The Wicked Day

1

WINTER PASSED, AND MARCH came in with its roaring winds and spasmodic storms, then softened towards the sweetness of an early spring. Sea-pinks covered the cliffs with rose, white flowers danced along the arched bramble boughs, red campion and wild hyacinth shone in the grass. Nesting birds called over the lochs, and the moors echoed to the curlew's bubbling note. On every skerry, and every grassy bank near the water, swans had built their weedy castles, and on each one slept a great white bird, head under wing, while the watchful mate cruised nearby, head up and wings set like sails. The water's surface echoed with the screaming of the oystercatchers and the gulls, and the upper sky quivered with lark-song.

A man and a boy were working on the stretch of moorland heather that covers the rolling center of Orkney's main island. At this time of year the heather was dark and dead-looking, but along the edges of the trodden roadway, and by every bank, crowded the pale, scented primroses. At the foot of the rolling moorland lay a thin strip of grazing, golden with dandelions. Beyond this a great loch stretched, and beyond that again, another, lying almost parallel, the two great waters separated at their southern extremities only by a narrow causeway and a strip of land well trodden by hoofs and feet, for this was a holy place in the islands. Here stood the great circles of stone, brooding, enigmatic, huge, and to be feared even by those who knew nothing of their purpose or their building. It was well known that no horse could be made to cross the causeway between dusk and dawning, and no deer had ever been seen to feed there. Only the goats, unchancy creatures always, would graze between the stones, keeping the grass smooth and short for the ceremonies still practiced there at the right seasons.

The two workers were busy on a level piece of moorland not far above these lochs with their guarded causeway. The man was tall, lean, hard, and though dressed as a peasant he did not move like one; his were the swift economical movements of a trained body. His face, young still, but engraved with bitter lines, was restless, in spite of the country tasks and the tranquil day. Beside him the boy, dark-eyed like his father, helped him peg together a board for one of the hives that would be carried to the moor when the heather bloomed, and set on the neat row of platforms that awaited them.

To them, with no warning but the soft pace of hoofs in the heather, and a shadow falling across the man's preoccupation, came Orkney's king, Gawain.

The man looked up. Gawain, starting a casual greeting, checked his horse sharply and stared.

"Mordred!"

Mordred let fall the mallet he had been using, and got slowly to his feet as a group of riders, a dozen or so with footmen and hounds, followed the king over the brow of the hill. The boy stopped his task and straightened to stare, open-mouthed.

Mordred laid a reassuring hand on his son's shoulder. "Why, Gawain! Greetings."

"You?" said Gawain. "Here? Since when? And who is this?" His look measured the boy. "No, I don't need to ask that! He's more like Arthur—" He checked himself.

Mordred said dryly: "Don't trouble. He speaks only the island tongue."

"By the gods," said Gawain, diverted in spite of himself, "if you got that one before you left here you must have been up earlier than any of us!"

The other riders had come up with them. Gawain, with a gesture, sent them back to wait out of earshot. He slipped from the saddle, and a groom ran forward to lead his horse aside. Gawain seated himself on one of the wooden platforms. Mordred, after a moment's hesitation, sat down on another. The boy, at a gesture from his father, began to gather up the tools they had been using. He did it slowly, stealing glances all the while at the king and his followers.

"Now," said Gawain, "tell me. How and why, all of it. The tale went out that you were dead, or you'd have been discovered long since, but I never believed that, somehow. What happened?"

"Do you need to ask? Gaheris must have told you. I assumed he was riding to join you."

"You didn't know? But I'm a fool, how could you? Gaheris is dead."

"Dead? How? Did the King catch up with him? I'd hardly have thought, even so—"

"Nothing to do with the King. Gaheris was wounded that night, nothing much, but he neglected it, and it went bad. If he had come to me — but he didn't. He must have known how little welcome he would be. He went north to his leman, and by the time they got to him there, there was no help for him. Another," said Gawain bitterly, "to Bedwyr's account."

Mordred was silent. He himself could mourn none of them but Gareth, but to Gawain, the only survivor now of that busy and close Orkney clan, the loss was heavy. He said as much, and for a while they spoke of the past, memories made more vivid by the familiar landscape stretching around them. Then Mordred, choosing his words, began to feel his way.

"You spoke of Bedwyr with bitterness. I understand this, believe me, but Bedwyr was hardly to blame for Gaheris's own folly. Or, in fact, for anything that happened that night. I don't plan to hold him accountable even for this." He touched his shoulder, briefly. "You must see that, Gawain, now that you have had time to come to terms with your grief. Agravain was the leader that night, and Gaheris with him. They were determined to destroy Bedwyr, even if it meant destroying the Queen as well. Nothing anyone could say—"

"I know. I knew them. Agravain was a fool, and Gaheris a mad fool, and still carrying the blood-guilt for a worse crime than any done that night. But I was not thinking of them. I was thinking of Gareth. He deserved better of life than to be murdered by a man he trusted, a man whom he had served."

"For the gods' sake, that was no murder!" Mordred spoke explosively, and his son looked up quickly, alarmed. Mordred spoke quietly in the local tongue. "Take the tools back to the house. We'll do no more work here today. Tell your mother I'll come down before long. Don't worry, all is well."

The boy ran off. The two men watched, not speaking, while the slight figure dwindled downhill in the distance. There was a cottage set in a hollow near the loch-side, its thatch barely visible against the heather. The boy vanished through the low doorway.

Mordred turned back to Gawain. He spoke earnestly. "Gawain, don't think I have not grieved for Gareth as much as any man could. But believe me, his death was an accident, as far as a killing in hot blood in a crazy melee can be an accident. And Gareth was armed. Bedwyr was not when he was attacked. I doubt if for the first minutes he even knew who was at the edge of his blade."

"Ah, yes." The bitterness was still in Gawain's voice. "Everyone knows you were on his side."

Mordred's head went up. He spoke incredulously. "You know what?"

"Well, even if you weren't for Bedwyr, at least it's known you were against the attack. Which was sense, I suppose. Even if they had been caught in bed together, twined naked, the King would have punished the attackers even before he dealt with Bedwyr and the Queen."

"I don't understand you. And this is beside the point. There never was any question of adultery." Mordred spoke with stiff anger, a royal rebuke that came incongruously from the shabby workmanlike peasant to the splendidly dressed king. "The King had sent a letter to the Queen, which she wished to show Bedwyr. I suppose it was to tell them he was on his way home. I saw it there, in her chamber. And when we broke in they were both fully clad — warmly wrapped, even — and her women were awake in the anteroom. One of them was in the bedchamber with Bedwyr and the Queen. Not an easy setting for adultery."

"Yes, yes." Gawain spoke impatiently. I know all this. I spoke with my uncle the High King." Some echo in the words, in that place, brought memory back. His glance shifted. He said quickly: "The King told me what had happened. It seems you tried to stop the fool Agravain, and you did prevent Gaheris from harming the Queen. If he had even touched her—"

"Wait. This is what I don't understand. How do you know this? Bedwyr could not have seen what happened, or he would not have attacked me as he did. And I think Bors had already gone for the guard. So how did the King hear the truth of the matter?"

"The Queen told him, of course."

Mordred was silent. The air round him was filled with the singing of the moorland birds, but what he heard was silence, the haunted silence of those long dreaming nights. She had seen. She knew. She had not hunted him away.

He said slowly: "I begin to see. Gaheris told me the guards were coming for me, and I must leave Camelot to save myself. He would take me away to safety, he said, in spite of the risk to himself. Even at the time, astray though I was in my wits, I thought it strange. I had struck him down myself, to save the Queen."

"Gaheris, my dear Mordred, was saving no one's skin but his own. Did it not occur to you to wonder why the guards let him out of the gates, when they must have known of the affray? Gaheris alone they would have stopped. But Prince Mordred, when Bedwyr himself had given orders that he was to be cared for…?"

"I barely remember anything about it. The ride is like a bad dream. Part of a bad dream."

"Then think of it now. That is what happened. Gaheris got out, and away, and as soon as he could he left you, to die or to recover, as God and the good brothers might contrive."

"You know of that, too?"

"Arthur found the monastery after a time, but you had gone. He had riders out searching for you, the length and breadth of the land. In the end they counted you lost, or dead." A smile without mirth in it. "A grim jest of the gods, brother. It was Gaheris who died, and you who were mourned. You would have been flattered. When the next Council was held—"

Mordred did not hear the rest. He got suddenly to his feet, and took a few paces away. The sun was setting, and westward the water of the great loch shimmered and shone. Beyond it, between it and the blaze of the sunset, loomed the hills of the High Island. He drew a long breath. It was like a slow coming alive again. Once, long ago, a boy had stood like this, on the shore not far from here, with his heart reaching out across the hills and the water to the remote and coloured kingdoms. Now a man stood gazing the same way, seeing the same visions, with the hard bitterness breaking in his brain. He had not been hunted. He had not been traduced. His name was still bright silver. His father sought for him in peace. And the Queen…

Gawain said: "A courier will be here within the sennight. You'll let me send a message?"

"No need. I'll go myself."

Gawain, regarding his lighted face, nodded. "And those?" A gesture towards the distant cottage.

"Will stay here. The boy will soon be able to take my place and do the man's work."

"Your wife, is she?"

"So she calls herself. There was some local rite, cakes and a fire. It pleased her." He turned the subject. "Tell me, Gawain, how long will you be here?"

"I don't know. The courier may bring news."

"Do you expect to be summoned back again? I hardly need to ask," said Mordred bluntly, "why you are here in the islands. If you do go back, what then of Bedwyr?"

Gawain's face hardened, setting in the familiar obstinate cast. "Bedwyr will tread warily. And so, I suppose, will I."

His gaze went past Mordred. A woman had come out of the distant cottage, and, with the boy beside her, stood gazing towards them. The breeze moulded her gown against her, and her long hair blew free in a flurry of gold.

"Yes, well, I see," said Gawain. "What is the boy's name?"

"Medraut."

"Grandson to the High King," said Gawain, musing. "Does he know?"

"No," said Mordred sharply. "Nor will he. He does not even know he is mine. She was wedded after I left the islands, and she bore three other children before her man was drowned. He was a fisherman. I knew him when we were boys. Her parents live still, and help her care for the children. They made me welcome, and were glad to get us handfasted after so long, but I could see they never expected me to stay for long, and she, certainly, has said she will never leave the islands. I have promised to see them all provided for. To the children—to all four of them—I am their stepfather. Some day Medraut may get to know that he is the bastard of "King Lot's bastard," but that is all, until perhaps one day I send for him. And saving your presence, brother, there are a few of those around. What need to whet ambition further?"

"What indeed?" Gawain got to his feet. "Well, will you stay with them, or come with me now to await the ship? The palace will give you more comfort than your hiding-place."

"Give me a day or so to make my peace, and I'll come." Mordred laughed suddenly. "It will be interesting to see how its luxury strikes me this time, after these months back at my old tasks! I haven't lost the taste for fishing, but I confess I was not looking forward to digging the peats!"

The King's relief and pleasure, and the Queen's obvious happiness at seeing him again, were, to Mordred, like the breaking of summer after a long winter of near-starvation. Not much was said about the events of that grim night; it was something that neither Arthur nor the Queen wished to dwell on; instead they asked for news of Mordred's months in exile, and soon, as he told of his attempts to get back into the hard-working rhythms of his childhood, they all three lost the memories of the "dreadful night" in laughter.

They spoke then of Gawain, and Mordred handed his half-brother's letter to the King. Arthur read it, then looked up.

"You know what's in this?"

"The main of it, yes, sir. He said he would petition you to let him come south again."

Arthur nodded. His next remark answered the question Mordred had not asked. "Bedwyr is still in Brittany, at his castle of Benoic, north of the great forest that they call Perilous. Indeed, to our loss, he looks to be settled there. He married during the winter."

Mordred, back in the stronghold of courtiers, betrayed no surprise except with a slight lift of the brows. Before he could speak, Guinevere, rising, brought both men to their feet. Her face was pale, and for the first time Mordred saw, in its lively beauty, the signs of strain and sleeplessness. Her mouth had lost some of its gentle fullness, as if it had been set over too many silences.

"I will go now, by your leave, my lords. You will have much still to say to one another, after so long." Her hand went out again to Mordred. "Come soon to talk with me again. I long to hear more of your strange islands. Meanwhile be welcome here, back in your home."

Arthur waited until the door shut behind her. He was silent for a space, and his look was heavy and brooding. Mordred wondered if he was thinking back to the events of that night, but all he said was:

"I tried to warn you, Mordred. But how could you have read my warning? Or reading it, what could you have done, more than you did? Well, it's done with. Again I thank you, and now let us speak no more of it.… But we must needs discuss the result. When you spoke with Gawain, what did he say of Bedwyr?"

"That he would contain himself as best he could. If tolerance of Bedwyr is the price for coming back into service with the Companions, then I think he will pay it."

"He says as much in this letter. Do you think he will keep to this?"

Mordred moved his shoulders in a shrug. "As far as he can, I suppose. He is loyal to you, sir, be sure of that. But you know his temper, and whether he can control it…" He shrugged again. "Will you recall him?"

"He is not banished. He is free to come, and if he does so of his own will, all should be well enough. Bedwyr is settled in Brittany, and he has written to me that his wife goes with child. So for all our sakes, and for my cousin Hoel's, too, it is best that he stay there. There is trouble coming in Brittany, Mordred, and Bedwyr's sword may be needed there, along with mine."

"Already? You spoke of this before."

"No. Not the matter that we discussed before. There is a totally new situation. While you were away in your islands there has been news from abroad, which will bring great changes both in the eastern and western empires."

He went on to explain. News had come of the death of Theodoric, king of Rome and ruler of the western empire. He had reigned for thirty years, and his death would bring changes as great as they were sudden. Though a Goth, and therefore by definition a barbarian, Theodoric, like many of his race, had admired and respected Rome even as he fought to conquer her and make a place for his own people in the kindly climate of Italy. He had embraced what he saw to be best in Roman culture, and had attempted to restore, or shore up, the structures of Roman law and the Roman peace. Under him Goths and Romans continued to be separate nations, bound by their own laws and answerable to their own tribunals. The king, from his capital in Ravenna, ruled with justice and even with gentleness, welding together a loyal legislature both in Ravenna and Rome, where the ancient titles of procurator, consul, legate, were still conferred and upheld.

Theodoric was succeeded by his daughter, acting as regent for her ten-year-old son, Athalaric. But it was not thought that the boy had any chance of the succession. In Byzantium, too, there had been a change. The ageing emperor Justin had abdicated in favour of his nephew Justinian, and had placed upon his head the diadem of the East.

The new emperor Justinian, wealthy, ambitious, and served by brilliant commanders, was reputed to be eager to restore the lost glories of the Roman Empire. It was rumoured that he had already cast his eyes towards the land of the Vandals, on the southern fringe of the Mediterranean; but it seemed likely that he would first seek to extend his empire westward. The Franks of Childebert and his brothers kept a watch always for any movement from the east, but now to the perennial threat of the Burgundians and the Alemans might be added the larger menace of Rome. Behind the barrier of Frankish Gaul, and dependent on her goodwill, lay the tiny land of Brittany.

Bordered on three sides by the sea, on the fourth Brittany was defended only by land nominally Frankish, but in fact half deserted, a dense forest peopled by wary tribesmen or folk displaced by war, who huddled together in makeshift villages, and with their half-savage leaders led an existence owing allegiance to no man.

Recently, King Hoel had written, there had been disquieting reports from some of these forest enclaves to the north-east of his capital. Reports had filtered in of raids, robbery, violent attacks on householders, and, the most recent, a horrifying case of wholesale slaughter where a farmstead had been deliberately fired, and its inmates — eight people with some half-dozen children — burned to death, and their goods and animals stolen. Fear had spread in the forest, and it was being murmured that the raiders were Franks. There was no confirmation of this, but anger was rising, and Hoel feared blind reprisals and a casus belli, at the very moment when friendship with his Frankish neighbours was most necessary.

"Hoel's own men could doubtless deal with it," said Arthur, "but he suggests that my presence, with some of the Companions, and a show of strength, might be an advantage, not just in this, but in the graver matter that he writes of. But see for yourself."

He handed Hoel's letter to Mordred. The latter, alone of the Orkney brothers, had, under the tuition of the priest who had taught them the mainland speech, taken the trouble to learn to read. Now he frowned his way slowly through the beautifully penned Latin of Hoel's scribe.

It seemed that King Hoel had recently received a message sent, not by the new emperor, but by an officer purporting to represent him. This was one Lucius Quintilianus, called Hiberus, "the Spaniard," one of the recently styled consuls. Writing with a truly imperial arrogance, and quoting Rome as if she still bristled with eagles and legions, he had sent to Hoel demanding gold and a levy of troops — far more than he could ever raise — to "help Rome protect Brittany from the Burgundians." He did not state what the penalty would be for refusal; he did not need to.

"But the Franks? King Childebert?" asked Mordred.

"Like his brothers, a mere shadow of their father. Hoel believes they must have had the same demand, so it looks as if Rome must have strength enough to enforce it. Mordred, I am afraid of this emperor. The Celtic lands have not weathered Rome's desertion, and the threat of barbarian domination, to accept once again the collar and chain of Rome, whatever "protection" she brings with her."

The situation, Mordred reflected, was not without its ironies. Arthur, blamed at home by the Young Celts for his adherence to Roman forms of law and centralized government, was nevertheless prepared to resist a possible attempt to bring Celtic territories back within Rome's fold.

"Under her yoke, rather!" said Arthur, in reply to his son's wry comment. "The times are long past when, in return for tribute, a king and his people were protected. Britain was taken by force, and thereafter forced to pay tribute to Rome. In return she enjoyed, after the settlement, a period of peace. Then Rome, self-seeking as always, lifted her shield, and left her weakened dependencies open to the barbarians. We in these islands, and our cousins in their near-isle of Brittany, alone kept our nationhood and remained stable. We have achieved our own peace. Rome cannot expect now to reimpose debts we do not owe. We have as much right to demand tribute from her for Roman territories which are now British again!"

Mordred said, startled: "Are you saying that this new emperor — Justinian? — has demanded tribute of us?"

"No. Not yet. But if he has asked it of Brittany, then sooner or later he will ask it of me."

