Ygraine gave me a hand. She looked tired, and the magnificent gown of purple, with its shimmer of pearls and silver, showed up her pallor, and the shadows at mouth and eyes. But her manner, composed and cool as always, betrayed no trace of fatigue.
She came straight to the point. "So, he got her pregnant."
Even as the knife-twist of fear went through me, I saw that she had no suspicion of the truth; she was referring to Lot, and to what she took to be the reason for his rejection of her daughter Morgan in favor of Morgause.
"It seems so." I was equally blunt. "At least it saves Morgan's face, which is all that need concern us."
"It's the best thing that could have happened," said Ygraine flatly. She smiled faintly at my look. "I never liked that marriage. I favored Uther's first idea, when he offered Morgause to Lot years ago. That would have been enough for him, and honor for her. But Lot was ambitious, one way or another, even then, and nothing would please him but Morgan herself. So Uther agreed. At that time he would have agreed to anything that sealed the northern kingdoms against the Saxons; but while for policy's sake I saw that it had to be done, I am too fond of my daughter to want her shackled to that wayward and greedy traitor."
I put up my brows at her. "Strong words, madam."
"Do you deny the facts?"
"Far from it. I was there at Luguvallium."
"Then you will know how much, in loyalty, Lot's betrothal to Morgan bound him to Arthur, and how much marriage would have bound him, if profit pointed another way."
"Yes. I agree. I'm only glad that you yourself see it like that. I was afraid that the slight to Morgan would anger you and distress her."
"She was angry at first, rather than distressed. Lot is among the foremost of the petty kings, and, like him or not, she would have been queen of a wide realm, and her children would have had a great heritage. She could not like being displaced by a bastard, and one, besides, who has not shown her kindness."
"And when the betrothal was first mooted, Urbgen of Rheged still had a wife."
The long lids lifted, and her eyes studied my impassive face. "Just so," was all she said, without surprise. It was said as if at the end of a discussion, rather than the beginning.
It was no surprise that Ygraine had been thinking along the same lines as Arthur and myself. Like his father Coel, Urbgen had shown himself staunch to the High King. "Rheged's" deeds in the past, and more recently at Luguvallium, were chronicled along with those of Ambrosius and Arthur, as the sky accepts the light of the setting and the rising sun.
Ygraine was saying, thoughtfully: "It might answer, at that. There's no need to ensure Urbgen's loyalty, of course, but for Morgan it would be power of the kind that I think she can manage, and for her sons..." She paused. "Well, Urbgen has two already, both young men grown, and fighters like their sire. Who is to say that they will ever reach his crown? And the king of a realm as wide as Rheged cannot breed too many sons."
"He is past his best years, and she is still very young." I made it a statement, but she answered calmly: "And so? I was not much older than Morgan when Gorlois of Cornwall married me."
For the moment, I believe, she had forgotten what that marriage had meant: the caging of a young creature avid to spread her wings and fly; the fatal passion of King Uther for Gorlois' lovely duchess; the death of the old duke, and then the new life, with all its love and pain.
"She will do her duty," said Ygraine, and now I saw that she had remembered, but her eyes did not falter. "If she was willing to accept Lot, whom she feared, she will take Urbgen willingly, should Arthur suggest it. It's a pity that Cador is too nearly related for her to have him. I would have liked to see her settled near to me in Cornwall."
"They are not blood kin." Cador was the son, by his first wife, of Ygraine's husband Gorlois.
"Too close," said Ygraine. "Men forget things too quickly, and there would be whispers of incest. It would not do, even to hint at a crime so shocking."
"No. I see that." My voice sounded level and cool.
"And besides, Cador is to wed, come summer, when he gets back to Cornwall. The King approves." She turned a hand over in her lap, admiring, apparently, the glint of the rings on it. "So perhaps it would be as well to speak of Urbgen to the King, just as soon as some portion of his mind is free to think of his sister?"
"He has already thought of her. He discussed it with me. I believe he will send to Urbgen very soon."
"Ah! And then -- " For the first time a purely human and female satisfaction warmed her voice with something uncommonly like spite. "And then we shall see Morgan take what is due to her in wealth and precedence over that red-haired witch, and may Lot of Lothian deserve the snares she set for him!"
"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. But Lot 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 armor 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 with Lot. 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 favors 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 color 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 someday, 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 that Lot 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 to Cornwall, 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.
7
"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 catch Lot 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 jeweled 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 than Lot? 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 with Lot before you? That she was not already pregnant to him, and took you in the hope of snaring some kind of power and favor to herself? She knew Uther was dying; she feared that Lot, by his action at Luguvallium, had forfeited the King's favor. If she could father Lot'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 and Lot 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 be Lot'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, eclipsing Lot as you would soon eclipse Uther. She made her bid to father Lot'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 w
ill 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. If Lot 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 persuaded Lot 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."