“This is Masters Elias and Savaric,” Arthur said. “Allow me to introduce Queen Ygierne, my mother.”
“Your majesty,” the boys said in unison, bowing again.
“My son tells me that you have some keys in your possession,” she said.
“Yes, your majesty.”
“May I see them?”
Savaric put his hand into the special pocket of his cloak and pulled them out. He dropped them into her outstretched hand. The keys clinked together as they fell into her hand, making a sweet, bell-like sound. She closed her hand quickly, stopping the sound abruptly. Transferring one key to the other hand, she looked at them each in turn.
“Hmmm. Very finely made. Very old. These were not made in this land, but far away across the seas. Arthur, remember that they sing together. That may be important later.”
She turned toward the boys. “To answer your question, yes, there is something magical about me, as you put it. But it is not for you to know more of or to speak of,” she said sternly. Her cool stare burned again on their chests, this time more intently with her proximity. “Ever.”
The two boys nodded their heads. “Yes, your majesty,” they said in unison again.
“Return to your seats, your food is served.” She held out the keys. “Your keys.”
Savaric gingerly took them from her hand, and they backed away from the throne.
They ate the meal in silence, not even glancing at each other. When they stood up from the table, a maid came to their side and silently led them to a bedchamber.
They removed their outer clothing and got into their beds without speaking. Elias blew out the lantern they had been left, and darkness descended on the room.
“Savaric, do you think she—”
“Not a word, Elias. She’ll know.”
“But, what—”
Savaric sat up in bed, pushing aside the covers abruptly. “Do you really want someone … something like her mad at you for not doing what she said, within minutes of when she told you?”
After a long silence, Elias’s small voice said, “No.”
“Good.” Savaric flopped back into bed. Another long silence.
“Savaric.”
“What?”
“Your task will befall your swords?”
“Yes, I know. But we have knights with us. We just have to stay alert and be ready with our knives. WE don’t even have swords, remember?”
“You’re right. Yes, of course. And you have a cudgel.”
“Yes, a cudgel…”
A fist banged loudly on the door. “Open up,” a gruff voice shouted.
The boys bounded out of bed and across the room. They opened the door to a very stern-looking Gawaine standing in the hall, his arms folded across his great chest and his legs wide.
“Sir Gawaine…”
“His majesty orders that you stay in your bedchamber until you are summoned in the morning. A guard is going to be posted at your door and will be assigned to you during the day.”
“But, why?” said Elias. “We haven’t done anything…”
“You do not question a royal order—wrong or right—you just follow it.” Sir Gawaine glared down at them, huffing through his thick beard. Elias and Savaric just stared at him, cowed by his appearance. Sir Gawaine hesitated, seemed ready to say something, and hesitated again.
“It’s for your safety,” he said finally. He turned his back and walked quickly down the hall. The guard looked over at them, nodded, and positioned himself by the door, looking straight ahead.
Savaric quietly closed and locked the door. “Well, that should make you feel better.”
Elias stared at him, his eyes huge. “We’re important enough to be assigned our own knight.”
“Yes. I guess you can look at it that way, can’t you. Come on, let’s go to sleep.”
It didn’t take long for the boys to fall into a deep sleep, knowing they were being carefully watched over.
CHAPTER 25
The next day, they traveled through low rolling hills covered in short grass. An occasional twisted tree dotted the landscape. They traveled quietly; the only sounds were the creaking of the leather saddles, a horse nickering, or the occasional bright metallic ting of sword and scabbard tapping stirrups. Periodically, they stopped and waited while a scout went ahead or up a hill to see if anything approached them. An uneasy pall settled over the group as they waited, the horses stamping their feet and shaking their heads impatiently.
Savaric looked over at their appointed knight, making sure he was still close. The alertness of the knights, the quick and constant glances all around, said that everyone had the unsettling sense that something evil lingered close by, or that something bad was about to happen, but no one acknowledged it. They kept moving ahead, slowed by wearing their armor, not stopping to eat or rest, but instead eating pasties from their saddlebags as they rode on.
In the late afternoon, as the sun shone directly into their eyes, they came to a valley with steep rock cliffs on each side. The valley floor was dotted with smooth mounds covered in grass, looking like several dozen gigantic turtles had gone into a deep and ancient sleep, succumbing as the grasses grew heedlessly over them.
The horses neighed nervously. One horse reared up, almost unseating the knight. “Whoa, there, Basker. Settle,” the knight said soothingly. The group continued to pick their way around the mounds.
Savaric looked ahead into the sun to the other end of the valley, desperately wishing to be out of this strange and heavy-feeling place. As he looked, it seemed as if the sun grew brighter. He blinked and squinted, raising his hand to his face.
“Did you see …” Savaric began.
“That,” Elias finished.
“Yes,” their knight said quickly as he reached for the sword strapped to his back.
The group stopped, watching as the bright light faded a bit, then turned into sparkling specks of light that faded as they fell to the ground. When their eyes adjusted and they could see again, Morgain stood there, backed by a pulsing white light. Her silvery ice-blue dress seemed to float around her as if she were under water. A tall crown sat on her head, sparkling with diamonds and sapphires.
