The Once and Future King (29 page)

Only one of them at a time could get a good hold of the horn, so they took it in turns to do the hauling, while the others pushed behind when the head got snagged in a heather root or a drain. It was heavy for them, even in this way, so that they had to stop every twenty yards or so, to change over.

‘When we get to the castle,’ panted Gawaine, ‘we will prop it up in the seat in the garden. Our mother is bound to walk past there, when she goes for her walk before supper. Then we will stand in front of it until she is ready, and all will suddenly step back at once, and there it will be.’

‘She will be surprised,’ said Gaheris.

When they had at last got it down from the sloping ground, there was another hitch. They found that it was no longer possible to drag it on the flat land, because the horn did not give enough purchase.

In this emergency, for it was getting near to suppertime, Gareth voluntarily ran ahead to fetch a rope. The rope was tied round what remained of the head, and thus at last, with eyes ruined, flesh bruised and separating from the bones, the muddy, bloody, heather—mangled exhibit was conveyed on its last stage to the herb garden. They heaved it to the seat, and arranged its mane as well as they could. Gareth particularly tried to prop it up so that it would give a little idea of the beauty which he remembered.

The magic queen came punctually on her walk conversing with Sir Grummore and followed by her lap dogs: Tray, Blanche and Sweetheart. She did not notice her four sons, lined up in front of the seat. They stood respectfully in a row, dirty, excited, their breasts beating with hope.

‘Now!’ cried Gawaine, and they stood aside.

Queen Morgause did not see the unicorn. Her mind was busy with other things. With Sir Grummore she passed by.

‘Mother!’ cried Gareth in a strange voice, and he ran after her, plucking at her skirt.

‘Yes, my white one? What do you want?’

‘Oh, mother. We have got you a unicorn.’

‘How amusing they are, Sir Grummore,’ she said. ‘Well, my doves, you must run along and ask for your milk.’

‘But, Mammy…’

‘Yes, yes,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Another time.’

And the Queen passed on with the puzzled knight of the Forest Sauvage, electrical and quiet. She had not noticed that her children’s clothes were ruined: had not even scolded them about that. When she found out about the unicorn later in the evening she had them whipped for it, for she had spent an unsuccessful day with the English knights.

The plain of Bedegraine was a forest of pavilions. They looked like old—fashioned bathing tents, and were every colour of the rainbow. Some of them were even striped like bathing tents, but the most part were in plain colours, yellow and green and so on. There were heraldic devices worked or stamped on the sides – enormous black eagles with two heads perhaps, or wyverns, or lances, or oak trees, or punning signs which referred to the names of the owners. For instance, Sir Kay had a black key on his tent, and Sir Ulbawes, in the opposing camp, had a couple of elbows in flowing sleeves. The proper name for them would be manchets. Then there were pennons floating from the tops of the tents, and sheaves of spears leaning against them. The more sporting barons had shields or huge copper basins outside their front doors, and all you had to do was to give a thump on one of these with the butt—end of your spear, for the baron to come out like an angry been and have a fight with you, almost before the resounding boom had died away. Sir Dinadain, who was a cheerful man, had hung a chamber—pot outside his. Then there were the people themselves. All round and about the tents there were cooks quarrelling with dogs who had eaten the mutton, and small pages writing insults on each other’s backs when they were not looking, and elegant minstrels with lutes singing tunes similar to ‘Greensleeves’, with soulful expressions, and squires with a world of innocence in their eyes, trying to sell each other spavined horses, and hurdy—gurdy men trying to earn a groat by playing on the vielle, and gypsies telling your fortune for the battle, and enormous knights with their heads wrapped in untidy turbans playing chess, and vivandières sitting on the knees of some of them, and – as for entertainment – there were joculators, gleemen, tumblers, harpers, troubadours, jesters, minstrels, tregetours, bear—dancers, egg—dancers, ladder—dancers, ballet—dancers, mountebanks, fire—eaters,
and balancers. In a way, it was like Derby Day. The tremendous forest of Sherwood stretched round the tent—forest further than the eye could see – and this was full of wild boars, warrantable stags, outlaws, dragons, and Purple Emperors. There was also an ambush in the forest but nobody was supposed to know about that.

