Pendragon's Heir

by Suzannah Rowntree

  PERCEVAL SET OFF THE NEXT MORNING after matins, taking only Rufus, his arms, a bottle of water and a packet of hardtack, and a blanket rolled up behind his saddle. He rode as far as the bridge with Sir Gawain, Sir Lancelot, and Sir Galahad, and halted with them by a meadow still pockmarked with the hoof-prints of the day before. It was a grey, drizzling morning and few of the people had ventured out of doors to wave them goodbye.

  “Well,” said Perceval.

  “I am going north,” said Sir Galahad. The early morning light on his pale face suggested that he had not slept, but a mood of piercing keenness burned in him.

  “I will go straight into Wales,” said Perceval. “That is where I found Carbonek in the autumn.”

  “I mean to wander as the wind blows,” said Sir Lancelot with a smile, and held up a finger to test the air.

  But Sir Gawain put up his hand to shade his eyes and squinted. “Is that Sir Mordred, going west?”

  “Is he going after the Grail?” Perceval asked, with a friendly impulse.

  “Most are,” said Gawain.

  Galahad shook hands with Perceval. “Farewell, fair brother. We will meet again. Goodbye, Sir Gawain. Goodbye, Father.”

  He turned his horse and went trotting up the river. As the road bent, he turned and waved before he went on. And so went the Grail Knight from Camelot.

  Lancelot grinned after him, slapped Gawain on the back, and with a shout sent his horse plunging towards the forest.

  Sir Gawain rubbed his shoulder. “He’ll be my death someday. I expect you to avenge me, when it happens, Perceval.”

  Perceval laughed. “I shall slay him in kind, with thumps on the back.” He paused. “You knew, didn’t you? That Lancelot had a son?”

  “It was no secret. We had forgotten it, out of courtesy.”

  “But I thought there was a penalty for adultery. Burning.”

  “The penalty is only so harsh in the case of certain high ladies, as we read in the laws of the ancient commonwealth. In any case, it is within the King’s discretion to show mercy. Lancelot was judged penitent.”

  “And so it was forgotten.” Perceval frowned. “So easily.”

  “He has lived a blameless life since.”

  Perceval remembered what he had seen in the moonlit garden. “And if I knew that he had not? If I knew that he—or anyone—was to blame for something now? Should that be forgotten, too?”

  Gawain glanced at him. “What! Do you mean that you know any ill of Lancelot?”

  “No. No, sir.”

  “If you think ill of any man, keep your tongue in your head. If you know ill of any man, speak boldly. Pursue the enemies of Logres, wherever you find them, and leave good men in peace. This is no more than you have always done.”

  “That’s true. Well, farewell, Father.”

  Gawain looked at him under grave and shaggy eyebrows. “Come back safely. Find the Grail and your lady, or not, but come back.”

  “And you, fair father.”

  He turned, as Galahad had done, when he stood on the threshold of the forest. But Gawain was already out of sight. Perceval turned back to the road and ambled on, Rufus’s feet squelching on the soft wet road, the chill breeze blowing against his right cheek. He wondered how long it would take to find Carbonek.

  20

  Who will help me? who will love me?

  Heaven sets forth no light above me:

  Ancient memories reprove me,

  Long-forgotten feelings move me,

  I am full of heaviness.

  Rossetti

  NO SUMMER WARMTH FOUND CARBONEK. THAT spring some of the weeds clinging to the rocky soil of the Waste put out stunted flowers, but although the bitter teeth of winter lost their edge, the year passed without sunshine or birdsong into a foggy, watery summer. And Blanchefleur, shivering in her closet one midsummer night, thought that the weather reflected her mood.

  She was glad of all the work that fell on her shoulders in Carbonek. Gone were the days of leisure and tatting. When Naciens was not out on one or another of his errands, she read with him in languages, philosophy and the sciences. But it was her apprenticeship to Dame Glynis, the castle’s housekeeper, that drained every dreg of her strength. After a long day shadowing the old lady from laundry to infirmary, fumbling with distaff and spindle in the solar, candle-making in the kitchen or poultice-brewing in the infirmary, she should have been glad each evening to take the long trudging journey up to her closet in the Grail Chapel.

