Lancelot

by Giles Kristian

  ‘We can do it,’ I said.

  ‘We can do it,’ Melwas said.

  ‘Perhaps there should be three,’ Bors suggested. ‘Someone to stop these two trying to out-row each other and tipping the poor girl overboard while her lord watches from the beach.’

  ‘Don’t push it, Bors,’ Pelleas said. Bors shrugged as if to say it had been worth a try.

  ‘I would imagine that Senara could out-row both of them,’ Agga said, which had even Melwas and me laughing, for no one could deny that Senara had an impressive set of shoulders on her.

  Then talk turned to that day’s mock battle, with boys claiming that those who had beaten them had been lucky, and others saying how things would turn out differently next time, while Benesek, Madern and Edern talked amongst themselves.

  I just ate my broth, thinking of the task I had been given and wondering what the next day would bring, and I was perhaps the only one in that hut who noticed Pelleas leave his food uneaten and quietly stalk out into the night.

  The next morning dawned bright and warm enough that I woke drenched in sweat and thirsty. The sea was blinding to look at, a dazzling reflection of a blue sky in which a few wisps of cloud hung as if they had nowhere to go. The white flowers of the sea kale growing in large clumps above the high tide line buzzed with black and yellow flies. Scattered tufts of pink thrift, lilac-coloured sea lavender and white sea campion shivered in the breeze on the cliffs and amongst the boulders on the shore. Guillemots and razorbills cried from their nests on Karrek’s high ledges, while cormorants and shags set out to fish in the shallows, or else perched in their nests lower down the cliffs, wings stretched out to dry in the warm sun. And Melwas and I set off up the Mount to fetch Senara and take her to Lord Evalach.

  We were both dressed in our best or cleanest clothes. I wore a tunic of green linen, dun-coloured trews and a pair of soft leather shoes which had known previous owners but had been newly stitched and rubbed with beeswax. Melwas wore his Roman leather breastplate. I did not yet possess such armour, so Bors, who had brought his own armour with him from Gannes, lent me his, which I was proud to wear. Nor did I own a sword yet. We practised with a variety of blades, most of them poor quality swords which Pelleas and the other warriors of Karrek had taken as plunder over the years, the idea being that we would not become too familiar with and thus reliant on any particular length, weight and style of blade before we were fully trained.

  ‘Better to be able to beat your enemy with whatever is in your hand at the time, be it a farmer’s scythe or a Saxon long knife,’ Pelleas told us.

  Or perhaps we had not been given our own swords because Pelleas believed such a thing must be earned. For now, though, because it had been his idea that I should escort Senara in his stead, Pelleas had lent me Boar’s Tusk and his sword belt, so that I thought I was Mars or some other god of war striding up the Mount with that sword at my hip.

  ‘Can’t do anything about that beardless face of yours, lad,’ Pelleas had said that dawn, taking the belt and scabbarded sword from his own waist and handing them to me, ‘but we can at least make you look the part from the neck down.’ He had stood back to appraise me while I got used to the feeling of the borrowed accoutrements and the smell of Bors’s sweat, which stained the leather breastplate. ‘A good sword like that might at least discourage Lord Evalach’s men from insulting you for your age.’ He grinned. ‘A beardless lad carrying a blade like that. It’d make me think twice.’

  ‘But I haven’t earned it,’ I said, feeling as embarrassed as I did invincible.

  ‘All in good time, Lancelot,’ he said. ‘And so long as you don’t try that shield-jumping lunacy in your first real fight.’

  Melwas wore Benesek’s long sword: a beautiful and deadly weapon with a silver-gilt hilt of gleaming ivory and a pommel set with red garnets. It was sheathed in black leather wound with silver wire, while the scabbard mount itself bore some Saxon script which Benesek called runes. He had killed the sword’s previous owner, a Saxon chieftain, in some long-ago battle, and High King Uther himself had told Benesek that he had fought well enough to earn that magnificent sword and more. ‘Before most of you were born, that was,’ the warrior had told us, ‘in the days when we still believed we would throw the Saxons back into the sea.’

  Benesek had never named the sword because he believed such a fine blade must already have a name and would resent being renamed and bring him bad luck. And years ago, when Merlin had come to Karrek with his slave Oswine, and Pelleas had told the Saxon to read the inscription on the scabbard, Benesek had growled at Oswine to keep the runes to himself in case he did not like the name.

