Mordred, Bastard Son

by Douglas Clegg

  All in all, we lived a sheltered life on the Isle of Glass, for when the storms came, we could retreat to our warm cavern paradise and believe that the nameless goddess walked among us.

  In the summers, Morgause often arrived in her great pale-green garments and with a great cloak of pure white that shone in the sun and sparkled at twilight as if it were made of faerie dust, for she loved finery and refused to wear the more modest and humble white-brown robes of the wise women. She returned without any of her sons, complaining of them constantly, and took part in the priestess activities, though she had become ambivalent about the rituals. Merlin came and went during the warmer seasons of summer and spring, bringing with him more manuscripts and scrolls, so news of the outside world came to us through them and others who were wanderers between the worlds.

  We learned of the great peace that had lasted since the time of my birth, among the southern kingdoms of Britain. Yet we also learned of the ravages of the wars to the north, and the many deaths of Britons in defense of the kingdoms.

  Morgause told my mother, so that I might hear, that her sons were being drawn into service for Arthur, and though she fought her husband bitterly over this, my cousins had already begun training for battle with hopes of knighthood.

  “I should have stayed here with them when they were still young. I should have told Lot that they died at sea, so that they might never grow too fond of those robber-kings.” She wept bitter tears against my mother’s bosom, and my mother comforted her with memories of their childhood, of the moments they had stolen of happiness and tenderness and joy.

  “I should never have agreed to marry King Lot,” Morgause said more than once. “I thought it would bring safety to all of us. I thought Orkney would not join with Arthur in his wars. I did not see this in my visions. I did not see any of it, and I do not know why the goddess blinded me so.”

  “What did you see?” Morgan asked. “For I saw much of it when I was too young to understand, and I warned you of it, though we could not know the form these dark days would take.” My mother had lost much of her ability to scry after my birth. It was thought that her anger of the past, or the violence of Arthur’s act against her, had blocked the future from her. She was intensely interested in anyone who saw what-was-to-come.

  Morgause closed her eyes before saying, “I saw the kingdoms of Arthur burning. I saw the isle of Avalon as if I were a raven, flying over frozen sea, rapidly, toward towers that seemed bright as fiery torches. I saw…Arthur’s battered, wounded body. And…your face, but it did not seem like you, no, not a face, but a mask that you wore…and in your arms...that man.”

  I held my breath as she spoke, for these visions the elders had terrified and fascinated me, too.

  “Then,” my mother said, comforting her with a hollow voice, “all will be made well.”

  When Morgause caught me spying, she drew me aside long after supper and took me into my bedchamber. She drew back the door, and, in the darkness of my room, sat me down upon a chair and squatted in front of me, holding my hands. “You are to take care of her now, as she, and I, have cared for you. You are old enough, Mordred, to watch out for her. I trust you will have the Druids send messages to me should anything happen.”

  “What will happen?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, her soft voice growing colder than I had ever heard it. “But I have seen enough of this life to know that there are those poisons that take many years to work upon the soul. And I am afraid for your mother. Once, she…she tried to hurt herself. I was able to stop her then. But I am afraid if she were to do that again, I could not. All I ask is that you watch out for her, and protect her from any danger, for her spirit is waning in these times and I cannot be here for her much of the year.”

  “I promise,” I said, and when I spoke the words, I meant them, although I did not find myself able to truly protect my mother from her own dreams and furies.

  2

  My daylight hours, when not working toward shepherding, or at the fields that needed seeding and tending, or chasing the bulls that wandered the desolate lands that we gathered up as cattle for one month a year, I spent with Merlin, who came at Beltane each year and left before Samhain had arrived at the beginning of winter. My studies were harsh, and often I stayed up late into the night, reading by the glow of the watch fires in the clearing above our caves. It took me six years of my life to learn the damnable Latin tongue, and Greek seemed simple to me, and I loved reading the old parchments stolen from that library of Alexandria by Merlin himself in a previous lifetime. He brought me scrolls about our tribes, and about the Etruscans of Italy and their temples, and of the Great Alexander who had conquered Egypt and the East, and of the kings of Troy before its fall. Persian mathematics gave me headaches and strained my eyes. I found the most difficult studies to be about that complicated Ogham language of the Druids. I never could master the intricacies of its various meanings and inflections. I had been learning the magick of numbers and their uses, and found that cities could be built from the calculations of a scroll. I was made to read the gospels of Christianity that I might understand the wisdom of their beliefs, and I read what Merlin brought me of the law of the Hebrew people and of the moon-gods of ancient Babylon.

  “Truth is not owned by one tribe, you whelp-bastard!” he shouted at me when I told him that I didn’t want to be corrupted by these other religions. “These are the many lights of the gods, and you cannot choose to claim that you seek truth if you douse those lights as others might! You talk like those who wish to see the gods of our tribe wiped out just as they burn our histories and our lives! You Cornish son of a jackal-bitch from the prick of a gob-arise robber-king, sit down and read until your eyes bleed, until that mind of yours opens to what these scrolls tell you! This weakness and fear in your brain will addle you—I should never have let you grow up here. I wanted to take you to Rome, to those labyrinthine halls beneath the fallen city, deep where the Etruscan Mysteries are still practiced, that you might avoid this…distraction here. The world is a wider place than Broceliande, and there are greater seas than the Lake of Glass.”

