Merlin lifted his arms and Oswine moved in, taking the feathered cloak from his master, who was naked beneath it, his scrawny body white as chalk but for the shapes and swirls which adorned his skin and seemed imbued with life of their own in the fitful light given and snatched away by the fire. Then he sat on the edge of the bed, staring straight ahead, his eyes wide and bulbous. He showed no sign of seeing any of us or even knowing we were there, as Oswine gestured at Iselle to make up the fire now so that his lord would not get cold.
My mouth was dry, but I did not dare move to fetch a drink. I still needed to empty my bladder, yet I could not leave, so bound was I by Merlin’s magic and by the invisible strings which shivered between us all like spider’s silk.
Mute, barely breathing, my stomach as hollow as an oak gall, I stood still as Iselle poked the fire, creating space for new fuel, and the fire cracked and spat, and Oswine gently drew the bed skins off Guinevere. And by a brief flare of copper firelight I saw her: the lady lost in a dream. She lay in a blue linen dress which Arthur must have put on her in readiness should Merlin be successful and bring her back to herself and to Arthur. The dress was drawn in at the waist by a delicate gold chain. A fine silver band wrapped around her pale upper arm, though it was much too big, the serpent-head terminals kissing where once they must have challenged each other across a white sea. Her black hair had been combed, her head encircled by a crown of wood anemones and sweet violets and, seeing her thus, my heart ached for Arthur. I did not dare look in his face for fear of seeing the terrible hope there.
Merlin lay down beside the lady, shuffling closer until their bodies touched, then wrapping his hand around hers, one bird’s foot grasping another. Talons entangled.
Banon lifted her black head and let out a whine, as if she had heard something which we humans had not. Then Oswine laid the feathered cloak upon the lady and the druid, leaving only their feet and shins exposed.
Wherever you are, lady, he is coming for you. I sent that thought towards her, then I looked at Iselle and found that she was already looking at me.
I run. Like water. Like fire. Clear of the dark woods, the root-nooks and the soft bog. Out under the sky. Into the long grass which whispers to me as I pass through it. Unbound and lordless. Drumming the earth in the ancient rhythm, the song of my kind since long before man sought to bend our spirit. To tame us and taste the wind, flying across the earth at speeds he would otherwise never know.
No men here. In this hidden valley, this secret, sunken place which is guarded by oak wood and steep sides of wind-rippled heather. And I run, not in fear but in joy. Finding peace in movement. The thump of my heart, the passing of my breath, the cadence of my hooves upon the ground and within the ground, honouring the soil which gives us the sweet grass. Echoing the earth thrum of the first herds. When men dreamed us into the white spume of racing waves. When they gave us gods to protect us and used us to collect the souls of the dead. When they first yoked us to gleaming chariots and we carried them into war.
I do not try to impose my own will on this creature. I would be unable to. But I would not want to, either. She is proud and free, this mare, and might run to the world’s edge, as a peal of thunder across the firmament. I will cling into her if I can, for I revel in the wind through my soul and in the not trying. And I feel that she knows we are joined. It is as though she wishes to give me this gift of serenity, of letting the world slide off us like smoke. And so I let myself recede, a flame burning out, and give myself to the mare, whose heart’s incessant beat is as the ebb and flood of the tides, the turn of the seasons, the death of the old stallion and the birth of the foal.
The world is grey when we come to the pool, which sits low and sullen in the glen like the last water in the cauldron. I lift my head and cry out in triumph and defiance, aware of the slowing of my hooves’ song on softer ground. Aware of a savage thirst, my flanks wet with lather, my belly sucking in and swelling out. I walk to the water and turn into the wind, then I drink, cooling the fire in my blood. Then swing my head up, ears swivelling, breathing and blowing and tasting the air. And I feel the mare’s fear now, for some part of her remembers being smaller. Weaker. A prey animal forever seeking the protection of the herd, and even now she readies herself to dance away and run again, rather than risk the impossibility of escape.
