Legacy: Arthurian Saga (215 page)

The only sound was the soft and
dreadful hacking of metal into flesh and feathered bedding.
Morgause died at the first blow. The coverlet dragged from her
clutching hands, and the naked body fell back into the merciful
shadows. Less mercifully the head, half severed, lolled into
starlight on its blood-drenched pillows. Gaheris, himself drenched
in the first dreadful fountain of blood, lifted the red sword for
another blow, then, with a howl like a hurt dog, threw it aside
with a clatter, and, flinging himself to his knees in the pool of
blood, put his head down beside his mother's on the pillow and
wept.

Mordred found that he was holding
Lamorak with a grip that hurt them both. The killing had been so
swift, so unlooked-for, that neither man had made any conscious
move at all. Then Lamorak came to himself with a jerk and a gasping
curse, and tried to arm Mordred aside. But Morgause was dead and
beyond help, and her son knelt unheeding, uncaring, his unprotected
back to them both, his sword ten paces away on the floor. Lamorak's
blade wavered, and sank. Even here, even in this moment, the rigid
training held. There had been a dreadful slaying done in hot blood.
But now the blood was cold, the room was cold, and there was
nothing to be done. Lamorak stood still in Mordred's grasp, his
teeth beginning to chatter now with reaction, horror and the icy
chill of shock.

Mordred let him go. He picked the
knight's clothing up, and bundled it into his arms.

"Here, get these on, and go. There's
nothing to be gained by staying. Even if he was fit to fight you
now, it cannot be here, you know that." He stooped quickly for
Gaheris's abandoned sword, then, taking Lamorak by the arm, urged
him towards the bedroom door. "Into the other room now, before he
comes to. The thing's done, and all we can do is prevent that
madman from making it worse."

In the antechamber the women still
slept. As Mordred shut and latched the door the nun stirred in her
sleep and muttered something that could have been "Madam?" then
slept again. The two men stood rigid, listening. No sound, no
movement. Morgause's screaming, brief as it had been, had not been
heard through the thick walls and closed doors.

Lamorak had hold of himself now. He
was still very pale, and looked sick and haunted, but he made no
attempt to argue with Mordred, and set himself to dress quickly,
with only a glance or two at the shut door of the dreadful
room.

"I shall kill him, of course," he said
thickly.

"But not here." Mordred was cool. "So
far you've done nothing that any man would blame you for. The King
will be angry enough at the mess, without your adding to it. So
take my advice and go now, quickly. What you do later is up to
you."

Lamorak looked up from fastening his
tunic. "What are you going to do?"

"Get you out of here, Gaheris away,
and then report to the King. I was sent to do that anyway. Not that
it matters now, but I suppose her tale of being ill, dying even,
was pure invention?"

"Yes. She wanted to see the King and
plead with him herself for release." He added, very softly: "I was
going to marry her. I loved her, and she me. I had promised to talk
with him myself tomorrow... today. If she were my wife, surely
Arthur would have let her leave here, and live once more in
freedom?"

Mordred did not reply. Another tool,
he was thinking. I was once her pass to power, and now this man,
poor gullible fool, was to be her pass to liberty. Well, she is
gone, and the King will hardly be sorry, but in death, as in life,
she will wreck the peace of all those near her.

He said: "You knew that the King had
sent for Gawain and the other two already?"

"Yes. What will they -- what will
happen there?" A glance toward the door.

"Gaheris? Who knows? As for you... I
said you were to be blamed for nothing. But they will blame you, be
sure of that. It is even likely that, being the men they are, they
will try to kill Gaheris, too. They like to keep sex and murder
right in the family."

This, dry as spice-dust, made Lamorak,
even through the grief and rage of the moment, look sharply at the
younger man. He said, slowly, as if making a totally new discovery:
"You -- why, you're one of them. Her own son. And you talk as if...
as if..."