King Arthur paid no attention to the coming battle. He sat invisible in his pavilion, at the hub of the excitement, and talked to Sir Ector or Kay or Merlyn day after day. The smaller captains were delighted to think that their King was having so many councils of war, for they could see the lamp burning inside the silk tent until all hours, and they felt sure that he was inventing a splendid plan of campaign. Actually the conversation was about different things.

‘There will be a lot of jealousy,’ said Kay. ‘You will have all these knights in this order of yours saying that they are the best one, and wanting to sit at the top of the table.’

‘Then we must have a round table with no top.’

‘But, Arthur, you could never sit a hundred and fifty knights at a round table. Let me see…’

Merlyn, who hardly ever interfered in the arguments now, but sat with his hands folded on his stomach and beamed, helped Kay out of the difficulty.

‘It would need to be about fifty yards across,’ he said. ‘You do it by 2πr.’

‘Well, then. Say it was fifty yards across. Think of all the space in the middle. It would be an ocean of wood with a thin rim of humanity. You couldn’t keep the food in the middle even, because nobody would be able to reach it.’

‘Then we can have a circular table,’ said Arthur, ‘not a round one. I don’t know what the proper word is. I mean we could have a table shaped like the rim of a cart—wheel, and the servants could walk about in the empty space, where the spokes would be. We could call them the Knights of the Round Table.’

‘What a good name!’

‘And the important thing,’ continued the King, who was getting wiser the more he thought, ‘the most important thing,
will be to catch them young. The old knights, the ones we are fighting against, will be mostly too old to learn. I think we shall be able to get them in, and keep them fighting the right way, but they will be inclined to stick to the old habits, like Sir Bruce. Grummore and Pellinore – we must have them of course – I wonder where they are now? Grummore and Pellinore will be all right, because they were always kindly in themselves. But I don’t think Lot’s people will ever really be at home with it. That is why I say we must catch them young. We must breed up a new generation of chivalry for the future. That child Lancelot who came over with You—know—who, for instance: we must get hold of kids like him. They will be the real Table.’

‘Apropos of this Table,’ said Merlyn, ‘I don’t see why I should not tell you that King Leodegrance has one which would do very well. As you are going to marry his daughter, he might be persuaded to give you the table as a wedding present.’

‘Am I going to marry his daughter?’

‘Certainly. She is called Guenever.’

‘Look, Merlyn, I don’t like knowing about the future, and I am not sure whether I believe in it…’

‘There are some things,’ said the magician, ‘which I have to tell you, whether you believe them or not. The trouble is, I can’t help feeling there is one thing which I have forgotten to tell. Remind me to warn you about Guenever another time.’

‘It confuses everybody,’ said Arthur complainingly. ‘I get muddled up with half the questions I want to ask you myself. For instance, who was my…’

‘You will have to have special Feasts,’ interrupted Kay, at ‘Pentecost and so on, when all the knights come to dinner and say what they have done. It will make them want to fight in this new way of yours, if they are going to recite about it afterwards. And Merlyn could write their names in their places by magic, and their coat armour could be engraved over their sieges. It would be grand!’

This exciting idea made the King forget his question, and the two young men sat down immediately to draw their own blazons for the magician, so that there should be no mistake
about the tinctures. While they were in the middle of the drawing Kay looked up, with his tongue between his teeth, and remarked:

‘By the way. You remember that argument we were having about aggression? Well, I have thought of a good reason for starting a war.’

Merlyn froze.

‘I would like to hear it.’

‘A good reason for starting a war is simply to have a good reason! For instance, there might be a king who had discovered a new way of life for human beings – you know, something which would be good for them. It might even be the only way of saving them from destruction. Well, if the human beings were too wicked or too stupid to accept his way, he might have to force it on them, in their own interests, by the sword.’

The magician clenched his fists, twisted his gown into screws, and began to shake all over.

‘Very interesting,’ he said in a trembling voice. ‘Very interesting. There was just such a man when I was young – an Austrian who invented a new way of life and convinced himself that he was the chap to make it work. He tried to impose his reformation by the sword, and plunged the civilized world into misery and chaos. But the thing which this fellow had over—looked, my friend, was that he had a predecessor in the reformation business, called Jesus Christ. Perhaps we may assume that Jesus knew as much as the Austrian did about saving people. But the odd thing is that Jesus did not turn the disciples into storm troopers, burn down the Temple of Jerusalem, and fix the blame on Pontius Pilate. On the contrary, he made it clear that the business of the philosophers was to make ideas
available,
and
not
to impose them on people.’

