“Both a good use of your time,” said Nerys, with no hint of laughter. “When do you mean to visit Mrs Jones?”
“Christine said to send alms by a servant, and anonymously, ‘by the example of monseigneur Saint Nicholas’.” She shot an impudent grin at Nerys, and then admitted, “Emmeline will be busy tomorrow with the Infants’ Bible Study. We have agreed to go the day after, so you need not worry. In the meantime I shall be as medieval as I know how, and languish about like Burne-Jones’s Briar Rose.”
THAT NIGHT SHE DREAMED ABOUT THE King again.
She stood in a riverside meadow between greenwood and castle. Overhead the sun shone gilt in a sky like powdered lapis and struck golden sparks from the King’s blood-red dragon banner.
For the hundredth time, she half-closed her eyes against the fiery colour of meadow flowers and silken pavilions. For the hundredth time a blinding glint from someone’s mailed shoulder forced her to blink and turn her head to see the King.
In crown and heraldic red robes, bearded, belted, bear-like, he sat enthroned by an oak tree with two wolf-hounds at his feet. Youthful vigour lay couchant in his gigantic limbs and in his big veined hands, but his level look was grave and wise. There was a sheathed sword lying across his knees, and his fingers moved up and down the scabbard as though it could make music.
A harper sat at his right hand, mouth open in song. At something the minstrel said, graceful feminine heads swayed and laughed all around, and white hands clapped, scattering flashes of colour from undersleeve and lining. Yet no sound reached Blanche’s ears. Unlike the vision, it had been lost long ago.
By the King on his left hand sat the Queen in a shower of silver-blonde hair that fell unbound to her hips. When she smiled it was to herself, secretly, as if to a jest only she heard. With the ladies round about she was tying may-thorn hoops, but then she looked up—this was Blanche’s favourite part—and her mouth seemed to shape Blanche’s name. In a turmoil of green robes she came forward, arms opening.
BLANCHE WOKE.
On most nights it was easy to turn over and go back to sleep, but tonight wakefulness caught and held. At last she slid out of bed and tiptoed to her dressing-table, feeling across it for her mother’s ring. It slid onto her finger. She couldn’t feel the spidery words against her skin, but she remembered them. Guinevere.
Guinevere was the name of a queen from legend. Like the one in the dream she had had since childhood.
Impossible thoughts wheeled through her mind.
In the next room, she heard Nerys moving, opening her wardrobe door…
For years, Nerys had woken her at midnight on her birthday, and they had stolen downstairs to have hot cocoa and cake by the kitchen fire. Blanche was much too old for midnight feasts now, of course. And it was a night too late. Still…they were both awake. And she wanted some company.
Blanche shrugged into her peignoir and went out into the hall. There was no answer to her tap at Nerys’s door. Blanche hesitated, and nearly gave up and went back to bed. Then she remembered the creak of the wardrobe door. Perhaps she had knocked too softly. She twisted the handle, cracked the door ajar, and peeped in, whispering, “Nerys?”
There was light in the room. The curtains had been pulled back, and moonlight pooled on the floor. But the wardrobe door also sat ajar, and from it came a warm golden glow…
Nerys was nowhere to be seen.
Blanche assumed, yawning, that Nerys must have left a lamp burning in there. It seemed a dangerous thing to do, and she closed the door behind her and crossed the room to the wardrobe.
She opened the door and saw at once that there was no lamp. It was more like…
…more like daylight.
Blanche blinked at the light, and her heart skipped a little faster, but she was too curious to be frightened. Instead she ducked her head and stepped through the wardrobe door.
SHE EMERGED FROM A BIG WOODEN chest, up-ended so that its lid functioned like a door. Blanche glanced about her, and for a moment imagined that her childhood dream had come to life. A swift rush of gladness took her by the throat and almost knocked her to her knees. It was just like waking the morning after a nightmare to discover that one’s worst fears had not, after all, come true. Then she shook herself, a little ashamed of the notion. Did she want to live in a picture-book? And her waking life was hardly a nightmare. She looked around again, with a more critical eye.
