by Harper Fox
“Shut up and listen. Art Green and Lannie Whitley used to work here.” I could have shrivelled to dust in the harrowed anger of his gaze. “They both died a year ago in a cave rescue up on Sewingshields. So did the kid they were trying to save. There was a rockfall. So this is a fucking awful time of year for us here, son, and if you think you’re in some way bloody funny…”
I turned away. If there was a practical joke in progress, it was clearly on me. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine why Lance or Art would have wanted to screw with my head like this, but it didn’t matter—I had photographic evidence right here on the wall behind me. Wide bright smiles, a green summer hill in the background. It was a lovely photo. I wished I had a copy to keep for myself.
The room was quite dark. My vision had been very selective. There was a brass plate screwed into the wall beneath the photo, nicely engraved with names and dates and a one-line message.
In Memory of Lost Comrades.
I straightened up. The little reception area, which I’d thought cold and damp, was suddenly unbearably close. Airless, way too hot. There was a fan somewhere but it wasn’t doing any good. I couldn’t see it, only hear the throb of its blades, a rapid thudding in my ears. No, I decided, heading for the door—more like a fluttering, a trapped bird’s frantic wingbeat.
In fact I didn’t know what the hell the sound was, but I was sure things would be clearer if I could get back out of here into the light. I shoved the door open and stumbled halfway down the flight of wooden steps. Once there, the sickening flutter seemed to get into my eyes too. I stopped, grabbing at the handrail.
A car door slammed. I heard running feet on gravel.
“Gavin!”
Piers’ grip closed on me just in time. The wingbeats were trying to batter me down. They sounded like rotors now, like a helicopter landing in my head. Maybe this was just a migraine. I fought it. “Don’t. I’m okay.”
“Not that colour, you’re not. Sit down or you’re going to faint.” I half fell onto the steps. His hand was on the back of my skull, pressing it between my knees. “That’s it. What’s wrong?”
The door behind me clicked. Heavy footsteps descended the steps. My furious ranger, no doubt, come to see me off the premises… I got my head up for a second. He was standing on the gravel looking at me, expression less angry than bewildered. “I didn’t mean to upset him. Does he know Lance and Artie?”
“Er… He’s a friend, yes.”
Leave it to Piers to find a tactful answer. I did love him. Loved the weight of his hand, keeping me clear of the birds and the rotors and my own sudden-onset insanity.
“I’m sorry, then. I thought I knew all their mates. Look, do you want to bring him inside for a cup of tea?”
Inside. Inside was the beautiful, impossible photo. “No,” I said, sitting up. “I just want to go home.”
“All right.” Piers aided my scramble to my feet. “Thanks, but I’ll just take him back.”
“Seriously. I’d never have dropped it on him like that if I’d known.”
We were in the car. Piers had abandoned his newfound verve and was driving as if he had a parcel of eggs in the passenger seat. In between gear changes his hand was on my thigh. I tried to fill in the gap between the rescue-hut steps and now, but it was a void.
“Gav, please talk to me.”
“I can’t. I just want to go home.”
“Okay. I’ll check you out of the hotel and grab your things, then—”
“No. I mean…” What the hell did I mean? Where was home? My tiny, comfortless roost, barely more than a desk and a library? If I had nothing better, it was nobody’s fault but my own. “I’d like us to share a flat. Will you move in with me?”
“Yes. God, yes. For now, though—where do you want to go?”
“The hotel is fine. Anywhere I can be warm.”
“Okay.” He felt my hands. “Yes, you’re freezing. What did he drop on you, love? What happened to Arthur and Lance?”
I couldn’t tell him, of course. I decided I never would. The prospect of eternal silence comforted me, gave me a handhold. If he didn’t have to know, I didn’t either, not really. The things I shared with Piers became real. I reached this resolve, and the words fell from me, stones from an upturned sack. “He told me they’re dead. They’ve been dead for a year.”
Chapter Eleven
I couldn’t get warm. In the hotel room, I threw on two extra jumpers and huddled by the radiator, which promptly switched itself off. Piers cursed it and strode off to start a bath running. He ordered me into it, but that did no good either: as soon as I sank into the water its heat died around me. Piers intercepted me as I stumbled back into the bedroom. “What are you doing? I told you to soak.”
