13

Rumors rippled to the shore. There moved
Behind them in the far-back massive waves
Approaching. Black grew the ocean of events
And wild the spray.
          Then on a sudden day
The riders came to Camelot, racing
And stained with blood, shouting for entry.
And the gates of the citadel thudded as they opened
Letting in the tidings of the times,
The once-for-ail that would allow no doubt.

Now were the last days come. Mordred the smiler
Had won the Saxon lords and crowned himself
A feral, fever-throated king in London,
Making of the place a sump of crime,
Bubbling, stewing ponds and swamps plutonic.
Unceasing fulminated he to make
Of parricide a policy.

Gone was the peace. There had been no peace.
There was only treason. And so there came
The twentieth and the last year of Arthur's reign.

Many were they who, fearing, fell away
And gave their swords to Mordred, gifts of steel,
The spendthrift currency of war; and few
Remained in Camelot, for men knew now
That Arthur's pledge to Rome had dimmed, dissolved,
And run away like water through his fingers
Leaving him British only -- not even king.

The august city, London, that not long since
Had quartered legions and minted Roman coins
And looked to Arthur, now at Thames side
Readied its merchants' barks for upstream war,
Bristling with Saxon pikes and English daggers,
And rowed by British slaves. On that calm river
Only the swans were loyal to Arthur, for they fled
Westering to the shallows and the meadowsides,
The upstream country that was British still.
And they drooped their heads in long, white sorrow.

And these were the staunch captains, few left.
There was Gawain -- always -- old by now,
His hand trembled and his speech slowed,
But courtesy he gave to all and spoke no ill.
Kay and Bedivere, the lightning two,
Owed little, so they thought, to Roman arts;
Yet they stayed, the two, with Arthur and with Rome,
Cursing the wiles of Mordred and his men.
Lucan the butler, and the choice companion
Of wassailers, felt growing tenderness
For Arthur struggling with events in spate,
And he left some gifts at Stephen's shrine for him.
Bors was true though at first he wavered
Lured by Mordred's gold, until Gawain
Made open jokes of gold and silly men;
Bors then left off his love affair with shame.
Logrance too, remotely come and sullen,
The largest of Arthur's men, a giant, gaunt
And full of noise and rumblings. All knew
That he would fight come battle. Around the fire
He played a tiny flute with bird-like notes
And as he sang of home he wept large tears.
He fought on Arthur's left, and he would die
Giving no inch of ground, last one but Kay
And Lucan to drop before the Saxons
While shielding the wounded Arthur.

And Gryfflet who was born upon the coast;
He loved a flowing tide and fought best
Within gull-flight of the sea. He of old
Had been with Arthur carrying him in boats.
He lacked three fingers; he said he sold them.
And captain Gareth; he stuttered, an islander
From northern parts -- a friend of wolves men said --
And most hideous with red claw hands;
He too would fight. Pellinore would fall
Cut down by Mordred to whom he gave a message --
A lonely message before the die was cast --
Arthur's last message to his son.
On the last day Pellinore, perhaps the bravest,
Rose at table in Camelot to offer
A herald's service to go among the Saxons.
He died.
          Others fell away, ill chaff,
Light and crackling, waiting for the torch.
Among them were three captains, useful men,
And they survived beyond their span of years
To all men's wonder.
           Ban the brave led all
In treachery, swearing an oath upon his sword
To Arthur five days before he fled and left behind
Twin children and a wife with harvest hair.
Arthur's captains killed them and they were glut
For dogs and crows and stealthy things of night.

The second, Blamor, who had boasted much
But little did for Arthur, held out cupped hands
While fifty silver pieces from Leo's mints
Were poured out and hilled up as in a fetid cup;
But he was diligent in saving them
Buying a vinyard from a Visigoth
In Frankland, he lived for many years
Among his children, also many, and he suffered,
Lurching from chair to chair his waning years
Leaping with fear at every sound.
          The third,
Gartad, fought well, killing three men
Of Arthur's in the last affray, and he
Was given custody of Camelot,
By then a ruin. And as the years flew by
The empty halls and chapel, the timbered walls
Melted with the rains into the earth.
He moved about in them, a ghost and friendless,
Whistling old tunes that once had made those walls
Ring out in genial echo. He died at sixty
Hunting for his sword to give it back
To Arthur who had given it to him.

