Pendragon's Heir

by Suzannah Rowntree

  Blanchefleur felt the texture of wool, smelled lanolin, rubbed oil against her fingers. All of it familiar. “This is Sir Gareth’s cloak. The one he gave you, because you were cold…”

  “That was the way of it. O Gareth! Ever the truest friend, laughing and loyal and incapable of a lie.” Her voice ebbed and flowed with a rhythm that was all the expression she would allow of her grief. “And Gaheris. For whom shall I mourn first? The nine orphaned babes? The cold Queen of Orkney in her childless age? Gawain, titanic in love as in war?” She took a breath. “Or reeling Logres and her stricken King?”

  Arthur. Blanchefleur’s fingers tightened on the cloak. “How is he?”

  The Queen’s voice turned from elegy to flat distaste. “Barely the man I knew. You would think Mordred King now.”

  Blanchefleur remembered what Perceval had said of the Queen and Mordred. “He’s one of the King’s counsellors?”

  “Worse,” said the Queen, “one of his relations. Agravain is another. God knows what put it into that young man’s head to accuse me. He had not the wit to do it maliciously, I think. But who egged him to it?”

  “Could he have been truly mistaken?”

  The Queen shook her head. “I never sent Sir Lancelot that ring, but a page brought it to him and he came at once. The page is a boy ten years old. Ten! All he could tell us was that a veiled lady gave him the ring. It was certainly mine. The boy cannot have been dishonest, and I, I never sent the ring. Another must have stolen it and given it to him. A woman certainly took part.”

  “Morgan?”

  “I can think of no other.” Arms folded, she was drumming again against her arm. “But the Queen of Gore has kept silence for months, and the new men of the Table have never had to do with her malice or her cunning. She is already half a story to them. My guilt was more credible.”

  She seemed to become aware of her jumping fingers, and dropped her arms to her sides, and spoke almost to herself. “What now? I should have died this morning, and with my death, as it was meant, the Table might have healed. But so long as I am alive, men will fight for me. Sir Lancelot makes pretty speeches, but he would never allow me to return to the King.”

  “Surely he has good reason,” said Blanchefleur. “You don’t really wish to be burned, do you?”

  Guinevere glanced up at her sharply. “Yes.”

  Blanchefleur blinked.

  The Queen moved with all the unhurried grace that marked her lightest motion: untying the cord at her shift’s neck, stripping it from her body, stepping into the water. Her words were equally slow, equally clear.

  “The Table is broken. The Table was broken the moment Lancelot blooded his sword in my chamber. And with the Table is broken the heart of the most glorious king of the earth. O Arthur! Better to die than to see such a lord destroyed on my account.”

  BLANCHEFLEUR WENT OUT BEARING HER MOTHER’S grimed shift and the cloak of Sir Gareth. As she paused in the great hall, looking for a servant to show her to the laundry, Sir Lancelot intercepted her.

  “What of the Queen?”

  “She is resting.”

  “I am glad to hear it.”

  Blanchefleur said: “What now? The King is not going to let you make off with her like that, is he?”

  There was a wry twist in the corner of his mouth. “I have defied the King with force of arms. There can only be one response. By nightfall I will know when I may expect to receive him before my gates.”

  “The Queen spoke of going back to him—”

  “Not to be thought of.”

  “No. Certainly not if she is innocent. But that must be proved, and there must be a reconciliation. If that is what we want, is it wise for the two of us to remain here?”

  Sir Lancelot shook his head. “I fear if she is found elsewhere, she will be taken and burned.”

  “It wouldn’t soften him?”

  “It might have, once.”

  Blanchefleur looked up at him in mute distress.

  “A man changes when he loses all the things that define him.”

  She pressed her lips together. “Even the King?”

  Sir Lancelot looked down on her from his great height and said, “Even the King.”

  Tears itched in her throat. So many had lost so many things today. She stepped back and said, “How can I find Sir Perceval?”

  “He is resting in one of the chambers. My steward will tell you which.”

