‘Don’t you die, Galahad,’ Gawain growled at me from the other end of the shieldwall. Our enemies were so close now that even in the dark I could see the crows which they had painted on their shields in honour of Lady Morgana. And I hated them for it.
‘Protect the horses and the cauldron,’ Parcefal said.
I lifted my shield and levelled my spear. I could smell the approaching spearmen now. Wool grease and sweat. Leather and dung and the onions they had eaten.
And they came for us just as we had hoped that they would.
A horn blared in the night somewhere to our left beyond the sloping ground to the west. A horn whose braying note had filled Lord Arthur’s enemies with gut-twisting terror so many times over the years, and now sounded again with breath from the same lungs as then. And following in the wake of that fateful note, the thunder of hooves rumbling through the earth, as over the rise came horsemen with levelled spears and helmet plumes flying and yelling to their gods and for Arthur.
The crow-shields had not formed a wall of limewood and steel. They had not needed to, thinking they would flood over us, as cold shadow surges across the land when the sun falls to the horizon. But now they turned to see the wave of steel-tipped death rolling towards them across the hillside, and some of them bunched together and threw up their shields, while others, driven by some desperate and vain instinct, turned away and fled. And perhaps if cloud had veiled the moon at that moment, some of them might have found sanctuary in darkness. But as it was, the silvery light fell like a blade across that land.
Lord Cai rode at the tip of the wedge formation and so was the first to strike, though in half a heartbeat the others hit too and a terrible noise rent the night; the splintering of shields and bone, the clang and clash of steel and the screams of the dying and the shrieking of horses and the shattering of men.
Cai and the others broke through the ruin they had wrought, spurring their mounts on across the slope, for they were just fifteen strong and Cai knew that if they got snarled up in a melee with so many spearmen, the enemy’s numbers would tell and men and horses would die. But neither would horses charge a well-built shieldwall, and so Cai yelled for his men to wheel their horses and form the wedge again, which they did with the fluid ease of long practice.
‘Shieldwall! Shieldwall!’ Ambrosius was yelling, and though the crow-shields were scattered across the slope like autumn leaves before the wind, many of them had found their wits amongst the wreckage of the night and were hurrying to either Ambrosius or Melehan, who was a spear-throw away on the left, roaring commands and beating his spear against his shield.
But Cai and his cataphracts were cantering again, plumes dancing, shields bouncing on their backs, their war horses’ iron-shod hooves drumming their three-beat gait upon the ground.
‘By the gods, I’ve missed that sight,’ Parcefal bellowed, as Cai and his men spurred into a gallop and that wedge punched through Ambrosius’s loose wall, and spears plunged down and the horses in their leather armour broke men where they stood. This time Cai didn’t lead them on but wheeled his grey Andalusian and drew his sword and his men did the same, pressing among the living, the dead and the dying, hacking down with their swords like men chopping down briars around some long-abandoned shrine.
Over on the left, Melehan had gathered a score of spearmen now who were as yet untouched by Cai’s second charge. By the grey light I could see them arraying themselves shoulder to shoulder, left legs forward, feet planted, shields overlapping, and I knew they would be hard to beat.
‘To Cai!’ I yelled, and then I was running, my breath loud inside my helmet, my legs working hard, though the weight of my scale coat and leather tunic, my shield and greaves felt as nothing. All I felt was the hunger to kill. Perhaps some part of me knew that if Melehan brought his wall of warriors into the melee against Cai, the cataphracts would eventually be speared in their saddles or pulled from their mounts and butchered on the ground. But in that moment the battle lust was in me and so I ran towards the killing, towards the carnage of steel and flesh, and only when I was amongst it, like a stone around which a river flows, did I realize that Gawain and Gediens, Parcefal and Iselle had run with me.
I killed men. My spear was a living thing in my hands, its blade ripping and piercing, and when I left it in an enemy’s guts, I drew Boar’s Tusk and reaped lives with that blade as my father had done before me. I was fast and strong, and I had some skill, but I was also savage, and I saw that savagery reflected in the terrified eyes of those I killed.
‘For Arthur!’ Parcefal bellowed, lopping off an arm which fell with the shield still attached.