She stood in a pavilion, surrounded by the spicy smell of the woods on a warm spring morning full of light and birdsong. The pavilion itself was just like the ones in her dream, made of imperious saffron-coloured silk that rippled in the morning breeze. Sunlight filtered through the wall and drenched the pavilion’s interior with rosy light.
It was like standing inside a jewel, and the pavilion’s furniture was rich enough to do it justice. There was a couch, chairs, and a low table all made from carved and inlaid wood. On the table goblets and bread and apples and roasted meat were set out.
And still Nerys was nowhere to be seen.
Blanche stood without moving for a space, head bent to listen. Apart from the sighing of the breeze and the sound of birds, she could hear nothing. She was in a lonely place, then, and not (alas!) in the busy meadow of her dream.
Curious to see the place to which she had wandered, she began to move forward, lifting her eyes from the ground—and with a gasp, saw she was no longer alone. The flap of the tent was still falling without a whisper of sound behind a newcomer.
He was young and savage and dirty, reeking of horses, clad in skins. There was a knife almost as long as her forearm strapped to his calf, and he carried a pair of javelins with knapped-stone blades point-down in one hand.
He spoke.
“Duw a rodo da ywch, arglwyddes.”
2
Logres
—O mother
How can ye keep me tether’d to you?—Shame.
Man am I grown, a man’s work must I do.
Follow the deer? Follow Christ, the King,
Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King—
Else, wherefore born?
Tennyson
IN THE DAYS WHEN A MAN might travel from one end of Britain to the other without leaving the shade of the greenwood if he kept his word, let his sword rest lightly in its sheath, and watched for foes, when roads were hard to find and friends harder, and fire and steel the first necessities of life—long ago, deep in the hills of Wales, there lived a boy and his mother.
The boy’s name was Perceval, and all the days he could remember he had run wild in the woods wearing deerskin and wolfpelts, knowing no enemies but wolves and wolf’s-head outlaws, knowing no human company but that of his mother. But hers was enough. In her stories, in the long passages she had him memorise, and in the unknown languages in which she drilled him until he could speak and understand them with ease, lay a door to the outside world that had captured his imagination.
This could be ignored in the winter, when the world was dead and the cold and hunger bit so hard that survival took all their time and energy. But when each spring came and the sun gathered warmth and the whole forest woke into life, the call sounded more insistently to leave the hidden hills and go out into the world of men and deeds.
Last spring, for the first time, he had told his mother what he felt, for the need to be up and doing was too strong now to be ignored.
“I know I must stay and care for you, Mother,” he finished, half ashamed of the confession.
But she sat silently for a while and her answer, when it came, was the last thing he expected.
“Oh, Perceval, a falcon is born to hunt, and so are you. One day you will hunt indeed—but not yet.”
“Why? Am I not ready?”
She looked at him sadly and said, “Give me a little longer.”
That year his mother had barely given him a moment’s rest. Odd requests sent him roaming far into the wilds or kept him scratching figures into the walls of their cave: the kindl
ing of a lantern on a rocky western coast, a calculation of how the stars would stand at the vernal equinox. Old lessons, too, had to be repeated from beginning to end, and discussed in conversations that tested not only his grasp of the contents but also his fluency in the Latin, or Greek, or occasionally even Saxon or Irish to which his mother would change mid-speech.
This spring the call was back, biting harder than ever.
He had prowled far to the north on this particular morning, armed with the slender darts he made himself, when he saw the riders.
There were three of them, mailed and jingling. At their saddlebows hung vivid shields and iron helms; by their stirrups rode lances. In the dappled wood they made a bright splash of colour, and Perceval was pierced with the longing to ride with them to strange countries and stranger adventures.
On that impulse he stepped out into the road and hailed them.
