
the sea...Mordred, brought up in islands as yet untouched either by
Roman civilization or Christian ethic, had no more sense of sin
than a young animal, or one of the ancient Celtic gods who haunted
the cairns and rode by like rainbows on sunny days. Why, then,
should his body recoil, rather than respond to hers? Why feel as
if, clingingly, something evil had brushed him by?

She pushed him away suddenly, and
reached for the lamp. She lifted it, then paused, looking him over
slowly with that same discomforting look. "Trees can grow tall, it
seems, Mordred, and still be saplings. Too much, perhaps, yet not
enough your father's son...Well, let us go. I to where my patient
Gabran waits for me, and you to your child's bed with the other
children. Do I need to remind you to say nothing about anything
that has befallen this night, or anything I have said?"

She waited for a reply. He managed to
say: "About this, madam? No. No."

"This"? What is "this"? About anything
that you have seen, or not seen. Maybe you have seen enough to know
that I am to be obeyed. Yes? Well then, do as I bid you, and you
will come to no harm."

She led the way in silence, and he
followed her up the passageway and out into the antechamber. The
key shot behind them in the well-greased wards. She neither spoke
again nor looked at him. He turned and ran from her along the cold
corridors and through the dark palace to his bedchamber.

During the days that followed, Mordred
tried, along with the other boys, and half the Orcadians besides,
to come near enough to the King's envoy to have speech with him. In
the case of the islanders, and the younger princes, it was a matter
of curiosity. What was the mainland like? The fabled castle of
Camelot? The King himself, hero of a dozen stark battles, and his
lovely Queen? Bedwyr his friend, and others of the companion
knights?

But all, princes and commoners alike,
found it impossible to come near the man. After that first night he
slept on board the royal ship, and disembarked daily to be
escorted, ostensibly for a word of courtesy with Queen Morgause,
but really, rumor had it, to make sure that her preparations went
forward fast enough to catch the good autumn weather.

The queen was not to be hurried. Her
ship, the Orc, lay by the wharf, ready in all but the last touches.
Workmen busied themselves with the final gilding and painting,
while their women stitched at the great decorated sail. In the
palace itself Morgause's own women busied themselves with the
finishing, tending and packing of the sumptuous clothes that the
queen planned for her reception at Camelot. Morgause herself spent
many hours in her secret room below the rock. She was not, as
whispers went, consulting her dark Goddess, but in fact concocting
unguents and lotions and perfumes, and certain subtle drugs that
had the reputation of restoring beauty and the energy of
youth.

In his corner of the courtyard,
Beltane the goldsmith still sat at his work. The gifts for Arthur
were finished, packed in wool in the box made to receive them; the
old man was busy now with jewels for Morgause herself. Casso, the
dumb slave who helped him, had been set to fashioning buckles and
brooches for the princes; though he was not an artist like his
master, he made a good job of the designs given him by Beltane, and
seemed to enjoy the time the boys spent watching him and talking
round the smelting-stove.

Mordred, alone of them all, tried some
sort of communication with him, asking questions that needed no
more than a nod or a shake of the head for answer, but he got no
further than a few facts about Casso himself. He had been a slave
all his life. He had not always been dumb, but had had his tongue
cut out by a cruel master, and considered himself the most
fortunate of men to have been taken in by Beltane and taught a
trade. A dull life indeed, thought Mordred, and wondered--though
only idly--at the air of contentment that the man visibly wore; the
air, if the boy had recognized it, of a man who has come to terms
with his limitations, and who has made a place for himself in life,
which he fills with integrity. Mordred, who had had small reason
during his life to think the best of any man, assumed merely that
the slave had some sort of satisfactory private life which he
managed independently of his master. Women, possibly? He could
certainly afford them. When (his master safely abed) the slave
joined in the soldiers' dice game, he always had coin in plenty,
and easily stood his share of the wine. Mordred knew where the
money came from. Not from Beltane, that was sure; who -- apart from
the odd gift -- ever paid his own slaves? But there had been a day
a month or so back when Mordred took a small boat out alone and
went fishing, coming back late in the half-light that was all the
night the islands knew in summer.

There was a small trading ship lying
moored at the royal wharf; most of her men were on shore for the
night, but some officers were apparently still aboard; he heard a
man's voice, and then a chink that might have been the sound of
coins passing. As he tied his boat to the wharf in the shadow of
the trader he saw a man walk quickly down the gangplank and up
through the town towards the palace gate. He recognized Casso. So,
the man took commissions privately, did he? Legitimate trading
would hardly need to be done at midnight. Well, a man had to fend
for himself, thought Mordred, with a shrug, and forgot all about
it.

