Lancelot Read online

  He turned back and glared at me and his good eye told me it had seen something terrible in the flame-chased dark outside.

  ‘Your mother will be in torment, boy. Off with you! Before all is lost.’

  ‘We’ll go together,’ I said and heard a scream in the night which could have been a vixen though I knew it was not.

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ Hoel said, lurching towards me as if to strike me with the rope and leather bird which he still clutched in his claw-like hand. ‘I’ll not run with the rest. Couldn’t if I wanted to.’ I knew it was true. It was impossible to imagine Hoel’s whip-lean old legs carrying him at pace through the snow. I had not even seen him ride for as long as I could remember and neither did he accompany the men on the hunt these days, trusting that my father was good enough with the falcons not to ruin them.

  ‘Go! Now!’ he yelled, and he did strike me with the lure. Twice, though I stood and took it. Hoel should have had an apprentice but he had refused all suitors – not that there had been many – and I believed he was saving the position for me, though it would be a few years yet before I was ready. I spent half my life in that dark, pungent place and whilst the master falconer’s knowledge was vast, his work all but incomprehensible to me, I was fascinated by the birds. I admired them. Loved them even. And though the world would have me be more, being a prince, I would gladly have become Hoel’s apprentice. Hector my brother would have Benoic’s high seat and I would have the hawks and the falcons.

  But it would never be so, and I knew it then as surely as I knew that dead white eye of Hoel’s would never see the peregrine dive fast as thought to snatch a grouse in mid-flight. Still I stood there, wanting more from the old man. Needing something.

  ‘They will not kill me,’ he said. ‘King Claudas is not a barbarian. He must love the hunt as your father does and will not kill me.’ His mouth was not practised at lies, for his birds did not need to be lied to, but he swept an arm back towards the mews and their inhabitants, some of which were still bating because they could smell fire and blood. ‘His own master falconer does not know these birds. He will keep me on.’ That one eye of his could pierce like a thin blade. ‘But they will kill you. Or worse.’ He waved his arms, shooing me. ‘Now go. And quickly!’

  He was too old and stiff to flee and we both knew it. Nor would he leave his hawks to the care of strangers, so I resigned myself to abandon him. To leave the mute-scented sanctuary in which I had been happiest. I turned and went to the door beyond which chaos reigned.

  ‘Wait, boy!’

  I spun back, hoping past hope that the old man had changed his mind and would fly with me into the night.

  ‘Here, come here. Quick now.’ He was fumbling at the latch of the sparhawk’s mews, his fingers clumsy with age and perhaps fear. King Claudas was as cruel as winter. Crueller even than my father, I had heard men say. No doubt Hoel had heard it too. He reached in and took the bird in gentle hands. ‘Take her,’ he said. ‘She’s yours now.’

  I was confused. The sparhawk was a juvenile, her plumage all mottled browns and her eyes still yellow, though even then she had that angry look all sparhawks have. I had been with Hoel when he found her before the snows came, in the forest near Gourin. We were drawn by the noticeable absence of other nests; a sure sign, said the master, that a female sparhawk was in residence thereabouts. He was never wrong about such things.

  ‘The sparhawk?’ I said now, not understanding.

  ‘Yes, the sparhawk,’ Hoel said, bringing the bird up to his face to study her, as if fixing the memory in his mind. ‘Keep her safe. Rear her justly. Learn from each other.’

  I was just a boy and I looked over my right shoulder to where my father’s snow-white gyrfalcon sat his perch, glaring at me like Hoel had. ‘Ee-ack, ee-ack!’ he said. I felt his wrath and understood it. If I was to take a bird and save it from this terrible night and our enemies, then surely it must be the king of them all, and he was the gyrfalcon. The tercel was trained in the art of the hunt, worth more than his weight in gold. Many times had I seen him high against the roof of the world, cutting across the sky like a shooting star. I had revelled in that moment when he tucked his wings and started his dive, his silhouette growing until at last he was seen or sensed by his prey but too late. The tercel was a killer. But the sparhawk? She was untrained. A fledgling, not long since all untidy fluff and gaping beak, shrieking to be fed.

