But what that shield might be, or where it might be found, she would not say. Our need, though, was past disputing; as ever, Morgan had the right of it there.
So Gweniver announced to the folk that Arthur was gone from us, gone with his ship and his Companions; and though they were stunned and grieved to hear it, they accepted it at once as truth—and as fact also, which is not always the same thing. But it also somehow made their acceptance of Gweniver as sole ruler, Ard-rian alone, easier to encompass also, this mysterious vanishing of the King; as for Marguessan who claimed the title Ard-rian for herself, naught had been heard of her since her ship had basely fled from stricken Camlann, leaving her son’s vessel to be destroyed behind her, with him still aboard.
"What else did we think would be?" I remarked bitterly to Morgan. "She comes and goes like some dark comet, an evil tail-star. A baleful influence and an erratic orbit and malisons raining down on all in her path, and then she is gone again."
"She will be back," said Morgan, and in her voice was mere statement of fact, pure comment; no emotion I could discern. "One time more; we may depend upon it."
And we did, and she was; but even the self-styling Ard-rian Marguessan was just now not in the forefront of our frets. In our traha and our grief and the momentary madness that comes with such stark sudden overwhelming loss as we had suffered, we had somehow neglected to remember that maintaining the fiction of Arthur’s death, or undeath, would exact a soul-price on us who knew the truth.
And that toll of spirit, terrible enough already, grew heavier and harder to bear every day; even now, looking back, I do not know how we managed to find our way through to even outer peace. There were a million things that could have betrayed our secret, a million times one or all of us could have misspoken or said awry. All our thoughts must be watched and warded; even our grief must of force be secret. Gweniver had at once put on royal mourning, inflexible in her resolve, and none of us could persuade her against it; indeed, she had ordered the Court into mourning as well. Those of us in on the secret knew well why she did so, of course, but we did gently point out to her that this might be a rather notable and easily read signal to the truth. She would not be turned; and after meditating a little on the problem of the discrepancy—if Arthur was not dead, why was his wife wearing mourning?—had given out that she did so for those who perished at Camlann, as honor from their Ard-rian. If the Queen could not mourn openly for her dead King, Gwen might still grieve, privately in public, for her Artos. We did not press her.
And yet, you know, the secret held. Perhaps it was dan that it should remain unbroken; perhaps our terror of betraying the truth somehow shaped a new truth from concealment, as adamant is forged in the firemount’s throat. Now whether one may rightly make truth from lies I do not know; as a bard, I would say under no circumstances should a lie come to stand for what happened otherwise, and perhaps even our good intentions did not excuse us. But I can tell you that for Keltia, Arthur lived on, and all his Companions with him, and the great ship Prydwen; and perhaps, in our grief, we came to believe this ourselves even, a little, sometimes, for comfort—though we knew well it was not so. And perhaps that was not so terrible a thing. But it troubled me to lie to the world, though most of the others seemed not to mind so much as I. Then again, they were not bards.
Majanah, who as I have said came with us from Aojun, had herself given her daughter Donah the news of her father’s death, so I was spared at least one encounter I had purely and priorly dreaded. Hard enough had it been to tell Gwennach and Morgan and Ygrawn; to have to look into those young eyes so like my friend’s, and speak to her of his ending, would have been more than my soul could have endured, and I was glad, if that is the word for it, that Janjan had drunk that cup herself.
As for Arawn Pendreic, the young Tanist of Keltia had been himself told by Gweniver his mother and Ygrawn his granddam, so again the task was spared me. Though I am bard and every lament and marunad and coronach in Keltic letters is mine to know and to sing, I am not skilled at speaking of true grief in life, nor yet in imparting it to the bereaved. Perhaps no one is, mask it never so well; in telling of the death of others we are reminded that we ourselves may be called to face such loss.
