Firelord

King of a Hundred Battles

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bearded men on spent horses that still hit the remnant of Cerdic’s near men with the force of God’s own lightning, scattering, trampling before they wheeled in formation like urgent autumn birds to charge the next square.

Then Bedivere clutching my shoulder, hoarse and jubilant. “Combrogi, Artos! They got back!”

I wiped the mud from my eyes, trying to make out faces in the scrofulous pack. “Who … who’s leading?”

“Don’t know, the fool’s got no shield.”

Suddenly Bedivere lifted me off my feet with a massive, savage joy. “It’s Gareth! It’s the macDiurmuid.”

Bedivere was twenty again, leaping up and down like a child. “The Goddamned horrible macDiurmuid! You beautiful man, you darling. GarethV’

“Give … give me your sword, Bedivere.”

I severed Cerdic’s head and lifted it by the thick hair as a rider wheeled away from Gareth and lumbered wearily toward us. A fine head, a king’s head.

The horseman stripped off his helmet: Lord Bors, pig-dirty and red-eyed but sustained by that vitality that comes too early in Hfe and leaves too soon.

“My lords, I saw the dragon fallen, and I thought—”

“Na, I dropped the bloody thing,” Bedivere growled. “We thought you were dead.”

Bors grinned. He looked tipsy. “And if I didn’t die this week,

I never will.”

“Hell, at your age it’s impossible,” I said. “Lower your

lance.”

He dipped the point, and I impaled Cerdic’s head on it. “Throw this to his earls. Let them see it’s over.”

“Aye, sir, will I not.” Bors swung the victory high. “And God give you long life, sir.”

He yanked the tired horse about and galloped to where the combrogi and Orkney were combining in a deadly phalanx, driving the Saxons further back. Some of them were running clear away from Badon now. It was over.

I sagged down in the mud by Cerdic’s hacked trunk, shrugging off Bedivere’s arm. “Leave off, leave off. I’m not hurl.”

“I know that. It’s Kay.”

He pointed at the muddy little pile not far away. My brother Kay, die body that hurtled between Cerdic and my death, and he lay in the mud with the stain widening over his torn mail coat. The combrogi had run right over him.

“Give him water, Bedivere.”

Kay opened his eyes, the only thing he could move. “No

. Half blood as it would be.” My little brother Caius, my Kay, so eager to keep up with me, go much of his life lived in my fast-running shadow.

“Did … did y’see me land on that b-bastard?” he choked.

“Didn’t I now? I’d be dead without you, Kay.”

“Ah … mum always said so.”

Bedivere tried to ease him, clumsy with caring, but it hurt Kay

• ID move at all. “We’re nothing without you, Kay.” . My brother sighed as if he were suddenly tired of the whole dung. His breathing was broken, hollow. “Great louts, both of

• you. Should have stayed home.” He tried to smile; blood trick-» fed out of his mouth. “Can’t feel my legs, ‘torius.” ‘: ‘ “Don’t try. The men will carry you.”

—>•-, Kay gagged suddenly. “You’ll see I get back? You know how v: mum worries.”

• * His fingers closed feebly around mine, and then Kay was gone.

Bedivere and I couldn’t look at each other. We straightened ; . the crumpled little body and I closed the eyes. Bedivere tried to /x speak, an odd, strangled sound. Sitting in the cold mud, sud-:;y, denly he buried his face in dirty hands. 0;: “Oh, Jesus.” ^ “I know, Bedwyr.”

-*•; He lashed out desperately. “You don’t know. Nobody knows 5; anything ever, Goddamnit. Jesus rutting Christ, where does it

-£” end? I’m old and shivering cold and I want to go on living and breathing sweet, and I’ve already lived too long to look at this, ; and—”

•v , He lurched to his feet, glaring at the plain and the enemy v streaming away in defeat from Badon. Suddenly he lifted the ” ^sword and jammed it into the ground with a dry sob.

“Burn in hell,” said Bedivere to no one and the world. “Burn in hell, burn in bloody, rutting hell!”

‘;.’-;. My small bower had room only for a firepit, a cot and a stool, .•);’;•‘but Maelgwyn’s cooks brought hot water enough in an iron ^-caldron for me to bathe luxuriously. Wherever the water touched Jflyskra, the over-strained muscles melted like butter until I had *** down or fall on my face, washing and dragging off my piecemeal. When the small, bedraggled man pushed

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aside the bower curtains, there wasn’t much royal dignity left that I couldn’t cover with a towel.

“King of a hundred battles,” Gareth wheezed, “no food has come to Badon.”

