The Merriest Knight

by Theodore Goodridge Roberts

  "Bright Lady, I had ridden far,

  With a dream for guide, and a shooting star,

  A milk-white doe and a golden bee.

  I found you under the wishing-tree.

  "Long we wandered, hand-a-hand,

  From Dublin e'en to Fairyland,

  By hill and vale, by tarn and mere,

  By leafy glade and silver strand.

  "Oft did we dally by the way,

  At dark of night and heat of day;

  Lip to lip and breast to breast,

  Whilst moons and suns went East and West.

  "For war-horns brayed—but not for me.

  A fig for vaunting chivalry!

  Let fools who will, and knaves who must,

  Spatter their blood and eat their dust!

  "Bright Lady, pity me who ride

  With only Will-o'-the-wisp for guide—

  Forsook by thee—lost and alone—

  By rocky track and grieving tide.

  "Ah, Christ, that I had labored then

  In that red field of beasts and men!

  Pity me now, O pitiful Lord,

  Who did not perish by the sword,

  "But wander, desolate and alone,

  Bruising my feet on stock and stone,

  Crying upon a lost white hand

  To lead me back to Fairyland."

  The troubadour had no more than drawn breath after his last pathetic note, than he uttered a cry of dismay—for the young knight had him gripped by the front of his doublet. The lost one's face was convulsed as if with anguish, and his eyes flashed madly, but he made no sound. For a minute—while the company stared at him spellbound—he shook the terrified minstrel like a thing of rags and sticks; then he flung him aside and dashed from the hall. Every man there, save the unnerved troubadour, gave chase. But it was a short chase; for the knight soon stopped of his own accord, and turned and came back to his pursuers, blank of face and heavy of foot. The troubadour and his fellows departed next day; but the words of that sad song remained, for curious old Dame Gwyn had paid the scrivener to write them down from the minstrel's dictation.

  That was the end of the story as told by Dennys ap Rhys at the old lord's supper table; and at its conclusion it was observed that Sir Lorn, who had sat silent throughout the telling, was sound asleep.

  "Very interesting," said the old lord reflectively. "I have heard other versions of the same piece. Its theme is of no mortal lady, needless to say; and she goes by various names. Nothing is more likely than that our friend is one of her victims. I have known others—and some who recovered completely from the experience, which this young knight will do in time, doubt it not. In fact, I am not at all certain that I did not once come within a hand's-turn of encountering her myself, and have never ceased to regret whatever it was that came between us; for I have never been one to cry 'fie' or 'avaunt' at any aspect of romantic beauty, mortal or supernatural."

  At that, old Sir James grumbled that it was time for bed.

  Chapter Three

  Dennys Has an Adventure Before Breakfast

  Late as it was when Dennys got to sleep, he was awake again soon after sunrise. He saw the rich tapestries on all sides, flagons and cups empty and deserted on the board, and the Lost Knight sprawled in slumber on a couch of silks and soft furs; and so, in the blink of an eye, he recalled the incidents of their arrival at the inn, and the hospitality of the old nobleman, and he knew where he was. Sounds of the waking of inn and town and the encompassing camp came to him through walls and floors and windows, and stirred his blood and spirit. He dressed lightly and went down the winding stairs to the room which he had seen by torchlight and in wild confusion the night before.

  Confusion and hubbub still reigned in level sunshine, but now only of impatient fellows demanding their morning bacon and ale, that they might be about their diverse and devious affairs and diversions. Servants of the inn struggled among them with jacks and tankards, being snatched at for their wares and then pushed aside, while they in turn snatched for farthings due them or for recovery of the mead or ale. Dennys tried to pass without attracting attention, through to the jagged aperture that had been the doorway before last night's entrance of Sir Lorn on his warhorse, for he was eager for a glimpse of Carleon and the royal court. But a big fellow with eyes but half open and his points still untied laid hold of him by the shoulders before he was clear of the press, and demanded the jack of ale he had paid for.

  "I know nothing of it," said Dennys.

  "Ye lie!" bellowed the other.

