Lancelot

by Giles Kristian

  Now, for the first time, the Pict chieftain looked unsure. He had not liked his axe sparking with that last strike and he looked from Lord Arthur to the priestess, who was still up to her belly in the water.

  ‘Arthur,’ she said, her tongue questing over her lips as though she was tasting his name. Then she turned and looked at me and I shivered under her gaze.

  ‘And he is Lancelot ap Ban,’ Arthur told her. ‘A favourite of the druid Merlin.’

  That was stretching the truth, I thought, for Merlin had never given me the impression that he even liked me, but the priestess, staring at me, tilted her head on one side, her breasts still pert from the cold, their nipples dark and stiff.

  ‘Lancelot,’ she said.

  ‘We seek the sword,’ Arthur said. ‘For when we have it we will unite the Britons and sweep the Saxons from the land.’

  ‘Lancelot,’ the priestess said again.

  ‘Give her a smile, lad,’ Gawain beside me said under his breath. ‘What use is that pretty face of yours if you can’t persuade some mad Pict witch not to drown us and hack our damned heads off?’

  I did not smile but the priestess did. Then the Picts came for me.

  ‘No!’ Arthur yelled. ‘Not him. Just me. I will go to your god. I’ll go on my knees if you spare him.’

  The priestess raised a hand and the Picts let go of me.

  ‘Take me,’ Gawain said. ‘I’m ready to piss in your sacred pool and spit in your god’s eye.’

  ‘Arthur,’ the priestess said. Arthur nodded, satisfied, and the two Picts took hold of him and together they walked into the lake to the waiting woman. She was already chanting in a low voice. The fearsome chieftain was grinning, the earlier incident with the axe forgotten now that his priestess had resolved to continue the rites. And perhaps he was spinning the picture in his mind of himself dressed in Lord Arthur’s magnificent bronze scale armour, my helmet with its long white plume and silver-chased cheek guards, and riding Gawain’s massive war horse.

  ‘This is not the last day, Arthur,’ I said. I don’t know why I said it. Arthur was up to his thighs in the dark water, the broad-shouldered Picts were steeling themselves for the task of thrusting him under, and their leader was making practice cuts through the air with that blood-smeared axe of his. And yet Arthur looked back at me and smiled.

  ‘This is not the last day,’ he said. Then they pushed him deeper still and the water closed around him, becalming so that he was reflected in its dark mirror. It was as if there were two Arthurs, one of them already in the world beyond, looking back from the cold, still depths of the sacred lake.

  A murmur rose from the Picts on the rocks above. Then those folk in the tree line were buzzing like flies on a carcass and I looked up and saw why.

  The figure stood at the summit of the falls, right out on the treacherous ledge where he risked being swept over into the raging torrent, which would surely pummel him to bloody splinters against the rock. Yet he stood as still as the rock itself, immovable and defiant against the eternal, ceaseless gushing. Forbidding and portentous, a staff in one hand and swathed in robes as black and purple and green as a raven’s wing.

  ‘Took his merry time,’ Gawain said, the half-twist of a smile on his lips.

  Not the last day, I said in my mind, looking up. Knowing that my lungs would not flood with water, nor would my head be mounted on a sharpened stake come sunset.

  Not the last day.

  Merlin lifted his staff and I could see that he was hurling proclamations down at us, though his words were drowned by the falls’ gushing din. Still, seeing the druid up there, the priestess turned her back on Lord Arthur and swept out of the water, shivering like any normal person would amongst clouds of midges in the dusk. She hurried back up the path to her cave and the Picts looked at one another, none of them seeming to know what was happening. When she re-emerged, she wore a herringbone twill kirtle of undyed wool beneath a yellow-brown bear skin, whose head and snout and sightless eyes sat upon her dark head and whose forepaws were crossed and pinned together over her chest. It had been a big beast in life and I wondered if the cave had once been its lair, and if those claws which now gleamed white against the priestess’s dress had once pawed salmon out of the water where men were sacrificed to the gods.

  She carried a slender staff topped with a polecat’s skull, the wicked-looking teeth as long as a finger, and used the staff to make a slow and dignified descent down the hill to the mist-slick rock. There, she stood. Looking up at Merlin. Waiting.

