The Broken Sword (30 page)

And then a woman screamed.

She screamed because the dead knight's eyes had popped open. As the King peered into them with amazement, Sir Naw coughed gruffly and sat up, his face once again assuming its beet-red color.

"Begging your pardon, Majesty," he said, feeling his ribs. "Must have got cracked on the head."

The crowd which, aside from the screaming woman, had stood in stupefied silence during his remarkable recovery, now cheered frantically. The knights slapped Launcelot on the back. His face, still radiant in its earnestness, streamed with tears. The formerly dead Naw of Catraeth was handed the bucket of mead that had finally arrived, and guzzled it with noisy relish.

Then the queen fell to her knees, and the crowd's resultant gasp could be heard all the way to the castle.

"I wish to become a Christian," she said.

In the ensuing silence, several of the women—the prettiest, Taliesin noticed—and even some men, particularly courtiers who sought the queen's favor, did likewise. But neither Launcelot nor Guenevere saw them, for the look that passed between the two of them was like a river of fire.

W
ith Launcelot as her
champion, the queen's popularity among her people grew tremendously. Her subjects everywhere followed her example in converting to Christianity, particularly since Guenevere did not immerse herself completely in its harsh strictures, as did Launcelot. On the Christian holiday of Easter, she enlisted the help of the farmers' wives to dye hundreds of eggs with the red blossoms of the gorse bush, just as the druids had since antiquity, to celebrate the vernal equinox.

Holding a basketful of them, Merlin remembered the eggs piled high in the sacred circle at Mona, glinting red as jewels in the dawn light.

"We shall set them out on the castle grounds for the peasant children to find," Guenevere said. "And afterwards, they can take them home for supper. It will not hurt the King to be held in esteem by his subjects."

"No, it will not hurt," Merlin said with a sad smile, knowing that the queen was trying to preserve some of the ways of the old religion for his sake, even though the druids were no longer even a thought in men's minds.

Likewise, at what had once been the festival of Lammas in autumn, Guenevere had dozens of human-size Corn Mothers made from the first cuttings of wheat, effigies of the earth goddess who had been foremost among the ancient gods. In the days of Taliesin's youth, a Corn Mother had stood in every grain field as an offering, so that the harvest would be bountiful.

"They will offend the Christian priests," Merlin warned.

"Nonsense," she answered blithely. "I have had them made to frighten away the crows." She regarded him slyly. "So that the harvest will be good."

She even kept a trace of Beltane, erecting a maypole hung with colored ribbons, for the village maidens to weave as they danced around it.

How the people had loved her, Taliesin thought later, after Arthur's dreams had been shattered beyond rebuilding. They had loved her, yet eventually they turned against her with the hatred of a mob.

But that was not to come for some time.

The two decades following Launcelot's miracle— though the Merlin never discovered whether the "dead" knight had ever really died at all, and cursed himself daily for pronouncing Naw of Catraeth deceased after doing no more than taking his pulse—marked the true flowering of the Round Table.

Much of it was due to Launcelot himself, who was named to serve with the King's personal guard shortly after the incident on the jousting field. Here, at last, he was accepted by the other knights, since Naw's son, known for his prodigious drinking ability as Dry Lips, was among them and had vowed to torture any man who dared speak against the one who had restored his father's life.

With this recommendation, the younger members began to emulate Launcelot immediately, shining their armor, performing good deeds for commoners and nobles alike, disdaining the pleasures of the flesh when they could, and purifying themselves in the icy waters of a lake when they could not.

The older knights, too, though they smiled at the zealous antics of their youthful brethren, began to moderate their rough ways. Kay, who had been a member of the Round Table from the time Arthur first conceived of it, made a valiant effort to control his usually colorful language while leading the new recruits who came to Camelot in a steady stream through their daily drill. Unfortunately, this restraint made him so ill-tempered that he instigated a brawl nearly every night in the Great Hall after dinner until the King ordered him to begin cursing again.

Gawain, the second-oldest of the group—and the most indispensable, since he knew every town, village, forest, and field in Britain—had few faults to correct. He spoke little, noticed everything, and forgot nothing. Yet even he began to wash his hair and beard with passable regularity, and even bought a wooden comb to use on special occasions.

