Lancelot

by Giles Kristian

  His hands were raised to his mouth and I could just about hear my name in the teeth of the wind, so I swam towards him, against the tide, kicking with what little strength I had left, and as I came closer I realized that the man calling to me was Benesek.

  He had not spoken to me since the day I had lost his sword. He had raged that day and I wondered if the omen of that crane was a warning that Benesek had come to kill me. Yet, I swam to the shore anyway and had to crawl from the sand onto the shingle because I had no strength to stand and walk through the shifting shallows.

  I coughed and spat sea-tainted saliva and climbed to my feet, racked with shivering and so tired that I could barely lift my head. ‘I will find it,’ I told Benesek.

  Rain ran down his face and dripped from the ends of his long, drooping moustaches. ‘Forget about the damn sword, Lancelot,’ he said, unpinning his thick felt cloak. He was heavy-browed and solemn and I knew then that he had not come to kill me, because he stepped forward and put that big cloak around my shoulders. I tried to grip it at my neck but my hands were clumsy and numb and so Benesek fastened it with his own brooch. ‘It’s Pelleas,’ he said, those two words like a kick in my guts. ‘He’s dying.’

  I found the Lady at Pelleas’s bedside when I entered the hut which I had shared with him during my first years on Karrek. She leant close to the warrior and whispered to him that I had come, but I stayed at the door, dripping onto the floor rushes, unable to move as Pelleas pushed himself up against the bolsters. He grimaced with the effort.

  ‘There you are, lad,’ he said, forcing a smile onto his wan face. He looked exhausted. His bed had been turned north-south to confuse malevolent spirits and there was a bunch of mint tied around his wrist. Remedy for a bad stomach.

  ‘Come, Lancelot,’ the Lady said, beckoning me closer.

  I told myself that Pelleas would not want me to see him in this frail condition, when in truth it was I who was terrified to see him like this. I just stood there, hands knotted at my sides, teeth clenched to stop them chattering with cold.

  ‘Closer, lad,’ Pelleas rasped. ‘Dark in here.’

  The hearth had been well fed and the flames were tall and hungry, their copper light filling that wattle hut. I walked to the bed and the Lady stepped back so that I had no choice but to fill the space she had ceded to me.

  ‘Gods, Lancelot, you look worse than me,’ Pelleas said and this time the smile reached his eyes.

  Someone had tied bunches of rosemary and mint to the roof poles above Pelleas’s bed, though their fragrance could not smother the sharp stench of fresh faeces and Pelleas knew it.

  ‘My guts,’ he said through his teeth. ‘They’re rotting inside me, lad.’

  ‘I can only smell the mint,’ I lied. Pelleas nodded, then closed his eyes and kept them closed.

  ‘The pain is back,’ the Lady told me. ‘Stay with him, Lancelot. I will fetch something stronger to help him. Something that will make him sleep at least.’ With that she drifted out into the rain-scoured twilight and only when the door clumped shut behind her did Pelleas open his eyes again.

  ‘I haven’t found it yet,’ I said, not knowing what else to say.

  ‘You never will,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t you dropped it.’ Melwas had let go of the sword. It was his fault as much as mine. Perhaps more so. ‘Benesek knows it,’ Pelleas said, ‘so whatever you’re trying to prove out there with the fish—’ He stopped to shift position beneath the bed pelts. ‘Pride. Honour. Whatever damn reason. Not worth dying for, lad.’ He grimaced with pain. ‘Not at your age anyway.’

  ‘Benesek might never find another like it,’ I said.

  ‘Benesek has enough silver squirrelled away to have some Frankish blacksmith make him a better sword. Not as pretty, perhaps, but a Frankish blade that’ll cut stone and keep its edge. Don’t worry about Benesek.’

  Talking hurt him and so I was reluctant to encourage further conversation. Not that words would otherwise pour out of me.

  ‘Watch Melwas,’ he said. ‘He hates you more now than before.’

  ‘He killed my bird,’ I said. As if such a thing was important to a man on his deathbed. I felt a fool for saying it.

  He nodded. ‘I heard some talk, those years ago,’ he said.

  ‘You said nothing,’ I said. The old anguish and sorrow of that first year on the island stirred in me like a dull pain. I wondered who else had known that my sparhawk’s broken wing was no accident.

  ‘I knew you’d try to kill him,’ Pelleas said, shifting again. The stench became worse. ‘I was right,’ he said.

