He dwells too much on the effect, Guinevere thought, and not enough on the cause.

  It didn’t help that Arthur had replaced his regular scribe with his teenage son, Mordred, when he came back from the quest. Mordred was one of the few things she and Arthur still fought about. He wouldn’t have had to do much in order to irritate Guinevere, the mere fact of his existence was enough, but he went above and beyond. He was a changeful young man, by turns charming and cold, innocent and knowing, aggressive and vulnerable, with the spotty country manners you’d expect from someone who grew up in the northern backwater court of Lot and Morgause. (Although—Guinevere forbore to point out—his half brothers, Gawain and that lot, had somehow learned to act like gentlemen.) If he absolutely had to go and have a bastard, why couldn’t he have had one like Galahad? Maybe he and Lancelot could arrange a swap.

  He did write a neat hand though, she’d give him that. And his presence made Arthur happy in a way that nobody else’s did, not even hers.

  Guinevere waited to deliver her news while Mordred was summoned. He was the spit and image of Arthur, lean and tall, though Mordred tended to hunch in a way that was either good-naturedly self-effacing or falsely humble, depending on who you asked. He affected ragged clothing, to add to the air of the exiled prince. Like many teenagers he thought he possessed guile, whereas in fact he had none.

  When he was ready with his chalk she delivered her news, which was that Lancelot was back from the quest.

  “What?” Arthur asked. “When?”

  “Don’t know. A maid went in to clean and found him in his room praying. He may have been back for days. He won’t talk to anyone. Or eat anything.”

  “And he didn’t find it?”

  “Definitely not.”

  She said all this evenly, to make it clear that she wasn’t avoiding the topic, because it wasn’t a topic and there was nothing to avoid. There was always a particle of tension in the air when Lancelot came up, because sometimes he would pretend to woo her, in strictly platonic fashion, and she would gently spurn him, in the same fashion. It was a game, a courtly ritual. Lots of the knights played it with some married lady or other. It was nothing, the sort of breath of wind that adds a little texture to the placid surface of a marriage. And after all it wasn’t as though she’d gone and had a child with her half sibling.

  In one night. And then a thousand nights with me, and nothing.

  Guinevere went on—a litany of deaths and defeats—and Mordred’s chalk squeaked and clacked in the quiet. When he was done Arthur gave him a manly approving nod—Well done, son!—as if he’d just slain a dragon. Pretty much anything Mordred did elicited this nod from Arthur, which meant they were at best meaningless and at worst actively unnerving to the boy. Arthur was a great king but as a father he appeared to have no natural instincts whatsoever.

  I can’t be the first person to observe, she thought, how often those best placed to take care of a child have the least idea what it needs.

  “Did Lancelot say anything else?” Mordred asked, because why leave well enough alone?

  “Not to my knowledge. I expect he’ll go back out again. I think he’s quite ashamed that he didn’t make it further.”

  A lot of the Grail survivors felt that way. They skulked around the castle avoiding one another’s eyes and serving out endless penances, starving and beating themselves for their failures. Some woke up in the night shouting battle cries. Some of them couldn’t sleep in their beds at all, they slept on the floor or camped out in the courtyards at night.

  “Thank you, Mordred,” Guinevere said. “You may go.”

  That was another thing: Arthur would never, ever dismiss Mordred. He seemed to think his son was so fragile the slightest brush of his fingers would destroy him, which meant that Guinevere always had to be the one to say Bye-bye, off you go! Which made her even more the evil stepmother.

  “Shall we walk?” Guinevere said. It wouldn’t be long now, the crisis, but he would need her help. Keep him moving, keep him talking, that was the thing. She knew Arthur extremely well.

  Once she was properly cloaked and shod it was good to be outside. Arthur gulped the fresh air like a swimmer surfacing. Sheets of white mist hung motionless in the still air. The silver birches on the edge of the lawn stood bowed down with slush as if in shame, like Lancelot.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Yet. I flatter myself that I’m a man of action, but at present I can think of no actions to perform.”