  ‘What if the sword is called Slayer of Britons?’ Benesek had asked. ‘Or what if there is some curse in the runes?’ After considering this, Pelleas agreed they were better off not knowing. But that sword looked well at Melwas’s hip now as we walked in silence up the track, already sweating in the heat of the risen sun. We did not wear our leather helmets. For one thing it would be a blazing hot day come noon, and for another, we would be escorting Senara across a few hundred yards of water to a friend and ally, not going into a fight. And so I had tied my hair back with a strip of leather, as I alone of the boys did not shave my head. It was Merlin who had said that I must not take the shears and razor to my hair but should let it grow. He did not say why and I did not ask, but today was one of those days when I would have gladly cut it all off to feel the sea’s breeze on my scalp.

  ‘I will do the talking when we meet Lord Evalach,’ Melwas said now, the first words either of us had spoken since meeting on the shore.

  ‘Fine by me,’ I said.

  And when we crested the grassy rise that was yellow with buttercups and bird’s-foot trefoil and thick with butterflies and humming with bees, we found the Lady and her girls waiting for us. Having expected Pelleas and Edern, they were shocked to see Melwas and me, so that Jenifry and Erwana, who were sobbing and lamenting over Senara, now cuffed at their tears and lifted their chins as we strode towards them.

  And then I saw her. She had been standing behind the Lady’s left shoulder but now she stepped out into the bright day and in that moment there was nothing and no one else on the crown of that hill. Her dress, the blue of a song thrush’s eggs, was drawn in at her waist by a narrow leather belt whose brass buckle glinted in the sunlight. Her long hair, dark and glossy as a raven’s wing, was loose and tousled by the sea breeze, and her eyes gleamed like the swirls of iron and steel in the best swords forged by a master smith.

  Guinevere.

  I couldn’t breathe. My stomach lurched like a barrel from a wrecked ship, having risen fast to the surface, now rolling and bucking amongst the waves. In the years since I had last been so close to her, I had tried to see her in the eye of my mind, but now I realized that my imagination was a blunt and useless tool compared with the gut-wrenching reality of seeing her in the flesh.

  ‘Keep up,’ Melwas growled over his shoulder, for I had fallen behind. My stride had faltered at the sight of Guinevere. My courage had flown with the sudden, almost crippling burden of that long-awaited, often dreamt-of moment.

  ‘Do not row too fast or seem too eager,’ the Lady told us, ‘but keep a steady pace and remain dignified until your duty is discharged.’

  ‘Yes, Lady,’ I heard Melwas say.

  ‘Lancelot?’

  I tore my eyes from Guinevere. ‘Yes, Lady,’ I echoed.

  ‘Give my compliments to Lord Evalach and his son, Saret, if he has accompanied his father. Pelleas told you the words?’

  ‘Yes, Lady,’ Melwas said again.

  She nodded. ‘Do not rush them. Do not mumble.’

  ‘No, Lady,’ Melwas said, for it was he who would repeat the words Pelleas had shared with us that dawn. The warrior had eyed us suspiciously, as if, having woken to a fresh day, he’d regretted giving us the task of delivering Senara to her would-be husband.

  ‘Do not embarrass me,’ he had said again, in case we had not heard
the previous three or four warnings. ‘The Lady wanted me to send Edern with you but I convinced her you two were ready. So you had better be.’

  Melwas and I had looked at each other and made a silent agreement to keep the truce between us, for Pelleas’s sake. For our own sakes too. I don’t think either of us considered poor Senara in all of it.

  Now, at a gesture from the Lady, I walked forward and picked up two plump satchels which were stuffed with Senara’s belongings, and slung them over my shoulder, then stepped back so that Guinevere would once again be in my line of sight. Our eyes met and my chest tightened and it was almost like pain. But then Guinevere broke the moment by shifting her gaze to Senara, smiling as she and the other girls bade their final farewells, wishing Senara a long and happy life and calling on the goddess Epona to bless her with all the earth’s abundance.

  The Lady embraced Senara, inhaled the scent of the white flowers bound in her brown hair and then kissed her cheek. Melwas, doing his best impression of an implacable Guardian of the Mount, had turned his back on them all and faced down the slope, which was the signal to Senara that it was time to go. I looked at Guinevere, hoping to meet her eyes once more before I turned, but she was watching Senara and I could stare no longer without making a fool of myself.

