“What do you mean, Godmother?” I asked, chilly.
“I’d like to see how your skill compares to the prince’s,” you said.
And I must answer, “He can best me.”
“Oh, Medraut, join us,” Lleu said. “Just this once. It’s only a game.”
“Join them,” you said. It was a command.
I said in a low voice, “Godmother, I would rather not.”
“Don’t glare so,” you said coolly. “Join them.”
Helpless as I was before you always, I had no choice but to obey. In fierce silence I took up one of the wooden swords, and with Gaheris and Agravain took my place opposite Lleu.
He eluded us, foxlike, avoiding and repelling our blows. We might as well try to fight a waterfall. He disarmed Gaheris again and again, and Gaheris admitted defeat when Gwalchmei called out to him, “You’re finished. If it were real swords you’d be dead by now.” And with Gaheris out, Agravain, Lleu, and I were suddenly pitted against one another in earnest, and playing a little desperately.
But Lleu fought me as though we were the only two people in the world. He dealt with Agravain because he had to, fending off his cousin’s blows as though Agravain were no more annoying than an insect, a trifling interruption. Agravain fought doggedly, retrieving his sword twice from the ground, growing more and more irritable. The third time Agravain’s sword went flying across the grass, Lleu stamped furiously on the wooden hilt so that it splintered and cracked before Agravain could pick it up again. Agravain snatched hold of Lleu’s arm, trying to pull him down with his hands.
“Let go!” Lleu cried in a high voice, and when Agravain did not, Lleu suddenly and unexpectedly tumbled to the ground and rolled out of his reach.
“Get out of there,” Goewin shouted. “He’s beaten you.”
Agravain tossed his long, burnished braid pridefully over his shoulder and came away, to slump in silent anger next to his brothers against the stone wall.
Then it was Lleu and I, alone, locked together in silent, furious intensity. The old bitter resentment raged through me: I was stronger and taller and more experienced than Lleu, and I knew I could not win. He must defeat me before you and all your young sons. I fought with passionate disregard for our difference in size, knowing he was my better, and that my strength was my only advantage. But Lleu slipped out of my range, dodged my blows and parried with a ferocity and determination fully equal to my attack. When Lleu at last twisted in underneath my guard and pressed the wooden blade agains K bl with t my throat, I could not bear to prolong this competition. I knelt before him in formal surrender, as before a judge or an executioner, with head bowed and neck bared.
“Oh, well done!” Gareth breathed.
“Well done,” you echoed.
Lleu let fall his sword. He offered me his hand to help me rise;
I took it and got slowly to my feet. Such a performance, both of us so calm and polite! But his hands trembled, the black hair he pushed back from his forehead was damp, and his face was wan. It had been something more than a game.
VI
The Running of the Deer
I DO NOT LIKE the sword. It is clumsy and imprecise, designed for haphazard damage, for total and purposeless destruction. With bow and arrow the kill is clean and swift: That is the weapon of the hunter, not the warrior, the one who kills beast, not man, who kills for survival, not power. Try bringing down a hart, or a hare, or a swan, with a sword.
I tell this over to myself as a litany, so to excuse the delight I draw from the chase, the exhilaration and abandon that Lleu calls bloodthirst. After you came to Camlan, to hunt was all my solace or pleasure. I most often went alone, at my ease in the deep, green forest south of Camlan, not even expected to return at night those times I was not needed in the mines. On days when I must work I could at least stalk rabbit and partridge through the twisted trees clinging to the red sandstone of the Edge. I carried a bow with me always, those days.
So it was one morning when Goewin came to my room early and asked, “Will you be hunting on the Edge today?” She knew, as all Camlan knew, how I passed my spare hours.
“I had not meant to,” I answered briefly, my hands busy with knife and horn and bowstring. “Why?”
“Lleu and the cousins are planning to play some kind of game there,” she said, sitting at my desk and watching me stock my quiver. “They’ll be all over chasing and hiding from each other. I think they’re a lot of idiots, but I wouldn’t want you to mistake one of them for a wild pig and stick an arrow through somebody’s throat.”
That made me laugh. “What are they doing that you aren’t with them?”
“They’re playing out a hunt. Not a real one. They’ll take some hounds, but no bows or spears.”
She was still frowning. I asked, “What are they hunting, then, that you so fiercely disapprove?”
With the tip of a finger the gentle princess crushed a small and shining insect that was moving across my desk, and flicked it through the open window. “Lleu.”
“I hope he proves a better quarry than he is a hunter,” I said.
She gave a short, explosive gasp of laughter. “Ih! Well, he knows the Edge better than the cousins do. He can hide from them even if he can’t outrun them. That’s why they need the hounds.” She stood up to leave, and finished, “I just wanted to warn you.”
“Thank you,” I said.
But she waited at the door and did not go. “If Lleu escapes them and returns to the Queen’s Garden by sunset without being caught, he wins. I won’t join in something so childish. The prince of Britain!” She paused. “ N be;Oh, well.”
“Childish, no,” I said. “Not the Wild Hunt.”