(no subject)
Title: engedjétek hozzám a kisdedeket
Author: Soujin
Characters: Sagramore, his mother, Palomides' father, Mordred, sundry attending characters
Rating: PG-13
Archive: Yes
Disclaimer: Nothing here belongs to anybody alive
Notes: This story has no justification whatsoever. Also, there is racism.
Summary: The making of a knight. Sort of.
engedjétek hozzám a kisdedeket
“You are a child,” she tells him, cupping his dark cheek in her darker hand. Sagramore sighs and clutches a handful of her dress, smooth green silk in at least three shades, jewels woven into her girdle and hem. Her hair is as black as his eyes, falling in curls over her shoulders, familiar to him as his name. Everything about her is warm, warm and beautiful and safe, except that it also isn’t. “You must listen to me. You can’t go out without Rahel to go with you, and you must obey her.”
“He’s a child,” comes the big, thick voice of his father. “Children play.”
“Most children aren’t dying,” she says sharply.
“He isn’t dying, woman, for Christ’s sake.”
“I’d like to see you mind him when he’s ill.”
“I’ll mind him when he’s older,” says his father. “You hear that, boy? When you’re older I’ll teach you to ride and hunt and use my sword.” He kneels down to Sagramore, so that his beard is level with Sagramore’s eyes (sometimes Sagramore thinks that’s all there is to his father, just a giant beard, no face at all). “You see my sword?” one big hand clapping against it in its scabbard. “I’ll give you that when you’re old enough, and teach you to use it, too. Your uncle forged it for me. It’s cut like ice, the best sword in the country.”
“Don’t let him play with it,” his mother says, her hands curved protectively over his shoulders. “He’ll get hurt.”
Sagramore smiles at his father’s beard, though, to show that he is grateful for the words.
“Now, then, sevgili,” she says. “Your father is busy. I’ll call Rahel to come get you. You must promise me you won’t be silly like last time. You didn’t get hurt, but you’re just a child, and you can’t understand how dangerous silly things can be.”
He nods obediently, and when Rahel comes, he takes her hand, which looks white against his. It’s hard to move fluidly in the jewel-crusted red silk his tunic is cut from, so he follows her stiffly.
---
Sagramore leans over his father’s shoulder, watching the hand of cards that whisk around as fast as blinks, shuffling and reshuffing. “Are you cheating?” he whispers in his father’s ear, and the big beard shakes with laughter.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in your room, boy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your mother won’t be pleased, now, will she?”
“No, sir,” he says in a small voice. He hasn’t left his room all day; he’s bored and he doesn’t want to go back.
“Have you been sick to-day?”
“No, sir. Not to-day.”
“Feel sick?”
“No, sir.”
“Might as well stay here, then. I’ll teach you to play cards, too.”
The cards are a little too big for his hands, but he holds them tightly, fanning them out like the tail of a peacock. The huge beard lurks close to his cheek, and he feels the warm breath of his father like an echo after his words.
“Good lad. Now, in this game, you’ve got to have seven cards in your hand, but it’s easy enough to pick up two when you draw. No one notices. If they do, they won’t say a thing; you’re the prince. No, they won’t say a thing.”
“Sagramore!”
He turns at his mother’s voice, dropping his eyes guiltily. His father steals the cards from his hand with an easy motion.
“M’lady, no need to worry. The boy’s been here with me.”
“You don’t know what to do.”
“Wager I’d figure it out.”
“Wager nothing. God, do you want our son to die? Come with me, child, the physician’s here. The priest also. Come, child.”
He gets up and goes to her and the soft silk of her dress, the jewel-blue safety of her clothes. Her hand slips into his.
---
Sagramore sits very still as the priest bathes his forehead with cool water. This ritual is nothing new; he could recite from memory what the priest will say and what will happen. Besides, it’s only a precaution. His mother swears his sickness isn’t a demon--the Greek physicians wrote about it, she swears, and said it could be cured. She just doesn’t know how. But to be sure she invites the Hungarian priests into her home to bless Sagramore and see whether God will do at once what the physicians are so slow to achieve.
The priest recites in Latin, which Sagramore can’t speak, and he closes his eyes and just waits. He’s been sicker than usual the last few days, and his stomach is still shaky. The holy water is soothing, and the rhythmic chanting he can’t understand lulls him into drowsiness.
That will upset Ana, he reminds himself sleepily. Stay awake, stay awake, as the priest anoints him with oil, a sweet-smelling thumbprint cross on his forehead, his lips, and his chest, and asks Mother Mary to make him well and keep him safe.
---
One day his father announces that he’s old enough to learn to ride. “He’s ten years old,” his father says. “I was a page at his age. I knew how to clean swords, mend armour, serve a knight at table, and I damn sure knew how to ride a horse. I’ll teach him myself.”
“No,” his mother says.
“Christ, woman, he’ll be fit for nothing. Look at him.”
Sagramore waits aside of them, thin and solemn-mouthed. (Oh, God, he wants to ride. He’s heard Rahel’s husband speak of it, the sweet grace of the horse, the body beating below you, going faster than the whole world. He’s never gone fast before. God, please, let Ana say yes.)
“He can be a perfectly good prince without knowing how to ride.”
“A waif who speaks two languages and does nothing else? He’s not fit to command a troupe of Romany brats, let alone my soldiers. He hasn’t even got any friends. I had a blood brother when I was ten.” (The word he uses is hu barat, true-friend.)
“If you want to drive your son until he falls dead at your feet, you do it, hayvan,” his mother says, her tone turned vicious. “It was you who made him sick to begin with, dragging me across the mountains while I was ready to bear him.” She starts to weep.
“I don’t want to ride,” Sagramore says softly.
“What, boy?”
“I don’t want to ride. I’m afraid of horses.”
His mother takes his shoulder. “Oh, my darling. You don’t have to. Does he?” turning back to his father.
The big beard shivers with displeasure. “No. He doesn’t. Go play with your nurse, boy.”