  “If the Saxons did what God has done, killed fifty-eight knights of the Round Table, you would cross the North Sea and burn Saxony to the ground.”

  “Well, I’m not going to make war on God and burn Heaven, if that’s what you’re suggesting. You’re being deliberately provocative.” His breath was white in the air like smoke. A dragon’s breath. A Pendragon’s. “You see how this will end, don’t you?”

  “I could make an educated guess. Galahad will achieve the Grail, and maybe a few others. Maybe Percival. But that’s all. And I think God will consider the whole business a failure.”

  “I agree. This is not God making peace. He is washing His hands of us. And where does that leave us?”

  “Out with the bathwater, I suppose.”

  Numerous tender little pawprints crossed the gray slushfields around them. Mice. Or shrews. Or voles. Arthur would know.

  “Maybe it’s a cleansing,” he said, “like the Flood. Or God felt we were getting too familiar. Camelot is the Tower of Babel, and He is showing us our place the same way He did then, with confusion and ruin.”

  “You need a distraction. This is a hunting lodge, let’s go hunting.”

  “Nothing’s in season.”

  “There’s always foxes,” the queen said. “Or do the shepherds a favor, hunt some wolves.”

  “Good God, woman, a king can’t hunt wolves! And I can’t go hunting while knights are dying.” Arthur blew into his cupped hands. “Maybe I should join the quest. Maybe God is waiting for me to come personally.”

  “God will kill you if you go.”

  “Perhaps a sacrifice is necessary. The king must die, so the land may live.”

  “That would be very pagan of Him. But I don’t think this is about you, Arthur. If you won’t hunt then we’ll go hawking.”

  But an elderly cadger informed them that the falcons were moulting and could not be flown, and any lesser bird was of course unsuitable for a king. So off they set again into the sunless morning. A heavy mass of wet snow slumped off an angle in the roof and landed with a thump a yard behind them.

  At Camelot Arthur had spent much of his time walking like this, through the empty halls and colonnades of his deserted castle, like the lonely leopard in Camelot’s bestiary who paced ceaselessly, never doubting that she would one day find the door that led out of this damp grim enclosure and back to the hot savannas of her youth. Arthur had probably covered as many miles as the Grail knights, all told, a spiral quest wound in on itself, going nowhere.

  Off in the mist a crow cawed loudly.

  “You’re not sulking, are you?”

  “I’m thinking,” Arthur said.

  “They can look similar to the untrained eye. Common mistake. Trap for young players.”

  “You know people are saying I planned it all?” he said. “That God and I are in on it together? Most of the knights are childless, so when they die their properties revert to the Crown. It’s all a great big royal land grab.”

  “Is it?”

  “Well, it’s an ill wind.”

  “They must have a high opinion of your relationship with God if they think you’re running a scam together.”

  “The king of the Franks thinks the Grail is a holy weapon that I’ll use to conquer the world,” Arthur said. “He’s sent out a party of his own to try to find it first.”

  “Good luck to him,” Guinevere said. “They say Sir Harry le Fise Lake has left the Table to start a free company. It’s called the Ugly Mugs—that’s a Grail joke.”

  Arthur managed to laugh at that. A good sign. She remembered after the wedding when her father presented them with the Round Table. Arthur’s elaborate gratitude, then his expression slowly turning to tragic dismay as an endless parade of servants carried it into the Great Hall, piece after piece after piece. It was their first real joke together.

  The sun seemed to be beaming down cold, not heat. She slipped on some ice and nearly went down. There was a slow leak in her boot.

  “I’m going inside,” Guinevere said. “And when I’m warm again I’m going to the archery butts. Meet me there, if you dare.”

  * * *

  • • •

  To Guinevere’s critical eye Great Standing wasn’t very well situated. They’d built it in a bosky hollow for some reason, dark and damp. But to get to the butts you crossed a bridge over a lovely little brook, and then beyond the brook you burst out into some glorious flat open hayfields, snow with hummocks of dead frosty grass showing through, declining gently toward a bank of low hills in the distance.

