Legacy: Arthurian Saga (218 page)

The King and his hundred set out on a
fine and blowy day of June. Their way took them over the high
downs. Small blue butterflies and dappled fritillaries fluttered in
clouds over the flowery turf. Larks sang. Sunlight fell in great
gold swaths over the ripening cropfields, and peasants, white with
the blowing chalk dust, looked up from their work and saluted the
party with smiles. The troop rode at ease, talking and laughing
together, and the mood was light.

Except, apparently, for Agravain. He
drew alongside Mordred where he was riding a little apart, some way
behind the King, who was talking with Cei and Bors.

"Our first sally with the High King,
and look at it. A carnival." He spoke with contempt. "All that talk
of war, and kingdoms changing hands, and raising armies to defend
our shores again, and this is all it comes to! He's getting old,
that's what it is. We should drive these Saxons back into the sea
first, and then it would be time enough to talk...But no! What do
we do? Here we ride with the duke of battles, and on a peace
mission. To Saxons. Ally with Saxons? Pah!" He spat. "He should
have let me go with Gawain."

"Did you ask to?"

"Of course."

"That was a peace mission, too," said
Mordred, woodenly, looking straight between his horse's ears.
"There was no trouble forecast in Dunpeldyr, only a little
diplomatic talking with Tydwal, and Gareth along to keep it
muted."

"Don't play the innocent with me!"
said Agravain angrily. "You know, why he's gone."

"I can guess. Anyone can guess. But if
he does find Lamorak, or news of him, let us hope that Gareth can
persuade him to show a little sense. Why else do you suppose Gareth
asked to go?" Mordred turned and looked straight at Agravain. "And
if he should come across Gaheris, you may hope the same thing
yourself. I suppose you know where Gaheris is? Well, if Gawain
catches up with either of them, you'd best know nothing about it.
And I want to know nothing."

"You? You're so deep in the King's
counsels that I'm surprised you haven't warned him."

"There was no need. He must know as
well as you do what Gawain hopes to do. But he can't mew him up
forever. What the King cannot prevent, he will not waste time over.
All he can do is hope, probably in vain, that wise counsel will
prevail."

"And if Gawain does run across
Lamorak, which might happen, even by accident, what do you expect
him to do then?"

"Lamorak must protect himself. He's
quite capable of it." He added: "Live what life brings. Die what
death comes."

Agravain stared. "What? What sort of
talk is that?"

"Something I heard recently. So what
about Gaheris? Are you content for Gawain to run across him,
too?"

"He'll not find Gaheris," said
Agravain confidently.

"Oh, so you do know where he
is?"

"What do you think? He got word to me,
of course. And the King doesn't know that, you may be sure! He's
not as all-knowing as you think, brother." He slid a sideways look
at Mordred, and his lowered voice was sly. "There's quite a lot
that he doesn't see."

Mordred did not answer, but Agravain
went on without prompting: "Else he'd hardly go off on an
unnecessary jaunt like this and leave Bedwyr in
Camelot."

"Someone has to stay."

"With the Queen?" Mordred turned to
look at him again. The tone, the look, said what the bare words had
not expressed. He spoke with contemptuous anger: "I'm no fool, nor
am I deaf. I hear what the dirty tongues say. But you'd best keep
yours clean, brother."

"Are you threatening me?"

"I don't need to. Let the King once
hear--"

"If it's true they're lovers, he ought
to hear."

"It cannot be true! Bedwyr is close to
the King and Queen, yes, but--"

"And they do say the husband is always
the last to guess." Mordred felt a wave of fury so strong that it
startled him. He began to speak, then, glancing towards the King's
back and the riders to either side, said merely, in a low,
suppressed voice: "Leave it. It's fool's talk anywhere, and here
you might be overheard. And keep your tongue off it with me. I want
no part of it."

"You were ready enough to listen when
your own mother's virtue was questioned." Mordred said,
exasperated: "Questioned! I was there, my God! I saw her lying with
him!"

"And cared so little that you let the
man escape!"

"Let it go, Agravain! If Gaheris had
killed Lamorak there, while the King was still negotiating with
Drustan to leave Dumnonia and join the Companions--"

"You thought of that? Then? With her
-- them --that in front of your eyes?"

