Guenevere, Queen of the Summer Country

by Rosalind Miles

  “We shall. We must! When these pagans are dazzled with the gold of other gods, we must have trophies of our own to wave before their eyes. So Avalon must be our goal.” He paused, and the face of Brother Boniface swam before his mind. “I have already given thought to this. I have sent to Rome for assistance with my plan.” For a handsome youth, as dark as Boniface is fair, he wanted to say, but refrained. For a lusty lad with that special light in his eye. Who may be vowed to Christ, but whose purity can be sacrificed to win us Avalon. Who will spend the rest of life under the whip, in tears and penance for his broken vows, but who will give us the way to the Lady that we need. Either he or Boniface should catch the old whore’s eye. After that, it will be up to others to drive the advantage home.

  “There is also the King.” Brother John broke in on his thoughts. “This Arthur, if he survives. We supported his proclamation; we should be able to gain some help from him.”

  “We will, Brother, we will. We have done much in this benighted land, and we shall reap our reward.” The Abbot folded his hands. “And God is with us,” he said confidently. “He will deliver these pagans into our hands.”

  ON THE DAY of the battle the sun was slow to rise. Roaming about the tent, Arthur went to the entrance again and again, searching the heavens for the morning star. From the camp bed where she lay, Guenevere watched him wearily, and felt again a soreness around her heart. Death and war, war and death, instead of new love and the first sweet steps of their life together—why did this have to be? “Arthur!” she called.

  He turned and came to her, leaning over the bed. She stroked his chest, her body still remembering the strained and hasty love he had offered her last night. She took his face between her hands and drew him down to kiss his anxious eyes. “Fear not, my love. What will be is written in the stars. And we are ready to meet the will of the Great Ones, whatever they decree.”

  NOW, AS SHE looked down on the battlefield, Guenevere asked herself again, were they right to march out to meet King Lot, or should they have drawn him south and waited for him to attack?

  Arthur had sworn that he would not let his enemy set foot in the Middle Kingdom. Still less should they fall back to the Summer Country and find themselves cornered in Camelot. So they had rallied their troops and marched due north to the kingdom of Gore. On his borders, said King Ursien, lay the plain and the Forest of Bedegraine. There on the plain, with the forest at their back and a range of hills ahead, they could take their stand and do battle with King Lot.

  Long days of marching and nights of broken rest had brought them here at last. Soon the scouts were bringing back warning of King Lot’s approach. An army was coming, so vast, the outriders said, that all the earth shook under their tramping feet. Then their torches had burned late into the night as they hammered out their campaign.

  When you are grown, you will lead battles from a high hilltop where you can command, her mother the Queen had said. And you will have a champion, but he will fight for you in the field, not beside you in the war chariot as we used to do. So Guenevere had armed Arthur with her own hands. She had strapped on her mother’s scabbard to keep him safe, and as she buckled Excalibur to his side, she had offered a prayer for victory and a long-drawn-out kiss. Watching now from her chariot on the hill, Guenevere would command more of the battle, she knew, than those fighting on the plain below.

  Now their forces were assembling in the precise formations they had planned out hour after weary hour. To her left and right, a dozen gallopers stood poised to carry her orders to the commanders in the field. Below her, Arthur, Lucan, King Ursien, and King Pellinore commanded the four main divisions of the attacking force. But many others had rallied to their banner too. When the messengers had ridden out, sounding the trysting horn to the cry of “Pendragon!,” kings, lords, and fighting men had answered the call.

  They came from the north, south, and west, lords, knights, and men-at-arms. They came from the far islands of Man and Wight and Mona, to fight beside silent Shetlanders and bands of laughing giants from the Island of the West—laughing only until battle began, Arthur said, and then even their looks would kill. Men came from the east too, even from the threatened Saxon shore. They abandoned their fight against the invading Northmen in favor of Arthur’s war against the enemy within. All came for the memory of King Uther, to honor his dead name.

  And then there were Uther’s old allies from France, King Ban and King Bors from the kingdom of Benoic. These two brothers had crossed the sea from Little Britain with their three young sons to honor their former bond of friendship with the High King. Lean, handsome men speaking broken English in the endearing accent of the French, they made one bow to Guenevere with their bright eyes and quicksilver smiles, and she warmed to them for life.

