Camelot

by Giles Kristian

  The monk scratched amongst his coarse beard and grimaced. ‘Parcefal never lacked courage,’ he said, ‘but he was never short of wits either. A druid is a druid.’

  Gawain hoomed deep in his throat but did not disagree, and with that he turned around and we set off after him across the muddy ground between the swine pens and byres, the stables, workshops, forges and roundhouses which crowded Tintagel.

  There were few people about. Some traders setting up. A brace of children out fetching water, a filthy hound trailing at their heels. A man beneath the eaves of Uther’s old hall, bent over and coughing his lungs into the sludge. The wintry sun was breaking over the plateau, throwing long shadows in which the sea wind seemed to gather, rippling the puddles. I shivered again and clutched the wool at my neck to keep out the cold.

  And we went to find Merlin.

  At first, I thought that we walked through a sea mist, but Gediens told me that it was, in fact, low cloud, rolling across the wind-whipped heights and shredding itself upon the bluffs and crags. Gulls whirred around us in that damp fog, shrieking like tormented wraiths, in and out of our sight from one heartbeat to the next as we made our way to the north-east side of the peninsula. Here, the sound of the surf rose on the gusts which snatched at my robes and whipped my hair, and we came to the ironclad gate through which passed the treasures of the world: olives and oil, walnuts, honey, spices, silks, glassware, pottery and wine, all brought here on ships which sailed away from these shores laden with gold and tin.

  Father Yvain had to thump his spear against the gatehouse to wake the guards, while the rest of us shuffled side to side in the damp chill. Iselle was suggesting we go around the gate and scramble down the rocks, when the door clunked open and a guard emerged, bleary-eyed and resentful, squinting into the pale morning as he fastened his cloak with an iron pin brooch.

  ‘You blind? It’s low tide,’ he called, throwing an arm towards the cliff edge and yawning, his clouding breath smelling of ale and garlic. ‘No boat’ll be beaching till after noon.’ The words were barely out of his mouth when his drink-blurred gaze slipped off Father Yvain and caught on Gawain. His eyes widened and his mouth closed.

  ‘Open the gate,’ Gawain demanded.

  The guard was not much older than I. Too young, I thought, to recognize Gawain, who had not been to Tintagel in years. But not too young to recognize a lord of battle.

  ‘Of course. Course, lord,’ the man mumbled, turning to join another guard who had stumbled out of the little house and was already in place to draw the beam from the gate lock. Then we were through and out onto the worn path which ran alongside the palisade and down towards the stairway carved long ago into the rock.

  Out in the bay, the ship which we had seen the previous night lay at anchor still, swaying on the swell, her crew too distant for me to see whether they had the dark complexions of Greeks from the shores of what the Romans called Mare Nostrum, ‘Our Sea’.

  ‘Watch your footing,’ Gawain called over his shoulder, for the steps were slick and treacherous and the wind was beating up at us in salty gusts.

  I looked down on the circling gulls and the ebbing tide which had left a dark stain on the sand and shingle, and I saw the cave’s gaping mouth at the foot of the cliff. I was struck by the thought that Merlin might take one look at my robes and hate me, if not worse. It was said that with just a few words he could cast maggots into a man’s guts. That he could shrivel an enemy’s manhood with a muttering and fluttering of fingers. And, like others in Britain who sought the return of the old gods, wasn’t it likely that the druid would resent Father Yvain and me as followers of Christ?

  I heard Gediens tell Gawain that he would have expected Parcefal to be keeping watch at the mouth of the cave, but we could not see anyone waiting in the shadow as we stepped onto the beach, the gulls crying above us, the rolling breakers breathing and sighing a hundred paces off.

  ‘Something feels wrong,’ Iselle told me, drawing an arrow from the bag on her belt, and then we were inside the cave, the wet rock glistening and the sound of the sea distant and muted.

  ‘Parcefal,’ Gawain called into the gloom, his voice swimming around the cavernous space. Daylight leaked in through a hole up ahead, some hundred paces from where we stood, showing us that the cave stretched all the way through the headland.

  ‘Up there.’ I pointed at a ledge high up beyond the tideline. ‘There’s something there.’

