“Ah, well. He’s his mother’s son, as you are yours. So much depends upon him, and what he understands—about the dragon and her ways. What he doesn’t, you’ll have to teach him.”
“What? I don’t know anything.”
“You’d be surprised. The Merlin says the new world’s coming to destroy the old, but he’s a curmudgeon. What if your future king could be the best of both?”
Lance forgot himself. He seized her shoulders, distantly relieved when she didn’t seem to mind, gazing up at him fearlessly. “You know the Merlin?”
“Of course. Pendragon’s son will rise in England’s darkest hour, the Merlin says, and maybe he’s right.”
“England?” Lance tried the strange word carefully. His head was still full of Latin, of the strange, compulsive business of learning to read. “Where’s that?”
“Here, ignorant boy. Or it will be, once these tribes of Angles settling up and down the country name the place after themselves.”
“Nonsense. They’ll never get that far. Not the Saxons, either—Arthur will raise an army from Cerniw and the old lands to the west, Caer Lir and Rheged and...”
“Ah. Outraged, are you—about these damned invading foreigners?”
“Of course. The land is ours.”
“Did you ever stop to think about what the Picts think of you?”
“The Picts?” Bewildered, Lance let the old woman go. “What have they got to do with anything?”
“Little more than animals, aren’t they? Blue-painted savages who sweep down out of the dark to pillage and burn. And you, orphaned lad, have better reason than most to believe it so.”
“How could anyone deny it? Father Tomas told me the whole story of the night of the raid. One of the savages slew my mother from behind.”
A look of pain crossed the old woman’s face. It was ordinary, human: surprising and piercing to Lance, who had grown used to her eldritch smile. “Ah, my poor Elena,” she said. “I shouldn’t think she took that in good part.”
“No. But you told me truly about her, all those months ago when we first met. She was holding another of them by the hair and smashing his skull with a pan. Did you know her too, my lady?”
“Never mind that. Look at this toy, which I picked up on my travels.”
Lance was getting lots of practice in dealing with his elders. Tomas, relieved of the prospect of looking after the vicus alone, was becoming more eccentric every day. Patiently he took the little stone she’d handed to him from some pouch within her robes. It was flat, no bigger than the palm of his hand. On it was carved, with a jeweller’s mastery, a kind of crescent moon, pierced through its horns with a V-shaped staff. Beneath it was a sign like a lightning flash, and two circles connected by a narrow, elegant neck. The whole was bordered by a pattern he recognised, a kind of knotwork Elena, when intolerably bored by winter confinement, would irritably embroider onto bed coverings. “Beautiful,” he said, following the hypnotic shape of the circles with one fingertip. “What does it mean?”
“Ah, who knows? Not even they know, not anymore. Maybe once, before you Celts arrived, seized their lands and scattered their culture to the winds.”
“Are you saying this is Pictish work?”
“It is. You should see the full-size stones. Bigger than you are, and covered with serpents, boars, horses with beaks, fish-tailed dragons... Of course they learned the knotwork from you.”
“I’m not a Celt. I’m a—”
“Oh, a Briton! That’s right, I forgot.Brittunculi, the Roman lads on the Wall—right here, as it happens—used to call you lot. Dirty little Britons! That was before they started recruiting you, getting men like your father to farm their land for them, marrying your women and putting their fine long legs and noble faces into the stream of life for princely souls like you to inherit.” She caught hold of the front of his shirt, her fist the size of a sparrow but strong. “Listen to me, Lance. I’m not telling you this to shame you or to pull you down. He came to you, didn’t he—this future king, with his smile and his sunlight, and his gift for making men want to follow him to the gates of death, and after?”
“Yes,” Lance said. His throat was sore and tight. “But he had to go, and I... I had to stay.”
“Nothing’s forever, boy. Remember these words, if you find yourself at his side again. His people will call him Arthur of the Britons. He’ll come to think of himself that way, and so will generation after cascading generation of fools—some romantic, some vicious beyond understanding—who believe that there’s one purebred race in this land, or ever could or ever will be.”
“He doesn’t think that. He’s travelled too much, seen too much.”
“Oh, I grant you he’s bright. And he’s more the politician than I thought any lad of sixteen summers could be—old Ector did well with him. But you’re the clever one, Lance. Tell him that the Celts took this land from the men who lived here in shadowy time out of mind, and the Romans took it from the Celts. The Angles and Saxons will take it from you, and there’ll be pain and bloodshed, loss and gain, and eventually, in a time even I am not permitted to see, one people standing in the sun—cross-fertilised over and over again, vigorous, all their arts and learning shared.”
“My lady, I don’t understand.”
“It doesn’t matter. Tell him, if you love him, that this sacred island of his lies on a natural westbound invasion route, and his life doesn’t have to be the price of pretending that’s not true. Don’t let the Merlin sell him that miserable dream.”
Lance stumbled back from her. “I can’t tell him anything,” he said hoarsely. “I’d give my soul to send him one line in reply to the words he’s given me, but I’m too ignorant even for that. Probably I’ll never see him again.”
