Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [280]
Gwenhwyfar looked at the boy, following his skillful work with sword and shield—he broke away from the others, attacked like a fury, toppling them over, caught one lad so hard a blow on his head that he left him stretched senseless, sent another reeling with a fierce blow on the shield. He was only a youngster—his rosy face was fuzzed with the first beginnings of beard, so that he still looked like a cherub—but he was near to six feet tall, and big and broad-shouldered as an ox.
“He fights like the fiend,” Gwenhwyfar said, “but who is he? I seem to have seen him about the court—”
“He is that young lad who came to court and would not give his name,” Lancelet said at their elbow, “so you gave him to Cai to help in the kitchens. He’s the one they called ‘Handsome’ because his hands were so fine and white. Cai made all sorts of rude jokes about spoiling them by turning the spit and scrubbing vegetables. Our Cai has a rough tongue.”
“But the boy never answered him back,” said Gawaine gruffly at Arthur’s other side. “He could break Cai with his two hands, but when the other lads urged him on to strike Cai—once Cai made some kind of wicked joke about his parentage, saying he must be base-born and the son of scullions, since he came so naturally to such things—Handsome only looked right over the top of his head and said it would not be well done to strike a man who had lamed himself in the service of his king.”
Lancelet said wryly, “That would be worse to Cai than being beaten senseless, I think. Cai feels he is fit for nothing but to turn the spit and serve the plates. One day, Arthur, you must find a quest for Cai, even if it is no more than to go and find traces of old Pellinore’s dragon.”
Elaine and Meleas giggled behind their hands. Arthur said, “Well, well, I will. Cai is too good and too loyal to be soured this way. You know I would have given him Caerleon, but he would not take it. He said his father had bidden him to serve me with his own hands so long as he lived, and he would come here to Camelot to keep my house. But this boy—Handsome, you called him, Lance? Does he not put you in mind of someone, my lady?”
She studied the boy, charging now against the last of the opposing group, his long, fair hair flying in the wind. He had a high, broad forehead and a big nose, and his hands, gripped on the weapon, were smooth and white—then she looked past Arthur at just another such nose and blue eyes, though these were hidden in a shock of red hair, and said, “Why, he is like Gawaine,” as if it were something shocking.
“God help us, why, so he is,” said Lancelet, laughing, “and I never saw it—and I have seen much of him. I gave him that saffron shirt, he had not a whole shirt to his name—”
“And other things, too,” Gawaine said. “When I asked him if he had all that was fitting to his station, he told me of your gifts. It was nobly done of you to help the boy, Lance.”
Arthur turned to him and said in surprise, “Is he, then, one of your brood, Gawaine? I knew not you had a son—”
“Nay, my king. It is my—my youngest brother, Gareth. But he would not let me tell.”
“And you never told me, cousin?” Arthur said reproachfully. “Would you keep secrets from your king?”
“Not that,” protested Gawaine uncomfortably, and his big, slab-sided face flushed red, so that he and his hair and his brick-red cheeks seemed all one color; it seemed strange to Gwenhwyfar that so big and rough a man could blush like a child. “Never that, my king, but the boy begged me to say nothing—he said you have favored me because I was your cousin and your kinsman, but if he won favor at Arthur’s court and from the great Lancelet—he said that, Lance, the great Lancelet—he wished it to be for what he had done, not for his name and