Then get up and do it all again.

One last condition. Know, as your brother helps you up to start the horrible dance again, that it was mostly for nothing as his hoarse voice gasps in your ear, “Didn’t stop them. They’re taking the first level. Look at them!”

For all you’ve done, the ants are still moving on the hill, and the first level can never hold.

We pulled back to a good distance behind Cerdic’s rear so that we could hit him with as much speed as possible. The horsemen limped into formation behind Kay or Gawain, balky and mean as tired children. Bedivere was unhurt, but there was no fight left in him. He grimaced at the leaden sky.

“Going to rain again.”

I snarled, “What else would it do?”

“I wonder how Lancelot managed.”

“How did we?”

He only stared back at my truculence.

“That’s how we managed.” I twisted in the saddle to glare back at Gawain. The bulk of him and his mount were one vast corpus of misery, blood on the horse’s shoulder, blood on Gawain’s leg and in his beard.

“Got to go in quick,” I shouted. “They’re losing the first level.”.

“Do I not have eyes?” Gawain grated, rubbed raw himself. “Don’t tell me it’s lost. I can see it’s lost!”

I hauled erect in the stirrups, a weary ton raising a hacked and blunted sword. “Forward—”

“Orkney, forwa—for Christ’s sake, straighten that line* What is it I lead, a clout of wounded nuns? Forward—”

“Dobunni, forward—-”

Once more we staggered toward the juggernaut. Once more the lumbering charge, the shock and tearing through, and then we swept up the causeway through a rain of stones and axes from the captured first level, on to the second where men cursed and oxen strained to drag the heavy catapults higher to the third. The causeway was crowded with double-burdened men as we clattered in, all carrying bundles of shafts and a catapult stone under each arm, still able to laugh as they trudged through

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pelting rain. Vital men of a youth that war requires, for whom age is still too far to see clearly and death unimaginable even when it happens next to you.

I reined aside, dismounted and gave my horse into Bedivere’s keeping—“Go on, I’ll stay here”—then perched on a timber to one side, looking back past the laboring men to the plain below where, in Cerdic’s rear, men ran to collect in busy little clumps too distant for me to discern their purpose.

“Ay, Dafydd!”

He bobbed toward me, loaded down like the rest, the harp bag swinging on his side. “And a fine day to my king, sir.”

“Tired, Davy-bach?”

In daylight, the young harper had a wide white grin and eyes that looked out in sardonic comment on a world full of music and only a little too serious for its own good.

“Not a whit, great king.” He wiped his face, sweaty despite the cold, flinging his arm out at a world thick with Saxons. “But they don’t know when they’re beaten.”

“Let’s teach them.”

“Won’t we just, now!”

I pointed out over the plain. “You’ve an archer’s eye. That lot in the rear, what are they about?”

Dafydd shielded his narrowed eyes. “It looks like—oh my! Yes, it looks like they’re cutting up your downed horses, sir.”

Time, that was the piece to move on the board now. Give Cerdic no hope but cold waiting and hunger and then Gareth on his back. While we held on. We had to hold on.

The Saxons lost no time in filling the first level. I found Maelgwyn watching them anxiously from a catapult platform.

“Can’t let them take any more ground, Arthur. We’ve scarce room to move now.”

“Tell your archers to keep sniping. Where’s Lancelot?”

“Caught a nasty one. Went to rest while he’d time.”

The timber hall was crowded with wounded now. I picked my way through them, passing a word and a joke with some, then pushed aside the heavy curtain that separated Lancelot’s tiny bower from the main chamber. My lord-milite hulked on a low stool, clumsily wrestling the mail shirt over his head with one good arm.

“Here, I’ll do it. Hold still.”

Stripped to his thick waist, Ancellius Falco looked like an

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aging, battered bull, once-powerful muscles blurred to shapelessness. The heavy chest and shoulders, crinkly with whitish hairs, no longer rippled with excess power but sagged with the toll of their exertion. Fleetingly I imagined that body covering Owen’s, surprised that the thought could still carry a pang, however faint.

“I’m glad you’re back,” 1 greeted him. “How many did you lose?”

Sharply, out of his exhaustion. “Too many.”

“That’s not a number.”

“Thirty, thirty-five, I don’t know. I’ll count later.” The words were barbed with aggression. I knew thai tone. It wanted to hurt something back for the pain it suffered.

“Give me your arm.”

The wound was short but deep, the work of a throwing ax. It bruised the whole forearm. Lancelot reached unsteadily to the small dish that held a greenish-yellow salve of chicken fat and decayed hyssop. He gobbed a bit on shaking fingers and tried to work it into his right arm.

