Arthur, p.44
Arthur, page 44
With an effort beyond mere flesh and blood and bone, he somehow gets his left foot beneath him again, and drives himself up, still taking blows on Excalibur, still gasping, hauling breath into scolding lungs.
But then, the unthinkable. Excalibur is gone. The blade is broken. He holds the ivory hilt, still, and a short length of blade remains, but the rest lies in the grass at his feet. It is in this moment Arthur knows it is over.
All of it is over.
Nabor seems as surprised as he. As if the mercenary feels the weight of the omen. As if he knows that Britain is lost.
And yet, Arthur breathes still, his heart beats still, and so there is hope.
I will not yield. I will never yield.
Nabor grins. Lifts his sword, its edge jagged now, where Excalibur has bitten it.
‘I’m still here, boy,’ Arthur gasps, turning to look into the boy’s eyes, to give him at least that. Then he lifts that broken sword and invites Nabor to come.
I … do not … yield.
Nabor raises his sword and comes, and then he stops mid-stride, and stands a moment, staring at Arthur, his expression one of confusion. There is an arrow through his neck, the head and protruding shaft wet with blood, the white swan-feather fletchings quivering in the breeze.
Nabor takes one faltering step more, then falls to his knees, hands clutching at the arrow, and Arthur looks into the mist and sees Iselle on the back of a white mare, her bow in her left hand.
‘Lady! They are breaking!’ a disembodied voice calls from somewhere behind her. ‘Now is our time!’
Arthur looks at his daughter and she looks at him, their eyes full of unspoken words. Then Iselle pulls a rein, wheeling her horse away, and she shrieks in savage joy like some bird of prey, and rides back towards the sound of battle.
When Arthur looks back to Nabor, the man is dead on the ground, those swan feathers shivering against the grass. Then Arthur feels another blow, but it is just the boy throwing himself against Arthur’s body, wrapping his arms around him, his cheek pressed to the bronze scales of his armour.
‘We’re alive, boy,’ he says. He holds the boy to him and looks around. They are alone once more. Just the two of them on the edge of the mere and, like wraiths, he thinks they could just vanish.
‘Come, boy. Let’s get you to Camelot. You’ll be safe there.’
The boy does not answer, and they walk for a while, Arthur limping, the boy helping him, bearing some of the weight of that scale armour and the old man beneath. They do not ride Malo, for the stallion is puffing still, his flanks slick with lather. He deserves the rest, and so Arthur leads him by his reins, and they can see the old hill fort now. It rises out of the mist. While it stands, all is not lost. It cannot be.
Other things, though, lie hidden in the mist. Broken bodies. Open flesh steaming in the dawn, adding to the strange fog. Now and then the pitiful whinny of a stricken horse, a cry of pain or low moan of a dying man. Soon to be silent, all, the wrack of corpses left on the strand now the tide of battle has ebbed.
‘Not long now, boy,’ he says.
The boy does not speak, but he is looking up at the ramparts too, at those banks and ditches behind which fires have long burned against dark nights and in the hearts of men and women since before the Romans came to Britain. And yet, hope is a heavy thing. Arthur knows that only too well. Knows what it is to carry the hopes of others, just as the boy all but carries him now.
The boy is not the first to do so, either. Arthur knows he never bore the weight of this land and its peoples alone. There were others who shared the burden. Gawain, as loyal a friend and sword-brother as any man ever had. And Merlin, who dreamt to the gods and perhaps tried harder than any of them to remember the old ways, to bring them back and save Britain. There had been Lancelot, too, the greatest and best of them. How he had loved Lancelot, and how that love had torn him asunder.
And Guinevere. His heart. He had fought for Guinevere. Always for her.
‘Soon be there,’ he tells the boy, because it seems the boy is tired. Their pace has slowed. Not much, but enough to tell it. ‘There’ll be food. Soft furs. A fire.’
They walk a little further, then the boy stops. He pulls away. Looks up at Arthur, tears standing in his eyes. ‘I don’t want to go,’ he says.
