The Return of Sir Percival (30 page)

“Milady, do you remember when I was sent north to aid the men of the Marches against raiders—raiders who later turned out to be Morgana's mercenaries?”

“I remember. You volunteered for the assignment,” Guinevere said, the barest hint of censure in her voice.

Percival did not react to the subtle rebuke, and Guinevere regretted it the instant it was said.

The Knight nodded. “In the year that I was there, I formed and trained a force of men. It was not a full legion … but it was at least two thousand strong, maybe as large as three thousand at the end of my time there. I have sent a rider to the north seeking the aid of those men. I believe a part of that force will come south to—”

“You believe, Sir Percival?” Guinevere interrupted, her voice rising. “You would have me gamble all on a mere belief?”

“My Queen,” Percival said with certainty, “no man can know what the morrow will bring, but I know those men. If they get the message, they will come in force.”

Guinevere turned and walked across the room, her gaze coming to rest upon the Pendragon's battle flag for a moment. When she turned, her eyes, full of trepidation, met Sir Percival's. “And if they come, in force, a day late,” she said quietly, “it will not matter.”

Before Percival could respond, Capussa intervened. “May I speak on this matter for a moment, Queen of the Britons?”

Guinevere turned to the Numidian and nodded. “Yes, of course.”

Capussa walked slowly around the table, his hands clasped behind his back, a contemplative look on this face.

“The army—your army—is not well trained, nor are its numbers equal to that of the enemy yet, but the training will continue on the march, and our numbers grow by the day. If we march south at speed, we can link up with the forces of Londinium and choose the ground where the battle will be joined. If we wait, Londinium and its forces will be destroyed, the enemy's ranks will grow with that triumph, and that greater force, flush with victory, will seek us out. Morgana will then choose the time and place of battle.”

The Numidian paused two paces away from Guinevere and hesitated. He looked around the room, and his eyes met those of Merlin, Cadwyn, and Percival, and then came to rest on Guinevere.

“Yes, on the day of the next battle, our force will have grown and it will be better trained, but the men in that army will also know we let their countrymen die, when we could have marched to their aid. Those men, Queen Guinevere, will know we feared Morgana and her forces, and they will carry that fear into battle.”

Capussa's eyes fixed on Guinevere, and he spoke in a voice that carried no doubt.

“You are the Queen of this land, and the decision is yours, but I will tell you this: I have fought in four wars and in more battles than I can count, and I believe we must join forces with the might of Londinium and attack—now.”

Guinevere stared at Capussa in silence, and then she closed her eyes, struggling to weigh what had been said. The fate of thousands of men rested upon her shoulders—as well as the fate of the kingdom. The ghosts of Camlann that haunted her dreams begged her to retreat from the abyss, and they almost carried the day. In the end, what tipped the balance was her belief in Percival and his Numidian companion. They had prevailed against countless men in gladiatorial battles, killed Hengst the Butcher, freed Londinium, and crushed Ivarr the Red in the battle of the River Wid. If they believed they could conquer yet one more enemy, she must have faith in their judgment.

After a long moment, she opened her eyes. “Very well,” she said, “we march south—but I would know every part of your plan down to the smallest detail.”

“We, my Queen?” Percival said. “I'm not sure I—”

Guinevere turned to Percival. “Yes, we, Sir Percival. I am riding south with you, along with Cadwyn and Sister Aranwen, if they so desire.”

“Yes!” Cadwyn said, striking her small fist on the table, drawing a look of surprise from everyone in the room except Guinevere, who restrained a smile.

“It is too—” Percival started.

“Dangerous? According to General Capussa, the greater danger lies in staying here, and in any event, I will not allow one extra man to stay behind to guard my person when that man could hold a sword and shield in the line.”

Percival's brow darkened, and Guinevere knew he was about to object again, when Merlin intervened. “Sir Percival, there are royal waystations along the road that can provide safe accommodations for the Queen and her small court. The army will be camped outside the walls of those waystations. You can be assured the Queen will be safe.”

Guinevere turned to Merlin and gave him a regal nod. “Then so it shall be, Merlin the Wise.”

Capussa slapped an unhappy Percival on the shoulder and said with a smile, “Then the matter is settled, Knight. The Queen and her army will march south. Let us make our preparations.”

T
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eddan the Broad carefully examined the wooden doll he'd been carving for his three-year-old granddaughter for the past hour. Although the delicate work was becoming increasingly difficult for the old blacksmith's rough and gnarled hands, he knew the near-lifelike figurine would find favor with the child. As he reached for the carving knife resting on the stump beside him, he heard the sound of hooves pounding up the road toward the village. His hand moved from the carving knife to the sheathed sword leaning against the far side of the stump.

A moment later, a single rider galloped into view. Aeddan strained to see whether the man's saddle bore a white strip of cloth, a marker the outer sentries would have tied there to signal the rider posed no threat.

“I can see the white, Aeddan,” his son-in-law, Connor, called from the base of the hill below.

