The Idylls of the Queen

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Pellinore’s sons Aglovale and Dornar, and the bastard half-brother Tor, were ready to claim treason and challenge Gawain and Gaheris; but Lamorak, the best warrior of the group and the only one who could have defeated Gawain in single combat, acted like a man of sense, or at least it seemed that way at the time, and pretended that he wished to end the feud. Lamorak claimed it had been Sir Balin, not Pellinore, who killed King Lot. Agravain and Gaheris tried to give him the lie. There had been too many witnesses who testified after Terrabil that Pellinore struck the blow. But in the confusion of battle, and with Lot, Balin, and now Pellinore all three dead and most of the witnesses either dead, scattered, or no longer quite so confident of what they had glimpsed and overheard in the press, who was to say for sure any longer? Queen Morgawse at least, poor lady, believed Lamorak. So did Gareth Beaumains. Gawain did not believe him, but accepted his claim as an honest opinion and agreed to bury the past. As for Pellinore’s last known son, Percival the Pure, he showed himself more interested in baiting me and otherwise maintaining his high virtue than in the rights and wrongs of mundane family matters, and pardoned the sons of Lot out of hand.

  Then Lamorak became the lover of Queen Morgawse, and one dark night in her chamber he struck off her head. Maybe he had planned it all along, or maybe they had some kind of lovers’ quarrel. Possibly Morgawse had learned something else about her husband’s death, or Lamorak something else about his father’s. Maybe it was some foolish jest that turned into a grisly accident. Whatever happened, Lamorak did not return to court at once to report it, but disappeared in the other direction, leaving his confused dwarf to discover the mayhem and gallop back to Camelot.

  Gawain and his brothers, except Gareth, set out in pursuit, but saw nothing of Lamorak until he surfaced again at a tournament in Surluse, in borrowed armor and shield, trying to fight anonymously and bearing away the prize as calmly as if he had not left his paramour headless in her bed. Lot’s sons were able to corner Lamorak alone somewhere in the woods after the tournament.

  There was talk afterwards that all four brothers must have fallen on Lamorak at once, that he could have defeated Agravain, Gaheris, and Mordred together, or Gawain alone, even when Gawain was in his full midday strength and filled with rage for the death of his mother. No one else was present except two squires Lamorak had picked up at Surluse, full of fresh hero-worship for the hero of the tournament, not well acquainted with what the battle was about, and therefore not overly reliable witnesses. They claimed that one or more of the attackers had killed Lamorak’s horse and then, after a battle of more than three hours, another one had cut Lamorak down from behind. The Surluse lads knew Gawain’s distinctive shield, gold pentangle on gules, but the shields of the other three are pretty much alike, lions and bends in various tinctures, so it remained unsure which was the backstabber, not that it much mattered. Gareth Beaumains disowned all his brothers for the deed.

  Beaumains and the others who say Lamorak could not have been guilty of the death of Queen Morgawse, that something else must have happened to her, have nothing to go on but Lamorak’s reputation until then. And Lamorak’s reputation, like Lancelot’s, was built mainly on the might of his arm, the general opinion being that any man who can strike down ninety-nine out of a hundred other men in battle or tourney must therefore of necessity be a model of honor in every other respect as well. My own opinion was that if it had been Percival, there would have been some reason to inquire more deeply into what had happened in Dame Morgawse’s bedchamber; but since it was Lamorak, Gawain and his brothers could hardly be blamed for interpreting the matter as they did.

  Lancelot, though claiming to believe Lamorak innocent, accepted the reasonableness of Gawain’s situation and stepped in to help Arthur enforce a kind of truce between Lot’s sons and Pellinore’s remaining kindred. Knights with no other interest in the affair than professed concern for honor and justice had a good enough excuse to refrain from attacking Gawain and his brothers by saying that they were sparing the King’s nephews for Arthur’s sake. Percival held gently aloof from the business and at length went away to achieve the Holy Grail and die with Galahad. Gareth Beaumains held haughtily aloof. Dornar managed to get himself killed in a joust that had nothing to do with the old feud, leaving only Aglovale and Tor alive of all Pellinore’s known offspring. They did not seem interested in digging up the bones of the old feud with anything but their tongues, from time to time, and neither of them had been at the Queen’s dinner. Tor was not even at court, having wintered in his own castle.

  Of course, the fruit could have been poisoned by someone else besides those at the dinner, and Pellinore had left nephews and nieces, and maybe a few more bastard sons and daughters not yet identified. Brandiles, Gawain’s wife’s brother, was one of Pellinore’s nephews, being the son of Pellinore’s brother Alain of Escavalon, and Brandiles had been at the fatal dinner.

