Lancelot

by Giles Kristian

  ‘Good, isn’t it?’ Benesek said through a grin and I nodded as I handed the cup back to Pelleas. ‘But don’t let the others see you drinking it,’ he said, and I looked over at Melwas and Agga and the rest, who were too deep in ale to be worried what I was doing. It was a rare day when they were allowed to partake in a feast at the keep with the men. Perhaps the Lady was in generous mood, feasting King Uther’s men because of her relief at having her own man, Pelleas, back safely, for he had been gone longer than normal. Or else maybe she thought we ought not miss the opportunity to see the great Merlin with our own eyes and perhaps even hear what he or Uther’s warriors had to say about affairs in the kingdoms of Britain.

  Benesek turned back to Pelleas. ‘So. Any excitement?’ I assumed he was talking about Pelleas’s journey as guide and bodyguard to the Greek, Paulus, whom I could see telling the Lady all about his time at Tintagel, describing the famous high cliffs from the look of his reaching arms and wondrous expression. The Lady had of course been there many times, yet she seemed to be listening to the small, brown-skinned merchant with patience and interest.

  ‘Nothing worth getting Boar’s Tusk dirty for,’ Pelleas said, sipping the wine. Boar’s Tusk was the name of his sword, which was shorter than most swords I had seen, because he favoured stabbing rather than slashing ‘like a man cutting barley’, as he put it when teaching the other boys sword work. Neither Boar’s Tusk nor its scabbard were at Pelleas’s hip now though, having been left with the other men’s weapons in the shelter of the lean-to outside in accordance with the custom of the feasting hall when we had important guests. ‘But we may be called upon to fight before winter,’ Pelleas added in a low voice. ‘King Gruffyd ap Gwrgan has been sending war bands across the Hafren to test Dumnonia’s spears. As for the Saxons,’ he added – and at this he frowned and I could see he would have spat but for the press of bodies around him – ‘the Saxons push deeper into Caer Gwinntguic.’

  ‘The truce is broken?’ Benesek asked. Clearly this was worrying news, but all I could think about was that wine and how I wanted to taste it again.

  ‘King Deroch preserved the truce as best he could and longer than anyone thought possible,’ Pelleas said. ‘But with boatloads of land-hungry Jutes sailing up the Solent …’ He lifted his shoulders in a shrug and drank.

  ‘Who are the Jutes?’ I asked, resigning myself to the sad truth that I had drunk all the rich red wine I was going to that night.

  ‘Just another type of Saxon,’ Benesek rumbled.

  ‘But unlike those Saxons who have grown soft farming the land which King Deroch has allowed them to keep,’ Pelleas said, ‘these new men still have war in their veins. So now the Saxons who were at peace with Deroch are breaking the terms of their truce and threatening Caer Gwinntguic. And blood will follow. Sure as a bad head follows good wine.’

  Benesek grunted. ‘I wouldn’t mind some proper fighting for once,’ he said, pulling the forks of his long moustaches through a big fist. ‘A chance to earn war silver again.’ He lifted his own horn cup. ‘Instead of being paid in Greek wine and Sicilian oil for guarding merchants and teaching beardless boys how to use a blade without cutting off bits of themselves.’

  Pelleas must have sensed my eagerness to hear more about the wars in Britain and the peoples who threatened her kingdoms. ‘Don’t get all giddy over his talk of fighting, Lancelot,’ he said, nodding towards the other warrior. ‘Benesek wouldn’t trade this soft life. The shieldwall is for young men who have yet to learn how dangerous it is to be in one.’ He swept his cup through the smoky air. ‘Let some snot-nosed farmer’s son take a Saxon spear in the belly. Let the men of Dumnonia blunt their swords against Dyfed and Gwent.’ He shrugged those big shoulders of his. ‘We did our bit even before Uther reigned, when Ambrosius was king and Hengist’s hordes needed killing. And if the day comes when we have to make a shieldwall again, then so be it. But until that day, I’ll guard this island and keep merchants alive long enough to sell their wares beyond the Iron Gate. But most importantly,’ he said, lifting the cup, ‘I’ll drink their wine.’

  The two warriors banged their horn cups together and drank again.

