That was when I saw you, but so did he.
Caped and hooded, Yssobel sat among the Athenians, most of whom had returned to the camp. Odysseus kept watch over her shoulder. He had alerted their hosts to the possibility of defending Yssobel, and they had merely shrugged.
Yssobel kept thinking that she had not even asked the young warrior’s name, though she was certain it would be the same as his father’s.
Legion was alive with music and dancing, and the dryads moved restlessly in whatever shadow they could find. The trees writhed with their shapes as they tried to conceal themselves and protect their charges from the wilful, drunken carving of runes and names, or the stripping of bark to feed the fires. But the female suddenly put her light touch on Yssobel’s shoulder.
The men around her all rose to a crouch, watching the tree nymph with dark-browed interest. ‘My nest is yours if you wish. If you wish to speak to the person you love. I have found a night-place among the roots of the fortress for a while.’
She slipped away towards the high walls; although Yssobel could see her, Yssobel’s red side saw only a slender young oak tree, receding in the mind’s eye until it became a part of the earth.
Odysseus suddenly leaned forward and whispered, ‘Armed men. Coming this way. I count five, and one is clearly searching.’
Yssobel closed in on herself and feigned sleep. The Athenians, already back in relaxed position, talked quietly, while Odysseus poked at the fire. The flames flared slightly as the band of men passed, their longs cloaks swirling. They walked towards the fortress gates; two of the band glanced back to where Yssobel was concealed, but the small camp they had passed was one of thousands, and they saw nothing new.
As soon as they had entered the fortress, Yssobel shrugged back her hood. ‘Why would he come here, of all directions? He’s aware of me. I’m certain of that.’
Odysseus agreed. ‘And yet he can’t quite see you.’
There was a brief exchange then between old Greek and new; the Athenians were asking about the cause of the concern. The most grizzled of them glanced at Yssobel, laughed, and made snipping motions with his fingers against his hair. Odysseus clearly agreed.
‘That young man at the fire said your hair was like a beacon. Why do you keep it so long, so free?’
It was a moment of truth. Yssobel lay back for a while, staring at the night sky, where the first faint hints of a new dawn were catching and brightening the very tops of the trees. The air was freshening.
‘My mother always wanted me to keep it long. She liked to comb it; she liked to braid it. There was such affection when I was younger.’
‘She was holding on to something she’d once had herself. And there is nothing wrong with that. But our friend here is right: you shine like a bronze shield in bright sunlight.’
‘And I was nearly seen because of it. Ah well; since your friend agrees with you.’ Yssobel reached for her knife and passed it to Odysseus. He checked its edge, pulled a rough stone from the fire and honed the blade. He worked quickly, shearing her hair to shoulder-length, gathering the thick locks and passing them to her. As he worked, she watched the gates to the fortress. She had been unnerved twice in the night, and she did not feel ready to meet the man whose group had swept past earlier; the look in his eyes had been frightening.
When Odysseus was done she wept for a moment, then laughed quietly. From her belt she undid the two silver clasps that Jack had fashioned.
By looping the twisted hair through the wider one, then tying it tightly using the smaller, she made a new belt that she could step into and tighten at her waist.
Odysseus grinned as she tried it on. ‘Not practical, but very beautiful.’
Yssobel laughed at his words. She was not mocking him. She wanted to ask: ‘Are you talking about me? Or my belt?’
Odysseus did not have tears in his eyes, but there was loss there, loss in his gaze; And there was the sign of loss on his lips, that knowing smile, the small twist of the mouth that says: This is it; this is the end.
He knew that she was now thinking of young Peredur.
‘Am I beautiful?’ Yssobel asked.
‘Very.’
‘Am I practical?’
Odysseus laughed aloud, shaking his head. ‘Are we talking about belts? If so, no. If not, then yes. You will hold hard in difficult times. I’ve always known this. You came out to Serpent Pass on the hardest of days, those ice-days, bringing me your life and supplies. You never asked me why I was there, what I was doing. You came because that is what you do: you hold hard to what you have; and yet are prepared to share it.’
