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

by Harper Fox

  Lance closed his eyes. They’d left the track, but Ector’s beautiful mare was picking her way through the rushes so surely that she needed little attention. And he wanted an instant of blindness, of seeing nothing but blood-filtered sunlight. When he opened them again, the world was still there. But Lance hardly knew it—hardly recognised his own self within it. The sky, the very turf beneath his horse’s hooves, the long-familiar swell of the land that would conceal the lough for a few minutes more, until they broached the crest… All were different to him; he perceived them with a mind transfigured.

  Arthur, who had mistaken his silence for hesitation, was awkwardly assuring him he need not find his board or expenses, that Ector would consider him his ward, just as he did Arthur, until he was old enough to wield a sword for his wage.

  Lance let him run on. The voice was pleasant to him, as if he’d been hearing it all his life, like the sound of the wind through the gorse. Lance had been abandoned here. He’d had enough time now to accept that Viviana had told him the truth about Ban. He had been a lost child. But Viviana had taught him that he was a child no more, and must not behave as such. And now he was no longer lost.

  No longer lost, but chosen. Found and chosen by the one soul in the world whose choosing could matter to him, by whom he would allow it. It had taken Lance very little time to understand that he would follow Arthur into battle, death and beyond, but that quiet certainty had belonged only to himself, and he had stilled his mouth and his heart from its expression.

  He couldn’t do better even now. He was smiling, and he wondered if Art would take that as his acceptance. They rode on in silence for a short while longer, and then they reached the hillcrest.

  The lough lay glittering before them, giving back the sky its brilliant blue. A year had passed since Lance had seen it shine, had seen it anything other than half-frozen beneath leaden skies. He remembered how he had used to come up here in summer and stand in this very spot, to watch it dance in light.

  He stopped, and felt rather than saw Arthur rein to a halt beside him. “It might seem strange to you,” he said, “but for a while, this place was more a home to me than any I’ve ever known.”

  “No, it doesn’t seem strange. I could make a kingdom here—these moors, and this beautiful lake.”

  “It’s called a lough,” Lance corrected. “To rhyme with...” He glanced across at Arthur’s wrists, fine-made but already scarred, muscular with horsemanship and work. “To rhyme with tough.”

  “Well, Lance o’ the lough, you must consider finding your home elsewhere. You don’t have to decide at once—you can meet us at Caer Lir, if you wish. But tell me at least that you’ll think about it.”

  Lance nodded. He knew he should speak, after such an offer, and he tried to find the words. But Arthur seemed quite satisfied, and after a moment turned back to his contemplation of the water. “Was it here that you found the sword?”

  Lance looked down briefly at the weapon in its scabbard. “No, a short way further east. Come on and I’ll show you.”

  The place was so ordinary that Lance was surprised he could find it again. Viviana’s herb was growing in abundance all along the fringe of the lough now. How he had searched, to find her a few fresh strands! He could have cured all Vindolanda of its fevers now. Nevertheless he directed the horse with unerring certainty to the very spot where he’d first caught sight of the spiralling gold. “There, Art,” he said, the short name coming easily to his lips now. “I found it just there, in the shallows.”

  “Just there,” Arthur echoed. “Tell me the whole story of its finding.”

  Lance frowned. Why would Art assume there was more to it than Lance had already told him—that he’d gone out as bidden to fetch herbs for the old woman, and come back instead with the sword? Lance wasn’t sure himself why he’d held back part of the truth. Possibly, he told himself wryly, because he didn’t want his new friend to think him a lunatic. Well, that was too bad.

  He drew breath, but Arthur gently interrupted him. “Never mind,” he said. “I will tell you the story. You came here, and you saw the sword. But it was given to you by a hand, a pale beautiful hand that came out of the water and disappeared under it once more.”

  Lance stared at him. “She touched me, too,” he said, although his heart was so high in his throat that he could barely speak. “Just once, on the wrist. I thought she would be cold, but she was warm as blood.”

  Arthur turned to look at him. “Was she?” he said, almost wistfully. “I never heard that part.”

