The Book of Avalon Eternal

Gawain is lying in his bed. It is later in the evening after the day's events: the discovery of Mordred's body, his gruesome viewing of it, and the entirely unexpected and unwelcome return of Lancelot. After the initial shock of his presence had worn off, Galahad rushed through the crowd and locked his father in a tight embrace. Gawain could see Galahad sobbing, his head buried in his father's long, soft hair falling gently to his shoulders. And his father held him in return. In Lancelot's eyes, no tears were shed. He only held his son and stared into the sky.

Tristan, from behind Gawain, took several steps towards Lancelot, but Gawain gave him an incinerating glare. Galahad had reunited with his father: for anyone else, welcoming Lancelot was a direct affront to Gawain. Lancelot was the ultimate traitor, and he was a murderer, the murderer of (my brother) - Gawain immediately crushed the thought and banished it from his mind. Holding tight to Nimue, he walked slowly past Lancelot, ignoring him, although Lancelot stared at him with the pomposity of the old to the young, and Nimue led him back upstairs through the halls of the palace to his bedchamber.

Now Nimue sits beside him on the bed as he reclines on pillows, broken leg elevated. She also had produced from under her shift a small vial that she described as a potion that relieves pain. She instructed him to open his mouth, and holding his chin she used her finger to administer three tiny drops to the end of his tongue. He swallowed and within several moments felt the warming glow of it.

'There are three things we need to talk about,' Nimue says. He stares back blankly, feeling pain recede.

'First, I have one hundred and eleven prisoners in the dungeon and nine of every ten will be executed.' Gawain starts to protest, but Nimue stops him with raised finger and foreboding look.

'Second,' she continues, 'is the matter of what to do with Mordred's body. It lays in the temple of Asyatai, as you commanded. But it cannot stay there long, and it is fouling the temple, and I will not abide the offending of a Fay, if for no other reason than it will disrupt our plans. And third is the return of Lancel -'

'Do not speak his name in my presence,' Gawain cuts her off, his words slurring only a little. Nimue nods and looks down at the stone floor where her bare feet rest.

'I would hear your ideas for each of the matters at hand. And we will have to deal with Lancelot' - she pronounces the name softly but sharply - 'whether you want him to be here or not.'

Sighing, he began: 'I will share with you my ideas, but I suspect that you have made up your mind.'

'Nevertheless, I would hear them.'

'We cannot execute nine of every ten prisoners. It would be just to follow the Roman practice and execute one of every ten, but nine...that is barbaric.'

'And would it be just to follow the Roman practice? When did the Romans treat our people with justice? They are no measure of justice. Is it just that those prisoners below bonded themselves to Mordred who is now not only a usurper, but a patricide? They deserve to be killed to a man - that would be just. I spare of eleven - that is not justice. That is my mercy.'

'Need I state the obvious: that the less we kill, the more we can send to work the estates, and ensure the food supply of Camlann remains abundant.'

'We can buy slaves. Or better, we can take them as spoils. These traitors of Mordred's army, I would not have them wash the shit from my chamber pot. They deserve death, not a life of estate work. I will not be constantly on guard against further treason from them.'

Gawain shakes his head in resignation. 'Let us move on. Mordred. We should give him a funeral pyre and burn his body.'

'Absolutely not. And have his scent drift upwards to the gods? I will do all in my power to ensure the gods never find his soul.'

'Nimue, he was my brother.'

'He was your half-brother, and he was born because of the weakness of Anna.'

'I am begging you to stop your harshness towards her,' Gawain says tiredly.

'Because I value what you want, and because I want to give you what you want to the extent that it is wise and prudent, I will agree to a funeral pyre for Mordred. But it must be outside of the walls of Camlann, and as soon as his body is burnt, the pyre must be doused in water so that as little as possible of his scent is noticed by the gods.'

Knowing that this deal is the best he will get, Gawain nods in acquiescence. 'Let us do it tomorrow at sunset.'

'As for Lancelot,' Nimue begins.

'As for Lancelot, he shall be immediately expelled from Camlann. He must be gone by morning under pain of death.'

Nimue's eyes narrow. 'Gawain, he is already gone.' This revelation shocks him.

'Where has he gone?'