The strangers reined in. Startled hands tightened on hilts and lances, but then relaxed at the sight of the boy in wolf-pelts. “Who calls?” asked the foremost, a dark man with a lean scarred face.
“First tell me who you are,” said Perceval, so eager that his breath lagged behind his words. “Do you come from Heaven like the angels? Or are you fays from the other world?”
“Neither,” was the answer. “We are not angels, though we serve the King of Heaven. Of the elves you, perhaps, may know more than we do.”
“What are you, then?”
“Men. Knights who serve Arthur Pendragon the High King. I, Lancelot, hold these lands of him.”
Perceval stood stock-still, thinking, for so long that the man went on with a smile: “Will you hold for me a corner of this wood? Then you may catechise whom you wish.”
“No; only tell me this,” said Perceval. “Where may I find your King? I should like to be a knight.”
One of the men behind Lancelot coughed as though smothering a laugh, but Lancelot replied gravely. “I counsel you to go in search of him, sir, for it is the Pendragon’s chief delight to grant such boons to bold men. Yet there are conditions. You must keep yourself either to gentle words or hard blows, and you must defend the weak and poor.”
“I will do these things,” said Perceval with a gesture of easy assurance, and the knight smiled again.
“Then travel east and a little south. When you come to broader lands there will be others to point the way.”
Perceval lifted his darts in salute. “We will meet again,” he said, and vanished into the forest.
THAT EVENING WHEN PERCEVAL CAME HOME his mother was sitting outside the cave, sewing in the last light of the sun. He exchanged greetings and dropped to a crouch beside her. Words had never come to him with difficulty, and he had had all afternoon to think the matter over.
“I went north today,” he told her without preface, “and I met three knights who said they served the High King Arthur and the King of Heaven. And there is nothing else in the world I would rather do or be.”
As she had the year before when he first told her his dreams, his mother sat in silence. Her needle went in and out of the patch on her old blue cloak many times before she answered, and the sadness was there in her voice again, but heavier. “Perceval, you must understand. It is not an easy life: full of wanderings, woundings, dangers, and death. In the end, always death.”
“But those come to us and all mortals, Mother. Why! Would you discourage me, after all this time?”
For the length of a breath, her face was still and pale as stone. “To all mortals, yes. I know this is your calling, Perceval. But I cannot follow you when you go. If you go east, I must go west, and an end will come of me in Britain. Will you not stay another year?”
“No, Mother.” He pointed to the chain about her neck. “I must follow my father’s calling. You said it yourself on the night of the frost, when I speared the man from the hills.”
“Then you have guessed,” she said. “Yes. It was the Pendragon of Britain whom your father served, and loved better than a brother. And your father gave this to me before you were born.” She lifted the chain over her head. From it hung a golden ring with a fire-red stone.
“Tell me why,” he said, as he had when he was a little boy.
Her lips moved in a weary smile. “A knight will give a lady a ring from his hand and take a kiss from her lips, when he wishes to love her and serve her all his days,” she recited, as she had when he was small. She pulled the ring from the chain and held it out to him. “This ring is the knight’s who swore to serve me. Take it. One day you may find a lady to wear it.”
Before the sun was up, Perceval kissed his mother goodbye. “Go to the King at Camelot,” she told him. “Remember what I have taught you. Your father was among the mightiest of the knights of Logres.”
“I will be a son worthy of him.”
Perceval’s mother looked up at him. Her grey eyes opened on him like fathomless wells of thought. Perceval found himself holding his breath dizzily to hear the echo of his words splashing into their depths.
“And you will be a son worthy of him,” she said. Then he blinked, and she was his mother again; and she turned her head aside so that he could see only the white swell of her cheek, but heard her sigh: “Alas…”
He rode away in the rain on Llech, his little grey pony. His mother stood outside the cave watching him go; she waved once when he looked back. Then Perceval fixed his eyes on the forest ahead, and knew that the trees were clouding her from view, and he never saw her in the world again but once.
