Legacy: Arthurian Saga (125 page)

"And what of King Lot, since I have
gathered he does not go with you?"

At that I got a bland look, and a tone
as smooth as any politician's. "He leaves, too, at first light. Not
for his own land...not, that is, until I find which way Colgrim
went. No, I urged King Lot to go straight to York. I believe Queen
Ygraine will go there after the burial, and Lot can receive her.
Then, once his marriage with my sister Morgan is celebrated, I
suppose I can count him an ally, like it or not. And the rest of
the fighting, whatever comes between now and Christmastime, I can
do without him."

"So, I shall see you in Amesbury. And
after that?"

"Caerleon," he said, without
hesitation. "If the wars allow it, I shall go there. I've never
seen it, and from what Cador tells me it must be my headquarters
now."

"Until the Saxons break the treaty and
move in from the south."

"As of course they will. Until then.
God send there will be time to breath first."

"And to build another
stronghold."

He looked up quickly. "Yes. I was
thinking of that. You'll be there to do it?" Then, with sudden
urgency: "Merlin, you swear you will always be there?"

"As long as I am needed. Though it
seems to me," I added lightly, "that the eaglet is fledging fast
enough already." Then, because I knew what lay behind the sudden
uncertainty: "I shall wait for you at Amesbury, and I shall be
there to present you to your mother."

2

Amesbury is little more than a
village, but since Ambrosius' day it has taken some kind of
grandeur to itself, as befits his birthplace, and its nearness to
the great monument of the Hanging Stones that stand on the windy
Sarum plain. This is a linked circle of vast stone, a gigantic
Dance, which was raised first in times beyond men's memory. I had
(by what folk persisted in seeing as "magic art") rebuilt the Dance
to be Britain's monument of glory, and the burial-place of her
kings. Here Uther was to lie beside his brother
Ambrosius.

We brought his body without incident
to Amesbury and left it in the monastery there, wrapped in spices
and coffined in hollowed oak, under its purple pall before the
chapel altar. The King's guard (who had ridden south with his body)
stood vigil, and the monks and nuns of Amesbury prayed beside the
bier. Queen Ygraine being a Christian, the dead king was to be
buried with all the rites and ceremonies of the Christian church,
though in life he had barely troubled even to pay lip-service to
the Christians' God. Even now he lay with gold coins glinting on
his eyelids, to pay the fee of a ferryman who had exacted such toll
for centuries longer than Saint Peter of the Gate. The chapel
itself had apparently been erected on the site of a Roman shrine;
it was little more than an oblong erection of daub and wattle, with
wooden shafts holding up a roof of thatch, but it had a floor of
fine mosaic work, scrubbed clean and hardly damaged. This, showing
scrolls of vine and acanthus, could offend no Christian souls, and
a woven rug lay centrally, probably to cover whatever pagan god or
goddess floated naked among the grapes.

The monastery reflected something of
Amesbury's new prosperity. It was a miscellaneous collection of
buildings huddled anyhow around a cobbled yard, but these were in
good repair and the Abbot's house, which had been vacated for the
Queen and her train, was well built of stone, with wooden flooring,
and a big fireplace at one end with a chimney.

The headman of the village, too, had a
good house, which he made haste to offer me for lodging, but
explaining that the King would follow me soon, I left him in an
uproar of extra preparation, and betook myself with my servants to
the tavern. This was small, with little pretension to comfort, but
it was clean, and fires were kept burning high against the autumn
chills. The innkeeper remembered me from the time I had lodged
there during the rebuilding of the Dance; he still showed the awe
that the exploit had raised in him, and made haste to give me the
best room, and to promise me fresh poultry and a mutton pie for
supper. He showed relief when I told him that I had brought two
servants with me, who would serve me in my own chamber, and
banished his own staring pot-boys to their posts at the kitchen
burners.

