‘Yvain did not doubt me,’ he said. ‘Few men would back then.’
‘I never asked for it,’ I said. Father Yvain was gone but the oath he had sworn to protect me remained like an iron collar around my neck. An encumbrance that grew even heavier when I was around Merlin, for he had forged that collar himself.
‘You have not been listening, Galahad.’ He sighed. ‘Truly, the spark did not fly far from the flint.’ He leant towards me, close enough now that I could see the yellow in his eyes and smell the apple wine on his breath. ‘Do you think she asked for any of it?’ he hissed, and I knew he was talking about Guinevere. ‘She married Arthur because I made it so. Because the gods showed me that Arthur and Guinevere would remake Britannia. Your father fought for Arthur because I needed him to. For Lancelot was the greatest fighter since Brân Galed himself. And together he and Arthur were the swords of Britain.’
‘And you, Merlin? Did you have a choice?’ I asked.
His eyes widened and he gave a snort that became a choking sound, which I realized was laughter. Perhaps he was out of practice. Still, his apparent amusement sickened me.
‘I was the only one who could hear the gods of this land. I was the last. Knowing that, do you think they would let me live a hermit’s life, curing the occasional leper and talking to the trees and the birds?’ He laughed again and Iselle looked over her shoulder, no doubt wondering what could be so amusing.
Merlin lifted a hand towards her by way of apology, and she carried on spooning food into Guinevere’s half-open mouth.
‘You see,’ the druid breathed, bending towards me again, ‘the gods toy with us, Galahad.’ He looked up at the thatch and the smoke below it seeking amongst the reeds for a way out. ‘Even here in this place. You think you are hidden here. You are wrong to think so.’
‘Other than Gawain, no one has found Arthur in all the years since the great battle,’ I said.
Merlin pointed a gnarly finger. ‘No man has found Arthur,’ he said, weighting the word ‘man’. ‘What do you know of her?’ He tilted his head towards the back of the room.
‘Iselle?’ I asked.
He nodded.
‘I know that she fears no man,’ I said.
He smiled.
Iselle put the spoon and bowl down and left Guinevere in the shadows, saying she would fetch a cup of weak ale for her to drink, and Merlin and I watched her walk out of the gloom and into the day.
When she was gone, the druid nodded at me. ‘Go on.’
I frowned at him. I felt disloyal talking about Iselle to this man whom I barely knew. And yet I wanted him to know her. What she had done for our cause. What it meant to her, and all that she had lost.
‘I know that she hates the Saxons,’ I said. ‘That she would do anything to bring the old gods back, for it is said that they left us when they abandoned Lord Arthur.’
His lip curled at that, but he nodded for me to continue.
‘I know that she believes in you,’ I said. ‘And that she hopes that you will bring Guinevere back to Arthur, so that he can be who he once was. So that he will bring the kings of Britain together under one banner and we shall rid the land of the sickness which ails it.’ The fire spat an ember at Merlin, landing in the folds of his tunic. He licked his finger and thumb and pinched the life from it.
‘You love her,’ he said.
I straightened on the stool and looked to the door, relieved not to see Iselle coming through it. ‘No.’ My eyes slipped from his.
‘Yes,’ he countered. ‘You love her and that is why you spend the days rolling in the mud with a toy sword, making a fool of yourself.’ He drained his cup, saw that the jug was empty and scowled around the room, muttering something about Oswine being a lazy Saxon swine. ‘Because you have your father’s pride and you think that you must protect her, which you cannot do if you don’t know one end of a sword from the other.’
‘Iselle does not need me to protect her,’ I said, not quite denying his accusation. ‘She is a warrior. It is in her.’
Merlin grinned and I was surprised to see that he still had most of his teeth. ‘Of course she’s a warrior, boy,’ he said. ‘I asked you what you know about her, and you tell me nothing. I only had to look at her and I know more than you.’ He shook his head and sighed. ‘I had hoped you would have more clever in you than your father.’
‘I know she lived with her foster mother, Alana,’ I offered. ‘Iselle says Alana met you when she was young.’
He wafted a hand at the hearth smoke. ‘Yes, yes, a long time ago. On the island where your father learnt how to slaughter men.’ He twirled a finger impatiently. ‘How did you meet her? Who found whom, Galahad?’
