The crystal cave - Mary Stewart [87]
"Dinias," I said. "He probably never saw me. I was kept out of the way...And my grandfather did sometimes explain me away to strangers as his own. He had a few scattered around, here and there."
"So I gathered. So the next rumour of a boy -- possibly the King's bastard, possibly his daughter's -- I hardly listened to. It was all long past, and there were pressing things to do, and always there was the same thought -- if she had borne a child to me, would she not have let me know? If she had wanted me, would she not have sent word?"
He fell silent, then, back in his own thoughts. Whether I understood it all then, as he talked, I do not now recollect. But later, when the pieces shook together to make the mosaic, it was clear enough. The same pride which had forbidden her to go with her lover had forbidden her, once she discovered her pregnancy, to call him back. And it helped her through the months that followed. More than that; if -- by flight or any other means -- she had betrayed who her lover was, nothing would have stopped her brothers from travelling to Budec's court to kill him. There must -- knowing my grandfather -- have been angry oaths enough about what they would do to the man who had fathered her bastard. And then time moved on, and his coming grew remote, and then impossible, as if he were indeed a myth and a memory in the night. And then the other long love stepped in to supersede him, and the priests took over, and the winter tryst was forgotten. Except for the child, so like his father; but once her duty to him was done, she could go to the solitude and peace which -- all those years ago -- had sent her riding alone up the mountain valley, as later I was to ride out alone by the same path, and looking perhaps for the same things.
I jumped when he spoke again. "How hard a time of it did you have, as a no-man's-child?"
"Hard enough."
"You believe me when I say I didn't know?"
"I believe anything you tell me, my lord."
"Do you hate me for this, very much, Merlin?"
I said slowly, looking down at my hands: "There is one thing about being a bastard and a no-man's-child. You are free to imagine your father. You can picture for yourself the worst and the best; you can make your father for yourself, in the image of the moment. From the time I was big enough to understand what I was, I saw my father in every soldier and every prince and every priest. And I saw him, too, in every handsome slave in the kingdom of South Wales."
He spoke very gently, above me. "And now you see him in truth, Merlin Emrys. I asked you, do you hate me for the kind of life I gave you?"
I didn't look up. I answered, with my eyes on the flames: "Since I was a child I have had the world to choose from for a father. Out of them all, Aurelius Ambrosius, I would have chosen you."
Silence. The flames leapt like a heartbeat.
I added, trying to make it light: "After all, what boy would not choose the King of all Britain for his father?"
His hand came hard under my chin again, turning my head aside from the brazier and my eyes from the flames. His voice was sharp. "What did you say?"
"What did I say?" I blinked up at him. "I said I would have chosen you."
His fingers dug into my flesh. "You called me King of all Britain."
"Did I?"
"But this is -- " He stopped. His eyes seemed to be burning into me. Then he let his hand drop, and straightened. "Let it go. If it matters, the god will speak again." He smiled down at me. "What matters now is what you said yourself. It isn't given to every man to hear this from his grown son. Who knows, it may be better this way, to meet as men, when we each have something to give the other. To a man whose children have been underfoot since infancy, it is not given, suddenly, to see himself