Mordred, Bastard Son

by Douglas Clegg

  “Not the women here,” I protested.

  “The women here are strange,” he said. “In my father’s castle, the women do the bidding of the men. Here, the men seem to obey the women.”

  “Aunt Morgause isn’t like the women where you live,” I said. “She does no one’s bidding but the goddess’s.”

  “She is different here than at home,” he said. “My father says she deceives much.”

  I didn’t like Gawain as a boy, but sometimes, I longed for my cousin’s home though I could only dream of it, for it sounded wonderful and so different from the Lake.

  My aunt Morgause was a warmer presence than my mother. As the seasons passed, and she and my cousins came less and less, I missed her embrace as she whispered to me that I was a “prince of all lands.”

  My mother often watched me, on her sadder days, when the rains came, when the winds were too strong to go much into the world above the caves. And as she watched me, I had the unhappy feeling that she saw my father in my face, and in the color of my hair and skin, though my eyes matched hers. I tried to be a comfort to her when I was a boy, but she often seemed to have retreated to another place.

  Then, even Viviane spoke to me about her. “You will enter manhood soon enough, Mordred. Even now, I feel we have kept you too much a boy, but it has only been from love and our longing to protect you. But you will learn much of the world in the years to come. Merlin returns before spring, but it may be for the last time, for the Lady of the Lake calls to him, as she calls to the Merlin in each lifetime. So your life will change. Your mother has been in pain for many years. No herb or spell or prayer has helped her much, and I have watched the long spider-legs of shadow cross her face and her soul. Do you know where she goes in the dark of the moon?”

  I shook my head, but said, “She has her duties as a priestess. I am forbidden, as are all men, to know of this.”

  “It is not that,” my great-aunt said, and offered me a few puffs on her pipe, something I had begun enjoying. “It is to the those Roman outcasts called Strega by those who have met them. The ones who sell their potions and poisons in the marketplace. I do not know them, nor do I wish to meet them, ever. I am glad that they are far from us, a good day’s journey on horseback, for I could not bear the stink of them. I understand they make cheap love philters and create elaborate curses to be brought down on those who will not pay their price. They are dream-merchants as well, for they sell the ability to invade sleepers and give them restless thoughts. They are the dark side of a foreign goddess. She is from Greece and Italy, and has been calling those who despair to her. Some believe they worship Hecate, the owl goddess of the Greeks.”

  “The goddess, in all her forms, is good,” I said, having learned this in the teachings of the Druids.

  “No, that is not correct,” Viviane said. “The goddess in all her forms is blessed. A blessing to one may be a curse to another. But there is a dark side to the gods. The boars of Moccus are not good, though they serve Arawn. The flying pestilence, though an incarnation of the Lady Nimue, is not good, for it brings disease and eats our crops and kills our cattle and sheep and goats. We suffer from the goddess, but this does not mean she does not bless us. And so this Hecate, stolen from a foreign land, brings her own pestilence to our forest. Your mother has shared blood with those Roman sisters.” She said this as if she’d forgotten that I sat beside her. “She has taken vows with them.”

  I drew in a smoky cough from her pipe, and passed it back to her. “She has much to be angry about. I wish it were not so. I wish all those who hurt her would...”

  “Do not forget the greatest law we know,” Viviane said. “And that is the law of three. And this law tells us what?”

  “That what we bring into the world will return to us threefold.”

  “And nine times nine comes the dark,” she finished. “Your mother is bringing something here. In her night worship. She is bringing something terrible to us, I fear. I do not trust Romans, or their sorceries.”

  “I will speak to her,” I said.

  “Is that enough?” Viviane asked. Tears came into her eyes, and she reached over to embrace me. The smoke around us was like a mist, connecting the two of us, Crone and youth. “You were blessed, as was she. She seeks vengeance in her life. But vengeance is not for us, but for the gods.”

  I determined, as Viviane wept against my neck, that I would find out about my mother’s nightly excursions to these Strega.

  I would see for myself where she went, and what she did there.

  Chapter Seven

  1

  I followed my mother many nights, carefully riding my horse toward the forest paths rather than the main roads she took so that she would not see me.

  Once close enough, I dismounted, hiding behind rocks and bushes and lying flat among the ferns as she made her way to that poisoned well where the Strega, those three Roman sisters, dwelt, but by the time I reached the place, I could not find them. They met at the dark of the moon, and I heard the growls of wild cats and the call of owls around me as I tried to search for them in the pitch black. I did not enjoy spying on her, and I began to sense that she knew I had begun watching her too closely.

  “You are curious about my meetings?” she asked one day as we both carried the water pots to the lake.

  “Your meetings?” I lied with the question.

  “I have given myself to a goddess older than our own,” she said. “And she brings me comfort. She calms my dreams, which have been horrible tempests for many years. But now, they are beautiful and show me serenity where I had none within my heart.”

  “That is good,” I said. “But I have heard they are terrible hags and this frightens me.”

  She laughed. “I suppose to men they do look terrible, and you are nearly a man. How can I expect you to understand differently? What makes Viviane a Crone and the women I visit hags?”

  “Viviane does not like them.”

