“Thank you . . .” Artor whispered, but it was not his opponent to whom he was speaking. He swayed, and Medraut started forward, sword swinging high.
A smooth twist brought the king on guard, bringing up the Sword of the Defender two-handed to deflect Medraut’s blow. The clangor as the two blades met echoed across the vale. Artor’s knees bent slightly, the great sword drifting up to hover above his right shoulder.
“Why did you do this, Medraut? Why did you try to destroy Britannia?”
His son looked at him uncomprehending. “I wanted to rule—”
Artor shook his head. “The land cannot be ruled, only served.”
Medraut’s mouth twisted and he lunged. “You left her! You left me!”
For a moment the king hesitated, the truth of that accusation piercing more deeply than any enemy sword. Then strength surged up from the soil once more and he knew that he was still the Lady’s Champion.
Artor leaped back, sword sweeping down and to the side, knocking his son’s weapon away and spinning him so that for a moment they stood with shoulders touching, as if they met in the dance.
“I was promised everything, and then betrayed,” hissed Medraut. “I came to you, since my mother had cast me aside like a tool she no longer wanted to use. And you banished me to the barbarians and forgot me! I’ve had to fight for my life, my name. . . .” He whirled away, the rest hanging unspoken between them—for Guendivar. . . .
“Surrender and you shall rule the North,” said Artor, his breath coming fast.
“I could win it all yet, Father. . . .” Medraut advanced with a series of flashing blows that kept the king busy defending.
“Not while I live!” Artor knocked the younger man’s last stroke aside with a force that sent him reeling.
“You will die, at my hand, or the hand of time—” answered Medraut, panting. “The heirs of Britannia are young foxes, eager to gnaw out their own little kingdoms, and that will be the end of your dream.”
Instinctively Artor settled to guard, but his mind was whirling. He bore the Sword of the Defender, but what could a dead man defend? He looked up at the mocking face of his son. Men called Medraut the Perjurer, but surely Deceiver would be a better name, sent to tempt him to despair. And yet the power of that impossible moment of connection with the land still sang in his veins.
“Oh Medraut, is there room for nothing in your heart but hate?”
“You took the only thing I might have loved!” Medraut cried out in answer, and ran at him with wildly swinging sword.
Artor retreated, using all his skill to fend that blade away. The boy was a good swordsman, but he was battering with berserker fury as if he meant to obliterate, not merely kill. Forty years of experience kept the king’s weapon between him and that deadly blade. It was those same battle-trained reflexes, not Artor’s will, that halted Medraut’s charge at last with a stop-thrust that pierced through hauberk and breastbone and out the other side.
For a moment they stared into each other’s eyes. Then Medraut’s features contorted. His weapon slipped from his hand, and Artor felt the weight of the boy’s body begin to drag down the sword. He stepped back, and the blade slid free as Medraut fell, the bright blood—his son’s blood—staining the steel.
The air rang with silence.
“Father. . . .” A little blood was running from Medraut’s mouth. The king knelt beside him, laying down the Chalybe sword, reaching to ease off his son’s helm and smooth back the hair from his brow as if he had been a little child. Medraut’s eyes widened, meeting his father’s gaze unbarriered at last, shock transmuting gradually into an appalled understanding.
Then he twisted, hand clutching at his side. “It is not my blood,” he whispered, “that will consecrate the ground—”
He convulsed once more, thrusting the dagger that had been sheathed at his hip up beneath Artor’s mail. It seared along the old scar where Melwas had wounded the king long ago and stabbed upward into his groin.
For a moment all other awareness disappeared in a red wave of agony. When it began to recede, Artor looked down and saw that Medraut lay still and sightless, his face upturned to the sun.
Oh, Lady— thought the king, is this your sacrifice?
He could feel the warm seep of blood across his thigh and the beginnings of a deeper agony. Slowly he lowered himself to the earth beside the body of his son, vision flashing dark and bright with each pulse, fixing on the pebble that lay beside him. A glowing spiral spun within the stone. Artor’s fingers closed upon its solid certainty.
