Camelot

by Giles Kristian

  ‘I had them made for your father. A gift to mark our friendship.’ Looking down at the greaves, Arthur moved the lantern closer, so that each bird seemed alive as the flame’s glow played across the ridges and indentations in the bronze. That fierce eye. That sharp beak. The bristling feathers.

  ‘He told me,’ I remembered. I had not wholly believed my father. It had seemed impossible to the child I was then that my father could have been friends with the great Lord Arthur, warlord of Britain.

  ‘Closer.’ Arthur beckoned me with a sweep of the lantern, his voice barely more than a whisper. I went closer. I could smell the bronze now and the earthy, slightly sweet scent of the leather to which the scales were laced. I looked at my father’s helmet with its hinged cheek irons and its long, white horsehair plume. I closed my eyes and remembered washing that plume and combing the knots and tangles out until it flowed like water. My father had not said I had done a good job, but I had known that he was pleased. We had both been proud when he put the helmet on and tied the straps beneath his chin. For the last time.

  ‘Why have you kept it here all these years, lord?’ I asked, dreading the answer that I knew was coming.

  ‘I kept it for you, Galahad.’ He looked back at the armour. He must have cleaned it himself, I realized, for there was no patina on the scales or the helmet.

  ‘Why, lord?’ I asked.

  Arthur nodded, as if he had expected the question.

  ‘Because it is yours now,’ he answered. ‘Lancelot was my friend. If he were still here with us …’ He did not, or could not, finish that thought, but reached out and placed three fingers against the helmet’s cheek piece. ‘Your father would want you to have it,’ he said. ‘I knew about you, Galahad. Knew that one day Gawain would return to Ynys Wydryn and bring you to me. And so I kept your father’s war gear safe because I thought you would want it. That you would use it.’

  My guts had twisted into knots. My chest ached. I was ten years old again, standing on a hillside, watching my father ride away.

  ‘I don’t want it,’ I said.

  Arthur made a hum in his throat and scratched his cheek. However he had imagined this moment, it was not like this.

  ‘I’m sorry, lord, but I don’t want it.’ I swallowed hard. I needed to escape and so I turned and walked away.

  ‘It’s yours, Galahad,’ Arthur said as I opened the door and walked into the gathering dark. A darkness which could not dim the sight of my memory, seeing him as he once was. My father, in his scale armour, surrounded by enemies. Engulfed by them.

  I had to flee. Though I knew that he never had.

  ‘What would you have me do with it, lad?’ Arthur called after me, but I did not stop.

  I know this creature, and she knows me. She is nervous as we browse the brambles and wild flowers on the fringe of the forest clearing. It is dusk. The scent of new-made hay is on the air, even here among the trees, far from the nearest village and the fields at whose edges poppies flaunt their crimson heads in the summer breeze.

  There, twined around a young oak, climbing up and up, a braid of honeysuckle. Sweet and heady on the shafts of golden light which arrow through the clearing. Cream trumpet flowers shivering with the thrill of the embrace.

  Too good to leave, and besides, it is not yet night. We move slowly, alert to any hidden danger, twitching at the insects which drone in the heavy air, thick as silt stirred up from a river bed. We move through the dappled grass, the bitter ferns and the sweet-smelling herbs, and I believe I could lead this roe deer right into the clearing and up to the front door of the little dwelling if I chose to. For I have been so long in this other place that I am perhaps more like the creatures whose souls my own soul entwines than what I used to be.

  Sometimes, I can see into the world which I left behind. The world in which my body still lingers like an old house going to ruin. Sometimes, I look out from tired eyes and I see him. Arthur. Old now. Grey and broken, but Arthur still. My Arthur. But mostly I roam the wild woods and the grey skies. The wave-lashed shore and the high meadows where the grass grows as tall as a boy. I am trapped, and yet I am free.

