fic: silent the silent field
Title: Silent the Silent Field
Author: Soujin
Characters: Gaheris, Morgause, and a selkie. Also sundry others (Gawain, Mordred, Lamorak, Agravain, some OCs)
Rating: PG-13
Archive: Yes.
Disclaimer: As usual.
Summary: Gaheris' life is terrible. Sorry, Gaheris. Title is a quote from Tennyson's Idylls.
By the time her fourth son is born into the world, silent as a stillbirth, Anna is past caring. All she’s wanted these years past is a little girl to teach, a girl who will grow up lithe and dark with magic; a place for her power to go when it’s no longer hers. She lies tiredly in her bedchamber while the midwife wipes the blood off the child’s body.
“Mary, you’d never know he was living,” the woman murmurs. Anna lifts her head to look at him. The child’s eyes are black as stones. “What will he be baptised, Lady?”
“I’ll decide later,” Anna says quietly.
The midwife nods. All of Anna’s servants are loyal--afraid of her, perhaps, but loyal, and sometimes even sympathetic, although she doesn’t care for their sympathy. What she really cares for is the wordless obedience, and the knowledge that they are hers, and will say and do as she directs them.
As for the child, it’ll probably die. Most women’s do. It’s a miracle the first three were all healthy, especially Mordred, born when she was so young; she had a better chance with Gawain and Agravain, but they at least came out fat and screaming. This one is thin and wrinkled like an old man, and he never makes a sound.
--
A week later she brings him to the baptismal font and the priest ducks his head in the holy water. Her first three children screamed at this, too, but though Gaheris’ face twists with misery he remains silent. Lot watches impassively.
He suspects her, Anna thinks, of cuckolding him. She hasn’t yet; she may.
Gaheris reminds her, suddenly of her sister Elaine, though God knows she hasn’t seen Elaine in years. Her sister was silent too, the last child born before beautiful, half-blooded Arthur. Anna sighs. Perhaps Gaheris will disappear the way Elaine has. His black eyes irritate her, in a way she can’t put into words, and she knows that he’s watching her, despite his eyes can’t focus on an object yet.
--
After a while she forgets about him. She sends for a wet nurse right away; Mordred is the only child she nursed, and the only one she will unless she gets her daughter.
She supposes, when she supposes, that he plays in the nursery with the other three, that he’s growing up somewhere out of sight. Lot avoids hers for a while, then brings her into his bed again; she endures it, knowing that he isn’t Arthur. Sometimes she considers casting a glamour on herself to forget whose hands are touching her body, but the thought disgusts her and she lets it pass.
--
“Lady.”
“What is it, Rosmund?”
“The nurse sent me word, the littlest prince has taken ill. The surgeon came round and bled him, but they can’t tell what’s gotten into him. She begged you to come, Lady.”
“Tell her I will come in a little while.”
“She says he’s like to die.”
“I will come apace.”
--
Anna finds him lying in his bed, his face to the wall. He’s two years old, if she were to venture a guess--his hair is dark and sleek like the coat of a seal. His black eyes fasten on her.
She doesn’t love him. Knowing it doesn’t stir anything within her, no regret, no guilt: she feels nothing, but she makes a potion for him anyway, full of bitter herbs and bitterer magic, because he belongs to her. The nurse sits him in her lap and helps him drink it, stroking his hair and murmuring sweet things as if he were her own child.
Anna wonders whether it should offend her, but finds it doesn’t.
Gaheris mends quickly with the drink. She doesn’t have to see him again.
--
Her next child is another boy, and then, finally, her girl. The rest of the children don’t matter. Clarissant is what she’s always wanted.
--
He knows consciously, by the time he’s five years old, that his mother doesn’t love him.
It isn’t difficult to know. She doesn’t go out of her way to see him, or any of them, really--he was mothered more by Gareth’s wet-nurse than ever by Morgause. The older ones don’t seem to mind much. Mordred, who is almost as quiet as Gaheris himself, has Gawain, and sticks close to him. They laugh and talk and run together, and Gaheris watches. Agravain doesn’t like anyone else, so he just doesn’t bother.
For Gaheris it feels like a blow to the heart, like the time he fell down the castle stairs and had the wind knocked out of him, and lay there on the stone floor unable to breathe or speak.
--
As he gets older, he takes refuge with their tutors. The monks are glad to have one enthusiastic student, so he learns to read Latin and Greek, and Father Culoc teaches him to write in illumination.
He spoils his manuscripts, but it’s easy to be whipped for ruining the expensive vellum, then forgiven, then given the chance to begin over again--far easier than to watch Morgause sweeping down the hallway in her long rich dress without ever looking his way.
