The Idylls of the Queen

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “Kay,” she said, “find me Sir Lancelot.”

  “Madame,” I said, “the fruit may have been tainted somehow in storage. A viper…”

  “Find us that viper, then!” said the King.

  I nodded, kissed the Queen’s hand, and turned to go. Artus joined me at the door. “What ails her, Kay, that she can never keep Lancelot at her side?”

  “What ails the rest of us?” I said. “You know him, Artus. Fickle as quicksilver. When has our Lancelot ever chosen to stay at court waiting to be needed when he could sneak away and seek a little more glory on his own? What makes you think it was the Queen’s fault he left us this time?”

  “Not even his kinsmen know where he is. She’s already asked them.”

  “That’s nothing new. Most of the time Lancelot himself doesn’t know where he is.”

  “Kex,” said Arthur, “Mador will not believe it was tainted by mishap unless he sees an apple drawn from the earth with a viper still clinging to it by the fangs.”

  “You have other knights besides Lancelot.”

  “And most of those who could have hoped to defeat Mador de la Porte were with you at the Queen’s dinner.” He shook his head and sighed. “If we still had Merlin among us…”

  More than thirty years, and Artus still had not figured out that we were probably better off without the old troublemaker. “Merlin would have given us riddles, not answers. The old gaffer cared more about appearing mystical and mysterious than about deigning to state things clearly.” He had also made a few of his cleverly obscure prophecies that could be interpreted as slandering the Queen; and, since for all his supposed foresight he used to have a habit of turning up a day or so too late to save a person’s life, I was not sure he would have bestirred his white beard to save Her Grace anyway. “Have you sent out pursuivants to look for Lancelot?” I asked.

  Artus shook his head. “See to it, Kex.… But Mador thinks his cause is right. He will fight like a mad lion.”

  “Stall the combat as long as you can. Give her every extra day possible.”

  “I will do everything in my power. All that the law allows.”

  “You’ve twisted the law before. For the love of Ihesu, Artus, you won’t find another queen like Dame Guenevere. That witch of a look-alike is dead.”

  I left him and reached the antechamber. Dame Elyzabel was preparing a heavily spiced posset for the Queen. I guessed, by the way she glanced up at me, that she had overheard at least part of what we said. Probably she had also overheard a good deal of the earlier argument between Arthur and Dame Guenevere. “Don’t worry,” I told Elyzabel. “We’ll find that fool Lancelot.” I left without waiting for her reply, if she intended to make one.

  Another search for Lancelot. Probably more questing-hours have been squandered by knights riding throughout Logres, Cornwall, the North, and the petty kingdoms of Wales looking for Lancelot, and likely as not getting lost themselves in the search, than for any other single cause, not excluding the Holy Grail. But it seemed that, since Lancelot’s arrival in this land, no one else must ever be permitted to fight for the Queen. And, curse his hangers, if the Queen’s safety was to be ensured, he was the best fighter to ensure it.

  I found Gouvernail again and we chose a score of pursuivants to ride out at once and begin combing the country for the Flower of Knighthood, and twoscore more to start in the morning. Marshalling the knights as searchers would have to wait until after Sir Patrise’s burial.

  I did not intend to stop with scattering pursuivants and knights around like ants looking for the hero of the world. Merlin was gone, but the enchantress who had taken him off our hands, who probably had all his skills and maybe a few of her own besides, and used them with considerably more restraint and less officiousness, was still among the living. Dame Nimue had always been friendly to us; and, since no one knew where Lancelot was anyway, I could just as easily search for him on the way to her Lake as anywhere else.

  I returned to the death chamber. The tables were cleared away and the floor was already bare of rushes and swept clean. The fire was blazing up again, higher than before, with young Clarance watching it. “We scraped the dish out of the ashes and sent it to the silversmith, sir,” he reported, “with orders to melt it down completely and rework it. Master Gouvernail said best build up the fire here again and make sure all the fruit was well burned.”

  “That blaze should do the work. You don’t have to put on more wood when that burns down. Do you happen to know which cellars the fruit came from?”

  He shook his head. “No, sir. Someone from the kitchen—I’m not sure who, exactly—dug it up and carried it to the Queen. Her Grace wished to choose and arrange it herself, sir. And Doran—” (That was Coupnez’s real name.) “—carried the bowl here after Her Grace had arranged it.”

