I found some work at the foot of the hill on the northern side and avoided Arthur as much as I could. I avoided Bors. I avoided everyone. My mind reeled and my stomach churned and my throat clenched tight, so that I doubt I could have swallowed my food even had I tried to eat. She was coming. Guinevere. My Guinevere.
Arthur’s Guinevere now.
Samhain. When chaos rules.
I knew when she had arrived because Arthur sent word across the fort that all work should cease so that everyone, from the young to the old, could gather by the newly finished gatehouse to welcome Guinevere. Folk left their spades and their picks, their carts and wicker baskets, their timbers and ropes and made their way to the south-western corner of the hill. It wasn’t raining but it was a chill, damp day and a fog hung around Camelot, so that there was already a sense of the dead passing through the shreds of the veil between worlds to walk amongst us.
And if I could have passed from my world then, to escape it all, I would have. But I could not. And so I busied myself labouring in the old path which ran through the embankments into the fort from the north, clearing away the tangled undergrowth which over the years had invaded and sunk deep roots. I worked with a sickle, hacking and cutting and not minding the clawing thorns which gouged my hands and forearms and sometimes my face.
Wanting to go and not wanting to.
I had all but defeated the brambles in the channel between the outer bank and ditch when something made me hold before the next sweep of the sickle. I looked around but saw nothing but the fog which hung like smoke on a still day and gathered thickest in the gullies between the steep earthen banks. I shivered. It was Samhain eve and I wondered if some spirit was nearby, having left its burial mound to wander amongst us who still felt the earth beneath our feet, the rain on our skin and the stinging cuts of thorns. I was about to challenge the spirit, to ask what it wanted of me, even lifted the sickle towards the fog.
‘You were not easy to find,’ said a voice I knew. I turned to see Bors coming down the last bank, squeezing water from the hem of his red cloak. ‘I need to grease this,’ he said, almost falling and cursing under his breath. I was glad I had not challenged some spirit aloud, for Bors would have laughed and I wasn’t in the mood for it.
‘You’re bleeding,’ he said.
I touched my cheek and looked at the blood on my fingers then wiped it on my trews.
‘What do you want?’ I asked.
He gazed at the ground I had cleared, at the piles of severed briars, then back to the thick furze which still thrived in the ancient walkway, as though appraising my work, though really he was choosing his next words. ‘You can’t avoid her, Lancelot,’ he said, unsheathing the thing sooner than I had expected. But then Bors was never one to tiptoe around the edge of something.
‘There’s work to be done,’ I said.
‘Have you told him?’
I shook my head.
‘Then, what will you do?’
‘What can I do?’ I asked. ‘They are married.’ Saying it aloud gave it the finality of a death blow.
‘They are,’ he agreed.
‘He is my lord. I’m sworn to him.’
Bors nodded. ‘He is your friend,’ he said. ‘He couldn’t have known.’
‘He barely knows her,’ I said. ‘He told me.’
Bors considered this. ‘Do you know her, cousin? You did once but that was years ago. Guinevere will not be the same girl you used to run around Karrek with like hares in a meadow. She’s a woman now. A woman who has married for the sake of an alliance.’
‘Not much of an alliance,’ I said, tasting my own sourness. ‘Lord Leodegan is not even a king. And he’s a Christian,’ I added.
There was pity in Bors’s eyes then and I hated seeing it. ‘Then perhaps it is love,’ he said. ‘Or the beginning of love.’
‘Did you come here to make me feel worse, cousin?’ I asked.
He smiled. ‘I came to make sure you left some of these thorns for the rest of us.’ He nodded towards the south-west. ‘Gawain will have drunk all the mead if we don’t hurry. Come with me, Lancelot, before you cut your leg off with that thing,’ he said, gesturing at the sickle in my hand.
‘I’ll come soon,’ I said.
‘You’d rather be out here on your own with the dead on Samhain eve?’ he asked. ‘A sickle won’t be much use against the Morrigán.’ Since coming to Britain I had heard much of the Morrigna, the shape-shifting battle goddesses who, by their fearful presence, affect the fate of armies and warriors on the battlefield. ‘I saw a crow just now and the way it looked at me, I tell you, cousin, it was no ordinary crow.’ He sighed. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘We can avoid her by hiding in the bottom of our cups.’