  Neither did the druid rush, but kept us all waiting as he disappeared back into the birch and rowan and made his way from ledge to ledge and across mossy boulders, the Picts backing into briars and brambles, muttering charms and looking away rather than risking to meet the eyes of this fierce-eyed, feathered man. They knew a druid had come amongst them and they feared him. Perhaps they thought their priestess had summoned him in her rites. Or maybe they believed their gods had sent him to them in answer to the three sacrifices whose heads sat side by side in a deepening pool of blood around which flies cavorted.

  When Merlin came to the edge of the pool he did not look at any of us but kept his eyes on the priestess, his expression as grim as the grey rock around us, the green and purple-sheened feathers of his raven cloak stirring in the breeze coming off the falls.

  He greeted the priestess, nodding in a gesture of respect, but then proceeded to admonish her as a father might scold his wayward child. He told her that the gods had gratefully received the three drowned sacrifices but warned her that she would have brought their wrath down upon her people had she continued with the rites and drowned the four men who stood on the rock – he gestured at us then – and the rightful king of Dumnonia, who even now stood up to his waist in the dark water.

  The priestess seemed unsure, but Merlin asked her why she had ignored the sparks which had flown from the axe, for that was Taranis showing his anger at their treatment of Lord Arthur. For Arthur was Britain’s great warrior, he said, beloved of Taranis. Arthur was Britain’s shield and her sword. Arthur was Britain’s hope. And had the priestess been fool enough to drown Arthur in this lake, then she would be the ruin of Britain.

  She seemed to accept all this, if grudgingly; she was a death-craving thing. Then she told the two warriors who held Arthur to bring him out of the lake.

  ‘What about the others?’ she asked in her raspy, little-used voice, turning from a dripping Arthur to point that polecat skull at us. Merlin and Britain could have Arthur, if he was beloved of the gods, but she would have the rest of us. The lake, she said, was still hungry. And perhaps it was, but it seemed to me that it was she who lusted for more drowned men.

  Merlin pointed his ash staff at the water and shook his head. ‘Whatever promises you have made to Arawn and the spirits of this pool, I absolve you of them,’ he said. ‘But these men,’ he swept the staff towards us, ‘these men are mine and I free their souls now.’ With that he lifted a fist to his mouth and coughed into it. Then he raised that fist into the air and opened his hand and to my astonishment a tiny bird, a wren perhaps, whirred off into the sky. The painted people gasped and whispered. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Even the severed heads of the Goutodin men seemed to stare at the druid in wonder.

  Merlin seemed to shiver inside the raven-feather cloak and then he coughed into his fist again and another little bird appeared in his palm for a heartbeat before flitting into the dusk. The priestess watched it fly, muttering some spell under her breath, then turned back to Merlin in time to see the druid cough a third little wren into his fist and free it on the breeze. The fourth bird came reluctantly amidst much coughing and hawking, but at last appeared in Merlin’s open hand and I saw that it was a robin. For a moment it crouched, shivering and timid in the druid’s hand, so that I feared it was not well enough to fly, but Merlin whispered to it and then all but cast it into the air and it took wing and streaked off amongst the birch and willow nearby.

&n
bsp; ‘Four souls, I have claimed,’ the druid announced. ‘But that is not all. I have come for Excalibur too.’ The Picts might have ignored Lord Arthur when he spoke of the sword but they did not dare ignore a druid, particularly a druid dressed in a feathered cloak who could breathe birds into the air. Children clung to their mothers in fear. Warriors fingered their blades and some of them edged a little closer, their inquisitiveness overcoming their unease. ‘For I know that you, the Kindred of Cináed mac Gabrán, are the guardians of Maximus’s sword.’

  ‘How could he know?’ Bors said under his breath.

  ‘The wily dog,’ Gawain said, shaking his head.

  Arthur was smiling, if only with his eyes.

  ‘You,’ Merlin said, pointing his staff at the chieftain, who stood protectively by the severed heads as if he feared Merlin might steal them away too. ‘You are Uradech mac Maelgwn mac Gartnait,’ he said. ‘And your battle-fame is known far south of the stone wall.’ He turned and named another of the painted warriors by his father’s father, and then another. Then he told one of the wide-shouldered men whose job had been to drown men in the lake that his ancestor was Drest the Burner, who had been king of these people when the Romans came to Britain.

