Corbenic Page 8

  “You were a time!” Shadow looked at him closely. “Everything all right? Not bad news?”

  “No. Not bad at all.” The sun shone in his eyes; suddenly he felt it was true, and that surge of happiness came back, the same pride he had felt when he’d first walked out of Otter’s Brook. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go and see this fight.”

  The castle was hung with flags. As Cal ran after Shadow down the long, sloping path he saw that this morning the Dell was full of tents and vans; a sudden garish encampment that had mushroomed up in the sun, peopled by men in chainmail and bits of clanky plate armor and jeans, by a smith banging horseshoes on a vast anvil, by women in long dresses and braided hair cooking messes of stew in precarious cauldrons. There were kids everywhere, pinned and laced into a patchwork of homemade historical costumes, some with their faces painted with incongruous tigers or Welsh dragons. The smoke of fires hung low, the smell of sizzling meat and onions eye-wateringly strong from the hot dog van at the edge of the car park, and somewhere someone was playing a harp, the fine twang almost drowned out by the eleven o’clock news thundering from a radio hung on a stack of spiked halberds.

  “What is all this?”

  Shadow grinned. “A meeting of reenacters. I told you.”

  “And they’re going to fight each other? All of them?”

  She picked her way past a pile of steaming horse manure. “Watch your step. No, not like a battle. Hawk says they have those, but this is more like . . . a tournament. For Advent.”

  “Advent?”

  “Arthur called it. He always likes to celebrate the old feast days. Says he won’t sit down to eat till something really way-out has happened.”

  But Cal had stopped by a stall selling weapons, and she went back for him slowly. Swords of every period and variety hung there: rapiers, épées, foils, claymores, falchions; short Roman stabbing blades, huge unwieldable medieval broadswords. He stared at the prices almost in dismay. “These things cost a fortune.”

  “Good replicas always do.” Shadow tapped a hanging dagger; it clinked against the others in the row. Then she said, “None of them are as special as your sword. The Company are looking after it. They’ll know what to do.”

  A trumpet rang out in the castle, and a loudspeaker rumbled blurred words inside the walls. Shadow grabbed his arm. “Come on! We’ll miss him!” She pushed through a crowd of visitors packing the gloomy tunnel of the gatehouse and out into a vast grassy courtyard lined with spectators kept back by a white rope on pegs hammered into the mud. On all four sides the walls of the castle rose, lined with people. Some families had picnic rugs or folding chairs; from crumbling windows in Marten’s tower excited kids watched, gripped firmly by the shoulders, and along the battlements a whole court smoked and catcalled and ate, a bizarre confusion of fashions and epochs. Most were in medieval dress, but there were a few Roman legionnaires, a crusader knight, and a whole gang of Roundheads, leaning nonchalantly on huge pikes. High on the tower top sat a noisy row of Vikings, their legs through the safety rails, drinking from cans passed from hand to hand. An empty can was tossed down and just missed Cal, who glared up. The Vikings jeered.

  “Here,” Shadow said.

  The trumpets brayed again, loud and close. She ran up a flight of stone steps built against the curtain wall, and Cal followed. The steps were steep and irregular; at the top he pushed among the spectators until he could find a space, and glancing behind him he saw that they were high on the castle’s brink, and far below was the Dell’s green moat, and beyond that the town, and the estuary, and the white and silver spans of the Severn bridges.

  “Here he comes!” She sounded proud, full of laughter.

  Cal turned, and stared. A gaudy procession of armed men, horses, banners. And on the first horse, bareheaded in a chainmail hauberk and a surcoat blazing with the image of a golden sun, was the Hawk. Shadow yelled at him and he saw them, waving up and blowing kisses, and Cal saw he wore a heavy sword and two boys marched behind him with a plumed helmet and a lance. “He’s going to joust! He must be crazy!”

  Shadow smiled a secret smile. “He’s good at it. You watch.”

