Legacy: Arthurian Saga (71 page)

But now it was day, and I would soon
find out what the Queen wanted with me. I remember how restlessly I
fidgeted around while Ralf saddled my horse and made ready. Maeve
was with the maids in the kitchen, washing the sloes for the
wine-making. A pan of them was on the stove, coming to the simmer.
It seemed a strange memory to take with me on my visit to the
Queen, the smell of sloe wine. Suddenly I found the pungent
sweetness intolerable, and made, choking, for the air outside. But
then one of the girls came running to ask something about the
mixing, and in answering her I forgot my sickness, and then all at
once Ralf was at my elbow to summon me, and the three of us --
Ralf, the messenger and I -- were heading for Tintagel at a
hand-gallop through the soft, blowing September noon.

7

It was only a few months since I had
last seen Ygraine, but she seemed very much changed. At first I
thought this was only the pregnancy; her once-slim body was greatly
swollen and, though her face was full of the bloom of health, she
had that pinched and shadowy look that women get around the eyes
and mouth. But the change was deeper than this; it was in the
expression of her eyes, in her gestures, the way she sat. Where
before she had seemed young and burning, a wild bird beating her
wings against the wires of the cage, now she seemed to brood, wings
clipped, gravid, a creature of the ground.

She received me in her own chamber, a
long room above the curtain wall, with a deep circular recess where
the turret stood at the north-west corner. There were windows in
the long wall facing south-west, and through these the sunlight
fell freely, but the Queen was sitting by one of the narrow turret
windows, through which came the breeze of the soft September
afternoon, and the eternal noise of the sea on the rocks below. So
much was still here, then, of the Ygraine I remembered. It was like
her, I thought, to choose the wind and the sea sounds, rather than
the sunlight. But even here, in spite of the light and air, one got
the feeling of a cage: this was the room in which the young wife of
Gorlois the old Duke had passed those pent years before the fateful
trip to London where she had met the King. Now, after that brief
flight, she was penned again, by her love for the King, and by the
weight of his child. I never loved a woman, except one, but I have
pitied them. Now, looking at the Queen, young, beautiful, and with
her heart's desire, I pitied her even as I feared her for what she
might say to me.

She was alone. I had been led by a
chamberlain through the outer room where the women span and weaved
and gossiped. Bright eyes looked at me in momentary curiosity, and
the chattering was stilled, only to begin again as soon as I had
passed. There was no recognition in their faces, only perhaps here
and there some disappointment at the sight of so ordinary and
humble a fellow. No diversion here. To them I was a messenger, to
be received by the Queen in the King's absence; that was
all.

The chamberlain rapped on the door of
the inner chamber and then withdrew. Marcia, Ralf's grandmother,
opened the door. She was a grey-haired woman with Ralf's eyes in a
lined and anxious face, but in spite of her age she bore herself as
straight as a girl. Though she was expecting me, I saw her eyes
rest on me for a moment without recognition, then with a flicker of
surprise. Even Ygraine looked startled for a moment, then she
smiled and held out her hand.

"Prince Merlin. Welcome." Marcia
curtsied to the air somewhere between me and the Queen, and
withdrew. I went forward to kneel and kiss the Queen's
hand.

"Madam."

She raised me kindly. "It was good of
you to come so quickly for such a strange summons. I hope the
journey was easy?"

"Very easy. We are well lodged with
Maeve and Caw, and so far no one has recognized me, or even Ralf.
Your secret is safe."

"I must thank you for taking so much
care of it. I promise you I'd not have known you until you
spoke."

I fingered my chin, smiling. "As you
see, I've been preparing for some time."

"No magic this time?"

"As much as there was before," I
said.

She looked at me straightly then, the
beautiful dark-blue eyes meeting mine in the way I remembered, and
I saw that this was still the old Ygraine, direct as a man, and
with the same high pride. The heavy stillness was just an overlay,
the milky calm that seems to come on women in pregnancy. Beneath
the stillness, the placidity, was the old fire. She spread her
hands out.

"Looking at me now, do you still tell
me that when you spoke to me that night in London, and promised me
the King's love, there was no magic there?"

