The Once and Future King Page 13

  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 strings 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 the 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 re–appeared 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 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 n
ew 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.

  Chapter XIV

  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 discover 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: these had 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 Majeur. 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 his 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 national 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.