I cast my mind back to that day I had taken the coracle into the marsh and gone to the lake village in search of a dead man. ‘Iselle found me,’ I said, at which he lifted an eyebrow, as though that fact meant something to him. ‘She saved my life. She killed three Saxons.’
‘A warrior born,’ he said, and turned his gaze from the flames to Guinevere, who seemed to be watching us from the shadows.
The door opened, the flames leapt and Iselle came in with a jug of ale and two cups. She filled Merlin’s cup and then poured a cup for me.
The druid nodded his thanks, his hand in the sack by his feet, fingers caressing the feathered cloak within as he stared at Iselle’s face. ‘Galahad tells me that he would be a stain on a Saxon blade if not for you, girl.’
Pouring ale into the last cup, Iselle lifted her eyes to me. ‘Galahad was a fool to be alone and unarmed in the marsh,’ she said, then turned her back on us to carry the drink to Guinevere.
He leant towards me again. ‘I think she likes you,’ he whispered, then put the cup to his lips and drank. When he had finished, he dragged a stick-thin arm across his lips and grey beard. ‘But you are a fool, boy. Gawain, too.’ He grimaced. ‘All of you are fools.’ He rolled his eyes up and across the ceiling again. ‘And the gods are here in this place.’
I did not know why he said that, nor why he had been asking me what I knew about Iselle, but I did know that he had drunk at least a jug of apple wine and was now holding an ale cup which was already half empty. Instead of leaning across on his stool, he waggled a gnarly finger at me, beckoning me closer. I shifted my stool in the floor rushes and bent, turning my head to put my ear near his mouth.
‘Look at her,’ he hissed. I could see Iselle without having to move, though she had her back to me as she held the rim of the cup between Guinevere’s lips and gently tilted it. ‘Is it not obvious? Even were she not the warrior you say. Look at her, Galahad,’ he whispered, his words little more than the feel of his sour breath on my cheek. ‘Your eyes are young and yet you are blind.’
I looked. I tried to see whatever it was Merlin had seen.
‘And when you see it, you will say nothing, do you hear?’ His face was wolfish in the flicker of flamelight and shadow. ‘Nothing! It is not your place.’
I looked. And then my breath snagged in my chest. My skin prickled as though my tunic teemed with lice. My heart thumped its way into my throat, and into the cavity it had left behind flooded a terrible cold: a cold which spread through the marrow in my bones despite the hearth flames that cast the druid’s face into shadow, his eyes glittering with pleasure at my sudden understanding.
‘Not your place,’ he whispered again.
I looked. And I saw that Iselle was not just a young woman who had survived in the marshes, savage as a she-wolf and all but alone in this vicious, dark world. She was not just the proud, copper-haired Saxon-killer who tied my insides in knots whenever we were together and whenever we were apart. I could not say how I had not seen it before, but now it seemed to me that some god must have wreathed a strange fog around her which my eyes could not pierce. But Merlin, this old, broken man, had with whispered words dispelled that fog, so that now I saw it in her regal nose and her wide forehead. In her full lips and in the fire in her eyes. Pendragon fire. For Iselle carried the blood of heroes i
n her veins. She was a warrior born. And Arthur, the lord of battle, the flame in the darkness, was her father.
14
Old Enemies
WE HEARD THE FIRST deep, hollow calls of bitterns proclaiming the end of winter on the day Lord Constantine came. Rooks were busy rebuilding their weather-ravaged nests, their clamour drifting on the breeze like the sound of distant battle. Blackthorn was bursting into flower, recalling the snow which had fallen when we had set out from Arthur’s steading in search of Merlin, and the first furry flower heads were appearing in the goat willow.
Iselle had been the first to see the smoke curling up into the blue sky to the north, beyond the tall trees in whose upper boughs herons were adding sticks to last year’s nests. We had feared it was Saxons burning another farmstead or some fisher folk’s dwelling, but Arthur assured us it could not be, for no one lived so close as that.
‘My cousin has come,’ he told Gawain. And so Gawain, Gediens and Parcefal had gone to the place and found Lord Constantine and twenty warriors making camp around the beacon fire which they had lit in accordance with an old arrangement between Arthur and Constantine.
