Wicked Day

by Mary Stewart

  "If he wishes it, yes."

  "Then he is still there?"

  "He is where he always was, with all his fires and travelling glories round him."

  As they talked the sun had moved round, and the light from the window touched her face. He saw faint lines on the smooth brow, the shadow of fatigue under the eyes, a dew of transparency on her skin.

  He said abruptly: "I am sorry if I have wearied you."

  She did not deny it. She said merely: "I am glad you came," and followed him to the tower doorway.

  "Thank you for your patience," he said, and drew breath for a formal farewell, but a shout from the courtyard below startled him. He swung round and looked down. Nimuë came swiftly to his elbow.

  "You'd better go down, and hurry! Your horse has slipped his tether, and I think he has eaten some of the new seedlings." Her face lit with mischief, young and alive, like that of a child who misbehaves in a shrine. "If Varro kills you with his spade, as seems likely, we shall see how the fates will deal with that!"

  He kissed her hand and ran down to retrieve his horse. As he rode away she watched him with eyes that were once again sad, but no longer hostile.

  7

  MORDRED WAS HALF AFRAID that the King would ask him what his business had been with Nimuë, but he did not. He sent for his son next day and spoke of the proposed visit to the Saxon king, Cerdic.

  "I would have left you in charge at home, which would have been useful experience for you, but it will be even more useful for you to meet Cerdic and attend the talks, so as ever I am leaving Bedwyr. I might almost say as regent, since officially I am leaving my own kingdom for a foreign one. Have you ever met a Saxon, Mordred?"

  "Never. Are they really all giants, who drink the blood of babies?"

  The King laughed. "You will see. They are certainly most of them big men, and their customs are outlandish. But I am told, by those who know them and can speak their tongue, that their poets and artists are to be respected. Their fighting men certainly are. You will find it interesting."

  "How many men will you take?"

  "Under truce, only a hundred. A regal train, no more."

  "You can trust a Saxon to keep a truce?"

  "Cerdic, yes, though with most Saxons it's a case of trust only from strength, and keep the memory of Badon still green. But don't repeat that," said Arthur.

  Agravain was also in the chosen hundred, but neither Gawain nor Gareth. These two had gone north together soon after the council meeting. Gawain had spoken of travelling to Dunpeldyr and perhaps thence to Orkney, and, though suspecting that his nephew's real quest was far otherwise, Arthur could think of no good reason for preventing him. Hoping that Lamorak might have ridden westward to join his brother under Drustan's standard, he had to content himself with sending a courier into Dumnonia with a warning.

  The King and his hundred set out on a fine and blowy day of June. Their way took them over the high downs. Small blue butterflies and dappled fritillaries fluttered in clouds over the flowery turf. Larks sang. Sunlight fell in great gold swaths over the ripening cropfields, and peasants, white with the blowing chalk dust, looked up from their work and saluted the party with smiles. The troop rode at ease, talking and laughing together, and the mood was light.

  Except, apparently, for Agravain. He drew alongside Mordred where he was riding a little apart, some way behind the King, who was talking with Cei and Bors.

  "Our first sally with the High King, and look at it. A carnival." He spoke with contempt. "All that talk of war, and kingdoms changing hands, and raising armies to defend our shores again, and this is all it comes to! He's getting old, that's what it is. We should drive these Saxons back into the sea first, and then it would be time enough to talk.… But no! What do we do? Here we ride with the duke of battles, and on a peace mission. To Saxons. Ally with Saxons? Pah!" He spat. "He should have let me go with Gawain."

  "Did you ask to?"

  "Of course."

  "That was a peace mission, too," said Mordred, woodenly, looking straight between his horse's ears. "There was no trouble forecast in Dunpeldyr, only a little diplomatic talking with Tydwal, and Gareth along to keep it muted."

  "Don't play the innocent with me!" said Agravain angrily. "You know why he's gone."

  "I can guess. Anyone can guess. But if he does find Lamorak, or news of him, let us hope that Gareth can persuade him to show a little sense. Why else do you suppose Gareth asked to go?" Mordred turned and looked straight at Agravain. "And if he should come across Gaheris, you may hope the same thing yourself. I suppose you know where Gaheris is? Well, if Gawain catches up with either of them, you'd best know nothing about it. And I want to know nothing."

