The Wicked Day Read online

  Gaheris, cursing, jerked the dagger from his belt and cut down at Mordred's restraining hand. The blade bit, and Mordred's grip loosened. Gaheris wrenched himself free.

  Lamorak had reached the stool and snatched up his sword belt. Clumsily, still perhaps numb with shock, he wrenched at the hilt in the half-darkness, but the loose belt wrapped itself round his arm, and the hilt jammed. Wrenching at it, naked as he was, he turned to face the other sword.

  Mordred, blood dripping from his cut hand, pushed past Gaheris, getting himself between the two men, then thrust the flat of both hands hard against his half-brother's chest.

  "Gaheris! Wait! You can't kill an unarmed man. And not this, not here. Wait, you fool! He's a Companion; leave this to the King."

  It is doubtful if Gaheris even heard him, or felt his hands. He was crying, on hard, sobbing breaths, and looked more than half mad. Nor did he make any attempt to push past Mordred to attack Lamorak. He swung suddenly round, away from both men, and raced for the queen's bed, his sword held high.

  Clutching the coverlet to her, blinded by her hair, she tried to roll away and dodge him. She screamed again. Before the other men had even realized his purpose Gaheris, at the bedside, swung his sword up, and brought it down with all his strength across his mother's neck. And again. And yet again.

  The only sound was the soft and dreadful hacking of metal into flesh and feathered bedding. Morgause died at the first blow. The coverlet dragged from her clutching hands, and the naked body fell back into the merciful shadows. Less mercifully the head, half severed, lolled into starlight on its blood-drenched pillows. Gaheris, himself drenched in the first dreadful fountain of blood, lifted the red sword for another blow, then, with a howl like a hurt dog, threw it aside with a clatter, and, flinging himself to his knees in the pool of blood, put his head down beside his mother's on the pillow and wept.

  Mordred found that he was holding Lamorak with a grip that hurt them both. The killing had been so swift, so unlooked-for, that neither man had made any conscious move at all. Then Lamorak came to himself with a jerk and a gasping curse, and tried to arm Mordred aside. But Morgause was dead and beyond help, and her son knelt unheeding, uncaring, his unprotected back to them both, his sword ten paces away on the floor. Lamorak's blade wavered, and sank. Even here, even in this moment, the rigid training held. There had been a dreadful slaying done in hot blood. But now the blood was cold, the room was cold, and there was nothing to be done. Lamorak stood still in Mordred's grasp, his teeth beginning to chatter now with reaction, horror and the icy chill of shock.

  Mordred let him go. He picked the knight's clothing up, and bundled it into his arms.

  "Here, get these on, and go. There's nothing to be gained by staying. Even if he was fit to fight you now, it cannot be here, you know that." He stooped quickly for Gaheris's abandoned sword, then, taking Lamorak by the arm, urged him towards the bedroom door. "Into the other room now, before he comes to. The thing's done, and all we can do is prevent that madman from making it worse."

  In the antechamber the women still slept. As Mordred shut and latched the door the nun stirred in her sleep and muttered something that could have been "Madam?" then slept again. The two men stood rigid, listening. No sound, no movement. Morgause's screaming, brief as it had been, had not been heard through the thick walls and closed doors.

  Lamorak had hold of himself now. He was still very pale, and looked sick and haunted, but he made no attempt to argue with Mordred, and set himself to dress quickly, with only a glance or two at the shut door of the dreadful room.

  "I shall kill him, of course," he said thickly.

  "But not here." Mordred was cool. "So far you've done nothing that any man would blame you for. The King will be angry enough at the mess, without your adding to it. So take my advice and go now, quickly. What you do later is up to you."

  Lamorak looked up from fastening his tunic. "What are you going to do?"

  "Get you out of here, Gaheris away, and then report to the King. I was sent to do that anyway. Not that it matters now, but I suppose her tale of being ill, dying even, was pure invention?"

  "Yes. She wanted to see the King and plead with him herself for release." He added, very softly: "I was going to marry her. I loved her, and she me. I had promised to talk with him myself tomorrow… today. If she were my wife, surely Arthur would have let her leave here, and live once more in freedom?"

