No Such Place - Part 4
.
What time is it?
LANCE AND FRANCE TIME.
…yeah, I know.
Title: No Such Place - Part 4
Author: Mithrigil
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia
Characters: England, Roma Antiqua, Germania, Wales, France; King Arthur and associated personages.
Words: Still too many.
Rating: R.
Timeline: the 5th and 6th centuries A.D.
Summary: Not the King Arthur story you think it is. Part 1 is here, part 2 is here, and part 3 is here.
Sometime after 500 A.D….
Today, Cymry brings King Arthyr his bride.
She’s Cymry’s no matter what Albion says (and Albion’s said a lot about it but no one listens), because that is what Wart wants, never mind what Albion wants. Albion wants Wart for himself, even if he has to get married, so Wart should marry one of Albion’s people. But he wants a bride from Cymry and he won’t say why where anyone else can hear and since Wart is king now everyone else can hear.
Wart and the armies retook all of Mercia but Londinuim’s too far south, too close to Dubris and the channel, and there are still Saxons marching on Watling’s road. So they’ve set the keep in Camulodunum, where the Roman walls still stand, and if Albion thinks that’s no better, well, no one listens. It’s a filthy town with, with Rome’s footprints everywhere and Rome’s coins scattered on the ground. It’s the first one he put his soldiers in to stay. No one listens when Albion says that either. They only care that the walls are strong, never mind who built them.
And never mind that Wart’s precious bride has to cross all of the island, and even if Cymry’s bearing her she’s not a Nation, she can’t cross it to Wart like Albion did.
Albion wonders if Wart knows that too. Or if he believes it anymore.
Because nobody sees Albion here. When Wart’s not with the army or in the room with his generals (where Albion sneaks, sometimes, or thinks he has to sneak even though Wart does say that’s all right, after), he has a long room in the keep where he listens to people who come to speak to him, because he’s King and he’s held off the Saxons for ten more winters than his father.
Albion used to hide behind the biggest chair. He doesn’t have to. They’re all looking at Wart anyway.
-
“I’ve set up a room for you that faces the sea,” Wart says, when Albion is squiring him into his best clothes. “Like at Cornwall. You liked that, right?”
Albion’s fingers slip on the laces of the left greave, and he opens his mouth to ask why, but Wart gets there first.
“It’s close to here,” he says, “Two doors down. Northerly.” He stretches his leg, so Albion can tie it tighter. “With a standard on the wall. The one from this room. Didn’t you notice it was missing?”
“No,” Albion says.
Wart grimaces, and not at the lacing. “Oh. Sorry. But I did, it’s there. And a bed all your own-”
“Why?”
Wart’s calf shivers, and Albion doesn’t touch it. “What do you mean, why?”
“Why do I need a room of my own?”
Wart’s breath hangs on the air, and then lets out all at once; he turns, and kneels on the shin that’s not covered with a greave yet. Like this, he’d have to look up at Albion if Albion was standing, but he’s not, he’s kneeling too, so it’s just a different kind of looking down.
“I mean,” Albion starts, and his breath’s not coming in or out right either, “I mean I know what you’re going to do when you marry her, and you should probably do it in a bed, but I just won’t sleep here tonight if you need to be alone with her. I’ll just sleep outside or something, or in the kitchens, or with the guards, or-and, and then after that-after that can I come back?”
This close, Albion can hear the sound Wart’s lips make when they part, and the sound his eyes make when they close. Albion puts his hands on Wart’s cheeks-his beard is much thicker now, and since he’s all clean for the wedding it’s almost the same dense golden colour as his hair, and his hair is long enough now that the curling parts tangle with the beard parts when Albion tangles his fingers through them. He keeps Wart’s face tilted toward him, even if Wart isn’t looking right now. Wart should look, Albion wants him to look, Albion just wants him-
He pushes his palms in so that Wart’s lips gather into a kissing shape, and leans up before he loses his nerve.
The way Wart kisses has changed, Albion thinks-that’s okay, so has Albion’s way. It’s slower, sadder, more urgent, less about how it feels than what it’s trying to say. And Albion is trying to say you said you couldn’t betray me, you haven’t but you will this way, with the tautness of his lips and the pressure of his tongue, because he can’t say it aloud. He anchors his hands in Wart’s beard and lifts up on his knees as high as he can, he can be taller this way-he can show Wart that too, he can be grown-up enough to kiss again. He says all these things with his body, or tries to at least, but Wart knows how to listen even if he sometimes doesn’t hear, Wart knows what all of this means, Wart knows his Britannia, his Albion-
-and he probably knows what jealousy tastes like too.
That explains why Wart’s kissing differently. It’s because he’s not kissing back.
So Albion pulls away, but doesn’t let go, and doesn’t let himself cry either. He wants to. He wants a lot of things.
He can’t have any of them.
“Are you sure that’s what you want?” Wart asks him. His eyes are still closed, and his cheeks dip and swell when he says this, shifting under Albion’s palms. “If you’re sure, I can, but-but Britannia, I don’t think you do, or I’m afraid that you don’t, or-”
“You can’t tell me what I don’t want,” Albion shouts, even though they’re this close. “I don’t care if you’re king now, you can’t tell me what I don’t want!”
“Britannia-”
“I don’t want her!” He yanks on Wart’s beard, hard. “I don’t even know her and I don’t want her! You don’t need a queen. Emrys didn’t have a queen. So you don’t need a queen! And-and I can be with you. So there. That’s enough, isn’t it? That’s always been enough.”
“No it hasn’t,” Wart says.
It echoes.
“I do want you. And I want to protect you, and help you, and make you happy. That’s why I’m getting married.”
“But she’s not a Briton!”
“But if I married a Briton, all the others would be unhappy-”
“So you’d rather make them all unhappy?” It’s harder and harder to hold the tears back now, but Albion’s so angry and that’s an excuse, they’re not weak tears, they’re hot tears and that’s better than being hurt. “They’re not going to want her any more than I do!”
“Britannia, I can’t take a queen from your people.”
“Why not!” His lips are chapped and the salt is stinging them. “If it can’t be me, the at least-”
“She-” Wart gulps. Albion can feel it in his fingertips. “She could be like Anna-Morgause,” he says softly, as if he doesn’t want even the fae to hear. “I…I have to wed someone whose mother my father could never have touched.”
Albion’s not sure whether he’s the one to start shaking first. Either way, the tremour passes through Albion’s hands and up his arms, against Wart’s jaw so that his teeth chatter. His eyes are open now, slick and glassy, and when they find Albion’s he doesn’t feel so bad about crying anymore.
Wart murmurs, “Britannia,” and lowers his head, but Albion doesn’t kiss him now. He cranes his neck so that Wart’s brow rests against Albion’s shoulder, his arms rounding Albion’s back and pulling him close. “It’s not to hurt you.”
“But it does,” Albion says, because what he’s thinking-Rome said the same-is even worse to lend voice.
Cymry rides his dragon here. In the twilight when they arrive, Y Ddraig Goch’s scales are as red as the sun, with underskin of gold like the wheat its rays fall upon. He wheels around the city twice before settling with a great steaming hulk just outside the walls, and even this far off Albion can see the great white gash in his belly, glistening with cold blue veins like marble.
Once they’ve landed, Albion scuttles through the gates to meet them. The wedding party and army is a ways behind, he sees, up the road like an enemy. The dragon sees him first, and turns his head to regard him. There is blue in his eyes now, in the black slit.
“Have you seen what you need to?” Cymry asks as he dismounts from the dragon’s neck, barely marking Albion at all. He is well-accoutered in red and green, which make his eyes stand brighter and his pale hair gleam like a halo. He looks older, though that could be more how he is dressed than any other truth.
Albion ignores him too, and talks to the dragon instead. “Hallo.”
“Hail, little Nation,” Y Ddraig Goch says. His lips are also chapped.
“You are better?”
“I am victorious.” But the dragon lays down on the earth, likely tired from the flight.
Albion steps tentatively nearer, to show he is not afraid. “May I touch the wound?”
“Which?”
“The one my friend is in.”
Of course the dragon knows his meaning; he stretches, so that his hind-claws coil, both off the ground as he turns up his belly. The white gash is larger than Albion, perhaps even longer than two of him, and yet it takes up no space on the dragon’s golden belly at all. Albion feels as if he must walk the length of the castle itself to see it.
When he is near enough to touch, the scar, even healed, is wider than Albion’s palm, and probably deeper. He touches his hand to the veined white flesh, gently. The dragon’s heartbeat is slow, and distant, where its own blood does not flow. In fact, the skin there is cold to the touch, even if the rest of the dragon is steaming, wilting the wheat.
“That beast can’t hear you,” Cymry says, behind him, changing out one pair of gloves for another. “He’s dead.”