--
Gawain teaches him to box, fence, and joust, but he does all of those things badly. He knows Gawain doesn’t mean to use him as an example every time; it’s just that he illustrates so well what mistakes can be made.
For the first year he attends every practise faithfully. For the first year he endures being beaten by Agravain and Mordred, and even little Gareth, at nearly everything, and the year after that he starts running away to the sea.
The sea at the Orkney shore is cold and dark and edged by craggy cliffs of stone that sometimes turn white with seabirds, nestling and squawking and wheeling out against the sky like distant glimpses of angels. The beach is long and Gaheris finds a quiet place to sit where he digs up shells and practises illuminated script in the sand.
After a while the sea always washes it away.
One afternoon he realises that the seals that lie along the rocks on the shore sometimes slip out of their skins and sun, or fight with each other, honking and barking despite their human throats. For the first few months he just watches them.
--
He sits in his usual place, chasing after a sand crab idly, when the selkie woman catches him off-guard. Her eyes are as black as his own, flat and smooth like sea-washed stones. She reaches out and cups his thin face in her hands.
“Hello,” he says shyly, and feels a fool for saying it. But she answers.
“Man. Come into the sea, Man,” and he lets her draw him, crawls onto his knees and follows her into the cold, salty water, and swims with her in the shallows.
She tries to take him further, but he hesitates, so she goes on without him.
--
The next day she pulls him into the deep water. The day after that she holds him under for as long as he can hold his breath, until he surfaces gasping and she watches him, laughing. She picks the seaweed out of his hair and kisses him.
Gaheris realises that he’s never been kissed before. He’s had no romance with any castle girl, and his mother never kissed him. He supposes one of the nurses might have, back before he can remember. But he doesn’t remember.
He’s sixteen years old.
--
He spends every day with her after that, and for a while it’s just more swimming, and kisses, and the selkie catches oysters for him and sometimes brings him fish, and he feels too guilty not to share them.
Once he brings her a ring, and she laughs at him again.
“That was stupid,” he says, shamefaced.
“It was stupid,” she agrees. “How would I wear it?”
“I don’t know. I guess I thought--I wasn’t thinking.”
“Men never think.”
Her voice is light, but in the fading sun, when it’s almost warm in the sparse grass at the edge of the beach, they make love quietly, and he runs his thin pale hands through her wet black hair. He’s heard a hundred stories from the nurses and the servants of men who married selkies and got children on them, and hid their skins to keep them faithful.
He knows where she leaves her skin when she comes out of the water, but he thinks of himself, caught like a trapped rabbit in the castle, and how he can’t be happy and he can’t sleep easy, and the torturous practises with Gawain.
When she leaves in the evening he lets her go.
--
“Gaheris, all your brothers have gone to Camelot. Gareth will go next year. Why haven’t you left yet?”
“Forgive me, Lady.” His voice is soft; he can’t see her face. His head is bent as he kneels before her.
“It’s past time.”
“I’ll go within the week if you will it.”
“I will it.”
It’s the first time she’s spoken to him in two years. His father is long dead. They tell about how King Pellinore brought him down treacherously in battle; Gaheris doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about any of it. His selkie has a mate from her own kind. He’s no better than he ever was. King Arthur won’t knight him. Gaheris hasn’t got the skill to do any brave deeds.
He thinks, fleetingly, that he should have asked her to send him to a monastery. He can write and read, at least, as well as any man, perhaps as well as a brother. The monastery’s fee would be less than the allowance he’ll need to keep a horse and page and quarters in the court.
But he doesn’t believe in God. Father Culoc’s teaching didn’t extend so far. Besides, he’d have to manage the company of at least twenty or thirty other brothers every day, and the thought makes him sick.
It isn’t any good. The next day he gathers his things together, takes a horse from the stables, and rides for Camelot.
--
Nothing changes here. His brothers are glad to see him--at least Gawain is. Mordred is quiet, as Mordred is wont, but there’s some spark of welcoming in his eyes, and Gaheris is comforted by it for a little while. Agravain just grunts.
He stays in his room, and spends the allowance for his page on books instead.
--
Gawain’s voice is calm and steadying, warm like goat’s milk. “You should try to earn your knighthood.”
“I can’t.”
“All of my squires say that. And all of them have been knighted.”
“Your squires can hold a damn sword.”
“Not all of them.” His mouth turns up at the corner. “Look, you’re only seventeen. That’s the right age. Just come along on our next patrol of the border. Uncle Arthur’s fond of giving knighthoods for valour on the front.”
