Lleu, lying still with closed eyes, said suddenly, "Medraut."
"Little one?"
"That drink," Lleu saided D; Lleu. "Is it sending me to sleep?"
I watched him without feeling anything, as though I were watching from a distance. "Yes."
"You know he hates to be made to sleep," Goewin said angrily. "You do it on purpose."
"It will be easier for him," I said, now feeling amused at their indignation.
"I hate it," Lleu said, and struggled to sit up.
Lleu enraged: the Bright One. Helpless and splendid. "Lie still, little one; lie still." Goewin’s eyes on me were stony. "Don’t fight."
But Lleu fought. I always underestimate the strength of his will. "You must promise me you’ll not do it again," he said, struggling to stay awake and furious that he could not. "I’d rather be in pain."
"I won’t do it without good cause." Am I that cruel? "I don’t do it now without good cause. You’ll shock your parents well enough tomorrow without having spent a night without sleep."
"Sir, you didn’t even ask him!" Goewin said.
Allied against me.
"Medraut, listen to me," Lleu said. His eyes were closed and he spoke slowly and very quietly. "I command you—I command you not to use on me in the future, no matter how ill or hurt I am, anything that might make me sleep, without my consent. Swear."
I sat with my head bent. I must seem hard and proud of body and spirit, aloof and most at ease in my cold, austere surroundings; but I woke without complaint or question in the middle of the night to assist and care for them, the children who had usurped my place in my father’s heart and hearth. "I promise," I said, hesitating a little, "not to send you to sleep at any time you might be ill or hurt, from now on." Lleu’s rigid body had relaxed. "Did you understand that?" I asked. I turned to Goewin, inquiring. Lleu murmured something brief and inaudible. "Even if you didn’t understand," I said in quiet, "that is a promise I will keep." I bent over and kissed Lleu as easily and honestly as Goewin had, then stood and held out a hand to help her rise. At the door she turned and looked at me straight.
"Well," she said carefully, "it is behind you now." She did not mean the promise I had just made. Her words touched me with the cool surety of her fingertips. She had come to me for help; she trusted me even without fear, although she knew how you haunted me. "Thank you, Medraut," she said.
III
Edges
THE SECRET OF MY birth tore at me. It seemed strange that even when he spoke to me alone, Artos always referred to you as my aunt or my foster mother. But I asked him if I might tell the twins the truth. It seemed important that they know, especially Lleu, so that their acceptance of who and what I was could be completely unclouded. Vain of me, selfish and probably irrelevant; but Lleu must know the real reason I could not be made my father’s heir, the reason that went deeper than mere bastardy. Artos agreed. So I told them; I told them that you are my real mother, and that your brother Artos is my father.
On hearing this the Bright One immediately informed me, "But that’s incest," antha`d I could not help answering coldly, "So it is."
When you took him, Artos had not yet been told who his parents were and could not have guessed that you were his sister. I impressed upon Lleu and Goewin their father’s blamelessness, and avoided any judgment of you and your part. Nor did I tell them what Artos suspected afterward, and what you told me yourself, that you had wittingly made love to him so you might use any child you bore to him as a weapon against him. That knowledge in itself is terrible enough for me to live with, but the incest… I wish Lleu had been able to say something else when I first told him. That single sordid night of my father’s life dwindles to insignificance in the black light of my own shame.
So, they knew now, and that secret was shared. Finally I could shut away the thought of you, just as I hid the dragon bracelets from Cathay that I could neither bring myself to wear nor to give away. And I no longer dreamed of you.
It was a gentle summer, and when I was not at work I was often with Lleu and Goewin. Inwardly I longed for their companionship, and the two sometimes allowed me within their circle. Not completely, and not always. But enough. We visited the smithy; we flew my Oriental kites of red and gold paper from the top of the Edge. We rode together, and spent long hours exploring the surrounding country. And twice I took Lleu and Goewin into the copper mines. The first time was by day, with Artos. We stood in the entrance of the cavern that leads to the main workings, and Cadarn the chief foreman explained to the twins how the copper ore is removed and how the shaft entrances are reinforced with stone lintels. But I am not sure they saw anything beyond an impression of the intriguing black, hollow place before them, shot through with darts of flame and glinting water, and echoing with the voices of men and the sound of metal against rock. The second time I took them was by night.
During the long spring mornings Artos was rebuilding the floor and heating system of the villa; he was painstakingly prying up sections of tile and replacing the crumbling hollow clay bricks that lay beneath the atrium. The exposed catacomb of the hypocaust had the look of a miniature crypt, ancient and airless, so old and grim that while the floor was uncovered Lleu would not walk through the atrium by himself after dark. One night I challenged him: "Would you see real darkness?"