  ‘Is that why you asked for me?’ I said. ‘To warn me about Melwas?’

  The whites of his eyes were yellowish. His cheeks were sunken pools of shadow and I realized for the first time how much thinner he was. Whatever foul disease was killing him had been in him a while, only I had not seen it because I had been thinking of nothing but Benesek’s sword. And Guinevere.

  He looked to the door and his face tightened, then he curled a hand to usher me closer. I bent, holding my breath for the smell.

  ‘Need you to do something for me, lad,’ he said.

  ‘Anything,’ I said, remembering the formidable warrior who had slung me over his shoulder and carried me from that death feast at the Beggar King’s hall. ‘Anything. Just name it.’ I wanted to turn and fly to the door. To flee into the night and fill my lungs with clean air. To pretend that Pelleas, that brave and noble warrior, was anywhere but lying in that hut in his own filth and misery.

  ‘I want you to kill me, Lancelot,’ he said.

  For a heartbeat I thought I had misheard. And yet his eyes held my own, so that with a shudder of horror I realized I had heard well enough.

  ‘You must do it, lad,’ he said, ‘before this gut rot makes a mewling beast of me.’

  ‘No,’ I said, shaking my head; then his hand took mine and squeezed it hard. There was still strength in him. The savage strength of a desperate man.

  ‘You think I want to die like this, boy?’ he growled, spittle flecking at his lips. ‘Lying in my own reeking filth?’ There was fear in his eyes and for a moment he did not look like the man I knew. Then he let go my hand and seemed to sag back into the pelts.

  ‘The Lady will give you something,’ I said, ‘some infusion to help the pain. Something stronger perhaps. There are plants.’

  He shook his head, from which grey stubble sprouted because he had not shaved it in days. ‘Long ago I resigned myself to a blade death. A warrior’s death,’ he said. ‘Rather a quick blade than drifting away on some potion without knowing about it.’ He tensed with pain as I had seen him do before and it took him a while to find his breath and the composure to speak again. ‘I will face death, Lancelot, not hide from it, oblivious in some stupor.’

  My heart was thumping. The spitting hearth fire had begun to thaw my flesh and I ached all over now. Every sore and lesion announced itself like a candle flame against my skin. My salt-stung throat was so tight that I could not swallow. I thirsted for water, but I could not move to take up the jug on the table by Pelleas’s head.

  ‘Ask Benesek,’ I said. ‘Or Madern.’

  ‘They would not do it,’ he said. Then he grunted. ‘Perhaps they would. But after what we have been through together over the years …’ He shook his head. ‘I would not put that on them.’

  ‘But you would put it on me?’ I said.

  ‘What am I to you, lad?’ he asked. ‘An old man.’

  Pelleas was in his late middle years and I had never thought of him as old, though those years showed hard on him now.

  ‘You are my friend,’ I said.

  He exhaled through his cracked lips and closed his eyes. When he opened them again they were flat with sorrow. ‘Then do it as my friend,’ he said.

  My blood itself had soured. My vision was blurry and my legs threatened to give way.

  ‘Lancelot, you are unwell,’ the Lady said, not looking at me as she came into the room, pushing back her rain-s
oaked hood. I caught sight of Geldrin outside. He was bent double and panting, his breath fogging in the rain, and I knew that the Lady had sent him up to the keep to fetch the wooden cup which she now lifted to her nose to smell its contents. ‘You will forget about the sword and you will eat and drink what I send, do you understand, Lancelot?’ she said, moving to the other side of Pelleas’s bed and taking hold of the water jug.

  ‘Yes, Lady,’ I said, at which she nodded, pouring a thin trickle of water into the cup.

  ‘What’s in it?’ Pelleas muttered, suspicious eyes going from the Lady to the cup and then back to the Lady.

  She stirred the mixture with an eating knife, then smelled it again. ‘Cramp bark and white willow bark,’ she said, ‘and feverfew herb. I would have liked to add some valerian root but it seems we have none.’

  ‘Just for the pain?’ Pelleas asked.

  ‘Just for the pain,’ the Lady assured him, holding the cup to his lips. ‘You will sleep long and deep but you will wake again,’ she said.

  Pelleas grunted and drank, then cursed into the cup and dragged a trembling hand across his lips. ‘Tastes like rat piss. Next time mix it with wine,’ he said, shooting me a grin which contorted, becoming a sneer as the foul-tasting medicine hit his stomach.

