For a moment all the strength went out of him and he was shaking and slackened. Lancelot never broke his calm, and his hands closed like a vise over Perceval’s wrists and plucked them from his surcoat. “You know me, Perceval. I should have lost my right hand rather than see it slay one of your kindred—and Gareth, Gareth whom I knighted. Whom I loved.”
But Perceval lunged forward again. “I’ll have it. I’ll have both your hands and your coward head—”
Sir Lancelot stepped back a pace or two and bowed. “When you are stronger, I am at your service,” he said, and reached out his hand to the silent Queen, who had stood without moving since Sir Perceval’s intrusion. Mechanically, she took his hand and the two of them turned to go.
Blanchefleur hesitated to follow them, looking back to Perceval, who stood with his head flung back but his hands hanging uselessly at his sides and the hot anger on his face dimmed to a pale foreboding.
“I spoke rashly,” he grated. “I see the good knights of Logres slaying each other wherever I look. I will not add needlessly to this strife. Until justice is done, let your own dishonoured name reproach you.”
Lancelot did not answer, but his back became for a moment very still and quiet. Then he continued toward the stair, and the Queen followed. Perceval looked at Blanchefleur.
“Go to your mother,” he told her.
SIR LANCELOT LED THEM TO THE best room in the castle, a snug chamber hung with thick new tapestries and heated by a fire of scented wood. Maidens within busied themselves in pouring a hot bath and setting a light breakfast over the flame of a lamp to warm. When Lancelot and the Queen entered, a stillness fell upon them and they sank to the floor.
“Joyeuse Gard is your realm now,” Sir Lancelot said to the Queen, “and here is your chamber. The servants of your servant serve you. Have them bring whatever you wish.”
For the first time Guinevere spoke.
“They may go,” she said, and dropped his hand and moved further into the room. In a silken single file the maidens obeyed.
Only Sir Lancelot and Blanchefleur, with Branwen in the hallway behind, remained in the doorway. The Queen stood with her back to them, motionless. After a moment, she turned her head only and said in the same firm tone:
“Blanchefleur? Is that you?”
Blanchefleur looked up at Lancelot and he understood, stepping back and closing the door. When she saw his face it struck her that the Queen had not thanked him, but then the latch fell between them and he was gone.
“I’m here, Mother,” she said, coming a few steps further into the room.
Still Queen Guinevere did not turn to look at her. Instead, with a graceful gesture, she shook the sleeve back from her wrist and took up one corner of her rusty-black cloak to dab at her face. Only then did she turn and look at Blanchefleur. If she had been weeping, every trace of tears was gone, and she was all coolness and distance and lofty carriage.
She reached out and one pale fingertip lifted Blanchefleur’s chin. “How you’ve grown. I hear brave things of you, my daughter.”
Not for the Queen of Logres a fond meeting. Blanchefleur swallowed a hard lump of disappointment and steeled herself to this woman’s steely gaze. “From Perceval?”
“Yes.” A tight-drawn smile fleeted across her mouth and the fingertip tapped the side of her jaw and fell away. “A man’s loyalty is the sharpest of all weapons, Blanchefleur, and the hardest to find. Let me not hear that you have dulled it.”
Blanchefleur blinked. “Did he tell you I refused him?”
“Yes.” The Queen turned away from her and went to the window, where she stood with her fingers drumming on the sill. “Bear it in mind,” she said in a voice that seemed to come from far away, “that a woman’s shoulders are weak to bear the weight of a kingdom alone.”
Blanchefleur folded lips and hands and did not reply. The Queen turned from the window and said, “That was why we sent you away, you know. For safety.”
She lifted her chin and said what she would never have dared say to the King: “I wish you had kept me. In all the danger. I wish I had been there to share it with you.”
“We could never have risked it. When she heard of the prophecy, Morgan le Fay tried to kill you.”
Guinevere turned again and her fingers went on tapping the window-sill. Blanchefleur glanced from her stony profile to the nervous motion and back again, and for a moment she glimpsed under the stiff mask which the Queen of Logres wore clamped over her grief, and began to understand.
