‘It has many names,’ Merlin had said that day in Dumnonian woods by the Roman road two moons ago, with Arthur’s tears for his loyal soldier Herenc barely dry on his handsome cheeks. ‘I have heard it called Caliburn and Caledfwlch and the gods know what else, but let us call it Excalibur.’
‘The sword of Maximus,’ I said, recalling stories told by the Lady when I had first come to Karrek, and even before, when I was only up to Malo’s elbow.
‘Indeed,’ Merlin said, encouraged to know that he was not talking into the void. ‘And who, young Lancelot, was Maximus?’
I had looked at the others, feeling awkward, for surely everyone in those woods, but for poor Herenc, could have told the story of Maximus.
‘Go on, Lancelot,’ Arthur said, and his smile was enough to spur me on.
‘Flavius Magnus Maximus commanded the Roman army in Britain,’ I said. ‘One hundred years ago or thereabouts, and proclaimed himself Emperor of Rome.’ I stopped.
‘Yes, yes, carry on,’ Merlin said, twirling a hand at me.
I nodded. ‘He was a great warlord,’ I said. ‘When the first Saxon war bands came to the shores of Britain he drove them back into the sea. He slaughtered the invaders.’
‘And how did he do that?’ Merlin asked. ‘On his own? Was he a god?’ He swept his staff through the air. ‘Did he scythe the Saxons down like wheat?’
‘He united the Britons,’ I said.
‘Yes!’ Merlin said. ‘He united the Britons.’
‘But then his ambitions got the better of him,’ I said. ‘He became a tyrant.’
‘Show me a king who isn’t a tyrant,’ Merlin said. ‘Go on, go on.’ That twirling hand again.
‘Yes, but he wanted to be Emperor in Rome,’ I went on, ‘and took the best of Britain’s warriors across the Narrow Sea to fight for him in Gaul. He stripped the kingdoms of their spearmen and left Britain weak. The Picts raided in the north. The Saxon boats returned.’
Arthur frowned then. Perhaps he felt some guilt at having left Britain when he was my age to learn war and the ways of the Roman horse warriors known as cataphracts. High King Uther had been strong then and formidable, and Lord Arthur had forged his own way overseas. But had he returned to Dumnonia some years ago, before Uther started to fade, maybe he would have been accepted as the High King’s heir without a word raised against it. Too late now to learn from Maximus’s mistakes.
‘I did not say the man was perfect,’ Merlin said. ‘Although by taking his soldiers and governors across the sea he had in effect given Britain back to her rightful lords.’
He dipped his head, conceding the man’s faults. ‘It’s true, Maximus was greedy,’ he said. ‘These so-called Dark Isles were not enough for him. He wanted the shining jewel of Rome herself.’ With that the druid had fished inside his robes and produced a coin. It was gold and Merlin spat on it, rubbed it on his robes and tossed it to me. On one side was an imperious-looking face looking right, under neatly combed hair upon which sat an ornate pearl diadem. The man had a long straight nose and his eye was large, as if trying to fit in the breadth of all he surveyed and coveted. I had seen the face before, on silver siliquae back in Benoic. My mother had had an earthen jar full of them.
I turned this golden coin over. On the other side the same man was walking left, holding a wreath and palm, which seemed strange to me, for if this was the famed warlord then why was he not holding a sword?
‘Did he take it? Rome?’ Gawain asked.
‘He was acknowledged as Augustus in the western Roman Empire but was opposed by the eastern Emperor,’ Merlin said.
‘He ruled Britain, Gaul, Spain and Africa,’ Arthur said.
Merlin acknowledged this with a nod. ‘He did. But that is not the point, Arthur.’ He frowned. ‘Or maybe it is.’ He turned back to me. ‘But let us get back to Maximus in Britain. How, young Lancelot, did he unite the kingdoms?’
‘With the sword. With Caliburn,’ I said. In truth I knew nothing about it but since Merlin had started off by talking about the sword, it seemed a reasonable guess.
