“It was like I’d been cold all my life and hadn’t known it, because I’d never known anything else. And then in that moment I discovered warmth, and I knew what I’d been missing.”

  Lancelot blinked, returning to earth, but slowly, a drifting feather.

  “I also understood why my life till then had been so strange. I was a very ordinary child—please, I’m done with tall tales and false modesty, just know that I was undistinguished in every possible way. My parents died when I was young, and my father’s cousins were happy to inherit his castle but less happy to inherit his ten-year-old son, and the first chance they got they sent me to the Lady of the Lake.

  “There was a quid pro quo with the fairies, something to do with a water mill that my guardians had an interest in. You probably thought ‘du Lac’ was a family name, but it’s not. I actually grew up in a lake. I expect you all had rather lonely childhoods, too, to have grown up into the heroes you are now.”

  “Not me,” Palomides said. “I grew up in a palace.”

  “Well, I lived under a lake for seven years. I came up four times a year on the quarter days, then right back down again. It’s all like a fever dream to me now. It was the Lady who taught me how to fight—you must be fairy-trained, too, Dinadan, I can see it in your style, as I’m sure you can see it in mine.”

  Dinadan gave a very slight nod.

  “And I can see your brow wrinkling, Collum, so before you ask, she wasn’t the same Lady who gave Excalibur to Arthur. Lady of the Lake was her title, not her name. There must be lots of Ladies, of lots of Lakes. I never did learn her true name.

  “The agreement expired when I was seventeen, but before she let me go the Lady said I owed her a boon, and the boon was that I would sleep with her.” Lancelot kept his eyes on the candle flame. “But I wanted to stay a virgin and be a perfect knight. And it wasn’t as tempting as you may be thinking, she had grasshopper legs. And she was practically a mother to me, for God’s sake!

  “The Lady flew into a rage and tried to kill me. But she’d trained me too well. Afterward I swam up to the surface, and her blood washed off me in the lake, and I came back to the land of men.

  “It’s an awful story—but then when I performed my miracle, and healed Sir Meliot, it all made perfect sense to me. Why my parents died, why the cousins sent me away, why the Lady trained me and then tried to seduce me. By His grace I saw that it had all happened to get me to that moment, so I would be there to follow that hound and find the dead knight and heal the wound. It was like a crystal, perfect in each part and in the whole. God had laid it all out and He was pleased and proud that I had carried out His will.

  “While it’s happening you think you’re going to feel that way always, but you don’t. The moment passes. You remember it but you can’t feel it. The next day Sir Meliot was still healed but I no longer loved him, he was just a strange knight with an ill-trimmed beard who was stupid or unlucky enough to have run afoul of a cursed sword.

  “The only difference was that now I knew what warmth was, and I had to feel it again. Whatever I did after that, all the training and adventures and tournaments, it was for that. It was all I wanted, and God help anybody who stood in my way. People thought I wanted to be a perfect knight, and I told myself that, too, but I see now that what I was really trying to do was to control God. I knew that if I was perfect then God could deny me nothing, not even if He wanted to. He would have to love me. I would force His hand.

  “I wonder sometimes if it would’ve been better if I never did that first miracle.” The cat leapt back into his lap, purring thunderously, but Lancelot didn’t seem to notice. “Maybe man isn’t meant to feel what I did. Like King Midas, God should never touch His children.”

  This wasn’t the story Collum was expecting. He’d been looking for something more along the lines of an unswerving commitment to helping the weak and rescuing maidens and so on, but it did make sense of Lancelot’s almost uncanny calm. After you’d known a happiness beyond what the human soul was ever meant to feel, what could possibly disconcert or distract you? And what else could have driven Lancelot that hard, to train the way he did? He must’ve been powerless to do otherwise. A man made of lesser steel would’ve collapsed, or gone mad, but God’s love had pounded Lancelot like a red-hot sword on an anvil till he was sharp and unbreakable.