  Mordred did not reply. Another tool, he was thinking. I was once her pass to power, and now this man, poor gullible fool, was to be her pass to liberty. Well, she is gone, and the King will hardly be sorry, but in death, as in life, she will wreck the peace of all those near her.

  He said: "You knew that the King had sent for Gawain and the other two already?"

  "Yes. What will they — what will happen there?" A glance towards the door.

  "Gaheris? Who knows? As for you… I said you were to be blamed for nothing. But they will blame you, be sure of that. It is even likely that, being the men they are, they will try to kill Gaheris, too. They like to keep sex and murder right in the family."

  This, dry as spice-dust, made Lamorak, even through the grief and rage of the moment, look sharply at the younger man. He said, slowly, as if making a totally new discovery: "You — why, you're one of them. Her own son. And you talk as if… as if…"

  "I am different," said Mordred, shortly. "Here, your cloak. No, that bloodstain's mine, you needn't mind it. Gaheris stabbed my hand. Now, for the Goddess' sake, man, go, and leave him to me."

  "What will you do?"

  "Lock the room so that the women don't screech the place down when they wake, and get Gaheris out the way he came in. You came in through the main gate, of course? Do the guards know you're still here?"

  "No. I left in due discourse, and then… I have a way in. She used to leave a window open when she knew…"

  "Yes, of course. But then, why trouble—?" He was going to ask. Why trouble to drug the women? but then he saw that Morgause's sexual affairs would necessarily have to be hidden from the abbess. The holy women could hardly be expected to connive at them.

  "I'll have to leave court, of course," said Lamorak. "You will tell the King—?"

  "I'll report exactly what happened. I don't imagine the King will blame you. But you'd do well to get away until Gawain and the others have been settled. Good luck and good speed."

  Lamorak, with one last look towards the silent bedroom door, went from the room. Mordred glanced once again at the sleeping women, propped Gaheris's blood-stained sword in a shadowed corner where a faldstool hid it from view, then went back into the queen's bedchamber and shut the door behind him.

  * * *

  He found Gaheris on his feet, swaying like a drunken man and looking vaguely round him as if for something he had forgotten.

  Mordred took him by the shoulder and drew him, unresisting, away from the bedside. Stooping, he twitched the stained coverlet across to cover the dead body. Gaheris, rigid as a sleepwalker, let himself be led from the room.

  Once in the antechamber, and with the door shut, he spoke for the first time, thickly. "Mordred. It was right. It was right to kill her. She was my mother, but she was a queen, and to do thus… to bring shame on us and on all our line… No one can gainsay my right, not even Gawain. And when I kill Lamorak — that was Lamorak, wasn't it? Her — the man?"

  "I didn't see who it was. He snatched up his clothes and went."

  "You didn't try to hold him? You should have killed him."

  "For the love of Hecate," said Mordred, "save all that for later. Listen, I thought I heard footsteps. It could be time for the night office. Anyone could come by."

  This was not true, but it served to rouse Gaheris.

  He gave a startled glance around, as if just waking to a perilous situation, and said sharply: "My sword?"

  Mordred lifted it from the corner and showed it. "When we are outside the walls. Come. I saw where you left your horse. Quickly."

/>   They were crossing the orchard before Gaheris spoke again. He was still on the treadmill of agonized guilt.

  "That man. Lamorak, I know it was, and you know, too. You called his name. Don't try to shield him. Arthur's man, one of the Companions. He should be killed, too, and I shall do it. But she, she to lie with such a one… It must have happened before, you know. Those women were drugged. They must have been lovers—" He choked on the word, then went on: "She spoke of him once to me. Of Lamorak. She told me that he had killed our father King Lot, and that she hated him. She lied. To me. To me."

  Mordred said, quietly: "Don't you see, Gaheris? She lied to blind you, and she lied twice. Lamorak never killed Lot, how could he? Lot died of the wounds he got at Caledon, and they fought on the same side there. So unless Lamorak stabbed King Lot in the back, and that was not his way, he could not be his killer. Did you never think of that?"

  But Gaheris had no thoughts but the same trapped and torturing ones. "She took him as her lover, and lied to me. We were all deceived, even Gawain. Mordred, the others will say that what I did was right, will they not?"

  "You know as well as I how likely Gawain is to forgive you this. Or Gareth. Even your twin may not support you. And though the King isn't likely to grieve for your mother, he'll have to listen if the Orkney princes demand what they will call justice."

