Lancelot

by Giles Kristian

  Next day, we ride south all the hours of light and bed down in a shepherd’s hut, flames flickering in the hearth while a keening wind tears at the world. We lie together as though for the first time, or the last, and after, as I rest in her arms and she in mine, I think I would not fight if death came for me.

  When we come to the sea we turn west and ride on, and if not for Tormaigh, the fishermen and simple folk along the coast might think us no more than a man and wife out to find a new life, perhaps fleeing some round in Caer Gwinntguic plagued by Saxons.

  ‘You will have to sell him,’ Guinevere says. ‘As it is, they will come after us. You cannot hide a horse like Tormaigh.’

  She is right. Last night was last night. Now, on this new day, I would fight one hundred men. I would live through disease and defy the gods. Anything to stay with Guinevere. I imagine Mordred out looking for us, asking men if they have seen the traitors who turned on their lord. And men would answer that they had seen a man and a woman on a big dun war horse and point off in the direction we had ridden.

  But I cannot part with Tormaigh and we ride west into Cornubia. I tell Guinevere that I do not care if I never see Dumnonia again.

  ‘I have you,’ I say. ‘I want nothing more.’ She smiles and asks me where has the warlord gone? Where is the grim warrior whom she found prowling through the dark forests of Gaul?

  ‘Sometimes I can still see you as the boy you were, Lancelot,’ she says.

  Sometimes I feel I am still the boy who took the sparhawk from the old smokehouse. I am still the boy who wished he had taken the gyrfalcon instead, so that his father would have been proud. I think all this but say nothing, and we ride on, the low sun at our backs throwing long misshapen shadows on the old Roman road.

  We sleep in the ruins of a Roman temple which has been used as a winter byre for cattle, though there are still patches of white plaster on the walls and the faint remains of long-dead people painted by a skilled hand. Guinevere did not want to sleep in a place once inhabited by foreign gods and said she would rather make another shelter in the woods. But the weather has turned cold and dismal. Grey clouds drift down from the sky while a frigid mist rises from the earth, so that we ride through a damp miasma that chills the blood. And we are both so tired.

  ‘Just one night,’ I had said, and she nodded, too weary to argue.

  I think of asking her to use her talent, to let her spirit wander free of the flesh and journey in search of Arthur and Mordred, to learn if they are coming after us. But I know the journeying takes a heavy toll on her and she is already so tired. Besides, I have not seen her use the talent since that night long ago, when she and Merlin had flown far together, until I broke the spell by attacking the druid. Had I done that because I could not bear to see Guinevere used in that way? Or was it because I had not liked that which I could not understand? Or perhaps it had been jealousy, because Guinevere had given herself to the enchantment and left me behind. Whatever the reason, I had thrown Merlin against the wall and brought them both back to their bodies, and even now I do not think I can bring myself to ask Guinevere to give herself to the craft.

  The night is long and dark in that place, with the ghosts of those who once prayed there for company, but at last I fall into a dreamless sleep.

  I’m woken not by dawn, which has come and gone, but by a wind-driven rain spitting through a hole in the roof. I sit up in the skins and furs and it is as though an invisible fist, like the unseen hand of some Roman god, has struck me in the stomach, driving the air from my body. The green ribbon, with which she had tied back her hair, lies amongst the furs. I snatch it up and call out, but get no reply other than the rain gusting against the roof tiles. I run outside and find Tormaigh alone, cropping the wet grass, and I call out again, my voice raspy from sleep and smoke. But I know it is in vain.

  I know that Guinevere is gone.

  I am rat. I move in the shadows, in the corners and cracks, scurrying across the straw and reeds unlit by hearth flame and lamplight. I am hunted and hated, yet nothing stops me scavenging and feasting on the prizes which they leave behind and which their hounds have not gobbled up.

  I feel this creature’s loyalty to its tribe, the need to nurture its young. Its readiness to fight if necessary. I sense its mastery of our surroundings, of this hall in which it was born and has given birth. And yet I know that at the first whiff of danger, of smoke in the thatch or a bitch at her nest, she would pick up her litter and flee, venturing into the unknown without once looking back.