All around him, Savaric heard the metallic sound of swords being unsheathed.
“Arthur,” she called out. “Give it to me.” Her voice sounded like she breathed water, not air, and came from all directions around them instead of from the direction where she stood. The knights looked all around, confused.
“A crown, Morgain? You’ve already crowned yourself!” Arthur called out, his voice breaking through the waves of her voice.
“So petty, Arthur. And so tiresome,” she said, sighing. “GIVE IT TO ME.” Her voice thundered, sounding like a monstrous wave roaring against the cliffs. Her features changed for a moment, her face stretching long and thin, and her eyes glowing with ice-cold fury.
Arthur’s horse danced, bouncing from side to side on the narrow path. “No,” he said firmly.
“I thought as much,” Morgain replied. She raised her arms, flicked her wand, and crossed her arms over her face. As her sleeves covered her face, the white light enveloped her again.
“Invictus palerama noctuorni,” she called out. The ground around them vibrated. “Consirat toka.” The ground shook ferociously, thrashing them up and down like an earthquake. Most of the knights were thrown from their horses and tried to get up to their hands and knees after landing on their backs. The rest remained on horseback, trying to calm their hysterical horses. “Arassai!”
Suddenly the earth began to crack, making fissures of brown earth in the green grass. The fissures quickly spread and then connected, ringing around the mounds in neat circles. With a burst of energy, the mounds burst out of their earthly tombs, raining dirt, grass, and stones through the air and pelting the king and his knights. A chorus of roars came from the mounds, sounding like a herd of prehistoric mammoths.
Savaric rushed over to his knight, his arms ra
ised in the air, trying to protect his head, but he was hit over and over again with the debris. Ducking under the knight’s shield, he looked back out at the terrifying scene.
With mounds of green grass still attached like turtle shells to their backs, an army of giants had been awakened from the earth. Their stocky bodies looked like they were made from boulders chiseled into the shape of arms, legs, and trunks. Their heads were made from one piece of craggy rounded rock, topped with a shock of bright green grass for hair. The sound of their cries vibrated the valley, and the ground shook as they stamped their feet, shaking off the remains of their captivity in the earth.
“Strikin volan!” Morgain called out.
Savaric watched in horror as the giants twirled clubs the size of pigs over their heads. The earth shook massively as they beat the ground with their clubs. A brave knight ran toward a giant, screaming a blood-curdling war cry. He raised his sword and brought it down on the shoulder of one of the giants. The dull sound of rock meeting metal rang out. The unharmed giant looked at his shoulder and then at the knight, an awful mocking expression on his face. He smiled, the opening of his mouth an ill-defined slash on his face. The knight backed away a half step, but not before the giant swung his club across the knight’s chest, knocking him seven or eight feet across the field. The knight landed on the ground, a crumpled heap of metal. The giant took two steps over to where the knight lay and swung again. Savaric watched, terrified and shocked, willing the knight to move. The knight did not move.
Suddenly Savaric became aware that this was just one part of a battle that was going on around him. Knights tried their best to stay out of the way of the lethal clubs by jumping and leaping, but were slowed and weighed down by their armor. A choking dust thickened the air, making it impossible to see more than five feet away. Savaric’s knight stood on full alert, his body crouched and ready to spring. He backed over closer to Savaric. “Try to move to the edge of the valley! Get out of the middle of this!” he shouted.
Savaric couldn’t even remember where the edge of the valley might be, and the dust in the air was too thick to see where it might be. He looked back at the knight and shouted, “Where?” The knight just pointed. Savaric looked in that direction and waited for a break in the fighting. Two sets of fighters pulled away from each other as they fought, and Savaric ran into the gap. As he ran he found himself directly in front of a lumbering giant who moved through the battlefield while looking off to his right.
Savaric ducked down and veered to the left between the giant and his club, brushing against the stony mass of his body. He didn’t look back to see if the giant had registered his presence, but he heard a loud roar close behind him. Within seconds, another smaller break opened off to his left and Savaric ran through it, jumping over a crumpled knight. As he came down, he landed on a rock and fell, scraping his hands and knees.
After a quick glance around him, hoping no giant noticed his vulnerability, he sprinted for the edge of the valley with all the speed he could muster. He made it to the cliff wall and put his hands out to stop himself. He turned around and looked out at the battlefield, his back pressed to the stone cliff. The air was heavy with the dust and clods of dirt. Through the haze, Savaric caught momentary glimpses of the stony giants and flashes of metal from the knights’ armor. Disembodied grunts and bellows of the men fighting came from all directions. At first it sounded like a distant voice yelling something unintelligible over and over, but after a few moments other voices joined in and the cry became louder and clearer.
“The joints! The joints! Weak at the joints!”
Savaric heard someone calling his name. “Here!” he replied, shouting as loud as he could. He shouted again. “It’s Savaric, I’m here!”
