He would bide his time, and in the meantime he would live as a man, just like Marina the Monk had in Lebanon. He would bind his breasts and stuff his crotch and bathe in private. He would pretend to shave his face and learn to piss standing up. He would have lovers, and a hundred brothers, and he would be happy, because at long last he’d done what he always dreamed of doing. He’d turned into what he already was.

  Eighteen

  A Silver Shilling

  They’d won the day, but in his head Collum was still stuck back in the battle. Shadows kept turning into swords and spearpoints, lunging and stabbing at him. He was drinking hard to try to get them to turn back into shadows again. But they wouldn’t go.

  At least he wasn’t drinking alone. The victory feast wasn’t held at the Round Table but in a smaller, more private chamber in the stony quiet of the keep, the walls lined with shields and the horns of beasts, some of them utterly unidentifiable. The knights of the Table were there, plus every lord and lordling and king and kinglet who’d brought a few men to the battle. There were even two bishops, Caerleon and Londinium, and a papal legate.

  And Collum. It wasn’t a round table, but it was a very long one.

  The hot glory of the fight had cooled and congealed inside Collum into something sticky and clammy that he couldn’t get rid of. The room felt close and warm and smoky from candles and torches. Outside the night rang with the sound of crickets and the shouts of the drunken victors—the clumsy rabble of this morning were tonight’s legendary heroes. Mingling with those sounds were the moans of wounded men suffering the dark mercies of the surgeons. In the distance an abandoned siege engine burned like a dying dragon.

  Collum had killed six people today. Maybe more. You couldn’t exactly call it an accident, or unforeseeable, since it was exactly what he’d been single-mindedly training to do ever since he was a child, but till now he’d never really understood what it meant. It suddenly felt like a terrible mistake. What a great and awful power God had given to men, the power to revoke His divine gift of life, to unlock one another’s chests with the blunt key of a sword and roughly evict the ghost within. A pile of steel and guts, like Morgan said.

  He touched a wound he’d gotten on his right side, just above his hip—a hard blow had ground his mail right into his flesh, giving it a scaly, macerated appearance. They’d dressed it with bandages soaked in wine, but it still hurt.

  His stomach hurt, too, as if he’d eaten those men and now they were down there in his guts, groaning and aching, indigestible like roots or gristle: the ratty axman, the yellow-toothed giant, all the rest of them. After the battle he’d washed in the river, and then again back at the castle, but he still didn’t feel clean. He waved at a servant and pointed to his empty cup. Drank. Pointed again. Keep ’em coming. Maybe if he drank enough he could puke them out.

  Bedivere looked at him searchingly.

  “All right?”

  Collum gave him a sullen nod—sure, why wouldn’t I be?—and looked away. Whatever this was, he wanted to be alone with it.

  From the chatter going on around him Collum was coming to understand better what had actually happened today, which was that they’d come very close to losing everything. The archers who’d started the battle were unable to stop the cavalry charge they’d set off, and it made a bloody mash of Camelot’s right flank. Moments later another mounted formation exploded out of the woods straight into their unguarded left. Constantine and Scipio got into a sharp exchange over why they’d thought it wasn’t possible to get horses through that wood, and how Rience’s men had managed to do it without anybody noticing.

  After that unpromising start the weight of numbers would’ve carried the day for Rience if Camelot’s infantry hadn’t been fresher, and even then it was only Nimue’s arrival on the field that turned the tide irreversibly in Camelot’s favor.

  But everything came at a cost. Two lords had died, and a dozen knights, along with hundreds of archers and infantry. As soon as it was clear that Camelot was out of danger, Nimue collapsed and had to be carried back to the castle on a litter. She lay now in a feverish half sleep, rousing only to swear blisteringly at any physician who tried to examine her. The only person whose medical attentions she would accept was Palomides.

