by Jay Ruud
“Your Grace,” Merlin had said as we were finally able to approach Mark at the feast in the great hall of Camelot following the induction ceremony three days earlier. “Please accept my most sincere condolences on the loss you have suffered.” Leave it to Merlin to be as ambiguous as possible with regard to which particular loss Mark may have in fact been feeling most at the time.
Mark had nodded in response, and replied vaguely, “I appreciate your sentiments, my lord Merlin,” as he began to turn away.
“And,” Merlin had drawn the word out as Mark took a step away from us, then turned back with a mildly quizzical look to allow Merlin to finish. “Please allow me to introduce one of your own countrymen: Gildas of Cornwall, trusted squire to King Arthur’s nephew, Sir Gareth of Orkney.”
This news seemed to pique Mark’s interest somewhat, and he turned to me, offering his hand to allow me to kiss his ring of office. “Indeed? I don’t believe I am aware of your family, Gildas. Who is your father?”
I bowed slightly and, with a faintly stammering voice, reported that my father was an armor maker, the best in Launceston, providing mail, helmets, and weapons for several noble families in the area. It was through those connections that my father had been able to secure me a position in Camelot, beginning as page in the queen’s household before obtaining my current status as Gareth’s squire.
“Ah,” Mark had said condescendingly. “Where would knights be without their little armor makers, after all? But your father must be proud, surely. For look at how far you have risen in the world! Have you been back to see him since you left Cornwall?”
“I have not, your Grace. I do write my parents often, however.” If by often you mean twice a year or so. The gulf that had opened up between us was a problem, since the details of my world were so foreign to them. The fact that both my parents were illiterate was also a problem; when I did write them, they would have to find someone else to read them the letter. But how could I say this to the king? Their lives were as remote from his as mine was from theirs.
Merlin took advantage of the pause my awkwardness opened up by introducing the subject of our investigation. “You may have heard, my lord, that the queen has commanded Gildas and me to look into the deaths of your wife and nephew.”
Mark’s head snapped up with surprise and sudden interest. “She has done what? What does she expect you to find?”
“The truth, my lord. She only wants us to find the truth,” I answered, looking up at Merlin, who lifted his left eyebrow at me. He didn’t like to encourage my questioning of interviewees when he was the one conducting the investigations.
King Mark snorted. “The truth? The truth is that they’re dead. I don’t know what you can add to that. He died of a wound got in battle. She died of a broken heart. Why should there be any question?”
“We,” Merlin looked down at me to keep me still, “have reason to believe that it is not that simple. But aside from that, many are blaming Sir Tristram’s wife, Isolde of the White Hands, and saying she killed Tristram with her sharp tongue. Her father Duke Hoel is disturbed by this talk, and wants her exonerated. And finally, to be frank, your Grace…there is talk that you yourself may be behind these deaths.”
I moved back a step or two. Only Merlin could have thought this was a good way to approach a king. But Mark only gave Merlin a grim kind of smile. “There have been times that I could have killed both of them. When I wanted to kill both of them. When I first learned of their betrayal, the rage I felt within was uncontrollable. I couldn’t think straight. I wanted them to suffer as I was suffering. I put Isolde through the trial by ordeal of walking on hot coals—somehow she was not burned and the court was forced to find her innocent. When they fled my court into the wild I pursued them, but when I found them there in the woods in their love grotto, sleeping with Tristram’s sword between them, the rage drained from me. Do you know what I finally realized?”
Still a bit cautious, I slowly shook my head. Merlin raised his considerable eyebrows.
“They were doing the best they could. I mean, why else was that sword there? Sometimes people’s best is just not acceptable. But in this case, I felt that it was. As long as the affair ended there. I took Isolde back and Tristram went into exile. And married the Breton girl. That is where the story should have ended.”
“But it didn’t end there,” Merlin stated the obvious. “So do you have any idea who might have wanted Tristram dead? Or La Belle Isolde?”
“You mean besides myself?” King Mark’s smile became a bit more sardonic.
“I harbor no suspicions at to that,” Merlin demurred . “But you must surely understand that others might. One of the things we are trying to do is belay any such rumors, and the only way to do that is to uncover the complete truth about the affair. Let me remind you that not long since, we found that the lady Elaine, one of the queen’s ladies in waiting, was a spy of yours, and had conspired with others to implicate Sir Tristram in the rape of a peasant girl. Do you deny that?”