  “Where… Where did you hear the rest?”

  Arthur swung himself down from the saddle, landing in ankle-deep water. Lance’s first, prosaic, thought was that he himself would not have been so cavalier about such fine boots. He’d observed that, while Arthur was never profligate with clothes—the party were travelling light, and anyway he doubted Ector ever allowed much extravagance—the things he had were of the best, and their spoiling wasn’t the disaster it would have been to a child of Ban’s household.

  Lance realised he was seeking distraction because he was frightened. It was not so much that Arthur had known his story as seeing the change coming over his friend now. He’d lost his air of poise, and most of his colour, too. He had turned from the lough, and was staring off over the marshland to the east. He looked weary and lost. “The old man told how it would be. The one who brought me to Ector.”

  Forgetting concern for his own boots, Lance dismounted to stand beside him. “How do you remember?”

  “Ah—I was a disobedient, sharp-eared brat, always hearing what I shouldn’t. Poor Ector. He used to interrogate every passing guest to see if they were part of the prophecy. It isn’t just that though. All my life I’ve seen him. I… I see him now.”

  “Who?”

  Art smiled shakily. “Aren’t you paying attention? The old man. He comes to me to tell me things I don’t want to know. He sends me visions. He comes when I’m happiest, when I’m thinking of nothing but the sunlight and the pleasure of being alive. And all my life, I’ve been alone when he came. Now, though… Lance, turn now, and tell me that you see him too.”

  Lance obeyed. He did see something. Was he only flash-blind with sunlight on water? No—for a moment, a tall gaunt figure in black robes. Joy rose in him. Surely it was Viviana! She would answer Arthur’s fears, solve his mysteries. He drew a breath to call her name, but the light shifted, and she was gone. “I thought I saw…” he began, and tailed off. “Nothing now. Do you see it still?”

  “No,” Art said miserably. “I wish I did. If he talks to me, it isn’t so bad. But if he comes and goes like that, he means me to see something. And I guarantee I won’t like it.” He paused, swallowed hard. “You saw him, too, for an instant. Didn’t you?”

  Lance didn’t want to lie to him. Even the thought of doing so burned him with shame. But if it distressed him, was it kind of Lance to feed the vision? “Perhaps,” he said carefully, “you have heard him spoken of so often that he has come to be real to you.”

  “Lance.”

  “All right. I’m sorry. Yes, I did.”

  “Thank you. Tell me the truth always, no matter how bad. Do you see the darkening of the lough?”

  Arthur was stock-still in the shallow water, attention now fixed on the glittering horizon. “No,” Lance said, and watching him go paler still, he put a hand to his shoulder, bony and warm beneath his jerkin and shirt. “I see only bright day.”

  “Then this is the vision. I wonder why he showed himself to you, even for an instant? I regret it, Lance. I would not have you caught up in these terrors.” Then, to Lance’s dismay, the proud prince hid his face in his hands and shivered like a child.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Once upon a time, the skin of the earth was so thin that it barely hid the fires below.”

  Arthur raised his head. He was sitting curled up on the bank of the lough, Lance’s cloak wrapped around him. His brow had been pressed to his knees, but Lance ha
d caught his attention. Lance recognised his look, remembered it from the faces of his brothers and sisters around the fire on long cold nights. He was sure his own had been the same. Tell me a story... “The skin of the earth was so thin that a dragon could sink through it, when she came home tired from hunting among the stars.”

  One quirk of the handsome mouth. “A dragon?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t believe in them, Uther’s son. Anyway, it’s only a tale.”

  “Yes, of course. Go on.”

  Lance looked around. The horses were peaceably cropping the turf a few yards away. Gaius was nowhere to be seen. “The dragon fell asleep in the warm, soft rock. They sleep for hundreds of our lifetimes, her kind, but they live forever, too. She was a very fine dragon, very big, as long as...” Lance pointed off towards the west, then swept a gesture round across the moorlands to the east. “As long as the space from horizon to horizon. All along her spine she bore a crest of upright scales. Many summers and winters passed, and when at last she shifted in her sleep, her scales slipped sideways, all unseen beneath the earth.”

