Dearest Tertius, who will always be my Lance to me, who became my more-than-brother on the shore of the lake, and again in that well-remembered bed, with the deerhounds looking on! I hope you have learned to read Latin for yourself, or I will by now have scandalised your priest.
The court is settled in Cam. I am holding a place for you at my right hand. I commanded my round table to be built as I told you I would. I joked with my sawyers and masons that the hall would need to be built around it. Alas, they have not your sense of the ridiculous. Upon my return from Cerniw two moons later, the job was done. My latest recruits—four brothers from an island so far north of Scotia that the sun never sets during summer, nor rises in the winter, Bors, a lord of Gaul, whose land has been seized by the Saxons, causing him to throw in his lot with mine, and Drustan, an old friend from Cornwall—look like lost children around its vast edge. But it does solve quarrels over precedence, and because I believe the brothers from the Out Isles to have been driven slightly mad by their long, unnatural days and nights, it has spared much bloodshed. I have caused your mother’s name to be graven in gold at the rim.
The battle for Cam was a sharp one. Warlike descendants of the Durotriges had settled there. We were outnumbered, but Excalibur was like fire in my hand. The fort is desirable, the water supply from a spring so deep it cannot be tainted or stopped from outside. In these autumn dawns, badgers shuffle about in the woodlands all around. In spring, I am told, these same woods are the haunt of cuckoos. Deer and boar are plentiful.
Dear Lance, I would not often wish to experience such pain as I knew at our parting. Having learned to read Latin, you must learn to write it! Send via my tin merchant Landry, who trades in Londinium at the full of every moon. Aldegund, the Batavian commander in Pons Aelius who sent this on to you, knows him well. Place a direction on the outside, as I have done on yours.Artorius, filius Pendraconiswill find me. We call this place Cam, for the river, but it must have been an island in it once, or an islet. You’d better use the old name, which is Camelet.
Discharge your duties, my dark-eyed moorland prince, and come to me.
Lance sat up. His eyes were burning, the back of his neck stiff. There was no chance of reaching Aldegund and Landry in time for the next full moon, because—apart from his utter, miserable, thrice-damned inability to write a word of Latin—it had taken him the best part of a fortnight to decipher his letter from Art. He had done it, Tomas remaining wrapped in highest dudgeon, by borrowing one of the old man’s Latin texts, copied by some long-lost scribe whose hand resembled Art’s. Lance knew the story from Tomas’s many wistful fireside readings of the tale, wherein a prophet named Esdras went forth from his house and offered his soul to God for punishment rather than let the divine wrath fall upon his sinful neighbours.
Poor Tomas, surrounded by men and women who barely knew they were sinning, let alone in need of a priestly lightning rod! Lance had almost felt guilty, coming up here to the lough every day when his farm work was done, picking out the Latin words he knew, connecting them one to the other through the fibres of the tale, matching the shapes on the parchment to those on the pieces of birch.
But he’d have raided Tomas’s library a hundred times over, pillaged his texts without mercy, to find the key that would unlock Arthur’s words. Breathing a prayer of thanks to the long-lost scribe, he leaned back against a rock. Balana, who’d been peacefully cropping the turf, came and nudged his shoulder, as if aware that he’d finished his task. “I should have askedyouto read it,” he told her, rubbing her velvety lip. “You’d have managed it faster. And now—look at this!—he says I have to learn to write to him, too.”
If wishes were learning, the work would be already done. He stared into the sunlight, Art’s lettering and the scribe’s entwining and dancing in the bright air, creating new shapes that would be his own.My most dear Artorius—carissime Artorie, he would write, correctly using the vocative singular.Art, to me, from the hour when we laid down our arms and rode together into Vindolanda...
“Oh, and the sun fades to nothing in the beauty of his smile, and he walks on water, and brings back the spring to the earth, I suppose.”
Lance leapt to his feet. He whipped round, trying to locate the source of the reed-thin, crackling voice. Only a moorland hare was poised on a rock a couple of yards away.
Out in broad daylight and asking for trouble. Blindly Lance drew his spear from its loops on Balana’s saddle. Pictish raider seeking to distract and ambush him, the breeze playing tricks, drawing words from the water and the rustling birch, or nothing more than a good hare stew on the table tonight—he was ready for anything, if only he could get his heart out of his mouth and the tremor of fright out of his arm...
“Cures piles and warts, no doubt. Frightens the ticks off sheep.”
Lance wheeled again. “Where are you?”
“Why, here, boy. Just as I always have been.”
He rubbed his eyes. The hare was gone. In its place was an old woman, wrapped in a ragged black robe. Lance dropped his spear with a clatter onto the rocks. “Viviana!”
“Well, what of it? Why were you poking that twig at me? Where’s the sword from the lake?”
“I... I thought I’d never see you again.”
“Nor did I think you’d hand over your destiny to Uther Pendragon’s stealth-begotten son, young man!”
Dry-mouthed, unaccountably filled with joy, Lance made a cautious approach. He bowed to her shyly. “Will you come to the vicus with me, my lady? I’d be glad to offer you shelter and food.”
She looked him over, eyes bright. “Shelter and food, eh? This isn’t the starving brat I met up here half a year ago.”
“No, ma’am. I have changed greatly since then.”
“Two inches taller, chest and shoulders broader. Handsome, too—the very spit of his mother. Not a virgin anymore. Has a fine Roman horse. Still bearing Ban’s old sword, which is strange, for a boy who was entrusted with Excalibur.”
Blood ran hot and cold beneath the surface of Lance’s skin. He didn’t know where to begin to reply. On balance, the sword seemed the easiest place to start. “Arthur drew it out from a rock. That washisdestiny—ex calce liberatus.”
“Oh, I see.” She flickered him a mocking smile. “I suppose he wrenched it from your hands.”
“No, by no means. I gave it to him, with my...” His voice scraped, and he waited until he was sure it would be firm again. “With my whole heart.”
“Poor Lance. He did land on you like a cartload of rocks, didn’t he?”
“If I had the time I again I’d do the same, my lady, but... was it wrong?”
She got up and stretched. She was just as withered and ancient as Lance remembered, but there was a vigour to her movements, a deep-rooted, earthy power. “I’d have said so, once upon a time.”
“And now? Hedidbring the spring to the earth.”
