But inside, this poorest of poor dwellings showed some glimpses of simple comfort. Though the child's cradle was of old, warped wood, the blankets were soft and brightly dyed, and the pillow was stuffed with feathers. On the stone shelf that served the couple for a bed was a thick, almost luxurious coverlet of sealskin, spotted and deep-piled, a quality of skin which would normally go by right to the house of one of the warriors, or even the queen herself. And on the table -- a worm-ridden slab of sea-wrack propped on stones, for wood was scarce in the Orkneys -- stood the remains of a good meal: not red meat, indeed, but a couple of gnawed wings of chicken and a pot of goose-grease to go with the black bread.
The cottagers themselves were poorly enough dressed. Brude had on a short, much-mended tunic, with over it the sleeveless coat of sheepskin which, in summer and winter, protected him from the weather at sea. His legs and feet were thickly wrapped in rags. Sula's gown was a shapeless affair of moss-dyed homespun, girdled with a length of rope such as she wove for her husband's nets. Her feet, too, were bound up in rags. But outside the cottage, beached above the tidemark of black weed and smashed shells, lay a good boat, as good as any in the islands, and the nets spread to dry over the boulders were far better than Brude could have made. They were a foreign import, made of materials unobtainable in the northern isles, and would normally be beyond the means of such a household. Brude's own lines, hand-twisted from reeds and dried wrack, stretched from the cottage's thatch to heavy anchor-stones on the turf. On the lines hung the split carcasses of drying fish, and a couple of big seabirds, gannets, Sula's namesake. These, dried and stored, and eked out with shellfish and seaweeds, would be winter food. The promise of better fare, however, was there with the half-dozen hens foraging along the tide-mark, and the heavy-uddered she-goat tethered on the salt grass.
It was a bright day of early summer. May, in the islands, can be as cruel as any other month, but this was a day of sunshine and mild breezes. The stones of the beach looked grey and turquoise and rosy-red, the sea creamed against them peacefully, and the turf of the ridge behind was thick with sea-pink and primrose and red campion. Every ledge of the cliffs that bounded the bay was crowded with seabirds claiming and disputing their nesting territory, and nearer, on shingle or turf, the pied oystercatchers brooded their eggs or flew, screaming, to and fro along the tide. The air was loud with their cries. Even had there been a listener outside the cottage doorway, he could have heard nothing for the noise of the sea and the birds, but inside the room the furtive hush persisted. The woman said nothing, but apprehension still showed in her face, and she put up a sleeve to dab at her eyes.
Her husband spoke impatiently.
"What is it, woman? You're never grieving for the old enchanter? Whatever Merlin was to King Arthur and to the mainland folks with his magic, he's been naught to us here. He was old, besides, and even though men said he'd never die, it seems he was mortal after all. What's there to weep for in that?"
"I'm not weeping for him, why should I? But I'm afeared, Brude, I'm afeared."
"For what?"
"Not for us. For him." She gave a half-glance towards the cradle where the boy, awake but still drowsy from his afternoon's sleep, lay quietly, curled small under the blankets.
"For him?" asked her husband, surprised. "Why? Surely all's well for us now, and for him, too. With Merlin gone, that was enemy to our King Lot, and by all accounts to this boy of his as well, who's to harm him now, or us for keeping him? Maybe we can stop watching now in case other folks see him and start asking questions. Maybe he can run out now and play like other children, not hang on your skirts all day, and be babied like you've had him. You'd not keep him in much longer, anyway. He's long since grown beyond that cradle."
"I know, I know. That's what I'm feared of, don't you see? Losing him. When the time comes for her to take him back from us--"
"Why should it? If she didn't take him away when the news came of King Lot's death, why should she do it now? Look, wife. When the king her husband went, you'd have thought that was when she'd see to it that his bastard went, too, quietly-like. That was when I was afeared, myself. When all's said, it's the little prince, Gawain, that's king of the Orkneys now, by right, but with this boy, bastard or not, nearly -- what? -- nearly a year older, there's some might say -- "
"Some might say too much." Sula spoke sharply, and with such patent fear that Brude, startled, took a stride to the doorway, jerked the curtain aside, and peered out.
