Legacy: Arthurian Saga (227 page)

The doorstep where Mordred had been
abandoned belonged, not to one of the King's protected foundations,
but to a small community living remote from any town or road, and
vowed to silence and poverty. The track that led through their
little valley was used only by shepherds, or strayed travelers
looking for a short cut, or, as in Gaheris's case, by fugitives. No
messenger came there, no news, even, of the recent stirring scenes
enacted in Arthur's capital. The good brothers nursed Mordred with
dutifully Christian care, and even with some skill, for one of
their number was a herbalist. They had no way of guessing who the
stranger was who had been left on their doorstep during the storm.
He was well dressed, but carried neither weapon nor money. Some
traveler, no doubt, who had been robbed, and who owed his life to
the fear -- even perhaps the piety -- of the thieves. So the
brothers nursed the stranger, fed him from their plain rations, and
were thankful when, the fever gone, he insisted on leaving their
roof. His horse was there, an undistinguished beast. They packed a
saddle-bag for him of black bread, wine in a leather flask, and a
handful of raisins, and sent him on his way with a blessing and, it
must be admitted, a private Te Deum afterwards. There had been
something about the grim and silent man that had frightened them,
and the brother who had watched his sleep had told them with fear
of words spoken in grief and dread where the names of the High King
and his Queen recurred. Nothing more could be understood: Mordred,
deep in fever, had raved in the language of his childhood, where
Sula and Guinevere and Queen Morgause came and went in the hot
shadows, and all looks were alien, all words hurtful.

The wound was healed, but some residue
of weakness remained. He rode barely eight miles on the first day,
thankful for the plodding steadiness of the beast he bestrode. By
instinct he went northward. That night he spent in a deserted
woodcutter's hut deep in the forest; he had no money for an inn,
nor had the brothers been able to spare him any. He would have to
live, as they did (he thought hazily, as he huddled for warmth in
his cloak and waited for sleep), on charity. Or else on
work.

The thought, strange for so many
years, aroused him to a sort of bitter amusement. Work? A knight's
work was fighting. A weaponless man on a poor horse would be taken
on only by the pettiest and poorest of rulers. And any ruler would
ask questions. So, what work?

Out of the advancing clouds of sleep
the answer came, with amusement still gone awry, but with something
about it of an old longing. Sail. Fish. Dig peats. Grow a thin crop
of grain and harvest it.

An owl sweeping low over the
woodcutter's thatch gave its high, tearing cry. Half asleep, and
already in vision on the edge of the northern sea, Mordred heard it
as the cry of a gull, and it seemed like part of a decision already
made. He would go home. He had been hidden there once before. He
would hide there again. And even if they came looking for him
amongst the islands, they would be hard put to it to find him. It
did not occur to him to do anything but hide, so fixed in his
poisoned delirium had Gaheris's lies and his own delusions
become.

He turned over and slept, with cold
air on his face and the cry of the gull still in his dream. Next
day he turned westward. Two successive nights he spent in the open,
avoiding the monastery houses where he might have heard of Arthur's
search for him. The third was passed in a peasant's hut, where he
shared the last of the brothers' hard bread and wine, and chopped
firewood for his lodging-fee.

On the fourth day he reached the sea.
He sold the horse, and with the money paid his passage northward on
a small and barely seaworthy trader which was the last to leave
port for the islands before winter closed the way.

Meanwhile Gawain came back to Camelot.
Arthur sent Bors to meet him, to give him a full account of the
tragedy, and also to temper as far as he might Gawain's grief over
Gareth and Agravain and his anger with their killer. Bors did his
best, but all his talk, his assertion of the Queen's innocence, his
tale of Agravain's drunkenness and habitual (in these days)
violence, of Gaheris's murderous intentions, of the attack on the
unarmed Bedwyr, and the half-lit chaos of the fighting in the
Queen's bedchamber... say what he might, nothing moved Gawain.
Gareth's undeserved death was all he spoke of, and, Bors began to
think, all he slept, ate and dreamed with.

