The Wicked Day Read online

  10

  DURING THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, Mordred tried, along with the other boys, and half the Orcadians besides, to come near enough to the King's envoy to have speech with him. In the case of the islanders, and the younger princes, it was a matter of curiosity. What was the mainland like? The fabled castle of Camelot? The King himself, hero of a dozen stark battles, and his lovely Queen? Bedwyr his friend, and others of the companion knights?

  But all, princes and commoners alike, found it impossible to come near the man. After that first night he slept on board the royal ship, and disembarked daily to be escorted, ostensibly for a word of courtesy with Queen Morgause, but really, rumour had it, to make sure that her preparations went forward fast enough to catch the good autumn weather.

  The queen was not to be hurried. Her ship, the Orc, lay by the wharf, ready in all but the last touches. Workmen busied themselves with the final gilding and painting, while their women stitched at the great decorated sail. In the palace itself Morgause's own women busied themselves with the finishing, tending and packing of the sumptuous clothes that the queen planned for her reception at Camelot. Morgause herself spent many hours in her secret room below the rock. She was not, as whispers went, consulting her dark Goddess, but in fact concocting unguents and lotions and perfumes, and certain subtle drugs that had the reputation of restoring beauty and the energy of youth.

  In his corner of the courtyard, Beltane the goldsmith still sat at his work. The gifts for Arthur were finished, packed in wool in the box made to receive them; the old man was busy now with jewels for Morgause herself. Casso, the dumb slave who helped him, had been set to fashioning buckles and brooches for the princes; though he was not an artist like his master, he made a good job of the designs given him by Beltane, and seemed to enjoy the time the boys spent watching him and talking round the smelting-stove. Mordred, alone of them all, tried some sort of communication with him, asking questions that needed no more than a nod or a shake of the head for answer, but he got no further than a few facts about Casso himself. He had been a slave all his life. He had not always been dumb, but had had his tongue cut out by a cruel master, and considered himself the most fortunate of men to have been taken in by Beltane and taught a trade. A dull life indeed, thought Mordred, and wondered—though only idly—at the air of contentment that the man visibly wore; the air, if the boy had recognized it, of a man who has come to terms with his limitations, and who has made a place for himself in life, which he fills with integrity. Mordred, who had had small reason during his life to think the best of any man, assumed merely that the slave had some sort of satisfactory private life which he managed independently of his master. Women, possibly? He could certainly afford them. When (his master safely abed) the slave joined in the soldiers' dice game, he always had coin in plenty, and easily stood his share of the wine. Mordred knew where the money came from. Not from Beltane, that was sure; who — apart from the odd gift — ever paid his own slaves? But there had been a day a month or so back when Mordred took a small boat out alone and went fishing, coming back late in the half-light that was all the night the islands knew in summer.

  There was a small trading ship lying moored at the royal wharf; most of her men were on shore for the night, but some officers were apparently still aboard; he heard a man's voice, and then a chink that might have been the sound of coins passing. As he tied his boat to the wharf in the shadow of the trader he saw a man walk quickly down the gangplank and up through the town towards the palace gate. He recognized Casso. So, the man took commissions privately, did he? Legitimate trading would hardly need to be done at midnight. Well, a man had to fend for himself, thought Mordred, with a shrug, and forgot all about it.

  The day came at last. On a bright sunny morning of October the queen with her women, followed by the five boys, Gabran, and her chief chamberlain, headed the stately procession to the wharf. Behind them a man carried the box of treasure destined for Arthur, and another bore gifts for the King of Rheged and his wife, Morgause's sister. A pageboy struggled with the leashes of two tall island-bred hounds destined for King Urbgen, while another boy, looking scared, carried at arm's length a stout wicker cage in which spat and snarled a half-grown wildcat intended as a curious addition to Queen Morgan's collection of strange birds and beasts and reptiles. With them went an escort of Morgause's own men-at-arms, and last of all — ostensibly to honour her but looking suspiciously like a guard — marched a detachment of the King's soldiers from the Sea Dragon.

