Trystan reached for his cup but took only a small sip. “No, I’m not going to get drunk tonight. She put up with it better than I. Women can do that,,they’re—what are they that we’re not?”
I hiccuped. “Realists?”
His turn to salute me with raised cup. “Well put. She endured. We met when we could, but it was painful to see her leave my bed for his. To come to mine from his. To see her torn apart like
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those captives today, because Marcus really cared for her, too. Sometimes I wondered who suffered most: he learning later all at once or me knowing all the time, or Yseult in the middle. We began to quarrel, began to learn how far across a bed it can be. A battlefield. 1 hated myself and her and Marcus, drank to dull the hatred and hated all the more. And she paid. I gutted her because I couldn’t live with it, because she was someone I could make suffer for my suffering.”
His voice broke suddenly: “I mean, she’s not that strong. She can’t stand alone. She needs a place to be safe.”
Trystan came to sit by me, refilling my cup. “Marcus caught us together. Perhaps 1 wanted him to. You see the ax poised and long for it to make an end. I couldn’t stay at Castle Dore. Ambrosius was my savior, recruiting court idlers for his new aloe. That’s how I came to your friendship, you cleansing comet of a man.”
I was rather befogged now, more than the wine could warrant, ears ringing queerly. “Firelord …”
“My men say you have a destiny. Perhaps I’m part of it. I feel that ax hasn’t fallen yet for either of us.”
Shivering suddenly. “Cold, Tryst. I’m cold.”
“Come by the fire.” He took my arm to help me up. “I believe my comet has had enough.”
A figure loomed out of the darkness beyond the fire. I squinted at it. “Who’s ‘at?”
“Prince Gawain,” said the mountainous shadow. “I must speak with you.”
“Not now,“I slurred. “Let it wait.”
“Cannot wait.” The great bulk of Gawain came into the light, strangely tentative. “Please.”
That was an odd word from Gawain. “Well?”
“It’s about tomorrow.”
“He means your duel,” Trystan prompted cordially. “The one you pinched from me.”
Gawain’s presence sickened me for his granite arrogance, his treatment of captives, but none of this could account for the mindless, murderous anger his nearness inflamed. He and his brother were of one cloth, and only the Prydn word could name it. Tallfolk.
“Well, Prince? Has your brother sent you with an apology?”
As well ask if he’d grown wings since breakfast. “Apologize, hell! I came because he will not, cannot apologize, and—”
*&-•*
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Gawain labored under the vast burden of humility for the sake of love. “He can’t fight your way.”
.The strange anger stitl mounted in me, “The Pict way? Why not, the son of a bitch called me one.”
Gawain couldn’t afford to heat now; something else was too important. “Tribune, you may have noticed his leg. You don’t know how he hates it, how it makes him feel less than a man. Let it be lance or sword, anything else, but don’t shame my brother like this. He won’t go barefoot. He’ll die first.”
“Unless you persuade him to withdraw. 1 think you’ve already
tried.”
“I have,” Gawain admitted, not without difficulty. “Done everything I could. 1 know Agrivaine’s not easy. His temper’s a laid tinder fire, all it needs is a -spark. He’s always been that
way.”
“Got to learn, then.”
The fog thickened around my senses, making me an island of rage in a mist. I could tell Gawain would rather have his teeth pulled one by one than ask anything of me. What I was doing was not the way, but I couldn’t stop.
“Lord Arthur, I’m not a man to be asking, much less begging. But I beg you. He’s not afraid, but leave him his dignity. His pride as a prince of Orkney.”
Aye, tallfolk. Like the woman who had Morgana driven from the village with sticks when she only wanted to comfort a child. Like the one who tried to cheat Cradda of her ewe, or the Votadini farmer at the well who was a decent man, a humane man so long as certain lies were perpetuated, certain lines left uncrossed. They must be left their pride, someone to feel better
than.
“You and your brother are not men to talk of dignity, Gawain. Life I’ll leave him, butihat stiff back will bend.”
Was that whipcrack my own voice, full of demonic energy, barely human?
“You call that leaving him life?” Gawain asked. “Making him show his weakness to the world? Is he not a fine soldier? Was’t not himself saw Cerdic’s plan in time lo stop it? You are
cruel.”
“Well, that’s news.” I controlled my tfiickening tongue with an effort, dimly aware of the buzzing in my ears. “This afternoon while a priest warbled a hymn of gratitude, you personally cut the heart out of a man as an offering to Christ—and you talk of leaving dignity? Tied men between horses and pulled them apart,
and call me cruel? Sent the rest home without tongues or their eyes burned out, and / am cruel? If I were half that, I’d deal with you like the Rome you sneer at, line the road from here to the Wall with crosses and hang an Orkney lord from every one as a lesson to your petty arrogance. Damn you both, there isn’t time for that anymore. It doesn’t happen that wavl”
Someone tried to steady my drunken career around the fire, someone who looked like Tryst, but dim, washed out by the mad, white glare in my brain. “Easy, Arthur.”