  The other knight wore blue, pale blue, and his helmet was crested with a leaping cat; Cal wondered at how heavy it must be. In the cleared center of the tiltyard a long space had a frail barrier down the center; marshals with white batons conferred there, calling complex instructions, gesturing the crowd back. The two knights, one at each end, were handed up their lances, heavy, unmaneuverable things, but Hawk tucked his up expertly and brought the horse around, its yellow caparison already mudflecked, its eyes in the wide holes of the golden cloth white and tense. He made a strange flamboyant salute, but not to them; to a group of people on the tower, a man in a tweed suit, and a tall man behind him, and a woman with long blond hair.

  “Who are they?”

  “Quiet! This is it.”

  The horses backed, snorting. Drums were rolling, an ominous thunder. In the hushed crowd a baby cried. At the very center of the lists, the marshal’s baton came down. The crowd roared. The horses began to run, straight at each other; the lances swiveled down. There was a terrifying second of expectation, then the blue knight’s lance sliced over Hawk’s shoulder and they were past each other, and Hawk was at the far end, wheeling around. Before Cal could speak they came again, the thunder of the hooves vibrating deep in the turf and the stones, the lances deadly and long, and even as he saw with a shock of fear that there was no padding, that they were real, Hawk’s lance struck the round shield of the blue knight with a crack, splintering, flinging the man down and off with a sickening thud on the grass. The crowd went mad, screaming their praise.

  “This is crazy! He might be hurt!” Cal’s yell was lost, but Shadow just shook her head and pointed. The blue knight was on his feet.

  Still crazy, Cal thought. But the excitement was burning in him, too, he knew that as he watched Hawk leap down and hand his horse to a boy who ran out for it and then draw his sword.

  The blue knight flung off his helmet. He had a dark tanned face; he winked at Hawk. Then he attacked.

  “Is this a setup?” Cal had Shadow by the shoulder.

  “What?”

  “Like a stage fight!” He had to shout in her ear. “Or is it real?”

  She looked at him then, strangely, and her answer was so low he barely heard it. “They’ll never say.”

  The swords rang and clashed. He knew nothing of this but it stirred him; he could see how the attacks were swept in, feinted, covered; how the parries worked to block and protect the body, that there were ways of balancing and using the other’s weight and force against him, that it was a whole science, a beautiful, deadly dance. Hawk slashed; the crowd gasped as the blue knight ducked barely in time, then rushed in, cutting right and left into the rock-steady parries, twisting, swinging swiftly around to avoid a vertical slice of the hissing blade.

  Shadow was yelling, jumping up and down, and so was he, he realized, shouting, “Hawk! Come on!” and other useless nonsense, and it was back, something of that crazy desperate longing that he had felt before the Grail, that hunger, that loss of himself. “Hawk!” he screamed, and the golden knight turned with a great roar and smashed his opponent’s sword aside so that it flew and skidded over the muddy grass.

  Everyone flung their arms up and cheered.

  And the blue knight knelt gasping, breathless, and laughed, and Hawk leaned on his sword and laughed with him, sweat dripping from his chin.

  And in that instant, a bird plummeted out of the sky. A sudden, violent shock, it screamed down straight into Cal’s face; he flung an arm up, caught a fluttering screech of hooked beak, a cold eye, felt the rake of talons. Then he was down, people around him scattering and yelling, Shadow dragging him and the bird diving at him again, a demented, terrifying slash so that he beat at it and flung his arms over his head, a hot scratch searing down his face.

  “Cal! It’s gone. Are you all right?”

&
nbsp; Carefully, he uncurled. “What the hell was it?” he gasped.

  “A bird. Some sort of falcon. It seemed to go right for you.”

  “An osprey.” A woman in a fifteenth-century shift pointed up. “There it is.”

  It had risen, far into the blue, a point of darkness. Three times it screamed around the castle, every eye following it, until it swooped down and down onto the arm of a huge brawny red-haired man outside in the encampment. Cal was hanging so far out over the wall to see, Shadow had to grab him. The falconer looked up, one look. Sour. Then he was gone in the crowd.

  “Who was it?” Shadow stared. “Did you know him?”

  “That was Leo.” Blood ran onto his lip; he could taste it.

  “From that . . . from Corbenic?”

  “I’m sure it was him.”

  “Cal!”

