Camelot

by Giles Kristian

  But then I saw what the warrior with the broken sword wanted us to see. There was a third Saxon war band. Another three hundred warriors gathering in the gloaming at the foot of the tor, their spears pointing at the darkening sky.

  Men around me groaned. Some cursed the gods. A few fell to their knees, exhaustion flooding into the places within them where there had remained some small vestige of hope.

  ‘Is there no end to them?’ Parcefal spat, taking off his helmet, too exhausted even to sweep the lank, grey hair from his eyes.

  ‘It’s Prince Cynric,’ Iselle said, and she was right. I recognized the man: his fair beard and long golden hair and his hauberk of polished mail which shone like silver.

  ‘Maybe they’ll be tired out by the time they get up here,’ one of King Menadoc’s sun-shields said, stirring a smattering of bitter laughter, as men will laugh who know there is nothing left to do but die. For they supposed that King Cerdic had withdrawn his attack so that his son, the newly arrived prince, could share the glory. That together, they would come and sweep us from the tor and into oblivion. That together, they would snuff out the flame of Britain once and for all.

  ‘I was beginning to think he would never come.’ Merlin’s voice was like the squawk of a rook, loud in my ear, for I had not seen him come to stand beside me.

  I turned to stare at the druid. ‘You knew he would come?’

  Here and there, knots of men still fought, not knowing or daring to stop, but for the most part it was as though the battle and the day itself held its breath.

  ‘We hoped,’ Gawain answered on behalf of them both. ‘Though the bastard waited until half of us were dead.’

  ‘He’s ambitious, not stupid,’ Merlin said, squinting down the hill with his old eyes.

  Gawain shook his head, spat into the grass and stalked off to tell Lord Cai and Lord Constantine what apparently only he and Merlin knew.

  ‘Prince Cynric won’t attack?’ I asked Merlin.

  ‘No, I don’t believe he will,’ Merlin said. ‘Well, not us, anyway.’ And then I understood.

  ‘You’ve been dealing with him?’ I felt a flush of anger at him for having kept it from me.

  The druid batted that suggestion away with a hand. ‘We sent a messenger or two.’

  I spat a curse at myself for not having seen it, but then Father Yvain’s voice carried to me from the past. Might as well try to guess what a fish is thinking as seek to know the mind of a druid. Then my attention was pulled to halfway down the tor, where Prince Melehan was screaming at his men, trying to get them formed into a shieldwall facing not us, but Prince Cynric at the foot of the hill. For Melehan understood what was happening. He knew that the Saxon prince intended to kill him, because Cynric had never accepted the deal which his father had struck with Lady Morgana; that in exchange for peace now, the sons of Mordred would sit on Dumnonia’s high seat after Cerdic and Morgana were dead. Why should Melehan be given what it was Prince Cynric’s right to take, if he could? And so Cynric would try to kill Melehan now and it would be up to his father the king whether he chose to fight his own son, or else waited to see how things turned out. Perhaps he would even join the prince now and together they would wipe out Morgana’s power in Britain.

  Either way, there would be more blood on that grey day, I thought grimly.

  I looked back into the south-east and the hill fort there, that old bastion of defiance and hope whose earthen ramparts my father and Arthur had dug with their own hands, but which now stood beneath a pall of smoke that was spreading across the eastern sky like a stain. Gawain and Iselle and some of the others were looking towards Camelot too.

  ‘The gods are cruel,’ Parcefal muttered.

  No one else spoke of it. It was too heavy a thing.

  Cynric had come, as Merlin and Gawain had hoped he would, but first he had burned Camelot. What choice now then for Lady Morgana, but to fight or run? To survive if she could, one way or the other.

  ‘Cynric won’t attack us?’ I asked Merlin again, for it still seemed impossible that we might live after all.

  ‘If he does, I shall turn his guts into three rats, and they will eat him alive from the inside. We have a truce.’

  ‘A truce?’ Iselle repeated, wincing as she touched two fingers to the gash above her eye to see if it was still bleeding. Even then, after everything and having come so close to death, she seemed to despise the idea of peace with the Saxons. ‘For how long?’ she asked, wiping the fresh blood on her trews.