  ‘You’ve seen the boy, Pelleas, now let him go,’ the Lady said. ‘He needs to rest.’

  ‘Away with you, then,’ Pelleas told me, nodding at the Lady that he was ready to finish what was left in the cup. ‘But you come and see me soon, Lancelot, do you hear me?’

  I said that I would and then I left them, the dying warrior’s voice still in my skull as I walked through the seething rain towards the hut which I shared with the other boys of Karrek.

  I want you to kill me, Lancelot.

  Geldrin ran up to me to ask how Pelleas was, his small face tight with worry as he chewed his thumbnail. But I could not answer him because Pelleas’s words flooded my mind like water gushing in through a crack in a boat’s hull. And the next thing I knew, Geldrin was yelling. He was calling for help and I wondered what could have happened to him seeing as he had been fine a moment ago.

  ‘Somebody! Help me!’ he shrieked and so I asked him what all the fuss was about. Well, I tried to ask him, but I could not form the words and all that came out of my mouth was a low burble of unintelligible nonsense, because I was lying face down on the mud-slick grass. And then the darkness swallowed me.

  I woke in the Lady’s keep with no knowledge of how I had come to be there. Neither had I ever been in the room in which I now found myself, though I knew it must be at the top of the keep because all I could see from the window slit was endless blue sky and the white gulls that laid claim to it, shrieking madly as though mocking all other creatures for being shackled to land or sea. I was sweat-soaked. Unbearably hot. My mouth so dry that my lips were fastened together and I could not open them.

  The surge of the sea sounded more distant than usual and I was struck with the need to escape the blankets and furs which held me captive. To go to the window and peer out, so the cool breeze upon which those gulls caroused could scour the stupor from me and I would be restored.

  But then, perhaps I was not in the Lady’s keep at all. Perhaps I was in a dream and in reality still lying in the mud outside Pelleas’s hut. Because my eyes were seeing, albeit through a haze which distorted everything, that which I knew could not be real. And yet if it were a dream it was more real than any dream I had ever had, which made me suspect I had not spun it alone. Had the Lady poured some herbal draught down my throat as I lay where I had fallen, so that now my mind was no longer fully my own?

  ‘The Lady asked me to look after you,’ Guinevere said, handing me a cup of water. I spilt a good deal of that cool water on the furs but at least the moisture broke the seal of my parched lips. Yet still I could not speak. ‘You’ve been asleep since yesterday,’ she said, pressing the back of her hand against my forehead and holding it there a moment. ‘But now you are awake you must eat to keep up your strength.’

  ‘I’m hot,’ I said.

  She touched her own head for comparison and frowned. ‘The fever is still in you.’ She went over to a chest beneath the window and took out another blanket, then came and laid it on the mound of pelts which already swamped me. ‘We shall sweat this fever out,’ she said. ‘But you must drink every cup of water that I give you.’ She wore her hair loose and with the light of the day behind her it took on a reddish hue and I remembered her saying when we were children that it was the fire in her.

  ‘You know, Lancelot,’ she said, giving me a sidelong glance and showing me the small clay pot of untouched salve that she had made for the raw sores on my skin, ‘it works much better when you put it on the bits that hurt.’ She shook her head, touching a gentle finger to the salve.

  I pushed back the covers and tried to sit up to better get a sense of where I was.

  ‘Bors and Branok carried you on a litter,’ Guinevere said, knowing the question before I asked it, then proceeded with exquisite care to dab the ointment onto the sores on my neck and shoulders. I breathed in the aroma of meadow bright, rosemary and comfrey root and I shivered at her touch.

  ‘Back under the furs with you,’ she said when she had finished.

  I slid back down into the bed, dizziness swimming in me from the effort of moving.

  ‘The Lady wants you close to her. Close to the gods, too,’ Guinevere added, gesturing at the small chamber around us, which must have been the lookout back in Roman times, for there were several window slits affording views to the north, south, east and west. Guinevere nodded at the simple bed upon which I lay. ‘The Lady comes up here when she hopes to receive dreams from the gods,’ she said, filling the cup with water again. ‘You are honoured to be here, Lancelot.’

  She did not trust me not to spill the water and so held the cup to my lips, and as I drank I remembered lying face down in the grass. Then I remembered more and my stomach rolled over itself. ‘Pelleas,’ I said.

