The Bleak and Empty Sea

by Jay Ruud

  “Well, you know of course about the sordid affair with Sir Lamorak. Everybody in Camelot knows about that. But it was not, unfortunately, my mother’s first illicit assignation. When I was about four years old, my mother came to Camelot as an ambassador from the court of my father, King Lot of Orkney. She had really been sent as a spy, of course, since my father and his allies were planning their rebellion against the newly-crowned boy king whose right to the throne was contested at the time. You know of course that Arthur became king through a device of Merlin’s: a sword plunged through an anvil sitting on a great stone that, according to the mage, could only be removed by the rightfully born king of all Logres. When the upstart fifteen-year-old Arthur was able to do what none of the boldest and most nobly-born peers of the land could do, many of those very peers took umbrage and denied Arthur their support. Anyway, Queen Margause, my lovely mother—who was, by all accounts, the most beautiful woman in the kingdom—arrived in Camelot, the young king was besotted with her, even though she was trailing her whole brood of brats: Gawain was ten, Gaheris eight, Agravain six, and then me, the baby of the family. Of course I didn’t realize it at the time, but while she was here Margause managed to seduce the young king (not, I’m sure, a difficult task for a mature and beautiful woman targeting an adolescent boy with raging hormones).”

  “The king…and Margause?” I was taken aback by the revelation. “But wasn’t she his…”

  “His half-sister, yes. Now you understand why this must remain a secret. This liaison occurred around the beginning of August, and Margause returned with all of us to Orkney immediately afterwards. My brother Mordred was born nine months later.”

  “But…brother and sister…I can’t understand what could have moved them to…”

  “As I’ve already said, what moved Arthur was hormones. What moved my mother was much darker, I have no doubt. She certainly thought that her sexual favor would bind the boy king to her and enable her to supply Lot with information he would otherwise have no access to…or, in the event that Lot was ultimately defeated, would make the victorious king sympathetic to her and may even give her the opportunity to act as the power behind the throne—the older woman manipulating the young king through her carnal powers. In the long run, she might even be the mother of the king’s only son, the likely heir to the throne, and someone she could continue to manipulate, and make her the power behind the throne over the reigns of two kings. Don’t look skeptical, young Gildas, you did not know my mother. She was not only capable of thinking this way, she was exceedingly likely to think this way.

  “But let your mind be at ease about the incest. Neither Arthur nor Margause knew of their relationship until after their encounter. Only Merlin knew at the time who Arthur’s father was. As I said, after the incident with the sword in the stone, a number of the great barons of the country refused to recognize Arthur as their king. The sword was Merlin’s test, and everybody knew that Merlin could have rigged the contest so that only his own candidate knew the secret of how to draw it from the anvil. My father was one of them. Who was this Arthur, anyway? Who was his father? Was he somebody’s bastard, and if so, what right did he have to the throne of Logres? So Merlin had to come clean. He revealed the fact that Uther Pendragon had sired Arthur on Igraine, the Duchess of Cornwall, in the guise of her husband Gorlois. Since Gorlois himself was already dead, and since Uther married Igraine afterwards, Arthur was the only legitimate son of Uther, the last king. That knowledge satisfied some of the barons—not, I should say, King Lot—but it did mean that Margause was Arthur’s half-sister, and it made Mordred not only a bastard but the child of incest.”

  “So…,” I began, “I guess that explains why you and Sir Gaheris have blue eyes and blond hair…”

  “Like my mother,” Gareth agreed.

  “Sir Gawain and Sir Agravain have red hair and green eyes…”

  “Like my father,” Gareth agreed.

  “And Sir Mordred has dark hair and dark eyes…”

  “Just like the king.”

  It gave me a lot to think about. “And Mordred knows where he came from? So his surliness is because he resents the king for not recognizing him? Not legitimatizing him?”

  “No,” Gareth told me. “Actually, I haven’t really gotten to the bad part of the story.”

