Carefully, slowly, I pushed the flap aside. And, filling my chest as though breathing in courage, stepped into the tent.
Within, the smoke was thick and I coughed, wafting it away, my eyes adjusting to the darkness at the centre of which a lamp flame burned tall and steady. Not enough to light the interior but enough to reveal her face.
‘Hello, Lancelot,’ she said. This golden-haired woman. This Lady who looked like we imagine the goddesses Epona and Macha to look, serene and wise and beautiful.
‘Hello,’ I said, not even thinking to ask how she knew my name.
There were dried plants hanging from the roof beam as well as strange objects: little horses and birds and people, too, made of braided reeds and grass. They swayed gently in the small draughts which snuck through the gap I had left in the door flap.
‘What can I do for you, son of Ban?’ she asked, leaning forward on her stool so that even more of her face was revealed.
I looked down at Flame. The fox sat beside her stool, looking at me with those amber eyes. Watching me.
‘He’s my fox,’ I said.
The golden Lady raised an eyebrow, the curl of a smile touching her lips. ‘Is he now?’ she said.
I wondered why the creature had not come to me but still sat beside this stranger. Had he forgotten all the times I had fed him from my own plate?
‘His name is Flame,’ I said.
‘It is a good name,’ the Lady said. ‘Now tell me, how fares your sparhawk? You’re not overfeeding her, are you? Thinking to make up for her starving before?’ She lifted her chin towards the entrance flap. ‘When you were out there in the wilds together.’
‘How do you know I have a sparhawk, Lady?’ I asked her.
She almost shrugged. ‘I hear her crying in that basket. I know a sparhawk’s voice when I hear it.’ She smiled and there was warmth in it. ‘And I share your affection for such remarkable creatures, Lancelot,’ she said.
‘Her tail feathers are bent,’ I said. I felt the need to confess it, for it was my fault. ‘From being in the basket.’
The Lady nodded. ‘You must dip them in hot water,’ she said. ‘Hot, not boiling. And not too long. Say … the time it would take you to put on your shoes.’ She looked down at my bare feet. ‘If you had any.’
She was teasing me.
‘She’ll hate me,’ I said, imagining the bird’s furious shrieks and glaring eyes as I immersed her tail in scalding water.
‘Have you manned her?’ the Lady asked.
‘No,’ I admitted.
She nodded. ‘Then what have you to lose? Sooner done the better. When she flies true again she will know it is because of you. Not that she will thank you, of course. Sparhawks are never our friends. But she’ll know it.’
I did not know what to say. I looked at Flame. The fox looked up at the golden Lady and made a guttural chattering sound, at which the Lady produced a dead vole from an earthen jar and dropped it into Flame’s open jaws. The fox chewed and crunched, the sound filling the smoky, herb-scented tent.
‘So you will do it? With the hot water?’
‘Yes, Lady,’ I said.
‘Good.’ She sat back on the stool, her face retreating into shadow. ‘So, for how long will Benoic’s king reside in this stinking place?’
I shrugged. ‘King Claudas attacked our home. We have nowhere else to go.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said. I thought that a strange thing for her to say and suspicion gnawed at me. What if this golden Lady was our enemy? I supposed she might have gained Flame’s trust with tidbits. Voles and rabbits and such. But she had not earned my trust and I knew I should leave. Knew I should not have entered her tent in the first place.
Then the entrance flap was pulled aside and light flooded the interior and I turned to see a huge man standing there, swathed in a damp fur, his face all beard and frown.
‘This him?’ he said.
And I did not wait to find out who he was but ran for the gap, slipping past him before those big hands could grab hold of me.
Then I was out in the day and running again. Back through the mud and the rain. Back to my people.
We had been guests of the Beggar King for nine nights and this night we were to be feasted. Every one of us who had fled our home and survived the march north had been promised a banquet at our host’s expense.
‘His expense now but ours later,’ my mother had pointed out, but even thoughts of the debt we would owe the Beggar King could not dampen the excitement which seemed to have the dispossessed of Benoic buzzing like bees in a hive. Men and women scrubbed their clothes and combed their hair and wore whatever finery – necklaces, rings, buckles and brooches – they had not yet exchanged for food or wine or anything else which could make their new lives more comfortable.
