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

died, and the new young King took the throne.

When Arthur found what he had done, he might have added to his sin by killing her, but for my
intervention. I banished her from court, bidding her take horse forYork , where Uther's true-born
daughter Morgan was lodged with her attendants, awaiting her marriage to the King of Lothian.
Morgause, who like everyone else in those days was afraid of me, obeyed me and went, to practise her
woman's spells and nourish her bastard in exile. Which she did, as you will hear, at her sister Morgan's
expense.

But of that later. It would be better, now, to go back to the time when, in the breaking of a new and
auspicious day, with Morgause out of mind and on her way toYork , Arthur Pendragon sat in
Luguvallium of Rheged, to receive homage, and the sun shone.

I was not there. I had already done homage, in the small hours between moonlight and sunrise, in the
forest shrine where Arthur had lifted the sword of Maximus from the stone altar, and by that act declared
himself the rightful King. Afterwards, when he, with the other princes and nobles, had gone in all the
pomp and splendour of triumph, I had stayed alone in the shrine. I had a debt to pay to the gods of the
place.

It was called a chapel now — the Perilous Chapel, Arthur had named it — but it had been a holy place
long before men had laid stone on stone and raised the altar. It was sacred first to the gods of the land
itself, the small spirits that haunt hill and stream and forest, together with the greater gods of air, whose
power breathes through cloud and frost and speaking wind. No one knew for whom the chapel had first
been built. Later, with the Romans, had come Mithras, the soldiers' god, and an altar was raised to him
within it. But the place was still haunted with all its ancient holiness; the older gods received their
sacrifices, and the ninefold lights still burned unquenched by the open doorway.

All through the years when Arthur had been hidden, for his own safety, with Count Ector in
theWildForest , I had stayed near him, known only as the keeper of the shrine, the hermit of the Chapel
in the Green. Here I had finally hidden the great sword of Maximus (whom the Welsh called Macsen)
until the boy should come of an age to lift it, and with it drive the kingdom's enemies out and destroy
them. The Emperor Maximus himself had done so, over a hundred years before, and men thought of the
great sword now as a talisman, a god-sent sword of magic, to be wielded only for victory, and only by
the man who had the right. I, Merlinus Ambrosius, kin to Macsen, had lifted it from its long hiding-place
in the earth, and had laid it aside for the one to come who would be greater than I. I hid it first in a
flooded cave below the forest lake, then, finally, on the chapel altar, locked like carving in the stone, and
shrouded from common sight and touch in the cold white fire called by my art from heaven.

From this unearthly blaze, to the wonder and terror of all present, Arthur had raised the sword.
Afterwards, when the new King and his nobles and captains had gone from the chapel, it could be seen
that the wildfire of the new god had scoured the place of all that had formerly been held sacred, leaving
only the altar, to be freshly decked for him alone.

I had long known that this god brooked no companions. He was not mine, nor (I suspected) would he
ever be Arthur's, but throughout the sweet three corners ofBritain he was moving, emptying the ancient
shrines, and changing the face of worship. I had seen with awe, and with grief, how his fires had swept
away the signs of an older kind of holiness; but he had marked the Perilous Chapel — and perhaps the
sword — as his own, beyond denying.

So all through that day I worked to make the shrine clean again and fit for its new tenant. It took a long