Under Camelot's Banner (51 page)

“You heard Her Majesty!” he bawled. “We withdraw! Turn around you sluggards! I want us back up those cliffs before dark!”

The mounted men took up the orders, expanding them as they rode along the clot of carts and men-at-arms. The soldiers themselves shrugged and grumbled and set about obeying, because there was nothing else they could do. Sir Ioan, the last knights in the company approached Sir Lancelot who faced him stonily. Sir Ioan retreated without comment, but not without many a worried glance toward the queen.

Queen Guinevere's ladies, however, were not so willing to let her march into folly. They flung themselves weeping at her feet, tearing at their hair and grabbing her hands and clutching her hems. One by one Guinevere raised them up, speaking soft words of comfort to each. Lynet paid them little attention. She already understood this was going to happen, and that she would climb that narrow way beside the queen. Her attention was all on Gareth.

He was the only still figure in the boiling crowd that was the ruins of the royal procession. Every voice was raised in question, in curse or exclamation. Instructions and the reasons for them had to be repeated two and three times before they were believed. But Gareth did not move, nor did he answer any who shouted up at him, not even Lionel. He just stared at Lynet, reaching out to her with his gaze, trying to beg her to take care, to let her know he wanted to sweep her up beside him and gallop away from this other woman who had suddenly gone so terribly mad, and yet still had the power to command legions.

Behind him, Lynet saw herself. She stood there, in her modest finery, looking up at him and knew this was what he had seen when he had taken her hand to lay over his heart. It was a shadow already and stood with a host of other shadows. She saw two dim silhouettes standing before each other, speaking unheard words the thought of which made Gareth's heart both cringe and swell with anger. Behind these waited two other shadows, blurred by time and distance yet made clear in a different way by love, of — a brown haired man turning toward the black-haired, blue-eyed woman she had seen with the queen. He smiled at her, a smile of love and delight as he took her hand, and she returned that smile with silent feeling matching his measure for measure.

With all this behind him, Gareth stared at her.

Mounted again, Lancelot brought his horse alongside his squire's, saying something. Gareth blinked and only slowly looked to his knight. Lancelot looked over his shoulder at Lynet standing there alone. His lip curled up in a sneer that might have been for the queen as much as for her, and cuffed Gareth on the shoulder. Lynet turned her back on him, so he could listen to his knight and do what he must, and so she would not have to watch him ride away from her.

“Lady?” It was Lionel. The tall thin squire, came up beside her carrying the staff that held Guinevere's banner. “The queen has said you are to carry this, if you are able.”

“Thank you, Lionel. Would you … Would you tell Gareth I begged him to remember my promise, and his?”

Lionel bowed. “I will, my lady.” He was plainly curious, but it was just as plain that like the rest of them, he was frightened out of his senses by this turn of events and did not have the wit or will left to ask many questions.

Lynet moved to Guinevere's side. The sea winds snapped and rattled the swan banner overhead. The staff in her hand was heavy and warm from Lionel's grip. It wobbled in her hands. Her aching arms strained to hold it even now. It would be unbearably heavy by the time they reached the top of those towering cliffs.

Sir Tristan's corpse lay on the sands, bloody and staring at the sky. Queen Iseult draped herself over him, shedding salt tears to run down to the waves that rolled endlessly in and out.

“Lady Lynet,” called the queen.

Lynet drew her shoulders back. She shifted her grip on the banner's staff, as a man might on a pole arm and walked to stand before Queen Guinevere. All the queen's ladies stood arrayed around her. They watched Lynet as she approached and made her curtsey. Some saw her through veils of poison anger, other with mixtures of pity and fear. Lynet let all this brush past her as if she had been a shadow herself.

“Your Majesty,” she said to the queen in the Dumonii language. “I understand why others call this mad.”

Queen Guinevere's mouth twitched into a hint of a smile. “As do I,” she answered in that same language. “But we will go on despite that.” She lifted her gaze to the cliff side, measuring its height and seeing that now they had only three witnesses overhead, and that as she watched one of these vanished. “You will have to show me the way, Lynet.”

