Camelot

by Giles Kristian

  ‘So?’ Father Yvain said.

  Broad-shouldered and black-bearded was Yvain. His hands were thick-fingered and gnarled as an old yew tree, and yet so many times I had marvelled at the graceful shapes which he teased from apple and ash, beech and blackthorn. Gaming pieces, bodkins and spoons, lidded boxes for salves and herbs, stool legs, shepherd’s crooks and walking sticks for the older monks. All came from his lathe and his rough hands.

  ‘Everything I make, I make as if the High King of Britain himself will hold it in his own hands,’ Yvain had told me once, when as a child I had watched some spinning piece being kissed into shape by bright iron. Not that there had been a High King of Britain these past thirty years or more.

  ‘Father Brice sent me to fetch you,’ I said now. A sudden sting in my right foot, in the soft flesh of the arch.

  That grunt again in the back of his throat. ‘Tell him no.’

  I looked from Yvain to Dristan, who gave the slightest shrug of his narrow shoulders, his eyes fixed on me as he worked the strap back and forth.

  ‘Father?’ I wondered how Yvain could refuse before he had even heard what Brice wanted of him.

  ‘He wants me to go somewhere,’ he said. ‘To the village or to the nuns. Somewhere.’ He lifted his chin and Dristan stopped pulling the strap, so that the workpiece went suddenly still. Yvain blew on it, examining it closely as Dristan caught his breath. ‘Whatever it is, tell him no. I’m not going out there.’ Again, he lifted his beard, all flecked with wood chips, and with nimble hands Father Dristan unwound the strap so that Yvain could remove the workpiece from the lathe. ‘I’ll not leave this island again, Galahad. Not in this body.’ He turned the piece in his big hands, seeming less than satisfied. ‘I’ve work to do. Tell Brother Brice that.’

  ‘It’s for the child,’ I said, ‘and … for his mother. Father Brice would put the infant in the grave with the body of a grown man.’ Father Dristan was frowning at me. ‘A man on the crannog was dying—’

  ‘And Brother Brice wants me to go over there and bring his corpse back to Ynys Wydryn,’ Father Yvain interrupted me, turning the workpiece over in his big hands. ‘To go out there and risk my neck to bring a dead man back for a dead child.’

  Father Dristan’s eyes widened at that, but he knew better than to question Father Brice’s wishes in front of Yvain, even if those wishes seemed at odds with our faith.

  ‘I’ll not go,’ Yvain said. ‘Not this time.’

  I nodded and could not help but wonder at the things, the terrible things, that Father Yvain must have seen out there in the marsh and even beyond. Things of which the brothers whispered, wide-eyed, in the dormitory. Tales which grew yet sharper fangs and claws in night’s ensuing silence, preying on us each in the lonely dark.

  ‘Well, Galahad,’ he said, and held up the fruit of his labour, turning it this way and that in the pale shaft of daylight which quested through the smoke-hole along with spitting gusts of rain.

  ‘It is beautiful, Father,’ I said.

  Yvain frowned. ‘It might be. When I bring out the grain and if it doesn’t crack.’

  It was a goblet made of spalted beech. A simple thing. But I knew that Father Yvain would work the beeswax into the wood until those strange, dark patterns told stories as rich as those of any bard.

  ‘Off with you then, lad. And remember what I told you: I’ll not go.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘And get that splinter out of your foot.’ He took a knife and sliced a burr from the underside of the goblet’s base. ‘A little thing like that will kill you if it can.’

  He didn’t miss much, Yvain. I nodded and pulled my cowl over my head, wondering how the rough wool would feel against my bare scalp come the new moon, when my novitiate would end and I would take the tonsure and become a brother.

  Then I stepped out into the damp day and for a moment stood looking up at the sky. Above me, several rooks bickered and cried, tumbling like black ashes against the vast emptiness. Dusk was gathering, the day retreating, and I could feel the light leaching out of the sky. The brothers’ voices, rising and falling with the breeze, seemed as much a prayer against the coming night as a liturgy for the poor child who had not lived but a day.