  Gawain nodded. ‘Up you go.’ And so I hitched up the hem of my habit and climbed, pulling myself onto that shelf of rock with a sense of relief because there was no legendary druid waiting there to curse me or cut my throat.

  ‘Just this,’ I said, lifting up the sack which I found leaning against the rock wall, and the top of which I had seen from below. Other than the charred remains of a fire, an iron pot and some knuckles of animal bone – no doubt the remains of a meal – there was nothing else on that ledge to indicate that Merlin and Parcefal were still around, if they had been there at all.

  ‘Nothing,’ Gediens called from deeper within the cave. He was working his way back to us, using his spear as a staff to help him across the wet rocks.

  I clambered down with the sack to join the others, then drew it open. For a moment I did not know what I was looking at. Shadow in shadow. I leant it towards the cave’s mouth and the daylight glossed the blackness within. A whisper of purple. A ghost of green. I put my hand inside.

  ‘Feathers,’ I said.

  ‘A druid’s cloak,’ Father Yvain growled.

  Gawain nodded. ‘Best leave that be,’ he said and so I did, gladly pulling the drawstring to return Merlin’s possessions to darkness. ‘But don’t lose it,’ Gawain warned.

  ‘This is blood,’ Iselle said, crouching near the cave’s entrance.

  We gathered around her and we knew she was right. It was not much, just a dark scarlet slick in the sand and shingle, but even in the shadows she had seen it.

  ‘Whatever happened here happened as the sun came up,’ Gawain said, ‘else the tide would’ve washed it away.’ With that he straightened and walked back outside.

  I offered him Merlin’s sack, but he curled his lip. ‘You hold on to that, Galahad.’ He was staring towards the ship anchored out in the bay.

  I offered the sack to Gediens, but he raised a hand and shook his head, and I grimaced with the knowledge that I would have to be responsible for the thing. It seemed to me a strange twist of fate that I had lost the cutting of the Holy Thorn and gained a druid’s raven-feathered cloak, and whatever else Merlin might keep in that sack.

  ‘What now?’ Gediens asked.

  Gawain turned away from the sea and strode back up the beach towards the stone stairway.

  ‘We ask questions,’ he called over his shoulder.

  Two spearmen were tramping down those steps to begin their sentry duty should any boats come in on the next high tide. As they came onto the shingle and we passed them, they frowned at us, no doubt wondering what we were doing down there, but too lazy or uninterested to ask.

  ‘Things have changed here,’ Gediens muttered, not for the first time since we had arrived at Tintagel.

  ‘Things have changed everywhere,’ Gawain said, his boots scuffing on the wet rock, his bear-shield bouncing against his back.

  I followed that bear up the worn stairway, the black-feathered cloak whispering to me from the sack in my hand. And what it whispered of was blood.

  9

  Lord of the Heights

  WE MET WITH THE hunchback Lidas as arranged and stabled the horses where we had slept the previous night. The owner, a short, bald man named Brycham, agreed to let us stay there again, though he seemed surprised that Gawain and Gediens would choose such humble lodgings.

  ‘Lord Geldrin would surely host men such as yourselves in his own hall.’ Brycham frowned and scratched at an old sore on his neck. ‘No need for you to bed down with the beasts.’ His eyes flicked to Iselle, to the Saxon sword on her back, the knives i
n her belt and the bow in her hand, then back to Gawain. Chances were, he knew who was renting his stables. Word of Lord Arthur’s bear-shields being at Tintagel would by now have hopped from lip to ear like fleas from dog to dog, but however much he ached to ask us our business, a stronger instinct told Brycham to mind his own.

  ‘Fresh straw and a roof over our heads are all we need,’ Gawain told him. ‘Though I shall be grateful if you would feed the horses with the best grain you have,’ he said, giving Brycham a coin, which vanished into the man’s purse.

  ‘The same barley that makes Lord Geldrin’s bread,’ the little man replied, dipping his head and raising his hand. ‘I’ll roll it myself.’

  With the horses in good hands, we bought some bread and cheese and salted fish and returned to the ale house, where we hoped to discover something which might help us find Parcefal and his charge.

