that helped to throw the winter's rains away from walls and doors. Between the houses ran narrow streets, steep guts also paved with the flagstones so lavishly supplied by the local cliffs.
The main building of the palace was the great central hall. This was the "public" hall, where the court gathered, where feasts were held, petitions were heard, and where many of the courtiers — nobles, officers, royal functionaries — slept at night. It comprised a big oblong room, with other, smaller chambers opening from it.
Outside was a walled courtyard where the queen's soldiers and servants lived, sleeping in the outbuildings, and eating round their cooking fires in the yard itself. The only entrance was the main gateway, a massive affair flanked to either side by a guardhouse.
At a short distance from the main palace buildings, and connected with them by a long covered passage, stood the comparatively new building that was known as "the queen's house." This had been built by Morgause's orders when she first came to settle in Orkney. It was a smaller yet no less grandly built complex of buildings set very near the edge of the cliff that here rimmed the shore. Its walls looked almost like an extension of the layered cliffs below. Not many of the court — only the queen's own women, her advisers, and her favourites — had seen the interior of the house, but its modem splendours were spoken of with awe, and the townspeople gazed up in wonder at the big windows — an unheard-of innovation — which had been built even into the seaward walls.
Inland from palace and township stretched an open piece of land, turf grazed close by sheep, and used by the soldiers and young men for practice with horses and arms. Some of the stabling, with the kennels, and the byres for cattle and goats, was outside the palace walls, for in those islands there was little need of more defense than that provided by the sea, and to the south by the iron walls of Arthur's peace. But some way along the coast, beyond the exercise ground, stood the remains of a primitive round tower, built before men's memory by the Old People, and splendidly adaptable as both watchtower and embattled refuge. This Morgause, with the memory of Saxon incursions on the mainland kingdom, had had repaired after a fashion, and there a watch and ward was kept. This, with the guard kept constantly on the palace gate, was part of the royal state that fitted the queen's idea of her own dignity. If it did nothing else, said Morgause, it would keep the men alert, and provide some sort of military duty for the soldiers, as a change from exercises that all too readily became sport, or from idling round the palace courtyard.
When Mordred with his escort arrived at the gate the courtyard was crowded. A chamberlain was waiting to escort him to the queen.
Feeling awkward and strange in his seldom-worn best tunic, stiff as it had come from the cupboard, and smelling faintly musty, Mordred followed his guide. He was taut with nerves, and looked at nobody, keeping his head high and his eyes fixed on the chamberlain's shoulder-blades, but he felt the stares, and heard mutterings. He took them to be natural curiosity, probably mingled with contempt; he cannot have known that the figure he cut was curiously courtier-like, his stiffness very like the dignified formality of the great hall.
"A fisherman's brat?" the whispers went. "Oh, aye? We've heard that one before. Just look at him.… So who's his mother? Sula? I remember her. Pretty. She used to work at the palace here. In King Lot's time, that was. How long ago now since he visited the islands? Twelve years? Eleven? How the time does go by, to be sure.… And he must be just about that age, wouldn't you say?"
So the whispers went. They would have pleased Morgause, had she heard them, and Mordred, whom they would have enraged, did not hear them. But he heard the muttering, and felt the eyes. He stiffened his spine further, and wished the