Arthur doesn’t understand. ‘They will look after you there,’ he says. ‘You’re Prince Erbin.’ He can feel blood at his shoulder. Myriad pains rising in him like storm rain in a barrel. He should keep moving while he still can. ‘You are the hope of Britain, boy.’
The boy shakes his head. ‘I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it.’
To Arthur this feels like a blow, after everything.
And yet …
‘What do you want, boy?’ he asks.
The boy frowns, looks at the ground, then brings his eyes back up to Arthur’s. ‘I want to stay with you.’
Arthur’s breath catches in his chest. Did he mishear the boy? ‘I cannot stay here,’ he says. He lifts an arm towards the distant clamour of battle. ‘I’m too old for all this.’
The boy says nothing.
Arthur inclines his head. He needs the boy to listen and listen well. ‘I can’t stay, boy,’ he says.
‘I know,’ the boy says.
It dawns on Arthur then, but he almost doesn’t dare allow himself the hope. He looks around again, chewing on his next words, then fixes his gaze on the boy once more.
‘If you come with me, you don’t get any of this,’ he says, lifting his chin in the direction of that great hill fort, that beating heart of Dumnonia. ‘You don’t become a king. You don’t lead men. You don’t have everything that they would give you. Do you understand?’
The boy nods. ‘We should go.’ His eyes are full of hope.
Arthur cannot speak now. His throat is too tight. He blinks the tears from his own eyes, lifts a hand to scrub them from his cheeks. He takes a breath and takes the boy’s hand and they go to Malo, who nickers softly, and Arthur mounts, then pulls the boy up behind him. He turns the stallion into the west, and together they head back towards the mist-wreathed birch, alder and willow. There is an old path through the mere. A secret way across the water. Perhaps he is the only man still alive who remembers it.
Epilogue
THE DAY EBBS NOW. The sun has dwindled to a yolk of brightness on the southern horizon, where it rests in a bed of light the yellow of mullein petals and the red of campion. Clouds loom above me, drifting on a chill northerly which shivers my feathers as I watch through the interplay of light and dark the others of my kind tumble and course for their evening roost in the far trees across the stubble field.
I am crow.
I hop three times, then walk obliquely towards him, leaning back a little so that I might fly away from him should he move. But he does not move.
A rattle and caw escape my throat and I take to the air, my wing tips spread like fingers, and I cannot stop this creature from calling out with the joy of it. Caa-caa. Caa-caa. Wings beating, rowing against the biting wind. Up and up, then jinking sideways, then momentarily still, as a small boat on the crest of a great ocean wave, before falling, down and down to alight on the branch of an alder in a clump beside the old man’s steading.
I will have to go soon. Back through the veil. I cannot stay with this crow, and she must fly into that cauldron of noise in the far woods and take her roost before nightfall. But I may hold to her a little longer yet. I still have some small power to move where I will in this eternal dream.
And so I watch the old man. He lies beneath a hazel which still holds its leaves, though some are flecked with dull yellow now at the season’s turn. I watch and I ache for the old man and for the past, yet I am happy because he has found peace at last. His eyes are closed and he lies there as still as the coming winter. No breath in him that I can see. No pain. No anguish for things done and things not done.
Arthur. I speak his name, feeling the magic in it, though the world hears only a crow’s caw.
The clump of the steading door startles me, and I resist the bird’s instinct to take wing. The boy emerges. He wears a bear skin around his shoulders and holds two spears and a flask, and he walks with eager step to the hazel beneath which the old man lies. And he bends and grips the man’s shoulder and speaks to him in a soft voice.
The old man does not move.
The boy shakes him again, and this time the old man opens his eyes and looks at the boy and mutters something in reply.
The boy offers the old man his hand, but the man refuses it and climbs to his feet unaided. Presses his hands into the small of his back. Loosens his neck. The boy hands him the larger of the two hunting spears, then sets off towards the woods. But the old man does not follow straight away.
He looks up at me. His hand falls to the iron strap end of his belt, for he thinks I am the Morrigán. Thinks I have come for him. But I hold his eye, just as I hold this bird to the branch though she wants to be gone. And the old man lifts a hand to his chest and keeps it there, and breathes slowly out. And there are tears in his eyes now.
