Pendragon's Heir

by Suzannah Rowntree

  Again the silence bore that odd secrecy, before he replied, “Whoever made a decision because of what must be done? Ask, rather, what you truly desire.”

  She looked into the sky and the sun was smiling. “A decision? You mean—I could say no?”

  “Why not? If it is what you truly desire—on your own account.”

  Blanche gulped. But she was unsurprised by the thought, for it had been lurking at the back of her mind until liberated by Mr Corbin’s words. Sudden tears rose in her throat and she blurted out:

  “I can’t go! I can’t! It would kill me!”

  She stared up at him, blinking back the tears. He took her arm with a swift gesture of comfort. “But this is melodrama, Blanche. How far away can they be? Paris? Milan?”

  The mention of those two kindly cities struck her as a cruel joke. “Oh, if only!”

  “India, then? But that isn’t far. Not today. Haven’t you read that capital book, by Mr Verne, wasn’t it?”

  “It isn’t India,” she said.

  He frowned. “Surely not Australia?”

  In the midst of her tragedy she couldn’t help laughing. “No, indeed!”

  But Mr Corbin remained serious. “You said I wouldn’t believe you, Blanche. What aren’t you telling me?”

  “You would laugh…”

  “I give you my word not to laugh. Tell me, Blanche. Better than keeping it all bottled up inside.”

  Blanche screwed her eyes shut. Then she said, “My mother is named Guinevere, and she is the one you are thinking of.”

  “THERE’S EVEN A PROPHECY,” SHE FINISHED. “Pendragon’s heir is the life of Logres. If I go back there, I’ll be killed!” She glanced up at Mr Corbin’s saturnine profile. “Oh, but you can’t believe me. You don’t believe in fairy-tales, do you?”

  “I do not,” he said. “But I know of science, and the strange properties of space and time. Why shouldn’t this all be possible?”

  Blanche gaped. “You mean you believe me?”

  “Of course I do. You are not crazy, and why should you be lying?”

  “You’re wonderful,” she cried. “Tell me, what should I do? This is my home—this time, this place. I don’t want to leave.”

  Mr Corbin shrugged. “Your parents thought they were doing their best for you, sending you here. Who would willingly leave, having stood on the brink of the twentieth century and looked into a bright future where war and poverty might very well vanish, within fifteen years or so, before a peaceful brotherhood of humanity…? It is hard on you, having lived here, to go back to the Dark Ages.” He glanced up at the abbey with a laugh. “Only just now I was speaking of the discomforts of such places.”

  “I shall probably have to live in something like it.” Blanche felt tears crawling up her throat again. “Oh, what shall I do?”

  Mr Corbin shook his head. “Miss Pendragon, you are not a child anymore. Nobody can advise you, least of all me. You must follow your own heart and judgement.”

  She looked at him in doubt. “I’ve always done what Sir Ector advised. Or Nerys. They always knew best. And I know they love me. How could I disappoint them?”

  “But everyone makes mistakes,” he said gently. “Especially with their children, I think; they are so full of their own hopes that they forget to let you have yours. Don’t be afraid to know your own mind.”

  Blanche nodded, and let her gaze fall to her feet. “I will try. I will try to make the right choice.”

  “Miss—Blanche,” said Mr Corbin, and stepped closer. She shivered with surprise as his cool fingers tipped her chin. She looked up, into his eyes, and smiled awkwardly; after the adventure of the pavilion, she felt shy even of Mr Corbin. But he returned the smile, and her discomfort smoothed away.

  “The only wrong choice,” he told her with gentle insistence, “would be to let someone else choose for you.”

  5

  Nay, then,

  Do what thou canst, I will not go to-day;

  No, nor to-morrow, not till I please myself.

  Shakespeare

  IT WAS A WARM MAY EVENING not long after the excursion to Tintern, and Blanche sat on the hammock in the garden. She had been reading a Miss Austen novel, Mansfield Park, but even the charming Crawfords no longer distracted her thoughts, and she had flung the book down among the cushions. Instead she was tatting lace for a collar, her fingers scrambling wildly across the cotton. The sun, sinking into flaming clouds, would be gone soon and the bite of cold would send her indoors, to dinner and Nerys and polite conversation. Blanche tatted a little faster. She needed to think.

