Camelot

by Giles Kristian

  ‘Her name was Alana,’ she said. I had expected to see tears but there were none. Instead her eyes were sharp, burnished arrow heads in the dying flamelight. ‘She raised me.’ Her jaw clenched on her next words, then she shook her head at some memory. ‘I told her the Saxons were close. I told her to go to Camelot. To seek the Lady Morgana’s protection. She would not listen.’

  ‘Camelot is where we should all go,’ Father Yvain said. ‘The Saxons are thick as fleas on an old hound.’

  Gawain took off his helmet and ran a hand through his silver hair, glad to be rid of the weight of the armour. ‘We’re going west,’ he said. ‘As soon as we’ve done what we came here to do.’

  ‘You would think you’d be safe, living out here like this.’ Father Yvain gestured at the simple dwelling. There were only two beds, suggesting that Iselle and Alana had lived alone. ‘Never thought the Saxons would trouble the fen folk.’ He lifted the pail and flung the last of the water at a roof timber and a flame which crackled amongst a bunch of dried herbs. White smoke plumed, sweet and woody, and the place was plunged into a deeper dark. ‘Seems to me King Cerdic means to deal with us as a man runs a flame along his tunic and breeks to be rid of lice,’ he said.

  ‘I told you,’ Gawain said to the monk, lowering his voice out of respect for Iselle, ‘told all of you. There is no one standing against Cerdic now. The kings of Britain look to their own walls and no further. Only Constantine bleeds the Saxons and he cannot fight much longer.’ With the last of the flames doused, Gawain bent, turned a stool back onto its legs and sat down beside the hearth, exhaling with a weariness that betrayed all his war finery.

  I went to Iselle and squatted beside her, trying not to look down at the woman whom she cradled still. Knowing that Iselle had loved her, but not having known Alana myself, it felt wrong to look at the dead woman’s face, to see her for the first time without her soul.

  ‘Let me help you,’ I said. I did not know how, but I had to do something. ‘Please, Iselle.’

  She looked at me as though all she had heard was the wind in the bulrushes.

  ‘I’ll check the pen,’ Father Yvain said, ‘in case they left any of your animals alive.’ And with that, he went into the night.

  Gawain was building up the fire, blowing softly onto the embers. Lost in his own thoughts.

  ‘What will you do, Galahad? Pray for her?’ Iselle asked, her voice edged with scorn. So, she had heard me.

  ‘I could. If you would like me to,’ I replied. But I knew she had no use for my prayers. Her gods were the old gods of Britain: Cernunnos and Arawn, the horse goddess Rhiannon and Taranis lord of war, and a dozen more besides; compared to those, our god must have seemed weak. ‘I can help you to bury her,’ I offered.

  ‘I don’t need help,’ Iselle said.

  ‘What will you do?’ I asked her. ‘You can’t stay here.’

  ‘Why not?’ she challenged me, but she must have known it was a foolish question.

  ‘We’ll stay here a day or two.’ Gawain was looking into the new flames which capered amongst the sticks and split wood, his scarred face cast in their molten copper glow. ‘If Iselle doesn’t mind. When the Saxons have moved on and the water has receded, we’ll leave. We’ll go west.’ His lips warped. ‘They will have taken our boat. So, we go west on foot.’

  ‘After you have found what you’re looking for out there?’ I asked.

  Gawain nodded. ‘After that,’ he said.

  ‘And you know where to find it?’ I said.

  ‘I will when the water recedes.’ He looked over to us then, his face grim and gaunt in the wash of firelight. ‘Will you help me, girl?’ he asked. ‘You know the marsh better than any of us.’ But Iselle did not reply. She was staring at Alana’s face. And now, at last, there were tears in her eyes.

  Two days later, we burned the roundhouse properly. It was Iselle’s idea. She laid Alana’s corpse on a thick pile of rushes beside the hearth and we set several fires amongst the thatch and furniture, using dry reeds and wood from the animal pen. It had not rained since the night we came there, so the flame took hungrily to the wood, running along timbers like a living thing and leaping to the reeds, which belched yellow smoke before bursting alight. We left the place burning like a great pyre.

  Gediens had been against setting the dwelling aflame. He feared that the smoke would bring Saxons the way hounds will prowl downwind of roasting meat. But Gawain pointed to three other distant and faint plumes of smoke against the blue sky, reminding us that the Saxons were busy killing and burning elsewhere and would take little notice of another smudge of smoke hanging above the marsh.