Then I see her. Emerging from gorse beyond the deer trail, like my own shadow catching me up. A mare the same grey as the sky. Breathing hard. Tossing her head, saying that she has chased me as the moon chases the sun. She whinnies, seeks my permission to come closer, but I jump sideways, away from her and from the pool, and lean back, legs splayed. The mare shrieks again and comes on, inexorable as night, as I swing my head and cry out, my muscles taut, heart thumping, blood in spate.
Still the mare comes on, close enough now that the whites of her eyes gleam like smooth river pebbles and her scent is thick in my mouth. And I know that this mare is possessed by another. I know that he has come. The druid. Somehow, he has found me. After all this time.
Yet, he is too late.
I hold the mare’s eyes for another few heartbeats. Then I shriek to the grey sky.
And run.
Afterwards, it was a long time before Merlin would speak. He had thrown off the feathered cloak and sat up, looking straight ahead at the swords and pelts hung from the wall pegs but seeing things that were further away, far beyond our sight. The fire popped and he started, looking at the flames, so that I saw there were tears in his eyes.
‘Fetch him a drink,’ Gawain growled at Oswine, who had been preparing his master a meal of cheese and smoked eel, having told us that the journeying always brought on a ravenous hunger in the druid.
I did not know if Arthur had seen the tears in the old man’s eyes, but he covered the lady with the bed furs again, taking a moment to run his fingers over her forehead into her black hair, as one might wake a lover or a child.
Perhaps we waited out of respect. Or because we thought it was Lord Arthur’s right to be the first to ask. Or, maybe we waited because secretly we already knew, yet sought to stretch out the time when all was still possible. But when Merlin had drained his cup, having neither looked any of us in the eye nor uttered a word, we could endure it no longer, and I was grateful when the silence was broken.
‘Say something, druid,’ Gawain said, at which Arthur flinched as though struck, yet he turned his eyes to Merlin in the same way that I have since seen men look upon a stillborn child or a woman defiled by the enemy; seeing because he must, though knowing the sight will haunt him after.
Merlin had the decency to choose Arthur’s eyes out of all those watching him.
‘I failed,’ he said.
We knew it, of course, for all that I still hoped that he had not. That perhaps the rites were not yet over, or that having been gone so long, the lady might not return at once, as sight does not when eyes first open after a long sleep, but would rouse over the course of the night and the next day.
Arthur held the druid’s gaze awhile and it seemed he wanted to ask more, but then he nodded and, telling us he needed to breathe clean air, threw a cloak around his shoulders and went into the night.
Gawain, Gediens and Parcefal looked at one another with tired resignation and it seemed to me that the three of them looked older, as though the small hope which had flickered in their hearts, helping them defy time itself, had been snuffed out and the years flooded in with the dark.
‘I’m going to my bed,’ Parcefal rumbled.
‘And me,’ Gediens said.
‘I’ll see to Arthur,’ Gawain said, and drank a great wash of ale before heading out after his lord, uncle and friend.
Iselle put a log on the fire and knelt to blow new life into the coals, her face giving away nothing save that her mind was busy untangling thoughts. I turned my attention back to Merlin, expecting him to give us more. To do something more.
‘What is it, boy?’ he asked, deliberate with the insult. ‘Even Ut
her knew better than to stare at me like a fool trying to boil water with his eyes.’ He pushed himself up and stood unsteadily but Oswine helped him over to the bench by the hearth and sat him down before going to fetch his food.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
Oswine offered him the plate but Merlin waved it away with a grimace.
‘I told you,’ he said. ‘I failed.’ His voice was dry as ancient bones.
I wondered if he was avoiding my eye because he was ashamed, or because there were things which he was keeping to himself and feared saying without a word spoken.
‘You did not find her?’ I asked.
Iselle looked up from the other side of the hearth, her face washed by new flamelight.