She stared at him, not quite understanding his words. ‘I came to Serpent Pass because I was fond of you, and concerned for you.’
‘You loved me, Yssobel, and you knew it wouldn’t last. There is an agony - don’t deny it - there is an agony in holding on to something that must pass away. I don’t know how we know it, but we can see the end of love. And yet the end of love is not the end of fondness. You must pass on. I have murder to commit. Your life is love; mine is the knife, the blade, practicality without beauty.’
Yssobel knelt before him and took his hands in hers. ‘How can you be so young and think so darkly? Maybe things will change.’
‘It is for the simple reason that I am so young that I can think so darkly. When I’m an old man, I can learn from my young mistakes.’
‘I’m a mistake?’
‘Certainly not! You are the surge of water on the shore; you reach, you drag a small part of me; just as I reach and drag a small part of you. We are just the flow of tide. For me? Murder and a life I hardly know, though I have seen its reflection. Penelope. And how beautiful she is. What love we shall have. How practical she will be as she waits for my return from murder. I know her. We were children together. Our parents were neighbours. The sand shore of our home island is imprinted with our childlike traces. The footprints of innocence, Yssobel. Our life will be long and beautiful, though only after difficulty. It’s very hard to live with the certainty that your dream will come true. You? That is for you. If you hold on to what you have, you will find that you have more, far more, than you are holding. That is practicality! That is strategy.’
Yssobel reached for Odysseus’s face, kissed his mouth, whispered, ‘May a woman ask a man to take her to a quiet place and say goodbye with gentleness, warmth?’
‘She may.’
Later, she sat in the tree and entered the earth.
The Crossing Place: Crow Choice
Bydavere had returned to the battleground. He had approached it cautiously, and on foot, aware of the crying of men’s voices and the screech and confrontation of carrion birds. He stripped clothing and armour from a fallen man, and all the time he was attacked by birds; they did not want him there. The field was theirs.
He came back to where Arthur had made a temporary enclosure, in the woods away from the lake, where his dying body had been dragged by what he called ‘the kiss that stole my death’.
‘They’ve gone,’ Bydavere reported, and Arthur accepted that without expression.
‘I wonder who won the day.’
‘Not the field of carcasses that are left. There are no gatherers that I could see, no women, no sons; only crows.’
‘We fought,’ Emereth reflected, ‘in a strange place. Morthdred must feel the same, if he has survived.’
Arthur said nothing for a moment, then agreed. ‘All of my life had led to that hill, that final skirmish. I don’t suppose it matters where it happened. It was meant to be the end, and so it happened in a world of its own. I feel for the good men who rode with me. Where are they now?’
‘Scattered. Finding their own paths,’ Bydavere said.
This discussion was happening in the early hours of the day, and a new sun was beginning to bring dim light to the horizon across the reed-fringed lake. It was suffused through mist. Arthur stood and stretched, then took Bydavere by the arm, and the two old friends walked to where the water was still and cold against the bank. Crouching, they reached between the reeds and splashed their faces.
‘You were talking loudly as you slept,’ Bydavere said. ‘It disturbed my own sleep, not the others, though we’re all restless.’
‘You don’t know what to do.’
‘We’ll find our own ways. Half of us are young, only a few of us old and weary.’
Arthur glanced at Bydavere, recognising the mocking tone. ‘Weary enough to be unable to avoid that bloody blow. Old enough to know to escape the field. And nothing about you - a man older than me - seems weary; or ageing. You have a good future.’
‘I wish I could see it, Arthur,’ answered Bydavere wistfully, looking up into the dawn sky. ‘Just a hint of it. A torch in the dark, telling me where to ride.’
‘The torch will come. Just don’t expect it to be a torch. Or in the dark.’
Bydavere laughed. ‘A dark-haired, dark-eyed woman on a proud horse, riding from the edge of the woods and beckoning to me. “This way!” she cries. I’d settle for that.’
‘You’d follow her?’
‘I was not born to follow, as well you know. I was born to be a knight-in-arms, and to assist. I was born to be a friend and a war-friend, and a shield-friend, though always acknowledging his warlord.’
