Twilight of Avalon

by Anna Elliott

  The young man had looked away, his gaze fixed on the ceiling again, and now his throat contracted as he swallowed. When he answered, his voice was flat, barely audible. “Ralf.”

  Ector’s eyes surveyed the boy’s slender frame, fastening on the tightly bound upper arm. “Well, then, Ralf. Your first taste of war—and you’ve got the badge of honor to show for it. Get a good many more of those, I shouldn’t wonder, before the Saxon devils are driven back where they belong.”

  Isolde saw—and she knew Ector saw, as well—the involuntary shudder that rippled through the boy’s body, the flare of panic that widened his eyes. He didn’t speak, though, and after a moment Ector said, “Made you feel a bit hollow, I expect. Takes some getting used to before you can stand on the business end of a Saxon war charge and not feel like your innards are gone liquid enough to leak out your arse.”

  The old man’s words seemed to strike like blows aimed at the foot of a dam or like the lance of a knife on a festering wound. Another shudder rippled through the boy, and pent-up words spilled out of him in a voice low, hoarse, and almost toneless, while his eyes remained staring and fixed.

  He’d been on the front lines, had faced the brunt of the Saxons’ charge. He’d heard them coming, voices raised in battle cry, though at first they’d appeared only as a sort of moving wall. Then he’d seen them. Blond giants of men, swinging swords and great two-edged axes above their heads, the hooves of their horses churning the ground into mud.

  And then the battle had been on him, and he could see nothing but the slash of weapons, the heave of bodies, men, and horses, all around, hear nothing but the screams of the horses, the shouts of the other men, though he knew by the raw pain in his throat that he was screaming, too. He’d seen the man beside him fall under a blow from one of the double-edged axes. He’d seen another man’s stomach parted by a sword point, as one of the enemy took him from behind, and had seen others trampled, crumpled like broken rag dolls beneath the horses’ hooves.

  “Their wizards come first—howling curses. Like…” Ralf shuddered. “Like nothing you’ve ever heard. They’ve drums they beat on. Made of human skulls and the flayed skin of the dead. And horns they blow on—made of thigh bones. And the soldiers—they fight like…like animals,” Ralf said hoarsely. “If their chief is killed, it’s a shame to them to leave the field of battle alive. They’ll come at you, seeking death. Wanting to die. Like demons. Like nothing that has a mortal soul. It’s—”

  He stopped. A fine sheen of sweat had broken out on his brow, and his eyes were dark with the memory, his hands white-knuckled at his sides.

  “Well, they are heathens, lad.” Ector’s tone was matter-of-fact. “And like they say, if you talk to a pig and expect to hear anything back but an oink, you’ll only be disappointed sore.”

  That brought a brief twist of a smile to Ralf’s mouth, and he shivered convulsively again, some of the tension of his slender body starting to seep away.

  Ector nodded as though satisfied and nudged the boy lightly on the good arm. “Never you mind it, lad. I remember once—in my young days, it was—during a raid on a Saxon war camp. I’d got one cornered, like, and we were fighting hand to hand. I drew first blood—struck him a blow on the thigh—and he came at me like Satan himself. I’ve got a mark of it still—just here, you see?”

  He pushed back the sleeve of his tunic and held out a wiry arm, showing the puckered line of an old scar running up along the muscle from wrist nearly to elbow. Slowly, Ralf’s eyes fixed on the mark, and he nodded, though he didn’t speak.

  “Well, this ’un,” Ector went on. “This Saxon I was fighting spoke a bit of the British tongue—enough that we could understand each other, he and I. We were fighting hard, blocking each other’s blows, drawing apart and then charging at each other again.”

  The old man’s voice was low, but all the same the words seemed somehow to echo the tension of that long-ago battle, to conjure up out of the air the ringing clash of swords, the thud of metal against leather shields. Isolde saw Ralf raise himself, his face quickening with interest as Ector went on: “Once, while we were circling each other, each looking for a place where a sword point could get in, he sort of hissed at me that he’d fight me till his lifeblood ran out of him in rivers, so long as he could take me with him. That if he died in killing me, he’d go to the warriors’ hall and live on endless roast meat and mead from the udders of some kind of heathenish goat.” Ector shrugged. “Or some such rubbish. Didn’t catch it all.”

