Lancelot Read online

  ‘She took a dove the day before last,’ I said. ‘As well as any goshawk could.’

  The Lady half smiled. ‘On the cliffs overlooking the old wreck,’ she said. ‘I saw it.’

  ‘I was going to give it to Pelleas for his pot,’ I said, embarrassed to know that she had been watching. I talked to the sparhawk more than I should, when I thought we were alone. Talked about my brother and father. About the traitor Balsant and about my mother. ‘But she took the dove up onto a branch and ate her in front of me,’ I said.

  The Lady laughed. ‘I know,’ she said, and I frowned again and she raised a hand by way of an apology.

  My cheeks flooded with heat. ‘I have never seen its equal, Lady,’ I said, taking our conversation back to the glove and lifting it to my tortured nose, fancying that I caught the faintest scent of the leather hide and the oils which had been worked into it to keep it supple.

  ‘I am pleased,’ she said, and seemed contented to see my appreciation of the workmanship. I had thought old Hoel’s glove was wonderful, but this one was fit for a prince. Fit for a prince of birds, too, and it made me wish, as I had not done for some time, that I had brought the white gyrfalcon from Benoic rather than the sparhawk.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘And for the wine.’

  ‘Which you could not taste,’ she replied, one eyebrow arched.

  I smiled.

  ‘Beware Melwas,’ she said. ‘He will be a formidable warrior one day. One of our best.’

  ‘I do not fear Melwas or any of them,’ I said, though my reflection in the water barrel should have told me that perhaps I ought to.

  ‘I know you don’t,’ she said, and those green eyes were so knowing that I suspected she could see my thoughts as clearly as the swollen nose on my face.

  She nodded at my gloved hand. ‘She will not like the new glove at first but she will grow used to it soon enough if you put her food on it. And once it smells of you.’

  I wanted to ask her things then. Questions that had been simmering away in my mind for weeks, ever since I had grown used to living on the Mount. Such as why had she saved my life that night in the Beggar King’s hall? And why had her men not helped my father in the midst of that bloody betrayal? Why just me?

  I had asked my bird these questions many times, but all I got from her by way of reply was silent defiance or, when she was in fair mood, grudging respect. Neither of which was much use to a young boy with unanswered questions.

  But standing here in the keep on the heights of Karrek, that deerskin hawking glove warming to my skin, I could ask the Lady herself. What better time than now, when we were alone and my victory in the foot race was still fresh enough that she might indulge me further.

  ‘Thank you,’ was all I said. For whilst I did not believe that I feared Melwas or Agga or any of the older boys on the island, I could not tell myself that I did not fear the Lady. This golden woman who ruled an island of boys and girls and battle-scarred warriors.

  More boots clumped in the stone stairwell then, followed by three thumps on the oak door.

  ‘Come in, Madern,’ the Lady said, and the door opened to reveal the warrior who, seeming not in the least surprised that the Lady had known it would be him, announced that a boat from the mainland had beached.

  ‘Lord Cynfelin’s men, Lady. Come to fetch Wenna,’ he said.

  The Lady frowned, still looking at me. ‘Sooner than I expected,’ she said to herself, turning to Madern. ‘The girl shows ability, Madern. I would have had her stay with us longer.’

  The warrior shrugged broad shoulders in a gesture which said it was none of his concern.

  ‘So be it,’ the Lady said.

  Wenna was promised in marriage to this Lord Cynfelin, so Pelleas had told me, and she had been sent to Karrek by her father to protect her from other would-be suitors and the temptations of the world, as Pelleas put it, until a deal could be struck between her father and Lord Cynfelin. It seemed that two powerful men had come to an agreement and Lord Cynfelin had sent for his prize.

  ‘Is Wenna to marry?’ I asked. I thought her too young and this news of a lord’s men coming to take her away came as a surprise.

  ‘She is the same age as you,’ the Lady told me, heavy-browed. ‘Off you go now,’ she said, taking a small pot from the table and with a slender finger painting her lips with red ochre. ‘And do not antagonize the other boys,’ she added in a stern tone while rubbing a little of the powder into her cheeks too, as I had seen my mother do times beyond counting.