  What would the druid think if he knew? That my gift, my talent, my curse, is more potent even than his own? That for me the years are a stream? And like a salmon, I can swim with the current but also against it, upstream, back to times and places which are nothing now but someone’s fading memory, or a faint echo of feeling among ruins, or a story passed like a drink around a fire.

  And here I am now, in the before, spirit-joined with this creature, on the edge of the clearing where he lives.

  Lancelot.

  I let the roe eat some of the honeysuckle, but then I pull her away and we move on, keeping the wind in her nose, and now I smell him. See him. He is tall and strong. Dark-haired and keen-eyed. He is beautiful. As is his boy, who flies at him now, the clatter of their wooden swords giving the roe a start, though I hold her to this spot amongst the beech and black bryony. A hunter’s arrow could not pierce my heart more. I am here, in the past, breathing the same forest air as he. Warmed by the same late evening sun which warms his cheek.

  The boy is fast and strong and his father grins to see it. So proud. They move as easily as water, the boy and the man. Like a dance. Twisting and spinning, ducking and thrusting, their practice swords kissing and clacking and whipping the dusk air.

  Galahad looks so like his father. It’s in his cheekbones and in the way he tilts his head when the two break apart to catch their breath. It’s in his hawk’s eyes, in that questioning look, as though he is measuring himself against all others, against the world itself, and I remember the boy I knew on the island. That proud boy who swam out in a storm and pulled me from the clutches of some greedy god. The boy who became the man with whom I am entwined now and always. And who waits for me.

  But then the door of the little house opens and my hold on the doe almost breaks, for the pain is too much. She is fair-haired and pale-skinned, and she comes to watch them both, and they both turn and smile at her and now I see that Galahad looks as much like her as he does his father. They both love her and she them. It is in their faces and in the air. So thick in the air that I breathe it in, much as I don’t want to. The three of them. Three souls hiding from the world.

  The boy goes for his father again, but Lancelot parries every thrust and strike until, at last, he seems to misjudge the boy’s attack and the boy scores a hit on his chest and my love falls to his knees as if mortally wounded, clutching the spot where the boy struck him. And the boy grins at his mother, who claps her hands like the beating of a dove’s wings.

  Above me, some startled creature takes flight, yet I hold to the spot, just as Lancelot tries to hold the grimace of pain in his face but cannot. The twist of lips, lips which I have known so well, becomes a smile. He laughs, and in his eyes I see how much he loves the boy. Loves him to the end of everything.

  I can look no more. And so I release my grip on the doe, her bunched muscles bursting into movement, and we fly into the forest.

  Owl and polecat, fox and badger were out hunting still when I found myself standing outside Arthur’s stable, my cloak pulled tight against the cold. Dawn had not yet seeped into night’s black hem and the others were deep in sleep when I had eased the door shut behind me and made my way across the wooden trackway which Arthur had cleared of slime and moss.

  I entered the stable and again I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of my father’s armour. Now, I knew it for what it was: metal and leather, linen and horsehair, not flesh, blood and soul, and yet still I half expected it to greet me. Which might have been why I did something which I would have struggled to explain even to myself.

  ‘Father,’ I said, in a quiet voice. Then a little louder, a little brighter, as I might have called to him when I returned from the rabbit snares or the willow traps. ‘Father.’

  I waited, feeling blood course through my veins. Feeling the weight of the silence and of my heart, like a ston
e in my chest.

  Perhaps I had just wanted to feel the old familiar greeting in my mouth again. To remember what it was to be a boy and have a father. Or perhaps I meant to wound myself, to wallow in pain by tricking my heart into hoping, beyond reason and sanity, that I might hear my father’s voice say Hello, boy.

  Something rustled in the dark. I lifted the lamp and saw two mice scurry across the reed bundles. Somewhere in the night beyond the old stable, an owl screeched. A long, drawn-out shriek accusing me of stirring up the past and things which were better left alone. I made the sign of the Thorn, went up to the armour and placed my palm on the cold bronze scales. I was closer now than I had been earlier with Arthur, and I saw that many of the little plates were dented. Some of these bent and damaged scales made lines across the coat. Silent echoes from across the years. I closed my eyes and ran my hand over these scars, imagining each sword blow which had made them, each savage blow which my father had felt but which had not put him down.

