by Donna Hosie
Talan was the knight who filled me in about Balvidore: self-proclaimed king of Logres, and leader of the Saxon warlords who had now invaded. Talan claimed that Balvidore ate roasted babies for the break of the fast, and then bathed in the blood of virgins. What I took far more seriously were the rumoured sightings of a bloodied and beaten Arthur being held captive in the dungeons of Camelot.
“I still don’t understand how my brother was taken, or by who?”
“Magic - dark and light - graces these lands, Lady Natasha,” replied Gareth. “It was foretold that Arthur would return after the battle of Camlann. The fellowship of Camelot was scattered, wounded and lost. Arthur was mortally felled and taken to the land of Avalon to be healed. Sir Bedivere was the knight who placed him in the boat. We were to wait for Arthur’s return, and wait we did. An enchantment, a dreamless, ageing sleep was laid over these lands. Now Arthur has returned, and we have awoken to our former selves. Our quest is perilous, but simple: find Arthur, and restore him as the rightful king of Logres.”
The rain was pounding against my face. It was brittle, like ice. It felt like hundreds of needles were prickling my skin.
“But what if Arthur doesn’t want to be king?” I said, spitting into the rain. “What if he wants to go back to Avalon Cottage with me?”
Gareth looked at me like I had asked the most ridiculous question in the world.
“Arthur is the king of Logres,” he replied simply. “It is his destiny. There is no other way.”
And another problem was just added to the list.
As dusk fell we reached a stone building. From the outside it looked like an abandoned church. The centre of the structure was long and rectangular, with two tall square towers at either end. Percivale sent some of his guards up, four to each tower. Glass windows sparkled like rubies as fires were lit inside for the knights. The rest of the travelling court of Caerleon was setting up camp for the night outside. I found a drenched Eve, shivering violently by one of the carts. She was trying to lift a heavy black cauldron by herself. I took off my cloak and wrapped it around her.
“Go inside,” I said. “I’ll do this.”
“No, m’lady,” replied Eve, coughing. She took the cloak off and wrapped it back around me. “This is servant work.”
“I’m hardly a lady, Eve, and I thought we agreed you were going to call me Titch or Natasha from now on.”
Refusing to listen to the other, both Eve and I worked together and carried the supplies from her cart into the abandoned church, including – to my horror – several cages of hyperactive chickens.
“Why are we unpacking everything if we’re only staying one night?” I asked.
Eve sneezed and coughed. “Balvidore’s ruffians have been sighted not four leagues from here, m’lady. Anything left outside could be stolen or burnt during the night.”
“What about the horses?” I asked, not wishing to sound stupid by asking exactly how long a league was. It could have been forty metres or forty miles for all I knew.
“Horses are the responsibility of the grooms,” explained Eve.
By grooms she meant little boys, no older than ten years, who were expected to handle and comfort terrified animals three times their height and twenty times their weight.
Cracks of lightning speared the sky; Eve whimpered. I put my arm around her freezing bony shoulders and dragged her inside. I found Gareth, Talan and David huddled around a fire, so I pushed them aside and tried to warm up Eve. Privacy was non-existent, but I desperately needed to get Eve out of her wet clothes and into dry ones.
I put my hand to her forehead. It was clammy, but I didn’t know whether that was because she was wet from the storm. Her long red hair had congealed into thick lumps, like tomato-covered spaghetti.
“Talan, could you please ask the court physician to come here,” I asked. “David should take more medicine, and I want something for Eve immediately.”
“Your bidding is my command, Lady Natasha,” replied the knight, and he jumped to his feet and strode off, still clutching a tankard of frothy ale that looked like shaving foam.
“Could you help me arrange these cloaks into a shelter,” I said to Gareth. “Eve needs to change out of these wet clothes.”
“You first, m’lady,” wheezed Eve. She was shivering so violently it was a wonder she hadn’t toppled into the fire.
“I would like to assist if I may,” offered David, and together, he and Gareth quickly constructed a screen with cloaks and spears.
I found some dry clothes for Eve inside a large wooden chest. There were several women making the journey to Camelot with the travelling court, and while the white cotton tunic was frayed and grubby, it was dry. That was all I needed.
When I returned to our little corner, I saw that Talan had returned with the physician. I had been expecting a much older man, but Percivale’s doctor was younger than my father. He was tall and broad, with the muscular body of someone who played a lot of sport. His light brown hair was cropped short, and his large nose was crooked. It looked like it had been broken several times. He stared at me for several seconds, looking at me like a person gazes at a portrait. Then he nodded to himself and went back to mixing a potion for David. My first impression was not good. He could have at least smiled, or introduced himself.
A wooden box, the size of a small suitcase, was by his feet. It was already open, and so I peered inside. It was filled with jars, and strange metal implements that looked rusty and unhygienic and just as likely to kill as cure. One half of the chest was filled with roots and berries and lumps of black rock that looked like coal. Several pieces of fur were jammed into the corners, and a handwritten journal was lying open, its pages torn and stained. Several of the jars contained what appeared to be skin and bone, floating around in a cloudy substance the colour of pee.
Were you expecting a range of paracetamol and flu remedies?
