‘Arthur! We thought you were dead,’ I said, having thrown my arm and the long knife wide, rather than threaten my lord and friend with it. And yet I held on to that knife.
Arthur screamed a curse at me, spittle flying from his mouth and catching in his beard, then he turned and swung Excalibur, sinking the blade into a roof post, and I used that moment to put myself between him and Guinevere, whose face was all incredulous horror as she watched Arthur wrench his sword free of the wood.
‘She’s my wife!’ he roared, swinging his baleful glare back to me.
Mordred was in the doorway behind him, looking more like his father than he had ever done. Melwas was there, too, though his eyes were in Guinevere like hooks.
‘My wife,’ Arthur said again, his unblinking gaze still fixed on me. Though this time the words were small. Almost lost things. Fragile as the last autumn leaf. There were tears in his eyes.
‘Arthur,’ I said, holding my arms wide to show I meant him no harm as I moved to the edge of the bed and stood, feeling his hot breath on the bare skin of my chest. ‘They said you were dead.’ I dropped my chin and slowly placed my long knife on the bed by Guinevere’s bare feet. She had pulled the bed skins up to cover herself, not that it stopped Melwas staring. I had my trews on, though nothing more. ‘Mordred said he saw you killed,’ I said.
Arthur was breathing fast. His flesh trembled, as if a hateful spirit inside him fought to break out of his skin and drown the dawn in blood.
‘How could I know the Picts had taken him prisoner?’ Mordred said from the doorway. ‘All I have done is protect Dumnonia. But you, Lancelot? Look what you have done.’
Arthur lifted Excalibur towards me until the point rested above my chest, in the hollow of my throat. One thrust and it would be over. Part of me wanted him to do it. I think he saw that in my eyes, and perhaps that’s why he did not. But his eyes burned into mine, his teeth clenched in a snarl. A grimace of unbearable pain.
‘Husband,’ Guinevere said, the word unsure, as though she were testing it. As though it tasted different now on her tongue. ‘We didn’t know.’
He turned on her, though kept Excalibur pressed against my throat, cold iron against hot flesh. ‘You have bewitched him,’ he snarled at Guinevere. ‘I can smell it.’ He spat towards her. ‘You have done this.’ Tears dripped from his beard, once golden but now greying. ‘You have … broken it,’ he said.
In that bitter moment, as much as I pitied my friend for what we had done to him, I hated him for the agony I saw in Guinevere’s face. We had thought Arthur dead, yet here he was, not his restless spirit come back to our realm, but flesh and blood and tears. Arthur had returned and found only betrayal.
I saw his eyes flick down to the bed and linger there a while. What tortures his mind must have summoned. Then those tear-brimmed eyes came back to me and his brows lifted, giving him such an aspect of sadness as could have darkened the dawn.
‘Never before here. In this place,’ I said, answering what he could not ask. ‘Only since we thought you dead. I swear it.’ I needed him to know that. For what it was worth.
He lowered Excalibur, looking at me as though I were a familiar stranger whose likeness he was trying to place. ‘And before?’ he said. ‘When you lived on Lady Nimue’s island?’
I blinked slowly, wanting more than anything to spare him that wound, yet knowing I could not lie to him.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘There, yes.’
Arthur nodded. Took a breath. ‘Mordred, take her,’ he said.
‘No,’ I told Mordred, who approached with that leech Melwas at his side, their swords raised.
‘It’s all right, Lancelot,’ Guinevere said, gesturing at Mordred to pass her the long overdress which lay on the rush-strewn floor. Mordred did, offering the dress on the end of his sword. No sooner had she put it on than he took hold of her arm and pulled her towards the door.
‘Take your hands off her, Mordred,’ I snarled.
‘You presume to order my son?’ Arthur rasped at me.
‘I’ll kill you, Mordred,’ I said.
Mordred grinned, thrusting Guinevere to the threshold, where she stopped and looked back at me.
‘Do nothing, Lancelot,’ she said, and for a brief moment we saw the end of everything in each other’s eyes.
Outside, a horse whinnied and I knew that Mordred had made Guinevere mount Eilwen, her mare.
‘You did this,’ Arthur told me, then he turned away as though he could no longer bear to look at me. ‘You did this,’ he said, walking back to the doorway through which the first spits of rain were gusting on a thin breeze.