"What ails you? There's no one there. And if there were, they'd hear nothing. The wind's getting up, and the tide's well in. Listen."
She shook her head. She was staring at the child. Her tears had dried. When she spoke, it was barely above a whisper.
"Not outside. There's no folk could get near enough without we heard the sea-pies screaming. It's here in the house we need to watch. Look at him. He's not a baby now. He listens, and sometimes you'd swear he understood every word."
The man trod to the cradle's side and looked down. His face softened. "Well, if he doesn't, he soon will. The gods know he's forward enough. We've done what we've been paid for -- and more, seeing what a sickly wean he was when we took him first. Now look at him. Any man might be proud of a son like him." He turned away, reaching for the staff that stood propped beside the doorway. "Look you, Sula, if any ill had been coming, it would have come before this. If harm was meant to him, the payments would have stopped, wouldn't they? So stop your fretting. You've no call now to be fearful."
She nodded, but without looking at him. "Yes. It was simple of me. You're right, I dare say."
"It's a few years yet before young Gawain will be troubling his head about kingdoms, and king's bastards, and by that time this one might well be forgotten. And if that means they stop the payments, who cares for that? A man needs a son to help him, in my trade."
She looked up at him then, and smiled. "You're a good man, Brude."
"Well," he said gruffly, pushing aside the curtain, "let's have an end to this. I'm going up to the town now, to hear what other news the sailors brought."
Left alone with the child, the woman sat for a while without moving, the fear still in her face. Then the boy's hand reached towards her, and she smiled suddenly, a smile that brought youth back, bright and pretty, to her cheeks and eyes. She leaned to lift him from the cradle, and set him on her knee. She picked up a crust of the black bread from the table, sopped it in a beaker of goat's milk, and held it to his lips. The boy took the bread and began to eat it, his dark head cuddled into her shoulder. She laid her cheek against his hair, and put a hand up to stroke it.
"Men are fools, so they are," she said softly. "They never see what's staring them in the eye. You'll be no fool, though, my bonny, not with the blood that's in you, and the way those eyes look and see right through to the back of things, and you only a baby still...." She gave a little laugh, her mouth against the child's hair, and the boy smiled at the sound.
"King Lot's bastard, is it? Well, so they say, and better so. But if they saw what I see, and knew what I guessed at, ah, these many months past..."
She rocked the child closer, calming herself, sending her mind back to those summer nights two years ago when Brude, with a gift of gold ensuring his silence, had put out, not to his accustomed fishing ground, but farther west, into deeper water. For four nights he had waited there, grumbling at the loss of his catch, but kept faithful and silent by the gift of gold and the queen's promise. Then on the fifth night, a calm, twilit night of the Orkney summer, the ship from Dunpeldyour had stolen into the sound and dropped anchor, and a boat put out from her side with three men, queen's soldiers, rowing it. Brude answered their soft hail, and presently the thwarts of the two craft rubbed together. A bundle passed. The larger boat dipped away and vanished. Brude turned his own boat landward, and made all speed to the cottage where Sula waited by the empty cradle, holding on her lap the shawl that she had woven for her own dead child.
A bastard, that was all
they had been told. A royal bastard. And as such a danger, somewhere, to someone. But someday, perhaps, to be useful. So keep silent, and nurture him, and your reward may one day be great....
The reward had long since ceased to matter to Sula. She lived with the only reward she needed, the child himself. But she lived, too, with the constant fear that someday, when it became expedient to one or the other remote and royal personage, her boy would be taken from her.
She had long ago formed her own guesses as to the identity of these personages, though she knew better than to speak of them, even to her husband. Not King Lot; of that she was certain. She had seen his other children by the queen; they had Morgause's red-gold hair and their father's high color and sturdy build. No such signs identified her foster child. The dark hair and eyes might, indeed, have been Lot's, but their setting, with the line of brow and cheek-bone, was quite different. And something in the mouth, the hands, the slender build and warm, clear skin, some elusive way of moving and looking, marked him, to Sula's constantly watching eyes, as the queen's child, but not the king's.