"When do you go, sir?"

"Preparations are already well forward. We go as soon as we may. Yes, I said "we." I want you with me."

"But with Bedwyr away in Brittany — or will you leave Duke Constantine in charge here?"

Arthur shook his head. "No need. It should not be a long visit. The immediate business is this trouble in the Perilous Forest, and that should not take us long to clear up." He smiled. "If we do see action there, you can call it re-training after your holiday in the Orkney isles! If the other matter becomes serious, then I shall send you home as my regent. Meanwhile I shall leave the Council in charge, with the Queen, and send a sop to Duke Constantine in the form of a letter charging him with the guardianship of the west."

"A sop?"

"A comfort and a drug, maybe, for a violent and ambitious gentleman." Arthur nodded at Mordred's quick lift of the brows. "Yes. Too violent, I have long thought, for the country's need. His father Cador, to whom I promised the kingdoms in default of an heir of my body, was of different metal. This man is as good a fighter as his father, but I mislike some of the tales I have heard about him. So I give him a little favour, and when I return from Brittany, I will send for him here and come to an understanding."

They were interrupted then by an urgent message relayed from the harbour on Ynys Witrin where the Sea Dragon lay. She was equipped, provisioned, and ready to sail. So the King said no more, and he and Mordred parted to make ready for the journey into Brittany.

2

AS SO OFTEN HAPPENS, ONE trouble breeds another. While Arthur and his Companions were still on the Narrow Sea, tragedy, this time real and immediate, struck at Brittany's royal house.

King Hoel's niece Elen, sixteen years old and a beauty, set out one day from her father's home towards Hoel's castle at Kerrec. The party never arrived. Her guards and servants were attacked and killed, and the girl and one of her women, her old nurse, Clemency, were carried off. The other woman in the party, though unhurt, was too shocked to give a coherent account of what had happened. The attack had taken place at dusk, almost within sight of the place where the party had proposed to lodge for the night, and she had not noticed what badge the attackers wore, or indeed anything about them, except that their leader, he who had dragged Elen up before him on his horse and spurred off into the forest, had been "a giant of a man, with eyes like a wolf and a shock of hair like a bear's pelt, and an arm like an oak tree."

Hoel, not unnaturally discounting most of this, jumped to the conclusion that the outrage was the work of the ruffians who had been terrorizing the Forest. Whether they were Bretons or Franks, his hand was forced. The women must be rescued, and the attackers punished. Even King Childebert would not blame the Breton king for avenging such an outrage. Arthur and his party sailed into Kerrec's harbour to find the place in a turmoil, and themselves just in time to lead the hastily mounted punitive expedition into the Forest. Hoel's chief captain, a trusted veteran, with a troop of Breton cavalry, accompanied Arthur and his Companions.

The party rode fast, and more or less in silence. According to what information could be gathered from the princess's surviving waiting-woman, the attack had taken place on a lonely stretch of road just where the way left the Forest and bordered a brackish lake. This was one of the shore lagoons, not quite an inlet of the sea, but moved by the tides, and in spring and autumn washed through by the sea itself.

They reached the lake shore soon after dusk, and halted short of the site of the abduction, to wait for daylight, and for Bedwyr to join them. There had been no rain for several days, so Arthur was hopeful that there would still be traces of the struggle, and tracks to show which way the marauders had gone. Hoel's messenger had gone ahead already to Benoic, and now, just as orders were given for the night's halt, Bedwyr arrived out of the dark with a troop of men at his back.

Arthur greeted his friend with joy, and over supper they fell at once to talk and planning for the next move. No shadow of the past seemed to touch them; the only reference, and that oblique, to the events that had banished Bedwyr to Less Britain was when he greeted Mordred.

This was after supper, when the latter was on his way to the pickets to see that his horse had been properly cared for. Bedwyr fell in beside him, apparently bent on the same errand.

"They tell me that you, too, have been sojourning in the outer dark, Mordred. I am glad to see you back with the King. You are fully recovered now, I trust?"

"Small thanks to you, yes," said Mordred, but smiling. He added: "On second thoughts, all thanks to you. You could have killed me, and we both know it."

"Not quite so easy. The decisions were not all mine, and I think we both know that, too. You're a bonny fighter, Mordred. Some day perhaps we may meet again… and in rather less earnest?"

"Why not? Meantime I am told I am to wish you happy. I gather you are lately wedded? Who is she?"

"Her father is Pelles, a king in Neustria whose land borders mine. Her name is Elen, too."

The name jolted them back to the urgencies of the moment. As they inspected their horses Mordred said: "You must know the ground hereabouts?"

"I know it well. It's barely a day's ride from my family's castle of Benoic. We used to hunt here, and fish the lake. Many's the time my cousins and I—"

He broke off, straightening.

"Look yonder, Mordred! What's that?"

"That" was a point of light, red, nickering with shadows. Another wavered below it.

"It's a fire. On the shore, or near it. You can see the reflection."

"Not on the shore," said Bedwyr. "The shore is farther away. There's an island there, though. We used to land and make fire to cook the fish. It must be there."

"No one lives there?"

"No. There's nothing there. That side of the lake is wild land, and the island itself nothing but a pile of rock with ferns and heather, and on the summit a grove of pine trees. If someone is there now it's worth our while to find out who it is."

"An island?" said Mordred. "It might well be. A good choice, one would think, for a night or so of undisturbed rape."

"It has been known," said the other, very dryly. He turned with the words, and the two men went swiftly back to Arthur.

The King had already seen the fire. He was giving orders, and men were hurrying to saddle up again. He turned quickly to Bedwyr.

"You saw? Well, it could be. It's worth looking at, anyway. How do we best get there? And without alarming them?"

"You can't surprise them with horses. It's an island." Bedwyr repeated what he had told Mordred. "There's a spit of land, rock and gravel, running out from the shore on the far side of the lake. That's about three miles from here. You can get half that distance by the shore road, then you must leave it and enter the forest. There's no path there along the shore; you would have to make a wide detour to skirt the thick trees. Bad going, and quite impossible in the dark. And the forest goes all the way to the sea."

"Then it hardly seems likely that their horses are round there. If that's our rapist still on the island, then he got there by boat, and his horse will still be on the shore road. Right. We'll take a look, then picket the road in case he tries to make a break. Meanwhile we need a boat ourselves. Bedwyr?"

"There should be one not far away. This is oyster water. The beds are only a short way from here, and there may be a boat there—unless, of course, that's the one he took."

But the oyster-fisher's boat was there, lying beached on the shingle near a pier of rough stones. The boat was a crude, shallow-draught affair with an almost flat bottom. Normally she would be poled out slowly over the oyster-beds, but there were paddles, too, tied together and stuck up in the ground like flagstaff's.

Willing hands seized her and shoved her down the shingle. The men moved quietly and quickly, without talking.

Arthur, looking out towards the distant glimmer, spoke softly. "I'll take the shore road. Bedwyr" — a smile sounded in his voice — "you're the expert on expeditions of this kind. The island's yours. Who do you want with you?"

"These craft won't hold more than two, and they're hard to handle if you're to go farther than pole depth. I'll take the other expert. The fisherman's son, if he'll come."

"Mordred?"

"Willingly." He added, dryly: "Re-training after my sojourn in the islands?" and heard Arthur laugh under his breath.

"Go, then, and God go with you. Let us pray the girl still lives."

The boat went smoothly down the bank, met the water, and rode rocking there. Bedwyr took his seat cautiously in the stern, with the pole overside to act as rudder, and Mordred, stepping lightly in after him, gripped the paddles, and settled down to row. With a last shove from the men on shore, they were afloat, and drifting into darkness. They could just hear, above the lapping of the lake, the muffled sounds as the troop moved off, their horses keeping to the soft edges of the roadway.

Mordred rowed steadily, pushing the clumsy craft through the water at a fair speed. Bedwyr, motionless in the stern, watched for the guiding glimmer from the island.

"The fire must be almost dead. I've lost the light.… Ah, it's all right, I can see the island shore now. By your left a little. That's it. Keep as you are."

Soon the island was quite clear to their night-sight. It was small, peaked, black against dark, floating dimly on the faint luminescence of the lagoon. A slight breeze ruffled the water, and concealed the sound of the paddles. Now that the fitful and somehow baleful light of the fire had vanished, the night seemed empty, and very peaceful. There were stars, and the breeze smelled of the sea.

They both heard it at the same moment. Over the water, in a lull of the breeze, came a sound, soft and dreadful, that dispelled the illusory peace of the night. A long, keening ululation of grief and fear. On the island. A woman crying.

Bedwyr cursed under his breath. Mordred drove the paddles in hard, and the clumsy boat jumped and lurched, swinging broadside onto the rock of the shore. He shipped the paddles and grabbed at the rock in one spare, expert movement. Bedwyr jumped past him, his sword ready in his hand.

He paused for a moment, winding his cloak round his left arm. "Beach her. Find his boat and sink it. If he dodges me, stay here and kill him."

Mordred was already out, and busy with the rope. From the black wooded bank above them the sounds came again, hopeless, terrified. The night was filled with weeping. Bedwyr, treading from shingle to pine needles, vanished in silence.

Mordred made the boat fast, drew his own weapon, and moved quietly along the shingle, looking for the other boat.

The island was tiny. In a very few minutes he was back at his starting-point. There was no boat. Whoever he was, whatever he had done, he was gone. Mordred, his sword at the ready, climbed fast after Bedwyr towards the noise of weeping.

The fire was not quite out. A pile of ashes still showed a residual glow. Beside it, in its faint red light, the woman sat, hunched and wailing. Her hair, straggling unbound over a torn robe of some dark colour, showed pale. The fire had been kindled on the island's summit, where a stand of pine trees, clinging to what seemed to be bare rock, had laid down a carpet of needles, and where a cairn, built long ago and fallen apart with time and weather, made some sort of crude shelter. The grove appeared to be empty but for the crouched and mourning figure of the woman.

Mordred, many years younger than the other man, was close behind him as he reached the grove. The two men paused there.

She heard them, and looked up. The starlight, and the faint glimmer from the fire, showed that this was no girl, but an old woman, grey-haired, her face a mask of fear and grief. The wailing stopped as if she had been struck in the throat. Her body stiffened. Her mouth gaped wider, as if for a scream.

Bedwyr put out a hand and spoke quickly: "Madam — Mother — don't be afraid. We are friends. Friends. We have come to help."

The scream was choked back on a strangled gasp. They heard her breathing, short and ragged, as she strained white-eyed to see them.

They moved forward slowly. "Be calm. Mother," said Bedwyr. "We are from the King—"

"From which king? Who are you?"

Her voice was breathless and shaking, but now with the exhaustion of grief, not fear. Bedwyr had spoken in the local tongue, and she answered in the same. Her accent was broader than Bedwyr's, but the language of Less Britain was close enough to that of the mother kingdom for Mordred to understand it easily.

"I am Bedwyr of Benoic, and this is Mordred, son of King Arthur. We are King's men, seeking for the lady Elen. She has been here? You were with her?"

Mordred, while Bedwyr was speaking, had stooped to pick up a handful of pine drift, and a broken spar of wood. He scattered the stuff on the ashes, and a flame spurted, caught and held. Light nickered up redly, and showed the woman more clearly.

She was well, though plainly, dressed, and was perhaps sixty years old. Her clothing was dirtied and torn, as if in some sort of struggle. Her face, grimed and distorted with weeping, showed a big discoloured patch of bruising over one cheek, and her lips were split and crusty with dried blood.

"You come too late," she said.

"Where has he gone? Where has he taken her?"

"I mean too late for the Princess Elen." She pointed towards the tumbled cairn of stones. They looked that way. Now in the strengthening light of the fire they could see that something — someone — had been scrabbling in the thickly heaped pine needles. Some of the smaller stones from the cairn had been pulled down, and pine cones and needles scattered over them.

"It was all I could do," said the woman. She held out her hands. They were shaking. The men looked at them, stirred by horror and pity. The hands were torn and bruised and bloody.

The two knights went across to the cairn where the body lay. It was imperfectly hidden. Beneath the scattered stones and pine needles the girl's face could be seen, streaked with dirt and agonized with death. Her eyes had been closed, but the mouth gaped still, and the neck, with the death marks on the throat, hung crookedly.

Bedwyr, still with the gentleness that Mordred would never have suspected in him, said, half to himself: "She has a lovely face. God give her rest." Then, turning: "Don't grieve. Mother. She shall go home to her own people, and lie in royal fashion, at peace with her gods. And this foul beast shall die, and go to his, for his just reward."

He took a flask from his belt and knelt beside her, holding it to her lips. She drank, sighed, and in a while grew calmer. Soon she was able to tell them what had happened.

She did not know who the ravisher was. He was not, she affirmed to their relief, a foreigner. He had spoken but little, and that mostly curses, but he and his followers were unmistakably Bretons. The reports of a "giant" were not so very far wrong: He was a man huge in every way, stature, girth, strength, with a loud voice and a bellowing laugh. A bull of a man, who had burst out of cover with three companions — roughly clad fellows, like common thieves — and slain four of the princess's escort with his own hands before they had well had time to recover from their surprise. The remaining three fought valiantly but were all killed. Herself and the princess were dragged away, Elen's other woman ("a poor thing, who wailed and screamed so, if I had been one of those beasts I would have killed her on the spot," said the nurse trenchantly) had been left alone, but the attackers, riding off, took the party's horses with them, so had little fear of pursuit.

"They brought us to this place, at the water's edge. It was still dark, so it was hard to make out the way. One of them stayed with the horses on shore, and the others rowed us across to this rock. My lady was half fainting, and I tried to tend her. I had no other thoughts. We could not have escaped. The big man — the bull — carried her up the rocks to this place. The other fellows would have dragged me after, but I dodged them and ran, and when they saw that I had no intention of trying to leave my lady, they let me be."

She coughed, and licked her cut lips. Bedwyr held out the flask again, but she shook her head and presently continued: "The rest I cannot speak of, but you can guess at it. The two fellows held me while he — the bull — raped her. She was never strong. A pretty girl, but pale always, and often ill during the cold winters."

She stopped again, and bent her head. Her fingers twisted together.

After a while Bedwyr asked gently: "He killed her?"

"Yes. Or rather, what he did with her killed her. She died. He cursed, and left her yonder by the stones, and then came back to me. I had made no outcry — they shut my mouth with their stinking hands — but I was afraid that now they would kill me also. For what they did then… I had hardly thought… I am past my sixtieth year, and then one should be… Well, no more of that. What is done is done, and now you are here, and will slay this animal while he lies sleeping off his lust."

"Lady," said Bedwyr forcefully, "he shall die this night, if he is to be found. Where did they go?"

"I do not know. They spoke of an island, and a tower. That's all I can tell you. They had no thought of pursuit, or they would have killed me, too. Or perhaps, being animals, they did not think. They threw me down beside my lady, and left me. After a while I heard horses going. I think they went towards the coast. When I could move, I gave my lady what burial I could. I found a place in the stones of the cairn where someone, fishermen perhaps, had left flint and iron, and so made a fire. Had I not been able to do that I should have died here. There is neither fresh water nor food, and I cannot swim. If they had seen the fire and come back themselves, then I should have died sooner, that is all." She looked up. "But you — two young men like you against that monster and his fellows… No, no, you must not seek him yourselves. Take me with you, I beg of you, but do not seek him out. I would see no more deaths. Take my story back to King Hoel, and he—"

"Lady, we come from King Hoel. We were sent to find you and your lady, and punish the ravishers. Do not fear for us: I am Bedwyr of Benoic, and this is Mordred, son of Arthur of Britain."

She stared in the dimming light. It was apparent that she had either not heard before, or had not understood. She repeated, still only half believing: "Bedwyr of Benoic? Himself? Arthur of Britain?"

"Arthur is here, not far away, with a troop of soldiers. King Hoel is sick, but he sent us to find you. Come now, Lady. Our boat is small, and none too seaworthy, but if you will come with us now to safety, we will return later and carry your lady back for a seemly burial."

So it was done. Two litters were improvised from pine boughs, and on them the girl's body, decently shrouded in a cloak, and the old nurse, collapsed into a feverish sleep, were sent to Kerrec under guard. The remainder of Arthur's force, guided by Bedwyr, rode for the sea shore.

It was low tide. The sand stretched wide and flat and grey, shining faintly under the darkness. They splashed across the river mouth where the lake water and the tide mingled, and then, away ahead of them to seaward in the breaking dawn, they saw the steep cone of the sea-islet which, by Bedwyr's reckoning, must be the "island tower" of which the ruffians had spoken.

Since the old woman had been abandoned to die on the lake island, the tide had flowed and ebbed again, so there were no guiding marks on the sand, but inland on the flats where the river wound its way through its delta of salt turf to the sea, the tracks of horses were plain to be seen making straight for the shore and the rough causeway that led across, at low tide, to the island. Its high rocks, cloudy with trees, loomed out of a calm sea, the tide, just on the turn, creaming along the island's base and between the stones of the causeway. No light showed anywhere, but they could just see, guided by Bedwyr's pointing finger, the outlines of a tower at the summit.

The King regarded this, sitting his horse at the sea's edge, motionless but for the knuckle that tapped thoughtfully at his lip. He might have been contemplating the making of a rose-bed in the Queen's garden at Camelot. He looked no more warlike than he had done on that "peace mission" to Cerdic, when Agravain had inveighed so bitterly against the apparent tameness of the "duke of battles." But Mordred, at his side, watching with interest and a rising excitement that he found hard to conceal, knew that he was seeing for the first time, at last, the Arthur of the legends; this was a professional, an expert at his trade, the man who alone had saved Britain from the Saxon Terror, deciding how best to set about a very minor matter.

The King spoke at last. "The place looks half ruined. The fellow is a brigand, holed up here like a badger. This is not a case for siege, or even attack. By rights we should take hounds and bay him out like a boar."

There was a murmur from the others, like a growl. They had all seen the girl Elen's body as it was carried ashore. Bedwyr's horse reared suddenly, as if sharing its rider's tension. Bedwyr's hand was already at his sword, and behind, among the Companions, metal gleamed in the chill dawn light.

