‘No.’ I was on my feet now, shaking my head at that gnarled, blackened stick which smouldered and smoked in Lord Arthur’s hearth. ‘No.’ I looked round and saw that Father Yvain and Gawain were both watching me.
‘What have you done?’ I yelled at Gawain, who raised a cautionary hand and opened his mouth to speak.
‘I did it,’ Iselle admitted, cutting him off. ‘I burned it.’
I turned to her, hoping that she was lying. Knowing that she was not.
‘The berries too,’ she added. ‘I took them when you were asleep, and I put them in the fire.’
I felt sick. I looked at the feeble flames and then back at Iselle.
‘How could you?’ I asked her, forcing the words out between gritted teeth, my muscles quivering in my flesh. ‘Who gave you the right?’ I was hot with rage which only burned hotter still because I saw no regret in Iselle, no sign that she was sorry for what she had done.
‘It’s better this way,’ she said.
‘Better? Are you mad? Who are you to decide what is better?’ I was trembling with anger. I could feel the blood pounding in my head, and I wanted to take Iselle by the shoulders and shake her, but I could not move.
Gawain and Father Yvain came inside, and I knew that they had known. That Gawain was complicit came as no surprise. I did not believe that the warrior cared for anything other than his quest to find Merlin and restore Arthur to his former glory. But had Father Yvain known and done nothing?
‘Why, Iselle?’ I asked. ‘Why did you do it?’ My anger was tempered now by a sinking feeling at their betrayal.
‘It’s done, Galahad,’ Father Yvain said. ‘Nothing can change it.’
I glared at him. ‘Have you forgotten our brothers already, Father?’ I asked him.
‘I’ve not forgotten them, lad,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘But a tree is just a tree.’
Was I still caught inside my dream? If so, I needed to wake up.
‘It was an offence to the gods,’ Iselle said. ‘We are all better off without it.’
‘But I swore to the brothers,’ I told her, then turned to Yvain. ‘I swore to them in my prayers. I would keep the Thorn safe. That was why I could not stay with them at the end. Father Brice knew it and he entrusted the Thorn into my keeping. God helped me carry it to safety.’
‘No, Galahad.’ Gawain waved a finger at me. ‘Not god. Hanguis and Endalan. They’re the reason you’re alive now.’ He pointed at Iselle. ‘And Iselle before them,’ he added. ‘You’re alive because we didn’t let the Saxons kill you.’
There was a cold truth in his words. And yet I owed it to Father Brice and Father Judoc and all the others to speak for them. I felt that the monks were listening now. That I was being judged and found wanting. Fists clenched, fingernails biting into my palms, I wanted to tell Iselle that I hated her for what she had done. But the truth was I did not hate her.
‘Put the Brothers of the Thorn and their god behind you, Galahad,’ Gawain said. ‘None of it can help you now.’ He turned and walked back outside, the new day washing his own scale armour in crimson. ‘Get your things, everyone. We’re leaving.’
Iselle wound the surplus thread around her bone needle, which she tucked back into the scrip on her belt. Then, without looking at me, she followed Father Yvain outside. I watched her go and I turned back to the hearth. I whispered to Father Brice that I was sorry. And I watched the Holy Thorn smoulder and burn.
7
The Riven Land
WE LEFT ARTHUR AND Guinevere sitting wrapped in furs among the fruit trees as dawn broke in the east, flooding the marshes with golden light and promising a fine cold day. Iselle led the way, walking an arrow-shot ahead. She was happiest in her own company, it seemed to me, and of us all she had the greatest knowledge and experience of that waterlogged world. Whenever some bird clattered up from the frosty reed-beds at our approach, I realized how clumsy we were compared with her, who had passed those same birds before us and not driven them to seek the safety of the sky. In a glance, Iselle could read the shape of a stunted willow, its extremities combed by the prevailing winds, and know which way we must go. She could taste a drop of water from one ditch and a drop from another and know how far we were from the sea or if the Hafren was surging and we would need to find higher ground. With her bow she could conjure a meal of bittern or duck as easily as think of it, and it soon became clear why she had not merely survived out here amongst the floodplains, fringe streams, rivers, ditches, ponds and lakes, but had thrived.