“It’s gone cold.”
“It can’t have done.”
I sat on the edge of the bed and curled up, pressing my brow to my knees, while he went to feel the water’s clammy chill for himself.
“Okay. I don’t know what’s going on here, but let’s just get you into bed.”
I was glad the chambermaid service was slack. The bed was the same tangled mess we’d left behind, and although we’d introduced a towel or two into our lovemaking to spare the mattress, scents of warm animal life folded round me as I burrowed under the duvet. I tried not to ball up. I wanted to deal with this, to convince Piers I hadn’t lost my mind. But I was so bloody cold. Spasms of shivering racked me. Piers caressed me through the duvet. I heard him on the phone to room service, demanding extra blankets, soup, other things I couldn’t take in for the chattering of my teeth. A minute or so later the door banged and I heard him in the corridor, shouting—actually shouting—at whichever poor bastard was failing to provide these amenities fast enough. This is Northumberland! How can you have Wi-Fi and no hot-water bottles?
“Here you go.” He was back by the bed. He must have met the delivery halfway. I felt the blankets land on me as he shook them out. “Sit up for a minute. Try and get some of this down you.”
I did as I was told. Piers was holding the bowl for me. I had to pull myself together before he started trying to feed me, so I reached to take it from him. I remembered other hands around a warm bowl. I thought about the story of Persephone. Lance had given me soup, not a pomegranate seed, but I had eaten with them, hadn’t I? I’d broken bread and eaten with them. By all the rules of legend I should have stayed with them, there in the house of the dead.
“Let me up.”
“Stay put. You have to eat something.”
“No. Now.”
I bolted past him, tearing myself free of the sheets. I made some effort at shutting the bathroom door behind me but didn’t have time, and anyway was grateful when his ready grasp stopped me banging my head off the toilet cistern or crashing too hard to my knees on the floor. A spasm went through me like my grandmother wringing out a dishcloth and my stomach turned inside out.
“Bloody hell, Gav.”
He sounded almost impressed. I almost was, too. That had been worthy of a long hard student night on the town. “Sorry. Jesus.”
“It’s okay.” He flushed the toilet for me, patted me on the back. “Is this some kind of horrendous migraine? Do you need a doctor?”
“Don’t think so.” In fact my head was clearing. For the first time since getting back here I could feel the warmth of his hands. “No doctor.” I hauled myself upright using the edge of the sink for support, and shakily washed my mouth out. “Need to be back in bed, is all. With you, if you can still stand me.”
He steered me out of the bathroom. We stood together by the bed for a moment. Then he took off his coat and shoes and pushed me in ahead of him. He wrapped me up in that bony, long-limbed embrace of his, perfect and unique in all the world, rearranging me to fit. At last heat woke up in me, a flickering serpent coiling up my spine. “Piers, what the hell’s going on? I saw them. I touched them. They were playing Elbow, for God’s sake. ‘Station Approach.’”
“Try not to
think about it now. Thank God, you’re warming up a bit.”
“Back in the land of the living.”
“That’s right. Just hang on to me.”
I did. I slept for hours, and when I woke in the twilit room I was warm as toast, my arm still clamped tight round his waist. He was looking down on me in amusement. “Hello, Rip van Lowden.”
I grunted. My neck was stiff. I hadn’t moved a muscle, and apparently neither had he, except at some point to produce from somewhere a small brown paper bag, which he was waving gently in front of my eyes. “Hi,” I muttered. “I must have been crushing you. What’s that?”
“My ploy to distract you the second you woke up.”
I did my best to let it work. If I didn’t, I would have to start thinking, with God knew what results this time. I took the package from him cautiously. “Is it a book?”
“What else is there ever any point in getting you? It’s not a Christmas present as such. I bought it months ago, then I wasn’t sure about giving it to you. I know how you feel about medieval fol-de-rol.”
“Why now?”
“I’ve been carrying it round in my pocket. And now just feels like a good time.”
