His laughter rose to a high-pitched splintering giggle as he collapsed on the ground in a ball, holding his stomach. The spasm passed; Trystan rolled over on his unwounded front, wiping the tears away. “And then by way of comment, he just stands there and makes casual water. Oh, Arthur, I’ll write love songs alone. I’m not for epic. I seem cursed with futility.”

He started to sputter again, but with a different sound, as if a new emotion sprang up to choke what held it in check. Suddenly his face was a slate wiped clean of all but horror and exhaustion. “Did … did you see the water in the shallows? It was pure red.”

And then my garrulous Tryst had no more to say, just stared at nothing and shook.

The legion officers reported Cador unharmed, but no one knew his present whereabouts, certainly nowhere about the deserted palace. Some of the raiders had won mis far. The halls were littered with broken statuary, looted chests, a few beams blackened by fire. Only a few servants crept about, straightening up. I passed one woman crouched on the stone steps leading to the upper gallery, and asked for Cador.

“Don’t Icnow,” she mumbled.

“Guenevere?”

She wagged her head vaguely toward a chamber on the gallery. “One of them got her.”

A trail of blood led from the door along the gallery. Too weary to deal with any more than the dull fact, I followed the spatters until they ended in an alcove. Not Guenevere, but the body of a young Pict. The knife wound was centered just under his heart. He wore the tattoo marks of a Venicone. I turned and plodded back to the door and pushed it in.

The chamber was a shambles, chairs and sconces overturned, the bedclothes half dragged to the floor. Guenevere huddled on the edge of the bed, ashen, knuckles white around the hilt of the smeared dagger. She might have been there for hours, unmoving but for the trembling of her rigid body.

Guenevere

123

I sank down heavily beside her. “Give you good morning. I found your visitor.”

Guenevere didn’t move or look up, just shook. I saw her clear then. Men praised her beauty even in age and never realized it was only her reaction to them, a vital charisma with which she invested her life. Drained of it, she looked vulnerable and almost pathetic. Druith-Belrix gazed with me now and saw her with a wiser heart, no longer a mere prize but a woman apart, a human being who must win or fail on her own strength.

“Did he die?” she spat suddenly. “Did he die? Did he die?”

“Thoroughly.”

“Good.”

With some difficulty, I coaxed the knife from her tensed fingers and held her tight to stop the trembling. She vibrated against me.

“Fadier?” she asked finally.

“All right, I think.”

“And Peredur?”

“He took a wound, but he’il recover.”

“I should go to him.” But she didn’t move, just dropped her head on my shoulder. “Is it going to be like this always? Are we going to live our lives at bay, waiting for those animals to come again?”

I was too tired to lie, and a woman self-possessed enough to dispatch a man with one knife thrust deserved better. “Probably.”

Another long silence. “Well, I shall just have to get used to it, then. Was it bad at the river?”

“Oh, Trystan said it best. Hordes of strangers, no one you’d really want to meet.”

Guenevere ventured a hint of smile. “The fool, that does sound like him. Was he hurt?”

“Not mortally,” I said, trying to keep her spirits up. “His horse kicked him. Somewhere between the epic and the ode. Now if I may impose on your hospitality—”

The Venicone hadn’t laid hands on her wine. There was a full beaker on the hearth. I filled a bowl and made Guenevere sip it carefully, sharing with her myself. Some of the color crept back into her sallow cheeks. Her fear was a palpable thing. It must have been a nightmare hearing the harsh voices, the footsteps running across the hall below, mounting the steps, flinging her door wide. Even now, with our faces close together, I could see the echo of that fear as she touched my cheek.

124

Firelord

“He had marks like this,” she wondered. “But who gave them to you?”

“An old and very honorable woman.”

“Pict?”

“Not really. Prydn. You call them Faerie. She is called Gern-y-fhain. That means head of the family or Purest One or even queen if you want. Picts call such women Faerie queens when they might not rule more than fifteen of their folk. Most of the year they have no home but where the cattle end at sundown, and they—”

Over Guenevere’s shoulder, Dorelei laughed and little Drost threw up his tiny and imperial arms, summoning the powers of obedient creation to his whim.

“—they live hard lives, perhaps, but they taught me the names of things hard to say in words and all the gentleness I’ve ever known.”

Still her fingertips trailed over my cheek. “That must be it, Arthur. What was missing before. They were wise teachers, I

think.”

Footsteps came along the gallery, then a stocky, powerful-looking cavalryman in ring-mail filled the doorway.

“Lord Arthur, I have the centurions’ tally of lost and wounded.”

