“No,” Lance agreed softly. It was hard for him to remember that the boy he had met three years ago had been engaged since then in almost constant warfare. How many lives had he taken? Lance was not sentimental; had stabbed a sheep-raider to death and snapped his comrade’s neck for him barely a month before, when a bunch of them had ambushed him on his way back from the moors. But Art had been a warrior. “You had your reasons.”
“I had Ector’s. He told me it was necessary, that I’d saved the kingdom. The Merlin had prophesied I’d kill them, he said.” Art shuddered. Then he pushed to his feet and paced a few strides toward the narrow, barred window, where the night pressed in blackly from outside. “God, Lance!” he suddenly cried, turning by the wall like a caged wolf. “I wish I’d been Ector’s son in very truth. I’d have flown his pennant a thousand times more gladly than Uther’s bloody red dragon. I didn’t even realise until he was dead.”
“He was trying to guide you by what he thought was right. It cost him dearly.”
“It’s made me want to exterminate every Saxon and Angle in the land, pirate or settler. And that’s wrong, isn’t it?”
Not a question Lance was meant to answer. Arthur was looking into the silences inside, where he had to make his own decisions. “Bless you, Lance,” he said fervently. “You won’t ever tell me what I want to hear, will you?”
“Not unless I think it’s right.”
“Or advise me, unless…”
“Unless you ask for it.” A double meaning there: he let Art know, with a lift of one eyebrow, that it was intended.
And after a thoughtful few seconds, Art threw off the shadows that had clustered around him. The effort was too harsh, and Lance could see that he was exhausted. “Well,” he said. “Sufficient to the day, for these grave topics. What do you think of Din Guardi, Lance? It’s beautiful, isn’t it. But why?’
Because somehow life runs into it from the heart of the world, Lance thought. The dragon of the ridge lives here, just as she does in my land. But all Arthur needed right now were his thoughts on the military advantages of the fort, and he sat back, tilted his head and looked around. “It’s beautiful because… it has a well, straight down and into the bedrock. Pure water, unfailing supply—you’d have to dig through solid rock for weeks to poison it or cut it off.” He leaned forward a little, tracing with his finger the line of the walls beyond the guard’s chamber, the height of the roof. “Also because… just there, you could run a dividing wall through and make the place independently defensible from north and south. I’d triple the width of the walls—about nine foot should do—and, nice as they are, I’d lose all the windows.”
Arthur laughed. “I knew it would be so. You’re a strategist, my friend, and you’ll see what’s to be done on the battlefield just as clearly as you have in here. Thank you for coming, for giving up your father’s kingdom. You won’t regret it. I’ll make you a general, like Guy. You’ll be my second-in-command.”
Lance listened in dismay. “What—because I know how to quarter off a building?”
“You’d be astounded how many don’t. Listen, Lance—”
“No, Your Majesty. You listen. If you put me at the head of your army like a bladder on a stick, the men won’t respect me. They don’t know me from King Coel’s wolfhound. Thank you for giving me my own chambers, for welcoming me as a friend, not a recruit. But tomorrow, while you’re in discussion with the kings, let me go and drill among your soldiers. Let me work with them, fight with them, and if I do well, promote me as you wish. Not until then.”
“But I want you at my side.”
“Yes, as your friend, as I am now. On the battlefield and in the conference chambers, too, once I’ve earned my place there. Don’t make me into something I’m not in the meantime. That’s all I ask.”
Arthur turned pale. Had Lance overestimated his capacity to bear contradiction? He was much more imperious in manner than Lance remembered from their weeks at Vindolanda, the boyish airs he’d assumed to make Ector laugh replaced with the real thing. It suited him, God knew, like his new height, like the quiet royal splendour of his clothes. But Lance, a future king himself, and proud as death even if he’d been a swineherd, could not jump through hoops for him, not at any cost…
“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!”