I did not go. I lay alone in my pavilion, listening to the far off sounds of Gawain shouting, and Arthur, and even Lancelot. I had not expected that. I had expected Lancelot to come as a supplicant to Arthur, but he was angry, too. He was angry that Guinevere had been put to the fire, angry that he was being treated like a traitor.
But where the shouts and anger had come quick and fast, they fell away quickly, too. I still did not go out. I could not bear to watch Lancelot give her away. In the end, though they both talked of their great love for her, she was a thing to them, to be given back and forth. That was why Mordred wanted her so badly, for she was his father’s most prized possession.
I came to the door of my pavilion when I heard it go quiet. I stood and watched as Arthur came back to his pavilion with Guinevere. I saw his hand, tight around her upper arm. She came willingly beside him, but it looked still almost as though he was dragging her. She did not see me. I was sure that her thoughts were of Joyous Guard. She looked, too, thinner and more tired than I had seen her in my dream, and worse than that, absent from herself and from Arthur beside her. This would only go better for Mordred, only feed his grim obsession. I was sick with it, sick with the thought of it. Sick, too, with the thought that Arthur would take her now into his tent and – what? – I could not pretend I did not know Arthur. Nor could I pretend I did not know what a husband did to his wife once he has found out that she has loved another.
Chapter Seventy Four
As I stood at the mouth of my own tent, staring at Arthur’s, listening to the violent shouting – from both of them – within, and trying not to picture what might be going on inside, Mordred strode up beside me.
“So,” he said, low and dark, “my father has his wife again.”
It fell suddenly, awfully quiet in the tent. I did not say anything to Mordred. I did not turn to look at him. It was dark overhead, the clouds low, the night growing bitterly cold as the sun sank away. Perhaps it would even snow. There was an awful, grim atmosphere around the camp, and it was not just the ominous weather. No one knew what the next move would be. It all depended, I supposed, on what happened tonight, in that tent. I did not know if war would ever end if Guinevere confessed the truth to Arthur, or worse, gloated of it, to punish him for wanting her killed. That did not seem beyond her. Would Arthur rest until Lancelot was dead? Or would it only hollow him out from his heart, that the one man he could not bear to kill had done this crime against him?
Mordred reached for my hand. He wanted to know what was going on inside. I snatched it away. He reached for it again, and I jumped back.
“You will not benefit from my magic arts again, Mordred,” I told him, cold and aloof, drawing myself back from him, crossing my arms over my chest.
“Why not?” he demanded.
“Why not?” I snarled. “Mordred, you tried to force yourself on me. Our agreement is over. Do you understand?” I took a threatening step towards him. I did not know how much black magic I was capable of, but I knew what Nimue had done, and I knew if I summoned her to lock Mordred beneath the earth until he was crushed to death by his own self-love then she would come, and she would see it done. I had an ally stronger than he was now, and I would not forget it.
“So, it will be war between you and me, then?” he asked. His empty black eyes bored into me, but I did not feel them. Not anymore. Somehow it was a relief to be openly his enemy.
“Mordred, it has always been war between you, and everyone else.”
He turned around and left.
The next day we rode back to Camelot. Arthur must have been satisfied with what was returned to him. They rode side by side, Arthur and Guinevere, as though they were the same King and Queen they had been long ago, only now they did not look at each other, or speak to each other at all. I hung back with Ywain in the column of men leaving the camp. As we went, I turned over my shoulder and looked at Joyous Guard disappearing into nothingness over the horizon. Kay was there still, and Lancelot. If I could have done without breaking Arthur’s heart even more, I would have closed my eyes and opened them there.
“Is it over, then?” Ywain asked quietly, beside me.
Without turning to look at my son, I shook my head. “No, Ywain. It is not over.”
I did not want to go to Camelot. When the two paths opened up before us, I turned my horse towards Rheged, and Ywain and his men followed. I was pleased at that. So, my son was with me. Perhaps Arthur would be angry that I had absented myself from his and Gawain’s war, but I did not care. I wanted to absent myself from the whole thing.
Nimue was in Rheged when we arrived, waiting in my room. I walked in with Ywain, who was still wanting to talk strategy. I could tell he was considering whether to put the might of Rheged behind Arthur once more, but the war had moved from Britain. Even now it would be moving across the sea, Lancelot retreating to his father’s castle at Benwick and gathering all the men who owed him allegiance or who had heard of his strength on the battlefield. That was where it would be decided, far from here, and Rheged would retreat into its peace. Perhaps I would have to punish the lords of the other lands who had not put their strength behind Arthur, but that would come later. Besides, it did not seem worth it to me to punish our own people, when we too, Ywain and I, might have been swayed to pledge our allegiance to a different leader.
Nimue smiled when she saw Ywain and me together, and I felt the pain run through me again. I did not want her pity, I did not want her painful sympathy. It only made me think of all that wasted time.
I stepped forward into the embrace she offered me. She did not look like a child anymore, but she still felt small as one in my arms.
“Nimue,” I said, lost in my confusion, in all I needed to know, “where have you been?”