  "You? You're so deep in the King's counsels that I'm surprised you haven't warned him."

  "There was no need. He must know as well as you do what Gawain hopes to do. But he can't mew him up for ever. What the King cannot prevent, he will not waste time over. All he can do is hope, probably in vain, that wise counsel will prevail."

  "And if Gawain does run across Lamorak, which might happen, even by accident, what do you expect him to do then?"

  "Lamorak must protect himself. He's quite capable of it." He added: "Live what life brings. Die what death comes."

  Agravain stared. "What? What sort of talk is that?"

  "Something I heard recently. So what about Gaheris? Are you content for Gawain to run across him, too?"

  "He'll not find Gaheris," said Agravain confidently.

  "Oh, so you do know where he is?"

  "What do you think? He got word to me, of course. And the King doesn't know that, you may be sure! He's not as all-knowing as you think, brother." He slid a sideways look at Mordred, and his lowered voice was sly. "There's quite a lot that he doesn't see."

  Mordred did not answer, but Agravain went on without prompting: "Else he'd hardly go off on an unnecessary jaunt like this and leave Bedwyr in Camelot."

  "Someone has to stay."

  "With the Queen?"

  Mordred turned to look at him again. The tone, the look, said what the bare words had not expressed. He spoke with contemptuous anger: "I'm no fool, nor am I deaf. I hear what the dirty tongues say. But you'd best keep yours clean, brother."

  "Are you threatening me?"

  "I don't need to. Let the King once hear—"

  "If it's true they're lovers, he ought to hear."

  "It cannot be true! Bedwyr is close to the King and Queen, yes, but—"

  "And they do say the husband is always the last to guess."

  Mordred felt a wave of fury so strong that it startled him. He began to speak, then, glancing towards the King's back and the riders to either side, said merely, in a low, suppressed voice: "Leave it. It's fool's talk anywhere, and here you might be overheard. And keep your tongue off it with me. I want no part of it."

  "You were ready enough to listen when your own mother's virtue was questioned."

  Mordred said, exasperated: "Questioned! I was there, my God! I saw her lying with him!"

  "And cared so little that you let the man escape!"

  "Let it go, Agravain! If Gaheris had killed Lamorak there, while the King was still negotiating with Drustan to leave Dumnonia and join the Companions—"

  "You thought of that? Then? With her — them — that in front of your eyes?"

  "Yes."

  Agravain stared with bolting eyes. The blood flushed his cheeks and ran into his forehead. Then, with a sound of contempt and helpless fury, he reined his horse back so sharply that blood sprang on the bit. Mordred, relieved of his presence, rode on alone, until Arthur, turning, saw him there and beckoned him forward.

  "See! There is the border. And we are awaited. The man in the center, the fair man in the blue mantle, that's Cerdic himself."

  * * *

  Cerdic was a big man, with silvery hair and beard, and blue eyes. He wore a long robe of grey, with over it a caped blue mantle. He was unarmed save for his dagger, but a page beh
ind him bore his sword, the heavy Saxon broadsword, sheathed in leather bound with worked gold. On his long, carefully combed hair was a tall crown also of gold, elaborately chased, and in his left hand he held a staff which, from its golden finial and carved shaft, appeared to be a staff of royal office. Beside him waited an interpreter, an elderly man who, it transpired, had been son and grandson of federates, and had spent all his life within the bounds of the Saxon Shore.

  Behind Cerdic stood his thegns, or warrior lords, dressed like their king save that where he wore a crown, they had tall caps of brightly coloured leather. Their horses, small beasts that showed almost like ponies beside Arthur's carefully bred cavalry mounts, were held in the background by their grooms.

  Arthur and his party dismounted. The kings greeted one another, two tall men, richly dressed and glittering with jewels, dark and fair, eyeing one another over the unspoken truce like big dogs held back on leash. Then, as if some spark of liking had suddenly been kindled between them, they both smiled and, each at the same moment, held out a hand. They grasped one another's arms, and kissed.

