‘You have done that before, haven’t you?’ he asked. ‘No lies, girl. Your father and his Christian priests are not here now. Do not be afraid, Guinevere.’
Guinevere shivered and her teeth worried at her bottom lip. Even with her face painted she looked no more than her eleven summers then, and the anger which had seethed in me earlier, at the way Uther’s men looked at Guinevere as she had played the harp, welled in my chest again.
‘No one could have such control as you did,’ Merlin told her. ‘Not on their first journeying. Nor their second or third.’ He removed the garland of bird’s feet from his head and held it out to Oswine, who stepped up and took hold of it as one might handle a poisonous snake or a razor-sharp knife.
‘Have you done it before, girl?’ Merlin asked again, snapping the words with growing impatience.
Guinevere glanced up at me and our eyes met, just for a moment, then she looked at Merlin and nodded.
The druid dipped his head at the confirmation of his suspicions, then lifted an eyebrow at the Lady. ‘It would seem you might raise a decent crop for once, Lady,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘After years of famine and blight, at last some young people who may be of use.’ He shrugged at Pelleas. ‘Then again, a youth’s promise is like the froth on water, hey Pelleas?’ Pelleas did not reply and Merlin turned back to Guinevere. ‘We shall see, girl,’ he said. ‘We shall see.’
‘This is why you came to the Mount?’ the Lady said with a knowing look. ‘To test our young men? To test my girls? What have you seen, Merlin?’
‘Too much, Lady. I have seen too much, as well you know.’ Merlin showed the Lady a palm as he handed the bird-skull necklace to Oswine. ‘But are we not old friends, Nimue?’ He smiled and his dark face was at once both handsome and wicked-looking. ‘I heard that Lord Leodegan was sending another ship,’ he gave a sour grin, ‘one with a better captain than the last ship, I hoped,’ he said, ‘and it seemed a good opportunity to pay you all a visit. Balor curse me if I lie.’
The Lady pressed her red lips into a fine line as she considered this. ‘We will talk tomorrow,’ she said, then turned to her girls and clapped her hands. ‘To bed now. In the morning, Guinevere will tell us of her journey, but now we will sleep.’ She clapped her hands again. ‘Hurry, all of you. To bed.’
As they filed out, Erwana stared at me with her pretty eyes and tall Jenifry whispered something to Senara which made her giggle.
‘I trust you will be comfortable in your lodgings, Merlin,’ the Lady said, herding the girls, who were chattering with excitement now that the magic and its grave mystery had dissipated like the smoke from the Lady’s smouldering sage.
The druid looked at me and sighed. ‘You see how I am treated, boy?’ he said. ‘Sent out into the rain like a dog.’ He looked up at the smoke-hung beams. The rain still beat on the thatch; a soft hiss now, not the god’s fury of before. ‘There was a time I was welcome under this roof. But the past is the past. Tell me, Lancelot,’ he said, his eyes glinting, ‘whatever happened to your fox? Flame, wasn’t it?’
My mouth fell open. How could Merlin know about Flame? But then, he was a druid and his powers were beyond my understanding. Or perhaps the Lady had told him about Flame, for she had met the fox when I had chased him into her tent. So long ago now, it seemed.
‘I last saw him in Armorica,’ I said. ‘But never knew when he would come. He was not tame.’
Merlin laughed at that. ‘No,’ he said, ‘many things but never tame.’
‘Pelleas will escort you back down the Mount,’ the Lady said, far less impressed than I with Merlin and his insights.
‘Ah, to be as free as a fox and come and go as one pleases,’ the druid said to me, then turned to his slave. ‘Well then, Oswine, into the cold and rain with us. We do not linger where we are not wanted.’
Pelleas rolled his eyes at the Lady and I watched Guinevere, hoping she would look at me before she left the room, but she did not, and a heartbeat later she was gone.
‘You can carry it back down to my master’s dwelling, boy,’ Oswine said in his harsh accent, gesturing to the sack on the floor into which he had placed Merlin’s folded feathered cloak along with his master’s other accoutrements.
‘You can carry it yourself, Saxon,’ I said, certain that Oswine had feigned being out of his skull on mead earlier. He had tricked me and I disliked him for it.
