Legacy: Arthurian Saga (84 page)

With no need this time for disguise, I
traveled in comfort, if not in princely style. Appearances had
never troubled me; a man makes his own; but I had friends to visit,
and if I could not do them honor, at least I must not shame them.
So I hired a body-servant and bought horses and baggage mules and a
slave to look after them, and set off for my first destination,
which was Rome.

The road out of Massilia is a
straight, sunbeaten ribbon of white dust running along the shore
where the villages built by Caesar's veterans crouch among their
carefully tended olive groves and vines. We set out at sunrise with
our horses' shadows long behind us. The road was still dewed, and
the air smelled of dung and peppery cypress and the smoke of the
early fires. Cockerels crowed and curs ran out yapping at our
horses' heels. Behind me the two servants talked, low voiced, not
to intrude on me. They seemed decent men; the freeman, Gaius, had
seen service before, and came to me well recommended. The other,
Stilicho, was the son of a Sicilian horsedealer who had cheated
himself into debt and sold his son to pay it. Stilicho was a thin,
lively youth with a cheerful eye and unquenchable spirits. Gaius
was solemn and efficient, and more conscious of my dignity than I
had ever been myself. When he discovered my royal status he took on
an aura of pomp which amused me, and impressed Stilicho into
silence for almost twenty minutes. I believe that thereafter it was
continually used as a threat or a bribe for service. Certainly,
whatever means the two of them employed, I was to find my journey
almost a miracle of smoothness and comfort.

Now, as my horse pricked his ears at
the morning sun, I felt my mood lift to meet the growing
brilliance. It was as if the griefs and doubts of the last year
streamed back from me like my horse's shadow. As I set off
eastwards with my little train I was for the first time in my life
free; free of the world in front of me, and free of the obligations
at my back. Until this moment I had lived always towards some goal;
I had sought for and then served my father, and after his death had
waited in grief until, with Arthur, my servitude might start again.
Now the first part of my work was done; the boy was safe and, as my
gods and my stars could be trusted, he would remain so. I was still
young, and facing the sun, and, call it solitude or call it
freedom, I had a new world in front of me and a span of time ahead
when at last I could travel the lands of which as a boy I had been
taught so much, and which I had longed to see.

So in time I came to Rome, and walked
on the green hills between the cypresses, and talked with a man who
had known my father when he was the age I was now. I lodged in his
house, and wondered how I had ever thought my father's house in
Kerrec a palace, or seen London as a great city, or even a city at
all. Then from Rome to Corinth, and overland through the valleys of
the Argolid where goats grazed the baked summer hills, and people
lived, wilder than they, among the ruins of cities built by giants.
Here at last I saw stones greater even than those in the Giants'
Dance, lifted and set just as the songs had told me, and as I
traveled farther east I saw lands yet emptier with giant stones
standing in desert sunlight, and men who lived as simply as roving
wolf-packs, but who made songs as easily as the birds, and as
marvelously as the stars moving in their courses. Indeed, they know
more about the movements of the stars than any other men; I suppose
their world is made up of the empty spaces of the desert and the
sky. I spent eight months with a man near Sardis, in Maeonia, who
could calculate to a hair's breadth, and with whose help I could
have lifted the Giants' Dance in half the time had it been twice as
great. Another six months I spent on the coast of Mysia, near
Pergamum, in a great hospital where sick men flock for treatment,
rich and poor alike. I found much that was new to me there in the
art of healing; in Pergamum they use music with the drugs to heal a
man's mind through dreams, and his body after it. Truly the god
must have guided me when he sent me to learn music as a child. And
all the time, on all my journeys, I learned smatterings of strange
tongues, and heard new songs and new music, and saw strange gods
worshipped, some in holy places, and some in manners we would call
unclean. It is never wise to turn aside from knowing, however the
knowing comes.

Through all this time I rested, steady
and secure, in the knowledge that, back there in the Perilous
Forest in Brittany, the child grew and thrived in
safety.