  ‘We start asking questions and every man and his dog on this rock will know who you are,’ Father Yvain warned Gawain, as we stood for a moment eating and watching a dozen slaves being led towards Uther’s old hall by a knot of lean, grizzled spearmen. Seven of the slaves were fair-haired Saxons and from the looks of them they had been beaten half to death. Who could say where the other poor creatures were from? Gediens said they had the fierce, proud look of Gaels. Or perhaps they were men of Cambria. Raiders whose arms had driven their boats on to Dumnonian shores, but who would never again cross the Hafren and return to their kin.

  Father Yvain tore a hunk of bread from a loaf which he then passed to me. ‘Next thing you know,’ he said through a mouthful, ‘we’ll be hauled in front of this Lord Geldrin, who’ll be wanting to know why Gawain, son of King Lot of Lyonesse, and the great Arthur ap Uther’s right hand, is skulking around his fort unannounced.’

  Iselle glared at the Saxons with hate-filled eyes and I knew she wanted nothing more than to sink arrows into their flesh or cut their throats with her long knife. But it seemed this Lord Geldrin would have the first opportunity to view the slaver’s stock before those broken, beaten men were driven to the block and sold on the open market. They waited, wretched and miserable, as a steward went inside the hall to announce the traders to his lord.

  ‘We were supposed to be on our way by now,’ Gediens said, burying a lump of cheese in a piece of bread and pushing the whole lot into his mouth.

  ‘But we’re not,’ Gawain said. ‘And the chances are every man and his dog on this rock already know we’re here.’ He looked at Father Yvain. ‘Still, we came for Merlin and we’re not leaving without him.’

  One of the slaves, a scrawny, sallow-skinned man, did or said something which earned him four lashes of his master’s hazel switch. He tried in vain to fend off the blows, crying out in pain, and I thought of the whipping I had received at the hands of Father Judoc for going into the marsh without the brothers’ permission. After turning away to growl at another man, the slaver spun back to the sickly-looking slave and struck him twice more for good measure.

  I shuddered. Was Father Judoc sitting in heaven at Saint Joseph’s right hand? Were the Brothers of the Thorn watching me through the veil which hangs between this world and the world beyond? Were they judging my worthiness to have survived, to live and breathe when they did not?

  ‘I want to know whose ship that is in the bay,’ Gawain said, ‘and whose blood is in the sand.’ We nodded, all of us agreed that knowing the answers to those questions was worth the risk of folk learning that Gawain of Lyonesse, once one of Arthur’s famed horse lords, had come to Tintagel. And so we sought those answers in the ale house, which to my surprise was just as thronged with beer- and wine-soaked men and women as it had been the previous evening. The clamour filled my head again, a rushing, dizzying noise flooding in where for years there had been only prayer and the devotions and the low murmur of the brothers’ voices.

  And the stink of that place, of all those people crammed so close that the lice could jump from one to another, of sweat and vomit and piss. Of stale beer and last night’s meat dishes and the mouldering thatch above our heads. And of the memory of all that drink which I had poured down my gullet the previous evening. It brought the gorge up my throat and so I picked the least muddied piece from the hay strewn across the floor and held it to my nose, rolling it between finger and thumb to free the scent of a summer long gone.

  ‘No more than two drinks, Galahad,’ Gawain warned, though he needn’t have, for I could not stomach the thought of drinking anything other than the weakest ale.

  ‘I’ll be better on my own,’ Iselle said. Gawain nodded, at which Iselle set off, soon disappearing among the crowd. The rest of us split up, Father Yvain and I joining a table of Greek merchants who were awaiting a ship from Ireland to carry them south and home again with the tin they had bought. Being Christians, they were willing to talk to us and, though they had never heard of the Order of the Holy Thorn, they gratefully received Father Yvain’s blessings, sharing a jug of wine with us in return.

  ‘The light of Christ is a weak flame in this land,’ a man named Anatolios told me in his strange accent as he filled my cup, ‘so we are glad to meet fellow believers.’ He tapped the rim of his cup against my own, while his friend talked with Yvain. ‘Now tell me, young man, about your order. Did Saint Joseph of Arimathea truly bring the cup of Christ to the Dark Isles?’ He leant back, a mix of curiosity and doubt in his sun-darkened face, then stamped his foot on the earthen floor. ‘Did his holy feet walk upon this very earth?’