Melwas stood there still, in a warlord’s scale armour, his sword raised towards me.
‘Arthur,’ I called, but Arthur was gone and a few moments later I heard the three of them gallop off into the beech wood.
‘Just you and me now, Lancelot,’ Melwas said, not quite smiling. ‘I’ve waited a long time for this.’
‘I’m better than you, Melwas,’ I said.
‘You have always thought so,’ he said, then pointed his sword at Boar’s Tusk which hung in its scabbard from a peg by the open door. ‘I’ll be waiting outside.’
And he was.
He came at me fast and hard, his sword a grey blur in the grey dawn, but I was unencumbered by armour and quick, almost as agile as I had ever been, and I knew better than anyone alive how Melwas fought. He lunged and jabbed, scythed and swung, but his blade could not cut me. He feinted high and swept low, tried the wrath blow, swinging from above and diagonally, aiming for my ear, and the low blow, seeking my arms, but I saw every cut before it came. I knew his next move even before he had finished the last, knew his patterns as a spider knows its own web. And as he tried to kill me, I moved like smoke weaving through a crowded hall.
Still, he was good. Better even than I remembered. Perhaps his hate lent him speed. Perhaps the years of enmity had honed him more than years of war had, for he parried and twisted, thrust and cut beyond anything I’d seen, so that thrice he forced me back and I felt the close passing of his sword on my bare skin. He was good, was Melwas. So very good.
But I was better. I had always been better. And even if Melwas had never admitted it to himself, he knew it then because he had given everything he had, tried every cut, every dance, every trick, yet I was unharmed. Not once had his sword found the bare flesh of my arms, chest or back, and now he was sweat-sheened and panting and his eyes said that he knew.
I spun Boar’s Tusk forward, as I had done so often when we had fought each other as boys, and I grinned at Melwas. Even in the midst of that appalling dawn and the misery it had wrought, my blood thrummed, flowing hot and urgent as it always did when I beat an enemy.
I killed Melwas with a cut to his neck. I gave him a quick death, for no other reason than because we had grown to manhood together under the same sky, but as he died I thought of my sparhawk, that angry, yellow-eyed bird. I whispered to her that she had been avenged. After all the years.
Then, leaving Melwas where he lay, I went inside and took my scale armour, my greaves and my helmet with its long white plume from the chest where I had stored them in oiled skins. Much of the bronze was covered in a green crust, but I had a jar of apple vinegar and would clean the war gear until it shone like the summer which had gone for ever. I would comb the horse-tail crest and polish Tormaigh’s boiled leather armour. I would hone Boar’s Tusk until it was sharp enough to cut bonds of blood and memory.
They had taken her from me again. And so I would go back despite having sworn that I never would. I was Lancelot, son of Ban and lord of battle. They had taken her from me.
And I was going to war.
26
Trial by Fire
I RIDE TOWARDS the fire. Towards chaos. Tormaigh encased in leather armour, his shaffron and breastplate gleaming like chestnuts, his mouth flecking at the bit as I drive him on. The stallion lives for the charge and knows he carries a lord of war, though he does not know wha
t I must ask of him now.
We weave amongst the trees, Tormaigh’s breath as loud as forge bellows, his black mane bouncing and shattering. His iron-shod hooves pummelling the ground like a drum beating to war. In my right hand I grip a long spear, in my left the reins, though all the stallion needs is the touch of leather against his neck to veer the opposite way, so that we thread the forest as neatly as a goshawk. In truth I need only look in the direction I want him to go, and we break from the tree line and I let out the reins and lean forward, pressing my heels, and now we really are flying, flinging mud into the past, Tormaigh’s black mane given to the wind like a silken war banner.
That wind is in my face, cold and sweet with woodsmoke, yet still Tormaigh’s hoofbeats carry to the crowd up on the rise which shifts like a current through the sea, faces turning to the coming thunder. They see a war horse, one of the legendary beasts which their enemies have learnt to fear, charging towards them in leather and mail. On its back a lord of battle in bronze scales burnished to shine like the sun. In polished iron helmet, his face enclosed in silver-chased cheek pieces, its white plume streaming behind, white like the cloak on his back. They see the steel glint of his spear blade and the bronze greaves on his lower legs, a gift as famous in Dumnonia as the friendship which had them forged.
