‘He is too careless of himself,’ Guinevere said, a frown betraying her fears for him. She looked down at the linen bag. ‘I shall sew some of these flowers into his clothes. In the hem of his tunic and at the neck of his cloak. It will protect him from disease.’ She smiled. ‘In the summer I feared he was starting a fever and so added the juice from twelve foxglove leaves to his beer. It is supposed to only work for children,’ she said, bringing the bag of yarrow up to her nose once more, ‘but the next day he woke without a sweat and hale as ever.’ She swung her eyes back up to mine. ‘Don’t tell him,’ she said. ‘He would not approve.’
We have worse secrets than that, I thought, but nodded anyway. It was not that Arthur did not believe in magic and charms – he kept Merlin around, after all – but he ever believed himself to be the forger of his own fate.
The gods help the man who helps himself, he had told me once. I had not been able to disagree. Yet clearly he had not known of Guinevere’s talents, her ability to journey even as far as a druid, and now he might associate her craft with her time on Karrek. Her time with me.
‘Are you happy?’ I asked. The words were out before I could stop them. Never before had I asked someone a question to which I wanted them to answer both yes and no.
‘I am happy,’ she said.
I nodded, having no words to that.
‘You look like a beast in that fur,’ she said. She was in the ermine cloak, white as new snow but for the hem, which had taken up some mud. I could not see where the little skins had been joined. It must have cost five times the price Bors and I had paid between us for our bear skins.
‘Bors says we smell like Saxons in them,’ I said.
‘An improvement, I’m sure,’ Guinevere said, her lips pursing to restrain a smile.
I looked back to see that Bors was still making friends with the young woman who sold the horns and polished cups. She was showing him a drinking horn and it seemed his interest was genuine. Then for some reason I looked up at the hill to the south, above which the rooks clamoured as they always did when they were not off foraging. There was a man up there on that hill, sitting a white horse. Just sitting, still as a rock, a spear in his hand and looking down at the market which thronged outside the grand gatehouse. The gatehouse which he himself had planned in the Roman style and upon which he had laboured, hefting timbers on his shoulder and placing the stone rubble between the framework with his own hands. I knew the horse and I knew the man sitting it, still and watchful against the blue sky and the rooks and jackdaws bickering above the skeletons of elm and ash.
It was Arthur.
The snows came. They lay thick upon thatch and on the ramparts and filled the ditches, so that Camelot’s formidable aspect was lost and our hill-fort looked little more than a white hump in the landscape, but for the smoke which it belched into the sky. For the cold kept folk inside and our hearth fires burned day and night.
Merlin remarked one day that from the flat land to the north, Camelot resembled a great dragon sleeping under the snow-veiled earth, its foul, smoky breath rising to the wintry sky as proof that it was alive and well and just waiting.
It was an evocative image, made even more poignant for High King Uther having been the Pendragon of Britain, the warrior who had made it his life’s work to stem the Saxon tide. Now we had Arthur to continue that work. Perhaps even to finish it.
‘The Saxons will find this dragon roused soon enough,’ Arthur had replied to Merlin, though Arthur himself and those of us who were never far from his side had not been idle, even with snow thick on the ground. Every other day we took the horses out, visiting Dumnonia’s rounds and being sure to be seen, our war gear glinting on sunny days, our helmet plumes brightening darker ones. We had to keep the horses fit, of course, but Arthur knew that come the spring he would need to call spearmen from all over Dumnonia, and so it was important that he was seen to be doing his part, out there protecting them, his hands numbing on the reins while they warmed theirs by the fire.
We rode east, too, past Merlin’s fence, upon whose stakes the heads would still have been recognized by those who knew the men in life. The crows had taken most of the eyes and shredded their lips, but the cold had slowed the rot. Neither had the Saxons dared tear down the fence, which told us that they feared Merlin’s magic. This pleased the druid enormously.
For three weeks snow lay on Dumnonia. They were quiet days. Even the land was quiet, sound muffled as if by a great fur, creatures hiding in their dens but for fox and hare, whose tracks made stitches in the white mantle.
