"You think she trapped him deliberately?"
"How else? You know her. She wove her spells for this."
"A very common kind of spell," I said dryly.
"Oh, yes. ButLot has never lacked women, and no one can deny that Morgan is the better match, and as pretty a lass besides. And for all the arts Morgause boasts, Morgan is better able to be queen of a great kingdom. She was bred for it, as the bastard was not."
I watched her curiously. Beside her chair the brown-haired girl sat on her stool half asleep. Ygraine seemed careless of what she might overhear. "Ygraine, what harm did Morgause ever do to you that makes you so bitter against her?"
The red came up in her face like a flag, and for a moment I thought she would try to set me down, but we were neither of us young any more, or needing the armour of self-love. She spoke simply: "If you are thinking that I hated having a lovely young girl always near me, and near to Uther, with a right to him that went back beyond my own, it is true. But it was more than that. Even when she was a young girl —
twelve, thirteen, no more — I thought of her as corrupt. That is one reason why I welcomed the match withLot . I wanted her away from court."
This was straighter than I had expected. "Corrupt?" I asked.
The Queen's glance slid momentarily to the girl on the stool beside her. The brown head was nodding, the eyelids closed. Ygraine lowered her voice, but spoke clearly and carefully. "I am not suggesting that there was anything evil in her relationship with the King, though she never behaved to him like a daughter; nor was she fond of him as a daughter should be; she cajoled favours from him, no more than that. When I called her corrupt, I spoke of her practice of witchcraft. She was drawn to it always, and haunted the wise-women and the charlatans, and any talk of magic brought her staring awake like an owl at night-time. And she tried to teach Morgan, when the princess was only a child. That is what I cannot forgive. I have no time for such things, and in the hands of such as Morgause..."
She broke off. Vehemence had made her raise her voice, and I saw that the girl, like the owl, was also staring awake. Ygraine, recollecting herself, bent her head, a touch of colour in her face again.
"Prince Merlin, you must pardon me. I meant no disrespect."
I laughed. I saw, to my amusement, that the girl must have heard, she was laughing, too, but silently, dimpling at me from beyond her mistress's shoulder. I said: "I am too proud to think of myself in the same breath as girls dabbling with spells. I am sorry about Morgan. It is true that Morgause has power of a sort, and it is also true that such things can be dangerous. Any power is hard to hold, and power misused recoils on the user."
"Perhaps some day, if you get the chance, you will tell Morgan so." She smiled, trying for a lighter tone.
"She will listen to you, where she would shrug her shoulders at me."
"Willingly." I tried to sound willing, like a grandfather called in to lecture the young.
"It may be that when she finds herself a queen with real power, she will cease to hanker for another sort." She turned the subject. "So now thatLot has a daughter of Uther's, even if only a bastard, will he consider himself bound to Arthur's banner?"
"That I cannot tell you. But unless the Saxons make heavy enough gains to make it worth Lot's while to try another betrayal, I think he will keep what power he has, and fight for his own land, if not for the High King's sake. I see no trouble there." I did not add: "Not of that kind." I finished merely: "When you go back toCornwall , madam, I will send letters if you like."
"I should be grateful. Your letters were a great comfort to me before, when my son was at Galava."
We talked for a while longer, mainly of the day's events. When I would have asked after her health, she put the query aside with a smile that told me she knew as much as I, so I let it be, asking instead about Duke Cador's projected marriage. "Arthur hasn't mentioned it. Who is it to be?"
"The daughter of Dinas. Did you know him? Her name is Mariona. The marriage was arranged, alas, when they were both children. Now Mariona is of age, so when the duke is home again, they will be wed."
"I knew her father, yes. Why did you say 'alas'?"
Ygraine looked with a fond smile at the girl by her chair. "Because otherwise there would have been no difficulty in finding a match for my little Guenever."
"I am sure," I said, "that that will prove more than easy."
"But such a match," said the Queen, and the girl made a smiling mouth and lowered her lashes.
