by Lavie Tidhar
‘What do you want me to do?’ Agravain says.
‘Do? Everything!’ Kay says. ‘Look, go and talk to the company commanders at least. Get these idiots to shut up and go to sleep. We march at first light tomorrow.’
‘Come on, they’re just letting off steam. They’re kids,’ Agravain says.
‘Just… do it, will you? Go!’
Agravain gives him a sullen look but complies.
Kay stares at the paperwork on the desk. Bills of lading and promissory notes, endless lists of inventory and accounts… He lifts up the pen, takes a fresh sheet of parchment, and starts to do sums.
*
‘Daddy? Daddy!’
The green children run to the giant figure that comes striding towards them through the forest. Bercilak lifts them up in a bear hug, tosses them to the sky as they shriek with laughter.
‘Neve! Mercury! Shana! Acanthus! Jack-in-the-Green! Penny! Oh, hello, which one are you?’
‘He’s only a baby,’ one little girl says. The Green Knight picks up the baby and strokes his green hair. Tiny foliage already grows behind the baby’s ears.
‘I’ll call him Bolton.’
‘That’s a stupid name! And it’s a girl.’
‘I’ll call her Bolton, then!’
‘Daddy, you’re silly!’
The Green Knight roars and the children scamper as he chases after them.
‘You’ll never catch us!’
‘Quick, in the canopy!’
‘I’m a root!’
In moments they vanish in the forest. Only their eyes gleam bright, staring at him as they try so hard not to giggle.
‘I’m sure I can’t see you,’ Bercilak says. ‘Anyway, where’s your mummies and things?’
‘All about.’
‘All about, eh?’
‘Daddy’ – a small boy rematerialises from the bark of an oak – ‘are you going to the war?’
‘Sure am, kiddo.’
‘But isn’t it… dangerous?’
Bercilak laughs. He pulls out his long sword and shows it to them. ‘I am a knight!’ he says. ‘A knight of the Round Table! I am the bestest fighter in the land! I eat the hearts of men and sheath my manhood with the lining of their intestines! Also, I am a primeval manifestation of the forest given human form. So, you know. Not that easy to kill.’
‘Daddy, you’re the bravest!’
‘I know, kiddo. I know.’
‘Can we play catch again?’
‘Let’s play hide and seek!’
‘Grr!’ the Green Knight roars. The children scamper, shrieking.
He gives them a count of ten before he gives chase.
*
Day turns to night and night to day and back again. The moon streaks across the sky. Stars blink and fade, the Earth – as propounded by Aristarchus of Samos, at least – revolves around the sun. Time, which Parmenides has argued is nought but an illusion, nevertheless passes.
The soldiers march.
They come from Camelot. From Londinium. From Tintagel and from the Glastonbury Tor and from the line held against the Picts along the Wall.
And they converge, at last, on that bleak and barren plain men call Camlann.
Where the enemy’s army is waiting.
70
The clash of steel on steel. The screams of dying men. A horse breathing his last in the mud. It rains. The whisper of arrows flying overhead. The hiss of a flame. The dull thud of a lance as it pierces bone. The hiss of warm blood from an artery. The distant crackle of thunder and the muffled beat of the enemy’s drums.
All that and more.
Lightning illuminates the battleground. It’s like a war painting by Aristides of Thebes. The bright vermilion of mercury sulphide. The black of charcoal. The startled white of lead. Perhaps a hint of ochre yellow to complete the classical four-colour composition of the picture. The sun, perhaps, the promise of a dawn hidden just behind the curvature of the Earth.
‘White Company, to me!’ screams the Black Knight of the White Hill Gang. They charge across the battlefield. The swords that flash, the spears that bite! Beware the White Hill Gang, and run, before the fearsome knight!
‘South Londinium company, to me!’ shouts Sir Daniel von dem blühenden Tal of the Frankish mob. His men give cheer, and follow him to meet the foe. And on, and on:
‘Bors Company!’
‘The Bastards!’
‘Men of the Hard Hand, to me!’
‘Attack!’
‘Attack!’