"I'll meet him, and when I do, I shall
kill him" was all he would say. "He's been sent away from court.
The King has banished him. Not for anything that stains the Queen,
but--"

"To keep him out of my reach. Yes.
Well," said Gawain stonily, "I can wait."

"If you do kill Bedwyr," said Bors,
desperately, "be sure Arthur will kill you."

The hot, blood-veined Orkney eyes
turned to him. "So?" Then the eyes turned away. Gawain's head went
up. They were just in sight of the golden towers, and the sound of
a bell tolling slowly came floating, echoing from the water that
edged the roadway. They would be there for Gareth's
burial.

Bors saw the tears on Gawain's cheeks,
and, drawing his horse back, said no more.

What passed between Gawain and his
uncle the High King no one else ever knew. They were closeted
together in the King's private rooms for the best part of a day,
from the moment the funeral was over, right into the night and
towards the next morning. Afterwards, without a word to any man,
Gawain went to his rooms and slept for sixteen hours, then rose,
armed himself, and rode to the practice field. That evening he ate
at a tavern in the city, and stayed through the night with a girl
there, reappearing next day in the field.

For eight days and nights he did this,
talking with no one except as business required. On the ninth day
he left Camelot, escorted, and rode the few miles to Ynys Witrin,
where the King's ship, the latest Sea Dragon, lay.

She set her golden sail, raised her
crimson dragon to the autumn winds, and weighed anchor promptly for
the north.

It was Arthur's bid for two things: to
get a trouble-maker as far out of the way as possible, and into the
cooling winds of distance and time; and to give Gawain's hurt and
angry spirit some work to do.

He had done the obvious thing, the one
thing Mordred had not even thought of. Gawain, King of the Orkneys,
had gone back to take up the rule of his islands.

Winter passed, and March came in with
its roaring winds and spasmodic storms, then softened towards the
sweetness of an early spring. Sea-pinks covered the cliffs with
rose, white flowers danced along the arched bramble boughs, red
campion and wild hyacinth shone in the grass. Nesting birds called
over the lochs, and the moors echoed to the curlew's bubbling note.
On every skerry, and every grassy bank near the water, swans had
built their weedy castles, and on each one slept a great white
bird, head under wing, while the watchful mate cruised nearby, head
up and wings set like sails. The water's surface echoed with the
screaming of the oystercatchers and the gulls, and the upper sky
quivered with lark-song.

A man and a boy were working on the
stretch of moorland heather that covers the rolling center of
Orkney's main island. At this time of year the heather was dark and
dead-looking, but along the edges of the trodden roadway, and by
every bank, crowded the pale, scented primroses. At the foot of the
rolling moorland lay a thin strip of grazing, golden with
dandelions. Beyond this a great loch stretched, and beyond that
again, another, lying almost parallel, the two great waters
separated at their southern extremities only by a narrow causeway
and a strip of land well-trodden by hoofs and feet, for this was a
holy place in the islands. Here stood the great circles of stone,
brooding, enigmatic, huge, and to be feared even by those who knew
nothing of their purpose or their building. It was well known that
no horse could be made to cross the causeway between dusk and
dawning, and no deer had ever been seen to feed there. Only the
goats, unchancy creatures always, would graze between the stones,
keeping the grass smooth and short for the ceremonies still
practiced there at the right seasons.

The two workers were busy on a level
piece of moorland not far above these lochs with their guarded
causeway. The man was tall, lean, hard, and though dressed as a
peasant he did not move like one; his were the swift economical
movements of a trained body. His face, young still, but en graved
with bitter lines, was restless, in spite of the country tasks and
the tranquil day. Beside him the boy, dark-eyed like his father,
helped him peg together a board for one of the hives that would be
carried to the moor when the heather bloomed, and set on the neat
row of platforms that awaited them.

To them, with no warning but the soft
pace of hoofs in the heather, and a shadow falling across the man's
preoccupation, came Orkney's king, Gawain.

