Lancelot Page 7

  And my parents’ killers almost upon us.

  ‘Not far now, boy,’ Pelleas said, breathing hard. Encumbered by muscle and war gear and the boy he had stolen from death.

  I looked left and right and saw water and did not understand how that could be. Then I realized that we were running out into the sea along a narrow sand and pebble path. Just three spear-lengths from sea to sea, the water breaking white in the darkness along the causeway’s western edge and all of it cloaked in thick mist. The Lady’s magic.

  ‘Little further,’ the warrior carrying me said. The Beggar King’s men were on the pebble path now too. I heard their curses and threats above the jangle and clump of the Lady’s warriors’ mail and sword scabbards.

  Then the sea’s sighing loud in my ears and I lifted my head to look back at the mainland we had left behind, thinking that we were going to give ourselves to the water. We would come to the end of this narrow, fragile causeway and let the sea swallow us whole, and that would be that.

  ‘There! I see the flame,’ one of Pelleas’s companions said.

  I fought for every breath and thought my ribs must have snapped like twigs against the shining warrior’s bulk, and then he stopped and lifted me off his shoulder and put me on the wet stones. ‘Get in,’ he said, catching his breath, nodding at the nearest boat. There were three of them, bobbing on the calmer side of the causeway, each guarded by a spearman.

  My legs would not work and so the shining warrior picked me up and put me in the boat and the golden Lady got in behind me, sat at the bow and pulled me onto the bench beside her as Pelleas and the others piled into the three craft, the hulls grinding and scraping against the stones. The men took up oars and bent to the task and a spear plunged into the slack water beside us. Another streaked from the mist to hit our stern. Then stones clacking and warriors emerging from the sea fog, pointing spears and brandishing blades and yelling at us with impotent rage.

  Pelleas and the others pulled the oars, dragging the dark water past our hulls and taking us out. The night air was cold on the back of my neck and rushing in my ears as I stared back at that fog-wreathed finger of land that dared accuse the vast grey, shifting world beyond.

  I saw my uncle. The traitor. A man I had admired. Hated too, in my secret heart. But now feared. He pushed his way through the clamorous crowd until he stood on the edge of the causeway, on the slippery wet stones, and I was certain he would wade into the sea and swim after me and kill me.

  But Balsant did not stride into the water or dive head first. He just stood there, his boots in the brine and his sword in his hand. The sword which was dark with my father’s blood. Cursed iron. Tainted by fraternal murder. His stare clung to me and would not let go, even as we slid beyond range of their spears. Soon beyond the range of their insults and threats, though my uncle had said not a word nor flailed. The betrayer. The king killer. His eyes in me like hooks and mine in his, until at last the mist rose as a living wall between us, and all of them and the path too were hidden from sight as if none of it had ever really existed.

  If I’d had the words I would have asked the Lady where we were going. Even though I thought I knew. We were rowing to the next world. These silent, broad-shouldered men would keep pulling the oars, the rhythm of the blades hitting the water and biting as strong and regular as my heart thumping in my chest. They would row and row and we would glide further from all that had been, deeper into the dark unknown. And then we would pass through some watery gate into the next world where my father and mother and brother waited for me.

  ‘You are safe now, child,’ the Lady said, taking off her wolf pelt and wrapping me in it, pressing it to my trembling flesh. Pelleas told the others to ship their oars and I twisted on the bench, eager to see this entrance to the world beyond, but all I saw was a wall of wood. Nail-studded oak planks which stank of pitch.

  ‘You’ll have to climb now, boy. I’ll not carry you up,’ Pelleas said, as a net thumped against the hull and faces appeared above us. His legs braced in the thwarts, the warrior reached towards me, nodding that I should give him the basket. I shook my head. He took it from me easily, then tossed it up to one of the ship’s crew who caught it, thank the gods.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ the Lady said. I stood, looking into her eyes, one hand clutching old Hoel’s hawking glove which was still tucked in my belt, the other grabbing hold of the net. One hand on the past. One on the future.

