Lancelot

by Giles Kristian

  ‘King Claudas came in the night, like a wolf into the fold,’ my mother said, which roused a sneer from my father, who did not care for the inferred comparison of his people to sheep. His champion, Tewdr, and those other brave men who had fought and fallen deserved better than that.

  ‘Claudas will die,’ my father rumbled, which raised some half-hearted murmurs of agreement from the warriors of Benoic around me.

  ‘None of us can escape death, great king,’ the Beggar King said. ‘But let us not dwell on such dark matters now. You have sought my protection and shall have it until such time as you are ready to leave us. All are welcome here.’ He smiled at my mother. ‘We have few laws and I am no tyrant.’ He clapped his hands twice and from the back of the hall, where darkness still ruled, came forward a score of servants carrying jugs and cups. ‘Take your ease. Regain your strength. Drink and eat. Whatever I have is yours.’

  ‘Not while my people stand out there shivering in the mud,’ my father said.

  Balsant turned and nodded at our men, who nodded back in agreement though they must have been eager to wash away the sour taste of defeat with the Beggar King’s wine and ale.

  ‘As you say, lord king,’ the Beggar King said, then clapped his hands again and gestured at his servants to carry drink to those waiting outside. ‘All will be provided for. Now allow me to feed your family and loyal warriors,’ he said, gesturing at Balsant and the others. ‘And these two fine-looking young men who must be your sons, yes? The older one has your noble features, King Ban, and looks every inch a king-in-waiting.’ The Beggar King smiled and turned his gaze on me. ‘But this young prince has his mother’s fearsome beauty.’ He raised an eyebrow at my mother. ‘He has your piercing eyes, Queen Elaine. Your fire. There is no mistaking it.’

  My mother thanked our host for the compliment but I did not know what to make of his words and so frowned at him. A warrior like Derrien or Olier would surely take being called beautiful as an insult. And neither did I like hearing that I looked like my mother, while Hector apparently looked like a king. My brother was happy enough with it though, standing there in his frayed cloak and filthy trews, trying to look taller than he was.

  Servants wove amongst us with brass bowls of warm water and even dried our hands with linens after we had washed off the worst of the filth. Then they brought out boards of bread and cheese and honey and dried fruits, which we fell on like wolves to flesh. Not even Balsant or my father resisted. Decorum and pride all but abandoned now, they chewed and scoffed, shoving the food into their mouths as they moved off to one of the tables to talk privately with the Beggar King, leaving the rest of us to savour that simple bounty.

  ‘Well, we made it, lad,’ Govran said, grinning at me through a mouthful of ripe cheese.

  Olier came over and slapped Govran’s back. ‘We’ll get our strength back, buy horses from this king and ride back to Benoic. And if King Claudas is there drinking our wine from our cups, we’ll slaughter him like a hog. What do you say, Govran?’

  Govran washed the cheese down with ale then dragged an arm across his lips. ‘Let’s just enjoy being alive for a day or two, lad,’ he told the warrior and shook his head at me. ‘Young bloods. Always so eager to die, boy. Remember, there are plenty of ways to come across death, without going looking for it.’

  Olier shrugged and went off in search of someone who would swear oaths of vengeance over ale with him. I knew he would find a willing accomplice in Derrien.

  I admired Olier and in truth I enjoyed hearing him talk of paying back King Claudas in blood. That was the way it should be. I knew it. I even wondered if Govran had perhaps lost the courage he must have owned when he had fought shoulder to shoulder with my father.

  The world seems so simple to a boy.

  We ate and we drank and when my father had finished talking with the Beggar King we were shown to an area against the palisade on the east side of the town, where tents had been erected or emptied for my father’s people. We made ourselves as comfortable as we could, my mother and Balsant singing our host’s praises whilst inside they simmered at the indignity of it all.

  Tents and mud and fish. That would be my life for the foreseeable future. Tents, mud and fish. And Celice.