I winced at Merlin’s word choice but watched Mark intently for his reaction. Finally, he shrugged and said, “Spy is your word. She was an agent of the Cornish crown, and would report to me the latest doings of King Arthur’s court. Any plot against Sir Tristram she engaged in on her own authority, not mine.”
“I daresay,” said Merlin, sounding unconvinced.
“As for Tristram’s enemies, there were probably dozens in my court who saw Tristram as a rival. He was my nephew, and so I made him one of my closest advisors. It was Tristram I sent to battle Marholt when the Irish refused to pay their tribute. It was Tristram I sent to sue for the hand of La Belle Isolde—that, of course, did not turn out so well.” The sardonic smile again. “But these favors made him something of a prima donna in the court, and many were jealous of him, They railed against him to me behind his back. But that all ceased when he went to Brittany. I can’t think that any of them would have had the courage or the ingenuity to arrange for a murder by long distance.”
“Are there names you might give us? Anyone particularly fervent in his animosity toward Tristram?”
“How much time have we got? There are dozens I could probably name. But I can’t think of anyone who particularly stands out in that respect. Suffice it to say that if a man was a member of my court, he harbored envy of and sometimes hatred for Sir Tristram. But there are too many to list here and now.”
There was no more to be gotten from the king, and we had let him go. When I told all this to Dinadan, he nodded. “The old bird’s right, I’ll say that for him,” he offered. “I was in that court dozens of times, and you could cut through the hatred with a knife. Gossips and backstabbers all over the place. Tristram couldn’t stand it,” Dinadan shuddered. “Even Sagramore, as it worked out, turned on the poor bugger.”
“So he did,” I muttered, thinking back to Sagramore’s part in the plot to frame Sir Tristram in the case of Mistress Bess of Caerleon, now married to Colgrevaunce. “And you? Why did you stay with him?”
“Ah,” Dinadan waved the question away. “Everybody needs a friend, right? Well he was mine. And he sure needed me, you know? Always a loner, which is not so bad in itself—I mean, Sir Lamorak was always something of a loner too, from what I hear. But Tristram brooded. His very name means sorrow, doesn’t it? He needed somebody to cheer him up.”
“As I recall, your constant jibes weren’t always cheering,” I told him.
“Purely for his own good. He took himself too seriously all the time. I liked to remind him of how absurd his whole situation was, right? ‘Thought havin’ a go at your uncle’s wife was a good idea, did ya? How’s that workin’ out for you, then?’ sort of thing, ya know? Anyway,” Dinadan grew more serious. “Tristram was a great knight. He made me a much better knight by giving me an example of what that looked like. Of course,” he added with a gleam in his eye, “he believed that his love for Isolde g
ave him his courage and his nobility. He was always talking about making himself ‘worthy’ of his beloved by performing great and noble deeds. Well, you can only take so much of that before you need some fresh air, if you know what I mean. Noble deeds are a good in themselves. I performed some of my own while I was with him. How else could I be worthy to be his companion?”
I felt myself turning a bit red since, of course, the only reason I wanted to be a knight at all was to be worthy of the lady Rosemounde. Not only to impress her and to win her love, but now also to impress her father and make him think me worthy. But I didn’t say anything to Dinadan, whose motive for his own deeds did not seem so very different, after all. Though he didn’t seem to recognize it. But at that point I glanced around and saw my lord Merlin approaching us from the After Castle.
“Ah, there you are!” He cried. He seemed in particularly high spirits, his long hair and beard stirring in the sea breeze. “Marvelous day, isn’t it?” He took a deep breath. “Yes, the salt air in the lungs. It’s good to be at sea again. I haven’t been on board a ship since the days of the Irish wars, back at the beginning of Arthur’s reign.”
“Oh yes,” Dinadan responded. “I wasn’t a part of the Table yet, but I remember stories of those times.” He winked at me surreptitiously. “They said you proved yourself the greatest magician in the world in Ireland, when you conjured the Giant’s Circle aboard Arthur’s fleet of ships and then brought it to Logres to set it up on Salisbury Plain. Greatest feat of magic in history, they all said.”
Merlin snorted. “Stuff and nonsense, Dinadan. No magic was involved in that project. Now, greatest feat of mechanical engineering in history, that I might believe.”
