Taliesin closed his eyes briefly, trying to compose himself. "I hadn't expected Arthur to... to change so much. That is, the incident on the road with the, er, food ..." He put a trembling hand to his brow. "And now this..."
"Did you really think he'd be the same person he was sixteen hundred years ago?" Hal spat. "He's already lived that life. He needs another. His own life, not this perversion you've dreamed up."
"It's the only one there is!" the Merlin rasped. "That was the magic, to bring about this life, in this way. I paid for that magic with my life. I have nothing more to give."
Hal stood motionless, looking as if he were going to punch the old man. Then he turned away. "Jesus," he said, raking his fingers through his hair. "Jesus," he said again. A long moment passed between them. "How much time has he got?"
"What?"
"He's living out King Arthur's unspent life, isn't he? How much more of that life has he got? He's already eighteen years old."
"I... I can't say." Taliesin licked his dry lips. "I never thought..."
"Well, we'd better start thinking. Because sooner or later, somebody's going to try to kill him."
The old man blanched.
"That bullet I took could just as easily have hit Arthur."
"Hal, don't talk this way. Please."
"Will my shutting up keep it from happening?" He turned away in disgust. "You selfish old goat," he said.
"Selfish!" Taliesin shook with anger. "I gave my life for this magic! Don't you understand?"
Hal whirled back to face him. "What I understand is that you stuck a wonderful kid with the butt-end of someone else's life, and it's turning bad."
"It's not turning bad. He's working miracles."
Hal's eyes were cold. "And guess what happens to miracle workers?" he asked softly. "What do you think we do with our Messiahs?"
He walked out.
Taliesin leaned his head back on the sofa, feeling sick. Hal was right. Horribly, startlingly right. Arthur's time on earth would only be as long as his namesake had left in that other life.
And the blood was already starting to flow.
Emily ran inside her house and leaned against the locked door, weeping.
It was the shock of the situation, she told herself. First, seeing Hal lying in a pool of his blood, then having him come to life again in front of her.
But it was neither of those remarkable occurrences that caused her to run away from Miller's Creek. It was the woman who had pointed at her with a look of horror in her eyes, and then fainted.
Fainted. Emily's face had apparently been so hideous that the woman had fainted at the sight of her.
And then Hal, critically injured, trying to make her feel better by calling her beautiful.
She thought she could bear anything, Emily thought, feeling herself shaking. She had steeled herself for any reaction from Hal. She had anticipated shock, revulsion, pity... She could have handled any of those. But not what happened. When he had called her beautiful, his words had been like a knife in her heart.
He had been grateful, of course. The water had saved his life, and she had brought the water. Perhaps, in his half-conscious state, he had even believed her to be beautiful for a moment, before he saw her as the grotesquerie she truly was.
She covered her face with her hands. How her heart had shattered with that single gunshot! When Hal had fallen to the ground, she would have given her life to make him whole again. And she had, she had brought the water, though it had taken a while for it to work…
Something was odd, she noticed. Something ... She looked at her hands.
The scars on them were gone.
And on her arms. She touched her face again. It was smooth, the heavy ropes of her scars undetectable. With a cry, she leaped up and ran to the bathroom, which contained the only mirror in the building.
"Oh, my God," she whispered as she stood before the dirty glass. Her face was completely unmarked. She touched her smooth cheeks, unable to believe the sight.
"Oh, my God," she said again. She took her hands away from her face and looked at them.
It had not been the water that had healed her. Of that she was absolutely certain.
It had been Arthur's hands.
Gwen walked back slowly to her house, where her mother was nearly beside herself with excitement.
"Honey, I've been watching you on TV!" she exclaimed. "Why, that boy—the one they're calling the Messiah—he acted like he knew you! I mean, he held your hand and everything!" Her eyes were sparkling. "Oh, tell me what it was like!"
Gwen stopped in the middle of the room. "That's what you noticed?" she asked incredulously. "A man was shot, and then was healed without a mark, Mom. Did you miss that part?"
