M. K. Hume [King Arthur Trilogy 04] The Last Dragon (5 page)

‘I entered the hut because I heard the queen shrieking like a mad woman. King Mark was standing behind the corpse of Lord Trystan, who had fallen from his stool onto the floor. Clearly, Trystan had been sitting at a table with his back to the door, and his hands were empty of weapons. He had been killed from behind, unaware of Mark’s presence. Iseult’s warning came too late.’

‘How did he die then?’ one of the kitchen servants interrupted. His slack mouth was open and his eyes were gleaming as he enjoyed the vicarious violence. ‘I heard he was beheaded!’

Mellyr felt a little disgusted. ‘The king’s blade had struck Lord Trystan at the base of the skull so that the point of the weapon was forced upwards under the bone. Trystan’s bowels and bladder had voided but there was very little bleeding, yet our king had become spattered with blood. He must have twisted the knife with some force to be so soiled.’

The servants shivered deliciously as they imagined the gruesome tableau. Like all men who serve and have no power themselves, they were rapt, captured by the frailty and fallibility of their master.

‘The queen knelt beside her lover and cradled his twitching body in her arms, careless of the blood and shit that soiled her skirts. No matter how I try, I can’t forget her face. Her expression was so blank that she seemed unaware of what was happening. She had become a woman of ice again, so that her face registered nothing, not even grief. She knew what her fate must be, although I’ve often wondered whether Mark would not have killed her but instead brought her back to Canovium, bound and helpless, as proof that he was the better man. He is still besotted with her, even after her death, so who can tell? He might have spared her to slake his lusts and to answer any lingering doubts about his manhood. We’ll never know, for Queen Iseult took her life into her own hands.’

His audience leaned towards him, even Pedr, who prided himself on not being easily convinced by honeyed words.

‘She didn’t speak; she didn’t weep. When our master ordered her to leave the corpse, she obeyed, although she made a little cry of protest when King Mark sheathed his knife and drew his sword. I think I protested as well. It seemed an unworthy and unnecessary act to desecrate a corpse, but in the throes of his anger and spite our master felt no such qualms. He cut off Trystan’s head, although he lacked the muscle to sever it with a single blow. He struck Trystan’s throat twice with his blade before the head rolled free.’

Mellyr paused and someone pushed a horn cup of ale into his hands to oil his throat.

‘“Where’s your famed beauty now, Trystan, spymaster and whoremaster?” our master demanded. “Where’s all your courage now?” But our queen said nothing. She flinched when Mark kicked the corpse, but her face seemed frozen, as if she were already dead.’

Mellyr could feel the eyes of the servants fixed on his face, so he gulped down half the ale in his cup. ‘Then our queen drew a pretty little knife from under her travelling cloak. I can see it still in my mind’s eye. It was heavily decorated with gold embossing and cabochon jewels, and didn’t seem strong enough to do any damage. The blade was so very slender.

‘“Would you kill me then, wife?” King Mark asked, and I confess I moved forward, ready to stand between them. But there was no need for me to intervene.’ Mellyr paused for so long that his audience became restive.

‘Well, finish your tale, man,’ Pedr demanded, captured by the vividness of the story despite his determination to remain untouched by the queen’s punishment.

Mellyr sighed deeply. ‘Our queen was so beautiful that she could make even my old body stand to attention, and never more so than when she stared at her husband with her knife, a gift from her lover, held firmly in her hands. She was magnificent. “I’ll not sully this blade with your accursed blood, Mark,” she whispered. “I’m sorry that I’ll not see you humbled, or live to watch your accursed, miserly soul dragged to judgement for your crimes – but death is far better than another moment of life as your possession.” That’s all she said, but the king’s face became so pale that I believe he’d have killed her then for her insults, had he been given the chance. But Queen Iseult died the way she had wanted to live – on her own terms. She reversed the knife and used both hands to drive it into her breast, right here.’

Mellyr tapped his own chest to indicate where the queen had driven the blade between her ribs, and directly into her heart.

‘She stood for a heartbeat, her eyes fixed on the king with an expression of such contempt that I’ll never forget it. Then she pulled the knife out with the last of her strength, and folded as if her knees had collapsed under her weight. She died where she lay, and the expression of loathing in her eyes never changed.’

