Camelot & Vine (21 page)

Elaine released me and collapsed onto
Heulwen, who fell onto the pillows. Elaine’s eyes closed but her
hands reached out and found Lynet on one side and Heulwen on the
other. She grasped their clothing, hung on and gulped for air.
Lynet began to weep. My hand tingled with the return of blood.

“It’s a boy.” Beatha sounded more surprised
than pleased, and I remembered she’d predicted a girl. She placed
the babe on his mother’s bulbous belly, his flesh-gray umbilical
cord intact. Elaine made no move to hold him, but Guin
instinctively reached to balance him beneath his mother’s breast.
For a few seconds the only sound was Elaine’s gasping, while Beatha
cleaned the boy’s nose and eyes. Guin gazed at him, her chest
heaving, her lips pressed hard together.

Beatha lifted the babe and gave his behind a
solid smack. The child himself announced to the dell that
Lancelot’s baby was born.

“Thanks be to the gods,” Heulwen whispered.
Nestled in Heulwen’s arms, Elaine let her hands flutter, feeling
for something. Guinevere lifted the baby to her, and she cradled
him at her breast to nurse.

I tried not to cry, blinking fast and
sniffing, I turned my face upward to prevent the tears from
falling. But my eyes filled and tears fell, running down my cheeks
until I forgot myself.

-----

“Your birthing spell is like none I’ve
witnessed before, mistress,” said Heulwen.

“Truly,” said Lynet.

We sat on the threshold of the birthing hut,
watching the dawn turn pink above the trees. Heulwen had doomed one
of the chickens that wandered the dell, and we huddled by the fire
to eat it. With Beatha as sentinel, Elaine slept inside, her baby
in her arms.

“The Saxon spell’s the only one I know,” I
said. “But please, remember King Arthur said ‘no magic.’”

“Your secret’s safe,” said Lynet.

“Mmhmm.” Heulwen tossed a bone into the
fire. “Saved her life.”

“And Lancelot’s baby,” said Lynet.

Guinevere gnawed at a bone and said nothing.
But she smiled.

-----

“I’m afraid not.” Myrddin put down the clay
battery with force, rocking the table.

“Uh-oh.”

“What is uh, oh?”

“I kind of promised someone.” Morning
trickled into the dell from above the treetops. Across the garden,
the women snoozed in the birthing hut.

“To whom did you promise a pregnancy
potion?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

He frowned at me over his nose. If he’d had
reading glasses they would have perched there, enhancing his
scowl.

“You must be careful, Casey. It is perilous
to promise what you cannot deliver.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

It was impossible to avoid being jostled in
the tiny church. It wasn’t so easy to breathe, either. Soldiers
lined the walls and filled the tiny apses of the same building on
which I’d seen workers completing the thatch a few days before, a
building so new that when one did manage to breathe one smelled the
cow dung used to mix the plaster. Ladies and farmers squeezed
together on the benches. Everyone who lived at Cadebir must have
been there, Christian or no; how often does one witness the
christening of the first-born male child of Lancelot du Lac?

Lynet and I found seats at the back where
the scarcity of oxygen was relieved by the occasional opening and
closing of the wooden door. A tiny window at the front, high above
the altar and barely big enough for a bird to perch in, allowed in
a bit of sunlight, if not air.

I stretched my neck to peek over rows of
hatless heads. Lancelot was easy to spot, glad-handing through the
congratulators and glancing about to see who was seeing him. Elaine
sat placidly in the front row beside Guinevere. King Arthur was
seated on his wife’s other side, his arm draped across her shoulder
like a comfortable scarf, his unreadable back to the crowd.

The door opened behind us. Several bodies
pressed against the walls to allow passage for a ceremonial
procession consisting of Caius, lugging an iron bucket in his arms,
and the droopy-eyed priest, who pressed a vellum scroll to his
lips. Caius bent his long legs to keep from jostling the water but
he failed, sloshing and splashing himself with every step. The
priest made smooth progress behind him, his pious eyes lifted to
the ceiling.

Cai placed the bucket on the simple altar
before the congregation, receiving a final splash to his chin. He
stood aside and bowed his proud head. The priest faced the room and
looked us over, waiting for all stirrings to subside. Finding us
worthy at last, he unrolled the scroll and cleared his throat. The
collective body leaned forward. Soldiers stood on tiptoe. Lynet
breathed in but not out. The people of Cadebir were not often read
to.