  Up the table leg now, sinking my claws into the soft wood, climbing as deftly as a squirrel up an oak’s rugged trunk. Onto the boards, where trenchers of flesh and plates of cheese and cups of berry-smelling liquid sit abandoned. As well that my belly is full, else I could not prevent this creature gorging on such a feast.

  But there! The golden man, glinting in scales by the candlelight, reeking of the blood of other men. He who sent the rest of them scurrying from his hall, his wrath like the storms which sometimes shake the stout door in its frame or lift thatch from the roof.

  I feel his misery. It comes off him like dampness. Like the pungent scent of fruit beginning to rot. He drinks long and deeply and when he bangs the cup down upon the board it rattles my limbs.

  Now the other man stalks back to the table, he too stinking of horses and blood and hate. His eyes the same eyes. His body covered in the same burnished scales.

  I scamper through spilled liquid, past an overturned cup, and cower against a loaf which radiates heat from deep inside. I sniff the air, my ears reaching forward, then stand on my hind legs and slowly move my head from side to side, trying to see better with these poor eyes.

  Their voices are as the rumbles of sullen grey skies. The golden man turns his gaunt face up, stares at the roof beams where some bird has its nest. He holds on to the table’s edge as if he fears being swept away by a great torrent of water. He closes his eyes and bows his head, and I feel my tail flick this way and that. This creature trying to shake me off. Knowing it is a dangerous game we play. That one of them may see her and kill her. Kill us both, perhaps.

  The younger man pours red liquid into a cup, filling it to the brim. Gives it to the golden man, who bares his teeth at the offering but takes the cup to his lips. When the cup thumps down the other man fills it again. Then looks up and sees me and I squeal in fear.

  Down onto all fours, I turn but he is upon me with the jug, smashing it down so that I feel the baneful snap of bones and the hot, wet ruin of my innards. Down it comes again and I shriek, desperately calling my spirit back lest it be trapped in this dying creature and snuffed out like a candle.

  The taste of blood and terror and the creature’s last gasp.

  I fly.

  27

  Death of a Dream

  FOR TWO DAYS I retrace our steps, like a man retreading his own footprints in the snow. Like a hunter trailing a deer. My fear, that she means to go back to Arthur. To make things right between them. Between us all.

  I do not care who sees me or who they might tell. I ask anyone I find if they have seen her: women braving the day to gather firewood and men cutting peat. A bent old crone gathering bracken. A man and his son driving a cart full of reeds and sedge for thatching. I even ask the creatures I come across. An oystercatcher stabbing at worms in the mud. A hare gnawing the bark of a birch tree. But no one has seen her and I have already ridden further than she could have walked, and so I turn back and go west again, avoiding the old Roman temple this time and sleeping beneath the sky, lest that place and the ghosts of old gods had brought me bad luck.

  Sometimes men recognize me, if they have carried a spear against the Saxons. Even with my helmet hanging from a saddle horn and my scale armour rolled up in leather behind me, they know who I am and they call Taranis’s blessings upon me and ask Cernunnos to protect me, that I may in turn protect them against their enemies. I wonder, would they do the same if they knew my crimes? If they knew that my spear had
killed Bedwyr, the master of Lord Arthur’s famed horses. What will the bards say of me when I am gone? Will I be remembered as the man who broke his oath to Arthur?

  Lancelot the betrayer.

  Let them scorn my name for a thousand years. I care not, so long as I am with her.

  But she is gone, and so I ride west in search of her, like a man chasing the sun that has already fallen beyond the far horizon. West into the land of the people of the horn, named for the Cornubian peninsula which juts into the Dividing Sea.

  I cannot lose her again. I will not.

  The fisherman was one of King Menadoc’s Sun Shields once. He knows me and says he was there that day long years ago at Tintagel, when High King Uther died.

  ‘I wasn’t in the hall, of course, being a nobody,’ he says, though his old warrior’s pride lights his tired eyes. ‘But we heard about you. How Merlin brought you to the Pendragon’s bedside and old Uther had you swear an oath to protect the next king. And you just a beardless lad and all.’ He grins at the memory of that distant summer. ‘We saw you after and knew you must be something special. You helped Arthur find the sword, didn’t you? Is he king in Dumnonia now?’