"Put up your swords." Arthur neither glanced aside, nor raised his voice. He sat relaxed and quiet, knuckle to lip. "I was about to say that this was a matter for One man only. Myself. Do not forget that the Princess Elen was kin to me, and I am here for King Hoel, whose niece and subject she was. This beast's blood is for me." He turned then, stilling the renewed murmur. "If he kills me, then you, Mordred, will take him. After you, if it becomes necessary, then Bedwyr and the others will do as they wish. Understood?"

There were assenting noises, some of them obviously reluctant. Mordred saw Arthur smile as he went on: "Now listen to me, before we scale the island. There are apparently at least three other men with him. There may be more. They are your meat; tackle them how you will. Now, they may have seen our approach; they will surely suspect it. They may come out to face us, or they may try to barricade themselves in the tower. In that case it will be your task to bay or burn them out, and bring their leader to face me." He shook the reins, and his horse moved forward, fetlock deep in the sea. "We must cross now. If we delay longer the tide will be over the causeway, and they will come down to take us at a loss as we swim our beasts ashore."

In this he proved wrong. The gang, secure in their knowledge of the rising tide, and, with the stupidity of their brutish natures, unheeding of pursuit, were all within the tower's walls, and had set no watch. Round the remains of their supper fire they slept, four of them, in a litter of gnawed bones and greasy remnants of food. The leader was still awake, nearest the fire, turning over in filthy hands a pair of golden bangles and the jewelled charm that he had torn from Elen's pretty neck. Then some sound must have caught his ear. He looked up, to see Arthur in the moonlight beyond the tower doorway.

The roar he gave was indeed like a bayed boar. And he was as swift, a giant of a man, with thews like a smith, and eyes blazing red as a wild beast's. The King would not have scrupled to kill him unarmed — this was no fight, as he had said, but the slaughter of mad brutes — but no sword could have been wielded within the tower's walls, so Arthur perforce stayed where he was, and let the man snatch up his weapon, a massive club which outreached the shorter man's weapon by inches, and rush out on him. His fellows, slower with sleep and surprise, tumbled out in his wake, to be seized by the knights who waited to either side of the tower door, and killed forthwith. Mordred, hand to hand with a burly fellow who stank, and whose breath reeked like an open drain, found himself forgetting all the knightly practice that the years had taught him, and reverting to the tricks that had once served the fisherman's son in the rough tussles of his boyhood. And it was two to one in the end. As Mordred, tripping, went down under the other man's weight, Bedwyr, joining him almost casually, spitted the fellow like a fowl, then stooping, cleaned his sword on the grass. The dead man's clothes were too dirty for the office.

The gang were all dead within seconds of emerging from the tower. Then the Companions stood back to watch the execution of the leader.

To their trained eyes it seemed obvious that he had himself had some kind of training in the past. A brute he was, but a brave brute. He rushed on Arthur, club against sword, and with the first tremendous swipe of the club outreached the shorter man's sword with a blow that sent the King reeling, and dinted the metal of his shield. The heavy club, sliding across the metal, took the giant for a moment with its impetus, and in that moment Arthur, recovering his balance, cut past club and arm, straight for the unprotected throat above the thick leather jerkin. The giant, for all his size, was quick on his feet. He jumped back, the club beating upward again and striking the sword out of line. But Arthur's arm and body went with the thrust, taking the blow higher, over the club and straight at the giant's face. The point just scraped his forehead, a short cut but a deep one, right above the eyes. The man yelled, and Arthur jumped back as the great club flailed round again. Blood spurted and flowed down the giant's face. It blinded him, but the very blindness almost proved Arthur's undoing, for the man, maddened by the sting of the wound, hurled himself straight at the King, ignoring the ready sword, and with the surprise of his rashness getting past it so that he came breast to breast with his opponent, and with his great weight and wrestling grip began to bear Arthur backward to the ground.

Perhaps Mordred was the only one there to appreciate the swift and very foul blow with which the King extricated himself. He wrenched out of the monster's grip, dodged the club again with apparent ease, and cut the man across the back of the knees. Yelling, the giant fell with a crash like a tree, thrashing about him as he went. The King waited, poised like a dancer, till the club's head thudded into the turf, then cut the wrist that held it. The club lay where it had struck. Before the giant could even feel the pain of the fresh wound the King stepped past through the gush of blood and stabbed him cleanly through the throat.

They recovered the princess's jewels from the tower, threw the bodies into it, and set fire to it. Then the troop rode back to catch up with their companions, and carry their heavy news to King Hoel.

3

ONE POSITIVE GOOD CAME out of the tragedy of the Princess Elen. It was certain that Hoel's Frankish neighbours had had nothing to do with the rape, and, when it was known that the "giant" and his ruffianly companions were dead, the villagers and the forest folk who had suffered from the robbers' depredations dared speak out at last, making it quickly apparent that the recent raids and harassments had all been the work of the same robber band.

Accordingly, as soon as the funeral was done with, but before the time of mourning was past, Hoel and Arthur were able to sit down and discuss the demand made by the consul Quintilianus Hiberus. They decided to send an embassy to him, ostensibly to discuss the Roman emperor's proposals, but in reality to see for themselves what his strength was. Hoel had already sent to King Childebert and his brothers to find out if they had encountered the same demands, and if so, what stand they were prepared to take.

"It will take a little time," said Hoel, stretching his feet nearer the fire, and rubbing a hand over an arthritic knee, "but you'll stay, I trust, cousin?"

"To deploy my troops with yours in full sight, while your embassy goes to nose out Hiberus' intentions? Willingly," said Arthur.

"I'd hoped that you might lend some weight to the embassy, too," said Hoel. "I'm sending Guerin. He's as wily an old fox as ever wasted a council's time. They'll never understand half he says, let alone what his proposals mean. He'll make time for us, and meanwhile we'll get an answer from the Franks. Well, cousin?"

"Of course. For me, then, Bors. He has no wiles at all, but his honesty is patent, and therefore disarming. We can instruct him to leave the politics to Guerin. I'd like Valerius to command the escort."

Hoel nodded approvingly. They were in his private apartments in the palace at Kerrec. The old king was now free of his bedchamber, but spent the days sitting, wrapped in furs, over a blazing fire. His muscular bulk had run, with age, to overweight, and this had brought with it the usual attendant ills; his bones, as he put it, creaked in the draughts of his old-fashioned and relatively comfortless stronghold.

Arthur, with Mordred, and two or three of Hoel's own lords, had supped with the king, and now sat over a bowl of mulled and spicy wine. Bedwyr was not with them. He had gone back at his own request to his lands in the north of Brittany. The reason he gave was his young bride's health. He had confided to Mordred, on the ride south with the body of the murdered princess, that his own Elen, being subject to the fears of her condition, had dreamed of death, and could not rest until her husband returned to her in safety. So, the funeral once over, Bedwyr had ridden north, leaving those of the Young Celts' faction who were present with Arthur's forces to whisper that he had gone sooner than come face to face with Gawain.

For Gawain was on his way to Brittany. Arthur had judged it wise to invite his nephew, now back in the ranks of the Companions, to follow him and share such action as might ensue. The expected fighting had proved to be merely a punitive skirmish with a robber gang, and for this Gawain had sailed too late. So now, discussing with Hoel the composition of the joint embassy, Arthur suggested that Gawain should be part of it. Since Hoel could not go, and Arthur judged it better that he himself should not, some representative of the royal house ought to be present to lend the right dignity to the occasion.

Hoel, humming and huffing in his beard, cast a look at Mordred, misinterpreted the frown he saw there, and cleared his throat to speak, but Arthur, catching the exchange of glances, said quickly: "Not Mordred, no. He is the obvious choice, but I need him elsewhere. If I am to stay here till this is settled then he must go back to Greater Britain in my place. The Queen and Council make a stopgap government, but that is all it is, and there are matters outstanding that must be dealt with, with more authority than I have left with them."

He turned to his son. "After all my talk, eh? Re-training, indeed! Rowing a boat on a lagoon, and killing a robber or two. I'm sorry, Mordred, but a dispatch I had today makes it necessary. Will you go?"

"Whatever you bid me, sir. Of course."

"Then we'll talk later," said the King, and turned back to the discussion.

Mordred, half disappointed and half elated, was nevertheless wholly puzzled. What could be the urgent business that was forcing the King to change his plans? Only yesterday he had spoken of sending Mordred with the embassy. Now it was to be Gawain. And Mordred doubted the wisdom of that choice. His half-brother would be sailing over with the hope of some sort of action; he would be disappointed, not to say angry, to find himself taking part in a peaceable deputation. But Arthur seemed sure. Speaking now in answer to some question of Hoel's, he was declaring that recently, over the affair of Queen Morgan, and during the past months in Orkney, and finally in the moderate tone he was now taking over Gareth's killer, Bedwyr, Gawain had shown himself to have acquired a certain steadiness, and would find the adventure on foreign soil, though it might prove merely to be a diplomatic mission, a rewarding experience.

In which Arthur, as seemed his fate whenever he had to deal with Morgause's blood and brood, was mistaken. Even as he spoke, Gawain and his young cronies, while their ship neared the Breton coast, were busily burnishing up their war weapons, and talking eagerly of the fighting to come.

Later Arthur, having bidden Hoel good night, bore Mordred off with him to his own apartments for the promised talk.

It was a long talk, lasting well into the night. The King spoke first of the message that had caused his change of plan. It was a letter from the Queen. She gave no details, but confessed herself far from happy in her increasingly precarious role. She reported that Duke Constantine, having removed to Caerleon with his train of knights, had announced his intention of proceeding to Camelot "as more fitting for one ruling the High Kingdom." The Queen had sent begging him to hold to what Arthur had bidden, but his reply had been "eager and intemperate."

"I fear what may happen," she had written. "Already I have had reports that in Caerleon, far from holding his force there at the disposal of the Council, he acts and speaks like one already ruling in his own right, or as sole and rightful deputy of the High King. My lord Arthur, I look daily for your return. And I live in fear of what may come if some ill should befall you or your son."

Reading the letter, Mordred was eager to go. He did not pause, did not want, to analyze his feelings towards Duke Constantine. Enough that the man still acted as if Arthur had no son of his body, let alone the blood-kin of his half-sister's son Gawain. And as Arthur had said, the stories of some of Constantine's doings augured ill for the kingdom. He was a stark ruler and a cruel man, and the note of fear in Guinevere's letter was easy to interpret.

Any regret Mordred might have felt at leaving the King's side vanished. This regency, brief though it might be, was the time he had wanted, a trial period when he would rule alone with full authority. He had no fear that Constantine, once he, Mordred, was back in Camelot and at the head of the royal bodyguard there, would persist in his arrogant pretensions. Mordred's return, with the King's authority and the King's seal, should be enough. "And you will find there," said the King, touching the pouch of letters that bore his seal, "my mandate to raise whatever force you may think needful, to keep the peace at home, and to make ready in case of trouble here."

So, in mutual trust, they talked, while the night wore away, and the future seemed set as fair behind the clouded present as the dawn that slowly gilded the sea's edge beyond the windows. If Morgause's ghost had drifted across the chamber in the hazy light and whispered to them of the doom foretold so many years ago, they would have laughed, and watched for the phantasm to blow away on their laughter. But it was the last time that they would ever meet, except as enemies.

At length the King came back to the subject of the coming embassy. Hoel had high hopes of its success, but Arthur, though he had concealed it from his cousin, was less sanguine.

"It may come to a fight yet," he said. "Quintilianus is serving a new master, and is himself on trial, and though I know little enough about those surrounding him, I have a suspicion that he will be afraid to lose credit with that master by treating with us. He, too, needs to make a show of strength."

"A dangerous situation. Why do you not go yourself, sir?"

Arthur smiled. "You might say that that, too, is a question of credit. If I go as an ambassador I cannot take my troops, and if the embassy should fail, then I am seen to fail. I am here in Brittany as a deterrent, not as a weapon.… I dare not be seen to lose, Mordred."

"You cannot lose."

"That is the belief that will subdue Quintilianus and the hopefuls of the new Rome."

Mordred hesitated, then said frankly: "Forgive me, but there's something else. Let me speak now as your deputy, if not your son. Can you trust Gawain and the young men on a mission of this kind? If they go with Valerius and Bors, I think there may be fighting."

"You may be right. But we shall lose little by it. Sooner or later there must be fighting, and I would rather fight here, against an enemy not yet fully prepared, than on my own borders the other side of the Narrow Sea. If the Franks hold the line with us, then we may well succeed in deterring this emperor. If they do not, then for the present the worst that can happen is that we lose Brittany. In that case we take our people, those who are left, back to their homeland, and find ourselves once again embattled behind our blessed seas." He looked away, staring into the heart of the fire, and his eyes were grave. "But in the end it will all come again, Mordred. Not in my time, nor, please God, in yours, but before your sons are old men it will come. It will not be an easy task, whoever attempts it. First the Narrow Sea, and then the ramparts of the Saxon and English kingdoms, manned by men fighting for their own lands. Why do you think I have been determined to let the Saxons own their settled lands? Men fight for what is theirs. And by the time our shores are seriously threatened, I shall have Cerdic on my side."

"I see. I wondered why you did not seem more worried about the embassy."

"We need the time it may buy for us. If it fails we fight now. As simple as that. Now it grows late, so to finish our business." He reached a hand towards the table where a letter lay, sealed with the dragon seal. "Invincible or not, I have given thought to the chance of my death. Here is a letter, which in that event you are to use. In it I have informed the Council that you are my heir. Duke Constantine knows well that my oath to his father was only valid in default of a son of my body. Like it or not, he must accept it. I have written to him, too, a letter that he cannot gainsay. With it comes a grant of land; his dukedom will include the lands that came to me with my first wife, Guenever of Cornwall. I hope he will be content. If he is not" — a glint in the King's eyes as he glanced up at his son — "then that will be your affair, not mine. Watch him, Mordred. If I live, then I myself will call the Council as soon as I return to Camelot, and all this will be settled publicly once and for all."

It is never easy to receive a bequest from one still living. Mordred, for once at a loss for words, began to speak, haltingly, but the King waved him into silence, coming at last to the subject that, to Mordred, would have been first.

"The Queen," said Arthur, his gaze on the fire. "She will be under your protection. You will love and care for her as her own son, and you will see to it that for the rest of her days she lives safely, with the honour and comfort due to her. I do not ask you to swear this, Mordred, knowing that I need not,"

"I do swear it!" Mordred, on his knees by his father's chair, spoke for once with uncontrolled emotion. "I swear by all the gods there are, by the God of the kingdom's churches, and the Goddess of the isles, and the spirits that live in the air, that I will hold the kingdoms for the Queen, and love and care for her and secure her honour as you would do were you still High King."

Arthur reached to take the younger man's hands between his own, and raising him, kissed him. Then he smiled.

"So now we will stop talking about my death, which will not come yet awhile, I assure you! But when it does, I give my kingdoms and my Queen into your hands with a quiet spirit, and with my blessing and God's."

Next day Mordred sailed for home. A few days after he had gone, the embassy, gay with coloured pennants and tossing plumes, set out for Quintilianus Hiberus' encampment.

Gawain and his friends rode at ease. Though the talk was of the sort that Mordred would have recognized — the young men looking to Gawain for reckless leadership and excitement — they did contain themselves with decorum on the ride. But none of the younger faction made any attempt to conceal their hope that the peaceful overtures would fail, and that they would see action.

"They say Quintilianus is a hot man, and a clever soldier. Why should he listen to an old man giving another old man's message?" Such was Mador's description of King Hoel's embassy. Others chimed in: "If we don't get fighting, at least they're sure to show us sport — games, hunting — and it will go hard if we cannot show these foreigners what we can do!" Or again: "They say the horses in Gaul are beauties. We might get some trading done, if the worst comes to the worst."

But it seemed they were doomed to disappointment on all counts. Quintilianus' headquarters was a temporary camp built on a bleak stretch of moorland. The party arrived towards evening of a dull day with a chilly wind carrying rain. The dead springtime heather stretched black and wet on every hand, the only colour in the moorland being the livid green of the boggy stretches, or the metallic gleam of water. The camp itself was laid out on the Roman pattern. It was well built with turf's and stout timber, and was impressive enough as a temporary stance, but the young Britons, ignorant of warfare and accustomed to the great Roman-based permanent structures of Caerleon and Segontium, looked about them with disappointment and contempt.

It was hard to say whether caution or care for his guests' comfort had impelled Quintilianus Hiberus to house the British outside the walls of the camp. Tents had been erected some hundred paces outside the surrounding ditch, with their own horse lines and a pavilion which would serve as a hall. There they were invited to dismount, while their own grooms took their horses to the lines. Then on foot they were led up the main way towards the camp's center, where the commander's headquarters stood.

There Quintilianus Hiberus and Marcellus, his second in command, received the embassy with chilly courtesy. Speeches, previously prepared and learned by rote, were exchanged. They were long, and so over-careful as to be almost incomprehensible. No mention was made either of the emperor's message or of Hoel's intentions. Rather, a rambling account of the old king's health was produced in answer to their host's indifferent query, with details, delicately touched on, of his cousin Arthur's anxiety, which had provoked that warrior to visit Brittany's king. That he had brought a sizeable force with him was not stated, but the Roman consul knew it, and they knew that he knew.…

Only when the polite sharpening of blades had been going on for some time did Guerin and Bors allow themselves to approach a statement — still far from direct — of Hoel's position and its backing by Arthur of Britain.

The young men, waiting formally behind their ambassadors, chafing after the decorous inaction of the ride, and thinking of food and recreation, had time to grow bored, to eye their surroundings curiously, and to exchange stares with the warriors of the opposite faction who waited in equal boredom behind their own leaders.

These leaders, after a lengthy and dragging parley, made more tedious than need be by the fact that Bors spoke little or no Latin, and Marcellus spoke nothing else, came at length to a stalemate pause. There would be, said Quintilianus, drawing his mantle about him and rising, further parley tomorrow. Meanwhile the visitors would no doubt care to rest and refresh themselves. They would be shown now to the tents prepared for them.

The ambassadors bowed gravely and withdrew. Their hosts came forward, and the party was escorted back through the camp. "No doubt," said the youth escorting Gawain, with rather threadbare politeness, "you are weary after your journey? You will find the lodgings rough, I am afraid, but we ourselves have become accustomed to living in the field—"

He yawned as he spoke. This meant no more than that he was as weary of the talks as the other young men, but Gawain, bored, contemptuous, and beginning to see his hopes of glory fading, chose to take it otherwise.

