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

by Harper Fox

  His mouth hurt where she’d hit him. Although the terrible cold of the night before had let go its grip on the land, all was still grey, the noon light a dead glare behind clouds. Since the raid on the village, Lance had hardly noticed how little sunlight he’d seen. He remembered the boisterous springs that had once swept White Meadows, the crystalline windblown light that made the coltsfoot dance and sent the lambs scattering wildly over the fields. Blackthorn blossoms would open and shine before the leaves came, bright on the dark thorny wood. Celandines would gape and give back the sun in the oily sheen of their petals, and between one day and the next the marshes would turn pink in a delicate flush of bogbean. Now it was as if his eyes had forgotten how to recognise any colours but grey, sedge green and mud brown. Suddenly, acutely, Lance missed the sun.

  As if in response to his longing, the clouds parted a little over the shore. A thin light, faint but very clear, picked out a glimmer of gold at the lough’s edge. Its beauty passed through Lance like a blade, but, determined not to lose track of his intentions, he lowered his head and made his way stolidly toward it. Perhaps the pale gleam was that of young feverfew leaves. Perhaps he’d find what he needed there.

  Yes, fresh leaves. That was what they were when Lance crouched down to gather them. He was ankle deep in the lough, but had lately spent so much of his time with wet, cold feet that he had barely noticed. He put his hand into the water and reached out.

  Shock jolted through him. Another hand was there in the water with his—a long, pale hand with a tracery of scales. It grasped his wrist for an instant, as if in recognition or greeting, then vanished.

  And then, instead of leaves, he was looking at a sword.

  Chapter Four

  He sank to his knees in the shallows. He was chilled, his reflexes slow. He raised his hand, shaking water from it. Fear tried to lurch up out of his gut: what had touched him?

  But he wasn’t afraid, only depthlessly surprised. He looked at his wrist. The only part of him not freezing cold was the place where that shining hand had touched him. He was warm there as if kissed by Bride herself, by the blazing goddess of springtime and fire Elena welcomed at Imbolg, for all Father Tomas reproved her and told her that Bride was Maria, the mother of Christ. He felt as if he would be warm there forever, and for a moment that meant more to him than the beautiful sword still shining at him up out of the reeds.

  He watched it blindly, his breath coming shallow and fast in his throat. Then it shifted, as if it would slide back into the depths of the lough, and Lance surged forward to grasp it.

  He got clumsily to his feet, taken off-balance by the weight. Water sheeted off the blade, and what he’d thought to be rust fell away, only a layer of mud and silt over bronze so fresh and bright it could have been forged yesterday. But Lance, the soldier’s son, knew weaponry, and this was nothing created by a Roman of his father’s generation, or even many generations before.

  It didn’t look Roman at all. Unconscious of the sunlight now streaming down around him—one shaft of it, in all the shadowed marshland—he turned over the sword from the lough. It was plain, heavy, but so beautifully balanced that he had no difficulty wielding it. Its wooden hilt—bog oak, he thought, or yew, perhaps—was delicately inlaid with spirals of copper and gold.

  A stone had been set into the hilt, a flattish disk with some kind of spiral marking upon it. The bands that held it together were streaked with verdigris. When Lance tried to make out its pattern, he couldn’t.

  His head spun and ached with the effort of failure. As a child, he’d have run with this wonderful thing to the village, to show anyone who’d listen what he’d found. But the weight of the sword in his hand, and some solemnity of light in the air all around him, told him in silence that such times were past for him. He had to go back, and straight away, but as a guardian and provider, not a foolish boy.

  Then his brow cleared, and he lifted his head. He was child enough still to be wildly excited. The gap in the clouds closed above him unnoticed, and he splashed his way out of the lough: began running, as soon as his feet hit dry land, as fast as he could for the cave.

  Only when he was slowing up, breathless, in the shadow of the crag, did he remember the old woman’s herbs. She was standing on the turf outside the cave as if waiting for him, and he braced up. He no longer minded what she said to him or even what she did, but he was sorry to have forgotten her needs.

