Gabran shut the lid of the box with a snap, but when Mordred reached to lift it Morgause stopped him.
"No, Mordred. Not now. We shall see that they have it before today's dusk. But you and I still have something to talk about, have we not? What is fitting for the young man to whom the future king of these islands owes a dear debt? Come with me now. We will talk of this in private."
She stood up. Gabran moved quickly to her side, his arm ready for her hand, but ignoring him, she stepped down from the dais and reached a hand towards the boy. He took it awkwardly, but somehow she made a graceful gesture of it, her jewelled fingers touching his wrist as if he were a courtier handing her from the hall. When she stood beside him she was very little taller than he. She smelled of honeysuckle, and the rich days of summer. Mordred's head swam.
"Come," she said again, softly.
The courtiers stood back, bowing, to make a way for them. Her slave drew back a curtain to show a door in the side wall. Guards stood there to either side, their spears held stiffly. Mordred was no longer conscious of the stares and the whispering. His heart was thudding. What was to come now he could not guess, but it could only, surely, be more wonders. Something was hanging in the clouds for him; fortune was in the queen's smile and in her touch.
Without knowing it, he tossed the dark hair back from his brow in a gesture that was Arthur's own, and with head high he escorted Morgause royally out of her hall.
3
THE CORRIDOR BETWEEN THE palace and the queen's house was a long one, without windows, but lit by torches hung on the walls. There were two doors in its length, both on the left. One must be the guardroom; the door stood ajar, and beyond it Mordred could hear men's voices and the click of gaming-stones. The other gave on the courtyard; he remembered seeing guards there. It was shut now, but at the end of the corridor a third door stood open, held wide by a servant for the passage of the queen and her attendants.
Beyond was a square chamber, which acted apparently as an anteroom to the queen's private apartments. It was unfurnished. To the right a slit window showed a narrow strip of sky, and let in the noise of the sea. Opposite, on the landward side, was another door, at which Mordred looked with interest, and then with awe.
This doorway was curiously low and squat — the same primitive shape as the door of his parents' cottage. It was set deep under a massive stone lintel, and flanked by jambs almost as thick. He had seen such entrance-ways before; they led down to the ancient underground chambers that could be found here and there through the islands. Some said they had been built, like the tall brochs, by the Old People, who had housed their dead there in stone chambers beneath the ground. But the simpler folk regarded them as magical places, the sidhe or hollow hills that guarded the gates of the Otherworld; and the skeletons that were found there, of men and beasts, were the remains of unwary creatures who had ventured too far within those dark precincts. When mist shrouded the islands — which was rare in those windy seas — it was said that gods and spirits could be seen riding out on their gold-decked horses, with the sad ghosts of the dead drifting round them. Whatever the truth, the islanders avoided the mounds that hid these underground chambers, but it seemed that the queen's house had been built beside one of them, perhaps only discovering it when the foundations were dug. Now the entrance was sealed off by a heavy door of oak, with big iron hasps, and a massive lock to keep it fast against whatever lurked behind it in the dark.
Then Mordred forgot it, as the tall door ahead of them opened between its two armed guards, and beyond was a blaze of sunlight, and the warmth and scent and colour of the queen's house.
The room they entered was a copy of Morgause's chamber at Dunpeldyr; a smaller copy, but still, to Mordred's eyes, magnificent. The sun streamed in through a big square window, under which a bench made a window-seat, gay with blue cushions. Near it, full in the sunlight, stood a gilded chair with its footstool and a cross-legged table nearby. Morgause sat down, and pointed to the window-seat. Mordred took his place obediently, and sat waiting in silence, with thumping heart, while the women, at a word from the queen, betook themselves with their stitchery to the far end of the room, in the light from another window. A servant came hurrying to the queen's side with wine in a silver goblet, and then, at her command, brought a cup of the sweet honey drink for Mordred. He took a sip of it, then set the cup down on the window sill. Though his mouth and throat were dry, he could not drink.
The queen finished her wine, then handed the goblet to Gabran, who must already have had his orders. He took it straight to the servant at the door, shut the door behind the man, then went to join the women at the other end of the room. He lifted a small knee harp from its shroud in the corner, and, settling himself on a stool, began to play.
Only then did the queen speak again, and she spoke softly, so that only Mordred, close beside her, would be able to hear.
"Well, Mordred, so now let us talk. How old are you? No, don't answer, let me see.… You will soon pass your eleventh birthday. Am I not right?"
"Y—yes," stammered the boy, amazed. "How did — oh, of course, Gawain told you."
She smiled. "I would have known without being told. I know more about your birth than you do yourself, Mordred. Can you guess how?"
"Why, no, madam. About my birth? That's before you came to live here, isn't it?"
"Yes. I and the king my husband still held Dunpeldyr in Lothian. Have you never heard what happened in Dunpeldyr, the year before Prince Gawain was born?"
He shook his head. He could not have spoken. He still had no inkling of why the queen had brought him here and was speaking to him like this, secretly, in her private chamber, but every instinct pricked him to the alert. It was coming now, surely, the future he had dreaded, and yet longed for, with the strange, restless and sometimes violent feelings of rebellion he had had against the life to which he had been born, and to which he had believed himself sentenced till death, like all his parents' kin.
Morgause, still watching him closely, smiled again. "Then listen now. It is time you knew. You will soon see why.…"
She settled a fold of her gown, and spoke lightly, as if talking of some trifling matter far back in the past, some story to tell a child at lamp-lighting.
"You know that the High King Arthur is my half-brother by the same father, King Uther Pendragon. Long ago King Uther planned my marriage to King Lot, and though he died before it could take place, and though my brother Arthur was never Lot's friend, we were married. We hoped that through the marriage a friendship, or at least an alliance, might be formed. But, whether through jealousy of Lot's prowess as a soldier, or (as I am persuaded) because of lies told to him by Merlin, the enchanter, who hates all women, and who fancies himself wronged by me. King Arthur has always acted more as an enemy than as a brother and a just lord."