Instead, I skirted the communal hut and Edern and Avenie’s place and fell against the wattle fence of the pig pen, earning a contemptuous snort from one of the beasts as I stood looking up at the fast-sailing clouds, the stench of manure tainting every ragged breath. The incessant, drawn-out sighs of the ebb tide sounded distant and dull. The full moon above me was not a searingly bright and cloud-beset disc, but a smear of silver, dull as a dirty blade, and for a moment I was not sure where I was. An ear-piercing ringing had me pressing my hands against my ears, though some part of me knew the sound was inside my own head.
I prayed to Taranis, master of war, to whom my father used to pray, that the god would give me strength now. Strength to do what must be done, before my body failed me and the black void swallowed me again. That come the dawn, I would not be found by Benesek or Edern or one of the others, naked but for my loincloth, face down in the grass.
I was moving again, faltering, almost falling yet somehow keeping my feet, towards the hut from whose thatch grey smoke rose like steam into the chill night.
What if someone was with him? What then? I shook my head, trying to rid it of that accursed ringing, then pushed open the door and stepped inside. And there he was, sitting up in his bed, the lines of his haggard face etched by the bronze glow of the hearth fire. Boar’s Tusk lay in its scabbard beside him and he had one hand on its hilt as if he had been waiting for an enemy.
Or waiting for me.
‘Took you long enough,’ he said.
I looked to make sure that we were alone, then went over to him and this time I lifted the jug from the table by his bed and drank from it. When I put the jug back I saw him notice my trembling hands.
‘Knew you’d come,’ he said. ‘I knew it.’ He yet had enough life in him to look amused by my standing there in the dead of night, thin and pallid and wearing only enough cloth to preserve my modesty.
He frowned. ‘You will do it, lad?’ he said.
I nodded. ‘How?’ I asked.
He closed his eyes and exhaled, then smiled and told me how.
There were tears in my eyes as I drew Boar’s Tusk from its scabbard. The blade was polished and honed to a razor’s edge and beautiful.
‘You’ll need strength,’ he warned me, ‘to do it right.’
‘I know,’ I said. The swirls along the sword’s length reminded me of blood eddies on water.
‘And you’ll have to help me out of this damned bed,’ he said, lifting a hand and offering it to me as he grimaced with the effort of shifting himself to the edge of the bed.
I laid Boar’s Tusk on the table and told him to hang on round my neck as I put my arms around him, under his arms, and eased him off the bed. The strain of it flooded my vision with blackness and the ringing in my ears was deafening, but Pelleas’s legs buckled and I lowered him until he was kneeling on the rushes.
We were both gasping so that neither of us could talk for a while, but then Pelleas straightened his back and sat tall, his backside resting on his heels, and so I took Boar’s Tusk from the table whilst arming sweat from my forehead and eyes.
‘You’re a good lad,’ he said with a nod, smoothing his tunic of undyed wool.
‘I can’t do it,’ I said. The sword grip was slick in my hand. I felt the need to void my bowels and the muscles in my thighs quivered incessantly.
‘Yes, you can, Lancelot,’ Pelleas said, lifting his head, though he could not see me because I stood behind him. ‘You have it in you. I should know.’
I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said.
‘Come here, lad,’ he said, and so I moved to stand in front of him, then fell to my knees so that our faces were no more than a foot apart. I could smell the disease on his creaking breath but could not hold his eye and so looked at the floor rushes instead. Pelleas took hold of my chin and pushed my head back up so that our eyes met. ‘You can do it, Lancelot. And you must do it.’ His hand fell away but I held his gaze now.
‘Ask Benesek,’ I said, hoping beyond hope to escape this dreadful responsibility. Even then.
Pelleas shook his head. ‘It must be you,’ he said. ‘It will be you.’ There was a gut-wrenching sadness in his eyes but no tears. He smiled thinly. ‘Besides, Benesek hasn’t got a decent sword,’ he said.
Silence. A log spat an ember into the rushes where I watched it die.
