For Camelot's Honor (26 page)

The creatures were enchanted but they were horse enough to fear for their eyes. Calonnau dove again and again, deviling them, making them rear and strike out uselessly with their hooves and fall back as she wheeled overhead. Elen felt the wild beauty of the dive, of the strike, and her soul sang with the power of it. She took her knife into her curled hand and stood ready, ready for blood, ready for the strike and the feasting …

Half Helm dragged the spear from the ground. More hooves sounded, this time from their right, and Elen jerked her head around in time to see two horses, one brown and one grey run from around the white store house, and Adev peer from the corner.

Adev had fled with the others. Adev had freed Donatus.

Geraint slammed the dwarf down to the ground where the creature lay stunned and broken, and he mounted the tall grey. He rode at once into the demons, bowling them both down, swinging his sword. It caught one on the helm, spinning him around, sending him slamming into the ground. But he picked himself up at once, as Geraint wheeled around, and Geraint froze at the sight, and Elen did too. Such a blow should have broken him, if not killed him.

Beside Geraint, the other demon grabbed hold of his spear, and the stillness was over. Geraint swung Donatus around to dodge the coming blow. Half Helm had his sword out, and he dove for Elen. She swung the dwarf's whip, but it glanced off the helm and he sliced down at her side, but the blow caught only her cloak and she pulled herself away from the blow, stabbing up with her knife into his sword arm. She caught the space between corslet and guard, and living or dead, he had blood enough.

A blow slammed against her from behind and Elen slammed into the earth, the world suddenly blackness and sparks of bright light. Her knife skittered from her hand. Geraint screamed, Calonnau screamed. Awash in pain, Elen could not move. Thunder roared in her ears. It seemed the ground shook. There were voices, the grinding of steel and wood.

Before she could move again, the red-capped creature was beside her, a knife at her throat.

“She dies!” he thundered. “You like this game of hostages now, mighty lord? You strike one blow more and it is she who dies!”

Geraint wheeled the horse around, and froze. There were still sounds. Hooves and wheels and shouts and more shouts and they dizzied her head and made her stagger. All that was clear was the knife and the dwarf, and the bare-skulled grey man who lifted his spear. Elen cast out all her strength of will, and called Calonnau down. The hawk screamed and dove down, talon's extended, but the dwarf ducked sideways, and the hawk missed him narrowly, swooping up just before reaching the ground and fighting to climb again. Geraint tried to charge forward in that moment, but the Grey Man blocked him. The dwarf bared his teeth, and drove the knife into her.

Pain tore through her. Geraint cried out to shake the heavens. Calonnau's scream mixed with his. Elen heard the sounds of battle, heard shouts, too many and not Geraint's voice. Dead? No. There …. She could not see properly, and yet, and yet … she reached up with one hand, and pulled the knife from the dwarf's hand, and sat up.

There was no blood. Pain, but no weakness, and she held the knife.

“Do you think any of us care for your spear?” she croaked.

The dwarf bared his teeth at her and scrambled backwards. Elen stood slowly, the knife in her hand. Its blade was clean, she noted. Of course. There was no blood to flow. She stalked forward. He had tried to kill her, he had tried to cause Geraint's death. Pain sang through her and drove her forward. She would not let him leave this.

“Help me,” croaked the dwarf. “Help me, lord king!”

A stranger. A stranger on horseback, a spear in his hand and a black cloak billowing from his shoulders. The dwarf looked in terror at the stranger, and the stranger cast his spear, and the dwarf fell, impaled on the weapon for an instant, and then the spear was gone and there was only the body at Elen's feet.

“Elen!” Geraint threw himself from his horse to run forward and grasp her shoulders. “How …”

With a shaking hand, she touched the clean edge of her bloodless wound. Revulsion gathered in the pit of her stomach.
What am I become? Am I a corpse? Like the Grey Men? I cannot die because I am already dead?

But Geraint only drew her to him. She closed her eyes. She could not look at him. She could not return his warm, living embrace.

What am I?

“We must go!” shouted the stranger. “Now!”

Geraint released her, and pulled her toward her horse. He boosted her into the saddle. She should have been dead, at least unconscious from the blow, but she was only cold. Deathly cold. Corpse cold. Elen recovered enough of herself to call down Calonnau, but her hands were shaking too badly to hold the reins. Geraint saw this at once and snatched them up. The stranger, his spear once again in his hand, turned his horse's head due west and urged the animal into a full gallop. Geraint dug his heels into Donatus's sides, and Elen kicked at her reluctant brown, feeling the daze wearing off her.