---
Rahel’s husband teaches him to ride in secret. Sagramore commands him, using his mother’s haughty tone, as superior and princely as he can be. God, it’s worth it. He flies like the wind, the sweat pours from the horse, his own thin body feels hollowed out with air. Afterwards he bathes for an hour, getting all the smell and horsehair off him before his mother comes to see him.
The new physician must be doing something right, she says. They take the bloodletting up to twice a day.
---
“Your father is dead.”
Sagramore clenches his teeth on whatever wants to come out: it can’t. The huge beard is gone. He can’t remember when it left, except that it only seemed like a short time ago until now. Now it feels like years.
I have never learned to cheat at cards, he thinks frantically. O, God, who is going to teach me to cheat at cards?
His mother looks at him quietly. “He was killed in the skirmish at Öskii. We are going back to Constantinople. I hate these cold winters anyway. So do you, you just don’t realise it.” She smoothes his black, curly hair with one hand. “You’ll feel it like home when you’re there.”
“Who will be King?” he asks, his voice shaky.
“Your uncle. Your uncle will rule. He has already given me an escort to take us home. We’re going home, Sagramore.”
He’s dressing for the journey when his uncle comes into his room. Sagramore has only seen his uncle a few times, but the beard is almost as massive as his father’s.
“Boy,” his uncle says.
“Yes, sir?”
“Your father left you his sword.” His uncle squats down on the marbled floor and belts the sword around Sagramore’s waist. Even buckling it in the last notch can barely keep the swordbelt from sliding over his hips. “You’ll grow into it, I suppose. If not, get someone to make you a new belt. And be careful, for God’s sake.”
Sagramore doesn’t know what to say, so he says, “Thank you.”
---
The tall black man who greets them smiles at Sagramore. He speaks in flawless Turkish, even better than Sagramore’s own. “Princess,” he says to Sagramore’s mother, “you and your son are welcome back to your proper estate.”
“Thank you, Sir Esclabor,” she says. “Where is my brother?”
“Within, Princess. He awaits you.”
“I am leaving Sagramore with you. Take care of him,” she says, in her most haughty and commanding voice of all. “He is a fragile child. I will have you executed if the slightest thing happens to him.”
When she’s inside the Pasha‘s quarters, the tall man kneels down with Sagramore.
“Fragile, huh?”
Sagramore sighs. “Sick. I get sick. Please, will there be someone here to teach me to fight and ride and be a knight?”
The man rests his hand on Sagramore’s shoulder. His skin is only two shades darker than Sagramore’s mother’s: Sagramore thinks, I am like his shadow. And it’s true that they have the same thin build and black eyes. “Your highness, I’ll teach you all those things. My son Palomides is in Britain. He’s a knight to Arthur Pendragon, the high king there. I’ll teach you exactly as I taught him.”
“Are you a knight?” Sagramore asks softly.
“I am.”
“It’s all right to be a black man there?”
“It’s all right to Arthur. Other people may not like it. How old are you?”
“Thirteen.”
“I’ll teach you everything I can as quickly as I can.” He grins and ruffles Sagramore’s hair. “And if you decide you want to be off to Camelot when you’re of age, we’ll see what the Princess says.”
“She’ll say no,” Sagramore tells him.
---
The sword master is a talkative man--he, like the tall man, is from Arabia. The riding instructor is nothing like Rahel’s husband, but he teaches Sagramore to ride bareback as well as on a saddle. There are a dozen tutors and a dozen more physicians, and he learns to read and write, to wield his father’s ice-sharp sword, and a curved scimitar. A monk teaches him the catechism, and the new physician uses new medicines, ground herbs from Byzantium that burn his mouth, make him sleep less soundly, but make the headaches afterward almost go away, at least for a while. A servant of his mother’s fits him with flowing Arabian robes that are white and easy to move in, not like the jewelled tunics he used to wear.
The tall man teaches him about chivalry and the codes of conduct, how to fight with honour. While Sagramore cleans and polishes his saddle and bridle, he listens to the tall man’s stories about Arthur Pendragon.
“A sword from a rock?”
“In and out, like your knife into boiled meat.”
“I think that is a good way to choose a king.”
“Magic?”
“If it knows who has the right to the throne.”
The tall man looks at him closely. “Do you think right is bloodline or ability?”
“It doesn’t matter. He had both, didn’t he?”
“If he had not?”
“I don’t know,” Sagramore says, wiping his bit silver and shining.
“Do you think you have both?”
“What?”
“You’re the Princess’ son. Could you have ruled in your father’s place, back in Hungary?”
“I don’t know,” he says, bending his face close to the sweet-smelling leather of his bridle, trying not to see his father’s beard, quivering with displeasure as he says, “A waif,” says, “He doesn’t know how to do anything.”
---
Sagramore is rubbing down the mare he rides, whispering to her in Hungarian. No one here knows it, and his mother refuses to speak it to him. “Learn Greek,” she says. “Learn Turkish. Speak like a real prince.” So he calls his mare sweet things in Hungarian, and tells her about how much he hates doctors.
“Sagramore.”
He turns to see the tall man standing in the stable door. “Yes, sir?”
“The Princess’ brother has been assassinated. You’ve been deemed successor. I’ll explain more to you on the way, but you must come with me. The Princess asked me to bring you back to the palace to be dressed for the coronation.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Come on,” the tall man says sternly. “Act with honour. Come on.” Sagramore looks at the waiting hand, the lean black body silhouetted in the dusty light. There’s no silk robe, but he knows the look and the posture and the intent.
He comes.
---
“God, Sagramore,” his mother says, letting down the black coils of her hair from the dressing. “I thought those men were teaching you. What did I waste all that money for? You don’t know anything.”
He sits on her bed, wrapped in a cloth, his head pounding. “I’m sorry.”
“You can’t be sorry. You have to listen to your ministers. Why do you think you have them? You can’t waste the treasury. You can’t insult ambassadors.”
“He provoked me,” Sagramore says sullenly, bitterness and the lingering aftertaste of vomit on his tongue.