  “As soon as your fire burns down,” I said, “find Coupnez and bring him to the kitchen. I’ll be wanting you, too.” Clarance was that rare bird, a reliable page.

  I went down to the kitchen and found, as I expected, that everyone from Tychus Flaptongue and Chloda down to the mice had used the tragedy as an excuse to stop work for the more important business of gossip. Two or three scullions had little Tilda in tears, trying to use her kittens as tasters for suspicious scraps of food. Several more were clustered around old, one-eyed Rozennik, accusing her of bewitching the fruit when she dug it up. Grimpmains, who had recovered his stomach with wonderful speed, was sitting like a storyteller in a circle of rapt listeners, and Flaptongue was declaiming, in a voice that he probably hoped would reach the King himself but which in fact hardly carried above the clamor of his own kitchen, that no stew or soup of his seasoning had ever so much as given anyone wind-pains. What other mischief was going on I did not have the chance to see, since most of the noise and confusion stilled at my entrance.

  I rescued Tilda’s kittens, ordered sound thrashings for her tormentors and those of old Rozennik, and told the entire kitchen staff that if the court went supperless that evening, so would they.

  “Nay, then, sir,” said Chloda, who interprets the fact that she became chief cook a few days before I was made seneschal as grounds for questioning my judgment from time to time, “I doubt they’ll be in overmuch appetite for supper tonight, nor for livery neither.”

  “Whether anyone has appetite for it or not, I want supper on the tables at the usual time, or you’ll go hungry tomorrow as well, if I have to brank every one of you myself. Now, what cellar did the fruit come from?”

  Chloda folded her arms across her scrawny chest. “Nay, then, how would I know? I told Flaptongue to fetch it, or send folk to do it for him.”

  “Flaptongue,” I said; and Tychus Flaptongue, who has been with us almost as long as Chloda and would probably be jealous if her were less afraid of responsibility, replied that he had sent Rozennik and helpers of her choosing to whatever cellar she liked.

  The fruit pits were nearly emptied by this time of year, and it turned out that Rozennik and her helpers, Nat Torntunic and Wilkin, had visited several in order to find what the old woman considered a suitable bagful for Her Grace to choose from. Fortunately, they thought they would at least remember which cellars, if not which exact pits, they had visited. Leaving instructions for Clarance to follow us with Coupnez, we started for the storage cellars.

  In the end, we visited all of them, since we found traces of digging in more pits than Rozennik and her scullions remembered. Wherever any ground seemed to have been recently turned, we dug in search of adders or their traces. We found none, but I took an apple or pear from each place we dug, except two pits that seemed completely emptied.

  Clarance, pulling Coupnez along, did not find us until we were more than halfway finished with the task. The delay had been occasioned by Clarance’s trouble in locating the younger page. Although it was not the usual kind of work for noble-born pages, I set Clarance digging in my place with the scullions and watching for adder-traces, while I questioned Coupnez.

 
It was hard work—he seemed to think I was accusing him of poisoning the fruit, and I had to cuff him a couple of times and threaten him with being locked up alone overnight before I could get anything more than tearful and half-incoherent protests of innocence and pleas not to make him eat any fruit. What I finally learned, if it could be called learning, was that Coupnez had answered the Queen’s bell in her own antechamber, taken the bowl of apples and pears ready-arranged from her, and brought it at once to the small banquet chamber, where he had left it on a sideboard; and the chamber had already been full of servants setting things up.

  Knowing Coupnez, I doubted he had gone straight from the Queen’s apartment to the banqueting chamber without stopping once or twice on the way to gawk at something or put his burden down and run or doze for a few moments. That, however, was his tale, and for once he kept to it. I suspected he was more afraid, this time, of being thought to have had anything to do with a knight’s death than of being punished for lying; but you can hardly rack a nobly-born infant, or even threaten him with more than a light whip, so in the end I had to accept his story and let him go without learning where or when he had loitered during his errand.

