Pendragon's Heir (22 page)

It was her own fault. At the time it had seemed the only thing to do, but she had agreed to the riddle game and must keep her word. She fell to her knees and reached through, into the dark, out of the light of Sarras. “Jesu, protect me—”

A
FIRM HAND TOOK HERS
. I
N
an instant the steeple was gone and Blanchefleur stood by Morgan in a cloistered walk on a starry summer’s night in—
where
were they? Not Sarras, although the lofty foliage of elms and oaks was visible beneath the stars beyond the cloister. They stood on the high balcony of a mazelike castle with the wind sighing through branches and banners. Two figures came down the passage toward them, and as they approached, Blanchefleur glanced unbelievingly at Morgan. The Witch of Gore looked back with a ghastly smile on her empty face. Blanchefleur turned and looked into the young eyes of the High King of Britain. Beside him, clinging to his arm, Morgan walked, scarcely more than a girl, as Arthur was scarcely more than a boy. She was speaking in tones too low to hear; their heads bent together, curiously trusting.

Blanchefleur turned away with a cry, and the scene dissolved to the tower in Sarras. “You’re lying,” Blanchefleur gasped, jerking away from the opening in the floor, but Morgan’s hand yanked her back. Her voice was even.

“Keep still. There is more to see.”

“No!” Blanchefleur strained away, but Sarras vanished and once again they stood outside at night. Now it was a drab early spring, all mud and stinking puddles in the fields outside a castle wall. A door in the wall opened, then slammed again. Morgan stood there alone, head drooping, carrying a little bundle in both arms: a baby. She looked up, and on her face was a bitter inscrutable smile.

Moving stiffly, Blanchefleur turned her head to look at the older Morgan standing beside her. She hated herself for even asking, but she had to hear it from Morgan’s own lips. She had to know for sure what Morgan meant to tell her. “A child?” she mouthed.

The bitter smile touching Morgan’s mouth hadn’t changed in the intervening decades. She said: “If it comforts you, he didn’t know we were brother and sister at the time.”

There was a jingle of harness. The long-ago Morgan looked and saw a horse fastened to a ring on the wall. It was difficult for her to mount carrying the baby, but she managed it, and the plod of hooves carried her away.

Blanchefleur knelt on the stone in the tower at Sarras; it seemed her mouth and heart and every limb had turned to ash.

“I’ll never believe you,” she groaned.

Not until then did she feel her arm hanging limply down into the stairwell. Morgan had gone.

17

There the cavaliers of Britain roam,

Valiant in arms, with knights of other lands.

…

Valour is needed by all those who come,

For here a knight his death, not glory, stands

To find.

Ariosto

I
N THE LITTLE MONASTERY WHERE
S
IR
Ector and Nimue left him to recover, Sir Perceval ran a fever for two days and afterwards was as weak as a kitten for a sennight. Outside, the winter bit deep and snow fell on the hills, but the monastery lay snug in its valley, steam rising from low thatched roofs.

One late afternoon ten days before Christmas when Perceval began to feel more like himself, he was sitting on a rail in the stable feeding Rufus a handful of oats when from outside he heard a commotion. A moment later his uncle Sir Gareth came bounding in with his destrier and some of the brothers trailing behind.

“Well met, fair nephew!” he said. “I had been questing, and returned to Camelot, and lo, there was nobody to greet me but my own Lady Lynet, for everyone has gone on a very great hunting-trip after the White Stag, even the Queen. And my lady told me from Sir Ector that you lay here in a fever. I pressed on to see you.”

“Then you might have spared yourself the trouble,” Perceval laughed. “I am sound as a bell and just about to ride to Camelot myself.”

Sir Gareth fiddled with the straps of his horse’s bridle, giving the task only half his attention, and making a nuisance of himself with the quiet monks. “No need,” he declared. “Camelot stands nigh-empty. Only Sir Mordred’s squire arrived home yesterday to say that his master would be back by the week’s end, and rather than await his coming, I have decided to run an errand for Lynet. Will you ride with me?”

Perceval grinned. “I may be persuaded. What’s the nature of this errand?”