And, this once granted, other things became clear: the queen's men who had hurried the child out of Dunpeldyour before King Lot arrived home there from the wars; the subsequent massacre of all the town's infants in an attempt to catch and destroy that one child, a massacre attributed by Lot and his queen to King Arthur and his adviser Merlin, but instigated in fact (it was whispered) by King Lot himself; and the regular payments, in cash and kind, that came secretly from the palace, where, during the child's lifetime, King Lot had rarely set foot. From the queen, then. And even now that King Lot was dead, she paid still, and still the child was safe. This, to Sula, was all the proof that was needed. Queen Morgause, a lady not renowned for gentleness, would hardly so have nurtured her husband's bastard; a bastard, moreover, older than the eldest legitimate prince, and as such, arguably, with a prior claim to the kingdom.
Queen's bastard, then. By whom? To Sula's mind there was no doubt there, either. She had never laid eyes on Queen Morgause's half-brother, Arthur the High King of Britain, but like everyone else she had heard many tales of that wonder-working young man. And the first of those tales was that of the great battle of Luguvallium, where the boy Arthur, appearing suddenly at King Uther's side, had led his troops to victory. Afterwards -- so the tale went, told with pride and indulgence -- he had gone, still ignorant of his true parentage, to lie with Morgause, who was Uther's bastard daughter, and so Arthur's own half-sister.
The timing was right. The child's age, and looks, and ways were right. And those rumors about the massacre at Dunpeldyour, whether ordered by Lot or by Merlin, were accounted for, and even -- such were the ways of the great -- justified.
Now Lot was dead, and Merlin, too. King Arthur had other and greater matters on his mind, and besides -- if all the tales that reached the taverns were true -- by the time he had other bastards by the score, and had shut this shameful begetting from his mind, or else forgotten it. As for Morgause, she would not kill her own son. Never that. But with King Lot gone, and Merlin gone, and the High King far away, why should she leave him here any longer? Why any more need to keep him secret in this lonely place?
She clutched the child closer, her fear cold and heavy in her. "The Goddess keep you safe, make her forget you. Make her forget you. Leave you here. My bonny, my Mordred, my boy from the sea." The child, roused by the sudden movement, tightened his arms round her and said something. It was inaudible, muffled against her neck, but she caught her breath and fell silent, rocking, staring over the child's head at the cottage wall.
After a while the small, ordinary sounds of the room, and the long hush of the sea outside, seemed to calm her. The child drowsed in her arms. Softly, she began to sing him back to sleep.
From the sea you came, my prince, my Mordred. You escaped the fay with the long hair that tosses on the waves. You came from her sister, the sea-queen who eats drowned sailors, who draws the boats Down into deep waters. You came to the land, to be prince of the land, And you will grow, grow, grow...
Queen Morgause did not make a feast that night.
When the fresh news was brought of the hated enchanter's death she sat for a long time very still, then, taking a lamp in her hand, she left the bright hall where the talk was still going noisily round, and made her way to the sealed chambers underground where she worked her dark magic, and waited for such glimmers of Sight as came to her.
In the first chamber, her stillroom, a half-empty flask stood on the table. In it was the remains of the poison she had mixed for Merlin. Smiling, she passed through another door, and knelt by the pool of seeing.
Nothing came clearly. A bedchamber, with a curved wall; a tower room, then? The bed with a man in it, still as death. And he looked like death: a very old man, gaunt as a skeleton, with grey hair straggling on the pillow, and a matted grey beard. She did not recognize him.
He opened his eyes, and it was Merlin. The dark, terrifying eyes, set in that grey skull, looked straight across the miles, across the seas, into hers where she knelt by the secret pool.
