When First I Met My King: Book One in the Arthur Trilogy

by Harper Fox

  Shivering, he picked his way through frozen tussocks towards the foot of the cliff. Something—an angle of the moonlight, maybe—had thrown into sudden view the entrance to a cave. He stumbled in blindly, past caring if a wolf-pack had claimed it first.

  The cave wasn’t deep. Its earth floor was dry. As well as his meal, Lance had lost all chance of getting back to the village tonight. Dropping onto his backside, drawing his knees to his chest, he decided not to care that he’d probably die before morning. There were other things to think about: that voice, the sound of sunlight, still resounding in the chambers of his skull, and…

  And the paintings. There were outlines on the cave’s far wall, vivid in the moonlight.

  Lance stared. Once, long ago, he’d eaten a mushroom of the wrong sort, and except that mushrooms of any kind had vanished from the fields at the beginning of this eternal winter, he wondered if he could have done it again.

  He could see horses. Not tall ones like those the Romans had brought: more akin to his own old pony, whose unquestioning, warm-breathed friendship he’d pushed far to the back of his mind after the famine had claimed her. Even smaller, though, by contrast with the stick-like human figures, their bellies round, black-tipped legs vigorous, bodies just here and there daubed with a vivid ochre.

  There were cattle, too, some recognisable to him, and one vast ox, which surely must have been someone’s hungry fantasy. Even more bizarre, a fur-covered elephant, drifting as if through an unending dream, a little deeper into the shadows of the cave… Lance had heard of these beasts in the Roman books from which Father Tomas had tried to teach him Latin, had smiled at stories of the Carthaginian general who had gone into battle perched on the back of one. Reaching out frost-cracked fingertips, Lance touched the painting and smiled.

  A little of the black pigmentation came off on his skin. Surprised, he eased back. It was just a few grains, but he didn’t want to damage the finely drawn thing. How had it survived, if it dissolved so easily?

  He looked around. Something had changed in this ancient shelter, something recent. Perhaps a prevailing wind had altered, some shielding outcrop fallen. Yes, the wall was damp. The endless winter was reaching its erasing touch even into this last refuge. The next time some outcast found his way to the wrong side of the ridge, the paintings would be gone.

  He wished it wasn’t so.

  Then something scraped and moved in the depths of the cave, and Lance forgot everything in terror. He jolted back. His nerves were raw with starvation, and he stood for a moment in rigid silence, pressing his breath deep into his lungs. The scraping came again. The lights of pity and love which had briefly flared in his mind flickered out. He was a rigid knot of self-preservation once more.

  There was just the outside chance that the sound could be his hare. Hunger sank its claws into his gut, so sharp that he couldn’t bear to remain still an instant longer, and he edged into the shadows of the cave.

  Chapter Three

  There was a bundle of rags, with sticks poking awkwardly out of it.

  The bundle breathed. It twitched, issued a rasping cry, and used its sticks to try to scrabble away from him. The movement allowed him to distinguish a head, a frail skull patched with strands of dead-white hair.

  It was a woman, or the skeletal remains of one. Once she was as far away from him as the confines of the cave would allow, she pushed herself up into a sitting position. Lance thought he heard the scrape of her spine on the rock. She was panting hard, as if she’d run and run, and the cracked black hole of her mouth was flecked with foam. Then, to Lance’s bemusement and horror, she began to grin, and after catching a few more wheezing breaths, she spoke.

  “Well, boy? You’ve hounded me to earth. Don’t you have the nerve to finish me?”

  Lance stared at her. The voice was surprisingly clear and strong, not the rasp her toothless mouth had threatened. “What?” he said, and his own sounded weaker—dry and thin with starvation. “I was chasing a hare. But I lost it.”

  “Hah. Not for want of trying. Come on, what’s it to be? The knife? Or are you bold enough to snap my neck?”

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Lance said, perplexed. “Who are you?”

  She seemed to give it thought. She crouched herself together, drawing her knees to her chest. In the depth of her milky eyes, Lance saw a glimmer of amusement, and he dared a step closer to her, tugged by an indefinable curiosity. “I am,” she murmured, as if to herself, barely audible, drawing the boy a little closer still. “I am… the witch!”