‘Welcome to my table,’ the Beggar King announced as our dispossessed flooded into his hall, pushing down the sides and into every space between the tables. Warming hands above lamp flames. Burning with shame, resentful of those who had not suffered as they had, yet expectant of alms all the same and ravenous. ‘Tonight, you will all sleep soundly and with full bellies,’ our host said. ‘This is my gift to you in honour of our friendship.’ He spread his arms and smiled. ‘Sit, good people of Benoic. Take your ease. Smile and laugh and put your trials from your minds.’
There was not much laughing, yet a murmur did fill the hall as we crammed into the benches, the warriors of Benoic sitting together near their king, their wives and children and the rest sitting where they could. I squeezed between Govran and Derrien, opposite my father and mother and Hector and Balsant. I was near crushed between those men but I managed to put the sparhawk’s basket under the table with the latch door facing me so that I might feed her some meat should we get some.
She screeched at the clatter and flurry as men put their spears, axes and swords on the rushes nearby, along with whatever belongings they had not trusted to leave in their tents. You are screeching now but wait until I dip your tail in scalding water, I thought, remembering the golden Lady’s advice. I had not seen the Lady again nor told anyone about her. Nor had I mentioned Celice, of course, but then who would I tell? I would rather forget about her. And especially what I had seen through the hole in her father’s tent.
Ki-ki-ki-ki! cried the sparhawk in her dark nest. I wondered if the golden Lady could hear her now, wherever she might be. And I wondered if Flame was by her side still, or if he had vanished again, leaving her as he had left me.
‘Keep an eye on the bird, lad,’ Derrien said, leaning on me because he was already into his third cup. He was the one who had first noticed the sparhawk’s broken tail feathers and it crossed my mind that if Derrien knew about hawks he might help me with her tail and with her manning in the days to come. For surely old Hoel’s work was undone now and she would have gone back to her wild self. ‘This whole town, if you can call it a town, is teeming with outlaws and cut-throats,’ he said. ‘The swill of a dozen other places. The leavings of the civilized world.’ His words slewed one into another. ‘Mark me, boy. Any one of them would kill for a bird like her and the silver she’d fetch, even with her gnarled tail feathers.’
‘I would not let anyone take her,’ I said. He nodded and scrubbed my head with a hand even as I pressed my legs against the wicker basket beneath the table, fearing that some seaweed harvester or one of the lewd and salacious women I had seen about the place might be crawling unseen on hands and knees to take the sparhawk from me.
She was still shrieking in the cramped dark. Needful of meat. We could all smell the pottage warming over the hearth and after the lean pickings of the last days our stomachs clenched for whatever steamed in those cauldrons. But the hawk’s wailing might have been fear too, because a din rose in the hall now as folk sailed on rivers of wine. I was allowed ale and had emptied one cup and now Govran half filled my cup from his own, and I felt like a man. Truly I was no longer an eight-year-old boy but a warrior of Benoic.
Ale makes
fools of us all, young and old and everyone in between.
I felt the flush it had brought to my cheeks and perhaps it made me brave, as well as foolish, because I was thinking of talking to my father and telling him about the golden Lady. She had known me. Had known I was King Ban’s son. So perhaps my father knew her, too. Certainly anyone who had met her would remember it, of that I was sure.
But before I summoned the voice to call across the table, aiming as I was for a gap in my parents’ conversation, the Beggar King commanded our attention. He jumped nimbly up onto a bench between Reunan the potter and his wife Briaca and called for his servants to bring out some sea-smelling dish which was his particular favourite and would take the edge off our hunger in order that we might fully savour the forthcoming meal.
‘My lord king. Men of Benoic,’ the Beggar King said, gesturing at his servants to attend to the menfolk first, ‘if my wine has revived you, if my ale has lifted you from despair, wait till you taste the moules and you will see why we live here on the land’s edge!’ His own warriors cheered this, raising cups to their lord and to us too, as the twenty servants, each holding a steaming, cloth-bound clay bowl, spaced themselves evenly between the warriors who sat at our table salivating into their dirty beards.