“In Avalon,” she replied simply. “There was no right cause to stand behind in Arthur’s war. Avalon will not move against Lancelot. He was fostered there, and the island is his home. It was the same reason, Morgan,” she added, delicately, “that Avalon never moved against you, even after you tried to kill Arthur. Avalon does not abandon its own. I can take no part in their war.”
I nodded. I understood.
Ywain was uncomfortable around Nimue. I think something deep in his blood, some vestige of my magic, sensed the strength of her power, and it made him uneasy. He made a polite excuse to leave.
I sat with Nimue in my window seat, us both facing each other with our knees drawn up. I knew I did not have much time.
“Nimue…” I felt uneasy, unsure how to begin. I had asked for death before, but that had been in the heat of my anger. I drew in a sharp breath. “Now is the time. You must take Mordred, and you must do whatever you did to Merlin to him. Shut him beneath the earth. Kill him. I know he is Arthur’s only child, his heir, but there is no other way.”
Nimue took my hands in hers. “Morgan, I cannot. Merlin put himself into my hands. He loved me. He came to me of his own free will and I – I had to. To protect Arthur, to protect Britain. To protect you. Perhaps if we had acted earlier – perhaps I could have done something while Mordred was still a child, but now –” She shook her head. There were tears shining in her eyes, and her voice was beginning to crack. For the first time I felt truly, deeply and completely afraid. “Even if I could lay my hands on him, I do not know if I have the strength in me to do it. There is something. I –” She shook her head again. “There is a blackness around him. I cannot see where he is, who he is with, what he is doing. I do not understand it – perhaps if we still had Merlin’s books. No, no, Morgan I know why you did it, and perhaps you were right. But Morgan,” her look grew steely again, and she leaned towards me, the tears in her eyes still unfallen, “I will do everything in my power, I will give all my strength, to stop him, and to save Arthur. I have sacrificed so much, Morgan, to keep him safe.”
She did not say Avalon will do everything in its power. She did not say I have defended my King.
“Was there ever anything between you?” I ask
ed, softly.
“What?”
“Between you and Arthur.”
Nimue shook her head, but she did not meet my eye.
“Arthur loves his wife,” she said tersely, leaning back away from me, letting her hands trail out of mine.
“And you are happy with Pelleas.”
She nodded. “The ones you want so much you think you will die without them, they are not the ones who make you happy.”
I thought of Lancelot, and then of Accolon and Kay.
“You are right, Nimue.” Now I had begun I could not stop thinking about Kay, and the way that we had been. I should have held tighter to that. I should not have let it go. “You know, I wished over and over again that Ywain would be Kay’s,” I told her.
To my surprise she sat up suddenly beside me. “Is he not?” she asked.
“Isn’t it plain? He looks just like Uriens – he did, more so, anyway, when he was a boy.”
I felt my heart flutter for a moment, the old wish gathering around me, but then she shrugged in agreement. “I suppose he does. But I have always thought that he looked just like you.”
I let it pass away. Worse, far worse, it would have been for her to say he must have been Kay’s, and for me to have been cold to him for Uriens’ sake for all these eighteen years.
Chapter Seventy Five
With the start of summer came the news that Arthur was taking his armies south across the water to France. War was coming to Lancelot’s castle. I was surprised at how well I remembered Benwick Castle from my time there. It had been so long ago. Ywain had been an infant, still. But I remembered.
I was tired of war. I had watched three wars already. I had waited pregnant in Rheged while Arthur fought with Lot, I had ridden with the armies to Rome and stood back in the camp while the men sacked the city and sang their songs of victory, and I had waited in the camp outside Joyous Guard, not wanting to know what was going on. Not wanting to guess. Another war. I did not want to go.
Ywain wanted to. He was a young man, and all he had ever been told was that the measure of a man was his victories in battle. All the great men he had ever heard of were fine warriors. His Uncle Arthur, the great warrior king who conquered all of Europe. Sir Lancelot, the man that no one could defeat on the battlefield. Sir Gawain, the brave Prince of Lothian from whom entire armies fled. This was the size the men I had known as boys came to my son as. Big, and bright and bold as heroes. Like gold statues. But I had seen Gawain cry, and seen Arthur twelve years old in his nightshirt, pouting because his brother had a boy in his bedroom, and seen Lancelot lying beside me, wounded.
I sat with Ywain in the council room that had been his father’s and, I supposed, his father’s father’s before that. I realised that I knew nothing about the ancestors of my son on his father’s side. They were kings too. Perhaps once they had been kings of all of Wales, although now Rheged was still powerful enough to have the other kingdoms nearby under its vassalage. I sat in the window, gazing out across Rheged’s courtyard. The knights below were gathering and preparing for war. I had seen the same sight, almost, long, long ago when I had been pregnant with Ywain. I felt the same things then that I did now. How pointless it was. And once again it was for the sake of Arthur and a woman.
I gazed at Ywain, sitting at the table, leaning over a map. His lips were moving with his thoughts as he traced his finger down across the spine of France to Benwick. I thought perhaps he was counting the miles, or working out the men he could take there. He was quick and sharp. I wondered again who had taught him.
