‘Back, lad,’ Gawain growled at me but I held my ground.
‘No!’ Lady Triamour shouted. ‘No more! Back. Back, men of Camelot.’ She had changed her mind, and the crow-shields didn’t need telling again. They lowered their shields and retreated, gathering close to their lady. She had seen two of her men slaughtered and perhaps she knew that her gods were not with her on that wind-pummelled clifftop.
‘Good,’ Lord Geldrin said. ‘Now I suggest you leave Tintagel, Lord Gawain. My men will return your belongings. You take your horses and you go, and you will not come back here again, do you understand?’
Gawain was breathing hard, his sword dripping crimson into the grass. He nodded. ‘I do.’
Lord Geldrin was glaring at me then and there was fire between us.
‘You know I had to do it, lad,’ he said. ‘The dead must be avenged.’ He nodded. ‘Keep the spear. A gift.’
I said nothing. The spear felt good in my hand. I wondered if my throw was still true, if I could hit Lord Geldrin from where I stood.
‘Galahad,’ Gawain rumbled. ‘We’re leaving.’
Still looking at the Lord of the Heights, I nodded. Then I turned and we strode back down the hill towards Tintagel, now and then looking back to make sure Lady Triamour’s men weren’t coming after us.
‘You’re looking old, my friend,’ Gawain said to Parcefal, who was leaning back against his saddle horns, letting his mare pick her own way down a rocky bluff.
‘I am old,’ Parcefal said, lifting his left arm and wincing at some pain. Below us, Tintagel was waking up to a new day. ‘I meant to put that big ox down on the first pass.’
Gawain and Gediens grinned bitterly at that. But I could still hear Lord Geldrin’s words on the wind.
The dead must be avenged.
Lord Geldrin’s men returned everything they had taken from us, including, to my surprise, the druid’s sack, though I was not much comforted to have it again in my possession. Then they escorted us across the land bridge, making sure that the big gates on the landward side were firmly shut and barred behind us. They had not let Gawain sell any of the horses back to Lidas the hunchback, and so we were five riding, with four spare mounts, those horses serving to remind us that we had failed. And that Father Yvain was gone.
I had not gone to the edge of that bluff and looked over, yet still my mind kept showing me his dead body, broken on the rocks. Rolling back and forth in the breakers as the sea worked up the hunger to claim him. He was gone and my heart ached for him.
‘He was a good man.’ Iselle looked up at the sky as she rode, watching a white egret fly out to sea, graceful and buoyant into the wind, its neck tucked back, legs trailing behind. I fancied it was Yvain’s soul escaping his broken body, flying to his wife and children who waited for him on Arawn’s shore. Somehow, I knew that Iselle thought the same as she watched that bird.
‘As brave as any man I’ve known,’ Gawain said, riding behind me. ‘There was nothing we could do.’ I could feel his eyes on the back of my head.
I took a breath, trying to swallow the knot in my throat. ‘Just as there was nothing we could do for the brothers,’ I said, the words as acrid as smoke. ‘You remember how we left them to die?’
For a long moment there was just the sound of the horses’ hooves clumping softly on the earth, the jangle of tack and the creak of leather.
‘There have been many sacrifices, Galahad,’ Gawain said. ‘There will be many more before this is over.’
‘And when will it be over, lord?’ I asked.
‘When Arthur leads us to victory,’ he said. ‘When the Saxons are thrown back into the sea.’
‘When the gods return to the land,’ Iselle added.
‘Imagine the Beltane fires,’ Gediens said. ‘Night will become day.’
‘I hope I live to see it,’ Parcefal said.
I twisted in my saddle and looked at the big grey mare which Father Yvain should have been riding, and I felt his absence like a great weight, a quern stone sitting in my stomach. A burden of guilt for the years which Father Yvain had given, for the words he had spoken and their binding of him to me. But why had Merlin made him swear such an oath? What did the druid want with me?
‘Do you think Father Yvain is with his family now?’ I asked Iselle.
She considered this for a time. ‘Merlin had the ear of the gods, so they say.’ She leant to touch the iron bit in her horse’s mouth. ‘That is what Arthur believed.’
