The Once and Future King (66 page)

Anguish of Ireland had once dreamed of a wind which blew down all their castles and towns – and this one was conspiring to do it. It was blowing round Benwick Castle on all the organ stops. The noises it made sounded like inchoate masses of silk being pulled through trees, as we pull hair through a comb – like heaps of sand pouring on fine sand from a scoop – like gigantic linens being torn – like drums in distant battle – like an endless snake switching through the world’s undergrowth of trees and houses – like old men sighing, and women howling and wolves running. It whistled, hummed, throbbed, boomed in the chimneys. Above all, it sounded like a live creature: some monstrous, elemental being, wailing its damnation. It was Dante’s wind, bearing lost lovers and cranes: Sabbathless Satan, toiling and turmoiling.

In the western ocean it harried the sea flat, lifting water bodily out of water and carrying it as spume. On dry land it made the trees lean down before it. The gnarled thorn trees, which had grown in double trunks, groaned one trunk against the other with plaintive screams. In the whipping and snapping branches of the trees, the birds rode it out head to wind, their bodies horizontal, their neat claws turned to anchors. The peregrines in the cliffs sat stoically, their mutton—chop whiskers made streaky by the rain and the wet feathers standing upright on their heads. The wild geese beating out to their night’s rest in the twilight scarcely won a yard a minute against the streaming air, their tumultuary cries blown backward from them, so that they had to be past before you heard them, although they were only a few feet up. The mallard and widgeon, coming in high with the gale behind, were gone before they had arrived.

Under the doors of the castle the piercing blasts tortured the flapping rushes of the floors. They boo’ed in the tubes of the corkscrew stairs, rattled the wooden shutters, whined shrilly
through the shot—windows, stirred the cold tapestries in frigid undulations, searched for backbones. The stone towers thrilled under them, trembling bodily like the bass string of musical instruments. The slates flew off and shattered themselves with desultory crashes.

Bors and Bleoberis were crouching over a bright fire, to which the bitter wind seemed to have given the property of throwing out light without heat. Even the fire seemed frozen, like a painted one. Their minds were baffled by the plague of air.

‘But why did they go so quickly?’ asked Bors complainingly. ‘I never knew a siege to be raised like that before. They raised it overnight. They went as if they had been blown away.’

‘They must have had bad news. Something must have gone wrong in England.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘If they had decided to forgive Lancelot, they would have sent a message.’

‘It does seem strange, sailing away at a moment’s notice, without saying anything.’

‘Do you think there can have been a revolt in Cornwall, or in Wales, or in Ireland?’

‘There are always the Old Ones,’ agreed Bleoberis numbly.

‘I don’t think it could be a revolt. I think the King was taken ill, and had to be carried home quickly. Or Gawaine might have been taken ill. That blow which Lancelot gave him the second time, perhaps it perched his brain—pan?’

‘Perhaps.’

Bors banged the fire.

‘To go off like that, and never say a word!’

‘Why doesn’t Lancelot do something?’

‘What can he do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘The King has banished him.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then there is nothing to do.’

‘All the same,’ said Bleoberis, ‘I wish he would do something.’

A door opened with a clatter at the bottom of the turret
stairs. The tapestries swirled out, the rushes stood on end, the fire gushed smoke, and Lancelot’s voice, embedded in the wind, shouted: ‘Bors! Bleoberis! Demaris!’

‘Here.’

‘Where?’

‘Up here.’

As the distant door closed, silence returned to the room. The rushes lay down again, and Lancelot’s feet sounded clearly on the stone steps, where before it had been difficult to hear his shout. He came in hastily, carrying a letter.

‘Bors. Bleoberis. I have been looking for you.’

They had stood up.

‘A letter has come from England. The messengers were blown ashore, five miles up the coast. We shall have to go at once.’

‘To England?’

‘Yes, yes. To England, of course. I have told Lionel to act as transport officer, and I want you, Bors, to look after fodder. We shall have to wait until the gale blows itself out.’

‘Why are we going?’ asked Bors.

‘You should tell us the news…’

‘News?’ he said vaguely. ‘There is no time for that. I will tell you in the boat. Here, read the letter.’

He handed it to Bors, and was gone before they could reply.

‘Well!’

‘Read what it says.’

