Then, the torches, in daylight might be extinguished, for a light, as of the will-o-the-wisp of marshes came up as the caverns deepened. The trickle of a stream broke through rock, and warmed the cavern for it was from the fires of Arawn and the place called Annwn, the Otherworld, beneath the earth heated the water that fed into the Lake. Within the stream, the residue of some substance that came from deep within the stone from which the stream poured that could also be rubbed on the skin to make the body shine even in darkness—we called it the Lady’s Lamp, for it lit our way in sunless places. You followed that stream along a narrow path that went down the stone corridor, and then the area widened, and even greater light came up, as if it were twilight here at all hours. The stream had grown in size so that one could not cross it without a leap. Far above, sunlight or moonlight would break through the rock ceiling in small holes that had been made by our ancestors to help the escape of the smoke from their fires so that they might dwell here, away from all others.
Here, the cavern took form—stonecutters had carved out steps down along the rock wall, which curved and descended and then rose again, this time above the stream. And here, then, you would come upon the Lake of Glass, and the great island along it. Hot springs from above and below the rock warmed the cavern, but fed into the lake, which had a cooling effect so that the temperature here was always mild, as if it were May most of the year. Flowering vines hung down from the chasm in the earth far above the lake, and where the lake came to the isle at its center, it narrowed into easily crossed streams. The Lake of Glass truly was like a mirror, for it reflected silver and gray from the rock ceiling, just before the cave ceiling broke apart completely, a great gap in the earth above it, though it was sheltered by trees that had begun to grow nearly vertically across it, perhaps a two hundred feet above your head. It was like some ancient hidden world, and it was the wonderland in which I grew up.
The lake was wide, and on either side of it, a sedge grew, and the horses, which had been bred from the original Iceni horse from distant lands to the northeast, those hundreds of years ago, which were stocky and heavily muscled in the thigh and with a white fur about the fetlock, wandered along the paddocks that had been built for them. Upon this lake, the black swans glided, having found the Lake of Glass even through the thick tree canopy above.
Just beyond the far shore rose the curved entrances to homes that had been built between the earth and rock and stone stairs leading from doorways above to doorways below. Though humble and mean in aspect from the outside, within these homes, deep and extensive chambers had been carved.
The hot springs that ran beneath, which fed into the lake, warmed the homes in the winter. In the summers, they were often too warm for sleeping, and many folk took to climbing up the steps, toward the mouth of land above that opened to tree-shrouded night sky to sleep in the clearing above.
Above the caverns, where horsemen gathered before daybreak, an old temple made of rounded rock and tall stones stood sentry at the entrance to our Sacred Grove where Druid priests worshipped and prophesied. To find this other entryway into the lake and the isle had been made nearly impossible by the thousand-year trees that grew to hide it, planted by Arawn before he entered the Otherworld. Only our people knew how to navigate the brambles and thorn-hedged paths of this twisted labyrinth that hid us from the world.
It was said that any strangers to the Grove who tried to enter would be blinded by piercing thorns or by white ravens of the goddess that guarded our buried city from the gnarled branches of oaks
It was a world of magick and great wisdom, the abode of that sacred Lady who is the rightful keeper of both the Cauldron of Rebirth and of that sword of power and darkness called Excalibur.
These were two of the twelve sacred objects of the Celtic tribes, and though these tribes were spread out from Iberia to Macedonia even, some said, to the northernmost lands of ice and to the legendary lands far to the west of the Hebrides, these two—the Cauldron and Excalibur—had provided protection and secrets to the Lake of Glass for many years. Even with the sword of power now within my father’s kingdom, our protection remained, and the last of the Druids were safe in their worship of the Grove, and those exiles and misfits of the tribes whose lives might be in danger in the lands could come and seek sanctuary here and know that no Briton king would find them.
If you can imagine its great curved stone steps, and the hanging red flowers that seemed like small trumpets, where the honey birds would fly about like faeries to catch nectar from within the summer blossoms; where the horses would be led down the trails from above with great spectacle, for the Eponi loved their animals as much as their children and felt the horses were their ancestors come back from the dead, by choice, into the bodies of their sacred animals. The black swans, rising all at once with a great noise, as they moved across the lake to return to the world above. They mainly came in winter when the warm waters of the lake called to them. And the festivals of winter and summer, the Lugos harvest that the Eponi celebrated, the wonders of Samhain, and Beltane with its fires. One hundred folk lived among the cliff wall chambers, and more lived above, and these were the last of our tribes in Broceliande, for the world beyond the forest had been taken by others. We knew of Druids who still lived in isolated places of Britain, but here, in Armorica, this place within Broceliande, was the last refuge of our kind.
