The King Arthur Trilogy (2 page)

‘By day,’ said the boy Merlin, ‘these creatures sleep as you see them now; but every night they wake and fight together, and their battle lasts until the sunrise gives them sleep again; and their battling shakes the mountain crest, and the earth gapes and closes and the waters of the pool are lashed to tempest; and it is so that the tower that you would build above them does not stand.’

Now the end of the day had come, and the dusk was deepening fast, and even as he spoke the sleeping dragons began to rouse. Fire-red and frost-white coils rippled and stirred and the great heads reared up, and the jaws gaped and began to breathe out thin jets of fire that grew and strengthened to rolling clouds of flame; and with a waking roar that made the very ground thrum beneath the watchers’ feet, the two monsters sprang together.

All night long, by the levin-light of their own breath that filled the great chasm and played like summer lightning upon the whipped-up shallows remaining of the pool, the two fought. And first the white dragon had the advantage and drove the red to the far end of the pool; and then the red dragon rallied and turned
the fight again; and the water boiled about their lashing coils, and all the crest of the mountain shuddered with the tumult of their battle. And slowly the red dragon drove the white back until he in his turn was at the end of the pool. And then when it seemed that all was over, the white dragon gathered himself and hurled himself yet once more upon the red …

But the first light of day was waking in the sky, and the fire of the dragons sank and their movements grew slower, and little by little the great coils relaxed, and they sank to sleep.

Then Vortigern demanded of the boy Merlin the meaning of what he had seen; and Merlin told him that the red dragon was Britain and the white dragon was the Saxon kind, and that every night they fought out the conflict between the two.

‘Then surely the red dragon had the victory,’ Vortigern said, ‘and I and my realm have nothing to fear.’

‘But the white dragon was gathering his fighting power again when this new day laid sleep once more upon them both,’ said Merlin. And he looked as though into a great distance; but a distance that was within himself. Three strains of power ran deep within Merlin; from his mother who was of the Demetii he had the herb-skills and the ancient half-lost wisdoms of the Old People, the Little Dark People; and from the old Druid, almost the last of his kind, who had taken and reared
and trained him after his mother entered her nunnery, he had star-knowledge and the skills of shape-shifting and art-magic; and both these he could use at will. But from his father he had the power to look into the future as other men look into the past; and this came not at his own will but at the will of the power itself, that was like a great wind that snatched him up into some place where past and future were one. So now he began to shake like a young aspen tree in the wind. And he began to prophesy in a high clear voice many things concerning the red dragon and the white.

And when at last the high wind of prophecy forsook him and he ceased to shake, and looked again out of his own golden eyes and spoke again in his own voice, he said, ‘But all these things will be after your time, my Lord the King.’

And a pang of fear shot through Vortigern, and he said, ‘Then how can they concern me? Tell me now of
my
time!’

‘Your time?’ said Merlin. ‘Your time is short, and ends in fire at the hands of the sons of the dead High King Constantine, Ambrosius and Utha. They have gathered many fighting men in Less Britain, which some call Brittany, that gave them shelter when you slew their sire; and already their ships are fitted out, already they spread their sails to the wind that shall carry them across the Narrow Seas. They will drive back the Saxon hordes;
but you they will burn shut up in your strongest tower, in vengeance for their father’s murder. Then Ambrosius shall be crowned High King; and he shall do great things for this realm of Greater Britain; but he shall die at the Saxons’ hands; and after him Utha shall take the crown; but his days, too, shall be cut short, by poison. Yet after him, to Britain in her need, shall come another, greater than they.’

Then between fear and rage, Vortigern cried out to his guards, ‘Seize him! Stop his mouth with your swords!’

But the rim of the sun was lifting above the rim of the mountains eastward, and the first rays shone level into the eyes of King and court and guards, making them blink; and when the dazzle cleared from their sight, the dark gape of the dragon-pool had closed over, and only the mountain grasses shivered in the dawn wind where it had been. And of the boy Merlin nothing remained but a kind of shimmer in the air that was gone almost before they saw it; and a voice that lingered after the rest was gone, ‘There shall come another … another … greater than they …’ and was lost in the soughing of the wind through the grasses.