  "Unhand me, knave!" said Dennys; and he moved both his arms at the same moment, sinking his right fist in the bulging belly, and his left in the bulging jowl.

  The rude fellow subsided slowly, his eyes wide open now, but blank with surprise, and his mouth open but speechless. The pressure and shouting on every side was so witless and violent that the incident passed unheeded; and Dennys was clear of the melee a moment later. He went around back to the inn yard, and discovered his groom Oggle working the winch over the well with one arm while embracing a kitchen wench with the other.

  "One thing at a time, good Oggle," he advised.

  The groom released both his holds simultaneously and sprang away, and the rope whirred out; the bucket splashed in the depths, and the girl fell down.

  "You see what I mean," said Dennys pleasantly: and he helped the wench to her feet and gave her a kiss and a black penny.

  He was in high fettle. The day and the world were young; the sun was bright; and promises of new scenes and sensations buzzed and lilted and glinted all around him. This was Carleon, an open gateway to the world of chivalry.

  This was the threshold of Life. But he kept his feet on the ground and made an inspection of the stable to which Oggle had led him at a word. It was a strong place of mortised stone, and reserved for the use of customers of consequence. Here he found Sir Lorn's great horse Bahram (so named by Dame Gwyn from the depths of her knowledge), his own brown gelding Hero, and his ponies, and two high but aged chargers and several hackneys which, so a stout fellow in a chain shirt and armed with a short sword and a half-pike told him, were the property of the King.

  "The King!" Dennys exclaimed. "King Arthur?"

  "There are other kings than Arthur Pendragon, young sir," the armed groom replied disdainfully. "And some of certainer parentage. There is Your Honor's host and my liege lord for one—King Torrice of Har."

  "I might have guessed it," said Dennys. "That old lord with the vast whiskers and pink scalp! He looks a proper knight, sure enough!"

  "I have heard such tales of His Majesty's youthful prowess from my grandsire, and of the mighty deeds of his prime from my sire, as would dumbfound you, young sir," said the other. "And even I," he went on, "have seen him unhorse tolerably good knights, and hold his own on foot against gentlemen of one-fifth his years."

  At that, Dennys cried out: "God's wounds! How old is he?"

  "Older than the wizard Merlin," said the stout groom, with solemnity. "And he is lord of twenty baronies, and fourteen castles, and manor houses beyond reckoning. And yet he lives here at the inn, like a landless private old gentleman, while his vassals despoil him in the land of Har, and others rob him in this place."

  "Is he mad?" asked Dennys. "But no! His eyes are sane," he added.

  "That is truth," said the groom. "But he is a poet. He has made more and better poems, I wager, than all the beggarly troubadours afoot today in this island of Britain; and in Ireland too, where even swineherds and shepherds practice the art while the wolves carry off their charges. And he is a knight with a quest; and being a poet, the object of his quest is a thing, or a being, beyond the ordinary imagination. And after riding on that quest longer than the lifespans of three ordinary mortals, and all over Christendom, he settled down at this inn five winters since, because a gypsy who called herself the Queen of Egypt told him that his quest would be achieved here in Carleon if he would but stay still and abide his time; which irks His Majesty bu
t suits that old fox Sir James very well, and poor old Luke and the other ancient knaves, but is hard on an active, adventurous man like me."

  "What name does he give his quest?" Dennys asked; but before the groom could begin the answer, Sir James tottered into the stable with his feet in slippers, and a dressing gown clutched about him, and his voice raised in snarling complaint.

  "Horses before high noon! What itch bites him now? Hi, stir your sticks! Where are you snoring now, fellow? Is this what you're paid for, think ye—to guzzle an' wench all night and sleep all day?"

  "I am here and awake, Your Worship," cried out the armed groom, with a sneer and a bite in his voice. "I have stood on guard here all night; and now I have the honor to report that every beast in this stable has been fed an' groomed an' watered—not only our liege lord's, but his guests' as well."

  "Don't bawl at me, you rogue!" bawled the knight, with a vehemence which all but ejected his few remaining long front teeth. "Or youll be sent packing, along with that sham knight and his cowherd squire and cutthroat grooms!"

