Mordred, Bastard Son

by Douglas Clegg

  But I felt, in my heart, that if I saved this maiden, if I rescued her from terrible trouble, she might grant that Broceliande would remain untouched and that the tribes of our people could remain within its boundaries without fear of Roman rule. It was, perhaps, a naïve dream, but I had done so much to hurt those around me who had raised me on the lake that I wished to make amends in some important way.

  But as I spoke, Lancelot’s eyes showed both anger and sadness. He shook his head slightly, and turned away for a moment as if gathering his thoughts. Then he turned back to me, his eyes nearly burning with some inner fire. “All night I have stood watch and through the day. The caverns below us have changed, Mordred. The people here are changed. They fear where they had no fear before. You cannot expect me to remain behind while you pursue this…this madness alone. I have fought in battles. I have seen the rough magick of the Anthea and have cut the throat of more than one necromancer in my time. When I brought your father to that sword…” He hesitated, not wishing to tell me more.

  “What did you see?” I asked.

  “I saw my shame. I saw the light of Annwn itself in that sword. Reflected in it, I saw my own death,” he said. “And it is not today, Mordred. It is not tonight that I will die.”

  When he said this, I felt thunderstruck by the revelation of it. “And my father saw his death, as well?”

  Lancelot nodded, keeping his eyes on me for my reaction.

  “And I am the one who will kill him?” I asked.

  “I could not tell from his manner,” he said. “Only that he knew that his son would destroy him.”

  “His bastard,” I said. “I know why Merlin does not wish for you to come with me. You are tainted by the sword Excalibur, Lancelot. You are cursed by that reflection you saw.” I felt an icy chill in my heart, for I had given myself to the man who had aided my father, who had hunted my mother as if she were a doe running along the fields to be cut down, a child in its belly. My mind raced as a torment ached within me. “There was a knight, beloved of my father, who brought the guard down to search for Morgan le Fay. You were there in Tintagel when my mother and Merlin had to flee like criminals from that castle. You hunted her. You would have cut her throat while I grew inside her.”

  “It is my shame that I did so,” he said, keeping his voice low. “You must believe that.”

  “You and I both have dishonored the Lady,” I said. “You must stay here.”

  “That would be foolish,” he said. His eyes softened slightly and he whispered, “Do not keep me from this. Though you know the dishonor of my youth, your heart knows of my love for you.”

  He looked to me, then, like a man who had lost his dreams. Part of me wished to embrace him, and part of me wished to hate him. The alchemy of love is a mingling of confusion with flesh and soul, and I cannot fathom its depths, nor can I do more than journey with it. At that moment, I felt the ice-chill of indifference, and the resignation I had begun to feel in that idyll we had spent after my mother’s passing—a new word to me, for I had heard it but had not understood it: guilt. I felt guilty for our crimes of passion, and for my mother’s death, and for this world that had begun unmaking itself around us. I had gone to Lancelot with the purity of love and the urgency of lust, but we had to separate, now, because of the consequences of that mating. Yet I knew I loved him, for this is the curse of love: that it will bring about terrible things to those who find it, and yet, it is worse to have none at all.

  By nightfall, I had mounted Caradoc, whose saddle and pommel had been draped with light provisions so not as to weigh him down. In the flickering shadows of evening torchlight, Lancelot approached me again and when he saw that I meant to speak, he held his hand up for me to stop.

  “I do not come to entreat you,” he said. “I will be here waiting for your return, though I do not wish for you to take this dangerous journey alone.” Then he drew a small brooch pin from his collar. “This was a gift to me from your father. It is too dark to see what is engraved upon it, but it shows the red-and-white dragons of the pen-Dragon, and upon its curve is written, ‘No subject of Arthur pen-Dragon, King of the Seven Kingdoms, shall harm the one who carries this.’ It was given to me when I left his service. I give it to you now that it might protect you should you need it.”

  He passed it to me, and I leaned down, pressing my lips to his forehead. “I will return with it,” I said. “If the gods are kind.”

  “I know,” he replied.

  I took the small brooch from him. It had a slightly curved hasp, and a long, sharp point to its pin. The brooch itself was a metal disk with some inlaid filigree upon it. I carefully thrust it through the cloth at the neck of my cloak.

  “And this, if you will accept it,” he said. He drew from within the folds of his cloak a torque. The torque was once a symbol of our tribes, a collar made of twisted metal that all but met at its center. These were still worn though they had become symbols of our slavery to Rome to those who lived before I was born, and were out of fashion with many.

  Yet, this curved and twisted bracelet—for this originally was for his own upper arm—seemed beautiful to me as I held it in my hand.

  “It is a symbol of my faith in you,” he said. “As once it was given to me as a symbol of my purity, for you are the only pure thing in my life.”

  I could not see its design or what metal had been used to make it, but it felt light in my hands. “It is too big for my arm,” I said. “But here.” I slipped it behind my neck, and pressed it so that its open end met my throat. It came to rest perfectly, nearly as if it were meant for my neck.

  “Are you still my hunter?” he asked.

  “As you are my stag,” I said.

