Under Camelot's Banner

by Sarah Zettel

  “I do not think they are minded to attack us, my lord,” he continued. “They are more interested in hiding from their king.”

  Lancelot scratched his chin, eyeing the hole, the ladder and the stone. “That’s as may be, but we will put a guard on this place anyway. Perhaps our Lady Lynet will be so good as to tell us if this rabbit warren has any other runs.” He glanced over his shoulder. “But I think our queen would command your attention first.” He smiled fondly as he spoke and Lynet felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck in sudden warning. Her brittle mind began to break open yet again, and she forced herself into motion before the blurring of her vision could coalesce into some unnatural sight.

  With Sir Lancelot beside them, Gareth and Lynet returned to the litter where the queen waited. Queen Guinevere listened gravely to what they had to say, ripples of anger passing repeatedly across her visage, although she made no move to interrupt Lynet’s recitation.

  When Lynet was finished, the queen glowered across the headland to the fortress island. “Is there nothing left of you, Mark?” she murmured in the Dumonii tongue. “Where did the man I knew go?”

  “What now, Majesty?” asked Sir Lancelot.

  “We go on,” said Queen Guinevere calmly.

  Sir Lancelot scowled at the distant island. “We will not gain entrance to that fortress with what we have here.” It clearly pained the knight to admit this, but it was a plain fact.

  “You will not,” replied the queen. “But I will. Move on!” she cried out to the procession waiting behind her.

  And so, they had no choice but to mount their horses once more and obey.

  The fortress island was not a true island, for a narrow spit of land connected it to the shore. But this land bridge rendered the place only slightly more accessible. The pass was a narrow track that sloped sharply down to the sea between two towering cliffs. In better times those cliffs would be well patrolled, as they provided excellent views of both land and sea for miles. Lancelot set the men to watch all around the procession as it descended the steep, narrow way. The watchmen looked up and about nervously, but they saw nothing but sky, sea and birds. Neither did the runners Lancelot sent out before and behind. There was no reassurance in this. It only made the unnatural silence press more closely about their ears, until the rushing of the sea began to fill it in. The sea where King Mark said he would drown his people. The sea that had birthed her mother, and the fae cousins who would murder her if she gave them the chance.

  Only the queen betrayed no hint of worry, but rode in her chair with her head erect and her hands still.

  Once they reached the shore, they must climb again up a the steep, twisting rocky way that lead out to the island. They could see the fortress rising above them as grey and craggy as the cliffs that held it up.

  Tintagel’s fortress was in no way a welcoming place. It was a place of first defence from the sea and last defence from land. Lynet had never lived there. No one who had a choice would. King Mark and Queen Iseult’s high house stood within the castell, just as Cambryn’s was. That Mark had retreated to this place was one more sign how badly things had gone.

  The narrow strip of stoney beach opened before them. The bright blue waters rolled back and forth, washing the sands. Lynet looked at the foam-laced waves and heard them mutter, telling the morverch she was come, calling them to lift up their heads and reach out for their revenge. Then she saw something else. She saw a man’s body stretched out on the stones, blood staining his golden hair black.

  Tristan! she heard a woman cry, and knew no one else heard that broken voice.

  Lynet made herself look up as those around her did, straining to see the palisades and parapets of the fortress above, and for the first time, they saw the forms of men looking back down at them. One, two, three, four, silhouettes black against the grey sky. They did not move up there. They just looked down, counting those who counted them.

  “Well, Majesty?” said Lancelot resting his fist against his hip. “What shall we do?”

  But Queen Guinevere regarded the heights mildly for only a moment before speaking. “You will take the men back up the cliffs a safe distance,” she said. “Set what watch you think good.” The queen held out her hands for her ladies to help her down from her chair. “The lady Lynet and I will go to greet King Mark.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “What!” The word rose in a staggered chorus from a dozen throats. More than one voice cried out wordlessly and men and ladies both crossed themselves. Lynet felt her face turn white but found she could make no sound. Gareth had already taken a step closer to her, and she saw on his face the last thing she expected — anger, pure and plain.

