Lancelot woke feeling ravenous. The day before, he had intentionally fasted before going to meet King Arthur and being knighted, and then, after missing breakfast and lunch, he had felt too anxious and tossed about by a sea of emotions to eat much of dinner, even after the Queen had brought him a tray…
With that thought, he buried his head in his hands and decided he didn't want breakfast after all. He had told the Queen of England – well, the Queen of Britain, he supposed she must be, since the other British kings like Sir Gawain were part of King Arthur's court, but it was easier to think of them as the King and Queen of England – anyway, he had told the Queen of England that he felt like hurting her, and he admitted to being in love with the King.
There was a knock on his door. Messengers telling him to leave? But surely they would bang with a mailed fist, rather than the brisk but friendly 'tap, tap-a-tap tap – tap tap!' that Uncle Dap woke him with. 'Good morning,' he called sleepily.
His uncle came in and laid the breakfast tray down on his bedside table. 'The Queen thought you might feel more comfortable having breakfast in bed, this morning,' he said. 'Don't let court life get you into lazy habits, lad – Sir Lancelot, I mean. But what's wrong?' he added, concerned. 'You're usually up and doing press-ups for an hour before you come down to breakfast. Are you ill?'
'That's the same thing Queen Guinevere asked me, last night.'
'Well, have something to eat and see if you feel better after that. The King wants to do some more jousting practice with you, just to prove that yesterday wasn't a fluke.'
So, after having breakfast and getting washed and dressed, Lancelot presented himself to the King. The Queen was with him, and they were holding hands and smiling. They seemed to be very close, despite the King's brief flare-up of anger yesterday. He had no right to come between them. But the Queen held out her hand, welcoming him. He was about to kiss it, but instead she took his hand and shook it warmly, offering companionship as an equal – perhaps even friendship – instead of allowing him to honour her as his liegelord's wife. In the morning, in a calm mood, this seemed more of an excessive intimacy than hugging the night before had been.
'I think we need some time to get to know each other better, over the next few days,' the King said. 'There aren't enough knights home at the moment for a proper tournament, but we generally have one-on-one jousting championships once a week. In the meantime, I thought the two of us might get some more practice in. Or would you prefer to do some fencing first, or archery? Or do you like hawking? Do you have a bird?'
'I'm very out-of-practice in hawking, I'm afraid,' Lancelot said. 'I had a kestrel when I was a boy, but after I turned twelve, I was too busy training for battle, so I gave Kes to my cousin Lionel. I don't have a lot of experience with animals – other than my horse, of course.' He felt guilty at not having been the one to take Cray her breakfast that morning. Uncle Dap had assured him that she was fine – so either he, or one of the King's grooms, must have fed and watered her and seen to her needs. Admittedly, it was Uncle Dap's job, as Lancelot's squire now that he was truly a knight, to attend to tasks like these, but Lancelot, as someone who had still been a squire just the previous morning, felt uncomfortably that he ought to take care of his own horse – and that his uncle really ought to go home, unless he was too afraid of getting into trouble with Lancelot's parents for having allowed him to run away.
At moments like these, he sometimes felt that life would have been much simpler if he had been orphaned as a baby and brought up by a water-fairy instead of by mortals, and then he felt guilty, because that was like wishing his parents and his uncles dead. Besides, what fairy would have had the patience to coach him through six years of practising weight-lifting and throwing javelins and charging with spears and learning to take care of armour?
He snapped back to attention. The King was speaking to him. 'I said, would you like a gyrfalcon?'
'Seriously? But – aren't those only for kings?'
'Does it matter? You're a king's son. Plenty of the knights here are kings. But I don't mean to wish a falcon on you if you're not interested. What do you like to do, when you're not practising fighting?'
Lancelot didn't know how to answer that. What did he do, when he wasn't practising fighting? He cleaned his armour and weapons. He memorised the names for parts of armour, and – at Uncle Dap's insistence – terms in heraldry. He did castle chores – but that would no longer be his job, now that he was a knight. He went to church on Sundays. He fed and groomed Cray and exercised her, but riding when he wasn't jousting wasn't exactly fun; it was just a matter of keeping Cray healthy. Until he had set off for England to find King Arthur, he had barely gone outside except to do jousting practice or to take care of Cray. His life had been one of training in the Armoury at Benwick Castle.
He remembered that party where King Arthur had first spoken to him, and how he and the other pages – and some of the grown-ups – had played apple-bobbing and hide-and-seek and Albion alaunt and pin-the-horn-on-the-unicorn. He hadn't exactly been laughing – he had been too busy concentrating – but it had been fun. He could barely remember, now, what having fun felt like. For the first time, he realised that in his years of training to be, as far as he could, a good knight, he had also trained himself to be a hopelessly boring person whose company no-one except Uncle Dap could be expected to enjoy.
'Do you read?' the King asked.
Did that mean, did he enjoy reading, or was he literate? 'I can read,' he said. Uncle Dap had insisted on it, because he needed to be able to read what different authorities thought of the relative merits of different types of armour.