Caa-caa. Caa-caa. I call his name.
Arthur. Arthur.
He knows. He knows I am here. That I have come back.
It is too much now.
He smiles. Holds my eyes a moment longer. Then he turns and follows the boy.
I stay for another dozen heartbeats, but my hold on this creature has ebbed like the day, and I must go.
I call his name for the last time.
Then I leap into the sky and beat my wings for the darkness.
Author’s Note
THE WRITING OF THIS book was never part of some grand plan. Indeed, having written Lancelot, and then Camelot, I felt I needed to step away from these stories and the process of writing them, which I found emotionally and creatively exhausting. It was the right decision, because the experience of writing my thriller, Where Blood Runs Cold, was invigorating and, well, thrilling. What a contrast it was, writing a story set in the modern world, for the most part in one environment (the snowy mountains), and spending almost the entire time with just two characters.
Still, I knew it was not without risk. After eleven historical novels, would I be able to write a contemporary story and respect the unwritten (and sometimes written) rules of the thriller? Could I write in short sentences, disregard worldbuilding in favour of a plot-driven, exhilarating tale, include unexpected twists, a wicked bad guy, page-turning tension, cliff-hangers, and bring it all in at around 85,000 words (Lancelot, after all, was over 200,000)? And of course, would those readers who enjoy my historical novels take a chance on my present-day thriller? It’s not for me to say in which of these things I succeeded (although at 88,000 words, I just about got that right), and which I failed, but I was utterly amazed when Where Blood Runs Cold was made The Times’s Thriller of the Month and went on to win the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize 2022. On a personal level, that award alone was vindication for my decision to venture off-piste and write a contemporary tale.
So, what next? Well, this is where other powers began to exert their influence. Something was calling me back to the fractured, darkening world of sub-Roman Britain. Turns out I had underestimated the allure of this island’s greatest myth and the rewards available to someone lucky enough to be able to play with it. And now, having relished my adventure in the Norwegian mountains, I felt ready to re-immerse myself in Arthur’s world. If I were to get mystical about it, I might even suspect the power of ‘threeness’ of playing a part. Lancelot and Camelot are of course imbued with Celtic mythology, and triadism is a recurring theme in Irish and Welsh tradition. The Morrigán, for instance, occurs in triple form, and there are other three-faced divinities. Images of sacred bulls are rendered with three horns. Ulster’s warrior hero Cú Chulainn wore his hair in three braids and killed enemy warriors in groups of three. There was a tradition of killing the king in three ways, by wounding, burning, and drowning. There is the totality of time as represented in the past, present, and future. There’s an acknowledgement that things happen in threes. A belief in the three realms of sky, earth, and water (or underworld), an understanding of Man’s journey through birth, death, and rebirth. And on, and on. Indeed, the importance of triplism is not lost on my Merlin, who has tattooed on the palm of his right hand a triskele, a symbol comprising three conjoined spirals. The triskele has had different meanings in different cultures across the ages, but it cannot escape its association with triadism.
There is power in three, then, so how could I not write another book in my Arthurian retelling?
Furthermore, whilst a duology is a statement of intent, I think a trilogy of Arthurian Tales really stakes a claim on my little slice of the myth. And, because these books are companion novels rather than a linear series, there would be a synergy, I hoped, in adding another book.
But what kind of story would it be? Well, I left Arthur in Camelot a shadow-man, a broken vessel, and I felt he deserved another chance. I owed the legend, the great warrior, his shining moment. I may never have made him a king, but I could give him one last charge into glory. So, the subject of this book was never in doubt. It had to be Arthur.
Of course, Lancelot and Camelot were written in the first person, because telling the story from the narrator’s point of view seemed the best way of really getting under the skin of both Lancelot and Galahad. For whatever reason, it didn’t feel right to put myself in Arthur’s skin, as it were, and write in the first person, though I still wanted the reader to feel as close to our hero as possible and for the story to feel intimate and focused. And so, I went for the ‘limited third person’ approach (as opposed to the more traditional omnipresent third person), so that we only ever see the world through Arthur’s eyes. Until the epilogue, that is, when Guinevere, her spirit inhabiting a crow, slips back through the veil to cast an eye upon Arthur for the last time.