‘I don’t even know who it is from.’

‘Perhaps it will say in the letter.’

Lancelot reappeared before they had taken their researches further than the date.

‘Bleoberis,’ he said, ‘I forgot. I want you to look after the horses. Here, give me the writing. If you two start spelling it out, you will be reading all night.’

‘What does it say?’

‘Most of the news came by the messenger. It seems that Mordred has revolted against Arthur, proclaimed himself the Leader of England, and proposed to Guenever.’

‘But she is married already,’ protested Bleoberis.

‘That was why the siege was broken up. Then, it appears, Mordred raised an army in Kent to oppose the King’s landing. He had given it out that Arthur was dead. He is besieging the Queen in the Tower of London, and using cannon.’

‘Cannon!’

‘He met Arthur at Dover and fought a battle to prevent the landing. It was a bad engagement, half on sea and half on land, but the King won. He won to land.’

‘Who wrote the letter?’

Lancelot suddenly sat down.

‘It is from Gawaine, from poor Gawaine! He is dead.’

‘Dead!’

‘How can he write…’ began Bleoberis.

‘It is a dreadful letter. Gawaine was a good man. All you people who forced me to fight him, you didn’t see what a heart he had inside.’

‘Read it,’ suggested Bors impatiently.

‘It seems that a cut which I gave him on the head was a dangerous one. He never ought to have travelled. But he was lonely and miserable and he had been betrayed. His last brother had turned traitor. He insisted on going back to help the King – and, in the landing battle, he tried to strike his blow. Unfortunately he was clubbed on the old wound, and died of it a few hours later.’

‘I don’t see why you should be disturbed.’

‘Listen to the letter.’

Lancelot carried it to the window and fell silent, examining the writing. There was something touching about it, the hand being so unlike its author. Gawaine had hardly been the sort of person you thought of as a writer. Indeed it would have seemed more natural if he had been illiterate, like most of the others. Yet here, instead of the spiky Gothic then in use, was the lovely old Gaelic minuscule, as neat and round and small as when he had learned it from some ancient saint in dim Dunlothian. He had written so unfrequently since, that the art had retained its beauty. It was an old—maid’s hand, or an old—fashioned boy’s, sitting with his feet hooked round the legs
of a stool and his tongue out, writing carefully. He had carried this innocent precision, these dainty demoded cusps, through misery and passion to old age. It was as if a bright boy had stepped out of the black armour: a small boy with a drop on the end of his nose, his feet bare with blue toes, a root of tangle in the thin bundle of carrots which were his fingers.

‘Unto Sir Lancelot, flower of all noble knights that ever I heard of or saw by my days: I, Sir Gawaine, King Lot’s son of Orkney, sister’s son unto the noble King Arthur, send thee greetings.

‘And I will that all the world wit that I, Sir Gawaine, Knight of the Round Table, sought my death at thy hands and not through thy deserving, but it was mine own seeking. Wherefore I beseech thee, Sir Lancelot, to return again unto this realm and see my tomb, and pray some prayer more or less for my soul.

‘And this same day that I wrote this cedle, I was hurt to the death in the same wound which I had on thy hand, Sir Lancelot – for of a more nobler man might I not be slain.

‘Also, Sir Lancelot, for all the love that ever was betwixt us…’

Lancelot stopped reading and threw the letter on the table.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘I can’t go on. He urges me to come with speed, to help the King against his brother: his last relation. Gawaine loved his family, Bors, and in the end he was left with none. Yet he wrote to forgive me. He even said that it was his own fault. God knows, he was a right good brother.’

‘What are we to do about the King?’

‘We must get to England as quickly as we can. Mordred has retreated to Canterbury, where he offers a fresh battle. It may be over by now. This news has been delayed by storm. Everything depends on speed.’

Bleoberis said: ‘I will go and look to the horses. When do we sail?’

‘Tomorrow. Tonight. Now. When the wind drops. Be quick with them.’

‘Good.’

‘And you, Bors, the fodder.’

‘Yes.’

Lancelot followed Bleoberis to the stairs, but turned in the doorway.

‘The Queen is besieged,’ he said. ‘We must get her out.’

‘Yes.’