Guinevere was here. At Camelot. The woman I had loved from the very moment I pulled her from Manannán mac Lir’s greedy clutches that storm-flayed day long ago was here on this hill, and I was standing in wet boots in a thorn-filled ditch with a sickle to scare away the roaming dead. And so, with a sickening sensation of excitement and dread writhing in my hollow stomach, I went with Bors to join the celebrations. Because it was Samhain, the time of chaos, and Arthur’s wife had come.
In the years since I had last seen her, there had not been a day when I had not thought of Guinevere. Whether I wielded a sword and shield, learning the arts of war, or swam around the Mount. Whether I was picking mussels off the rocks at low tide, climbing down the ledges in search of gulls’ eggs, honing blades, polishing the men’s war gear or eating in the communal hut. There was a moment of every day, be it as fleeting as a sparrow darting into a lord’s hall then out of the smoke hole, that I thought of Guinevere.
At those most often unexpected times, when I was not on my guard against it, she came on me like a stab wound. A wound which, though hidden from sight, never scabbed over. And even when she did not come with sudden, sharp and unbidden anguish, she was always with me; a dull ache deep in my chest. An ever-present absence. Guinevere.
I had been with others. Mostly during those times I visited Tintagel with Bors and Benesek or Edern, but it had been little more than sport, and each time only reminded me of what I really wanted but could not have. And yet now, seeing Guinevere again after years spent holding her only in my secret heart, I was taken aback. Not merely to be under the same swathe of sky as her, to be breathing in the smoke from the same fires and shivering from the same damp air, but because she was not the same Guinevere I had brought with me through the years. Gone was the raven-haired girl with the knowing eyes and the wicked half-smile. In her place was a queen-in-waiting.
Her hair, which had never used to stay where it was put, was now braided and coiled and set in place with silver pins. Her skin, which though ever pale had used to be flushed from wind and sun, was as white as marble. Her eyes were dark with kohl and green with malachite, and her lips were red. Her chest swelled beneath a dress of green silk and a silver wolf’s pelt, and that dress, hemmed with silver thread, reached almost to the ground, so that only a glimpse of her silver-studded tan leather shoes could be seen. At her neck she wore a fine torc of twisted silver and around her upper right arm coiled a silver serpent with a red garnet eye.
And I could not find my breath.
Thus did Guinevere come back to me, her back spear-straight, her chin high and her expression imperious as Arthur led her by the hand along the wooden walkway beside which firebrands burned every ten feet, giving the fog a strange and eerie glow. I had laid my share of those timbers upon which she walked, over which they progressed slowly, so that everyone who had gathered at the gatehouse on the innermost embankment, from Arthur’s warriors to the craftsmen and labourers, the old, the young and the slaves, could get an eyeful of their lord and his beautiful, regal wife. The future of Britain.
Arthur’s horse warriors had taken the red ribbons from their spears and nailed them to the top of the gateway palisade, where they hung limp and damp. From the guard tower above the open gate they had draped Arthur
’s war banner, that huge red cloth with its squat black bear on all fours, but the effect of all this red on the hill-fort’s newly built defences was, if anything, slightly ominous, not that anyone said so.
Arthur himself was dressed for war in his scale armour, which reflected the torch flames, and his polished helmet with its gold-chased cheek pieces and long red plume. His sword belt was studded with silver scales and, unlike Bors’s, Arthur’s cloak was dry though there was no wind to billow it for the full effect. Even so, he looked magnificent.
And I was thorn-ripped, mud-spattered, damp and no doubt stinking of sweat.
I watched her, saw how she smiled at Arthur’s men, at Bedwyr and Cai, who both fell to their knees in the mud and pledged their swords to her protection. And yet, where had they been that day of the shipwreck? Where had they been when some fetid sailor had followed Guinevere up the dark stairwell to the Lady’s dream chamber and thrown her down on the bed?
