NINE

1

“I’m glad we weren’t trying to surprise them.” The cliff tops ahead of us were swarming with people, all of them staring out towards our ships and looking distinctly hostile, even from as far away as we were. We had approached with the morning tide, and although none of us could accurately tell when we had first been seen from land, the word had obviously spread quickly, and soon lines of people could be seen on the sloping hillside, running down from the gates of Tod’s massive stronghold—no one I knew would have called it a castle—like streams of ants whose nest has been disturbed.

Beside me in the prow of his galley, Connor Mac Athol grinned. “You’ll never surprise Tod’s people from the sea, my friend. That’s why they built their defenses up there in the first place. Living as close to the sea as they do, they live in fear of who might come visiting at any time, and so they make sure they can see and be seen far in advance of any attempted landing on the coast. They turn out to watch us, lining their cliffs like that, every time we pass by, coming and going, so I’ve no doubt they’ll have recognized us by now. The difference is that this time, we’re going to land … at least, one of us is.” He raised his voice to Shaun Pointer, amidships behind us. “Make ready the boat, Shaun, and take us in, but mind you make sure that no one else tries to approach with us. One ship alone will be a curiosity; two would be seen as an attack. Bring us as close as you can to shore without exposing us to bowshots, then launch the boat.”

He turned back to me. “You’re sure you don’t want to wear your armor? I don’t know these people at all, and this is the closest I’ve ever been to them, save once, many years ago. They have no reason to trust us. There’s no guarantee they won’t open fire on you as soon as you draw within range.”

He and I had been through this discussion several times, and I knew he was concerned for my safety, but I had long since made up my mind, for what seemed to me to be logical reasons, to make my approach as simple as possible. I was here in response to a request from the former queen of these people, Morgas, who might now be dead, for all I knew, and since I could not bring a horse ashore with me, I saw little point in hampering myself with heavy armor when I had to walk. Accordingly I had chosen to wear only light armor: a leather corselet over a knee-length tunic of miraculously light and strong ring mail, given to me years earlier by Bishop Germanus, and the only weapons I would carry would be my spatha, my dagger and a quiver of throwing lances. Connor had wanted me to take my knight’s banner with me, too, but I had opted not to do even that, content to leave it safe aboard Connor’s galley with my knight’s sword. I intended to visit Queen Morgas as a simple guest.

Now, as the galley surged forward under the thrust of its massive oars, I wondered fleetingly if I might have erred in that decision, and whether it might have been better to appear in this alien king’s domain with a little more visible splendor to announce my dignitas. No sooner had the thought occurred to me, however, than I dismissed it with a rueful grin. Dignitas was something you either had or lacked, and it was intrinsic. It could not be gained from mere clothing and impedimenta.

Suddenly, with an abruptness that startled me, the bottom shelved steeply upwards and became visible beneath us. I heard Shaun Pointer’s voice raised in a series of rapid commands. The right bank of oars rose from the water in a shower of spraying drops, and the left bank spun the galley within its own length, leaving it broadside to the shore as some of the crew rushed to unlash and launch the boat that would take me to the edge of the land. I turned again to Connor, who was watching me with an expression I could not read, and grinned at him, hoping my expression showed no apprehension of what I was about to do.

“Well, I can’t change my mind now … I suppose I have to go …”

“Aye. And God go wi’ ye … your Christian God or any other of your choosing. If the queen is dead, show her son your letter. Even if he can’t read, he should recognize his mother’s work, and their laws of hospitality should keep you safe. Be back here on the strand seven days from now, and every day after that until I appear. Stay well, my young friend, and be careful what you eat up there, among those savages.”

Moments later, after cautiously negotiating the climb from galley to boat, I was sitting in the stern of the small craft, being rowed towards the shore by four of Connor’s men, and people were already streaming down onto the beach, whether to welcome me or to make a prisoner of me I was not yet sure.

My rowers cast off again as soon as I was over the side, and I waded to the beach alone, wet only to the knees, and then stood and waited until the first of the throng from above reached me. They were talking loudly among themselves as they came, showing no fear of a single man alone upon their strand, and I could not understand a syllable of the gibberish they were speaking. I had thought their language might resemble the tongue spoken by Connor’s folk, but everything I heard sounded utterly alien to me. They crowded around me, evidently demanding to know who I was and what I wanted there, and I began to grow slightly apprehensive when several of them began fingering my mail tunic and one of them made to snatch at my sword. But as I sprang backwards and away from him, bumping into someone behind me, I heard shouts from the rear of the crowd, and it parted to admit four men mounted on sturdy little garrons, their finery and bright colors, as much as their mounts, showing them to be chieftains or leaders of some description. These four did not dismount, but sat staring at me, not bothering to conceal their hostility.

I spoke to them first in the language of Arthur’s people, then in the trading language known as the Coastal Tongue, and finally in Latin, hoping that one, at least, among them might be able to answer me. Nothing I said brought the slightest glimmer of understanding to a single face, and I felt my heart sink, knowing that my own mother tongue and even the name of my people would never have been spoken here.

In the end, despairing of anything else, I drew myself up to my full height—taller than any man there—and jabbed at my chest with my thumb, saying my name aloud and repeating it before I pointed towards the fortified hilltop at their backs and uttered the name of their king, praying within myself that Connor had been right and that this was, in fact, Tod’s kingdom of Gallowa. “Tod,” I said. “Tod of Gallowa.” Stony silence and sullen suspicion greeted that, and so, my heart beginning to flutter in panic, I tried again. “Morgas. Morgas. Your queen, Morgas.” I repeated the dumb show with my thumb and pointing finger. “Clothar … Morgas.”

“Morgas.” Finally one of the four had spoken, and although all he did was repeat the name, I focused on him immediately, nodding my head and going through the motions again. “Clothar … Morgas?”

It may have been the interrogatory note at the end of my statement that made the difference, I had no way of knowing, but the fellow to whom I had spoken beckoned me to follow him, turned his mount around and set off up the hill. I followed close behind, surrounded by the now silent but still curious crowd, and as we mounted the steep slope I began to be thankful that I had not, after all, worn my full armor. It was a long, slow climb.

We eventually reached the top, and I found myself confronted by a huge example of the kind of stronghold that Camulod had been hundreds of years earlier: a vast, circular defensive position of successive earthen ramps separated by great steep-sided ditches, each of them more than three times the height of a man. The place would be easy to defend and almost impossible for an enemy to capture, no matter how determined the assault, because the defenders could merely withdraw from one ramp to the next, leaving the attackers to climb into and then out of each ditch in succession, while under constant attack from above. There was one opening in the massive outer wall, a broad tunnel of a gateway protected and defended by side ramps and overhead bridges, and my guide led me through it as the accompanying crowd magically faded away to continue whatever activities its various elements had been involved in before our ships were sighted.

When we emerged from the tunnel I found myself on a drawbridge that spanned the chasm of the first interior ditch, and we progressed from there over a succession of similar bridges, from rampart to rampart across the intervening ditches. I counted six rings of defense, each with its own retractable bridge, and beyond the final ring was the central area, perhaps a hundred and fifty paces in diameter, that was the central command post and the focal point of all life in the stronghold. It was almost completely filled with buildings, most of them simple round or oblong huts, dug into the earth itself and roofed with a low thatch of reeds. Two buildings, however, much larger than all the others, were of post-and-pole construction. My guide led me directly to the smaller of these and barked something unintelligible to one of the three guards at the front entrance, then turned to me with an upraised palm in an unmistakable signal to stand and wait.

A short time passed before a truly remarkable figure emerged from the dark doorway and stood looking at me, leaning casually against the wall by the entrance, arms folded over an enormous chest. The man seemed gigantic, but not so much in height as in sheer bulk. His head was bald, but he was clean shaven, too, which surprised me, because every other man I had seen since landing here was wildly bearded. Mere moments later, however, I realized that he was, in fact, completely hairless, lacking even eyebrows, and I had to force myself not to stare at him in open curiosity. For all I knew, if this were the king himself, he might be easily offended by any recognition of his obvious difference from other men, and so I schooled my face to reveal nothing of my thoughts, silently thanking both Germanus and Merlyn for the many lessons they had given me in the need to remain inscrutable when dealing with strangers.

Whoever this man was, his stare was direct and slightly disconcerting, even although I knew what he was seeking to achieve. A prolonged, silent appraisal can be an intimidating weapon against anyone who has not learned to deal with such things. Fortunately, I had used the same technique myself on many occasions and so was able to withstand its being used against me. I smiled at him, and he immediately began speaking in a deep, rumbling voice to the man who had led me here. Their conversation was brief, and when it ended the bald man came towards me, his arms still folded across his chest, and circled me several times, examining me from head to foot. Then, after his third time around me, he stepped back, looked me in the eye and spoke in fluent Latin.

“My man Cyrgus here tells me you speak outlandish gibberish, looking down your nose. I presume it is Latin?”

“Thank God, an educated man,” I said, unable to contain my relief. “Yes, it was Latin, although I also tried the Coastal Tongue and several others. Where will I find King Tod of Gallowa?”

“I am Tod. Who are you?”

“My name is Clothar, and I come from Camulod, far to the south of here in Britain. Your mother wrote to me and asked me to come here to talk with her.”

“My mother wrote to you?”

“Aye. Your mother is Queen Morgas, is she not? I trust she is well.”

“Aha! I remember now. You must be the fellow she met in Connlyn’s country. The Frankish knight, she called you. But I did not know she had written to you, let alone asked you to come here. She was very ill for a long time.”

Something in the way he spoke the words chilled me, because beneath them I sensed the underlying and unspoken phrase, before she died. I coughed, uncomfortable with having to ask, and glanced around me.

“Is she … is she well?”

He laughed, to my profound relief. “Oh, aye, she’s well now, but she’s not here. Why would you think she would be here?”

“I—” I was completely at a loss for words. “She—I thought … She wrote to me, asking me to come to her here, at your castle. She said she lived with you.”

He laughed again, and I found myself liking him in spite of my ignorance of what was happening here. “She does, she does, but this is not my castle, merely one of my coastal strongholds. This is Cyrgus’s place, the fellow who brought you up here. He commands here on my behalf, and you have only found me here by accident. I come this way no more than once in every few months, to see that everything is as it should be. He told me that you asked for me by name, but mine is a common name hereabouts and he paid it no attention until you mentioned my mother’s name. Fortunate for you that you did. There is only one Morgas in Gallowa. Come inside and talk to me, for you are the first man I’ve met in years who can speak to me in Latin. Come, come inside.” He unfolded his arms and reached out an enormous hand to grasp me surprisingly gently by the shoulder and urge me towards the doorway.

It turned out that his castle was a full day’s ride from the coast, directly inland, and that he would be returning there in three days, after he had visited one more stronghold to the north of where we now were. That news dismayed me, and I quickly explained to him that I had but seven days before the ships that had delivered me would pass this way again to pick me up and take me back to Gaul. No matter, he said, he would dispatch an escort to ride inland with me in the morning and see me safely to his mother, and with any kind of fortune, he and I might meet again before I had to return to sea. In the meantime, he insisted that I dine with him that night.

We enjoyed a private and surprisingly civilized meal. I learned that he was a practicing Christian and had received his Latin education from a series of visiting priests throughout his boyhood, all of them students and disciples of an Eirish missionary called Padraic, whose teachings they had spread throughout the islands off the coast and through much of the Caledonian—he called it Alban—mainland itself. He had a fine mind and an amiable personality, and he loved to talk, and so we talked throughout the entire day, he hungry for conversation on any and all matters that were not concerned solely with hunting, fighting, fishing or farming, and I happy to oblige him, since he was such an engaging and mercurial character. I told him about Arthur and his dreams, and about Camulod and its armed forces, about our expedition to Gaul at the invitation of King Pelles, and even about Connor Mac Athol and his people’s new kingdom in the islands to the north.

