Pendragon's Heir (3 page)

Last spring, for the first time, he had told his mother what he felt, for the need to be up and doing was too strong now to be ignored.

“I know I must stay and care for you, Mother,” he finished, half ashamed of the confession.

But she sat silently for a while and her answer, when it came, was the last thing he expected.

“Oh, Perceval, a falcon is born to hunt, and so are you. One day you will hunt indeed—but not yet.”

“Why? Am I not ready?”

She looked at him sadly and said, “Give me a little longer.”

That year his mother had barely given him a moment’s rest. Odd requests sent him roaming far into the wilds or kept him scratching figures into the walls of their cave: the kindling of a lantern on a rocky western coast, a calculation of how the stars would stand at the vernal equinox. Old lessons, too, had to be repeated from beginning to end, and discussed in conversations that tested not only his grasp of the contents but also his fluency in the Latin, or Greek, or occasionally even Saxon or Irish to which his mother would change mid-speech.

This spring the call was back, biting harder than ever.

He had prowled far to the north on this particular morning, armed with the slender darts he made himself, when he saw the riders.

There were three of them, mailed and jingling. At their saddlebows hung vivid shields and iron helms; by their stirrups rode lances. In the dappled wood they made a bright splash of colour, and Perceval was pierced with the longing to ride with them to strange countries and stranger adventures.

On that impulse he stepped out into the road and hailed them.

The strangers reined in. Startled hands tightened on hilts and lances, but then relaxed at the sight of the boy in wolf-pelts. “Who calls?” asked the foremost, a dark man with a lean scarred face.

“First tell me who
you
are,” said Perceval, so eager that his breath lagged behind his words. “Do you come from Heaven like the angels? Or are you fays from the other world?”

“Neither,” was the answer. “We are not angels, though we serve the King of Heaven. Of the elves you, perhaps, may know more than we do.”

“What are you, then?”

“Men. Knights who serve Arthur Pendragon the High King. I, Lancelot, hold these lands of him.”

Perceval stood stock-still, thinking, for so long that the man went on with a smile: “Will you hold for me a corner of this wood? Then you may catechise whom you wish.”

“No; only tell me this,” said Perceval. “Where may I find your King? I should like to be a knight.”

One of the men behind Lancelot coughed as though smothering a laugh, but Lancelot replied gravely. “I counsel you to go in search of him, sir, for it is the Pendragon’s chief delight to grant such boons to bold men. Yet there are conditions. You must keep yourself either to gentle words or hard blows, and you must defend the weak and poor.”

“I will do these things,” said Perceval with a gesture of easy assurance, and the knight smiled again.

“Then travel east and a little south. When you come to broader lands there will be others to point the way.”

Perceval lifted his darts in salute. “We will meet again,” he said, and vanished into the forest.

T
HAT EVENING WHEN
P
ERCEVAL CAME HOME
his mother was sitting outside the cave, sewing in the last light of the sun. He exchanged greetings and dropped to a crouch beside her. Words had never come to him with difficulty, and he had had all afternoon to think the matter over.

“I went north today,” he told her without preface, “and I met three knights who said they served the High King Arthur and the King of Heaven. And there is nothing else in the world I would rather do or be.”

As she had the year before when he first told her his dreams, his mother sat in silence. Her needle went in and out of the patch on her old blue cloak many times before she answered, and the sadness was there in her voice again, but heavier. “Perceval, you must understand. It is not an easy life: full of wanderings, woundings, dangers, and death. In the end, always death.”

“But those come to us and all mortals, Mother. Why! Would you discourage me, after all this time?”

For the length of a breath, her face was still and pale as stone. “To all mortals, yes. I know this is your calling, Perceval. But I cannot follow you when you go. If you go east, I must go west, and an end will come of me in Britain. Will you not stay another year?”

“No, Mother.” He pointed to the chain about her neck. “I must follow my father’s calling. You said it yourself on the night of the frost, when I speared the man from the hills.”

“Then you have guessed,” she said. “Yes. It was the Pendragon of Britain whom your father served, and loved better than a brother. And your father gave this to me before you were born.” She lifted the chain over her head. From it hung a golden ring with a fire-red stone.