“You say what now?” Dinadan responded, somewhat lost.
“It wasn’t wizardry but winches that moved those stones, you great lunkhead. Look,” Merlin turned and pointed to the mast amidships, next to which stood a fairly large windlass. It was a device made up of a horizontal cylinder that sailors turned by a large crank. Rope was wound round the cylinder, or barrel, and a winch was attached to the rope. “Sailors use that windlass to raise and lower the sail, do they not?” The mast, some two feet wide where it intersected the deck, was as tall as the length of the ship itself, about forty-five feet or so, It supported a single large sail, roughly thirty-five feet square, which the seamen had raised that morning. Looking up, I couldn’t help thinking about that white sail on Kaherdin’s ship when he returned from Cornwall. The white sail that Isolde of the White Hands had claimed was black. Such a simple thing to have caused such anguish. Dinadan would say it was foolishness. But I think I might have died if I was in Tristram’s position, and waiting for news of my lady Rosemounde.
“In the same way the crew of the Rosamounde raised the great sail this morning through use of that engine, Arthur’s army raised the stones of the Giant’s Ring and got them aboard our ships for transport back to Logres. I used giant engines that worked on the same principles as that windlass, both to lift them into the ships and to set them up on Salisbury Plain. Stonehenge was raised through science and mathematics, Dinadan, not by magic.”
“I hear there was some good fighting in those Irish wars,” Dinadan continued, drawing the old necromancer out a bit more. “A good number of reputations were made there, from what I’ve heard. King Mark would talk about it sometimes, I remember, when he was waxing lyrical about Isolde’s homeland.”
“He might well talk about it,” Merlin replied. “The war there gave him his reputation and his throne. And his wife, for that matter. I suppose that’s where all of this began.”
“All of what?” I wanted to know. “Do you mean the Tristram and Isolde saga is connected with the Irish war?”
“I mean that, and much more.” Merlin’s eyes grew far away. “And it goes back long before the Irish wars. It goes back to a different war—the war that Uther Pendragon waged against Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall over the duke’s wife. Uther had taken a great longing for the fair Igraine, and felt he would die if he could not have her.”
“Another great recommendation for this ‘courtly love’ madness,” Dinadan said. “Never mind that she’s married. Just fight a war for her. That’ll impress her. As for the men killed in the war, well, those are acceptable losses, since it was done for love. Right old man? You had something to do with that as well, or so I’ve heard.”
Merlin did not deny it. “There was a madness on Uther. He would indeed have destroyed his kingdom, sacrificed all the men in his army—and Gorlois’s as well—to win Igraine or die trying. I could not dissuade him. So I did the next best thing.”
“Which in this case was disguising Uther as Gorlois and sneaking him into Tintagel castle,” I added. As a Cornishman, I knew this history as well as my name.
“It ended the war,” Merlin stated matter-of-factly. “It was a simple matter to dress Uther in Gorlois’s arms and get him past the guards into Igraine’s chamber. Once there, in the dark of her room, I cannot speak for her.”
“What does that mean, you ‘cannot speak for her’? What are you saying?” I bristled. This was, after all, a former duchess of my homeland.
Merlin sighed. “I mean, of course, that anyone who wants to believe her story that she thought it was the duke in bed with her is free to do so. For myself, I have difficulty believing that, darkness or no, she did not know her own husband.”
I fumed a bit while Dinadan conceded, “She did marry King Uther pretty quickly afterwards, as I’ve heard. Convenient that Gorlois himself was killed in the battle about the same time little Arthur was being conceived.”
“Yes, quite a stroke of luck, that. Well, who can really say what the timing was. It was important that people believed in that version of events, at least. But the important thing for my story here is that it was Cador, a cousin of Gorlois but one fighting on Uther’s side, that slew Gorlois in battle and brought the body to the doors of Tintagel while Uther was still ensconced with Igraine. It came as a big surprise to all of Tintagel’s defenders, but when Uther emerged from Igraine’s chambers, they were less surprised. And the lady Igraine did not seem greatly perturbed. So Igraine married Uther, I took Arthur when he was born to be secretly fostered by Sir Ector, and Morgan and Margause, the daughters of Gorlois and Igraine, were sent north to marry King Lot and King Uriens and get out of Uther’s hair. And Cador inherited the Duchy of Cornwall.”
