Camelot Read online

  Giles Kristian

  * * *

  CAMELOT

  Contents

  Prologue

  1: Voices for the Lost

  2: A Wolf in the Reeds

  3: Warriors from the Storm

  4: Into the Earth

  5: Ghosts from the Past

  6: Shadow and Bronze

  7: The Riven Land

  8: Tintagel

  9: Lord of the Heights

  10: Yvain

  11: Camelot

  12: Merlin

  13: A Warrior Born

  14: Old Enemies

  15: The Druid

  16: The Fisher King

  17: The Isle of the Dead

  18: The Cauldron of Anwnn

  19: Spirit Walkers

  20: Guinevere

  21: Iselle

  22: Swords of Britain

  23: A Flame in the Dark

  Author’s Note

  Dramatis Personae

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Family history (he is half Norwegian) and a passion for the fiction of Bernard Cornwell inspired Giles Kristian to write. Set in the Viking world, his bestselling ‘Raven’ and ‘The Rise of Sigurd’ trilogies have been acclaimed by his peers, reviewers and readers alike. In The Bleeding Land and Brothers’ Fury, he tells the story of a family torn apart by the English Civil War. He also co-wrote Wilbur Smith’s No.1 bestseller, Golden Lion. Giles plunged into the rich waters of the Arthurian legend for his most recent novel, the Sunday Times bestselling Lancelot. It’s a myth to which he returns in Camelot – a thrilling reimagining of the story of Lancelot’s son, Galahad.

  Giles Kristian lives in Leicestershire.

  To find out more, visit www.gileskristian.com; you can also follow him on Twitter@GilesKristian and Facebook/GilesKristian.

  Also by Giles Kristian

  THE RAVEN NOVELS

  Raven: Blood Eye

  Sons of Thunder

  Odin’s Wolves

  THE BLEEDING LAND

  The Bleeding Land

  Brothers’ Fury

  THE RISE OF SIGURD

  God of Vengeance

  Winter’s Fire

  Wings of the Storm

  THE ARTHURIAN TALES

  Lancelot

  Camelot

  For more information on Giles Kristian and his books, see his website at www.gileskristian.com

  Camelot is for Freyja and Aksel.

  You will find your own paths through bramble and briar, And I will love you every step of the way.

  For the fire of vengeance, justly kindled by former crimes, spread from sea to sea, fed by the hands of our foes in the east, and did not cease, until, destroying the neighbouring towns and lands, it reached the other side of the island, and dipped its red and savage tongue in the western ocean.

  Gildas, excerpt from ‘Concerning the

  Ruin of Britain’ (De Excidio Britanniae)

  The Saxons are strong again. They are rapacious and without mercy. Their war bands stalk the land from Bernaccia in the north-east of these isles to Rhegin in the south, and they have come west even as far as Caer Gwinntguic, so that I fear they will never now be driven off, but will subjugate and oppress our people, and still their savage appetites will not be sated. I find myself yearning for the old days. When there was hope still. And though he himself lived in shadow, beyond the light of God, I cannot help but wish that we still had Arthur. I have even dreamt of him, riding out of Camelot at the head of his glorious horse warriors. How the ground trembled beneath their hooves! But Arthur is gone. The kings will not rally. They will not fight. Armed only with our prayers, and drawing courage from the Holy Thorn, we are left to watch the encroaching darkness.

  Excerpt from a letter from Prior Drustanus

  of the Monastery of the Holy Thorn in Britannia,

  to his Holiness Pope Laurentius of the

  Apostolic Palace in Rome

  Prologue

  HE IS GONE. MY LOVE. I feel it as a severing, a ripping away. Sudden and brutal and I am falling through the darkness, down and down like a stone cast into the ocean. Fading towards the black depths, cold and unbreathing. Memories and faces falling away from me like the last autumn leaves from the oak.

  Disintegrating into my own wake as I descend. I am coming. Then light. A silver slash in the darkness. No! I am coming! Flying now. Whipping this way and that, my soul an ember in the storm’s maelstrom. He is gone and I reach out after him. Questing into the whirling dark. Grasping in vain as light flares. Wait! Flaring light. Too bright, so that I cringe away, seared with pain, gasping and tasting blood. Breathing iron and foulness. And somewhere in the thunderous clamour I hear myself shrieking. I feel my great muscles bunching, my heart thumping, the blood hot and urgent in my veins. Wait for me!