  ‘Who can say, lady?’ Merlin replied, ‘but the gods are with us and that is what matters now.’ He nodded to Iselle and to me and winked at Taliesin. Then, telling the boy to stay close, he set off across the hilltop, declaring to all in a thin voice which was whipped this way and that by the wind, that he had summoned the gods with the help of the Cauldron of Annwn. That the gods had answered him and had fought beside us and carried his curse to our enemies, so that they would die, and we would live.

  So that Britain would endure.

  For a while we watched the fighting. I saw Melehan leading his best men in a desperate bid to kill Prince Cynric. A great wedge of crow-shields carving their way towards the Saxon. The man was no coward, but then he had every reason to crave Cynric’s death. I did not see what happened, for I knew we should not linger on that hill while we had the chance to slip away. We would have to come back for the dead, but it would be night soon and we must go while we could.

  I found Gawain and together we made our plan. I was reintroducing myself to Medyr’s stallion, asking the horse if he would carry me again now, and in return I would see his brave master burned on a hero’s pyre, when Morvan, Lord Constantine’s second in command, came over to say that his lord wanted to speak with me. Constantine had made sure it was he who had taken the surrender of those three hundred crow-shields who had abandoned Lady Morgana, and he was taking each man’s oath there and then, on that hillside, in full view of anyone who cared to notice.

  ‘Lord,’ I said, at which he turned from the rows of kneeling warriors, gesturing that Morvan should continue the proceedings. ‘We should go before the issue is decided.’ I nodded down towards the clashing shieldwalls below. For now, at least, it seemed King Cerdic was letting his son fight his own battles.

  ‘The Saxons won’t fight us again today,’ Lord Constantine stated, and gestured at his new recruits, those many spearmen who had come over to us. ‘They know the victory would cost them too dear.’ He gave a tired smile. ‘It seems the druid proved his worth at last.’

  I nodded, suddenly so weary. ‘I must go, lord.’

  ‘Go where?’ he asked.

  I did not answer that.

  ‘Come with me, Galahad,’ he said. ‘I saw you fight today. You are gifted. As good as your father was, perhaps. But I think you have something which even the great Lancelot did not possess.’ I did not ask what that was, but it did not stop him telling me. ‘You have it in you to be a leader of men,’ he said. ‘I saw it. They fought for you, lad.’

  ‘They fought for Iselle,’ I replied.

  He took a step towards me. ‘She is Arthur’s daughter. Of that there’s no doubt. And that helped us here today. Because Arthur’s name was still …’ He turned an eye up to the bear banner which rippled beneath the darkening sky. ‘… still in the air,’ he said with a flutter of bloodstained fingers. ‘Men wanted to see Iselle for themselves. I daresay a good many of them half believed … hoped, at least, that Arthur himself would come after all.’ He lifted an eyebrow. ‘But you and I both know that Arthur is not coming. He will never ride again, and so we need a new warrior to give the people hope. We need a king, Galahad.’

  ‘I thought you were a king,’ I said.

  He ignored that. ‘I am old. And I’m tired. I’ve been fighting all my life, but I can’t fight for ever.’ He straightened as if in defiance of his own words. ‘Come with me and learn from me.’ Again, he extended a hand towards the kneeling men who had been spared the slaughter now taking
place at the foot of the tor. ‘We have the beginnings of an army. In time more will come, because we made a stand here today and even with so few we were not beaten.’

  I turned and my eyes found Iselle. She was helping Lord Cai get a wounded man up into the saddle.

  ‘But they will not follow her,’ Constantine said.

  ‘Because she is a woman?’ I asked. ‘She is as much a warrior as any man on this hill.’

  ‘We need more than a warrior,’ he said. ‘We need a king.’

  I stared at him, aware of the blood simmering in my veins. Hot and needful.

  ‘Come with me to Caer Lerion,’ he said. ‘There are men there who will join us. After today.’ He came forward and took hold of my forearm, its muscles screaming from wielding Boar’s Tusk all day. ‘We will start there and together we will remake Britain.’