“I have eyes, lad,” Aeddan growled in response, and then smiled at the peal of laughter that followed from his russet-haired daughter, Wynne. She was busy washing clothes in a wooden bucket, steps away from where her husband was chopping wood. The blacksmith returned to his carving, finishing the last strokes necessary to put the outline of an apron on the little doll's dress. As he returned his carving knife to its place in his belt and stood, Connor called up to him again.

“Aeddan! The rider has a message for you. Says he's on the Queen's business, he does,” Connor finished, amusement in his voice.

Aeddan scoffed as he strapped on his sword belt and started down the hill. One of the heads of the other villages must have sent the message and told the lad carrying the missive to make a jest at his expense. When he reached the bottom of the hill, the blacksmith looked over at his son-in-law. The younger man was a hand taller than he was and almost as broad in the chest. His full head of brown hair framed a plain face with friendly brown eyes.

The blacksmith nodded to the five piles of wood Connor had stacked up against the rear wall of the four-room wood and stone structure.

“Preparing for a cold winter, are ye?”

“Well, you never can have too much firewood,” Connor said defensively.

“Now where have I heard that before?” Wynne said as she walked around the corner of the house, wearing a worn brown dress. Somehow, the simple garment seemed beautiful when she wore it. Aeddan pretended to scowl when he saw the impish smile on his daughter's face.

“Bah! Where's this messenger?” he said in a gruff voice. “I need to be about the Queen's business.”

Wynne and Connor laughed together, and she pointed toward the front of the house. “He's waiting by the gate.”

Aeddan chuckled to himself as he entered the home he shared with his daughter and son-in-law. He washed his face and hands in a wooden wash bowl, straightened his worn leather jerkin, and then walked through the house to the front door. He laid one hand on the pommel of his sword before opening the door and walked into the yard.

The man standing outside the gate in the stone wall that surrounded the house was about the same height as Aeddan, seventeen hands, but where Aeddan was broad in the chest and had heavily muscled arms and shoulders, the man at the gate was lean and rangy. Aeddan was surprised to see that the messenger, like himself, looked to be in his fourth decade of life. Most of the messengers from the other villagers were younger men, or even lads.

As Aeddan approached the stone wall, his attention was drawn to the sigil woven into the right shoulder of the messenger's brown jerkin: a red dragon with an arrow beneath it. It was the mark worn by the Pendragon's core of archers. A full quiver of arrows was just visible above the man's left shoulder. The blacksmith glanced over at the rider's horse and saw both a long and a short bow attached to the saddle.

Aeddan stared at the man, unaware of Connor and Wynne's presence in the yard behind him.

“Aeddan, is all well?” Connor said, unease in his voice.

He ignored the younger man and walked toward the man at the gate. The man stared back at him with cool grey eyes.

“I haven't seen that uniform in a long time,” Aeddan said in a guarded voice.

“Aye, and I thought that I would never have cause to wear it again,” the man answered.

“And what cause, Archer, changed your mind?”

“I was asked to do so, by a Knight of the Table.”

Aeddan stared at the man, taking his measure, and then said gruffly, “That cannot be. They be gone, all of them.”

“All, except one—Sir Percival.”

Anger stirred inside of the blacksmith. “You would be wise not to jest about that particular Knight in the Marches. We hold him in high regard.”

The man reached into his jerkin and pulled out a scroll that was sealed with a red wax stamp. “I do not jest, Aeddan the Broad. I have had the honor to meet Sir Percival. He said you would know how to decipher this.”

Aeddan stared at the archer, unmoving, and then strode forward and took the scroll of parchment, broke the seal, and opened it. He stared at the writing for a moment and then turned and walked back into the house without a word. Wynne followed him inside. The blacksmith walked into the small room that served as his personal chambers and sat down at a rough-hewn oak desk. The desk was bare except for a candle, a worn Bible, a pot of ink, and a quill.

“Father, who is this man? Can what he says be true?” Wynne said in a hushed voice.

“I … I don't know, lass. It's … it's been so long.”

Wynne watched as her father lit the candle and opened the Bible to a particular page. Then he took a small roll of parchment from the drawer in the desk and began to decipher the coded message in the scroll, using the page from the Bible as the key. The blacksmith had not decoded a message in almost a decade, and his eyes were no longer as sharp as they once had been, but he still remembered the old craft. After checking his work three times, he silently read the message. His hand shook as he laid down the quill. For a moment, he was quiet, and then he turned to his daughter.

“It is he, Wynne. Thank the Lord, he has returned.”

She sank down beside his chair. “Father, how can you know?” she whispered. “You said yourself that the Table died with the Pendragon. How could this man have survived?”

Aeddan stood and walked to the door of the room and then looked over his shoulder at Wynne.

“Tell Connor to come to your old room.”

Wynne ran to the door and called to her husband before following her father down the hall to the room that had been hers before she married. After she and Connor entered the room, Aeddan walked over to the bed in the corner of the small, tidy room and said quietly, “You had a bad fever when you were eight years old.”

“I remember, father,” Wynne said.

“Aye, but what you may not remember is that when you were near death, the Knight, Sir Percival, learned of your sickness, and he came to this house. I was one of his captains in the Legion of the Marches. Your mother had passed, so you were all I had. He came to your bedside and knelt on the floor, here,” Aeddan said, pointing to a spot at the foot of the bed.