Only Lord Constantine himself came back with Gawain, for Arthur would not have men know where he lived, and I saw that the rumours about the warlord styling himself after a Roman general were true. He was in his sixties, lean and hardened and scarred by a lifetime of war, and his face reminded me of a statue I had seen on the ramparts of Castle Dore when I was eight summers old and my father took me to see King Cyn-March’s great Samhain fire. For Lord Constantine wore no beard or moustaches to hide his grim and austere face. His cloak was the colour of a ripening plum, he wore a breastplate of hammered bronze which had been shaped to mimic a well-muscled torso, and he carried under his arm a Roman helmet which boasted a stiff plume of red horsehair.
He was the nephew of Uther Pendragon and grandson of King Constantine, who had claimed to be Emperor of Rome, and I had never seen a man carry himself with such pride, nor one who looked more at odds with the world, as though he had been born in another time and had spent his life and blood striving to return to it.
Arthur welcomed him and shook his hand, but there was no warmth between them, no friendship that I could see. Just mutual respect between warriors who had faced the same enemies and fought the same wars.
‘It’s been a long time, cousin,’ Arthur said.
‘The years pass swiftly, Arthur, and the Saxons still come each spring. I fear we shall never be rid of them.’ He spread his arms, turning his palms up. ‘But we are still alive in spite of it all.’
For a while the old warriors talked of old battles, as though they could still hear the echo of the steel-song in their ears, and then Arthur introduced me, at which Lord Constantine’s jaw tightened, his thumb stroking the ivory eagle’s-head hilt of the Roman gladius sheathed at his right hip.
‘Galahad ap Lancelot,’ he repeated, frowning at my habit, which was crusted with dried mud. ‘Your father was the best I ever saw.’
I said nothing, but Arthur filled the awkward silence.
‘Galahad is proving himself a skilled swordsman in his own right,’ he said, which was being overly generous, but I felt a little taller anyway.
‘You are a Christian, Galahad?’ Lord Constantine asked me.
‘I was, lord,’ I replied, for in truth I did not know what I was any more.
Lord Constantine did not know what to make of that. Some said he was a Christian himself, but I had also heard that he maintained a shrine to the Roman god Mithras in some forest cave. He looked at each of us in turn, his hard eyes lingering a moment on the Saxon knife hanging from Iselle’s belt.
‘I came at the right time, for it seems you are building a new army, Lord Arthur,’ he said. He did not even try to hide the note of scorn in his voice. And yet when we went inside to hear his reason for coming, and he saw Merlin sitting by the hearth, hammering a bundle of rosemary with the poll of a hand axe, the warlord’s face seemed to drain of blood. His previous disdain gave way to undisguised awe.
‘You are a man who holds on to his ambition, Lord Constantine, I’ll say that for you.’ Merlin brought the axe head down onto the trencher with a thud. He was naked from the waist up, the strange symbols and patterns, long ago pricked into his skin and rubbed with ash or woad, telling their stories by the firelight in a language beyond my understanding. ‘Or is it King Constantine these days?’ he asked.
Constantine did not answer this, for even if he had proclaimed himself king some years ago, the idea was an absurdity these days, with Lady Morgana still ruling in Camelot and King Cerdic’s Saxons running rampant from Rhegin in the south to Lindisware in the north, and in most of the kingdoms between.
‘You are an old man and yet still you dream of Uther’s high seat,’ Merlin said.
The pine smell of Merlin’s herbs sharpened the air. Oswine poured a cup of ale and offered it to our guest.
‘I dream of killing Saxons, Merlin, and little else,’ Lord Constantine replied, nevertheless accepting the drink from a Saxon.
The druid mouthed something under his breath and swept two fingers across the trencher, taking up some of the oil which he had beaten out of the needle-like leaves and rubbing it into the crook of his left elbow to soothe some pain in the joint. ‘Then breathe deeply, lord, for the scent of rosemary stirs our memories.’ He smiled. ‘An old druid trick, it has ever helped us recall the lore. Perhaps it will help you remember how you and Arthur used to slaughter men in the olden days.’
‘I fight still,’ Lord Constantine said, his pride stung by the insult.