'He and Galahad left late this afternoon for his estate. Galahad said that Lancelot his father will be kept there as an honored guest for as long as he wishes.'

'Galahad has now turned traitor too?' Gawain seethes.

Nimue touches his arm: 'Galahad is not a traitor,' she says gently. 'He is a loyal son.'

'He betrays me.'

'He betrays you so he can be loyal to his father: which is the greater duty?'

At that Gawain is silent.

Nimue continues: 'Openly challenging Galahad - and his men - is not an option at present. Let Lancelot settle in with Galahad. Let them enjoy their feasting. Let Galahad pray blessings and piety over his father to the Christian god, as Lancelot becomes drunk with wine and grabs at every housemaid and female slave on Galahad's estate. We will turn our attention to them soon enough, and we will let them make the noose that hangs them.'

Gawain weighs all of this in his mind, and eventually nods. His eyes start to glaze, and he feels suddenly very tired.

'I am going to direct the preparations for the funeral pyre. I recommend you sleep. You are sick and injured, and sleep is the best medicine.' She pauses at the door. 'I shall sleep in your chamber tonight. You still need someone to attend you, and Meurig has worked very hard. Tonight, I relieve him.'

Gawain nods at her, and she leaves the room and shuts the door behind her, silent as a ghost.

The night and following day pass quietly. In the evening and at dawn, Nimue washed his face and combed his hair and beard. Gawain got up from his bed several times to walk, held up and supported by her. She applied a balm to his superficial wounds and worked a mending spell over his broken leg. She told him that mending spells must be used sparingly: a bone mended too fast will be fragile and almost certainly will break again. But a bone mended slowly and complementing the body's natural healing process will be much stronger than the bone was before the break.

In the afternoon, he was visited by Sagramor and his brother Gareth. They brought him food, and a large jug of wine which they all shared. Nimue as always refused: never once had alcohol passed her lips. She always says it is absurd to drink a liquid that dulls the mind and deprives you of your power.

Now Gawain sits in his chair, watching as the sun goes down. He can see the long golden-orange streaks of light that paint the canopy of the forest, and the sky turns pink and then a deep royal purple. When the sun is gone, night falls over Camlann, while the torches along the ramparts light up one by one, casting their illumination over the ground below, and making the fortress and palace from a distance look like a burning ember in the last fading campfire at the end of the world.

Nimue arrives and pulls him to her, and they begin their progression down the hall. She has made and brought him a crutch, which he uses to support his broken leg. As he gets a feel for the crutch, she moves further away from him, but close enough to steady him should he stumble, and around his right forearm she laces her arm and holds him closer to her.

They arrive in the courtyard, and Gawain finds that a bier has been made, and Mordred has been laid upon it. Four squires carry the bier: none of the knights of the Round Table accepted the task, both for their own honor and to avoid Gawain's reprisal. The crowd of people - knights and squires, and the craftspeople, servants, and slaves who work in the palace; and more villagers than Gawain expected from the surrounding hamlets and villages that are locked in Camlann's orbit.

He and Nimue lead the crowd out through the front gates of the fortress, which have been left open after sunset for this evening's ceremony. The pyre is built: it stands ten feet high, with kindling stuffed underneath and jars of pitch diluted with fire-oil, procured from the druids' manor some three miles from Camlann to the north, soaking it so that the pyre reeks of the pungent odors of the two substances combined. As Gawain approaches the pyre, he turns to the right, and he and Nimue take their place in the front row. His brothers Gareth and Agravain stand to his left, the three brothers of Mordred bearing witness to his immolation.

And yet, a fourth brother of Mordred should be here, a brother that Gawain has done his best to excise from his memory as one would cut out a tooth that tortuously aches until it is removed. He only does this because the pain of repressing the memory of his lost brother is less painful than remembering him. Even in his memories of childhood, he tries to removes him, and yet he is there as an emptiness; someone missing who should be there and was there, but it is agony for Gawain to imagine him there in truth, as he was, running and laughing and wrestling with him. His death is made so much worse because it was a murder, and a murder committed so carelessly during an act of great betrayal that itself prevented justice for a greater betrayal from being carried out.

