To this point the marshal hadn’t interfered, just observed it all silently, arms folded. He was a small, elegant man. His name was Aucassin. Now he sighed and slowly, unhurriedly, bent and picked up Marcas’s fallen waster from the worn grass.

  Collum had moved beyond fear into a state of total focus that bordered on the mystical. He was no longer Collum, he was a god among mortals, Jupiter Triumphans. He was Sir Lancelot du Lac himself, the lightning-struck sword Arondight bright in his hand!

  He woke up an hour later with bruised knuckles, a splitting headache, and a broken nose.

  * * *

  • • •

  Marshal Aucassin didn’t exactly take an interest in Collum after that, but he made room for him in the yard. The marshal seemed to be above the rules that required the other masters of Dubh Hall to ignore or abuse Collum; maybe it was the fact that he could’ve beaten any of them with a sword, or maybe it was his air of Continental sophistication. For the marshal of an utterly obscure household in the Out Isles, he was a pretty well-traveled fellow. He could speak any number of languages, though he spoke them all with a thick Frankish accent. He’d fought under King Bors of Gannes and later King Claudas of the Land Laid Waste and studied with several interesting Continental swordmasters. He’d sought out the Saxon adepts Octa and Baldulph, and even an Egyptian master who’d somehow fetched up in Paris.

  He had a pronounced mystical bent, and his training often took the form of obscure aphorisms—A straight arm is the essence of manhood; a moving leg is the manhood of essence—and cryptic verses:

  Only circles, never lines

  Only movement, never still

  Nimbly wind and counter-wind

  Long the journey to the kill

  But over time Collum began to discern in all the flowery talk and puzzling metaphors an orderly system that reduced the chaos of combat to something almost comprehensible. In the art of the longsword there were fourteen guards, five major and nine minor. No more, no fewer. There were eight cuts, all linked by flowing motions and arcs that chained them together. There were four thrusts and four parries. All else arose from combinations of these fundamental elements.

  Collum’s world was now sharply divided between the humiliating abuses of his life as a servant and his steady progress in the promised land of the training yard. It occurred to him early on to steal a real sword and kill Lord Alasdair with it, but that seemed unnecessary now. He wasn’t worth it, it would just be a distraction. As prodigies will, Collum outstripped first his peers and then the motley gang of household knights who lodged at Dubh Hall, who learned quickly that they wanted nothing to do with Alasdair’s terrifying feral fosterling. He spent a lot of time alone fighting the pell, a thick, stripped-pine post six feet tall that was a staple of knightly training. Aucassin taught him an antique poem about it, called, naturally enough, “The Poem of the Pell,” which began:

  Of fight the discipline and exercise

  Was this: to have a pale or pile upright

  Of mannys hight, thus writeth olde wyse;

  Therwith a bacheler or a yong knight

  Shal first be taught to stand & lerne fight

  The pell had a red demon face painted on it by hands unknown, a cousin to the forge-demon, with a wide fangy mouth that gleefully ate up the blows he rained on it.

  Collum bashed the pell to the point of exhaustion, day after day, year in and year out, the courtyard echoing with the dull, arhythmic clonking sound of wood on wood. High cuts and low cuts and cross-cuts, diagonal and vertical, upward and downward, weak edge and strong edge. The Squinting Cut, the Scalp Cut, the Battle Cut. The Father Strike, the Crooked Strike, the Crosswise Strike. A hundred of one, then on to the next, then start the cycle over. All he could think was that if he kept training and fighting he would one day refine the taint out of himself, burn it away, the one that made it impossible for anyone anywhere to love him. He would fight his way off this island, over the sea and all the way to Camelot.

  As he got bigger Collum was no less resented and despised by the folk of Dubh Hall, not just for his connection to Lord Alasdair’s debt but also increasingly for his vocal Christianity and allegiance to the southern swine at Camelot. The beatings he received were no less harsh, though he found himself better able to tolerate them. His body accumulated scars, from burns and whippings, but that did not stop it growing strong. He was biding his time now. This wouldn’t go on forever. Once he was eighteen they would have to give him his knighthood and let him go. If nothing else they had to give him that.

