This was the place that shaped Arthur, this backwater, where the deep British past persisted the way scraps of winter snow last late into the spring in the shadows of trees and gullies. This would’ve been the world of Arthur’s mother, too, Bedivere knew. Queen Igraine was a daughter of Cornwall, with an iron-rich bloodline that ran unbroken all the way back to the kings and queens of the proud Dumnoniae.

  Ancestral voices must have whispered to Arthur here. Old stories, old secrets. And Arthur never had to be told a thing twice.

  But this wasn’t the solution to Arthur, it was yet another mystery, because when Bedivere looked at the king now he saw no trace of the Old Britain. To all appearances Arthur was the quintessence of a Christian king, like his father, speaking Latin like a tribune and attending Mass daily. He never once went back to Little Dunoak. He even gave lip service to the idea, which only the deeply fanatical or sentimental took seriously, that one day the Romans would return from across the sea and fold Britain back into the embrace of their resurrected empire.

  Arthur showed no discernible interest in witchwork or quarter days, standing stones or harvest festivals. Probably to him they reeked of his unhappy childhood. Probably it felt like if he so much as acknowledged them then the royal dream would vanish and he would have to go back there. So he’d buried the Old World along with the child he’d been and built King Arthur on the gravesite.

  But what is buried is not gone.

  * * *

  • • •

  Of course a great Christian king needs must have a queen. Loyal courtiers put it about that Arthur’s marriage to Guinevere was a love match—as the story went, they’d begged him to make a more politically advantageous marriage, but the king’s passion for Guinevere carried all before it, just as his father’s passion for Igraine had. It was a romance for the ages, and people sang a lot of songs and sobbed a lot of poetry about it.

  That was the story. Bedivere thought it was bullshit. Arthur married Guinevere for one reason only, which was that she was an Eastbrook. The Eastbrooks weren’t royalty, they were of at best middling rank, but they were a vast and wealthy family with rich holdings all across the north and east—between them they held as much land as any kingdom in Britain. They’d been slow to accept Arthur as king—a few had even joined the revolt against him—but a marriage to Guinevere bound the Eastbrooks to the throne, pulling in landholders from all over the map and giving them a solid stake in Arthur’s reign. In Bedivere’s eyes it was the quintessence of Arthur’s kingliness that he sacrificed whatever unnamed yearnings lay in his heart on the altar of his royal duty.

  She was not unbeautiful, though she was hardly what Bedivere would’ve called womanly. Just sixteen on her wedding day, Guinevere was almost as tall as Arthur. She stood straight as a mast, thin and curveless, with a pale round face and wavy dishwater hair; she looked, Bedivere thought in his less kind moments, like a mop dressed up as a queen. But she made a professional job of it all, smiling and waving and dancing and laughing whenever Arthur whispered to her at a banquet. He’d give her that.

  The Round Table came to Camelot from Guinevere’s father, King Leodegrance, as part of her dowry, and in all honesty it was a bit of a white elephant. It was so big they had to take it apart just to get it inside. They couldn’t throw it away, but what the hell to do with it? But Arthur quickly realized that the Round Table was the kind of problem that could solve several others.

  One of them was that Britain had a surplus of knights. Arthur had needed them for his military campaigns, and he’d egged them on and made sure they were properly trained and kitted out, but now the campaigns were largely over and the knights were still here, knocking around Britain in great numbers with nothing to do. They were getting bored and starting to push people around. He was catching glimpses of that old Utherian cruelty again. They needed to be put to work.

  So Arthur started an exclusive club, answerable directly to him, with a lot of prestige and badges and silly rituals and fancy perquisites attached to it, and of course everybody wanted to be in it. But there was a catch: membership in the Round Table required adherence to a strict code of honor. Arthur would take all that military muscle he’d used to expand Britain’s frontier and steer it inward, to keep order and do good at home. Britain was a big place with a lot of dark corners. The knights would roam at will, exploring, investigating, seeing that justice was done according to God and king. Then they would return to Camelot and tell Arthur all about it over good food and excellent wine.

  But as the Table evolved and the knights pushed deeper into the wilds of Britain, they reported curious things. Wonderful things. They began to catch coy glimpses of the marvelous, the divine weft threaded through the mundane warp of this earthly fabric. They began to have adventures. They were discovering a new frontier within Britain, invisible and passing strange. A new war was starting, and it was a war of wonders.

  A mysterious maiden would turn up at Camelot lugging a magic shield, or a broken sword, or the severed head of her husband or brother or occasionally even herself. A little dog would come yapping into the hall and lead the knights off into the forest where its master lay dying of a cursed wound given him by a floating sword. Giants thundered and ravaged. Sulfurous fumes issued from marble tombs.

  Bedivere watched these developments with a mixture of awe and unease. To be sure there was greatness afoot, undying glory to be won, and he himself was not immune to its siren song. But the stakes were rising too. These adventures were testing the knights, urging them on toward a transcendence that hovered always just out of their reach. God had personally put Arthur on the throne, and now He seemed to have come back to scrutinize his investment. Bedivere loved God, but he loved Arthur more, and he felt nostalgic for the days when the great game of knighthood was just a game. He would have given his life to protect Arthur, but he couldn’t protect him from God.

