He swept on, stammering a little. "Am I not, then, in sober fact, heir to Dunpeldyr? Or, if Tydwal is to hold that stronghold for Gawain, then of the Orkneys? Sir, the two kingdoms, so far apart, are hard for one man to hold, and this, surely, could be the time to divide them? You have said you will not let Queen Morgause go back. Let me go back instead!"
"You have not understood me," said the King. "You have no right to either one of Lot's kingdoms."
"No right!" It could have been the young Arthur himself who said it, springing upright like a bow when the arrow flies. "When you yourself were begotten out of wedlock by Uther Pendragon, on the lady who was still Duchess of Cornwall, and who could not wed him before a month was out?"
No sooner was it said than he would, if he could, have swallowed the words back. The King said nothing, nor did his look change, but recollection struck Mordred silent, and with it his fear returned. Twice in one evening he had lost his temper, he, Mordred, who for years now had fought his nature down to achieve, as armour against the displacement, the insecurity of his life, that sea-cold shell of control.
Stumblingly, he tried to unsay it. "My lord, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to insult you or… or your lady mother. I only meant—I've thought about this for so long, thought every way whether it could be legal for me to have a place, a place to rule.… I know I could. One does.… And I thought about you, and how you came to it. Of course I did. Everyone knows — that is — men do say—"
"That I am technically a bastard?"
Amazingly, the King did not sound angry. Mordred's courage crept back. His fists pressed into the table, striving for steadiness. He said carefully: "Yes, sir. I wondered about the law, you see. The mainland law. I was going to find out, and then ask you. My lord, if Gawain goes to Dunpeldyr, then, by the Goddess herself, I promise you that I am fitter than Gaheris or Agravain to rule the Orkneys! And who knows what trouble and moil there could be if twins were named successors?"
Arthur did not answer at once. Mordred, his plea made, the words said, subsided into silence. The King came out of his thoughts, and spoke.
"I have listened to you because I was curious to know what kind of man you had grown to be, with your strange upbringing, so like my own." A slight smile. "As everyone knows, I, too, was begotten out of wedlock, then hidden for many years. With me it was fourteen years, but I was in a household where from the start I was taught the skills of knighthood. You have had less than four years of such teaching, but they tell me you have made much of them. You will come into your own, believe me, but not as you have planned or imagined. Now you will listen to me. And sit down, please."
Wondering, the boy pulled up a stool and sat. The King himself stood up, and paced the length of the room and back before speaking.
"First of all, whatever the law, whatever the precedent, there is no question of your taking the kingdom of the Orkneys. That will be for Gawain. My intention is to keep Gawain and his brothers here among my fighting knights, and then, when the time is right, and if he wishes it, let him take back his island kingdom from my hand. And in the meantime, Tydwal will stay in Dunpeldyr."
He stopped his pacing, and sat down again.
"This is not injustice, Mordred. You can have no claim to either Lothian or the Orkneys. You are not Lot's son." He gave it emphasis. "King Lot of Lothian was not your father."
A pause. The flames roared in the chimney. Outside in a corridor somewhere, someone called out and was answered. The boy asked, in a flattened, neutral voice: "Do you know who is?"
"I should," said the King, for the second time.
Now comprehension was instant. The boy went upright on the stool. It brought his eyes almost on a level with the King's.
"You?"
"I," said Arthur, and waited.
This time it took a moment or two, and then, not the sick disgust he expected, but merely wonder and a slow assessment of this new fact.
"With Queen Morgause? But that — that—"
"Is incest. Yes." He left it there. No excuse, no protestation of his own ignorance of the relationship when Morgause seduced her young half-brother to her bed. In the end the boy said merely: "I see."
It was Arthur's turn to be startled. Held so in his own consciousness of sin, of disgust at the memory of that night with Morgause, who had since become for him a symbol of all that was evil and unclean, he had not taken into account the peasant-reared boy's reaction to a sin far from uncommon in the inbred islands of his homeland. In that homeland, indeed, it would hardly be counted as a sin. Roman law had not stretched so far, and it was not to be supposed that Mordred's Goddess — who was also Morgause's — had implanted much sense of sin in her followers.
Mordred, indeed, was already wholly occupied in other considerations. "So that means I am — I am—"
"Yes," said Arthur, and watched the wonder, and through it the excitement, kindle in the eyes so like his own. No affection — how could there be? — but a shift of the powerful and inborn ambition. And why not? thought the King. Guinevere will have no child by me. This boy is twice Pendragon, and from all reports as well-liking as any boy will ever be. Just now he is feeling as I felt when Merlin told me the same thing, and put the sword of Britain into my hand. Let him feel it. The rest, as the gods will it, will come.
Of the prophecy of Merlin, that the boy would cause his downfall and death, he never thought at all. The moment was for him one of joy, unspoiled.
Unspoiled, too, miraculously, by Mordred's indifference to the long-past sin. Because of this very lack of reaction he found that he could speak of it himself.
"It was after the battle at Luguvallium. My first fight. Your mother, Morgause, came north to tend her father. King Uther, who was sick, and though we did not know it, dying. I did not know then that I, too, was a child of Uther Pendragon's. I believed Merlin to be my father, and, indeed, loved him as such. I had never seen Morgause before. You will be able to guess how lovely she was, at twenty.… I went to her bed that night. It was not until afterwards that Merlin told me Uther Pendragon was my father, and I myself heir to the High Kingdom."
"But she knew?" Mordred, quick as ever, had fastened on the thing unsaid.
"So I believe. But even my ignorance cannot excuse my share of the sin. I know that. In doing what I did, I wronged you, Mordred. So the wrong persists."
"How? You looked for me, and brought me here. You need not have done so. Why did you?"
"When I ordered Morgause here," said Arthur, "I thought her guilty of Merlin's death, that was — is — the best man in all this realm, and the one dearest to me. She is still guilty. Merlin is old before his time, and carries in him the germ of the poison she fed to him. He knew that she had poisoned him, but for the sake of her sons he never told me. He judged that she ought to live, so long as she stayed harmless in exile, to rear them against the day when they could serve me. I only learned of the poison when he lay, as we thought, dying, and in his delirium spoke of it, and of Morgause's repeated attempts to kill him by poison or by sorcery. So after his entombment I sent for her to answer for her crime, judging, too, that it was time her sons left her care and came into my charge."
"All five. That surprised everyone. You said you had had reports, sir. Who told you about me?"
Arthur smiled. "I had a spy in your palace. The goldsmith's man, Casso. He wrote to me."
"The slave? He could write? He gave no hint of it. He's dumb, and we thought there was no way he could communicate."
The King nodded. "That's why he is valuable. People talk freely in front of a slave, especially a dumb one. It was Merlin who had him taught to write. Sometimes I think that even his smallest acts were dictated by prevision. Well, Casso saw and heard plenty while he was in Morgause's household. He wrote to me that the "Mordred" now in the palace must be the one."