Merlin raised a finger. ‘Excalibur,’ he said. Then he went over to Lord Arthur and gestured at the sword at Arthur’s hip. Arthur drew the sword and handed it to Merlin. ‘And was Excalibur an ordinary sword, like this?’ he asked me. Asked all of us. I shrugged and so Merlin looked at Arthur.
‘It was said by some to be the sword of Hercules, the hero of ancient times,’ the druid said. ‘By others that it was forged by the Roman smith god Vulcan. Somehow, do not ask me the ins and outs of it, the sword was passed down and down until it ended up in Maximus’s hands.’
‘He likely stole it,’ Gawain said.
‘Perhaps he did,’ Merlin admitted, ‘but who would not covet such a treasure?’
‘Maximus brought the sword to Britain. He was still just a general at the time,’ Arthur said, ‘and he rode to all the kingdoms and showed the warlords the sword and men recognized its power.’ He looked at Gawain and Bors and lastly at me. ‘He brought peace to these isles and his armies kept Britain safe.’
So we six, who slept in those woods not knowing what the next day would bring, had listened to Merlin, who told Arthur how he could remake Britain. How he could do as Maximus had done and unite the kingdoms under one warrior king, as Uther had tried but ultimately failed to do. And that warrior king would be Arthur. Arthur would wield the ancient talisman as another warlord had done not so very long ago, and we warriors of Britain would free ourselves of the Saxons and throw them back into the sea.
I doubted that this talisman could still exist, for why did no Pictish warlord wield it now? Why was there no talk of it in Britain, other than as a fragment of stories passed down the generations? Gawain doubted its existence too. Bors did not seem concerned one way or the other; it was all just a great adventure to him. As for Oswine, Merlin’s Saxon slave, who knew what he thought? But Merlin believed the thing existed and, more than this, that it could be found. Arthur, perhaps wanting to believe more than actually believing, was prepared to at least try, for he must do something to prove that he was the Pendragon’s rightful heir and Britain’s best hope.
And so we rode the length of Britain looking for a sword. We rode in search of Excalibur.
Oswine saw them first. Behind us. Twenty spearmen on sturdy, well-built ponies rumbling along the great earthen rampart which we had crossed as dawn broke across the hilltops to the north. Not even trying to hide themselves, which was not a good sign, for it meant they saw no need for the element of surprise. Nor was there. We were only four warriors, five counting Oswine, and Bors and I had only been in one real battle before. I felt a lightness in my chest. Felt the blood coursing through the veins in my forearms and a slight thrumming of the muscles in my thighs, as if they were readying themselves. It was not fear but something else. It was that same quiver in the flesh that I had felt in my sparhawk the moment she eyed prey. It was the quickening of the heart. The throbbing of blood before another’s blood is spilt.
We watched them ride in column along the wall as if asserting ownership of it. Then they stopped and turned their mounts to look north after us, their spear blades glinting in the day.
‘We’ll never outride them,’ Lord Arthur said. After five hundred miles our ill-fed horses were weary and it was all they could do to plod on into the unknown. Gawain’s big mare suffered worse than our smaller horses, being a heavy beast, bred for power and speed, not mile after mile of rough, hilly ground, and while we gave her the greater portion of the grain we had bought along the way, leaving the others little more than their grazing, it was not as much fodder as she was used to. In contrast, the Picts’ mounts were surely fresh and strong and familiar with every footfall from here to wherever their masters called home.
‘We can’t beat that many,’ Gawain said, which was not saying that we should not fight, just that we could not win. ‘But we could slow them down. Uncle, you and Merlin might get away. Hide up until they give up searching.’
Arthur and Gawain shared a look of surprise. ‘You did not mention that this was King Bors’s son!’ Arthur said to Merlin. ‘Now you tell me?’ It seemed that he did not know whether to be angry or delighted.
Merlin shrugged as if to say what difference does it make?
‘Lancelot being King Ban’s boy is one thing,’ Arthur went on, nodding at me. ‘But this is Bors, son of Bors?’ He studied Bors as if seeing him properly for the first time. ‘I knew your father. A good man. Fought beside him. Hunted with him.’
‘Drank with him,’ Gawain put in, his scarred face not so grim-looking then.
‘He talked of you, lord,’ Bors said, then nodded at Gawain. ‘Both of you.’