  Even in the merciless light of morning the queen looked lovely. Her hair, washed with sweet essences and dressed with gold, sparkled and shone. Her eyes were bright under their tinted lids. Normally she favoured rich colours, but today she wore black, and the somber dress gave her figure, thickened with child-bearing, almost the old lissome slenderness of her girlhood, and set off the jewels and the creamy skin. Her head was high and her look confident. To either side of the way the islanders crowded, calling greetings and blessings. Their comfort-loving queen had not granted them many such glimpses of her since her banishment to these shores, but now she had given them a sight indeed, a royal procession, queen and princes and their armed and jewelled escort, with, to top all, a sight of King Arthur's own ship with its dragon standard waiting to shepherd the Orc to the mainland kingdom.

  The Orc took sail at last, curving out into the strait between the royal island and its neighbour. Astern of her, at the edge of her creaming wake, rode the Sea Dragon, a hound herding the hind and her five young steadily southward into the net spread for them by the High King Arthur.

  * * *

  Once away from the Orkneys with the queen and her family safely embarked, the captain of the Sea Dragon was not too much concerned with speed; the High King was still in Brittany, and Morgause's presence would suffice when he was once more at Camelot. But he had wisely allowed extra time for the voyage in case the ships struck bad weather, and this, very soon, they did. During their passage of the Muir Orc — that strait of the Orcadian Sea that lies between the mainland and the outer isles — they met winds of almost gale force, that drove the two ships apart, and sent even the hardiest of the passengers below. At length, after some days of stormy weather, the gales abated, and the Orcadian ship beat into the sheltered waters of the Ituna Estuary and dropped anchor there. The Sea Dragon struggled into the same wharf a few hours later, to find the Orkney party still on board, but making preparations to go ashore and travel to Luguvallium, the capital of Rheged, to visit King Urbgen and Morgan his queen.

  The captain of the Sea Dragon, though perfectly aware that he was prisoners' escort rather than guard of honour, saw no reason to prevent the journey. King Urbgen of Rheged, though his queen had transgressed notably against her brother Arthur, had always been a faithful servant of the High King; he would certainly see to it that Morgause and her precious brood were kept safe and close while the ships were repaired after the gale.

  Morgause, who saw no need to ask permission for the journey, had already dispatched a letter to her sister, bidding her expect them. Now a courier was sent ahead, and at length the party, as carefully escorted as before, set out for King Urbgen's castle.

  * * *

  For Mordred, the ride was all too short. Once the party left the shore and struck inland through the hills he was passing through very different country from any that he had seen or even been able to imagine before.

  What impressed him first was the abundance of trees. In Orkney the only trees were the few stunted alders and birches and wind-bitten thorns that huddled along the meager shelter of the glens. Here there were trees everywhere, huge canopied growths, each with its island of shadow and its dependent colony of bushes and ferns and trailing plants. Great forests of oak clothed the lower hillsides, giving way on higher ground to pines that grew right up to the foot of the tallest cliffs. Down every gully in those cliffs crowded more trees, rowan and holly and birch, the thickly wooded clefts seeming to hang from the silver mountain-crests li
ke the ropes that held down the thatch of his parents' cottage. Willow and alder lined every smallest stream, and along the roadways, on the slopes, bordering the moorland stretches and sheltering every cottage and sheep-cote, were trees and more trees, all in the russet and gold and rich red of autumn, backed with the black glint of holly and the dark accent of the pines. Along the track where they rode the hazel-nuts dropped ripe from their fringed calyxes, and under the silver webs of autumn late blackberries glinted like garnets. Gareth pointed excitedly to a burnished slow-worm pouring itself away into the bracken, and Mordred saw small deer watching them from the ferns at the edge of the forest, as still and dappled as the forest floor where they stood.

