But it was hard going through the trees and before long we stopped and looked at one another, both thinking the same thing, then took a foot each and proceeded to drag the sailor down the woodland track, his head bumping over rocks and divots and his ruined eyes staring up at the branches above and the night sky beyond.
We had not got far when a figure stepped out of the trees ahead, stopping us both in our tracks until we realized it was Guinevere. She wore a black cloak over her green linen dress and her hair was tied back from her face, making her high cheekbones even more striking.
‘I thought you would have got further by now,’ she said when we reached her and stopped to catch our breath. Even in the dark I could see that her lip was swollen. I suspected there would be bruises beneath the drying bloody crusts on her face.
‘You could have killed a thinner one,’ Bors answered, looking at Guinevere with a combination of astonishment and awe. She did look beautiful, even blood-smeared like that, and I could not blame Bors if he found himself struck by that beauty. Her eyes were still wide and glinted like a blade’s edge in the dark because of the horror which they had witnessed. And perhaps because of what had come after, too.
‘Let’s move,’ I said, and so we did. And by the time we got down to the shore, Bors and I were puffing and spent. Bors fetched some rope while I found some rocks and then we carried the currach down the shingle and heaved the corpse into it.
When Bors moved to get in the boat, Guinevere put a hand on his shoulder. ‘No, Bors,’ she said, and for a heartbeat I saw again the ferocious creature who had stooped like a hawk and clawed the sailor’s eyes to pools of red ruin. ‘I’ll go,’ she said. ‘I will do it.’
Bors looked at me and I nodded. The truth was that I had not killed the sailor alone. Guinevere had helped me do it. His death was on both of us and if Guinevere felt that we should send his corpse to the seabed together then that was what we would do.
‘Wait for me,’ I told Bors and pointed to my swollen eye, which Bors had said was starting to look like a ripe plum. ‘You and I need to walk back into the keep together so you can tell everyone how you gave me this,’ I said.
He lifted his chin. ‘And you don’t think they’ll wonder there’s not a mark on me?’ he said, but I was already pushing the currach out into the calm water, which lapped around her skin hull as if eager to swallow the offering which lay at our feet.
We rowed to the east side of the Mount where the water was deepest and there I ran Boar’s Tusk into the dead sailor’s stomach and chest several more times to make sure he would not swell and float to the surface when he began to rot. Then, just to make sure that the current would not bring him up, we put the rocks inside his tunic and trews, tying the leg ends closed and the tunic’s hem tight against his body to keep the rocks in place. When it was done we pitched him over the side and he slipped into the water with barely a splash and vanished.
Guinevere looked at me and I nodded, then we leant over the currach’s sides and washed our hands and faces in the cold water, so that we were shivering when we came ashore and I put my hand against her face, looking into her eyes which were brimmed with tears.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘You?’
Other than her swollen lip, there were no bruises that could not be disguised by a little crushed lead and chalk and a touch of the rouge which the girls made from crushed mulberries.
I nodded. Who could put into words the strangeness of that night? Its horror and its wonder. Then we lifted the currach from the lapping tide and found Bors standing where we had left him.
‘Not the nose,’ he said when we had turned the boat over on the shingle. He grinned. ‘I wouldn’t want to ruin these good looks. A black eye to match yours. That should do it.’ He pointed a finger at me. ‘Don’t miss, cousin.’
‘I won’t miss,’ I said. And then I hit him.
13
The Edge
THE OTHER BOYS laughed at my eye, which was the colour of a ripe olive, and they laughed even more when they saw Bors’s matching one. We made a show of pouring each other a cup of ale and slapping each other’s back, friends again after our disagreement, and the next time I saw Guinevere through the roistering throng she was whispering into Alana’s ear. I did not breathe until I saw Alana’s eyes, which were round as coins, and her teeth half buried in her chubby bottom lip, so that I knew Guinevere’s confession was vivid enough to slake the girl’s appetite, yet short of the whole truth.
