By Force Alone

by Lavie Tidhar

  ‘I did not know Angles and Britons ran together,’ she says.

  ‘Running, not so much,’ Leir says, and smiles. ‘A measured walk, perhaps. The Aetheling and I have an understanding.’

  ‘Why fight,’ Pelles says, ‘when two can profit?’

  Guinevere looks from one to the other. She likes nothing about what is going on. She still intends to do harm to this Pelles. And now she’s added this Leir to her list. But these two wank stains clearly have something in mind for her, or she’d long be dead by now. She gnaws on a chicken drumstick.

  ‘Profit how?’ she says.

  ‘Ah…’

  The two men exchange amused glances.

  ‘The usual, really, dear Guinevere. A tax on all that can be taxed, control of the waterways and imports from the continent and exports to same, some Goblin Fruit, the beer concessions, a bit of slavery, metalwork, hire out mercenaries to protect the merchants, gold…’

  ‘Gold? What gold?’

  She senses something important in the way he’d casually dropped in that last one. There are no gold mines in this area. The two kings exchange glances but do not reply directly.

  ‘You understand the benefit of neighbours cooperating in this manner, don’t you? Besides, there’s always someone keen to steal your shit.’

  ‘Me, you mean?’

  ‘Oh, precious thing! You and your girls are like the mosquitoes that irritate by biting, but can always be swatted away. No, I mean the one in the south. A lean young wolf, who thinks us fucking lambs he can devour at will.’

  ‘Yes,’ Leir says, ‘this Arthur has proven quite a taxing obstacle. We almost rid ourselves of him a while back but he… prevailed.’ He shrugs. ‘But that’s a problem for another time.’

  ‘Yes,’ Pelles says. He claps his hands. ‘Bring out the leprechaun,’ he says.

  The other girls perk up at that. It’s not the sort of line you hear every day. Enid even puts down the slice of bread she’d been dipping in the fat, though not before taking a healthy bite.

  ‘What the fuck’s a leprechaun?’ Isolde says.

  A small creature is brought into the hall in chains. Guinevere watches it. Him. It’s a male, and though he’s the size of a child he is clearly adult, even old. His clothes are a dirty green and he has a bushy red beard and sad, haunted eyes. She watches his hands. They are dirty and scarred, and the nails are broken.

  As though he had been made to dig in some pit for too long.

  ‘That’s a leprechaun,’ Pelles says.

  ‘Top o’ the mornin’ to y—’ the leprechaun starts, then gives up. ‘Please,’ he says. ‘Please. Just let me go.’

  Pelles removes a small pouch from his belt and opens it. He takes out a round, shiny object and tosses it to Guinevere. She snatches it out of the air.

  Stares at the gold coin in her palm.

  *

  Wrong...! whispers the worm in her mind. Poison!

  It feels strange in her hand. It is a plain coin, it is not imprinted with anyone’s visage. She scratches the face with a nail and the gold comes off and a strange, silvery metal is underneath that feels almost crumbly.

  ‘What is it?’ she says.

  ‘Leprechaun gold,’ Leir says. ‘Wash your hands now that you’ve handled it. I believe the material to be poisonous.’

  ‘I have never seen this kind of metal before.’

  The Lord Pelles yanks on the leprechaun’s chains savagely, and the small creature stumbles and falls.

  ‘Please,’ he says. ‘Please. It is not my doing.’

  ‘Tell them,’ the Lord Pelles says.

  ‘The grail…’ the creature whispers.

  ‘The what?’ says Guinevere.

  ‘It streaked across the sky, perhaps three decades ago, in the time of Uther it were.’ The leprechaun’s eyes are wide and haunted. ‘A dragon…’ he says.

  ‘A star stone,’ Leir says. ‘A Lapis Exilis, that fell from the heavens. It did not fall straight down but at an angle from the skies, descending until its path led it at last through this land. Mutilating it in the process with its burning flame.’

  ‘A stone from the sky?’

  ‘This happens. You may see them in the night sky, sometimes. Like fireflies, flashes of brightness that just as quickly vanish. Not this one, though. This one was big.’