  But he is gone. Up! I scream, silently. Get up! And the stallion, his stallion, flails and struggles in the mud. Rolls and screams in hatred and defiance. Rolls again, forelegs stretching, hooves plunging into the churned filth and the gore of men. His heart thumps. A thunder clap and his hind legs thrust us upward and now his voice and my voice are one and we shriek. Standing now, blood flowing back into muscle, my will raising the stallion as though the gods themselves had cast a lunge line over him and hauled him up onto his feet. But not just my will. His own pride, too. The stubbornness that they both shared. But he is gone, and I wheel round and round, tossing my great head, throwing men back. I scatter them. Those fiends who took him from me. Now galloping, hooves drumming the earth, parting the struggling, bellowing mass and running as though along a causeway with the iron sea on either side, closing in. Keep going, brave Tormaigh. Run! I feel the stallion’s life spilling away, as sand from a fist which I clench but know I cannot hold.

  Yet I must. We are one, the stallion and I, and the world is madness. All hate and fear and death. The end of things. Run, Tormaigh. Run, my good boy. We burst from the swarming flesh and we stumble but do not fall, and now canter up the rise, coursing the channel through the tall grass, the channel of the stallion’s own making, when his master, his friend, drove him down towards the heinous strife.

  Up now. The roar of it all receding, rolling away like a wave back down the shingle. Up. Panting. Each breath stolen. Up. Staining the grass with hot blood and sweat lather as we sweep along this pathway which leads back to the boy.

  1

  Voices for the Lost

  THE INFANT LIVED FOR as long as it took the tallow candle beside his crib to burn down to the iron socket. When his blue-veined abdomen sucked against his tiny ribs for the last time, his life departed with no more fuss than the smoke from that sooty hempen wick curling up to the rafters. Earlier, when it was still hoped that prayer might bear the child through the mortal danger, as the basket had borne little Moses among the bulrushes, I heard Father Judoc moan to Father Brice that it was a waste to use a candle when a rushlight would serve.

  ‘You know as well as I that the child has been called to heaven to sit at our Lord’s right hand,’ Father Brice replied. ‘Let his poor mother keep vigil over her babe without fear that the flame might extinguish and she not know if the child will be in this world or the next when it is relit.’

  The baby had come too soon and there had been no time to send for the nuns across the water, nor to send Father Yvain to take a cutting from the Holy Thorn to place in the woman’s hand as she laboured. The brothers had done what they could, but it was not enough, and Judoc had sent me to fetch Father Phelan and some of the others so that they might sing the child’s soul to heaven now that his leaving was inevitable.

  By the time they had gathered in the infirmary and decided which hymn would best fit such a sombre occasion, it was too late. That scrap of a boy had left his mother
alone in the world once more and gone to sing with the angels on high, or so Father Brice said, though the babe had barely squawked or made any sound at all since he had struggled into the world.

  Neither did his mother shriek or wail. Not at first. From the stool beside the little bed, she turned tired eyes up to Father Brice, the stamp of the crib’s rail livid as a birthmark across her pale cheek. I saw such sadness in that face, a pure desolation, and felt ashamed to be there, helpless, as Father Brice nodded that the moment had come.

  The old monk rubbed an ashen cheek as if suddenly aware of the new white bristles rasping beneath his fingers, and I saw in that moment how tired he was. Weary not from this vigil alone but from hundreds like it. From a lifetime of shepherding souls to the borders of hereafter. From simply enduring, too, year upon year, as our little island of Ynys Wydryn endured, though the world beyond failed as everything must. Because our tor, a hill rising from the murk of marsh and lawlessness, offered rare sanctuary from a land in turmoil.

  Just as the marsh tides flood and recede, eroding our muddy shore little by little, day after day, so had the years and the lives and the deaths scoured Father Brice, body and soul. And now I feared that the angels’ wings which beat in that room, unseen by mortal eyes, might draw the tired old monk to heaven in their wake.