‘I should think so,’ Arthur said. Then his lips tightened. ‘They say he died of grief. For your uncle,’ he said.
Bors’s brow darkened at the memory. ‘They were as close as brothers ever were,’ he said.
Arthur nodded and smiled, and for a moment one might have forgotten that we were on another king’s land, being followed by three times our number of mounted warriors. ‘Well then, are we not brothers?’ he asked Bors and me. ‘Brothers of the sword.’ He laughed, remembering past times with Bors’s father. Here, as sudden as when the sun breaks through cloud, was the Arthur I had seen on the night of King Uther’s balefire. It was the first glimpse of that Arthur since we had set off on Merlin’s quest. ‘We are well met, Bors ap Bors. And well met, Lancelot ap Ban.’
I could not help but smile and neither could Bors. Merlin shook his head and Oswine grinned. The Picts could have charged us there and then and I would have ridden into them screaming their deaths, Boar’s Tusk flashing in the morning sun.
‘Do you think we might save the festivities until we have what we came all this way for?’ Merlin asked. ‘If you princes don’t mind, of course.’
Arthur ceded the point with a raised hand.
‘You want me to scatter them?’ Gawain asked him, grinning at the thought of what could only amount to suicide.
‘Cernunnos and his horned snakes, do you think we rode the length of Britain to fight a handful of sheep-stinking savages?’ Merlin asked.
‘What else can we do?’ Arthur asked him.
‘What else? We can talk to them, Arthur. Has it not occurred to you that these painted Picts might be the very people we have been looking for? I will know when I get a good look at them.’
‘So we just sit here and wait?’ Gawain asked. ‘Maybe they surround us and butcher us with those spears while you get a good look at them. Or,’ he said, turning a palm up to the sky, ‘maybe they listen to what we have to say … then butcher us.’
‘We keep going,’ Arthur said, before Merlin could answer. ‘They know we are no threat and they are curious. They’ll come closer and when they do, they will see Merlin and won’t attack then.’
Merlin nodded. ‘Only the mad would attack a druid,’ he confirmed. ‘Let us hope they are not mad.’
‘In the meantime, we look for some advantage of terrain,’ Arthur the warlord of many victories said. ‘Somewhere they can’t surround us. Somewhere defensible so that if they do attack, we can kill enough of them to make the rest lose heart.’
As if they had heard Arthur’s words across the distance, the horsemen walked their mounts down the steep bank and disappeared into the ditch, at which point we set off.
The horsemen followed us north, sometimes visible when we looked over our shoulders, sometimes hidden by hawthorn scrub or birch woods or the lie of the land, but always following. Until, as dusk fell across the wild lands in a wash of golden light beneath charcoal clouds, we looked behind and they were gone.
‘Maybe they’ve given up,’ Bors suggested.
‘They haven’t given up,’ Arthur said.
Half hidden behind the western hills now, the sun drenched the moor in golden light, as though defying its fall, turning heather crimson and the spindly coarse grass as bright as a newly unfurled beech leaf. We wanted the night and yet did not want it.
‘Perhaps we can lose them in the dark,’ Gawain said.
‘Why would we want to lose them?’ Merlin asked him. ‘These men who have been following us like flies are almost certainly the Miathi. The very Picts with whom we have come to speak.’
‘And if they’re not?’ I asked. If they were not, then we would probably die, I thought.
‘We won’t know until we meet them,’ Merlin said, ‘and that will be soon enough, Lancelot. When they are ready to introduce themselves.’
And as the sun fell out of sight we continued towards a great pinewood which loomed dark upon a hill, like a cloak thrown over a shoulder, our progress between blackthorn and juniper scrub lit by a strange ephemeral light the pale purple of June comfrey.
A little while later, Arthur pointed above the pinewoods where a golden eagle soared, still lit by a sun lost to us, searching for one last morsel of the day. And almost with that eagle’s passing from our sight did the strange light leach out of the world and the darkness flood in.
We made camp amongst the pines deep in the wood where the trees were close enough to whisper to one another, hoping the Picts would not bring their horses in there. Hoping that they would spend the night amongst the heather beyond our sanctuary and wait for us to emerge in the dawn, and perhaps then we would see if they were willing to listen to what Merlin had to say.