  Lance leapt back. She had unfolded with a shout, arms and legs thrust out at him like spikes. He caught his heel on a stone, and landed with a thump on his back.

  Immediately he scrambled up, tears of pain and fright stinging his eyes. Through their distorting veil he watched her resume her woodlouse curl against the wall. It took him a while to realise that she was wheezing with laughter. It shook her bony body like a storm. When she managed to draw breath, it exploded from her in a wild cackle that bounced off the walls of the cave and startled a handful of bats from their roost. Her eyes became slits and streamed with water. “Witch!” she rasped again, and rocked under another shrieking convulsion.

  The word meant little to Lance. It was her movement that had scared him, triggering the reflex that would have saved him from a lunging boar or the strike of an adder. Witch was a name Father Tomas used for any elderly woman of the village who had met with his disapproval. Send your children to me for their stories, my lord Ban, not to that old witch. Gathering himself together, he saw that she was still laughing at him, and for an instant considered finishing her off with a knife or a stone in very fact.

  But the shock she had given him had shaken some frozen part of him loose. Whoever she was—whatever her odd sense of humour—she was a creature even weaker and poorer than himself. And Ban, although his concern for his children’s education had been patchy, had always insisted on one thing: you never raised your hand, nor if you could help it so much as your voice, to a woman, an elder or a child. You display them perfect courtesy, boy. Because I am a king, and you are my son.

  The memory sent a thread of gold through Lance’s mind. It was the first link, between the father he had loved and the one who had deserted him by vanishing into death. Only when it was forged did Lance realise what an abyss of black rage it had crossed. He swallowed hard, and brushed dry earth off his clothes. “Ma’am,” he said. “My name is Lance. I am the son of Ban, the king of Vindolanda. If you are in want, I will help you, if I can.”

  It took a few seconds, but the shrieking cackle stopped. Wiping her eyes, the old woman scrutinised him. “You will help me?” she said. “What will you do for me, prince of Vindolanda?”

  Prince of Nowhere. The voice in his head had been a man’s, and young as green oaks in springtime. He’d have pointed out to her that now, in the wake of slaughter and grief, he was king, but he didn’t want to set her off laughing again. “Well,” he replied cautiously, “you do seem hungry. Maybe I can catch you something to eat.”

  “Hmm. And maybe I’d let you, if you wouldn’t faint and die of the cold three steps outside of this cave.”

  Lance opened his mouth to protest. But when he thought about setting off once more across the marsh, a weariness dropped on him, so massive and terrible that it sent him to his hands and knees, head spinning, a veil of red descending over his eyes.

  “Here,” said the old woman, softly. “Here, child.”

  She was sitting beside him. Lance couldn’t recall her leaving her spot by the cave wall, nor being aided to sit there himself. He watched, dizzy and passive, while she ferreted about in the folds of her torn black robes, and to his surprise, produced a handful of hazelnuts. Looking at them in her dirt-creased palm, he felt a wash of sickness: she smelled appalling, or one of them did. Either way, his manners pricked him again, and he said, weakly, “Thank you,” and took them from her hand.

  She must have managed to roast them somewh
ere. They were dry, and crumbled deliciously in his mouth. His spit gave a long-starved squirt, and he put a hand to his lips in embarrassment. The old woman cackled softly at him, nodding her head back and forth. “There,” she said. “When you feel better, go and fetch me my supper.”

  The hazelnuts did him a disproportionate amount of good. He sat for a little while in the light from the setting moon, feeling strength creep back into his limbs. Then he set out, spear in hand.

  He couldn’t hope to stalk anything at this hour, but his feet took him unerringly down through the bracken and the marsh towards the burn. The air felt no warmer around him, but something had shifted or changed: under a frozen skin, the stream was now running fiercely with meltwater from the hills. Here and there it had carved out pools for itself, where it glimmered with a crystalline light.

  In the first pool Lance came to, shining grey and brown, belly dappled with pale rainbows, a massive trout was circling beneath the ice. Instinctively Lance dropped low so as not to shadow the pool, but the fish was spiralling with such calm intent that he thought it wouldn’t have noticed him anyway. It barely flinched when Lance struck with the spear: quivered on the end of it like a strange flag when he raised it triumphantly high above his head.