“But he’s part of you now,” Albion snaps back. “You used Grigory’s horn to make Y Ddraig Goch better. So their blood is shared. They’re brothers too now.”
Cymry grabs Albion by the wrist and pulls him away. “It doesn’t work that way.”
“It does for the fae,” Albion says, wrenching his arm out of Cymry’s grip. He goes to the dragon again defiantly and puts his hand on the scar once more. “He’ll be mine someday too.”
“Or you’ll be his, when he eats you.”
“He won’t eat me,” Albion says, honestly, and rubs the dragon’s belly where the scar is thinnest, to prove it. “He’ll let me ride him like Grigory did, and I’ll see the whole world from his back.”
Cymry doesn’t laugh at him-he never laughs, not like Caledonii does. But he scoffs, and he sighs, and he says, “Keep dreaming,” as if that’s a bad thing to do.
Of course they’re going to make a big show of the wedding. The bride came such a long way, after all. Now that night has fallen, the people have pitched torches and canopies to cover the food. It is not to be a Christian ceremony, and Albion’s thankful for that, at least. The ground is strewn with flowers wherever someone isn’t standing, but they’re too mixed and too wild to have actually grown in this field, and they smell something awful. Even the fae agree.
Thousands have gathered to see her, and she brought another thousand with her in force (and a hundred of them on horses!), so it’s quite a crowd. Albion stays by Wart, follows at the tails of his fur-lined cape. He talks about important things with important people before the procession begins. Albion can smell his sweat only because he knows the scent exactly.
The musicians are the ones to stop all the chatter, and soon the drums and flutes and Roman harps are louder than the voices all around. The minstrels dance as they play, trailing long sprigs and ferns, wearing bones and bells, and they clear a somewhat winding path through the revelers. When they find Wart, they circle him and isolate him from the rest-except Albion, stubbornly clutching the hem of his cape even when the flutes whistle in his ear or the drum startles behind his head. (The fae are imitating all this, and those who can fly are whirling around the musicians, creating circles within circles, spirals within spirals, and when Albion watches this he gets so dizzy that he buries his face in Wart’s cape and tries to cover his ears too. It only helps a little, which is worse than not helping at all.) He misses when the bride arrives, but soon the whispers and cheers are too loud to ignore, even over the music. So he looks up, and peers around Wart’s side, past the chaos of the minstrels.
The girl that Cymry is leading is no older than Albion looks.
He wants to scream. He very nearly does. But the music is that much louder. She’s a girl, she’s barely a dozen summers old and Wart is almost three times that, and why can she be a child and wed him?
Cymry sidesteps the musicians and brings the girl into the circle. She’s in a red dress that fits her well except for how long it is, which is long enough to trail behind her through the grass and flowers and hide her feet. Her hair is long too, and black, and too thick and heavy to curl, so what happens is that the parts of it that aren’t braided look like a rock-face in the dark, with all the gold she’s wearing in it standing out and waiting to be mined. She’s pretty, Albion decides, the same way Anna-Morgause was pretty when she was small, but with better and clearer eyes. The girl’s are blue like Gallia’s.
She bows, and hides even more of herself in her skirts and the flowers. “I am Gwenwhyfar,” she says, and Albion wonders why she’s all in red if her name says she’s white. Maybe it’s because she’s so pale. “If I please you, let us be wed.”
“You do please me,” Wart says, “and even if you didn’t, I don’t see why not.” He smiles at her, and takes her with a knuckle under the chin-Albion can tell that he is shaking because all the fur in the cape is shifting, tracing patterns in itself-and bends almost double to kiss her.
Albion makes himself watch. He’s not sure whether Wart is kissing her like he kisses Albion (he’s not sure whether he wants to be sure) but it’s not a brief kiss, and she’s smiling on the other side of it or at least Wart can see her teeth-
“Runt. Let go of him and take my hand.”
Albion very nearly hisses at Cymry, “Never.”
“Fine,” Cymry says, and then crosses near and seizes Albion’s wrist. He won’t let go of Wart’s cape, and he leans even closer so that he can feel the scabbard of Wart’s sword-Germania’s sword-under the cloth, but if Cymry has to hold his hand somehow then fine, ceremony is ceremony.
The kiss stops, and the musicians pick up a slower tune as the druids come to sanctify things before the revels. They cover Wart and Gwenhwyfar in more flowers, and make them join hands, make them embrace. Gwenhwyfar’s face is on level with Wart’s ribs, only a little higher than Albion’s. He feels Cymry’s hand tighten on his wrist but he won’t let off the cloth, no matter how slick the fur is getting from his tears.
-
It is a nice room all his own. Wart did try. The window faces the sea, and Albion’s drawn the curtains back even if it’s cold and raining and the mist makes the hearth flicker. He stares at the unicorn on the standard and wonders if it can’t see him anymore either, but doesn’t bother asking.
The bed is very big, and very empty. Albion tries to bash himself a dent in the straw all the way to the floor, so that the straw bunches up and becomes Wart-shaped beside him. It’s not working very well. All he’s succeeded in doing is tearing the mattress and getting straw in his hair, and getting itchy all over. He thinks it might serve him right for being so selfish but he doesn’t stop, and then when the straw starts getting wet because of the open curtains it stinks. And that’s too much punishment for even him.
So he sits by the window and scratches the cuts from the straw, which isn’t Wart-shaped at all, and he wonders if the sky is crying or sweating. Has Wart done what Albion said he should? Does he listen to the land now? “Of course not,” Albion mutters to himself, that’s what this is, and he wraps himself in the blanket and uses that to scratch the itches instead.
It’s pretty on the water, though. The waves are big enough to see and loud enough to hear. This is the sea that the faeries say there are other Nations on the far side of, ones who can see them too. Albion hasn’t met them yet. He doesn’t think he ever shall. The only people who want Albion now want him dead or theirs or worse, and Nations don’t survive like that.
He hates this keep, and he hates this city, and he hates Caledonii and Cymry and Eire wherever she is for not helping at all. He hates that everything smells like Rome and whatever doesn’t smells like Saxony, and even if he doesn’t hate Saxony and Rome themselves he hates them for fighting and getting him tangled in it. And he hates most that he wants to be left alone when it’s not what he really wants at all. He hates everything, the rain and the clouds and the little ship on the sea and the straw and Gwenhwyfar and everything-
-a ship?
A ship. Coming nearer to the coast, with a lantern on the hull growing brighter.
Albion scrambles off the ledge and into the room, slips on the straw-he rushes out the door and down the hall to Wart’s room and bangs on the door, shouting for him. “Wart! Wart, there’s a ship and it has no standard and it’s coming here-Wart, Wart, open up-” No one’s answering-is it like with Anna-Morgause? Is Wart sick or drunk or under a spell? Either way, Albion yells one more time, and then just opens the door and runs in.
It’s a good thing he’s already screaming, because otherwise seeing a naked little girl on his side of the bed would make him. But she’s there, curled up and concerned but not covered in the blankets, and Wart’s sitting on the edge of the mattress beside her, as if he’s just now gotten up. “Britannia, I heard you. Is it a dream?”
“No, it’s real, there’s really a ship! And it doesn’t have a standard and I know it’s not ours, and-”
“All right, all right-shh. Calm down.” Wart smiles, and slides off the bed to get his boots and clothes and weapons. “You wouldn’t be this scared if I’d have been with you, so it’s okay to not be scared now. We’ll get a detachment together and see who it is. Right?”
And since Albion has been shouting, the next words come out just the same. “Don’t make fun of me!”
Wart, for his part, looks confused, but it isn’t enough. “Who’s making fun of you?”
“You are! You’re-” Albion covers his mouth so he doesn’t choke or cry, but the words slip out through his fingers. “You’re making me less.”
The boots hit the floor, and Wart steps into them. Albion can hear every crinkle of the leather, every slap they make against his shins. He comes nearer, and Albion glares up at him defiantly, hand still clasped on his mouth.
“You are,” he murmurs.
Wart picks him up like a sack of grain and carries him out of the room.
He only makes it a few steps into the hall when Albion starts punching him in the back. Sometimes he hits the scabbard instead, and it hurts but he doesn’t stop until Wart puts him down. “Britannia-”
“You promised to believe me!” He’s not shouting as much now, but it’s still loud and sad and broken and pathetic and he hates that too. “Even if it’s just a dream-and it’s not-it’s never just. Not with me. You know that.”
This time, when Wart picks him up, it’s tenderer, chest-to-chest, and although it makes Albion feel even younger than he sounds, it’s closeness, and that’s-that’s better. “Let’s get you a cloak, all right? It’s cold. You’re coming with me to meet the ship.”
He snuffles his face into Wart’s shoulder, until Wart puts him down again.