Kay looked pale but obstinate.

‘Arthur is fighting the present war,’ he said, ‘to impose his ideas on King Lot.’

The Queen’s suggestion about hunting unicorns had a curious result. The more lovelorn King Pellinore became, the more obvious it was that something would have to be done. Sir Palomides had an inspiration.

‘The royal melancholy,’ said he, ‘can only be dispelled by Questing Beast. This is the subject to which the maharajah sahib has been accustomed by lifelong habit. Yours truly has said so all along.’

‘Personally,’ said Grummore, ‘I believe the Questin’ Beast is dead. Anyway, it is in Flanders.’

‘Then we must dress up,’ said Sir Palomides. ‘We must assume the rôe of Questing Beast and be hunted ourselves.’

‘We could scarcely dress as the Beast.’

But the Saracen had run away with the idea.

‘Why not?’ he asked ‘Why not, by Jingo? Joculators assume garb of animals – as stags, goats and so forth – and dance to bells and tabor with many gyrings and circumflexions.’

‘But really Palomides, we are not joculators.’

‘Then we must learn to be so!’

‘Joculators!’

A joculator was a juggler, a low kind of minstrel, and Sir Grummore did not relish the idea at all.

‘However could we dress as the Questin’ Beast?’ he asked weakly. ‘She is a frightfully complicated animal.’

‘Describe this animal.’

‘Well, dash it all. She has a snake’s head and the body of a leopard and haunches like a lion and feet like a hart. And hang it, man, how could we make this noise in her belly, like thirty couple of hounds questin’?’

‘Yours truly will be the belly,’ replied Sir Palomides, ‘and will give tongue as follows.’

He began yodelling.

‘Hush!’ cried Sir Grummore. ‘You will wake the castle.’

‘Then it is agreed?’

‘No, it is not agreed. Never heard such nonsense in me life. Besides, she don’t make a noise like that. She makes a noise like this.’

And Sir Grummore began cackling in a tuneless alto, like thousands of wild geese on the Wash.

‘Hush! Hush!’ cried Sir Palomides.

‘I won’t hush. The noise you was makin’ was like pigs.’

The two naturalists began hooting, grunting, squawking, squealing, crowing, mooing, growling, snuffling, quacking, snarling and mewing at one another, until they were red in the face.

‘The head,’ said Sir Grummore, stopping suddenly, ‘will have to be of cardboard.’

‘Or canvas,’ said Sir Palomides. ‘The fishing populace will be in possession of canvas.’

‘We can make leather boots for hoofs.’

‘Spots can be painted on the body.’

‘It will have to button round the middle –’

‘– where we join.’

‘And you,’ added Sir Palomides generously, ‘can be the back end and do hounds. The noise is plainly stated to come from the belly.’

Sir Grummore blushed with pleasure and said gruffly in his Norman way, ‘Well. thanks, Palomides. I must say, I think that’s demned decent of you.’

‘Not at all.’

For a week King Pellinore saw hardly anything of his friends. ‘You write poems, Pellinore,’ they told him, ‘or go and sigh on the cliffs, there’s a good fellow.’ He wandered about, occasionally crying out, ‘Flanders – Glanders’ or ‘daughter – ought to,’ whenever the ideas occurred to him, while the dark Queen hung in the background.

Meanwhile, in Sir Palomides’ room, where the door was kept locked, there was such a stitching and snipping and painting and arguing as had seldom been known before.

‘My dear chap, I tell you a libbard has black spots.’

‘Puce,’ Sir Palomides said obstinately.

‘What is puce? And anyway we have not got any.’

They glared at each other with the fury of creators.

‘Try on the head.’

‘There, you’ve torn it. I said you would.’

‘Construction was of feeble nature.’

‘We must construct the thing again.’

When the reconstruction was finished, the paynim stood back to admire it.

‘Look out for the spots, Palomides. There, you’ve smudged them.’

‘A thousand pardons!’

‘You ought to look where you are goin’.’

‘Well, who put his foot through the ribs?’

On the second day there was trouble with the back end.

‘These haunches are too tight.’

‘Don’t bend over.’

‘I have to bend over, if I am the back end.’

‘They won’t split.’

‘Yes, they will.’

‘No, they won’t.’

‘Well, they have.’

‘Look out for my tail,’ said Sir Grummore on the third day. ‘You are treadin’ on it.’