  “Did you find it?” she called out to him eagerly. Her robes and her long grey hair were drifting on the wind, and from this distance it almost seemed to Lance that she was smiling.

  “Yes,” he called back. “It grows fresh at the top of the lough. But then I found this, and I forgot about it. I’m sorry, ma’am. I’ll go back straight away.”

  But the old woman didn’t look sick anymore. She crossed the space between them in long, loping strides, and she held out her arms for him. Lance, astonished, walked into her embrace. “Dear Lance,” she said. “My dear good boy.”

  ***

  She wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell him anything about the sword. She laughed at his solemn determination to go home, told him they’d survive a while longer without him, and sent him off once more to hunt.

  That night by the fire, however, a spirit of festivity seemed to come over her. The sword was set out carefully on the floor of the cave between them, where they could both see and admire it. She produced from somewhere a tiny flask and offered it to Lance, her face creasing up like a horseshoe bat’s with merriment. Lance drank and obligingly choked, and she burst into cackles and finished off the potion herself without turning a hair. All she would say about his find was that he should keep it—consider it his own, until time and event told him otherwise. His other questions she deflected with a vacant, senile smile Lance knew by now was entirely feigned.

  She did, however, at last tell him her name. It was late, the fire dying, the boy almost asleep on the cloak she’d laid out for him. Viviana, she whispered, and the word fell like rain into his mind, like a cool round stone into a well. Then, when his eyelids were flickering: Viviana. The word-shapes change. The stream divides, but not the source. Viviana. Viviana.

  She watched over him that night. He was almost restored to himself, and she could not push on events any further. It no longer lay in the power of Viviana and her kind to awaken or summon the land’s buried dragon. That task now lay in hands that held swords, and all she could do was try to ensure that those hands were the right ones.

  In the ancient darkness left behind when the flaring Roman lights had gone—in the new darkness cast by the shadow of Christ—she and her sisters had reached out for one another, and had done what they could. When she threw her knucklebone dice across the floor of the cave, or sang to the fire until its flames turned blue and danced for her, she thought they had succeeded.

  She thought all would be well. She was sorry she’d told him about his father, but perhaps he’d disbelieved her, or forgotten her words in the thrill of discovery: he was sleeping with one hand on the hilt of the sword. He knew the use of one already, thank heaven—she was much too old now for that kind of teaching—and a king was coming, a warrior with dragon blood in his veins.

  Then, like all the mothers who had come before her, she knew that she mustn’t sit and watch over what she’d sown. In the grey dawn, while he was still curled in his dreams, she got up silently and stretched, relieved at the prospect of her own rest. She thought about the hare, and the freedom of that wild running, but she was done with it for now, and the boy had behaved so well by her that she didn’t need it. Didn’t need anything further from this world, and so she bent over the sleeping boy, allowing herself one regretful caress of his hair.

  On her way out of the cave she paused, and wiped off with her thumb one of the few remaining traces of the painted, dancing beasts. The wall was empty now, a rainwashed blank. Then Viviana returned to the lough.

  Chapter Five

  Lance traced the old woman’s footpr
ints to the water’s edge, and stood there calling her name. Fear stirred in his stomach. Anyone less likely to drown herself he couldn’t imagine, but maybe she’d come to harm by accident. He waded a little way out and searched the reedy shallows. No sign. He waited, thigh-deep in water, beginning to shiver. Then he stripped off his tunic, breeches and boots, threw them to the shore and dived in.

  Nothing. She was gone. The moors felt empty, emptier by far than before he’d met her. Loss went through him, keen as a knife. His bare two nights with her had felt in some way like time with his mother, redeemed from the jaws of death. She’d taken him in, and he in his turn had saved her.

  He staggered out of the water, gasping for breath. He picked his clothes out of the reeds and put them on, becoming aware of the changes in the world around him. Last night he’d have frozen to death in the water. The night before, he’d have had to crack its surface to get in. He was cold now, but only as he would have been on any spring morning, coming up here with brothers and sisters to bathe.

