Camelot

by Giles Kristian

  I took the bait. ‘I’m no more a monk than you,’ I said, feeling no guilt saying it, just a strange emptiness. Now that Father Yvain was gone, there were no brothers of the Holy Thorn. The order was only as real as a memory, and I alone could carry it with me.

  But then, what did that make me?

  ‘It is strange to think of Arthur and Guinevere having been lord and lady here,’ Iselle said. ‘When you think of them now, hiding in the marsh.’ I followed her line of sight towards the great hall which dominated the fortress. Until that moment I had purposely not allowed my eyes to settle on it, as one might leave the meat in the broth till last to better savour it.

  It was as big as Uther’s old hall at Tintagel, though unlike that hall, whose timbers were warped with age, these beams were as spear-straight as the day Arthur’s builder set them in place. The thatch upon the sloping roof was grey but there were no patches of lichen amongst it, and it was not hard to imagine the Lord Arthur and his beautiful wife stepping out beneath a summer sky, their names invoked as folk will call upon the gods for a good harvest, the hopes of Britain on their shoulders.

  ‘Do you think it can be as it once was, Galahad?’ Iselle asked me. ‘If Merlin can bring Guinevere back into the light. If Arthur takes up Excalibur once more and leads us?’ There was so much hope in her proud face. I ached for her.

  ‘Gawain must believe it,’ I said. ‘And he is not a man given to fanciful ideas, it seems to me.’

  Iselle frowned. ‘He is a warrior. He knows nothing else. Gawain wants the Arthur of old back because he knows that Arthur, the lord of battle, is a man whom others will follow. That even the kings of Britain will follow, and so there will be a great army. That is what Gawain wants and he will do anything to see it come to pass.’

  ‘Parcefal and Gediens believe it too,’ I said, but she did not answer that, for we both knew that they, like Gawain, were echoes of a time past, all of them searching for the voice that created them.

  ‘Let’s try the lady’s hall first?’ Iselle said.

  And so we set off along the timber trackway as a peal of thunder rolled across the western sky and the dogs of Camelot gave up a chorus of howls. Iselle said they sounded like the monks of the Holy Thorn singing their prayers. But she got no rise from me, because I was watching a group of warriors gathered around two bare-chested, mud-slathered men who were grappling, each trying to throw the other down.

  We both stopped. ‘No,’ Iselle said. She had grabbed my arm. I felt her fingers pressing down to the bone. ‘It can’t be.’

  One of the men put the other down and a cheer went up from half of the crowd, as the two wrestlers writhed in the mud, so coated in it that the whites of their eyes shone against the black.

  My stomach was clenching, the back of my neck prickling. Because some of the men, eight or nine of them, had long fair hair worn loose or tied into warrior braids, golden beards or beard ropes and ruddy complexions. These were fur-clad and most of them carried hand axes on their belts, and the swords that I could see were longer blades, like the one which Iselle had just given to Gawain.

  They were Saxons.

  ‘What are they doing in Camelot?’ Iselle hissed, her hand falling from my arm to the hilt of her long knife.

  That Saxons could be here, in the heart of Dumnonia, seemed impossible. That they could be here by invitation was unthinkable. And yet, here they were, men wearing at their necks iron or silver amulets of their god Thunor. Men with the grey Morimaru in their eyes and the blood of Britons on their hands. Men cheering for their companion, who had now bound Morgana’s man with strong arms and gripping legs, much to the disgust of the Dumnonians, who jeered, accusing the Saxon of cheating.

  For a while we watched the bout and though, because of the mud, it became impossible to say which man was which, when the Saxons gave a great cheer and slapped each other’s shoulders and sought their winnings from a grey-bearded Dumnonian, neither of us mentioned the bad omen in it. But then, as if to mock our silence, thunder rumbled through the grey sky, closer this time, followed by fat drops of rain which splashed on the timber track and presaged the kind of downpour which has folk running for cover.

  And yet, as we wandered amongst the timber-framed buildings, past the smithy and the workshops of the potter, the woodworker, the bronze-caster, the basket-weaver and the barrel-maker, I realized that the rain was helping us. For like everyone else, we threw up our hoods, making it less likely that someone would ask who we were. When I said as much to Iselle, her scathing reply was that the people of Camelot must be growing used to having strangers within their walls.

