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If someone were to see him now, they’d have a hard time recognising him as Sir Lancelot, noble knight of the Round Table. He’s long since lost his armor, parts of it too damaged and parts of it just impractical for the kind of life he led now. No more castles with fair maidens and belligerent kings to sleep in for the night, Gawain’s luxurious pavilion tents, Camelot’s simple but comfortable rooms. He is wearing a sort of short sleeved tunic and a pair of loose breeches that leaves his lower legs exposed. All over his sunburned arms and legs are the vestiges of old cuts, scrapes and gashes.
He’s been roaming on the open road for a very long time, he doesn’t know how long. He seldom meets anyone these days, but sometimes people ask about it. By now, everyone seems to come from a different world than Lancelot's. Lancelot's world had been towers, ramparts and moats, dense and luscious forest with villainous knights and mysterious creatures lurking behind every corner of roads that always seemed to lead where he wanted them to. Now, it’s dusty roads, blisters on his feet and sun burning the back of his head like a brand.
He used to be busy, he remembers. Back then, before everything happened and everything ended, he also roamed, but a purpose always seemed to find him. Places to be, villains to slay, maidens to help. Now, he is untethered. No kings to answer to, no quest to embark on. He wondered occasionally if this was the feeling hermits sought. Nothing about his wanderings feels particularly religious to him. They do not feel like anything at all. He is walking, step after step. One, two. Left, right. Careful, the path is exposed. Smoke in the distance, better go somewhere else.
At first, he had revisited places from before. Never got too close, always stayed in the outskirts, but it was a strange sort of comfort to see them there. Everything had ended for him, but some things continued. Never Camelot, of course. He couldn’t bring himself to get so close to the epicenter. Then, day after day, he got further and further, eventually he reached landscapes he couldn’t recognise. The world changed around him, and he barely registered it. He was alone after all, and he never changed anymore.
One day, in those late weeks of spring when flowers get blown off trees by cruel dry winds, and the sun shines with an intensity that makes the air tremble in fear, a sensation of familiarity starts tickling the back of his head. He starts to recognise some of the curves of the landscape, gentle hills and smooth rocks. He has inadvertently gone back. The shapes are familiar, but not what fills them. On the old frame, an entirely new landscape has grown.
Memories start to emerge in long closed cabinets of Lancelot’s mind, the dust of disuse lodging into his parched throat, making him cough. He wants to turn back. He has lived so long without them, his mind felt cluttered and overwhelming. He tries to sit down but his legs don’t let him. He feels drops of liquid running down his dirty, dry face. His tongue darts out to catch them. They taste salty. He suddenly remembers tears, and what causes them. A single thought emerges from the rubble of his mind: he has to keep walking. He has to go back to Camelot. The time has come.
Slowly, painfully, he picks up his pace again. The motion of walking is simple and comforting. One, two. Left, right. He looks up, searching for the towers, ramparts and moats of his past. In his mind, he can see them clear as day, looming over him as the road snaked closer and closer to the place he had called home. Birds flew and dove around the towers, nested in the merlons, chirping and screeching all the while. Laughter, yells and sounds of metal clanging used to make him feel overwhelmed as he came back from a quest, dreading the hustle and bustle of Camelot.
Now, though, the silence is deafening. Search as much as he tries, no looming towers and sturdy ramparts welcome Lancelot back home. Shrubs, geckos, crickets and the occasional old gnarled tree are his sole companions. He’s getting near, though. The certainty of muscle memory settles in his bones. Sure enough, after a bend in the road, there it is in the distance: the hill where Camelot once stood.
On the hill, and all around it, what Lancelot finds is the ruins of a castle that was once great. Only the base of a couple towers are still standing. As for the rest, only the foundations remain. Moss, ivy and all manner of vegetation thrive like scavengers on the carcass of a dead animal. Unable to stop walking, Lancelot continues to approach this stone corpse.
This place, the heart of Lancelot's youth, looks like the remains of civilisations long gone that he used to find in isolated forests and moors, back when– before. It looks centuries and centuries old. How much time has really passed? A few years, maybe? A decade? Lancelot brings his hands to his face. Surely, if so many years have gone by, he’d be able to feel it on himself, he’d have to have changed somehow. But his face feels the same as it always felt.
He wanders aimlessly through the ruins at the foot of the hill, almost in a trance. He keeps trying to fish out of his mind the memories of what every place once looked like, finding it harder every moment that passes. The same building seems to him as if it could have looked a number of ways when it was still standing, or maybe like it was never there at all. And then, slowly but surely, all he can imagine is ruins.
Walking to the opposite side of the hill, he finds a small church, with a small graveyard next to it. While the church, too, is covered in ivy, and the graveyard is mossy and unkempt, they still look in much better condition than anything else surrounding them. There didn’t use to be one, he thinks. Services were held in a little chapel inside the castle.
He doesn't think he ever attended, but he remembers his son, for he did use to have one, looking gangly and awkward as he sat on the tiny wooden pews. He had a serious face, he remembers, soft in the way expertly carved marble can look soft. Lancelot rubs his eyes roughly, trying to get the picture out of his head, to protect it from the ivy that’s taking over in there.
He had been to the crypt only once, on the king’s insistence. It was dark and damp, and the torchlight only made it look less inviting. The king, prone to occasional fits of morbidity, was explaining to him the sort of funeral he wished for. Lancelot thought at the time that when his day would come he’d want to just be left in the middle of nowhere, maybe by a lake, like a weary traveller taking an afternoon nap. But that day hadn’t come yet.
The wind blows through the grass in the graveyard, making the headstones look as though they’re dancing along with it. Lancelot walks through the rows of graves, spotting names he doesn’t recognise, and names that seem familiar but not enough to remember. Some graves don’t have any name on the headstone, some don’t even have a headstone. Some of these people, Lancelot thinks, he’s probably killed himself, but he can’t remember who.
At the end of the path that runs through the graveyard, two graves stand taller than the rest. The headstones, devoid of any decoration, simply say “King Arthur”, “Queen Guinevere”. Lancelot holds out his hand to trace the letters carved into the stone and feels his knees buckling, but something pushes him to keep walking along the graveyard wall.
The names on the headstones that stand alongside it feel a lot more familiar. “Gareth Beaumains”, “Agravaine of Orkney”, “Gaheris of Orkney”. He can’t remember their faces anymore, but he remembers the feeling of flesh against metal, the thud of bodies hitting the floor.
Past those, another identical headstone reads “Gawain of Orkney”. Lancelot had buried him right on the edge of that battlefield, on the other side of the sea. He had dulled his sword digging a deep hole in the ground, and tenderly laid him there. He covered it in soil and planted some wildflowers over it. Then, he had started walking, and never stopped since. He wonders what he would find were he to dig up this grave.
All the way at the end of the graveyard wall, in a shady corner, a lone grave stands. Lancelot gets closer to it, and reads the name on the headstone. “Lancelot du Lac”. He stops walking. He feels dizzy, like all the ivy of the castle and the church has taken over his skull and is now trying to make more room for itself. Bracing himself on the headstone, he slowly sits down.
He leans his back on the headstone and looks up. A skinny and twisted tree that grows outside the graveyard shades him with one of its branches, and the hot dry wind blows what few flowers had grown on it down onto Lancelot's tired body. He closes his eyes and sees the sunlight at the edge of his eyelids. The wind carries voices from the top of the hill, where Camelot’s Great Hall had once stood. A group of children is chattering excitedly, while an adult talks to them in a language that feels familiar to Lancelot, but not enough to understand.