  I put the cup to my lips, trying not to wince at that first sip of wine, and told Anatolios the stories that I myself had been told by Father Brice when I was a boy alone in the world and in need of tales.

  Gediens and Gawain went their separate ways, moving among the crowd, stopping now and then to strike up a conversation, filling a cup here, drinking a cup there, though their faces were so scarred and grim from war, their scale coats and weapons so conspicuous, that men and women seemed to shrink away from them, or even turn their backs and pretend they had not seen them.

  A few men, warriors themselves, or at least men who had stood in the shieldwall or carried a spear beneath some lord’s wind-stirred banner, dipped a head or dug an elbow into a rib, lips moving behind raised cups as they drew their companions’ eyes towards the two figures moving through the hall.

  ‘They can smell the blood on them,’ Father Yvain murmured to me as I drained my second cup. He had followed my line of sight towards Gediens, who was fishing for information among a knot of drunken men and women, including Anatolios and his fellow merchants, who had gathered around a girl and her lyre. ‘They smell it and fear it and they don’t want to get so much as a drop of it on themselves.’

  ‘Gawain says that the war will come to the west, even to Tintagel,’ I said, as the first notes of that lyre sang out, almost lost amongst the thrum of voices, tentative and sweet and pure as spring meltwater.

  ‘I think Gawain is right,’ Father Yvain nodded. ‘The Saxons will come, but until they do, folk here will make the most of being alive.’ He lifted the wine jug, his eyebrows too, and I nodded, letting him refill my cup despite Gawain’s orders. Then we both drank, and I realized that, if anything, the wine was making me feel better than I had felt before.

  ‘She’s a beauty, isn’t she?’ Yvain was watching the pretty, dark-haired girl whose long fingers danced on the lyre strings, pouring notes into that fug-filled hall like some queen scattering coins among the poor. He had assumed I was watching the dark-haired girl too, but I wasn’t. My eyes followed Iselle, catching sight of her now and then amid the human swell. In awe of how easily she seemed to navigate this world, which must have been as strange to her, a young woman of the wind-shivered reed-beds and ancient, secret tracks, as it was to me, who had been raised first in the forest, away from prying eyes, then in a house of prayer on Ynys Wydryn.

  Where folk shrank from Gawain and Gediens, wary and watchful, where they scorned or ignored Father Yvain and me, our robes marking us as followe
rs of the new faith, they seemed drawn to Iselle. Their eyes and whispers followed in her wake. I watched men break off from their conversations to put themselves in her path. They offered her drink or invited her to sit beside them and share their meals. They asked about the sword on her back and the long Saxon knife sheathed on her belt, and one or two of them got to see those weapons close up when Iselle drew them, turning the blades this way and that until firelight sang in the ghostly swirls, reminding the blades of their birth.

  I saw one man beside her move his hand down and out of sight amongst the press of bodies, a grin on his face as he found what he was searching for. Iselle twisted and there was a flurry of movement, a scuffle in a heartbeat, and then the man dropped, clutching his groin, and only the laughter of those around him reassured us that Iselle had not cut him open, and that the worst he would suffer was pain and embarrassment.

  ‘She’s a fierce one,’ Father Yvain grinned as we watched Iselle move on through the press of bodies without so much as glancing back at the mess she had made.

  ‘She is too sure of herself,’ I said. Really, I was thinking how in awe of her I was. ‘She should be more careful.’

  Father Yvain looked at me, his eyes and the shape of his mouth within that thicket of beard telling me that I should have just said what I really thought.

  That Iselle was magnificent.

  As dusk fell and a gathering wind scattered rain across the plateau in fitful gusts, hissing in torches, whipping the flames to a breathy roar but never quite extinguishing them, we met back at our humble lodgings to share what we had learnt.

  ‘Where’s Iselle?’ I asked, realizing that she was not among us. I had not seen her since leaving the ale house and now I was worried.

  Gediens nodded at the spitting dark. ‘I saw her go that way.’ He pointed his spear towards the tanner’s workshop, beyond which stood a cattle byre and beyond that, the cliff terraces. Between keening gusts, I could hear the sea breaking itself upon the rocks far below.