  “May the wind be at your back, and the gods in your sword,” he said.

  He watched me as I brought Caradoc around toward the path at the edge of the Grove. I glanced back to him once. He stood there, a shadow among shadows, watching me go.

  I leaned forward to the horse and whispered those few Ogham words I knew that might allow the horse to move swiftly along the forest paths.

  As the horse began to gallop, I passed that altar-stone upon which Merlin lay. The Druids had covered his body with sirus branches and the bark of the willow, though his great painted face showed through. Seven priestesses of the Lady performed purification rituals with their cauldrons and prayers, the bright yellow of torches all around, reminding me of the Glamour Lamentation of light among the elementals of the forest when my mother had begun her passage to death.

  The high, sweet, yet infinitely sad songs of the young children of the Lake, singing the ancient songs for the safety of the Merlin’s soul, seemed to rise above the trees, and to move as if with wings along the darkening sky, following me with its pure sorrow.

  Do not go yet into that night, I vesseled to Merlin, hoping he could hear me.

  5

  The Roman roads ran often in straight lines, at the high ground through Broceliande. The villas and their growing towns—or those that were long abandoned—were off the roads, in clearings that either had been meadows once or were a result of years of cutting back at the forest. But I could not take these roads, which had begun falling into disrepair in my lifetime. Instead, I stuck to the hidden paths of forest and marsh, those thin ways between bogs and along stream-beds that I could identify by markings left by our tribes. Alder and birch often were planted near them, and if in a straight row, I would know the path as one of our forest highways. These were not so sophisticated as the Romans’ brilliantly laid-out roads, but they were shortcuts through the endless forest that outsiders had never learned to master.

  The crisp chill of an early autumn was in the air, and riding so fast—for Caradoc had wings upon his hooves, it seemed—made it that much colder for me as if we flew through an icy wind. Caradoc knew these paths by instinct or luck, and though I kept my body low to his neck and shoulders out of fear of branches, he carried me safely along the way.

  And then, suddenly
, I felt a sharp stabbing just behind my left ear, and I nearly let go of the reins with the pain of it. But it was Merlin’s voice, vesseling at that great distance to me. It is too late. His voice seemed feeble and weak. Guinevere has fallen. The murderous spirits have taken over her most trusted guards. You must hurry. You must use the vessel itself, Mordred. The vessel.

  6

  Though my horse kept moving at a swift gallop, it was if things slowed for me in vision. I could see light in the forest where there hadn’t been any, as if moonlight itself were a being that did not come from above, but far below, a cloud of steam from the bogs. Merlin continued to vessel into me. This is the final lesson of that art called vesseling, whelpling. You must heed this for I may not speak within you long. The soul within my body longs for its journey, and I cannot hold it for many more hours. The Cauldron of Rebirth is the physical vessel of making and unmaking. But the vessel of the goddess is all around you, and as your flesh gives of this halo that become the vessel, all sentient creatures do as well. The water, the rocks, those elementals, it is the source of life itself, within the greatest vessel. Imagine you are in a river, and you must divert its flow with your body. You raise your arms. You push with your legs. You create new channels for that river to flow. So the vessel is there, and it is only to be used with the Art. You may not use this as if you are a sorcerer from Ravenna. Even I have only tapped into the vessel’s power once or twice in this current lifetime. But it is important that the maiden you seek reach the shores of Britain unharmed. Men have grown drunk with the invisible flow of the vessel, Mordred. You must resist its pull, for once you feel it, you will wish for more of it.

  While he spoke, all around me I saw evidence of this vessel in this slowness of time that made it seem as if Caradoc’s hooves only touched the ground every few moments, and the world around us froze and yet moved slowly. I saw light as I had never seen it in the night—colors of yellow and green and blue and a deep violet haze, all of it flowing like a watery mist, almost as if I were riding that horse slowly through the bottom of the Lake of Glass and all else moved in a stream around us.

  Life, Merlin told me, is painted upon the vessel, and its source flows from within it. The vessel and the Cauldron are one, and the Art is there to control the flow of the vessel in times of great trouble. Though it does not seem so, this is one of those dangerous times, dolphin-fish. I wish you were not the one to drink from its cup. But you must, for I cannot, and you are a greater student of this art than any youth I have ever known. Morgause has damaged my final soul, and I allow it to flee this body, for I am bound and settled here. Do not ever forget that though you will be faced with trials and dangers, the flow of life is meant to be protected from those who do not trust the gods themselves.

  And then his voice went silent, and the world returned to what it had been moments before—the light faded into darkness, and I rode upon my horse, who moved swiftly as time resumed its normal pace. As if guided by Merlin himself, Caradoc began to slow as we reached a northeastern edge of the woods that encircled a generous sward, a circle of grassland that had been a perfect camp for the future queen’s retinue.

  And then I saw one of the most terrifying things I have ever before seen. I knew the stories of Roman punishments from my teachings, but never imagined that I would see this:

  Torches nearly as tall as men lit the clearing, as if to display the handiwork of those servants of Morgause. Each torch had, at its based, a soldier, bound to it, blackened with pitch, so that when the torch burned down the staff, it would continue burning the flesh of the dead man beneath it.