The book was exquisite. I sat up a little, leaning against Piers, holding it reverently. It was a beautiful fit to my hands. Gilded leather, worn to silky delicacy with age. The cover plate was a wafer-thin piece of enamel work. Its background was a starry midnight sky, and in the foreground two horsemen rode their chargers at full pelt through glimmering snow. Tales from the Quests, the volume was called, by an author I’d never encountered. I had thought I knew them all, wearily, inside out and backwards. “My God. Where did you get this?”
“Close to home, weirdly enough. The second-hand dealer’s round the corner from your flat.”
“What—Bill’s Books?” I couldn’t believe it. “Bill’s idea of literary gold is a first-edition Harold Robbins.”
“I know. But one day there it was, spoiling the line of his Jeffrey Archers. I almost didn’t get it. I was afraid it was a kid’s book or something.”
Only if the kid concerned was a Persian prince. My fingers felt sticky and unworthy, so I laid the book down on my lover’s beautiful breast and eased it open. There were thirteen chapters in it, each one an untold story of the Round Table knights. They seemed to want to show themselves to me, pages parting at my touch to illustrations as dynamic and unique as the cover. There they all were—Gawaine and his brothers; Parsifal, Arthur and Lancelot and Guinevere. Their dress was medieval but the author had taken his tales out of Camelot and placed them in the wildwood, on beaches, lonely clifftops, circles of stone. I leaned across Piers’ body and kissed the rib that shielded his heart. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t have to say anything, love.”
“I’m sorry I was ever such a hardarse that I made you think I wouldn’t want this.”
“I’m glad you do.”
“Piers, before I left—just before I left his house on Christmas morning, he called me Gawaine. Arthur did. It was only once, and it was like he hadn’t meant to, but I heard.” I closed the precious book and spread my hand out on it, my fingertips touching Piers’ skin, as if contact with both of them could spare me from the avalanche of questions and fears waiting poised in my mind. “What the hell happened to me?”
“If I try to answer that, will you listen through to the end?” I nodded, and he pulled the duvet up and drew me close to him again. “Come here, then. Here’s the first thing. I want you to talk to a doctor and get a referral for a CAT scan. That’s nothing new—I’ve wanted to tell you that for ages. You’re getting too many headaches and you’re taking too many pills. Now…you listen, Gav, because for what it’s worth I don’t believe the things you saw and felt were anything to do with a medical condition or with drugs. I believe you met the ghosts of Hallow Hill. If that makes me as crazy as you are, they’ll just have to lock us up together.”
The ghosts of Hallow Hill… Why did it help, that Piers had found a name for them? It pushed the whole experience a little farther away from me, gave me breathing space. “He kept asking me—Arthur did—if I was his rescue, if he’d really saved my life.”
“Did the guy at the rescue station tell you how they died?”
“Just that they were trying to save a kid. But Lance told me the whole story. Some of their equipment failed, and this kid dropped right down into a crevasse where they couldn’t reach him. The caves were getting dangerous and the team was ordered out. But Art couldn’t give up on the kid. He went back down on his own and Lance followed him.” I paused, trying to fill in the gap, grasp the missing tail of Lance’s story. “He never… Oh God. He never told me how they got out.”
“Maybe saving you paid Arthur’s debt. Maybe after that he could go.”
I rested my brow on his shoulder. I listened to the slow, steady thump of his heart. I’d been about to start a sentence which began, but Catholics don’t believe, and I was done with those. His capacity for faith was the one thing holding me out of the abyss. He wasn’t credulous. He was open and strong. I kissed the satiny hollow under his collar bone. “You believe me?”
“Absolutely. I’m serious about the doctor, too. Did you take in that bit?”
“Yes. I’ll do it.”
The phone rang. I put out a hand to joggle the receiver and cut the line, but the ringing started again straight away. I couldn’t take my eyes off Piers, couldn’t look away from the serene benediction of his gaze. Blindly I picked up. “Yeah. Hello?”
“Room 131? I’ve got a call for you, a Charlie Evans from Newcastle university.”