  Father Brice glowered all through Compline, though his ire was wasted as Father Yvain was not there to see it. Of the others, only Father Padern had supported Brice’s idea of seeking a recently deceased adult to share the infant’s grave. Not that the old cellarer volunteered to risk the marsh and venture to the folk on the crannog when I relayed Yvain’s refusal.

  ‘I will go myself,’ Father Brice had declared, pressing his mottled hands together, each gripping the other. But if he had believed that at all, his resolution faded like the fog of those words on the cold air. Father Padern arched a brow at me. Neither of us thought Father Brice was seriously considering leaving the monastery. But for Padern and Prior Drustanus, who had lain on his sickbed since the first ospreys had been seen in the marshes, gathering their strength before flying south for the winter, Brice was the oldest of the brothers. And while his mind was talon-sharp, his body was more suited to prayer than to sculling through the bogs in midwinter. Besides, there was evil out there among the reed-beds and fens. Evil lurking in the carrs and twisting with the willows’ roots. Malevolence moving in the mires.

  We had all heard the tales the folk of the island villages told of the thrys, a race of human-like creatures who dwell in the darkest reaches, sometimes underwater, waiting to murder unsuspecting travellers. Every few years, word spread of folk who had gone into the marshes never to be seen again.

  And there were the mists which rose from the black water as though pyres, as many as there are stars in the night sky, burned in the underworld, their smoke passing through the veil into our own world. There was also the dreaded marsh fever, which could be caught from these unholy fogs and which would have you vomiting and yellow-skinned, your bones rattling in your flesh until you died.

  Of us all, only Father Yvain dared the marsh, carrying messages from Prior Drustanus to Prioress Klarine at the convent, or to fetch Ermid the smith from the lake village when we needed something forging which was beyond the wood-turner’s own talents.

  ‘I’ve faced worse than some stinking fen-dweller,’ he had told me once when I had asked why he was unafraid to take the coracle out onto the dark water, not knowing what was out there beyond the safe haven of our island. Father Yvain had been a warrior once, had even fought as a spearman for Lord Arthur, though he would rarely talk of those days now. If Yvain was not willing to leave our little sanctuary and go out there, then no one was. Father Brice would have to resign himself to laying the child in its grave alone and hope that our Lord’s angels would find their way through the mists of Avalon to guide the infant’s soul to heaven.

  And so the old monk glowered through the night prayers, and Father Yvain turned his wood in the workshop, and the poor exhausted woman sobbed because she feared her baby would for ever wander the shadowy realm between our world and the next.

  For myself, I wondered if the Lord God even knew we were here, we ten clinging to that island in the marshes where the old gods of Britain had once abided before the Saxon gods came to the Dark Isles. I could speak the prayers by rote, leaving my mind free to roam, and though I felt some guilt at pondering such a thing at such a time, I decided it was better to seek the answers to these questions now, in my novitiate, than later. That way, by the time I took my vows and Father Brice himself gave me the tonsure, my mind would have been put at ease that I might devote myself fully to God.

  And yet even such thorny contemplations withered in the damp cold of this night, so the Lauds of the Dead found me shivering and yawning in the reedlight-flickered dark at the rear of the church, thinking of my bed and of sweet sleep, when I should have been thinking only of my devotions.

  For the little church was draughty in winter, when the apple trees beyond the pasture were black skeletons and bitter gusts bl
ew from the west across the marsh and rolled up the tor like a wave. The reed thatch leaked, and we waited for drier days to replace it, in the meantime huddling beneath it, warmed only by our own breath as we sang and by the illusion of heat provided by the fragile flames of tallow lamps. And even though Father Yvain joined us for Lauds, his habit strewn with wood shavings, there were not enough voices to drown the sobs of the grief-stricken woman which seeped through the wattle wall and pierced the rhythmic rise and fall of our song.

  Someone somewhere hissed, but in the gloom I could not see who. Then Father Dristan’s elbow in my ribs drew my attention to Father Judoc, who was glaring at me from where he stood, to our right beneath the driest of the old thatch. He beckoned me with his eyes and so I wriggled through the brothers, still singing as I went, until I stood before Judoc and bent to put my ear near his mouth.