  She was shrieking now and Hoel had the kindness to whisper love to her even on a night like that. ‘I’m sorry, Princess, be good now,’ he soothed, with one hand taking a wicker basket from beneath the table and plunging the bird into its unfamiliar darkness. ‘She’ll need feeding as soon as you can,’ he told me, making his offering. I nodded, accepting the basket and its furious occupant, though I had one eye still on the gyrfalcon. Hoel picked up his own falconer’s gauntlet, the leather worn and stained by blood, sweat and rain, but clean. It was a magical thing, that glove, cut and stitched from a tracing of Hoel’s own left hand and, but for the birds themselves, which anyway belonged to my father by rights, was the old falconer’s most treasured possession. Yet now, without a second glance at it, he moved closer and tucked the glove into my belt.

  ‘Now go. To your mother and father. They will be looking for you.’

  So I went.

  Flame, my almost tame fox, was waiting for me by the wood pile under the smokehouse eaves, his rich coat a reflection of the fire which flapped from the roof of the barn like a great sail, spewing innumerable sparks into the black sky. He must have followed me first to the stables, then to Hoel’s place, silent and with almost feline caution and stealth. Now he could smell the sparhawk in my basket and he held his body low against the snow, looking up at me with his amber eyes as he did when begging for whatever meat I had pilfered from the table for him.

  ‘Come, boy,’ I said, retreading my own tracks, though there were others in the icy snow now. There were bodies too. Six or seven of them. Warriors I had known all my life, lying there like animal carcasses. Bravely, dutifully, they had stumbled from their beds out into the night to face our enemies and had died for it, returning to a sleep from which they would never wake. And when I passed Gwenhael where he lay torn and staining the snow, I did not look because I knew he would be ashamed to be seen thus. But I had seen neither Tewdr, my father’s champion, nor my brother nor my father, and so I dared hope they still lived. Then my heart kicked in my chest at a sudden terrible thought. Perhaps they had fled already.

  I stopped and Flame did too, because a knot of King Claudas’s warriors had come round the corner of the byre, all pluming breath and laden with the treasures they had stolen from the shrine: silver statuettes and gold dishes and candle holders and even the silks from behind which the priests spoke the words of the gods. And even as I stood there, too afraid to move in case I drew their eyes, I was disgusted that men would seek riches for themselves before they had won the fight. Before they had even fought, from the look of them. Like a pack of dogs after scraps they were, and I hated them. Yet the ringing of steel on steel from inside the great hall told me the King of the Wasteland had worthier men serving him, too. Men who would fight first and steal later.

  A hand clamped over my mouth and I was hauled back against a mountain of muscle and cold ring mail all wreathed in ale breath.

  ‘Easy, lad,’ Tewdr growled in my ear. I stopped thrashing and let Tewdr all but drag me backwards, my heels ploughing furrows through the snow until we were hidden in the shadow of the cooper’s workshop. Though not in time.

  One of King Claudas’s men had seen us and alerted his company of thieves. For a moment they seemed reluctant to set aside their treasures, but then they did so, dropping them and drawing swords and raising spears, their insults whipped away by an icy gust. Tewdr growled a curse.

  ‘He’s here! Thank the gods!’ I turned to see my mother and brother and several of my father’s household warriors, many of them bloodied, their eyes shining with the battle lust. Behind
them stood half a dozen of the servants and some slaves, all crushed by the weight of the belongings which my mother would salvage from this night’s ruin. ‘Here, boy,’ my mother hissed. ‘Where in Cernunnos’s name have you been?’

  My uncle Balsant was there too, gripping the thick ash shaft mounted with the silver boar. My father’s standard. I could tell Balsant had had to fight for it. Even so he winked at me before handing the standard to Hector and coming to join Tewdr, pointing his big sword and threatening our enemies who were coming, joined now by others fresh from killing.

  ‘Go to them, lad,’ Tewdr gnarred, pushing me towards my family, and then my father was there too, looming in the flame-chased shadows, his face set like a granite cliff but his eyes betraying his horror at what was happening. I saw that his sword glistened with blood. With him were Govran, Budig, Salaun and three other warriors, their hot breath clouding round their beards as they readied themselves to fight or flee, half-watching their wives and children who were escaping towards the eastern woods, bundled in pelts, bent by sacks and a few of them leading pack horses.

