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  Gawain nodded to the woman. ‘Hold on to your anger. Feed it,’ he told her. ‘There will come a time when it will feed you in return and give you strength.’ He gave no further explanation, and we continued on, soon leaving them far behind, the man limping, the barrow creaking, the woman glaring and the children wide-eyed.

  We saw other families at a distance. Too afraid of Saxons or thieves, or else too superstitious to use the Roman road, these folk moved among the trees either side of the Fosse. We caught glimpses of wild-looking men and women watching us with dark, sunken eyes. We saw children so thin and starving, their clothes so threadbare and ragged, that they seemed to be made of the same sticks and leprous white bark as the birch trees between which they darted, making games of their tragedy. These were the lost folk of Britain. The dispossessed, drifting south and east like ash from a hundred fires, and whenever I saw them, I prayed to God to guide them to some safe haven. In truth, though, I felt myself drifting further from God the more I saw of Britain. The God I had known on Ynys Wydryn, or at least the God to whom I had prayed daily in that island sanctuary, was said to be merciful and omniscient and all-present. But I saw no sign of Him now, so it seemed to me that if He existed at all, He was confined to that monastery far behind us, the way an oak’s shadow is tethered to the tree and can never be parted from it no matter the sun’s great journey across the sky.

  For there were worse sights even than these desperate, anguished folk. I saw a young man no older than I hung upside down from the bough of a rowan tree. He had been stripped naked, strung up and throat cut, and now turned on that rope above a pool of congealed blood in the leaf litter, arms reaching, his ashen face and staring eyes seeming to ask all the world what he had done to deserve it. Whether these things were done by Saxons, or Britons, we had no way of knowing, though I knew we all preferred to think it was the Saxons than to acknowledge that the land and her people were so riven, that we had fallen so far since the time of Arthur.

  A little further on, we were warned by the raucous rasping of crows that we approached another grisly scene. We found a woman face down in the grass. Her clothes were cut or torn, so that her fair skin was as loud as a shout against the dark winter grass. I had to drink from my flask to wash down the bile which had risen in my throat. I saw Iselle muttering a curse at the men who had done this unspeakable thing, while above us the crows eddied in a black, boiling cauldron of noise, incensed by our intrusion.

  ‘We should bury her.’ I swallowed hard.

  ‘Cut the boy down too and put them in the ground together,’ Father Yvain added, no doubt thinking what we all were: that these two had been lovers. Or brother and sister perhaps.

  ‘We don’t have a spade.’ Gediens stated the obvious.

  ‘Nor the time.’ Gawain looked from the young woman in the grass to Father Yvain with an expression which said that this was what the world beyond Ynys Wydryn had become. The monk shook his head in despair but did not, I noticed, make the sign of the Thorn. ‘We keep going,’ Gawain said, and so we did.

  And there were other sights which soured my stomach and my soul. Other horrors which could not be unseen, and which haunted my sleep. The charred remains of a roundhouse, glistening in the rain yet still smouldering, and inside, a family of five, lying in their beds, their blackened bodies twisted by the flames. A white mare cropping the grass, though her guts had spilled from a savage wound, trailing ten feet behind her like a knotty purple rope and upon which a scrawny dog was feasting, growling with satisfaction. An old man’s head mounted on a spear, his white hair wisping in the breeze like bramble-caught wool. A brook dammed with the dead, the water rising against that grim rampart and flooding the banks. We heard wolves howling in the night and sometimes saw them at dusk and dawn, drawn down from the hills and forests by the bounty of flesh. We saw rooks and crows and ravens clouding above settlements whose gates would not normally have been open, and almost every breath that we took was tainted with smoke.

  I saw a fox digging an infant from its shallow grave. The fox was so brazen, so emboldened by the prospect of its meal, that it did not run off at our approach but kept pulling until that lost child was brought back into the light. Then, seizing a stubby arm between its teeth as though it were a chicken leg, the fox made off, dragging the little corpse with it.

