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No more of that.
Brother Coel said he’s discouraged recording so bald and secular a history, so I let him try his own hand. Gladly. There’s little I can remember about the midlands without my insides turning over. He got so far before I stopped him. We were going to throw the page away, but on second thought 1 let him leave it with the others. Not much for style, but a comment of sorts.
He still thought I glossed too lightly over a significant British victory and asked for one symbolic picture or event to illuminate the shadowy scene.
I said half a baby in a ditch.
Sensitive little fellow, he’s excused himself for a while. He should come back soon. I don’t think there’s all that much time left.
None of us spoke much afterward of that summer; I don’t propose to elaborate now. We left it a burning garbage heap that stank from Badon to Verulamium. The Saxons had nothing to put against my cavalry but spears, shields and a few bows, but they stood firm when we charged, their big, ruddy-faced women shouting encouragement and holding up newborn children to give the men heart. The few battles were a gulp of fresh air before the inevitable end. When the nightmare was accomplished, my report to Ambrosius began:
The midlands are cleared. The Catuvellauni are coming home.
—and somehow never went any further.
The first refugees poured in after us with their wagons, oxen and plows. They called us saviors (Ambrosius, did you hear?), met us with gifts and songs and garlands of flowers, wondering why the lords of Count Arthur smelted so of greasy smoke. Such
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grim young men who never sang and who had forgotten how to smile.
One day is enough to tell of, the last. Lancelot and myself. The woman and her child. A significant scene for Coel.
I sat in my tent pondering the dispatches for Ambrosius, hoping he was still alive to read them. Lancelot had volunteered to make the long trip back to Eburacum with a small party. The papers were sealed and ready to go, all but one. Mundane lists on supply, the condition of the men, casualties, the good, practical observations of a Roman soldier. However, the report of accomplished mission still consisted of two bare sentences. I read them a hundred times; they mocked me, now pitifully bald, now more than enough.
The midlands are cleared. The Catuvellauni are coming home.
From outside came the clop-clop of two horses nearing at a walk. Then Lancelot, sharp and peremptory:
“I don’t care, hold them here!”
A fly buzzed my ear. I batted it away, feeling hot and gritty, looked once more at the laconic report and tossed it with the others to go.
Ave. and the hell with it.
Lancelot thrust himself into the tent and stood at the entrance like a man bidden to come against his will. Normally fastidious, he hadn’t shaved for several days. Under the cheekbones that stood out more sharply now, his thinned face was shadowed with brownish stubble. He wore only breeches and a linen shirt grimy as my own. All our garments smelled of the thick smoke that hung over the midlands in memory of a hundred burned byres, immolated cattle and fowl. Lancelot was just back from firing one of the last.
“Done?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“AH burned?”
“All.”
Still he didn’t move, increasing my own irritation. They all had that look lately, a bafflement as of being in an alien place where nothing was familiar but the sour taste of disgust.
“Don’t just stand there. Come in,”
Lancelot sank down on a stool by the table, jerking his head at the dispatches. “They’re ready to go?”
.“You can see they are.”
“So am I.”
The fly buzzed between us. Lancelot swung at it with the fury of a frustrated cat.
“Get some food and rest,” I said. “You can leave in the morning.”
“Who can eat?” he grated. “Every mouthful tastes of that filthy smoke.”
“I eat it, too.”
His red-rimmed eyes bored into me. The scrutiny rubbed me the wrong way. I knew why he volunteered to return to Eburacum besides escaping this channel house, and for that reason never mentioned Guenevere in his presence. Whether he loved or was merely fascinated by her, who can say? He was not a Trystan; where Tryst needed an object for passion, Lancelot needed one to worship. He idolized Gwen but never knew her, not even in bed.
“What’s wrong, Lancelot?”
“The same thing wrong with all of us. We stink.”
Christ, they all sounded like that nowadays. “None of us like what we have to do.”
“So?”
“So don’t come in here like a bleeding saint with your arse-paining principles and tell me what you’re sick of. A sensible man would ignore it.”
“And that thing outside in the ditch that you won’t even cover with an inch of dirt. Do you ignore that?”
“Completely.” Controlling my irritation took effort. It pressed down on me with the weight of loathing behind it. “You know why it’s there. No one is going to forget the midlands.”
“I don’t think we will,” Lancelot agreed thinly. “I’ve tried to remember the reason all summer. All this morning.”
