So the whispers went. They would have pleased Morgause, had she heard them, and Mordred, whom they would have enraged, did not hear them. But he heard the muttering, and felt the eyes. He stiffened his spine further, and wished the ordeal safely over, and himself home again.
Then they had reached the door of the hall, and as the servants pushed it open, Mordred forgot the whispers, his own strangeness, everything except the splendid scene in front of him.
When Morgause, suffering under Arthur's displeasure, had finally left Dunpeldyr for her other kingdom of Orkney, some stray glimmer in her magic glass must have warned her that her stay in the north would be a long one. She had managed to bring many of the treasures from Lot's southern capital. The king who reigned there now at Arthur's behest, Tydwal, must have found his stronghold stripped of most of its comforts. He was a stark lord, so cannot have cared overmuch. But Morgause, that lady of luxury, would have thought herself ill used had she been denied any of the appurtenances of royalty, and she had managed, with her spoils, to make herself a bower of comfort and colour to cushion her exile and enhance her once famous beauty. On all sides the stone walls of the hall were hung with brilliantly dyed cloths. The smooth flagstones of the floor were not, as might have been expected, strewn with rushes and heather, but had been made luxurious with islands of deerskin, brown and fawn and dappled. The heavy benches along the side walls were made of stone, but the chairs and stools standing on the platform at the hall's end were of fine wood carefully carved and painted, and bright with coloured cushions, while the doors were of strong oak, handsomely ornamented, and smelling of oil and wax.
The fisherman's boy had no eyes for any of this. His gaze was fixed on the woman who sat in the great chair at the center of the platform.
Morgause of Lothian and Orkney was still a very beautiful woman. Light from a slit window caught the glimmer of her hair, darkened from its young rose-gold to a rich copper. Her eyes, long-lidded, showed green as emerald, and her skin had the same smooth, creamy pallor as of old. The lovely hair was dressed with gold, and there were emeralds at her ears and at her throat. She wore a copper-coloured gown, and in her lap her slender white hands glinted with jewelled rings.
Behind her her five women — the queen's ladies — looked, for all their elegant clothing, plain and elderly. Those who knew Morgause had no doubt that this was an appearance as carefully contrived as her own. Some score of people stood below the dais, about the hall. To the boy Mordred it seemed crowded, and fuller of eyes even than the outer courtyard. He looked for Gawain, or for the other princes, but could not see them. When he entered, pausing rather nervously just inside the doorway, the queen was sitting half turned away, talking with one of her counsellors, a smallish, stout greybeard who bent humbly to listen as she spoke.
Then she saw Mordred. She straightened in her tall chair, and the long lids came down to conceal the sudden flash of interest in her eyes. Someone prodded the boy from behind, whispering: "Go on. Go up and then kneel."
Mordred obeyed. He approached the queen, but when he would have knelt, a movement of one of her hands bade him stand still. He waited, very straight, and apparently self-contained, but making no attempt to conceal the wonder and admiration he felt at this, his first sight of royalty enthroned. He simply stood and stared. If the onlookers expected him to be abashed, or the queen to rebuke him for impertinence, they were disappointed. The silence that held the hall was one of avid interest, coupled with amusement. Queen and fisherman's boy, islanded by that silence, measured one another eye to eye.
If Mordred had been half-a-dozen years older, men might more readily have understood the indulgence, even the apparent pleasure with which she regarded him. Morgause had made no secret of her predilection for handsome youths, a fancy which had been allowed a relatively free reign since the death of her husband. And indeed Mordred was personable enough, with his slender, straight body, fine bones, and the look of eager yet contained intelligence in the eyes under their wing-tipped brows. She studied him, stiff but far from awkward in his "best" tunic, the only one he had, apart from the rags of every day. She remembered the stuff she had sent for it, years ago, a length of homespun patchily dyed, that not even the palace slaves would have worn. Anything better, missed from the coffers, might have caused curiosity. Round his neck hung a string of shells, unevenly threaded, with some sort of wooden charm obviously carved by the boy himself from a piece of sea-wrack. His feet, though dusty from the moorland road, were finely shaped.
Morgause saw all this with satisfaction, but she saw more besides: the dark eyes, an inheritance from the Spanish blood of the Ambrosii, were Arthur's; the fine bones, the folded subtle mouth, came from Morgause herself.
At length she spoke. "Your name is Mordred, they tell me?"
"Yes." The boy's voice was hoarse with nervousness. He cleared his throat. "Yes, madam."
"Mordred," she said, consideringly. Her accent, even after her years in the north, was still that of the southern mainland kingdoms, but she spoke clearly and slowly in her pretty voice, and he understood her very well. She gave his name the island pronunciation. "Medraut, the sea-boy. So you are a fisherman like your father?"
"Yes, madam."
"Is that why they gave you your name?"
He hesitated. He could not see where this was leading. "I suppose so, madam."
"You suppose so." She spoke lightly, her attention apparently on smoothing a fold of her gown. Only her chief counsellor, and Gabran her current lover, knowing her well, guessed that the next question mattered. "You never asked them?"
"No, madam. But I can do other things besides fish. I dig the peats, and I can turf a roof, and build a wall, and mend the boat, and — and milk the goat, even—" He paused uncertainly. A faint ripple of amusement had gone round the hall, and the queen herself was smiling.
"And climb cliffs as if you were a goat yourself. For which," she added, "we should all be grateful."
"That was nothing," said Mordred. His confidence returned. There was really no need to be afraid. The queen was a lovely lady, as Sula had told him, not at all as he had imagined a witch to be, and surprisingly easy to talk to. He smiled up at her. "Is Gawain's ankle badly sprained?" he asked.
A new rustle went round the hall. "Gawain," indeed! And a fisher-boy did not hold conversation with the queen, standing as straight as one of the young princes, and looking her in the eye. But Morgause apparently noticed nothing unusual. She ignored the murmurs. She had not ceased to watch the boy closely.
"Not very. Now that it has been bathed and bound up he can walk well enough. He will be back."…at the exercise of arms tomorrow. And for this he has you to thank, Mordred, and so have I. I repeat, we are grateful."
"The men would have found him very soon, and I could have lent them the rope."
"But they did not, and you climbed down twice yourself. Gawain tells me that it is a dangerous place. He should be whipped for climbing there, even though he did bring me two such splendid birds. But you…" The pretty teeth nibbled at the red underlip as she considered him. "You must have some proof of my gratitude. What would you like?"
Really taken aback now, he stared, swallowed, and began to stammer something about his parents, their poverty, the coming winter and the nets that had been patched twice too often, but she interrupted him. "No, no. That is for your parents, not for you. I have already found gifts for them. Show him, Gabran."
A young man, blond and handsome, who stood near her, stooped and lifted a box from behind her chair. He opened it. In it Mordred glimpsed coloured wools, woven cloth, a net purse glinting with silver, a stoppered wine flask. He went scarlet, then pale. Suddenly, the scene had become somehow unreal, like a dream. The chance encounter at the cliff, Gawain's talk of reward, the summons to the queen's house — all this had been exciting, with its promise of some change in the monotonous drudgery of his life. He had come here expecting at most a silver coin, a word from the queen, some delicacy, perhaps, that could be begged from the palace kitchens before he ran home. But this — Morgause's beauty and kindness, the unaccustomed splendours of the hall, the magnificence of the gifts for his parents, and the promise, apparently, of more for himself… Dimly, through the heart-beating confusion, he felt that it was all too much. There was something more here. Something in the looks the courtiers were exchanging, in the speculative amusement in Gabran's eyes. Something he did not understand, but that made him uneasy.