‘You heard him, Saxon,’ Pelleas said, nodding at the sack.
Oswine grinned at me and shrugged, then bent, grabbed hold of the sack and slung it over his shoulder. Thus we four set off into the windswept night, down to the sea which churned white on the rocks, the breaking water glowing in the dark.
Pelleas was snoring like a hog when I eased myself out of bed and flung my cloak around my shoulders. I fumbled my way through the dark hut towards the door, barely helped by the feeble flames losing their fight for life in the hearth. Pelleas was too deep in sleep to know that the fire needed feeding, or else he had too much wine in his belly to feel the cold. Besides which, he would have expected me to keep the flames dancing on a night as damp and cold as this. Instead I had lain shivering beneath the furs. Waiting. Because I wanted darkness.
Now I crept through that darkness, light-footed and holding my breath as the warrior snored in his pelts and the weak flames writhed in their death throes. Pelleas stirred neither at the latch nor the creak of the door, and I turned, taking one last look at the snorting, snuffling lump before stepping into the night.
The rain had stopped at last, though the wind had not yet blown itself out and the surf still hurled itself upon the rocks, hissing as it flooded back down the strand to regroup for the next assault. An arrow-shot off shore, the Dobhran rocked at her mooring amongst low, fast-running, white-crested furrows, and in a gust of wind I heard the faint murmuring voices of the men keeping watch from her stern.
I looked over to Merlin’s hut and saw that it was all quiet. Smoke curled up from the roof in silver wisps and I reflected that Oswine, a Saxon and enemy of our people, was doing a better job with his master’s fire than I had done with Pelleas’s. Most of the other huts were cold and empty because few of the island’s inhabitants had wanted to face that wrathful night and now slept where they could in the Lady’s keep.
Everyone but for me and those poor men on the Dobhran was asleep or happily swathed in pelts, and I shivered again at the touch of the sea air on my neck.
Then I ran. My cloak flying behind me like a broken wing, I ran. Not to warm myself against the damp, blustery chill but because some need compelled me. Across the rocks and the bristling grass. Sliding on ground churned to a muddy, glutinous mess by booted feet, then onto the stony trail which snaked amongst the trees that cloaked much of the Mount. Up the track which my feet knew so well, my clothes still pungent with the strange smoke that had hung in drifting veils in the Lady’s chamber.
Running. Not needing the moonlight which now and then flooded the night to reveal glistening drops falling from branches around me. Running as fast as I had run to win the island race. Perhaps even faster, for the need to gain the summit was like bellows to the forge burning hot in my chest.
Through the last soaking, wind-flayed trees and across the grassy bluff from which, up ahead, the granite burst in cold outcrops, dark, jagged shapes against the sky. And then I stopped.
What now? I had not thought about that, lying awake listening to Pelleas snoring, waiting for the fire to die. I would go back up to the keep. That was all I knew, and now I stood feeling like a clod, sucking in the night air and staring up at that Roman tower.
I looked east over the water, across the forests of Dumnonia, beyond which the far horizon was a white ribbon on night’s hem, and I knew there was not much time. Perhaps folk would rouse themselves late this morning, because of the night’s festivities, but Pelleas always woke with the dawn no matter how much wine or ale he had drunk. And so I steeled myself and walked up to the keep and just then the door opened. I froze.
The man who stumbled out was one of King Uther’s men. Fumbling at his trews, he growled something to me about needing to piss, and I had to twist aside or else he would have knocked me down in his hurry. Then I slipped through the half-open door and crept up the winding stone steps, hardly breathing at all now, until I was in the narrow corridor above the main hall where men and women were sleeping, courtesy of the Lady of the Mount.
I walked past the first and second doors and stood in front of the third, the sight of that simple oak plank door flooding my memory with storm fury and wild eyes and waves which tried to bury us. It was the same door against which I had slept on a blanket that night when she had come to Karrek. When I had cheated Manannán mac Lir of his full haul of souls. Guinevere’s door.
The look in Guinevere’s eyes that day she had so nearly drowned was the same look I had seen in her eyes earlier this night, when she had clawed her way back to the surface of her conscious mind. I did not care what Merlin wanted or what the Lady wanted, or what they hoped to achieve by forcing Guinevere to take part in their magic. I had seen the dread in her eyes and I would do whatever I must to protect her.