  “Your Majesty, I cannot permit this,” cried Sir Lancelot over the din. “Even if it were not madness, the king will have my head when he hears.”

  “I will make it plain to him that you were carrying out my commands,” replied Guinevere. She had already ascended beyond all their objections. Lynet had seen Laurel like this often enough to know that not one of the verbal bolts shot now would reach her. She was already gone. And she would take Lynet with her.

  “Majesty …” Sir Lancelot began again.

  “Peace, my Lord Lancelot,” Queen Guinevere held up her hand. “Listen to me.” She lifted her voice, and Lynet saw shadows flit dark around her veil, but not one of them resolved. She meant this to be something the whole crowd of them heard, and to use the strength of her own words to chase back those formless fears and ghosts of memory. “Mark has lost much of his reason, but his men who are there with him have not. If they see two women approach them, alone and on foot, they will hesitate long before attacking, perhaps even before telling him what they see. If they see a force of fighting men, they may believe whatever tales of invasion and betrayal have been flooding this countryside.”

  “And if he takes you hostage rather than simply killing you?” inquired the knight. It seemed to Lynet that Sir Lancelot was attempting to shock the queen. If so, he was disappointed, for she remained impassive.

  “Should that come to pass, my lord, you will have the satisfaction of not only being right when your queen was wrong, but you will have the chance to make such a daring rescue that the bards will sing about it for a thousand years.” Queen Guinevere gave him a small smile. “And I would suggest in advance of this that you send at least some of our men, and all my ladies to the high house. It looks sore neglected and in need of a woman’s firm hand.”

  The knight and the queen stared at each other for a long time. Then, Sir Lancelot shrugged, as if it made no difference at all to him and strode into the disorder that had been the royal procession.

  “You heard Her Majesty!” he bawled. “We withdraw! Turn around you sluggards! I want us back up those cliffs before dark!”

  The mounted men took up the orders, expanding them as they rode along the clot of carts and men-at-arms. The soldiers themselves shrugged and grumbled and set about obeying, because there was nothing else they could do. Sir Ioan, the last knights in the company approached Sir Lancelot who faced him stonily. Sir Ioan retreated without comment, but not without many a worried glance toward the queen.

  Queen Guinevere’s ladies, however, were not so willing to let her march into folly. They flung themselves weeping at her feet, tearing at their hair and grabbing her hands and clutching her hems. One by one Guinevere raised them up, speaking soft words of comfort to each. Lynet paid them little attention. She already understood this was going to happen, and that she would climb that narrow way beside the queen. Her attention was all on Gareth.

  He was the only still figure in the boiling crowd that was the ruins of the royal procession. Every voice was raised in question, in curse or exclamation. Instructions and the reasons for them had to be repeated two and three times before they were believed. But Gareth did not move, nor did he answer any who shouted up at him, not even Lionel. He just stared at Lynet, reaching out to her with his gaze, trying to beg her to take care, to
let her know he wanted to sweep her up beside him and gallop away from this other woman who had suddenly gone so terribly mad, and yet still had the power to command legions.

  Behind him, Lynet saw herself. She stood there, in her modest finery, looking up at him and knew this was what he had seen when he had taken her hand to lay over his heart. It was a shadow already and stood with a host of other shadows. She saw two dim silhouettes standing before each other, speaking unheard words the thought of which made Gareth’s heart both cringe and swell with anger. Behind these waited two other shadows, blurred by time and distance yet made clear in a different way by love, of — a brown haired man turning toward the black-haired, blue-eyed woman she had seen with the queen. He smiled at her, a smile of love and delight as he took her hand, and she returned that smile with silent feeling matching his measure for measure.

  With all this behind him, Gareth stared at her.

  Mounted again, Lancelot brought his horse alongside his squire’s, saying something. Gareth blinked and only slowly looked to his knight. Lancelot looked over his shoulder at Lynet standing there alone. His lip curled up in a sneer that might have been for the queen as much as for her, and cuffed Gareth on the shoulder. Lynet turned her back on him, so he could listen to his knight and do what he must, and so she would not have to watch him ride away from her.