  ‘Go, my king,’ Tewdr said over his shoulder. ‘Go now.’

  ‘Aye, we’ll catch up,’ my uncle told my father, though he was looking at my mother and she at him. Then he put a stride between himself and Tewdr so that each would have the space for sword-work. Three of the other warriors tramped over to join them but my father ordered Govran and the remaining men to stay with my mother, whose keening demands washed over me like water off a gull’s wing. I stood there adrift, a boy clutching a basket with a frightened bird in it, wishing I held a sword and owned a man’s strength to use it.

  ‘Come, then, you sons of Balor!’ Tewdr roared at King Claudas’s men, striding forward to meet them. Tewdr bear-slayer. Champion of Benoic.

  My uncle and the others went with him. No chants or war songs. Just brave men who knew they must die.

  ‘Come, boy!’ I almost dropped the basket because a hand grabbed mine and wrapped it tight. Rough, hard skin. A vice grip. One which had never dropped a sword. Or a drinking horn. ‘You got the gyrfalcon,’ my father said. ‘Good. Now come.’ He pulled and I went. Quickly through the snow. Following the others towards the distant tree line. Fugitives beneath the stars and the swirling copper embers of our ruin and the gods who scorned us.

  Behind me I heard the clash of blades. And screams.

  2

  Peregrination

  WE MADE A pitiful caravan. A procession of the dispossessed. Pilgrims devoted only to survival, stripped of all else but the will to endure. Many of the women and children were weeping because their husbands and fathers had not come and so never would. Most were freezing and weary with grief. Some of the men were wounded and dripped blood on the snow, and one of them, a big man called Alor, who had taken a spear in his belly, walked off into the trees to die alone and in peace. No one stopped him. We could not rest and warm our flesh beside fires for fear of our enemies catching up and finishing what they had begun. For they must have known by then that Ban, King of Benoic, still lived.

  If you could call it living. I would have preferred the raging, wrath-filled king I better knew than the man in his place now. I would have my father cursing the gods and swearing vengeance. I would have fury, his knuckles across my cheek. Anything but what he was then: a shrunken man, bent by a burden of shame, the fire gone from his eyes, doused by the disgrace of his fall. I could see that even by the light of the stars and with my child’s eyes and I feared it terribly. And so I avoided him, my mother too, for she had greater concerns now, such as making sure we sank no further than the depths to which we had come.

  Smoke rising, stars falling. All in that one foul, ill-fated night.

  Hector had shared some bread and cheese with me and I had saved a hunk of the bread for Flame, who I knew was tracking me from the safety of the trees. I was looking for the fox when I saw my mother ambush Hector. She and Govran had been talking out of my father’s sight and now she all but dragged my brother into the darker shadow of a snow-laden pine while Govran waited nearby, huffing into cold hands. Mother hissed at Hector to stand tall, to square his shoulders and be a man while our father drowned in self-pity.

  ‘Uncle Balsant is dead and the kingdom is lost,’ Hector protested, still gripping my family’s standard, the silver boar gleaming dully in the nearly-dark.

  My mother seemed to miss a breath then. Somewhere in the canopy above, a bird flapped and a trickle of snow fell, and my mother’s eyes hardened, becoming as sharp as her cheekbones which pressed like blades beneath her pale skin.

  ‘Balsant did his duty and we will honour him, if we survive,’ she said, then she grabbed hold of Hector’s shoulders and he flinched at her touch. ‘But if you do not act the man now, they will turn wolf on us,’ she rasped, lifting her breath-wreathed chin towards a knot of three warriors who trudged past, shields slung across their backs and using their spears as staffs. ‘They will smell our weakness and turn on us. They will rob us and abandon us. They may already conspire to sell us to our enemies. Do you understand me, my son? Would you see your mother raped? Your brother’s skull staved in?’

  I thought of Gwenhael lying far behind us torn and dead.

  Hector set his jaw. Shook his head. ‘Never,’ he said.

  My mother nodded and stroked his cheek and I felt it from where I stood. ‘That’s my Hector. Your father has cost us much. We will not let his failings murder us.’

