The Hollow Hills - Mary Stewart [83]
"You think not?" said the King again. I saw his finger-bones whiten where he held the goblet, and wondered that the thin silver did not crush. "When we last spoke together, Merlin, I asked a service of you, and I have no doubt it has been faithfully performed. I believe that service has almost reached its end. No, listen to me!" This though I had not spoken, nor even taken breath to speak. He talked like a man in a corner, attacking before he is even in danger. "I don't have to remind you what I said to you before, nor do I have to ask if you obeyed me. Wherever you have kept the boy, however you have trained him, I take it he is ignorant of his birth and standing, but that he is fit to come to me and stand before all men as a prince and my heir."
The blood ran hot under my skin in a flush I could feel. "Are you trying to tell me that you think the time has come?"
I had forgotten to school my voice. The silver goblet went back on the table with a rap. The angry blue eyes came back to me. "A king does not 'try to tell' his servants what they must do, Merlin."
I dropped my eyes with an effort and slowly, deliberately unclenched the apprehension that gripped me, the way one levers open the jaws of a fighting dog. I felt his angry stare on me, and heard the breath whistle through his pinched nostrils. Make Uther really angry, and it might take me years to fight my way back to the boy's side. I was aware in the silence that he shifted in his chair as if in sudden discomfort. In a breath or two I was able to look up and say: "Then supposing you tell me, King, whether you sent for me to discuss your health, or your son. Either way, I am still your servant."
He stared at me in rigid silence, then his brow slowly cleared, and his mouth relaxed into something like amusement. "Whatever you are, Merlin, you are hardly that. And you were right; I am trying to tell you something, something which concerns both my health and my son. By the Scorpion, why can I not find the words? I have sent for you not to demand my son of you, but to tell you that, if your healing skill fails me now, he must needs be King."
"You told me just now that you were healed."
"I said the wound was healed. The poison has gone, and the pain, but it has left a sickness behind it of a kind that Gandar cannot cure. He told me to look to you."
I remembered what Lucan had told me about the King who walked with ghosts, and I thought of some of the things I had seen at Pergamum. "You don't look to me like a man who is mortally ill, Uther. Are you speaking of a sickness of the mind?"
He didn't answer that, but when he spoke, it was not in the voice of a man changing the subject. "Since you were abroad, I have had two more children by the Queen. Did you know that?"
"I heard about the girl Morgian, but I didn't know about this last stillbirth until today. I'm sorry."
"And did this famous Sight of yours tell you that there would be no more?" Suddenly, he slammed the goblet down again on the table beside his chair. I saw that the silver had indeed dented under his fingers' pressure. He got to his feet with the violence of a thrown spear. I could see then that what I had taken for energy was a kind of drawn and dangerous tightness, nerves and sinews twanging like bowstrings. The hollows under his cheekbones showed sharp as if something had eaten him empty from within. "How can anyone be a King who is less than a man?" He flung this question at me, and then strode across the room to the window, where he leaned his head against the stone, looking out at the morning.
Now at last I understood what he had been trying to tell me. He had sent for me once before, to this very room, to tell me how his love for Ygraine, Gorlois'