‘Not just the Saxons,’ Gediens muttered. ‘Plenty of Britons would hang the old bastard from the nearest tree and I wouldn’t blame them. They think he abandoned us when we needed him most.’
Father Yvain made a gruff sound in his throat. ‘Might as well try to guess what a fish is thinking as seek to know the mind of a druid.’
Arthur arched an eyebrow at the monk but said nothing. It was clear by his face that he too thought Merlin had abandoned him. It was loud in the silence.
‘He’s alive,’ Gawain said, bringing us back to what mattered. ‘Soon as I have my hands on him, I’ll bring him here.’ Arthur had nodded and looked over his shoulder into the shadows, where two eyes glowed.
Later that night, Iselle and I had gone out to the smokehouse to fetch an eel and three trout which Arthur had hung some days before. I waited until we were alone in the cramped dark and then asked Iselle what she knew of Merlin. I could scarcely believe I had met Arthur ap Uther, warlord of Britain. But then to hear that Merlin, the last of the druids, was alive … What next? Perhaps Joseph of Arimathea would be seen praying for my lost brothers in the shelter of the Holy Thorn.
‘My foster mother met him when she was young,’ Iselle said. ‘Though she never spoke of him. I think she was afraid of him.’ She lifted the eel off the hook, and I found a basket to put it in as Iselle wafted away the sweet, musty alder smoke rising from the ashes of an old fire. ‘I don’t know why Merlin left,’ she said. ‘He must have had his reasons. But Gawain will bring him back. Can you imagine it? Merlin and Arthur together again?’
I could not see her face clearly in the murk, but I could sense her excitement. I felt her thoughts thrumming like a bow string in the thick air. ‘If Merlin couldn’t help Lord Arthur back then,’ I said, ‘when he needed him most, what makes you think he can help him now?’
‘What do you care?’ she asked, reaching for a fish and putting it into the basket. ‘All you care about is your god and that gnarled old tree which I have seen a dog piss on.’
‘I am not a monk of the Thorn,’ I said, ‘and never will be now.’
‘No. You are Lancelot’s son. Lancelot the great warrior.’ There was scorn in her words, and I wanted to challenge her but instead I gritted my teeth and reached up, ripping the last fish from the hook and thrusting it into the basket.
‘I saw the way you looked at Guinevere,’ I said. ‘You hate her because she loved my father.’
‘Don’t you hate her?’ she asked.
I said nothing. My eyes stung from the smoke.
‘They betrayed Arthur and it broke him,’ she said.
I had heard others say it, when they thought I could not hear. Or perhaps when they knew that I could. But it was worse hearing it from Iselle. She brushed past me and stood with a hand on the door, ready to open it for me as I was carrying the basket of fish. I did not move. ‘So, if you hate her,’ I said, ‘why do you care if Merlin can heal her?’
She glared at me through the gloom. ‘You still don’t understand, do you?’
I shrugged. ‘I understand that Arthur lives, but he is a broken man. And that Merlin lives and that men died looking for him, for Arthur’s sake, even though he may not be able to cure Guinevere.’
She shook her head at my stupidity. ‘But what if Merlin can bring her back?’ she asked. ‘What then? Why do you think men gave years of their lives to the search? Why would a warrior like Gawain scour Britain in service to a broken lord?’
I blinked at the smoke, trying to swallow a cough which was in my throat. Trying to think. And then, suddenly, I saw it. I saw what Iselle had seen. What all of them had seen.
‘Because if Arthur has Guinevere back, he will return too,’ I said. ‘He will be Lord Arthur again and wield Excalibur to unite the kings and spearmen of Britain. He’ll gather his horse warriors and ride against the Saxons and drive them from the land.’ I saw it all. It was laid out before me like a trackway through the tall reeds. And in the gloom, through the smoke rising up to the hooks from which a skinned hare and a brace of rock doves hung, I saw the flash of Iselle’s teeth.
Five days after we had arrived at this hidden place, Gawain announced it was time to leave. He and Gediens had been out looking for signs that Cerdic’s warriors were still prowling Avalon’s willow-edged bogs and twisting marsh trackways. The two warriors would stand silently for long periods, watching the daytime sky for smudges of smoke. We would take turns going out into the night to look for the copper glow which told the sad tale of the murder of some wildfowler, fisherman or basket weaver’s family by the followers of Woden and Thunor. At such times, being used to waking during the night to sing the devotions, I would stand by Arthur’s pigpen and think of the brothers, of Father Brice and old Padern and Father Dristan, hearing their voices in my head as I quietly hummed the familiar prayers, while night herons and owls glided in the darkness around me like spirits.