  Having spent the afternoon in an unsuccessful quest for poisonous serpents, I left orders that all rats and mice should be left in their traps and brought to me alive early in the morning, instead of being killed at once. I locked the bag of fruit in my room and then, having already laid myself open to criticism from courtly tongues that would call it the first duty of a true knight to offer his last respects to a comrade’s corpse, I went to sup before visiting Sir Patrise in the chapel.

  CHAPTER 6

  Of the Blood Feuds of the Sons of Lot

  “Wit thou well, sir knight, said they, we fear not to tell thee our names, for my name is Sir Agravaine, and my name is Gaheris, brethren unto the good knight Sir Gawaine, and we be nephews unto King Arthur. Well, said Sir Tristram, for King Arthur’s sake I shall let you pass as at this time. But it is shame, said Sir Tristram, that Sir Gawaine and ye be come of so great a blood that ye four brethren are so named as ye be, for ye be called the greatest destroyers and murderers of good knights that be now in this realm; for it is but as I heard say that Sir Gawaine and ye slew among you a better knight than ever ye were, that was the noble knight Sir Lamorak de Galis.”

  —Malory X, 55

  Mordred met me on the way to chapel. “We are gathering together after the burial,” he said, cleaning his fingernails with the tip of his knife as we walked. “All those of us who, having been guests of the Queen, share in some degree the suspicion that has fallen on her fair, silvering head.”

  “I’ve told you before, keep your evil-meaning tongue off Her Grace.”

  “Ah, yes. I sometimes forget. We all love Guenevere, but some of us more than others, eh? Mador de la Porte is to be excluded from our meeting, of course.”

  “Whose inspiration was this meeting?”

  “Brother Gawain’s, naturally. Since all of us are prevented from defending the Queen, both because we are all under suspicion with her and because a few evil-minded ones among us suspect her ourselves, Gawain has had the incredibly novel idea that we should vow ourselves to another quest for our missing Lancelot. Who, sharing no kind of sympathy at all with Her Grace, could not possibly fall under suspicion of sharing any sort of plot whatsoever with her.”

  Gawain’s idea. As usual, one or other of the great ones had taken the credit before me. “At least this won’t be the usual year-and-a-day quest, not counting the time spent coming back,” I said.

  “I see no reason why it shouldn’t. A year and a day have never sufficed before to locate the noble Du Lac. Of course, if he is not found and brought back within… I reckon fifty-five days at the most that our King may claim custom and postponement… even Lancelot will be able to do little except clear the name of a small heap of ashes.”

  “God damn you to Hell, Mordred!”

  “Very likely.” It was his standard response whenever I, or anyone else, damned him. “Indeed, I have had it on the authority of a saint that my damnation is a fact already recorded wherever they record such matters. So you see, when I speak of Her Grace as a small heap of ashes, I have good reason to sympathize with that same small heap of ashes.” He turned his head to look at me, and for a moment his voice sounded sincere beneath the glaze of witticism. “I would prefer that the Queen not burn. Therefore I will join the new quest with a ready heart. But suppose whoever finds Lancelot is the true poisoner? Will he tell the great hero of the Queen’s danger, or will he find means to ensure that Lancelot stays away?”

  “We’ll go in pairs.”

  “And thus cover less country, which we would have little enough time to cover singly. Will you join the quest this time, Seneschal?”

  “Even if it means traveling with you.” If we went in pairs, it would probably come to that in any case. Mordred and I could get along more companionably with each other, most of the time, than most other men could get along with either of us.

  He nodded. “There is also the thought that we are misjudging our traitor. A man may wish to murder an enemy, and yet have no objection if another man desires to prevent an innocent dame from suffering for the deed.”

  “A man could also confess and save a great Queen from taking his blame.”

  “Ah, but poison is the coward’s weapon. Or the witch’s, of course. Returning to Aunt Morgan le Fay, have you thought that she may have another secret lover among us?”

  “Weren’t you the one who reminded us that she’s been presumed dead for years?”

  He shrugged. “I sometimes wonder if the line between life and death applies quite so strictly to folk like Morgan and Merlin as to the rest of us poor mortals. Who knows? Perhaps, from there beyond the grave, she took a fancy to our handsome young Sir Patrise and summoned him to her. But you haven’t been to see him laid out yet, I think?”

  “I’ve had other things to do.” Though they had not accomplished much.

