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

Chapter Twenty: King Anguish (part four)

Griffen sneaks into my chamber that night. He puts his hand over my mouth.

‘Follow me, lad,’ he says. There’s a grimness to him. A seriousness.

I go in my stocking feet. I follow him down to the catacombs. My mother is there. She is fierce. There is a body laid out on the top of a tomb. I do not look at it. I turn my eyes to the torchlight.

‘You know your father is sick, Mordred,’ says Queen Isolde.

I turn to her. I meet her brown eyes. I do not want to look at the thing resting on the tomb. I know what it is.

‘Tristan claimed a fever took him as they crossed the sea,’ says Griffen.

‘Show him, Griffen,’ says my mother.

I breathe in deeply. I move to the head of the tomb. I look down and see my brother. I touch his face. He is cold.

I kiss his dead forehead.

Griffen is on my right side. He has a tray in his hand. Upon the tray is a large shard of metal. Sharp metal.

Griffen speaks as gently as when I was a six-year-old with a cold. ‘This was in his brain. The knife snapped when they stabbed him through the skull. They tried to hide the wound...’

 I look at Queen Isolde. We are in tune. ‘Yes, Mother,’ I say. I accept the task she has charged me with. I accept it gladly.

 

* * *

 

I go to Sir Tristan’s chamber. There is no guard on the door. Through the windows I hear his men outside. There are so many of them that they cannot all fit into the castle. They are camping outside of the walls. They have not gone to sleep. I hear laughter from outside; it contrasts with the atmosphere of grief that pervades the King of Erin’s castle.

I push open Sir Tristan’s door. The candles are lit, but he is not there.

I hear a scream. Iseult.

I run to her chamber. There is blood outside her door. A body. Her bodyguard has been slaughtered. He is slumped in her doorway. I push the corpse aside, draw my sword, and burst through the door.

Dark, swarthy Sir Tristan has hold of my beautiful sister. She is struggling with him. Siobahn is white-faced, weeping, trying to tear Tristan’s arm away from Iseult.

I feel a moment of fear, and then anger. I could take him by surprise right now, run him through.

‘Just a little kiss,’ Tristan is saying. My sister squirms away from his putrid lips.

I cannot kill him dishonourably. I think about all his men, the extent to which they outnumber our own. If I kill him in private, without knightly ceremony, then there’s nothing to stop them slaughtering the whole household as he did my brother.

'Tristan!’ I shout. My voice sounds childish in my own ears. He releases my sister. Her arms free, she slaps him in the face. He snarls at her like the animal he is. She does not flinch.

‘Well, well,’ says Tristan, rubbing his cheek. ‘So King Marhault sends a child to guard his delicious daughter where a man failed.’

‘Step away from my sister, you bastard,’ I say.

He laughs at me. ‘Is this a challenge, you whelp?’

‘Mordred,’ says my sister, warning me off.