This is the king stone . . . the heart of Britannia. It was beneath my feet all along.
His hearing must be going too, he thought then, for his head rang with strange music . . . like Gaulish battle horns. . . .
Guendivar gasped and reached out to Peretur for support as pain stabbed upward through her womb.
“My lady, what is it? Are you ill?”
She tried to straighten, staring round at the men who had come with her to the marketplace. Blood and dust and sunlight filled her vision; she saw an old fortress on a hill.
“Camboglanna . . .” she whispered. “Artor has been wounded!”
As the words articulated her inner vision, she was aware of a great surge of mingled grief and exultation that seemed to rise from the very soil.
“Lady, the king told us to guard you here!” said Peretur in alarm.
She shook her head. “The battle is over. If you want to keep me safe, then follow, for go to him I will!” She started towards the stables, and after a moment the men came after her.
To Morgause, the moment was like a shadow on the sun, a shudder in the soil. She stood swaying in the road, suddenly finding it hard to breathe. Luguvalium lay a day and a half behind them. To left and right rose the outriders of the moors. Ahead, the Wall marched over the first of the crags, and brown dust stained the sky.
“What is it?” cried her priestesses. “What do you hear?”
“I hear a calling of ravens,” whispered Morgause, “I hear the groans of dying men. The blood of kings soaks into the soil. We must go quickly, if we are to get there in time!”
“In time for what?” asked Nest, hurrying after her, but Morgause did not reply.
Ninive stood weeping before the tumble of earth and stone where once a cliff had been. Oak and ash and thorn had disappeared beneath the landslip, and with them all trace of the Druid who had used her aid to perform his last and greatest act of magic, but from beneath the rubble, the little stream still trickled, singing to the stones.
Merlin had accomplished what he intended, but had he saved the king? She knew only that there had been a great shift in the fabric of reality. What would he want her to do? Ninive dried her tears and stood listening, and it seemed to her that in the whisper of the wind and the gurgle of the stream she heard his voice once more.
She picked up the bag in which she had carried their food, and began to follow the course of the Cam south, toward the Wall.
* * *
Consciousness returned slowly. Artor drew a very careful breath, wondering how long he had lain wounded for his body to have already begun to learn ways to avoid the pain. He could feel the wound as a dull ache in his lower belly, but his flesh held the memory of a throbbing agony.
People were talking in low voices nearby—someone must have survived. He must have wakened before, already fevered, for he had thought that Morgause was there, and Betiver. The king opened his eyes and blinked, recognizing a Roman hauberk and curling dark hair threaded with grey.
“My lord! You are with us again!” Betiver turned and knelt beside him, his fine features bronzed with campaigning and drawn with strain.
“And so are you,” answered Artor. “Old friend, what are you doing here?” He had been unconscious for some time, he thought, for his wound had been bandaged, and he was lying inside some roughly repaired building in the fortress.
“We could get no news—” Betiver said helplessly. “I th
ought you might need me. I came as swiftly as I could— dear God, if only I had come in time!”
“You did.” The king’s gaze moved around the room, seeing only Betiver’s men. “We won. . . .”
“The field was already yours when I got here,” said Betiver. “My men have scoured it, seeking survivors. A few of the rebels got away. Vortipor is alive, though wounded, and a few others—pitifully few.”
Artor drew a long sigh and winced as his belly began to ache again. “I saw Goriat fall . . .” he said.
Betiver nodded. “Morgause has gone out to look for him. We were grateful to have someone so skilled in leechcraft join us,” he added with reluctant appreciation. “It was she who dressed your wound.”
“My poor sister. She has lost all her sons . . .” said Artor. And so have I, he thought then, and the tide of grief that followed bore him once more down into the dark.
Once, as a child, she had been told the tale of Niobe, who had boasted too loudly of her children, and seen them taken by the gods. Now, thought Morgause as she searched the field of Camboglanna, she wept Niobe’s tears.
