Lancelot

by Giles Kristian

  ‘Morgana,’ I blurted, feeling a fool for not having realized sooner. ‘Morgana is Lord Arthur’s sister,’ I said.

  ‘Half-sister,’ Merlin corrected, climbing to his feet and brushing the damp leaves off his robes. ‘If that makes it any more palatable.’

  ‘Did Morgana know? When she and Arthur lay together?’

  ‘Queen Igraine saw the girl now and again. In secret. I daresay the girl knew who her mother was.’

  ‘So Morgana must have known who Arthur was,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ the druid said, ‘but of course Igraine did not know that the two of them were rolling in the straw.’

  So Morgana was Mordred’s mother. I thought back to the day Uther died, when I had seen Morgana amongst those gathered around the High King’s bed. She had hissed at me that day, though I still did not know why. Benesek had said she was mad, and perhaps it was not surprising after what had happened to her.

  Merlin put the fungus in the bag with the other things he had collected.

  ‘Arthur found out and sent the baby away,’ I said, ‘just as Uther had sent Morgana away.’

  ‘Worse than that,’ Merlin said, snatching up his staff and walking off. ‘A fisherman was paid to row him out, poor little Mordred tied up in a sack with only a heavy rock to play with.’ He lifted a hand and spread his fingers. ‘Plop.’

  ‘Arthur did this?’ I asked, not believing that Arthur could have done such a thing.

  ‘Uther’s doing really,’ Merlin said, ‘to spare his son from the disgrace of incest. But Arthur knew. And when it was done … or when they all thought it was done, Arthur was ashamed.’

  He gave a little gasp of excitement and pointed his staff at a large puffball which sat like an old white skull amongst the wet, brown leaf litter. ‘My favourite,’ he said, and prodded the mushroom, at which a cloud of smoke rose into the air. ‘Why do you think he ran off to Gaul?’ Merlin said. ‘To learn how to fight? He could have done that here. Uther was always fighting someone.’

  On we went, ever deeper into the wood. ‘No, poor Arthur was ashamed,’ Merlin said. ‘He went across the sea and learnt his trade. He is good at war,’ he said, examining branches and trunks as he went. ‘The best I’ve ever known.’

  ‘How did Mordred survive?’ I asked.

  ‘How should I know?’ the druid said. ‘The fisherman Uther had paid to drown the boy like a rat in a barrel was soft-hearted? Or perhaps an otter carried the sack with Mordred inside it on its back and deposited it on the shore? Or maybe Manannán mac Lir sent a wave to carry him to some safe haven.’

  ‘Did you know that he lived?’ I asked.

  ‘I heard whispers,’ he admitted. ‘In the breeze of a swan’s wing. In the sigh of a salmon breaking the surface. And now Mordred has forgiven his father for trying to drown him. And Arthur has forgiven the boy for being the issue of a poisonous act. All is well. All is well.’

  He was ahead of me, so that I couldn’t see his face, but his tone betrayed his words.

  ‘You think it strange?’ I asked, ‘that Mordred should forgive Arthur?’

  ‘I think the gods love chaos, Lancelot,’ he said. ‘If they did not, there would be a little pile of bones on the seabed this very day, instead of a young man who collects heads and yet forgives those who wanted him dead.’ He bent and picked something up, smelled it, then showed it to me. It was a bird’s pellet. ‘What bird coughed this up, Lancelot?’

  I glanced up at the trees around us. ‘A kestrel,’ I guessed.

  He rolled his eyes and broke apart the little mass of hair and feathers. ‘With all these bones? Don’t be a fool. It belonged to a brown owl, which I will take as a bad omen, Lancelot. Prophetic of mischief, mark my words.’

  I hadn’t noticed the bones but nor was I interested in being tested. I was thinking about Mordred and Arthur and wondering why Mordred had chosen to come back to Arthur now after all those years.

  ‘And talking of mischief,’ he said, picking out the small bones to examine them one by one before casting them aside. He waved the half-dismembered pellet at me. ‘What are you going to do about your own little mess?’ he asked.

  I frowned at him.

  ‘Don’t play the innocent, Lancelot. It’s a bit late for that, don’t you think?’

  I knew then why he had asked me to accompany him. It was not for my spear, for no man, not even an outlaw, would attack a druid.

  ‘You think I don’t know about you and Lady Guinevere, your friend’s devoted wife?’ he asked. ‘I knew it long before that night when you—’ He tilted his head on one side and pulled his beard, which had grown since I had last seen him, through a dirty hand. ‘When you interrupted us,’ he said.

  Interrupted? That was one way of saying it. I had thrown him into a wall to separate him and Guinevere and ruin the spirit flight in which they had been spellbound together. ‘I knew it that day of the storm,’ he said, ‘when you hurled that pretty hawking glove into the sea.’

  How could he have known about that, I wondered. But then, he was a druid.

  ‘I’m not doing anything,’ I said, which was true.

  ‘But you want to,’ he said.

  ‘She was mine before she was his,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be simple,’ he said. ‘You were children. As hare-brained as Arthur and Morgana.’ He frowned, scratching his cheek. ‘Although I don’t recall them ever murdering a man and feeding his corpse to the crabs, but still, that’s not the point.’ He tilted his staff towards me and there was more than a touch of threat in the gesture. ‘Arthur needs you, Lancelot,’ he said. ‘He needs you.’

  ‘Arthur is my friend,’ I said. I felt then as though I had betrayed Arthur, yet I had done nothing other than try to avoid Guinevere since she came to Camelot. ‘He is my friend,’ I said again. ‘I would do anything for him.’

  Merlin smiled and nodded. ‘Yes. I believe you would,’ he said. ‘But women can make such fools of us.’

  ‘We can make fools of ourselves,’ I said, remembering how I had burned for Guinevere to look at me up on the hill when Arthur and Mordred were getting reacquainted. And how, years before, I used to run up the Mount to catch a glimpse of her leaving the Lady’s keep to gather herbs before sunrise.

  ‘That is probably the wisest thing I’ve ever heard you say,’ Merlin said. Then his right eyebrow arched like a drawn bow. ‘You will do nothing stupid?’

  ‘She barely acknowledges me,’ I said.

  ‘You will do nothing stupid,’ he repeated, this time more a statement than a question.

  ‘They are married,’ I said. ‘What she and I had together is gone.’

  The druid nodded and pointed his staff into the forest, muttering something about needing to lay eyes on two magpies on his right-hand side to nullify the ill omen of the owl pellet. But we never saw any magpies that day. And as for me doing anything stupid as far as Guinevere was concerned, I never got the chance.

  It was winter. Folk collected wood or cut turves and peat to stack and dry for the fire. They cut reeds and sedges to dry for thatching and gathered bracken to use as bedding for cattle. On those days when it was too wet to work outside, there was still threshing and winnowing to be done. It was the time when we made preparations for the hardships of the cold, dark months when men did little but busy themselves with handicrafts and sit by the hearth drinking ale, or mead if they could get it. When women spun thread and made trews and cloaks and tunics, or cooked warming broths. When dung was collected from the barns and stored to be mixed with marl and spread on the fields.

  It was a time when the earth slept and men did not venture far from their own roofs, and when their swords hung in their scabbards on pegs gathering cobwebs.

  And yet that winter, when we did not expect it, war came to Dumnonia.

  Arthur’s great hall was complete and so too were many other buildings which crowned Camelot’s plateau. Dwellings, storerooms, armouries, workshops, granaries, stables and a smithy which rang almost day and n
ight with the sound of the hammer striking the anvil, so busy were Arthur’s smiths making spear blades and swords, helmets, shield bosses and arrowheads and the iron shoes which Arthur’s horses wore to protect their hooves on the stone-paved Roman roads which still criss-crossed Britain.

  ‘The time to prepare for war is when there is peace,’ Arthur had told me. And none of us had expected to have to fight before the spring. Yet I welcomed the news, when it came from Caer Gwinntguic to the east, that a war band of Saxons led by a king called Aella had landed at Selsey. Aella had beaten off a force of Britons from Rhegin who had tried to oppose their landing and now the enemy marched west, their ranks swollen with Saxons who had been born in Britain, their forefathers those whom King Vortigern invited here by the boatload to guard the eastern shore in return for land and silver.

