“Here, Princess,” said Cleodalis with jovial aplomb, “is one of the knights who by the bidding of Merlin has saved us all from the villain Rience this day.”
When Guinevere saw who it was, recognition passed across her features and for a moment, revilement. To her credit though, she retained her noble poise.
“You are Sir Balin of Northumberland,” she attested quietly.
He nodded and genuflected before her, lowering his head, self-conscious of his own bloody and grimy appearance in the face of her clean beauty.
“How is it that you are banished from Arthur’s sight one minute and save his bride to be in the next?”
“My lady, all I do I do for King Arthur.”
She said nothing, and Cleodalis fidgeted at his side.
“Princess,” he said, “I must attend to the preparations for our defense.”
“You may go, Cleodalis. I will be fine.”
Balin heard the seneschal grind his heel on the flagstones as he left.
“Rise, Sir Balin,” she said.
He did, but continued to avert his eyes from hers, which regarded him nakedly and somehow made him feel the same.
“You frighten me, Sir Balin,” she said at last.
That surprised him, and he cleared his throat.
“My Lady has nothing to fear from me. I apologize for my appearance…”
“You appear at last as you are. When I first saw you, in the courtyard at Camelot, in chains, I pitied you. When next I saw you, clean and girded like a saint, and you murdered that enchantress, I was terrified. Now, bloody as you are, I am merely frightened, as I am frightened by the descriptions of the last plague on Egypt or by the angel that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. You are a bloody man, Sir Balin. But a Queen must not shrink like a blushing maiden from certain truths. My Arthur has need of bloody men like you. So do I.”
Balin was conflicted as to how to respond, so he said nothing.
“I am a woman, and Cleodalis thinks I see and know nothing. He is a good man, but as he is blind to craft in women, so too is he blind to dishonor in men. In his daughter, I see my father’s face, as plain as I see it in my own mirror.” She looked away for a moment, sad.
Balin rankled. He had thought Leodegrance a pious, Christian king and an honorable man. He was ashamed to know such a base secret about him, if his own daughter could be believed.
“There is a traitor here in Carhaix,” said Guinevere. “I have known it for a long time.”
“A traitor?” Balin said, bristling. “Who, my Lady?”
“My father’s best knight, Sir Bertholai The Red. He keeps a twice armed lanner falcon for hunting bustards.”
“I saw such a knight down in the courtyard,” Balin said, remembering the huge falcon and the black gloved knight who bore him. “What proof do you have of his treachery?”
“I have seen him fix messages to his falcon’s arm and send it over the wall. When it returns, the messages are gone.”
Balin gave pause, chewing over his next words carefully.
“Might he not be communicating with your father in the north?” Balin asked.
“What do you know of falconry, Sir Balin?” she retorted impatiently.
“Nothing, I admit.”
“Bertholai taught my cousin, Sir Geraint. A falcon is not a pigeon. It will not carry messages as far as Daneblaise.”
“As you say, my Lady,” said Balin quietly.
Guinevere regarded him stoically and raised her eyebrows.
“I was terrified when I saw you behead the Lady of The Lake,” she said. “But later, I thought that perhaps you were a Christian man who found the influence of Avalon on Arthur’s rule abhorrent as I did. I heard you called ‘savage’ and denounced as a madman. But the angels of the Lord are not mad when they do His bidding, no matter how terrible. You called her false, and there were tears in your eyes. As Arthur raged against you, in my heart, I rejoiced at what you had done, and I suspected that you had some reason dear to your heart. I do not say this to engender your loyalty but to demonstrate my trust. Now I ask you, Sir Balin. Will you reciprocate my trust?”
Balin was so moved by the nobility of the Princess’ entreaty, by her faith in him, that he felt his lip tremble, and he lowered his head once more. “I will see about this Bertholai, my Lady.”
“In turn, I will soothe Arthur’s anger against you when he comes.”
“My Lady, I ask that you do not trouble yourself in that regard, nor even say that I am here. If the King is to forgive me, let it be of his own accord, by reason of my own actions.”
