Lancelot

by Giles Kristian

  ‘When you have pulled your nose out of things which are none of your business, follow me,’ Merlin said, stepping back into the rain. I hurried after him.

  Into the keep, the smoke stinging my eyes after the cold night air. Up the worn stone steps which I had last climbed after winning the island foot race. Only this time I was even more nervous than I had been then, because I knew I had somehow been drawn into things I neither understood nor thought I should understand. And yet the dread gnawing at me as I followed this bird creature up the winding passage was as nothing compared with the horror that filled me when, Merlin having rapped on the door with his staff, we entered the Lady’s chamber.

  Smoke drawn by the open door engulfed me and I tried to swallow the cough which snagged in my throat, but spluttered and choked instead, swiping at the sage- and cedar-scented fog as I peered into the room. It was dark. As dark as the night outside, being lit only by three small pottery lamps which must have been filled with expensive olive oil, for they did not give off the fish stink like the lamps in the main chamber downstairs. By this frail light I saw the girls of Karrek, eight of them sitting cross-legged on pelts spread across the floor boards, their hands clutched in their laps and the whites of their eyes glowing in the dark.

  Guinevere was there but she, like the others, was looking at Merlin, and then Merlin’s slave Oswine loomed in front of me and his eyes were hard and cold and he did not look befuddled by drink now as he snatched the sack out of my hand and walked off with it.

  ‘Lancelot, what are you doing here?’ It was the Lady. She was standing opposite us though I had not seen her until now.

  ‘I brought the boy,’ Merlin answered before I could summon a reply. I just stood there, my long hair soaked through and water dripping from my cloak’s hem onto the floor with a rhythmic tap.

  The Lady did not look happy about it but she said nothing, and perhaps she too was awed by the druid in his coat of crow and raven feathers, his necklace of beaked, empty-eyed skulls and his wreath of rotten bird’s feet. He was not a big man and yet he seemed so in that smoke-hazed dark, and the girls sitting in a tight knot on the floor instinctively drew together, seeking safety within the group.

  ‘Shut the door,’ Merlin told me and so I did, and the moan of those old iron hinges might as well have been my own lament, for at that moment I would have rather been outside in the pouring rain and up to my ankles in mud than in that room with unseen magic eddying around me.

  ‘Is she ready?’ Merlin asked the Lady.

  The Lady nodded.

  ‘Did she drink it all?’ the druid asked and again the Lady nodded.

  ‘Keep her safe, Merlin,’ she warned him, but the druid dismissed her concerns with a flutter of fingers and walked over to the girls, planting the butt of his staff on the floor with a thud. He stood perfectly still, looking down at them, his feather-cloaked back to me, and I did not know what I was expected to do and so edged backwards until I felt the stone wall of the lady’s chamber through the damp wool of my cloak and tunic.

  ‘Stand, Guinevere,’ Merlin said. ‘I have come to see if you really do have the gift.’

  Guinevere looked to the Lady, who nodded that she should do what the druid asked, and so Guinevere stood and the other girls shuffled apart to let her through. Merlin nodded over to Oswine, who had taken a skin drum from Merlin’s sack and now sat with his back against the Lady’s bed with the drum held vertically on his thigh. In his right hand he gripped some animal’s leg bone, perhaps from a fox or small dog. And with that bone Oswine began to beat the drum.

  Merlin pulled the pin from his snake brooch and swung the cloak of feathers off his shoulders while kicking aside the floor skins. He bent and placed his gnarled ash staff on the floor, then took Guinevere’s hand and pulled her towards him, holding her against his chest as he threw the cloak of feathers around them both.

  The room was smoky and dark and I was two spear-lengths from Guinevere and yet I thought I saw that same look in her eyes that I had seen on the day of the shipwreck, when she must have felt Arawn’s claws in her, dragging her down, the god trying to claim her for the underworld. But if I saw it at all it was gone one breath later as she and Merlin closed their eyes.

  The drum beat was fast and even, a relentless rhythm that Oswine beat out with that leg-bone tipper, so that I knew that the Saxon was not drunk at all now and wondered if Merlin had used some magic to cure him of the effects of the mead. Either that or Oswine had only been pretending to be out of his tree earlier, which begged the question, why?