  ‘They are flocking to this King Aella because he promises every spearman a share of the spoils,’ the messenger from the fort of Venta Belgarum told Arthur. ‘The main army is camped outside our western wall to prevent Dumnonia’s spearmen from joining with us,’ the man said, sweeping an arm out wide, ‘but their raiding bands are on the move. Burning. Stealing cattle. Murdering. Raping.’

  Men shook their heads and touched the iron of their blades or growled promises of vengeance. Easy words when you are still safe behind ramparts and palisades.

  We were gathered in the new hall, whose beams and thatch were sweet-smelling and bright, not ingrained with the smoke from ten thousand hearth fires. Arthur’s war leaders Gawain, Bedwyr and Cai were there, as well as many of his more experienced horse warriors and spearmen. Guinevere was there, too, standing at Arthur’s shoulder. Watching him. She had not yet met my eye, but I had not sought it, for Merlin was in the hall and after our conversation in the woods I felt self-conscious.

  ‘The Saxons of Caer Gwinntguic have been waiting for someone to lead them ever since Uther killed King Beorn,’ Gawain said. He was dressed for war and mud-spattered, having ridden to make sure that no Saxons had yet strayed into Dumnonia’s eastern borderlands. It seemed they had not, but it was surely a matter of when, not if. ‘They want more land,’ he said. ‘Always more.’

  I had looked at Arthur then and known that he too wanted to fight, no matter that some of the older warriors warned him that we were not yet ready for war, that we must wait until we were stronger. Until we were joined by at least some of the kings of Britain. King Cynfelyn ap Arthwys of Cynwidion perhaps. Or Lord Farasan who led the spearmen of Caer Celemion to the north of Caer Gwinntguic.

  ‘Let King Deroch and your cousin blunt their spears on the whoresons,’ one of Arthur’s scarred-faced horse warriors suggested. His name was Parcefal and someone had cut him from below his right eye, down his cheek, through his lips and down his chin, so that a stark white line ran through his dark beard. He was a frightening-looking warrior and yet he was as kind a man as I have known and a favourite with the younger spearmen for his humour and willingness to help them with any task, from putting the keenest edge on their blades, to adjusting their saddle girths to get the best from their horses. Parcefal smiled his unnerving lip-splitting smile. ‘If the Saxons kill Lord Constantine it will save you the trouble, Arthur.’

  ‘Are you afraid to fight them?’ Mordred challenged Parcefal.

  The hall fell silent. Arthur shook his head at Mordred and raised a placating hand at Parcefal, but the scarred warrior just grinned at Mordred. ‘Careful, boy,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to tan your arse in front of everyone.’

  Mordred glowered but had the sense to hold his tongue, and Arthur half smiled to himself.

  ‘We could wait for them here,’ an older warrior named Ector said. He had been one of Uther’s men but had left Britain with Arthur those years ago and had fought beside him ever since. ‘We could make Aella think we’re weak or too afraid to fight him. Let him come here to us.’ He gestured up at the golden thatch. ‘He might imagine himself living in this hall. Let him imagine it and we’ll be ready. I say let the dogs die in our ditches. Come Beltane their skulls will look good on the palisade.’

  But Arthur shook his head at the idea. ‘This King Aella won’t waste men attacking us here. He would try to trap us in Camelot and raid Dumnonia around us. But if we help Caer Gwinntguic now, King Deroch will be in our debt and the other kings of Britain will see that I am a man of my word.’ There were murmurs of disagreement but Arthur cut them off with a raised hand. ‘And they will see how good we are at war,’ he said. And that, of course, was his intention. Arthur would use King Aella’s incursions to show what his famed horsemen on their armoured mounts could do to packs of spearmen who had strayed too far from their own camp.

  ‘I agree,’ Gawain said. ‘Hit them hard and fast. They will expect us to wait for better weather. They think they can roam all winter unchecked.’ He grimaced. ‘Like wolves out for sheep that have strayed from the flock.’

  ‘Strike them now,’ Bedwyr said, thumping a fist into the cup of his empty hand. ‘Aella is stretching his hand out towards the fire,’ he added, doing the same thing himself because the flames in Arthur’s new hearth were tall and reaching, casting us all in their copper glare. ‘Let us burn it for him,’ he said. Only, we were the fire in Bedwyr’s analogy, and the men around me nodded and hoomed. Teeth shone in the fire glow.