And the east rose up like a hot wind of fire
Rushing at Arthur, Mordred in the van
Hewing with his bitter blade and cursing,
Carrying with him, beside the Saxon peril,
The renegades and slipstring British sons
Who only yesterday had placed their hands
Upon the board in Camelot and drunk
Good Roman wine with Arthur. Gone were they
Over the garden hills and the chalk lands,
Denouncing friends of happy days before,
Themselves the bearers of the curse of Cain --
Never to be sure of anything thenceforth,
Nor to rest in homely ease of heart.
Arthur never mentioned them by name
And when others with curses did, he turned his back
And spoke not.

14

The last days came and went, a marching line
Of solemn vergers each with neutral face,
Each cloaked like all his fellows, sun up, sun down.
Those days belonged to Arthur. He served them well
Facing the Saxon columns in the east
And in the gloaming north the Picts, each day
A battle and a roster of the dead
With still fewer left to waste the morrow.

Came the thunderclap when Arthur's queen,
The childless, stately Guinevere renounced
Her crown, and with her tire and jewels and maidens
On six sumpter mules left Camelot
For a holy life of abstinence and peace.
Immured in a coolness that was not melancholy,
Seeming unmoved, she passed among the Saxons,
Nodding only to Mordred, and disappeared,
The last heirloom of the house of Arthur,
The icy vestal and the unconnected
Through whom accrued to Arthur Britain's title.

Now in her going she tore the spiderweb,
The delicate and scarce-existent grapplings
That gave support to Arthur, and men's homage.

As if an ocean on a sudden dwindled
To a drop, like the last one on a rose,
Just as the lax breeze at sunrise shakes
A lovely shower of dewdrops down -- save one --
So on a sudden Arthur stood alone,
The last of his battles fought and noon at hand.

And on that day when, routed from the field
And as long feared, defeated and thrust back
On Camelot -- and not too many days
Left of the few to single out a purpose --
Arthur turned to Gawain:
           "Now, my uncle,
Do we flee or fight? Little it seems is left.
So if we fight, we fight in desperation,
And if we flee, we flee into the hills
Beyond the site of Caerleon wherein
For all time we will disappear, savages
Lost to any of the arts of life
Save hiding in dark lairs and springing out
Believing in the pretense that we live
As Romans."
           And Gawain said,
"You have answered it yourself."

And Arthur, "No, let us neither. Let us go to Glaston
And there, within its waters, perhaps recover."

And Gawain, "Does all the world not know
That Glaston's Tor is Morgen's home and bower?
And is the lovely Morgen not your sister?
And is she not your wife too, beloved dearly?"

And Arthur, "Uncle, what of that past remains
I do not know. She did I truly love --
And still do. But so do I love you
And the few who follow me. Our time there
Could make us strong again."

And Gawain said, "Your sister's child -- and yours --
Young as he is, rides in war behind us,
Grinding his teeth at the thought of slaying you.
What will Mordred's mother say?"

"Of that I do not know, for I am weary
Thinking a while -- and then another while
Until I can no longer think -- nor feel.
I lose myself, betray myself in thinking."

And Gawain,
"Will you not even go to Caerleon?
The Tor is death."
           And Arthur cried aloud,
His words sounding like a strong cloth ripped
Suddenly asunder behind one's back,
A renunciate cry, a blinding urgency.

"Not so! Not so! Somewhere there is a healing.
Somewhere knotted hands and fingers loosen,
Somewhere torrid dreams give way to waking
And the hot impurities of night give way
To a gentle rising and a standing up,
Freed from the need to wonder, safe at last
In certainty. A medicine to the soul,
A vessel cooling to the aching heart,
A salver heaped up with the cakes of health
Is hid in Glaston, I have heard it said --
No! It is no light report. I know it.
           Rome has gone.
This I acknowledge and name my dream a folly,
And myself a fool for dreaming. I thought that I
Could persuade time into a footling track
Where I, a Roman and an emperor,
Could charm the obdurate flints of rutted roads
And ruined highways into smooth tiles,
And crowding weeds to ordered banks of flowers --
Where all was easy. The Saxon and my son
Have changed all that.
           And now is the last melee
Gone, its din faded. Surely there is
Somewhere left a cup of healing. Today
We leave the Camelot I built, for Glaston,
A refuge, a fortress, a chapel, and a home --
My last."
           "There are battles still to fight,"
Gawain replied, "And home is not that near."

