The horn sounded a third time, and suddenly I knew I would live, and I was weeping for joy and all our spearmen were half crying and half shouting and the earth was shuddering with the hooves of those Godlike men who were riding to our rescue.
For Arthur, at last, had come.
PART TWO
The Princess Bride
IGRAINE is UNHAPPY. She wants tales of Arthur’s childhood. She has heard of a sword in the stone and wants me to write of it. She tells me he was sired by a spirit on a queen and that the skies were filled with thunder on the night of his birth and maybe she is right and the skies were noisy that night, but everyone I ever talked to slept through it, and as for the sword in the stone, well, there was a sword and there was a stone, but their place in the tale is still far ahead. The sword was called Caledfwlch, which means ‘hard lightning’ though Igraine prefers to call it Excalibur and I shall call it so as well because Arthur never cared what name his long sword carried. Nor did he care about his childhood, for certainly I never heard him speak of it. I once questioned him about his early days and he would not answer. “What is the egg to the eagle?” he asked me, then said that he had been born, he had lived and he had become a soldier, and that was all I needed to know.
But for my most fair and generous protector, Igraine, let me set down what little I did learn. Arthur, despite Uther’s denial at Glevum, was the son of the High King, though there was small advantage to be gained from that patronage for Uther fathered as many bastards as a torn cat makes kittens. Arthur’s mother was, like my most precious queen, called Igraine. She came from Caer Gei in Gwynedd and is said to have been the daughter of Cunedda, King of Gwynedd and High King before Uther, though Igraine was no princess for her mother was not Cunedda’s wife, but was instead married to a chieftain of Henis Wyren. All that Arthur would ever say of Igraine of Gwynedd, who died when he was on the verge of manhood, is that she was the most wonderful and clever and beautiful mother any boy could ever wish for, though according to Cei, who knew Igraine well, her beauty was sharpened by a rancorous wit. Cei is the son of Ector ap Ednywain, the chieftain at Caer Gei who took Igraine and her four bastard children into his household when Uther rejected them. That rejection occurred in the same year Arthur was born, and Igraine never forgave her son for it. She used to say that Arthur was one child too many, and somehow she believed that she would always have ruled as Uther’s mistress had Arthur not been born.
Arthur was the fourth of Igraine’s children to survive infancy. The other three were all girls and Uther evidently liked his bastards to be female for they were less likely to make demands on his patrimony when they grew. Cei and Arthur were raised together and Cei says, though never in Arthur’s hearing, that both he and Arthur were frightened of Igraine. Arthur, he told me, was a dutiful, hard-working boy who strove to be the best at every lesson, whether in reading or sword-fighting, but nothing he could ever achieve gave his mother pleasure, though Arthur always worshipped her, defended her, and wept inconsolably when she died of a fever. Arthur was then thirteen, and Ector, his protector, appealed to Uther to help Igraine’s four impoverished orphans. Uther brought them to Caer Cadarn, probably because he thought the three daughters would be useful throw pieces in the game of dynastic marriages. Morgan’s marriage to a Prince of Kernow was shortlived thanks to fire, but Morgause married King Lot of Lothian and Anna was wed to King Budic ap Camran across the water in Brittany. These last two were not important marriages, for neither king was close enough to send reinforcements to Dumnonia in time of war, but both served their small purposes. Arthur, being a boy, had no such usefulness and so he went to Uther’s court and learned to use a sword and spear. He also met Merlin, though neither man talked much of what passed between them in those months before Arthur, despairing of ever being given preferment by Uther, followed his sister Anna to Brittany. There, in the turmoil of Gaul, he grew into a great soldier and Anna, ever conscious that a warrior brother was a valued relative, kept his exploits known to Uther. That was why Uther brought Arthur back to Britain for the campaign which ended in his son’s death. The rest you know.