But I could not avoid Donah forever, nor did I wish to. It was just that I had taken some hard, hard buffeting these past days, and I knew that did I see Donayah just now, the encounter would—literally as well as figuratively—send me to my knees. Knowing how Artos had loved his firstborn, loving the lass myself from an infant—I had attended her saining on Aojun, one of the proudest honors of my life, to have been named for the night to the ranks of women, so that I might attend a ritual of the Mother; I had held her when she was a scant hour old, and had gone on to make a bond with her of uncle and niece that, though I loved him dearly, so far I had not managed to make with Arawn my nephew—knowing all this, I could not think to find a way to comfort Donah on her loss, which was my loss as well. I never thought it might be she would end up consoling me instead…
She came to my music-room late in the day, the same day that Gweniver had announced the news to Keltia, giving birth to the myth. She wore the red of everyday Keltic mourning, in obedience to the Queen’s command, but around her hair was the blue scarf, folded as a browband (and which would be exchanged in public for a blue faceveil; Yamazai men do so too), that on Aojun is the sign of one who mourns.
Donah said no word, but came in as if by right and sat in the window-seat she favored, that gave out over the view below: a corner of the City, the rose gardens of Turusachan and the great shining sweep of the bay. I continued with the piece on which I had been working on and off ever since Kholco; but it continued to defeat my every effort, or maybe it was just not ready to come to me, and finally I slammed it into my leather satchel with a fearful oath.
Glancing guiltily up as I belatedly called to mind Donah’s presence, I saw her watching me with a half-smile. She raised her brows and gave me a quizzing look that reminded me so much of her mother that I burst out laughing, and felt better at once.
"Ah well," I muttered, with a shamefaced shrug. "Some days you get it by the throat and show it who is master here, and other days it gets you so and shows you… It evens out in the end."
"Very like," she agreed, still smiling. "Else we would have no songs at all…" She drew a deep breath, then found somewhat of great interest in the coping of the stones round the window-ledge. "My mother has told me," she began in a low voice, "of what ending my father made on Kholco, and of how this must remain hidden forever."
"Aye."
She turned to me all in a rush, lest her courage should fail her. "But, uncle, you were there! You were with him! He spoke to you before he went—did he say—well, did he say aught of me?"
Her voice quivered on the question, and I almost broke on hearing it. I went over to her and put my arms round her where she sat.
"Oh cariadol, surely he did! Of you and your mother both—how not?"
"Then—will you tell me? How it was? How he died?" And I, of course, could not refuse. It was not as if she were still a lassling, after all: She was a young woman of her majority now; should aught befall Majanah, which Goddess forfend, Donah could assume her rightful place as Jamadarin. Also she had been Graal Princess, and was still on the inner planes. But chiefly she was our Donayah, and also a lass who had lost her much-loved father; she had the right to hear.
And though I began this telling with as little joy as I had begun the others (though with as scrupulous accuracy also), by the time it was done I found to my own ‘stonishment that I was feeling the tiniest scrappet less hurting about it, as if it had helped me to share no less than it had helped her that I should share. Not healed, nay, that should never be; not in this life, not in all the lives of all the worlds… But just for this moment, I could speak of Arthur and not weep, or at least not overmuch. Telling Donah had been a way of abreacting my own feelings of guilt, in a way that telling Gwen and Morgan and Ygrawn
and Janjan had not been. Even my formal recounting, as Pen-bardd, for the historical records, made to Grehan who had succeeded Tarian as Taoiseach and to six recorder-bards, had not been so healing and restorative.
She was silent for a long while after my tale concluded, and I did not press her into speech. Then she stirred, and brushed back her bright hair in the gesture she had inherited from her father; but her fingers touched the blue silk of the hilyat-shaar, the mourning scarf, and she caught her breath back a little at the physical reminder.
"It seems to me," she said carefully, "that tasyk made the best choice he could make in such straits. Too, to go out in flaming glory must not have displeased him, either. For my part, I only wish I could have gone with him."
And hearing my own deepest wish and desperate regret and gnawing guilty longing given voice by Arthur’s daughter turned a key then far within me: A door unbarred that I had guarded, a gate swung open that I had locked, and all the pent-up denied blame and grief and if-onlys and what-ifs came flooding through and out at last…
"There now," said Donah solicitously, her hand patting my shoulders that still heaved with the aftermath of my weeping. "Is that not better, so?"
