by Mary Stewart
For all his caution, he found Gawain awake, up on an elbow, and reaching for his dagger.
"Who's that?"
"Mordred. Keep your voice down. It's all right."
"Where've you been? I thought you were in bed and asleep."
Mordred did not reply. He had a habit of quenching silences. He had discovered that if you failed to answer an awkward question, people rarely asked it twice. He did not know that this was a discovery normally only made in later life, and by some weaker natures not at all. He crossed to his bedplace, and, once hidden by the buttress, dropped his bundle on the bed, and his cloak after it. Gawain was not to know that under the cloak he had been fully dressed.
"I thought I heard voices," whispered Gawain. "They've set a guard on the door. I was talking to him."
"Oh." Gawain, as Mordred calculated, did not sound particularly interested. He probably did not realize that it was the first time in Rheged that such a guard had been set. He would be assuming, too, that Mordred had merely been out to the privy. He lay back. "That must have been what woke me. What's the time?"
"Must be well after midnight." Mordred, winding a kerchief round his injured hand, said softly: "And we have to make an early start in the morning. Best get some sleep now. Good night."
After a while Mordred slept, too. Half a league away, in the edge of the vast tract of woodland that was called the Wild Forest, a young wildcat settled into the crotch of an enormous pine tree and began washing its fur clean of the smell of captivity.
12
IN THE MORNING IT WAS APPARENT that Nimuë's warning had been extended to their escort. The soldiers saw to it that the Orkney party stayed together, and, with the greatest possible tact, made the close guardianship seem an honour. Morgause took it as such, and so did the four younger princes, who rode at ease, talking gaily with the guard and laughing, but Mordred, with a good horse under him and the open stretches of mainland moor beckoning from either side of the road, fretted and was silent.
All too soon they reached the harbour. The first thing to be noticed was that the Orc rode alone at the wharfside. The Sea Dragon, explained the escort's captain, had suffered only slight storm damage, so had held on her way south; he and the armed escort were to sail with the party in the Orc. Morgause, annoyed, but beginning to be apprehensive and so not daring to show it, acquiesced perforce, and they boarded the ship. This was now a little too crowded for comfort, but the winds had abated, and the passage out of the Ituna Estuary and southward along the coast of Rheged was smooth and even enjoyable.
The boys spent their time on deck, watching the hilly land slide past. Gulls slanted and cried behind the ship. Once they threaded a fleet of fishing boats, and once saw, in a small inlet of the hilly coast, some men on ponies herding cattle ("Probably stolen," said Agravain, sounding approving rather than otherwise), but apart from that, no sign of life. Morgause did not appear. The sailors taught the boys to tie knots, and Gareth tried to play on a little flute one of them had made from reeds. They all improvised fishing lines, and had some success, and in consequence ate good meals of fresh-baked fish. The princes were in wild spirits at the adventure, and at the dazzling prospect, as they saw it, in store for them. Even Mordred managed at times to forget the cloud of fear. The only fly in the ointment was the silence of the escort. The boys questioned the soldiers — the princes with innocent curiosity, Mordred with careful guile — but the men and their officers were as uncommunicative as the royal envoy had been. About the High King's orders or plans for their future they learned nothing.
So for three days. Then, with the ship's master cocking a worried eye aloft at the suddenly moody canvas, the Orc put into Segontium, on the coast of Wales just across from Mona's Isle.
This was a much bigger place than the little Rheged port. Caer y n'a Von, or Segontium, as it had been in Roman times, was a big military garrison, recently rebuilt to at least half its old strength. The fortress lay on the stony hillside above the town, and beyond that again rose the foothills and then the cloud-holding heights of Y Wyddfa, the Snow Hill. To seaward, across a narrow channel as blue in the sunshine as sapphire, lay the golden fields and magic stones of Mona, isle of druids.
The boys lined the ship's rail, staring and eager. At length Morgause came out of her cabin. She looked pale and ill, even after such a smooth and easy voyage. ("Because she's a witch, you see," said Gareth, proudly, to the escort's captain.) When the ship's master told her that they must wait in harbour for a change of wind, she said thankfully that she would not sleep on board, and her chamberlain was sent across to engage rooms at the wharfside inn. This was a prosperous, comfortable place, and good rooms were forthcoming. The party went cheerfully on shore.
