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When Gawain of Orkney was fourteen years old, he sat his younger brothers down in a row like little ducks and imposed on them all his worldly wisdom. There were three brothers, then, and no sisters: Agravaine, a spiteful youth of twelve; Gaheris, ten and desperate to grow; Gareth, the youngest at seven, precocious and precious.
The wisdom of Gawain of Orkney ran as follows:
- Never forget your family.
- Never speak your mind.
- Never disobey Father.
Nearly one year later, the third point was amended:
- If you kill a man, kill his sons as well.
When Gawain was sixteen, he met a strange man in the darkness who wore robes of the finest silk and held the world in his hands. He knew Gawain’s name, and spoke it like a prophecy.
“Who are you?” Gawain said, because at heart he was a child, and scared.
“That doesn’t matter,” said the man, although not with reprimand. Then light flared an unearthly shade of white-blue, and the darkness faltered for just a bit. In the flickering torch-flame, Gawain saw a kindly old man who gave him the first smile he had seen since he had told his mother that Father was dead.
“Stop smiling,” he told the man dully. “There’s nothing to smile at.”
The man did not stop smiling. “Of course not. Do you speak Latin, Gawain?”
No answer.
“I think you do. You’re not a true Scot, at heart. Ah! Think before you answer.”
Gawain thought. Rule Number Two. Carefully, he said, “And it please you.”
“It does, it does,” said the old man, with a whimsical clap of his hands. “I hope you speak Latin, Gawain. Nullae sunt occultiores insidiae quam ea quae, latent in simultatione officii. Remember that, if you’re smart enough.”
Cicero, but incomplete. No deceit is so veiled as that hidden by courtesy — and what? It was missing a clause, which the old man surely knew . But all answers would lose him the game, so Gawain stayed silent.
“No? Pity.” And then, as though reading his mind: “You’ll play soon enough, Gawain. I’ve got something for you.”
“A key?”
“Ohoho!” It was a truly jolly chuckle, the kind an old man must practice daily in the mirror to perfect. Gawain hated it. “No, not a key. I could get you a key, if you were inclined to cooperate. Do you have a mathematical mind, Gawain?”
“A what?”
“No, I didn’t think so. Such things are teachable, but I don’t think you want to apprentice yourself to me, do you?”
Gawain looked him in the eyes, truly in the eyes, for the first time. He saw nothing but a trustworthy twinkle. “No,” he decided, and a chill ran down his back for reasons he could not pinpoint.
“No,” the kindly old man agreed. “Besides, you’ve got greater things in store. You don’t need me to teach you what you will learn on your own.” Then, before Gawain could curse his ambiguities: “You know, I saw the most interesting sword once. It had a message engraved on it in Latin. Old, you know. Very old.”
Unable to stop himself despite the rushing terror in his ears, Gawain said, “What did it say?”
“On one side it said, hoc gladio Lancelotus virum quem magis amat necaturus est,” the man said. “And as for the other, you will surely learn one day. Good evening, Gawain. Keep hope. An angel might come.”
He was nearly out the door before Gawain’s curiosity overcame his patriotism. “Lancelotus?” he called, rising from his huddled perch against one wall of his cell. “Who’s Lancelotus?” As an afterthought: “And who are you?”
“Oh, you’ll find out soon enough on both counts,” the wizard Merlin said, pausing in the doorframe. “The question that matters more is: who is the man that Lancelot loves most?”
When Gawain of Orkney was seventeen years and one week old, he betrayed Father. Worse: he did so for a woman.
The first thing Guinevere, Queen of the Britons said to him was, “He will let you rot in here before offering you anything more.”
The second thing was, “My husband? No, don’t be stupid.”
Then, third; suddenly paled as though constricted in some invisible grip, “Of course I’m Guinevere. I cannot say more. Goodbye.”
But she returned, day after day for nearly six months, slightly more ashen each time, until Gawain could bear it no longer. She came to see him early in the morning that day, as she always did, because she said it was the only time that she could pretend the castle was hers. She said: “He drowned the children yesterday.”
Gawain did not ask if she meant her husband. She never meant her husband.
“I don’t know why,” she said, her skeletal hands wrapping around the bars of his cell and a rare look of grief in her eyes. “I don’t understand. He wouldn’t tell me why, he just said it had to be done, and my husband nodded along. Gawain, I’m so afraid. There were seventeen children. Babies. Just ordinary babies. I don’t even like babies.”