  Nevertheless, the feud between Lot’s family and Pellinore’s had not led to any new known bloodshed since Lamorak’s death. King Bagdemagus’ death at Gawain’s hands during the Grail Quest was comparatively fresh. It had not led to any outward demands for justice. Like Astamore, all of Bagdemagus’ other surviving daughters, nephews, and cousins claimed to accept it as a simple misfortune of friendly combat. But the honesty of a killing does not always keep kinsfolk from seeking justice or revenge, whichever you call it. Indeed, the more fair-minded we become about refusing to put a man through process of law for killing another in honest accident, the more we seem to force any revenge-seeking relative to work in secret. I liked young Astamore and did not find it pleasant to think of him as a poisoner; but the fact that a father like Bagdemagus could produce a son like Meliagrant showed there was treachery somewhere in the bloodline. Maybe it came from Bagdemagus’ parents, had lain fallow in their children, as sometimes happens, and could surface again in their other grandchildren as it had in Meliagrant. Meliagrant had seemed a good young knight, too, at first.

  Bagdemagus was not the only man Gawain had had the misfortune to kill on the bloody Quest for the Grail. There was also Ywain the Adventurous, the namesake and bastard half-brother of Ywain of the Lion. Both Ywains were the sons of King Uriens and cousins-german to Gawain himself. If it had been Ywain of the Lion, Morgan’s son, that Gawain had killed, then Le Fay might have had reason to turn her love for her nephew into hate. But Queen Morgan had no reason that anyone knew to love her husband’s bastard; and both Ywain of the Lion and old King Uriens had forgiven Gawain, more readily than Gawain forgave himself, for the death of Ywain the Adventurous. So had The Adventurous forgiven his killer, too, before dying of his wounds.

  In the matter of Ywain’s death, we had the testimony of Ector de Maris, Lancelot’s half-brother, to second Gawain’s own account. They had been traveling together for a time. Ector de Maris had no apparent reason to gild any tale to Gawain’s advantage. Therefore, when Ector’s recital was softer toward Gawain than Gawain’s own, it was probably the truth.

  Gawain the Golden-Tongued, on the other hand, with his cultivated custom of speaking ill of nobody, might be capable of gilding a tale to the advantage of Ector de Maris or any other rival. And it was at about this point I began to suspect my own head was going unclear with wild surmise and lack of sleep. There were too many possibilities, too many possible traitors—and not enough, if you started with the premise that all of us, in theory, should be too honorable to attack a comrade with poison.

  Revenge had to be the key. But revenge of whom? I kept the keys for the King, I wore my own key on my shield… why couldn’t I find the key to Patrise’s death?

  Towards dawn, when I woke out of a doze in which I had been mixing up King Pellinore with his brother Pellam, the Maimed Fisher-King of Carbonek, I decided I had thought too much for the time being, and had better take a few hours of real sleep. As I straightened my stiff knees, I glimpsed a similar movement on the other side of the chapel.

  Mordred had left the chapel early in the evening, shortl
y after his brothers Agravain and Gaheris. He must have slipped back in when I was dozing; it had been some time after midnight that I noticed him again, deep in the shadows on the far left, across from me. Now he rose and followed me out, joining me in the corridor.

  “A pleasant game, is it not?” he murmured. “Not that it can save the Queen, of course. Mador will hardly withdraw his accusation on the strength of my surmises, or even yours. Still, it’s a pleasant game.”

  Like Lore of Carlisle in the banquet chamber, Mordred must have been doing much the same thing as myself in the chapel. Why not? He had first suggested it. “All right, King’s Nephew,” I said, “what pet surmises did you reach?”

  “None, as yet. But you may remember my notion—idle, perhaps—that a man with an uneasy conscience might watch the longest at his victim’s bier?”

  I nodded. “Mador, Bors de Ganis, your brothers Gawain and Gareth. A saint, a near-saint, the probable intended victim, and the dead man’s nearest kinsman. Persant stayed maybe half the night, too. I could hardly have chosen a less suspicious assortment.”

  “There was one other who stayed most of the night. Yourself, Sir Seneschal.”

  I thought about it for a moment and decided it was hardly worth the retort I was a little too tired to put into the right words. “And you, Mordred.”

  “And myself, intermittently. But the Queen has given me no cause to use poison.”

