The Last Enchantment - Mary Stewart [121]
"Yes." It was true. Sometimes one or more of the knights accompanied the Queen, but frequently they were occupied on affairs more important than squiring her on her daily rides. She had troopers and grooms, and nowadays there was no danger, so near Camelot, from the kind of wild outlaw who had frequented lonely places when I was a boy. So Guinevere had risen early on what promised to be a fine morning, mounted her grey mare, and set out with two of her ladies, and four men, of whom two were soldiers. They had ridden out across a belt of dry moorland bordered to the south by thick forest. To their right hand lay the marshlands, where the rivers wound seaward through their deep, reedy channels, and to the east the land showed rolling and forested toward the high lift of the downs. The party had found game in plenty; the little greyhounds had run wild after it, and, said Cei, the grooms had their hands full riding after them to bring them back. Meantime, the Queen had flown her merlin after a hare, and had followed this herself, straight into the forest.
Cei grunted as my probing fingers found the injured muscle. "Well, but I told you that it was nothing much. Only a sprain, isn't it? A pulled muscle? Will it take long? Oh, well, it's not my sword arm...Well, she galloped the grey mare in, and the women stayed back. Her maid's no rider, and the other, the lady Melissa, is not young. The grooms were coming back with the greyhounds on the saddle, and were still some way off. Nobody was worrying. She's a great horsewoman -- you know she even rode Arthur's white stallion and managed it? -- and besides, she's done it before, just to tease them. So they took it easy, while the two troopers rode after her."
The rest was easy to supply. It was true that this had happened before, with no chance of ill, so the troopers spurred after the Queen at no more than a hand-gallop. They could hear her mare thudding through the thick forest ahead of them, and the swish and crackling of the bushes and dead stuff underfoot. The forest thickened; the two soldiers slowed to a canter, ducking the boughs which still swung from the Queen's passing, and guiding their horses through the tangle of fallen wood and water-logged holes that made the forest floor such dangerous terrain. Half cursing, half laughing, and wholly occupied, it was some minutes before they realized that they could no longer hear the Queen's mare. The tangled underbrush showed no trace of a horse's passing. They pulled up to listen. Nothing but the distant scolding of a jay. They shouted, and got no answer. Annoyed rather than alarmed, they separated, riding one in the direction of the jay's scolding, the other still deeper into the forest.
"I'll spare you the rest," said Cei. "You know how it is. After a bit they foregathered, and by then, of course, they were alarmed. They shouted some more, and the grooms heard them, and went in and joined the search. Then after a while they heard the mare again. She was going hard, they said, and they heard her whinnying. They struck their spurs in and went after her."
"Yes?" I settled the injured arm into the freshly tied sling, and he thanked me.
"That's better. I'm grateful. Well, they found the mare three miles off, lame, and trailing a broken rein, but no sign of the Queen. They sent the women back with one of the grooms, and they went on searching. Bedwyr and I took troops out, and for the rest of the day we've been quartering the forest as best we could, but nothing." He lifted his good hand. "You know what that country's like. Where it isn't a tangle of tree and scrub that would stop a fire-breathing dragon, it's marsh where a horse or a man would sink over his head. And even in the forest