The Chessboard Queen (18 page)

He waited for Lancelot to make some response but he was too bewildered. So he was a king’s son. That was nice, he supposed. The Lady always said he must have come from a good home. But how much more did she know? All this time she had lied to him! How could she? How could she have ripped him from his poor mother’s arms? No! The Lady could not do such a thing! There must be a mistake. Perhaps the woman was mistaken. He could have crawled away while she slept so that when the Lady discovered him, she had assumed he was lost and alone. . . . That must be it. He had to have an explanation that would exonerate his dear Lady. At his left, someone was pouring him another cup of wine. He took it gratefully.

“Mother? Father? What is wrong with Sir Lancelot?” Guinevere had entered unnoticed and was poised at the door. “Is he ill? Shall I call Tenuantius to see to him?”

Leodegrance rose and beckoned her to him. “No, my dear. Come in. He should be all right soon. We have been rather clumsy in telling Lancelot what we know of his family. I’m afraid we have upset him.”

Lancelot put down his cup and gazed at Leodegrance, a slow smile of wonder appearing on his face.

“Upset . . . no, only amazed,” he assured him. “You have given me a wondrous present. I only need a few moments to understand it properly. You say that I look like my . . . my father?”

“Remarkably!” Guenlian said and Leodegrance nodded in agreement.

“How strange!” Lancelot itched to find a mirror and see himself in this new light. He put aside his worries about the Lady. He had never considered it before: somewhere back in the dim reaches of history, a man had lived and died and passed his visage on to his son. What else had he given him? And his mother, how determined she must have been to prefer death to life without her husband!

“My mother, Lord Leodegrance, what happened to her?”

“I went on to find Guenlian and the boys, but I heard that your mother was taken to the home of friends and lived there for a time. Then she joined a group of women and formed a religious community near the western coast. That was many years ago and she was very worn and ill. I’m afraid there is little chance of your finding her now.”

“But certainly I must try to let her know that I survived!”

Leodegrance seemed not to know how to answer this. Finally he said, “Your mother was always very delicately balanced. What she endured would have unhinged any mind, but in her family there were rumors of madness. If she still lives, she has made her peace and found her solace in God. For you to appear alive, grown and looking so much like Ban, might be too much for her to comprehend.”

“You have a duty to Arthur now, too, you know,” Guinevere added, surprised that she should make any suggestion that would keep him about.

“Yes, of course,” Lancelot’s smile was gone. “But I would like to know what happened to her, and, if she has died, be able to say a prayer by her grave.”

Pincerna, the family steward, entered to ask if he might allow the food to be served. Rhianna and Letitia had been sitting quietly in a corner listening to the revelations, but Rhianna sighed audibly with relief at the news that dinner had arrived. Lancelot was astonished to discover that he, too, was starving. He had always assumed that momentous news took away one’s appetite.

The dinner was superb and they somehow managed to move the conversation to more general matters, although Lancelot barely heard what was being said. Finally he rose and begged to be excused.

“I must leave tomorrow morning. Arthur has requested that I meet him in Caerleon in six weeks’ time. I would like to spend the weeks in searching for some word of my mother. May I ask, by the way, what happened to King Claudas?”

“He is still alive, I believe, though not well. He leaves the governing of his lands entirely to his son, Meleagant.”

Meleagant. The man who had visited Arthur. Lancelot knew he was arrogant and powerful. And his power was drawn from the death of Ban, the robbing of Lancelot’s birthright. He clenched his fists until the nails cut his palms. Then he took a deep breath.

“Revenge is not the duty of man,” he reminded himself. “We are allowed only to forgive.”

But he longed bitterly to taste revenge just this once. The strength of that desire told him why it was a pleasure that God reserved to Himself. The violence in his heart terrified him.

“I will need a month alone to come to terms with this,” he mourned to himself. “I vowed that I would never be tainted by earthly love or hate and now I am consumed by both. I have been in the world of men such a short time. What am I becoming?”