  Ector stopped. Ralf was watching the older man, and the remaining tension had by now ebbed out of the boy’s frame. The fixed, glazed look had gone from his eyes, leaving them for the first time interested and alert.

  “And what did you say to him?”

  “Say?” Ector gave an explosive snort. “Told him he was in for one bloody great surprise when I’d killed him and he found himself in hell.”

  Isolde found herself laughing. She doubted the existence of Ector’s Saxon, British-speaking or otherwise, and she’d seen wounds enough to know that Ector’s scar had been made by a dagger or knife, not a sword. But beside her, Ralf was laughing, too, the taut, desperate strain lifted from his face for the first time since he’d come in, so that he looked—almost—like the same boy who’d ridden out to battle the month before. Or as much the same, Isolde thought, as he ever will.

  “One bloody great surprise,” Ralf repeated, still laughing and shaking his head. “One bloody great surprise. That’s good, that is. That’s really good.”

  Isolde had tied the last of the bandages on Ector’s foot, and now she picked up her leather medicine scrip and turned away. Again and again and again, she thought, these men break my heart.

  ONE OF THE MEN LYING AGAINST the opposite wall—a foot soldier with a crushed arm—had woken and begun to scream, and Isolde worked her way quickly across the room to kneel by his side. He was older, she thought, somewhere just short of thirty summers, with a dark, blunt-featured face; a thick, powerful neck; and a swordsman’s heavily muscled frame. His body was unmarred, save for the right arm that lay useless at his side. It had been crushed by an ax blow into a mass of torn flesh and splintered bone, and now Isolde saw that it was still oozing blood through the linen wrappings she had applied last night.

  He was still screaming as Isolde reached him, though his eyes were closed—harsh, rasping screams that made the muscles of his throat stand out like cords. Isolde put one hand on his forehead to quiet him, reaching with the other for the poppy-laced cup of wine that stood by his side. And all I can do, she thought, is try to drug away as much of the pain as may be until it is clear whether his body will heal itself or yield.

  Though it would be miracle if he survived such a wound. In the two days he’d lain on the pallet here, he’d only brought up whatever drafts she tried to coax him to take, and already she could see the deadly red streaks spreading upward from the shoulder, despite the hot poultices and salves she’d applied.

  The man’s face looked pinched, the skin a muddy yellow-gray and drawn tight over the bones of the skull. He was unknown to her, though the dark coloring and strong, compact build marked him for one of the Welshmen, and Isolde saw that about his throat he wore a roughly carved cross on a leather thong. One of Madoc of Gwynedd’s infantrymen, maybe. Gwynedd was largely a Christian land, and Madoc a Christian king.

  Isolde cradled the soldier’s head in the crook of one arm, raising him enough so that she could hold the cup to his mouth. The first swallow he only retched up into the already vomit-soaked straw, but the second sip he kept down, and as Isolde eased him back against the pallet, he let out an exhausted sigh. Then his brow contorted as his pain-clouded eyes fixed blearily on her face.

  “Mother…Mother…help me…hurts.”

  Usually, Isolde thought, it is a mother they call for. Sometimes God, sometimes Jesus the Christ, but most often Mother these men want when they wake.

  “Hush, now.” Isolde closed her fingers around his
. “You’re safe. I won’t leave you.”

  She started to unwrap the bandages with her free hand, keeping up the low murmur of words. “This is the tale of Pwyll, Lord of Dyfed, and Arawn, King of Annwn.”

  For as long as she’d cared for the men wounded in Con’s campaigns, she had told one or another of the old bards’ tales as she worked over the injured or ill, so that she scarcely thought of it as anything other than second nature now. She wondered, sometimes, where she had learned the stories that seemed suspended in an ever-ready wellspring inside her, rising effortlessly to her lips.

  But it had also become second nature never to let herself dwell on questions like that for long. The answers were part of the time forgotten, for seven years now locked away behind a black wall.

  For the men conscious enough to follow the story, the tales took their minds off the pain. And if she told one of the tales of the old heroes, of long-ago battles fought and won, the story sometimes seemed to give them courage as well. But even the ones too far gone to listen—like this man here—were usually soothed, quieted by the sound of her voice and the rhythm of the words.

