Mordred came to an end at last. In the silence that followed, the flames in the big fireplace flapped like flags in the wind.
Again the King's words were unexpected. He spoke as if the question came straight from some long-held thought, that seemed, to the matter in hand, quite irrelevant.
"Why did she call you Mordred?"
With all the familiar talk behind him, the boy hardly paused to think as he replied, with a directness that only an hour ago would have been unthinkable:
"It means the boy from the sea. That's where they got me from, after I was saved from the boat that you had the children put in to drown."
"I?"
"I heard since that it wasn't you, lord. I don't know the truth of it, but that is what I was told first."
"Of course. That is what she would tell you."
"She?"
"Your mother."
"Oh, no!" said Mordred quickly. "Sula never told me anything, not about the boat, or about the killings. It was Queen Morgause who told me, much later. As for my name, half the boys in the islands are called Mordred, Medraut.… The sea is everywhere."
"So I understand. Which is why it has taken so long for me to locate you, even knowing where your mother was. No, I am not talking about Sula. I mean your real mother, the woman who bore you."
Mordred's voice came strangled. "You know that? You were — you mean you were looking for me? You actually know who my mother is — who I really am?"
"I should." The words came heavily, as if loaded with meaning, but Arthur seemed to change direction, and added merely: "Your mother is my half-sister."
"Queen Morgause?" The boy gaped, thunderstruck.
"Herself."
Arthur left it there for the moment. One thing at a time. Mordred's eyes blinked rapidly, his brain taking in this astounding new fact, thinking back, thinking ahead...
He looked up at last. Fear was forgotten now; the past, even the recent past, forgotten also. There was a blaze behind his eyes that told of an almost overmastering excitement.
"I see it now! She did tell me a little. Only hints — hints that I couldn't understand, because the truth never occurred to me. Her own son… Really her own son!" A deep breath. "Then that is why she sought me out! Gawain was only the excuse. I did think it strange that she should want to nurture one of her husband's bastards by some girl from the town. And even to show me favour! When all the time I was her own, and only a bastard because I was born before time! Oh, yes, I know that now! They had been wed barely eight months when I was born. And then King Lot came back from Linnuis and—"
A sudden complete stop. The excited comprehension vanished as if a shutter had dropped across his eyes.
More things were, coming together. He said, slowly: "It was King Lot who ordered the massacre of the babies? Because his eldest son had a doubtful birth? And my mother saved me, and sent me to Brude and Sula in the Orkneys?"
"It was King Lot who ordered the massacre. Yes."
"To kill me?"
"Yes. And to blame me for it."
"Why that?"
"For fear of the people. The other parents whose children did die. Also because, even though in the end he fought under my command, Lot was always my enemy. And for other reasons."
The last sentence came slowly. Arthur, still feeling his way towards the moment when the most important truth might be told, lent it a weight that might have been expected to set Mordred asking the question that had been fed to him. But Mordred was not to be steered. He was busy with his own long obsession. He took a step forward, to lean with both hands flat on the table and say, with intensity:
"Yes, other reasons! I know them! I was his eldest born, but because I was begotten out of wedlock he was afraid that in days to come men might doubt my birth, and make trouble in the kingdom! It was better to be rid of me, and get another prince in wedlock, who might in due time take the kingdom without question!"
"Mordred, you are running too far ahead. You must listen."
It is doubtful if Mordred noticed that the High King was speaking with less than his usual assurance. Was looking, indeed, if one could use such a word of the great duke of battles, embarrassed. But Mordred was past listening. The full implications of what he had learned in the past few minutes swept over him in a bewildering cloud, but brought with them a new confidence, a lifting of caution, the driving satisfaction of at last being able to say it all, and to say it to the man who could make it come true.
He swept on, stammering a little. "Am I not, then, in sober fact, heir to Dunpeldyr? Or, if Tydwal is to hold that stronghold for Gawain, then of the Orkneys? Sir, the two kingdoms, so far apart, are hard for one man to hold, and this, surely, could be the time to divide them? You have said you will not let Queen Morgause go back. Let me go back instead!"