‘You didn’t come down here to tell me you won’t do it,’ he said.
‘No,’ I said, looking down at the sword in my hand.
‘Lancelot, look at me,’ he said, and so I did. ‘You are my friend,’ he said. ‘What you do for me now takes more courage than a man might see in his life. I know it. And I thank you for it. And if our shadow bodies meet in the hereafter, I will thank you again and we shall be friends again.’
I said nothing because I could not speak. But I did look into his eyes and in that look I tried to tell him that I loved him.
‘Now, lad,’ he said, nodding and straightening again as he steeled himself. ‘Do it.’
I let out the breath I had been holding and climbed to my feet, moving around him so that I stood looking down at his head, which I could see by the flame-glow was newly shaved. Then, with two hands on the grip, I lifted Boar’s Tusk and placed its point gently on the skin of the hollow between his neck and his left collarbone. Pelleas did not so much as flinch at the blade’s cold touch. He knew the sword was as sharp as it could be, and that one massive thrust would drive that blade down to tear open his beating heart. And so he knelt there, straight-backed, his hands on his thighs and his eyes closed.
‘Goodbye, my friend,’ I said, and whispered to Taranis to make me strong enough.
Then I plunged the sword down.
I escaped the horror I had made and stood for a while outside the hut, drawing long breaths and looking up at the night sky. A bat wheeled in its erratic and graceless flight and then was gone, and I wondered if it had in fact been Pelleas’s soul fleeing his mortal body. I did not know how long it took a man’s soul to reach Annwn’s shores far beyond the Western Sea, but I hoped that Pelleas would soon be hunting the boar and the stag in that realm where disease held no sway and pain was unknown.
High above me the clouds raced on as before, charging past the moon which shimmered through my tears. Around me, the inhabitants of Karrek Loos yn Koos slept on, and around us all the sea murmured as it ever did, its breathy cadence unaffected by what had just taken place. One heartbeat Pelleas was here with us, like the rocks and the trees, like the surf rolling up onto the shingle and the fish swimming in the bay. Then, he was gone. Just like that, Pelleas was nothing more than my memory of him.
I then did the second hardest thing I had ever done. I went back inside that hut. For a moment I just looked at him and I was struck by how much his face had changed since his life had fled, so that if someone had walked in then who had not known Pelleas well, they might not even recognize him. His face was impossibly gaunt and had turned a greyish yellow that not even the fire glow could warm.
Thankfully there was little blood. There was a neat crimson cleft against his collarbone and the tunic around it was stained dark, but the blood from his ripped-open heart had filled his chest instead of spilling all over him. Carefully, or as carefully as my own fevered and frail body would let me, I lifted him, taking pains to keep his torso upright so as not to spill any blood as I moved him back to his bed. Then I positioned the bolsters behind him until he looked almost as he had when I had come, but for his face which was hollow and sallow by the flamelight and so barren without the spark of his soul.
When this was done, I cleaned Boar’s Tusk and polished the blade until it gleamed, then I put it back in its scabbard and laid it on the furs over his thighs. I looked at him sitting there, even though it tortured my own heart to do it, and then I said goodbye to my friend for the last time, before heading into the night.
12
Conceived in Blood
I SAT SHIVERING in a small clearing amongst the blac
kthorn, oak and hazel, where the breeze blowing in off the sea could do nothing to help dry my tunic and trews. It was one of those warm, late summer days, when the air itself is sluggish and thick with the scent of honeysuckle, and the woodland clearings and thickets are glutted with the drowsy buzzing of flies. When bees and butterflies throng at the flowers and caterpillars plague the oaks and beetles scuttle through the litter and, now and then, you hear the distant hammering of a woodpecker chiselling out grubs from their tunnels in old timber.
Above me the sky was the blue of cornflowers, and I watched the martins and swallows joining together to celebrate the seemingly endless summer and the infinite bounty of insects to be plundered. They chased and swerved and plummeted, imitating each other in flight, and then as one flock they veered and cut away, vanishing as quickly as they had appeared.
