Lancelot

by Giles Kristian

  Then we are at the top and I turn and look out across the sea, filling myself with breath and looking back towards the mainland.

  ‘Where are you?’ I whisper into the wind.

  ‘Memories, eh?’ Benesek says. ‘Like a knife in the guts. Come on then. I daresay she knows you’re here.’

  But I stand there a little longer, watching two crows above the red, brown and copper woods, riding the gusts perhaps for no other reason than the joy of it. Then I turn and walk across the age- and wind-worn rock, following my old friend into the keep.

  ‘Lancelot,’ she says and she smiles. ‘I have missed your face.’ I sit on the stool beside her bed and take her hand, enclosing it in both of mine because it feels so cold, though there are logs burning in the hearth.

  ‘I am sorry I did not come sooner,’ I say, hoping she cannot see the horror in my eyes. Knowing that she must. She is Nimue, Lady of Karrek. Yet she looks like a living skeleton.

  ‘Lancelot has been too busy breaking Britain,’ Merlin says from where he stands by the small window slit through which I glimpse gulls wheeling in the white sky. ‘Busy rutting like a beast. Busy killing like a fox in the hen coop. Busy forsaking oaths and that sort of thing.’

  I have not seen Merlin for years and this is the first time he has acknowledged me since Benesek brought me into the Lady’s chamber. There had been rumours that the druid was dead, or else gone from Britain for ever, yet here he is, acting as though no more than a day or two has passed since our last meeting.

  ‘What do you know of Britain these days, Merlin?’ I ask him. ‘You have not been seen in years.’ I did not want to make trouble, not in front of the Lady, but neither would I meekly bear his insults.

  ‘More than I could tell you in your remaining years, Lancelot,’ he says. ‘That’s what I know of Britain. Britain then, Britain now. Even the Britain that is to come.’ He curls a lip and I see that, unlike Benesek, the druid seems to have all his teeth. ‘But none of that matters,’ he says. Then he lifts an accusing eyebrow. ‘I know something else too. That I did not betray Arthur.’

  ‘Enough,’ Benesek says. ‘Show some respect or get out.’ He fixes us both with fierce eyes then brings another fur from a chest at the foot of the bed and lays it over the Lady.

  She thanks him with a look. ‘We are to blame,’ the Lady tells Merlin. ‘Not Lancelot.’

  The druid concedes this with a flash of his palm. ‘I know,’ he says. ‘I know.’

  ‘To blame for what?’ I ask, looking from the Lady to the druid.

  Merlin moves to the table and pours wine into a cup. ‘Benesek is right,’ he says. ‘Now is not the time.’

  ‘If not now, when?’ the Lady says. Her voice is a dry rasp. ‘What is left unsaid here will be ashes on the wind soon enough.’

  ‘Rest, my Lady,’ I tell her, squeezing her hand in mine. Her hair is thin and grey. I can see her scalp through it. Her eyes are sunken and her lips are dry and thin as twine. I tell her she owes me nothing and I remember that night in the Beggar King’s hall, when my father was betrayed and my family put to the sword. If not for the Lady I would have died that night. Before I had even lived. I owed her my life but I had repaid her by leaving and only returning now, when it was all too late.

  ‘You were meant to go, Lancelot,’ she says, and I flinch, wondering if I had spoken my thoughts aloud. ‘You were ready. It was meant to be.’ She looks over at Merlin, who in his black robes seems little more than a shadow in the dark room. ‘We both dreamt it, Merlin and I. Many years ago.’

  I glance up at Benesek but he shrugs. Don’t look at me, he says without speaking.

  ‘After the dreams, I came to find you, Lancelot,’ the Lady says.

  I smell the staleness of her breath. The sickness in the room, despite the little bags of lavender here and there and the woodsmoke.

  ‘I was nearly too late,’ she says.

  That night flashes in my mind like lightning in the dark. I see my brother, brave Hector, hacking down a man who would have killed me. I do not want to summon the next part. The gods know I don’t. But memories are unbiddable and in the eye of my mind I see my brother with a man’s spear in him. I have heard his cry countless times across the years, in a vixen’s scream. In a white owl’s cry around Samhain.

