Lancelot Read online

‘No,’ I said, and he shrugged those big shoulders of his.

  ‘I’ll be back before the new moon. Don’t go challenging the other boys to a race or swimming out to wrecks while I’m gone.’ The sparhawk gave a weak, plaintive cry. The first few days after the accident she had glared at me, accusing and bristling with enmity. But now I saw only fear and confusion in those yellow eyes. ‘And stay away from that girl,’ Pelleas said. ‘Girls are nothing but trouble, even for a lad your age.’

  ‘We are not allowed to mix with them,’ I said.

  ‘I know that, lad. I also know that Agga and Erwana meet in the woods by that old ash when there’s no moon and they think they’re as cunning as can be. Agga won’t spoil the girl though. He’s stupid but not that stupid.’ I looked at him, surprised. ‘Yes, I know the tree. The one the boys carve up.’

  In the bark of that tree I had read the nicknames the boys had for Pelleas, Madern, Benesek and the rest, and felt guilty then.

  ‘And I pulled Jowan out of the girls’ quarters by his curls one night when the Samhain fires were burning and everyone was up to their eyeballs in wine. Pulled him out just in time, too, for his own sake,’ he said, tapping the hilt of the sword scabbarded at his hip. ‘That was before you came.’

  He grabbed his spear from where it leant against the wall and hefted the chest onto his shoulder. Then he paused at the threshold. ‘Kill the bird and stay away from the girl,’ he said, and then he was gone, though his parting words seemed to linger in the room. Kill the bird and stay away from the girl.

  I did neither.

  Some days the sparhawk and I watched the boys training for war, the bird sitting on Old Hoel’s glove as she used to; but now both wings were bound tight against her body so that she could not try to fly even if some instinct fired her sinews. The boys taunted us when they had the breath for it, when they were not fending off each other’s sword blows or being made to hold rocks above their heads until they staggered and fell.

  ‘You should give that feathered rag to Jowan,’ Melwas said one day. ‘They would be perfect for each other.’ Jowan was always there, watching the others train, his broken arm splinted and his face pinched with envy and bitterness. Pelleas had told me he doubted Jowan’s arm would ever be right again, and that if it did not set straight and true he would in all likelihood have to leave Karrek, such an impairment being unacceptable in a Guardian of the Mount.

  ‘Look at him,’ Jago called, stepping back from his opponent and pointing his wooden sword at me. ‘A prince without a kingdom and a hawk that can’t fly. The bards could weave a sad tale there.’

  We watched, the sparhawk and I, and we tried to pay their insults no heed. And while those boys trained with shield, sword and spear, I learnt each one’s strengths and weaknesses. I studied them and in my mind I fought them.

  Other days we wandered together, hiding in the thickets, waiting for rock doves to break free of the woods as we had done before, the hawk aware of every snapping twig and fluttering leaf. If nothing else I did not want her to forget herself. I thought that if she saw her prey living unthreatened and carefree she would burn to heal herself and punish them. Her wing would set neatly, neater than Jowan’s arm, and she would fly again.

  And the only times I saw Guinevere were fleeting and from a distance. A glimpse now and again when she and the other girls were about the island with the Lady collecting plants, roots and leaves for their herb lore.

  Then one day the Lady appeared at the door of our hut, dressed in a gown of green wool with a wolf pelt draped around her shoulders against the early morning chill. The first leaves were starting to turn, flecks of copper shimmering amongst the green forest which blanketed the mainland across the water.

  ‘I would like you to do something for me, Lancelot,’ she said. She was watching me feed the sparhawk. Rather, trying to feed her. The bird was uninterested in the squirrel flesh I offered her. I was stroking her beak with the bloody scrap, hoping to rouse her appetite, which had ebbed day by day. ‘Will you help me?’ the Lady asked. She could plainly see what I was trying, and failing, to do, but she said nothing about it. Perhaps she too thought I should have killed the hawk by now. That I was weak for not snapping the bird’s neck. Weak for hoping. Or perhaps she believed I might actually have the hawk flying again in time. Whatever she thought, standing there watching me stroke the bird’s beak with the meat, she said nothing about it. ‘So?’ she asked.

