Part 29 (1/2)

He dreamed that he was riding by the Lake sh.o.r.e, and there, standing in a boat, poling it through the shallow water, stood Nimue; only it was not Nimue, it was a boy, with Merlin's eyes. The boy looked at him gravely, and repeated, in Merlin's voice, what Nimue had said to him yesterday when, arriving at the convent on Ynys Witrin among her maidens, she had sent to beg speech with him.

”You and I, Emrys,” she had said, giving him the boyhood name Merlin had used for him, ”have let ourselves be blinded by prophecy. We have lived under the edge of doom, and feel ourselves now facing the long-threatened fate. But hear this, Emrys: fate is made by men, not G.o.ds. Our own follies, not the G.o.ds, foredoom us. The G.o.ds are spirits; they work by men's hands, and there are men who are brave enough to stand up and say: ”I am a man; I will not.” ”I am a man; I will not.”

”Listen to me, Arthur. The G.o.ds have said that Mordred will be your bane. If he is so, it will not be through his own act. Do not force him to that act.... I will tell you now what should have remained a secret between Mordred and myself. He came to me some time ago, to Applegarth, to seek my help against the fate predicted for him. He swore to kill himself sooner than harm you. If I had not prevented him, he would have died then. So who is guilty, he or I? And he came to me again, on Bryn Myrddin, seeking what comfort I, Merlin, could give him. If he could seek to defy the G.o.ds, then so, Arthur, can you. Lay by your sword, and listen to him. Take no other counsel, but talk with him, listen, and learn.

Yes, learn. For you grow old, Arthur-Emrys, and the time will come, is coming, has come, when you and your son may hold Britain safe between your clasped hands, like a jewel cradled in wool. But loose your clasp, and you drop her, to shatter, perhaps for ever.”

In his dream Arthur knew that he had accepted her advice; he had called the parley, resolving to listen to anything his son had to say; but still Nimue-Merlin had wept, standing in the boat as it floated away on the gla.s.sy Lake and vanished into the mist. And then, suddenly, as he turned his horse to ride up towards the meeting-place, the beast stumbled, sending him headlong into deep water. Weighted by his armour - why was he full-armed for a peaceful parley? - he sank, deep and ever deeper, into a pit of black water where fish swam around him, and water-snakes like weeds and weeds like snakes wrapped his limbs so that he could not move them....

He cried out and woke, drenched in sweat as if he had indeed been drowning, but when his servants and guards came running, he laughed and made light of it, and sent them away, and presently fell again into an uneasy sleep. This time it was Gawain who came to him, a Gawain b.l.o.o.d.y and dead, but imbued somehow with a grotesque energy, a ghost of the old, fighting Gawain. He, too, came floating on the Lake water, but he pa.s.sed from its surface right into the King's tent and, pausing beside the bed, drew a dagger from his blood-encrusted side, and held it out to the King.

”Bedwyr,” he said, not in the hollow whisper in which ghosts should speak, but in a high metallic squeaking like the tent poles s.h.i.+fting in the breeze. ”Wait for Bedwyr. Promise anything to the traitor, land, lords.h.i.+p, the High Kingdom after you. And with it, even, the Queen. Anything to hold him off until Bedwyr comes with his host. And then, when you have the certainty of victory, attack and kill him.”

”But this would be treachery.”

”Nothing is treachery if it destroys a traitor.” This time Gawain's ghost spoke, strangely, in Arthur's own voice. ”This way you will make certain.” The blood-stained knife dropped to the bed. ”Crush him for ever, Arthur, make certain, make certain, certain....”

”Sir?”

The servant at his bedside, touching the King's shoulder to wake him, started back as the King, jerking upright in the bed, glared round as if in anger, but all he said was, abruptly: ”Tell them to see to the fastenings of the tent. How am I expected to sleep when the whole thing s.h.i.+fts about as if a storm was blowing?”

It had been agreed, in the exchange between the heralds, that fourteen officers from each side should meet at a spot half-way between the hosts.

There was a strip of dry moorland not far from the Lake sh.o.r.e where a pair of small pavilions had been pitched, with between them a wooden table, where the two leaders' swords were laid. Should the parley fail, the formal declaration of battle would be the raising, or drawing of a sword. Over one pavilion flew the King's standard, the Dragon on gold. To this device, Mordred, as regent, had also been ent.i.tled. He, his mind set on the necessity of being received into grace, and not putting in the way of grace the smallest rub, had given orders that his royal device should be folded away, and until the day was spent and he was declared once more as Arthur's heir, a plain standard should be carried for him.