  She curtseyed, trying to move with her mother’s slow grace, and went to find the laundry. Perceval probably wished to be alone, she thought, to spend the worst of his sorrow in secret and present a stout face to the world. But it was hard to know he was so close, in so much pain. It was hard to have no right to go to him.

  Branwen found her by the doorway into the laundry, staring into unbidden memories. She stood in her dream again and saw the fire, the fog, the gentle face of the man she now knew as Gareth. Then the memory was gone, and she was standing in the doorway in La Joyeuse Gard, and the shaft of thin morning sun coming in the window was barely four hours older than the light in her dream.

  Branwen said, “You must still be tired. Go and rest.”

  Blanchefleur shook her head. “I will not sleep. Let us find work to do.”

  JOYEUSE GARD FILLED WITH PEOPLE ALL that day. Ox-carts trundled over the drawbridge with women and children huddled on top of their possessions and men trudging behind. Animals flowed bleating or lowing into the courtyard pens. In the smithy three men worked through the day making last-minute repairs to arms and weapons.

  When Blanchefleur went into the hall for supper she found the room humming with new arrivals. More trestles had been put up and benches found to seat all the people.

  She hesitated in the doorway and looked in vain for the Queen, or for any man she might recognise apart from Sir Lancelot, who sat in a cluster of strange knights at the high table.

  She turned to Branwen, about to suggest that they eat with the Queen, when a dragging step sounded in the passage and she saw Perceval leaning on Heilyn. He had bathed and changed to a soft clean leather jerkin and linen breeches. Against the left side of his head the hair stuck up in unruly tufts as though he had fallen asleep while it dried plastered between head and pillow.

  He said no word, but letting go of Heilyn bowed and offered his hand and led her up to the dais, limping heavily on his bruised leg. Before she sat, Blanchefleur caught his eye and smiled at him, trying to show some of the sympathy she felt. Perceval returned the smile, but tightly and distantly, as though he had no intention of letting her be concerned with his grief.

  When she took her seat, silence fell on the table, and Sir Lancelot stood and lifted his cup. “Heir of Logres,” he said in a voice loud enough for all his men to hear, “be welcomed. You are among true and loyal men.”

  She bowed from her seat and said, “Sir, I know it.”

  She was a little surprised when the knights around Lancelot drifted over and knotted around her. Perceval presented them to her: Sir Lionel, Sir Hector, Sir Alisander le Orphelin, Sir Pertisant. With the older knights, Lionel and Hector, Lancelot’s kin, she could speak easily and graciously, but she had seen the younger ones smiling and whispering the night before. Tonight they were full of charm and laughter. She kept her guard up.

  Elsewhere at the high table it was a quiet and sombre meal, full of talk of the war. She heard Sir Lionel say, “Of course Sir Gawain will be commanding the Table”—and she looked at Perceval, and wondered if he felt the same pang of foreboding. What hope had they, fighting against lords, fathers, and brothers? Victory or defeat would bear the same grief.

  A stir at the doorway. A mailed step on the pavement. Sir Perceval rose from his feet and Blanchefleur looked up to see a man she recognised: Sir Bors, with grimy foam on his boots.

  “Bors!” Perceval called, and the air was thick with cries of welcome. But before he would touch his food he told his news.

  “The King called his council—all five that were left
. Alas, cousin, that you slew the brothers of Orkney! Sir Gawain is furious beyond measure. We heard he went for horse and armour after you left, meaning to ride after and challenge you to combat. Sir Ironsides managed to get to him in time. They say that at the council even Sir Mordred could not slide a word in edgewise. No one else tried.”

  “And the King?” Sir Lancelot asked.

  “Seemed to revive when he knew the Queen was safely away. But I cannot tell if he is angry or pleased. It is agreed with Gawain that he must besiege La Joyeuse Gard—so Mordred told me, and sent me to bring word that the King will come soon. Not so soon as Gawain would like, but before Sunday.”

  Slowly, Lancelot nodded. Blanchefleur stared at her trencher. She had hoped, against all hope, that the King would take some other course of action. The news seemed to drag them all one step closer to some terrible doom.