“Tell me why,” he said, as he had when he was a little boy.

Her lips moved in a weary smile. “A knight will give a lady a ring from his hand and take a kiss from her lips, when he wishes to love her and serve her all his days,” she recited, as she had when he was small. She pulled the ring from the chain and held it out to him. “This ring is the knight’s who swore to serve me. Take it. One day you may find a lady to wear it.”

Before the sun was up, Perceval kissed his mother goodbye. “Go to the King at Camelot,” she told him. “Remember what I have taught you. Your father was among the mightiest of the knights of Logres.”

“I will be a son worthy of him.”

Perceval’s mother looked up at him. Her grey eyes opened on him like fathomless wells of thought. Perceval found himself holding his breath dizzily to hear the echo of his words splashing into their depths.

“And you will be a son worthy of him,” she said. Then he blinked, and she was his mother again; and she turned her head aside so that he could see only the white swell of her cheek, but heard her sigh: “Alas…”

He rode away in the rain on Llech, his little grey pony. His mother stood outside the cave watching him go; she waved once when he looked back. Then Perceval fixed his eyes on the forest ahead, and knew that the trees were clouding her from view, and he never saw her in the world again but once.

H
E WOUND DOWN THROUGH THE WOODS
and hills of Wales, sometimes walking and sometimes riding the clammy, muddy little pony he had taken for the journey. The rain drizzled steadily, dripped down his neck, and turned the pony’s grey coat black. In the soggy valleys, Llech’s hooves sank deep into the mire. It occurred to Perceval once that perhaps summer would be a pleasanter time for travel. But it never came into his mind to look back now, with the world and adventure ahead.

When he came to the River Usk, at the border of his world, he forded it, turned, and followed it south-east through the hills, pressing on as quickly as possible, up strange hill and down unknown dale until the land around him began to change. The hills fell gentler and lower, the trees thinned, and the river gathered strength and girth.

It was late on the second day, as the sun began to set, that he emerged from the forest and stared down one last long slope to a rolling plain, where the Usk turned and ran away south to the sea. Perceval stared at the scene in amazement. All his life he had lived in thickly-wooded hill-country. There were more hills and trees in the distance, but down in the plain lay short-cropped pastures with many sheep and cattle, the first farmland he had seen.

He rode down the hill, turning his head from side to side to drink in the view. Far away on the right, he glimpsed the sea and what might be more land beyond.

Perceval rode straight to the village, but was stopped by the sentry at the gate, who came running out of the little guard-house pulling on his helm. He squinted at Perceval and snapped, “What do you want here?”

“Your hospitality, fair sir,” said Perceval. “I have travelled far today.”

“Go on!” said the gate-warden. “You’re one of those elvish folk from the hills. Steal a man’s breath from his mouth if it weren’t nailed down.”

Perceval blinked in surprise. “I—”

“No,” said the gate-warden. “Move on. We’ve trouble enough without your kind adding to it.” He put his hands on his hips and planted himself in the gate, glowering.

“Certainly. Only tell me in which direction is Camelot.”

“Straight east. Why are you riding there?”

“To be a knight,” replied the wild boy, and faded into the dusk with his dirty pony before the man could gather breath to reply. Before night he had coaxed Llech to swim the river and was among the trees on the other side.

Perceval lit a fire, huddled into his pelts, and closed his eyes. He was hardened to the cold and wet and slept lightly, darts in hand. Long before dawn came, he toasted the last of his mother’s bread over the reawakened fire and was on his way across the hills, straight for the rising sun. He camped near the Wye that evening, found a ford by which to cross in the morning, and kept on until he came to a high treeless ridge overlooking low wooded hills and the glimmer of water, and saw nestled within them green pastures studded with little farms and animals like ants. The distant lowlands looked sunny and warm, but up here on the ridge blew an icy wind that seemed to turn the sun cold.

There was one tree, an oak, not very old, but gnarled and disfigured. On it a brace of ravens sat complaining. If there had been a stone lying on the ground, Perceval would have tossed it at them.

