Dinadan shook his head and asked: "Where is your man?"
She came closer and spoke confidentially.
"We found a dagger he cast away—a rich tool with gems like white and blue fire in the hilt of it; so Gart followed in his tracks to give it back to him, poor soul."
Dinadan said nothing to that, whatever he thought. He gave the woman a roasted fowl, a great scone, and a cake stuffed with plums from one of his hampers, then resumed his journey, though twilight was thickening to dusk in the forest. And he went faster than he had gone before, despite the obscurity. Soon he dismounted and went afoot, with both good horses following close. So they stumbled through thick and thin till close upon midnight. Then Dinadan unsaddled, unbitted, and watered and grained the horses; supped well; and, after partially disarming himself, took a hint from the reported behavior of the lost lover and climbed into a convenient tree, taking his sword with him. He was down and about at the lift of dawn, after an uneasy night. They rested at noon, beside a brook; and there he found a pair of knightly greaves in the reeds, still undimmed.
"If he be more knave than fool, he turned to his left here and went downstream, for easy going: but if he be more fool than knave he held straight across and through bush and tangle," he reasoned.
After an hour of such reasoning, during which he and the horses dined and rested, he tossed one of his three remaining pennies for a decision: heads, the knave's way, tails the fool's.
Tails won, so he forded the brook and plunged again into the tangled ups and downs of the wilderness. A few hours later, he stumbled upon a great sword in a scabbard studded with bright stones, and the great belt too; and these he hung to the saddle of Kedge's charger. Next day, he found a fine breastplate and a backplate to match it in a thicket of hollies.
"The madman must be all unarmed and unharnessed by now," he said, marveling; and there he tarried and played the silver harp a long hour, on the chance that the object of his quest might be lurking close at hand. But nothing came of it.
* * *
Three days later, within an hour of high noon, Dinadan's ears were startled and offended suddenly by an outburst of rude shouts and jeers and hooting laughter. He dismounted, drew his sword, and moved cautiously toward the sounds through the intervening underbrush; and the horses followed as cautiously. Soon he looked out at an extraordinary scene. Here was a forest glade hedged with crude huts and smoking potfires along its farther side and alive with people between himself and the huts; and in the midst, a naked man skipping, leaping, and turning this way and that the while men and women and children lashed at him with green rods and dry sticks and whooped at his antics. But the naked man was silent.
"Hold!" bawled Dinadan. "Stay your hands, churls!"
All eyes, save only the naked man's, turned and fixed. All hands were stayed. All sound, and all motion save the skipping of the naked man, ceased as instantly as if struck by a deathly frost. Only the naked man paid no heed.
Dinadan shouted again, "By God's wounds!" and stepped forth fully from the covert with the long sword in one hand, the silver harp in the other, and all his armor flaming white from crest to toe. And the tall chargers came after, tossing their heads and pricking their ears.
"You there!" he cried. "You, sir! If you're a man, stop that capering and come to me!"
But the naked fool—for a fool he looked, and a piteous one at that—continued to skip and twist to right and left and forth and back without so much as a glance at the fierce intruder. Then Dinadan tucked the sword under his left arm and took the harp in both hands and struck the strings. He struck again and set them all ringing and singing. At that, the naked man stumbled and fell, staggered upright and stood for a minute as still as stone, then gripped his head in his two hands. Looking at Dinadan, he uttered a piteous cry and started staggeringly toward him, shouldering the petrified beaters from his path. Dinadan harped on, and even more inspiringly than before. Still crying out piteously, the naked man stumbled to a stop and looked back, and his outcry changed in volume and tone to a furious roar; and, turning again, he hurled himself forward, wrenched the sword from its scabbard under Dinadan's left arm and, still roaring like an avenging lion, leaped and turned in the air and rushed upon his late tormentors. Then the people came to life and scattered like partridges—all save a big man who held a stout oaken staff instead of a green sapling in his hands. He was not quick enough. In the very act of jumping aside, he was caught by the whistling arc of steel.
The naked man stood gazing down at the thing before him on the reddening greensward. Dinadan went forward and stood beside him.