Goewin, fearless, said, "Show us." So that night I took them back to the mines. We made our way quietly through the young fields to the forest and the Edge; Lleu’s broken arm kept us from being able to climb, so we took the safest and most open paths. But beneath the Edge there is only the earth itself, and there the concept of safety becomes brittle and trivial. We stood in the first cavern, quiet now, and Lleu’s face was waxen in the light of his taper.
"Look up," I said.
The first cave is wide, long, and low-ceilinged. The rock roof is rippled and smooth, like the muscles in a horse’s back. "It’s like the sand at the coast," Goewin said. "It’s beautiful."
Lleu said, "We mustn’t go in very far."
"No," I answered. I did not laugh.
I marked the walls with charcoal when we came to turnings. Lleu and Goewin had only seen these tunnels full of the movement of men pulling carts and cutting stone. The carts stood at rest now, and the stone lay in heavy piles or jutted strangely and unnaturally from the walls where it had been hewn. The caves are no darker by night than by day; our candle flames cut the darkness softly, like aingftly, l hand parting hair, not a chisel shaping rock. We kept to wide, straight, level passages, for the tunnels and caverns connect and cross, run parallel and above and below one another. It is a quiet, secret place. At night it seems to return to its former silence, the silence of the inside of the earth, ignoring the little pickings of the miners during the quick days.
"This is all yours, Lleu," Goewin said suddenly. "When you’re high king, this will be part of your kingdom too."
"Dare anyone say he owns this?" Lleu said.
"Surely not one who is afraid of the dark," I answered quietly.
He hated that. He hated it, and never argued: we stood two hundred feet below the surface of the earth, and only I knew the way out. Even Goewin said nothing in his defense. The prince of Britain, and afraid to walk through his own house at night! Well, he was not prince of Britain yet.
Perhaps I managed to shame him with my derision, and now he learned to disguise his fear. After that night, as his father replaced the atrium floor, Lleu followed behind, filling in and matching the broken stretches of mosaic with chips of glass and malachite and azurite. After he had glimpsed the abyss, the low dusty hollow place beneath the villa no longer frightened him. But I had not finished with this lesson in darkness.
One afternoon in deep July I rode north and east with Lleu and Goewin, straight across the green country toward the high moors on the horizon, through the forested park where the high king’s deer and boar grew fat, across one of the old, straight Roman roads paved with heavy flagstones. Beyond that we followed a little river between steep wooded hills, and left behind us the poppy-lit fields. The way grew steeper; behind and below us the oak and birch leaves shone green in the sun, and the river snaked away in runnels of diamond light. Above, the high, flat peak that one can just glimpse from the top of the Edge was shrouded in cloud and mist. I know the moors well enough, but Lleu and Goewin had never been here before.
"Shall I take your reins?" I asked Lleu as the steep land beneath the horses’ hooves grew stony and riddled with tufts of bracken. The trees about us thinned and dropped away.
"I can manage," Lleu said fiercely. His riding had improved, but because of his broken arm the reins still gave him trouble. Caius, the high king’s steward, was teaching Lleu to ride in the Roman fashion so that he might control the horse more with his knees than his hands.
"The ground will get rougher," I explained in apology. "Well, be careful."
We left the trees behind. The ground cover was all heather and gorse, brilliant violet and gold. The air was still; foamy, scattered clouds swung low in the sky, sometimes blocking the sun, sometimes not. The lowest clouds tore on the summit of the hill we were climbing, making a shredded curtain of mist beyond which nothing was visible. "Where are we going?" Goewin asked.
"This is the highest of the peaks you can see on the horizon from Camlan," I said. "Have you never climbed any of them?" I knew they had not. Looking straight ahead of me toward the crest of the peak, riding serenely a little forward of my young sister and brother, I said, "Well, you have already seen the dark below. This is perhaps the abyss inverted."
Goewin, with a brief snort of indignation, pulled forward till she rode abreast of me, and said in a cold, inquisitive voice, "Sir? ‘The abyss inverted’? I don p o? I don19;t understand."
"The dark above. Not literal darkness, as in the mines, but a place of mystery all the same. When we ride into the mist, look about you."
We entered the fog. Beads of water hung like amethysts on the heather. Behind us where the ground fell away the cloud came down like a screen, hiding the countryside below. Only the river could be seen, a shining streak of light slashing through the white wall of fog at an incongruous angle. The mist hid the land between ourselves and the river, and the faraway line of water looked as though it were suspended in midair.
"Why does it glitter?" Lleu asked.
"The sun is shining down there," Goewin told him. "It’s only we who are in cloud."
We rode on. The heather gave way to bare peat now, and the country became strange. Even as little as ten miles to the south the moors are gentler than these reaches of bog. "We could get very lost," Lleu said.
"We could," I said. "The fog could be many times as thick. If it were we would stay in one place till it cleared. As it is, we keep the river in sight." Behind us we could still see the river, a wire of pure silver suspended in the white, empty air.