Legacy: Arthurian Saga (43 page)

But he persisted. "I took the money,
didn't I? You saw."

"And if you did? You didn't give
information for money, you took it afterwards. It's different, to
my mind. If Vortigern likes to throw his money away, then by all
means rob him of it. Forget it, I tell you. Have you news of my
mother?"

"I've just come from there. She's ill,
did you know?"

"I got news on my way south," I said.
"What's the matter with her? How bad?"

"A chill, they told me, but they say
she's on the mend. I thought myself she still looked poor enough,
but she was fatigued with the journey, and anxious about you. What
did Vortigern want you for, in the end?"

"To kill me," I said
briefly.

He stared, then began to stutter. "I
-- in God's name, Merlin, I know you and I have never been...that
is, there've been times --

" He stopped, and I heard him swallow.
"I don't sell my kinsmen, you know."

"I told you I believed you. Forget it.
It was nothing to do with you, some nonsense of his soothsayers'.
But as I said, here I am safe and sound."

"Your mother said nothing about
it."

"She didn't know. Do you think she'd
have let him send her tamely home if she had known what he meant to
do? The men who brought her home, they knew, you can be sure of
that. So they didn't let it out to her?"

"It seems not," said Dinias. "But
--"

"I'm glad of that. I'm hoping to get
to see her soon, this time in daylight."

"Then you're in no danger now from
Vortigern?"

"I would be, I suppose," I said, "if
the place was still full of his men, but I was told at the gate
that they've cleared out to join him?"

"That's so. Some rode north, and some
east to Caer-Guent. You've heard the news, then?"

"What news?" Though there was nobody
else in the street, he looked over his shoulder in the old, furtive
way. I slid down out of the saddle, and threw the reins to Cadal.
"What news?" I repeated. "Ambrosius," he said softly. "He's landed
in the southwest, they say, and marching north. A ship brought the
story yesterday, and Vortigern's men started moving out straight
away. But -- if you've just ridden in from the north, surely you'd
meet them?"

"Two companies, this morning. But we
saw them in good time, and got off the road. We met my mother's
escort the day before, at the crossways."

"'Met'?" He looked startled. "But if
they knew Vortigern wanted you dead --"

"They'd have known I had no business
riding south, and cut me down? Exactly. So we cut them down
instead. Oh, don't look at me like that -- it wasn't magician's
work, only soldiers'. We fell in with some Welsh who were on their
way to join Ambrosius, and we ambushed Vortigern's troop and cut
them up."

"The Welsh knew already? The prophecy,
was it?" I saw the whites of his eyes in the dusk. "I'd heard about
that...the place is buzzing with it. The troops told us. They said
you'd showed them some kind of great lake under the crag -- it was
that place we stopped at years ago, and I'll swear there was no
sign of any lake then -- but there was this lake of water with
dragons lying in it under the foundations of the tower. Is it
true?"

"That I showed them a lake,
yes."

"But the dragons. What were they?" I
said, slowly: "Dragons. Something conjured out of nothing for them
to see, since without seeing they would not listen, let alone
believe." There was a little silence. Then he said, with fear in
his voice: "And was it magic that showed you Ambrosius was
coming?"

"Yes and no." I smiled. "I knew he was
coming, but not when. It was the magic that told me he was actually
on his way."

He was staring again. "You knew he was
coming? Then you had tidings in Cornwall? You might have told
me."

"Why?"

"I'd have joined him." I looked at him
for a moment, measuring. "You can still join him. You and your
other friends who fought with Vortimer. What about Vortimer's
brother, Pascentius? Do you know where he is? Is he still hot
against Vortigern?"

"Yes, but they say he's gone to make
his peace with Hengist. He'll never join Ambrosius, he wants
Britain for himself."

"And you?" I asked. "What do you
want?" He answered quite simply, for once without any bluster or
bravado. "Only a place I can call my own. This, if I can. It's mine
now, after all. He killed the children, did you know?"