  ‘No, Lady,’ I said, thanking her again, then took my new hawking glove, squeezed past Madern and ran down the stone steps which were cold on my bare feet. And, my victory prize still on my hand, so snug, so perfect compared with Hoel’s old glove, I stepped out into the day.

  For the next six days I barely took the new glove off and even slept in it, in order that my scent would seep into the deerskin and the sparhawk would become accustomed to it the sooner. In that time she caught another dove and also a small herring gull, and on both occasions I got to her before she could carry her kills up into a tree and humiliate me.

  I held her jesses and had her eat gobbets of flesh from the glove, a little at a time each day, until I was confident that she was happy enough with the change. And nor did I scrub the blood out of the leather, because I wanted her to associate the glove with filling her belly. It pained me to see that new deerskin blemished already and I knew that I would have to clean it soon or the leather would stiffen, but for now it was more important to earn the bird’s trust.

  ‘Never thought I’d say it but it would seem you’ve made a hunter of her,’ Pelleas said, appearing at my shoulder one dawn as I stood on the Mount’s south side looking west across the sea. ‘So I’ve heard.’

  I felt awkward, unaccustomed as I was to company when the hawk and I roamed the island. A light rain hung like mist in the air and the day was as grey as the sea which surged landward in furrows of shattering foam and spray.

  ‘She does it for herself, not me,’ I said.

  ‘Aye, then she’s found the thrill in it,’ Pelleas said, as if that was something he understood intimately.

  Like me the sparhawk was staring out to sea, perhaps wondering what lay beyond that dull horizon where cloud met ocean, where it was impossible to tell which was which. The bird seemed almost as comfortable in Pelleas’s company as in my own, which was perhaps not surprising seeing as we three still shared a hut. For her part, perhaps, the hawk was earning the warrior’s respect.

  ‘One day we’ll take her over to the mainland so she can have a proper go at the hares,’ he said. ‘I think she’s big enough and brave enough to take a young’un.’

  ‘Would the Lady let me go across?’ I asked, intoxicated by the idea of escaping Karrek and its isolation. I also relished the thought of seeing how the bird would fare against this new prey which she was unused to. She had learnt to fly well after those ungraceful early days with her broken wingtips, mangled tail feathers and suspicious hatred, so that I was sure that together we could learn to catch a rabbit or hare early in the season. If the Lady allowed us to try.

  ‘I think I could persuade her,’ Pelleas said, almost smiling. ‘If you can prove your bird is worth the effort.’

  The sparhawk would not take that bait but just glared into the west.

  ‘Well then?’ Pelleas said. ‘Did I come up here to look for the faces of old lovers in the waves?’ He had been staring out to sea but now he turned in time to see the flush in my cheeks. ‘Or are you going to show me what she can do?’

  I looked at the hawk’s yellow eye. ‘She prefers hunting with the sun behind her,’ I said. I didn’t want to fail in front of Pelleas. Not now that he had come out of his way to find us and watch us take a blackbird or starling or some other prey. Not for any reason.

  ‘We don’t always get to choose the battlefield, lad,’ he said.

  I frowned, knowing we must try even if it ended in disaster.

 
Pelleas had almost given up complaining about the bird’s shrieks and occasional bating in the night when he was trying to sleep. Now, if he was prepared to entreat the Lady on our behalf about going over to the mainland, it was the least we could do to show him what we spent day after day learning while he and the others were training in the arts of war.

  I turned my back on the grey sea and sunless dawn and walked towards the flickering green of elm and elder, at which the bird on my glove stretched her wings in readiness, knowing it was time. For like all sparhawks she hunted from cover, coming at her prey unseen until the very last when it was too late to escape her.

  No talking now. Soft footfalls and slow movements, me slipping the leash off the sparhawk’s jesses and she keeping almost still, eyeing the wood. Waiting.

  We went a little further but stopped short of going where the trees and thickets were more tightly packed, for whilst she was supremely adept at negotiating more open woodland, as a large female she did not often risk flying amongst dense undergrowth.

