The Book of Avalon Eternal

Nimue leaps up from her seat by the window. She says to Sagramor: 'When was it found? Who brought it?'

'It was found within the hour, dropped at the front gate. There has been a guard in the guardhouse since dawn, as is usual. The watch does not change until two hours past midday, which is still several hours from now. There is no reason why the guard on duty would not have heard someone come that close to that gate and drop a body.'

Nimue replies derisively: 'There is a reason, and that reason is that the guards of this palace are lazy. They are late to their watches, and when they are not sleeping, they are eating.'

Gawain feels forgotten by the window and says, 'I must go and see his body.' Sagramor's expression reveals his skepticism that Gawain could even get back to the bed unaided, much less go out into the courtyard.

'Where is his body now?' Gawain asks urgently.

'The body has been taken and laid beside the latrine.'

Gawain feels anger rising. 'And who is responsible for that?'

Sagramor falters, looks away and does not reply, but stares at his toes extending beyond the end of his sandal straps.

Nimue breaks the silence: 'Take me to where the body is.'

'Nimue, I must go too. I must,' Gawain says pleadingly to her.

'Gawain, you are in no condition to go anywhere.' Her expression is inscrutable.

'As the commander of all the chieftains and of the army of Camlann, I must go to receive the body of the usurper. And - ' Gawain's sentence is cut off by his voice breaking. Nimue stares stonily as he finishes: 'And he was my brother.'

Nimue spits. 'He was your half-brother, and he was born by Arthur's weakness and perversity and the deception of Irun Gwilt. And the foolishness and desperation of your mother.'

His face turns scarlet. 'How dare you speak of her in that way. How dare you speak of her at all.' His voice is a hiss, pushed out through the tightly woven threads of rage that now bind his better emotions.

Nimue softens and says to him, 'I know you loved Anna. And to you she was a good mother.' Gawain nods, his rage slightly placated.

'And that is why it is so hard for you to hear the truth about her,' Nimue says, and looks away from him.

Before Gawain can respond, she speaks briskly to Sagramor to lead the way, while she positions herself under Gawain's left arm so that he may lean on her as they walk. Her form is surprisingly solid, despite the lightness and thinness of her frame.

Sagramor leads them through the hallways and emerges from the lower hall into the palace's main courtyard, which surrounds the entire palace between the outer wall and the palace itself. At the eastern end of the courtyard, beyond another internal wall and set down into the ground up against the outer wall, is the latrine. There is a large crowd of people there. They make their way towards the crowd, Sagramor leading, Nimue and Gawain behind. As they approach, the crowd parts to allow the trio to approach the body.

Gawain sees a wrapped bundle lying on the ground beside the main pit. Owain, Lionel, Galahad, Bedivere, Percival, and Tristan turn to look at him, and he meets each of their gazes with a restrained fury and searching suspicion for whomever may be responsible for this treatment of Mordred's body.

'Show him to me,' Gawain says. Nimue steps forward and pulls Gawain along with her. He hops on his good leg to keep up, hanging on to her shoulders as she guides. They reach the wrapped bundle, and Nimue kneels to the ground beside it. His hands remain on her shoulders, and she circles her arm around his thigh to steady him.

Reaching with her other hand, Nimue peels back the cloth that covers the head of the body. And the face of his brother is revealed. It is Mordred. Mordred who had all the beauty of their mother, and none of the kindness and gentleness of Arthur. Mordred, filled with bitterness and blind ambition. Always believing he was owed something he had not received. Self-conscious of his malformed foot, which he was born with, and which carried him all his life, though he hated it and the limp it gave him.

His fair hair lay flat over his forehead, and his skin was now turned a ghastly whitish green. His face, once beautiful even with all the resentment laced into it, is contorted, and his nose and mouth are pressed to one side and flattened. Many of his teeth are broken or missing, revealed by his mouth that hangs open. And worst of all, his head lies at an obscene angle, turned far to the right so that the tip of his twisted nose can now touch the end of his right shoulder, from Owain's heavy boot. And as Nimue peels the cloth back further, the wound wrought by Excalibur is revealed as well: a perfectly shaped hole exactly the width and length of Excalibur's blade, straight through Mordred's heart.

