Perhaps I could have slept if I’d drunk more apple wine, but I was afraid of the dreams that might haunt me if I gave myself to sleep’s capricious rule. And so I lay awake in the dark dormitory, trying and failing to think of anything but that day ten years past, when everything I knew was ripped from my hands. When everything I was and everything I had hoped to be vanished like smoke on the breeze and became no more than a memory.
When I was sure that the brothers were deeply asleep, when Father Yvain and Father Meurig were snoring like a pair of hogs, and Father Folant had ceased his impenetrable somnolent mumbling, I eased out from beneath my blankets and knelt in the rushes at the end of my bed. The only light came from a lamp horn beside Father Judoc’s bed, which he watched to know when to wake us for the night prayers. But its jaundiced glow did not reach far and so my hands followed my eyes to the humped dark shape of the oak chest which held all my worldly belongings. For a moment I did nothing but let my palms rest upon the smooth wood. Remembering.
The creak of the hinges was no louder than the squeaks of mice in the thatch. No one woke and for a moment I breathed in the smell of my old home and the past. I felt my way down into the chest, rummaging beneath my spare habit of worn wool, and the poor cup which I had made under Yvain’s tutorship in my second year on Ynys Wydryn. The cup had cracked in the drying, but I kept it anyway. Delving deeper, I felt the straps of Tormaigh’s bridle; the headpiece, cheek piece and throatlatch, and could smell the old cracked leather just by feeling it. I thought I caught Tormaigh’s scent too, lingering still in the few strands of his mane which even now remained caught between the crown strap and cheek piece. I felt the cool hardness of the bit, which I remembered Gawain taking from the dead stallion’s mouth and from which I had cleaned the animal’s blood-flecked spittle. I had brought Tormaigh’s bridle with me to Ynys Wydryn because I had loved him, and he had never betrayed me, and for the first months I had polished the leather and iron, thinking it did the stallion honour. After that first year I had never again taken it out into the light of day.
I felt the soft leather purse, inside which were a handful of haws from the Holy Thorn. Prior Drustanus himself had pulled them from the thorny briar and given them to me during my first winter on Ynys Wydryn. I worked at the drawstring, then sought inside the purse, feeling for the haws, which were shrivelled and hard between my fingers and thumb. But I let them be and drew the string tight again, for I had come to wade deeper than that. And then I found it in the dark. The leather still smooth. Still hard.
A sheath to protect the inside of a boy’s forearm against the stinging lash of the bow string. I took the bracer out, amazed at how small it was. In my memory it had been worthy of a grown warrior. I held it to my nose and smelled the beeswax which had been carefully worked into the leather, and in the dark I could just make out the simple pattern, incised with meticulous care on the outward-facing side. A sun. Its rays streaking out all around. A blazing sun. The same, only smaller, as that which adorned Tormaigh’s breastplate of boiled leather.
Just holding that bracer, I felt an echo of the thrill that had shivered through me the first time I put my left arm into it and felt the leather against my skin. Kneeling in the floor rushes still, I closed my eyes, immersing myself deeper in the past. I saw my father sitting by the hearth, leaning into the firelight to see better as he worked. Piercing the leather with his knife. Threading the thong ties. Rubbing the beeswax in until he could see the flames reflected in the leather. His eyes were narrowed, his expression unsure, as if he feared his work was too poor, even though I had never seen anything finer.
In the end he had been proud of the bracer. Wearing it, I had been the king of the forest.
Father.
4
Into the Earth
I FOUND GAWAIN AND HIS men in the warming-room, working at bowls of hot wheatmeal, milk and honey with spoons I had turned myself. There was an empty bowl on the floor beside Iselle’s Saxon sword and two damaged arrows, and my stomach lurched. I was not sure why, but then, to my surprise, I realized I did not like knowing that Iselle had spent the night by the hearth with these men.
As for the warriors themselves, they seemed bright-eyed and determined, renewed from a comfortable, dry night’s sleep. They had combed the knots from their hair and beards, scrubbed the dirt from their armour and polished their helmets so that they gleamed in the dawn light flooding into the room, the door being open to let the clean air scour the damp stench from the place.