  But instead, when she had pulled the covers up to her nose and tucked her feet into the hem of her smock, there was all night to think and worry. Months of work and study had already passed since her meeting with Morgan in Sarras. But after dark, all this faded away, and the past crowded closer than the present.

  Once again she closed her eyes and relived those hectic moments inside Morgan’s memory, the sudden, queasy shock almost like fainting that took her from waking in Sarras to waking in Carbonek with a stomach clenched in horror.

  She had thought Logres a dreamworld. She had been wrong. For the first time in her life she was really awake. No longer were all her senses drowned in sleep. Now delight spun like a dance, worry gripped like a fist, fear cut like a knife. Could she stand and not fall on this trembling earth? Could she drink this wine and not stagger?

  And Arthur the King, as lightning, fell from heaven… “It is a lie,” she whispered to the empty dark of her closet, just as she had that first night. But the aching cold knotted tighter and heavier in her gut. What if Arthur—that giant looming behind all the history and legend of Britain—what if he really was, as Morgan claimed, guilty of such gruesome things?

  “It is impossible,” she said aloud, remembering the gracious lord she had met in Sarras. Then a voice in her ear murmured, “But such a man would know how to dissemble.” Implacably, her doubt built a gallows on which to hang him: Perhaps she was not really his daughter. Did the King of Logres think not? Had he sent Morgan to kill her, to dispose of an imposter without sparking war? Was he capable of calling her “dear-heart” while measuring the time till his assassin arrived?

  She rolled from one aching side to the other, trying to smooth out the knot between her shoulder-blades. She was awake and the wind between the worlds had carried her, like Comus’s Lady, into the blind mazes of a tangled wood. And yet she had known. She had known that Providence was a lion in ambush.

  Only she had never imagined a thing like this.

  It was, oddly enough, the memory of Perceval that shook the suspicions out of her. No one in his right mind would send Perceval, however young and unproved, to guard anyone intended to die. And she laughed at the thought.

  “It is a lie,” she said to herself, each night alone with the glimmer of starlight and Grail-light shining like Hope through her closet window. But that did not keep what she had seen from gnawing on her mind. There must be a grain of truth at the bottom of this bitter cup. What was it, the one truth on which Morgan had built her lie?

  Tonight she rubbed her goosefleshed arms and considered telling Nerys what had happened in Sarras. But these days Nerys was seen only in passing; some business of her own kept her from both the quiet industry of the solar and the chatter and bustle of the Great Hall at meal-times.

  And if she found her? If she asked a moment of Nerys’s time, and found a corner in which to breathe new life into Morgan’s lies, or dare to name such crimes as murder, incest, goetia?

  She shuddered again. Ah, they were lies, and not to be dignified with credence.

  Inside, Blanchefleur relived the past in Sarras. Outside, seasons wheeled away and the landscape changed as the castle faded from one place to another.

  Wherever it went Carbonek took desolation with it, from gorsy moor to silent fen, from splintered pine-forest to blackened and blasted garden. And yet despite the drear surroundings and the endless shortage of food and fuel, the castle-dwellers themselves yielded to no melancholy. It was difficult to pine away in the company of Dame
Glynis or Branwen.

  One midsummer evening, gathered with some others around the chess-board in the hall, Blanchefleur was listening to the squire Heilyn debate a theory of polity with one of the younger knights when Nerys came and laid a hand on her arm and said, “Come with me.”

  Blanchefleur followed reluctantly. “What’s the matter, Nerys?” she asked when they had left the others out of earshot.

  Nerys turned to her. In the months since they had come to Carbonek, the fay’s agelessness had grown more evident, as if the veil that shrouded her was burning away under some influence stronger than herself. Blanchefleur shied away from looking into her eyes, which had become windows into vast cosmic spaces, never as unearthly as now. Her words were fewer these days but heavier, and today they fell like crushing weights from an immense height:

  “There is a lady dying who wishes to see you.”

  Blanchefleur tried to think who Nerys could mean. In Carbonek, no one ever seemed to fall ill.

  “Her name is Elaine,” Nerys added. And Blanchefleur remembered King Pelles’s daughter, who had been the Grail Maiden before herself, whom she had never seen.

