Sorry for taking so long, guys. I'd like to thank Egyptian Tamer (double thanks for two nice reviews), Ivory Novelist, L J Groundwater, Camreyn (thank you for nagging me! It helps!), hornofgondor2, Gypsy Luv! (thank you twice!), mssparrington, Squallsgurlygurl, Velven, my friend who would like to sleep with Hugo Weaving, ElleloveMax, God (lol- pretzels for Bush!), Lyowyn, Marblez, gwen, forgotten-magick (thank you for two reviews…) keelin (I hope this encourages you to read more slashy goodness!), Green Bird, Jewely and Zuzivlas.

Chapter Eleven

Sunset

Lancelot clung to Tristan like a shipwrecked sailor to driftwood.

"You're no longer a mystery," he had whispered. In one moment, years of reasoning had been torn apart: Tristan was not as wild and free as he had always appeared.

Lancelot remembered Tristan's words of – could it be? – just two days ago:

"Wild things don't have names."

Tristan had a name and perhaps he had never been so wild at all. Or perhaps he had waited his whole life to be tamed.

It didn't matter. Lancelot could see the only thing he needed to know as clearly as his reflection in a mirror; he could see it in Tristan's eyes just as he could hear it in Tristan's voice.

His heart laid bare.

Tristan had fallen in love with him.

"Arthur! Arthur!" Gawain chased his captain through the stone outbuildings. "Won't you speak to me?" he demanded, once he had finally caught up.

Arthur turned at last. His appearance was made haggard by too much worry and too little sleep. "I'm sorry," he said. It was an unusually empty apology and Gawain swept it quickly aside.

"We must leave soon," he said. "The Saxons could come at any day."

Arthur's voice was weary. "I know."

"I ask your leave to pack."

"You are free, Gawain. Leave when you will."

Gawain watched his Commander's retreating back. He was stunned, if truth be told. In the space of a few days - since Lancelot's capture - Arthur had become a different person. He looked older and somehow shadowed, as if a black cloud constantly hung over him.

Inadvertently, Gawain found himself remembering something from a time so long ago that it now seemed like a dream:

You never know what you have until you lose it.

Percival had said that or had it been Kay? It scarcely mattered now. The point was that Arthur had nearly lost Lancelot.

Nearly.

Arthur collapsed on his bed. He lay face down with his head buried in the pillow. The iron buckle of his belt dug into his skin and yet he didn't move. He was too tired; too far gone.

Still he danced the fine line between sleeping and waking for many minutes, listening to the sound of his own ragged breathing.

And then he slipped into another world- so slowly and so gently that the point where sleep ends and dreams begin was nothing more than a blur.

He found himself in a sunlit glade in the middle of a gentle wood. There was pink and white blossom on the floor and the heady scent of flowers on the air. The sky was the bright cloudless blue of a warm spring and yet there was no birdsong to be heard.

A glint of silver caught the corner of Arthur's eye and he turned to find himself looking at the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

Lancelot lay on the ground, as naked as the day he was born, amidst the blossom. His skin was dappled by the sunlight that filtered though the branches above. Stray white flower petals had settled in his hair and Arthur's fine silver cross was about his neck and glinting in the light.

A fallen angel…

"Come closer…" Lancelot whispered. Arthur obeyed, kneeling in the soft and slightly damp earth. Without knowing why, he reached out and took a white petal from Lancelot's hair and rubbed it between his fingers.

"Are you going to kiss me?" Lancelot asked, with his voice like milk and honey.

Arthur didn't start or act surprised. It was exactly what he had expected; what he had longed for and prayed for.

He leaned down and touched his lips to Lancelot's.

And Lancelot vanished like smoke on the wind.

Arthur woke up, his shivering belied by the sweat that coated his body and soaked his hair.

Gawain crouched on the floor, packing up the few things he had acquired in fifteen years of service to Rome. He neatly folded a light cloak for the spring months, two thin tunics for summer and a pair of spare breeches. On top he placed leather sandals, some glass beads for his mother at home and a wooden horse that Dagonet had whittled for him.