“I don’t care if he called me a Saracen whore!” his mother says, turning on him. “Your father, your uncle, they both knew when to hold their tempers! God, you’re worse than useless--if only you were useless, I could at least act around you, the ministers could at least arrange things. But you, with your vile tongue and that rash head of yours--!”
“I’m sorry.”
She slaps him across the cheek. “Don’t speak to me that way. My life has been a tragedy from one end to the other. First your father drags me from my home to that godforsaken land, where I give birth to you, and God doesn’t even take you from me or give me another child for my own. And when I finally do come back to Byzantium I have to bear your troublemaking on the throne of my country.”
He bites his lip until blood drips down his chin, but the tears come anyway. “I’m so tired,” he says. His face is stinging from her hand, the bile in the back of his throat is rising again, and his head aches, it aches. “I’m so tired.” Before he knows it he’s weeping.
His mother rises in a shower of silk, orange and topaz, and calls for the physician. He gives Sagramore a drink of blood and some bitter plant, and it makes him gag but at least it makes him sleep.
---
“You’re ruining Constantinople.”
“I don’t care,” Sagramore says, turning away from the tall man. “It’s not my city.”
“It’s mine.” The hand that grips his shoulder is not kind. Sagramore clenches his jaw. “My city, and the Princess’.”
“Do you love her?” he asks.
“Always. I thought I taught you about honour. I taught you about a man’s duty to his country.”
“It’s not my country!”
“It’s your country while you rule it,” the tall man says, his fingers biting into Sagramore’s shoulder like a mouthful of teeth.
“I just want to go,” Sagramore says quietly, although in his head he’s screaming it. “I want to go to Britain. I want to go back to Hungary. I want to be somewhere else. I hate this country. I hate the heat and the clothes and the tongue and the doctors. I hate her.”
“There’s a plot to assassinate you, as your uncle was assassinated. The people of this country hate you as much as you hate them.” The tall man’s eyes are calm, watching him. “But you’re fortunate to-day. I have been meeting with the Princess--the suggestion has been made that she remarry a British king and bring him here to rule. You’ll be sent in his place as a knight to Arthur Pendragon to pledge faith between the two countries.”
“Oh, God,” Sagramore says. “Oh, God, why didn’t she do that sooner?”
---
The sea voyage made him sicker than usual, and he stayed in his cabin almost until they reached the Cornish port, but here, on the shore of Britain, his legs stop shaking and his head seems clearer than it has in weeks. Months, maybe.
His English is terrible, piecemeal, taught him by one of the sailors on the ship. When he buys a horse with the last of the money his mother gave him, the horse trader says,--
“Where you headed, boy?”
“Camelot,” he answers eagerly, loving the world to-day. The horse is really a stocky Welsh pony, but she’s steady and she lips his hand while he puts the bridle over her head. “I am Sagramore, I come to serve Arthur Pendragon in Camelot, I plan to be knight. Please, Camelot is which way?”
The horse trader laughs. “Camelot’s that way. Careful how you go.”
Sagramore smiles as he climbs onto the horse. Somehow, he doesn’t remember when, his long legs and awkward movements gave way to grace, and he takes his seat easily, his father’s sword slapping against his hip.
(Oh, God, I’m free, he thinks. I can ride as long as I want until I get there. Once the King has knighted me, I can go anywhere.) (It will probably kill him, he thinks. Fifteen years under the care of every physician his mother could hire, and the blood drinks and the bitter herbs and the leeches and the powders. God in glory, he’s never been alone before, no, he has never gone anywhere alone before. No medicines and no careful watch; he’ll surely die here.) (But, he thinks, it feels so good.)
---
“Hey, blackie,” the man calls out. “Fine horse you have.”
Sagramore looks up from where he’s kneeling to make his fire. There are six men, all of them fair-haired, all of them armed. “Sir?” he says, trying to get his mouth around the word as cleanly as possible.
“He’s a foreign one.”
“They’re all foreign,” one of the other men says, casually. “Worse than the French ones, these half-blooded fellows.”
Sagramore stands, his hand at his hip, fingers curling around the hilt of the sword. “You insult my blood.”
“We’ve insulted his blood.”
“We have?”
“Called the Devil the Devil. Nothing wrong with that.”
“Wait,” one says, glancing at his companions. “He wants to fight.”
“I kill you for this insult,” Sagramore says, starting to draw. His head is pounding suddenly. He remembers Rahel‘s husband in the corridor, saying in a low whisper to another servant, “No surprise the boy’s sick like that. They say the Devil always keeps a hold of those black ones. They’re not Christian.” He remembers his father saying, “God, Anna, he’s as good as dead. If he weren’t going to have enough trouble with that damned sickness, my country isn’t going to like him on account of your blood, and yours on account of mine. Where are we going to find a place for him?” He remembers the tall man telling him to act with honour, and that’s the only reason he tells them what he intends to do. He can hardly think. He’s too angry to think.
The first man laughs. “Blackie’s going to kill us? He can’t even lift that sword, look at the size of him.”
“Dunno,” says the third one, dubiously. “Got the Devil, right? Devil helps his own.”
One of the other men draws his own sword.
Sagramore strikes him down.
He realises a moment later that he only managed it because they were off-guard. The men have immediately all got their swords out, and they’re at him, and oh, God, practise with the sword master was never like this, was always just a shout away from drop-arms, but these men won’t hold if he tells them he’s spent, and they’re all at him at once-- He uses the sword like he’s been taught, pretending to be his father, as if he could fill himself with his father’s strength by wielding it. He yelps when someone else’s sword hits his arm. He’s going to die but not because of his sickness: because of his temper, here in this distant place where no one knows him and no one will know to send his body back to his mother--
Somewhere distantly he hears horses, horses running, and new voices that he’s never heard before. Someone screams, but it isn’t him, and his sword hasn’t hit home. It’s as if there’s a blindness on him, and he can’t see, he just thrusts feverishly with the sword. Then there’s another scream. He hits someone. He doesn’t. Jesu Almighty, he can’t see. He can’t hear anything any more over the blood in his ears. Then he can--but muffled, as if there were hands over his ears.