Tod knew all about that last topic, as I had expected, and he told me ruefully that the Scots of Dalriada were the main reason why he kept his coastal strongholds so fully manned. He knew his mother and the queen up there were sisters, and while he had never had reason to doubt the goodwill of King Brander Mac Athol, he yet held little hope of ongoing amity between his people and the contentious Islanders, once King Brander was no longer there. He was convinced that, sooner or later, the Scots of Dalriada would descend upon his holdings, seeking conquest. They had made no hostile moves to do so to this point, he said, but they were plainly an industrious and ambitious people, and he doubted that they would long be satisfied with living solely in the cramped confines of the isles.

I tried to reassure him that such an outcome was unlikely, but even to myself, my arguments lacked conviction. Connor and his crews were the only Scots I had met, and I had never seen their home, but I knew the people there were arming themselves to strike into the mainland. They might not come this far southward, but once on the mainland and established, who could tell how far they would range, or in which directions?

I left at dawn in search of Morgas with an escort of ten mounted warriors, and Tod lent me one of his own horses, not a garron, for the journey. I had to ride bareback, since the saddle with stirrups did not appear to be known this far north of the Wall, but that was a minor consideration and I enjoyed the comparative freedom of riding an untrammeled mount. It was indeed a full day’s ride, and the sun had sunk in the west long before we saw the pile of Tod’s castle on the horizon.

2

“I can hardly believe you are here, young man … that you really came. In truth, I never thought to see you again at all. Had anyone asked me what I expected of you, after reading my letter, I would have said I expected you to be too much a man, involved in other things—any other things—to pay the slightest attention to the ravings of an old woman whom you had met but once and briefly. And yet here you are, and all the way from Gaul, no less!

“I should have my slovenly servants beaten for not awakening me the moment you arrived … but they have all been with me these many years—too many years—and their concern is all to make my final days as restful as they may be. Even so, notwithstanding, I should have them whipped for being such dullards, for not knowing that just seeing a strange face and talking with its owner would brighten my days and shorten my nights. Nights can be too, too long when you grow old, young man. Remember that. Now, what was I saying?”

I was smiling at her easily, marveling about how I could ever have found her unpleasant or demanding on our first meeting. Now, she was utterly delightful, mainly because she was pleased and flattered that I should have taken the time and trouble to come from so far away to visit her, merely on the strength of her cryptic invitation.

She had been asleep when I arrived the previous night, and her stern guardians, all of them women and none of them young, had been instinctively mistrustful of me, so that they had not only refused to rouse her merely to greet me but had warned me that, because of the queen’s advanced age and frail condition, I might not expect to see her before noon the following day.

She had not been informed of my presence until after her midday meal, and she had sent for me immediately, furious at the presumptuousness her wardens had shown in daring to decide for themselves whom she might and might not see. She summoned all of them and then apologized profusely to me for their misconduct and arrogance before dismissing them all angrily, sending them off with hanging heads that would mark their contrition at least until they rounded the nearest corner.

I settled down to converse with her after that, and to try to satisfy, at least partially, her insatiable curiosity about everything that was happening in Britain, south of Hadrian’s Wall. It was several more hours, however, before she referred in any way to the topic of her letter and the portentous tidings she had hinted at so mysteriously. She had to sleep for an hour every afternoon, she informed me, and the time had come for her to do that, but she and I would dine alone that night, and when we were well fed and comfortable by the fireside, she would tell me everything I had come here to discover.

There was nothing I could say in response, other than to promise to be ready whenever she should summon me, and I stood respectfully while her attendants ushered her away in the direction of her personal chambers. Then, with time on my hands again, I went to the stables and found my horse, after which I rode around Tod’s castle in a great, sweeping circle, examining it from every aspect. This truly was a castle—a square-sided edifice designed purely for defense and protection—built of stone and sited strategically at the top of a long, low ridge that offered clear sightlines for miles in every direction.

I found the place disconcerting, however, because it was clearly Roman in origin, and yet I had been taught that the Roman legions had never penetrated this far north into Caledonia, beyond the long-abandoned Antonine Wall that lay north of Hadrian’s great barrier. It was clear, however, looking at this castle, that they had not only penetrated this far but, contrary to all my teachings, they had remained here for long enough to erect the imposing stone battlements at which I was now staring. How long the castle had stood there I had no means of knowing, but it must have been hundreds of years.

The exercise of riding around the place had filled up the time between mid-afternoon and dinner, but I was greatly disappointed to learn on my return that the original Roman bath house had been unused for so long that no one nowadays even knew what it had been used for. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, I had plenty of time to cleanse myself with hot water from the kitchens and to make myself presentable before the queen summoned me to her table.

The dinner we shared that night was delicious, although it had evidently been expressly prepared in acknowledgment of the lady’s great age, for it was a wonderful offering of stewed meat, so tender that it required no strenuous chewing, in a thick, wondrously flavored gravy full of vegetables and herbs, and served on thick rounds of bread still warm from the ovens. There was no wine, which pleased me mightily despite my having formed a tolerance for the stuff in recent months in Gaul, but instead enormous flagons of rich, yeasty and wonderful beer that they brewed right there in the castle. Then, as Morgas had promised, the meal was cleared away, the fire stocked with fresh fuel, the servants all dismissed, and she and I were left alone to enjoy the firelight and the warmth, and to talk together to our hearts’ content. I was almost beside myself with curiosity by then, having to fight the urge to ask her outright whence all this secrecy sprang, but she kept me waiting no longer, and as soon as she began to speak I sat back, enthralled on the instant by the tale she had to tell, and grateful that I had made no attempt to rush her before she was ready to tell it in her own way.

“I wouldn’t say I was ever Uther Pendragon’s mistress,” she began, “but I shared a bed with him on several occasions, for a period of several weeks.” She saw me sink back into my seat, and she laughed, a surprisingly high, girlish giggle. “I shocked you! You never expected to hear such a thing from an old woman, did you?”

“No,” I protested, throwing up my hands. “No … Yes! Forgive me, but you are correct. I was shocked, at the speed of … I mean, right at the start of … You certainly know how to capture a listener’s attention, my lady.”

“And so I should, at my age. Besides, it was the simple truth. As I said, for a while he shared my bed … or I shared his. We deceived him, you see. We lied to him.”

“Pardon me, my lady, but I don’t understand. I have heard Merlyn Britannicus speak of these events, but he was not there when what he was describing took place and so he was reporting only what he had heard, seen through different eyes than yours, so forgive me for asking, but who do you mean when you say ‘we’?”

“Us, of course. Ygraine, and the rest of her women … Oh, very well, I’ll have to start right at the beginning, since you clearly know nothing of such ancient history. You’re too young, so there’s no difference in your mind between what happened a mere fifty years ago in my lifetime, and what happened five hundred years ago, in Julius Caesar’s. Let me think now …

“Ygraine was the queen of Cornwall, originally from the place the Romans called Hibernia, and she had been wed to create an alliance between her father, a powerful chief over there, and Lot, the King of Cornwall. His full name was Gulrhys Lot, and although he could pretend to be pleasant when it suited him, which was not very often, he really was an abominable creature, and completely mad. And the older he grew, the worse he became.

“There was a war going on at that time, between Lot and the northern forces of Camulod—any place north of Cornwall was ‘northern’ to the people down there—and the Camulod armies were commanded by Uther Pendragon, whom we had been led to believe was a ravening beast. Of course, it was Lot who was doing the leading there, and you couldn’t believe a word from his mouth. In any event, the queen, accompanied by a group of us, her ladies attendant, had spent the winter that year at the home of Lot’s old supporter, Duke Herliss, and we had to travel back in the springtime, to Lot’s stronghold at Golant. It was a journey of some thirty Roman miles, but we were accompanied by Herliss himself and an entire train of men and supplies bound for Lot in Golant, and it was deemed to be too early yet for any serious penetration of our territories by Pendragon’s armies.

“As it turned out, it was not so at all. We were ambushed and captured—our entire party, men and wagons of supplies—by a part of Uther’s army. It was a terrifying experience for the queen, and for us, but she was more resilient and resourceful than I had thought she was, and she immediately ordered me to take her place and assume her identity, pretending to be Lot’s queen while she presented herself as a mere servant, hoping to avoid detection. And the ruse worked, for a while. I was taken away and held separate from the other women, although they were allowed to visit me each day, and Ygraine remained unidentified.

“I don’t really know when I began to notice it, although I suspect now it was evident from the outset and we simply did not want to grant it credence, but Uther Pendragon was as different as he could possibly be from the animal we had been told he was. He was clean, for one thing, and so were most of his men, and they took cleanliness seriously … far more than Lot and his followers, most of whom stank like rancid goatskins. He was soft spoken, too, never raising his voice in my hearing, anyway. But most of all, he was considerate of my person, and I had not expected that. He was my captor and I was his prisoner, his chattel … and supposedly the wife of his greatest enemy. He could have used me like the most common strumpet, in front of his men, or thrown me to them for their sport, and no one would have raised an eyebrow. But he did not. He held me in his own command tent, certainly, and under guard at all times, but I had a screened-off section of the tent for my own use, and he never sought to enter it uninvited, not once.”

She was quite wrong about that, I was sure, for I was having no difficulty at all in seeing her as she must once have been, decades earlier, and I was utterly captivated by her recital, trying to imagine the response that her beauty must have provoked in a young Uther Pendragon at the very peak of his powers, less than a year before his death. I had no need to protest this time, however, for she was already moving on, lost in her own memories.

One eyebrow quirked upward. “You notice that I said ‘uninvited’? Well, I invited him several times, and he came to me willingly. Of course he thought I was the queen, Ygraine, and I did not disillusion him. Indeed, I encouraged him, believing it would mold him better to our intent, which was all a strategy to divert his attention away from the real Ygraine.” She paused for a moment, and when she spoke again her voice was wistful, tinged with what might have been regret.

“It was flattering to be chosen to impersonate the queen, and I accepted the duty knowing that I might have to bed our captor, but what never crossed my mind was that I might enjoy doing it. His enjoyment of me was taken for granted by all of us women, for he was but a man and I was beautiful in those days, hard as you might find that to imagine. I was tall and wide shouldered, with a slim waist and full, heavy breasts that turned the head of every man who saw me, and I had long, golden hair. I was very proud of my hair … of my breasts, too, for that matter … Anyway, I was also young and healthy, with the lusts of any healthy young animal, and I enjoyed men. In fact I had a reputation among the queen’s women—undeserved, I must point out—for being too easy, too willing. And Uther was attractive, admirable and appealing. And now you are almost certainly wondering why I am telling you all this and challenging you to imagine me as a young, proud, long-haired beauty. Well, be patient for a little longer.

“The most astonishing part of this entire tale to that point, at least in my own mind, is that Uther Pendragon had known right from the outset that I was not Ygraine of Cornwall. He had known from the very moment of our capture that we were attempting to gull him, and he gulled us, instead, using our own stratagem against us and allowing Ygraine to think herself safe, while his men kept her under constant watch, listening to her every word. But he soon discovered that Ygraine had no grand secrets to disclose concerning Lot, and that in fact she loathed and feared the man. And then, on a mild spring afternoon, he called me to him and told me he knew I was not Ygraine.

“I thought he had just found out, and I was terrified at first, for I thought he must be furious and would have me flogged, at the very least, for deceiving him. But he was not even slightly angry. He told me then that he had known all along who Ygraine really was, recognizing her at first sighting by her bright red hair, which he had heard described in Camulod by one of her own brothers. Then he asked me who I was and where I had come from, and I told him the truth this time, that I had been born above the Wall, one of seven daughters of a small local king who had once been a famous warrior, and that I had been sent to Cornwall by my father, who had known Lot’s father well in their youth.