“And now to see to the servant,” said the physician, rising from attending to David.
I had gasped at his accent. It was unmistakable. A thick Scouse accent from the city of Liverpool.
Now I knew my geography of the British Isles, and certainly it was plausible that a physician from the north-west would settle in north Wales and the court of Caerleon, but what was beyond the realms of possibility was that an accent so modern was already here.
“Robert of Dawes,” he said, finally introducing himself. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Lady Natasha.”
“Nice to meet you,” I mumbled. “Eve is just over here.”
I led the physician around the screen of cloaks to where Eve lay shivering and white.
“Oh, Eve,” I cried, dragging her upright with a struggle. “Let me change her into something dry first,” I appealed to the physician, “but please don’t leave.”
“I will stay unless summoned by Lord Percivale,” replied Robert of Dawes. “There is much I wish to discuss with you, Lady Natasha, if you will permit my company.”
I nodded as the physician disappeared behind the other side of the makeshift screen. The men’s voices became louder as more beer was drunk, but my only concern was getting Eve into a state of consciousness. It shocked me how quickly she had deteriorated in such a short period. I should never have left her alone on the cart in the rain.
I pulled and tore at her wet clothes, rubbing her goose-pimpled flesh as I went. I then pulled the borrowed dress over her bony little frame. It was like dressing a rag doll that had lost its stuffing.
“Eve, please wake up,” I begged, slapping her face.
She moaned quietly, and her eyelids flickered.
“I’m sorry to be a bother, m’lady,” she whispered.
“No bother at all,” I replied, “now just stay awake a little longer. The court physician is here. He can help you.”
Robert peered around the edge of a cloak.
“May I see her now?” he asked in that thick accent. I nodded, but kept Eve in my arms. She may have seen fifteen winters, but
she had the weight of someone who hadn’t been fed for most of them.
I watched intently as Robert of Dawes listened to Eve’s chest with his ear against her ribcage. Then he checked her limp wrist for a pulse. He called for more light, and it was David who appeared holding a flaming torch. Robert checked her pupils, and then felt under her armpits.
Something wasn’t right. Or rather, it was all too right. The new court physician was methodical in the way he treated Eve. Even with his medieval tools, he checked measurements and moved his hands across her body in the impersonal manner of a modern doctor.
David was told he could go and we returned to the shadows. A thick brown sludgy potion was poured down Eve’s throat, which made her gag. I wiped her mouth and rocked her to sleep in my arms like a baby. It took just seconds.
“Will she be okay?” I asked.
“She has been ill for some time, I suggest,” replied Robert, pausing to check her pulse again. “The infection in her chest is quite advanced.”
Now I was certain something was wrong. Robert used the same phrases as a medic from my time.
He leant in towards me. I was already lodged into the corner and his presence so close to my face felt intimidating. I could smell fatty meat on his breath. He quickly turned his head around to check no one was there, before placing a foul-smelling finger to my lips.
“I need to talk to you alone, Natasha, but now is not the time or the place,” he hurriedly whispered. “For now, answer me this one question: would you be able to find the tunnel again if we went back to the lake?”
My mouth opened and closed like a fish. He was confirming my suspicions as if they were the most natural thing in the world.
“I…I…”
“I know what you are and where you are from,” whispered Robert, with even more urgency in his voice. “Now tell me, could you find the tunnel again?”
I nodded. “I think so, but…”
Robert interrupted me, placed his hands on my ears and kissed the crown of my head.
“Bless you, girl. Tomorrow, I’ll find you and we’ll speak some more.”
He rose to his feet, grabbed his medicine box and swept from my sight.
So Arthur, Slurpy and I were not the first. Just how many more were here from my time? More importantly, how could I break it to Robert that far from giving him faith, I had inadvertently caused his world to collapse?
Chapter Fourteen
Ddraig
The strange mixture Robert of Dawes had created for Eve worked like magic. Her fever broke during the night, and by morning she could sit up and drink hot water laced with nettle leaves. It smelt vile, but my new friend drank every drop without a murmur.
I decided that Eve needed to be my priority, and so I tied my horse to a cart, and let it trot alongside us as I sat watching over her. As much as I wanted to be close to Bedivere, I would not become one of those girls who gave up on their friends for the sake of a boy – however hot and kissable.
The storm had moved on, and a warm autumn sun hovered low in the sky. Eve slept most of the morning, and so I made myself sick by gorging on pale green apples that were in another open sack at the rear of the cart. Every so often I would take Eve’s pulse. It was a foolish gesture. I had no idea what was quick and what was slow. It just made me feel as if I was doing something useful.
I needed Eve to know I cared.
At some point during the day the travelling court crossed the border from Wales to England. I had spoken to Bedivere, and he had said the road to Camelot would take a couple of days to track, if there were no problems along the way. I made him promise that he and the others would not desert me. He agreed, reluctantly. I waited for him to kiss me, but he didn’t. Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to make a show in front of the men, or ruin my reputation in some way?
Or perhaps he simply hadn’t wanted to, and it was that thought that played on my mind as I continued to eat apple after apple. I seemed to repel boys in the same way Arthur attracted girls. I was the anti-Roth.