At one point Alana looked up at me and her cheeks coloured, so I looked away and feigned interest in a grinning Elsam man who, drunk as he was, juggled a cup, an eating knife and an apple, keeping all three chasing each other through the smoky air to the cheers of those gathering around him.
Another two sailors sang the song of Manannán mac Lir, god of the sea, and the voices which poured from those leather-skinned, wind-blasted men blended like milk and honey. By the time they came to the part about Manannán’s seaborne chariot and his horse Enbarr of the flowing mane, the Lady herself had taken up the harp to accompany them. An honour, that, and little surprise that the Elsam’s crew were all puffed up with pride and raising cup after cup of ale.
The next day, there were many sore heads on Karrek. To my surprise mine was not one of them and I woke early, my blood simmering still after all that had happened the night before. And yet there was a heaviness in my stomach too, as though I was weighed down by one of those stones which we had put in the dead sailor’s trews to take him to the seabed. It was not guilt for having killed him – I would have done the same again and more to keep Guinevere safe – but rather the dread at what might happen to Guinevere should the Lady or Benesek find out what we had done.
By noon we were sweating out the previous night’s ale, training with spear and shield out on Karrek’s gusty southern slope. Thrust and parry. Counter-strike and back to high guard. Strike and low guard, our arm bones rattling beneath the shield.
I had soon taken two new bruises to add to those earned the night before, because my mind was drifting and Agga was quick to punish my mistakes. Yet even this new, bright pain could not raise me to my usual standard.
Agga’s leather-sheathed spear blade struck my shoulder and I wondered what Guinevere felt about what we had done together naked in the blood-soaked rushes. Agga’s low thrust took me on the outside right thigh, deadening the muscle so that I could barely stand, and I feared that Guinevere regretted giving herself to me.
‘You’re a sorry heap today, Lancelot,’ Agga said.
I glanced up at the keep. Did she feel ashamed?
The leather helmet did nothing to stop Agga’s next blow from rattling my brain around my skull. He was grinning, enjoying himself. ‘Too much ale last night?’ he said.
‘Three cups too much,’ I said. Which might have been true. Perhaps if I had been sober I might not have needed Guinevere to stop that big sailor strangling me.
‘Lucky for you you’ve got me and not Melwas,’ Agga said, jabbing with his spear again, though this time I met it with my shield and turned the blow aside before ramming my spear into his shield hard enough to force a small split between two of the limewood planks. ‘He would’ve knocked your head off your shoulders by now.’
I glanced over at Melwas. He was all teeth and snarl as he battered poor Geldrin, whose only recourse was to keep moving backwards under that deluge of blows.
Melwas and I had barely spoken since our fight out on the currach, which was fine by me, for I had nothing to say to him now I knew it was he who had broken my sparhawk’s wing, and I daresay he had nothing but bile for me because I had knocked him senseless with an oar and made him drop Benesek’s sword into the sea. We avoided each other on the practice field and our mentors rarely paired us up, knowing it would only end in blood and malice.
‘What’s that about?’ Clemo said, pointing his spear towards a knot of men at the foot of the hill. They were moving along the strand and across the rocks, peering over the edge
s and into the gullies and little channels where the water churned and leapt. They were sailors from the Elsam and for a moment we all stopped, breathing hard, and watched their progress along the shore. It was not long before one of them trudged up the hillside towards us and I recognized him as the juggler from the night before. Now, though, his face was taut and his brow heavy.
‘We can’t find Briac, our carpenter,’ the man said. ‘None of us has seen him since last night.’
He addressed Madern, who stood there with his arms slung over the spear which lay across his shoulders. ‘What’s he look like, this Briac?’ he asked.
‘He’s big, bearded and ugly,’ the Elsam man said, then frowned. ‘Big as you, I’d say, but his beard has never seen a comb. Scars on his hands—’
‘Saw him last night,’ Madern interrupted, ‘not since.’ He twisted at the waist to look at the rest of us. ‘Any of you seen the man?’ he asked. We shook our heads and Madern turned back to the sailor and shrugged, then nodded down to the rocks further along the shore where Briac’s companions were still searching. ‘You think he got drunk out of his skull and rolled all the way down to the sea?’ he asked. No hint of a smile. ‘Or perhaps he was hungry. Came down in the night and put out in the currach to catch a mackerel or two.’ He winked at Agga. ‘Fell overboard and drowned.’ Some of the boys sniggered at that.