We went south and, as dusk fell, came across a moss-crept, decomposing hut which we found to be abandoned, though there were snares and traps within which showed that some wildfowler had sheltered there recently. We stayed the night in that draughty place and in the morning we set off again as a thick blanket of cloud gathered above us, prolonging the night and threatening rain which did not fall. The day after that it snowed. The snow did not settle, but swirled on the breeze, hazing the world and making stark, foreboding shapes of the leafless oaks, black alder and ash. And I wondered if Iselle had known it would snow and that was why she had sewn the rabbit pelt into her hood. I did not ask her. We had not spoken since leaving Arthur’s steading and the silence stretched between us, heavy as the day.
I smouldered inside my cowl and Iselle glowered from inside her newly lined hood and Father Yvain despaired of us both. ‘This thing between the two of you,’ the monk nodded towards Iselle, who was out in front as usual, ‘it’s like ice growing in the water barrel.’ He puffed with the effort of climbing a grassy ridge, using his spear as a staff to help him up. ‘The longer you leave it, the harder it is to crack.’
I said nothing, and when we got to the top of the ridge the monk stopped and put his hands on his hips, pretending to appreciate the view as snow settled on his bear skin and melted in his big beard. Really, I knew he was trying to catch his breath. ‘More like your father than you know,’ he said, his gaze ranging along that shoulder of land running south-east beside the Hafren, which snaked inland to the south of Avalon.
‘Save your breath, Father,’ I said. ‘At your age you don’t have enough to waste.’ Even blowing as he was, he managed to laugh at that. Gawain and Gediens were huffing up the slope behind us, their war gear clinking and clattering as they climbed.
‘Have you asked yourself why she did it, lad?’ Father Yvain said.
‘Because she hates our god,’ I replied.
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Or maybe it’s because she’s alone in the world. And she likes you and doesn’t want you going off and getting yourself killed for the sake of some old tree. Have you thought of that, Galahad?’
I had not thought of that, but I did now. Iselle had never talked about her real parents, other than to say that they had died in the turmoil of Arthur’s wars. And now her foster mother, Alana, was gone too. Her home was nothing but ashes on the wind. The Saxons had taken everything from her, and for all that she had grown up roaming the marsh and the hidden ways alone, like a wolf driven from the pack which must become fierce if it is to survive, could it be that Iselle had grown tired of this solitary life? Perhaps loneliness or curiosity had led her to stalk me through the reed-beds that day I went to the lake village. Or perhaps Iselle hated our Christian god and burned the cutting of the Holy Thorn because she thought me a fool. That was more likely, I told myself as I watched a grey heron beat into the west, its neck outstretched and its legs trailing behind, a grey ghost sweeping through the falling snow. I wondered what it must be like to be up there, looking down on the land. To see everything. Perhaps to know everything.
We trudged on along that high ground. Ahead, we could just make out Camelot upon its hill to the south by the brown tinge its fires gave the snow-laden clouds. Turning my face to spare it the wind’s bite, I could not but gaze at that distant hill, imagining Camelot as it once was, when there was still hope in Britain. I could not help but think of my father and Lord Arthur riding their war horses through the great fort�
��s gates, fresh from some victory against the Saxons. Still young. Still friends. The heroes of Britain.
That night we came to the Roman road which Gawain called the Fosse and which he said ran from the Saxon lands of Lindisware in the north-east to Lindinis in Dumnonia. Wide enough for four horsemen to ride abreast, it was nothing like our own paths and ways, which meandered along animal tracks or watercourses and which so often became quagmires in winter. This Roman road, built on an embankment so that the legions that had once marched along it need not fear ambush, lay for the most part as straight as a spear across the land. And whilst, here and there, weed and grass and bramble pushed through the stony surface, inexorably reclaiming the land, as we longed to do, it was not hard to imagine the road as it had once looked. Awesome, imposing, a thing made of earth and stone, sweat, blood and ambition.