  The shuttle, followed by its inky shadow, danced up and down above the cream-coloured lace and Blanche, staring through it, still saw the windows of Tintern. Since the trip she had not spoken to anyone about what she had learned from Nerys and Sir Ector in the library. If anything, she had tried to forget. But her time was running out. Her guardian would return in a day or two from the Newport Antiquities Society’s monthly meeting, and when he spoke to her about it again—as he certainly would soon—she needed to have a decision.

  But what decision? “Don’t be afraid to know your own mind,” Mr Corbin had said. Blanche felt like laughing. Know her own mind! It was easy for him to say it, but her mind fought knowing. Mr Corbin was right, of course: it was hard, it was impossible for her to leave this time willingly, with everything that she knew and loved. But Sir Ector and Nerys expected her to go—expected her to return to take up the life to which she had been born and even, in a way, raised. How would she ever talk them into letting her stay? She stirred uncomfortably in her seat.

  She heard a door close and looked across a lawn like green fire to see Nerys coming from the house to call her for dinner. The sun flared once and was swallowed up in a velvet bank of cloud. The light changed from gold to purple. Red bled across the horizon and Blanche, suddenly in shadow, rose from the hammock. Then she shivered in a breath of wind that scattered the perfume of roses and sent a dank, earthy scent fluttering around her.

  She pulled her shawl closer. The wind raced across the lawn and tugged loose the strands of Nerys’s hair. For a moment, apart from the leaves and grasses stirred by that chill breath, all motion ceased. Blanche saw her draw breath. Then the gust died and Nerys was hurrying across the lawn calling her name.

  “Blanche—come quickly.”

  Blanche dug among the cushions for her book and thrust it with the tatting into her work-basket. As she fumbled with the catch, Nerys caught her arm. “Leave it,” she panted. At the uneven note in her voice, Blanche turned and looked at her. Something of the immortal woman’s glory had broken loose with the strands of hair, some hint of power hung about her, but her eyes were wide with what could only be called fear. Blanche dropped her work-basket.

  Then Nerys’s fingers gripped Blanche’s arm convulsively, and her gaze slid past, into the shadows of the bushes beyond. Blanche turned to see. For a moment she saw nothing; then the shadows coalesced. There, just beyond the beeches from which the hammock hung, stood the statue of a man in armour, shield on arm, sword drawn.

  Blanche felt the hair rise along the back of her neck. The weird light of dusk, the trembling of Nerys—Nerys, trembling!—and above all the mute, inexplicable figure reminded her of a childish nightmare. For one horrible moment she supposed that it must have been standing there watching her for hours. But it moved, and was an armoured man with a sword coming at them around the tree.

  Blanche screamed before she could stop herself. Then Nerys snatched her hand and they were fleeing across the lawn to the house. Footsteps pounded behind them. Blanche did not dare to look over her shoulder. They reached the door and flung against it. Blanche grabbed blindly for the knob; then the door spilled them into the hall.

  She looked back. Nerys was there, almost stumbling into her arms; behind Nerys, the knight and the sword, only yards away and closing in. “Quickly—the wardrobe,” Nerys said, slamming the door shut, and shooting the bolt.

  At t
he foot of the stairs, in the middle of the house, stood a wardrobe which Blanche knew had nothing in it but coats and tennis-racquets, though it was always kept locked. Was it like Nerys’s wardrobe upstairs? Would it take them to safety? She darted down the hall and tugged the handle. Then a heavy blow struck the back-door and shook the whole house. There was such implacable malice in the shivering air that Blanche nearly screamed again. Nerys pushed her aside, fumbling at a chain around her neck.

  Voices and running feet came up the passage from the kitchen. One of the housemaids looked into the hall just as another violent crash shook the house. The bolt on the door was not a heavy one. Already the bar was bending and the wood of the door was splintering. But Nerys, poised with a key in her hand, said calmly to the maid:

  “Tell Keats we shall be a few minutes late for dinner, will you, Lucy?”