  Wrapped in black feathers and in the ceaseless beat of the hide drum, Merlin and Guinevere swayed now, like a ship’s mast in a wind-driven sea. The Lady took a bundle of smouldering herbs from a brass dish and went about the room with it, sweeping it this way and that before her. When she came to me she held the tightly bound herbs in front of my face so that the smoke thickened and curled towards me and I found myself breathing deeply of that white smoke as I had seen the girls do. After a while the smoke thinned slightly and curled upwards and the Lady said nothing but moved on, bending to do the same to Oswine, though he seemed not to even see her, so lost was he in the beating of his drum.

  Smoke from a hearth fire will usually rise into the thatch, but this herb smoke quested around the Lady’s chamber in wispy white tendrils, as though seeking something, and I wondered if this was magic too. Some spell of Merlin’s or the Lady’s. Or even if that smoke was the spirit of some god moving amongst us, called to this place by a druid who men said carried within him the lost knowledge of Britain. And yet when I looked at that feather-shrouded man what I felt more than awe, more than fear or reverence, was hatred. I did not know what he was doing with Guinevere under that druid cloak but I knew nothing good could come of it. I even hoped that some war band of far-venturing Saxons would come ashore that very moment, and that the clash of steel would break this spell. I wished that Oswine would be overcome with drunkenness again and spew his guts over that drum and end its relentless beating. I hoped that Guinevere would resist whatever enchantment the druid wove.

  But no enemies attacked Karrek. And Oswine did not puke but kept drumming. And Guinevere journeyed.

  I fly above wood and meadow, east towards the far-off pale glow which makes a dark and ominous horizon of hill and forest, a black realm where gods could roam unseen by men.

  East towards the light which rises like a slow but inexorable tide, seeping into the night. Too little moonlight to see by. No snow on the ground to brighten the world, and so I fly on towards the dawn.

  The hoot of an owl follows in my wake. A vixen’s screech cuts blade-like through the breeze. Some unseen creature snaps a twig in the oak wood below me but I fly on, beating into the current, the stroke of each downbeat moving my wing tips forward and downward. I feel I am an old raven, full of knowledge and craft and sorrow too, for my lost soul mate, whose absence is a dull ache in my beating breast.

  Two bats flit away, tumbling down to a hedgerow. There are no other creatures on the wing and I fly on, thinking that she will not come. That she cannot. I could not journey at her age. Or, perhaps I could. It was long ago and thought is fogged now by the needs of the bird.

  Above me, the cloud rips itself apart and in the sudden flooding moonlight I see something on the hillside below. I fly down and land beside the skeletal remains of a sheep carcass. I flap and sidle and hop closer, my head twitching this way and that, looking for danger in the silver glow, then peck between two gleaming ribs for a scrap of tough flesh. But there is nothing here for me and I voice my irritation then crouch low and spring into the air, beating my black wings, climbing back into the night sky.

  Then some ancient instinct strikes and I swerve and beat hard. I roll with the breeze as a black shape bursts up at me, its wings brushing mine as I veer away, its voice a rasping ‘karh-karh-karh’. Up I climb, my old heart thumping, and this crow climbs with me, young and wild and unafraid.

  It is she. I know it.
Up and up we climb, jostling in the cold night, she cawing with the thrill of it as we circle, owning the sky. Black feathers against the black night, while our brothers and sisters huddle in their cosy roosts. We cavort, unburdened of the laws of men. Unbound and untamed.

  Free as gods.

  They were no longer swaying with the beat of the drum. The feather cloak had fallen away and now lay on the floor beside them, and Merlin clutched Guinevere by her shoulders, his hands like claws digging into her flesh. The druid’s eyes were closed but Guinevere’s were half open, though they were rolled up into her head so that only the whites showed, and I shuddered to see this because I knew that wherever Guinevere was, she was no longer here in the Lady’s chamber with me. Her mouth was opening and closing, yet she made no sound, and Oswine kept beating his drum, and the girls sitting on the floor stared with wonder and horror and perhaps even jealousy.

