He looked down at Tristan and the Queen lying side by side, the sun on her cheeks, wisps of her hair stirring in Tristan’s breath. For a moment I had the strange sensation that he was going to lie down beside them. Then he turned and made his way out of the room, into the clearing.
Not until we returned to our horses did the King speak. “Lovers lie naked,” he said. At a nearby rustling he whirled, gripping Tristan’s sword.
It was only the white brachet, bursting through the undergrowth, its tail wagging wildly, its coat matted with burrs.
Lovers lie naked; the Queen and Tristan are innocent. Between them the sword: the very sign and symbol of that innocence. Tristan and the Queen, wronged by jealousy and evil rumors, flee to the dark forest, where he watches over her like a brother. When she bathes in a stream, he stands guard beside the water, his sword drawn, his eyes scanning the woods for danger. At night they remove only their mantles. The sword lies between them when they sleep.
How deeply, in order to believe this, the King must have suffered.
There is great rejoicing in the castle. In the high hall the tables and benches are removed for games and dancing; minstrels sing the adventures of Arthur and Gawain. Tristan and the Queen have returned!—summoned by the King, pardoned in Council, welcomed before the entire court. The King’s laughter rings out among the revelers. Tristan sits at his right hand, the Queen at his left; he looks from one to the other joyously. It is as if we were celebrating the visit of a young prince and his bride.
He has given them freedom to go and come as they like. Indeed, the King has asked the Queen to stay close to Tristan, whenever he himself is not with her. As the days pass, the King absents himself more and more, hunting with his knights and barons in the royal forest beyond the orchard. One has the impression that he is abandoning the Queen to Tristan by day, in exchange for the Queen in his bed at night.
They, for their part, do not devour each other with adoring looks but behave with modesty and discretion, as befits the King’s wife and nephew. It is true that the Queen, accompanied by Tristan, occasionally visits the women’s quarters, or her walled garden, but these absences are of such short duration that they cause puzzlement rather than slander. It is almost as if, since their return from the Forest de la Roche Sauvage, the Queen and Tristan had agreed to remain apart from each other, in order to demonstrate their gratitude to the King.
Is it possible that something has changed between them?
Stranger and stranger. A week has passed, and the Queen and Tristan continue to behave with a circumspection so complete that it becomes difficult to think of them as lovers at all. He is gentle toward the Queen, listens with interest to all that she says to him, smiles mildly, is perhaps a little pensive. At supper he speaks vigorously with the King, throws back his head in laughter. Has their ardor cooled? Did they enjoy each other so ferociously in the Forest de la Roche Sauvage that they are now content to be only amicable? Is it possible that they were never what they seemed to be, that the rumors have been false from the beginning?
Even the King is aware of the change that has come over them. He studies their faces, unable to surprise a surreptitious glance, a revelatory pallor. They are gentle and innocent as children. Sometimes Tristan goes hawking with the King, while the Queen plays the harp or embroiders among her companions in the women’s quarters.
The King, who was unable to bear the ardent looks of the lovers, is made uneasy by this new decorum.
At night the King makes love to the Queen in the royal bedchamber. No longer do I hear the sound of the creaking oak door, or the pad of footsteps stealing from Tristan’s chamber.
A great peace has come over the castle.
I have it! I have it! A small incident occurred this morning, which revealed to me, in one of those sudden bursts of understanding—sharp as a smell—swift as a sword thrust— precise as a scarlet oriflamme against an azure sky—but whence these rhapsodic flourishes, highly unpleasing in an old knight scarred in battle? Calmly, Thomas.