  Servants were sweeping off the earth mounds where the targets were mounted. You could barely see them in the mist. A dog barked far away. A sprinkling of little birds were left that hadn’t flown south, robins and redwings, hopping from branch to branch.

  A frozen land. And it felt frozen in time. Nothing would happen here till either the Grail was found or the last knight fell trying.

  But of course that wasn’t true. It only felt like that here, within the enchanted penumbra of Camelot. All over Britain people kept on being born and dying, Grail or no. They were spinning and hunting and spreading manure and planting new vines and waiting for spring. If anything people were taking advantage of the Table’s unhealthy preoccupation with the Grail. A self-proclaimed bandit king had set himself up in the Forest Sauvage. There were debauched monks in Astolat. Half of Gore was delinquent in its taxes.

  The realm was being neglected. Camelot needed to catch up. It was time for this to be over. Past time.

  She knew what people said, that the Grail was meant to be a cure for her infertility, but she didn’t believe it. She knew a poisoned chalice when she saw it. She could feel it out there somewhere, crouched in some remote grove or chapel like a silver spider in its web, a hidden thing that drew knights to it, and retreated from them as they came. One by one they burned up as they approached it, as stars did falling to earth, a whole flock of Icaruses—Icari?—descending in a cloud of feathers. And one Daedalus to mourn them all.

  She supposed she should show the Grail more respect, and God for that matter, but Guinevere’s approach to religion had always been pragmatic, as it was to all things. As a princess she’d expected to marry for politics, not true love. Likewise as a Christian she didn’t feel the need to be virtue incarnate. She wanted to achieve goodness, not perfection. After all if God had nothing to forgive her for then how would he maintain his hard-earned reputation for mercy?

  Perhaps that was why she had no child.

  Arthur was different. Guinevere’s marriage to Arthur was a political marriage, but it had come with unlooked-for blessings: Arthur was handsome, and kind, and faithful, and he didn’t (often) drink to excess. He’d also turned out to be one of the few people Guinevere had met in her life who was as intelligent as she was and could keep up with her in conversation. But there was another surprise waiting in her marriage, which was this absurd craze for divine adventuring, this obsessive pursuit of the miraculous. Arthur wasn’t a pragmatist like her, he had a hunger for perfection. If there was a third party in their marriage it wasn’t Lancelot, it was God.

  She supposed it must have to do with his absent father, or fathers. Arthur’s real father, Uther, had tossed him aside, and his foster father Ector hadn’t been much better. No more had his heavenly father, God. Not a lot of cuddles at bedtime. All boys need a father’s love, and they’ll do anything to get it, and Arthur had tried being good, and it hadn’t worked, so that left only greatness. Perfection. If only, if only Arthur had had a father there to say, it’s all right, this is good enough. You can stop now, I will love you whatever happens, whatever you do, whoever you are. But there was no one there to say it. God would never say stop. And so Arthur never would.

  (No wonder Arthur fell all over himself to baby Mordred, who wasn’t even particularly good, let alone great. Because he was starved for love Arthur thought Mordred should be glutted with it, stuffed like a goose, but there’s such a thing as overcorrection. Trap for young players.)

  And now Arthur’s passionate wooing of God had gone south, God in His wisdom had set the bar too high, and what to do? A more reasonable man would take it on the chin, hang up the questing gear with a rueful chuckle, chalk it up to the sad fallible nature of humanity, which could never by its very fallen nature achieve the lofty ideals of etc., etc. But she knew that for Arthur it must be like being run through the heart. He couldn’t take it on the chin, he lived to prove to God and himself that he was who the sword said he was, he was God’s chosen king. That his goodness could pay for his monstrous father’s crimes, even undo them. And God was telling him no. No one else knew what it cost him, because Arthur had the kind of strength that kept you moving and talking and smiling even when you had your death wound, till you fell down a corpse. But his wife knew.