They were there for four days. The queen kept to her rooms with the women. The boys were allowed to explore the town, or, still carefully watched, to go down to the shore to hunt for crabs and shellfish. The second time they set out, Mordred, as if on an impulse of boredom, turned back. Though he did not say so within his brothers' hearing, he let the two guards see that crab-hunting offered no amusement to a boy who had done it for a living only a few years ago. He left them to it, and went alone into the town, then, hiding his eagerness, sauntered at an easy pace along the track that climbed away from the houses and led past the fortress walls towards the distant heights of Y Wyddfa.
The air was dazzlingly clear after the night's frost. The stones were already warm. He sat down. To any watcher he would appear to be enjoying the view and the sunshine. In fact he was looking carefully about him at the prospect of escape.
Above him, in the distance, a boy tended a flock of sheep. Their tracks seamed the face of the hill. Higher, beyond the slopes of stony pasture, lay a wood, the outskirts of the forest that swept up to clothe the flanks of the Snow Hill. A gap in the trees showed where a road led eastward.
There lay the way. The road would surely join the famous Sarn Elen, the causeway that led down to Deva and the inland kingdoms. He could lose himself there, easily. He had all his money on him, and, with last night's frost as an excuse, had brought his cloak.
A pebble rattled on the path. He looked round, to see, barely a dozen paces away, the two guards standing, at ease, ostensibly gazing idly into the distance towards the beach below the town. But their pose was alert, and from time to time their glances came his way.
It was the same two men who had accompanied the princes to the shore. Now, small in the distance, he could see his brothers, easily recognizable among the other crab-catchers on the beach. He looked for their escort, and saw none.
The men had left the other boys to their pastime, and had followed him quietly up the hillside. The conclusion was inescapable. The guards were for him alone.
An emotion that the caged wildcat would have recognized swelled burstingly in Mordred's breast, and into his throat. He wanted to shout, to lash out, to run.
To run. He jumped to his feet. Instantly the men were moving, casually, towards him. They were young and fit. He could never outdistance them. He stood still.
"Time to be going back, young sir," said one of them pleasantly. "Nearly dinner time, I reckon."
"Your brothers are going in," said the other, pointing. "Look, sir, you can see them from here. Shall we go down now?"
Mordred's face was still as stone. His eyes betrayed nothing of the emotion that filled him. Something that no wild animal — and few men — would have understood kept him silent and apparently indifferent. In two deep and steadying breaths he willed the fear and with it the furious disappointment to spill from him. He could almost feel it draining from his fingertips like blood. In its place came the faintest tremor of released tension, and then, into the emptiness, the calm of his habitual control.
He nodded to the men, said something distant and polite, and walked back to the inn between them.
He tried again next day.
The princes, tired of the shore and the town, were avid to visit the great fortress on the hillside, but this their
mother would not consider. Indeed, the escort's captain said flatly that even princes of Orkney would not be allowed within the gates. The place was fortified and always held in readiness.
"For what?" asked Gawain.
The man nodded at the sea.
"Irish?"
"Picts, Irish, Saxons. Anyone."
"Is King Maelgon here himself?"
"No."
"Which is Macsen's Tower?" The idle-sounding question came from Mordred.
"Whose tower?" demanded Agravain.
"Macsen's. Someone spoke of it yesterday." The someone had been one of his guards, who had remarked that the site of the tower was well up on the hillside, not far below the wood.
The captain pointed. "It's up there. You can't see it now, though, it's a ruin."
"Who was Macsen?" asked Gareth.
"Do they teach you nothing in Orkney?" The man was indulgent. "He was Emperor of Britain, Magnus Maximus, a Spaniard by birth—"
"Of course we know that," interrupted Gawain. "We are related to him. He was Emperor of Rome, and it was his sword that Merlin raised for the High King: Caliburn, the King's sword of Britain. Everyone knows that! Our mother is descended from him, through King Uther."
