“Dead too, I imagine, or Cadal would not have got this far to warn us.”

“And Brithael?”

“Dead.”

“Did you know all this before we came tonight?”

“No,” I said.

“Nor of Gorlois’ death?”

“No.”

“If you were a prophet as you claim to be, you would have known.” His voice was thin and bitter. I looked up. His face was calm, the fever gone, but his eyes, slaty in the grey light, were bleak and weary.

I said briefly: “I told you. I had to take the time on trust. This was the time. We succeeded.”

“And if we had waited until tomorrow, these men, aye, and your servant here as well, would still be living, and Gorlois dead and his lady a widow . . . And mine to claim without these deaths and whisperings.”

“But tomorrow you would have begotten a different child.”

“A legitimate child,” he said swiftly. “Not a bastard such as we have made between us tonight. By the head of Mithras, do you truly think my name and hers can withstand this night’s work? Even if we marry within the week, you know what men will say. That I am Gorlois’ murderer. And there are men who will go on believing that she was in truth pregnant by him as she told them, and that the child is his.”

“They will not say this. There is not a man who will doubt that he is yours, Uther, and rightwise King born of all Britain.”

He made a short sound, not a laugh, but it held both amusement and contempt. “Do you think I shall ever listen to you again? I see now what your magic is, this ‘power’ you talk of . . . It is nothing but human trickery, an attempt at statecraft which my brother taught you to like and to play for and to believe was your mystery. It is trickery to promise men what they desire, to let them think you have the power to give it, but to keep the price secret, and then leave them to pay.”

“It is God who keeps the price secret, Uther, not I.”

“God? God? What god? I have heard you speak of so many gods. If you mean Mithras—”

“Mithras, Apollo, Arthur, Christ—call him what you will,” I said. “What does it matter what men call the light? It is the same light, and men must live by it or die. I only know that God is the source of all the light which has lit the world, and that his purpose runs through the world and past each one of us like a great river, and we cannot check or turn it, but can only drink from it while living, and commit our bodies to it when we die.”