  The three of us set off down the hill, butterflies scattering before us, Melwas and I pretending we could not hear Senara softly sobbing, for neither of us had any words of comfort for a young woman being given to an old man. She was still sobbing when she and Melwas climbed into the currach and I waded into the shallows, pushing them out before jumping into the boat. I was still thinking of Guinevere as I set my oars and took up the stroke in time with Melwas behind me, but he had tired of Senara’s weeping now and told her to stop for her own sake.

  ‘Your eyes are puffy and red,’ he said, his oars and mine striking the water together. ‘You look like you’ve been sitting by a smoky fire all night. It doesn’t make you prettier.’ Up came the oars, dripping water beads which shone in the golden day. ‘Lord Evalach will not be expecting a miserable, puffy-faced, red-eyed girl,’ he said.

  There was no malice in the way he said it, and it was true that Lord Evalach might be offended if he thought that his future bride had been crying at the prospect of going back to Dumnonia with him, so Senara wiped her tears and her snotty nose on the sleeve of her dress and sat straighter on her bench, looking beyond us both towards the shore.

  I looked over my shoulder and saw no sign of the Dumnonians either on the strand or amongst the trees beyond the shore, and as much as Senara must have thrilled at the thought of becoming a rich and powerful Lady as Lord Evalach’s new wife, perhaps part of her hoped that Evalach would not come at all, that she might return to her friends and her simple life on Karrek. Who could say what thoughts wove and knotted behind those eyes? Those eyes which were on me now, so that I saw them properly for the first time. Lively, hazel eyes, made not ugly by the tears, as Melwas had suggested, but alluring, even pretty, in a sad way.

  Lean, plunge, pull, lift. We worked the oars as neatly as we could, keeping the rhythm even and unhurried, driving that skin-hulled boat across the bay, and all the while Senara stared at me. Anyone would have thought I had three horns and eyes of fire from the way she stared, and even Melwas noticed it.

  ‘Any sign of your soon-to-be husband?’ he asked her. I could tell by the sourness in his tone that his intention was to divert Senara from whatever thoughts occupied her mind as she sat there watching me row.

  Her eyes flicked to the shore. ‘No,’ she said, then swung those hazel eyes back to me, so that I could feel the hot flush in my cheeks and knew my face must be as red as the garnets set in the pommel of the sword at Melwas’s hip.

  ‘They say Lord Evalach had his last wife poisoned,’ Melwas said, ‘because she grew so fat that he could not stand to share his bed with her.’

  If there were such whispers I hadn’t heard them, and I wondered if Melwas had made it up from some spiteful wish to unnerve Senara. If he had, then he must have been disappointed when she dismissed the rumour simply by checking that the coil of brown hair pinned at the back of her head was still firmly in place. ‘I heard that Lady Seva died from the flux,’ she said, ‘and that her doting husband mourned her for a year.’ She shrugged, her eyes still on me. ‘And besides, didn’t the Lady ask you to give Lord Evalach’s son, Saret, her compliments?’ she said, not waiting for Melwas to answer. ‘I rather doubt Saret would accompany his father to collect me had Lord Evalach murdered his mother.’ She gave me a wry half-smile, then looked out across the water to where a gull bobbed on the gentle tide. ‘And they say we girls are the wellsprings of rumour.’

  Melwas’s oar blade bit the water ahead of mine, ruining the rhythm for the next few strokes. ‘All I am saying is that I would not let myself get fat if I were you,’ he said, and I thought Senara’s gasp was in response to that, until I realized she was looking at something, or someone, on the shore.

  ‘They’re here,’ she said, her teeth worrying at her bottom lip and all of a sudden looking like the girl I remembered from my first summer on Karrek rather than the young lady she was now. Her hands were clenched in her lap so tight that her knuckles were as white as the flower petals in her hair.

  I looked over my shoulder at the shore and saw that Lord Evalach had come to The Edge.

  If I had not pitied Senara before, or thought much about her at all, my mind being full of Guinevere, I pitied her now I had seen Lord Evalach. I had known he was not a young man but I had not known he was white-haired and warped with age and almost toothless. And yet for all that he looked a withered old thing, particularly standing beside his handsome young son, he seemed to tremble with lust when he laid eyes on Senara, who was so much taller than him. With his bent spine and bowed legs he would need to stand on a stool to look her in the eye, but then I recalled what Benesek had said about him putting a child in her belly before this summer’s end, and thought the difference in height would not matter in the marital bed. At least he would be hard pressed to beat her, I thought, imagining that Senara could throw her new lord over her shoulder and walk off with him should she wish to.

