“No, sire.”
“The man shall come to me with no jugglery in dark corners.”
“Wise forethought, my lord king.”
“I remember me, Dubricius, that you have little leisure to hear of dreams. I have given you the names of the holy houses to be rebuilt and consecrated in the name of God. We will save Britain by the help of the cross. God speed you.”
Alone in the half light of the hall Uther stood and stared into the fire, his eyes luminous in the glow, while the pungent scent of the burning wood swept up like a savour of eastern spices. There was intense feeling on his face, a kind of passionate calm, as he gazed into the red bosom of the fire. Presently, as though turning in thought from some enchantment of the past, he sighed wearily, put his black hair from his forehead with both hands, and looked at his image in a mirror of steel that hung from a painted pillar. There was a wistful look upon his strong face; he had a soul that remembered, a soul not numbed by time into mere painless recollection of the past. As in some mysterious temple, love, with solemn sound of flute and dulcimer, kept fire unquenched night and day upon the altar of his heart.
Rising up out of his mood of gloom, an earthly Hyperion whose face shone anew over Britain, he passed out, and calling to the guards lounging on the terrace, descended the stairway that sloped through gardens to the river. His state barge was in waiting at the gate, and entering in he was borne downstream towards the town whose white walls rose up amid the emerald mist of spring. Over all Uther cast his eye with a lustre look of love, a love that shone like the smile of a child at a mother’s face. Caerleon was dear to him beyond all other cities; its white walls held his heart with the whispered conjure word of “home.”
Landing at the great quay, where many ships and galleys lay moored, he passed up towards the market square with the files of his guard, smiling back on the reverences of the people, throwing here and there a coin, happy in the honour that echoed to him from every face. Before the walls of a pilastered house his guards halted with a fanfare of trumpets, a sound that rolled the gates wide and brought a mob of servants to line the outer court. Knights came down from the house with heads uncovered. It was the King’s first entry into Gorlois’s atrium since the disbanding of the host after the war in Wales.
A face scarred with red across cheek and chin, with nose askew, one lower lid turned down, came out to Uther from the doorway of an inner room. There was a drawn look upon the man’s face, a sullen saturnine air about him as though he were vexed inwardly with the chafe of some perpetual pain. The pinched frown, the restless bloodshot eyes, the hunched shoulders, were all strange to Uther, who looked for Gorlois, the man of arrogant and imperial pride, whose splendour of person, carriage of head, and long lithe stride had marked him a stag royal from the herd of meaner men.
Uther, grave as a god, gripped the other’s thin sinewy fingers, his eyes searching Gorlois’s face with a large-minded scrutiny inspired by the natural sympathies of his heart. Gorlois, for his part, half crooked the knee, and drew a carved chair before the ill-tended fire. He had an Asmodean pride, and the look in Uther’s eyes was more troublesome to him than a glare of hate. His face never lightened from the murk of reserve that covered it like a mask, and it was the King who spoke the first word over the flickering fire.