Sir Gareth threw up his hands and collapsed onto a haybale. Behind him, the brothers breathed a sigh of relief and began untangling the harness. “Lynet is with child, and she
must
have dragon sausage,” he said. “Welsh dragon sausage. Pork, beef,
Cornwall
dragon—not good enough. What do you say, nephew?”

Perceval put a hand to his head with a sudden memory. “I would come, but I have no helm. I lost it in the other world, and have nothing with which to buy another.”

“Careless of you,” Sir Gareth said. “Then ride with me to find a dragon. There will be enough gold in its hoard for a hundred helms.”

The next morning, and with the monks’ direction, they armed and set out riding north-east at an easy pace. It was on the second day, as they paced up the western bank of the Wye seeking a ford, that they saw two other knights riding south down the eastern bank.

Here the river was narrow, twice the distance of a stone’s throw across. It was easy to see the markings on the shields of the two knights, and to his great surprise, Perceval recognised one of them. It was a sable shield, bearing a silver dragon. The second knight had the similar-hued bearings of argent, a bend sable.

Perceval acted without thinking, pulling Rufus into the lee of an oak, watching through the leaves. Sir Gareth joined him without a word or a sound. When, after a little time, the knights on the opposite bank of the river turned and made their way under the shadows of the trees, Perceval turned to Gareth and cried,

“He is still alive, then!”

“Yes, and on his way to Camelot for Christmas.” Gareth laughed.

“You mean Sir Breunis?” Perceval asked, a little confused. “Is he now a member of the Table?”

“Sir Who? Oh, you mean the knight with the silver serpent? But I have never seen that device before. No, I meant the other one.”

“Did you know him?”

“Mordred. Our cousin.”

Gareth spurred his horse back to the path and lead the way up the river. “Tell me what you know about Sir Breunis,” he said over his shoulder.

“He was a common wayside robber,” Perceval said. “I passed my sword through him and the King gave him his life when he begged for it. He vowed to mend.”

“It has happened before,” Gareth told him. “There was Ironsides, the Red Knight, whom I fought on my first quest, and for many years now he has been a true knight of the Table. And your mother’s brother, who served with us seven years after the Queen of Gore’s enchantment was broken. Depend upon it, when we come to Camelot, we will find Sir Breunis’s name on a siege as well.”

Perceval glanced at Gareth, and saw a crease between his eyebrows giving the lie to his words. “Do you really think so?”

The crease deepened, and then smoothed away in a smile. “Let us hope!”

It was in a valley on the other side of the river that they found the little desolate village the monks had spoken of. Here they were pointed to a nearby well, where the trees and the ground were all blackened with fire and the gnawed bones and bootless weapons of unhappy villagers strewed the ground.

In the dim sunset Perceval looked the glade over and said, “Does your lady wife think so little of sending you out on deadly errands?”

Sir Gareth unstrapped the blanket from behind his saddle. “It’s our fourth child. I’ve grown accustomed to it.”

“Of course,” Perceval said with a grin, “even dragonfire might burn less hot than my lady aunt’s temper.”

Sir Gareth cuffed Perceval across the ear. “For that piece of insolence, youngster, you take the first watch. And be glad you are so tender in years that I dare not risk my honour upon you in single combat to prove my Lynet as sweet-tempered as she should be.”

“Tender in years? What, and my wounds not yet healed from a battle you would have trembled to see?”

“Dare not accuse me of cowardice, child.”

“Dare not call me a liar, ancient kinsman.”

“Enough!” With a snap, Sir Gareth shook out his blanket and sank down between the roots of an oak-tree. “A week after Christmas, then, in the meadow outside Camelot, we will joust. And God have mercy on your soul.”

T
HE MOON ROSE HIGH ABOVE THE
trees as Sir Perceval kept watch. Gareth snored under the shadowy oak. Apart from this, the only sound came from flittering bats and the snuffling of a passing badger. Perceval stared at the well in the moonlight, and was happy. Happy to be active again, happy to be back in the company of his brother-at-arms, happy to be home, with his sword on his hip and his shield on his arm, as they should be, instead of hidden away at the back of a wardrobe.

He stretched a little, and his mail made metallic whispers that echoed away in the night. But then they went on, even though now he was stock-still; and then came a little snort and a few more scuffling noises, and he knew that the dragon was coming.

He rose to his feet as quietly as possible, and drew his sword.

