Wicked Day (20 page)

"Poison."

The word sent a shiver through the company. Men repeated it to each other, so that the whisper ran through the air like a hissing. Poison. The woman's weapon. The witch's weapon.

Mordred, unmoving, felt Gawain stiffen beside him. "You took them poison?"

"Yes. Yes. With the gifts. A present of wine."

None of the local people spoke. And none of those from Orkney needed to. Mordred said softly, a statement, rather than a question: "From the queen."

Gabran said, on another long, gasping breath: "Yes."

"Why?"

"In case the woman knew… guessed… something about you."

"What about me?"

"I don't know."

"You are dying, Gabran. What about me?"

Gabran, queen's minion, queen's dupe, told his last lie for the queen. "I do not know. I… swear it."

"Then die now," said Mordred, and pulled the knife out.

They took him straight away to the High King.

15

ARTHUR WAS DOING NOTHING MORE alarming than choose a hound puppy out of a litter of six.

A boy from the kennels had brought them in, with the bitch in anxious attendance, and the six pups, white and brindled, rolled yapping and wrestling with one another round the King's feet. The bitch, restless and uneasy, darted in repeatedly to pick up a pup and restore it to the basket, but before she had grabbed another, the first would clamber straight out and re-join the tumble on the floor.

The King was laughing, but when his guards brought Mordred in, the laughter went out of his face as if a light had been quenched. He looked startled, then recovered himself.

"What is this? Arrian?"

The man addressed said stolidly: "Murder, sir. A stabbing. One of the Orkney men. This young man did it. I didn't get the rights of it, sir. There's others outside that saw it. Do you want them brought in as well, sir?"

"Later, perhaps. I'll talk to the boy first. I'll send when I want them. Let them go now."

The man saluted and withdrew. The hound-boy began to gather up the pups. One of them, a white one, eluded him, and, squeaking like an angry mouse, charged back to the King's feet. It seized a dangling lace in its teeth and, growling, worried it furiously. Arthur glanced down as the hound-boy pulled the pup away. "Yes. That's the one. To be named Cabal again. Thank you." The boy scuttled out with the basket, the bitch at his heels.

Mordred stayed where the men had left him, just inside the door. He could hear the guard outside being mounted again. The King left his chair by the leaping fire, and crossed to where a big table stood, littered with papers and tablets. He seated himself behind this, and pointed to the floor across the table from him.

Mordred advanced and stood. He was shaking, and it took all his will-power to control this, the reaction from his first kill, from the hideous memory of the burned cottage and the feel of that weather-washed bone in his hand, and now the dreaded confrontation with the man he had been taught was a ferocious enemy. Gone, now, was the cool conviction that the High King would not trouble with such as he; Mordred had himself provided a just excuse. That he would be killed now, he had no doubt at all. He had brawled in a king's house, and, though the man he had killed was one of the Orkney household, and was justly punished for a foul murder, Mordred, even as a prince of Orkney, could hardly hope to escape punishment himself. And though Gawain had supported him, he would hardly go on doing so now that Gabran's confession had branded Morgause, too, with the murder.

None of this showed in the boy's face. He stood, pale-faced and still, with his hands gripped together behind his back where the King could not see their trembling. His eyes were lowered, his mouth compressed. His face looked sullen and obstinate, but Arthur knew men, and he saw the telltale quiver under the eyes, and the quick rise and fall of the boy's breathing.

The King's first words were hardly alarming.

"Supposing you tell me what happened."

Mordred's eyes came up to find the King watching him steadily, but not with the look that had brought Morgause to her knees in the roadway at Camelot. He had, indeed, a fleeting but powerful impression that the King's main attention was on something quite other than Mordred's recent crime. This gave him courage, and soon he found himself talking, freely for him, without noticing how Arthur's apparently half-absent questioning led him through all the details, not just of the killing of Gabran, but of his own story from the beginning. Too highly wrought to wonder why the King should want to hear it, the boy told it all: the life with Brude and Sula, the meeting with Gawain, the queen's summons and subsequent kindness, the ride to Seals' Bay with Gabran, the final hideous discovery of the burned-out cottage. It was the first time since Sula's death, and the end of his own childhood, that he had found himself talking

— confiding, even — in someone with whom communication was easy. Easy? With the High King?

