by Lavie Tidhar
‘The contents of your trunk,’ he says. ‘I’d like a rummage, if you please, good sirs.’
They stare at him, incredulous. They draw their swords.
‘May I enquire your name, sir?’ Agravain says. ‘So I should know what moniker to give Tamesis as I offer her your corpse?’
‘It is Lancelot.’ He considers. ‘Latterly of Judea.’
‘You are a long way from home.’
The men snigger.
‘There will be no one to sing your burial song. Or whatever custom is of your peoples.’
‘That’s alright,’ Lancelot says. ‘I hadn’t planned on dying.’
‘Then you’re a fool.’
They charge him.
The flying sword, Secace, is out of her scabbard before they take a single step. It whistles through the air. Chops off the sword arm of one attacker, swings in a parabola and returns to Lancelot’s hand. The men move warily, surrounding him.
‘Pharaoh’s Chariot!’ Lancelot says. He is a blur of motion, rising through the air, the sword sending sparks as he barrels through the enemy. He doesn’t wish to kill. Aims for their sword hands. They drop the metal, one by one.
‘Solomon’s Tent!’
He moves in a circle around them, as fast as thunder, and he draws the darkness round them until they can see no more.
Swordless, confused, they stumble and curse him. He steals to the trunk. He opens it.
A chalice, made of gold. He scratches the surface, finds the grey metal underneath.
Yes, he thinks. It is as his old master told him.
Excitement grips his heart, for this is, at long last, a clue.
More objects, looted who knows where. Bowls and plates, an altar decoration of some local god. He wonders that they should be placed so close together in one place. His old master had warned him that such objects should best be placed apart.
The darkness ebbs. The men see him.
He turns, mockingly, and bows. ‘Gentlemen.’
‘Thief!’
They charge him. He tosses the sword Secace in the air above their heads and leaps. He lands on the flat of the blade and sails beyond them, over the low roofs, and jumps again, grabbing the sword by the hilt as he lands on the ground. He sheathes the sword.
Well, well, he thinks.
It is high time to get out of town.
*
So that’s why Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, Initiate of the Inner Circle of the Venerated Secret Brotherhood of the Seekers of the Grail, Master of the Flying Sword, the Auroch’s Charge, and the Judean Lightning Strike, travelling swordsman and powerful practitioner of the ancient art of gongfu, now sits alone in the dark recesses of the Cameleopard’s Head drinking establishment and roadside inn and warily watches the door.
He is also disconcertingly low on funds.
The inn is on the great Roman North Road leading out of Londinium. Lancelot sips warm beer from an earthenware mug and watches the door with one hand on the hilt of his sword.
He also watches the other patrons.
It is an interesting time to be on this island, he reflects. The ship from the continent had dropped him off on the eastern shore of the Severn sea, and from there he made his way by foot to Glastonbury. It was where his old master had come, and where, before him, it was said, that the secretive Saviour from the Galilee had come after faking his own death in Jerusalem, and before he went to distant Qin, where he became a wushu master.
He’d searched for clues in Glastonbury but found none. In learning the lie of the land, he learned of the new king, Arthur, and the gang war brewing with the Six Kings.
Which made things potentially… interesting, Lancelot thought. And also, potentially, lucrative, since he’d need to take on work to keep him going during his quest.
Ascertain. Assimilate. Infiltrate. Engage. How many times has he had the field operative tenets drilled into him back in Arimathea? At least they still spoke Latin here, at least in the southern parts.
What a shithole, he thought. What a colossal fucking shithole this place was.
Still.
He asked around and heard the stories of the dragon that appeared in the sky during the reign of Uther, him who they called Pendragon. He tracked the journey of the dragon northwards and that decided Lancelot’s direction.
He made his way up to Londinium, taking on small jobs, monster hunting and the like. He slew a brace of giants outside Sorviodūnum but, in truth, there was hardly a fight in them. They were big and slow and seemed mostly confused, and malnourished. He kept his eyes open for anything out of place but he’d seen no trace of that which he was seeking.
