The Last Enchantment - Mary Stewart [1]
Afterwards, at the victory feast, Lot headed a faction of rebel lords who opposed Uther's choice of heir. At the height of the brawling, contentious feast, King Uther died, leaving the boy, with myself beside him, to face and win them over.
What happened then has become the stuff of song and story. Enough here to say that by his own kingly bearing, and through the sign sent from the god, Arthur showed himself undoubted King.
But the evil seed had already been sown. On the previous day, while he was still ignorant of his true parentage, Arthur had met Morgause, Uther's bastard daughter, and his own half-sister. She was very lovely, and he was young, in all the flush of his first victory, so when she sent her maid for him that night he went eagerly, with no more thought of what the night's pleasure might bring but the cooling of his hot young blood and the loss of his maidenhood.
Hers, you may be sure, had been lost long ago. Nor was she innocent in other ways. She knew who Arthur was, and sinned with him knowingly, in a bid for power. Marriage, of course, she could not hope for, but a bastard born of incest might be a powerful weapon in her hand when the old King, her father, died, and the new young King took the throne.
When Arthur found what he had done, he might have added to his sin by killing her, but for my intervention. I banished her from court, bidding her take horse for York, where Uther's true-born daughter Morgan was lodged with her attendants, awaiting her marriage to the King of Lothian. Morgause, who like everyone else in those days was afraid of me, obeyed me and went, to practise her woman's spells and nourish her bastard in exile. Which she did, as you will hear, at her sister Morgan's expense.
But of that later. It would be better, now, to go back to the time when, in the breaking of a new and auspicious day, with Morgause out of mind and on her way to York, Arthur Pendragon sat in Luguvallium of Rheged, to receive homage, and the sun shone.
I was not there. I had already done homage, in the small hours between moonlight and sunrise, in the forest shrine where Arthur had lifted the sword of Maximus from the stone altar, and by that act declared himself the rightful King. Afterwards, when he, with the other princes and nobles, had gone in all the pomp and splendour of triumph, I had stayed alone in the shrine. I had a debt to pay to the gods of the place.
It was called a chapel now -- the Perilous Chapel, Arthur had named it -- but it had been a holy place long before men had laid stone on stone and raised the altar. It was sacred first to the gods of the land itself, the small spirits that haunt hill and stream and forest, together with the greater gods of air, whose power breathes through cloud and frost and speaking wind. No one knew for whom the chapel had first been built. Later, with the Romans, had come Mithras, the soldiers' god, and an altar was raised to him within it. But the place was still haunted with all its ancient holiness; the older gods received their sacrifices, and the ninefold lights still burned unquenched by the open doorway.
All through the years when Arthur had been hidden, for his own safety, with Count Ector in the Wild Forest, I had stayed near him, known only as the keeper of the shrine, the hermit of the Chapel in the Green. Here I had finally hidden the great sword of Maximus (whom the Welsh called Macsen) until the boy should come of an age to lift it, and with it drive the kingdom's enemies out and destroy them. The Emperor Maximus