  He had to go. He’d promised Tomas he’d bring food to the survivors in the praetor’s house. The deer would have thawed by now, and he was strong again and could carry it easily. Perhaps the old woman had set off before him and he’d find her alive and well down there, outraging the priest with her herbs and incantations.

  Lance ran back to the cave. He had no scabbard for the sword and so pushed it through the slack in his belt. The weapon bumped awkwardly against his thigh as he began to retrace his route through the marsh. He could see the deer in the distance, sprawled where he’d left it. The flesh would still be good, and every scrap would be gratefully consumed, but foolish sorrow filled him at the sight of the carcase. Nothing should be dead on such a morning as this, not a beast or an old woman, not Elena, not brothers and sisters or...

  The deer leapt upright. Pale by moonlight, here in the sudden sun the creature shone out brighter than hawthorn. A white hart! Lance stared in astonishment. No beast more magical roamed the loughs and moors. In Elena’s stories, its appearance meant sovereignty, sacrifice, nobility. Lance’s regrets about supper vanished. He watched, immobile, while the hart shook itself and trotted off, head high, towards the ridge.

  On instinct Lance followed, not in the spirit of a hunter now but as a worshipper. How his mother and sisters would have exclaimed at such rare news! His father would have called together the men of the village and forbidden them to harm the beast.

  For the first time since the raid, Lance felt no backwash of grief at these unstoppable would-have thoughts. Even his new disbelief and rage about Ban faded off into the distance. Maybe the old woman really had cured him of his sorrows with her throat-stripping watercress soup. Elena’s myths of the white hart might be prophecies, joy returning to Vindolanda with the spring.

  He stumbled up the last few steps of the crag. The Wall was falling into disrepair here, and it didn’t take him long to reach its crest. He halted, one hand poised on the hilt of the sword.

  The white hart had vanished. Instead, making their way boldly along the valley road to Vindolanda, a dozen men were riding.

  Saxons! The thought flashed like lightning through Lance’s mind. His only evidence was the colour of their hair, shining gold and red in the sun. Danes, perhaps... It didn’t matter. Saxons and Vikings seizing land here, Goths and Vandals descending on Rome in such brutal hordes that the army had abandoned towns like Vindolanda and left them to burn... Every loss Lance had endured was the fault of raiders like these, a small-scale invasion he would stop with his own hands right now.

  With his own sword. He unhitched the weapon and it seemed to leap to his grasp, no longer a burden but a living extension of himself and his rage. Yes, he would stop them, if his own blood had to be the price.

  The riders came to a halt on the road. Had they seen him? Lance almost hoped so. He felt ten foot tall, a vengeful giant on the dragon’s spine. But as he watched, one of the men pointed in the direction of the V-shaped notch in the ridge to the east, to the place where the burn poured through.

  The turret, magical gateway guarding the moor. Lady Viviana’s moor, Lance’s sole refuge… Fury swept like a blizzard through his mind, whiting out all thought, all sense of self-preservation, all sanity. He dropped back down the north side of the Wall, landed lightly as a cat, and began to run.

  ***

  It was Bear who had spotted the water. His guardian, a straight-spined old soldier of Roman descent named Ectorius, nodded in approval. The boy must learn to be aware of the needs of horses and troops, and become adept in meeting them. Their journey had been long, and the animals were thirsty. Ectorius nodded, giving permission for him to lead off toward the glittering burn.

  They had almost reached the ruined turret when Bear reined in his horse and stood listening. Ectorius exchanged a glance with his own son, Gaius. Neither of them could hear anything but skylarks, and the long-billed water birds called curlew which sang so joyously up on these moors when the sun came out.