  When he got back, the cave was full of firelight, a flickering beacon across the moor. He didn’t know where the old woman had found the kindling, or the strength to gather it, but she was sitting between the rocks in the entrance, poking contentedly at the flames. She took the fish from him wordlessly, jerking it off the spear with her bare hands and spiking it through with a bronze cooking spit she had also procured from somewhere. She balanced the spit on two stones, nodded in satisfaction, and began to turn it, apparently oblivious to the heat.

  Lance wondered if he’d fallen asleep. Barely a moment seemed to have passed, but a wonderful fragrance was filling the cave, and the trout’s skin had turned golden brown. Hunger racked him. He tried not to look or breathe. He watched the painted wall determinedly while she ate, pulling the fish apart with her fingers and attacking it indiscriminately, guts, bones and all.

  She wasn’t the quietest eater. Lance kept his face politely expressionless, focussing his mind on the dance of the giant ox, the horses and hunters, reborn in the flames. Perhaps they were meant to be seen by firelight. He tried to lose himself in wondering what their makers had been like, what their loves and their wants must have been, and he almost succeeded…

  “Well,” the old woman said to him, holding him out a big piece of trout on the spit, “what do you think they wanted?”

  Lance stared at her. “The same things that I do,” he said without thinking, and waited for her to laugh at him.

  But she only nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “A warm fire, company, and most importantly a full belly. Matters of the spirit should come first, I’m sure, but they seldom do. So eat this, before your britches slide off you entirely.”

  He couldn’t believe there was anything left of the trout to be had. At his last glance, the old woman had reduced it to fins and tail. But here was a fair rich slice, dripping with grease from the fire. Lance, who had not yet learned to question gift horses, took the food and the mind-reading at face value, and began to eat.

  He fell asleep almost immediately afterwards, hardly taking the trouble to wipe his mouth and lie down. It was a deep and dream-filled sleep, in which he turned into a hare and ran and ran after Elena and Ban’s departing spirits, but still could not catch up. Transforming back into his own flesh, he wept and mourned as he had never done while waking; lay down by the grass-covered Wall and howled, until a strange, low-pitched singing joined with his own sounds of grief, and he lifted his head.

  A dragon was floating over the ridge. Enthralled, tears forgotten, Lance staggered to his feet and tried to run toward the dancing, glittering beast. But she opened her great jaws and sang to him that the time for their joining had not yet come, and then, absurdly, she placed the end of her tail in her mouth as if to end the discussion, and Lance woke smiling.

  ***

  He was alone in the cave. He felt strangely bereft until he heard the old woman scuffling about outside. He got up stiffly, stretched, and went out into the weak daylight, noting to his astonishment that despite its shroud of misty clouds, the sun was nearing zenith. “Why did you let me sleep so long?”

  She stopped pulling handfuls of greenery out of the rivulet that ran past the cave, and fixed him with a brightly sarcastic gaze. “Forgive me, Your Highness. I forgot all about your schedule of public engagements. Here, take these—we’ll have watercress soup for our breakfast. Boiling it should take the fluke-worm out.”

  She looked much better this morning. Now she was just a grubby old woman, not an insect-puppet jerked around by unseen strings. Lance was bemused by the changes in her. She had put on weight overnight, disproportionate to the meal he’d been able to give her. Somehow she’d contrived to stitch the cobweb tatters of her robe back into one garment. It wasn’t overly clean and nor was she, but both had acquired a dignity. More mysteriously, her balding pate was now covered with steel-grey hair, which she had braided into a plait as thick as a tow rope.

  She watched him alertly as they ate their soup, which was almost too bitter even for a courteous prince to swallow without pulling a face. “Disgusting, isn’t it?” she said cheerfully. “That’s its power—to cure you of dark thoughts. Tell me what such a fine young sprig of the White Fields aristocracy is doing out here, starving in the marshes.”

