‘I’ve never found one before,’ I said.
‘Brings luck, they say,’ Arthur said, returning the elf bolt to me. ‘Hold on to it.’
I bent and tucked the elf bolt into my boot.
‘Are you ready?’ he asked me. ‘I’m not going to go easy on you.’
I smiled. ‘I’m ready,’ I said.
Then, the low autumn sun warming our backs, we raced each other up the steep banks and down the ditches in which Roman soldiers must have died, all the way up the formidable hill which once had been a bastion of hope and which would be once again. We raced to the top of Camelot.
We worked hard and we worked fast, clearing the woodland which our enemies might use to their advantage from around the foot of the hill. We reclaimed the plateau from brambles and rowan, dug the rotten posts of long-vanished dwellings out of the ground and began redigging the ditches and enlarging the ramparts. We sweated and laboured until our hands blistered, our backs ached and our muscles screamed for rest, because we wanted to get as much done as we could before winter frosts hardened the earth and the cold drove our workforce inside to their hearths. For though Arthur’s own horse warriors and spearmen toiled as ardently and ably as any legionaries who’d worked on the great walls in the north of Britain, we did not labour alone on that hill. Arthur had sent out word throughout Dumnonia that anyone who came to help him rebuild Camelot would be fed, watered and paid, and they came in their dozens. More than we had expected. Sometimes whole families came, using the timber we had cleared to build makeshift dwellings and working from sunrise to sunset.
‘I never dreamed so many would come,’ Arthur said one night, looking down from the summit to the village which had sprouted like toadstools after rain. Fires lit the night, their smoke drifting up to us and hazing the stars.
‘They came to see Excalibur,’ Bors told him.
Arthur shook his head. ‘They came because they believe in Camelot. They want to be a part of what we are doing here.’
They were both right, for Arthur’s fame and word of Excalibur had spread far and wide, and many folk had come to get a glimpse of the new Maximus, as they called Arthur that autumn. But most who came stayed. They saw what we were doing with that ancient hill-fort and they took up picks, axes and spades, and filled wicker baskets with earth, and there cannot have been as many souls swarming over that limestone hill since that day some four hundred years ago when the legions had fought their way up those ditches and banks and put the defenders to the sword.
Some forty or so men had come to Camelot hoping Arthur would take them into his war band. Like most men laying eyes on Arthur’s armoured horse soldiers for the first time, these newcomers were in awe. Arthur was canny enough to have his men give a demonstration whereby they charged across the meadow in a thunderous clamour like the coming of a god, and plunged their spears into straw targets to the cheers and terrified thrill of the watching crowd.
Most were beardless youths who had little or no experience of battle. Some were older men who had earned their scars and had stories to tell but who missed the companionship of a warrior band and saw in Arthur their chance to live their old lives again.
‘Look at them. Men want to fight the Saxons in the spring,’ Bors had said one day as we watched three such experienced spearmen come into the camp at the foot of the hill, their shields above their heads to show that they came in peace.
‘No, Bors, men want to fight for Arthur,’ I said.
Only a handful were told to come back in a year or so, when they had a little more flesh on their bones. ‘There will be many campaigns and I will need you soon enough,’ Arthur assured these crestfallen young men, who stayed with us anyway and helped with the building. Of all those that stayed, only the three best riders were taken to be trained as cataphracts, because Arthur did not yet have enough horses. The other men were taken on as spearmen and it was Bors’s task and mine, when we were not busy on the ramparts, to train them in the use of sword, shield and spear.
One of the newcomers, a broad-shouldered, flat-nosed warrior named Óengus, who boasted his own sword and iron helmet, had been fool enough to protest at the prospect of having to take instruction from, as he put it, waving his shield towards Bors and me, green shoots who had never stood in the shieldwall before. He liked the sound of his own voice, did Óengus, and he was performing for the others, who watched with keen interest, because some of them shared his opinion.