"You are a clever wicked girl," I said presently, tears still streaming. "It must come to you from your mother, for your father, who was devious enough when it suited him, was devious in a different way that I would have known to guard against."
"As you had been doing," she said with a certain complacency. "And that was just the problem… We all of us thought it was long past time you dropped that mask and wept. And though Gerrans put up a valiant case, I claimed the errand as my own idea, and so I came."
"Aye, well, and here I thought to comfort you," I said. "And I have done my share of weeping, you know; it was just that I did not wish to do so before Gwen or Morgan or the rest."
"Silliness," Donah rebuked me with great fondness. "They would have wept with you, any of us would have—and will yet. And it will be, not well, but better."
I began a reply, but suddenly found myself snatched away down a different trail altogether, utterly unvoluntary; and I knew that feeling…
"You must leave me now, alanna," I said abruptly, though not ungently. "I do not mean to be discourteous, but something is upon me that requires me pay heed—and I have learned long since that I ignore this sort of claim to my sorrow."
Donah smiled, dropped a kiss on my cheek and went out, well pleased with herself. I scarcely heard the door close behind her, so away was I already with whatever it was that had so commanded my attention. The words that had been niggling at the edges of my awareness, refusing to accommodate themselves to the music that had been echoing half-formed in my inmost ear, now came together, clear and plain and sure, innocently astonished, as if to say ‘What, us?, as if there had never been any question or trouble about the fit. I began to write them down before they could change their mind.
It was not one of my best or even better efforts in the end—though I know the bard-historians will be annoyed about it, liking to date all work precisely in an ollave’s creative life, I shall not tell you what song it was—but it served its purpose. It pulled me out of myself and my grief, it got me to write out the whole of it—the sorrow and the loss and the anger—and it performed that magical and notable antic that only one’s art can do: to distance what is felt from what is made of that feeling.
Nor was it the great work that had long been presaged by Merlynn’s words and Gwyn’s; that one was yet to come. This now was only a forerunner, a trial-piece, as when one who carves that magnificent Keltic knotwork in silver and gold will try them first in bone. A humbler medium, before the hand is set to the greater: but not to be scorned for it. There is as much honor in forging a boot-nail as in forging a sword, and both are necessary to their purpose. I would forge my song-sword in its own good time.
All the same, though, I reflected as I read it over, I would not be presenting this boot-nail any time soon before my peers. But I was grateful to the trial-piece all the same.
The season following produced rather more than an indifferent chaunt: For one thing, it produced another Pendreic. Gweniver gave birth to Arthur’s second daughter, Arwenna Seren Siedah Ygrawn, early in the Bear-moon—an omen not lost on those who were inclined to see such. Her father’s name had indeed meant ‘bear,’ and surely Artos had comported himself like that creature on many occasions (too many perhaps, you might be thinking); but Arwenna was a most usual babe, a quiet pleased infant with her father’s red-brown hair and her mother’s cool gray eyes, endlessly interested in anything and anyone who came within her chub-fingered, acquisitive grasp. For all she resembled her parents, though, many there were among older Kelts who swore she was the image of her grandsir Amris; and not a few complained of the Yamazai birthname her goddessmother the Jamadarin of Aojun had bestowed upon her. But Gweniver curtly dismissed this, saying only that Artos would have wished it so, and doubtless she was right.
True to her given promise, that goddessmother stayed with Gweniver until the child was weaned, as did Donah also, thrilled with a new halfsister; and for her part Gweniver, whom those two and Morgan had assisted at the birth, took great comfort in their presence. Arawn, who had been away in fosterage with the Clann Chattan, had been recalled to Caerdroia’s greater safety during the brief outfrenne war and its sequels; and now, after the birth of his fullsister, he was sent away again, this time to foster with the O Torridon at Rosyth on Caledon. Many wondered at this, thinking that surely the Ard-rian would wish to keep both her children close by her just now, as she strove to adjust to ruling alone. But then, they did not know their Ard-rian; and clearly they did not know our Gwen.