  King Pellinore had raised his forces too, and five divisions took to the field under the banner of Listinoise. And from the far northern kingdom of Terre Foraine came King Pellinore’s brother Pelles, with all his men.

  With his son Lamorak at his side, King Pellinore had presented Pelles to Guenevere with rough pride, but a certain constraint, too. “Greet my brother, Your Majesty, I beg?”

  Guenevere had stepped forward smiling, but at the sight of King Pelles she had felt a sudden chill. Lean as a skeleton, his bony frame seemed to rattle inside his armor, and his sunken face and bloodless skin had the clammy pallor often seen in men on the point of death. In his moribund body, only his eyes showed any signs of life. Buried deep in their bony sockets, they blazed with a fanatic’s fire.

  “Welcome, my lord,” Guenevere said heartily, “for your dear brother’s sake. King Arthur and I are most grateful for your aid in this war. And may all your Gods fight with you under your banner, and protect you in the field.”

  “There is only one God, and Jesus is His name!” the King responded, glaring into her eyes.

  “Now, Pelles,” said Pellinore with a warning cough. He turned to Guenevere. Embarrassment was written on his face. “My brother has had a great trial in his life, my lady. It was given to him to love only one lady in all his days. She died giving birth to their only child.” The loving glance Pellinore threw at Lamorak here told Guenevere the rest of Pelles’s tale—he’d never had a son.

  “My wife was sainted among women!” Pelles cried in the same high tone. “Her father was the first king in these islands to declare for the One God. She was silence and submission and virtue itself to me. But for my sins, God chose to punish me with her death. And I live in prayer and fasting ever since.”

  “But the child survived, a beauty, like her mother,” Pellinore went on warmly. “Her name is Elaine. And through her, my brother believes that he will have a destiny higher than that of other men. It has been foretold to him that his grandson will be the noblest knight in all the world.”

  “But only if she comes untainted to the bridal bed!” King Pelles interjected feverishly. His pallid face took on an unhealthy flush. “She must be known to no man except one. The best knight of our time will come to her and father her Christ-given son. This boy is fated to do the work of God. His name shall be called Galahad, the servant of the Lord!”

  Guenevere felt a spurt of wild distaste. So Pelles refused thigh-freedom to his daughter, in pursuit of this mad dream? “Where is she now?” she said, watching King Pelles with mounting unease.

  “Safe in my castle of Corbenic!” He laughed, an unpleasant sound. “She lives like a princess in a golden chamber, inside a silver tower, within a wall of bronze. She is secured behind three locks, each with a different key, each in the care of a different lord of mine, until the knight comes who is fated to father her peerless child!”

  “How so?” Guenevere queried grimly. “How can her child become the noblest knight in the world? How can he be nobler than all we have here? And how can she meet the knight who will be her love?”

  “It shall be as it has been told to me!” Pelles insisted wildly. “Hear me, Your Majesty …” He was still protesting as Pellinore led
him away.

  Guenevere repressed a shudder of anger and shock. “The poor girl’s a prisoner!” she said to Ina afterward. “And all for the sake of her wretched virginity!”

  Ina had nodded vigorously. “That’s what comes, madam, when the rule of the Mother is overthrown, and women find themselves under the sway of men. Why, the girl could be with us now, riding to war in a silver chariot, instead of being locked up to wait for the mystery man!”

  The mystery man.

  Would a lover ever come for poor Elaine? Or was she doomed to live forever as a virgin in a tower?

  “Benoic!”

  “À moi, Benoic!”

  A flurry of sharp cries from below brought Guenevere out of her reverie, and she stared down at the plain. She saw the blue-and-white banner of Little Britain, and three tall youths on fiery horses charging and wheeling as they rehearsed for the fray. They were the sons of the French kings, Ban and Bors. If men could bring their sons to battle, why should daughters be forced to stay at home?

