The Once and Future King (33 page)

The remaining infantry, by his orders, were to be turned off like so many cattle, to stray and save their naked legs however they could. The knights were to band themselves into a single phalanx to resist the charges, and any man who ran away thereafter was to be shot at once for cowardice.

In the morning, almost before they were formed, Arthur was on them. In conformity with his own tactics, he sent only a
small troop of forty spears to start the work. These men, a picked striking force of gallants, resumed the onslaughts of the previous afternoon. They came down at a hand gallop, smashed through the rank or broke it, re—formed, and came again. The dogged regiment withdrew before them, sullen, dispirited, the fight knocked out of it.

At noon the three kings of the allies struck with their full force, in a final blow. There was the moment of intermingling with a noise like thunder, the spectacle of broken lances sailing in the air while horses pawed that element before they went down backward. There was a yell that shook the forest. After it, on the trodden turf with its hoof—marks and kicked sods and a débris of offensive weapons, there was an unnatural silence. There were people riding about aimlessly at a walk. But there were no longer any organized traces of the chivalry of the Gael.

Merlyn met the King as he rode back from Sorhaute – a magician rather tired, and still unmounted. He was dressed in the infantry habergeon in which he had insisted on fighting. He brought the news that the clans on foot had offered their capitulation.

In the September moonlight several weeks later, King Pellinore was sitting on the cliff top with his fiancée, staring out to sea. Soon they were setting off for England, to be married. His arm was about her waist and his ear was pressed to the top of her head. They were unconscious of the world.

‘But Dornar is such a funny name,’ the King was saying. “I can’t think how you thought of it.’

‘But you thought of it, Pellinore.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes. Aglovale, Percivale, Lamorak and Dornar.’

‘They will be like cherubs,’ said the King fervently. ‘Like cherubim! What are cherubim?’

Behind them the ancient castle loomed against the stars. There was a faint noise of shouting from the top of the Round Tower, where Grummore and Palomides were arguing with the Questing Beast. She was still in love with her counterfeit, and still kept the castle in a state of siege – which had only been broken for a few hours on the day of Lot’s return with his defeated army. It had been a surprise for the English knights to learn that they had been at war with Orkney all the time, but it was too late to do anything about it, since the war was over. Now everybody was inside, the drawbridge was permanently up, and Glatisant lay in the moonlight at the foot of the tower, her head gleaming like silver. Pellinore had refused to have her killed.

Merlyn arrived one afternoon in the course of his northern walking tour, wearing a haversack and a pair of monstrous boots. He was sleek and snowy and shining, like an eel preparing for its nuptial journey to the Sargasso Sea, for the time of Nimue was at hand. But he was absent—minded, unable to remember the one thing which he ought to have told his pupil, and he listened to their difficulties with an impatient ear.

‘Excuse me,’ they shouted from the top of the wall, as the magician stood outside, ‘but it’s about the Questin’ Beast. The Queen of Lothian and Orkney is in a frightful temper about her.’

‘Are you sure it is about the Beast?’

‘Certain, my dear fellow. You see, she has us besieged.’

‘We dressed up,’ bawled Sir Palomides miserably. ‘as a sort of Beast ourselves, respected sir, and she saw us coming into the castle. There are signs, ahem, of ardent affection. Now this creature will not go away, because she believes her mate to be inside, and it is of a great unsafety to lower the drawbridge.’

‘You had better explain to her. Stand on the battlements and explain the mistake.’

‘Do you think she will understand?’

‘After all,’ the magician said, ‘she is a magic beast. It seems possible.’

But the explanation was a failure – she looked at them as if she thought they were lying.

‘I say, Merlyn! Don’t go yet.’

‘I have to go,’ he said absently. ‘I have to do something somewhere, but I can’t remember what it is. Meanwhile I shall have to carry on with my walking tour. I am to meet my master Bleise in North Humberland, so that he can write down the chronicles of the battle, and then we are to have a little wild—goose watching, and after that – well, I can’t remember.’

‘But, Merlyn, the Beast would not believe!’

‘Never mind.’ His voice was vague and troubled. ‘Can’t stop. Sorry. Apologize to Queen Morgause for me, will you, and say I was asking after her health?’

He began to revolve on his toes, preparatory to vanishing. Not much of his walking tour was done on foot.

‘Merlyn, Merlyn! Wait a bit!’

He reappeared for a moment, saying in a cross voice: ‘Well, what is it?’

‘The Beast will not believe us. What are we to do?’

He frowned.

‘Psycho—analyse her,’ he said eventually, beginning to spin.

‘But, Merlyn, wait! How are we to do this thing?’

‘The usual method.’