  We saw what Britain had become. And sometimes we wept. And I looked at Gediens and Gawain, at those two old warriors who had fought but failed to hold back the Saxons, just as that dam of corpses would eventually fail to hold the brook, and I wondered where they found the strength to endure, to keep fighting when all was lost. I pitied them for all that they had lost themselves, the years and the friends and the hopes, but I admired them too. More than that, I began to be aware of something besetting my conscience, gnawing at it like a rat’s teeth. Not all the time. Often, I was too tired from walking, or too wet, or too cold to think about anything other than the fire at the end of the day and the hot food I would eat. But sometimes, especially when I lay in my furs and skins either in the shelter of the woods or in some abandoned roundhouse, I would feel those rodent-like teeth worrying away, laying bare a shame which I had never admitted to myself. That I had spent the last ten years in prayer and relative safety. That I had been warm and well fed and had hidden away in the monastery on Ynys Wydryn while Britain burned and terror stalked the land.

  8

  Tintagel

  WE CAME TO TINTAGEL under a full moon. The same full moon under which I would have taken my vows as Father Brice gave me the tonsure. I would have looked up to that moon no longer a novice but a full Brother of the Holy Thorn. Father Meurig would have prepared a celebratory feast of swine flesh and hot bread and Father Judoc would have passed around a skin of his best apple wine and no doubt Father Dristan would have danced about like a fool until he spewed and fell into the sleep of the dead, long before even old Father Padern took to his bed. It would have been a celebration and I would have been one of them, my life given to prayer for the preservation of all believers and of the tree which stood on that lonely, wind-scoured hill.

  Instead, I was a leaf blown from a felled tree. Carried on a wind which had been blowing long before my birth. There was no monastery now and only one Brother of the Thorn and that was Father Yvain, not me. I was neither monk nor warrior. I was no one. And yet I found myself standing on a gust-harried ridge under a full moon, the sigh of the sea and its crashing against the rocks loud in the night as I stared out towards the great peninsular fortress which was famed throughout these Dark Isles.

  That moon’s silver spilled across the dark sea to light a trading ship which sat tugging at its anchor, and the breakers which galloped to the shore. It flooded across Tintagel’s heights, revealing more than a hundred buildings from whose windows or doors yellow firelight leaked on a murmur of distant voices. And I tried to imagine Parcefal watching the night even now from the shelter of the sea cave at the foot of the cliffs, where his messenger had told Gawain that he and the druid would be waiting.

  ‘Have you ever seen such a place, Galahad?’ Iselle asked me. Like me, she was staring across the water, her eyes reflecting the lustre of the silvered sea below.

  ‘Never,’ I replied, trying to imagine what it must be like to live on that clifftop. I thought of the hives which the brothers had kept near the apple orchards on Ynys Wydryn and how the bees would cluster, one upon another, thick as a blanket. That was what Tintagel must be like, it seemed to me.

  ‘I would rather sleep here.’ Iselle pointed her bow at a patch of tall grass which shivered in the breeze.

  ‘We may have to,’ I said, for between us on the mainland and the narrow land bridge leading to the exposed cliff-girt headland was a clutter of buildings, amongst which warriors stood warming themselves around flaming braziers. We had already seen those spearmen turn people away, for it seemed no one was allowed to cross into the fort at night, and several tents huddled in the lee of the ridge near where we stood, canvas thumpi
ng in the wind. Gawain and Gediens had been talking with some of those men for a while and now they were walking towards us, their helmets and scale armour burnished by the low moon at our backs.

  ‘We’re in.’ Gawain picked up his knapsack and threw it over his shoulder, and I looked at Iselle and nodded, trying to reassure her. A crease between her dark eyebrows, she nodded back, picking up her own gear and looking across at the settlement where King Uther’s hall still stood. My own blood pounded in my veins at the prospect of being in Tintagel, where lords and kings of Britain had ruled, where High King Uther Pendragon had sat like an eagle on its eyrie. And where my father had spent time as a young man. But I knew that Iselle hated the thought of being there. I had seen her kill men with her bow and rob their corpses and show no fear while doing it. But now she was chewing her lip and running her thumb up and down her bow’s grip, digging a thumbnail into the leather binding, because she had lived a more solitary life even than I, and the thought of being among all those people filled her with dread.

