Lancelot

by Giles Kristian

  And I followed him.

  Neither of us spoke as we took up the oars and rowed, watching the Dumnonians disappear over the dunes with their prize, who, to her credit, did not look back at us or at Karrek beyond our bow. Not once did she look back, and then she was gone, and we rowed in silence and shame, neither of us wanting to acknowledge the insults we had borne.

  Instead, I lost myself in the rhythm of the stroke and thoughts of Britannia, having just set foot on the mainland for the first time in my life. Our sweat dripped onto the skin hull and the oars clumped in the tholes and I wondered at the kingdoms and lords and peoples that lay beyond those dunes and forests.

  When we were halfway across, Melwas broke the silence. ‘I saw you,’ he said as we both leant back in the stroke, pulling our oars through the calm, sun-dappled water. ‘Giving Senara the eye. You were worse than that slobbering old toad back there. I know what was going on.’

  ‘Nothing was going on,’ I said. ‘And anyway, how could you see my eyes? You’re behind me.’

  ‘Don’t get clever with me,’ he said. ‘It’s because of you that we were humiliated back there by that old goat and that other big pile of dung. If I’d had Agga or Branok with me they wouldn’t have dared. They would have seen proper warriors.’ The oars bit and the currach scudded across the bay like a cloud before a gale, and my blood pounded in my ears. ‘But they saw you and thought the Lady mocked them by sending a boy,’ Melwas said. ‘Lord Evalach looked at you and was reminded of the little bastards he’s whelped on his slaves over the years.’

  The muscles in my thighs thrummed and my hands tingled on the ash oar handles and I reminded myself of Pelleas’s warning not to embarrass him.

  ‘You are not one of us and you’ll never be a Guardian of the Mount,’ Melwas said. ‘You should leave Karrek. Go back to Armorica.’ He laughed. ‘Do you remember that sparhawk of yours? Of course you do, that bird was your only friend. And what kind of a hawk was she? Couldn’t even fly straight. Even before I snapped her wing.’

  It took me the next oar stroke to unravel that confession. A black veil fell across my vision. I twisted on the bench and flew at him, fists flying. I struck his cheek with my left and slammed the knuckles of my right against his temple, my weight on top of him, pushing him down into the currach’s bow. But somehow he got his knee up between us, then worked his foot into my stomach and launched me backwards and my calves hit the aft thwart. I fell heavily against the craft’s hazel ribs.

  ‘I broke her wing and she squawked like a mad thing,’ Melwas said, crouching and holding on to the currach’s sides because the boat was rocking dangerously. ‘Clawed and pecked at me, savage as a Pict,’ he said, then I was up and launched myself at him but this time he was ready and threw an arm round my neck and we fell together against the stern, and I could not breathe because Melwas was strangling me. He was the stronger but I was rage itself for what he had done to my hawk; I broke his chokehold and then it was just a flurry of fists, some landing true, most missing, scuffing off heads or striking shoulders.

  ‘We were all in on it,’ Melwas managed to say as we struggled and grappled and the currach rolled from side to side, water spilling into the hull. ‘We all heard you cry yourself to sleep over that useless bird.’

  I wanted to kill him. I drove a fist into his stomach and he twisted out from under me and threw himself back, then he pulled Benesek’s long sword from the silver-bound scabbard and pointed it at me.

  ‘I’ll kill you,’ he snarled through bloody teeth. And perhaps some part of me knew that this fight was not worthy of Pelleas’s sword, or else I forgot I was wearing it. Either way I left Boar’s Tusk in its scabbard and bent to snatch up one of the discarded oars and held it across my body, legs bent, feet braced against the currach’s skeleton.

  ‘You’re not good enough,’ I said, knowing Melwas and what he would do next. He came fast, sure-footed even on that rocking boat, but I swung the oar blade at his head. He got the long sword up with enough muscle behind it to check the oar’s flight, and in doing so fell for the feint. I threw my left foot and left arm forward, bringing the oar’s grip across and twisting at the waist to slam the handle into his unguarded left temple. The blow spun him and he fell. I heard a crack as his face hit the top edge of the currach’s side and saw a flash of silver and gleaming ivory as Benesek’s sword flew. Barely a splash and it was gone.

