Arthur’s eyes opened. ‘Too many have gone,’ he murmured under his breath, then pulled up a stool and sat, staring into the flames with the distracted air of an old man lost in memories. ‘Too many.’
I looked at Gawain, who was pressing a thumb into the palm of his other hand, kneading away some or other pain. ‘How is she, uncle?’ he asked. It seemed that Arthur had not heard, but then he looked round into the shadows again and this time I saw something in the gloom.
‘She is … unchanged,’ Arthur said.
Iselle and I caught each other’s eye, both of us understanding at the same time. Both of us seeing for the first time. My breath caught in my chest. My flesh crawled. There was someone sitting in a chair in the dark. Someone watching us. Father Yvain hissed in shock, instinctively signing the Thorn. He was closer to the seated figure than I, yet no more had he noticed it before now.
I took a step forward.
‘She knows you’re here,’ Arthur told us, his eyes still reflecting flame. ‘But only the gods know where she is.’
Yvain picked up the horn lantern and lifted it, his eyes wide as he bathed the woman in its glow. It seemed he was afraid and he glanced at Gawain, who gave the slightest nod, the two old spear-brothers sharing a brief moment of understanding, though the woman herself did not react or even seem aware of the monk. She simply stared ahead, seeing nothing. Or else seeing something which the rest of us could not.
‘Does she mind the light?’ Father Yvain asked, lowering the lamp a little.
Arthur shook his head and so the monk lifted the lamp again, though he dimmed the light anyway by shielding the lantern with his hand.
The woman was impossibly thin. Her hands lay on her lap, as fleshless as a bird’s feet. Her chest was as flat as a boy’s beneath a linen dress which had perhaps fitted her once and was the blue of a song thrush’s eggs. Her neck was delicate, slender and white as a birch, and her face was gaunt, the pale skin drawn so tightly over the bones beneath that it seemed it might tear open if she made any expression such as a frown or a smile. But there was no expression. It was a desolate face and were it not for the faint rise and fall of the woman’s chest, so faint beneath that ancient dress that I had to stare a while before I could be sure of it, I would have thought her a corpse. And I would have said Arthur had lost his mind. That here was a madman keeping company with the dead.
And yet she was undead, this silent, spectral woman, and in that way she was a flesh and blood memory which I believed haunted Arthur no less than the demons cavorting in his eyes.
‘She’s my wife, Galahad,’ Arthur said, turning those sad eyes up to me. ‘My Guinevere.’
I was unable to speak for the tightening of my throat. I knew who she was. I had known her the moment I saw that long hair, black as a raven’s wing, and that face, hollow and starved of joy, yet still somehow beautiful.
I thought back to the day of the great battle, when Tormaigh, my father’s stallion, had stumbled weary and blood-slathered from the fray to where I stood on the hill, my eyes filled with unspeakable horrors. I had mounted my noble friend and he had carried me to a clearing in the woods, where I found Guinevere lying among the meadowsweet once so sacred to the druids of Britain. Even then she was already lost, unable to speak. Voiceless and spellbound. Adrift like an autumn leaf on the wind.
‘You remember her, Galahad?’ Gawain asked.
I nodded. I had tried to wake Guinevere. I had yelled until my voice was a dry rasp. I’d shaken her and pulled at her, desperate to release her from whatever enchantment imprisoned her. Not because I cared for her – I did not know her and had met her only once and briefly – but because I felt alone. Because I was terrified and I missed my mother and I wanted someone to see my tears.
‘She has been this way ever since.’ Arthur poked an iron into the fire. Sparks crackled and flew.
In the eye of my mind I could still see the faces of the men who had found us there in that glade. Some of Arthur’s spearmen fleeing from the final slaughter. They took us to Gawain, who sought out a healer for Guinevere, though the old woman had been unable to cure her. And so, Gawain took Guinevere to the Christian women and me to Ynys Wydryn and the monks of the Thorn. Years in the past. And yet it felt so close again now in that gathering of souls who had been there under that late summer sky, as Britain plunged like a blade into the quenching trough and we watched to see if she would emerge whole or shatter into brittle pieces.