Someone is shielding the ship’s lantern from the rain. Its little, long-fingered hands make shadows like the clouds do to the moon. The rings around the nails glow red, as the skin is thinner there, and Albion sees every speck of grime between them, as black as the bones beneath. He can’t see more than that hand at all, but beneath him is a heap of bandages, an unfurled sail, a stench of death.
The Britons gather on the shore-Albion can’t hold Wart’s hand here, but he can stand very close, and he does, clutching at his cloak instead. Cymry’s people on the roads, Saxony in the south, Caledonii and Lot in the north-and all within-is there to be no haven, not even the sea?
“Salve!” Gallia says.
He lopes himself over the side of the boat-it really wasn’t big enough to be called a ship, and there are only two people in it even if one of them is a Nation-and runs right to Albion, splashing in the tide. His smile gets even brighter this close, and his eyes and his hair, and Albion pulls the cloak tighter around himself instinctively. This is the closest they’ve ever stood and now Albion can see that Gallia’s almost a head taller, even if his face and voice are about the same age as Albion’s, and his eyes are so clearly a Nation’s. “You’re Britannia, aren’t you? I was right! Do you want to play? Maman didn’t come with me but she said it’s all right if we play together even if Papa is trying to kill you.”
Albion shrinks away-he can’t help it-and looks to Wart, but Wart is looking at the other person coming out of the boat. It’s a young man, a human, with black hair and-well, most of his face is covered in bandages, even his eyes.
“Oh, him?” Gallia asks, trying to swivel so that his head is in Albion’s line of sight. “That’s Launcelot. He’s my friend. He didn’t want to be with the army anymore so we came here together. I think Papa will kill him too if he goes back. He already tried, look!” Gallia tries to grab Albion by the hand but only gets the cloak, though that’s still enough for him to drag Albion over by. He lets go of Albion as if he never held him at all and puts his hands on the young man’s face instead, rubbing the bandages. Under one of his hands, blisters burst and soak the cloth yellow. The young man cries out in pain, shaking. Gallia smiles hopefully.
“Hold there,” Wart says-in Brythonic, not Latin, because this is a test. He comes nearer with some of the torch-bearers and soldiers. “You’re from the Saxon army?”
Gallia looks up at Wart, and holds the young man’s face even tighter. “Surely you don’t want to hurt me!” he says in Latin. “Besides, you can’t. And he is wounded. He just wants to fight for you. And I just want to play with Britannia-”
“Please,” the young man groans from beneath the cloth on his face. “Please, kill me or keep me, but do not send me back to Saxony.” The way the wrapping shifts as he speaks gives Albion chills, and he wedges himself against Wart’s side, tries to use Wart’s cloak too.
Wart lays his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Tell me who you are.”
“My name is Galahad,” he says, with phlegm through his voice, “but I am called Lende or Launcelot.”
It’s his true Name, Albion thinks, and knows he has power now. Galahad.
“A good thing, since I can’t pronounce that last one, Lende. Come. We will mend you. Who hurt you? What rank did you hold?” He hoists Lende up out of the boat, and another soldier comes forward to support Lende’s other side. Lende flinches from the touch, but probably knows it’s as much a check as anything else, and since he can’t see through all the bandages it’s for the best.
Gallia laughs-it sounds like flutes pretending to be drums-and puts his arm around Albion just the same way, his fingertips brushing past the cowl and sliding on Albion’s throat. “Come on, let’s go too! Support me, Britannia!” But when they follow Wart and Lende and the soldiers it’s more like he’s dragging Albion along, and Albion does want to sink into the sand and bury himself in it so Gallia can never touch him again.
As few as ten steps more, and Lende pitches forward into the sand, coughing violently. Red and gold stain the bandages from the inside, and Wart’s calling to the soldiers to carry the young man, get him laid out and treated, and all Albion can think is that Wart doesn’t know who his enemy is.
They strip Lende of everything, in the keep’s hall, his weapons first. Among them is a sword as heavy as Germania’s, but because it is thicker, not longer. It is wrapped in hide the way Lende’s face is wrapped in cloth. Once it’s set down against the corner, Gallia abandons Albion and goes to unwind it, stroking his fingers on the gaps in the hide, rubbing them on the edge.
Wart asks him again, “Who were you, to Saxony?”
“No more than cavalry,” Lende says, “my father sent me from Benoic.” He adds, with a rattling sigh, “A bastard,” and peels the sodden cloth from his face.
Or, rather, from what remains of it.
Albion doesn’t shrink away-he’s seen worse and more recent. But because he doesn’t flinch he can see all of it, the curve of every bubbling blister, the ones that the press of Gallia’s hand ruptured. The burns are in crude crossed streaks, plainly not a single accident, nor self-inflicted, and they cover all from the missing peak in his hairline to the curve of his neck. About a quarter of his face is still whole around his right eye, enough to guess his age by if his body won’t tell. There had been hair on his cheeks before the burns crossed them, but not enough to cling.
Just because Albion doesn’t look away doesn’t speak for the others. In fact, the only ones who seem not to shy from it are he, Wart, and Gallia.
Wart gulps and tries to ignore it. “Where’s Benoic?”
“Leon,” he says. His mouth moves very little, perhaps for fear of agitating the blisters.
“Well, that explains why you can speak our language.”
“And why Saxony does not want me, sir.”
“That’s-recent, isn’t it.” Wart reaches out to indicate, but not quite touch, the burns.
Lende might be smiling. “That’s the reason I left.”
Gallia, with the hide from Lende’s sword gathered in his arms and coddled like a toy, pads over to sit against Lende’s leg and pouts up at Wart. “Papa didn’t trust Launcelot,” he says, earnest and sparkling, in Latin again. “He loves me too much. Launcelot, I mean.”
“I served my people the best I could,” Lende whispers, putting his hand affectionately through Gallia’s hair. “And I do want to be a good soldier. The best, if I can. But I can’t do that unless I serve a lord I believe in, and that lord is not in Saxony.”
Albion feels distinctly ill, and Lende’s face is not to blame for it. He asks, “Are you a Christian?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think that lord is in Britannia either.”
This marks the first time that Albion has seen Gallia frown. It makes him much less beautiful, but oh, does it make Albion feel triumphant.
“Of course he is,” Wart says, dismissively, and all the vindictive good Albion just felt in his bones is stripped away. “When you’ve recovered, do you think you could lend yourself in defense of this Nation and his people?”
Albion hopes, against hope, that Lende will say no, and let them burn the rest of his body and send smiling, perfect Gallia away for good-
“Sire?”
In front of the Nations-and behind the men-Gwenhwyfar’s standing with a torch and a cloak, still breathing heavily (she must have run down the hall) and red in the cheeks. Wart turns to regard her with a smile and an explanation; Lende just turns to regard her at all, and it’s Lende she’s looking at.
She drops the torch and screams.
Some of the straw on the floor catches fire. Since Wart’s run after his wife to calm her down, that leaves Lende and the Nations to put it out with their cloaks. Albion grabs the hide out of Gallia’s hands-why is he just standing there?-and throws it over the straw to stamp on it. “Come on, you sod, help out-”
“Why is she scared?”
-Albion trips and almost falls in top of the fire. Gallia somehow sounds even more beautiful when he’s about to cry.
He puts a hand on Albion’s shoulder. It’s trembling. “Britannia, why is she scared?”
Albion swats it off. “Because Lende’s ugly,” he says, digging his foot in to the hide and scraping it on the floor. Lende’s doing the same thing on the other side of the cloaks and now that it’s dark again Albion can only see Lende’s eyes. They’re gold, like the straw and Wart’s hair, eyes aren’t supposed to be like that.
“No-no, he’s not!” Gallia shouts, and kicks Albion in the seat.
Albion falls forward, right into Lende’s front-Lende catches him, but Gallia’s jumped on him now, pounced on his back and grabbed onto his hair, and since Lende’s still holding onto him and wondering what to do with him Albion can’t throw them off-
“He’s not!” Gallia’s holding so-so tightly- “He’s not, he’s the most beautiful person in the world except Maman, you take that back Britannia, take it back,” -so tightly on Albion’s neck, and when Lende finally lets go of his front Albion can barely even lift his arms to fight. But he does, he gets an elbow back, doesn’t know what part of Gallia he hits but he definitely hit it hard enough, and he squirms out of the hold enough to turn around and hit him again and again and again-
-
Even after all the burns on his face have healed-Albion counts the seasons, and it takes more than there are in a year-Lende’s still a tattered mess. He goes about Camulodunum with it covered most of the time, his cowl up and more cloth over his mouth, but when he’s in the field he can’t hide beneath anything more than his helmet. The helmet’s beautiful, more metal than leather, and even though Lende says his uncle built it, Gallia’s the one that carved all the shapes in.