  “We ran out of food in the village last night. I came out to hunt, and to bring back a deer that had frozen to death by the lough.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Except that I saw a hare, or I thought I did, and I chased her out here, or...” He hesitated at the golden gleam in the old woman’s eyes. “Or I thought I did.”

  “And is that all?”

  What more did she want? “I dreamed about a dragon,” he said suddenly, not knowing why. “And I keep hearing a voice. He calls me Prince of Nowhere, and he says he’s on his way.”

  She sat up alertly. “Ah. Pass me my scrying glass, boy.”

  “Your...”

  “My glass! Well, whatever I have these days—the cauldron will do. Let me see.”

  Lance unhooked the bowl and handed it to her. She stared into the murky remains of their breakfast, swirled the liquid around, thrice to the right, thrice to the left, then uttered a raven-like squawk. “Aha! It is so. And so soon!”

  “What is so, ma’am?”

  “You’ll know soon enough. We must stir our shanks. No wonder the morning is brighter, the streams running clear.” She squinted into the cauldron. “Oh, this bowl’s a good one for scry. There’s Vindolanda, burning down. And there’s good King Ban, running for his life while Elena stayed and swung a sword and then a kitchen knife, and then a pan, to try and save her bairns.”

  Lance recoiled. She was insane. He had to act accordingly. Instead of jumping the fire to strangle her, he said, tightly, “My father’s dead. Don’t dare to speak of him so.”

  “It’s not the time to speak of him at all. We have important matters in hand.”

  “I said don’t speak of him so!”

  He lurched to his feet, overturning the cauldron. The last of the watercress splashed across the floor of the cave. The old woman didn’t move. “You had better go,” she said. “My bones ache with fever, and in return for this outrage, you must fetch me the herb that grows in the ferns to the east of the lough. It looks like a daisy, but its leaves smell clean and sweet.”

  “You don’t look as if you have a fever.” Temper dying, Lance hung his head. “I am sorry. I could have burned you.”

  “Never mind about it now. Hurry, boy,” she added harshly, as he hesitated to leave her. “I am very ill, and the plant will cure me.”

  Lance was back before the shadows of the crags had retreated far on the moor. He knelt before the old woman, and watched in dismay as s
he snatched the handful of flowers and leaves he had brought, glanced through them once and hurled the lot into the fire. “Stupid boy,” she said. “Did your mother teach you nothing? Those are weeds, noxious rubbish. Go back and search again.”

  Lance sat back on his heels and looked at her, confused. Elena had certainly taught him to recognise feverfew, and that was what he had picked. There was little point in arguing with her—his evidence was sizzling wetly on the fire.

  Perhaps she was delirious. Obediently therefore he got up and went to fetch more. He checked every stem he gathered to make sure he wasn’t confusing it with camomile. This time his offerings met with a worse reception still: she dashed them from his hand, swearing at him again in a strange language he was quite grateful not to understand.

  He wanted to be offended, but under the rage in her eyes he could see a terrible anxiety. Pity stirred in him. Was she scared of dying? She had seemed so fierce: he wouldn’t have thought she’d fear her own end in this way. Then, how little he knew of the world! Good King Ban, fleeing for his life... Impossible, but his life was full of uncertainty, even where he had thought it most fixed. “Please, my lady,” he said, mindful of her age and his own ignorance. “Describe it to me once more.”

  Her hand flew out and caught him a painful crack on the mouth. Lance gasped. No-one outside of his family had dared to strike him. Ban, for all he had freely chastised his sons himself, would never have permitted an outsider to lay hands on them. Carefully, tasting his own blood, he got to his feet and walked away.

  He gathered the feverfew again. The same, he breathed to himself: it was the same. If she turned it down this time, he would tie her up, infuse it for her himself and feed it to her. Remembering how Elena had grasped his nose to make him open his mouth for medicine, he grinned. What would the old monster do if he tried that?

  For the first time it occurred to him that he didn’t know her name, and he wondered why he hadn’t asked her. Why she hadn’t told him. Never mind. He could think of enough things to call her. The same—these damned plants were the exact same as before. Nevertheless Lance made his way further and further round the edge of the lough, in the hope of finding some that were fresher. Perhaps that was what she had meant.