“
Hodie congregamus nos ut filium Lancelot
du Lac, dux Belgae, inungere...”

Lynet let out the air she’d been holding.
“This must be the holy part,” she whispered.

“I wouldn’t know.”

The cleric droned on. His congregants
relaxed into whispers and fidgets. After a while the new parents
stepped to the altar. Lancelot’s posture radiated pride. Elaine
cooed to the infant as she reluctantly handed him over to the
priest, who dangled the babe over the bucket.
“In nomine patris,
filii et spiritus sancti...”

I thought it a crime to dunk the poor baby
with so little air in the room already, and the underwater interval
seemed perilously long. When the priest finally raised the dripping
child, the boy wailed his indignant protest. Everyone laughed,
perhaps in relief, and someone said that, judging by the cry,
Lancelot’s offspring was as powerful as he was.

When the laughter died down, the priest
spoke in words we all understood. “In the name of Jesus our
Saviour, I christen thee Galahad.”

King Arthur’s back stiffened.

One little fact about Galahad, the purest
and most powerful knight, the one who achieved the holy grail, had
slipped my mind. He was the son of Lancelot.

The king dropped his arm from the queen’s
shoulder and turned to search the crowd. Guinevere looked up at him
but by then he’d forgotten her and found me. He shook his head in
joyful amazement. I wondered why. Then I remembered.

I had predicted Galahad.

-----

“My lady wizard astonishes me!”

Outside the church in the blessed open air,
King Arthur threw his arms around me. His enthusiastic embrace
surprised me and even hurt a little. I rested my face against his
chest for a second, letting my blush pass, engulfed in his smell of
burnt oats and wood smoke. I hadn’t felt so approved by a man since
my father was alive.

But pleasing my father was easy. “That’s my
girl,” he’d say, and he’d be right. Pleasing Arthur was unexpected,
“astonishing.” Pleasing him thrilled me with a blood-rush like a
first kiss. And Arthur’s smell was not my father’s smell. His arms
were not my father’s arms.

With one arm around me and the other around
his queen, King Arthur gabbed with his friends like a tipsy barfly,
while a crowd formed on the dusty path like it does after a
wedding.

Caius, his shirt finally dry, ducked out
under the church doorway with his elegant, gray-haired wife. Their
arrival built anticipation for Lancelot’s entrance, which, when at
last it happened, the crowd greeted with applause. Lancelot
accepted his accolades with a deep bow, and allowed his wife to
fade into his background as though she’d had little to do with the
work of bearing the child she held in her arms.

King Arthur let go of me to be the first to
grasp Lancelot’s hand. “Lancelot! Have you heard the prophecy?”

“Prophecy?”

“Mistress Casey prophesied the name of your
son.”

Lancelot squinted, his spotlight dimmed.

Elaine gazed up at her husband. “But even I
didn’t know,” she said.

“Galahad is to become a great warrior.” The
king made certain to be heard above the crowd. “That’s what you
said, is it not, mistress?”

“Something like that.” I regretted having
mentioned it.

“I’m amazed,” said Medraut. “You are shield
as well as prophet.” I detected sarcasm, but King Arthur didn’t
seem to notice.

“Casey saved Elaine’s life too, Your Grace,”
said Lynet. “And Galahad’s.”

“How so?” asked the king.

“She did it with—”

Lynet stopped herself and I held my breath,
trying not to glare at her.

“—her womanly knowledge.” She hooked her arm
in Gareth’s.

“Wizard and midwife,” said the king,
apparently not caring to know the details of childbirth. “Are you a
physician, too?”

“Not really, Your Grace.”

Lancelot tried to smile but his face
pinched. “I am at a loss as to how to show my gratitude, Mistress
Casey.”

“There’s no need. I was happy to.”

King Arthur hugged me to his side again,
making me trip over his feet in the dust. “Mistress Casey, I
treasure you more each day.”

“I’m glad, Your Grace.”

“So great a wizard must call me ‘Sire,’ as
my closest friends do.”

