Lancelot

by Giles Kristian

  Then we pulled back and for several heartbeats just looked into each other’s eyes, Guinevere’s white teeth dragging at her bottom lip. Not, I think, because of some nervousness or fear of getting caught with me, but rather because she feared revealing so much of herself, of her secret thoughts, to anyone. Especially me, perhaps.

  ‘You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,’ I said. It was true, for all that I feared how trite it must have sounded to her, though she did not say so. I wondered how Guinevere’s father could have sent her away. Surely she was a light in his life. This radiant, fearless girl.

  She pouted and it was all I could do not to kiss her again. ‘You have lived in the forests of Benoic and on this island and this is the furthest you have ever been into Britain,’ she said. ‘When you have actually seen something of the world I will ask you again if you still think I am the most beautiful thing in the world.’

  ‘And I will say the same again,’ I said.

  She frowned and shook her head and some strands of her dark hair fell over her left eye. She did not sweep the hair away but left it there, as if half hiding behind it. As if my gaze frightened as much as intrigued her.

  ‘So what will you tell Alana?’ I asked.

  She gave that half-smile which hinted at mischief. ‘I will tell her that we kissed,’ she said.

  ‘Just that?’ I asked.

  She lifted her chin. ‘There is nothing more to tell,’ she said. ‘Though she will not believe that and will try to wring me like a sponge for every last detail.’

  The horror of that thought must have shown on my face.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I shall tell her that we kissed and I shall say no more than that. She will of course spin her own version of it in her mind, but that can only help us. The more our meetings feed Alana’s own imagination, the more likely she is to keep our secret.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said, still feeling uneasy about anyone else knowing. But then Guinevere kissed me again and I did not care about anything else in the world.

  They were happy days on Karrek. That summer seemed to stretch on and on, like the blue skies beneath which we trained with our weapons until the sweat poured down our bare torsos and the breath rasped in our throats. And still we fought and competed against each other in foot races, and lifted rocks and swam circuits of the island, each of us eager to prove himself and earn the praise of our betters.

  In spite of the fever that had laid me low after my fruitless search for Benesek’s sword, as that summer slowly slipped away I grew strong. By the time the nights drew in and our shadows lengthened on the shingle shore, and the prevailing breeze from the Western Sea raised bumps on bare arms, my shoulders had filled out. The leather thong around my neck upon which I had hung the silver ring Guinevere had given me was tight now. My stomach was ridged with bands of muscle, while the muscles in my arms were hard and taut as ship’s knots. Yet even with this new muscle I was still fast and with the wooden swords landed blows even on Benesek and Edern almost as often as they hit me.

  I was good with the bow, too, and could hit the target almost as often as Agga, and though I could still not throw a spear as far as Melwas, Agga or Bors, I could cast with more accuracy than they, which even Benesek admitted was more advantageous in a real fight. ‘Unless your enemies are running away,’ the warrior had joked, ‘and you don’t care which one you kill but just want to stick one of them before you go home to your wine and your woman.’

  I was strong and fast and confident. And I was in love.

  Bors knew my secret of course. For one thing, shortly after he had come to Karrek and we had become friends, he had asked whose ring I wore around my neck and I had told him. For another, he had seen my face when he gave me the salve which Guinevere made for me back when I had been covered in sores.

  ‘You may as well chase the tide, Lancelot,’ he had said with pity in his smiling eyes as we sat one warm summer night on the shore, watching the black water break white on the rocks.

  ‘You’ve seen how fast I am,’ I replied, smiling. I did not want his pity. ‘And besides, her father Lord Leodegan is a Christian,’ I said. ‘His hall is glutted with Christians, which is why Guinevere is here on Karrek.’

  Bors flinched his head back a little, which was his way of saying that he still did not understand.

  ‘The Christians fear Guinevere’s abilities,’ I said. ‘They do not understand her talents and feel threatened by the old ways.’

  Bors grunted. ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ he said. ‘Their god seems weak next to Cernunnos or Balor or Taranis.’

  He knew about Guinevere’s journeying. Thanks to the girls who had been there, the whole island knew what I had done to Merlin that night in the keep.

