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

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, 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 for York, 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
to York, 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