Camelot

by Giles Kristian

  Lord Constantine let out a stale breath, and in that moment he looked old and tired, as though the illusion of his bronze armour and greaves, his crested Roman helmet and the eagle-headed sword at his hip had failed. The spell shattered by Arthur’s last words.

  Merlin poked an iron in amongst the burning logs, releasing a scatter of sparks which crackled noisily in the silence. ‘You all see that the Lady Guinevere is lost,’ he said, ‘but you don’t see that Arthur is just as lost.’ He grimaced. ‘You don’t want to see.’

  ‘And what do you see, druid?’ Gawain challenged him, lifting his bearded chin towards the fire, his face all granite and scar by its fitful light.

  ‘I see men desperate to taste wine that has long been drunk,’ he said, giving those quiet words to the flames.

  Gawain glowered.

  ‘Arthur is right,’ Lord Constantine said. ‘I have wasted a journey and should have stayed in Caer Lerion.’

  ‘There is hope, still,’ Gawain told him, then turned back to Merlin. ‘You will bring the lady back to him, Merlin,’ he commanded, ‘or I will give you back to Lady Morgana as her plaything.’

  Merlin’s lip curled as he turned his gaze on the warrior. ‘Only a fool would threaten a druid,’ he replied, though the words sounded more like a distant echo than a threat in the here and now.

  Gawain ignored him and turned back to Lord Constantine. ‘What will you do?’

  Lord Constantine shook his head as he considered this. The fuel in the hearth cracked. The druid brooded, sour as old milk. Iselle simmered, hopeful still, and the warriors in that small space, men who had fought all their lives and who would fight until their last breath if only their lord of battles would return to them, seemed burdened by every year on their backs.

  ‘I will meet with King Cerdic.’ Lord Constantine pressed his left fist into his cupped right hand. ‘I will parley with him and buy us time, if I can.’

  Gawain nodded. ‘I will come with you,’ he said. ‘I’ll be more use there than here.’

  Gediens and Parcefal gnarred in agreement.

  ‘Cerdic will remember us,’ Parcefal said, ‘and seeing us again will give credence to the rumour that Arthur lives.’ He lifted the ale jug but was disappointed to see that it was empty. ‘We cannot fight him.’ He put the jug back down. ‘But maybe we can give him cause to sleep with one eye open.’

  ‘Cerdic will shake like a wet dog at the sight,’ Merlin muttered. ‘The old men of Dumnonia, come to wave their rusty swords at him.’

  Gawain raised an eyebrow. ‘Cerdic must be an old man himself,’ he said. ‘He will know better than to dismiss men who, like him, have lived so long.’

  Lord Constantine extended his hand to Gawain. ‘I will be glad to have you beside me, Lord Gawain,’ he said as Gawain shook his hand. Then the grandson of King Constantine shook hands with Parcefal and Gediens. Old enemies and sword-brothers, men who had fought under Uther’s dragon and Arthur’s bear, bound once more in a blood pact. Resolved to spend the last of their strength in defence of Dumnonia. Resigned to fan a flame which guttered in the dark, all but gone out.

  Gawain rubbed the back of his neck. ‘We leave in the morning.’

  Constantine nodded. ‘I will be waiting with my men.’ Then he looked at me. ‘Keep up with your training, Galahad. Britain will need every sword.’ He turned to Iselle, who looked so much like her father now that I knew it. ‘Every bow,’ he said to her. I wanted to tell him, tell them all, that she was Arthur’s and Guinevere’s own daughter. Instead, I clamped my teeth together.

  ‘Dawn, then,’ Gawain said.

  ‘We’ll be ready,’ Lord Constantine said, and with that he left us.

  Gawain turned to me and Iselle. ‘You’ll keep an eye on the druid. He must be ready to attempt the lady’s healing when we return.’

  ‘He will be, I swear it,’ Iselle said.

  I looked at Merlin, who sat rocking on his stool, his eyes closed. And I looked beyond him, beyond the bloom of light cast by the fire, to where Guinevere sat in shadow. So close and yet beyond reach. There but not there. The ruin of Britain.

  And our last hope.

  The horses were restless in the gloom, disturbed by my presence and by the halo of light and the stink from the fish-oil lamp which I had set down on an upturned barrel. Or perhaps they sensed my unease. My fear.

  I placed a gentle hand on the cold bronze, as one might approach an animal so as to gain its trust. More than that, it was as though I sought the armour’s forgiveness for rejecting it when Arthur first showed it to me, and my mind had flooded with memories.

