by Harper Fox
He was laughing still. “Father, forgive me,” he managed, as Tomas approached. He was just out of reach of the long, whipping rod. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have asked you to read it. I swear.”
“What difference does...” Tomas leapt as high in the air as he could, cassock flapping wildly. His swipe with the rod brushed Lance’s knees. “What difference does knowing it make?”
“I just didn’t know he’d write something like that down. I wasn’t even sure he’d remember. He’s had lots of lovers, you see.”
Another impotent swipe. “Close your wicked mouth!”
“He has to. He’s going to be king, and he might not live long, so he has to get heirs.”
“He won’t get them with you!”
Lance slid down to the edge of the roof. He caught the end of the whip and held it fast. He’d stopped laughing, and his face was oddly gentle. “There’s more to love than that.”
“That’s just where you’re wrong,” Tomas gasped, trying to twitch the rod away. “Procreation is the sole reason for the lusts of the body. All else is wickedness.”
“How strange it is. I struggle with Arthur’s writing, but I have read most of your holy book by now. I’ve never found such a thing written there.”
“Nevertheless, it’s... it’s what I was taught.”
“Who would teach you such a thing?”
“My preceptors from Rome. Holy men!”
“They must have faced a quandary, I suppose.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
Lance tugged the rod out of Tomas’s hand. He put it across his knee, and without any sign of effort or anger, snapped it in two. Then he jumped down off the roof. He was taller than Tomas by now, beginning at last to fill out into the length of his bones. He turned to face him, and any authority the old man had held over him vanished at that moment, like dew on the sunlit gorse. “If all joys of the flesh are wicked as you say, where are the children to come from who will carry on your church? I suppose that was the compromise. I even understand it in a way. But already you make no distinction between the words in your book and lessons taught you by men, with no better idea of what’s right and wrong than you have yourself. And that makes me afraid.”
“How dare you?” Tomas rasped. But the time for remonstrance was past and gone for him. The wicked child—a fine young man now, straight as a reed, a far-seeing clarity in his brown eyes—was gently and kindly dusting him down. “Terrible things come out of your mouth,” Tomas said wearily at last. “But your actions contradict them. Why did you stay with us, when your prince has offered you so much?”
“You read past his sinful words of love, then? You didn’t go blind?”
“They’re all words of love, it seems to me. The court is established in the south, in a place he calls Cam. He says he’s keeping a place at his side for you, a seat at his right hand. You’ll leave us now, won’t you? You’ll go.”
Lance looked away. He reached for the strips of birch that had slithered into the dry stable gutter, carefully piled them up and bound them once more in their leather ribbon. He fastened the hoop of the ribbon around his wrist. “No,” he said hollowly. “I will not.”
“Why not? The teachings of my book mean nothing to you—not even the words of my new and gentle god.”
“Did my mother need a book to take you in and shelter you, and not... feed you to her dragons, as must have been a sore temptation? Even my father, whose life should be judged for what it was, not just its miserable ending—he built you your church and fed you at his table. It seems to me that men shouldn’t need a book or a god to make them good.”
He opened the stable door, and Balana came nickering out to him, snorting and lowering her impeccably trained Roman head for her bridle. Lance unhooked it from the back of the door and put it on her. Ector had left him the beautiful horned saddle too, but that was locked up in the armoury. Balana widened her eyes at his unaided leap onto her back, but stood foursquare and still for him, just as she would have done with battlefield spears raining down around her.
“Don’t misunderstand me, Tomas,” he said. “I know what I’ve given up. I don’t mean the honours and the place at his side in Cam. I’d just give my immortal, wicked soul to be with him once again by the lough.” He touched the mare’s sides with his heels. “See to it that Bryn the drover’s fed, and have the farmhands settle the new tup. I’ll be back by sundown.”
Chapter Eighteen
Dearest Tertius, who will always be my Lance to me, who became my more-than-brother on the shore of the lake, and again in that well-remembered bed, with the deerhounds looking on! I hope you have learned to read Latin for yourself, or I will by now have scandalised your priest.