Govran looked over at his wife Klervi on the next table, and she gave him such a tender smile as made my chest tighten, and I looked at my mother, who was filling my uncle’s cup with wine. ‘Ever had mussels, lad?’ Govran asked me. I shook my head and Govran grinned, eager to see what I would make of the juicy-looking flesh inside those gaping, blue-black shells. The aroma itself had my head spinning. Butter and wine. Parsley and onion. I wondered if the sparhawk would eat this strange bounty from the sea. Hunger would broaden her tastes, I thought. Or else she would have to wait for whatever meat was in that bubbling pottage over the hearth. Though I knew what she really needed was raw meat.
No sooner had the servants placed the first clay pots on the table than our warriors were raiding them, grabbing the steaming mussels, digging them out with filthy fingers or using the shells themselves as pincers to grip them before shoving them into their mouths, all slurping and hooming with pleasure and blowing on hot fingers. Juices running through beards. Grins. Laughter. A frenzy of eating, and even my father fell to the food with savage relish, in that moment looking like himself again.
I reached for the pot in front of Derrien and something hot whipped across the bare skin of my arm. Blood. I looked up and saw the blade tear free of Derrien’s throat. Saw the servant’s gritted teeth as he turned and stuck the blade in the man beside Derrien.
Death was in the hall.
Our warriors could not get out from the table fast enough, could not grab their weapons from the floor. Most had their throats cut while they fiddled with the moules, bled out with the food still in their mouths, for every servant had brought steel to the table.
‘No! No!’ my father roared, throwing one of the Beggar King’s men back with a sweep of his arm, heedless of the knife jutting from his shoulder. Then he drew his sword and climbed out from the bench.
‘Run, boy,’ Govran croaked, his throat half ripped out and spraying gore. Then a warrior thrust his spear into the groom’s back, driving him forward onto the table.
‘No!’ I heard my uncle bellow and I looked back across that table and saw them cut my mother’s throat.
She clawed at the gash as though she could close that horrible wound, her eyes wide with terror.
Reunan the potter, his wife Briaca and their son Tudi were slumped on their bench. Govran’s wife Klervi was screaming, clutching the hilt of the knife in her chest, and Meven, my father’s old steward, was looking up at the roof, a savage grin sliced into the gristle beneath his chin. All around me men, women and children were being slaughtered and amongst that horror I saw the Beggar King standing there, picking moules from a pot and popping them into his mouth.
‘Balsant! Balsant!’ my father bellowed as he held three warriors at bay, scything his great sword at men who knew they were unworthy to be killed by it. Olier was behind him and cut a man down, and two of my father’s best men were with them, still fighting hard. ‘Here, boy! To me!’ my father yelled, beckoning me with a hand even as he put a man down in the rushes.
A hand gripped my neck, the fingers burrowing into the tendons and flesh so that I was caught like a fish in an eagle’s talons. I saw the knife coming. Saw flames reflected in the steel. I will walk to the afterlife holding my mother’s hand, I thought.
The man grunted and staggered forward and Hector chopped at him again, his face a vision of terror. ‘To Father,’ he shouted, and we scrambled up onto the bench and across the table, as everyone we knew died around us and the air took up the startling, iron stink of fresh blood.
‘My sons!’ said the King of Benoic, thrusting his sword into an open mouth and hauling it back. ‘Don’t be afraid, boys,’ he growled. ‘It is only death.’
Olier went down, skewered by three spears. The others were dying too.
‘Balsant!’ my father roared, spittle lacing his dark beard, his fury ruling him. He was a lord of war and did not know how else to be.
Then my uncle came.
‘Brother!’ the king said.
Balsant barrelled Hector and me aside and thrust his sword into his brother’s stomach. Enough muscle behind it so that the blade burst from the king’s back. From my father’s back.