  Once, when their road led them over a high pass, and between the crests of the hills the country opened on a blue distance, Mordred checked his horse, staring. It was the first time he had seen so far with no sea visible. For miles and miles the only water was the small tarns that winked in the hanging valleys, and the white of streams running down through the grey rock to feed them. Hill after blue hill rose into the distance where a great chain of mountains lifted to one square-topped and white. Mountain or cloud? It was the same. This was the mainland, the kingdom of the kingdoms, the stuff of dreams.

  One of the guards closed in then, with a smile and a word, and Mordred moved back into the troop.

  Afterwards he was to have only the haziest recollections of his first sojourn in Rheged. The castle was huge, crowded, grand and troubled. The boys were handed straight to the king's sons; in fact the sharp impression was of being bundled out of the way while some crisis, never fully explained to them, was sorted out. King Urbgen, perfectly courteous, was abstracted and brief; Queen Morgan did not appear at all. It seemed that recently she had been kept in a seclusion that almost amounted to imprisonment.

  "Something about a sword," said Gawain, who had managed to overhear a conversation in the guardroom. "The High King's sword. She took it from Camelot while he was abroad, and put a substitute in its place."

  "Not just the sword," said Gaheris. "She took a lover, and gave the sword to him. But the High King killed him just the same, and now King Urbgen wants to put her away."

  "Who told you that? Surely our uncle would never let him use his sister so, whatever she had done."

  "Oh, yes. Because of the sword, which was treachery. So the High King will let him put her away," said Gaheris eagerly. "As for the lover—"

  But at this point Gabran came across the courtyard to them, with a summons to the stables, and even Gaheris, not famed for his tact, thought it better to postpone the discussion for the time being.

  They found out a little more, but only a little, from Urbgen's two sons. They were grown men, sons by the king's first marriage, seasoned fighters who had at first taken pride in their father's alliance with Arthur's young sister, but now wished her gone, and were ready to support Urbgen's petition to have the marriage set aside.

  The truth, it appeared, was this. Morgan, tied by marriage to a man many years her senior, had taken as lover one of Arthur's Companions, a man called Accolon, brave, ambitious and high-spirited. Him she had persuaded, while Arthur was abroad from Camelot, to steal his great sword Caliburn, that men called the sword of Britain, and carry it to Rheged, leaving in its place a substitute fashioned secretly by some creature of Morgan's in the north.

  What the queen intended was never satisfactorily explained. She cannot have thought that young Accolon, even with Urbgen out of the way, the sword of Britain in his hand, and Morgan married to him, could ever have been able to supplant Arthur as High King. It was more probable that she had used her lover to further her own ambition, and that the tale she eventually told to Urbgen was truthful in the main. She had had dreams, she said, which had led her to expect Arthur's sudden death abroad. So, to forestall the chaos following on this, she had taken it upon herself to secure the symbolic sword of Britain for King Urbgen, that tried and brilliant veteran of a dozen battles, and husband of Arthur's only legitimate sister. True, Arthur himself had declared the Duke of Cornwall to be his heir, but Duke Cador was dead, and his son Constantine still a child.…

  So went the tale. As for the substitution of a worthless copy for the royal sword, that, she alleged, had only been a device to help the theft. The sword hung habitually above the King's chair in the Round Hall at Camelot, and nowadays was taken down only for ceremony, or for battle. The copy had been hung there only to deceive the eye. But from it might have come tragedy. Arthur had returned unharmed from his travels, and afraid for himself and Morgan should the theft be discovered, challenged the King to fight, and with his own good sword attacked Arthur armed only with the brittle copy of Caliburn. The outcome of that fight was already part of the growing legend of the King. In spite of his treacherous advantage Accolon had been killed, and Morgan, afraid now of the vengeance of both brother and husband, declared to all who would listen that the fight was none of her making, but only Accolon's, and since he was dead, no one could contradict her. If she mourned her dead lover, she did so in secret. To those who would listen she deplored his folly, and protested her devotion—mistaken, she admitted, but real and deep—to her brother Arthur and to her own lord.