  “What? What could be worse than incest and adultery? What do you mean the bad part of the story?” I felt a cold hand squeezing the back of my neck as I shivered at the tale. This was my hero. This was Arthur, founder of the Round Table and creator of a new order of chivalry. How could he be behind these things?

  Sir Gareth drew a deep breath. “Here’s the thing. As I said, nobody but Merlin knew the truth about Arthur, and he hadn’t even told Arthur. So when Arthur admitted to him what he’d done, Merlin blew up. He told him the fruit of that union could only bring destruction on his kingdom. Well Arthur, impressionable kid that he was, thought Merlin was making a prophecy that his son by Margause would grow up to kill his father and destroy Arthur’s kingdom. When Arthur heard that Mordred had been born on May Day, he issued a command that all of the male babes in the kingdom born to noble families on that date must be surrendered to the crown. Not realizing what was coming, the nobles complied, and my mother dutifully allowed the agents of the king to take Mordred away.”

  “Well then, what was coming? What did Arthur do with the children?”

  “He put them all into a ship,” Gareth carefully explained. “A ship that had no captain or pilot or crew—that just contained the babies, all of them just a month old. The reasoning was this: if he set them adrift on a ship, he felt that nobody could claim that he had murdered the children. Whatever happened to them was God’s will. If God wanted the babes saved, then He would do it. If He was willing to let them be slain, then He would not intervene. And who could say that it was Arthur’s fault? Wouldn’t it be blasphemy to blame the king for what God failed to do?”

  “No, it would not. In fact, that line of reasoning is blasphemous in itself. It’s an attempt to manipulate the people’s faith and use it for personal advantage. I cannot believe that the king had any hand in this villainy.”

  Gareth gave a grim smile. “Your outrage is well placed, my friend. I will not say the king himself gave out this rationalization, but his advisers certainly did.”

  “But obviously Mordred survived. Did all of the babes live?”

  Sir Gareth shook his head gravely. “The ship was cast adrift in the Channel, and a storm drove it against the rocks near a remote castle on the shoreline, breaking the ship apart. Every child on board was drowned—every child but one. A good man, Lord Berwyn, came rushing from the castle when he saw the ship flounder, and found only one survivor cast up from the sea—the baby Mordred. Shortly thereafter, word came to the kindly fellow of the ship and its tragic cargo, and he realized that the babe was in danger if he was found to have survived. So he kept the child hidden and raised him as his own for fourteen years.”

  “I don’t understand,” I interrupted. I was breathing hard now, so distressed was I about this story that I couldn’t digest it all at once. “The ship was full of children, all of the same age and all from noble families. How can anyone be sure that the child that survived is Mordred, and not one of the other noble children?”

  “Ah,” Sir Gareth answered. “Good question. And one, I might add, that nobody ever asks. But here is what happened. My mother had put a necklace around the boy’s neck with a pendant that carried the crest of the House of Orkney. That pendant was on the child when Lord Berwyn found him, and when he sent the child back to his mother in Orkney fourteen years later, he brought her the pendant as evidence of his parentage. Besides that,” Gareth added with a slight shrug, “Mordred at fourteen looked so much like his father the king had at that age—just about the same age as Arthur was when he conceived him—that Margause could have no doubt of his identity.”

 
I began to feel dizzy, as if I were about to faint, and sick to my stomach as well. I felt as if all the pillars supporting my world were being knocked out from under me one by one. King Arthur? This sounded more like King Herod. How could I remain devoted to this man and his ideals—ideals that the Knights of the Table had just finished swearing to, but which now seemed as hollow as that broken ship‘s hull? “Well,” I said after a fairly long pause. “I guess that would explain Mordred’s bad temper. Knowing your father tried to kill you when you were a month old might cause you some resentment, especially if you were now grown and were a knight in his castle, without being acknowledged as his son. I mean, why go through this ritual? Why would Mordred play Arthur’s game and join his order of knights?”