“He asked me, too, if I was content with my life in Cornwall, and what prospects I had of a good marriage, and I told him the truth again. I had none at all, since all the men I knew were either toadies to Gulrhys Lot or else were dead by his hand. I might have considered marrying some of those who died, but I would never lie with, let alone wed, any of the disgusting creatures who had bought their survival with the sacrifice and betrayal of everything they had been taught to believe in. I had no wish by that time, I told him, to live anywhere else but in the place where I had been born, here in the north.

“He sent me away that same day, taken under guard towards the sea, where his soldiers, after only a few days, hailed a small fleet of galleys from the north that had been sent to meet with them. I sailed back here aboard one of those craft and found my father’s home and was made welcome. I have never been back in Cornwall since then, nor have I felt an urge to go there. I never heard another word of Queen Ygraine and her women … probably all dead now, long since. Nor did I hear the name Pendragon again until I met you, on that visit to my … brother.” The hesitation in her voice was minimal, but there was no missing it. Queen Morgas was less than comfortable acknowledging her brother, and she returned immediately to her monologue as if glad to be able to dispose of him.

“You told me then that Uther Pendragon had fathered a son, this Arthur, whom you named as King of All Britain … what was the name you used?”

“The Riothamus.”

“Aye, that’s it, the Riothamus. But I could not see then how that could come to be, and I confess I still do not. Uther Pendragon was no king, he was a chief in his own land, Cambria. And Camulod was no kingdom, it was a place. I heard it described once as a village on a hilltop.” She stopped short as I muttered something to myself, and suddenly she was once more the querulous, humorless old woman I had first met in Ushmar’s stronghold, years earlier. “What did you say? Have I said something amusing?”

I wiped the beginnings of a smile off my face and cleared my throat. “Forgive me, my lady, but I was amused by your description of Camulod as being no more than a village on a hilltop.”

“And what, tell me, is amusing about that?”

I held up my hand in submission. “Nothing, my lady, nothing at all. It merely crossed my mind that Rome began its life in the same way, as a village on a hilltop. Forgive me, I had no wish to offend you.”

Her face cleared and she nodded. “You are perfectly correct and I am not offended. Rome was once a village on a hilltop. But since when has Camulod become a kingdom?”

“It has not, my lady. It is merely the home of the High King, and he has been King only since the assembled bishops of Britain placed the crown of Riothamus on his head in solemn conclave, less than five years ago. But he comes of royal blood, none the less. He has the blood of the kings of Hibernian Scots in his veins, through his mother, Ygraine, and—”

“Of course … Ygraine was his mother.” Her face twitched with the racing of her thoughts, and then she nodded, accepting whatever she had seen in her mind’s eye, and even beginning to smile gently. “Aye, that would be inevitable, given time and opportunity. Ygraine’s had been a bleak and loveless life, married to Lot. She would have been ill prepared to resist Uther’s attractions … if she ever tried at all. And they were never wed?”

“No, my lady, they never were. From what I have heard, Uther and Lot and the Lady Ygraine all died on the same day. Uther had sired his son upon Ygraine, and they had been together for a year, so the boy was three months old when they all died in the final battle of that war. Merlyn Britannicus arrived too late to save the life of the child’s mother, and as he himself had been married to one of Ygraine’s sisters, he was now both cousin and uncle to the babe, whose mother called him Arthur just before she died. The child was the only survivor of that entire debacle, and Merlyn found him only by accident, floating in a boat. He took the child home with him to Camulod and raised him as his own son, the heir to a long and distinguished blood line …”

As I fell silent, Morgas moved as if to speak again, but then she, too, lapsed into silence, lost in her own thoughts for a long time. Eventually she said, “So Uther died in Cornwall … I never knew that … had no way of knowing … but I always believed that he survived that war and married, to breed other sons and daughters.”

“No, lady,” I replied quietly, “he did not survive.” And then her words finally registered in my awareness and I straightened up. “What do you mean, ‘other sons and daughters’? Other than whom? You knew nothing of Arthur until I named him to you, so what other—? By the sweet Christ! You bore a child to Uther Pendragon! You did, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did.” Her face was a picture of utter tranquility. “I was quickened by the time I left him, his child already growing in my womb, although I would suspect nothing of it until I missed my second menses. The first one I disregarded. My body never had been regular in its cycles and I had several times missed an entire showing. And by then, two months had passed and I was safely home, and had attracted the attention of the man to whom I would be wife for many years. He had a son of four years old, also called Tod, who had never known a mother’s love and who now reveres me as he would his own mother—the girl child who died birthing him—and we were to be wed. Tod was eager to have it so before he returned south to his own kingdom here in Gallowa, and when I discovered the truth of what was happening within me, I confessed my condition to him, fully believing that he would put me aside. He did not. He knew I had been a prisoner, and he decided I had been used against my will, and so he told me to say nothing more, and he never mentioned it again. We were wed immediately, and I left my own father’s kingdom forever and came here. And in the course of time, I gave birth. My husband never told anyone that the child was not his, and you may be sure I kept the knowledge closely guarded in my heart.”

“So you are saying, are you not, that Arthur has a brother, a rival for Uther’s bloodright?”

“No, not a brother. Uther fathered me a daughter.”

“A daughter.” Somehow, that surprised me and was anticlimactic. A daughter would provide no threat to Arthur’s situation. In fact a daughter, a sister to Arthur, might be a joy rather than a threat of any kind. “Uther had a daughter? And you never tried to find him, to tell him?”

She smiled at me, a tender, wistful smile. “What good could that have done? The very attempt could have brought nothing but grief to everyone concerned. I bore Uther no malice. He had treated me humanely and with dignity, and he had given me back my life. His child, our child, was accepted by my husband, Tod, immediately and he became besotted with her, and she grew up loving him as her father, loving him more than any man on earth throughout her childhood years. She had no idea of her true paternity, and I had no slightest wish to cause distress to either her or Tod by telling her. Better, I thought, to let it be, to change nothing and carry the truth of it to my grave without hurting her.”

“I see. And I can appreciate your reasons for doing that … But why change now? Has she learned the truth about her father?”

“No, and she is dead … my lovely child is dead … has been for ten years now …” She sighed deeply. “As to why I should break my silence now, there are several reasons, one of them overriding all the others. The one that made me write to you.

“I was convinced for years that I had told no one the truth, but I had forgotten, because I trusted her completely and had never seen her since, that I had told my sister Morag, right at the very outset, when I first discovered my condition and did not know what to do. Morag and I were friends as well as sisters. We were the two eldest daughters, and we shared everything. She was far closer to me than any of my other sisters, who were all much younger. Morag was no more than a year older than I was, but it was she who urged me to tell Tod the truth about my being with child—I was already more than two months quickened by then, and she convinced me that I could never conceal the truth about the dates and timing of such an event. It was a terrifying thing to do, but it turned out to be the right thing, and I have always been grateful to her for that, although I never saw her again after I left, and when my child was born, I named her Morag, too.”

“And …?” I could not see where this was leading, but her next words struck me dumb.

“Morag told our brother, Connlyn. He was just a little boy at the time, spoiled beyond belief by a crowd of doting elder sisters, so that he learned early how to manipulate people … and he never forgot what she had told him. I have no idea when or why she did it, but I have no doubt she did, because Connlyn himself told me about it.”

I sat quiet for a moment, pondering that, before I spoke again, spreading my palms in bafflement. “So Connlyn knows that Arthur has, or had, a sister. Where is the harm in that? Your brother has proven himself to be a treacherous liar and a devious, dangerous enemy, but this knowledge of a dead sister … I can see nothing in it that might endanger Arthur, or Camulod.”

“I know you can’t. But there is more to tell.”

A distinct chill swept over me, bringing my skin up in a rash of goose bumps, and I knew that I would not like what I was about to hear next. “What more?”

“Much more. I told you earlier that I had six sisters. One of the youngest was called Salina, and she was the most beautiful of all of us. I barely knew her before I married Tod, for there were eight years between us, but I met her again years later and we became friends. Well, through a long tale which you don’t need to know, Salina, from her very early childhood, lived in the islands of Orknay, in the far northeast, where she became the adopted daughter of the king there, after his son, who was to have been her husband when they came of age, was taken and killed in a raid.

“Years later, when the Scots who now rule the islands west of here made contact with the Orknay king, Salina met and wed their king, a man called …” She was plainly searching for the name, and I supplied it.

“Brander Mac Athol.”

Her eyes widened. “How come you to know that?”

“I know his brother, Connor Mac Athol. It was he who dropped me ashore here. He told me your sister had been his brother’s wife.”

“Well!” She made a snorting sound, expressing her bafflement at the ways of the world, and then her eyes narrowed and she returned to her story. “Connor Mac Athol was the name of the man who first brought me tidings of my sister Salina, in a letter. He rowed ashore alone, watched by our guards, and left the package containing it lying on a rock, to be delivered to Tod. In the letter, Salina told me about her life, and invited me to travel north to Orknay, to witness her wedding to this Brander fellow, who called himself King of Scots.”

She fell silent again for a while, gazing into nothingness. “I could not go,” she began again. “Tod had fallen sick, for the first time, of the pestilence that would kill him two years later, and I could not leave him sickening abed while I ran off to meet a sister I had never known. But Morag was fourteen that year, and well grown, for her age, tall and beautiful and as innocent as a flower. I thought it would do her good to be away for a while, to see other parts of the world, and to be free of the heartbreak of watching her father grow ever sicker. And so we made arrangements for her to travel north to Orknay, aboard one of Brander Mac Athol’s galleys, to witness in my stead. And so she did, and remained there for almost a full year, breaking hearts wherever she went.” She smiled, wistful again, and then turned to me and looked me directly in the eye.

“When they brought her home again, they stopped first in Brander’s kingdom, and then set out in Connor’s own galley to come here, but a storm blew them off course and they were swept far to the south, to take shelter in the bay of a town called Ravenglass, very close to a place called Mediobogdum, an abandoned Roman fort ten miles from Ravenglass and high in the hills, where one of Connor Mac Athol’s dearest friends had chosen to live. Naturally enough, finding themselves so unexpectedly close, they went to visit him, and there, ten miles from nowhere, Morag met and fell in love with a young man her own age, whose name was—”

I had caught my breath so sharply that I inhaled some saliva and choked, throwing myself into a fit of painful coughing. By the time the paroxysm had died away, my mind was still reeling with the implications of what Morgas had told me.

“She was his sister,” I gasped, still straining for air. “Sweet Christ, she was his sister! And he loves her still, his lost, true love … His own sister …”

“Half sister, but that makes no difference. This was the ancient gods at work … those who delight in confounding mankind’s hopes and plans. The tragedy lay in the fact that Destiny itself had decreed what must happen—even to sending the storm that blew them south to Ravenglass. It was not the fault of the children. All they did was to react naturally to each other. Neither of them could have known anything was wrong, for none of the people present there knew anything other than that Morag was the daughter of King Tod of Gallowa.”

“But they lay together …”

“Aye, they did. And their union bore fruit. There are people who will tell you lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but where the name Pendragon is involved, I choose to believe otherwise.”

“Great God! What did you do?”

“All that I could. Even before Morag came home, she had a suitor waiting for her, a young Norweyan prince called Haakon, who had met her in Orknay, and I had been amused to see him come, and to see how smitten he was with my beautiful child. But then Morag came home, full of joy over this other boy she had loved, whom she swore she would marry one day. His name was Arthur, she told me, from a place called Camulod, and his father had been a great warrior chief from Cambria, called Uther Pendragon.”

Once again a stillness settled over both of us, and I sat staring at her while she gazed off into some far-distant corner of her memories. Then, after a time, she sighed, shuddering. “You cannot possibly imagine, young man—first of all because you are a man—the effect that name had upon me when I heard it from my daughter’s lips. Within the space of a single heartbeat, all the pain and grief and shame I thought I had avoided came crashing down on me, and I saw what I had done … what my years of silence had brought about. I could not cope with it, and for the first and only time in my life, I collapsed, senseless.

