Corbenic

Chapter Ten

Ladies and damsels climbed into towers and peered through the wall battlements, thronging at windows to see the knights joust.

Didot-Perceval

He had always loathed the men. Over the years there had been many, and four who’d stayed around for a few months each, one almost a year. Cal had been sullen, barely able to speak to them, even Aled, who’d been so free-handed with his money and had given him that denim jacket when he was thirteen. But it had been cheap and tacky and he’d sold it. They’d taken her out, and she’d laughed and seemed happy; sometimes he’d let himself almost think one of them might make a difference. But the voices had always come back, and the gin to drown them out. And when the men had gone she was worse. Now, maybe, there was another one. He waited, watching Shadow through the glass door, feeding a pigeon crumbs from her pockets.

Breathy sounds. A scuffle. Then, “Cal? Is that you?”

“Mam? Where are you?”

She laughed. It wasn’t the usual giggle. She was sober. A huge relief washed over him; his very bruises seemed to stop aching.

“I’m at Rhian’s.”

“Who’s Rhian?”

“She’s my new outworker. From the hospital. We went to a group session last night and it was late so I stayed over.” She laughed again, a light sound. “What did you think? New boyfriend?”

He shrugged. “Sort of.” He couldn’t remember the last time she had sounded like this.

“I rang you last night but you must have been out. I wanted to tell you how I feel so good, Cal! These people—Dr. Lewis got me onto the program—they’re really helping me. I’m going to sort things out, Cal, I really am this time.”

Looking out up the crowded street he said, “That’s great, Mam.”

“You don’t think I can do it, do you?”

“Of course I do. If you get the help. It’s just . . .” He stopped, hating himself, but she hadn’t even been listening.

“I’ve had my hair done, Cal. Rhian came with me. You should see the little blond highlights! And this new medication, it’s so good! I can sleep, and there are no voices anymore; no one talking to me all the time.”

He let her go on; it spilled out of her and he listened to it, thinking how empty the house must be for her, without him. She’d cleaned and hoovered, she said, and done the washing. “And tomorrow the whole group’s going out for a meal. Nice people they are. And no wine.” Her voice was low, close to the receiver. “I’m right off that, Cal.”

“Great!” he said. “I’m really proud of you.” Thinking of the last time she’d said that, of the day he’d come home deliriously pleased with his exam results and found the bottles under the sink. How he had taken them into the street and smashed them, one by one, green glass and blue and white, sobbing in fury, and the shards had cut him. How she’d screamed and screamed. How the neighbors had come out.

Shadow was watching. She looked impatient. “Come on!” she mouthed against the glass.

He nodded, turned away. “Listen, Mam, I’m glad things are okay. I’ve got to go now. My friends are waiting.”

“Cal,” she said, her voice choked, “I know I drove you away.”

His heart thumped. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Yes, it was. I don’t blame you.”

“No . . .”

“And when I get straight it’ll be different. You’ll be proud to come home. Rhian says I can do it, and I will.”

He smiled, wan. “I’ve got to go. . . .”

“But you will come home next weekend, won’t you? You can see my new hair.”

“okay.” He was lying, he knew he was, but he was helpless. “Next Saturday. Bye, Mam. The money’s running out.”

“I love you, Cal,” she said quickly. Then the insistent bleep nagged the silence and he put the receiver down and the coins clunked into the box. Wearily, he put the other pound back into his pocket and pushed the heavy door wide.

“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?”

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.