They know me. Know why I have come. And they stare with wide eyes, touching iron for luck, pushing against strangers to clear a path.
Tormaigh does not slow. If anything, we ascend the slope even faster now, the stallion’s great heart beating us up like wings lifting a hawk into the sky, and I feel the cold air on my teeth as we crest the ridge, the crowd ebbing from us, and I see the flame leaping from the brand in Arthur’s hand. I see a billow of black smoke behind him, and a golden bloom amongst the dry stalks of last summer’s barley.
Spearmen run to face me, shields and shafts raised, but Tormaigh doesn’t slow and my spear blade opens a man’s throat and we are through, and now I see her, bound to the stake by an iron chain, her dark hair blowing around her pale face. A Christian priest harangues the flame, spitting at it.
‘Burn the witch!’ he cries, his thin voice sharp enough to pierce the murmur and shouts of the crowd, as Arthur turns, his own scale armour full of the fire he carries, and sees that I have come.
If they had thought I would come at all, they had not thought I would come from the trees, and now I see warriors with bear shields pushing west through the congregation, skirting the little hill of timbers and the sacrifice at its heart, reckless in their eagerness to get to me and to protect their lord.
A spear flies from the throng but misses me. Another blade streaks through the smoke and I duck and it sails above my head, then I pull Tormaigh up and dismount in one movement and I am striding towards Guinevere.
A spearman blocks my path so I cut him down.
‘No, Lancelot!’ someone cries. It is Agga, with whom I learnt blade craft, and now he raises his shield and spear and sets himself before me, but the fire is growing, questing towards Guinevere, and I feint high and sweep low, taking Agga in his shin. He drops to one knee and I leap high, thrusting down over his raised shield into his side and he is dead as my feet hit the ground once more and I stride on.
More are coming. Perhaps this was a trap. Perhaps he lit the fire because he knew I would come. Would he put out the flames if his men cut me down? Would he scramble onto that pile of timber and cut Guinevere free, if I lay dead in the grass?
‘Hold, Lancelot!’ Bedwyr, horse lord, pushes through the crowd on his black mare, flanked by two more men who had been my brothers once. ‘Hold!’ Bedwyr bellows, but I cannot, and my spear flies. Such a throw as would have made Benesek proud. It impales Bedwyr through his chest before he can even lift his shield. A moan rises from Dumnonian throats to see their hero, Bedwyr slayer of Saxons, slumped dead in his saddle.
I pull Boar’s Tusk from its scabbard as the other two drive their mounts towards me, but they are hampered by the moving swell of folk who have come to watch Arthur punish us who betrayed him.
I see Arthur’s eyes now within his helmet. We had thought him killed in the north, gone for ever, yet now he looks at me as one might glare at a long-dead friend on Samhain night, and I hold his gaze, as Gawain, coming up beside him, roars at the spearmen of Dumnonia.
‘Kill him!’ Gawain yells. Gawain, my old friend. ‘Kill the traitor!’ he shouts.
Two more spearmen try and both die for it.
Though he yet holds that fire brand, Arthur has not drawn Excalibur and so I walk past him and climb onto the pyre and he just watches as I hammer Boar’s Tusk against the iron chain, not taking my eyes from Guinevere’s.
‘Kill them all,’ she says, wild and full of hate.
The heat is ferocious, a loud inexorable breath on my skin, accompanied by the crack and spit of the dry fuel. The flames are around our feet now, licking up through the gaps. Hungry. Flapping like little war pennants in the wind.
The chain breaks and a spear embeds in the stake where Guinevere was a heartbeat before. She and I clamber down into the maw of the congregation, men and women shrieking at us as we run hand in hand back to Tormaigh, and more spearmen burst from the crowd.
‘Go,’ I tell Guinevere, pointing my sword at the stallion, who has savaged a spearman who tried to take his reins. But Guinevere will not go without me and I cut a man down and send another reeling.
Then I lock eyes with a third and see that it is Bors. He lifts his chin to the two horsemen, who are free of the crowd now and waiting for me, their spears levelled.
