silver

... so be gentle if I'm missing something obvious.

That said, I've read only one book by Zelazny, Lord of Light, and that was I was 16 or 17. I thought it a pretentious bunch of garbage then, and hindsight has never convinced me to re-visit that analysis, no matter how many Hugos the guy amassed.

It's my (semi) considered opinion that switching between the vernacular and high-fantasy is a difficult trick to pull off. Tolkien (of all people!) managed it very well, but its presence is most often indicative of a lazy hack. (Jesus! I really didn't think much of Lord of Light, did I? That almost certainly means I got it completely wrong or totally right.)

Lord of Light (yes, as I hazily recall) was the Hindu pantheon turned into silly science fiction superheroes. Your final paragraph suggests to me that he tried to do the same thing with the Arthur legends in Guns of Avalon.

Which title, incidently, is almost certainly a play on the title of a 1961 World War II movie called The Guns of Navarone, which might, possibly, say something about Zelazny's intentions.