He was distracted from his surroundings by Llech, who buried his head in the grass and began tearing up wads of it, roots and all. Perceval slid down from the pony’s back, letting the halter trail on the ground. Llech moved off a pace or two. “Well, then,” Perceval said to him. “Eat if you like, but I see a pool down the hill, and I am thirsty enough to swallow all of it.”

He strode through the grass, then slid down the steep slope, taking care not to make a sound, for he was beginning to hunger for fresh meat. At the slope’s foot he found a little, dark, deep mere, with strands of early-morning fog still clinging to its surface, very secret in the hills and the wood. But Perceval saw immediately that he was not alone. There on the other side of the lake, mirrored in its surface, stood a bright saffron-coloured pavilion still limp with morning dew.

Perceval went warily toward the strange structure. Trampled grass showed where horses and men had walked around the pavilion, but he could hear no sound of voice or harness. He lifted the tent flap and went in.

There was a gasp, and he was looking into the startled face of a tall and stately damsel, crowned with hair like flame.

B
LANCHE WAS SURE
,
NOW
,
THAT SHE
wasn’t dreaming. Her heart was hammering too hard for this to be a dream.

The young savage spoke again in the shushing tone she used herself to calm a horse.
“Duw a rodo da ywch”
—but now suddenly the words made sense to her. It was Welsh. It was a greeting in Welsh. She knew Welsh because Sir Ector insisted that she practice it often when she went to visit poor folk in the village.

“Good morning,” she said in the same language, and swallowed hard.

He looked at the food on the table by the couch. “I have travelled far, damsel, and am very hungry.”

Blanche edged away from the table, closer to the wooden chest which led back into Nerys’s bedroom. “Eat,” she said with an imploring gesture.

He went to the table, dropped into a low crouch, and began to eat with great tearing bites, never taking his eyes from her face. Caught in that gaze she dared not turn and bolt into the wooden chest, so she stood motionless staring back at him. He was lean and brown, all bone and sinew. There were white scars and scabbed cuts on his bare arms and legs and the skin wrinkled like old leather at his knees and elbows. Above all that his face was incongruously young, so young that she began to fear him a little less. Then for the first time she really saw the look in his eyes, so frankly admiring that she turned her head away with an angry blush, and the taste of dread came back.

He ate half of the food exactly: one of the bannocks, one of the apples, and one of the collops of meat, wolfed down in less time than she thought possible. There were two cups on the table as well, and when he had finished everything else, he sniffed and tasted the wine. Immediately he spat it onto the grass.

“It has gone sour,” he said, seeing her horrified look.

She shook her head at him, lest he suspect her of meaning him harm. “It’s wine. It should taste like that.”

He replaced the goblet on the table and rose to his feet, picking up the javelins again.

“I thank you for the food, damsel,” he said, but he made no move to leave. Blanche tried to think of something to say, but before she could open her mouth he moved forward and caught her hand, even as she shied away. She smelled smoke and sweat and horse.

“Be not frightened,” he said, very earnestly, pulling her back to face him. “I will serve you. I will give you a ring for this one.”

She looked at him blankly, then glanced down at her hand.

The ring of Guinevere.

“It was my mother’s,” she murmured, but her mouth had gone dry and no sound came from her lips, and she was already reaching up with her free hand to pull off the jewel. Let him have it, if he would only leave her. And who was her mother, anyway?

He took the ring and dropped it into the pouch that hung from his belt, and produced another, gold with a blood-red stone, which he slid onto her hand where her mother’s ring had been.

“I thank you, damsel.” And he leaned forward and kissed her, very quickly but fiercely, on the mouth.

When he had kissed her he released her and fell back a step, looking doubtful, as if suddenly aware that he had trespassed some boundary. At that look Blanche’s mind began to work again, and she found she was clenching her hands into fists by her sides.

“You had best run,” she told him coldly. “My guardian is near, and if he finds you here he will kill you.”

He fell back another few steps, said “Be well, damsel,” and turning on his heel left as silently as he had come. Only the flap of the pavilion shivered to show that he had been.