“I’ll fall off my horse.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
Gaheris leans against the wall, his arms folded across his chest. “--Gawain--”
“What is it?”
“Did Mother love you?”
Gawain pauses for a long while before he says, “In her own way.”
--
He goes on the next patrol, but at the second night when they camp he slips away to go hunting with his knife. He doesn’t have Agravain’s skill--Agravain, so blunt and caged indoors, so angry, is wild and free in the forest, and hunts as if he were born for it above any other purpose--but he can cut a snare and skin a rabbit, and it’s something to do. It gets him away from the rest of them.
He first hears the cries from far off, and mistakes them for some kind of bird. Then they grow louder, and he can hear the wounded note underneath, bright with pain.
When he finally finds the cluster of willows, the cries are loud enough to have frightened the woods silent. Gaheris catches a glimpse of pale brown linen, and winds his way through the brambles into the copse.
It’s a child.
--
“Hey, lass.”
She looks up, shutting her mouth, her cheeks tear-stained.
“Art thou lost?”
She nods, wordlessly.
“Hurt?”
Another nod.
“Come, show me what’s hurt thee.”
She gets to her feet and limps to him, standing at the edge of the trees. The knees of her skirt are streaked with the dirty brown of blood, and Gaheris sits her down before him, kneeling.
“Didst fall?”
She nods.
“On the stones?”
Nods.
He lifts up her skirt to find her knees scraped and bloodied, and strips off his tunic. He bites through the thread on the seams with his teeth, and ties half the cloth around both her legs.
“Shall I take thee home?”
She nods.
“Show me which way’s home?”
The child shakes her head. Her hair is drawn back into a plait the colour of musty straw--she’s Saxon. He sighs. The skirmish he’s followed his brothers on is with the Saxons, who won’t be ruled by Arthur. His own reddish-dark hair will give him away at once for a Celt.
“Dost mind what village?”
She shakes her head.
“Nor how far?”
Of course not.
“Didst thou come by walking?”
She nods.
“Then it can’t be far. Wast walking with the sun in thine eyen?”
Nods.
“Then I’ll find it. Canst ride on my shoulders.” He offers his arms, and she lets him lift her onto his back, where she wraps her legs around his neck and clings to his head with her arms. Gaheris sighs again.
“What’s thy father do, lass?” he asks, as he starts walking westward.
“Ferrier.” It’s the first time she’s spoken, and her voice is thick from her crying.
“That’s a good trade. Hast any brothers or sisters?”
“Brother. All th’others died.”
“What’s thy brother’s name?”
“Richard.”
He keeps her talking all the way back to the village. At the outskirts, some man in a blacksmith’s leather apron raises a cry before Gaheris ever sets foot on the path. Before he has time to think, the child’s been pulled from his back by a blonde, thin-boned woman, and he’s been backhanded across the mouth and kicked to the ground with a boot in his stomach.
--
When he comes round, he’s lying on a straw mattress in a house lit by a smoky fire. The thin-boned woman is washing blood out of his mouth.
“Boy’s waked, Davey.”
A man comes into view, a man with a giant bushy beard and fierce eyebrows. Gaheris closes his eyes.
“Hey, boy. Anna says thee saved her from the woods.”
Gaheris nods, his eyes still shut. He hurts just looking at the man, letting alone the pain in his back and stomach.
“Came from the knights, did thee?”
He nods again; he can’t talk around the cloth in his mouth.
“We’ll be sending thee back soon as thee’s got thy feet again. Wager thee couldn’t walk now if I put money on thee.” The man laughs, a broad laugh that makes Gaheris’ head ache. He lies still while the woman finishes cleaning his face.
--
The Saxons are true to their word. By the next morning he’s not so sore he can’t walk, and they tell him the way back to his camp from the village.
Agravain swears.
“We should rout the blond bastards off the face of the earth.”
“Shut up,” Mordred says automatically.
“Are you all right?” Gawain asks.
“I’m fine,” Gaheris says. “I’m fine. They wouldn’t have done it if they hadn’t thought I was trying to steal their child. They let me go, didn’t they?”
“Aye, they did.”
When Gawain and Agravain are busy elsewhere, Mordred catches Gaheris lying down by the fire and puts a blanket around him, smoothing back his hair with one hand.
“It’s well you’re well, brother.”
Gaheris sighs. It feels like something painful and old drains out with his breath, like a splinter in his blood that’s finally coming out. For the first time in his life he thinks that perhaps his brothers love him.
In the end, he’s still enough hurt that Gawain won’t let him go to the fight, but when they return to Camelot Arthur knights him anyway.