As we prepared a camp in the beech wood nearby, I tried to imagine the many hundreds of men who must have laboured on it. Roman soldiers from Gallia or the Rhinelands, or even from Rome itself, men who lived and toiled and died beneath a foreign sky. I wondered if their souls had found the afterlife. Or did some of those men’s ghosts still march along this road, never finding rest, never reaching their destination?
We would have to sleep beneath the cold sky and so were gathering fuel to make a fire that would burn through the night. Some deadfall from the beech trees, but mostly juniper branches, which we knew would give little smoke. As I brought a load back to the camp, I saw Gawain just standing, his arms full of branches, looking back to the road.
‘We used to thunder along here,’ he said, his thoughts cantering along that road into the past, recalling his years as one of Lord Arthur’s famous horse warriors, his cataphracts, who had become the phantoms of Saxon nightmares. ‘Arthur would moan that Uther should have kept the roads in good repair, of course, but then he always did admire the Romans.’ He grinned at the memory. ‘We’d move fast, cover such distances in a day that we could hammer a Saxon war band in Caer Celemion in the morning and cut up another in Cynwidion before sunset.’
‘They must have thought there were thousands of us.’ Gediens too had stopped to look towards the road, his own head full of the past.
Gawain’s smile faded and he shook his head. ‘With just another two hundred we could have chased them into the Morimaru and watched them drown.’
‘What became of them? Lord Arthur’s war horses?’ I asked, throwing my branches onto the growing pile beside Father Yvain, who was on his knees setting the fire within a ring made from stones found in the ditch beside the road.
‘I heard they vanished. Like Merlin.’ Yvain blew into the embers he had nurtured in a pile of birch bark scrapings.
‘Folk used to say that Lord Arthur’s horses were so saddened by his death that they galloped into the Western Sea, where the goddess Epona turned them into waves,’ Iselle said, shaking the berries off a juniper bough.
‘Better than the truth, I suppose,’ Gawain muttered. ‘That they were butchered. Most of them. Those fine, fine horses.’ He closed his eyes to better see those horses and when he opened them again, they glistened with tears. He blinked and shook his head to rid himself of the memories. ‘Some survived,’ he said, turning to Iselle. ‘Some ran to the Western Sea, just like in your story. And maybe the sea goddess did turn them into waves.’ He shrugged and walked to the fire, dropping his wood with the rest.
‘There are others like you?’ Iselle asked. ‘Alive somewhere?’
A gust sought amongst the trees and Gawain pulled his cloak around his neck to keep its cold fingers off. ‘I don’t blame a man for wanting to live,’ he said. ‘If a man is going to stand in the shieldwall or ride into slaughter, he needs to have something to believe in. We’ve not had anything to believe in for a long time.’ He huffed warm air into his hands. ‘Maybe that will change.’
The first flames crackled and spat from Yvain’s creation and so the monk bent lower still and blew upwards into the fuel, feeding the fire.
‘Well, it had better be soon,’ Gediens said, holding two sticks side by side to compare their lengths, ‘because I’m getting too old to be traipsing across the land and sleeping out in winter.’
‘It’s a young man’s business,’ Gawain agreed, easing himself down onto a bench he had made from stumps and deadfall.
Gediens swept one of the sticks through the air with a whipping sound. ‘I fear young men these days don’t have it in them. Not like we did.’ This was for my benefit, I knew, but I ignored it. ‘What say you, Galahad?’ he asked, and with that he tossed one of the sticks at me and I caught it. He pointed with his own. ‘Why don’t we see if you have any of your father’s talent? Surely the apple did not fall so far from the tree.’ He slashed his stick again as if it were a sword. ‘First one to land a good hit. Iselle can decide it.’ Iselle didn’t say that she would or wouldn’t, but a smile played at the corners of her lips at my obvious discomfort.
I took three steps and dropped the stick I held onto Yvain’s fire, causing him to mutter that it was too soon for pieces that size.
Gediens sighed and lifted his chin to Gawain. ‘Are you sure we got the right monk?’ he asked.
‘Leave the lad alone, Gediens,’ Father Yvain rumbled. ‘He didn’t ask for any of this.’