  ‘The girl, Galahad; it will not do. She is distracting the brothers from their prayers.’ I knew Father Brice had given her permission to spend the night in the infirmary with the little corpse, that our prayers might pass through the walls to give her solace. But from the sound of her sobbing, it seemed our devotions were giving her no comfort at all. ‘Take her some wine,’ Father Judoc hissed, ‘and only a little water.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’ I turned to leave.

  He grabbed my arm. ‘Only a little water, Galahad,’ he repeated. ‘She will find some peace in sleep.’ He grimaced. ‘And we shall be spared a woman’s wailing.’

  I nodded and went to fetch a jug of apple wine, wondering if I would still be at the brothers’ beck and call once I became fully one of them. When I rapped the cup’s base on the infirmary door, I realized that my palms were slick with sweat and my stomach was rolling over itself like a pot of eels. I thought of what I had heard Father Folant say, that the dead baby was Britain itself. But then, Folant was ever the voice of doom, filling our ears with his dark prophecies about the future.

  There was no answer from within. The sobbing quietened, though, and I heard a rhythmic gasping as of someone trying to catch their breath. I lifted the jug to my nose and inhaled the aroma of fermented apples and honey, a smell of summer days conjured brightly in the mind as if by some charm. I pushed the door open and went in.

  An oil lamp burned with fitful, sooty splutters which seemed to mimic the woman’s own breathing. By its light I saw that the bundle was back in its simple crib of pale birch, which Father Yvain had made on the day the woman’s husband had brought her to the tor. No one knew where her husband was now. Against the brothers’ advice, he had gone to fetch a healer who was known to live on a spit of land in the Meare Pool, but he had not returned and perhaps never would.

  ‘I am sorry,’ I told the woman, who sat by the crib as she had when her child still clung to life. She looked at me with such sadness as I had not seen for a long time. Her eyes were swollen and red. Her face glistened with snot and tears, and if I had felt trepidatious before entering that dim room, I felt contemptible now, standing there with an offer of apple wine, as if that would make things better. And yet she tried to smile.

  ‘Thank you, Galahad.’

  I was shocked and must have shown it.

  She frowned. ‘That is your name?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, pouring the wine into the cup. I had added only half a beaker of water to the drink.

  ‘They talk of you,’ she said.

  I moved closer and offered her the cup. She took it and drank, emptying it before I had the chance to place the jug on the table beside her. I refilled the cup and put the jug down. My name was known in Avalon. I knew that, and I hated it.

  ‘What is your name?’ I asked her.

  ‘Enid,’ she answered.

  I nodded at the wine in her hands. ‘It is strong, Enid,’ I warned her. ‘I’ll add more water. If you like.’

  She shook her head and drank again, then looked into the crib. ‘My child is lost.’

  ‘No. He will find his way to heaven,’ I tried to reassure her. ‘We all prayed for him. The one true God will welcome his soul.’

  She scowled at me. ‘There are no gods here, Galahad,’ she rasped. ‘Not yours, not mine. My poor little boy is lost. We are all lost.’

  I did not know what to do. What could I say? The brothers’ devotions carried through the wall and I wished that I were with them and not here with this woman whose pain was like a living thing, a beast with grasping hands and talons which seemed to claw into my own flesh in search of my heart.

  I picked up the jug and filled Enid’s cup again, but she would not take it this time. She gripped the crib’s rail, her knuckles white by the guttering flamelight, new tears making her eyes pools of misery.

  ‘He is lost. My baby is lost and all alone.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I am so sorry.’ And with that, to my shame, I turned and hurried from the room.

  I rejoined the brothers and lifted my voice to heaven with them, singing a little louder than before, even more afraid of hearing Enid’s sobs through the wall now that I knew her name and she knew mine.