Later, much later, Gawain will find out that one of those children was his brother and his cousin as well. It will make him pause for a moment, overcome with a faint sense of guilt, because it was not for the children that he surrendered his pride. It was for Guinevere. His frozen, scarred hands found hers, intertwined with each other around the rusted metal bar, and he said, “Go tell your husband I’m ready to kneel.”
Her breath caught. Eyes wide. Terrified that the words she heard were not the truth, were something conjured up by Him.
“After all,” Gawain added, “the two of you are my aunt and uncle. You’re family.” And Gawain, the implacable statue of duty, pasted a smile on his face. Strange. Virginal.
When Gawain was seventeen years and three weeks old, the world turned under his feet and his sacrifice evaporated into thin air. There was a girl, that much he knew. She might have been thirteen or sixteen or twenty, neither he nor Guinevere ever found out. They never even saw her. But there was a girl, and she was a hunted thing, but like a cunning hare she lured the fox to a cave or a tree and trapped him there with his own teeth. And just like that, Gawain had tarnished the memory of Father for nothing.
“Well, you’re not in a cell anymore,” Guinevere said prosaically, when Camelot had been freed for a little over a day. The colour was already returning to her cheeks. She would not have lasted much longer without an intervention, they both knew… perhaps Gawain would have been next. The next meal. They would never find out, now. “It’s not like you could avenge your father from behind bars.”
“I knelt. I knelt while his murderer watched on.”
“Oh, buck up. Did you want to spend the rest of your life in prison?”
“Yes,” said Gawain, stubbornly.
“Liar.”
“Not yet,” Gawain said, although he wasn’t sure why. Then, always practical, he pulled himself together. Remember the Rules. The Rules always held. “I’ve got to get a quest,” he decided. “Soon. It’s very important.”
“Is it? I’m sure you know your own affairs.”
“You doubt me?”
“Well, quests and things. The sort my husband gives. They’re not very martial, you know.”
He squinted at her. “So?”
“So,” said Guinevere slowly, looking at him with utmost seriousness, “you might be a knight now, but can you do anything other than kill?”
When Gawain of Orkney was eighteen, he learned there was nothing he was good for but killing. Standing before the court with a dead woman’s head tied around his neck, he didn’t begrudge Guinevere anything as she excoriated him in front of everyone whose opinion mattered: he knew from the look in her eyes that redemption required a rock-bottom from which to begin. “You must be the defender of all maidens,” she proclaimed, as her husband watched on amiably. “This is your atonement, Sir Gawain.”
And later: “Don’t stop protecting them when they aren’t maidens anymore. Obviously.”
“I’m not an idiot.”
“I never thought you were an idiot,” said Guinevere, like she thought he was something worse.
When Gawain was nineteen he found out the way the world worked. “So that’s it, is it?” he said, very quietly, when the hubbub of his return to court had faded and he told the story— the whole story— to Guinevere, alone in her gardens, his hand entangled in the green silk belt at his waist like it was a bandage.
“It?” she said, not understanding. It wasn’t often that Guinevere didn’t understand something.
Gawain flicked at a rose moodily with his free hand. “That’s chivalry. You put your neck on the line and are faced with impossible choices and choose wrong, because of course you do, but none of it matters as long as you’re— charming. I’m not charming.” He looked up, eyes open and honest and full of fear. “Guinevere, I’m not charming. I don’t know what I did, but I can’t do it again. And they all think— they all think I won. But soon they’re going to realise that it was a fluke, and—”
“Do you know what I think?” Guinevere interrupted, resting back against a trellis interlaced with creeping vines. Little white flowers bobbed around her head as she stared up at the deep blue late-afternoon sky, bounded on all four sides with the stone walls of Camelot.
“What?” Irritable at the lack of engagement. “What do you think?”
“I don’t think your aunt wants to kill me at all.”
Gawain had enough grace not to say the first thing on his mind, which was to point out that they were talking about him right now. “Oh? I mean, why would she? She doesn’t even know you.”
“Exactly. And you say she’s a smart woman. I think this is about you. ”
“Wasn’t it always?” said Gawain, bewildered.
“You’re insufferable. I wish they’d cut your head off. Gawain, think about it— you were no one before this.”
Never forget Father. “I was King of the Orkneys and Lothian.”