As I explained in the Author’s Note in Lancelot, you won’t find much of the traditional myth in these books, and I’m sorry if that’s disappointing. One reason for this is because many stories in the myth are, frankly, strange to say the least. Apart from some implied magic, such as that relating to Guinevere’s spirit journeying, and despite the elusiveness of a historical Arthur, my books are grounded in a historically rendered world: a sub-Roman Britain being inexorably overrun by incoming Saxons. It would be difficult, therefore, to include Geoffrey of Monmouth’s pig-gobbling giant with his club that two men could barely lift off the ground. Or a sinful king and his sons who are magically transformed into savage boars. Or a sword-catching Lady who lives beneath the surface of a lake. Or a headless green knight. And so on.
Rather, I’ve had fun subverting some aspects of the legend, giving subtle nods to characters and episodes in the age-old stories with my own versions and conceivable explanations. In Camelot, my ‘Green Knight’ is a warrior with skin stained by the copper bands on his arms and at his neck, and from living in the caves of a copper mine. Gawain cuts off his head, of course. In Lancelot, my ‘Round Table’ is the stump of a once huge oak tree, around which Arthur and his most trusted warriors gather to talk of war. My ‘Lady of the Lake’ is a Pictish priestess who symbolically submerges Excalibur in the water (or underworld) before drawing it out again.
I could not resist inserting Tristan and Isolde into the tale, because it seemed to me that their situation, their unfortunate love triangle with King Mark at the sharp end, provided the perfect mirror through which Arthur could reflect on his own relationship with Lancelot and Guinevere. Thus, through their tragedy he might gain some objective insight and, hopefully, find some redemption for his own.
The Saracen warrior Palamedes first appears later in the legend, in the thirteenth-century French romance Palamedes, the Post-Vulgate Cycle, Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, and the Prose Tristan. But I thought him too good a potential character not to include here. The trouble with discovering such a character late on is that I wish I’d written him into Lancelot. Guivret the Small, also known as the Little King, pops up in Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec and the Welsh Geraint, but I have taken only his name and stature into my own tale. In fact, the role of dwarves in Arthurian literature (there are many mentions) is a subject all on its own. I won’t get into that here, other than to say the theories are quite fascinating.
One thing I was pleased to do was revisit the younger Morgana (or Morgaine as she was) in the backstory timeline, because I felt it was important to give some context as to why she becomes the twisted, hate-filled figure we see in Camelot. Well, Uther killed her father, took her mother for his wife and her home for himself. Arthur then gets her pregnant, is openly ashamed of having done so, and stands by as Uther arranges for the infant Mordred to be rowed out upon a lake and thrown overboard. If the actress playing Morgana in a screen adaptation was to ask, ‘What’s my motivation?’ there would be plenty to get into! Later, of course, Arthur kills Mordred and Galahad kills her son Ambrosius, so one can perhaps understand the old woman’s demeanour in my stories.
Some other familiar faces, e.g., Gawain, Galahad, Iselle, do appear towards the end of Arthur, but it was a deliberate decision to keep them in the background. They had their time in the previous novels, and it was important for this story to be about Arthur and about the boy in whom he sees, in many ways, his younger self, burdened with the hopes and expectations of others. It was also imperative that this should be a self-contained story as much as possible. I like to think that a reader could come to this novel and enjoy it even if they hadn’t previously read the other two, although I suspect the experience would be enhanced if they had.
Of course, traditionally, Arthur is never seen or heard of again following his mortal wounds received at the hands of his own son, Mordred, at the Battle of Camlan. However, it was too exciting for me to imagine that he did not die of his wounds, nor was he healed in Avalon (where I sent him to live a hermit’s life in Camelot), there to remain until his death from old age. The question I wanted to pose is, what if Arthur had lived? What kind of man would he have become? And, more importantly, could he be tempted back to the world, to wield Excalibur one final time before slipping through the veil at last?