“The floor … it was dirt back then. He said to me, ‘Come, Captain, kneel with me, for I intend to pray for God's mercy until either your child is well or has passed into heaven.'”

Aeddan's voice broke when he said the last word, but after a moment, he cleared his throat and continued, his eyes fixed on the floor. “And so we prayed together, side by side, a common blacksmith and a Knight of the Table, until the morn.” He looked up at his daughter.

“Your fever broke, and Sir Percival left to rejoin the legion. From that day to this, thank the Lord, you haven't been sick a day, Wynne, not a day. So … so you say, how do I know?”

He lifted the deciphered message, tears streaming down his face, and read in a halting voice, “Captain Aeddan, I pray that this message finds you and the child, Wynne, safe and in God's grace. It has been many years since our parting, but I remember, as if it was yesterday, our time of prayer together, and the child's smile when she woke, having cast off her ague.”

Wynne raised her hand to her mouth and spoke in whisper. “Father, I remember … the tall man, with dark hair … he was kneeling beside you when I woke.”

Aeddan wrapped his arms around his daughter and hugged her tightly. “Aye, lass, he surely was. And now, he has returned.”

T
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M
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As Aeddan the Broad walked up the road toward the stone meetinghouse, the feeling of disquiet within steadily grew. After receiving the message from Sir Percival, he had sent a rider to the tower atop the hill to the north, with orders to light three fires on the stone roof—the signal for a general council of war. That signal had not been given in almost a decade.

The thirty war leaders and their retainers gathered in the meetinghouse above had hastened to answer the call. Each of the men represented one of the thirty towns or villages that formed the northwestern border, or the Marches, of what had once been the kingdom of Arthur Pendragon. If they found his reason for the call to arms to be wanting, their ire would be great indeed, and he would almost surely be deposed as the leader of his village.

In truth, Aeddan did not fear the loss of his standing in the village, but rather that he would fail Sir Percival. He was not skilled in the use of words, like the younger and more ambitious Bran, the headman from the town of Cairn to the west. Bran had not served in the Legion of the Marches during the war with Morgana, and he rarely attended the training musters each spring. For Bran, coin was worth more than honor, so he would surely oppose the Knight's request.

Aeddan glanced over at Connor, walking beside him, and he was reassured by his calm demeanor. Although he had not asked him to do so, Aeddan knew Wynne's husband had met with some of the younger headmen before the meeting. Had Aeddan been walking into a hornet's nest, Connor would have let him know. As Wynne had confided in him before her marriage to Connor, “He's not the strongest or the handsomest man in the village, but he is surely the cleverest.”

Connor caught Aeddan's glance and looked over at him.

“All will be well, Aeddan. You shall see.”

“Aye, I pray that it is so, but I fear they won't remember the debt that is owed.”

The two men walked on in silence for a while, and then Aeddan gestured toward the meetinghouse above. “You see, the affairs of the south have always been distant from us. Oh, we swore fealty to the rule of the Pendragon, but in truth, we knew that the new King, like Uther before him, would leave our cold, green hills and poor homesteads alone for the most part. And so it was. The King didn't take much in taxes, and he didn't give much in protection. We were expected to take care of our own, and well, we had always been able to do that. But … there was a time when that was not so.”

Aeddan stopped walking, pulled out a leather flask from his cloak, and took a long drink. Then he offered it to Connor, who smiled and shook his head.

“Wynne always knows when I've had a taste, and I don't want to be scolded tonight.”

“Aye, that she does,” Aeddan said with a nod. After taking another drink and restoring the flask to his pocket, the older man raised a fist in quiet frustration.

“I … I fear that the men up there won't remember the fell times, when the witch Morgana unleashed her raiders against the Marches. It was so many years ago. At first … well, we thought the raids, which were bigger and came more often, might be the work of a new Pict war leader … someone out to prove his mettle, but then we came to know otherwise. We came to know that these new and fearsome bands of Picts, Norse, and Saxons were sellswords—warriors paid with Morgana's gold.”

A roar of laughter from the meetinghouse, now just a hundred paces distant, drew Aeddan's attention for a moment, and then he continued.

“The witch was clever. She knew that if she burned enough of our towns and villages, and killed enough of our people, the Pendragon would have to send forces north, weakening his center. And so kill and burn she did aplenty; those that were not killed in a raid were sold into slavery. In time, the Pendragon did send forces to help, but they moved too slowly, and they always returned to their quarters farther south, leaving us at the mercy of her raiders all over again.”

Aeddan paused for a moment and looked down at the field below, where he and the men of the village trained during the spring and summer months.

“And then, Sir Percival came. At first, we had no faith in him. Aye, we knew he be a doughty fighter, but what could he know of fighting raiders and brigands who struck without warning and then ran off? We were wrong. He'd fought an enemy like that before—the seawolves. He knew what he was about, he did indeed. He ordered a part of the royal garrison to come north with him, and he had them build fortified camps outside each village. He moved into one of the empty houses in the village and lived and ate with the rest of us.”