Óengus might have a big mouth, but he was right that we were young, not yet twenty years old. And it was true that we had never yet fought in the terror-soaked tight press of the shieldwall, although we knew we surely would come the spring. Even so, neither of those truths stopped Bors using the butt end of his spear to disarm Óengus of his sword and shield, before pummelling him until Óengus was bleating like a stuck sheep. As Bors walked off, I gave Óengus back his sword and shield and told him, trying not to smile, that I would teach him a way to counter the sword disarm, and he had enough wits still left in his head to say he looked forward to learning it. If any of the others still doubted our competence to teach them, they kept it to themselves.
Now, with just two moons come and gone since Arthur had first shown me Camelot, the place was beginning to resemble the fortress it had once been. In spite of the weather.
‘We’ll be like pigs in a wallow if it rains any more,’ Arthur said, standing to stretch his back, then leaning on his spade. It had rained without respite for two days and already we were covered in filth, so no one would have ever guessed that the man toiling beside me on the eastern ramparts was Lord Arthur, Prince of Dumnonia and son of Uther Pendragon. We were turning the turf, making the ditches deeper and using the spoil to heighten the banks, and had we gone about this in the spring, in no time the earth would have been blanketed in new grass. But it was autumn now and we would have to get used to mud.
‘At least it makes the digging easier,’ I said, thrusting my own spade into the wet earth, its thin wooden blade shod with sharp iron.
‘Easier? Fighting battles is easier than this,’ Arthur said, staring into the south. We were working on the highest rampart and yet the grey, rain-filled day did not afford good views across Dumnonia. But Arthur peered, as though he could see the distant coast and the gulls wheeling above the grey sea. As though he could smell the brine in the damp air and hear the retreating surf hissing and bubbling amongst the shingle.
I dug again. Carried the earth on my spade and lifted it. Slid the glistening dark soil onto the bank behind us, which was already a foot taller than me.
He was in a strange mood this morning. Most days he worked harder than anyone, pushing carts of soil, hefting timbers and rocks, digging with a single-minded resolve that put others to shame but made them toil harder themselves. His strength was not exceptional but his stamina was unmatched. But that morning Arthur’s heart was not in it, and it was not the first time I had caught him gazing off at nothing.
‘Are you unwell?’ I asked him, careful not to be overheard. All along the rampart, men drudged, the sound of their digging like an echo across the years, their sweat washed by the rain onto the earth like an offering.
I looked at Arthur, thinking that he had not heard me. But he shook his head. ‘I am perfectly well,’ he said, scowling, and thrust his spade down with such force that the shoulder was just visible as a ridge in the ground. With gritted teeth Arthur wrestled with the shaft, trying to lever it and widen the incision so that he could haul the spade back out. The shaft snapped, leaving the blade stuck in the earth and sending Arthur stumbling.
‘Gods!’ he roared, and others on that bank looked over, their dirt-smeared faces unreadable.
‘Then something is on your mind, lord,’ I said.
‘Don’t call me lord, Lancelot,’ he said. Or rather growled, stepping aside as I thrust my own spade into the earth to retrieve Arthur’s broken blade, for not even a prince of Dumnonia would leave that sheath of good iron in the ground.
‘Well, you are
not yourself this morning,’ I said, breaking the soil around the lost spade.
‘And you are more talkative than normal,’ he replied.
I handed him my spade and dropped to my knees to pull the wooden blade out with my hands. But it was stuck, as though the earth refused to return what Arthur had given it, and my hands slipped off the wet wood and I fell onto my backside, taking a splinter in a thumb for my trouble.
It was worth it to see Arthur smile.
‘I’m afraid, Lancelot,’ he said, the smile vanishing as quickly as it had appeared. ‘I’ve fought many men in single combat, I’ve broken shieldwalls and I’ve had three good horses killed under me.’ He made fists of his dirty hands and looked south again. ‘And none of those things made my palms sweat as they sweat now. None of them made me lose my appetite nor made my stomach roll and flutter like …’ He frowned, searching for the right words. ‘Like bats trembling and tumbling over each other, trapped and driven increasingly mad.’
I laughed at that and he scowled at me as if I had betrayed him. I climbed to my feet, holding my palm towards him to show my remorse.
‘I’m sorry, lord,’ I said, trying to look serious. ‘What’s worrying you?’ I asked, pushing my long hair off my face and tying it behind my head.