  ‘On my honour she is a maiden,’ Melwas said, ‘a daughter of the Mount and sister of Britannia, respectful of the gods, versed in the healing arts and—’

  ‘On your honour?’ Lord Evalach blurted, glancing at the grizzled-looking warrior beside him, who hitched his top lip to bare his teeth. ‘Your honour?’ Lord Evalach said again, tearing his rheumy eyes from Senara to glare at Melwas. Spittle seeped from the corner of his mouth but if he knew it he did not care. ‘And what have you done in your short life that your honour should mean anything to me?’ he asked, the word ‘honour’ dripping with scorn.

  Melwas bristled but held his tongue, either out of respect for this Dumnonian lord or else because he had no answer to Evalach’s question. There were twenty spearmen standing sweat-drenched amongst the humps and hollows of the grassy dunes, their shields painted with their lord’s symbol of a bull’s head. Flies buzzed around them. Nearby, a colony of shrieking silvery-grey terns flapped and dived amongst the dunes, angry at the invaders who threatened their nests. Even with the sea breeze blowing towards them I could smell the Dumnonians’ stink and sense their hostility.

  ‘Are there no grown men left on Karrek Loos yn Koos?’ Lord Evalach asked. ‘Or perhaps Lady Nimue amuses herself at my expense?’ He gazed at Senara, the spittle having slid amongst the grey bristles of his ill-shaven chin, and I pitied the girl. I did not even want to look at her for fear of seeing the horror in her eyes at what her future held. ‘She resents losing one of her precious girls,’ Lord Evalach went on, ‘and is sickened by the thought of young Senara being rutted by an old man. So she sends boys by way of insulting me.’

  ‘I am no boy, lord,’ Melwas said, and neither did he look like a boy, being tall and broad and in his leather armour with Benesek’s long sword at his hip.

  ‘Yo
u’re a boy until you prove otherwise,’ the scarred warrior beside Lord Evalach said, trying to provoke Melwas. It worked. Melwas stepped forward, drawing Benesek’s sword. I pulled Boar’s Tusk from its scabbard and moved up to his left shoulder.

  ‘Enough,’ said the young man on Lord Evalach’s right. I had assumed he was Evalach’s son, Saret, the bad start having spoiled the formal introductions and the exchanging of compliments. ‘Let them be, Father,’ he said, confirming my assumption. Saret was neither tall nor broad but his face was open and honest-looking and as clear-skinned and handsome as his father’s was sallow and time-ravaged. ‘These young men are Guardians of the Mount and deserve our respect,’ he said, looking me in the eye. I held his gaze, Boar’s Tusk still raised before me. ‘You have tested them and they have shown that they are no cowards.’

  ‘See this, dear Senara?’ Lord Evalach said, sweeping an arm towards Saret. ‘My son already speaks as though he commands. He cannot wait until I am dead.’ He gave a toothless grin. ‘Do you really think I want to make an enemy of Lady Nimue, boy?’ he asked Saret. ‘You think I would spill blood in King Menadoc’s land?’

  ‘I think these young men have discharged their duty,’ Saret replied. ‘I think we should thank them and be on our way.’ He nodded at me and I nodded my thanks to him for intervening. The other men of Lord Evalach’s party were watching us with a mixture of disdain and amusement, and no doubt some of them hoped to see blades flash and blood fly, as bored warriors will. But there would be no crimson this golden day.

  ‘We have been told,’ Lord Evalach said to his champion, whilst beckoning Senara to him. She looked at me and I nodded, sheathing Boar’s Tusk.

  ‘Good luck, Senara,’ I said and with that she walked towards Lord Evalach and I picked up her two satchels and gave them to a Dumnonian spearman who had stepped forward to take them from me.

  While his lord took Senara’s hand in the claw of his own, Evalach’s champion grinned at Melwas. ‘Off you run, little boys,’ the warrior said, fluttering ringed fingers at us, and Melwas stood there for a moment, stiff with anger and embarrassment, then plunged Benesek’s sword into its scabbard, turned his back on the Dumnonians and strode across the sand past the pile of dry wood which would be lit to warn Karrek in times of danger, towards the boat which rested above the high tide line.