Lancelot Read online

  ‘You can finish it after. He won’t beat you,’ Geldrin said, sweeping his helmet through the air. ‘You’re his favourite. Everyone says it.’

  ‘Everyone can say what they like but it doesn’t mean anything,’ I said, eyeing the dark interior of the hut, then turning my ear towards it. I could just hear the soft tearing sound of the sparhawk eating, ripping flesh from a duck’s neck which I had saved for her.

  ‘Come on!’ Geldrin pleaded. ‘Before Madern gets back with the others. They’ll take it out on me if you don’t come.’

  Geldrin believed that, I could tell. I believed it too, for though he was older than I, Geldrin was no bigger and I often saw him running errands for one of the others. But in truth, part of me was flattered that the other boys should want me to judge a practice bout. I had thought they all hated me for winning the island foot race. Perhaps it would do me good to spend some time with others my own age, or near enough, rather than roaming Karrek with a hawk as my sole companion. That was my mother’s voice in my head. Still, I stood, laying Pelleas’s mail shirt on the stool, and nodded at Geldrin who grinned and nodded back.

  The practice bout was over soon enough. Agga won and they hardly needed me to say it, for by the end Peran was limping and swiping blood from his lip while Agga was busy challenging Kitto, Clemo and Florien to a fight. I congratulated Agga and tried to catch Peran’s eye to acknowledge his courage, but he would not look at me. Then I left them to it and ran back to my work, hoping to be scrubbing those rusty iron rings before Pelleas returned.

  I was a spear-throw away from the hut when I heard it. The sparhawk’s incessant kew-kew-kew-kew which pierced the gathering wind and made my blood run cold. For I was familiar enough with her voice by then to know that something was the matter, and that she was suffering.

  I found her dangling upside down from her perch, twisting round and round and bating, and in a heartaching moment I saw the reason for her panicked shrieking. Her left wing flapped madly but the right was only twitching, because the leash was wrapped around it. There were feathers on the floor and spots of blood and I stood there as bound by the horror of it as was the hawk held by her own leash, and did not know what to do.

  ‘Hold still,’ I said, reluctant to touch her for fear of making things worse. ‘I can’t help you if you don’t keep still,’ I hissed, and maybe she understood me then, or perhaps she was exhausted from fighting, but she ceased her bating and just hung there, twisting slowly on the leash which had snapped her wing. Panting for breath. Her yellow eyes sharp not with arrogance or enmity now but with fear and confusion and pain.

  ‘There we go,’ I said, fingers more gentle than they had ever been, unwinding the leather leash, her hot body filling my left hand with vibrant life, her little heart thumping against her breastbone. She flapped and kewed in vain and I tried to soothe her, stroking her neck with my thumb and whispering that she would be all right though I knew she would not. Then she was free of that damned leash and I saw the full horror of her broken wing and it sickened me.

  ‘I’m sorry, bird,’ I said, knowing I was to blame for her ruin. ‘I’m sorry I left you.’ And now her fear turned to anger and she stabbed my arm with her beak, breaking the skin so that blood welled. She raked me with her talons. Scoured my face with her blazing eye. Accused me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. If I hadn’t gone with Geldrin I would have heard her call the moment she became entangled. But she had bated, tried to fly, and the leash had snagged her and she had swung down, somehow getting snarled in the leash so that through continued attempts to escape she had snapped her right wing. And all the while I had been away from her as no proper austringer would have been so soon after manning his bird.

  In my mind I heard old Hoel scolding me for my stupidity. I saw the disappointment in my father’s eyes and I saw my brother standing up for me, telling them all that I was only young and that I would learn, and that hurt like a cold hand squeezing my heart because I wanted to see Hector again but I never would.

  ‘You should never have come with me,’ I told the sparhawk. ‘Hoel should have kept you. It is his fault,’ I said, but I knew the fault was mine and only mine. She looked at me and gave a pitiful little shriek and I would rather she yelled and clawed and stabbed me but she had neither strength nor heart for that now.

