Lancelot Page 8

  I eased my right hand into the pouch on my belt and brought out the rabbit’s leg and a piece of its liver and laid them on the glove, then gently lifted my left arm up away from my body. My heart beat its own wings in my chest. Today is the day. She would fly to the glove and finish under sun and sky the meal she had begun by candlelight.

  Pursing my lips, I gave the sing-song whistle that she knew so well. The cuckoo call that told her I had food for her. There would come a time, I hoped, when I flew her at game and she would be lost from sight, and I would need to know that the call would bring her back to the glove.

  She shrugged herself. Gripped the perch. Eyed me with apprehension and bitterness. But would not come.

  I whistled again, making sure to keep my arm still. Several times over the last days she had flown, but always to the ground halfway between the perch and the glove with its glistening, blood-scented offerings. Today she would fly to my arm. She would wing her crooked way to me and savage the liver and the leg with that wicked curved beak.

  I stood there. Above us, the sun moved across the glade. In the distance, the whisper of the sea and the shrieks of gulls. All around us the flutter and soft rattle of leaves in a breath of sea breeze. The sparhawk watched me but did not move. I whistled again. Waited. Whistled again. Lifted my aching arm a little higher. Whistled again.

  Time passed. I lowered my arm because it ached. Took a breath and raised it again. Whistled.

  She did not come.

  My throat tightened. I was no hawk-master. I did not know how to do this. Not any of it. The creature was wild and hate-filled and who was I to think I could teach her anything? I clamped my teeth together. I had not cried for my mother and father. Nor for Hector. I would not cry because of this hawk.

  I wanted to whistle again but could not. I should let the bird starve. Why had I carried her in that basket from the ruin of Benoic, all the way to this rock off the shore of the Dark Isles?

  Better to wring its damned neck, lad, and save you both the trouble. Pelleas’s words ran through my head. My arm ached and my mouth tasted the bitterness of tears. Perhaps she could not fathom that, although she was still tied, she was free to come to me. Or was she simply too stubborn and proud to obey?

  The sparhawk shook herself. Blew out her feathers to their full extent and strode up and down the hazel perch, looking this way and that.

  I gave the call, the worst I had ever done it because my heart wasn’t in it now.

  The hawk cried back, opened her wings, dropped from the perch and came. With three flaps of those imperfect wings she gulped up the space between us, but then a guttural clamour and two crows dived at her, one a wing’s length from striking. The sparhawk shrieked and swerved ungracefully and landed flapping amongst the grass as the crows mobbed her, up and down like a pair of little smith’s hammers, calling in their gruff voices a hawk, a hawk, incensed at the intrusion, thrumming with an eternal and innate hatred.

  I ran forward and scattered the crows, which flew like shadows before a flame, and the sparhawk screamed at me in a voice that was almost human.

  Your fault! I should never have trusted you! she cried.

  ‘We should never trust anyone,’ I said, and threw the rabbit’s liver and leg at her, pulled off Hoel’s leather gauntlet and cast it onto the ground. Then I sat down in the grass and glared at the bird, understanding why my father had looked so defeated when he saw this spiteful creature instead of his snow-white gyrfalcon. I understood why Pelleas said I should wring her neck and be done with it. What did it matter now anyway? My father would never see her hunt. He would never be king again and lead his people. I should cut the jesses and let the bird fly off and be damned.

  She fluffed her feathers, strode then skipped over to the liver and impaled it with those scimitar claws. She cocked her head and glared at me with that hateful yellow eye. Then she stabbed down with her beak and began to eat.

  Shearwaters, razorbills, guillemots and kittiwakes shrieked and called from the island’s south side, furiously building nests on the ledges and crags. The cormorants and shags which roosted near the foot of the cliffs now perched on rocks by the sea’s edge, their wings spread, hanging out to dry. Gulls wheeled, keening above the bay, diving to plunder the votive treasures left by the ebb tide, whilst black and white oystercatchers waded in the shallows, stabbing at mussels and crabs with their spear-like bills.