But the anger was a terrible engine. “Be cruel, a says. Dost think Melga felt no pain? Any one of my brothers be better men than thee. Nectan, Urgus, Cunedag—better!” I staggered and wove. “Good God! To be king over such as you.”
I lunged for Gawain, but Trystan held me back. “King, is it? What the hell are you—?”
“Get away from me!”
But Tryst gripped tighter. “For the fove of reason, man. What’s the matter with you? They’re only a buggering lot of Picts.”
For what happened then, magic or madness, I have no explanation. With a roar, I struck blindly at Gawain. The thrust of the blow didn’t end but went on and out, dragging me after it through the white glare to come crashing down on my knees.
In sudden silence the glare receded to definable colors. The room, Trystan and Gawain were gone.
I crouched at the summit of a bare hill near a heap of heavy stones from which protruded the heavy hilt of a kmgsword. A chain ran from the depths of the stone pile to coil about my waist, locking me to it.
Below me on the plain, a vast multitude waited, expectant. While I looked, they raised their arms in salute. The hails from a million throats racketed between ground and sky.
A-ve! A-ve!
“Merlin, are you there? Help me.”
But there was no Merlin, only myself and the waiting throng. Then Morgana sprinted out of the press, running up the hill toward me.
“Belrix, come home.”
I tore at the chain, lunged this way and that with furious strength, but it held tight.
Morgana called: “Take thy sword and free us!”
No strength of my own would drag the chain from its mooring. Desperate, I clutched the sword hilt—
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A-ve!
j-l-fc;
—raised it and brought it down on the links. They parted like butter, and I ran toward Morgana’s outstretched arms, caught her up, swept her high off the ground.
“See? Have found thee again!” I laughed with joy. “And will never leave now.”
“Forever,” she whispered against my cheek. “Would see thy child-wealth, thy son?”
“Yes, show him to me. Morgana.”
She held me tight, impossibly tight. “A waits for thee,” Morgana whispered in a harsher, deeper voice.
Then I felt the cold shock as the knife went into me and, falling away from the arms that held me hard, saw they were not Morgana’s at all. A stranger poised over me, knife ready to strike again. Stranger, yet not so alien 1 couldn’t recognize the set of the eyes. We made this killing machine, she and I. He was us.
“Morgana!”
The light failed and the shadows crowded back, and I was dying from the knife he raised again. “Why, boy? You’re all we
ever wanted.”
“You’re all I ever wanted,” he said. “Come hold your wealth.”
Hard to see him now, the light fled so fast. “We made you together. ^Vhy do you kill me?”
“Because you killed us.”
He hurled himself on me, and the last of the light gleamed on the bronze knife before he drove it home, on the rings of her fingers as she framed my face in them.
“Arthur.”
“You’re all I ever wanted , . .”
“Arthur.”’
“Why do you kill me?”
“Arthur, look at me.”
I was on my couch. Guenevere knelt over me in her nightrobe as the world rushed back to imprison me again. I blinked stupidly up at her, feeling her cool hands on my face and neck. My jaw throbbed. Someone had hit me very hard.
“… Where’s Tryst?”
Guenevere laughed softly. “Gone to bed. He said you were mad drunk and raving. Gawain had to bless you with his good right hand.”
“That he did. And you came?”
“I wanted to come all day. This morning when I was so pitiful and frightened—and ugly, God knows—you were so gentle, as if
you’d come from church and not a battie.” Guenevere brushed her cheek against mine. “You deserve to go a little mad. But when you talked of the Faerie and what they taught you—there was a woman, yes?”
“All I ever wanted …”
Guenevere put a finger over my lips. “All / ever wanted. Perhaps. Today I’m not sure of anything, whether I want you or just not to sleep alone in the bed where I almost died.” Her mouth against mine was what I imagined it would be: searching, cool, not everything given yet, as if she were honestly thinking about it.
My body still burned with phantom pain where the dream knife had stabbed, still tensed for the coming death stroke, part child again, wary against the dark that held nothing but fear and strangers. I reached for Morgana and Guenevere all in one hope, life reaching for life on a death-ridden day. Reached for Gwen to join with her and live. She came to me in perhaps the same, simple need. 1 unlaced the front of her nightrobe and freed her breasts, heard her slight shudder-breath as I ran my lips and tongue over the curve and the nipple.