Something in his tone made me ask. “What about this morning?”
“All this morning,” he echoed. “I thought about the need for it. There was nothing different about today except when I woke up I knew it was over for me.”
He sounded so earnest, searching for the words. “Just one
more day, one more fire and then but of here to Eburacum. But
__ whatever kept me going didn’t quite reach. I burned the place,
yes. There was only one animal alive, a ridiculous, sway-backed
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horse. Stolen, I suppose. These people never have horses, not the peasants. Somehow I couldn’t kill it.”
He seemed so pathetically dogged in his desire to explain, I tried to ease him. “Well, one horse. The Catuvellauni c&n use it.”
Lancelot stared down at the table. “There’s more. When I fired the byre, there was a woman inside hiding under some straw. The smoke drove her out. A big cow of a woman with dirty hair and not many teeth and a child squalling in her arms. So we stood there, I with my sword, she with that child that never stopped screaming. And we just stared at each other.”
“Well, you only did—”
“What I had to? Count Arthur, do you know how often this summer I’ve done what 1 had to? Eighty-six times. Thirty-six women and fifty children.”
“For Christ’s sake, you count them?”
“Why not? God will.”
“What are you, an Anchorite?” I lunged off the stool, raging around the tent like a fire set by his words. “Pain and suffering will make you noble, hugging them to your breast? Not bad enough when it’s faceless, you have to bloody count them. Our private conscience. Does it help to count two more? Does it?”
He shook his head listlessly. “Not today. I told you it didn’t reach.”
“What?”
“I couldn’t.”
1 understood then. We faced each other across the tent, sweating, aware of the buzzing of that stupid fly. “You let them go?”
“No, my lord.” Lancelot’s bulky shoulders heaved forward as he rose from the stool. He moved heavily to the entrance. “I am your man to obey your laws. I brought them here. They’re outside. But if you need them on the heap with the others today, you may have to do it yourself.”
It carried no taste of insubordination, only helpless finality. Lancelot had not ignored the order, only postponed it, put execution back in my hands.
“I see. All right.”
He followed me out of the tent. A few yards away, by the fly-bitten horse, the woman squatted on her haunches in dirty homespun, wisps of straw in her braided yellow hair. A husky farm woman past the first bloom, she held the child close, darting fearful glances up at the men around her. My captains hovered near, aloof and yet oddly protective: Bedivere, Gareth,
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Trystan and Gawain. They seemed vastly relieved when I came to handle it.
“No one seems to understand orders today,” I said.
They avoided my glance. Bedivere twisted a short length of halter around his palm. Gareth jabbed sullenly at the earth with his sword. Big Gawain glowered off into limbo. Perhaps the most sensitive of the lot, Trystan could not disguise the troubled self-disgust in his eyes.
Still I mouthed the words that no longer carried any conviction. “Ambrosius said just do it. Don’t think about it.”
Bedivere spoke now. “Have you tried that?”
“Yes, damn it!”
My old friend dropped the halter and spat eloquently on the ground.
Trystan murmured, “Lancelot’s not the only one who counts.”
Then I understood completely that baffled expression. Not refusal, not inability to sup at horrors, only surfeit. They were stuffed with it. They couldn’t swallow any more, and the song of their misery was the mean hum of flies over the small carcass in the ditch. Suddenly that was too much for me, too.
“Someone get a spade. Cover that thing. Now.”
“Aye.” Relieved, Gareth moved quickly to obey.
“So everyone’s had enough.”
“Damned right,” Gawain mumbled.
“Even my terrible Gawain who divided men with horses?”
“Those were men, Arthur!”
“Oh yes, those were men. That’s a difference. And I called you a butcher, didn’t I?” I went back to the woman and leaned on my sword. “My lords, who in hell do you think you are? You think I haven’t pondered the reason for this insanity?”
“If there is one,” Trystan wondered fervently, “I’d dearly love to know it.”
Starting to reply, I realized how futile any answer to mem would be. They were warriors, a means somehow deluded into seeing themselves as an end. They never worked for food, they fought or waited in a hall to fight while someone pulled their food out of the ground, someone cooked it and someone else served it to them. Not one ever worried over sick cattle or drove them miles to grass that wasn’t there or went hungry so gaunt children could eat. Not one ever bent their stiff backs one inch because someone stronger enjoyed a right that was denied them.