  Then, by a stunted solitary ash we waited. I wondered if Pelleas the warrior had the patience for this. Often the sparhawk and I would stand this way for what seemed an age, me barely breathing, moving only my eyes, the bird even stiller. Tense. Bunched like a muscle before a fight. Pelleas was a shield cleaver. A spear breaker. A man who never seemed more content than when he was swinging a sword at an opponent or an axe at a log, or wrestling the other men into submission to the joy of the boys and girls of Karrek. But what we were doing now required restraint. If there was not a good chance of catching the prey, the sparhawk and I both knew it was better not to fly. In truth I was not yet sure that I was suited to it, for there had been times when I had cast her at some uncatchable bird, which was a waste of her strength and an unnecessary risk. Even so I had manned the hawk and was still flush with the triumph of that, and my heart was beating fast now.

  ‘The art of hunting with birds is not much known in the Dark Isles,’ Pelleas had said that first night the sparhawk and I shared his hut. The Sarmatians taught it to the Gothic tribes, he explained, who in turn gave it to the Romans. ‘But you won’t see it much in Britain now. And I’d wager never a hawk on the arm of a lad young as you.’

  How a man like Pelleas knew such things was a mystery and I nevertheless expected him to ruin things now with some gruff curse and a flap of his arm as I eyed the wood, waiting for a tree sparrow or a bullfinch or some other bird to break cover.

  Waiting. The sparhawk forgetting her ill temper, setting aside her mistrust of me, her mind on the task at hand. I just keeping the perch of my arm still and my eyes scouring the trees in the unlikely event that I should spot some prey before she did.

  Had Pelleas gone, I wondered after a while, for I could not hear him breathing behind me. He has snuck away so as not to ruin our hunt, I thought. A pity. Surprised as I was to see him, I had now grown excited by the prospect of showing him what my bird could do. Not the white gyrfalcon but an imperfect sparhawk, a creature which barely tolerated me and which defied me whenever she could. But my bird nevertheless.

  A rock dove clattered amongst the leafy branches of an elm, its wingbeats like the clapping of hands as it found a new perch. My bird had seen it. Her yellow eye was fixed on it, fixed in it like a hook, and her body thrummed like a heart about to burst. She knew she could not catch a rock dove if it got a head start. But the dove had not seen her yet. Had not noticed us half hidden by the trunk of that stunted ash.

  Unsatisfied still, the rock dove flapped its grey wings and dropped from the branch, landing in the grass a short spear-throw to my front and right and already pecking about. Looking up incessantly, as creatures will that know they are some other animal’s prey.

  Now! I had barely thought it when the sparhawk ghosted off the glove, quick and low against the ground, so low that she almost scythed the grass. And for a half-breath I lost sight of her amongst the trees, but then there she was, rising, wings spread, tail open, the dark striped bars of her underside vivid in the grey dawn.

  ‘Gods,’ Pelleas said. Behind me still. There all along. My sparhawk had the dove in her talons as she banked round and came back towards where we stood. She climbed above the ash and dropped the kill, which landed at my feet, and I saw that the rock dove’s neck was snapped. There was also a deep bloody gash along its breast.

  ‘Fierce little fiend, isn’t she?’ Pelleas said, turning his admiring eyes up to the canopy of the ash where the sparhawk sat preening herself, making sure each of her tail feathers was aligned perfectly after the excitement of the hunt. And while she feigned indifference to the kill, perched in that branch tidying herself like that, what I saw in her was pride.

  ‘Seems you’ve not been idling the days away after all, lad,’ Pelleas said. ‘Benesek and the others won’t believe it.’ He bent and picked up the torn rock dove. ‘So let’s show them this, hey. Forget beating Melwas and Agga in a foot race. Some more of these for the pot and you’ll be a proper hero around here.’

  I nodded. Not that I cared what the other boys thought of me. But I did want to earn Pelleas’s respect and so I looked up at the sparhawk and gave her my whistle, which more often than not she ignored as if she were deaf. This time though, perhaps because she was not done showing off, she swooped from the branch, lighted on my outstretched arm and settled on the deerskin glove.

  There has not been such a storm for years. Nor one so out of nowhere, the day having dawned fair and calm. Now, roiling clouds, bruised and black, pushing each other eastward across the low sky like an armada of black ships bearing tragic news of death and defeat. Difficult to fly in this.