“See? See, I’m almost done with the moon part,” he tells Albion, trapping him in a corner of the armoury when his chores are almost done. He thrusts the helmet into Albion’s face. “And these parts next to it are going to be stars of course, and under them flowers, and under them the field where he’s kneeling to the queen-”
“I know,” Albion snaps, trying to push past, “and I don’t care, and if you don’t stop I’ll smear my hands all over it, so let me pass.” He’s done staining all the new leather for straps and belts, and his own hands will probably be black for a week.
Gallia doesn’t move, though. “It’s not my fault you don’t know what’s pretty.”
“Yes, I do.” He elbows Gallia out of the way and goes over to the bucket of water he dragged in earlier so he doesn’t stain anything else at the keep.
But then Gallia touches his shoulder before he can wet his hands. “No, you don’t.”
“You can’t tell me what I do and don’t know.”
“If you knew what’s pretty, you wouldn’t think Lende’s ugly-”
“He is, you toad, he looks like a leper-”
“-and you wouldn’t think you’re ugly either.”
Albion’s hands hover above the water. They’re shaking so much that the stain is dripping off and leaving blotches on the surface, rippling as they sink. Now Gallia has him by both shoulders, and he can probably feel that, but-but Albion can’t move, it’s awful.
“You aren’t, you know,” he says. He’s slid his hands down from holding Albion’s shoulders to actually embracing him, like Wart used to, and the fit is almost the same, enough that Albion almost settles into it. Almost. There’s still stain dripping off his hands, and he can feel the water rustling. “Even if you have bugs on your forehead.”
“Do not.”
“Do so. But they’re not ugly. I only love things that are beautiful. So you must be beautiful. That’s why I want to play with you. You’re pretty and you make funny sounds and you think funny things, and you talk to people who aren’t there.” He’s speaking right into Albion’s ear like the fae do, and Albion shivers. It tickles. It’s like Rome. “So I want to play with you like this, because it’s going to be different after Papa kills you and I want to play with you both ways.”
Albion turns around and hits him in the face. His knuckles leave a black mark from all the stain. It’s not the only mark he leaves-he hits Gallia a lot, more times than Gallia hits him today-but it’s the biggest one, the most important one, and when the master-at-arms and some soldiers pry them apart, Albion can’t stop looking at it and Gallia can’t stop touching it.
He’s dreamt of sleeping, and dreamt of being made to, but now he dreams-and it is a dream-of lying there awake. He knows it is a dream, because Wart is beside him, and Wart has not stayed with him since Gwenhwyfar came. And they’re alone-not even the fae are about, and the unicorn in the standard is still and asleep. Wart isn’t any smaller or younger, but his beard is strangely soft against Albion’s brow, and Albion holds him tightly, fastens himself to Wart’s bare chest.
“What do you dream?” Wart asks, even if Albion is dreaming already.
Albion thinks a moment-outside himself, he can see how close they are, how the blankets seem to cover only one person. “I dream that we’re like this,” Albion says, “only the same size.”
Wart laughs, just short gentle breaths against Albion’s scalp. “You’d have to grow up very fast for that to happen.”
“Or you’d have to be small again,” Albion corrects. “That’s what I dream the most. It’s because I don’t know what I’ll look like when I’m big, but I can remember what you looked like when you were small.”
“Ha, sometimes I forget that.”
“It’s not that different,” Albion says, and in the dream he closes his eyes, to conjure the image to himself. “You were always skinny, and if you had straw in your hair I couldn’t tell the difference, and I could see your mouth even when you didn’t smile.”
“So the last is the only part that’s different,” Wart mutters, and Albion thinks he might be smiling, but his eyes are closed in the dream, so he can’t know.
“It’s not just that. You…you weren’t a different person, and I know that it’s because you’re grown now and I’m not, but you loved me differently.”
“No I didn’t.”
“Yes you did. You-wanted me, and shared things with me, and it was about more than just helping me grow up, you wanted me to grow up with you, not because of you. And I knew it. I still know it, and I know that it’s not true anymore, or that other things are truer than it.” He holds on tighter, it feels so much sparer under his arms. Is the dream over? “How much of what you love now is what’s actually here? How much is what I am? How much is what I’m not, yet?”
Wart’s hand comes up to hold the base of Albion’s skull. Albion nestles closer-why is Wart’s chest so smooth and small?
He says, “It’s who you are, Britannia, all of it,” and Albion opens his eyes, hoists himself up on his hands.
Wart grins up at him through a gap in his teeth, and his lips have no beard to interfere with it. His hair is no shorter, but it frames a smaller face, and the shoulders it fans out against are bony and naked and thin. Even his eyes have followed this-this is a Wart who never saw his father die, or his uncle, or even his cousin Cai-this is a Wart who wants nothing more than to be what he is and do as he wants and know and love his Nation.
Albion’s throat is parched, and his breath isn’t working at all. He forms words, and even in the dream he doesn’t know what they are. All he knows is that they lead to Wart laughing, and pulling him down again, not to kiss but just to hold. Albion wraps himself around Wart as if his body is a trap, fastens on with every joint, fingers and ankles and neck and knees. But Wart doesn’t seem to mind it, because he’s doing the same, twining himself through every knot in Albion’s body, so that even the parts of them that aren’t touching feel like they’re both there. Wart says something too, but Albion can’t hear it either, and soon they are kissing whether they meant to or not, wonderful hungry kisses that don’t fill them up but don’t stop trying either. They roll about, and it’s not a mattress anymore, it’s not even straw, it’s a field of tall grass and the bank of a river, and as they scuffle Wart’s trapped with his back to it again, so Albion really is surrounding him. He laughs, and Albion takes the sound into his mouth and thinks he might be crying, but Wart kisses those parts too, Albion’s cheeks and neck and shoulders when the tears drip down that far.
“You can look at me, you know,” Wart says, “I won’t go away.” He pulls back enough that Albion can-that brings their hips together, and there’s heat there, so Albion’s eyes open as much at the shock as the suggestion.
He hears the sound of the river before he sees it. It’s running through Wart’s eyes, behind them, everything white and black and grey washed blue. They’re glassed over, Albion thinks, and he sees himself in them-
-older and stronger. Like Rome.
He wakes up screaming.
His face had been to the straw and it muffled nothing, nothing at all, it’s still so loud in his own ears, and opening his eyes doesn’t stop it, and closing them’s even worse-and there’s no one to hold in this bed, no one at all, even the straw is just caving under him and the blankets are spitting him out. He falls onto the stone floor, and if he hits something he doesn’t feel it, doesn’t care. He’s already hurt. He’s already crying. The tears don’t allay the burning behind his eyes.
He scrambles, half on his knees, for the door, and is barely standing when he gets to it and slams it open. The watch in the hall this time of night try to touch him, but he won’t have it, he swats them off and tears down the hall, past every faerie who asks or laughs, farther than Wart’s room, away and down, down and out the gates and to the sea. He doesn’t even get that far-he trips, falls onto his hands and knees at the shore. The waves lap against his wrists and knees and hips, and slowly, all the parts that are burning and angry ebb away.
After two deep breaths, he is violently sick, but nothing comes out.
It’s raining. It always seems to, these days, but this is just a heavy mist as if the clouds have come down to earth and wrapped themselves around. It makes the water colder but denser, so thick that Albion thinks he could lift it in his hands and none would trickle out. He tries, and uses it to splash the sweat from his face. His palms and fingers are still black from all the leather stain, and bruised under that from hitting Gallia, so the salt stings and leaves chalk streaks in his skin. He wonders if Gallia would think that’s pretty too.
For an hour at least, he kneels there, calming himself in the sand. The air is as thick as the water, so no wonder he feels more like he’s drinking it than breathing it. But it works, after a time, and the sun hasn’t made any attempt to rise by the time he feels well enough to return to the keep. He lets his eyes refocus, stares at the stone, counts all the windows and towers.
His room is not the only one with a window that faces the sea.
He stops in the sand, and looks up to where the shadows are, higher than the clouds, and his are the eyes of a Nation.
The gold bands in a girl’s black hair catch the sunlight as it appears. She sits shifting in the lap of a man whose eyes shine the same way, even if nothing else of his face is pleasant to look at. She holds him. She rides him. She cups his hideous cheeks and kisses him.
Albion does not know which feeling is worse, the hatred, the fear, the envy-or the relief, that Wart can still be his instead.
-
.
Citations for Part 4
Camulodunum.
Gwenhwyfar.
Lende, and where Lende is from.
Figuring out how to render Lancelot’s name was more than a bit difficult. He doesn’t appear in most early accounts of the legend-he was added by this French guy, so he doesn’t have a Brythonic equivalent-and then when I found out that the name was supposed to be Lanzo I thought, well, fuck it, I’ll go with both his proper name (Galahad), and the name that Lancelot was most likely derived from. See, -el and -ot are old French suffixes, meant to turn nouns into masculine adjectives, and Lanzo comes from Lend-which means health. Hail, irony, thou heav’n-borne maid.