"Why should you think we are not used to rough quarters? Because we have come with a peaceful embassy, it doesn't mean that we are not fighters, and as ready in the field as any rabble on this side of the Narrow Sea!"

The youth, surprised, and then as quickly angry as the other, flushed scarlet to his fair hair. "And what field of battle have you ever been on. Sir Braggart? It's a long time since Agned and Badon! Even the fabled Arthur, that your fellows were boasting about in there, would be hard put to it to wage a war nowadays, with men who are only good for talking!"

Before Gawain could even draw breath, "And not even too good at that," put in someone else, with a cruel imitation of Bors's thick Latin.

There was laughter, and through it a quick attempt by cooler spirits to pass the exchange off with jesting, but Gawain's brow was dark, and hot words still flew. The fair youth, who seemed to be someone of consequence, bore through the talk with a ringing shout of anger: "So? Didn't you come all this way to beg us not to fight you? And now you boast and brag about what your leaders can do! What do you expect us to think of such empty braggarts?"

Here Gawain drew his sword and ran him through.

The stunned minutes that followed, of unbelief, then of horror and confusion, as the fallen man's companions ran to raise him and find if life remained in him, gave the British just enough time to escape. Gawain, shouting, "Get to the horses!" was already half-way to the picket lines, followed closely by his friends who, from the moment the bitter words began to pass, had seen the violent end coming. The ambassadors, dismayed, hesitated only for a moment before following. If the assailant had been any other than Arthur's nephew, they might have given him over to the punishment due to one who broke a truce, but as it was, the leaders knew that the embassy, never hopeful, was now irretrievably shattered, and all their party, as truce-breakers, were in great danger. Valerius, an old soldier used to instant decisions, took swift command, and had his whole party mounted and out of the lines at the gallop before their hosts had well grasped what had occurred.

Gawain, wildly galloping with the rest, struggled to pull his horse out of the troop and wheel back.

"This is shameful! To run away, after what they said? Shame on you, shame! They called us cowards before, what will they call us now?"

"Dead men, you fool!" Valerius, furiously angry, was in no mood to mince words, prince or no prince. His hand came hard down on Gawain's rein, and dragged the horse into the rapid gallop alongside his own. "It's shame on you, prince! You knew what the kings wanted from this embassy. If we come alive out of this, which is doubtful, then we shall see what Arthur will have to say to you!"

Gawain, still rebellious and unrepentant, would have replied, but at that moment the troop came to a river, and they spread out to force their horses through it. They could have forded it had there been time, but at that moment the pursuing party came in sight, and there was nothing for it but to fight. Valerius, furious and desperate, turned and gave orders for the attack.

The engagement, with tempers high on both sides, was short, ferocious and very bloody. The fight was a running one, and ended only when half the embassy, and rather more of the pursuing force, were dead. Then the Romans, gathered for a few minutes' respite at the edge of a little wood, seemed to be taking counsel, and presently two of their number turned and made off towards the east.

Valerius, unwounded, but exhausted and liberally stained with other men's blood, watched them go. Then he said, grimly: "Gone for reinforcements. Right. There's nothing we can do here. We leave. Now. Bring the loose horses and pick up that man yonder. He's alive. The rest we'll have to leave."

This time there was no argument. The British turned and rode off. The Romans made no attempt to stop them, nor were any taunts exchanged. Gawain had had his way, and proved what had not needed to be proved. And both sides knew what must happen now.

4

MORDRED SAT AT THE WINDOW of the King's business room in Camelot. The scents from the garden below eddied on the warm breeze in sudden gusts of sweetness. The apple blossom was gone, but there were cherries still in bloom, standing deep among bluebells and the grey spears of iris. The air was full of the sound of bees, and birds singing, while down in the town bells rang for some Christian service.

The royal secretaries had gone, and he was alone. He sat, still thinking over some of the work that had been done that day, but gradually, in the scented warmth, his thoughts drifted into dreaming. So little time ago, it seemed, he had been in the islands, living as he had lived in boyhood, thinking in bitterness that he had lost everything in that one night when the Orkney brothers had risked all for themselves and their friends on that mad, vicious attempt to finish Bedwyr. Thinking, too, of the summer's tasks ahead of him: harvesting and drying fish, cutting peats, rebuilding walls and repairing thatch against the dreadful Orkney winter.

And now? His hand, resting on the table, touched the royal seal. He smiled.

A movement outside the window caught his eye. Guinevere the Queen was walking in the garden. She wore a gown of soft dove-grey, that shimmered as she moved. Her two little dogs, silver-white greyhounds, frisked round her. From time to time she threw a gilded ball and they bounded after it, yelping and wrangling as the winner carried it back to lay it at her feet. Two of her women, both young and pretty girls, one in primrose yellow and the other in blue, walked behind. Guinevere, still lovely, and secure in her loveliness, was not one of those who seek to set her beauty off by surrounding herself with plain women. The three lovely creatures, with the dainty little dogs at their skirts, moved with grace through the garden, and the flowers of that sweet May were no fairer.

Or so thought Mordred, who was rarely a poet. He gazed after the Queen, while his hand once more, but quite unconsciously, reached out and touched the dragon of the royal seal. Again he drifted into dream, but this time it was not a dream of the islands.

He was brought sharply to himself by the sounds, urgent and unmistakable, of a King's messenger being ushered through the royal apartments. A chamberlain opened the door to announce a courier, and even as he spoke the man hurried by him and knelt at the regent's feet.

One glance told Mordred that here was news from Brittany, and that it was not good. He sat in the great chair and said, coolly: "Take your time. But first — the King is well?"

"Yes, my lord. God be thanked for it! But the news is ill enough." The man reached into his pouch, and Mordred put out a hand.

"You have letters? Then while I read them, compose yourself and take a cup of wine."

The chamberlain, who missed nothing, came in unbidden with the wine, and while the man drank gratefully, Mordred broke the seal of the single letter he had brought, and read it.

It was bad, but, to one remembering that last conversation with the King, not yet tragic news. Once again, thought Mordred, the evil fates summoned by Morgause were at their work. To put it more practically, the Orkney rashness had yet again brought the promise of disaster close. But possibly something could be saved from near-disaster; it was to be hoped that all Gawain had done was to bring matters to a head too soon.

The King's letter, hastily dictated, gave the facts merely of the disastrous embassy and the running fight that had followed. Under Mordred's questioning the courier supplied the details. He told of the rash exchange between Gawain and the Roman youth, of the murder, and of the flight of the embassy and the subsequent skirmish by the river's bank. His story confirmed what Arthur's letter indicated, that all hope even of a temporary peace had vanished. It was possible that Hoel might be able to take the field, but if not, Arthur must command Hoel's army, together with such force as he had brought with him. Bedwyr had been recalled from Benoic. Arthur had already sent to Urbgen, to Maelgon of Gwynedd, to Tydwal and the King of Elmet. Mordred was to send what force he could, under the command of Cei. He would then be well advised to put forward his own meeting with Cerdic, when he could apprise him of the situation. The letter closed briefly, with urgency: "See Cerdic. Warn him and his neighbours to watch the coast. Raise what force you can meanwhile. And guard the Queen's safety."

Mordred dismissed the man at length to rest. He knew that there was no need to enjoin discretion; the royal couriers were well chosen and highly trained. But he knew that the man's coming would have been noted, and rumour would have run through Camelot within minutes of the tired horse's coming up through the King's Gate.

He walked over to the window. The sun had slanted some way towards the west, and shadows were lengthening. A late thrush sang in a lime tree.

The Queen was still in the garden. She had been cutting lilac. The girl in the blue dress walked beside her, carrying a flat willow basket filled with the white and purple blooms. The other girl, with the two little dogs leaping and barking round her, was stooping, with her skirt kilted up in one hand, over a border of ferns. She straightened with the gilded ball in her hand and threw it, laughing, for the greyhounds. They raced after it, both reaching it at the same moment, and fell into a yelping, rolling tangle, while the ball flew free.

Keep the Queen safe. How long could this serene and flower-filled garden peace be kept? The battle might already have started. Might be over. With enough bloodletting, thought Mordred, to content even Gawain.

His thoughts went further; were checked. Even now he himself might be High King in fact, if not yet in name.…

As if his thought had been the shadow of a flying cloud that touched her, he saw the Queen start, then lift her head as if listening to some sound beyond the garden walls. The spray of lilac which she loosed sprang back into its own scented bank of blossom. Without looking she dropped the silver knife into the basket which the girl held beside her. She stood still, except for her hands, which seemed to rise of their own will to clasp themselves at her breast. Slowly, after a moment, she turned to look up towards the window.

Mordred drew back. He spoke to the chamberlain. "Send down to the garden to ask if I may speak with the Queen."

There was an arbour, pretty as a silk picture, facing south. It was embowered with early roses, showers of small pale-pink blossoms, with coral-coloured buds among them, and falling flowers fading to white. The Queen sat there, on a stone bench warm from the sun, waiting to receive the regent. The girl in yellow had taken the greyhounds away; the other remained, but she had withdrawn to the far side of the garden, where she sat on a bench below one of the palace windows. She had brought some sewing out of the pouch at her girdle, and busied herself with it, but Mordred knew how carefully he was watched, and how quickly the rumours would spread through the palace: "He looked grave; the news must be bad.…" Or, "He seemed cheerful enough; the courier brought a letter and he showed it to the Queen.…"

Guinevere, too, had some work by her. A half-embroidered napkin lay beside her on the stone bench. Suddenly a sharp memory assailed him: Morgan's garden in the north, the dying flowers and the ghosts of the imprisoned birds, with the angry voices of the two witches at the window above. And the solitary, frightened boy who hid below, believing that he, too, was trapped, and facing an ignominious death. Like the wildcat in its narrow cage; the wildcat, dead presumably these many years, but, because of him, dead in freedom with its own wild home and its kittens sired at will. With the lightning-flicker with which such thoughts come between breath and breath, he thought of his "wife" in the islands, of his mistress now gone from Camelot and comfortably settled in Strathclyde, of his sons of those unions growing up in safety — for the children of that solitary boy could now incur, how readily, the sting of envy and hatred. He, like the wildcat, had found the window to freedom. More, to power. Of those scheming witches, one was dead; the other, for all her boasted magic, still shut away in her castle prison, and subject, now, to his will as ruler of the High Kingdom.

He knelt before the Queen and took her hand to kiss. He felt its faint tremor. She withdrew it and let it fall to her lap, where the other clasped and held it tightly. She said, with a calmness forced over drawn breath: "They tell me a courier has come in. From Brittany?"

"Yes, madam." At her nod he rose, then hesitated. She gestured to the seat, and he sat beside her. The sun was hot, and the scent of the roses filled the air. Bees were loud in the racemes of pink blossom. A little breeze moved the flowers, and the shadows of the roses swayed and flickered over the Queen's grey gown and fair skin. Mordred swallowed, cleared his throat and spoke.

"You need have no fear, madam. There have been grave doings, but the news is not altogether bad."

"My lord is well, then?"

"Indeed yes. The letter was from him."

"And for me? Is there a message for me?"

"No, madam, I'm sorry. He sent in great haste. You shall see the letter, of course, but let me give you the gist of it first. You know that an embassy was sent, jointly from King Hoel and King Arthur, to talk with the consul Lucius Quintilianus."

"Yes. A fact-finding mission only, he said, to gain time for the kingdoms of the west to band together against the possible new alliance of Byzantium and Rome with the Germans of Alamannia and Burgundy."

She sighed. "So, it went wrong? I guessed it. How?"

"By your leave, the good news first. There were other fact-finding missions on their way at the same time. Messengers were sent to sound out the Frankish kings. They met with encouraging success. One and all, the Franks will resist any attempt by Justinian's armies to reimpose Roman domination. They are arming now."

She looked away, past the boles of the lime trees now lighted from behind by the low sun, and gilded with red gold. The young leaves, wafers of beaten gold, shone with their own light, and the tops of the trees, cloudy with shadow, hummed with bees.

Mordred's "good news" did not appear to have given her any pleasure. He thought her eyes were filled with tears.

Still regarding those glowing tree-trunks with their mosaic of golden leaves, she said: "And our embassy? What happened there?"

"There had to be, for courtesy, a representative of the royal house. It was Gawain."

Her gaze came back to him sharply. Her eyes were dry. "And he made trouble." It was not a question.

"He did. There was some foolish talk and bragging that led to insults and a quarrel, and the young men fell to fighting."

She moved her hands, almost as if she would throw them up in a classic gesture of despair. But she sounded angry rather than grieved. "Again!"

"Madam?"

"Gawain! The Orkney fools again! Always that cold north wind, like a blighting frost that blasts everything that is good and growing!" She checked herself, took in her breath, and said, with a visible effort: "Your pardon, Mordred. You are so different, I was forgetting. But Lot's sons, your half-brothers—"

"Madam, I know. I agree. Hot fools always, and this time worse than fools. Gawain killed one of the Roman youths, and it turned out that the man was a nephew of Lucius Quintilianus himself. The embassy was forced to flee, and Quintilianus sent Marcellus himself after them. They had to turn and fight, and there were deaths."

"Not Valerius? Not that good old man?"

"No, no. They got back in good order — indeed, with a kind of victory. But not before there had been several running engagements. Marcellus was killed in the first of these, and later Petreius Cotta, who took command after him, was taken prisoner and brought back to Kerrec in chains. I said it was a victory of a kind. But you see what it means. Now the High King himself must take the field."

"Ah, I knew it! I knew it! And what force has he?"

"He leads Hoel's army, and with them the troops he took with him, and Bedwyr is called down from Benoic with his men." Coolly he noted the slightest reaction to the name: She had not dared ask if Bedwyr, too, were safe; but now he had told her, and watched her colour come back. He went on: "The King does not yet know what numbers the Frankish kings will bring to the field, but they will not be small. From Britain he has called on Rheged and Gwynedd, with Elmet, and Tydwal from Dunpeldyr. Here I shall raise what reinforcements I can in haste. They will sail under Cei's command. All will be well, madam, you will see. You know the High King."

"And so do they," she said. "They will only meet him if they outnumber him three to one, and that, surely, they can do. Then even he will be in danger of defeat."

"He will not give them time. I spoke of haste. This whole thing has blown up like a summer storm, and Arthur intends to attack in the wake of it, rather than wait for events. He is already marching for Autun, to meet the Burgundians on their own ground, before Justinian's troops are gathered. He expects the Franks to join him before he reaches the border. But you had better read his letter for yourself. It will calm your fears. The High King shows no doubts of the outcome, and why should he? He is Arthur."

She thanked him with a smile, but he saw how her hand trembled as she held it out for the letter. He stood up and stepped down from the arbour, leaving her alone to read. There was a fluted stone column with a carefully contrived broken capital overhung with the yellow tassels of laburnum. He leaned against this and waited, watching her surreptitiously from time to time under lowered lids.

She read in silence. He saw when she reached the end of the letter, then read it through again. She let it sink to her lap and sat for a while with bent head. He thought she was reading the thing for the third time, then he saw that her eyes were shut. She was very pale.

His shoulder came away from the pillar. Almost in spite of himself he took a step towards her. "What is it? What do you fear?"

She gave a start, and her eyes opened. It was as if she had been miles away in thought, recalled abruptly. She shook her head, with an attempt at a smile. "Nothing. Really, nothing. A dream."

"A dream? Of defeat for the High King?"

"No. No." She gave a little laugh, which sounded genuine enough. "Women's folly, Mordred. You would call it so, I am sure! No, don't look so worried, I'll tell you, even if you laugh at me. Men do not understand such things, but we women, we who have nothing to do but wait and watch and hope, our minds are too active. Let us but once think, What will come to me when my lord is dead? and then all in a moment, in our imagination, he is laid in sad pomp on his bier, and the grave is dug in the center of the Hanging Stones, the mourning feast is over, the new king is come to Camelot, his young wife is here in the garden with her maidens, and the cast-off queen, still in the white of mourning, is questing about the kingdoms to see where she may with honour and with safety be taken in."

"But, madam," said Mordred, the realist, "surely my — the High King has already told you what dispositions have been made against that day?"

"I knew you would call it folly!" With an obvious attempt at lightness, she turned the subject.

"But believe me, it is something that every wife does. What of your own, Mordred?"

"My—?"

She looked confused. "Am I mistaken? I thought you were married. I am sure someone spoke of a son of yours at Gwarthegydd's court of Dumbarton."

"I am not married." Mordred's reply was rather too quick, and rather too emphatic. She looked surprised, and he threw a hand out, adding: "But you heard correctly, madam. I have two sons." A smile and a shrug. "Who am I, after all, to insist on wedlock? The two boys are by different mothers. Melehan is the younger, who is with Gwarthegydd. The other is still in the islands."

"And their mothers?"

"Melehan's mother is dead." The lie came smoothly. Since the Queen apparently had known nothing about his illicit household in Camelot, he would not confess it to her now. "The other is satisfied with the bond between herself and me. She is an Orkney woman, and they have different customs in the islands."

"Then married or not," said Guinevere, still with that forced lightness, "she is still a woman, and she, like me, must live through the same dreams of the wicked day when a messenger comes with worse news than this you have brought to me."

Mordred smiled. If he thought that his woman had too much to occupy her than to sit and dream about his death and burial, he did not say so. Women's folly, indeed. But as he held his hand for the letter, and she put the roll into it, he saw again how her hand shook. It changed his thoughts about her. To him she had been the Queen, the lovely consort of his King, the elusive vision, too, of his desires, a creature of gaiety and wealth and power and happiness. It was a shock to see her now, suddenly, as a lonely woman who lived with fear. "We have nothing to do but wait and watch and hope," she had said.

It was something he had never thought about. He was not an imaginative man, and in his dealings with women — Morgause apart — he followed in the main his peasant upbringing. He would not wittingly have hurt a woman, but it would not have occurred to him to go out of his way to help or serve one. On the contrary, they were there to help and serve him.