Morgause, crouching there with her hands to her belly, as if she would guard Lot's last, unborn child, knew then that once more the reports were false. Merlin lived still, and, prematurely aged as he was, with his health wrecked by the poison, he still had power enough to bring her and her plans to nothing.
Kneeling there, she began a frantic, frightened spell that, in the old man's weakened state, might serve to protect herself and her brood of sons from Arthur's vengeance.
2
The boy was alone in the summer world with the singing of the honey bees.
He lay flat on his back in the heather at the head of the cliff. Not far from him was the straight-cut line of dark turf where he had been working. The squared peats, stacked like slices of black bread along the ditched gash, were drying in the hot sun. He had been working since daybreak, and the line was a long one. Now the mattock lay idle against the peats while the boy drowsed after his midday meal. One hand, outflung on the heather, still held the remains of a barley bannock. His mother's two hives -- crude skeps of barley straw -- stood fifty paces in from the brink of the cliff. The heather smelled sweet and heady, like the mead that would be made from the honey. To and fro, sometimes within a finger's breadth of his face, the bees hurtled like slingshot. The only other sound in the drowsy afternoon was the crying, remote below him, of the seabirds at their nests along the cliff.
Something changed in the note of that crying.
The boy opened his eyes, and lay still, listening. Underneath the new, disturbed screaming of kittiwakes and razorbills, he heard the deeper, four-fold alarm note of the big gulls. He himself had not moved for half an hour or more, and in any case they were used to him. He turned his head, to see a flock of wheeling wings rise like blown snow above the cliff's edge some hundred paces away. There was a cove there, a deep inlet with no beach below. Hundreds of seabirds nested there, guillemots, shags, kittiwakes, and with them the big falcon. He could see her now, flying with the gulls that screamed to and fro.
The boy sat up. He could see no boat in the bay, but then a boat would hardly have caused such a disturbance among the high-nesting colonies on the cliff. An eagle? He could see none. At the most, he thought, it might be a predatory raven after the young ones, but any change in the monotony of the day's work was to be welcomed. He scrambled to his feet. Finding the remains of the bannock still in his hand, he made as if to eat it, then saw a beetle on it, and threw it away with a look of disgust. He ran across the heather towards the cove where the disturbance was.
He reached the edge and peered down. The birds flung themselves higher, screaming. Puffins hurtled from the rock below him in clumsy glide, legs wide and wings held stiffly. The big black-backed gulls vented their harsh cries. The whitened ledges where the kittiwakes sat in rows on their nests were empty of adult birds, which were weaving and screaming in the air.
He lay down, inching
forward to peer directly down the cliff. The birds were diving in past a buttress of rock where wild thyme and sea-pink made a thick carpet splashed with white. Clumps of rose-root stirred in the wind of their wings. Then, among all the commotion, he heard a new sound, a cry like the cry of a gull, but somehow subtly different. A human cry. It came from somewhere well down the cliff, out of sight beyond the rocky buttress where the birds wheeled most thickly.
He moved carefully back from the edge, and got slowly to his feet. There was no beach at the foot of the cliff, nowhere to leave a boat, nothing but the steadily beating, echoing sea. The climber had gone down and there could only be one reason for trying to climb down here.
"The fool," he said with contempt. "Doesn't he know that the eggs will all be hatched now?" Half reluctantly he picked his way along the cliff top to a point from which he could see, stranded on a ledge beyond the buttress, another boy.
It was no one he knew. Out in this lonely corner of the island there were few families, and with the sons of the other fishermen Brude's son had never felt in tune. And oddly enough his parents had never encouraged him to mix with them, even as a child. Now, at ten years old, well grown and full of a wiry strength, he had helped his father with the man's jobs already for several years. It was a long time since, on his rare days off, he had troubled with children's ploys. Not that, for such as he, birds'-nesting was a child's game; still,, each spring, he made his way down these very cliffs to collect the freshly laid eggs for food. And later he and his father, armed with nets, would come to catch the young ones for Sula to skin and dry against the winter's hardships.