Camelot Page 5

  I was the youngest of us, and in one day I had seen more than most of them had seen in years. It perturbed them. It perturbed me, too, and though I sang the praises by rote, I was still out there in the marsh, shaking with fear. Stomach-sick. Appalled. Perhaps the brothers saw that, too. But worst of all in their eyes, I had brought Iselle.

  The next day, we buried the child and the man, bound up in the same winding sheet. It was a wet, miserable affair, but at least Dristan and I had little trouble digging a grave because the earth was sodden and soft. We stood around the excavation, cowled against the day, hands clenched within our sleeves as we lifted our voices above the wind’s keening and sang the two souls to heaven. The old apple trees behind us creaked and moaned. The grasses and ferns hissed, and the rain roared into the earth and roof thatch, flung one way and then another like handfuls of gravel thrown by a god. But the infant’s mother, Enid, wept silently as Father Yvain and Father Dristan, on muddy knees, lowered the corpses into the puddle already rising in the grave.

  I had not spoken with Enid since my return. Did she know it was I who had fetched the cobbler’s body to Ynys Wydryn and nearly died in the attempt? Or that I would be whipped for it? Why would she care? What mattered to her was that her son was no longer alone. He would find his way to the afterlife, guided there by Eudaf the cobbler, as a man leads his own child by the hand through tall grass or darkening woods.

  I did see her share a knowing look with Iselle, who had come to pay her respects but who kept her distance, sheltering beneath the canopy of the ancient yew, watching from its shadow. It was possible that the women knew each other, but more likely, I thought, was that they shared some innate feminine compassion, an appreciation for the loss which we men could never wholly comprehend.

  Yet we sang, and the wind howled. And as Father Yvain worked with the spade and wet earth thumped onto the winding sheet, I watched a flock of rock doves being buffeted and tossed about inside the wind’s fury. If they did not turn into the wind soon, they would be flung out across the marsh and lost to it. But if those birds cried in fear, I did not hear it for the storm and our singing. Instead, I watched them tumbling eastward towards that grey water churned to a muddy brown, and I thought of three Saxons lying dead out in the marsh.

  Father Brice did not linger over the rites. Even as Father Yvain was piling the spoil back onto the grave and slapping it down with his spade, the brothers scuttled away, shivering and dripping, to the warming-house. Yet Father Brice himself stood a while longer, his face turned up to the scudding grey cloud and his eyes closed against the rain.

  It seemed to me that he was listening. To what or whom, I could not say.

  ‘Come, Galahad,’ Father Judoc called, his face hidden in the shadow of his cowl as he waited beneath the eaves of the warming-house. ‘It’s time.’

  I looked back at Iselle, who still stood amongst the gnarled, reaching boughs of that yew, beneath which Joseph of Arimathea had once regaled the folk of Avalon with stories of Christ and the sunbaked lands far to the east. And even through the rain and the smoke which swirled down from the warming-house in billowing grey palls, I could see the challenge in Iselle’s eyes. She thought me weak for submitting to the coming punishment. She did not know me and yet she wanted me to defy my brothers and refuse their discipline. I could see it in her face.

  ‘Galahad!’ Judoc called again. I tore my eyes from Iselle and left her standing beneath that ancient tree. And as I walked towards the bite of the lash, I prayed that I would find the courage to endure it.

  3

  Warriors from the Storm

  I BIT DOWN ON A short length of rope to keep from crying out as Father Judoc struck me. I had wailed when the Saxons caught me in the marsh. I had shrieked and begged God to help me. Now, knowing that Iselle was out there, I vowed I would not whine if I could help it. Yet with each strike I gave a strangled yelp, and after the third time Father Brice told the brothers to sing.

  ‘Let us not trouble the Prior,’ he said, gesturing to the wall beyond which Drustanus lay dying in his own small cell. ‘The Psalm of the Cup, Brothers,’ he added with a nod, and they took it up at once, their voices smothering my stifled cries even as they winced with each blow of the crooked wand.

  Father Dristan, I noticed, would not watch, but held his gaze on the floor rushes, though his voice flowed like clean water over smooth pebbles. For he had been the one sent to the Thorn to cut off the spiny switch and it seemed he felt in some part responsible for my suffering now, as each lash bit into my back and Father Judoc hissed the count, and red berries flew from the Thorn like drops of blood.

