The King Arthur Trilogy Read Online Free PDF Page B

rested, he rode south again, he carried with him not only another victory, but something that went deeper with him, though he did not know it, and was to remain with him all his days. For in the high-walled garden of the castle there, he saw Guenever, King Leodegraunce’s daughter, for the first time. She was sitting with her ladies, and all of them weaving garlands of honeysuckle and columbine and the little loose-petalled Four-Seasons roses to braid into their hair. The Princess’s hair was black with a shimmer of copper where the sun caught it, and her eyes, when she looked up from the flowers in her lap, were grey-green as willow leaves and full of cool shadows.
    And Arthur saw all this; but she was scarcely more than a child, and though he was but eighteen himself, he was feeling very old, old and weary with his hard-won victories and the deaths of men. And though they gave each other one long grave look before her father swept him on his way, he thought no more of that first encounter after he rode south again, than that he had seen a girl making a flower-chain in the King’s garden.
    Yet something of him was changed from that moment. Something in him that had been asleep before, began to stir and to ache, longing for – he did not know what. Almost he forgot, as time went by, but never quite, until the time came for him to remember fully once again.
    Arthur rode south to his great castle of Caerleon. And while he was there, Margawse his half-sister, she who was Queen to King Lot of Orkney, came to spy out for her husband the secrets and the strengths and weaknesses of his realm. She came, no man knowing who she was, as a noble lady on a journey, seeking a night’s shelter for herself and her ladies and escorting men-at-arms. And Arthur, who had never seen her before, did not know her either, and gave her courteous welcome.
    Merlin could have warned him, but for once Merlin was not at his side but had gone north on a visit to his old master who had reared and trained him. Cabal, Arthur’s favourite hunting dog, growled and raised thehackles on his neck when she came near, but Arthur paid no heed, only thrust him back with his heel and ordered him from the Great Hall lest he frighten their guest.
    That evening they made merry in the Great Hall in honour of the lady’s coming, and when supper was over, the harpers made their music that was as sweet as the music of the Hollow Hills. But the night was heavy, full of thunder in the air, and the torches in their wall-sconces burned tall and unwavering; and by and by, the lady said, ‘My Lord King, the night is overheavy within doors, and there is no air to breathe; is there a garden in this castle?’
    ‘There is a garden behind the keep,’ Arthur said, ‘it will be cooler there.’
    ‘Then by your leave, I and my maidens will walk alone there in the dusk.’
    And so the lady and her maidens went out to the garden; and in the Great Hall the harpers played on, and the pages set out the boards for chess, and cleared the floor for the games that the young knights and the squires played after supper.
    But in a while one of the pages came to Arthur and whispered, ‘Sir, the lady asks that you go to her in the garden, for she bears a message for you which she says cannot be spoken here in the crowded Hall.’
    So Arthur got up and went quietly from the Hall, and down the narrow stairway in the wall and through thepostern door that gave on to the castle garden. The air was like warm milk, and the scent of honeysuckle and sweet briar hung heavy between the high walls, and the full moon was pale and blurred in the hazy sky. And in the entrance to the vine-trained arbour at the far end, the lady waited for him, quite alone, for all her maidens it seemed were gone.
    Queen Margawse was twice as old as he was; she had borne four sons to the King of Orkney, and the eldest of them, Gawain, was not much younger than Arthur himself; but he neither knew nor cared for that.