‘But what is it?’ they cried in despair.

He disappeared completely, his voice remaining in the air.

‘Just find out what her dreams are and so on. Explain the facts of life. But not too much of Freud.’

After that, as a background to the felicity of King Pellinore – who refused to bother with trivial problems – Grummore and Palomides had to do their best.

‘Well, you see,’ Sir Grummore was shouting, ‘when a hen lays an egg…’

Sir Palomides interrupted with an explanation about pollen and stamens.

Inside the castle, in the royal chamber of the Pele Tower, King Lot and his consort were laid in the double bed. The king was asleep, exhausted by the effort of writing his memoirs about the war. He had no particular reason for staying awake. Morgause was sleepless.

Tomorrow she was going to Carlion for Pellinore’s wedding. She was going, as she had explained to her husband, in a manner of a messenger, to plead for his pardon. She was taking the children with her.

Lot was angry about the journey and wished to forbid it, but she knew how to deal with that.

The Queen drew herself silently out of the bed, and went to her coffer. She had been told about Arthur since the army returned – about his strength, charm, innocence and generosity. His splendour had been obvious, even through the envy and suspicion of those he had conquered. Also there had been talk about a girl called Lionore, the daughter of the Earl of Sanam, with whom the young man was supposed to be having an affair. The Queen opened the coffer in the darkness and stood near the moonlit patch from the window, holding a strip of something in her hands. It was like a tape.

The strip was a less cruel piece of magic than the black cat had been, but more gruesome. It was called the Spancel – after the rope with which domestic animals were hobbled – and there were several of them in the secret coffers of the Old Ones. They were a piseog rather than a great magic. Morgause had got it from the body of a soldier which had been brought home by her husband, for burial in the Out Isles.

It was a tape of human skin, cut from the silhouette of the dead man. That is to say, the cut had been begun at the right shoulder, and the knife – going carefully in a double slit so as to make a tape – had gone down the outside of the right arm, round the outer edge of each finger as if along the seams of a glove, and up on the inside of the arm to the armpit. Then it had gone down the side of the body, down the leg and up it to the crutch, and so on until it had completed the circuit of
the corpse’s outline, at the shoulder from which it had started. It made a long ribbon.

The way to use a Spancel was this. You had to find the man you loved while he was asleep. Then you had to throw it over his head without waking him, and tie it in a bow. If he woke while you were doing this, he would be dead within the year. If he did not wake until the operation was over, he would be bound to fall in love with you.

Queen Morgause stood in the moonlight, drawing the Spancel through her fingers.

The four children were awake too, but they were not in their bedroom. They had listened on the stairs during the royal dinner, so they knew that they were off to England with their mother.

They were in the tiny Church of the Men – a chapel as ancient as Christianity in the islands, though it was scarcely twenty feet square. It was built of unmortared stones, like the great wall of the keep, and the moonlight came through its single unglazed window to fall on the stone altar. The basin for holy water, on which the moonlight fell, was scooped out of the living stone, and it had a stone lid cut from a flake, to match it.

The Orkney children were kneeling in the home of their ancestors. They were praying that they might be true to their loving mother – that they might be worthy of the Cornwall feud which she had taught them – and that they might never forget the misty land of Lothian where their father reigned.

Outside the window the thin moon stood upright in a deep sky, like the paring of a finger—nail for magic, and against the sky the weather vane of the carrion crow with arrow in mouth pointed its arrow to the south.

Fortunately for Sir Palomides and Sir Grummore, the Questing Beast saw reason at the last moment, before the cavalcade set out – otherwise they would have had to stay in Orkney and miss the marriage altogether. Even as it was, they had to stay up all night. She recovered quite suddenly.

The drawback was that she transferred her affection to the successful analyst – to Palomides – as so often happens in psycho—analysis – and now she refused to take any further interest in her early master. King Pellinore, not without a few sighs for the good old days, was forced to resign his rights in her to the Saracen. This is why, although Malory clearly tells us that only a Pellinore could catch her, we always find her being pursued by Sir Palomides in the later parts of the Morte d’Arthur. In any case, it makes very little difference who could catch her, because nobody ever did.

The long march southwards towards Carlion, with litters swaying and the mounted escort jogging under flapping pennoncels, was exciting for everybody. The litters themselves were interesting. They consisted of ordinary carts with a kind of flag—staff at each end. Between the staffs a hammock was slung, in which the jolts were hardly felt. The two knights rode behind the royal conveyances, delighted at being able to get out of the castle and see the marriage after all. St Toirdealbhach followed with Mother Morlan, so that it would be a double wedding. The Questing Beast brought up the rear, keeping a tight eye on Palomides, for fear of being let down once again.

