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ailing or sopped, for they lie quiet in the kennels.” The porter shook his head in the torchlight. “Indeed, had you not been the duke and his retinue, but rather the warlike Uther and his host, I fear Tintagel would have been easily overwhelmed and Her Grace most vilely mishandled by that most goatish of monarchs.”
    “Insolent knave,” said Merlin. “Dost criticize the duchess of Cornwall? Thou shalt be whipped.” But his false anger served to conceal his true amusement, and to himself he said, that cunning baggage! For not even Merlin, with all his arts, could divine the ways of women. And then he did wonder how she could have known the king would come this night, and he learned from the porter subsequently that these orders had been in effect since the duke had left Tintagel to be besieged in Terrabil at the very outset of the war, now a fortnight in progress.
    But Uther Pendragon meanwhile did not await for the arrival of the grooms to dismount but rather flung his reins to old Ulfin, leaped afoot, and with lustful impatience hastened through the courtyard and hurled open the portal of the keep, which was unlocked and unguarded as well, and penetrating the darkness of the great entry hall, so lost himself, making a clangor amidst the shields hung upon the walls there.
    “Ho!” cried the king. “A light! A light!” And at length a steward appeared in nightdress, carrying a dripping candle and rubbing his sleepy eyes with his knuckles.
    “Your Grace!” cried he in amazement, freeing Uther Pendragon from entanglement in the straps of a shield. “We were told by Her Grace that Your Grace had been slain in the war with the king and to expect your return nevermore.”
    Now Uther Pendragon was most pleased to hear this, but he nevertheless remembered to serve his imposture, and he said gruffly as he could in the duke’s thin voice, “No more of thy prattle. Where is thy lady?”
    “Surely in her bedchamber, Your Grace,” said the steward, and he bowed, spattering tallow on the stones of the floor. “She hath not gone elsewhere since your departure.”
    “Give me that light,” said the king, “and begone.” But no sooner had the steward obeyed this order and gone away than Uther Pendragon realized that he knew not the route to the fair Ygraine’s bedchamber, and he feared that he might spend the night in a vain search through the vast corridors of lofty Tintagel.
    But meanwhile Merlin had come in from the courtyard, and he now undertook to guide the king to the private quarters of the duchess of Cornwall, the situation of which he knew exactly though never having been in this castle before. And soon this pair, monarch and wizard, in the guises of duke and knight, arrived before an arch framing a door upholstered in red silk onto which a golden dragon had been worked in cunning applique.
    Now Uther Pendragon could not forbear from swearing vilely, “God’s blood! The traitorous Gorlois doth privily usurp my device. I’ll have his ugly head for that—after having swyved his beautiful wife.”
    But Merlin spake in a whisper. “Methinks that is the work of the fair Ygraine and unbeknown to the duke, whose head she doth expect you will have already taken. But soft now, Sire. She waits within.” And the magician went to turn the handle of the door, but the king delayed him with a statement of great intensity.
    “Thou hast done thy service, Merlin, and may retire.”
    “But was it not you yourself, Sire, who applied to me for aid? Think on your habitual peculiarity arising from passionate anticipation.”
    “Wouldst climb into bed along with me?” asked the king. “Art thou unnatural in this as in thine other modes of life?”
    “As you wish, Sire. I shall await without until you need my craft,” said Merlin.
    “I command that thou go away altogether!” said Uther Pendragon. “I assure thee that having seen my dragon upon this very door I shall never know my old peculiarity once I am within.”