  It was the signal. The ranks of tall blond warriors broke, moving forward with shouts of welcome. The grooms came running forward with the horses, and the party remounted. Mordred, beckoned forward by the King, received Cerdic's ceremonial kiss, then found himself riding between the Saxon king and a red-haired thegn who was a cousin of Cerdic's queen.

  It was not far to the Saxon capital, perhaps an hour's ride, and they took it slowly. The two kings seemed content to let their mounts pace gently, side by side, while they talked, with the interpreter craning to catch and relay what was said.

  Mordred, on Cerdic's other side, could hear little, and after a while ceased trying to listen through the shouts and laughter of the troop, as Saxon and Briton tried to make themselves mutually understood. He and his neighbour, with gestures and grins, managed to exchange names: the red-haired thegn was called Bruning. A few of the Saxons — those who had spent all their lives in the federated territories of the Shore — knew enough of the others' language; these were mostly the older men; the younger men on both sides had to depend on goodwill and laughter to establish some sort of rapport. Agravain, scowling, rode apart with a small group of the younger Britons, who talked among themselves in low tones, and were ignored.

  Mordred, looking about him, found plenty to interest him in the landscape that very soon began, even in the scant miles traversed, to look foreign. Lacking an interpreter, he and Bruning contented themselves with exchanging smiles from time to time, and occasionally pointing to some feature that they passed. The fields here were differently tilled; the instruments used by the working peasants were strange, some crude, some ingenious. Such buildings as they passed were very different from the stone-built structures he knew; here little stone was used, but the huts and shippons of the peasants showed great skill in the working of wood. The grazing cattle and flocks looked fat and well cared for.

  A flock of geese, screaming, flapped across the road, sending the foremost of the horses rearing and plunging. The goosegirl, a flaxen child with round blue eyes and a lovely face aflame with blushes, scampered after them, waving her stick. Arthur, laughing, threw her a coin, and she called something in response, caught it, and ran off after her geese. The Saxons, it seemed, were not in awe of kings; indeed, the cavalcade that Agravain had angrily called a carnival now really began to bear that appearance. The younger men whistled and called after the running girl, who had kilted her long skirts up and was running as lightly as a boy, with a free display of long bare legs. Bruning, pointing, leaned across towards Mordred.

  "Hwæt! Fæger mægden!"

  Mordred nodded with a smile, then realized with surprise what had been slowly coming through to him now for some minutes. Through the shouting and laughter had come words here and there, and sometimes phrases, which, without consciously translating, he found himself understanding. "A fair maid! See!" The half-musical, half-guttural sounds were linked in his brain to images of his childhood: the smell of the sea, the tossing boats, the voices of fishermen, the beauty of the sharp-prowed ships that sometimes crossed the fishing grounds of the islanders; the big blond sailors who put into the Orcadian harbours in rough weather to shelter, or in fine weather to trade. He did not think they had been Saxons, but there must be many words and inflections common to Saxon and Norseman alike. He set himself to listen, and found sense coming back to him in snatches, as of poems learned in infancy.

  But, being Mordred, he said nothing, and gave no sign. He rode on, listening.

  Then they crossed the brow of a grassy hill, and the Saxon capital lay below them.

  Mordred's first thought, on sighting Cerdic's capital, was that it was little more than a crudely built village. His second was amusement at the distance he, the fisherman's son, had travelled since the days when an even cruder village in the islands had struck him dumb with excitement and admiration.

  The so-called capital of Cerdic was a large scattered collection of wooden buildings enclosed by a palisade. Within the palisade, centrally, stood the king's house, a big oblong structure, barnlike in size and made entirely of wood, with a steeply pitched roof of wattled thatch and a central vent for smoke. There was a door at either end of the hall, and windows, narrow and high, set at intervals along the walls. It was symmetrically built, and one would have said handsome, until memory recalled the gilded towers of Camelot and the great Roman-based stone structures of Caerleon or Aquae Sulis.

