Mordred, Bastard Son

by Douglas Clegg

  “Some souls choose not to be reborn from it,” Lukat said. “People stay there for thousands of years before returning here. It must be wonderful. My mother’s there. The Druids told me she has not wished to be reborn, and they speak with the dead. She would not remain there if it did not bring her happiness. When I die, I’ll see her there.”

  “It makes me scared,” I said, finally, as if it were a secret I’d kept too long. “King Arawn looks like a monster.”

  “I think all kings look like monsters,” Lukat said, and again I thought my father. Was my father a monster as my mother had told me? Was he a good man, as Merlin had said?

  Lukat reached over and scruffed up my damp hair. “We don’t have to think about Arawn for a long time to come. My father told me that when his chariot comes and you feel the heat of his horses and the howls of his hounds approaching, you seek him out. But you, when you hear his hounds, Mordred, you just run as fast as you can and maybe he won’t catch you.”

  2

  All the swimming and running and swordplay had its effect on my body. One day I looked into the mirror bowl and did not see the chubby face with its odd little nose, but instead, saw a more sculpted face of a boy who showed the man within himself through muscle and cheekbone and I barely recognized this new youth in that reflection. I had lost much of my weight, and had begun to take pride in the contests and competitions. We had yearly races, and archery contests on horseback. We hunted, after the blessings of the deer and the boar and the fish. Lukat and I often slept in the woven blankets out beneath the trees as we tracked a stag for many days and nights. I had begun to understand what the work of men was, and I enjoyed being among the horse herds and the charioteers who showed us their skills and their labors. The shepherds, the root and seed gatherers, and the watchers, who protected our home from the tallest branches of the trees, also took us on their journeys that we might understand the ways of the forest.

  3

  Lukat and I had many adventures together as boys, and sometimes, when we escaped the daily work, we’d climb the tallest oak we could find, to look out over the haze of the forest after a rainfall and just sit there, looking out over our domain. All we could see was forest and hill, and the balding areas of the desolate lands. Sometimes, the wild horses ran across the heath in the distance, or we’d see the lake’s hunters out stalking boar and deer. I remember the first time we spotted the standing stones of the grove—they had always been there, yet we had never noticed them. These gray stones, nearly as tall as a man. “They were hunters who met with Lord Arawn’s wrath,” Lukat’s father told us. “Many hundreds of years ago, these were men who boasted of their prowess at the hunt. And when one of Arawn’s stags escaped from the Otherworld, these hundred men of the forest set out after the stag for many days, for a stag of Annwn would never die, not matter how many times it was slain for meat. It would rise up again the next night and might be slain again. It was greatly prized, as you may imagine. But when they had quarried the stag, here in the grove, Cernunnos himself came to the protection of the sacred animal. And these hunters, in seeing him, turned to stone—for we are not meant to look upon the face of the gods directly. And though their features have washed away over the years of rain and snow, these were once men. And buried beneath them, in the mounds,” he added, “are fallen Romans who came to burn the forest and murder the Druids themselves.”

  “Were they killed by the goddess?”

  “Or the Druids?” Lukat asked.

  “No,” he said, his voice lowering in a thrilled excitement as if he meant to gleefully terrify us with this tale. “The earth itself swallowed them whole, and the roots of the oaks strangled them after they had spilled the blood of many Druid priests.”

  I loved Lukat’s father’s tales, and my time with Lukat during the day always seemed too short.

  We laughed with the jokes that little boys make, and for which we were scolded by our elders, for they often involved belching or farting or playing pranks on the gullible. Lukat had a penchant for filling sheep’s bladders stolen from the butcher’s table with water and then tossing them from the trees onto our friends who passed by. His punishment for this was cleaning up the butcher’s ice-cold chamber after the salting of the meat. From the age of ten onward, we often borrowed horses from the paddocks above and rode them out into the desolate lands, pretending we were knights with swords or even the gods Cernunnos and Arawn, fighting over the Lady of the Lake.

  Once, when Lukat and I rode out along a sunlit road between the thick alders and yews, with me behind him, and he before me, with a colored blanket as our saddle, I leaned forward and kissed him lightly, just below the ear, at the place where he had a curl of dark hair that I could not resist touching.

  I did not then even understand why I did this, and my heart beat too fast in my chest as I drew back from him again. He glanced back and gave me a look that could only be one of scrutiny rather than delight, and said, “No.”

  We rode on in silence.

  That night, I lay in bed furious with myself for what I had before only done in dreams. I didn’t understood my own nature in wishing to kiss him, or noticing that place at the back of his neck, and that curl of hair, and the way his ear looked to me, as if it wanted a kiss.

  The way the sun had felt upon my skin, and the smell of the wildflowers on the soft air while the stag-thistle’s seeds were carried on a gentle breeze around us.

  It seemed like a moment stolen from time, a dream that had come into being, its spell broken by my actions.

  I took a terrible risk, and had, in the process, lost my one true friend.

