Mordred, Bastard Son

by Douglas Clegg

  As she spoke, I was sure my knees shook and my eyes went wide.

  We gathered around, wool and flax blankets at our shoulders to keep warm, all the children of the Isle sitting within a circle along with the priestess of the Lake who told us about her dangerous encounters.

  “It is how I lost my legs,” she said, drawing smoke from her pipe. Viviane liked to smoke with a long clay pipe full of the yellow-white virago leaf, which was forbidden to children, for it brought with it bad dreams. Sometimes just breathing in the smoke, which always reminded me of the crisp air of autumn, brought me nightmares afterward.

  “I was a young woman, not yet a priestess, and I had gone out with my bow to hunt deer for the Samhain feast nights. I had prayed to the Roman goddess Diana for the blessing of her ability, and to Cernunnos for one of his stags. But as I went through the woods at twilight, I saw what I thought was simply a boar. And so I pursued it, believing I’d been doubly blessed, for the boar would feed us for many nights. I chased it deep among the yellow-leafed wood, and it headed toward the cliffs that overlook the valley of no return. I thought I had him now, this great wild pig. But as I ran toward it, and then crouched to aim my arrow, I realized that this boar was a monstrous spirit. It was larger than any creature I had ever before seen in the forest, and its tusks were like the teeth of dragons. One of the Moccus, I knew. I entreated the god of these creatures, Arawn of the Otherworld, for mercy, though he does not often hear the cries of the living for all those departed spirits who entreat him for rebirth. And I had been mistaken—this was a she-boar, and her fully belly told me she had babes within her. There is nothing worse than a she-boar protecting her offspring, and this was as true for the Moccus as for any living creature. Smoke came from the she-boar’s nostrils and fire traveled on her breath. Soon I was the one being pursued, for though I let two arrows fly, they did not pierce the creature’s tough hide. I had to run along the cliffs, and other boars of her kind rallied to her war cry. These, her mates, were even larger and thicker than she.

  I stood at the edge of the cliff, with three of the great boar beasts surrounding me. I looked behind and saw that I stood just a few steps from a long drop into the fields below. You see, this was part of the Moccus’ training, for it had been how their ancestors had fought armies of men, by chasing them to the cliffs until they either had torn those men limb from limb, or the men had taken their own lives by jumping over the edge. I could try to fight the beasts, though they were nearly larger than I. They advanced closer to me. Closer. I prayed to the goddess and to Cernunnos for relief, and to Arawn with hopes he could hear me…but I knew what I had to do.”

  “Did the boar-bitch bite you?” I asked, and everyone around me laughed as I asked this.

  “No,” she said. “The goddess told me she would bring my breath back to me, but that I would have to give up my long, beautiful legs if I wished to return to the lake. And so…”

  “You jumped?” Lukat asked, and we all went quiet, watching Viviane as she puffed at her pipe and looked each of us in the eyes before answering, the flickering firelight dancing across her face.

  “I would not call it jumping,” she said, a smile broadening on her face. “But the Boars of Moccus certainly leapt toward me. The largest male nearly tore my throat, but I stepped backward, and he rolled with me over the edge of that cliff.”

  I felt the air suck out of my lungs as she said this, as if I were right there with her and the beast, falling into the valley of no return, where many had gone lost forever.

  “And is that how you lost your legs?” I asked.

  “I would’ve kept their use if that damn animal hadn’t landed right on my knees,” she said. “I landed far below, but upon a soft bed of thick grass that had a swampy stream beside it. The boar weighed as much as a horse, and so my legs were of no more use. It was four days before anyone found me.”

  “How did you live?” another child asked.

  “The blessings of our sacred Lady. The stream, and a bit of wild pig for supper.” She laughed as she finished the tale. I am still not sure to this day what of it was truth and what was not. But tales of the dangerous creatures like the boars of Moccus, which terrorized villages far from our caverns, and had even left deer and horses dead at times, were not to be ignored. The forest, I learned, was not always a safe place, and I grew frightened as a child if I found myself too far away from others in the woods above the caves.

  5

  Once, when I was ten, and went to gather wood for the evening’s fires, I found myself lost along a streambed, unsure as to which direction home might be.

  I did not panic at first, but followed the water, hoping that the caverns and meadows would appear to me through a break among rock and tree. After several hours, I began to call out, but my voice echoed in the last of the sunlight, and my cries went unanswered. I continued to follow the stream, until I came upon a fountain in the earth, and near it, an earthen home with a thatched roof that hung about it like a farmer’s hat. Thinking that whomever lived there would be one of our tribe, I went in through the low open doorway, but the long room was empty. In a corner, some furs as if for a bed. And the strangest thing, to me, for I had never before seen it: a shiny metal shirt, hanging along the table of the kitchen, and beside it, a shield, as well as a helmet that I would one day learn was that of a knight. Something about the place frightened me—it was not like my own home, and when I saw a sword in its sheath, although I wanted to go draw it out, I imagined the owner of this place to be some ogre—and I did not want to be caught like a thief in his hovel.