  “Oh,” she said softly. “Of course I’ll come.”

  Nerys led up the stair toward the big, warm rooms on the south side of the castle. “I have attended her often in her illness,” she said, and Blanchefleur wondered if that explained the fay’s intensified otherness. “She is no longer herself, and her humour is bitter. But she wishes for you.”

  Nerys paused outside the door of a room not far down the corridor from the solar. Her tone was oddly pleading. “Be kind to her, Blanche.”

  “Of course.”

  Elaine of Carbonek’s chamber was as shabbily furnished as any other room in Carbonek, but clearly every available comfort had been provided. There was a fire in the hearth burning to fend off the cold even now in midsummer. Dim tapestries lined the walls, and somewhere, rugs had been found to cover the floor. Chests marched against the wall, a heavy curtain shrouded the window, and the canopied bed was covered with a new blanket.

  One of the other women of the castle, the wife of one of the knights, rose from the bedside with a murmured word, bent gracefully, like a streamer in the wind, and left them. Nerys beckoned Blanchefleur to the bed.

  Elaine of Carbonek was forty, maybe, with a sharp pale face nearly as white as her pillow. Against that deathly pallor, the shadows of her purple-rimmed eyes and her grey-streaked dark hair sprang into violent contrast. Blanchefleur, seeing how desperately ill the woman was, did not see the dislike in her eyes until Elaine said, in a soft husky voice like an accusation:

  “You are Guinevere’s daughter. You have her face.”

  “Yes,” Blanchefleur said. “Did you know her?”

  “No.” Something too hard and sharp to be a smile crossed her lips. “But I know her face. Come closer and let me see you.”

  With an inarticulate fear Blanchefleur looked at Nerys standing like a tombstone by the end of the bed. Nerys lowered her head. Blanchefleur moved closer to Elaine, leaning forward a little, and forced herself to look into those frankly, coldly searching eyes.

  “I cannot tell,” Elaine said at last, with a frown. “Perhaps there is a little of him in the jaw.”

  Blanchefleur shot another helpless glance at Nerys and said, “A little of whom?”

  Nerys opened her mouth to say something, but Elaine saw it and forestalled her: “The Knight of the Lake. They say he’s your sire.”

  The tone, and the look that crossed her face—a curious mixture of gloating and despair—stung Blanchefleur into familiar words: “It’s a lie!”

  Elaine smiled. “Is it? Lancelot betrayed the King of Carbonek. Why should he hesitate to betray the King of Logres?”

  Blanchefleur’s first impulse, as in Sarras, was to turn on her heel and leave, but then she remembered that Nerys had asked her to be kind. Also Elaine was not Morgan; she had been the Grail Maiden, too, once.

  So she swallowed the jagged lump of anger in her throat and said: “Pardon my hasty words. Please, I have no wish to rake the past.”

  Elaine frowned. “And yet you are all too ready to speak in ignorance.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Then listen to me.” Elaine went to struggle to her elbow, but sank back gasping. Nerys moved forward to prop the dying woman up a little higher. Elaine looked at Nerys as the fay lifted her in strong arms and laid her back on the pillows; the hostility faded out of her eyes. “Nerys,” she murmured. “You will outlive us both. What do you want with years? If I could only take some of yours!”

  “If I could only give them,” Nerys said.

  She retreated to her former station and Elaine, turning her head, looked at Blanchefleur. She lifted a finger to point. “I bore the Grail Knight to Sir Lancelot. And I did it wearing that face.”

  Blanchefleur recoiled. “How?” she asked, before she could stop herself or think better of it. But Elaine had already gone on, as if she had not even heard the question.

  “I was happy until he came, wandering through the Waste to Carbonek,” she said. “Once I saw him, my peace of mind was gone. But he, poor fool, he loved the Queen of Logres. It was wrong of him, and he knew it. Then it was said that from us would come the Grail Knight, the deliverer we had all so long awaited. He was rightfully mine: mine, not hers…

  “I knew he meant to leave us, and my heart was already breaking. So I went to the Castle of Case, and the witch of Case gave me aid…I said I knew your face, maiden. I saw it in the mirrors of Case, when Brisen had clothed me in the form of Guinevere. How I hated that ashen hair and those pale-blue eyes! I could cheerfully have taken my nails to them. But I knew my revenge would be far more subtle a thing.”