Fifteen years of service and so few possessions…

Galahad stood in the doorway and watched his friend pack in a surly silence, his arms folded across his chest. After all the years of longing for home he didn't want to leave now it came to it. He didn't want to abandon Britain in ignominy; he didn't want to leave it to the bastard Saxons who had done the unthinkable to one of his friends.

And so Galahad sulked.

"What is your problem?" demanded Gawain. He threw the question over his shoulder.

Galahad sighed and gave up his weight to the doorpost. "It's a long way back," he said. "To Sarmatia, I mean."

"Are you scared?" Gawain waited for the firm denial. For the 'don't be stupid; I'm a grown man' speech. It never came. He abandoned his packing and turned around to face his friend. "It's an awfully long way back," he said. "Fifteen years back…"

"Aye."

Bors sat in the stables and rubbed oil into his horse's tack, until the leather was soft and supple. He then gave fetched Lancelot's saddle and gave it the same meticulous attention. Across the room, Arthur's squire, Jols, had set about sharpening every weapon he could lay his hands on, until the fortress echoed with the sound of scraping metal. He had begun the tedious work in the armoury but had soon moved to the stables where the horses and the presence of Bors took away the awful loneliness that now seemed to fill the air.

"You think there'll be a fight?" Jols asked Bors, as he tested the edge of a knife. It was razor-sharp.

Bors gave a grim smile. "There's always a fight, mate."

Jols nodded. He had expected the answer. "Tell you what, I'll go and get two plates of that stew I can smell."

"Sounds good to me."

The scent of Vanora's cooking was indeed heavy on the air. Meat stewed in ale and twice-cooked bread. It wasn't fine food but at least it was filling.

Arthur, red-eyed from his troubled sleep, found his way to the kitchen. Wordlessly, Vanora spooned meat onto a huge chunk of bread. She watched as Arthur ate it.

"You're not well," she said.

"No." Arthur accepted more bread, this time soaked in gravy that trickled down his chin. "Has Lancelot been eating?"

Vanora thought of Tristan's twice daily visits to the kitchen. He always left with two laden plates, one of which always has the softest middle part of the loaf of bread or the most tender cuts of meet. "Tristan takes him food," she told Arthur and then, hesitantly, she added, "It seems our hawk has finally been tamed…"

At the mention of Tristan, Arthur's face fell. He ate the rest of the food in silence, studiously avoiding Vanora's eyes, which were altogether too sharp.

He couldn't, however, avoid Jols. His squire breezed into the room and asked Vanora for two plates of stew. His eyes fell on Arthur.

"You don't look well, sir," he said.

Arthur glanced up at him and tried to change the subject. "You've been sharpening weapons." The sound of blade scraping against stone had been hard to ignore.

"Aye, sir. Good to be prepared- you taught me that."

Arthur's furrowed brow creased even more. "Prepared for what?" he asked.

"Whatever's round the corner, sir."

Arthur nodded. It was a good answer.

Jols gave his Captain his best crooked smile. "I expect it's hard to leave the fort," he said. "After all these years. The place is full of memories."

One hundred young knights round a table clapping one another on the shoulders. Brothers in arms.

Eighty knights, battle-hardened but still smiling, drinking toasts to the glorious dead.

Fifty knights drowning their sorrows in pot after pot of ale.

Twenty knights trying to forget. The grim smiles between men that might be dead come the morrow.

Six knights with freedom that they are too bitter to enjoy.

"Leaving here has weighed heavily on my mind," Arthur told Jols.

He watched Jols leave and then jumped as Vanora settled a hand on the his shoulder.

"You're a God-awful liar," she said. "I know what troubles you."

"The dead weigh heavily on my mind," Arthur confessed.

"Not only the dead…" Vanora suggested. Her smile knew too much.

Arthur resigned himself to the inevitable conversation as Vanora fetched two pints of ale before perching next to Arthur. She weighed her next words carefully and almost whispered them as if mindful of Arthur's evident embarrassment. "I know you love Lancelot," she said.

