Children of the May (Children of the May Book 1)

Chapter Twenty: King Anguish (part one)

We did not go and see Hilda the next day, or for several days after that. The weather stayed fine, sunny and blue-skied, and Palomina insisted that we made as much progress on the longboat as we could before the season turned. As it was we had been very lucky in how long the summer had lasted.

‘Your weather in these western lands is terrible, Drift,’ she would say at regular intervals. ‘We must keep working while this run holds.’

Work on the boat progressed quickly. We had been unable to find any tools in the castle, but Epicene proved adept at fashioning what we needed from steel and iron we sneaked out of the armoury.

Accolon had said nothing to us about our plan, though of all of us he was closest to Lady Bertilak. He spent most of his time with Bellina, but seemed content to watch us, rather than do anything to stop our work.

We felled several trees from the forest, fashioned them into planks, and found a large, dry cave not far from the harbour where we set about seasoning the wood. Palomina taught me how to bend the wood using vices and weights, so as to shape the beams in accordance with the plans she had drawn up.

Back at the castle people seemed to be happy enough. Mordred had brought both Piers and Palomides into the group practising martial skills. He had initially offended Piers by telling him that he would serve as squire to the rest, but Melwas, who took an obvious pleasure in correcting Mordred when he slipped up, reminded him of his words on the Arthur’s ship: were we not to forget whether we low or high-born? Piers could be a knight of our cause every bit as much as any of us. When they weren’t in their treehouse, Aglinda and Alisander liked to act as squires, bringing lances and holding horses for the others.

Yes, the horses. On the morning of the third day Melwas had returned to the plain of wild horses, and the herd had followed her to the grasslands in front of the castle. They could not be encouraged to enter the castle itself, so Lady Bertilak ordered her servants to set up a tilting ground on the grasslands, a task which they accomplished unseen and overnight. The horses took well to being saddled, and the others used the opportunity to practise the skills of the joust. They each chose a beautiful suit of armour from the castle’s huge collection and began the process of learning how to level lances: first using straw-filled targets, and then sparring with each other. Mordred, Palomides and Piers turned out to be the best at this – Mordred for his aim, Palomides for the sureness of an eye much used to bobbing about on the sea, and Piers for the strength of his arm, now that the Questing Beast’s bite had completely healed.

Many blunt lances were smashed against shields and plates of armour, many times one or other of them was unhorsed. According to Piers, Accolon was always watching: ‘He stands there to the side with Bellina,’ he told me, ‘talking to her at the top of his voice.’ He put on his dreadful impression of Accolon: ‘Of course I could take part if I wanted to do, my lady love, but I am afraid I would embarrass them. Sir Kay the Seneschal himself trained me to joust, and this game is not jousting as I know it, wot wot.’

Agravaine fell behind the others. It was obvious to most of us that he was hurt by how close Melwas and Mordred had become, though the two of them did not seem to notice that each smile and touch that passed between them fed the misery in his eyes. The big Caledonian took every opportunity to join Palomina, myself, and occasionally Epicene when we needed fire, in our work on the longboat. He was happiest when wrenching particularly heavy pieces of wood to his shoulder, grunting under their brute weight as he moved them around on Palomina’s orders.

Our days became full of pleasant routines. I would look after Christian overnight and pass him to Agravaine, and sometimes Piers, for the rest of the daytime. Lady Bertilak had arranged for the drawbridge to be opened during daylight hours, so there was no need for us to ask her for permission to leave the walls. As we walked to the harbour, Palomina would tell us her plan for the day’s work. Within a few weeks we had begun to assemble the skeleton of a hull in the cave, though she told me that we would have to complete the final assembly down at the harbour.

Though Palomina was occasionally frustrated by my clumsiness, we would often laugh through the day. She would tell me of her family and homeland, and I would tell her stories and fables I had learned from Martha. She joked that having made the longboat so well, I would surely make a great first mate when she captained her own ship away from her brother. ‘It would be no bad thing,’ she would say, ‘a first mate with magical powers over the sea.’

‘I-I-I-I-I-I don’t know that I have power over the s-s-sea.’

‘It would be no bad thing to have a first mate like you, magical powers or not,’ she would reply, patting me on my misshapen back.

After work was finished, we would return to the castle about an hour before the evening meal. Palomina would go to the bathhouse, and I would wait until she was done. I was glad that I bathed later than everyone else, as it meant no one had to see my body. Unlike the others, I had never changed into the clothes I found in Lady Bertilak’s chest. Though what I found inside the chest in my room looked like they would fit me, they were too brightly coloured, a patchwork of stripes and spots. They were the clothes of a court jester, rather than a normal boy. My own clothes became frayed by my work.

After bathing I would go to the great hall to eat, and then there would be singing and games. One night Elia announced that she had remembered the whole of the song about King Pellinore’s hunt for the Questing Beast. It turned out to be a funny, circular song, which could, as long as one’s vocabulary contained enough words for bodily waste, go on forever.

      

King Pellinore after the Questing Beast

Chased it down a very deep pit,

But the Beast was ware and away it screeched

Leaving poor P its very brown shhhhhhhhhh – Leavings

 

It was a game to Elia to see how much she could make us laugh by dragging out the ‘shhhhhhhhhh’, before she shamefacedly added the unrhyming ‘leavings’ to the end of the verse.

King Pellinore after the Questing Beast

Chased it to down to the northern sea,

But the Beast was ware and away it screeched

Leaving poor P it’s very green wwwwwwwww – Leavings

 

We would play a similar game with the refrain, emphasising the short, staccato ‘quest’s, and stretching out the ‘ore’ sounds at the end of each line until we had no breath left:

And the Questing Beast ran from Pellinoooooooore,

If you quest for the Quest then you’ll quest no mooooore

 

 

‘That’s why the song never ends, it’s like the whole point of the story, you see,’ Elia explained after Piers had finished his own, increasingly crude variations on the verse. ‘Although it’s a true story as well, probably. The quest for the Questing Beast can never end; it always escapes. So if you’re questing for the Questing Beast you’ll never get to your next quest.’

‘Aye, that’s not a job I’d like to get on,’ said Piers rubbing his old injury, before launching into a story that was even less suitable for Aglinda and Alisander’s ears than the song. Thankfully, I do not think that the little ones understood half of what they heard in the tales he told. More than once I caught Accolon unable to suppress his laughter at one of Piers’ stories, though Bellina always remained stony faced, and would make loud remarks about the poverty of peasant humour. The lady would smile benignly as she worked on her embroidery. After games, stories and songs we would go to bed, though it was noticeable that Agravaine often left much earlier than the rest of us.

Despite the dark clouds cast by Agravaine’s envy, and the fear that Accolon could destroy all our work with just a few words, we went on, and on the whole we were happy.

Of the beast we heard nothing, not so much as a howl.