  “What happened then?”

  Lance got up and extended a hand, just as he had on the first day of their meeting. “Stand up and you’ll see.”

  This time the grip on his was confiding and friendly. Art surged upright. He looked in the direction Lance was indicating. “Oh,” he said. “The hills that look like breaking waves.”

  “Yes. Ice came, then rain, my story says. Great walls of ice, and a flood big enough to carve out the whole river valley. The dragon’s scales had turned to stone, the black, hard rock the Roman army quarried to build their roads. Then the softer rocks underneath them, the mudstones and clays, all wore away...”

  “And so we can see them. The dragon’s spine.”

  “It was a story of my mother’s.”

  Arthur turned to Lance. His whole focus settled upon him, unsettling as a hawk’s. “You’ve never spoken to me about her.”

  “Nor to anyone.”

  “How did she know, do you think—about the dragon?”

  “It was only a story. But her beliefs were old ones, Art. Every month when the moon was full, she and some of the other women of the village would go up to a cave in the cliffs, to meet and talk to something they called the dragon there.”

  “I want to ask you things. What your mother was like, what it was like to have one. But the time isn’t right, is it?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  The grey eyes remained, steady and kind, on his. “Do you follow in her ways, then? Or those of Father Tomas’s new god?”

  Lance swallowed. “There was never any... punishment, in my mother’s ways. She would leave that to our consciences, and help us out with the back of her hand if we did wrong.”

  Art sighed. “Blasphemous, our priest at home would say.”

  “And what do you say?”

  “That to me, it makes perfect sense. This beautiful lough of yours—is it sacred, or can ordinary mortals wash away their visions and dark thoughts in it?”

  “Both. At least... one thing doesn’t mean that the other can’t happen. My mother would say.”

  Art nodded. He threw Lance a scapegrace, understanding smile, then unfastened his jerkin and tugged his shirt over his head. “Let’s go swimming, then.”

  All his life, Lance had come up here with his brothers and friends to bathe and splash about in the water. He’d never thought twice about watching one of them undress: they’d just been skinny moorland lads like himself, sinewy and pale with lack of sun. Art’s bare back was the colour of sandstone on a summer afternoon. He was unfastening the crotch-lace of his deerskin trousers. For the first time in his life, Lance had to look away.

  Swiftly he dealt with his own clothes. He knew from experience that, no matter how tempting at the surface, the lough retained a chill from the time of Elena’s tales of ice and rain. He drew a warning breath, too late: Art had plunged through the reeds and dived.

  He surfaced a heartbeat later. His voice rang out like music. “Holy Belenus! Sacred Dark Mother—Gog, Magog and Lleu Llaw Gyffes!”

  Lance broke into laughter. He forgot his shyness and his sudden prickling awareness of his companion’s body, and strode in to join him. “I told you it was cold.”

  “You did... not!” Art was treading water, his breath coming in painful gasps. “You said my flesh would encounter my spirit in here, or... something of that sort.”

  “And isn’t it true?”

  “Only in as much as I’m going to... die!”

  Lance snorted. He put one hand on the tawny, wet head and pushed Art under: got time for half a yelp as Art’s warm grip fastened round his waist and tugged him down too.

  The water was full of shafts of light. Lance and the prince tumbled through them, rolling and scrapping like otter cubs. Lance’s world went sun-over-soil with the force of his rolling dive. He evaded Art’s pounce, stretched out his limbs in a pure ecstasy of flight.

  A little further down, the light faded out to peaty bronze. Seizing Art’s arm so that he wouldn’t become lost or entangled in the reeds, Lance guided him to the place where the pale hand had risen from the water. They were back within their depth. He found a foothold on the bulrush-matted mud and broke surface for air. “It was here,” he said when he could, still keeping his hold on Art. “This is where she gave me the sword. Who was she, Art? What did it mean?”

  “I don’t know. I wish you didn’t have to be part of it.”

  “I am, though. You and Sir Ector knew the legend, but it happened to me. You don’t have to be afraid, I’m certain. Viviana was strange, but she was kind to me. She saved my life.”

