THE WICKED DAY - Book review

The Wicked Day is Mary Stewart’s fourth instalment of her Arthurian legend, published in 1983.

The first three books are The Crystal Cave (1970), The Hollow Hills (1973) and The Last Enchantment (1979). I read the first two in the 1970s and the third in the 1980s. It has taken me all this time to get round to the fourth, though it has been on my shelf for thirty years, but it was worth the wait!

The book concerns Mordred, the bastard son of Arthur and the king’s half-sister Morgause, the man Merlin predicts will be the death of Arthur. Mordred ‘the boy from the sea’ has been sequestered in the Orkneys by adoptive parents (fisherman Brude and wife Sula) and is unaware of his origins. By chance Mordred rescues the young Gawain, one of the beautiful witch-Queen Morgause’s sons on a cliff edge and his rewarded is to serve in her castle. His mother Sula believes it is a great opportunity for the boy: ‘Her eyes, red-rimmed with working near the smoke of the peat fire, stared up at him with an intensity that made him want to fidget and move away. She spoke in a low, urgent whisper, “This is a great day for you”...’ (p31).

Stewart’s prose is as descriptive as ever, a fitting conclusion to the series. ‘Morgause, who liked to play with people as if they were creatures caged for her whims’ (p42). The visuals place the reader in the scene: ‘Beyond the window the midnight moon, at the full, had cooled from marigold to silver, and a sharp-edged blade of light cut across Morgause’s chair, sparking on gold and drowning the folds of her gown’ (p82).

‘He was still on the treadmill of agonised guilt’ (p181) is a telling and apt phrase for the period, the sixth century.

Morgause has four sons: Gawain, Gareth, Agravain and Gaheris, who accept Mordred with dubious grace. The queen’s current lover is Gabran. Finally, Mordred learns that he is the king’s bastard son...

The tragedy of Arthur is well-known, so there is no risk of any spoiler here.

The title of the book is taken from Mallory’s poem The Death of Arthur: ‘The wicked day of destiny’.

‘She spoke softly, still smiling. “Mordred, listen to me. You are young, and you do not know the world. I hated Merlin, but he was never wrong. If Merlin saw it written in the starts that you would be Arthur’s doom, then how can you escape it? There will come a day, the wicked day of destiny, when all will come to pass as he foretold’ (p168).

Despite this, Mordred loves the king and cannot foresee how he could be an instrument of his father’s destruction. He is determined to prove the fates wrong. And yet... On meeting Nimuë, Merlin’s successor: ‘He stopped dead in the doorway. A feeling of dread, formless and heavy, settled on him, as if the vultures of fate clung to his shoulders, their claws digging into his flesh’ (p190). Foretold doom hovers throughout the narrative and how the inevitable happens is well told.

The murder scene involving Gaheris is quite a shock. The later battle scenes are not as graphic as, say, Bernard Cornwell’s (qv Agincourt), but work, nevertheless.

A satisfying conclusion to the Dark Ages myth, the legend, the Once and Future King.