It was to be seen that the Queen kissed the departing marshal on both cheeks; then, after her, the King did the same. And Bedwyr, apparently unmoved after the Queen's embrace, had tears in his eyes as he turned from the King.
The court saw him off, then turned with anticipation to greet Gawain.
The doorstep where Mordred had been abandoned belonged, not to one of the King's protected foundations, but to a small community living remote from any town or road, and vowed to silence and poverty. The track that led through their little valley was used only by shepherds, or strayed travellers looking for a short cut, or, as in Gaheris's case, by fugitives. No messenger came there, no news, even, of the recent stirring scenes enacted in Arthur's capital. The good brothers nursed Mordred with dutifully Christian care, and even with some skill, for one of their number was a herbalist. They had no way of guessing who the stranger was who had been left on their doorstep during the storm. He was well dressed, but carried neither weapon nor money. Some traveller, no doubt, who had been robbed, and who owed his life to the fear — even perhaps the piety — of the thieves. So the brothers nursed the stranger, fed him from their plain rations, and were thankful when, the fever gone, he insisted on leaving their roof. His horse was there, an undistinguished beast. They packed a saddle-bag for him of black bread, wine in a leather flask, and a handful of raisins, and sent him on his way with a blessing and, it must be admitted, a private Te Deum afterwards. There had been something about the grim and silent man that had frightened them, and the brother who had watched his sleep had told them with fear of words spoken in grief and dread where the names of the High King and his Queen recurred. Nothing more could be understood: Mordred, deep in fever, had raved in the language of his childhood, where Sula and Guinevere and Queen Morgause came and went in the hot shadows, and all looks were alien, all words hurtful.
The wound was healed, but some residue of weakness remained. He rode barely eight miles on the first day, thankful for the plodding steadiness of the beast he bestrode. By instinct he went northward. That night he spent in a deserted woodcutter's hut deep in the forest; he had no money for an inn, nor had the brothers been able to spare him any. He would have to live, as they did (he thought hazily, as he huddled for warmth in his cloak and waited for sleep), on charity. Or else on work.
The thought, strange for so many years, aroused him to a sort of bitter amusement. Work? A knight's work was fighting. A weaponless man on a poor horse would be taken on only by the pettiest and poorest of rulers. And any ruler would ask questions. So, what work?
Out of the advancing clouds of sleep the answer came, with amusement still gone awry, but with something about it of an old longing. Sail. Fish. Dig peats. Grow a thin crop of grain and harvest it.
An owl sweeping low over the woodcutter's thatch gave its high, tearing cry. Half asleep, and already in vision on the edge of the northern sea, Mordred heard it as the cry of a gull, and it seemed like part of a decision already made. He would go home. He had been hidden there once before. He would hide there again. And even if they came looking for him amongst the islands, they would be hard put to it to find him. It did not occur to him to do anything but hide, so fixed in his poisoned delirium had Gaheris's lies and his own delusions become.
He turned over and slept, with cold air on his face and the cry of the gull still in his dream. Next day he turned westward. Two successive nights he spent in the open, avoiding the monastery houses where he might have heard of Arthur's search for him. The third was passed in a peasant's hut, where he shared the last of the brothers' hard bread and wine, and chopped firewood for his lodging-fee.
On the fourth day he reached the sea. He sold the horse, and with the money paid his passage northward on a small and barely seaworthy trader which was the last to leave port for the islands before winter closed the way.
Meanwhile Gawain came back to Camelot. Arthur sent Bors to meet him, to give him a full account of the tragedy, and also to temper as far as he might Gawain's grief over Gareth and Agravain and his anger with their killer. Bors did his best, but all his talk, his assertion of the Queen's innocence, his tale of Agravain's drunkenness and habitual (in these days) violence, of Gaheris's murderous intentions, of the attack on the unarmed Bedwyr, and the half-lit chaos of the fighting in the Queen's bedchamber… say what he might, nothing moved Gawain. Gareth's undeserved death was all he spoke of, and, Bors began to think, all he slept, ate and dreamed with.
"I'll meet him, and when I do, I shall kill him" was all he would say. "He's been sent away from court. The King has banished him. Not for anything that stains the Queen, but—"
"To keep him out of my reach. Yes. Well," said Gawain stonily, "I can wait."
"If you do kill Bedwyr," said Bors, desperately, "be sure Arthur will kill you."
The hot, blood-veined Orkney eyes turned to him. "So?" Then the eyes turned away. Gawain's head went up. They were just in sight of the golden towers, and the sound of a bell tolling slowly came floating, echoing from the water that edged the roadway. They would be there for Gareth's burial.
Bors saw the tears on Gawain's cheeks, and, drawing his horse back, said no more.
What passed between Gawain and his uncle the High King no one else ever knew. They were closeted together in the King's private rooms for the best part of a day, from the moment the funeral was over, right into the night and towards the next morning. Afterwards, without a word to any man, Gawain went to his rooms and slept for sixteen hours, then rose, armed himself, and rode to the practice field. That evening he ate at a tavern in the city, and stayed through the night with a girl there, reappearing next day in the field.
For eight days and nights he did this, talking with no one except as business required. On the ninth day he left Camelot, escorted, and rode the few miles to Ynys Witrin, where the King's ship, the latest Sea Dragon, lay.
She set her golden sail, raised her crimson dragon to the autumn winds, and weighed anchor promptly for the north.
It was Arthur's bid for two things: to get a trouble-maker as far out of the way as possible, and into the cooling winds of distance and time; and to give Gawain's hurt and angry spirit some work to do.
He had done the obvious thing, the one thing Mordred had not even thought of. Gawain, King of the Orkneys, had gone back to take up the rule of his islands.
BOOK III
THE WICKED DAY
1
WINTER PASSED, AND MARCH came in with its roaring winds and spasmodic storms, then softened towards the sweetness of an early spring. Sea-pinks covered the cliffs with rose, white flowers danced along the arched bramble boughs, red campion and wild hyacinth shone in the grass. Nesting birds called over the lochs, and the moors echoed to the curlew's bubbling note. On every skerry, and every grassy bank near the water, swans had built their weedy castles, and on each one slept a great white bird, head under wing, while the watchful mate cruised nearby, head up and wings set like sails. The water's surface echoed with the screaming of the oystercatchers and the gulls, and the upper sky quivered with lark-song.
A man and a boy were working on the stretch of moorland heather that covers the rolling center of Orkney's main island. At this time of year the heather was dark and dead-looking, but along the edges of the trodden roadway, and by every bank, crowded the pale, scented primroses. At the foot of the rolling moorland lay a thin strip of grazing, golden with dandelions. Beyond this a great loch stretched, and beyond that again, another, lying almost parallel, the two great waters separated at their southern extremities only by a narrow causeway and a strip of land well trodden by hoofs and feet, for this was a holy place in the islands. Here stood the great circles of stone, brooding, enigmatic, huge, and to be feared even by those who knew nothing of their purpose or their building. It was well known that no horse could be made to cross the causeway between dusk and dawning, and no deer had ever been seen to feed there. Only the goats, unchancy creatures always, would graze between the stones, keeping the grass smooth and short for the ceremonies still practiced there at the right seasons.