‘But Merlin failed Arthur at the end,’ I said. ‘Perhaps Merlin had lost his power by the time he made Yvain swear the oath.’
A frown passed like a shadow across Iselle’s brow. ‘Even if his spell did not work, or if Merlin knew it would not work and meant to deceive Yvain …’ she spoke the words as if they tasted foul, ‘do you think Yvain was the kind of man who would give up searching for his family?’
I did not need to answer that. Yvain would find his wife and his son and his daughter in Arawn’s realm. I searched the sky, but the egret was long gone. It had ghosted into the grey somewhere above the Western Sea and so I closed my eyes and watched Father Yvain carrying a laughing little girl upon his shoulders.
We rode east, to Camelot. Gawain had been right to suspect that the ship moored in Tintagel bay had something to do with it all. Parcefal explained that he had gone into the fort to buy supplies, leaving Merlin and his Saxon slave, Oswine, in the sea cave.
‘The old bastard was griping day and night about the food,’ Parcefal told us, ‘like a maggot in my ear, he was. In the end I thought I’d shut him up by fetching some fresh bread and cheese. Some wine, perhaps.’ But when Parcefal had gone back down to the sea cave, Merlin and Oswine were gone, only a few drops of blood in the sand to tell of a struggle. ‘A maggot in my ear,’ Parcefal said again, then cursed under his breath. The old warrior was embarrassed. All those years of searching for Merlin, to finally find him, only to lose him again.
‘I don’t blame you,’ Gawain said. ‘Being in Merlin’s company is like having a toothache. I rode the length of Britain beside him and it was only because of Arthur that I didn’t cut out the druid’s tongue when he was asleep.’ He grunted and shook his head. ‘Mind you, Lancelot hated him even more than I did.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Your father thought Merlin manipulated Guinevere. Because she had the gift,’ Gawain said. ‘Lancelot thought the druid had his claws in her, and I daresay he did. That devious bastard had his claws in all of us.’ He seemed to chew on his next words before deciding to let them out. ‘There was a time, when Arthur was at his lowest ebb, when it seemed the gods and men had forsaken him, that he believed that Merlin was behind all of it.’ I looked at Gawain and he held my eye. ‘That Merlin had known Lancelot and Guinevere would fall in love. That he made sure they did. Just like he tricked your father into swearing an oath of loyalty to Arthur.’
Iselle and I glanced at each other. ‘Why would Merlin do that?’ I asked.
Gawain shrugged. ‘Why does a druid do anything?’ he said, using a finger to dig something from his ear. ‘Maybe he saw such promise in Guinevere that he wanted the two greatest warriors in Britain protecting her. Or maybe he knew that Lancelot needed to love Guinevere, as a hawk needs flesh, that without that need, your father would never earn the love of the gods. Who can say?’
‘I think he knew that Lancelot’s guilt would bind him even more tightly to Arthur,’ Iselle said. ‘So that he would do anything for him.’
Those were heavy words and silence followed in their wake, aside from the soft clump of the horses’ hooves on the grass and the creaking of saddles.
I had never met Merlin. To me he had always been nothing more than rumour. A bad taste on the air and barely given breath amongst the brothers of the Thorn. But now I knew he was of flesh and blood and I was already beginning to hate him.
11
Camelot
WHEN WE CAME TO Camelot four days later, Gediens told me I looked like a fi
sh pulled from the depths, all bulging eyes and open mouth. But if that were true, I was not the only one in awe at the sight. Iselle sat tall in the saddle, her neck craned as she looked up at that great hill and the wall of dressed stone and timbers surmounting it. Even Gawain gazed upon it dewy-eyed, though I knew it was not for how impressive it looked but rather for what Camelot represented, and for the memories forged there which Gawain carried with him, as bright and sharp still as the sword in his scabbard.
We came as though summoned by the ringing of the smith’s hammer, as if beckoned by the sweet scent of the hearth and by the less pleasant stench of humanity and its foulsome dregs. For there is comfort even in this, Parcefal admitted, when one has been long on the road.