He avoided looking at Guinevere as he bade them good night. He went at once to his room.

Guenlian hesitantly put a hand to her hair. The air in the room was so charged, she half expected it to be in disarray.

“My dear,” she commented to Guinevere, “you do bring us such interesting guests.”

Chapter Nine

Lancelot did not sleep that night. Whenever he closed his eyes, he felt himself pursued by flaming demons slavering in their eagerness to destroy him. He tried to sort out his feelings logically, to put them in tight, narrow boxes from which they could not escape to trick him into denying his mission. In the darkness it was the Lady he kept seeing. Had she lied to him?

“It is not your place to question the deeds of the Lady,” he told himself sternly. “Wasn’t she always good to you? Did you ever want for comfort or love?”

“But why did she leave my mother to die?” a voice within him demanded.

“How do you know she did? Perhaps she didn’t see her or perhaps she didn’t realize the woman meant anything to you. She is not human. There are many things about us that she doesn’t understand.”

“Things that you understand?”

“Yes, I am human.”

“Are you? There are many at Arthur’s court who would deny that.”

“I have heard them. I forgive them. They don’t know. . . .”

“Just how human you are,” the voice persisted. “Would you like them to know? Shall we tell them that you want to cut the heart out of your enemy? That’s a human impulse. Or perhaps they should learn how you lust after another man’s wife, and that man your leader and friend? Why don’t we tell them the things you dream about Guinevere? Nothing could be more human than that.”

“Stop it!” Clutching his aching head, he sat straight up in bed.

The linen was cool and clean and smelled vaguely of rosemary. The bed was soft, a feather mattress. Lancelot could bear the comfort no more. The sky had turned that morning gray when all objects are one color and the edges blend together. He could not remain here. In this place of ease and grace he might forget all he had committed himself to. Here, much more than in the opulence under the Lake, Lancelot felt at home. This was a place where he might belong if he gave in and rested; if he relaxed. He stood up and was surprised to find that the floor was warm beneath his bare feet. This was too much! He mustn’t give in! What an insane idea. What would happen to all those poor suffering souls that he had sworn to save?

He pulled on his clothes and gathered his equipment. He knew it was rude to leave without thanking his hostess, but the social sin seemed far less than the mortal one that was tempting him. He tiptoed through the sleeping house and out to the stables. Clades had been well cared for and greeted him with a loving whinny. Lancelot put his arms about the horse’s neck and stood a moment drawing strength from the safety of the animal’s loyalty.

The watchman at the gate showed no surprise at the haste of his early departure and so he was spared the added burden of manufacturing an excuse. He plunged across the creek and headed for the welcome loneliness of the forest.

• • •

When Guinevere heard that Lancelot had left, she shrugged.

“He is a very odd man, Mother. I don’t understand him at all. But he is Arthur’s friend and, they say, an excellent soldier. I try to be nice to him.”

Guenlian was relieved to hear no trace of interest in her daughter’s voice. For all the revelations they had given Lancelot last night, he had given them one which was equally disturbing. They had noticed the way he looked at Guinevere and how he strove to conceal it. The only question had been if Guinevere noticed it, too.

“She seems to have no interest in him,” Leodegrance considered cautiously. “She does not seem aware of his attention.”

“She has been the wife of a king for more than five years now. The first thing she must have learned was to dissemble.”

“To us?” Leodegrance blurted. “No, I know, to everyone. It becomes a second nature after a while. But you are sure she cares nothing for him?”

“She seemed more embarrassed by him than anything. But she must be used to some of these men becoming infatuated with her.”

“Was that what it was?” Leodegrance was still worried. “There was something more in his eyes last night. He’s running from her now, even more than from what we told him. But he is Arthur’s man. How long do you think he will stay away? How long can he hide from her and from the way he feels? You didn’t know his father as well as I did. The way he loved his wife was almost idolatrous. No wonder she wanted to join him in death. Her family wasn’t sure they wanted him to marry her; thought they might find someone with more land. She was willing enough, though. He came and carried her off by night, then sent word to her family that they could burn her dowry for all he cared, but if they wanted her back, they would have to kill him first.”