  I nodded. Of course I would do whatever she asked of me. Unless it was to kill the sparhawk.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘It’s Guinevere. I’ve tried, Lancelot, but I have failed to draw her out of herself.’ I was still looking at the bird but I was listening hard now. ‘I have failed to lift the girl’s spirits and fear her sour mood is beginning to taint the other girls.’ She came closer and I could smell the pungent sweetness of burnt herbs on her. It made me shiver inside my own skin. ‘Guinevere misses her home. You understand that, I’m sure. And yet I wonder what she misses so. They could not see her promise.’ She frowned. ‘Or perhaps they could and that was the problem,’ she said with a weary resignation, ‘why Lord Leodegan sent her to me. For Guinevere’s own good. Do you understand, Lancelot?’

  I didn’t but nodded anyway.

  ‘What can I do, my Lady?’ I asked.

  ‘Be her friend, Lancelot.’ She put a hand on my shoulder and I trembled under her touch. ‘Be her friend.’

  The sparhawk turned her beak away from the raw flesh and I gave up trying to feed her. I would try again later, when we were alone.

  ‘You’ll do this for me?’ she asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘Good,’ she said, then studied the sparhawk, who looked a sorry sight swaddled like an infant. ‘So, what will you do about her?’ she asked.

  ‘I won’t kill her,’ I snapped.

  She seemed taken aback and I feared I had offended her.

  ‘I know you won’t,’ she said, reaching out and running her thumb down the back of the sparhawk’s neck.

  Old Hoel would never have allowed anyone to stroke one of his hawks save my father, and neither should I have allowed it. But I could not forbid the Lady. Besides which, the bird seemed comforted by her touch. Perhaps you would also let the Lady feed you, just to spite me, I thought.

  ‘Tomorrow then,’ the Lady said. ‘Come to the keep at dawn. Guinevere will be ready.’

  I nodded again, already wishing the night away.

  ‘I don’t need looking after,’ she said. She stood facing me, hands on her hips, feet planted wide in the doorway of the keep. You would have thought I had come to steal and burn, to slaughter all those whose sanctuary lay within those Roman-built stone walls. ‘I am older than you,’ she said. ‘I am eleven.’

  ‘Then we are almost the same age,’ I said. She was older by a year. She had seemed two years older to me, though I did not say as much. I just watched her watching me, her lips pursed and her black hair lit by a copper sheen in the dawn sun.

  ‘I am taller than you,’ she said.

  I shrugged.

  ‘You are not even big enough to learn how to fight like the others.’

  ‘I already know how to fight,’ I said, standing a little straighter. I wished I was wearing shoes, to be taller even by the thickness of a leather sole.

  ‘Do you?’ she asked, cocking her head slightly.

  ‘I have seen men killed in battle,’ I said. ‘Seen them lying in pools of blood.’ I don’t know why I said that but there was a flash of surprise in her face and I liked seeing it.

  ‘I have seen men drown,’ she said. ‘My own nurse too.’ She seemed to shudder at the memory. ‘Drowning is worse than being killed by a blade. Being burnt alive is the worst of all.’

  I did not know what to say to that. I thought of that night when I had slept outside her door listening to her crying into her pillow. She must know I had heard her.

  ‘I don’t need you to look after me,’ she said.

  I shrugged again. ‘Th
e Lady told me to come.’

  She glanced over her shoulder to make sure we were alone. ‘Lady Nimue thinks I am the bad apple that will ruin the others,’ she said. Lady Nimue. I had heard her name spoken only twice in the time I had lived on Karrek and yet this girl, who had been on the Mount only days, was comfortable saying it aloud. ‘She thinks that if I’m prowling around this island with you I won’t be ruining the other girls. Though I must still learn the herb lore and … other secrets.’

  ‘The Lady thinks you are sad because of the ship. Because of all those who drowned.’

  Her eyes narrowed. They were green and blue. ‘Do I look sad?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Why did you save me?’

  I frowned. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know much, do you, Lancelot?’

  ‘I know how to swim,’ I said.

  Her pale cheeks flushed red with that.

  ‘I can show you the island,’ I said.

