"Mary Stewart - The Arthurian Saga 03 - The Last Enchantment" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Mary)

killed. So it is just that some of the blame should rest on him; just, too, that some of it should cling 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's 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. OnlyLot , 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. If so, his hopes were defeated. When, in the fierce fighting around the King's litter in the center
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
young blood and the loss of his maidenhood.
 Hers, you may be sure, had been lost long ago. Nor was she innocent in other ways. She knew who
Arthur was, and sinned with him knowingly, in a bid for power. Marriage, of course, she could not hope
for, but a bastard born of incest might be a powerful weapon in her hand when the old King, her father,