  Behind a barn, we came upon a group of children waging battle against each other with wooden swords and wicker shields. There were four boys and three girls, and the side with four were pretending to be Saxons.

  ‘Look at these fierce warriors,’ I called. ‘Stay back or they may cut off your head.’

  At this the children grinned savagely and resumed their battle with even more vigour now that they had an audience. One of the older boys proclaimed that he was Lord Arthur, and the lad beside him, a small, wild-looking boy whose sword was a blur in his hand, told Iselle that he was Lancelot. And my heart kicked like a horse.

  I took a breath, feeling Iselle’s eyes on me. The wooden swords clacked and clattered. ‘Brave warriors of Dumnonia,’ I said, waiting as the two armies separated once more and nursed injuries, checked their weapons for damage or looked at us, one or two of them eyeing my habit with suspicion. ‘I have heard that Lady Morgana has found a druid. And that he is here in Camelot. Is it true?’

  ‘It’s true!’ one of them replied, sweeping his sword left and right.

  ‘His name is Merlin,’ the eldest boy added. ‘He was a great druid in the old days.’ He was still using his Lord Arthur voice.

  ‘Are you a druid?’ a younger boy asked me.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Dalam,’ one of the others spat. ‘There are no druids now but for Merlin. He is the last.’

  The younger boy glowered, and another boy explained that I was a Christian, at which I saw the disappointment in the smaller boy’s eyes.

  ‘I’ve seen him. Merlin,’ the eldest girl said. She wore a strip of linen around her head and over her right eye. ‘My father is one of the guards.’ She lifted her chin and her left eye was sharp with pride. ‘Lady Morgana gave him a Roman coin once because he fought bravely at the Battle of Giant’s Rock.’

  I did my best to seem impressed. ‘Your father must be a great warrior.’

  ‘Where is Merlin now?’ Iselle asked. The girl narrowed her good eye at Iselle.

  ‘I’m not supposed to say,’ she said, glancing back at her companions, most of whom were fighting once more, caught up in the ebb and flow of their own great battle.

  ‘We won’t tell anyone,’ I lied. ‘But we would like very much to catch a glimpse of a real druid.’

  She considered this and seemed to understand. Then she took three steps towards us, her new and ominous expression seeming out of place on her young face. ‘Everyone will have the chance to see Merlin before sunset,’ she said.

  I looked up at the sky but if there was a sun up there, I could not see it. Then the girl held the point of her wooden sword to pursed lips, deciding what she would and would not say. ‘Are you two in love?’ she asked, looking from me to Iselle, then back to me. This took us both by surprise. Iselle laughed, which, if anything, fanned the heat in my cheeks.

  ‘We do not even believe in the same gods,’ Iselle told her, and then came the rain as we knew it would. It hissed down in veils of grey, blurring the world.

  The girl narrowed her eyes at Iselle. ‘The north-east gate, before sunset,’ she said, then she turned and ran with the others, who scattered and vanished like minnows from a plunging oar blade.

  ‘We may as well find a roof to wait under,’ Iselle said, setting off towards the perimeter wall to shelter beneath the concourse, upon which stood Lady Morgana’s men, leaning on their spe
ars, heads tucked into their shoulders as they looked out east across the forests of Caer Gwinntguic.

  ‘You don’t mind sheltering from the rain with me,’ I challenged Iselle, ‘even though we pray to different gods?’

  She tilted her head to one side and eyed me as I deserved. And then we waited, watching the rain seethe down upon Camelot, wondering why there were Saxons here, and hoping that the girl with the eye patch was not taking us for a pair of fools.

  12

  Merlin

  AT FIRST, WE DID not see him because of the rain. We saw the ox and cart and the man with the hazel switch and the boy walking on the other side of the beast. We saw the folk of Camelot emerging from their dwellings and workshops, from the barns and byres and from Lady Morgana’s great hall, all of them wrapped in cloaks and leather capes against the deluge. We saw a party of spearmen crowding around the cart and we knew why the cart had been empty when the man had brought it in through the south-west gate, and we knew that it was not empty now, though we had yet to lay eyes on its cargo.