"Yes." Agravain stared with bolting
eyes. The blood flushed his cheeks and ran into his forehead. Then,
with a sound of contempt and helpless fury, he reined his horse
back so sharply that blood sprang on the bit. Mordred, relieved of
his presence, rode on alone, until Arthur, turning, saw him there
and beckoned him forward.

"See! There is the border. And we are
awaited. The man in the center, the fair man in the blue mantle,
that's Cerdic himself."

Cerdic was a big man, with silvery
hair and beard, and blue eyes. He wore a long robe of grey, with
over it a caped blue mantle. He was unarmed save for his dagger,
but a page behind him bore his sword, the heavy Saxon broadsword,
sheathed in leather bound with worked gold. On his long, carefully
combed hair was a tall crown also of gold, elaborately chased, and
in his left hand he held a staff which, from its golden finial and
carved shaft, appeared to be a staff of royal office. Beside him
waited an interpreter, an elderly man who, it transpired, had been
son and grandson of federates, and had spent all his life within
the bounds of the Saxon Shore.

Behind Cerdic stood his thegns, or
warrior lords, dressed like their king save that where he wore a
crown, they had tall caps of brightly colored leather. Their
horses, small beasts that showed almost like ponies beside Arthur's
carefully bred cavalry mounts, were held in the background by their
grooms.

Arthur and his party dismounted. The
kings greeted one another, two tall men, richly dressed and
glittering with jewels, dark and fair, eyeing one another over the
unspoken truce like big dogs held back on leash. Then, as if some
spark of liking had suddenly been kindled between them, they both
smiled and, each at the same moment, held out a hand. They grasped
one another's arms, and kissed.

It was the signal. The ranks of tall
blond warriors broke, moving forward with shouts of welcome. The
grooms came running forward with the horses, and the party
remounted. Mordred, beckoned forward by the King, received Cerdic's
ceremonial kiss, then found himself riding between the Saxon king
and a red-haired thegn who was a cousin of Cerdic's
queen.

It was not far to the Saxon capital,
perhaps an hour's ride, and they took it slowly. The two kings
seemed content to let their mounts pace gently, side by side, while
they talked, with the interpreter craning to catch and relay what
was said.

Mordred, on Cerdic's other side, could
hear little, and after a while ceased trying to listen through the
shouts and laughter of the troop, as Saxon and Briton tried to make
themselves mutually understood. He and his neighbor, with gestures
and grins, managed to exchange names: the red-haired thegn was
called Bruning. A few of the Saxons -- those who had spent all
their lives in the federated territories of the Shore -- knew
enough of the others' language; these were mostly the older men;
the younger men on both sides had to depend on goodwill and
laughter to establish some sort of rapport. Agravain, scowling,
rode apart with a small group of the younger Britons, who talked
among themselves in low tones, and were ignored.

Mordred, looking about him, found
plenty to interest him in the landscape that very soon began, even
in the scant miles traversed, to look foreign. Lacking an
interpreter, he and Bruning contented themselves with exchanging
smiles from time to time, and occasionally pointing to some feature
that they passed. The fields here were differently tilled; the
instruments used by the working peasants were strange, some crude,
some ingenious. Such buildings as they passed were very different
from the stone-built structures he knew; here little stone was
used, but the huts and shippons of the peasants showed great skill
in the working of wood. The grazing cattle and flocks looked fat
and well cared for.

A flock of geese, screaming, flapped
across the road, sending the foremost of the horses rearing and
plunging. The goosegirl, a flaxen child with round blue eyes and a
lovely face aflame with blushes, scampered after them, waving her
stick. Arthur, laughing, threw her a coin, and she called something
in response, caught it, and ran off after her geese. The Saxons, it
seemed, were not in awe of kings; indeed, the cavalcade that
Agravain had angrily called a carnival now really began to bear
that appearance. The younger men whistled and called after the
running girl, who had kilted her long skirts up and was running as
lightly as a boy, with a free display of long bare legs. Bruning,
pointing, leaned across towards Mordred.

"Hwaet! Faeger maegden!"