  I carried her outside and took the polishing cloth from the ground beside the stool with the mail laid upon it, then wrapped the bird in that cloth, keeping her wings against her body, as a mother would swaddle her infant. I remembered Hoel doing something similar with an injured kestrel, though he had killed the bird soon after.

  ‘We will fix you,’ I told my sparhawk, who shrieked and glared as I placed her back in the basket which had been her home and her prison from the night we had fled from my own home across the sea until we came together to Karrek Loos yn Koos. But I hoped that the familiarity of that confinement, as well as the dark, would calm her now. At least she could do herself no further harm in there, I told myself, fighting the temptation to close the lid on the basket so that I would no longer have to see her. So that her eye could no longer burn into mine. And in that yellow eye I saw my own condemnation. In that thin little cry I heard my crime.

  I snatched up the fine deerskin hawking glove and I turned my back on the bird and when I went back out into the day I found it changed. The sky in the west was black and low and swollen. The fingers of the storm were already clutching at Karrek, flinging waves upon the rock and flicking white spume up onto the strand.

  I ran. Across the pasture beside the ragged western shore, leaping white rocks and tufts of long grass. Then climbing. Up through the trees. Scrambling over ledges and boulders. Skirting to the west of the Lady’s keep and gaining the higher ground. Racing only against myself, the wind hissing past my ears and through the long grass and rattling the leaves on the trees.

  I ran because I wanted to escape that baleful, accusing yellow eye. Wanted to escape the island itself and throw myself into the rushing sea and swim back to Benoic. Back to the time before, when I had a mother and a father and a brother.

  I watched the deerskin hawking glove being swallowed by the thrashing, slathering waves. The wind as fierce as a god’s breath in my face, dragging the water from my eyes and pushing it into my whipping hair. A herring gull, riding the storm, wound up and up into the blackening sky, shrieking, passing judgement on me on behalf of all the winged creatures. The only bird out there in this. Alone. Lost perhaps.

  Then I saw something else. Something further out. A darker shape beyond the veil of rain lashing the sea. I narrowed my eyes against the gusts, thinking my ears must be falling for some trick of the gale, hearing screams in the wind’s keening. Hearing the crack and splintering of timbers, fragile as twigs in the maw of this storm which had come from nothing, as though summoned by some dark and powerful magic.

  There it was again. A ship. A ship storm-driven onto the rocks and foundering, its oaken belly ripped open. Its ravenous hull drinking the sea. I could see it more clearly now. The bow lifted, part of it fully clear of the white water. The stern heeling so that I could see the deck and, crammed against the nearside rails, those of her crew trying to cling on as the ship died beneath them.

  I was already moving. Down over the rocks, light on my bare feet, fingers brushing the cold granite. Leaping from ledge to ledge. Sliding on my backside. Down to the boulders that were wet with sea spray, then racing across the smooth stones and plunging in amongst the rocks that bristled with mussels, those black shells always flooding my mind with a memory of the bloody feast in the Beggar King’s hall.

  Then the gush of water in my ears and the briny taste in my mouth and I was swimming. Arms plunging over and over, dragging myself deeper. Legs kicking, churning the water in my wake, my torso twisting slightly, screwing through the surging swell.

  I swallowed some and retched and kept swimming, burrowing beneath the waves which wanted to hurl me back onto the shore, feeling the
water grow colder the further from land I went. Now and then between the rolling furrows I heard the screams of the drowning and I swam towards those screams. Not thinking, just moving, as the rain thrashed the racing sea and the world dissolved: cold, grey, insubstantial.

  I swam beyond the place where I thought I had seen the ship and for a moment stopped to catch my breath, rising and falling on the swells as I listened, turning this way and that, eyes scouring the soaking, leaden shroud for a glimpse of the doomed vessel. It has sunk, my mind said. The sea has claimed the ship and her poor crew. And days from now, having gorged on the fruits of the storm, it will puke white corpses upon the shore.

  Another scream. Close. I twisted, blinking away the water that slapped my face. Then I saw her. Black hair, black as a crow’s wing, and pale skin. The only living thing in the teeth of this wailing storm. Clinging to a spread of canvas that was still attached to a splintered spar. But the canvas was sinking, its edges descending into the depths, and as more of it was swamped so more of it vanished beneath the surface. If the girl did not let go it would pull her down to the seabed with it.

