To protect Logres, Perceval had already abandoned the peace and comfort of his mother’s home. And he had always been ready to die.
Blanchefleur dropped her hand from her mouth, turned a perfectly expressionless face to Mordred, and sank down into her chair, folding her hands in her lap.
Mordred looked at her for a long second. Then he shrugged and waved to Saunce-Pité.
Blanchefleur did not even turn her head to see him dragged out. When the sound of their feet had died away, she realised she was holding her breath. She forced herself to go on breathing soundlessly, counting each breath, straining to hear—something.
Mordred sat in front of her, fingers steepled, watching her. It was full dark in the pavilion now, and the light shone on his narrow pale face, so that it shone like a mad moon in some faraway sky. She avoided it, choosing instead to look at the darkness three inches to the right of his head.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Oh, Perceval!
It had only been a moment since she had last seen his face—but this choking panic was clouding her memory, as if years had already gone by. Suddenly she could not even remember the colour of his eyes.
“Sarras,” she thought. Only a little longer, and the comradeship they had once shared would go on.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Easier now. Only a little longer.
Footsteps outside, coming nearer. Saunce-Pité entered, ducking for the flap of the tent. His shadow loomed huge on the pavilion wall.
Mordred said, “Is it done?”
Saunce-Pité nodded.
Mordred looked at Blanchefleur. “It is not yet too late—for you.”
She stood up. “That makes no difference.”
“Well,” said Mordred, and pulled his chair to the table and took up a quill.
Sir Breunis took Blanchefleur by the elbow. She went without wasting a backward glance at Mordred, almost pulling the outlaw after her in her eagerness to escape, for she half feared that if she remained a moment longer, she would fling herself at Mordred’s feet and beg to accept one or the other of his offers. Outside, the afterglow of sunset still hung in the eastern sky, giving them enough light to see. Blanchefleur remembered that there was no sun in Sarras. She would miss the familiar stars.
Sir Breunis led her out of the camp, toward the forest. Three men stood gathered there beneath the trees. One of them turned to her and took her other elbow.
She looked at the ground by their feet, searching for what must be lying there. Her lips stumbled over the words.
“Where is he? Where’s Perceval?”
“Here, love.”
She looked up at the man by her side with swift, speechless joy.
He passed his arm around her as her knees went weak for shock, and looked over her head at Saunce-Pité.
“How can we thank you?” asked Perceval.
“Drop a word in the King’s ear for me,” said the outlaw with an anxious kind of geniality. “Tell him I’m no murderer, nor thief neither if I could get the chance, except that Mordred has been sitting in my valley for two years carrying on his little war with the world under my banner. I’ll be Mordred’s dupe no longer, and now I’ve taken my chance to give the King a return on the favour he did me a while ago, it’s off to Ireland for me tonight.”
Blanchefleur stared at him wordlessly. At the edge of hearing, a horse shifted and gave a soft snort.
“Well, off with you,” said Sir Breunis.
12
I knew
That some such tale would be
For all these years she grew more fair,
More sweet her low sweet speeches were,
More long and heavy grew her hair,
Not such as other women wear;
But ever as I looked on her
Her face seemed fierce and thin.
Swinburne
BLANCHEFLEUR DID NOT SPEAK, OR EVEN think, for the first three miles of their journey. Perceval was there. She could smell him and could feel the steel rings on his shoulders chafing against her cheek. And Mordred was left behind somewhere, in the night, in the trees. That was enough.
Perceval, finding a road, had held their horse to a steady canter, but now he let it drop into a trot. Blanchefleur shifted to a more comfortable position, and said, “I’m not sorry.”
Perceval’s voice found its way to her through the dark. “For what?”
“He thought I would run away to save our lives. I’d do it again.”
“Of course,” Perceval said, his tone blank as if he did not quite understand her. Perhaps it had not even occurred to him that the choice could have been different.
She smiled in the dark. “Where are we going?”
“Trinovant. Only fifteen miles. We can make it by morning.”