"Then should we not visit the tower?" asked Mordred. "It's not inside the fortress, so surely anyone can go? Even if it's ruined—"
"Sorry." The captain shook his head. "Too far. Against orders."
"Orders?" Gawain was beginning to bristle, but Agravain spoke across him, rudely, to Mordred.
"Anyway, why should you want to go? You're not Macsen's kin! We are! We are royal through our mother as well."
"Then if I am bastard Lothian, you can count yourselves bastard Macsen," snapped Mordred, fear and tension breaking suddenly into fury, and careless for once of his tongue.
He was safe enough. The twins, loyal to their boyhood rule of silence where their mother was concerned, would never have thought of repeating the insult to Morgause. Their methods were more direct. After a startled pause of sheer surprise, they yelled with rage and fell on Mordred, and the pent-up energies of seaboard suddenly exploded in a very pretty dog-fight all round the inn yard. After they had been pulled apart and then beaten for fighting, the queen was so angry at the disturbance that she forbade any more excursions from the inn. So no one got to Macsen's Tower, and the boys had to content themselves with knucklebones and mock fights and story-telling; children's ploys, said Mordred, this time with open contempt, still smarting, and stayed away.
The next day, quite suddenly in the evening, the wind changed, and blew strongly again from the north. Under the watchful eye of the escort the party re-embarked, and the Orc made quickly south with a steady wind until she could turn in from the open weather to the quiet waters of the Severn Sea. The water was like glass. "Right to the Glass Isle," said the master, "I do assure you." And the shallow-draughted Orc did indeed sail in on an estuary mirror-smooth, with the oars out for the last stretch to take the little ship clear up to the wharf of Ynys Witrin, the Isle of Glass, almost in the shadow of the palace walls of Melwas, its king.
• • •
Melwas's palace was little more than a large house set in the flat meadowland rimming the largest of the three sister islands called Ynys Witrin. Two of the islands were hills, low and green, that rose gently from the encircling water. The third was the Tor, a high, cone-shaped hill symmetrical as an artefact, and girdled at its base with apple orchards where wisps of smoke proclaimed the cottages of the village that was Melwas's capital. It towered above the surrounding water-logged flatland of the Summer Country like a great beacon. This, in fact, was one of its functions; a beacon turret stood at the very top of the Tor, the nearest signal point to Camelot itself. From that summit, the boys were told, those walls and shining towers might be seen quite close and clearly, across the glassy reaches of the Lake.
King Melwas's own fortress lay just below the Tor's summit. The approach to it was a winding road, steeply cut from the gravel of the hill. In winter, men said, the mud made it all but impossible to get to the top. But then in winter there was no fighting. The king and his company stayed in the comfort of the lakeside mansion, and their days were filled with hunting, which was mostly, in that sodden Summer Country, wild-fowling in the marshes. These stretched away to southward, with their glinting waters only occasionally broken by the willow islands and the alder-set reed-beds where the marsh-dwellers had built their raised hovels.
King Melwas received the party kindly. He was a big, brown-bearded man, with a high colour and a red, full-lipped mouth. His attitude to Morgause was one of open admiration. He greeted her with the ceremonial kiss of welcome, and if this was a shade too prolonged, Morgause made no objection. When she presented her sons the king was warm in his welcome of them, and rather warmer in his praise of the woman who had borne so handsome a tribe. Mordred, as always, was presented last. If, during the formal greetings, the king's look came back rather too often to the tall boy standing behind the other princes, no one but the boy himself seemed to notice. Then Melwas, with another lingering look, turned back to Morgause, with the news that a courier awaited her from the High King.
"A courier?" Morgause was sharp. "To me, the King's sister? You must mean one of his knights? With an escort for us?"
But no; it seemed that the go-between was merely one of the royal couriers, who, waiting duly on Morgause, gave Arthur's message briefly and with little ceremony. Morgause and her party were to remain on Ynys Witrin until the following day, when they were to ride, with an escort sent by Arthur, to Camelot. There the King would receive them in the Round Hall.
