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.The thing came to the bank, and I caught a leg and held it.Bedwyr scrambled ashore, and turned to help the Queen.She came gracefully enough, with a little gasp of thanks, and stood shaking out her stained and crumpled cloak.Like her riding dress, it had been soaked and roughly dried.I saw that it was torn.Something pale shook from the folds and fell to the muddy turf.I stooped to pick it up.It was a chessman of white ivory.The king, broken.She had not noticed.Bedwyr pushed the table back into the water, and took his horse's bridle from me.I handed him his cloak and said formally to the Queen, so formally that my voice sounded stiff and cold:"I am glad to see you well and safe, lady.We have had a bad day, fearing for you.""I am sorry." Her voice was low, her face hidden from me under the hood."I took a heavy toss when my mare fell in the forest.I — I don't remember much after that, until I woke here, in this house.""And King Melwas with you?""Yes.Yes.He found me lying, and carried me here.I was fainting, I suppose.I don't remember.His servant tended me.""He would have done better, perhaps, to have stayed by you till your own people came.They were searching the forest for you."A movement of the hand that held the hood close about her face.I thought it was trembling."Yes, I suppose so.But this place was near, just across the water, and he was afraid for me, he said, and indeed, the boat seemed best.I could not have ridden."Bedwyr was in the saddle.I took the Queen's arm, to help her up in front of him.With surprise —nothing in that small composed voice had led me to suspect it — I felt her whole body shaking.I abandoned the questioning, and said merely: "We'll take this ride easily, then.The King is back, did you know?"I felt the shudder run through her, like an ague.She said nothing.Her body was light and slender, like a girl's, as I put her up in front of Bedwyr's saddle.We went gently on the way back.As we neared theIsland , it could be seen that the wharf was ablaze with lights, and milling with horsemen.We were still some distance off when we saw, lit by their moving torches, a group of horsemen detach themselves from the crowd, and come at the gallop along the causeway.A man on a black horse was in the lead, pointing the way.Then they saw us.There were shouts.Soon they came up with us.In the lead now was Arthur, his white stallion black with mud to the withers.Beside him on the black horse, loud with relief and concern for the Queen, rode Melwas, King of the Summer Country.I rode home alone.There was nothing to be gained, and too much to be lost, by confronting Arthur and Melwas now.So far, by Melwas' quick thinking in leaving the marsh house by the back way, and being present to greet Arthur as his ships put in to the wharf, the affair was saved from scandal, and Arthur would not be forced, whatever his private feelings when he found or guessed at the truth, into a hasty public quarrel with an ally.It was best left for the present.Melwas would take them all into his firelit palace and give them food and wine, and perhaps lodge them for the night, and by morning Guinevere would have told her story — some story — to her husband.I could not begin to guess what the story would be.There were elements in it which she would be hard put to it to explain away; the room so carefully ready for her; the loose robe she had worn; the tumbled bed; her lies to Bedwyr and myself about Melwas.And more than all, the broken chessman and its evidence of a true dream.But all this would have to wait until, at the very least, we were off Melwas' land, and no longer surrounded by his men-at-arms.As for Bedwyr, he had said nothing, and in the future, whatever his thoughts, his love for Arthur would keep his mouth shut.And I? Arthur was High King, and I was his chief adviser.I owed him a truth.But I would not stay tonight, to face his questions, and perhaps evade them, or parry them with lies.Later, I thought wearily, as my tired horse plodded along the shore of theLake , I would see more clearly what to do.I went home the long way round, without troubling the ferryman.Even if he were willing to ply so late, I did not feel equal to his gossip, or that of the troops who might be making their way back.I wanted silence, and the night, and the soft veils of the mist.The horse, scenting home and supper, pricked his ears and stepped out.Soon we had left the sounds and lights of theIsland behind us, the Tor itself no more than a black shape of night, with stars behind its shoulder.Trees loomed, hung with mist, and below them lake water lapped on the flattened shingle.The smell of water and reeds and stirred mud, the steady plod of hoofs, the ripple of the Lake, and through it all, faint and infinitely distant, but tingling like salt on the tongue, the breath of the sea-tide, turning to its ebb here at its languid limit [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]