I looked down the table to where the darkly handsome Lancelot was now being consoled by his mother as she dabbed at the blood on his face with a napkin dampened by wine. “Half-brother?” I asked Galahad.
“I was born to the King’s lover, not to his wife,” Galahad leaned close to me and explained softly. “But Father has been good to me and insists on calling me prince.”
King Ban was now arguing with Father Celwin about some obscure point of Christian theology. Ban was debating with courteous enthusiasm while Celwin was spitting insults and both men were enjoying themselves hugely. “Your father tells me you and Lancelot are both warriors,” I said to Galahad.
“Both?” Galahad laughed. “My dear brother employs poets and bards to sing his praises as the greatest warrior of Armorica, but I’ve yet to see him in the shield-line.”
“But I have to fight,” I said sourly, ‘to preserve his inheritance.”
“The kingdom’s lost,” Galahad said carelessly. “Father has spent his money on buildings and manuscripts, not soldiers, and here in Ynys Trebes we’re too far from our people so they’d rather retreat to Broceliande than look to us for help. The Franks are winning everywhere. Your job, Derfel, is to stay alive and get safe home.”
His honesty made me look at him with a new interest. He had a broader, blunter face than his brother, and a more open one; the kind of face you would be glad to see on your right-hand side in the shield-line. A man’s right side was the one defended by his neighbour’s shield, so it served to be on good terms with that man, and Galahad, I felt instinctively, would be an easy man to like. “Are you saying we shouldn’t fight the Franks?” I asked him quietly.
“I’m saying the fight is lost, but yes, you’re oath-bound by Arthur to fight, and every moment that Ynys Trebes lives is a moment of light in a dark world. I’m trying to persuade Father to send his library to Britain, but I think he’d rather cut his own heart out first. But when the time comes, I’m sure, he’ll send it away. Now’ he pushed his gilded chair away from the table ‘you and I must leave. Before,” he added softly, ‘the fili recite. Unless, of course, you have a taste for unending verses about the glories of moonlight on reed beds?”
I stood and rapped the table with one of the special eating knives that King Ban provided his guests. Those guests now eyed me warily. “I have an apology to make,” I said, ‘not just to you all, but to my Lord Lancelot. Such a great warrior as he deserved a better companion for supper. Now, forgive me, I need to sleep.”
Lancelot did not respond. King Ban smiled, Queen Elaine looked disgusted and Galahad hurried me first to where my own clothes and weapons waited, then down to the flame lit quay where a boat waited to take us ashore. Galahad, still dressed in his toga, was carrying a sack that he slung on to the small boat’s deck. It fell with a clang of metal. “What is it?” I asked.
“My weapons and armour,” he said. He untied the boat’s painter, then leaped aboard. “I’m coming with you.”
The boat glided from the quay under a dark sail. The water rippled at the bow and splashed gently down the hull’s length as we drew off into the bay. Galahad was stripping himself of the toga, which he tossed to the boatman, before dressing in war gear, while I stared back at the palace on the hill. It hung in the sky like a sky ship sailing into clouds, or maybe like a star come down to earth; a place of dreams; a refuge where a just King and a beautiful Queen ruled and where poets sang and old men could study the wingspan of angels. It was so beautiful, Ynys Trebes, so utterly beautiful.
And, unless we could save it, doomed utterly.
Two years we fought. Two years against all odds. Two years of splendour and vileness. Two years of slaughter and feast, of broken swords and shattered shields, of victory and disaster, and in all those months and in all those sweated fights when brave men choked on their own life blood and ordinary men did deeds they never dreamed possible, I never saw Lancelot once. Yet the poets said he was the hero of Benoic, the most perfect warrior, the fighter of fighters. The poets said that preserving Benoic was Lancelot’s fight, not mine, not Galahad’s, not Culhwch’s, but Lancelot’s. But Lancelot spent the war in bed, begging his mother to bring him wine and honey.