by Lavie Tidhar
And the Lady says nothing.
‘What do you want?’ Arthur says.
The cat thinks she can hear his heartbeat. It is so strong, so vital. There is so much life in him, and so much power, or the potential for power still. This is what the Lady wants, this is why Merlin serves him. They feed on power like leeches feed on blood.
The Lady and Merlin exchange glances. She cannot have him, not now, the cat knows. The little Merlin has staked out his claim long ago. The boy is his, for life.
The Merlin nods. The Lady looks at Arthur.
Her smile is sad.
‘I want your death,’ she says.
*
What has transpired in that room is for them alone. And perhaps the king thinks he has got the bargain he had come to seek. What is death to a young man, anyway? Well, he is promised now. They’ll say no more about it, till the very end.
When he comes out of the room his men are jubilant. They have the arms they sought. The battles from here on will go their way. They’ll vanquish Yder of the savage north, and Outham the Old and all the others. They’ll unify this island and rule over all. They’ll grow stinking rich with power.
That night there is a feast to seal the deal and the mermaids come out of the depths to sing, and the shadows dance in the torchlight and the wine from sunken ships from the sea of Hispania flows like water.
In the morning the men are gone.
Cath Palug watches their departure, the knights clutching their heads in the dawn’s early light, and Arthur stepping with a new weight on his shoulders, and Merlin beside him is mute.
Then they vanish into the mist, back on the road. The arms they had bargained for will be delivered by water.
They’re gone, and she will not inquire further.
In the afternoon her mistress calls her to her rooms. Cath Palug sees a familiar figure taking wine with the Lady.
‘Oh, cat!’ the Lady Morgause says in false surprise. ‘What a delight to see you once again!’
‘Lady Morgause,’ the cat says politely, with barely disguised loathing. ‘What brings you here?’
‘I have business with your mistress, cat,’ Morgause says. ‘If that’s alright with you?’
‘Business, Lady?’
‘I’m in the market for a weapon,’ Morgause says, and smiles a smile that bares her teeth. ‘Who better than the Lady of the Lake to sell me one?’
‘You need a magic sword, my lady?’
‘In a way, cat. In a way…’
That smile she has. Those awful teeth so white and sharp.
‘So, Sister Nimue?’ Morgause says.
The Lady of the Lake smiles politely back. Takes a sip of her hot flavoured water.
‘It’s thanks to Cath Palug I found it, really,’ she says. ‘She’s most astute in her use of the seeing pools.’
‘Indeed…’ Morgause murmurs.
‘Here,’ Nimue says.
She hands over a woodcut.
The cat cranes her neck to try and see.
Morgause smiles. The cat jumps on the table and slinks around her mistress, peering into the woodcut in Morgause’s hands.
A pretty girl is carved into the picture. She’s by a stream, and looking up and smiling, with eyes so full of hope.
She looks familiar. The cat has seen her once before, in scrying.
‘Her name is Guinevere,’ the Lady says.
Morgause says: ‘She’s perfect.’
PART SIX
THE CHOIR OF ANGELS
38
‘Guinevere’s coming! Guinevere’s coming!’
Running footsteps. They hear her before they see her. A shadow, moving softly, whistling. ‘Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence’, some melody she’d picked up from the traders on the Tyne, some Christist ditty out of Greece or somewhere. She smiles and her teeth are sharp and the night is cool and the night is dark.
She sings.
‘Let all mortal flesh keep silence, and with fear and trembling stand…’
They hear her before they see her.
They run.
‘Guinevere’s coming! Guinevere’s—’
Behind her, the twang of a bow, the whistle of an arrow overhead. One of the men ahead pitches face forward in the dust and doesn’t rise. She steps over his corpse.
‘For the King of kings and Lord of lords comes forth to be sacrificed, and given as food to the believers; and there go before Him the choir of Angels—’
‘Choir of Angels, motherfuckers!’ Laudine screams behind her. She lights a torch and it bursts into flame. In its shuddering light the young woman is briefly visible, her face a painted war mask, her eyeballs as white as imported ivory.