  I was close enough, standing there amongst the pines, to taste my mother’s venom on the night air. My father the tyrant fed her own ambition. Lifted her far above her birth. But the king without a kingdom? That man dragged her towards ruin and she could not allow it. She resented him already, even with the smoke of his defeat still on the breeze.

  ‘We will survive, my son. And rise again,’ she told Hector. ‘But you must shed the spoilt prince and become the man and you must do it this very night. Govran will support you if any give us trouble.’

  Hector glanced over to where my father’s groom waited. ‘Mother,’ he said with a nod, then looked up at the silver boar, trying to draw courage from that totem which had stood above many battles, witness and shining spur to our father’s victories. Then my brother strode out of the shadow and across the starlit snow, the standard in his grip and my mother’s hopes on his shoulders.

  He ordered five men to stop and take their ease while the rest passed, for those five were to make a rearguard in case King Claudas’s men even now tracked us through the forest. They were not happy about it, those five, and muttered and moaned, but my father’s glowering presence and long shadow were close enough to dissuade them from questioning the boy who could not yet grow a man’s beard. Then Hector ordered Derrien and Olier, who both led horses, to ride ahead to ensure that we did not spring an ambush, and to warn the folk of any farmsteads hereabouts that we would expect provisions: food and drink and even clothing for those of us who had fled ill-prepared for the rigours of an exodus through the snow.

  And I should have been proud of Hector then, to see him commanding grown men and experienced killers. Trying to steer us through the wreckage of that night so that we might survive. But I was a boy with a boy’s small view of the world and I had my own troubles. The sparhawk would need fresh meat in the morning and I had none to give her. Added to this, Hoel had begun the bird’s manning, which must progress daily or else the creature would return to her wild state, and so this responsibility was now mine, for all that I did not want it.

  I would have gladly taken the gyrfalcon. Of course I would. That magnificent tercel would catch us much-needed food, take pigeons, waterfowl or rabbits and return to my father’s arm. But were I to open the wicker basket and slip her jesses, the sparhawk was more likely to fly like a dream into the dawn and never return. And so I must feed her and man her and keep her alive even though I had not a belonging in the world other than the clothes I wore, a cloak not thick enough to keep out the cold and an old man’s hawkin
g glove.

  I could never hate Hoel for it though. I believed he was dead, slain in his musty hovel amongst the mews and their shrieking inhabitants. Cut down by unthinking men who neither respected his white beard nor considered the lustreless value of his knowledge. But the sparhawk, with her fierce, haughty eye and her hunter’s instinct, which was as yet useless to man, was an encumbrance. An unwanted charge. And so I hated her.

  We trudged on, more than one hundred of us, a procession of refugees through the forest, like lost souls wandering the spirit world in hope of being called back to the flesh. With the dawn we came to Calangor, where we rested. No one had given the order to lay down burdens, collect dead-fall for fires and tend wounds now that there was enough light to see by. Neither my father, nor Hector, nor even my mother had called the halt. Rather there was a collective weariness, an overwhelming need to stop, as much to give proper thought to what had happened as to rest, perhaps. For dawn brings light to the mind as well as the world, and can vanquish the devils and spirits which seek to confuse and deceive and would see us lost in the dark.

  Women and children took men’s helmets and used them to carry water from the stream. Fires were lit and fir boughs were cut and laid on the ground for folk to sit on. People melted snow to slake their thirst and shared what food they had managed to stuff into knapsacks before fleeing their homes. They shared stories, too, those who could summon the words. Tales of the night before, of courage, catastrophe and escape, and with the words came realization, if not acceptance, and tears. Tears to make the ambling stream envious.

  Many found loved ones by the light of the new day: husbands or wives, fathers or daughters they had feared lost. Friends greeted friends, embracing, weeping, comforting the bereft and the broken as best they could. The fighting men boasted of kills, swore vengeance on our enemies, even clamoured about going back that very day. They talked of taking King Claudas’s ale- and blood-drunk war band by surprise, killing as many as they could and bringing back those of our people who were otherwise destined for new lives as slaves in another kingdom. But their boasts were no more than hot air on a cold day.