Within three days Ambrosius and Utha his brother landed on the coast of Britain with a great war host behind them. They marched upon the stronghold to which Vortigern had fled, and sought to beat down the
walls; and when the walls proved too strong for them they piled timber and brushwood all round the place and kindled it, and shot fire arrows into the thatch of the tall roof; and the flames leapt up day and night until the stones cracked and flew apart, and the great timbers roared up and crumbled into ash, and the whole tower was eaten by the flames as by a dragon, and Vortigern with it; and so their father Constantine was avenged.

Then Ambrosius was crowned High King, and with Utha his brother he turned upon the Saxons, and by long and desperate fighting drove them back from the lands that they had over-run.

But the time came when Utha, leading his troops up through Wales to meet a Scottish thrust from the north-west, saw a great star blazing in the night sky above his camp fires. And from the star shone a beam of light which became a dragon all of misty fire as though the star-trace that men call the Milky Way had gathered itself into the shape of a great winged beast. And from the dragon’s mouth shone two more rays that bestrode the whole of Greater and Less Britain. Then Utha sent for Merlin, who had been with one brother or the other from the time they landed, and asked him the meaning of the strange lights in the sky. And Merlin said, ‘Grief upon me! Grief upon us all! For Ambrosius your brother is dead! Yet the light foretells also great things to come,
for in the battle that lies before you the victory shall be yours, and you shall be High King of Britain, for the star and the dragon beneath it are yourself, and the two rays from the dragon’s mouth foretell that you shall have a son greater than his sire whose power shall reach over all the lands that the rays bestride.’

So Utha grieved for his brother, and rode on against the men of the North and West. And when he was crowned High King of Britain in Ambrosius’s place, he took the name of Utha Pendragon, which in the British tongue means Utha Dragon’s-Head.

And in battle after battle he fought and defeated the Saxons and the Picts and the men from over the Irish Sea, until all the southern part of Britain was free of fire and sword; and then he drew a breath of quiet and set his mind to keep Easter in London, and make a great thanksgiving feast. And he bade all his lesser kings and nobles with their wives to come and join him there. Now among those who gathered to him in London that Eastertide were Gorloise, Duke of Cornwall, and his wife, the Duchess Igraine. And Igraine was the fairest of all the ladies about the court, and as soon as he saw her, the King’s whole heart fixed itself upon her as it had never done upon any woman before, for all his life since he came to manhood had been too full of fighting to have room for love. He sent gifts to her chamber, gold cups and jewels for her neck; and whenever she sat at
table or walked abroad she had but to look up to find his hungry gaze upon her.

Then the Duchess Igraine went to her husband and said, ‘The King sends me overmany gifts and his eyes are always upon me. Therefore let us leave here quickly and go back to our own place.’

So the Duke gave his orders, and with the Lady Igraine and all their following, left the King’s court before he knew it and set the horses’ heads towards Cornwall.

And when the King found them gone, he was fiercely angry, and sent after them demanding that they should return. And when they did not return, he gathered his fighting men and marched after them and made war on the Duke of Cornwall.

Duke Gorloise set his lady in Tintagel Castle, which was the strongest hold in all Cornwall, being set on a headland above the pounding sea, with but one causeway leading to it from the mainland, and that so narrow that it could be held by three men against an army. And he pitched his war camp in another strong place inland of the castle and barring the way to the King. Then Utha Pendragon came up, and made his own camp opposite to where Duke Gorloise was. So the fighting began between them and lasted many days. And all the while his hot and hungry love for Igraine tore at the King, giving him no peace, whether in the red heart of the battle by day or in his lonely tent at night. At last, when a
week had gone by, he called to him Merlin, who was with the camp. And Merlin came and stood like a tall shadow in the entrance to the tent, with the flicker of the camp fires behind him, not asking why he had been sent for, for he had been watching the great star hanging in the green twilight sky over Tintagel, and he already knew.