  "They will ask it on Lamorak!"

  "For what?" said Mordred, coolly. "He would have married her."

  That silenced Gaheris for a moment. They had reached the orchard wall, and he paused under the apple tree and turned. The moon was rising now behind a drift of cloud, and the bloodstains on his breast showed black.

  "If they do not kill him, I shall," he said.

  "You can try," said Mordred dryly. "And he will kill you, make no mistake. And then your brothers will try to kill him. So you see what this night's work has done?"

  "And you? You seem to care nothing for what has happened. You speak as if it hardly touched you."

  "Oh, it touches me," said Mordred briefly. "Now, we are wasting time. What's done is done. You will have to leave court, you know that. You will be well advised to get away before your brothers get here. Get over the wall now, Gaheris; your horse is there."

  Gaheris swung himself over, and Mordred, climbing after him, stayed astride the wall while his brother untied the horse and checked the girths. Then he handed Gaheris's sword down into his hand.

  "Where will you go?" he asked him.

  "North. Not to the islands, and Dunpeldyr is held for Arthur as well. What is not? But I shall find a place where I can sell my sword."

  "Meantime take my purse. Here."

  "My thanks, brother." Gaheris caught it. He swung himself to the saddle. It brought him almost to Mordred's level. He hung on the rein for a moment while the roan horse danced, eager to move. "When you see Gawain and the others—"

  "Tell them the truth and plead your cause for you? I'll do what I can. Farewell."

  Gaheris pulled the horse's head round. Soon there was no sign of him except the fast soft thud of retreating hoofs. Mordred jumped down from the wall and walked back across the orchard.

  5

  SO DIED MORGAUSE, WITCH-QUEEN of Lothian and Orkney, leaving by her death and its manner another hellbrew of trouble for her hated brother.

  The trouble was far-reaching. Gaheris suffered banishment, and Lamorak, riding white-faced and silent into headquarters to surrender his sword, was relieved of his command and bidden to absent himself until the dust should have time to settle.

  This would not be soon. Gawain, savage with outraged pride rather than grief, swore on all the wild gods of the north to be avenged both on Lamorak and on his brother, and ignored all that Arthur could say to him, pleas and threats alike.

  It was pointed out that Lamorak had offered marriage to Morgause, and that her acceptance gave him the betrothed's claim to her bed, and with it the right to avenge her murder himself. This right Lamorak, one of Arthur's first and most loyal Companions, had waived. Gaheris, he had sworn, was safe from him. But none of this appeased Gawain, whose anger had in it a large measure of sheer sexual jealousy.

  Just as violent was Gawain's railing against Gaheris, but there he got no support from his brothers. Agravain, who had always been the leader of the twins, seemed lost without Gaheris; he tended to turn to Mordred, who, for reasons of his own, suffered him willingly enough. Gareth said little throughout, but withdrew into silence. In her death as in her life his mother had wronged him deeply: bitter as was the story of her dreadful death to her youngest son, the tales of her impurity, which were common knowledge now, wounded him more.

  But all the shouts for vengeance had to die. Lamorak had gone, no one knew where. Gaheris had vanished northward into the mists, Morgause was buried in the convent graveyard, and Arthur went with his followers back to Camelot. Gradually, for sheer lack of fuel, the blaze kindled by the murder died down. Arthur, fond of his nephews, and secretly relieved at the news of Morgause's death, steered as carefully as he could between the shoals, kept the princes as busy as he might, gave Gawain as much authority as he dared, and waited with weary apprehension for the storm to break again. About Gaheris he could not bring himself to care overmuch, but Lamorak, who was innocent of all but folly, was almost certainly doomed. Some day Arthur's valued Companion would come against one of the Orkney princes, and be killed, fair or foul. Nor would it stop there. Lamorak, too, had a brother, at present serving in Dumnonia with one Drustan, a knight whom Arthur hoped to attract into his service. It was possible that he, or even Drustan himself — who was a close friend to both brothers — would in turn swear and require vengeance.

  So Morgause, in her death, did what she had planned to do with her life. She had planted a canker in the blossoming chivalry of Arthur's court: not, ironically, the bastard she had reared to be his bane, but her three legitimate oldest, her wild, unpredictable and now almost ungovernable sons.

