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By Root 616 0

him that would help to offset the haunted somberness that sometimes hung around her. I spoke of him, commending him, and in a while she grew calmer, and began, with growing ease, to tell me about her marriage. I listened, and watched, and had time, now, to mark the changes in her; changes, I thought, due to the power that she had had so drastically to assume. My gentle Ninian had gone, with me into the mists. There was an edge to this Nimuë that had not been there before; something quietly formidable, a kind of honed brightness, like a weapon's edge. And in her voice, at times, sounded a subtle echo of the deeper tones that the god uses when, with authority and power, he descends to mortal speech. These attributes had once been mine. But I, accepting them, had taken no lover. I found myself hoping, for Pelleas' sake, that he was a strong-minded young man.

"Yes," said Nimuë, "he is."

I started out of my thoughts. She was watching me, her head on one side, her eyes alight once more with laughter.

I laughed with her, then put out my arms. She came into them, and lifted her mouth. I kissed her, once with passion, and once with love, and then I let her go.

10

Christmas at Caerleon. Pictures came crowding back to me, sun and snow and torchlight, full of youth and laughter, of bravery and fulfillment and time won back from oblivion. I have only to shut my eyes; no, not even that; I need only glance into the fire and they are here with me, all of them.

Nimuë, bringing Pelleas, who treated me with deference, and her with love, but who was a king and a man. "She belongs to the King," he said, "and then to me. And I -- well, it's the same, isn't it? I am his before ever I can be hers. Which of us, in the sight of God and King, is ever his own man?"

Bedwyr, coming on me one evening down beside the river, which slipped along, swollen and slate-grey, between its winter banks. A fleet of swans were proving the mud at the water's edge among the reeds. Snow had begun to fall, small and light, floating like swansdown through the still air. "They told me you had come this way," said Bedwyr. "I came to take you back. The King stays for you. Will you come now? It's cold, and will get colder." Then, as we walked back together: "There's news of Morgause," he said. "She has been sent north into Lothian, to the nunnery at Caer Eidyn. Tydwal will see to it that she's kept fast there. And there's talk of Queen Morgan's being sent to join her. They say that King Urbgen finds it hard to forgive her attempt to embroil him in treachery, and he's afraid that if he keeps her by him the taint will cling, to him and to his sons. Besides, Accolon was her lover. So the talk goes that Urbgen will put her away. He has sent to Arthur for permission. He'll get it, too. I think Arthur will feel more comfortable with both his loving sisters safely shut up, and a good long way away. It was Nimuë's suggestion." He laughed, looking at me sideways. "Forgive me, Merlin, but now that the King's enemies are women, perhaps it is better that he has a woman to deal with them. And if you ask me, you'll be well out of it..."

Guinevere, sitting at her loom one bright morning, with sun on the snow outside, and a caged bird singing on the sill beside her. Her hands lay idle among the coloured threads, and the lovely head turned to watch, down beside the moat, the boys at play. "They might be my own sons," she said. But I saw that her eyes did not follow the bright heads of Lot's children, but only the dark boy Mordred, who stood a little way apart from the others, watching them, not as an outcast might watch his more favoured brothers, but as a prince might watch his subjects.

Mordred himself. I never spoke with him. Mostly the boys were on the children's side of the palace, or in the care of the master-at-arms or those set to train them. But one afternoon, on a dark day drawing to dusk, I came on him, standing beside the arch of a garden gateway, as if waiting for someone. I paused, wondering how to greet him, and how he might receive his mother's enemy, when I