  The loss of that sword stunned me in a way none of Melwas’s blows had. Gripping the hide hull I peered over the side, drops of blood from my nose spilling like red garnets onto the sun-shimmered water. I could see dark patches of weed and lighter swathes of sand and clouds of small fish darting this way and that like flocks of silver starlings. But I could not see Benesek’s sword and I knew the current had already carried us away from it. I turned and looked at Melwas lying face down in the bilge. He was not moving. Blood swirled with the water that had come over the sides and his shaved head was smeared with blood and I looked towards Karrek, aware that Pelleas or Benesek or any of the other boys might have seen the whole thing.

  I had lost Benesek’s sword, that beautiful, deadly, precious sword which he had won in battle against a Saxon chieftain. And I had killed Melwas. In truth I only regretted one of those things.

  11

  For Friendship

  ‘HE’S NOT DEAD,’ Pelleas growled, lifting his ear off Melwas’s chest. ‘Not yet anyway. But when Benesek finds out his sword is on the seabed you’ll both be dead. And you’ll be glad to be dead because it’ll mean the pain has stopped.’

  I looked at Bors, who grimaced on my behalf.

  ‘I’ll find it,’ I said. ‘When the tide is out you can see the bottom. I’ll go back out. I’ll find it.’

  ‘You’d better,’ Pelleas said. ‘And soon, before it rusts. You can find the oars while you’re at it,’ he said. Because three of the currach’s oars had fallen overboard when I flew at Melwas, I had been left to half paddle, half punt the boat back across the bay, so that I was exhausted as well as bleeding by the time I dragged Melwas onto the strand. Pelleas did not say whether or not he had watched my ungainly, undignified crossing from the shore; I hoped he had not.

  ‘But first you and Bors are going to take Melwas to his bed and hope that he doesn’t stop breathing before Geldrin gets back with the Lady. She’ll know what to do with him.’

  Melwas was already groaning by the time Bors and I left him, and as much as I wanted my face to be the first thing that Melwas saw when he woke, I knew I had to face Benesek and explain how we had lost his sword.

  ‘If I were you I’d be swimming back to Armorica now,’ Bors said as we walked barefoot back across the shingle bank along which purple sea pea flowers crept and golden-yellow horned poppies shivered in the gentle, warm wind. The other boys had come from spear training with Madern and Edern and were gathered on the rocks looking out across the water as if they might see that ivory-hilted Saxon sword standing proud of the burnished sea. Benesek glared at me and I could not look him in the eye as I went to my fate. ‘His moustaches are quivering, he’s so angry,’ Bors said, which did nothing to comfort me.

  ‘He won’t kill me,’ I said, sounding more confident than I felt. ‘I’m the only one who knows where the sword went in.’ I glanced across the bay. ‘Look, the tide is on the way out. Benesek will have his sword back before dusk. Maybe even before he’s finished his first jug of wine.’

  I did not need to look at Bors to know that he did not share my confidence. I fancied I heard his eyebrows rise towards the stubble on his sun-browned scalp, and yet he said he would help me look for the sword seeing as Melwas wasn’t going to be much use, today at least.

  And then Benesek raged. It could have been worse. Much worse. I suspected that Pelleas had said enough to dissuade his friend from wringing my neck there and then. But Benesek did rage. He bellowed and flailed his arms, red-faced, eyes bulging, his spittle wetting my face as I stood there thinking how lucky Melwas was to be getting away wit
h it, just because he had not been quick enough to stop my oar from knocking the wits out of him.

  And then, just like that, the squall of Benesek’s wrath was gone, though he still glared at me with eyes like boiled duck eggs.

  I glanced at Pelleas beside him but he said nothing and so I looked back to Benesek, waiting for him to catch his breath and begin yelling again. From the corner of my eye I could see Agga and Peran smirking, and no doubt all the boys, apart from Bors perhaps, were enjoying watching me being upbraided.

