In the afternoons we heard mass, then back for whatever conferences we needed with Kay, who knew more about taxes man either of us. The late evenings Guenevere and I kept for ourselves, but even by the rude bed where we slept and played and fitted to the hollows of each other,, there were piles of tax tables, maps and dispatches, writing materials. Young and new as we were, we remembered the tragic failures of Vortigern and the lonely battles of Ambrosius. For the time, we rode the first glow of our people’s hope and trust, but if we did not draw Britain together, someone else would kill us and do it mem-selves. No doubt some would be glad to, but never enough at the same time: for once, that first nervous summer, the tragedy of Britain worked in our favor.

The weight never left us, even in bed. Even wrapped around each other and moving to our climax, Guenevere’s expression would change—

“Of course I love you, goose.”

“Then what?”

“You really trust the Coritani?”

“Oh God, Gwen, not now1.”

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Or writhing under the caress of her wise mouth that set the center of me on fire, I’d explode gloriously, wrenching and panting down to sanity again. Quiet then, spent, with my heart slowing and Owen’s long hair flung cool and soft across my thighs, she would ask in the contented silence, “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing.”

“Finger’s twitching.”

“Those damned Demetae taxes. Kay said—”

“Oh, really!”

Long bare legs sliding over the edge of the bed to snatch her nightrobe from a chair. “God in heaven, even when I’m—don’t you ever leave it, Arthur?”

“Do you?”

The robe drops back on the chair.“No.”

And she’d slip back into bed, nestling with one smooth leg between mine. “We do need so much money.”

“Well, go to sleep.”

“Mmm … cover me.”

“Rest you gentle, Gwen.”

“Sleep you sound.”

That fall the last ineffectual Roman emperor abdicated in favor of a capable barbarian named Odoacer, who sent me greetings and styled himself King of Italy. Funny to think that Rome ended when we began. We were her children; she gave Gwen and me the language we thought in, but I was always more of a Roman at heart than Guenevere. And this must be remembered when you judge her.

Guenevere grew up in the north and enemy to her meant Pict. It was a thing deep in her vitals that the tribes north of the Wall were vicious dirt. As for Faerie, they were less than human. She heard at her nurse’s knee how iittle folk were the reincarnated souls of the pagan dead, and where her educated mind later scorned, her Parisi soul still put the iron over the doorsill. And she could hate—not entirely without reason. It was a Venicone who tried to rape and murder her. The prejudice lived deep and “implacable in my queen.

There were other things later, things that work on a woman. Although she was an astute ruler, some girl-part of Guenevere was yanked too soon into womanhood. She had never suffered injury or loss that could not be righted by a word to a hundred obedient hands. When our own child miscarried, she was help-To Wear the Crown

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less. No one could put it right. Is it any wonder she hated Morgana’s son, who had the insolence to be beautiful as well as bold?

Guenevere was asleep, but I worked by fat lamp with a good blaze in the firepit against the wet autumn night. Bedivere knocked and entered, followed by a bedraggled little monk who dripped and shivered as he knelt to me.

“God’s b-blessing and long life to the Emperor of Britain.”

Brother Lewin he was, and he bore a letter for me.

“And that’s all he bears.” Bedivere had made sure. “We searched him like a beggar looking for lice.”

“Sit by the fire, monk. What letter?”

Brother Lewin had a nervous stammer and the haggard look of a fat man gone thin too fast. His habit hung on him in sodden folds, but his eyes were honest and unshifting.

“Forgive me, Lord. I could not write her name, only what it sounded like. So m-many of her words were not words at all. I did my b-best.”

“Bedwyr, some utsge for Brother Lewin.”

The worn scrap of parchment was thin and brown with use. I read the letter through, read it again, feeling hot and cold.

“That’s all, Bedivere. Get you to bed.”

He glanced doubtfully at the monk. “And him?”

“He’s done me a kindness. He’ll sleep by my fire tonight.”

The uisge warmed Lewin, half fire itself. He’d come a long journey from the far pastures of the Attecotti with nothing more than water to drink. And water was his downfall, that and the inhumanly dirty food of the otherwise blameless Attecotti to whom he preached the Word. If their dark gods were not invincible, their filth was. The water fevered his blood and a dish of boiled sheep’s stomach opened up his bowels for a month.

My mouth watered. “It’s a delicacy. They were offering their best, but it does tend to spoil.”

Brother Lewin shuddered. “Yes.”

The sickness was no laughing matter. The Attecotti nursed him, but his condition worsened until he couldn’t eat or even sit up. Fearing for his life, the villagers decided that only Faerie magic could save him.