The Elsam man was not amused. But he was wary enough of Madern not to admit taking offence at the warrior’s unhelpful suggestions. He thanked him before turning to walk back down the hill to join the others searching for Briac.
‘Back to it, you lazy swines,’ Madern barked. The clack of spear staves and the clump of leather-sheathed blades striking shields rose once more on the breeze. And under my breath I prayed to Manannán mac Lir that he would keep Briac’s sword-ripped corpse under the sea until the fish and crabs had feasted on it and there was nothing left.
The men of the Elsam looked for their carpenter until dusk. They scoured the shoreline and the woods and every crevice at the foot of the rocks on Karrek’s western side. The Lady had the keep searched and we heard that she even wove a revealing spell with some of Briac’s belongings, such as a chisel, adze and gouge, which his friends brought ashore from the Elsam. Though if she gleaned anything from that magic she kept it to herself, for no one took a currach out to the deeper water east of the Mount with ropes and hooks to fish Briac from the swaying sea grass. And the next morning, under a low and leaden sky, we watched the Elsam slip her mooring and drift off across the grey, her square sail beaten by rain and wind.
There were whispers that the gods must have had a hand in it, for men did not simply vanish like smoke seeping into the thatch, as Benesek put it that night when we gathered in the men’s hut to eat. This made some touch the iron of their eating knives or sword hilts, though not Madern, who made a gruff sound in the back of his throat as he sat amongst us on the floor, spooning broth into his mouth. ‘What business would the gods have with a nobody like him?’ he asked. No one could say and so Madern continued, ‘More likely that one of his crewmates hated his guts and saw the opportunity to do something about it. When Briac stepped outside to piss, this man followed him, cut his throat, dragged him down to the shore and sank him. Weighed him down with stones as you would a crab pot.’ He shrugged and slurped from his spoon as though to suggest there was nothing mysterious at all about the carpenter’s disappearance.
‘If that’s true, whoever did it must have really hated him to drag that big bastard all the way down,’ Edern suggested, so that all of a sudden it seemed everyone agreed that Briac must have deserved such an end and from then on no one said any more about it.
That night I went to my bed furs thinking of Guinevere. But I dreamt of Pelleas. In my dream he was not the ailing, thinning man he had become in his last days, but the formidable warrior he had been when I first laid eyes on him in the Beggar King’s hall. In my dream he was teaching me sword craft, explaining how the Romans, who had conquered Britain four hundred years in our past, had used short swords, while the Britons had used longer swords more like that Saxon blade of Benesek’s which now rusted on the seabed. Safe behind their shieldwalls and fighting shoulder to shoulder, the Roman soldiers stabbed up into the bellies of the Britons, who fought not as one solid body of warriors like the Romans but as individuals. And because the Britons’ swords were long, cutting weapons, they were unwieldy in the press of bodies and so those brave Britons died with their guts spilling onto the soil and earth and bones of their ancestors.
Pelleas thrust Boar’s Tusk again and again, teaching me how it was done. And then my father and mother and Hector were there in my dream too and we were back in our hall in Benoic, searching in the spear racks and amongst the floor rushes and even in the thatch for swords, for any weapon we could find, because old Hoel’s shrieking birds had warned us that King Claudas’s war band was coming.
‘They will be here before the dawn,’ my father said, grim-faced, gripping his great boar spear and bristling with violence. But I could not find a blade anywhere. I scoured the dark corners and even searched beneath a great table that had in life never been in my father’s hall, but I could find no weapon and dread lay upon me like a sodden fur.
‘Your hawk told us,’ my mother said, and even she held a long knife in readiness to fight what was coming. Then in my dream I looked up and saw the sparhawk dangling on her leash from a roof beam, spinning and screeching and flapping.