The poll of the axe came down again. Three sharp strikes and Merlin added some of the rosemary to a small iron dish which sat in the hearth.
‘Forgive me, lord,’ Merlin said, ‘but I thought you had been hiding in the forests of Caer Lerion.’ He frowned. ‘Gawain must have been talking of another king of Dumnonia.’
Gawain lifted an eyebrow at Lord Constantine. Not an apology – he did not like the man enough for that – but an acknowledgement of how Merlin could vex like poison ivy.
‘Why have you come, cousin?’ Arthur asked, weary of idle talk. Weary of sharing his home with all of us, perhaps, for he had grown more accustomed to birdsong and the drone of insects, and the wind amongst the reed-beds, than to men talking of war and of Britain.
Lord Constantine drank deeply and nodded, and I wondered how he managed to keep that armour so clean out here in the marsh. It shone like gold, fire reflecting in the smooth curves and bronze muscle which mimicked the physique of a younger man, so that Constantine must have felt the weight of years and of his own long-held ambition whenever he strapped that cuirass on.
‘King Cerdic has proposed a parley,’ he said. ‘He sent messengers to me.’
Parcefal made a scoffing sound. ‘Why would he parley now?’
‘Because I kill his men, Parcefal.’ The jagged vein in Lord Constantine’s temple bulged, straining beneath weathered skin.
‘You are a thorn in his flesh. A small thorn,’ Gawain said. ‘And if the rumours are true, you have fewer than two hundred spearmen.’
Lord Constantine lifted his chin. ‘I fight,’ he said, and turned that Roman face on Arthur. ‘I carry the bear banner still, and still it has the power to sow fear in Saxon bellies. But it is your banner, Arthur. Imagine the fear it would sow were you to stand with me beneath it.’
I saw Gawain and Parcefal exchange a look which was almost like thirst. For while neither man liked Constantine, he spoke to their shared hopes and they could not help but drink in his words.
‘Perhaps.’ Arthur lifted his right hand to his left shoulder, his fingers remembering the old wound. A wound more terrible than any other. A cut to the heart as well as the flesh, because the sword that made it had been thrust by his own son.
If only he knew that his daughter was standing but a few paces away, I thought. Balm for the most grievous wound, surely. I had thought of little else si
nce I had seen the truth with my own eyes. It whirred around in my skull. It nagged at me day and night, and yet I could say nothing. Not yet.
‘But why would Cerdic parley now, when you alone bleed him?’ Arthur asked his cousin. ‘When the other kings hide behind their walls or pay him tribute?’
‘And seeing as Lady Morgana will not fight him, either,’ Gawain added.
Lord Constantine scratched at an old scar on his cheek. ‘What does it matter why?’ he asked. ‘We need time, Arthur. If you come back, men will join us. I know it.’ His eyes met mine and I wondered if he saw my father in me. Was he recalling that Tintagel dawn long ago when he attacked Arthur’s men, and my father had run to help Arthur, the two of them forging their friendship in the flames of war? ‘Peace will give us the chance to gather our strength,’ he said.
Gawain nodded. ‘He’s right, Arthur. Let Cerdic think his enemies are licking their wounds. But we will send out word across Britain of your return. Scatter seeds of hope across the land. We will gather spearmen.’ He looked at the hearth flames dancing for Merlin. ‘We will start a fire.’
‘It can be done, Arthur,’ Lord Constantine said. ‘Come with me. Let the Saxons see that you live. That the man who haunts their dreams still lives.’
‘Cerdic will be less likely to break the truce if he knows you are back in the fight,’ Parcefal said, and with that he put a hand on Arthur’s left shoulder. That wounded shoulder. Perhaps chance but perhaps not. ‘We have waited so long, old friend.’
I looked at Iselle, who gave a slight nod, her eyes aflame.
But Arthur’s brow was furrowed, his own eyes dull, his thoughts not on his bear banner or Excalibur or on fields of summer wheat flattened by Saxon corpses. But on something, or someone, else.
He turned and looked beyond the fire to where Guinevere sat.
‘I cannot go,’ he said. ‘I will not.’ He lifted his cup, drank deeply and put it down on the table. ‘You have wasted a journey, cousin,’ he told Lord Constantine, and with that he walked out the door, leaving us all looking at each other.
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