  ‘They have never acclaimed him,’ I say.

  ‘And where would we be without him?’ he asks, touching the iron of his fishing knife at the thought of Britain without Arthur.

  He agrees to take me across the water on the rising tide and swears that his grandson will look after Tormaigh. I offer him coin but he will not hear of it, saying that it is an honour to serve Lord Arthur’s champion and friend. Cringing inside my skin, I nod and thank him and push the skiff into the surf, the hem of my white cloak billowing in the cold water before I jump aboard, almost numbed by the sight before me.

  ‘Don’t see folk coming and going these days,’ he says, insisting on rowing us himself. Still proud, though his only armour these days is the fish scales glittering on his tunic and trews and in the little boat’s bilge.

  I say nothing, too full of memory now to speak.

  It looks the same as the first day I saw it. A great tree-swathed hill rising from the grey sea. Granite and gorse and a tower on its crown, looming against the sky in which gulls tumble and shriek.

  ‘You know the Lady?’ he says.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, feeling as though I am coming home. I see myself swimming through time and tide. I see the boys training with spear and shield on the eastern slope. I hear Guinevere laughing as we run together across the rocks, jumping pools, our bare feet slipping on bladderwrack and slick weed. Nothing but memories now.

  I tell the fisherman to meet me in the little bay at dawn two days hence and he says he hopes I find who I am looking for. Not what, but who, and I wonder how he knows.

  And yet as soon as I step ashore, I know that Guinevere is not there. Perhaps I have arrived here first, as when we were children, though I had not known that I was waiting for her then. Yet the air itself changed the day she came. As unmistakable as the scent of green leaves opening after summer rain.

  Now Karrek is as it had been before her. I feel her absence even as I see the toll which the years have taken on this place. The hut in which I had lived with Pelleas is a ruin, its roof fallen in. A memory flashes in my mind, like an eel rolling in the pail, of fever and tears. Of Pelleas kneeling and telling me I was his friend. Of steeling myself to put Boar’s Tusk to the hollow between his neck and collarbone. Of pushing the blade down.

  Some of the huts still stand and while weather-beaten and neglected might yet keep the rain off, but ghosts care nothing for rain.

  I feel like a ghost myself. A soul lingering long after the body has been given to flame or earth. Seeking all that it has lost. A spirit full of envy for things that never were but which might have been. I think of Benoic and my family and I try to picture my brother with a man’s face and bearing. I think of my mother, loving her and hating her too, for choosing my uncle over her own husband. And I think of him, my father the king, and I wish I could meet him as a man, without fear, and know him properly.

  ‘Lancelot, is that you?’

  I turn to see a man come from one of the huts and for a long moment I just stare at him, hardly daring to believe my eyes.

  ‘Benesek,’ I say, and a moment later we are locked in an embrace, holding each other fiercely because neither of us has the words.

  Eventually we both pull away and he looks me in the eye and asks me where Bors is.

  ‘He is dead,’ I tell him, hoping that he does not ask more, seeing the hurt I have done him with that news. Though his eyes tell me this is just the newest pain, like fresh snow falling on layers of old ice. ‘Where is everyone?’ I ask.

  He frowns, pulling at one fork of his long moustache, which is white now. He is smaller than I remember him, not bent with age nor wasted to bone. Just smaller somehow.

  ‘All gone,’ he says. ‘Nearly all. Left to fight in Arthur’s wars. Or just left.’ He shrugs. ‘Or died.’ He waves a hand towards the bay, in the direction of the place on the far shore which we used to call The Edge. ‘The girls went home or to husbands,’ he says. ‘No new ones came.’

  I think of little Geldrin, always the weakest of us, and of long, lean Jowan, whose arm Melwas had broken the first time I ran in the annual foot race. I wonder what became of pretty Erwana, and Alana who had kept Guinevere’s and my secret and helped us to cover our tracks more times than I could remember.

  ‘Guinevere is not here?’ I ask, though I do not need to.

  The old warrior eyes me with suspicion. ‘Why would she be?’

  I say nothing and he asks what I am doing there. He says that if I’ve come looking for more spearmen then I have had a wasted journey, but then he grunts, as though understanding. ‘Arthur needs Merlin,’ he says, watching my eyes for confirmation.