  Isolde went on with the tale of how, for one year, Pwyll had taken Arawn’s place as king of the Otherworld. And, slowly, the soldier’s pain-dulled eyes slid closed and his clutching fingers relaxed. As gently as she could, then, Isolde eased her hand away from the soldier’s limp grasp, and, still speaking, drew a pot of salve from the leather scrip at her side.

  The stories were so familiar she scarcely had to think about the words anymore; they came automatically, leaving her mind free. Still, the rhythm of the story helped to steady her hands and keep her from thinking too much about the pain she inevitably inflicted even as she worked to heal.

  The last of the soldier’s bandages fell away, leaving the shattered arm open to view. Useless, she thought, to wish the world can be other than it is. Useless even to be angry at the bloody, wretched waste of constant war.

  But before she could begin salving the wound, the man’s eyes flickered open again, and this time they widened in horrified awareness as his gaze fell on her face. Instantly, he threw himself sideways across the pallet, trying to wrench away, and his good hand flashed out in a gesture far older than the wooden cross he wore. Second and third fingers bent, first and smallest finger raised like horns. The ancient sign against evil or witchcraft.

  Isolde rose to her feet and turned away without even trying to quiet him. There was no more good she could do here. Experience had taught her that much.

  “Hedda.”

  Hedda had turned at the man’s frightened cry, and now at the summons she crossed quickly to Isolde’s side.

  “He’ll not let me finish—not now.” Isolde spoke in a low voice and kept her face carefully averted from the wounded man. “And I’ll only make things worse if I try. But his wound needs to be treated with this”—Isolde held out the pot of salve—“and then wrapped up again. You know the way.”

  This time, there was no pause, no blank-eyed stare before Hedda’s nod. “I know. I see to it, my lady.”

  It was at moments like these, moments when she and Isolde were alone, that Isolde caught brief flashes of what she thought might lie behind Hedda’s dull-eyed stolidity. Moments like these when she knew for certain that Hedda’s dullness was a way of winning freedom, at least of a kind.

  Hedda had been carrying a tray that held brown bread and cheese and an earthenware water jar. She shifted the burden to her hip to reach for the pot of salve.

  “Here, I’ll take it, Hedda.” Isolde took the tray and handed her the salve pot in return. “Who was it for?”

  The other girl was silent a moment, her pale gaze, fixed on the floor.

  “For Saxon prisoners, Lady.”

  And at moments like these, Isolde thought, you could sometimes catch a flash of anger beneath Hedda’s calm. Hedda’s voice had been almost toneless, but all the same Isolde touched her lightly on the arm.

  “I’m sorry, Hedda.”

  A brief spasm, as of pain, passed across the Saxon girl’s broad brow. When she spoke it was almost an echo of what Isolde had thought only a moment before.

  “Waste of tears to cry.”

  There was nothing that Isolde could say in reply, and so she only took the tray and said, “I’ll take the prisoners’ food tonight, if you can finish with this man here. How many prisoners this time?”

  “Only two.” Hedda had turned away, moving to kneel where Isolde had done, and spoke over her shoulder, her broad face stolid once more. “In cells. Under the north tower.”

  Chapter Four

  HE SAT AT THE SKIFF’ S steering oar, watching her as she trailed one hand in the water, the curling black hair fanned out over her shoulders in a windblown cloud. As though feeling his gaze, she rolled over onto her back to look up at him. “Did I ever tell you the story about Trevelyan? The only man to escape when Lyonesse sank beneath the sea?”

  He shook his head. “I knew you couldn’t do it.”

  “Do what?”

  He gestured to the fishing line, baited with a fish head from the leather bucket at his feet. “Stay quiet long enough for me to actually catch anything.”

  She scooped up a handful of water and flicked it at him, spattering his tunic and boots. “Do you want to hear the story or no?”

  She had a sweet voice, musical and very clear. He’d always thought so. Even when she’d been an infuriating little ten-year-old shadow, trailing after him, dogging his every move.

  “All right, tell me about this Trevelyan. What did he do?”