"I am different," said Mordred,
shortly. "Here, your cloak. No, that bloodstain's mine, you needn't
mind it. Gaheris stabbed my hand. Now, for the Goddess' sake, man,
go, and leave him to me."

"What will you do?"

"Lock the room so that the women don't
screech the place down when they wake, and get Gaheris out the way
he came in. You came in through the main gate, of course? Do the
guards know you're still here?"

"No. I left in due discourse, and
then... I have a way in. She used to leave a window open when she
knew..."

"Yes, of course. But then, why
trouble--?" He was going to ask. Why trouble to drug the women? but
then he saw that Morgause's sexual affairs would necessarily have
to be hidden from the abbess. The holy women could hardly be
expected to connive at them.

"I'll have to leave court, of course,"
said Lamorak. "You will tell the King--?"

"I'll report exactly what happened. I
don't imagine the King will blame you. But you'd do well to get
away until Gawain and the others have been settled. Good luck and
good speed."

Lamorak, with one last look towards
the silent bedroom door, went from the room. Mordred glanced once
again at the sleeping women, propped Gaheris's blood-stained sword
in a shadowed corner where a faldstool hid it from view, then went
back into the queen's bedchamber and shut the door behind
him.

He found Gaheris on his feet, swaying
like a drunken man and looking vaguely round him as if for
something he had forgotten.

Mordred took him by the shoulder and
drew him, unresisting, away from the bedside. Stooping, he twitched
the stained coverlet across to cover the dead body. Gaheris, rigid
as a sleepwalker, let himself be led from the room.

Once in the antechamber, and with the
door shut, he spoke for the first time, thickly. "Mordred. It was
right. It was right to kill her. She was my mother, but she was a
queen, and to do thus... to bring shame on us and on all our
line... No one can gainsay my right, not even Gawain. And when I
kill Lamorak -- that was Lamorak, wasn't it? Her -- the
man?"

"I didn't see who it was. He snatched
up his clothes and went."

"You didn't try to hold him? You
should have killed him."

"For the love of Hecate," said
Mordred, "save all that for later. Listen, I thought I heard
footsteps. It could be time for the night office. Anyone could come
by."

This was not true, but it served to
rouse Gaheris.

He gave a startled glance around, as
if just waking to a perilous situation, and said sharply: "My
sword?"

Mordred lifted it from the corner and
showed it. "When we are outside the walls. Come. I saw where you
left your horse. Quickly."

They were crossing the orchard before
Gaheris spoke again. He was still on the treadmill of agonized
guilt.

"That man. Lamorak, I know it was, and
you know, too. You called his name. Don't try to shield him.
Arthur's man, one of the Companions. He should be killed, too, and
I shall do it. But she, she to lie with such a one... It must have
happened before, you know. Those women were drugged. They must have
been lovers--" He choked on the word, then went on: "She spoke of
him once to me. Of Lamorak. She told me that he had killed our
father King Lot, and that she hated him. She lied. To me. To
me."

Mordred said, quietly: "Don't you see,
Gaheris? She lied to blind you, and she lied twice. Lamorak never
killed Lot, how could he? Lot died of the wounds he got at Caledon,
and they fought on the same side there. So unless Lamorak stabbed
King Lot in the back, and that was not his way, he could not be his
killer. Did you never think of that?"

But Gaheris had no thoughts but the
same trapped and torturing ones. "She took him as her lover, and
lied to me. We were all deceived, even Gawain. Mordred, the others
will say that what I did was right, will they not?"

"You know as well as I how likely
Gawain is to forgive you this. Or Gareth. Even your twin may not
support you. And though the King isn't likely to grieve for your
mother, he'll have to listen if the Orkney princes demand what they
will call justice."

"They will ask it on
Lamorak!"

"For what?" said Mordred, coolly. "He
would have married her."

That silenced Gaheris for a moment.
They had reached the orchard wall, and he paused under the apple
tree and turned. The moon was rising now behind a drift of cloud,
and the bloodstains on his breast showed black.