Gawain was holding his hands towards the new growing flame. ‘You think Hanguis and Endalan saw themselves dying on that hill?’ he asked Father Yvain. ‘You think they asked for that?’ The only answer was the crackle of juniper spines catching fire. ‘They knew we were there to get Galahad out. They knew what they were dying for.’
‘I would not have had them give their lives for mine,’ I said, and meant it.
Gawain looked at me and nodded. ‘Sometimes we don’t get to choose, Galahad,’ he said. A gust punched through the woods like a fist, flaring the fire. ‘Sometimes we are part of something bigger than what we can see. What I do know is that we have you. And whether you like it or not, you are Lancelot’s son.’ He rubbed his hands together and palmed them towards the fire again. ‘We’ve found Merlin and we’ll bring him back. And maybe, if the gods will it, we’ll have Arthur again.’
No one spoke for a long while after that, none of us wanting to break the strange spell which Gawain had woven. Each of us perhaps daring to imagine what might be if Arthur rode again. If he unsheathed Excalibur and united the Britons beneath the bear banner, as he had once before, and drove the Saxons back to the coast.
We cooked two bitterns and a tufted duck over the fire, took it in turns to keep watch and slept as well as we could through the cold night. And in the pre-dawn dark we set off again, shivering and stiff, as a robin admonished us from an old oak stump near the road, its percussive tick tick unnaturally loud in that otherwise still and murky world.
Sometimes we walked along the Fosse in the footsteps of long-dead legionaries. At other times, particularly if some hill or deviation did not afford us a far view, we kept amongst the trees. For whilst it became less and less likely we would meet any Saxons with every day we journeyed west, it was still possible. We did not want to come across a scouting party out stealing food for Cerdic’s army, or a war band probing for signs of resistance from the cowed lords of Britain, like boys poking sticks into a wasps’ nest for the bloody-minded mischief of it. Nor did we want to be met by any of Morgana’s men or any spearmen who bent the knee to King Cuel of Caer Gloui, for then Lord Gawain would be obliged to travel to their lord or lady’s court to pay his respects, which he did not want to do.
‘What we are doing must stay between us,’ he had warned. ‘When we are strong enough, when Arthur is strong enough, we will summon the kings and spearmen of Britain. But we cannot risk a false dawn.’
We all agreed. Besides which, who would believe that Arthur lived? Other than those few loyal warriors who had searched the land for Merlin, no one had seen Arthur these last ten years. He was a memory. A hope to some, perhaps, those who still believed that the old gods of Britain would ret
urn with shining swords to save us from our enemies. To most, Arthur was an idea, as intangible as gossamer webs on dewy autumn grass, his name the whispered chant of a raven’s beating wings.
‘When we’re ready, they will come,’ Gawain assured us. ‘But we are not ready yet.’
He thought our hopes and ambitions as fragile as a new flame on a damp wick and so the fewer eyes that saw us, the fewer tongues that spoke of us, the better.
And yet, we could not weave around ourselves one of the invisibility spells for which Merlin had been famous, and nor could we expect to have the Fosse to ourselves.
We met a man and woman and their three children as they joined the road ahead of us. They had fled their home in Caer Celemion, which was being ravaged by Saxon war bands now that Lord Farasan was in his grave, and were bound for Cornubia. The man was limping, pushing their belongings in a handcart which moaned with every turn of its battered wheels.
Seeing Gawain and Gediens’s bear-shields and fine war gear, the man spoke of his family’s flight with downcast eyes, his voice tremulous but respectful. His wife, though, spat towards Gawain and Gediens, calling them cowards for going south when they should have been marching north to fight. The man, who by his age and the rusting helmet in his barrow had perhaps earned his limp in the Saxon wars, struck his wife, drawing blood from her lip and perhaps thinking it a small price to pay for saving his family from Gawain’s wrath.
But Gawain tilted his spear towards the man, his eyes as sharp as that spear’s blade. ‘Lay a finger on your wife again and she’ll be pushing you and your broken legs along in that barrow,’ he told him. The man muttered some apology, his gaze fixed on a weed which had pushed through the road by his feet.
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