  Dennys was about to speak up, but checked himself at a warning glance from the armed groom and turned and slipped out of the stable instead. He walked haphazardly, shaken with hot anger against that malignant old knight.

  "Were he two score years younger, I'd feed his crooked tongue to the crows," he fumed. "A sham and a cowherd, are we? A pox to him!"

  He wondered that King Torrice, though himself older than Merlin, could put up with the snarling, doddering old carper. . . . Screams tore him out of his abstraction. He found himself in a lane between huts and hovels and crooked palings. Here he glimpsed both dust and muck, and a variety of filth and a dead yellow cat. He did not pause for a second glance, however, but flattened the crazy fence on his left with a thrust of a foot and sprang into the narrow yard behind it. The screams, which were of childish terror and pain, and as pitiful as the death-cry of a rabbit, came from a hut at the back of the yard. Without a check, he leaped to the hut, flattened the shut door as he had flattened the fence, and leaped within. There was light enough to see by, from a small windows and the doorway. He saw a woman holding a squirming naked child face down across her lap, and a man stooped over them with a cobbler's awl in his hand. The awl had a red tip. Dennys smelled scorched flesh. (All this in a single second of time!) The man and woman had their faces turned to him, open-mouthed but silent. The child's cries still rang and sobbed.

  Snatching up an oaken stool by a leg, Dennys hurled it with all his might—and all this so swiftly that the stool found its mark while the man's mouth was still open. The fellow went over backward onto the red coals on the hearth. The woman stood up, and the child rolled from her lap to the floor; but before she could move again, Dennys had her by the throat. It was a smooth round throat, but he gripped it without pity. Her bright black eyes were wide with terror; but he cursed them while he glared into them. He flung her furiously atop the senseless body on the hearth, then took the naked child in his arms and fled from there.

  Dennys saw people clustering on his left, so he ran to the right. He saw a group in front, so he turned aside and leaped a fence and ran among scattering children and fowls, cats and pigs. A lean dog confronted him, but with more of inquiry than hostility in its air and attitude, and slunk aside just before he reached it. He crossed another fence and came to another vile and narrow lane and turned to his right along it. He heard shouts behind him, so kept up his hot pace. Now he noticed that the child in his arms had ceased its outcry, though sobs still shook it. He glanced down. It was gazing up at him with a look in its teary eyes which he could never describe or forget.

  He glanced up again within the second, yet only in the nick of time, for here was a rogue with a knife coming at him and not ten paces distant. But the approach was warily zigzag and therefore slow. Dennys checked and glanced quickly around and behind him. He saw the same lean dog within a yard of his heels, trotting with lifted head and one sharp ear cocked forward, but quietly withal. He thought fast: No foe and perchance a friend. He turned, but kept his feet shifting and sliding, and extended the child toward the dog. The dog wagged his tail. Still shifting and turning, Dennys set the child on the ground, and still stooped double, charged the man with the knife, and drew a poniard with each hand at the same moment. The fellow stood, and after a fatal instant of indecision, made to throw his knife. But Dennys threw first.

  Short one of his best daggers—for the ruffian crawled off with it imbedded in his middle—Dennys recovered the child, after freeing its arms gently from the dog's neck, and resumed his confused flight. Now a dozen pursuers were in sight, and a few stones were thrown, and ragged shouts of "Stop thief!" went up. The dog turned, with bared fangs and bristling hackles, but turned again and came on at Dennys' whistle. Dennys saw the glow of a forge, and red and white flakes of fire flying from hammered hot iron, close ahead and on his right; and his heart rose, for here was a smith of some sort. And if the smiths of Carleon were of the same kidney as the smiths of home, here was sure succor.

  "A hand, a hand!" he cried. "Up, smith! To the rescue!"

  The anvil stopped ringing and the sparks flying, and a man in an apron made of an ox-hide issued from the smithy. He was of heroic dimensions; and he swung a sledgehammer in his right hand and held before him with his left a great bar of iron with a point which pulsed from white to pink to red and threw off a thin haze of smoke.

