Mordred's messenger, arriving as the morning market-carts rumbled over the Isca bridge, found the palace in turmoil, and the Queen gone.
10
IT WAS A BRIGHT DAY, THE last of summer. Early in the morning the heralds of the two hosts led the leaders to the long-awaited parley.
Mordred had not slept. All night long he had lain, thinking. What to say. How to say it. What words to use that would be straightforward enough to permit of no misinterpretation, but not so blunt as to antagonize. How to explain to a man as tired, as suspicious and full of grief as the ageing King, his, Mordred's, own dichotomy: the joy in command that could be, and was, unswervingly loyal, but that could never again be secondary. (co-rulers, perhaps? Kings of North and South? Would Arthur even consider it?) At the truce table tomorrow he and his father would be meeting for the first time as equal leaders, rather than as before. King and deputy. But two very different leaders. Mordred knew that when his time came he would be not a copy of his father, but a different king. Arthur was of his own generation; by nature his son had his thoughts and ambitions channelled otherwise. Even without the difference in their upbringing this would have been so. Mordred's hard necessity was not Arthur's, but each man's commitment was the same: total. Whether the old King could ever be brought to accept the new ways that Mordred could foresee, ways that had been embodied (though in the end discreditably) in the phrase "Young Celts," without seeing them as treachery, he could not guess. And then there was the Queen. That was one thing he could not say. "Even were you dead, with Bedwyr still living, what chance had I?"
He groaned and turned on the pillow, then bit his lip in case the guards had heard him. Omens bred too fast when the armies were out.
He knew himself a leader. Even now, with the High King's standard flying over his encampment by the Lake, Mordred's men were loyal. And with them, encamped beyond the hill, were the Saxons. Between himself and Cerdic, even now, there might be the possibility of a fruitful alliance; a concourse of farmers, he had called it, and the old Saxon had laughed.… But not between Cerdic and Arthur; not now, not ever.… Dangerous ground; dangerous words. Even to think such thoughts was folly now. Was he, at this most hazardous of moments, seeing himself as a better king than Arthur? Different, yes. Better, perhaps, for the times, at any rate the times to come? But this was worse than folly. He turned again, seeking a cool place on the pillow, trying to think himself back into the mind of Arthur's son, dutiful, admiring, ready to conform and to obey.
Somewhere a cock crew. From the scrambled edges of sleep, he saw the hens come running down the salt grass to the pebbled shore. Sula was scattering the food. Overhead the gulls swept and screamed, some of them daring to swoop for it. Sula, laughing, waved an arm to beat them aside.
Shrill as a gull's scream, the trumpet sounded for the day of parley.
Half a mile away, in his tent near the Lake shore, Arthur slept, but his sleep was an uneasy one, and in it came a dream.
He dreamed that he was riding by the Lake shore, and there, standing in a boat, poling it through the shallow water, stood Nimuë; only it was not Nimuë, it was a boy, with Merlin's eyes. The boy looked at him gravely, and repeated, in Merlin's voice, what Nimuë had said to him yesterday when, arriving at the convent on Ynys Witrin among her maidens, she had sent to beg speech with him.
"You and I, Emrys," she had said, giving him the boyhood name Merlin had used for him, "have let ourselves be blinded by prophecy. We have lived under the edge of doom, and feel ourselves now facing the long-threatened fate. But hear this, Emrys: fate is made by men, not gods. Our own follies, not the gods, foredoom us. The gods are spirits; they work by men's hands, and there are men who are brave enough to stand up and say: "I am a man; I will not."
"Listen to me, Arthur. The gods have said that Mordred will be your bane. If he is so, it will not be through his own act. Do not force him to that act.… I will tell you now what should have remained a secret between Mordred and myself. He came to me some time ago, to Applegarth, to seek my help against the fate predicted for him. He swore to kill himself sooner than harm you. If I had not prevented him, he would have died then. So who is guilty, he or I? And he came to me again, on Bryn Myrddin, seeking what comfort I, Merlin, could give him. If he could seek to defy the gods, then so, Arthur, can you. Lay by your sword, and listen to him. Take no other counsel, but talk with him, listen, and learn. Yes, learn. For you grow old, Arthur-Emrys, and the time will come, is coming, has come, when you and your son may hold Britain safe between your clasped hands, like a jewel cradled in wool. But loose your clasp, and you drop her, to shatter, perhaps for ever."
In his dream Arthur knew that he had accepted her advice; he had called the parley, resolving to listen to anything his son had to say; but still Nimuë-Merlin had wept, standing in the boat as it floated away on the glassy Lake and vanished into the mist. And then, suddenly, as he turned his horse to ride up towards the meeting-place, the beast stumbled, sending him headlong into deep water. Weighted by his armour — why was he full-armed for a peaceful parley? — he sank, deep and ever deeper, into a pit of black water where fish swam around him, and water-snakes like weeds and weeds like snakes wrapped his limbs so that he could not move them.…
He cried out and woke, drenched in sweat as if he had indeed been drowning, but when his servants and guards came running, he laughed and made light of it, and sent them away, and presently fell again into an uneasy sleep. This time it was Gawain who came to him, a Gawain bloody and dead, but imbued somehow with a grotesque energy, a ghost of the old, fighting Gawain. He, too, came floating on the Lake water, but he passed from its surface right into the King's tent and, pausing beside the bed, drew a dagger from his blood-encrusted side, and held it out to the King.
"Bedwyr," he said, not in the hollow whisper in which ghosts should speak, but in a high metallic squeaking like the tent poles shifting in the breeze. "Wait for Bedwyr. Promise anything to the traitor, land, lordship, the High Kingdom after you. And with it, even, the Queen. Anything to hold him off until Bedwyr comes with his host. And then, when you have the certainty of victory, attack and kill him."
"But this would be treachery."
"Nothing is treachery if it destroys a traitor." This time Gawain's ghost spoke, strangely, in Arthur's own voice. "This way you will make certain." The blood-stained knife dropped to the bed. "Crush him for ever, Arthur, make certain, make certain, certain.…"
"Sir?"
The servant at his bedside, touching the King's shoulder to wake him, started back as the King, jerking upright in the bed, glared round as if in anger, but all he said was, abruptly: "Tell them to see to the fastenings of the tent. How am I expected to sleep when the whole thing shifts about as if a storm was blowing?"
It had been agreed, in the exchange between the heralds, that fourteen officers from each side should meet at a spot half-way between the hosts.
There was a strip of dry moorland not far from the Lake shore where a pair of small pavilions had been pitched, with between them a wooden table, where the two leaders' swords were laid. Should the parley fail, the formal declaration of battle would be the raising, or drawing of a sword. Over one pavilion flew the King's standard, the Dragon on gold. To this device, Mordred, as regent, had also been entitled. He, his mind set on the necessity of being received into grace, and not putting in the way of grace the smallest rub, had given orders that his royal device should be folded away, and until the day was spent and he was declared once more as Arthur's heir, a plain standard should be carried for him.