  I moved round to the back of the armour and by the oil lamp’s glow I found three small holes, one in the shoulder and two in the small of the back. I explored each one with my fingers, following the course of the spear which had been thrust up beneath the scales to tear through the tough leather beneath. To rip into my father’s flesh.

  I placed my hands on the same parts of my own body and tried to imagine the pain, but I could not. Then to the helmet, where my father’s shade lingered strongest. I touched that white plume which I had seen flying in the wind. I put it to my nose and breathed in its smell. I combed it with my hand, feeling the long, coarse hairs pass between my fingers. And then, heart clenching, hands shaking, I put the helmet on my own head. I caught the faint scent of my father’s sweat in the leather liner. After all the years. And in that moment, I was not a man standing in a stable on a winter’s night, but a ten-year-old boy pretending to be a warrior. Playing games of war within the protective fortress of a father’s love.

  ‘It fits you.’

  I ripped the helmet off my head and turned to see Iselle standing just inside the stable.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. How had I not heard her come in? She came nearer, stopping just beyond the glow of the lantern which I had set down on a stool. I saw the glint of bronze scales in her eyes and knew she was awestruck by the war gear, as I had been.

  ‘This is your father’s,’ she said. Not a question. She just knew.

  ‘Lord Arthur kept it for me.’

  She took another step and put a hand on the armour, just as I had done. ‘It is magnificent.’

  I nodded. It was strange watching her fingers find the battle marks on the bronze. I wanted to tell her that it was not her place to touch the armour in which my father had breathed his last breath. But I said nothing.

  ‘They say your father was the greatest warrior to walk the land since Cú Chulainn,’ she said. ‘That even the battle god Belatucadrus grew envious of Lancelot and made him fall in love with Guinevere because he wanted to sow the seeds of his downfall.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’ I asked.

  She cocked her head, studying me as if wondering whether I believed it. ‘I am not a child, Galahad. Such stories are for children and men in their ale cups.’ She pulled her hand away, as though the scales had burned her. ‘But he must have been a fighter without equal. Imagine what he and Lord Arthur could have achieved had Lancelot not betrayed his friend. Had he not broken Arthur’s heart.’

  ‘If Lord Arthur despised my father so much, why did he save his war gear and keep it these last ten years?’ I asked. ‘Look at it.’ I lifted the helmet. ‘Think of the times he must have come in here to clean and polish the bronze and steel. I expect my father’s sword is sharp too.’ I looked at Boar’s Tusk in its scabbard but left it where it was. ‘Why would Arthur do this if he so hated my father?’

  Iselle’s teeth worried at her bottom lip as she considered her answer. ‘He said he kept it for you?’

  ‘But I don’t want it,’ I said.

  ‘Because you are afraid?’

  ‘My duty is to protect the Holy Thorn,’ I said. ‘My brothers cannot do it and so I must. I will carry the Thorn to safety. To some secret place.’

  I did not want to tell her that I hated my father for leaving me alone in the world. For choosing Arthur and for choosing Guinevere and for not choosing me. For holding tight to his spear and shield and for letting go of me.

  ‘But perhaps you are meant to have it.’ She was looking again at the war gear. ‘Perhaps that is why I followed you in the marsh. Why I saved your life.’

  ‘You hate the Saxons. That is why you killed those men.’

  She did not deny it, and yet I could see that she was thinking other things, trying to untangle knots in her mind.

  The owl in the night screeched again but I did not sign the Thorn this time.

  ‘So, what will you do with it?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing. I told you, I don’t want it. Arthur can sink it in the mire if it pleases him. An offering to the gods who he believes have abandoned him.’