  “I’m not sure that she’d save mine.”

  “Did I do the wrong thing? Was the sword meant for you after all?”

  “No.” Art shook his head, sending water flying. He stared off over the water. “Look, Guy will come searching for us soon. Then I’ll have to go back and help with preparations for our journey, and we’ll have no more time. Come with me.”

  Lance followed him onto the shore. They were still hand in hand, and he wondered if Art had ceased to notice. His grasp was frank as a child’s, but a bright new heat was coursing through Lance. They settled on the flat outcrop of rock which Elena said had been scoured smooth by the ice. Over untold thousands of years, he suddenly remembered, and tried to fit that with the life of the world as Father Tomas taught it: a mere four thousand, surely not long enough for dragons to sleep and make hills, and great majestic walls of ice to come and go.

  The rock was sheltered by small, scrubby birch. When next the breeze blew—blessedly warm on goosepimpled skin—the shift of light and shade caught the bronze of the sun sign Art wore on his new chain. “You don’t think the world is new,” Lance said, reaching out with his free hand to catch and hold the heavy pendant. “You don’t believe in this new god.”

  “I do as far as Ector and Guy are concerned. They were confirmed in the new faith before they took me in, and they’ve given me everything. But...”

  A reed-music hush came over the lough. Gently Art drew his hand away. Lance didn’t try to stop him, though letting go made him feel sick. “We should probably get dressed,” he said. “But... what?”

  “Do you have anyone, Lance? A woman, someone who’s had your children, or... well, anybody?”

  “Children?” Lance echoed in wonder. “Father Tomas still tries to whip me with a birch rod if I’ve done wrong. He’s insistent that I’m still a child myself.”

  Art gave him a sidelong glance, so warm it made him glad that the rock beneath his backside was cold enough to prevent any of his body’s recent awkward reactions to pleasure. “Not hardly.”

  “Well... all right.” He chuckled. “My ma didn’t think so either. She and Tomas used to go at it hammer and tongs, about children born out of what he calls wedlock. There were so few of us here even before the raid that she couldn’t understand his objection to any healthy bairns c
oming along. But no, I don’t have someone like that. There’s time enough, isn’t there?”

  “Not for me.”

  “Oh.” Rapidly Lance strung ideas together. Here was Arthur Pendragon, eldest son of Uther of Cerniw, already launched into a battle for his kingdom, a fight which could veer from diplomacy to deadly violence any day. Lance steadied his voice and tried to sound far more worldly than his years and experience of life allowed. “You... have to get yourself an heir?”

  “Steady on. First I have to get myself a lawful Christian wife.”

  “Do you?”

  “I know. It didn’t bother Uther, did it? But times have changed since then, and Father Marcus says it must be so.”

  “Your village priest?”

  Art grinned. “If only he’d confine himself to the village,” he said. “He’d have travelled all the way up here with us if Ector had let him. He doesn’t beat me with a birch rod, but he does tell me things. About what will happen to my immortal soul if I don’t toe the line. So Ector made him stay at home, to give me a break.” His smile faded. “Because if it were… only a case of getting a child, that’s been seen to.”

  Lance felt an odd twitch of shock. He and Art had compared notes, and although neither knew his exact date of birth, had concluded that they must be more or less the same age. “A boy?” he asked tentatively, and waited until Art nodded. “Where is he?”

  “In Ireland with his mother. I, er... I went to a Beltane fire.”

  “Oh!” Lance couldn’t hide a grin. Children from the May Eve rites were a foregone conclusion. Father Tomas had made half-hearted efforts to repress them, but even up here on the moorlands, before the great winter had come, the early summer nights had been too sweet. “Was she nice? The girl, I mean?”

  “Yes. Unfortunately she was also my half-sister, Modron.” Art twisted round to face Lance, urgently, as if afraid of his judgement. “I didn’t know her, I swear. She’s Ygraine’s first daughter, by Gwrlais. She was six when the Merlin took me away, and I’d never clapped eyes on her since.”