“I know,” she said, taking a step forward and holding out her hands. “I know it was done from love for me. I’m only sorry I had to wait so long, so long, to meet you.”
The tattoo on the window-sill hushed. Blanchefleur stood holding out her hands, willing the Queen to soften, to bend. No answering feeling stirred in that smooth pale face, but at last she came forward, put two cool hands in Blanchefleur’s, and kissed her cheek. Then she drew quickly back and turned aside and went to the steaming bath, shrugging out of the black cloak.
Underneath, she wore a white shift smudged with soot.
The Queen looked at the cloak a moment, then folded it with careful deliberation and gave it to Blanchefleur. “This should go to Sir Gawain,” she said, and though there was no discernible emotion in her voice, Blanchefleur felt a dull ache. “He would desire it.”
Blanchefleur felt the texture of wool, smelled lanolin, rubbed oil against her fingers. All of it familiar. “This is Sir Gareth’s cloak. The one he gave you, because you were cold…”
“That was the way of it. O Gareth! Ever the truest friend, laughing and loyal and incapable of a lie.” Her voice ebbed and flowed with a rhythm that was all the expression she would allow of her grief. “And Gaheris. For whom shall I mourn first? The nine orphaned babes? The cold Queen of Orkney in her childless age? Gawain, titanic in love as in war?” She took a breath. “Or reeling Logres and her stricken King?”
Arthur. Blanchefleur’s fingers tightened on the cloak. “How is he?”
The Queen’s voice turned from elegy to flat distaste. “Barely the man I knew. You would think Mordred King now.”
Blanchefleur remembered what Perceval had said of the Queen and Mordred. “He’s one of the King’s counsellors?”
“Worse,” said the Queen, “one of his relations. Agravain is another. God knows what put it into that young man’s head to accuse me. He had not the wit to do it maliciously, I think. But who egged him to it?”
“Could he have been truly mistaken?”
The Queen shook her head. “I never sent Sir Lancelot that ring, but a page brought it to him and he came at once. The page is a boy ten years old. Ten! All he could tell us was that a veiled lady gave him the ring. It was certainly mine. The boy cannot have been dishonest, and I, I never sent the ring. Another must have stolen it and given it to him. A woman certainly took part.”
“Morgan?”
“I can think of no other.” Arms folded, she was drumming again against her arm. “But the Queen of Gore has kept silence for months, and the new men of the Table have never had to do with her malice or her cunning. She is already half a story to them. My guilt was more credible.”
She seemed to become aware of her jumping fingers, and dropped her arms to her sides, and spoke almost to herself. “What now? I should have died this morning, and with my death, as it was meant, the Table might have healed. But so long as I am alive, men will fight for me. Sir Lancelot makes pretty speeches, but he would never allow me to return to the King.”
“Surely he has good reason,” said Blanchefleur. “You don’t really wish to be burned, do you?”
Guinevere glanced up at her sharply. “Yes.”
Blanchefleur blinked.
The Queen moved with all the unhurried grace that marked her lightest motion: untying the cord at her shift’s neck, stripping it from her body, stepping into the water. Her words were equally slow, equally clear.
“The Table is broken. The Table was b
roken the moment Lancelot blooded his sword in my chamber. And with the Table is broken the heart of the most glorious king of the earth. O Arthur! Better to die than to see such a lord destroyed on my account.”
BLANCHEFLEUR WENT OUT BEARING HER MOTHER’S grimed shift and the cloak of Sir Gareth. As she paused in the great hall, looking for a servant to show her to the laundry, Sir Lancelot intercepted her.
“What of the Queen?”
“She is resting.”
“I am glad to hear it.”
Blanchefleur said: “What now? The King is not going to let you make off with her like that, is he?”
There was a wry twist in the corner of his mouth. “I have defied the King with force of arms. There can only be one response. By nightfall I will know when I may expect to receive him before my gates.”
“The Queen spoke of going back to him—”
“Not to be thought of.”
“No. Certainly not if she is innocent. But that must be proved, and there must be a reconciliation. If that is what we want, is it wise for the two of us to remain here?”