But then, the unthinkable. Excalibur is gone. The blade is broken. He holds the ivory hilt, still, and a short length of blade remains, but the rest lies in the grass at his feet. It is in this moment Arthur knows it is over.
All of it is over.
Nabor seems as surprised as he. As if the mercenary feels the weight of the omen. As if he knows that Britain is lost.
And yet, Arthur breathes still, his heart beats still, and so there is hope.
I will not yield. I will never yield.
Nabor grins. Lifts his sword, its edge jagged now, where Excalibur has bitten it.
‘I’m still here, boy,’ Arthur gasps, turning to look into the boy’s eyes, to give him at least that. Then he lifts that broken sword and invites Nabor to come.
I … do not … yield.
Nabor raises his sword and comes, and then he stops mid-stride, and stands a moment, staring at Arthur, his expression one of confusion. There is an arrow through his neck, the head and protruding shaft wet with blood, the white swan-feather fletchings quivering in the breeze.
Nabor takes one faltering step more, then falls to his knees, hands clutching at the arrow, and Arthur looks into the mist and sees Iselle on the back of a white mare, her bow in her left hand.
‘Lady! They are breaking!’ a disembodied voice calls from somewhere behind her. ‘Now is our time!’
Arthur looks at his daughter and she looks at him, their eyes full of unspoken words. Then Iselle pulls a rein, wheeling her horse away, and she shrieks in savage joy like some bird of prey, and rides back towards the sound of battle.
When Arthur looks back to Nabor, the man is dead on the ground, those swan feathers shivering against the grass. Then Arthur feels another blow, but it is just the boy throwing himself against Arthur’s body, wrapping his arms around him, his cheek pressed to the bronze scales of his armour.
‘We’re alive, boy,’ he says. He holds the boy to him and looks around. They are alone once more. Just the two of them on the edge of the mere and, like wraiths, he thinks they could just vanish.
‘Come, boy. Let’s get you to Camelot. You’ll be safe there.’
The boy does not answer, and they walk for a while, Arthur limping, the boy helping him, bearing some of the weight of that scale armour and the old man beneath. They do not ride Malo, for the stallion is puffing still, his flanks slick with lather. He deserves the rest, and so Arthur leads him by his reins, and they can see the old hill fort now. It rises out of the mist. While it stands, all is not lost. It cannot be.
Other things, though, lie hidden in the mist. Broken bodies. Open flesh steaming in the dawn, adding to the strange fog. Now and then the pitiful whinny of a stricken horse, a cry of pain or low moan of a dying man. Soon to be silent, all, the wrack of corpses left on the strand now the tide of battle has ebbed.
‘Not long now, boy,’ he says.
The boy does not speak, but he is looking up at the ramparts too, at those banks and ditches behind which fires have long burned against dark nights and in the hearts of men and women since before the Romans came to Britain. And yet, hope is a heavy thing. Arthur knows that only too well. Knows what it is to carry the hopes of others, just as the boy all but carries him now.
The boy is not the first to do so, either. Arthur knows he never bore the weight of this land and its peoples alone. There were others who shared the burden. Gawain, as loyal a friend and sword-brother as any man ever had. And Merlin, who dreamt to the gods and perhaps tried harder than any of them to remember the old ways, to bring them back and save Britain. There had been Lancelot, too, the greatest and best of them. How he had loved Lancelot, and how that love had torn him asunder.
And Guinevere. His heart. He had fought for Guinevere. Always for her.
‘Soon be there,’ he tells the boy, because it seems the boy is tired. Their pace has slowed. Not much, but enough to tell it. ‘There’ll be food. Soft furs. A fire.’
They walk a little further, then the boy stops. He pulls away. Looks up at Arthur, tears standing in his eyes. ‘I don’t want to go,’ he says.
Arthur doesn’t understand. ‘They will look after you there,’ he says. ‘You’re Prince Erbin.’ He can feel blood at his shoulder. Myriad pains rising in him like storm rain in a barrel. He should keep moving while he still can. ‘You are the hope of Britain, boy.’