  4

  Though many believe that the heathens are full of those like me, I could not find other boys who shared my desires. Now, when I look back at those days, I think it was good, for I, being unable to fulfill desire, I thought about it much and considered what my life would be as I got older.

  My mother, though she told me she had long understood my nature, and “the gods bless those such as you with great insight and understanding,” did not herself seem to carry much understanding for me. She had begun withdrawing from others, including me as I reached that point just before manhood, as if I had gone over to the enemy camp. She had sought out the goddess of the waning moon as her patroness, and, in so doing, had spoken much of my father and of the wounds inside her that had festered during the years since she last saw her beloved homeland. Now and then, she would offer up a tenderness to me, or ask me how my studies had been—for I had learned both the old language and the new, and also could read some of the ancient Greek writings that Merlin had brought to me.

  “You are special to me,” my mother would say, “but you are reaching those years when we will not agree on anything. Sometimes, I think boys should be stopped at sixteen.”

  “Killed?” I asked, surprised at the thought.

  “No, just drawn away, for they are old enough to father children, and they are still good and kind, but as their blood boils, they bring war and worse upon the world. What a pleasant place it would be if youth were the last of men, and afterward they would go off to sea or away until old age.”

  I laughed later about this with Viviane as I worked in her many gardens. I squatted down to cut and then plant new growth while she sat watching and guiding me from a curved rock.

  “Your mother has wicked ideas,” she said. “But do not let her words bother you. She loves you, and would not have you vanish after your sixteenth year.”

  “I am full of confusions,” I said. “And Merlin will not speak to me of what I feel. Nor will my mother, though she did once when I was a boy. Well, I suppose I don’t feel comfortable speaking with her about it anymore.”

  “But you do with me?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You are…well, you’re a Crone.”

  “And what does Crone mean to you?”

  “It means that…well, that you’re wiser than many of my elders. It means that you have seen much. That you listen to th
e goddess with finer ears than I do.”

  “Sometimes it means that I’m simply old.” She smiled. “But if you want to talk about your feelings.”

  “About things,” I said.

  “Ah, it is of your dual nature.”

  “Dual?”

  “The sun and the moon together,” she said. “It is like an eclipse when they meet, and people are scared as the darkness covers the sun. But even when this happens, the light is more intense than if the sun and moon had not come together. You have the strong muscles of one who will be a man among men, and the mind of one who will be a scholar. You bring the philosophy you learn from your studies as if you were a philosopher in Rome. But you have that other side to you. It is that part of you that desires men, for love. It is that simple, Mordred. There are those, even here, who do not understand it, although they forget that Arawn and Cernunnos have shared a single bed—the forest and the Otherworld together. It is what brings you the spark of life that others do not readily have. You will have an understanding of men and of women that those attracted to their opposite sex will never possess. In some ways, you are more fearless because of it. In other ways, more withdrawn.”

  I felt my face burn as she spoke, for I had not mentioned my inner anguish to her. Yet, I should have guessed that she would know the malady from which I suffered. “Is there a cure for this?” I asked.

  “A cure?” She looked at me strangely. “Why would you cure what is from your very nature?”

  “My friends—the other boys—do not feel as I do.”

  “Some of them do, but they hide it. When I was a girl, few hid it, but as with all things, in times of trouble, fear grows. Most don’t hide it, and there are men here you may meet who are like you, and have taken their love. They live above, usually, among the forest paths, in the turf houses, or else they go to the villas for they find the towns of more interest than the woods. You have known of the priestess who handfasted with the Eponi herder?”

  I nodded. “But it is accepted for the women.”

  “No more than for the men. But when you are not yet a man, many have difficulty understanding it. It is worse in the world beyond this forest, so look to the blessings of your life. There are those of your age who are turned out of their homes merely for love, or the lack of it, among their kinsfolk.”

  “I have lost a friend,” I said.

  “Ah, your friend Lukat. Have you indeed lost him? Or have you frightened each other with the power of your feelings?” She smiled as she asked me this, and when the gardening was done and I carried her on my back toward home as the evening sun dappled the darkening leaves above us, she said, “I suspect he loves you as you love him, but he has not the same nature as you. This may be difficult for him, for the youths who only feel drawn to maidens are frightened of what they do not understand. But this is not your fault, Mordred. You must follow your heart in all things. In the life I have led, that is the only truth that has never proven wrong. I once knew a boy like you, many years ago. He felt confusion in his nature, and he followed paths that were not his.”

  “Did he like other boys, too?”

  “Yes, he did,” she said. “And he was beloved of the Lady of the Lake, as you are. He would swim her waters many days and when we spoke of his yearning for a boy like him, I tried to help him understand that he would one day find that boy—that man—but that life did not hand us these wonderful loves too early, lest we take them for granted.”

  “And did he?” I asked. “Did he find someone to love?”

  “Perhaps,” she said. “He left us. He left us because he could not accept his nature, nor could he accept the waiting for the gods to send him love. But patience is all the gods ask of us, Mordred. I hope you will have a little patience.”

  “I will, Aunt Vivy,” I whispered. “I promise.”