‘No, Lancelot,’ Bors beside me said, taking hold of my arm for I had taken a step. ‘No.’
I looked at him. ‘Let go of me, cousin.’
He shook his head. ‘She has just come. You cannot put this on her now. Gods, Lancelot,’ he hissed, ‘imagine the embarrassment to Lord Arthur? No, cousin, say nothing. Do nothing.’
He was right. I knew he was and I looked back to Guinevere, who had bid Bedwyr and Cai rise and now crouched beside a little curly-haired girl who had run up to give her a basket of bread. The girl’s parents looked on with pride and Guinevere hugged their daughter close and kissed her cheek and the crowd aahed, and in that moment Guinevere had them. Arthur saw it. Smiling, he offered Guinevere his hand and she stood so that her husband could lead her through the gates of Camelot.
Someone called, ‘Lord Arthur and Lady Guinevere!’ and others echoed it, and in no time they were shouting this in one voice, loud enough to draw any curious spirits making their way through the shredded veil from their world to ours. ‘Lord Arthur and Lady Guinevere,’ they called, and I still knew Guinevere’s face well enough to know that their affection disconcerted her, for all her efforts to maintain the regal grace akin to indifference. I doubted Arthur knew it, though, and that pleased me in some small, sour way. He grinned like a boy, proud of his wall and its gatehouse which he had devised from his memory of Roman ruins, and proud of his wife, who was the most lovely thing on that hill and in all of Dumnonia, perhaps all Britain, and so, grinning, he drew Guinevere towards the yawning, flame-flickered gateway.
Then, as Arthur made a point of stopping to commend one of his builders on the quality of the timber lattice framework and the facing of dressed stone, Guinevere turned her head and she saw me. My breath snagged and it seemed a weight pressed on my chest, heavy as a quern stone. It lasted no longer than a salmon taking a fly, but in that cruel moment, her face lit by the hissing flames, her eyes in me, she was my Guinevere again.
Then she turned her face away and walked through the gate into Camelot and was gone.
That Samhain eve I took Bors’s advice and lost myself in my cups. And the next day, when the feasting began in earnest, I did the same, so that even if all the dead of Arawn’s realm had crossed over to skulk amongst us I would not have noticed.
The days passed and the refortification of Camelot continued, and whether Arthur was busy playing the husband or else had other matters to attend to, I did not see much of him in the ditches. Some days, when I worked on the ramparts or carried Roman stones up to the inner bank, or helped drive in the timbers of the smaller, lighter palisades on the outer banks, which would protect archers and javelin men from attackers, I half expected to turn round and see Guinevere standing there with that questioning yet knowing look in her eyes. I imagined her finding me, as she used to on the island, and the two of us running off to some secret place beyond eyes and ears. Perhaps I would tell her how Arthur and I had become the best of friends. How I loved him as a brother. But that I loved her too. She would explain how her father had forced her into marrying Arthur and she would tell me not to look so dismal, that we would conceive of a way to be together without betraying Arthur.
And the sea would flow to the well springs of rivers and the rain would rise from the fields to the sky.
But Guinevere never came. Mordred did.
I did not know who he was at first but I noticed him. We all did. He rode through the gatehouse onto the plateau with the straight-backed assuredness of a lord, though he could have been no more than sixteen years old. The fair hair on his chin looked as insubstantial as the downy heads of the cankerworts which children pluck from the fields to blow. Not that I boasted a beard to talk of, unlike Bors, who was rightly proud of his.
I had been instructing three young men in the proper use of the spear, teaching them how, when attacked from behind, a man might turn in to his assailant, perform a quick block and thrust at the face, when we heard someone haranguing the gate guards to let him in. I could not hear the case which the stranger presented, but his tone was belligerent and I did catch the words father and you stinking weasel turd. Next thing, the gates were hauled open and in rode this young man with the dawn sunlight flooding at his back.
I told the new recruits to continue practising the spear moves and I watched the newcomer on his sturdy little pony, around which small clouds of flies swarmed, though the young man seemed oblivious to them. The reason for the flies was the four severed human heads tied by their long fair hair to the saddle horns. One of the heads looked many days dead but the others were fresh and the flies were feasting.
Then the young man turned his head stiffly and regarded me with contemptuous eyes.
‘You there, take me to Lord Arthur,’ he said in a disagreeable, screechy voice halfway between a boy’s and a man’s. Blood had trickled from the trophies’ raw necks to stain the yellow saddle and run in dark, sticky trails down the pony’s flanks and belly.
‘I’m busy,’ I said, turning back to the young spearmen who were more interested in the stranger and the grisly heads swinging from his saddle than in their spearcraft.
‘Don’t turn your back on me,’ he whined.
Ignoring him, I lunged at a spearman who had the sense to keep his mind on the task and parried my sheathed spear blade in a manner which showed that he had been paying attention that morning.
‘Are you deaf? I said, don’t turn your back on me,’ the stranger said again. I nodded at the young spearman, which was all the praise he would get for his parry, then turned back to Mordred, for no other reason than I was intrigued by him.
He reached down and patted one of the pale, dead faces. ‘Do you think I got these by dancing around with a practice spear?’ he asked. He was sure of himself for a young man whose balls had not long dropped, but I did not know who his father was then.
‘I’m guessing you found some dead Saxons and cut off their heads so that people might think you had killed them,’ I said, for those grimacing faces were unmistakably Saxon.
He did not like that. Not at all, and it took him several heartbeats to get a rein on the fury which burned in his cheeks and blazed in his grey eyes.
‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘What is your name?’
I shrugged, seeing no point in not telling him. ‘I’m Lancelot,’ I said.
His eyes widened at that. Mordred’s every emotion moulded and remoulded his face, from one moment to the next. Or so it seemed to me. ‘You are one of those who rode north with Lord Arthur to bring back the sword Excalibur,’ he said.
I nodded.
He grimaced. ‘I was meant to be there. It should have been me riding through Britain beside Lord Arthur and Excalibur,’ he said with a tone and expression which suggested there was someone he blamed for missing out on those many, many arse-numbing weeks in search of Maximus’s sword.
Still, I was intrigued. By the Saxon heads as much as by this young man’s brazenness, for despite what I had said to him, I knew full well that he had killed the men to whom those heads had belonged.
I wasn’t sure how I knew, but I knew.
‘And why should you have ridden with us, boy?’ I asked, adding the last word because I knew it would sting him and I wanted to see it in his face.
‘Because Lord Arthur is my father, you ignorant toad,’ he said.
I had not expected that. Arthur had never mentioned that he had a son. But then, he had not talked to me of his wife, either, until that day we were digging together. And of the two surprises, this one paled against the heart-piercing revelation that he had married Guinevere.
‘Well?’ he challenged me. ‘Will you take me to him?’
I was taking in the news that here was Arthur’s son. I was looking at him with new eyes and those eyes saw now the resemblance: the lean face, full lips and storm-cloud eyes. The fair down which would in time grow to a full golden beard, and the high forehead and fair hair which, in a few years, would have receded from his temples. This young man had killed the four Saxons and he was Arthur’s son.
Even so, I did not have to like him.
‘You don’t need me to take you,’ I said, pointing my spear back into the settlement. ‘You’ll find him up there, covered in wood shavings and sweating with the rest.’
‘And I’ll be questioned by a dozen spearmen before I get anywhere near him,’ he said. He was right of course. He nodded at me. ‘If you take me, the sooner my father gets to welcome his son,’ he said. ‘You being the man who saved my father at Tintagel and helped him bring Maximus’s sword back to Dumnonia.’
‘I didn’t save him,’ I said. ‘It was a fight. I fought.’ Behind me the clack, clack of spear staves striking each other as the young spearmen practised what they had learnt.
Mordred shrugged as if to say it meant nothing to him either way. And maybe I wanted to be there when Arthur saw Mordred, if only to witness my friend’s embarrassment at not having mentioned to me that he had a son. Or perhaps I wanted to go up to where Arthur laboured on what would be his great hall because I knew that Guinevere would be there and I had not seen her since the day she arrived at Camelot.
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