"I love him like he's my twin brother- my own kin."

Vanora shook her head. "No you don't."

Arthur didn't look at her. He looked at the table, at his tankard of ale, at his hands, down at the floor.

Eventually, he spoke. "Sometimes I feel... As if I don't know how to feel," he paused and downed his tankard of ale in a series of gulps. "And sometimes I feel..." Another pause, several short beaths. "I feel too much."

The Deep, Silent Night

Lancelot was awake long before he opened his eyes. He could feel the heat of Tristan's bare-chested body pressed up against his own. Tristan's hair, wild and tangled as it was, tickled his neck as he lay still with his head nestled against Tristan's shoulder.

It was the silent hour just before dawn. This day's silence was broken only by the sound of Lancelot's own ragged breathing. Tristan made no such noise, although his right hand was curled around the older man's wrist so that the heartbeat pulsed beneath his fingers. The pulse spoke of life; it was a rhythm of promises- of stories that could be.

Lancelot's other hand rested on the taut skin of Tristan's torso. Slowly, he traced feather light circles across the lean muscle and ran the tips of his fingers through the course hair.

"Do you realise that tickles?" Tristan sounded faintly amused.

A rosy blush spreads across Lancelot's cheeks. Thank goodness it was dark. "I didn't know you were awake," Lancelot stammered.

"I don't sleep," Tristan said. His right arm, already wrapped around and beneath Lancelot, tightened its grip. Obediently, Lancelot allowed himself to be rolled onto his side. The change of position caused a sharp stab of pain and he clenched his teeth together. The pain subsided quickly- so quickly that Lancelot suspected he'd only imagined it.

On opening his eyes, he was surprised to see that the embers of the fire across the room illuminated Tristan's outline. His eyes shone in the faint light, even as the rest his face was shadowed. Transfixes, mesmerized, unable to help himself, Lancelot leaned forward. He stopped with his lips a mere fraction from Tristan's. He didn't dare take it any further.

"Don't fear me," Tristan said.

Lancelot gently touched his lips to Tristan's.

The kiss was short. Lancelot sighed and rolled onto his back. He was separated from Tristan by a finger's breadth and yet he could feel the heat that radiated from the other man.

"What will you do now?" Lancelot asked; he knew that Tristan came from a closely-knit tribe- the tattoos on his face were more that evidence to that.

"I might go to Sarmatia," said Tristan noncommittally. "I might travel. I have a fancy to see the lands of the far, far east. The spice lands."

For a moment Lancelot settled into his own thoughts. "The papers are worthless," he murmured.

"Sorry?"

"The papers giving us free passage. I always imagined that they would be like freedom on a piece of paper and yet now, now I have one, I don't know what to do. There's too much choice… I fear I will spend the rest of my life trying to find my way home."

Tristan sounded thoughtful. "Are you saying that serving Rome was freedom in its own way."

"No. I'm saying that we've never had freedom. We haven't, have we?" Lancelot demanded.

"You should ask Arthur. He's the one with the gilded tongue." Tristan sounded bitter in a way he never had before.

"I'm asking you," said Lancelot, suddenly petulant and angry too.

Tristan leaned forward and tried to kiss him again. His lips caught on Lancelot's jaw. "Yes," he said reluctantly. "We've had freedom: the freedom to die."

"But what about the freedom to live?"

"I think we have it now."

Lancelot moved closer to Tristan. "Oddly enough, I used to think you wanted to die." His voice took on a whimsical tone. "That soldiering was just the means to the end."

Tristan swallowed. His palms were sweating for the first time in his life. "I want you to come away with me," he said.

Later, as the black night sky became a dull grey, a thousand Saxon campfires were extinguished. Tents disappeared and the heavy baggage carts were left behind.

The Saxon army marched south.

Above their destination, Hadrian's Wall, a winged shadow soared through the morning sky. It cried shrilly, screaming for its master.

The hawk without a name had all but been abandoned.

Tbc…