This flew now on the other pavilion. As the two men took their places at the table, Mordred saw his father eyeing it. What he cannot have known was that Arthur himself, as a young man, had borne a plain white banner. ”White is my colour,” he had said, ”until I have written on it my own device. And write it, come in the way what will, I shall.”

To Nimue in her convent of maidens on the island in the Lake came Arthur's sister Queen Morgan. This was a Morgan subdued and anxious, knowing well what might be her fate if Arthur should be defeated or die in battle. She had been her brother's enemy, but without him she was, and would be, nothing. She could be trusted now to use all her skill and vaunted magic on his behalf.

So Nimue accepted her. As Lady of the Lake convent, Nimue stood in no awe of Morgan, either as sorceress or queen. Among her maidens were other royal ladies; one of them a cousin of Guinevere's from North Wales, another from Manau Guotodin. With them she set Morgan to prepare medicines and to make ready the barges that would be used to ferry the wounded across to the island for healing. She had seen Arthur and delivered her warning, and he had promised to call the parley and let the regent have his say. But Nimue, for all her words to Pelleas, knew what the G.o.ds withheld behind the thunder-clouds that even now were building up beyond the s.h.i.+ning Lake. Small from the island, the two pavilions could be seen, with the small s.p.a.ce between.

For all the ma.s.sed clouds on the far horizon, it promised to be a beautiful day.

The day wore on. Those officers who had accompanied their leaders to the truce table showed ill at ease at first, eyeing friends or former comrades on the other side with distrust, but after a while, relaxing, they began to talk among themselves, and fell into groups behind their respective leaders' pavilions.

Out of earshot of them, Arthur stood with Mordred. Occasionally they moved, as if by consent, and paced a few steps and back. Sometimes one spoke, sometimes the other. The watchers, focused on them even while they spoke of other things, tried to read what was happening. But they could not. The King, still looking tired, and frowning heavily, did nevertheless listen with calm courtesy to what the younger man was, with emphasis, saying.

Farther away, unable to see clearly or to hear anything at all, the armies watched and waited. The sun climbed the sky. The heat increased, brightness flas.h.i.+ng back from the gla.s.sy surface of the Lake. Horses stamped and blew and switched their tails, impatient of heat and flies, and in the ranks the slight fretting of suspense changed to restlessness. The officers, themselves on the fidget, checked it where they could, and watched the truce table and the sky with steadily growing tension. Somewhere in the distance the first dull roll of thunder sounded. The air weighed heavy, and men's skins tightened with the coming storm. It was to be guessed that neither side wanted the fight, but, by the irony that governs affairs of violence, the longer the truce talks went on, the more the tension grew, till the slightest spark would start such a fire as only death could quench.

None of those watching was ever destined to know what Arthur and Mordred spoke of. Some said later - those who lived to speak - that in the end the King smiled. Certain it is that he was seen to put out a hand to his son's arm, turning back with him towards the table where the two swords lay side by side, unsheathed, and beside them two goblets and a golden jug of wine. Those nearest heard a few words: ”...To be High King after my death,” said Arthur, ”and meanwhile to take lands of your own.”

Mordred answered him, but in a voice too low to overhear. The King, gesturing to his servant to pour the wine, spoke again. ”Cornwall,” they could hear, and later, ”Kent,” and then, ”It may well prove that you are right.”

Here he stopped and glanced round as if some sound had interrupted him. A sudden stray current of air, thunder-heavy, had stirred the silk of his pavilion, so that the ropes creaked. Arthur s.h.i.+fted his shoulders as if against a cold draught, and looked sideways at his son, a strange look (it was the servant who, afterwards, told this part of the story), a look which was mirrored in a sudden flash of doubt in Mordred's face, as if, with the smile and the smooth words and the proffered wine, there might still be trickery there. Then in his turn the regent shrugged, smiled, and took the goblet from his father's hand.

A movement went through the waiting ranks, like a ruffle of wind across a cornfield.

The King raised his goblet, and the sun flashed in the gold.

An answering flash, from the group beside his pavilion, caught his eyes. He whipped round, shouting.

But too late.

An adder, a speckled snake no more than two handspans long, had crept from its hiding to bask on the hot ground. One of Arthur's officers, intent on the scene at the truce table, stepped back unseeingly onto the creature's tail. Whipping round, the adder struck. At the pain the man, whirling, saw the snake on the recoil. His own reflex, that of a trained fighting man, was almost as fast. He s.n.a.t.c.hed his sword out and slashed down at the snake, killing it.