And so I was here in the Lady’s keep when I should have been asleep in my own bed in Pelleas’s hut on the shore.
It was possible, I thought, that the Lady had moved Guinevere up to the next level of the keep, where her own chamber was and where there was another room in which half the girls slept. Then again, Guinevere had not mentioned moving to another room and surely she would have said, for she found it amusing that she had been kept apart from the other girls because her dark moods frightened them.
‘Really it is because the Lady does not want me to share my gift with the others. They are not ready yet,’ she had told me one morning as we waded in the shallows gathering oar weed for Yann the cook who wanted it to thicken his fish broth. Though at the time I had not known what she meant by her gift. Not really. ‘I am used to it,’ she had said with a shrug, bringing up a handful of slick green weed.
Guinevere was on the other side of the oak door in front of me. I knew it and I would protect her. Merlin would not draw her into his spells again and the Lady would not test her and Uther’s spearmen would not stare at her. I took off my cloak and rolled it up, then lay down with my head upon it, peering up through the darkness at the cobweb-draped timbers and wondering whether they were from the Roman times, or if some Briton had long ago replaced the old beams. Then my thoughts turned to Flame and I wondered again how Merlin knew about the fox. I was still wondering when the door by my feet opened, just the width of a spear shaft, so that a small wash of golden light lit some of the dressed stones around the door frame.
The light retreated and all was dark again. But the door remained open. Somewhere nearby, a mouse scrabbled in the wall. The low rumble of a man snoring in the chamber below seeped through the boards but otherwise all was so quiet that I could hear the soft spate of my own blood flooding in my head.
I stood, wincing as a board creaked beneath my feet, holding my breath. Remembering, I bent and retrieved my cloak, then gently, slowly, pushed the door just wide enough that I could squeeze through.
Guinevere sat on her bed, upon coarse, dun-coloured blankets which were still neatly stretched over the wool-filled mattress. In her lap she held a rushlight in its iron stand and by that pure light I saw her.
Unpinned now, her hair fell in dark tangled tresses down to her chest. Her eyebrows were still strikingly dark with sooty dye, but the green around her eyes was smudged and had been dragged into her hairline above her ears. The paint which had made a rosebud of her lips had fled across her left cheek in a blood-red smear and her dress of pale blue linen was stained with colour and tears. She looked like a girl who had raided her mother’s cultus cabinet and felt the hazel switch across her legs because of it.
I shut the door behind me and sat on the bed beside her, aware more than ever that Guinevere was taller than me. Sometimes she teased me about this. Not now.
The room smelled of the rushlight’s burning tallow and the sage and cedar smoke which had wicked into the weave of our clothes. But there was another scent too and it came from Guinevere, from the pale skin of her neck which had been laced with sandalwood-infused olive oil.
‘Are you hurt?’ I asked. A stupid question. I knew she was not, not in her body, anyway, but I had not known what else to say.
‘No,’ she said, no louder than a breath.
A silence drew out between us, spooling into the dark like a ship’s anchor rope into the depths. I was thankful at least for the rushlight’s gentle hiss.
‘Sometimes I don’t want to come back, Lancelot,’ Guinevere said. ‘When I am journeying,’ she clarified.
‘Where do you go?’ I asked.
She shrugged. ‘Anywhere,’ she said, her voice soft and somehow distant. She turned her face to me then and her tear-glistened eyes were wide and fierce. ‘If you could only see what it is like,’ she said, then put a hand on mine. ‘You could come with me.’ Her hand squeezed mine tight. ‘I could teach you.’
I felt the scowl tighten my face.
‘I don’t like magic,’ I said, and immediately regretted saying it because she took her hand away, the spark in her eyes already gone.
We sat there in uncomfortable silence a while longer and then Guinevere leant over and placed the rushlight on the table beside her bed. She lay down on her side facing the cold stone wall, her back curved, head tucked, legs pulled up to her abdomen.