The man looked up. Gawain, starting a
casual greeting, checked his horse sharply and stared.

"Mordred!"

Mordred let fall the mallet he had
been using, and got slowly to his feet as a group of riders, a
dozen or so with footmen and hounds, followed the king over the
brow of the hill. The boy stopped his task and straightened to
stare, open-mouthed.

Mordred laid a reassuring hand on his
son's shoulder. "Why, Gawain! Greetings."

"You?" said Gawain. "Here? Since when?
And who is this?" His look measured the boy. "No, I don't need to
ask that! He's more like Arthur--" He checked himself.

Mordred said dryly: "Don't trouble. He
speaks only the island tongue."

"By the gods," said Gawain, diverted
in spite of himself, "if you got that one before you left here you
must have been up earlier than any of us!"

The other riders had come up with
them. Gawain, with a gesture, sent them back to wait out of
earshot. He slipped from the saddle, and a groom ran forward to
lead his horse aside. Gawain seated himself on one of the wooden
platforms. Mordred, after a moment's hesitation, sat down on
another. The boy, at a gesture from his father, began to gather up
the tools they had been using. He did it slowly, stealing glances
all the while at the king and his followers.

"Now," said Gawain, "tell me. How and
why, all of it. The tale went out that you were dead, or you'd have
been discovered long since, but I never believed that, somehow.
What happened?"

"Do you need to ask? Gaheris must have
told you. I assumed he was riding to join you."

"You didn't know? But I'm a fool, how
could you? Gaheris is dead."

"Dead? How? Did the King catch up with
him? I'd hardly have thought, even so--"

"Nothing to do with the King. Gaheris
was wounded that night, nothing much, but he neglected it, and it
went bad. If he had come to me -- but he didn't. He must have known
how little welcome he would be. He went north to his leman, and by
the time they got to him there, there was no help for him.
Another," said Gawain bitterly, "to Bedwyr's account."

Mordred was silent. He himself could
mourn none of them but Gareth, but to Gawain, the only survivor now
of that busy and close Orkney clan, the loss was heavy. He said as
much, and for a while they spoke of the past, memories made more
vivid by the familiar landscape stretching around them. Then
Mordred, choosing his words, began to feel his way.

"You spoke of Bedwyr with bitterness.
I understand this, believe me, but Bedwyr was hardly to blame for
Gaheris's own folly. Or, in fact, for anything that happened that
night. I don't plan to hold him accountable even for this." He
touched his shoulder, briefly. "You must see that, Gawain, now that
you have had time to come to terms with your grief. Agravain was
the leader that night, and Gaheris with him. They were determined
to destroy Bedwyr, even if it meant destroying the Queen as well.
Nothing anyone could say--"

"I know. I knew them. Agravain was a
fool, and Gaheris a mad fool, and still carrying the blood-guilt
for a worse crime than any done that night. But I was not thinking
of them. I was thinking of Gareth. He deserved better of life than
to be murdered by a man he trusted, a man whom he had
served."

"For the gods' sake, that was no
murder!" Mordred spoke explosively, and his son looked up quickly,
alarmed. Mordred spoke quietly in the local tongue. "Take the tools
back to the house. We'll do no more work here today. Tell your
mother I'll come down before long. Don't worry, all is
well."

The boy ran off. The two men watched,
not speaking, while the slight figure dwindled downhill in the
distance. There was a cottage set in a hollow near the loch-side,
its thatch barely visible against the heather. The boy vanished
through the low doorway.

Mordred turned back to Gawain. He
spoke earnestly. "Gawain, don't think I have not grieved for Gareth
as much as any man could. But believe me, his death was an
accident, as far as a killing in hot blood in a crazy melee can be
an accident. And Gareth was armed. Bedwyr was not when he was
attacked. I doubt if for the first minutes he even knew who was at
the edge of his blade."

"Ah, yes." The bitterness was still in
Gawain's voice. "Everyone knows you were on his side."