  ‘Well, lad?’ Benesek said. ‘You’re not going to find my sword, standing there like a pissing post!’ he bawled, pointing out across the bay towards the mainland foreshore which glistened, dark and slick with green weed abandoned by the falling tide.

  And so Bors and I undressed there on the rocks and waded out until the water was up to our chests, at which point we kicked off and swam, as I had used to do each morning, in the days before I had begun to learn my weapons. We swam to the place where I thought the currach had been when Melwas and I had fought. We dived under times beyond counting, raking fingers through the sand and tangles of weed, salt water stinging our eyes as we looked for the glint of steel or red garnets through the billowing clouds of silt which our hands or feet had stirred up. We were still out there when the sun slipped behind the horizon and the tide rose by six feet in the time it takes to put an edge on a blunt knife.

  And we did not find the sword.

  I went back out at dawn the next day and every day after that, and Bors came too when he could. But more often than not, Pelleas or Edern or one of the other men yelled at my cousin to get out of the water and join the others at their weapons.

  ‘Don’t stay too long and freeze,’ Bors would say, reluctant to leave me searching alone, for the men never called me in. They knew it was a serious matter, losing another man’s sword, and perhaps they also knew that I would not give up until I found it, and so they let me be, and I spent more time in the sea than on land. I would only stumble ashore when I got so cold that my limbs would not do what I asked of them and I could no longer make fists with my hands because of the numbness. Even though the days were clement and the sea was not too cold, after so much time in the water I could not seem to get myself warm. After four or five days, sores opened in my skin, until eventually my body was covered in them. It was agony when the salt water got in to these lesions but I did not care, and often I saw Pelleas or Benesek himself, watching me from the shore, though they never spoke of the sword or my search for it when they saw me in the communal hut. Not that I went in there much, not wanting to face Benesek until I could return his sword.

  Melwas was out of his bed the day after our fight, and smashing Agga’s shield to splinters on the training field the day after that. And yet he never helped me look for the sword. Not once. Which was fine by me, for had we to spend any time together out there in the bay I might have tried to kill him properly for breaking my sparhawk’s wing, never mind that it had been four years since he had committed that heinous crime.

  One day, Bors came and crouched beside me in the hut, handing me a bowl of pottage which he had managed to almost fill with the dregs from the pot suspended above the greying embers. I had just come ashore and was still wet and shivering and almost too tired to eat, even though I was ravenous. ‘You know, Lancelot, the blade will be ruined by now,’ he said.

  I spooned the food between numb lips, surprised to find it was still warm, and fell to eating like a starving man.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ I said, scraping the bowl. ‘Not if it is buried.’

  He shrugged, then reached into the scrip on his belt and took out a clay pot, not much bigger than a hen’s egg. The pot’s cream-coloured contents were set hard like tallow.

  ‘For the sores,’ he said, then frowned. ‘You’re to use it sparingly.’

  ‘From the Lady?’ I asked. I had not seen the Lady since she had come down the Mount to tend to Melwas and I wondered how she knew about the weeping wounds in my skin.

  Bors shook his head. ‘From Guinevere,’ he said, nodding over to Pelleas, who sat asleep by the far wall, his untouched meal beside him. ‘He must have told her,’ Bors said. ‘Must have asked her to make something to help the sores.’

  I looked at Pelleas, and perhaps I should have noticed how thin he was then, but all I could think of was Guinevere. In the years since we had roamed the island together as children, Guinevere had become somehow ethereal to me. The time we had spent in each other’s company, exploring the woods, climbing the granite cliffs and leaping like salmon in and out of the shallows, had in those intervening years seemed more like a conjuring of my own imagination than real memories. She was no more real than that, no more tangible than smoke or morning mist, and so I had taken to my weapons training in earnest.

  After my first season, Pelleas admitted that he had never known someone to whom weapon craft came so easily.

  ‘You’re gifted, Lancelot,’ he said after I had parried a dozen of his thrusts and strikes, not that he had been trying his best. ‘Perhaps the gods put this talent in you. Or maybe you just learn things as quickly as a fish learns to swim or a dog to bark. It’s not for me to say.’ He lifted his shield and practice sword. ‘But being a warrior is more than this,’ he said. ‘None of us are born knowing that. We have to learn it. And you will.’