Mordred nodded with a smile, then
realized with surprise what had been slowly coming through to him
now for some minutes. Through the shouting and laughter had come
words here and there, and sometimes phrases, which, without
consciously translating, he found himself understanding. "A fair
maid! See!" The half-musical, half-guttural sounds were linked in
his brain to images of his childhood: the smell of the sea, the
tossing boats, the voices of fishermen, the beauty of the
sharp-prowed ships that sometimes crossed the fishing grounds of
the islanders; the big blond sailors who put into the Orcadian
harbors in rough weather to shelter, or in fine weather to trade.
He did not think they had been Saxons, but there must be many words
and inflections common to Saxon and Norseman alike. He set himself
to listen, and found sense coming back to him in snatches, as of
poems learned in infancy.

But, being Mordred, he said nothing,
and gave no sign. He rode on, listening.

Then they crossed the brow of a grassy
hill, and the Saxon capital lay below them.

Mordred's first thought, on sighting
Cerdic's capital, was that it was little more than a crudely built
village. His second was amusement at the distance he, the
fisherman's son, had travelled since the days when an even cruder
village in the islands had struck him dumb with excitement and
admiration.

The so-called capital of Cerdic was a
large scattered collection of wooden buildings enclosed by a
palisade. Within the palisade, centrally, stood the king's house, a
big oblong structure, barnlike in size and made entirely of wood,
with a steeply pitched roof of wattled thatch and a central vent
for smoke. There was a door at either end of the hall, and windows,
narrow and high, set at intervals along the walls. It was
symmetrically built, and one would have said handsome, until memory
recalled the gilded towers of Camelot and the great Roman-based
stone structures of Caerleon or Aquae Sulis.

The other houses, also symmetrically
built but much smaller, clustered around the king's house,
apparently at random. Among them, beside them, even alongside their
walls, stood the sheds for the beasts. The open spaces between the
buildings swarmed with hens, pigs and geese, and children and dogs
played in and out of the wheels of ox-carts, or among the scattered
trees where the woodpiles stood. The air smelled of dung and
freshly mown grass and wood-smoke.

The big gates stood wide open. The
party rode through, under a cross-beam from which blew Cerdic's
pennant, a slim, forked blue flag that cracked in the breeze like a
whiplash. At the door of the hall stood Cerdic's queen, ready to
receive the visitors into her house as her husband had received
them into the kingdom's boundaries. She was almost as tall as her
husband, crowned like him, and with her long flax-hair plaits bound
with gold. She greeted Arthur, and after him Mordred and Cei, with
the ceremonial kiss of welcome, and thereafter, to Mordred's
surprise, accompanied the royal party into the hall. The rest of
the troop stayed outside, where, in time, the distant shouting and
the clash of metal and the hammering of hoofs indicated that the
younger warriors, Saxons and British together, were competing in
sport on the field outside the palisade.

The royal party, with the interpreter
in attendance, seated themselves beside the central hearth, where
the fire, freshly piled, was not yet lighted. Two girls, like fair
copies of Cerdic, came carrying jugs of mead and ale. The queen
herself, rising, took the jugs from her daughters' hands and poured
for the guests. Then the maidens went, but the queen remained,
seating herself again on her lord's left.

The talk, necessarily slowed by the
need for translation, went on through the afternoon. For a
beginning, the discussion kept mainly to home matters, trade and
markets, and a possible revision, in the future, of the boundary
between the kingdoms. Only as a corollary to this, the talk turned
eventually on the possibility of mutual military aid. Cerdic was
already conscious of the growing pressures being exerted against
his countrymen in their ever-narrowing territory on the Continent.
The East Saxons, more vulnerable than Cerdic's people, were already
seeking alliances with the English between the Thames and the
Humber. He himself had approached the Middle Saxons of Suthrige.
When Arthur asked if he, Cerdic, had also explored an alliance with
the South Saxons, whose kingdom, in the far south-east corner of
Britain, was the nearest landfall for any ships from across the
Narrow Sea, Cerdic was guarded. Since the death of the great leader
of the South Saxons, Aelle, there had been no ruler of note.
"Nithings" was the West Saxon king's expressive word. Arthur did
not pursue the question, but turned to the news from the Continent.
Cerdic had not heard of the death of Clodomir's children, and
looked grave as he considered the probable changes that would
ensue, and the increasingly hazardous position of Brittany, the
only buffer state between the Shore territories of Britain and the
threatened Prankish kingdoms. As the time wore on, it no longer
seemed so outlandish an idea that at some time in the near future,
Briton and Saxon might have to be at one in the defense of their
country's shores.