Legacy: Arthurian Saga (205 page)

"Orders to keep me out? Or
in?"

"Oh, in -- well, that is, I mean to
say, to look after you, like, sir." The man cleared his throat, ill
at ease, and tried again. "I thought you was all in there, asleep.
You been with your lady queen, then, maybe?"

"Ah. King's orders to report on our
movements, too?" Mordred let a moment of silence hang, while the
man fidgeted, then he smiled. "No, I was not with Queen Morgause.
Do you always ask the king's guests where they spend their
nights?"

The man's mouth opened slowly. Mordred
read it all easily: surprise, amusement, complicity. He slipped his
free hand into the pouch at his belt and took out a coin. They had
been speaking softly, but he lowered his voice still further. "You
won't tell anyone?"

The man's face relaxed into something
like a grin. "Indeed, no, sir. Excuse me, I'm sure. Thank you, sir.
Good night, sir."

Mordred slipped past him and let
himself quietly into the bedchamber.

For all his caution, he found Gawain
awake, up on an elbow, and reaching for his dagger.

"Who's that?"

"Mordred. Keep your voice down. It's
all right."

"Where've you been? I thought you were
in bed and asleep."

Mordred did not reply. He had a habit
of quenching silences. He had discovered that if you failed to
answer an awkward question, people rarely asked it twice. He did
not know that this was a discovery normally only made in later
life, and by some weaker natures not at all. He crossed to his
bedplace, and, once hidden by the buttress, dropped his bundle on
the bed, and his cloak after it. Gawain was not to know that under
the cloak he had been fully dressed.

"I thought I heard voices," whispered
Gawain. "They've set a guard on the door. I was talking to
him."

"Oh." Gawain, as Mordred calculated,
did not sound particularly interested. He probably did not realize
that it was the first time in Rheged that such a guard had been
set. He would be assuming, too, that Mordred had merely been out to
the privy. He lay back. "That must have been what woke me. What's
the time?"

"Must be well after midnight."
Mordred, winding a kerchief round his injured hand, said softly:
"And we have to make an early start in the morning. Best get some
sleep now. Good night."

After a while Mordred slept, too. Half
a league away, in the edge of the vast tract of woodland that was
called the Wild Forest, a young wildcat settled into the crotch of
an enormous pine tree and began washing its fur clean of the smell
of captivity.

In the morning it was apparent that
Nimue's warning had been extended to their escort. The soldiers saw
to it that the Orkney party stayed together, and, with the greatest
possible tact, made the close guardianship seem an honor. Morgause
took it as such, and so did the four younger princes, who rode at
ease, talking gaily with the guard and laughing, but Mordred, with
a good horse under him and the open stretches of mainland moor
beckoning from either side of the road, fretted and was
silent.

All too soon they reached the harbor.
The first thing to be noticed was that the Orc rode alone at the
wharfside. The Sea Dragon, explained the escort's captain, had
suffered only slight storm damage, so had held on her way south; he
and the armed escort were to sail with the party in the Orc .
Morgause, annoyed, but beginning to be apprehensive and so not
daring to show it, acquiesced perforce, and they boarded the ship.
This was now a little too crowded for comfort, but the winds had
abated, and the passage out of the Ituna Estuary and southward
along the coast of Rheged was smooth and even enjoyable.

The boys spent their time on deck,
watching the hilly land slide past. Gulls slanted and cried behind
the ship. Once they threaded a fleet of fishing boats, and once
saw, in a small inlet of the hilly coast, some men on ponies
herding cattle ("Probably stolen," said Agravain, sounding
approving rather than otherwise), but apart from that, no sign of
life. Morgause did not appear. The sailors taught the boys to tie
knots, and Gareth tried to play on a little flute one of them had
made from reeds. They all improvised fishing lines, and had some
success, and in consequence ate good meals of fresh-baked fish. The
princes were in wild spirits at the adventure, and at the dazzling
prospect, as they saw it, in store for them. Even Mordred managed
at times to forget the cloud of fear. The only fly in the ointment
was the silence of the escort. The boys questioned the soldiers --
the princes with innocent curiosity, Mordred with careful guile --
but the men and their officers were as uncommunicative as the royal
envoy had been. About the High King's orders or plans for their
future they learned nothing.

