Legacy: Arthurian Saga (56 page)

"I said I'd do it."

"What's the matter? Are you
ill?"

"It's nothing. I'm weary. We had a
hard ride. I'll see the King in the morning early, before he leaves
for the crowning."

He gave a brief nod of thanks. "That's
not the only thing I came to ask you. Would you come and see my
wife tonight?"

There was a pause of utter stillness,
so prolonged that I thought he must notice. Then I said: "If you
wish it, yes. But why?"

"She's sick, that's why, and I'd have
you come and see her, if you will. When her women told her you were
here in London, she begged me to send for you. I can tell you, I
was thankful when I heard you'd come. There's not many men I'd
trust just now, and that's God's truth. But I'd trust
you."

Beside me a log crumbled and fell into
the heart of the fire. The flames shot up, splashing his face with
red, like blood.

"You'll come?" asked the old
man.

"Of course." I looked away from him.
"I'll come immediately."

5

Uther had not exaggerated when he said
that the Lady Ygraine was well guarded. She and her lord were
lodged in a court some way west of the King's quarters, and the
court was crowded with Cornwall men at arms. There were armed men
in the antechamber too, and in the bedchamber itself some half
dozen women. As we went in the oldest of these, a gray-haired woman
with an anxious look, hurried forward with relief in her
face.

"Prince Merlin." She bent her knees to
me, eyeing me with awe, and led me towards the bed.

The room was warm and scented. The
lamps burned sweet oil, and the fire was of applewood. The bed
stood at the center of the wall opposite the fire. The pillows were
of grey silk with gilt tassels, and the coverlet richly worked with
flowers and strange beasts and winged creatures. The only other
woman's room that I had seen was my mother's, with the plain wooden
bed and the carved oak chest and the loom, and the cracked mosaics
of the floor.

I walked forward and stood at the foot
of the bed, looking down at Gorlois' wife.

If I had been asked then what she
looked like I could not have said. Cadal had told me she was fair,
and I had seen the hunger in the King's face, so I knew she was
desirable; but as I stood in the airy scented room looking at the
woman who lay with closed eyes against the grey silk pillows, it
was no woman that I saw. Nor did I see the room or the people in
it. I saw only the flashing and beating of the light as in a globed
crystal.

I spoke without taking my eyes from
the woman in the bed.

"One of her women stay here. The rest
go. You too, please, my lord." He went without demur, herding the
women in front of him like a flock of sheep. The woman who had
greeted me remained by her mistress's bed. As the door shut behind
the last of them, the woman in the bed opened her eyes. For a few
moments of silence we met each other eye to eye. Then I said: "What
do you want of me, Ygraine?"

She answered crisply, with no
pretense: "I have sent for you, Prince, because I want your
help."

I nodded. "In the matter of the
King."

She said straightly: "So you know
already? When my husband brought you here, did you guess I was not
ill?"

"I guessed."

"Then you can also guess what I want
from you?"

"Not quite. Tell me, could you not
somehow have spoken with the King himself before now? It might have
saved him something. And your husband as well."

Her eyes widened. "How could I talk to
the King? You came through the courtyard?"

"Yes."

"Then you saw my husband's troops and
men at arms. What do you suppose would have happened had I talked
to Uther? I could not answer him openly, and if I had met him in
secret -- even if I could -- half London would have known it within
the hour. Of course I could not speak to him or send him a message.
The only protection was silence."

I said slowly: "If the message was
simply that you were a true and faithful wife and that he must turn
his eyes elsewhere, then the message could have been given to him
at any time and by any messenger."

She smiled. Then she bent her
head.

I took in my breath. "Ah. That's what
I wished to know. You are honest, Ygraine."

"What use to lie to you? I have heard
about you. Oh, I know better than to believe all they say in the
songs and stories, but you are clever and cold and wise, and they
say you love no woman and are committed to no man. So you can
listen, and judge." She looked down at her hands, where they lay on
the coverlet, then up at me again. "But I do believe that you can
see the future. I want you to tell me what the future
is."

"I don't tell fortunes like an old
woman. Is this why you sent for me?"

"You know why I sent for you. You are
the one man with whom I can seek private speech without arousing my
husband's anger and suspicion -- and you have the King's ear."
Though she was but a woman, and young, lying in her bed with me
standing over her, it was as if she were a queen giving audience.
She looked at me very straight. "Has the King spoken to you
yet?"

"He has no need to speak to me.
Everyone knows what ails him."

"And will you tell him what you have
just learned from me?"

"That will depend."

"On what?" she demanded. I said
slowly: "On you yourself. So far you have been wise. Had you been
less guarded in your ways and your speech there would have been
trouble, there might even have been war. I understand that you have
never allowed one moment of your time here to be solitary or
unguarded; you have taken care always to be where you could be
seen."

She looked at me for a moment in
silence, her brows raised. "Of course."

"Many women -- especially desiring
what you desire -- would not have been able to do this, Lady
Ygraine."

"I am not 'many women.'" The words
were like a flash. She sat up suddenly, tossing back the dark hair,
and threw back the covers. The old woman snatched up a long blue
robe and hurried forward. Ygraine threw it round her, over her
white nightrobe, and sprang from the bed, walking restlessly over
towards the window.

Standing, she was tall for a woman,
with a form that might have moved a sterner man than Uther. Her
neck was long and slender, the head poised gracefully. The dark
hair streamed unbound down her back. Her eyes were blue, not the
fierce blue of Uther's, but the deep, dark blue of the Celt. Her
mouth was proud. She was very lovely, and no man's toy. If Uther
wanted her, I thought, he would have to make her Queen.