  Arthur didn’t seem to want him to. The Round Table became his obsession. The knights of the Table were a great force for good, but it went beyond that for Arthur. It was personal. His bottomless intellect had finally met an inexhaustible mystery, a puzzle to consume his entire attention, his whole mind, and his soul along with it. And at the end, at the center of the labyrinth, waited his father.

  Not his earthly father, not Uther, the bad cruel father who’d sent him away. These adventures came from God. A king is the father of his nation, but even a king needs a father of his own. Arthur longed for God’s attention and approval the way any son would, and every time an adventure arose, Arthur felt his father’s eyes on him. Here was the certainty he longed for, that even the sword in the stone couldn’t give him. If he could prove himself to God, he would know who he truly was.

  And there was no end of adventures. It seemed like they would go on forever.

  * * *

  • • •

  They certainly went on for a long time. Twenty years, twenty glorious years, as the young King Arthur gradually became the great King Arthur. His reign was so joyful and peaceful and prosperous that people forgot all about the Arthur that was, the terrified country squire who one morning blundered into the wrong churchyard and inadvertently detonated a miracle.

  But Bedivere didn’t forget, and one night he glimpsed that boy again.

  It was late, very late, and Sir Bedivere and King Arthur sat surrounded by the spectacular wreckage of yet another Round Table feast. Servants were mopping the floor and dragging away tablecloths heavy with spilled wine and gravy. They ferried trays piled with bowls and goblets and pitchers and sodden trenchers back to the kitchens, where the almoner would collect the leftovers to give to the poor.

  Lancelot had retired early, along with other holy joes, and by now even most of the serious drinkers like Villiars and Gawain and his brothers had ceded the field. But tonight for some reason the king was drinking deep. Bedivere had already been sick once, but he wasn’t going to let the king drink alone.

  They’d been silent for a good while, their drunken thoughts staggering in their own separate circles. The cellarer had left them a jug of sticky-sweet hippocras and a board piled with bread and melting wedges of cheese. A servant with a harelip was with great concentration putting out every second candle in the chandelier with a long-handled candlesnuffer to save precious beeswax. Another, thin and somber, was carefully arranging the tall black chairs one by one back into their perfect fans.

  “You know I’m illegitimate,” Arthur said, apropos of nothing. “Mother and father weren’t married when they conceived me. Couldn’t wait. Child of lust.”

  “Everybody knows that, Arthur,” Bedivere said. “Nobody cares.”

  “I care.”

  “Jesus was a bastard, too, you know. Mary and God weren’t married. At least yours got married after.”

  “That’s right.” Arthur snorted. “Me and Jesus. And I’ve got one too now. Bastard I mean. Just like my father. And God.”

  He meant Mordred, of course, who’d shown up at court a few weeks earlier with no advance notice. Wound tight as a crossbow, that one. He was Arthur’s son with Morgause, his own half sister, and therefore the illegitimate half brother of Gawain and the Orkney gang. But of course Arthur made a place for him. Unconsciously he was turning over an old silver coin in his fingers, a keepsake, worn almost smooth, that he took out when he was thinking.

  “You know he raped her.”

  Bedivere felt cold at that. These were things not spoken of.

  “My father killed my mother’s husband and then he raped her. And Merlin helped, and God watched and did nothing. That’s how I was born. She must’ve hated him like poison.” He poured himself some more wine but didn’t drink it. His face was flushed. “Must’ve hated me too.”

  “Arthur. Stop. Your parents would be so proud if they could see you.”

  Bedivere was embarrassed to find himself choking up. He cried easily when he was drunk.

  “If my father were still around to see me, I would hang him.”

  Arthur’s black hair looked flat and lank. He took another sip and blotted his lips with a napkin. He was lost in thought, and he stayed there for a long time. Finally he closed his eyes.

  “Little bear,” he whispered. “I was a little bear once.”

  He said it in the language of his childhood. Bedivere had never heard him speak British before. Arthur began to snore softly.

  For once Bedivere felt free to study his beloved as much as he liked. Asleep, the king looked childlike and at the same time older than his years, all stubble and clogged pores and broken veins. Gazing at him Bedivere felt for a moment every bit the prophet that Merlin was. He could see it all, past, present, and future, and what he saw made him afraid.

  Arthur wasn’t wrong. There was a terrible truth at the heart of his life that colored everything he did and everything he was. Maybe all men had such secrets; certainly he, Bedivere, had one. Arthur’s secret was that when he was hardly more than a child they had handed him the whole world, and that world had a flaw in it, and the flaw was him. He was conceived in sin and deception and murder, and no matter how great a king he became, how passionately he pursued perfection and devoted himself to God, he could never change that. That was the catch, that was the cost, and he could never make it right. It was like one of those cursed wounds from the stories, that would never heal.

