And now it was daylight, a new day, and he was wide awake. He stretched luxuriously, with excitement running through his body. He could feel it in his very bones. The bed was soft and warm, and smelled only slightly of the dressed furs that covered it. The room was big, and to his eyes very well furnished, with the two wide beds and the clothes-chest and a thick woven rug hanging over the door to keep out the worst of the draughts. Floor and walls alike were made with the flat, local stone slabs. At this early hour, even in summer, the room was very cold, but it was cleaner than Sula's hut could ever be, and something in the boy recognized and welcomed this as desirable. Between the beds, above the clothes-chest, was a narrow window through which the early morning air poured, cool and clean and smelling of the salt wind.
He could lie still no longer. Gawain, beside him, still slept, curled like a puppy in the welter of furs. In the other bed little could be seen of the twins save the tops of their heads; Gareth had been pushed to the bed's edge, and lay sprawling half out of it, but still deeply asleep.
Mordred slid out of bed. He padded to the clothes-chest, and, kneeling upon it, looked out of the window. This faced away from the sea; from it, by craning, he could see the courtyard and the main outer gateway of the palace. The sound of the sea came muted, a murmur under the incessant calling and mewing of the gulls. He looked the other way, beyond the palace walls, where a track ran green through the heather towards the summit of a gentle hill. Beyond that curved horizon lay his foster home. His father would be breaking his fast now, and soon would be gone about his work. If Mordred wanted to see him (to get it over with, said a small voice, quickly stifled in the dark and barely heeded rearward of his mind) he must go now.
On the chest lay the good tunic that he had been given last night, with a cloak, a brooch, and a leather belt with a buckle of copper. But in the very moment of reaching for the prized new clothing he changed his mind, and with something like a shrug picked up his old garment from the corner where he had thrown it, and slipped it on. Then, ducking past the door curtain, he let himself out of the room, and padded barefooted along the chill stone corridors to the hall.
The hall was still full of sleepers, but guards were changing duty for the morning shift, and servants were already moving. No one stopped him or spoke to him as he picked his way across the cluttered floor and out into the courtyard. The outer gate was open, and a cart of turfs was being dragged in by a couple of peasants. The two guards stood watching, at ease, eating their breakfast bannocks and taking turn and turn about to drink from a horn of ale.
As Mordred approached the gate one of the men saw him, nudged the other, and said something inaudible. The boy hesitated, half expecting to be stopped, or at any rate questioned, but neither of the men made a move to do so. Instead, the nearest one lifted a hand up in a half-salute, and then stood back to let the boy go by.
Perhaps no other moment of royal ceremony in Prince Mordred's life was ever to equal that one. His heart gave a great bound, right into his throat, and he felt the colour rush into his cheeks. But he managed a calm enough "Good morning," then ran out through the palace gate and up the green track into the moor.
He ran along the track, his heart still beating high. The sun came up, and long shadows streamed away ahead of him. The night's dew shivered and steamed on the fine grasses, on the rushes smoothed by the light wind, till the whole landscape thrilled and shimmered with light, a softer repetition of the endless, achingly bright shimmer of the sea. Overhead, the clouds wisped back, and the air filled with singing as the larks launched themselves from their nests in the heather. The air rippled with song as the land with light. Soon he reached the summit of the moor, and before him stretched the long, gentle slope towards the cliffs, and beyond them again the endless, shining sea.
From this point he could see, clear across the sea in the early light, the hills of the High Island. Beyond them lay the mainland — the real mainland, the great and wonderful land that the islanders called, half in jest, half in ignorance, "the next island." Many times, from his father's boat, he had seen its northern cliffs, and had tried to imagine the rest; its vastness, its forests, its roads and ports and cities. Today, though hidden from view, it had ceased to be a dream. It was the High Kingdom, to which he would one day travel, and where he would one day matter. If his new status was to mean anything, it would mean that. He would see to it.
He laughed aloud with joy, and ran on.
He came to the turf cutting. He paused, deliberately lingering by the ditch he had dug only yesterday. How long ago, already, it seemed. Brude would have to finish it now — alone, too, though lately he had been complaining about pains in his back. Perhaps, thought the boy, since they were apparently going to leave him free to come and go from the palace, he could come down early each day for an hour before the other boys were up, and finish the digging. And if he were given real princely status, with servants, he could maybe set them to the task, or to the collecting of the lichens for his mother's dyestuffs. The basket was still standing there by the diggings, where he had left it yesterday, forgotten. He snatched it up, and ran on down the track.
The gulls were up, and screaming. The sound met him, raw on the wind from the sea. Something else was on that wind, a strange smell, and in the gulls' screaming a high shiver of panic that touched him like the edge of a knife. Smoke? There was usually smoke from the cottage, but this was a different smoke, a sour, chilled and sullen emanation, carrying with it a smell that mocked the good scent of roasting meat on the rare days when Sula had meat in the pot. This was not a good smell; it was sickening, an ugly mockery, making the morning foul.
Mordred's breeding, perverse though it was, had made him the child of one fighting king, and the grandson, twice over, of another. This combined with his hard peasant upbringing to make fear, for him, something to be faced immediately, and found out. He flung the basket of lichens down and ran full tilt along the cliff path, to where he could see down into the bay that had been his home.
Had been. The familiar cottage, with its clay oven, its lines of pegged fish, the hanging festoons of drying nets — all had vanished. Only the four walls of his home still stood, blackened and smoking with the sluggish, stinking smoke that befouled the sea-wind. Most of the outer roof slabs still lay in place, held as they were by stone supports built into the walls, but those in the center were thinner, and here and there had been pegged into place by driftwood. The thatch of the roof, dry with summer, had burned fiercely, and, with the pegs destroyed, the slabs had sagged, tilted, and then cracked, sliding down with their blazing load of thatch into the room below, making a pyre of what had been his home.
It must be, in very truth, a pyre. For now, retchingly, he recognized the smell that had reminded him of Sula's cooking pots. Sula herself, with Brude, must be inside — underneath that pile of burned rubble. The roof had fallen directly over their bedplace. To Mordred, groping, dazed, for the cause of disaster, there was only one explanation. His parents must have been asleep when some stray spark from the unwatched embers, blown by the draught, had lodged in the wind-dried turfs of the roof, and smouldered to a blaze. It was to be hoped that they had never woken, had perhaps been rendered unconscious by the smoke, to be killed by the falling roof before the fire even touched them.