Legacy: Arthurian Saga Read Online Free PDF

the other door. None of them looked
back.
    Someone spoke to me, but I did not
answer. I ran out through the colonnade, across the main court, and
out again into the quiet sunlight of the orchard.
    My uncle found me on Moravik's
terrace.
    I was lying on my belly on the hot
flagstones, watching a lizard. Of all that day, this is my most
vivid recollection; the lizard, flat on the hot stone within a foot
of my face, its body still as green bronze but for the pulsing
throat. It had small dark eyes, no brighter than slate, and the
inside of its mouth was the color of melons. It had a long, sharp
tongue, which flicked out quick as a whip, and its feet made a tiny
rustling noise on the stones as it ran across my finger and
vanished down a crack in the flags.
    I turned my head. My uncle Camlach was
coming down through the orchard.
    He mounted the three shallow steps to
the terrace, soft-footed in his elegant laced sandals, and stood
looking down. I looked away. The moss between the stones had tiny
white flowers no bigger than the lizard's eyes, each one perfect as
a carved cup. To this day I remember the design on them as well as
if I had carved it myself.
    "Let me see," he said.
    I didn't move. He crossed to the stone
bench and sat down facing me, knees apart, clasped hands between
them.
    "Look at me, Merlin."
    I obeyed him. He studied me in silence
for a while.
    "I'm always being told that you will
not play rough games, that you run away from Dinias, that you will
never make a soldier or even a man. Yet when the King strikes you
down with a blow which would have sent one of his deerhounds
yelping to kennel, you make no sound and shed no tear."
    I said nothing.
    "I think perhaps you are not quite
what they deem you, Merlin." Still nothing. "Do you know why Gorlan
came today?" I thought it better to lie. "No."
    "He came to ask for your mother's
hand. If she had consented you would have gone with him to
Brittany." I touched one of the moss-cups with a forefinger. It
crumbled like a puff-ball and vanished.
    Experimentally, I touched another.
Camlach said, more sharply than he usually spoke to me: "Are you
listening?"
    "Yes. But if she's refused him it will
hardly matter." I looked up.
    "Will it?"
    "You mean you don't want to go? I
would have thought..." He knitted the fair brows so like my
grandfather's. "You would be treated honorably, and be a
prince..."
    "I am a prince now. As much a prince
as I can ever be."
    "What do you mean by that?"
    "If she has refused him," I said, "he
cannot be my father. I thought he was. I thought that was why he
had come."
    "What made you think so?"
    "I don't know. It seemed -- " I
stopped. I could not explain to Camlach about the flash of light in
which Gorlan's name had come to me. "I just thought he must
be."
    "Only because you have been waiting
for him all this time." His voice was calm. "Such waiting is
foolish, Merlin. It's time you faced the truth. Your father is
dead." I put my hand down on the tuft of moss, crushing it. I
watched the flesh of the fingers whiten with the pressure. "She
told you that?"
    "No." He lifted his shoulders. "But
had he been still alive he would have been here long since. You
must know that." I was silent. "And if he is not dead," pursued my
uncle, watching me, "and still has never come, it can surely not be
a matter for great grief on anyone's part?"
    "No, except that however base he may
be, it might have saved my mother something. And me." As I moved my
hand, the moss slowly unfurled again, as if growing. But the tiny
flowers had gone. My uncle nodded. "She would have been wiser,
perhaps, to have accepted Gorlan, or some other prince."
    "What will happen to us?" I asked.
"Your mother wants to go into St. Peter's. And you -- you are quick
and clever, and I am told you can read a little. You could be a
priest."
    "No!"
    His brows came down again over the
thin-bridged nose. "It's a good enough life. You're not warrior
stock, that's certain. Why not take a life that will suit