  ‘So,’ Pelleas said, swiping wine from his moustaches with the back of his hand. ‘What’s Merlin doing here?’

  Benesek grimaced. ‘Damned if I know,’ he said. ‘But I don’t like it.’

  ‘Nor do I,’ Pelleas said, looking into his cup as if Merlin’s presence had soured its contents, as the tide of bodies around us shifted and the boys ushered the Greeks and Uther’s men closer to the herb-fringed dais, to give our guests the best view. Though as yet the only thing to see on the dais was a lonely stool.

  The murmur of men’s voices retreated and in its place flowed the bright sound of a lyre being plucked, its strings singing like the first spring meltwater questing over pebbles. The melody was tentative, seeking its way through the press of those who now turned towards the dais. Rising with the hearth smoke to taunt the rain-filled night beyond those Roman bricks and tiles.

  ‘We didn’t come to a death vigil! Faster!’ one of King Uther’s big-bearded men roared, perhaps drunk on mead or wine, but our warriors barked at him to hold his tongue and the man shrank into himself, flushing beneath his beard.

  But anyway, the player would not be rushed. I went up onto my toes, stretching to get a look at whoever was teasing those strings. For a moment, just a brief moment, I did not recognize her for she looked so different from the girl I knew. Then my breath caught. It was Guinevere. She sat upon a stool of dark polished oak, the lyre fashioned from lighter wood – sycamore perhaps – standing on her lap as she plucked the gut strings.

  Her dark hair was braided and coiled and pinned at the back of her head. Her lips were red, stained with a salve of alkanet root and ochre. Her eyebrows had been darkened with a mixture of soot and galena, but the most striking thing about her was her eyes. Blue pools in a green wood, painted with the powder of ground malachite stone. Ordinarily, without these dyes to accentuate them, her features were striking. Now her appearance staggered me, and though the melody which she drew from the lyre was slow and wistful, my heart was galloping in my chest.

  Guinevere. That night, standing there in the company of warriors, merchants, the Lady herself and the most famous druid in Britain, I realized that I was in love with Guinevere. I was not yet eleven years old.

  ‘A rare tune, this,’ Pelleas said, caught in the music’s spell, as were many of the warriors in that chamber. Their women too. Guinevere played the Lament of Adaryn, a tune we all knew, though it seemed, judging by the scarred and bearded faces around me, that the story never got any less sad the more men heard it. The Lament told of a young warrior called Kavan, who was called to war by King Gudavan’s drums just two days before he was to marry Adaryn, his childhood sweetheart. Kavan marched under Gudavan’s banners and stood his ground in the shieldwall against the king’s enemies. And there, in the heart of the blood fray and knowing what he stood to lose, Kavan fought like a demon, cutting men down by the score that he might return to Adaryn.

  The hack and hew. The ringing of Kavan’s sword in the death-filled day. The screams and moans of the wounded. The clamour of battle. Guinevere’s fingers told it all, dancing across those six strings now, nimble as the flames in the hearth. And as the music eddied and grew, she rocked her body back and forth in time with it, like a boat riding the waves.

  King Gudavan saw how well and bravely Kavan fought and how deadly was the young man’s sword and, the battle won, he invited Kavan to his feast table. An honour most men would crave. Yet Kavan declined the invitation, wanting only to return to his village and marry his love. To sheathe his battered sword and raise crops and children and grow old with Adaryn. King Gudavan told Kavan to go in peace and with the kingdom’s thanks, but in his chest the king’s heart burned with anger at the offence. So that no sooner had the young warrior turned his back than King Gudavan was plotting his revenge.

  ‘Trouble, la
d, that’s what women are,’ Pelleas growled under his breath as I stood there savouring the music as I had savoured Pelleas’s Greek wine.

  ‘It never stopped you,’ Benesek said.

  ‘That’s how I know,’ Pelleas said, earning a hiss or two from folk who did not want gruff talk breaking the lyre’s nectarous spell.