The younger boys, excited and barely controllable, noticed nothing amiss, but Gawain and Mordred could see how anger fought with growing apprehension in her, as she questioned the man sharply.
"He said nothing more, madam," repeated the courier. "Only that he desired your presence tomorrow in the Round Hall. Until then, you will stay here. The, Lady Nimuë, madam? No, she has not yet returned from the north. That is all I know."
He bowed and went. Gawain, puzzled and inclined to be angry, started to speak, but his mother waved him to silence, and stood for a while biting her lip and thinking. Then she turned quickly to Gabran.
"Have them call my women. They are to unpack our clothes, and lay out the white robe for me, and the scarlet cloak. Now, yes, now, man! Do you think I will stay here tamely overnight, and go at his bidding to the Round Hall tomorrow? Do you not know what that is? It's Arthur's council chamber, where judgments are given. Oh, yes, I have heard of that hall, with its 'Perilous Chair' for the wrong-doers and those with grievances against the High King!"
"But what peril can there be for you? You have done him no wrong," said Gabran quickly.
"Of course not!" snapped Morgause. "Which is why I will not go like a suppliant or a wrong-doer, to be received in front of the Council by my own brother! I will go now, tonight, while he is in hall at supper with the Queen and all the court. Let us see then if he intends to deny her state to the mother of—" She stopped, and apparently changed what she had been going to say. "—To his sister and his sister's sons."
"Madam, will they let you go?"
"I am not a prisoner. How can they stop me, without letting people see that I am ill used? Besides, the King's troop has gone back to Camelot, has it not?"
"Yes, madam, but King Melwas—"
"After I am dressed, you may ask King Melwas to come and see me."
Gabran turned rather reluctantly to go.
"Gabran." He stopped and turned. "Take the boys with you. Tell the women to get them ready. Their court clothes. I will see to it that Melwas gives us horses and an escort." Her lips thinned. "As long as we are guarded, Arthur cannot hold him accountable. In any case, that is Melwas's danger, not ours. Now go. You will not ride with us. You will follow with the rest tomorrow."
Gabran hesitated, then, catching her eye, bowed his head and went from the room.
It was not
hard to guess what sort of persuasion she used with Melwas. In the event, she got her way. By the brief autumnal sunset the little party was riding across the causeway that led eastwards across the Lake. Morgause rode a pretty grey mare, richly harnessed with green and scarlet, and chiming with bells. Mordred, to his great surprise, was given a handsome black horse, well matched with the one Gawain rode. The armed escort sent by Melwas clattered along, strung out alongside them on the narrow causeway. At their backs the sun set in a furnace of molten brass that died slowly to burnt green and purple. There was a chill to the air, a touch of frost coming with the blue shadows of twilight.
The horses' hoofs scrunched up to a ridge of gravel, and then the road lay ahead, a pale strip leading through the watery wilderness of reeds and alders. Duck and wading birds fled upwards with a clatter, the water rippling back from their wakes like melted metal. Mordred's horse shook its head and the bridle rang with silver. In spite of himself he felt his heart lift suddenly with excitement. Then all at once someone exclaimed and pointed.
Ahead, at the summit of a thickly rising forest, their bannered pinnacles catching the last of the sunset and flaming up into the evening sky like torches, rose the towers of Camelot.
13
IT WAS A CITY SET ON A HILL. Caer Camel was flat-topped and very wide, but it stood up as conspicuously as the Tor in the midst of that level or low-rolling countryside. Its steep sides were ridged, horizontally, as if a gigantic plough had been driven round the hill. These ridges were revetments and ditches, designed to hinder attackers. At the crest of the ringed hillside the fortress walls circled the summit like the crown on a king's head. At two points, north-east and south-west, the massive defense works were pierced by gates.
Morgause's party approached from the south-west, towards the entrance called the King's Gate. They crossed a small winding river, then followed the road as it curved steeply upwards through thick trees. At the top, set in the corner of Camelot's outer walls, stood the massive double gate, open still but guarded. They halted while the escort's captain rode forward to exchange words with the officer of the watch.