  I first saw her at the market on the north side of the town, two days after coming to the place. Revived by salty fish stew and eager to be away from my mother and father and the others, I had taken to exploring, which no one minded, if they even noticed when I left the cramped tent I shared with the dispossessed King, Queen and Prince of Benoic.

  ‘You will not venture outside the walls,’ my mother had said. ‘Promise me.’ I had sealed that promise with a kiss and that was that, I was free.

  Traders had set up simple stalls or spread their wares across skins laid out on ground which sloped gently up towards the dunes beyond the palisade and so was less muddy than the rest of the town. There were the usual leather goods – belts, shoes, horse harnesses and saddle gear – and wool in bales, bone-hilted knives and jars of oil and coloured glass beads and brass and copper brooches and iron spear heads, axe heads, bows and sheaves of arrows. There were folk selling horses and others selling goats or pigs, cattle, hens, or women for men’s pleasure, or a combination of any of these. It was such a confusion of goods that it was almost impossible to tell what a man or woman’s trade was. And yet compared with the markets I had visited before, there was not much of any quality on show.

  ‘Stolen, the lot of it,’ Govran told me later that night. ‘Poached and robbed and brought here to the land’s edge where this Beggar King has built a nest for thieves. The best of it, the olive oil and the good horse stock, gets shipped across the sea to Britannia. What’s left passes from one bandit’s hand to another and this so-called king takes a slice from every deal.’

  ‘Are men afraid of him?’ I asked. ‘Is that why they share with him?’

  ‘Afraid? No, lad. He doesn’t need men to fear him. Not when he’s got a ship. Two ships, as it turns out. And those ships carry the loot to Britannia. His wealth is his power, lad.’

  I didn’t know any of this that first time I saw Celice. I heard her before I laid eyes on her. I was watching a man mistreating a piebald mare, lashing her flank with the bridle she would not let him put on because he had not won her trust. She refused to keep still, and who could blame her?

  I had been about to offer to help, for I was sure I could get the bridle on her if I could find something to stand on, when I heard a song on the breeze. A song which my mother used to sing to me when she wanted me to go to sleep, about a hero from the forgotten times who fought and beat Balor, god of death, thus bringing his wife back to life. But even my mother had never sung it as I heard it being sung now, and I left the man and his mare and followed the voice, wriggling through a knot of men and women until I popped out of the throng like a bung from a flask.

  And there she was, sitting on a barrel in a long tunic of white linen, hugging her knees to her chest as she sang. Much older than I. Fourteen, perhaps. Fair-haired and pale-skinned and so pretty that just looking at her was almost painful. It seemed that my insides were rising on beating wings. Fire burned in my cheeks and scalp and I wanted more than anything for the girl to look my way, to see me amongst the crowd. At the same time there was an unexplained dread that I might catch her eye.

  ‘Have you ever heard a voice like what my Celice has got?’ a man, whom I took to be the girl’s father, challenged the gathering. ‘The only thing sweeter in all Armorica is this here cider, which is on its way to some great king in Britannia.’ He grinned and patted one of the barrels which were stacked beside him and guarded by a big-bellied man with a long-hafted axe, who looked bored, not seeming in the least affected by the girl’s singing. ‘Well, apart from these barrels here. They’re damaged, see?’

  The big man beside him smiled and tapped the cheek of his axe head, implying that the damage was no accident.

  ‘Can’t send damaged barrels to a king, can w
e?’ the trader said. ‘Which means I’ll have to sell them to you lot at a price that’ll see me and my girl starve, but what can I do?’

  Celice was singing still and I was staring still and her father was proclaiming the quality of the cider to the crowd, who were all but licking their lips, when all of a sudden that fair head turned and those blue eyes were looking at me. And that voice, far sweeter than cider could ever be, was singing to me. If I were the sparhawk I would have bated and been snarled by the jesses. But I was a boy and I did the only thing a boy could do.

  I ran.