The houses on the Isle of Glass, though carved from that deep, rich earth and stone of the caverns, was not rude or barbaric. The floors of our homes were made from beautifully painted tiles that the artisans had crafted, and the inner walls had a white plaster to them, and looked finer than many a turf-and-thatch hut. The houses were a series of chambers carved back into the inner cavern cliffs, and a series of curved copper pipes that ran through holes at the corners of the chambers, from one home up through the other. These carried the steamy water from the hottest of the Lady’s heated pools. Around the base of each pipe, as it entered the floor, porous black stone from the coast had been brought, which heated off the pipe and these stones could be put at the foot of each bed, beneath the wool blanket, for additional warmth on a winter’s night. This had been designed two lifetimes before by Merlin, who had stolen the copper cylinders from Roman Baths that had been abandoned in past wars. My mother told me that she had never lived in such comfort, for the castles of Britain were all drafty and damp all year ‘round. We had tables carved from blessed oak that had fallen after centuries in the forest, and flat-stones for chairs, or stools made from the fir trees. Our kitchens were open, and near the doorways; the hearths themselves were just outside each door, at a wide ledge that was like a balcony, and above the hearth, the opening of the Lady’s caverns to the sky above so that the smoke from our many fires would drift upward, though when summer was upon us, we cooked meals above the caverns so as to keep the air of our underground kingdom clear and clean.
The secret of my existence was kept by a handful of folk, including my mother’s family that lived here, as well as the Druids and charioteers, and those who knew were sworn to secrecy of my true father. It was said that Merlin was my father, and that was enough to give me a special place in this world, but being a child of Merlin was better than being the son of a king.
My cousin Gawain stayed for a year, after which his mother, Morgause, took him to the Orkney Isles. She returned with him, along with his brothers Agravain and Gareth, once King Arthur’s hunt for Morgan’s offspring had ended.
They visited often in the summers, but my cousins and I rarely got along as I grew up. Gawain was the first to detect that I was different from other boys, that I had sensitivity and some unspoken secret that he and his brothers did not share. Though we got along well enough, once Gawain turned thirteen or so, he ignored me completely, and some summers, Morgause came alone to Broceliande because her boys, she told me, “were training in the arts of war, in the style of the Romans.” She did not say this with much happiness, and she mentioned often that she didn’t like th
e way her husband, Lot, raised them “as if they are Roman soldiers.” She always looked to my mother, her older sister, for approval and for guidance in matters of the heart and spirit, and once I overheard Morgause tell my mother that she had raised boys that she found she did not like at all.
Late at night, when I could not sleep, I would take the stone steps up to the world above where my mother and her younger sister often sat, playing a game called Ogham-lay. It was a game that had small bone chips with markings on it, and I never properly learned it but I loved lying on the summer grass, near them, listening to them talk about the old times of their childhood; of Gorlois and their brothers, whom they barely remembered, but kept alive through these evenings; of their mother, Ygrain, and the army of a thousand spirits she had once raised from the Otherworld in order to keep the long boats of the Norsemen off the shores of Cornwall. As they spoke, I nearly imagined my mother and my aunt as one person, for their voices were similar. Where Morgause had warmth and summer in her throat, my mother had cool hollow in her tone, and together it was like music to a very little boy who loved the world he had been born into.
The caverns of the Lady of the Lake and its island were the whole world I knew, and though I heard of castles and kings and distant monsters of both human and otherworldly form, it seemed like a pleasant tale within a sanctuary of the goddess and god of the earth. This was my kingdom, my mother was its queen, my aunt, its princess, and I was its prince.
But my mother had begun to move into shadow here, in this beautiful paradise, though she had once loved the sunlight.
3
My mother was cursed with a Celtic beauty. Some of the Broceliande road and its byways said that she was the most exquisite creature of her time. Morgause, nearly her twin in feature, also had beauty, but it is often the beauty within the soul that shines brightest, and Morgause’s family life in Orkney had dimmed that a bit. Although the same could be said of my mother, Morgan le Fay seemed to have what the Druids called “the shining soul.” But she scarred that soul and its light as her life continued, for the terrible act that my father had brought to her, and the unspeakable outrages with which Arthur’s father had cursed her family, continued to haunt her throughout her life. But in those days, she was as beautiful like the underground lake that was our passage from the caverns through the forest—brilliant and unfathomable. She had the dark-almond eyes of her tribal sisters, and skin that was olive. Her dark hair had been kept shiny with herbs that gave it a slightly reddish cast. She allowed her hair to grow long, and to fall along her arms like a cloak, with gentle curls, when I was young. She looked like one meant to live always in the wilderness, and the curve of her hips seemed like a Cauldron itself, and her longer fingers, like the branches of a tree. Her body was like those of the athletic goddess who hunts the forest, and it is from her that I gained my love of athletics and competition—she told me that she had studied much with the wise of the southern countries, and she taught me the movements and ways to always retain health no matter the prison. She did not love anything more than a fresh clean spring and the sacred groves, but I saw early her love for handsome men and women of a striking beauty.
“All men are the god when love is within them, and all women the goddess,” she told me as she prepared my herbal bath at night, as she had from the time I could remember. “Even among the many young men who seek me out, I see the god in their eyes.”
“Which god?” I asked, being all of nine years and too inquisitive.
