But still he wanted to stave off the moment if he could.
“If it’s winter you fear, let me take you back to the grange,” he offered. “I can keep you like a queen in Castle Bel Content.”
She could hear her heart crying, Yes, let’s do that. I want to stay here!
“And I could love you like a king,” she said wanly, stroking his hand. “But we’re only safe as long as we keep on the move. We’d be trapped like rats in Bel Content if Mark and Andred tracked us there.”
“As they will,” he added, almost to himself. “They must.” She had never seen him look so grim.
An endless moment passed.
“Oh, my lady,” he breathed. He tipped up her chin to look her in the eyes. “I’m a hunter, at home in the heart of the wood. But you’re a child of the sea. You want to go back to Ireland so you can have the ocean, the tides, the waves, and the shore.”
Tremulously, she shook her head. “Neither is more to me than the other. It takes the sea and the land together to make a world.”
He folded her into his cloak and softly quoted a fragment of an ancient runic verse, cherished between them whenever they were apart.
Bel ami,
si eczt de nouz
Ne vouz sanz mei,
ne mei sanz vouz.
“‘My dearest love,’ ” she translated back to him, “‘this is our fate, neither you without me, nor me without you.’ ”
They stood together in a silence too deep for tears. Together they had walked the world between the worlds, and now it was slipping away. Isolde could hardly speak for pain.
“We should go back to court,” she said through cold, stiff lips. “Then I can end this hollow marriage with Mark, and you can leave his service with honor, not as a fugitive.”
Tristan stared at her in horror. “Go back to court?” He laughed in disbelief. “Mark tried to kill me, lady!”
Isolde dropped her gaze and looked away. “You don’t know that.”
“I know that Andred and his two villains made an attempt on my life,” he spat out, “and they said that the King himself had ordered my death.”
“But that’s just what Andred would have told them, don’t you see?”
“Lady, lady,” he groaned. “Blame it all on Andred if you like. But surely you understand that Mark himself—”
“No, I don’t,” she interrupted. “Mark is many things, but he wouldn’t do that.”
Tristan nodded bleakly. Isolde refused to believe her husband could be a murderer. What could he say? His tongue lay like lead in his mouth.
Dimly, he heard Isolde speaking again.
“I want to separate from Mark with dignity. Then we’ll go home to Ireland and live in peace.”
He could not contain himself. “And you think Mark will simply let us go?” Dark visions of the future crowded his mind. “It’s true that we’ll have to leave, if we want to be safe. Sooner or later one of the woodland folk will give us away. But let’s be very careful about what we do next.”
A new excitement was written on Isolde’s face. “You think we should make straight for the coast and sail to Ireland?”
He caught her rising spirits. “Anywhere in the world!”
She gave a tremulous laugh. Should they do this? Could such a thing be right? She could hardly breathe. “And I’ll write to Mark from there.”
Goddess, Mother, thanks! Tristan bowed his head. “To Ireland, then,” he cried.
Isolde looked at him through a veil of tears. How she loved this man!
Ireland.
Erin.
Home.
chapter 36
So then, who do we have today?”
Resplendent in all his finery, Mark lolled back on his throne and looked out over the Audience Chamber with a sense of satisfaction filling his soul. See, he could dress up grandly when he chose. No well-worn riding habit this morning, as familiar and wrinkled as a second skin, but the very best that the royal wardrobe could afford. Silently, he preened himself on his tunic of bright scarlet, the weight of the gold chains around his neck, and his cape of cloth-of-gold. From the crown on his head to the tip of his red leather boots, he fancied he looked every inch the King.
And what other king took care of his people like this? If he was choosing for himself, he’d be out in the sun right now, racing through the forest with his band of knights or plunging his overheated body in the sweet sharp shock of a freezing mountain stream. Instead, he was pent up indoors, enthroned on this dais, giving himself freely to any wretched peasant or muddy oaf who turned up at court. He could see them all now, huddled around the door, lining up to press their stinking petitions into his hand and beg him to right some ridiculous wrong.
