King of the Middle March Read Online Free

Italy. Very difficult. Very expensive.”
    â€œSo everything’s ready!” Lord Stephen said. “Down to the last shaving.”
    â€œPronto,” Silvano replied. “Two hundred ships.” He rubbed his right thumb and forefinger. “Now money!” he said.
    Lord Stephen smiled that wistful smile that just flickers around the corners of his little mouth. “Well, all these ships are young and impatient, aren’t they, Arthur? We mustn’t keep them waiting.”
    â€œWhen you pay?” demanded the shipwright. “We Venetians keep our promise. You crusaders break yours.”
    Before we left the dockyard for Saint Nicholas, one of our boatmen lit a torch and set it up in the stern. The water around us soon caught fire, and turned itself into flashing daggers and stars.

7
GLASS VENETIANS
    A T HOLT, THREE OF THE CASTLE WINDOWS HAVE BEEN leaded and glassed, and Lord Stephen has an azure Venetian glass goblet with a twisted stem.
    Here, glass is used in all kinds of ways. For jugs, tureens, drinking glasses. And for jigsaw pictures of Mary and Jesus. I’ve seen women wearing necklaces strung with little glass balls, pale green and violet and misty blue. They’re like sea-eyes.
    If you half-close your eyes, Venice might be wholly glass. Windows flashing, domes shining, water jigging and leaping as if it were plucked by sky-puppeteers with invisible silk strings.
    Venetians have sallow skins. The men are golden ruffians. Even when they shave, they look unshaven, and wiry hair grows all over their bodies. The women are beautiful lionesses, with hair of two or even three different colors—tawny and bronze and copper. They’re always laughing, and most of them have singed, husky voices; they speak very fast, with much more to say than time to say it in.
    Their eyes are so large and liquid that at first I supposed Venetians must be gentle or even breakable. But actually, they’re tough too, and self-interested and calculating.

8
HOWEVER HARD WE TRY
    L AMB-CLOUDS, AND THE SKY’S BLUE PASSAGES; AND then my own face, rather blurred. My big ears. My eyes, wide and alert. That’s all I could see to begin with.
    And then, when I held up my seeing stone to the sun, this last day of June, I thought I could actually see through it. Like staring into a pond, down through the layers of water, beyond the spawn and the wrigglers.
    But my stone is much, much more than a mirror or a pond. It is a world. I still keep it in the dirty old saffron cloth in which Merlin gave it to me, only now it’s even dirtier, and each time I look into it I see my namesake, King Arthur, or the knights of the Round Table. His fair fellowship.
    Once upon a time I thought I was Arthur-in-the-stone. Sometimes what happens to King Arthur seems to copy what happens to me, but sometimes it’s the other way round. He and Ygerna, his blood-mother, have found each other, and I believe that in the end I will find mine. I’ve hoped the same hopes as Arthur, and feared the same fears. I’ve seen Arthur’s knights ride out, north and south, east and west, questing for the Holy Grail, and I’ve seen Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere naked to one another, joyful and sorrowful, and I keep wondering what will happen if the king finds out.
    My stone is telling me something, if only I can work out what.Duty and sacrifice and honor and passion, insult and treachery: I’ve seen all those in my stone, and I see more all the time. From the day Merlin gave it to me, I’ve never gone anywhere without it.
    When I stepped into our tent and looked into my stone again, the king was there. Sitting alone at the huge Round Table and staring into it.
    A huge hunk of rock crystal. A hemisphere. It’s too heavy for even one hundred men to lift, so Merlin, the Hooded Man, must have spirited it to Camelot. Within the crystal there are nodules and black warts, cracks, splits. There are stars and dark