  It was shining brilliantly now. The locals all the way from Pons Aelius in the east had complained of an endless winter, and although Ectorius had seen signs of it—barely the beginnings of growth in the fields, the people thin and weary, lambs few—all around them, this spring day was perfect. The good weather seemed to be following them. Gaius, a big, raw-boned lad, with a face as kind and ugly as his father’s own, had teased Bear that the sun had started to shine from his regal backside, and the boy had begun to take such nonsense good-naturedly, instead of trying to engage his foster brother in mortal combat every time they quarrelled. Now, as often, Bear had seen or heard something imperceptible to other senses, and Ectorius had learned to take him seriously. “What is it?” he softly asked.

  “I’m not sure. Someone coming, I think. But he moves like a cat, or the wind.”

  Ectorius drew his sword. He motioned to the armed grooms travelling with them to take up defensive positions. Their journey had been safe so far, but up here in the borders, so the tales said, little Pictish hunters could emerge from the very hills to seek their prey. Their reputation was uncanny. Blue ghosts who sailed in on the wind and snatched up lambs and babies from cradles… It was nonsense, of course, Celtic twilight, but nevertheless he made ready.

  Yes. He could hear it now, too. Light, running footsteps. Bear had trotted his horse forward to meet the sound, almost into the shadow of the turret’s arch. Ectorius didn’t think there was much to worry about, and he knew that from now on he had to let the boy fight his own battles. Reining back his horse, gesturing to the others to do the same, he kept a discreet watch.

  It was just a lad, and a skinny one at that. But he leapt with such force from the reeds behind the arch that Bear did not stand a chance: in an instant he was dragged from his mount and down into the stream. His thin, dirty assailant crashed into the water with him. “Saxon!” the newcomer bellowed, shoving Bear under the surface, sending rainbows flying. “Danish pig! This land will never be yours. I defy you!”

  Bear was startled into passivity. He was winded, too, and shocked by the water’s cold sting. It was an instant only. Ectorius watched in approval as he twisted out from under and sprang to his feet. His sword had never left his hand. “Saxon?” he demanded in his turn. “Dane? How dare you, you savage? I am prince of Cerniw, and my father was the son of the Dragon of the South, as good a Briton as ever lived!”

  The blade flashed. The dark-haired lad staggered up out of the water and jumped back, but only far enough to draw his own weapon.

  Ectorius leaned forward in his saddle. This stranger bore a sword such as the old Roman had never seen, and he wielded it well. Too well for his protégé? Ectorius tensed. If the boy fell, all was lost…

  Then, suddenly, the very air changed. The flaring rage between Bear and his opponent seemed to fall out of it like scales. Bear had been schooled in the rules of combat, and apparently so had his opponent, although God alone knew where. Engagement with a worthy foe must be fair. Soldier
s on the battlefield could hack at one another like butchers, but this boy had offered himself one-on-one. Bear found his balance, waited till the other was firm on his feet too, and made his move.

  Blade hit blade, and sparks flew.

  Ectorius watched the fight progress. Bear was putting into practice all he had been taught, and keeping his head, too, which could not always be counted on. The other, after his initial burst of rage, had settled into a combat stance that was almost cool, and heaven only knew where he had got that astounding sword. Bear was actually smiling—had breath and poise to ask, between parries, “Well, what are you, moorland warrior? A long-legged Pict?”

  “Pict?” the other demanded, accurately mimicking Bear’s outraged echo of Saxon. “I am Lance, son of King Ban of Vindolanda…” He paused, long enough to spring up the stream bank, obliging Bear to move after him, fighting uphill. “As good a Roman as ever drew breath.”

  “Oh? I am Roman, too, by upbringing.”

  The boy called Lance seemed to consider this, although he didn’t ease the ferocity of his attack. “In that case we probably have no fight.”

  “Probably not,” Bear admitted. He was getting the worst of it. Childishly he added, “But you started it!”, and lunged in with an uncontrolled thrust whose force Lance effortlessly caught and turned against him, dumping him backover into the water once more.

  The splash was considerable. Gaius roared with laughter. Lance put up his sword at once and waded in, one hand extended to help.