HE WOUND DOWN THROUGH THE WOODS and hills of Wales, sometimes walking and sometimes riding the clammy, muddy little pony he had taken for the journey. The rain drizzled steadily, dripped down his neck, and turned the pony’s grey coat black. In the soggy valleys, Llech’s hooves sank deep into the mire. It occurred to Perceval once that perhaps summer would be a pleasanter time for travel. But it never came into his mind to look back now, with the world and adventure ahead.
When he came to the River Usk, at the border of his world, he forded it, turned, and followed it south-east through the hills, pressing on as quickly as possible, up strange hill and down unknown dale until the land around him began to change. The hills fell gentler and lower, the trees thinned, and the river gathered strength and girth.
It was late on the second day, as the sun began to set, that he emerged from the forest and stared down one last long slope to a rolling plain, where the Usk turned and ran away south to the sea. Perceval stared at the scene in amazement. All his life he had lived in thickly-wooded hill-country. There were more hills and trees in the distance, but down in the plain lay short-cropped pastures with many sheep and cattle, the first farmland he had seen.
He rode down the hill, turning his head from side to side to drink in the view. Far away on the right, he glimpsed the sea and what might be more land beyond.
Perceval rode straight to the village, but was stopped by the sentry at the gate, who came running out of the little guard-house pulling on his helm. He squinted at Perceval and snapped, “What do you want here?”
“Your hospitality, fair sir,” said Perceval. “I have travelled far today.”
“Go on!” said the gate-warden. “You’re one of those elvish folk from the hills. Steal a man’s breath from his mouth if it weren’t nailed down.”
Perceval blinked in surprise. “I—”
“No,” said the gate-warden. “Move on. We’ve trouble enough without your kind adding to it.” He put his hands on his hips and planted himself in the gate, glowering.
“Certainly. Only tell me in which direction is Camelot.”
“Straight east. Why are you riding there?”
“To be a knight,” replied the wild boy, and faded into the dusk with his dirty pony before the man could gather breath to reply. Before night he had coaxed Llech to swim the river and was among the trees on the other side.
Perceval lit a fire, huddled into his pelts, and closed his eyes. He was hardened to the cold and wet and slep
t lightly, darts in hand. Long before dawn came, he toasted the last of his mother’s bread over the reawakened fire and was on his way across the hills, straight for the rising sun. He camped near the Wye that evening, found a ford by which to cross in the morning, and kept on until he came to a high treeless ridge overlooking low wooded hills and the glimmer of water, and saw nestled within them green pastures studded with little farms and animals like ants. The distant lowlands looked sunny and warm, but up here on the ridge blew an icy wind that seemed to turn the sun cold.
There was one tree, an oak, not very old, but gnarled and disfigured. On it a brace of ravens sat complaining. If there had been a stone lying on the ground, Perceval would have tossed it at them.
He was distracted from his surroundings by Llech, who buried his head in the grass and began tearing up wads of it, roots and all. Perceval slid down from the pony’s back, letting the halter trail on the ground. Llech moved off a pace or two. “Well, then,” Perceval said to him. “Eat if you like, but I see a pool down the hill, and I am thirsty enough to swallow all of it.”
He strode through the grass, then slid down the steep slope, taking care not to make a sound, for he was beginning to hunger for fresh meat. At the slope’s foot he found a little, dark, deep mere, with strands of early-morning fog still clinging to its surface, very secret in the hills and the wood. But Perceval saw immediately that he was not alone. There on the other side of the lake, mirrored in its surface, stood a bright saffron-coloured pavilion still limp with morning dew.
Perceval went warily toward the strange structure. Trampled grass showed where horses and men had walked around the pavilion, but he could hear no sound of voice or harness. He lifted the tent flap and went in.
There was a gasp, and he was looking into the startled face of a tall and stately damsel, crowned with hair like flame.
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