  An arrow’s flight from the shore, the Lady’s ship, Alargh, ‘Swan’, rocked at her mooring, a gull resting atop her bare mast. Further out, too far to see men’s faces, four currachs bobbed like nutshells. I imagined their thwarts brimmed with flapping silver. Herring, mackerel, whiting and perhaps even a haddock or two would crowd the feast table that night, with the surplus carted off to the smokehouse whose sweet oakwood breath was already on the morning breeze.

  That dawn before swimming I had watched dolphins against the distant skyline, more of them than I could count, arching and diving, sewing the horizon. Then, squinting against the sun’s glare off the water, I had seen an osprey, higher up than the quarrelling gulls, a darker shape against the endless blue firmament, proclaiming all he had witnessed on his travels. I knew from what old Hoel had taught me that the bird had begun its journey in far-off Africa and would fly further still, to some part of the northern Dark Isles, to spar and mate and claim a kingdom of sky and water. Awed by that sea-hawk and his perseverance, I wished him well as I picked a way across the rocks and shingle and eased myself into the shallows, gasping as I kicked out and gave myself to the colder depths.

  I swam most days, when the other boys began their weapons training and the forge anvil began to knell, and the few girls who lived on Karrek Loos yn Koos occupied themselves with their mysteries under the Lady’s watchful eye. But for the last nine or ten mornings I had swum all the way round the island, taking an age to do it but emerging eventually, exhausted, shivering and ravenous.

  ‘Seems to me you’d rather be an otter than a boy,’ Pelleas had observed the first time I stumbled ashore having circled the island.

  The truth was there was something about the water that drew me to it again and again. It was part fear, part defiance that enticed me, compelled me to immerse myself and, always with a blood-shivering thrill, wade out to the uncertain deep. I would think of death. I would wonder what my mother and father and Hector had thought at the very moment of theirs. I would lift my feet. Fill my lungs with air. Yield for a moment to the course and current, then kick and pull and fight. The waves could not bury me like a creature under the plough-turned earth. No unseen, underwater tide could catch me in its net and drag me out too far to claw my way back. No lake or ocean or sky could overwhelm me. I would defy it all. I would swim.

  Now, having filled the hollowness that came after a swim with half a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheese, I sat on a rock overlooking the grassy slope below the Lady’s keep, chewing samphire and relishing the saltiness on my tongue and the warm light on my face. Watching.

  The thirteen boys stretched their limbs and sinews, rolled their freshly shaven heads round their shoulders and pulled their heels to their backsides. They took no note of me, nor of Pelleas and the other warriors who were taking their ease in the sunshine, all thought and ambition turned towards the coming race. Nor did the boys make a show of noticing the girls who had come chattering from the Lady’s keep to watch the sport, though they were as aware of them as they were of the sky above their heads and the rock beneath their feet.

  On the Lady’s word they would set off from the keep like hounds after the hart, down the steep track through the trees and around the Mount, keeping to the fringes where grass met bare granite, over the crags and bluffs, then back up to the keep. They would complete this circuit three times in honour of three gods: Morrigán, Queen of Demons, goddess of war; Cernunnos, the horned one; and Arawn, lord of the underworld. For these gods were the three which the Lady most venerated.

  For the winner, a gift from the Lady herse
lf. Traditionally, a knife or a belt buckle or an elm bow. A fine woollen cloak or a pair of boots. But really the winning itself was the prize. It was all for the honour of it. For the victory at the end of the hard-run race.

  ‘Goes back years. Long before you came mewling into the world, lad,’ Pelleas told me. Agga was the current champion, having won the race a year ago to the day and by a good distance too. The bone hilt of the knife sheathed on his belt still gleamed like fresh milk.

  He and Melwas stood apart now, their friendship put in the shade by something deeper: rivalry. They being the biggest and strongest and knowing it.

  Jowan looked fast, I thought, with those long, lean legs, big hare’s feet and not so much in the way of heavy muscle as some of the others. In contrast, Peran was short and stocky but there was strength in those legs of his and he did not lack for stamina, which would play an important part. I had watched him training with Madern, hammering his sword against the grown man’s shield long after all the other boys, but for Melwas and Agga, had given in to exhaustion and sat cradling aching arms and bruised pride.

