Camelot

by Giles Kristian

  ‘I have little to fear from Saxons,’ Lord Geldrin agreed, dipping his head towards Iselle. ‘Or from Lady Morgana, though she pays well for my wine and olive oil and I will be a poorer man when she is no longer the Lady of Camelot.’ In three steps he was beside me. ‘But this man’s father and I were friends,’ he said, reaching out to take hold of my shoulder, his eyes gripping my eyes. ‘Your father had a sparhawk, Galahad. A savage little creature, all beak and claw and hatred.’

  I nodded. ‘A boy called Melwas broke its wing. My father told me.’ Someone behind me rumbled that Melwas had been Mordred’s man.

  ‘The bird died soon after,’ Lord Geldrin said, a shadow falling across his face which even the flamelight could not dispel. ‘I could have stopped it, stopped Melwas, but I didn’t, and I’ve never forgotten it.’ He looked at King Cuel and King Bivitas and shrugged. ‘Strange how a little thing like that can haunt you through the years,’ he said, then he turned to Iselle. ‘And I knew your mother, lady. She was kind to me.’ He nodded, an echo of the oath he had sworn to her the previous day, then he turned to King Catigern. ‘I fight for Galahad and Lady Iselle,’ he said. ‘And when it’s over, I will return to my eyrie and you can all fight amongst yourselves over the scraps.’

  I could not like the man, but I admired him. In a tent full of kings and lords, he had unveiled a simple truth, that no matter a man’s power and riches, he cannot escape the debts he owes to his own honour.

  ‘We are all here to fight,’ King Cuel said, eager to bring us back to important matters. ‘But the loss of Lord Cyndaf and his two hundred spears hurts us.’ He scratched amongst his red bird’s-nest beard, which I doubted had ever known a comb. ‘We will be thinner still come dawn, I suspect,’ he said, by which he meant we would lose more spearmen to the dark. He opened his big hands towards Gawain and Iselle. ‘Even against twice our number, when we thought Arthur would lead us there was hope. But now?’ His red brows drew together.

  ‘You think we should seek terms, King Cuel?’ Merlin asked him. ‘You think Morgana and her Saxon king will let you lead your men back to Caer Gloui and forget that you raised the boar banner here against her?’

  ‘She will know by now that Arthur did not come,’ King Cuel said.

  ‘She will,’ Merlin admitted, ‘and she will see that we are all here even so,’ and he threw his arms wide. ‘Don’t you see?’ His robes were black, but his eyes held flames within them like two bronze scales from my father’s armour. ‘We are here.’ And those three words were given like beats on a drum. ‘And this is just the beginning. And though it may be that we cannot win this fight, we will cut our enemies deeply. We will bleed them and the other kings and lords of Britain, the men of Gwinntguic and Caer Lerion, of Elmet and Rheged, those who did not come to stand with us, will smell Saxon blood on the air. They will gather like wolves around a wounded deer and they will strike.’ He pounded a fist into the triskele on his other palm. ‘But I believe we will win.’ He turned to Gawain. ‘Why am I alive still, an old man like me, if not for the will of the gods? They have given me another chance, you see? I failed them before. I failed all of you.’ He pointed at me then and it seemed that the candles guttered as heads turned. ‘Here we have Lancelot’s son. A man who does not share his father’s weakness.’ He swung his finger to point at Iselle. ‘And here we have Uther Pendragon’s blood, held in the flesh of a warrior unburdened by her father’s failure.’ He raked the assembled lords and kings with his flaming eyes. ‘This is our chance to finish what Uther began.’

  ‘And how many young men have to die tomorrow for you to make amends with the gods, druid?’ This from Menadoc, King of Cornubia, who had taken the high seat after the death of his brother, Cyn-March, in the way that Uther had seized power in Dumnonia following the assassination of his brother Ambrosius Aurelius. Menadoc was old now, as old as Merlin perhaps, and Cornubia being a sub-kingdom of Dumnonia, he knew how his people would suffer at Morgana’s hands if we lost. He had not spoken until now, and his words were heavy, as though he had weighed all that had been said and found that the scales did not balance.

  ‘The gods have always demanded sacrifice, King Menadoc. You know this,’ Merlin said.

