The scream Norwenna gave at the moment of birth was worse than any that had preceded it. It was the shriek of an animal in torment, a lament to make the whole night sob. Nimue told me later that Morgan had caused that pain by thrusting her hand into the birth canal and wrenching the baby into this world by brute force. The child came bloody from the tormented mother and Morgan shouted at the frightened girl to pick the child up while Nimue tied and bit the cord. It was important that the baby should first be held by a virgin, which is why the girl child had been taken to the hall, but she was frightened and would not come close to the blood-wet straw on which Norwenna now panted and where the new-born, blood-smeared child lay as though stillborn. “Pick it up!” Morgan yelled, but the girl fled in tears and so Nimue plucked the baby from the bed and cleared its mouth so that it could snatch its first choking breath.
The omens were all so very bad. The haloed moon was waning and the virgin had fled from the babe that now began to cry aloud. Uther heard the noise and I saw him close his eyes as he prayed to the Gods that he had been given a boy child.
“Shall I?” Bishop Bedwin asked hesitantly.
“Go,” Uther snapped, and the Bishop scrambled down the wooden ladder, hitched up his robe and ran across the trampled snow to the hall's door. He stood there for a few seconds, then ran back towards the rampart waving his hands.
“Good news, High Lord, good news!” Bedwin called as he clambered awkwardly up the ladder. “Most excellent news!”
“A boy.” Uther anticipated the news by breathing the words.
“A boy!” Bedwin confirmed, 'a fine boy!"
I was crouching near the High King and I saw tears show at his eyes that were gazing toward the sky.
“An heir,” Uther said in a tone of wonder as though he had not really dared to hope that the Gods would favour him. He dabbed at the tears with a fur-gloved hand. “The kingdom is safe, Bedwin,” he said.
“Praise God, High Lord, it is safe,” Bedwin agreed.
“A boy,” Uther said, then his huge body was suddenly racked with a terrible cough. It left him panting. “A boy,” he said again when his breathing was steady.
Morgan came after a while. She climbed the ladder and prostrated her stocky body in front of the High King. Her gold mask gleamed, hiding the horror beneath. Uther touched her shoulder with his staff. “Rise, Morgan,” he said, then he fumbled beneath his robe to find a gold brooch with which to reward her. But Morgan would not take it. “The boy,” she said ominously, 'is crippled. He has a twisted foot." I saw Bedwin make a sign of the cross for a crippled prince was the worst omen of this cold night.
“How bad?” Uther asked.
“Just the foot,” Morgan said in her harsh voice. “The leg is properly formed, High Lord, but the Prince will never run.”
From deep inside his swathing fur cloak Uther chuckled. “Kings don't run, Morgan,” he said, 'they walk, they rule, they ride and they reward their good, honest servants. Take the gold." He held the brooch towards her again. It was a piece of thick gold, marvellously wrought into the shape of Uther's talisman, a dragon.
But still Morgan would not accept it. “And the boy is the last child Norwenna will ever bear, High Lord,” she warned Uther. “We burned the afterbirth and it did not sound once.” The afterbirth was always put on the fire so that the popping sound it made would tell how many more children the mother would bear.
“I listened close,” Morgan said, 'and it was silent."
“The Gods wanted it silent,” Uther said angrily. “My son is dead,” he went on bleakly, 'so who else could give Norwenna a boy child fit to be a King?"
Morgan paused. “You, High Lord?” she said at last.
Uther chuckled at the thought, then the chuckle turned into laughter and finally into another racking cough that bent him forward in lung-aching pain. The coughing passed at last and he drew in a shuddering breath as he shook his head. “Norwenna's only duty was to drop one boy child, Morgan, and that she has done. Our duty is to protect him.”
“With all the strength of Dumnonia,” Bedwin added eagerly.
“Newborns die easily,” Morgan warned the two men in her bleak voice.
“Not this one,” Uther said fiercely, 'not this one. He will come to you, Morgan, at Ynys Wydryn and you will use your skills to make certain he lives. Here, take the brooch." Morgan at last accepted the dragon brooch. The maimed babe was still crying and the mother was whimpering, but around the ramparts of Caer Cadarn the pot-beaters and fire-tenders were celebrating the news that our kingdom had an heir again. Dumnonia had an ed ling and an ed ling birth meant a great feast and lavish gifts. The bloody birth-straw of the bed was brought from the hall and dumped on a fire so that the flames crackled high and bright. A child had been born; all that child now needed was a name and of that name there could be no doubt. None. Uther eased himself out of his chair and stood huge and grim on Caer Cadarn's wall to pronounce the name of his new-born grandson, the name of his heir and the name of his kingdom's ed ling The winter-born babe would be named after his father. He would be called Mordred.
Norwenna and the baby came to us at Ynys Wydryn. They were brought in an ox-cart across the eastern land bridge to the Tor's foot and I watched from the windy summit as the sick mother and the maimed child were lifted from their bed of fur cloaks and carried in a cloth litter up the path to the stockade. It was cold that day; a bitter, snow-bright cold that ate at the lungs, chapped the skin and made Norwenna whimper as she was carried with her swaddled babe through the land gate of Ynys Wydryn's Tor.
Thus did Mordred, Edling of Dumnonia, enter Merlin's realm.
Ynys Wydryn, despite its name, which means the Isle of Glass, was not a true island, but rather a promontory of high ground that jutted into a waste of sea-marsh, creeks and willow-edged bogs where sedge and reeds grew thick. It was a rich place, made so by wildfowl, fish, clay and the limestone that could easily be quarried from the hills edging the tidal wastes that were crossed by wooden track ways on which unwary visitors were sometimes drowned when the wind came hard from the west and blew a high tide fast across the long, green wetlands. To the west, where the land rose, there were apple orchards and wheat fields, and to the north, where pale hills edged the marshes, cattle and sheep were herded. It was all good land, and at its heart was Ynys Wydryn.
This was all Lord Merlin's land. It was called Avalon and had been ruled by his father and his father's father, and every serf and slave within sight of the Tor's summit worked for Merlin. It was this land with its produce trapped and netted in the tidal creeks or grown on the rich soil of the inland river valleys that gave Merlin the wealth and freedom to be a Druid. Britain had once been the land of Druids, but the Romans had first slaughtered them, then tamed the religion so that even now, after two generations without Rome's rule, only a handful of the old priests remained. The Christians had taken their place, and Christianity now lapped around the old faith like a wind-driven high tide splashing through the demon-haunted reed-beds of Avalon.