  His curses often went on and on. I was barely affected by them anymore. I had heard worse from him when our lessons had begun when I was a little boy. Sometimes, I even laughed and called him a son-of-a-bitch-goddess, which got him laughing as well. He taught me phrases that my mother forbid me from using in the daylight hours, and I learned all the insults that could be made of the body parts and of mating from him, some of them in the Roman tongue, some in Greek, but most in the language of the Britons. My favorite of his was when he said of someone with whom he disagreed, “He talks like a plague-carrying prick-discharge of a Saxon mouth-whore!” It took me more than a few nights to even understand it, and when I did, I awoke laughing in the middle of the night, imagining the disgusting image of it. He called my great-aunt Viviane “a hag without a hagdom!” when they fought, which was often, and as if they had been married for several lifetimes; though she gave as good as she got by calling him “a great old wrinkled ball-sack without a ball in sight!”

  But when it came to my lessons, Merlin, for all his rages, taught me well.

  I was not particularly talented toward learning, but I found in it an interest that seemed to bring me out of any loneliness I felt in the lake kingdom.

  I read the stories of heroes and gods that were local to those ancient places, and my mother and her friends delighted in these tales and told me more of their own lore. I reveled in the legends of the Lady of the Lake and her stolen sword and the Cauldron of Rebirth, stolen by an ancient hero from the Otherworld. Its theft caused Arawn to loose the Boars of Moccus upon the world of men.

  The nameless Lady, Our Lady of the Lake, hid the Cauldron that Arawn should never find it again, and she brought it forth in the times of great need of its healing magick. Merlin told me he’d seen the Cauldron once, and only once, in all his lifetimes. “It is gilt-edged and covered with rubies along its lip, but
the bowl itself is dark black and shiny as glass. It can be carried by one man, but is too heavy for all but the one who is destined to hold it.”

  “I am surprised my father did not steal it when he took the sacred sword,” I said.

  “Ah.” He considered this and shook his head. “Your father tricked me, as I am too often tricked by those the gods favor.”

  “He tricked you? But you are the Merlin,” I said in wonder.

  “Yes,” he said. “And he was a boy of fifteen, and often those are the greatest of tricksters. But I had merely told him of the sword’s existence. He had a friend—more than a friend I think, like a brother to him. Like your friend Lukat is to you. And the friend guided him to the sword, though I do not understand this friend, for he did not stop Arthur from it.” Merlin’s mind seemed to wander away from him as he spoke of my father, so I quizzed him, since few would talk at length of the high king.

  Merlin glanced up to the cavern walls, as if they would remind him of my father and his friend, stealing the sword Excalibur from its burial mound within a hidden cave. “Well, Arthur has much good in him, though your mother and her sister will never believe me. He was like you, not in most ways, but of a curious mind. He learned the Art, as well, though he was not as good as you at it, and much of it was clouded from him after he took the sword, for the Art does not always respond to a boy who uses it for his own gain. But he has had a different path. Each of us has a different path to take. Sometimes, whelpling, there is no sense to it, and I have taken many paths in my lifetime.”

  “But if it was bad to take the sword, why wouldn’t he put it back?”

  “It was destined for him, I suppose, though the Lady of the Lake has not yet forgiven me. Nor has your mother or her sister. And, in particular, that great old harpy, Viviane. She still growls in my presence. The she-bitch. But she knew what Arthur would do. She saw it in her scrying bowl and she did nothing to stop it, so she is no less guilty than I, and I could not see what would come of it.”

  “If my father knows the Lake of Glass, why does he not come here?” I asked him. “He must know that Morgan lives here. He must know that his son also is here.”

  “Mordred, your father’s afraid of this place. He understands the arts we practice, though their understanding was taken from him. He has seen things, in taking Excalibur from us, which gave him fear of this place, a twisting serpent of shadow across his mind. I had to unravel his memory of finding the sword. In its place, within his thoughts, I planted a forest of thorns so that he might never come here again. It has kept you safe. This magick protects Morgause and her sons, too, for few others who set foot within Arthur’s court may find this place so long as it is under the protection of the Lady.”

  And then I asked him the one question I did not understand, though it plagued me in those early mornings when I lay upon my bed, and looked up at the red-and-yellow rock of my bedroom ceiling. “Why does my father wish to kill me? I would not harm him, though he has hurt my mother and taken from her and my aunt their kingdoms. Would he not understand that I have no wish to take his kingdom?”

  When I asked this, Merlin grew dark, and pressed his face into his hands as if washing it in despair. Then he looked at me again, and said, “He understands too well the prophecies. But do not be concerned so much with him. He lives across the sea that separates this small Britannia from the larger one. He has Saxons to fight for years to come, and has quests whose calls must be answered. Concern yourself with your life here, with your studies, and the Art itself. Are you happy here, Mordred?”

  “Yes. I love the lake and I feel the Lady here with me at all times.”

  “Does she comfort you?”