The servants I had brought were two of
Arthur's. In recent years, living alone in the Wild Forest, I had
cared for myself, and now had none of my own. One was a small,
lively man from the hills of Gwynedd; the other was Ulfin, who had
been Uther's own servant. The late King had taken him from a rough
servitude, and had shown him kindness, which Ulfin repaid with
devotion. This would now belong to Arthur, but it would have been
cruel to deny Ulfin the chance of following his master's body on
its last journey, so I had asked for him by name. By my orders he
had gone to the chapel with the bier, and I doubted if I would see
him before the funeral was over. Meantime, the Welshman, Lleu,
unpacked my boxes and bespoke hot water, and sent the more
intelligent of the landlord's boys across to the monastery with a
message from me to be delivered to the Queen on her arrival. In it
I bade her welcome, and offered to wait on her as soon as she
should be rested enough to send for me. News of the happenings in
Luguvallium she had had already; now I added merely that Arthur was
not yet in Amesbury, but was expected in time for the
burial.

I was not in Amesbury when her party
arrived. I rode out to the Giants' Dance to see that all was ready
for the ceremony, to be told on my return that the Queen and her
escort had arrived shortly after noon, and that Ygraine with her
ladies was settled into the Abbot's house. Her summons to me came
just as afternoon dimmed into evening.

The sun had gone down in a clouded
sky, and when, refusing the offer of an escort, I walked the short
distance to the monastery, it was already almost dark. The night
was heavy as a pall, a mourning sky, where no stars shone. I
remembered the great king-star that had blazed for Ambrosius'
death, and my thoughts went again to the King who lay nearby in the
chapel, with monks for mourners, and the guards like statues beside
the bier. And Ulfin, who, alone of all those who saw him die, had
wept for him.

A chamberlain met me at the monastery
gate. Not the monks' porter; this was one of the Queen's own
servants, a royal chamberlain I recognized from Cornwall. He knew
who I was, of course, and bowed very low, but I could see that he
did not recall our last meeting. It was the same man, grown greyer
and more bent, who had admitted me to the Queen's presence some
three months before Arthur's birth, when she had promised to
confide the child to my care. I had been disguised then, for fear
of Uther's enmity, and it was plain that the chamberlain did not
recognize, in the tall prince at the gate, the humble bearded
"doctor" who had called to consult with the Queen.

He led me across the weedy courtyard
toward the big thatched building where the Queen was lodged.
Cressets burned outside the door and here and there along the wall,
so that the poverty of the place showed starkly. After the wet
summer weeds had sprouted freely among the cobbles, and the corners
of the yard were waist-high in nettles. Among these the wooden
ploughs and mattocks of the working brothers stood, wrapped in
sacking. Near one doorway was an anvil, and on a nail driven into
the jamb hung a line of horse-shoes. A litter of thin black
piglings tumbled, squealing, out of our way, and were called by a
sow's anxious grunting through the broken planks of a half-door.
The holy men and women of Amesbury were simple folk. I wondered how
the Queen was faring.

I need not have feared for her.
Ygraine had always been a lady who knew her own mind, and since her
marriage to Uther she had kept a most queenly state, urged to this,
possibly, by the very irregularity of that marriage. I remembered
the Abbot's house as a humble dwelling, clean and dry, but boasting
no comfort. Now in a few short hours the Queen's people had seen to
it that it was luxurious. The walls, of undressed stone, had been
hidden by hangings of scarlet and green and peacock blue, and one
beautiful Eastern carpet that I had brought for her from Byzantium.
The wooden floor was scrubbed white, and the benches that stood
along the walls were piled with furs and cushions. A great fire of
logs burned on the hearth. To one side of this was set a tall chair
of gilded wood, cushioned in embroidered wool, with a footstool
fringed with gold. Across from this stood another chair with a high
back, and arms carved with dragons' heads. The lamp was a
five-headed dragon in bronze. The door to the Abbot's austere
sleeping chamber stood open, and beyond it I caught a glimpse of a
bed hung with blue, and the sheen of a silver fringe. Three or four
women -- two of them no more than girls -- were busying themselves
in the bedchamber and over the table, which, at the end of the room
away from the fire, stood ready for supper. Pages dressed in blue
ran with dishes and flagons. Three white greyhounds lay as near to
the fire as they dared go.