The sun struck the metal. The sword's flash, the King's raised arm, his sudden movement and shout of command, came to the watching hosts as the long-awaited signal. The inaction, the nerve-stretching tension, made almost unbearable by the thundery heat and the sweating uncertainty of that long vigil, suddenly snapped, in a wild shout from both sides of the field.

It was war. This was the day. This was the wicked day of destiny.

A dozen flashes answered as the officers on both sides drew their swords. The trumpets screamed, drowning the shouts of the knights who, trapped between the armies, seized their horses from the grooms and turned furiously to hold back the converging ranks. They could not be heard; their gestures, misinterpreted as incitements to attack, were wasted. It was a matter only of seconds, seconds of furious noise and confusion, before the front ranks of the two armies met in a roaring clash. The King and his son were swept apart, each to his proper station, Arthur under the great Dragon, Mordred no longer regent and King's son, but for all time branded traitor, under the blank standard that, now, would never be written on. And then over the bar of the field, called by the trumpets, like a sea of tossing manes, came the spears and horsehair of the Saxons, and the black banners of the northern fighters who, like the ravens, could hardly wait to take the pickings from the dead.

Soon, too late to dull those flas.h.i.+ng signals, the thunderheads came slowly ma.s.sing across the hot sky.

The air darkened, and in the distance came the first flicker of lightning, the herald of the storm.

The King and his son were to meet again.

Towards the end of the day, with his friends and long companions dead or dying round him, and the hundreds of wasted deaths reeking to the now dark and threatening sky, it is doubtful if Arthur even remembered that Mordred was anything but a traitor and an adulterer. The straight speaking, the truths laid down during that talk by the truce table, the faith and trust so nearly reaffirmed, all had vanished in the first stress and storm of the attack. It was Arthur, duke of battles, who once more took the field.

Mordred was the enemy, the Saxon allies his savage helpers; this battle had been fought before, and many times. This was Glein and Agned, Caerleon and Linnuis, Cit Coit Caledon and Badon Hill. On all these fields the young Arthur had triumphed; for all of them his prophet and adviser, Merlin, had promised him the victory and the glory. Here, too, on the Camel field, it was victory.

At the end of the day, with the thunder overhead and the lightning flaming white from the sky and the water of the Lake, Arthur and Mordred came once again face to face. There were no words. What words could there have been? For Mordred, as for his father, the other man was now the enemy. The past was past, and there was no future to be seen beyond the need to get to the end of this moment that would bring with it the end of the day.

It was said afterwards, no one knows by whom, that at the moment of meeting, as the two men, on foot now, and white with the sweat and dust of the battlefield, knew one another, Mordred checked in his stride and stroke. Arthur, the veteran, did not. His spear took his son straight and clean beneath the rib-cage.

Blood gushed down the spear shaft in a hot stream over Arthur's hand. He loosed the shaft, and reached for his sword. Mordred lurched forward like a spitted boar. The b.u.t.t of the shaft struck the ground. He leaned on it, and, still carried forward by the weight of the half-checked stroke, came within sword's length of his father. Arthur's hand, slippery with blood, fumbled momentarily on Caliburn's grip, and in that moment Mordred's sword swung, even as he fell dying, in a hard and deadly blow to the side of the King's head.

Mordred pitched down then into the pool of his own blood. Arthur stood for a few seconds still, his sword dropping from his bloodied hand, his other hand moving numbly as if in an attempt to ward off some slight and trivial blow; then slowly his body bent and buckled, and he, too, fell, and his blood joined with Mordred's on the ground.

The clouds broke, and like a waterfall the rain came down.

EPILOGUE.

The cool stream on his face brought Mordred back for a moment into the dark. It was quiet, too, all sounds hushed and far, like distant water lapping on a pebbled sh.o.r.e.

A cry somewhere nearby. ”The King! The King!” ”The King! The King!”

A bird calling. The hens were coming down the s.h.i.+ngle for food. A gull screaming, but in words now: ”The King! The King!”

Then, and this made him sure it was a dream, the voices of women. He could see nothing, feel nothing, but near him was the rustle of a gown and a gust of women's scent. Voices eddied across him, but no one touched him. A woman's voice said: ”Lift him carefully. Here. Yes, yes, my lord, lie still. All will be well.”

And the King's voice, too faint to hear, followed - surely? - by Bedwyr's: ”It is here. I have it safely.

The Lady will keep it for you till you need it again.”