I could hear the great battle again, the screams of men and horses. I could smell the spearmen tearing each other apart with blades and hatred. I could smell Tormaigh too, the sweet hay scent of his steaming breath and the iron stink of the blood matted in his black mane and gleaming coat. I could hear his three-beat gait drumming the earth. Feel the cold bronze scales of my father’s armour on my cheek before the battle began, as he held me to him and told me he loved me. Before he walked Tormaigh down the slope and turned to look at me one final time, the last meeting of our eyes.
Arthur sighed a stale breath of old sorrow and weariness. ‘My poor Guinevere,’ he said. Not just your Guinevere. My father had loved this woman too. I had known that the day she came to our door on Samhain eve. I was out gathering valerian root because my father had been plagued with bad dreams, and Guinevere had come. As though the dreams which tormented my father had created her.
I looked at Guinevere now, at those lips which my father had kissed. At those claw-like hands, which he must have held in his own when they were young in the world and happiness seemed as real as the trees and the sky and the wind. And standing in Guinevere’s presence, I hated my father because he had given her his soul, and I hated Guinevere for taking it. And I felt like the boy I once was, left alone on a hill.
‘Your father took her from me,’ Arthur continued. I started and looked at him, struck by the fear that he could somehow hear my thoughts. Iselle’s head turned towards me, her eyes wide and bright in the firelight. I saw her hand fall to the bone grip of her knife hilt, seeking the comfort of it, perhaps.
‘Your father thought she was his and he took her from me,’ Arthur said, and there was an edge of steel in his voice which cut through his weariness. It twisted in my guts.
‘None of that was Galahad’s doing.’ Gawain shook his head. ‘Leave the lad out of it.’
Had my mother known about Guinevere? Had it broken her as it broke Arthur? I would’ve been too young to see it then, but I saw it now in Arthur, his features warped in the flame glow. A mask of bitterness and pain.
‘Look at him, nephew,’ Arthur commanded, his eyes in me like hooks. ‘Don’t tell me you can’t see him in that face. In those eyes.’
‘I see him,’ Gawain admitted. ‘Of course I do. But the lad can’t be blamed for any of it.’
‘No,’ Iselle said, shaking her head at me as if in disbelief. ‘You are not his son.’ Her voice was tremulous, like cold water with the wind across its face. ‘Not Lancelot’s son.’ She had taken a step away from me, her right hand still clutching the long knife’s grip. ‘You can’t be. You’re a monk of the Thorn.’
‘Not yet, he’s not,’ Father Yvain murmured.
All their eyes were on me, heavy as wet wool. Even Guinevere seemed to be watching me.
‘Galahad is not his father,’ Gawain said, though it did not stop Iselle from drawing an arrow from the bag at her waist and fingering its iron head to ward off bad luck.
I knew what folk thought of my father. What they said about him.
‘Perhaps,’ Arthur said, his teeth dragging his fair beard over his lip, ‘we should wish that he was his father. Can you imagine, nephew? You would like that, wouldn’t you?’
Gawain did not answer that. Arthur closed his eyes. ‘Your father and I were the swords of Britain,’ he told me. ‘Our enemies trembled at the mention of our names, and where we fought it was as though the gods fought beside us.’ He stood like that for a while, remembering. Recalling times and events to himself like the secrets and intimaci
es of long-lost lovers. And when his eyes opened again there were tears in them. ‘I loved your father,’ he said. ‘Truly, Galahad, I loved him. But he broke my heart.’
The sadness in Arthur’s words was almost tangible. The torment in his face terrible. But my own chest was flooding with heat, my muscles tightening in my flesh.
‘He chose you over me, lord,’ I offered.
Arthur’s eyes sharpened. He could see the pain in me just as I could see it in him.
‘It’s not about choosing,’ Father Yvain put in, his gruff voice like a whetstone, grinding into the intimacy of the moment which Arthur and I shared. ‘When men fight shoulder to shoulder,’ Yvain went on, gripping an imaginary shield, ‘when they send their enemies into the afterlife and see their friends taken in blood and agony, they become brothers.’ He placed the horn lantern back on the table. ‘They can hate each other or love each other, but nothing can change what they are.’ He nodded. ‘That’s the way of it.’