It happened late this afternoon at supper, directly after grace. The King had returned from his hunt somewhat earlier than usual, and sat in his carved chair at the head of the table, with the Queen at his left side and Tristan at his right. Suddenly he reached out both arms and seized the Queen’s hand and Tristan’s hand, looking at each of them in turn with a gaze of ardent affection. He released their hands and turned his attention to the pantler, who was approaching with a platter of bread and butter. At that moment the Queen and Tristan exchanged a look so rapid that it was less a look than the failure of a look, less a look than a pause in a gaze directed elsewhere—but in that flicker of a glance, in that shadow of a pause, I understood, in a flash of feeling that made my skin warm, the history of their enigmatic behavior. I saw in that glance a satisfaction, as if they were acknowledging the successful operation of a plan—a plan that was luminously clear to me. They had agreed, in the strength of their rapturous love, to abstain for a while from amorous dallying, out of pity for the King. It was as if they were so sure of themselves, after the Forest de la Roche Sauvage, that they could bear to be obedient.
Does the King understand they are being kind to him? Is this the source of his uneasiness?
The King cannot conceal his discontent. It is possible of course that he imagines a trick of some kind, as if the resourceful lovers were deceiving him in a new way. Or does he sense the terrible strength of a love that permits itself such denials?
In the morning, after chapel, the King and I took a walk in the courtyard. We stopped at the mews, to see a new gyrfalcon from Norway that is said to be faster than any of our hawks. Inside we found Tristan, standing in the dusky light with a hooded merlin on his wrist. The King and Tristan spoke for a few moments about the new gyrfalcon, which the falconer was training in the field beside the orchard. The King then urged Tristan to visit the Queen, who was with her companions in the women’s quarters. Tristan hesitated and said he had promised to be present at the training of the new gyrfalcon, after which, if the King desired it, he would visit the Queen. The King strongly repeated his request. Tristan placed his bird on a perch, bowed his head lightly, and set off slowly for the women’s quarters.
Does the King fear their abstinence, suspecting it to be the sign of a love higher than his own? Or is it that, although he cannot bear to be betrayed, he can bear even less the shame of being spared?
The King’s bizarre behavior continues. Does he wish to hurl Tristan into the arms of the Queen?
Tonight as I lay in bed I heard the sound of the bar sliding back in the door of the royal bedchamber. Footsteps— unmistakably the King’s—moved directly to Tristan’s chamber. A knock, a sliding bar, low voices. Two sets of footsteps— the King’s and Tristan’s—departed from his room and entered the royal chamber. What could it mean?
I must have drifted into sleep, for when I woke I saw the light of a candle flickering on the ceiling above my drawn bed curtains. Suddenly the curtains rattled open and I saw the King’s face, bending toward me. His eyes were excited and impatient. I swung my legs over the side of the bed, threw a mantle over my nakedness, and followed the King into the royal bedchamber.
In the dark, lit only by the candle, I saw Tristan lying on his back on the floor. One arm was flung out; his eyes were closed. I turned in alarm to the King, who stood over the immobile body of his nephew as if in a trance; by the light of the candle I bent over fearfully for a closer look. Tristan’s eyes opened. He looked at me without surprise, smiled frankly, then sprang up, with the swift grace that has always been his, and stood before the King.
Tristan spoke in a whisper. “The Queen is sleeping soundly, my lord.”
The King appeared to be waking from a dream. He turned his face toward me, while continuing to gaze at Tristan, and said in a low voice, “The Queen was having nightmares. I thought perhaps Tristan—”
Seated now at my table, I write these lines hastily. How much longer can these disturbanc
es continue? Disorder in the bedchamber, division in the castle, unease in the kingdom. I fear for the King, fear for Tristan. They are playing a dangerous game that cannot end well. The King, feigning concern for his wife, invites Tristan into the royal bed; Tristan lies chastely on the floor. Move and countermove, trap and escape. Where will it end? Must sleep now.
I ask myself: why did the Queen and Tristan return to the castle? Is it that their idyll in the forest was born in secrecy and could not survive secrecy’s end? But surely they might have fled to another forest, in another kingdom. You forget, Thomas, that the King summoned them. Why then did they obey? Can it be that, even as they betray the King, they remain loyal subjects whose deepest impulse is obedience?