  Behind me, the door creaked open and I turned to see Pelleas come quietly into the room, his shaven head glistening with rain and beads of water shining in his beard. He moved up to my shoulder and leant down so that his wine-sour breath was hot against my cheek. ‘Been looking high and low for you,’ he hissed. ‘What are you doing up here?’ He looked up at Merlin and Guinevere and touched the iron of his belt buckle for protection against whatever magic was taking place in that gloomy, smoke-filled chamber. ‘Thought I told you to stay away,’ he growled. He did not say whether he meant from Merlin or Guinevere but I supposed in that moment it amounted to the same thing.

  Now it was the Lady’s turn to hiss at Pelleas, who frowned and straightened, his eyes, like mine, fastening on the druid and the girl whose flesh-and-blood-made bodies were before us though their souls might be soaring with the gods for all I knew.

  I realized that this was what Merlin had meant when he said he was going on a journey. Wherever he was roaming now, it seemed that Guinevere was his travelling companion, and that soured my guts.

  The Lady muttered something under her breath and I looked over at her, wondering what part, if any, she played in the strange sorcery. Her eyes were not on Merlin but on Guinevere and only Guinevere, and there was something in the Lady’s face that had my heart racing, pounding almost in time with Oswine’s drum. She was afraid for Guinevere. She was afraid and that meant that wherever Merlin had taken Guinevere, it was not a safe place – for a druid perhaps, but not for a girl who was not yet twelve years old.

  I wanted to call out, to tell Merlin to stop. And if he would not, to beg the Lady to beckon them back from wherever they wandered. I looked round at Pelleas, who must have read my thoughts for his eyes hardened and he gave a slight shake of his head. I swung my gaze back just as Guinevere threw back her head and her bare throat gleamed white and her eyes shone white and her whole body was shaking now, her flat chest heaving, her hands flapping at her sides like fish pulled into the bilge. There were bubbles and spume on her red lips and there were tears on her cheeks, glistening in the lamplight.

  I could not bear it any longer.

  ‘No,’ Pelleas growled, his big hand fastening on my shoulder, and just then there came a roaring, hissing, clacking din, which had us looking at the walls and the roof above us. The girls fingered hare’s foot charms, knot amulets or sprigs of dried hawthorn, seeking the protection of these talismans against whatever indignant spirits whirled in the night beyond those stone walls. To me it sounded as if some angry god was hurling handfuls of stones against the Lady’s keep, but neither Merlin nor Guinevere seemed to notice the commotion, so bound up were they in their spell.

  ‘It’ll be over soon,’ Pelleas gnarred under his breath.

  But I wanted it to be over now. My blood, which had earlier run cold in my veins, now gushed hot. It flooded my limbs, demanding movement, keening for action even as Pelleas’s strong arm held me to the spot.

  Guinevere made a whimpering, moaning sound and her legs almost buckled but Merlin’s hands still gripped her shoulders and I saw the strain in his arms as he held her upright. And I could watch no more.

  I broke free of Pelleas and threw myself at Merlin, my shoulder striking his side, knocking the breath from his body and sending him staggering so that he hit the wall and crumpled to the floor.

  ‘No!’ the Lady screeched, stepping towards the druid, but then she stopped, her hands over her own red lips and her eyes blazing.

  I went to take hold of Guinevere but Pelleas took hold of me instead and this time there would be no escape.

  ‘You damned fool,’ the warrior growled into my ear. His shield arm was around my neck, clamped so tightly that I could barely breathe and I thought he meant to strangle the life out of me.

  Released from the spell, Guinevere looked this way and that, her hands clenched at her sides, knuckles glowing white. She seemed not to know where she was or who we were, and I tried to call out to her, to tell her that she was safe, but I could get no words past Pelleas’s chokehold.

  ‘What have you done, Lancelot?’ the Lady said. She took Guinevere’s hands in her own and whispered to her, and Guinevere nodded, coming back to herself. Oswine was helping Merlin to his feet.

  Satisfied that Guinevere was safe, the Lady turned her attentions to the druid, who was bent over, one hand pressed flat against the Roman stonework as he caught his breath and gathered his wits.

  ‘Don’t you know how dangerous it is to interrupt such a journey?’ the Lady asked me, staring at Merlin. ‘A soul may become disembodied. It may remain trapped in the other world,’ she said, her eyes round with the horror of that thought.

  ‘Want me to beat some manners into the lad?’ Pelleas asked her, spinning me round to face him and raising his right hand to strike. I sucked smoke-thickened air into my lungs and braced for the blow.