  “I imagine many of us will watch with the corpse most of the night,” said Mordred. “Those of us, especially, who might have an uneasy conscience about his death… or might fear being thought to have an uneasy conscience.”

  * * * *

  I had planned to wake with the body only long enough for decency’s sake, but Mordred had a point. By tomorrow or the next day we would have scattered, so this would be one of my last chances to see them all, try to read their souls in their faces. Therefore I spent most of the night in the chapel, in a prie-dieu near the side, watching to see which of the twenty-two passed the longest time with Sir Patrise, and trying to determine who did it for love, who for piety, and who for an uneasy conscience.

  Mador, of course, waked the whole night with his cousin’s body. So did Bors de Ganis, kneeling almost as close to the corpse as Mador, but more silently. The court would have expected nothing less from the only knight to achieve the Grail and return alive.

  Gawain was there all night, too, or most of it, with Gareth near him. Lancelot’s absence and Gawain’s near-escape from death by poison seemed to have brought Beaumains closer to his eldest brother, at least temporarily, than he had been for years. The middle brothers, Agravain and Gaheris, stayed only long enough to save appearances.

  Persant of Inde spent quite a while, but it looked to me as if the old knight had dozed off on his knees, a good trick for a future hermit to learn. Gouvernail did not come until after midnight, probably having sensibly taken some sleep after seeing the remains of the dinner cleared up. When he came, he stayed near the back and I was not sure when he slipped out again—I probably dozed off myself for a few moments. The others seemed to have worked out some arrangement, two at a time for about an hour, then another pair to relieve them, almost as smoothly as monks in choir.

  If they had in fact planned their order for watching, they had left me out of the conference. Also, most likely, Mordred. Maybe Pinel, too—he knelt through at least two changes of the wa
tch. But Pinel, coming from Carbonek, was acceptable company to Bors, when he kept quiet (even Bors seemed to find Pinel’s theological theories tedious and unsatisfying).

  All in all, I did not make an enlightening study of it. The candlelight and the angles made it next to impossible to read much in any man’s face and sometimes the Queen’s dinner guests were hidden among other knights, clerks, priests, and dames.

  If Patrise had had a paramour, she kept herself well hidden to the last. He had sometimes carried the favor of Dame Lynette, Gaheris’ wife; but she was as free with her scarves and sleeves as she was strict with her body. If Dame Lynette’s honor had finally cracked… but Gaheris would not have attacked his wife’s lover with poisoned fruit that his own brother was likely to eat. Besides, King Lot’s sons were in the habit of avenging their family’s wrongs with lance and sword, and Gaheris was easily better than Patrise in the field.

  It still being simplest to assume that mischance had led Patrise to take poison intended for Gawain, I tried to tally up the various blood feuds Gawain had been involved in over the years.

  The longest and ugliest was that between the sons of Lot and the family of King Pellinore. Pellinore had slain Lot in the battle of Castle Terrabil, when Lot was leading the second rebellion against Arthur. Despite the loss of her newly-born Mordred—for a few years only, as it turned out—Queen Morgawse and her older sons had remained loyal to Arthur and took his part against that of their husband and father; but they could not forgive his death when they had wanted his defeat, pardon, and logical place among Arthur’s knights along with King Uriens and other former rebels.

  Some of the witnesses claimed that Pellinore could as easily have taken Lot prisoner as killed him. A few even said they thought Lot was about to surrender, or had already surrendered; it was unlikely, considering Lot’s character—still, he had enough grievous wounds besides his cloven head, and finishing an enemy without taking time to hear his surrender would have been in keeping with Pellinore’s dogged singlemindedness. For all that, Lot’s death in battle probably should not have started the feud it did. We interred Lot and his fellow rebel kings with all honors and rich tombs, maybe a little too much—Arthur could hardly have buried his own foster-father with more dignity—and Pellinore, Lot’s killer, was the first to propose Gawain, Lot’s oldest son, for a seat at the Round Table. But Honor must be a shrew of a mistress. Lot’s sons waited for years, but at last Gawain fought it out with Pellinore one day, with nobody else around but Gaheris and the squires. Gawain saw to it that Pellinore got as fine a burial as Lot, and paid for part of the tomb and a century of Masses. If a rich tomb comforted Lot, it should comfort Pellinore, too.