On to Part 5...
.
What time is it?
LANCE AND FRANCE TIME.
…yeah, I know.
Title: No Such Place - Part 4
Author: Mithrigil
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia
Characters: England, Roma Antiqua, Germania, Wales, France; King Arthur and associated personages.
Words: Still too many.
Rating: R.
Timeline: the 5th and 6th centuries A.D.
Summary: Not the King Arthur story you think it is. Part 1 is here, part 2 is here, and part 3 is here.
Sometime after 500 A.D….
Today, Cymry brings King Arthyr his bride.
She’s Cymry’s no matter what Albion says (and Albion’s said a lot about it but no one listens), because that is what Wart wants, never mind what Albion wants. Albion wants Wart for himself, even if he has to get married, so Wart should marry one of Albion’s people. But he wants a bride from Cymry and he won’t say why where anyone else can hear and since Wart is king now everyone else can hear.
Wart and the armies retook all of Mercia but Londinuim’s too far south, too close to Dubris and the channel, and there are still Saxons marching on Watling’s road. So they’ve set the keep in Camulodunum, where the Roman walls still stand, and if Albion thinks that’s no better, well, no one listens. It’s a filthy town with, with Rome’s footprints everywhere and Rome’s coins scattered on the ground. It’s the first one he put his soldiers in to stay. No one listens when Albion says that either. They only care that the walls are strong, never mind who built them.
And never mind that Wart’s precious bride has to cross all of the island, and even if Cymry’s bearing her she’s not a Nation, she can’t cross it to Wart like Albion did.
Albion wonders if Wart knows that too. Or if he believes it anymore.
Because nobody sees Albion here. When Wart’s not with the army or in the room with his generals (where Albion sneaks, sometimes, or thinks he has to sneak even though Wart does say that’s all right, after), he has a long room in the keep where he listens to people who come to speak to him, because he’s King and he’s held off the Saxons for ten more winters than his father.
Albion used to hide behind the biggest chair. He doesn’t have to. They’re all looking at Wart anyway.
-
“I’ve set up a room for you that faces the sea,” Wart says, when Albion is squiring him into his best clothes. “Like at Cornwall. You liked that, right?”
Albion’s fingers slip on the laces of the left greave, and he opens his mouth to ask why, but Wart gets there first.
“It’s close to here,” he says, “Two doors down. Northerly.” He stretches his leg, so Albion can tie it tighter. “With a standard on the wall. The one from this room. Didn’t you notice it was missing?”
“No,” Albion says.
Wart grimaces, and not at the lacing. “Oh. Sorry. But I did, it’s there. And a bed all your own-”
“Why?”
Wart’s calf shivers, and Albion doesn’t touch it. “What do you mean, why?”
“Why do I need a room of my own?”
Wart’s breath hangs on the air, and then lets out all at once; he turns, and kneels on the shin that’s not covered with a greave yet. Like this, he’d have to look up at Albion if Albion was standing, but he’s not, he’s kneeling too, so it’s just a different kind of looking down.
“I mean,” Albion starts, and his breath’s not coming in or out right either, “I mean I know what you’re going to do when you marry her, and you should probably do it in a bed, but I just won’t sleep here tonight if you need to be alone with her. I’ll just sleep outside or something, or in the kitchens, or with the guards, or-and, and then after that-after that can I come back?”
This close, Albion can hear the sound Wart’s lips make when they part, and the sound his eyes make when they close. Albion puts his hands on Wart’s cheeks-his beard is much thicker now, and since he’s all clean for the wedding it’s almost the same dense golden colour as his hair, and his hair is long enough now that the curling parts tangle with the beard parts when Albion tangles his fingers through them. He keeps Wart’s face tilted toward him, even if Wart isn’t looking right now. Wart should look, Albion wants him to look, Albion just wants him-
He pushes his palms in so that Wart’s lips gather into a kissing shape, and leans up before he loses his nerve.
The way Wart kisses has changed, Albion thinks-that’s okay, so has Albion’s way. It’s slower, sadder, more urgent, less about how it feels than what it’s trying to say. And Albion is trying to say you said you couldn’t betray me, you haven’t but you will this way, with the tautness of his lips and the pressure of his tongue, because he can’t say it aloud. He anchors his hands in Wart’s beard and lifts up on his knees as high as he can, he can be taller this way-he can show Wart that too, he can be grown-up enough to kiss again. He says all these things with his body, or tries to at least, but Wart knows how to listen even if he sometimes doesn’t hear, Wart knows what all of this means, Wart knows his Britannia, his Albion-
-and he probably knows what jealousy tastes like too.
That explains why Wart’s kissing differently. It’s because he’s not kissing back.
So Albion pulls away, but doesn’t let go, and doesn’t let himself cry either. He wants to. He wants a lot of things.
He can’t have any of them.
“Are you sure that’s what you want?” Wart asks him. His eyes are still closed, and his cheeks dip and swell when he says this, shifting under Albion’s palms. “If you’re sure, I can, but-but Britannia, I don’t think you do, or I’m afraid that you don’t, or-”
“You can’t tell me what I don’t want,” Albion shouts, even though they’re this close. “I don’t care if you’re king now, you can’t tell me what I don’t want!”
“Britannia-”
“I don’t want her!” He yanks on Wart’s beard, hard. “I don’t even know her and I don’t want her! You don’t need a queen. Emrys didn’t have a queen. So you don’t need a queen! And-and I can be with you. So there. That’s enough, isn’t it? That’s always been enough.”
“No it hasn’t,” Wart says.
It echoes.
“I do want you. And I want to protect you, and help you, and make you happy. That’s why I’m getting married.”
“But she’s not a Briton!”
“But if I married a Briton, all the others would be unhappy-”
“So you’d rather make them all unhappy?” It’s harder and harder to hold the tears back now, but Albion’s so angry and that’s an excuse, they’re not weak tears, they’re hot tears and that’s better than being hurt. “They’re not going to want her any more than I do!”
“Britannia, I can’t take a queen from your people.”
“Why not!” His lips are chapped and the salt is stinging them. “If it can’t be me, the at least-”
“She-” Wart gulps. Albion can feel it in his fingertips. “She could be like Anna-Morgause,” he says softly, as if he doesn’t want even the fae to hear. “I…I have to wed someone whose mother my father could never have touched.”
Albion’s not sure whether he’s the one to start shaking first. Either way, the tremour passes through Albion’s hands and up his arms, against Wart’s jaw so that his teeth chatter. His eyes are open now, slick and glassy, and when they find Albion’s he doesn’t feel so bad about crying anymore.
Wart murmurs, “Britannia,” and lowers his head, but Albion doesn’t kiss him now. He cranes his neck so that Wart’s brow rests against Albion’s shoulder, his arms rounding Albion’s back and pulling him close. “It’s not to hurt you.”
“But it does,” Albion says, because what he’s thinking-Rome said the same-is even worse to lend voice.
Cymry rides his dragon here. In the twilight when they arrive, Y Ddraig Goch’s scales are as red as the sun, with underskin of gold like the wheat its rays fall upon. He wheels around the city twice before settling with a great steaming hulk just outside the walls, and even this far off Albion can see the great white gash in his belly, glistening with cold blue veins like marble.
Once they’ve landed, Albion scuttles through the gates to meet them. The wedding party and army is a ways behind, he sees, up the road like an enemy. The dragon sees him first, and turns his head to regard him. There is blue in his eyes now, in the black slit.
“Have you seen what you need to?” Cymry asks as he dismounts from the dragon’s neck, barely marking Albion at all. He is well-accoutered in red and green, which make his eyes stand brighter and his pale hair gleam like a halo. He looks older, though that could be more how he is dressed than any other truth.
Albion ignores him too, and talks to the dragon instead. “Hallo.”
“Hail, little Nation,” Y Ddraig Goch says. His lips are also chapped.
“You are better?”
“I am victorious.” But the dragon lays down on the earth, likely tired from the flight.
Albion steps tentatively nearer, to show he is not afraid. “May I touch the wound?”
“Which?”
“The one my friend is in.”
Of course the dragon knows his meaning; he stretches, so that his hind-claws coil, both off the ground as he turns up his belly. The white gash is larger than Albion, perhaps even longer than two of him, and yet it takes up no space on the dragon’s golden belly at all. Albion feels as if he must walk the length of the castle itself to see it.
When he is near enough to touch, the scar, even healed, is wider than Albion’s palm, and probably deeper. He touches his hand to the veined white flesh, gently. The dragon’s heartbeat is slow, and distant, where its own blood does not flow. In fact, the skin there is cold to the touch, even if the rest of the dragon is steaming, wilting the wheat.
“That beast can’t hear you,” Cymry says, behind him, changing out one pair of gloves for another. “He’s dead.”