  There were no berries left on that switch by the time Judoc finished, and when it was over, Father Brice rinsed the raw abrasions with soured wine. I gasped with the stinging agony of it and Father Brice smeared honey into the wounds and bound them in clean linen, muttering that I must never again leave the monastery without the brothers’ consent or put myself in danger.

  When he had tied off the dressing, he stood back to inspect his work, then raised a hand towards the door beyond which the wind howled. ‘Now you have seen what is out there, let us hope you are eager to take your vows and stay among us here on Ynys Wydryn. To serve the Thorn with a steadfast heart.’ He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Perhaps the Lord was at work in this.’

  I watched the flames dancing in the hearth as I considered his words. ‘If that is so, Father, might God have sent Iselle to protect me and bring me safely back?’

  His brows lifted and he scratched a bristled cheek made ruddy by the wind. ‘It is possible,’ he said.

  I frowned. ‘And in return, rather than showing her kindness and hospitality, we make her stay in the byre with the cows while we warm ourselves by the fire?’

  Father Brice gave that some thought but did not get the chance to answer, because Judoc growled that I was talking nonsense. ‘She is a creature of the marsh, Galahad. As wild as the hawk and the wolf.’ He clenched a fist, from which a finger extended to point at the roof. ‘The Lord does not work through such creatures,’ he said.

  ‘God may not, Brother,’ Father Folant rasped from his stool on the far side of the hearth, not taking his eyes off the flames, ‘but the Devil does. The girl is his servant. Galahad brought her here and the end will follow.’ He spat into the fire, the flames hissing in reply. ‘I’ve seen it.’

  Father Padern and Father Meurig made the sign of the Thorn. Judoc looked up at the soot-stained thatch as if he feared that at any moment the wind would rip it off and cast it away. ‘This storm blew up when the girl came ashore,’ Father Folant said. ‘None can deny it.’

  Father Meurig nodded. ‘The Devil has sent her to tempt us.’ His gaze slid from one man to another.

  ‘It is worse than that, Brother,’ Father Folant said. ‘You’ll see.’ His flame-gilded face lifted, and his eyes fastened on me. ‘You’ll all see.’ He tapped a finger against the side of his head. ‘And when you do, you won’t think that Brother Ridras was so cracked in the head after all.’

  Mention of Brother Ridras deepened the creases in the monks’ brows. Father Padern and Father Judoc whispered blessings upon his soul and Father Dristan visibly shuddered. For Ridras had been tormented by visions of the ruin of Britain, just as Father Folant now was. He had claimed to dream of the fires of Hell sweeping across the land to consume the children and the old. He believed that the suffering and the degradations which had stalked these isles since the disappearance of Arthur were just the beginning, and that even the marshes of Avalon and our island of Ynys Wydryn would be swallowed by encroaching darkness.

  We had watched Father Ridras sink ever deeper into the mire of his own dark thoughts until, one day last summer, Father Dristan had found him in the orchard hanging from the branch of an apple tree. A shameful and cowardly act, Father Judoc had said, so that whenever Ridras’s name was spoken, the brothers made the Thorn and squirmed as though plagued by lice.

  ‘Well,’ Father Yvain exclaimed a
bove the pop and crack of the hearth wood, ‘so long as we’re still breathing and have a roof over our heads, I’ve got work to do.’ He drained his cup and thumped it onto the table. ‘It’ll keep me warm enough and I won’t have to sit here listening to this,’ he said, and on his way to the door he stopped and placed a gentle hand on my shoulder. ‘You do anything like that again, Galahad, and I’ll flay you for a wine skin,’ he said, then he leant down and put his mouth close enough to my ear that I could smell the drink on his breath. ‘I’ll take her some spiced wine and a fur,’ he whispered, ‘and you won’t be a damn fool. Understand?’

  I nodded, and when he opened the door rain gusted in and wind buffeted the hearth flames, making the coals seethe and glow.

  ‘More wood for the fire, Brother Dristan,’ Father Brice said. ‘It will be a long night.’ Dristan dipped his freshly tonsured head and went to fetch his damp cloak from the peg. I watched the flames and drank wine to ease the pain of my ravaged back. And the next day, warriors came out of the storm.