And then iron-grey clouds from the west brought a great downpour which washed it all away and turned the ground to mud. That mud froze solid soon after and we did not take the horses out then in case they cut their feet on the hard ruts and peaks. We would need every one of those big horses soon enough when Arthur took the war to King Aella in Rhegin, and could not afford for any to go lame.
The hard ground delayed ploughing but there was plenty of other work that could begin again now the worst of winter was behind us. None worked as tirelessly as Tinas the blacksmith and his apprentices. Arthur had brought Tinas from Tintagel, promising the smith nothing but hard work and fair pay, but even to Arthur’s surprise Tinas had come with his wife and children and set up a new forge on the north-east edge of the plateau, set apart from the dwellings to spare folk the worst of the constant hammering and thick, pungent smoke.
One afternoon, Arthur invited me to visit Tinas with him. He had found me by the copse a short walk from the east gate, where I often went to practise my weapons. Bors sometimes came with me, but he had taken up with the pretty horn trader with the big eyes, whose name was Emblyn, and I had not seen much of him since. I assumed they were snugged up somewhere warm like hibernating bears. I could not envy my cousin, only admire his talent for happiness.
‘I’d wager you could take a sparrow on the wing, Lancelot,’ Arthur said. I had known he was there, one foot up on a coppiced alder stool and leaning over that leg, quiet so as not to put me off my throw. His hunting hound, Caval, sat patiently at his heel.
‘A plump pigeon perhaps, but not a sparrow,’ I said, turning to greet him, meeting smile with smile. Caval barked and wagged his tail as I greeted him too, scratching behind his ears as he liked.
My spear had pierced the middle of the matted reed target which I had wedged between an elm’s diverging trunk forty feet away. Not dead centre – in truth Arthur being there had put me off – but it was a decent cast all the same.
‘Do you think of nothing but war, my friend?’ he asked. We shook hands, though he did not throw his arm round my shoulder as he usually did.
‘Do you?’ I asked, and he cocked an eyebrow in acknowledgement of a riposte well made, then smiled again.
‘Come to the forge with me, Lancelot,’ he said. ‘Tinas has been working on something I want you to see.’
‘A new sword?’ I said, teasing him. Excalibur was at his hip even then on that late winter day with no enemies within fifty miles. Because folk wanted to see that long sword at Arthur’s hip. They expected to see it. But I had seen Arthur fight with another sword for fear of Excalibur’s ancient blade breaking in the midst of battle. That would be a bad omen, hard to ignore, so that I had once suggested he ask Tinas to make him another sword which resembled Excalibur, even matching the dark wood of the spherical pommel which was smooth and shiny with age and wear.
‘She has a few more good years in her yet, Lancelot,’ Arthur said, his left hand closing around Excalibur’s ivory grip. ‘No, there’s something else I want to show you.’
So we had walked up between the ramparts which he and I had dug together, and through the gate, where the guards stood straighter as Arthur passed. And I knew there was something weighing on Arthur’s mind, if only by the number of sticks which he gathered up to hurl for Caval to bring back to us, his tail making a breeze. It was easy to forget what a fierce beast that dog could be when there was the scent of fox or
boar, badger or deer on the air.
As ever, Tinas was hard at work and did not even stop to greet his lord, but kept on hammering a small piece of iron which already looked flat to my eyes. We waited and watched and only when Tinas was satisfied with his work did he stop and look up at us, arming sweat from his greasy forehead despite the chill of the day.
‘What do you reckon, lord?’ he asked Arthur, holding up the piece after having plunged it in the quenching trough. I saw then that it was the cheek piece from a helmet of the kind Arthur and I both wore. The edge of it had been bent but no longer.
‘I can see nothing wrong with it,’ Arthur said, ‘though I would say that anyway, if only to have you making spear heads instead. We shall need more spears than fine helmets.’
Tinas lifted his bearded chin and showed his teeth. ‘You want to tell Bedwyr that I’m too busy making spear heads to fix his helmet?’
Arthur laughed and raised a placating hand. ‘I’d rather not,’ he said.
‘They’re ready, lord,’ Tinas said. ‘I assume that’s what you’ve come for.’