  “Lady?” It was Lionel. The tall thin squire, came up beside her carrying the staff that held Guinevere’s banner. “The queen has said you are to carry this, if you are able.”

  “Thank you, Lionel. Would you … Would you tell Gareth I begged him to remember my promise, and his?”

  Lionel bowed. “I will, my lady.” He was plainly curious, but it was just as plain that like the rest of them, he was frightened out of his senses by this turn of events and did not have the wit or will left to ask many questions.

  Lynet moved to Guinevere’s side. The sea winds snapped and rattled the swan banner overhead. The staff in her hand was heavy and warm from Lionel’s grip. It wobbled in her hands. Her aching arms strained to hold it even now. It would be unbearably heavy by the time they reached the top of those towering cliffs.

  Sir Tristan’s corpse lay on the sands, bloody and staring at the sky. Queen Iseult draped herself over him, shedding salt tears to run down to the waves that rolled endlessly in and out.

  “Lady Lynet,” called the queen.

  Lynet drew her shoulders back. She shifted her grip on the banner’s staff, as a man might on a pole arm and walked to stand before Queen Guinevere. All the queen’s ladies stood arrayed around her. They watched Lynet as she approached and made her curtsey. Some saw her through veils of poison anger, other with mixtures of pity and fear. Lynet let all this brush past her as if she had been a shadow herself.

  “Your Majesty,” she said to the queen in the Dumonii language. “I understand why others call this mad.”

  Queen Guinevere’s mouth twitched into a hint of a smile. “As do I,” she answered in that same language. “But we will go on despite that.” She lifted her gaze to the cliff side, measuring its height and seeing that now they had only three witnesses overhead, and that as she watched one of these vanished. “You will have to show me the way, Lynet.”

  “As Your Majesty commands.”

  Holding the swan banner before her, Lynet led the queen to the foot of the rocky cliff.

  There was only one way to show her. A narrow, steep and crooked track had been dug by generations of hands into the cliff face of the island. No horse could climb this way. Armed men would have had to go single file. The sea hammered at the stone and the vibration of it thrummed through Lynet like the low note of a single harp string.

  Sir Tristan had played the harp so beautifully. Once he had played for her alone, and she remembered how she perched on the edge of her stool, her eyes opened as wide as they would go. She drank in the music and the smiles of that golden man who called her his friend and the keeper of what was most dear to him.

  She wondered if anyone could see the shadows that followed her.

  The banner staff was a huge weight now, and it slipped again and again in her hands as she trudged upward. Her soft slippers were no good for this sort of climb and shifted dangerously underfoot. Pain wracked her poorly shod feet, and burned in her still-healing arms. The winds grabbed at her veils and skirts, trying to pull her yet further off balance. It was no comfort at all that the queen whose idea this had been struggled as much as she.

  One step at a time they climbed. They breathed on the path’s short level stretches. They grit their teeth for the steep lengths that were worse in some ways than climbing a ladder would have been. Lynet could now see the mainland easily. They had climbed above those other cliffs. Most of their former procession still struggled up the narrow track toward the castell, but some had ridden ahead, and stationed themselves to watch over the progress and safety of those who followed. One rider stood out from the others, alone on the rolling green clifftops. Lynet stared, hoping to see that it was Gareth, but it was not. She could make the bright red hide of the horse. That man was Sir Lancelot, and from the lift of his head she saw he watched them as well.

  She thought of those silhouettes behind Gareth, of the queen and the knight in the darkness, their words to each other unheard, as their faces were unseen. The anger and fear Gareth had felt rolled over her, and she knew precisely what betrayal it was he feared the two of them had undertaken together.

  Could it be? This struggling woman gambling now with her own life as well as for the land they both shared. Could she have betrayed her husband with that blunt, sneering man who watched them now?

  If Lynet looked back now, would she see Iseult looking on her sister queen with sympathy?