  "Good smith!" cried Dennys. "I'm no thief nor kidnaper! I took this small child from torturers who burned it with red iron, so hear me God—Jesu!"

  "Take it inside," said the smith, with scarcely a glance.

  Dennys sprang past him into the smithy, with the dog at his heels. It was a place of gloom lanced by a shaft of sunshine and pricked by the filming red eye of the forge; and even as he peered around him, he heard the smith shouting in the lane.

  "A smith, a smith!" shouted the smith. "To me, smiths all! To me, Brothers of the Iron!"

  Dennys heard the yells and hoots of the crowd. He set the child down on the clay floor and left it to the dog. He took an iron bar from beside the anvil-block and returned to the lane. There the crowd was thickening and the smith was advancing upon it with slow and ponderous tread and still bellowing: "To me, smiths all!" The crowd was edging in on right and left. Dennys darted to the left and jabbed fast, using the bar like a half-pike with one hand, and a long dagger with the other. Staves and spike-headed clubs were swung at him, but never in time, for short jabs and stabs are faster than swinging blows. Three louts fell, and others retired upon the main body, one of them crawling on all fours.

  But the mob continued to grow and to close in, and the air was thick with stones and sticks. Dennys took such a knock on his left shoulder that he dropped his dagger, and while stooping to recover it, he took one on his leather cap that staggered him; the leather of that cap was from the hide of a wild mountain bull, however, so his skull remained uncracked. But for a minute he reeled as though blinded, and went berserk and swung the iron bar with both hands, spinning the while like a top against the front rank of the mob and into it, crushing bones and weapons and driving the leaders back against the pressure from the rear until there was no room for an arm to be raised in attack or defense. Menacing shouts and whoops changed to yells of terror and yelps and grunts of pain; and now the smith was in action with hammer and hot iron; and of a sudden, more smoky men in cowhide aprons appeared at the rear of the mob and fell on with a variety of implements and weapons peculiar to their craft: whereupon utter panic possessed the crowd, and tore it, and scattered it.

  Dennys came out of his berserk rage and crumpled to his knees, and would have slumped forward on his face if a pair of horn-hard hands had not clamped his ribs and lifted him and held him upright. It was well meant by the smith, but it was a sorry service to the squire; for at that moment the final missile of the fray—a large cobble flung haphazardly—came whizzing to a violent stop against an unprotected side of Dennys' head.

&
nbsp; Chapter Four

  Dennys Has a Broken Head

  Dennys heard a voice he did not like.

  "Vagabonds! I warned you. Frauds! Murderers—else how did they come by the armor and horses and gear? He had proved himself no knight—he tumbled at a touch! And this rogue here? He is a proven kidnaper!"

  "You lie!" shouted Dennys.

  It was conceived as a shout, but it came forth a rasping whisper. He opened his eyes, and saw the sagging jowls and mean mouth and shallow optics of Sir James. He essayed another shout of defiance, and this time achieved a louder and clearer whisper: "You lie!"

  The thin lips and pale eyes above him snarled and glinted.

  Another voice spoke.

  "There's your answer, my bold James. He gives you the

  lie."

  Dennys shifted his glance without turning his head, for his neck was as stiff as a board, and saw on his other side that hospitable old gentleman whom he knew now to be King Torrice of Har, and older than Merlin. The King smiled at him and Dennys whispered again, though his jaws were as stiff as his neck, and his tongue felt too large for his mouth:

  "Where is the child?"

  "In safe hands," said the King.

  "I took it from torturers," said Dennys.

  "It?" sneered Sir James.

  "You did well, my lad," said the King.

  "And the dog?" asked Dennys.

  "The dog too," the King replied gravely. "Both are safe under this roof."

  "You have not asked after your precious Sir Lorn le Perdu," sneered the old knight.

  "What of him?" cried Dennys, starting up, but falling flat again instantly with a yelp of pain.

  "Perdu," Sir James replied; and he chuckled meanly and said it again: "Perdu!"

  Again Dennys started from his pillow, but only to subside again.