  He turned. Hawk was down on the grass, pushing through the crowd that was streaming toward the archery butts set out in the upper barbican. When he reached the foot of the wall he stared up, the sweat still gleaming on him. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine.” Cal mopped the blood up with a tissue. “Great.”

  The sarcasm was wasted. Hawk just nodded. “The Company want to meet you. Come on.”

  At the end of the battlements was a small door marked PRIVATE. Ignoring that, Hawk opened it and led them in, and in the sudden dimness Cal saw he was in a tower room, the floor made of planks of wood, an apple-wood fire burning in the great hearth against one wall. He saw the blond-haired woman turn to him, and then, sitting by the fire, the man in the tweed suit, who looked up as they came in. He had a grave face, and for a moment Cal thought he seemed like a university type, a lecturer. And then he thought, No. A soldier.

  The man had Cal’s sword on his knees. “So,” he said, looking hard at Cal, his voice soft. “This weapon was given to you? You must be someone very special.” The sword gleamed, its red stones bright in the flame light.

  “And you must be Arthur,” Cal said.

  Arthur stood. “Yes,” he said mildly. “So I am. This is Gwen, my wife. And my seneschal, Kai.” The tall man. So handsome that Cal hated him on sight. And the long dark coat had to be Armani, at least.

  Kai smiled, slightly mocking. “Your face is cut. Why did the bird attack you?”

  “My business.” He took a step forward and held his hands out. “That’s my sword. I want it.”

  “Do you?” Arthur gestured toward Hawk. “My nephew tells me you want to sell it.”

  “That was yesterday. Things are better today.”

  “But what will you do with it?”

  “Learn to use it.” Cal glanced at Hawk. “I’d like to learn. If you’d teach me.”

  “We’ll all teach you, laddie,” Hawk said heartily.

  “Indeed,” Kai said acidly. “You’ll need all of us.”

  Cal turned to Arthur, who held the sword out in both hands.

  “Then take it back, and everything that it means, and be one with us, Cal.”

  Slowly, Cal reached out and took it, the weight of the metal, warm from the fire, put his fingers around the blade, held it tight.

  Arthur smiled. “Welcome to the Company.”

  Behind him, Kai folded his arms. “Maybe now we can eat,” he muttered.

  Spear

  Chapter Eleven

  “Go thy way,” said she, “to Arthur’s court, where are the best of men, and the most generous and bravest.”

  Peredur

  December was already halfway over. The weather had chilled; as he waited on the corner of Otter’s Brook, Cal saw that the last few leaves which had clung onto the trees only yesterday were gone now, blown away by the blustery wind. As he watched them their stark bare shapes offended his longing for order—trees were so haphazard; he wanted to straighten them up. Plunging his hands in his pockets he paced the pavement, kicking rotten leaves into the gutter. He didn’t know what any of the trees were called. In Sutton Street there had never been any, just the stubborn weeds that sprouted every year from the cracks in the paved yard.

  Hawk’s van rattled around the corner. Cal picked up the sword in its canvas case and ran over.

  “Sorry.” Shadow had the door open, breathless. “Couldn’t get it to start. We daren’t stop.”

  Cal jumped in, putting the sword tidily onto the heap of weapons and books and blankets and other junk under the seats. Hawk shuddered the gears, muttering to himself in exasperation. Then he said, “In the old days people knew how to travel. Horses. Fine carriages. Not these foul-stenched tin cans.”

  “Just because you can’t afford a good one.” Shadow reached out and tickled his neck. He gave a yelp; the van swerved unnervingly. Grinning, he said, “In the old days I had the best. Warhorses, chargers. Men ran out of castles to help me dismount. Squires removed my armor in sumptuous chambers, and there were women, lady, beautiful women. And feasts.”

  Shadow looked at Cal and rolled her eyes. He smiled back briefly, but the whole idea reminded him of Corbenic, and as the van roared up the hill the sword shifted against his foot, nudging.