  When I was ready, I lifted the armour from its stand, the scales rattling softly, stirring from their long sleep. A thousand whispers in the dark. I pushed my arms through the tunic’s elbow-length sleeves and held it bunched in front of my chest for a long moment, appreciating its weight. Half expecting a voice to shatter the moment and condemn me for my presumption. But no one spoke, and I lifted my arms above my head and let the long coat fall, leather and bronze and the past, too, pouring over me in a drenching of sound and smell and memory.

  My thick woollen habit helped to fill the coat, a foot of grubby hem showing below the last row of bronze scales. I shrugged and bounced up and down to ensure the fit, seeing my father as I did so, then I knelt in the hay and strapped the greaves to my lower legs, holding the position awhile and running my finger over the hawk’s head pressed into the bronze at the knee. Tracing the fierce eye, the savage beak and the feathers. Wondering if any man still lived in Britain capable of such exquisite craftsmanship. I would find someone to mend the three holes in the back of the coat, to patch the leather and replace the missing scales. Or … maybe I wouldn’t. The past would still be the past.

  Next, I put on the silver-studded baldric, the leather worn and creased yet still supple, and settled Boar’s Tusk against my left hip. That was when the weight of the armour pressed down on me. It seemed too tight now. Too heavy! I pulled at the neck. Tried to tug it away from my chest, but my fingers slipped from the scales and I could not grip it. I could not breathe. One of the horses whinnied, sensing my anguish. Another pawed at the ground, and I fought for each breath and thought I must take off my father’s armour or die in it as he had.

  I was unworthy of it and I knew it. The scale coat and the belt and the sword remembered. They had served the greatest warrior in these Dark Isles and they knew that I was unfit to follow him. I stumbled back against a post and I slid down to the straw, breathing in ragged gasps, clawing at the scales.

  ‘Father.’ I choked on the word, my throat too tight. ‘I’m sorry, Father.’ My voice breaking, scattering into the lamplit dark as I looked up at the helmet still perched on the stand, its long plume a smear of white through my tears.

  It must have pained Gawain to see Venta Belgarum in Saxon hands. To see fur-swathed spearmen upon the fort’s ramparts. To hear guttural Saxon voices all around us and perhaps even to feel the presence of foreign gods, lingering like the smell of charred timbers and spilt blood. For Gawain, Parcefal and Gediens had fought here alongside Arthur and my father. Many brave warriors, with whom they had shared fire, ale and stories, had died winning this fort back from the Saxon king Aella, who had taken it from King Deroch. It had been a victory, one of many for Arthur, and Parcefal spoke of the fires that had been lit in celebration, their flames whispering to the night sky of glory, courage and loss. And yet what had it achieved?

  The Saxon advance into Caer Gwinntguic had been stopped for a year or two, like a wound staunched to stop the flow of blood. But the wound had not healed, the Saxon boats had not stopped coming. Every spring and summer they crossed the Morimaru and spilled their hungry men upon our shores. Every battle waged amongst the meadowsweet and marsh marigold, every skirmish fought in the woods and ancient forests, robbed the rounds and cantrefs of Britain of husbands, fathers, brothers.

  We had come to Venta Belgarum in the rain, our shields held upside down above our heads to show th
at we came in peace, riding through the vast encampment which smothered the land on the fort’s western side. For the Saxons had ever spurned buildings of stone and would not live in the Roman halls, temples, bathhouses and villas which still stood within the walls. Father Brice had said that the Saxons were like animals and feared what they did not understand, for surely they could not conceive of how such buildings could be constructed. Father Judoc said that the Saxons believed the Romans to have been a race of giants, while Father Yvain had told me that the reason the Saxons avoided Roman buildings was that they believed them to be crowded with ghosts. But I wondered if the Saxons would not take up lodging in the old villas because they feared that the gods from their homelands across the Morimaru would not know to look for them inside dwellings of stone and brick. And no Saxon fighting in a foreign land cares to be invisible to his gods.

  And so we had ridden among several hundred tents, past groups of sullen men sitting or standing around fires which gave more smoke than flame, our hands never far from our weapons, though we knew we would be dead in a matter of heartbeats should any of us spill Saxon blood. A band of twelve Saxons had ridden from the fort to escort us in.

  ‘How does it feel, Galahad?’ Gawain had asked me, nodding at the scale coat.

  ‘Heavy,’ I said.