  She touched the scale coat again. To see the awe with which she beheld it, you would have thought the armour had been made by gods. Or worn by one.

  ‘May I?’ she asked, nodding at the helmet in my hands.

  I wanted to say no. Instead, I held the helmet towards her and as she took it our fingers touched and a shiver ran through me.

  ‘I asked you what you were doing out here,’ I said.

  Reverently, slowly, she put the helmet on. It was much too big for her. There was empty space between her high cheekbones and the steel-hinged guards, and she had to tilt it back in order to see properly. And yet it suited her. She looked fierce. She looked beautiful.

  ‘I was awake when you crept out,’ she said. ‘I thought you were going to pray to your god. I wanted to hear what you would pray for.’

  It was not the truth, but I did not challenge it. She removed the helmet and offered it back to me but I shook my head and so she placed it on the pole above the scale coat.

  ‘It will be dawn soon.’ I picked up the reed lamp from the stool. Iselle took one last look at my father’s scale coat and plumed helmet, his greaves and his sword, and followed me back into the night.

  I went back to my blankets by the hearth and I dreamt not of my father riding off to die but of Father Brice. In my dream he had survived the slaughter on Ynys Wydryn and I met him in some dark, cramped, smoky place, which may have been the tunnels beneath the tor or even Lord Arthur’s smokehouse. For some reason, the monk could not or would not speak, but I could. I told him over and over that I was sorry I had not stood beside him when the Saxons came. Next time I would, I told him, though Brice seemed more concerned with trying to find our way out of that place, and I cannot say whether we would have escaped, for Father Yvain prodded me awake and I saw it was morning.

  Everyone else was awake before me and for a while I just sat there in my blankets, trying to fix Father Brice’s face in my mind even as the dream fell away from me. Iselle, I saw, was sitting across from me, the other side of the hearth, her back against the wall, stitching a rabbit skin into the lining of her hood. Arthur, Guinevere and Gediens must have been outside, while Yvain and Gawain were talking in low voices beyond the open door which invited clean dawn air to scour the fug from the room. I shivered to feel the touch of it on my neck.

  ‘You were dreaming.’ Iselle looked up from her work.

  Father Brice drifted from me like the smoke from the dying fire.

  ‘Did I say anything?’ I asked, remembering how, once, Father Dristan had woken me and pulled me through the dark dormitory to Father Meurig’s bed because the cook was talking in his sleep. We had stood by Meurig’s bed, our shoulders shaking, eyes glistening with tears, and hands clamped over our mouths to keep from laughing aloud as the cook mumbled about some recipe of eels, pignuts, parsnips and milk curdled with wood sorrel.

  ‘You groaned a little. Nothing t
hat made sense,’ Iselle assured me.

  I pressed my knuckles into a crick in my neck and looked over at Father Yvain and Gawain, wondering what they were discussing. Gawain had a cup in his hand, and I realized how thirsty I was from having breathed in so much smoke during the night. The warrior must have felt my eyes on him for he turned and looked at me, a sourness in his scarred face. Then Father Yvain looked over to me. A heartbeat and his eyes were back on Gawain’s, their hushed conversation resumed, and I felt a knot tying itself in my guts.

  Perhaps it was the dream of Father Brice, or maybe there was some other instinct whispering to me, for something made me reach for my knapsack. I thrust my hand inside, feeling for the damp linen pouch in which I kept the cutting of the Holy Thorn and the eight precious berries. It was not there. I opened the sack fully and turned the opening towards the daylight so that I could see inside properly.

  ‘It’s gone, Galahad,’ Iselle said.

  For a moment I wondered how she had known what I was looking for. ‘Where?’ I asked. But even as I spoke, I looked at the hearth and the charred fuel from which, now and then, a small tongue of fire licked, as if tasting the air. My stomach clenched and I couldn’t breathe. The little cutting had been green wood, cut from the living tree just days before, so it had not burned well and had retained its shape.