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The Last Enchantment by Mary Stewart6/24/2023 So it is just that some of the blame should rest on him just, too, that some of it should cling to me. It is a lie that he ordered the slaughter but his sin was the first cause of it, and though it would never have occurred to him to murder innocent children, it is true that he wanted his own child killed. So, although a witch plotted the massacre, and another king gave the order for it, and though I myself tried to shoulder the blame, the murmur still persists: that in the first year of his reign Arthur the High King had his troops seek out and destroy some score of newly born babies in hope of catching in that bloody net one single boy-child, his bastard by incest with his half-sister Morgause.Ĭalumny, I have called it, and it would be good to be able to declare openly that the story is a lie. Besides, in the minds of simple men, to whom the High King is the ruler of their lives, and the dispenser of all fates, Arthur would be held accountable for all that happened in his realm, evil and good alike, from a resounding victory in the battlefield to a bad rain-storm or a barren flock. It is harder to kill a whisper than even a shouted calumny. This is what they whisper of Arthur, even though in other ways he is held up as the type itself of the noble ruler, the protector alike of high and lowly. NOT EVERY KING WOULD CARE to start his reign with the wholesale massacre of children.
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