Camelot

by Giles Kristian

  She had brought her long knife, but not the Saxon sword. I had brought my spear and Boar’s Tusk, but no more. If any of the men saw me going outside, I wanted them to think I had gone to empty my bladder, if they thought anything at all before sinking back into sleep.

  I laid my spear and sword beside the cloak, then stood to face her. ‘I’ve missed you,’ I said.

  Her brows lifted. ‘We have barely been apart.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ I said.

  She smiled. ‘I don’t think you would have made a good monk.’ She glanced down at my white cloak spread across the ground.

  I considered this. ‘I don’t think so, either,’ I said.

  I took her hands in mine and this time I guided her, down to the cloak, and she let me do it, a half smile on her lips as though she was curious to watch what I would do from one moment to the next.

  Must everyone test me? I thought.

  She looked left and right into the moonlit wood then lay back, reaching behind her head and spreading her loose copper hair on the white cloak, so that I thought it looked like the lustrous mane of some magnificent fabled creature.

  ‘I have missed you too.’ She took my hand and pulled me gently down, and neither of us spoke for the next thousand heartbeats.

  Not until Iselle felt something, or someone, watching us in the night.

  At first, I thought I had done something wrong, for she pulled away from me, a hand on my chest, and turned her face away. But I realized she was looking off towards the trees and so I rolled to the side and stood, arranging myself.

  ‘What is it?’ I hissed at her, clothing myself, buckling on my sword belt and grabbing my spear from the ground, all the while watching the trees around us, trying to follow Iselle’s line of sight.

  ‘There’s someone here,’ she said.

  Fear hardened my stomach. Dried my mouth. I listened, half expecting to hear the mournful note of a horn, which would tell us that Sadoc or Gadran up on the high ground had seen enemies in the night. I wished I was wearing my scale coat and that I had brought my shield. Mostly I cursed myself for being such a fool and bringing Iselle out here away from the safety of the farmstead.

  ‘An animal?’ I suggested. ‘Badger or fox?’

  Iselle had drawn the long knife. She held it before her like a challenge to the shadows.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

  I looked behind me, gripped by the ice-cold fear that there were unseen enemies amongst the trees around us. Were they spirits? Did that account for my blindness to them? The dead for whom this island was named by those who had heard the terrible stories?

  ‘Come out,’ Iselle urged, giving those words to the silver birch and the moon-dappled night, or so it seemed to me. ‘Come. We will not hurt you,’ she said, and lowered her knife in a show of peace.

  I did not lower my spear.

  ‘We will not hurt you,’ Iselle said again, in a voice like that which people use when trying to reassure a child that he or she is safe. The moon emerged from a bank of shredding cloud and just then a figure stepped out from behind a young lime tree and I blinked at the sight and looked around again, suspecting some trick. It was a boy. Eleven summers perhaps. No more. Dark-haired and wild-looking, his face pale like the moon. Deep pools for eyes. His trews, tunic and cloak ragged and torn and dirty with muck, leaves and briar.

  ‘Are you alone?’ Iselle asked. I had yet to find my tongue.

  The boy nodded.

  I still did not lower my spear. The moonwash fell across the trees around us now and I looked this way and that, expecting enemies to appear all around.

  ‘Come.’ Iselle beckoned the boy with her free hand as she slid the long knife back into its sheath. The boy gave me a wary look but stepped out of the shadows and walked towards us.

  ‘How long have you been spying on us?’ I asked.

  The boy thought about this. ‘Some time,’ he said, which was not the answer I wanted to hear. But then he said, ‘Since you came ashore.’ He frowned, his smooth, white face a mockery of age and woes. ‘But I’ve been watching you for longer than that, too.’

  Iselle and I looked at each other, neither of us knowing what to make of that. ‘Where are your mother and father?’ Iselle asked him. I was still ill at ease with the thought of his having watched us since I had put my cloak on the ground.

  The boy’s hands balled into fists. ‘They were taken.’

  ‘When? By whom?’ I asked, but Iselle shook her head at me and took a step towards the boy.

  ‘Come with us,’ she said, ‘back to the house. It’s safe there.’

  The boy shook his head. ‘It’s not safe.’ His eyes were wide. ‘They are coming.’