But it had been three days since Gediens had spied a party of spearmen in the distance and heard their strange, guttural words carry across the reed-bed, and two days since I had seen fire burning the night sky. Gawain said that the Saxons had moved on. Perhaps gone north to raid in Caer Cynwidion, since King Conyn had taken to his deathbed and left his followers fighting amongst themselves over who should succeed him.
‘And if they haven’t gone?’ Father Yvain asked from where he sat on a tree stump, running a whetstone along the blade of his spear.
A breeze blew from the west and the Hafren Sea, whipping Gawain’s silver hair as he watched the pale sun plunging towards the fog-veiled horizon. He shrugged. ‘We can’t stay here. Parcefal will be expecting us and the longer he waits, the more likely that someone will recognize Merlin, or that the druid will change his mind and vanish again.’ He turned and looked towards the orchard where Guinevere sat in her chair, her hands clasped in her lap, her face turned up to the wintry sky. For sometimes, when the weather was kind, Arthur would carry her outside to escape the peat smoke and gloom of the house. He was with her now, leaning against a fallen apple tree with life in it yet, watching a pair of crows mob a marsh harrier, chasing it away from their roosts.
‘We leave in the morning,’ Gawain said.
I looked back to the trackway and beyond, to the wall of towering reeds from which we had emerged those days ago to find Arthur’s steading, and into which Iselle had vanished at dawn in search of feathers to make new fletchings.
‘It’s all right, she knows,’ Gawain said. ‘I told her this morning.’ I felt a flush of heat in my face and wondered how Gawain had known I was looking for Iselle. ‘She’s coming with us to Tintagel. There’s nothing for her here in Avalon. Nothing here for you, either, lad.’
I knew he was right, but still I did not like his assumption that I would go with him. That his course, upon which he had been set since the day he had left me at the monastery with the Brothers of the Thorn, was now my own.
‘Don’t look at me like that, Galahad,’ the warrior said. ‘You may have lived half your life as a priest of the Christ god, but you were never meant to become one of them.’ He raised a hand before I could speak. ‘I’ve never been a man who claims to know about gods and fate, providence and charms. I’d leave that to Merlin.’ He glanced towards the orchard again. ‘Arthur, too. He believed a lot of it when it suited him. But I didn’t give you to the care of the Christians so you could spend your life in prayer on some island in the marsh. That’s not your fate, Galahad,’ he said, scratching the scar that someone long ago had carved from his hairline down to the ridge of bone above his left eye. ‘That’s not you. I know that much, lad.’
‘How?’ I asked. ‘How do you know?’
He grimaced, pressed a thumb against his broken nose and expelled a wad of snot onto the mud.
‘I know because I knew your father,’ he grunted.
I did not like this man telling me what I was and what I was not. Nor did I like the awe with which he spoke of my father. Whatever he thought of my father a
s a man, Gawain clearly admired him as a warrior. More than that, Gawain and Arthur seemed to revere him, speaking of my father as though he had been untouchable on the battlefield. A reaper of lives. A god of war. Could that be the same man who had hidden from the world like an outlaw, so that my childhood was a friendless one? The man who loved another woman more than he loved my mother? The man who chose to fight and die for Arthur rather than to live for me?
‘I have to save the Thorn,’ I said. ‘I have a cutting and berries and must find somewhere safe to plant them.’ For I knew that was the task which Father Brice had entrusted to me when he gave me those precious haws. It already seemed so long ago now.
Gawain’s frown told me what he thought of that, but I ignored him.
‘The Saxons may have found the holy tree and hacked it down,’ I said.
‘Won’t the Christ god send a fog to hide the tree?’ Gawain asked. ‘Won’t he strike the Saxon down who touches the tree with his axe?’
I could not tell by his war-worn face if he was mocking me, but it seemed that he was and the muscles in my arms and legs drew tight like knots, anger flaring in my chest.
‘There is no one left on Ynys Wydryn to pray for the Thorn’s deliverance,’ I said, thinking of poor Father Brice and Father Judoc and the rest, whose corpses would by now have been savaged by wolves and foxes, ravens and crows and countless smaller creatures which flew or crawled or slithered. ‘There is no one to protect the Thorn from the enemies of God. I must continue the brothers’ work. I will ensure that the tree endures.’