  ‘He may seem weak but look how he gathers men,’ I said. ‘Merlin says that one day our gods will be gone from Britain and the Christian god will rule here.’

  ‘Christians are strange,’ Bors said, his only comment on the druid’s grim prediction.

  ‘So Guinevere will stay here on the Mount,’ I said, ‘and of all the girls, she has the greatest ability. And one day the Lady will be old.’

  ‘Guinevere will inherit the Lady’s power and position,’ Bors said, understanding now, ‘and you will be a Guardian of the Mount and the two of you will rule this little island like Uther and Igraine.’

  He shook his head, looking up at the moon. ‘Then I hope you are not just fast but patient too, cousin,’ he said.

  I touched the ring at my neck and turned to look up at the keep on top of the hill. I had once manned a hawk. I had taken a spiteful, starved and broken-winged sparhawk and taught her to tolerate me, as her keeper at first, then as her companion in the hunt. I could be patient, I thought.

  With Bors’s help and Alana’s too, Guinevere and I met in secret whenever we could. Sometimes we swam across to The Edge and waited for one another in the thorny glade. Other times, I saw her when the Lady sent her down to the shore with medicine or ointment when one of us boys had been cut in training, or if one of the men suffered a toothache or sore back. More often than not, Guinevere and I came no closer than a shared smile or furtive glance: morsels to the starving, and yet delicious. There were times, though they were too few, when we managed to contrive it that I took the remedies from her. For a heartbeat, no more, our fingers would touch and the thrill of that illicit moment would thrum in my blood like a bow string when the arrow flies.

  Eventually, the summer faded. We slaughtered and salted some of the pigs and raided Cornubia’s woods for their mast of beech and hazel nuts, acorns and chestnuts. We unburdened the orchards of apples, pears and plums, pillaged the brambles of their blackberries, rosehips and sloes, and dived down to the oyster beds for their rich harvest.

  After the Lady or one of her girls had spoken the calming charms, we smoked the bees from their hives and stole their sweet honey for our mead, their reddish resin for its healing properties and their wax to make candles to light when the Lady hosted important guests, for they burned with a bright and steady flame and did not stink like the mutton-fat candles. We slaughtered two old ponies and smoked their flesh and one blustery afternoon Melwas, Agga and Edern, who had taken the currach across to the mainland, returned in boastful triumph with a full-grown boar which they had speared to the north-east, not a day’s walk from King Menadoc’s hall.

  ‘And what would you have done had a king’s man found you hunting Menadoc’s beasts in Menadoc’s woods?’ Benesek challenged them as they hefted the carcass from the boat, but the only answers he got were grins. The boys were not punished. Even Benesek was impressed with the prize and we gutted and skinned the beast and hung it to smoke.

  The skies seemed either to be heavy and grey and thronged with cloud, or else bright blue and clear and so cold that the mornings greeted us with the hoar frost crunching underfoot. Dunlins and turnstones and other wading birds wore their winter plumage of dull browns and greys, and now and then a throbbing
noise would have one of us looking up to see a pair of swans in flight, their great wings beating into the south.

  If I saw a stoat bounding across the leaf-littered hill, its coat was completely white, and in its looping run I always heard old Hoel in my head. ‘He’d rather turn and let the gyrfalcon rip into him than flee through the mire and get that pretty coat filthy,’ he had told me one winter when Benoic lay under a quilt of snow and we were out hunting other creatures that would be easily seen against the white. ‘An ermine would die for his pride,’ the falconer said.

  Snow fell on the Lady’s keep that winter. As fine as flour on the threshing-room floor, yet it lay on the grass of the Mount and on the strand above the lapping tide, and before long that thin mantle was stitched with the tracks of hare and badger, pigeon and gull. And with the snow came a ship.