--
In the end, he goes back to Orkney for nothing so much as for the sake of his selkie woman. It’s been years--nine, ten, he doesn’t remember accurately. His own wife waits for him back in Camelot, and it would be a lie to say he doesn’t love her; he loves her more than his own life.
It’s just that he can’t sleep at night, and when he does he dreams of the Orkney shore and the cold sand, and the selkie watching him from her place on the sun-warm stones, waiting for him to return.
It’s either that dream or the one where he dies, in a burst of scattered blood and shattered bone, and as to which one he’d like to have come true, he doesn’t have any trouble deciding.
So he leaves Lynette and goes back to his mother’s castle.
--
The selkie opens her arms to him as if he’d never gone away. The first day, the first hour he goes down to the beach, before he ever tells Morgause that he’s arrived. And there she is, waiting for him, stretched out on the sand.
He’s not a boy any more, no youthful lover, but he’s ready to leap into the sea for her in a moment. She makes him feel whole again, she makes his blood stop pounding and thickening and aching in his body. It’s like returning home after a journey abroad. It’s like sleeping after having been awake too long.
Afterwards he lies on the warm rock with her while she plays with his hair. She’s forgotten his name, true, but she knows him.
He doesn’t talk to her of going or staying or how long he’s been gone. He’s not even sure she’d understand that. He’s not sure she would care, or whether it would matter. It’s just the presence of her, and he knows as surely as he knows anything that it’ll end as it did before, she’ll go back to her own kind, but in the wintry season when the seals aren’t mating she can cast off her skin and stay with him a while.
It was the right choice to come, he decides. It was the right choice.
--
Anna is grateful for the boy.
Lamorak is no skilled lover, and not particularly wise. He’s just a soldier with a few ideas. But his body is young and his eyes are bright and he loves her, or he thinks he loves her, and she’s been lonely since Lot died.
No man will ever be Arthur; she will never have that. But Lamorak eases the longing when she’s with him, and she’s always been willing to take advantage.
He’s overstayed his time in her home. She knows that. He was sent to her to make peace on behalf of his family, since his father committed the unpardonable sin of being the one to slay Lot in battle. Of all the ways to show diplomacy, finding his way into her bed is not the worst. Still, if any of her sons find out, she supposes they’ll hold her responsible, as though she should be loyal to the memory of a dead man.
--
In the morning she takes breakfast with him, and afterwards he shows off his skill with the sword against one of her servants--it is his fancy, to show her how strong he is, and she tolerates it because it brings him much pleasure.
When he has done with that she sets aside her book and convinces him to come upstairs with her. Something in her is troubled to-day, worse than usual, and she wants the company.
In her warm bed, he spreads her dark hair across the pillow, down from its plaits; he kisses her shoulders and vows undying love that she knows won’t last. Anna knows. She has time for her teacher.
He whispers her real name and not her title: Anna, Anna, a groan wrested from his lips each time she presses near to him and draws away again, teasing him brainless.
--
She doesn’t know how long Gaheris has been watching--she only knows that she lifts her head and there he is in the doorway, her black-eyed son, his face drawn.
“Mother of God,” he says, in a strangled voice, when he sees that her eyes are on him.
“Gaheris.” She says it sharply, bitingly, to call him back. “Get out.” She sits up, drawing her sheets around her. “Get out.”
And then she feels it, like lightning down her spine, the burning shock of realisation. Like Elaine, who was silent, but felt things as strongly as she or Morgan ever did--like Elaine, her son is more than she credited him. She almost laughs: it is so unfair, and it is also just.
His eyes are flat, are blind, like stone instead of eyes. She doesn’t love him. She feels no stirring of love for him, poor creature, but she understands that she has done this, as surely as she did anything in the lives of her children.
“Do you love me, Gaheris?”
Lamorak is silent beside her, senseless. Of course he has no idea what to do.
Gaheris’ thin body shakes. “Yes.”
“That was your choice. It was always your choice, little fool. You should have learned better, like Mordred.”
“But surely--”
“I am done, Gaheris.”
Instead of turning away, he gropes blindly at his side for his sword, and she knows, she knows, but she sits very still and waits. She will give him this gift, let him be brave, let him make his own vengeance for his life.
She has no other gift for him at all.
--
His sword pierces her like a hawk sweeping down and killing, always killing: in this, at long last, he has a steady hand.
And there’s silence, not even Lamorak’s shuddered breath to break the stillness, not even the pounding retreat of his footsteps as he runs, panicked, down the stairs. In an instant, she remembers Gaheris’ birth, as silent as this, as cold, as bloody.
It’s over, Anna thinks, and then her body falls to the floor.