  He’d heard her tell the tale at least a dozen times before, but he listened without interrupting all the same. As long as she talked, he could almost block out the memory of that morning. Of going into his mother’s rooms and finding her, her eye puffed and blackened, the color of rotting fruit, her mouth bloodied and torn, with another tooth knocked free. His father was coming more often, now that he was home from the summer campaigns.

  ISOLDE STOOD AT THE ENTRANCE TO the north tower as the echoes died away, leaving only the sound of the wind wuthering about Tintagel’s walls. The words had gone, like all the others before. This one, though…

  Not Morgan’s voice. Of that much she was sure. She frowned. And this voice had seemed—what?

  Closer, somehow, she thought. As though it called directly to whatever was behind the black wall in her mind. The part of herself and of the past she’d forgotten by force of will.

  She shivered, suddenly, and stepped into the tower’s torchlit door. Put it away. Away with everything else.

  THE SMELL OF THE PRISON CELL was worse, even, than the stench of the infirmary hall. Filth and moldering straw, urine and sweat and unwashed skin, as there was in the room above. But here the smell was overlaid by the acrid reek of fear.

  The prison block was unlighted, so that it was a moment before Isolde could make out, by the light of the torch in the passage outside, the two men crouched against the stones of the far wall. When she could see enough to pick her way through the piles of blackening straw, Isolde moved to the nearer of the two men and held out the tray. It was too dark to see his face clearly, but she could see his eyes, pale blue like Hedda’s, staring at her with a stunned, dull gaze. He made no move to take the food, only sat slumped against the wall, his legs drawn up, arms limp and dangling between his knees.

  “He’ll not be able to take it.” It was the other man who spoke, his voice harsh, though whether with thirst or anger or simply long disuse she couldn’t tell. “He’s got two broken wrists. Not much good for feeding himself.”

  Isolde had seen him straighten as she entered, then sink back as though he’d expected someone else. His face, though, was even more shadowed than that of the man before her, and she could see nothing of him save a blur of pale skin against the moisture-slick wall at his back.

  Isolde turned back to the first man, and saw what she had not noticed before, that beneath the ragged sleeves of his tunic, both his
wrists were swollen, blackened with bruises and tilted at a stomach-turning angle, like the splayed limbs of a child’s doll. She could see, too, here and there, jagged edges of bone distending the skin.

  Sharply, Isolde turned and called over her shoulder to the soldiers outside.

  “Guard—bring the light in here.”

  Silently, one of the men obeyed, moving to set a lighted lantern beside her on the floor, and Isolde nodded.

  “Thank you. You can go now. And shut the door.”

  The soldier hesitated at that, but he was a young man, with a thin face and a nervous, shifting gaze, and after a moment he bowed. “As you like, my lady.”

  Isolde waited until the heavy door had swung closed, then turned back to the first Saxon man. He was tall, with the long-limbed strength of his race, and a warrior’s broad-shouldered build. His eyes, though, held the pitiful, bewildered look of an animal in pain. And he was young. Fifteen, at most, Isolde thought. As young as Ralf—and in a similar case.

  His face, like his wrists, was covered with bruises, one eye swollen shut, his mouth bloodied and torn. But even so, his features still had the soft, unformed look of youth and his cheeks had only the faintest golden stubble of beard. His hair was probably fair, though it was so matted with sweat and dried mud that now it looked almost brown, and his clothes, too, looked stiff and gritty with sweat and filth.

  “Here.” Isolde knelt beside him and held the water jar to his swollen mouth.

  The boy swallowed automatically, gasped with shock as the water reached his throat, and then, all at once, began to cry, great choking, racking sobs that shook his whole frame and smeared the dirt and dried blood on his face with tears.

  Isolde started to reach a hand out to him, then stopped. Bad enough, she thought, for him to cry before one of his captors—and a woman, at that—without his being offered the insult of a comforting touch.

  Before she could decide whether to speak or turn away, she saw the other prisoner stir in his shadowed corner. It was still too dark for her to see clearly, but she had the impression that he hesitated briefly, as though unwilling to move. At last, though, he rose to his feet and came forward into the circle of light. He was uninjured as far as Isolde could see, but he moved stiffly, as though guarding against jarring some inner hurt. Silently, he laid one hand on the boy’s heaving shoulder.