Lancelot

by Giles Kristian

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  The legions of Rome are a fading memory. Enemies stalk the fringes of Britain. And Uther Pendragon is dying. Into this fractured and uncertain world a boy is cast. He is a refugee from fire, murder and betrayal – an outsider whose only companions are a hateful hawk and memories of those he’s lost.

  Yet he is gifted, and under the watchful eyes of Merlin and the Lady Nimue he will hone his talents and begin his journey to manhood. He will meet Guinevere, a wild, proud and beautiful girl, herself outcast because of her gift. And he will be dazzled by Arthur, a warrior – a leader of men – who carries the hopes of a people like fire in the dark.

  But these are times of struggle and blood, when even friendship and love seem doomed to fail. The gods are vanishing beyond the reach of dreams. Treachery and jealousy rule men’s hearts, and the fate of Britain itself rests on a sword’s edge.

  But the young renegade who left his home in Benoic with just a hunting bird and a dream of revenge is now a lord of war …

  He is a man loved and hated, admired and feared.

  He is a man forsaken but not forgotten.

  He is Lancelot.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue

  1. Fire in the Night

  2. Peregrination

  3. The Beggar King

  4. Pelleas

  5. The Island

  6. Lady of Karrek

  7. The Freedom of Birds

  8. Songs of Britain

  9. Journeying

  10. Young Bloods

  11. For Friendship

  12. Conceived in Blood

  13. The Edge

  14. The Death of a King

  15. Arthur

  16. Betrayal at Dawn

  17. Excalibur

  18. Camelot

  19. Malice of the Gods

  20. Spear Song

  21. A Storm of Blades

  22. A Gift

  23. Lord of War

  24. Black Bryony and Bittersweet

  25. Red in the South

  26. Trial by Fire

  27. Death of a Dream

  28. The Boy

  29. A Hawk Still

  Author’s Note

  Dramatis Personae

  About the Author

  Also by Giles Kristian

  Copyright

  For my father, Alan James Upton (1946–2016) who, in his last weeks, taught me what courage is.

  Prologue

  I PURSUE. RELENTLESS. Through every twist and turn, through the bitter smoke rising from countless steadings. Over the swell of burial mound and the glitter of stream. Between corn stacks and ancient oaks and standing stones, the woodlark an undulating streak of brown a talon’s length ahead. Now the white flash of his neck. Now the black and white on the leading edge of his wing. His song forgotten, his terror a taste on the wind.

  I cannot catch him. Roll. Turn. Rising to the gods and swooping to the land. Stitching earth to sky. I revel in the chase but more so in the sight. All the bounty of the world crammed into my fierce eye.

  I swerve, breaking from the lark’s wake. Drawn to the hum rising not from the nearby ocean but from men. I alight atop the branchless tree. The tooled tree, around whose waist hangs a belt of iron chain. I smell the rising fog of the crowd’s breath. It warms my feathers against the thin dawn air and I watch. I feel, too. More than a bird should feel. The sorrow which lies over the assembly like a shroud. The fear. The uncertainty and the regret.

  The hum rises, rolls across the gathered like a wave, and subsides again. Spearmen come, parting the congregation, clumsy with fear and duty. Among them a woman. Her back as straight as their spears but far nobler. Hair black as a crow’s wing. Blue as a beetle’s shell. The burnished copper of beech leaves at the season’s turn. And she still owns such beauty that the air of the day is at once drawn into three hundred chests, like smoke and sparks sucked up the forge hood.

  Arms snake out, hands clutching, grasping at her russet gown. Men and women coalesce, hungry to touch her as she passes. They crave a portion of her tragedy. Thirst for a sliver of her power. Fear her craft.

  My hunger fades with the memory of the woodlark. A mean-spirited boy sees me and throws a stone and I rise from the stake, my broad, pointed wings beating faster than thought, and I hover in the gathering breeze, still watching the woman as she is led, pulled now and then like an unwilling mare to the stallion.