"I didn't, but you hardly surprise me.
It's a habit of his, after all." I paused. "Look, Dinias, there's a
lot to say, and I've a lot to tell you. But first I've a favor to
ask of you."

"What's that?"

"Hospitality. There's nowhere else I
know of that I care to go until I've got my own place ready, and
I've a fancy to stay in my grandfather's house again."

He said, without pretense or evasion:
"It's not what it was." I laughed. "Is anything? As long as there's
a roof against this hellish rain, and a fire to dry our clothes,
and something to eat, no matter what. What do you say we send Cadal
for provisions, and eat at home? I'll tell you the whole thing over
a pie and a flask of wine. But I warn you, if you so much as show
me a pair of dice I'll yell for Vortigern's men myself." He
grinned, relaxing suddenly. "No fear of that. Come along, then.
There's a couple of rooms still habitable, and we'll find you a
bed."

I was given Camlach's room. It was
draughty, and full of dust, and Cadal refused to let me use the
bedding until it had lain in front of a roaring fire for a full
hour. Dinias had no servant, except one slut of a girl who looked
after him apparently in return for the privilege of sharing his
bed. Cadal set her to carrying fuel and heating water while he took
a message to the nunnery for my mother, and then went to the tavern
for wine and provisions.

We ate before the fire, with Cadal
serving us. We talked late, but here it is sufficient to record
that I told Dinias my story -- or such parts of it as he would
understand. There might have been some personal satisfaction in
telling him the facts of my parentage, but until I was sure of him,
and the countryside was known to be clear of Vortigern's men, I
thought it better to say nothing. So I told him merely how I had
gone to Brittany, and that I had become Ambrosius' man. Dinias had
heard enough already of my "prophecy" in the cavern at King's Fort
to believe implicitly in Ambrosius' coming victory, so our talk
ended with his promise to ride westwards in the morning with the
news, and summon what support he could for Ambrosius from the
fringes of Wales. He would, I knew, have been afraid in any case to
do other than keep that promise; whatever the soldiers had said
about the occasion there in King's Fort, it was enough to strike my
simple cousin Dinias with the most profound awe of my powers. But
even without that, I knew I could trust him in this. We talked till
almost dawn, then I gave him money and said good night.

(He was gone before I woke
next morning. He kept his word, and joined Ambrosius later, at
York, with a few hundred men. He was honorably received and
acquitted himself well, but soon afterwards, in some minor
engagement, received wounds of which he later died. As for me, I
never saw him again.)

Cadal shut the door behind him. "At
least there's a good lock and a stout bar."

"Are you afraid of Dinias?" I
asked.

"I'm afraid of everybody in this
cursed town. I'll not be happy till we're quit of it and back with
Ambrosius."

"I doubt if you need worry now.
Vortigern's men have gone. You heard what Dinias said."

"Aye, and I heard what you said, too."
He had stooped to pick up the blankets from beside the fire, and
paused with his arms full of bedding, looking at me. "What did you
mean, you're getting your own place here ready? You're never
thinking of setting up house here?"

"Not a house, no."

"That cave?"

I smiled at his expression. "When
Ambrosius has done with me, and the country is quiet, that is where
I shall go. I told you, didn't I, that if you stayed with me you'd
live far from home?"

"We were talking about dying, as far
as I remember. You mean, live there?"

"I don't know," I said. "Perhaps not.
But I think I shall need a place where I can be alone, away, aside
from things happening. Thinking and planning is one side of life;
doing is another. A man cannot be doing all the time."

"Tell that to Uther."

"I am not Uther."

"Well, it takes both sorts, as they
say." He dumped the blankets on the bed. "What are you smiling
at?"

"Was I? Never mind. Let's get to bed,
we'll have to be early at the nunnery. Did you have to bribe the
old woman again?"

"Old woman nothing." He straightened.
"It was a girl this time. A looker, too, what I could see of her
with that sack of a gown and a hood over her head. Whoever puts a
girl like that in a nunnery deserves -- " He began to explain what
they deserved, but I cut him short.