‘What does it matter to you?’ the druid snapped, a spark of anger in a spent fire. ‘It is as I said. As I told Arthur, though I don’t think he believed me.’ He chewed the next words before he said them. ‘The gods have abandoned me. As they have abandoned Britain. The power which I once enjoyed. It’s gone.’ His eyes turned up to where the smoke gathered, seeping out through the reed thatch. ‘They have taken it from me as a mother snatches a toy from a disobedient child.’ He held his palms towards the fire and shivered. You’d have thought he had been out in the cold night air. But then, who could say where he had ventured in search of Guinevere beneath that cloak of crow and raven feathers?
He growled at Oswine to bring the plate back, which the Saxon did before filling the druid’s cup. Merlin picked up a piece of eel and thrust it into his mouth. ‘You would all have been better leaving me to pass my last years alone,’ he said as he chewed. ‘Instead of dragging me back to the world.’ He wafted a hand at me. ‘You’re like thieves digging up a corpse to steal the coins from his eyes.’
I glanced back at the lady lying in her bed, a ring of flowers in her dark hair. Not a corpse, but not really alive either. ‘You could try again,’ I said.
He laughed at that. A dry, resentful expulsion which ended in coughing. After, he took his hand from his mouth and grabbed at the air above the hearth. ‘And you could try to catch smoke and hold it in your hand, Galahad,’ he said, then he looked up at me, his eyes meeting mine for the first time. ‘Or try to run back to that hill at Camlan and beg your father not to leave you there and ride to his death.’
I felt that as the pain he had intended, and I wanted to strike him. And why shouldn’t I? This man, whom folk called the last of the druids, had done nothing to earn my respect, nor should I fear his power, for I believed he had none. And yet perhaps that was more reason to let him be, and so I swallowed my anger. He was just an old man. Broken and lost. He was nothing more than the soot still hanging in the air from a flame which had been snuffed out.
‘It will be morning soon, Galahad,’ Iselle said, knowing the heat that was in my blood. I nodded and turned away from Merlin to gather my cloak.
‘The gods set us all up, Galahad,’ the druid mused, as Iselle and I left him sitting by the flames. ‘Like a game of chess,’ he called after us, ‘they set the pieces up and then they walk away from the game.’
The waning moon was low in the east yet bright enough to throw shadows from the outbuildings and the old crooked apple tree. It silvered the reed-beds and shivered in muddy puddles. It shone in the smoke leaking from Lord Arthur’s thatch and it lit the way for a fleet of clouds sailing across the night sky, making me think of the Saxon ships which would soon be crossing the Morimaru now that spring was here.
‘It will be full again soon enough.’ Iselle was looking up, for we had stopped on the way to the byre, to fill our lungs with clean air before going to our beds.
‘It will,’ I agreed, not looking at the moon. Looking at her. And though it would indeed wax full soon enough, and we must swear loyalty to the Saxon king and his wife or else witness the final ruin of Britain, in that moment I did not care.
Our hands touched. A shiver ran through me from my head to the muscles in my thighs. Then we were entwined, our mouths pressed softly together, tasting each other. I had never had wine or mead so intoxicating, and Iselle sighed into my mouth and I breathed in her breath, needing her, flesh and soul. Then she broke the kiss, pulling away to look into my eyes, as if to make sure I was the man she thought me to be. As if the taste of me in her mouth had revealed something else.
‘Come,’ she said, and taking my hand she led me to the stable.
Merlin slept three days and nights after his failed attempt to restore Guinevere. Gawain, Gediens and Parcefal spent much of that time making plans in preparation for King Cerdic’s ultimatum and its aftermath. Still they begged Arthur to put on his old scale armour and lead them as he had in former times, but Arthur would not leave Guinevere. For she must want to live, he said, to return to him, or else how could she have endured this affliction for so long?
‘The gods test me, still,’ he told us. ‘They test my resolve and my loyalty. If I remain steadfast, there is hope that they will return her to me. My sins demand a price. I will not abandon her.’
And so Gawain and the others talked of the kings of Britain: which of them could perhaps be persuaded to fight alongside Lord Constantine, given the Lady Morgana’s betrayal? Who among them had the most to lose by bending the knee to a Saxon king in Camelot? And who could be called upon to fight in order to prevent the Lords Melehan and Ambrosius becoming joint kings of Dumnonia, having suffered because of Mordred’s treachery at the last great battle? Having seen fathers, sons, uncles and brothers killed because of it.