‘But you’d follow that dark-haired woman.’
‘Faster than I can throw a spear. Why not? Torches burn out.’
‘Everything burns out, my friend. But I hope she comes for you.’
The air was fresh; the reed bed stirred with a breeze and a sudden flight of small water birds broke the heavy dawn silence. ‘That could have been a meal for all of us,’ Bydavere said, shaking his head as he watched the birds descend further out on the lake.
‘What was I saying in my sleep? What deep secrets did my lips murmur when I was caught between here and the otherworld?’
‘You see her. You see the woman who stole your death. You were raging at her. You kept on and on about the kiss that stole my death.’
‘Did the others hear this?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. But there is something else: you were making a sound.’ Bydavere looked hard at his friend. ‘It was the sound of despair.’
Arthur crouched in silence for a while, letting his fingers play with the muddied water at the lake’s fringe. Then he said, ‘Thank you for telling me this.’
Bydavere took his knife from its sheath and cut a reed; he cut two sections of the reed and crossed them on the ground.
‘We go our own ways, Arthur. I cannot accompany you on your pursuit of death.’
From behind them, Emereth shouted. ‘Arthur! The lake! The boatmen are back.’
The lake fog was lifting. The small craft was appearing. The two tall boatmen plunged their poles languorously into the increasingly shallow water. Two huge dark-feathered birds perched on the wide prow, watching the land, the only signs of life in them the occasional lift and flutter of their wings.
As the barge came closer, so these birds rose almost effortlessly into the air, wings wide, catching an updraught that Arthur could not feel. As they rose higher they came into a tumble of an embrace together before plunging into the lake, ahead of the boat.
Arthur had no time to ponder on this strange scene. Behind the boat, land was rising. It loomed large through the dawn fog. It seemed to grow from the lake. It was a wide island, and verdant. The reeds began to shift as the lake was disturbed, ripples becoming waves that began to surge around his feet.
The waves consumed the shore, the lake spreading inland so that suddenly Arthur and Bydavere were hip-deep in water.
The island was not growing; it was approaching. It seemed almost to float on the lake. Soon it was so vast in his vision that Arthur could see the narrow paths between the steep wooded slopes. There was the gleam of marble deep within, the hint of structures, the sharp glance of new light on old walls, deep within the forest.
And it was a forest of yews, evergreen and gleaming, reaching out beyond the island, massive and ancient, splattered with the blood red of their fruits, their apples. The trees reached forward, as if grasping the air in front of them, and as the barge came to a slow halt in the reed bed, so did the island come to a stop, sending a massive wave of water that knocked down all Arthur’s men, surged into the tree line and the camp, then withdrew to leave a sodden and muddied bank.
The island towered high, filling the horizon. The boughs of the yews, hundreds in number, looked to Arthur like arms, reaching out to protect him as he craned his neck to see the full extent of this apparition. Silent and strange, it was waiting, floating; watching. And Arthur knew that it had come for him.
The two bargemen had lowered their poles and crouched down in the craft, one on each side of the mast and the furled sail. They became a part of the boat; they might have been carvings in its hull.
Standing on the saturated bank, feet buried in the mud surge, Arthur waited, breathing shallowly; and Bydavere, trusted Bydavere, waited equally calmly.
The reeds were suddenly disturbed. With a double birth cry, the waters were broken and two women surged into the air, rising suddenly and spectacularly, their bodies draped with black cloaks, their hair spraying widely as they shook their heads. One was young and one was older. Waist deep among the reeds, they met each other’s gaze and laughed, then turned their look on Arthur.
They walked through the reeds, stepping ashore, the lake draining from them, the brightness in their eyes and smiles extending as their gazes embraced both the men who waited for them.
The younger woman winked at Bydavere who whispered, ‘By Brigga! I’m in love. Quite suddenly!’
‘Easy,’ Arthur warned, and the lake nymphs laughed again.
The older woman, so sure in her gaze, so certain in her posture as she lifted her cloak and squeezed the lake from its fabric, said to Arthur, ‘Do we seem lovely to you?’