  I remembered my father telling me about that morning on Tintagel’s heights, when Uther was dead and Lord Constantine, furious at not being named Uther’s heir, had slaughtered Lord Arthur’s men and hamstrung their horses. My father said he only had to think of that day to hear the screams of the horses again. He and Arthur and Gawain and Merlin had narrowly escaped with their lives.

  I pulled my arm away and glanced up at the dusky sky. ‘Will you kill her now?’ I asked him, ‘or in the dawn?’

  His dark eyes sharpened. The muscle in his cheek twitched beneath an old scar and grey stubble, but he said nothing. And so, I turned and walked away from him. Back to Iselle.

  We rode into Camelot unchallenged. Iselle and I, Gawain, Parcefal, Merlin, Taliesin, Lord Cai and the last of the horse lords of Britain. Twenty-three of us in all. More followed on foot, including Lord Geldrin and his men, King Menadoc and his sun-shields, and some others who wanted to rest before setting off for their homes. Meanwhile, the surviving men of Cynwidion, those of Powys and King Cuel of Caer Gloui were already on their way back to their respective kingdoms, intent on using the cover of darkness to put as much distance between themselves and our enemies as possible.

  But we had come to Camelot and now we walked amongst the charred and smoking timbers, the scorched and blackened thatch and the small fires which still burned here and there. And the bodies. Dozens of them, grey with death and ashes. And red too.

  Only a skeleton garrison had been left behind, for what had Morgana to fear from Saxons? But they had run or been slaughtered.

  ‘Prince Cynric will be a formidable enemy,’ Gawain said.

  But not today.

  Some of the survivors wandered through Camelot like the walking dead themselves. Seeming lost and confused, as if they hardly recognized the place. Others sat by the ruins of their homes or beside their dead, while a few were still putting out fires which had not taken properly because of the earlier rain.

  None opposed us. All stared at us, for we came on war horses, wearing armour and helmets that were damaged and dented and sheened with blood. Our faces were grimy and drawn and pale, and our eyes were swollen with horrors.

  Lady Morgana’s hall, which had once been Arthur’s hall, still stood. The Saxons had tried to fire it but the timbers had not caught and the thatch had not taken the flame, and so it stood there and Iselle and I stared at it awhile, she because her father and mother had lived there, I because I could almost feel the pain my father must have felt when he looked upon the place, knowing that Guinevere lay under that roof. In Arthur’s bed.

  Parcefal growled that Prince Cynric would not be the opponent Gawain feared, if he was not even clever enough to leave a garrison of his own men in Camelot. But I knew Cynric would have needed every spear in case his father the king opposed him. And as for Camelot, I supposed he despised the place, just as the Saxons had always despised the stone villas and palaces which the Romans left behind. Camelot had been the heart of Arthur’s defiance and so he had burned it. Or tried to.

  ‘I want the gates reinforced and the walls manned!’ Lord Cai announced, sweeping his blunted sword across the fort, and weary men hefted shields and spears and tramped up onto the ramparts, even kings and lords. And we knew it would be a long night.

  I turned away from Arthur’s hall and, limping because of the sword cut I had taken in my thigh, fetched the wolf banner from where I had left it by Medyr’s stallion, whose name I still did not know. I carried the banner to a patch of ground which had been churned to mud, where the ashes stuck but for those which were being swirled about by the wind. And there I drove in one spear and then the other, stretching out the banner until the wolf could be seen clearly and for what it was.

  When I turned back to Iselle, Taliesin was beside her. Iselle put her arm around the boy’s shoulder and we all watched the wolf banner, hoping it would stay upright in the soft ground. Behind it, in the west, the light was fading, leaching from the world. It would be dark soon, and in the darkness, we are prey to our fears.

  I looked over at what had once been Arthur’s stables. When we had come through the gates it had been burning still and had collapsed in on itself, throwing up a shower of sparks. Now, some spearmen were trying to stamp out the flames which still licked amongst the ruins, but Merlin shooed them away with his staff.

  ‘Here, Galahad,’ he called. ‘Build this up. We need a fire, and this is a good place for one, don’t you think? Good as any.’

  I dragged some of the fallen timbers back into a pile and soon the flames were leaping high, chasing away the shadows.

  Author’s Note

  PLEASE BE AWARE, this note contains spoilers!