  ‘No harm will come to you now, Lancelot. I give you my word,’ the Lady said. I had never before heard a woman give her word but in that moment I trusted the golden Lady. I knew that her word was a bond that she would never, could never break. Besides which, the sparhawk was aboard that ship now and where she went I must follow.

  I stood up onto the bench and took hold of the coarse ropes in both hands, glancing once more at the man who had carried me from that death-filled hall. He nodded and gestured at the net.

  I climbed.

  5

  The Island

  I SPLIT THE rabbit’s head to get to the brain, but the movement startled the bird and she bated, attempting to leap from the glove in a bid for freedom. It ended badly, as it had a hundred times since we had come to the island, I holding the jesses tight and she hanging upside down, revolving, flapping and shrieking in the flickering light of the lamp on the table.

  I put the knife down and slowly, gently, lifted her back onto my fist but she bated again. And again. And again.

  ‘Better to wring its damned neck, lad, and save you both the trouble,’ Pelleas said, sitting on the edge of his bed to lace his boots.

  I had cried out in the night again. In my dreams I had seen them cutting my mother’s throat. I had seen Hector lying there in the rushes and, as is the way of dreams, it had all come with fresh terror and I had thought I might prevent it by crying out. Pelleas had said nothing. But we both knew it.

  He shrugged now. ‘Or else let her go.’

  He knew how to be big, did Pelleas. Knew how to use a sword and spear and growl filthy curses under his breath which had the other boys sniggering. But the man knew nothing of hawks. Even less than an eight-year-old boy, which was saying something.

  ‘If I let her go she’ll die,’ I said, ‘because she does not know how to hunt and kill. They learn it from their parents. Or the hawk-master, if they are taken from the nest.’ I thought of old Hoel then and resented him for not having trained the bird before that night when King Claudas wreaked havoc in Benoic.

  Pelleas shrugged again. ‘As I said, wring its neck then. Be done with it.’ He thrust a foot into the other boot and laced it. ‘For you do not seem to be getting very far with it. That bird hates you.’

  ‘She hates everyone,’ I said, looking into the sparhawk’s yellow eye, which glared back at me with suspicion. Her talons, like little scimitars, gripped the gauntlet upon which I placed the rabbit’s head, away from the fist so that she could see the brains inside the skull.

  So many times she had ignored this invitation when we first came to the island, having grown used to me dropping food into the basket for her to eat unobserved. But I knew she must get used to life outside that false nest and learn to feed properly or else die of starvation. And so I would stroke her talons with the meat, caress her chest and the edge of her wings with it until she would peck at what annoyed her, and thus might get the smallest taste of the brains and know it was food. Know too that I was not her enemy but her friend.

  Sometimes she bated at me, furious at my presumption in touching her, enraged by the intrusion. Other times, perhaps lulled by the same gentle words I had often spoken to soothe Malo, she would, scowling, stab at the offending gobbet. If I kept still as a corpse, she would even step to the glove. Then one day, hunger, or curiosity perhaps, had overcome her hawkish pride and she had pecked at the rabbit, smearing her curved beak with blood. Then had fed with ravenous abandon as she did now. Devouring the brains. Filling me with hope that she would survive in spite of everything.

>   That I would fix her. In spite of everything.

  ‘You’re a determined little lad, I’ll give you that,’ Pelleas said, gathering his spear from the corner of the room and stopping for a moment to watch the sparhawk feed. I said nothing, trying to keep my arm still so as not to scare the bird and set her bating again. ‘Still, I s’pose it gives you something to do,’ the warrior said. ‘And takes your mind off …’ He cleared his throat. ‘You know,’ he said, picking up his shield, ‘the past.’

  Then he was gone and we were left in the flame-lit gloom. Just us two. The hawk and the boy.

  Once called Ictis by the Romans, the island was now known as Karrek Loos yn Koos, meaning hoar rock in woodland, and perhaps that harkened back to a time before the sea had flooded the bay. We called it Karrek, or simply the Mount. It was a small tidal island nestled in a bay off the south-western coast of Cornubia, which was a sub kingdom of great Dumnonia, in Britannia. A lofty mass of rock, trees and gorse cut off from the mainland by some five hundred yards of sea. The Lady’s island. My new home.