  The tonsured man is talking now, but my ears are not my eyes and his words are as the honking of a goose. Up they pull her, ungraceful onto the faggots of sticks and wicker, and bring the cold chain round her waist, marrying her to the stake. She fights only with her eyes now and her carriage. Pride and shame are her only magic, whatever the tonsured man says, his arms stretched up, hands grasping at the sky.

  Hanging there above them all, I am a quivering ball of energy, pent up with the tension of a drawn bow. I hope I do not spy another lark or a stonechat, a finch or a pipit, for my mastery over this creature’s instinct is thin as smoke; I may cut off west, chasing some quarry to the ends of the earth.

  Fire now. Bright enough to hurt my eye. Blooming from a stave with the stench of pitch. The man holding this torch comes forward, his eyes cast down, as if he fears to meet the woman’s gaze. And well he might fear it. Might dread those blue-green eyes which have seen men’s souls as the hawk’s eyes see the world: in infinite, immaculate detail.

  He is frozen, this fire-bearing man. Still and stiff as the stake which he dare not approach. Perhaps he is afraid of the woman. Perhaps he fears the crowd, which holds itself like a stuck breath. Wanting fire and yet not wanting it.

  Now the golden man comes, his scales glittering in spite of the day. Folk shrink back from him in contrast to the way they had swarmed to the woman. They avert their eyes but I do not avert mine and I watch him snatch the firebrand from the other, his face the pallor of cold hearth ash.

  He calls to the crowd in a voice like pain, and with long strides across the mud he carries the flame forward, an offering of fire to that which can be nothing without it.

  But then he stops. He stands alone in a sea of souls. Not afraid to look at her as the other man had been. Their eyes are in each other now. Talons snarled in talons. Roots entwined in roots.

  Somewhere a woman shrieks. More cries rise on hate-filled breath and the golden man lifts the wind-whipped firebrand, limbs steeled, purpose renewed, and takes the last three steps.

  The woman’s tears fall to the dry wood. She turns her face away, looking above them all. Looking beyond them all, through the veil which separates one life from the next. The flame catches amongst the dry straw thrust between the wicker. A crackle of fire. A gasp from those who have come to bear witness. The first foul tendril of sickly yellow smoke curls up and a gust washes me in its charred stink. Too much for a creature of the clean sky. I careen up, away from the devouring hatred and fear, and I let the wind slice me away down the valley.

  1

  Fire in the Night

  I STILL REMEMBER my father’s smell: leather and steel. The wool grease which was in his cloak and on his trews and on his blades, keeping the water out but stinking of sheep. The sweet hay scent of the stable and the old sweat of the saddle pads. His own sweat, too, and a man’s muskiness. And the sometimes terrifying taint of breath made sour by ale and wine.

  Mostly I cannot conjure his face any more. Perhaps I do not want to. But I remember his smell. I only have to think of it to be a boy again.

  I remember his touch, too, but because of its rareness, its unfamiliarity. The big hand scrubbing my head, leaving my hair standing in tufts. The granite of his chest against
my back as he helped me draw my first bow. The pungent softness of his beard when he whispered to me one evening by the hearth that my mother was the most beautiful woman in all of Benoic.

  And less rare, the sharp stones of his knuckles across my cheek which would leave me deaf and hot in one ear for a day. The bite of his belt when I had displeased him. Or someone else had. The iron grip of big hands on my arms and the shaking which rattled my brain in its skull and the raging, rain-flecked gale of his fury in my face.

  Strangely, amongst all the swirling chaos of that night, I vividly recall the feel of my father’s hand. The coarseness of his skin wrapping mine. The thick, callused vice of it as he pulled me through the churning smoke and the flame-licked dark because our enemies had come.

  I had been in the stables, brushing Malo, my father’s stallion, because he was in such a foul mood that no one else, not even Govran, would go near him. The snow lay thick that winter and lingered into spring. A white pelt on Benoic which had kept folk by their hearth fires, kept cattle in the byre and the horses in their stalls. For you did not risk a prince of beasts and beloved of the horse goddess Rhiannon by riding him in the snow without good reason. But try telling Malo that. Fifteen hands high and of Spanish stock, so Govran said, Malo was strong and fast, contemptuous and dangerous. Hot blood in a cold land. And he was bored. Frustrated by stillness. Blamed the world and the gods and man for it, but did not blame me.