  ‘As the dragon flew,’ the leprechaun said, ignoring Leir, ‘it laid an egg. The egg fell, to the north of here. The dragon flew further on, and where it fell nobody knows or, if they know, they aren’t telling.’

  ‘An egg,’ Guinevere says flatly. She makes sure to put the false gold down and to wash her hands carefully in the basin, like the king said. She cleans under her fingernails. Enid, a hen’s egg half up to her mouth, lowers it.

  ‘I believe,’ Leir says, ‘that a fragment of the heavenly rock broke apart from the main body and fell not far from here.’

  ‘And it has, what, gold? This isn’t gold.’

  ‘This is a metal seldom seen upon this Earth,’ Leir says. ‘And what’s more, I want it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That is not your concern.’

  ‘Well, can’t you go and get it?’ Guinevere says.

  Leir nods to the leprechaun. The creature nods nervously.

  ‘No, no. I mean, yes. I mean, no. It is far beyond the wall, you see. It belongs to him…’ He shudders.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Urien of the Hen Ogledd,’ Lord Pelles says. ‘That sneaky fuck. It’s in his territory and the bastard’s mining star stone for all it’s worth. And passing it as gold to all and sundry! I do not care, myself, for this tale of dragons or what have you. I just want the counterfeiting done with. Leprechaun?’

  ‘Yes, yes. I mean, no. I mean, he had enslaved us in service of the mining, lady. It is a dismal operation in a dismal place where nothing grows and nothing lives. We sickened there. Look at me!’ The leprechaun watches her with its sad deformed eyes. ‘I am dying, lady. We are all dying there.’

  Guinevere finds an apple. Takes a bite. She stares at them all. Shrugs.

  ‘So?’ she says. ‘What the fuck has any of this got to do with me?’

  Pelles smiles.

  Leir smiles.

  The leprechaun moves its mouth in a ghastly pained grimace that must be an attempt at a smile.

  ‘Well, seeing as you’re here…’ Pelles says.

  ‘Yes…?’

  ‘I’d like you to solve this problem for me, Lady Guinevere.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I’d like you,’ the Aetheling says patiently, ‘to go to this accursed place where the false gold is minted, bring the operation to an end and liberate the metals mined there.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘To put it plainly, I want you to rob them of their gold.’

  Guinevere stares at him. Knows this is a fool’s errand. Knows this is an execution in waiting. Knows, too, that she doesn’t really have a choice.

  ‘And if I refuse?’ she says.

  ‘Lady, if you do,’ the Aetheling says, ‘then I shall slit your throat and bury you and your women with all due ceremony in a barrow, with all your possessions intact – you know how us Angles take our burial rites seriously. And you will be left to rot and your bones to bleach for centuries, for curious grave robbers to eventually come, and dig your sorry carcass up, and puzzle over your garments and all your assorted crap to try and figure out questions such as what roles did women play in this society. But they will come to few good answers, and you’ll be dead and buried all the same. So?’

  ‘…I’ll take the job,’ Guinevere says.

  41

  ‘That fucking fuck,’ Laudine says.

  ‘Oh, I will deal with him in due course,’ Guinevere says darkly.

  They ride out of the Dolorous Tor at daybreak. The sky overhead is bleak. This smog in the air is bewitched with dark sorcery. Guinevere thinks of star stones and poisoned metal. She thinks of devastation.

  Perhaps from the a
ir you can see it, she thinks. A dark path cutting across the landscape. The route of fire plotted by the fallen star.

  All through that day and the next the sun is hidden behind the smog. They’d entered a land of mist. Shapes move in the fog, and coloured lights, and she can hear sobs and screams. Footsteps come and go. She hears the neigh of horses. She hears the ghostly clash of steel. The tang of sulphur in the air, the stench of coal, the burned taste of mistletoe. The smoke gets in her eyes and into her mind and makes her see fantastical shapes, all bursting stars and ghostly apparitions. There are no maps in this land beyond the wall. The Angels travel blind.

  At night it gets colder and there are no stars and distant fires glow behind the wall of smoke. The night is restless with the tread of troubled spirits. The Angels stop, exhausted, make camp beside a giant oak. They come to realise too late it is a gibbet. The mutilated corpses of some hideous beings hang from thick ropes. She’d seen nobody like them. They are mutatio, transformed. Human shapes but made deformed and awful, some with arms like trunks and some with skins all green and covered in boils. One has three eyes. The girls have not the energy to even cut them down. They huddle by the ancient tree and fall into uneasy sleep. They do not build a fire.