“When I awoke, I was in my own bed, and Morag was sitting on it beside me, holding my hand, distraught. She had thought I would be happy with her announcement, and instead I had fallen down in a swoon of horror.

“I cannot really tell you why I behaved as I did immediately after that, because it makes no sense. You must bear in mind that, at that point, there was no suspicion in my mind that she might be with child. She was a mere child herself and that never even crossed my mind until much later. No, I was simply overwhelmed with grief because all the happiness I had sought for her—and all the lies of omission, all the silence I had undertaken to protect her and shelter her from the truth—was not now merely set at naught, it was shattered, destroyed by the tragic folly of her having fallen in love with the only person in the world who was forever forbidden for her: her own brother.”

She sighed again and plucked absently at something on the fabric of her dress. “I began to weep with her, and once I had begun, I could not stop. I wept for two days … I who had never been seen to weep before. I knew I was being foolish and full of self-pity, but I was powerless to control myself, to simply stop the tears. And of course, no one knew why I was behaving that way. My man was dying, everyone knew that, but he had been failing steadily for two years and incapable of rising from his bed for the past six months, so that everyone, including me, had long accepted that his death would be a benison when it eventually came. But that is finally what they blamed for my condition … grief. They were right, of course, but wrong in thinking to know why. I was grieving for my daughter, and the loss of innocence she was about to undergo, for throughout all that time when I was inconsolable, my mind was working, working, working, and I had come to know what must be done.”

“You told her.”

“Yes, I told her. What else could I do? I took her away with me, to visit a dear friend who lived half a day’s walk from here. Morag loved going to visit her, and she and I would often ride over there on garrons, all by ourselves, for there was never any danger of raiders in these parts. The ride took about four hours, so we could leave after dawn and be there before midday. On this occasion, however, I had arranged for my friend to be away from home when we arrived but expected back within the day. And so we settled in, supposedly to wait for her, but really to give me time and privacy for what I had to say to Morag.

“She refused to believe me at first, told me I must be mad, or mistaken, or both … But there was no avoiding the truth of it for her, once I had begun to tell her my story.

“She took it very badly, far worse than I had imagined, and for a month she would not speak to me at all. Not a word, not even a look. And then she missed her monthly flow. She had been of age for that for two, almost three years by then, so we knew she did not suffer from the irregularities that had always plagued me. Morag was as predictable as the moon itself in her cycles, and when she missed, knowing she had lain with the boy for several nights since her last time, she had the good sense to come to me and tell me. And of course that put an entirely new aspect on the situation. But it was Morag herself who solved the problem, for by then she had spent weeks thinking about the story I had told her, and without asking me, she approached the young prince from Orknay, who was still haunting our harbor hoping to catch a glimpse of her. She made no attempt to cozen him or to lie to him. She told him she had met a young man and been foolish enough to fall in love, and that she now regretted it, but she was carrying the young man’s child. She had no wish ever to see the young man again, but her child would need a father. She would become his true wife, she said, if he could bring himself to accept her in the condition she was in.

“It must have been humiliating, having to abase herself like that and throw herself on his mercy, but he was insanely in love with her, sufficiently besotted to accept her terms as the only way he could ever hope to have her, and so they were wed, quickly and without fuss, and he carried her away to Orknay as his wife.” She lifted her chin towards the fire. “The fire’s almost out. Better put on some more peats now, before it’s too late.”

I crouched in front of the dying fire and stirred up the sunken husk of glowing peat coals into a last tiny inferno, and thrust fresh bricks of the dried fuel into the glowing embers. I moved back to my seat, rubbing the peat dust from my hands. Morgas had sat watching me as I rebuilt the fire, and seeing that her thoughts were elsewhere, I prompted her quietly.

“You stayed here, when she left.”

“Of course I did. How could I do otherwise? I had a dying husband to attend to. But I had spoken with young Haakon before he left, and he promised to send a ship for me in half a year, by which time, we believed and hoped, Tod should be long dead and free of the constant pain he had suffered for two years … Long dead was correct. He died the month after Morag left, and young Tod, who was a man nearing twenty by then, became king in his stead. The rest of that half year passed very slowly, but eventually a galley came for me and took me off to the north, for a long, long way. Do you know how far away Orknay is?”

I shook my head. “No, my lady, I don’t even know what it is.”

“It is a group of islands, far to the north and east, isolated and bleak. They are almost as far away as the Norweyan lands, which is why the Norweyans rule there. No one on the mainland here cares about them.”

“But you arrived there in time to help your daughter with the birthing?”

“Aye, I arrived in time, but she was not to be helped. She died, delivering her baby. She had always been a healthy, beautiful child and she was a beauty as a woman, too, but when I arrived in Orknay, I could scarcely recognize her as my daughter. She had lost far too much weight and she looked terrible, and her pregnancy had not been an easy one. Something, some spark, the very will to live, it seemed, had gone out of her when she discovered that your Arthur was her brother. She felt betrayed—soiled, too, I suppose—and she simply lost interest in living. There was nothing I could do to change that, because I was the one at fault. She believed that I had been the author of all her grief, and she was right. Had I been honest with her from the start, had I told her the truth about her birth, she would have known her brother by his name when they met, and all of this would have been avoided.”

I waited, but she seemed to have no more to say, and so I cleared my throat gently and asked my next question. “And the baby, my lady … was it boy or girl?”

“It was a boy. We named him Mordred. He is your king’s son … his son and his nephew at the same time, since his mother and his father were brother and sister. A pretty pickle …

“You will hear people say, from time to time, whenever a case occurs, that the offspring of incestuous couples are born deformed or demented, living symbols of their parents’ guilt and sin. But that is not the case with Mordred. The boy is beautiful, with large, gold-flecked eyes that any young woman would love to possess. He is ten now.”

“And is he still in Orknay?”

“No, he is here with me, in Gallowa. I brought him back here as a babe in arms, as soon as he was weaned from the wet nurse who fostered him. Haakon had no objections, since the boy was not his and had cost him his wife. I grieved for Haakon, poor man, almost as deeply as I did for my lost child, but I came to thank God for the boy, for he gave me back a reason for living. You will meet him tomorrow. He has been out on his first hunting trip, with one of his uncles.”

“Does he know about …?”

“About his father? Aye, he does. I had to tell him sooner than I thought to, when I learned what my demented brother had in mind for him. I would have told him eventually, however, having no wish to make the same error twice.”

“And what, precisely, did you tell him?”

“I told him who he is … the heir of Camulod’s king.”

“Camulod has no king, my lady. The High King of All Britain merely lives there. But that high kingship is what the boy might be heir to … High King of All Britain.”

“I knew that. King of Camulod was just a simpler way of explaining things to the child. But my brother Connlyn knew it, too … I know not how.”

I could not sit still for another moment. I rose quickly to my feet and began to pace the room from end to end. “How could he know that? How could he have learned of it? Who could have told him? And what did he think he could gain by the knowledge?”

“He thinks he can gain a kingdom, Master Clothar. He is convinced of it. That is why he had sent for me on that occasion when you rescued me, and even although I knew nothing of what was in his mind, I would not have gone to him had he not threatened my grandson. It was a subtle threat, but unmistakable to one who knew Connlyn’s ways of old. I had never liked or trusted him, even as a child, and I would not trust him now. And so I traveled south, wearing a false smile of familial friendship, to find out what he truly wanted.

“Well, he wanted me to know that he knew the truth of things, and he wanted me to bring the boy to him. He was full of grand ideas and plans, and while I thought him mad at first, I came to see that he was intent upon making it happen. I had always known him as a self-centered, manipulative creature, with no thought of anyone else in his head at any time, save when he needed them for reasons of his own, but I had never known how grasping, ambitious and ruthless he really is. I managed, fortunately, to keep all signs of my loathing for him hidden. I listened with what I hoped appeared to be enthusiasm, and told him I would gladly bring the boy to him. Then I returned here and told Tod everything, and that was when I wrote the letter to you. That was nigh on two years ago, and nothing has happened in the meantime, probably because my grasping brother has had his hands full, fighting off Arthur’s armies. Word comes through to us from below the Wall from time to time, so we know what is going on. But we expect Connlyn or his allies to come searching for Mordred very soon now … So your arrival is well timed.”

I had stopped pacing by then and stood frowning at her, my arms crossed on my chest. “How so, my lady? What mean you by that?”

“The boy needs to meet and know his father. He is merely curious now, because he has never known a father, and I have told him the truth, that his father knows nothing of him and does not even suspect that he exists. So there is no malice in the child, no ill will, and he will go to meet the Pendragon openly, as who he is. But all of that could change if my brother lays hands on him instead. He would turn Mordred against his father very quickly and he would use the boy as a bargaining tool—Arthur’s son, the legitimate heir to the High King’s legacy. And eventually, when Arthur dies in battle or from illness or by treachery—Connlyn cares nothing how he dies, only that he does—then he will thrust the boy into power and himself into dominance as Mordred’s uncle and regent.”

I stalked away from her towards one of the narrow, shuttered windows that kept out the night air and flung the shutters open, feeling the cool breeze flow in instantly. I spoke to her over my shoulder. “I still do not understand how your brother could have come to know all this, my lady … Unless you told him.”

“Do not be foolish, Master Clothar. He knew from my sister that Morag’s father was Uther Pendragon, and none of the other people in the party that was with Morag when she met young Arthur saw anything strange or remarkable in their attraction to each other. The two were of an age, and both were beautiful and full of life. Their escort talked of it openly and with enjoyment, thinking they had control of everything and that the two of them were too closely watched to permit anything improper to occur. Connlyn has spies everywhere, and any one of them could have stumbled over what he saw as this useless but intriguing piece of information—Tod of Gallowa’s daughter, Morag, and the young Pendragon. He would then have sold it to Connlyn, and all my brother would have needed was the merest hint of what had happened. And when word came to him that Morag was wed to Haakon of Orknay so soon afterwards, he, being Connlyn, would have added the results in his own mind and drawn his own conclusions.

“But he would probably have thought it merely amusing and of no value to him, until Arthur Pendragon became High King of All Britain. Then Connlyn’s devious, scheming mind would have begun to see the possibilities underlying what he knew.” She had been speaking into the space between us, her eyes fixed on some point above my head, but now she looked directly at me. “And so we come to the point of all of this. How do you think your king will react to the announcement that he has a son?”

I could only shake my head, trying to visualize myself breaking the news to Arthur. I truly had no idea of how he would react, and I told the queen so. She pursed her lips and sat nodding her head gently.

“Will he receive him, think you?”

“Oh, Arthur will receive the boy, have no doubt of that. And once the shock of knowing that he has a son wears off, he will probably acknowledge him openly as his heir. And he will treat him as he should be treated, with deference to his rank and in honor of his mother, whom Arthur still reveres after ten years … And yet the boy is the fruit of incest, no matter how innocent of knowledge or intent it was. I have no way of predicting how that might influence the King. I simply do not know.”

“But you will take the boy to Camulod now.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now,” said Queen Morgas. “When you leave here to return to wherever you are going. Otherwise he may not be here when you return, and if Connlyn has possession of him, the gods alone know what grief will come of it, for all concerned.”

She was right, beyond dispute, but she had given me far more to chew on than I thought I could accommodate, and I lay awake yet again until the very middle of the night, agonizing over another session with this old woman before I finally drifted off to sleep.

3

Connor’s ship was easier to board at sea than any other I ever saw, because I had the privilege of using the device they called the Admiral’s hoist, a swiveling crane built into the ship for the sole purpose of moving Connor on and off the vessel, since his wooden leg made it almost impossible for him to do so by any other means, save when the ship was moored at deck level alongside a wharf. I tightened the rope beneath young Mordred’s arms and signaled to the seamen to heave away. The rope tightened and the boy swung up into the air, his eyes wide with concern until he disappeared safely into the well of the ship. Moments later, the rope came back for me, and I quickly placed one foot in the loop at the end of it and held on grimly as I, too, swooped up and outwards to board the galley. Land creature that I was, I detested being swung out over heaving waters that I knew could swallow me alive, never to be seen again.