"If I dared use divination in your presence, madam," I said, smiling, "I would predict that one as splendid will present itself, and soon."
I spoke lightly, in formal courtesy, and was startled to hear in my voice an echo, though faint and soon lost, of the cadences of prophecy.
Neither of them heard it. The Queen was holding a hand to me, bidding me good night, and the girl Guenever held the door for me, sinking, as I passed, into a smiling curtsy of humility and grace.
"It's mine!" said Arthur, violently. "You only have to count! I heard the men talking about it in the guardroom. They didn't know I was near enough to hear them. They said she was big-bellied by Twelfth Night, and lucky to catchLot so early, they could pass it off as a seven-month child. Merlin, you know as well as I do that he never came near her at Luguvallium! He wasn't there until the very night of the battle, and that night — that was the night — " He stopped, choking on it, and turned with a swirl of robes to pace the floor again.
It was well after midnight. The sounds of revelry from the town were fainter now, muted with the chill of the hour before dawn. In the King's room the candles had burned low into a welter of honeyed wax.
Their scent mingled with the sharp smoke from a lamp that needed trimming.
Arthur turned sharply on his heel and came back to stand in front of me. He had taken off the crown and jewelled chain, and laid his sword aside, but he still wore the splendid coronation robe. The furred cloak lay across the table like a stream of blood in the lamplight. Through the open door of his bedchamber I could see the covers turned back ready on the great bed, but, late though the hour was, Arthur showed no sign of fatigue. His every movement was infused with a kind of nervous fury.
He controlled it, speaking quietly. "Merlin, when we spoke that night of what had happened — " A breathing pause, then he changed course with ferocious directness: "When I lay incestuously with Morgause, I asked you what would happen if she should conceive. I remember what you said. I remember it well. Do you?"
"Yes," I said unwillingly, "I remember it."
"You said to me, 'The gods are jealous, and they insure against too much glory. Every man carries the seed of his own death, and there must come a term to every life. All that has happened tonight is that you yourself have set that term.'"
I said nothing. He faced me with the straight, uncompromising look that I was to come to know so well.
"When you spoke to me like that, were you telling me the truth? Was the prophecy a sure one, or were you finding words of comfort for me, so that I could face what was to come next day?"
"It was the truth."
"You meant that if she bore a child to me, you could foresee that he — she? — would be my death?"
"Arthur," I said, "prophecy does not work like that. I neither knew, in the way most men think of
'knowing,' that Morgause would conceive, nor that the child would be a mortal danger for you. I only knew, all the time you were with the woman, that the birds of death were on my shoulders, weighing me down and stinking of carrion. My heart was heavy with dread, and I could see death, as I thought, linking the two of you together. Death and treachery. But how, I did not know. By the time I understood it, the thing was done, and all that was left was to await what the gods chose to send."
He paced away from me again, over toward the bedchamber door. He leaned there in silence, his shoulder to the jamb, his face away from me, then thrust himself off and turned. He crossed to the chair behind the big table, sat down, and regarded me, chin on fist. His movements were controlled and smooth, as always, but I, who knew him, could hear the curb-chain ring. He still spoke quietly. "And now we know the carrion-birds were right. She did conceive. You told me something else that night, when I admitted my fault. You said I had sinned unknowingly and was innocent. Is innocence, then, to be punished?"
"It's not uncommon."
" 'The sins of the fathers'?"
I recognized the phrase as a quotation from the Christian scriptures. "Uther's sin," I said, "visited on you."
"And mine, now, on the child?"
I said nothing. I did not like the way the interview was going. For the first time, talking with Arthur, I did not seem able to take control. I told myself I was weary, that I was still in the ebbtide of power, that my time would come again; but the truth is I was feeling a little like the fisherman in the Eastern tale who unstopped a bottle and let out a genie many times more powerful than himself.
"Very well," said the King. "My sin and hers must be visited on the child. It must not be allowed to live.
You will go north and tell Morgause so. Or if you prefer, I shall give you a letter telling her so myself."
I took breath, but he swept on without giving me time to speak.