Messages from Ralf came occasionally,
sent by King Hoel to await me at certain prearranged ports of call.
This way I learned that, as soon as might be, Ygraine was pregnant
again. She was delivered in due time of a daughter, who was called
Morgian. By the time I read them, the letters were of course long
out of date, but as far as the boy Arthur was concerned I had my
own more immediate source of reassurance. I watched, in the way I
have, in the fire. It was in a brazier lit against the chill of a
Roman evening that I first watched Ralf make the journey through
the forest to Hoel's court. He traveled alone and unremarked, and
when he set out again in the misty dark to make for home he was not
followed. In the depths of the forest I lost him, but later the
smoke blew aside to show me his horse safely stabled, and Branwen
smiling in the sunlit yard with the baby in her arms. Several times
after that I watched Ralf's journey, but always smoke or darkness
seemed to gather and lie like mist along the river, so that I could
not see the tavern, or follow him through the door. It was as if,
even from me, the place was guarded. I had heard it said that the
Perilous Forest of Brittany was spellbound land; I can affirm that
this is true. I doubt if any magic less potent than mine could have
spied through the wall of mist that hid the inn. Glimpses I had, no
more than that, from time to time. Once, fleetingly, I saw the baby
playing among a litter of puppies in the yard while the bitch
licked his face and Brand looked on, grinning, till Moravik burst
scolding out of her kitchen to snatch the child up, wipe his face
with her apron, and vanish with him indoors. Another time I saw him
perched aloft on Ralf's horse while it was drinking at the trough,
and yet again astride the saddle in front of Ralf, hanging on to
the mane with both hands while the beast trotted down to the
river's edge. I never saw him closely, or even clearly, but I saw
enough to know that he thrived and grew strong. Then, when he was
four years old, the time came when Ralf was to take him from the
Forest's protection and seek Count Ector's.

The night his ship set sail from the
Small Sea of Morbihan I was lying under a black Syrian sky where
the stars seem to burn twice as big and ardent as the stars at
home. The fire I watched was a shepherd's, lit against the wolves
and mountain lions, and he had given me its hospitality when my
servants and I were benighted crossing the heights above Berytus.
The fire was stacked high with wind-dried wood, and blazed fiercely
against the night. Somewhere beyond it I could hear Stilicho
talking, then the rough mutter of the shepherd, and laughter
shushed by Gaius' grave tones, till the roar and crackling of the
fire drowned them. Then the pictures came, fragmentary at first,
but as clear and vivid as the visions I had had as a boy in the
crystal cave. I watched the whole journey, scene by scene, in one
night's vision, as you can dream a lifetime between night and
morning...

This was my first clear sight of Ralf
since I had parted from him in Brittany. I hardly knew him. He was
a tall young man now, with the look of a fighter, and an air of
decision and responsibility that gave him weight and sat well on
him. I had left it to Hoel's and his discretion whether or not an
armed escort would be needed to convoy his "wife and child" to the
ship: in the event they played safe, though it was obvious that the
secret was still our own. Hoel had contrived that a wagonload of
goods should be dispatched through the forest under the escort of
half a dozen troopers; when it set off back towards Kerrec and the
wharf where the ship lay, what more natural than that the young man
and his family should travel back to Kerrec with the return load --
I never saw what was in those corded bales -- using its protection
for themselves? Branwen rode in the wagon, and so, in the end, did
Arthur. It looked to me as if he had already outgrown women's care;
he would have spent all his time with the troopers, and it took
Ralf's authority to make him ride concealed in the wagon with
Branwen, rather than on the saddlebow at the head of the troop.
After the little party had reached the ship and embarked safely,
four of the troop took ship along with Ralf, apparently convoying
those precious bales to their destination. So the ship set sail.
Light glittered on the firelit sea, and the little ship had red
sails which spread against a breezy sky of sunset, till they
dwindled and vanished small in the blowing fire.