  From the edge of the sward to its center, along any low trees there, soldiers had been stripped to a cloth that was wound about their loins and were crucified along crossed branches of the trees. Great spikes had been nailed at their wrists, and their arms and legs were bound with thick cords. Some of them had been used as a kind of dagger practice; others had spears piercing their sides, chests and faces. Others were burnt by torches. They had many stab wounds in their bodies and the surrounding trees were spattered black-crimson with blood, and the roots soaked with it.

  It was the old Roman punishment, done in a way that shocked me from a level of innocence that I had before seeing it. I had not been able to imagine absolute evil, nor did I believe it existed. I had been taught by the elders that all in nature was good, but it was obvious to me that evil existed as well—for these acts against these dead men evoked horror and pity within me. My life before this moment, for whatever trouble there had been, whatever tragic sorrow I had felt in my mother’s death, was a pale flickering from a candle when compared to the enormity of this unspeakable act before me. It was like a pageant of human savagery.

  The enormity of it—of seeing twenty-five men thus bound and wounded, all of them dead from arrows shot into them as they hung there—took my breath away.

  Merlin had been right.

  I was too late for Guinevere.

  The remnants of a camp had been torn down as if by savage beasts, and scaffolding had been erected at the center of the ring of the crucified.

  I did not recognize immediately what this small stage might be, but I could guess it: those spirits who had invaded the flesh of Guinevere’s guardians intended to torture her in some way if they had not already done so and were finished with her.

  I tried to remember all Merlin had taught me of the Arts, whether of vesseling or raveling, or of that summer in my childhood when he taught me the forms of using the sword with that “dragon memory,” which was of the earth and its power, and of the prayer of calling wind, though this might not be answered, or the whistle one might make to call wolves of the forest, though these might bring danger to one’s side as well as to the enemy.

  I hoped to hear Merlin’s voice reassuring me, but I had begun to fear that he had left the world. I had no time for grief. No time for reflection any longer.

  There was a gathering about the stage, and the men there held something high above their heads, something wrapped in linens and fur. I could only guess what this might be.

  It was Guinevere herself, bound.

  As I dismounted Caradoc, leading him off the path through the tangle of dried vines, I moved closer to the edge of the trees to see what these creatures had planned. Yet it was eerily silent, as if these creatures could not speak at all, and as if the feet of the men they’d possessed did not make a sound when touching the dried leaves that had begun to fall along the meadow.

  Though I say ‘creatures’ these were men, and had the thin, beaky looks of the Gallic races. They wore the armor of guards, and I counted nearly twenty-three of them gathered around that stage that was no stage, but a funeral pyre.

  I guessed what they planned: they would tie her to that bed of thorns and brambles they had gathered, and set her ablaze while she lived.

  Merlin, I vesseled. Merlin, come to me.

  I waited but seconds. Completely alone with my horse, and needing to face twenty-three men possessed by the wandering spirits, who are the hungriest of ghosts, for they eat the souls of others for sustenance.

  I remembered what Merlin had told me before his voice had died away:

  The vessel of the goddess is all around you, and as your flesh gives of this halo that become the vessel, all sentient creatures do as well. The water, the rocks, those elementals, it is the source of life itself, within the greatest vessel. Imagine you are in a river, and you must divert its flow with your body. You raise your arms. You push with your legs. You create new channels for that river to flow.

  So, I thought: Imagine you are in a river. Imagine this. Imagine the elementals themselves.

  I glanced among the trees—the oaks that twisted and grew from great rock, the rowans, the crack-willow, the alders, the hawthorn along the sedge of the bog not far away, the ash trees that clumped together on the other side of the meadow—even the blackthorn brambles along the periphery of the camp—all of them, sacred to the Druids, sacred of the Grove. T
hese had the vesseling within them, as did the fern and ivy that grew thick, and that bog-cabbage that had reached its peak not a month earlier. The rocks themselves, and the water of the bog and of the rill and stream over which we’d passed along the forest path.

  The elementals are of fire, air, water, and earth.

  I did not know how I would do this, but I knew I must try. I slowly unsheathed my sword, raising it up first to the sky above, and then thrusting it into the moss at my feet. I called with my mind to that great dragon which slept within the earth, that it might bless my blade. I whispered aloud, “I am Mordred, son of the high king Arthur pen-Dragon, whose line descends from your brethren. I am here to protect Arthur’s bride. Bless this sword that it might protect her.”

  Then I raised the sword again into the air and whispered, “I am Mordred, son of Morgan of the Fay, who lives as a twinned soul in the flesh with her sister Morgause. You spirits of the air who lamented my mother’s passing, I ask you to bless this blade that it will protect me.”

  I felt nothing then, and wondered if such prayers were foolish rituals that might make one feel strong and yet confer nothing of magick.

  Life itself is a vessel.

  Merlin had once said to me when I was a boy, “Somewhere between where I sit and where you sit, our essence has been poured into a vessel.”