  The other houses, also symmetrically built but much smaller, clustered around the king's house, apparently at random. Among them, beside them, even alongside their walls, stood the sheds for the beasts. The open spaces between the buildings swarmed with hens, pigs and geese, and children and dogs played in and out of the wheels of ox-carts, or among the scattered trees where the woodpiles stood. The air smelled of dung and freshly mown grass and wood-smoke.

  The big gates stood wide open. The party rode through, under a cross-beam from which blew Cerdic's pennant, a slim, forked blue flag that cracked in the breeze like a whiplash. At the door of the hall stood Cerdic's queen, ready to receive the visitors into her house as her husband had received them into the kingdom's boundaries. She was almost as tall as her husband, crowned like him, and with her long flax-hair plaits bound with gold. She greeted Arthur, and after him Mordred and Cei, with the ceremonial kiss of welcome, and thereafter, to Mordred's surprise, accompanied the royal party into the hall. The rest of the troop stayed outside, where, in time, the distant shouting and the clash of metal and the hammering of hoofs indicated that the younger warriors, Saxons and British together, were competing in sport on the field outside the palisade.

  The royal party, with the interpreter in attendance, seated themselves beside the central hearth, where the fire, freshly piled, was not yet lighted. Two girls, like fair copies of Cerdic, came carrying jugs of mead and ale. The queen herself, rising, took the jugs from her daughters' hands and poured for the guests. Then the maidens went, but the queen remained, seating herself again on her lord's left.

  The talk, necessarily slowed by the need for translation, went on through the afternoon. For a beginning, the discussion kept mainly to home matters, trade and markets, and a possible revision, in the future, of the boundary between the kingdoms. Only as a corollary to this, the talk turned eventually on the possibility of mutual military aid. Cerdic was already conscious of the growing pressures being exerted against his countrymen in their ever-narrowing territory on the Continent. The East Saxons, more vulnerable than Cerdic's people, were already seeking alliances with the English between the Thames and the Humber. He himself had approached the Middle Saxons of Suthrige. When Arthur asked if he, Cerdic, had also explored an alliance with the South Saxons, whose kingdom, in the far south-east corner of Britain, was the nearest landfall for any ships from across the Narrow Sea, Cerdic was guarded. Since the death of the great leader of the South Saxons, Aelle, there had been no ruler of not
e. "Nithings" was the West Saxon king's expressive word. Arthur did not pursue the question, but turned to the news from the Continent. Cerdic had not heard of the death of Clodomir's children, and looked grave as he considered the probable changes that would ensue, and the increasingly hazardous position of Brittany, the only buffer state between the Shore territories of Britain and the threatened Frankish kingdoms. As the time wore on, it no longer seemed so outlandish an idea that at some time in the near future, Briton and Saxon might have to be at one in the defense of their country's shores.

  At length the talk came to a close. In the doorway of the hall the sunlight slanted low and mellow. From the field outside, the sounds of sport had died down. Cattle were lowing as they were driven in for milking, and the smell of wood fires sharpened the air. The breeze had dropped. The queen rose and left the hall, and presently servants came running to set the boards up for supper, and to thrust a torch into the kindling for the fire.

  Somewhere, a horn sounded. The warriors, Cerdic's and Arthur's together, came in still gay with their sport, and took their places, apparently at random, at the long tables, where, shouting as loudly as if still out on the open down, and hammering on the board with the handles of their daggers, they called for food and drink. The noise was tremendous. Arthur's Companions, after a few moments of deafened confusion, cheerfully joined in the tumult. Language ceased to matter. What was being said was more than clear to everyone. Then a fresh shouting arose as ale and mead were brought in, and after that the great trays of roasted meats, still smoking and sizzling from the ovens; and the Saxon thegns, who until then had been trying, with gestures and yells of laughter, to communicate, ceased abruptly and turned all their ferocious attention to eating and drinking. Someone handed Mordred a horn — it was polished like ivory and most beautifully mounted with gold — someone else filled it till it slopped over, then he in his turn had to give his full attention to his platter, which soon meant parrying his neighbours' efforts to pile his dish again and again with the best of the food.