  The Lady reaches across and puts her other hand upon mine. ‘You were so small, Lancelot, but even then I knew you were the one. Knew it that day you came into my tent.’

  ‘Foxes don’t like being chased,’ Merlin says, accusing me with his cup. I wonder what became of Flame, the fox which had befriended the boy I was back in Benoic. So long as he had a better life than the sparhawk, I think.

  Benesek brings a cup over to the Lady and holds it to her lips so that she and I do not have to let go each other’s hands. ‘You never told us why we had to bring the boy,’ he says to her, his own mind reaching back through the years to that night in Armorica. He had been a warrior in his prime then. He and Pelleas both. ‘We never asked. Just did as we were told. Good men died,’ he says.

  The Lady turns her eyes on me and they still have that piercing, knowing quality which I have only ever seen in one other person. ‘You were the child of war, Lancelot. We knew that Britain would need you. That’s why we brought you here. To keep you safe. To make you ready.’ She closes her eyes for a long moment. Just talking seems to take all the strength she has. But when she opens her eyes they seem a little brighter, as though she has asked some higher power for a moment’s respite and been granted it. ‘Your gift is from the gods, Lancelot, but we did what we could.’

  ‘Not that any of it matters now,’ Merlin says, turning his back on us to look out of the window. Darkening the chamber by blocking the daylight. ‘Britain is lost.’

  ‘Lost?’ Benesek folds his arms over his chest. ‘You know Arthur. He’ll move against Aella in the spring. The kings will send spearmen.’

  ‘Arthur is a broken man,’ Merlin says, still looking at the world beyond the keep. ‘He has turned his back on the old gods and so they slip even further away into the darkness. Britain will descend into chaos.’ He turns back to the room and eyes Benesek. ‘Did you know he keeps a Christian priest at Camelot?’

  Benesek touches the hilt of the sword at his hip. ‘Lord Arthur knows how to win,’ he says. ‘That’s all I know. He and his big horses are the reason why all of Britain isn’t crawling with Saxons.’ He lifts his white-bearded chin to me. ‘Arthur and his horses and Lancelot here. If not for them, Aella and Cerdic would carve Britain up between them.’

  ‘Oh yes, Benesek, Lancelot has played his part,’ Merlin says, casting his gaze on me. A hawk’s spiteful scrutiny. ‘And now Arthur is lost and Britain with him.’

  ‘What’s he talking about?’ Benesek asks me.

  I feel the Lady’s heartbeat in her thin wrist, thumping weakly against the bone. Refusing to be stilled. ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ I say, looking into the Lady’s eyes. She knows. I can see it. She knows how Guinevere and I broke Arthur’s heart. And how Arthur told all of Britain that Guinevere had bewitched me. How he told himself that, rather than believe his best friend had wilfully betrayed him. Or perhaps he does believe that Guinevere ensnared me with secret enchantments. That she bound me to her and I was led to ruin as an ox to slaughter. But the Lady knows. About the fire and the crowd and the blood on my hands. Even so, she does not hate me for it. I see only love in her eyes, and pity, and that is enough to make the breath catch in my throat.

  ‘None of it matters now,’ I say to myself.

  ‘We have all failed,’ Merlin says. ‘The Saxons will drive us away as we have scattered our own gods to the winds. We tried but we failed.’

  ‘Where will you go, Lancelot?’ the Lady asks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I will look for her.’

  ‘You’re a fool, Lancelot,’ Merlin says.

  ‘You will not find her,’ the Lady says. A tear escapes her eye and rolls into the hollow of her cheek.


  I shrug. ‘Then it does not matter,’ I say.

  The Lady lifts my hands to her mouth and I feel her dry lips on my skin. After that kiss, she smiles and for a brief moment I see the golden woman again. ‘Thank you, Lancelot. You protected them both,’ she says. ‘The rest was too much to ask.’

  I say nothing. I have no words.

  28

  The Boy

  THE DOOR IS flung open and the boy comes in, the unstrung bow in one hand, and in the other a brace of dead hares tied by their hind legs.

  ‘I saw the big stag, Father,’ he says, the hut flooded now with the last golden blush of the day. ‘Near the mud wallow.’ He grins, his cheeks ruddy from the late autumn air and his nose glistening with a dew drop. ‘He’s strutting around looking for a fight. Did you hear him roaring?’

