Mary Stewart - The Arthurian Saga 03 - The Last Enchanment

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THE LAST ENCHANTMENT

Mary Stewart

Let us hope that he is dead, too, by this.

' The king said,

"Let us do more than that.

Let us make sure.

' THE LAST ENCHANTMENT, Mary Stewart's third magnificent and haun

ting

novel of Dark Age Britain.

"Fully captures the flavour of Arthurian Britain and its rich legends,

with larger than life characters who involve the reader in every action

and emotion.

' The Bookseller

"Spellbinding.

' Harpers & Queen Also by Mary Stewart Madam, Will You Talk?

Wildfire at Midnight Thunder on the Right My Brother Michael Nine

Coaches Waiting The Ivy Tree The Moonspinners This Rough Magic Airs

Above the Ground The Gabriel Hounds The Wind Off the Small Isles Touc

Not the Cat Thornyhold Stormy Petrel The Crystal Cave The Hollow Hills

The Novel ofMordred The Wicked Day Poems Frost on the Window For

Children The Little

Broomstick Ludo and the Star Horse A Walk in Wolf Wood The Last

Enchantment Mary Stewart CORONET BOOKS Hodder and Stoughton To

one who

by Mary Stewart First published in Great Britain in 1979 by Hodder and

Stoughton Coronet edition 1980 The right of Mary Stewart to be

identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in

accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior

written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any

form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and

without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent

purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Stewart, Mary, b.

1916 The last enchantment.

Title 823'.

9'1F PR6069.

T46L/ ISBN 0 340 25829 2

Printed and bound in France by Brodard & Taupin Hodder and Stoughton

division of Hodder Headline PLC 338 Euston Road London NW1 3BH C

ONTENTS

Book I DUNPELDYR i Book II CAMELOT 163 Book III APPLEGARTH 2

65 Book IV

BRYN MYRDDIN 379

THE LEGEND 493 AUTHOR"S NOTE 497

Book I DUNPELDYR CHAPTER i Not every king would care to start his re

ign

with the wholesale massacre of children.

This is what they whisper of Arthur, even though in other ways he is

held up as the type itself of the noble ruler, the protector alike of

high and lowly.

It is harder to kill a whisper than even a shouted calumny.

Besides, in the minds of simple men, to whom the High King is the ruler

of their lives, and the dispenser of all fates, Arthur would be held

accountable for all that happened in his realm, evil and good alike,

from a resounding victory in the battlefield to a bad rain-storm or a

barren Sock.

So, although a witch plotted the massacre, and another king gave the

order for it, and though I myself tried to shoulder the blame, the

murmur still persists; that in the first year of his reign, Arthur the

High King had his troops seek out and destroy some score of newly-born

babies in the hope of catching in that bloody net one single boy-

child, his bastard by incest with his half-sister Morgause.

"Calumny', I have called it, and it would be good to be able to declare

openly that the story is a lie.

But it is not quite that.

It is a lie that he ordered the slaughter; but his sin was the first

cause of it, and, though it would never have occurred to him to murder

innocent children, it is true that he wanted his own child killed.

So it is just that some of the blame should rest on him: just, too,

that some of it should ding to me; for I, Merlin, who am accounted a

man of power and vision, had waited idly by while the dangerous child

was engendered, and the tragic term set to the peace and freedom which

Arthur could win for his people.

I can bear the blame, for now I am beyond men't judgment, but Arthur is

still young enough to feel the sting of the story, and be haunted by

thoughts of atonement; and when it happened he was younger still, in

all the first white-and-golden flush of victory and kingship, held up

on the love of the people, the acclamation of the soldiers, and the

blaze of mystery that surrounded the drawing of the sword from the

stone.

It happened like this.

King Uther Pendragon lay with his army at Luguvallium in the northern

kingdom of Rheged, where he was to face a massive Saxon attack under

the brothers Colgrim and Badulf, grandsons of Hengist.

The young Arthur, still little more than a boy, was brought to this,

his first field, by his foster-father Count Ector of Galava, who

presented him to the King.

Arthur had been kept in ignorance of his royal birth and parentage, and

Uther, though he had kept himself informed of the boy's growth and

progress, had never once seen him since he was born.

This because, during the wild night of love when Uther had lain with

Ygraine, then the wife of Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall and Uther's most

faithful commander, the old Duke himself had been killed.

His death, though no fault of Uther's, weighed so heavily on the King

that he swore never to claim for his own any child born of that night's

guilty love.

In due course Arthur had been handed to me to rear, and this I had

done, at a far remove from both King and Queen.

But there had been no other son born to them, and at last King Uther,

who had ailed for some time, and who knew the danger of the Saxon

threat he faced at Luguvallium, was forced to send for the boy, to

acknowledge him publicly as his heir and present him to the assembled

nobles and petty kings.

But before he could do so, the Saxons attacked.

Uther, though too sick to ride at the head of the troops, took the

field in a litter, with Cador, Duke of Cornwall, in command of the

right, and on the left King Coel of Rheged, with Caw of Strathclyde and

other leaders from the north.

Only Lot, King of Lothian and Orkney, failed to take the field.

King Lot, a powerful king but a doubtful ally, held his men in reserve,

to throw them into the fight where and when they should be needed.

It was said that he held back deliberately in the hope that Uther's

army would be destroyed, and that in the event the kingdom might fall

to him.

It so, his hopes were defeated.

When, in the fierce fighting around the King's litter in the centre of

the field, young Arthur's sword broke in his hand.

King Uther threw to his hand his own royal sword, and with it (as men

understood it) the leadership of the kingdom.

After that he lay back in his litter and watched the boy, ablaze like

some comet of victory, lead an attack that put the Saxons to rout.

Afterwards, at the victory feast.

Lot headed a faction of rebel lords who opposed Uther's choice of

heir.

At the height of the brawling, contentious feast.

King Uther died, leaving the boy, with myself beside him, to face and

win them over.

What happened then has become the stuff of song and story.

Enough here to say that, by his own kingly bearing, and through the

sign sent from the god, Arthur showed himself undoubted King.

But the evil seed had already been sown.

On the previous day, while he was still ignorant of his true parentage,

Arthur had met Morgause, Uther's bastard daughter, and his own

half-sister.

She was very lovely; and he was young, in all the flush of his first

victory, so when she sent her maid for him that night he went eagerly,

with no more thought of what the night's pleasure might bring but the

cooling of his hot blood and the loss of his maidenhood.

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