  Since they couldn’t face him one-on-one, the other boys would track Collum down when he was alone and attack him in a gang, any way they could: sand in the face, stone in the fist, thumb in the eye, knee in the groin. Practice yard rules did not apply.

  Collum complained to Marshal Aucassin.

  “Let those boys be your masters,” the marshal said, “as I have been.” He was whittling a votive figurine, which was his hobby, though he was in no other obvious way devout.

  “What, fight like them?” Collum said irritably. “Like a dirty coward?”

  “Is that what I’ve taught you? To fight the way your opponent does?” Aucassin closed his heavy lids and shook his head at the tragedy of Collum’s stupidity.

  “No, master.”

  “No. Not like them. You must fight worse.”

  So when they went low, he went lower. He went for the nose, the Adam’s apple, the corners of the mouth. The knees, the instep, the balls. He shouted “For Camelot!” while he did it.

  Collum was right that it couldn’t last forever, but wrong about everything else. An incurable optimist, Lord Alasdair invested in another one of his friends’ speculative enterprises, a scheme to send ships full of otter and seal skins to the Frankish kingdoms and bring them back full of wine. Contrary to all historical precedent, the business was a spectacular success, and Lord Alasdair was able to scratch his way back to a state of solvency and then modest wealth. That meant he didn’t need Collum’s stepfather’s money anymore. One cold spring afternoon he told Collum to collect his things and get out by sunset.

  Collum took this news as stoically as any beating. It would be the end of beatings, at least there was that. They would never whip and burn and drown him again, though he would always have the scars. He would always have a limp. But where would he go now? He’d been at Dubh Hall for so long he could barely remember the time before it.

  Of course he could go back to his stepfather’s house and beg his younger half brother for a place. But he knew he wouldn’t. Collum gathered up his things. He felt around inside his thin straw mattress for the four much-clipped silver shillings he kept there. From under a loose flagstone he retrieved a stolen hatchet and silver spoon, both engraved with the arms of Dubh Hall, a hedgehog, that were worth two more shillings. They would be worth a spell in the stocks, too, or worse, if he was caught with them.

  He went to the practice yard and gripped by a rage he didn’t even recognize he hacked at the pell with his hatchet till he’d chopped it off at the root and it flopped over, finally defeated, its red demon face face down in the dust at last. Then he strode back to the house.

  Lord Alasdair himself was a knight, of course, and he owned a marvelous armor. Every piece was edged in brass, and its breastplate was set with lines of fancy decorative rivets and covered in rich red velvet. It stood on a stand in a place of honor in the hall. Collum had never seen him wear it.

  Slowly, piece by piece, barely knowing what he was doing, he put on Lord Alasdair’s glorious armor. It was awkward, and he quickly discovered that you couldn’t really do it by yourself, not correctly, but halfway through Marshal Aucassin appeared and wordlessly, with no expression on his narrow face, buckled and strapped and bolted and tied the fine old steel into place. When he was done he knocked his brown knuckles on Collum’s armored back.

  “Go on, boy,” he said.

  On Collum went. He walked clanking out into the afternoon sunlight. Lord Alasdair’s armor was worth a small fortune, fifteen pounds easily, but in that moment Collum didn’t care. He was Collum of Mull, the wool-broker’s stepson, and he would sooner be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. Alasdair hadn’t expelled him, he’d released him.

  He went to the stables, knocking down a house knight along the way (for Camelot!), took a horse, and rode the eight miles into town, stopping only for a last look at his father’s house. How he’d longed to go back there, night after dark cold night, and how small and ordinary it looked now. It held nothing for him. By the time he got to the docks the sun was almost down but the wind was fair, and he traded the hatchet for a ride on a fishing boat across the Firth of Lorn to the mainland.

  As soon as they left the shallow bay the wind kicked up, speeding them out past low-lying sandbanks and into open water. Land sounds gave way to soft sea sounds: creaking, sloshing, slapping, the crying of seabirds. The temperature plummeted shockingly fast. Collum had never been to the mainland. You could see it on a clear day, green hills with halos of cloud over the tallest ones, not obviously that much different from the hills of Mull.