  ‘Hold!’ Merlin said, shrugging Oswine off and stooping to pick up his staff, which lay abandoned on the rushes. ‘Do not touch him, Pelleas,’ the druid warned, coming to stand before me. His face was hard with shadow and flame-glow. His head twitched now and then and it seemed that some part of him was still wherever it was that his soul had wandered before I knocked him down. ‘How is the girl?’ Merlin asked over his shoulder.

  ‘Returned,’ the Lady said. ‘She is returned.’

  His eyes glowing like hot embers, Merlin lifted his staff and pointed its gnarly end towards me. ‘You would dare to attack a druid, boy?’ he asked, pressing the staff against my chest. I flinched at its touch, feeling the power within it. ‘I could make your young heart wither in your chest like an old apple,’ he said. ‘I could fill your pure lungs with writhing maggots.’ His head twitched again. ‘I could make your soul burst into flame. I could promise you eternal pain or make it your fate to never find your kin in the afterlife. To wander lost and tormented unto wild madness.’

  With that the druid pressed the staff hard against my breast bone, then raised it until the warm wood rested beneath my chin. He lifted my head and narrowed his eyes. ‘I could do any of this, boy, and yet you dare to attack me?’ He half turned, swinging the staff to point it at Guinevere, who stood there, shoulders slumped, her face drawn and ashen. ‘You would risk your soul for her?’

  I looked into Guinevere’s eyes but she seemed not to see me, and I knew that the journey, the soul flight she had just undertaken with Merlin, had taken a dreadful toll on her.

  ‘Well, boy?’ Merlin spat.

  ‘Best answer him, Lancelot,’ Pelleas said in a low voice.

  I straightened. Oswine, standing behind Merlin now, stared at me with his light blue eyes and gave an almost imperceptible shake of his fair head.

  ‘Yes,’ I told Merlin. ‘I would.’

  There was a collective gasp from the girls, who had sat watching the whole episode in silence and must have thought they were about to witness a druid’s terrible revenge.

  ‘I’ll give him a thrashing,’ Pelleas said, and I knew he hoped that Merlin and the Lady would agree to that, thus the worst I would suffer would be bruises and wounded pride, rather
than whatever soul’s torment Merlin would conjure for me.

  But Merlin’s face changed then. One heartbeat he had seethed with ire and threat and malevolence. The next he looked as light and content and cheerful as a man at his daughter’s wedding feast.

  ‘There is no need for that, Pelleas,’ he said, holding my eye for a long moment before turning back to the Lady. ‘No need. The boy is as the boy should be.’

  I did not know what Merlin meant by that. I just stood there, my body still tensed in readiness for pain.

  The Lady was watching the druid with suspicious eyes. ‘You do not want him punished?’ she said.

  ‘Punished?’ Merlin said. ‘And what would that achieve?’ He looked back to me and raised a finger in the air, a thick golden ring on it burnished by the lamplight. ‘I want him trained,’ he said. ‘Like the others. I want him to learn every sword stroke, every spear thrust. I want him worked each and every day until he can barely walk back to his bed. Pelleas, you will take this boy as a smith takes good iron and you will hammer and forge and polish and hone him, do you hear? You will make him rouse the envy of Belatucadrus himself.’ Merlin locked eyes with me. ‘Or even the Roman god, Mars,’ he said almost begrudgingly, ‘for one cannot deny that for all their avarice and vainglory the Romans were so very good at war.’ He pointed that ringed finger at Pelleas. ‘You will hone him, Pelleas. For as long as it takes. Until he is ready.’

  Pelleas glowered. ‘Ready for what?’ he asked.

  ‘To do what must be done, of course,’ Merlin said, and with that it was clear that the druid was finished with me, for he waved me away with an ink-etched hand and turned to Guinevere. ‘So, young Guinevere. I think we know now why your father sent you here.’

  I could not guess what was in Guinevere’s mind then. Her eyes were cast down at the floor rushes and I wondered if she felt ashamed, for it seemed her father had sent her here because of the talent which she had just demonstrated. For her own good, was how the Lady had put it. Some could not see her promise, she had told me. Well, Merlin could see it. He was twisting the end of his dark, oiled beard between finger and thumb as he considered the girl in front of him.