“Hey. Hey! Christ, hit him.”
“Easy, lad.” A warm, buttery accent he can’t place. “Easy, put your sword down.”
“Just clout him.”
“Shut up.”
He feels a hand on his face, another on his arm. “Hey, boy. Wake up.” At the touches suddenly the blindness seems to pass, and Sagramore blinks, his eyes stinging, at the face in front of him. “There he is, he’s back.”
“Easy, lad. Mordred, get him down. He’s got to be tended to.”
“Can’t believe we stopped,” a sullen mutter. “It’s a half-black one. He’s probably going to kill us too.”
“Shut up.” The one standing before him is a short, dark boy with skin as pale as his father’s. He half-grins at Sagramore. “Get you down, now. Gawain’ll have a look at you.”
Sagramore’s knees buckle obediently, and he falls, half in the boy’s arms.
“Get his head, keep his head up.” Another boy--this one’s red-haired, and he has the warm accent. “Oh, it’s nothing bad. That’s fine. Give me your shirt, Mordred.” The black-haired boy strips off his tunic and hands it to Gawain. “Didn’t protect your hands, did you? See that, Agravain? That’s what I’m always telling you. You’ve got to protect your hands or you end up with cuts like these. That’s easily mended if it stays clean, but they sting like the Devil.” He tears Mordred’s tunic into strips and reaches for the waterskin Mordred hands him. “Wash them up, wrap them, you’ll be fine.”
“Lecture, lecture,” Agravain says, irritably.
“Now, the arm, that’s a bit worse, but I think I can tie it up all right.”
Mordred casts a glance at Gawain that Sagramore can see is veiled admiration. “There he goes. You’ll be fine,” he says to Sagramore. “Gawain’s got a fine hand at fixing up fighting wounds.”
“Thank you,” Sagramore says, the words slurred a little. His breath is aching in his throat.
“Oh, you’re all right.”
“We’d better camp here. I want to bury the Saxons, and he’s not fit to travel for a day at any rate. Agravain, fix that fire, would you? Mordred, as soon as I’m done here I’ll start looking for rocks. You see if they’ve got any crosses or anything to put in their hands.”
Agravain grunts but gets to work on Sagramore’s poor fire, rearranging the branches Sagramore had haphazardly stacked, and collecting a handful of bark and twigs from his saddlebag.
Gawain wraps Sagramore’s hands in the strips of Mordred’s tunic, and then binds his arm cleanly. “There! Pity we can’t find out where they came from, send their horses back to their families. Decent horses. We’ll take them as far as Caer Leon and leave them with one of the traders there, I know there are a few honest ones. --Hey, lad, where are you bound?”
“Camelot, I go to Camelot,” he says.
“So are we,” Mordred says.
“That’s fine, then.” Gawain smiles. “You can travel along with us, and I can keep an eye on that arm. All right, come on, Mordred, let’s get to work.”
Sagramore watches from the ground as Mordred searches the bloody bodies of the blond men for crosses, and places them in the men’s hands, folding the fingers shut. Gawain brings back armfuls of stones and stacks them around the men until they disappear.
---
Mordred sits up for the watch. Sagramore is lying under a blanket, aching too much to sleep. After an hour he gets up and comes over to Mordred, sitting down beside him, blanket wrapped around his shoulders.
“--Oh, it’s you. How do you feel?”
“Well, sir.”
“Don’t call me sir.” Mordred scowls at him, and Sagramore’s stomach sinks.
“Forgive me, please. I do not mean any insult.”
“Don’t look like I kicked you, Christ in glory.” He reaches over and brushes his hand over Sagramore’s curly hair. Sagramore shivers. Something in his stomach is lurching, has been ever since he lay with his head in Mordred’s lap as Gawain tended to his wounds. Sitting next to Mordred is making it worse.
“Thank you.” He’s suddenly grateful for his accent, half-disguising the unevenness in his voice.
“Don’t need thanks,” Mordred says, turning gruff. He touches Sagramore’s cheek with his fingertips. “You cold?”
“A small.” He smiles, feeling it pull at the stiffness in his face. (It feels so good.)
“Good.”
“I am so fortunate to meet you on my way. Otherwise I do not know I live. A great deal of men.” He swallows, flushing a little. “You fight for me, save my life. Your brother fix my hurt. You--you are not hurt?”
“No.”
Sagramore’s stomach lurches more unpleasantly. Mordred is too taciturn--is angry about something, or displeased, and Sagramore looks appalled, trying desperately to understand what it is he’s done.
“What?” Mordred frowns at him.
“You are angry at me? Please do not be angry. I fix whatever thing I do.”
Mordred’s breath catches. “Damn it, you idiot,” he says, and his arm is suddenly around Sagramore’s sore waist, and Sagramore has never been kissed before, but he knows what this is, and he presses close, ignoring all the places that hurt. Mordred is cool to the touch but warm also. Mordred tastes sweet. Mordred is like coming home after years of journeying, and Sagramore closes his eyes and lands on that shore.
---
Mordred looks at him guiltily, running a hand down his naked back. “God, you’re beautiful. I shouldn’t have--damn it! You’re a child.”
Sagramore laughs. “Not child,” he says, tangling his fingers in Mordred’s black hair. “I am not child.”
“God,” Mordred says, and pulls him close again. The cool night air on his skin is like the holy water the priests used to pour over him, the warmth of Mordred’s breath is like the sun in Constantinople. Sagramore rests his head on Mordred’s shoulder and closes his eyes against the scattered stars and the dull burning of the fire and the lightly breathing blanketed hills of the others.
“You will be my friend?” he whispers in the dark. “My brother-friend, I mean, hu barat?”
Mordred’s arms tighten around him for answer, and Sagramore thinks that perhaps if his father knew, perhaps he would not be so disappointed in his son--and at least, since his father is dead, it is not too great a sin to pretend the giant beard was proud of him.