  Iselle raised a hand to stop me from speaking. ‘Who is coming?’ she asked the boy, which was exactly what I had been about to ask.

  It seemed a shiver ran through his little body then. ‘The neamh-mairbh,’ he said.

  Iselle and I looked at each other again but gave no words to our shared fears, for the neamh-mairbh were the walking dead. Monsters from fireside tales. Hideous creatures who were said to drink the blood of those they killed. The skin crawled on the back of my neck and down my arms, and I lifted my spear again as I looked around, my heart quickening at the sight of a face. Just a pattern in the birch bark. My guts lurching at some breeze-stirred bramble or at the distant crack of a twig which was likely nothing more than some predator venturing amongst the leaf litter.

  ‘What is your name?’ Iselle asked the boy.

  He did something then which I did not expect. He grinned.

  ‘I’m Taliesin,’ he said.

  Despite the boy’s dire warning about the neamh-mairbh, Iselle managed to summon a smile of her own, all for him. ‘Well, Taliesin, we should go.’

  The boy’s parents had been taken a year ago or more. Not from the farmstead we sheltered in, but another, above the shore on the east side of the island. Taliesin had been alone ever since. A boy left to fend for himself on the Isle of the Dead. And we were the first people he had seen in all that time … if we were saying that those who had taken his mother and father were not people. Not any more. A thought to make the blood run cold in the flesh.

  ‘Is it possible that you are the one I felt?’ Merlin asked the boy. Taliesin did not answer, but Merlin nodded. ‘Yes, yes I think so. At first, I thought it was a druid, but it was you. I’m sure of it.’ He was watching Taliesin with such a look of curiosity it was a wonder the boy did not melt under the druid’s fierce eye like an icicle beneath a candle flame. But the boy was not like a normal boy, whether because of the life he had endured here alone or because of some stranger reason, and he regarded Merlin with a similar inquisitiveness. So much so that, for us who stood around in a darkness barely challenged by the single lamp flame which Lord Cai held, it was like looking at the reflection of a mirror which shows a man his younger self. I doubted, though, that Merlin was ever as beautiful as Taliesin.

  ‘You have the sight?’ Merlin asked.

  Taliesin tilted his head on one side, weighing his reply. ‘I see things sometimes,’ he said, and those big eyes swung to the open door, beyond which Cai’s men moved in the dark, hissing at one another to be watchful and ready.

  ‘We don’t have time for this if there’s any truth in what the boy said,’ Gawain put in. He put a hand on Taliesin’s shoulder and the boy flinched at the touch. ‘How many are coming?’ Gawain asked. ‘Are they thieves and cut-throats? Or warriors? Men with swords and helmets?’ He tapped his own crested helmet as if the boy might never have seen such a thing before.

  For a moment, Taliesin seemed somehow absent from his body, those dark eyes seeing things beyond the rotting wattle walls. Things that were not easily shaped into words or brought willingly to the lips. Then he shivered and his eyes sharpened on Gawain.

  ‘They’re here,’ he hissed.

  Gawain and Merlin exchanged a glance that was loud with unspoken words, then Gediens appeared
at the threshold, his broad shoulders filling the space.

  ‘A horn,’ he told Gawain, ‘Gadran, up on the western ridge.’

  Gawain nodded, shooting Taliesin a suspicious look as he fastened his silver pin brooch, no doubt wondering how the boy had known. Then he strode outside to join Cai, who was forming his men into a defensive position with their backs to the roundhouse’s open door.

  I put on my helmet and picked up my shield and spear, and Iselle took up her bow, the Saxon sword already sheathed at her hip.

  ‘You’ll stay with me, Taliesin,’ Merlin told the boy. He gestured at Oswine, who stood in shadow by the old weaving loom, testing the edge of his short axe by shaving a sliver of wood from the loom beam. ‘And you needn’t be afraid,’ Merlin said. ‘Whatever is out there, it cannot be as foul or wicked as that Saxon there.’

  Oswine grinned, drawing a little iron hammer from inside his tunic where it hung and pressing it to his lips, in this way invoking his god, Thunor.