  Menadoc knew it, and yet he begrudged it. He had seen too many of his spearmen die in other people’s wars. ‘You were wrong about Arthur. Yes, he held back the tide for a while, but he was not the Pendragon you prophesied.’ He threw an arm in Cuel’s direction. ‘He was not even a king,’ he said. ‘What if you’re wrong about this girl?’ He frowned at Iselle, then shook his head at Merlin. ‘Our world has changed. Our gods are changing. The time of the druids is long passed.’

  ‘Don’t be an old fool, Menadoc.’ Merlin turned on the man, but Iselle stepped forward, stilling Merlin’s tongue with a raised hand.

  ‘I killed my first Saxon when I was thirteen,’ she told King Menadoc, who lifted his chin, inviting her to say what she would. ‘He was alone,’ Iselle said. ‘Lost in the marsh when a mist rose and separated him from the others in his hunting party. He was a big man. As big as Gawain. But he was afraid.’ She lifted a hand to her pale throat. ‘He kept touching the silver hammer of his god. He was asking his gods for help when I let him see me through the reeds.’ She let that sink in, lingering awhile in the memory of it.

  ‘I don’t think he wanted to harm me,’ she continued. ‘I think he was relieved to see someone out there, to know he was not alone after all.’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe he thought I would help him. I remember his face. It was a good face. A strong face. I smiled at him to show that I was not afraid, and he spoke in a soft voice as he came closer, his hands away from his blades, because he did not want to frighten me away. And when he was close, so close that I could smell his stink, I drew my knife and I buried it in his eye.’ Her lips warped with the telling. ‘I watched as he fell into the black water, clutching at that knife, and all I thought was that I was a fool for not killing him with an arrow, because he thrashed and went down where I could not reach him and I never saw that knife again.’

  Iselle had never told me that story, and hearing it now made my blood run cold. I was not the only one by the looks on the faces around me. That a young girl could do such a thing. Could be so savage.

  ‘I was killing Saxons long before I knew whose granddaughter I was. Whose daughter,’ Iselle said. ‘And tomorrow, when we face our enemies, you will not see me hiding at the rear, no matter what plans Merlin has for Britain and for me.’

  My fists clenched at my sides. My chest tightened and I tried to catch Iselle’s eye, to urge her to say no more, for I did not want her risking her life to prove anything to these men. But she avoided my eye. She knew what she was doing.

  ‘Tomorrow, I will fight,’ Iselle told us all. ‘Not because Arthur was my father, but because I must fight. We must all fight. Here in this place. Or else we will lose everything. Our people will be driven out or killed or enslaved. Our gods will abandon us, never to return, for we will have proved ourselves unworthy of them. And so I will fight.’ She took a deep breath and lifted her chin. ‘But will you and your brave men fight with me, King Menadoc?’ she asked.

  The old king gave a grimace to reveal the last of his teeth. ‘Aye, we’ll fight, lady,’ he grunted. ‘The men of Cornubia will not be found wanting.’

  ‘And we’ll fight, lady.’ This time it was King Cuel who spoke. ‘And we’ll send the Saxon dog and his traitor bitch back to Camelot with their tails between their legs.’ With that he lifted his cup towards Iselle, and all around me kings and lords raised their cups in the fire-licked dark and swore death to our enemies, and so loud was the clamour that those warriors outside in the camp around us, men awaiting the dawn and the carnage it would bring, must have thought that some battle god had stridden into that tent and promised us the victory.

  Gawain nodded at me and I nodded back. Then I looked at Merlin. He stood pulling his beard rope through his fist, watching Iselle, the ghost of a smile on his lips and his eyes full of
flame.

  Our enemies swept towards us like the shadows of fast-moving cloud darkening the summer meadow. They came in three great bodies of men, five hundred warriors in each advancing mass, walls of shields whose bosses glinted in the sun, great hedges of spears whose blades promised pain and death, the ruin of men and the torment of mothers and wives.

  To the left, a huge war band of Saxons, their banner a moss-green ship’s prow beast on a dun-coloured cloth. Some in ring mail but most in leather and skins and even furs despite the warmth of the new day. Here and there, steel helmets. Most in leather skull caps. All with spear and shield and a hunger for good, rich land to farm and upon which to raise more Saxons.