The wind had died sometime in the night. The rain, too, had slowed to a haze of drizzle which hung in the air like dew.
‘I hope you slept well, Galahad,’ Gawain said, pointing a spoon at me.
I had not slept before night prayers and, after, had lain awake until the first light seeped through the window slits, praying to Joseph of the Thorn to guide me.
‘I did not, lord,’ I said, wondering where Iselle was now.
Gawain half smiled. ‘You’re young enough that it doesn’t show in your face.’ He arched the eyebrow through which that savage scar ran. ‘I was like that once. There was not enough wine and not enough women. I could drink the night away and still be in the saddle hunting deer or boar come the dawn.’
His men chuckled at that, as Father Meurig came in and gave Gediens a small, bulging sack. ‘Cheese, bread, a fowl, some smoked mutton and plenty of hazel cobs which are still good. And three flasks of our most … warming apple wine,’ he said.
The warriors thanked Meurig, even if it was clear that the food was a parting gift, telling them that they must leave that very morning.
‘You will need to fetch another flask,’ Gawain told Meurig, who followed the warrior’s line of sight to where I stood.
‘Galahad?’ Father Meurig looked down at the knapsack in my hand, then up to my face.
‘I’ve told you, monk,’ Gawain said before I could answer, ‘Galahad is leaving with me.’
Meurig stood a moment, blinking and pulling on his ear, not knowing what to say or do. Then, without a word, he hurried off, leaving me alone with the four men.
‘It will be hard.’ Gawain nodded at the doorway beyond which a sullen day brooded under a heavy sky, angry still, but exhausted from raging.
‘I have not said I am coming with you,’ I said.
He ignored that. ‘There is no coming back. This place is finished. Your days of hiding from the world, hiding from yourself, well, they’re over.’
‘I have not decided yet,’ I said, thinking that was true despite the knapsack in my hand. Despite having that dawn stuffed it with a waxed deer skin, my old habit, some bread and cheese and smoked meat stolen from the pantry and six apples and a cup which did not leak. At some point in the night I had decided I would go with Gawain, though now, in the day’s pale light, the thought of it was absurd. Furthermore, Gawain’s expectation of it was riling. Still, I clung to the knapsack.
‘Can’t deny who you are,’ Gawain said. ‘Who your father was.’
Gediens and Endalan shared a sideways look and made to rise from their stools. Gawain growled at them to stay where they were.
The creature stirred in me then. It seemed to shake itself. I felt it in my guts and in my chest and shivering into my limbs. ‘Do not talk of my father,’ I snapped. ‘I hate him.’
Gawain winced, as if those words had stung him.
‘I understand, Galahad,’ he said. ‘Your father and I …’ He stopped, searching for the words. ‘Well, we were not always friends. And worse than that, too.’
I saw the shadow of a snarl on Hanguis’s lips, though whatever harm my father had done him, he kept it to himself.
‘Even so,’ Gawain went on, ‘your father was the greatest warrior I have ever known. He was better than me. Better than Arthur,’ he said in a softer voice, his eyes losing their sharpness. In that moment, Gawain’s soul seemed to fly from the room. He was somewhere else and twenty years away. And wherever he was, my father was with him. ‘I have never seen s
uch skill,’ he murmured. ‘Could neither be taught nor learnt. Not a talent like that. It was god-given.’
I made the sign of the Thorn.
‘Not your god of bramble and briar, lad,’ Gediens sneered. ‘Taranis, Master of War. That’s who loved your father.’
I felt foolish. Why was I standing there clutching a knapsack of food and talking to these men who were as different from me as the gyrfalcon from the jackdaw?
Gawain shook himself free of his memories and returned to us from across the years, his gaze burrowing into my soul. ‘You are Lancelot’s son.’
My limbs felt heavy and numb, but not from a lack of sleep.
‘I am not a warrior,’ I replied.
