The Hollow Hills - Mary Stewart [67]
"It'll be fine. But don't send me to bed yet, please, Moravik. May I stay up and talk to you?"
"Hm. Send you to bed, indeed! Aye, you always did look meek and talk soft, and you doing exactly as you wanted all the time..." She sat down by the fire, spreading her skirts, and nodded to a stool. "Well, now, sit down and let me look at you. Mercy me, and here's a change! Who'd ever have thought it, back there in Maridunum, with hardly a decent rag to your name, that you'd turn out a son of the High King himself, and a doctor and a singer...and the sweet saints only know what else besides!"
"A magician, you mean?"
"Well, that never surprised me, the way I heard you'd been running off to the old man at Bryn Myrddin." She crossed herself, and her hand closed on an amulet at her neck. I had seen it glinting in the firelight; it was hardly a Christian symbol. So Moravik still hedged herself around with every talisman she could find. In this she was like most of the folk bred in the Perilous Forest, with its tales of old haunt-ings, and things seen in the twilight and heard in the wind. She nodded at me. "Aye, you always were a queer lad, with your solitary ways, and the things you'd say. Always knew too much, you did. I thought it was with listening at doors, but it seems I was wrong. 'The King's prophet,' they tell me you're called now. And the doings I've heard about, if the half of them's to be believed, which I doubt they're not...Well, now, tell me. Tell me everything."
***
The fire had burned low, almost to ash. There was silence from the next room now; the drinkers had either gone home, or settled to sleep. Brand had climbed the ladder an hour since, and snored softly beside Ralf. In the corner beside the dozing beasts, Branwen and the child slept, unmoving.
"And now here's this new start," said Moravik softly. "This baby here, you tell me he's the son of the High King, Uther himself, that won't own to him. Why do you have to take it on yourself to look after him? I'd have thought there's others he might ask, that could do it easier."
"I can't answer for King Uther," I said, "but for myself, you might say the child was a trust left to me by my father, and by the gods."
"The gods?" she asked sharply. "What talk is this for a good Christian man?"
"You forget, I was never baptized."
"Not even yet? Aye, I remember the old King would have none of it. Well, that's no concern of mine now, only of your own. But this child here, is he christened?"
"No. There's been no time. If you want to, then have him christened."
" 'If you want to'? What way is that to talk? What 'gods' were you talking of just now?".
"I hardly know. They -- he -- will make himself known in his own good time. Meanwhile have the boy christened, Moravik. When he leaves Brittany he's to be reared in a Christian household."
She was satisfied. "As soon as may be. I'll see him right with the dear Lord and his saints, trust me for that. And I've hung the vervain charm over his crib, and seen the nine prayers said. The girl says his name's Arthur. What sort of a name is that?"
"You would say Artos," I told her. This is a name meaning "Bear" in Celtic. "But don't call him by that name here. Give him some other name that you can use, and forget the other."
"Emrys, then? Ah, I thought that would make you smile. I'd always hoped that one day there'd be a child I could call after you."
"No, after my father Ambrosius, as I was called." I tried the names over to myself, in Latin and then in the Celtic tongue. "Artorius Ambrosius, last of the Romans...Artos Emrys, first of the British..." Then aloud to Moravik, smiling: "Yes, call him so. Once, long ago, I foretold it, the coming of the Bear, a king called Arthur, who would knit past and future. I had forgotten, till now,