So for three days. Then, with the
ship's master cocking a worried eye aloft at the suddenly moody
canvas, the Orc put into Segontium, on the coast of Wales just
across from Mona's Isle.

This was a much bigger place than the
little Rheged port. Caer Von, or Segontium, as it had been in Roman
times, was a big military garrison, recently rebuilt to at least
half its old strength. The fortress lay on the stony hillside above
the town, and beyond that again rose the foothills and then the
cloud-holding heights of Wyddfa, the Snow Hill. To seaward, across
a narrow channel as blue in the sunshine as sapphire, lay the
golden fields and magic stones of Mona, isle of druids.

The boys lined the ship's rail,
staring and eager. At length Morgause came out of her cabin. She
looked pale and ill, even after such a smooth and easy voyage.
("Because she's a witch, you see," said Gareth, proudly, to the
escort's captain.) When the ship's master told her that they must
wait in harbor for a change of wind, she said thankfully that she
would not sleep on board, and her chamberlain was sent across to
engage rooms at the wharfside inn. This was a prosperous,
comfortable place, and good rooms were forthcoming. The party went
cheerfully on shore.

They were there for four days. The
queen kept to her rooms with the women. The boys were allowed to
explore the town, or, still carefully watched, to go down to the
shore to hunt for crabs and shellfish. The second time they set
out, Mordred, as if on an impulse of boredom, turned back. Though
he did not say so within his brothers' hearing, he let the two
guards see that crab-hunting offered no amusement to a boy who had
done it for a living only a few years ago. He left them to it, and
went alone into the town, then, hiding his eagerness, sauntered at
an easy pace along the track that climbed away from the houses and
led past the fortress walls towards the distant heights of
Wyddfa.

The air was dazzlingly clear after the
night's frost. The stones were already warm. He sat down. To any
watcher he would appear to be enjoying the view and the sunshine.
In fact he was looking carefully about him at the prospect of
escape.

Above him, in the distance, a boy
tended a flock of sheep. Their tracks seamed the face of the hill.
Higher, beyond the slopes of stony pasture, lay a wood, the
outskirts of the forest that swept up to clothe the flanks of the
Snow Hill. A gap in the trees showed where a road led
eastward.

There lay the way. The road would
surely join the famous Sarn Elen, the causeway that led down to
Deva and the inland kingdoms. He could lose himself there, easily.
He had all his money on him, and, with last night's frost as an
excuse, had brought his cloak.

A pebble rattled on the path. He
looked round, to see, barely a dozen paces away, the two guards
standing, at ease, ostensibly gazing idly into the distance towards
the beach below the town. But their pose was alert, and from time
to time their glances came his way.

It was the same two men who had
accompanied the princes to the shore. Now, small in the distance,
he could see his brothers, easily recognizable among the other
crab-catchers on the beach. He looked for their escort, and saw
none.

The men had left the other boys to
their pastime, and had followed him quietly up the hillside. The
conclusion was inescapable. The guards were for him
alone.

An emotion that the caged wildcat
would have recognized swelled burstingly in Mordred's breast, and
into his throat. He wanted to shout, to lash out, to
run.

To run. He jumped to his feet.
Instantly the men were moving, casually, towards him. They were
young and fit. He could never outdistance them. He stood
still.

"Time to be going back, young sir,"
said one of them pleasantly. "Nearly dinner time, I
reckon."

"Your brothers are going in," said the
other, pointing. "Look, sir, you can see them from here. Shall we
go down now?"

Mordred's face was still as stone. His
eyes betrayed nothing of the emotion that filled him. Something
that no wild animal -- and few men -- would have understood kept
him silent and apparently indifferent. In two deep and steadying
breaths he willed the fear and with it the furious disappointment
to spill from him. He could almost feel it draining from his
fingertips like blood. In its place came the faintest tremor of
released tension, and then, into the emptiness, the calm of his
habitual control.