"In two pieces!" Dinadan exclaimed, shaken. "But doubtless he deserved it. A shrewd stroke, by my halidom! But come away now. Theyll be swarming upon us with spears and axes in a minute, and arrows will be flying. Come away. I have a spare horse."
But the naked man paid no heed to the words but continued to gaze down grimly upon the dead man.
"Come away—or well both die like wild boars," Dinadan urged. "If you're a knight—for that was a knightly stroke— you 11 get no honor here, nor come by any reward, though you carve and split a score of these savages, but only a messy and ignoble death. Come away now, good knight—or poor fool, whatever you are!"
So saying, Dinadan laid hold of the other with a heavy hand and made to turn him and draw him away; whereupon the naked man struck and staggered him with a naked left fist to his helmeted head and started to raise the wet sword against him. This was too much for Sir Dinadan's sore-tried temper. Quick as a flash, he retaliated with a shrewd bang of the little harp on the other's unprotected head. Down crumpled the naked one—fool, knave, mad knight, and lost lover or whatever he was—and lay still. Shaken then with remorse, Dinadan flung the broken harp away and lifted the pathetic figure—thin and bramble-scratched and welted and bruised, yet formidable withal— in both arms and turned back to the horses.
An iron-headed arrow knocked on his armor somewhere and fell harmless. He urged the good horses backward into the coppice, laid his senseless burden on the ground for the half-minute it took him to rearrange the arms and gear on the spare horse, then lifted it to Kedge's saddle. He bolted from cover then, snatched up his sword, which the madman had dropped when bashed with the harp, and bolted back quicker than the telling. But quick as he had been, he could hardly believe what he saw upon his return: the limp figure upright in the saddle, with the left hand on the reins and the right pulling the castaway sword from its gem-studded scabbard. And even while Dinadan gaped, the four-foot blade came clear and whirled in air, shearing saplings like grass. The tall horse reared, spun on its hind hoofs, and would have dashed into the open if Dinadan had not jumped to its head and dragged it down.
The naked man roared: "Unhold him—or you die!" And the great sword showered leaves and twigs on him.
But he held on and roared back:
"Fool! Spears and arrows await you out there—and you naked as a trout! Fool, mind that sword! But for the horse's sake I'd let you go, whoever you are, the devil take you! Stay your jerking on the bit, and that swordplay, or I'll forget your nakedness and stick you through the middle like a bag pudding!"
The menacing sword-arm sagged limply and the jerking bridle-hand came to rest; and the naked man stared down from the high saddle at the full harnessed knight, and Dinadan stared up at him.
"Naked, d'ye say?" he asked, in a dazed voice. "Am I mad, then? Or bewitched or bedeviled?"
Dinadan exclaimed, "Hah! I know you now!" and let go his hold. "But we must win clear of this, or feed the foxes! Here's my shield. It will cover your front—or better still, sling it to cover your back."
He mounted.
"Follow me!" he cried, launching his tall charger through thick and thin.
The other followed. But by now they were surrounded; and vengeful rogues armed with boar spears and axes sprang up before them from the underbrush. The long swords flashed to the right and the left, and the battlewise horses dodged and charged
as nimbly as terriers. The long swords ran red to their hilts. The shouts and screams fell and faded away to rearward; and still the tall horses crashed through thick and thin.
Dinadan drew rein and dismounted and turned.
"How fared you, sir?" he asked.
The naked man dismounted too. The long shield hung down his back. He drew it around to his front and smiled grimly at the hatchet embedded in it.
"That would have done it," he said, quietly. "A good shield. Gramercy, sir."
Dinadan nodded and fell to examining the horses. Neither of them had taken so much as a nick.
"Lucky," he said, with a sigh of relief, and loosed the girths of both and lowered the saddles and gear to the ground.
"What now?" the other asked.
"Well rest a little, then return to Sir Gyfyl, Dame Ingrid, and their granddaughter the Damosel Alyne," said Dinadan, regarding him searchingly. "Alyne. Don't tell me you've forgotten her—or are you quite mad?"
