Legacy: Arthurian Saga (89 page)

It was about three days before I found
a formula which promised some help for the king, and sent a message
to Gandar. He, gasping before he had fairly got through the
curtains, came himself, but instead of the assistant I expected he
brought a girl with him, a young maiden whom I recognized after a
moment as Morgause, the King's bastard daughter. She could be no
more than thirteen or fourteen, but she was tall for her age, and
it was true that she was beautiful. At that age many girls only
show promise of beauty; Morgause had the thing itself, and even I,
who am no judge of women, could see that this might be a beauty to
send men mad. Her body was slight with a child's slenderness, but
her breasts were full and pointed and her throat round as a lily
stem. Her hair was rosy gold, streaming long and unbound over the
golden-green robe. The large eyes that I remembered were gold-green
too, liquid and clear as a stream running over mosses, and the
small mouth lifted into a smile over kitten's teeth as she dropped
a deep reverence to me.

"Prince Merlin." It was a demure
child's voice, little more than a whisper. I saw Stilicho glance
round from his work, then stand staring.

I gave her my hand. "They told me you
had grown into a beauty, Morgause. Some man will be fortunate.
You're not contracted yet? Then all the men in Condon have been
slow."

The smile deepened, folding itself
into dimples at the corner of her mouth. She did not speak.
Stilicho, catching my glance, bent over his work again, but not, I
thought, with quite the concentration it required.

"Phew," said Gandar, fanning himself.
I could see the sweat already beading his broad face. "Do you have
to work in a tepidarium?"

"My servant comes from a more blessed
corner of the earth than this. They breed salamanders in
Sicily."

"More blessed, you call it? I'd die in
an hour."

"I'll have him bring the things out
into my chamber," I offered.

"No need, for me. I'll not stay. I
only came to present you my assistant, who will care for the King.
Aye, you may well look surprised. You'll hardly believe me, but
this child here is skilled already with drugs. Seems she had a
nurse in Brittany, one of their wise women, who taught her the
gathering and drying and preparing, and since she came over here
she's been eager to learn more. But an army medical unit didn't
seem quite the place for her."

"You surprise me," I said dryly. The
girl Morgause had moved near the table where Stilicho was working,
and bent her graceful little head towards him. A tress of the
rosegold hair brushed his hand. He labelled two jars at random,
both wrongly, before he recovered himself and reached for a knife
to melt the seals again.

"So," said Gandar, "when she heard the
King needed drugs, she asked to look after them. She's practiced
enough, no fear of that, and the King has consented. For all she's
young, she knows how to keep her counsel and who better to care for
him and keep his secrets than his own daughter?"

It was a good idea, and I said so.
Gandar himself, though nominally the King's chief physician, had
charge of the army medical teams. Until this recent wounding the
King had hardly needed his personal care, and in any action or
threat of it Gandar's place would be with the army. In Uther's
present predicament his own daughter, so fortunately skilled, would
answer very well.

"She's more than welcome to learn all
she can here." I turned to the girl. "Morgause, I've distilled a
drug which I think will help the King. I've copied out the formula
for you here -- can you make it out? Good. Stilicho has the
ingredients, if he'll take time to label them correctly...Now, I'll
leave him to show you how to compound the medicine. If you give him
half an hour to get his apparatus out of this steam bath
--"

"No need, for me," she said in a
demure echo of Gandar. "I like the heat."

"Then I'll leave you," said Gandar
with relief. "Merlin, will you come and sup with me tonight, or are
you with the King?"

I followed him out into the cool
airiness of my own room. From beyond the curtain came the murmur,
hesitant with shyness, of the servant's voice, and an occasional
soft question from the girl.

"It'll be all right, you'll see," said
Gandar. "No need to look so doubtful."

"Was I? Not about the medicine, at any
rate, and I'll take your word for the girl's skill."

"In any case, you'll surely stay a
little while, and see how she does?"

"Certainly. I don't want to be too
long in London, but I can give it a few days. You'll be here
yourself?"

"Yes. But there's been such a marked
change in him even in these last three days since you came, that I
can't see he'll need me in attendance much longer."

"Let's hope it continues," I said. "To
tell you the truth, I'm not much troubled...Certainly not for his
general health. And for the impotence -- if he gets ease and sleep,
his mind may stop tormenting his body, and the condition may right
itself. This seems to be happening already. You know how these
things go."

"Oh, aye, he'll mend" -- he glanced
towards the curtained door and dropped his voice -- "as far as need
be. As to whether we can get the stallion back to the stand again,
I can't see that it matters, now that we know there's a prince
safe, and growing, and likely for the crown. We'll get him out of
his distemper, and if by God's grace and the drugs you brought he
lives to fight...and stays king of the pack --"

"He'll do that."

"Well..." he said, and let it go. I
may say here that the King did in fact mend rapidly. The limp
disappeared, he slept well and put on flesh, and I learned some
time later from one of his chamberers that, although the King was
never again the Bull of Mithras that his soldiers had laughed over
and admired, and though he fathered no more children, he took
certain satisfactions in his bed, and the unpredictable violences
of his temper declined. As a soldier he was soon, again, the
single-minded warrior who had inspired his troops and led them to
victory.

When Gandar had gone, I went back into
the boy's room to find Morgause slowly conning over the paper I had
given her, while Stilicho showed her, one by one, the simples for
distillation, the powders for sleeping draughts, the oils for
massage of the pulled muscles. Neither of them saw me come in, so I
watched for a few minutes in silence. I could see that Morgause
missed nothing, and that, though the boy still watched her sideways
and tended to shy from her beauty like a colt from fire, she seemed
as oblivious of his sex as a princess should be of a slave. The
heat of the room was making my head ache. I crossed quickly to the
table. Stilicho's monologue stopped short, and the girl looked up
and smiled.