He glanced this way and that, but the others were bent to their work again, their own hopes no less a part of Camelot’s construction than the soil and the timbers and the stones which had stood in forsaken Roman villas before Arthur had oxen haul them here to shore up the ramparts.
‘It’s my wife,’ he said in a low voice. ‘And don’t call me lord, Lancelot. Especially not here with us both looking like a couple of slaves digging a cesspit.’
I nodded. I had known Arthur had a wife but he had never spoken of her to me and I had assumed that perhaps he did not care much for her. After all, a prince did not marry for love, or even for the joys of the bed, but for alliances.
‘Is she unwell?’ I asked, sensing that was not it, but not wanting Arthur to silt up now.
‘Why must everyone be unwell today?’ he asked.
I shrugged.
‘She’s coming here,’ he said. ‘Gawain is bringing her. They left Soissons five days ago. Should be here tomorrow or the day after. Certainly by Samhain.’
Samhain, which stood at the boundary between two halves of the year, was just four days away. Folk were already gathering the herds of cattle and sheep from open pasture and choosing which animals were to be slaughtered and which were for winter feeding and breeding. But more than this, folk were beginning to thrum with the excitement that always came before the great celebrations, because on Samhain the veil between this world and the unseen world dissolves and spirits walk amongst us.
‘She is coming and I am not ready. Look at us,’ he said, throwing an arm out towards the earthen bank behind us, which had been rising day by day.
‘You think she expects a rich hall like your father’s?’ I asked, throwing up my arms. ‘Great beams draped with banners and a roof so vast that two hundred warriors and their horses could look up at it?’
‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘But I had thought I would give her more than a wind-blown tent and a muddy hill. In Soissons we had a villa. Stables of whitewashed stone. Private chambers adorned with paintings of men and women who seemed alive whenever flamelight moved across them. You should see them, Lancelot,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘We had rows of vines laden with grapes. We bathed, Lancelot!’ he said. ‘In hot water! There were fires under the floor which heated the tiles in winter.’
‘You have Excalibur,’ I said before he could go on, for surely that was worth more than a hall and a high seat, which were things any of a dozen lords within a two-day ride could boast. Worth more than grape vines and hot baths, too.
But Arthur’s face was agonized. I had never seen him look so ill at ease, not even when the painted Picts had led him into the pool below the sacred falls.
‘You don’t know her, Lancelot.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know her,’ he said. ‘Not really. We were married at Beltane. Not the last one but the one before.’ Rain dripped from his fair beard and his long hair was soaked and lank, but there was a flash of mischief in his grey eyes then. ‘I thought she was the most beautiful creature I had ever laid eyes on. Gods, Lancelot, she is extraordinary. It was an arrangement of course. Her father is wealthy and he thought I would be sitting on Uther’s high seat by now. Merlin assured him of it. My father wanted me to marry higher.’ His lip curled in his rain-beaded beard. ‘Some princess of Gaul or even Swabia, if not one of King Syagrius’s daughters, who were pretty enough, truth to tell. He hoped I’d bring an army to Britain and that together we would throw the Saxons back into the sea.’
He looked south, across the meadows and the distant woods of beech and oak which were copper in the grey day. A hawk soared in the south, a lonely speck beneath the cloud.
‘But when I saw her …’ he said, and left those words hanging while his mind soared beneath some far-off, kinder sky. He looked so young then as he talked of his wife. Here is an Arthur whom his enemies would not recognize, I thought, and could not help but smile as he confided how this daughter of some rich lord had beguiled him.
‘So she’s beautiful,’ I said.
‘Not just beautiful, Lancelot,’ he said. ‘I have seen many beautiful women. I have known a handful well,’ he added, lifting an eyebrow, ‘but there was something more about her. A vitality … a spirit.’ He shook his head, unhappy with his own powers of description. ‘Lancelot,’ he said, his forehead creasing, ‘you know when you hunt a deer and by the will of the gods you manage to get downwind of it, close enough so that the creature does not even know you are there, and for a moment you take the time to watch the deer as it forages.’ I nodded. ‘And then,’ Arthur went on, ‘for reasons you cannot explain, the creature looks up. You know. Right at you.’ He put two fingers up to his eyes. ‘Eye to eye,’ he said, ‘and in that heartbeat there’s no one else in the world and you see the creature’s wild soul. Something at once familiar and yet at the same time indescribable. Like a dream you can still feel clinging to you though you can’t quite remember it.’