We took turns to keep watch. Arthur first, then Bors, then Gawain, and when he woke me for my vigil it was so dark in those woods that I could barely see my hand in front of my face. If they are going to come they will come now, I thought, listening to Gawain’s snoring and the usual discordant music of the woods at night. The screech or hoot of an owl. The squeak of a bat and the peep of a shrew. The scratch and grunt of a badger shuffling along a woodland path and a hedgehog snuffling on its way. And the occasional snap of a twig which stills blood and breath but is nothing more than some unseen creature on its nightly rounds.
I listened and I watched so far as I could, and the Picts did not come and soon enough it was time to wake Oswine for his watch.
‘Already?’ he grumbled, blinking bleary eyes at me. I nodded and, leaving him to it, wrapped myself in a cloak which was frayed and holed, and lay down to sleep amongst creeping lady’s-tresses and fragrant twinflower.
It seemed I had only just closed my eyes when I was awoken by the cold kiss of a blade at my throat. The whites of the Pict’s eyes glowed in the gloom, as did his naked torso, the pale skin luminous against the darker glyphs inked into the skin of his chest, arms and neck. His teeth flashed and he shook his head, lifting my chin with the blade, so I took my hand from Boar’s Tusk’s hilt as another warrior stooped to gather up the sword and baldrick from the woodland bed.
Too late to fight. The Picts were amongst us. Like wraiths in the darkness, they moved with barely a sound, examining buckles and strap ends and helmets with curious excitement, as if those things were in themselves rare treasures. Gawain was growling and struggling beneath three men who pinned him down with the weight of their own bodies, but like me the others were subdued in their cloaks and forest beds, holding themselves still beneath the deadly edge of knife and spear blade.
‘Who was on watch?’ Lord Arthur gnarred.
‘Merlin, lord,’ Bors said, as two men pulled his hands together to bind them.
‘So he’s dead?’ Arthur asked, but none of us could answer that question. Gawain gave the struggle up as hopeless and let them take his blades and tie him. Then, with the Picts having spoken less than a dozen words either to us or to
each other, we found ourselves being led east through the pinewoods, trussed and shamefaced like slaves on the way to the block.
I wondered if Merlin had fled or else if the Picts had killed him and left his body lying there to be claimed by the creeping lady’s-tresses.
Once out of the trees, we came to where our captors had left their sturdy ponies cropping the grass and now I could see the Picts better by the pale light of the dawn breaking in the east. They were wild-looking men, scarred and painted and sinewy, and it was easy to see why such men as these had struck fear into the Roman legionaries who patrolled both the walls we had crossed on our journey north. Easy to see why they still struck fear into the farmers of Alt Clut and the folk of Goutodin.
Wild-looking though they were, Lord Arthur tried to speak to them. He even introduced himself and all of us by name, but the Picts showed neither understanding nor interest, though I thought I saw a flash of recognition in some of them at Arthur’s mention of Uther Pendragon. Yet even the High King’s name didn’t spare Lord Arthur when one of the Picts, having met his words with a gaping yawn, came to the end of his patience and struck him across the temple with the butt of his spear, knocking Arthur to the ground.
We all winced, for it was a savage blow. But even with his hands bound and his skull still ringing like a bell Lord Arthur climbed to his feet and nodded to me that he was not hurt.
Ignoring us, the Picts argued amongst themselves in a language we could almost understand if we unravelled it, now and then pointing off this way or that, and I dared to hope that they were quarrelling about whether or not to keep looking for Merlin, for they had known we numbered six and were now five. I said as much to Gawain.
‘Even if he somehow wriggled off the hook, he can do nothing for us now,’ he said, then spat a wad of blood-laced saliva and dragged bound hands across his split lip. ‘Damned druid would have been more use had he kept a proper watch,’ he said, glaring at Oswine. ‘What say you, Saxon? Is your master halfway back to Dumnonia by now? Or should we expect him to ride to our rescue on the back of an eagle and take off some heads with his staff?’
Lancelot Page 37