"You have not understood me," said the King. "You have no right to either one of Lot's kingdoms."
"No right!" It could have been the young Arthur himself who said it, springing upright like a bow when the arrow flies. "When you yourself were begotten out of wedlock by Uther Pendragon, on the lady who was still Duchess of Cornwall, and who could not wed him before a month was out?"
No sooner was it said than he would, if he could, have swallowed the words back. The King said nothing, nor did his look change, but recollection struck Mordred silent, and with it his fear returned. Twice in one evening he had lost his temper, he, Mordred, who for years now had fought his nature down to achieve, as armour against the displacement, the insecurity of his life, that sea-cold shell of control.
Stumblingly, he tried to unsay it. "My lord, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to insult you or… or your lady mother. I only meant—I've thought about this for so long, thought every way whether it could be legal for me to have a place, a place to rule.… I know I could. One does.… And I thought about you, and how you came to it. Of course I did. Everyone knows — that is — men do say—"
"That I am technically a bastard?"
Amazingly, the King did not sound angry. Mordred's courage crept back. His fists pressed into the table, striving for steadiness. He said carefully: "Yes, sir. I wondered about the law, you see. The mainland law. I was going to find out, and then ask you. My lord, if Gawain goes to Dunpeldyr, then, by the Goddess herself, I promise you that I am fitter than Gaheris or Agravain to rule the Orkneys! And who knows what trouble and moil there could be if twins were named successors?"
Arthur did not answer at once. Mordred, his plea made, the words said, subsided into silence. The King came out of his thoughts, and spoke.
"I have listened to you because I was curious to know what kind of man you had grown to be, with your strange upbringing, so like my own." A slight smile. "As everyone knows, I, too, was begotten out of wedlock, then hidden for many years. With me it was fourteen years, but I was in a household where from the start I was taught the skills of knighthood. You have had less than four years of such teaching, but they tell me you have made much of them. You will come into your own, believe me, but not as you have planned or imagined. Now you will listen to me. And sit down, please."
Wondering, the boy pulled up a stool and sat. The King himself stood up, and paced the length of the room and back before speaking.
"First of all, whatever the law, whatever the precedent, there is no question of your taking the kingdom of the Orkneys. That will be for Gawain. My intention is to keep Gawain and his brothers here among my fighting knights, and then, when the time is right, and if he wishes it, let him take back his island kingdom from my hand. And in the meantime, Tydwal will stay in Dunpeldyr."
He stopped his pacing, and sat down again.
"This is not injustice, Mordred. You can have no claim to either Lothian or the Orkneys. You are not Lot's son." He gave it emphasis. "King Lot of Lothian was not your father."
A pause. The flames roared in the chimney. Outside in a corridor somewhere, someone called out and was answered. The boy asked, in a flattened, neutral voice: "Do you know who is
?"
"I should," said the King, for the second time.
Now comprehension was instant. The boy went upright on the stool. It brought his eyes almost on a level with the King's.
"You?"
"I," said Arthur, and waited.
This time it took a moment or two, and then, not the sick disgust he expected, but merely wonder and a slow assessment of this new fact.
"With Queen Morgause? But that — that—"
"Is incest. Yes." He left it there. No excuse, no protestation of his own ignorance of the relationship when Morgause seduced her young half-brother to her bed. In the end the boy said merely: "I see."
It was Arthur's turn to be startled. Held so in his own consciousness of sin, of disgust at the memory of that night with Morgause, who had since become for him a symbol of all that was evil and unclean, he had not taken into account the peasant-reared boy's reaction to a sin far from uncommon in the inbred islands of his homeland. In that homeland, indeed, it would hardly be counted as a sin. Roman law had not stretched so far, and it was not to be supposed that Mordred's Goddess — who was also Morgause's — had implanted much sense of sin in her followers.