  The men in that hall were experienced fighters, warriors who had fought in Gaul against the Franks and in Armorica too, and even here in Britain against Arthur’s cousin Lord Constantine. They were not farmers who snatched up their spears to march with their lord every other summer. They were well trained and well armed. And they had Arthur.

  ‘We’ll do more than burn it, Bedwyr,’ Arthur said, looking at me. There was a fire in his eyes and there was a quickening in my blood. I nodded and Arthur nodded back, and I knew we were going to war.

  We followed the old Roman Portway that ran between Old Sarum and Calleva Atrebatum, then took the road which I have heard men call the Devil’s Highway because only a god or some supreme spirit could have laid such a structure across the green land and through thick forest. But I had seen the walls of Hadrian and Antoninus with my own eyes and I knew what the Romans had been capable of. Yet many of Arthur’s spearmen, especially the younger ones who had not campaigned with him before, were awestruck. Some were even too afraid to set foot on the raised stone way and preferred making their slow progress through the trees either side.

  We sent no word to King Deroch that we rode east into Caer Gwinntguic, because we did not want the Saxons to get wind of our coming. Nor did Arthur want his cousin Lord Constantine to know it, for we could not be sure that Constantine would not try to betray Arthur again, even if it meant allying himself with the Saxons.

  Really, Arthur wanted to create a spectacle with his horses. He wanted to roll across Caer Gwinntguic like thunder. He wanted to come upon the Saxons like a squall and wreck them. And any survivors from his slaughter would carry word of it back to their people, who would not have known such an enemy for more than a hundred years and the time of Maximus. Thus would terror spread amongst the Saxons like a plague and the name of Lord Arthur, son of the Pendragon, would haunt men’s dreams.

  That is perhaps how a cheap bard might sing it. In reality it did not happen as we’d hoped.

  It started well. We rode in column two abreast, sixty men on armoured horses and I mounted on Tormaigh my dun stallion, who tossed his head as though he were as eager to fight as the rest of us. He so reminded me of Malo, that horse, and if those two had ever met there would have been teeth, flying hooves and blood. I wondered what had become of my father’s stallion and though it was a small thing I hoped my uncle the traitor had suffered the worst of Malo’s black temper through the years.

  Behind us marched just short of a hundred spearmen. It was an impressive force and in truth Arthur had left only old men and beardless boys to man Camelot’s walls, not that our enemies would know that. And not that our enemies would be foolish enough to attack up Camelot�
�s steep banks and ditches. So Arthur had assured those who came to his hall with creased brows at the prospect of their protector, their lord, leading his warriors out of Camelot.

  ‘And yet the Roman soldiers did,’ Guinevere said, drawing eyes. As if there were not already eyes on her. ‘When the legions came to Britain they took this hill and butchered every man, woman and child who lived here. Merlin will tell you.’

  ‘Where is Merlin?’ Bedwyr asked, but no one could answer him, not even Arthur.

  ‘Just like him to be gone when it might be useful to know the auguries,’ Cai said with a wry grin. The druid would disappear, sometimes for weeks at a time, then his voice would announce him in some dark corner and you would wonder if he had in fact been there all along.

  Guinevere’s dark eyes shone like flint shards. ‘I was a little girl but I remember my father telling me that this hill ran with blood,’ she said, unafraid to speak her mind in a room full of battle-scarred men.

  The hall fell silent when she spoke. Her words were ominous, and I sensed folk’s macabre thrill as they imagined our hill running with blood. But Guinevere could have been talking about the best willow woods near Camelot for harvesting withies and even the mice in the floor reeds would have ceased their scrabbling.

  What wife wants her husband to ride to war? But Arthur had already made up his mind, for all that his brow darkened at Guinevere’s tale. Perhaps he wondered why Lord Leodegan had told such a story to a little girl.

  ‘Saxons want booty and ale,’ Gawain announced, his gruff voice like rusty shears cutting the invisible threads by which Guinevere held those gathered in her husband’s hall. Her hall, too.