"Well, of course not," Ginger said. "But that's what Miller's Creek does. That was no big surprise to those of us that live here."
"Oh," Gwen said. "The surprise was that a boy held my hand."
Ginger sighed. "Here we go again. All I'm saying is that you might be more excited. Out of all those girls he could have, he picked you!"
"He didn't pick me," Gwen explained irritably. "I was sent out to give him a message. He doesn't even know me."
"But he must have liked how you looked, or something." Ginger eyed her daughter dubiously. "Didn't you wear any makeup at all, honey?"
Gwen closed her eyes in exasperation. "No, I didn't. You didn't used to like my makeup, remember?"
"No, but..." She smiled gaily. "Well, maybe he likes the natural look."
"Jesus," Gwen muttered.
"What have I said now?"
"Nothing. Nothing at all." She walked to her room and closed the door. "As usual," she muttered.
She stood in front of her dresser and examined the face she saw in the mirror. What a dishrag, she thought. She must have been insane to go out looking like this, naked, exposed, her face showing her every emotion.
Still, as much as she hated to admit it, her mother had made a point. Arthur Blessing had seemed to choose her. He had looked into her eyes and then held out his hand to her with an urgency and truth that Gwen could not help but feel. And her response to him had been just as genuine. For the moment when their hands touched, she had felt something unlike any other experience in her life.
She had felt safe. She had felt as if she belonged.
What bullshit, she thought. She probably just looked easy, like her mom. The guy probably planted the photographer in the first place. Give the little hick girl a break. Make all the old folks think what a nice boy he was.
"Bullshit!" she said out loud, sweeping all the items off her dresser. "Bullshit!" Then she laid her head on her arms and cried.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
THE SUITOR'S REVENGE
Almost to the end of her life, Guenevere had no idea why her horse had been so frightened that it threw her. She had felt the animal's fear, of course; it had rippled through the mare's body like a wave.
She had barely seen the two people before the mare bolted. And they looked innocuous enough. Prince Melwas and his sister, Morgause, who was still a small child. The mare had never minded people, and was in fact rather fond of children, unlike many of the beasts in her father's stables.
Only decades later, on her deathbed, did Guenevere understand the depth of Morgause's power. She had been born with it, a true witch. Long afterward, everyone who had been involved with her—that is, those who were somehow left alive—came to recognize its depth.
Merlin thought about her a great deal in his old age. It filled him with guilt that he had not tried to influence Morgause while she was still young. Had she received the training and knowledge given to others of her ability, she might have become as great a magician as himself. She might have developed her power to the point where, along with Merlin, she could have helped stem the tide of foreign invasions and the constant war that they brought.
Together, they might even have been able to revive the Old Religion, with its values of peace and spi
ritual mastery, so different from the new ways that men were coming to embrace, ways in which death was the final arbiter of right and wrong. According to the new ways, the man—and there were only men, no women—who remained alive after single combat became the one whose point of view prevailed. This idea, and all the others that sprang from it, would never have taken hold in the Old Religion, where winning and justice were not necessarily the same thing.
And so the Merlin chided himself for not giving Morgause a chance to learn from him in the way he had learned in the days of the great druid centers. Toward the end, though, he entertained another idea: that perhaps Morgause, with all her ability, was not a creature of the Old Ways at all, but rather the embodiment of the new, an evil master-work born to destroy everything she touched, a living sword.
Morgause eventually brought them all down, even Arthur. But she had begun with Guenevere. Begun and failed. The girl's inexperience was undoubtedly the reason why Guenevere had lived. Had Morgause been even a little older, Guenevere's death would have been assured. All of the others had been.
Morgause never made the same mistake twice.
At the time she had set herself to the task of killing Guenevere, Morgause was only eleven years old. She was beautiful, sweet-faced and rosy-cheeked. Even as Guenevere tumbled through the air from her screaming horse, there was a part of her mind that took in the sight of the lovely little girl and thought, What a sweet child!
