Page 57 of The Bear's Heart
There was no food in the wagon, nor anything to drink, and I was very hungry. On top of that, I was pregnant. Not a condition in which it was a good idea to starve oneself. The only one having his needs met was Medraut, who had grown into a chubby, bonny baby with a head of very dark hair and an angry scream when he wanted something. Looking at him made me wonder what my own child was going to look like. Medraut had a distinct look of Llacheu, which you’d expect with cousins, I supposed. Although, with blond Theodoric as a father, I was surprised he wasn’t fairer.
Raising my eyes from regarding Medraut, I found Morgana’s eyes fixed on me with almost hypnotic intensity. I started, met her gaze for a moment and looked away, profoundly uncomfortable. My eyes returned unbidden to the dark-haired baby in her sister’s arms.
This was the exact moment another aspect of the legends crept up on me. I’d known it before, but would have dismissed it as rubbish if I’d ever stopped to think about it. Yet now, with this little clone in the wagon sleeping in his mother’s arms, it all came back to me. In some stories Medraut wasn’t just Morgawse’s child– he was Arthur’s too, incestuously. The thought rested in my stomach like a rock, once thought, impossible to unthink.
I tried to push it out of my mind, back to the recesses from which it had come, clawing its way angrily to the surface. But I couldn’t. The more I tried, the larger it loomed, until it seemed to fill my entire head with a mesh of whispering possibilities.
At last, I could bear it no longer. “D’you think he looks like his father?” I asked Morgawse, out of the blue. The feeling of her sister’s cold dark eyes fixed on me wouldn’t go away, but I was held now, desperate to delve further into this.
She looked across. We were on a level even though she was in the wagon and I was on my horse. “Not really.” Her brows creased in a faint frown. “He’s all Pendragon with very little Goth about him.” She stroked his baby soft cheek. “We Pendragons have strong characteristics. Look at us all– dark hair, dark eyes, dark hearts.”
I bristled in my husband’s defense. “Arthur doesn’t have a dark heart.” Was that a smirk I saw out of the corner of my eye on Morgana’s lovely face?
Morgawse gave a grimace that might have been a smile. “Perhaps, perhaps not. But a darker heart than you might think.”
I didn’t like the way this conversation was going. I remembered the brothel at Caer Luit Coyt where Theodoric had claimed Lucretia’s blond baby as his. The blond baby. British mother plus Goth father had produced a baby as blond as a Goth, like Theodoric. So why wasn’t his son by Morgawse as blond? Could this disturbing legend of the child’s paternity, as well as the list of battles and the sword in the stone, also be based on truth?
Morgana’s eyes bored into me and my son did a somersault in my stomach, pressing uncomfortably against my bladder for an instant. I wished I could take off the hot mail shirt, but Drustans had refused to allow it. Sweat ran down my back and my undershirt stuck hotly to my skin, which the flies seemed to like very much. “You’d think he’d have been blond like his father,” I said, feeling irritable.
She shook her head. “Not coming from me. Look at Cadwy. His mother was a Saxon princess– his great-grandfather was Hengest himself– but he’s as dark as all of us. Our father has passed a strong bloodline on to us all, and we stamp ourselves proudly on our children.”
Maybe she was right. I tried again. “He looks a lot like Arthur.”
There was that smirk again.
Morgawse looked proud. “Who better to resemble than a king?”
I wasn’t going to find an answer to my questions in her responses. She sounded as though she was talking about Theodoric being Medraut’s father, but she would, wouldn’t she? Even if he were not. There was no way she’d tell me if someone else had fathered her child, especially not if it were her brother. I was back to square one, other than her assurance that Pendragon children were all born dark. Which made me think of my child again. I fell silent, my hand cradling my small taut belly, wondering where Arthur was now.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Full darkness hadfallen by the time we reached Caswallan’s villa. I felt faint for lack of food and from being overheated inside my mail shirt. I was also shaky from the aftermath of having killed a man. Trying not to think about what I’d done wasn’t working. I kept seeing his ugly face and his eyes glazing over as he rolled off Ummidia with my sword jammed between his ribs. The grating of the sword on bone replayed itself endlessly inside my head, however hard I tried to distract myself.
When my horse halted in the farmyard, I was so exhausted, both mentally and physically, that I slumped forward onto its neck for a moment. It took a supreme effort to straighten up and pay attention to what was going on.
Alerted by his farmhands, Caswallan himself, a tall man with sparse white hair and a long face as ascetic as Abbot Jerome’s, came hurrying out to meet us. With him came servants carrying bronze lanterns which cast circles of welcoming warm yellow light across the well-swept cobbles of the yard.
Caswallan’s eyes widened with surprise as he saw the wagon load of extra women he’d not been expecting. He recognized Morgana immediately, stuttering, “M-milady,” in tones of horror. When he saw she was bound, his eyes went even wider with shock and probably fear.
Morgawse spoke up. “My sister was in charge of taking us to witness the ambush my brother Cadwy planned.” She handed the sleeping baby down to a servant. “Do not waste your sympathy on her. I’ve seen her true colors.” She jumped from the wagon and took the baby back.
I slid down from the saddle and took off my helmet. Caswallan’s gaze took me in. I didn’t think he could look more shocked, but he did. “Is this…is this thequeen?”
Morgawse heaved a sigh. “It is. And she’s exhausted. We all are. We need food– straightaway.” She was all imperious princess, and I had to admire her coolness in the face of adversity.
Caswallan remembered his manners. “Milady.” I couldn’t be sure which one of us he was talking to. At a wave of his arm, his farmhands took our horses, and one of them helped the other women down from the wagon. Ummidia looked as though she’d been the loser in a boxing match.
“Tell my wife to have a meal prepared,” Caswallan ordered an elderly servant, who went running to do as he was bid. Then he turned back to us, his voice strained with anxiety. “Please, ladies, come this way and accept my humble hospitality.”
We followed him through the gloomy cool of the inner courtyard and into the villa. Here, his wife and three serving women were already hastily organizing a meal, laying out platters of cold meat, bread, onions, and cheese, and jugs of wine and beer. I’d never been so glad to see a laden table as I was just then.
Morgawse must have been as hungry and exhausted as I was after a full day riding in that wagon in the heat, and having to feed her baby while she was doing so. Yet she seemed to have gained a second wind. She crisply told Caswallan’s middle-aged wife, Melvina, that the other three women had been raped, the young girls very badly. Horrified, Melvina immediately took them under her wing and off for a bath and clean clothes. No such thing as preserving the forensic evidence in this day and age.
That left Morgawse and myself, and our two young escorts with their royal prisoner, to eat in the dining room with Caswallan. Starvation had made me giddy, and I took a long draught of wine that made me giddier still, but left a track of delicious fruitiness down my throat. Knowing that in my old time alcohol in pregnancy was frowned upon had no effect on me; it was drink wine or nothing where water could be such a germ carrier. And besides, after everything I’d gone through, I needed a drink, and the wine refortified me much more quickly than food would.
“What do you want me to do with the Lady Morgana?” Caswallan asked. He had a nervous look to him, as he might well have, considering he lived in her brother Cadwy’s kingdom and must have known the powers she possessed. At his request, Morgana was untied and allowed to sit and eat with the rest of us, although she only deigned to nibble on a piece of bread and sip some wine.
The two young men who’d escorted us, deprived of Drustans’ leadership, looked to be of a similar opinion to Caswallan. Morgana was a royal princess, sister of their own king, as well as Caswallan’s, and they’d been glad to undo her ropes. Now, faced with a decision about her, they looked at each other in discomfort.