“Were you? Were you really? Are you King of the Orkneys and Lothian?” She leaned close, brown eyes narrowed in something between cruelty and honesty. “From where I’m standing, Gawain, my husband is King of the Orkneys and Lothian. Unless… unless you start to make a name for yourself. Unless you start to earn that knighthood you held out on for so long. Unless people start to know who Sir Gawain is.”
He was silent. Watching her. Eyes gaping and almost wobbly, as though he would cry, although Gawain never cried. Could not remember the last time he had cried. Crying was for the weak, for those who did not merit their own existence, and he would never love anyone who cried. That was what he had told his brothers the last time he had seen tears on Agravaine’s cheeks. It was what Father had told their mother and what their mother had told them.
“So if I’m the wicked Morgan,” Guinevere continued, watching his reaction with a detached sort of interest, like an entomologist who has caught a yellowjacket and is curious whether it will try to sting, “who has no sway at court, not directly, then the best thing I could do for my nephew is give him a story. Don’t you think?”
“I’m going to let her down,” Gawain whispered, mesmerized. “I’m going to ruin this. I can’t be a story, I can’t keep charming them. No one likes me. No one has ever liked me except you. I betrayed Father’s memory so you wouldn’t be alone as that— that monster Merlin drained everything he wanted out of you. And now look at me. He’s been gone for a two years and I’m a— a fucking lapdog. A lackey. If Father were alive he would beat me to death and he would be right to do so.”
Then Guinevere said what she had always wanted to say, which was, “I’m glad your father’s dead, Gawain.”
He stilled. Then, with none of the violence for which she had prepared herself: “I know.” His hand flexed around the green girdle. “Me too.”
They sat in silence for a long moment, as the sun disappeared behind the high walls of the castle and the greens of the garden elongated and stretched into grey. Finally, in a far more controlled tone of voice, Gawain said, “Do you know, Merlin visited me once? Just once.”
“What? Really?”
“Yes. Before I met you. He quoted Latin at me. Cicero, and something else about a man I’d never heard of killing someone. I thought he was taunting me at the time. But do you know what the Cicero bit was?”
“How could I possibly know what the Cicero bit was?”
Gawain ignored her. “No deceit is so veiled as that hidden by courtesy.”
“I know that,” said Guinevere, Roman to her core. “But it’s missing a bit. Nullae sunt occultiores insidiae quam ea quae, latent in simultatione officii aut in aliquo necessitudinis nomine. No deceit is so veiled as that hidden by courtesy or else in the name of duty.”
“Duty?” said Gawain, a slow smile spreading across his face. He didn’t often smile. Guinevere thought it looked nice on his face, although it was a different expression than the one he would come to depend on. More edged. Too many teeth. “I’ve never thought it should be translated as duty. I prefer the name of love.” His head turned to face her like a snake. “Guinevere, do you love me?”
When Gawain was twenty he discovered that he could get away with murder. His cousin Yvain, who was always sharper in real life than he was in Gawain’s mind, shot him a thoughtful look when the body of King Pellinore was laid out on a bier, the court standing solemnly in attendance. It was a look Gawain couldn’t quite read: dark eyebrows drawn slightly together, mouth slightly pursed, head tilted down as though in the hopes he wouldn’t be noticed. Well, Gawain thought to himself, to cover the slight anxiety this look elicited in him, it wasn’t like anyone noticed Yvain anyway.
After the funeral, Gawain’s brothers— or at least those who had made it to court— found him in the courtyard. Agravaine looked awkward and out of place; his hands were clutched around his forearms as though he were cold, and his face was painted in the platonic ideal of disdain. Gaheris looked like Gaheris, which was to say, vaguely uninterested. Gawain offered them a sort of strangled half-smile, coupled with an implied furious invective: why are you talking to me? Why are you talking to me in public?
“Bastard got what was coming,” spat Agravaine, slightly too loudly, as though in answer to this unspoken question.
Gawain could feel the frantic grimace creeping over his face, but in his nervous state, control over his features seemed a far-flung possibility. “Rule Two!” he hissed.
“Rule Two,” Agravaine and Gaheris chorused with varying degrees of obedience.
At least Gawain would have no problems with Gaheris. The man’s face never shifted from an expression of bored placidity. He had been Gawain’s squire for some years; now, he was a knight of his own, although privately Gawain wasn’t sure why. He didn’t seem to do much. Gawain had enough self-awareness to realise that neither did he— he had about three quests to his name for as many years of knighthood— but at least he spent a large quantity of his copious free time training with his sword, as a knight should do, or riding his horse, tending to his horse, talking to his horse, or else wise in some respect engaged with horsely activities.