  Outside it all stood Mordred. He had shown himself resourceful and cool, had prevented further bloodshed on that murderous night, and had gained time for good counsel. That the Orkney princes would not — some said could not — respond to good counsel was hardly his fault. It was noticeable that less and less did the court count him as one of the "Orkney brood." Subtly, the distance between him and his half-brothers increased. And with Morgause dead, men hardly troubled any longer with the fiction of "the High King's nephew." He was simply "Prince Mordred," and known to be close to the King and Queen in-love and favour.

  Some time after Arthur's return to Camelot he called a council in the Round Hall.

  It was the first such council that the two younger Orkney brothers had been entitled, as Companions, to attend. Even Mordred, who with Gawain had been given that status some years ago, met with a change: instead of sitting at the King's left, as had been his privilege over the past two years, he was led by the royal usher to the chair on Arthur's right, where Bedwyr usually sat. Bedwyr took the seat to the left. If he felt demoted he did not show it; he gave Mordred a smile that seemed genuine, and a ceremonious little bow that acknowledged his new status to the younger man.

  Bedwyr, the King's friend of boyhood days, and constant companion in the closest sense, was a quiet man with the eyes of a poet, and, after the King's, the most deadly sword in the kingdoms. He had fought at Arthur's side through all the great campaigns, and with him shared the glory of wiping the Saxon Terror from Britain's boundaries. Possibly alone of the warrior lords, he showed no impatience with the long-drawn peace, and when Arthur had had to travel abroad at the request of allies or kinsmen, and take his fighting men with him, Bedwyr never seemed to resent the necessity of staying behind as regent for his king. Rumour, as Mordred well knew, gave reasons for this: Bedwyr had not married, and in the close company as he was of both King and Queen, it was whispered that he and Queen Guinevere were lovers. But Mordred, also constantly with them, had never caught a look or gesture that bore this out. Guinevere was
as gay and kind to him as he had ever seen her with Bedwyr, and, perhaps with a little of the inbred jealousy taught by Morgause, he would have denied, even with his sword, any overt hint of such a connection.

  So he returned Bedwyr's smile, and sat down in the new place of honour. He saw Gawain, leaning close to his brother, whisper something, and Agravain nodding, then the King spoke, opening the Council, and they fell silent. The meeting droned on. Mordred noticed with amusement how Agravain and Gareth, at first rigid with importance and attentive to every word, soon grew bored and impatient, and sat in their seats as if on thorns. Gawain, like the greybeard beside him, was frankly dozing in a shaft of sunshine from a window. The King, patient and painstaking as ever, seemed to throw off preoccupations with an effort. The round table in the middle of the hall was loaded heavily with papers and tablets, and by it the secretaries scribbled without ceasing.

  As usual at the Round Hall councils, routine matters were dealt with first. Petitions were heard, complaints tabled, judgments given. King's messengers brought what information was fitted for the public ear, and later, those of the King's knights-errant who had returned home would report on their adventures to the Council.

  These were the travelling knights who acted at once as Arthur's eyes and as his deputies. Years ago, once the Saxon wars were over and the country settled, Arthur had looked around for means to occupy what Merlin had called "the idle swords and the unfed spirits." He knew that the long and prosperous peace which contented most men was not to the liking of some of his knights, not the young men only, but the war veterans, men who knew no other life but that of fighting. There was no longer any need for the picked body of Companions, the knights who under Arthur had led the force of cavalry which had been used as such a swift and deadly weapon during the Saxon campaigns. The Companions remained his personal friends, but their status as commanders was changed. They were appointed personal representatives of the King himself, and, as deputies armed with royal warrants, and each in command of his own men, they travelled the kingdoms, answering the call of the petty kings or leaders who needed help or guidance, and taking with them the High King's justice and the High King's peace wherever they went. They also policed the roads. Robbers still lurked in the wilder parts of the country, haunting fords and crossways where traders or rich travellers might be ambushed. These they sought out and killed, or brought them back for the King's justice. One other and most important task was the protection of monasteries. Arthur, though not himself a Christian, recognized the growing importance of these foundations as centers of learning and as an influence for peace. Their hospitality, moreover, was a vital part of the peaceful commerce of the roads.