Guinevere nodded.
“You are an honorable knight, sir. I will abide.”
He went from her chamber and back down the tower steps into the courtyard once more.
He wanted only to head to the healer to check on Brulen, but the princess’ words gnawed at him and he called for a man-at-arms.
“Where is the dungeon?”
The soldier pointed out the stair that led beneath the central keep, and Balin went over, seeing no guard at hand.
He descended the torch lit steps and found the bank of dim cells. Again, there appeared to be no man on duty.
He stalked down the short hall, seizing a torch from the wall and holding it up to the barred windows set into the thick cell doors. He saw only straw and a few scurrying rats until he reached the last.
There he saw a portly man lying face down in the bloody straw, a ring of jailer’s keys on his broad belt.
He wheeled and raced back down the hall, taking the steps back up to the courtyard two at a time.
Balin drew frightened stares as he raced in his bloodstained armor to the gate, the dungeon torch still in his hand.
The two halberdiers at the gate crossed their pikes at his approach.
“Where is Sir Bertholai?” Balin demanded.
“He is gone with Father Amustant and the priests to the Northern Crossroads,” said one of the guards. “He will be back within the hour.”
“No, he won’t.” Balin growled, then shouted for Cleodalis, quenching the torch in the guards’ water bucket in frustration.
The seneschal came running, holding his stately robes.
“Your Sir Bertholai is a traitor,” Balin informed him.
Cleodalis met this accusation with a prim and indulgent smile.
“You have been speaking to the Princess, Sir Balin. Sir Bertholai has been King Leodegrance’s best man since we were all of us boys. I would trust him with my own daughter’s life.”
Balin smirked, considering the revelation the Princess had shared with him about Cleodalis’ daughter, but it was not his place to cut the man so completely. In truth, he pitied this man, cuckolded by his own master.
“As you trusted him to take King Rience to your dungeon? And yet your jailer lies dead and Rience is escaped, probably dressed as a hermit. Where is my brother?”
Cleodalis looked flabbergasted. He was already gesturing for a guard to confirm Balin’s words about the jailer.
“He is there on the wall,” Cleodalis said, pointing.
Balin found Brulen leaning on one of the battlements, staring off to the west. He was stripped to tunic and hose, and his wounded arm was bound with poultice and splint. His face and hands were clean.
A breeze stirred the vast field of green grass, which was level but for a diminutive copse of perhaps a dozen trees in the center, the lonesome remainder of the vast unnamed forest which had furnished the bones of Carhaix.
“Brulen,” Balin said, gasping from having run up the stairs to the top of the wall. “Rience has been smuggled out of the city.”
“In the hermit train?” Brulen asked, with an air of unconcern.
“Yes. The knight who accompanied them is false.”
“Find me a knight who is true and I will call it news,” Brulen said sullenly.
Though few had ever been able to tell them apart, the two brothers knew the subtle differences in each other. Their faces were like
identical patterned garments commissioned and worn by different men. At a glance they were indistinguishable, but upon closer consideration, they bore the barely perceptible marks of vastly different owners. There had always been a youthfulness, a facileness to Brulen that was not present in Balin’s rough expression.
But now that naivety was gone. The brightness of his eyes had dimmed somewhat. Not enough for anyone to notice save Balin.
“We must go after them!” Balin exclaimed.
“Rest, brother. They are too far ahead. If Arthur is coming as you say, then Rience will not go far ere he returns. With Lot and the Saxons, he will still have the advantage in numbers. His ambition will not allow him to fully retreat.”
Balin sighed.
“It will be a hard fight,” he said and dashed the battlement stone with his mailed fist, casting sparks. “I should have slain Rience when I had the chance!”
Brulen shrugged.
“You may yet get your chance to amend your mercy.”
Balin put his fists to the stone and leaned on the wall as Brulen was doing. He felt the breeze that rippled the tree tops and grasses course through his hair, and he realized that they had said very little on the dawn ride to the city with Rience.