"Not in the ruse that brought the King
to you, madam. In what happened after, perhaps."

"'Perhaps'?" There was a quick lift to
her voice that warned me. Ygraine might be a Queen, with mettle as
high as a man's, but she was a woman nearing her seventh month. My
fears were my own, and must stay my own. I hesitated, searching for
words, but she went on quickly, burningly, as if to convince
herself across my silence: "When you first spoke with me and told
me you could bring the King to me, there was magic there, I know
there was. I felt it, and I saw it in your face. You told me that
your power came from God, and that in obeying you I was God's
creature, even as you were. You said that because of the magic that
would bring Uther to me, the kingdom should have peace. You spoke
of crowns and altars...And now, see, I am Queen, with God's
blessing, and I am heavy with the King's child. Dare you tell me
now that you deceived me?"

"I did not deceive you, madam. That
was a time full of visions, and a passion of dreams and desires. We
are quit of those now, and we are sober, and it is daylight. But
magic is here, growing in you, and this time it is fact, not
vision. He will be born at Christmas, they tell me."

"'He'? You sound very
sure."

"I am sure."

I saw her press her lips together as
if at a sudden spasm of pain, then she looked away from me, down at
her hands which lay folded across her belly. When she spoke, she
spoke calmly, straight to her hands, or to what they covered.
"Marcia told me of the messages she sent to you in the summer. But
you must have known, without her telling you, the way my lord the
King thinks of this matter."

I waited, but she seemed to expect an
answer. "He told me himself," I said. "If he's still of the same
mind now as he was then, he won't acknowledge the child as his
heir."

"He is still of the same mind." Her
eyes came swiftly up to mine again. "Don't misunderstand me, he has
not the faintest doubt of me, nor ever had. He knows that I was his
from the first moment I saw him, and that from that moment, on one
excuse or another, I never lay with the Duke. No, he does not doubt
me; he knows the child is his. And for all his high speech" --
there was the glimmer of a smile, and suddenly her voice was
indulgent, the voice of a woman speaking of her child or of a loved
husband -- "and for all his rough denials, he knows your power and
fears it. You told him a child would come out of that night, and he
would trust your word, even if he could not trust mine. But none of
this alters the way he feels about it. He blames himself -- and
you, and even the child -- for the Duke's death."

"I know."

"If he had waited, he says, Gorlois
would still have died that night, and I would have been Queen, and
the child conceived in wedlock, so that no one could question his
parentage or call him bastard."

"And you, Ygraine?"

She was silent for a long time. She
turned that lovely head of hers and gazed out of the window, where
the sea birds swung and tilted, crying, on the wind. I saw, I am
not sure how, that her calm was that of a soldier who has won one
battle, and rests before the next. I felt my nerves tighten. I did
not hold Ygraine lightly, should the battle be with me.

She said, very quietly: "What the King
says may well be true. I don't know. But what's done is done, and
it is the child who must concern me now. This is why I sent for
you." A pause. I waited. She faced me again. "Prince Merlin, I fear
for the child."

"At the King's hands?" I
asked.

This was too straight, even for
Ygraine. Her eyes were cold, and her voice. "This is insolence, and
folly, too. You forget yourself, my lord."

"I?" I spoke as coldly. "It is you who
forget, madam. If my mother had been wed to Ambrosius when he begot
me, Uther would not now be King, nor would I have helped him to
your bed to beget the child you carry. There should be no talk of
insolence or folly from you to me. I know, who better, what chance
there is in Britain for a prince conceived out of wedlock and
unacknowledged by his sire."

She had flushed as red as she was pale
before. Her eyes dropped from mine, their anger dying. She spoke
simply, like a girl. "You are right, I had forgotten. I ask your
pardon. I'd forgotten, too, what it was like to talk freely. There
is no one here besides Marcia and my lord, and I cannot talk to
Uther about the child."