  ‘Let the girl burn it,’ he had said as we left Iselle alone to say her last words to the woman who had nursed her, raised her and loved her as though she were her own. ‘She can’t live in the ashes. And I need her now,’ the warrior said, looking north across the reed-beds, which were still swollen with rain.

  We watched the fire awhile because we knew that Iselle was seeing memories in the flames. Then, without a word, she turned away and we took this to mean she had decided to go with us, though none of us asked her lest the question itself sharpened her pride and purpose against us. For there was something wild about Iselle. A hardness in spite of the incorporeal, waterlogged world which had raised her. A defiance shaped by wind and loneliness. And yet, as we trudged north along hidden ways amongst bristling reeds, the sky as pale as the wood anemones which I had known in another lifetime, I knew that I wanted to be near her.

  She led us to a finger of land to the north of the Meare Pool. How she had found the trackways and the low, wave-swept spines through the marsh to take us to the place which Gawain had described was a mystery to the rest of us. ‘It has the whiff of magic about it, if you ask me,’ Gediens said under his breath as we squeezed water from our cloaks and rubbed warmth into freezing legs. Iselle stood apart, stringing her bow now that we were on firmer ground.

  ‘Instinct, nothing more,’ Gawain replied, jumping up and down to get the water out of his scale armour and some heat into his bones. ‘How does a hawk know to mantle its kill?’ He moved his left shoulder around in its joint, grimacing. It must have been stiff from holding his shield above his head to keep it out of the water. ‘In snow, how do wolves know to walk in the tracks of the beast in front?’ he asked. ‘We are what we are.’ He turned his eyes on me. ‘No use in trying to pretend otherwise.’

  ‘Easy for you to say,’ Father Yvain muttered, ‘you who have never tried to sow seed or tan a hide or coppice a wood. The only thing you’ve ever known is the sword.’ The monk swung his knapsack onto his back, where it nestled half-buried in the bear skin. ‘But there are other ways.’

  Gawain gave a low grunt. ‘Other ways.’ His lips twisted in his silver beard. ‘Like falling to your knees before the Christ god while the land around you burns? Like singing while mothers weep for their starving children? For their husbands slain by the Saxons? And where did that get your brothers, Yvain? What good has it done our people?’

  I hated Gawain then, and his words which struck me like a blow to the chest. Because there was truth in them.

  Father Yvain said nothing, just set his jaw and fixed his eyes on the path trodden by Iselle. We fell to silence, each alone with our thoughts and fears, and trudged onwards.

  ‘We are close,’ Gawain said after a while, leading us now that he recognized where we were. We followed him along a narrow channel which someone had cut through the vegetation and I felt like some creature coming into another creature’s lair, for the reeds were so tall here that they leant over to touch above us, forming a tunnel into which the low winter sun cast arrows of golden light. Soon, we came to a ten-foot-high wall of reeds which would have been impenetrable had Gawain and Gediens not drawn their swords to hack a pathway through, now and then stopping to catch their breath. At those times it was unbearably quiet, so oppressive and still. The floor of the bed was an unctuous black mud that would have swallowed us were it not
for the broken and flattened reeds which supported our weight. There were no calls of birds. There was no whirring of insects as that which fills the marshes in summer. Just an ominous sense of dread which I knew I was not alone in feeling. It was like a cold hand gripping the back of my neck. It was as if we were passing through a veil from one world to another. And in a sense, we were.

  The steading was as poor as any I had seen. There were some swine, two sheep, a goat and some hens pecking in the mud for worms. The outbuildings comprised a small grain store, a smokehouse, an empty stable which was used as a store room, and a run-down byre which would not afford livestock much protection in bad weather.

  The house itself was a crude affair of wattle and mud and rotting reed thatch, no better than a hovel. And yet, before Gawain approached the door, he stood a while, his helmet tucked under his arm, regarding the place with such a look on his face as I had never seen there before. It reminded me of how Iselle had looked as she watched the flames consume her home.

  Still, I could not imagine why we had laboured, freezing and destitute, through the marsh, seeking out whomever lived in such a place as this. My expression must have said as much, for Father Yvain raised a big hand towards me and shook his head, his own eyes moving from Gawain to the steading in a way that revealed he understood something I did not.