Author: Soujin
Characters: Sagramore, his mother, Palomides' father, Mordred, sundry attending characters
Rating: PG-13
Archive: Yes
Disclaimer: Nothing here belongs to anybody alive
Notes: This story has no justification whatsoever. Also, there is racism.
Summary: The making of a knight. Sort of.
engedjétek hozzám a kisdedeket
“You are a child,” she tells him, cupping his dark cheek in her darker hand. Sagramore sighs and clutches a handful of her dress, smooth green silk in at least three shades, jewels woven into her girdle and hem. Her hair is as black as his eyes, falling in curls over her shoulders, familiar to him as his name. Everything about her is warm, warm and beautiful and safe, except that it also isn’t. “You must listen to me. You can’t go out without Rahel to go with you, and you must obey her.”
“He’s a child,” comes the big, thick voice of his father. “Children play.”
“Most children aren’t dying,” she says sharply.
“He isn’t dying, woman, for Christ’s sake.”
“I’d like to see you mind him when he’s ill.”
“I’ll mind him when he’s older,” says his father. “You hear that, boy? When you’re older I’ll teach you to ride and hunt and use my sword.” He kneels down to Sagramore, so that his beard is level with Sagramore’s eyes (sometimes Sagramore thinks that’s all there is to his father, just a giant beard, no face at all). “You see my sword?” one big hand clapping against it in its scabbard. “I’ll give you that when you’re old enough, and teach you to use it, too. Your uncle forged it for me. It’s cut like ice, the best sword in the country.”
“Don’t let him play with it,” his mother says, her hands curved protectively over his shoulders. “He’ll get hurt.”
Sagramore smiles at his father’s beard, though, to show that he is grateful for the words.
“Now, then, sevgili,” she says. “Your father is busy. I’ll call Rahel to come get you. You must promise me you won’t be silly like last time. You didn’t get hurt, but you’re just a child, and you can’t understand how dangerous silly things can be.”
He nods obediently, and when Rahel comes, he takes her hand, which looks white against his. It’s hard to move fluidly in the jewel-crusted red silk his tunic is cut from, so he follows her stiffly.
---
Sagramore leans over his father’s shoulder, watching the hand of cards that whisk around as fast as blinks, shuffling and reshuffing. “Are you cheating?” he whispers in his father’s ear, and the big beard shakes with laughter.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in your room, boy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your mother won’t be pleased, now, will she?”
“No, sir,” he says in a small voice. He hasn’t left his room all day; he’s bored and he doesn’t want to go back.
“Have you been sick to-day?”
“No, sir. Not to-day.”
“Feel sick?”
“No, sir.”
“Might as well stay here, then. I’ll teach you to play cards, too.”
The cards are a little too big for his hands, but he holds them tightly, fanning them out like the tail of a peacock. The huge beard lurks close to his cheek, and he feels the warm breath of his father like an echo after his words.
“Good lad. Now, in this game, you’ve got to have seven cards in your hand, but it’s easy enough to pick up two when you draw. No one notices. If they do, they won’t say a thing; you’re the prince. No, they won’t say a thing.”
“Sagramore!”
He turns at his mother’s voice, dropping his eyes guiltily. His father steals the cards from his hand with an easy motion.
“M’lady, no need to worry. The boy’s been here with me.”
“You don’t know what to do.”
“Wager I’d figure it out.”
“Wager nothing. God, do you want our son to die? Come with me, child, the physician’s here. The priest also. Come, child.”
He gets up and goes to her and the soft silk of her dress, the jewel-blue safety of her clothes. Her hand slips into his.
---
Sagramore sits very still as the priest bathes his forehead with cool water. This ritual is nothing new; he could recite from memory what the priest will say and what will happen. Besides, it’s only a precaution. His mother swears his sickness isn’t a demon--the Greek physicians wrote about it, she swears, and said it could be cured. She just doesn’t know how. But to be sure she invites the Hungarian priests into her home to bless Sagramore and see whether God will do at once what the physicians are so slow to achieve.
The priest recites in Latin, which Sagramore can’t speak, and he closes his eyes and just waits. He’s been sicker than usual the last few days, and his stomach is still shaky. The holy water is soothing, and the rhythmic chanting he can’t understand lulls him into drowsiness.
That will upset Ana, he reminds himself sleepily. Stay awake, stay awake, as the priest anoints him with oil, a sweet-smelling thumbprint cross on his forehead, his lips, and his chest, and asks Mother Mary to make him well and keep him safe.
---
One day his father announces that he’s old enough to learn to ride. “He’s ten years old,” his father says. “I was a page at his age. I knew how to clean swords, mend armour, serve a knight at table, and I damn sure knew how to ride a horse. I’ll teach him myself.”
“No,” his mother says.
“Christ, woman, he’ll be fit for nothing. Look at him.”
Sagramore waits aside of them, thin and solemn-mouthed. (Oh, God, he wants to ride. He’s heard Rahel’s husband speak of it, the sweet grace of the horse, the body beating below you, going faster than the whole world. He’s never gone fast before. God, please, let Ana say yes.)
“He can be a perfectly good prince without knowing how to ride.”
“A waif who speaks two languages and does nothing else? He’s not fit to command a troupe of Romany brats, let alone my soldiers. He hasn’t even got any friends. I had a blood brother when I was ten.” (The word he uses is hu barat, true-friend.)
“If you want to drive your son until he falls dead at your feet, you do it, hayvan,” his mother says, her tone turned vicious. “It was you who made him sick to begin with, dragging me across the mountains while I was ready to bear him.” She starts to weep.
“I don’t want to ride,” Sagramore says softly.
“What, boy?”
“I don’t want to ride. I’m afraid of horses.”
His mother takes his shoulder. “Oh, my darling. You don’t have to. Does he?” turning back to his father.
The big beard shivers with displeasure. “No. He doesn’t. Go play with your nurse, boy.”
