Lancelot

by Giles Kristian

  ‘Surely he will name Lord Constantine,’ Edern said, as if suggesting that Benesek need not travel to Tintagel to learn what we already knew.

  ‘There is no one else,’ Madern agreed.

  Lord Constantine, named after his grandfather whose men had elected him Emperor of the Romans though he had never been to Rome, was the son of Ambrosius Aurelius, who had been High King of Britain for ten years before he was assassinated and Uther assumed the throne in his brother’s place. By all accounts Constantine was a brave and steadfast man and no one could deny his claim or that he had been Uther’s sword these last years.

  ‘You won’t come?’ Benesek asked the Lady.

  She shook her head. ‘There is nothing I could do for Uther that Merlin cannot do. But we must know who is to be the High King’s successor. We must know if he has recalled Arthur, for my dreams tell me that he has. So, go to Tintagel and learn what you can.’

  ‘I’ll ask Merlin what he knows,’ Benesek said, ‘and if he’s not forthcoming I’ll wring him like a wet cloth. And … thank you,’ Benesek had said, and had even kissed the Lady’s hand, because not only was she doing him a great honour by sending him to King Uther in her stead, but she had known that Benesek would want to pay his respects to the man with whom he had fought many battles in the years before Benesek had become a Guardian of the Mount.

  Bors and I took the stony path which led to the narrow land bridge, then climbed the hill that was bright with milkwort, thrift, kidney vetch and yellow irises starting to bloom, up towards the gate in the wooden palisade. That fence of sharpened, fire-hardened timbers was set atop an earthen mound and ran from the northern edge of the peninsula across the uneven hummocks and dips to where the ground fell away so steeply on the southern side that it was no longer necessary. Yet even without that palisade, the peninsular fort of Tintagel was surely the most unassailable in Britain.

  ‘My father said the gods carved this fortress from the earth with their own hands,’ Benesek told me the first time we climbed that narrow shoulder of land onto the great promontory where a lord called Gorlois had once ruled, before King Uther killed him and married Gorlois’s wife. ‘Fifty good spearmen could hold this land bridge until the sky fell on their heads. Fifty spearmen in a tight shieldwall,’ he had said, looking up at the birds wheeling and crying through the sky above, ‘and if you wanted to take this rock, your only hope would be for Manannán mac Lir to turn your spearmen into gulls.’

  ‘Merlin did it,’ Edern had said, which had Benesek frowning in thought.

  For it was said that it was through some magic of Merlin’s that Uther breached Tintagel’s defences all those years ago and took it from Lord Gorlois. Some said the druid summoned a thick sea mist which hid Uther’s warriors until they were over the palisade. Others claimed that Merlin wove a spell of concealment on Uther himself, who slipped through the main gate beside a wool merchant’s wagon and opened the gate for his warriors, who poured across the land bridge in a killing wave of steel and fury. And still others believed that Merlin’s magic had made Uther resemble Gorlois so that Gorlois’s warriors had opened the gates for him themselves. So perfect was the illusion that even the Lord of Tintagel’s wife, Igraine, was fooled and, believing her husband had returned from hunting, she took Uther to her bed.

  ‘Then it’s just as well that Merlin is on our side, hey?’ Benesek had said, at which I had merely grunted, for I could not like the man.

  Tintagel was an impressive place. Not in the way that the Roman ruins of palaces and temples are impressive, but in a wild, intimidating, breathtaking way. More than three dozen houses, halls, barns and workshops perched on the grassy summit of a wind-blasted rock. A rock which loomed two hundred and fifty feet above a sea that hurled itself in eternal rage against the foot of the cliffs. It was an impregnable bastion and royal court whose sheltered, sea-carved cove welcomed merchant ships from the far reaches of what had once been the great empire of the Romans. But more importantly as far as I was concerned, it was not Karrek Loos yn Koos.

  I did not recognize the men guarding the gate and they did not know us, so we were made to wait for Benesek, who was doing a much better job of looking solemn as befitted the occasion. Or else he was feeling the climb in his legs, for Benesek was in his late middle years and had long since given up trying to compete with us on the training field.