  Pelleas raised a hand by way of an apology, because Guinevere’s fingers were weaving the sad part of the tale now and we did not need a bard to sing the words to know it. Bone-tired from battle, his wounds barely clotted and King Gudavan’s victory feast far behind him, the young warrior Kavan was walking the drover’s path back to his village, the sun on his face and his heart light with joy. He sang as he walked, his voice as charming as a thrush’s, rehearsing the song he would sing to Adaryn that night at their wedding feast, and, nearly home now, he stopped to pick a handful of stitchwort, that Adaryn might weave those white flowers into her hair on this their wedding day.

  That was when the king’s men sprang from their concealment, knife blades flashing in the day, and murdered brave Kavan, cutting the young hero down beside the hedgerow flowers for his offence to King Gudavan.

  ‘I’ve never heard it played better,’ Pelleas admitted to me under his breath. The men and women in that chamber were enthralled. Tears glistened in warriors’ beards. Men had taken hold of their wives’ hands and held them tight as ships’ knots. But Guinevere, Guinevere held us all in her spell.

  The Lady stood to the side of the dais, dressed in a long gown of pale green linen cinched at her waist by a delicate gold chain. Her golden hair was glossed by flamelight whilst at her neck she wore a torc of twisted gold, its deer-head terminals meeting at her pale throat. Her face was painted in such a similar way to Guinevere’s – the red lips, the dyed eyes – that she must have applied the red ochre and crushed green malachite to Guinevere herself. And the Lady was beautiful. No one in that keep could have thought otherwise. And yet every eye was on Guinevere. Every ear drank in each honey-sweet note.

  We allowed Guinevere to bind us with the strings of that lyre, and then to pull us down into the sad depths. And thus she came to the end of the unhappy tale, her fingers slowing, her own eyes shining with tears, as Adaryn in her bridal dress searched the woods and heath beyond the village for sign of her true love.

  ‘Kavan will come,’ she tells one and all, the shepherd and the woodsman, the hare and the fox. ‘He promised to marry me. Swore neither spear nor sword could keep him from me. And we shall be wed.’

  Adaryn searches all the long day, never doubting she will meet her young man on his way home to her. Then, as dusk falls, she follows the mournful song of a thrush, whose music is usually as bright as summer wheat, and there by a hedgerow she finds her love. He is pale-skinned and cold to touch, looking up to the sky with those eyes which once looked at her with burning adoration. And in his hand he still clutches the stitchwort meant for her hair, holding the delicate white flowers tight even in death. A promise, perhaps, that they will still wed, though not in this life.

  ‘No sword nor spear kept him from you,’ sings the thrush who sits amongst the bramble, ‘but that knife, which pierces your young warrior’s heart. That knife which I have seen in the king’s own hand.’

  The king’s no more. Now the hateful blade is mine, Adaryn thinks, as she draws the knife from her young man’s still heart and sheathes its cold steel in her own warm breast.

  A collective catch of breath in the Lady’s keep then. Such a gasp as might draw a flame. Guinevere’s fingers slowing now. Is it finished? No. A few more gentle tugs of the strings. A few notes, sad as feast leavings, given now to us who were still hungry for more.

  When it was over, when the last note of that song had vanished with the smoke through the cracks in the roof, a heavy silence lay across the gathering. But for the flapping of the hearth flames you could have heard a mouse scrabbling in the floor rushes. Guinevere herself kept her head bowed, looking at the lyre on her lap as though making sure that none of those six strings yet had more to add to the tale.

  I just stared. I was not the only one. It seemed to me that half the men in that keep had just lost their hearts to Guinevere, never mind that she was only a child. She did not look like a child though. And in that stifling silence I resented all those eyes being on her. The Greek, Paulus, was wet-lipped with lust, or so it seemed to me. Uther’s men were like hounds with the scent of prey in their noses and Melwas and Agga and the other boys were wide-eyed and stupid-looking with infatuation. And I hated it.

  But what angered me most was Merlin. The druid’s eyes were in Guinevere like fish hooks. He stood in the shadowed alcove near a stout door beyond which stone steps led up to the Lady’s chamber, so that in his black clothes one might not have known he was there. But I knew and so did the Lady, who was watching him watching Guinevere.

  Not that Guinevere seemed aware of anyone as she stood and turned, those sad strings still and quiet now, and laid the lyre on the chair. At the edge of the dais she looked out across the gathering, catching my eye for two heartbeats, then stepped down from the platform and went to the Lady, disappearing from my sight.