She had stopped just short of the
window. If she had gone to it, she might have been seen from the
courtyard. No, not a lady to lose her head.

She turned. "I am the daughter of a
king, and I come from a line of kings. Cannot you see how I must
have been driven, even to think the way I am thinking now?" She
repeated it passionately.

"Can you not see? I was married at
sixteen to the Lord of Cornwall; he is a good man; I honor and
respect him. Until I came to London I was half content to starve
and die there in Cornwall, but he brought me here, and now it has
happened. Now I know what I must have, but it is beyond me to have
it, beyond the wife of Gorlois of Cornwall. So what else would you
have me do? There is nothing to do but wait here and be silent,
because on my silence hangs not only the honor of myself and my
husband and my house, but the safety of the kingdom that Ambrosius
died for, and that Uther himself has just sealed with blood and
fire."

She swung away to take two quick paces
and back again. "I am no trashy Helen for men to fight over, die
over, burn down kingdoms for. I don't wait on the walls as a prize
for some brawny victor. I cannot so dishonor both Gorlois and the
King in the eyes of men. And I cannot go to him secretly and
dishonor myself in my own eyes. I am a lovesick woman, yes. But I
am also Ygraine of Cornwall."

I said coldly: "So you intend to wait
until you can go to him in honor, as his Queen?"

"What else can I do?"

"Was this the message I had to give
him?"

She was silent.

I said: "Or did you get me here to
read you the future? To tell you the length of your husband's
life?"

Still she said nothing.

"Ygraine," I said, "the two are the
same. If I give Uther the message that you love and desire him, but
that you will not come to him while your husband is alive, what
length of life would you prophesy for Gorlois?"

Still she did not speak. The gift of
silence, too, I thought. I was standing between her and the fire. I
watched the light beating round her, flowing up the white robe and
the blue robe, light and shadow rippling upwards in waves like
moving water or the wind over grass. A flame leapt, and my shadow
sprang over her and grew, climbing with the beating light to meet
her own climbing shadow and join with it, so that there across the
wall behind her reared -- no dragon of gold or scarlet, no
firedrake with burning tail, but a great cloudy shape of air and
darkness, thrown there by the flame, and sinking as the flame sank,
to shrink and steady until it was only her shadow, the shadow of a
woman, slender and straight, like a sword. And where I stood, there
was nothing.

She moved, and the lamplight built the
room again round us, warm and real and smelling of applewood. She
was watching me with something in her face that had not been there
before. At last she said, in a still voice: "I told you there was
nothing hidden from you. You do well to put it into words. I had
thought all this. But I hoped that by sending for you I could
absolve myself, and the King."

"Once a dark thought is dragged into
words it is in the light. You could have had your desire long since
on the terms of 'any woman,' as the King could on the terms of any
man." I paused. The room was steady now. The words came clearly to
me, from nowhere, without thought. "I will tell you, if you like,
how you may meet the King's love on your terms and on his, with no
dishonor to yourself or him, or to your husband. If I could tell
you this, would you go to him?"

Her eyes had widened, with a flash
behind them, as I spoke. But even so she took time to think. "Yes."
Her voice told me nothing.

"If you will obey me, I can do this
for you," I said.

"Tell me what I must do."

"Have I your promise,
then?"

"You go too fast," she said dryly. "Do
you yourself seal bargains before you see what you are committed
to?"

I smiled. "No. Very well then, listen
to me. When you feigned illness to have me brought to you, what did
you tell your husband and your women?"

"Only that I felt faint and sick, and
was no more inclined for company. That if I was to appear beside my
husband at the crowning, I must see a physician tonight, and take a
healing draught." She smiled a little wryly. "I was preparing the
way, too, not to sit beside the King at the feast."

"So far, good. You will tell Gorlois
that you are pregnant."

"That I am pregnant?" For the first
time she sounded shaken. She stared. "This is possible? He is an
old man, but I would have thought --"

"It is possible. But I -- " She bit
her lip. After a while she said calmly: "Go on. I asked for your
counsel, so I must let you give it."

I had never before met a woman with
whom I did not have to choose my words, to whom I could speak as I
would speak to another man. I said: "Your husband can have no
reason to suspect you are pregnant by any man but himself. So you
will tell him this, and tell him also that you fear for the child's
health if you stay longer in London, under the strain of the gossip
and the King's attentions. Tell him that you wish to leave as soon
as the crowning is over. That you do not wish to go to the feast,
to be distinguished by the King, and to be the center of all the
eyes and the gossip. You will go with Gorlois and the Cornish
troops tomorrow, before the gates shut at sunset. The news will not
come to Uther until the feast."

"But" -- she stared again -- "this is
folly. We could have gone any time this past three weeks if we had
chosen to risk the King's anger. We are bound to stay until he
gives us leave to go. If we go in that manner, for whatever reason
--"

I stopped her. "Uther can do nothing
on the day of the crowning. He must stay here for the days of
feasting. Do you think he can give offense to Budec and Merrovius
and the other kings gathered here? You will be in Cornwall before
he can even move."

"And then he will move." She made an
impatient gesture. "And there will be war, when he should be making
and mending, not breaking and burning. And he cannot win: if he is
the victor in the field, he loses the loyalty of the West. Win or
lose, Britain is divided, and goes back into the dark."

Yes, she would be a queen. She was on
fire for Uther as much as he for her, but she could still think.
She was cleverer than Uther, clear-headed, and, I thought, stronger
too.