  “For a long time, for years, it worked,” Lancelot said. “Even after I slept with Elaine, God let me do miracles. God is terrible, and He is merciful, and the really hard thing is that you never know which you’re going to get. Sometimes it actually made me angry, because I knew He shouldn’t love me anymore. I was unworthy, and contaminated with sin, and I knew God knew, but He loved me anyway.

  “Elaine was a miracle, too, of course, but she was also the beginning of the end of miracles, the miracle that undid all others, because she was the first crack in my perfection, and that crack let Galahad into the world. And Galahad ended it all.

  “But it’s wrong to put it that way, because God must’ve wanted that crack. The crack was part of the crystal.”

  A sudden deafening pop from the fire punctuated the sentence. Wind gusted outside, and the candles trembled. Dagonet had acquired an egg somewhere and was making it appear first in one hand and then the other without apparently traveling in between.

  “There’s a little coda to this story,” Lancelot said, “which is that the night Mordred came for me in the queen’s chamber, twelve knights came with him, and Sir Meliot de Logres was one of them. The same knight whose wound I healed, who I laughed with and loved and kissed, came hoping to catch me committing adultery so that Arthur would have me executed. Truly whatever God gives us we deserve, and more.”

  The cat lost patience and scrambled down from his lap. He took a chaste sip of water and sat back in his chair.

  “Do you feel God’s love here?” Collum asked. “In the monastery?”

  “Not yet. But I will pray and honor God until He returns or until I die.”

  “Lancelot,” Palomides said, “God’s love is all well and good, but Britain needs a king.”

  “I know that.” Lancelot balled a lettuce leaf up and tossed it into the fire. “And I know that you are going to find one.”

  “Help us then. Do God’s will again.”

  “I’m doing it here.”

  “What if God called you to be a king?” Collum said.

  “He won’t.”

  “You’re being disingenuous!” Dinadan was out of patience. “You’re the son of a king, best knight in the world, last of the heroes of the Table! God led us right to you! What more do you want? I won’t pretend my feelings about it are uncomplicated but who the hell else are we going to get?”

  “I have—”

  “Of course you’ve fucking sinned! Good God, you think that makes you special?! As if Arthur didn’t sin? He screwed his own sister! We need a king, not a saint! The people will love it: Lancelot gave his life to God, and God said unto Lancelot, Raise up this nation that your careless lust destroyed—!”

  “That’s enough.”

  “But it’s not enough.” Constantine turned pale at his own daring, but he kept going. “It’s not over, the miracles are coming back. Collum’s medal proves it. What if the very love you seek is waiting for you on the throne of Britain, Lancelot? All you would have to—”

  “Stop!”

  Lancelot’s voice echoed in the guesthouse hall, and a couple of brothers—night owls, staying up after sunset—turned to watch from the far end of the hall. He’d half risen, and he froze like that. It was the first time Collum had seen him lose his composure, other than that growl he gave in the mêlée. A crack in the crystal. But he got it back just as quickly.

  “You came here looking for a king, but it’s not me.” He sat down again. “Even I want it to be, but it’s not.”

  “Why not?” Dinadan said.

  Lancelot took a deep breath and blinked his eyes hard.

  “That night, the night it all happened, a boy brought me a message from the queen. It said that she required me to come to her chambers. It was late. Of course I questioned whether it was appropriate to see the queen at that hour, but I was flattered too. I wanted to go. I told myself that whatever a queen requires is by definition appropriate.”

  He paused, considering.

  “That’s not the whole truth. The truth is that I was in love with Queen Guinevere. After the Grail and the miracles, I never thought I would love again, but then there it was. God’s love went out like the tide, and when it did it revealed my love for Guinevere like a precious treasure in the sand.

  “So of course I went. But when I came to her door she looked at me like she’d never seen me before. She didn’t know what I was doing there.”

  “You are saying—” Palomides narrowed his eyes.