Nothing but silence now.
Author: Soujin
Characters: Gaheris, Morgause, and a selkie. Also sundry others (Gawain, Mordred, Lamorak, Agravain, some OCs)
Rating: PG-13
Archive: Yes.
Disclaimer: As usual.
Summary: Gaheris' life is terrible. Sorry, Gaheris. Title is a quote from Tennyson's Idylls.
By the time her fourth son is born into the world, silent as a stillbirth, Anna is past caring. All she’s wanted these years past is a little girl to teach, a girl who will grow up lithe and dark with magic; a place for her power to go when it’s no longer hers. She lies tiredly in her bedchamber while the midwife wipes the blood off the child’s body.
“Mary, you’d never know he was living,” the woman murmurs. Anna lifts her head to look at him. The child’s eyes are black as stones. “What will he be baptised, Lady?”
“I’ll decide later,” Anna says quietly.
The midwife nods. All of Anna’s servants are loyal--afraid of her, perhaps, but loyal, and sometimes even sympathetic, although she doesn’t care for their sympathy. What she really cares for is the wordless obedience, and the knowledge that they are hers, and will say and do as she directs them.
As for the child, it’ll probably die. Most women’s do. It’s a miracle the first three were all healthy, especially Mordred, born when she was so young; she had a better chance with Gawain and Agravain, but they at least came out fat and screaming. This one is thin and wrinkled like an old man, and he never makes a sound.
--
A week later she brings him to the baptismal font and the priest ducks his head in the holy water. Her first three children screamed at this, too, but though Gaheris’ face twists with misery he remains silent. Lot watches impassively.
He suspects her, Anna thinks, of cuckolding him. She hasn’t yet; she may.
Gaheris reminds her, suddenly of her sister Elaine, though God knows she hasn’t seen Elaine in years. Her sister was silent too, the last child born before beautiful, half-blooded Arthur. Anna sighs. Perhaps Gaheris will disappear the way Elaine has. His black eyes irritate her, in a way she can’t put into words, and she knows that he’s watching her, despite his eyes can’t focus on an object yet.
--
After a while she forgets about him. She sends for a wet nurse right away; Mordred is the only child she nursed, and the only one she will unless she gets her daughter.
She supposes, when she supposes, that he plays in the nursery with the other three, that he’s growing up somewhere out of sight. Lot avoids hers for a while, then brings her into his bed again; she endures it, knowing that he isn’t Arthur. Sometimes she considers casting a glamour on herself to forget whose hands are touching her body, but the thought disgusts her and she lets it pass.
--
“Lady.”
“What is it, Rosmund?”
“The nurse sent me word, the littlest prince has taken ill. The surgeon came round and bled him, but they can’t tell what’s gotten into him. She begged you to come, Lady.”
“Tell her I will come in a little while.”
“She says he’s like to die.”
“I will come apace.”
--
Anna finds him lying in his bed, his face to the wall. He’s two years old, if she were to venture a guess--his hair is dark and sleek like the coat of a seal. His black eyes fasten on her.
She doesn’t love him. Knowing it doesn’t stir anything within her, no regret, no guilt: she feels nothing, but she makes a potion for him anyway, full of bitter herbs and bitterer magic, because he belongs to her. The nurse sits him in her lap and helps him drink it, stroking his hair and murmuring sweet things as if he were her own child.
Anna wonders whether it should offend her, but finds it doesn’t.
Gaheris mends quickly with the drink. She doesn’t have to see him again.
--
Her next child is another boy, and then, finally, her girl. The rest of the children don’t matter. Clarissant is what she’s always wanted.
--
He knows consciously, by the time he’s five years old, that his mother doesn’t love him.
It isn’t difficult to know. She doesn’t go out of her way to see him, or any of them, really--he was mothered more by Gareth’s wet-nurse than ever by Morgause. The older ones don’t seem to mind much. Mordred, who is almost as quiet as Gaheris himself, has Gawain, and sticks close to him. They laugh and talk and run together, and Gaheris watches. Agravain doesn’t like anyone else, so he just doesn’t bother.
For Gaheris it feels like a blow to the heart, like the time he fell down the castle stairs and had the wind knocked out of him, and lay there on the stone floor unable to breathe or speak.
--
As he gets older, he takes refuge with their tutors. The monks are glad to have one enthusiastic student, so he learns to read Latin and Greek, and Father Culoc teaches him to write in illumination.
He spoils his manuscripts, but it’s easy to be whipped for ruining the expensive vellum, then forgiven, then given the chance to begin over again--far easier than to watch Morgause sweeping down the hallway in her long rich dress without ever looking his way.