The court is settled in Cam. I am holding a place for you at my right hand. I commanded my round table to be built as I told you I would. I joked with my sawyers and masons that the hall would need to be built around it. Alas, they have not your sense of the ridiculous. Upon my return from Cerniw two moons later, the job was done. My latest recruits—four brothers from an island so far north of Scotia that the sun never sets during summer, nor rises in the winter, Bors, a lord of Gaul, whose land has been seized by the Saxons, causing him to throw in his lot with mine, and Drustan, an old friend from Cornwall—look like lost children around its vast edge. But it does solve quarrels over precedence, and because I believe the brothers from the Out Isles to have been driven slightly mad by their long, unnatural days and nights, it has spared much bloodshed. I have caused your mother’s name to be graven in gold at the rim.
The battle for Cam was a sharp one. Warlike descendants of the Durotriges had settled there. We were outnumbered, but Excalibur was like fire in my hand. The fort is desirable, the water supply from a spring so deep it cannot be tainted or stopped from outside. In these autumn dawns, badgers shuffle about in the woodlands all around. In spring, I am told, these same woods are the haunt of cuckoos. Deer and boar are plentiful.
Dear Lance, I would not often wish to experience such pain as I knew at our parting. Having learned to read Latin, you must learn to write it! Send via my tin merchant Landry, who trades in Londinium at the full of every moon. Aldegund, the Batavian commander in Pons Aelius who sent this on to you, knows him well. Place a direction on the outside, as I have done on yours. Artorius, filius Pendraconis will find me. We call this place Cam, for the river, but it must have been an island in it once, or an islet. You’d better use the old name, which is Camelet.
Discharge your duties, my dark-eyed moorland prince, and come to me.
Lance sat up. His eyes were burning, the back of his neck stiff. There was no chance of reaching Aldegund and Landry in time for the next full moon, because—apart from his utter, miserable, thrice-damned inability to write a word of Latin—it had taken him the best part of a fortnight to decipher his letter from Art. He had done it, Tomas remaining wrapped in highest dudgeon, by borrowing one of the old man’s Latin texts, copied by some long-lost scribe whose hand resembled Art’s. Lance knew the story from Tomas’s many wistful fireside readings of the tale, wherein a prophet named Esdras went forth from his house and offered his soul to God for punishment rather than let the divine wrath fall upon his sinful neighbours.
Poor Tomas, surrounded by men and women who barely knew they were sinning, let alone in need of a priestly lightning rod! Lance had almost felt guilty, coming up here to the lough every day when his farm work was done, picking out the Latin words he knew, connecting them one to the other through the fibres of the tale, matching the shapes on the parchment to those on the pieces of birch.
But he’d have raided Tomas’s library a hundred times over, pillaged his texts without mercy, to find the key that would unlock Arthur’s words. Breathing a prayer of thanks to the long-lost scribe, he leaned back against a rock. Balana, who’d been peacefully cropping the turf, came and nudged his shoulder, as if aware that he’d finished his task. “I should have asked you to read it,” he told her, rub
bing her velvety lip. “You’d have managed it faster. And now—look at this!—he says I have to learn to write to him, too.”
If wishes were learning, the work would be already done. He stared into the sunlight, Art’s lettering and the scribe’s entwining and dancing in the bright air, creating new shapes that would be his own. My most dear Artorius—carissime Artorie, he would write, correctly using the vocative singular. Art, to me, from the hour when we laid down our arms and rode together into Vindolanda...
“Oh, and the sun fades to nothing in the beauty of his smile, and he walks on water, and brings back the spring to the earth, I suppose.”
Lance leapt to his feet. He whipped round, trying to locate the source of the reed-thin, crackling voice. Only a moorland hare was poised on a rock a couple of yards away.
Out in broad daylight and asking for trouble. Blindly Lance drew his spear from its loops on Balana’s saddle. Pictish raider seeking to distract and ambush him, the breeze playing tricks, drawing words from the water and the rustling birch, or nothing more than a good hare stew on the table tonight—he was ready for anything, if only he could get his heart out of his mouth and the tremor of fright out of his arm...
