Snow covers the ground, lying like a timeless blanket across the ground; and although footpaths will have been formed around the other side of the hall, from my window it is unblemished. Clean white snow like innocence lain upon these lawless lands.
From the window, my breath clouds as it leaves my aching lungs. I shiver, close the blanket over the window and wrap my cloak tighter around my shrunken, fragile frame.
Today I am an old man, where once I was young.
Today I feel the cold bite bitterly into my bones, where once I could shrug off the winter chill like a cloak.
Once my friends were many, my fame and accomplishments uncountable. Today my friends are gone and my accomplishments forgotten.
Time is a cruel mistress: she plays with history, distorting the truth as she shapes legends into myths. Into lies.
I have witnessed the twist of truth into legend, and legend into myth with my own eyes. People have told me, wrongly, what happened in an event as though they were there and know better, when it was I that was there, swinging my sword as I fought desperately to win through and stay alive.
None though have entered into myth and legend more than King Arthur.
So many people tell their story of Arthur and his knights and all tell it differently. Arthur was the greatest king of all time, and yet he had no right to the throne. Arthur was the saviour of Britain, who rescued the British from the Saxons; and yet he was the reason they survived and were allowed to revive their ambitions. Arthur was the only man strong enough to unite and rule the kingdom, and yet he was so weak that he could not even rule his own household. King Arthur: loved by his people, hated by his family.
There is truth in all of these stories. Arthur was all of these and more, but how can the bards sing their songs of what sort of man he was when they had no idea. The peasants that tell their tales will never know what caused the aches in his heart.
I do though, at least as well as any man alive for I was there with him. From the beginning to the very end. I was as close to Arthur as any man ever could be to him, and I have made it my mission to turn the myths and legends back into truths.
This is my story; it can be no other for I am telling the story of what I saw while I did what I did, how I did it and why. But this tale is so much more than my story; it is the story of how a country was formed, banded together in the face of invasion and how that country broke apart in the face of ambition.
It is the story of courage and cowardice, and how they can be confused with one another.
It is the story of love, and the lack of it, not just between men and women, but between fathers and sons, between brothers and friends.
It is the story of loyalty, of the men who have never met their commander face to face, using their last blood bubbling breath to swear their loyalty in the afterlife, and of kinsmen and friends betraying everything those titles stood for. All of this is bound together by the story of one man.
One man; loved so much by his people and hated so much by the people who were supposed to love him most. One man, who fought so hard for peace and was only ever granted war
And I, who have never believed in God, pray with all my heart that he may now, in death find the peace he never found in life.
YOU ARE READING
Winter's Blossom: The Seasons of Arthur
Historical Fiction"Strangely, I did not move for a moment. I just accepted death with a reluctant peacefulness. I knew I was about to die and there was nothing I could do about it. I did not even have a sword in my hand, for I had kept my arms free while running. I c...