--
Gawain teaches him to box, fence, and joust, but he does all of those things badly. He knows Gawain doesn’t mean to use him as an example every time; it’s just that he illustrates so well what mistakes can be made.
For the first year he attends every practise faithfully. For the first year he endures being beaten by Agravain and Mordred, and even little Gareth, at nearly everything, and the year after that he starts running away to the sea.
The sea at the Orkney shore is cold and dark and edged by craggy cliffs of stone that sometimes turn white with seabirds, nestling and squawking and wheeling out against the sky like distant glimpses of angels. The beach is long and Gaheris finds a quiet place to sit where he digs up shells and practises illuminated script in the sand.
After a while the sea always washes it away.
One afternoon he realises that the seals that lie along the rocks on the shore sometimes slip out of their skins and sun, or fight with each other, honking and barking despite their human throats. For the first few months he just watches them.
--
He sits in his usual place, chasing after a sand crab idly, when the selkie woman catches him off-guard. Her eyes are as black as his own, flat and smooth like sea-washed stones. She reaches out and cups his thin face in her hands.
“Hello,” he says shyly, and feels a fool for saying it. But she answers.
“Man. Come into the sea, Man,” and he lets her draw him, crawls onto his knees and follows her into the cold, salty water, and swims with her in the shallows.
She tries to take him further, but he hesitates, so she goes on without him.
--
The next day she pulls him into the deep water. The day after that she holds him under for as long as he can hold his breath, until he surfaces gasping and she watches him, laughing. She picks the seaweed out of his hair and kisses him.
Gaheris realises that he’s never been kissed before. He’s had no romance with any castle girl, and his mother never kissed him. He supposes one of the nurses might have, back before he can remember. But he doesn’t remember.
He’s sixteen years old.
--
He spends every day with her after that, and for a while it’s just more swimming, and kisses, and the selkie catches oysters for him and sometimes brings him fish, and he feels too guilty not to share them.
Once he brings her a ring, and she laughs at him again.
“That was stupid,” he says, shamefaced.
“It was stupid,” she agrees. “How would I wear it?”
“I don’t know. I guess I thought--I wasn’t thinking.”
“Men never think.”
Her voice is light, but in the fading sun, when it’s almost warm in the sparse grass at the edge of the beach, they make love quietly, and he runs his thin pale hands through her wet black hair. He’s heard a hundred stories from the nurses and the servants of men who married selkies and got children on them, and hid their skins to keep them faithful.
He knows where she leaves her skin when she comes out of the water, but he thinks of himself, caught like a trapped rabbit in the castle, and how he can’t be happy and he can’t sleep easy, and the torturous practises with Gawain.
When she leaves in the evening he lets her go.
--
“Gaheris, all your brothers have gone to Camelot. Gareth will go next year. Why haven’t you left yet?”
“Forgive me, Lady.” His voice is soft; he can’t see her face. His head is bent as he kneels before her.
“It’s past time.”
“I’ll go within the week if you will it.”
“I will it.”
It’s the first time she’s spoken to him in two years. His father is long dead. They tell about how King Pellinore brought him down treacherously in battle; Gaheris doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about any of it. His selkie has a mate from her own kind. He’s no better than he ever was. King Arthur won’t knight him. Gaheris hasn’t got the skill to do any brave deeds.
He thinks, fleetingly, that he should have asked her to send him to a monastery. He can write and read, at least, as well as any man, perhaps as well as a brother. The monastery’s fee would be less than the allowance he’ll need to keep a horse and page and quarters in the court.
But he doesn’t believe in God. Father Culoc’s teaching didn’t extend so far. Besides, he’d have to manage the company of at least twenty or thirty other brothers every day, and the thought makes him sick.
It isn’t any good. The next day he gathers his things together, takes a horse from the stables, and rides for Camelot.
--
Nothing changes here. His brothers are glad to see him--at least Gawain is. Mordred is quiet, as Mordred is wont, but there’s some spark of welcoming in his eyes, and Gaheris is comforted by it for a little while. Agravain just grunts.
He stays in his room, and spends the allowance for his page on books instead.
--
Gawain’s voice is calm and steadying, warm like goat’s milk. “You should try to earn your knighthood.”
“I can’t.”
“All of my squires say that. And all of them have been knighted.”
“Your squires can hold a damn sword.”
“Not all of them.” His mouth turns up at the corner. “Look, you’re only seventeen. That’s the right age. Just come along on our next patrol of the border. Uncle Arthur’s fond of giving knighthoods for valour on the front.”