"Did you find out how my mother
was?"

"They said she was better. The fever's
gone, but she'll not rest quiet till she's seen you. You'll tell
her everything now?"

"Yes."

"And then?"

"We join Ambrosius."

"Ah," he said, and when he had dragged
his mattress to lie across the door, he blew out the lamp and lay
down without another word to sleep.

My bed was comfortable enough, and the
room, derelict or no, was luxury itself after the journey. But I
slept badly. In imagination I was out on the road with Ambrosius,
heading for Doward. From what I had heard of Doward, reducing it
would not be an easy job. I began to wonder if after all I had done
my father a disservice in driving the High King out of his Snowdon
fastness. I should have left him there, I thought, with his rotten
tower, and Ambrosius would have driven him back to the
sea.

It was with an effort almost of
surprise that I recalled my own prophecy. What I had done at Dinas
Brenin, I had not done of myself. It was not I who had decided to
send Vortigern fleeing out of Wales. Out of the dark, out of the
wild and whirling stars, I had been told. The Red Dragon would
triumph, the White would fall. The voice that had said so, that
said so now in the musty dark of Camlach's room, was not my own; it
was the god's. One did not lie awake looking for reasons; one
obeyed, and then slept.

3

It was the girl Cadal had spoken of
who opened the nunnery gate to us. She must have been waiting to
receive us, for almost as soon as Cadal's hand was lifted to the
bell-pull the gate opened and she motioned us to come in. I got a
swift impression of wide eyes under the brown hood, and a supple
young body shrouded in the rough gown, as she latched the heavy
gate and, drawing her hood closer over her face and hair, led us
quickly across the courtyard. Her feet, bare in canvas sandals,
looked cold, and were splashed with mud from the puddled yard, but
they were slim and well-shaped, and her hands were pretty. She did
not speak, but led us across the yard and through a narrow passage
between two buildings, into a larger square beyond. Here against
the walls stood fruit trees, and a few flowers grew, but these were
mostly weeds and wild-flowers, and the doors of the cells that
opened off the courtyard were unpainted and, where they stood open,
gave on bare little rooms where simplicity had become ugliness and,
too often, squalor.

Not so in my mother's cell. She was
housed with adequate -- if not royal -- comfort. They had let her
bring her own furniture, the room was limewashed and spotlessly
clean, and with the change in the April weather the sun had come
out and was shining straight in through the narrow window and
across her bed. I remembered the furniture; it was her own bed from
home, and the curtain at the window was one she had woven herself,
the red cloth with the green pattern that she had been making the
day my uncle Camlach came home. I remembered, too, the wolfskin on
the floor; my grandfather had killed the beast with his bare hands
and the haft of his broken dagger; its beady eyes and snarl had
terrified me when I was small. The cross that hung on the bare wall
at the foot of her bed was of dull silver, with a lovely pattern of
locked but flowing lines, and studs of amethyst that caught the
light.

The girl showed me the door in
silence, and withdrew. Cadal sat down on a bench outside to
wait.

My mother lay propped on pillows, in
the shaft of sunshine. She looked pale and tired, and spoke not
much above a whisper, but was, she told me, on the mend. When I
questioned her about the illness, and laid a hand on her temples,
she put me aside, smiling and saying she was well enough looked
after. I did not insist: half of healing is in the patient's trust,
and no woman ever thinks her own son is much more than a child.
Besides, I could see that the fever had gone, and now that she was
no longer anxious over me, she would sleep.

So I merely pulled up the room's
single chair, sat down and began to tell her all she wanted to
know, without waiting for her questions: about my escape from
Maridunum and the flight like the arrow from the god's bow straight
from Britain to Ambrosius' feet, and all that had happened since.
She lay back against her pillows and watched me with astonishment
and some slowly growing emotion which I identified as the emotion a
cage-bird might feel if you set it to hatch a merlin's
egg.