The horses ran into the deepening night. Elen hung on grimly to the saddle bow and the hawk's jesses. It was all she could do. Her breath was harsh and ragged. She still hurt. Her throat burned, her wrist throbbed beneath the bandage. Every jolt of the horse's hooves sent fire through her. The countryside passed in a blur of shadows. Geraint did not even look back at her. All his concentration was in keeping with their rescuer.

At last, the stranger slowed his pace for a moment. He raised his spear and shook it, calling out something Elen could not understand. Ahead of them, the world seemed to twist, blur and change as in a dream, and time grew long and then short, and she could not see for a time, and then she could see that on the hill rising from the darkening night, there was a fortress wall.

She could not even find it in her to be surprised. Of course they rode forward, threading the earthworks, their rescuer hollering up at the gates. Of course the gates stood open to reveal a dusty yard. A sprawling house of stone stood against the night sky. Calonnau cried out in fear and beat her wings. Elen's vision wavered. She saw shadows, she saw bones where there should have been timbers.

“Help me, lord king!” cried the dwarf as she advanced with his knife in her hand.

Where's the knife?
She thought stupidly.
Where am I?

Then, she felt herself falling, and she could do nothing about it.

When Elen woke, she found herself lying on a narrow bed in the midst of a forest grove. Calonnau stood on a sturdy perch beside the bed, flapping and crying in frustration. Geraint was just rising from a plain stool to cross to her. The ground beneath him was flagstone and rushes. She blinked hard, then, she saw the trees were only painted on the high walls around her.

She stared at all these things, trying to reconcile them with where she had been a brief moment before.

“Elen?” Geraint took her hand and sank onto the bed beside her. “Are you well?”

She was, she realized, for all that pain lingered in her throat. She felt the clean touch of cloth that told her someone had wrapped a bandage about her neck to match the one binding her arm. She did not touch it.

“How long have I slept?” Her voice was harsher than it should have been. She did not want to think about the cause of that.

Geraint laid a hand on her cheek, checking after fever, or perhaps just reassuring himself she was still flesh. “Not long, and much of the time you were in a natural sleep. It is morning of the day after we were brought here.”

Her wits had cleared enough she could look past Geraint to see something of this place now. The trees were masterfully made on lime-whitened walls. A little watery sunlight and a breath of air trickled in from a narrow slit up by the ceiling. A brass brazier gave off some warmth as well as charcoal smoke. A table waited beside the stool Geraint had abandoned, and a plain wooden chest stood beside that with some clothes neatly folded on its lid.

But it was the trees that drew her eye. She had never seen such decoration in any place. They were more marvellous to her than any tapestry would have been.

Geraint followed her gaze. “Beautiful, is it not? Wait until you see the corridors outside. I have only heard stories of such places. Uncle Kai spoke of paintings like these when he told us tales of Rome, but he said that much of their art had been lost, even there.”

“Where are we?” she asked, marvelling still. The trees were caught at the height of spring. They seemed to grow out of rich and mossy ground. She could even see a bird's nest in one, and a fox's face peeping out from behind another.

“We are in the home of Gwiffert pen Lleied, also called the Little King.” Elen stiffened immediately, and Geraint laid a hand on her shoulder, pressing her back against the featherbed. “It was he who rescued us, Elen.”

Without thinking, she looked to Calonnau on her perch. The bird was, as always, frustrated at being leashed and confined but her heart beat steady and strong. If there was immediate danger, neither the hawk nor the knight felt it. The fears brought by waking in so strange a place began to ebb and she was able to tell herself they were brought on by the walls being so close about her.

“How came the Little King to rescue us?”

“I don't know,” admitted Geraint, leaning his elbows on his thighs. He looked toward the door, which had been painted cunningly to become the trunk of a great oak spreading its branches over the smaller trees. It reminded Elen of the Lady's door with its decoration of apple trees in fruit and flower. “I have so many questions I cannot number them, but what is plain is that all is very different from what I first thought.” Geraint smiled thinly and she pressed the hand that held hers. “Are you well enough to stand? The king our host sent word that he would be breaking his fast in his hall at this time, and should you wake, we were to join him there.” More softly he added. “I would know what you see in him.”

Elen searched her husband's face for a moment. “What do you suspect?”

Geraint's smile grew tight. “In a place where men vanish into thin air and die without making a sound, everything.”