And snicker-snack, there’s only forward, there’s no way back. The glorious battle, the wounded and dead, the mud and the screams and the blood and the blood and the bl—
*
‘Nasty business,’ Sir Pellinore says. He’s perched on a rock, on a crag, overlooking the field of battle. He munches on an apple.
The Questing Beast warbles in an awful, mournful cry. Sir Pellinore passes her a slice of apple and she chews it.
‘Perhaps it’s time for you and I to retire,’ the old knight tells her. ‘Things are going to be different, after this, I think. The world is changing. There will be less room in it for fanciful things. And my bones ache in the cold weather.’
The Questing Beast warbles in affection; but whether she’s convinced or not, the old knight cannot tell.
They watch the fight unfold. It’s hard to tell who’ll win. The old knight learned, a long time ago, that there aren’t really any winners in a war, just lots of losers. Life’s such a fleeting thing. It’s gone in moments. Sometimes he wonders if his true achievement isn’t simply that he’s lived so long.
What is it all for? he wonders. The apple’s sweet, with just a hint of sour. More and more now he’s glad of that long-ago viper’s bite, and the birth of his daughter, which took him away from court and set him on this different path. Forever questing, in pursuit of that which eludes you – and isn’t that, in microcosm, life?
Those men on the battlefield, they’re barely stories. Just build-up with a sudden end. At least Sir Pellinore, say what you will of him, will have beginning, middle and an end.
A bird comes to rest beside him. It turns, not unexpectedly, into a man.
‘Well, this is a giant fuck-up,’ Merlin says.
‘It’s nice to see you too,’ the old knight says.
‘I tried to warn him. But he wouldn’t listen.’
‘His father never was a man for listening when calls the blood.’
‘This Mordred,’ Merlin says, ‘he’s joined up with the Anglo-fucking-Saxons.’
‘I say, that’s bad!’
‘That little cunt!’
‘Indeed, indeed. Well, some would say they have a right to live here too,’ the old knight says, then instantly regrets it. Merlin’s fury’s like the sudden storm that tosses fishing boats into the depths.
‘I will see them wiped off the face of the Earth!’
Sir Pellinore somehow doubts that; but he wisely keeps that to himself. They’re not so bad, these Johnny Anglisc, these Johnny Come-Latelys. Strange, for sure, with their guttural tongue and their continental manners. And they’re fond of bloodshed as much as the next man. But they love their children, and they make beautiful jewellery, there really are some talented artists in their midst. And who’s to say whose land this is, really? Land’s just land. You may as well say it’s owned by the ants or the birds or the stags who live upon it. Do they not have a claim?
But Sir Pellinore is just a foolish old man, surely. And so he keeps these thoughts to himself.
‘Apple?’
‘Thank you.’
They chew this fruit of the Earth in companionable silence, and watch the battle commence.
*
An arrow through the eye takes down Daniel von dem blühenden Tal.
A dagger through the ribs for Escanor the Large.
The Black Knight of the White Hill Gang: trampled to death under the hooves of panicked horses.
*
‘Regroup! Ch
arge!’
The main forces of Hengist and Horsa and their clans are not even there. They wait beyond, as Mordred and his men do battle. Only a select engagement of Angle and Saxon mercenaries swell up Mordred’s ranks – but it just might be enough.
Lancelot sweeps through the battlefield like a dancer. He slashes and kicks, flies overhead with his sword arm extended, separating heads from their owners, hearts from their beats. He is a one-man war engine, like some Trojan War hero summoned from the feverish imagination of Homer’s whacked-out brain.
Beside him Bercilak, the Green Knight, roars as he swings a giant tree he’s using as a club. It sweeps up men and horses, it impacts with a thud that breaks whole skeletons inside their meat coats, that bursts eyes as though they were jellied sweets.
‘Vivi tu, vivi, o Santa Natura!’ screams the Green Knight.
‘Im ein ani li, mi li!’ screams Lancelot, quoting Hillel. If I am not for myself, then who will be for me?
‘Die!’ screams Geraint, before he gets a lance in his guts and speaks no more.