She tosses the torch high in the air.
It arcs overhead, hits a thatched roof, and the flames burst to life. In the light of the fire Guinevere can see the silent outpost’s packed earth tracks, the few houses and, ahead of her, her destination: the local thane’s counting house.
They’re out and about in the new Bernicia, far from home. The local thane’s men are in the counting house getting drunk. The Choir of Angels have been watching the camp all day. Now men come out to face her. Angles, holding swords. The flames light their faces, their reddened eyes. They charge her.
She turns her javelin, a Roman pilum, and stabs once, twice in one flowing motion. Two men drop to the ground with their intestines spilling. From within the shadows Isolde, ‘The Blonde’, fires knives.
Guinevere steps over the bodies and enters the counting room. The thane’s not there, only some weaselly accountant of his. He cowers from her. Guinevere looks around the room and gives an appreciative whistle.
‘Tax collecting’s been good, then?’ she says conversationally.
The accountant wields a knife, for all that his hand’s shaking. ‘Get away, witch!’
‘No witch, good sir,’ she tells him. ‘Merely an honest woman doing an honest day’s work.’
‘Please,’ he says. ‘Please.’
She reaches for an open, half-full bottle of barley wine. She lifts it up and takes a swig and makes a face.
‘Put the knife down,’ she says, not unkindly.
Screams outside, then silence. The rest of her choir step into the hall. Isolde, ‘the Blonde’, and Enid ‘the Knife’, and Laudine and Luned, ‘the Sapphic Assassins’, who follow the teachings of the ancient Greek poet.
‘Well lookie here,’ Isolde says. The accountant makes a mad, desperate dash for the door and Enid buries a knife in his neck. She jumps neatly out of the path of the blood spray and it catches Laudine full on.
‘Bitch!’
Enid laughs.
Guinevere looks at the loot. The Angles have been around for the past twenty years or so. A generation. They came up the Tyne or over the coast, some as small traders, some as farmers seeking land, others as soldiers-for-hire, for the kings of Bernicia and Deira were always at each other’s throats. Before you knew it the Angles built villages of their own, raised livestock, ploughed fields, established small businesses such as weavers and carpenters, potters and jewellers; and they also executed the old kings of Deira and Bernicia and their strongmen took over the thrones for their own.
In the counting room she sees bars of iron; gold jewellery; Roman coins, and Rhone wine from the continent; good firewood, and sacks of flour, and a pair of lovely gold earrings in a wooden box, and good cloth, and jars of honey, and pickled fish, and the remnants of a feast on the long table.
The girls sit down and finish off the goose and the bread and some apples and cheese, and they drink cider until they are quite drunk. Then they take whatever’s portable, the coins and the jewellery and the pieces of cloth, and Enid helps herself to the pickled fish for she has a predilection for the stuff, and then they scoot.
They set fire to the rest of the outpost before they ride into the night, and the flames cast the sky into a false dawn.
*
Guinevere sits by the stream tearing the petals of a daisy, yellow and whit
e.
She smiles a secret smile, and chants the words to herself.
‘He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me little, he loves me a lot. He loves me to passion, he loves me to folly, he loves me not at all.’
Of course I love you, the worm says, far away, and the girl shudders with delight.
Then she straightens up and forgets about the flower. She whistles, and her girls come to her from across the isolated meadow where they’d made their camp.
Isolde, ‘The Blonde’, rises from behind the bushes and shakes her shift back over her thighs. ‘Can’t a girl take a piss in peace anymore, Guinevere?’ she says in annoyance.
‘Isolde, dearest,’ Guinevere says. ‘Is there ever a time when you don’t take the piss?’
‘You should get yourself checked by the herb woman, Isolde,’ Laudine calls from the bank. She climbs out of the water, a fish and a knife in her hands. ‘You piss too much, you probably caught something from that Angle you were fucking back in Mercia.’
The other girls laugh. ‘Fuck off,’ Isolde mutters, but Guinevere can see she’s thinking it over.
‘You don’t know where they stick their dicks,’ Luned says sagely. ‘A watermelon or a sheep it’s all the same to men.’
