Balin and Columbine (A Children of the May Novella - Book 1.5b)

Chapter Five: The Meeting

Palomides had not stayed long with Balin in their dungeon cell. A week or so after the northern lad had been forced into the dark, smooth jail, Lucan the Butler took the foreigner away. Palomides had not been brought back. Balin often heard the malformed screams of torture victims echoing around the prison, but he could not tell if the trader’s cries were among them. The northerner hoped that Palomides’ father had paid Arthur’s unfair taxes and saved his son that fate.

Life underground had not been good for Balin’s sanity. It was not so much the loneliness, which was acute and oppressive, it was more the time he had to dwell on his brother’s death, and the knowledge that Lady Nemone of the Lake lived free. The murder of a brother or sister sits heavy upon anyone, but the pain of one who has lost a twin is perhaps more searing. The loss of the boy with whom he had once shared a mother’s womb felt like the loss of the greater part of himself. For Balin, Balan had represented the better portion of their shared existence, the graceful and courtly half, the part with intelligence and beauty. It was not for nothing that people called Balin the Savage – the young man knew that when they had playfully squirmed together in their mother’s belly, Balan had received the higher elements of their joint being.

He groaned to himself during the long, lonely days. He made elaborate fantasies about his revenge, and over the solitary time came to believe in those dreams of slaying the youngest lady of the lake. By the Pentecost his mind was broken to the extent that sometimes he believed he had already completed his quest, that he was in jail a triumphant victor rather than the victim of Arthur’s interfering laws.

His hair had grown long and even more untidy. His clothes became frayed from the times he threw himself against the cell door, reliving his imagined victory over Nemone. His dark beard grew as long as a hermit’s. Though lucan fed him badly, he did not lose his strength thanks to the way he would run and climb the walls of the round cell, when in moments of clarity he tried to escape.

He was sleeping, exhausted from another long night of failing to reach his cell’s single high window, when he was awoken by a struggle beyond the door. It was not unusual to hear guards beating new prisoners into silence in the corridor, but Balin was shocked to hear a woman’s voice screaming at the guards.

‘Unhand me! Let me go! There is no honour in Camelot! There is no honour in Camelot!’

‘I can’t be arsed with this, boss,’ grunted one of the guards. ‘Can we not just stick her in the first one?’

There was the clanking of metal, and then a man’s cry of pain.

‘Get her arm, you pillock!’

‘Bugger this,’ said the voice of Lucan the butler, and Balin heard the bolts of his own cell door begin to scrape open.

Wild-eyed, Balin leapt to his feet. His door hadn’t been opened in weeks; the guards just shoved his bowls of thin gruel through a small hatch. He crept to the side of the door, waiting for it to open. Perhaps they would be distracted by whomever they were struggling with, and he’d be able to escape. 

The heavy door burst open and clashed against the wall with a deep clang. Balin caught a glance of the screaming woman being thrown past him into the cell, but he didn’t stop to help her; this was his chance to escape, not hers. He swung himself around the corner of the door, and managed to squeeze past one of the guards into the torch-lit passageway.

‘By the Lord Jesus, stop him!’ cried Lucan.

‘I’d forgotten there was anyone in there,’ said one of the guards, before Balin rounded a corner and the sounds faded behind him. The northerner vaguely remembered the layout of the dungeons from when he had first been brought down; there was only one gate between him and the main part of the fortress. He prayed to the god of gates and doors that his jailors had forgotten to close that exit as they struggled with the woman.