  In the centre were Morgana’s Dumnonians; spearmen of Camelot and those of the lady’s allies whom she had gathered in beneath her banner of three crows like sheaves of wheat. Gawain had muttered that he could hear the dead, our fathers and their fathers and all those who had fallen to Saxon blades, moaning in heartfelt pain in the afterlife to see Britons standing with Saxons. Marching against the men who had fought for Uther and Arthur and Lord Constantine.

  On the right, and the largest of all the contingents, came King Cerdic’s Saxons, their shield rims kissing, their rampart of limewood, iron and leather as tight as the strakes of their ships’ hulls. These were men who had fought for what they had taken from us. What they had won from us. Many were young men, sons and even grandsons of those first men who had crossed the Morimaru from their homelands. Men who had answered the old king’s battle cry because they hungered for land and riches and renown of their own and hoped to find it in Dumnonia and Caer Celemion and Cynwidion.

  No nightmare could have conjured such a sight, and warriors around me invoked their gods or emptied their bladders or vomited amongst the meadowsweet or murmured last words to lovers, as if those words being given to the air would somehow find their beloved’s ears. Some men near me tried to raise an old battle song from their fathers’ and grandfathers’ time, but the song withered and died after a few lines and no one had the heart to take it up again.

  The smell of human dung was thick in the air and my own guts were sour and my mouth was dry, and I felt so heavy, all but paralysed by the memory of when last I had seen such a war host. When I had been a boy and had watched my father ride towards that hate-filled, fear-soaked maelstrom and had never seen him again.

  ‘We will beat them today and take back what they have stolen from us!’ Lord Constantine yelled. He and his two hundred spearmen were arrayed in our centre beneath Lord Arthur’s bear banner, which was stretched between two long boar spears and rippled in the breeze blowing across its surface, making the black bear shiver in its red field. ‘We will drive the Saxons from Dumnonia. We will remake Britain as it once was.’

  ‘Does he mean as it was before the Romans, or after?’ Iselle grinned beside me, for Constantine wore his helmet with the stiff red crest, and his breast- and backplates of hammered bronze, and his purple cloak. His men were similarly accoutred, each wearing a long cloak of purple or red, so that they looked like the legionaries who once marched along the roads of Britain.

  ‘Are you ready?’ I asked her.

  She nodded, sweeping her copper hair back from her face, then putting on her iron helmet with its moulded eyebrows and the snake’s head which came halfway down the nose guard. The helmet was a gift from King Menadoc of Cornubia, who had had it made for the son he never had, and with its liner stuffed with horsehair it fitted Iselle perfectly.

  ‘How do I look?’ she asked me.

  Bronze armour like mine would have been too heavy for her and so she wore a long coat of leather scales which had been a gift from Lord Constantine, taken as a prize in some long-ago battle. But Iselle and I had cut nine of the small bronze scales off my own coat – which I had never mended and so still bore the scars from my father’s last fight – and Gawain, Gediens, Parcefal and Lord Cai had each given nine scales from their own coats, and all of these we stitched here and there into the leather of Iselle’s coat, so that they caught the sunlight, winking with fire as she moved.

  ‘Well, how do I look?’ she said again, for the sight of her had robbed me of words. This was what she had craved, I realized. To be a part of something bigger than herself. To add her voice to the song which carried on the breeze, calling the old gods back to Britain. To chase the shadows from the land or, in failing, give her blood to the soil.

  ‘Like a queen,’ I managed. ‘You look like a queen.’ And she did.

  She clenched her jaw and nodded that she was ready, so I called to the spearmen to say we were coming through and those men parted for us. I hefted the wolf banner which the women among King Cuel’s camp followers had made, along with the two spears, and together we walked through that channel to calls of ‘Lady Iselle! Lady Iselle!’ And ‘Iselle ferch Arthur!’ ‘The Lady of Dumnonia!’ And, from some mouths in savage glee, ‘Saxon slayer!’, for it seemed the kings and lords who had been at that war meeting the previous night had recounted Iselle’s story to their warriors, so that her reputation had spewed from that tent like smoke from unseasoned wood, spreading far and wide. And though Iselle was untested in war and unknown to all but a few of those who had brought their blades and their courage to Ynys Wydryn, when they looked at her now, they saw a warrior goddess sprung up from the rich earth like summer wheat. A hero to lead them against the invaders, a new Boudica, who had united the Britons and led them to many victories against the formidable legions of mighty Rome.