Connor was waiting for me on the deck, one hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Found something of value then, did you?”

I winked at the lad. “Mordred, this is Admiral Connor Mac Athol. Connor, meet Mordred, a prince of Orknay.”

Connor inclined his head as the boy bowed deeply. “Orknay, eh? You are a long way from home, young man.”

“No, not so. His home is here in Gallowa. He is a prince of Orknay but has no memory of Orknay, since his grandmother brought him here as a small child, after his mother died.”

“Hmm.” Connor reached down and ruffled the boy’s hair. “I’ve been to Orknay, but that was many years ago, when my brother, King Brander, wed the Princess Salina. That was before you were even born. So you are to travel with us, are you? Well, we had best see to it that you learn your way about the ship. Have you been aboard a ship before? No, well, you will enjoy it, but there is not much room aboard a fighting galley like this, and so there are places you may go, and places you may not. Shaun! Shaun Pointer, to me.”

When Shaun had taken the boy away to show him the ship and its crew, Connor turned to me. “Who is he?”

“Queen Morgas’s grandson.”

“I know that, from what you said. And I know his mother is dead, too. Who was she?”

“The queen’s daughter.”

He fixed me with eyes narrowed to slits. “Wonderful. I might never have guessed that … Then that leaves us only to establish who the father is. Is he dead, too?”

“No.”

“No. That’s all you have to say? You’re going to make me pry it out of you, aren’t you?”

I stepped close to him and spoke quietly into his ear. “No, I’m not, Connor, but it’s not for the ears of others. The boy was in danger here in Gallowa. He has an uncle who would use him as a weapon. Morgas asked me to take him away for his own safety.”

“Use him as a weapon against whom?” He, too, spoke quietly now, keeping what he said from being overheard.

“Against us—against Camulod. The uncle is Connlyn, the same man Arthur is fighting in the north. The warlord.”

Connor’s head jerked back. “The same man?” He looked at me suspiciously, then nodded his head. “Very well. I’m prepared to accept that, but I’m no great believer in coincidences. If this Connlyn seeks to use the boy as a weapon against Camulod, then there’s more here than meets the eye. Who else but Merlyn or Arthur himself could be threatened by an unknown child? By-blow brats are a fact of life. It happens all the time. And why would either one of them care about such a witless thing? To threaten the place itself, in any way, you would have to threaten one of those two. But nothing makes sense there, except that the boy’s father has to be one of them. So which of them is it, Merlyn or Arthur? I find myself thinking that it would have to be Merlyn, because this boy is ten years old and Arthur would have had to sire him when he was fourteen or fifteen. Am I correct?”

“Yes, you are correct.”

“So it’s Merlyn?”

“No, it’s Arthur. He was fifteen. Fell in love with a young woman and sired the child on her without anyone’s knowledge—including his own. He has no idea the boy is alive.”

Connor drew himself upright in a way that reminded me of a hostile cat arching its back at a threat. “A young woman, you say, when he was fifteen? What was this young woman’s name, d’you know?”

“Aye, Morag.”

“And Arthur sired a brat on her!”

“You sound as though you know who she was.”

“I do know who she was! It was I who took her to Mediobogdum, the place where she met Arthur, when we were blown off course in a storm. But there was nothing between her and Arthur. And she was in my charge, so you may believe I was watching her closely. I would swear nothing happened between the two of them.”

“Then you would swear in vain, because it was Morag’s own mother who told me the truth. The girl was with child when she returned to her home, although she herself knew nothing of that. All she knew was that she had fallen in love with a young man called Arthur Pendragon and that she would be his wife. When the mother discovered her condition, she wed her off to some Norweyan lordling from Orknay, and Morag went sailing off to the north with her new husband. But she did not go happily. She was heartbroken, and she died birthing the boy.”

“Then why would her mother do such a thing to her?” Connor’s voice was growing louder, and I tugged at his sleeve, warning him to keep his voice down.

“Because she had no other choice.”

“There is always another choice.”

“Not so, Connor, not when the alternative is incest.”

His head jerked up as his eyes flew wide. “What?”

“Morag and Arthur were brother and sister, Connor, both of them sired by Uther Pendragon, although neither of them could have known of the other. Neither of their mothers knew of the other’s pregnancy. The children grew up hundreds of miles apart, and their father died before either one of them could come close to a first birthday. There is no possible way either one could have known of their real relationship to each other, and so the incest involved was guiltless and innocent, but it was real, none the less.

“It was all a mystery, shrouded in secrets and in silences … Queen Morgas herself said to me that this was a scheme of the ancient gods, who revel in confounding the hopes and yearnings of mankind, and I am inclined to take her at her word on that. Goings-on like this certainly have no place in the plans or activities of the one, merciful God I have been taught to worship.”

Connor turned away from me and caught hold of one of the ropes that secured the swinging chair from which he had commanded his galley and his fleet for many years, and he lowered himself carefully, but with the ease of long practice, into the securely anchored and suspended seat, and raised his artificial limb to rest it on the bench that extended outwards from his chair. He said nothing for a long time after that, but then he sniffed and spoke again, quietly, as though to himself.

“Well now, at least I can see why this whoreson Connlyn thinks to have found himself an opportunity—” He broke off as one of his mariners approached and stood waiting to be recognized. “Yes, Tearlach. What is it?”

The man growled something that I did not understand, and Connor rattled off what I took to be a string of instructions, then dismissed the fellow and turned back to me. “Forgive me, Clothar, but the fleet will not take care of itself, and my people seem to insist on having me make decisions for them. What was I saying? Connlyn, the treacherous whoreson, and his eye for a quick profit. I think he has miscalculated gravely, and it will cost him dearly. But the boy … does the boy know who his father is?”

“Aye, he does. He knows he is Arthur’s son.”

“And how does he feel about that, about his father? Is he angry, feeling abandoned and abused?”

“Not at all. As far as I can judge, he has no misconceptions about any of this. He never knew who his father was, but no one ever suggested to him that he had been abandoned, or that the father had neglected him. The boy appears to have grown up happy and well loved among a close family who, while not British, and really more Pictish than anything else, have managed to breed him properly and appropriately. I have great hopes for the lad.”

“Based upon what,” Connor growled, “other than the fact that you have a natural liking for the boy? I’ll grant you that he seemed pleasant enough in the few moments that I spent with him, but how can you hope to know what lies in his heart?”

“Because he has a wondrous sense of humor, Connor, and he is only ten years old. He knows how to laugh at himself already, and that is a marvelous thing. He can thank his uncles and cousins from his mother’s family for that, I know now, because having met many of them, I cannot remember ever having met an entire clan I liked so strongly and immediately.”

“What d’you mean, he knows how to laugh at himself? That sounds like stupidity to me.”

“Well, it isn’t, and you ought to know how important it is, because you share the same gift with him. A man who cannot laugh at himself can never see the humor in anyone or anything else, and that is a tragic flaw, no matter who it may involve. For in the lack of humor lie all the seeds of evil and destruction. People who see themselves as being worthy of admiration, and who cannot conceive of themselves as ever being a cause for laughter, are far too serious for their own good, and even worse, they generally believe they have a calling to impress the importance of their beliefs on others. God save us all from humorless men, for they are also merciless and implacable.”

I saw Connor’s shoulders straighten slightly as I said that, but he did not look at me.

“Connor, I like this boy. Mordred is a gentle and trusting soul, entirely lacking in evil or in discontent.”

He heaved a great sigh then and twisted in his seat to look at me. “So be it,” he said. “I believe you. But what will you do now? Why did you bring the boy with you?”

“Because I have to take him to Camulod, to meet his father.”

Connor shook his head. “Bad reason. His father’s not even in Camulod, for all you know. You told me a few moments ago that he’s fighting somewhere in north Britain, against the boy’s own uncle. So what good will it do to drop the lad off in Camulod and simply leave him there? You know how people are … the word will get out on him, and Arthur will find out about him before he ever gets close to home. And knowing Arthur, I doubt it would please him to have his family affairs providing the talk of the land before he even knows about their existence. Besides being ill considered, that way of handling this affair would be grossly unjust for both the boy and his father. Better to take him back with you to Gaul.”

“To Gaul? Now that would be stupid. Why would I do that? I want to take him to Camulod, to Merlyn. Merlyn will know what to do with him.”

“Aye, mayhap he will, but you’ll still be leaving the boy stuck there like a toad in a mud hole, and he’ll be the talk of the entire place. And Merlyn might not know what to do with him, despite what you think.” He pointed a peremptory finger at me to silence me before I could begin to interrupt him, and his voice grew more incisive as he went on to explain.

“Merlyn’s no longer the man he used to be when I first met him—he is human, like all of us, despite what silly, ignorant people mutter about him and sorcery. He has grown old. I first met him more than thirty years ago—before you were even born—and just like me, he is growing older and less agile than he was, both mentally and physically, with every passing month, let alone each year. He and I are almost of an age, and I know what age does to a man. He is not as resilient or as … what’s the damn word I’m looking for? He’s not as … adaptable, mentally, as he used to be. Believe me, it were better by far to write to Merlyn from Gaul, spelling out what you have learned from Queen Morgas, with all the goings-on behind it and underlying it, and let him work out some plan of response on his own. Merlyn takes his responsibilities very seriously nowadays, and my own brother Donuil is constantly at pains to make the old man’s pathway smoother and less rocky. But every time I see Donuil, or hear from him, he sings me a plaint of grief about how difficult it has become to keep Merlyn in Camulod and focused solely on Camulod’s affairs. Too many things demand his attention, and too much of his energy goes to waste nowadays in trying to deal with matters that really should not concern him. He has taken it upon himself to be Arthur’s representative to the clans in Cambria and Cornwall, and now he travels constantly, north Cambria to south Cornwall and back again, visiting in Arthur’s name and keeping the King abreast of what his people are thinking and saying. He’s too old for that, but too stubborn to stop. But when Arthur is away from Camulod, Donuil says, Merlyn spends most of his time there in his stead, and he speaks with the King’s voice and has become his seneschal, just as Donuil became Merlyn’s adjutant.”

“I know that,” I responded, “but surely this matter of the boy contains its own priorities? When he comes face to face with the boy, Merlyn will—”

“Merlyn will react as he sees fit at that particular time, Clothar, and if he is beset with problems, as he usually is nowadays, with Camulod at war, he may refuse to recognize the urgency of this particular situation.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to say that Merlyn would react promptly to this news, but I realized that Connor had his mind made up, and nothing I could say was likely to change it. Besides, he was already talking over me.

“He doesn’t even know you’ve left Gaul, does he? How do you think he might react, then, to seeing you standing in front of him in Camulod, when you have grave and genuine responsibilities to look after in Gaul? Think you he might be angry? Seems to me he would be, and with good reason, as he would see it.”

I sat mulling over what he had said, and the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that Connor was right. It would be both foolish and intemperate to drop the boy into Camulod unexpectedly and then abandon him there to whatever might occur. But the sole alternative open to me now was to take him back with me to Gaul, and I could not see how that might work to anyone’s advantage. And so finally, in frustration, I asked the question that had been in my mind for some time.

“What is to be achieved by taking young Mordred to Gaul?”

“Opportunity, lad … and breathing space. Once you have the boy safe in Gaul, you will know that he cannot be abducted, seduced or suborned by his whoreson uncle, so that will relieve you of a great cause for concern. Then, free of that concern, you’ll be able to sit down and take as much time as you need to write to Merlyn and explain what you have discovered, and describe everything that has happened in the past twenty-five years, far from the ken of anyone in Camulod, to bring matters to the condition in which they now stand. I will then take your letter with me directly to Britain when I next return, and it will be in Merlyn’s hands in Camulod within days of my leaving here. Merlyn will take the time to fully understand what you have told him, and he’ll be able to come up with some civilized way of dealing with the situation and of breaking the news to Arthur.