‘Arthur!’ Gediens echoed, plunging his spear through the neck of a man who was trying to spear one of Cai’s riders from behind. The whinnies of horses and the screams of men blended in a terrible cacophony and I scythed men down until my sword hand was slippery with blood and my face was slick with sweat and blood, and then there was no one left to kill.
‘Form up! Form up!’ Lord Cai was yelling, pulling his grey gelding round in tight circles, his bloodied sword raised to the waning moon like an offering.
‘Enough, Cai!’ Gawain roared. He was bent double, heaving breath into his lungs, but he was watching the crow-shields who stood in their wall some eighty paces away.
All around me were dead men and none of them our own.
‘Hold!’ Cai and his men fought to control their horses, the animals’ blood running hot in their great muscles, their flesh quivering with the terror and thrill of the fight.
Parcefal and Gediens were gathering up spears and handing them to the riders so that they would not have to dismount to arm themselves again should Cai give the order to attack Melehan’s shieldwall. Iselle was retrieving her arrows. I watched her pull one from a dead man’s throat and bend to wipe the point on the grass.
‘Are you hurt?’ I asked her.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You?’
I shook my head and Iselle thrust the arrow back into the bag on her belt, then nodded to draw my attention to something behind me.
Gripping his sword in two hands, Gawain raised it above his head and for a moment the polished blade hung there like a judgement which will bind the fates of men, then it came down onto the dark shape in the grass by his feet. He wrestled with the blade to free it and brought it up above his head again, and this time he roared with effort as he hacked down. He bent, snatched something up with his left hand, straightened and set off across the slope towards our enemies.
‘Galahad, with me,’ he commanded, and so I fell in at his right shoulder, breathing hard, blinking sweat from my eyes, my own blood still in spate and my hand sticky on Boar’s Tusk’s leather and silver-bound hilt, which was slathered with other men’s blood.
‘Melehan!’ Gawain called. ‘Melehan ap Mordred ap Arthur!’
Mordred’s son pushed his way out of the shieldwall and set himself in front of his men, who stood firm though they must have been inwardly reeling to have seen half their number butchered in the time it takes a man to bridle and saddle his horse. They were men of Britain and they would never have thought they would have to face Arthur’s famous horse warriors.
‘Look, traitor,’ Gawain’s voice carried in the still night air, ‘son of a traitor.’ With that he lifted his left arm and held up the severed head by its dark hair. The gory neck dripped rhythmically into the grass.
From the tightness of the prince’s face, Melehan already knew that his brother was dead. That all of his men save those at his back lay where they had fallen and would never rise again. But seeing now his brother’s dead face, its moon-washed pallor, the sightless eyes and the grimace, where just moments before there had been vigorous life, Melehan coughed and spluttered and spewed steaming puke onto the sheep’s sorrel.
Gawain pointed his gore-slick sword at me. ‘This here is Galahad,’ he said.
‘I know who he is,’ Melehan spat, dragging a hand across his mouth.
Gawain nodded.
‘Then you’ll remember his father. Lancelot ap Ban. Reaper of lives. Slayer of Saxons and killer of men. The greatest warrior since Taranis, lord of war, walked the land.’ Melehan did not answer this but spat a glistening string of foulness into the grass. ‘Galahad here just killed your brother,’ Gawain said, ‘butchered him like a man putting down a rabid dog.’
Melehan’s eyes turned on me, the hatred in them sharp and raw, and I glared back at him, then glanced at the head which Gawain was still holding up, because I could not remember fighting Ambrosius and thought that another look at his dead face might recall it to my mind.
‘We have a new lord of war, Melehan ap Mordred.’ Gawain lifted the point of his sword towards me again. ‘Go and tell Lady Morgana and that Saxon swine Cerdic that. We have Galahad ap Lancelot.’ With that he hurled Ambrosius’s head at Melehan, who all but jumped out of the way and watched horrified as his brother’s head rolled across the ground, coming to rest by the foot of one of the spearmen behind him.
‘Go, traitors,’ Gawain commanded those men of Camelot.