  ‘I can explore by myself. I’m not afraid. And I have a knife,’ she said, touching the bone-hilted knife sheathed on the belt which drew her long tunic of undyed wool in at her waist.

  ‘I can teach you how to swim. Properly. So that if a ship sinks under you again you will be able to save yourself.’

  Her eyes widened at that and I thought she would spit some insult at me but she did not. She just looked at me and folded her arms over her chest, which I noticed was flat, unlike some of the girls on Karrek.

  ‘What happened to your bird?’ she asked. ‘Why can’t it fly?’

  I knew she had seen me and the sparhawk walking the island but was surprised to know she had taken an interest.

  ‘She bated and got tangled in her leash. Broke her wing,’ I said, lifting my right arm and holding it crooked.

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘Then she will die,’ she said.

  ‘Not if I can keep her alive until the wing heals,’ I said, resenting her doubt. Did no one think it was possible? ‘She will fly again. You’ll see.’

  Her lips twitched up at the corners and my stomach rolled over itself.

  ‘You really don’t know anything,’ she said. Then she undid a leather thong on her wrist, swept her loose hair back and tied it with fast, nimble fingers. ‘Well then, let’s fly this keep before I get tangled in my own leash.’

  I nodded, trying to make sense of this strange girl who seemed to despise me one moment and yet agreed to explore the island with me the next.

  ‘I’ll show you the old ash where the other boys make fun of the men,’ I said. ‘You can read the tree like one of those books which the Christians revere so much.’ I grinned. ‘I don’t think you will find the same words in one of their books.’ No sooner had the words left my mouth than I feared I had embarrassed her. ‘You can read?’

  ‘Of course I can read,’ she said. ‘But I don’t care to look at some old tree.’ She pointed out to sea, where the furrows were breaking white here and there though it was calm enough. Gulls wheeled and clamoured in a sky that was mostly blue but for some thin shreds of white cloud. ‘I want to swim.’

  This caught me off balance, albeit swimming had been my suggestion in the first place. ‘Even after what happened?’ I said, thinking that being out there again so soon would bring memories of the shipwreck flooding into her mind. I was supposed to be making her happy, not reminding her of that.

  ‘We will swim all the way round the island,’ she said. ‘That is what you would be doing now, isn’t it? If Lady Nimue hadn’t told you to come up here and keep me away from the other girls.’

  I nodded. ‘You promise not to sink like a stone this time?’ I said. ‘The Lady will be angry with me if you drown.’

  ‘You mean you would not swim down and pull me up by my hair again?’ she said, turning her head sharply so that her long black mane flicked onto her shoulder.

  Now I thought about it, that must have hurt her.

  ‘I’m surprised I have any hair left,’ she said, running fingers through the tresses, teasing out a knot or two.

  Three girls came giggling round the corner of the keep, clutching baskets full of the woodland mast – beechnuts, acorns and chestnuts – and looked surprised to see me standing there with Guinevere.

  ‘Does the Lady know he’s up here?’ Erwana asked Guinevere, spite making slits of her big eyes.

  The other girls were Alana and Jenifry and they grinned at the thought of me getting into trouble with the Lady for being up at the keep without one of the men, or the Lady herself, being present.

  ‘I wouldn’t get too close to him,’ Jenifry said, putting her basket on the ground and standing straight to show off her height and the bumps under her tunic. ‘You’ve seen what happened to his bird.’

  ‘Never mind his bird, what about his family! Ask Lancelot what happened to them,’ Erwana said, still holding her basket brimming with such fruits of the forest as had not been plundered by the pigs that roamed Karrek’s woods. ‘Go on, ask him.’ She put her basket down next to the other two and swept her golden hair off her forehead. ‘I would be careful around Lancelot if I were you.’

  Guinevere glanced at me but would not indulge Erwana, though I could see that she was curious. Perhaps she recalled my talk of pools of blood and fighting men. ‘Tell the Lady that Lancelot and I have taken a boat over the water,’ Guinevere said, pointing to the mainland. ‘And that we shall be back in a day or so. If we have not been eaten by wolves or slain by Saxons.’