Another explanation presents itself. The love of Tristan and the Queen has always flowed around and against the King. Banished from the court, alone in the forest, did they find themselves sometimes thinking of him? Were they growing a little restless, there in the forest? In order for their love to flourish—in order for them to love at all—do they perhaps need the King?
A brilliant stroke! The King has summoned the Queen and Tristan before his Council, and in the presence of his leading barons has praised them for putting slander to rest by their exemplary behavior. Since their return to court, he said, they have in all things been obedient to the royal will, and anyone guilty of words touching upon the honor of his house will be punished swiftly.
By this speech the King has accomplished two things. He has transformed the lovers’ freely chosen abstinence, which galls him and provokes him at every instant, into an act of obedience to the royal will. But hidden within his praise is a second, darker, and more brilliant stratagem.
The King divines, with the keenness of a sharpened jealousy, that the Queen and Tristan are not obedient—that although they play the game of renunciation, at the hidden center of their renunciation is the opposite of self-denial: an utter abandonment of themselves to each other. For if, in the fullness of their triumphant love, they delude themselves into a concern for the King’s well-being, if they take pleasure in obedience, if they savor the delights of renunciation, in truth they renounce nothing, they obey no one, they are bound to each other above all earthly and heavenly things. And because the King divines this, which they themselves have not yet divined, swept up as they are in their little drama of renunciation, the King has seized an advantage in the dangerous game all three are playing.
Baffled at every turn, outwitted time and again in his effort to find evidence of a betrayal he cannot bear to know, the King has discovered, as if by following some impulse deep in his being, the one way likely to accomplish the end he dreads and longs for.
The King watches. The court goes about its pleasures. Tristan and the Queen are the very picture of propriety. Nothing changes.
And yet I ask myself: is there not a change? It is like a summer day, a day like all other summer days, except that you feel, hidden in the heat of high afternoon, the first chill of autumn. Besides, there are signs.
I have noticed a new wariness between the Queen and Tristan. When they are together, they are no longer at ease: they avoid each other’s eyes a little too carefully, stand a little farther apart than before. The King’s speech before the Council has clearly taken them by surprise. They detect in it a threat that they haven’t yet been able to unmask.
The Queen, especially, seems tired and somewhat strained. Each night she obediently performs her conjugal duty in the royal bed. Each day she bows her head at mass, dines at the King’s left hand, walks among her ladies. Where is Tristan? What has become of their passion in the forest? Her life is a masque, a play. Everything vital in her is hidden.
Today, as I walked in the courtyard past the kitchen and the bake house, Brangane stepped from around a corner and pressed a note into my hand. I had not spoken with her since the banishment of the Queen and Tristan. When I looked up from the note, she was gone. I was to meet her in the Queen’s tower chamber after the bells tolled noon. The Queen would not be present.
In the sun-warmed chamber, aswirl with glittering dust motes, Brangane barred the door and turned to me. Her face looked worn, her eyes heavy; in the warm, agitated light, she looked as if she were growing old.
“The Queen is unhappy,” she said.
“The Queen”—I hesitated, choosing my words carefully— “has many reasons for happiness.”
There flashed from her a look—of disappointment, of disdain—that made me hate my courtier’s smooth phrases, even as I watched her youth come rushing in.
“Why,” I asked sharply, goaded by her look, “did she return to the castle?”
“The King summoned her.”
“She obeys the King?”
She hesitated for only a moment. “She has always obeyed the King.”
“Always?”
She looked at me boldly. “At her marriage she kneeled before the King as her lord. She left when the King banished her. She returned when he called her back.”
I had forgotten Brangane’s quickness. What she said was true enough, for that matter. I was turning over my reply when she said, “It was Tristan who urged her to return.”
“Because they had been discovered?”
“For the sake of her honor.”
I tried to imagine Tristan waking beside the Queen in the forest, seeing the King’s sword.
“Her honor is now restored.” Even as I spoke I regretted the barely suppressed scorn of those words, but Brangane had already leaped past them.