  “I suppose because it’s family. All of his brothers are here, right? Our parents are dead. Where else can he go?”

  “Stay in Orkney? Rule there? Not have to face his bitterness every day? I don’t know, but it would have to be a better life.”

  “Not if what you wanted most was to show your father he’d been wrong about you. To show him you were better than he expected, or better than the others that he’d placed ahead of you—worthy, in fact, to be the heir that he refused to name you.”

  “Also not if what you really wanted was to take revenge on him,” I added, seeing the picture a little differently. “But what about you? You and Gawain know all of this, and yet here you are, among Arthur’s most trusted knights. I have to admit, this news about the king makes me question my devotion to him, even question my allegiance to Camelot. Why do you stay? Why did you even come here to be a part of what you knew was a…a sham?”

  Gareth gave me a fond half-smile and tilted his head slightly. “Gildas my lad, people are better than their worst acts. Yes, Arthur ordered the destruction of the children. Remember, though, that he was fifteen years old at the time…”

  “Old enough to know right from wrong!”

  “Perhaps,” Sir Gareth admitted. “But old enough to measure one evil against another and clearly see which is the lesser? It takes a mature mind. And to make decisions that affect all the people of a kingdom and to appear to know beyond question which is the correct decision is a skill only learned through years of experience on a throne. Remember that Arthur had been raised far from court by old Sir Ector, and had never had the slightest suspicion that he was the rightful heir to the throne until Merlin set up that damned sword in the stone. I can’t blame Arthur for what he did. He was doing nothing in those early days without the advice of his closest counselors. They are the ones who convinced him to pull that stunt with the ship.”

  “And who were they?” I demanded. “You’re going to tell me that Merlin was one of them?”

  Sir Gareth nodded slowly. “Merlin was the chief adviser to the throne, it’s true. But before you get too riled up about that, let me assure you that he didn’t have anything to do with the ship disaster. He had made the comment about Mordred growing up to destroy the kingdom, which did lead to that plan, but Merlin wasn’t in on the plan. If he had been, none of us would be on friendly terms with the old necromancer even today. No, it was his other close counselors, chief of which was King Pelinor. He was most to blame.”

  “Pelinor?” I said in disbelief. “Pelinor who killed your father? Pelinor, the father of Lamorak, who bedded you mother? He was responsible for the murder of those children and the attempt on Mordred’s life?”

  “The same,” Gareth said, chuckling at my bewilderment. “Now you see. All the stories turn out to be the same story in the end, don’t they, Gildas?”

  “That, or an endless cycle of blood and treachery. And yet out of all this Arthur tries to make a phony world based on false ideals? Isn’t he a hypocrite? Why should we follow them? Why should we follow him?”

  “Because the ideals aren’t false. People are often false, but the ideal remains. The world of Camelot is not phony, it’s a place in which we try to rise above the mundane world of falseness and incest and adultery and murder and revenge. If we can live by those ideals we can make a new world, a better world, and if we defend those ideals we can sustain that world. Gildas, Gildas, all men are sinners. What we have to do is try not to be. Arthur made a mistake when he was fifteen led on by the machinations of a scheming woman, and he compounded that mistake through the evil counsel of those whose task it was to set him on the right path. That was a long time ago. It will be thirty years, in fact, this coming May. I can forgive him, and I can applaud what he has done. People learn. They do the best they can, and when they know better, they do better. King Arthur has set a high standard to help them do better. That is what the Table Round is.”

  I wasn’t completely convinced. But I was talked down. It would take a lot more ruminating on my part before I could assimilate everything Gareth had burdened me with that morning. The canons were returning to the sanctuary to clean up after the ceremony and to store the mass elements and put out the candles, and some looked our way with some curiosity, so we began to make our way slowly toward to west portal of the church, neither of us saying anything as we shuffled out. Trying to put this new knowledge out of my head for now, I forced myself to think about the lady Rosemounde. I was glad to be setting out on this task for her, and particularly glad because it would take me away from Camelot. I felt that being away from the castle and the direct circle of Arthur and his knights would allow me to think about all of these things more objectively. And indeed, I could find joy in the fact that I was serving my lady, the one person that I still had the utmost faith in, the one being in earth and heaven that would never let me down. Thank God I was not fifteen, that malleable gullible age the king had been when he had committed his heinous crimes. A seventeen-year old like myself was far too experienced to be so naïve.