“In the meantime, while you are waiting to hear back from Merlyn and perhaps even from Arthur, you will have time to expose the lad to the way things are done in Camulod, and to teach him whatever you decide he might need to know—how to behave, how to dress, how to present himself when he finally comes to meet his father. He’s a Pict, an Outlander, whether you like it or not, and he looks like one. You’ll have time to change that, once you have him in Gaul. Cut his hair properly, teach him to wear your style of clothing, teach him the basics of good manners and civilized Roman behavior—and I’m only being half sarcastic there. I mean the other half in all sincerity. Hell, you can even teach him to ride a horse the way your people ride, and to fight the way they do. You’ll have the time, and all the old gods know the boy won’t suffer by learning new skills.”

I heard the sound common sense in everything he was saying, and the die was cast. I nodded in acceptance and told Connor to take us directly back to Gaul.

4

I set out to befriend the boy Mordred on the voyage to Gaul, knowing that he must be confused and perhaps even a little frightened by the suddenness with which all this had happened to him. I remembered very clearly my own panic and confusion when, as a ten-year-old boy like him, my life had been disrupted and set at naught within the space of mere hours and I had been shipped away from my home in the care of Bishop Germanus, whom I would grow to love but who had been a stranger to me—a stranger who had been given complete control over my life.

Mordred was wary of me at first, courteous enough in his acceptance of me as a participant in his new life, but none the less reluctant to concede anything to me in the way of goodwill before I had shown him my true mettle. That amused me and it pleased me, both at the same time, for it suggested that the lad was level-headed and would be nobody’s fool. But I made a point of being pleasant to him at all times during the first few days aboard Connor’s galley, and soon enough, once he learned that I knew his father as a friend and was willing to talk about him, he became eager to know everything I could tell him, so that we frequently ended up talking to each other for hours in the very prow of the long, narrow boat, where we were least likely to hamper the functioning of the vessel and its crew.

The boy’s appetite for information about his father was insatiable, but it was his lack of rancor over his status that I found most intriguing and most admirable. He asked me directly, very early in our discussions, if I really believed that his father the King had genuinely known nothing of what had happened after he was separated from Morag, and I responded openly, telling him that Arthur had known only what he had told me: that Morag had died within a year of leaving him in the abandoned Roman fort at Mediobogdum. That was all he had been told. He had known nothing—and still knew nothing—not only of what had happened to Morag but of anything else that had taken place since then, including Mordred’s own birth in Orknay and his mother’s death that same day. Arthur, I swore to the boy, had absolutely no knowledge of Mordred’s existence.

I could see from his face that the lad believed me, for he nodded, wide eyed with that gold-flecked gaze that marked him so unmistakably as Arthur’s son, and then shocked me by asking me if I believed Arthur would welcome him and acknowledge him, seeing that he must be a constant living reminder that Arthur had lain with his own sister. It was the kind of question I would have had difficulty dealing with had it come from a grown man, but to have it presented for my consideration by a ten-year-old boy was an unexpected twist that left me floundering, looking for words that would be neither offensive nor too adult and esoteric for his understanding. He waited patiently, however, his eyes fixed on mine until I had managed to bring my thoughts under control and to formulate an answer to his question, and then he listened carefully to what I said, nodding his head occasionally.

I made no attempt to prevaricate. As soon as I had adjusted to the shock of hearing him ask the question, I admitted that I could not guess at the correct answer, for in truth the only person who could answer it was Arthur himself, and even he would be incapable of responding truthfully until he found himself confronted by the truth of the situation. This was one of those things, I told Mordred, to which an easy and high-principled answer would always be positive before the fact, but when the harsh realities of the truths involved had to be assessed, and the life that must be lived as the consequence of those truths had to be faced, it would take a man of courage and moral determination to accept all that was entailed, and to proceed openly and in honesty and good faith. I told him I believed that Arthur was such a man.

But what if I were proved wrong, he wondered. And what if his father the King decided not to believe he was who he claimed to be? In spite of everything he or I or anyone else might believe, his grandmother’s story and the supporting evidence were all subject to denial were Arthur to determine that a conspiracy had been brought to bear upon him, fomented by Connlyn and abetted by Queen Morgas. Would Mordred’s life then be placed at risk?

That question was far easier to answer with conviction and authority, and I was able to set him at ease in the belief that his life would be in no danger from his father or from any of the King’s associates.

He appeared to accept that, too, with an astonishing degree of equanimity, and I marveled again, as I would so often in the future, at his composure. I had never known anyone so young to possess so much quiet self-confidence, and yet I thought there must be something more fragile underlying it … perhaps fear, perhaps doubts that he was keeping well concealed. And so I sought to distract him with talk of more pleasant things—things that I considered more suitable for a boy his age.

I told him about Camulod and the Order of Knights Companion to the King, and then went about the system of training that had recently come into being there, with young boys like him, known as squires, entering into an apprenticeship to an individual knight, a program that would teach them all the skills and disciplines, both moral and military, that were required by an aspiring knight. That caught his imagination, as I had hoped it would, and he was eager to know what he would have to do in order to enter into the squires’ training program. I told him that as soon as we were safely returned to Gaul, I would introduce him to my own young squire, Rufus, who would begin teaching him his basic tasks and duties, and he could work for me and share Rufus’s responsibilities until such time as we decided upon a knight from Camulod to whom he could be permanently attached. That way, I said, when Mordred finally returned to Britain again, to meet his father in Camulod, he would be well versed in the disciplines practiced there among the King’s knights.

From the moment of that discussion, he wanted to know everything that I could tell him about what the task of squire entailed from day to day, and by the time we came within sight of the coast of Gaul, I was confident that I had won his trust and respect. He was a sunny lad, tall and broad for his age, with a ready grin and a sharp wit, and there were times, looking at him, when it seemed to me that no one could ever have a moment’s doubt about whose son he was, for he had Arthur’s own coloring, from the dark hair streaked with strands of dark golden yellow, to the large and lambent yellow eagle eyes.

On landing in Gaul, I let it be known that he was Mordred, a prince of Orknay, the nephew of King Tod of Gallowa and the grandson of Tod’s mother, Queen Morgas, and that I had undertaken to see to his education as a favor to the queen herself. No one thought to question me any further, which pleased me greatly. I knew I could trust Connor Mac Athol to keep his mouth shut, and I had already decided that I would inform Perceval, Bors and Tristan about the truth of the matter as soon as I had decided upon the best course of action facing me. In the meantime, however, it was late October and winter was looming over us. Connor was already fretting about the weather, scanning the horizon constantly for the first signs of the approaching winter storms and haranguing his seamen mercilessly in his efforts to get the new cargo safely stowed quickly enough to let him off the shores of Gaul before the winter gales arrived to keep him in harbor. He had no slightest desire to spend the winter in Gaul, no matter how restful the sojourn might be.

The work schedule awaiting me on my arrival back in Gaul was a hectic one, and I plunged into it without delay. Within a day of our landing, young Mordred had been put to work with Rufus, who was a mere two years his senior, and I had my hands full with those particular tasks that had awaited my personal attention since the moment I set sail for Britain. There were few of those, fortunately, and I attended to them promptly, grateful that Perceval and his fellow officers had handled the mass of everyday tasks and drawn up all the necessary rosters and training schedules for the new intake of recruits. That would have been my responsibility had I remained here in Gaul, and I was genuinely grateful to have been relieved of it. But throughout all that I was doing in those first few days, I was thinking constantly about the letter I must now write to Merlyn.

The new batch of Corbenican recruits, the Second Sons, as they proudly called themselves, were already well on their way to completing their second month of basic training, and they were shaping up far more quickly than the first intake had, already developing what Lucius Genaro spoke of as a unit pride. That was to be expected, for the first intake had been the pioneers who demolished the mysteries of group discipline and the fears of the unknown that had faced them as traditionally independent, individual warriors, and they themselves were now helping to train the men who followed them. There was no longer any terra incognita in cavalry affairs for the incoming warriors of Corbenic. The men of the first intake had effectively cleared the way for all their countrymen to follow in their footsteps. Now, on the first opportunity I had to inspect the Corbenican troopers and the new recruits, I saw the change in all of them immediately. They had a confidence about them that was strikingly evident, and even the newest of the recruits already showed signs of being real cavalrymen, riding as members of a team of comrades, rather than as the self-reliant individuals they had always been in the past.

Pelles was glad to see me back in Corbenic—as was his sister Serena, who was waiting in my bed to welcome me when I retired on the first night of my visit to the villa. The king’s health had improved almost beyond belief, and he was more physically active and more enthusiastic about our joint plans and the growth of his new cavalry force than I would have thought possible mere months before. The success of our venture with his first intake of warriors had been largely responsible for the spectacular improvement in his health, and since my departure for Britain he had taken to spending at least half of his time in our new castle, in the quarters set aside for his use. He had developed a close friendship with Perceval, and was on first-name terms with Bors and Tristan.

During my absence he had even dealt with the problem of the murderous and unpunished Baldwin. I was intrigued to hear that, for Baldwin had still been held prisoner in the cells attached to the villa’s stables when I set out for Britain and I had been half expecting Pelles to have him quietly killed as he so richly deserved, but my cousin was neither that bloodthirsty nor that stupid. He had taken Baldwin, under heavy, mounted guard, on a tour of the training activities and facilities attached to the castle we had appropriated. Baldwin, no man’s fool at any time, had taken note of the activity, the organization, the discipline of the new Corbenican recruits and trainees, all working eagerly and diligently under the supervision of their Camulodian trainers. He had also been shown the training programs themselves and the number of personnel and cavalry mounts involved, and he had seen that, as he had correctly feared, Corbenic’s new military strength had already surpassed any power that he might ever have intended to bring against it from his own lands.

Then, at the end of the tour, Pelles had accused Baldwin again of foulest treachery and attempted murder of a particularly slow and heinous nature, reminding him that he had well and truly earned death at Pelles’s hands. Instead, the king had released him and told him to return home to his own holdings under threat of invasion and death should he or any of his people ever be found again in any part of Corbenic. Manacled and bound to his saddle, he had been accompanied to the edge of his own territories by a heavily armed cavalry escort, and turned loose there, weaponless and dressed in the clothes he had been wearing since his arrest on the day of our arrival.

I was not sure, when I first heard this story, that Pelles had done a wise thing in releasing such a man, and I told him so, but he merely smiled and waved away my concerns, telling me calmly that he had thought the matter through well in advance of doing what he did, and that both he and Baldwin knew, with absolute conviction, that Corbenic would never again be threatened by Baldwin or any of his people. I said nothing after that, accepting what Pelles had done, because it was done and there was no way now of undoing it, but I had lingering doubts about the wisdom of it.

It was Perceval who set my mind at ease the very next day, when I asked for his opinion. He was full of admiration for Pelles’s farsightedness and immediately pointed out the main benefit of releasing Baldwin, one that had not yet occurred to me. By releasing the father, Pelles had defanged the sons, none of whom had believed that their father would ever return home again. Convinced that he had vanished from their lives for good, they had started bickering and posturing among themselves in anticipation of the time that must soon come, when the old man died in captivity and his “kingdom” would be split among them. The truth was that each of the brothers believed that, after a certain amount of negotiating, he himself would rule Baldwin’s Land in its entirety, and tensions had already risen high, with bands of armed men in each of the brothers’ employ riding all over and squabbling with each other, not yet come to open warfare but escalating steadily in their open hostility to one another.