  Then the spearmen dispersed, taking up positions around the cart, and that’s when we saw him. I heard Iselle’s sharp intake of breath and saw her hand move inside her cloak to touch the iron pommel of the long knife on her belt.

  ‘It’s him,’ I confirmed. It had to be. Merlin. The man who helped Uther Pendragon seize Tintagel and become High King. The man who served Lord Arthur and helped him find the sword Excalibur, by whose ancient, gleaming blade Arthur united the kings of Britain for the first time in many generations. And the man who was nowhere to be found when Arthur needed him, and who had been barely even a rumour wafting through the cantrefs of Britain these last ten years.

  The man struck the ox’s muscled flank and it lumbered forward into the dusk, the cart behind it groaning as they set off beside the timber track which ran all the way through Camelot, past the great hall to the south-west gate. I saw the girl who had told us to be at the north-east gate at sunset and I nodded to her in thanks and she smiled.

  ‘The lady means to shame him.’ Iselle spat the words. ‘Here is a man who speaks with the old gods, the gods of Britain, and she means to display him like a prize slave.’

  It seemed to me that most of those who had come out into the hammering rain were as uneasy about this treatment of Merlin as Iselle was. Or perhaps they were just afraid. They kept pace with the cart but from a distance, murmuring in low voices, eyeing the druid from the anonymous shadow of the hoods and cloaks with which they covered their heads.

  ‘The last of the druids,’ I muttered, feeling a strange sense of emptiness and dread.

  ‘It is not how I saw him in my mind,’ Iselle admitted, as we shuffled along with the rest, catching glimpses of the prisoner between the shifting human tide.

  I supposed that Oswine, Merlin’s Saxon slave, had been killed already. Or else he was still being held captive somewhere heareabouts.

  ‘He must be very old now,’ I said. I felt foolish for not having prepared myself for the sight. What had I expected to see? A druid in all his terrible glory? A priest of the gods who carried the ancient knowledge of Britain with him like a fire in the dark?

  Of course, the last days, living in a cave, travelling by sea and by marsh and then being kept as a prisoner, must have taken a toll on the old man. He sat slumped, hands bound with rope, swaying and bouncing with the cart’s progress across the bumpy ground, so that I imagined his bones rattling in his skin like a smith’s tools in an old sack. He was mud-daubed and wild-eyed, and what hair he still had was grey, long and lank, hanging from his head in matted tangles. And if I had thought Lord Arthur and Guinevere were living skeletons, Merlin was so gaunt, so painfully thin, that it was hard to believe he had eaten in many days. He was an old, gnarled tree root of a man who looked as if he should have been ash on the wind by now, had not some curse held him here past his natural time.

  We walked with this strange procession through the shrouding rain, and when the cart reached the great hall, it stopped and the folk around it turned their eyes to the open door, beyond which the leaping flames and copper glow promised warmth and comfort, making me aware of how the rain had now soaked through my cloak and habit to chill my bones.

  There was a flurry of movement within the hall and then the Lady of Camelot emerged, blinking reddened, smoke-stung eyes at the rain. She was swathed in black cloaks which had been greased well enough that the water rolled off them in beads, spilling onto the planks beneath, and it was clear to me why her warriors had crows painted on their shields and why a great crow banner hung from Camelot’s gatehouse. For Lady Morgana was the living embodiment of the Morrigán. Her hair was long and silver and still thick enough to be tied back in a rope that could bind a man, as once her beauty might have done. Her hands were old, the knuckles swollen, so that even they looked like a crow’s feet, and her nose, which once must have looked regal and handsome, was long and beak-like on her age-shrunken face.

  Part of me wondered how it was possible that this old crone could wield such power in Camelot and in Britain. And yet she did.

  ‘People of Camelot,’ she called in the coarse voice of a rook, as two young warriors took up positions either side of her. ‘Look here!’ Another man stood off her shoulder and Iselle and I realized at the same time that this was the Saxon warrior who had earlier been wrestling in the mud. He was clean now, though, and wearing a mail tunic, his fair beard braided, a silver brooch fastening an ermine-trimmed cloak. His men stood nearby, similarly adorned for war, their spear blades glinting dully in the day.