There had been no formal reunion between them. No full embrace, no talk of forgiveness or understanding. Perhaps there didn’t need to be. Brulen had come at his summons to aid him, hadn’t he? They had won a great victory together. What might have been said surely had been said, not in words, but in deed.
“How is your arm?” he ventured lamely.
“The cut is not so deep. It will mend quickly, I think.”
“Brulen,” Balin said unable to contain his enthusiasm a moment more, “since we were boys taking turns racing our father’s horse along the old Roman wall, I have dreamed of what we accomplished last night.”
He opened his arms to embrace the breeze and smiled into the sun.
“What we did, they will sing of it, brother.”
Brulen said nothing for what seemed a long time before turning to look at his brother.
“Do you think they will?” Brulen asked.
“Two faced sixty and won!” Balin exclaimed, fairly bubbling over with excitement. “We’re heroes, you and I!”
“Heroes?” Brulen repeated. “To whom?”
“To King Arthur. To the people of this city.”
“To the men we left lying in that road, we were rampaging beasts,” Brulen said, turning back to regard the land. “And as to the adoration of Arthur? What is that?”
Balin frowned.
“Where is your fire, brother? Is it that you do not recognize the High King? Do you dread opposing your former master, King Lot?”
“Lot took me in, yes,” said Brulen, “after I left the kingdom of Malehault. He was a fair master, and you’re right. I would rather fight Rience and the Saxons than oppose him, but in truth, in my travels I have found no king worthy of my devotion, nor known any knight truly worthy of the name. I’m surprised you cast your lot with Arthur, brother.”
“Arthur is the chosen of God. He drew the sword of Macsen from the stone when no man could.”
“You believe that fairy tale?”
“I told you, I saw the miracle with my own eyes, brother,” Balin said. “Not a hundred men could draw it out. I myself tried.”
“What is a miracle but magic?” Brulen said. “The Merlin inclines Arthur’s ear at every turn. For all your hatred of Avalon, why have you not turned your sword against that black rascal?”
“Is your heart hardened because of how I dealt with the Lady Lile?”
Brulen shook his head.
“I cannot in good conscience fault you for that. I set the rash example myself in my own killing of that pernicious Gallet. We are a death for a death now, and I would leave it at that. Yet O my brother, how much greater is your crime. In my folly, I ruined only myself. Yours has damned all Albion.”
“It was on a path to damnation before, I would argue.”
“Do you think you have killed the Lady of The Lake truly, Balin? Don’t you know it’s an office, and that another has already risen to the title? Our own mother was offered it in her day. No Balin, Avalon endures, even without our poor aunt.”
Balin frowned deeply at that.
“Our aunt?”
Brulen turned to him.
“The Lady Lile was our mother’s sister. Yes. It’s true. I have learned a great deal in my travels, Balin. More than I would have you know. About Avalon, about the God you worship, about Merlin, and about your precious King Arthur too.”
Balin thought hard. His chest pounded with the revelation that he had slain his own kin. But what of it, really? Did a previously unknown connection to the Lady Lile make her any less of a villainess? If anything, her kinship with their mother made her sins against her even more offensive. Where sisterly affection should have restrained her, there had been nothing. In his eyes, that a sister had stood by and watched her own blood kin burned for forbidden knowledge she had bestowed, made her all the more monstrous.
But it was a truth. He felt it somehow. And what Brulen had intimated about Arthur troubled him.
“What have you learned? About Arthur?”
“Ask me anything else, Balin,” Brulen rasped, tears in his eyes. “I see the love you bear for him and I would spare you. Ask me about the plots of Merlin, or the great and terrible ladies who have broken with Avalon. Ask me about the Sangreal and the Templeise. Ask me about my own deceits and unworthy deeds. Ask me about the Copper Tower or Sir Breuse Sans Pitie, or The Questing Beast. But O my brother, do not ask me about King Arthur.”
Balin swallowed hard. What truth did he know?