The day came at last. On a bright
sunny morning of October the queen with her women, followed by the
five boys, Gabran, and her chief chamberlain, headed the stately
procession to the wharf. Behind them a man carried the box of
treasure destined for Arthur, and another bore gifts for the King
of Rheged and his wife, Morgause's sister. A pageboy struggled with
the leashes of two tall island-bred hounds destined for King
Urbgen, while another boy, looking scared, carried at arm's length
a stout wicker cage in which spat and snarled a half-grown wildcat
intended as a curious addition to Queen Morgan's collection of
strange birds and beasts and reptiles. With them went an escort of
Morgause's own men-at-arms, and last of all -- ostensibly to honor
her but looking suspiciously like a guard -- marched a detachment
of the King's soldiers from the Sea Dragon.

Even in the merciless light of morning
the queen looked lovely. Her hair, washed with sweet essences and
dressed with gold, sparkled and shone. Her eyes were bright under
their tinted lids. Normally she favored rich colors, but today she
wore black, and the somber dress gave her figure, thickened with
child-bearing, almost the old lissome slenderness of her girlhood,
and set off the jewels and the creamy skin. Her head was high and
her look confident. To either side of the way the islanders
crowded, calling greetings and blessings. Their comfort-loving
queen had not granted them many such glimpses of her since her
banishment to these shores, but now she had given them a sight
indeed, a royal procession, queen and princes and their armed and
jeweled escort, with, to top all, a sight of King Arthur's own ship
with its dragon standard waiting to shepherd the Orc to the
mainland kingdom.

The Orc took sail at last, curving out
into the strait between the royal island and its neighbor. Astern
of her, at the edge of her creaming wake, rode the Sea Dragon, a
hound herding the hind and her five young steadily southward into
the net spread for them by the High King Arthur.

Once away from the Orkneys with the
queen and her family safely embarked, the captain of the Sea Dragon
was not too much concerned with speed; the High King was still in
Brittany, and Morgause's presence would suffice when he was once
more at Camelot. But he had wisely allowed extra time for the
voyage in case the ships struck bad weather, and this, very soon,
they did. During their passage of the Muir Orc -- that strait of
the Orcadian Sea that lies between the mainland and the outer isles
-- they met winds of almost gale force, that drove the two ships
apart, and sent even the hardiest of the passengers below. At
length, after somedays of stormy weather, the gales abated, and the
Orcadian ship beat into the sheltered waters of the Ituna Estuary
and dropped anchor there. The Sea Dragon struggled into the same
wharf a few hours later, to find the Orkney party still on board,
but making preparations to go ashore and travel to Luguvallium, the
capital of Rheged, to visit King Urbgen and Morgan his
queen.

The captain of The Sea Dragon, though
perfectly aware that he was prisoners' escort rather than guard of
honor, saw no reason to prevent the journey. King Urbgen of Rheged,
though his queen had transgressed notably against her brother
Arthur, had always been a faithful servant of the High King; he
would certainly see to it that Morgause and her precious brood were
kept safe and close while the ships were repaired after the
gale.

Morgause, who saw no need to ask
permission for the journey, had already dispatched a letter to her
sister, bidding her expect them. Now a courier was sent ahead, and
at length the party, as carefully escorted as before, set out for
King Urbgen's castle.

For Mordred, the ride was all too
short. Once the party left the shore and struck inland through the
hills he was passing through very different country from any that
he had seen or even been able to imagine before.

What impressed him first was the
abundance of trees. In Orkney the only trees were the few stunted
alders and birches and wind-bitten thorns that huddled along the
meager shelter of the glens. Here there were trees everywhere, huge
canopied growths, each with its island of shadow and its dependent
colony of bushes and ferns and trailing plants. Great forests of
oak clothed the lower hillsides, giving way on higher ground to
pines that grew right up to the foot of the tallest cliffs. Down
every gully in those cliffs crowded more trees, rowan and holly and
birch, the thickly wooded clefts seeming to hang from the silver
mountain-crests like the ropes that held down the thatch of his
parents' cottage. Willow and alder lined every smallest stream, and
along the roadways, on the slopes, bordering the moorland stretches
and sheltering every cottage and sheep-cote, were trees and more
trees, all in the russet and gold and rich red of autumn, backed
with the black glint of holly and the dark accent of the pines.
Along the track where they rode the hazel-nuts dropped ripe from
their fringed calyxes, and under the silver webs of autumn late
blackberries glinted like garnets. Gareth pointed excitedly to a
burnished slow-worm pouring itself away into the bracken, and
Mordred saw small deer watching them from the ferns at the edge of
the forest, as still and dappled as the forest floor where they
stood.

Once, when their road led them over a
high pass, and between the crests of the hills the country opened
on a blue distance, Mordred checked his horse, staring. It was the
first time he had seen so far with no sea visible. For miles and
miles the only water was the small tarns that winked in the hanging
valleys, and the white of streams running down through the grey
rock to feed them. Hill after blue hill rose into the distance
where a great chain of mountains lifted to one square-topped and
white. Mountain or cloud? It was the same. This was the mainland,
the kingdom of the kingdoms, the stuff of dreams.