‘What in fuck’s name is a watermelon?’
‘A Jute trader told me about it. It’s a sort of Egyptian fruit, I think. It’s big and round and red inside.’
‘Like your ass, then, Luned!’
‘Fuck off, Enid!’
‘You can’t catch herpes from a watermelon, anyway… Whatever it is.’
Guinevere lets their conversation drift over her. She scratches herself idly.
I’m hungry, the worm says. It has longing in its voice.
‘They’ll be coming after us hard after that last score,’ Laudine says. ‘I say we head back to Pons Aelius. We’ve got us more than enough for the winter.’
‘And miss out on all the fun? I hardly think so,’ Isolde says.
‘You hardly think at all, and that’s your problem,’ Laudine says.
Guinevere heads to the copse of trees where they’d stashed the loot. She checks it over – the iron bars the Angles often use for barter, and sacks of salt, and the usual assortment of jewellery and coins and weapons. They could go back to Pons Aelius, she thinks. The Romans’ once-new castle on the Tyne’s mostly avoided by the Angles, who do not, apparently, trust Roman architecture. There are still independent Britons there.
‘Fuck that,’ she says. ‘Let’s send a message. I want to rob the Aetheling of Deira.’
‘Rob him? Rob him how?’
Guinevere’s smile widens. ‘We kidnap him and then demand his ransom.’
The girls erupt in shouts. ‘Are you mad!’
‘His weregild’s set at what, ten thousand tremissis? We will be set for life.’
‘A fucking short life!’
Hungry… the worm growls, far away.
Soon… Guinevere promises.
‘Besides, no one has this much gold lying around, not even the Aetheling. Not even the whole Kingdom of fucking Deira,’ Laudine says.
‘So what will you do, run off to the castle and take up sewing?’ Guinevere says. ‘The game’s out there, bitches. The game’s the game.’
‘No doubt!’ Isolde says, then blushes when the others stare at her. ‘I mean… One more big score, then we’d all be land owners and respectable, like. Right?’
‘Right,’ Enid says dubiously.
‘Right…’ Laudine says, but she does not sound convinced.
‘Luned?’ Guinevere says.
‘Hmmm?’
‘Are you in?’
Luned turns around and slowly smiles. ‘Can’t win if you don’t play, can you?’ she says.
So that’s that.
*
‘Guinevere’s coming! Guinevere’s coming!’
They ride down a dirt track with fields on both sides. Children run in the mud, waving and shouting, and Guinevere and the rest of the Choir of Angels toss them little bags of honey cakes, dusted with precious cinnamon spice. They’d scored some at the thane’s counting room. Where it came from remained a mystery. It is said giant cinnamon birds collected the sticks from trees that grew in some faraway land and used them to construct their nests, which brave traders then robbed.
Along the fields the farmers, too, straighten from their labour and wave and smile. To them, the Choir of Angels throw bags with precious salt, and here and there a small chunk of iron ore, which the Angles and the Saxons prize. This is why Guinevere and her girls can operate as they do. No villager would turn them in, and when the thane’s men come asking they are helpfully and politely pointed in the wrong direction.
They ride to the chief’s hall.
‘Maggs!’ Guinevere says. She hugs the old woman who comes out to welcome them. Maggs gives her a toothless grin and enfolds her in strong wiry arms.
‘My, my, but you look ripe for the plucking,’ she says.
‘Maggs!’
The old woman leers. ‘I’m just saying.’
‘I’m not looking for a man.’
‘It’s when you don’t look…’ She frowns. ‘Haven’t I taught you better? You must always look to see what’s ahead.’
‘I mostly look behind me, these days. Besides, I do not have your vision.’
They go inside. The chief, Aldwyn, is grateful for the gifts they bring. A feast is ordered. Guinevere says, ‘Who runs Deira these days?’
‘Fellow by the name of Pelles,’ Maggs says. ‘Came from the continent to take over the local racket. The clan chiefs back home want to make sure their… investments are taken care of.’
‘He’s the Aetheling?’