The boy shakes his head. ‘I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it.’
To Arthur this feels like a blow, after everything.
And yet …
‘What do you want, boy?’ he asks.
The boy frowns, looks at the ground, then brings his eyes back up to Arthur’s. ‘I want to stay with you.’
Arthur’s breath catches in his chest. Did he mishear the boy? ‘I cannot stay here,’ he says. He lifts an arm towards the distant clamour of battle. ‘I’m too old for all this.’
The boy says nothing.
Arthur inclines his head. He needs the boy to listen and listen well. ‘I can’t stay, boy,’ he says.
‘I know,’ the boy says.
It dawns on Arthur then, but he almost doesn’t dare allow himself the hope. He looks around again, chewing on his next words, then fixes his gaze on the boy once more.
‘If you come with me, you don’t get any of this,’ he says, lifting his chin in the direction of that great hill fort, that beating heart of Dumnonia. ‘You don’t become a king. You don’t lead men. You don’t have everything that they would give you. Do you understand?’
The boy nods. ‘We should go.’ His eyes are full of hope.
Arthur cannot speak now. His throat is too tight. He blinks the tears from his own eyes, lifts a hand to scrub them from his cheeks. He takes a breath and takes the boy’s hand and they go to Malo, who nickers softly, and Arthur mounts, then pulls the boy up behind him. He turns the stallion into the west, and together they head back towards the mist-wreathed birch, alder and willow. There is an old path through the mere. A secret way across the water. Perhaps he is the only man still alive who remembers it.
Epilogue
THE DAY EBBS NOW. The sun has dwindled to a yolk of brightness on the southern horizon, where it rests in a bed of light the yellow of mullein petals and the red of campion. Clouds loom above me, drifting on a chill northerly which shivers my feathers as I watch through the interplay of light and dark the others of my kind tumble and course for their evening roost in the far trees across the stubble field.
I am crow.
I hop three times, then walk obliquely towards him, leaning back a little so that I might fly away from him should he move. But he does not move.
A rattle and caw escape my throat and I take to the air, my wing tips spread like fingers, and I cannot stop this creature from calling out with the joy of it. Caa-caa. Caa-caa. Wings beating, rowing against the biting wind. Up and up, then jinking sideways, then momentarily still, as a small boat on the crest of a great ocean wave, before falling, down and down to alight on the branch of an alder in a clump beside the old man’s steading.
I will have to go soon. Back through the veil. I cannot stay with this crow, and she must fly into that cauldron of noise in the far woods and take her roost before nightfall. But I may hold to her a little longer yet. I still have some small power to move where I will in this eternal dream.
And so I watch the old man. He lies beneath a hazel which still holds its leaves, though some are flecked with dull yellow now at the season’s turn. I watch and I ache for the old man and for the past, yet I am happy because he has found peace at last. His eyes are closed and he lies there as still as the coming winter. No breath in him that I can see. No pain. No anguish for things done and things not done.
Arthur. I speak his name, feeling the magic in it, though the world hears only a crow’s caw.
The clump of the steading door startles me, and I resist the bird’s instinct to take wing. The boy emerges. He wears a bear skin around his shoulders and holds two spears and a flask, and he walks with eager step to the hazel beneath which the old man lies. And he bends and grips the man’s shoulder and speaks to him in a soft voice.
The old man does not move.
The boy shakes him again, and this time the old man opens his eyes and looks at the boy and mutters something in reply.
The boy offers the old man his hand, but the man refuses it and climbs to his feet unaided. Presses his hands into the small of his back. Loosens his neck. The boy hands him the larger of the two hunting spears, then sets off towards the woods. But the old man does not follow straight away.
He looks up at me. His hand falls to the iron strap end of his belt, for he thinks I am the Morrigán. Thinks I have come for him. But I hold his eye, just as I hold this bird to the branch though she wants to be gone. And the old man lifts a hand to his chest and keeps it there, and breathes slowly out. And there are tears in his eyes now.
