"As for the south-west, you have the gist of it, but not the whole. I have an enemy there now, a man I banished into exile, one Peter Ironhair." I went on to tell him of Ironhair, his eviction from Camulod, his flight and his unsuccessful bid for power in Cambria as champion of the demented prince Carthac Pendragon, and his subsequent alliance with the new ruler in Cornwall. I did not lie, but I confined my truths to my own dealings with Ironhair, making no mention of the boy.
Derek listened in silence, and when I had finished, he sat watching me, gnawing on the inside of his cheek.
"So this Ironhair seeks vengeance on the boy?"
"No, he seeks revenge on me. He knows my feelings for the boy and knows the duty I have undertaken to see him into manhood and into his inheritance. The boy will rule in Camulod one day. He's my only heir, though not my son. Ironhair knows he could damage me more by harming the lad than ever he could by killing me, in any fashion."
"Who is the boy?"
"My cousin Uther's son, Arthur Pendragon."
Derek had been scratching his beard, but his fingers stilled as I spoke and his eyes grew wide. "Uther Pendragon, the man I killed?"
"Aye. The boy is heir to Pendragon, thus this Ironhair perceives him as a threat to his own power, his eventual kingship there. The man is mad. You could become king of the Pendragon before Ironhair could."
Derek had been shaking his head as I said the last words, barely listening to me, but now he looked back at me in outrage.
"You say this Ironhair is mad, and yet you ask me to give shelter to a boy whose father died at my hand? What does that make you? Or me, were I fool enough to listen? You would expect me to spend the remainder of my life waiting for him to grow up and claim the blood price?"
"Not true! Of course not! That would never happen, and the boy will never know."
"Never?" Derek's voice was swelling with scorn and an anger born, I felt sure, of guilt. "How not? You know, I know, the gods know! And who else might know, only the gods can tell! But one of them—someone—will tell him, soon or late."
"I would not, nor would you. And no other knows."
"Pah! And I should accept your oath on that?"
"You should, it's freely given."
"You take me for as big a fool as you. Why should I?"
"Perhaps because you owe him a life, in return for his father's."
He sat gaping at me, speechless, then grunted explosively and hauled himself to his feet.
"You leave tomorrow," he growled, and he made his way directly to his horse.
I followed Derek in a curious frame of mind, in part disappointed by my failure to enlist his aid, but also relieved at my success in diverting his attention from the truth he had come so close to grasping. That danger, I now felt, was safely past, and with its passing my own task of finding safety for the boy had been simplified. The very name of Pendragon of Cambria, son of the ravager of Cornwall, was proof enough for him, I knew, of my need to hide the child. I could live easily with Derek's knowledge of that portion of the truth, since it entailed sufficient complexity to satisfy his curiosity, and that, in turn, satisfied me. I knew he would seek no other explanation and that the secret of the rest of the boy's parentage and his claim, through his mother, to Cornwall and to Eire would be safe.
As I rode down the narrow hillside track behind him, I found myself wondering how angry Derek really was, for I could discern no stiffness in his posture. He rode easily, slouched on the garron's back, his weight inclined towards me and against the slope, allowing the horse to pick his own route downward. I made no attempt to speak to him, contenting myself with going over all that had been said and wondering how I might have presented my petition more effectively. And in thinking of that, I began to imagine his reaction could he have known the true danger I . might represent to his people—a danger that had nothing to do with the boy, or with who I was, but far more with what I suspected I was.
I had a skin disease of some kind, and I had come to believe, despite the derisive guffaws of my good friend Lucanus, our beloved and much respected physician and surgeon, that it was leprosy. Lucanus had thought me mad and deluded, initially, upon hearing of my suspicions, and had been predisposed to make light of what he called my fanciful imaginings, until he realized how deeply concerned and afraid I was. Once he had seen my fear, he set out to calm and reassure me. He had worked among lepers all his life, he told me, gazing deeply into my eyes, and in the space of decades at the work had never known a single person to become afflicted after only a short exposure to the disease. My exposure to it, and to lepers, he insisted, had been less than one day, and I had had no physical contact with any of them.
I listened to him despairingly, yearning for comfort, but I remained unconvinced, because my affliction, whatever it might be, evinced itself incontrovertibly in the form of a dry lesion, a single blemish—on the right-upper quadrant of my breast—that bore all the classic signs of being leprous, according to Lucanus's own description. It was an area of deadness on my chest, less than the size of the ball of my thumb, white in the centre and reddish around the edges. It was impervious to pain, or to any sensation at all, and the hairs that grew within its borders were white, too. Peering closely at this phenomenon, Lucanus agreed that it might, indeed, be a leprous lesion, but then he sat back on his heels and blithely rattled off a long and reassuring list of other things it might have been, ticking each off on his fingers as he named it.
At that point, relieved beyond description, I told him dispassionately about my unsuccessful attempt to rescue his friend Mordechai Emancipates, a physician who had contracted leprosy from his own work with lepers, from the hillside crevasse into which he had fallen. I told him about my own injuries and my useless attempts to save Mordechai's life, and about how I had finally emerged from that place, covered in his blood and my own, leaving Mordechai's body behind me. In telling this story, I saw the first flicker of doubt on my friend's face. He asked me again how much blood had been spilled there, in the crevasse. How much of mine and how much of Mordechai's? How much of Mordechai's had spilled on me?
I had no way of answering his questions accurately, for the night had been dark and wet and cold and I had been unaware, much of the time, that we were even bleeding, but I could see that die awareness of what I had described was troubling my listener. He confessed to me that the mingling of tainted blood with healthy caused him some concern, although he could not be certain why. He had once found and purchased an ancient treatise on this very topic, he said, a scroll written many years earlier by a noted physician and scholar, but he had never studied it, or even taken the time to really read it thoroughly. The mention I had made of mixing my blood with Mordechai's had recalled it to his mind. He would make shift to find the scroll, he promised me, and to master its contents, but he had been searching for it fruitlessly ever since our conversation, unable to recall what he had done with it or when he had last seen it. Until he found it, Lucanus would withhold his final diagnosis and judgment on my condition, and the threat of leprosy would hang over my head like Damocles's sword.
The illness—the leprosy, in my stubborn conviction— was not fatal in or of itself as I had always, in my ignorance, believed. It was a disfiguring disease, and horribly so, involving as it did the gradual disintegration of the digits and limbs and the facial features, but it did not cause death, save in the bleakest cases, When people died of hunger through an inability to feed themselves.