Pendragon's Heir (25 page)

Sir Perceval paused at a distance until the King looked up and called him. At the summons he started forward and bowed and gave his news.

“Naciens the Hermit of Carbonek spoke to me in the Scots’ land. And I heard that the Grail Knight will be here at Pentecost.”

Before the King could reply, another step fell on the path, and the three looked up to see bars of argent. It was Sir Bors, a cousin of Lancelot’s.

“Sire,” he said, with the breath of a man who has been hurrying, “I saw Naciens the Hermit in Lyonesse, and he told me that the Grail Knight would come at Pentecost.”

“I can well believe it,” said the King with a smile.

“I rode five days without drawing rein to tell you,” said Bors.

Silence fell. The only sound was the soft splashing fountain. Above, moon and stars. Around, perfume. Beyond, the wild faint thread of a nightingale’s song.

“Earth is weighed down with Heaven tonight,” said Perceval, almost in a whisper.

The King stirred. “The noontide of Logres,” he murmured.

“Not so, by my faith,” said Bors, “but the dawn.”

“Good Bors, the son of succor!” said the King. “But I stand here in fear and trembling for a thing I cannot fathom. Who can say if the works of our hands will endure before the glory that is coming?”

On his way back to the castle, Perceval saw a figure moving through moonlight and shade, and recognised it as Sir Lancelot. With a murmur of apology he left Sir Bors and followed the Knight of the Lake’s shadowy form into the labyrinthine garden.

The sense of awe was still upon him, and he walked softly, almost breathlessly, lest by some loud noise or sudden movement he should break the spell of that graceful garden. Too softly: before he had gone more than ten paces from the path, on the shadowed border of a moonlit clearing he paused with a sudden sense of mistake. There was a ghostly apple-tree, covered in white blossom. Below it walked like a silent vision three others, rippling in and out of moonlight and shadow. At the approach of Sir Lancelot, one of them came forward. In the full moonlight, her hair and skin and samite gown shone like silver. Only her eyes were invisible, thrown into shadow, black pools of distance.

The Queen.

Perceval stood immobile. What had he stumbled upon? Unbidden, the words of the Lady Nimue came into his mind.
She would be burned
. Before they had flashed through his memory he wheeled around to hurry back the way he had come. He took only two steps into the bushes and came face to face with his father’s youngest brother, Sir Agravain.

Perceval stared at his uncle, his stomach churning, feeling like a sneak and a spy. But even in the grip of that dreadful moment he recognised the same look in Agravain’s twisted features.

Only for a moment. But as they both mastered themselves, it came burning hot into Perceval’s mind that Agravain must have been following Lancelot on purpose and not, like himself, by accident.

A rush of anger sluiced through him like floodwater. Afterwards, Perceval could not determine whether what he did next was right or wrong. “Agravain,” he cried out, in a voice that tried to be jovial, but choked on the horror of the moment. “Have you come to speak to Lancelot too? I saw him walk this way.”

Agravain, who had opened his mouth to speak, almost flinched as Perceval’s voice split the night air. “I—” he faltered.

“What a surprise,” said Perceval, still at the top of his voice and grinning madly, “to find you here. Shall we go on together?”

“I was just going back to the castle,” Agravain muttered.

“The evening is yet fair,” said Perceval. But as he sang out the words, footsteps approached, and the Knight of the Lake stood by them, straddling the path with his hands on his hips.

“I hear my name called,” he said with a gleam of laughter. Agravain conquered himself with an heroic effort and spoke a greeting. Then, so soundlessly that Perceval thought he was dreaming, under the dappled moonlight behind Lancelot the Queen appeared like a white shadow.

“Well,” she said, and her voice, like herself, was cool and silver. “I did not look to see such a gathering when I craved a moment of time from the Knight of the Lake.”

At the sound of the Queen’s voice Lancelot stepped aside with the measured grace that marked all his movements, but Perceval knew from the way he had stood blocking the path from them that he must not have expected her coming. And yet, such was his perfect self-command that not an eyebrow flickered when she spoke.

The Queen came forward flanked by the two other damsels Perceval had noted earlier. Lancelot, if outwardly composed, nevertheless stood speechless; Agravain’s eyes narrowed; Perceval, watching them all, felt like one waking from the dead. For had the Queen’s tryst with Lancelot been guilty or secret, she would not now stand before them, uttering a gracious word to each.