  The three sons of Benoic fell back into the ranks and were lost to sight. Guenevere shivered in the raw early-morning air. On the plain below, dark shapes were moving through the remains of the night. Beyond the forest, she knew, the army of King Lot was rousing itself for the kill. All the forces of death were massing for bloodshed now.

  From her hilltop vantage point, the battlefield stretched away, miles of green grass that would soon be red with blood. How would they fare? The six kings who had turned against Arthur had swollen to eleven, fielding more than three times the forces of Pendragon, the scouts reckoned, a monstrous total of a hundred thousand men. And this evil host had sworn to destroy Arthur and all who fought with him.

  Goddess, Mother, be with us, do not fail us now … Closing her eyes, she bent her head to pray.

  HOW THICK THE darkness is just before dawn! A clammy mist swirled about them, enveloping the hilltop. Guenevere shuddered, gripped with a sudden malaise. Suddenly all the world was sick and out of joint.

  “My lady?”

  “It’s nothing, nothing to worry about!”

  Brusquely she brushed aside Ina’s anxious stare. But the sickness remained. All around them the Queen’s guard were shivering uneasily too, their weapons and harness clinking in the dark. A light breeze swept past them with a graveyard kiss, and the air grew very cold. Guenevere sensed something like impending fate, and cast wildly around. But there was nothing to be seen. Then the curtains of mist lifted languidly and parted, and there, wreathed in white drifts, they were.

  Shapes of menace, but of enchantment too. She saw tall women, queenly and veiled in black. She saw spirit children laughing and singing as they danced toward her, holding out their arms. She saw a little child, a boy, watching her sturdily, standing foursquare amid the shifting mists. Then coming toward her was a tall, serene, floating form that Guenevere would have known anywhere.

  The Lady of the Lake come from Avalon, veiled from head to foot in black.

  I will be there, Arthur, she had said. At your last battle I will be there.

  The Lady had come to take Arthur home. Guenevere stared till the blood burst in her brain. There was a roaring in her ears, darkness closed her eyes, and she knew no more.

  CHAPTER 25

  “Goddess, Mother, save the Queen’s life! You took her mother; do not take her too!”

  Guenevere opened her eyes. She was lying on the damp and chilly grass, with the dawn light streaking the bowl of the sky overhead. The mist still writhed around her like a living thing, but the shapes she had seen were nowhere in sight. Ina hovered over her, praying and weeping, her tears turning to joy as Guenevere opened her eyes. “Oh, my lady,” she wept, “whatever ailed you there?”

  Guenevere struggled to sit up. “Nothing—a sudden faintness, that’s all …” Whatever this sight meant, there would be time enough later to wonder about the cause. “Hurry, Ina, help me up—”

  From below came the sudden roar of war horns sounding the start of the fray. The high-pitched snarl of trumpets rose above the battle cries of a hundred thousand throats. The two great armies began moving across the plain. The war of the eleven kings had begun.

  “PENDRAGON!”

  Arthur’s battle cry rang round the field as the two forces met. Those in the front died with the light of dawn. Before the sun had risen, many more lay dying on the ground. From Guenevere’s vantage point, the knights and men looked like toy figures struggling in the world below. But the hideous clash of arms, the shock of iron on flesh, the cries of anger and pain rose with terrible clarity to her ears.

  Arthur’s banner marked his progress through the fray. Guenevere watched with dread as the red dragon plunged here and there, wherever the fighting was at its worst. But everywhere Arthur went, Gawain was at his right hand, Kay on his left, and Bedivere guarding the rear. The four of them cut a wedge of death into the enemy troops, leaving the dead and dying on either side.

  Under a dull and bleeding sun, the work of death went on. On Arthur’s left flank, King Pellinore slashed and slew like a lion while on the right his brother King Pelles did the same. Lucan commanded a wheeling counterattack from the side, taking the massed armies of the kings on their undefended flanks and wreaking cruel havoc. When her mother said that queens must command from the top of a hill, did she know, Guenevere wondered, what it was simply to watch and endure?

  Mother, Goddess, must I suffer this? She shifted her stance, and the thought beat through her brain, Oh, to be a man now, or a warrior queen!