The dragon rippled out of the well in dark liquid folds, a stripe of moonlight running down its scales. Perceval bent at the knees, lifting his shield, raising his sword. A twinge plucked at his shield-arm and the certainty struck him that helmless and weakened as he was, he could not hope to face even this small dragon alone.

It lifted one of its two long snouts, sniffed the air, and saw him.

“
Gareth!
” Perceval bellowed, and then with a lash of the dragon’s tail he went down. At once he was struggling up again—too slow, too slow—then a crushing weight landed on his chest and wrestled him back to the earth. Perceval felt a blast of heat in his face and looked into a pair of toothy maws, each with a red-hot glare rising in the throat.

But Sir Gareth, shieldless and unhelmed, was already on his feet, yelling “Orkney! Orkney! A rescue!” The beast merely lifted one head and roared fire. But Gareth was no newcomer to dragon-killing. He dove to one side, surged up unscathed, and struck off both the dragon’s heads with one blow of such force that they went rolling across the glade and the blade scythed deep into the ground by Perceval’s head.

Perceval grunted as the twitching bulk of dead dragon toppled onto him. Fumes choked him. In the sudden dark that followed the flaming blast, Gareth was laughing.

“What cheer, nephew?”

I
T WAS
C
HRISTMAS
E
VE WHEN THEY
returned to Camelot with the dragon, heads and all, to which cause the remaining villagers had gladly contributed a cart and driver. Fierce weather froze the road solid enough for easy passage.

They kept the cold at bay with talk and laughter. Gareth’s tended to revolve around what he was going to do with the jingling bag in his pack, the gift the villagers had made him out of the little dragon-hoard.

But all talk of new arms and horses faded when at last they came out of the woods to the snowy meadow and saw Camelot rising on the hill above them, no less gracious and welcoming in the leafless nakedness of winter than in the green robes of summer.

There was the dragon to deliver first, which Sir Gareth, with a sudden impulse for theatre, did in the Great Hall itself, where, with an air of desperate candour that convulsed all watchers, he called forth Lynet and laid both the dragon’s-heads at her feet. One of the ladies screamed at the grisly sight, and some looked queasy, but Lynet had the stomach of a man, and received the gift with a pretty speech followed by a clout on the head, which Gareth repaid with a kiss.

With the comedy finished, it was time for dinner. After, Perceval and some of the knights he knew dragged chairs to the fire to finish a conversation. Sir Gawain joined them, but when the other men one by one drifted off to see families or horses or armourers, he rose and beckoned to Perceval.

The King’s solar was full of the scent of fir and spices. The Queen filled cups with mulled wine from a pot hanging over the fire, and the King sat by a chessboard, strumming his fingers on the arm of his chair as if working out a problem.

He looked up and smiled when he saw Perceval.

“So you are returned, Sir Perceval,” said the King. “Sir Ector has already told me the manner of your leaving the house in Gloucester. I am greatly in your debt.”

“Sire, I was glad to win this honour of serving you.”

The Queen handed wine to the two newcomers. “Be seated,” she told them, and sank into her own chair. Perceval obeyed with a sudden solemn premonition. This was not a council meeting, yet the air was oddly formal.

The King said: “What was your estimation of my daughter’s nature, Sir Perceval?”

“We have lived so long without her,” added the Queen, as if to soften the blunt force of the question. “Tell us all you can.”

Perceval opened his mouth—and then, perhaps for the first time in his life, thought better of it, and closed it again. He stared at the tapestry on the wall for what seemed an age before, at last, he said: “At worst, thoughtless. Too wrapped up in herself, and a little disdainful of Logres, I think. She was loath to come here at first, Sir Ector said, and so I found her. But then her conscience began to reproach her, and she listened to it.”

Perceval could not read the Queen’s face, for she held her cup like a mask before her mouth. But he saw something a little like disappointment in the King, and rushed on, bubbling out some of the warmth he had bottled in a moment ago. “There was a man in that other place, who I think had made her half in love with him. He offered her his protection and hand, but she refused him. For Logres. When the house was burning around our ears, she would not save herself without me and if not for her, you would have seen the letters of gold fade from my seige at the Table. When she listens to her conscience, the Lady Blanchefleur is better than an army.”