The Lazarus Vault

L

The bow is rough and gnarled: not horn or yew, like the Normans use, but unstripped dwarf-elm. That won’t stop it from killing me. Welsh archers can hit a bat’s eye in the dark.

I drop my spear and raise my hands in surrender. It’s a wise move. More men melt out of the forest. In their green-brown smocks and muddy faces, they look like trees come alive. They bind my hands and lead me away.

We march through the night. Whatever dangers lurk by the roads, these men don’t fear them. To be a prisoner is to be trapped in a long, lightless tunnel. I stare at my feet, never looking more than a yard in front of me. I don’t think about the King, or about Malegant — I don’t care. Instead I think about Jocelin. I remember the weight of the spear in my hand and the tremor of the point as it hung over his face. I remember the flash of mercy. I wonder why I did it. The rope chafes my wrists and I ask God, ‘Is this how You repay me?’

At dawn we reach a city on a river surrounded by woods and meadows. Sea-going ships unload on wooden piers, while a lofty stone tower overlooks stout walls. But if you look closer, the picture changes. The town is like an old fur coat patched with homespun cloth. Holes in the masonry have been filled with mortared rubble, or merely barricaded with palings, while the handsome red roofs sprout straw where the tiles have fallen through. At its centre stands an enormous roundhouse, like a pavilion: stone walls topped with a cone of thatch. The stones look ancient; the thatch is still yellow.

‘Whose castle is this?’

My captors ignore me. Dredging words from the depths of memory, I repeat it in Welsh. They look surprised.

‘Morgan ap Owain, King of Morgannwg.’

They lock me in a wattle enclosure that smells of pigs and leave me to rot. An icy wind blows rain through the woven branches, though I still haven’t dried out from my plunge in the river. I curl myself in a ball and fall asleep.

Hours later — I don’t know how many — the guards return. They tie my arms behind my back and slide a rod through my elbows, then drag me like a plough along the street to the roundhouse I saw earlier. Huddled in front of the gate a wretched group of prisoners waits in the rain. I don’t recognise them without their armour, until I see Hugh.

‘Are these your friends?’ one of the guards asks. I nod; he whips the rod out from my arms and pushes me in with the other prisoners. I almost sprawl headlong into the mud, but Hugh catches me.

‘They captured me just after I crossed the river.’

‘Us too. We found the ford Malegant used. Two minutes later, we were surrounded.’

‘What are they going to do to us?’

‘Give us an audience with the King of Morgannwg.’

He says the name with scorn. I know from my childhood that the Kingdom of Morgannwg hasn’t existed for fifty years. When the Normans conquered Wales they abolished it along with all the other old kingdoms. I assume that now, in the anarchy of the civil war, some enterprising local lord or bandit has seized power, resurrecting an obsolete title to buttress his authority.

William’s standing just behind Hugh. ‘Don’t mention the King,’ he hisses to me as I go past.

The guards take us through a double gate into King Morgan’s hall. It’s circular and entirely open, except for a central pole supporting the roof. A round table circles the edge of the room, with knights and barons seated at it like judges in a court.

The hall is filled with kings — rather, the same king again and again, woven into the cycle of tapestries around the room. A young king, a gold circlet on his head, receiving prophecies from a white-bearded old man. The same king, crowned and older, killing a swarthy giant; defeating a Roman emperor; locked in a great battle; finally, laid in a boat tended to by women in white. And, at the head of the table opposite the door, seated in majesty on a throne carved with dragons and lions.

The King moves. I blink. The smoky hall’s deceived me: the last hanging isn’t a tapestry, but cloth-of-gold, hung in the space where the eighth tapestry should be. The King sitting in front of it is entirely real: a flesh-and-blood man about my age, with a neatly trimmed beard and a gold crown on his head that looks very much like the one in the tapestries.

I don’t know how he claimed his title, but I have to admit he looks more the part than King Stephen did. He lounges back in his chair and studies the prisoners. William has slipped back into the middle of the group, keeping his face down to avoid being recognised. Hugh stands at the front and meets the King’s gaze.

‘Who are you?’

‘Knights from England. An enemy stole something from us. We followed him here to get it back.’

The King presses his fingertips together. ‘You should have appealed to me for help. What was it he stole?’

Hugh stays silent. That doesn’t impress the King.