  “Goddess, Mother, rain down fire like blood, hail your fury on the heads of our foes, give strength to our swords, bring our warriors safe home …”

  With tears pouring down her cheeks, Ina kept up a running prayer for victory. Guenevere echoed her in silence, and growing dread.

  For all their enemies were now afield, and the stoutest heart would have looked on them with fear. King Carados of Northgales commanded the right-hand block, while to his left was King Nentres of Garlot. She saw the banners of King Agrisance and King Vause, and the Kings of North Humber, of Solise, and the Castle on the Rock. All the traitors to Arthur were there, King Rience, King Brangoris, and the King of the Western Isles.

  And then Guenevere saw the black banner of Lothian with its sign of the raging bull. Below it fought a giant of a man, clad in black armor plumed with red and gold, and red and gold trappings on his black-armored horse. Even from a distance she could see a massive body, and above it a gross black beard on a broad beefy face. Arthur’s most fatal foe had taken the field.

  Guenevere caught her breath. No visor to his helmet? King Lot was so confident of killing Arthur that he had armed himself as if for war play, rather than real combat, man to man? Instantly she saw why. Surrounding King Lot in a solid block rode his knight companions, all men as heavy and huge as he was, all with one aim. From above, the steady progress toward Arthur of the black-armored wedge of death was plain to see. But surely Lot’s execution squad would not get within a yard or two of Arthur before he was aware that they were near? Her stomach lurched with fear. Goddess, Mother, save him, save my love …

  Meanwhile the battle raged. The two forces advanced and gave ground, wheeled and returned to the fray. Yet boldly as they fought, the sheer weight of numbers began to tell against Arthur’s men.

  If we lose …

  It was a fear that they had never voiced. Guenevere looked around, desperation fraying her self-command. In the forest on the edge of the plain, the two French kings and their sons waited in ambush, she knew. How long would Arthur struggle to turn the tide? When would he give the French the signal to break cover and attack?

  On Arthur’s right, the flank under King Pelles was beginning to crumble and give ground. And still King Lot and his knights continued their deadly progress through the ranks. A sudden fear flooded Guenevere, with it a certainty. Arthur had lost sight of the overall command. He would wait too long to signal the kings to attack.

  In a frenzy sh
e scanned the field and called a scout to her side. “Ride to the kings in the wood! Order them not to wait for Arthur’s signal, but to launch their ambush now!”

  “Ride to Sir Lucan!” she cried to another. “Say the Queen orders him to redirect his force. Attack on the left-hand side. At all costs save the King!”

  Goddess, Mother, too little, too late!

  A passion of fear and grief ran through her frame. Weeping, she wrung her hands and searched the field again. There on the outlying flank flew the banner of King Pellinore, Arthur’s most loyal friend. She looked around. “Ride for your life!” she cried to a flying scout. “Tell King Pellinore that King Lot is threatening King Arthur, and the King will die!”

  Now all her messengers were racing downhill to the plain, clods of earth flying up beneath their pounding hooves. On the battlefield, Arthur’s banner had moved again. Now he was fighting another knight in close combat, laying about him with furious power. Above the turmoil Guenevere caught the strains of Excalibur’s song, high and clear. But as Arthur swung and hacked, a lance from another knight pierced his mount to the heart.

  The poor beast convulsed. Its scream rose above every other sound. When its agony ceased, Guenevere knew, its knees would buckle, pitching its rider headfirst to the ground. Impeded by his heavy armor, a knight on foot was lost. Arthur himself spared every knight he unhorsed, disdaining to strike a man when he was down. But who would show him such chivalry?

  Arthur, Arthur, my love …

  Guenevere screamed as the horse had done, one long dying cry.

  “Pendragon!”

  “FOR PENDRAGON! For Pendragon!”

  With a ringing shout, Gawain forced his horse toward Arthur and plucked him from the saddle by main force. Kay caught a riderless charger loose in the melee and dragged it alongside. Bedivere drove forward to assist Gawain, fending off an attack on his fellow knight’s undefended back as he came. There was a wild confusion of men and horses, flailing arms and legs, then in a mighty scramble, Arthur was newly mounted, safe and unhurt.