With an effort of imagination that was foreign to him he cast his mind forward, trying to think as a woman might, to fear fate as it would affect the Queen. When Arthur did meet death, what could she expect of the future? A year ago the answer would have been simple: Bedwyr would have taken the widow to Benoic, or to his lands in Northumbria. But now Bedwyr was married, and his wife was with child. More than that: Bedwyr, in sober fact, was not likely to survive any action in which Arthur was killed. Even now, as Mordred and the Queen talked together in this scented garden, the battle might already be joined that would bring to reality her dream of the wicked day. He recalled her letter to Arthur, with its unmistakable note of fear. Fear not only of Arthur's danger, but of his own. "You or your son," she had written. Now, with a sudden flash of truth as painful as a cut, he knew why. Duke Constantine. Duke Constantine, still officially next in line for the throne and already casting his eyes towards Camelot, whose title would be greatly strengthened if, first, he could claim the Queen-regent.…

He became conscious of her strained and questioning gaze. He answered it, forcefully.

"Madam, for your dreams and fears, let me only say this. I am certain that the King's own skill, and your prayers, will keep him safe for many years to come, but if it should happen, then have no fear for yourself. I know that Constantine of Cornwall may try to dispute the King's latest disposition—"

"Mordred—"

"With your leave, madam. Let us speak directly. He has ambitions for the High Kingdom, and you fear him. Let me say this. You know my father's wish, and you know that it will be carried out. When I succeed him as High King, then you need fear nothing. While I live you will be safe, and honoured."

The red flew up into her cheeks, and her look thanked him, but all she said was, trying still to smile: "No cast-off queen?"

"Never that," said Mordred, and took his leave.

In the shadow of the garden gateway, out of sight of the arbour, he stopped. His pulse was racing, his flesh burned. He stood there motionless while the heat and hammering slowly subsided. Coldly he crushed back the lighted picture in his mind: the roses, the grey-blue eyes, the smile, the touch of the tremulous hands. This was folly. Moreover, it was useless folly. Arthur, Bedwyr… whatever Mordred was or might be, until both Arthur and Bedwyr were dead, with that lovely lady he could come only a poor and halting third.

He had been too long without a woman. To tell the truth, he had been too busy to think about them. Till now. He would find time tonight, and quench these hot imaginings.

But all the same, he knew that today his ambition had taken a different turn. There were precedents, undisputed. He had no wife. She was barren, but he had two sons. If Constantine could think about it, then so could he. And by all the gods in heaven and hell, Constantine should not have her.

With the King's letter crumpled fiercely in his hand, he strode back to the royal chamber, shouting for the secretaries.

5

IT WAS SOME TIME BEFORE Mordred saw the Queen again. He was plunged immediately into the whirlwind business of equipping and embarking the troops Arthur had asked for. In a commendably short time the expeditionary force sailed, under the command of Cei, the King's foster brother, with a reasonable hope of coming up with Arthur's army before the clash came. The courier who returned from this voyage brought news that was, on the whole, cheering: Arthur, with Bedwyr and Gawain, had already set out on the march eastward, and King Hoel, finding himself miraculously recovered at the prospect of action, had gone with them. The Frankish kings, with a considerable army, were also reported to be converging on Autun, where Arthur would set up his camp.

After this, news came only spasmodically. None of it was bad, but, coming as it did long after the events reported, it could not be satisfactory. Cei and the British kings had joined Arthur; that much was known; and so had the Franks. The weather was good, the men were in high heart, and no trouble had been met with on the march.

So far, that was all. What the Queen was feeling Mordred did not know, nor did he have time to care. He was setting about the second of Arthur's commissions, raising and training men to bring the standing army up to strength after the departure of the expeditionary force. He sent letters to all the petty kings and leaders in the north and west, and himself followed where persuasion was needed. The response was good: Mordred had laid openly on the table the reasons for his demand, and the response from the Celtic kingdoms was immediate and generous. The one leader who made no reply at all was Duke Constantine. Mordred, keeping the promised eye on the Cornish dukedom, said nothing, set spies, and doubled the garrison at Caerleon. Then, once the tally of kings and the arrangements for receiving and training the new army were complete, he sent at last to Cerdic the Saxon king, to propose the meeting Arthur had suggested.

It was late July when Cerdic's answer came, and that same day, on an afternoon of misty rain, a courier arrived from the Burgundian battlefront, bearing with him a single brief dispatch, with other tokens which, when the man spilled them on the table in front of Mordred, told a dreadful tale.

As was usual, most of his news would be given verbally, learned by rote. He began to recite it, now to the still-faced regent.

"My lord, the battle is over, and the day was ours. The Romans and the Burgundians were put to flight, and the emperor himself recalled what force was left. The Franks fought nobly alongside us, and on all sides some marvellous deeds were done. But—"

The man hesitated, wetting his lips. It was apparent that he had given the good news first, in the hope of cushioning what was to follow. Mordred neither moved nor spoke. He was conscious of a fast-beating heart, a constricted throat, and the necessity for keeping steady the hand that lay beside the spilled tokens on the table. They lay in a jumbled and glittering pile, proof that a tragic story was still to come. Seals, rings, badges of office, campaign medals, all the mementoes that, stripped from the dead, would be sent home to the widows. Cei's badge was there, the royal seneschal's gilded brooch. And a medal from Kaerconan, rubbed thin and bright; that could only be Valerius'. No royal ring; no great ruby carved with the Dragon, but—

But the man, the veteran of a hundred reports, both good and evil, was hesitating. Then, meeting Mordred's eye, he swallowed and cleared his throat. It was a long time since the bearers of bad news had had, as in some barbarous lands, to fear ill-treatment and even death at the hands of their masters; nevertheless his voice was hoarse with something like fear as he spoke again. This time he was direct to the point of brutality.

"My lord, the King is dead."

Silence. Mordred could not trust himself with word or movement. The scene took on the shifting and misted edges of unreality. Thought was suspended, as random and weightless as a drop of the fine rain that drifted past the windows.

"It happened near the end of the day's fighting. Many had fallen, Cei among them, and Gugein, Valerius, Mador and many others. Prince Gawain fought nobly; he is safe, but Prince Bedwyr fell wounded on the left. It is feared that he, too, will die.…"

His voice went on, naming the dead and wounded, but it was doubtful if Mordred heard a word of it. He moved at last, interrupting the recital. His hand went out to the parchment lying on the table.

"It is all here?"

"The news, my lord, but not the details. The dispatch was sent by Prince Bedwyr himself. While he could still speak he had them write it. The list of casualties will follow as soon as they are known and checked, but this, my lord, could not be delayed."

"Yes. Wait, then."

He took the letter across to a window, and with his back to the man, spread the page out on the sill. The careful script danced under his eyes. The drifting curtain of the rain seemed to have come between him and the letter. He dashed the back of his hand impatiently across his face and bent nearer.

In the end, and after three careful readings, the sense of it went right into his brain and lodged there, thrumming like the arrow that lodges deep in the flesh, spreading, not pain, but a numbing poison.

Arthur was dead. The news that followed, of complete and annihilating victory over the Romans and Burgundians, came as an irrelevance. Arthur was dead. The dispatch, dictated hastily in a field dressing station, gave few details. The High King's body had not yet been recovered from the field. Parties were still searching among the piled and pillaged dead. But if the King were still living, said Bedwyr tersely, he would by this time have made himself known. The regent must assume his death, and act accordingly.

The parchment slipped from Mordred's hand and floated to the floor. He did not notice. Through the window beside him, washed and sweet on the damp air, floated the scents of the Queen's garden. He looked out at the rain-heavy roses, the glittering leaves that quivered under the drifting drops, the misted grass. No one was there today. Wherever she was, she would know of the courier's coming, and she would be waiting for him. He would have to go to her and tell her. Arthur. And Bedwyr. Arthur and Bedwyr both. That was enough for her, and too much. But he must hear the rest first. He turned back to the courier. "Go on."

The man talked eagerly now, his fear forgotten. The regent was alive again, not composed exactly, but in command, his questions quick and direct.

"Yes, my lord, I was there myself. I left the field at full dark, as soon as the news was sure. The King was seen fighting still towards sunset, though by that time the main resistance was over, and Quintilianus himself had fallen. Everywhere was chaos, and already men were robbing the bodies of the dead and killing the dying for their weapons and their clothes. Our men were not merciful, but the Franks… My lord, these are barbarians. They fight like mad wolves, and they can no more be controlled than wolves. The enemy broke and fled in several directions, and were pursued. Some of them threw down their arms and held their hands out for chains, begging their lives. It was—was…

"The King. What of the King?"

"He was seen to fall. His standard had been cut down, and in the growing dark it could not be observed just where he was fighting, or what had happened. Bedwyr, wounded as he was, struggled to that part of the field and searched for him, and others with him, calling. But the King was not found. Many of the bodies were stripped already, and if the King had been among them—"

"You are telling me that his body had still not been recovered?"

"Yes, my lord. At least, not when I left the field. I was sent as soon as it became too dark to search further. It may well be that by this time another dispatch is on its way. But it was thought that the news should be brought to you before other rumours reached the country."

"So this is why no token, neither sword nor ring, has been brought back to me?"

"Yes, my lord."

Mordred was silent for a while. Then he spoke with difficulty. "Is there still thought to be hope for the High King?"

"My lord, if you had seen the field… But yes, there is hope. Even in naked death, the High King's body would surely have been known—"

Under Mordred's gaze, he stopped. "My lord."

After a few more questions Mordred sent him away, and sat alone, thinking.

There was still a chance that Arthur was not dead. But his duty was plain. Before the news reached these shores—and with the coming of the courier's ship the rumours must already be spreading like heath fires—he must take control of the country. His immediate moves were easily mapped: an emergency meeting of the Council; a public reading of Arthur's declaration of succession, with its ratification of his, Mordred's authority; a copy of this to be made and sent to each of the kings; a speech made to the army leaders.

Meanwhile the Queen waited, and while she waited, suffered. He would go to her, and take what comfort he could.

And what love he might.

Before he had taken three steps into the room she was on her feet. Afterwards he realized that he had not known to whom her first query related.

She said it, hands to throat. "He is dead?"

"Alas, madam, yes. That is the message as it came to me. He was seen to fall in the moment of victory, but, when the messenger was sent to me, they had not yet found his body."

She was so white that he thought she might fall. He went close quickly, and put out his hands. Hers flew out and held them tightly. He said urgently: "Madam, there is hope. And Bedwyr is alive, though wounded. He was well enough to order the search for the King's body before darkness fell."

She shut her eyes. Her lips, thin and gaping round a black 0, drew air in as if she were drowning. Her lids fluttered. Then as if some ghostly hand had slid under her chin and drawn her up, she stiffened and grew taller, then her eyes opened and her white face composed itself. She removed her hands quietly from Mordred's grasp, but let him lead her to a chair. Her women would have clustered near with hands and words of comfort, but she waved them back.

"Tell me all that you know."

"I know very little, madam. The letter was brief. But the messenger gave me a report." He recounted what the man had told him. She listened without interruption; indeed, a casual observer might have thought without attention; she seemed to be watching the raindrops following one another down the drooping stem of a rose that hung beyond the window-frame.

Mordred stopped speaking at last. The raindrops ran, gathered, swelled on a thorn, dropped splashing to the sill.

The Queen said quietly, in a calm, dead voice: "If there is indeed hope of the King's life, then surely a second courier will be following hard on the first. Meantime we must do as my lord commanded."

"Assuming his death," said Mordred.

"Assuming that." Then, with a sudden break of grief and terror: "Mordred, what will become of Britain now? What will come to us? So short a while ago we spoke of this, you and I — and now — now the day is upon us.

He made an involuntary move towards her, only a slight one, but it sufficed. She was still again, controlled, queenly. But her eyes betrayed her. She could not have spoken again without weeping. And that must not happen until she was alone.

He said, in as flat and matter-of-fact a tone as he could manage: "Two things must be done immediately. I must see Cerdic. A meeting has already been arranged. And I have convened the Council. They meet tonight. Until tidings come that either confirm or deny this news, it is vital that men should see there is still a central power in Britain, with a ruler appointed by the King's command, and carrying out his wishes."

He added, gently: "For you, madam, I do not think anyone will wonder at it if you are not present at the Council meeting."

"I shall be present."

"If you so wish—"

"I do wish it. Mordred, the High King's body has not been found. You have his seal, which you and I, as co-regents here in Camelot, have been empowered to use. But his ring and his sword, the true symbols of kingship, cannot be brought to you except from his dead body."

"That is so, madam."

"So I shall attend the Council. With Arthur's Queen at your side to support you, there will be no man in the kingdoms who will not have to accept Arthur's son as his rightful ruler."

He found nothing to say. She put out a hand, and he bent his head and kissed it. Then he left her. She would have time for her mourning before she took her place in the Round Hall beside the new King of Britain.

In a pine wood at the foot of the hills east of Autun, Arthur stirred and woke.

He lay wrapped in his war cloak, his sword to his hand. His shoulder and side were stiff with bruising from the blow that had felled him during the battle, and his head ached abominably, but he was otherwise unhurt. His tethered horse grazed near him. His companions, some forty men, were, like him, rousing to the first misty light of the new day. Three of the men were busy already relighting the blackened remains of the night fire. Others brought water, carefully cradled in their leather helmets, from the river that slid over its sparkling boulders some fifty paces away. They were cheerful, and laughed and jested, but under their breath, for fear of rousing the sleeping King.

Birds were singing in the alders by the river, and from the steep valley side beyond came the bleating of sheep, where some herdboy watched his flock. A harsher sound turned Arthur's eyes to a place beyond the ridge of woodland where big black birds swung and called in the misty morning. There lay the enemy they had pursued from the field. A few survivors, bound, lay nearby under the trees, but thirty or so men lay still unburied, their stiffened bodies exposed with the waxing day to the crows and kites.

It was well after noon before the burial party had done its work, and the King headed back with the troop towards Autun.

A mile or so short of the battlefield, he came across two bodies. The messenger he had sent back to Bedwyr and Hoel to tell them that he was safe, and would return with the daylight, had fallen in with two stragglers from Quintilianus' army. One he had killed; the other, though wounded and now near dead with exposure and loss of blood, had killed him.

Arthur killed the man himself, and spurred his horse into a gallop back to his headquarters.

6

"THE TREATY IS VOID," said Cerdic.

He and Mordred sat face to face. They had met on a high shelf of the downs. It was a fine morning, and larks sang wildly in the blue. To southward the smoke of a Saxon village could be seen hanging in the still air. Here and there, in cleared spaces between the thickets of ash and thorn, the golden green of ripening barley showed among the white flints where some Saxon peasant had scratched a living from the bony land.

Mordred had come in kingly state. The Council, apprised of Arthur's wishes before he left for Brittany, had raised no slightest-objection to Mordred's assumption of leadership; on the contrary; those councillors who were left after the departure of Arthur and his Companions into Brittany were most of them greybeards, and in their grief and fear at the news from the battlefield they acclaimed Mordred with outspoken relief. Mordred, wise in the ways of councils, moved with care. He emphasized the doubtful nature of the news, spoke of his still-held hope of his father's life, disclaimed any title but that of regent, and renewed his vows of faith to the Council, and liege homage to his father's Queen. After him Guinevere, speaking briefly and with obviously fragile composure in her husband's name, affirmed her belief that Mordred must now be invested with power to act as he saw fit, and, herself resigning, proposed him as sole regent. The Council, moved to a man, accepted her withdrawal and decided then and there to send a message to Constantine of Cornwall asking him to affirm his loyalty to the High King's successor.

Finally Mordred spoke again of urgency, and made clear his intention of riding south next day to the interview with Cerdic. He would take with him a detachment of the newly raised troops; it was never wise to approach their good Saxon neighbours without some show of strength. This, too, the Council voted him. So, escorted like a king, he faced Cerdic on the downs.

The Saxons, too, kept state. Cerdic's thegns crowded behind his chair, and an awning of brightly coloured cloth woven with gold and silver thread made a regal background to the thrones set for him and the regent. Mordred regarded Cerdic with interest. It was barely a year since he had last met the Saxon king, but in that time the latter had aged perceptibly and appeared not to be in robust health. Beside his chair stood his grandson Ceawlin, a young copy of the old fighter, who was said to have already fathered a brood of sturdy boys.

"The treaty is void."

The old king said it like a challenge. He was watching Mordred closely.

"Why else am I here?" Nothing could be gathered from the regent's smooth tone. "If it is true that the High King is dead, then the treaty — the same, or one revised as we may agree — must be ratified between myself and you."

"Until we know for certain, there is little point in talking," said Cerdic bluntly.

"On the contrary. When I last spoke with my father he gave me a mandate to make a new agreement with you, though I agree that there is little point in discussing that until another matter is cleared up. I doubt if I need to tell you what that is?"

"It would be best to come to the point," said Cerdic.

"Very well. It has lately come to my ears that Cynric, your son, and others of your thegns are even now back in your old lands beyond the Narrow Sea, and that more men daily flock to their standards. The bays fill with their longships. Now with the treaty between our peoples made void by the High King's death — supposing this to be true — what am I to think of this?"

"Not that we prepare war again. Until proof comes of Arthur's death this would not only be ignoble, but folly." There was a gleam in the old king's eyes as he looked at the younger man. "I should perhaps make it clear that in no case are we contemplating war. Not with you, prince."

"Then what?"

"Only that with the advance of the Franks and the westward spread of people who are not our friends, we in our turn must move westward. Your King has halted this emperor's first sally, but there will be another, and after that another. My people want a safe frontier. They are gathering to embark for these shores, but in peace. We shall receive them."

"I see." Mordred was remembering what Arthur had said to him in their last discussion at Kerrec. "First the Narrow Sea, and then the ramparts of the Saxon and English kingdoms.… Men fight for what is theirs." So might Vortigern have reasoned when he first called Hengist and Horsa to these shores. Arthur was no Vortigern, and so far he had been right not to doubt Cerdic: Men fight for what is theirs, and the more men manning the ramparts of the Shore, the more safely could the Celtic kingdoms lie behind them.

The old king was watching him closely, as if guessing what thoughts raced behind the smooth brow and unexpressive eyes. Mordred met his look.

"You are a man of honour, king, and also a man of wisdom and experience. You know that neither Saxon nor Briton wants another Badon Hill."

