Now we are home
A.N.: My dear readers, I am very sorry for the long time it took me to return to this story. The past half year has been hellish, however. My dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and we, as a family, had to deal with that and see how he responded to treatment and so on. I don't want to bore you with this stuff, I just want to let you know that I have not forgotten this story and I still intend to finish it.
Thank you for reading, I hope you'll enjoy it still, after all this time. To me, this chapter feels a little choppy, and I know that it is rather short, but I'm still easing back into it. The next one will be better, I hope. Please review.
Chapter Twenty
Camlann was burning. The people watched, petrified, from the battlements of Camelot as their houses went up in flames, their livelihood turning into ash before their eyes. Dark shapes moved amidst the flickering light of the fires, Caradoc's men, coming ever closer to the barred and bolted gate of Camelot. The men and women watched helplessly, clutching crude, makeshift weapons in trembling hands. Women burst into tears, averting their eyes from the sight, their tears turned into streaks of copper by the firelight.
"Archers!" Guinevere's clear voice rang out, and the creaking of two dozen bowstrings answered her, as they were drawn back, arrows notched, aiming at the shadowy enemy in the night. A war cry rose, an ungodly howl, terrifying enough to set the bones of Camelot's defenders to shaking, as the attackers surged forward, charging towards the walls.
"And release!" came the queen's cry. The bows sang, the arrows flew, and the war cry turned into individual screams of pain as many an arrow struck home. The people of Camelot cheered and their strength returned threefold. Their homes they could burn, but their loved ones, their lives, their children they would not touch, as long as their beloved queen was still with them, commanding them into battle.
OooOooO
On Arthur's front, the battle had scarcely begun before turning into slaughter. Maelgwyn had not counted on Merlin's men among Arthur's forces, and the knights, better trained than any force in Britain, cut through the armed clansmen in nothing but boiled leather and cloth like a sharp scythe through wheat. After one charge only, Maelgwyn's men were running, tripping over the corpses of their fallen comrades in their haste.
The self-styled king of Gwynedd himself had fled the field of battle as soon as he had seen how outmatched his men were. He had turned tail and ran, surrounded by the only men on horseback in his entire army.
Arthur called a stop to the madness shortly afterwards, and his men pulled back, allowing the disorganized horde to flee before them and disappear into the forest. The ground was slick with blood.
As his knights gathered around him, Arthur quickly glanced over each of them, breathing more freely as he saw them all alive and none hurt to gravely. They had weathered one more storm. But the danger was not over yet, they knew, for Caradoc was somewhere, and with him an army they had not yet defeated.
An uneasy thought had settled deep within him.
Had that really been it? Could it have been this easy? Or were the rest of them waiting somewhere, or worse, striking the heart of his young kingdom as it lay all but unprotected?
After a moment's deliberation, he commanded half his force to stay with the wounded and make the trek back at a slower pace, the other half he led with full speed back the way they had come, back towards Camelot.
OooOooO
Marian flinched whenever the sound of the battering ram striking the gate echoed across the courtyard of the fortress. She had gathered a group of women and children around her and tried to keep them calm by giving them a number of easy tasks to do like preparing bandages or fetching and heating water to be used later when the wounded were sure to arrive.
It was there that Galahad found her. The young knight was still limping badly, but the imminent danger allowed him to disregard the pain.
"Marian," he called her, forcing her to quickly disentangle herself from three crying children who had tried to climb into her lap simultaneously.
"Sir," she answered, bobbed her head and wiped her hands on her skirt, "what can I do for you?" Her voice had already adopted the tone she usually reserved for dealing with wounded men who were too stubborn to lay still while being tended.
Galahad gave her an appreciative nod as he regarded the group she was supervising.
"Keep them as busy as you can," he advised in an undertone. "Anything to prevent them from flooding the courtyard in a panic. Also, find your father and your sister and fetch all the healing supplies you can find."
She nodded quickly, but caught his arm as he turned away.
"Sir... how bad is it?"
Her voice was barely a whisper, almost inaudible over the hustle and bustle in the courtyard. He regarded her silently for a moment, his youthful face grim above the dark beard. The torchlight bathed him in golden glow and cast dark shadows onto his high cheekbones.
"It is bad, Marian," he answered her evenly after a while, "very bad. If they break through the gate before reinforcements come, we will all be dead by the time Arthur returns."
Marian felt her heart turn to ice at these words, felt the icy claw of fear grasp her chest even more tightly, but she swallowed and forced herself to adopt a brave face.
"Stay safe, my lord," she bade him quietly and he smiled, one of those rare smiles that lit up his face and set the hearts of many girls to racing.
"You, too, Marian," he told her and gave her shoulder a brief squeeze with one rough, calloused hand. "Lancelot would never forgive me otherwise."
And off he went, back to Guinevere and Taliesin upon the wall, to command and support the archers with his own bow.
Marian stood still for a moment, pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes and tried to reorganize her thoughts.
Her father would be on his way already, she knew, having gathered what supplies there were at their home, and Rhian would be with Gawain in the healing rooms. It was there she should go, as well, and look in on the wounded knight as well as getting her sister and the supplies, thus killing two birds with one stone.
Her head was pounding already, every shout and scream twice as loud in her ears as it actually was, and she had to shove her way through a crowd of people, catching a dozen elbows in the sides before she reached the doors. She heard only one soft movement behind the door, and then, before she had time to turn her head, the world splintered into shards of pain and the floor rushed to meet her as she fell under the blow from the man behind the door.