“Really?” Guenlian was impressed. “Would you have done that for me, my dear?”

Leodegrance laughed. “The way your parents kept you locked up, I never could have captured you at all. But you know very well that it was not your dowry that enticed me.” Guenlian did, but it was worth hearing again.

“Still,” she sighed, “I wish I felt as sure about Guinevere’s marriage as I do ours.”

“Nonsense, Arthur adores her. He would have married her with no dowry at all.”

“Of course, he is a fine man. But perhaps we should have given her more opportunity to have wanted to marry him.”

Leodegrance felt a shade of worry. He had felt it many times in the years since Guinevere’s marriage and each time he told himself it was the natural paternal dislike of giving up one’s only daughter to another man, however kind and well-off he might be. He quelled it again.

“If we had left Guinevere alone, she would still be living with us, wafting about in the woods half the time, with no future at all. We didn’t force her to choose Arthur. We only gave her the chance and let her know we would not be unhappy with him. She was getting far too dreamy. And think how romantic their meeting was, a midnight rescue from the Saxons! What girl could want more? She is perfectly happy now and infinitely more mature.”

Guenlian argued no more, but she was not certain. Guinevere had been a fey child, not like any other she had known, beautiful and effervescent and always too elusive to be sure of. It seemed sometimes that she did not entirely live with them, that she was claimed briefly by another world. But she had been theirs and no one else’s and it was to them that she always returned. Now, she wondered, did Guinevere still occasionally drift back into the other world? If so, was Arthur able to hold her to him when she came home? And, if she never left the order and rules of the courts, how much longer could she bear being earthbound?

Guinevere reflected that she was glad to be back. It was lovely to be home again, to slide back into the irresponsibility of childhood. Let someone else plan the meals and count the linen! She gratefully forgot that she was a queen and settled down to enjoy the pampering she had always known and expected.

• • •

Lancelot had always cringed when pampered, so the following few weeks were not at all unpleasant to him. Sleeping on the ground, wrapped in a cloak; waking with the rain on his face; eating stale, sodden bread—all were his idea of serious life: facing reality. He remembered Meredydd’s strictures that life was a constant climb against the wind, naked and alone. The only reward would come at death, when the good fighters would finally be given rest eternal. On days like these, he had no doubt of his reward.

Everywhere he went, he asked for information on the wife of King Ban. But no one he spoke with had any idea of where she might have gone or if she were still alive. As he went farther west, he was surprised to find that some of the elderly he asked actually remembered her and his father. They looked at him curiously and some commented that things were better in those days, they were. But they knew nothing.

From traders and wandering monks he found that there were hundreds of small religious communities along the western coast. No one knew all of them.

“Have you tried Docca’s school?” one asked. “St. Docca takes in boys from all over the island and teaches them their letters. Never heard of women there. But he might know about them. Only there’s no sense in your trying to get there this year. Winter’s coming early. There’ll be snow in the mountains by now. You could never find the trail.”

The trader pulled his cloak more securely over his face and urged his men and horses on to a villa or a town, perhaps, with an inn and a chance of a warm bed. It was altogether too cold for September. It might not hurt to leave a coin for the goddess. This looked like the kind of year to take no chances.

Lancelot made his gloomy way to Caerleon, hunched under his guilt, confusion, and frustration. He went there because he had promised to and because he could think of nothing else to do. He was not in the best of moods.

• • •

The Lady of the Lake was growing impatient again. “Where is that bird of yours?” she demanded of Adon.

“I’m sorry, my Lady. He migrates, you know. He can spy for me only when he is in Britain.”

“Have you no other spies?”

“Yes, but they are not nearly as reliable. They don’t get the information firsthand, you see, and tend to send everything on to me with no verification.”

“Well, what do they say?”