Rising steeply some five hundred feet above rich farmland, it was an ancient hill fort. A stronghold of the kings of old, long before Rome set her hobnailed heel upon our land. And there was something about the place which made my blood tremble in my veins as we sat our horses beneath the boughs of an old oak, to which some brown leaves clung still, having hung on through every winter gale. It was in the rustle and flutter of those dead leaves now. Faint voices from the past, whispering of death and war, of the violent dispute or silent disease which had robbed them of their lives. But these whispers were also of love and brief, golden happiness, of bountiful crops and barns full of grain and Beltane fires which licked the skies with flame.
On fine, clear days I had used to look upon this hill from the tor on Ynys Wydryn, knowing that for nearly thirty years it had stood as a symbol of defiance against the Saxons. But only now, with it cramming my eyes, with its memories on the very air and worming into my mind, did I truly understand Camelot. It was the beating heart of Dumnonia. Even without Arthur to man its walls and to lead his famed horse warriors out of its gates, Camelot was the hope of Britain. The last light in these Dark Isles. And perhaps Lady Morgana had taken Merlin because she wanted him at her side in the war against the Saxons, just as her half-brother Arthur had, and Uther before him.
But Gawain and the last of Arthur’s loyal men had not searched for the druid all these years to let Lady Morgana wield his power now. There were those who believed, though few would say it aloud, that Morgana had known of Mordred’s intended betrayal of Arthur. That she had even planted the seed of it in the young warrior’s heart when he was just a boy. For had she not desired Camelot for herself? So men said. And what more terrible revenge could she fashion for the man who had sired their son yet was so repelled by the incestuous act that he tried to have the boy Mordred killed?
‘What more vicious revenge than that,’ Gawain had remarked one black night by the fire, ‘on a man already savaged to the marrow by betrayal?’
‘Poor Arthur,’ Iselle had said, the flames lighting her face. Dancing in her eyes.
‘Aye, poor Arthur,’ Parcefal said.
Gawain threw a half-charred stick into the fire. ‘And now she has taken Merlin, to use him for her own ends.’
‘What if she hasn’t?’ I asked. ‘What if someone else has the druid?’
Gawain shook his head. ‘Morgana has him, lad. Why else was that sad-looking granddaughter of hers at Tintagel?’
Parcefal agreed. ‘Someone must’ve seen us and sent word to Camelot.’ He folded a blanket and tucked it behind him between his back and a rock, then lay back, watching the fire. ‘Have you noticed that we’re better at making enemies than we are at making friends?’
Gawain grunted in reply and looked off into the night.
And so we had come to that great hill fort beneath heavy, grey skies, to find the druid.
‘It is a sight to rekindle hope.’ Parcefal was hunched into both his cloaks, having thrown his spare one over his shoulders. Like the others, he was without his fine war gear; the scale coats, plumed helmets and bear-shields were wrapped and stashed on the spare mounts so as not to draw the eye of any folk coming or going through Camelot’s south-west gate. Still, the three men hardly looked like farmers.
‘Your father and Arthur dug those ditches together,’ Gawain told me, lifting his chin at the ramparts which had been thrown up on the hill’s already steep sides. ‘Day after day they worked in the mud. It was the only honest labour I ever saw Arthur do, other than making war.’ He shook his head. ‘This was his dream, Galahad. The two of them were like brothers then. Before it all soured.’
‘There’s no bond between men that a woman can’t sever,’ Gediens said.
Iselle lifted an eyebrow at him and he turned his palms up.
‘What if we can’t find him?’ I asked, for only Iselle and I would go into Camelot. The others would be recognized in mere moments were they to ride through those gates. Gawain had been beside Arthur when Arthur killed Mordred, so he could expect no hospitality from the Lady of Camelot. But Iselle and I were unknown and so it was up to us to find where the lady was keeping Merlin, assuming the druid was somewhere inside that citadel.
‘He’s in there somewhere,’ Gawain assured us as we dismounted, Iselle grimacing and pressing a hand to her backside, which clearly ached from riding. ‘You’ll smell him out.’
The ship on which the druid had been taken would have sailed up the Dumnonian coast as far as the Steart Peninsula, there taking the Parwydydd until the marsh became too shallow, at which point smaller craft would have carried them the rest of the way. Three days at most, Gediens said.
