And they crucified him.

They needed that, too,

What wonder 1 got drunk that night?

For want of a better word, you could call my mood self-pity, the natural need of a man who’s worked a long, hard time and wants to be petted for it or at least to have his feelings acknowledged. What better friend than Trystan for such a moment? In the palace chamber given to me, with a warming blaze from the firepit, Tryst and I shared a beaker of wine while he plucked soft melodies from his harp, sober and reminiscent, closer to his

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thoughts than the drink this night. He let me finish most of the beaker.

In his way, Trystan was as much a friend to me as Bedivere. Not as close; you weren’t allowed that near to Tryst. He kept you at arm’s length with a laugh or a self-deprecating joke that irritated blunter men and drove women to distraction. Self-immolation seems to carry its own glamour, the heightened perfume of a dying flower. Mature women may avoid it, but none are totally impervious. It appeals to the maternal or annoys their sense of order. They saw Trystan going to hell in a peal of hard, bright laughter and longed to save him. He sang them songs, allowed them to feel both saintly and sensual for a night or two before they found how truly unapproachable he was. Most were uncharitable in recalling him, but did so with flattering frequency and detail. If the grapes were sour, they were still plentiful.

His lyrics were not the heroic lies that make giants out of ordinary men. He sang of waking beside Yseult, of her breasts brushing against him in love making, the combat of passion, the satiate quiet afterward; of loving in the wrong place at the wrong time but loving nonetheless. Of lying on her, in her, their motion part of the rolling ship that carried them back to Marcus.

So many versions of their story have been mangled by minstrels, let me briefly state the bare facts. The King of Leinster in Ireland raided south Cornwall and was thoroughly trounced by Marcus Conomori to the tune of disaster and a ruinous ransom. It would have meant years of tribute. Leinster, however, noted that Marcus was a widower and offered a compromise: a portion of the tribute, some of it in cattle, and a perpetual peace to be sealed with Leinster’s jewel of a daughter in marriage. Even allowing for his possessive pride as a father, Leinster felt honor-bound to admit more men fell in love with Yseult at first sight man did not. And of course the tribute would continue to be paid. To put it baldly, Marcus bit. Letters sent, tokens of faith exchanged: done.

With Trystan as emissary, Leinster sailed home. He was minus a few good warriors—among them his nephew Morhalt, who’d been slain in the chance of battle by Trystan himself. Leinster saw no reason to announce the fact, but word got out anyway. Yseult flatly refused to meet the Comishman who killed her cousin, but the court of Leinster is small. They had to meet, there was time before their voyage while her wedding clothes were made, and Yseult began to find that loyalty had its limits.

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Trystan was handsome and kind, certainly well-mannered, he sang beautifully and glittered with the romance of a civilized court that dealt with far, fabulous Rome. Trystan couldn’t have been more than twenty at the time, Yseult about sixteen..

I met her myself a few years later. Her father didn’t misrepresent. She was heartwrenchingly beautiful, with that whiteness of skin that makes any color in the cheeks seem sudden and hectic, black hair and eyes almost that dark. Loving, too, in a very dependent sort of way, a kind of lost-waif quality that made men yearn to protect her. Yseult gave the impression she couldn’t get through dinner without the help of God and the nearest male. She never really lost her looks, though with age they ran to a bovine fleshiness and an expression of placid content that never quite resolved to enthusiasm, the look of a cow not particularly fond of its stall but unable to think of a better place to survive. So much for smug hindsight. At sixteen, she was exquisite, and the alchemy ran through Trystan like plague through a city.

He talked softly now as he plucked reflectively at the harp strings. Trystan didn’t speak often of the past; gossips were ample for that. 1 let him ramble on, lulled by the music and wine, the fire’s warmth and my own thoughts.

“The love potion?” Trystan caressed a chord from the strings. “There was one, but we didn’t need it. We were in love when the boat sailed.”

The Irish believe very strongly in magic, Trystan to)d me. Not surprising in a people who, until Caesar’s time, slaughtered their kings when they showed signs of age. The king was the incarnation of their tribal fortune, a god who must mate with a tribal goddess before crowning, usually a symbolic’animal like a white horse. I’d always thought they left it symbolic, but Trystan assured me the ceremony was dramatically literal.

