Under Camelot's Banner

by Sarah Zettel

  Lynet remembered Lord Wellan from other times. He’d been a sturdy ox then. He had a laugh like a goat’s bleating and a demeanor that could be deceptively rough and foolish, until he was ready to finish the argument he’d drawn the listener into. His wife was a stout grandmother, a full hand span taller than her husband. He had hauled her by the hair to throw her out of the high house. He had called her such foul names her ears still burned with shame.

  “God be with you, Lord Wellan,” said the queen as calmly and regally as if she sat on her throne in Camelot.

  Lord Wellan stood there, shifting from foot to foot, uncertain of what to do. It might have been ridiculous, had the old man not looked so genuinely terrified. His keen eyes looked watery and the shadows under them deepened as he lifted his gaze to meet the queen’s. His knees bobbed for a moment, as he tried to keep himself from kneeling. He looked wearily at Lynet, clearly seeing just one more nightmare to plague his home.

  “What are you doing, Majesty?” he whispered.

  The queen blinked. “I am come to visit your king, my lord, who is my neighbor and is liege man to my husband Arthur. What are you doing, Lord Wellan?”

  He was not a small man, but he had hunched in on himself, drawing in small, tired and uncertain. His square-boned hand gripped the edge of the door.

  “You can do nothing here, Majesty,” he whispered. “Please, go before the worst happens.”

  “An army is occupying your castell even now, and it is waiting for a reason to call for reinforcements to begin a siege,” said the queen. “The worst has already happened.”

  “Again.”

  “Why are you doing this, Wellan?”

  For the first time, his voice was steady and held some of the strength Lynet remembered. “He is my king, Majesty.”

  Queen Guinevere nodded once, acknowledging the strength of that simple statement. Mark was the king, and he had held this place under constant assault for long years. He was generous to those who followed him and the families of those who fell in his wars. He understood the power God had granted him, and he used it well, before he had been betrayed and broken. It would be a hard thing to be the one to break such a man again.

  The queen reached out an touched Wellan’s trembling shoulder. “I will enter here, Wellan,” she said gently. “I will come in peace or after you have all fallen to our siege. The season of war is upon us, and we already hold the castell. Do not let it come to that.”

  He licked his lips and glanced at Lynet. Why have you brought her? She heard the question as plainly in his thoughts as she did in her own, and she still did not know the answer. “Will you help him, Majesty?” Wellan asked huskily.

  “I will do all I can, Wellan, I promise.”

  Lord Wellan looked up at the queen who stood so calmly before him and in him Lynet saw a little child, not daring to believe the storm might be ending. Without another word, Wellan stepped aside, and knelt down.

  The queen touched his head briefly in blessing, and with Lynet still holding her banner, she walked into the fortress of Tintagel. Wellan stayed where he was, watching them go.

  It was not a large place. It was almost more watchtower than a place to wait out a siege. From the top of the walls one could see the country for miles around, but those grey walls closed in and the heavy sky hung low. The salt wind whistled around the sharpened tops of the timber palisades, and the ground beneath vibrated from the sea’s pounding. There were no people busy in the yard, no animals rooting or scratching. There were only a few poorly armed men in leather and bronze, watching the queen walk. There was no fire to give warmth and fend off the clutch of wind and weather.

  There was only one doorway to the interior from this little, bare court, and it was dark before them. The queen walked beneath the timbered threshold, and Lynet shuffled behind her.

  It was like walking into a cave. The day’s dim light snuffed out. Straining against the darkness, Lynet saw the dead. She saw her father soaked in his own blood. She saw her mother peaceful on her great bed. She saw Austell, dripping and drowned, his tinner’s rough hand still holding up his crucifix.

  She could not close her eyes. She could not hold them back. They flowed into her, filling her up and blotting out thought. She could only dimly see the sheen of Guinevere’s gold crown as she stepped among them. Tristan and Iseult lay side-by-side, his blood on her hands and mouth. Beside them lay the hawk-faced Goloris that she had seen before. Next to him knelt the black-haired girl Morgaine had been, wailing to Heaven itself. Over him stood another man, a twin to Goloris, but only a shadow within a shadow. It was the hated man. Uther, father of dragons, and with him was a woman, Goloris’s wife, Ygraine, as dark-haired as her daughters. She looked mutely up at him, took his hand, and led him away.

  A tiny fire had been lit in one corner and she saw the hands and eyes of those who huddled around it. They watched, as silent and despairing as the dead.

  Unafraid into this darkness walked Guinevere. She could not see the dead, but she knew they were there. She knew all the deeds of this place, and all the deaths that had brought her here, yet she kept walking. Lynet both hated and loved her for that calm courage.

  Finally, the queen halted. “God be with you, King Mark,” she said.

  The darkness before her stirred. A brown robed monk held a burning torch that illuminated nothing. Lynet’s head pounded with the sight, and the pain ran down her spine, spreading out to her arms, her legs and her feet. The dead waited behind her, so clearly visible. Why could she see all the dead and none of the living?

  “Guinevere,” the darkness said. “You come too late, Guinevere.”

  “Too late for what?”

  “Too late to save this place.”

  “Is this place in danger? I saw only the spring rains readying themselves outside.”

  There was a long pause. “Why is she here?”

  “She is here because I brought her, Mark.”

  “You mock me, Guinevere.”

  “Never.”

  It was wrong that the living were trapped here in this dark and cold. This place belonged to the dead. The living should have sunlight, and warmth. Why was she here? Why had she been brought back to this land at all? There was nothing for her here. Did the queen mean to give her over to the shadows?

  “She is here because you loved her family and her father came before to beg you to take up your place again. She is here because her father, whom you neglected, is dead of murder. You have wronged her Mark, and she deserves your apology, and a price for what you have done.”

  Shadows moved behind her, shadows coming to bear away the dead. Shadows come to stare. In the circle of the monk’s torchlight, Lynet saw something else. It was not the dead alone who made these shadows, but the living and the betrayed as well. They flew about King Mark, draping themselves over him. They weighed him down. They blotted out the torchlight and kept it from his eyes, and he knew it not.

  “Well, Lynet?” he said heavily. The shadows reached out and covered his mouth, seeking to stop his words as they blinded his eyes. “Do you deserve an apology and a price from me?”

  Shadows and darkness, they bound him tight, they blocked the light, they held him on that stone seat so that he could not move. He did not know. No one knew. No one could see but her, and she could not see anything else.

  Lynet’s hands failed her, and the staff with the queen’s banner fell clattering to the floor, instantly lost in the darkness. Lynet took one, lurching step forward, then another and another. The air was too cold and thick and full of salt to breathe. It was drowning her as surely as the shadows smothered Mark. She could see his shrouded form now, as he sat on the ancient seat carved of the same grey stone as the wall. Saw the weight of years and sorrow and shadows pressing him down, reaching inside and squeezing his heart.

  “Shall I tell you what I see, Majesty?” Her voice was too loud, too harsh. She trembled. She felt her own shadows behind her, pushing her forward so that she stumbled agai
n, though she stood still.

  “You can see now, Lynet?” King Mark laughed, a sound as cruel and cold as the smothering stone around them. “Yes, tell me what you see.”

  The brown robed monk held his torch a little higher, and the light spread out, just that much farther, and Lynet saw. “I see a woman with black hair and bright blue eyes. She is young and to you, she is fair beyond the telling of it. She was born in this place, but you never saw her except at Cambryn where she and her sister lived beside the Princess Guinevere.”

  The queen sucked in a breath. “What does Morgause have to do with this?”

  Lynet barely heard the question. There were only the shadows, showing her the whole of the past. “I see her later, in the high house of Tintagel. You and she, alone. She has come to spare your feelings. She knows your passion for her runs strong. She is come to tell you that Arthur looks with favor on her marriage to Lot of Gododdin, and that this is what she wishes for as well. She tries to tell you she is sorry, but it is best for the whole of the Britons, and that anther good woman will be found for him when the Dumonii are free of the Eire-landers.

  “But you do not listen. You cannot hear. You see only that she is to be lost to you, and you cannot let her go. This Lot, this old man from the north, will not take her from you. You forget you are king and that you owe God and your people to be more than a man. You will make her yours, and you knock her down and smother her screams with your hand …”

  “You forced Morgause?” cried the queen.

  “Witch! Devil!” Mark heaved himself to his feet.

  “But you do not say liar, Mark,” observed Queen Guinevere, her voice as hard as iron. “Say she is a liar and I will believe you.”

  Lynet swayed again, tugged this way and that by the current of the shadows Mark’s sudden motion had so disturbed. “You said you were sorry when you were done. You said you would prove a good husband, once you had told Lot and Arthur that she was yours. But she out foxed you. She told Lot herself. In her pain and her pride, she told him what had been done, and he did the thing you could not even contemplate.

  “He believed her. He held her as she cried, and he wanted you dead more than anything in the whole of the world.

  “But you were needed, not then but later. No one else had forgotten you were king. Only you. There was no other Briton who could take and hold Tintagel. Lot allowed his passions to cool, and took his lady to Gododdin, and left you here, alone with your guilt.”

  These two stood out clearly from the rest. At least, Morgause did, looking at her dim and fading lord. Why was she crying? What did a shadow see that brought such grief? But Morgause turned to her and with those honest and wounded blue eyes, she told Lynet she must go on. This was her story too, her own long thread of shadow that uncoiled yet in the world.

  “One year later, they sent you the child. His mother had given him birth and given him a name of sorrow, and sent him to you, for that much her husband could not do. He could not raise the son of his wife’s rape.

  “That is why you could not acknowledge Tristan. Even after Morgause died, you could not tell anyone who his mother had been. And you could not bring yourself to take another wife until you saw Iseult, so beautiful and so valuable to the ones who had held you bound for so long. Then Iseult betrayed you with your own bastard son.”

  He could have reached out and crushed her, swatted her back against the stone. She should have been afraid, but she had no fear left. She had nothing. She was nothing, just another shadow among shadows.

  Mark never raised his heavy hand. “He knew,” Mark whispered. “How he came to know, I cannot tell. Perhaps this place told him, as it tells you. Perhaps the stones and the sea spoke their whispers to his harp strings. But he knew and he meant to bring me down. That was why he seduced my Iseult, That was why he lied to keep you away, Guinevere. He laughed at me and taunted me, before … before …”

  Tristan’s shadow lay beside him, broken, battered and still triumphant, for Mark had fallen into darkness with him. She had been wrong before. It was not he who could reach out and strike her now. It was she who struck at him with her words.

  “That was why you would not have killed Iseult,” she murmured. No shadow showed her this, except perhaps the monk with his torch. “Why you would not kill me.”

  “You saw him. You knew him. He shone like the sun! Man or woman, there was no one he could not make love him …” Mark trembled. He shook his head from side to side. The shadows shivered and tried to cling the more tightly. “She screamed, my Morgause. She pleaded with me to stop and she wept when I would not.”

  But he wept now, tears fresh and salt, and the shadows tried to grab at them, but they could not hold, and with the king’s tears, the shadows began to slip away.

  “The last I saw of her was a look of hatred so pure that I knew she would have struck me dead if she could, and from that came this … this man who walked the world like one of the Roman gods. How could I know what was in his heart? How could I see that this child would be Morgause’s revenge?” He clutched his fists, pressing them against his brow, his anger shaking the air around him.

  “Morgause did not do this thing,” said the queen, her voice so hard and strong there was not a shadow in that place of horns and nightmares that could hold to it. “Do not dare to blame her for your crimes.”

  Mark squinted up at her, trying to see in the darkness. There were only the two shadows now, only Tristan and Iseult, flanking him, sad, bloody and terrible.

  “Will you bring your man to kill me now?” Mark asked. It was meant to be thrown as a barb, but it was a plea. “Will you finally make an end of this?”

  “No, Mark.” The queen shook her head slowly. “It will not go so easy for you. Your penance is this. You will come out of this hole, and you will bring your people with you. You will come to my side, and you will show the world that Tintagel and Camelot stand united. You will host my court in your great hall, and you will come with me to Cambryn and wherever else may be necessary.”

  “I cannot,” he whispered, and he fell back into his seat of shadows. He looked down. Could he see his own dead there? They could see him and they turned their faces up, hopeful, imploring. Come to us. Come to us.

  “You will. You left yourself alive Mark, hoping someone else would punish you, that God would take the burden of choosing from you. Well God is not here. There is only you and I, and you have heard your penance. You may accept it and live, or you may take your own life. The cliffs are just there beyond the wall. No one will stop you. But choose now, Mark. There is no more time.”

  She stood before him, tall and implacable, a figure so bright she banished all other shadows from Lynet’s sight. Queen Guinevere did not waver once while she pronounced the king’s doom, and with each word, he diminished until it seemed there could be nothing left to lose.

  “Help me, Guinevere,” he whispered.

  Again she shook her head. “I have no more help to give you.”

  He sat there, gripping the stone, staring at his liege through the darkness with which he had surrounded himself. The shadows settled once more, like crows on a dead man. He was theirs, he was theirs, and they would have him. She could not breathe. Her body was too heavy. There was too much pain. Lynet could not stand here anymore, and yet she must, or the shadows would have her too. Those were her dead there, and behind his broken father, Tristan turned his bloody face toward her. He smiled his smile of gold and sunlight, and pointed her at for the benefit of Queen Iseult, who had not seen her yet.

  When we have him, we will follow her next.

  Terror stopped her breath in her throat. You are not they, she tried to say back. You are not! You are nightmare and fear. They sleep in God’s hands. You are only here because of Mark and because of me!

  She had no words, but her will rippled the air, and she remembered what it was to be a shape, to take the fear and the guilt, to turn it into strength and give it back. Turn it back, give it back, to look at Ma
rk, and give him back the strength that poured from him like blood from a wound.

  And Mark met her eyes as if there was no darkness between them. Slowly, he stood. Slowly, for he was an old man and he had been sitting still for too long, he came forward, shuffling and stumbling, but still he came. He stood before her, and she could feel his breath, feel his heartbeat. Life moved in him still, and that life was stronger than the shadows.

  “I forgave you, you know,” he murmured. “Long ago. I think even while I … while I threw you back to your father I forgave you. I was not your fault what happened. You loved them both. I pray … I pray you will find a way to forgive me.”

  He took her hands then. She felt that his flesh was calloused and cold, and it made her think of Bishop Austell, how he had held her hands like this, telling her to be strong. And with the stately pace he had used to carry the host to the communion rail, Austell came to her from the ranks of the dead. He made the sign of the cross over her, and gathered Tristan and Iseult to him gently, and lifted them both away.

  Lynet watched them fly, and the current of them caught her own shape that was only loosely anchored by her clay flesh, and she too flew away.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Colan Carnbrea slipped into the high house of Tintagel with the men from Camelot. These men were tired, and the ladies petulant with their worry for their foolish queen away on the fortress island trying to coax out a madman. No one questioned an unfamiliar man who spoke their own language, as long as he came with a strong back and willing hands to shift the loads from the carts to the hall and the outbuildings. Even had he worn his own face, none of these would have known him. He lent hand and shoulder to every task; securing and grooming the horses, pitching the tents for those who could not be fit in the hall for the night, finding a place to store yet one more basket or bale. “You There” was his name today, and he answered to it with a will.