And all this under the eye of his lords and courtiers, too, every one clustered around him, beady-eyed, waiting for him to do something wrong. His eye fell on Andred, poised and ready at the foot of the throne. Thank God he had someone to handle all this for him.
“So, then, Andred,” he huffed, “what’s on today?”
Andred cast a cold eye round the chamber, taking in the gaudy courtiers chattering round the throne and the dull motley of townsfolk and villagers clustered by the door. Gods above, how these hovel-dwellers stank!
“Today will be like every other audience, sire. We’ll be through in a trice. There’s nothing here to keep you from your sport.”
“Good, very good,” Mark yawned. “Begin, then.”
“Before we do, my lord, I have a private communication for your ears.” Andred broke off and allowed a delicate pause. “The Lady Elva craves permission to return to court.”
“Who does?” said Mark obtusely.
“Your admirer, sire. Your former mistress—”
“Yes, yes,” Mark interrupted nastily. “No need to remind me, I haven’t forgotten that. What does she want?”
“A while ago, you suggested she retire from the court. A spell in the country, you said, would be good for her health. She sends to say she feels much recovered now. Will Your Majesty allow her to come back to Castle Dore?”
The crowd ebbed and swirled in the doorway, then parted to reveal the black habit of Father Dominian, who was entering with the two Princesses in his wake. Both fixed their eyes on the throne, dropped their eyes, and curtsied fulsomely as they came in. Mark eyed them in deep appreciation and played thoughtfully with his lower lip. Perhaps it might be a good idea to have Elva back.
He turned to Andred with a careless laugh. “Would she make them jealous?”
Andred started, taken by surprise. “Who?”
“Those two.”
Mark gestured toward the two sisters, now standing with Father Dominian below the dais. Nearest to him, Theodora was decked out in a bloodred gown with floating panels of mulberry, nightshade, and gold. Beside her, Divinia wore a simple silk shift of blushing pink with a train of ivory velvet, looking for all the world like a plate of strawberries and cream. Mark’s appetite rose. He wanted to strip her and eat her, nibbling her ears, her nose, and the tips of her childish breasts.
Then his eyes turned back to the toothsome, well-bosomed creature at her side. Either one of Theodora’s luscious, trunk-like thighs was worth the whole of Divinia’s skinny carcass to a red-blooded man. Who would trifle with a girl like a bowl of fruit when he could sink his teeth into a thick slab of sirloin well marbled with fat?
Mark wagged his head owlishly and gave a braying laugh. “She loves me, you know, that girl Theodora. They both do, of course, but the younger one would never say it to my face.”
Andred fought down a seething bile. Well, could that be because she doesn’t love you at all, he wanted to say? That she laughs at your thinning hair and expanding paunch, and dreams of a lover who doesn’t stink of horses and dogs?
Mark peered at Andred. “You’ve gone a peculiar color,” he observed. “Are you all right?”
I will be when I kill you, erupted in a silent scream from Andred’s dark soul. And both those di
m little Christian whores as well, and Tristan and Isolde too, don’t forget them . . .
He stroked down his mustache. “This is good news, sire,” he said unctuously. “But the Lady Elva—is it your wish she should come back to court?”
“Why does she want to come?” Mark demanded.
“To please you. She only has your interests at heart.”
“Does she, though?”
Mark paused to think. Already Elva had dwindled in his mind. For the life of him, he could not remember why he had sent her away. Oh yes, she had kept trying to order him about, that was it, nattering night and day. Always insisting that a king should do this, a king should do that, behaving as if he was the subject and she the one in command. A warm glow of resentment lit his feeble brain. She was as bad as Isolde—or worse. Neither of them ever treated him like a king.
Not like the two little Princesses from Dun Haven, who knew both their God and their King. He looked down from the dais at Theodora, who was fluttering her fleshy bosom most attractively.