Bors, left alone with the wind, picked up the letter with curiosity. He tilted it in the failing light, admiring the zed—like g, the curly b, and the curved t, like the blade of a plough. Each tiny line was the furrow it threw up, sweet as the new earth. But the furrow wandered towards the end. He turned it about, observing the brown signature. He spelled out the conclusion – making speaking movements with his mouth, while the rushes tapped and the smoke puffed and the wind howled.

‘And at this date my letter was written, but two hours and a half afore my death, written with mine own hand, and so subscribed with part of my heart’s blood.

Gawaine of Orkney’

He spelled the name out twice, and tapped his teeth. Gawaine. ‘I suppose,’ he said out loud, doubtfully, ‘they would have pronounced it Cuchullain in the North. You can’t tell with ancient languages.’

Then he put down the letter, went over to the dreary window, and began humming a tune called
Brume, brume on hil
, whose words have been lost to us in the wave of time. Perhaps they were like the modern ones, which say that

Still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland,

And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.

The same wind of sorrow whistled round the King’s pavilion at Salisbury. Inside there was a silent calm, after the riot of the open. It was a sumptuous interior, what with the royal tapestries – Uriah was there, still in the article of bisection – and the couch strewn deep with furs, and the flashing candles. It was a marquee rather than a tent. The King’s mail gleamed dully on a rack at the back. An ill—bred falcon, who was subject to the vice of screaming, stood hooded and motionless on a perch like a parrot’s, brooding in some ancestral nightmare. A greyhound, as white as ivory, couching on its hocks and elbows, its tail curved into the bony sickle of the greyhound, watched the old man with the doe—soft eyes of pity. A superb enamelled chess—board, with pieces of jasper and crystal, stood at checkmate beside the bed. There were papers everywhere. They covered the secretary’s table, the reading desk, the stools – dreary papers of government, still bravely persevered in – of law, still to be codified – of commissariat and of armament and of orders for the day. A large ledger lay open at the note of some wretched defaulter, William atte Lane, who had been condemned to be hanged,
suspendatur
, for looting. On the margin, in the secretary’s neat hand, was the laconic epitaph ‘susp.’, suitable to the mood of tragedy. Covering the reading desk there were endless piles of petitions and memorials, all annotated with the royal decision and signature. On those to which the King had agreed, he had written laboriously ‘
Le roy le veult.
’ The rejected petitions were marked with the courtly evasion always used by royalty: ‘
Le roy s’advisera.
’ The reading desk and its seat were made in one piece, and there the King himself sat drooping. His head lay among the papers, scattering them. He looked as if he were dead – he nearly was.

Arthur was tired out. He had been broken by the two battles which he had fought already, the one at Dover, the other at
Barham Down. His wife was a prisoner. His oldest friend was banished. His son was trying to kill him. Gawaine was buried. His Table was dispersed. His country was at war. Yet he could have breasted all these things in some way, if the central tenet of his heart had not been ravaged. Long ago, when his mind had been a nimble boy’s called Wart – long ago he had been taught by an aged benevolence, wagging a white beard. He had been taught by Merlyn to believe that man was perfectible: that he was on the whole more decent than beastly: that good was worth trying: that there was no such thing as original sin. He had been forged as a weapon for the aid of man, on the assumption that men were good. He had been forged, by that deluded old teacher, into a sort of Pasteur or Curie or patient discoverer of insulin. The service for which he had been destined had been against Force, the mental illness of humanity. His Table, his idea of Chivalry, his Holy Grail, his devotion to Justice: there has been progressive steps in the effort for which he had been bred. He was like a scientist who had pursued the root of cancer all his life. Might – to have ended it – to have made men happier. But the whole structure depended on the first premise: that man was decent.

