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

without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent
purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Stewart, Mary, b.

1916 The last enchantment.

I.

Title 823'.
9'1F PR6069.

T46L/ ISBN 0 340 25829 2
Printed and bound in France by Brodard & Taupin Hodder and Stoughton
A

division of Hodder Headline PLC 338 Euston Road London NW1 3BH C
ONTENTS
Book I DUNPELDYR i Book II CAMELOT 163 Book III APPLEGARTH 2
65 Book IV
BRYN MYRDDIN 379
THE LEGEND 493 AUTHOR"S NOTE 497


Book I DUNPELDYR CHAPTER i Not every king would care to start his re
ign
with the wholesale massacre of children.
This is what they whisper of Arthur, even though in other ways he is
held up as the type itself of the noble ruler, the protector alike of
high and lowly.

It is harder to kill a whisper than even a shouted calumny.

Besides, in the minds of simple men, to whom the High King is the ruler
of their lives, and the dispenser of all fates, Arthur would be held
accountable for all that happened in his realm, evil and good alike,
from a resounding victory in the battlefield to a bad rain-storm or a
barren Sock.

So, although a witch plotted the massacre, and another king gave the
order for it, and though I myself tried to shoulder the blame, the
murmur still persists; that in the first year of his reign, Arthur the
High King had his troops seek out and destroy some score of newly-born
babies in the hope of catching in that bloody net one single boy-
child, his bastard by incest with his half-sister Morgause.

"Calumny', I have called it, and it would be good to be able to declare