Morgause hadn't planned for the mare to shy. She hadn't even planned, at the time, to kill Guenevere. But the shying horse and the sight of Guenevere lying unconscious on the ground were so satisfying to her that the idea soon became inevitable.
Melwas, in a goodwill gesture by Guenevere's father, had been invited, along with virtually everyone from the House of Orkney, to spend the summer on the luxurious estate of King Leodegranz.
The truth was that the chiefdom of Orkney was remote, primitive, and impoverished. Although the chiefs liked to call themselves "kings," their kingdoms were little more than tribal settlements, not much changed from the Celtic clan holdings of a thousand years before. The Romans, though hated, had brought advances to Britain; but when the Romans beat their hasty retreat from the island because they themselves were under attack, Britain had reverted to its old ways.
The more progressive of the chiefdoms—generally, those which had to deal regularly with invasions from Saxon warships—kept in some contact with the outside world. But the inaccessible rural strongholds, like Orkney, had gone back to primitive ways in all respects, from using spears rather than swords as weapons, and eschewing more sophisticated forms of economics in favor of the old barter system. The only reason Orkney had not been gobbled up by another chiefdom was because it was worth so little.
Its chief, King Octa, never left the borders of his lands except for the occasional night foray into neighboring strongholds for the purpose of stealing horses. Since Orkney had changed very little during the Roman occupation, Octa remained the kind of tribal head that his ancestors had been, insular and isolated, surrounding himself with his warriors, spending his evenings drunk, attending to the simple needs of his people. For all events that required more political solutions, he sent young Melwas.
The prince, soft, foolish, utterly unlike his father in almost every way, would not have made a good warrior in any case. Perhaps Octa sent him on political missions in the hope that Melwas would bring Orkney into the modern world when he succeeded him. More likely, he just wanted to get his embarrassing son out of his sight and hoped that he would father another son before he died. At any rate, that was why the other kings of Britain were forced to regard Melwas as one of them, and why Leodegranz felt obligated to extend his hospitality to the Orkney contingent for as long as it was desired.
This, as it turned out, was a considerable length of time. Melwas, who had already been sufficiently remunerated for the cancelled marriage with Guenevere, had been growing accustomed to the things that gold could buy in the richer kingdoms when he was called home to Orkney. Melwas's father, far from expressing displeasure at his son's failure to wed the daughter of King Leodegranz, was delighted at this new and bloodless way of robbing distant strongholds, and demanded that Melwas return, taking as many people from Orkney as he could get away with. No point in feeding a lot of extra mouths, Octa reasoned.
So Melwas's entourage, which included all of the old and unattached women and most of the children in his father's circle of acquaintance, came in mid-spring to the fertile lands of King Leodegranz to show that there was no ill feeling between the two kingdoms, and there they remained, feasting nightly, until the latter part of June. And they would have remained even longer, were it not for Guenevere's fall from her horse and Morgause's murderous impulses.
It began innocently enough. Melwas, shocked—though slightly amused—at the sight of Guenevere flying through the air screaming, offered to help.
"I have women here with me," he said, motioning to a gaggle of sturdy females with forearms like bull haunches. Rather than remain in Leodegranz's dank castle, these women had built their own thatch-roofed huts on the grounds, where they kept to themselves and demanded that their meals be brought to them in an unending stream of oxcarts. "They are healers," Melwas said. "They will see to it that the princess suffers no ill effects from this."
Arthur was at a loss. He had judged Melwas to be a dullard long ago, and did not care to see Guenevere in his keeping. On the other hand, no one else was in the vicinity. Guenevere was not capable of riding back to the castle, and the women of Orkney did seem to be formidably competent, so he agreed.
"I'll accompany you back to the castle," Melwas offered heartily. "Guenevere is in good hands. She'll probably be better by morning." He clapped a hand on the young High King's back. "And meanwhile, you and I can have a few ales, eh?"