  I swiftly left the little house, and when I finally found my direction home, I asked Viviane about the strange house and the one who lived there by the fountain. “It is a sacred place, called Bel-Nementon,” she said. “It is watched over by a hermit who has taken a vow of isolation and meditation. Hermits often are in the woods—surely you’ve seen others? They live apart from us, though they come in the winter for warmth and food, or they act as messengers if the times are dangerous. But you must not return there, ever. Not to him. He is…a good man…I think. But he has many sorrows. Do you understand? He is sworn to protect the fountain with his life, do you see?”

  “Why? What does the fountain do?”

  “It speaks to him,” she said. “The way the goddess speaks to those who listen at her sacred places. But we must listen very carefully, with all our quiet and peace within us to hear.”

  “But the lake speaks to us. Won’t it speak to him, too?”

  “He…” she began, and thought a moment as she often did when she wanted to explain something to me that I might not yet grasp because of my age. “Sometimes, it is the small voice of the goddess that can’t be heard among a kingdom like ours, if one needs to hear it. Just as it’s easier to hear a mouse in the storehouse when it is quiet, so it is when we listen for the goddess to speak to us, individually, that we must go to a quiet place where we can truly listen to her.”

  “At his house…” I began.

  “You went into his home?” she asked with consternation in her voice.

  “I didn’t think he would mind,” I said. “I thought he might…” I tried to come up with a good lie to cover up. “I thought he might need help.”

  “You must not do this again, Mordred,” Viviane said, and for the first time in my experience, she seemed stern and unyielding. “You cannot just run roughshod over strangers and their lives.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What did you see there?”

  “I saw his sword,” I said. “It was gold at the handle, and silver along its edge.”

  “Would you like a sword, Mordred, my love?” she asked. I wanted to ask more of the hermit and the strange home, but swords caught my attention and my young mind easily skipped to a subject dear to my heart. Later in my youth I’d learn that she had changed courses so that she would not have to tell more of that man I had not yet seen.

  I nodded. “I want to fight dragons.”


  “Oh, but dragons are our protectors.”

  “Then I want to fight the boars of Moccus.”

  “I suppose you’re at the age when boys wish to do such things,” she said, and then she promised me she would ask Lukat’s father to teach me the art of the sword. “If you will not learn it from me.”

  “You know the sword?” I asked.

  She laughed. “All the Crones know the uses of the sword. I trained many young men and, yes, maidens, in my day to wield a half-sword. But I put aside the sword when the wars of my younger days had passed. It is not good to draw a sword for no reason at all, but it is good to know its uses in this world.”

  6

  Many nights I lay awake, and in my mind returned to that small house at the fountain, against the forest fence and the desolate territories. I wondered about the man who lived there, this wild hermit who could speak to no one but the gods themselves. I wondered if he was pretty, and if he ever donned that armor and raised that sword.

  I dreamed sometimes of what he must look like, and in the dreams he took my hand and we walked into the thatched-roof house.

  Chapter Five

  1

  My friend Lukat took me to his father to learn how to carry a dagger and a sword, and how best to use a shield, though our only shields were made of wood and our swords were birch branches that had fallen in a storm. His father was a large, thickset man, but when he wielded a sword he was agile as a dancer. He taught us how best to avoid situations with swords, but when cornered, how to use a dirk as well as sword to fend off attackers. My mother taught us both how to make stews without meat in them that tasted as if they were filled with venison, when it was barley and herbs and wild grasses. She also took time out to teach us the use of the double-sword we called the Broad-Tooth, and the Saxon long knife that called the Seax. Danil taught us the use of the bow and arrow, as well as the way to guide the horses at chariot.

  All the children of the isle would rise early in the day for training in the arts of the hunt and of war; the Eponi families would bring out their young horses that we should learn to ride fast through the forest, and how to bring a horse to near-silence when hunting. Though we were not at war with any kingdom, still, our elders knew the past wars that had swept Broceliande, and felt that even their youngest should be prepared.

  Lukat challenged me to races, and we ran for what seemed like many leagues across the meadows and deep into the fern-beds until I was out of breath. We stole herbs from Viviane’s gardens, and in chewing them had visions that made us laugh at nearly everything we encountered—when my great-aunt found out what we’d done, she scolded us for the thievery and made us work from morning until nightfall building stone walls around her gardens just to protect them from robbers like us.

  It was Lukat who inadvertently taught me to swim in water, for I had no such training. We had gone out on a flat boat that was used to transport those from the far side of the lake to the isle, and thought we would try to catch the bright orange fish that seemed to live only at the center of the lake. We had spent an entire afternoon making a net from horsehair and spun wool, and when Lukat passed it to me in the boat, he said, “When you dip it in the water, I’ll paddle to the left. Just lean over so that the net stays beneath the surface.”

  Then, as I did this, I heard him laugh at first and then felt his foot press against my backside, and I went sprawling, losing what little balance I had, and fell into the lake itself. Beneath the water, I tried to climb up to the boat, but could not seem to get anywhere as I flailed my arms and legs out. The water was dark but clear because of the intense sunlight from far above, and it was so warm that I could not tell where my body ended and the water began. But I held my breath, hoping to draw myself up from below, but I continued to sink down like a stone.