They looked at each other and they looked to their lord, who for the moment just stood there, his eyes still in me like hooks. But even Melehan knew that to stay was to die. He could not have known that we had attacked him without the Fisher King’s blessing, and so he must have believed that even if by some miracle he could beat us there on that corpse-strewn slope, the king would send spearmen after him and they would die before the dawn.
‘Go now,’ Gawain said.
The big warrior behind Melehan’s right shoulder pointed his spear across the hillside. ‘What about our dead?’ he asked.
‘They are traitors to Dumnonia and will be left for the crows and the dogs,’ Gawain answered. ‘But you may take that.’ He pointed his sword at the head which lay amongst the sorrel, staring up at the night sky.
Melehan did not turn to look at it but gestured for one of his men to pick up the head, which someone did, wrapping it in the cloak which he had taken off his own back, tying it closed with a belt.
‘You cannot win,’ Melehan told Gawain, then lifted his chin. ‘You are ghosts!’ he bellowed so that Lord Cai and all of the others could hear. ‘You are ghosts from the past. Soon enough you will join the dead and I will be High King. I will be High King!’
I felt Gawain beside me tense and for a heartbeat we both thought that Melehan was going to fight, that his men would beat their swords against their shields and the butchery would begin again. But then Melehan pointed his spear into the east and walked away and his men followed him, half watching us as they went, as though they did not trust the gift of life which Gawain had given them. As though they expected Lord Cai’s warriors to spur their mounts and charge, their spear points thirsting for blood.
But Lord Cai and his men just sat their mounts, their spears laid across their saddles before them, and watched those men go.
‘We’ll have to fight them again,’ Parcefal said, coming to stand beside me. Iselle and Gediens were with him.
‘We will,’ Gawain said.
‘Only, there’ll be more of them than there are hairs on a bear’s arse,’ Parcefal said.
‘There will,’ Gawain agreed.
‘But we will have Arthur,’ Iselle said.
No one answered that, and I thought of what Merlin had told me, that he feared that even with the cauldron he would not be able to bring Lady Guinevere’s mind back to her body. And without Guinevere there would be no Arthur.
‘I’ll send men to make sure they leave Gwynedd,’ Lord Cai said.
‘They’ll leave,’ Gawain said. ‘Let the men rest. They’ve a long journey ahead of them.’
I saw no surprise in Cai’s face. He rolled his shoulders and looked off into the night after the retreating column of spearmen.
‘You’re coming back?’ Gediens asked him, looking from Cai to Gawain, as if expecting one of them to explain himself. Gawain stood watching Cai, his arms folded across his chest like a man guarding himself against the possibility that he’s wrong. Beside him, Parcefal stood open-mouthed, also watching Cai, who twisted in the saddle, looking at the mounted men around him. Some of them nodded, their faces grim, granite-hard in the darker shadow of their helmets. Then at last Cai, lord of Arthur’s horse warriors, looked down at Gawain.
‘We’re coming back,’ he said. ‘If there is a chance that Arthur will ride again, we have to.’
Gawain nodded. No smile on his scarred face. Just acceptance, an acknowledgement as if of something preordained. As inevitable as death.
20
Guinevere
WE MUST HAVE MADE a sight which would live long after our deaths on the lyre strings of bards. A vision to linger in the mind like a dream which clings to the soul long years after the night which spawned it. Men in bronze scale armour and plumed, silver-chased helmets, each of which held the flames of the summer sun, and their spear points tied with red silken ribbons which caught the wind and played like tendrils of blood in water. Men on war horses whose coats gleamed upon their muscles and who wore, as proudly as the men on their backs, their own armour: breastplates and shaffrons of boiled leather rubbed with beeswax so that they looked like polished oak. We rode south through Gwynedd and Powys and Caer Gloui, and the ragged-looking folk in the fields, the gaunt men scything the long grass while the women and straw-limbed children followed in their wake, turning the hay so that it dried evenly, and those shearing their sheep, taking the fleeces early while they could, would stop their labours and stare as we passed.
Some would ask who we were, and we would say we were Lord Arthur’s men come to reclaim Britain. Others would watch us from a distance, not daring to approach, as if they feared we were not men of flesh and blood but the spirits of men returned to the land, come through the veil which separates this world from the world beyond, as if seeking vengeance for the betrayals of the past.