Elen could not fault this. Instead of answering, she pushed back the furs that covered her and eased her legs over the side of the bed. She stood, as relieved as Geraint to find her legs steady underneath her.

The clothes that had been laid out for her were simple but well-made — a brown dress of good wool trimmed with a border of oak leaves, as seemed fitting for the grove she had lain in. There was also a linen under dress and good shoes to replace the battered slippers that had carried her this far. What there was not was any woman to help her. So Geraint, with many a wry smile, undid her belt and helped divest her of her torn and filthy finery. She laid the old clothes carefully on the chest. Perhaps they could yet be cleaned and mended. She could not bring herself to easily part with anything from her home.

Geraint also had new clothes — a long tunic of rich blue and fine grey trousers and cross-laced sandals. He had washed face, hands and hair, but he had not been shaved, and his beard was rapidly becoming full and black to match his waving hair.

The clean clothes felt wonderful. A wooden comb allowed her to work the worst of the tangles from her hair and re-braid the plaits that hung on either side of her head. With her belt, necklace and rings all in their proper places, she felt ready to be seen. She did not come as a suppliant, but as a daughter of chiefs, worthy of respect, and hearing, even in this magnificent place.

Geraint nodded his approval and reassurance, and held out his hand for hers. At that moment, Calonnau shifted restlessly, and cried once. Elen suddenly did not want to leave the hawk behind. She put the gauntlet on her hand, and lifted the bird from her perch. Geraint made no remark at this. Elen was glad. She was not certain she could have explained.

Gwiffert's fortress was a far different place from the high house in which Elen had been raised. Rather than one great hall, it held a warren of narrow corridors lined with more doors than Elen had ever seen, all of them closed. As Geraint had said, the walls here were painted over with decorations far more fabulous than her little grove. Whole orchards of trees grew floor to ceiling, followed by fields of ripe grain. Herds of cattle grazed in green meadows. Ancient kings rode in chariots of bronze pulled by white horses.

Geraint seemed to navigate the place easily enough, and she was glad of his touch against her arm. The stone seemed to lean against Elen, and the still eyes of the paintings watched her far too closely. The pain in her wrist and throat throbbed in time to her heart's insistent beat, as far away as that was in Calonnau's breast, and she found herself near desperate for a glimpse of true sky or a breath of wind.

Where are the people? Someone must live in this warren. Where
are
they?

At last, they rounded a corner and walked under a soaring archway that opened onto a great hall. The hall looked as if it could have held her house and had room for a dozen cottages. Fires roared in four man-high hearths, filling the chill stone room with a warmth even Elen could feel. Spitted meats roasted over the flames, and the sizzle was as appetising as the scent.

Here were the people Elen had missed. Men in leather jerkins sat at long tables with dogs lolling about their feet. A cluster of women sat in a corner, distaffs and carding combs busy. Children turned the spits and stirred the pots under the eye of a stout and stern woman with her grey hair plaited and bundled tightly behind her ears. Still more people flitted back and forth on their own errands. The hall was as full of their voices as it was of the scents of cooking food. They were better dressed than the folk Adev's village, and better fed. They worked or ate briskly, busily, as people will when they have steady, true purpose.

All around the walls where Elen would have expected tapestries, or war trophies, were more of the paintings. These looked newer to her awe-struck eyes, more clean. They imitated the ribbon work she had grown up knowing, and the showed such symbols as were part of her daily speech. She saw the white mare there, here a white sow and a black boar, there men in bronze helmets and spears of familiar work, and there, a man beneath a black owl, its wings spread wide. Apple branches made a border for the space nearest the floor

Geraint touched her arm, and Elen realized she was gaping. She drew her eyes back down to the hall. At the far end waited a dais where a single, long table had been set. Only one person sat there — a lean man who held a spear in the crook of his right arm. This then was their host, the Little King. He stood as they entered, bowing deeply, and waving them forward.

As she walked beside Geraint, Elen took in more of this remarkable hall. The roof was sloped and peaked and buttressed with mighty beams that were black with age. The floor was made of many-colored tiles laid out to depict scenes of battle as well as great feasts and hunts and animals sporting in the forests.