‘What happened after that?’ Pedr asked. The description had been so vivid that he was desperate to know the king’s reaction. His long years of loyalty demanded some mitigating excuse in the tawdry tale of love, lust and revenge.

‘I don’t know. I fled like a coward, because I had seen what I should not have seen, and I feared the king’s retribution. The rest you know. Trystan’s body was set afire inside the hut and his remains were left for the scavengers, although Mark’s warriors were disgusted by such undignified orders. Lord Trystan was a warrior of many gifts, one of King Artor’s most trusted vassals, and to treat his corpse with such disrespect was a stain on their honour. We all knew that the Dragon would demand reparation for this murder – for murder it was, despite the provocation. But fortune favoured our king and Modred plunged us all into war before Artor could take action.’

‘Yet he buried Queen Iseult with all the dignity of her status, despite the fact that she’d made him a cuckold. Surely that stands to his credit?’ Pedr protested.

‘Some women are so lovely and so compelling that they drive men mad, regardless of their characters or their intentions. Our queen was married to an old man when she was little more than a child, and before her adultery scarcely anyone in the Deceangli lands did not worship her for her piety, her goodness and her care for her people. I believe Mark dared not anger them by treating her corpse with disrespect.’

‘That, at least, speaks well of him, although I’ll admit that the murder of Trystan is a stain on his honour. Old men in love can be so very foolish,’ Pedr said, and Elystan cackled his agreement from his stool by the fire.

In the dark corner near the hearth, a young boy pushed his cowl away from his sleepy head. Although he was exhausted from the labour of cutting wood and laying fires during the day, he had listened to the cruel story with interest. Hesitantly, he added his own mite to the story of the queen’s death, making the blood of all the men present run cold with disgust.

‘Why did our king keep her body for so long?’ he asked naively. All eyes swivelled towards him. ‘She was lying in the king’s hall for over a week . . . until she started to smell too ripe to remain above ground. I set the fires for her every morning and evening and scraped out the ash. The king often visited her corpse while she was waiting for the burial rites.’

‘What are you maundering on about, boy? It’s normal to lay out an important personage so that her subjects can pay their respects.’ Pedr added a cuff to the boy’s ear to his scornful comments.

‘Ow! What did you do that for, Master Pedr? I was only asking a question. You know that the king permitted nobody to come into the hall while the mistress was laid out there – just me. Everyone knows fires have to be lit and hearths cleaned, so no one notices me and my brushes. So why did the king . . . er . . . touch her?’

Pedr could think of nothing to say, and even Mellyr was momentarily lost for words at the awful implication of what the boy was innocently suggesting. Then, with a sudden indrawn breath, the seneschal found his voice. ‘What do you mean, lump, when you say
touch
?’

The boy looked awkward. ‘Our master stroked her body a lot when he forgot that I was there . . . and he talked to her as well. I saw him pulling down her skirts one day when I was going into the room. She was dead . . . so I couldn’t understand what he was doing.’

Mellyr crossed himself and even Pedr swore a gross oath under his breath. In the hushed silence that followed, every man present wished he was somewhere else – anywhere but in this room.

Mellyr was the first to find his wits. ‘You’ll say nothing to anyone about this, boy, if you value your head on your shoulders. I don’t care what you understand – or don’t understand – just keep your mouth shut about what you saw, for all our sakes. Or we’ll all swing for it.’

Shamefaced, the servants dispersed to their beds or their duties in haste, aware that their souls had been stained with something so unclean that no amount of water would wash away the unwanted knowledge. Even Pedr suddenly looked like the old man he was.

In the hall, Mark continued to berate the dead Iseult while tears of self-pity ran down his gaunt face. Outside, shivering with new-found knowledge, Mellyr checked that the guards were on duty, found a new flagon of wine in case his master should call for it, and then scuttled away to his cold, unhappy bed.

For the first time, the seneschal considered the possibility of flight. He was well over forty, his sons were grown and his wife had died of brain fever four years earlier. He knew he had reached the latter part of his life span and his tongue found a broken tooth in the back of his jaw that reminded him of his age. Soon he would be in his dotage. A daughter dwelled in far-away Pennal. Perhaps there, where the ocean winds scoured the black beaches clean, he could free himself from the filth he had seen and heard. Perhaps he could forget the scorn in Queen Iseult’s dead eyes and this new horror could be cast out of his imagination and his memory.