“But he’s part of you now,” Albion snaps back. “You used Grigory’s horn to make Y Ddraig Goch better. So their blood is shared. They’re brothers too now.”
Cymry grabs Albion by the wrist and pulls him away. “It doesn’t work that way.”
“It does for the fae,” Albion says, wrenching his arm out of Cymry’s grip. He goes to the dragon again defiantly and puts his hand on the scar once more. “He’ll be mine someday too.”
“Or you’ll be his, when he eats you.”
“He won’t eat me,” Albion says, honestly, and rubs the dragon’s belly where the scar is thinnest, to prove it. “He’ll let me ride him like Grigory did, and I’ll see the whole world from his back.”
Cymry doesn’t laugh at him-he never laughs, not like Caledonii does. But he scoffs, and he sighs, and he says, “Keep dreaming,” as if that’s a bad thing to do.
Of course they’re going to make a big show of the wedding. The bride came such a long way, after all. Now that night has fallen, the people have pitched torches and canopies to cover the food. It is not to be a Christian ceremony, and Albion’s thankful for that, at least. The ground is strewn with flowers wherever someone isn’t standing, but they’re too mixed and too wild to have actually grown in this field, and they smell something awful. Even the fae agree.
Thousands have gathered to see her, and she brought another thousand with her in force (and a hundred of them on horses!), so it’s quite a crowd. Albion stays by Wart, follows at the tails of his fur-lined cape. He talks about important things with important people before the procession begins. Albion can smell his sweat only because he knows the scent exactly.
The musicians are the ones to stop all the chatter, and soon the drums and flutes and Roman harps are louder than the voices all around. The minstrels dance as they play, trailing long sprigs and ferns, wearing bones and bells, and they clear a somewhat winding path through the revelers. When they find Wart, they circle him and isolate him from the rest-except Albion, stubbornly clutching the hem of his cape even when the flutes whistle in his ear or the drum startles behind his head. (The fae are imitating all this, and those who can fly are whirling around the musicians, creating circles within circles, spirals within spirals, and when Albion watches this he gets so dizzy that he buries his face in Wart’s cape and tries to cover his ears too. It only helps a little, which is worse than not helping at all.) He misses when the bride arrives, but soon the whispers and cheers are too loud to ignore, even over the music. So he looks up, and peers around Wart’s side, past the chaos of the minstrels.
The girl that Cymry is leading is no older than Albion looks.
He wants to scream. He very nearly does. But the music is that much louder. She’s a girl, she’s barely a dozen summers old and Wart is almost three times that, and why can she be a child and wed him?
Cymry sidesteps the musicians and brings the girl into the circle. She’s in a red dress that fits her well except for how long it is, which is long enough to trail behind her through the grass and flowers and hide her feet. Her hair is long too, and black, and too thick and heavy to curl, so what happens is that the parts of it that aren’t braided look like a rock-face in the dark, with all the gold she’s wearing in it standing out and waiting to be mined. She’s pretty, Albion decides, the same way Anna-Morgause was pretty when she was small, but with better and clearer eyes. The girl’s are blue like Gallia’s.
She bows, and hides even more of herself in her skirts and the flowers. “I am Gwenwhyfar,” she says, and Albion wonders why she’s all in red if her name says she’s white. Maybe it’s because she’s so pale. “If I please you, let us be wed.”
“You do please me,” Wart says, “and even if you didn’t, I don’t see why not.” He smiles at her, and takes her with a knuckle under the chin-Albion can tell that he is shaking because all the fur in the cape is shifting, tracing patterns in itself-and bends almost double to kiss her.
Albion makes himself watch. He’s not sure whether Wart is kissing her like he kisses Albion (he’s not sure whether he wants to be sure) but it’s not a brief kiss, and she’s smiling on the other side of it or at least Wart can see her teeth-
“Runt. Let go of him and take my hand.”
Albion very nearly hisses at Cymry, “Never.”
“Fine,” Cymry says, and then crosses near and seizes Albion’s wrist. He won’t let go of Wart’s cape, and he leans even closer so that he can feel the scabbard of Wart’s sword-Germania’s sword-under the cloth, but if Cymry has to hold his hand somehow then fine, ceremony is ceremony.
The kiss stops, and the musicians pick up a slower tune as the druids come to sanctify things before the revels. They cover Wart and Gwenhwyfar in more flowers, and make them join hands, make them embrace. Gwenhwyfar’s face is on level with Wart’s ribs, only a little higher than Albion’s. He feels Cymry’s hand tighten on his wrist but he won’t let off the cloth, no matter how slick the fur is getting from his tears.
-
It is a nice room all his own. Wart did try. The window faces the sea, and Albion’s drawn the curtains back even if it’s cold and raining and the mist makes the hearth flicker. He stares at the unicorn on the standard and wonders if it can’t see him anymore either, but doesn’t bother asking.
The bed is very big, and very empty. Albion tries to bash himself a dent in the straw all the way to the floor, so that the straw bunches up and becomes Wart-shaped beside him. It’s not working very well. All he’s succeeded in doing is tearing the mattress and getting straw in his hair, and getting itchy all over. He thinks it might serve him right for being so selfish but he doesn’t stop, and then when the straw starts getting wet because of the open curtains it stinks. And that’s too much punishment for even him.
So he sits by the window and scratches the cuts from the straw, which isn’t Wart-shaped at all, and he wonders if the sky is crying or sweating. Has Wart done what Albion said he should? Does he listen to the land now? “Of course not,” Albion mutters to himself, that’s what this is, and he wraps himself in the blanket and uses that to scratch the itches instead.
It’s pretty on the water, though. The waves are big enough to see and loud enough to hear. This is the sea that the faeries say there are other Nations on the far side of, ones who can see them too. Albion hasn’t met them yet. He doesn’t think he ever shall. The only people who want Albion now want him dead or theirs or worse, and Nations don’t survive like that.
He hates this keep, and he hates this city, and he hates Caledonii and Cymry and Eire wherever she is for not helping at all. He hates that everything smells like Rome and whatever doesn’t smells like Saxony, and even if he doesn’t hate Saxony and Rome themselves he hates them for fighting and getting him tangled in it. And he hates most that he wants to be left alone when it’s not what he really wants at all. He hates everything, the rain and the clouds and the little ship on the sea and the straw and Gwenhwyfar and everything-
-a ship?
A ship. Coming nearer to the coast, with a lantern on the hull growing brighter.
Albion scrambles off the ledge and into the room, slips on the straw-he rushes out the door and down the hall to Wart’s room and bangs on the door, shouting for him. “Wart! Wart, there’s a ship and it has no standard and it’s coming here-Wart, Wart, open up-” No one’s answering-is it like with Anna-Morgause? Is Wart sick or drunk or under a spell? Either way, Albion yells one more time, and then just opens the door and runs in.
It’s a good thing he’s already screaming, because otherwise seeing a naked little girl on his side of the bed would make him. But she’s there, curled up and concerned but not covered in the blankets, and Wart’s sitting on the edge of the mattress beside her, as if he’s just now gotten up. “Britannia, I heard you. Is it a dream?”
“No, it’s real, there’s really a ship! And it doesn’t have a standard and I know it’s not ours, and-”
“All right, all right-shh. Calm down.” Wart smiles, and slides off the bed to get his boots and clothes and weapons. “You wouldn’t be this scared if I’d have been with you, so it’s okay to not be scared now. We’ll get a detachment together and see who it is. Right?”
And since Albion has been shouting, the next words come out just the same. “Don’t make fun of me!”
Wart, for his part, looks confused, but it isn’t enough. “Who’s making fun of you?”
“You are! You’re-” Albion covers his mouth so he doesn’t choke or cry, but the words slip out through his fingers. “You’re making me less.”
The boots hit the floor, and Wart steps into them. Albion can hear every crinkle of the leather, every slap they make against his shins. He comes nearer, and Albion glares up at him defiantly, hand still clasped on his mouth.
“You are,” he murmurs.
Wart picks him up like a sack of grain and carries him out of the room.
He only makes it a few steps into the hall when Albion starts punching him in the back. Sometimes he hits the scabbard instead, and it hurts but he doesn’t stop until Wart puts him down. “Britannia-”
“You promised to believe me!” He’s not shouting as much now, but it’s still loud and sad and broken and pathetic and he hates that too. “Even if it’s just a dream-and it’s not-it’s never just. Not with me. You know that.”
This time, when Wart picks him up, it’s tenderer, chest-to-chest, and although it makes Albion feel even younger than he sounds, it’s closeness, and that’s-that’s better. “Let’s get you a cloak, all right? It’s cold. You’re coming with me to meet the ship.”
He snuffles his face into Wart’s shoulder, until Wart puts him down again.
