At dusk, on the night before the meeting of the King's Council, Nemo made her way up into the rafters, this time carrying a leather satchel that contained some food and water, a woollen blanket and a covered earthen pot to hold her own bodily wastes, should she become sore set. She slept well, high in the roof, and climbed out of the window again before the dawn broke to relieve herself in safety on the crest of a rooftop in the darkness. Then she climbed back into the building and made herself comfortable again, dozing intermittently until the Council began to assemble below her, the sound of their assembly and the swelling volume of their voices forcing her to lean forward and concentrate hard on one small group at a time, trying to overhear what they were saying. The noises of voices and movement blended together into a chaotic meld that rose directly upwards to where she watched and listened, and it was impossible to hear anything clearly, let alone understand what was being said.
By the time King Ullic entered the Hall and called the Council to order, Nemo had begun to regret having wasted so much time and effort in climbing up to her high perch, but then Uther entered the Great Hall a very short time later, and she suddenly found herself perfectly situated to observe what happened and able to hear every word perfectly.
Two of Uther's companions entered behind him. They were carrying a flat board between them on which lay a very large, obviously heavy piece of coal from which every trace of dust had been carefully removed; the entire surface had been burnished to the semblance of a gloss. They placed the coal in the middle of the floor and then withdrew. Painfully aware of all the eyes focused on him and the intense curiosity—some of it hostile—that was being directed his way, Uther stepped forward and asked his grandfather's permission to bring a borrowed sword into the room in order to make his demonstration. It was the law that no weapons were ever permitted in the Council chamber, and Uther's request was therefore received, after an initial concerted hiss of indrawn breath, in a scandalized silence. King Ullic nodded in acquiescence, however, humouring his grandson and saying nothing to dissuade him. Another of Uther's companions who had been waiting outside the doors brought in the sword and handed it to Uther, then left hurriedly.
Uther drew a deep breath and then looked about him at his grandfather's assembled Councillors. Among them he saw his lather, but he looked away quickly, refusing to meet Uric's eye and forcing himself to review instead what he was to do in the following few moments. Before coming here, he had thought about a number of things he might say to King Ullic to explain what he was doing and what he had discovered, but then he had dismissed all of them, convinced that actions would speak more clearly than any words. Now, trying not to acknowledge the fluttering hope that he had been right, since it would indicate that he might possibly be wrong instead, he made no attempt to speak before stepping forward to stand in front of the large lump of coal. He gripped the sword tightly in both hands and bent close to the coal, narrowing his eyes as he carefully laid the edge of his blade along one of the thin, almost invisible lines that marked the outer surface. Every eye in the gathering was on him, and he felt the scrutiny of each of them. No one spoke and no sound marred the perfect silence in the Hall.
Sucking in a deep, silent breath, Uther drew himself erect slowly and raised the sword carefully above his head, keeping his arms stiffly extended and his eyes fixed on the target lines he envisioned. Then his blade slashed swiftly, sibilantly downwards, a strong, clean, accurate blow that produced a dull, clanging sound. But instead of falling apart in neatly severed sections, the large piece of coal remained stonily intact, save for a number of flint-like splinters that broke off and whizzed away in all directions, clattering and sliding across the floor.
Uther gazed, stricken with horror at what had happened. The blade of the borrowed sword had twisted and bent with the impact of his deliberate blow, the dubious quality of its temper mercilessly exposed in this sudden, violent encounter with obdurate stone. And despite the numerous washings that the piece of coal had undergone, the impact had generated a small cloud of fine black dust that hung in the air, almost motionless, hovering as though to draw attention to the fact that Uther had just failed at something else, although no one could have guessed what that might have been.
Uther stood there, unable to move, his head lowered, his mind filled with dull, sluggish echoes of the sickening sound the sword had made against the coal. He would tell Nemo later that a hundred different thoughts swirled through his mind in the few moments after the sword landed, and most of them were questions: What happened? What went wrong? What had he been trying to demonstrate? What had he hoped to achieve? How could he have gone ahead with it without letting anyone know what was involved? How could he have been such a fool as to attempt this thing in public—not merely in public, but in full view of his grandfather's scowling Council of Elders, all of whom disapproved of him? Why didn't the coal split as it ought to have? Why hadn't he tested both it and the flawed sword earlier? Why, why, why, why?
As he stood there, frozen, Uther heard a swell of sound as his audience began to stir and to talk among themselves, quietly and with decorum because they were in Council. It would have been a grievous insult to the King had anyone permitted himself to laugh aloud or to voice his scorn of something that the King himself had authorized. And so they kept their voices low, their disapproval muted.
Uther's eyes moved to meet his grandfather's, and he saw the old man's hand come up, finger pointing, ordering him to leave the Council chamber. He nodded and began to turn away, but Ullic's voice stopped him.
"Take the weapon."
Uther stooped and retrieved the useless sword, seeing only now the rust that pocked it and the tawdry workmanship of the warped and twisted blade. Then, carrying the thing in both hands, he trudged from the Hall dejectedly, crushingly aware that his humiliation was not yet complete. He would have to face his grandfather later in the day, and probably his father, too, and attempt to explain what it was that he had been trying to do. Had he really tried to split stone with a sword? What practical purpose had he thought to achieve in doing such a thing? Uther writhed inside himself with shame and humiliation that he could ever have been so scatterbrained and so irresponsibly precipitate. He had failed again, utterly, to govern his compulsive enthusiasms, and he had failed to do an advance investigation of possibility and probability, when even a cursory investigation could have shown him that their hard, local Cambrian coal, dug from the exposed seam that surfaced close to their village, would not split as readily or cleanly as the softer coal used in Camulod. Uther knew he could blame no one but himself. He had walked—no, he had almost forced his way— into his grandfather's presence while the King was in Council, and he had used his status as a family member to gain his grandfather's attention. And then he had proceeded to humiliate himself, begging everyone there to witness his apparently mindless destruction of what must have seemed to them to be a perfectly good sword. It must have looked to everyone like a ceremonial sacrilege, some kind of inane, insane rite devised simply to outrage all of them.
His friends were waiting for him when Uther reached the doors and closed them behind him, but after one look at his face, none of them sought to join him as he strode past them and away. For his part, he did not even notice them. His mind was filled with the vision of his Grandfather Ullic's face and the stern disapproval that had filled it as he had glowered down from his dais.
As Uther was striding away, fleeing to hide his shame and humiliation. Nemo was witnessing an altogether different aspect of what his demonstration had evoked, one that would have confounded the boy had he known of it. She had been leaning forward, peering between two rafters in order to watch him as he walked away, carrying the sadly twisted weapon he had used in his "demonstration," and as the high doors closed behind him, she became aware of the deep silence that now held sway in the room below, one that no one seemed eager to break. She shifted her position, moving her head from one side to the other of the rafter she was straddling. Below her and to her right, the King still stood in front of his ceremonial seat, a thoughtful expression on his face as he gazed at the doors through which his grandson had made his exit. Every other eye in the room was fixed upon him, and Nemo had the feeling that everyone down there on the floor was holding his breath expectantly. The silence stretched and grew, and no one made a sound or moved to take a seat. Eventually, however, Ullic Pendragon turned his head back towards his expectant advisers and waggled his fingers in their direction.