  5

  I would tell more here of the tribal councils that were held; of the many messengers that arrived with news from Cornwall and Wales and from the Dragon’s Mount at the coast; those who came for charms and potions and salves of healing and in exchange brought news and wine and honey; of the study of the Grove and its trees and beasts; but these were not the direction of my life. Outside of athletics and the reading of the scrolls, I was concerned with friendship, and love, and what my place in the world should be.

  In those days, I did not think of myself as the son of a king and a queen, for my parentage was kept secret from those around me for the shame my mother felt it brought with her. Instead, I was seen as one of the many youths of our home, with no greater rank than the lowliest of goat-herds, and if I did not hunt for boar or deer with the others, if I did not work the summer gardens until I was exhausted come the late sundown, I did not gain a good word from anyone, even Viviane herself who believed that work for self and work for the tribes were interconnected. “You work a full day as all do, as to your abilities, and if you choose not to, why should we suffer for your lack of dedication to your own welfare? Do not expect alms here, as did your cousin Gawain when he lazily spent his summer protected by Morgause who ruined that boy with her coddling. Neither do I care for knights nor kings. And Princes are worse than the most pampered of ladies in the entire world. You are servant to yourself, and as you serve yourself, so you serve others.” She had said this on a particularly rough day for me, when I had let the sorrow of my lost friendship allow me to moans and grumble and stay in my bedchamber half the day.

  Neither was the life on the Isle of Glass one of devil-may-care, for if were sought idle pleasures when the harvest of the forest needed tending, the herdsman lost no time in bundling birch strips and swatting us as we passed until we went out into the orange-gold of the season to gather up the grains and bring them to the earthen storehouses. My cousin Gawain had never liked it there, and when he had returned before he took up a position with his father and with mine, as a servant-soldier, he mocked our country ways and called me his “little rabbit,” because I was always “hopping about, doing the bidding of these old women.”

  During the changing of seasons to winter, Lukat was out at the edge of the lake, for we bathed often in winter in its warm, healing waters. He called to me as I passed by, carrying the wood for the bread ovens, and I set my burden down and went over to him. Further out in the water stood a maiden I knew of by the name of Melisse. “I think she is the one I will handfast this coming Beltane,” he said.

  “But that’s before our Midsummer Rites. We won’t be brought into the Mysteries awhile yet.” It was the only thing I could think of to say to him, because it shocked me that he had fallen in love. It made me feel lonely to even know it. Lonely to imagine the handfasting ritual between my friend and a maiden, where the ceremonial rope would be bound between their wrists before all of the Isle of Glass, for the Lady herself to see their love for each other and how they had bound their souls together.

  “Rituals of manhood?” he grinned. “The Mysteries are ceremonial. Why wait for them? You’ve seen youths handfast before the rites. Those Druid rituals are meant as signs, Mordred. They don’t change you into a man. You become a man when you understand love. And the debt of love.”

  “The debt of love?”

  “Yes. I know it with Melisse. My debt is to love itself, that I will nurture and protect and grow with her. That’s how I know I’m a man,” he said, his eyes shining with this sense he had acquired.

  “That’s wonderful,” I told him, and glanced out at the girl who was my rival. She was pretty and fair-haired, and I could not think anything unkind of her. Or of him. I am petty and low, I thought. Mean and small and stupid. I am living in a dream to think he could be my closest friend all of our lives.

  “Join us,” he said, and I could tell by his gentle smile that he had forgiven me that small token of love I’d pressed behind his ear. Soon enough, we were splashing each other in the waters, and Melisse swam up to us and reminded me that I had told her that she looked like a frog when we were both no more than five years old. />
  I loved those years, and I cannot say much bad of them. I learned the way that I imagine children the world over learn of things, and I longed for things beyond my reach and dreamed of them, as many others do and have and will.

  I could not know the terror that awaited me, so soon along the road of life, for I had been kept innocent of the greater matters of the world, and had not yet been touched by madness or death.

  But before the winter was through, the terrible times would begin and I would learn too much of death and of the beginnings of grief, nearly as well as I knew my friend Lukat and my mother, and yet I would also learn of that love that haunted my dreams.

  As the seasons wore on, my mother’s spirit failed a bit. I awoke some nights to find her standing over my bed and whispering to me, “Arthur. Arthur. What have you done? What have you done?”

  I recall a night where I heard her whimpering, and I lit the candle by my bed, and she was huddled in a corner, staring at me and speaking in other languages that I could not understand, but it terrified me for she did not seem to know me at all in that trance-like state.

  Far too often, she called me Arthur, as she stared with cold eyes that held neither fear nor anger.

  This frightened me more than anything else in the world.

  Part II

  The Stag

  Chapter Six

  1

  As my mother began to lose something of herself in the nightmares she had, I went to others to seek remedies for her. Viviane and the priestesses reassured me that Morgan would find health in the goddess, “for her mind has been torn at by wolves, but she will heal as all things mend.” Some nights, my mother slept through until dawn, so I had begun to believe that the elders were right.