Art nodded. He threw Lance a scapegrace, understanding smile, then unfastened his jerkin and tugged his shirt over his head. “Let’s go swimming, then.”
All his life, Lance had come up here with his brothers and friends to bathe and splash about in the water. He’d never thought twice about watching one of them undress: they’d just been skinny moorland lads like himself, sinewy and pale with lack of sun. Art’s bare back was the colour of sandstone on a summer afternoon. He was unfastening the crotch-lace of his deerskin trousers. For the first time in his life, Lance had to look away.
Swiftly he dealt with his own clothes. He knew from experience that, no matter how tempting at the surface, the lough retained a chill from the time of Elena’s tales of ice and rain. He drew a warning breath, too late: Art had plunged through the reeds and dived.
He surfaced a heartbeat later. His voice rang out like music. “Holy Belenus! Sacred Dark Mother—Gog, Magog and Lleu Llaw Gyffes!”
Lance broke into laughter. He forgot his shyness and his sudden prickling awareness of his companion’s body, and strode in to join him. “I told you it was cold.”
“You did... not!” Art was treading water, his breath coming in painful gasps. “You said my flesh would encounter my spirit in here, or... something of that sort.”
“And isn’t it true?”
“Only in as much as I’m going to... die!”
Lance snorted. He put one hand on the tawny, wet head and pushed Art under: got time for half a yelp as Art’s warm grip fastened round his waist and tugged him down too.
The water was full of shafts of light. Lance and the prince tumbled through them, rolling and scrapping like otter cubs. Lance’s world went sun-over-soil with the force of his rolling dive. He evaded Art’s pounce, stretched out his limbs in a pure ecstasy of flight.
A little further down, the light faded out to peaty bronze. Seizing Art’s arm so that he wouldn’t become lost or entangled in the reeds, Lance guided him to the place where the pale hand had risen from the water. They were back within their depth. He found a foothold on the bulrush-matted mud and broke surface for air. “It was here,” he said when he could, still keeping his hold on Art. “This is where she gave me the sword. Who was she, Art? What did it mean?”
“I don’t know. I wish you didn’t have to be part of it.”
“I am, though. You and Sir Ector knew the legend, but it happened to me. You don’t have to be afraid, I’m certain. Viviana was strange, but she was kind to me. She saved my life.”
“I’m not sure that she’d save mine.”
“Did I do the wrong thing? Was the sword meant for you after all?”
“No.” Art shook his head, sending water flying. He stared off over the water. “Look, Guy will come searching for us soon. Then I’ll have to go back and help with preparations for our journey, and we’ll have no more time. Come with me.”
Lance followed him onto the shore. They were still hand in hand, and he wondered if Art had ceased to notice. His grasp was frank as a child’s, but a bright new heat was coursing through Lance. They settled on the flat outcrop of rock which Elena said had been scoured smooth by the ice. Over untold thousands of years, he suddenly remembered, and tried to fit that with the life of the world as Father Tomas taught it: a merefourthousand, surely not long enough for dragons to sleep and make hills, and great majestic walls of ice to come and go.
The rock was sheltered by small, scrubby birch. When next the breeze blew—blessedly warm on goosepimpled skin—the shift of light and shade caught the bronze of the sun sign Art wore on his new chain. “Youdon’t think the world is new,” Lance said, reaching out with his free hand to catch and hold the heavy pendant. “You don’t believe in this new god.”
“I do as far as Ector and Guy are concerned. They were confirmed in the new faith before they took me in, and they’ve given me everything. But...”
A reed-music hush came over the lough. Gently Art drew his hand away. Lance didn’t try to stop him, though letting go made him feel sick. “We should probably get dressed,” he said. “But... what?”
“Do you have anyone, Lance? A woman, someone who’s had your children, or... well, anybody?”
“Children?” Lance echoed in wonder. “Father Tomas still tries to whip me with a birch rod if I’ve done wrong. He’s insistent that I’m still a child myself.”
Art gave him a sidelong glance, so warm it made him glad that the rock beneath his backside was cold enough to prevent any of his body’s recent awkward reactions to pleasure. “Not hardly.”
“Well... all right.” He chuckled. “My ma didn’t think so either. She and Tomas used to go at it hammer and tongs, about children born out of what he calls wedlock. There were so few of us here even before the raid that she couldn’t understand his objection toanyhealthy bairns coming along. But no, I don’t have someone like that. There’s time enough, isn’t there?”
“Not for me.”
“Oh.” Rapidly Lance strung ideas together. Here was Arthur Pendragon, eldest son of Uther of Cerniw, already launched into a battle for his kingdom, a fight which could veer from diplomacy to deadly violence any day. Lance steadied his voice and tried to sound far more worldly than his years and experience of life allowed. “You... have to get yourself an heir?”
“Steady on. First I have to get myself a lawful Christian wife.”
“Do you?”
“I know. It didn’t bother Uther, did it? But times have changed since then, and Father Marcus says it must be so.”
“Your village priest?”