He nodded to the men, said something
distant and polite, and walked back to the inn between
them.

He tried again next day.

The princes, tired of the shore and
the town, were avid to visit the great fortress on the hillside,
but this their mother would not consider. Indeed, the escort's
captain said flatly that even princes of Orkney would not be
allowed within the gates. The place was fortified and always held
in readiness.

"For what?" asked Gawain.

The man nodded at the sea.

"Irish?"

"Picts, Irish, Saxons.
Anyone."

"Is King Maelgon here
himself?"

"No."

"Which is Macsen's Tower?" The
idle-sounding question came from Mordred.

"Whose tower?" demanded
Agravain.

"Macsen's. Someone spoke of it
yesterday." The someone had been one of his guards, who had
remarked that the site of the tower was well up on the hillside,
not far below the wood.

The captain pointed. "It's up there.
You can't see it now, though, it's a ruin."

"Who was Macsen?" asked
Gareth.

"Do they teach you nothing in Orkney?"
The man was indulgent. "He was Emperor of Britain, Magnus Maximus,
a Spaniard by birth--"

"Of course we know that," interrupted
Gawain. "We are related to him. He was Emperor of Rome, and it was
his sword that Merlin raised for the High King: Caliburn, the
King's sword of Britain. Everyone knows that! Our mother is
descended from him, through King Uther."

"Then should we not visit the tower?"
asked Mordred. "It's not inside the fortress, so surely anyone can
go? Even if it's ruined--"

"Sorry." The captain shook his head.
"Too far. Against orders."

"Orders?" Gawain was beginning to
bristle, but Agravain spoke across him, rudely, to
Mordred.

"Anyway, why should you want to go?
You're not Macsen's kin! We are! We are royal through our mother as
well."

"Then if I am bastard Lothian, you can
count yourselves bastard Macsen," snapped Mordred, fear and tension
breaking suddenly into fury, and careless for once of his
tongue.

He was safe enough. The twins, loyal
to their boyhood rule of silence where their mother was concerned,
would never have thought of repeating the insult to Morgause. Their
methods were more direct. After a startled pause of sheer surprise,
they yelled with rage and fell on Mordred, and the pent-up energies
of seaboard suddenly exploded in a very pretty dog-fight all around
the inn yard. After they had been pulled apart and then beaten for
fighting, the queen was so angry at the disturbance that she
forbade any more excursions from the inn. So no one got to Macsen's
Tower, and the boys had to content themselves with knucklebones and
mock fights and story-telling; children's ploys, said Mordred, this
time with open contempt, still smarting, and stayed
away.

The next day, quite suddenly in the
evening, the wind changed, and blew strongly again from the north.
Under the watchful eye of the escort the party re-embarked, and the
Orc made quickly south with a steady wind until she could turn in
from the open weather to the quiet waters of the Severn Sea. The
water was like glass. "Right to the Glass Isle," said the master,
"I do assure you." And the shallow-draughted Orc did indeed sail in
on an estuary mirror-smooth, with the oars out for the last stretch
to take the little ship clear up to the wharf of Ynys Witrin, the
Isle of Glass, almost in the shadow of the palace walls of Melwas,
its king.

Melwas's palace was little more than a
large house set in the flat meadowland rimming the largest of the
three sister islands called Ynys Witrin. Two of the islands were
hills, low and green, that rose gently from the encircling water.
The third was the Tor, a high, cone-shaped hill symmetrical as an
artifact, and girdled at its base with apple orchards where wisps
of smoke proclaimed the cottages of the village that was Melwas's
capital. It towered above the surrounding water-logged flatland of
the Summer Country like a great beacon. This, in fact, was one of
its functions; a beacon turret stood at the very top of the Tor,
the nearest signal point to Camelot itself. From that summit, the
boys were told, those walls and shining towers might be seen quite
close and clearly, across the glassy reaches of the
Lake.