  ‘Don’t need to prove myself to untried boys who have never stood in the shieldwall,’ he would say when one of us challenged him to hold the stones aloft or run up to the Lady’s keep in full war gear of leather tunic, mail shirt, helmet, and laden with shield and spear.

  And yet he could still throw a spear further than any man on Karrek. Maybe any man in Britain.

  ‘Now remember,’ he said, when the guards, who knew Benesek well enough, had let us through and we began to trudge up the steep path which led to the main part of the settlement, ‘we’re not here to hold some Greek wine merchant’s hand or buy wool or arrowheads.’ He sidestepped a pile of wet horse dung and raised a hand in greeting to the bull-like figure of Tinas the smith, who was working in his forge to our right. Tinas lifted the tongs and the blade they gripped in salute to Benesek. Then he plunged them into the quenching trough and for a moment the big man disappeared in a cloud of steam as the waters hissed and seethed. ‘Nor are we here so that you two young heroes can strut around trying to impress Tintagel’s young ladies.’

  Bors and I shared a grin which Benesek chose to ignore.

  ‘We’re here to pay our Lady’s respects to a dying man,’ he said, stepping over more horse dung, ‘and not just any man but the Pendragon himself.’ And that straightened our faces yet again. Uther had been High King for so many years that men feared what would become of us all when he was gone. Talk of his imminent death was accompanied by reports of terrible portents. A lamb born with two heads. An ancient oak which had burst into flame. A pike which, when gutted, had produced a human hand. All signs, folk said, that whispered of the doom of Britain.

  Not that the end of Britain would stop Bors and me from enjoying a few days at Tintagel, even if it meant we would have to slip Benesek’s leash later. And as if to prove that our ambitions in this regard were worthy, three girls who were carrying jugs of water, or more likely mead, down the path to the sentries at the wall smiled coquettishly and giggled as they came towards us, and as we stood aside to let them pass, one flicked her fair hair for Bors’s benefit while another looked at me from beneath eyelashes which fluttered like butterfly wings. And we, eager to show that we were friendly and happy to be there on that sun-blessed day, gave them our best smiles.

  ‘The gods help me,’ Benesek muttered, swiping sweat from his forehead and using the moisture to smooth the forks of his long moustaches. We continued along the well-worn, gorse-lined path which snaked southwards and up towards the ridge of rock that crowned the flat summit like an inner rampart and within which sat the majority of dwellings, including the king’s court. And it was only once we had climbed up the slope and over this craggy ring of earth and rock that I realized just how desperate things were in Britain and how dark were the clouds that were gathering beyond that blue, gull-chased sky.

  Tintagel swarmed with soldiers. There were always spearmen at Tintagel because although the High King was itinerant, moving between his lys, feasting at each until his retinue had stripped bare his host’s food stores, Dumnonia’s chief court, or penlys, had been here on this near-island fort since the legions sailed away. It was at Tintagel that King Uther spent the winter months but it was here that he would die, too, and so all the greatest warlords of Britain had come. I had never seen such a gathering.

  ‘That accounts for all the dung,’ Bors said, as we stood for a moment by a thicket of yellow gorse on the crest of the bluff, taking in the sight. For as well as the groups of spearmen clustered in the open spaces and around the thatched buildings, there were scores of horses picketed in the longer grass.

  ‘Getting an audience with th
e king won’t be easy,’ Benesek said, frowning at the view. There were hundreds of men gathered on those wind-buffeted heights, playing games, drinking, wrestling, sitting around cook fires, idling amongst the white sea campion and yellow crowfoot or sleeping under the clement sky.

  ‘Even getting into Uther’s hall won’t be easy,’ Bors said, and neither would it judging by the crowds; the makeshift shelters and canvas tents clustered thickest around the largest of all the buildings. Smoke sifted through the thatch of that hall even on such a warm day, and I remembered my own sickness three years since, when I had shivered so hard that my bones had rattled though I lay beneath piles of furs.