---
Rahel’s husband teaches him to ride in secret. Sagramore commands him, using his mother’s haughty tone, as superior and princely as he can be. God, it’s worth it. He flies like the wind, the sweat pours from the horse, his own thin body feels hollowed out with air. Afterwards he bathes for an hour, getting all the smell and horsehair off him before his mother comes to see him.
The new physician must be doing something right, she says. They take the bloodletting up to twice a day.
---
“Your father is dead.”
Sagramore clenches his teeth on whatever wants to come out: it can’t. The huge beard is gone. He can’t remember when it left, except that it only seemed like a short time ago until now. Now it feels like years.
I have never learned to cheat at cards, he thinks frantically. O, God, who is going to teach me to cheat at cards?
His mother looks at him quietly. “He was killed in the skirmish at Öskii. We are going back to Constantinople. I hate these cold winters anyway. So do you, you just don’t realise it.” She smoothes his black, curly hair with one hand. “You’ll feel it like home when you’re there.”
“Who will be King?” he asks, his voice shaky.
“Your uncle. Your uncle will rule. He has already given me an escort to take us home. We’re going home, Sagramore.”
He’s dressing for the journey when his uncle comes into his room. Sagramore has only seen his uncle a few times, but the beard is almost as massive as his father’s.
“Boy,” his uncle says.
“Yes, sir?”
“Your father left you his sword.” His uncle squats down on the marbled floor and belts the sword around Sagramore’s waist. Even buckling it in the last notch can barely keep the swordbelt from sliding over his hips. “You’ll grow into it, I suppose. If not, get someone to make you a new belt. And be careful, for God’s sake.”
Sagramore doesn’t know what to say, so he says, “Thank you.”
---
The tall black man who greets them smiles at Sagramore. He speaks in flawless Turkish, even better than Sagramore’s own. “Princess,” he says to Sagramore’s mother, “you and your son are welcome back to your proper estate.”
“Thank you, Sir Esclabor,” she says. “Where is my brother?”
“Within, Princess. He awaits you.”
“I am leaving Sagramore with you. Take care of him,” she says, in her most haughty and commanding voice of all. “He is a fragile child. I will have you executed if the slightest thing happens to him.”
When she’s inside the Pasha‘s quarters, the tall man kneels down with Sagramore.
“Fragile, huh?”
Sagramore sighs. “Sick. I get sick. Please, will there be someone here to teach me to fight and ride and be a knight?”
The man rests his hand on Sagramore’s shoulder. His skin is only two shades darker than Sagramore’s mother’s: Sagramore thinks, I am like his shadow. And it’s true that they have the same thin build and black eyes. “Your highness, I’ll teach you all those things. My son Palomides is in Britain. He’s a knight to Arthur Pendragon, the high king there. I’ll teach you exactly as I taught him.”
“Are you a knight?” Sagramore asks softly.
“I am.”
“It’s all right to be a black man there?”
“It’s all right to Arthur. Other people may not like it. How old are you?”
“Thirteen.”
“I’ll teach you everything I can as quickly as I can.” He grins and ruffles Sagramore’s hair. “And if you decide you want to be off to Camelot when you’re of age, we’ll see what the Princess says.”
“She’ll say no,” Sagramore tells him.
---
The sword master is a talkative man--he, like the tall man, is from Arabia. The riding instructor is nothing like Rahel’s husband, but he teaches Sagramore to ride bareback as well as on a saddle. There are a dozen tutors and a dozen more physicians, and he learns to read and write, to wield his father’s ice-sharp sword, and a curved scimitar. A monk teaches him the catechism, and the new physician uses new medicines, ground herbs from Byzantium that burn his mouth, make him sleep less soundly, but make the headaches afterward almost go away, at least for a while. A servant of his mother’s fits him with flowing Arabian robes that are white and easy to move in, not like the jewelled tunics he used to wear.
The tall man teaches him about chivalry and the codes of conduct, how to fight with honour. While Sagramore cleans and polishes his saddle and bridle, he listens to the tall man’s stories about Arthur Pendragon.
“A sword from a rock?”
“In and out, like your knife into boiled meat.”
“I think that is a good way to choose a king.”
“Magic?”
“If it knows who has the right to the throne.”
The tall man looks at him closely. “Do you think right is bloodline or ability?”
“It doesn’t matter. He had both, didn’t he?”
“If he had not?”
“I don’t know,” Sagramore says, wiping his bit silver and shining.
“Do you think you have both?”
“What?”
“You’re the Princess’ son. Could you have ruled in your father’s place, back in Hungary?”
“I don’t know,” he says, bending his face close to the sweet-smelling leather of his bridle, trying not to see his father’s beard, quivering with displeasure as he says, “A waif,” says, “He doesn’t know how to do anything.”
---
Sagramore is rubbing down the mare he rides, whispering to her in Hungarian. No one here knows it, and his mother refuses to speak it to him. “Learn Greek,” she says. “Learn Turkish. Speak like a real prince.” So he calls his mare sweet things in Hungarian, and tells her about how much he hates doctors.
“Sagramore.”
He turns to see the tall man standing in the stable door. “Yes, sir?”
“The Princess’ brother has been assassinated. You’ve been deemed successor. I’ll explain more to you on the way, but you must come with me. The Princess asked me to bring you back to the palace to be dressed for the coronation.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Come on,” the tall man says sternly. “Act with honour. Come on.” Sagramore looks at the waiting hand, the lean black body silhouetted in the dusty light. There’s no silk robe, but he knows the look and the posture and the intent.
He comes.
---
“God, Sagramore,” his mother says, letting down the black coils of her hair from the dressing. “I thought those men were teaching you. What did I waste all that money for? You don’t know anything.”
He sits on her bed, wrapped in a cloth, his head pounding. “I’m sorry.”
“You can’t be sorry. You have to listen to your ministers. Why do you think you have them? You can’t waste the treasury. You can’t insult ambassadors.”
“He provoked me,” Sagramore says sullenly, bitterness and the lingering aftertaste of vomit on his tongue.
