Legacy: Arthurian Saga (85 page)

A man had been carried in late in the
night, with a leg badly gashed and the life starting to pump out of
the great vein. I and the other doctor on duty had worked over him
for more than three hours, and afterwards I had gone out into the
sea to wash off the blood which had gushed thick and then hardened
on me. It was possible that the patient would live; he was young,
and slept now with the blood staunched and the wound safely
stitched. I stripped off my soaked loin-cloth -- that climate
allows one to work near naked on the bloodier jobs -- swam till I
was clean, then stretched on the still warm sand to rest. The rain
had stopped with evening, and the night was calm and warm and full
of stars.

It was no vision I had, but a kind of
dream of wakefulness. I lay (as I thought) open-eyed, watching, and
watched by, the bright swarm. Among that fierce host of stars was
one distant one, cloudy, its light faint among the others like a
lamp in a swirl of snow. Then it swam closer, closer still, till
its clouded air blotted out the brighter stars, and I saw mountains
and shore, and rivers running like the veins of a leaf through the
valleys of my own country. Now the snow swirled thicker, hiding the
valleys, and behind the snow was the growl of thunder, and the
shouting of armies, and the sea rose till the shore dissolved, and
salt ran up the rivers and the green fields bleached to grey, and
blackened to desert with their veins showing like dead men's
bones.

I woke knowing that I must go back. It
was not yet, the flood, but it was coming. By the next snowtime, or
the next, we would hear the thunder, and I must be there, between
the King and his son.

2

I had planned to go home by
Constantinopolis, and letters had already gone ahead of me. Now I
would have preferred to take a quicker way, but the only ship I
could get was one plying north close inshore towards Chalcedon,
which lies just across the strait from Constantinopolis. Arrived
here, delayed by freakish winds and uncertain weather, luck still
seemed against me; I had just missed a westbound ship, they told
me, and there was no other due to leave for a week or more. From
Chalcedon the trade is mostly small coastbound craft; the bigger
shipping uses the great harbor of Constantinopolis. So I took the
ferry over, not averse, in spite of the need I felt for haste, to
seeing the city of which I had heard so much.

I had expected the New Rome to surpass
the old Rome in magnificence, but found Constantine's city a place
of sharper contrasts, with squalor crowding close behind the
splendor, and that air of excitement and risk which is breathed in
a young city looking forward to prosperity, still building,
spreading, assimilating, and avid to grow rich. Not that the
foundation was new; it had been capital of Byzantium since Byzas
had settled his folk there a thousand years before; but it was
almost a century and a half now since the Emperor Constantine had
moved the heart of the empire eastwards, and started to build and
fortify the old Byzantium and call it after himself.

Constantinopolis is a city marvelously
situated on a tongue of land which holds a natural harbor they call
the Golden Horn, and rightly; I had never imagined such a traffic
of richly laden ships as I saw in the brief crossing from
Chalcedon. There are palaces and rich houses, and government
buildings with corridors like a maze and the countless officials
employed by the government coming and going like bees in a hive.
Everywhere there are gardens, with pavilions and pools, and
fountains constantly gushing; the city has an abundance of sweet
water. To the landward side Constantine's Wall defends the city,
and from its Golden Gate the great thoroughfare of the Mese runs,
magnificently arcaded through most of its length, through three
fora decorated with columns, to end at the great triumphal arch of
Constantine. The Emperor's immense church dedicated to the Holy
Wisdom sits high over the walls that edge the sea. It was a
magnificent city, and a splendid capital, but it had not the air of
Rome as my father had spoken of it, or as we had thought of it in
Britain; this was still the East, and the city looked to the East.
Even the dress, though men wore the Roman tunic and mantle, had the
look of Asia, and, though Latin was spoken everywhere, I heard
Greek and Syrian and Armenian in the markets, and once beyond the
arcades of the Mese you might have supposed yourself in
Antioch.