‘I am sick with my heart’s longing for Igraine,’ said the King, ‘and no nearer to her than I was seven nights ago. You who have the wisdom of the Old Ones, tell me what I must do to come to her.’

Merlin never moved. He knew that the time was come for the beginning of Utha’s son, who should be greater than ever his father was. And he said, ‘If you will give yourself up to my skills, I can give you the outer-seeming of Duke Gorloise for one night, and take upon myself the outer-seeming of Brastius, one of his household, that I may accompany you. And so you may go to Igraine in Tintagel Castle this night, none stopping you. But there is a price to pay.’

‘Anything!’ said Utha Pendragon. ‘Anything under the sky.’

‘Swear,’ said Merlin.

‘On the cross of my sword, I swear.’

Then Merlin came in and stood beside the brazier, looking at him across the little licking flames. ‘If you go to the Lady Igraine tonight, your son will be born at Christmas; the son I told you of, when we saw the great
lights in the sky on the night that Ambrosius died. And within the hour of his birth you shall give him into my keeping, that I may take and rear him for his destiny.’

Silence came down between them; and in the silence Utha said, ‘It will be from Duke Gorloise that you must claim that.’

And back across the small licking birch flames in the brazier he looked at Merlin, with a frown-line deepening like a sword-cut between his brows. He had not thought until that moment that any child of his begun as this one was to be, would seem ever after, in the eyes of all men, even in the eyes of the Lady Igraine, to be Duke Gorloise’s and not the High King’s.

‘No,’ said Merlin, seeing the thought. ‘It will be from you that I must claim it.’

And the King believed him. But he asked, ‘Why do you ask this price?’

‘Because you may have other sons. That could mean danger to this one, this chosen one, with a cloud lying over his birth, and because your way of life is not a safe one, and if you die before he is of an age to take the crown, in the struggle for power among your nobles he will be trampled underfoot.’

And Utha saw the truth of this; and he was bound by his blindly taken oath; but more than either of these things, he was driven by his love for Igraine. And he agreed the price.

So Merlin went away, and in a short while returned to the King’s tent with many things hidden under his cloak; and he cast a powder on to the brazier that filled the tent with a strange-smelling smoke; and he called up figures in the smoke, and made a magic that was older than the Druid kind. And at moonrise, two who to all outward seeming were Duke Gorloise and Sir Brastius of his household knights slipped out of the camp, and away, skirting the Duke’s camp, by secret ways to the gates of Tintagel high on its rocks above the crooning sea.

The gate-guard passed them through, thinking only that the Lord of Cornwall had snatched a few hours to come home to his wife; and they crossed the narrow courts of the castle and climbed the outside stair to the Duchess’s chambers. And down below in the walled shelter of the castle garden, a whitethroat was singing as though it were already dawn.

And the Duchess’s ladies gave him entrance, thinking only as the men of the gate-guard had done, and as the Lady Igraine thought also when he stood within her chamber, that her lord was come home.

And that night, in the great chamber high above the crooning of the western tide, with the whitethroat singing in the castle garden and Merlin standing with a drawn sword before the door, Arthur of Britain was conceived.

But meanwhile Duke Gorloise had made a night attack on the royal camp, and in the desperate fighting had met his death before ever the King came to the door of Igraine’s chamber.

Before dawn the High King took his leave of Igraine, saying that he must return to his men by daybreak; and so, with Merlin, slipped away.

And when soon after, news was brought to her of the night attack and her husband’s death, Igraine was struck with grief, and also with a great wonder as to who and what it was that had come to her in his likeness that night. But she kept the matter in her own heart, and did not speak of it even to the nearest of her ladies.

By and by King Utha Pendragon came into Tintagel in his own seeming and as a conqueror, but a gentle conqueror, for truly he was grieved at the death of Duke Gorloise, though glad that now Igraine was free. And when enough time was passed, he began to pay court to her; and though for a while she fought her own heart, it seemed to her that there was something about him that she remembered, and the something was sweet. And so after six months they were married with great rejoicing.