'That's good,' the King said. 'Not a lot of people here can. Gawain and his brothers can read and write a bit, because there was an old hermit on Orkney who taught him – you might remember him, he and his girlfriend got married in the same service as King Pellinore – but Gareth was the only one who was particularly interested. My foster-father insisted on making Kay and me have school lessons every morning, as well as training for battle in the afternoon, because that was how he and his best friend were brought up. I didn't find out that it wasn't normal for a knight's son to go to school regularly until after I became king. Of course, we had the summer off because we were busy bringing in the hay harvest, like everyone else in the village. Did you help out on the farms around your castle?'
'No, sire.' Lancelot had wondered whether he should – after all, a knight ought to lend his strength to help anyone in need, and surely that included farmers needing every pair of hands available to pick up the hay? But it wasn't considered fitting for a king's son, and besides, he had so much to learn that he couldn't spare the time.
'Did you have much forest around where you lived? The village where I grew up was really just a clearing in a forest full of wild boars and wolves – even small dragons – and outlaws and witches and anthropophagi. We were allowed to climb the trees on the outskirts of the forest around the village, but we weren't supposed to venture deeper in without an adult, because it was so dangerous. I always did, though. Do you like climbing trees?'
'I've never tried.' Lancelot tried to think of a way to continue the conversation. 'Did you fight with the outlaws?'
'Sort of. I fought with them, not against them. I used to be frightened of outlaws when I was little, but some of them were just misfits like old Wat – I think you met him yesterday?'
'Your kennel-keeper?'
'The older one, yes. People in my village used to throw stones at him because of his disfigurement, and it drove him mad, so he ran away to the forest. But there were also organised bands of outlaws – dissidents who objected to King Uther's rule – and they let Kay and me join them on some of their adventures, when they rescued people who had been kidnapped by witches or anthropophagi, especially when the prisoners included people from our village. And on one of these raids, we rescued Wat, and I asked him to come home with me, because I thought Merlin might be able to cure him of his madness. I suppose I thought Merlin could just magic him normal, but Merlin says therapy doesn't work like that. Wat couldn't be just like everyone else, but he could learn to be fully himself. And he seems to be fairly happy, as long as he can spend most of his time with dogs instead of people.'
'Did the outlaws mind when you turned out to be King Uther's son?'
'I think they forgave me. The second-in-command of the band, who was huge, sent me a giant longbow, far too long for me to pull. I don't know whether he meant it as an honour or a joke, or a bit of both. Though you're taller than me,' the King continued, thoughtfully. 'Maybe you should try it.'
So they fetched the giant bow, which Lancelot just about managed to draw, though he didn't do very well with it, and then he and the King practised archery with more normal-sized bows. Even the Queen asked to be allowed to try, and, with the encouragement of the two men, was soon shooting not too badly. When she looked at the arrows they were using – fledged with grey wild goose feathers barred with dark brown – and asked, 'Are these…?' and the King said quietly, 'Yes,' it jabbed Lancelot, once again, with the reminder that these two were a couple, with a shared language of private references that he knew nothing about.
But then the King, remembering, said, 'From a goose I knew, when I was young.'
'You should show Lancelot your menagerie,' the Queen said, and then, to Lancelot, 'He inherited his fascination with animals from Merlin.'
'Merlin – was he the old wizard who came to visit my mother and me in Benwick, about two weeks ago? With a creepy girlfriend?'
'I expect so. I know he and Nimue disappeared two weeks ago, and if they were travelling by magic, they could have arrived in France instantly. Did the old man seem to know everything about you, without being able to explain how?'
'Yes. He said that you both sent your love, and that I was going to get the hope of my heart thirty years from now, and the best knight in the world.'
'You see?' said the Queen encouragingly. 'You're the best knight in the world!'
'I don't know. That's what my mother thought, too, but I don't see how I can be. I think he meant that I'll get the chance to meet the best knight in the world. Maybe because I'll be allowed to serve the best knight in the world,' – he looked pointedly at Arthur here. 'Or maybe I'll train someone who will grow up to be the best knight in the world.'
'I'm fairly sure I'm not the best knight,' said the King. 'I think Merlin was trying to educate me to be the best king in the world – did you know that he used to be tutor to Sir Kay and me, after our original governess left?'
'No, sire.' Lancelot was still wondering how to keep the conversation going. He hadn't met Merlin for more than a few minutes, and he had been too disappointed at discovering that King Arthur was married, and that Gawain had been knighted before him, at the King's wedding, to take much in. He hadn't even known for sure that Merlin and Nimue were magic users until they suddenly vanished. 'What was it like, having a wizard as a tutor?' he asked.