  Blanchefleur turned away. “I have heard enough,” she said. But Elaine’s voice murmured on.

  “Did she hear of it, far off in Camelot? Did she hear how it dawned upon him what he had done—when everything was over, and he saw my true face? Or how the realisation drove him mad, and he fled under the knowledge of the manifold betrayal of every trust he had borne? Faithless to God, to King, to lady, to host, to me! And I was glad, because he would not love me.

  “I could never find my own way back to Carbonek. But how else would the Grail Knight have come into the world? My son was born, and grew stout and strong, like his father, who found his mad way back to us in Case. We drew him back to health, but he could never stomach the sight of me. He went away as soon as he could sit a horse. When my son was a little older I gave him to a monastery for his raising, and Naciens brought me here.”

  “You were penitent, then,” Blanchefleur said, struggling not to show her loathing. But Elaine’s mouth tightened with resentment: in the flickering candlelight, Blanchefleur saw for the first time that there were deep stubborn lines scored from nose to mouth.

  “Never! I was like the Lady Eve, cast out of my home for a sin Fate demanded of me.”

  Blanchefleur rose to her feet. “How can you say such a thing?” she said, fighting to keep her voice down. “There would have been another way. There is always another way.” She remembered something Perceval had said once, a long time ago. “A thing that cannot be done without dishonour is not worth doing. If we are citizens of Heaven—”

  She started as Nerys’s warning hand fell on her shoulder. In the tight-stretched silence Elaine smiled bitterly.

  “You are a proper Grail Maiden, damsel. I hope you may never see the underside of life, for it may strip you of your comforts. At least I have seen the daughter of Lancelot before I died. Take her away, Nerys; she tires me.”

  They left, Blanchefleur choking back her rage with clenched teeth, Nerys apparently without expression or emotion. The fay closed the door after them and stood in the shadowed passage for a moment with her head bent. At last, when no sound came from the room they had left, she lifted her head and murmured: “Alas! I may never die, but I am better prepared for it than she. Oh, if I could take her place�
�”

  All the indignation went out of Blanchefleur in a rush. “Oh, Nerys! You are so good, and I am so…very…angry.”

  Nerys sighed. A breath of cold air drifted down the passage and she lifted her hand to guard the candle she carried. “If I had known what she meant to say, I would have spared you.”

  “But it’s true, what she told me. About the Grail Knight.”

  “Yes.”

  “Could she be right then?” Blanchefleur grasped Nerys by the elbows, relieved to speak freely on this, at least. “About Lancelot? If a false Guinevere—then why not the true Guinevere?”

  “I—”

  “You think so too!” choked Blanchefleur, and remembered her worst nightmares about Arthur.

  Nerys spoke coolly. “Look at me.” Her ageless eyes, like abyssal depths, dizzied Blanchefleur. “I think, if it came to that, it would depend upon the true Guinevere.” She smiled. “Take the candle. I must go back to Elaine.”

  Blanchefleur began climbing to the Grail Chapel, but halfway up the stair the heart went out of her, and she sank down onto the steps. Perceval had once called her the true heir of Logres. What if she wasn’t? Until now, despite all the doubts that weighed her down, she had been able to brush the thought away like a nightmare upon waking. Now she wondered. What would the King do if he knew? What would Perceval do? Would they feel deceived?

  A tear slid down her cheek, and then another. She was crying. She was crying for Logres, because she wanted to belong here and she was afraid she did not.

  She felt a numb wonder. When had this happened? When had Logres become her home?

  And why, in the midst of all its intrigue and scandal, did she look to Logres for all her hopes and desires?

  She was still sitting on the stair when she heard steps coming up from below, light tripping feet that suggested Branwen. As they came nearer, Blanchefleur rose silently to her feet and continued to climb.

  “Oh! Blanchefleur! There you are!” Branwen’s breathless voice broke upon her. “Where have you been? King Pelles is asking for you.”