The Call of Camelot

Chapter 6 - Men of Legend

I love the first few seconds of the morning.  You know the ones I mean, where you're just coming out of a deep sleep into a beautiful crisp morning sky, all your worries and troubles don't yet exist for those few, blissful moments of pure peace...

Then all of a sudden, all the upset comes rushing back. Yeah, I really love those!

After those blissful, ignorant moments, the sounds of galloping horses and muffled shouts came rushing back in an instant. Mixed amongst the images of bright lights, grey skies and tree tops. And the bracelet, that bloody bracelet!

The feeling of heavy sleep still pulled at me, so much so that my eyes refused to open.  For the second time in three days I'd woken feeling tender and sore.  My mouth was dry and burned as though I hadn't touched water for days, but rather than fight against the exhaustion I remained still and tried to regain my sense of self.

I was laying on my back. I felt a cold damp cloth across my brow and a trickle of cool water run down my closed eyelids and across my cheek. My bed was soft and warm.  Beneath my palms, I could feel what felt like fur. Soft and silky.

As I felt the clarity of my mind return, so did the rest of my senses.  The air was heavy with scents of burning wood and dust.  Yes, dust has a smell! Don't try and tell me otherwise. The sound of crackling wood confirmed that a fire was close by.

Eventually, I let my eyes flutter open.  For a while my vision was still blurred so I stayed still and silent, 'till my eyes stopped trying to close and my sight came back into focus.

I was in a bed with a canopy of deep rose red.  The bed was centered in a darkened room of wood and stone, torches lined the walls, aflame and flickering above a wooden floor littered with straw.  I lifted my head enough to see that just beyond the foot of my bed was a hearth from which danced the friendly flames of red and gold, the smoke disappearing into the high thatched ceiling.

Okay! So I'm fairly certain that this definitely wasn't my hotel room.  My heart began to pound in my chest again, the shock of a fight or flight response making my body come to life.  Sitting bolt upright in my bed I checked to see if anyone had undressed me, but was relieved to see the same long sleeved shirt and shorts I'd dressed in that morning.

I began to search around the room for any sign of another person, thankfully I was alone.

I tossed off the damp cloth that had been resting on my brow and launched myself at the heavy wooden door next to my bedside.  I wasn't at all surprised when I found it locked.  My breath quickened as somewhere in the back of my mind, a voice tried to tell me to remain calm and not to descend into panic.  I tried to cling to that voice but my base instincts were telling me to scream, run, hide, do SOMETHING.

It was terrifying.

A few deep breaths grounded me enough to gather my thoughts, to not allow fear take hold and I looked around the room once more. I couldn't think of a single place in the world that would have a building such as this.  It looked Medieval, if not older, filled with authentic looking artefacts like horned cups and clay plates.  The windows were not windows, but glassless slits in the walls that in the Middle Ages were called eyes. They were set higher into the wall, making it  difficult to see.

Dragging a nearby stool was the solution to that problem, but what I saw through the opening was far from what I had expected.

I couldn't make sense of what my eyes were seeing, gone were any signs of a modern world! No roads, streetlights or electricity poles. What I was seeing was something unseen in my world.

Below me were jagged streets of trodden mud and straw, lined with square shacks of wood with thatched roofs.  Along those streets walked hordes of people, carrying baskets of food and walking animals on rope leads. Their chatter travelling up through the air to my ears.