“We told Morgan and Branwen to wait for us.”
“It is too late to find them now. Let them make their own way.”
“I wonder if Mother is with them. I don’t think Mordred recaptured her. If he did, he made no sign of it to me.”
“Good. We will think of them all as safe.”
The horse jogged on. Blanchefleur said conversationally, “Saunce-Pité.”
“Yes.”
For a little while they simply regarded the astonishing fact.
“Do you think he was telling the truth? About Mordred forcing him to do all those things against his will?”
Perceval stifled a yawn. “Does it matter?”
She laughed.
The road unwound before them, a pale skein in the moonlight. Blanchefleur slid in and out of full awareness; the only thing that kept her even partly awake was the fear of losing her balance and tumbling into the road. But the day’s events had left her drained to the last drop. She let her mind slip into numb silence.
Meanwhile Perceval pushed the horse between canter and trot. She wondered during one brief moment of wakefulness if he was hurrying too much; they could not be left unmounted in this extremity, stranded between safety and danger. But Perceval was the better judge of horseflesh. She resettled herself and closed her eyes.
Sometime in the night they reached the town of Trinovant and went to the great tower-fortress of the place, which at that time was held and governed by Sir Ector. She remembered torches, she remembered coming into warmth and seeing her old guardian blinking at them with the ruffled sleepiness of an owl. And then, for the first time in days—a roof over her head, and the softness of a real bed.
MORDRED’S VANGUARD APPEARED AT MID-AFTERNOON THE next day and began to pitch camp before the gates of the town. Blanchefleur passed the messengers in the passage as she went in to speak to Sir Ector.
“Blanchefleur,” he cried, looking up from a table where he was seated amid parchments and quills, scratching at a ledger. “Come in, come in.”
She hugged him and perched on the desk. “I woke late, and missed the excitement. What’s afoot? Have Mother and Branwen come?”
Sir Ector threw down his quill and began folding parchments. “There’s been no sign of them.”
“Not yet? Could we not send someone to find them?”
“Not with an army on our lawn. Mordred is here with his vanguard. If not for the two of you, he would have caught us by surprise. Perceval tells me he has several thousand men on their way. There’s nothing we can do for the Queen now.”
Blanchefleur nodded, knitting her brows. “They’ll take care of themselves, I’m sure, Mother and Morgan. Has anyone spoken to Mordred?”
“I sent a herald out to ask his business, making camp on our pasture-land like that.”
“What did he say?”
“Polite nothings. He did ask to see the Bishop of Ergyng.”
“He came here to be crowned King of Britain,” Blanchefleur recalled. “Perhaps he thinks the Bishop is more likely to do it if taken prisoner.” And cold shudders went down her spine at the thought of the games Mordred played with his prisoners.
“Most like,” Sir Ector agreed. “The Bishop is neither a traitor nor a
fool, but I’ve sent for him to make sure.”
“Does Mordred know Perceval and I are here?”
Laughter shone in Sir Ector’s eye as he began to return books and parchments to their pigeonholes. “Sir Perceval thought it best to go out with the herald.”
Blanchefleur put both hands to her mouth. “Perceval did that? Oh, how I’d have loved to see the look on Mordred’s face.”
“Perceval said it was a beautiful sight.” Sir Ector unfolded a map of Trinovant on the table. Blanchefleur swung a leg and glanced around. The comfortable untidiness of this pigeon-holed room reminded her of the library in the old house in Gloucestershire, and also—for the memory was inextricably bound to the room—the day when Nerys and her guardian had first told her that she was not a child of that world.
Nerys. She took a breath, and then thought better of it, and said, “I can’t call you Guardian anymore. What shall I call you now?”
Sir Ector looked at her with one eyebrow canted up above his spectacles. These were the only remnant of the things he had worn and used in that other world; instead of waistcoats and smoking-jackets he wore a furred gown, and he had grown a full beard to accompany his moustache. He said, “Did I ever tell you that I raised your father?”
“The King? Yes. Yes, you did.”