  Still: it was a victory. Rience himself had escaped but not many of his noble allies had. Some were cut down running, others were found hiding in the woods or hunting desperately for a church to take sanctuary in. A mob of armed peasants caught up with the Earl of Aeron halfway to Londinium, dressed as a woman. They butchered him right there in the road. A roving detachment led by Sir Dinadan had stumbled on a segment of the enemy baggage train bogged down in a muddy field. It yielded some richly gilded weapons and Rience’s own royal cache of wine, which the party was currently enjoying.

  “And did you see—did you see—Bedivere catch an arrow?” Dinadan mimed it, like he was catching an invisible fly. His face was red, and he looked a little stunned; he’d gotten a glancing mace blow to the head while trying to save a few of the luckless archers. “Like in the old days! And then”—he plunged a knife into the tabletop, startling an archbishop—“he stabs a man right in the eye with it!”

  Everybody turned to Bedivere for confirmation, but Bedivere seemed more interested in whatever was at the bottom of his cup of wine.

  “He turned the tide single-handedly.” Scipio waited for the laugh, but either people didn’t get the joke or just didn’t feel like laughing. Scipio was as neatly turned out as if he’d spent the day primping instead of laying about him in the press; Collum noticed for the first time that he wore a wedding ring. Dinadan was having some trouble getting his knife unstuck from the table.

  They were all doing their best to feel celebratory. Constantine had changed into party clothes, complete with shoes with upturned toes so long they had to be fastened to his knees with fine golden chains. But he sat staring at his food without eating, bleary and worn out, sweating in his finery in the hot, smoky room.

  “My friends.” A flushed King Cole the Old lifted a silver cup, not his first. “To Camelot.” Cole was an immensely distinguished royal figure who had only thrown in with King Arthur after having occupied and then lost the thrones of three different kingdoms in the Old North, where he was known as Coel Hen.

  Collum was glad to have an excuse to drink more. The table was crowded with bowls and saucers and goblets and gold plates.

  “And many happy returns!” shouted Lord Argente of the Straight Marches, a beat late. Argente was even older than King Cole and completely bald except for two white puffs coming out of his ears, which made him look like something was on fire in there. But when Camelot called he’d come straight from the Straight Marches, wherever they were, with a half dozen house knights.

  “Now.” King Cador of Cornwall clapped a heavy hand on his son’s shoulder. “How goes the pursuit of the stragglers?”

  Cador had the long, rookish face of a very tall man, though he still wasn’t as tall as Constantine.

  “Lord Lum is leading it.” Constantine seemed to have shrunk by a few inches in his father’s presence. “Rience’s men n-need food and rest, and he will deny them both.”

  “Have they crossed the Thames?”

  “D-don’t think so.”

  Cador pouted thoughtfully.

  “So they still hold the Salt Ford.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the Galafort?” Constantine shrugged. His father shook his head. “War’s a game of castles, boy! Battles are nothing—”

  “Don’t lecture me, Father. Rience is retreating through land that he already burned and pillaged on the way in. He’s left himself nothing to live on, and the locals hate him.”

  “They don’t hate him,” Cador said. “They fear him. Big difference.” Cador gave Cole a knowing look. They should leave this stuff to us real kings, eh?

  Collum had assumed Cador was at Camelot to advance his son’s fortunes, even put him forward as High King, but he seemed more intent on undermining him. Constantine muttered something about Vegetius’s De re militari and the dangers of pursuing a retreating enemy. The steel he’d shown on the battlefield was gone again.

  “Everybody is waiting for us to overcommit,” Palomides said, coming to his aid. “If we overextend ourselves west they will descend on Camelot en masse. Indeed, Rience’s entire campaign may well have been nothing more than a feint to draw us out.”

  “Who is ‘everyone’ in this scenario?” asked the papal legate, a mild-mannered man in an ecclesiastical-looking red hat, which he wore even indoors.

  “The Picts,” Palomides said. “Saxons, Orkneys, Scotti. Take your pick.”

  “It’s the Franks we should worry about.”

  “Lancelot would keep the Franks in l-line,” Constantine said.