“Cures piles and warts, no doubt. Frightens the ticks off sheep.”
Lance wheeled again. “Where are you?”
“Why, here, boy. Just as I always have been.”
He rubbed his eyes. The hare was gone. In its place was an old woman, wrapped in a ragged black robe. Lance dropped his spear with a clatter onto the rocks. “Viviana!”
“Well, what of it? Why were you poking that twig at me? Where’s the sword from the lake?”
“I... I thought I’d never see you again.”
“Nor did I think you’d hand over your destiny to Uther Pendragon’s stealth-begotten son, young man!”
Dry-mouthed, unaccountably filled with joy, Lance made a cautious approach. He bowed to her shyly. “Will you come to the vicus with me, my lady? I’d be glad to offer you shelter and food.”
She looked him over, eyes bright. “Shelter and food, eh? This isn’t the starving brat I met up here half a year ago.”
“No, ma’am. I have changed greatly since then.”
“Two inches taller, chest and shoulders broader. Handsome, too—the very spit of his mother. Not a virgin anymore. Has a fine Roman horse. Still bearing Ban’s old sword, which is strange, for a boy who was entrusted with Excalibur.”
Blood ran hot and cold beneath the surface of Lance’s skin. He didn’t know where to begin to reply. On balance, the sword seemed the easiest place to start. “Arthur drew it out from a rock. That was his destiny—ex calce liberatus.”
“Oh, I see.” She flickered him a mocking smile. “I suppose he wrenched it from your hands.”
“No, by no means. I gave it to him, with my...” His voice scraped, and he waited until he was sure it would be firm again. “With my whole heart.”
“Poor Lance. He did land on you like a cartload of rocks, didn’t he?”
“If I had the time I again I’d do the same, my lady, but... was it wrong?”
She got up and stretched. She was just as withered and ancient as Lance remembered, but there was a vigour to her movements, a deep-rooted, earthy power. “I’d have said so, once upon a time.”
“And now? He did bring the spring to the earth.”
“Ah, well. He’s his mother’s son, as you are yours. So much depends upon him, and what he understands—about the dragon and her ways. What he doesn’t, you’ll have to teach him.”
“What? I don’t know anything.”
“You’d be surprised. The Merlin says the new world’s coming to destroy the old, but he’s a curmudgeon. What if your future king could be the best of both?”
Lance forgot himself. He seized her shoulders, distantly relieved when she didn’t seem to mind, gazing up at him fearlessly. “You know the Merlin?”
“Of course. Pendragon’s son will rise in England’s darkest hour, the Merlin says, and maybe he’s right.”
“England?” Lance tried the strange word carefully. His head was still full of Latin, of the strange, compulsive business of learning to read. “Where’s that?”
“Here, ignorant boy. Or it will be, once these tribes of Angles settling up and down the country name the place after themselves.”
“Nonsense. They’ll never get that far. Not the Saxons, either—Arthur will raise an army from Cerniw and the old lands to the west, Caer Lir and Rheged and...”
“Ah. Outraged, are you—about these damned invading foreigners?”
“Of course. The land is ours.”
“Did you ever stop to think about what the Picts think of you?”
“The Picts?” Bewildered, Lance let the old woman go. “What have they got to do with anything?”
“Little more than animals, aren’t they? Blue-painted savages who sweep down out of the dark to pillage and burn. And you, orphaned lad, have better reason than most to believe it so.”
“How could anyone deny it? Father Tomas told me the whole story of the night of the raid. One of the savages slew my mother from behind.”
A look of pain crossed the old woman’s face. It was ordinary, human: surprising and piercing to Lance, who had grown used to her eldritch smile. “Ah, my poor Elena,” she said. “I shouldn’t think she took that in good part.”
“No. But you told me truly about her, all those months ago when we first met. She was holding another of them by the hair and smashing his skull with a pan. Did you know her too, my lady?”
“Never mind that. Look at this toy, which I picked up on my travels.”
