Morgause did not speak. She lifted a key that hung on a chain from her girdle, and unlocked the door. It opened in silence on its greased hinges. At a gesture from her, Mordred held the lamp high. Before them a flight of stone steps led steeply downwards into a passageway. The walls glimmered in the lamplight, sweating with damp. Walls and steps alike were of rough rock, unchiselled, the living rock into which the Old People had burrowed for their burial chambers. The place smelled fresh and damp, and salty from the sea.
Morgause pulled the door shut behind them. The lamp guttered in the draught and then burned strongly. She pointed, in silence, then led the way down the steps and along a passageway, straight and smoothly floored, but so low that they had to stoop to avoid striking their heads on the roof. The air of the place was dead, and one would have said still, but all the while there was a sound that seemed to come from the rock itself: a murmur, a hum, a throb, which Mordred suddenly recognized. It was the sound of the sea, echoing through the passageway more like a memory of waters that had once washed there, than like the sound of the living sea without. The two of them seemed to be walking into the corridors of a vast sea-shell whose swirling echo, straight from the depths, was breathed now by the air. It was a sound he had heard many a time, as a child, playing with shells on the beach of Seals' Bay. Momentarily, the memory dispelled the darkness and the drug of fear. Soon, surely, thought the boy, they would come out into a cave on the open shore?
The passage twisted to the left, and there, instead, was another low door. This, too, was locked, but answered to the same key. The queen led the way in, leaving the door open. Mordred followed her.
It was no cave, but a small room, its walls squared and smoothed by masons, its floor made of the familiar polished slabs. There was a lamp hanging from the rocky ceiling. Against one wall stood a table, on which were boxes and bowls and sealed jars with spoons and pestles and other instruments of ivory and bone, or of bronze bright with use. Stone slabs had been set into the walls to make shelves, and on them stood more boxes and jars, and bags of leather tied with lead wire and stamped with some seal he did not recognize, of circles and knotted snakes. A high stool stood by the table, and against another wall was a small stove, with beside it a skep of charcoal. A fissure in the roof apparently served to lead the fumes away. The stove must be lit frequently, or had been very recently. The room was dry.
On a high shelf glimmered a row of what Mordred took to be globes or jars made of a strange, pale pottery. Then he saw what they were: human skulls. For a sickening moment he imagined Morgause distilling her drugs, here in her secret stillroom, and making her magic from human sacrifices, the dark Goddess herself shut away in her subterranean kingdom. Then he saw that she had merely tidied away the original owners of the place, when the gravechamber had been converted to her use.
It was bad enough. The lamp quivered in his hand again, so that the sheen on the bronze knives trembled, and Morgause said, half smiling: "Yes. You do well to be afraid. But they do not come in here."
"They?"
"The ghosts. No, hold the lamp steady, Mordred. If you are to see ghosts, then be sure to be as well armed against them as I."
"I don't understand."
"No? Well, we shall see. Come, give me the light."
She took the lamp from him and walked towards the corner beyond the stove. Now he saw that there, too, was a door. This one, of rough driftwood planks, was narrow and high, shaped irregularly like a wedge; it had been made to fit another natural fissure in the rock walls. It came open with the creak of warped wood, and the queen beckoned the boy through.
This at last was the sea-cave, or rather, some inner chamber of it. The sea itself drove and thundered somewhere near at hand, but with the hollow boom and suck of a spent force whose power has been broken elsewhere.
This cavern must be above all but the highest tides; the floor was flat, and dry, its slabs tilted only slightly towards the pool that stood at the cavern's seaward side. The only outlet must be deep under the water. No other was visible.
Morgause set the lamp down at the very edge of the water. Its light, still in the draughtless air, glowed steadily, down and down into the inky depths of the water. It must be some time since the pool had been disturbed by any stray pulse of the tides. It lay still and black, and deep beyond imagination or sight. No light could penetrate that black liquid; the lamplight merely threw back, sharp and small, the reflection of the rock that overhung the water.
The queen sank to her knees at the pool's edge, drawing Mordred down beside her. She felt him trembling.
"Are you still afraid?"
Mordred said, through shut teeth: "I am cold, madam."
Morgause, who knew that he was lying, smiled to herself. "Soon you will forget that. Kneel there, pray to the Goddess, and watch the water. Do not speak again until I bid you. Now, son of the sea, let us learn what the pool has to tell us."
She fell silent herself at that, and bent her gaze on the inky depths of the pool. The boy stayed as still as he could, staring down at the water. His mind still swam in confusion; he did not know whether he hoped more, or dreaded more, to see anything in that dead crystal. But he need not have feared. For him, the, water was only water.
Once he stole a glance sideways at the queen. He could not see her face. She was bowed over the water, and her hair, unbound, flowed down to make a tent of silk that reached and touched the surface of the pool. She was so still, so tranced, that even her breathing did not stir the surface where her hair trailed like seaweed. He shivered suddenly, then turned back and stared fiercely down into the water. But if the ghosts of Brude and Sula and of the score of murdered babies that lay to Morgause's account were present in that cave, Mordred saw no hint of them, felt no cold breath. He only knew that he hated the darkness, the tomb-like stillness, the held breath of expectation and dread, the slight but unmistakable emanations of magic that breathed from Morgause's trance-held body. He was Arthur's son, and though the woman, with all her magic, could not know it, this short hour when he was made privy to her secrets was to sever him from her more completely than banishment. Mordred himself was not aware of this; he only knew that the distant suck and thunder of the sea spoke of the open air, and wind, and light on the tide's foam, and drew him irresistibly away in spirit from the dead pool and its drowned mysteries.
The queen moved at last. She drew a long, shuddering breath, then pushed back her hair, and stood up. Mordred jumped thankfully to his feet and hurried to the door, pulling it open for her and following her through the wedge-shaped gap with a sense of relief and escape. Even the stillroom, with its gruesome watchers, seemed, after the silence of the cave, the tranced breathings of the witch, as normal as the palace kitchens. Now he could catch the smell of the oils that Morgause blended to make her heavy perfumes. He latched the door thankfully, and turned to see her setting the lamp down on the table.
It seemed that she already knew the answer to her question, because she spoke lightly.
"Well, Mordred, now you have looked into my crystal. What did you see?"
He did not trust himself to speak. He shook his head.
"Nothing? Are you telling me that you saw nothing?"
He found his voice. It came hoarsely. "I saw a pool of sea-water. And I heard the sea."