  “The message wasn’t from her. I believe Mordred must have sent it, so that I would come to the queen’s chamber and he could surprise me there and say we were lovers, and nobody could prove otherwise. He’d planned it all along, and I think it’s fair to say his plan worked better than even he could possibly have imagined.”

  “So you weren’t naked,” Scipio said.

  “Naked? I was calling on the queen of Britain.” Lancelot gave a ghost of a smile. “I wore the best clothes I owned. I looked almost as good as Constantine. And no man could beat a dozen knights naked and unarmed, not even me. Well, maybe Galahad could have, but Galahad would never have been there in the first place.

  “But I’m not trying to tell you I’m innocent. I would have committed adultery with Queen Guinevere that night, I have no doubt of that. But I did not, for the sole reason that she didn’t want me.

  “And there you have it, gentlemen, the great romance of Lancelot and Guinevere. I don’t care if you forgive me, or Britain forgives me, I don’t even care if God forgives me. I will not forgive myself.”

  He stood up awkwardly.

  “Good night, and may God protect you all and bring you glory on your quest.”

  They left the abbey the next morning at sunrise, when the bees were still asleep in their hives. Nimue and Bedivere met them at the gate without a word, and they rode north. The monks of Hoxmead had already been awake for hours.

  Twenty-six

  The Waste Land

  King Arthur had had the high-beamed hall of Great Standing cleared and vigorously swept. Then he’d filled it with orderly rows of oak tables and chests and dressers and whatever other furniture he could commandeer on short notice, and on each piece of furniture stood a ziggurat of scrolls, each one bound with a ribbon. It was a city of parchment.

  And not a messy British city of crooked alleys and roundhouses, this was a proper Roman city, the kind where they actually planned it in advance before they built it. Neat and square. Sleet patted softly at the shutters in the quiet. Great Standing was the oldest of the royal hunting lodges—the moldings still had Uther’s grandfather’s arms worked into them. Crossed hammers. Force of arms.

  His name was Magnus, the grandfather. But whom did he marry? Guinevere couldn’t think of the wife’s name.

  And what was her device? Nails, probably.

  “Currency reform.” Arthur pointed to a heap of parchment rolls, and she retrieved her attention from the moldings. He pointed to another heap. “Great survey of Britain.”

  Guinevere curtsied politely to the rolls. It was cold in the hall, even though two fires roared in two monumental fireplaces, one at each end. Great Standing wasn’t really a winter lodging. The king strolled down the rows and aisles, uneven boards creaking, pointing to one pile of parchment after another. He was like a little boy sometimes.

  But all was not well with the royal boy. He hadn’t shaved, and his stockings were filthy. Where was Bedivere when you needed him? He never would’ve let Arthur go around like that. And Arthur looked gaunt; he’d lost easily fifteen pounds in the last year, since the Grail appeared.

  It couldn’t go on. A crisis was coming, Guinevere suspected, a great change, and she was rarely wrong about these things. She had come to observe it.

  “Naval construction. Judicial corruption. Expulsion of the Jews.”

  “You’re not actually going to—?”

  “Of course not. But people will keep bringing it up.”

  He had a pimple next to his long nose, and he toyed compulsively with that old coin, the only thing he still saved from his rustic childhood, as far as Guinevere knew. Arthur’s mind was always clear, but the strain spoke through his body.

  “This one’s forest law, which badly needs reform.” Good God, more scrolls. “Did you know Uther would blind a man just for poaching one of his pigs? Pictish rebels. Adulterine castles. The ribbons are color-coded too.”

  “You’re just showing off now.”

  “Yes.” Arthur picked up a roll and looked at her through it, end on. “I’m going to start putting all this into books. Scrolls are just impractical, the way you have to keep rolling and unrolling them. In a book you can jump from place to place. And it saves on parchment, too, because you can use both sides.”

  “According to Palomides,” the queen said, “it was Julius Caesar who invented books. He was tired of unrolling papyrus all day to read his military reports.”

  “And then he burned the library of Alexandria.”

  “Complicated man, Caesar.”