  Typically a son like Arthur would destroy his father. If he couldn’t, if his father was beyond his reach, then he would destroy his father’s legacy, the world his father had made, and himself along with it. Bedivere would back King Arthur against any general who ever lived, against Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar put together, but God help Arthur if he ever went to war with himself, because no man could stand against Blaec Artair. Not even Bedivere could save him then.

  And when Arthur fell so would Camelot. And Camelot was the pillar of the world.

  Bedivere woke from his trance to find the hall empty except for a few servants still waiting to clear away and see the weary king safely to bed. The air was full of birdsong. Earlier there had been a pie with live swallows inside that came fluttering out when it was cut open. Now the birds had flown up into the rafters, where they were chirping and twittering away as if it were morning, foolishly, even though dawn was still hours away.

  Seven

  The Last Battle

  “What do you mean, he’s dead?” Collum said.

  “What the fuck do you think he means?” Sir Villiars said.

  Bedivere shot him a look, but Villiars ignored him. Collum looked around helplessly, but it was true. He could see it in their faces. He’d been seeing it all along, he just hadn’t known it for what it was. He felt like a sailor swept overboard by a cold, silent wave. He was far from land, lost at sea, watching the warm lights of his cozy caravel disappearing among the towering swells.

  Nobody had seen. Nobody was coming.

  “He can’t be—”

  “He’s definitely dead,” Sir Dinadan said.

  Collum was breathing hard the way he had after he’d killed the knight. Cold sweat squeezed out of his pores, and for a heartbeat he thought he was going to throw up. It was unimaginable, but he didn’t have to imagine it because there it was, right in front of him. The world in all its unlimited horribleness had imagined it for him. Arthur was dead. And now—he thought miserably, selfishly—who’s going to fix me? Of all the horrible things he’d imagined happening when he got to Camelot, this was so much worse than the worst of them.

  “What happened?” he whispered.

  “Mordred killed him.” Villiars said it like he was reporting the weather. He sliced the head off his ale with two fingers and sucked them noisily, an operation that made Constantine blanch. “His own son. Arthur ran ’im through with a spear first, but Mordred pushed himself right up it and then—”

  He mimed an overhand sword stroke and made a clicking sound. Another silence descended, deeper this time.

  The truly strange part was that everything looked the same. The light, the chairs, the tiny dust motes, the smoke going up through the wooden louvers. The world had died unexpectedly, with no prior symptoms, but its appearance hadn’t changed. All the color should’ve run out of it, all the light should have vanished, endless night should have fallen. Instead it kept on going. The only difference was that now it all meant nothing.

  “It started when Lancelot—” Dinadan began.

  “Oh, don’t.” Constantine cut him off.

  “You’re not going to defend him?”

  “Can you not stop talking about it?!” Bedivere snapped incredulously.

  “One night while Arthur was away hunting, Lancelot slept with the queen,” explained Dinadan, who apparently couldn’t stop, “which is treason. So Arthur had to sentence her to death, but he knew Lancelot would rescue her. What Arthur did not know was that while rescuing her, Lancelot would kill Gawain’s brothers Gareth and Gaheris. Gawain swore bloody vengeance, and he and Arthur chased Lancelot back across the Channel.

  “Except some of us weren’t so sure Lancelot was guilty, because we were accursed fools, and we went with him. Which is why we’re still alive and our betters are all dead. Except for Bedivere. He stayed with Arthur.”

  “Lancelot was wr-wrongfully accused,” Constantine said wearily.

  “Cease your arguing,” said Palomides.

  “Stop,” Bedivere said. “Leave it alone.”

  Collum said nothing. But he knew in his bones, in his soul, that what Constantine said had to be true. Sir Lancelot du Lac would never have betrayed his liege lord.

  When Collum was three his mother died in a blizzard. His stepfather was stuck on the mainland at the time, leaving his mother home with him and his little stepbrother, Eoin, who was only six months old. They were hungry, and they’d eaten everything in the house, so their mother threw a thin blanket round her shoulders and went out for more food. But it was a complete whiteout, and she must’ve gotten turned around somehow. She walked the wrong way, lost her bearings, and ended up in the woods. It was a month before a dog found her face down on a frozen pond, a mile and a half from home. They had to saw her out of the ice.

  Collum knew he must have loved her, that his tiny heart must have been wild with uncomprehending grief, but he couldn’t remember it. He’d lost both his mother and his grief for his mother too. He sometimes wondered if it was gone completely, or if it was still there inside him somewhere, locked away in an unmarked chest with his memory of her voice, and her face, the silver key lost forever.

  But now he knew what it must have felt like.

  “In what might charitably be called a lapse of judgment,” Dinadan went on briskly, “Arthur left his incestuous bastard son Mordred in charge of Britain while he besieged Lancelot. Did you really not know about this? As soon as he was gone Mordred told everyone Arthur was dead and seized the throne for himself. He rallied half the country to his side. Arthur came straight back across the Channel and there was a battle at Camlann.

  “Arthur died. So did Mordred and practically everybody else.”

  “Why was Arthur fighting with a spear?” Villiars said, as if it had just occurred to him. “When he had Excalibur on his hip?!”

  He said it as though if he poked enough holes in the story it would cease to be true and Arthur would be alive again.