The old Roman villa at Camlan was drab; it was cold and decaying. The echoes of its former splendor only exaggerated its cheerlessness. The tiled floor still held between its cracks the dust and pollen that had settled there during the dry summer; mildewed grain littered the corners of the central atrium, whichdertrium, had been used as an emergency storeroom during the haphazard harvest that was gathered in the threatening shadow of a sudden storm. Part of the hypocaust had collapsed, and someone had tried to block off the drafty hole in the atrium floor with disused masonry and rubble left over from the villa’s original restoration. The old leaded glass windows, so perfect and unusual, had not been cleaned for many months. Even the braziers gave little heat. The Great Hall was warmer, with its roaring fire and close company, but after months of solitary silence and open space I found it crowded and airless almost beyond my endurance. I felt at home in the villa, ruined as it was; I knew those corridors, where each lamp bracket fits, the artist’s little flaws in the tiled border of the atrium mosaic, the staring glass eyes of the Christian portraits there.
No real welcome awaited me. Of course, they did not expect me, and those of the household who were still awake were preoccupied with some present crisis. It did not seem the right moment to inquire if I could still use my old room. When my father’s queen hurriedly received me I told her I would stay in the Great Hall where most of the household slept. Ginevra agreed, apologetically; they had been using my room for storage, and it would have to be cleared out before I could use it. "You’ll be more comfortable in the Hall," she added. "It’s warmer there. Artos is the only one who knows how the hypocaust works; we can’t mend it till he returns. And"—she paused; and I could see her setting her jaw so that she would not falter—"and I think Lleu is dying. He has been ill all winter, and today he is scarcely able to breathe. Otherwise we should have given you more of a welcome, Medraut."
Lleu, the Bright One: the high king’s youngest child, his heir, and my half brother. I had forgotten how sickly he was. His sister Goewin had always been healthy, and fiercely protective of her small twin brother. They were eight when I left. Lleu’s letters had stopped more than three years ago, before I came to the Orcades. He would be almost fifteen now, almost adult. Still so frail, racked by asthma, torn through and through by even the slightest chill wind or damp day? And Artos counted on him to be the next high king.
"Is Aquila still your physician?" I asked.
"Yes. But he’s hardly slept for three days," Ginevra told me, still unfaltering.
I said cautiously, "I might help him."
"We have all been helping," she answered.
"I meant as a physician," I said.
"Truly?" She was surprised, perhaps pleased. "Well, you had to learn something in six years away from us! You do seem wiser than you did. You look the same, but there is more to your silence than there used to be."
Ginevra has the smooth, open face of a child, and she is too short and stocky to be beautiful. But she is skilled as a mapmaker, speaks three different British dialects, and knows most of the villagers by name; she manages the household with undisputed authority. Her quick appraisal made me suddenly and unexpectedly shy, though it was for a moment only. She could not have noticed. I do not color, or blanch, when I am ill at ease. I glanced down briefly at the cracked, tiled floor beneath our feet, and asked if I might see Lleu.
The corridors were dark, for Ginevra could not afford to keep lamps burning in the halls. Since Lleu had been ill he was sleeping in the antechamber to his mother’s rooms, the only rooms in the house that were being steadily heated. He seemed to be asleep,m" o be as or senseless, when we came in, struggling for breath with eyes clenched tightly shut; but when I sat on the cot next to him and spoke his name he tried to answer, though he could do no more than gasp and choke, lying wretchedly trapped in his ridiculous frail body. Even so I was momentarily astonished by his beauty. It struck at me as it had when I first saw him, when he was an infant. I think it is the single characteristic in him that I have always envied, will always envy. He is graceful and slightly built, like an acrobat or a cat, with black hair and brilliant dark eyes; but the eyes were closed now, the fair skin dry and fiercely hot to touch, and he did not know me.
He did not even know his mother. She tried to comfort him while I felt his forehead, gauging his fever; but when my hands moved to his throat, testing the swollen glands there, he fought me, wildly trying to tear my hands away. "You want to strangle me," he managed to whisper, coughing and struggling. I stared at Ginevra, perplexed.
"Go gently, Medraut," she cautioned wearily. "He is afraid of everything."
I bent down and said firmly, close to his ear, "Little idiot. I’m trying to help you." I brushed his own hands aside, trivial, and lifted him till he sat upright coughing and sobbing against my shoulder. With one hand I rubbed his back firmly and with the other stroked his damp hair; and gradually the coughing subsided, and he could breathe a little. He slumped against my side, whimpering and exhausted. "Keep him sitting," I murmured to Ginevra. "I can make him a drink to ease his cough. Where can I find water?"
"In the next room," she told me. "You may use anything—there’re herbs and honey, as well."