  All I saw was the sunlight above me and a shadow where the boat floated.

  And then a hand grabbed me by the wrist and tugged me along, drawing me upward. It was Lukat, who had dived overboard to come get me. When I broke the water’s surface, I coughed up water and grabbed for his neck to keep from falling again. He pulled my arms from his throat, and instead pushed me toward the boat. “Grab the edge, Mordred. Grab it,” he said, more patient with me than I would have been had the situation been reverse. I went to his neck again, to cling to him as if he were himself a boat. But again, he pushed me away. “The boat. You can do this, Mordred. Go to the boat.” And so I at last moved my hands in a slapping kind of way, just beneath the water’s surface, and made it to the flat edge of the wood and bark boat, and grabbed hold of it.

  “Kick your legs beneath the water,” he said. “Kick them, come on. Not like that! Kick them as if you’re trying to be a fish. Like you’re swimming with a school of yellow fish.”

  And so he guided me slowly through the process of remaining afloat in the water. As the summer days passed, he taught me how to glide near the surface of the water so that I would not sink and how to measure my breaths so that before autumn came, I could swim from one end of the lake to the other and back. We often swam out to the rock ledges and outcroppings of the cavern walls and saw the strange man who was whiter than all others, named Maponus. He squatted upon his perch, thick fur blankets beside him, and offerings of food from the isle. His droppings were numerous, and added a sulfurous stink to that alcove within the cavern walls. He seemed nearly blind, for his eyes had no color in them, yet he seemed to hear any new ripple upon the water’s surface that approached his place.

  “They say he never leaves,” Lukat whispered to me, swimming close as we both looked at the old man.

  “What’s down there?” I whispered in return. “Why does it need protection?”

  “We’ll know when our midsummer rites come,” he said.

  “We have to wait so long.”

  “And you will drown if you do not keep swimming,” he said, kicking out at me.

  Lukat swam off toward the far shore, but I remained for a few moments, treading water, looking at the pale white man with his white eyes and long mane of white hair and beard. He sniffed the air, sensing my presence several feet from him in the water. He reached behind his back and drew out a thick stone blade, pointing it across the water. “Come no closer, boy,” he said. “I will cut your throat if it is not your time.”

  When I made it to shore, Lukat lay back on the cavern floor, panting with exhaustion. I drew up beside him and told him of what Maponus had said. Lukat looked up at me, sternly. “He killed a boy before. I heard. Stay away from him. Stay away from that place.”

  “Would he really kill me if I tried to get in there?” I asked.

  “If he could not kill you, you would have to kill him,” Lukat said. “My grandmother told me that the boy who stole Excalibur from the Lady had to murder the man who guarded that way into the labyrinth.”

  I lay back on the stone floor, staring up at the cave paintings over us. I could not tell him that the boy who had stolen the sword was my father.

  Father, I thought. He had been fifteen years old when he had gone down toward the doorway to Annwn to steal the sword that claimed many kingdoms. He had killed the man who had guarded that entry, before Maponus had come to atone for his own crimes and keep that way shut. My father had gone to a forbidden place, right at the door to the Otherworld, for Excalibur. A sword of power, I thought as I lay there beside me friend, both of us breathing too heavily from the long swim. A sword like no other, which sings to the man who will wield it. A sacred, magickal sword. It brings war and it promises peace. My father holds it, and rules the kingdoms of the Britons on the great island of our people to the west, and keeps the Saxons at bay as if they were hounds on the hunt. He must be a great man to do this. He broke the law of the Lake to get Excalibur, but it has brought him greatness. He had to kill the guard of the labyrinth to get it. He was fifteen, not much older than I am. He was not yet a man, yet he became a king and a great warrior.

  I hated my father with a passion, though I did
not yet know him. And yet, I also wanted desperately to know what kind of man he was, and what would he think of me, his son that he had never before laid eyes upon. I glanced over at Lukat, envying him his father, though he had lost his mother to the arms of death at his birth.

  I wanted to tell him that my father was alive, not dead at all, as the elders had told him. I wanted to tell him that my father was King Arthur himself, my mother’s half-brother, and that the blood of the king ran in my veins. Yet, it was the one promise I could not break to Merlin or to my mother. It would change how Lukat saw me, how he would treat me, and he might even hate me for this. I could not lose him as a friend. Even thinking of such a thing brought sorrow into my heart.

  On the cave ceiling above us was a depiction of Arawn himself, with the ram’s-head crown upon his scalp, his mouth opened it the voice that brought death to those who heard it, with the skulls of slain warriors at his feet. His hounds all around him, and the old woman known as the washer at the ford, who cleaned the souls of fallen heroes on the battlefield; not far from him were his sacred black swans and several hares and stags.

  “Do you think it’s beautiful?” I asked.

  “Annwn?”

  “Do you think it’s as they say? Beautiful and wonderful, full of fruit trees and stags and horns that give every kind of drink to those who wish it. That there are jewels in the roads into the Otherworld, and greater kingdoms than have ever existed in this world?”