  We did not ask how Gawain had won over the guards so that we could cross into Tintagel that night, but the way the two spearmen who led us over that crumbling isthmus eyed him told me that they held him in awe. They seemed to know Lord Gawain by name and reputation. Knew that he was a lord of war, a man who had fought at Arthur’s side and sent countless enemies shrieking to the afterlife. They respected and perhaps feared him too, for he carried the bear-shield, which showed that he was still waging Arthur’s war while most other men, including kings, looked only to their own interests, fought only for their own survival, like rats defending their nests, and had no higher ambitions. They looked at Gawain and saw a man who believed in the idea of Britain, and it scared them, for perhaps they imagined that Gawain would bring war to this south-west corner of the land, this sea-fretted rock, and they might have to sharpen their spears and swords and fight for something greater than themselves.

  Once we were on the other side, our escort announced Prince Gawain of Lyonesse and Lord Gediens of Glywyssing to the spearmen above the gatehouse, who leant out over the bulwark to get a better look, the whites of their eyes shining in the moonlight. The next thing we knew, the gates were pulled open and we were inside the fort, traipsing through the same mud which had sullied the great Uther Pendragon’s boots. The same ground which had trembled beneath the hooves of Lord Arthur’s war horses.

  ‘Met your father for the first time here, Galahad,’ Gawain said, as we followed the track which led up to the plateau. I felt the familiar knot draw tight in my guts as it did whenever Gawain brought up my father. ‘On the day Uther’s balefire lit the world.’ He pointed off beyond a clutter of buildings on our right. ‘Somewhere over there, I think. Hard to say in the dark. And there’s more here now.’ As he walked, he lifted his spear high. ‘Biggest flames I’ve ever seen. Loud as a storm.’ He shook his head, as if dazzled even by the memory of it. ‘They must have seen that fire from Dyfed.’ Despite that knot in my stomach, I wanted to hear more about how he had met my father. Still, I would not say as much, and I waited while Gawain sifted through his own mind. ‘He was already under Arthur’s spell by then. Of course, the mead helped.’ A rare grin spread across his lips.

  ‘Mead always helps,’ Father Yvain put in. Gediens murmured agreement.

  ‘He must have been your age,’ Gawain said and grunted as though this realization meant something. ‘You see, Merlin had tricked Lancelot into swearing an oath to serve Arthur.’ He looked round at me. ‘Did you know that?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Well, that’s Merlin for you.’ Gawain shared a knowing look with Father Yvain, who lifted an eyebrow. ‘Lancelot swore an oath to protect the next king of Dumnonia.’

  ‘But Arthur was never king,’ Iselle put in.

  ‘No, he wasn’t,’ Gawain admitted. ‘But everyone thought he would be. Including Lancelot. In the end it didn’t matter anyway because Lancelot and Arthur became as brothers. And once Lancelot had decided on a thing, the gods help the fool who tried to get in his way.’ The door of a nearby roundhouse thumped open and a man staggered out, spewing the contents of his stomach into the mud. ‘Lancelot saved Arthur’s life the very next day, when Constantine betrayed us.’

  ‘I wasn’t there, but I heard soon enough,’ Father Yvain said. ‘Everyone in Dumnonia heard how Constantine made a play for Uther’s high seat and murdered Arthur’s men in the dawn.’

  Gawain cursed. ‘As they blinked the sleep from their eyes.’ He shook his head as if even now he could not quite believe it had happened. ‘I lost friends that morning. Good men. Good horses too.’ He was eyeing each building that we passed – the roundhouses and workshops, the stables, granaries, smokehouses, byres, animal pens – and the cobweb of tracks which ran through the settlement, as though he was measuring this Tintagel against the one he had known. ‘And Arthur would have died too if not for Lancelot,’ he said. ‘But Lancelot had sworn to protect him and, as I say, once your father set his mind on something …’ He did not need to finish.

  As we walked on, a knot of children in the shadow of a kiln-house, who were passing round a wine skin between them, saw us. Or rather, they saw Gawain and Gediens in their scale coats and helmets, their shields slung across their backs. They ran over to us, four boys and three girls, and began dancing around the two warriors like moths around a pair of firebrands.