  Last night he had dreamed that the sword was hanging over him. He had lain there on his back in the quiet, warm room, rigid with sweat, not daring to open his eyes, and he had known, definitely, surely, with a sickening certainty, that the sword was pointing down in midair above his face, that its wickedly sharp edge was catching the glimmer from the security light on Trevor’s garage, that the icy point was only just above his forehead. He had felt it descend, felt the metal touch him, pin-sharp, so that he pressed back into the pillow with a gasp and then, quickly, summoning all his courage, snapped his eyes open.

  There had been nothing there.

  Sick with despair, he had sat up after a while, and pulling the duvet around his shoulders, huddled in the dark. It had been at least half an hour before he’d gotten up, groped for the sword under the bed, and found it zipped safe in the canvas cover Hawk had given him. Even then he hadn’t dared open the zip.

  “Well, you can see why Cal doesn’t want us calling for him at the house.” Shadow smiled archly. “Think of the embarrassment of this thing shedding its hubcaps in such a respectable residential area. Think of what the neighbors would say!”

  “Fine,” Cal muttered. “Make fun.”

  Maybe she saw he was down, because she said gently, “I was only joking.”

  It was true though. He always met them at the corner. After Shadow had come to the house that first time Trevor had said, “I don’t want her sort hanging round here,” in a voice that Cal hated. And yet he was a bit ashamed of them himself, the van with its painted sunflowers, their terrible clothes, the mess.

  Shadow was watching him in the mirror. She said, “I know what they’re like. Parents. Do what we say. Be what we want you to be.” She looked away, so he saw for the first time the tiny tattooed spider that hung from the web down under her ear. “They just stifle you.” She sounded surprisingly bitter. Cal nodded, wondering what she’d say if she knew he’d love to be stifled like that, to have had anyone that even cared what he did.

  To his relief the van turned onto the A48. It was so noisy that talking would be a waste of time. Cal watched the winter fields. Some were plowed, others had a few sheep huddled against the cold. All the woodlands had the same stark bareness; there were no birds, except that high above Wentwood a falcon swung. He frowned, thinking of the osprey. For three weeks he’d worked at the office and washed and ironed his clothes to perfection and tried to forget about Corbenic. And despite what he’d told his mother, despite all his promises, he hadn’t gone home. No money had been the first excuse, and yesterday he’d stopped her in midsentence and told her that Trevor had wanted him to work today, Saturday. It had been a lie. He just couldn’t face her. He couldn’t face the flat. He had only wanted to come here. He was one of the Company now, and they were teaching him. Every weekend and sometimes in the evenings Hawk practiced with him, and the moves of the sword, the dance and science of
it, were coming to delight him. To his own astonishment, he loved it. He felt so much better. He was fitter; he was sure the muscles of his arms were stronger. And he just liked being with them all.

  Turning off at Catsash, the van droned painfully up the long hill. Shadow giggled. “We’d be better off pushing.”

  “Shut it.” Hawk leaned forward, as if he urged the van on. At the top they turned left, and went through the lanes at the top of the ridge, before swinging over and down to Caerleon, where the long red curve of the Usk curled round the sprawling village. Arthur’s place was just outside, down toward Llangibby. As the van pulled into the farm drive, mud from its tires spattered the lopsided gate with its chalked name. CELLI WIC FARM.

  A gang of men and girls were shooting arrows at targets in the field; one of them came and opened the gate, leaning on it, and Cal saw it was the tall man, Kai.

  “Well.” Kai smiled his acid smile. “Our new boy. How’s it going?”

  “He’s coming on.” Hawk cursed as the engine cut out. In the sudden silence the slice and thud of the arrows, the shouts of the archers seemed unnaturally loud.

  “But will he make it? There’s more to being here than knowing how to swing a sword.” The tall man looked at Cal narrowly. “We have to be careful.”

  Hawk put both brawny arms on the wheel and said quietly, “He’s all right.”

  Kai nodded. “Let’s hope so. We’ve had enough of traitors.”

  “I’ll take responsibility for bringing him.”

  “Like last time.”

  Hawk started the van. “That was all a long time ago.”

  Kai stepped back. “As you and I both know, Hawk of May, not long enough.”

  The van rocked and plunged through the ruts.

  “What’s his problem?” Cal said irritably. “Seems like he can’t stand the sight of me.”