‘He’s here,’ Parcefal grunted. ‘I can feel the bastard.’
Gawain held out a hand to Iselle. ‘You’ll have enough eyes on you, girl, without having a Saxon sword on your back.’
Iselle tensed, her nostrils flaring, and I thought she would refuse, having already tied her bow and her arrow bag to her mare’s saddle. Frowning, she handed Gawain her Saxon sword, scabbard and baldric, and he wrapped the belt around the sword, then pointed at the long knife sheathed at Iselle’s waist.
‘No,’ she said. Her hand found the bone hilt.
Gawain pressed his lips into a tight line and nodded. ‘Stay out of trouble,’ he told us. ‘We’ll be hereabouts. And be quick about it.’ He turned in the saddle and looked back at the muddied track along which we had come. A man and a boy were leading an ox and empty cart towards the hill fort, the wheels creaking and the man now and then goading the beast with a hazel switch. ‘Lady Triamour will come,’ Gawain twisted back to us, ‘and when her grandmother learns that we are alive, she will have spearmen scouring Dumnonia for us and we’ll never get the druid back to Arthur.’
‘We’ll find him,’ I said, and meant it. I would do anything to hurt Lady Morgana, for while she had not been the one to throw Father Yvain from the cliff at Tintagel, her pursuit of Merlin was behind it. And so Iselle and I waited until the ox and cart had passed, then followed it up the cobbled roadway towards the gate, above which a banner was draped from the timber-built tower: a huge swath of undyed wool upon which were embroidered three great black birds. Crows, each as tall as a man, their beaks as long as a sword.
Whereas Tintagel had been carved by a god long before the time of kings, Camelot was sculpted by men and was no less impressive for it. It was a fortress built on the bones of our ancestors, the earth turned by muscle and iron, the soil watered with blood and nourished by kinship and common cause. And as we walked along the channel that had long ago been cut through the four great embankments which comprised the ramparts, I could not help but see my father working beneath the summer sun, his skin glistening, his long dark hair tied back as he had used to wear it when cutting timber or turning the ground or teaching me sword and spear. I could almost smell the sweat on his chest and in his beard. I felt his presence here as I had done when I had been alone with his armour at Lord Arthur’s steading. And before that, at Ynys Wydryn, when I had dug out the arm bracer from my chest of belongings and held it to my nose, breathing in the still lingering sweet and resinous scent and seeing in my mind my father sitting by the hearth, rubbing beeswax into the leather until it shone.
‘What
is it, Galahad?’ Iselle called back to me. She had walked ahead but now waited near the inner gate, as two guards questioned the man with the cart. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ I said, hurrying to catch up, then turning to look back once more along the rampart. But my father was gone.
We followed the cart through the gates, expecting the guards to ask who we were, but they barely looked at us, and then we were inside the inner rampart. Though we stood on the plateau, some five hundred feet above the old oak tree where we had left the others, the summit was almost windless. I looked this way and that, taking it all in, astonished by the scale of the place and bewitched by the moment of standing where my father must once have stood looking upon the same sights as now greeted my eyes.
‘I never thought I’d come here.’ Iselle’s voice was full of wonder, though hushed too, as if she felt she should not be here. As if someone might tell her to turn around and go back out through the gates, for this was nowhere for someone from the marshes to be. She shook her head. ‘I tried to imagine what it was like, but I never thought I’d see it.’
I did not need to answer. We were both overwhelmed, our gaze ranging across the thatched dwellings and workshops leaking smoke into the sky, across the barns and stores, the stables and the smithies and the myriad timber trackways, and all the folk who lived in relative safety within Camelot’s walls. Men, women, children, going about their business this grey day.
The noise of the place washed over us like a draught of strong wine: the barking of dogs, the lowing and bleating of cattle in their pens, the cuckoo calls of children playing, the chop of the axe and the squeak and clump of the carts, and the grunts of those driving the oxen, and the neighs and whinnies of horses.
‘But here I am.’ Iselle threw her arms wide. ‘In Camelot. With a half monk for company.’
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