Looking back at his life, it seemed to him that he had been struggling all the time to dam a flood, which, whenever he had checked it, had broken through at a new place, setting him his work to do again. It was the flood of Force Majeure. During the earliest days before his marriage he had tried to match its strength with strength – in his battles against the Gaelic Confederation – only to find that two wrongs did not make a right. But he had crushed the feudal dream of war successfully. Then, with his Round Table, he had tried to harness Tyranny in lesser forms, so that its power might be used for useful ends. He had sent out the men of might to rescue the oppressed and to straighten evil – to put down the individual might of barons, just as he had put down the might of kings. They had done so – until, in the course of time, the ends had been achieved, but the force had remained upon his hands unchastened. So he had sought for a new channel, had sent them out on God’s business,
searching for the Holy Grail. That too had been a failure, because those who had achieved the Quest had become perfect and been lost to the world, while those who had failed in it had soon returned no better. At last he had sought to make a map of force, as it were, to bind it down by laws. He had tried to codify the evil uses of might by individuals, so that he might set bounds to them by the impersonal justice of the state. He had been prepared to sacrifice his wife and his best friend, to the impersonality of Justice. And then, even as the might of the individual seemed to have been curbed, the Principle of Might had sprung up behind him in another shape – in the shape of collective might, of banded ferocity, of numerous armies insusceptible to individual laws. He had bound the might of units, only to find that it was assumed by pluralities. He had conquered murder, to be faced with war. There were no Laws for that.

The wars of his early days, those against Lot and the Dictator of Rome, had been battles to upset the feudal convention of warfare as foxhunting or as gambling for ransom. To upset it, he had introduced the idea of total war. In his old age this same total warfare had come back to roost as total hatred, as the most modern of hostilities.

Now, with his forehead resting on the papers and his eyes closed, the King was trying not to realize. For if there was such a thing as original sin, if man was on the whole a villain, if the bible was right in saying that the heart of men was deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, then the purpose of life had been a vain one. Chivalry and justice became a child’s illusions, if the stock on which he had tried to graft them was to be the Thrasher, was to be
Homo ferox
instead of
Homo sapiens.

Behind this thought there was a worse one, with which he dared not grapple. Perhaps man was neither good nor bad, was only a machine in an insensate universe – his courage no more than a reflex to danger, like the automatic jump at the pin—prick. Perhaps there were no virtues, unless jumping at pin—pricks was a virtue, and humanity only a mechanical donkey led on by
the iron carrot of love, through the pointless treadmill of reproduction. Perhaps Might was a law of Nature, needed to keep the survivors fit. Perhaps he himself.

But he could challenge it no further. He felt as if there was something atrophied between his eyes, where the base of the nose grew into the skull. He could not sleep. He had bad dreams. Tomorrow was the final battle. Meanwhile there were all these papers to read and sign. But he could neither read nor sign them. He could not lift his head from the desk.

Why did men fight?

The old man had always been a dutiful thinker, never an inspired one. Now his exhausted brain slipped into its accustomed circles: the withered paths, like those of the donkey in the treadmill, round which he had plodded many thousand times in vain.

Was it the wicked leaders who led innocent populations to slaughter, or was it wicked populations who chose leaders after their own hearts? On the face of it, it seemed unlikely that one Leader could force a million Englishmen against their will. If, for instance, Mordred had been anxious to make the English wear petticoats, or stand on their heads, they would surely not have joined his party – however clever or persuasive or deceitful or even terrible his inducements? A leader was surely forced to offer something which appealed to those he led? He might give the impetus to the falling building, but surely it had to be toppling on its own account before it fell? If this were true, then wars were not calamities into which amiable innocents were led by evil men. They were notional movements, deeper, more subtle in origin. And, indeed, it did not feel to him as if he or Mordred had led their country to its misery. If it was so easy to lead one’s country in various directions, as if she was a pig on a string, why had he failed to lead her into chivalry, into justice and into peace? He had been trying.

Then again – this was the second circle – it was like the Inferno – if neither he nor Mordred had really set the misery in motion, who had been the cause? How did the fact of war begin in general? For any one war seemed so rooted in its
antecedents. Mordred went back to Morgause, Morgause to Uther Pendragon, Uther to his ancestors. It seemed as if Cain had slain Abel, seizing his country, after which the men of Abel had sought to win their patrimony again for ever. Man had gone on, through age after age, avenging wrong with wrong, slaughter with slaughter. Nobody was the better for it, since both sides always suffered, yet everybody was inextricable. The present war might be attributed to Mordred, or to himself. But also it was due to a million Thrashers, to Lancelot, Guenever, Gawaine, everybody. Those who lived by the sword were forced to die by it. It was as if everything would lead to sorrow, so long as man refused to forget the past. The wrongs of Uther and of Cain were wrongs which could have been righted only by the blessing of forgetting them.