“I don’t care if he called me a Saracen whore!” his mother says, turning on him. “Your father, your uncle, they both knew when to hold their tempers! God, you’re worse than useless--if only you were useless, I could at least act around you, the ministers could at least arrange things. But you, with your vile tongue and that rash head of yours--!”
“I’m sorry.”
She slaps him across the cheek. “Don’t speak to me that way. My life has been a tragedy from one end to the other. First your father drags me from my home to that godforsaken land, where I give birth to you, and God doesn’t even take you from me or give me another child for my own. And when I finally do come back to Byzantium I have to bear your troublemaking on the throne of my country.”
He bites his lip until blood drips down his chin, but the tears come anyway. “I’m so tired,” he says. His face is stinging from her hand, the bile in the back of his throat is rising again, and his head aches, it aches. “I’m so tired.” Before he knows it he’s weeping.
His mother rises in a shower of silk, orange and topaz, and calls for the physician. He gives Sagramore a drink of blood and some bitter plant, and it makes him gag but at least it makes him sleep.
---
“You’re ruining Constantinople.”
“I don’t care,” Sagramore says, turning away from the tall man. “It’s not my city.”
“It’s mine.” The hand that grips his shoulder is not kind. Sagramore clenches his jaw. “My city, and the Princess’.”
“Do you love her?” he asks.
“Always. I thought I taught you about honour. I taught you about a man’s duty to his country.”
“It’s not my country!”
“It’s your country while you rule it,” the tall man says, his fingers biting into Sagramore’s shoulder like a mouthful of teeth.
“I just want to go,” Sagramore says quietly, although in his head he’s screaming it. “I want to go to Britain. I want to go back to Hungary. I want to be somewhere else. I hate this country. I hate the heat and the clothes and the tongue and the doctors. I hate her.”
“There’s a plot to assassinate you, as your uncle was assassinated. The people of this country hate you as much as you hate them.” The tall man’s eyes are calm, watching him. “But you’re fortunate to-day. I have been meeting with the Princess--the suggestion has been made that she remarry a British king and bring him here to rule. You’ll be sent in his place as a knight to Arthur Pendragon to pledge faith between the two countries.”
“Oh, God,” Sagramore says. “Oh, God, why didn’t she do that sooner?”
---
The sea voyage made him sicker than usual, and he stayed in his cabin almost until they reached the Cornish port, but here, on the shore of Britain, his legs stop shaking and his head seems clearer than it has in weeks. Months, maybe.
His English is terrible, piecemeal, taught him by one of the sailors on the ship. When he buys a horse with the last of the money his mother gave him, the horse trader says,--
“Where you headed, boy?”
“Camelot,” he answers eagerly, loving the world to-day. The horse is really a stocky Welsh pony, but she’s steady and she lips his hand while he puts the bridle over her head. “I am Sagramore, I come to serve Arthur Pendragon in Camelot, I plan to be knight. Please, Camelot is which way?”
The horse trader laughs. “Camelot’s that way. Careful how you go.”
Sagramore smiles as he climbs onto the horse. Somehow, he doesn’t remember when, his long legs and awkward movements gave way to grace, and he takes his seat easily, his father’s sword slapping against his hip.
(Oh, God, I’m free, he thinks. I can ride as long as I want until I get there. Once the King has knighted me, I can go anywhere.) (It will probably kill him, he thinks. Fifteen years under the care of every physician his mother could hire, and the blood drinks and the bitter herbs and the leeches and the powders. God in glory, he’s never been alone before, no, he has never gone anywhere alone before. No medicines and no careful watch; he’ll surely die here.) (But, he thinks, it feels so good.)
---
“Hey, blackie,” the man calls out. “Fine horse you have.”
Sagramore looks up from where he’s kneeling to make his fire. There are six men, all of them fair-haired, all of them armed. “Sir?” he says, trying to get his mouth around the word as cleanly as possible.
“He’s a foreign one.”
“They’re all foreign,” one of the other men says, casually. “Worse than the French ones, these half-blooded fellows.”
Sagramore stands, his hand at his hip, fingers curling around the hilt of the sword. “You insult my blood.”
“We’ve insulted his blood.”
“We have?”
“Called the Devil the Devil. Nothing wrong with that.”
“Wait,” one says, glancing at his companions. “He wants to fight.”
“I kill you for this insult,” Sagramore says, starting to draw. His head is pounding suddenly. He remembers Rahel‘s husband in the corridor, saying in a low whisper to another servant, “No surprise the boy’s sick like that. They say the Devil always keeps a hold of those black ones. They’re not Christian.” He remembers his father saying, “God, Anna, he’s as good as dead. If he weren’t going to have enough trouble with that damned sickness, my country isn’t going to like him on account of your blood, and yours on account of mine. Where are we going to find a place for him?” He remembers the tall man telling him to act with honour, and that’s the only reason he tells them what he intends to do. He can hardly think. He’s too angry to think.
The first man laughs. “Blackie’s going to kill us? He can’t even lift that sword, look at the size of him.”
“Dunno,” says the third one, dubiously. “Got the Devil, right? Devil helps his own.”
One of the other men draws his own sword.
Sagramore strikes him down.
He realises a moment later that he only managed it because they were off-guard. The men have immediately all got their swords out, and they’re at him, and oh, God, practise with the sword master was never like this, was always just a shout away from drop-arms, but these men won’t hold if he tells them he’s spent, and they’re all at him at once-- He uses the sword like he’s been taught, pretending to be his father, as if he could fill himself with his father’s strength by wielding it. He yelps when someone else’s sword hits his arm. He’s going to die but not because of his sickness: because of his temper, here in this distant place where no one knows him and no one will know to send his body back to his mother--
Somewhere distantly he hears horses, horses running, and new voices that he’s never heard before. Someone screams, but it isn’t him, and his sword hasn’t hit home. It’s as if there’s a blindness on him, and he can’t see, he just thrusts feverishly with the sword. Then there’s another scream. He hits someone. He doesn’t. Jesu Almighty, he can’t see. He can’t hear anything any more over the blood in his ears. Then he can--but muffled, as if there were hands over his ears.