  He laughed, drawing the eyes of the Saxons around us. ‘Give it another thirty years or so and you’ll forget you’re wearing it.’

  ‘Let us hope that in thirty years Galahad doesn’t need to wear it,’ Lord Constantine said, back straight, his smooth chin high, ignoring the insults being hurled at him by Saxon warriors who recognized him as the commander who yet defied them, who yet sent their spear-brothers to the afterlife, only to vanish back into the forests to the north.

  ‘He’ll need it,’ Parcefal assured him, ‘for there’ll always be someone who wants killing.’

  I had known the talk was for my benefit, to steer my thoughts from the thousand Saxon warriors around us and the very real possibility that King Cerdic might order his men to hack us down, ridding himself of a problem. Bright blood in a grey day.

  ‘Well, it suits you better than a monk’s robes,’ Gawain said, then shook his head at me as he had done several times since leaving Arthur’s. ‘Even if it is like riding with a ghost.’

  I knew all too well what he meant, what illusion I had shaped with that bronze scale coat and white-plumed helmet. With the hawk greaves and the fine sword scabbarded on my belt and the white cloak, a gift from Arthur, which fell from my shoulders to spill across the gelding’s back. I saw it not only in Gawain’s face and in the faces of the other men I rode with now, but in the eyes of some grey-bearded Saxons who watched me pass, leaning on their spears or squatting beside hissing fires, warming their hands and leaving the insults to younger mouths. These men’s eyes followed me, and I led them back through the years. Perhaps they heard again the thunder of hooves upon the earth, the screams of kinsmen impaled upon spears. For like Gawain, these old Saxons saw a ghost riding amongst them. They saw Lancelot.

  ‘Will King Cerdic remember my father?’ I had asked three mornings ago, when Gawain, Gediens and Parcefal had emerged from Arthur’s byre to find me waiting for them in the dawn. I was weary, and Gawain’s eyes had seized mine and, in that moment, he knew something of the battle I had fought in the stable while they slept.

  He dipped his chin. ‘He’ll remember,’ he said.

  ‘Does a man forget the pain of being kicked in the stones?’ Parcefal asked.

  I nodded. ‘Then let him think that Lancelot ap Ban has come again,’ I said, and Gawain had grinned and I grinned too. But then I saw him look past my shoulder and I turned to see Arthur standing with Guinevere cradled in his arms, for he would often bring her out to watch the sunrise. But, his face now. His lips were parted and his eyes stared, and it was not just surprise that I saw there but hate, perhaps even fear, for he glanced down at Guinevere in his arms to see if she was seeing the same apparition.

  ‘Galahad is coming with us, Arthur,’ Gawain called out. Trying to break the spell.

  Arthur blinked. Closed his mouth. Frowned. Guinevere was looking at me too, but who could say what she was thinking?

  ‘I … I thought I should wear it, lord.’ The words felt clumsy in my mouth. ‘I am no monk.’

  Arthur stared a little longer. Then he nodded. ‘It belongs to you, Galahad,’ he said. Then he carried Guinevere away, past the sheep pen to the willow beyond, whose long slender twigs were studded with downy buds.

  ‘That’s as good as having his blessing, lad,’ Gawain said, walking to me and gripping my shoulder with a strong hand. ‘You already had mine.’ He lifted an eyebrow. ‘You just brought it all back to him for a moment, that’s all,’ he muttered beneath his breath.

  I nodded, self-conscious in the helmet. Aware of several thousand scales of bronze pulling me down. Reeling, still, from the look on Arthur’s face.

  ‘We’re glad to have you.’ Parcefal rattled the scales on my other shoulder.

  Gediens smiled and nodded, drawing my gaze towards the house, where Iselle stood watching from the open doorway. ‘Handsome devil, isn’t he?’ Gediens called to her. He looked like a lord of war in his own armour and plumed helmet, his shield slung across his back.

  I mumbled some profanity at Gediens and he chuckled.

  ‘You men are like cockerels flaunting your combs and feathers,’ Iselle said through curling lips. ‘Next you’ll be seeing who can crow the loudest.’

  The three sword-brothers grinned at that, and I forced a smile onto my lips, but really I was hoping that they didn’t all think me a fool, standing there in the war gear of a great warrior when I had never been in a battle.

  And now we stood in an ill-lit hall which had belonged to the kings of Caer Gwinntguic, warrior kings who had been tasked with defending the westernmost reaches of the Saxon shore. Nowadays, this hall resounded with Saxon songs. Tales of Saxon victories and Saxon heroes seeped into these timbers and this thatch, and yet we hoped that rumour of Arthur still drifted from ear to ear like the tendrils of smoke which wreathed among the warriors who had gathered to hear why we had come.