  In the night a beast passes questing through their camp. Guinevere wakens. The creature moves stealthily, almost sadly. It has many mouths and tongues. It looks at Guinevere out of multiple sad eyes. It stops and stares.

  ‘Hello,’ Guinevere says.

  The creature warbles at her. It cannot form coherent words, but she can sense the need behind it, the desperate aloneness, the fear and pain. She says, ‘You are a girl,’ in mild surprise. The creature warbles. Guinevere strokes her fur.

  Footsteps in the fog. A knight appears. Bedraggled, thin. The creature turns and faces him. The knight looks on at her. A look of longing, and despair.

  ‘My girl,’ he says. ‘My girl.’

  The creature shrieks in wordless love and pain. The sound’s awful, it cuts the night. The Choir of Angels awaken, they stand guard, instinctively, knives drawn, siding with this questing beast.

  ‘I mean her no harm,’ the knight says tiredly. ‘She is of me. My daughter.’

  The creature keens.

  ‘Then let her be.’

  ‘I can’t.’ The anguish in his voice seems real. ‘It’s like a part of me and if I go too far I die, or she does, or we both.’

  They seem frozen there, staring at each other.

  ‘Where do you come from, knight?’ Luned says.

  ‘Far away from here. This land’s not right. Do you not feel it? There’s poison in the earth and in the air.’

  ‘A star stone, we were told,’ Isolde tells him.

  The knight considers. ‘Perhaps, yes. It is true I saw one fall, once, long ago, with my master Uther. They say there’s radiance in them, strong enough to heal or kill or both. I know no more. You should be careful. I have seen the dwellers in the fog and they are many of them crazed and altered, like these poor corpses overhead. And others dwell here who would use the weak and powerless. Beware, my ladies.’

  ‘We can take care of ourselves, if it is all the same to you, good knight.’

  The knight acknowledges the rebuke. ‘Forgive me, I did not mean to offend.’

  ‘What is your name?’ Guinevere says.

  ‘It is Pellinore, my lady.’

  ‘And where do you venture?’

  ‘Wherever she goes.’

  Guinevere turns to the questing beast. ‘Where do you go?’ she says, and very gently.

  The creature keens. The arms reach out and stroke her face.

  Images come, unbidden, into Guinevere’s mind. She sees a castle rising in the fog, above a great precipice. She sees great mounds of earth, and fires burning and a great radiance, and slaves digging deep in the ground, and she sees the rudimentary use of Roman mining techniques.

  But these are no Romans.

  Why there? she whispers into the questing beast’s mind.

  The reply is wordless. A sense of shelter, freedom, peace. The beast’s confused. It turns from Guinevere abruptly. Screams at the knight. The sounds that she makes are terrifying. Love and hate and longing. Then the arms like tentacles swing round and round and she is gone, bounding with superhuman speed into the mist.

  The knight just stands there, looking all forlorn.

  ‘Perhaps we’ll meet again,’ he says. ‘My ladies.’ He steps into the fog and then he too is gone.

  They sleep in shifts. When morning comes it is no clearer. They ride through peaty bogs and over twisted branches rising out of the ground, under trees where swinging corpses dangle. Mute faces stare at them behind the trees and from the water. The girls all stink, they dare not wash, their hair is matted, the knives or bows are always in their hands. But they are not attacked.

  They come one day at dusk to a village on the edge of the fog. The houses are small and lean-to, the thatched roofs grey and the walls made of mud and sticks. All men, all stooped and hopeless-looking. They welcome them in. They build a small fire and cook soup. The girls sip politely.

  ‘They took them,’ the chief of the village explains. Confiding.

  ‘Took who?’

  ‘The womenfolk. They stole them away.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘She did.’

  He nods, as if that explains everything. The girls exchange glances.

  ‘Took them where?’

  ‘To Maiden’s Castle.’

  Laudine farts. She looks vaguely surprised. Their diet has been meagre, their farts are as rare as hope, in this place.