  And like all stallions, Malo reckoned the next best thing to a run was a fight. ‘Damned devil near bit my arm off when I took the brush to him,’ Govran had come in saying, stamping from his boots great clumps of snow, which melted in the floor reeds.

  My father’s groom, Govran knew horses and loved them more than he loved people, including Klervi his wife, so she said often enough and got no argument from Govran.

  ‘Put Erwan on his arse when he tried to lift his hoof to check for rot,’ Govran spat, huffing into cold hands. ‘Ought to let that black devil loose and watch him run across the roof of the world, spitting fury an’ trailing fire.’ He looked first at my mother, then my father. He did not look at me. ‘You want the devil groomed you’ll have to send the boy.’

  Not many could speak that way to my father. But Govran could. They had been sword-brothers long before my father was king.

  ‘Doesn’t say much for you, Govran,’ my father told him. And it didn’t, for I was not yet nine years old. ‘Should I be sending out for a new groom?’

  ‘Or a new horse,’ my mother hissed.

  Govran muttered something which, fortunately for him, was not heard because the pine logs in the hearth popped and cracked over him. We had long used up the properly seasoned wood by then.

  Outside, the wind was getting up and I knew that would not help the mood in the stables. ‘He won’t bite me, Father,’ I said. Almost certain of it.

  A frown from my mother, heavy as snow-laden thatch. ‘That beast could bite off the boy’s head and swallow it in a gulp,’ she said.

  ‘He bites me because now and then he forgets what’s what,’ Govran said, rubbing some warmth into fingers and palms. ‘Goes back to thinking he’s the master and I’m the underling and tries to put me in my place. Bastard.’ He lifted his chin in my direction. ‘He’s not threatened by the boy.’

  ‘Boys don’t become men tied to their mothers’ skirts,’ my father rumbled, lifting the jar to his lips and drinking deeply.

  ‘Boys don’t become men by having their heads bitten off by bad-tempered beasts,’ my mother said.

  No smiles. Just fire and lamp flame, smoke and stale air. We were all aching for the season’s turn.

  A mutter and flick of the hand from my father. Enough. I was out the door, not even a horn lantern to light my way, tramping through the brittle snow and into Malo’s lamplit stall. Inside, it was warm with his musky scent and sweet with his breath, which plumed with the rhythm of forge bellows, fanning the ire which had driven all other humans away.

  ‘I am here,’ I said. ‘I am here.’ Spoken as softly as snow on snow. At first he snorted with derision, knowing full well that the men had retreated and sent in a boy. Ashamed of them for it. But I let him sniff my hands awhile, whispering that he could bite me if it would make him feel better. And when he didn’t bite me, I stood up on the farrier’s stool, buried my nose in his thick mane and inhaled him, then whispered that we two were friends and be damned the rest of them. Then we set to work: I on his raven black coat, ridding it of straw dust and dirt, he on the task of letting go his hatred.

  The mares and colts and other stallions in the stables were fidgeting. A horse fears the wind’s hiss because he fears snakes. It is in him, deep down, passed from sire to foal. So a foreigner had told Govran, who told me. ‘If you ask me, it is more likely they fear the sounds they cannot hear for the wind, such as a prowling wolf pack,’ Govran said, which seemed more likely to a young boy who thought a prince like Malo could not mistake the currents and tides of the sky for a creature which slides on its belly.

  I would get to three or four of the other horses after, if I could. But I loved Malo best, and when I was in his stall the world outside was as smoke dissipating on the draughts. It was Malo and me and the pig-bristle brush. Head to neck, chest, withers, then foreleg, all the way down to the knee and even the hoof. Now and then rubbing the bristles through the stag-horn comb to rid them of debris.

  Then his long back, side, belly, croup, and, finally, his hind legs all the way to the hoof. Each stroke teasing his skin’s oil to the surface until he gleamed like polished ebony. Then to his mane and tail with the comb, gentle as thought, yet careless of the half-moon’s passage across the sky, until they were as silk rippling in the gusts which squeezed their way between the stall timbers.

