Legacy: Arthurian Saga (76 page)

He said prosaically: "They're more
like to say the ship foundered and the child is dead."

"I shall be there to deny
it."

"You mean you won't stay with the
boy?"

"I must not, not yet. I'm
known."

"Then who will be with him? You said
he would be guarded."

For the first time I hesitated
fractionally. Then I met his eyes. "Ralf."

He looked startled, then angry, then I
saw him thinking back past his anger. He said slowly: "Yes. I was
wrong there, too. He will be true."

"There is no one truer."

"Very well, I am content. Make what
arrangements you please. It's in your hands. You of all men in
Britain will know how to protect him." His hands came down hard on
the arms of his chair. "So, that is settled. Before we march today
I shall send a message to the Queen telling her what I have
decided."

I thought it wise to ask: "Will she
accept it? It's no easy thing for a woman to bear, even a
queen."

"She knows my decision, and she will
do as I say. There's one thing, though, where she'll have her way;
she wants the child baptized a Christian."

I glanced at the Mithras altar against
the tent wall. "And you?"

He lifted his shoulders. "What does it
matter? He will never be King. And if he were, then he would pay
service where he had to, in the sight of the people." A hard,
straight look. "As my brother did."

If it was a challenge I declined it,
saying merely: "And the name?"

"Arthur."

The name was strange to me, but it
came like an echo of something I had heard long before. Perhaps
there had been Roman blood in Ygraine's family...The Artorii; that
would be it. But that was not where I had heard the
name...

"I'll see to it," I said. "And now,
with your permission, I'll send the Queen a letter, too. She'll lie
the easier for being assured of my loyalty."

He nodded, then stood up and reached
for his helmet. He was smiling, a cold ghost of the old malicious
smile with which he had baited me when I was a child. "It's
strange, isn't it, Merlin the bastard, that I should talk so easily
of trusting the body of my own ill-begotten son to the one man in
the kingdom whose claim to the throne is better than his? Are you
not flattered?"

"Not in the least. You'd be a fool if
you didn't know by now that I have no ambitions towards your
crown."

"Then don't teach my bastard any, will
you?" He turned his head, shouting for a servant, then back to me.
"And none of your damned magic, either."

"If he's your son," I said dryly, "he
won't take very kindly to magic. I shall teach him nothing except
what he has the need and the right to know. You have my word on
it."

On that we parted. Uther would never
like me, nor I him, but there was a kind of cold mutual respect
between us, born of our shared blood and the different love and
service we had given to Ambrosius. I should have known that he and
I were linked in this as closely as the two sides of the same
counter, and that we would move together whether we willed it or
not. The gods sit over the board, but it is men who move under
their hands for the mating and the kill.

I should have known; but I had been so
used to God's voice in the fire and stars that I had forgotten to
listen for it in the counsels of men.

Ralf was waiting, alone in the guarded
tent. When I told him the result of my talk with the King, he was
silent a long time. Then he said: "So it will all happen, just as
you said it would. Did you expect it to come like this? When they
brought us here last night, I thought you were afraid."

"I was, but not in the way you
mean."

I expected him to ask how, but oddly,
he seemed to understand. His cheek flushed and he busied himself
over some detail of packing. "My lord, I have to tell you..." His
voice was stifled. "I have been very wrong about you. At first I --
because you are not a man of war, I thought --"

"You thought I was a coward? I
know."

He looked up sharply. "You knew? You
didn't mind?" This, obviously, was almost as bad as
cowardice.

I smiled. "When I was a child among
budding warriors, I grew used to it. Besides, I have never been
sure myself how much courage I have."

He stared at that, then burst out:
"But you are afraid of nothing! All the things that have happened
-- this journey -- you'd have thought we were riding out on a
summer morning, instead of going by paths filled with wild beasts
and outlaws. And when the King's men took us -- even if he is your
uncle, that's not to say you'd never be in danger from him.
Everyone knows the King's unchancy to cross. But you just looked
cold as ice, as if you expected him to do what you wanted, just as
everyone does! You, afraid? You're not afraid of anything that's
real."

"That's what I mean," I said. "I'm not
sure how much courage is needed to face human enemies -- what you'd
call 'real' -- knowing they won't kill you. But foreknowledge has
its own terrors, Ralf. Death may not lie just at the next corner,
but when one knows exactly when it will come, and how...It's not a
comfortable thought."

"You mean you do know?"

"Yes. At least, I think it's my death
that I see. At any rate it is darkness, and a shut
tomb."

He shivered. "Yes, I see. I'd rather
fight in daylight, even thinking I might die perhaps tomorrow. At
least it's always 'perhaps tomorrow,' never 'now.' Will you wear
the doeskin boots for riding, my lord, or change them
now?"

"Change them. Thank you." I sat down
on a stool and stretched out a foot for him. He knelt to pull off
my boots. "Ralf, there is something else I must tell you. I told
the King you were with me, and that you would go to Brittany to
guard the child."

He looked up at that, struck still.
"You told him that? What did he say?"

"That you were a true man. He agreed,
and approved you."

He sat back on his heels, my boots in
his hands, gaping at me.

"He has had time to think, Ralf, as a
king should think. He has also had time -- as kings do -- to still
his conscience. He sees Gorlois now as a rebel, and the past as
done with. If you wish to go back into his service he will receive
you kindly, and give you a place among his fighting
men."

He did not answer, but stooped forward
again and busied himself fastening my boots. Then he got to his
feet and pulled back the flap of the tent, calling to a man to
bring up the horses. "And hurry. My lord and I ride now for the
ferry."