I found all I needed; the room was a dressing chamber converted into a little clinic, and Aquila seemed to be keeping almost all his medicines and equipment there. The suddenness of what was happening worked on me like a drug. I could move and think with precision, knowing with accuracy what I could do for Lleu. I forgot the winter journey, the misery of the last months with you, my own uncertain welcome in my father’s house. I had the sure certainty of my knowledge, and the healing in my hands. I went back to Lleu with the drink I had mixed, and held him while Ginevra coaxed him to swallow. Still he fought, this time refusing to drink when he noticed the sharp and bitter taste beneath the honey, strangely alert for all his delirium.
"Don’t send me to sleep," he begged desperately, quiet and fervent. "I want to breathe, not to sleep."
"This will ease your cough, little one," I answered. "It won’t make you sleep."
"Who are you?" Lleu asked abruptly. "Stay here." He choked again, and clung to me.
"I’ll call for someone to watch him," Ginevra said.
"I’ll stay. I don’t mind."
So she left us. I eased Lleu back down onto the pillows and sat on the floor next to the cot to wait for morning.
Sometimes Lleu slept; sometimes I helped him to drink, or held him upright until he stopped coughing, or drew the covers up again when he threw them off. A servant brought me a blanket, and late in the night, when Lleu’s breathing grew less ragged, I could doze a little. But most of the night I sat and watched, until the gray dawn light came stealing from behind the cloth-covered windows, and I could hear that others in the household were rising. Then I could not bear to seneot beartay awake any longer and fell asleep just as I sat: on the floor next the bed, leaning on the mattress with my face buried in one arm and the other flung across Lleu’s waist so that I should know if he stirred.
Not long afterward someone woke me and helped me to rise, and I found myself being led through the corridors in the direction of my own chamber. I felt dazed and stupid; it was a long time since I had let myself grow so exhausted. The girl who accompanied me explained that my room had been set in order for me while I had been with Lleu, and that I must feel free to come and go as I pleased within the villa. She was dark-haired, tall and long-limbed, with a somewhat hard face whose severity was tempered by humor. She seemed familiar, and at my door I asked her name. She stared at me, then laughed. I knew her then, and smiled with her, too tired to laugh. She looks more like Artos than either Lleu or I. "Princess Goewin. You must think me very foolish."
"No, no," she said. "You’re half-asleep, and I have changed since I was eight. I recognized your pale hair." She opened the door to show me in and said conversationally, "You saved Lleu’s life, didn’t you? I insisted they open your window, so it’s my fault if it’s too cold in here. I remember you almost always had the window open, and it needed airing badly." There were wooden shutters instead of glass in my window, and I used to keep them open for light, not minding the cold. It touched me that Goewin had remembered. I went to the window and leaned out: the Pennines glistened clean and bare in the distance, and closer by were black trees and stone walls limned with white. "You’re not wanting to go out in it again?" Goewin asked at my shoulder, narrowing her eyes against the bright light.
This time I did laugh. "No. I’m going to sleep. If Lleu gets worse, call me."
I ministered to Lleu for most of the winter. I was not so experienced as Aquila, but my knowledge of herbs and medicines reached far beyond his: for which, in all honesty, I must thank you, Godmother. Aquila, who worked with the calm authority of long years of practice, accepted me as a colleague and an assistant. No one spoke openly of my skill. Some were frightened by it; was it not madness to put the life of their young prince into the hands of the high king’s illegitimate son, who might know a thousand ways to poison him? But all that winter my own life centered around Lleu.
He was barely strong enough to get out of bed, and could eat only soup and thin wine. All life else for him was only the constant struggle to breathe, or to sleep fitfully, or to stare at the coals in the brazier and listen to people passing in the tiled corridor. We made him eat and saw that he was as warm as possible, and kept him bent over steaming bowls scented with mint and mustard to try to ease his breathing. He fought and fought against his illness, as though it were a physical creature that he held at bay. For long hours I fought with him. His unconscious fear of being hurt by anyone who touched him fascinated me; as far as Lleu was concerned it was a fear without foundation, but there is no emotion I could have understood more completely. When I was so badly hurt the summer before, I used to lie in dread of falling asleep; and more than that I dreaded your visits, your touch, your long fingers testing broken bones or securing bandages. But I had reason to dread you, and Lleu had no reason to dread anyone.
I knew so well how that game of fear might be played that I had to watch myself and guard against frightening him on purpose. Why is it such a great temptation to torment someone who is helpless? Lleu hated above all to be drugged into sleep, and I never allowed him to kterwed himnow whether the drugs I gave him would induce sleep or not. His terror at losing consciousness was so real that often he fought determinedly against nothing, against his own mind, to stay awake. I played upon his fear; though I did nothing to hurt him, nothing that could be noticed. At night when I woke sobbing or crying out against you I would vow to myself not to frighten him again. But Lleu had a sudden, imperious way of issuing questions that sounded like orders; he would demand, "Have you ever seen your real mother?" or "Tell me how you crippled your hand," and I could not bear to let such careless cruelty go unpunished. Then I would casually remark upon an increase in his fever, or speak of dreadful cures for conditions he did not have, and watch the color drain from his thin, bewitching face.