  “Oh, like he kept his cock in line?” Dinadan snapped, with sudden bitterness. The churchmen scowled. “A king has to master a country. He couldn’t even master himself. And I’ll tell you something else, it wasn’t Frankish gold in that baggage train, those coins were minted in Cameliard, which means the Eastbrooks. The queen’s family.”

  No one knew what to say to that.

  “There’s six keels of Mordred’s Saxons still running up and down the east coast,” said King Cole. He shifted in his chair, trying to ease a gouty foot. “Who’s going to pay them now?”

  “There’s always money in the monasteries,” Scipio said, “if you shake them hard enough.”

  “You would plunder the church to pay heathens?” the archbishop of Caerleon said.

  “Just sell some more indulgences, you old fraud! If God doesn’t like it He shouldn’t’ve left all those gold reliquaries lying around.”

  “Enough.” Bedivere massaged his forehead as if he had a sudden headache. He must get tired of being the grown-up in the room, Collum thought. “We won today, but the next army of any size that turns up at Camelot will take it. We must act.”

  “Pray,” the papal legate said.

  “God’s not listening,” Constantine said.

  “Another quest then,” the archbishop of Caerleon quavered. “You could find the Holy Lance, no one’s ever found that!”

  “There are no adventures left in Britain,” Bedivere said.

  “What would we do with a Holy Lance anyway?” Scipio pointed at Bedivere’s pheasant in sauce. “Are you going to finish that?”

  “When we were in the Otherworld I spoke with Morgan le Fay,” Collum said, trying heroically not to slur his words. “She told me she’s coming back to Britain.”

  Even the servants stopped what they were doing and stared.

  “Oh, that’s good,” Dinadan said. “What’s she going to do when she gets here?”

  “She says that as Igraine’s daughter the throne is rightfully hers. She offered to join forces with the Table. I declined on your behalf.”

  “Well, that was prudent. How long till she gets here?”

  “I don’t know,” Collum said. “But she seemed eager to get started.”

  “You must’ve had quite a long conversation.”

  “It definitely felt long.”

  “Would somebody please get me some wine?”

  Collum hadn’t noticed Nimue come in. She looked chalky and a little unsteady but not any less startlingly beautiful than she had on the battlefield. How strange that he hadn’t noticed it before. Collum poured her some wine and then some more for himself.

  “I’ll summarize our options for the late arrivals, as I understand them,” Bedivere said. “We can choose a lesser royal and try to raise him to the throne and make it stick. We can forcibly marry someone to Guinevere. We can wait for God to pull another king out of a hat. Or apparently we can bend the knee to Morgan le Fay.”

  The room was silent. Maybe they’d expected the list to be longer. Was that all, after all that fighting and killing and dying? In a corner Sir Dagonet sat mechanically vanishing and producing a silver spoon.

  “Or we can wait for Arthur come back. If anybody has any other suggestions, I’m eager to hear them.”

  “Constantine?” King Cador said pointedly. “Do you have anything to say?”

  “I support Sir Lancelot.”

  “Very well,” King Cador said. “I offer my services to Britain as high king.”

  “What is your position on the Pelagian heresy?” the papal legate asked politely. King Cole looked amused.

  “We should consider Morgan le Fay’s offer,” Palomides said.

  “Morgan le Fay is a pagan and a moral cesspool!” said the bishop of Londinium. “And a woman!”

  “She has Igraine’s blood. She has a claim. Perhaps it is time for the old Britain to have its say.”

  “Only the church can crown a king in this land,” growled Caerleon. “Our hand will not be forced.”

  “It is easier to crown than to dethrone,” Nimue said.

  “I want to say something about Morgan le Fay,” Bedivere said. “When we met her in the Otherworld, I recognized her. I’d seen her before.

