"Who told you that? Surely our uncle would never let him use his sister so, whatever she had done."
"Oh, yes. Because of the sword, which was treachery. So the High King will let him put her away," said Gaheris eagerly. "As for the lover—"
But at this point Gabran came across the courtyard to them, with a summons to the stables, and even Gaheris, not famed for his tact, thought it better to postpone the discussion for the time being.
They found out a little more, but only a little, from Urbgen's two sons. They were grown men, sons by the king's first marriage, seasoned fighters who had at first taken pride in their father's alliance with Arthur's young sister, but now wished her gone, and were ready to support Urbgen's petition to have the marriage set aside.
The truth, it appeared, was this. Morgan, tied by marriage to a man many years her senior, had taken as lover one of Arthur's Companions, a man called Accolon, brave, ambitious and high-spirited. Him she had persuaded, while Arthur was abroad from Camelot, to steal his great sword Caliburn, that men called the sword of Britain, and carry it to Rheged, leaving in its place a substitute fashioned secretly by some creature of Morgan's in the north.
What the queen intended was never satisfactorily explained. She cannot have thought that young Accolon, even with Urbgen out of the way, the sword of Britain in his hand, and Morgan married to him, could ever have been able to supplant Arthur as High King. It was more probable that she had used her lover to further her own ambition, and that the tale she eventually told to Urbgen was truthful in the main. She had had dreams, she said, which had led her to expect Arthur's sudden death abroad. So, to forestall the chaos following on this, she had taken it upon herself to secure the symbolic sword of Britain for King Urbgen, that tried and brilliant veteran of a dozen battles, and husband of Arthur's only legitimate sister. True, Arthur himself had declared the Duke of Cornwall to be his heir, but Duke Cador was dead, and his son Constantine still a child.…
So went the tale. As for the substitution of a worthless copy for the royal sword, that, she alleged, had only been a device to help the theft. The sword hung habitually above the King's chair in the Round Hall at Camelot, and nowadays was taken down only for ceremony, or for battle. The copy had been hung there only to deceive the eye. But from it might have come tragedy. Arthur had returned unharmed from his travels, and afraid for himself and Morgan should the theft be discovered, challenged the King to fight, and with his own good sword attacked Arthur armed only with the brittle copy of Caliburn. The outcome of that fight was already part of the growing legend of the King. In spite of his treacherous advantage Accolon had been killed, and Morgan, afraid now of the vengeance of both brother and husband, declared to all who would listen that the fight was none of her making, but only Accolon's, and since he was dead, no one could contradict her. If she mourned her dead lover, she did so in secret. To those who would listen she deplored his folly, and protested her devotion—mistaken, she admitted, but real and deep—to her brother Arthur and to her own lord.
Hence the turmoil in the castle. No decisions had been made as yet. The lady Nimuë, successor to Merlin as Arthur's adviser, and (it was said) to Merlin's power, had come north to recover the sword. Her message was uncompromising. Arthur was not prepared to forgive his sister for what he saw as treachery; and should Urbgen wish to avenge the betrayal of his bed, he had the King's leave to use his faithless queen as he saw fit.
As yet the King of Rheged had barely trusted himself to talk with his wife, let alone judge her. The lady Nimuë was still housed in Luguvallium, though not in the castle itself; somewhat to Urbgen's relief she had declined his offer of hospitality, and was lodged in the town. Urbgen had had enough (as he confided to his sons) of women and their dabblings in dreams and sorcery. He would have liked to refuse Morgause's visit, but there were no grounds on which he could do so, and besides, he was curious to see "the witch of Orkney" and her sons. So the great King Urbgen steered his way cautiously between Nimuë and Morgause, allowing the latter to visit and talk with her sister at will, and praying that the former, now that her business in the north was concluded, would leave Luguvallium without too embarrassing a confrontation with her old enemy Morgause.
11
AFTER SUPPER ON THE THIRD night of their visit, Mordred, avoiding the other boys, walked back alone from the hall to the rooms where the princes were housed. His way took him through a strip of land which lay between the main block of the castle buildings and the river.
Here lay a garden, planted and tended for Queen Morgan's pleasure; her windows looked out over beds of roses and flowering shrubs, and lawns that edged the water. Now the stalks of dead lilies stood up in a tangle of sweetbriar and leafless honeysuckle, and fungus rings showed dark green on the grass. Marks on the walls beside the queen's windows showed where the cages of her singing birds had hung before being carried indoors for the winter. Swans idled at the river's edge, no doubt waiting for the food the queen had brought them in less troubled days, and a pair of snow-white peacocks had flown to roost, like great ghosts, in a tall pine tree. In summer no doubt the place was pretty and full of scent and colour and the songs of birds, but now, in the chill damp of an autumn evening, it looked deserted and sad, and smelled of unswept leaves and rivermud.
But Mordred lingered, fascinated by this new example of mainland luxury. He had never seen a garden before, never even imagined that a piece of land could be carefully designed and planted simply for beauty, and its owner's pleasure. Earlier he had caught a glimpse, from a window, of a statue looking like a ghost against a dark tangle of leaves. He set himself to explore.
The statue was strange, too. A girl, airily draped, stooped as if to pour water from a foreign-looking shell into a stone basin below her. The only statues he had seen before were the crude gods of the islands, stones with watching eyes. This girl was lovely, and almost real. The dusk made gentle shadows of the grey lichen that patched her arms and gown. The fountain was dry now, the shell empty, but the stone bowl was still filled with water and the remains of the summer's water-lilies. Below the blackened leaves he could just see, dimly, the sluggish movement of fish.
He left the dead fountain, and trod softly across the lawn towards the river bank and the floating swans. There, facing the river and hidden from the palace windows by a brick wall thick with vines, was an arbour, a charming place, paved with mosaic work and furnished with a curved stone bench whose ends were richly carved with grapes and cupids.
Something was lying on the bench. He went across to look. It was an j, embroidery frame, holding its square of linen half worked with a pretty design of strawberries twined in their leaves and flowers. He picked it up curiously, to find that the linen was sodden, and marked by the stone where it had lain. It must have been there for some time, forgotten. He was not to know that Queen Morgan herself had dropped it when, here in their usual trysting-place, the news had been brought to her of her lover's death. She had not been in the garden since that day.
Mordred laid the spoiled linen back on the seat, and recrossed the lawn to the path below the windows. As he did so a light was kindled in one of them, and voices came clearly. One of these, raised in distress or anger, was unfamiliar, but the other, answering it, was the voice of Morgause. He caught the words "ship" and "Camelot," and then "the princes," and at that, without even pausing to think about it, he left the path and stepped up close to the wall under the window, listening.