The town, when he got there, was a let-down. Lancelot, in his time, had seen the great pyramids of Cairo, where the ancients buried their kings. He had trained with the magus, Simon of Samaria, in the seclusion of the Mount of Olives above Jerusalem, that fair city of white stone, and seen its new churches being built. He had fought bandits across the desert beyond the great salt sea of Palestine to reach Petra, that fabled city of red rock hewn into the mountains themselves. In the disguise of a beggar he wandered the Aventine and the Capitoline Hill, there to seek a boon from the mysterious Lord of the Guild of Beggars, whose eyes and ears, it is said, are everywhere.
He’s been around, Lancelot. And Londinium, frankly, in his not so humble opinion, was a – well, yeah. A shithole.
It is a word Lancelot is exceedingly fond of.
Oh, there was no doubt Londinium was Roman enough… in parts. You could see where once someone half-competent had drawn the streets, where army engineers constructed a river bridge, houses, even a governor’s palace. There was still a forum, of a sort. But what had once been a competent if unglamorous military town in a minor and distant part of the Roman Empire was now, well, an unglamorous and still military town in what was most definitely no longer a part of the Roman Empire, and moreover clearly had no decent engineers or architects to hand. Oh, there were fresh coats of paint on some of the houses, and some form of primitive rubbish collection still took place, and the local warlord had even made some half-hearted attempt to keep the public baths going, though they were dirty and the water lukewarm at best.
Lancelot liked things clean, for all that his work was often dirty. He liked things neat, for all that his work was often messy. He hired a room in a dosshouse near the White Hill and from there he did what he always did. Ascertain. Assimilate. Infiltrate. Engage. And all that nonsense they drilled into him back in Arimathea, when he still had his people and he still had his clan. When his old master was still alive.
But that was then. And that was a lifetime ago.
Now he was all alone. Homeless. Clanless. Masterless.
Rogue.
But the objective was still the same. The mission was the mission, and Lancelot would stick to it, like a drowning man holding on to the sides of a boat.
He had nothing else.
He just hoped it was worth it.
Whatever it really was.
So he observed Londinium. The town was a hive of activity. It had been near impossible to get a room. There were young men travelling everywhere from the countryside into the city, in search of employment, and in their wake they brought merchants and sweethearts and working ladies and pickpockets and jugglers and thieves. The jianghu, as his old master called it.
Those who lived outside the existing law.
Though as much as Lancelot could make out, this island and its people barely had law.
The young men streaming into the city were hired, if they were able-bodied and capable of handling a sword. Arms shipments came in by river, where from, he didn’t know. He hid one night near the bridge and watched a shipment come in, and saw a barge towed from the north but no one pulling it. Until he looked down, into the water of the great Tamesis, and saw pale bodies swim through the murk, women with gills and fins, and he smelled the stench of enchantment. He had seen mermaids before, had once nearly drowned when the ship he was tr
avelling on from Paphos was attacked by water demons, what the Romans called orcus. He had nearly drowned, but they saved him, and carried him to shore, half-dead, and one had kissed him, blowing air into his lungs. He had never forgotten that kiss, though he never knew her name…
But if the arms merchants had this whiff of enchantment about them, the swords were very real, and some of them quite old. He saw the blades distributed to the new recruits, saw the training camps established beyond the city walls.
This new warlord, Arthur, was building himself an army.
Lancelot considered enlisting, if only as a way to earn some money, but he sensed that Londinium and its meagre charms did not hold what he was seeking.
What did catch his ear, however, were the dockside tales of where the young warlord and his close circle were. Which, as it turned out, no one knew.
He’d gone north on the fairy paths, they said.
He’d struck a deadly bargain with a stunningly beautiful enchantress, they said.
He was captured by Picts, or pixies, or leprechauns, and held imprisoned in a black prison in a land where the earth itself was poison.
