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

openly that the story is a lie.
But it is not quite that.

It is a lie that he ordered the slaughter; but his sin was the first
cause of it, and, though it would never have occurred to him to murder
innocent children, it is true that he wanted his own child killed.

So it is just that some of the blame should rest on him: just, too,
that some of it should ding 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't 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.