  ‘He can read the markings, Lancelot,’ Arthur said, trying hard not to grin. I looked at Bors, who nodded, both of us understanding now. Merlin only had to get a look at the snake or the horse head, the bull or the eagle or the fish inked into a warrior’s arm or back or chest, to know his lineage. To the rest of us the markings were nothing more than representations of creatures and meaningless swirls, eddying patterns and curious symbols. But to Merlin they were stories. They were bloodlines etched in blue woad and he could read them.

  ‘Bastard planned this whole thing,’ Gawain muttered. ‘He could’ve saved those poor sods but he wanted to swoop in like the Morrigán and get everyone’s hair standing on end.’ He spat onto the rock. ‘I’d wager he’d have waited for another head or two to swell that pile if the witch hadn’t pulled Arthur into the water when she did.’

  That we would never know, and probably just as well, I thought, though Arthur was still trying to keep the smile off his face, and he having been heartbeats away from being plunged head first under the water and held there until dead.

  ‘My Lord Arthur needs the sword,’ Merlin told the priestess. ‘For with it he will reforge Britain as she was before the Romans sullied her. He will drive the Saxons back into the sea and those gods who have abandoned us will flood back.’ He glanced at the lake, then nodded at the priestess, who was so slight and pretty beneath that bear skin that it looked as though the great beast had lumbered up and caught her and intended to never let her go. ‘Some gods, of course, have never left us, but others were driven away,’ Merlin said. ‘We will need all the gods of Britain, all those whom our grandfathers’ grandfathers honoured and kept in their hearts, if we are to reclaim the land from the ravenous invader and drive out the Christians’ god, who infects men as the black flies infect your cattle and swine.’

  ‘What do we care for your wars?’ Uradech challenged Merlin, swinging his axe in Lord Arthur’s direction. Perhaps Merlin’s talk of Uradech’s reputation had emboldened the man, but now Merlin marched up to him as if he might strike the chieftain across the face with his gnarled ash staff.

  ‘You fool, Uradech! Any dog can have courage enough to fight, and have its face ripped off. Your victories in battle come from the gods. There is no druid in all Britain who is closer to the gods than I. They whisper to me.’ He fluttered a hand up into the air in imitation of the little birds which he had released. ‘I fly up to the gods to hear their messages. They have told me that Britain needs Lord Arthur and Lord Arthur needs Excalibur. These matters are as far beyond you as the tides are to the pig or the stars are to the earthworm.’

  The chieftain glowered at this but Merlin stared him down. ‘If you interrupt me again I will blow a swarm of maggots into your skull and they will feed on your brain and send you mad.’ He pointed down at Uradech’s crotch. ‘I will put wasps in your member and their stinging will make you scream like a little girl waking from a dream of monsters. I will blow a rat into your bowels, where it will scratch and tear and eat you from the inside out.’ He gave a savage grin. ‘All this I will do, Uradech mac Maelgwn mac Gartnait, if you bother me again.’

  The muscle and sinew of Uradech’s naked torso and arms seemed to throb as he imagined Merlin’s threats made reality, then he stepped back and put the axe across his shoulders and hung his blue-inked arms over the haft. He looked at his fellow warriors and shrugged, and some of them touched the blue whorls on their arms to ward off the evil of the druid’s words.

  ‘Where is the sword?’ Merlin asked the priestess, pulling the pointed tuft of his goat’s beard through a fist.

  She turned her head towards the cave, the bear’s face upon it looking sightlessly back towards its old den. ‘We have kept it safe since Maximus’s time,’ she said with a nod, and with that she walked barefoot once more up into the cave.

  ‘Untie my friends, Uradech,’ Merlin said. ‘And tell your people that we will be joining your feast when we return to Dùn Uaine. And the next day you will provision us to ride south. Your men will escort us to the wall of Antoninus to ensure that we are not attacked by some other tribe of painted head-loppers.’ The Pict nodded, no doubt still imagining those maggots in his skull and that rat in his bowels. And when the Picts had cut through our bonds and the priestess came back down to the water’s edge, she brought with her Excalibur. There was no jewelled scabbard. No gold- or silver-studded baldrick. The sword was bound and tied in a fleece whose grease would keep the worst of the iron blight from further eating that already ancient blade. The priestess untied the thongs, cast the fleece aside and brought the sword up as though presenting it to the cascading water. Dusk had thrown the lake into cool shadow now, but as I looked up I saw that the heights of the falls still glittered in the last light of the day.