  Whether it was Nerys’s cool manner, or some exertion of that veiled authority, Blanche never knew. The girl nodded and disappeared. Nerys fitted the key into the wardrobe lock and turned it. With a jerk, she pulled the door open a crack, and stood waiting.

  “What are you doing?” Blanche gasped.

  Nerys lifted a finger.

  The next blow came accompanied by the sound of splitting wood. Then with one more crash the door burst off its hinges into the hall. Blanche drew a breath like a sob. The knight stepped over the threshold toward them, silhouetted against angry twilight. Nerys, pale and concentrated, whisked open the wardrobe door and swept Blanche inside.

  BLANCHE STUMBLED INTO IRON-GREY RAIN SLASHING down from a clouded mid-afternoon sky. She stood in the stony courtyard of a castle, empty except for three posts standing erect by the wall and a man holding a sword. She blinked and gasped under the battering rain.

  The man in the courtyard straightened and turned to her, sweeping rain and sweat from his eyes. Blanche, reeling toward him, looked into his face and saw recognition. The boy from the pavilion.

  In that moment of terror she remembered that meeting only as something insignificant and long ago. She only saw his lean whiplike strength, the sword in his hand, and the eyes that had always been honest. “Please,” she gasped, glancing past Nerys, behind her, to the low stable door she had somehow exited, “help.”

  As she said the word the door wrenched open and their pursuer came out into the rain. She had forgotten to speak Welsh, but her panic spoke for her. Perceval glanced from the terrified women to the knight—immense, armoured cap-a-pie, with a two-handed sword that made his own feel like a toy—and laughed, more from the unexpectedness of the thing than anything else.

  “Stand behind me,” he said to the flame-haired damsel, and as she and her attendant darted out of the way he raised his shield, lifted his sword to shoulder height, and crouched low.

  The strange knight spoke, his voice echoing inside the iron helm. “Do you seek death, boy?”

  Perceval grinned. “I’ve yanked his beard once or twice. I can do it again.”

  Something stirred beneath the massive iron plates of the knight’s armour—something that may have been a shrug. Then the great sword lifted like the blade of a guillotine: two steps forward, and a rain of blows fell upon Perceval, who staggered back just too late and fell to one knee, lifting a smashed shield on a senseless arm to receive a new attack. Blanche gasped; at any moment she expected to see the boy crumple like blotting-paper. But then he lashed out at the knight’s knee and somehow reeled to his feet out of the enemy’s reach.

  The two circled in the rain with quick, taut steps. Blanche and Nerys, clinging together, shuffled to stay behind the boy. The knight lunged; there was a flash of steel like lightning and the fierce shriek of metal. Perceval maneuvered again, and Blanche found that she and Nerys were standing before the stable door.

  On the other side of Perceval the enemy knight had also seen this, and Blanche flinched again as he burst into deadly motion. But Nerys, tugging her arm with white fingers, hissed in her ear. “Now!”

  Blanche resisted for a moment. “Can’t we do something?” she groaned under the screech and crash of swords.

  “We can run!”

  Nerys pulled her toward the stable door. Blanche glanced back and what she saw remained frozen like a photograph in her mind long afterwards: two swords crossed in the air, and the planted feet and straining arms of both combatants. There was blood, mixed with rain, flowing down the boy’s shield arm. Then she was in the hallway of her own home again, dripping rain from an afternoon far away. Nerys slammed the wardrobe door and locked it, and even the dim light which shone from the keyhole had vanished when she removed the key.

  Nerys leaned back against the wardrobe, closed her eyes, and took a deep, trembling breath.

  Blanche’s legs buckled and she slid down the wall to the floor. She hugged her knees and breathed for a moment. “H-he can’t come back?”

  “Not at present.”

  “And the boy?” The boy in the pavilion, who had frightened her and robbed her. Again in her mind Blanche saw blood running down the young knight’s shield arm and with dispassionate wonder realised that somewhere in the last few breathless seconds, she had forgiven him. “Will he live?”

  Nerys opened her eyes, her voice matter-of-fact. “I cannot tell.”

  Blanche swallowed. “He’ll be killed!”

  “It’s possible,” said Nerys. “But not, I think, probable. The sons of Orkney are made of sterner stuff than the brigands of Gore.”