  Below me, the sea as black as the cloud but for the white gashes here and there where the storm sheers off a wave’s crest and scatters it to the wind like an offering.

  Before the world was full of wrath, I had spread my wings and shrieked with joy to ride the salty air. Thinking only, let the boy’s sparhawk not be untethered and hunting, for she is a savage, blood-thirsting creature. The boy has made her so. A herring gull is neither small nor meek, yet that sparhawk would go for me if she saw me. But she will not be on the wing today. Not in this.

  I test my voice. A mad laughing shriek as if in defiance of the storm. Oh the joy of it! And now, as I near land, that green island besieged by white-plumed furrows, I smell the mussels and the crabs and the sea urchins far below, where the ocean throws itself onto the rocks, trying to break but being broken. Over and over again. But I fight the need to plunge into the breakers for shallow prey. To forage amongst the stones and pools. For now at least. I have come for something else. Someone else.

  There. There he is. Surely that is him and I shriek again, spiralling down and down, my outstretched wings buffeted by the winds, my feathers trembling with the thrill.

  Yes, that is the boy, though he has grown since last I saw him. A handsome thing he is. Dark and lean-faced. Noble-looking yet somehow wild too, like the sea-battered coast of these Dark Isles.

  What is that he clutches in his hand? I shriek as though to ask the question but the boy cannot hear me amongst the storm’s baleful roar and the ocean’s self-sacrifice upon the ragged shore. A glove. An austringer’s glove and beautiful too. Even my herring gull’s eyes can see the craftsmanship in it. I shriek again, this time to warn the boy to stay back from the cliff edge lest he be blown off to smash his bones on the rocks far below. Like a mussel dropped to crack open its shell.

  Closer to the edge he goes and now my scream is one of terror because I fear he will jump to his death, and would that be so strange given all he has suffered?

  He stops and I let the storm toss me closer until I see that beneath that tangle of dark hair his face is ashen. Tight as his sparhawk’s claw on a kill.

  He pulls back his arm and … there. He throws the leather gauntlet and it turns over itself twice, three times. Falling. Falling into the suck and plunge of the white water at the cliff’s foot.

  I am too close to the roc
k and my wings open, catching a gust which lifts me up and turns me and I beat into the wind, gaining the rain-flayed sky, my plaintive mewing call lost in the tempest. Keow! Keow! Keow! Up through the grey. Up and up towards the grim, shifting black.

  For a moment I thought I saw the glove amongst the breaking water, small and lost and doomed, being drawn back out with the retreating sea. Being claimed. But then it was gone and I was glad of it. Damn that glove and damn this island. Damn the gods too, who sought to punish me. And yet had I not brought their judgement upon myself? By accepting the Lady’s gift and forgetting who I really was? When I had shut Hoel’s old glove in a chest and put on that new deerskin one I had cast off Benoic. I had betrayed the past and all but forgotten my father’s face. What was I doing here? Swimming with the rising tide each dawn and running laps of the island to prove myself, when I should have been raging against those who killed my family. Or perhaps I should have been with my brother Hector in the grave.

  Dark thoughts. Raging and storm-tossed like the water below, though perhaps not as fully formed at the time as I saw them after. Still, I was bitter and self-loathing. I was cursed.

  I had been sitting on a milking stool in the thin dawn light, scouring the rust from an old mail shirt of Pelleas’s, when Geldrin came running across the sand and grass, his fair hair sticking up in sweaty tufts from being under the leather helmet he now gripped by the chin thongs. With breathless excitement he asked me to come back with him to the practice field to judge a fight between Agga and Peran.

  ‘Come, Lancelot!’ he said, pointing off to the smokehouse beyond which some of the boys were fighting, their occasional shouts and the clack clack of their wooden swords now and then carrying to me on the breeze. ‘They want you to decide it.’

  I looked at the mail shirt across my knee then glanced up and down the strand for sign of Pelleas. He had told me that he wanted every spot of rust gone and the iron rings greased against sea air and salt spray by the time he returned from wherever he had gone before first light.