  Melwas, Agga, Jowan or Peran. One of these would be the winner, I was sure. Florien could throw a spear as far as any of them but he was no runner. Branok was almost as good as Goron with a bow and could split an apple with a knife thrown from ten paces, but he was a slow and steady boy and I doubted he would even try in the coming race. Similarly, Geldrin seemed to me to lack the fire in his belly to win. He was the smallest boy on the island, smaller than me though he was at least a year older, and he might have been as fleet as Malo, my father’s stallion, but he would not want to challenge the others for fear of provoking them to revenge.

  ‘Agga will have it again,’ I heard Madern say to Benesek, the two of them scratching their chins or pulling their moustaches as they eyed the racing stock. I had seen Benesek fight like a mad fiend that night in the Beggar King’s hall. Now, he grinned and shook his head whilst taking something from inside the neck of his tunic, threaded on a leather thong.

  ‘This says Melwas will win,’ he said, showing Madern a bronze coin, green with age now, minted in the time when the Roman legions marched in Britannia. His teeth were white against his long, dark moustaches. ‘For he has sulked a year now and will not let Agga beat him again.’

  Madern’s eyes flicked from the coin back to Agga, who was bent forward, hands clutching his muscular calves. Limber and strong and confident was Agga.

  ‘Well?’ Benesek said.

  Madern nodded. ‘A carafe of that Syrian wine I brought back from Durocornovium says Agga will win.’

  Benesek spat on the coin and rubbed it against his tunic. ‘Two carafes,’ he said, turning the coin to make it catch the light so that a little of the original bronze colour gleamed. It worked.

  ‘Agreed,’ Madern said.

  Just then the Lady came over the bluff and all the boys ceased their preparations that they might look at her. Her warriors and the girls looked up too, for her presence alone cast an ensnaring spell.

  I spat out the samphire and straightened, wanting the Lady to see me, though I knew she had more important things to do than notice a boy sitting in the sunshine while the others puffed up their chests in readiness for the great race in her honour.

  An overdress of fine green wool was cinched at her waist by a gold-studded belt, and her arms were bare but for several silver wire bracelets on her wrists. She wore a twisted silver torc at her neck and her golden hair was coiled and fixed behind her head with two long copper pins. She wore sandals on her feet but bent and took these off and handed them to one of her girls before picking her way effortlessly down between the rocks towards the waiting athletes.

  She looked like a queen and I supposed she was a queen here on this little island.

  A pretty, freckly-faced girl called Wenna ran up to the Lady and gave her a circlet of red campion, beaming with pride. The Lady accepted the gift and placed it on her head, which had Wenna blushing as red as the flowers that she must have spent all morning picking and weaving.

  Then the Lady went and stood in front of the boys, giving each of them a moment under her gaze. Some fidgeted. Others tried to look taller or broader than they were. Melwas, I saw, gave Wenna a champion’s grin before he had even run a dozen paces.

  ‘Who is going to win the day?’ the Lady asked the boys. I could not see her face properly now but I knew she was not smiling. It was a serious question and everyone knew it. Such a weighty question that no one, it seemed, dared answer her. They just stood there, sweat-sheened skin taut over eager flesh and muscle. But tongues as still as the rock upon which I sat.

  ‘Well?’ the Lady said. ‘Can none of you tell me? Is it beyond any of you to know?’ She glanced across at Pelleas, who stifled a grin, then she turned those green eyes back onto the boys. ‘Who is going to win?’ she asked again.

  A gull shrieked overhead, flying out to sea, laughing as he went. Near silence fell again, the only sound that of the surf stroking the shore. Until the spell was broken by two words.

  ‘I am,’ I said.

  I took off my shoes and dropped them in the grass, knowing that my own feet would grip the rocks of the shore better than those hobnailed soles. Agga, Jowan and a couple of the other boys were barefooted too, but the rest wore shoes or boots and as I walked over to join them Melwas nodded at my feet and smirked.

  ‘You’ll rip them bloody,’ he said.

  ‘Does a wolf cut his feet chasing down prey?’ I asked him. He laughed.

  ‘We’re not all flat-footed like you, Melwas,’ Agga said, hoping to provoke his rival before the race.