  The mother – I did not know her name then – closed her eyes, perhaps to bid her babe farewell, and when she opened them again twin tears spilled onto her face. She stood, strength summoned from where I do not know, and stared at that silent little body. It possessed a stillness more profound than even the deepest sleep can induce. So much promise in those stick-thin legs. So perfect those knotty little hands, which would never clutch at his mother’s breast nor tug her dark hair nor grip her finger. I whispered a prayer that I might grow in God’s grace and one day glean some small understanding of His plan.

  Then, with a gentleness beyond any mother’s for her living child, the woman picked up the little body and held it against herself. I thought that she was taking the last fading echoes of her little boy’s heart into her own.

  Father Brice and Father Judoc looked at each other, their hands signing the Holy Thorn in practised harmony, the prayers on their dry lips as soft and quiet as the greasy tallow smoke wisping upward to the thatch.

  Then the screaming. The tormented howl of an animal in pain. I had wanted to leave that place even before Father Judoc last trimmed the candle wick, but I knew I must stay.

  ‘Your novitiate draws to an end, Galahad, and you will be a brother of the order,’ Father Brice had said, soon after they noticed that all was not as it should be with the little one. ‘It is not enough merely to contemplate the mystery of salvation, to read and meditate on the sacred scriptures. You must experience at first hand the miracle of life … and the enigma of death.’ With that he had placed a hand on my shoulder, for he knew well enough that I had intimate knowledge of death, that the eyes into which he peered had borne witness to unspeakable violence. Years ago, now.

  ‘I should be out gathering thyme and parsley for Father Meurig and I must check the eel traps,’ I had protested. I wanted to be anywhere other than there in that room with that sorrow.

  Father Brice’s eyes had hardened. ‘You will stay, Galahad, and pray.’ Then he had glanced over to where the woman sat by the crib, her linens fouled from the labour and staining the air with iron. ‘Let us hope that the child rallies. That the Lord will let him abide with his mother. At least a while.’

  But the Lord in His wisdom had taken the child in spite of our prayers, and the monks, neither knowing how to comfort his mother nor having the courage to try, gave themselves to mournful song instead.

  ‘My child. My child is lost,’ the woman wailed. ‘See?’ Her eyes bored into mine and for a terrifying moment I thought she would hand the little body to me. ‘He is too small,’ she told me. ‘How will he find his way to Annwn?’

  I could not answer that but made the sign of the Thorn at her mention of the otherworld, the abode of the pagan dead, and, to my shame, looked away, shuffling closer to Father Phelan and the others, taking up the solemn chant in praise of God.

  The men’s voices were reed-thin at first but grew in strength, their breath blending in veils of fog in the chill dawn as they poured a balm of song into that small room which should instead have filled with a baby’s cry and a mother’s cooing.

  I was in full spate when Father Brice pulled me aside. ‘Fetch Brother Yvain,’ he said. ‘I need him to go across the water.’

  I nodded and turned to leave, grateful to be given a task, but Father Judoc grabbed my sleeve and hauled me back. ‘A moment, Galahad.’ He held up a finger and lifted his chin at Father Brice. ‘What do you intend, Brother?’ he asked. He stood a head taller than Brice and revelled in it, not that I’d ever seen Father Brice intimidated.

  ‘There is a man in the village who is sick,’ Brice said. ‘Eudaf the cobbler. His son came to me two days ago, begging me to send someone to sing the Litany for his father.’ He lifted an eyebrow and turned an upward palm towards the grieving mother. ‘I did not find the opportunity.’ He frowned. ‘Now I fear that I have failed the child, the mother and the cobbler.’

  ‘God willing, the man has recovered.’ Father Judoc placed his hands together, the straight fingers threaded to represent the Holy Thorn.

  Father Brice tilted his head towards another possibility. ‘But if he has died, and is not yet buried, it may be that this Eudaf can help the poor child,’ he said. ‘Help this young woman, too.’

  ‘It is sacrilege,’ Father Judoc blurted out, glaring at Father Brice.