I felt a rush of joy, like someone had
poured a bucket of it over me. I could only bow my head to hide my
blush. Lancelot called him “Sire.” Bedwyr, Sagramore, his son
Medraut—even Myrddin called him “Sire.” They all did, in a way
acknowledging him as “father.” I wanted that, too. Would he someday
allow me to call him by his name? Even in my private thoughts I’d
never dared think of him as “Arthur.”

Guin reached across her husband to take my
hand.

“Are you three not a pretty picture?” said
Lancelot. “Felicitations, Mistress Casey, on your promotion to
‘close friend of the king.’“

“Don’t be jealous, Lance,” said Arthur.
“There’s room in my heart for an infinite number of friends.
Loyalty is all I require.” He smiled at his disloyal friend and
turned to me. “Casey, I’m filled with hope. How do you feel?”

“I feel fine, Sire,” I said, inhaling the
thin air of the inner circle.

“Good! Sagramore, prepare the saddles.
Tomorrow we ride. We have Saxons to kill.”

TWENTY-NINE

Smoke rose from the smithy behind the barn.
I hunched my shoulders against the pre-dawn cold, seated astride
Lucy and bundled in Sagramore’s cloak.

Myrddin’s small, gilded knife, plus the
largest dagger I could manage, couldn’t protect me in battle
against experienced soldiers twice my size. Bedwyr hadn’t issued me
a sword because I couldn’t lift one. Magic was the only thing that
could save me, and where was I going to find that?

King Arthur cantered up to me on his
chocolate-brown stallion, Llamrai, the one horse at Cadebir who
came close to Lucy in size. “What do you think?” he asked, stroking
Llamrai’s new saddle.

“Very nice.” Sagramore and his men had made
a fine copy of Lucy’s tack. The wooden stirrups were not as fancy
but every bit as serviceable as Lucy’s metal ones.

“You see, we have more.” The king opened his
arms to direct my gaze to the barn. Horses stamped and snorted
outside its doors, their nostrils steaming in the early morning
cold. I watched Sagramore cinch a new saddle onto Bedwyr’s muscular
pony. Gareth and Agravain were already aboard their horses amid the
group of soldiers by the pasture fence.

By the barracks, half a dozen of Lancelot’s
men mounted up. Their steeds were outfitted with the usual small
blankets, in apparent defiance of this new way of riding. Either
that or Lancelot was low on Sagramore’s priority list.

With darkness still upon us, Bedwyr’s shout
came. “The carts are ready!”

The king’s excitement was evident in the
flaring of his nostrils. “You’re my protector,” he said. “You ride
with me.”

Good, because I liked him. Bad, because I
couldn’t even protect myself.

-----

Before we felt the heat of the rising sun we
turned north, leaving the main road for a lesser path across the
plains. We also left behind the tent city south of the road, and
the hundreds of soldiers there.

“Why don’t we take the army, Sire?” I asked.
No matter how strong our men were, no matter how fierce they looked
in torch light or how excited they were to kill Saxons, fifteen of
them was insufficient for my taste.

“That is not my plan.” King Arthur threw his
shoulders back and breathed the morning air through his
nostrils.

“What is your plan, Sire? If I may ask.”

“You must, for you are to protect me.” He
glanced over his shoulder, checking. The others were several
horse-lengths behind us. “My plan is stealth, surprise and
destruction. Keep it to yourself. The spy may be among us.”

“Sounds good.” It sounded vague.

“The Saxons we seek are mere stragglers,
left behind from the incursion we were fighting when you appeared.
If I’m correct, they’re caught between Poste Perdu and Beran Byrig
and cannot return across our border to their people. They’re likely
hiding in the woods north of the Giant’s Ring, not far from where
we left them, hunting for food and robbing travelers on the
road.”

“Why don’t the troops at Beran Byrig take
care of them?”

He smiled as though I were the simplest
child. “Because revenge is mine.”

“But you already killed the Saxon who tried
to kill you.”

“You may recall I killed two. You killed a
third. But they shall all die, every one.” The king shook loose his
hair. “The world will know what happens to those who breach my
borders and seek to murder me.”

The thought that I’d killed a man made my
stomach sick. What grief had that meant to his intimates? What, if
anything, had it done to the future? I preferred to think I’d
accidentally run into a Saxon and accidentally forced him onto the
king’s sword. I patted Lucy’s neck and kept silent.