  ‘Excalibur,’ Merlin said, his eyes the brightest things down there by the dark water. Brighter than the blade itself, though to my surprise that blade was not pitted and thin with age. I saw that the cutting edge bore several nicks and I imagined the long-ago battles in which Maximus had wielded that sword and scarred her on his enemies’ blades, shields and helmets.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ Lord Arthur said, studying the sword in the priestess’s hands. Hungry to hold it in his own.

  It was a long, straight sword, longer than Boar’s Tusk. As long as Benesek’s Saxon sword which Melwas and I had lost in Karrek’s bay years before. The shaped hand grip was gleaming ivory, whilst the guard and spherical pommel were of dark wood.

  ‘Come with me, Arthur ap Uther,’ the woman said. She shrugged off the bear skin but left the kirtle on this time. Arthur glanced at Merlin, who nodded, then the rightful king of Dumnonia waded once more into the small lake, only this time it was not to be drowned. It was not to be given to the god whose realm was somewhere beneath the surface over which the gnats danced, but rather to be given a treasure of Britain.

  Those two stopped where they had previously stood, the water making the priestess’s kirtle stick to her stomach and breasts. Arthur’s muscled and scarred torso gleamed white against the black water.

  The Picts who had come to witness the sacrificial rites were silent now, so that the only sound was the incessant out-breath of the falls. Even Merlin was captivated. Beguiled by the young priestess and the lord of war and the sword.

  ‘You will take this memory to your grave, Lancelot,’ he said, his eyes never leaving the spectacle, reading the shapes of the woman’s lips to know the words she spoke unheard above the clamour of tumbling, rushing water. And I knew the druid was right; that I would see this moment again, a clear and vivid picture in my mind of the day Arthur, my lord and friend, inherited Excalibur and took upon himself the task of remaking Britain.

  Holding Excalibur by the grip and the end of the blade, the priestess
lowered it into the water and for a short while it was lost from sight as she spoke her sacred words. Arthur stood still, his face solemn, eyes peering into the lake, as expectant and yet patient as an egret in the reed bed waiting to spear a fish or frog with its long beak.

  Then the priestess lifted the sword out of the water and held it up high, pointing it to the light at the summit of the falls, her thin arm trembling with cold or the sword’s weight. Without another word she gave the sword to Arthur, who took it by the hilt and wrapped his hand round that ivory grip, getting a sense of its balance and perhaps imagining the great general Flavius Magnus Maximus, commander of the legions of Britain, leading his warriors against the first Saxons who drew their boats up onto our shores.

  ‘Excalibur,’ Arthur said, claiming the sword, and I thought that even if the priestess asked for the sword back now, if she needed it for some last part of the rites, Arthur would not give it to her. That he would possess that sword utterly, and that perhaps the sword would possess him, too.

  Then the priestess took Arthur’s free hand in hers and led him out of the lake, the two of them shivering in the shadow and the falls’ chill breath.

  ‘What now?’ Gawain asked Merlin.

  But the druid did not answer and we watched as the priestess took Arthur up the path and into the cave.

  By the time Arthur emerged it was night.

  18

  Camelot

  IT WAS AS though all of Britain thrummed as that summer ceded to autumn and Arthur rode through the land. Each of the kingdoms was like a colony of bees swarming because it cannot build comb quickly enough to store all the nectar being brought back to the hive. Men who were ploughing the fallow fields prior to the sowing of winter crops left their oxen standing idle to witness the spectacle of Lord Arthur riding his great war horse, Llamrei, in his red-plumed helmet and glorious scale armour, Excalibur raised for all to see. Swineherds driving their charges into the woods to forage for beechnuts and acorns hurried quickly back to catch a glimpse of the procession. Women and children gathering wheat stubble to mix with hay for winter fodder stopped their back-breaking work and swarmed around us, calling Arthur’s name that he might look at them. They hoped to share some morsel of the gods’ favour which glowed around Arthur like the halo around the moon.