  The Elsam came from Tintagel and her arrival prompted a celebration on Karrek because we knew it was likely the last ship we would see before the spring. It brought grain, ale and wine and it also brought Edern and Madern back, which was another reason for lighting the beeswax candles to chase away the dark, and for bringing a joint of venison down from the hooks to add its salted flesh to the broth. The men had escorted a party of Greek merchants first to Tintagel, where they unloaded their amphorae of olive oil, and then across the Irish Sea to the slave markets on the Liffey, where the Greeks were hosted by the high king of Ireland himself, Lugaid mac Lóegairi. Then, having bought a number of slaves, the Greeks had returned to Tintagel, where High King Uther feasted them.

  ‘King Uther treated them like kings,’ Edern told us, shaking his head, ‘gave them wolf pelts and women, to loosen their tongues about all they had seen in Ireland and all they’d heard from Lugaid mac Lóegairi’s own mouth.’

  ‘Even offered to buy their Irish slaves for three times what the Greeks paid for them,’ Madern said, ‘but they claimed their Emperor would pay ten times that and so wouldn’t sell. Still, they accepted Uther’s invitation to stay the winter rather than risk a return so late in the season.’

  Their duty discharged and their purses full, Edern and Madern had bought grain, ale and wine and paid the skipper of a small coaster to convey them and their cargo to Karrek, and the day after their return, we gathered to the harp’s song and fed the fires until the flames leapt high as though revelling in their coming reign over the winter nights.

  I was fifteen and I raised my cup of strong ale to Pelleas’s memory with the rest of them, although I did not have the thirst for ale that Melwas, Agga, Bors and some of the others had. They drank until they staggered outside to heave the contents of their stomachs onto the snow in steaming streams. Then they would continue drinking.

  ‘He can’t take his ale,’ Melwas would say, gesturing at me with his cup, even if he was still wiping the vomit off his tunic. Maybe he was right. But wine and ale had ruined my father and I would not let it ruin me. Yet I drank enough to warm my insides and flush my cheeks. And make me want to declare to every living thing under that roof, under the stars themselves if it came to it, that I loved the girl who sat cross-legged on the dais plucking the lyre’s strings. Which might have been already obvious to anyone with eyes, had they not been fixed on Guinevere too.

  For if she had been able to hold a room full of people spellbound when she was a girl of eleven summers, at sixteen she could steal their souls.

  ‘Erwana is prettier,’ I had heard Peran tell Branok and Florien one day when we were putting arrow after arrow into the straw targets.

  And Erwana was pretty. She was golden-haired like the Lady and long-limbed and her clear-skinned face had a luminous quality which made it easy to imagine Erwana as a queen in a silken gown, dripping with silver and gold. Her eyes were large and blue and she knew how to use them. Jenifry too, with her almond eyes, full lips and fuller breasts, was considered a beauty, and the boys would curse the nameless lord of Britain who would one day marry her.

  But none of these girls had what Guinevere had. Her beauty was elemental. She was fire and she was ocean. She was air and she was earth, and you just had to be in the same room as her to sense that wild spirit and be enchanted by it.

  And I drank in the very sight of her as I sipped my ale.

  ‘She will meet you in the Lady’s dream chamber,’ someone whispered in my ear. I turned and Alana gave me a knowing look as she lifted a jug of ale towards the cup in my hand. I glanced around to see if anyone might have heard, then nodded at the short, copper-haired girl as she filled my cup, and how she managed not to spill any I could not say, for she did not take her eyes off me. Not even after she had finished pouring, until Benesek called her over to replenish his own cup. And even as she walked off through the crowd, she kept glancing back at me, the pale skin of her neck reddening.

  I looked at Guinevere, wanting to acknowledge the message Alana had delivered, but her eyes seemed not to see anything in that round chamber. She was far away now, borne on the wings of that harp’s song to another time, another place, and we who stood in that flame-lit dark were as the mice in the rushes or the bricks in the wall or the distant murmur of the sea.

  Perhaps Guinevere’s mysterious quality, that ability she had to enchant those around her, was god-given. Perhaps when she had escaped Manannán’s clutches that day she first came to Karrek, the sea god had left his mark on her. Or perhaps it had always been in her. Maybe the midwives had seen it when they first looked into Guinevere’s eyes the day she came into the world. The Lady saw it, Merlin had seen it, I saw it. And we were not the only ones, as she played the battle hymn of Belatucadrus and the men hummed along in their deep, sonorous voices, like echoes of times past when they had sung that hymn before battle.