“Times were dangerous for a baby heir then. I was only a humble young knight with a small son of my own. But for his own unspoken reasons, Merlin brought Arthur to me. Not until years later did I guess his true lineage.” Sir Ector smiled at her. “Uther Pendragon died within two years. He was your grandfather by blood. But you might call me Grandfather, if you like.”
“I’d love to.” Blanchefleur twisted her hands together. “Well, Grandfather, I should tell you—Mordred almost captured us when he took Camelot. If Nerys hadn’t got us to safety, I don’t know what might have happened. But Nerys didn’t make it.” She paused, trying to give him time to prepare himself. “He killed her.”
Sir Ector looked at her in unbelief. “How was that possible?”
“It was partly my fault. I left a knife of mine lying in my room, an obsidian blade. I got it in Sarras.”
“Nerys!” whispered Sir Ector. “I thought she would outlive us all.”
“Yes.” Again, she blamed herself for leaving the shadow knife where Mordred could find it.
Again, she reminded herself that she could not have foreseen Mordred’s crime.
Sir Ector pulled off his spectacles, slumped into his chair, and put a hand over his eyes. At length he said, “Yet it was her dearest wish. ‘Think of it!’ she said to me once. ‘An end to the long war!’ ” He looked at Blanchefleur with a painful smile. “Some days I long for the same rest myself.”
“The long war? Is that what she called it? But surely we can hope for some times of peace, even this side of Sarras?” Blanchefleur rubbed fingers against temples. “Do you remember the day you and she first told me about Logres? Do you remember what you told me then, about a prophecy?”
“About Arthur’s heir being the life of Logres?”
“Yes. That one.” Blanchefleur swallowed. “I’ve been thinking. I know the Ki—I know Father thought what I did in the Grail Quest fulfilled that prophecy, but what about Mordred? He’s a worse enemy than Morgan, and I keep thinking that if Mordred is to be stopped, maybe the responsibility is mine to stop him. And I haven’t stopped him yet.”
Sir Ector looked at her in surprise. “The prophecy said Logres would go on because of the Pendragon’s heir. Nothing about stopping Mordred.”
“And to think that I lived in Gloucestershire and never thought…” She slid from the table and went and ran a finger along the shelves, setting tasseled seals swinging. “Did you know Mordred was going to do this? Did you never find one of those old books—did you never…” she glanced down at him nervously “…read ahead?”
He stuck his thumbs in his belt and tilted his chair back to look at her. “I thought about it,” he admitted. “Every day for sixteen years, there in Gloucestershire, I thought about it. But in the end neither Nerys nor I thought it wise. I let her gather up the books—all the old romances that might hint how things would turn out—and take them away.”
“I wonder if she knew…”
“If she did, she never told me, and it was against our agreement.” He whistled softly between his teeth for a moment. “You see, the danger was that we could never trust the old romances. They were only memories of echoes, across the worlds, of the real thing that we are living. Who knows what might have been changed, or added, or forgotten? So we left them unread.”
Blanchefleur puffed out the ghost of a laugh. “Perhaps it is just as well that I cannot find them and read them now.”
Sir Ector said, so quietly that she almost failed to hear it: “I read the title of one of them as she took it away. It looked me in the face from her hands: I could not help it.”
“And?”
“It said in Middle French, The Death of Arthur.”
A cold hand settled around Blanchefleur’s throat and squeezed. At last she said: “But death comes—”
“To us and all mortals. I know. It may be years in the future.”
“Oh, Grandfather! There must be something I can do.”
“Why, what are you thinking of?”
“I don’t know. But if I really am the Heir of Logres, I ought to be able to do something to save it, oughtn’t I?”
“And you will, if you’re meant to. But serving Logres is not only about sitting in council with the wise, or outfacing sorcerers, or wandering the streets of Sarras in search of the Grail. There are also those who build houses, and plough the earth, and rear children.”
“I suppose there are.” She thought about that for a while and said, “But I need to know if I’m the Heir of Logres, don’t I? And if I could only look back and say, yes, a thing I did preserved her, then I would know who I am.”