  4

  Pelleas

  I LEFT IT a day, that my shame might subside, before returning to look for Celice again. And again she was singing, a livelier tune now, though her voice was even sweeter than I remembered, undulating like a finch in flight, melodious and bewitching. Again drawing a crowd to her father’s stall, though today he was selling tall clay jars full of olive oil from some far-off land. This time nothing was ‘as much like silk, as rich and healing as my fair daughter’s voice’. Nothing, that was, apart from the oil in those tall jars, which he had bought from a trader on his way to somewhere called Pyro’s Isle off the coast of Cambria in Britain. The Christian monks who dwelt on that craggy rock lived on prayers, more prayers and olive oil from the Greeks, apparently. But their next shipment would be a score of jars short.

  I stared and fidgeted and willed those blue eyes to look at me again and at one point I thought they did, but too fleetingly to be sure. And when her father was done with his business and Celice stopped singing, the dispersing crowd left me feeling so like a crab caught in a pool at low tide that I scuttled off again, cursing myself for a coward.

  For two days I stayed away from the market. I fed the sparhawk what meat I could bring her, now and then taking her out of the basket to get her used to me. I groomed Malo and I helped Govran clean and polish his saddle and tackle. I sat with Hector and watched him sharpen our father’s sword, and I accompanied old Meven the steward when he went to collect two skins of wine from the Beggar King’s own store, a small token of his esteem for my parents.

  But Celice’s voice was still in my ears. Her face still in my mind. So dawn of the third day saw me sliding in the mud and soaked by a thin drizzle as I set off to see Celice again.

  The market was busier than I had ever seen it. There seemed to be twice as many traders hawking their wares, inviting folk to examine their stock, or bartering with one another. An old man exchanging a pair of boots for a brace of dead hares and a small knife. A woman trading a necklace of amber beads to a dark-skinned man for two wine skins and a small copper coin. There were half a dozen of the Beggar King’s warriors threading the crowds this morning and some guarding a man who was weighing tin ingots on a set of brass scales. As I understood it, a ship had come in on the dawn tide, returning from Ireland, land of the Gaels, and the tin was part of her cargo.

  ‘He’ll be a proper king before long,’ I had heard my mother saying of the Beggar King to Hector, who had asked when we would return to Benoic to take back what was ours. ‘And when he is a proper king, we will persuade him to help us beat King Claudas.’

  I knew that tin was worth a great deal but even so I was shocked by how folk crowded round it now in the rain, so that the Beggar King’s men had to push them back with their spear shafts, yelling at them to keep their distance so that the business could be done.

  But I was not interested in tin. To me it was worthless compared with one glimpse of Celice. This time I would smile at her, I told myself. Perhaps I would even tell her that her singing was wondrous. The best I had heard in all my life.

  There was her father, still trying to sell his Greek oil and also a fine-looking helmet with a steel crest and cheek pieces. His bodyguard was a different man today, and there were three or four people admiring the helmet but I could not see Celice. Where was she? Surely her father should be peddling his lies, declaring that the only thing that shone more than his daughter was that helmet, which was of the Roman type, so said one of the men admiring it. Why was Celice not singing to draw customers in as she normally did?

  Did I have the courage to ask her father where she was? He would surely laugh at me. He would ask how I knew his daughter, and the truth was I did not know her. Had never spoken to her, nor knew if she would even recognize me, for I could not be sure our eyes had met. Not really.

  No, I would not ask after her. I would wander the market, the whole town if necessary, until I found her. And then I would tell her that I was a prince of Benoic and ask her to sing for me.

  Feeling brave and resolute, I turned away from the lying man and his Roman helmet, and that was when I saw the big guard with the axe, who usually stood watch over Celice’s father and the merchandise. He was standing by a large tent made of thick leather, which I presumed to be where Celice and her father lived. No doubt the man was guarding his master’s stock.

  Or … else … what if Celice was inside the tent? I was struck with a vision of her lying ill, which would explain why she was not helping her father this morning. I was walking towards the tent, my bare feet squelching in the cold mud and the big man staring at me.

  ‘Where is Celice?’ I asked him.

  ‘Who wants to know, boy?’ he said.

  ‘I do,’ I said.

  He spat into the mud. ‘And who are you, little man?’