Someone is shielding the ship’s lantern from the rain. Its little, long-fingered hands make shadows like the clouds do to the moon. The rings around the nails glow red, as the skin is thinner there, and Albion sees every speck of grime between them, as black as the bones beneath. He can’t see more than that hand at all, but beneath him is a heap of bandages, an unfurled sail, a stench of death.
The Britons gather on the shore-Albion can’t hold Wart’s hand here, but he can stand very close, and he does, clutching at his cloak instead. Cymry’s people on the roads, Saxony in the south, Caledonii and Lot in the north-and all within-is there to be no haven, not even the sea?
“Salve!” Gallia says.
He lopes himself over the side of the boat-it really wasn’t big enough to be called a ship, and there are only two people in it even if one of them is a Nation-and runs right to Albion, splashing in the tide. His smile gets even brighter this close, and his eyes and his hair, and Albion pulls the cloak tighter around himself instinctively. This is the closest they’ve ever stood and now Albion can see that Gallia’s almost a head taller, even if his face and voice are about the same age as Albion’s, and his eyes are so clearly a Nation’s. “You’re Britannia, aren’t you? I was right! Do you want to play? Maman didn’t come with me but she said it’s all right if we play together even if Papa is trying to kill you.”
Albion shrinks away-he can’t help it-and looks to Wart, but Wart is looking at the other person coming out of the boat. It’s a young man, a human, with black hair and-well, most of his face is covered in bandages, even his eyes.
“Oh, him?” Gallia asks, trying to swivel so that his head is in Albion’s line of sight. “That’s Launcelot. He’s my friend. He didn’t want to be with the army anymore so we came here together. I think Papa will kill him too if he goes back. He already tried, look!” Gallia tries to grab Albion by the hand but only gets the cloak, though that’s still enough for him to drag Albion over by. He lets go of Albion as if he never held him at all and puts his hands on the young man’s face instead, rubbing the bandages. Under one of his hands, blisters burst and soak the cloth yellow. The young man cries out in pain, shaking. Gallia smiles hopefully.
“Hold there,” Wart says-in Brythonic, not Latin, because this is a test. He comes nearer with some of the torch-bearers and soldiers. “You’re from the Saxon army?”
Gallia looks up at Wart, and holds the young man’s face even tighter. “Surely you don’t want to hurt me!” he says in Latin. “Besides, you can’t. And he is wounded. He just wants to fight for you. And I just want to play with Britannia-”
“Please,” the young man groans from beneath the cloth on his face. “Please, kill me or keep me, but do not send me back to Saxony.” The way the wrapping shifts as he speaks gives Albion chills, and he wedges himself against Wart’s side, tries to use Wart’s cloak too.
Wart lays his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Tell me who you are.”
“My name is Galahad,” he says, with phlegm through his voice, “but I am called Lende or Launcelot.”
It’s his true Name, Albion thinks, and knows he has power now. Galahad.
“A good thing, since I can’t pronounce that last one, Lende. Come. We will mend you. Who hurt you? What rank did you hold?” He hoists Lende up out of the boat, and another soldier comes forward to support Lende’s other side. Lende flinches from the touch, but probably knows it’s as much a check as anything else, and since he can’t see through all the bandages it’s for the best.
Gallia laughs-it sounds like flutes pretending to be drums-and puts his arm around Albion just the same way, his fingertips brushing past the cowl and sliding on Albion’s throat. “Come on, let’s go too! Support me, Britannia!” But when they follow Wart and Lende and the soldiers it’s more like he’s dragging Albion along, and Albion does want to sink into the sand and bury himself in it so Gallia can never touch him again.
As few as ten steps more, and Lende pitches forward into the sand, coughing violently. Red and gold stain the bandages from the inside, and Wart’s calling to the soldiers to carry the young man, get him laid out and treated, and all Albion can think is that Wart doesn’t know who his enemy is.
They strip Lende of everything, in the keep’s hall, his weapons first. Among them is a sword as heavy as Germania’s, but because it is thicker, not longer. It is wrapped in hide the way Lende’s face is wrapped in cloth. Once it’s set down against the corner, Gallia abandons Albion and goes to unwind it, stroking his fingers on the gaps in the hide, rubbing them on the edge.
Wart asks him again, “Who were you, to Saxony?”
“No more than cavalry,” Lende says, “my father sent me from Benoic.” He adds, with a rattling sigh, “A bastard,” and peels the sodden cloth from his face.
Or, rather, from what remains of it.
Albion doesn’t shrink away-he’s seen worse and more recent. But because he doesn’t flinch he can see all of it, the curve of every bubbling blister, the ones that the press of Gallia’s hand ruptured. The burns are in crude crossed streaks, plainly not a single accident, nor self-inflicted, and they cover all from the missing peak in his hairline to the curve of his neck. About a quarter of his face is still whole around his right eye, enough to guess his age by if his body won’t tell. There had been hair on his cheeks before the burns crossed them, but not enough to cling.
Just because Albion doesn’t look away doesn’t speak for the others. In fact, the only ones who seem not to shy from it are he, Wart, and Gallia.
Wart gulps and tries to ignore it. “Where’s Benoic?”
“Leon,” he says. His mouth moves very little, perhaps for fear of agitating the blisters.
“Well, that explains why you can speak our language.”
“And why Saxony does not want me, sir.”
“That’s-recent, isn’t it.” Wart reaches out to indicate, but not quite touch, the burns.
Lende might be smiling. “That’s the reason I left.”
Gallia, with the hide from Lende’s sword gathered in his arms and coddled like a toy, pads over to sit against Lende’s leg and pouts up at Wart. “Papa didn’t trust Launcelot,” he says, earnest and sparkling, in Latin again. “He loves me too much. Launcelot, I mean.”
“I served my people the best I could,” Lende whispers, putting his hand affectionately through Gallia’s hair. “And I do want to be a good soldier. The best, if I can. But I can’t do that unless I serve a lord I believe in, and that lord is not in Saxony.”
Albion feels distinctly ill, and Lende’s face is not to blame for it. He asks, “Are you a Christian?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think that lord is in Britannia either.”
This marks the first time that Albion has seen Gallia frown. It makes him much less beautiful, but oh, does it make Albion feel triumphant.
“Of course he is,” Wart says, dismissively, and all the vindictive good Albion just felt in his bones is stripped away. “When you’ve recovered, do you think you could lend yourself in defense of this Nation and his people?”
Albion hopes, against hope, that Lende will say no, and let them burn the rest of his body and send smiling, perfect Gallia away for good-
“Sire?”
In front of the Nations-and behind the men-Gwenhwyfar’s standing with a torch and a cloak, still breathing heavily (she must have run down the hall) and red in the cheeks. Wart turns to regard her with a smile and an explanation; Lende just turns to regard her at all, and it’s Lende she’s looking at.
She drops the torch and screams.
Some of the straw on the floor catches fire. Since Wart’s run after his wife to calm her down, that leaves Lende and the Nations to put it out with their cloaks. Albion grabs the hide out of Gallia’s hands-why is he just standing there?-and throws it over the straw to stamp on it. “Come on, you sod, help out-”
“Why is she scared?”
-Albion trips and almost falls in top of the fire. Gallia somehow sounds even more beautiful when he’s about to cry.
He puts a hand on Albion’s shoulder. It’s trembling. “Britannia, why is she scared?”
Albion swats it off. “Because Lende’s ugly,” he says, digging his foot in to the hide and scraping it on the floor. Lende’s doing the same thing on the other side of the cloaks and now that it’s dark again Albion can only see Lende’s eyes. They’re gold, like the straw and Wart’s hair, eyes aren’t supposed to be like that.
“No-no, he’s not!” Gallia shouts, and kicks Albion in the seat.
Albion falls forward, right into Lende’s front-Lende catches him, but Gallia’s jumped on him now, pounced on his back and grabbed onto his hair, and since Lende’s still holding onto him and wondering what to do with him Albion can’t throw them off-
“He’s not!” Gallia’s holding so-so tightly- “He’s not, he’s the most beautiful person in the world except Maman, you take that back Britannia, take it back,” -so tightly on Albion’s neck, and when Lende finally lets go of his front Albion can barely even lift his arms to fight. But he does, he gets an elbow back, doesn’t know what part of Gallia he hits but he definitely hit it hard enough, and he squirms out of the hold enough to turn around and hit him again and again and again-
-
Even after all the burns on his face have healed-Albion counts the seasons, and it takes more than there are in a year-Lende’s still a tattered mess. He goes about Camulodunum with it covered most of the time, his cowl up and more cloth over his mouth, but when he’s in the field he can’t hide beneath anything more than his helmet. The helmet’s beautiful, more metal than leather, and even though Lende says his uncle built it, Gallia’s the one that carved all the shapes in.