*
Tor, set on fire by a flaming arrow.
Gareth and Cynric, hacked to pieces with long fishermen hooks.
Elyan the White: heart attack in the midst of battle.
So it goes.
*
‘Fuuucking Anglo-Saxons,’ Merlin says, with feeling.
Sir Pellinore shrugs. ‘Don’t take it to heart,’ he says kindly. ‘For all you know in a few centuries some other lot will come with swords and an attitude. The Franks from Gaul, maybe.’
Merlin shudders. ‘Can you imagine?’ he says.
They stare at the battlefield.
‘Shouldn’t you be down there?’ Pellinore says.
‘Yeah, I guess. Not really into swords, though.’
‘No, never had you pegged for the scut work.’
‘It’s just all the… the blood and shit. It’s filthy.’
‘Got to get your hands dirty sometimes.’
Merlin stares at the battlefield. ‘My hands have been dirty for a very long time, Pellinore,’ he says softly; and the old knight cannot but concede the wizard’s point.
From their vantage location they watch the soldiers make war: it doesn’t look too bad, from up there; from a distance.
*
‘Kay? Kay!’
Bors the Younger is cold; so cold. He looks up but all he can see are the clouded skies. Then, miraculously, Kay’s face appears above him.
‘Bors! Oh, Bors!’
‘I’m so cold, Kay.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ Kay says, ‘We’ll get you back to camp, the medics will make you as good as new.’
‘I can’t feel my legs, Kay.’
‘Stay with me, Bors! Stay with m—’
‘Kay, I… I love you.’
Bors tries to smile. Kay is so close. He blocks out the skies. His lips are warm.
‘I love you, too.’
Then the world fades for Bors. He can hear something, he thinks. Some distant cries. He puzzles over them. Then even that last vestige of thought flees.
‘Bors! Bors!’
*
‘Oh, Bors,’ Kay says. He lets go of the corpse. He’s too old and too fat to be fighting this war. And he can hear the distant cries.
‘Victory! Victory’s ours!’
But he has no idea who’s shouting.
He turns and turns. His men surround him, dispatching any enemy who dares approach. Where’s Arthur? Where is the king?
He cannot see him.
That stupid boy!
Surely they’ve had enough, he thinks. More than their fair share of things. But it was never enough. There’s always more, and more, until you hit something even bigger than yourself, and it swallows you whole. Alexander of Macedon reputedly wept when he beheld that there were no more worlds to conquer. But the idiot died of gut rot at the age of thirty-two all the same, in distant Babylon.
There is always something bigger, ready to eat you up.
‘Arthur? Arthur!’ Kay screams. He shoves the loss of Bors and all his love and fear deep under. He hefts his sword. He’s still a knight. He’s still alive. And this is war.
‘To me, knights of the Round Table! To me, Britons! Charge!’
Oh, how they roar. Oh, how they cheer! Swords flash, the knives come out, and they surge, one last great desperate heave against the enemy, to turn the tide of war.
*
Bercilak, the Green Knight, takes a sword in the side. He looks down, surprised. Green sticky sap seeps out of the wound. Bercilak laughs and slaps the head of his opponent clean off. The head bounces on the dark ground.
‘Long live the king!’ Bercilak screams. A veritable rain of arrows flies down from the enemy’s archers then and hit him full in the chest. Bercilak stares in surprise at the arrows sticking out of his chest like the branches of a tree.
‘You think wood could stop me?’ he screams. He plucks out an arrow but the wound stays open, and more sap bleeds out. Bercilak roars and wields his sword, but there is no one to strike. The enemy’s pulled away, the Green Knight’s isolated in their midst.
They throw lances then; and it is possible the lance heads are fashioned of the metal that was found on the site of the grail, for it tingles unpleasantly when it cuts through his flesh, and the wounds stay open, and more and more of his blood comes pouring out. He roars and tries to charge them but they simply move away, and fire from a distance. He cries in pain, and it’s such an unfamiliar sensation that he laughs in delight.