'It was – interesting. And sometimes terrifying. Of course, most of the time we just did normal lessons like maths and Latin and history and geography. But apart from that, he sometimes used magic to show me things – for example, if I was getting bored in a jousting lesson, he might take me to watch a real joust, or if we were listening to someone reading a story about a giant, he might take me to see what the castle of a real ogre looked like. Most of the lessons were about animals. I think he thought that to be a good king, first I needed to know what it was to be human, and that the best way for me to learn what being a human meant was to learn what other creatures are like, and how we are connected to them. Do you know how I found out that I was the King?'
'Is it true that you pulled a sword out of a stone? One with an inscription on it that said "Whoso Pulleth Out This Sword of this Stone and Anvil, is Rightwise King Born of All England"?'
'Yes. I'd heard about the stone and the inscription, but when I saw it I didn't make the connection, or even stop to read the writing. I was Sir Kay's squire, and he wanted to compete in a tournament but he'd left his sword behind at the inn where we were staying, only of course when I went back to fetch it the inn was locked up because everyone had gone to watch the tournament, so I thought I'd better steal this one. I thought it was a war memorial, but I didn't even stop to think about damaging a memorial being an insult to the dead. I just wanted Kay to have a sword, and – this one was calling to me. I could hear music when I touched it, and the light in the churchyard became brighter. And I couldn't pull it out at first, but – everything I had ever learned while I was Merlin's pupil about strength and persistence, the lessons I had learned from fish and snakes, from hawks and geese, from owls and badgers, even from stones and oak trees, all came together, and on the third try I somehow knew how just how to pull it out.'
'I think you must have been like that even before you met Merlin,' said the Queen, squeezing his hand affectionately. 'Stubborn, and loyal, and rushing into things without thinking them through.'
'I suppose I was. When I first met Merlin – I only told Guinevere about this yesterday, Lancelot – it was because our hawk had flown off, and I insisted on going into the forest to try to coax him back, because I couldn't bear to go back to the austringer and tell him we'd lost the hawk he'd lost so much sleep training. But I didn't think about how much worse it would be for Kay to have to go back to the castle and tell them that he'd lost me. So then the next time something similar happened – we were doing archery practice, and a crow had grabbed one of my arrows and flown off with it, and I insisted on chasing after it – Kay warned me that it was obviously a witch's familiar, but when I wouldn't listen, he came with me. So that time, we both got captured by a witch who ate children, and Merlin had to come and duel the witch to rescue us.'
'Was that your sister Morgan?' the Queen asked.
'No, a completely different witch. There were lots of witches and wizards living there – it's a big forest.'
'Was she one of the anthropophagi?' Lancelot asked.
'No, they were different. Madame Mim was English, but the anthropophagi were from a long way away.'
'Like Sir Palamedes?'
'No, not at all. He's a normal human who comes from a country where everyone has black skin. And I certainly can't imagine him eating anyone. The anthropophagi were people who must have come from much further away – so far away that the people weren't even human, but people with dogs' heads, or giant ears so big they could use them as blankets, or people with no mouths who lived on smells – so I suppose they weren't exactly eaters of human flesh, but they were quite happy to feed off the smell of a roasting human. But even though they were eaters of humans, they weren't actually cannibals like Madame Mim, because they weren't human themselves.'
'But – the sword?'
'Ah, yes, the sword. Which I don't have any more, by the way. But the moment I pulled it out – it was the first time in my life that everything had felt absolutely right and I knew what I was doing. And yet – within a few years, starting from shortly after I met you, I had committed one of the worst actions that any king could. Guinevere and I talked about it last night, and we agreed that I should tell you, and fairly soon. But I've been talking about myself far too much as it is. I didn't mean to be so self-centred, when I wanted to spend the day learning more about you.'
'It's all right,' said Lancelot. 'I'd rather listen, if that's all right. You've had a much more interesting life than mine.'
'Or mine,' added the Queen.
'I had a more interesting childhood, anyway. But the question is what we do now, not what we've done in the past. We've all had the childhoods that brought us to where we are now – you exercising in the armoury, me getting into mischief in the forest, Gawain and his brothers running wild over Orkney except when the hermit could be bothered to give them a few lessons or tell them a story, Guinevere…?'
'Nothing very adventurous, I'm afraid. Learning a few languages, playing the lute, practising sewing – mostly just decorative embroidery, not much actually useful textiles work like learning to turn a raw fleece into a warm overcoat, because that was considered far too practical for a princess. And some falconry, but I don't have much experience of that, either. Maybe Arthur should give us both lessons together.'
The King smiled, and Lancelot could feel himself almost smiling too, at least inside, even if he knew that it probably didn't reach his face. 'I'd like that,' he said.
'Let's do that, then. When I was a boy, I never thought I'd really be allowed to be a knight, let alone King. I assumed I'd just spend my life being Sir Kay's squire. But if I'd had a choice of what I could do if I couldn't be a knight, I think I'd have liked to be a falconer – or better still, an austringer. People sneer at hawks compared to falcons, and think they're only good enough for yeomen and priests, but I like them. But all the same, Lancelot, I'd like to see whether the gyrfalcon takes to you.'