Cerdic smiled. "Now you have flashed your weapon at me. Prince Mordred, and I mine at you. That is done. I said they would come in peace. But they will come, and many of them. So, let us talk." He sat back in his chair, shifting a fold of the blue robe over his arm. "For the present I believe we must assume the High King's death?"

"I think so. If we make plans for that assumption they can be revised if necessary."

"Then I say this. I am willing, and Cynric with me, who will reign here when I am too old to fight, to remake the treaty with you that I made with your uncle." A sharp, twinkling look from under the shaggy brows. "It was your uncle last time we met. Now your father, it seems?"

"Father, yes. And in return?"

"More land."

"That was easily guessed." Mordred smiled in his turn. "More men need more land. But you are already too close for some men's peace of mind. How can you move forward? Between your lands and ours there lies this stretch of high downland. You see it." He gestured to the thin patch of barley shoots. "No ploughs, not even yours. King Cerdic, can make these stony uplands into rich fields of grain. And I am told that your neighbours, the South Saxons, no longer grant you free movement there."

Cerdic made no immediate reply. He reached behind him, and a guard put a spear into his hand. Behind Mordred a rustle and a whisper of metal betrayed quick movement among his own fighting men. He gestured with a hand, palm down, and the movement stilled. Cerdic reversed the spear and, leaning forward in his chair, began to draw in the chalky dust.

"Here we are, the men of Wessex. Here, in the rich corner lands, the South Saxons. And here stand you and I, now. The lands I am thinking of would be no nearer to your capital than our present borders. Here. And here."

The spear moved gently northward, then, just as Mordred would have protested, veered to the east and across the downland towards the upper Thames valley. "This way. This part is thick forest, and here is marshland, thinly peopled and poor. Both can be made good."

"Surely much of that is already Saxon land? Where your spear is now, that is the southern region, as they call it, of the Middle Saxons?"

"The Suthrige. Yes. I told you that we would take nothing that need trouble you."

"Would these settlers accept your people?"

"It is agreed." The old king slanted a bright glance up at the other man. "They are not a strong people, and it is rumoured that the South Saxons are casting their eyes in that direction. They will welcome us. And we will make the land good for ourselves and for them."

He went on to talk about his plans, and Mordred questioned, and they talked for some time. Later Mordred said: "Tell me, king. My information is not always correct." (this was not true, and he knew that Cerdic knew it, but the gambit brought a subject under discussion that neither had liked to broach openly.) "Since Aelle died, has there been a leader of note among the South Saxons? The land there is the best in the south, and it has long seemed to me that the king who held Rutupiae and the lands behind it held a key in his hand. The key to the mainland of the Continent and its trade."

There was a gleam of appreciation in the old king's eyes. He did not say in so many words that Aelle's descendants had no such grasp of the situation, but again, the two men understood one another.

He merely said, thoughtfully: "I am told — though of course my information is not always correct — that the harbour at Rutupiae is beginning to silt up, and no attempt is being made to keep it clear."

Mordred, who, too, had heard this, expressed surprise, and the two men talked for a while longer to their mutual satisfaction, with at the end a very clear idea that, should Cerdic decide that the gateway to the Continent would be worth a foray by the West Saxons, Mordred with the British would at the very least refrain from pushing in through the back door, and at the most would throw his weight in beside the West Saxon king.

"With eventual free access for British traders to the port, of course," he said.

"Of course," said Cerdic.

So, with a good deal of satisfaction on both sides, the conference ended. The old king set off southward with the elder thegns, while his younger warriors escorted Mordred and his troops part of the way north, with a joyous accompaniment of shouting and weapon-play. Mordred rode alone for most of the way, ahead of the troops. He was dimly conscious of the noise behind him, where Saxon and Briton alike seemed to be celebrating what was now an alliance, rather than a mere treaty of non-aggression. He knew, as Cerdic had known without saying it, that such an agreement could not so readily have been reached with the victor of Badon and its forerunning battles. A new start had been made. The day of the young men had begun. Change was in the air. Plans, long stifled, buzzed in his brain, and the blood he shared with Ambrosius and Arthur and Merlin the vanished statesman ran free at last with the power to do and to make.

It is certain that if, on his return to Camelot, he had found awaiting him the royal courier with the news of Arthur's safety and imminent return, there would have been a perceptible weight of disappointment among the relief and joy.

No courier was there. For days now the wind had blown steadily eastward across the Narrow Sea, keeping the British ships sealed in the Breton harbours. But it carried a ship from Cornwall to Brittany with letters from Constantine the duke. They were identical, addressed the one to King Hoel, and the other to Bedwyr, and the latter was carried straight to Arthur, where he lay still at Autun.

Mordred has shown himself in his true colours. He has given out through the kingdoms that King Arthur is slain, and he has assumed the kingship. The Queen has resigned her regency, and letters have come bidding me to resign my rights as Arthur's heir, and accept Mordred as High King. He treats now with Cerdic, who is to hold the ports of the Saxon Shore against all corners, and whose son is in Saxony raising his thousands, all of whom swear allegiance to Mordred.

Meanwhile Mordred the King talks with the kings of Dyfed and Guent, and men from Mona and Powys, and is riding even now to meet the leaders from the north who have long spoken against Arthur the High King, wanting freedom for every man to rule as he wills, without reference to the Round Hall and the Council. Mordred, perjurer that he is, promises them self-rule and a change of the law. So he makes allies.

Finally, with the High King gone, he plans to take Queen Guinevere to wife. He has lodged her at Caerleon, and consorts with her there.

Though the interpretation of Mordred's actions was Constantine's, the main facts as set out in the letter were true.

As soon as he returned from his meeting with Cerdic, Mordred had persuaded the Queen to go to Caerleon. Until the truth of Arthur's death was known, and the country — at present in the inevitable panic and turmoil following the sudden death of a powerful ruler — was more settled, and the new chain of command set up and working smoothly, he wanted, as he had promised, to ensure her safety. Camelot was as strong a city as Caerleon, but it was too far east; and any trouble that was coming, as Mordred judged, would come that way. The west was safe. (except, he reminded himself, from Duke Constantine, that silently resentful ex-heir of Arthur's, who had sent no answer to the courteous invitations of the Council to discuss the matter at the round table. But Caerleon, armed and defended, was as safe from him as from any other disaffected man.)

It was too near for Guinevere's liking to her own homeland of Northgalis, where a cousin now ruled who had wanted once to marry her, and who said so rather too often to the wife he eventually had to take. But the alternatives were even less comfortable. Guinevere would have preferred to take refuge in a convent, but of the two best sanctuaries, the nearer — the Lake convent on Ynys Witrin — was in the Summer Country, and the Queen would on no account put herself under the protection of its king, Melwas. The other, at Amesbury, Arthur's own township, which would have welcomed her, had failed signally to protect the last queen it had housed. Morgause's murder still haunted the place.

So Mordred, making necessity a pleasure, chose Caerleon, where he had already convened meetings with those kings from the west and north with whom he had not already had the chance to talk. He escorted the Queen there himself, embarking with her at Ynys Witrin, and setting sail for the Isca's mouth on the shore of the Severn Sea.

The voyage was calm, the sea gentle, the breezes light and fresh. It was a golden interval in the turmoil of that violent summer. The Queen kept apart with her ladies, but in the morning and evening of the two days' voyage Mordred visited her and they talked. On one of these occasions she told him, briefly and without detail, why she had been so reluctant to take refuge with King Melwas. It appeared that many years ago, in the hot spring of youth, Melwas had abducted the Queen by force and stratagem, and carried her off to a remote island in the water-logged fens of the Summer Country. There, by his magic, Merlin had discovered her, and had led Bedwyr to a timely rescue. Later, Arthur and Melwas had fought, a notable combat, at the end of which the King, being the victor, had spared Melwas's life.

"After that?" said Mordred, shocked for once into bluntness. "I would have dragged him to your feet and killed him there, slowly."

"And had every man and woman in the kingdoms sure of his guilt and my shame?" She spoke calmly, but her cheeks had reddened, whether at the memory of that shame or at the young man's fervour it was impossible to guess.

Mordred bit his lip. He recalled the story that Agravain had once told at a meeting of the Young Celts, and that he, Mordred, had not believed. So it was true; and now the cryptic references made by Bedwyr and Arthur at the site of the Princess Elen's rape became clear. He remembered further: the girl's violated body lying under its scrambled covering of pine needles.

He said thickly: "Later, then. But policy or no policy, I would not have let him live."

He took his leave then. After he had gone the Queen sat for a long while without moving, looking out across the deck-rail at the shining water, and the distant shore sliding by, with its trees like clouds, and the clouds above them like towers.

Having installed Guinevere in comfort in the Queen's palace at Caerleon, Mordred plunged into the round of meetings with the leaders and petty kings assembled in the fortress to meet him. What he had not expected, and what Constantine, that western duke, knew well, was the dissatisfaction, even hostility, he found there for some of Arthur's policies. In the remoter highlands, the silver-age Romanization so dear to Ambrosius and Arthur had never been acceptable. It was not only the young men who wanted change; the older kings, too, were chafing against what they saw as the restrictive policies of a remote and lowland center of government. Arthur, in attempting to restore the territorial integrity of Roman Britain, had remodelled his federation of kingdoms in a way that to many of the rulers seemed outdated. To these men Mordred, outlander and Young Celt, was the leader they hoped for. That Arthur had just stood against actual Roman domination in defense of the Celtic lands would do much to bring him nearer their hearts again, but Arthur was presumed dead, and it became increasingly apparent that in the Celtic Highlands his return would not be altogether welcome.

Mordred trod carefully, talked sparingly, counted the allies sworn to his banner, and went every evening to see the Queen.

It was perhaps a little sad to see how Guinevere lighted up at his visits, and how eagerly she plied him with questions. He answered her readily, keeping her more fully informed than Arthur had found time to do, of every move of state. She did not guess that he was simply taking every chance of seeing her, and every means of prolonging his meetings with her, letting her grow easier with him, become used to him in his role of ruler and protector. She thought merely that he was trying to bring her comfort and distraction, and was grateful accordingly, and her gratitude, in that time of uncertainty, grief and fear, brought her (as Mordred had hoped) within touching distance of tenderness, and sighting distance of love. At any rate, when he held her hand to kiss it, or, greatly daring, laid his own over it by way of comfort, she no longer hurried to withdraw from his touch.

As for Mordred, with his new authority, the uncertainty, the brilliant starting of long-held plans, the closeness of the long-desired and lovely Guinevere, he was swept forward from day to day on a full tide of sovereignty and power, and it is doubtful if at this stage he could have gone back. In love, as in other things, there comes a time when the will resigns and franks the desire, and then not even Orpheus, turning back, could cause his love to vanish. He had had that one glimpse of her, the real Guinevere, a lonely woman afraid of life, a leaf to be blown into a safe corner by any strong wind. He would be — was — her safety. He was subtle enough to see that she recognized it, and used her gently. He could wait.

So the days went by, and the wind still closed the Narrow Sea, and each of them, constantly, watched the road and the harbour for the messenger from Brittany. And each spent hours of the night watching the dark and thinking, thinking, and when they finally slept it was not of each other they dreamed, but of Arthur.

Of Duke Constantine, brooding in his Cornish castle, they did not think at all.

7

CONSTANTINE'S LETTER WAS BROUGHT to Arthur at his camp near Autun. King Hoel, feeling his years and his ailments now that the battle was over, had withdrawn towards home. But for Gawain, who in these days was always at his elbow, Arthur was alone.

He was also very tired. He had returned from the brief punitive foray into the mountains to find near-panic among the troops who, though still searching among the heaped dead for his body, believed themselves kingless. Even his return permitted little rejoicing, for Bedwyr, worse hurt than he had admitted, or that anyone had judged, was now seriously ill, and the surgeons shook their heads over the pallet where he lay unconscious in an annex of the royal pavilion.

So Arthur was alone in more ways than one. Bedwyr was dying. Cei, the elder foster-brother with whom he had been brought up, was dead. Caius Valerius, too, the ageing warrior, veteran of Ambrosius' wars, and friend to Uther Pendragon and Merlin… The list seemed endless, the names a roll culled from the tale of Arthur's past glories, or even a simple tally of his friends. Of those close to him Gawain alone was unwounded, and he, flown with the joy of his first great fight and resounding victory, had proved himself a strong support. To him Arthur, feeling his age for the first time (though he was by many years King Hoel's junior), turned in gratitude and affection.

He started to read the duke's letter. Through the skins of the tent wall he could hear the groaning and muttering where Bedwyr tossed on his sickbed. He would die before morning, they said, if the fever did not break.

The letter again. Mordred… making himself High King, talking with Cerdic, gathering the kings of Wales and the north…

"Well," said Arthur, frowning; his head ached and the torchlight made the words swim. "Well, all this is to be expected. If news of my supposed death was taken to Mordred, he would take exactly these steps. We spoke of it before he left Kerrec. He was to meet with Cerdic to ratify the treaty and talk over a possible new settlement in the future. Now, if my death was reported to him, he may well have thought it expedient to negotiate new terms, since the old treaty would then be invalid."

"New terms! An alliance that sounds like folly at its best, and at its worst a deadly peril! This about Cynric, raising fresh Saxon levies over here. Did you know, uncle?"

On the other side of the tent wall the sick man cried out, then was silent. Someone spoke hurriedly, there was muttering, quick footsteps, the swish of robes. The King was half on his feet, the parchment falling to the floor, forgotten, when the muttering began again. Not death yet, then; not quite yet. Arthur sank back in his chair.

"Did you know about Cynric?" persisted Gawain.

"Cynric? Oh, calling men to his standard in Saxony. No, but if it is true—"

"I'm pretty sure it's true," said Gawain. "I've already heard rumours going about the camp. Men massing by the Neustrian shore. Longships lying in the harbours like arrows jammed in a quiver. And for what? Cynric sails, and Cerdic moves towards the south-east ports to meet him, then the South Saxons are caught between the two, and the whole southeast will be Cerdic's, with freedom to invite whomsoever he pleases to come over and swell his army. The South Saxons have been the other wall that contained him, and who is to contain him now?"

His angry eyes glared into the King's, as if the latter's composure chafed him. If he heard the sounds from beyond the wall, he gave no sign of it. He had not attempted to lower his voice.

"No doubt the next courier will bring me a report of Cynric's doings." Arthur sounded weary but relatively unworried. "But for the rest of this letter, Gawain, remember who writes. Duke Constantine did not take kindly to Mordred's nomination as regent: He will have taken even less kindly to his appointment as my sole heir. Everything he says there—" He gestured to the letter on the floor, and Gawain stooped to pick it up. "Everything he says that Mordred has done, Mordred and I agreed should be done. We only have Constantine's word, which is hardly the word of a friend, for the way it is being done."

"But surely Mordred himself should have sent a report? If Constantine's man could get through—"

"If he believed the report of my death," said Arthur, "to whom would he send it?"

Gawain, with an impatient shrug, started to hand the letter back to his uncle. Then he checked. "There's more here. On the other side, see?"

Arthur took it from him, saw the last sentences on the back, and began to read them aloud.

" 'Finally, with the High King gone, he plans to take Queen Guinevere to wife. He has lodged her at Caerleon, and—' "

He did not finish it, but Gawain did, on a rising note where genuine anger was shot with a kind of triumph.

" 'And consorts with her there'!" He swung away, then back to the King. "Uncle, whether or not he believes you dead, this is the act of a traitor! He has no proof as yet, no shadow of reason for haling the Queen off to Caerleon, and paying his court to her! You say the rest of this letter could be true.… If it is, in whatever fashion, then this must be true also!"

"Gawain!—" began the King, in a warning voice, but Gawain, burning, swept on: "No, you must hear me! I'm your kin. You'll hear truth from me. I can tell you this, uncle, Mordred wanted the kingdom always. I know how ambitious he was, even at home in the islands, even before he knew he was your son. Your son, yes! But still a fisher-brat, a peasant with a peasant's guile and greed, and a huckster's honour! He's taken the first chance to turn traitor and get what he wants. With the Saxons and the Welsh at his back, and the Queen at his side… "consorts" indeed! He wasted no time! I've seen the way he looked at her—"

Something in Arthur's face stopped him there. It was hard to say what it was, for the King looked like a dead man carved in grey stone. Something about him suggested a man who sees at his feet a deadly pitfall lined with spears, and who with sheer stubborn faith holds to the one frail sapling that may stop him from falling. There was silence now from the next room.

Arthur's voice was still steady, still reasonable, but without life or tone. "Gawain. The last thing I enjoined on my son was, in the event of my death, to care for and protect the Queen. He stands to her also as a son. What has been said, we shall forget."

Gawain bowed his head and muttered something that might have been an apology. Arthur handed him the letter.

"Burn this letter. Now. That's it," as Gawain held the parchment up to a torch and watched it blacken and curl into crow's feathers. "Now I must go to Bedwyr. In the morning—"

He did not finish. He began to get to his feet, moving slowly, putting weight on the arms of his chair like an old man, or a sick one. Gawain, who was fond of him, was seized with sudden compunction, and spoke more gently: "I'm sorry, uncle, believe me, I am. I know you don't want to believe this of Mordred, so let us hope there is news soon. Meanwhile, is there anything I can do for you?"

"Yes. You can go and give the orders for our return home. Whatever the truth of the matter, I shall have to go back. Either I must deal with Mordred, or with Constantine. This is not the time to pursue our victory further, or even to call for talks with the emperor. Instead, I shall send him a message."

"Yes?" queried Gawain, as the King paused.

Arthur's look was cryptic. "A task that will please you. See that Lucius Quintilianus' body is disinterred and sent to the emperor, with this message: that this is the tribute that the British pay to Rome. Now leave me. I must go to Bedwyr."

Bedwyr did not die. The silence that had frightened the King was not death, or coma, but sleep, and the sick man woke from it with his fever gone and his wounds cool. Arthur, in spite of what might lie ahead of him, could set out for Britain with a free mind and a lighter heart.