Sir Ector laughed. “Oh, is that the trouble? If it concerns you so much, whether you’re the Heir of Logres, why not ask?”
“Ask!” Blanchefleur stared at him. “Whom?”
“Your mother would know.”
“Why, I couldn’t.”
This time, Sir Ector lifted both his eyebrows above his spectacles in incredulity. “Why not?”
“I…” But she had regretted her silence before, when it was too late, the night Camelot fell. Why, after all, not? “Perhaps I could.” She slid off the edge of the desk. “If I see her again.”
AT THAT, ONE OF SIR ECTOR’S knights came in with the Bishop, and Blanchefleur, knowing she was not needed, slipped out and looked for Perceval. She found him in the armoury with his shield and a pot of red paint.
“Why,” she said, “you’re wearing your surcoat.”
Perceval pulled her in for a brief hug. “Yes.” He let go and picked up the little blunt knife with which he had been scraping flakes of paint off his shield. The three-pointed label across the gules and gold of Gawain was coming off, leaving a soft yellow cloud over the leather beneath. Blanchefleur took a second, closer look at his surcoat. Here, too, a darker red stripe showed where some appliquéd cloth had been torn away.
She understood. It was like swallowing a stone. “Oh, Perceval. When did it happen?”
He glanced back up to her. If there was any pain in him, it was so mixed with other griefs that she could not single it out from among them. “I do not remember how many days ago. The Lady of the Lake took me to him before the end came.”
Again, Blanchefleur understood. “He spoke to you? I’m so glad.”
“He did.” Perceval blew the last of the yellow flakes off his shield and reached for the red paint. With careful strokes he smoothed over the yellow cloud; the label vanished. “In the end, he was given enough grace for that. It is hard to mourn.”
Blanchefleur remembered what he had once said about the elation of first grief. She slid onto the bench next to him and leaned against his left shoulder. When the hard grief, the
later grief came, she would be there.
Perceval said, “You have not told me what happened in the pavilion, with Mordred, before I woke.”
Blanchefleur winced and laughed a little. “I hoped you wouldn’t ask.”
Perceval finished with the paint, and returned the lid to the pot. “I am asking.”
“Well, he—he wanted to argue with me at first. He said a lot of nonsense, about Logres not being worth saving and the only purpose of Sarras being to distract people from what they can really do to help. He says Logres must be entirely destroyed.”
“What, right there in front of everyone?”
“Yes! Agravain, Alisander, Pertisant—I thought perhaps one of them would come to his senses when Mordred said that. I begged them to hear what Mordred was saying. But in the end they agreed with him.”
Perceval growled deep in his chest. “The shame of it! Even the Silver Dragon has some sense of honour, but not the brethren of the Table!”
“But they seemed so…” Blanchefleur searched for the right word. “So reluctant. So torn.”
He shook his head. “Have no unease on that account. There is a kind of flinty stubbornness that tricks itself out in the garb of pity. What happened after?”
“Well. Ah. Mordred asked me to marry him again. He said it would give him victory. So I refused. Then he said that he would let you and me go back to the other place, to Gloucestershire, you remember. Only we must sign away our title to Britain and Logres.”
Perceval nodded. “So I heard when I woke. He asked you to marry him again? Why did he do that? He knows what you think of him.”
“I don’t know why.” It was strictly true, but if she left it there, it would be like a lie. “But I nearly said yes. I am sorry.”
Perceval looked confused. “What? Why?”
“Well, he said a lot of things.”
Perceval went on staring at her. Blanchefleur felt herself becoming redder and redder. “It was only for a moment,” she mumbled. “And just for that moment, it seemed like the best way to keep him from killing everyone. Please don’t be vexed.”
“Oh, I’m not vexed.” She didn’t tell him she could feel his displeasure weighing down the air like a storm. “It just surprises me. Mordred!” He shook his head and reached for a pot of water to begin washing the paint-brush.
The Heir of Logres Page 16