Pelles knew all of that from his own spies, and he knew, too, that if civil war broke out so close to his borders, his territories would inevitably be invaded and his people caught up in the war to some extent. He also knew that his cavalry force was nowhere close to being ready for full action against an invading enemy; they had not yet had sufficient time to work off their rough edges, and every day, week and month that could be gained for extending their training was priceless. And thus he had decided to release his prisoner, sending him home to restore order among his restive sons and to re-establish peace and whatever prosperity he could recapture. Baldwin would warn his sons of the threat they would now face from Corbenic, and it was likely that the sons themselves would then attempt to upgrade their readiness. But that would take time and more expertise than they had at their disposal, and in the meantime, Pelles’s people would continue training and expanding their activities and their recruitment, going from strength to strength.

By the time Perceval had finished his poetic praise of Pelles’s long-headedness in this matter, I was smiling broadly and nodding in agreement, believing finally that Baldwin alive would do far more good for Corbenic than he ever would have had Pelles simply executed him.

Time was passing quickly, I found, and my letter to Merlyn remained unwritten, mainly because I felt no great sense of urgency about writing it. The other half of Connor’s fleet had not yet returned from Camulod and was expected daily, but until it arrived and its cargo was disposed of, I saw no need to tackle the physical writing of the letter and was content to let the elements of it simmer in the back of my mind.

I had miscalculated, however, for Connor had no intention of waiting around for the rest of the fleet to arrive, late as they were. He was content to leave the Camulod-to-Gaul traffic to be handled by the people to whom he had delegated that responsibility, and he surprised me by sending word to me, after what seemed no more than a few days, that he had purchased and collected most of the material available for him on this expedition and he expected to have his fleet laden and on its way home again within the following four to five days. That precipitated some intense activity on my part, for I could not permit him to leave without the crucially important letter I must write to Merlyn, and I knew that when he was ready and the tide was right, Connor would sail, with or without my letter, so I retired to my quarters and issued emphatic orders that no one was to disturb me for any reason. And then I sat down to write.

I cannot remember how many false starts I made in composing that letter, but there were more than merely a few. I would stop to read over what I had written, and would then decide that I had not made the proper introduction, or the right connections between vital elements of what I had to describe, or that I had not approached it from the best viewpoint. And so I would start again, the rejected pieces of handmade paper littering the floor around my feet and piling ever deeper. Finally, however, I began a version that did not decry itself on first inspection, and I kept working at it until I discovered I had exhausted my fund of information and had no more that I felt obliged to say. The letter was nine pages in length and covered in my small, densely packed writing, and when I finished it I knew I had worked through the night and dawn could not be far away. I dried the ink of my signature with sand, and then I folded the missive carefully, burned all the drafts, and took it with me when I went to find whatever sleep I could.

In the morning, feeling remarkably well despite my all-night marathon, I read the letter over again in the light of the new day and was pleased to find that nothing in it struck me as being inaccurate or wrong. I wrapped it securely in soft, supple chamois leather, tied it and sealed it with wax, and slipped it into a heavy leather cylinder for Connor to take with him to Britain. And then, enjoying a remarkable feeling of achievement, I went to the kitchens in search of something to eat.

5

Two days after Connor left for Dalriada, on the last day of October, the other half of his fleet arrived from Camulod, bringing the next-to-last contingent of our cavalry force and increasing our numbers in Gaul to somewhere in the region of four hundred fully trained Camulodian cavalry. Once again, they brought their own trained mounts with them, and I made a point of taking Tiberias Cato with me when I went to inspect them upon their arrival, since I knew he was anxious to examine the new bloodstock sent out on loan from Camulod. He had already begun breeding some of our largest stallions with his own black German forest horses, and his enthusiasm for the task had infected our troopers, who were wagering among themselves on the size and birth weight of the anticipated crop of cross-bred foals.

Our officer corps was enlarged by the new intake, too, which meant that Pelles’s recruitment and training programs would expand yet again, this time passing the point beyond which his new cavalry army could become self-sustaining even were our forces to return to Britain immediately. The senior officer in the new intake was an old friend and a fellow Knight Companion, Sagramore, whom I had not seen for nigh on two years, and his arrival was a pleasant surprise. But as he had brought letters with him from Merlyn, the celebration of our reunion would have to wait until I had read whatever tidings were contained in those.

As before, however, lengthy as Merlyn’s letters were, they contained little in the way of hard, factual information about what was happening with the campaign against Connlyn in the far north of Britain, and absolutely nothing concerning Arthur’s new wife, or her whereabouts. There was information aplenty, however, about domestic affairs in and around Camulod, including a specific mention that Elaine had been delivered of a boy child some months previously.

The strength seemed to drain from my legs so that I had to sit down quickly when I read that. Fortunately no one was there to notice my sudden distress, for had anyone questioned me about it, I know not what I might have said. As it was, I sat perched on the edge of a hard chair for some time, and I have no idea whether it was for a short space or for half an hour. I can only remember thinking that Elaine—my beautiful and wondrous Elaine—had had another man’s child. It mattered nothing that the man was her legal husband, formally wed to her in the eyes of God and man. The anguish that I felt was purely self-indulgent, born of self-pity, and my mind was filled with the image of her radiant face, smiling at me.

My reverie was broken when Bors leaned in through my doorway to tell me that King Pelles had arrived and was looking for me. I quickly tidied Merlyn’s letters into a pile, weighing them down with a rusted, centuries-old dagger that someone had found in the bowels of the castle months earlier, and then I shook my head hard, as though I could dislodge all selfish and extraneous thoughts, as I strode out into the afternoon sunlight to attend to my duties and to greet my guest, who was standing in the sunlight, laughing with Perceval, Bors and a small group of our senior officers.

I had met with Pelles three times since returning from Britain, but on this occasion he took me aside from the others immediately and told me he wanted to talk about something important that we had not talked about before. I was of course intrigued, because I could tell from his demeanor—and from the cautious, almost apprehensive look on his face—that he was far less than comfortable with whatever it was that he was about to say to me. I glanced back at the others, who were paying no attention to us, and suggested that we take his cart and go for a leisurely ride together out into the countryside where we could talk at length and in private.

Pelles had made great strides in his physical recovery, but he was still not fit to ride a horse for any length of time, and so he traveled in a fast, light two-wheeled cart that had been specially built for him and was drawn by a beautifully matched pair of geldings. He agreed, and I sent a runner to the stables to bring the king’s cart, and another to the kitchens for a flask of wine and a basket of food that we could take with us. I took the reins myself, and we were soon well away from the castle and riding easily along the cliff-top path that ran parallel to the beach far below. My regal cousin, however, remained much quieter than he would normally have been on such a day and such an outing, and so I decided to tackle him directly—him and whatever was causing him such obvious concern.

“You are unhappy, Cousin. What’s troubling you?”

He flushed and looked away towards the sea on our right. “I’m not unhappy, Clothar, not at all. Uncomfortable, perhaps, but not unhappy … I have something to ask you, and I’m having difficulty with it.”

“Why?”

“I … I suppose I’m afraid you’ll think me preposterous and foolish.”

I kept my tone light and bantering and my eyes firmly fixed on the rutted pathway ahead. “Preposterous and foolish … I see, both at once. Well, Cousin, I might, once I know what you are talking about, but even if I should think you so, both at once, what would you suffer by it?”

Even without looking at him, I could tell that he was watching me closely, probably frowning a little as he tried to determine whether I was being serious or facetious, and I gave him no help, keeping my face expressionless as I continued. “This time last year you did not even know I was alive, and had anyone told you then that I thought you foolish you would have paid no attention, because my opinion on anything you did would have been meaningless to you. Now you know who I am, and I am flattered that you would be so unsure of my approval, but it really is no more necessary to you now than it was a year ago.” Only then did I turn to look at him. “Did you understand a word of what I have just said?”

He was gaping at me, and his face broke into a grin. “No,” he said, “but that’s nothing new. I seldom understand anything you say.”

“So be it, then, and let’s get on with it. What is worrying you, and why would you think I’d find you foolish?”

“Because you might think I want to move too soon.”

“Move to where? And why?”

As his story spilled out I saw at once why he was so ill at ease, because although what he had to say to me was straightforward and easy to understand on the most obvious level, it quickly became clear that there were depths and eddies lurking beneath the surface, unseen and unsuspected, that might be gravely dangerous for the unwary traveler.

While I had been away on my brief visit to Queen Morgas, he told me, he had received several approaches from other kings whose territories lay nearby, kings with whom he had never had previous dealings. About three weeks after my departure, he had had two envoys quartered in his villa, one of them from the self-styled king of the Parisii, who had given their own name now to the old Roman station of Lutetia on the Seine River, calling it Paris, or Parisia, depending upon who was giving the report, and the other from the king of an ancient kingdom that extended along the coast to the south of the Parisians’ territories.

I listened to this without commenting, fully aware that it had been hundreds of years since either of the tribes he was speaking of had known any real power, and that I could not recall having heard either one of them, ever, mentioned by name throughout my entire boyhood. Rome’s presence had driven the lesser tribes of Gaul into oblivion. Now that the legions were gone from Gaul, however, sucked home to Italia to try to stem the invasions of the Huns and the Goths, the vacuum left by their departure was rapidly being filled by other power seekers—warlords and other ambitious men calling themselves kings, and all of them in need of an appearance of legitimacy—and it seemed only natural, Pelles said, speaking as a reigning, legitimate king, that most of these should spring, or be said to spring, from the ancient ruling clans of pre-Roman Gaul.

What was most important here, however, he pointed out, was not that the claims to power being made by these newborn kings were flimsy and spurious. That was irrelevant. They already held the power, so justifying their claims to it now was mere affectation. Nor was it relevant that Pelles of Corbenic was an established and respected king, whose legitimacy had never been questioned. To nakedly aggressive and ambitious men like these upstarts, all such considerations were trivial and unimportant beside the urgency of their own agendas.

The crucial relevance of their visits to Corbenic lay in the fact that these men—kings, warlords, call them what one might—had come in person, not caring or daring to send envoys, to talk with Pelles. That could only mean one thing: that word of Corbenic’s new military strength was abroad, no doubt as the result of our victory over the fleet of raiders a few months earlier. There were rumors out there, and these people wanted to see for themselves just what Pelles had in mind, and in hand, with his new army of cavalry, and to assess the level of threat that this development might present to their own plans.

“I hear what you are saying, Cousin. They are wondering how strong your strength really is.”

“Aye, they are, and some of them are none too subtle about their wonderings.”

“Think you they would dare to test you?”

“No.” His denial had not the slightest trace of hesitation, but he had more to add. “I doubt that any of them is strong enough to try us on his own, not at this stage, because our potential—and our actual strength, for that matter—is still unknown and their own forces are all infantry troops. Some of them, no more than a few, have horsemen at their disposal, but those are wild and undisciplined, just as we were before you came. They are not cavalry … not as we know cavalry. But upstarts or not, these men are arrogant and prideful, and it is not beyond belief that two or more of them might combine their forces, for a while at least, to lure us into battle and try to get the measure of us. More worthy of note, however, is the consideration that they may be afraid of Attila and his Huns. If that is the case, and I suspect it is, then these kings may be looking for allies, purely with an eye to their own welfare. I cannot fault them for that. The Huns are out there. Only a fool would doubt that now. Theodoric is no imaginary king, and all the talk is of Attila’s rage at him.”

“Did either of these kings ask you about alliance?”

“No, but they came together here by accident and neither one would care to show weakness of any kind to his neighbor. Had they come alone, at different times, I believe the outcome might have been different.”

“Hmm … How much did you show them while they were here?”

“Very little. Next to nothing, actually. They saw what they could see with their own eyes and I made no attempt to hide anything from them, but I laid on no demonstrations for them, either. They saw whatever was happening here while they were here, and so they will have some idea of how our troopers move and function as groups, rather than as single fighters, but they can have no conception of how devastating our cavalry would be in battle.”