Sisters, mothers, grandmothers: everything was rooted in the past! Actions of any sort in one generation might have incalculable consequences in another, so that merely to sneeze was a pebble thrown into a pond, whose circles might lap the furthest shores. It seemed as if the only hope was not to act at all, to draw no swords for anything, to hold oneself still, like a pebble not thrown. But that would be hateful.

What was Right, what was Wrong? What distinguished Doing from Not Doing? If I were to have my time again, the old King thought, I would bury myself in a monastery, for fear of a Doing which might lead to woe.

The blessing of forgetfulness: that was the first essential. If everything one did, or which one’s fathers had done, was an endless sequence of Doings doomed to break forth bloodily, then the past must be obliterated and a new start made. Man must be ready to say: Yes, since Cain there has been injustice, but we can only set the misery right if we accept a
status quo.
Lands have been robbed, men slain, nations humiliated. Let us now start fresh without remembrance, rather than live forward and backward at the same time. We cannot build the future by avenging the past. Let us sit down as brothers, and accept the Peace of God.

Unfortunately men did say this, in each successive war. They
were always saying that the present one was to be the last, and afterwards there was to be a heaven. They were always to rebuild such a new world as never was seen. When the time came, however, they were too stupid. They were like children crying out that they would build a house – but, when it came to building, they had not the practical ability. They did not know the way to choose the right materials.

The old man’s thoughts went laboriously. They were leading him nowhere; they doubled back on themselves and ran the same course twice: yet he was so accustomed to them that he could not stop. He entered another circle.

Perhaps the great cause of war was possession, as John Ball the communist had said. ‘The matters gothe nat well to passe in Englonde,’ he had stated, ‘nor shall nat do tyll every thyng be common, and that there be no villayns nor gentylmen.’ Perhaps wars were fought because people said
my
kingdom,
my
wife,
my
lover,
my
possessions. This was what he and Lancelot and all of them had always held behind their thoughts. Perhaps, so long as people tried to possess things separately from each other, even honour and souls, there would be wars for ever. The hungry wolf would always attack the fat reindeer, the poor man would rob the banker, the serf would make revolutions against the higher class, and the lack—penny nation would fight the rich. Perhaps wars only happened between those who had and those who had not. As against this, you were forced to place the fact that nobody could define the state of ‘having.’ A knight with a silver suit of armour would immediately call himself a have—not, if he met a knight with a golden one.

But, he thought, assume for a moment that ‘having,’ however it is defined, might be the crux of the problem.

I have, and Mordred has not. He protested to himself in contradiction: it is not fair to put it like that, as if Mordred or I were the movers of the storm. For indeed, we are nothing but figureheads to complex forces which seem to be under a kind of impulse. It is as if there was an impulse in the fabric of society. Mordred is urged along almost helplessly now, by numbers of people too many to count: people who believe in John Ball,
hoping to gain power over their fellow men by asserting that all are equal, or people who see in any upheaval a chance to advance their own might. It seems to come from underneath. Ball’s men and Mordred’s are the under—dogs seeking to rise, or the knights who were not leaders of the Round Table and therefore hated it, or the poor who would be rich, or the powerless seeking to gain power. And my men, for whom I am no more than a standard or a talisman, are the knights who were leaders – the rich defending their possessions, the powerful unready to let it slip. It is a meeting of the Haves and Have—Nots in force, an insane clash between bodies of men, not between leaders. But let that pass. Assume the vague idea that war is due to ‘having’ in general. In that case the proper thing would be to refuse to have at all. Such, as Rochester had sometimes pointed out, was the advice of God. There had been the rich man who was threatened with the needle’s eye, and there had been the money changers. That was why the Church could not interfere too much in the sad affairs of the world, as Rochester said, because the nations and the classes and the individuals were always crying out, ‘Mine, mine,’ where the Church was instructed to say, ‘Ours.’

If this were true, then it would not be a question only of sharing property, as such. It would be a question of sharing everything – even thoughts, feelings, lives. God had told people that they would have to cease to live as individuals. They would have to go into the force of life, like a drop falling into a river. God had said that it was only the men who could give up their jealous selves, their futile individualities of happiness and sorrow, who would die peacefully and enter the ring. He that would have his life was asked to lose it.