Ides of the May (Children of the May 2 - updates weekly)

Chapter Seventeen: Ragged on the Road

We rode as fast as we could the next day, and the day after that. We covered as much ground as we had in the previous four days. Bellina’s temper became frayed; she was unused to riding astride, and complained of her aches and pains constantly. Martha got angry with her in return, and refused to speak to her. I was in constant dread of what we would find when we got to Orkney. I expected that our friends would have been slaughtered by Sir Lamorak, and, against my will, my mind delighted in finding inventive and macabre scenes of their destruction. In one, we found them hacked to pieces and strewn across the shore; in another we found them burned around a huge stake, in a cruel mockery of the Maypole.

‘What’s that?’ said Petal, as we built a fire on which to cook a poor meal of gruel.

‘What’s what?’ snapped Bellina.

‘Shush, girl,’ said Martha angrily.

I crept up the rise of the hollow in which we had decided to camp, and looked north. We were in one of the wooded areas of Caledonia, a grand forest valley, banked by high mountains. There was a clear road marked through the valley, though roads were unusual in those parts. I heard the dull clunk of a cowbell over the wind that shook the tall trees, and had just decided it was simply a cow that had become separated from its herd when I saw a figure emerge from the gloom of the trees. It was hobbling along the road, twisting from side-to-side. With each sway of its body the cowbell tied round its neck sounded. I watched with a horrified fascination as it came closer.

‘A cow, lad?’ said Martha, who had climbed the rise behind me.

‘Take a look.’

The blacksmith peeked over the ridge, saw what I had seen, and in a moment she had broken cover and was sprinting towards the shambling figure. She left behind only two words and the wind. The words were: ‘My lady.’

I watched the huge woman sprint towards the wizened one, and knew that the figure on the road was my mother. I stayed where I was. My horror mixed with pure delight. Whatever had happened to Lady Nemue, terrible as it was, she deserved it. As Martha approached her, another figure broke from the cover of the wood. He rode a black horse.

‘Oi, get away from her!’ he cried at Martha.

It was Mordred, riding to Lady Nemue’s defence.

 

* * *

No matter how much Martha sobbed, clutching at my mother’s hands, the thing would not stop walking south. My explanation of who Martha was and why Mordred should not hurt her were thus conducted in odd conditions, as we walked beside Nemue’s husk.

Although it was dark, it was clear my mother had been wounded by the Spear of Longius, just as Garnish had been. She looked impossibly old, her bones prodding through spiderweb skin. There was a curve to her back that would never be straightened, and a wound in her chest that, though it had been bound, wept blood. Her eyes were clouded over, not with age, but with the same hollowness I had seen in Garnish. She smelled of piss and the grave. I looked on her coldly, but Martha would not stop sobbing.

‘I saw it happen,’ Mordred explained. ‘I’d been following Sir Lamorak for three days. He spotted her riding hard, and laid an ambush. Speared her from a bush. Then she turned into this. With her being your mother I thought I should make sure she was safe.’

Martha reached for my mother’s neck, and gently, so as not to hurt her, untied the cowbell. This done, she hurled the bell into the trees with absolute fury.