Arthur nodded. He seemed nervous. We watched Tinas go over to the bench behind him where lay all the tools of his trade, and he picked up a bundle, just over a foot in length and wrapped in soft leather, and brought it over to us. He leant over his anvil and looked down at my legs, then nodded with a grunt that seemed to convey satisfaction. I looked at Arthur but his eyes were fixed on the package which Tinas was unwrapping with reverence, despite being himself the creator of whatever was within.
‘I could not have done better,’ Tinas said, examining the work in his hands with an expression which could have been pride, or shame. It was impossible to say. ‘No,’ he said, picking up a cloth and giving the thing a last polish, ‘I could not have done better, Arthur,’ he said.
‘Then no man could,’ Arthur said, not minding the blacksmith’s familiarity. A man who could, by fire, water and skill, make bright strong metal or blades from rough ore, deserved respect even from his lord. Even from kings.
His eyes still on Arthur, Tinas nodded towards me. Arthur dipped his head, consenting, and the smith handed me the worked metal the way a mother might hand her newborn to another.
It was a pair of greaves, each shaped to protect a man’s leg from foot to knee. Somehow, though, Tinas had crafted the iron to show the muscles of the lower leg, similar to the old Roman breastplates that I had seen which depict the muscles of a fit man’s stomach and chest. Even more impressive than the muscle definition was the decoration over the knee. It was a hawk, all beak and glaring eye and bristled feathers.
‘Tinas impresses the iron from behind to form the raised image,’ Arthur said. ‘I saw it done.’
‘Bronze, mind,’ Tinas said, ‘so they won’t stop a Saxon axe from taking your leg off. But they’re light. You’ll still be able to dance in them,’ he said, as though he had heard about my fighting style and did not altogether approve.
‘I have seen ancient greaves with lions on the knee,’ Arthur said, ‘but I thought a hawk was fitting.’
I was running my fingers over the hawk’s curved beak and down the lines of the calf muscles, speechless with admiration at Tinas’s workmanship. Speechless too at the generosity of Arthur’s gift.
‘Do you like them?’ Arthur asked me. I looked up to see that he was grinning. He knew that I did.
‘They are beautiful,’ I said, pressing fingers deep into the felt and leather padding inside.
‘They are,’ Arthur agreed. ‘Achilles himself would have been proud to wear them as he fought beneath the walls of Troy.’
‘My wife stitched the liners,’ Tinas said, seeming prouder of that work than of the shaped bronze and the hawk’s head, which must have taken so many hours of gentle hammering to bring out the detail.
I saw then the tiny holes in the bronze through which fine gut thread secured the felt liners top and bottom.
‘Sulgwenn still has the eyesight of a girl,’ the smith said, jerking his beard up to the sky. ‘Swears she can see folk moving about on the moon sometimes. Says she can see them dancing, on a clear night,’ he said, talking over his embarrassment for his skill, which those bright greaves embodied. And perhaps to avoid being drawn into this weighty moment between friends.
‘I don’t deserve such a gift,’ I told Arthur.
He frowned. ‘The man who won Venta Belgarum?’ he said. ‘Who killed Aebbe and broke the Saxons? You deserve much more, Lancelot.’
‘If you’ll excuse me, Arthur, Lancelot,’ Tinas muttered, ‘I’ve proper work to do.’
‘Spear blades, Tinas,’ Arthur said. ‘Arrowheads, too. As many as there are stars in the night sky.’
‘Bring me iron, Arthur, from bog or mine, and I’ll make your spear heads,’ the blacksmith said, tossing handfuls of charcoal into the forge’s bright heart.
Arthur nodded, commended Tinas once more for his work and turned away from the smithy, suggesting that I might want to join him inspecting Camelot’s defences, and so I thanked Tinas, who nodded without looking up from his work, and followed Arthur.
It was cold enough that our breath fogged and Caval steamed like hot broth from his exertions, having scattered several hordes of foraging crows from the slope beyond the palisade. Arthur and I stood looking east towards Caer Gwinntguic, beyond which King Aella still held Rhegin.
‘Cai has seen scouts but nothing that has him concerned. Not yet,’ Arthur said.
He had left Cai in charge of Venta Belgarum with a garrison of fifty spearmen to bolster the town’s defences until the people of Caer Gwinntguic could choose a new king to sit on King Deroch’s high seat.