  Guinevere leant over the bed, her ear turned towards me, and I realized that I had barely spoken aloud. ‘Pelleas,’ I muttered again, coughing into the pelts as Guinevere straightened.

  ‘He lives,’ she said, ‘though Madern and Agga had to force him back into his bed.’ She shook her head in wonder. ‘He was on his way up here to see how you were. Not that he’d have got far, poor man. The Lady says there is nothing we can do for him now.’

  I laid my head back onto the sweat-sodden pillow, my eyelids feeling impossibly heavy. And I went away again.

  The next days passed in a fevered fog. I was either freezing cold or scorching hot and time after time besieged by waves of bone-rattling shivers against which I was helpless.

  ‘Don’t fight, Lancelot. Just let it take you, as we used to lie on our backs and let the currents carry us,’ Guinevere said during one such episode, holding my hands in hers as she would whenever these tremors took hold. And sometimes I was able to escape the fever for a while and be ten years old again, floating like bladderwrack in the shallows off Karrek’s eastern shore, the sun warming my face and Guinevere beside me.

  Other times, I was aware of her fingers raking through my hair or her cool breath on my forehead, and more than once I thought I heard her singing or humming in a voice that drifted in and out of my head like a gentle tide.

  At some point in my delirium, I later learnt, they had carried me down to the sandy shore when the tide was coming in, and the Lady had asked the retreating waves to carry away the disease and leave me well. Perhaps it had some good effect, or perhaps it did nothing but tire out those who bore me, but the fever had me still.

  Whenever I was in my right mind I would know that Guinevere was with me, dousing the fire in my skin with wet cloths, dabbing my lips with cool water and spilling foul-tasting potions into my mouth.

  Much of the time, though, I was confined in darkness, held captive by the sickness which, in Guinevere’s words, I had brought upon myself with
stubbornness and pride.

  ‘You would kill yourself for a sword?’ she asked one night, the scorn in her voice sharp enough to cut through the fever’s bonds and wound me.

  Not just a sword. For honour, I thought, but lacked the strength to say. Whenever I could summon my voice I’d ask after Pelleas, fearing to hear that he had died. And perhaps fearing to hear that he still lived.

  The days and nights passed in this way until one night I woke to find that I was alone in that chamber at the top of the Lady’s keep. I had been dreaming of my sparhawk and in that dream she and I were in the woods of Benoic where I had roamed as a child. My father was in the dream, too, as the man he had once been, rather than the man he became, and the white gyrfalcon was perched on his fist just as the sparhawk was perched on mine.

  ‘Show me, Lancelot,’ he said, stroking the proud falcon, and I grinned at him and we walked together, my chest brimming with elation at the prospect of proving myself, my bird’s arrogant yellow eyes fixed on the woods and her body tensed in readiness should some prey reveal itself.

  Soon enough, a quail clattered up from a patch of long grass and I extended my arm towards it and let go my sparhawk’s jesses and she leapt from the glove, beating hard. But then something was wrong. In a flail of wings she tumbled from the air, spiralling like an arrow, and struck the ground. Shrieking in terror. Flapping madly. Writhing in vain amongst a flurry of shed feathers, she cursed gods and men. She cursed me too, for she could not fly. She was an abomination to her kind. A ruined creature, in my dream and in life, and I was not brave enough to end her misery.

  This dream’s claws still in me, I was out of the bed and stumbling down the stairwell, feeling the stones’ coldness on the skin of my shoulders, arms and hands as I scuffed against the wall to steady myself. I was neither fully awake, nor well. Not even close to being free of the sickness which had weakened my body and clouded my mind, but I opened the keep’s door and careened into the night, gulping at the cool sea air and lumbering down the moonlit slope.

  My legs gave way and I sprawled headlong onto the dewy grass. Clambered to my bare feet and stumbled on and fell again, feeble and unsteady as a newborn foal. Up again, staggering on, looking up at the iron-grey clouds which raced through the silver black sky and dizzied me so that I had to stop for several heartbeats or else fall again. I looked behind me up the slope. No one following. I ran on, reaching the woods without falling, and wove between the trees whose branches grasped at me but could not catch me. The breeze whispered through those woods but I did not stop to listen to what it said, nor did I look for omens or stand a while upon the shore to watch the white-haired waves roll across the submerged rocks.