Whatever he did or didn’t do, his men were preparing for war, and the shipments of arms kept coming.
‘What’s up north?’ Lancelot asked Mirabelle. She was a little Frankish woman he’d met at the dosshouse, her mind half-gone, usually, on Goblin Fruit.
Mirabelle curled her hair and stuck her tongue out at him. ‘Picts,’ she said. ‘That sort of thing. They say there’s a wall the Romans built to keep them out, but it’s been falling apart. Old Uther, the Pendragon, fought there. Why?’
‘Just wondering,’ Lancelot said, and he drew her to him and she laughed.
Then, one night, he saw the shipment of false gold, and knew his quest was true.
Then he got the hell out of town.
46
So this is how Lancelot ends up at the Cameleopard’s Head drinking watered beer. He scans the patrons. He notices the clink of old coins, and the other things the locals use for currency now that the Romans are all but gone. Some trader earlier had deposited a heavy bag of onions on the floor by the door and loudly proclaimed a round of drinks for the house.
No one cheered – it isn’t that kind of place. A fire burns nearby but fails to warm the room. Earlier some young tough desperate for a drink deposited his sword behind the counter, on the account. This is how society operates when there isn’t a central authority issuing currency, Lancelot thinks. It runs on debt, not barter.
Everybody owes and everybody pays, as the poet said.
He watches for the shine of gold. It’s been growing more common, he has come to find. Leprechaun gold, they call it. Trickling into Londinium along the old North Road. So this is where he’ll go, too. North.
Try to find the source of it.
He watches the door as a cat comes slinking in. A queen cat, an alley cat he thinks – a city cat. She has the scars of battle on her.
She passes under tables, rubs up against the drinkers’ legs, steals a slice of liver off a plate without anybody noticing. She passes him. She glances with that special disinterest cats have.
‘Hello, kitty,’ Lancelot says.
The ancient Egyptians worshipped cats, he remembers. His master, Joseph, had trained for a time with the Egyptian magi, learning forbidden arts long forgotten elsewhere. For a long time he had thought the grail could be found there, deep in the deserts. There were drawings in the forbidden tombs of the pharaohs…
They broke into the Khufu’s great pyramid one starless night, he and the master and Iblis. It had not ended well, and they had to leave Egypt in something of a hurry…
The cat purrs. Those eyes that are so inhuman watch him. He feeds her a slice of beef. She meows and takes her prize under a chair.
Perhaps he is distracted.
The door bangs open and a troop of men barge in.
They kick the tables and the patrons run. They know what’s coming. In moments the room’s empty. There’s only Lancelot and the knights facing up to him, blocking the only door.
A rough and ready bunch.
Agravain of the Hard Hand steps into the room.
Extends his sword, then lets it drop. The knights make room around them. Agravain raises his bare hands, palms open. Assumes a fighting stance. Of the minor Sons of Zebedee School, if Lancelot has it right.
Well, well.
Agravain extends one hand in a gesturing motion.
Says, ‘Fight, motherfucker.’
Lancelot sighs.
‘Not again,’ he says.
*
In Smyrna when things went south he found himself, alone, facing up to some forty holy assassins of Mithras, the bull-headed god. It had come towards the end of a long and frustrating year that saw their master leading them all through the Decapolis and further – this was after Egypt and the debacle there. In Smyrna in a newly built church to the Christ the master believed an artefact could be found, but in the end it had turned out to be a trap. Iblis and the master made it out but Lancelot was trapped. That time, that fight, he thought he was done for. The assassins were well-trained, versed in the Eastern arts. They fell on him from all sides, jumping from the rafters, lighter than air, their blades like light.
He countered with the Tears of Demeter, flying throwing stars fashioned by the master’s personal smith. He killed five before they threw a net and caught him, then doused him in something potent that sent him into an enchanted sleep.