‘Don’t hold so tight, Grummore. My neck is twisted.’

‘Can’t you see?’

‘No, I can’t. My neck is twisted.’

‘There goes my tail.’

There was a pause while they sorted themselves out.

‘Now, carefully this time. We must walk in step.’

‘You give the step.’

‘Left! Right! Left! Right!’

‘I think my haunches are comin’ down.’

‘If you let go of yours truly’s waist, we shall come in half.’

‘Well, I can’t hold up my haunches unless I do.’

‘There go the buttons.’

‘Damn the buttons.’

‘Yours truly told you so.’

So they sewed on buttons during the fourth day, and started again.

‘Can I practise my bayin’ now?’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘How does my bayin’ sound from inside?’

‘It sounds splendid, Grummore, splendid. Only it is strange, in a way, coming from behind, if you follow my argument.’

‘I thought it sounded muffled.’

‘It did, a bit.’

‘Perhaps it will be all right from outside.’

On the fifth day they were far advanced.

‘We ought to practise a gallop. After all, we can’t walk all the time, not when he is hunting us.’

‘Very good.’

‘When I say Go, then, Go. Ready, steady, Go!’

‘Look out. Grummore, you are butting me.’

‘Buttin’?’

‘Be careful of the bed.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Oh, dear!’

‘Confound the bed to blazes. Oh, my shins!’

‘You have burst the buttons again.’

‘Damn the buttons. I have stubbed my toe.’

‘Well, yours truly’s head has come off also.’

‘We shall have to stick to walkin’.’

‘It would be easier to gallop,’ said Sir Grummore on the sixth day, ‘if we had some music. Somethin’ like Tantivvy, you know.’

‘Well, we have not got any music.’

‘No.’

‘Could you sing out Tantivvy, Palomides, while I am bayin’?’

‘Yours truly could try.’

‘Very well, then, off we go!’

‘Tantivvy, tantivvy, tantivvy!’

‘Damn!’

‘We shall have to make the whole thing again,’ said Sir Palomides over the week—end. ‘We can still use the hoofs.’

‘I don’t suppose it will hurt so much fallin’ down out of doors – not on the moss, you know.’

‘And probably it won’t tear the canvas so badly.’

‘We will make it double strength.’

‘Yes.’

‘I am glad the hoofs will still do.’

‘By jove, Palomides, don’t he look a monster!’

‘A splendid effort this time.’

‘Pity you can’t make fire come out of his mouth, or somethin’.’

‘A danger of combustion there.’

‘Shall we try another gallop, Palomides?’

‘By all means.’

‘Push the bed in the corner, then.’

‘Look out for the buttons.’

‘If you see anythin’ we are runnin’ into, just stop, see?’

‘Yes.’

‘Keep a sharp look—out, Palomides.’

‘Right ho, Grummore.’

‘Ready, then?’

‘Ready.’

‘Off we go.’

‘That was a splendid burst, Palomides,’ exclaimed the Knight of the Forest Sauvage.

‘A noble gallop.’

‘Did you notice how I was bayin’ all the time?’

‘I could not fail to notice it, Sir Grummore.’

‘Well, well, I don’t know when I have enjoyed myself so much.’

They panted with triumph, standing amid their monster.

‘I say, Palomides, look at me swishin’ my tail!’

‘Charming, Sir Grummore. Look at me winking one of my eyes.’

‘No, no, Palomides. You look at my tail. You ought not to miss it, really.’

‘Well, if I look at you swishing, you ought to look at me winking. That is only fair.’

‘But I can’t see anythin’ from inside.’

‘As for that, Sir Grummore, yours truly can’t see so far round as the anal appendage.’

‘Now then, we will have one last go. I shall swish my tail round and round all the time, and bay like mad. It will be a frightful spectacle.’

‘And yours truly will continuously wink one optic or the other.’

‘Could we put a bit of a bound into the gallop, Palomides, every now and then, do you think? You know, a kind of prance?’

‘The prance could more naturally be effected by the back end, solo.’

‘You mean I could do it alone?’

‘Effectually.’

‘Well, I must say that is uncommonly decent of you, Palomides, to let me do the prancin’.’

‘Yours truly trusts that a modicum of caution will be exercised in the prance, to prevent delivery of uncomfortable blows to the posterior of the forequarters?’

‘Just as you say, Palomides.’

‘Boot and saddle, Sir Grummore.’