Mordred, indeed, was already wholly occupied in other considerations. "So that means I am — I am—"
"Yes," said Arthur, and watched the wonder, and through it the excitement, kindle in the eyes so like his own. No affection — how could there be? — but a shift of the powerful and inborn ambition. And why not? thought the King. Guinevere will have no child by me. This boy is twice Pendragon, and from all reports as well-liking as any boy will ever be. Just now he is feeling as I felt when Merlin told me the same thing, and put the sword of Britain into my hand. Let him feel it. The rest, as the gods will it, will come.
Of the prophecy of Merlin, that the boy would cause his downfall and death, he never thought at all. The moment was for him one of joy, unspoiled.
Unspoiled, too, miraculously, by Mordred's indifference to the long-past sin. Because of this very lack of reaction he found that he could speak of it himself.
"It was after the battle at Luguvallium. My first fight. Your mother, Morgause, came north to tend her father. King Uther, who was sick, and though we did not know it, dying. I did not know then that I, too, was a child of Uther Pendragon's. I believed Merlin to be my father, and, indeed, loved him as such. I had never seen Morgause before. You will be able to guess how lovely she was, at twenty.… I went to her bed that night. It was not until afterwards that Merlin told me Uther Pendragon was my father, and I myself heir to the High Kingdom."
"But she knew?" Mordred, quick as ever, had fastened on the thing unsaid.
"So I believe. But even my ignorance cannot excuse my share of the sin. I know that. In doing what I did, I wronged you, Mordred. So the wrong persists."
"How? You looked for me, and brought me here. You need not have done so. Why did you?"
"When I ordered Morgause here," said Arthur, "I thought her guilty of Merlin's death, that was — is — the best man in all this realm, and the one dearest to me. She is still guilty. Merlin is old before his time, and carries in him the germ of the poison she fed to him. He knew that she had poisoned him, but for the sake of her sons he never told me. He judged that she ought to live, so long as she stayed harmless in exile, to rear them against the day when they could serve me. I only learned of the poison when he lay, as we thought, dying, and in his delirium spoke of it, and of Morgause's repeated attempts to kill him by poison or by sorcery. So after his entombment I sent for her to answer for her crime, judging, too, that it was time her sons left her care and came into my charge."
"All five. That surprised everyone. You said you had had reports, sir. Who told you about me?"
Arthur smiled. "I had a spy in your palace. The goldsmith's man, Casso. He wrote to me."
"The slave? He could write? He gave no hint of it. He's dumb, and we thought there was no way he could communicate."
The King nodded. "That's why he is valuable. People talk freely in front of a slave, especially a dumb one. It was Merlin who had him taught to write. Sometimes I think that even his smallest acts were dictated by prevision. Well, Casso saw and heard plenty while he was in Morgause's household. He wrote to me that the "Mordred" now in the palace must be the one."
Mordred was thinking back. "I think I saw him send the message. There was a trading ship tied up at the wharf; it had been unloading wood. I saw him go on board, and someone gave him money. I thought he must be doing work on his own, that the goldsmith didn't know about. That would be it?"
"Very possibly."
The memory brought back others: Morgause and her private smiling when he spoke of his "mother." Her test to see if she had passed on the Sight to her son. And Sula; Sula must have known that one day he would be taken from her. She had been afraid. Had she suspected, then, what might one day happen?
He asked abruptly: "Did she really have Gabran kill them?"
"If he said so, knowing he was dying, you may be sure of it," said the King. "She would think no more of it than of flying her hawk at a hare. She had your first nurse, Macha, murdered in Dunpeldyr, and herself goaded Lot into killing Macha's child, who had taken your place in the royal cradle. And, though Lot gave the order, it was Morgause who instigated the massacre of the children. This we know for truth. There was a witness. There have been many killings, Mordred, and none of them clean."
"So many killings, and all for me. But why?" The one clue he had been given, all those years ago, he had, like Arthur, forgotten in the excitement and heady promise of this meeting. "Why did she keep me alive? Why trouble to have me kept in secret all those years?"