  “You may defeat him,” Sir Bors said. “There are yet more of the Table to declare for you and come to Joyeuse Gard.”

  Lancelot spoke sharply. “Declare for me? This is a private quarrel. I do not challenge the High King for his throne.”

  “You challenged his justice, which is the same thing.”

  “It was no justice at all, and that shall I prove upon the body of any who denies it. The King should know I had no choice. I had been a false knight had I done elsewise.”

  “Many may see it otherwise, even here, fair coz,” said Sir Lionel. “If you wish to know how many, ask your friends here who they will have for king.”

  Sir Bors lifted his hands and said: “I am for Arthur. I am only here to defend true justice and to fight for whoever will champion it. But even if the Queen is proven innocent, cousin, your high-handedness has carried you into enmity with the King. What of Sir Clarrus, whom you slew on the threshold of the Queen’s chamber? What of Gareth and Gaheris, who died this morning? None of them cold murder, I grant you, but Sir Gawain may certainly claim the right of a kinsman to see that blood avenged.”

  Sir Lancelot shook his head. “We will treat. There will be no fighting, so long as the King’s grace is pleased to acknowledge his Queen.”

  After the meal Blanchefleur tugged on Perceval’s sleeve.

  “Come away,” she whispered. “I want to speak with you.”

  She took him to her chamber, where she had sent Branwen to kindle a fire and mull wine. While the damsel whispered with Heilyn in the doorway, Blanchefleur turned to Perceval pleadingly.

  “You should leave. Go back to your father at Camelot now, before it is too late. Bury your kin. Do not join Lancelot in his quarrel.”

  “It is already too late,” he said. “I have lifted my hand against my King and must wait, with the rest, for his judgement.”

  “Surely your father will intercede for you.”

  “It is possible that he will.”

  She stared at him in amazement. “Is it possible that he will not?”

  Perceval looked at his cup, brows crammed down hard over his eyes. “You heard Sir Bors say he would have ridden after Lancelot to fight him. Lancelot, his dearest friend in the world.”

  “All the more reason to leave this place! You mustn’t be here when he comes.”

  “I cannot leave,” he said after a long pause.

  “Why? Why not?”

  “I have a trust here which I cannot abandon,” Perceval said, and bowed his head toward her.

  She snatched off the ring on her hand and held it out to him. “I release you from your service to me. Take the ring and go.”

  He kept his head bent. “You may release me. Your father did not.”

  “My father?” She rushed on: “Then I’ll go. We’ll both go. It was a mistake to come here.”

  Perceval spoke slowly, as if battling to think clearly. “My father said you were best here…And after yesterday, with Sir Odiar, with the murder outside Astolat, I know he was right.”

  The words slurred and jostled one another with weariness. Silently, Blanchefleur reproached herself. Aloud she said, “Oh, Perceval, it isn’t fair of me to push you on this today. But please think about it.”

  He nodded as if only half hearing her words, and set his cup down untasted on a table. “I will. Good night.”

  He limped to the door. Blanchefleur said, “Perceval.”

  “Yes?”

  “I am so sorry about your kinsmen. I cannot imagine—oh, Perceval.”

  She had never known Gaheris or Gareth, so it was foolish to stand there with the tears rolling down her cheeks when Perceval, who had both known and loved them, stood looking at her with dry and stoical eyes. Yet behind them she could see that he was in pain, half-dazed with grief and in despair for the shattered heart of Logres. Worst of all was the certain knowledge that she could have spared him.

  “It’s my fault. I knew something terrible was about to happen. I could have prevented it.”

  He stared at her blankly and at last said: “Perhaps, and perhaps not. Do not spend tears on it. Good night.”

  He went out and Blanchefleur listened wretchedly to his limping steps fade away down the passage.

  31

  And terms of ransom they have laughed,

  And truce to haughty scorn;

  For dead to do Sir Launcelot

  The fierce Gawayne hath sworn.