But Agravaine seemed to have inconvenience clamped between his teeth like a bit. “What’s Rule Three now, then?”
“What?”
“It used to be, uh, never disobey Father,” Agravaine extrapolated, as around him the post-funerary crowd stood in the cold and muttered to each other in little clumps. “Then it was about us getting revenge.”
“If you kill a man, kill his sons as well,” Gaheris corrected. Good old Gaheris. He was and always had been Gawain’s favourite brother. Not exactly an original thinker, but dependable and mild-mannered, never the problem-causer.
Now Agravaine shot him an irritated look and stamped his feet a bit to warm them. His breath was pluming out in the frozen air. “Yes, whatever. But we’ve gotten our revenge.”
“Don’t just say that—” hissed Gawain incredulously, but was interrupted by Gaheris’ philosophical musings.
“Rule Three is about more than just our specific goals. Rule Three is a firm piece of life advice. If you kill a man, kill his sons as well. Take care of loose ends. If you are to commit a murder, make sure no one is left to seek revenge.”
Agravaine frowned, and shot a look at the bier where lay the icy corpse of King Pellinore. “But wouldn’t that imply that we should—”
“Don’t worry about it,” chided Gawain, praying to anything out there, be it the stars or the gods or the Virgin Mary, that no one could overhear them. “No one knows. No one will ever know, Agravaine. Now shut up. ”
“Is that your new Rule Three?” said Agravaine scathingly, not shutting up. “Agravaine should shut up? Maybe I’m intelligent and you just don’t know it.”
“You’re older than me and you’re not even a knight yet, Aggs,” Gaheris pointed out in his reasonable way.
“Don’t call me Aggs. No one has called me Aggs since I was ten.”
“Look, Gawain told you to shut up. We don’t disobey Gawain. He’s looking out for us. And he’s a big knight now, or sort of. He’s got that green belt and everything, and people respect him.”
The amazing thing was that they did. Gawain was hardly the Round Table’s most brilliant knight, but he had been steadily making allies and, with Guinevere’s help, charming the wives of powerful men. Occasionally charming them very much indeed.
“Is that the new Rule Three?” Agravained asked, with a measure of earnestness. “Never disobey Gawain?”
“It is now,” snapped Gawain, tired of his attitude. “Now go stand somewhere not next to me and try to look respectful.”
When Gawain was twenty-one, he retrieved the magical bridle from the castle behind the moat of death.
When Gawain was twenty-two, he bested the Carle of Carlisle and stayed the night in his manor.
When Gawain was twenty-three, he journeyed to a haunted island and, with the help of a man from beyond the sea, bested its invaders.
When Gawain was twenty-four, a strange man came to court, and the world tilted on its axis. He watched horses be driven into the ground for the sake of a woman the mysterious knight did not even know. He watched from afar, drifting in the water, as blood dripped from hands down into the river below. He watched as the knight cried, and he thought: I should detest this. This is weakness. I am the greatest knight in the world, now, and this man with tears on his face is threatening my position. He is a pathetic coward, and I should discredit him or have him killed.
He did not.
What he should have done was remember the name Lancelot from so many years before, from the mouth of the enchanter Merlin.
He did not.
When Gawain was older than he had been, he found there was little to do in Camelot that he had not already done, few people to win over who had not already been beaten. He took the first quest that came his way and left Logres behind, journeying in a direction that had not existed until he took it. Isolation: it was a thing he treasured. Only then could he feel, just briefly, like a person. The open plains and the thick, empty forest did not know who Sir Gawain was. They did not care. So the man on the large roan horse took off Sir Gawain and hung him from the saddle bags, and when he came to a bridge and a guard who challenged him, he beheaded the man without any of the fanfare he would normally have employed.
He rode on. He left Sir Gawain and his horse by a river bank and entered the castle from which the guard had come. Several hours later, he exited the castle, locked the gate, and threw the key in the river. Sir Gawain, the shining star of chivalry, rested by the river and admired the birds. He had nothing to do with what happened in the castle, and besides, if the man on the horse happened to look a little like Sir Gawain, there was no one left alive to point this out.
By the time he put Sir Gawain on again like a fine suit of armour, he felt refreshed and far more like a person instead of a character. Solitude. It was a beautiful thing. If you couldn’t find it, you simply had to make it.