The naked man heaved a sigh and moaned, "I've forgot everything, God help me!"
"Don't you know who you are?"
"Nay, nothing. If you know who I am, and what I was— I can see what I am: a poor naked fool—be merciful and tell me."
"Don't you know that sword in your hand?" "I know it. It is my sword."
"And the shield that but now saved your naked back from the hatchet there?"
"A good shield—but not mine."
"Your name is Tristram. Sir Tristram, a Cornish knight, young, but of prowess both horsed and afoot." "Hah! Tristram." "Now you remember?"
"Nay, I remember nothing. But now that you have said it, Tristram—I know it in my marrow."
* * *
So they ate and drank; and they conversed pleasantly, for Sir Tristram was knowledgeable despite the fact that his conscious memory was a blank. Then Dinadan bathed Tristram's welted back, treated the worst hurts with a healing ointment, and gave him his only other shirt, which was of fine linen, and an old buckskin tunic. Then Dinadan brought the greaves which he had found beside a brook, and the breast- and backplates he had found in a thicket of hollies, and the gem-studded belt and scabbard he had stumbled upon in a tangle of eglantine. Tristram knew them all as well as he knew the sword, but rack his brains as he would, he could not remember when or why he had discarded any one of them.
"Even before you won to that ruinous castle, you had lost your horse and shield and helmet," Dinadan told him. "You came to the damosel's harping afoot and muddied to the knees and bareheaded. You came in to her through the window, from the outer dark."
Tristram sighed and said, "I know nothing of it."
"And you kissed her," Dinadan persisted. "D'ye tell me you know nothing of that?"
"Even so, my friend. Nothing."
Then Dinadan told him all he knew of that affair, as he had heard it from Alyne's own lips.
"All news to me," said Tristram. "Damosel, kisses, old ruins—I remember none of it. It's all lost to me—it and all else of my past. I was the sport of savages—an abject clown beaten with rods—when you saved me. Before that, nothing. I might as well have been dead, or unborn."
Dinadan believed him.
They rode on, good companions. On the second day after their dramatic meeting, they came upon a dismal swamp.
"I never saw this before," said Dinadan. "I must have made a wrong turn somewhere."
So they made a turn which he hoped was a right one. Next day they came upon another landmark that was strange to Dinadan—a ruined and deserted hermitage and chapel.
"I never saw this before," said Dinadan. So he changed direction again: and so they were lost completely in that vast wilderness.
* * *
A sennight later, the wanderers drained the last of the leather bottles and ate the last stale scone and rasher of rancid bacon. As for the horses, they had been for so long reduced to a diet of thin grasses and other bitter herbs of the wilderness that they had all but forgotten the taste of oats and beans. Then, for three days, the cavaliers browsed with their steeds and grew thin on wild berries.
"This is all my fault," Sir Dinadan complained, as the two stumbled aimlessly through brush and brier with the horses stumbling after. "A blind guide would have served you full as well."
"Nay, Din, 'tis my fault," said Sir Tristram. "Had I not lost my wits, you would not have come in search of me and so lost both of us; in which case, I should still be as you found me, or dead of their rods and staves, and you still enjoying the hospitality and harping of that damosel Alyne. But this will be a more honorable death than the one you saved me from. But, even so, I'm in a fair way to die in ignorance of the cause of my stark madness."
Dinadan stood and turned and said gently, "Nay, Tris, I can enlighten you. If it will be of any comfort to you, my dear friend—and since you may not live to learn it from another—I will tell you what I heard of you before I left Camelot."
At the word Camelot, Sir Tristram struck a hand to his head.
"That love had smitted you suddenly to madness and driven you raving into the woods," Dinadan continued; and Tristram continued to stand like one stunned; and Dinadan went on, "Love, my poor friend! A bitter brew at the best— but hell's drink, in your case, and it scalded you to madness. For you loved a queen—Queen Isoud of Cornwall."
At that name, Sir Tristram uttered a stricken cry, then shouted: "To Camelot! To Camelot! To horse! To horse!" and he looked 'round about him wildly.