All the saints came out of their beehives to see them off. All the Fomorians, Fir Bolg, Tuatha de Danaan, Old People and others waved to them without the least suspicion from cliffs, currachs, mountains, bogs and shell—mounds. All the red deer and unicorns lined the high tops to bid good—bye. The terns came with their forked tails from the estuary, squeaking
away as if intent upon imitating an embarkation scene on the wireless – the white—bottomed wheatears and pipits flitted along beside them from whin to whin – the eagles, peregrines, ravens and chuffs made circles over them in the air – the peat smoke followed them as if anxious to make one last curl in the tips of their nostrils – the ogham stones and souterrains and promontory forts exhibited their pre—historic masonry in a blaze of sunlight – the sea—trout and salmon put their gleaming heads out of the water – the glens, mountains and heather—shoulders of the most beautiful country in the world joined the general chorus – and the soul of the Gaelic world said to the boys in the loudest of fairy voices: Remember Us!

If the march was exciting for the children, the metropolitan glories of Carlion were enough to take their breath away. Here, round the King’s castle, there were streets – not just one street – and castles of dependent barons, and monasteries, chapels, churches, cathedrals, markets, merchants’ houses. There were hundreds of people in the streets, all dressed in blue or red or green or any bright colour, with shopping baskets over their arms, or driving hissing geese before them, or hurrying hither and thither in the livery of some great lord. There were bells ringing, clocks smiting in belfries, standards floating – until the whole air above them seemed to be alive. There were dogs and donkeys and palfreys in caparison and priests and farm wagons – whose wheels creaked like the day of judgment – and booths which sold gilt gingerbread, and shops where the finest bits of armour in the very latest fashions were displayed. There were silk merchants and spice merchants and jewellers. The shops had painted trade signs hung over them, like the inn signs which we have today. There were servitors carousing outside wine shops, and old ladies haggling over eggs, and itinerant cads carrying cages of hawks for sale, and portly aldermen with gold chains, and brown ploughmen with hardly any clothes on except a few bits of leather, and leashes of greyhounds, and strange Eastern men selling parrots, and pretty ladies mincing along in high dunces’ caps with veils floating from the top of
them, and perhaps a page in front of the lady, carrying a prayer book, if she was going to church.

Carlion was a walled town, so that this excitement was surrounded by a battlement which seemed to go on for ever and ever. The wall had towers every two hundred yards, and four great gates as well. When you were approaching the town from across the plain, you could see the castle keeps and church spires springing out of the wall in a clump – like flowers growing in a pot.

King Arthur was delighted to see his old friends again, and to hear of Pellinore’s engagement. He was the first knight he had taken a fancy to, when he was a small boy in the Forest Sauvage, and he decided to give the dear fellow a marriage of unexampled splendour. The cathedral of Carlion was booked for it, and no trouble was spared that a good time should be had by all. The pontifical nuptial high mass was celebrated by such a galaxy of cardinals and bishops and nuncios that there seemed to be no part of the immense church which was not teeming with violet and scarlet and incense and little boys ringing silver bells. Sometimes a boy would rush at a bishop and ring a bell at him. Sometimes a nuncio would pounce on a cardinal and cense him all over. It was like a battle of flowers. Thousands of candles blazed before the gorgeous altars. In every direction the blunt, accustomed, holy fingers were spreading little tablecloths, or holding up books, or blessing each other thoroughly, or soaking each other with Holy Water, or reverently displaying God to the people. The music was heavenly, both Gregorian and Ambrosian, and the church was packed. There were monks and friars and abbots of every description, standing about in sandals among the knights, whose armour flashed by candle—light. There was even a Franciscan bishop, wearing grey, with a red hat. The copes and mitres were almost all of solid gold crusted with diamonds, and there was such a putting of them on and taking of them off that the whole cathedral rustled. As for the Latin, it was talked at such a speed that the rafters rang with genitive plurals – and there was such a prelatical issuing of admonitions,
exhortations and benedictions that it was a wonder the whole congregation did not go to heaven on the spot. Even the Pope, who was as keen as anybody that the thing should go with a swing, had kindly sent a number of indulgences for everybody he could think of.

After the marriage came the wedding feast. King Pellinore and his Queen – who had stood hand in hand throughout the previous ceremony, with St Toirdealbhach and Mother Morlan behind them, quite dazzled with candle—light and incense and aspersion – were propped up in the place of honour and served by Arthur himself on bended knee. You can imagine how charmed Mother Morlan was. There was peacock pie, jellied eels, Devonshire cream, curried porpoise, iced fruit salad, and two thousand side dishes. There were speeches, songs, healths, and bumpers. A special courier arrived at full speed from North Humberland, and delivered a message to the bridegroom. He said, ‘Best wishes from Merlyn Stop. The present is under the throne Stop. Love to Aglovale, Percivale, Lamorak, Dornar.’