“Rather like a lapdog assaulting a wolfhound, if you can picture it,” Trystan said. “The hapless lout must rise to the occasion, but if he can’t, there’s a potion ready that would make him randy for his own grandmother. As with the horse, so with his queen. If the wedding night’s a failure, that augurs poorly for crops and cattle. In Ireland kingship is uphill most of the way.”

Yseult’s mother knew that Marcus was well beyond the first shout of lusty youth. Trusting the brute power of’the wedding potion, she sent along a phial of it.

“The boat was our world for the precious few days we had,” Trystan remembered. “We talked as much as we made love, or rather I talked and she listened. Until she came, I didn’t know

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how much sharing was locked up in me. I nattered her blue, but she loved sitting at my knee, drinking in the life I laid before her. It must have seemed very impressive to a girl never more than a day’s ride from home.”

Trystan grinned ruefully. “I told her of my father’s castle, that impoverished little hill-fort with its stockade and hall. In times of trouble, every cowherd and his kine had to squeeze in with us. But it sounded very grand to Yseult. She listened by the hour while I talked of everything but tomorrow. We had a few days, then Marcus met the boat and … took her.”

Trystan drew a brief, sweet phrase from the harp. “But I’d touched someone and, because of it, I was changed for all time. It’s not our innocence we lose in loving, only our ignorance.”

The wine worked swiftly on my empty stomach, but \ welcomed and surrendered to it. This was needed, this exchange with another human being. And on this night more than one ghost hovered in the shadows beyond the firepit.

There’s child in me, Belrix.

Go away, I’m tired. I don’t want the pain of you now.

Still, being part of reality, how could she go away? She walked the world as I did, grew big with the reality, riding the hills after tinefhain herds. The wealth would form in her through this autumn, poise to leap into life through long nights by the crannog fire and be bom near Brigid-feast early in February, in the dark months when fhain and cattle alike nestled under the hill.

Ghosts walked my mind, ghost-senses mixed with the smoke from the fire, brown skin wrapped in green leaves on Midsummer night.

Thee’s gone from me,

AH of it was coming true: move by move. Merlin placed them on the board. Morgana, Guenevere, now Lancelot. Pawn, queen, knight and—king? The thought was sudden and cold as it was honest. I’d never go back to Morgana. Plan, dream, promise, delude myself, what difference? Merlin’s bit was in my mouth, Merlin who was no more than myself, spurring me toward tomorrow. Twist as I might to look back, I could only run on.

No, you promised her.

Trystan lit one candle from another. “Gloomy in here. ‘ Tig better to light one candle than curse the dark.’ “

My tolerance for truism was thin as his. “Who mined that gem?”

“I’d rather not know,” Trystan decided archly. “Someone

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with a razor gift for platitude. What is it about homilies makes you want to retch? I mean, I’ll light their silly candle, but someone’s damn well going to hear about the dark.”

He was in good form, worthy of my bleary toast. “Well said,

bard.”

“Arthur, I believe you’re drunk.”

“A little. Aren’t you?”

“Not tonight,” Trystan answered quietly, taking up his harp. “I’m a perishing bore drunk. No company at all, no wit, just curse, drink and cry. No, tonight I want io talk. I need it. Many more days like this, I may not get the chance.”

He looked away into the fire and struck an eerie, dissonant

chord.

“So we came home to Castle Dore. Uncle Marcus was not required to wrestle with a mare, but there was the royal consummation with a picked group of nobles on watch outside the wedding chamber. I never drank much before that night, but thank the gods we were allowed it. Marcus came out from time to time, flushed, sweaty, calling for wine and sometimes food. He’d drunk the potion and, on his faith, Yseult’s mother was Cupid’s own sorceress. Nay, he felt twenty again. Bring on all the maidens in Cornwall, he’d stomach for the lot.

“There were the usual jokes. I pretended to laugh, but all I could see was Yseult in mat big bed, the royal pawn in Leinster’s shabby gambit: lose a war, win it back with a wedding. Then Marcus would sigh with a vast regret as if to say ‘duty calls,’ pretend to gird up his loins, and swagger back into the wedding chamber.”

A little foggy myself now, I could still see how the truth of Trystan shone through his brittle, supercilious mask. He looked very vulnerable in the firelight.

“There was an hourglass on the table before me while we watched. Getting very drunk, it seemed not sand but my insides were running down the glass. My face hurt from smiling when I wanted to shriek at all of them shut up, wanted to break down that filthy door and—”