“The hunter,” she said. “Cernunnos, who is the stag and the one who hunts the stag. The older Romans called him Silvanus, for he is of the forest and of lust, as is the nature of men.”
“In women, the goddess is there?”
“Yes,” she said. “In some boys, as well. I see her in you. Do you know those soldier-mages who love one another?”
I nodded, for I had seen the men who coupled in handfasting, though they often left the Lake and Isle, for many men left to go live among the towns and villas and castles.
“You are like them,” she said. “In the kingdoms of men, they do not often understand this. But in the old days, when all the tribes were one, it was a blessing to have men like those who love each other, as it is to have women who handfast together. I saw it in you when you were but a few years old, as did your great-aunt and Merlin, too. You are blessed with love, Mordred. No matter what comes later in this life, nor what you hear from others, do not forget your blessings from the goddess and from Lord Cernunnos, who walks among the stags of the wood.”
I didn’t then understand her, nor would I for several more years. All I knew was that my mother was beautiful; her words were full of promise and understanding. I was nearly jealous of her for the way she attracted men, although she considered this her curse and not her blessing. She had taken lovers, including the charioteer called Danil, who had first brought her to the isle when she was pregnant with me. I saw him the most of any man that she loved, and he let me tug at his long yellow hair when I was a boy. But she would not handfast with any man, and when I asked her of this, she told me that she had lost all love for men but for Merlin and me. “And even Merlin has his deceptions. Men cannot be trusted, and it is better to live a little lonely than to marry a man who cannot be trusted.”
She rocked me to sleep at night with such words, and I had begun to form opinions of the world of men beyond our caverns well before I came of age. I was a funny, strange little boy—chubby until my twelfth year, and with dark hair that always seemed to be dirty to me no matter how many times it was washed. When I saw my reflection in the mirror bowls, I did not think I was pleasing to look at. My nose seemed wrong, and my lips were too thick, and my eyes seemed more like the doe than the stag.
I was not the boy I wished to be, and when I watched my friend Lukat, who was born just a month before I had come into the world, I wanted to be him more than I wanted to be Mordred.
4
Lukat was the son of an Eponi horseman whose mother had died at his birth, and so we had something in common between us—or so I was told to say. I had been taught, once I was old enough to understand, that I must never tell anyone of my father, though it was known that he was my uncle. The shame and fury that my mother carried had to be passed to me, and instead, the tale was told that my father had died in some distant battle before my birth. The elders, of course, knew more than this, but this secret was well kept in order that should any of the young people leave to go seek fortune in the world, it would never be known that the bastard son of King Arthur had survived.
The truth had been hidden, even from Lukat, to whom I told many secrets. And so I had been born without a father, and he had lost his mother at his birth. I shared my mother with him whenever he needed her guiding hand, and he, his father, when I wished to ride out into the forest with the other boys and play at war and hunting. Lukat had the glow of a god within him even as a child, and his eyes were sharp and he could lift up a great bow and shoot its arrow far across the lake when I could not even lift it. He would take me riding with him on his horse called Lugos, and from him I learned of the poisoners who lived near the old well, itself poisoned by them, almost to the villas and castles beyond the forest, those three Roman women who called themselves Strega, and who knew the lore of the berries that kill and the red flower of fire with seeds that burned the throat until madness followed. It was rumored these Strega were three sisters with but one soul between them, and they grappled for dominion of it constantly and tried to steal the souls of others. Through Lukat’s father, Anyon, I got to know the horse folk, and the charioteers; and through me, Lukat became closer to Merlin, who taught us both to read the ancient scrolls of Alexandria that he had salvaged from a fire. We learned of the Greek conqueror Alexander, and of the friends, Damon and Pythias, and of the legends of the gods of that world so far away from us where Merlin said our ancestors had once lived. From the elders, we learned of the dangerous creatures of the woods, from the gryphons that li
ved in the hills to the dragons of the eastern caverns, as well as those spirits that took the form of a beast in order to terrify all.
“Like the Boars of Moccus,” Viviane told us by the fires one night.
“What’s Moccus?”
“Who,” she said. “The Moccus were deceitful kings and queens of the world, reborn as these ravaging pigs. Boars are sacred to Arawn, so even these demonic creatures serve him. They wander the desolate lands between the forest and the marshes, and there they have lived and bred for hundreds of years, perhaps thousands. But these are not our forest pigs. They barely resemble boars, but seem like a mating of wolf and hyena, though in other ways they have the boar’s markings and behavior. The Moccus can grow nearly as large as an Eponi horse, and their tusks are curved like crescent blades, and sharp as wolf’s teeth. With six thick tusks, small, stupid eyes that glow red at sunset, and spiny hairs that can impale a boy if he gets too close, these are the most dangerous of the beasts of our countryside. In the olden days, the ignorant would sacrifice young virgins to the boars of Moccus by burying them up to their necks that the boars should come and tear them apart.”
Mordred, Bastard Son Page 5