Gediens and Gawain both nodded at that unassailable truth.
I did not know what to say. What did I know of such things? My brothers had been men of prayer. All I knew was that my father, of whose flesh and blood I was created, abandoned me on that hill and rode away to die. And I could not forgive him.
‘How can you love her still?’ Iselle asked Arthur, looking back to Guinevere with naked disgust. ‘After what she did, how can you care for her like this? All these years?’
‘Hold your tongue, girl,’ Gawain told Iselle. ‘It’s none of your concern.’
‘It is all of our concern,’ Iselle said. ‘It is the concern of kings and beggars. It is the concern of the gods themselves, for why else did they turn their backs on us?’
‘Enough!’ Gawain snapped, but Arthur lifted a hand towards him.
‘Let her speak her mind.’ He nodded at Iselle. ‘Nothing can hurt me now.’
Iselle lifted her chin towards Guinevere, who sat shrouded in shadow, returned to the darkness once more. ‘She and Lancelot betrayed you, lord,’ she said. ‘They wounded you more than your enemies ever did in battle. You lost heart. You no longer believed that we could win.’ Iselle’s hands were clenched by her sides. Her eyes were narrowed, as if she still could not fully believe that the man sitting there by the fire was the same man whose courage and martial prowess was the golden thread and honeyed mead of bard song. Whose victories had brought the kings of Britain together and bought years of peace. The great warlord who, folk whispered, had not died on that savage day of bloodletting ten years ago but still lived and would rise again to lead us out of the darkness.
‘And what would you have me do?’ Arthur asked her, then shook his head. ‘Have I not given enough?’
Iselle unclenched her hands and held them towards him. ‘You should be leading us still. You should be High King. You should be Arthur Pendragon.’
With those words hanging in the smoky air, a silence spread among us. We all knew to hold our tongues then, even Iselle. We knew that the next words could only belong to Arthur. He knew it, too, and for a long moment he carried that burden, keeping his thoughts to himself as the fire breathed softly in the hearth.
Then he looked at Iselle and there was such sadness in his eyes that it made my own heart ache. ‘I am nothing without her,’ he confessed.
I looked at Iselle and she looked at me, and I saw blame in her eyes. She could not truly hate a woman who was trapped between life and death. Nor could she hate my father, a stranger who had gone to Arawn’s realm years ago. But she could hate me, because I was Lancelot’s son.
‘There may be reason to hope, uncle,’ Gawain said.
Arthur looked round, the anguish in his face turning to suspicion. As though he wanted to believe but also did not want to.
‘Careful, nephew,’ he warned. ‘In all the years you have been searching, you have never said as much.’
Gawain acknowledged this with a nod. ‘And yet I say it now.’
Arthur picked up the fire iron again and idly poked at the fuel, though he sat a little straighter, his shoulders less rounded than before.
The air in the room had changed. I felt it as a vibration, the way you sometimes feel a storm coming before you hear it or see it.
‘We’ve found him, Arthur,’ Gawain said. He exhaled as though there were weight in those words and he had been holding them until that moment. ‘We’ve found Merlin.’
6
Shadow and Bronze
OVER THE NEXT DAYS, Arthur seemed changed. It was a gradual change, in any one moment as imperceptible as a marsh marigold’s turning towards the sun. But there was no denying it. It was as though some of the years had fallen away from him and, as on the first night, when a play of the firelight had revealed glimpses of the man he used to be, now I saw flashes of Arthur ap Uther in the wan light of the late winter day. I saw it as he worked with a spade on a ridge beyond the orchard, turning the ground and planting a sackful of onions and garlic bulbs which had sprouted new green shoots. I saw it as he climbed up onto the roof with Gawain to pull off some of the old thatch and replace it with new bundles, and as he went into the marsh with Gediens and Iselle and returned later with a duck or some other wading bird for the pot. I even saw it as he listened to Gawain or Father Yvain telling what they knew about the Saxons or the kings of Britain. Or of Camelot, which Arthur himself had made and which yet held out against the invaders, a beacon of hope in the bleakest of days.