“I know her. I know Ysolt the Fair. I fear—” She paused.
“You fear she may do something?”
“I fear her unhappiness,” she said tiredly. Then: “The King watches her.”
“The King loves her.”
She ignored me. “You are close to the King. You know where he goes—when he goes—”
“You’re asking me to spy on the King?”
She looked at me with impatience. “I am asking you to see that no harm comes to anyone.” Already she was moving toward the door.
Only after she had left did it strike me that what she was asking wasn’t that I observe the King carefully, but that I report his movements to her, so that the Queen might be at liberty to—do as she liked.
At supper the King turned to me in a burst of boyish good spirits and cried, “Thomas! Why so melancholy?” I was about to answer lightly when I noticed the Queen looking at me. In that proud and sorrowing gaze I felt a confusion come over me, I could not speak, it was as if the word “melancholy” were opening inside me like a black blossom, until lowering my gaze to the edge of my plate I stared down like an awkward child, and I don’t know what would have happened if the King, still in high spirits, hadn’t suddenly cried out, “Tristan! A song for melancholy Thomas!” whereupon I recovered sufficiently to raise my eyes to Tristan, who was staring at the Queen.
The King, whose passion for the hunt can no longer be suppressed, has asked me to watch over the Queen in his absence. By this he means that I am to follow the Queen and Tristan everywhere. The King will leave tomorrow at daybreak and return at nightfall.
I have informed Brangane of the King’s plans.
When she tried to thank me, my head felt suddenly hot, and I became filled with such rage that I could neither see nor hear. I was aware only that she had drawn her head back, as if I had struck her in the face.
Where to begin?
In the heat of the noonday sun, I sometimes like to walk in the King’s garden. The white roses and red roses in their beds, the heartsease and columbine, the interlaced branches of the beech trees on the sanded paths, the leaden birdbath with its dark image of a falcon rising from the center, the arbor of purple grapes, the splash of the fountain from which water pours through the mouths of four stone leopards—all this soothes the troubled mind, soothes the body itself, which, like a tired animal, seeks out hidden and quiet places where it might lie down in the coolness of dark green shade. Here and there st
and benches covered in soft turf, but I wandered into the thickest part of the garden, near the far wall. Among the fruit trees I lay down on the grass. The stone wall rose high above; through the green leaves and twisting branches I could see scarcely any sky. The King was hunting in the forest. The Queen had retired with her ladies. In the stillness of the garden I closed my eyes.
When I opened my eyes I saw the King’s face bending close to mine. I could not at first account for this. The King, I thought, had come to lie down beside me in the shade of the garden, as he used to do, in the days of his boyhood, when he liked to lie on his back in the grass and ask whether, in addition to each individual tree, there was a substance named “Tree” that had a real existence, and, if so, how that “Tree” differed from the particular tree before us. Then it struck me that I must be dreaming, since the King was hunting in the forest. But already I knew that I was not dreaming, the King’s face was sharp with urgency, his eyes fierce and sorrowful. He shook me roughly. “Thomas!” As I rose and began to follow him I had the sensation that the green shade, the paths, the fountain, the roses, the stillness of the hour—all were fading and dissolving behind me, like those images that stand hard and brilliant in the mind and, as the eyes open, waver and grow dim.
He led me across the courtyard to the Queen’s tower, from which a narrow door opened into her walled garden.
I followed him along a sanded path shaded by a row of almond and walnut trees growing on one side. We passed a fish pond, a small herb garden of sage, hyssop, marjoram, and rue, square beds of roses and marguerites, a grove of hawthorn trees. Here and there in the garden wall I saw recesses with turf seats shaded by branches on lattice frames. Toward the northwest corner stood a tall hedge, higher than my head, with an opening shaped like an archway. As the King stepped through the opening he drew his sword. Behind him I entered the hedge, passed along the sharply turning paths of a maze with hedgerows on both sides, and came at last to a grove of fruit trees, beyond which rose the garden wall.
The King in the Tree Page 19