  ‘Here!’ I yelled, kicking hard to raise myself above the waves. ‘Here!’ But the wind moaned and the sea breathed and the girl could not hear me and so I swam to her. It was further than it had looked and I knew the sea wanted me then, hungered to pull me down with the others from the doomed ship. But it would not have me. Nor would it have the girl.

  I was swallowing too much seawater now because I was exhausted and open-mouthed, breathing hard, and the sea was spilling down my throat, burning it. Choking me.

  ‘Here!’ I gurgled and spat, ‘over here.’ Arms flailing, the stroke ruined now and my legs feeling so very heavy, I reached out for the girl and missed. Choked. Rose on a swell and kicked through it. Stretched again and missed again. Kicked and fought through the surge as the wind whipped stinging spray into my eyes. Then I had her. My hand clutched her arm, her flesh warmer than the sea. ‘Let go of it,’ I spluttered. ‘It will pull you down.’ There was not much of the white canvas left on the surface but the girl’s fists were still full of it. ‘Let go,’ I spat, and pulled her around and saw her eyes which were round with terror and her lips which were blue and trembling. ‘Please!’

  She nodded and let go of the sailcloth and I put one of her arms around my neck and told her to hold on, already kicking for the shore. But then we were lifted by a swell and when we fell she was gone and I twisted but could not see her. I plunged under and I saw those eyes glaring at me from a face which was sinking, pale as a moon in the darkness. Then a flash of silver on her reaching fingers.

  I dived down through the streaming bubbles of her silent scream, kicking through the murk, my ears full of pain and my hands clawing at the sea. And I made a desperate grab at the pale glow of her skin, clutching the floating tendrils of her black hair. That was enough and so I writhed back around until I could see the black sky beyond the surface and, holding tight, kicked again. Lungs screaming. Searing.

  We broke from the sea together, gasping and coughing, and this time I screamed at her to not let go, knowing that if we went under again we would sink to the depths together. ‘Kick!’ I told her. ‘Kick or we’ll die!’

  She kicked and clawed at the sea with her free hand and we fought for the wave-beaten shore. Behind us, the broken ship was being pummelled upon the rock and would soon be given to the sea. Her cargo was sunk. Her crew and passengers were lost: corpses floating on the waves or sinking down and down to lie for ever amongst the slick weed of the seabed. All of them but for the girl, whose warm body and beating heart and thrashing legs were fierce with life. The sea could have it all and the storm could rejoice in its savagery but neither would claim us so long as we had breath.

  Not far. Keep kicking. Keep breathing. The thunderous crash of the waves upon the shore was louder than the wind’s keening. Nearly there. Then my foot brushed against slippery weed and struck a rock and I tried to stand, pulling the girl upright with me, but we stumbled together and fell forward into the surf. Then she pulled me up and we were surrounded by voices and men wading into the breaking water.

  ‘Here, lad, I’ve got you.’ Pelleas.

  ‘I’ve got the girl,’ another man said, resentment flooding me as he prised the girl from me and took her off in a cradle of arms.

  ‘Anyone else alive out there?’ someone asked. Madern, perhaps.

  I could not answer. I was coughing, spitting bitter-tasting strings which flew off on the wind, but I heard a big warrior named Edern say that the sea had given back all it was going to. ‘Nothing else alive out there. Not in this.’

  Nor was there.

  ‘We’ll get you inside by the fire,’ Pelleas said, and then my feet were no longer on the sand and stones because the warrior had scooped me up, so that his hot breath was against my cheek and his big chest engulfed me. And it was the second time that Pelleas had carried me.

  ‘Peran, fetch the Lady!’ he called. I heard the chatter of boys amongst the storm’s din. ‘Clemo, I want dry blankets and hot broth.’

  Somewhere above me a herring gull shrieked against the squall, flying great circles through the grey and watching us all with its keen eye. And I watched that gull for a while, shivering in Pelleas’s arms as he carried me up the foreshore.