Gawain steels his gaze as he regards the corpse of his brother. He hears the words of Nimue again in his mind, asserting that Mordred was only his half-brother. But to Gawain, no clarification of this sort is needed. He was his brother, and that was all.

In a flash, he sees a rapid succession of images from their shared past that pass through his mind in their entirety over a matter of seconds. He, the elder brother, and young Mordred following him, limping all the way, but resilient and goodhearted. Mordred, wanting to play with him and Gareth as they went about their adolescent adventures in the emerald green hills of Orkney washed in the cold spray of the northern ocean. Mordred, whose eyes clouded with time as he grew, becoming harder and darker, resentment lodged in them like a grain of sand that formed a black pearl of anger, pain, and bitterness that he could never release or overcome. Mordred, the child with bright and clear green eyes that became clouded with hatred as even now they are clouded with the rime of cold death.

His mother Anna lied to him for his entire childhood, lied and told him that her husband King Lot who sat on the island throne was his father, as he was the father of Gawain, Gareth, Gaheris, and Agravain. He grew up knowing them as his brothers, and that he was secure with his father and mother, living together in peace with his family.

Until one day, when Agravain was a young man, and had taken to spending more time in the forest at the manor of Irun Gwilt, he learned the truth of Mordred's origin from the old wizard: that he was conceived after a long winter's banquet at King Lot's great palace on Enys Mare, when Arthur, encouraged by Irun Gwilt and in the unwisdom of youth, had become very drunk on Lot's wine and was secretly given a potion by Irun Gwilt to make his desire irresistible to his better nature; and his sister Anna too had become drunk, and was given a potion secretly by Irun Gwilt to make her burn with passion. Irun Gwilt guided Arthur to Anna's room, and they in their drunken and altered state made hungry, eager love in the comforting darkness of night, only to arrive at a morning of deep shame as the sunrise illuminated the room with soft light as they woke to find themselves naked and entwined in embrace.

Agravain held this in his heart for months, until his own devious nature weakened his better judgment, and he told Mordred the truth of his birth. And in that moment Mordred lost his father King Lot and all of his brothers, to his mind ripped from him by his true father Arthur. Mordred was filled with hatred for his true father until he died on the field at Camlann pierced by his father's sword; and it was a hatred that could never be soothed, and it was so far immersed in darkness that it could never be transformed into anything like love.

This is the man that Gawain looks down upon, the twisted form that was his brother and is now a mangled corpse beside a latrine pit. He turns to the chieftains that stand around him, his eyes filled with angry tears, making him angrier by their swelling emergence. Held up by Nimue, he says to them: 'You will immediately pick his body up and place it on the marble slab in the temple of Asyatai at the forest's edge, who in his kindness takes frail humanity into his bosom and in death heals their hearts from the pain they bore in life.'

Galahad and Tristan move first to lift Mordred, and Galahad takes his arms while Tristan raises his legs. But then Galahad stops, and looks to the back of the crowd, at a figure in the middle distance of the courtyard in a red cloak approaching the latrine. The people in the back of the crowd start to murmur amongst themselves as the stranger approaches. They nervously part as he comes near enough to pass through them.

Gawain feels the muscles of Nimue's back tighten. Now she grips him harder, and he can feel her saying to him that he must now stop and look; that though the banished and the vanquished may be gone for many turns of the great Earth, their return is inevitable, for the past and future are linked, and the one redeems the other.

But not without the pain of great effort and the suffering of having one's soul hammered into a new shape as a smith shapes iron in the forge.

In the center of the crowd, facing him as he is held by Nimue: the stranger removes his cloak to reveal his long flowing hair of bright blond streaked with silver now, his face familiar but aged. For there in all of his faded but shining glory stands Lancelot.