  Crouching in the stern, he watched the umbilical of wake that connected him to his island home disperse and fade away. The sky above Mull was wild and windblown, here dropping curtains of gray rain, there lighting up a headland with a clear shaft of sunlight that made it look like a lost paradise. The island’s bumpy silhouette got thinner and thinner till he could cover it with two fingers, and it became the small, insignificant thing he always knew it was.

  Proper ocean swells arrived, and the wind kept rising. He shivered in his stolen armor. Suddenly all his bravado blew away and he longed for his familiar berth on the floor of the Great Hall. Where would he sleep tonight? What was he doing? He knew no one on the mainland. His whole soul burned with regret. He’d given in to a childish impulse to prove that he was something more than what he really was, which was nobody at all. He was the motherless, fatherless stepson of a tradesman. He was a bastard and a thief and a fool, and that’s all he ever would be.

  He could still go back. Grovel and pay a fine, do his time in the stocks. He could go to work for his half brother. Let his hard-won muscles go slack, his belly fill out, his calluses soften, live out his days as an oversize clerk who had once, years ago, shown some promise with a sword.

  But he needed to know who he was. They had told him he was nothing and nobody, and before he died he needed to know if that was true.

  Night fell, the wind dropped, and the fishermen made him row. By the time they reached land he’d been sick three times. He spent what little was left of the night in a haystack. But he was on his way, seventeen years old, strong and healthy, with a rich man’s armor and little money and no prospects whatsoever, and somewhere far to the south was Camelot. He felt so broken that nowhere and nothing else could fix him. Camelot was the one crucible hot enough to burn away all his weakness and shame and confusion, leaving him whole and pure and bright. Therwith a bacheler or a yong knight.

  Four

  Camelot

  He started getting coy glimpses of it, peeking over hills and between trees, but superstitiously Collum avoided looking straight at it till he topped a rise and it was right there square in front of him.

  As a castle there was nothing fancy about it, none of your newfangled circles or star shapes. Camelot was a massive stone box, not quite square—irregularities in the terrain and the whims of generations of kings had pulled it from a true rectangle into a lumpy, nameless five-sided shape. It stood on a gently sloping bluff, guarded on four of its sides by a lazy loop of the river Brass, and on the fifth by a moat that had been diverted from the river.

  A low, wandering outer curtain wall separated the castle grounds from the town that clung to its skirts. Inside it Collum could make out a high inner curtain with massive muscular towers topped by crenelated battlements. From within that rose roofs and more towers and finally the upraised fist of the inner keep, the oldest part, a huge blunt mass of stormy gray rock.

  The sight washed away Collum’s sleepless night and soothed his bleary red eyes. There was nothing wrong here. Knights could curse at you, fairies could trick you, it didn’t matter. Camelot would go on forever and ever, world without end.

  As he rode closer, through fields of flowering blue flax seething with brown butterflies, he picked out things he recognized from the stories. The triple-arched Gate of Three Queens. Camelot’s notorious Rain Gate. That green strip of cleared ground must be the tiltyard. The tower with the curious domed top was Merlin’s Tower, which was sometimes there and sometimes not.

  There was the outlying Tower of Stars, linked to the keep by a single delicate footbridge. That fat one was the Bakehouse Tower, and there, tallest of all, was the Godsfall, so named because King Uther was accustomed to hurl the idols of the pagan peoples he’d conquered and converted from the top of it.

  Camelot town was quiet, the streets all but empty. A distant hammering came from somewhere, and he smelled baking bread, but otherwise the whole place could’ve been in an enchanted sleep. A tabby cat lounged slit-eyed in the morning sun. He crossed the drawbridge. He thought he’d have to beg or bribe or bluster his way inside but the crook-backed old man on duty just took his sword and his horse and waved him through, under the heavy ironshod double portcullis.