‘Plant the cutting here.’ Father Yvain pointed the spear he was sharpening in the direction of the orchard. ‘Among the apple trees. It’s as good a place as any.’
I glared at him. ‘This is not safe land, Father.’ It troubled me that Yvain did not seem to share my concern. He had never been the most devout of the brothers, far from it, but I thought he would want to honour his fellow monks by doing what he could to protect the Thorn.
‘Nowhere is safe,’ he replied. ‘Not these days.’ He spat on the whetstone and ran it along the blade’s edge. ‘Plant it here and be done with it.’
My blood was running hot. Had they forgotten the slaughter below the tor? I knew that the brothers’ sacrifice meant little to Gawain, who was no Christian. But Father Yvain? I expected better of him.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I will find another place. Where there are Christians who will guard the holy tree as the brothers would if they still lived.’
Gawain came at me then. In five paces he was on me, his fist full of my habit as he drove me backward across the mud. ‘You damned fool!’ he said, his spit hitting my face. ‘I lost two good men getting you off Ynys Wydryn! Better men than you, boy.’ I struggled against his grip and, hauling myself back, threw up my left hand, knocking his fist away from my throat. He stepped back and so did I.
‘Enough!’ Father Yvain yelled. He was somehow, suddenly, between us, his broad back before me. His great bulk loomed in the dusk, his spear raised towards Gawain threateningly. ‘Leave him be, Gawain.’
Gawain pointed a ringed finger at Yvain. ‘You forget yourself, monk,’ he spat, and I thought he would draw his sword then.
‘No, brother, I do not.’ Yvain lifted his spear blade higher still.
A deep rumble came from Gawain’s throat. Some instinct made me look over my shoulder and there was Iselle, standing with her unstrung bow stave strapped across her back. I wondered how long she had been there watching us.
‘I’ve not been a monk so long,’ Father Yvain warned.
‘Long enough, I’d wager,’ Gawain sneered, all but asking Yvain to do something with the spear, whose blade was speckled with rust.
‘Peace, Gawain.’ Arthur had left the apple trees where Guinevere sat. His face was drawn and pale and the eyes below that furrowed brow, eyes which raked Gawain, Yvain and me, were hard and flat, as though he was angry that we should presume to bring our petty quarrels into his dismal refuge.
Yet Gawain, who either had not heard Arthur or did not want to hear, took a step towards Yvain and threw his arms wide, inviting Yvain to attack him.
Yvain held his ground but did not lower the spear.
‘I said peace!’ Arthur called, striding towards us, raising a hand to show the palm.
Down came Yvain’s spear blade. Gawain lifted a hand towards him, acknowledging that he himself had let the situation slip out of his grasp. Then he lifted his chin towards me. ‘He is more like his father than he knows,’ he said, his anger dissipating though his jaw was still clenched tight.
Arthur had come to a stop some ten paces away, his booted feet planted in the mud. ‘Is that not what you hoped, nephew?’ he asked.
Gawain folded his arms over his broad chest and considered this. ‘Hanguis and Endalan did not die for nothing,’ he told me, then looked at Father Yvain. ‘Not for some old tree.’
Father Yvain nodded and planted the butt of his spear in the mud. ‘You’ll get no argument from me about that.’
Gawain frowned. For a moment it seemed he and Arthur had more to say to each other, but then Gawain turned and strode off towards the house, muttering about needing a drink. ‘We leave at sunrise,’ he called over his shoulder.
Iselle held my eye for a heartbeat, then she too went inside.
I turned my attention back to Arthur, who gazed at me with eyes so blue and yet so distant that it seemed they reflected another sky from another time. ‘Lancelot was the most stubborn man I ever knew,’ he said, pulling his thinning beard through a fist. For the first time I saw the ghost of a smile on his lips. ‘Merlin told me once that when your father was a boy, he had a sparhawk. A fearsome, hate-filled bird. A mistrustful, broken-winged fiend of a hawk, but young Lancelot would not give up trying to man her. He’d work day after day, sunrise to sunset, seeking to win the bird’s trust, though he knew little about the austringer’s art. Merlin said it was a battle between obstinate wills, Lancelot’s and the hawk’s. The bird was vicious and wild, and no one believed young Lancelot could man her.’ Arthur’s lips tightened then. He gave a slight shake of his head and turned to look back to where Guinevere sat among the fruit trees, their gnarly shadows distorted by the setting sun so that they looked like dark, grasping hands reaching for her across the ground.