Sir Lancelot shook his head. “I fear if she is found elsewhere, she will be taken and burned.”
“It wouldn’t soften him?”
“It might have, once.”
Blanchefleur looked up at him in mute distress.
“A man changes when he loses all the things that define him.”
She pressed her lips together. “Even the King?”
Sir Lancelot looked down on her from his great height and said, “Even the King.”
Tears itched in her throat. So many had lost so many things today. She stepped back and said, “How can I find Sir Perceval?”
“He is resting in one of the chambers. My steward will tell you which.”
She curtseyed, trying to move with her mother’s slow grace, and went to find the laundry. Perceval probably wished to be alone, she thought, to spend the worst of his sorrow in secret and present a stout face to the world. But it was hard to know he was so close, in so much pain. It was hard to have no right to go to him.
Branwen found her by the doorway into the laundry, staring into unbidden memories. She stood in her dream again and saw the fire, the fog, the gentle face of the man she now knew as Gareth. Then the memory was gone, and she was standing in the doorway in La Joyeuse Gard, and the shaft of thin morning sun coming in the window was barely four hours older than the light in her dream.
Branwen said, “You must still be tired. Go and rest.”
Blanchefleur shook her head. “I will not sleep. Let us find work to do.”
JOYEUSE GARD FILLED WITH PEOPLE ALL that day. Ox-carts trundled over the drawbridge with women and children huddled on top of their possessions and men trudging behind. Animals flowed bleating or lowing into the courtyard pens. In the smithy three men worked through the day making last-minute repairs to arms and weapons.
When Blanchefleur went into the hall for supper she found the room humming with new arrivals. More trestles had been put up and benches found to seat all the people.
She hesitated in the doorway and looked in vain for the Queen, or for any man she might recognise apart from Sir Lancelot, who sat in a cluster of strange knights at the high table.
She turned to Branwen, about to suggest that they eat with the Queen, when a dragging step sounded in the passage and she saw Perceval leaning on Heilyn. He had bathed and changed to a soft clean leather jerkin and linen breeches. Against the left side of his head the hair stuck up in unruly tufts as though he had fallen asleep while it dried plastered between head and pillow.
He said no word, but letting go of Heilyn bowed and offered his hand and led her up to the dais, limping heavily on his bruised leg. Before she sat, Blanchefleur caught his eye and smiled at him, trying to show some of the sympathy she felt. Perceval returned the smile, but tightly and distantly, as though he had no intention of letting her be concerned with his grief.
When she took her seat, silence fell on the table, and Sir Lancelot stood and lifted his cup. “Heir of Logres,” he said in a voice loud enough for all his men to hear, “be welcomed. You are among true and loyal men.”
She bowed from her seat and said, “Sir, I know it.”
She was a little surprised when the knights around Lancelot drifted over and knotted around her. Perceval presented them to her: Sir Lionel, Sir Hector, Sir Alisander le Orphelin, Sir Pertisant. With the older knights, Lionel and Hector, Lancelot’s kin, she could speak easily and graciously, but she had seen the younger ones smiling and whispering the night before. Tonight they were full of charm and laughter. She kept her guard up.
Elsewhere at the high table it was a quiet and sombre meal, full of talk of the war. She heard Sir Lionel say, “Of course Sir Gawain will be commanding the Table”—and she looked at Perceval, and wondered if he felt the same pang of foreboding. What hope had they, fighting against lords, fathers, and brothers? Victory or defeat would bear the same grief.
A stir at the doorway. A mailed step on the pavement. Sir Perceval rose from his feet and Blanchefleur looked up to see a man she recognised: Sir Bors, with grimy foam on his boots.
“Bors!” Perceval called, and the air was thick with cries of welcome. But before he would touch his food he told his news.
“The King called his council—all five that were left. Alas, cousin, that you slew the brothers of Orkney! Sir Gawain is furious beyond measure. We heard he went for horse and armour after you left, meaning to ride after and challenge you to combat. Sir Ironsides managed to get to him in time. They say that at the council even Sir Mordred could not slide a word in edgewise. No one else tried.”