It was in a blaze of sunrise, perhaps
lit only by the Syrian flames, that the ship docked at Glannaventa.
I saw the ropes made fast and the party cross the gangplank to be
met by Ector himself, brown and smiling, with a full-armed body of
men. They bore no badge. They had brought a wagon for the cargo,
but as soon as they were clear of the town the wagon was left to
follow, while out of it came a litter for Branwen and Arthur, and
then the party rode as fast as might be for Galava, up the military
road through the mountains which lie between Ector's castle and the
sea. The road climbs through two steep passes with between them a
low-lying valley sodden with marsh, which is flooded right through
till late spring. The road is bad, broken by storm and torrents and
winter frosts, and in places where the hillsides had slipped in
flood time the road has vanished, and all that remains of it are
the ghosts of the old tracks that were there before the Romans
came. Wild country and a wild road, but straight going on a May day
for a body of well-armed men. I watched them trotting along, the
litter swinging between its sturdy mules, through flame-lit dawn
and firelit day, till suddenly with evening the mist rolled down
dark from the head of the pass, and I saw in it the glitter of
swords that spelled danger.

Ector's party was clattering downhill
from the second summit, slowing to a walk at a steep place where
crags crowded the edge of the road. From here it was only a short
descent to the broad river valley and the good flat road to the
waterhead where the castle stands. In the distance, still lit by
evening, were the big trees and the blossoming orchards and the
gentle green of the farmlands. But up in the pass among the grey
crags and the rolling mist it was dark, and the horses slipped and
stumbled on a steep scree where a torrent drove across the way and
the road had collapsed into the water's bed. The rush of water must
have blanketed all other sound from them. No one saw, dim behind
the mist, the other men waiting, mounted and armed.

Count Ector was at the head of the
troop, and in the middle of it, surrounded, the litter lurched and
swung between its mules with Ralf riding close beside it. They were
approaching the ambush; were beside it. I saw Ector's head turn
sharply, then he checked his horse so suddenly that it tried to
rear and instead plunged, slipping on the scree as Ector's sword
flashed out and his arm went up. The troopers, surrounding the
litter as best they might on the rushing slope, stood to fight. At
the moment of clashing, shouting attack I saw what none of the
troop appeared yet to have seen, other shadows riding down out of
the mist beyond the crags.

I believe I shouted. I made no sound,
but I saw Ralf's head go up like a hound's at his master's whistle.
He yelled, wheeling his horse. Men wheeled with him, and met the
new attack with a crash and flurry that sent sparks up from the
swords like a smith's hammer from the anvil.

I strained my eyes through the
visionary firelight to see who the attackers were. But I could not
see. The wrestling, clashing darkness, the sparkling swords, the
shouting, the wheeling horses -- then the attackers vanished into
the mist as suddenly as they had come, leaving one of their number
dead on the scree, and carrying another bleeding across a
saddle.

There was nothing to be gained by
pursuing them across mountains thick with the misty twilight. One
of the troopers picked up the fallen man and flung him across a
horse. I saw Ector point, and the trooper searched the body
looking, apparently, for identification, but finding none. Then the
guard formed again round the litter, and rode on. I saw Ralf,
surreptitious, winding a rag round his left arm where a blade had
hacked in past the shield. A moment later I saw him, laughing,
stoop in the saddle to say through the curtains of the litter:
"Well, but you're not grown yet. Give it a year or two, and I
promise you we'll find you a sword to suit your size." Then he
reached to pull the leather curtains of the litter close. When I
strained my sight to see Arthur, smoke blew grey across the scene
and the shepherd called something to his dog, and I was back on the
scented hillside with the moon coming out above the ruins of the
temple where nothing remains now of the Goddess but her nightowls
brooding.

So the years passed, and I used my
freedom in travels which I have told of in other places; there is
no room for them here. For me they were rich years, and lightly
borne, and the god's hand lay gently on me, so that I saw all I
asked to see; but in all the time there was no message, no moving
star, nothing to call me home. Then one day, when Arthur was six
years old, the message came to me near Pergamum, where I was
teaching and working in the hospital. It was early spring, and all
day rain had been falling like whips on the streaming rock,
darkening the white limestone and tearing ruts in the pathway which
leads down to the hospital cells by the sea. I had no fire to bring
me the vision, but in that place the gods stand waiting by every
pillar, and the air is heavy with dreams. This was only a dream,
the same as other men's, and came in a moment of exhausted
sleep.