by Joan Wolf
“I know.” The wariness mixed with bewilderment. “Gawain did tell me once that I looked like the king, but I had no idea of how close the resemblance was.”
His bewilderment was genuine, she thought. He really had no idea of who he was.
Gwenhwyfar knew. He was Arthur’s son. He had to be. There could be no other explanation for such a resemblance. Nor had Arthur been prepared for it. Clever as he was at hiding his feelings, he had not been able to hide his shock at the sight of Mordred.
The boy was Arthur’s son. By Morgause? Gwenhwyfar did not think so. All her feminine instincts told her that her fastidious husband was unlikely ever to have been attracted by Morgause’s voluptuous charms. The knife edge of pain ripped through her once more. She thought she knew who Mordred’s mother was. Not Morgause, but Morgause’s sister. The witch. Morgan.
The boy was gazing at her with Arthur’s eyes. There was more in those eyes than bewilderment, however. There was also the dazzled wonder that was most men’s tribute to her extraordinary beauty. It was not a look she had ever seen on Arthur’s face, but it was there, unmistakably, on his son’s.
She forced herself to meet those uncannily familiar eyes with a semblance of equanimity. “It is rather a striking likeness. I wonder that your mother never noticed it.”
“My mother has never met the high king,” came the simple, devastating reply.
“That explains it, then,” said Gwenhwyfar through stiff lips. She turned to the door. “I wish you a good night’s rest, Prince. Ask the servant for anything you may need.”
“Good night, my lady,” came the boy’s polite reply. At least he did not have Arthur’s voice, she thought as she closed the door of his room behind her.
She retraced her steps to her own rooms, looked in quickly on Morgause, then sent Olwen on one last errand. She was to tell Arthur’s body servant, Gereint, that the queen wished to see the king as soon as possible.
She waited for two hours, until the dinner was long finished, before she sent Olwen with another message.
The reply was from Gereint, not Arthur. The king could not come to his wife tonight. The king had ridden out of Camelot an hour ago. Gwenhwyfar knew instantly where he had gone. To Avalon.
Arthur was in as little doubt as Gwenhwyfar as to Mordred’s identity. As he cantered Ruadh through the light July night, his mind was working, remembering, adding, subtracting, and coming up with its inevitable conclusion.
No child of Morgause’s and Lot’s would look like Mordred.
It was not Morgause who had borne a son fifteen years ago, but Morgan.
That was why she went so faithfully every year to Lothian. Not to see Morgause, but to see Mordred.
Mordred was his son. His son and Morgan’s.
Why had she never told him?
The last of the lingering July sunset had faded from the sky when Arthur rode into the courtyard of Avalon. All was quiet. The household, including Morgan, rose very early. It was after eleven o’clock now; they had probably all been abed for an hour.
Arthur rode Ruadh to the stable, woke up one of the grooms who slept in the attic, and told him to take care of the horse. Then he walked back to the house.
The night air was cool and he wore only a short-sleeved tunic, but he was not chilled. His mind was conjuring up for him another night, another time he had ridden alone to Avalon. He had been sixteen then, not much older than the boy at Camelot. He was thirty-one now, and the emotions tearing at him had not changed much over the years.
It was summer and all the shutters were open. Arthur went around to the back of the house to the window he knew was Morgan’s. It was slightly ajar. The high king of all Britain pulled it open, levered himself up with his hands, and climbed into the room.
He landed very softly on the floor inside, too softly to awaken any sleeper. But even though the room was dark, she was not asleep. “Arthur?” she said in a soft, worried voice.
“Yes. You knew I was coming?” He walked to the table where he knew there was a lamp. She heard him pick up a tinder box.
“I knew something had happened to distress you. A few hours ago. I didn’t know if you were coming here, though.” The lamp was lit and he turned to look at her. She was dressed in a thin, white round-necked gown, and her bare throat and arms were round and slender as a young girl’s. A strand of hair had caught in her eyelashes and she pushed it out of the way. She had been lying down; the light cover was pulled up to her waist and the pillow was dented. But she looked wide-awake.
“Morgause came to Camelot tonight,” he said. “She brought Mordred with her.” He watched her face change.
There was a very long silence. “I’m sorry. I never meant you to find out this way.”
His composure cracked. “How could you, Morgan? How could you have done this to me? Kept him from me? Not told me? And then to let me meet him like that, in front of everyone!”
She turned her face away as if she couldn’t bear to look at him. “I didn’t know, Arthur. I didn’t know they were coming to Camelot.”
“Well, they did.” His voice was bitter. “Gawain brought them into the dining room. I saw him for the first time in the full view of all my officers.”
She flinched, picturing the scene. He walked from the table to the foot of her bed. She felt his eyes on her face. He said, “I always swore that no child of mine would ever be reared the way I was.”
Her eyes lifted instantly. “He wasn’t! I would never have let that happen! He has been happy, Arthur. Please believe that.”
“I don’t know what to believe.” He was dark under the eyes and white about the mouth. “I still can’t believe that you did this to me.”