Caa-caa. Caa-caa. I call his name.
Arthur. Arthur.
He knows. He knows I am here. That I have come back.
It is too much now.
He smiles. Holds my eyes a moment longer. Then he turns and follows the boy.
I stay for another dozen heartbeats, but my hold on this creature has ebbed like the day, and I must go.
I call his name for the last time.
Then I leap into the sky and beat my wings for the darkness.
Author’s Note
THE WRITING OF THIS book was never part of some grand plan. Indeed, having written Lancelot, and then Camelot, I felt I needed to step away from these stories and the process of writing them, which I found emotionally and creatively exhausting. It was the right decision, because the experience of writing my thriller, Where Blood Runs Cold, was invigorating and, well, thrilling. What a contrast it was, writing a story set in the modern world, for the most part in one environment (the snowy mountains), and spending almost the entire time with just two characters.
Still, I knew it was not without risk. After eleven historical novels, would I be able to write a contemporary story and respect the unwritten (and sometimes written) rules of the thriller? Could I write in short sentences, disregard worldbuilding in favour of a plot-driven, exhilarating tale, include unexpected twists, a wicked bad guy, page-turning tension, cliff-hangers, and bring it all in at around 85,000 words (Lancelot, after all, was over 200,000)? And of course, would those readers who enjoy my historical novels take a chance on my present-day thriller? It’s not for me to say in which of these things I succeeded (although at 88,000 words, I just about got that right), and which I failed, but I was utterly amazed when Where Blood Runs Cold was made The Times’s Thriller of the Month and went on to win the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize 2022. On a personal level, that award alone was vindication for my decision to venture off-piste and write a contemporary tale.
So, what next? Well, this is where other powers began to exert their influence. Something was calling me back to the fractured, darkening world of sub-Roman Britain. Turns out I had underestimated the allure of this island’s greatest myth and the rewards available to someone lucky enough to be able to play with it. And now, having relished my adventure in the Norwegian mountains, I felt ready to re-immerse myself in Arthur’s world. If I were to get mystical about it, I might even suspect the power of ‘threeness’ of playing a part. Lancelot and Camelot are of course imbued with Celtic mythology, and triadism is a recurring theme in Irish and Welsh tradition. The Morrigán, for instance, occurs in triple form, and there are other three-faced divinities. Images of sacred bulls are rendered with three horns. Ulster’s warrior hero Cú Chulainn wore his hair in three braids and killed enemy warriors in groups of three. There was a tradition of killing the king in three ways, by wounding, burning, and drowning. There is the totality of time as represented in the past, present, and future. There’s an acknowledgement that things happen in threes. A belief in the three realms of sky, earth, and water (or underworld), an understanding of Man’s journey through birth, death, and rebirth. And on, and on. Indeed, the importance of triplism is not lost on my Merlin, who has tattooed on the palm of his right hand a triskele, a symbol comprising three conjoined spirals. The triskele has had different meanings in different cultures across the ages, but it cannot escape its association with triadism.
There is power in three, then, so how could I not write another book in my Arthurian retelling?
Furthermore, whilst a duology is a statement of intent, I think a trilogy of Arthurian Tales really stakes a claim on my little slice of the myth. And, because these books are companion novels rather than a linear series, there would be a synergy, I hoped, in adding another book.
But what kind of story would it be? Well, I left Arthur in Camelot a shadow-man, a broken vessel, and I felt he deserved another chance. I owed the legend, the great warrior, his shining moment. I may never have made him a king, but I could give him one last charge into glory. So, the subject of this book was never in doubt. It had to be Arthur.
Of course, Lancelot and Camelot were written in the first person, because telling the story from the narrator’s point of view seemed the best way of really getting under the skin of both Lancelot and Galahad. For whatever reason, it didn’t feel right to put myself in Arthur’s skin, as it were, and write in the first person, though I still wanted the reader to feel as close to our hero as possible and for the story to feel intimate and focused. And so, I went for the ‘limited third person’ approach (as opposed to the more traditional omnipresent third person), so that we only ever see the world through Arthur’s eyes. Until the epilogue, that is, when Guinevere, her spirit inhabiting a crow, slips back through the veil to cast an eye upon Arthur for the last time.
