The Winter Prince (The Lion Hunters:01)(11)

On hearing this the Bright One immediately informed me, “But that’s incest,” antha`d I could not help answering coldly, “So it is.”

When you took him, Artos had not yet been told who his parents were and could not have guessed that you were his sister. I impressed upon Lleu and Goewin their father’s blamelessness, and avoided any judgment of you and your part. Nor did I tell them what Artos suspected afterward, and what you told me yourself, that you had wittingly made love to him so you might use any child you bore to him as a weapon against him. That knowledge in itself is terrible enough for me to live with, but the incest… I wish Lleu had been able to say something else when I first told him. That single sordid night of my father’s life dwindles to insignificance in the black light of my own shame.

So, they knew now, and that secret was shared. Finally I could shut away the thought of you, just as I hid the dragon bracelets from Cathay that I could neither bring myself to wear nor to give away. And I no longer dreamed of you.

It was a gentle summer, and when I was not at work I was often with Lleu and Goewin. Inwardly I longed for their companionship, and the two sometimes allowed me within their circle. Not completely, and not always. But enough. We visited the smithy; we flew my Oriental kites of red and gold paper from the top of the Edge. We rode together, and spent long hours exploring the surrounding country. And twice I took Lleu and Goewin into the copper mines. The first time was by day, with Artos. We stood in the entrance of the cavern that leads to the main workings, and Cadarn the chief foreman explained to the twins how the copper ore is removed and how the shaft entrances are reinforced with stone lintels. But I am not sure they saw anything beyond an impression of the intriguing black, hollow place before them, shot through with darts of flame and glinting water, and echoing with the voices of men and the sound of metal against rock. The second time I took them was by night.

During the long spring mornings Artos was rebuilding the floor and heating system of the villa; he was painstakingly prying up sections of tile and replacing the crumbling hollow clay bricks that lay beneath the atrium. The exposed catacomb of the hypocaust had the look of a miniature crypt, ancient and airless, so old and grim that while the floor was uncovered Lleu would not walk through the atrium by himself after dark. One night I challenged him: “Would you see real darkness?”

Goewin, fearless, said, “Show us.” So that night I took them back to the mines. We made our way quietly through the young fields to the forest and the Edge; Lleu’s broken arm kept us from being able to climb, so we took the safest and most open paths. But beneath the Edge there is only the earth itself, and there the concept of safety becomes brittle and trivial. We stood in the first cavern, quiet now, and Lleu’s face was waxen in the light of his taper.

“Look up,” I said.

The first cave is wide, long, and low-ceilinged. The rock roof is rippled and smooth, like the muscles in a horse’s back. “It’s like the sand at the coast,” Goewin said. “It’s beautiful.”

Lleu said, “We mustn’t go in very far.”

“No,” I answered. I did not laugh.

I marked the walls with charcoal when we came to turnings. Lleu and Goewin had only seen these tunnels full of the movement of men pulling carts and cutting stone. The carts stood at rest now, and the stone lay in heavy piles or jutted strangely and unnaturally from the walls where it had been hewn. The caves are no darker by night than by day; our candle flames cut the darkness softly, like aingftly, l hand parting hair, not a chisel shaping rock. We kept to wide, straight, level passages, for the tunnels and caverns connect and cross, run parallel and above and below one another. It is a quiet, secret place. At night it seems to return to its former silence, the silence of the inside of the earth, ignoring the little pickings of the miners during the quick days.

“This is all yours, Lleu,” Goewin said suddenly. “When you’re high king, this will be part of your kingdom too.”

“Dare anyone say he owns this?” Lleu said.

“Surely not one who is afraid of the dark,” I answered quietly.

He hated that. He hated it, and never argued: we stood two hundred feet below the surface of the earth, and only I knew the way out. Even Goewin said nothing in his defense. The prince of Britain, and afraid to walk through his own house at night! Well, he was not prince of Britain yet.

Perhaps I managed to shame him with my derision, and now he learned to disguise his fear. After that night, as his father replaced the atrium floor, Lleu followed behind, filling in and matching the broken stretches of mosaic with chips of glass and malachite and azurite. After he had glimpsed the abyss, the low dusty hollow place beneath the villa no longer frightened him. But I had not finished with this lesson in darkness.