  ‘We tried to plead with the mistress of that place, but we were ignored.’

  ‘Mistress?’ Guinevere says. ‘We were told the lord Urien rules in this land.’

  The chief shrugs bony shoulders. ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘We know little, lady. We were prosperous once, and at peace. Then came the blight on the land and we sickened. Then they came to take the womenfolk away, for the work they are doing.’

  ‘What work are they doing?’

  He just shrugs. ‘We’d lost hope,’ he says. ‘Then, one day, knights appeared from the fog. Outsiders. Welsch. They were unaffected by the blight. Strong and lean. They had been travelling for some time, they said. They had wandered far along the fairy path and on their return to the world became lost. They wanted to go south, but we pleaded with them to help us. To go rescue our women from Maiden’s Castle and from the clutches of the queen who dwells there. At last they accepted.’

  ‘And did they return?’

  ‘They did not.’

  The girls sleep uneasily that night, in that village of doom. In the morning they mount their horses and ride into the fog again. There are people living, even here. They meet them on their travels. Wanderers in carts, and small hidden villages amidst the ferns and even fields of boggy weeds where farmers bend to pluck ill-smelling plants – but they have gold. The girls have never seen so much gold as this. Wary of the coins, they do not handle them. All these people are sick with a plague that has no earthly origin. In a clearing one night they see a unicorn emerge out of the trees.

  They are rare. Julius Caesar had reported seeing one deep in the forests of Germania. It is stag-like, huge, and with a single horn protruding from its forehead, with branches growing out of the tip.

  The girls are still. The creature stands there. Moonlight filters through the fog.

  Guinevere dismounts. She tiptoes to the unicorn. It stirs. It huffs. It shakes its mane.

  ‘There’s a good unicorn, there, there…’

  The creature stares at her. Its eyes are very bright. It sniffs the air. A stream of piss hits the ground and steams into the air.

  ‘Well there’s a big boy, no mistake,’ Isolde says, staring.

  The unicorn shakes its head. It neighs again.

  ‘I think he wants us to follow him.’

  They do.

&nb
sp; The unicorn leads them through the trees. It leads them over a brook with foul-smelling waters. It leads them on a trodden footpath and over a fairy bridge and past a lost Roman cemetery from some forgotten military campaign, and then they’re through the fog and the castle looms out of the earth.

  It’s night. The moon is out. The moon is red. The castle’s black. It stands atop a giant precipice. Hot fires burn in the enormous pit. They hear the sound of chains and grunts and cries of pain. They hear the sound of whips. The unicorn whinnies, once, and vanishes into the trees and fog. The Choir of Angels are alone again.

  The girls stare at the castle. The place is definitely spooky.

  ‘Well?’ Isolde says at last.

  Guinevere shrugs.

  ‘You only live once,’ Guinevere says.

  They turn their horses.

  They ride up to the castle.

  42

  ‘Welcome, welcome, ladies!’

  The reception committee’s a bit of a surprise.

  A beaming major-domo extends her arms to the travellers. Guinevere, on her horse, sags with tiredness. They’d expected a fight and got a ceremony instead.

  Soldiers stand to attention. Women, all, helmeted and breastplated, holding spears. Their armour gleams. There’s gold woven into everything.

  ‘Welcome to Maiden’s Castle. I shall have rooms prepared.’ The major-domo claps her hands. ‘Water! Baths! Garments for our guests! Prepare the feast!’

  ‘This is somewhat unexpected,’ Guinevere says.

  ‘Why?’ the major-domo asks. ‘What did you expect?’

  Guinevere considers. ‘I’m sure I couldn’t say.’

  ‘I shall inform the lady of the house of your arrival. Please, follow me.’

  The girls dismount. They hand over their tired horses, and surrender blades and bows. They follow meekly, the castle broods upon its mound of dug-up earth. Its halls are cavernous, its corridors are hewn of strange black stone. But there are carpets on the floor and torches set at intervals along the walls. The air is scented with crushed sage and marjoram.

  It’s like a repetition of a thing already seen. They’re given rooms, hot baths are readied, the girls bathe and clean their hair, the soap is scented. The air is bright and clear with candlelight. Soft music plays. It’s very pleasant. The Angels gather to discuss.