“I’ll fall off my horse.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
Gaheris leans against the wall, his arms folded across his chest. “--Gawain--”
“What is it?”
“Did Mother love you?”
Gawain pauses for a long while before he says, “In her own way.”
--
He goes on the next patrol, but at the second night when they camp he slips away to go hunting with his knife. He doesn’t have Agravain’s skill--Agravain, so blunt and caged indoors, so angry, is wild and free in the forest, and hunts as if he were born for it above any other purpose--but he can cut a snare and skin a rabbit, and it’s something to do. It gets him away from the rest of them.
He first hears the cries from far off, and mistakes them for some kind of bird. Then they grow louder, and he can hear the wounded note underneath, bright with pain.
When he finally finds the cluster of willows, the cries are loud enough to have frightened the woods silent. Gaheris catches a glimpse of pale brown linen, and winds his way through the brambles into the copse.
It’s a child.
--
“Hey, lass.”
She looks up, shutting her mouth, her cheeks tear-stained.
“Art thou lost?”
She nods, wordlessly.
“Hurt?”
Another nod.
“Come, show me what’s hurt thee.”
She gets to her feet and limps to him, standing at the edge of the trees. The knees of her skirt are streaked with the dirty brown of blood, and Gaheris sits her down before him, kneeling.
“Didst fall?”
She nods.
“On the stones?”
Nods.
He lifts up her skirt to find her knees scraped and bloodied, and strips off his tunic. He bites through the thread on the seams with his teeth, and ties half the cloth around both her legs.
“Shall I take thee home?”
She nods.
“Show me which way’s home?”
The child shakes her head. Her hair is drawn back into a plait the colour of musty straw--she’s Saxon. He sighs. The skirmish he’s followed his brothers on is with the Saxons, who won’t be ruled by Arthur. His own reddish-dark hair will give him away at once for a Celt.
“Dost mind what village?”
She shakes her head.
“Nor how far?”
Of course not.
“Didst thou come by walking?”
She nods.
“Then it can’t be far. Wast walking with the sun in thine eyen?”
Nods.
“Then I’ll find it. Canst ride on my shoulders.” He offers his arms, and she lets him lift her onto his back, where she wraps her legs around his neck and clings to his head with her arms. Gaheris sighs again.
“What’s thy father do, lass?” he asks, as he starts walking westward.
“Ferrier.” It’s the first time she’s spoken, and her voice is thick from her crying.
“That’s a good trade. Hast any brothers or sisters?”
“Brother. All th’others died.”
“What’s thy brother’s name?”
“Richard.”
He keeps her talking all the way back to the village. At the outskirts, some man in a blacksmith’s leather apron raises a cry before Gaheris ever sets foot on the path. Before he has time to think, the child’s been pulled from his back by a blonde, thin-boned woman, and he’s been backhanded across the mouth and kicked to the ground with a boot in his stomach.
--
When he comes round, he’s lying on a straw mattress in a house lit by a smoky fire. The thin-boned woman is washing blood out of his mouth.
“Boy’s waked, Davey.”
A man comes into view, a man with a giant bushy beard and fierce eyebrows. Gaheris closes his eyes.
“Hey, boy. Anna says thee saved her from the woods.”
Gaheris nods, his eyes still shut. He hurts just looking at the man, letting alone the pain in his back and stomach.
“Came from the knights, did thee?”
He nods again; he can’t talk around the cloth in his mouth.
“We’ll be sending thee back soon as thee’s got thy feet again. Wager thee couldn’t walk now if I put money on thee.” The man laughs, a broad laugh that makes Gaheris’ head ache. He lies still while the woman finishes cleaning his face.
--
The Saxons are true to their word. By the next morning he’s not so sore he can’t walk, and they tell him the way back to his camp from the village.
Agravain swears.
“We should rout the blond bastards off the face of the earth.”
“Shut up,” Mordred says automatically.
“Are you all right?” Gawain asks.
“I’m fine,” Gaheris says. “I’m fine. They wouldn’t have done it if they hadn’t thought I was trying to steal their child. They let me go, didn’t they?”
“Aye, they did.”
When Gawain and Agravain are busy elsewhere, Mordred catches Gaheris lying down by the fire and puts a blanket around him, smoothing back his hair with one hand.
“It’s well you’re well, brother.”
Gaheris sighs. It feels like something painful and old drains out with his breath, like a splinter in his blood that’s finally coming out. For the first time in his life he thinks that perhaps his brothers love him.
In the end, he’s still enough hurt that Gawain won’t let him go to the fight, but when they return to Camelot Arthur knights him anyway.