Lance was getting lots of practice in dealing with his elders. Tomas, relieved of the prospect of looking after the vicus alone, was becoming more eccentric every day. Patiently he took the little stone she’d handed to him from some pouch within her robes. It was flat, no bigger than the palm of his hand. On it was carved, with a jeweller’s mastery, a kind of crescent moon, pierced through its horns with a V-shaped staff. Beneath it was a sign like a lightning flash, and two circles connected by a narrow, elegant neck. The whole was bordered by a pattern he recognised, a kind of knotwork Elena, when intolerably bored by winter confinement, would irritably embroider onto bed coverings. “Beautiful,” he said, following the hypnotic shape of the circles with one fingertip. “What does it mean?”
“Ah, who knows? Not even they know, not anymore. Maybe once, before you Celts arrived, seized their lands and scattered their culture to the winds.”
“Are you saying this is Pictish work?”
“It is. You should see the full-size stones. Bigger than you are, and covered with serpents, boars, horses with beaks, fish-tailed dragons... Of course they learned the knotwork from you.”
“I’m not a Celt. I’m a—”
“Oh, a Briton! That’s right, I forgot. Brittunculi, the Roman lads on the Wall—right here, as it happens—used to call you lot. Dirty little Britons! That was before they started recruiting you, getting men like your father to farm their land for them, marrying your women and putting their fine long legs and noble faces into the stream of life for princely souls like you to inherit.” She caught hold of the front of his shirt, her fist the size of a sparrow but strong. “Listen to me, Lance. I’m not telling you this to shame you or to pull you down. He came to you, didn’t he—this future king, with his smile and his sunlight, and his gift for making men want to follow him to the gates of death, and after?”
“Yes,” Lance said. His throat was sore and tight. “But he had to go, and I... I had to stay.”
“Nothing’s forever, boy. Remember these words, if you find yourself at his side again. His people will call him Arthur of the Britons. He’ll come to think of himself that way, and so will generation after cascading generation of fools—some romantic, some vicious beyond understanding—who believe that there’s one purebred race in this land, or ever could or ever will be.”
“He doesn’t thi
nk that. He’s travelled too much, seen too much.”
“Oh, I grant you he’s bright. And he’s more the politician than I thought any lad of sixteen summers could be—old Ector did well with him. But you’re the clever one, Lance. Tell him that the Celts took this land from the men who lived here in shadowy time out of mind, and the Romans took it from the Celts. The Angles and Saxons will take it from you, and there’ll be pain and bloodshed, loss and gain, and eventually, in a time even I am not permitted to see, one people standing in the sun—cross-fertilised over and over again, vigorous, all their arts and learning shared.”
“My lady, I don’t understand.”
“It doesn’t matter. Tell him, if you love him, that this sacred island of his lies on a natural westbound invasion route, and his life doesn’t have to be the price of pretending that’s not true. Don’t let the Merlin sell him that miserable dream.”
Lance stumbled back from her. “I can’t tell him anything,” he said hoarsely. “I’d give my soul to send him one line in reply to the words he’s given me, but I’m too ignorant even for that. Probably I’ll never see him again.”
“Put your trust in time, as old Ector would say. And get your priest—as he says, in that lovely epistola you carry with you everywhere, and sleep with under your pillow—to teach you how to write.”
“How do you know all this? About Ector, and Art, and me, and—”
“And your mother, too.”
“What?”
“You’d better turn away, boy. It’s rude to watch an old woman while she’s changing.”
Sharply he obeyed. All around him the air was thickening, pressing on his skin and the depths of his ears like the shift before a storm. “Please, Viviana. My mother?”
When her voice resumed, it was wild, weirdly low to the ground, words from a throat not designed for them. “Don’t fear death, Lance. Dying can be bad, but death... We come from the earth on the spine of the dragon, and she takes us home again, that’s all. Tell this to the king. Let him not sunder the contract, the ancient, loving kinship between men and the land. It’s not too late. That’s what your mother says. Oh, and the usual—what a fine boy you are, and how proud of you she is, and all the rest of it. Yes, yes, my dear priestess. We know all that. He knows.”