“No,” he said firmly to Andred. “Elva must not return. You can tell her that from me. Now see to the petitioners, will you? They don’t all need to approach the throne; you can deal with them.”
Mark dismissed Andred with a nod of the head and the sense of a job well done. Already his mind was turning to the time after the audience when he’d have the Princesses alone. His blood thickened. He was itching to get his hands on both of them, the dainty morsel in pink and white and the older, heavier, gamier bird. Yes, of course it was a sin to lust after a woman while he still had a wife, let alone lust after two. But he wouldn’t be the first man to take a brace of fine sisters to bed, one after another like two courses at a meal.
And there was that Spanish cardinal, the fine cleric from Rome, coming in through the door, Mark noted. Well, he was the man for the task, he could sort this out.
“Good day, Dom Arraganzo,” he caroled. With one stroke of his pen, the Papal Legate could annul the marriage to Isolde, and pouf! The whole wretched union would be gone, would be no more. Then he’d be free to marry one sister and hold the other in reserve to be his mistress later on. Now, which one to marry? Better to begin with the lesser and keep the stronger for another day. He pointed to Divinia and patted his thigh.
“Come here, my dear,” he called.
“A moment, sire.”
It was Andred, pressing up to the foot of the dais with a woodman in tow. The man wore a rough coat of scarred and ill-matched pelts, cobbled up from the damaged skins he could not sell. A pair of shifty eyes looked out of a hard-bitten face, and he grunted a greeting through a mouthful of broken teeth.
Andred pushed him forward urgently. “This man has news, sire, that you’ll want to hear.”
The man grinned and showed his teeth. “There’s a knight in the forest, a huntsman as skilled as any I’ve known. He’s been slipping around, hiding out there for a few weeks now. Then a fine lady came looking for him and gave me gold. She was . . .”
Mark sat like a man made of stone. A fine lady with the sound of the Western Isle in her voice and a head of red-gold hair.
Isolde.
Looking for Tristan, who else in the world could it be?
He let out his breath in a hiss.
Issssolde.
And Tristan.
So my traitorous nephew has come secretly back to Cornwall to do me wrong, and my wife has been trailing him through the wood, like some gypsy whore cast off by her traveling man.
Isolde chasing Tristan.
And both of them utterly careless of any harm they might do to him.
Rage filled his brain. Dimly, he heard Andred’s voice above the angry roaring of his mind.
“Did she find him, fellow?”
“He’s a man of the woods, sir. He found her.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they’re living together like woodlanders, moving from place to place. They think they’ve gone unnoticed, but I know where they are.”
“Wait outside, then,” Andred said dismissively. “We’ll call on you in a while.”
“You owe me a reward,” said the forester triumphantly. “I’m a poor man, and I’ve come all this way to court.”
“You’ll be paid, forester,” Andred retorted with an ominous glint. “But for now, get out and wait to be told what to do.”
The woodman hurried out. As he did so, a furious muttering broke the silence he left behind. Both the Dun Haven Princesses had rounded on Father Dominian and were confronting the little priest.
“Isolde? That’s the name of the Queen. So she’s come back here?” Theodora stuttered, her eyes as round as moons. “You told us she’d gone to Ireland and that she wouldn’t come back. We thought the King had finished with his wife—annulled her, or whatever it’s called. And all along—” Her eyes bulged as if they would burst.
“It’s adultery,” piped Divinia, her watery features blazing like sea fire. “And fornication, too, setting us on to court him like a single man.”
Father Dominian held up his hands. “Daughters, daughters, please—”
“And in the meantime”—Theodora was gathering fury as she spoke—“the missing Queen lies in the woodland with a runaway knight. More sin and wickedness to taint us both. And the King—what’s he doing about that?”
“Now God preserve us!” gulped Divinia. “And our immortal souls.” Clasping her hands together, she began to pray.
It’s adultery . . .
Sick to his soul, Mark contemplated the wretchedness of being once again a married man. It came to him that he had enjoyed flirting with the Princesses more than anything since his bachelor days. For a while he had felt like a single man again, and he wanted that back.