Mordred did not even notice the absurdity. He went on. He was talking now about the killing of Gabran.

At some point in the tale he took a step forward to the table's edge, and laid the wooden charm in front of the King. Arthur picked it up and studied it, his face expressionless. On his hand a great carved ruby glimmered, making the pathetic thing the crude toy that it was. He laid it down again.

Mordred came to an end at last. In the silence that followed, the flames in the big fireplace flapped like flags in the wind.

Again the King's words were unexpected. He spoke as if the question came straight from some long-held thought, that seemed, to the matter in hand, quite irrelevant.

"Why did she call you Mordred?"

With all the familiar talk behind him, the boy hardly paused to think as he replied, with a directness that only an hour ago would have been unthinkable:

"It means the boy from the sea. That's where they got me from, after I was saved from the boat that you had the children put in to drown."

"I?"

"I heard since that it wasn't you, lord. I don't know the truth of it, but that is what I was told first."

"Of course. That is what she would tell you."

"She?"

"Your mother."

"Oh, no!" said Mordred quickly. "Sula never told me anything, not about the boat, or about the killings.

It was Queen Morgause who told me, much later. As for my name, half the boys in the islands are called Mordred, Medraut.… The sea is everywhere."

"So I understand. Which is why it has taken so long for me to locate you, even knowing where your mother was. No, I am not talking about Sula. I mean your real mother, the woman who bore you."

Mordred's voice came strangled. "You know that? You were — you mean you were
looking
for me?

You actually know who my mother is — who I really am?"

"I should." The words came heavily, as if loaded with meaning, but Arthur seemed to change direction, and added merely: "Your mother is my half-sister."

"Queen Morgause?"
The boy gaped, thunderstruck.

"Herself."

Arthur left it there for the moment. One thing at a time. Mordred's eyes blinked rapidly, his brain taking in this astounding new fact, thinking back, thinking ahead. .,-. .

He looked up at last. Fear was forgotten now; the past, even the recent past, forgotten also. There was a blaze behind his eyes that told of an almost overmastering excitement.

"I see it now! She did tell me a little. Only hints — hints that I couldn't understand, because the truth never occurred to me. Her own son… Really her own son!" A deep breath. "Then
that
is why she sought me out! Gawain was only the excuse. I did think it strange that she should want to nurture one of her husband's bastards by some girl from the town. And even to show me favour! When all the time I was her own, and only a bastard because I was born before time! Oh, yes, I know that now! They had been wed barely eight months when I was born. And then King Lot came back from Linnuis and—"

A sudden complete stop. The excited comprehension vanished as if a shutter had dropped across his eyes.

More things were, coming together. He said, slowly:
"It was King Lot who ordered the massacre of
the babies?
Because his eldest son had a doubtful birth? And my mother saved me, and sent me to Brude and Sula in the Orkneys?"

"It was King Lot who ordered the massacre. Yes."

"To kill me?"

"Yes. And to blame me for it."

"Why that?"

"For fear of the people. The other parents whose children did die. Also because, even though in the end he fought under my command, Lot was always my enemy. And for other reasons."

The last sentence came slowly. Arthur, still feeling his way towards the moment when the most important truth might be told, lent it a weight that might have been expected to set Mordred asking the question that had been fed to him. But Mordred was not to be steered. He was busy with his own long obsession. He took a step forward, to lean with both hands flat on the table and say, with intensity:

"Yes, other reasons! I know them! I was his eldest born, but because I was begotten out of wedlock he was afraid that in days to come men might doubt my birth, and make trouble in the kingdom! It was better to be rid of me, and get another prince in wedlock, who might in due time take the kingdom without question!"

"Mordred, you are running too far ahead. You must listen."

It is doubtful if Mordred noticed that the High King was speaking with less than his usual assurance.