I had been standing all this while;
now I turned aside to bring up a chair and set it near her in the
turret embrasure. I sat down. Things had changed between us,
suddenly, as when a wind changes. I knew then that the battle was
not with me, but with herself, her own woman's weakness. She was
watching me now as a woman in pain watches her doctor. I said
gently: "Well, I am here. And I am listening. What did you send for
me to tell me?"

She drew in her breath. When she spoke
her voice was calm, but no more than a whisper. "That If this child
is a boy, the King will not allow me to rear him. If it's a girl I
may keep her, but a boy so begotten cannot be acknowledged as a
prince and legitimate heir, so he must not remain here, even as a
bastard." Visibly, she steadied herself. "I told you, Uther does
not doubt me. But because of what happened that night, my husband's
death, and all the talk of magic, he swears that men may still
believe that the Duke and not himself begot this child. There will
be other sons, he says, whose begetting no man will question, and
among them he will find the heir to the High Kingdom."

"Ygraine," I said, "I know what a
heavy thing it is -- however it happens -- for a woman to lose her
child. Perhaps there is no heavier grief. But I think the King is
right. The boy should not remain here to be reared as a bastard in
times so wild and uncertain. If there should be other heirs,
declared and acknowledged by the King, they might count him a
danger to themselves, and certainly they would be a danger for him.
I know what I'm talking about; this is what happened in my own
childhood. And I, as a royal bastard, found fortune as this prince
may never find it; I had my father's protection."

A pause. She nodded without speaking,
her eyes once again on the hands that lay in her lap.

"And if the child is to be sent away,"
I said, "it's better that he should be taken straight from the
birth chamber, before you have had time even to hold him. Believe
me" -- I spoke quickly, though she had not moved -- "this is true.
I'm speaking now as a doctor."

She moistened her lips. "Marcia says
the same."

I waited a moment, but she said no
more. I started to speak, found my voice come hoarsely, and cleared
my throat. In spite of myself, my hands tightened on the arms of my
chair. But my voice was calm and steady as I came to the core of
the interview.

"Has the King told you where the child
is to be fostered?"

"No. I told you it wasn't easy to talk
to him about it. But when he last spoke of it he said he would take
counsel; and he spoke of Brittany."

"Brittany?" For all my care, the word
came out with a cutting edge. I fought to recover my calm. My hands
had clenched on the chair, and I relaxed them and held them still.
So, my doubts were real. Oddly enough, the knowledge hardened me.
If I must fight the King as well as Ygraine -- yes, and my Delphic
gods as well -- then I would do so. As long as I could see the
ground to fight from... "So Uther will send him to King
Budec?"

"It seems so." She seemed to have
noticed nothing strange in my manner. "He sent a messenger a month
ago. That was just before I sent to ask you to come. Budec is the
obvious choice, after all."

This was true. King Budec of Less
Britain was a cousin of the King's. It was he who, some thirty
years ago, had taken my father and the young Uther under his
protection when the usurper Vortigern murdered their elder brother
King Constans, and in his capital of Kerrec they had assembled and
trained the army which had won the High Kingdom back from
Vortigern. But I shook my head. "Too obvious. If anyone should look
for the boy to harm him, they'll guess where to go. Budec can't
protect him all the time. Besides --"

"Budec cannot care for my child as he
should be cared for!" The words came forcibly, stopping me short,
but the interruption was not uncivil. It came almost like a cry. It
was plain that she had not heard a word I had said. She was
fighting herself, choosing words. "He is old, and besides, Brittany
is a long way off, and less secure even than this Saxon-ridden
land. Prince Merlin, I -- Marcia and I -- we think that you -- "
The hands suddenly twisted together in her lap. Her voice changed.
"There is no one else we can trust, And Uther -- whatever Uther
says, he knows that his kingdom, or any part of it, would be safe
in your hands. You are Ambrosius' son, and the child's closest
kinsman. Everyone knows your power, and fears it -- the child would
be safe with you to protect him. It's you who must take him,
Merlin!" She was begging me now. "Take him safe, somewhere away
from this cruel coast, and rear him for me. Teach him as you were
taught, and rear him as a King's son should be reared, and then
when he is grown, bring him back and let him take his place as you
did, at the next King's side."