  We made our way through the camps of spearmen and I saw that each group of men had a different device painted on their shields. Some had a bull’s head in black on a red field. Some had a red eagle on white and some had two white wolves pawing at each other above the shield’s iron boss. One group of spearmen had yellow shields painted with widening stripes emanating from the central boss so that those shields resembled little suns, and another war band’s shields were painted with what appeared to be stag antlers. And as we pointed out each new device Benesek told us which lord those spearmen belonged to.

  ‘They are King Menadoc’s men, of course,’ he said of the sun shields. ‘That lot are King Cyngen Glodrydd’s men of Powys,’ he said, pointing at the shields painted with the stag antlers, ‘and those scarred bastards are Einion ap Mor’s men,’ he said of a band of spearmen who were taking their ease in the sunshine. I looked long and hard at those men because Einion ap Mor was King of Northern Britain and thus a ruler almost as powerful as High King Uther. A large contingent of men even had big, curved, oval shields and iron helmets with stiff crests of red horsehair and these, Benesek told us, were Lord Constantine’s men.

  Yet amongst these war bands of the kings and lords of Britain, there was one group who stood out more than any other, even more than King Uther’s own men who carried shields that bore his symbol of the red dragon, and Lord Constantine’s soldiers in their Roman armour with their long shields. These others had the look of strangers amongst strangers. They were big men all and had the self-assured look of those experienced in war. Some had sun-darkened skin, darker even than that of the Greek traders whom we escorted to Tintagel now and again, and their shields were covered in bleached white leather and painted with a black bear standing on all fours upon the iron boss. But it was not their shields, their skin or their seasoned confidence which commanded our attention. It was their horses.

  ‘What beasts are they?’ Bors asked, as if we were not looking at horses at all but some other creatures from the legends we’d heard as children. We had threaded our way through the soldiers and the hawkers, servants and slaves who attended them, and come to the king’s hall, outside which thirty tethered horses cropped the grass and summer flowers.

  ‘They’re war horses,’ Benesek said, watching us, for Bors and I had chosen a horse each and stood stroking their muscled necks and shining flanks. ‘Bred for size, strength and speed and trained for battle.’

  Draped over a makeshift rail were great sets of scale armour, enormous ringmail coats, leather shaffrons to protect a horse’s head, and hardened leather breastplates, and I tried to imagine what so many big, armoured horses must look like together at the gallop.

  ‘Even in Armorica we did not have such as these,’ Bors said in wonder. The mare whose withers I patted gave a gentle whinny of pleasure.

  ‘My father’s horse was a hot blood,’ I said, remembering Malo and wondering if he’d had a good life serving my uncle the traitor. With any luck that proud black beast had thrown Balsant, either to avenge my father or more likely because he was ever a malevolent horse. ‘But I have not seen or heard of such as these in Britain,’ I said.

  ‘That’s because there aren’t any others like these in Britain,’ Benesek said. ‘Least there haven’t been since long before you two came mewling into the world.’ Not liking the idea of strangers interfering with the horses, one of the big bear shields came over, scowling at us, but Benesek told the man that we were with him and, seeing Benesek in his war glory, the man muttered a greeting then turned and went back to his patch of flattened grass.

  ‘They’re beautiful,’ I said, putting my face against the mare’s muzzle and inhaling her sweet scent. She nickered softly. I could smell new grass and comfrey on her breath and I knew from the brightness of her eyes and the lustre of her coat that it was unlikely that any horses in Britain were fed so well as these.

  ‘Beautiful they may be to us, Lancelot, but I doubt the Franks think them so when they’re thundering at them with mailed, spear-armed men on their backs.’

  Casting a glance at the men taking their ease in the grass, I tried to imagine what it must be like to face twenty or even more of these big men and horses on a battlefield and I looked again at the bear-painted shields which lay on the ground beside the warriors.

  ‘Whose men and horses are they?’ I asked Benesek.

  When he did not answer, I turned and saw that he was looking off towards the granary and smokehouse and the knot of warriors walking past those buildings towards the king’s hall.

  ‘They’re his,’ Benesek said, and even though there were five men walking towards us there could be no doubting which one of them was the lord of these horse warriors.

