But then Morgan and Nimue reappeared.
There was silence in the hall as the two women walked to Norwenna’s chair where, with due humility, they knelt. The head monk, a small fierce man with a bristling beard who had been a tanner before converting to Christ and who still stank of the dung needed by his former trade, demanded to know their business. His wife defended herself from evil by making the sign of the cross, though she spat as well just to be sure.
Morgan answered the monk from behind her golden mask. She spoke with unaccustomed deference as she claimed that Gundleus’s messenger had lied. She and Nimue, Morgan said, had peered into the cauldron and seen the truth reflected in its watery mirror. There was no victory in the north, nor was there defeat there either, but Morgan warned that the enemy was closer to Ynys Wydryn than any of us knew and that we should all be ready to leave the Tor at first light and seek safety deeper inside southern Dumnonia. Morgan spoke the words soberly and heavily, and when she had finished she bowed to the Queen, then bent awkwardly forward to kiss the hem of Norwenna’s blue robe.
Norwenna snatched the robe away. She had listened in silence to the dour prophecy, but now she began to cry and with the sudden tears came a wash of anger. “You’re just a crippled witch!” she screamed at Morgan, ‘and want your bastard brother to be King. It won’t happen! You hear me! It will not happen. My baby is King!”
“High Lady Nimue tried to intervene, but was immediately interrupted.
“You’re nothing!” Norwenna turned on Nimue savagely. “You’re nothing but an hysterical, wicked child of the devil. You’ve put a curse on my child! I know you have! He was born crooked because you were present at his birth. Oh God! My child!” She was screaming and weeping, beating her fist on the table as she spat her hatred at Nimue and Morgan. “Now go! Both of you! Go!” There was silence in the hall as Nimue and Morgan went into the night.
And next morning it seemed Norwenna must be right for no beacons blazed on the northern hills. It was, indeed, the most beautiful day of that beautiful summer. The land was heavy as it neared harvest, the hills were hazed by the somnolent heat and the sky almost cloudless. Cornflowers and poppies grew in the thorn thickets at the Tor’s foot and white butterflies sailed the warm air currents that ghosted up our patterned green slopes. Norwenna, oblivious to the day’s beauty, chanted her morning prayers with the visiting monks, then decreed she would move from the Tor and wait for her husband’s arrival in the pilgrims’ chambers in the shrine of the Holy Thorn. “I have lived among the wicked too long,” she announced very grandly, as a guard shouted a warning from the eastern wall.
“Horsemen!” the guard cried. “Horsemen!”
Norwenna ran to the fence where a crowd was gathering to watch a score of armed horsemen crossing the land bridge that led from the Roman road to the green hills of Ynys Wydryn. Ligessac, commander of Mordred’s guard, seemed to know who was coming for he sent orders to his men to allow the horsemen through the earth wall. The riders spurred though the wall’s gate and came towards us beneath a bright banner that showed the red badge of the fox. It was Gundleus himself and Norwenna laughed with delight to see her husband riding victorious from the war with the dawn of a new Christian kingdom bright upon his spear-point. “You see?” she turned on Morgan. “You see? Your cauldron lied. There is victory!”
Mordred began to cry at all the commotion and Norwenna brusquely ordered him given to Ralla, then she demanded that her best cloak be fetched and a gold circlet placed upon her head and thus, dressed as a queen, she waited for her King before the doors of Merlin’s hall.
Ligessac opened the Tor’s land gate. Druidan’s ramshackle guard formed a crude line while poor mad Pellinore shrieked in his cage for news. Nimue ran towards Merlin’s chamber while I went to fetch Hywel, Merlin’s steward, who I knew would want to welcome the King.