“Charlie…” For a moment I couldn’t place the name. Before I could ask the receptionist to take a message—and anyway it wasn’t that kind of hotel—she had put him through. My tame metallurgist from the university lab, of course. I’d forgotten all about him. “Hi, Charlie. Can I call you back? It’s not a good—”
“Never is a good time for bad news,” he interrupted me cheerfully. “Sorry, mate. I’m on the fly. But I just wanted to tell you, in case you were building any grand theories on it—that sword of yours isn’t ancient. Seventeenth century, maybe even later. It’s not Excalibur.”
“Wow. Club my dreams to death, why don’t you?”
“Oh dear. Are you very gutted?”
“No. I’m fine. Thanks for doing the work, mate. I’ll see you next term.”
I hung up. Piers was watching me in concern. I found a smile for him. “There goes the sword from the lake.”
“Oh, was that the lab?”
“Yeah. Late medieval, not Iron Age at all. Not, as Charlie kindly pointed out, Excalibur.”
“You had a lot of your thesis riding on that, didn’t you?”
“I’ll have to do a bit of a rewrite. It really doesn’t matter, love. Doesn’t matter at all.”
Something woke me in the early hours. My head was full of restless ideas, visions of rescue men and knights in shining armour. I got out of bed, careful not to disturb Piers. He’d turned out a very fast learner. My flesh was still singing from the depth and sweetness of his penetration, and God, could he ever make it last—I’d been wailing, clutching my pillow and trying not to have a heart attack by the time he’d finished with me. He was flat out on his front now, his fingers twitching with dreams. I eased the duvet up round his shoulders and gently touched his hair.
I lit the remains of a couple of candles and carried them over to the dressing table where I’d been working. I sat down and began to leaf through my thesis proposal.
A bit of a rewrite wasn’t going to cut it at all. Scrap it and start over would be better, and I didn’t have time, let alone any ideas. I’d been building Camelot on sand. There wasn’t enough evidence to prove my beloved King Arthur’s historical reality and probably there never would be. Why had I been so desperate to deny that? I’d started altering the facts, slanting the way I presented them, to fit my theory, unforgivable for an academic. I coul
d see that now.
My first chapter wasn’t bad. All I’d done there was lay out a plan to look at why the legend meant so much to so many people. It was rather stiff and disapproving in its tone. I couldn’t accept the beauty and deep inner truth of a legend without facts to back it up, and therefore nor should anyone else. I felt as if the person who had written those stringent, bitter pages had died and been reborn, wiped clean and clueless.
Still, there were some good ideas in there. I extracted the chapter and set the rest aside. It would be a hell of a thing, to admit to myself after all this time that I’d been barking up the wrong tree. But I was a folklorist, not a historian. My business was the making of myth, myth as an end in itself. Why did so many people revere and love the Arthur legend still? Like Piers, I was involved in the mysteries, the necessities, of faith.
The pen he had given me lay gleaming in the candlelight. It had run out, I remembered. I knew that if I tried it now it would work. I took a long look in the mirror. My own reflection didn’t trigger in me my usual discontent, and anyway I was now much more interested in what lay beyond it. My beautiful lover, a knight who’d discarded his armour and fallen asleep in the forest. Someone to guard with my life.
Tales from the Quests was lying on the dressing table where I’d carefully placed it, well out of range of KY and sweat. Its gilding flickered and gleamed. Oddly I could make out its detail more clearly in this light than I’d been able to by the bright bedside lamp. The cover image had a title, delicately lettered in black ink. “Gawaine and Parsifal Ride into Battle.”
Gawaine, Art had called me. Gawaine and Piers de Val.
I picked up the pen and began to write.
Epilogue
I had a strange start to the New Year. Piers and I ended up outside my family home, not his, on New Year’s Day, staring at my dad’s neglected front garden and wondering if it was even worth ringing the bell. Before I could decide—and Piers had been right; some sort of decision, some sort of confrontation, was crucial to my long-term mental health—a car pulled up over the road and my eldest brother got out. The sinking in my stomach turned out not to be necessary. For once he was pleased to see me. I put him into perspective, he said, looking Piers up and down. He too had thought the New Year a good time to try for a visit and an introduction, and I didn’t understand what he meant until his beautiful black girlfriend got out of the car and stood smiling nervously on the pavement beside him.