‘They’re coming,’ Hector said, and even in the dream my blood ran cold because I feared someone must have found Briac of the Elsam. Such confusions dreams are, that the past and the present, and even sometimes the future, will weave together with other happenings and leave you grasping at something as elusive as the gods themselves. And in my dream they had surely found Briac’s corpse washed up on the tide and somehow they knew that I had killed him.
‘Fire. There’s fire,’ my brother said in the dream.
‘The beacon is lit,’ Pelleas said, pointing Boar’s Tusk at me. ‘Come, Lancelot.’
‘Wake up! Wake up, cousin!’
I opened my eyes to see Bors. He was pulling on his leather armour and I saw that his spear leant against the wall beside him. Around us the other boys were waking, scrubbing sleep from their eyes and throwing off bed skins. ‘The beacon is lit,’ Bors said and I knew that it was Bors and not my brother that I had heard in my dream. My cousin’s eyes flashed with excitement, for the beacon on the mainland shore would only be lit if we were in danger. It was forbidden for anyone to come onto our island unannounced and uninvited, might well be suicidal for someone who did so in the middle of the night. For this reason the Lady had an arrangement with King Menadoc of Cornubia that in the event of an invasion of his kingdom, or some other threat to Karrek or the Lady and her people, King Menadoc would light the pile of wood above the high tide, that we might arm and ready ourselves.
That warning beacon had not blazed in all the years I had lived on Karrek, and both Bors and I were intoxicated by the prospect of standing in a shieldwall with Benesek and Edern and the other Guardians of the Mount against whoever threatened us. What had we trained all these years for if not to safeguard our Lady and protect the young women in her care?
‘Shields!’ Madern yelled in the open doorway. ‘No one comes to the shore without a shield.’
I had put on my thickest winter tunic for its added protection against blades, pulled on my boots and slung the sword belt over my left shoulder so that Boar’s Tusk hung in front of my left hip. Then, side by side, Bors and I strode through the night to join those who were already forming a wall of shields on the island’s northern shore facing the mainland.
The beacon flames leapt high into the night sky, the crack and pop of the fire-ravaged wood carrying across the water which was dark but for the copper gloss which those flames cast a spear-throw’s distance out into the bay. And beside that ember-spewing fire, illuminated so that their spear blades and helmets and sh
ield bosses glinted, stood a line of warriors.
‘How many?’ Benesek asked. A tear appeared in the veil of dark cloud above us and through that rent the silver light of a waxing moon shone, so that Benesek’s helmet with its silver-chased cheek pieces and white horsehair crest, and his tunic of riveted iron rings, all glowed silver. He did not look old or ale-ravaged or afraid. He looked like a god of war sent down in that shaft of silver light to defend our little island and lead us to victory.
‘Forty,’ Geldrin replied before I had even counted fifteen.
‘There’ll be more of them behind the dunes,’ Edern said.
There were nineteen of us armed and ready on the strand above the gentle waves that spilled one after another, seething and bubbling into the shingle. No one spoke. We gripped our spears and our shields and we watched those men who had come to The Edge, and we kept our thoughts to ourselves, knowing that Benesek would tell us what to do and when to do it.
I looked over my shoulder and saw that the beacon fire had brought the Lady down from the keep. She wore a white dress which seemed to glow. Her golden hair, braided and coiled, was pinned at the back of her head. At her neck she wore a torc of twisted silver which glinted dully against her pale skin, kissed by that same moonlight which illuminated Benesek. I felt Bors beside me stand a little taller and straighter knowing that the Lady was with us. Doubtless I stood straighter, too, for there was not a man amongst us who did not crave to be noticed planted there on our island’s shore, his shield rim kissing his neighbour’s, his spear blade pointing at the iron-grey cloud which slid inexorably into the south-east. The gash in those clouds had healed now so that the moon’s presence was marked only by a wan glow which leached into that veil but could not penetrate it.
And yet even in the nearly dark I could see that not all the girls had accompanied the Lady down to the water’s edge. Erwana and Jenifry were there and Jenifry was crying by the looks. But Alana was not with them. Nor was Guinevere.
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