As I entered, there was a pause in the
bustle and chatter. All eyes turned to the doorway. A page bearing
a wine-jar, caught within a yard of the door, checked, swerved, and
stared, showing the whites of his eyes. Someone at the table
dropped a wooden trencher, and the greyhounds pounced on the fallen
cakes. The scrabbling of their claws and their munching were the
only sounds in the room to be heard through the rustling of the
fire.

"Good evening," I said pleasantly. I
answered the women's reverences, watched gravely while a boy picked
up the fallen trencher and kicked the dogs out of the way, then
allowed myself to be ushered by the chamberlain toward the
hearthplace.

"The Queen -- " he was beginning, when
the eyes turned from me to the inner door, and the greyhounds,
arched and wagging, danced to meet the woman who came through
it.

But for the hounds and the curtsying
women, a stranger might have thought that here was the Abbess of
the place come to greet me. The woman who entered was as much a
contrast to the rich room as that room had been to the squalid
courtyard. She was dressed from head to foot in black, with a white
veil covering her hair, its ends thrown back over her shoulders,
and its soft folds pinned to frame her face like a wimple. The
sleeves of her gown were lined with some grey silken stuff, and
there was a cross of sapphires on her breast, but to the somber
black and white of her mourning there was no other
relief.

It was a long time since I had seen
Ygraine, and I expected to find her changed, but even so I was
shocked at what I saw. Beauty was still there, in the lines of bone
and the great dark-blue eyes and the queenly poise of her body; but
grace had given way to dignity, and there was a thinness about the
wrists and hands that I did not like, and shadows near her eyes
almost as blue as the eyes themselves. This, not the ravages of
time, was what shocked me. There were signs everywhere that a
doctor could read all too clearly.

But I was here as prince and emissary,
not as physician. I returned her smile of greeting, bowed over her
hand, and led her to the cushioned chair. At a sign from her the
boys ran to collar the greyhounds and take them aside, and she
settled herself, smoothing her skirt. One of the girls moved a
footstool for her, and then, with lowered eyelids and folded hands,
stayed beside her mistress's chair.

The Queen bade me be seated, and I
obeyed her. Someone brought wine, and across the cups we exchanged
the commonplaces of the meeting. I asked her how she did, but with
purely formal courtesy, and I knew she could read nothing of my
knowledge in my face.

"And the King?" she asked at length.
The word came from her as if forced, with a kind of pain behind
it.

"Arthur promised to be here. I expect
him tomorrow. There has been no news from the north, so we have no
means of knowing if there has been more fighting. The lack of news
need not alarm you; it only means that he will be here as soon as
any courier he might have sent."

She nodded, with no sign of anxiety.
Either she could not think much beyond her own loss, or she took my
tranquil tone as a prophet's reassurance. "Did he expect more
fighting?"

"He stayed as a cautionary measure, no
more. The defeat of Colgrim's men was decisive, but Colgrim himself
escaped, as I wrote to you. We had no report on where he had gone.
Arthur thought it better to make sure that the scattered Saxon
forces could not re-form, at least while he came south for his
father's burial."

"He is young," she said, "for such a
charge."

I smiled. "But ready for it, and more
than able. Believe me, it was like seeing a young falcon take to
the air, or a swan to the water. When I took leave of him, he had
not slept for the better part of two nights, and was in high heart
and excellent health."

"I am glad of it."

She spoke formally, without
expression, but I thought it better to qualify. "The death of his
father came as a shock and a grief, but as you will understand,
Ygraine, it could not come very near his heart, and there was much
to be done that crowded out sorrow."

"I have not been so fortunate," she
said, very low, and looked down at her hands.