  “She does not have to like them. She has never met them and never will, for she is against the foreign manifestations of the goddess.”

  “But they are hags,” I said. “Night hags. I heard they steal dreams and in their places leave nightmares and terrible visions.”

  “And you heard this from?”

  Although both Viviane and Merlin had told me this, I decided to only mention my teacher. “Merlin told me they work a rough sort of magick.”

  “You believe the word of a man who sleeps with the Pictish whores and bathes but once a century? He does not know much of women, Mordred, though he may have been a woman for a few lifetimes. And you do not know them. To me, they are wise women, though their aspect is frightening. Yet it is so that men may fear them and tremble at their power.” She grinned, and I could not tell if this was a joke or not. As if reading my mind, she said, “And no, you are not going to meet them, Mordred. I’d be afraid that they might take too much to you and wish to keep you. Youths such as yourself are attractive to such hags.”

  “I thought you said they were crones.”

  “Neither crones or Strega! All of it, nothing but words,” my mother said. “Men created such language simply to insult women and enslave people. There’s more to existence than the barbs that fall from the tongue. I am tired of words and curses and vows. Tired of it all.” Then she went silent, and any good humor in her was gone. I watched a shadow cross her face as if she meant to tell me more about the Strega, but it was as if to do so would require the breaking of a vow.

  2

  In the autumn of my fifteenth year, I learned too much of the struggle of life that had been hidden to me and only existed in scrolls and parchment or in the tales told by Viviane and the Druids during the Grove worship. I had been dreaming too much of boys my age, and those a few years older. I thought of their faces, their bodies, the way their legs moved when they ran or when they clutched each other as they wrestled in games. I thought too much of them and how I wanted to hold them. But when I awoke, I remembered Merlin’
s warning to me of the sacredness of the arts I still needed to learn before manhood took me over. I did not understand why I couldn’t seek out others like me and fulfill these dreams of mine, but I longed for power as I’m certain my father before me had also longed for it, though he had grabbed it while I waited patiently for those magickal arts that Merlin might pass to me.

  We had warnings of the Moccus boars, that someone had entreated Arawn in the Otherworld for favor and this brought these dangerous beasts roaming into the woods. Lukat and I went to our treetops to watch for them, but only saw stags and their mates out along the desolate lands beyond the trees. All the youths and maidens and those of ancient years were told to keep to the thicket at the cavern, and venture no further than the paddocks and streams that led from the Lake of Glass, until the watchers and herdsmen gave word that the Moccus boars had passed on to other hunting grounds. At the far rim of our forest, the Druids put out scraps and roots and baskets of berries in offering to Moccus and Arawn that the boars should feed and leave us untouched.

  Soon after the Samhain festival, the harvest in and the first frost upon the ground, the time of the boars had passed, and the sun gleamed bright though the air was like ice. Lukat and Melisse invited me out with them for an afternoon horseback ride. The two of them rode together, and I felt a twinge of jealousy, not just that Melisse had captured the heart of my closest friend, but that they had each other. They had love, and seemed as one when together. I longed for that love—the touch and the closeness of another, what Viviane called the “twin soul.”

  I rode alone, thinking of my promise to Merlin to remain chaste, though it seemed against my very nature to do so. In my head, I argued with him, though he ignored my vesseling calls. Does not the Lord of the Forest call all creatures to mate when it is their season? Does not the goddess bless the act of love and creation?

  Youths my age often handfasted and had begun raising families, though many waited until their twentieth year, for in our tribe we had rites of maidenhood and rites of manhood which would not be crossed until maturity of both mind and body had been reached. Still, I didn’t think Lukat and Melisse would wait that long for the ritual of handfasting—anyone could see their love, on their faces, like the spirit of life itself waiting to bring new life from them both.

  And yet, I had no love, nor had I found any youth like me in the cliff homes of the cavern.

  But riding close behind my friends, I was happy for their future and for what they had found, despite my envy of their having it. We raced our horses through the winter meadows, though the chilly wind whipped my cap off and nearly tore the cloak from my back. Among the alder and ash, we dismounted and walked our mares to the crooked emerald stream where it was said the faeries bathed. Like the waters that fed the caverns, it was a warm heat that came up from the stream in a very light mist, and warmed us greatly as we drew off our shoes and dipped our feet into it.

  Melisse spoke of their plans for the next Beltane fires, when they would handfast, and Lukat made jokes about how they would have to carve up a new home in the caves if they were to bring children into the world.

  “I won’t have children yet,” Melisse said, with a scolding laugh. “I am going to be a Druid.”

  “A Druidess?” I asked. “Have you begun the training?”

  “For six years,” she said. “And for seven more.”

  “Seven years with no children? Shall I wear a chastity belt?” Lukat asked, almost surprised. “A year from midsummer, do Mordred and I not become men? Will we not ride the bull and wear the sacred antlers and learn the secrets of men that we may no longer be called boys? So many years without knowing the pleasure of you?” Then he laughed. “I guess I will have to find another bride.”

