Page 66 of The Road to Avalon
Cei hammered on the door. Down the street, a few doors opened and the curious peered out, alerted by the sound of so many hooves passing so late in the day and now the frantic hammering.
Nothing happened, so Cei banged again. He was just raising his gloved fist to knock a third time when the door creaked open the barest crack and the same wizened face we’d seen before peered out at us. “Wot d’you want?” she snapped, as though we were door-to-door salesmen come to sell her a new broom she didn’t need.
“Open up in the name of the High King,” Cei thundered, giving the door a good shove.
She sucked in her cheeks and spat onto the road close to Cei’s feet. “Open up fer the High King again, is it?” she chuntered. “High Kings, queens, princesses, magic men. I doan hold wi’ none o’ them. You’d best come in, but doan go thinkin’ I’m takin’ you anywheres, because I ain’t. Me legs is too tired.”
Cei pushed the door wide open, sweeping her to one side, before she had the chance to tell us anything else about the way she felt.
Arthur stepped past him into the house’s atrium, and I hurried in behind. The old woman stumped over to a stool beside the door and settled on it with a deep groan, sucking her flaccid lips as though she had a sweet in her mouth, or loose false teeth, neither of which could be true.
Arthur didn’t need any guiding. He strode across the atrium into the courtyard and instead of taking the colonnaded walkway around the edge, marched diagonally straight to where Morgawse’s rooms lay.
Cei and I hurried in his wake.
He didn’t bother to knock on his sister’s doors, but seized the lion-headed handles and threw both open wide. On an empty room.
For all of ten seconds he stood on the threshold gazing around, but the room had nowhere anyone could hide. With a sharp intake of breath, he crossed to the entrance to Morgawse’s chamber and threw those doors open as well.
I didn’t follow him this time, but stood waiting, half in the walkway, half inside Morgawse’s rooms, acutely aware of what had happened here a bare forty-eight hours before. Viewed from the corner of my eye, the spot on the mosaic where Morgana’s body had sprawled seemed to hold a shadow of her form, as though she’d not really gone. Easy to believe her malevolent spirit might linger on.
Where were they all?
Arthur turned on his heel and marched back out into the courtyard without a word. He halted near the central fountain, and bellowed. “In the name of the High King, show yourselves.”
The servants, who might have been hiding or just reclusive, came edging out like wary mice from their holes. A good dozen of them, all as frightened as each other, not made any braver by the daunting sight of their High King in full armor and with a face like thunder, standing squarely on the low wall around the fountain so he looked a giant of a man.
“Who’s in charge?” Arthur shouted.
A spare, middle-aged man with a tonsure of thin gray hair and a squint came forward, stopping at a distance as though afraid Arthur might hurt him. He might have been right.
“Where is your mistress?” Arthur asked, aiming his question at the man but sweeping the rest of the servants with his gaze.
The man shifted uneasily. “My mistress in’t here, Milord King.” He rubbed his hands together then wiped them on his tunic. “She left yesterday, after…” His voice trailed off and he looked down at his bony, sandaled feet.
“After what?”
The poor man swallowed. “After we buried the Princess, her sister.”
Hot weather, of course. No one would want to delay a burial. We hadn’t with Amhar, after all, or Llacheu. A body in this heat would start to decay immediately after death, would stink, would bloat… No. I wouldn’t think about that. My son should stay perfect, untouched, inviolate. But for his head…
“My sister?” Arthur’s words hung heavily in the evening air.
“Yes, Milord.” The man wrung his hands and sweat prickled out on his brow.
For a moment, Arthur’s hand went to his head as though it ached, fingertips splayed on his forehead. He must have been exhausted. Maybe his head ached as badly as mine. “What about your mistress? Where did she go? And the Lady Nimuë?”
“And Merlin?” Cei put in. “Where’s he gone?”
The poor servant looked as though he’d like the ground to open up and swallow him. “All gone,” he said. “The Lady Nimuë took Milord Merlin with her, headin’ west, I believe. He were sleepin’. I didn’t go to look, but Dilic the kitchen boy did. He said they took the road toward Maridunum.”
Carmarthen– Merlin’s town. I’d asked him once if he’d been born there, and he’d laughed and told me no. It sounded as though he was going there now, and not willingly. What did the old stories say? That somehow, he’d fallen into the power of a woman called Nimuë and she’d locked him away forever in a crystal cave. But Nimuë was his daughter, and who would have expected her to turn out to be his nemesis? Not me. I’d been lulled into a false sense of security because she was his child and by how she’d helped us find Excalibur. I’d thought her on our side. But was she on anyone’s but her own?
“I’ll send men after them,” Cei said.
Arthur nodded. “Have them brought back here.” He surveyed the cringing servants. “But which way did the Princess Morgawse go?”
The man swallowed hard. “She told me she were going to see her son.”