I knelt beside him. “Here, let me.”

He submitted, hostility rising from him like rank sweat. “How is it our valiant emperor has no wound?”

“Lucullus said he’d like to live to ninety-five. Down on the field it seemed an attractive idea.”

“Obviously.”

“I’ll be honorable tomorrow.”

“Or surely the day after.”

The naked scorn was a measure of his fatigue. Worn to the quick now and always frustrated, Lancelot wanted to fight something, mostly me.

“Always in command, Arthur.”

I went on working over his arm.

“I’ve always marveled at your lack of doubt,” he probed. “No, it’s more than that. No consciousness of sin or error, like a man who never bathes because he thinks he never gets dirty.”

I rubbed more salve into the wound. If our confrontation was to be here and now, then so be it. Even controlled and honorable men like Lancelot needed an accounting sometime, and they may pick their own moment.

“Why in God’s name did she marry you? Why you when I could have been happy all my life with nothing but her? She proved that, she said as much. I loved her when you were still

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running the moors with your Pict woman. I loved her even then.”

“Purely and perfectly, like your Grail. Bandages?”

“Over there.” Lancelot hissed in irritation. “Stinking rain, it never stops.”

I uncoiled the linen dressing. “How’s Lucullus?”

“Alive,” he retorted flatly. “That lily, I thought he’d be the first to fall, but he was always a survivor. Like you.”

“We’re a happy breed.”

“If survival means that much.”

I started to bandage his arm, feeling my own irritation rise. “Honor should be on the inside, not an iron shirt. A man can’t grow that way.”

That grated him even more. “Good King Arthur, always sure and strong. Then why did she come to me?”

“I don’t know, Lancelot, except that we all somehow get what we deserve. You got Eleyne. Gwen and I are so alike, good at rule, clever with words, shrewd with people. So stuffed with talents, the love got mislaid like something we just put down a thought ago and can’t remember where. Don’t ask for reasons. We’ve always had the whole Christly mess in bed with us. It getscrowded.” I tied off the bandage. “There, you’re wrapped.”

Lancelot hauled a blanket over his shoulders. “You only know her as a queen and consort. To me she was a woman.”

“That surprised you?”

“Gentle and yielding and full of so many needs you never—”

“I’d hoped you’d spare me this.”

His head snapped around. “Spare you hell!”

“I mean the mawk. A moment ago I was jealous because you’d had her. Now I wonder if you ever did. Deft and sure she is, but not gentle, and if she yields, it’s like steel that will straighten again. She was raised that way.”

“Have’you seen her with flowers, Arthur? That garden she tends like children?”

“Very like children.”

“Sometimes I’d watch her hands on a petal or a stem and know it worth my salvation to be touched like that by her. Then I’d turn away, say no, never. You see, I’d never have—she came to me.”

“I remember when, almost the week.”

Lancelot spoke now with a soft urgency, finally voicing the confession he’d wanted to make for so long. I couldn’t deny him the painful pleasure.

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“She came like a hurt chiid,” he said, “and I thought, how could someone so cool and perfect need so much.”

{ sat down across the fircpit from him, the warmth bringing my weariness to the surface like infection. “You’re all so astonished at that. We were tired, we were empty. I searched a few beds myseif, don’t ask what for.”

“It was a day in the garden among her flowers. A plant had died, something she tried to grow and failed. She was so disappointed. No, more than that. Suddenly she looked up—I’ll never forget it—looked up at the ramparts and the walls as if she were stifled. Not beautiful then, but very plain and so damned helpless I had to take her hand, put an arm around her and say something like ‘It’s only a flower’ when it seemed so much to her. She was beautiful all her life and I loved her all my life and the one moment I had to tell her was when she wasn’t at all beautiful or perfect but pathetic. And all the closed doors just … opened.”

His expression seemed to sag as something went out of it. “Wrong it was. Mortal sin, but she made me come alive where I was dead, and for a while …”

For a while; until a lifetime caught up with him and he found that guilt was all’that ever defined him. I thought, I’m getting old, I’ve lived too long when I can know that much about an honorable man that bards sing of and common folk speak of as a god.

Lancelot studied me with puzzled loathing. “And you knew all the time and never did anything, never raised a hand.”

“Perhaps I owed her something. Someone. You or something else. It would have come,” I sagged toward the fire’s heat. “I’m very tired, don’t ask me to make sense now.”

That wouldn’t do for his bafflement and his ordered cosmos. He must have lived with the question from the beginning.