The Knight With Two Swords by Edward M Erdelac

Author:Edward M Erdelac [Erdelac, Edward M]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-12-25T22:00:00+00:00

Second Part:

The Dolorous Stroke

CHAPTER ONE

Three days after the siege of Carhaix, which became known as the Battle of The Copse, the long funeral procession of King Lot of Orkney arrived at Camelot, where his youngest sons, Gareth and Mordred, and his daughter, Soredamor, awaited with their mother, Queen Morgause. The old Queen of Norgales was there, too, and King Uriens’ wife, Queen Morgan La Fey.

There was something in those three austere and aloof queens that made Balin shiver. Garbed in sable mourning clothes and faceless beneath night black veils, they stood arm in arm before the great Black Cross in front of St. Stephen The Protomartyr’s, inscrutable in aspect and silent and still as ancient monoliths. Morgause was heavy with the last scion of Lot, and somehow the matronly swell of her belly made her all the more imposing and phantasmagorical, as though she were some dread progenitress of darkness, a malevolent and willful Pandora, or a mysterious Nyx, in whose womb God had somehow stuffed up the primordial denizens of antediluvian chaos. Why Balin had these ill feelings toward Lot’s widow, he did not understand. She was one of King Arthur’s half-sisters by the late Igraine of Tintagel. Family.

Of Arthur’s other sister, Morgan La Fey, Balin knew very little, only rumors he had heard from Matthew and Safir during his imprisonment. He knew that she had been a student of the Merlin, and that she had left his tutelage for greater, deeper instruction from the Queen of Norgales.

The Queen of Norgales, it was said, had courted the Devil and King Rience for power and protection, respectively, after Sir Aglovale and the knights of Pellinore had slain her wicked husband, King Agrippe. Agrippe had been a vile persecutor of Christians, the worst since Agrestes. He had invaded the kingdom of Pellinore’s brother, King Pellam of Lystenoyse, Matthew said, because the Devil himself had tasked him to do so for the promise of absolute rule over Albion. Safir had told Balin the Queen rivaled even the maidens of Avalon in knowledge of the magic arts, yet stood in opposition to them.

No one knew her given name. Matthew had said she’d hidden it from the world, so that no man, angel, or demon could have power over her.

But for all his dread of these three terrible queens, Balin felt only pity for Lot’s orphaned daughter, Soredamor, a flush faced girl of thirteen, eyes red from crying, her red hair bound away in black barbette and black fillette like a young nun. Gareth, too, only fourteen, cried openly at the sight of his father’s covered corpse, borne stoically by his elder brothers Gaheris, Gawaine, and Agravaine, as well as Arthur himself, and King Uriens. As for Mordred, he was no more than a pudgy babe clutching his mother’s skirt and stuffing his own fist into his mouth. He would never know his own father.

All of Camelot turned out to mourn King Lot and see him entombed at St. Stephen’s, even Archbishop Dubricius and

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