The Last Enchantment - Mary Stewart [74]
"I think you can comfort yourself. I doubt if many men believe that you had anything to do with it."
"No matter." He almost snapped it over his shoulder. "Some will, and that is enough. As for Lot, he had an excuse of a kind; an excuse, that is, that common men can understand. But I? Can I publish it abroad that Merlin the prophet told me the child might be a danger to me, so I had it murdered, and others along with it for fear it should escape the net? What sort of king does this make of me? Lot's sort?"
"I can only repeat that I doubt if you are held to blame. Morgause's women were there within hearing, remember, and the guards knew where their orders came from. Lot's escort, too -- they would know he was riding home bent on revenge, and I cannot imagine that Lot remained silent as to his intentions. I don't know what Ulfin has told you, but when I left Dunpeldyr most people were quoting Lot's orders as responsible for the massacre, and those who thought you ordered it think you did so on my advice."
"So?" he said. He really was very angry. "I am the kind of king who cannot even decide for myself? If there is to be blame allotted for this between us, then I should take it, and not you. You know that well enough. You remember as well as I do exactly what was said."
There was no reply to that, either, and I made none. He prowled up the room and back again before he went on:
"Whoever gave the order, you can say if you like that I feel guilt in this. You would be right. But by all the gods in heaven and hell, I would not have acted like that! This is the kind of thing that lives with you, and after you! I shall not be remembered as the king who beat the Saxons out of Britain, but as the man who played Herod in Dunpeldyr and murdered the children!" He stopped. "What is there in that to smile at?"
"I doubt if you need trouble yourself about the name you will leave behind you."
"So you say."
"So I said." The change in tense, or something about my tone, arrested him. I met his look, and held it. "Yes, I, Merlin, said so. I said so when I had power, and it is true. You are right to be distressed at this abomination, and you are right, too, to take some of the blame to yourself. But if this thing goes down in story as your act, you will still be absolved of blame. You can believe me. What else is to come will absolve you of anything."
The anger had died, and he was thinking. He spoke slowly. "Do you mean that some danger will come of the child's birth and death? Something so terrible that men will see the murder as justified?"
"I did not mean that, no -- "
"You made another prophecy, remember. You hinted to me -- no, you told me -- that Morgause's child might be a danger to me. Well, now the child is dead. Could this have been the danger? This smear on my name?" He paused, struck. "Or perhaps some day one of the men whose sons were murdered will wait for me with a knife in the dark? Is that the kind of thing you had in mind?"
"I told you, I had nothing specific in mind. I did not say that the child 'might' be a danger to you, Arthur. I said he would. And, if my word is to be trusted, directly so, and not by a knife in another man's hand."
He was still now as he had been restless before. He scowled at me, intent. "You mean that the massacre failed of its purpose? That the child -- Mordred, did you say? -- is still alive?"
"I have come to think so."
He drew a quick breath. "Then he was saved, somehow, from that wreck?"
"It's possible. Either he was saved by chance, and is living somewhere, unknowing and unknown, as you did through your childhood -- in which case you may encounter him some day, as Laius did Oedipus, and fall to him in all ignorance."
"I'll risk that. Everyone falls to someone,