She drew a long breath. “I did it because it was the only thing I could do,” she answered steadily. “We could not marry. You know the reasons for that. Then I discovered I was to have a child.” She made her voice stay quiet and dispassionate, refusing to let him see the anguish that had filled her then, that filled her now. “Morgause saw it first, actually. I was too stupid, or too unhappy, to understand the signs. She saw it and she told Father. He wanted me to marry Cai.”
She saw, and perfectly understood, the look that flickered across his face. Her quiet voice continued. “I refused. I refused also to consider trying to abort the child. Father then said my only other choice was to go away, have the child in secret, and give it to someone else to rear.” It was so hard to say all this. It brought back the pain too vividly. She cleared her throat. “When I refused to do that too, Father said he would send for you.” She met his eyes. “He was ready to do that, Arthur. You must not blame this . . . situation on him.”
“You wouldn’t.” His voice was expressionless.
“I wouldn’t. I said that I would give up my child only if I could be assured he would be loved and cared for. I could see how Morgause was with her own children. When she said she would take the baby and pretend he was hers, I agreed.”
The lamplight was shining up under his face, lighting it from below, making the cheekbones look higher, the cheeks more hollow than they really were. “You told me you could not have children.”
“I can have no more children. Mordred’s birth was very hard. It did something to my insides.”
His head snapped up as if he had been punched in the jaw. “What do you mean, his birth was very hard?” Then, as she did not answer: “God. Your mother died in childbirth, didn’t she?”
“Arthur—” she began, but he cut in furiously.
“Was Merlin insane? What was he thinking of? He sent you off into some remote corner of Wales. You might have died!”
“Well, I didn’t. It was Morgause who got me through, actually. She was better than any doctor.”
He came around the bed and sat down. “I never knew.” He seemed to find that incredible. “You went through all that, and I never knew.” He found he was beginning to shake.
“I didn’t want you to know.”
“I don’t understand
.” Even his teeth were chattering. “That time in Calleva, when I almost died. You said there was work for me. Then you hid your thoughts. You were thinking of him, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
She looked at him out of grave brown eyes. “I didn’t tell you because I knew what you would do. You would never have left him in Lothian, Arthur. You would have acknowledged him and made him your heir.”
He stopped his teeth from chattering by sheer force of will. “He is my heir. I have no other son.”
Her eyes closed very briefly. “I know. And I am sorry.”
“Well, I’m not.” His eyes blazed. “I’m glad Gwenhwyfar has no children. I want our son to be high king after me.” He stared at her, his mouth hard. “Why wouldn’t you marry me, Morgan? Why did you send me to Gwenhwyfar? It didn’t matter that you could have no more children. We had a son. We could have had him made legitimate.”
“You don’t understand,” she began to say.
“No,” he shot back with corrosive bitterness. “I don’t understand. I wish to God I did.”
“It is really very simple,” she replied, not giving an inch before his anger. “I was not thinking of your need in this, Arthur. I was thinking of his. It was better for Mordred to stay in Lothian. He was happy. At least I could give him that, a happy childhood.”
There was silence. All that Morgan could hear was the tapping of a loose shutter as it bumped against the house in the soft night breeze.
“He would have been happy with you and me,” he said at last. His narrow nostrils were still pinched with temper, but his voice was quieter.
“No.” The shutter was tapping harder now. “He was better off in Lothian with Morgause. Happier. Safer. As you were happier and safer in Avalon than you would have been with Uther and Igraine.”
“I was happy in Avalon because I had you.”
She bowed her ruffled head. “I know.”
He reached out his hand to cover hers where it lay on top of the cover over her lap. He lifted it and kissed her palm once, hard, and then dropped it. “You’re right,” he said. “I would not have left him in Lothian. I have never been any good at giving up what is mine.”
Her hand tingled from the violence of his caress. “I have had a lot of practice,” she said.
He moved then and she was in his arms. She closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against his shoulder. He put his mouth to her hair. “Was it very bad?” he asked.
She had never talked about that time with anyone, but she had never forgotten it. “Yes,” she said. “Very bad. The hardest thing I have ever done in my life.” His arms tightened. “Even when he was a baby,” she added, very low, “he looked like you.”
It was very quiet. She could feel his heart beating against her temple. Someone must have secured the shutter, for it was no longer tapping against the house.
“He must be told the truth,” Arthur said.
Morgan did not reply. She had always known what would happen should Arthur discover Mordred.
“He thinks himself the son of Lot and Morgause?”
“Yes.”
“Who else knows the truth?”
“No one but Morgause and Pellinore.”
Her face was still against his shoulder. She turned her head a little and settled more comfortably into his arms. He cradled her easily. “Morgan,” he said, his lips against the top of her head, “he must be told.”
She sighed. “Yes, I know. Poor boy. He must be perfectly bewildered by you.”
“Mmm.” He was thinking of something else. “I will tell Mordred the truth. That is his right. But it will be best to let everyone else go on thinking that Morgause is his mother.”
He felt her head move under his lips and looked down into her upturned face. “But why?” she asked in bewilderment. “Surely it can make no difference to the world whether his mother is Morgause or me.”
“Think,” said Arthur gently. “If the world knows that you and I have produced a son, then it will know the reason for my visits to Avalon.”
Her eyes widened. “I had not thought of that.”