  ‘No,’ I say, smiling because he is smiling.

  I have been stitching a leather bracer for him now he is strong enough to draw the bow and good enough with it to see us well fed. The skin of his left forearm is red from the string’s lash, but I have nearly finished the bracer.

  ‘He is not as big as he was though,’ he says, hanging the hares on a peg. ‘He looks thinner.’

  ‘That’s because he is the king,’ I say, ‘and must see off every rival or else lose his hinds. He has no time to eat.’

  He wipes his nose on the back of his hand and sniffs. ‘Worth being hungry if you can be the king,’ he says.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I say, then I show him the bracer. ‘It will be ready tomorrow.’

  He comes over and takes the leather arm guard, wrapping it around his forearm. My needle work is poor and the leather is unadorned but for a small sun which I have incised in it, the rays streaking out all around, yet the boy stares at the bracer as if it is crafted from Cornubian silver. Though it does shine, from the beeswax which I have rubbed into it.

  ‘Can we fight with the spears, Father?’ he asks. He feels like a warrior with that hardened leather against his skin. His hair, as fair as his mother’s, sticks up like a hedgehog’s spines.

  ‘It will be dark soon. Maybe tomorrow,’ I say, and see the disappointment in his face. That scowl which is so deep that even in the pitch black of night you would know of its arrival, for there is almost heat in it. A day is a long time to wait when you are nine years old, and yet the scowl is gone in a heartbeat. He smiles and it fills his blue eyes as his mother’s smile used to fill hers. Though his eyes, I know, are mine.

  ‘If I land a hit, can we go to the Samhain fire at Castle Dore?’ he asks, handing the bracer back to me. ‘Please, Father.’

  It is my turn to frown now, for it is rare that we leave the woods, rarer still that we go to the hill-fort where King Cyn-March has his hall. But he is just a boy and one day he will live his own life amongst people, not as we live now, hiding from the world. And anyway, the Samhain fire will be on the hill beyond the fort’s eastern gate, and it will be dark. No one will take any note of a boy and his father watching the flames leaping and questing into the night sky.

  ‘If you land a hit,’ I say, holding up a finger, ‘we’ll go to see the fire. If not, you can help me cut reeds.’

  ‘Because you’re getting too old to bend and swing the scythe,’ he says, grinning with mischief. I growl and call him a toad and grab him and he wriggles like a fish but I hold him tight, not letting him get away. And he doesn’t want to get away.

  I have taught him to hunt and in the use of the spear and shield. We have practised with the wooden swords like Roman gladiators in our woodland arena, and soon he will be strong enough to use an iron sword. He is already fast and agile. We will work on his stamina until he can run to Thunder Hill and back again without stopping.

  But I cannot give him a mother’s love. Her gentle hands when he has a cut or scrape that needs cleaning. Her protective arms and her voice in his ear when he wakes from a bad dream, his eyes wide with night-time terrors.

  I know he misses her, though he does not say so, perhaps for my sake. We shed our tears when the fever took hold of her and bore her to Annwn on a river of raving misery. I have not seen the boy cry for a year.

  I sometimes wonder, will I see Helaine again in the next life? Or will it be Guinevere I find in the sun-warmed meadows where the flowers never fade and wither? Will our souls seek each other, drawn together as horizon to sky? As sea to shore, so that in Arawn’s realm we will make up for all that we have missed in this life. The emptiness made full. All that was forbidden allowed to grow under the sky.

  Guinevere. An ache even now.

  Perhaps such thoughts are unworthy beneath this roof. But I love the boy. I love the boy for myself and I love him for the mother who cannot. I love him for everyone and everything I have lost.

  ‘Have you fed Tormaigh?’ I ask.

  ‘I’ll do it now,’ he says. My old stallion is a sullen beast but he loves the boy too.

  The boy carries a pail to the grain sack and it takes all his strength to lift the sack and steady it so as to pour out a measure, but he does not ask for help.

  And I pick up the leather bracer and the needle and thread.

