[Moruadh]

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MORDRED, BASTARD SON

Chapter One

1

The long wooden boat, its sails lowered, glided along the marshy shoals at the inlet from the mist-shrouded sea.
Standing at the boat’s prow, a cloaked figure guided the boatman between the rocks, toward the strand, as if knowing the place by heart.

2

These were the days after the fall of the kingdoms of Arthur, King of the Britons, whose sovereignty had run from Cornwall to Wales to the west of Gaul called by some Armorica, by others, Britannia. The Romans threatened battle to the east; the Saxons and the men of the North had launched boats upon the southern kingdoms, and it was rumored that an attack on the coast was imminent. The omens of the last days emerged through the mist of smoke and ash that touched the stone-grey sea. Great dark fish of the deep flung themselves onto the sand, as if the water itself had been poisoned. In the air, flocks of ravens flew swift along the twisting roads at the edge of the marshy strand that led to the great rock island, the Dragon’s Mount, which jutted out from a strand of the southern Armorica coast called Cornouaille by the Celtic tribes. The priests and bishops called out for the heathens to be hunted down, for they had brought ruin to the crops and kept the land unholy and allowed the Saxons and the men of the North to destroy the holy sites. But those who had known the Days of the Kings and of the Druid Priests, had remembered the Roman captivity, called out for the Merlin in the old tongue, hoping that the ancient mage might save them from the devastation.
Atop the peak of the Dragon’s Mount, where the rocks flattened like great altars, soldiers stood vigil lest those who had lost faith during the fortnight might risk the quicksand marshes and ascend the rocky stair to the ancient place of pagan worship.
The year of war and fire lay dying, and the Cauldron of Rebirth, called by some the Grail, had been lost. The isles of Avalon in the brackish summer sea turned to haze and even the finest boatmen could not find them. Those who worshipped the heathen gods went underground, those of Christendom sought sanctuary in the ruins of abbeys and monasteries and nunneries and the Roman villas, which had become property of either church or warlord; the wars continued, even after the great castles of Arthur, pen-Dragon had fallen and lay in ruin.
All of it, so it was said, could be laid at the feet of one man, whose infamy had spread throughout the kingdoms and whose name had quickly come to mean, simply, “traitor.”
That name was Mordred.
“Mordred,” curved upon the lips of those men who sought the source for the unraveling of the world – as if the word “Mordred” were an eel that wriggled and slithered along the tongue, many grimaced as the name was spoken. He was known to be unnatural; a demon; a spirit of malevolence rising from the miasma; some believed him to be a creature of the night, drinking the blood of youths; still, others remembered his mother, and how she had turned to darkness and raised her son in shadow. A great price of gold and silver had been set upon the head of this bastard heathen, as well as for the sword he had stolen from the greatest of Kings of the Britons.
And yet, few could recognize the face of this man. By legend, he was a hideous, deformed creature, with the horns of the Bull-god upon his forehead, and the stench of the grave about him.
The villagers expected a phantom in the form of a man.
It was to this craggy shore that a stranger arrived, cloaked and masked.

3

He paid his fee to the boatman with a sack of gold – and none questioned him, though rumors spread as fast as fire across a field of drying hay.
A soldier under Bedevere’s command, standing with his comrades along the Roman wall, found the boatman soon after his landing. Threatening him and his crew with death, the boatman confessed that the masked stranger had first come to him with blood on his hands, blood on his gold, and had only washed in the sea when the stranger had noticed the boatman’s glare. “He wears a mask of gold and silver, as I have seen the heathens wear for their infernal celebrations,” the boatman said.
The soldier struck the old man hard, and the boatman fell to the earth. “You are heathen yourself. I see the markings upon your wrist old man. You brought this murderer to our land to escape his fate among Arthur’s knights.”
Then, he took the gold from the boatman. Passing it to his companions, the soldier told them to arrest the boatman until a confession was had as to the whereabouts of “that bastard Mordred who shall not live to see another dawn.”