"Quite apart from your forebodings — which God knows I would be a fool not to respect — can you not see how dangerous this thing could be now, if Lot should find out about it? It's plain enough what has happened. She feared she might be pregnant, and to save her shame she set herself to snare a husband.
Who better thanLot ? She had been offered to him before; for all we know she had wanted him, and now saw a chance to outshine her sister and give herself a place and a name, which she would lack after her father's death." His lips thinned. "And who knows better than I that if she set herself to get a man, any man, he would go to her for the whistle?"
"Arthur, you talk of her 'shame.' You don't think you were the first she took to her bed, do you?"
He said, a little too quickly: "I never did think so."
"Then how do you know she had not lain withLot before you? That she was not already pregnant to him, and took you in the hope of snaring some kind of power and favour to herself? She knew Uther was dying; she feared thatLot , by his action at Luguvallium, had forfeited the King's favour. If she could fatherLot 's child on you..."
"This is guesswork. This is not what you said that night."
"No. But think back. It would fit the facts of my foreboding equally well."
"But not the force of them," he said sharply. "If the danger from this child is real, then what does it matter who fathered it? Guesswork won't help us."
"I'm not guessing when I tell you that she andLot were lovers before ever you went to her bed. I told you I had had a dream that night at Nodens' shrine. I saw them meet at a house some way off an ill-frequented road. It must have been by prearrangement. They met like people who have been lovers for a long time. This child may in fact beLot 's, and not yours."
"And we've got it the wrong way round? I was the one she whistled up to save her shame?"
"It's possible. You had come from nowhere, eclipsingLot as you would soon eclipse Uther. She made her bid to fatherLot 's child on you, but then had to abandon the attempt, for fear of me."
He was silent, thinking. "Well," he said at length, "time will tell us. But are we to wait for it? No matter whose child this is, it is a danger; and it doesn't take a prophet to see how that could be...or a god to act on it. IfLot ever knows — or believes — that his eldest child is fathered by me, how long do you think this chary loyalty of his will last? Lothian is a key point, you know that. I need that loyalty; I have to have it. Even if he had wedded my own sister Morgan, I could hardly have trusted him, whereas now..." He threw out a hand, palm up. "Merlin, it's done every day, in every village in the kingdom. Why not in a king's house? Go north for me, and talk to Morgause."
"You think she would listen? If she had not wanted the child, she would not have scrupled to get rid of it long since. She didn't take you for love, Arthur, and she bears you no friendship for letting her be driven from court. And to me" — I smiled sourly — "she bears a most emphatic and justified ill-will. She would laugh in my face. More than that: she would listen, and laugh at the power her action had given her over us, and then she would do whatever she thought would hurt us most."
"But —"
"You thought she might have persuadedLot into marriage merely for her own sake, or to score from her sister. No. She took him because I foiled her plans to corrupt and own you, and because at heart, whatever the time may force him to do now,Lot is your enemy and mine, and through him she may one day do you harm."
A sharpening silence. "Do you believe this?"
"Yes."
He stirred. "Then I am still right. She must not bear the child."
"What are you going to do? Pay someone to bake her bread with ergot?"
"You will find some way. You will go —"
"I will do nothing in the matter."
He came to his feet, like a bow snapping upright when the string breaks. His eyes glittered in the candlelight. "You told me you were my servant. You made me King, you said by the god's wish. Now I am King, and you will obey me."
I was taller than he, by two fingers' breadth. I had outfaced kings before, and he was very young. I gave it just long enough, then said, gently:
"I am your servant, Arthur, but I serve the god first. Do not make me choose. I have to let him work the way he wills."
He held my eyes a moment longer, then drew a long breath, and released it as if it had been a weight he was holding. "To do this? To destroy, perhaps, the very kingdom you said he had sent me to build?"
"If he sent you to build it, then it will be built. Arthur, I don't pretend to understand this. I can only tell you to trust the time, as I do, and wait. Now, do as you did before, put it aside and try to forget it. Leave it with me."