Hector shrieked and flew at our uncle but one of the Beggar King’s men speared him and he fell to the floor, clutching the shaft that was in him, mewling like a child.
Balsant stepped back, all grimace and tears as one of the treacherous servants came for me with a knife, but my father stumbled over and cut him down before dropping to his knees before me, his wounds spilling blood, his paling face level with mine. I looked into his eyes. Right into his eyes. The first and last time.
Thuds and grunts all around us and now the Beggar King’s men were falling. Arrows streaking through the smoke which was being drawn towards the open door. Warriors coming into the hall, loosing bows and hurling spears, and one of them coming at my father. No. At me! He loomed in the flamelight, his mail shirt and helmet shining.
‘King Ban’s boy,’ this warrior said, glancing from my father to me, holding his iron-rimmed shield between me and the melee of fighting men. It was the same man I had seen at the entrance of the golden Lady’s tent. The one who had tried to grab me. He glanced at the Beggar King’s men, who had either thrown themselves at his companions or closed around their lord to protect him. ‘You’re coming with me, boy,’ he said.
I looked at my father, who was dead though his eyes were open and he knelt still.
‘Bring him, Pelleas.’ A woman’s voice. I looked round to see her standing in the doorway. Golden hair tied back. A green gown and a wolf pelt about her shoulders. ‘Bring him,’ the Lady told the shining warrior. He went to grab me but I slipped his grasp for the second time and dived under the table, crawling through the cut grass and reeds to the sparhawk. I sat in the dark, my arms wrapped round the wicker basket, my cheek pressed against it as steel sang and men screamed.
‘Come, Lancelot. You’re safe with me.’ The golden Lady was peering under the table at me while the big warrior growled at her that they must go and go now.
I did not move.
‘If you do not come with me they will kill you,’ she said. ‘Like they killed your mother and father.’
And my brother, I thought.
Still I did not move but clung to that basket like a shipwrecked boy holding fast to a floating timber. Then the golden Lady gestured at the big warrior, who nodded and dragged the bench back and bent to peer at me under the table. All beard and growl.
‘Bring him, Pelleas,’ the Lady said.
And so Pelleas did.
It was my second time fleeing into the night, running from death. Not that I was doing the running myself. Pelleas had slung me over his shoulder like a sack of grain
and was plunging through the mud. Long strides in the dark. Tents and workshops, men and women and their wind-whipped flames all a blur as I struggled for the breath which Pelleas’s shoulder drove from me with every stride. I clung on to the wicker basket and its fierce-eyed occupant as if holding on to life itself.
There were fewer than twenty warriors running with us, not enough to fight the Beggar King’s men who pursued. And yet I knew that the man carrying me, and his companions, would fight to the death for the golden Lady. Two already had and even now lay in that bloody hall with my slaughtered family and all those sons and daughters of Benoic.
Mother! The terror of it filled me. Swamped me like a black tide and I slipped away into some dark place inside myself.
The coolness of ring mail on my skin. The iron smell of it and the stench of the grease which had been rubbed into it, and the old leather stink of the baldric which I grabbed with one hand now, suddenly back in the savage world. I could see but little, knowing only that we ran down to the sea.
We clumped onto a wooden boardwalk that was treacherous with slime, and I saw two of Pelleas’s companions slip and fall, cursing, but Pelleas kept his feet. Then thick mud again, spattering my face and the basket which I somehow clung to still and which was banging against the warrior’s backside. Then we passed through the north gate, the sentries’ challenges loud in my ears, and Pelleas’s boots were no longer sinking, because we were running across rock. A sea mist had rolled in and was rising up towards the palisade and the men chasing us, and I was certain that the golden Lady had summoned that sea fog with some powerful magic.
Up a grassy hill, down a sandy path. Splashing through a pool brimming with slick weed. Now uneven rock which looked pink in the moonlight, Pelleas never losing his footing. Never coming close to falling or dropping me. Now thick bristling grass. Now shingle. The bark of a cormorant disturbed into flight. The breath of the waves reaching up the shore. The sparhawk screeching in fury and sandpipers scattering up from their scrapes on either side.
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