When the excitement over the message had died down, and the wedding present had been found, some round games were immediately arranged for the younger members of the party. In these a small page of the King’s household excelled. He was a son of Arthur’s ally at Bedegraine – King Ban of Benwick – and his name was Lancelot. There was bobbing for apples, shovel—board, titter—totter, and a puppet or motion play called
Mac and the Shepherds
, which made everybody laugh. St Toirdealbhach disgraced himself by stunning one of the fatter bishops with his shillelagh, during an argument about the Bull called Laudabiliter. Finally, at a late hour, the party broke up after a feeling rendering of
Auld Lang Syne.
King Pellinore was sick, and the new Queen Pellinore put him to bed, explaining that he was over—excited.

Far away in North Humberland, Merlyn jumped out of bed. They had been out at dawn and sunset to watch the geese, and he had gone to his rest very tired. But suddenly he had
remembered it in his sleep – the simplest thing! It was Arthur’s
mother’s
name which he had forgotten to mention in the confusion! There he had been, chattering away about Uther Pendragon and Round Tables and battles and Guenever and sword sheaths and things past and things to come – but he had forgotten the most important thing of all.

Arthur’s mother was Igraine – that very Igraine who had been captured at Tintagil, the one that the Orkney children had been talking about in the Round Tower at the beginning of this book. Arthur had been begotten on the night when Uther Pendragon burst into her castle. Since Uther naturally could not marry her until she was out of mourning for the Earl, the boy had been born too soon. That was why Arthur had been sent away to be brought up by Sir Ector. Not a soul had known where he was sent, except for Merlyn and Uther – and now Uther was dead. Even Igraine had not known.

Merlyn stood swaying in his bare feet on the cold floor. If only he had spun himself to Carlion at once, before it was too late! But the old man was tired and muddled with his backsight, and dreams were in his noddle. He thought it would do in the morning – could not remember whether he was in the future or the past. He put the veined hand blindly towards the bedclothes, the image of Nimue already weaving itself in his sleepy brain. He tumbled in. The beard went under the covering, the nose into the pillow. Merlyn was asleep.

King Arthur sat back in the Great Hall, which was empty. A few of his favourite knights had been taking their night—cap with him, but now he was alone. It had been a tiring day, although he had reached the full strength of his youth, and he leaned his head against the back of his throne, thinking about the events of the marriage. He had been fighting, on and off, ever since he had come to be King by drawing the sword out of the stone, and the anxiety of these campaigns had grown him into a splendid fellow. At last it looked as if he might have peace. He thought of the joys of peace, of being married himself one day as Merlyn had prophesied, and of having a home. He
thought of Nimue at this, and then of any beautiful woman. He fell asleep.

He woke with a start, to find a black—haired, blue—eyed beauty in front of him, who was wearing a crown. The four wild children from the north were standing behind their mother, shy and defiant, and she was folding up a tape.

Queen Morgause of the Out Isles had stayed away from the feasting on purpose – had chosen her moment with the utmost care. This was the first time that the young King had seen her, and she knew that she was looking her best.

It is impossible to explain how these things begin. Perhaps the Spancel had a strength in it. Perhaps it was because she was twice his age, so that she had twice the power of his weapons. Perhaps it was because Arthur was always a simple fellow, who took people at their own valuation easily. Perhaps it was because he had never known a mother of his own, so that the rôle of mother love, as she stood with her children behind her, took him between wind and water.

Whatever the explanation may have been, the Queen of Air and Darkness had a baby by her half—brother nine months later. It was called Mordred. And this, as Merlyn drew it later, was what the magician called its pied—de—grue:

Even if you have read it twice, like something in a history lesson, this pedigree is a vital part of the tragedy of King Arthur. It is why Sir Thomas Malory called his very long book the Death of Arthur. Although nine—tenths of the story seems to be about knights jousting and quests for the Holy Grail and
things of that sort, the narrative is a whole, and it deals with the reasons why the young man came to grief at the end. It is the tragedy, the Aristotelian and comprehensive tragedy, of sin coming home to roost. That is why we have to take note of the parentage of Arthur’s son Mordred, and to remember, when the time comes, that the king had slept with his own sister. He did not know he was doing so, and perhaps it may have been due to her, but it seems, in tragedy, that innocence is not enough.

EXPLICIT LIBER SECUNDUS