It is a place not easy to picture, if
one has never been beyond Britain's shores. Above everything it was
exciting, with an air full of promise. It was a city looking
forward, where Rome and Athens and even Antioch had seemed to be
looking back; and London, with its crumbling temples and patched-up
towers and men always watching with their hands to their swords,
seemed as remote and near as savage as the ice-lands of the
northmen.

My host in Constantinopolis was a
connection of my father's, distant, but not too distant to let him
greet me as cousin. He was descended from one Adean, brother-in-law
of Maximus, who had been one of Maximus' officers and had followed
him on the final expedition to Rome. Adean had been wounded outside
Rome and left for dead, but rescued and nursed back to health by a
Christian family. Later he had married the daughter of the house,
turned Christian, and though he never took service with the Eastern
Emperor (being content with the pardon granted him through his
father-in-law's intercession) his son entered the service of
Theodosius II, made a fortune at it, and was rewarded with a
royally connected wife and a splendid house near the Golden
Horn.

His great-grandson bore the same name,
but pronounced it with the accent of Byzantium: Ahdjan. He was
still discernibly of Celtic descent, but looked, you might say,
like a Welshman gone bloodless by being drawn too high towards the
sun. He was tall and thin, with the oval face and pale skin, and
the black eyes set straight, that you see in all their portraits.
His mouth was thin-lipped, bloodless too; the court servant's
mouth, close-lipped with keeping secrets. But he was not without
humor, and could talk wisely and entertainingly, a rarity in a
country where men -- and women -- argue perpetually about matters
of the spirit in terms of the more than stupid flesh. I had not
been in Constantinopolis half a day before I found myself
remembering something I had read in a book of Galapas': "If you ask
someone how many obols a certain thing costs, he replies by
dogmatizing on the born and unborn. If you ask the price of bread,
they answer you, the Father is greater than the Son, and the Son is
subordinate to Him. If you ask is my bath ready, they answer you,
the Son has been made out of nothing."

Ahdjan received me very kindly, in a
splendid room with mosaics on the walls and a floor of golden
marble. In Britain, where it is cold, we put the pictures on the
floor and hang thick coverings over walls and doors; but they do
things differently in the East. This room glittered with color;
they use a lot of gold in their mosaics, and with the faintly
uneven surface of the tesserae this has the effect of glimmering
movement, as if the wall-pictures were tapestries of silk. The
figures are alive, and full of color, some of them very beautiful.
I remembered the cracked mosaic at home in Maridunum, which as a
child I had thought the most wonderful picture in the world; it had
been of Dionysos, with grapes and dolphins, but none of the
pictures was whole, and the god's eyes had been badly mended, and
showed a cast. To this day I see Dionysos with a squint. One side
of Ahdjan's room opened to a terrace where a fountain played in a
wide marble pool, and cypress and laurel grew in pots along the
balustrade. Below this the garden lay, scented in the sun, with
rose and iris and jasmine (though it was hardly into April)
competing with the scent of a hundred shrubs, and everywhere the
dark fingers, of cypress, gilded with tiny cones, pointing straight
at the brilliant sky. Below the terraces sparkled the waters of the
Horn, as thickly populated with ships as a farm pond at home is
with waterbeetles. There was a letter waiting for me, from Ector.
After Ahdjan and I had exchanged greetings, I asked his leave, then
unrolled and read it. Ector's scribe wrote well, though in long
periods which I knew were a gloss on what that forthright gentleman
had actually said. But the news, sorted out from the poetry and the
perorations, bore out what I already knew or suspected. In more
than guarded phrases he conveyed to me that Arthur (for the
scribe's sake he wrote of "the family, Drusilla and both the boys")
was safe. But for how long "the place" might be safe, said Ector,
he could not guess, and went on to give me the news as his
informers reported it.