  I should have taken more note of the sailors of the Elsam staring at Guinevere like hungry men, but I was halfway drunk and humming with the rest and the Lady’s keep was crammed with bodies and I was building up to declaring my love for Guinevere to anyone who would listen.

  ‘Pelleas!’ Benesek called out, lifting his cup to me as the last notes from Guinevere’s lyre faded against a chorus of appreciative grunts and the thumping of hands against roof posts and table tops. It was the third time I had drunk to Pelleas that night, but we all missed him, none more than Benesek, who had been Pelleas’s friend and sword-brother for more years than I had been alive.

  ‘To Pelleas,’ I said, the pain of his loss still enough to rob me of breath like a blow to the stomach. More painful still when I could see the grief in his friend’s eyes. I drank deeply. Benesek nodded, dragging a hand across his long moustaches. ‘To Pelleas and the man who put Boar’s Tusk into his heart.’

  The breath caught in my throat. My blood ran cold and I looked into Benesek’s dark eyes and he looked into mine.

  ‘Whoever did that, not in a fight, mind, but in cold blood …’ he grimaced, ‘went in there in the dead of night. Looked him in the eye.’ He dipped his head slightly and then looked into the hearth flames which were leaping to cast copper light on the cobweb-slung beams and ancient roof timbers. ‘He’s a brave man who did that. I could not have done it.’

  He knew very well who had done it, and his knowing it hung in the air between us like smoke. But I said nothing, hoping that Benesek would not force my admission for I did not want to speak it aloud.

  His eyes bored into mine. He raised his cup again and we drank together. Then he turned his gaze towards the dais and for a while neither of us spoke as we watched Madern giving Hedrek some last advice before Hedrek’s sword demonstration.

  ‘Who’ll wager against him cutting off his own foot?’ Bors asked, coming to stand beside me, feeling that he had walked into something but saying nothing of it.

  ‘Why do you think Madern chose Hedrek?’ Benesek asked, finding a louse or some dirt in his moustaches and flicking it into the hearth. ‘If he’d wanted limbs flying and blood everywhere he’d have chosen you for the demonstration, Bors.’

  We grinned at that, even Bors, who never seemed to take
offence at anything or anyone. And anyway, Benesek had a point, for whilst Hedrek was easy enough to beat in a proper fight with the practice swords, of all of us he had the best memory for the positions and looked the neatest when performing them. Bors, drunk as he was, could have walked up onto the dais, picked up one of those blunt swords and beaten Hedrek to the rushes with it. But it would not have made for a pretty display.

  ‘Talking of swords, Lancelot,’ Benesek said, turning to me. I cringed, expecting him to bring up the Saxon sword. ‘Pelleas wanted you to have Boar’s Tusk,’ he said.

  Just like that.

  I stood there dumb as a roof post, still taking in Benesek’s words even as the bones in my shoulder and arm rattled under Bors’s congratulatory blow. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked the warrior. He handed his cup to Bors so that he could lift the baldrick over his shaven head. Then he wound the belt around Boar’s Tusk and held it towards me and I just looked at it for a moment, wondering why he was only telling me now, so many weeks after the smoke from Pelleas’s balefire had drifted eastward on the breeze.

  ‘Take it,’ Bors hissed at me.

  I took it.

  ‘You’re sure?’ I asked again.

  Benesek turned to Bors and rolled his eyes. Then he fixed me with his gaze once more. ‘Course I’m sure, lad,’ he said, an edge of irritation to his voice. His wine-stained lips parted, revealing his teeth. ‘I thought about keeping it myself, what with you and Melwas having thrown my sword into the sea,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t see why you should have a sword like Boar’s Tusk while I should be left nothing but my good looks.’ He shrugged, nodding at the sword in my hand. ‘But that’s what the fool wanted.’

  What would the others say? I wondered, glancing back to the dais, where Hedrek and Madern, having loosened their limbs and made their practice cuts through the smoky air, now stood facing each other awaiting the Lady’s word to begin the demonstration.