‘They must fight,’ Gediens said, ‘for they must realize that all Britain will be lost if the heartlands of Cynwidion and Caer Celemion are overrun.’
Parcefal shook his head. ‘If the Saxon chieftains south of the River Tamesis join Cerdic, as I have heard they will, and bring a thousand spears into Dumnonia, we will never be rid of them. Not without Camelot.’
Gawain agreed. ‘So, we must fight this summer.’ He scratched his beard. ‘Not a raid here and there. Constantine must come out of the forest and plant his banner.’
‘Our banner.’ Parcefal thumped his chest with a fist. For Constantine flew the same bear which adorned their shields. Lord Arthur’s bear.
‘We bring them to battle before the wheat ripens,’ Gawain said. ‘It is the last chance we will have. It is the only way.’
They talked of raising spearmen as though it could be done, throughout three sunny days that woke adders from their dormant state, while goldcrests and greylag geese took to the sky for their breeding grounds further north and east. They talked because the season was turning and at such times hopes will rise with the sap, and it is hard to think of death in the midst of new life. And they talked because they did not want to think about the failure which we had all witnessed. For years they had searched for Merlin, hoping that he could cure Guinevere and that her recovery would return Arthur to them and to Britain. But it was all for nothing, and I think they would have ridden to fight King Cerdic alone rather than face the truth of it.
Iselle spent most of those three days hunting in the marsh, so that I began to think she regretted what had passed between us that night in the stable beneath the cross where my father’s armour had hung. I could think of little else. I craved her scent. Her touch. Those parts of her that were secret and hidden but which I now knew. It haunted me like a dream. And so I busied myself with my weapons, throwing the spear until my shoulder muscles burned. Practising my sword cuts against the woven reed target until I could no longer lift Boar’s Tusk. Relishing the exquisite pain of swollen muscle and taut flesh. The familiarity of the weapons in my hands had reached me across the years like an echo from my childhood and my father’s tutelage, so that his sword hilt and spear shaft felt almost a part of me now.
But then, at dusk on the fourth day, Merlin woke. Gediens and I were fighting with leather-sheathed spears when Oswine came to say that the druid wanted to see us all together. Was he going to try again to heal Guinevere? Or, like the snakes which could be
found coiled beneath brambles near the wood, had he woken with new venom to spit at us about the gods and their abandonment of us?
‘I have had a dream,’ he told us when we gathered around his bed of skins in the byre. He hadn’t eaten in four days and he had a wild look in his eyes. ‘Or else my mind snagged it in the depths, when I was neither asleep nor awake. As a man hooks a fish on a line which he has left unattended.’ He frowned, scratching a hollow cheek, clearly troubled by the not knowing. He lifted a hand to show the palm upon which was inscribed a triskele, the three conjoined spirals the green of old copper. ‘Mine to ponder,’ he said to himself, then looked up at us again. ‘It need not concern you.’
‘Believe me when I say that it does not concern us,’ Gawain said, stretching a strip of leather between two hands to test its strength. He had taken it upon himself to replace the carrying strap on my father’s shield, the current one having perished to the extent it could not be trusted. ‘Now, tell us why you called us here or go back to sleep and leave us in peace.’
‘Aye,’ Parcefal said, ‘the horses need feeding and won’t thank me for keeping them waiting.’
Merlin looked at me. ‘There was a time, Galahad, when men showed me the respect I deserved.’ His eyes were aflame, so that for what it was worth, I would have believed that whatever was in his mind, the gods had put it there. ‘Never get old, lad, that is my advice to you.’
But Arthur, who knew Merlin best, was watching the druid in silence, and it seemed to me that he was expecting something. He knew that fire in Merlin’s eyes.
Merlin turned his face to Arthur, nodding before he spoke. ‘There may be another way, Arthur,’ he said. ‘To bring Guinevere back.’
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