  “She was on the ship that came and took Arthur away. It was her who touched his head and called him ‘brother.’ ”

  Was it possible? Collum struggled to fit that idea in with what he’d seen of her. Was Avalon part of the Otherworld? Just offshore, in the Fairy Sea? Could she be keeping Arthur prisoner there, injured but alive? If she was then she’d kept very quiet about it.

  “I cannot understand what any of you are talking about.” Lord Argente pulled anxiously at one of his ear-tufts. “Could we not ask the Grail King?”

  “King Pellas left Britain along with the Grail,” Palomides said gently.

  “Well, could not Joseph of Arimathea be had?”

  “Oh sure,” Dinadan said. “He’s only been dead for five hundred years!”

  “Nonsense! He popped up on the Grail Quest every five minutes!”

  “I think that was his ghost.” Dinadan rubbed his face. “Though right now a ghost king doesn’t sound that bad.”

  This is going nowhere, Collum thought. Mud and blood and murder, drunken bickering in a smoky room. There must be another way to make a king.

  “We need the blood of the Pendragons,” said Old King Cole.

  “Oh, people always say that. But as soon as they’ve got it, well, there they go, spilling it everywhere.”

  Heads turned. It was a boy’s voice, high and piping, from the far end of the room. He was leaning languidly against the doorframe, finely dressed in black velvet trimmed in silver. He couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven, but he spoke with a man’s confidence. Two exasperated-looking soldiers hovered behind him.

  “Who the hell are you?” Bedivere said.

  “God’s bones.” Nimue put her hand to her forehead as if to check if she was still feverish. “Here we go.”

  “I don’t understand.” King Cador looked around helplessly. “Who is that?”

  King Cole pointed ominously, his face darkening: “That is scum begotten by scum!”

  Bedivere rose, half drawing his sword, but something in the boy’s face made him stop there.

  “For those of you who don’t know me,” the boy said, with uncommon self-possession, “my name is Sir Melehan. My father was Sir Mordred, begotten by that notorious scum King Arthur. As his only living male descendant, I am here to take my rightful place on the throne of Camelot.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The feast wasn’t so much adjourned as it was abandoned. Sir Melehan explained that he’d come with an army, two thousand men down from Orkney and Elmet and another five hundred from across the Channel. They were camped ten miles away, ready to descend on Camelot if he did not reappear, unharmed and newly crowned, within three days.

  Lord Argente spat at his feet and Scipio called him a liar. Having accomplished that much, they sent Sir Melehan to the dungeons and went to bed.

  Alone in his bedchamber, sweating vinous sweat in the summer heat, Collum lay fully dressed on his field of golden lions, each one framed, or maybe caged, inside its golden diamond. He ached and stung in half a dozen places. He tried to work out the last time he’d actually closed his eyes and slept. Before the battle. Before the Glass Castle, before his journey across the Otherworld, before the old man in the garden. It must’ve been on a stony beach in Cornwall, a thousand years ago. It felt like Britain was drifting apart, piece by piece, disintegrating into a shapeless, kingless archipelago. He’d thought Camelot would make him whole and new, it would fix what was broken, but Camelot was no better off than he was.

  He wanted to close his eyes but he was afraid of what he might see. He felt desperate not to be alone, but there was no one at Camelot, or anywhere else for that matter, whom he could wake up at this hour. Eventually he got up and went to the window. Down in the courtyard someone was kneeling on the grass, all alone, under a fat setting summer moon that was very slightly flat on one side. It was Nimue.

  He picked his way carefully downstairs in the torchlit darkness; the spiral staircases at Camelot were pitched so steeply that they slung knotted ropes down them from the top floor to hang on to so that people didn’t break their necks. He’d gone past tiredness into some exalted spiritual state on the other side. The summer air felt like a calm sea he was drifting through like a jelly.

  Nimue was digging a hole with a small shovel in the carefully tended lawn. She worked diligently, uncomplainingly, like a forest creature burrowing in the dark. A handful of glowing golden-green motes hung around her head: fireflies. She must’ve bewitched them. He could see the shape of her narrow shoulders through her dress as she worked.