  “And I will have to find a bride, too,” she said. “If you expect me to be a wife as the kind that the horse-herds marry. I want that kind of wife who will be a slave to a foolish husband. I will not carry water from the lake, nor will I wash your filthy undergarments. And if one of us has to cook, you might want to start learning, because I would rather eat raw barley than spend my days over the hearth-fire.”

  “She has bewitched me,” Lukat said, and reached over to grab her hand and squeeze it. “Do not ever fall in love, Mordred. You will become its slave, as I have.”

  “But it is a lovely sort of slavery,” she said, and grinned. “Mordred, someday you will meet a man and then you’ll be arguing over who does the washing, too.”

  “Yes, and may he be a better man than most, for I know how you stink at dawn when you first wake,” Lukat added.

  “It’s you who stinks,” I said, laughing as I splashed water up at both of them.

  We sat on a long, flat rock and Lukat brought out the lunch he’d packed into his serving pouch. It was a long flatbread cake and dried mutton with swamp apple sliced across it and long-stem mushrooms that were called “little amulets,” all slathered in rosemary butter. To drink, we had skins full of heavily diluted unfermented wine from the wild grapes. We divided up the food, passing bits to each other that tasted especially good. Lukat kept claiming that the wine made him drunk, although it could not have, for there was so little of it and it had not even fermented. Melisse talked a bit about her brothers who had left our forest sanctuary, knowing they could never speak of the Lake of Glass, to go join King Hoel’s army at the northern coast, which fought against the provincial governors who paid allegiance to no people, as well as the Saxons who had come to those shores, all in service to the great court of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table and for the glory of that sword Excalibur. As she spoke, it struck me as odd that she didn’t know I was that king’s son, and I felt more isolated from the world around me knowing I could not speak of the reasons for my mother’s well-known furies and silences and her inability to leave our home in the winter, even for the feasts of the nameless days at solstice-time.

  Lukat turned to me, as the afternoon dwindled, and put his arm over my shoulder. “You are more brother than any brother to me. I hope when Melisse and I have children, you will be their guardian and uncle.”

  “Yes!” I shouted, and could not help myself—I kissed him on the cheek, feeling that welling up of friendship and affection.

  He blushed, and grinned, and Melisse said, “No stealing my husband-to-be, Mordred. You will have many handsome men to choose from, with your looks and talents. You don’t need this horse-herd from the caves.” We laughed and then Melisse stood, offering her hand to me. “Do you know how to dance, Mordred?”

  “I have watched dancing, but never done it.”

  “Come on, then,” she said. “Take my hand.” She had that kind of girlish smile that seems like the sun coming out from behind a cloud—there was no guile there, no hidden meaning to her. I loved Melisse in that moment, as I hadn’t completely loved her before. She had accepted me for who I was, and wanted my friendship, offering me hers in return. I took her hand, which was slightly cold. She drew me up, and Lukat reached into his shirt for the pipes he played when we guided the sheep along the dusty trails.

  He began to play a lively tune that reminded me of the wild Beltane dances. Melisse guided my hands to her waist and then began moving her feet in a lively fashion as we twirled around on the cold ground. “Faster!” she cried as the Lukat’s tune picked up. “Lose yourself in it. Mordred! Yes! Like this!” She held my hands and spun away from me, and I did the same, still touching her fingers. Then we came back together, and Lukat’s music seemed to linger in the air in that green paradise, and I have frozen it in my memory above many others, for it was the last of its kind for me in this life.

  This is my memory that I ravel into you: the beautiful red-wine-haired girl of sixteen, her fingertips touching mine, her skirt and cape swirling in a blur of dance, the mist of the stream and the green of the fern at its edge, while the white frost speckled among the mosses like faery dust, and the boy of sixteen on the flat rock, playing the five-fluted pipes, looking like beautiful Pan s
erenading children just before they entered the world of men and women.

  How I would return to that moment, the tincture of time, if I could, that moment before my left foot returned to earth and while my right leg had just landed on the dead leaves below them.

  For the hour to come would be one I could never wipe from my thoughts as long as I lived. That brief moment of the dance held my hopes before the darkness swooped down like a crow upon us.

  3

  We were back on our horses too soon, but we went slowly along the path, catching the last of sunlight between the oaks. “I want to begin farming the lake itself,” Lukat said. “No one has tried it yet.”

  “They’ve tried,” Melisse said. “But no one has the ideas you have, my love.”

  “Cress and eel-spice can grow in the water, easily,” Lukat said, looking across to me. “I think we can use the far shore to plant, and I’ve already grown swamp apples there. If we grow them far enough away—near the luminous pools—the branches won’t get in the way of the boats.”

  “You’ve done this all in secret?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “He wanted to make sure it worked before he said anything,” Melisse said, leaning forward to whisper something to the mare, for the Eponi could whisper to their horses in order to train them and guide them.

  “If we are to have many children,” Lukat said, “I need to make sure we bring more food to our people.”

  “Two children,” Melisse said. “A boy and a girl.”

  “Two boys, two girls,” he said, laughing.

  “Seven years from now, we can fight about it like old people,” she said gaily. “Once I’m a Druid.”

  “Mordred, my brother, I’m going to be a Druid’s bitch,” Lukat smirked.