“Damn,” Art said faintly. “I thought these visions had stopped.”
Lance listened. It felt strange, exerting his senses to pick up the trace of another man’s hallucination. But he’d almost managed it, back on the moors by the lough three years before: for an instant he had almost seen Art’s spectral tormentor…
Ah, was it working now, too? A deep, low vibration began to make his eardrums flutter, as if a sound-below-sound was reverberating through the hall. A moan, from a throat unimaginably vast and terrible…
The wine cup he’d been drinking from rattled on the bench, tipped up and clattered to the floor. “Not a vision,” he said, getting up and taking Art by the shoulders. “Not unless I and your nightwatchmen share it.” Arthur’s lost gaze focussed, and Lance indicated the soldiers, glancing at one another in confusion and running for the stairs. “It’s something outside. Come on!”
Chapter Nine
The turf outside the keep was shaking underfoot. Stumbling out into the night, Lance first noticed that the stars were gone, that the night had clouded to absolute black. There was no moon, and the torches in the cressets in the archway to the keep trembled and threw harsh shapes of orange and shadow up the ancient walls. Dust was falling from their mortar.
He should have been afraid. A wild exhilaration had seized him, though, and swinging round to find Art, he saw the strange joy reflected in his face. “What is it?” he demanded. “It feels as though the earth is dancing!”
“Well, I don’t think it’s Saxons,” Art replied, grinning, his hand nonetheless on the hilt of Excalibur. “What do you think? Is old Din Guardi about to come down around our ears?”
“Ah, would that it might!”
The great sorrowful voice cut across the grinding in the castle’s foundations, the cries and chatter of the soldiery assembling before the keep. Lance and Arthur spun around to see a tall, gaunt figure, clad in a voluminous nightgown, lurching across the courtyard toward them. His hands were upraised, and the gown’s fabric, none too clean, flapped round him in the wind. “Would that it might fall, and be done!”
“My God, it’s Coel,” Art said. Lance stared in disbelief. Yes, the dishevelled, wild-haired apparition was Arthur’s dignified fellow diplomat of that afternoon.
Coel came to a frozen halt a few yards away. “The worm!” he cried. The rumbling and shaking increased, as if on cue, and Lance shifted uneasily at the strange oppression in the air, like storm pressure unable to find a release. “The worm! The worm returns after her routing, to burrow and nest in the bowels of my accursed home!”
He sounded distraught, barely sane. Lance, dismayed to see him like this, took a few cautious steps toward him, but he shrank away. A block or two detached itself from the keep’s upper battlement, narrowly missing them both.
An elderly woman, also in her night clothes, ran out barefoot onto the turf. She hitched up her long skirts and dashed to Coel’s side. The roar and the vibration were beginning to abate. “No, no, love,” she cried, taking hold of his elbow. Turning to Arthur: “Forgive him, Your Majesty. He sleepwalks. These strange nights disturb him. Come, my lord. It’s cold. Come back inside.”
But Coel stood rigid. He looked at Arthur, then, not seeming to find what he wanted there, fixed a wild gaze on Lance. “The worm,” he repeated. “She feasts, and kills, and nests in my castle.” His face assumed an expression so utterly woebegone that Lance, to his horror, felt laughter strike sparks in his lungs. From the corner of his eye, he saw Art look away, as if similarly affected. “We are cursed,” Coel finished. “I shall call this place the Gard Dolorous, my castle of sorrows.”
His wife led him off, talking to him soothingly. Overhead, the clouds parted, and bright stars blazed out over the sea. Air moved sweetly over the turf, rich with seaweed and salt. Pressing both hands to his mouth, Lance turned to see the king of the Britons huddled against the wall, for the second time that night weeping with silent laughter.
***
Lance helped him back up the stairs. He was still wiping his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said, when Lance, who had recovered more quickly, chided him. “He was just such a sight. That song the men sing about him popped into my head, and… Oh, dear.This is my Gard Dolorous.” He shook with fresh laughter. “And what does he mean, he’s cursed by a worm?”
Lance half-lifted him up the last few steps. He could manage fairly well on the flat, but neither let go. They made their way along the stone-flagged corridor and stopped outside the door to Lance’s room. It was cold now, the night deepening, and Lance pulled his cloak tightly around both of them, frowning in thought. Arthur, like Coel, had used the Latin wordvermis, and it resonated oddly in his mind. “My mother’s people had a word not unlike that,” he said, “but it meant something bigger. Is there one in Kernowek?”
Art considered. “I’m not sure. But I had a Breton nurse. The way she spoke—it was a tongue for fireside tales, for twilight, ancient things that could twist and turn out of their own darkness.Ver, she used to say. That’s a little likevermis, but it didn’t mean a worm.” He stood thoughtfully, arm still warm around Lance’s shoulders. Then he burst out laughing again. “Adragon, Lance?”
“Does it sound more deranged than a murderous worm?”
“I don’t know. My whole life seems deranged to me in one way or another. The last thing that made sense was… riding with you and Guy, up in the hills at Vindolanda.” He paused, and they both listened to the tramp of the guard changing watch down below in the keep. Carefully, deliberately, he let Lance go and stepped back. “It’s very late. I must let you rest. Do you need anything else?”
“No. My chamber is very fine. You know I should be sleeping with the rest of the men, in a tent on the dunes.”
“It’s a cold night. You’ll just have to cope. Do you have enough blankets?” He considered, then brightened. “Oh, would you like a girl? Coel has some very pretty maids and kitchen wenches. They’re already gossiping about my handsome friend—you won’t be refused.”
Lance recoiled. The movement was small but impossible to repress. “What?”
Art’s gaze faltered. “Or a boy? I remember you told me, back at Vindolanda—”
“Arthur!”
He hadn’t meant it to come out as a shout. Never before had Art tried to avoid his eyes, but he was doing so now, trying to hide behind the long, thick fall of his hair. “For God’s sake,” he said awkwardly. “Don’t wake the place up. What’s wrong?”
It took Lance a moment to find words. “I’m trying to imagine,” he began, “what my mother would have done to me, had I offered a guest a girl from her household as a… as atoyfor the night.” The girl concerned would have been, more likely than not, a priestess, accompanying her mistress to the ceremonies Elena took care to hide from the priest, at full moons and turns of the year. “I’ve hardly even seen a woman here, except scuttling about from one domestic task to another, or flirting with the soldiers at the gates. What’s happened?”