  The Dark Isles. That’s what we in Benoic had called Britannia, though many of our people’s ancestors had come from there during the harder times of Roman rule, and folk were still sailing south across the Dividing Sea to escape the Saxons who spilled from their boats into Britain to burn and kill and take the fertile land for their own. Britain. A place at the edge of the world, so said the Romans. A harsh land of wild peoples and bogs and wind-scoured heaths. An island rearing out of the northern seas and infested with outlaws and barbarians and would-be kings, so that you had to wonder why the Saxons wanted it so badly.

  The place of my ancestors too, before they had taken ship to Armorica. Before they had carved out a kingdom with the sword and become lords of Benoic. And now I lived on this rock which was a place between worlds, not Armorica and not quite Britain. But I lived. Perhaps the last of my people. Except for my uncle.

  I thought of the traitor now and the sparhawk screeched as though she had seen him in my mind and so I hummed that tune which my mother used to sing, and which a girl who had betrayed me had sung, and the bird went back to her meal and I put Balsant from my thoughts, thinking instead of that night when I had come to Karrek. The shaven-headed warriors who had burst into the Beggar King’s hall and spirited me away from that butchery were sullen and quiet when we came ashore on the ebb tide, climbing up the slick rocks with the sea’s murmur in our ears. They had left two of their sword-brothers behind as corpses and I think they blamed me for their loss. As for me, I was still not certain that we had not passed to the other world. I had never been aboard a ship before, and sailing through the mist, the hull and rigging creaking, the men silent in the dark and the sound of the sea kissing the bows, had woven some spell around me.

  I had found a coil of rope into which I placed the basket to safeguard it against the ship’s roll, and had fallen asleep neither knowing nor caring if I should ever wake. So deep and death-like had that slumber been that I missed much of the next day and only awoke when the sun was sinking to the western horizon and the Mount loomed black and ominous against a molten copper sky.

  I admit that as I stood at the rail I searched for my mother and father and Hector on the shore. I imagined they might somehow be standing there looking out to sea. Waiting for me.

  Now I knew I would never see them again in this life.

  ‘This is your home now, child,’ the Lady had said as her warriors, but for Pelleas, strode off towards the dwellings snugged at the foot of the towering rock, their spear blades threatening the sky, their voices like the low rumble of distant thunder. ‘Pelleas has a bed for you.’

  The warrior had spat. ‘What am I supposed to do with a wet-behind-the-ears boy?’ he grumbled, but the Lady paid no heed and I looked up to see a group of older boys running across the rocks to greet the warriors, chattering like gulls. Eager for stories but getting only growls, curses or flailing arms as though they were buzzing flies that needed shooing.

  ‘Well? You coming, boy?’ Pelleas said, walking off. I looked at the Lady. She nodded that I should go. ‘That bird of yours keeps me awake, I’ll eat it,’ the warrior added, his mailed back broad as a closed door.

  Inside the basket the sparhawk shrieked and I heard the frustrated flutter and flap of wings.

  ‘Go with him,’ the Lady said, her voice as soft as the murmur of the sea from which her island arose as if summoned by some god.

  And then I had followed Pelleas, my ribs still aching from being carried over his shoulder, my mind’s eye still full of blood and the sight of men cutting my mother’s throat. At least you were in your basket and did not have to see it, I thought to the bird as we walked across the dark rock.

  That had been two moons ago. Just two. And yet I felt I had been on the island for a year. Partly that was because by now I knew every rock and stand of gorse, every pool left behind at low tide and each twisting, rocky path through the hazel wood which the Mount wore like a cloak. But it was also, perhaps, because the hawk and I spent our days alone. Days unmarked by the duties and tasks which had filled my previous existence. Here on Karrek I was as free as the bladder wrack drifting in the bay. As lordless as the gulls wheeling above the Lady’s windswept fortress crowning the Mount.