He realised that she was speaking to him.

“And I am glad to see you, Sir Perceval, still upon your feet,” she said. “For it was told to me that you took a wound at Carlisle.”

“Madam,” he said, sagging with relief, “and I also am right glad to see you here.” Whether she caught the double meaning or not was not apparent. She dropped her lashes, smiled, and moved on.

19

O servant of the high God, Galahad!

Rise and be arm’d: the Sangreal is gone forth

Through the great forest.

Morris

O
N THE DAY OF
P
ENTECOST THE
High King of Britain held festival at Camelot.

Even that morning, latecomers still straggled in to the bursting castle. Sir Gareth and Sir Gaheris arrived before breakfast, having ridden south a few days on a quick patrol. While they still stood stretching their legs in the courtyard, Sir Kay returned from Trinovant with Sir Ector and the Bishop of Ergyng. Then at mid-morning, just after church, two kinsmen of Sir Lancelot came riding in on horses stumbling with exhaustion: Sir Hector de Maris and Sir Lionel. Through gulps of water, they told the others that they had ridden night and day since escaping from the dungeons of the Castle Nigramous. Finally, a short space before midday, with the feast about to begin, Perceval rode through the keep gate and saw Gawain on the ramparts above, staring up the river with shaded eyes.

“Is all well?” Perceval called, reining in his horse and speaking through a thicket of white blossoms. Nine of the Queen’s maidens had carried him on a last-minute maying, and his arms were full of the thorned flowers.

“Sir Lancelot went away with a damsel after sunset last night,” Sir Gawain told him, “and he is still gone.”

“Did he not say when he’d return?”

“Not a word.”

“I am mounted and ready. Shall I ride after him?”

“No,” Gawain said with a laugh. “I’ve seen Pentecost feasts before. If he does not come, let me ride out. Though it will be a pity, for his is the only siege empty, saving the Siege Perilous.” He turned and scanned the landscape again. “Wait!”

A single knight came trotting out of the forest, bearing the familiar argent and gules. When Gawain stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled, he waved his lance in the air and spurred his horse to a canter.

“He is in a good mood,” Gawain said, leaving the ramparts to join Perceval in the gate. On reaching the keep, Lancelot reined in beside them and pulled off his helm, revealing a flushed and grinning face.

“Perceval was worried about you,” Gawain told him very seriously. “Where have you been?”

“I knighted a boy,” Lancelot said through the grin, and trotted on, up the hill, to the stables.

“So ho, a boy.” Gawain cocked an eyebrow. “I wonder if that has anything to do with the old story… Give me your horse, Perceval. I can put him away while you take those flowers inside.”

Sun flooded the great hall of Camelot with midday light, striking sparks from hurrying women in finery and serving-men in refurbished livery. Perceval dumped his mayflower on the Table and jumped aside to avoid a page spreading fresh rushes on the hall’s floor. Fetching up against his own siege, he folded himself into the seat so as to be out of the way as he watched Lynet and her sister hanging the new Pendragon banner on the wall behind Arthur’s chair. Then someone came up with fresh tablecloths, and Perceval vaulted across the Table to avoid her. He landed gently on the rushes inside the Table, opposite his own seat and the Siege Perilous, and turned laughing…

Perceval stopped laughing. The Siege Perilous had been as blank as a practice shield ever since he had first come to Camelot. There were fiery marks on it now, words of gold.

“Lynet,” Perceval called. “You can read.”

She came over and stared at the siege. As the others in the hall crowded around them, Lynet read:

“On the day of Pentecost this seat shall find its master.”

“Call the King,” someone said.

When Arthur came, he stared at the words for a while, and then sent for a cloth of samite. “So the Siege Perilous will be filled at last,” he said. “Let it be veiled until it is claimed.”

