Mordred, Bastard Son

by Douglas Clegg

“And North-Galis, as well, and Cornwall.”

  “Lover of Arthur.”

  “Mother of Mordred.”

  “Sister of Queen Morgause of the Orkneys.”

  “Daughter of Ygrain.”

  And still these women did not stop their whispering and echoes of each other’s phrases.

  I went over to the well, and there beside it, upon a cloak of dried flowers, lay Morgan le Fay, the twin blades removed from her breast, but a thick, dark stain there. I knelt down beside my mother, slipping my arms beneath her shoulders, keeping a hand at her scalp to support her head. She shuddered slightly, and her breath quickened. I lifted her up, and took her out of that dreadful place.

  9

  When I reached the caverns with her, I took her immediately to Morgause, awakening her. “I have done something terrible,” I said.

  Morgause glanced at my face and then at my mother’s body.

  “She’s alive,” I said. “But barely. The witches of the well brought her to this.”

  “She breathes?” Morgause asked, looking at her sister’s face and then back to mine.

  “She needs a great healing,” I said. “Everything that can be done.”

  “You must go call Viviane,” Morgause said. “Go now. Call the wise women and the priests. We will do everything we can, but time cannot be wasted, Mordred. Go!”

  10

  In life, there are moments of great crisis, and when we are faced with them, we often act better than we might at any other time. Or we act like the worst of criminals and double-dealers for fear that we might be sucked into the maw of that horrible circumstance and never escape.

  What I had done that night would ring forever after in my ears, for I had fulfilled one vow and promise and paid one price, but had not ever asked of the price others would pay because of this.

  But I would soon find out, for when the goddess is angered, she does not wait years for her retribution.

  She does not wait hours.

  I had stolen one of the hallowed treasures of our people for a selfish act that had seemed selfless to me when I performed it. I could mull over all the had-I-nots, but I could take no comfort in that game.

  For when the healing circle had begun around my mother, who began to die a slow death, surrounded by all who had ever loved her, Morgause came to me, for she knew what must be done, absolutely, to save the life of Morgan le Fay.

  “Mordred,” she said. “You must fetch the Cauldron of Rebirth from the waters.”

  I gave her a look that felt within me like a lie.

  When I said nothing, she said, “Hurry. Go. It may be used once or twice in a generation, and has not been used for many. But we may speak with Arawn through it, and bathe your mother in its healing. You must fetch it now, for each second is precious for my sister’s life and I will not have her die like this.”

  I began to turn away from her, as if to go, but could not. I faced her again.

  “You know where it lies. You touched it once,” she said. “Your fingers had burned from it, when the funerary games had begun, and…”

  She watched my face, confusion spreading upon her own, mixed with the panic she must have felt. And then she looked at my arms, and grabbed them, lifting them up so as to see them better in the firelight.

  They were blistered and red, and she did not say a word at first, but only let go of my arms and then slapped me as hard as I’d ever been hit on the face, so much so that I nearly fell to backward.

  “Whatever you have done,” Morgause said, snarling nearly like the Anthea. “Undo it. Unmake this wickedness. Your mother’s life hangs in the balance. Her soul has been eaten away by this poison just as her flesh was pierced by the blades. Do not let the Queen of Cornwall die because of your evil.”

  11

  This was the night that became known as the Lamentation of Glamour, for those who were there and sat among the forest, saw the green phantom-lights of the marshes at a great distance and knew that the soul of one of the royal queens of the people of the sea, the Mor or Mir as we were called, was passing though had not yet entered the realm of Arawn. A glistening mist came up from those lower regions of the lake, and many would later say they saw spirits of the dead rise in that mist to come pay respect to the dying queen. The Druids had gone to the Grove, and among the thick oaks, they went to the foot of the oldest, called the Ram Oak, for the fleece that was laid upon its branches in remembrance of ancestors of healing and wisdom. Here they sang the great song of life and creation in the hidden language that sounded like the call of beautiful birds blended with the hymns of the Romans. The sound was sad and mysterious, and when I heard it, many wept and were inconsolable, for that was the effect of those Druid voices in their song. The herding people went to their fields and paddocks, to pray with the animals who spoke directly to the souls of the dead that Queen Morgan might be returned to the Lake, whether this night or in her new incarnation. The warriors took up their bows and aimed arrows for the deepest of pits that they might awaken Arawn to this trouble; the messengers called out from their hills and trees, like a hundred owls in the hunt; the artisans painted upon the outside walls of the cliff-dwellings the tale of the Lady of the Lake and Arawn, of the sword called Excalibur, and of the Cauldron of Rebirth; and Nimue, that wind-on-water spirit, was invoked through much sorcery, though she did not respond; the call also went to Merlin, and even I called to him through vesseling, though I heard nothing when I first sent out my thoughts upon the air; and though many searched the night sky for the white ravens of the Lady, none were seen, neither the gray doves of the rock, nor the stag of Cernunnos among the emerald depths of the forest.

  The wise women would not let me in the healing circle, and Morgause told me that I must not pollute my mother further with “those crimes your father brought to us.”

  I felt alone and empty and thought of killing myself that I might go beg Arawn to take my soul in exchange for my mother’s.

  And as I crouched above the caverns, watching the fires that had been lit and the lamps of the forest with their blue-yellow light, someone with a torch in his hand approached me. I glanced up at him, but the shadows cast by his torch hid his face from me.

  He crouched down beside me, and I finally recognized him—the hermit from the woods. He drew his cap down and undid his cloak.

  He wrapped me into it and put his arms around my shoulder, whispering to me, “All the Grove is in sorrow. What great queen dies?”

  I could not even answer him, but began sobbing against his shoulder, wishing I would not, wishing I could wash the cup of time until there was no memory of the past two days. When I told him what I had done, he said, “Dry your tears. We will get this Grail back from these Anthea. I know them too well and their tricks. They have hunted me many years, and haunted my dreams, but they have their own fears.”

  12

  Still, he was then a stranger to me, for he offered no name, nor did I offer mine. I rode on the back of his mottled horse, and we passed the cloaked guardians of the groves who seemed as if they had become trees themselves, their arms raised up like branches, and yet they were still, as if turned to stone, so fast did we pass them by.

  At last, we came to that grotto, but its waters were dry, and the eels and its fish dead at the silt bottom. He went ahead of me, brandishing a sword and his torch as well, as if expecting these sisters to leap out at us from the dark.

  There, in the empty chamber with its rushes laid out upon the floor where my mother had recently fallen, was that Cauldron that this hermit called “Grail,” but it was broken, as if hewn down its center by the great force of a sword. Blood had also been spattered around it, with strange markings etched upon it.

  The Anthea were gone, and the only trace of them were the bones of animals that they’d eaten, piled in corners, and dried berries and flowers, which the hermit told me, “are some for healing, some for death,” and he took many of them and brought them into his carrying pouch. “These jackal-women only h
ide tonight. They know that I would take their last soul if I should find them.”

  13

  When we arrived, I ran with the two halves of the Cauldron to the wise women and passed them to Viviane. When Morgause saw the hermit with me, she glared at him, and then her venom aimed for me as she drew me aside and said, “Why do you bring him here? He does not belong.”

  “He helped me get the Cauldron back,” I said.

  “You have done too much damage, Mordred,” she said. “Get him out of our sanctuary. He does not belong with us. Tell him to go back to his kingdoms and his swords. He curses us. He curses your mother with his presence here.” Morgause’s voice was more horrible than I’d ever heard it, as if she’d hidden a creature of cruelty within her soul and only now let it out. “Did he tell you who he is? What he has done? Did he bring you to this? Tell him that I curse him. I curse you both, whether it damns my soul or not.”

  It was again as if she had beat me, and I felt battered more on the inside than the out. I caught a glimpse of my mother laying there, and of Viviane cutting her own flesh to spill blood onto my mother’s wound; and the smell of thick swamp was in the air; and charred incense that smelled too much like bladderwort and myrrh; my mother’s face; her eyes closed; lips slightly parted; her skin more pale than I had ever seen it.

  When I went to that strange hermit who had swiftly become my only rock in this sea-swept night, I asked him, “Who are you that Morgause hates you?”

  “I am your stag. You are my hunter. Can we not remain so?”

  “But she knows you. And you her.”

  He looked at me with that intensity that I had seen in his face when he first held me in his arms. He put his hands on my shoulders as if he were afraid that I would run from him. “I am a fallen man, accursed of the goddess. Morgause has hated me many years, and had your mother seen me, she too might have wished to poison my cups, for once, many years ago when all of us were younger than you are now, we shared dark days. I should leave you and never look back here. I hope that Morgan, your mother, recovers for even broken, the bowl has much power in it.”

  “They will not let me near her,” I said. “Stay with me. Tonight. Here.”

  “You do not understand,” he whispered. “My lovely hunter. You do not know what brambles grow between Morgause and I. Even if you did…”

  “Then take me with you.”

  “With me?”

  “Where you sleep. Take me there. For I won’t find rest here, and I cannot face the dawn thinking of my mother’s life, which I failed to save.”

  “Do not bury her before her time,” he said. “The Cauldron has brought the dead to life before. Though cracked, it may yet hold some water-magick.”

  14

  I rode with the hermit, the man I called Stag, enemy of my kind, despised of Morgause. I would discover more about him before I returned homeward again. I would learn that he had once born a foundling of the goddess, at the edge of our lake, said to be the son of the Lady herself, as are all abandoned babies at the lake’s far shore. He was mystery in flesh, and I had only begun to delve into his secrets as we rode together.

  Yet that night, he was, to me, the stag of the forest, blessed of Cernunnos, sent to me by the gods. I could not deny that as I rode upon his horse, pressed against his back, his great arms around me, I felt I had become the man that I had been meant to become, no matter what storms the gods would bring down around us.

  Within his turf-and-thatch house, he laid me down upon the furs of his bed, and we wrapped ourselves in each other’s sorrow and longing and there slept, though I had not thought I could close my eyes.

  Too soon, before dawn had crept through the cracks and the windows of that hovel, the hide at the doorway had been drawn back.