  ‘Who is he?’ Bors asked. We were not the only ones staring. In fact, the only folk not ogling the approaching warlord were those men whose shield bore his symbol of the bear.

  ‘He’s Arthur,’ Benesek said. ‘Arthur ap Uther ap Constantine ap Tahalais. And if it were up to me, the next High King of Britain.’

  And he was a warlord. In his early thirties, I guessed, he was tall, broad-chested and handsome, and he walked with the assurance of a man who knows that the men around him would draw their swords against the gods themselves if he commanded them to.

  If I had thought Benesek looked impressive in his armour and his silver-chased helmet, he paled in comparison to the spectacle which this man made. If Taranis, god of war, had taken human form and come down to walk the same ground as us, he would have looked like this lord of horse warriors. His armour was made of thousands of small overlapping bronze plates which resembled fish scales and which had been burnished so that they glinted in the midday sun. His helmet, which he carried under his arm, was polished iron and adorned with heavy golden eyebrows, gold-chased cheekpieces and mounted with a blood-red plume as long as a horse’s tail. His sword belt was studded with silver scales and his lower legs were protected by strips of iron, and it was the first time that I had seen such splinted armour. His cloak, billowing in the breeze as he walked, was as red as his helmet’s plume and fastened with a silver gilt and red enamel ring brooch whose pin could have been a weapon itself, so large was it.

  He was magnificent.

  ‘Lord Arthur,’ I said under my breath, watching as Arthur seemed to see something which made him veer from the track towards a group of King Uther’s men, who were sitting around a cooking fire whose smoke was being strewn eastward by the salty sea breeze. One of those men had lost his sword arm up to the elbow, and recently by the look of the bloodstained linen which bound the stump, so that he struggled to get to his feet until Arthur helped him up.

  Of the men who accompanied Arthur, one wore the black gown of a druid and carried nothing but a staff. It was Merlin. He and the other three stood talking amongst themselves, as if it was not the first time that they had been made to wait while their lord conversed with the wounded.

  ‘He’s always at the centre of the web, that one,’ Benesek said, meaning the druid, but I was more interested in Arthur. I watched him reach inside his cloak and bring out a coin, which he gave to the one-armed veteran before rejoining his small retinue and continuing on.

  ‘You know Lord Arthur?’ I asked Benesek.

  ‘Not the man,’ he said. ‘I know him by reputation, though I have seen him before, when he was just a
boy. He has been fighting for some king in Gaul these ten years or so. But if he’s back …’ He left the words hanging, then shrugged as if to say we would have to wait and see.

  I wanted to ask more about Lord Arthur’s reputation then and there but I did not get the chance, because the red-cloaked, scale-armoured warlord was just two spear-lengths away now and in truth I was awestruck.

  I hoped I would catch his eye but he swept past me, his men in his wake, and then came a voice I had not heard for many years.

  ‘Benesek, where is Lady Nimue?’

  I turned to see Merlin standing there. He had not followed Lord Arthur into King Uther’s hall and now leant the gnarled end of his ash staff towards Benesek. Almost threateningly.

  ‘It’s good to see you too, Merlin,’ Benesek said.

  Merlin ignored the sarcasm. ‘She is not here?’ he asked.

  ‘I am here,’ Benesek said. It was clear that their feelings for one another were less than warm. I remembered that Pelleas had not liked Merlin either.

  The druid turned and looked at me. ‘At least you have brought Lancelot as I asked,’ he said.

  That came as a shock. I had not known why Benesek had chosen Bors and me to accompany him to Tintagel. If I had thought about it at all, I might have supposed it was a reward, a prize of sorts, for we had been the last two standing in the recent melee of swords, when we all fought as pairs until only one pair remained. And the Lady, who had been watching that day, stared at me with those knowing green eyes as I stood panting and sweat-soaked.

  ‘Haven’t you sprung up like a mushroom after the rain?’ the druid said now, looking me up and down. He grinned and I saw that he still had all his teeth. ‘If you pushed me to the floor again I might never get up.’

  My face flushed with heat as I recalled that night some seven years ago now, when I had thrown myself at the druid to break his spell on Guinevere. To bring Guinevere back from whither her soul had flown.