I beckoned him to the stool and rose. “Come rest, Gareth.” He stumbled forward. “If 1 do, will I ever get up again?” Gareth collapsed on the stool, clawing the mail cowl from his head. It seemed a lifetime since we said good-bye. Never, of all the men in all the battles of my life, have I seen a man so pitiful as Gareth. Without hot food or warmth or dry clothes since Camelot, his short, bandy-legged body shook with a chill deep in the marrow of his bones. Under the incredible grime his lips were blue and cracked with exposure. He’d lost his shield on the way out, he said, skirmishing past Badon. After that it was a long cold run from wagon to wagon. Let the bards sing what they will, Badon was won by a mite of a Leinsterman miles away

from the battle.

“Plenty to eat,” Gareth slurred drowsily, yawning as the warmth invaded him. “They make good beer, heathen though they are, and I was forced to drink great quantities against the cold. All (yawn) for naught, though, for I’ve caught the devil’s own chill.”

A great, rattling snuffle. Gareth dragged a dirty paw under his chapped nose. “And Rhian’ll be at me now (yawn) with her stinking onion poultices … and telling me I should …”

My back was turned for a moment as he spoke. “Yes, Gareth?”

He never answered, fallen dead asleep in the middle of a thought, head drooping, swaying slightly on the stool. Before he fell off, I picked him up like a child and carried him to my cot. It didn’t wake him. Nothing could.

Not for months did we realize what a staggering thing was done at Badon. Of ten thousand Saxons, half never left it. Another two thousand, fleeing from Lancelot’s cavalry, never reached home. For the surviving chiefs it would be years, even decades, before they could dare such an effort again.

More than defeat, we broke them. They can’t take the west, not now, perhaps not ever. Whatever history says of Britons— arrogant, treacherous, jealous and self-dooming—with all of that, we’ve somehow learned to be a country.

I leaned out the casement. Getting dark now; our fires were bright jewels hung on the night. Somewhere on the parapets, someone plucked limpid melody from a harp. I hoped it was Davy-bach playing.

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The news of victory sped before us to Camelot where a dozen messengers waited—obsequious, over-hearty men already claiming their share of glory. Artorius, Gloria! The map of Britain was stable, the future assured. Once again the fractious tribes were my dutiful children, pledging that loyalty from which (in their true hearts, of course) they never departed. Wordy letters from old Marcus with the same felicity: we must stand together, we are Britain, et cetera. Business as usual.

Fires of celebration blazed all over the Severn valley, flared

up in Camelot’s courtyard. Horns blared, dancers leaped, flagons

broke and emptied, pipes squealed, drums boomed in jubilation,

. and a certain percentage of the next generation were joyously

• -.conceived.

Victory! Victory!

But from honest Peredur only silence while Guenevere waited for exile.

She was still confined at Camelot with one servingwoman and

under close guard, in a small house near the south wall. She and

her woman rose when I entered. Gwen appeared nervous, bundled

in a shapeless robe, obviously neglectful of her appearance.

i The once meticulously plaited hair was merely combed out,

1” banging loose with gray wisps streaking the dull auburn. Her

cheeks fell in more sharply around their bones. She looked haggard.

“My royal lord.”

“Lady.”

“Welcome home. You may wididraw, Imogen.”

Her servingwoman bobbed up and down to me and retired behind the bower curtain. Guenevere made a vague gesture at her hair, then gave it up.

“It’s the wet. I can’t do a thing. Would you like some hot wine?”

“Yes, thanks. How is it with you, Gwen?”

She offered me the drink. “I don’t seem to need much nowadays,. Imogen sees to me. Poor Arthur, you look so soggy.”

“Tired to death.” I sagged onto a bench. Still Gwen hovered dose. We hadn’t spoken since the night of Morgana’s death and that distance stretched between us now. From outside we could ;’. hear the orgy of celebration.

“You’re their darling again.” She wandered away to sit, her movements oddly vague and directionless, a bird bom to soar ^suddenly without a sky. “It’s been very bad without you.”

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“Yes.”

“Odd. I mean we weren’t all that much together before.”

“But it’s worse now,” I confessed.

“Having you here and not—why did you come, Arthur?”

“I don’t know. To tell you we won. Maybe a pat on the head, well done.”

Something glistened in her eyes. She ducked her head over a scrap of sewing to hide it. “Somehow I feel like an afterthought. No matter, I hear the court’s full of comforting women now.”

“Gwen, don’t. Not between us.”

“That’s true,” she reflected. “Two hypocrites in he!l roasting each other’s sins on the same spit.”

“Just that 1 couldn’t imagine not coming to tell you.”

The needle plied through and through the cloth. “I hoped you’d come before you left. I waited here thinking of how I’d receive you and what I’d say, warm or cool, injured or repentant. You didn’t come and didn’t come and then I opened the casement and hung out of it shameless as a brothel sign, just hoping for a glimpse of—oh—hell!” She snapped off the thread angrily. “There’s a lot to be said for the convent life.”