  ‘Look upon the ruin of Britain.’ Lady Morgana walked over to the cart. The two warriors went with her and, at her signal, one of them grabbed hold of Merlin’s hair and hauled his head back so that he had no choice but to look at Lady Morgana. ‘Here is the festering wound which poisons the land,’ Morgana said.

  There was something terribly cruel in Morgana. As cruel as a sharp knife. I could feel it from where I stood, and I feared it, as a murmur ran through the crowd. A young man stepped out and spat at Merlin. The druid neither flinched nor moved to wipe the spittle from his cheek. He just stared at Morgana, who gestured at the warrior to let go of the druid. The warrior stepped back, and Merlin dropped his head and closed his eyes.

  ‘To spit at a druid,’ Iselle whispered, appalled.

  ‘Burn him!’ a woman yelled.

  ‘Hang him!’ a child of no more than eight winters demanded.

  Whatever power Merlin had once wielded over folk, whatever awe had kept these people cautious earlier, was gone, dispelled by the sour wind of their lady’s words.

  ‘Where was Merlin when Dumnonia needed him?’ an old man asked us all, before bending, clawing up a handful of mud and flinging it at the druid.

  ‘Where are the gods now, druid?’ a voice from the crowd screeched. ‘We’ve Saxons within our walls, eating our food and drinking our ale.’

  This raised a rumble of agreement as ominous as the earlier thunder, and the warriors flanking Lady Morgana glanced at each other uneasily, though Lady Morgana gave a slight shake of her head, a gesture which told them to let that dissent die away unanswered. I saw that those two men shared so much with each other – the lean face, full lips and contemptuous look in their grey eyes – that it was clear they were brothers, just as something less definable marked them as kin to the lady herself.

  ‘Who are they?’ I asked the man beside me. A blacksmith, he wore a leather apron and his eyebrows had been singed away by the heat of the forge, and now the rain was washing the soot from the creases beneath his eyes and beside his nose.

  His lip curled in his short, scorched beard. ‘That one is Melehan,’ he pointed at the man who had yanked Merlin’s head back by the hair, ‘and the one with the nice new boots is Ambrosius.’ The blacksmith spat into the mud. ‘Mordred’s brood,’ he said, and Iselle and I shared a look before turning our attention back to Merlin and Lady Morgana.

  ‘Merlin is a canker,’ the lady
squawked, ‘and we must cut him out if we are to thrive again as once we did.’ She turned to the Saxon in the fine war gear, sweeping rain from her claw-like hands, and I feared she would cut Merlin for real. It was all too easy to imagine Morgana taking a blade to the old man’s flesh. To imagine a druid’s blood puddling in the filth and mud. ‘He does not look much now, Prince Cynric, but he was powerful once. Your father will attest to it.’

  ‘I have heard the stories, lady,’ the Saxon said with a nod, though he looked less than convinced.

  Lady Morgana looked up at the darkening sky. It seemed that she was waiting for something. Then she told Melehan to see that Merlin was driven to the south-west gate in order that all the people of Camelot should have their chance to see him. Down came the hazel switch and the ox lurched forward, the cart trundling in the animal’s wake, and though many of the folk slunk off to their homes to get dry, some walked the rest of the way, and Iselle and I stayed amongst them.

  I could see that Iselle was desperate to give Merlin some sign. To let him know that we were there to help him. But I did not have to warn her against it, for the druid had neither the strength nor the will to lift his head. And when the cart had been as far as the gate and turned around again, we lingered amongst the last witnesses of Merlin’s humiliation, until the ox was made to stop by a roundhouse behind Lady Morgana’s hall. Here, Melehan and his brother Ambrosius took hold of Merlin and hauled him off the cart, Melehan growling at us to go back to our homes because the night would be starless and black and there were no torches to see by because of the rain.

  We took shelter beneath the ramparts again, wet through and shivering with cold. ‘Gawain will be wondering what has happened to us.’ Iselle looked back in the direction of the south-west gate.

  ‘He will have to wait a little longer,’ I said, and Iselle turned back to me. ‘We do it tonight. Agreed?’

  She nodded. There was no moon. There were no stars. The rain fell furious and relentless from the gloom above. And yet I saw the white of Iselle’s teeth. Just a glimpse in the darkness. And the wolfish glint in her eyes.