King Gwiffert came around his table, but did not put down his spear. Geraint brought them to a halt before the dais and bowed as Elen curtseyed. Her first impression of Gwiffert was a sharp man — pointed chin, long, dextrous hands, lean but wiry limbs. His hair was bright gold and his blue eyes slanted above his sharp cheekbones. There was beauty in that face, but it was of a dangerous kind. It reminded her of something she could not quite remember. His skin was brown, but it was the rough brown that comes after fair skin has been long exposed to sun and harsh weather. His undertunic and close-fitting trousers were pure white. The over-tunic of rich, forest green was so long it brushed the tops of his sandaled feet. It had been embroidered on hem and cuff with the faces of the moon in white and silver threads. A golden torque in the semblance of a scythe-tusked boar encircled his throat.

“Be welcome, Sir Geraint. Be welcome
Chwaer
Elen.”

Elen straightened, surprised by this term of honor that had so recently belonged to her mother, and the evasive memory came to her. Beneath his golden hair and wide brow, Gwiffert had blue eyes like the rider in her dream of death.

“We owe you more than we can say, Majesty,” said Geraint smoothly. Elen's own mouth was dry and her manners confused as she struggled to rise above her dream memories. It was good fortune that Geraint was used to such scenes from Arthur's court, and could speak where she could not.

“I am only glad I could reach you in time. Please, sit with me.” King Gwiffert stepped back gesturing toward the table. “Food is being brought.”

Geraint led Elen to sit at the the king's left hand. He took the place on the right. Elen tried to school her features into polite lines. She tried to concentrate on setting the annoyed and impatient Calonnau on the back of an unoccupied chair and tying her jesses down tightly. Whatever her dreams, she and Geraint were here now and they were dependent on this man's good will.

“I am sorry I sent no woman to wait on you, Sister. Despite what you see,” King Gwiffert nodded toward the busy hall. “We are few in number here, and our women are even fewer.” He shook his head sadly.

“How did this come to be, Sir?” asked Geraint. “This seems a great hall.”

“Seems,” said the king bitterly. “And should be. Its master was a Roman and brought great builders from the ancient city of Athens, which mothered Daedalus the greatest of all artisans. He meant to make a great house like no other on the isle of the Britains. It was to stand on the river Severn, a symbol of his lordship over those he called barbarians.” He smiled. “But he fell in love with one who should have been his slave and made her his wife. She raised them up a son and she made sure he learned the best of both halves of his blood so that he might rule righteously over his lands.”

As the king spoke, Geraint's careful eyes drank in the man in front if him in a way that might have been thought of as overmuch boldness, but the Little King did not seem to notice.

What does he see?

“Your father?” asked Geraint quietly.

Gwiffert turned his face away and gazed about the hall with its ribbonwork and bestiary so familiar, but their way of making so strange. “Such grand plans, but they were not to be,” he said softly.

“We are a long way from the Severn” said Elen. The spear in Gwiffert's hand was carved with ancient runes she did not believe she could read, even if she were closer to them. What she could see was that the windings that held the head to the shaft were silver rather than copper or hide. The tip itself was some black stone that glittered where the firelight touched it.

No iron in its making, then, nor could there be for a thing so enchanted it could be cast out and return at once to its master's hand. This, surely, was the spear they sought. The death of Urien was held in that long hand, and the prize of the fae.

If he saw how hungrily she eyed his weapon, he gave no sign. He only sighed. “Aye, we are a long way from the river, Sister, and have been these many years.”

Two old women and a trio of girls in plain linen brought the food then. All was simple, but filling — stewed mushrooms, apples, stout loaves of bread and slices of cold venison and pork in jellied gravies. There was beer and cider to drink from bronze cups. Elen ate, and tried not to think too much on Adev's people. What had happened to them? Were the Grey Men gone? Was the wrath of their king averted? Elen fed Calonnau tidbits with the tip of her knife, enduring the hawk's impatience. She wanted to fly. She wanted to be out of this stone cavern.

And so do I, but we have work here.

Once they had finished and praised all there was, Elen was able to ask the next question.

“Majesty, how is it your house came to be in so strange a place?”

King Gwiffert hung his head. When he looked up again, it was not at her or Geraint, but down the length of his hall toward the men and women who moved about within it.

If not true shame, a good semblance.
The thought brought Elen up sharply.
Why should it be false?

“It was war,” said King Gwiffert. It was a recitation he began, a story told so many times, the teller knew it by heart. “A man called Jago sought to become high king over all the land he called Gwynedd. But the men of Rhyd Sarn would acknowledge no overlord, and so the fight was joined. But his numbers were greater and his warriors more fierce. There were
scoti
with them even, brought down from the north and over from the west with promises of land and prizes.” A muscle twitched in Geraint's cheek, but he remained silent.