But the horses were not there, for they had gone on while the knights stood: but they were soon discovered, drinking at a well. At sight of that well, Dinadan gaped.
"This is it!" he cried. "Twas here I first saw Alyne!"
Tristram cared nothing for that piece of information, but was for mounting and spurring blindly in quest of the fount of his madness. Dinadan was hard put to it to hold him and bring him to reason. They did not come to blows, but it was touch and go. Tristram came to his senses at last, thanks to the queasy prompting of his berry-lined stomach.
"You're right!" he gasped, clinging to Dinadan for support. "Your damosel must provision us. I see it now—for now I'm as sane as you are. Lead on now—to the buttery-hatch."
They had not far to go. A banner flapped on the only remaining tower of the ruinous castle.
"That's something new," said Dinadan.
The drawbridge was still down and its outer end still embedded in the bank, but the moat showed almost as much water as mud now and only fringes of the bushes and rank rushes that had clogged it. Wondering, Dinadan led across the bridge, and there saw yet more to wonder at: trimmed hedges, cleaned ditches, and mended walls.
"Kedge has been hard at work," he muttered.
Now Kedge himself appeared from behind a newly thatched byre, went back on his heels at the sight of them as if at a blow in the face, bestirred himself to a few heavy steps, halted again, and stood gaping like a zany.
"What the devil!" cried Sir Dinadan. "What ails you? Don't you know me?"
The squire moved his lips, but nothing came of it. Dinadan advanced, grabbed a handful of the front of the squire's tunic, and shook.
"It's me, dolt! What kind of knavish welcome is this? Speak up, friend Kedge—explain yourself—or I may lose my temper!"
Kedge managed a whisper then, though a cracked one.
"Not so loud, sir, I beg you! Very sudden, sir—an' unexpected. The damosel—the Dame Alyne—had a vision in a dream."
And there he stuck, looking the very picture of confusion and distress. But Dinadan's temper was up, so he spoke again without lowering his voice.
"What gibberish is this?—damosel, dame, Alyne? Does something ail her?—and the good dame too? 'Not so loud!' quoth you. Is someone dead? Or everyone, perchance? And yourself gone mad? Speak out, or I'll shake you out of your shirt—weak with starvation though I be!"
"Nay, sir, but hear me—for old sake's sake! She saw you dead in a vision—stark an' cold. And her other harping lover too. The one you went after to fet
ch back to her, mauger your head. Both stark an' bloody on the ground. She went mad."
"So she is mad," said Dinadan, in a flat voice; and he dropped his hand nervelessly from Kedge's chest.
"Nay, not now, sir," Kedge stammered. "I—ah!—that's to say, she—a good abbot happened along and—married her."
"An abbot married her? Are you mad too?" "Nay, sir—to me."
Dinadan was silent, blinking at nothing in particular.
Then Sir Tristram, who had endured the conversation with obvious impatience, spoke for the first time since leaving the sylvan well.
"The devil take all that! To the buttery!"
The hungry knights did not visit the buttery, however. Instead, Kedge and two scullions brought victuals and drink of the best to them behind a haystack; and the chargers were well served too, and also out of view of any window of the castle.
Kedge apologized: "It is wiser, sirs, not to destroy her faith in her tragical vision, I think. That's to say, better let sleeping dogs lie."
"Dead dogs," amended Dinadan, with a cynical grimace.
* * *
The knights departed between sunset and moonrise, accompanied by a tinker who swore that he knew the shortest way to Camelot as well as he knew the shortest way to his mouth with a bottle, and a strong forest pony hung about with victuals and drink. They went a mile, in silence save for the prattle of their guide and the snorts of their refreshed and rebeaned chargers. Then Dinadan railed out upon women, and particularly against damosels and never mind the tinges of their tresses: red, yellow, brown, and black, they were all unworthy of trust; and as for loving one of them—never again!
"You know nothing about it, good Din," said Sir Tristram, loftily. "Only the lover of Queen Isoud knows the meaning of the word love."
"God defend me from that knowledge then, good Tris, since capering naked in the wilderness is the fruit of it," gibed Dinadan.
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