  The very thought robbed Lynet of her breath. She stumbled, and below her the waves hissed in anticipation. She leaned against the rough rock cliff, heedless of how it would snag her delicate clothing.

  “Are you all right, Lynet?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. It cannot be I’m aiding another cuckolder. Not again.

  “Lynet, look at me.” The queen’s hands grasped her shoulders.

  Throw myself into the sea. The morverch will at least be quick. Lynet opened her eyes to see the queen leaning close, searching her for hurt or fever. Reflexively, Lynet looked over her shoulder. Only one shadow waited there now. It was Arthur, the tall, proud greying man who Lynet had last seen standing on the steps of Camelot’s keep, watching regally as their procession started away. He watched Guinevere now, suffused with a love that was strong and gentle, and absolutely secure. There was no one else waiting for her.

  “You must stay with me,” called the queen over the roar of the ocean and the endless wind.

  Lynet used the banner staff as a support to push her away from the cliff. “Yes, Majesty,” she said, drinking in a deep breath of harsh salt air. “All the way to the end.”

  There was nothing to be said. They turned together and they continued up that steep and jagged path.

  At last, when Lynet’s legs shook and her feet cracked and cringed each time she set them down, they found themselves standing amid the heather and stones of the clifftop. The wind blew harsh and hard and the leaden sky overhead seemed so close Lynet wondered that the staff’s tip did not tear the clouds. A few yards ahead waited the black-timbered gates and unforgiving grey walls of Tintagel’s fortress.

  Like so much that belonged to the Dumonii, this had been many things in the past. It had begun as a monetary, she remembered being told, before it was realized what an unassailable fortress it was made. God’s house and all his servants were moved to another cliff, and these walls were raised to protect chieftains and their more earthly concerns. Bishop Austell had had his learning at that monetary, Lynet remembered a little dazedly, as she gazed across at those other walls. She wondered if they had said mass for him there. She would ask later. If she lived. Her vision sparked and wavered, and her mind was too weary to hold the shadow plays back. She
saw a man in a robe of the roughest wool hold aloft a wooden cross and give thanks to God. She saw a wizened brown people clinging to the cliffside, wearing clothing that was little more than skins and strings while a storm howled around them.

  She saw a man, a man with a long face and a hooked nose looking out from the palisades. A bronze torque flashed at his throat, and he watched an army on the opposite headland, and in all that army, he saw one man whose torque was gold and he hated that other man with a passion that robbed him of reason. The hook-nosed man was named Goloris, and the man he watched for was named Uther who had the gall to name himself the father of dragons. Goloris turned from the palisades and went down to his wife and daughters.

  “Come, Lynet,” said the queen. “We are not done yet.”

  Queen Guinevere smoothed her sleeves in an incongruous and useless gesture and started down the track to the black-timbered gates. Two black haired girls ran behind her, laughing and holding each others hands. Lynet trudged behind them all up to the gates. It was ludicrous, standing here, exhausted, dishevelled, arms and feet burning with pain and her legs so weakened that the next gust of sea wind might blow her over. Yet, here she stood with the queen’s banner flying proudly and indifferently over her head.

  Queen Guinevere lifted her chin. “King Mark!” she called out in a voice that carried itself high and strong on the battering wind. “Mark! The High Queen Guinevere is come to your house! Lord Wellan! Lord Peder! Master Hovan! Open for your queen!”

  There is no chance she’ll be heard, thought Lynet with an unsteady mix of hope and fear. They’d be left standing here out among the wind and shadows, and have to turn around and walk all that long, treacherous way down again. She did not dare look out at the water. She would cry out if she saw the morverch waiting.

  Then, slowly, impossibly, the little door that waited beside the gates creaked open. In the gap between door and arch stood a small man. His head had long since gone bald, but his beard and grey moustache flowed rich and full. His blue tunic was belted with knots of bronze and blue enamel and hung down to his knees over his brown trousers, but both had seen hard use of late, and were rumpled and stained as if he had had no others to wear over the past days.