Nor, it turned out, did we, not so much; which is why, when at last Gweniver made that pronouncement at which all Keltia would so soon shake in thunder, we were as taken by surprise as any.
"Resign!" I gasped. "Nay, Gwennach, you cannot—"
"I can, and I shall," said Gweniver calmly, not looking at me or anyone in the chamber. "I have not spoken of it sooner, because so soon after—well, afterwards we had many graver things to consider. But I determined on this that very hour wherein I knew my Artos was gone, and I will not be swayed nor gainsaid. Not by you, Talyn, not by any. This shall be."
Looking at her, I hardly felt inclined to do so; and the others she had dismissed along with me—Morgan, Ygrawn, Majanah, Ferdia, Grehan, Daronwy—seemingly shared my feeling full measure.
"How, then, will you go about this?" asked Ygrawn after a long and twangling silence. "Arawn is still far too young to take up rule—"
"Just so," said Gweniver. "Therefore upon my resignation as Ard-rian I shall set up a Regency for my son, and there shall be three Regents who shall rule for Arawn until he comes of age. I myself shall be one of the three."
"And the others?" asked Majanah, her face giving no clue to her feelings on this decision.
"The Rian-dhuair Ygrawn Tregaron ac Pendreic gan Amris," said Gweniver, deliberately giving her matemother not only the honorific of Queen-dowager and the surname of her marriage but the sponsal affix that she derived from her first pairing, the ceile-charach union with a prince of Keltia that had produced Arthur for us all. Ygrawn’s face did not change nor did her gaze shift or falter at this perhaps over-elaborated naming; but that with her was only usual.
"And the third?" said Grehan, unable to hide his annoyance; as Taoiseach he should certainly have been consulted before the Ard-rian took it into her head and hands to disarrange all Keltia, and I sympathized with his wrath, the more so considering Gwen’s answer.
"The Princess Morguenna Pendreic, Duchess of Ys."
I started violently, but really I should have seen it coming from a very long way away; and reaching out to sense Morgan’s feeling on the matter I found at once that she had certainly expected it. And, to my continuing surprise, was by no means reluctant for it… But Gweniver was not yet done with astonishments.
She paused a moment
, her gray gaze touching on each of us in turn around the table.
"We three shall act as Regents for Arawn, as I have said. But one thing more… I have taken counsel of the Chief Brehon of Keltia and a panel of her ollave-legists, and I have found there is full lawful sanction for this I declare now to you, and tomorrow to the folk: that Arthur Penarvon, born Pendreic, Ard-righ of Keltia of the House of Don, shall remain King of Kelts until such time as his death can be proved most uncontrovertible. And therefore all rulers after him, Ard-rian or Ard-righ, shall hold their rank and rule by his grace and make their laws and judgments in his name. For did not Arthur say he would return? And shall his crown and Seal not be awaiting him when he does?"
The look of triumph on her face hit perfectly off the blank gaping astoundment she saw on ours, and glancing round at each of us again she laughed.
"Not often I manage to silence all you together! Has no one aught to say, then?"
I opened my mouth, drew breath to speak, then closed it again decisively. Let someone else talk against for once; I for my part was not venturing to touch this one with a lonna…
"It is on me we have more crops than one being sown here," said Grehan carefully. His earlier annoyance was gone, replaced by a wariness unparalleled; he would have continued, but by now Daronwy had recovered from her dumbfounded silence, and she had never been one long to remain speechless when events threatened.
"Are you daft? Ever was it Artos of whom I would so inquire, but, Lady, it seems you are taking up his mantle where he did cast it down… Gwennach—"
Now even Daronwy seldom spoke to her High Queen in such wise, and though she had almost constantly addressed herself so to Arthur, generally it had been on points—war or strategy or tactics—where she knew she stood on unassailable rock and he ankle-deep in a swamp. But this was different, and I thought I knew why: for that she had lost Roric in Prydwen, her Aojunese lord of many years’ pairing, and this was a way of working through her grief.
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