“You should think, again, about marriage,” I told my son, gently.
He looked up from the map. “Marriage?” he asked, unsure of where my words had come from. If there was to be war, then my son might be killed. He should try to leave a child behind him, if he could, before it was too late.
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “To whom? There are no princesses in Britain, and we are at war with France.”
“There are girls in Avalon. No, they are not princesses, but it is an honour for a man to have a wife who has had her woad in Avalon. An honour your father always failed to appreciate.”
To my surprise, Ywain seemed a little more interested. He turned in his seat to face me, looking away from the map.
“A witch?” he asked.
I nodded. “You have magic in your blood, from me. I am known in Avalon. You could choose a girl with whom you could be happy. You wouldn’t have to worry about allegiances, or politics. Besides, it would give you Avalon’s protection, once I was gone.”
He turned back away from me, after I had said that. I supposed he had not realised that Avalon only protected its own. Perhaps he had thought that half my blood in his veins made him one of Avalon’s own as well, but that was not how Avalon worked.
“Do I need it?” he asked, quietly.
“We all do.”
But as it turned out, there was not enough time. Arthur called us before the end of spring came, to go to France. It would be hot down there in the south, and perhaps Arthur wanted an end to it, before the heat that came with the full ripeness of summer would make warring unbearable.
So Ywain prepared for war, not marriage, and I prepared myself for the fact that I might never take my son to Avalon. Somehow I had felt that this might be a kind of redemption for us. Well, I would have to put all of my strength and skill, then, into keeping my son alive.
Nimue left as the last preparations were being made. She kissed me on the cheek, and told me to come to Avalon when it was over. I hoped I would live to see it. I did not know, truly, if war between Arthur and Lancelot would ever reach an end. Arthur would not win, and Lancelot would not kill him.
It was the day she left, as though her presence, her power had been keeping him away, that I returned to my room, and found Mordred there. When I saw him I could feel the fear pumping in my heart, but I pushed it away. I would not be afraid of him. I was in my castle. I was Queen here. He was just a nasty, greedy boy.
“Leave, Mordred,” I told him from the doorway.
“I need a potion of yours,” he told me, ignoring me.
“I already told you, Mordred, you will get no more magical help from me.”
He darted forwards towards me and I rushed out of the way. I changed into his own shape. He would not intimidate me. Besides, I calculated that Mordred loved himself enough to be put off striking someone who looked exactly like himself. I noticed that he wore Arthur’s surcoat, the coat of red and gold emblazoned with Uther’s dragon, and as I had taken his shape so, too, did I.
“Morgan.” His tone was low and threatening and he stepped towards me, but I felt safe. I was prepared this time. “Give it to me of your own will, or I will take it.”
“Take what?” I sneered. “The books are burned, and you have no magic skill of your own. Sure enough you have power in your blood, but you have no knowledge. Take anything you like from here. In your hands, it will be no good.”
I did not even know what he could possibly want. Perhaps it was just the potion for his blood. Perhaps even Mordred was afraid of death, though I could not see what joy life held for such a bitter creature as him. He turned from me and began searching through the cupboards in my room. I leaned back against the doorframe, watching him. Eventually he found something, something about which I had forgotten, but I was not worried. It was the remnants of the potion I had given Uriens the night I had killed him. It would be old, weak. It would hardly have any power left in it. Still, Mordred had a cruel look of victory on his face, and he held the neck of the leather skin of it tightly in his hand, and shook it before me.
“You have forgotten something, sweet Aunt!” he cried in delight.
I shrugged. “You wish to put a man to sleep? That drink is fifteen years old.” I shrugged again. “Take it.”
He seemed pleased by that, though I could not see why. As he went to walk past me, I put out my hand to stop him.
“Mordred, what did
you come here for? Surely not just to see if I had any potions?”
“I came on my father’s orders. To make sure Rheged was emptied, for war.”
The next day, we departed. Mordred lingered behind to make sure that everyone left. The men were all afraid of him, I could see that. Ywain tried to show that he was not afraid, but he did a poor job of it, and his men sensed that Mordred was someone to be feared.
I rode side by side with my son at the head of the armies of Gore. It was a long ride, and tedious. The horses did not like the journey across the sea, and there were not enough boats so we were packed on tight. Mordred did not follow close behind. There must have been men to collect back at Camelot, or some other task he had to perform for his father. I was grateful for it. I did not like having him around.
Even on the boats, men were getting ill, and injured. There were rats, and men were bitten and grew infected. I gave my healing touch to everyone that I could, but without the herbs I needed, without the time to prepare, there was little more than that that I could give. When we landed in Calais, we had already lost almost fifty men.
The journey down was perilous, too. No one had warned us in Rheged that Carhais, the city of Guinevere’s ancestors, was not with Arthur. No, the Breton folk had decided that they owed their allegiance not to their princess Guinevere’s husband, but to her protector Lancelot, and they were unwilling for us to pass and go to his aid.
MORGAN: A Gripping Arthurian Fantasy Trilogy Page 54