‘Tally—ho, Sir Palomides.’

‘Tantivvy, tantivvy, tantivvy, a—questin’ we will go!’

The Queen had recognized the impossible. Even in the miasma of her Gaelic mind, she had come to see that asses do not mate with pythons. It was useless to go on dramatizing her charms and talents for the benefit of these ridiculous knights – useless to go on hunting them with the tyrannous baits of what she thought was love. With a sudden turn of feeling she discovered that she hated them. They were imbeciles, as well as being the Sassenach, and she herself was a saint. She was, she discovered with a change of posture, interested in nothing but her darling boys. She was the best mother to them in the world! Her heart ached for them, her maternal bosom swelled. When Gareth
nervously brought white heather to her bedroom as an apology for being whipped, she covered him with kisses, glancing in the mirror.

He escaped from the embrace and dried his tears – partly uncomfortable, partly in rapture. The heather which he had brought was set up dramatically in a cup with no water – she was every inch the homebody – and he was free to go. He scampered from the royal chamber with the news of forgiveness, went spinning down the circular stairs like a tee—to—tum. It was a different castle to the one in which King Arthur used to scamper. A Norman would hardly have recognized it as a castle, except for the pele tower. It was a thousand years more ancient than anything the Normans knew.

This castle, through which the child was running to bring the good news of their mother’s love to his brothers, had begun, in the mists of the past, as that strange symbol of the Old Ones – a promontory fort. Driven to the sea by the volcano of history, they had turned at bay on the last peninsula. With the sea literally at their backs, on a cliffy tongue of land, they had built their single wall across the root of the tongue. The sea which was their doom had also been their last defender on every other side. There, on the promontory, the blue—painted cannibals had piled up their cyclopean wall of unmortared stones, fourteen feet high and equally thick, with terraces on the inside from which they could hurl their flints. All along the outside of the wall they had embedded thousands of sharp stones in the scraw, each stone pointing outward in a
cheval de frise
which was like a petrified hedgehog. Behind it, and behind the enormous wall, they had huddled at night in wooden shacks, together with their domestic animals. There had been heads of enemies erected on poles for decoration, and their king had built himself an underground treasure chamber which was also a subterranean passage for escape. It had led under the wall, so that even if the fort were stormed he could creep out behind the attackers. It had been a passage along which only one man could crawl at a time, and it had been constructed with a special kink in it, at which he could wait to knock a pursuer on the head, as
the latter negotiated the obstacle. The diggers of the souterrain had been executed by their own priest—king, to keep the secret of it.

All that was in an earlier millennium.

Dunlothian had grown with the slow conservancy of the Old Ones Here, with a Scandinavian conquest, had sprung up a wooden long—house – there, the original stones of the curtain wall had been pulled down to build a round tower for priests. The pele tower, with a cow—byre under the two living chambers, had come the last of all.

So it was among the untidy wreckage of centuries that Gareth scampered, looking for his brothers. It was among lean—to’s and adaptations – past ogham stones commemorating some long—dead Deag the son of No, built into a later bastion upside down. It was on the top of a wind—swept cliff purged to the bone by the airs of the Atlantic, under which the little fishing village nestled among the dunes. It was as the inheritor of a view which covered a dozen miles of rollers, and hundreds of miles of cumulus. All along the coast—line the saints and scholars of Eriu inhabited their stone igloos in holy horribleness – reciting fifty psalms in their beehives and fifty in the open air and fifty with their bodies plunged in cold water, in their loathing for the twinkling world. St Toirdealbhach was far from typical of their species.

Gareth found his brother in the store—room.

It smelt of oatmeal, ham, smoked salmon, dried cod, onions, shark oil, pickled herrings in tubs, hemp, maize, hen’s fluff, sailcloth, milk – the butter was churned there on Thursdays – seasoning pine wood, apples, herbs drying, fish glue and varnish used by the fletcher, spices from overseas, dead rat in trap, venison, seaweed, wood shavings, litter of kittens, fleeces from the mountain sheep not yet sold, and the pungent smell of tar.

Gawaine, Agravaine and Gaheris were sitting on the fleeces, eating apples. They were in the middle of an argument.

‘It is not our business,’ said Gawaine stubbornly.

Agravaine whined: ‘But it is our business. It is at us more than anybody, and it is not right.’

‘How dare you to say that our mother is not right?’

‘She is not.’

‘She is.’