“Let me have it.”

He passed me the vellum roll. At second glance, I recognized the man they called Lancelot. Close up and in daylight the hero of the third squadron was a sober and ordinary young man of less than average height, with a square, unsmiling countenance. Going down the ranks, you wouldn’t look at him twice.

The casualty list was glaringly disproportionate. Bedivere and Trystan suffered heavy losses, but Gareth a mere handful. The implication seemed clear: we would not go into battle again until every man could set his feet in those stirrups. The roll made no mention of the first or second squadrons, however.

“I could not find the Princes of Orkney for an accounting,” Lancelot explained in his queerly accented Latin. “They were given the Pict captives.”

Guenevere said with cold venom, “That’s fitting.”

Lancelot approached her with a huge deference. “Lady, there are wounded men on the field. Did you not say you would go out

to them?”

“Yes, of a certainty.” She tried to rise, still spent from her ordeal. Each of us reached to help her. She wiped the blood from her hand on a piece of linen. “What is your name, friend?”

Guenevere

125

“Lancelot, Lady.”

From his deference and avoidance of her direct gaze, I judged him unused to the company of women. “He may have saved your city,” I put in. “Ask your father what service he did today.”

“Indeed?” As always in the company of men, Guenevere scraped up enough vivacity to charm. “Well, Lancelot, we must remember you. Meanwhile, I’ll take what women I can find and go to the field. God be with you, my lords.”

I inclined my head and stepped aside for her. Lancelot bowed deeply—a little too deeply. She was a woman, after all, not a vestal virgin. As he gazed after Guenevere, I had another chance to observe this puzzling, capable man. Some of my cohort were simple men-at-arms like Gareth and Bedivere, but none more self-effacing than Lancelot. Still, common soldiers didn’t speak Latin better than a bishop; he was obviously raised in the language. And something else: this chilly morning the cloak was thrown across his body and draped over his left shoulder. Unconsciously, he held it in place with his left hand. Very un-British, but quite natural for one accustomed to Roman dress.

“Lancelot, have we met before?”

“I think not. Tribune. You’d been captured when I came to this service.”

“Froir^where?”

“Gaul, sir.”

Yes, where else? With a soft shock, I knew those plain, sad features as well as Morgana’s, had known them since Merlin’s first vision. “Your name isn’t Lancelot.”

He shrugged thick shoulders. “It’s what the men call me, the best they can do with Latin.”

“You are Ancellius.”

“Why, yes,” he admitted. “Ancellius Falco. My father was lord of Clermont-Ferrandr”

“You fought the Goths with Ecdicius.”

“Yes again.” He seemed mildly confused. “But how did you—?”

“How do I know?” The laughter sounded harsh. “Because I’m bewitched or a genius or mad. All three, very like. Ambrosius said you’d taken vows.”

From his sudden reticence, the subject was clearly distasteful to him. “I lacked the grace to serve God.”

Oh, don’t you see? Being here, being real, he made my dreams augury and Merlin a prophet. “Why have you come?”

126

Fireiord

His answer wasn’t meant to be ironic. There was no irony in this man. “Why not? There’s no more Gaul, no more world really but here. It seemed the thing to do.”

That was a long day. An endless mass and requiem for the dead, avoiding the field where Gawain and Aghvaine herded the Pict captives, trying not to hear them. Moving from bed to bed in the infirmary or blanket to blanket by the river among men too shattered to be moved, pausing a minute by Peredur as Guenevere tried to coax soup into him.

“I got through it,” he kept saying in a broken, reedy voice. “I got through it. Mark me, Gwen. This Arthur, he’s immortal. He has God in the saddle with him.”

There were others to kneel beside, men who contended with the vast bafflement of death. They had faith, they prayed, yet this dark thing waiting was of no religion, simply was. Gradually as they drifted away from this shore toward another, bewilderment gave way to serenity. They left tife tike a room no longer needed, blew out the candle and were gone.

I had led them to this and would lead more to it again, and who in the bleeding world gave me the right? Not humility I felt but a great, leveling reality. I was only a piece on the board myself, riding the mare of fortune and toiling under it as well. Move by move it happened, shaped as Merlin foretold: Morgana, Guenevere, Ancellius. Yet the emerging pattern still made no sense. King of Britain? I, with no ambition beyond going home under the hill?

Liar, Merlin prompted.

Shut up, madman.

No, he persisted. You see how they need a god. This name, that name, what matter? The Nazarene was only a builder with a genius for men, but their need for a Messiah made him a god.