“And all of this has to do with the Irish War how?” I asked a bit impatiently, as I was losing track of relationships here.
“Duke Cador of Cornwall had two sons,” Merlin went on patiently. “Constantine, the elder, was a bookish lad who was earmarked for the monastery from an early age. Cador’s second son, born two years after Arthur, was Mark. Pretty much the opposite of his brother, Mark always preferred swords to books and a charging destrier to a spirited debate. By the time he was fifteen he could unhorse any knight in Cornwall. By that time, Arthur had been on the throne a little over two years, and had won his wars against King Lot and his allies. King Pelinor, Duke Hoel, and Duke Cador were young Arthur’s closest advisors, along with myself, of course. All of us a good deal older and wiser than the brash young king.”
“And then there was this war with Ireland?” I put in with some irony. Was the old man ever going to get to his point?
“And then there was war with Ireland,” Merlin glowered at me, his eyebrows lowered like thunderclouds over his eyes. “King Rience of Ireland sent the young king a message: Rience had the unusual habit of trimming his cloak not with fur but with the beards of kings he had subdued, and he informed Arthur that unless the boy shaved his beard and sent it to him, Rience would come to Logres and take it, along with the head it was attached to. Well, you see, it was a double insult. Arthur had won his throne by force even though he’d inherited it by true bloodline…”
“More or less,” Dinadan added.
Merlin shrugged, “More or
less. But Rience refused to acknowledge any martial prowess in the lad, and figured he could bully him into submitting to Ireland’s hegemony. But it was also an insult to Arthur personally, you see, because he was just seventeen at the time. He really had no beard at all. I offered to lend him mine if it would prevent a war, but he wouldn’t have it, and we were off to Ireland.”
“So how does Mark come into all of this?” I asked, for these were details even my Cornish roots had not supplied me.
“Old Mark was there as Cador’s squire,” Dinadan answered, sharing what he knew. “He was the great hero of the war, right? Or at least that’s how he told it.”
“He told it true,” Merlin conceded. “He was in the war, originally as his father’s squire. He was fifteen, but a full-grown lad and powerful, like Arthur himself at that age. We had battled the Irish in skirmishes for some weeks before we came to Dublin, which they had fortified against our coming. We besieged the city for days before Rience decided it would be better to come out and face us in the open. A foolish mistake, because he was outnumbered and they had plenty of provisions within the city. They could have waited us out until we were forced to break camp with the coming winter. But Rience had removed that option when he sent Arthur the insulting note. He had to face him in the field or lose all honor. So out he came, with his thousand troops. We had probably sixteen-hundred, about two-hundred of those being mounted cavalry. Rience had maybe three hundred knights, so that helped even the odds for him. And he used the cavalry like a battering ram, charging through Arthur’s assembled host and killing or wounding at least a hundred of our infantry before he’d run through the whole army and taken up a position on a hilltop behind us.”
“Bad planning,” Dinadan commented.
“Well, to be fair, Arthur was expecting a siege, the army was putting together siege engines, and Rience took us by surprise when he rode out of the city at full charge. Many knights were not able to get mounted at all, and the bowmen were lucky to be able to get off one shot before the army was through us. But there they were, atop that hill, forcing us to travel upward into a shower of their arrows to attack them. But Arthur knew that if we gave them a chance to dig in there, were would never turn this battle to our favor. Duke Cador didn’t hesitate: he and his knights formed a wedge, their shields in front to protect them against the arrows raining down, and led a charge up that hill. But it was Mark who wound up leading the way. Knights were dropping to the left and right of him, including his father, who was downed by an arrow to the shoulder, but Mark was determined, and he was lucky. And once he reached the Irish lines, he was deadly. Slashing all about him with his sword, he downed at least two dozen bowmen single handed, then charged like a wild man against the wall of knights around King Rience. I’ve never seen a battle-frenzy turn any warrior as berserk as I saw Mark that day. He had cut down five knights single-handedly before some of Cador’s other troops reached the Irish lines to help him. Then Arthur led a charge up the other side of the hill, and that threw them into confusion and their lines began to fall apart. In the chaos of the melee Mark killed nineteen knights and an untold number of archers, and, although it was Sir Balin and his brother Balan who ultimately captured the fleeing Rience, everybody knew it was Mark who’d won the day.”