"If they do not kill him, I shall," he
said.

"You can try," said Mordred dryly.
"And he will kill you, make no mistake. And then your brothers will
try to kill him. So you see what this night's work has
done?"

"And you? You seem to care nothing for
what has happened. You speak as if it hardly touched
you."

"Oh, it touches me," said Mordred
briefly. "Now, we are wasting time. What's done is done. You will
have to leave court, you know that. You will be well advised to get
away before your brothers get here. Get over the wall now, Gaheris;
your horse is there."

Gaheris swung himself over, and
Mordred, climbing after him, stayed astride the wall while his
brother untied the horse and checked the girths. Then he handed
Gaheris's sword down into his hand.

"Where will you go?" he asked
him.

"North. Not to the islands, and
Dunpeldyr is held for Arthur as well. What is not? But I shall find
a place where I can sell my sword."

"Meantime take my purse.
Here."

"My thanks, brother." Gaheris caught
it. He swung himself to the saddle. It brought him almost to
Mordred's level. He hung on the rein for a moment while the roan
horse danced, eager to move. "When you see Gawain and the
others--"

"Tell them the truth and plead your
cause for you? I'll do what I can. Farewell."

Gaheris pulled the horse's head round.
Soon there was no sign of him except the fast soft thud of
retreating hoofs. Mordred jumped down from the wall and walked back
across the orchard.

2

So died Morgause, Witch-Queen of
Lothian and Orkney, leaving by her death and its manner another
hellbrew of trouble for her hated brother.

The trouble was far-reaching. Gaheris
suffered banishment, and Lamorak, riding white-faced and silent
into headquarters to surrender his sword, was relieved of his
command and bidden to absent himself until the dust should have
time to settle.

This would not be soon. Gawain, savage
with outraged pride rather than grief, swore on all the wild gods
of the north to be avenged both on Lamorak and on his brother, and
ignored all that Arthur could say to him, pleas and threats
alike.

It was pointed out that Lamorak had
offered marriage to Morgause, and that her acceptance gave him the
betrothed's claim to her bed, and with it the right to avenge her
murder himself. This right Lamorak, one of Arthur's first and most
loyal Companions, had waived. Gaheris, he had sworn, was safe from
him. But none of this appeased Gawain, whose anger had in it a
large measure of sheer sexual jealousy.

Just as violent was Gawain's railing
against Gaheris, but there he got no support from his brothers.
Agravain, who had always been the leader of the twins, seemed lost
without Gaheris; he tended to turn to Mordred, who, for reasons of
his own, suffered him willingly enough. Gareth said little
throughout, but withdrew into silence. In her death as in her life
his mother had wronged him deeply: bitter as was the story of her
dreadful death to her youngest son, the tales of her impurity,
which were common knowledge now, wounded him more.

But all the shouts for vengeance had
to die. Lamorak had gone, no one knew where. Gaheris had vanished
northward into the mists, Morgause was buried in the convent
graveyard, and Arthur went with his followers back to Camelot.
Gradually, for sheer lack of fuel, the blaze kindled by the murder
died down. Arthur, fond of his nephews, and secretly relieved at
the news of Morgause's death, steered as carefully as he could
between the shoals, kept the princes as busy as he might, gave
Gawain as much authority as he dared, and waited with weary
apprehension for the storm to break again. About Gaheris he could
not bring himself to care overmuch, but Lamorak, who was innocent
of all but folly, was almost certainly doomed. Someday Arthur's
valued Companion would come against one of the Orkney princes, and
be killed, fair or foul. Nor would it stop there. Lamorak, too, had
a brother, at present serving in Dumnonia with one Drustan, a
knight whom Arthur hoped to attract into his service. It was
possible that he, or even Drustan himself -- who was a close friend
to both brothers -- would in turn swear and require
vengeance.