‘I just told you, Galahad. Your father was not made but rather born. Where he fought, the enemy withered and our own spearmen became champions. Having Lancelot with us was like having Arthur’s bear banner flapping above our heads. Or the Pendragon’s banner in the time before. It bled the Saxons’ courage and fed our own.’
‘He is nothing to me,’ I said.
‘His blood runs in your veins,’ Gawain said.
Why had I taken the child’s leather bracer from my chest and put it in the knapsack? I should have carried it down to the jetty and cast it into the marsh. Perhaps my memories would have sunk with it.
‘What’s happening here?’ Father Brice said, appearing in the doorway with Father Meurig at his shoulder.
‘We are leaving.’ Gawain stood. The other warriors did the same, collecting their coats of scale armour, their cloaks, helmets and weapons which were scattered around the warming-room.
Father Brice looked at me. At the knapsack in my hand. ‘Galahad?’
I did not know what to say or how to say it.
‘Tell him, lad,’ Gawain said.
‘I have to go with them, Father,’ I said.
‘Go where?’ Brice asked.
I looked at Gawain and felt like a fool again, for I had not asked him where we would go or even why. All I knew was I had to go with him.
‘I’ve told you, monk.’ Gawain was shrugging himself into the long coat of gleaming bronze scales. ‘The Saxons are closing in. They will find this place, if not in a matter of days then surely in the spring. Come with us. Or die here.’
‘Our place is here. On this holy island into whose earth Joseph of Arimathea thrust his staff, which took root and grew into the sacred Thorn.’ Brice signed the Thorn, as we all would when we spoke its name. ‘We do not fear death.’ He grabbed at the cloth of his habit with a gnarled hand. ‘We have no need of armour. No need of shield and sword. Besides which, Prior Drustanus lies on his deathbed. Would you have us abandon him?’
‘I’ll not let Galahad die for a tree,’ Gawain said. ‘Or for a man who is already halfway dead.’
‘I’m going with them, Father,’ I said again.
Father Brice came up to me and took my hand, turning his back on Gawain and the others. Father Judoc and some of the brothers had now gathered outside. I could hear them talking in low voices.
‘Do not feel any obligation to go with this man,’ Brice told me, ‘no matter the past. His path is not your path.’ The skin of his hands felt as rough as linden bark against my own. ‘You are not your father.’
‘Perhaps God wants me to go,’ I suggested weakly. I had no reason to believe this was true, but then nor had I ever heard the Lord of Heaven’s voice in my mind telling me that I was destined to be a servant of the Thorn.
To my surprise, Father Brice nodded. ‘That may be true, Galahad,’ he said. ‘It does seem fateful, perhaps, that after all these years Gawain has returned here just days before you take the tonsure and swear yourself to the brotherhood.’
He pursed his lips and considered all this for a long moment as, behind him, the warriors prepared to leave. ‘Give me a day, Galahad,’ he said. ‘Let me speak with the brothers and seek guidance from the saint.’ He turned to Gawain. ‘You may stay another night. Eat and rest. Will you give us that?’
Gawain looked at his companions. Gediens shrugged and Endalan nodded. Hanguis inclined his tall spear towards me. ‘Give him another day to be sure of himself,’ he told Gawain. ‘Won’t do us any harm getting more warmth into our bones. More food in our bellies.’
Gawain scratched his beard. ‘One day, monk,’ he said, ‘because you took the lad in and have been a friend to him these past years.’ He took up his own spear from where it leant against the wall and strode out, parting the gaggle of monks who clustered beyond the door.
‘Well, Galahad,’ Father Brice looked up at me with a tired smile, ‘it seems I may enjoy your company a little while longer. There’s something we must do. Come with me.’
‘Where to, Father?’ I asked. But he had already turned and walked out of the warming-room into the bruised day, and so I followed him.
Father Brice took me to the Thorn. It stood upon a wind-scoured hillside to the west of the tor, black, lonely and ancient. Patient and persistent, a shelter for sheep and, in a way, for a people. Keeping watch over us as it had done for five hundred years.