‘You can’t kill me!’ he screams. ‘I have natural immunity!’
They come closer then. With swords and shears. With gardening implements. They hack at him. They cut and chop and trim him. And Bercilak, too late, realises even a mighty oak’s no match for a man’s axe.
‘Fuck you!’
But more and more they come. And his blood sprays the black ground, and where it falls new, green shoots emerge, and tiny plants take root and grow. Nature finds a way.
Bercilak sinks to his knees.
‘I am undone,’ he says. The spirit that animates him must return to the primordial forest from whence it came. And yet he resists.
To live, he thinks, has been so glorious! He wishes to remain in this realm but a moment longer. To savour one more time sweet life, its contradictions, its strange allure.
Then the final axe falls for the final instance, and this time it’s Bercilak’s head that rolls. He blinks, surprised, sees feet and skies, and then the spirit’s gone.
A mound of twigs and leaves and moss, dry branches.
In moments a fire arrow hits the pile and it bursts into flame.
But the shoots of green around that place of death remain. The ash will fertilise the ground. In time new plants will grow and flowers bloom. In time the deaths on that wide expanse of plain will vanish, and only the blooms shall remain.
In time…
*
‘There you are,’ King Arthur says.
Mordred, the traitor, turns with a grin to face him.
PART FOURTEEN
THE DEATH OF ARTHUR
71
Excalibur strikes.
But Mordred with a litheness born of youth jumps out of way’s harm. He parries the attack and slashes savagely at Arthur, who falls back. Mordred uses the momentum to push him harder. Arthur parries the next strike, then lunges with a nasty little knife. It grazes Mordred’s rib. Mordred kicks and catches Arthur in the chest. They fall back from each other, stare.
Neither of them is smiling anymore.
They are so much alike: Mordred as thin as a young branch, and Arthur as the older tree that birthed him, still straight-backed and standing tall. Mordred’s all in black, and Arthur’s battle wear is dusty, green and brown, but the look in their eyes is identical: it is furious and focused, and signals someone’s death.
But whose?
Arthur stabs and Mordred slashes, hacks and kicks. Arthur roars and comes at him with E
xcalibur and Mordred, almost contemptuously, parries the attack and shifts his stance and grins.
You little prick.
There’s only the two of them now doing battle. Around them the great sea of the wounded and the dead lies over the plain of Camlann. It moves in the tide: waves of freshly dying soldiers peaking in final screams, but mostly traced in shallow eddies of whimpers and cries.
Then great big silences.
Here and there sporadic fighting still takes place. Somewhere high up a few archers still track moving targets, from the safety of the hills they take down human prey.
But mostly now the battle’s done. It’s hard to say who won, who lost, there’s no one left to take a proper tally of the living and the dead and do a count.
The men who are left surround the two fighters in a circle now. They give them a wide berth. Kay is there, for always there must be someone to keep an account. Owain, the Bastard, and Agravain of the Hard Hand. They’re too hard to kill. They remain.
Arthur and Mordred fight like shadows. They leap and their swords clash in mid-air. Mordred turns and runs and Arthur gives chase. Mordred feigns and lashes at him and Arthur laughs and Excalibur flashes and the sound of steel on steel echoes through that valley of death.
And so it goes.
Hack hack slash stab feign thrust parry stab stab knife.
They don’t really fight like soldiers. They fight like the gutter rats they are. Arthur kicks dust into Mordred’s eyes and slashes at his legs but Mordred recovers, jumps, screams, ‘Somebody shoot him in the fucking back!’
But the last of the hidden archers has been taken down. Lancelot has been busy, sneaking up on them, slashing throat after throat, silently. No archers come to Mordred’s aid, and none to Arthur’s. The two men are alone there on the battlefield.
One by one, the Ladies of Water materialise ringside. They form wherever there is moisture. They emerge like shadows out of puddles of blood. They are drawn to the power on display here like flies looking to lay their eggs in rotten meat. They watch so avidly. Their eyes shine and their lips are wet.
‘The boy is strong,’ Sir Pellinore says.
‘Arthur is stronger.’