  Yet even with the days all my own I still had not fully manned the hawk or taught her to kill for herself. I would lie on my bed and torture myself with the memory of the blood feast. I would imagine myself jumping in front of my mother and thrusting my eating knife into the heart of the man who came to kill her. I saw myself take up my brother’s sword and hack my uncle down, cursing him as he died, telling him that this was his punishment for betraying my father. Betraying him long before that awful night.

  Or I would stand on the beach looking south across the sea, sending promises of vengeance on the breeze. The Beggar King and his people would see me again. My uncle would see me too. And they would suffer the worst pains I could inflict on them. I had time and imagination enough to conjure all sorts of tortures and contemplate which would be the most painful and vile for a man to endure. One thing I knew: I would take my uncle’s hand, the one I had often seen brush my mother’s hand when he thought no one was watching. I would chop off that hand and make my uncle watch as I fed it to the pigs.

  And so, with all this revenge to plot, the sparhawk was neglected and still unable to hunt for herself. ‘Today will be the day,’ I told her, stepping out of Pelleas’s simple dwelling and blinking against the glare.

  It was a warm, still day and the tide was rising, reclaiming the last weed-slick humps of the mainland foreshore. Beyond that, impenetrable forest. A green mass which filled my eyes and whispered to me on breezy days. But not today, and I turned my back on it, the sparhawk sitting on my left arm, the seabirds wheeling above, the day stretching before us.

  ‘There he goes, the little lord,’ a boy called Melwas shouted. Armed with a wooden practice sword and a man’s shield he stood with the other boys on the flatter ground between the shore and the rising mound, waiting for the men who would train them this morning.

  ‘And the bird that flies like a broken arrow,’ Agga called, pointing a spear whose blade was sheathed in leather so that it might bruise but not kill. Both boys were some three or four years older than I and begrudged me the freedom I enjoyed while they and the other eleven boys living on Karrek spent their days learning the arts of war. Sword, spear and shield work. Running up and down the Mount for endurance and speed. Holding rocks above their heads for strength. And Agga was right about the bird but I said nothing, ignoring them as I always did.

  During her rages and struggles inside the basket the sparhawk had snapped off the tips of her primary wing feathers as well as mangling her tail feathers. I had tried dipping them in hot water, as the Lady had suggested that first time we had spoken, and the tail feathers were undoubtedly straighter than they had been, but I could do nothing about her wing tips, and so she flew poorly. She knew it, too, a
nd landing on the ground or alighting on a perch would flap and shriek with rage and frustration, cursing her incompetence, the clumsiness which was so contrary to her nature.

  We emerged from the shadow of the trees into a sunlit clearing and she flapped, the nervous creature she was, her eekipip, eekipip filling the glade in which I had set up a perch, putting two almost straight branches in the ground as the uprights and securing a thin, bowed hazel branch between them. I had tied a long leather leash to the perch and by now the bird was used to the routine. Used to not doing what I asked of her, too. But we could work in peace here, out of sight of those with whom I shared the island, and even if the others knew where we were, they left us alone.

  Now, I slipped the leash through the loop of the jesses on the hawk’s leg and she stepped willingly from my arm onto the perch. Then I tied a length of twine to the leash using the falconer’s knot old Hoel had taught me, hoping the twine was not too heavy for her to carry in flight. I laid the creance in a double line out from the perch into the glade and back to the bird, and while I did this she pecked at the leash. Pecked the twine. Fidgeted. Lifted her head and watched me.

  Slowly, so slowly, I walked away from her across the clearing, feeling her yellow eyes on me, that mistrustful stare of hers searing into my back. Even after I had carried her on the glove every day since I set foot on the Mount.

  I counted twenty paces and stopped. The twine creance was twenty-five paces in length, giving her a surplus of slack to avoid her snapping it with a jerk and flying off, never to be seen again.

  Barely breathing now, I turned as slowly as a flower turns towards the sun. She sat there, twenty paces away, her scimitar-armed feet clutching the hazel branch, her head cocked. She was a haughty princess sitting before a line of would-be suitors. She was a queen of Persia waiting to be flattered with gifts of gold and jewels and silks.