We had been bumping along a dusty, pot-holed track for hours when a call went out from the front. It rippled back along the men on horses until it reached us.
Smoke had been spotted in the distance. I gently pushed Eve to one side, and strained my back and neck in an attempt to see past the giant Shire horse that was pulling our cart. Sure enough, two giant plumes of thick black smoke were billowing into the sky. Two small green hills obscured what was on fire, but I assumed it was a building and not a forest, as the smoke was ballooning upwards instead of spreading out.
The men around us reacted quickly. Carts and support wagons were stopped and pulled over into the berry-covered hedgerows. The horses that belonged to knights and armed guards were spurred to the front of the procession; dust and grit flew into the air and settled painfully into the corners of my eyes.
Eve was confused by the sudden increase in noise and whimpered in fright. I attempted to settle her as two horses galloped past me, but I became distracted by the faces of the knights. It was Bedivere and Gareth. I had had no idea they had been right behind me all this time.
Fear gripped many of the servants, who ran around with no purpose other than to make the person nearest to them even more frightened. This was old-age terrorism. Some servants were cowering behind thorny bushes; others were making for a dense copse of trees in the distance.
“Eve, stay where you are until we know what’s going on,” I shouted. My feet had taken over control of my body and were running in the direction of Bedivere and Gareth. I could see that mass of chestnut hair in the distance, but he was getting further and further away from me.
“No, Natasha,” cried a thick Liverpool accent, and I suddenly found myself rugby-tackled by the court physician, Robert of Dawes.
“I have to get to Bedivere,” I cried, struggling to remove myself from the two thick arms that held fast around my apple-swollen stomach.
“He won’t thank you for it,” replied Robert, picking me up with ease. “Trust me, Bedivere will think better of you for keeping order back here. I haven’t been here long, but I’ve already learnt you don’t get in the way of a knight and danger.”
He placed me back on the ground and started barking instructions. His voice boomed out in all directions, as he ordered supplies to be tipped out and carts and wagons to be overturned.
Robert was making a fortress.
To protect us from what, though? Most of the knights had already galloped away into the distance, towards a third eruption of smoke.
Suddenly, the sky above us was thick with a quick moving mass, which flapped and screeched as one enormous black cloud.
I was terrified of birds, petrified of anything that flapped in such an excited, out of control fashion. I threw myself to the ground and covered my head with my hands. The blackbirds were only a few feet above our heads, and had swarmed out of a wooded area to my right.
“Arm yourselves,” cried Robert, and the servants and guards who were left with the supplies quickly grabbed bows and arrows from an upturned armoured wagon. Two women dropped to their knees, and clasped their hands together in prayer.
“How are you at archery, Natasha?” asked Robert.
“Have the birds gone?”
“Something far worse than birds is out there,” said Robert, as an unnatural hush descended on those of us left by the side of the track.
A tree to my left burst into flames. A crimson fireball rose into the sky, as a stomach-vibrating roar knocked everyone to the ground with a sonic boom. The praying women started shrieking their devotion to their God.
“Wait,” screamed Robert. “Wait until it shows colours.”
“What the hell was that?” I screamed back.
“A Ddraig,” cried Robert. “Everyone, keep your eyes alert and pray for red.”
He grabbed hold of me and pulled me to his side.
“Stay with me, but if you see white then run as fast as you can.”
“A white what?”
“You’ll know when you see it,” replied Robert, his eyes darting in all directions, “although you may not believe it…”
The physician was interrupted by another ear-splitting roar that flattened person, horse and tree alike. An oak tree, at least thirty metres tall, disintegrated into flame and cinder.
“It’s an ambush,” gagged Robert, as he coughed up a mouthful of smoke. “The evil bastard lured the knights away and left us sitting here like ducks.”
I had no idea what was going on, but only one thing was now on my mind: Eve. I had to get back to my friend.
Toxic black smoke was eating at my eyeballs, causing them to stream with tears. An acrid stench had filled my nostrils and was burning the back of my throat.
Eve. Where was Eve?
I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear the choking screams of people around me. I strained my ears, listening amongst the cries for one from Liverpool, but if Robert was still yelling, I couldn’t hear him.
Then there was a swooping sound, like a huge vibrating heartbeat, and the vague shapes of people stumbling around began to materialise. A piercing scream split the air and was just as quickly silenced. It wasn’t a cry of panic. It was pain. People didn’t scream that high if they were frightened. A splash of liquid hit my face, splattering against my skin. It felt warm, and thick. I don’t know why, it was instinctive, but I touched the fluid with my fingers and then placed it to my lips. I vomited up undigested apples as I realised what had drenched me.
The toxic black cloud that smothered us was clearing. It was a pale grey now, but I still couldn’t see into the distance where Bedivere and the other knights had charged. I couldn’t see further than the length of a netball court. My eyes were pulled to a young girl with long dirty-blonde hair. She couldn’t have been more than eleven years old. She was screaming for her mother; tears were streaming down her pale face. An enormous barrel-shaped man knocked her to the ground in his haste to escape. She sprawled into the dirt. The man did not look back.