When Gawain was one age or another, he realised he had fallen in love. It wasn’t a sudden sort of thing, but a gradual dawning awareness that this ease, this desire to subsume himself in another person, was made of the same stuff that poetry was. It had started as a nagging thought, something he said to Lancelot in a curious tone of voice very late at night, when they had stopped to rest in the castle of the lord of somewhere-or-other, and after the rest of the household had gone to bed, Gawain had padded down the hallway with a clay bottle of wine in his hand. They couldn’t find cups, so they drank it out of the bottle, passing it back and forth and then, after they had mostly finished it, attempting to alternate who held the bottle and who drank.
When the bottle was empty, they sat contentedly on the windowsill and listened to the wind whistle past the shutters. Gawain, without thinking, said: “I feel alone with you, Lancelot.”
“Mm,” said Lancelot, in a pleased sort of way, as though he understood what this meant. And that was that.
He could not have said when they started being whatever it was they became. It happened as slowly as Gawain found the word to describe it. There had been, at some point, a time when they were friends. They were still friends. But people who were simply friends, Lancelot pointed out once, as they lay on the ground of some clearing far from anything, little flowers scattered around them, did not often have sex in the middle of a forest.
“Speak for yourself,” said Gawain. “Haven’t I introduced you to Ettarde? You’d love Ettarde. No, you wouldn’t, that’s a lie. You’d be ambivalent about Ettarde. Florie, though, she’s another one, and you’d like Florie. Oh, you remember Ysabele—?”
“Fine,” said Lancelot, “be that way.”
But they were rare moments of peace, stolen from the midst of war and travel and courtly intrigue. Sometimes Gawain thought about running away, which was nonsense. What was there to run from? There was nothing in the land of Logres or beyond it that he could not best.
Except Lancelot, but that hardly mattered.
Time passed, and it did not pass. Gawain was the greatest knight in the world, or Lancelot was. He was twenty-five, or perhaps thirty-five. He was the father of sons he did not know, and the lover of women he could not remember. His smile was worn as easily as his sword, and his brothers obeyed his every word. He was the most honest man in Logres, or his deceit was veiled and hidden by courtesy; he gave his name only when asked but he never lied.
Gawain was dead in the cemetery of the Devil. Lancelot was dead in the land of Rigomer. They killed men, and killed their sons too. Camelot stood, and stood, and would never fall.
Until it did.
While Lancelot slept, Gawain lay down beside him.
“I visited Arthur today,” he said conversationally. “I don’t think he really understood what I was saying.”
Lancelot made a noise in his sleep, non-committal, as though he were too drowsy to form words. He was a man who often communicated in vague sighs.
“Do you remember when Merlin controlled him?” Gawain continued, shifting so he could look Lancelot in the face. “Well, you wouldn’t. It was all Merlin, though. Everything was Merlin the whole time. Everything. Nothing was my fault, really. People think I control Arthur, but you know, everything I did was what Merlin set up. I mean, he might have warned me. I’m not so arrogant that I wouldn’t heed a warning. A warning might have changed everything. But no. The bastard was too obsessed with his plan for world domination, or eating our souls, or whatever it was he wanted.” He reached out, very gently, and ran a finger down Lancelot’s cheek. It was cold in the moonlight. As cold as marble. Lancelot was always cold.
When he didn’t wake, Gawain sighed and stood up. Cast around the clearing for anything interesting to do, anything that would distract him. Lancelot’s sword lay strewn with utter disrespect several feet away, and the sight of it made Gawain cock his head. He realised he had never before seen its blade clean of all blood. It glinted strangely, almost as if there were something on it. Gawain padded over the frozen ground of the clearing toward it, curious.
He read the words inscribed on the upward-facing side in Latin. “With this sword Sir Lancelot shall kill the man he loves most.” Something about the phrase sparked his memory. Hoc gladio… hoc gladio Lancelotus… a vision flashed before his eyes, of an old man who was even older than he looked, and a foolish child who had called himself Gawain without knowing what that meant. It was like a contract you signed: wealth, power, adoration, all for the low price of happiness. The worst part was that he could not say that, given a chance to do it all over again, he would have been any better or worse than he was.
He couldn’t turn the sword over, but he didn’t need to, as he knew what it said on the other side. Overhead, the stars peeked out from the icy sky. Gawain shivered, even though he could not feel the cold, and turned away. “Oh well,” he said, to no one in particular. “It’s nice to know he really loved me.”
Then he sat down on the carpet of dead leaves and waited for the Rapture.