"To use as a tool, a pawn, what you will." If the King remembered the prophecy now, he did not burden the boy with it. "Maybe as a hostage in case I found out she had murdered Merlin. It was after she reckoned herself safe that she took you out of hiding, and even then the disguise she chose for you — Lot's bastard son — was sufficient to conceal you. But I can't guess further than that about her motives. I have not got her kind of subtlety." He added, in answer to some kind of appeal in the boy's intense gaze: "It does not come from the blood we share with her, Mordred. I have killed many men in my time, but not in such ways, or for such motives. Morgause's mother was a Breton girl, a wise-woman, so I have heard. These things go from mother to daughter. You must not fear these dark powers in yourself."
"I don't fear them," said Mordred quickly. "I have nothing of the Sight, no magic, she told me so. She did once try to find out about it. I think now that she was afraid I might 'see' what had happened to my foster parents. So she took me down with her to the underground chamber where there is a magic pool, and told me to look there for visions."
"And what visions did you see?"
"Nothing. I saw an eel in the pool. But the queen said there were visions. She saw them."
Arthur smiled. "I told you that you were of my blood rather than hers. To me, water is only water, though I have seen the mage-fire that Merlin can call from the air, and other marvels, but they were all marvels of the light. Did Morgause show you any magic of her own?"
"No, sir. She took me to the chamber where she made her spells and mixed her magic potions—"
"Go on. What's the matter?"
"Nothing. It was nothing, really. Just something that happened there." He looked away, towards the fire, reliving the moments in the stillroom, the clasp, the kiss, the queen's words. He added, slowly, to himself, making the discovery: "And all the time she knew I was her own son."
Arthur, watching him, made a guess that was a certainty. The rush of anger that he felt shook him. Over it he said, very gently: "You, too, Mordred?"
"It was nothing," said the boy again, rapidly, as if to brush it aside. "Nothing, really. But now I know why I felt the way I did." A quick glance across the table. "Oh, it happens, everyone knows it does. But not like that. Brother and sister, that's one thing… but mother and son? Not that, ever. At least, I n
ever heard of it. And she knew, didn't she? She knew. I wonder why she would want—?"
He let it die and was silent, looking down at the hands held fast now between his knees. He was not asking for a reply. He and the King already knew the answer. There was no emotion in his voice but puzzled distaste, such as one might accord some perverted appetite. The flush had died from his cheeks, and he looked pale and strained.
The King was thinking, with growing relief and thankfulness, that here there would be no tie to break. Violent emotions create their own ties, but what remained between Morgause and Mordred could surely be broken here and now.
He spoke at length in a carefully low key, equal to equal, prince to prince.
"I shall not put her to death. Merlin is alive, and her other killings are not my concern to punish here and now. Moreover, you will see that I cannot keep you near me — here in my court where so many people know the story, and suspect that you are my son — and forthwith put your mother to death. So Morgause lives. But she will not be released."
He paused, leaning back in the great chair, and regarding the boy kindly. "Well, Mordred, we are here, at the start of a new road. We cannot see where it will lead us. I promised to do right by you, and I meant it. You will stay here in my court, with the other Orkney princes, and you, like them, will have royal status as my nephew. Where men guess at your parentage, you will find that you have more respect, not less. But you must see that, because of what happened at Luguvallium, and because of the presence of Queen Guinevere, I cannot openly call you son."
Mordred looked down at his hands. "And when you have others by the Queen?"
"I shall not. She is barren. Mordred, leave this now. The future will come. Take what life offers you here in my household. All the princes of Orkney will have the honour due to royal orphans, and you — I believe you will in the end have more." He saw something leap again behind the boy's eyes. "I do not speak of kingdoms, Mordred. But perhaps that, too, if you are sufficiently my son."
All at once the boy's composure shattered. He began to shake. His hands went up to cover his face. He said, muffled: "It's nothing. I thought I would be punished for Gabran. Killed, even. And now all this. What will happen? What will happen, sir?"