‘And you and I will be at Aella’s throat before he’s ready to march west again,’ I said.
Arthur nodded but said nothing to that. Caval had gone bounding down the ramparts after a hare and Arthur cursed the hound, fearing it might break a leg in its foolishness, for its prey was long gone.
‘I won’t clear the ditches out again,’ he said. ‘It was a mistake. Better to let them fill with gorse and bramble. Harder for the enemy to pass but won’t protect them from our spears,’ he said. He was right. The outer ditches were fairly shallow, minor obstacles to a determined attacker, but filled with thorn, briar and nettle they would hamper the enemy. They would slow any attack, giving our men more time to kill them with Tinas’s spear blades.
Caval looked up at us and barked, as if asking us where that hare had gone.
‘There is something I need you to do, Lancelot,’ Arthur said.
I had known something was coming and here it was at last. I looked down at the greaves in my hand, breath-stealing, wondrous and polished so that they looked like gold, and I thought of the deerskin hawking glove which the lady had given me after I won the foot race on Karrek. Stitched by a craftsman in Cambria, supple as thought and gleaming with oils.
‘Anything, Arthur,’ I said. ‘Did I not swear an oath?’
‘To serve the next king of Dumnonia,’ he said, ‘and I am not yet king.’
‘You will be,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Perhaps. But I ask you this as a friend, Lancelot, not as your lord or would-be king.’
A creeping dread stalked me for I knew that Arthur’s gift of the greaves was his attempt to sweeten the coming draught. I nodded, showing I was ready for whatever he needed of me.
‘You know I was myself sworn to King Syagrius in Gaul?’ he said.
‘I know you fought for him,’ I said. ‘Gawain told me Syagrius treated you like a son. That he trusted no one more. I did not know you were oath-tied to him,’ I said, that new knowledge already weighing on me, because an oath is a heavy thing.
Arthur nodded. ‘When I left Dumnonia for Gaul, old Syagrius took me in. Though he wasn’t old then. Just seemed so to me.’ He smiled. ‘I was younger than you are now,’ he said. ‘His sons, the princes, were as my brothers. King Syagrius was kind to me.’ His lips tightened. ‘More generous than I had a right to expect,’
he said, his guilt rising again for having been complicit in Uther’s plan to sink the infant Mordred down to the seabed.
‘And you swore allegiance to him,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘So long as he remained a friend to Dumnonia,’ he said. ‘Syagrius taught me war. The Roman art of war. It was he who showed me what big, well-trained, armoured horses could do to a disorganized enemy.’ He smiled, brimming with memory. ‘I found my talent for war in his service, Lancelot. Ten years of fighting to keep the Franks at bay. And now this,’ he said, jutting a chin in the direction of a different enemy who would engulf him if they could.
‘Did King Syagrius release you from the oath?’ I asked, though I knew the answer now.
‘No, Lancelot,’ Arthur said, ‘and he only let me bring men to Britain on my word that I would return were I not affirmed king after Uther’s death.’ He shrugged. ‘I am no king,’ he said.
‘But you cannot leave,’ I said. ‘Without you here, Caer Gwinntguic will fall. Dumnonia after that. Then Cornubia. And they will just be the first. In the north, Elmet will fall to the Saxons of Lindisware and after that—’
Arthur raised a hand to stop me naming all the kingdoms that would fall like apples in an autumn gale were he not leading his armoured horsemen and Dumnonia’s spearmen against the Saxons.
‘I cannot leave Britain again,’ he said, watching his far-away hound rooting and sniffing at a badger’s sett in the outermost rampart, which we had cleared of lime and birch the previous summer. ‘If I did, the kings would never welcome me back again.’ He shook his head. ‘No, I cannot leave. But you can.’
I turned to him, though he kept his eyes fastened on Caval.
‘I need you to fulfil my obligations in Soissons, Lancelot. I need you to take my place and fight for King Syagrius.’ He looked up, his eyes following a heron’s flight into the east, the grey bird’s long neck retracted like a wary snake, its wingbeats slow but strong. ‘I hear he has secured his borders in the north as far as Cambrai and to the Meuse in the east,’ he said.
Lancelot Page 49