“By that time, Lord, I was so far gone with fever I knew not real from dream, and those dreams were of women. My old

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weakness. Satan much tempted me before I donned habit. So I thought the woman was a succubus sent to test me.”

Lewin’s expression was more man than monk just then. “The dark jewel of her, tiny but near perfect and nigh all of it showing as proof. And when she uncovered the rest and got in bed with me, I thought my soul was lost. But it was not for mat. The warmth of her broke my fever, that and the magic drink she gave me.”

She cured him where none else could, coming each day to tend him while the wary village women hovered outside with iron and rowan against any evii she might take it in mind to work. And the dark woman demanded no payment of the Attecotti for curing their priest.

“Only of me,” Lewin said. “When I could sit up, she put her knife to my throat, my cowering self catching one word of her every four, and said the fever she banished she could bring again or cut my p-poor throat on the instant did I not pay her in service.”

Brother Lewin gulped at the uisge. “Och, she was determined, my lord. Never have 1 seen a face so hard and set. But desperate as well. I think she would have begged if that had served.”

“And she asked you to write this?”

Lewin shifted uncertainly. “Forgive all, m-my gracious lord. I do not know if this is impertinence, coming to you with this thing, if indeed this woman is what she says,”

“She was.”

“And forgive my Latin, but her language—God love me!—she has n-no notion of pronoun. You and she and he and us and ours, it’s all the same, just said a little differently. It took me so long just to understand the gist. With your permission.”

Lewin approached and pointed to the bottom of the page. “This word near the end, it’s not a word at all. I could only scratch out what it sounds like and the sound is like nothing in this world.”

Mangled as it was, I recognized the Prydn word. It translates inadequately in British. It-could be a whisper, a cry of joy or despair, carrying all the taste of the emotion, meaning you or my knowing of you. Wanting or fulfillment. So complete and all-embracing that Adam must have said it just so.

“It just means love, Brother Lewin.”

Lewin’s letter as written made little sense, but I translated Morgana’s heart with my own.

‘;• To Wear the Crown 191

Belrix third husband, lord of Briton-fhmn,

You said you would come home but did not.

Venicone rode north with tale-speaking that Artostall-folk is now first husband to Briton but I knew that was Belrix.

And I heard of adaltrach [second wife] called Gwynhwyfar. I will not beat her when I see her, though I have first wife right, she being pale and ugly as they say and much older than me.

Belrix has given fhain son-wealth. He wracked me being born, but I bit on the cloth and Dorelei held me and I thought on the hills at Bel-tein and my lord of summer.

Wealth is called Modred for Cradda’s sire, but Earth-name is Belrix.

Your wealth will come to you and you will know him lord of fire. He is born of Mother and Lugh and greatest beauty of all Prydn.

I am filled and not filled with [love] you.

Morgana second daughter

Oh yes, Brother Lewin saw her child. It seemed impossibly small like all Faerie children, but the woman told him it was born at Brigid-feast six months past.

“And indeed beautiful, my lord. Nut-brown skin, black hair, eyes slanted like his mother’s. Oh, and angry, bless him! As if she’d forgot to feed him and he wasn’t going to stand for it.”

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Wheel of Shadow, Wheel of Sun

Ambrosius never built a seat of power, but Guenevere and I knew we must gather the reins in one place and keep them there, the hinge pin of Britain. In the midlands campaign I freed a number of slaves, some of them Iceni masons and carpenters from the eastern city of Camulodunum. Their homeland overrun, they attached to Maelgwyn. Learning of my desire for a royal seat, he sent them to me.

Severn river and valley is the heart of free west Britain, the home of Dobunni and Silure. On the west bank of the river, the Iceni built us an imperial villa not unlike Uther’s, but much larger and better-defended with log and earthwork ramparts vitrified by fire. It was Roman in all but the subtleties: we needed firepits and outside latrines, since the builders knew nothing of Roman heating and sewage anymore.

A community more than a dwelling, there were houses within the walls for my combrogi and the entourages of tributary princes constantly coming and going. We named it Nova Camulodunum to honor the Iceni, but my people never called it anything but Camelot.

Within its precincts, there was no tribe or tribal interest, only the peace of Britain. Couriers came from Rome and even Byzantium; merchants brought us the riches of the east. Arabian stallions clattered down our quays, side by side with fine steel ingots from Damascus and Prankish armorers to wrap my combrogi with new ring-mail. And outward with our wool and tin and lead went our greater wealth, the singers of songs, the missionaries of Christ with their peculiar British taint, preaching social reform along with the Word—bright, diligent worms boring through the