  They came from the marsh like wraiths. Grey and grim and looming. Ghosts from another time summoned by the wailing wind and brought to Ynys Wydryn.

  Father Meurig saw them first. At dawn he had gone down to check the eel traps and was up to his knees in the storm-driven water when some sense made him look out into the channel where, through sweeping veils of rain, a shape formed. The prow of a boat, he realized, a huge figure standing at the fore, guiding the small craft as if escorting souls to the hereafter.

  Meurig had not stayed to learn more. ‘Devils!’ he had gasped, dripping water onto the rushes, bent double from running up the hill to warn us. ‘Devils from the marsh are coming.’

  ‘Saxons, more likely.’ Father Brice looked back to the door. Most of us had slept in the warming-house, it being the sturdiest building and best able to withstand the wind’s wrath.

  My stomach clenched with fear. I wondered if the ghosts of the Saxons whom Iselle had killed had somehow followed us back to the monastery.

  ‘Fetch spears, Brother,’ Father Judoc told Dristan, then he turned, glaring at those of us who had been huddled near the hearth, drinking warm apple wine. We were standing now, though, frozen with dread, and my back seared from the lash, my muscles tight as knots.

  ‘No matter what happens, they must not learn the whereabouts of the Thorn,’ Father Brice warned us. His eyes were wild but knowing, as if he had been waiting for this day. ‘We will die and be with Christ and Joseph before we tell the heathens where it is.’

  ‘Yes, Brother,’ we said in a ragged chorus.

  Then the door was flung open and Dristan stumbled in, clutching a sheaf of spears.

  ‘They are almost here!’ he said, eyes bulging like boiled duck eggs as Judoc, Meurig, Father Folant and I each grabbed a spear.

  ‘For the Thorn,’ Father Brice said, pulling his small eating knife from his belt and leading us out into the swirling madness of the day.

  Father Yvain was already out there. Having come from his workshop, he stood in the clearing with his back to us, a long-hafted axe in his hands. We hurried to him, instinctively arraying ourselves either side of him because he was the broadest and biggest of us and had once been a warrior. Then I looked across to the byre and through the wind-flayed shrouds of rain I saw Iselle standing in the doorway to keep her bow string dry, a half-dozen arrows planted in the earth by her feet.

  Yvain saw her too and grunted with grim respect. ‘Do as I say, Brothers,’ he barked, flexing and tightening his fingers on the axe haft.

  ‘God preserve us.’ Old Father Padern threaded his fingers in the sign of the Thorn and held that gesture up with trembling arms, aiming it at the wraiths emerging from the tree line onto the slope of the hill.

  ‘Four,’ I heard Yvain say under his breath and knew he was weighing our chances of living to see the storm blow itself out. ‘Stay behind me, lad,’ he growled. ‘You’re in no condition to fight.’

  ‘I can throw a spear,’ I said, and had proved it, if only when hunting waterfowl in Ynys Wydryn’s reed-fringed ditches or, now and then, bringing down a deer or boar in the high woods of Pennard Hill. Though I must have made for a pathetic sight now, standing there naked to the waist but for the linens wound around my torso, my lank hair running with rain, my flesh quivering with fear and cold.

  The figures were halfway across the pasture now and I watched Iselle pluck an arrow from the ground and fit it on the string. She caught my eye and gave a slight shake of her head, the meaning of which I could not fathom, though it turned my gaze back to the striding, grey forms. Not ghosts but warriors. Broad-shouldered and shield-bearing, clad in furs and bronze. Spears in their hands, swords slung on baldrics across their shoulders or bouncing against their thighs as they trudged towards us. Faces grim-set beneath iron helmets whose long red plumes fell like streams of blood.

  ‘Their shields, Galahad.’ Father Yvain’s eyes narrowed against the rain. ‘Can’t make it out.’

  I stepped up to Yvain’s shoulder, raising a hand to shelter my eyes from the downpour and willing them to identify what was on the leading man’s shield.

  ‘A black beast,’ Father Dristan offered. ‘A hunting dog, I think.’

  ‘A bear,’ I said. ‘A black bear on a white field.’ I could see it clearly now despite the rain. The shields of all four men were covered with bleached white leather and painted with a black bear standing on all fours upon the iron boss.