Black bryony and bindweed twisted and twined in the thickets around me. Thorny dog roses and brambles grappled and grasped, and goosegrass scrambled its way along the forest floor. It was just one small clearing amongst the profusion of life beyond the place which we called The Edge, on the mainland shore. And yet whenever I came here, no sooner had I dried from the swim across the bay than would my palms become slick with sweat. Having barely slowed after the exertion of the swim, my heart would beat faster again, urgent as a hawkmoth’s wingbeats as it hangs above a cluster of honeysuckle. I would feel the blood thrumming in my veins as it did before a fight or contest against one of the other boys. And none of this was because I had broken the Lady’s rules by coming here to the mainland.
A twig snapped somewhere behind me and I stood from my log seat, turning towards the sound. Nothing. A deer perhaps, which had not smelled me, with there being no breeze to carry my scent. I had swum from Karrek’s north-east shore as I always did on a sunny day. The seabed from there to the mainland was rocky and weed-covered, making the sea look dark, so that anyone looking out would be less likely to see me. Elsewhere, the seabed was sandy and the sea clear, meaning I would stand out against it on a day so bright as this, and I did not relish the thought of having to explain to the Lady why I had broken her rules. Nor would I escape Benesek, who would wonder why I was deemed still too weak to train fully but not too weak to swim from shore to shore.
But I had made it across unseen and now I waited in that small glade, watching a tribe of wood ants carrying their prey – a butterfly with reddish-yellow and black wings – across the woodland floor. I could hear the rustle of their vigorous, inexorable progress, but then another sound made me look up in the direction of the shore.
‘One day they will catch us,’ Guinevere said, dripping in a shaft of sunlight beside an old blackthorn which had been raided for firewood in the recent past. Yann the cook said that faggots of thorn bush baked the sweetest bread and regularly sent one of us to cut some for the store.
‘And what would they do?’ I asked with a shrug.
‘Cast us out?’ Guinevere suggested, bending to squeeze the water out of her sodden dress. ‘It has happened before, to a girl and boy who were found together in the smokehouse.’ The cream-coloured linen clung to her lithe body in such wonderful ways.
The first time we had met beyond The Edge I had done my best not to stare, though my best efforts had been feeble. Not that Guinevere ever seemed embarrassed or told me not to look. Now though, as she stood there drenched and breathing hard after the swim, I let my eyes wander to the swell of her breasts. Even down to the small dark patch which showed faintly through the dress at her crotch.
‘The smokehouse?’ I said.
Guinevere smiled, amused by the thought. Somewhere in the branches nearby a raven gave that strange call that sounds like the glug, glug of wine being poured from a bottle. ‘They must have thought that was the last place anyone would look.’
I grinned. ‘At least their love was preserved,’ I said, impressed with my own joke. Guinevere rolled her eyes. ‘They wouldn’t cast us out,’ I said, standing and walking to her. ‘You are the Lady’s most gifted student. And I am the best sword on the island.’ I grinned again. That boast was unearned, for while none of the other boys could beat me with the practice swords, both Benesek and Edern could. But being with Guinevere brought out my arrogance. When I was with her I feared nothing. I thought myself capable of anything.
‘How do you know I am the Lady’s best student?’ she challenged me, watching me from the corner of her eye as she turned her head and grasped her long dark hair so that water ran from her fists.
‘Aren’t you?’ I said.
She answered that with just a look and I kept my eyes on hers now, even though they were being drawn to the swell of her breasts in that sodden linen dress like a bee to a teasel flower.
‘So what shall we do, Lancelot? Creep around like mice afraid of the cat? Stealing a moment here, a moment there?’
I shrugged. ‘For now,’ I said. ‘But one day, you will take the Lady’s place and I will be as Pelleas was, a Guardian of the Mount and the Lady’s champion.’
‘Poor Pelleas,’ she said. ‘You must miss him.’