  But Melwas did not take the bait. ‘So little boys are given the honour of competing now?’ he said, not to the Lady directly but loud enough for her to hear.

  I looked up at her, hoping she would not forbid me to run.

  ‘Melwas has a point,’ Pelleas said, ‘about Lancelot being just a boy. He’s too young for it. You know what they’re like when they get going, my Lady. Lad’s only half the size of some of ’em.’

  I held the Lady’s green-eyed gaze, my lifted chin and braced chest and shoulders an echo of my earlier claim that I would win the race. When I had said it the girls had giggled and some of the warriors had laughed. Twirling the coin on the end of its leather thong Benesek had jokingly called to Madern that all bets were off now that there was a new contender to consider. As for the boys, a few grinned and some even whooped, relieved that I had broken the spell which the Lady’s challenge had laid upon them, binding every tongue.

  But the commotion was short-lived and subsided as, one by one, every person standing beneath the Lady’s keep realized that I was serious.

  And I was serious. The Lady saw it in me.

  ‘Lancelot will race,’ she said with the slightest nod of her flower-crowned head, our eyes still locked. ‘And he will be treated no differently. Come what may.’

  I did not take the time to look at Pelleas or Melwas to see their reaction. I was forcing my way amongst the other boys who were already lining up, leaning into the sea breeze.

  ‘So be it, lad. But if you end up drowned, or get your head smashed in on the rocks, don’t expect me to look after that bloody bird of yours,’ Pelleas growled at me.

  I ignored him.

  ‘Are you ready?’ the Lady asked us, and received a chorus of yes Lady as we jostled and elbowed each other for all the difference a foot or two’s lead would make in the overall scheme. Then a stillness descended over Karrek. My heart was thumping. My mouth was dry, my palms were wet, and deep in my ears there was a rhythmic whooshing which flooded all other sound, so that the cry of a seagull somewhere above might as well have come all the way from beyond the veil that separates this life from the next.

  For some reason I thought of Hector then. I imagined him standing amongst us, bent forward over his leading leg, face clenched, eyes narrowed, determined to prove himself as he always was. He would beat us all now were he here, I thought, for Hecto
r was fast and strong and had been born to be a king. Desire and blood combined, woven together like silken threads in the richest of tapestries, shining brighter than all around it.

  Hope of our people. My brother, who had inside him my father’s courage and vigour but none of his cruelty. And yet all of it, Hector’s promise, his ambition, our people’s prospects, all had been snuffed out in one foul night. A blazing flame doused in blood.

  Blood. My mind turned against me then, conjuring another vision of my brother, of him throwing himself at our uncle the traitor and being speared by another man. Hector’s gore-slick hands grasping at the shaft sticking from his flesh. A crimson bloom on the tunic which our mother had adorned with whorls of bright blue yarn.

  ‘Go!’

  Born to be king and killed for it.

  ‘Lancelot!’ Pelleas bellowed. ‘Run, lad!’

  That voice hauled me back to myself and the sight of the other boys’ heels as they hared off down the hill.

  So I ran.

  I tripped on a tussock of long grass, almost falling on my face, but somehow kept my feet, the girls’ squeals and the men’s roars in my ears, and then I was already past one. Clemo. Fat and slow was Clemo, though when he did score a hit with the sword in training, boys ended up on their backsides. He was out of this race now though and I doubted he would even finish it.

  Over the bluff. Down the worn track between the granite ledges and across the sun-browned grass. Leaping shelves of bare rock. Not thinking, just trusting my eyes and my feet to find their way. Onto steeper ground, my legs all but overtaking themselves as I hurtled headlong, towards the birch and hazel, slipping in between Enyon and Kitto, getting an elbow in my shoulder and hearing curses billowing in my wake.

  Then we were amongst the trees where the path narrowed and there was no choice but to keep in single file, the boys’ breathing loud beneath that leafy canopy, their shoes scuffing against the ground.

  Quick feet. Arms spread like wings for balance. Reckless.

  ‘You may as well give up now,’ Melwas called from somewhere up in front. ‘This is my race.’ His words came stuttering like cart wheels over cobbles. All heard. None replied.