‘And what happened, Lord Arthur?’ Father Yvain asked. I was glad of that, for I had bitten my tongue to stop myself from asking.
Arthur turned back to me. ‘The boy manned the bird,’ he said.
‘And the bird manned the boy.’ Father Yvain smiled.
‘In the end that proud hawk would eat from Lancelot’s hand,’ Arthur said. ‘He could cast her at some prey and call her back and she would drop the prize at his feet because she wanted to impress him.’
Yvain nodded, satisfied with the end of Arthur’s tale. Then, saying he would carry Guinevere inside, he left Arthur and me standing there, watching the shadows merge and pool, darkness rising like a tide as the sun set.
‘Your father never lost that spirit,’ Arthur said, looking into the west. ‘He did everything he could not to leave you, Galahad. You know that, don’t you?’
I felt my face tighten. Felt my throat constrict.
‘I did not see the end’ – Arthur reached across his chest to press a hand to his shoulder as if to a wound – ‘but men have spoken to me of it. They say Lancelot refused to yield. That he would not succumb to death even though it was not possible for a mortal man to deny it. He fought with every sinew. Every breath. For you, Galahad. Because he loved you.’
My chest ached. My breath came in short stabs and I watched a loose mob of jackdaws and rooks winging towards a clump of alders already dark with roosting birds.
‘Come, Galahad,’ Arthur said, ‘I have something for you.’
We stood for a moment, letting our eyes settle into the darkness beyond the glow of the horn lantern which Arthur held. The air smelled of straw and dust, leather and iron and old horse urine, though it
was clear that no horse had lived in the stable for years. There were barrels and baskets and some amphorae of the type Greek merchants brought to Britain to trade for our tin. There were bundles of reeds, old spit irons and a rusted cauldron and a saddle and tack, all spattered white with bird droppings.
I followed Arthur deeper inside and saw, leaning against the near wall, a shield like the ones Gawain and his men had, with bleached leather stretched across it and the black bear standing on all fours on the shield boss. Only this shield was even more scarred and battered, the leather torn and begrimed and stained with rust-coloured daubs. This was Arthur’s own shield, I supposed. Once a sight to put fear in Saxon bellies. Now, a dust-covered relic. To look at it was to glimpse a glorious time long past, when even the kings of the land had come together under one banner. When the people had hope. When Britain had Arthur.
I was still looking at that shield when Arthur spoke my name softly and pulled a linen sheet from the gloom itself, or so it seemed. He took a step back and lifted the horn lantern before him.
No! I drew a short breath and stepped back, knocking an empty barrel over. I don’t know how many times my heart hammered in my chest before I breathed again. I stood there, hands clasped against my mouth, my blood cold. Cold to the very marrow of my bones. Unable to speak or move. Constrained as if by chains or some potent spell.
Because I saw my father back from the dead.
‘It’s all right, Galahad.’ Arthur’s voice sounded distant, drowned out by the rushing of the blood in my ears. ‘Don’t be afraid.’
I blinked. I took a step forward. Then another. My hands moved down to my chest and I felt my heart beating against my breastbone.
It was not my father returned from Annwn, but it was his panoply. His war gear, conjured as if from my memories, all hung and mounted on a simple wooden cross stand so that in the dark it had tricked my eyes. So that in that instant when Arthur had removed the sheet, I had seen my father standing there in his war glory. And even now, knowing it for what it was – metal and leather, stitching and wool – I could barely breathe as I gazed at it. My father’s long coat of overlapping bronze scales, each little plate shining dully in the dark. The silver-studded sword belt crossed from right shoulder to left hip, and the sword itself, Boar’s Tusk, snug in its scabbard, sleeping away the years. A long spear leant against the right end of the cross beam, as though gripped in a hand, and leaning against the bottom of the upright were my father’s iron greaves, skilfully wrought to depict the muscles of his legs. On the face of each greave, at knee height, were twin images of a hawk’s head, impressed into the bronze by a master smith. It was a depiction of that very same bird which my father had manned as a boy, and looking at those greaves now I felt again the wonder, the thrill that had run through my blood when I would steal a glimpse of them without my father knowing.
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