And in a way that is what we were.
Lord Cai sent riders to the lords of Britain, to King Catigern and King Bivitas and Lord Cyndaf of Caer Celemion, telling them to forge spear blades and swords, to make arrows and shields, and to gather their spearmen and prepare for war. For Arthur would come again, they said, and so he who does not make ready to fight beneath the banner of the bear is a traitor to the land of his ancestors and an enemy of the gods of Britain.
We also sent a man east to Caer Lerion to find Lord Constantine and tell him to march his men south into Dumnonia, for it was in Dumnonia that Arthur’s heart had beat loudest and where the echoes of his past glories could still be heard, faint as the notes of distant war horns on the wind. And so it was in Dumnonia that we would make our stand.
King Pelles had been sad to see me go, but I think I was not the same man leaving his hall as the one who had come, and that when my grandfather bid me farewell, the tears gathering in his old eyes as we stood in the shadowed courtyard, the sun not yet risen above the eastern palisade, he saw more of my father in me than my mother.
He had taken both my hands in his and nodded towards Iselle who was nearby, saddling her mare, her breath and the mare’s pluming in the pre-dawn chill. ‘She is the land and the hearth and the dream,’ the king told me. ‘Whatever else happens, Galahad, do not forget that.’
For a heartbeat I thought he knew that Iselle was Arthur and Guinevere’s daughter, and I held my breath beneath his scrutiny, wondering how he knew it. Had Merlin told him? Or maybe the old man did not know the truth of who Iselle really was, but simply knew that I loved her – for I did love her – and his meaning was that it is for those we love that we must hope and dream and fight.
Whatever my grandfather knew, or did not know, I told him that I would remember his words and heed them. Then we had ridden out, each of us in turn dipping his ribbon-bound spear point to the king as we passed, Cai and his men giving thanks and honour and love to the man they had served for ten years and who had released them from his service now.
‘You were always Lord Arthur’s men,’
Pelles had said, when Cai formally requested the king’s permission to ride with us back to Dumnonia and war. ‘I shall not see you again in this life.’
It was a sad parting, for King Pelles had been kind and generous to them and they had served him loyally, but it was true that they belonged to Arthur and he to them, and so we had ridden out through the gates with heavy hearts and to the sounds of weeping from King Pelles’s people, who stood in the dawn and watched us until we were gone from their sight.
And these men, who had been gone from the world so long, now let the tears stream into their own beards as they saw for themselves the ruin of Britain. For the further east we rode, the more degradation and suffering we saw. Rounds left charred and smoking from some raid, men, women, children lying where they had been slain. We were forewarned of the dead by the crows and ravens thick upon them like black cloaks rippling in the breeze. The birds covetous of their feasts so that only when we came within a spear’s length would they take wing, croaking with indignation. Or else it was the dogs that warned us of corpses among the ruins and ash, the beasts snarling at each other over their spoils of flesh, snarling at us too, though we kept our distance, for no one wanted to see such horrors if they could help it.
We saw men who had been mutilated and hung from low branches as warning to others of the fate which awaited those who dared fight. We saw women and children wandering the fields or drovers’ paths, sometimes in small groups but often alone, perhaps the sole survivors of their household, walking as if lost or half asleep. We saw the smouldering remains of pyres and the piles of newly turned earth under which folk had buried their dead, and we saw gates shut against us and palisades lined with frightened faces, though we called out that we were Lord Arthur’s men returned from Ynys Môn to fight against Lady Morgana and her Saxon king.
‘You have been gone a long time, brother,’ Gawain rumbled to Cai as we rode past a group of fugitives on the road, a dozen old men, women and children pushing handcarts or hefting their belongings in sacks on their backs. They had fled from their village on the northern border of Caer Celemion and sought protection now in the walled town of Caer Baddan, which the Romans called Aquae Sulis. And they watched us with expressions of fear, wonder and disbelief; though, seeing our bear-shields, one greybeard, who must have been old when Uther still reigned, told us he would take up his own shield and spear again if Arthur returned.
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