OooOooO
The world slowly drifted back into focus, through a haze of red and black. Her head was pounding horribly and she felt sick to her stomach. The floor seemed to move like a ship on a stormy sea and it took all her willpower to keep from vomiting. Dimly aware that someone was speaking to her, she blinked once, twice, and wished the light would stop flickering like that. The heat was blistering. A... fire?
Marian's eyes snapped open, just as two large, calloused hands grasped her shoulders and hoisted her upwards. Her stomach lurched once more and she gasped for air.
"We have to get out!" the voice near her growled and she was pulled against a solid chest, her arm slung across broad shoulders. Tangles of blond hair caught her in the face and only then did her sluggish mind make the connection.
"G...Gawain?"
"Aye!" the knight growled, and Marian squinted at him in the dancing light. He was pale as death, and beads of cold sweat gleamed on his forehead.
"You shouldn't move," she told him weakly. He laughed, a harsh, painful sound.
"Move or burn, Marian!"
She glanced around and felt fear lance through her. They were surrounded by flames, the entire room was engulfed in fire! How had this happened? How could the healing rooms have caught fire? Was Camelot even still standing?
Fire. Right, there was... Rhian! Before she could protest again, the big knight had shouldered open the door and cold night air washed over them. She was dropped onto the floor and finally lost the fight with consciousness. Dimly aware that the sounds of battle were close by, she felt the world slip away from her once more.
OooOooO
The first sunlight of the next day fell upon a bleak sight. Many houses in Camlann were naught but smoldering ruins, blackened timber reaching up into the sky like bones amid the ash. Dead bodies littered the ground around the gate, pierced by arrows, cut apart with sword or axe. Women and children moved among them, trying to find their husbands, their fathers or brothers.
The gate had not been breached. Camelot had survived. Like the angels in those strange Christian stories, the men Constantinus of Dumnonia had promised had descended upon their attackers, driving them back into the burning village. That alone would not have been enough to ensure victory, but Arthur and his knights had arrived just in the nick of time, and together, though they were tired and bloody and their mounts near exhaustion, they had beaten Caradoc of Ebrauc, leaving his body broken upon the battlefield and his men running for the hills.
Still, the people of Camlann and Camelot did not rejoice in their victory. It had been bought at a dear cost. Many men lay dead, and not just soldiers. Farmers, craftsmen, servants, all those who had picked up a weapon in defense of their home, had fought alongside their queen, and quite a number of them had paid with their lives.
Lancelot walked among the survivors, his heart constricting with grief. He had endured both battles with nothing but a shallow cut to the arm, but there were other kinds of pain. In the distance, he saw Guinevere and Arthur talking to Gweir, but he knew that no words would comfort the healer. Just as no words would ever comfort Tristan, who had hidden himself somewhere to suffer alone and in silence.
They had just returned to the fortress, their hearts still light and overjoyed at winning, when Taliesin and Galahad had met them in the courtyard, their faces grave, and told them that someone had started a fire within Camelot.
Gawain, mercifully awakened by the heat, had managed to save himself and Marian, but for Rhian, who must have been further inside, probably rendered unconscious by the smoke, there had been no way of saving her. Nobody had yet dared to search the scorched ruin of the house of healing for the charred remains of her, but already her death was a certainty. They had searched everywhere, but she had not been found among the survivors.
Tristan had taken all that without a single word. His stony face had not betrayed an ounce of feeling while he listened to his brothers, his friends, expressing their condolences at the loss of someone whom he had never even been able to acknowledge openly as his woman. Then he had left, silent as ever, without a backwards glance.
Lancelot felt his heart sink further as he ascended the stairs towards the room they had put Marian in. While he was glad that she was alive, gladder than he could have said, he knew not what to say to her, what condolences to offer someone for the loss of a sister.
He pushed open the door without knocking. His footsteps rustled in the clean rushes upon the floor.
Marian was awake. She sat upright in bed and looked very pale and very small in the thin shift and amidst a tangle of blankets. Her green eyes were huge in her small, heart-shaped face and the look she gave him was heart-wrenching.
OooOooO
Marian did not even try to speak as Lancelot entered the room. Her throat was still raw, both from the smoke and from crying, and her mind had long since given up on speech. There was nothing to say, nothing that would make the remotest bit of sense. Whenever she had tried speaking after she had awoken out there, in the mud, she had tried to tell people that they were mistaken, that her sister could not possibly be dead. But no-one would listen to her, nobody took her words for anything more than the ravings of a girls half mad from grief.
There was no proof she could offer, nothing but the knowledge that she would have known if Rhian had died in that fire. She had always known when her sister was sick, she had always felt it when Rhian was unwell. There was simply no way her sister could have passed from this world without her knowing it.
After they had left her alone to rest, she had wrecked her brain trying to come up with some kind of plan, some kind of way to convince someone that her sister was merely lost and in need of help, but so far, she had not been able to come up with anything and the silence had become deafening. Lancelot's arrival was a gift from heaven.
Suddenly he was there, beside her, and he pulled her into a tight embrace, trapping her against his firm chest and resting his cheek on top of her head.
She closed her eyes and breathed him in, reveled in the familiar scent of leather, horse and steel, and she allowed herself to relax against him.
"I am so sorry," he whispered, "so very sorry, my love." His deep, silken voice washed over her like a soothing breeze and the iron band around her chest loosened a little.
"I will take care of you now, I promise."
She did not try to respond, did not argue. She wanted to keep this moment as a perfect memory, wanted to preserve it so she could wrap herself in it when the nights were cold and sad.
Wrapping her arms around his neck, she kissed him, a long, silent declaration of love. Here, in his arms, was home. She knew that he would believe her, he would help her. Her knight, her Lancelot, would never let her down.
...to be continued...