They spur their mounts forward and a shaft cuts through the smoke and takes one of them in his neck, knocking him backwards off his horse.
‘Go, cousin,’ Bors says, running to meet the last rider, who is not quick enough. Bors twists away from his spear and rotates, driving up with his legs and thrusting his sword into the man’s belly, and I mount, pulling Guinevere up behind me. I turn Tormaigh in tight circles, the stallion shrieking from the blood and fire, the noise and the acrid smoke, and I see Arthur still standing there, watching me, the torch still in his hand, its fire reflected in his scale armour, making him look like a golden king.
Bors is mounted now too, looming in the saddle which he’d emptied with a throw better than any I had ever made, and we kick our heels and ride, seeking a way through the spearmen who swarm around us now, thrusting and lunging but wary of the beasts which have been trained to trample their enemies. One of them is Mordred, his face twisted with hate as he jabs his spear up at me, calling me traitor.
A spear blade slides off my right greave and Tormaigh rears, squealing, mane flying, his forelegs striking men’s shields and heads and throwing them back, and Guinevere somehow holds on and then the stallion’s ironshod hooves thump onto the ground and we plough through the throng. Through the drifting grey haze, back towards the trees from whence we came.
‘Bors,’ Guinevere says. I feel her go rigid and I haul on the reins and turn back towards the chaos and the pyre which is all flame now, roaring with fury at being cheated of its offering. But Bors is not with us. There is just the horse, walking riderless down the slope in our wake. Its eyes wide. Its flanks red.
And so I turn Tormaigh back towards the woods and kick my heels and the ground flies beneath us.
We hold each other against the cold and the night. Against the very air itself, as though it would harm us if it could.
‘I love you, Lancelot,’ she says, her first words since. I tell her that I love her, too. That I have always loved her, even from that first day of storm and drowning, when I should have been too young to know. Her tears are for Bors. I feel them pressed between our cheeks, warm and wet, and do not wipe them away. ‘He said I bewitched you.’
‘You did,’ I say, moving just enough to kiss her lips, which taste of salt.
She thinks about that. ‘My father sent him a priest, to free him from the spells I had used to bind him, just as I bound you. The fire would do the r
est.’
I tell her that I cannot believe that Arthur would have let her burn. That I do not want to believe it.
Her eyes hold mine with a beseeching force. ‘We betrayed him,’ she says.
I say, ‘You were mine before you were his,’ but she does not answer that and I hear how petulant it sounds. How wrong, too. Guinevere had never belonged to me, nor to Arthur, nor even to her father, who had sent her to live in the shadow of the Mount. Some creatures must always be free.
She unties a ribbon of green silk from her wrist and ties back her hair. ‘What will we do?’ she asks.
A sound in the woods beyond our lean-to shelter. The whites of Guinevere’s eyes as we hold our breath, peering between the upright branches and green yew boughs. Nothing moving in the dark woods. Just fat drops falling from sodden branches. I wonder if the pyre still burns, or if the rain has made it a seething, smoking hill. I wonder if Arthur stands beside it still. Staring west after us.
‘We will live,’ I say.
‘And Arthur? Dumnonia?’ she asks.
I breathe in the earthy, woody scent that fills that dark den. Dying leaves and damp air. Death and decay.
‘Arthur is nothing to me now.’ I remember him standing by the pyre. Watching me. Why hadn’t he drawn Excalibur and fought me? Had he wanted me to free Guinevere? ‘I fought for Arthur, not Dumnonia,’ I say. ‘All of it is gone now.’ I hold her and kiss her forehead. I bury my face in her hair and breathe her in, smelling the woodsmoke from what would have been her balefire. I tell her that none of it matters. Not my reputation, nor the wars nor Dumnonia. I tell her that she is all I need.
‘Poor Bors,’ she says. ‘He loved you, Lancelot.’
‘And I him,’ I say, my throat tightening like a knot. I do not want to think of my cousin and how he died helping us escape, yet I keep seeing in my mind that riderless, blood-drenched horse, and I wonder if I shall see it all the days of my life.
‘You will be with him again,’ Guinevere assures me, her breath warm on my neck. And perhaps I will. But for now he is gone, my cousin and my friend. My good, brave Bors. And all I can do is hold Guinevere tighter, my own tears falling in the dark.
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