The Last Enchantment - Mary Stewart [137]
All was ready for us at Melwas' hall. The king himself was dressed in rich dark blue, and was, I noticed, fully armed. His handsome face wore a smile, easy and welcoming, but his eyes had a wary look, and there were altogether too many men-at-arms crowded into the hall, besides the full company outside, brought down at readiness from his hilltop fortress, to throng into the orchard-fields that served the palace for garden. Banners and bright trappings gave the welcome a festive air, but it was to be seen that every man wore both sword and dagger.
He had, of course, expected Arthur. When he saw me his look at first lightened with relief, then I saw the wariness deepen, and tight lines draw themselves around his mouth. He greeted me fairly, but very formally, like a man making the first move of a gambit at chess. I replied, with the long, studied speech of Arthur's deputy, then turned to the old queen, his mother, who stood beside him at the end of the long hall. She showed no such caution as her son's. She greeted me with easy authority, and made a sign toward a door on the right of the hall. There was a stir as the crowd parted, and Queen Guinevere came in among her ladies.
She, too, had expected Arthur. She hesitated, looking for him in the glitter of the packed hall. Her gazed passed me, unseeing. I wondered what god had moved her to wear green, spring green, with flowers embroidered on the breast of her gown. Her mantle was green, too, with a collar of white marten, which framed her face and gave her a fragile look. She was very pale, but bore herself with rigid composure.
I remembered how, that night, I had found her shaking in my grasp; and on the thought, as if I had been dipped in cold water, I saw that Arthur had been right about her. She might be a queen in bearing and in courage, but under it all there was a timid girl, and one looking, all the time, for love. The gaiety, the ready laughter and high spirits of youth, had masked an exile's eager search for friendship among the strangers of a court vastly different from the homely hearthstone of her father's kingdom. I would never, wrapped in Arthur as I had been for twenty years, even have troubled to think about her, except as his people thought: a vessel for his seed, a partner for his pleasure, a glowing pillar of beauty to shine, silver beside his gold, on the hilltop of his glory. Now I saw her as if I had never seen her before. I saw a girl, tender of flesh and simple enough of spirit, who had had the fortune to marry the greatest man of the age. To be Arthur's Queen was no mean burden, with all that it entailed of loneliness, and a life of banishment in an alien country, with, as often as not, no husband near to come between her and the flatterers, the power-hungry schemers, those envious of her rank or beauty, or -- perhaps most dangerous of all -- the young men ready to worship her. Then there would be those (and you could trust them to be many) who would tell her, over and over again, about the "other Guinevere," the pretty Queen who had conceived from the King's first bedding of her, and for whom he had grieved so bitterly. It would lose nothing in the telling. But all this would have been nothing, would have passed and been forgotten in the King's love, and her new, exciting power, if only she had been able to conceive a child. That Arthur had not used the Melwas affair to have her put aside, to take a fertile woman to his bed,