But the real change Launcelot wrought was in the way the Round Table knights fought. The members of Arthur's personal guard had always been brave men, prepared to throw away their lives in an instant to protect their King, but their valor had been a series of individual acts.

It was the way the tribes of Britain had always fought, each man a self-contained army, charging the enemy as if he alone were fighting. It was also why the Britons lost almost every battle with the Romans during their four centuries of occupation. In the end, Caesar's legions had left the island they called Britain not because the native fighting force was so effective, but because the Britons were too stubborn to accept defeat, whatever their losses.

Launcelot saw at once that this was not the way for fighting men to gain their objective, when that objective was to keep one of their number alive. Nevertheless, he kept silent for several years, grieving each time the knights returned from battle carrying one of their own upon their shields, learning the faces and names of their replacements, knowing that those faces, too, would soon be gone.

He kept silent until Arthur himself was wounded after eight of the twelve men in the unit were killed in a single battle against the Saxons at Badon Hill. It had been a terrible fight, but the Britons had won despite the near loss of their King... or perhaps because of it. There would be peace for some time, Launcelot knew. Peace and, once again, an entirely new King's Guard.

It was then that he finally spoke.

Hesitantly at first, counting on Arthur's word that at the Round Table all, including the King himself, were equal, Launcelot suggested that they change their tactics. "We cannot continue to fight like wild men," he said. "We must organize ourselves into a more effective formation."

"Fight like the Romans?" Kay spat. "Bah! I'd sooner eat the offal out of a pig's arse."

"It would not be like the Romans," Launcelot argued. "They depend on vast numbers and perfect discipline. I'm talking about twelve men. Twelve men who think and act as one."

"How do you propose to learn that?" Arthur asked, amused.

"We must practice fighting one another. Constantly, so that we understand in our bones every strength and weakness, not only in ourselves, but in each of the others, whatever our weapons."

Gawain wiped his forehead, his eyes closed. His weapon of choice was the light spear, meant for throwing. He did not want to imagine what would happen if he killed Launcelot—or, God help him, the King—on the castle grounds.

"Practice fighting, eh?" Kay beamed at the idea.

Dry Lips thumped the table with his fist. "I like it. Though I pity the man to put his sword against mine." He cast a challenging stare at Launcelot.

"I, too, would pity him," Launcelot said genially. ''For this reason the weapons should be made of wood, and the spears blunted with cloth as well."

"What?" Kay roared. "Are you suggesting that the Knights of the Round Table play with wooden swords, like children? Have you no pride, man?"

"My pride is as nothing compared with the life of my King. Or my brothers at this table." Lancelot looked to each of them in turn. "Of the eleven knights who accepted me at this table when I first joined them, only three are left. The losses in this unit are terrible. And unnecessary. We are all willing to die when our time comes, but only a fool dies when he can live just as easily. The longer we keep ourselves alive and together, the better we will be. I promise you this."

"Hear, hear," Gawain said, noticeably relieved.

"I think it's a good idea," young Geraint Lightfoot ventured. "Fighting as one, we'd be better able to protect the King. And ourselves."

"I agree," Arthur added. "I'd like every one of you to stay with me until we're all old men, and our weapons hang rusting on our walls."

"But... but..." Kay's mouth opened and closed like a trout's. "By Mithras' balls, every butt-stuffing courtier in Camelot will see us!"

"Let them watch!" Dry Lips shouted, laughing. "And they shall see that the Knights of the Round Table can fight better with wooden swords than the combined armies of a hundred kings!"

S
o it was that
, while peace stretched through the long summer and the autumn harvest and into the following winter, the noblest of Arthur's knights spent day after wearying day thrashing one another with toy weapons.

Kay, who led the drills, came to understand the wisdom of Launcelot's precaution as soon as they started. At the end of a fortnight, each man was covered with splinters.

But at the end of three months, they had learned one another's moves so well that their strikes were no longer marked by wounds, but by kills. The cloth-blunted tips of the swords and spears were smeared with berry juice, so that each could see where another had struck a blow to him that would have been fatal had the weapons been real. Each knight was killed almost daily.

In six months' time, there were no injuries and no kills. Each knight knew himself and his fellows so well that they could neither harm one another nor be harmed.

"Still playing at being soldiers?" one of the knights from Arthur's regular army jeered when Kay walked in to dinner, red-nosed and shivering after another day of practice on the snow-covered practice field. "Or did you lose your stick?"