The danger of invasion, always there
but for the last few years sporadic, had begun to grow into
something more formidable. Octa and Eosa, the Saxon leaders
defeated by Uther in the first year of his reign, and kept prisoner
since then in London, were still safely held; but lately pressure
had been brought to bear -- not only by the Federates, but by some
British leaders who were afraid of the growing discontent along the
Saxon Shore -- on King Uther to free the Saxon princes on terms of
treaty. Since he had refused this, there had been two armed
attempts to release them from prison. These had been punished with
brutal severity, and now other factions were pressing Uther to kill
the Saxon leaders out of hand, a course he was apparently afraid to
take for fear of the Federates. These, firmly ensconced along the
Shore, and crowding too close for comfort even to London, were
again showing threatening signs of inviting reinforcements from
abroad, and pressing up into the rich country near Ambrosius' Wall.
Meanwhile there were worse rumors: a messenger had been caught, and
under torture had confessed, that he carried tokens of friendship
from the Angles on the Abus in the east, to the Pictish kings of
the wild land west of Strathclyde. But nothing more, added Ector,
than tokens; and he personally did not think that trouble could yet
come from the north. Between Strathclyde and the Abus, the kingdoms
of Rheged and Lothian still stood firm.

I skimmed through the rest, then
rolled up the letter. "I must go straight home," I told
Ahdjan.

"So soon? I was afraid of it." He
signed to a servant, who lifted a silver flagon from a bowl of
snow, and poured the wine into glass goblets. Where the snow had
come from I did not know; they have it carried by night from the
hilltops, and stored underground in straw. "I'm sorry to lose you,
but when I saw the letter, I was afraid it might be bad
news."

"Not bad yet, but there will be bad to
come." I told him what I could of the situation, and he listened
gravely. They understand these things in Constantinopolis. Since
Alaric the Goth took Rome, men's ears are tuned to listen for the
thunder in the north. I went on: "Uther is a strong king and a good
general, but even he cannot be everywhere, and this division of
power makes men uncertain and afraid. It's time the succession was
made sure." I tapped the letter. "Ector tells me the Queen is with
child again."

"So I had heard. If this is a boy
he'll be declared the heir, won't he? Hardly a time for a baby to
inherit a kingdom, unless he had a Stilicho to look after his
interests." He was referring to the general who had protected the
empire of the young Emperor Honorius. "Has Uther anyone among his
generals who could be left as regent if he were killed?"

"For all I know they'd be as likely to
kill as to protect."

"Well, Uther had better live, then, or
allow the son he's already got to be his legitimate heir. He must
be what? Seven? Eight? Why cannot Uther do the sensible thing and
declare him again, with you to become regent if the King should be
killed during the boy's minority?" He looked at me sideways over
his glass. "Come, Merlin, don't raise your brows at me like that.
The whole world knows you took the child from Tintagel and have him
hidden somewhere."

"Does the world say where?"

"Oh, yes. The world spawns solutions
the way that pool yonder spawns frogs. The general opinion is that
the child is safe in the island of HyBrasil, nursed by the white
paps of nine queens, no less. It's no wonder he flourishes. Or else
that he is with you, but invisible. Disguised perhaps as a
packmule?"

I laughed. "How would I dare? What
would that make Uther?"

"You'd dare anything, I think. I was
hoping you'd dare tell me where the boy is, and all about
him...No?"

I shook my head, smiling. "Forgive me,
but not yet."

He moved a hand gracefully. They
understand secrets, too, in Constantinopolis. "Well, at least you
can tell me if he's safe and well?"

"I assure you of it."

"And will succeed, with you as
regent?"

I laughed, shook my head, and drained
my wine. He signaled to the slave, who was standing out of hearing,
and the man hurried to refill my glass. Ahdjan waved him away.
"I've had a letter, too, from Hoel. He tells me that King Uther has
sent men in search of you, and that he doesn't speak of you with
kindness, though everyone knows how much he owes you. There are
rumors, too, that even the King himself does not know where his son
is hidden, and has spies out searching. Some say the boy is dead.
There are also those who say that you keep the young prince close
for your own ambitious ends."

"Yes," I agreed equably, "there would
be some who say that."