  7

  The Freedom of Birds

  THAT NIGHT OF the storm I lay outside the small room in the Lady’s keep where the girl slept. We had sat shivering together by Pelleas’s hearth, watching the flapping flames and slurping steaming broth as the Lady fussed around us. Around the girl really, making her drink herb-infused potions and frequently checking the strength of the blood beating in her neck or wrist. And when the Lady had been sure that the girl was not going to drown in the sea that had already swamped her lungs, she said they would go up to the keep where she could rest more comfortably. But the girl had looked at me then as though I were a floating timber out there in the storm, her eyes brim full of the horror of that splintering ship and her ears ringing with the screams of the drowned.

  ‘Lancelot will come too,’ the Lady said, and so I had, though I was not allowed into the chamber itself and had been given a blanket to soften the hard boards outside, as you might give to a puppy on its first night in a new place. I was so tired I could have slept in the saddle of a galloping horse, but sleep did not come straight away because I could hear the girl crying. I could tell she was sobbing into her bed furs to muffle the sound and I wished that the oak door was thicker.

  ‘She has lost much,’ the Lady whispered, on her way to her own bed but stopping to crouch beside me, shielding her lamp flame against the breeze sweeping through the keep. ‘Her uncle was one of those who drowned. And her chaperone, who had nursed her since birth.’ She looked at the closed door through which the sobbing seeped like blood through gauze. ‘I daresay she knew the other men of her escort and maybe even the crew.’

  The captain of that ship, who had been tasked by the girl’s father with delivering her safely to Karrek and the Lady’s keeping, had lost his bearings in the storm. Having been blown past the harbour he had tried to turn and had not reefed his sail in time, so Madern, who had long experience of the sea, said after, when the men talked about the sinking and raised a cup to those who had perished.

  ‘The shock is as a wound in her,’ the Lady said. Those green eyes burned into my own. ‘But she will heal in time. She will live and have a full life. Because of you, Lancelot.’

  She stood then and I felt the urge to confess that I had thrown the deerskin hawking glove into the sea. She should know that I planned to leave Karrek and seek passage back to Benoic before I forgot the faces of my mother and father and brother. I would tell her that I meant to plot my revenge against my uncle Balsant and the Beggar King. That the gods were angry with me for hiding away on this island and had shown their anger by urging the sparhawk to bate so madly that she snarled herself in her own leash and broke her wing.

 
‘You are an extraordinary boy,’ she said.

  I am a traitor to their memory, I thought, cringing under her scrutiny. Old Hoel’s glove and a suspicious, hate-filled bird. My only possessions from before. One discarded, damp and mildewed, the other now a ruined, pitiful creature who would never fly again. Because I had fled. I had survived.

  And yet I knew that I would not leave. Not now.

  She glanced once more at the iron-studded door. ‘Sleep now, Lancelot.’

  And so I did.

  The girl’s name was Guinevere and I did not see her again for many days. She stayed up in the keep with the Lady while I remained down on the shore with my bird and with Pelleas, who said I was a fool if I did not break the sparhawk’s neck and be done with it.

  But I was defiant. ‘I have bound the wing,’ I said. ‘And look. She eats what I give her. The wing may heal. She may fly again.’

  He was busy packing his sea chest and would sail with the tide, escorting a Greek olive-oil trader called Paulus to Tintagel. He shook his head and sighed, pressing a folded cloak down onto the other contents and checking that the lid would still close.

  ‘You are a strange one, lad,’ he said. ‘You’d jump into the mouth of a ship-killing storm and somehow survive what would have drowned most fish, yet you are too timid to put a useless bird out of its misery.’

  ‘She might fly again,’ I protested, feeding the hawk a gobbet of beef heart which I had got from Yann the cook, who did not know that the sparhawk was injured. Had he known, he wouldn’t have wasted good food on a ruined bird.

  ‘And I might travel back east with Paulus and kick the Emperor of Constantinople off his throne and reign in his place,’ he said, fastening the chest. ‘But somehow I don’t think I will get around to it.’

  I said nothing and went back to feeding the bird, though I could feel Pelleas watching me.

  ‘You want me to do it?’ he said. ‘One twist and it’s done.’