There was a difference in the way he carried himself. The wretched apathy which had seemed to cling to him fell away and now there was a restlessness about him. A nervousness.
‘This is what he was like the night before he married her,’ Gawain told me one afternoon as we watched Arthur bent over, axe in hand, scraping the slime and rot from the timbers of the walkway, while his dog, who Gawain told me was called Banon, sat patiently nearby. The weather being good, Gawain and I had been out gathering deadfall to burn instead of Arthur’s peat turves, and when we returned we found Arthur hard at work. ‘He was like this when he and your father dug Camelot’s defensive ditches, too,’ Gawain added, scratching his beard thoughtfully as I stacked the wood beneath the eaves.
‘You’ve given him a reason to hope,’ I said, glancing at the famous lord of war as he worked in the filth. For the flint and steel which had put a spark in Arthur’s heart was the news that Merlin had been found. Just as the bards sang their tales of Arthur, so they gilded the dark nights with stories of Merlin, the last of the druids. They recounted the fear which his spells sowed in Saxon bellies, and his vast knowledge of the gods and his ability to speak with them. And of course, the bards told of the sword Excalibur, which Merlin had discovered and given to Lord Arthur so that he might hold it like a firebrand to light the way for the people of these Dark Isles.
The difference was that all folk believed in Arthur son of Uther. Arthur the man. And they hoped beyond hope that he would return to fight for them again. It was not so with Merlin. Folk believed that the druid, one-time adviser to the Pendragon himself, had not been a man of flesh, blood and bone, but rather a mysterious spirit being. A shape-shifter. A legend passed from lip to ear around the hearth, the whisper of the wind among the yews and oaks and ancient standing stones.
I could not recall my father talking of Merlin, though he must have known him. And as for the Brothers of the Thorn, they would not speak the druid’s name for fear that doing so was to invoke the old gods and give breath to ideas which they would sooner were buried. But even those who had known Merlin, men such as Gawain and Gediens and Arthur, who had journeyed with the druid and received his counsel, and who could testify to his walking the same ground as mortal men, could not say what had become of him. He had simply vanished like a word on the air.
‘No one has seen him in years,’ Gawain had explained to me that first night at Arthur’s steading, after the reason for our being there had been brought into the light. ‘We have been searching, those of us who still hold to our oaths to serv
e Arthur. Many have died for it. Others who set out never returned.’
‘What made you so sure Merlin was alive?’ I’d asked, preparing my bed of skins by the hearth. The journey and then the warmth of Arthur’s fire had brought a heavy tiredness upon me, but I would say my prayers for the brothers’ souls before I gave in to sleep.
Gawain shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘If there was a chance he was still breathing, still stirring up trouble somewhere, we had to try. For his sake.’ He nodded towards Arthur, who had carried Guinevere to their bed and sat stroking her hair, whispering secret things in a voice no louder than the breath of the flames in the hearth.
I learnt that Arthur had nothing good to say about Merlin. He blamed the druid for Britain’s ruin as much as he blamed himself and his own failure. And yet whatever he felt about the man, it seemed Arthur had clung to the hope, as one tries to cling to a dream which fades on waking, that the druid would be able to cure Guinevere. That only Merlin, with his vast knowledge of herb lore and ancient texts and of the gods themselves, could dispel the strange affliction. Arthur believed that Merlin could bring her back.
Gawain told us that Parcefal, another of Arthur’s loyal warlords, beside whom he had routed Saxon armies and shared his greatest hopes, and who had, like Gawain, been looking for Merlin across the years, had found him at last, living a hermit’s life on Ynys Weith off the south coast of Britain. It was almost unbelievable. And yet Arthur had believed.
‘Did he know that I live?’ Arthur had asked, his eyes smouldering as the news took hold in him.
‘Parcefal’s messenger did not say and I did not ask,’ Gawain replied, ‘but Merlin agreed to go with Parcefal to Tintagel and await me there. We can’t risk him being caught out on the roads,’ he said, nodding at the door beyond which night had fallen. ‘The Saxons would skin him.’
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