The King set sail at last on a cloudy day with white spume blowing back from the wave-tops and the far sky leaning low over the heaving grey. The sea witch, it seemed, held sway over the Channel waters. Though the wind had changed its quarter at last, sea and sky alike still seemed to conspire against Arthur her old enemy. Even the gulls, flakes ripped from the white waves, drove to and fro in the wind with shrieks of uncanny laughter, like a mockery. A gloomy, driving sea, without glitter, without light, heaved northward in the sudden turn of the wind. A gust took the Sea Dragon's standard and shredded it into streamers that whirled downwind. "An omen," men whispered, but Arthur, looking up, laughed, and said: "He has gone ahead of us. If we seize the weather, we shall fly as fast as he."

And fly they did. What they could not know was that Cynric's Saxons had seized the same chance of wind, and that the longboats were also on their way across the Narrow Sea. Long and low, in those heaving seas the British caught no sight of them until, in the final gleams of a late and clouded afternoon, as they scudded along with the line of the Saxon Shore like a white wall on the horizon, the Sea Dragon's lookout saw what looked like Saxon longships riding in nearer the coast.

But when the King, with the heavy slowness that he showed these days, clambered up to a viewpoint by the mast, the longships — or their shadows — were gone.

"South Saxon ships, caught by the change of wind," said the master, at Arthur's elbow. "Shallow draught. They're lucky. They'll be back at anchor now, and no trouble to us. If we—

He did not finish. A shout from the masthead made them all look round.

Low over the sea, its rain tearing out like a witch's hair, came a squall. Its shadow fled on before like a doom. The master shouted. The seamen ran to their places. King, knights, sailors gripped the nearest stay.

The squall struck. In an instant all was screaming wind and rain. The air was black. Water cascaded down, whipping their faces so that they covered their eyes. The little ship shook and shuddered, stopped as if struck on a rock, then heeled over, reared and bucked like a frightened horse. Ropes strained and snapped. The whole ship's structure groaned. Somewhere a crack of timber gave warning.

The squall blew for perhaps ten minutes. When, as suddenly as it had come, it blew away, fleeing over the sea above its shadow, the fleet, scattered and damaged, found itself driven almost within hailing distance of the coast. But the coast was the West Saxon shore, and there was no way that they could beat farther westward against a capriciously veering wind, to make the Dumnonian harbours, or even the debated shelter of Potters' Bay.

The King, with water licking the lower deck of the Sea Dragon, and two of her sister ships wallowing badly alongside, gave the order.

And so the sea witch drove Arthur ashore in Saxon territory where Cerdic's son Cynric, watching for the stragglers of his own immigrant fleet, rested with a band of his men after their stormy voyage. To him, from the ruins of the Roman lighthouse, came the watchman, running. Ships — three ships, and others heading shorewards behind them — were coming into the deep harbour to westward. There was no standard, no device. But by their lines and rig they were British ships, and they were setting inshore where they surely had no right to be. He had had, in the rapidly worsening light, no hint of their beaten condition.

Cynric did not know that the proposed immigration was known to, and approved by the British; nor could he know that, by Mordred's new treaty with Cerdic, the incoming British ships were welcome to land. He drew his own conclusions. His landing had been observed, and was now, perhaps, to be opposed. He sent a messenger urgently inland to report his arrival and summon Cerdic's help, then gathered his men together to oppose the British landing.

If the two forces could have held apart long enough for the leaders to recognize one another or dispatch and receive a message, all might have been well. But they met in the growing dusk of that murky day, each side bent on its own desperate course and blind to all else.

The Saxons were tired after a stormy voyage, and most of them strange to the country and therefore alive to apprehension. They also had with them their women and children. Primed with legends about the wars fought for each hide of land since Hengist's time, and seeing the incoming troops at a disadvantage as their craft ran inshore, they seized their weapons and raced down to the attack.

Arthur was indeed at a sad disadvantage. His men were highly trained and seasoned troops, but they had had little rest, and were some of them still suffering badly from the effects of the voyage. He did have one stroke of luck: the horse carriers, seeking a flat beach, had ventured farther along the coast to land, so those of the cavalry mounts which had survived the crossing uninjured were safely got to shore some distance off. But they — Arthur's best troops — could be no help against Cynric's men. Arthur and those of his knights who were with him, met by armed Saxons as they struggled up the steep and streaming pebbles of the shore, fought on foot and in no sort of order. The struggle was disorganized, bloody and, on both sides, disastrous. Just before dark a panting messenger on a lathered pony came to Cynric's side. The message passed. Cerdic was on his way and Britain's new king with him. Cynric was to withdraw.

Cynric, thankfully, withdrew as best he could, his men streaming off inland into the gathering darkness, guided by the messenger towards the oncoming army of the West Saxons.

Arthur, exhausted but unhurt, listened in silence to the report of someone who had heard the Saxon's shouted message.

"It was Cynric himself, my lord, who led this attack. Now he has sent to his father for help, and Cerdic is coming. With Britain's new king, I heard them say so, marching against you to help Cynric and these invaders."

Arthur, weary to death and grieving over his losses, which were even now being assessed, leaned heavily on his spear, confused, and, what was strange to him, irresolute. That "Britain's new king" must be Mordred was obvious. Even if Mordred believed him, Arthur, dead, he would hardly march with Saxons to intercept British troopships obviously bringing home Arthur's battle-weary troops, unless Constantine had been right, and he coveted the kingdom to the point of treachery.

Someone was approaching, his feet sliding in the grinding pebbles. As Arthur turned, half expecting the angry Orkney voice at his elbow, triumphant over this evidence of treachery, a man came up.

"My lord, my lord! Prince Gawain is hurt. His boat was wrecked as it drove ashore, and he was wounded even before he could come to land. It is thought that he is dying."

"Take me there," said the King.

Gawain had been carried ashore on a stretcher of smashed planking from the wrecked boat. The remains of this, splintered and gaping, lay tilted on the shingle in the edge of the tide. Bodies of the dead and wounded lay about on the beach, looking like heaps of sodden clothing.

Gawain was conscious, but it was plain that he had received his death wound. His face was waxen, and his breathing shallow and sparse.

Arthur bent over him. "How is it with you, nephew?"

The pale lips gaped. In a while Gawain whispered: "My evil luck. Just as the war starts."

The war he had wanted, had almost worked for. The King put the thought aside, and stooping lower, moistened the dying man's lips from his wine flask.

The lips moved again.

"What's that? I didn't hear."

"Bedwyr," said Gawain.

"Yes," said the King, wondering. "Bedwyr is well enough. They say he is recovering fast."

"Bedwyr…"

"Gawain, I know that you have much to forgive Bedwyr for, but if you are asking me to take any message other than one of forgiveness and friendship, you ask in vain, dying or no."

"Not that. Bring Bedwyr back now. Needed. Help you kill… the traitor… Mordred."

Arthur made no reply to that. But in a few moments he could see that none was needed.

So, still counselling murder and strife, died the fourth of Morgause's sons. Leaving only the one, Mordred, his own son. Mordred, the traitor?

8

MORDRED WAS BACK IN CAMELOT when the news reached him of fighting on the south coast. No details were given. Mindful of his commitment to Cerdic, he gathered what troops were available and hastened southward, falling in with the West Saxon army just as a second messenger came panting with a fuller but strange-sounding version of what had happened.

His story was this: King Arthur's troopships had been sighted by the Saxon shore-dwellers, appearing soon after the longships, unable to reach the harbour at the mouth of the Itchen, had discharged their cargo of immigrants in the shallow, sheltered water behind Seal Island. Then a flying scud of cloud and mist had blotted out the fleet. The Saxon incomers, nervous, and not knowing what to expect from the approaching ships, had hurried their women and children inland away from the shore, and gathered in a defensive crowd within reach of signals from the lighthouse. The shore-folk who had come down to receive them gave them quick reassurance. They were safe now. The High King's ships, whether or no the King himself was on board, would not come into the shore ports, which were by treaty ceded to the Saxons these many years.

But hard on the reassurance came the runner from the lighthouse, gasping. The ships had turned under cover of the squall, had come inshore, and were even now landing armed men on the beaches only a short way to the west. It was apparent that, having been warned of this fresh influx of Saxon immigrants, Arthur had hoped to stop them by sea, but having failed, had sent his troops ashore to kill them or take them prisoner. To those who expressed doubt of this — these were the citizens of long standing, and Cynric himself was among them — the newcomers would not listen. The risk was too great. If the British meant business, and were allowed time to get their horses ashore… Everyone knew the reputation of Arthur's cavalry.…

So the Saxons, unorganized and weary as they were, had charged to the beaches and closed with Arthur's men. There they had met slaughter and defeat, and now, exhausted, were straggling inland with the frightened inhabitants of the shore villages, with Arthur and his cavalry in pursuit. And, the messenger concluded, with a sidelong glance of mistrust at Mordred, the Saxons — men, women, and little children — cried to their king for help against Arthur the breaker of treaties, the invader of their rightful kingdom, the slayer of lawful and peaceful incomers.

The distressful tale came pelting out, in the rough tongue of the Saxon peasant. It is doubtful if Mordred understood more than one word in three. But he grasped the central fact, and, rigid at Cerdic's side, felt the cold creep over him as if the blood drained from his body down into the chalky earth. The man stopped speaking, Cerdic began a question, but across it Mordred, for once heedless of courtesy, demanded harshly: "The High King? Is that what he is saying? That Arthur himself is there?"

"Yes. It seems," said Cerdic, with fierce self-control, "that we have moved too soon, Prince Mordred!"

"This is certain?"

"Certain."

"This changes everything." Mordred, with an effort, made the under statement calmly, but his mind was whirling. What had happened could lead — had already led — to complete disaster: for himself, for the Queen, for the future of Britain.

Cerdic, watching him closely under those fierce brows, merely nodded.

"Tell me exactly what has happened," said Mordred quickly. "I hardly understood. If there could be any possibility of error… ?"

"As we go," said Cerdic. "Ride beside me. There is no time to waste. It seems that Arthur is not content with taking the shore villages, but he has driven their people inland, and is gathering his cavalry for pursuit. We must go to defend them." He spurred his pony, and as Mordred brought his own mount alongside, the old king repeated the rest of the messenger's tale.

Almost before he had done, Mordred, who had been biting his lips with impatient fury, exploded.

"This is absurd! Room for doubt, indeed! It is simply not to be believed! The High King break his own treaty? Is it not patent that his ships were driven ashore by the storm, and made landfall where they could? For one thing only, if he had intended to attack, he would have landed his cavalry first. It sounds to me as if he had been forced to go ashore, and that Cynric's people attacked on suspicion, without even an attempt at parley."

"That much is certainly true. But according to this man they knew only that the ships were British; the royal ship flew no standard. This in itself was suspicious—"

Mordred felt a sudden leap of the heart: shame and hope together; the chance that all, still, could be well. (Well? He did not pause, in that shame and hope, to examine the thought.) "Then it is possible that Arthur him self was not there? Was Arthur seen? Recognized? If his standard was not flying—"

"Once the British gained the beach, the Dragon was raised. He was there. This man saw him himself. Gawain as well. Gawain, incidentally, is dead."

The horses' hoofs beat softly on the sodden ground. Rain drove in their faces. After a long silence Mordred said, his voice once more cool and steady: "Then if Arthur lives, his treaty with you still stands. It cancels the new alliance, which was made on the assumption of his death. What's more, it is certain that he would not break that treaty. What could he stand to gain? He fought only because he was attacked. King Cerdic, you cannot make this a cause for war."

"For whatever reason, the treaty has been broken," said Cerdic. "He has advanced, armed, into my country, and has killed my people. And others have been driven from their homes. They have called to me for help, and I have to answer their call. I shall get the truth from Cynric when we meet. If you do not wish to ride with us—"

"I shall ride with you. If the King is indeed bringing his troops ashore through Saxon territory, then it is of necessity. He does not want war. This I know. There has been a tragic error. I know Arthur, and so, king, should you. He favours the council chamber, not the sword."

Cerdic's smile was grim. "Lately, perhaps. After he got his way."

"Why not?" retorted Mordred. "Well, ride to join Cynric if you must, but talk with Arthur, too, before any further follies are committed. If you will not, then you must give me leave to talk with him myself. We can come out of this storm yet, king, into calm weather."

"Very well," said the old king heavily, after a pause. "You know what you must do. But if it does come to fighting—"

"It must not."

"If Arthur fights, then I shall fight him. But you — what of you, Prince Mordred? You are no longer bound to me. And will your men obey you? They were his."

"And are now mine," said Mordred shortly. "But with your leave, I shall not put their loyalty to the test on this field. If parley fails, then we shall see."

Cerdic nodded, and the two men rode on side by side in silence.

Mordred, as events were to prove, was right in his judgment of his army. The main body of his troops were men who had trained and served under him, and who had accepted him willingly as king. If a new Saxon war was to be started, the people — the townspeople, the merchants, the now thriving farmers in their lands made safe by the old treaties — wanted none of it. Mordred's recent announcement of his decision to ratify the treaty and, more, close an alliance with the powerful West Saxon king had been welcomed loudly in the halls and market-places. His officers and men followed him loyally.

Whether they would take arms against Arthur himself, for whatever reason, was another matter. But of course it would not come to that.…

Arthur, leaving a picked force of men to guard the beached ships while the storm damage was repaired, led the remainder of his army fast inland, hoping to avoid the Saxon stragglers, and reach the border without further trouble. But soon his scouts returned with the news that Cerdic himself, marching to his son's rescue, was between the British and home. And presently, through a gap of the high downland, they could see the spears and tossing horsehair of Cerdic's war-band, with in the rear, dimly glimpsed through the rain, the glitter of cavalry massed and orderly under what looked like the Dragon of Arthur's own standard. Less mistakable was Mordred himself, riding beside Cerdic at the head of the Saxons.

The troops recognized him first. Mordred, the traitor. The mutter went through the ranks. There were men there who had heard Gawain's dying words, and now at the sight of Mordred himself, approaching with the Saxon army, conspicuous on the glossy black horse that had been Arthur's gift, a growl went round, like a wind-borne echo of Gawain's final breath.

"Mordred! Traitor!"

It was as if the cry had burst in Arthur's own brain. The doubts, the accumulation of exhaustion and grief, the accusations levelled by Gawain, whom in spite of his faults Arthur had loved, weighed on the King and numbed his powers of thought. Caught in his unguarded confusion, in the aftermath of so much grief and loss, he recalled at last, as if the winds had blown that, too, out of the past, the doom foretold by Merlin and echoed by Nimuë. Mordred, born to be his bane. Mordred, the death-dealer. Mordred, here on this dark battlefield, riding against him at the head of the Saxons, his ancient enemies…

The canker of suspicion, biting with sudden pain, became certainty. Against all belief, against all hope of error, it must be true. Mordred, the traitor.

Cerdic's army was moving, massing. The Saxon king, his arm thrown up in command, was speaking to Mordred. In the throng behind the two leaders there was an ominous shouting and clash of shields.

Arthur was never one to wait for surprise. Before Cerdic could form his war-band for battle, his cavalry charged.

Mordred, shouting, spurred forward, but Cerdic's hand came down on his rein.

"Too late. There'll be no talking today. Get back to your men. And keep them off my back. Do you hear me?"

"Trust me," said Mordred, and, wheeling his horse, lashed the reins down on its neck and sent it back through the Saxon ranks at a gallop.

His men, some way to the rear of the Saxons, had not yet seen what was happening. The regent's orders were curt and urgent. "Flight" was not the word he used, but that was the essence of the order. To his officers he was brief: "The High King is here, and joins battle with Cerdic. We have no part in this. I will not lead you against Arthur, but nor can I take Arthur's part against a man whose hand I have taken in treaty. Let this day come to an end and we will sort things out like reasonable men. Get the troops back towards Camelot."

So, with unbloodied swords and fresh horses, the regent's army retreated fast towards its base, leaving the field to the two ageing kings.

Arthur's star still held steady. He was, as Merlin had foretold, the victor in every field he took. The Saxons broke and yielded the field, and the High King, pausing only to gather the wounded and bury his dead, set off towards Camelot, in pursuit of Mordred's apparently fleeing troops.

Of the battle at Cerdices-leaga it can only be said that no one celebrated a victory. Arthur won the fighting, but left the lands open again to their Saxon owners. The Saxons, gathering their dead and counting their losses, saw their old borders still intact. But Cerdic, looking after the British force as, collected now and orderly, it left the field, made a vow.

"There will be another day, even for you, Arthur. Another day."

9

THE DAY CAME.

It came with the hope of truce and the time to achieve sense and moderation.

Mordred was the first to show sense. He made no attempt to enter Camelot, much less to hold it against its King. He halted his troops short of the citadel, on the flat fields along the little River Camel. These were their practice grounds, and an encampment was there, furnished ready with supplies. This was as well, for already the warnings of war had gone out. The villagers, obedient it seemed to words carried on the wind, had withdrawn into the citadel, their women, children and cattle housed in the common land to the north-east within the walls.

Mordred, going the rounds that night, found his men puzzled, beginning to be angry, but loyal. The main opinion seemed to be that the High King, in his age, was failing in judgment. He had wronged the Saxon king; that was one thing, and soon forgiven; but also he had wronged his son, the regent Mordred, who had been a faithful guardian of the kingdom and of the King's wife. So they said to Mordred; and they were visibly cheered when Mordred assured them that the next move would be a parley; there would soon, he said, be daylight on these dark doings.

"No sword will be drawn against the High King," he told them, "except we be forced to defend ourselves from him through calumny."

"He asked for a parley," said Arthur to Bors.

"You'll grant it?"

The King's force was drawn up at some distance from the regent's. Between the two armies the Camel, a small stream, flowed glittering among its reeds and kingcups. The stormy skies had cleared, and the sun shone again in his summer splendour. Beyond Mordred's tents and standards rose the great flat-topped hill of Caer Camel, with the towers of Camelot gold-crowned against the sky.

"Yes. For three reasons. The first is that my men are weary and need rest; they are within sight of the homes they have not seen these many weeks, and will be all the more eager to get there. The second is that I need time, and reinforcements."

"And the third?"

"Well, it may even be that Mordred has something to say. Not only does he lie between my men and their homes and wives, but between me and mine. That needs more explaining than even a sword can do."

The two armies settled watchfully down, and messengers, duly honoured and escorted, passed between them. Three other messengers went secretly and swiftly from Arthur's camp: one to Caerleon, with a letter to the Queen; one to Cornwall, bidding Constantine to his side; and the third to Brittany, asking for Bedwyr's help, and, when he could, his presence.