  Hence the turmoil in the castle. No decisions had been made as yet. The lady Nimuë, successor to Merlin as Arthur's adviser, and (it was said) to Merlin's power, had come north to recover the sword. Her message was uncompromising. Arthur was not prepared to forgive his sister for what he saw as treachery; and should Urbgen wish to avenge the betrayal of his bed, he had the King's leave to use his faithless queen as he saw fit.

  As yet the King of Rheged had barely trusted himself to talk with his wife, let alone judge her. The lady Nimuë was still housed in Luguvallium, though not in the castle itself; somewhat to Urbgen's relief she had declined his offer of hospitality, and was lodged in the town. Urbgen had had enough (as he confided to his sons) of women and their dabblings in dreams and sorcery. He would have liked to refuse Morgause's visit, but there were no grounds on which he could do so, and besides, he was curious to see "the witch of Orkney" and her sons. So the great King Urbgen steered his way cautiously between Nimuë and Morgause, allowing the latter to visit and talk with her sister at will, and praying that the former, now that her business in the north was concluded, would leave Luguvallium without too embarrassing a confrontation with her old enemy Morgause.

  11

  AFTER SUPPER ON THE THIRD night of their visit, Mordred, avoiding the other boys, walked back alone from the hall to the rooms where the princes were housed. His way took him through a strip of land which lay between the main block of the castle buildings and the river.

  Here lay a garden, planted and tended for Queen Morgan's pleasure; her windows looked out over beds of roses and flowering shrubs, and lawns that edged the water. Now the stalks of dead lilies stood up in a tangle of sweetbriar and leafless honeysuckle, and fungus rings showed dark green on the grass. Marks on the walls beside the queen's windows showed where the cages of her singing birds had hung before being carried indoors for the winter. Swans idled at the river's edge, no doubt waiting for the food the queen had brought them in less troubled days, and a pair of snow-white peacocks had flown to roost, like great ghosts, in a tall pine tree. In summer no doubt the place was pretty and full of scent and colour and the songs of birds, but now, in the chill damp of an autumn evening, it looked deserted and sad, and smelled of unswept leaves and rivermud.

  But Mordred lingered, fascinated by this new example of mainland luxury. He had never seen a garden before, never even imagined that a piece of land could be carefully designed and planted simply for beauty, and its owner's pleasure. Earlier he had caught a glimpse, from a window, of a statue looking like a ghost against a dark tangle of leaves. He set himself to explore.

  The statue was strange, too. A girl, airily draped, stooped as if to pour water from a foreign-looking shell into a stone basin below her. The only statues he had seen before were t
he crude gods of the islands, stones with watching eyes. This girl was lovely, and almost real. The dusk made gentle shadows of the grey lichen that patched her arms and gown. The fountain was dry now, the shell empty, but the stone bowl was still filled with water and the remains of the summer's water-lilies. Below the blackened leaves he could just see, dimly, the sluggish movement of fish.

  He left the dead fountain, and trod softly across the lawn towards the river bank and the floating swans. There, facing the river and hidden from the palace windows by a brick wall thick with vines, was an arbour, a charming place, paved with mosaic work and furnished with a curved stone bench whose ends were richly carved with grapes and cupids.

  Something was lying on the bench. He went across to look. It was an j, embroidery frame, holding its square of linen half worked with a pretty design of strawberries twined in their leaves and flowers. He picked it up curiously, to find that the linen was sodden, and marked by the stone where it had lain. It must have been there for some time, forgotten. He was not to know that Queen Morgan herself had dropped it when, here in their usual trysting-place, the news had been brought to her of her lover's death. She had not been in the garden since that day.

  Mordred laid the spoiled linen back on the seat, and recrossed the lawn to the path below the windows. As he did so a light was kindled in one of them, and voices came clearly. One of these, raised in distress or anger, was unfamiliar, but the other, answering it, was the voice of Morgause. He caught the words "ship" and "Camelot," and then "the princes," and at that, without even pausing to think about it, he left the path and stepped up close to the wall under the window, listening.