Even from a distance I could see the rags flickering amongst the branches. Hundreds of scraps of wool or linen tied by pilgrims over the years, each one fluttering in the breeze, as though whispering the prayer that was on the lips of whoever tied it there.
Approaching the tree, we disturbed a flock of rooks. The birds flapped up from the Thorn’s knotted and fissured branches, cawing and rasping indignantly in a scatter of dark, reflective green-and-blue plumage, as though the timeworn tree itself were disintegrating into the wind. I counted nine birds taking to the sky, vanishing into the grey, and I could not help but mark that to be the same number of souls who lived below the tor, bar one.
Father Brice paid his respects to the Thorn, thanking the saint for having chosen Avalon and Ynys Wydryn as the place to start his church. Then he drew his small knife and took a cutting from the tree, the effort leaving him red-faced and puffing.
‘To think, Galahad,’ he mopped sweat from his brow, ‘that Joseph’s hand, that gripped the staff from which the Thorn grew, had also touched the body of Christ when he took him down from the cross and laid him in the tomb.’
He held the cutting towards me, expecting me to grasp it, which I did, careful to avoid those long, sharp thorns. ‘Thus, do you hold Christ’s body now,’ he said, then dipped his head, the skin of which was raw from being freshly shaved, ‘in a way.’
I nodded and withdrew my hand, and he tucked the cutting into his belt, a gift for the Prior, I supposed, and I imagined old Drustanus holding it at the end of his life as he passed from this world to the next.
I knew what Father Brice was trying to do. And in truth I did hold the Thorn in awe. For its own sake, having grown from a staff as a sign of God’s will, but also because it represented a new beginning for the peoples of Britain. The old gods had fled these isles or turned their backs on the Britons. That was what folk whispered by their hearths. But here was a god who would welcome all into his fold. So the brothers of the Thorn believed. So we hoped.
After that, Father Brice gathered a handful of red haws from amongst the thorniest reaches where the birds had not scavenged and placed them in the scrip on his belt. When it was done, he looked into the east, sucking his finger where a barb had stabbed him. The sky there was almost black. Heavy with swollen cloud and menacing. But I did not think the threat of rain was what had turned Father Brice’s expression as ominous as the day.
‘We had best be getting back,’ he said, and so we hurried down the saint’s hill and across the reed-beds back towards the shelter of the great tor.
Now, I was helping Father Judoc and Father Dristan repair the sheepfold, where an eight-foot length of the wall had collapsed in the storm winds. Moving gingerly because the lacerations on my back stung like burns.
Father Meurig had driven the small flock into the byre, where they seemed happy enough, so there was no pressing need to be out in the rai
n piling the stones back into place. But our working on the wall was Father Judoc’s way of showing Lord Gawain that the brothers had no intention of leaving the monastery, nor would they quake in terror at the warrior’s talk of Saxons. And so, wincing whenever the others weren’t looking, I hefted stones and set them one upon another, hoping that Saint Joseph or Christ or God in His heaven would send me a sign which would portend that it was my fate to stay on Ynys Wydryn. For I could not say what had led me to fill my knapsack and stand before Gawain as though I would leave the monastery and go into the savage lands with him. I could only ascribe it to a moment of confusion which had since passed.
Having found me on that crimson day long ago, Gawain had then abandoned me, just as my father had done. The brothers took me in when I had nothing and no one, and so I would take the tonsure and join them, and Gawain would vanish like marsh mist back into the past where he belonged.
That thought had me wondering where Iselle had gone. Were it not for the Saxon sword which leant against a stool in the warming-house, I would have believed she had left us. But that fine sword was hers. She had won it and I could not think that she would just leave it behind.
‘I trust you have come to your senses, Brother,’ Father Judoc said, pointing at a particular stone which he wanted me to heft up to him. ‘And that Brother Brice has reminded you of your place here among us.’ I gave him the stone and he turned it one way, then the other, until it nestled amongst those around it. ‘Of your … importance,’ he added with a satisfied nod. Then he took a moment to appraise our work. ‘The Prior would tell you himself, were he not busy preparing his soul for heaven.’
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