‘By Ban’s head, I swear I can imagine what Mark was doing,’ Mellyr whispered into the darkness of his narrow room, where his status allowed him to sleep alone. ‘I can see his old man’s hands stroking the queen’s thighs, even though her flesh must have been cold and swelling. May God preserve us from such abomination!’

His mind flinched away from his new awareness. The darkness offered no possible justification for the king’s actions, and the wind chilled the air in the narrow cell so that Mellyr shivered in his woollen robe.

‘I think I’ll steal away to my daughter’s croft in the morning,’ he said to himself. ‘There’s nothing to keep me in this place of pain and misery. At least, I’ll not have to watch Canovium soiled by our king’s downfall. Such a fate
will
come, because God doesn’t permit such sins to go unpunished.’

Finally, when he had made his decision, the seneschal was able to sleep. No night terrors were visited upon him, and in the morning he awoke to a roll of thunder and the whispering wind of a growing storm.

Long after the seneschal had fled, and numbed by the boredom of endless servitude to a master who was too frightened to leave his citadel, the warriors of Canovium were caught unprepared when King Bran and his son Ector, nominated heir to Artor’s throne, eventually arrived to smoke out King Mark. Nearly eighteen months had passed since the High King’s death, but the council hadn’t forgotten the treachery of the Brigante and Deceangli tribes. At a hastily convened meeting at Viroconium, the assembled kings had cast both tribes out of the confederation and then set a huge blood price of gold in punishment for Artor’s death that must be paid promptly by the conspirators. Ultimately, the debt was paid by traders and landowners, even though they had taken no part in the decisions to break their oaths of fealty, because they feared another bloody conflict if they refused the kings’ demands. The Deceangli debt was paid in full, but the southern kings still demanded the body of King Mark, preferably alive, so warriors were despatched under Bran and Ector to advance on the fortress of Canovium.

Mark raved and railed against the Ordovice king, swearing that he’d never open his gates and submit to Ordovice arrogance. Drunk and terrified, he swore he’d commit suicide in the forecourt of his fortress rather than submit to such oafs or permit them to drag him off in chains like a common felon. But the lords of his court and the merchants of Canovium knew that his end had come, so they sent a petition to King Bran in which they promised to deliver the person of King Mark – alive or dead – if the Ordovice warriors spared the town.

Politics always works to the same pragmatic pattern. When a ruler becomes a liability to trade and business, even the most faithful of his friends will look the other way as he is dragged down from his throne like a worthless slave. Mark was overcome by his own guard. His hands and feet were trussed together, despite his struggles, before he was delivered to King Bran on a spavined horse. Thus Canovium saw their loathed king no more, and the citizenry swore that the air became cleaner after his departure. The landowners of the tribe selected a distant kinsman with an honourable reputation to take Mark’s place, and life went on for the Deceangli tribe as if he had never existed. Such is the realistic attitude adopted by men and women who must earn their bread through toil.

Ector was twelve and growing tall, although he had not yet won his place as a warrior. But he had watched King Artor die at Camlann with such gallantry that the boy’s pride in his family name had increased tenfold. Too young to rule, regardless of King Artor’s intentions, the lad nursed a fierce resentment towards the Brigante and Deceangli tribes, and the cowardice of King Mark had only served to heighten his loathing. Coldly, Ector suggested that the traitor should be imprisoned by the shattered citizens of Deva until the loyal kings could gather to decide his fate.

So Mark was locked in the darkest recesses of the old Roman prison of that city, where his jailers ensured that he should take no physical pleasure from continuing to live. The Romans had understood the indignity of pain, so Mark’s cell was so small that he could scarcely move in the confined space. Rotten, vile-tasting food and stagnant, slimy water sustained his body, although the prisoner was forced to scavenge for vermin and insects in his cell to supplement his diet. He was aware that his jailers urinated and defecated in his water and thin gruel, but starvation robs even the most fastidious man of pride and he devoured what was given to him in an effort to stay alive.