Brulen grasped Balin’s arm tightly. “But if you do dare ask me, then you must ask about King Lot and Queen Morgause, and about why the kings are rebelling.”
“I know why,” Balin interjected. “Clarivaunce…”
“Aye, that fool Clarivaunce! And Uriens, all the rest who were greedy or uncertain and yielded. But what of King Aguysans? And what of King Cradelment and King Idres? And what of good King Lot? Mark you, if I am right, he will not live past tomorrow.”
“What are you on about, brother?”
Brulen shook his head and drew him into the embrace he had pined for before, but now Balin stiffened.
“A true knight may serve only one master, Balin,” Brulen whispered in his ear. “Truth or delusion. Every man must choose.”
Balin was vexed. He didn’t understand anything Brulen was saying. What treachery was there here?
“Brulen,” he asked, and cursed himself inwardly to hear in his own voice the same boy who had begged him to race along the Roman wall one last time with their father’s horse when Brulen had wanted only to go and read somewhere, “will you not stay with me?”
“I will fight beside you again, my brother,” he said, parting from their firm embrace to look into his eyes. “But not for any king.”
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
Within two hours, Father Amustant returned with his acolytes, much shaken and bearing two corpse wagons of dead Snowdonian knights for burial.
He said that once they had passed out of sight of Carhaix, Sir Bertholai had flung his hawk into the sky, and while the two guards he had taken along looked up to admire its flight, he had drawn his sword and treacherously slain them. Then he had pulled one of the robed monks up onto the back of his horse and galloped off to the west.
“That monk was Rience,” said Balin, when he heard. “He will join King Lot and Osla. They know our numbers and that Arthur is coming.”
“Our only advantage is this fortification,” said Brulen.
In that at least, Rience’s original plan had still been foiled.
Night fell, and the women, children, and elderly were ushered into the city keep.
There was a shout on the wall that announced the arrival of an armed host, but it was not the thousands of Rience, merely Arthur and the Camelot kni
ghts with a thousand footmen and archers, as promised.
Balin took hold of Cleodalis as the order to open the gates was given.
“I beg you, sir, say nothing of my presence here. My brother and I are but knights in service to Carhaix.”
Cleodalis agreed, though his face registered his bemusement, and he and Brulen replaced their helms and harnesses and Balin hid his charge. He left the Adventurous Sword hanging on Ironprow’s saddle, fearing he would be recognized by it. He feared also, that perhaps in the heat of battle or by some strange twist of unlikely circumstance, he might use it to fulfill the maiden’s prophecy and slay Arthur by accident.
Arthur rode in fully armored, with a steel company of cavalry at his back, all the heroes he had seen last at the dining hall. Arthur’s squire Timias held his fluttering dragon pennant at the head of all.
Arthur greeted Cleodalis as Timias took hold of his stallion, and he swung down from the stirrups.
“Merlin told us that Carhaix was threatened by Rience, and that we must ride here at once. Is he here now?”
“I have not seen him since two nights ago, sire,” said Cleodalis. “Rience rides at the head of five thousand men from the west, knights and Saxons under Lot of Orkney and the Saxon chieftain Osla Big Knife. He will be here by dawn, and we have but four score and two hundred defenders and those you have brought.”
Arthur paced, thinking.
“Where is Leodegrance?” he asked.
“He fights the Saxons in the north at Daneblaise with the bulk of his army,” said Cleodalis, wringing his hands. “If only Merlin were here. I wish he would return and weave some magic spell to open the earth and swallow Rience and his horde.”
Balin pursed his lips disapprovingly behind his helm.
“Christian men should not put their faith in a wizard for victory, but in the Lord,” came a strident voice from above.
The men craned their necks and saw Guinevere standing at the top of the stair in breeches and a leather jerkin, a spear in her hand and a seax at her belt like some Saxon battle maiden.
A cheer went up among the knights, though those among Arthur’s company who were pagan took no comfort and looked grim. Arthur grinned widely to see his woman speak bravely to him.
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