  Something struck Arthur, a thought or a memory, because with no warning he picked up a silver knife off a tray where it sat next to an uneaten cheese and threw it hard at a window. The knife hit handle-first and bounced off, leaving a white star on the pane. Irritated, Arthur took a poker from the fireside to finish the job, then strode out into the courtyard—an alert footman opened the doors just in time.

  Freezing air blasted in.

  “How long since the king slept?” Guinevere asked the footman.

  “Not since Wednesday, Your Majesty.”

  Guinevere slung the heavy train of her gown over her arm and followed her husband out onto the grass, which was coated in an inch of gray slush. Even in February the King’s Wood couldn’t manage a proper freeze. The stuff was translucent, you could see right through it down to the dead grass and leaves underneath. Arthur stood looking out at the winter woods with his hands clasped behind him, indifferent to the flecks of freezing rain that settled on his black hair, still without a strand of gray.

  “I always wanted to do that,” he said.

  “What? Break things like a spoiled child?”

  “Make a scene. Act the fool. What’s the point of being a king if you can’t be a mad king once in your life?”

  “And? How was it?”

  “In truth it was less satisfying than one had hoped.”

  He was embarrassed. Dramatic gestures didn’t come naturally to him; at times like this you could tell he didn’t grow up a pampered prince.

  “Well, don’t be discouraged, it was just a first try.” The queen hugged herself in the cold wet. “Though you know a poor family could’ve eaten for a month for the price of that window.”

  “I’m creating work for the glaziers. Promoting industry. Basic economics. Tell me the news?”

  “Inside.” The slush was soaking through her silk shoes.

  The footman opened the doors for them again, and another was already waiting on all fours with a rag to mop up the slush they would track onto the floor. Guinevere went and stood by one of the fires to try to get warm.

  It had been eight months since Galahad parked his saintly arse in the Siege Perilous, and in that time the quest for the Holy Grail had declined from a glorious miracle to a lingering curse, and Camelot had become a hive of gossip and a sinkhole of grief. Arthur had temporarily relocated here to Great Standing to escape it all, but he couldn’t bring himself to make a clean break. He’d brought his clerks and his counselors and his parchment with him so he could continue conducting matters of state, and fresh misery arrived daily in the form of riders with the news from Camelot. Today Queen Guinevere had come to deliver the news herself.

  For eight months she’d watched Arthur struggle to understand the disaster of the Grail Quest and give it a meaning. It was fascinating—viewed in a cold, detached way—to watch an intellect as powerful and remorseless as his throw itself full force at a terrible divine mystery. What the devil was He punishing us for this time? Apart from the usual? Arthur’s mind demanded answers from itself, and when answers were not forthcoming it put itself to the question, applying the hot irons and the pliers. Arthur abhorred cruelty in others but he could be quite cruel to himself.

  In a crisis it was Arthur’s habit to channel chaos into orderly patterns, and to that end he’d taken down the stuffed heads of wolves and bears and stags from one long wall and replaced them with ninety-nine slates, four rows of twenty and a fifth top row that was one short. On them a scribe recorded the comings and goings and risings and fallings of each knight of the Round Table on the great Grail Quest. The top two rows you had to reach with a ladder.

  Each slate had a knight’s name chalked on it and below that a series of symbols. A little slantwise dagger indicated combat, followed by the name of the antagonist, or a G for a giant, or an F if they’d met with a fiend or a demon. An A meant they’d encountered an angel or other divine being, and a cross (similar to the dagger, one had to be careful) to show they’d been shriven or attended Mass. There was a star for any marvel witnessed. And so on. When a knight was reported dead his slate was turned to face the wall and the date and place and cause of death, if known, were written on the back. It was Arthur’s way of feeling like he was in control, but to Guinevere’s eye the slates were an oppressive, looming presence, like tombstones. The reversed slates of dead knights were shuffled to the right-hand columns, which meant that the ranks of the dead were gradually marching their way relentlessly across the wall from right to left.