  ‘Ha!’ Father Yvain exclaimed. ‘Not Saxons! Closer to ghosts than Saxons.’

  ‘The bear? Truly?’ Father Brice said. ‘Can it be?’

  Father Yvain looked at Iselle, but she had already lowered her bow, though she kept the arrow kissing the string. ‘You might end up wishing they were Saxons, lad,’ he said to me in a low voice. I was about to ask why but he strode forward to meet those men with their bear-shields and their helmets and their swords. Those lords of war.

  ‘Yvain, you old ox!’ the leader of the bear-shields called, holding his shield and spear wide apart as he came, teeth showing amid a silver beard. ‘How long has it been, old friend?’

  ‘A lifetime. More,’ Father Yvain replied, swinging the axe and sheathing its head in the earth before embracing the other man, the two of them like bears themselves. The other three warriors’ smiles could not fully dispel the bleak set of their jaws, though, or soften their hard eyes. Eyes which slipped from Father Yvain to me.

  ‘I’ll get some wine warmed,’ Father Meurig said, and to my bemusement he and Father Padern walked off through the rain past Iselle, who was coming towards me, the unstrung bow stave in one hand. She frowned at my bandages and I knew she could not understand why I had let the monks beat me.

  ‘You know them?’ I asked her, realizing that she had known before any of us that these strangers were not Saxons.

  ‘They are Lord Arthur’s men,’ she replied in a quiet voice, awe lighting her moss-green eyes.

  ‘Arthur,’ I whispered, the name feeling strange on my lips. Feeling almost like a blasphemy. ‘Lord Arthur.’

  Father Brice turned and flapped a hand at me and said something, but his words were lost in the gushing rain and I was a leaf on the storm, swirling into the past. Lost in some half-remembered dream. Arthur.

  A hand slapped against my upper arm. ‘I said, fetch our guests some dry blankets, Galahad,’ Brice hissed. ‘Go now. Off with you.’

  ‘Wait,’ the man with the silver beard said, walking towards me. He was thick-set and broad-shouldered, his face scarred, his nose bent, and his jaw clenched. It was a terrifying face, but for the eyes. The eyes were smiling. ‘Galahad,’ he said, exhaling as he spoke my name. As though he had been waiting to say it a long, long time. Then he glanced down at the bandages which were sopping wet now and would need to be changed. ‘What in the name of Taranis happened to you?’

  Father Brice began to mumble an explanation, but the warrior raised a hand to silence him. ‘Later,’ he said. He was just staring at me through
the rain which dripped from the rim of his dented, plumed helmet. ‘It is good to see you again, Galahad,’ he said. Then the smile in his eyes spread to his lips. ‘You’ve grown, lad.’

  Some part of my memory knew those eyes. Knew that battle-scarred face, albeit the years must have left tide marks of their own since I had known it.

  ‘Who are you, lord?’ I asked, keenly aware that the others were looking on. Those of the brothers who had not already retreated from the day and from these men.

  ‘I am Gawain,’ he said.

  ‘Gawain, son of King Lot of Lyonesse and slaughterer of Saxons,’ Father Yvain said, as the rain swirled around him. ‘And these three tough old bastards,’ he added, pulling his axe from the earth and pointing its muddy head at the other warriors, ‘are Gediens ap Senelas, Hanguis ap Brodan, and Endalan ap Plaarin.’ The three men nodded at me in greeting. At me! Like Gawain, they were scarred and hard-looking and none of them young.

  ‘I knew your father.’ Gawain extended to me a hand which was crisscrossed with the cicatrices of old wounds.

  The saliva soured in my mouth. I looked at Yvain, who dipped his head in a gesture which assured me that all was well, and so I took Gawain’s offered hand, and it seemed his grip would crush the bones in mine. My father? I felt a dragging weight in my stomach. Felt a strange sense of dread writhe like a serpent in my soul.

  ‘It is so very good to see you, Galahad,’ the warrior said.

  For a long moment we just stood there, our eyes fixed on each other, as if we were both trying to take the past and the present and join them together, the way you knot two lengths of a severed rope.

  ‘Come, Lord Gawain of Lyonesse,’ Father Brice said, shepherding the other three rain-drenched warriors towards the monastery. ‘Now that we know we are not going to be murdered by Saxons, let us not catch our deaths lingering in this foul day.’