  ‘Saxon slayer! Saxon slayer!’ men roared in unison, in voices as rough as steel on a whetstone, a chorus that stood the hairs on the nape of my neck and on my arms. We stopped beside Arthur’s bear banner and Lord Constantine himself came forward and thrust his spear into the dew-damp earth that he might help me plant both shafts of Iselle’s banner deep enough that they would stand even with the wind playing across the wool.

  When it was done, Iselle and I took a moment to admire the leaping wolf, black as shadow upon its field of green cloth, then we both turned to look at our enemies, who had halted in their shieldwalls two arrow-shots away and now stood at rest, their spear blades pointing at the sky.

  ‘There are so many of them.’ There was almost wonder in Iselle’s voice.

  ‘That’s a good thing,’ I said. ‘The more there are, the more we can kill.’

  A grunt escaped Lord Constantine’s throat. ‘I hope you’re not as reckless as your father was. This battle will not be over quickly, so you want to make sure you’re still alive at the end of it.’ He fixed his old eyes, eyes which had seen so many battles and so much butchery, on the Saxons and their Dumnonian allies. ‘We’ll bleed them, Galahad. Drop by drop, we’ll bleed them until they’ve got nothing left.’

  His armour, with its moulded stomach and chest muscles, gleamed beneath the dawn sun and, though he was old, I suspected that the body beneath that breastplate was still hard and muscled. He was an echo of Rome, was Constantine, a lasting vestige of discipline and implacable will and, like the Roman statues and palaces, the walls and the amphitheatres which still stood in these Dark Isles, I could imagine Lord Constantine outlasting us all. ‘Don’t throw your life away, lad,’ he said. ‘Make those whoresons come and take it.’

  I nodded, took a breath, held it, released it. It was Constantine who had chosen the ground where we would make our stand, and even Gawain, who could not like the man, had agreed that it was the best place to plant our banners. And also the worst. For Ynys Wydryn was more or less an island, only connected to the mainland by a narrow strip of land to the east, and it was on that strip, which was cut across by a ditch built long ago, that we stood blocking the way. And that was why our enemies in their three bodies of spearmen had stopped. There was only solid ground enough for one of those bodies of men to attack at any one time, so that most of Cerdic’s Saxons and Lady Morgana’s Dumnonians would have to wait their turn before they could fight. This negated their superior numbers to a great extent, thoug
h of course they could disengage and replace tired men with fresh ones in ways that we could not.

  But it was also a desperate place to hoist our banners of the Wolf and the Bear, King Catigern’s stag antlers and the shining sun of Cornubia and the bristling boar of Caer Gloui, because if King Cerdic and Lady Morgana chose to, they could keep us on the island as a stopper holds wine in a flask, and we twelve hundred would live on fish and fowl and grow old on this island, in the shadow of the tor which stood at our backs two miles away, as it had once seemed my fate to do. For this island had been my home. And now, perhaps I would die here, my blood seeping into the rich soil as had the blood of the brothers who had raised me in the shadow of the Holy Thorn. I hoped that I would possess the same courage as they.

  ‘Look.’ Iselle pointed with the spear.

  The crow-shields parted, and two figures emerged, one a warrior with a silver torc glinting at his neck, the other a black-haired woman in a black gown, so that she looked like a crow as they made their way towards us. I recognized both. Then a third man stepped out from King Cerdic’s shieldwall and joined the other two. Not Cerdic’s son, Prince Cynric, but a man I had never seen before.

  ‘How good is your throw,’ Lord Constantine asked me, nodding at the spear in my hand.

  I hefted the spear, testing its weight, but Iselle shook her head.

  ‘No, Galahad. Let us hear what they have to say.’

  ‘They want to get a better look at what they’re facing,’ Lord Constantine said. ‘We shouldn’t let them.’

  But Iselle was already walking down the embankment. Constantine looked at me, eyebrows raised, a half-smile on his lips, and together we followed Iselle down and across the ditch and up onto level ground again, from where Lord Melehan, Lady Triamour and the Saxon, whoever he was, would be unable to see much more than the first four ranks of our spearmen.