Sooner than expected, the looked-for herald came. Bedwyr, though still not fully recovered from his sick-bed, was on his way, and with his splendid cavalry would be at the King's side within a few days.

And none too soon. It had come to the King's ears that certain of the petty kings from the north were marching with the intention of joining Mordred. And the Saxons along the whole length of the Shore were reported to be massing for a drive inland.

For neither of these things was Mordred responsible, and indeed, he would have prevented them if at this stage it had been possible; but Mordred, like Arthur, was, without the wish for it, without the reason, being thrust closer hour by hour to a brink from which neither man could take a backward step.

In a castle far to the north, beside a window where the birds of morning sang in the birch trees, Nimuë the enchantress threw back the coverlets and rose from her bed.

"I must go to Applegarth."

Pelleas, her husband, stretched a lazy hand out and pulled her to him where he still lay in bed.

"Within raven's stoop of the battlefield?"

"Who said it would be a battlefield?"

"You, my dear. In your sleep last night."

She lifted herself from him, with her robe half round her, staring down. Her eyes were wide, blurred still with sleep, and tragic.

He said gently: "Come, love, it's a hard gift to have, but you have grown used to it now. You've spoken of this, and looked for it, for a long time. There is nothing you can do."

"Only warn, and warn again."

"You have warned them both. And before you Merlin gave the same warning. Mordred will be Arthur's bane. Now it is coming, and though you say Mordred is no traitor in his heart, he has been led to act in ways that must appear treacherous to all men, and certainly to the King."

"But I know the gods. I speak with them. I walk with them. They do not mean us to cease to act, just because we believe that action is dangerous. They have always hidden threats with smiles, and grace lurks behind every cloud. We may hear their words, but who is to interpret them beyond doubt?"

"But Mordred—"

"Merlin would have wished him dead at birth, and so would the King. But from him already much good has come. If even now they might be brought to talk together, the kingdom might be saved. I will not sit idly by and assume the gods" doom. I will go to Applegarth."

"To do what?"

"Tell Arthur that there is no treachery here, only ambition and desire. Two things he himself showed in abundance in youth. He will listen to me, and believe me. They must talk together, or between them they will break our Britain in two, and let her enemies into the breach that they have made. And who, this time, will repair it?"

In the Queen's palace at Caerleon the courier brought the letter to Guinevere. She knew the man; he had gone many times between herself and Mordred.

She turned the letter over in her hand, saw the seal, and went as white as chalk.

"This is not the regent's seal. It is from the King's ring, that was on his hand. They have found him, then? My lord is truly dead?"

The man, who was still on his knee, caught the roll as it fell from her hand, and rising, backed a step, staring.

"Why, no, madam. The King lives and is well. You have had no news, then? There have been sore happenings, lady, and all is far from well. But the King is safely back in Britain."

"He lives? Arthur lives? Then the letter — give me the letter! — it is from the King himself?"

"Why, yes, madam." The man gave it again into her hand. The colour was back in her cheeks, but the hand shook with which she tried to break the seal. A confusion of feelings played across her face like shadows driving over moving water. At the other end of the room her ladies, in a whispering cluster, watched anxiously, and the man, obedient to a gesture from the chief of them, went softly from the room. The ladies, avid for his news, went rustling after him.

The Queen did not even notice their going. She had begun to read.

When the mistress of the ladies returned, she found Guinevere alone and in visible distress.

"What, my lady, weeping? When the High King is alive?"

All Guinevere would say was "I am lost. They are at war, and whatever comes of it, I am lost."

Later she rose. "I cannot stay here. I must go back."

"To Camelot, madam? The armies are there."

"No, not to Camelot. I will go to Amesbury. None of you need come with me unless you wish it. I shall need nothing there. Tell them for me, please. And help me make ready. I shall go now. Yes, now, tonight."

Mordred's messenger, arriving as the morning market-carts rumbled over the Isca bridge, found the palace in turmoil, and the Queen gone.

10

IT WAS A BRIGHT DAY, THE last of summer. Early in the morning the heralds of the two hosts led the leaders to the long-awaited parley.

Mordred had not slept. All night long he had lain, thinking. What to say. How to say it. What words to use that would be straightforward enough to permit of no misinterpretation, but not so blunt as to antagonize. How to explain to a man as tired, as suspicious and full of grief as the ageing King, his, Mordred's, own dichotomy: the joy in command that could be, and was, unswervingly loyal, but that could never again be secondary. (co-rulers, perhaps? Kings of North and South? Would Arthur even consider it?) At the truce table tomorrow he and his father would be meeting for the first time as equal leaders, rather than as before. King and deputy. But two very different leaders. Mordred knew that when his time came he would be not a copy of his father, but a different king. Arthur was of his own generation; by nature his son had his thoughts and ambitions channelled otherwise. Even without the difference in their upbringing this would have been so. Mordred's hard necessity was not Arthur's, but each man's commitment was the same: total. Whether the old King could ever be brought to accept the new ways that Mordred could foresee, ways that had been embodied (though in the end discreditably) in the phrase "Young Celts," without seeing them as treachery, he could not guess. And then there was the Queen. That was one thing he could not say. "Even were you dead, with Bedwyr still living, what chance had I?"

He groaned and turned on the pillow, then bit his lip in case the guards had heard him. Omens bred too fast when the armies were out.

He knew himself a leader. Even now, with the High King's standard flying over his encampment by the Lake, Mordred's men were loyal. And with them, encamped beyond the hill, were the Saxons. Between himself and Cerdic, even now, there might be the possibility of a fruitful alliance; a concourse of farmers, he had called it, and the old Saxon had laughed.… But not between Cerdic and Arthur; not now, not ever.… Dangerous ground; dangerous words. Even to think such thoughts was folly now. Was he, at this most hazardous of moments, seeing himself as a better king than Arthur? Different, yes. Better, perhaps, for the times, at any rate the times to come? But this was worse than folly. He turned again, seeking a cool place on the pillow, trying to think himself back into the mind of Arthur's son, dutiful, admiring, ready to conform and to obey.

Somewhere a cock crew. From the scrambled edges of sleep, he saw the hens come running down the salt grass to the pebbled shore. Sula was scattering the food. Overhead the gulls swept and screamed, some of them daring to swoop for it. Sula, laughing, waved an arm to beat them aside.

Shrill as a gull's scream, the trumpet sounded for the day of parley.

Half a mile away, in his tent near the Lake shore, Arthur slept, but his sleep was an uneasy one, and in it came a dream.

He dreamed that he was riding by the Lake shore, and there, standing in a boat, poling it through the shallow water, stood Nimuë; only it was not Nimuë, it was a boy, with Merlin's eyes. The boy looked at him gravely, and repeated, in Merlin's voice, what Nimuë had said to him yesterday when, arriving at the convent on Ynys Witrin among her maidens, she had sent to beg speech with him.

"You and I, Emrys," she had said, giving him the boyhood name Merlin had used for him, "have let ourselves be blinded by prophecy. We have lived under the edge of doom, and feel ourselves now facing the long-threatened fate. But hear this, Emrys: fate is made by men, not gods. Our own follies, not the gods, foredoom us. The gods are spirits; they work by men's hands, and there are men who are brave enough to stand up and say: "I am a man; I will not."

"Listen to me, Arthur. The gods have said that Mordred will be your bane. If he is so, it will not be through his own act. Do not force him to that act.… I will tell you now what should have remained a secret between Mordred and myself. He came to me some time ago, to Applegarth, to seek my help against the fate predicted for him. He swore to kill himself sooner than harm you. If I had not prevented him, he would have died then. So who is guilty, he or I? And he came to me again, on Bryn Myrddin, seeking what comfort I, Merlin, could give him. If he could seek to defy the gods, then so, Arthur, can you. Lay by your sword, and listen to him. Take no other counsel, but talk with him, listen, and learn. Yes, learn. For you grow old, Arthur-Emrys, and the time will come, is coming, has come, when you and your son may hold Britain safe between your clasped hands, like a jewel cradled in wool. But loose your clasp, and you drop her, to shatter, perhaps for ever."

In his dream Arthur knew that he had accepted her advice; he had called the parley, resolving to listen to anything his son had to say; but still Nimuë-Merlin had wept, standing in the boat as it floated away on the glassy Lake and vanished into the mist. And then, suddenly, as he turned his horse to ride up towards the meeting-place, the beast stumbled, sending him headlong into deep water. Weighted by his armour — why was he full-armed for a peaceful parley? — he sank, deep and ever deeper, into a pit of black water where fish swam around him, and water-snakes like weeds and weeds like snakes wrapped his limbs so that he could not move them.…

He cried out and woke, drenched in sweat as if he had indeed been drowning, but when his servants and guards came running, he laughed and made light of it, and sent them away, and presently fell again into an uneasy sleep. This time it was Gawain who came to him, a Gawain bloody and dead, but imbued somehow with a grotesque energy, a ghost of the old, fighting Gawain. He, too, came floating on the Lake water, but he passed from its surface right into the King's tent and, pausing beside the bed, drew a dagger from his blood-encrusted side, and held it out to the King.

"Bedwyr," he said, not in the hollow whisper in which ghosts should speak, but in a high metallic squeaking like the tent poles shifting in the breeze. "Wait for Bedwyr. Promise anything to the traitor, land, lordship, the High Kingdom after you. And with it, even, the Queen. Anything to hold him off until Bedwyr comes with his host. And then, when you have the certainty of victory, attack and kill him."

"But this would be treachery."

"Nothing is treachery if it destroys a traitor." This time Gawain's ghost spoke, strangely, in Arthur's own voice. "This way you will make certain." The blood-stained knife dropped to the bed. "Crush him for ever, Arthur, make certain, make certain, certain.…"

"Sir?"

The servant at his bedside, touching the King's shoulder to wake him, started back as the King, jerking upright in the bed, glared round as if in anger, but all he said was, abruptly: "Tell them to see to the fastenings of the tent. How am I expected to sleep when the whole thing shifts about as if a storm was blowing?"

It had been agreed, in the exchange between the heralds, that fourteen officers from each side should meet at a spot half-way between the hosts.

There was a strip of dry moorland not far from the Lake shore where a pair of small pavilions had been pitched, with between them a wooden table, where the two leaders' swords were laid. Should the parley fail, the formal declaration of battle would be the raising, or drawing of a sword. Over one pavilion flew the King's standard, the Dragon on gold. To this device, Mordred, as regent, had also been entitled. He, his mind set on the necessity of being received into grace, and not putting in the way of grace the smallest rub, had given orders that his royal device should be folded away, and until the day was spent and he was declared once more as Arthur's heir, a plain standard should be carried for him.

This flew now on the other pavilion. As the two men took their places at the table, Mordred saw his father eyeing it. What he cannot have known was that Arthur himself, as a young man, had borne a plain white banner. "White is my colour," he had said, "until I have written on it my own device. And write it, come in the way what will, I shall."

To Nimuë in her convent of maidens on the island in the Lake came Arthur's sister Queen Morgan. This was a Morgan subdued and anxious, knowing well what might be her fate if Arthur should be defeated or die in battle. She had been her brother's enemy, but without him she was, and would be, nothing. She could be trusted now to use all her skill and vaunted magic on his behalf.

So Nimuë accepted her. As Lady of the Lake convent, Nimuë stood in no awe of Morgan, either as sorceress or queen. Among her maidens were other royal ladies; one of them a cousin of Guinevere's from North Wales, another from Manau Guotodin. With them she set Morgan to prepare medicines and to make ready the barges that would be used to ferry the wounded across to the island for healing. She had seen Arthur and delivered her warning, and he had promised to call the parley and let the regent have his say. But Nimuë, for all her words to Pelleas, knew what the gods withheld behind the thunder-clouds that even now were building up beyond the shining Lake. Small from the island, the two pavilions could be seen, with the small space between.

For all the massed clouds on the far horizon, it promised to be a beautiful day.

The day wore on. Those officers who had accompanied their leaders to the truce table showed ill at ease at first, eyeing friends or former comrades on the other side with distrust, but after a while, relaxing, they began to talk among themselves, and fell into groups behind their respective leaders' pavilions.

Out of earshot of them, Arthur stood with Mordred. Occasionally they moved, as if by consent, and paced a few steps and back. Sometimes one spoke, sometimes the other. The watchers, focused on them even while they spoke of other things, tried to read what was happening. But they could not. The King, still looking tired, and frowning heavily, did nevertheless listen with calm courtesy to what the younger man was, with emphasis, saying.

Farther away, unable to see clearly or to hear anything at all, the armies watched and waited. The sun climbed the sky. The heat increased, brightness flashing back from the glassy surface of the Lake. Horses stamped and blew and switched their tails, impatient of heat and flies, and in the ranks the slight fretting of suspense changed to restlessness. The officers, themselves on the fidget, checked it where they could, and watched the truce table and the sky with steadily growing tension. Somewhere in the distance the first dull roll of thunder sounded. The air weighed heavy, and men's skins tightened with the coming storm. It was to be guessed that neither side wanted the fight, but, by the irony that governs affairs of violence, the longer the truce talks went on, the more the tension grew, till the slightest spark would start such a fire as only death could quench.

None of those watching was ever destined to know what Arthur and Mordred spoke of. Some said later — those who lived to speak — that in the end the King smiled. Certain it is that he was seen to put out a hand to his son's arm, turning back with him towards the table where the two swords lay side by side, unsheathed, and beside them two goblets and a golden jug of wine. Those nearest heard a few words: "...To be High King after my death," said Arthur, "and meanwhile to take lands of your own."

Mordred answered him, but in a voice too low to overhear. The King, gesturing to his servant to pour the wine, spoke again. "Cornwall," they could hear, and later, "Kent," and then, "It may well prove that you are right."

Here he stopped and glanced round as if some sound had interrupted him. A sudden stray current of air, thunder-heavy, had stirred the silk of his pavilion, so that the ropes creaked. Arthur shifted his shoulders as if against a cold draught, and looked sideways at his son, a strange look (it was the servant who, afterwards, told this part of the story), a look which was mirrored in a sudden flash of doubt in Mordred's face, as if, with the smile and the smooth words and the proffered wine, there might still be trickery there. Then in his turn the regent shrugged, smiled, and took the goblet from his father's hand.

A movement went through the waiting ranks, like a ruffle of wind across a cornfield.

The King raised his goblet, and the sun flashed in the gold.

An answering flash, from the group beside his pavilion, caught his eyes. He whipped round, shouting. But too late.

An adder, a speckled snake no more than two handspans long, had crept from its hiding to bask on the hot ground. One of Arthur's officers, intent on the scene at the truce table, stepped back unseeingly onto the creature's tail. Whipping round, the adder struck. At the pain the man, whirling, saw the snake on the recoil. His own reflex, that of a trained fighting man, was almost as fast. He snatched his sword out and slashed down at the snake, killing it.

The sun struck the metal. The sword's flash, the King's raised arm, his sudden movement and shout of command, came to the watching hosts as the long-awaited signal. The inaction, the nerve-stretching tension, made almost unbearable by the thundery heat and the sweating uncertainty of that long vigil, suddenly snapped, in a wild shout from both sides of the field.

It was war. This was the day. This was the wicked day of destiny.

A dozen flashes answered as the officers on both sides drew their swords. The trumpets screamed, drowning the shouts of the knights who, trapped between the armies, seized their horses from the grooms and turned furiously to hold back the converging ranks. They could not be heard; their gestures, misinterpreted as incitements to attack, were wasted. It was a matter only of seconds, seconds of furious noise and confusion, before the front ranks of the two armies met in a roaring clash. The King and his son were swept apart, each to his proper station, Arthur under the great Dragon, Mordred no longer regent and King's son, but for all time branded traitor, under the blank standard that, now, would never be written on. And then over the bar of the field, called by the trumpets, like a sea of tossing manes, came the spears and horsehair of the Saxons, and the black banners of the northern fighters who, like the ravens, could hardly wait to take the pickings from the dead.

Soon, too late to dull those flashing signals, the thunderheads came slowly massing across the hot sky. The air darkened, and in the distance came the first flicker of lightning, the herald of the storm.

The King and his son were to meet again.

Towards the end of the day, with his friends and long companions dead or dying round him, and the hundreds of wasted deaths reeking to the now dark and threatening sky, it is doubtful if Arthur even remembered that Mordred was anything but a traitor and an adulterer. The straight speaking, the truths laid down during that talk by the truce table, the faith and trust so nearly reaffirmed, all had vanished in the first stress and storm of the attack. It was Arthur, duke of battles, who once more took the field. Mordred was the enemy, the Saxon allies his savage helpers; this battle had been fought before, and many times. This was Glein and Agned, Caerleon and Linnuis, Cit Coit Caledon and Badon Hill. On all these fields the young Arthur had triumphed; for all of them his prophet and adviser, Merlin, had promised him the victory and the glory. Here, too, on the Camel field, it was victory.

At the end of the day, with the thunder overhead and the lightning flaming white from the sky and the water of the Lake, Arthur and Mordred came once again face to face. There were no words. What words could there have been? For Mordred, as for his father, the other man was now the enemy. The past was past, and there was no future to be seen beyond the need to get to the end of this moment that would bring with it the end of the day.

It was said afterwards, no one knows by whom, that at the moment of meeting, as the two men, on foot now, and white with the sweat and dust of the battlefield, knew one another, Mordred checked in his stride and stroke. Arthur, the veteran, did not. His spear took his son straight and clean beneath the rib-cage.

Blood gushed down the spear shaft in a hot stream over Arthur's hand. He loosed the shaft, and reached for his sword. Mordred lurched forward like a spitted boar. The butt of the shaft struck the ground. He leaned on it, and, still carried forward by the weight of the half-checked stroke, came within sword's length of his father. Arthur's hand, slippery with blood, fumbled momentarily on Caliburn's grip, and in that moment Mordred's sword swung, even as he fell dying, in a hard and deadly blow to the side of the King's head.

Mordred pitched down then into the pool of his own blood. Arthur stood for a few seconds still, his sword dropping from his bloodied hand, his other hand moving numbly as if in an attempt to ward off some slight and trivial blow; then slowly his body bent and buckled, and he, too, fell, and his blood joined with Mordred's on the ground.

The clouds broke, and like a waterfall the rain came down.