  ‘Merlin is here?’ I say.

  ‘Of course he’s here.’ He cocks his head back towards the Mount rising behind him and I look up, half expecting to see the druid watching us from the top of the keep. ‘They were lovers once,’ he says. ‘Long time ago. Long before your time here.’

  That raises goose flesh on my arms. Although, in a way, haven’t I always known there was something deep and old running between those two? It made sense of why Pelleas and Benesek had never liked the druid. Why they had always been so protective of the Lady.

  ‘He came when he found out,’ Benesek says. ‘I don’t know how he knew, and I didn’t ask. But he knew.’ It is as if a shadow falls across his face then, even though there is no sun visible in the pallid sky. ‘She’s dying, Lancelot,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what of. Neither does Merlin, but it won’t be long now. That’s why he came.’

  A sudden coldness moves inside me, somewhere deep down, and Benesek looks away for a long moment, giving me time alone with that revelation. In my mind the Lady is as she was the day she stood on the shore and watched Benesek, Bors and me board the Swan bound for Tintagel; not young but not old. Golden and ethereal and so far beyond the ravages of years and disease as to seem protected by the gods.

  Benesek tilts his head and examines me as a man might study a horse before making the trader an offer. He says, ‘She will be glad to see you again. She’s missed you, Lancelot. You more than any of them.’

  ‘And I have missed her,’ I say. ‘You too, my old friend.’ I reach out and grip Benesek’s shoulder, wondering where the years have gone. Wondering if the Lady’s sickness is one of the heart because we have all abandoned her. Not all, I reflect, looking at the old warrior and thinking that here is a man who knows how to hold to an oath. A better man than I.

  I turn and see that the fisherman in his little boat is more than halfway across the bay and I hope he keeps his word and does not betray me. He could buy a ship with the money he could get for Tormaigh and my war gear.

  ‘You still have my helmet?’ Benesek asks. I tell him I do and he seems happy about that. ‘Well, I suppose you may as well keep it now,’ he says, and we both smile in
spite of everything. Then he lifts his chin and says, ‘It’s quite a reputation you’ve earned. They say you’re the best in all Britain. There are songs about you and Arthur,’ he says, hitching a lip to reveal his last few teeth, ‘and not one of them mentions how you lost my sword.’ He lifts an eyebrow. ‘I must have taught you well.’

  ‘You could teach me even now,’ I say.

  He likes that. Then he shakes his head. ‘A vicious little brawl that was. That day at Tintagel. Had a damned limp ever since.’ He pats himself above the left hip. ‘I can still throw a spear, mind.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ I say and mean it, though he must be at least fifty-five years old.

  He looks at me, the sea breathing at my back, gulls crying above us. ‘You ready then?’ he asks, turning an eye up towards the keep, as uneasy as I am about the prospect of going up there.

  I nod, fingering the iron pommel of the long knife at my waist, and we start up the well-worn hill and I am flooded with memories.

  ‘Don’t expect her to be like she was,’ Benesek says, already breathing hard, though he does not let the old wound frustrate his efforts. ‘She barely eats. A brisk wind could carry her off like a dry leaf.’ He stops and turns to me, pointing a finger in warning. ‘Just don’t expect her to be as she was.’

  I fix his eyes with mine. ‘I know, Benesek,’ I say, and he nods, grunts and continues along the path, and I see myself running up that hill. I hear Agga’s footfalls behind me and his ragged breath. I see Melwas ahead, his shorn scalp glistening with sweat, and I feel my chest tighten, hear the blood gushing in my ears. Pounding, like an echo of my younger heart. A thousand memories fill me, blending like one of the Lady’s herbal draughts.

  I see myself running up this path to meet Guinevere. Even the trees either side of the path, the birch, hazel and yew, seem to whisper to me in remembrance, as does the smell of wet earth and rock, bark and leaves. The gusting tang of the sea and the weed on the strand, and the years recede like the tide, so that I ascend that hill now like the shadow cast by my younger self. I follow the boy I once was. I feel his hopes and fears. His sorrows and all his loss and his resolve to outrun them. To be first. To win.