Within seconds the king emerged from the cloud of dust. The lower part of his armor was gone, as well as his helmet; only his breastplate remained—heavily dented and smeared with blood. A gash above his right eye poured blood over his face and into his eyes. He wiped his face with his sleeve to clear his vision, then walked powerfully over to where Savaric stood against the stone cliff.
“Your majesty, are you…”
“Yes, yes, I am well. Follow me.” The king turned north, his body crouched and alert, keeping close to the edge of the valley. They moved fast, jumping up to the top of boulders and sliding down the other side. When they reached the north end of the valley, they started to climb up the rock face to escape the valley.
“Watch where I put my hands and feet, and do the same.”
Savaric did his best to follow Arthur, but his arms and legs were shorter than his. As he jumped and stretched to the handholds, he missed and slid back down to a ledge only as wide as his foot.
Back from the battlefield a new cry was going up. “Neck, neck. Aim for the neck!”
Savaric turned back to the battlefield to look. One of the giants lumbered toward him, just a few feet away and closing quickly. He stopped and stamped his feet and roared, shaking the ground and vibrating small stones loose from the cliff, which rained down on Savaric’s head. Savaric turned back to the wall, trying desperately to find another handhold. The giant moved closer, reaching his boulder hands for Savaric’s feet. Suddenly he was pelted with even more pebbles as Arthur slid with lightning speed to his ledge and then down past him.
“Keep moving up!” he shouted as he went by.
Savaric looked again for a handhold and found one, then moved as swiftly as he could, ignoring his scraped hands and knees. He gained ten feet and came to another ledge, and turned around to face the valley, turning just in time to see the giant’s head fly off his neck and into the air, dirt streaming from the wound like gushing arterial blood.
Arthur turned away and scrambled up to where Savaric stood. He smiled, with just one side of his mouth twitching upward, a satisfied look on his face, then pushed on up the cliff without saying a word. Savaric followed and soon arrived at the top of the cliff, breathing hard. Arthur calmly surveyed the scene below.
Hands on his knees, Savaric tried to catch his breath and look back at the valley. The dust was beginning to clear. Crumpled heaps of armor and giant boulder-like arms and legs littered the ground. Dwarfed by the giants, the knights had learned to shed their armor to gain back their mobility. They now moved lithely around the giants, staying out of reach of the massive clubs, darting in and out like mosquitoes stabbing at the joints and necks of the lumbering giants.
“We need to help them! We must go back. Where’s Elias?” Savaric gasped. He looked back and forth over the valley, straining for a glimpse of Elias.
“This battle is already over, and we have won. We have to push forward now so that we can win the war,” Arthur replied calmly.
Savaric looked at the king and then back at the field, trying to comprehend what Arthur had decided. “Won? But what about all of them?” he said, gesturing to the fight still going on. “Elias?”
“We must go now, before we are missed. We only have this advantage for a few more minutes. Come,” he said. He turned and strode away.
Savaric looked at the battlefield for a second more, then followed.
CHAPTER 26
Savaric and the king walked for a short time and then came across one of the horses that had skittered away from the battlefield. After a careful approach and a bit of gentle persuasion, Arthur mounted the nervous horse and pulled Savaric up behind him. They rode at a quick pace to the north.
Arthur was driven and relentless, stopping only once for the rest of the day. Savaric could only see the back of Arthur’s mail byrnie and the rolling land and lakes as they rode by. He soon fell into a restless, jostled sleep. Hours later he woke up abruptly when he felt the horse slowing and heard Arthur muttering. The sun had almost set, and the gloaming lit the land around them with a eerie orange glow. The horse sidestepped and jostled its riders, uneasy.
“Where are we?”
“Banna is just a few miles away. We need to rest and hide for the night.”
“There’s a cottage over there. Why don’t we—”
“Two reasons. I don’t want to get too close to the lake and alert any possible water fairies. And two, I don’t want my subjects to know I’m passing through either. A cottage a mile away will know by an hour after sunset that the king is here. You can’t tell where loyalties may lie.”
Even before he had finished saying this, Arthur was already nudging the horse toward the straggling group of trees at the base of the cliff. Savaric glanced at the direction they were going, sighed, and dropped his head to Arthur’s back. “Another night out in the cold,” he said under his breath.
Arthur said nothing, but Savaric’s head bobbed a little bit on his back. Savaric realized that Arthur was laughing quietly and straightened up fast.
After skirting the cliff, they came to an indent where the cliff walls extended out on both sides, encircling a small patch of land. If anyone approached them, they would have to come through the forest first, and their backs faced the cliff. They would know if they were found. They shared a bit of bread stowed in the horse’s saddlebags.
“Since you’ve slept already you can take the first watch,” Arthur said. He pulled a blanket from the saddlebag around himself and looked asleep within minutes. Savaric stared at him and turned around, looking about in wonder and fear. The king had entrusted him with his life—with keeping watch. He paced back and forth across the opening of the enclosure and peeked into the forest and up the cliff, listening intently to every crack of trees in the forest, tweet of birds, and sigh of the wind.
The Secret Key of Pythagorum Page 16