  Outside, Lord Cai and his warriors were arrayed in a crescent formation, facing out, each man separated by a distance of five feet, shield raised, spear levelled, one foot forward, the other planted in the grass. No wall of shields, leather-bound rims kissing, men close enough to feel the rise and fall of their neighbour’s shoulders and chest with every fearful breath – not enough men for that – but each would have the space for spear work. Iselle stood in the middle of the open ground behind the crescent, an arrow nocked but her bow held down by her side.

  I looked over to the barn, where two men stood guard, protecting the horses which had been taken in there for safety, the night being too dark to fight on horseback.

  ‘Where shall I stand?’ I asked Gawain, who was looking up at the crest of the western hill, where rocks glowed in the moonlight. Lord Cai’s men had moved almost as one, like a skein of geese pulling together against the sky, so that I did not know where to put myself.

  Gawain growled a curse. The rocks up on the ridge vanished, suddenly swathed in darkness, and we looked up at the waning moon to see it swallowed by cloud from the west. Darkness flooded the vale, consuming the farmstead and all of us who stood wide-eyed where once a family had turned soil and tended livestock, but where nettle and bramble now thrived.

  ‘Someone’s coming!’ one man yelled, pointing his spear off towards the squat black shapes of the coppiced trees at the foot of the eastern slope. Shields were lifted higher. Flesh tensed. Muscles braced.

  ‘It’s me,’ a voice called from the darkness, and men exhaled, mumbled profanities, touched iron for luck as Sadoc loped into the clearing. His scale armour and war gear jangled, his chest heaving as the crescent of warriors moved apart, absorbing him into the line.

  ‘What did you see?’ Cai asked him.

  ‘Nothing,’ Sadoc replied, setting himself like the others, his spear blade rising and falling because he was winded from running. ‘Heard Gadran’s horn. He’s still up there?’

  No one answered. There was no need. We had all been expecting or hoping to hear Gadran’s horn again, or for Gadran himself to return with word of the enemy we should expect. But the night was eerily quiet. It pressed down upon us and encroached from all sides, an impenetrable darkness hedging us in, heavy with threat like some foul omen which whispers of death. We waited, my blood gushing in my ears, my breath strangely loud in the helmet with the silver-chased cheek pieces down. The muscles in my thighs quivering. I clenched my jaw to stop my teeth clattering together.

  What if I cannot fight? What if I am a coward? These men, warriors all, see my father when they look at me. But I am not my father.

  I shook my head as if to uproot these fears and scatter them. Then a spear streaked out of the night to clatter against a man’s shield and with it came screams.

  ‘Artorius!’ Lord Cai bellowed and his men repeated the cry as a mass of beings swarmed out of the dark and the sounds of slaughter filled the world: shrieks and the wooden clatter of shields and the metallic tonk of blades on iron bosses. The neamh-mairbh had come. A streak of white in the gloom and one of the fiends went down, clutching at the swan-fletched arrow in its chest.

  In front of me, Gawain thrust his spear into flesh, hauled it free, thrust again, then stepped forward and swung his shield across his body to hammer a snarling face with the boss.

  ‘Fight!’ he yelled. ‘For all the gods, lad! Fight!’

  I looked left and right. It was chaos. I saw Lord Cai beset by three of the creatures, desperately fending them off with spear and shield. I saw Parcefal hurl his spear and draw his sword, that blade scything in the dark, taking a head. And I saw Gediens throwing assailants back, swinging his spear to keep them off, like a flaming torch defying the dark. All along the crescent, blades tore night’s shroud and helmet plumes danced.

  ‘Fight, Galahad!’ Gawain roared, hurling his own spear and stepping back to buy time to pull his sword from its scabbard. ‘Damn you!’ It was like the deep rolling snarl of a dog, yet I heard it beneath the battle din, and another arrow hissed in the dark and then I saw one of ours fall. It seemed the creatures were all over him, rabid as a pack of wild dogs, too many to fight. He went down and they were trying to haul him away through the grass, but his companions would not give him up, one grabbing hold of a leg while another drove the creatures back with steel and fury.

  Gawain cleaved a shield and the fiend behind it fell back, the stump of its severed arm spraying gore.

  ‘Kill them, Galahad!’ Gawain cried. Then Cai yelled that Fiacha was down, and in the murk I could make out three of the creatures bent over Fiacha, stripping him of his fine war gear. And I was striding towards them, shield and spear raised, the screams and clashing of arms sounding far away now, like the murmur of the sea beyond grassy dunes. And the darkness encroached, crowding my peripheral vision so that all I saw was the iron blade of my spear and the creatures before me.