I sat watching the rushlight and the sooty tendrils that snaked up to the roof beams, thinking I should go back to my place on the hard boards in the corridor, when Guinevere shifted on the bed so that her knees were touching the wall.
‘Stay,’ she said. So quietly that I could not be sure I had heard it. I sat a while longer, hoping she would say it again so that I would not upset her by doing something wrong. But she said nothing more and so I held my rolled-up cloak behind my head and lay down next to her, watching the flamelight shivering in draughts I could not feel, until I fell asleep.
A hand on my shoulder. I gasped and scrambled upright against the wall, blinking foggy eyes, my heart thumping in my chest as I remembered where I was. Pelleas loomed over me and my nose filled with the sheep stink of the grease which he had rubbed into his leather breastplate so that it shone now. He gripped a spear in his right hand.
‘Time to go, lad,’ he said.
I did not know how long I had slept but it could not have been very long. The dawn light bleeding into the room through the Roman glass of the small window was pale and thin and it seemed to me no time at all had passed since Guinevere had told me to stay.
‘Up you get,’ Pelleas said, then he nodded his freshly shaven head at Guinevere, who was now sitting with her back against the wall, cradling her legs against her chest. ‘Sorry to intrude like this, Lady Guinevere,’ he said, ‘but if my Lady catches Lancelot in here you’ll both be in trouble.’
I rubbed my eyes and looked over to the window.
‘They’re stirring downstairs,’ Pelleas said, ‘but if we go now they’ll just think we’ve been about our business early.’
I nodded, gathering up my cloak. How had Pelleas known where to find me?
‘And say goodbye, Lancelot. You won’t be seeing much of each other from now on,’ he said, then frowned. ‘Your days blowing about like a leaf in the wind are over, lad. It’s the warrior’s way for you. And not before time,’ he added, glancing at Guinevere. Then his eyes widened at me as he nodded towards her. ‘Well, lad, say goodbye.’
I turned to Guinevere. Her face was still daubed in the Lady’s paints and her dark hair hung in tangles or loose coils either side of her pale face.
‘Goodbye,’ I said, sure that I would see her again soon. Unless Pelleas meant that I should leave Karrek?
Her ochre-smeared lips made a thin smile that did not reach her blue-green eyes. ‘Thank you, Lancelot,’ she said.
‘It would be better,
Lady Guinevere,’ Pelleas said, gesturing to Guinevere’s bed with his spear shaft, ‘if we kept this between us.’ He raised his left hand. ‘I know, I know, it’s all innocent. But still. Not a word to anyone, understand?’
Guinevere and I both nodded and Pelleas bowed his head just once in response, affirming that this was near enough a solemn oath between the three of us, then he went to the door and pulled it open just enough that he could peer out to make sure no one was walking the corridor. He beckoned me with a big hand and I moved up behind him, close enough to smell the fresh sea air on his cloak.
‘No fuss now, lad. We’re just fetching my sword which I left here last night after too much wine,’ he said, and I noticed that the scabbard at his hip was empty. He must have put Boar’s Tusk in the lean-to before coming up to find me.
I looked back at Guinevere one last time, and she gave a slight nod of her head as if to tell me it was all right to go. That she would be all right. Then I followed Pelleas out into the corridor and down the stone steps, and at the bottom we met Edern and Avenie who were coming blinking and yawning from the main chamber where they had slept with the rest.
‘A good night, hey, Pelleas?’ Edern said, stretching his arms wide and wincing at some ache or pain as Pelleas collected Boar’s Tusk and Edern’s sword too, which lay in a pile of other weapons covered in skins.
‘Tell that to my poor skull,’ Pelleas replied, handing Edern’s sword to him. ‘Still, no one can say that we don’t know how to treat our guests, hey, Lancelot?’ he said, cuffing me around the head. I tried to smile but I was thinking of Guinevere and what Pelleas had said about us not seeing much of each other from now on.
It was a chill, damp dawn. The gulls were already shrieking high above a bleak-looking sea, riding the thin westerly breeze which ruffled the grey-green tufts of marram grass that bristled on Karrek Loos yn Koos like the fur on a bear’s back. In front of us, further down the slope, other head-sore men and women wrapped in pelts and cloaks traipsed back to their dwellings on the shore.
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