4

And yet, for one long day and night, the stranger traveled inland, finding the narrow byways off the main coastal roads, avoiding the trade routes and the endless run of horsemen and soldiers.
The nameless days of December passed, the days without sun following the solstice; the hours since the song of swords had last been sung; many nights since the last cry had been heard on the battlefields, beyond the gentle slope of land. The fires had come, and then the silence. The dead remained unburied where they had fallen; the living had retreated from the sea to the forest and the inland villages. Smoke plumed at a great distance, from the still-burning towers along the sea wall. The sky above, at twilight, ran crimson through thatched gray clouds, and the local folk who lived along the marshlands and the fields beyond the ruined castle of the dead warlord, Hoel, felt this was a sign that Arthur had begun his journey to the Otherworld, through the isles of Avalon.
The forest by the roadside grew dark too fast; and omens and auguries were read by the priests of old, in secret places, and predictions of the coming year mingled with prophecies of the immortal king. Whispers rode the wind across the wolf-scavenged battlefield at the plain beyond the woods. At the far end of the torn castle wall, near the abbey and the old Roman road, it was whispered that all that had been found was lost, and all that had been dreamed, disturbed.
Into this approaching dusk, came that dark-hued stranger, a man of shadows, like the spirit of one long dead now raised to complete a task. That phantom, masked and shrouded, carrying a staff that looked as if it had once been a spear of war.

5

He wore a heavy, ragged cloak, as a beggar might, and some folk grew afraid that he brought a plague with him as he skulked beneath the fallen towers, still blackened and smoldering. His face, covered by that jeweled mask placed as if hiding a war-scar.
He grasped his staff, trudging up the dirt road with its markers of pikes with the heads of traitors upon them. In a time of plenty, he might be judged a wanderer, but in these dangerous times after the wars, fear had spread across the land. Strangers brought with them dread. The kindest among the folk in the village whispered in doorways that this might be a hermit come to the forests, having retreated from the world of men in order to fight the demons of temptation. Those of the old beliefs, those who still kept the antler headdress hidden beneath their straw mats, or went to beg the Lady of the Wood for herbs and salves, felt that he might be one of their Druids, perhaps even the sacred Merlin, disguised as a wanderer.
Those who held to fearful beliefs thought it might be one of the undead of the battlegrounds, called the Wandering Ones. These spirits had not been invited into the Otherworld for crimes they had committed and debts they owed.
This cloaked man went along, unmolested, unharmed, and as twilight grew near, he stopped along the rotting wood and crumbling stone of an old Roman villa that had but one standing wall left to it.
Here, he slept, curled nearly into a ball, against the cold stone.

6

He awoke shivering. Above him, a boy of no more than nine or ten, standing in a peasant shift, pointing down at him. Beyond the boy, two monks watched his slow movements as he sat up.
“The soldiers came. Three nights past,” the little boy said. “Sir Bedevere’s, they told me. Looking for a stranger, they told me. They promised my father and brothers gold should any of us find him.”
“That warlord’s army might have more pressing things to do than raid these villages and search for one man,” the elder monk said, resting his hand upon the boy’s shoulder briefly as if for comfort. “Do not be afraid of these things, child. And if gold is to be had, you shall have it, I’m certain.” His voice carried with it a wheeze and a cough, and the young monk with him touched the edge of his hand as if to steady him.
The young monk moved closer to the stranger, raising his russet robe slightly as he got down on one knee beside him.
“Is it the devil?” the boy asked. “They say he has the jaws of a wolf.”
The monk lifted the stranger’s hood so that he could better see his face. The monk reached up to the mask that covered the stranger’s eyes, and drew it from him. He recognized the mask as one used many years before in the heathen ceremonies, and it was the face of Cernunnos, the Lord of the Forest. A pagan god’s face, etched into the gold and silver mask. Around the eyes, amber and garnet stone.
The hunter and the hunted one.
Beneath the mask, a face sharply handsome, yet worn as if all his energies had been spent.
The stranger’s eyes opened and closed as if he believed himself dreaming rather than waking.
When the stranger opened them again, the elder monk said, “He has been hurt much. I dread what will become of him. Yet, we must take him. If not us, the soldiers. Or the wolves.”
The stranger’s eyes were warm and a brown-green shade.
Then, the young monk turned back to the boy and his companion, “This may be the one who has been sought these many days.”