  I opened my eyes as I heard the noise, and when my vision came into focus, I saw Morgause standing over me, looking every inch the priestess of the goddess, with her blue robes and her raven-white cloak, reminding me of that Medea of Colchis, of whom I’d read in Merlin’s scrolls. Her eyes were bright and sharp and fierce, and her lips were drawn back across her teeth in a beautiful grimace of fury.

  In her hands, the double-bladed dagger that my mother had thrust into her own bosom. She held it over my lover’s left shoulder, as I lay beside him.

  She whispered in my mind, the vesseling of it like the scratching of a wild beast within my head, startling me with sudden, vicious pain, as surely as if she had brought my hand into the mouths of those eels in the sea that set afire the ones who come near them: If you do not come with me now, this moment, I will send your lover to his next life in the most painful way you could imagine, nearly as painful as the way your own mother’s life trickles into the Otherworld as you lie here with the greatest traitor of your tribe.

  Chapter Thirteen

  1

  I sat up in bed, staring at her, and then the man beside me awoke and turned slightly over, looking at Morgause and the double blades pointed to his flesh.

  “Tell him who you are,” she snarled. “Tell him. If you don’t, I will.”

  I put my arms across his shoulders. “It doesn’t matter who he is.”

  “He is the man,” my aunt said, “who guided your father down into the labyrinth where you but nights ago had your Midsummer rites. He was fifteen then, as young as Arthur, when they, together, stole Excalibur from its burial place, and stole the kingdom of the Britons from your mother. His name is…”

  Before she could say it, the man whose body I didn’t want to ever let go of turned to face me. He whispered, “Lancelot.”

  2

  I had heard this name before, but could not know what it meant or why it had been rarely said in all my childhood. Lancelot had been a child of the Lady herself, of the lake, of the isle. And his legend was of the greatest betrayer of the caverns, for her had been most loved, and most honored as a child. He had shown blessings of the Lady, and had been the best horseman. The best swordsman. A messenger faster than any other. All of this, when he'd been a mere boy. But these stories were rarely referred to in my childhood, and none had told what had become of this boy who had been the brightest gift of the goddess to the shores of the isle.

  As I lay there, thinking of this, he wrapped his arms around me, and pressed his mouth against my ear. His warm breath against me as if about to say something to make me understand.

  But Morgause’s voice grew even harsher as she taunted us. “And there you are, Lancelot, come to do penance for your terrible crimes against the Lady and against that mortal lady to whom you were once wed. And here is where it has brought you. You bed the son of Arthur himself. Is that your way of being close to him? And you, Mordred. You make yourself the whore of this traitor as soon as you reach manhood.” I had never before heard her speak like this to me, and the shock of it left me feeling cold inside.

  Then she nearly barked her orders to me. “Get up. You have much to do. You lay with your whore-knight here while your mother travels to Annwn. You are going to make sure she does not complete that journey, or so help me, both of you will die before nightfall. Say your goodbyes. I will wait but a few moments without this dirt hovel, and I expect you to be clothed and prepared for the journey you must now take, Mordred.”

  3

  “I knew you were Arthur’s son,” Lancelot whispered to me, holding my face close to his lips as if he meant to kiss me, though we remained seconds from it. “I wanted to resist you. I wanted to, but when you came to me.”

  “First in dreams,” I said.

  He watched me, as if afraid of what he would have to say next. He bit his lower lip, and I reached up and drew his hair to the side so that I might see his eyes better and watch them as if I could climb through those soul-windows into him. “Everything she said of me is true,” he whispered. “I have done terrible things when I was young. I pay for them now. A maiden, abandoned by her husband on their wedding day, was given to me to marry. She bore my child though we but shared two nights abed. I could
not love her, though I tried. She died of sorrow, too young, while I was at war. When I returned, I found her body floating along the river near my home. And my child had been taken away before I had even known of its life.”

  “And my father? You are that same knight who was beloved of him?”

  He nodded. “We were once like brothers. But the stain upon my soul grew too great.”

  I had no time to judge him, to judge his past, any more than I would wish my own to be judged. But I thought of my friend Lukat, and how I had loved him as if he were like my brother, too. And how this man whose arms I could not draw myself away from had loved my father like that—and in such a way that he had even gone against his own tribes for that deep brotherhood.

  “Believe one thing only,” he whispered tenderly and yet with a kind of force I had not yet known from him. “I saw you and I knew that I had to hold you. I could not avoid you. Nor could I resist you another night. If the Lady of the Lake has granted me the blessing of your love, I do not mind all else that may happen. What we have done together feels sacred to me, though you may come to feel that we have committed a terrible wrong. But if I were to die today, I would die with the knowledge that I had you in my arms this morning and I would go into the Otherworld with that shred of joy within me.”

  I sighed, for I could not help myself. Then I drew back. “I must go. Now. Before she does something terrible.”

  He sat up in our bed, drawing the furs away from his body. All I wanted to do was sink back into him and stay there, but the thought of my mother’s suffering blocked this from my mind. “Will I see you tonight?” he asked, as if he expected pain to suddenly spring forth from his words.