But not with these two, oh no! Listen to them now. The younger one wailing about her immortal soul and the older revealed as an angry virago all too ready for a fight. Isolde, Elva, and now this fat bitch to boot—they were all the same. All they wanted was to dominate and domineer.
And who was King here, after all? He leaned forward from the throne.
“Step forward, Princesses, and make your farewells,” he called dangerously. “I must attend to affairs of state, and you must return to Dun Haven while your father lives. When he dies, I shall vest your wardship in the hands of the Church. And in the meantime, I wish you Godspeed from Castle Dore.”
He did not heed the stunned silence that followed his words. Andred was the next to feel the weight of his angry eye.
“Get a band of men together and send for the dogs,” Mark hissed. “Tristan and Isolde have taken shelter in the forest, and we’re going to hunt them down.”
chapter 37
Gods above, how he hated this midsummer sun! Even more than he hated every flake of winter’s snow. Hated the seasons in the forest, even when the woodland wore its fairest face. You lived out too long when Uther Pendragon died, Merlin reflected savagely as he went along. The sun, the wind, the rain, the ice, and the frost—every one of them was a little death to those who spent their lives out of doors. Even to a bard, a Druid of the seventh seal, a Lord of Light. Even to Merlin himself.
Plodding onward at his own pace, the white mule Merlin was riding rolled one blue eye and one brown, and reflected, too. What painful creatures these two-leggers were! Born without hair or fur, how poorly they withstood the weather all year round. Yet still they held themselves equal with the Gods, whereas in fact—
“Hold your tongue, fool,” said Merlin rancorously, “and let’s get on.”
The mule nodded, and both travelers gave their attention to the road ahead. At least in the greenways they were sheltered from the heat of the sun. Carved out by wanderers and drovers and millions of unknown feet, the ancient tracks were so deep and overgrown with trees that a traveler could cross the whole of the island in these green tunnels without being seen.
On! Merlin berated himself, on! Or you will come too late.
Too late to save Tris
tan.
Ye Gods, Merlin mourned. When would these human creatures be able to rule their own fate? Even a Lord of Light could not be everywhere. Yet who would work for these islands, if not himself? Who but Merlin, from the dawn of time?
“Who brings in the winds from the mountains?” he began in his high, bard-like chant.
“Who teaches the sun when to rise?
Who cares for the cattle on the hillside
And the child in the wood?
Who feeds a man’s hunger and heals his thatch of wounds?
Merlin! Merlin!
Merlin through all time.”
Good, yes, very good, and every word true. And how these hidden greenways soothed his soul. Merlin cast an appreciative eye up the steep banks running away toward the horizon on either side. Whoever was out and about could not see him here. No one should know how Merlin came and went.
Especially when he had failed.
Failed first of all with Igraine, when the old Queen would not choose Tristan over Mark and see that Isolde was sent out of the way. And failed again now, losing Tristan in the forest, just as he’d lost Tristan’s mother all those years ago.
Gods above, how had it come about?
Weeping with fury, Merlin cracked each of his knuckles till his fingertips shot out blue flame. How could he have missed Tristan in the wood? The young knight was there, he knew; all the woodland creatures told him so. They had seen him slipping through the trees with all the skill of a wild thing, covering his tracks, lying low, and finally going to earth.
Yes, of course, Tristan was there! Merlin moaned. He had felt him, smelled him himself. Yet even the woodman, a creature of the forest, could only detect his presence. He could not track him down.
And failing Tristan, the old enchanter groaned, he’d failed Isolde, too. He could have spared that vital spirit from all the dread events that lay ahead. But Tristan was the focus of his love. Tristan, like Arthur, was the child of his dearest soul.
And Tristan’s road ahead was dark indeed. Alas for the unmothered child and the fatherless boy. Tears sprang to Merlin’s eyes.
Tristan and Isolde - 03 - The Lady of the Sea Page 24