  I thought about telling him the truth. Surely he would not look at me with such disdain when he learnt I was a prince. But Govran had warned me against telling anyone who I was, for we could not be sure who our friends were in this strange town.

  ‘I am …’ I began, then stopped. I could not say I was her friend, when it was not true. I thought hard. ‘Celice has a beautiful voice,’ I said.

  He grunted at that, which made my blood hot.

  ‘Your master will have to wait. She’s not to be disturbed,’ he said. ‘Now piss off, little man.’

  I stood there. Hating him. Not knowing what to do.

  ‘I said piss off,’ he growled, lurching at me with that big axe before straightening again at his post.

  Your master will have to wait. What did he mean by that?

  I walked off a little way, until screened by people and tents, then I doubled back, approaching the big tent from behind, where that big-bellied man could not see me. I had to know if Celice was in there. My biggest fear became the most likely explanation for Celice’s absence: that she was ill, perhaps even dying from some disease, but that maybe there was something I could do for her. Fetch her some of the wine which the Beggar King had given to my mother and father. Show her the sparhawk to cheer her. Something.

  There was a rent in the leather at the back of the tent, small enough that it might not have been noticed, yet big enough to put my eye to. I waited for two men laden with baskets to walk by, on their way to the shore to gather seaweed, most likely. I did not want to be seen peering into someone else’s tent. Not that anyone would take notice of me. The day was grey and a light rain was still falling and wasn’t everyone in this town a thief anyway? So Govran said.

  I heard a chime of laughter that could only have come from Celice and for some reason it hit me like a blow. Clearly she was not ill and so I crouched and closed one eye, putting the other to the tear, breathing in the smell of leather and pine resin.

  And I saw her. Her long hair and her left shoulder and the round swell of her breast, white in the gloom. White against the darker skin of the hand upon it, fingers splayed and pressing until the whole breast was covered and the man to whom the hand belonged grunted with satisfaction.

  ‘It’ll cost you another coin to touch the other one,’ Celice told him. ‘Two if you want to touch down there.’

  I pulled away from the tent, a churn in my stomach like protests against meat gone bad, and spun round. I saw a bent old crone watching me and she grinned and cackled through toothless gums. I ran away, slipping and sliding through the mud, burning with shame, the rain in my eye
s and the memory of what I had seen filling my mind. How could she let that man touch her like that? Why would she do it? Celice had betrayed me and so I ran, back past the men weighing the tin ingots, squeezing through a crowd which had gathered to watch a huge man performing feats of strength with a pair of anvils. And then I saw something which stopped me in my muddy tracks.

  Flame! I knew it was him. The black patch of fur on the white bib of his throat. The black sock which was longer on his right foreleg than his left. He recognized me too, was sitting there watching me even though he was drawing the attention of several men and women who no doubt saw a lustrous red pelt to be had. Then the fox turned and ran and so I ran after him.

  Weaving between stalls and tents. Jumping a selection of buckles and brooches spread across a cow hide. Round a stack of barrels and a rack upon which a deerskin was stretched for scraping. Between a man and woman who were yelling at each other. Past a gaggle of lewd, ill-dressed women who called out to me, laughing. The fox never slowed but was a fleeting dart of fire, the brush of his tail leading me like a burning brand.

  ‘Watch it!’ a man growled, because I had made him drop some firewood he was carrying.

  ‘What you been thieving, boy?’ a pockmarked warrior bellowed in my wake. Then another man made a grab for me but he would have had more luck catching smoke and I ran on, weaving in and out. Jumping guy ropes and pegs and slipping in the mud but not falling, then round the rumps of two tethered mares, just in time to see Flame flatten himself to slink under a tent’s hem.

  I slid to a stop, breathing hard. The tent was bigger than most of those around it. I came round to the entrance and saw that the flap was not fastened. There was a gap and beyond it the flicker of lamplight. I smelled the sweet pungency of smouldering herbs. Saw a faint wisp of smoke curling out into the grey day. I could not simply walk in. But neither could I do nothing, knowing that Flame was inside. Alive when I had thought I would never see him again.