Maggs says, ‘The omnium ducibus dux, the boss of bosses,’ and cackles.
‘What’s he like?’
A shrug. ‘Alright, I suppose, as long as you don’t fuck with him.’
Guinevere: ‘I think it’s too late for that.’
Maggs: ‘So I’ve heard. You girls been keeping busy.’
‘Girls gotta eat.’
‘I raised you well…’
‘Do you think he’ll come after us, Maggs?’
The old woman looks at her levelly. ‘He already has, fool. His men have been scouring the land from half across the Roman Wall to the sea. If they find you…’
She leaves the thought unsaid.
Guinevere, with a lightness she doesn’t quite feel, says, ‘Well, we’ll just have to make sure he doesn’t.’
‘You can’t run forever, girl.’
‘I don’t intend to.’
‘Then what?’
‘Tell me, Maggs. Where can this new Aetheling be found?’
The old woman goes still. ‘Why?’
‘Call it curiosity.’
‘Curiosity killed the cat…’
‘I ain’t no cat.’
‘Well, that’s debatable.’
‘So?’
‘He inhabits a hill fort to the north of here. Wild country, out there you can run into anything, even Picts and giants, all sorts of things. New place, heavily fortified, mostly Angle soldiers, some hired Jutes. Not people to fuck with. Called the Dolorous Tor, it’s near the Wansbeck River. From what I’ve seen in my scrying, they have been landing men there for some time, as though building up an army. But for what or against whom I couldn’t tell you.’
‘They say there’s a new king in the south,’ Guinevere says.
Maggs shrugs. ‘A king’s a king and a rat’s a rat, and if one dies there’s always another one right behind on its tail.’
‘The Dolorous Tor, eh?’
Hungry… the worm whispers, far away.
Maggs cocks her head quizzically. Perhaps she alone beside Guinevere can hear it.
‘You know why I never kept a pet?’ she says.
‘Why?’
‘Sooner or later they shit in your home.’
‘Alright…’
‘Come. There is time before the f
east. I see your girl Isolde’s getting busy with the boys already.’
Guinevere looks over. Isolde’s got her hands on a young hunter’s chest and is urgently murmuring in his ear.
‘Dumb as two planks, that boy,’ Maggs says.
Guinevere says, complacently: ‘That’s how she likes them.’
*
Maggs’ house is cool and dark and quiet. A fire smoulders in a ring of stones. The house is untidy. There are chicken bones on the ground and garments thrown about, and a collection of dried herbs and an assortment of oddly shaped rocks and metals, and a small thin knife made of flint, which must be very old.
‘Sit, sit. Let’s scry. It’s been forever since I’ve had a good scry. How about you, Guinevere?’ Maggs leers. ‘Got any good scrying recently?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Well, well, I’m sure you don’t, I’m sure you don’t,’ Maggs says. ‘Now, where’s my glass ball, where did I put it… Ah, here it is.’
It’s impossible to say just what Maggs is. She is not a native Briton nor an Angle or a Saxon or a Jute. She speaks bad Latin and worse Anglisc and whatever it is Jutes speak. She has been old for as long as Guinevere has known her, which is her entire life. She is what the continental newcomers call a haegtesse, and like their wise old women she, too, can use a glass ball to sometimes see that which is unseen. She’d brought up Guinevere after her father died.
‘So what do you see, Maggs?’
‘I see white sails, and a black sea, and an island in the distance… But this is far in the future still, I think.’
She peers into the glass ball and mutters to herself. Her index finger moves, as though swiping through images only she can see.
‘I see a group of men moving furtively through this land,’ she says at last, thoughtfully. ‘One of whom is a fish and the other a tree.’
‘That doesn’t make much sense, Maggs,’ Guinevere says.
‘Yes, well.’ She coughs. ‘I see… I see a man in your future. He’s handsome, if you like them that way.’
‘Handsome how?’
‘Skinny as a chicken bone, and with a killer’s eyes…’
‘He doesn’t sound very appealing. Don’t you have anything else for me?’
‘So impatient, you are. Always were.’ But she keeps scrolling, and her lips move without sound, until—