  ‘Aye, she’ll be trouble, that one,’ Benesek said, then shouted to Geldrin to fetch him another jug of wine, while Pelleas was looking at me with sympathetic eyes.

  ‘Go on, then,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to stand here listening to us all night.’

  The smell of roast meat and of fish and chive broth was in the room now. We would be eating soon. If I threaded my way to Guinevere, we might sit and eat together as we so often did on the rocks overlooking the Western Sea, sharing an apple or some bread and cheese we had saved from breakfast. But Melwas and the others were already crowding round her, so that I knew I would run their gauntlet of jibes. Bad enough that Guinevere should witness my humiliation, but I would answer insults with fists and my inevitable beating would prove more embarrassing still.

  Pelleas and Benesek were discussing Uther’s gift and when would be the right time to slaughter and salt the old bull, that would be eating grain better saved for the other animals were it not given to the butcher’s knife. So I went, squeezing between the men and women of Karrek and past Uther’s big men, who stank of their damp woollen cloaks, and then I wriggled between Baralis and Edern, who were so deep in talk of tin prices that they paid me no mind. But then I saw dirty bare feet in the floor rushes and above those feet black trews, and I looked up into a brown-skinned face that made me start.

  ‘Hello, boy,’ said Merlin.

  It was a most striking face. Fierce. Intelligent. Cruel.

  ‘Lord,’ I said, wondering if there was some particular way to address a druid. I had never met one before. There were only a handful of druids left in all of Britain and Ireland, though there had once been many. Long ago, the druids kept the secrets of the Dark Isles. They communed with the gods, interpreted dreams, read the future and advised kings. But when the Romans came to these lands they strove to stamp out the order by trapping and killing the last surviving druids in a great slaughter on the island of Mona. That slaughter had been done four hundred years since, and yet here I was standing before the druid who men said whispered into the ear of the High King himself.

  ‘Do you miss your home, boy?’ Merlin asked. His thick dark brows angled back from his eyes like eagles’ wings and his sunken cheeks were pools of shadow in the flame-lit room. His beard, which had been wisped and frayed by the sea wind before, was oiled and jutted from his chin like a spear blade now.

  ‘Do you cry for your mother and poor Hector? Do you whine into your pillow while Pelleas snores like a hog?’

  ‘No,’ I said, wondering how he knew that Pelleas snored loud enough to make the thatch quiver above our heads. I did miss my home of course. I missed the hawks and falcons and Malo my father’s proud black stallion, but I was not going to give this stranger the satisfaction.

  ‘Then do you pine for the power that might have been yours one day,
had your family not been murdered?’

  A stranger he might be, yet there was something familiar about his eyes. ‘You know my brother’s name?’ I said. I had not liked hearing him speak it.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I knew your mother and father. Queen Elaine was mean-spirited and greedy, while Ban was a drunkard and a cuckold.’ One of those eagle-wing eyebrows stretched itself. ‘We do not choose our parents, boy.’

  It was as if he had struck me. Hard. Then seeing anger in me he raised a placating hand, the palm of which was etched with a triskele, the three conjoined spirals drawn in green ink. ‘None of all that is your fault, boy,’ he said, ‘before you fly at me like some savage hawk.’ His eyes flashed. ‘That is to say a hawk that can fly.’

  Another insult? On top of the last? And what did he know of my sparhawk? Why this man was goading me, or how he knew the things he did, I could not say, but I did know that the best thing would be to walk away from him.

  ‘Wait, boy,’ he said before I had taken a step.

  I waited. Wondering if my legs would obey me if I did try to walk away. There was something about this man, something familiar and yet something which sent a chill up my arms and to the back of my neck, and I wondered if he were working some spell on me right there and then, some magic which bound me to that spot on the keep’s rush-strewn floor when I so wanted to be anywhere else.

  ‘You are the boy who saved Guinevere, aren’t you?’ he said.

  I neither nodded nor spoke, just looked into his dark eyes. Outside, the rain was flaying the night. Now and then a keening gust found its way in through the old stonework, flaring the hearth flames and spitting rain into the keep.