  The first looked up in time to see its death in my spear blade, mouth open in a silent scream. I hauled the spear from the snagging eye socket, then cast it at the fiend fleeing towards the trees, taking it in the back. The third came at me teeth and blade but fell back with a white-feathered arrow in its mouth, then Boar’s Tusk was in my hand and I was the fiend in the darkness, stalking for another kill. I found it when two of the savages came shrieking from the shadows, one of them throwing itself against my shield, trying to rip it from my arm. The new strap held, and I twisted to my right, thrusting Boar’s Tusk into the fiend’s side with a crack of bone. A thin yelp and the creature fell away, but something struck my right shoulder hard enough to throw my head back and flood my neck bones with heat, yet I turned from the waist and scythed the shield rim into a mouth, scattering teeth and gore into the grass.

  For a moment I lost sight of the creature, then I saw it on its back amongst the nettles, wide-eyed and trying to scuttle away like some giant insect. Three strides and I was upon it, thrusting down with Boar’s Tusk, that shining blade thirsty for blood, and the thing shuddered and went still.

  Someone was yelling my name, though it sounded far away, somewhere beyond the flooding pulse of my own blood in my ears. I killed twice more but afterwards could not recall the manner of those killings, and then there was a pale light in the world again and I looked up to see the moon unveiled, slipping free of cloud.

  And suddenly the creatures were fleeing back into the trees surrounding the farmstead, vanishing as quickly as a shoal of fish when a hand breaks the surface of the water. One moment they were there, a horde of shrieking madness, the next they were gone, and we were left breathless and fear-soaked. Wild-eyed. Turning this way and that in benumbed confusion. Unsatiated. Blood-crazed. Hating the enemy more for fleeing than for attacking.

  Iselle was standing in front of me. I could see her mouthing my name, but I could not hear her. I turned and saw Gediens staring at me, heavy-browed. Just staring. Parcefal was looking at me too, saying something to the man beside him.

  I heard the word hurt and reali
zed that Gawain was asking me if I had taken a wound. I shook my head, then remembered the blow I had taken on my shoulder and touched the scales there. They were sound and I felt no pain.

  ‘Hold!’ Lord Cai commanded, stalking along the line of his men towards me. ‘Hold! Let them go!’

  He had retrieved my spear and now brought it to me. ‘That was a fine throw,’ he said, pulling the blade through a fistful of bitter dock to clean it. ‘You fought well, Galahad,’ he said, holding my eye a moment as he handed me the spear. Then he turned, calling to his men to keep their eyes on the tree line in case the men who had attacked us came again. For they were men, I realized as we walked amongst the fallen, butchering any that still breathed.

  ‘Galahad!’ Gediens strode up to me. ‘Come here, lad.’ He pulled me into an embrace, his blood-slick armour pressing against my own, the bronze scales kissing. ‘Knew you had it in you,’ he said. ‘We all knew.’ He pulled away and looked into my eyes. ‘You fought like Taranis himself.’

  ‘Taranis would never have let his shield drop like that,’ Gawain put in.

  ‘This one’s alive,’ Merlin called out. The druid had emerged from the house, accompanied by Oswine and Taliesin, and was crouching beside a wounded enemy who had managed to crawl a good distance off through the wet, flattened grass. The creature lay gurgling and choking. Oswine rolled the man over onto his back and we saw the blood bubbling at his lips. Like all the others, he was dressed in leather and skins and he gave off a stink of rancid meat and dung, worse than any animal. His hair was long and white, thickened with lime, plastered to his head and tied at the nape of his neck, and his face beneath the slick mask of dark blood was feral, the skin stretched tight across his sharp cheeks and forehead, his lips drawn back from his teeth like a corpse’s after a month in the grave. But the strangest thing about him, and the others too, was the green tinge of his skin. Under the fitful glow of the rushlight which Oswine held over Merlin, the man on the ground beside him looked the colour of bread when the mould is in it. The stain seemed worse on his hands and his neck, and this seemed the same with the others, from what I had seen by the weak light of the waning moon.