Arthur was trying to find words to get out of spending any more time with Melwas than necessary, when the young child-princess from Orkney spoke up. "If you please, brother, won't you stay alone with me for a moment? There is something of gravity that I wish to discuss with you."
The girl was so somber and pretty and intelligent, it was nearly impossible to imagine that she came from the same bloodline as the oafish Melwas. She resembled a serious little bird of some kind—silent, thoughtful, never demanding to be the center of attention, and so detached from whatever events swirled around her that one would think she lived in her own little world. She was not at all like a child, though.
"Go ahead," Arthur said affably. "Actually, I've got to get back to Ector's, anyway."
"Oh," Melwas said, pouting. "Pity." He scowled at little Morgause. "Well, what is it?" he fumed as Arthur rode away. "It's important that I make a good connection with the High King, as you know."
"You have Guenevere," Morgause said in her serious, adult way.
"Well, I don't really have her. I mean she's here, but she's hardly—"
"Take her back to Orkney."
Melwas rolled his eyes elaborately. "And why would I do that?"
"To hold hostage," Morgause replied. "You can say that you took her because your honor was broached."
"By what? Her wanting to marry Arthur Pendragon? Can you blame her? He's the High King. He's—"
"You can demand Leodegranz's kingdom in exchange for her."
Melwas laughed out loud. "Is this the sort of thing you think up while you're brewing potions with those hags? For your information, the army of Orkney isn't a tenth of what Arthur and Leodegranz together can drum up."
"Anyone who tries to invade our stronghold will have to go through the hill pass. Our men can pick them off one by one as they try to get through. Then you can make a bargain for Guenevere's life."
Melwas tried to laugh, but his spittle dried in his throat. "A hostage? Good gods, you're serious, aren't you?"
Morgause didn't answer.
"What if they won't bargain?"
The girl shrugged. “Then you can marry her," she said softl
y. "Or kill her."
Unconsciously, Melwas backed away. He loved his half sister, but there had always been something about her that frightened him. Her beauty, perhaps. Or her coldness. Or, even then, her power.
Morgause was a bastard, spawned by one of the witch-women his father kept around him. To be sure, Octa had always been more comfortable with them than he had with his wife, Melwas's mother, Branwyn, who had come to him in marriage through an alliance between Octa and her father, the chieftain of Strathclyde. The poor woman had trembled and shaken through the entire wedding feast, so repelled had she been at the barbarism of Orkney and its king.
From the beginning of their marriage, Octa had referred to his wife as "the white girl," referring to the pallor of her skin, which he found unattractive and weak-looking. He had stayed with her only long enough to conceive a son. After Melwas's birth, the chief went back to his women, who all practiced the Old Religion, freely offering him their bodies as well as producing potions for ailments and luck and casting spells against enemies and various demons.
Branwyn found them all appalling. She never adjusted to life in Orkney, and her only pleasure seemed to be in telling young Melwas tales of the delights of more civilized places. She sewed clothes for him that were utterly unlike the leather and hopsack garments worn by her husband and the other men in the tribe: shirts with billowing sleeves, made of fabric as soft as a maiden's hair, sent to Branwyn by her family in Strathclyde, and tunics of brilliantly dyed cloth.
The warriors—for all men in Orkney were warriors— looked at the boy askance, but dared not speak against him. As for Octa, he only shrugged and left his wife and child alone, presuming that they were made of finer stuff than he, and not caring much. When the time came, he thought vaguely, he would make a warrior of his soft, rather fat son. Meanwhile, there were the lusty healer-women who concerned themselves with his body and his spirit.
One of them bore him a daughter just after the death of his wife. He moved the woman into his stronghold to perform the tasks Branwyn had taken on. She would hoot with derision at how little there was to do there, and poke Melwas in his stomach with her finger, telling him how flabby he was, and hold up her own little girl, Morgause, as an example of what an Orkney child ought to be.
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