“As Your Majesty commands.”

Holding the swan banner before her, Lynet led the queen to the foot of the rocky cliff.

There was only one way to show her. A narrow, steep and crooked track had been dug by generations of hands into the cliff face of the island. No horse could climb this way. Armed men would have had to go single file. The sea hammered at the stone and the vibration of it thrummed through Lynet like the low note of a single harp string.

Sir Tristan had played the harp so beautifully. Once he had played for her alone, and she remembered how she perched on the edge of her stool, her eyes opened as wide as they would go. She drank in the music and the smiles of that golden man who called her his friend and the keeper of what was most dear to him.

She wondered if anyone could see the shadows that followed her.

The banner staff was a huge weight now, and it slipped again and again in her hands as she trudged upward. Her soft slippers were no good for this sort of climb and shifted dangerously underfoot. Pain wracked her poorly shod feet, and burned in her still-healing arms. The winds grabbed at her veils and skirts, trying to pull her yet further off balance. It was no comfort at all that the queen whose idea this had been struggled as much as she.

One step at a time they climbed. They breathed on the path's short level stretches. They grit their teeth for the steep lengths that were worse in some ways than climbing a ladder would have been. Lynet could now see the mainland easily. They had climbed above those other cliffs. Most of their former procession still struggled up the narrow track toward the
castell
, but some had ridden ahead, and stationed themselves to watch over the progress and safety of those who followed. One rider stood out from the others, alone on the rolling green clifftops. Lynet stared, hoping to see that it was Gareth, but it was not. She could make the bright red hide of the horse. That man was Sir Lancelot, and from the lift of his head she saw he watched them as well.

She thought of those silhouettes behind Gareth, of the queen and the knight in the darkness, their words to each other unheard, as their faces were unseen. The anger and fear Gareth had felt rolled over her, and she knew precisely what betrayal it was he feared the two of them had undertaken together.

Could it be? This struggling woman gambling now with her own life as well as for the land they both shared. Could she have betrayed her husband with that blunt, sneering man who watched them now?

If Lynet looked back now, would she see Iseult looking on her sister queen with sympathy?

The very thought robbed Lynet of her breath. She stumbled, and below her the waves hissed in anticipation. She leaned against the rough rock cliff, heedless of how it would snag her delicate clothing.

“Are you all right, Lynet?”

She squeezed her eyes shut.
It cannot be I'm aiding another cuckolder. Not again.

“Lynet, look at me.” The queen's hands grasped her shoulders.

Throw myself into the sea. The
morverch
will at least be quick.
Lynet opened her eyes to see the queen leaning close, searching her for hurt or fever. Reflexively, Lynet looked over her shoulder. Only one shadow waited there now. It was Arthur, the tall, proud greying man who Lynet had last seen standing on the steps of Camelot's keep, watching regally as their procession started away. He watched Guinevere now, suffused with a love that was strong and gentle, and absolutely secure. There was no one else waiting for her.

“You must stay with me,” called the queen over the roar of the ocean and the endless wind.

Lynet used the banner staff as a support to push her away from the cliff. “Yes, Majesty,” she said, drinking in a deep breath of harsh salt air. “All the way to the end.”

There was nothing to be said. They turned together and they continued up that steep and jagged path.

At last, when Lynet's legs shook and her feet cracked and cringed each time she set them down, they found themselves standing amid the heather and stones of the clifftop. The wind blew harsh and hard and the leaden sky overhead seemed so close Lynet wondered that the staff's tip did not tear the clouds. A few yards ahead waited the black-timbered gates and unforgiving grey walls of Tintagel's fortress.

Like so much that belonged to the Dumonii, this had been many things in the past. It had begun as a monetary, she remembered being told, before it was realized what an unassailable fortress it was made. God's house and all his servants were moved to another cliff, and these walls were raised to protect chieftains and their more earthly concerns. Bishop Austell had had his learning at that monetary, Lynet remembered a little dazedly, as she gazed across at those other walls. She wondered if they had said mass for him there. She would ask later. If she lived. Her vision sparked and wavered, and her mind was too weary to hold the shadow plays back. She saw a man in a robe of the roughest wool hold aloft a wooden cross and give thanks to God. She saw a wizened brown people clinging to the cliffside, wearing clothing that was little more than skins and strings while a storm howled around them.