Mordred is carried to the top of the bier by the squires even as the lower kindling begins to alight with small flames that flicker and pierce the night. The smell of the smoke conjures a memory before he can catch it, before he can grip this one and force it back down and crush its head with his heel as one would a serpent. It is the memory of the day that was decreed by Arthur to never be spoken of again, and to be removed from any records written or passed down by memory as the druids do. For when the great and layered sins of Guinevere and Lancelot were laid bare, the Round Table was shattered into pieces by Excalibur wielded in Arthur's hand, the remnant cracks of which still can be seen despite the most potent spells of reparation woven by Morgan and Nimue in tandem.

He frantically tries to stop the memory, but it gains momentum and expands further in his mind. The dark morning at dawn, the most portentous time of day or night to perform an execution as has long been known by the druids and by the wizard priests of the deep forest who keep their own counsel along with that of stags and great oaks whose wisdom is tapped deep into the well that brings the silver thread to this world. He feels again the sickening dread that caused his hands to tremble as Guinevere was bound so tightly to the stake, and how she raised her head in defiance looking more than ever that morning as though she were cut from marble by the finest sculptor of Rome. He turned his head as the first flames licked her unshod feet.

But a sudden commotion, an unrecognizable sound, brought his attention immediately back to the stake where Guinevere was bound: an arrow so large, fired from what he later learned was a bow larger than any he had ever seen before, purchased from a Roman craftsman traveling in Gaul, and planted in the ground on the hillside above the execution site. The arrow had been shot with such precision by a Frankish archer, paid a small fortune by Lancelot, that it broke the stake in two, and Guinevere leapt from the mound around which the kindling and wood already burned her feet lightly singed as she. beat out the tiny flames that sought purchase around hem of her dress. The ropes that bound her shoulders and legs now trailed from her back, but her hands remained bound, and for several moments that seemed endless and somehow otherworldly, she stood in the middle of the crowd who had come that dawn to see her die. She stared at them speechlessly while they returned her gaze with blank and uncomprehending faces.

And now the worst part of the memory that Gawain cannot stop and that must be carried through to the end: Lancelot charging down the hill on his great black steed, shining greatsword swinging in his right hand as though it was weightless. His charge was blocked by many knights on horseback who tried to intercept them, but he knocked them aside as though they were children. Or perhaps, more accurately, as a god would to men. The final approach was blocked by the knights who were on foot, and who formed a suicidal line to stop Lancelot's inexorable run, but Lancelot kicked his steed who ran even faster. And Lancelot's steed and his swinging greatsword cut through his onetime comrades in a final betrayal to add to his many other sins.

Lancelot strained against the boundaries of all his terrible and matchless skill and seized Guinevere's arm, which he then lifted and released, and for a moment Gawain saw Guinevere suspended in air as though she was floating upward to heaven, until Lancelot's arm wrapped her waist and pulled her to the saddle behind him.

Gawain did not see them disappearing into the blinding light of sunrise, for he looked to the ground where the knights were gathering themselves up, and he saw that one knight did not move. His heart filled with a searing dread, and he looked upon the face of Gaheris his most beloved brother, the brother for whom he prayed so fervently with his mother when Gaheris was so young and small, sick and close to death; clutching his mother's hand, while her tears ran freely and her prayers were lifted to every god she knew, while he fearfully joined her prayers by imitating her. And despite those prayers he shared with his mother, he found Gaheris bleeding out from a mortal wound inflicted by Lancelot.

Gawain is brought back to the present by the sound of laughter. He looks around, feeling that something is very wrong. He looks to the bier and the pyre and sees that the flames have now gathered strength and rise high into the evening sky. But the terrible image troubles his sight: Mordred's body has not been placed prone in the traditional position of reverence. He has been sat upright on a wooden chair, secured by a stake that impales his corpse from the bottom upwards until it emerges from his mouth, causing his head to turn up in a gruesome way that is causing some in the crowd to laugh. The most dishonorable death that could be done, the Throne of Fire, and done to him after death leading to the greatest desecration that would offend the sight of the gods and ensure his soul would be ignored by them for all of eternity, no matter how much he screams and shrieks for their attention.

Gawain cannot feel anger because his mind is erased with incandescent rage by the utter shock of what he sees. He looks down at Nimue who still stands by his side, arm entwined with his, and the fire illuminates her face while the reflection of the flames dances in her soft brown eyes.