  Camelot is, perhaps, more of a companion novel to Lancelot than a sequel in the usual sense. This was ever likely to be the case. When I wrote Lancelot, I had no intention of following it up. Lancelot was to be a big, fat, standalone volume. A reimagining of one of the great figures of British myth and legend. It was never in my mind during the writing that I should leave the story open-ended, or that the characters might go on to live again on the page. However, in the event, both my agent and my editor persuaded me that I wasn’t yet finished with this world and these characters, whom I had come to know so intimately. After all, Lancelot had sold well, and some reviews expressed disappointment that there wouldn’t be more, and, well, hadn’t I spent too long and put in too much effort creating that vision of Arthur’s and Lancelot’s Britain just to walk away now?

  And I remembered the boy who was left alone on that hill in the last pages of Lancelot. I could see him in my mind’s eye, standing there, waiting for his father, who would never come. My own brother had been particularly upset with me for that ending. How could Lancelot have just left his son there? he asked, the disapproving frown on his face intimating that I had ruined what, up to that point, had been a good book.

  But Lancelot had to ride to Arthur’s side, I explained. For their old friendship. For honour. For Britain. For Guinevere! And who knows, maybe the great warrior thought he would ride back up that hill to the boy? And even if not, even if he had chosen those other things over his own son, didn’t that just show that, for all his talent, for all his brilliance, Lancelot was, in the end, a flawed man? Like his father before him.

  And yet. That boy alone on the hill. He was standing there still, and would be for ever … unless I gave him his own story. Didn’t I owe him that? Certainly enough people thought that I did.

  I wanted to call the book Galahad. It seemed right after Lancelot. But I accepted that Galahad simply wasn’t such a familiar name, whereas Camelot looms large in the public imagination. More than a fortress of timber and stone upon an ancient hill, it is a dream. The evocation of hope, unity and defiance against the darkening world. A fading dream now, though, after the climactic struggle of Lancelot’s final pages.

  But I knew that this would not be Lancelot part II. Camelot would be a different story. It had to be. And Galahad would be a very different character to his father, and not just because, in writing another first-person story, it was important to distinguish the narrator’s voice to avoid it feeling like a continua
tion of the previous book.

  No, here was a different kind of man. In the traditional tales, Galahad embodies purity and virtue. He is a sinless virgin all his life. Obviously, I wasn’t going to go that way! Having replaced Perceval as the Grail hero, Galahad was raised in a nunnery, yet he was the greatest warrior in the world, a man whose arrival was prophesied from the days of Joseph of Arimathea. As such, he was preordained to be the only one to attain the Grail. Hard to make that work, I thought, in a sub-Roman Britain that had, since the story told in Lancelot, become a brutish hellhole of cut-throat anarchy, slaughter, filth and darkness, where famine and pestilence rule and the uneasy truce between the Saxons and the Britons is breaking. Sticking a pure-hearted golden boy into that mess seemed incongruous to me, even cruel. Moreover, protagonists in drama require motivation. Where’s the conflict, where’s the challenge, if you’re a pre-selected winner? Where’s the suspense?

  I did know that Galahad wasn’t going to have Lancelot’s uncompromising confidence and his obvious talents. In some ways, Galahad is the antithesis of his father. He is unsure of himself and his place in the world. He fears the unknown and does not possess Lancelot’s hawk-like focus. Galahad is a young man burdened by his father’s legacy and, frankly, haunted by his father’s abandonment of him. He tries for as long as he can to reject everything his father was, refusing the call of the martial life and the whispers of his own blood. And yet, how far from the tree can the apple fall?

  The principal characters would be very different from the previous book, then, but I went about the writing in a similar way, taking up threads of the well-known stories and weaving them into something new. Of course, even having made a basic chapter outline, I watched the story take on a life of its own, as I suspect is usually what happens to authors and their best-laid plans, and I think that’s only healthy. After all, what would be the point in recycling an existing version of the Arthurian myth? Indeed, the fascinating, and frankly mind-boggling thing about the stories of Arthur created between the sixth century and today is the sheer variation in the characters, places, themes, objects and events. Writers have been changing and adding to the canon (no doubt deviating from their own carefully laid plans) for … well, forever.