  Buchanan

  ON THE SECOND MORNING AFTER HER arrival the Queen asked to speak to Sir Lancelot and he came at once to her chamber where Blanchefleur, Branwen, and two other damsels of Joyeuse Gard sat in silence. Blanchefleur had raided the castle’s little library of books and distracted herself with these, but not all the others had the same learning, and boredom had settled upon them like a cloud as they watched the Queen sleep or sit for brief intervals staring out her window with her prayer-book drooping from her hand. Yet she never dismissed them, she never spent a moment alone, and Blanchefleur guessed why. They were her guard: witnesses for later inquiry, to speak to her conduct.

  The Queen did not rise from her chair by the window when Sir Lancelot came, and she began without formality. “Sir knight, you have once again earned my most hearty thanks, and saved me from a shameful death.”

  From his place a step or two inside the open door, Lancelot bowed.

  “Yet in preserving my life you have done deeds of violence against Logres. Now on my account a rift has opened within the Table, and while I live I fear it cannot be healed.”

  A sinew flexed stubbornly at the corner of Lancelot’s jaw. “As long as you live, there is hope that your name may be restored with honour.”

  The Queen shook her head. “Do you think this is a matter of grace given on the field of battle? I was found guilty by the Table, not vanquished in combat. To redeem my name I must be acquitted as I was condemned, by the Table—and in snatching me from the flames, I fear you have but sealed their verdict.”

  “There is another way, if the King can be persuaded to take it,” said Lancelot. “The Table found you guilty, but the sentence was passed by the King. He has the right to overlook your punishment. Let him cool from his first despair and his wrath against you. When he remembers the old days, he will take you back.”

  “He?” A faint red stain burned on her pale cheekbones. “Shall the High King of Logres stand before the world, cowed by an erring wife he has not the will to punish? No! If I cannot have my name cleared in the eyes of the world, let me submit myself to his justice.” Each word whispered like a knife. “He would have repented of it soon enough. I would have been a martyr, instead of—what I am.”

  How like her, thought Blanchefleur with an itch of resentment, to think first and always of appearances.

  “I will see you quitted,” said Lancelot, passing a weary hand across his eyes. “Until then, I beg you, wait patiently. All that I have is yours.”

  “Let it outweigh the treasures of Ind; I would not take it. Not all the wealth in the world could console me for what I have lost.”

  It was Lancelot’s turn to go red. “Despise me if you wish,” h
e said. “Perhaps I deserve it. But had I not ridden to your aid, some other gentleman would have. And you would be in his castle, if not mine. And he would be preparing to lay down life, spurs, and honour in your defence, if not I. Be kind to me for his sake.”

  The Queen ducked her head, staring at her hands. At last, more gently, she said, “I do you wrong, my friend. But now that I am stronger, and have my wits about me, I do not wish to remain here. Let me go away to some nunnery, and send word to the King. He will do as he will. I do not think he will kill me.”

  Lancelot’s mouth was a thin straight line. “No one will leave the castle,” he said, and pointed to the window. “Look down the road to Camelot.”

  “What is it?” breathed the Queen, turning to see. But even Blanchefleur knew what the answer would be.

  “The King is coming,” said Lancelot.

  THE ARMY FROM CAMELOT HAD GATHERED quickly and travelled in haste. It was small, just over half the knights of the Table and their followers, everyone who was not out questing or behind the walls of Joyeuse Gard.

  But these were the best knights of the world, and Blanchefleur knew that not a man within the walls of Joyeuse Gard looked on them without disquiet as they pitched camp before the castle walls. Sir Lancelot, she knew, hoped to avoid a battle, and she added her prayers to his hopes.

  Early that afternoon there came the note of a trumpet from below, and the other damsels in the Queen’s chamber flocked to the window. Almost at once, Branwen wheeled to Blanchefleur. “Come and see.”

  The others fell back at her approach, and through the window she saw a small body of knights riding out from the camp of the army of Britain. Above them floated a banner she knew, the red dragon banner of Arthur of which she had dreamed as a child. Below, clearly to be seen, shone the gules and gold she knew so well, so that for a moment she thought it was Perceval himself.

  Her throat went dry at the bravery of their show. “Are they attacking?” she asked.