I half nodded and looked away, regretting having brought Pelleas into it. No one had been accused of killing the warrior, nor had there been any talk of it openly, for everyone on the island knew that whoever had sheathed a blade in Pelleas’s heart had done it out of love or comradeship. To end his suffering. But the memory of that night, of looking into his living eyes before sending his soul to the afterlife, was sharp still. Painful still.
Guinevere took my hands in hers. We were standing so close that I could smell the sage which she had chewed to sweeten her breath. She gave a sad smile. ‘You think life will be so simple?’ she asked.
‘I think we will always be together,’ I said.
She arched her brows. ‘And the vengeance you have sworn on your uncle? On those others who did those unspeakable things? You would forget all that and live here to grow old with me?’
I frowned. ‘At some time I will have to leave for a while,’ I admitted. ‘But will return as soon as I have avenged my family. Then we will grow old here together. We will swim all the days of summer and in the winter we will tell stories to our children by the fire.’
I kept my face as straight as I could while Guinevere’s eyes widened in feigned shock at my presumption. ‘So how many children shall we have?’ she asked.
I pretended to give the question some thought. ‘Two boys,’ I said after a while, ‘and perhaps a girl also. Who will be headstrong and troublesome like her mother.’
She pursed her lips. ‘And there was me thinking you only thought of fighting and running and hurling your spears and trying to be better than Melwas,’ she said, ‘but it seems you have planned our future.’
Neither of us could keep up the pretence any longer and we both laughed, and of the half a dozen times we had met here across the water, this was the longest Guinevere had let me hold her hands before breaking the grip.
‘Where are you supposed to be?’ I asked.
Her lips, as full and pink as the corncockles which throng among the summer rye, curled up at the corners.
‘I should be gathering ingredients.’
‘What ingredients?’ I asked.
She frowned, trying to remember. ‘Ash leaves, cowslip root, eyebright, lavender, mugwort, thyme and yarrow,’ she said. ‘But Alana will give me half of whatever she finds.’
‘Alana knows you are here?’ I said.
‘Of course she does,’ Guinevere said. ‘But she won’t say anything to anyone. So long as I tell her what we get up to.’ She almost smiled. ‘Some of it, anyway.’
I tried to hide my alarm at that thought. ‘What potions are you girls making?’ I asked.
Guinevere narrowed her eyes at me. ‘You know I can’t talk about the craft,’ she said.
‘I tell you when I have learnt a new spear block or sword strike,’ I said.
‘Whether I want to see it or not,’ she said.
For the first time it w
as I who broke our hand hold, my brow tightening like a belt cinched at the waist.
‘Oh, Lancelot, for such a formidable young warrior you are easily harmed,’ she said, and I did not know if she was still teasing me but she took hold of my hands again.
‘You know some herbal lore?’ she said. ‘Thyme for courage. Basil for wealth. Rosemary keeps a woman young. Sage wards off evil.’
I gave a half-hearted nod and wondered what her sage-chewing said about me, as she gestured to a clump of tall plants which looked to my eyes like any other thorny furze. ‘Some of what we are supposed to gather today is to help us to journey,’ she said. I wished then that I had not asked, remembering that night years ago, when Merlin had come to Karrek and he and Guinevere had journeyed together.
‘Perhaps it is for the best if I do not know,’ I said gloomily.
She nodded and to my surprise leant forward and kissed me on the lips, then pulled back, a mischievous smile playing at the corners of her mouth. ‘So long as you do keep showing me the sword tricks you have learnt,’ she said, ‘for I am interested. I swear it.’
‘They are not tricks,’ I said, then smiled. ‘I could teach you how to knock a sword out of a man’s hand and cut a flying arrow in two. If you like.’
‘I am sure such skills will come in useful growing old here with the gulls and the fish,’ she said, and with that she leant in again and this time I was ready. I shivered with the forbidden thrill of that kiss, the blood gushing in my ears and in my groin like an echo of the surf rolling up the shore beyond the trees.
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