As I explained in the Author’s Note in Lancelot, you won’t find much of the traditional myth in these books, and I’m sorry if that’s disappointing. One reason for this is because many stories in the myth are, frankly, strange to say the least. Apart from some implied magic, such as that relating to Guinevere’s spirit journeying, and despite the elusiveness of a historical Arthur, my books are grounded in a historically rendered world: a sub-Roman Britain being inexorably overrun by incoming Saxons. It would be difficult, therefore, to include Geoffrey of Monmouth’s pig-gobbling giant with his club that two men could barely lift off the ground. Or a sinful king and his sons who are magically transformed into savage boars. Or a sword-catching Lady who lives beneath the surface of a lake. Or a headless green knight. And so on.
Rather, I’ve had fun subverting some aspects of the legend, giving subtle nods to characters and episodes in the age-old stories with my own versions and conceivable explanations. In Camelot, my ‘Green Knight’ is a warrior with skin stained by the copper bands on his arms and at his neck, and from living in the caves of a copper mine. Gawain cuts off his head, of course. In Lancelot, my ‘Round Table’ is the stump of a once huge oak tree, around which Arthur and his most trusted warriors gather to talk of war. My ‘Lady of the Lake’ is a Pictish priestess who symbolically submerges Excalibur in the water (or underworld) before drawing it out again.
I could not resist inserting Tristan and Isolde into the tale, because it seemed to me that their situation, their unfortunate love triangle with King Mark at the sharp end, provided the perfect mirror through which Arthur could reflect on his own relationship with Lancelot and Guinevere. Thus, through their tragedy he might gain some objective insight and, hopefully, find some redemption for his own.
The Saracen warrior Palamedes first appears later in the legend, in the thirteenth-century French romance Palamedes, the Post-Vulgate Cycle, Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, and the Prose Tristan. But I thought him too good a potential character not to include here. The trouble with discovering such a character late on is that I wish I’d written him into Lancelot. Guivret the Small, also known as the Little King, pops up in Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec and the Welsh Geraint, but I have taken only his name and stature into my own tale. In fact, the role of dwarves in Arthurian literature (there are many mentions) is a subject all on its own. I won’t get into that here, other than to say the theories are quite fascinating.
One thing I was pleased to do was revisit the younger Morgana (or Morgaine as she was) in the backstory timeline, because I felt it was important to give some context as to why she becomes the twisted, hate-filled figure we see in Camelot. Well, Uther killed her father, took her mother for his wife and her home for himself. Arthur then gets her pregnant, is openly ashamed of having done so, and stands by as Uther arranges for the infant Mordred to be rowed out upon a lake and thrown overboard. If the actress playing Morgana in a screen adaptation was to ask, ‘What’s my motivation?’ there would be plenty to get into! Later, of course, Arthur kills Mordred and Galahad kills her son Ambrosius, so one can perhaps understand the old woman’s demeanour in my stories.
Some other familiar faces, e.g., Gawain, Galahad, Iselle, do appear towards the end of Arthur, but it was a deliberate decision to keep them in the background. They had their time in the previous novels, and it was important for this story to be about Arthur and about the boy in whom he sees, in many ways, his younger self, burdened with the hopes and expectations of others. It was also imperative that this should be a self-contained story as much as possible. I like to think that a reader could come to this novel and enjoy it even if they hadn’t previously read the other two, although I suspect the experience would be enhanced if they had.
Of course, traditionally, Arthur is never seen or heard of again following his mortal wounds received at the hands of his own son, Mordred, at the Battle of Camlan. However, it was too exciting for me to imagine that he did not die of his wounds, nor was he healed in Avalon (where I sent him to live a hermit’s life in Camelot), there to remain until his death from old age. The question I wanted to pose is, what if Arthur had lived? What kind of man would he have become? And, more importantly, could he be tempted back to the world, to wield Excalibur one final time before slipping through the veil at last?