‘I know the feeling,’ I said, and I did.
‘Merlin warned me she would be trouble. He knew her and her father.’ Arthur plunged my spade down and brought up a wedge of earth, then carried it to the bank and piled it on top. ‘But when I saw her, I knew I’d marry her. The Beltane fires blazed that night and I barely noticed them,’ he said, smacking the earth down with the spade.
‘You fell in love with a beautiful woman and married her,’ I said. ‘And now this rare beauty is on her way here, while we flounder in the mud. You’ll be together again,’ I said, turning my palms up to meet the rain. ‘But to look at you anyone would think the Saxons were coming.’
He was digging again but I had no spade and could only watch.
‘I would sooner fight the Saxons,’ he said, putting a foot on the lug to force the spade deep. ‘I don’t know her,’ he said, then stopped what he was doing and looked at me. ‘I barely know her,’ he corrected himself. ‘The ashes from the Beltane fires were still warm to the touch when a Frankish war band crossed the Meuse. I rode north to war. When I returned, we spent some days together, but soon enough an envoy brought word that my father was dying and I came to Britain.’ He glanced round. A huge man carrying a palisade timber up the hill on his shoulder raised a hand in greeting and Arthur waved back. ‘I want Guinevere to be a part of all this,’ he said. ‘That’s why I sent for her. I want her to build Camelot with me.’
It seemed as though a cold hand had grabbed my heart and was squeezing it. I could not breathe. I took an involuntary step backwards, slipping slightly in the sodden earth.
‘Guinevere?’ I said.
Arthur smiled at me. ‘You wait till you meet her, Lancelot. When I tell Guinevere how you saved my life at Tintagel, she’ll count you a friend. I know she will.’ He plunged the
spade down. ‘I just hope she has feelings for me. That the fire between us still burns,’ he said, wincing at his attempt at the bard’s craft. He was still talking but I did not hear him. I was watching that hawk drifting in great circles beneath the charcoal grey cloud.
‘Lancelot? What’s wrong?’ Arthur said.
‘I’m thirsty,’ I said. ‘Who is Guinevere’s father?’ I asked.
He came over and handed me the spade. I dug. ‘Lord Leodegan,’ he said. ‘I’ve no doubt he’ll come too, when he hears Guinevere is back. He’s a good man, I think, though I hear he is a Christian now. He’s turning an old Roman temple into a church at Carmelide. Now there is a god who spreads like a dog rose,’ he said, as though he could not understand the appeal of the Christians’ god. ‘Guinevere is not a Christian. At least, I don’t think she is. Careful,’ he said, ‘or we’ll have no spades between us and no choice but to dig with our hands.’
I dug. I was sick to my stomach. My hands trembled on the shaft but I dug, and I could not look at Arthur. My lord. My friend.
Because Guinevere was coming to Camelot.
19
Malice of the Gods
AT SAMHAIN WE mourn the death of the old year. We feast and we drink and we look to the future, towards the new year, but we mourn the old. It is a dangerous time, for we linger on the edge of winter and the world stands still, and the gateway between our earthly world and the realm of the spirits stands open. It is at Samhain, too, that the gods visit men, sometimes prophesying when a warrior will die in battle. It is a time when spirits change shape to prowl among the living, when life and death intertwine. It is a time of not being, when order crumbles like an ancient bone brought out of the soil into the air. At Samhain, chaos rules. And that Samhain, chaos ruled me.
She had arrived on the eve of the rites, Gawain and six of Arthur’s warriors bringing her across the Dividing Sea from Arthur’s hall in Gaul. And from the moment Arthur had mentioned her, to the moment three days later when I laid eyes on her, I had not eaten a morsel of food nor slept hardly at all.
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