The dead lay scattered like chaff in a newly reaped field; ravens stalked among them, gleaning their share of the grisly harvest. Selgovae and Saxons lay sprawled together, Dumnonians and Demetians, men from every corner of Britannia, in death there was no distinction between Medraut’s rebels and those who had stayed loyal to Artor. This was not like the Saxon wars, when Britons had fought invaders from across the sea. There could be no winner in such a conflict as this had been, no matter which side claimed victory.
She had found Goriat early on. With him, she mourned Aggarban and Gwyhir and Gualchmai, but in a sense, she had lost them all a long time ago. The grief that kept her creeping from one body to another, turning them to peer at contorted faces, had been born when her youngest son left the Isle of Maidens, cursing her name.
That longest of days was beginning to draw to an end by the time she discovered Medraut. Betiver had said that his body had lain next to that of the king, but after Artor was taken up, the corpse must have been moved by the men who had served with the king in Gallia. It had not only been moved, she saw now, but hacked and slashed in posthumous vengeance so that without Betiver’s description she would not have known which wound had been made by the Chalybe sword.
She carried water from the river and bathed the body as once she had bathed her child. They had stripped Medraut as well as mutilating him, but she could still see that her son had grown into a beautiful man—fair in body, at least, if not in soul. Cleansed of blood, his face bore a familiar sneering smile.
“And whose fault was that?” she muttered as she covered him with her veil. “Surely you were my most successful creation, a weapon aimed and sharpened which has finally struck home.” He had pierced her to the heart as well.
“Is this all my doing?” Morgause gazed around her, shivering despite the warmth of the sun. “Ah, Medraut, even now I cannot hate you without hating myself as well!”
At the Isle of Maidens she had been kept too busy to think about the past; now it overwhelmed her. If she had had a blade, in that moment she might have executed her own self-judgment, but the fallen weapons had already been collected.
A raven fluttered to the ground nearby, its beak opening in a groan; in a moment two more followed it.
“You shall not have him!” Morgause exclaimed, and in their cries she heard an answer.
“I shall have all of them . . . from my bloody womb they are born, and in blood they return to me. Weep, my daughter, for all slain sons, and for all the mothers who will mourn them—weep with Me!”
The lamentations of the ravens rang around her, but the wail that rose from her belly to her breast to burst from her throat was far louder—a ullullation of mourning that echoed from the escarpment. Hearing it, men crossed themselves or flexed fingers in the sign of the Horns, looking over their shoulders.
But Morgause, when that cry had gone out of her, felt her own burden of grief a little lessened, knowing she did not mourn alone. Presently she heard the creak of wheels as men came with the cart to gather the corpses for the funeral pyre.
“Treat him with honor,” Morgause said harshly, as they bent to take up Medraut’s body, “for he came of the blood of kings.”
“Lady, will you return to the fortress?” asked the troop leader. “They said that the king has awakened and is in pain.”
The king . . . she thought numbly. Artor still needed her. She would have to live, at least for awhile.
“He is still alive?” Guendivar slid down from the horse and staggered as her muscles cramped from the long ride. torchlight chased distorted shadows across the yard of the fortress. It was after midnight, but she had insisted they continue without stopping, desperate to reach Artor.
“The king lives,” said Betiver, “but—”
She stumbled past him up the steps of the praetorium, where the roof had been repaired with rough thatching. An oil-lamp cast a fitful light on the sleeping man and the woman who sat by him. At Guendivar’s step, she rose, and the queen stiffened, recognizing in the drawn features a reflection of Medraut.
Morgause stepped back abruptly, as if she had seen that moment of recoil. “You will wish to be with him. There is no more I can do for now.” With a rustle of draperies she left the room.
The queen sank down upon the bench and took Artor’s hand. It was warm, as if within, the solstice fires still burned. She laid her own fingers, chilled by her ride, upon his brow, and saw the flickers of pain that moved beneath his dreaming fade, and the firm lips within the curling beard curve in a little smile.