‘If the king of England wants to invade my kingdom, I’ll give him a fight. I’ll push him all the way back to the sea, reclaim all of Britain as it was in Arthur’s time.’

He’s exaggerating. It’s a fine castle, but Stephen’s army could reduce it in a week. If Stephen hasn’t crushed this pretender already, it’s only because he’s had more urgent concerns. But Morgan’s men love it. They’re on their feet, shouting and clapping. Some of them pelt us with scraps from their plates. I duck a crust of bread and listen to what they’re saying. One name, chanted over and again.

Arthur. Arthur. Arthur.

At last I understand the tapestries, the crown and the throne. Morgan’s an opportunist, a usurper papering over his theft with a grandiose title that’s fallen out of use. But the title he’s claiming is more ancient and profound than the dilapidated kingdom of Morgannwg.

Morgan raises his hand and the hall goes quiet. Hugh’s about to say something, but before he can speak I step forward, feeling for where the different torches overlap to make the brightest place. It’s a trick I learned as a troubadour — no one listens to a man in shadow.

‘I can tell you a tale.’

The King’s gaze switches on to me. ‘Iwant answers. The truth. I have the best minstrels and harpers in Wales to tell me stories.’

‘Not like mine. I have the greatest story that was ever told in a royal court.’

Another troubador’s conceit. No one pays to hear about the moderately interesting.

‘My story is the story of Perceval the Welshman. A story no one has ever heard before. A story of secrets.’

Our eyes meet; he’s intrigued. He nods.

‘Tell me your tale, and I’ll see how I like it.’

I lift my shoulders, tugging against the rope. ‘It’s easier to tell with my hands unbound.’

A guard cuts the rope. I rub my wrists, then walk over to the table and take a cup of wine to wet my throat.

‘Long ago, when Arthur was king …’

I make it up as I go along. Sometimes I catch myself digressing, or repeating too much, but each time some instinct draws me back to the story, like a blind man feeling the edge of the path with his stick. I watch the King’s face the same way I watched Ada’s when we sat by the river at Hautfort, catching the things that please him, amplifying them where I can. Some of it comes from the stories my mother told me; other pieces from scraps I’ve heard in other halls, or half-remember from the books I studied as a child. For the rest, I take the coarse threads of my life, dye them vivid colours and weave my own tapestry to hang in the hall.

I tell the king how Perceval was born in the waste forest of Wales. How his father and his brothers were Arthur’s knights, all killed on the same day. How his mother raised him with no knowledge of knights or chivalry, to protect him from the same fate — but how the moment he saw a company of knights riding through the forest, he knew it was his destiny.

I tell how Perceval went to Caerleon where Arthur kept his court. I make great play of looking around the hall.

‘It wasn’t a particularly great or magnificent court …’

Morgan flushes, sensitive to any insult.

‘… only three thousand knights or so.’

They all laugh. Morgan thumps the arm of his chair and nods his approval. The energy in the room lifts and channels into me.

I tell them more. How Arthur dubbed Perceval a knight, and how Perceval set out to find adventures. How he met the Lady Blancheflor, saved her castle from the wicked Clamadeu and made her his sweetheart, though not his wife. In my story, there’s no husband to get in the way.

The hall’s growing dim — the servants have forgotten to replace the candles. I shift position; I crouch to keep my face in the light. I tell how Perceval set out again and came to a broad river and met a fisherman. How the fisherman directed him to a castle in a hidden valley, and how that night at supper he witnessed marvels he did not understand.

Afterwards, I couldn’t tell you how it came to me that way. All I know is that at that moment there isn’t a man in the hall who would not stay there until dawn to find out what the grail and spear mean.

I tell them how Perceval woke the next morning and found the castle deserted. How as he was riding over the drawbridge it closed behind him. How he never found the castle again — how the quest drove him mad. How he lost his memory so totally that he no longer even remembered God. He wandered for five years, forgetting everything, until on Good Friday a hermit took him in and restored him to sanity. How he vowed he would not spend two consecutive nights under the same roof as long as he lived, until he had found out why the spear bled, and what the grail contained.

How –

I break off suddenly. Morgan thinks it’s a dramatic effect; he waits a moment for me to continue. When he realises I’m not going to, he rises forward like a man woken from a dream.

‘And?’

I shrug my shoulders. ‘I don’t know the ending. The story hasn’t finished yet.’