  ‘Who are you, lords?’ the gang’s leader asked, a predatory grin on his face. Thickset, fair-haired and no older than thirteen, he trod a fine line between respectfulness and disdain, yet he offered the wine skin to Gawain, who did not break stride and only barely acknowledged the boy. ‘Whatever you’re looking for, I’m your man,’ the boy continued undeterred, keeping pace with us, walking backwards through the mud. ‘Wine, ale, women. Boys.’ He threw his arms wide. ‘I can get you anything. Honoured to help fine lords such as yourselves.’

  ‘The ale house still behind Uther’s hall?’ Gawain asked.

  The boy frowned. ‘Uther?’ He glanced at one of his companions, a copper-haired boy who shrugged, grinning like a fiend as he capered alongside Gediens. ‘You mean Lord Geldrin’s hall.’

  ‘He’s a Christus man, a priest,’ a girl squawked, pointing at me. Her face was covered in sore-looking pustules and her eyes were wide and appalled as she ran them up and down my habit, which, being of undyed wool, was a dingy white but looked bright under that moonlight. I supposed she had not noticed Father Yvain, who was actually a monk, because of his warrior’s build, the spear in his hand and the bear skin he wore over his own robes.

  The girl spat at me. ‘We don’t want your kind here.’

  ‘He’s no priest,’ a tall, whip-thin boy with a mass of dark curls said. ‘His head is not shaved.’

  ‘And anyway, the Christians are rich, my father says,’ another girl told the one with the weeping pimples.

  ‘Only the Greek ones,’ the tall boy said as we walked alongside stables from which now and then came the soft nickers and snorts of contented horses, ‘and they’re a different sort of Christian.’

  ‘I’m the sort of Christian who can turn you into a toad,’ I said, at which most of them laughed and whooped excitedly, though the girl with the pustules looked horrified.

  Father Yvain and Iselle seemed amused by the attention I was receiving, but then another girl asked Iselle was she a warrior and had she ever killed a man, and would she consider selling the fine-looking sword on her back because the girl knew a merchant who would buy it off her at a good price. Now it was my turn to grin at her, though as we rounded the stables, the sight of the great hall looming before us stopped us in our tracks. That gaggle of crowing youngsters might as well have dissipated like the smoke which drifted on the night air.

  ‘It’s been a long time,’ Gawain said. Even he had stopped to look, though whereas Iselle and I stared in awe and wonder, it seemed to me that Gawain was held to the spot by the ghostly bonds of memory.

  Gediens put his spear
across his shoulders and hooked his arms over the stave. ‘A lifetime.’

  The hall was huge, by far the largest building I had ever seen, and the moon rising above its eastern eaves illuminated a sloping roof of new golden thatch. By the fitful light thrown from a nearby brazier I could just make out some words painted on a great wooden lintel above the entrance. The red paint was faded, weathered almost away, but the ghost of the words lingered still. A fronte praecipitium a tergo lupi.

  ‘First time I laid eyes on this place, I was a beardless spearman,’ Gediens mused. ‘Nearly pissed my trews when I heard King Uther spitting fury at a groom who had saddled his stallion when he’d wanted his white mare.’

  A muffled grunt escaped Gawain’s throat. ‘Sounds like Uther.’

  I could not help but wonder how my father must have felt on that summer day when he had met Uther Pendragon as the king lay on his deathbed.

  But there was no king at Tintagel these days.

  ‘You’ll have to pay your respects to Lord Geldrin tomorrow,’ the thickset, fair-haired boy told Gawain. ‘My uncle knows him. I can have him put in a good word for you, lord. Who shall I say has come to Tintagel?’

  ‘We’ll be gone tomorrow, so there’s no need to trouble Lord Geldrin,’ Gawain said. ‘But tell me, who is the man to speak with if we’re looking to buy horses?’

  The boy thought about this, he and his curly-haired friend tossing names back and forth. Eventually they agreed that the man Gawain wanted was a hump-backed trader named Lidas.

  ‘Then we will speak with this Lidas and perhaps do business. After that, we will be gone.’ Gawain took a coin from the purse on his belt and gave it to the boy, who nodded, understanding the bargain that had been struck with that small silver disc. He would say nothing to this uncle of his who knew the Lord of Tintagel. Then, because folk needed Lord Geldrin’s permission to use the sea steps leading down to the beach after sunset, and we preferring that the Lord of the Heights not know of our presence there, Father Yvain asked the boy where we could find the ale house.