  But later, in my bed, when the only sounds were the mice scrabbling among the floor reeds and the snoring of men and, beyond our thin walls, the occasional screech of an owl or bark of a dog carrying across the dark water, I lay thinking of that woman and her dead child. I heard her words over and over in my head, as monotonous as the Litany and as forlorn as the marsh around our refuge. There are no gods here … not yours, not mine.

  Cold words. Terrible words which pulled and plucked at me and would not let me sleep. And so, being as careful as I could not to make any sound or movement which might haul the others from their slumber, I rose and crept through the darkness towards the sliver of deathly pale light which showed beneath the door.

  The sea’s breath was in my face, thin as hate. It stung my cheeks, made cold wells of my eyes and chafed my hands raw on the oar’s shaft as I pushed the coracle on through the reeds. Go no further, those brittle reeds seemed to whisper whenever the Hafren’s breeze quested through them, stirring the mist like the breath of some creature slinking low now that night gave way to dawn. You should not be out here, it hissed. The marsh is no place for one such as you. And neither was it, I knew, as I sculled the oar through the cold water – slowly, that my presence might go unnoticed by man. By creature. And by spirit.

  Around me, the first curlews stabbed the muddy fringes with their long, downward-curving beaks, their plaintive and lonely calls weaving a sad sound. Cour-leee. Cour-leee. Cour-leee. Behind me, the tor loomed in the fog, humped and vast. A dragon’s back as old as the world. A dark mass in a dawn which, like the infant soon to be laid in the grave, seemed too weak to survive. For it was an unformed, insubstantial day. The kind when the veils between the worlds are thin as smoke and folk stay indoors by their hearths, busying themselves with work which can be grasped and held and felt by the flesh.

  So why was I out in the reed-beds now? Woven willow rods and bullock hide all that was between me and the water and whatever lay beyond its obsidian blackness. What had I been thinking, skulking past the brothers out into the pre-dawn gloom, down to the jetty where the little coracle rocked gently among the reeds? Perhaps it was not too late to go back. To tie the boat to the piling and scurry up to the dormitory before anyone knew what I had done. For, once I lost sight of the tor in the marsh mist, I might never find my way back.

  You are not him. Turn back now.

  My flesh shivered. Last evening’s food and ale had curdled in my stomach and my bowels were sour water, so that I felt that the marsh was in me as much as around me. It pressed on me, heavy with threat, and I could not help but wonder at the fates of those folk who ventured here never to be seen again. Were they taken by the thrys, those creatures who dwell among the sedges and feed on human flesh? Did some madness come upon them, inhaled with this drifting fog? Some dark desire which compelled those doomed souls to give themselves to the marsh, the way those who believe in the old gods offer gifts of i
ron or silver to the water? Or perhaps the wading curlews around me had been men once, now turned by some enchantment into birds and bound to the marsh for ever.

  Why would you want to be him? Turn back.

  Some movement drew my eye and I started, almost tumbling off the coracle’s narrow thwart, the craft tipping dangerously, and I held the oar above my head, using it to balance as the rocking subsided. Just a marsh harrier out hunting, sweeping over the reed-beds, swooping in a flash of silver throat and nape, her brown back the same colour as the seed heads. Then she dropped into the reeds and was gone, and I wondered what prey she had seized with her killing talons. What little body she had punctured with those deadly claws.

  ‘Lord, give me courage,’ I whispered, afraid to speak aloud in such a place, even to God.

  There are no gods here … not yours, not mine. Enid’s words rippled through the dark mire of my fear. Something plopped into the water off to my left and I glimpsed the sleek brown shape of an otter before it vanished, leaving a wake of bubbles behind it. I caught my breath, inhaling the sweet, musky scent of death and decay. I licked dry lips, tasting the salt of the Hafren and the bitter draught of my own despair, and I sculled the oar through the water, the blade describing a serpent twisting over itself, forever seeking to grip its own tail. On and on. Deeper, ever deeper into this insubstantial world, this girdle between land and water, keeping the weak dawn light on my right cheek. Towards the lake village. Now and then catching sight of the ancient causeway which the first people had built that they might more easily travel between the island settlements, though no man would trust that trackway now. No living man, anyway.