When he awoke he was in the dungeons deep under the city, in a stone-hewn cell where no one could hear his screams. They bound him in irons and tortured him until his mind fled from his body and wandered in another world, under an alien sky.
Later, when he woke again, the details were fuzzy. A purple sky, and red-and-purple storms raging far on the horizon. The land itself was made of black tar and ice, and all manner of mechanical things moved about it. He saw yellow flowers as tall as trees, and met, in their shadows, natives of that world, who greeted him in some sing-song language he could almost understand, but didn’t.
Locked in his cell for that long and cold duration, shivering, talking to the rats beyond the walls, he thought of the words of his master. It had been long ago, only recently after finding Lancelot. They were camped under stars in the Galilee, and the master pointed to the heavens.
‘The sky thou seest above is Infinite,’ he said. ‘It is the abode of persons crowned with ascetic success and of divine beings. It is delightful, and consists of various regions. Its limits cannot be ascertained.’
Lancelot looked at him without comprehension and the master smiled. ‘These words are from the Mahabharata, which travelled back to us along the roads from India.’ The master looked up, and his eyes softened. ‘I want to believe…’ he said.
But all through the long winter in Smyrna, abandoned, forgotten, Lancelot could think of nothing but the walls of his cage.
‘We are all caged,’ his master said, in his mind. ‘It just so happens that for some of us the bars of the prison are bigger.’
His master never made a lot of sense, in truth. His true faith was perhaps unknown even to himself. In his travels with the master Lancelot had seen churches being built and synagogues and temples being destroyed. He saw ancient oracles burned down and groves of sacred trees set aflame. He saw the statues of ancient gods broken and ground to dust. His master was tolerant of religions old and new, but he had his own dark faith.
Once a year, the master undertook a pilgrimage to Carthage, where members of his order gathered. They followed a strain of Gnosticism, believing, so the master told him, that the earthly world was merely a prison, that the demiurge – a sort of jailer-god – had thrown them into.
The members of the Venerated Secret Brotherhood of the Seekers of the Grail sought to escape that prison.
All through that long winter in Smyrna Lancelot raged against his absent master. The master had learned secret arts from the East. H
e could kill a man instantly with the touch of his palm. He could speak the language of Jinn. He could summon elementals and leap from treetop to treetop, and hold his breath for almost five minutes when diving underwater. The master was, quite possibly, insane, but he was Lancelot’s master all the same.
He had found him, wandering, dazed, lost, out in the Arabian desert one night under cold bright stars. Lancelot’s memories of the time before the master found him were hazy. He preferred to keep them that way. The master found him, and fed him, and drew him to his fire. The master trained him. Lancelot owed him everything – his loyalty, his love, his life.
And yet he raged.
It was Iblis who came, in the end. Iblis of the black eyes and the silken assassin’s cord and the hidden knives – oh, how she loved her knives! She came like the wind down the corridors of that sunless prison, and the guards fell like leaves. She unlocked his cell and stepped in and said, ‘It stinks in here.’
‘It’s good to see you too,’ Lancelot said.
‘Here,’ she said. She tossed him a sword. ‘If you still remember how to use it.’
‘It will come back to me, I’m sure.’
She smiled, but only with her teeth. Iblis had the coldest eyes that Lancelot had ever seen.
He followed her meekly out of the cell.
That night on their escape they slaughtered the followers of the bull-headed god until the blood flooded down the corridors. They emerged into sunrise, leaped up over the wall of that temple, and Lancelot stumbled. Iblis grabbed his arm and pulled him straight.
‘Can you manage?’
‘Let go,’ he said. But he knew she was right. He was weak after months of imprisonment.
The master waited for them in a grove beyond the city. He embraced Lancelot, briefly, then outlined the plan. It was as though the entire thing, their assault on the temple, Lancelot’s long imprisonment, none of it had mattered at all.
It was always on to the next clue and the next, with the master.
Searching for…
Something.
The Lapis Exilis, he called it.