  Chapter Five

  The Narrow Sea

  It was perhaps three hours after we had watched the harbor of Southampton disappear to our stern that Sir Dinadan and I stood on the port side of the deck, looking southwest with a salty sea-breeze blowing through our hair. I was tickled to have learned that the name of our vessel was the Rosamounde: the duke had named it after his younger daughter, and I loved it. I was fated to love anything with the name of Rosemounde. Merlin was in the wooden After Castle in the stern of the ship, where they had put our quarters along with those of the ship’s captain and the five officers of the Duke’s Guard, on board to protect the ship from pirates. The twelve members of the crew slept below deck, and six of them were there now, resting before taking over their shift at night. Our expected sailing time to cover the 170 nautical miles to Saint-Malo was a day and a half, assuming we could maintain an average speed of five knots.

  Dinadan and I found it peaceful, leaning on the wooden railing and gazing out into what mariners called the Narrow Sea. Inwardly, I was brooding over the story Gareth had told me of King Arthur and the child Mordred. Despite Gareth’s rationalizations, I had difficulty reconciling my devotion to the ideal of Arthur’s Camelot with the reality of rottenness at that world’s core. It did not sit right with me. But for now I was determined to complete the task at hand, the task that Rosemounde had given me. She, at least, was no fallen idol. She still deserved my devotion. And so I tried to put the king’s malicious act out of my mind. It was something I could think about, and deal with, later on. Much later on.

  Looking down, I contemplated the overlapping oak boards that formed the clinker-built hull of the large Cog ship we sailed on. Duke Hoel, as things worked out, was not on board. After a long private counsel with King Arthur he had decided to stay in Camelot for a few weeks to attend to some private matter. He did, however, follow through with his offer of transport to Brittany on board his personal ship. He needed to send some urgent messages to his son, Kaherdin, in any case, and would wait for our return on the same ship to make his own crossing back to Brittany. King Mark, on the other hand, had returned straightaway to Cornwall on the day fol
lowing the induction ceremony.

  Sir Dinadan had joined us for the crossing, and chiefly wanted to know how our interview with King Mark had gone. As Sir Tristram’s closest companion, Dinadan had spent a good deal of time in Mark’s court. But his scathing sense of humor and merciless satire of the king had made him persona non grata of late, especially now that Tristram was gone, and he had thought it wise not to join us in our questioning of the king. But he was intensely interested in what Mark had to say about the deaths of Tristram and Isolde, and pushed me to recount the interview for him as we stood on the deck of Duke Hoel’s ship, looking out into the channel toward France, and I was quite willing to describe the meeting for him.

  King Mark was of an age with King Arthur, perhaps a few years younger, but he had far more grey in his hair and beard, both of which were long and flowing. His bearing was kingly, but he was of slighter build than Arthur and a little more stooped, as if there were a great weight upon him. Indeed, in the interview his face had appeared strained and sallow, his pale grey eyes mournful. The expression perfectly matched his attire, which, though black, was made of the finest materials: a cloak of finely woven wool with sable trim, over a tunic of heavy samite in a twill weave, died black. It was a mourning fashion Merlin referred to later as “bleak chic.” He wore inky black in his grief, but whom was he grieving? His wife, who had died trying to reach her fallen lover across the sea? His nephew, who had died crying for Mark’s wife? For both of them? For his own life, whose closest relationships had proven unworthy, unfaithful, unsatisfying? What a sad life for a king. And a lonely one. He was lord of my own native land, but even if he were not, I could not but have felt some sympathy for Mark.