  Four years of sword, spear and shield. Of triumphs and defeats. Pain, bone-tiredness and the occasional joy of mastering one of Edern’s sword techniques or Benesek’s spear strike combinations. Four years of learning to be a Guardian of the Mount so that we could serve the Lady when Pelleas and the others were too old to escort Greek merchants to Tintagel or train boys how to fight. Four years since I had been close enough to Guinevere to look into her eyes, and in that time she had shimmered just beneath the surface of my thoughts, as elusive as Benesek’s sword as I swam face down in the shallows or dived deep enough to hurt my ears when the tide was in.

  But now she was real again. I had seen her and she had seen me, and as much as I wanted – as much as I needed – to retrieve that sword for Benesek, in a strange way I would do it for Guinevere too. She would know that once I had set my course I was steadfast in it. I wanted her to know that.

  I held the little pot as a man might clutch an ingot of silver or tin, because it belonged to Guinevere and she must have been familiar with its rough texture and the chip in its lip which was sharp to the touch. I put it to my nose and inhaled the herbaceous scent of yellow meadow bright and rosemary and the sweetness of honey.

  ‘The sword is lost, Lancelot,’ Bors said. ‘There is no point killing yourself trying to find what cannot be found.’

  Beneath the pungent sweetness now came the aroma of comfrey root and with it a memory of my mother smearing green ointment onto Hector’s arm, which he had broken falling from Malo, my father’s stallion. I inhaled that scent and told myself I would not use Guinevere’s salve. There were too many sores anyway, on my feet and legs, back and chest, and rather than emptying that little clay pot I would keep it and in keeping it be in some small way closer to Guinevere.

  ‘Thank him for me, Bors,’ I said, nodding towards Pelleas.

  ‘Thank him yourself,’ he said.

  I nodded. Tomorrow, I thought. When I had given Benesek his Saxon sword.

  The next dawn brought stinging rain on an unseasonably chill wind. This wind came from the west, bringing great veils of rain which surged across the open sea like the ill will of angry gods, darkening a day which had barely begun. It raised the water around Karrek into furrows which raced across the bay to crash and shatter upon the mainland, hurling white spume onto the rocks. It was a miserable, menacing day and perhaps I should not have been choking amongst those racing black breakers, not least because it was almost impossible to search in any one area since I kept getting carried off. It was dangerous to be out there, too, for there were rocks on the seabed and more than once I was hurled onto them and had to fight the current to get
clear or else risk being thrown against them again and again until I was pummelled to death.

  But I was out there and I hoped that the violence of the wind-whipped water might have disturbed the seabed and perhaps uncovered Benesek’s sword, which had so far remained hidden from me. After what Bors had said the previous night, I had visions of finding a rust-eaten blade that was a mockery of that dazzling Saxon-forged weapon.

  Five times that day I had climbed ashore, thrown a cloak over my shoulders and sat shivering on the shingle, dry-retching from the sea water I had swallowed and muttering prayers to Manannán mac Lir that he might return the sword, for it was not Benesek’s fault that it had sunk to the seabed and nor had I meant it as an offering to the god. Then, exhausted and cold, I had given myself to the sea once more and continued my search, the sores on my skin weeping into the water and half blinding me with pain.

  Yet there was a serenity beneath the surface, the rain’s hiss and the sea’s onslaught upon the rocks reduced to a distant, dull roar, as I clawed and raked the sand, certain that at any moment I would grasp that ivory hilt.

  It was following one such strangely alluring moment of calm, when I had broken the surface to draw a breath of dusk air, that I saw a figure on Karrek’s shore. Even at that distance the figure loomed in the darkening day, and then something else caught my eye. High above the Mount, above the Lady’s keep, a crane beat its wings westward into the rain-filled skies, its neck outstretched and its stilt-like legs trailing behind, and I felt that bad omen like a shiver as I looked back at the man waiting on the shore.