  “Yes, my lord, she does. I felt her when I was little, and had dreams of terrible places, and she held my hand as a mother would.”

  “And do you love your mother?”

  I nodded.

  “And Viviane?”

  I nodded.

  “And me?”

  “More than any father I could wish for,” I said.

  “Then do not think of that distant kingdom of Arthur and his knights and warlords. What’s done cannot be undone. Arthur may have sons and daughters by women other than your mother, so this prophecy of doom may not speak of you, but of another. He has not yet taken his bride from the provinces to the east of us. You may not be the destroyer of his kingdoms. You may live this entire lifetime here, and perhaps even your next.”

  “That is all I want,” I said, and then we returned to our lessons.

  3

  Without Merlin, I doubt I would have been able to dream of the world beyond the Isle of Glass—his teachings brought me visions of the vast expanse of kingdoms and wilderness, and though I was privileged to learn of it, I shared as much as I could with my few friends so that they, too, could dream of other places and times.

  One Midsummer’s Night, Merlin sat me down in a boat upon the lake and said, “You know of the Raveling.”

  I nodded.

  “Your mother stole it from me, against my will.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I long ago forgave her. But, I must ask, did she pass you the art of it?”

  I wanted to lie and say she had not, but I could not, not to Merlin. I couldn’t take his disdain or anger, and had long ago trained myself to be the obedient pupil to him, my master in all things.

  I nodded. “But I don’t know it well. She took me into it once so that I might understand the days before my birth.”

  “And did you? Understand?”

  I shook my head. “Not then. But as I grow older, I begin to see why we had to leave my grandmother’s kingdom. I find most of it confusing.”

  “And were you sick after? When the raveling and its unraveling came to pass, did you have nights of pain?”

  I remembered these all too well. “Yes. I had a terrible fever for weeks, and Viviane brought me into the healing circle that I might not slip away. I had aches in my bones as if they wished to break free of my flesh, and my thirst could not be quenched for many nights no matter how much water I drank.”

  “I do not teach this Art lightly,” he said. “And I would not teach you, had your mother not already brought it into your body. Once in the body, it will not leave.” Then a newborn fury rose up in him, and he began cursing with all the languages known to him, of rutting and of the male and female parts, and words in many tongues that all meant those things that the body expelled or was diseased by. Finally, he muttered, “By the gods, if she has taught her sister this Art, I will…”

  “My mother raveled to no one but me,” I said, hoping to calm him. “She regretted what she had done, and Viviane herself, and the Druidess they call Manann, both made her swear upon her own life that she would never partake of this Art again for it brought suffering with it.”

  He grunted his assent to this. “Viviane is a wise old wench. She will be raveled at her death so that her wisdom will not die with the passage of her spirit. She understands the uses of the Art. What do you really know of it?”

  “It is for you alone,” I said. “For it is used in the moments before death that the memory of the great and small may not be lost from our people.”

  “Memory?” He shook his head, sighing. “You do not understand its power. The raveling itself may bring death to the one who is already near the doorway of the dead. The fever and pains you experienced, Mordred—your mother should never have inflicted those upon you. It was selfish of her. It has killed people, this Art, and it does not simply drink from memory. It may drink the soul itself if not done precisely. When I perform this sacred act, I take upon myself the spirit debt, and I, too, grow sick from this that the soul might go free into Annwn.”

  “My mother told me she wished she hadn’t stolen it,” I said. “She told me that it was an accursed Art to practice.”

  “Yes, she swore this to me, but too late for you,” he said. “By raveling into you, she passed this into your body and the body does
not forget such things. If I could, I would remove this from your blood knowledge, but it is impossible. Once the fevers of the raveling have entered the blood, they remain there, sleeping, waiting to return. So, you must learn this Art, though I wish you never to practice it on pain of death.”

  “Yes, my lord,” I said.

  “When someone ravels, whelp”—as he had called me from my earliest days, although when I had behaved wrongly, he had called me “worthless whelp,” which made me laugh—“they also unravel. It is a strong art, not for someone of this lifetime. Do you understand?”

  I nodded. “Will we learn this now?”

  “There is another art you must master first, and once you have done this, we will begin the raveling. This art is called the Vessel of Mercury.”

  “Is it a healing art?”

  “No. It’s born of the voice of the mind. Have you ever spoken into a vessel?”

  “A vessel? Like a bowl?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Just like a bowl. Or a cup.”

  I shook my head. “No, my lord.”

  “Here,” Merlin said. He reached into the folds of his snow-white garment and drew out a wooden trencher. He passed it to me.

  I looked down at it in my hands. Then I looked to him. “What shall I do?”

  “Speak into it, rock sprite. See what happens.”

  Feeling silly, I lifted the bowl to my face and said, “Like this?” into it.

  “Did you hear anything?”

  “No, my lord.”

  “Not a sound? Try again.”

  Again I spoke into it: “What am I meant to hear?”

  He remained silent. A few seconds passed. He said, “Again.”

  “I am speaking into a bowl,” I said, slowly and softly.

  And then I heard it.

  A whisper returned to me, an echo of my own voice but with a change to it.