“Shall I take your reins?” I asked Lleu as the steep land beneath the horses’ hooves grew stony and riddled with tufts of bracken. The trees about us thinned and dropped away.
“I can manage,” Lleu said fiercely. His riding had improved, but because of his broken arm the reins still gave him trouble. Caius, the high king’s steward, was teaching Lleu to ride in the Roman fashion so that he might control the horse more with his knees than his hands.
“The ground will get rougher,” I explained in apology. “Well, be careful.”
We left the trees behind. The ground cover was all heather and gorse, brilliant violet and gold. The air was still; foamy, scattered clouds swung low in the sky, sometimes blocking the sun, sometimes not. The lowest clouds tore on the summit of the hill we were climbing, making a shredded curtain of mist beyond which nothing was visible. “Where are we going?” Goewin asked.
“This is the highest of the peaks you can see on the horizon from Camlan,” I said. “Have you never climbed any of them?” I knew they had not. Looking straight ahead of me toward the crest of the peak, riding serenely a little forward of my young sister and brother, I said, “Well, you have already seen the dark below. This is perhaps the abyss inverted.”
Goewin, with a brief snort of indignation, pulled forward till she rode abreast of me, and said in a cold, inquisitive voice, “Sir? ‘The abyss inverted’? I don p o? I don19;t understand.”
“The dark above. Not literal darkness, as in the mines, but a place of mystery all the same. When we ride into the mist, look about you.”
We entered the fog. Beads of water hung like amethysts on the heather. Behind us where the ground fell away the cloud came down like a screen, hiding the countryside below. Only the river could be seen, a shining streak of light slashing through the white wall of fog at an incongruous angle. The mist hid the land between ourselves and the river, and the faraway line of water looked as though it were suspended in midair.
“Why does it glitter?” Lleu asked.
“The sun is shining down there,” Goewin told him. “It’s only we who are in cloud.”
We rode on. The heather gave way to bare peat now, and the country became strange. Even as little as ten miles to the south the moors are gentler than these reaches of bog. “We could get very lost,” Lleu said.
“We could,” I said. “The fog could be many times as thick. If it were we would stay in one place till it cleared. As it is, we keep the river in sight.” Behind us we could still see the river, a wire of pure silver suspended in the white, empty air.
Within our circle of mist the peat was black, the air gray. Sudden gullies of water gushed here and there over dark slides of earth. We no longer climbed; the peak flattens near the summit, and we rode on almost level ground along the edge of the top of the hill. Measures of bog stretched away from us toward the highest point, hidden by cloud; vast outcroppings of rock loomed out of the fog, looking at first like huts or groups of people or withered trees, then becoming stones again as we passed by. The horses stepped cautiously between low clots of turf that rose above the mud and were rooted together by clumps of short, coarse grass. Three gray birds flew off into the mist in a flurry of clapping and cracking wings, and twice we heard the loud, strident crying of some disturbed moor bird. That was all we encountered of other living beings. At last we came to a wide, flat, shallow stream with unexpectedly white sandy banks like the mouth of a river; on the near bank stood a cairn of piled loose rock. We dismounted and added a few pebbles to the cairn, drank from the stream, and ate a luncheon of honey, bread, cheese, and eggs. We talked while we ate, for when we were silent we were too much aware of how alone we were, and how lost we could be.
“On a clear day it might be lovely up here,” Goewin said.
“Then why should Medraut think it an evil place?” Lleu muttered.
“No one spoke of evil,” I said lightly. “Only of mystery, and darkness.”
“Like the mines,” Lleu said slowly, understanding. “This is real, but it doesn’t threaten you. You don’t have to come here. Father holds back the real evil—the pirates and invaders from the sea, the painted people from the north—treats with them and keeps them at ease.”
“It’s no easy thing to treat with the Sea Wolves,” I said.
Goewin added thoughtfully, “You have to—you have to be able to imagine what they are thinking. It’s not like feeding hounds and having them be loyal to you. Hounds don’t plan; they don’t think.”
“But the Saxons think wrong,” Lleu said.
“Only according to you!” Goewin laughed. “The raiders from the w mis from arships may be evil, but not all Saxons are evil, certainly not those who have settled here in peace. You can’t just dismiss them all. And not all your own folk are good, either. What will you do if a treaty is broken? What will you do if you find treachery within?”
Lleu laughed also. “When I find treachery within I’ll call on you, suspicious one. I can continue Father’s defense.”
“But it isn’t just a matter of defense!” Goewin pressed. “You have to be able to change, to know whether to attack or to organize new treaties yourself, even if you’re not sure they’ll work—you have to stand your ground but be fair to your enemy at the same time. That’s what Father really does. You have to learn to take risks.”
In fierce rapture, I watched their faces as the twins worked their way through the last argument. “Have you thought long on the government of a kingdom, Goewin?” I asked. Oh, she of all of us has always and only been the true child of the high king: Artos the Dragon and Artos the Bear, forbidding and forgiving, who holds a few tottering and assaulted peoples together as a single, peaceful kingdom.
We turned back. We broke into sunlight again, and began the journey home across that broad, bright country.
IV
The Bright One