I said: "You understand it all? Good.
I'll leave you now with Stilicho. If there's anything you want to
know that he can't tell you, send for me."

I turned then to give instructions to
the boy, but to my surprise Morgause made a quick movement towards
me, laying a hand on my sleeve.

"Prince --"

"Morgause?"

"Must you really go? I -- I thought
you would teach me, you yourself. I want so much to learn from
you."

"Stilicho can teach you all you need
to know about the drugs the King will want. If you wish, I will
show you how to help him over the pain of the tightened muscles,
but I should have thought his bathslave would do that
better."

"Oh, yes, I know. I wasn't thinking of
things like that: it's easy enough to learn what is needed for the
King's care. It was -- I had hoped for more. When I asked Gandar to
bring me to you, I had thought -- I had hoped --"

The sentence died and she drooped her
head. The rosegold hair fell in a gleaming curtain to hide her
face. Through it, as through rain, I saw her eyes watching me,
thoughtful, meek, childlike.

"You had hoped -- ?"

I doubt if even Stilicho, four paces
away, heard the whisper. " -- that you might teach me a little of
your art, my lord Prince." Her eyes appealed to me, half hopeful
and half afraid, like a bitch expecting to be whipped.

I smiled at her, but I knew my manner
was stiff and my voice over-formal. I can face an armed enemy more
easily than a young girl pleading like this, with a pretty hand on
my sleeve, and her scent sweet on the hot air like fruit in a sunny
orchard. Strawberries, was it, or apricots...? I said quickly:
"Morgause, I've no art to teach you that you cannot learn as easily
from books. You read, don't you? Yes, of course you do, you read
the formula. Then learn from Hippocrates and Galen. Let them be
your masters; they were mine."

"Prince Merlin, in the arts I speak of
you have no master."

The heat of the room was overpowering.
My head hurt me. I must have been frowning, because she came close
with a gentle dipping movement, like a bird nestling, and said
rapidly, pleadingly: "Don't be angry with me. I've waited so long,
and I was so sure that the chance had come. My lord, all my life I
have heard people speak of you. My nurse in Brittany -- she told me
how she used to see you walking through the woods and by the
seashore, gathering the cresses and roots and the white berries of
the thunder-bough, and how sometimes you went with no more sound
than a ghost, and no shadow even on a sunny day."

"She was telling stories to frighten
you. I am a man like other men."

"Do other men talk to the stars as if
they were friends in a familiar room? Or move the standing stones?
Or follow the druids into Nemet and not die under the
knife?"

"I did not die under the druids' knife
because the archdruid was afraid of my father," I said bluntly.
"And when I was in Brittany I was hardly a man, and certainly not a
magician. I was a boy then, learning my trades as you are learning
yours. I was barely seventeen when I left there."

She seemed hardly to have heard. I
noticed how still she was, the long eyes shadowed under the
curtaining hair, the narrow white hands folded below her breast
against the green gown. She said: "But you are a man now, my lord,
and can you deny that you have worked magic here in Britain? Since
I have been here with my father the King, I have heard you spoken
of as the greatest enchanter in the world. I have seen the Hanging
Stones, which you lifted and set in their place, and I have heard
how you foretold Pendragon's victories and brought the star to
Tintagel, and made the King's son vanish away to the isle of
HyBrasil --"

"So you heard that here, too, did
you?" I tried for a lighter tone. "You'd better stop, Morgause,
you're scaring my servant, and I don't want him running off, he's
too useful."

"Don't laugh at me, my lord. Do you
deny that you have the arts?"

"No, I don't deny it. But I couldn't
teach you the things you want to know. Certain kinds of magic you
can learn from any adept, but the arts which are mine are not mine
to give away. I could not teach them to you, even if you were old
enough to understand them."

"I could understand them now. I
already have magic -- such magic as young maids can learn, no more.
I want to follow you and learn from you. My lord Merlin, teach me
how to find power like yours."

"I've told you it isn't possible. You
will have to take my word for that. You are too young. I'm sorry,
child. I think that for power like mine you will always be too
young. I doubt if any woman could go where I go and see what I see.
It is not an easy art. The god I serve is a hard
master."

"What god? I only know
men."

"Then learn from men. What I have of
power I cannot teach you. I have told you it is not my
gift."

She watched me without comprehension.
She was too young to understand. The light from the stove glimmered
on the lovely hair, the wide, clever brows, the full breasts, the
small, childish hands. I remembered that Uther had offered her to
Lot, and that Lot had rejected her in favor of the young
half-sister. I wondered if Morgause knew; and, compassionately,
what would become of her.

I said gently: "It's true, Morgause.
He only lends his power for his own ends. When they are achieved,
who knows? If he wants you, he will take you, but don't walk into
the flames, child. Content yourself with such magic as young maids
can use."

She began to speak, but we were
interrupted. Stilicho had been heating something in a bowl over the
burner, and was no doubt so busy straining to hear what was being
said that he let the bowl tilt, and some of the liquid spilled onto
the flames. There was a hiss and a spitting, and a cloud of
herb-smelling steam billowed thick between me and the girl,
obscuring her. Through it I saw her hands, those still hands,
moving quickly to fan the pungent mist away from her eyes. My own
were watering. Vision blurred and glittered. The pain in my head
blinded me. The movement of the small white hands through the steam
was weaving a pattern like a spell. The bats went past me in a
cloud. Somewhere near me the strings of my harp whimpered. The room
shrank round me, chilled to a globe of crystal, a
tomb...

"I'm sorry, master. Master, are you
ill? Master?"