  Arthur would never be good enough for Him. And when Arthur finally realized that then something would have to give. But what? And what exactly would it give?

  To her irritation Arthur didn’t join her at the archery range till the bells were ringing nones and the sun had sunk low in the sky. The whole world was drained of color. She’d already shot a dozen arrows, with indifferent results, and she didn’t feel like shooting anymore. Oceans of shadow washed across the snowfield from the western woods, as if the trees had been drawn there and the ink had run across the page. She was chilled to the bone all over again.

  When Arthur did finally turn up he suggested they play rovers, like children did, so they wandered around the field calling out targets: a bush, a tuft of grass, a stump. Whoever got closer won that round and got to pick the next target. Once they flushed a hare and both shot at it and missed. It wouldn’t have mattered, the arrows were blunts anyway.

  “I’m sorry I took so long,” Arthur said, “but King Erec came to beg an audience in person. He told me the most extraordinary story, about some knights causing trouble in Destregales—it was Lavaine, Hellaine le Blank, and Bellangere le Beuse.”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  “Apparently there was an old giant named Umfrey who lived in the hills north of Carnant. He was a gentle enough soul, didn’t eat people, just took a sheep every week or two. He slept most of the time. King Erec said he slept on his belly like a little boy. Well, Sir Lavaine got it into his head that this Umfrey was a monster, an enemy of God, and therefore he was their next adventure on their glorious path to the Grail. So they searched him out and chopped him up with axes while he slept.”

  “Not very knightly.”

  “It was a damned atrocity. Umfrey woke up halfway through and broke Hellaine’s leg before he died.”

  “Serves him right. The fool.”

  Hellaine was an ignorant man who grabbed the maids’ bums. Guinevere aimed an arrow at a young oak by itself in the middle of the field, picturing Sir Hellaine. She held the bow at full draw for a count of ten, just to show she could, then shot and hit it. Arthur applauded, then missed with his own shot. Point to Queen Guinevere, who leads ten to seven. A spot on the inside of her forearm was starting to burn where the leather guard didn’t quite cover it.

  “What did they do with the body?”

  “Nothing. They left it lying there and rode away. Wolves and bears came from miles around. You can imagine the stench. The sky was black with birds.”

  “At least the shepherds were happy.”

  “But that’s just it, they weren’t! They were furious! Apparently they worshipped Umfrey, to them he was the god of those hills, and if he took a sheep every week or so they considered it a necessary sacrifice to keep the rivers flowing and crops growing. When they found out what happened they set up on the road back to town with bills and bows and axes and ambushed the knights in a mob. Killed all three of them.”

  “What did Erec do with them?”

  “Well, the knights had killed four already. Erec hanged the ringleader and put the rest in the stocks, but that was all. He’s worried they’ll revolt.

  “But that’s not even the point. The point is that they didn’t care, Guinevere. I thought that at least, at least, people would be proud if we found the Grail. I thought they would want to see us claim it for Britain. But they don’t care! And why should they? Imagine what we must look like to them: a bunch of wealthy Christian killers, walking around in a fortune’s worth of steel armor, trampling their gardens and yelling about our God in a language most of them don’t even understand. Look at us go, chasing divine marvels, while they break their bodies to plough our land! Of course they don’t care!

  “And does God even care? I trusted Him for so long, Guinevere. So long. But now He’s asked too much, we’ll never bring home the Grail, and even if we did I wonder if it would be enough. I don’t think it would. His discipline has always been harsh, but I thought His harshness was love, it was how badly He wanted to us to be good. But it’s become something else.

  “Maybe he’s simply inhuman, like a storm, or a fire.”

  Arthur stared up at the nothingness of the sky, shaking his head.

  “I don’t know what it all means, and I suppose I never will, but I won’t beg anymore. I can’t. He was my father’s God, Uther’s God, but He is not mine. We’ll find our own way. Or maybe we’ll go to war with Him, like you said.”