  ‘It is a kindness,’ Father Brice countered with a thoughtful nod. I saw that his tonsure was in need of a blade, for there was new white growth, as fine as cankerwort down, sprouting on the front of his liver-spotted scalp. ‘A simple kindness, nothing more,’ he said, glancing at the woman.

  The look on my face must have told them both that I did not know what they were talking about, and it was Father Judoc who took it upon himself to enlighten me, presumably hoping to win an ally against Father Brice.

  ‘Brother Brice would have the dead child placed in the earth with this villager so that the man’s soul may escort the little one to heaven.’ Father Judoc curled his lip in distaste. ‘It is a pagan ritual. I have seen it done.’

  ‘Her grandmother served King Deroch back in Uther’s day,’ Father Brice said. ‘Her father fought in Lord Arthur’s shieldwall. I would assuage her pain if I can.’ For we did not save her child, was what he left unsaid.

  Judoc shook his head. ‘It is not Christian.’

  ‘Not Christ-like to seek to comfort those in pain?’ Father Brice asked us both. ‘And is it not wise,’ he went on, inclining his head to give this next point more weight than the first, ‘to keep the peace with those who may yet turn back our enemies? Their gods were powerful here, once.’

  ‘The Saxons cannot be turned back,’ Father Judoc said. ‘They will not relent until they have slaughtered every last Briton or else driven us into the Western Sea. Britain is lost, Brother. You are a fool if you cannot see that. And helping non-believers will only anger the Lord further. It will only hasten the end.’

  Father Brice gave him a sad smile. ‘If we are already lost, Brother, then what harm can this small kindness do?’ With that he turned his face, guiding our eyes back to the dismal scene of the young mother holding the dead infant to her bosom. Her mewling was pitiful to hear, all the more for being muffled by the little thatch of fair hair against her lips. It glistened with her tears, that hair, as though she offered the child a second baptism, just a candle’s length after we had watched Father Brice wash the child with water from the White Spring. The mother had not seemed to know what Father Brice was doing. Or if she knew, she did not care.

  ‘Do it if you must, Brother, but it will not be on my conscience,’ Father Judoc said, making the sign of the Thorn again.

  ‘Of course not,’ Father Brice sa
id, one eyebrow arching. Then he turned to me and lifted his white-stubbled chin and I went to find Father Yvain.

  ‘The poor wretch has left us already, then.’ Father Yvain nodded at Father Dristan to keep working the lathe, which the younger man did, pulling backwards and forwards on the leather strap that was wrapped around the piece, turning the wood one way and then the other. Over and over.

  Yvain did not look up, his iron hook tool casting chips and curls of creamy wood onto the floor rushes. ‘Boy or girl?’

  The smell of that place changed as often as the weather, depending on which wood he was working and whether it was seasoned or freshly cut and still wet. Today, I caught the sweet smell of cherry mixed with the cat-urine tang of elm.

  ‘A boy,’ I said.

  He made a gruff sound in his throat, whether at that revelation or because of how the green wood was turning, I could not say. ‘Knew something wasn’t right when I heard no squawking,’ he said. ‘Not since the girl stopped labouring.’

  Sweating in spite of the chill day, Father Dristan pulled the leather strap with the fluid consistency of long practice, and Father Yvain pressed the little hook into the wood, gouging some decoration into it. Creating by taking away. ‘Poor little soul,’ the older man said, blowing away from the sharp iron a sliver of wood, bright as a curl of fair hair. He sighed. ‘May the Lord be merciful.’

  ‘Amen,’ Father Dristan breathed.

  Father Yvain seemed to fill the low-beamed workshop, seemed as much a part of that place as did the bowls stacked to dry on shelves, and the old, scarred work benches and the piles of ash-shafted hook tools and spooning knives forged by Yvain himself, each for a specific task. He could be found there most of the day, even at those times when the rest of us were gathered at prayer. Not that the others begrudged Father Yvain’s absence from Sext and None, or from Vespers, where we almost never saw him. Aside from his wood-turning, Yvain shouldered certain responsibilities, undertook tasks which none of the others would. There was an unwritten covenant among the brothers that in return he be allowed to spend more time at his lathe than at prayer, which was why I now stood in the workshop, fighting the temptation to lift my foot and search for the splinter which was tormenting me.