She saw a man, a man with a long face and a hooked nose looking out from the palisades. A bronze torque flashed at his throat, and he watched an army on the opposite headland, and in all that army, he saw one man whose torque was gold and he hated that other man with a passion that robbed him of reason. The hook-nosed man was named Goloris, and the man he watched for was named Uther who had the gall to name himself the father of dragons. Goloris turned from the palisades and went down to his wife and daughters.

“Come, Lynet,” said the queen. “We are not done yet.”

Queen Guinevere smoothed her sleeves in an incongruous and useless gesture and started down the track to the black-timbered gates. Two black haired girls ran behind her, laughing and holding each others hands. Lynet trudged behind them all up to the gates. It was ludicrous, standing here, exhausted, dishevelled, arms and feet burning with pain and her legs so weakened that the next gust of sea wind might blow her over. Yet, here she stood with the queen's banner flying proudly and indifferently over her head.

Queen Guinevere lifted her chin. “King Mark!” she called out in a voice that carried itself high and strong on the battering wind. “Mark! The High Queen Guinevere is come to your house! Lord Wellan! Lord Peder! Master Hovan! Open for your queen!”

There is no chance she'll be heard,
thought Lynet with an unsteady mix of hope and fear. They'd be left standing here out among the wind and shadows, and have to turn around and walk all that long, treacherous way down again. She did not dare look out at the water. She would cry out if she saw the
morverch
waiting.

Then, slowly, impossibly, the little door that waited beside the gates creaked open. In the gap between door and arch stood a small man. His head had long since gone bald, but his beard and grey moustache flowed rich and full. His blue tunic was belted with knots of bronze and blue enamel and hung down to his knees over his brown trousers, but both had seen hard use of late, and were rumpled and stained as if he had had no others to wear over the past days.

Lynet remembered Lord Wellan from other times. He'd been a sturdy ox then. He had a laugh like a goat's bleating and a demeanor that could be deceptively rough and foolish, until he was ready to finish the argument he'd drawn the listener into. His wife was a stout grandmother, a full hand span taller than her husband. He had hauled her by the hair to throw her out of the high house. He had called her such foul names her ears still burned with shame.

“God be with you, Lord Wellan,” said the queen as calmly and regally as if she sat on her throne in Camelot.

Lord Wellan stood there, shifting from foot to foot, uncertain of what to do. It might have been ridiculous, had the old man not looked so genuinely terrified. His keen eyes looked watery and the shadows under them deepened as he lifted his gaze to meet the queen's. His knees bobbed for a moment, as he tried to keep himself from kneeling. He looked wearily at Lynet, clearly seeing just one more nightmare to plague his home.

“What are you doing, Majesty?” he whispered.

The queen blinked. “I am come to visit your king, my lord, who is my neighbor and is liege man to my husband Arthur. What are you doing, Lord Wellan?”

He was not a small man, but he had hunched in on himself, drawing in small, tired and uncertain. His square-boned hand gripped the edge of the door.

“You can do nothing here, Majesty,” he whispered. “Please, go before the worst happens.”

“An army is occupying your
castell
even now, and it is waiting for a reason to call for reinforcements to begin a siege,” said the queen. “The worst has already happened.”

“Again.”

“Why are you doing this, Wellan?”

For the first time, his voice was steady and held some of the strength Lynet remembered. “He is my king, Majesty.”

Queen Guinevere nodded once, acknowledging the strength of that simple statement. Mark was the king, and he had held this place under constant assault for long years. He was generous to those who followed him and the families of those who fell in his wars. He understood the power God had granted him, and he used it well, before he had been betrayed and broken. It would be a hard thing to be the one to break such a man again.