  The three girls looked at each other wide-eyed and perhaps I had a similar expression on my face because I thought that Guinevere was serious. That we were going to take a boat across to the mainland, which of course was forbidden.

  ‘Come on then,’ she said, striding past me.

  And so I went.

  That first day we did not escape Karrek and cross to the mainland. That had just been Guinevere’s way of trying to shock the other girls, and it had worked. We did swim halfway around the island though, on the landward side, from the old upturned skiff amongst the rocks on the west side to the pebble beach on the east. It was far enough for Guinevere to show me that she could swim well enough and needed no lessons from me, though she was red-faced and puffing by the time we waded ashore.

  It must have been fear or the cold water which had all but paralysed her that day of the storm, I thought, though said nothing.

  ‘Do you imagine that it hurts? Drowning?’ she asked. We sat shivering on the rocks, watching the gulls wheel high above the furrowed sea, waiting for our clothes to dry. She had swum in her under-tunic and I in my braies which came down to my knees, so we would have to walk back for the rest of our clothes. ‘When you take that last desperate breath and your lungs fill up with water. Do you think it hurts?’

  I had never given it any thought but I did then. ‘No,’ I said after a time. ‘And even if it did hurt, it wouldn’t for long. You would sink fast as an anchor.’

  Guinevere considered this for a while, though I could not tell whether she agreed with me. ‘Just think of all the creatures you would see as you sank. If it didn’t hurt too much to notice.’ She picked up a small smooth pebble and threw it and it plopped into a breaking wave. ‘Down and down into the deep,’ she said. ‘With the fishes and the eels and far stranger creatures for which we have no names.’ She frowned, rubbing the pale skin of her arms upon which the breeze had raised goose flesh. ‘I suppose it’s very quiet down there on the seabed.’

  ‘I have never heard a crab talk,’ I teased, but she did not smile. People she had known were down there now. Their flesh even now being picked at by fish. Her old nursemaid’s hair swaying with the seaweed in the currents and tides.

  After that, we picked our way across the rocks, looking for sea creatures left behind by the ebb tide, Guinevere’s tunic still dripping; and the whole east side of the Mount was cast in shadow by the time we went up to the flat ground to watch the boys practising with bows. They were shooting at straw targets
forty paces away, under the watchful eyes of Edern and Benesek, who now and then put an arrow in the centre of a target with their own bows to show the boys – and each other – how it was done.

  ‘That one is strong,’ Guinevere said, gesturing at Melwas, who of all the boys was repeatedly drawing the bow string back to his chest and holding it there without trembling with the effort, patiently awaiting Edern’s command to loose.

  ‘He’s strong,’ I agreed, ‘but Agga has the better eye.’ As if to prove me right, Agga’s next arrow struck the target where, if it were a man, his heart would be, whilst Melwas’s shaft struck the right shoulder. ‘Though neither is as good as Goron,’ I said, pointing. ‘He will put ten arrows into the kill spot, one after the other. He’s even better than some of the men.’ I liked Goron. He was the one who had yelled at me to go on and win the foot race when I had passed him. There was no spite in Goron, though you would not want to upset him if he was holding an elm bow and a straight arrow fletched with eagle’s feathers.

  ‘No doubt you are even better than Goron,’ Guinevere said, challenging me with a dark eyebrow.

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I have not done much shooting. None since I came here. Anyway, when I kill my enemies I will do it close up so that I can look into their eyes as they die.’ Geldrin now loosed before he was ready and the arrow flew high, arcing and diving twenty paces short and ten wide of the intended target. ‘Doesn’t seem very noble, killing people who might not even know you have come for them.’

  ‘You are young to think about such things,’ she said.

  ‘My father was a king,’ I said. As though that explained it.

  We collected our clothes from the other side of the island and I walked with Guinevere back up to the keep as the sun plunged towards the horizon and the first stars glowed in the endless sky.

  The door opened and a broad-shouldered girl named Senara beckoned Guinevere with a flutter of her hand. ‘Hurry! The Lady is about to show us how to mix a potion.’ Senara shot me a look which told me that I was not permitted to know any more than that, then grinned and disappeared.