"Mary Stewart - The Arthurian Saga 03 - The Last Enchantment" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Mary)

 The Last Enchantment




Merlin 03




Mary Stewart




(1979)



To one who was dead
and is alive again,
who was lost,
and is found.



BOOK I

Dunpeldyr

1



Not every king would care to start his reign with the wholesale massacre of children. This is what they
whisper of Arthur, even though in other ways he is held up as the type itself of the noble ruler, the
protector alike of high and lowly.

It is harder to kill a whisper than even a shouted calumny. Besides, in the minds of simple men, to whom
the High King is the ruler of their lives, and the dispenser of all fates, Arthur would be held accountable
for all that happened in his realm, evil and good alike, from a resounding victory in the battlefield to a bad
rain-storm or a barren flock.

So, although a witch plotted the massacre, and another king gave the order for it, and though I myself
tried to shoulder the blame, the murmur still persists: that in the first year of his reign Arthur the High King
had his troops seek out and destroy some score of newly born babies in hope of catching in that bloody
net one single boy-child, his bastard by incest with his half-sister Morgause.
 Calumny, I have called it, and it would be good to be able to declare openly that the story is a lie. But it
is not quite that. It is a lie that he ordered the slaughter; but his sin was the first cause of it, and though it
would never have occurred to him to murder innocent children, it is true that he wanted his own child