“And the King?” Sir Lancelot asked.
“Seemed to revive when he knew the Queen was safely away. But I cannot tell if he is angry or pleased. It is agreed with Gawain that he must besiege La Joyeuse Gard—so Mordred told me, and sent me to bring word that the King will come soon. Not so soon as Gawain would like, but before Sunday.”
Slowly, Lancelot nodded. Blanchefleur stared at her trencher. She had hoped, against all hope, that the King would take some other course of action. The news seemed to drag them all one step closer to some terrible doom.
“You may defeat him,” Sir Bors said. “There are yet more of the Table to declare for you and come to Joyeuse Gard.”
Lancelot spoke sharply. “Declare for me? This is a private quarrel. I do not challenge the High King for his throne.”
“You challenged his justice, which is the same thing.”
“It was no justice at all, and that shall I prove upon the body of any who denies it. The King should know I had no choice. I had been a false knight had I done elsewise.”
“Many may see it otherwise, even here, fair coz,” said Sir Lionel. “If you wish to know how many, ask your friends here who they will have for king.”
Sir Bors lifted his hands and said: “I am for Arthur. I am only here to defend true justice and to fight for whoever will champion it. But even if the Queen is proven innocent, cousin, your high-handedness has carried you into enmity with the King. What of Sir Clarrus, whom you slew on the threshold of the Queen’s chamber? What of Gareth and Gaheris, who died this morning? None of them cold murder, I grant you, but Sir Gawain may certainly claim the right of a kinsman to see that blood avenged.”
Sir Lancelot shook his head. “We will treat. There will be no fighting, so long as the King’s grace is pleased to acknowledge his Queen.”
After the meal Blanchefleur tugged on Perceval’s sleeve.
“Come away,” she whispered. “I want to speak with you.”
She took him to her chamber, where she had sent Branwen to kindle a fire and mull wine. While the damsel whispered with Heilyn in the doorway, Blanchefleur turned to Perceval pleadingly.
“You should leave. Go back to your father at Camelot now, before it is too late. Bury your kin. Do not join Lancelot in his quarrel.”
“It is already too late,” he said. “I ha
ve lifted my hand against my King and must wait, with the rest, for his judgement.”
“Surely your father will intercede for you.”
“It is possible that he will.”
She stared at him in amazement. “Is it possible that he will not?”
Perceval looked at his cup, brows crammed down hard over his eyes. “You heard Sir Bors say he would have ridden after Lancelot to fight him. Lancelot, his dearest friend in the world.”
“All the more reason to leave this place! You mustn’t be here when he comes.”
“I cannot leave,” he said after a long pause.
“Why? Why not?”
“I have a trust here which I cannot abandon,” Perceval said, and bowed his head toward her.
She snatched off the ring on her hand and held it out to him. “I release you from your service to me. Take the ring and go.”
He kept his head bent. “You may release me. Your father did not.”
“My father?” She rushed on: “Then I’ll go. We’ll both go. It was a mistake to come here.”
Perceval spoke slowly, as if battling to think clearly. “My father said you were best here…And after yesterday, with Sir Odiar, with the murder outside Astolat, I know he was right.”
The words slurred and jostled one another with weariness. Silently, Blanchefleur reproached herself. Aloud she said, “Oh, Perceval, it isn’t fair of me to push you on this today. But please think about it.”
He nodded as if only half hearing her words, and set his cup down untasted on a table. “I will. Good night.”
He limped to the door. Blanchefleur said, “Perceval.”
“Yes?”
“I am so sorry about your kinsmen. I cannot imagine—oh, Perceval.”
She had never known Gaheris or Gareth, so it was foolish to stand there with the tears rolling down her cheeks when Perceval, who had both known and loved them, stood looking at her with dry and stoical eyes. Yet behind them she could see that he was in pain, half-dazed with grief and in despair for the shattered heart of Logres. Worst of all was the certain knowledge that she could have spared him.
The Heir of Logres Page 4