“Hey. Hey! Christ, hit him.”
“Easy, lad.” A warm, buttery accent he can’t place. “Easy, put your sword down.”
“Just clout him.”
“Shut up.”
He feels a hand on his face, another on his arm. “Hey, boy. Wake up.” At the touches suddenly the blindness seems to pass, and Sagramore blinks, his eyes stinging, at the face in front of him. “There he is, he’s back.”
“Easy, lad. Mordred, get him down. He’s got to be tended to.”
“Can’t believe we stopped,” a sullen mutter. “It’s a half-black one. He’s probably going to kill us too.”
“Shut up.” The one standing before him is a short, dark boy with skin as pale as his father’s. He half-grins at Sagramore. “Get you down, now. Gawain’ll have a look at you.”
Sagramore’s knees buckle obediently, and he falls, half in the boy’s arms.
“Get his head, keep his head up.” Another boy--this one’s red-haired, and he has the warm accent. “Oh, it’s nothing bad. That’s fine. Give me your shirt, Mordred.” The black-haired boy strips off his tunic and hands it to Gawain. “Didn’t protect your hands, did you? See that, Agravain? That’s what I’m always telling you. You’ve got to protect your hands or you end up with cuts like these. That’s easily mended if it stays clean, but they sting like the Devil.” He tears Mordred’s tunic into strips and reaches for the waterskin Mordred hands him. “Wash them up, wrap them, you’ll be fine.”
“Lecture, lecture,” Agravain says, irritably.
“Now, the arm, that’s a bit worse, but I think I can tie it up all right.”
Mordred casts a glance at Gawain that Sagramore can see is veiled admiration. “There he goes. You’ll be fine,” he says to Sagramore. “Gawain’s got a fine hand at fixing up fighting wounds.”
“Thank you,” Sagramore says, the words slurred a little. His breath is aching in his throat.
“Oh, you’re all right.”
“We’d better camp here. I want to bury the Saxons, and he’s not fit to travel for a day at any rate. Agravain, fix that fire, would you? Mordred, as soon as I’m done here I’ll start looking for rocks. You see if they’ve got any crosses or anything to put in their hands.”
Agravain grunts but gets to work on Sagramore’s poor fire, rearranging the branches Sagramore had haphazardly stacked, and collecting a handful of bark and twigs from his saddlebag.
Gawain wraps Sagramore’s hands in the strips of Mordred’s tunic, and then binds his arm cleanly. “There! Pity we can’t find out where they came from, send their horses back to their families. Decent horses. We’ll take them as far as Caer Leon and leave them with one of the traders there, I know there are a few honest ones. --Hey, lad, where are you bound?”
“Camelot, I go to Camelot,” he says.
“So are we,” Mordred says.
“That’s fine, then.” Gawain smiles. “You can travel along with us, and I can keep an eye on that arm. All right, come on, Mordred, let’s get to work.”
Sagramore watches from the ground as Mordred searches the bloody bodies of the blond men for crosses, and places them in the men’s hands, folding the fingers shut. Gawain brings back armfuls of stones and stacks them around the men until they disappear.
---
Mordred sits up for the watch. Sagramore is lying under a blanket, aching too much to sleep. After an hour he gets up and comes over to Mordred, sitting down beside him, blanket wrapped around his shoulders.
“--Oh, it’s you. How do you feel?”
“Well, sir.”
“Don’t call me sir.” Mordred scowls at him, and Sagramore’s stomach sinks.
“Forgive me, please. I do not mean any insult.”
“Don’t look like I kicked you, Christ in glory.” He reaches over and brushes his hand over Sagramore’s curly hair. Sagramore shivers. Something in his stomach is lurching, has been ever since he lay with his head in Mordred’s lap as Gawain tended to his wounds. Sitting next to Mordred is making it worse.
“Thank you.” He’s suddenly grateful for his accent, half-disguising the unevenness in his voice.
“Don’t need thanks,” Mordred says, turning gruff. He touches Sagramore’s cheek with his fingertips. “You cold?”
“A small.” He smiles, feeling it pull at the stiffness in his face. (It feels so good.)
“Good.”
“I am so fortunate to meet you on my way. Otherwise I do not know I live. A great deal of men.” He swallows, flushing a little. “You fight for me, save my life. Your brother fix my hurt. You--you are not hurt?”
“No.”
Sagramore’s stomach lurches more unpleasantly. Mordred is too taciturn--is angry about something, or displeased, and Sagramore looks appalled, trying desperately to understand what it is he’s done.
“What?” Mordred frowns at him.
“You are angry at me? Please do not be angry. I fix whatever thing I do.”
Mordred’s breath catches. “Damn it, you idiot,” he says, and his arm is suddenly around Sagramore’s sore waist, and Sagramore has never been kissed before, but he knows what this is, and he presses close, ignoring all the places that hurt. Mordred is cool to the touch but warm also. Mordred tastes sweet. Mordred is like coming home after years of journeying, and Sagramore closes his eyes and lands on that shore.
---
Mordred looks at him guiltily, running a hand down his naked back. “God, you’re beautiful. I shouldn’t have--damn it! You’re a child.”
Sagramore laughs. “Not child,” he says, tangling his fingers in Mordred’s black hair. “I am not child.”
“God,” Mordred says, and pulls him close again. The cool night air on his skin is like the holy water the priests used to pour over him, the warmth of Mordred’s breath is like the sun in Constantinople. Sagramore rests his head on Mordred’s shoulder and closes his eyes against the scattered stars and the dull burning of the fire and the lightly breathing blanketed hills of the others.
“You will be my friend?” he whispers in the dark. “My brother-friend, I mean, hu barat?”
Mordred’s arms tighten around him for answer, and Sagramore thinks that perhaps if his father knew, perhaps he would not be so disappointed in his son--and at least, since his father is dead, it is not too great a sin to pretend the giant beard was proud of him.