  ‘Wait here,’ Gawain commanded. ‘Don’t follow me.’ And with that he walked up to the door, stood a long moment with his hand on the latch, then let himself in and was swallowed by darkness.

  Iselle shrugged. ‘I’ve never been here,’ she said, in answer to the look I gave her as Gawain disappeared inside the house and we waited on the timber trackway laid between the outbuildings and animal pens. On the eastern side of the steading there was a stand of gnarled and brittle-looking apple trees. On the west, a drainage dyke between fields, which must have taken sweat and toil to dig, though it had won some land from the marsh. And further off, a small wood of sallow, hazel and ash. All of it was bordered by a palisade of reeds whose feathered heads bristled in the breeze, giving it the look of winter wheat in the dying day.

  ‘Such a place could stay hidden even from God,’ I told Iselle, watching smoke seep from the thatch to drift eastwards like a faint whisper. Then Gawain reappeared at the threshold and lifted his bearded chin to us.

  Gediens and Father Yvain shared a knowing look.

  ‘You ready, lad?’ Gediens asked me. Why me? I nodded, aware of the sluggish beating of my heart, as though it, too, laboured through the mud of the marsh. I might have relished the thought of a fire to warm my blood, and perhaps some hot food to fill my stomach. But I did not think of either as we made our way along the track towards that dark doorway. All I felt was dread.

  ‘In you come.’ Gawain’s voice was low, as if he feared waking someone sleeping within. The door clumped shut behind us and my eyes sifted through the darkness beyond the hearth fire’s bloom of copper and gold. A small table. A bed against the far wall. A bench beside the hearth. Woven baskets and wooden pails. Spears leaning against the thatch. A brace of ducks hanging from a roof beam, turning slowly in the smoke.

  ‘Closer, lad, so I can get a look at you,’ someone said. I took a step towards the hearth. Then another. Still I could not see the man who had spoken, for he stood on the far side of the hearth beyond its light. Beside him, a black hound sat on its haunches, watching us from the shadows. Gawain stood to my right, Gediens, Father Yvain and Iselle behind my left shoulder. ‘So, this is him,’ the man said. His voice was dry and cracked. Brittle like the apple trees I had seen. ‘Galahad,’ he said, and it was as though he were speaking aloud for the first time a name which he had kept safe in his mind.

  He stepped forward into the fire glow and I saw him. And I knew that those eyes would stay with me all my life. Those blue eyes in which demons danced amongst reflected flame.

  ‘Galahad,’ Gawain dipped his head towards the man, ‘this is Lord Arthur ap Uther ap Constantine ap Tahalais.’

  I heard Iselle behind me gasp and I felt the sting of peat smoke in my own throat as I drew a breath.

  Arthur.

  Invisible spiders scuttled up my arms. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled in their roots. Could this old man really be the Arthur who had united the kings of Britain beneath his bear banner, with the sword Excalibur gleaming beneath sullen skies? The man who came so close to hurling the invaders back into the sea from whence they came? Arthur. The light in the darkness.

  No, it could not be. And yet I knelt among the floor rushes and bowed my head and I sensed Iselle do the same.

  ‘Please,’ the man said, lifting a hand. ‘No!’ he said more sharply.

  I looked up and saw not a prince or a lord of war. Not even a warrior like Gawain or Gediens. I saw an old man. Hollow-cheeked and gaunt. A man burdened by memories. A man haunted by the past.

  ‘I am not the man I was,’ he confessed, seeing the disbelief in my face. He held my eye as I got to my feet, as though needing to be sure that I understood. ‘All of that was … a long time ago.’

  ‘Not so long ago, uncle,’ Gawain countered.

  Arthur flapped a hand at Gawain and muttered something under his breath, then he came around the hearth, his black hound padding obediently beside him, and stood before me. He straightened to his full height and only then, with the fire casting his face into shadow, did I catch a glimpse of the man he had once been. Broad-chested and powerful. Handsome and confident. A leader of men. But then a tilt of his head and a change in the light and like the fleeting glimpse of a ghost, the vision was gone.

  ‘My lord,’ Father Yvain rumbled from behind me. ‘We thought you were dead. All these years. Few dared to hope. But lord …’ He swallowed down the next words, but they worked their way back up his throat. ‘Why do you not fight?’