When the hall was finished, the doors opened. In came the ninety-nine knights of the Round Table and sat in their ninety-nine seats, each with a name written on it in words of gold, from the King at the head of the Table facing the hall doors, to Sir Bors and Sir Perceval facing him on each side of the shrouded Siege Perilous. In jostled the visitors, the servants, and the people of the town to sit at the four long tables on each side of the hall. Above, the galleries flooded with silk and the laughter of ladies. Perceval looked up and searched for those he knew—his aunt Lynet, Lyones wife of Sir Gaheris, Guimier wife of Sir Caradoc, and the Queen of Logres. A twinge of sorrow struck him for apparently no reason, and it took him a moment to realise that he hoped and half-expected to see his mother there. It was not her face that broke upon him through the rippling colour of the gallery, however; it was Nimue’s, as subtle and secretive as ever, that looked down on him, and bowed in greeting, before turning away again.

Even the Elves had heard of the Grail. Even the Elves had come to see.

Then the food came in, and Perceval gulped as he inhaled the fragrance of boar, beef, venison, pheasant, and game of all kinds cooked in stews, in pies, or roasted. Someone passed him a flagon of wine, and he splashed out a cupful; since the first time he had tasted it, in the pavilion more than a year ago, he had gained the stomach for it. Bread came around next, soft fluffy brown rounds still warm from the oven to serve as plates and soak up gravy. There were apples and carrots, parsnips and onions, whole roasted mushrooms and long strips of crisp smoked bacon, nuts and barley, all mixed together beneath a huge boar stuffed and roasted and propped up on a platter. There was a pie full of mutton, sweetened with plums, nuts, and apples. There were ten enormous wheels of cheese, blue-mottled inside, whose smell failed to fight off the knights gathered to do them injury.

Perceval had no idea how he would even begin to taste everything. But his dilemma was put off. Just as the Bishop rose to say grace, a page ran into the hall waving his cap. “Sire! Sire!” he cried. “Here’s a great marvel!”

After the discovery of the words on the Siege Perilous, Camelot was athirst for any news. A breathless silence fell on the hall. The page skidded to a stop, turning red.

“Will you not come out and see it?”

Then everyone moved, jumping up with a rattle of chairs and following the page outside, down the hill, to the river running around the foot of Camelot-town. In the water below the bridge floated a not-quite-square stone, like the keystone of an arch. A sword had been thrust point-first into the rock. Here it had floated, and here it waited as if to be drawn, bobbing on the current.

Perceval saw the King’s hand go hesitantly to his own sword, Excalibur, then fall back again as Arthur remembered that the sword in the stone which had made him King so many years ago was long broken, and the one he wore now was the gift of the Lake.

The King leaned out over the parapet and read the second prophetic message of the day, chiselled into the stone.

“Never shall I be drawn, but by the best knight of the world.”

By Perceval’s side, Sir Caradoc murmured “What, bar none?”

The King looked up with a smile. “Well, Sir Lancelot. As it appears, someone has sent you another sword.”

Lancelot shook his head. “It was not meant for me, sire.” The King waited for more explanation, but Lancelot bowed his head and stood back.

“Sir Gawain?”

“I fear that only the right owner of this sword will lay hands upon it and escape harm,” said Gawain. “Nevertheless, I will try.” He stepped onto the bridge, leaned over, and knotted his hand around the hilt. Grunting, he drew it up an inch or two—but the stone clung to the blade. Gawain let go and the sword slid, bobbing, back into the water.

The King turned and surveyed the crowd. “Will you try, Sir Perceval?”

“I am sure that this sword was meant for the Grail Knight,” Perceval said. “But I will try if you wish.”

He stepped up beside his father and closed his hand around the hilt. In that moment he wondered, with a sudden thrill, if the sword would move in his hand. But the stone stuck with the sword, and although he put forth all his strength, the further he drew it up the heavier it became, until the pommel slipped through his fingers and the stone splashed back into the river.

“It will not come,” he said, gasping air.

“Then let us wait for the coming of the Grail Knight,” said the King, and they all went back to the feast.

Perceval was settling back into his seat, and the Bishop was just drawing breath, when there was a sound like trumpets, and the doors of the hall slammed open. Some of the knights started to their feet, hands going to swords and daggers. But Perceval grunted in surprise, and glanced up at Bors on the other side of the Siege Perilous. It was the old man they had both seen questing in the night: Naciens, the hermit of Carbonek. He came over the threshold, under the leaping arch of the tall door, leading by the hand a young man of Perceval’s age all clad in red armour, but with an empty scabbard and no shield. In perfect silence the hermit led the young man to the seat by Perceval’s, and drew off the white cloth. And now on the Siege Perilous appeared the words: