It was a good game. More and more archers were edging forward and letting loose, laughing and cheering, and one or two shafts turned into a light drizzle. They were rewarded with wails and shouts from the other side, pain and anger. The enemy infantry formation shifted under the arrows like a restless animal.

  One lucky arrow must have caught a breeze because it drifted farther back, past the infantry, to the cavalry. These were knights in heavy armor. They weren’t in much danger from a windborne arrow, but they had titles and reputations to defend, and they weren’t going let a bunch of smug Camelot fat cats dribble arrows down on their heads. Another arrow came down, somebody shouted a curse, and all at once the cavalry square lost its collective temper and charged like a young bull.

  The knights didn’t care that there was infantry in front of them. Officers shouted at the foot soldiers to hold but they weren’t the ones with a line of giant horse-borne hotheads right behind them. They ran for it. Then the lord commanding the center line saw the left moving, and he wasn’t going to let them grab all the glory, and just like that it all passed the point of no return. The whole of Rience’s army shifted forward like a muddy hillside losing its grip and becoming a landslide.

  Collum watched it come. Camelot’s archers were shooting in earnest now, straight and hard and flat, right arms dipping for arrows and nocking and drawing and loosing clothyard shafts. Collum saw a horse rear up in pain with an arrow sticking straight out of its chest. Archers weren’t knights, they didn’t give a shit about chivalry, and if they didn’t snuff out that cavalry charge before it got to them they were dead men.

  He squeezed his borrowed sword tight then forced himself to relax. The oncoming line looked like one long breaking wave bearing down on a beach. Nobody could stop this now. Not out of fear but from some even deeper animal instinct, he pissed himself.

  Camelot’s officers were shouting: “Hold now! Hold with me, hold! Hold!”

  An arrow loosed from just behind Collum’s right ear flashed out and away in a strangely foreshortened curve and vanished into the oncoming mass. On his left a long spearhead appeared. Another arrow flew, and one of the attackers lost his feet and went down and was trampled. One of Rience’s men was coming straight at him: a big man with pink jowls, some kind of rash creeping up his neck, big sad eyes, and a yellow cross surcoat, jogging stolidly with the pack. He trampled down a bushy weed a hundred yards away.

  The fear was mounting and mounting in Collum, but he was between them and Camelot and he could not move. In his whole life up to that point Collum had only ever seen two men die by violence, Sir Villiars and the nameless knight of Three Scepters, a Chevron Or, but now a dark flight of arrows hissed out from behind him and ten, twenty men took them face- and chest- and neck- and eye-first and staggered and were overrun. Yellow Cross kept coming, though.

  A roar rose up around Collum like a sudden storm, and Collum roared, too, without even meaning to, the roar roared right through him. They were almost here, the fear got worse and worse until for a heartbeat it was infinite and unbearable, and then Yellow Cross was ten feet away and all the fear melted away completely the way the white cap of a volcano vanishes just before an eruption, and Yellow Cross was—

  Collum was on the ground, flat on his face with his ears ringing and grit in his mouth and a boulder on top of him. It was pitch dark and the boulder was crushing him. He heaved; the boulder was a heavy struggling body. On his third try he got up onto his hands and knees, then he got a knee up and dragged up his sword, which two people were standing on. He was bashed from the side and almost went over again but forced himself grunting back into the light and onto his feet.

  Shouting, struggling, surging men were jammed like cattle shoulder to shoulder and chest to chest. He couldn’t have fallen over again if he wanted to. He had no idea which way he was facing. Maybe twenty yards away horses were rearing and plunging, their riders furiously smashing and lashing the heads of those around them. Twisting wildly, Collum slung an armored elbow into the head of the man opposite him, and as in a dream it became the snarling face of the man-at-arms who’d given him his sword. The man glared at him but then grimaced and threw his head back—a thin warrior behind him in an old-fashioned bascinet had somehow found enough room to jam a sword into his back.

  Collum wrenched his arm free, lunged past the man-at-arms and shoved the point of his borrowed sword into the freckled hollow of the attacker’s throat. The man jerked his chin down sharply as if he’d just seen something of which he seriously disapproved, then coughed blood out of his mouth and neck at the same time. The crowd spasmed and pushed Collum chest to chest with the dying man, who spluttered out more blood right in Collum’s face. He could taste it, hot and salty along with the cold, bitter dirt he’d eaten. He tried to spit it out.

  “Jesus,” Collum whispered. “Holy precious baby Jesus.”

  He doubted precious baby Jesus could hear him. He couldn’t hear himself. There was no semblance of a battle line. He looked for the gray-eyebrowed man-at-arms but he’d vanished, dead or dragged under. He started shoving his way toward the rampaging horsemen, Rience’s men—the horses were in yellow barding. That’s what must’ve happened: right as the two lines met Rience’s cavalry must have shock-charged Camelot’s undefended left flank.

  Collum was wading against the tide; most people were fleeing the cavalry. He remembered to clank down his visor, but the world shrank to a slit and he had no idea what was anywhere so he opened it again. Something was scratching at his armor—he swung around to see a man with a blond mustache trying to get a short sword between the plates. Collum punched him and wrapped an arm around his narrow shoulders, hanging on to him like a rock in a maelstrom, and forced his sword into the man’s side and through his kidney and jerked it out again.

  “Camelot!” His voice broke. “Camelot!” The word had lost all meaning.

  The two armies were crushed and fused together. Everywhere Collum looked he saw unthinkable things. A man out of armor was trying desperately to climb the lone tree, one foot dangling by a strip of skin. A sharp sword cut a smooth flat section off a man’s skull, exposing a flash of pale gray-pink brain before it erupted in gore. An axman with a long red braid removed a horse’s right foreleg at the knee with a big two-handed swing. The horse staggered down onto its face, screaming, and another rider hewed right down through the axman’s collarbone into his chest.

  “For—!” Collum’s voice died. This cannot be how kings are made. You couldn’t make order out of chaos. Something had gone terribly wrong. There must be some way he could explain it to everybody—

  A horned knight on an armored horse came crashing through the press like a rolling boulder, clipping and crushing everything in his way. In a tournament he would have dismounted out of courtesy, Collum thought stupidly, even as the horseman smashed down at him with a long-handled war hammer and he parried clumsily and his arm went numb. He stabbed back up but the man kept hammering him, a god raining down thunderbolts, and Collum was crawlingly aware of how exposed he was from behind.

  The horse bit at him and a hoof clanged off his chest. In a spasm of fear he pulled a knife from his belt left-handed and shoved it in to the hilt between the horse’s ribs. It tore itself away, rearing and plunging madly.

  The mob had thinned out around him a little, and he rolled his shoulders and reset himself. It was coming back to him what this was about. These men wanted Camelot and they couldn’t have it. He wouldn’t let them. He pushed forward in what he hoped was the direction of enemy lines, sweat streaming off him. He passed the lone beech, a relic of the sane world of moments earlier.

  He was remembering that he knew this game. Strange faces goggled at him and shied away: a chinless beanpole in yellow, a devil with beard almost up to his eyes. A man in a kettle hat painted red thrust at him with a gilded sword, a neat twisting thrust that must have cost him years of practice. He was quick but not that quick: Collum caught the tip of his blade in his gauntleted fist. The man backed away but he didn’t want to let go of that fancy blade, and while he was struggling with the decision Collum struck him hard with his own very unfancy sword, not penetrating his mail but definitely cracking the man’s collarbone. Before Collum could finish him, a pop-eyed spearman’s thrust skated up his breastplate, tearing apart Alasdair’s marvelous velvet. Collum snapped the head off the spear with his sword and then surged swiftly forward—why was everyone else moving so slowly?—and amputated one of the man’s hands at the wrist. A blunt blow on his shoulder spun Collum around: a huge bushy-bearded Orkney, mouth crammed with yellow teeth at all angles, swinging a heavy ax. A local hero, small-town Goliath, probably not unlike Collum himself.

  But nobody was like Collum now. He felt rampant with power. This was a battle. He was fighting a battle! As the man reared back for another blow a gap in his armor winked open just above his kneecap and Collum darted his sword into it, feinted, then did the same on the other side, and when the man staggered Collum batted his ax aside and collapsed the side of his head.

  All this talk talk talk about birth and blood and crowns and claims. Finally, here was something real! A sword in your head: that was a God damned claim. He would prove it upon their bodies. A circle was clearing around him. From the lofty height of battle rage he looked down on his everyday self and saw it for what it was, a miasma of doubt and inward-falling confusion, a queasy nightmare from which he had at last awoken. Almost casually he kicked a ratty axman in the groin, a Pictish mercenary maybe, who’d come all this way to get Collum’s foot in his fruits and then his blade in his stomach. It came out skimmed with red and brown.

  “Camelot!” he roared. “The Table!”

  He smashed a shield with a candle-sigil so hard it knocked in the teeth of the man holding it. He risked a look back and saw that the wound inflicted by Rience’s cavalry in their flank was clotting. Camelot’s own cavalry had finally arrived to engage them, strength to strength—Palomides had found a dappled stallion somewhere—and a mob of men with billhooks was tearing a struggling rebel knight out of his saddle. The world was recovering its order, pulling itself together after its earlier disastrous collapse.

  Now there was a ragged line of infantry on either side of Collum pushing back at the attackers, and a crowd of archers was shooting over their heads, volley on volley on volley.

  “Camelot! The Table!”

  He lowered his shoulder and charged and smashed deep into the yellow ranks, ran until the press of men slowed and stopped him. He wondered if he’d just made a fatal error, but then his holy bloodlust reasserted itself. A mistake? No, this was so much better! There were so many more enemies here! Somebody was already knocking on the small of his back with the point of a snapped-off lance, looking for a way in, and Collum gracefully spun past the sharp tip and got a glimpse of a furious dark-faced man with a riveted cap and a big gap between his two front teeth before his fist bashed the man thunderously in the face.

  He jabbed a bug-eyed staring man in the thigh, made him drop his sword, then caught an ax blow on his armored forearm—that would bruise later—and slithered the point of his sword past a round buckler and into the man’s rich, soft entrails. An arrow exploded into shards off his shoulder. The enemy front wavered, uncertain whether to flee or mob him.

  Flee, he thought. Hie ye from this place.

  “Camelot!”

  Collum’s own men caught up and enveloped him again, trying to turn the moment into the start of a proper rout. The front line overtook him and he chased it. See: they didn’t need Morgan. They would build the Table again themselves, the old way, blow by blow, meadow by meadow, and not stop till all stood as it was before.

  Bedivere brushed past Collum at a jog, brusque and businesslike. He snatched a black studded club away from a man, wresting it out of his grip one-handed with such authority that the soldier just turned and fled, slipping on the mud.

  “Arthur! The Table!”

  Ahead of Collum the rush met a wave of enemy reinforcements, fresh men who pressed back at them. Where the hell had they come from? The woods? For a heartbeat the whole battle paused in equilibrium, army to army, both sides screaming and pounding and shoving at each other. Far back in the enemy host Collum glimpsed an enormous roaring horseman who could only have been King Rience himself. He really was exceptionally large.

  A dark cloud of arrows passed overhead going the other way and bit into the rabble behind Collum. The enemy flank was wrapping round them to the left, curling around the end of Camelot’s line and making it unravel. Collum saw three of his fellows go down in a row, one-two-three, overpowered and stabbed and overrun. The world was crumbling again, back into chaos. No. Collum stepped on something that rolled and sat down on his ass. Immediately a man with a long, tall shield fell on top of him.

  It was the most beautiful shield Collum had ever seen, a carved, gilded dragon curled around a green oak tree. What a terrible waste, he thought stupidly. It should be hanging on a wall somewhere, not out here getting scraped and ruined. He writhed out from under it, lost his sword, scrabbled for it again and stumbled to his feet, but a hard shove from behind immediately sent him reeling, and he had to snap his head around when an arrow came flashing straight at his eyes; it clattered off the side of his helm…

  HUMP. The earth was a giant bass drum, and God beat on it once.

  The shock froze the whole battlefield. Everything stopped. Fifty yards away, back in the enemy lines, a great dome of mud rose up and dark shapes flew gracefully away from it, pinwheeling bodies and fragments of bodies and weapons and armor. A heartbeat later a circular shock wave rippled the bloody mud under Collum’s feet, and he heard the whine of metal fragments.

  In the breath of silence that followed a man screamed brokenly. Both sides looked around wildly for whatever had done it and whether it was going to do it to them next. Collum looked, too, and for a moment his eye skipped over her, then slid back.

  It wasn’t God, it was Nimue. She was striding forward across the churned muck, tiny between the four house knights escorting her.

  “Clear!” they shouted. “Clear a path! Clear!”

  Her lips were moving but Collum was too far away to hear. She pointed and lightning struck, once and then again, leaving a searing pink broken vein of light across Collum’s vision. The thunder almost knocked him down.

  Like a startled school of fish the mass of Rience’s army turned as one and ran. Nimue pressed her two small hands together and squeezed her eyes tight shut, and her whole body shuddered, and the mud of the churned meadow opened underneath a knot of horses and men and then closed over them.

  Collum stared, not at the magic but at the woman working it. When she cast a spell Nimue’s whole soul was there in her face, naked and exposed. She was so strong and so vulnerable at the same time, with a thin sweaty lock of brown hair that had got free pasted across her pale forehead, as she summoned power from beyond to break men’s bodies.

  Collum thought he had never seen anybody so beautiful.

  Her right hand glowed, then pulsed so bright Collum had to turn away, though he caught the afterimage of a searing white beam, a crack into an otherworld of intolerable alchemical brightness. Where it lanced through the crowd men lit like torches. Later the scavengers and looters picking over the battlefield would find chunks of cracked glass where the beam had touched the ground. Some of Rience’s men were withdrawing in good order but others downed weapons and sprinted.

  Collum knew he should run after them, but all at once he found himself spent, a slack empty skin, a sponge with all the strength squeezed out of him. All that joy and power had drained back down to whatever sunless sea they came from. He was turning back into himself again.

  The lone beech tree was split and smoldering. It was over. They’d won. Do you see, Morgan, from your glass castle? But how then could he feel so empty? A hollow armor defending a hollow fortress, and Arthur’s empty bed. He bent over and put his hands on his knees and closed his eyes, and in the black he saw the city, the drowned fairy city, the tall towers and flooded streets. His forearm was throbbing, and low down on his right side was a wound he didn’t remember getting. The stubs of broken arrows hung off his armor where they’d lodged in the gaps. A bit of his helmet had been bent in by a blow and was cutting into his temple, and the blood and sweat stung his eye.

  Hoofbeats. He opened his eyes again in time to see Scipio race past him on horseback at a gallop, laughing and singing, sounding completely berserk. Dinadan was close behind, waving his thick sword. Together they were riding down the stragglers.

  Seventeen

  The Tale of Sir Dinadan

  Lord Dugfall had a small, remote fastness called Greenstone House at the head of the Great Wold Valley in Ebrauc, a green vale of thinly scattered farms watered by the Gypsey Race. It was an ancient land, haunted by long barrows and gangs of old standing stones. It hadn’t been much troubled by the arrival of the Romans or by their departure.

  Lord Dugfall had two children, a girl and a boy, Orwen and Oriel. They were twins, though the two children didn’t especially resemble each other. They were the same height, but Oriel was broad and heavyset while Orwen was on the slender side. Oriel had gorgeous curly blond hair that the ladies of the castle were always running their fingers through, to his endless irritation, while Orwen’s hair was straight dishwater. Her features were neat and unremarkable, while Oriel had a bruiser’s jowly face, with a nose that looked broken even before it was actually broken, which happened for the first but not last time when he was eleven.

  He was a relentlessly physical little boy, always climbing things and falling off them and hitting them with other things to see which of them would break. He was especially devoted to a violent form of football that was played with several dozen boys from all over the area. Oriel captained one team, and the other was led by an exotic-looking child named William Colingham, who had dark eyes and long, loose black hair—the Dugfalls and the Colinghams were the two large landholding families in the Great Wold Valley. The ball was an inflated pig’s bladder filled with dried peas, and the playing field was the whole town and the fields around it. The game generally left crops and fences and small outbuildings in ruins and only ended when the bladder popped or someone got seriously hurt.