  Arthur looked at the monk. ‘Why don’t you, Yvain?’ he asked with a sad weariness. ‘I would not have expected you to turn to the Christians’ god.’

  Father Yvain did not answer that, and for a heavy moment the only sound was the flap of the hearth flames.

  Iselle took a step forward. ‘Lord, if the people knew that you live, they would have hope again.’

  I cringed inwardly at Iselle’s presumption. But Arthur just stared at her.

  ‘How can you deny them hope?’ she pressed on, and I turned and looked at her, my eyes willing her to tread carefully, to give Lord Arthur the proper respect. But Iselle would not meet my eye, taking another step so that she was at my shoulder. ‘They would fight, lord,’ she said. I could smell parsley and mint on her breath, a sharp, clean scent in that musty-smelling hovel. ‘They would fight for you.’

  Most people would be too awestruck to speak to Lord Arthur, let alone in such a forthright way. But Iselle was not like most people. She had no fear. And now Arthur watched her, as a man might regard a thatch fire from a distance, wondering who had lit the flame and why. I glanced at Gawain, hoping he would break the akward silence, but he gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head, which I took as him warning me not to interrupt. He wanted to see where this would lead.

  Iselle lifted her chin in a gesture that spoke of mistrust or suspicion, as if she had not yet accepted that the man before us was the warlord of the bards’ songs, the Arthur whispered of by the wind in the trees and long grass in summer. ‘They would fight for you,’ she added, ‘and the kings of the land would have courage again.’

  Arthur’s eyes hardened at her words. ‘Tell me, girl, what you know of courage.’

  Father Yvain shook his head at Iselle, but she would not be silenced.

  ‘I know it takes courage just to survive out there,’ she said. I thought of the hanged folk in the marshes and the Brothers of the Thorn lying butchered on Ynys Wydryn. Of Iselle’s foster mother Alana and of the smoke from half a dozen steadings staining the sky. ‘I know that the Arthur of the stories would not hide from the world like this,’ Iselle went on, looking into the dark around us. ‘I know that the A
rthur who slaughtered Saxons would never abandon his people while he had breath and a blade.’

  Arthur considered her words, then lifted an eyebrow at Gawain as he leant to stroke his hound between the ears. ‘Where did you find this young she-wolf?’

  ‘Galahad found her,’ the warrior replied. His lip pulled back from his teeth in a smile. Or perhaps it was a grimace. ‘The Christians feared her.’

  ‘I am sure they did.’ Arthur lifted his gaze from Iselle and laid it on me as an invitation to speak.

  ‘She saved my life, lord,’ I said. ‘The Saxons came to Ynys Wydryn.’ I saw no need to say more. Arthur stiffened, putting a hand to his chin and pulling his beard between finger and thumb as he turned to glance back into the shadows behind him.

  When Arthur turned back to us, Gawain said, ‘The monastery is gone, Arthur.’

  ‘They murdered the brothers,’ Father Yvain put in, moving into the halo of light cast by a horn lantern which sat on a table beside a jug and two wooden cups.

  ‘May Christ and Saint Joseph keep them,’ I said, thinking of the cutting of the Thorn and the eight haws which Father Brice had pulled from the briar and hidden in my knapsack the day he was martyred. Red and cool to the touch, those berries. Hardened drops of blood, one for each of the brothers.

  ‘Hanguis and Endalan are dead.’ Gawain’s jaw clenched after the words. We looked at one another. It was the first time it had been said aloud and we all knew it was true. Arthur turned his face up to the roof and closed his eyes. Gediens looked at the helmet in his hands, his thumb exploring a dent in the iron. Iselle took her bow string from the scrip on her belt and laid it along the hearth stones to dry, though her eyes never left Arthur. Nor, I noticed, did Father Yvain’s. The monk was an ominous presence in that ill-lit place, studying Arthur the way I had seen him trying to read the grain, burrs and knots in a piece of cherry wood or blackthorn. Here before us was the great warlord, whose famous horse warriors had thundered across the land into legend. What was he thinking now? Did the Pendragon blood boil in his veins at this news that the Saxons were rampaging unchecked? Did his heart clamour to raise his bear standard and call spearmen to his side? To be dux bellorum again. The lord of battle.