  AN AGE AWAY IN THE RAIN, Perceval heard the door slam behind him, and at that distracted moment his enemy disengaged. The next stroke caught the broken shield on his arm, scooped him aside, and flung him to the cobblestones. His enemy did not pursue the advantage, however. Instead he threw open the door of the stable and stood motionless, staring into the warm questioning eyes of horses.

  In the sudden silence, there were shouts from within the castle and men-at-arms spilled into the courtyard.

  The knight fell back a step and breathed out a curse, looking at Perceval.

  “Do not doubt that this debt will be repaid with interest.” And he strode into the stable.

  BLANCHE SHOOK HER HEAD, A WAVE of dizzy tiredness sweeping over her. “Nerys, I don’t understand. How did this happen?”

  Nerys looked at her with quick compassion. “The thing we feared,” she said. “She has found you at last: Morgan le Fay, the Queen of Gore.”

  “The sorceress? But who was the knight?”

  “Did you not mark his shield?”

  Blanche gave a barking laugh. “I did not!”

  Nerys shook her head. “I forget that to you, a shield is not the same as a placard. He bore the Blue Boar, the device of Sir Odiar, the Queen’s paramour and cutthroat.”

  PERCEVAL STRUGGLED TO HIS FEET AND reeled toward the stable door. Just as he reached it, a screaming neigh warned him to dive aside. Even so, the rush of horseflesh that broke open the door almost swept him away. All the horses of the castle spilled into the courtyard at once, and in the midst of them the knight of Gore, riding easily without saddle or bit, raced them across the courtyard, burst open the closing gate, trampled down the rising drawbridge, and was gone.

  In the lull that followed a cool silence and numbness fell on Perceval. His knees gave way and he sank to the threshold of the stable, cradling his gashed shield arm. Dimly, in the background, he heard the roar of flames.

  “AND THIS?” BLANCHE GESTURED TO THE wardrobe. “It goes back to Logres?”

  “Yes.” Nerys laid her hand on it. “When I knew that Sir Ector would be gone, I bound the key to the Castle Gornemant so that if there was need we could go to Sir Perceval. Not that I imagined we would need it.” Her brows knitted. “How much does Morgan know? She could not have chosen a better moment for an attack. Did she know Sir Ector was away?”

  A drip of ancient water ran down Blanche’s neck, but the shiver tingling her spine felt more like fear. “What now?”

  Nerys shook her head. “If the Queen of Gore has found you,
the best I can do is hold the walls for a while. Sooner or later she will find her way back.”

  Blanche swallowed. “You mean that I’ll be sent back to Logres.”

  “We knew the time was coming,” Nerys reminded her.

  In the sudden relief of escape, Blanche could no longer hold back the words.

  “I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to live in that place. The very thought of it makes me feel sick. Nerys, I’m so sorry, but I just can’t.”

  6

  See ye not the narrow road

  By yon lillie leven?

  That’s the road the righteous goes

  And that’s the road to heaven.

  The Queen of Elfland’s Nourice

  IN THE SILENCE AFTER BLANCHE’S WORDS Nerys went down the hallway to the smashed door and stood silhouetted against the last purple and yellow streaks of sunset, risen up on tiptoe with her chin lifted as though sniffing or listening. At last she turned.

  “Come with me.”

  She plunged out the door and Blanche ran to catch up with her. Outside, a cold gale whipped through the trees, tumbling leaves and twigs across the lawn toward the house. Already the rose-bushes by the hammock were stripped of their petals. Beyond, in the orchard, the apple-trees creaked and groaned: the blast almost seemed stronger here. It whipped hair into her face and blinded her, and in that dizzy moment the gale seemed the wind of an incredible speed, as though she was rushing through a tunnel on the viewing-platform of a train. Then, unsettled and breathless, she pushed her hair back and struggled after Nerys.

  The gate at the end of the orchard was open, with a snapped latch and one broken hinge. Nerys wrestled it upright and flung all her weight against it.

  “Help me,” she called back. The wind snatched the words from her mouth, but Blanche understood the sense, if not the purpose, and threw herself against the gate. They strained in the teeth of the wind for a few gasping seconds. Then the gate closed, and the wind was gone.