I rode for a spell in silence before adding, “I am glad to hear that. So, disregarding everything you have said about your visitors, what is it, in your mind, that makes you afraid I’ll think you foolish? What you have told me to this point makes perfect sense and I see nothing foolish about it. But you want to stage some kind of demonstration, don’t you?” He said nothing, but I saw his eyebrows shoot up in astonishment. “Well, am I right?”

“Umm …” His thoughts had obviously been elsewhere, but his gaze sharpened quickly and he nodded. “Aye, I do. I believe we need to do something … but I’m unsure now what would be best. I thought at first of taking a strong force with me and introducing myself to all my brother kings around these parts, but then I realized I might simply be asking for trouble doing that. They are kings, but they are not my brethren by any stretch of logic or imagination. Besides, that would be a long and strenuous exercise, and I am not yet strong enough for anything that demanding. It would mean weakening our own position here at home, too, while I was away traveling, and depriving our recruits of the teaching they could receive from the veterans I would have to take with me. So I rejected that idea. And then this morning I decided I would ask you for your advice. I’m convinced I need to do something, but I can’t make up my own mind on what would be best. That’s why I feel foolish.”

“No need, Cousin.” I had been looking about me, searching for a place to stop and eat, and now I steered the wagon off the path towards a copse of trees on the sloping side of a small knoll. “There’s no foolishness involved in this. You have defined a problem clearly and it needs to be addressed.” I looked back at him, grinning, but quite serious. “What you really need is a minor war … not a full-scale, years-long event, but a short, sharp affair that would allow us to tackle an enemy superior in numbers and to crush them quickly and thoroughly, demonstrating our far greater strength clearly enough that only a suicidal fool would ever dream of attacking Corbenic thereafter.

“That would be the best possible solution, but it’s one that’s unlikely to occur any time soon. As you say, these kings you’re talking about are too newly come to power to make alliances. They can’t afford to trust their own associates yet, let alone their rivals. One of them might attack you someday, but I doubt that any would be foolish enough to try it now, before they know your new capabilities. So, what we require is something else, some other form of demonstration that will show, peacefully but unmistakably, that Corbenic is not to be trifled with.” I hauled on the reins and stopped close by the trees, pleased to see a tiny stream meandering through the grass at the bottom of the little hill. “Here, let us climb down, cushion our bony backsides on soft green grass for a while. We can eat and drink while we await the dawning of inspiration.”

It was a full day later when a possible solution came to me, seemingly out of nowhere. I had been working all morning on a task I detested—preparing duty rosters for the coming month—and as soon as I was done with it, sometime towards noon, I made my way outside and up to the top of the walls, where I stopped to lean against the parapet and let the breeze clear my head. Directly below me, outside the walls, two ten-man squads of recruits were battling each other afoot, wearing full armor, and although I could not see their faces, I could imagine them frowning with concentration as they sought to hold formation and fight as single units of five men each, under the watchful eyes of a group of their senior trainers. The heavy clacking and clattering of their wooden practice swords carried clearly up to where I watched, and the scene suddenly reminded me of a day from my boyhood, at the Bishop’s School in Auxerre, when I had been involved, with all my classmates, in a contest of skills for an unknown prize.

An unknown prize. The phrase triggered an entire series of reactions. The mere suggestion of a prize implied a reward of real value, there for the winning; that the prize was unknown added mystery; and the combination of the two had meant that every entrant had competed against all comers with everything he had. I still remembered the excitement of that afternoon, and my heartbeat quickened as I realized that it had all been staged by a man who was here with me today—Tiberias Cato. I swung away and almost ran back down the stairs from the battlements to the castle yard.

A short time later, I was sitting in Cato’s work area, less than a quarter of a mile outside the castle gates, perched in reasonable comfort on a wooden stool as I waited for him to finish the notes he had been compiling when I arrived, and enjoying the familiar and evocative smells that surrounded the old man in his living. Predominant among those were the odors of dung and horse sweat, mixed with the sweetness of hay and the dusty, distinctive aroma of old straw, all of these augmented by Cato’s own peculiar, familiar and far-from-unpleasant body scent, and the aromatic mixture transported me effortlessly back to when I was a boy in school, bubbling with enthusiasm for everything that I was learning.

Now he sat up straight, threw down the pen he had been using and rose to his feet, beckoning me to follow him. He led me out of the cramped cubicle he used for his records keeping and across the cobbled stable yard to the front door of his cottage, where he ushered me inside and poured a mug of frothy beer for each of us from a wooden keg set up against the wall by the window. That done, he produced two small knives and a couple of wooden platters from a low shelf, and laid out a wedge of strong cheese, a fresh loaf of bread and a bowl of sun-dried grapes that he took from a lidded wooden box on the table. We ate and drank in companionable silence for a time, and then the old man set aside the heel of bread he had been eating and drank down the last of his beer before belching loudly and asking me what had brought me knocking on his door so unexpectedly.

As briefly as I could, I told him about my discussion with Pelles the previous day, describing the visits of the other kings and the motivations we had ascribed to them. He sat listening intently, his mouth pursed in thought, and when I began to talk about the contest at the Bishop’s School, he raised a hand abruptly.

“You want to set something up … something of that kind, eh? A contest, here in Corbenic.”

I nodded. “Aye. But for all comers, and not simply here in Corbenic … I think here, at the castle, where our walls can speak for themselves. A contest of arms, open to anyone from the region who wishes to compete, with prizes of sufficient value to attract the best of the best.”

“What kind of prizes?”

I barely hesitated. “Horses, for one thing. We have the finest anywhere, the biggest and the best trained, any one of them worth six to ten of any other herd. And weapons, too. We would offer fine weapons to be won, weapons of the highest quality. And purses—both gold and silver. We could make the contest highly attractive.”

“Aye, you could, but if I am not wrong in my understanding, the objective in staging this event would be to demonstrate Corbenic’s strength and superiority in cavalry. Is that not so, or have I erred here?”

“No, Magister, you’re correct, but what are you suggesting?”

Cato’s eyebrow quirked at my use of his title, and he returned it immediately, shrugging his shoulders, his voice heavy with irony. “Nothing at all, Magister … not really. But you might not be doing yourself much good, arranging such a thing. Seems to me, for this idea of yours to work the way you want it to, your own people would have to win all the prizes, against all comers. All of them. Otherwise, it’s a waste of time and effort, because if you don’t do it right—if your victory is less than overwhelming, less than total, with outsiders winning any of the major events—then the message you’ll be delivering won’t really be saying what you want it to.”

“What will it be?”

“What you’ll be saying, in the event that some of your people get beaten, is that you might be formidable, with all your elaborate, high-and-mighty cavalry, but you might not necessarily be invincible. Right?”

“No, I don’t think so.” I was hedging here, suddenly uncomfortable with what Cato was saying because part of me recognized the truth of it. “I don’t think so, because throughout the tournament, we’ll have our cavalry on parade at all times. They will dominate the event. They’ll—”

“Horse turds.” His tone was flat and unequivocal. “Who cares how they look? Who’s going to pay attention to any of that? There’s nothing magical about cavalry, Clothar. There’s been cavalry quartered in these parts now for hundreds of years. German cavalry, the best that Rome ever had. They were right here, in Corbenic, more than a hundred years ago. Of course, they were different from yours—no comparison, in fact. I know that, and you know it and your people know it, but nobody else knows it, or cares. A man on a horse is a man on a horse. Some are bigger than others, but they’re all basically the same. They’re cavalry.” He waved away my protest before I could utter a word. “I know you don’t like it, and I know it’s not even true, Clothar, but it’s what people think! It’s what they believe, and you can like it or lump it. They think your new cavalry is just another updated version of an old idea—and one that will never last, because it has been tried before, right here in their own region, and it failed then because it flies in the face of everything we know, which is that if God had wanted horses to behave like herds of sheep, he would have given them long, wooly coats.

“Besides, your troopers are Corbenicans. They’re local. They live here. That means everyone else who lives in these parts knows what to expect of them—they expect them to fail, because that’s what people always expect of people they live with. People fear and detest new ideas. They want them to fail because if they don’t fail, they’ll succeed. And that means that, willy-nilly, things will change—things that have no need to change. So don’t delude yourself with talk of expectations and perceptions, Magister Clothar. What you have to concern yourself with is how your new Corbenican cavalry will behave, if you do this thing—how they will perform. It will be what they do, what they are seen to do, that counts, and if one or more of their champions gets himself bested in fighting against an outsider, that’s the image the people watching will take away with them. It won’t be, ‘Did you see the beauty of the Corbenican formations and the size of their horses?’ It’ll be, ‘Did you see the way the Parisian champion, What’s-his-name, unhorsed that prancing fool of a Corbenican?’ People are nasty, Clothar, and they love to sneer at people who set themselves above others and then take a fall. You need to avoid that, my young friend, and at all costs.”

I realized that I had never before heard Tiberias Cato become so excited about anything other than horses, nor had I ever heard him say so much at one time, but more than anything else, his words made me recall a similar conversation I had had a few years earlier with Arthur Pendragon, about the strength and power of people’s perceptions. I stood up from the table and went to stand at the window, thinking about what Cato had said while I looked out towards the neighboring paddocks. Then I turned to look at him again. “Are you saying it won’t work? That I should abandon the idea?”

“No, damnation! I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying that if you intend to take this route, you’d better make sure that the people you select to do your fighting for you are the best of all the men at your disposal, and that they all know you’ll cut off their balls if they let you down. Don’t think, even for a moment, that you can rely on volunteers for this. All the volunteering will come from outside Corbenic. Your most important job will be selecting the best of your own men for each and every contest. You can’t afford to have anyone less than the very best in each category fighting for you, and you’ll have to have all of them training full-time, and at top capacity, for at least a month in advance of the event, because you can’t afford to leave anything to chance. Chance will always play a part in contests of skill, but not too great a part if your people are trained and rehearsed to the point of perfection … or as near to it as is humanly possible.”

I found myself grinning. “Some might call that cheating.”

Cato did not return my smile. “We are discussing war here,” he said, reverting to the same flat, emphatic tone he had used earlier. “I pray you, do not lose sight of the realities involved in this. You have, after all, just pointed them out to me. They amount to warfare, Clothar, and there is no cheating in war. There is planning, and subterfuge and blatantly contrived deception. Any ruse is legitimate in the pursuit of victory. If you pursue this plan, you will be staking everything, including the future of Pelles’s kingdom, upon your men’s ability to win a total victory. Large stakes, Seur Clothar of Camulod. Large enough, I would suggest, to make you ask yourself if this commitment can be worthwhile.

“If you decide it is, then we had better start working on it immediately. We will need to start making solid decisions very quickly: where and when these Games will be held, the kind of contests that will be involved, the way they’ll be structured, the layout of the various testing grounds, the weapons to be used, all the rules of procedure and the criteria to be applied in rendering judgment on the results. And I can tell you now, it’s already too late to do anything this year, because it will take more time than we have left. You’re going to need a year to do this right. It will take months to plan everything, so you’ll be working on that throughout the winter, and all the planning will have to be completed before we send out the word that the Games will take place. Doing that alone—getting the word out there and spread properly—will take months, and we’ll have to be ready to announce it in the spring.

“And if we do this at all, we should do it in conjunction with a major festival, the vernal equinox or the summer solstice, and invite everybody to attend, the common folk as well as the contestants. And all of them, attendees and contestants, should be invited to bring their wives and consorts with them. And if you’re going to have that many people gather, you’re going to need to be able to entertain them all day, every day, dawn to dusk, and to put them up in comfort and feed them amply for as long as will be needed.” He plucked at his lower lip and half smiled as he quirked one eyebrow at me. “You have much to think on for the next few days, I believe.”

I grinned at him. “Aye, I do, but the decision is not mine. I have to take this to King Pelles and await his pleasure on the matter, but I would like to be able to tell him you’ll help me with the planning. Will you?”

The old horse master grinned back at me and nodded. “Aye, with the planning, but not with the donkey work. I am too old nowadays to go shoveling dung.”