He smoothed her hair back from her cheek. “I shall talk to Morgause before I see Mordred.”
“But you have never even met Morgause. How can you expect people to believe you had a child with her?”
“Who knows with certainty that we never met?” he returned. Morgan frowned in an effort of memory. “I suppose that is true, but . . .”
“I will not be expected to furnish the date and the time,” he said with assurance. “Don’t worry about it. It will be enough if I acknowledge Mordred as my son and Morgause as his mother. No one will question my word”
And no one would, she thought. You did not ask the high king anything he did not want to be asked. She looked up at him now, trying to see him as he would appear to someone who did not know him. His thick black hair was ruffled from his ride through the night and he wore no jewelry, no mark of rank save the purple border that trimmed the neck and sleeves of his tunic. Yet no one, seeing him even in this casual guise, could doubt for a moment who he was. Arthur wore power as if it were an invisible cloak. He had worn it ever since she could remember. It was stronger now than it had been when he was a boy, but even then it had been a part of him.
It was a quality his son did not possess. She would never tell him, but that was the reason she had tried to keep Mordred safe in Lothian. Mordred was the dearest boy in the world, but he would never make a king.
Now that Arthur had solved for himself the problem of Mordred, his mind turned to other things. “Were you ever tempted,” he asked, “to marry Cai?”
She smiled faintly and shook her head.
The pinched look had come back to his nostrils. “You gave me to Gwenhwyfar. I fear I am not so generous.”
She reached up with gentle fingers and touched his mouth. “I know.”
“You should have run away with me fifteen years ago. There would have been no need for all this deception, these secrets . . .”
“And there would have been no battle of Badon, either,” she returned firmly. “However the world may judge us, Arthur, at least we two will always know that we acted in the best interests of our country.”
“You did,” he returned. “I wanted to run away to Armorica.”
“You would have been miserable. You were born to be Britain’s king.”
“You are more Merlin’s pupil than I, Morgan,” he said somberly.
The room was completely dark now, the lamp the only pool of light. Morgan glanced toward the window. “Arthur. You must return to Camelot before morning. If people know that you came here tonight, it will not be possible to keep my identity a secret.”
“All right.” His light eyes were narrow in his concentrated dark face. “I’ll go.” He reached for her and, with a swift and fluid movement, brought the two of them to lie on the bed. “But not yet.”
Chapter 32
ARTHUR arrived back at Camelot before dawn. He had to go through the gate, of course, and the guards who opened it for him would tell their fellows that the king had ridden out this night, but no one could know for certain where he had gone. Nor was anyone likely to ask him.
He unsaddled Ruadh himself and put the chestnut in his stall. Then he walked from the stable to the palace, which he entered by way of the open window in his bedroom. He thought, with a flash of amusement, that he was getting rather old to be spending so much time climbing in and out of bedroom windows. Once inside, he stripped, threw his clothes on a chair, fell into bed, and went instantly to sleep.
Gereint woke him three hours later with a surprised “My lord! I did not know you had returned!”
Arthur half-opened his eyes and regarded his young body servant. “I apologize for not checking in with you, Gereint.”
The boy grinned. As he began to pick up the clothes Arthur had thrown in a heap on the chair, he said, “The queen wished to see you last night
, my lord.”
At that Arthur opened his eyes fully and sat up. He rubbed his head, yawned, and stretched. Gereint watched with admiration as the muscles in the king’s shoulders and arms flexed under the smooth brown skin. “I want a bath,” Arthur said. The boy’s eyes moved to the king’s face. All its humor had vanished. “First a bath,” Arthur repeated. “Then I will see the queen.”
The palace did not have a private bath wing as did Avalon. There was no one left in Britain skilled enough to install the elaborate piping required for a traditional Roman bath. But Arthur had been brought up with the Roman ideal of cleanliness, and even in the coldest weather he insisted on bathing in the big wooden tub that had to be filled and emptied by hand.
After he had bathed and shaved and dressed, Arthur had his usual breakfast of bread and fruit. Then he sent Gereint to the queen’s rooms to ask if his wife would receive him.
She would. It was still very early and the little hall was filled with servants carrying water and breakfast to the various bedrooms. Arthur crossed the hall and entered the door that led to the queen’s suite of rooms. Olwen was waiting for him in the anteroom. “The queen is in her sitting room, my lord,” she said, and Arthur nodded and walked down the corridor, a faint line between his brows. He hoped Gwenhwyfar was not going to ask where he had been last night.
Gwenhwyfar was alone, standing beside a small marble-topped table that held a particularly unusual brass lamp that had come from Rome. It had once graced Igraine’s chambers at Venta. For a brief, vivid moment the sight of the lamp conjured up his mother for him and he could see her quite clearly: the narrow, fine-boned face, the winged brows and dark blue eyes. A hawk in a cage—that was what she had always put him in mind of. His eyes moved slowly from the lamp to the woman standing beside it.
Gwenhwyfar was dressed in a pale yellow tunic and gown and the glow of her hair was brighter than the polished brass of Igraine’s lamp. She was paler than usual; she did not look as if she had slept well. She regarded him silently, waiting for him to speak first.