Was looking, indeed, if one could use such a word of the great duke of battles, embarrassed. But Mordred was past listening. The full implications of what he had learned in the past few minutes swept over him in a bewildering cloud, but brought with them a new confidence, a lifting of caution, the driving satisfaction of at last being able to say it all, and to say it to the man who could make it come true.

He swept on, stammering a little. "Am I not, then, in sober fact, heir to Dunpeldyr? Or, if Tydwal is to hold that stronghold for Gawain, then of the Orkneys? Sir, the two kingdoms, so far apart, are hard for one man to hold, and this, surely, could be the time to divide them? You have said you will not let Queen Morgause go back. Let me go back instead!"

"You have not understood me," said the King. "You have no right to either one of Lot's kingdoms."

"No right!" It could have been the young Arthur himself who said it, springing upright like a bow when the arrow flies. "When you yourself were begotten out of wedlock by Uther Pendragon, on the lady who was still Duchess of Cornwall, and who could not wed him before a month was out?"

No sooner was it said than he would, if he could, have swallowed the words back. The King said nothing, nor did his look change, but recollection struck Mordred silent, and with it his fear returned.

Twice in one evening he had lost his temper, he, Mordred, who for years now had fought his nature down to achieve, as armour against the displacement, the insecurity of his life, that sea-cold shell of control.

Stumblingly, he tried to unsay it. "My lord, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to insult you or… or your lady mother. I only meant—I've thought about this for so long, thought every way whether it could be legal for me to have a place, a place to rule.… I know I could. One does.… And I thought about you, and how you came to it. Of course I did. Everyone knows — that is — men do say—"

"That I am technically a bastard?"

Amazingly, the King did not sound angry. Mordred's courage crept back. His fists pressed into the table, striving for steadiness. He said carefully: "Yes, sir. I wondered about the law, you see. The mainland law. I was going to find out, and then ask you. My lord, if Gawain goes to Dunpeldyr, then, by the Goddess herself, I promise you that I am fitter than Gaheris or Agravain to rule the Orkneys! And who knows what trouble and moil there could be if twins were named successors?"

Arthur did not answer at once. Mordred, his plea made, the words said, subsided into silence. The King came out of his thoughts, and spoke.

"I have listened to you because I was curious to know what kind of man you had grown to be, with your strange upbringing, so like my own." A slight smile. "As "everyone knows," I, too, was begotten out of wedlock, then hidden for many years. With me it was fourteen years, but I was in a household where from the start I was taught the skills of knighthood. You have had less than four years of such teaching, but they tell me you have made much of them. You will come into your own, believe me, but not as you have planned or imagined. Now you will listen to me. And sit down, please."

Wondering, the boy pulled up a stool and sat. The King himself stood up, and paced the length of the room and back before speaking.

"First of all, whatever the law, whatever the precedent, there is no question of your taking the kingdom of the Orkneys. That will be for Gawain. My intention is to keep Gawain and his brothers here among my fighting knights, and then, when the time is right, and if he wishes it, let him take back his island kingdom from my hand. And in the meantime, Tydwal will stay in Dunpeldyr."

He stopped his pacing, and sat down again.

"This is not injustice, Mordred. You can have no claim to either Lothian or the Orkneys. You are not Lot's son." He gave it emphasis. "King Lot of Lothian was not your father."

A pause. The flames roared in the chimney. Outside in a corridor somewhere, someone called out and was answered. The boy asked, in a flattened, neutral voice: "Do you know who is?"

"I should," said the King, for the second time.

Now comprehension was instant. The boy went upright on the stool. It brought his eyes almost on a level with the King's.

"You?"

"I," said Arthur, and waited.

This time it took a moment or two, and then, not the sick disgust he expected, but merely wonder and a slow assessment of this new fact.

"With Queen Morgause? But that — that—"

"Is incest. Yes." He left it there. No excuse, no protestation of his own ignorance of the relationship when Morgause seduced her young half-brother to her bed. In the end the boy said merely: "I see."