  I hear Tormaigh snort and nicker in greeting and I go to the hearth and ladle hot spiced wine into a cup, thinking the boy will need a warm drink inside him after being out all morning. I sent him to find valerian root, for I have been sleeping fitfully and I remember something from a long time ago, about how that root, dried and taken in a tincture, will bring on a deep sleep. But the voice I hear softly greeting the old stallion is not the boy’s, and I set the ladle on the hearth stone and straighten, staring at the door, unable to move. Waiting.

  No one knocks. No one calls in greeting.

  I cannot breathe. It is Samhain eve. The gods torment me, I think. No, the gods forgot me long ago, and Tormaigh would not have greeted a shade thus, so I go to the door. I reach out, for a heartbeat watching the quiver in my hand on the latch. Then I lift it and open the door and it is as though I am looking at a memory made flesh. As though I have conjured it just by wanting it to be so.

  Living apart from others, with just the boy and Tormaigh for company, I have little use for words. Now I cannot find any and so I just stare.

  ‘You look well,’ she says, her eyes shining from within the shadow of her cowl. She wears black robes, like a druid, drawn in at her waist by a rope.

  I stare at her and she stares at me and I see the quiver in her lips, faint as the tremble in a moth’s wing, but I see it.

  ‘May I come in?’ she asks. Spoken as though she is not confident of my answer, but after a long moment I nod and stand back from the door. She glances back to the dun palfrey, which seems content cropping the grass, then swings her gaze back to me. Breathes deeply. Steels herself, then steps forward but stops on the threshold a moment, hands holding the door frame, eyes settling on the interior. She walks in and I watch her like a hawk, half expecting her to change form, like the Morrigán, her black robes to become a flock of crows and tumble back out into the day to taunt me for a fool. A fool who has not slept a full night since I can remember. Whose mind is dazed as if by wine.

  I watch her and I smell the cold air and the dampness of the forest on her.

  ‘Take off the hood,’ I say. She does, slowly as though she is not used to being free of it, and then I let go the breath that had been caught inside me. She is still so beautiful, my heart, my Guinevere.

  ‘I have a son,’ I say. The words come unbidden.

  ‘I know,’ she says. She smiles and I remember a hundred such smiles. I remember those lips on my lips and her breath in my mouth, hot and needful.

  ‘I looked for you,’ I say. ‘For so long.’

  She nods as though she had known it.

  ‘Why?’ I ask her.

  ‘Does it matter now, Lancelot? After all the years?’

  ‘It matters,’ I say. I give her the cup of hot spiced wine and she wraps her hands around it, clinging to it.

  ‘Do you really think we could have be
en happy?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, and she shakes her head and I feel like a child who knows nothing of the world.

  ‘He would have found us,’ she says. ‘They would have killed you.’

  I tell her that I would have killed them, but I hear how foolish it sounds. What is to be gained from saying such things now, so many years too late?

  She says, ‘He would never have allowed us to live together, as husband and wife. It would have been too much for his honour. Too much for his heart.’ She lifts the cup to her mouth and sips the wine, watching me through the steam rising from it.

  ‘We could have left Britain,’ I say. ‘We could have gone to Armorica. Anywhere.’ I might as well be plunging a blade into my own chest, and yet I must give voice to the quiet torments of the years. ‘I would have protected you,’ I say.

  She frowns, my words hurting her as they hurt me. ‘Manannán mac Lir was supposed to take me, that day of the storm,’ she says. ‘He had promised me to Arawn. But you saved me. You cheated Manannán.’ Her teeth pull at her bottom lip as her eyes explore my face and the years in it. ‘That is what Merlin says. He told me when I was just a girl. He said the reason you saved me was so that I could be Arthur’s. So that I could help Arthur save Britain.’ She falls silent then, though she need not say the rest. By loving each other and by betraying Arthur, we had brought ruin to these isles.

  Since the day Arthur had found us together, chaos had reigned. The Saxons had not been brought to battle for years. Each spring brought new boatloads of warriors to swell Aella and Cerdic’s armies, so that the dream we once had, of driving the Saxons back into the sea, was like long-vanished smoke from Uther Pendragon’s balefire. In the years since our last victories, famine and plague had come to the land. The kings, who for a time united under Arthur, now mistrusted each other and fought like dogs, for land and revenge and for silver to buy peace with the Saxons.