  They crowded in on us, pushing us this way and that, their insults and challenges fouling the air with breath and filling the place with a clamorous din.

  ‘Easy, Galahad,’ Gawain warned, when I knocked away the hand of a Saxon who seemed determined to wrench one of the bronze scales from my coat.

  I felt something wet strike my helmet’s right cheek iron and my nose, and I turned, but had no way of knowing which man had spat at me. Then someone yelled for silence and the tumult receded. Warriors came amongst us and, their spears held across their bodies, pushed the crowd back so as to give us space. And then they did the same to open up a channel between us and the raised dais, and only then did we see our host. Or rather, hosts, for to our surprise, and horror too, Lady Morgana sat in the seat beside the old Saxon king. The black cloak which she wore over layered tunics of black wool was fastened with a silver brooch whose pin was long and wicked sharp. The skin around her eyes was dark with soot, her silver hair was braided into a rope and tied off with a leather thong, and at her pale neck she wore a torc of twisted silver which could buy the service of three hundred spearmen for a season’s campaigning. Black and silver was Morgana, and her eyes shone with malice.

  Melehan and Ambrosius stood beside their grandmother, lean-faced and contemptuous, whilst the fair-bearded Prince Cynric, a warrior in his prime, a king-in-waiting, stood at his father’s shoulder.

  We removed our helmets and I glanced at Gawain, wondering if he was thinking the same as I, that we would be lucky to ride away from Venta Belgarum.

  ‘I am glad that you accepted my invitation, Lord Constantine.’ King Cerdic’s voice dispelled the last murmurs in the hall, stilling every tongue. He lifted an ale horn in our direction. ‘It is good to meet face to face after all these years.’

  ‘Lord king,’ Constantine repli
ed, those two words like poison in his mouth.

  Cerdic put the horn to his lips, drank deeply, then knuckled his grey moustaches and gave Constantine a grin which was more raw red gums than teeth. ‘And the same to you, Lords Gawain, Parcefal and Gediens.’ He swept the drinking horn from right to left. His accent was thick, and he seemed pleased with himself for knowing who was who. ‘You have all proved yourselves great warriors in the years since I brought my people to this land. But you, Lord Gawain, son of King Lot of Lyonesse,’ he said, leaning forward in the chair, his shoulders still thick with muscle though he was an old man. ‘I remember you well. You and Lord Arthur and your big war horses. My people had not fought against such an enemy for five generations.’ He took a deep breath and sat back. ‘You made many widows in those days. Sent many young warriors to Woden’s hall to drink ale with their fathers and grandfathers.’ He looked up at the rafters and lifted the drinking horn in honour of the dead.

  ‘I wish we had sent more of your people to feast in the afterlife,’ Gawain said, at which those Saxons in the hall who understood our language jeered and called upon their king to butcher us and feed us to his hunting hounds.

  But King Cerdic showed no sign of being offended. He just gave his son, the prince, a look which seemed to say, You see, boy, this is what I have been dealing with all these years, while Cynric regarded Gawain in such a way that the unspoken challenge was loud enough for all to hear.

  ‘But let us not talk of the past.’ King Cerdic batted the air with a hand. ‘That is not why you lords of Britain have come.’ He turned to look at me then, and I did not see in those eyes the confusion and dread which I had seen in Arthur. What I saw in this Saxon king was curiosity. ‘We have not met,’ he said.

  ‘No, we have not, lord king.’ I could feel Lady Morgana’s glare while I held the king’s eyes.

  ‘There are whispers in my camp.’ He put a thumb and forefinger beside his right ear and lightly rubbed them together. ‘There are those who say that you are not of this world. That the sorcerer, Merlin, has summoned your people’s greatest warrior from Annwn to fight against me again as he once did.’ He smoothed his long moustaches through his fist, and I could see that he hoped the whispers were true. ‘They say that you are the great Lancelot, who turned the tide of battle on that day ten summers ago, when the steel storm raged. When your people and mine soaked the earth with slaughter’s dew.’ He glanced at Lady Morgana, whose claw-like hands gripped the arms of her chair as her eyes gripped me. ‘That would be some powerful drýcræft,’ Cerdic said. ‘More powerful than anything my own sorcerers are capable of.’ His eyes narrowed and he leant forward again. ‘Tell me, were you there that day?’