  Strolling up through the gently sloping grounds, Collum startled a couple of tame deer. Camelot was a fortress but it was also a royal palace, with some concessions to civilian luxury: a hornbeam maze, an orchard, fountains, a pond. The famous Rose Garden, planted with seeds from as far away as Crete. He’d never been anywhere so grand and clean and orderly. Everywhere the Pendragon dragon was worked in stone and wood and paths and topiary. Back at Dubh Hall there had been a small cabinet that held the household treasures: amber beads all the way from Egypt; a little clasp knife with an ivory handle in the shape of a leopard; a cup made out of a hairy exotic thing called a coco-nut; a dried pressed olive sprig that was said to have come from Gethsemane. But this was a whole world made from treasures, a world of emerald leaves and white stone shot through with threads of golden sunlight.

  Camelot wasn’t always a seat of British royalty. The curtain walls were speckled with stones and ornaments scavenged from Roman buildings, and some of the exposed foundations belonged to the imperial fort that had stood here once, identical to all the other forts the Romans had stamped all over Britain. And it went back further than that. Broad banks and waves of earth rippled out from around the castle, the kind you saw around the oldest hill forts, made in ancient times by the Old Ones, who worked the landscape like a blacksmith works hot metal. Camelot had always been a place of power.

  Collum proceeded on foot through the Rain Gate, so named for the rain of boiling water and hot sand it offered invaders, courtesy of its many murder holes and machicolations. A couple of ancient guards watched him from above—too old, he would’ve thought, for active service, but Camelot was turning out to be something of a rest home for elderly soldiers.

  But that’s it. Of course. He was too late. Arthur’s court must’ve moved on to Caerleon for the summer. He’d thought they’d wait till after Whitsunday. Dammit, now he’d have to go all the way to Glamorgan. His journey wasn’t over after all.

  Well, he could at least have a look around first.

  Collum marched unopposed across the outer bailey, which had a great green curtain of ivy spilling down one wall, and through an archway into a huge grassy interior courtyard. The mountainous keep peered down at him through narrowed arrow-slit eyes, a few of Arthur’s azure-and-gold banners dripping down its sides. A couple of bored white geese were investigating a neat garden in one corner, and an anvil and some smith’s tools lay temporarily abandoned in a circle of bare ground. It was all real. The promise of the stories in the flame-lit darkness of the smithy had been kept. White linens had been left to soak in a wooden tub, and he wanted to run over and touch them. The linens of Camelot! What heroes had slept and dreamed in these sheets!

  A high slate-roofed hall formed one side of the courtyard. The Great Hall.

  There was the door, right there. Did he really dare? Collum’s head was spinning. He blinked his eyes hard. He sniffed and tweaked his nose with his fingers. Yes, he dared. He’d waited for this for nine long years, and that was long enough. He whispered a prayer, straightened his spine, and opened the door.

  The Great Hall of Camelot was vast and shadowy, more like a forest at dusk than a hall. A massive chandelier hung from the roof beams, a grand celestial double wheel of candles, though only a few were lit. Narrow sunbeams speared down at steep angles through rows of high slit windows. Drifting motes glowed in the light and vanished into shadow again. Sparks on the smithy floor.

  He’d arrived at the center of the turning world.

  The Round Table was even bigger than Collum had pictured it, a hoop of thick varnished oak a hundred feet across, worn and scarred, darkly gleaming. You noticed the chairs as much as the table, a hundred of them set around it in two perfect fans, one on the inside of the O, one on the outside. Each chair was tall and straight-backed and varnished black, with the name of a knight written across the back in gold; supposedly Merlin himself had done it by magic. Collum had always imagined the Great Hall loud and full of people, but on this particular morning it was still and silent.

  It wasn’t quite empty, though. As his eyes adjusted, Collum picked out a man sitting at the table with his head down on his folded arms, apparently asleep. Another one, wide and frog-mouthed, sat with a cup of wine in front of him, even though the bells were only just ringing for terce. A ridiculously tall fellow with long, loose blond hair stood contemplating one of those green slit windows with his hands clasped behind his back, apparently lost in thought. A fourth man lay full length on his back on top of the Table, his eyes closed, as if he’d been laid out there for burial.