Presently his eyes opened. “I dreamed I was in Demetia . . . the Irish campaign. But you are here. . . .”
Guendivar nodded. She had been with him in Demetia too, but not like this, her soul seeking his like a homing bird.
“And I am here”— Artor grimaced —“for awhile. . . .” She started to protest, but he shook his head. “I always expected to die in battle, but I had hoped for a clean kill.”
“It is only the wound fever,” she said desperately. “We healed you before!”
“Well, we shall see. . . .” His voice trailed off. “God knows, now that we are together at last, I want. . . .” His eyes closed. She bent over him in panic, but it was only sleep.
She set her arms about him, calling on the goddess who had filled her at Beltain, and presently there came to her, not the exultant sexual power that had awakened the king’s manhood, but a brooding, maternal tenderness—Brigantia, comforting her fallen champion, her most beloved child.
Through the remaining hours of darkness, a little longer than the night before, Guendivar dozed, cradling her king in her arms. When the light of morning began to filter through the thatching, she heard voices outside and, looking up, saw Ninive. As the young woman entered the room, Artor stirred.
“You were with Merlin—” said the king. In the strengthening daylight, Guendivar could see all too clearly how the fever had already begun to burn his flesh away.
Ninive nodded and came to the foot of the bed, looking like a wood spirit in her tattered cape, with leaves still caught in her hair.
“We were in the Forest of Caledon. He wanted to come to you—”
“But something happened. He touched me during the battle. What did he do?” the king asked harshly.
“Age came on him suddenly, as it does, in the wild . . .” Ninive said with difficulty. “He used the last of his strength to make a great magic. And when it was over I felt him all around me, as if he had not gone away, but become present everywhere in the world.”
“Perhaps it must be so,” Artor murmured then. “It was ever the way for the prophet to go before the king. . . .”
Later that morning, when the king had slipped once more into uneasy sleep, Guendivar consented to walk out into the sunlight and take a little food. They had set up a rude table and there was some thin ale and barley bread and hard cheese. Pr
esently, she was joined by Ninive and Morgause.
“How bad is the king’s wound?” asked the girl.
Guendivar fixed her eyes on the broken gate, through which she could see the edge of the bluff and the gleam of river beyond, as if she could bear to hear the answer but not to read it in the older woman’s eyes.
“Bad enough, if the blade has only penetrated the layers of muscle that sheathe the belly. But if it opened the gut . . .” Morgause shook her head. “There is nothing I can do.”
Guendivar turned. “You are the Lady of the Lake! We must take him there,” she said desperately. “The Cauldron healed him before!”
Morgause stared at her as if, sunk in her own sorrow, she had forgotten who she was.
“Could he endure the jolting of a horselitter for so long?” asked Ninive, looking from one to the other.
“He will die if he stays here,” Morgause said slowly. “Perhaps, if a coracle would float this far upstream, we could take him by water part of the way.”
“We will do it!” Guendivar stood up suddenly. “I am the Tiernissa, and even Betiver will obey!”
“You are the Tiernissa, queen in the realm of men,” said Morgause, something kindling in her face that had not been there before, “as I am the Hidden Queen, the White Raven who reigns in the country of the soul.”
“Among my mother’s people I might be counted a queen as well,” said Ninive, “though the forest is where I rule.”
“With three queens to care for him, surely Artor will be healed!” exclaimed Guendivar, and in that moment, when the sun shone so brightly on the hills, she could even believe it true.
As the coracle began its journey downriver, Morgause saw two ravens lift from the old thorn tree and fly away before them. On the next day, there were a dozen, and after that, always at least that many, circling the boat and flying ahead or behind it.
Guendivar would stiffen when she saw them, as if to defend the king, though the birds showed no signs of hunger. The warriors who paced them along the bank had another interpretation, and said that Lugos and the Lady of Battles had sent their birds to guard their champion. Ninive said it was Woden, who had given Merlin his Spear.
The Hallowed Isle Book Four Page 18