  Even Malo could not hold a grudge for long. Not with me. By the time I had finished, the glint in his eyes which had been indignation before was pride now. And there he stood, snorting and arrogant, living up to his name, which meant shining hostage, for he had belonged to my father’s enemy before. When I was still at the breast, he was taken in a raid along with other treasures, though in the end my father had liked him too much to sell him back.

  ‘A horse can be as vain as any warrior,’ Govran had said. Malo was vainer than any of my father’s men. But I liked him and he liked me. And he never once bit me. Not once.

  And the first I knew of the attack that night which would change my life for ever, was the scream.

  Grooming cloth in hand, I was almost done, stroking away the last of the dust left behind by the soft brush, wiping around Malo’s eyes and ears where he would not tolerate bristles. I was immersed in the task, relishing the gleam in his black coat just as my father’s hearth warriors indulged themselves when they worked a lustre into helmets and blades and scabbards and the leather of their sword belts. So that at first I had not caught the shrill note of a horn in the wind’s wild keening beyond the fragrant haven of the stables. It was Malo who told me. He snorted and lifted his head, ears flicking, sifting screams and a braying horn from the wind’s own lament.

  I smelled smoke in that same heartbeat and I knew our enemies had come. The horn sounded again and I ran out into the night, which was copper and bronze now because they had fired the grain store and the smithy. The cows in the byre lowed in fear and I saw shapes running through the snow. Saw fire in blades and helmets and was frozen beneath the spell of it.

  ‘Boy! Run, boy! To your father!’ It was Gwenhael, plunging through the mantle, sword in hand, his eyes wild with ale and his breath fogging as he yelled. ‘Go, boy!’ he bellowed at me, then turned his fur-clad mass towards a warrior who jabbed a spear at him. Gwenhael parried the strike before sheathing his sword in the man’s belly, but there were three more closing in on him, like wolves on a bear, and Gwenhael raised his steaming sword and roared his challenge. I watched him go down under a deluge of blades and insults and then I ran.

  Though not towards the hall and my father. I ran alongside the stab
les, as terrified by the whinnying and squealing of the horses as by Gwenhael’s killing, then I cut across the open ground in front of the barn, fleet as a hare over the fire-bronzed snow. The old smokehouse had been home to Hoel and his hawks since King Peredur’s backside warmed the oak throne of Benoic and I had never known the door to be locked. It was not locked now and it flew wide with a clump that had the birds screeching and flapping in their mews, straining at their leashes in mad excitement.

  ‘Who has come, boy?’ Hoel croaked, his curiosity the only thing staying his hand and the leather lure it gripped, which would otherwise have stung me for scaring the hawks. Though what the old falconer thought he would do with that lure against the men who were killing my father’s warriors, who could say? ‘Well, out with it, lad! Who is killing who?’

  ‘They are Claudas’s men,’ I said, knowing it without needing the proof of the King of the Wasteland’s stag banner or sight of Claudas himself in the flame-licked night. ‘I saw them kill Gwenhael,’ I admitted, ashamed for some reason.

  Hoel made a sound in his throat which I heard even with the hawks shrieking all around us. Behind him my father’s gyrfalcon was a fury of white trying to escape his perch, his shrill kee-errk, kee-errk piercing the musty gloom and his great wings causing the candles to gutter.

  ‘Well, what in the name of Taranis are you doing here, boy?’ Hoel asked, his head tilted in mimicry of one of his hawks so that he could pin me with his one eye. The other was a clot of cream amongst a mass of wrinkle and scar, thanks long ago to some fierce creature’s talons. A horrifying wound for a boy my age to behold, more horrifying still for the boy he had been to endure. Even so, the one-eyed apprentice had become master, and I was used to the horror of it.

  I watched Hoel’s back as the gusts from the half-open door where he stood peering out swathed me in the familiar scent of his sweat. In truth I liked the old falconer better than I liked my father and Hoel knew it and felt guilty for it. He also knew that my fondness for him and his birds might get me killed.