--
In the end, he goes back to Orkney for nothing so much as for the sake of his selkie woman. It’s been years--nine, ten, he doesn’t remember accurately. His own wife waits for him back in Camelot, and it would be a lie to say he doesn’t love her; he loves her more than his own life.
It’s just that he can’t sleep at night, and when he does he dreams of the Orkney shore and the cold sand, and the selkie watching him from her place on the sun-warm stones, waiting for him to return.
It’s either that dream or the one where he dies, in a burst of scattered blood and shattered bone, and as to which one he’d like to have come true, he doesn’t have any trouble deciding.
So he leaves Lynette and goes back to his mother’s castle.
--
The selkie opens her arms to him as if he’d never gone away. The first day, the first hour he goes down to the beach, before he ever tells Morgause that he’s arrived. And there she is, waiting for him, stretched out on the sand.
He’s not a boy any more, no youthful lover, but he’s ready to leap into the sea for her in a moment. She makes him feel whole again, she makes his blood stop pounding and thickening and aching in his body. It’s like returning home after a journey abroad. It’s like sleeping after having been awake too long.
Afterwards he lies on the warm rock with her while she plays with his hair. She’s forgotten his name, true, but she knows him.
He doesn’t talk to her of going or staying or how long he’s been gone. He’s not even sure she’d understand that. He’s not sure she would care, or whether it would matter. It’s just the presence of her, and he knows as surely as he knows anything that it’ll end as it did before, she’ll go back to her own kind, but in the wintry season when the seals aren’t mating she can cast off her skin and stay with him a while.
It was the right choice to come, he decides. It was the right choice.
--
Anna is grateful for the boy.
Lamorak is no skilled lover, and not particularly wise. He’s just a soldier with a few ideas. But his body is young and his eyes are bright and he loves her, or he thinks he loves her, and she’s been lonely since Lot died.
No man will ever be Arthur; she will never have that. But Lamorak eases the longing when she’s with him, and she’s always been willing to take advantage.
He’s overstayed his time in her home. She knows that. He was sent to her to make peace on behalf of his family, since his father committed the unpardonable sin of being the one to slay Lot in battle. Of all the ways to show diplomacy, finding his way into her bed is not the worst. Still, if any of her sons find out, she supposes they’ll hold her responsible, as though she should be loyal to the memory of a dead man.
--
In the morning she takes breakfast with him, and afterwards he shows off his skill with the sword against one of her servants--it is his fancy, to show her how strong he is, and she tolerates it because it brings him much pleasure.
When he has done with that she sets aside her book and convinces him to come upstairs with her. Something in her is troubled to-day, worse than usual, and she wants the company.
In her warm bed, he spreads her dark hair across the pillow, down from its plaits; he kisses her shoulders and vows undying love that she knows won’t last. Anna knows. She has time for her teacher.
He whispers her real name and not her title: Anna, Anna, a groan wrested from his lips each time she presses near to him and draws away again, teasing him brainless.
--
She doesn’t know how long Gaheris has been watching--she only knows that she lifts her head and there he is in the doorway, her black-eyed son, his face drawn.
“Mother of God,” he says, in a strangled voice, when he sees that her eyes are on him.
“Gaheris.” She says it sharply, bitingly, to call him back. “Get out.” She sits up, drawing her sheets around her. “Get out.”
And then she feels it, like lightning down her spine, the burning shock of realisation. Like Elaine, who was silent, but felt things as strongly as she or Morgan ever did--like Elaine, her son is more than she credited him. She almost laughs: it is so unfair, and it is also just.
His eyes are flat, are blind, like stone instead of eyes. She doesn’t love him. She feels no stirring of love for him, poor creature, but she understands that she has done this, as surely as she did anything in the lives of her children.
“Do you love me, Gaheris?”
Lamorak is silent beside her, senseless. Of course he has no idea what to do.
Gaheris’ thin body shakes. “Yes.”
“That was your choice. It was always your choice, little fool. You should have learned better, like Mordred.”
“But surely--”
“I am done, Gaheris.”
Instead of turning away, he gropes blindly at his side for his sword, and she knows, she knows, but she sits very still and waits. She will give him this gift, let him be brave, let him make his own vengeance for his life.
She has no other gift for him at all.
--
His sword pierces her like a hawk sweeping down and killing, always killing: in this, at long last, he has a steady hand.
And there’s silence, not even Lamorak’s shuddered breath to break the stillness, not even the pounding retreat of his footsteps as he runs, panicked, down the stairs. In an instant, she remembers Gaheris’ birth, as silent as this, as cold, as bloody.
It’s over, Anna thinks, and then her body falls to the floor.
Nothing but silence now.