"You see?" I said. "Your own decision
this time, freely given. And yet who can say it is not as much a
part of the pattern as the 'chance' of Budec's death?" I got to my
feet, stretching, and laughed. "By all the living gods, I'm glad
that things are moving now. And gladder for the moment of one thing
more than any other."

"That you're to get the child so
easily?"

"Oh, that, of course. No, I really
meant that now at last I can shave off this damnable
beard."

10

By the time Ralf and I reached
Maridunum my plans, so far as could be at this stage, were made. I
sent him by the next ship to Brittany, with letters of condolence
to Hoel, and with messages to supplement the King's. One letter,
which Ralf carried openly, merely repeated the King's request that
Hoel should give shelter to the baby during his infancy; the other,
which Ralf was to deliver secretly, assured Hoel that he would not
be burdened with the charge of the child, nor would we come by the
royal ship or at the time ostensibly fixed. I begged his assistance
for Ralf in all the arrangements for the secret journey at
Christmas that I planned. Hoel, easy-going and lazy by nature, and
less than fond of his cousin Uther, would be so relieved, I knew,
that he would help Ralf and myself in every way known to
him.

With Ralf gone, I myself set out for
the north. It was obvious that I would not be able to leave the
baby too long in Brittany; the refuge with Moravik would serve for
a while, till men's interest died down, but after that it might be
dangerous. Brittany was the place (as I had said to the Queen)
where Uther's enemies would look for the child; the fact that the
child was not -- had never been -- at his publicly declared refuge
at Hoel's court might make them believe that the talk of Brittany
had been nothing but a false trail I would make certain that no
real trail would lead them to Moravik's obscure village. But this
was only safe as long as the boy was an infant. As soon as he grew
and began to go about, some query or rumor might start. I knew how
easily this could happen, and for the child of a poor house to be
so cared for and guarded as must happen here, it would be very easy
for some question to start a rumor, and a rumor to grow too quickly
into a guess at the truth.

More than this, once the child was
weaned from women and the nursery, he would have to be trained, if
not as a young prince, then as a young noble and a warrior. It was
obvious that Bryn Myrddin, on no count, could be his home: he must
have the comfort and safety of a noble house around him. In the end
I had thought of a man who had been a friend of my father's, and
whom I had known well. His name was Ector, styled Count of Galava,
one of the nobles who fought under King Coel of Rheged, Uther's
most considerable ally in the north.

Rheged is a big kingdom, stretching
from the mountainous spine of Britain right to the western coast,
and from the Wall of Hadrian in the north clear down to the plain
of Deva. Galava, which Ector held under Coel, lies about thirty
miles in from the sea, in the north-west corner of the kingdom.
Here there is a wild and mountainous tract of country, all hills
and water and wild forest; in fact, one of the names it goes by is
the Wild Forest. Ector's castle lies on the flat land at the end of
one of the long lakes that fill these valleys. There was in past
time a Roman fortress there, one of a chain on the military road
running from Glannaventa on the coast to join the main way from
Luguvallium to York. Between Galava and the port of Glannaventa lie
steep hills and wild passes, easily defended, and inland is the
well-guarded country of Rheged itself.

When Uther had talked of fostering the
child in some safe castle he had thought only of the rich,
long-settled lands inside Ambrosius' Wall, but even without his
fears of the nobles' loyalty, I would have counted that country
dangerous; these were the very lands that the Saxons, immured along
the Shore, coveted most dearly. It was these lands which, I
guessed, they would fight for first and most bitterly. In the
north, in the heart of Rheged, where no one would look for him and
where the Wild Forest itself would guard him, the boy could grow up
as safely as God would allow, and as freely as a deer.

Ector had married a few years back.
His wife was called Drusilla, of a Romano-British family from York.
Her father, Faustus, had been one of the city magistrates who had
defended the city against Hengist's son Octa, and had been one of
those urgent to advise the Saxon leader to yield himself to
Ambrosius. Ector himself was fighting at the time in my father's
army. It was in York that he had met Drusilla, and had married her.
They were both Christians, and this was possibly why their paths
and Uther's had not often crossed. But I, along with my father, had
been to Faustus' house in York, and Ambrosius had there taken part
in many long discussions about the settlement of the northern
provinces.

The castle at Galava was well
protected, being built on the site of the old Roman fort, with the
lake before it, and a deep river on the one hand, and the wild
mountains near. It could be approached only from the open water, or
by one of the easily watched and defended valley passes. But it did
not have the air of a fortress. Trees grew near it, now rich with
autumn, and there were boats out and men fishing where the river
flowed deep and still through its sedgy flatlands. The green
meadows at the waters' head were full of cattle, and there was a
village crowded under the castle walls as there had been in the
Roman Peace. Two full miles beyond the castle walls lay a
monastery, and so secluded were the valleys that right up on the
heights above the treeline, where the land stretched bare of all
but short grass and stones, one saw the strange little blue-fleeced
sheep that breed in Rheged, with some shepherd boy cheerfully
braving the wolves and fierce hill foxes with the protection of a
stick and a single dog.

I traveled alone, and quietly. Though
the hated beard had gone, and with it the heavy disguise, I managed
the journey unnoticed and unrecognized, and came to Galava towards
late afternoon on a bright, crisp October day.

The great gates were wide open, giving
on a paved yard where men and boys were unloading a wagon of straw.
The oxen stood patiently, chewing their cud; near them a lad was
watering a pair of sweating horses. Dogs barked and skirmished, and
hens pecked busily among the fallen straw. There were trees in the
yard, and to either side of the steps up to the main door someone
had planted beds of marigolds, which blazed orange and yellow in
the late sunshine. It looked like a prosperous farm rather than a
fortress, but through an open door I could see the rows of freshly
burnished weapons, and from behind one of the high walls came
shouted orders and the clash of men drilling.