15

The empty bridal had come and gone for Morgen
Twenty years before when an autumn closed
And left sky-painted oaks like signatures
With flourishes where hung the mistletoe
That drops its berries painfully,
Token malign of love in wintertime.
So dropped she Arthur's child, a somber birth.
Lovely was the mother, forlorn the child,
A dark lad who would race along the Cam
Or push off, punting in the reeds to seek
The nest of waterfowl, the holes of stoats --
A stealthy hunter this Mordred, unappeased
By the death of game, relentless in the chase.

Until he came of age, again in winter --
As all things in his brevity were chilled
And all he touched soon died, as if the frost
Flowed to fingertips from icy heart.
Thus bearing with him knowledge of his birth
And where it pointed him, he left his ways
For Camelot.
          The years had passed for Morgen
As in a dream. Little notice came
Of him she loved, the faintest echoes only --
Tales of the great Arthur, the man who cast no shadow,
The swift and furious, the clement and the just,
King of Britons and emperor of Rome.
Each tale she treasured, and longed for sight of him.

Once in the early dawn of some one day
Forgotten now, Merlin had come to her,
Taught her of wounds, and herbs, and fevers, all
For one occasion only -- but that not yet.

"Morgen, my daughter, stay here upon his hill
And here in Glaston. Do not leave it ever.
Here was the goddess' home, here her shrine
And here, wrapped in old oracles,
The life and tale of Britain centered; here,
Half lost among the secrets of the past
But still here underground, the cup of Gwyn
And the long draught from it to make one whole.
Stay here and learn the secrets.
          What your love,
Sorrowful and tainted, compared to this!
Here all things are true, and here the golden age.
Here is your home."

Not ever did Morgen leave but kept the Tor,
A priestess errant in a sacred park,
Moving by day between the shrine of Mary,
Kept by the monks who sang the offices,
And the house, ali ivy-grown and ruined, of her
of Britain, Matrona.
          Great had been Matrona
And great was Mary; Morgen prayed to neither,
Nor honored them as far as any knew.
She thought of Arthur and sorrowed for their son,
A youth of lies and eerie in his strength.
She thought herself accursed and scorned by all.

Morgen, the fated one, the beautiful,
Shone on that island like a summer moon
And herself made lovely what was favorless.
As years declined and one by one fell off
Like golden oak leaves spinning to the ground
All in the autumn, many knew of her,
The Lady of the Lake, as skilled as good,
Incomparable with salves, a lady tender,
A lady unassuming, unknown to greed
While serving all -- such were the rumors
Along the coasts and inland on the downs:
The Saxon even trusted her and left
His own gods to go to her in need. The monks,
Custodians of Mary on the Tor,
Dazzled too, recounted as in sadness
How the lady never came to Mary,
Nor prayed to Michael, but still to all seemed sainted.

Illtud once on pilgrimage came by
And greeted her, wondering and loving both.
He had known the army of the gods,
Nodens, and Lud, Mabon the Youth, and Gwyn,
Lord in the underworld, Bell and Llyr,
And Bran -- these the comfortless companions,
The portentous ones who in his youth had rattled
Like skeletons in every nightmare dream.
Now he wore the Cross, was Christ's man,
And Mary's servant. And thus he spoke to Morgen:

"Daughter, whom men call Lady of the Lake,
And whose fame is everywhere, widely flung
Your mercies are; they should belong to Mary.
Be with her and kneel before her Son.
Long are one's years in hell."

And Morgen said, "Good Illtud and my cousin,
I have a brother Arthur -- whom you know --
The whole world knows my love for him,
A sorry thing I did not understand
And do not now. My love I cannot leave.
I am alone here and Arthur I do not see.
Our son has ridden off and he is fat
With evils; his father's death is said to be
His prize. And what a love, unspeakable
In this its blossoming, must I now feed
With relict hopes, and tears, and vacant thoughts!
How can you think, good Illtud, that wretched I,
Lost to two loves, neither wife nor mother,
How can you think a choice of mine would change
In the smallest what will surely come to me?
And so I merely wait."