“See? See, I’m almost done with the moon part,” he tells Albion, trapping him in a corner of the armoury when his chores are almost done. He thrusts the helmet into Albion’s face. “And these parts next to it are going to be stars of course, and under them flowers, and under them the field where he’s kneeling to the queen-”
“I know,” Albion snaps, trying to push past, “and I don’t care, and if you don’t stop I’ll smear my hands all over it, so let me pass.” He’s done staining all the new leather for straps and belts, and his own hands will probably be black for a week.
Gallia doesn’t move, though. “It’s not my fault you don’t know what’s pretty.”
“Yes, I do.” He elbows Gallia out of the way and goes over to the bucket of water he dragged in earlier so he doesn’t stain anything else at the keep.
But then Gallia touches his shoulder before he can wet his hands. “No, you don’t.”
“You can’t tell me what I do and don’t know.”
“If you knew what’s pretty, you wouldn’t think Lende’s ugly-”
“He is, you toad, he looks like a leper-”
“-and you wouldn’t think you’re ugly either.”
Albion’s hands hover above the water. They’re shaking so much that the stain is dripping off and leaving blotches on the surface, rippling as they sink. Now Gallia has him by both shoulders, and he can probably feel that, but-but Albion can’t move, it’s awful.
“You aren’t, you know,” he says. He’s slid his hands down from holding Albion’s shoulders to actually embracing him, like Wart used to, and the fit is almost the same, enough that Albion almost settles into it. Almost. There’s still stain dripping off his hands, and he can feel the water rustling. “Even if you have bugs on your forehead.”
“Do not.”
“Do so. But they’re not ugly. I only love things that are beautiful. So you must be beautiful. That’s why I want to play with you. You’re pretty and you make funny sounds and you think funny things, and you talk to people who aren’t there.” He’s speaking right into Albion’s ear like the fae do, and Albion shivers. It tickles. It’s like Rome. “So I want to play with you like this, because it’s going to be different after Papa kills you and I want to play with you both ways.”
Albion turns around and hits him in the face. His knuckles leave a black mark from all the stain. It’s not the only mark he leaves-he hits Gallia a lot, more times than Gallia hits him today-but it’s the biggest one, the most important one, and when the master-at-arms and some soldiers pry them apart, Albion can’t stop looking at it and Gallia can’t stop touching it.
He’s dreamt of sleeping, and dreamt of being made to, but now he dreams-and it is a dream-of lying there awake. He knows it is a dream, because Wart is beside him, and Wart has not stayed with him since Gwenhwyfar came. And they’re alone-not even the fae are about, and the unicorn in the standard is still and asleep. Wart isn’t any smaller or younger, but his beard is strangely soft against Albion’s brow, and Albion holds him tightly, fastens himself to Wart’s bare chest.
“What do you dream?” Wart asks, even if Albion is dreaming already.
Albion thinks a moment-outside himself, he can see how close they are, how the blankets seem to cover only one person. “I dream that we’re like this,” Albion says, “only the same size.”
Wart laughs, just short gentle breaths against Albion’s scalp. “You’d have to grow up very fast for that to happen.”
“Or you’d have to be small again,” Albion corrects. “That’s what I dream the most. It’s because I don’t know what I’ll look like when I’m big, but I can remember what you looked like when you were small.”
“Ha, sometimes I forget that.”
“It’s not that different,” Albion says, and in the dream he closes his eyes, to conjure the image to himself. “You were always skinny, and if you had straw in your hair I couldn’t tell the difference, and I could see your mouth even when you didn’t smile.”
“So the last is the only part that’s different,” Wart mutters, and Albion thinks he might be smiling, but his eyes are closed in the dream, so he can’t know.
“It’s not just that. You…you weren’t a different person, and I know that it’s because you’re grown now and I’m not, but you loved me differently.”
“No I didn’t.”
“Yes you did. You-wanted me, and shared things with me, and it was about more than just helping me grow up, you wanted me to grow up with you, not because of you. And I knew it. I still know it, and I know that it’s not true anymore, or that other things are truer than it.” He holds on tighter, it feels so much sparer under his arms. Is the dream over? “How much of what you love now is what’s actually here? How much is what I am? How much is what I’m not, yet?”
Wart’s hand comes up to hold the base of Albion’s skull. Albion nestles closer-why is Wart’s chest so smooth and small?
He says, “It’s who you are, Britannia, all of it,” and Albion opens his eyes, hoists himself up on his hands.
Wart grins up at him through a gap in his teeth, and his lips have no beard to interfere with it. His hair is no shorter, but it frames a smaller face, and the shoulders it fans out against are bony and naked and thin. Even his eyes have followed this-this is a Wart who never saw his father die, or his uncle, or even his cousin Cai-this is a Wart who wants nothing more than to be what he is and do as he wants and know and love his Nation.
Albion’s throat is parched, and his breath isn’t working at all. He forms words, and even in the dream he doesn’t know what they are. All he knows is that they lead to Wart laughing, and pulling him down again, not to kiss but just to hold. Albion wraps himself around Wart as if his body is a trap, fastens on with every joint, fingers and ankles and neck and knees. But Wart doesn’t seem to mind it, because he’s doing the same, twining himself through every knot in Albion’s body, so that even the parts of them that aren’t touching feel like they’re both there. Wart says something too, but Albion can’t hear it either, and soon they are kissing whether they meant to or not, wonderful hungry kisses that don’t fill them up but don’t stop trying either. They roll about, and it’s not a mattress anymore, it’s not even straw, it’s a field of tall grass and the bank of a river, and as they scuffle Wart’s trapped with his back to it again, so Albion really is surrounding him. He laughs, and Albion takes the sound into his mouth and thinks he might be crying, but Wart kisses those parts too, Albion’s cheeks and neck and shoulders when the tears drip down that far.
“You can look at me, you know,” Wart says, “I won’t go away.” He pulls back enough that Albion can-that brings their hips together, and there’s heat there, so Albion’s eyes open as much at the shock as the suggestion.
He hears the sound of the river before he sees it. It’s running through Wart’s eyes, behind them, everything white and black and grey washed blue. They’re glassed over, Albion thinks, and he sees himself in them-
-older and stronger. Like Rome.
He wakes up screaming.
His face had been to the straw and it muffled nothing, nothing at all, it’s still so loud in his own ears, and opening his eyes doesn’t stop it, and closing them’s even worse-and there’s no one to hold in this bed, no one at all, even the straw is just caving under him and the blankets are spitting him out. He falls onto the stone floor, and if he hits something he doesn’t feel it, doesn’t care. He’s already hurt. He’s already crying. The tears don’t allay the burning behind his eyes.
He scrambles, half on his knees, for the door, and is barely standing when he gets to it and slams it open. The watch in the hall this time of night try to touch him, but he won’t have it, he swats them off and tears down the hall, past every faerie who asks or laughs, farther than Wart’s room, away and down, down and out the gates and to the sea. He doesn’t even get that far-he trips, falls onto his hands and knees at the shore. The waves lap against his wrists and knees and hips, and slowly, all the parts that are burning and angry ebb away.
After two deep breaths, he is violently sick, but nothing comes out.
It’s raining. It always seems to, these days, but this is just a heavy mist as if the clouds have come down to earth and wrapped themselves around. It makes the water colder but denser, so thick that Albion thinks he could lift it in his hands and none would trickle out. He tries, and uses it to splash the sweat from his face. His palms and fingers are still black from all the leather stain, and bruised under that from hitting Gallia, so the salt stings and leaves chalk streaks in his skin. He wonders if Gallia would think that’s pretty too.
For an hour at least, he kneels there, calming himself in the sand. The air is as thick as the water, so no wonder he feels more like he’s drinking it than breathing it. But it works, after a time, and the sun hasn’t made any attempt to rise by the time he feels well enough to return to the keep. He lets his eyes refocus, stares at the stone, counts all the windows and towers.
His room is not the only one with a window that faces the sea.
He stops in the sand, and looks up to where the shadows are, higher than the clouds, and his are the eyes of a Nation.
The gold bands in a girl’s black hair catch the sunlight as it appears. She sits shifting in the lap of a man whose eyes shine the same way, even if nothing else of his face is pleasant to look at. She holds him. She rides him. She cups his hideous cheeks and kisses him.
Albion does not know which feeling is worse, the hatred, the fear, the envy-or the relief, that Wart can still be his instead.
-
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Citations for Part 4
Camulodunum.
Gwenhwyfar.
Lende, and where Lende is from.
Figuring out how to render Lancelot’s name was more than a bit difficult. He doesn’t appear in most early accounts of the legend-he was added by this French guy, so he doesn’t have a Brythonic equivalent-and then when I found out that the name was supposed to be Lanzo I thought, well, fuck it, I’ll go with both his proper name (Galahad), and the name that Lancelot was most likely derived from. See, -el and -ot are old French suffixes, meant to turn nouns into masculine adjectives, and Lanzo comes from Lend-which means health. Hail, irony, thou heav’n-borne maid.
On to Part 5...
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