On the instant, twelve pairs of hands reached for the man and hurled him across the Great Hall.

They had become one mind as well as one body. When the Saxons invaded again, the Round Table had no losses through seven months of fighting.

T
welve years later, only
three members of the King's personal guard had been carried back to Camelot on their shields. Once a commonplace occurrence, the funeral of a Round Table knight was now marked with great ceremony, as if a member of the royal family had died.

For Arthur, the pain was just as great, since the knights had taken the place of the brothers and sons he had never had. When Bors, a brilliant soldier who had served as Launcelot's second-in-command, had fallen in the battle of Tribruit, both Arthur and Launcelot had been nearly inconsolable with grief.

Bors had been one of the new recruits to the King's Guard during the time of Launcelot's change in training tactics—a change which the commanders of the army's other divisions had adapted after his success. The only son of a wealthy noble, Bors had sold most of his vast estates upon the death of his father and come to Camelot to serve the King, in whose name he distributed bags of silver—enough to purchase life's necessities for a year or more—to destitute women wherever he found them. He marked no difference in age or social status among the beneficiaries of his largesse: Widows, scullery maids, even tavern harlots from one end of Britain to the other found their lives changed by the young knight who asked for nothing—not even thanks—in return, but reminded them only that their good fortune came from their King.

When the other knights explained to him that the women would most likely throw the silver away in drink or hand it over to some vermin-covered lout with a thick pole between his legs, Bors only shrugged and said, "What do I care what they do with it? At least it isn't burdening my back any longer."

He had lived only to serve as Arthur's sword, and when he died, it seemed no one would ever take his place at the Round Table.

"But we must find a replacement," Launcelot said, trying without much success to raise a heavy pewter goblet to his lips. The King had invited him to share a drink in Bors' honor on the evening before the funeral. For the occasion, a cask of old Roman wine had been opened, and the two men had reminisced about past battles until the first streaks of dawn illuminated the sky.

"Bors cannot be replaced," Arthur said with the deliberate slowness of a man who has passed through all previous phases of drunkenness. "His chair at the Round Table shall remain empty, for all time." His chalice hit the table with a thud. "Under pain of death! Thus decrees Arthur, High King of Britain."

Launcelot's eyes clouded with tears.
"La siège perileuse,"
he said in the florid accents of his native Brittany. "To be occupied by none..."

"Under pain of death!"

"... under pain of death, except he whom the hand of God shall place there." He looked blearily at the King. "We have to leave some room for God."

"Oh, very well." Arthur waved the detail aside. "I'll make the pronouncement at the funeral."

"W
hat do you mean
, you're going to leave Bors' seat empty!" Merlin snapped as soon as the mourners had left the gravesite. "How much did you drink last night?"

"It will remain unoccupied, as a sign of respect," Arthur said with as much dignity as a man suffering from the effects of ale-head could muster.

"Respect!" the wizard shrieked. "We're not talking about a dinner party, Arthur. This is your personal guard, responsible for your life. You can't leave a spot empty because of some sentimental—"

"Enough." Arthur pressed his thumb and index finger against his eyes, hoping to stem the throbbing that threatened to pop them out of their sockets. "I've said that the seat will not be filled, and that is the last I'll speak of it."

With a sigh, Merlin followed him into the castle. There was no point in discussing Bors' seat—or, as the young knights were already calling it, the Siege Perilous—with the King until he was in a better temper. Merlin shooed away the servant who was waiting to remove Arthur's ceremonial robes.

"Bring a glass of wine," he instructed, unclasping the King's heavy fur-trimmed cloak himself.

"That's not for me, I hope," Arthur said.

"Indeed it is. If you were more of a drinking man, you'd know that it's the only thing that will allow you to survive the rest of the day." When the wine came, Merlin added to it some powdered burdock root from the medicine bag he always carried with him. "Here," he said, handing Arthur the drink, "although I've half a mind to let you suffer."

"Hah! It's your constant prattle that makes me suffer, not the wine." He quaffed down the potion, then looked through the morning's documents. Merlin, meanwhile, found a bound copy of Plato's
Republic
and leafed through it absently while reclining on a settee. The two of them were so accustomed to the other's presence that each felt as comfortable as if he were alone.