Queen's bastard, then. By whom? To Sula's mind there was no doubt there, either. She had never laid eyes on Queen Morgause's half-brother, Arthur the High King of Britain, but like everyone else she had heard many tales of that wonder-working young man. And the first of those tales was that of the great battle of Luguvallium, where the boy Arthur, appearing suddenly at King Uther's side, had led his troops to victory. Afterwards — so the tale went, told with pride and indulgence — he had gone, still ignorant of his true parentage, to lie with Morgause, who was Uther's bastard daughter, and so Arthur's own half-sister.
The timing was right. The child's age, and looks, and ways were right. And those rumours about the massacre at Dunpeldyour, whether ordered by Lot or by Merlin, were accounted for, and even — such were the ways of the great — justified.
Now Lot was dead, and Merlin, too. King Arthur had other and greater matters on his mind, and besides — if all the tales that reached the taverns were true — by the time he had other bastards by the score, and had shut this shameful begetting from his mind, or else forgotten it. As for Morgause, she would not kill her own son. Never that. But with King Lot gone, and Merlin gone, and the High King far away, why should she leave him here any longer? Why any more need to keep him secret in this lonely place?
She clutched the child closer, her fear cold and heavy in her. "The Goddess keep you safe, make her forget you. Make her forget you. Leave you here. My bonny, my Mordred, my boy from the sea." The child, roused by the sudden movement, tightened his arms round her and said something. It was inaudible, muffled against her neck, but she caught her breath and fell silent, rocking, staring over the child's head at the cottage wall.
After a while the small, ordinary sounds of the room, and the long hush of the sea outside, seemed to calm her. The child drowsed in her arms. Softly, she began to sing him back to sleep.
Queen Morgause did not make a feast that night.
When the fresh news was brought of the hated enchanter's death she sat for a long time very still, then, taking a lamp in her hand, she left the bright hall where the talk was still going noisily round, and made her way to the sealed chambers underground where she worked her dark magic, and waited for such glimmers of Sight as came to her.
In the first chamber, her stillroom, a half-empty flask stood on the table. In it was the remains of the poison she had mixed for Merlin. Smiling, she passed through another door, and knelt by the pool of seeing.
Nothing came clearly. A bedchamber, with a curved wall; a tower room, then? The bed with a man in it, still as death. And he looked like death: a very old man, gaunt as a skeleton, with grey hair straggling on the pillow, and a matted grey beard. She did not recognize him.
He opened his eyes, and it was Merlin. The dark, terrifying eyes, set in that grey skull, looked straight across the miles, across the seas, into hers where she knelt by the secret pool.
Morgause, crouching there with her hands to her belly, as if she would guard Lot's last, unborn child, knew then that once more the reports were false. Merlin lived still, and, prematurely aged as he was, with his health wrecked by the poison, he still had power enough to bring her and her plans to nothing.
Kneeling there, she began a frantic, frightened spell that, in the old man's weakened state, might serve to protect herself and her brood of sons from Arthur's vengeance.
BOOK I
THE BOY FROM THE SEA
1
THE BOY WAS ALONE IN THE summer world with the singing of the honey bees.
He lay flat on his back in the heather at the head of the cliff. Not far from him was the straight-cut line of dark turf where he had been working. The squared peats, stacked like slices of black bread along the ditched gash, were drying in the hot sun. He had been working since daybreak, and the line was a long one. Now the mattock lay idle against the peats while the boy drowsed after his midday meal. One hand, outflung on the heather, still held the remains of a barley bannock. His mother's two hives — crude skeps of barley straw — stood fifty paces in from the brink of the cliff. The heather smelled sweet and heady, like the mead that would be made from the honey. To and fro, sometimes within a finger's breadth of his face, the bees hurtled like slingshot. The only other sound in the drowsy afternoon was the crying, remote below him, of the seabirds at their nests along the cliff.
Something changed in the note of that crying.
The boy opened his eyes, and lay still, listening. Underneath the new, disturbed screaming of kittiwakes and razorbills, he heard the deeper, four-fold alarm note of the big gulls. He himself had not moved for half an hour or more, and in any case they were used to him. He turned his head, to see a flock of wheeling wings rise like blown snow above the cliff's edge some hundred paces away. There was a cove there, a deep inlet with no beach below. Hundreds of seabirds nested there, guillemots, shags, kittiwakes, and with them the big falcon. He could see her now, flying with the gulls that screamed to and fro.
The boy sat up. He could see no boat in the bay, but then a boat would hardly have caused such a disturbance among the high-nesting colonies on the cliff. An eagle? He could see none. At the most, he thought, it might be a predatory raven after the young ones, but any change in the monotony of the day's work was to be welcomed. He scrambled to his feet. Finding the remains of the bannock still in his hand, he made as if to eat it, then saw a beetle on it, and threw it away with a look of disgust. He ran across the heather towards the cove where the disturbance was.
He reached the edge and peered down. The birds flung themselves higher, screaming. Puffins hurtled from the rock below him in clumsy glide, legs wide and wings held stiffly. The big black-backed gulls vented their harsh cries. The whitened ledges where the kittiwakes sat in rows on their nests were empty of adult birds, which were weaving and screaming in the air.
He lay down, inching forward to peer directly down the cliff. The birds were diving in past a buttress of rock where wild thyme and sea-pink made a thick carpet splashed with white. Clumps of rose-root stirred in the wind of their wings. Then, among all the commotion, he heard a new sound, a cry like the cry of a gull, but somehow subtly different. A human cry. It came from somewhere well down the cliff, out of sight beyond the rocky buttress where the birds wheeled most thickly.
He moved carefully back from the edge, and got slowly to his feet. There was no beach at the foot of the cliff, nowhere to leave a boat, nothing but the steadily beating, echoing sea. The climber had gone down and there could only be one reason for trying to climb down here.
"The fool," he said with contempt. "Doesn't he know that the eggs will all be hatched now?" Half reluctantly he picked his way along the cliff top to a point from which he could see, stranded on a ledge beyond the buttress, another boy.