  I might have seized him by the throat, but he moved away. “If we are to play the game, Sir Seneschal,” he remarked, “we must begin with all the pieces. Pleasant dreams, King’s Brother.”

  I turned my back on him and walked away without returning the wish. He would come back to the subject later. He might even, eventually, have some thoughts to speak worth the hearing. Beneath that delight in pushing his listeners to the limit, he had a keen mind. If we traveled together seeking Lancelot, we would have time enough to talk things through, assuming we could keep from killing each other on the way.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Wife of Sir Gaheris of Orkney

  “And upon Michaelmas Day the Bishop of Canterbury made the wedding betwixt Sir Gareth and the Lady Lionesse with great solemnity. And King Arthur made Gaheris to wed the Damosel Savage, that was Dame Linet; and King Arthur made Sir Agravaine to wed Dame Lionesse’s niece, a fair lady, her name was Dame Laurel.”

  —Malory VII, 35

  I slept until prime and woke with the idea forming that if all else failed, I could act on one of Mordred’s hints and take the blame for the poisoning on myself. It would not be a glorious way to save the Queen, but it would be a surer way than for me to fight as her champion. Mador has kept himself in fighting trim, while, thanks to the other duties that have taken too much of my time, I am no longer the man of arms who killed two kings with one lance beside the Humber. If I fought the Queen’s fight against Mador and got myself killed, the only good result would be that I would no longer be there to watch her burn.

  In the end, it came to nothing; but for a time the idea of confessing had its charm—the ultimate in secret chivalry, if there can be such a thing as chivalry without glory. For a moment I considered making a confession at once and sparing Her Grace the weeks of doubt and uncertainty. But a mere confession of incompetence would carry no weight without some kind of proof, while the price of an open confession of malice aforethought would probably be death, without recourse, King’s foster-brother or not. I have never been suicidal, and the price of suicide is Hell.

  On the other hand, if someone would accuse me, if some line of reason or evidence would point strongly enough at me to persuade Mador to drop his accusation against the Queen and charge me instead, then I could fight my own combat cheerfully, win or die. There were still enough folk who remembered Arthur’s bastard Lohot, Dame Lyzianour’s son, and blamed me for treachery in his death, even though, in the lack of any other witness to the deed, no one quite dared accuse me in open court, especially with the King himself inclined to accept my word. It should not take overmuch to convince some gossipers that this new treachery also was my work. They might be whispering it already.

  The chief trouble with the scheme was that, although my taking the blame for Patrise’s death would save the Queen this time, it would leave the real traitor at large. Unless Patrise had been the intended victim, and the danger to the Queen only incidental, there would still be someone sneaking around court waiting for a new chance to strike against Gawain, or Her Grace, or maybe all of us in general. At best, it would leave unpunished a piece of scum who was willing to see Dame Guenevere burned for his own treachery.

  We had at least fifty-five days, time enough to reach Dame Nimue’s Lake and bring her back with three fortnights to spare, possibly even time enough to find Lancelot, if we had exceptionally good luck and he was easier to find than usual. I decided to keep my confession as a last measure, with the result that the secret, noble gesture died stillborn.

  Nat Torntunic brought me the rats and mice entrapped during the night—not as many as I had hoped, but they proved to be more than enough. I thought of turning the task of testing my bags of fruit over to Mordred, who would have enjoyed it; but he would probably have used cats and hounds instead of rats and mice, and I was not sure I could have trusted whatever results he told me. It occurred to me, rather late, that I should have marked exactly where each piece of fruit had come from; but, as it turned out, it would have made no difference. Not one of the mangy beasts burst its entrails and died from nibbling an apple or pear. The fruit in storage was safe. There had been no viper, no venomed earth. The stuff had been poisoned after being dug up.

  I could account for it from the time old Rozennik and her scullery-lads dug it up to the time Coupnez collected it, already arranged in its bowl, in the Queen’s antechamber. Gouvernail, Clarance, and others confirmed that there had been servants in the small banquet chamber from the time Coupnez brought in the fruit to the time the Queen and her guests arrived. Therefore, it must have been poisoned between the time Coupnez left the Queen’s apartment and the time he arrived in the banquet chamber. The little wretch had either taken it to someone—likely for the bribe of some silly trifle—or put it down somewhere while he played or dawdled. At this point, I was angry enough to have racked the truth out of him, Earl’s son or not, child or not, Arthur’s and the court’s outrage or not—but probably it would have done no good, since the greater chance was that Coupnez had set the bowl down and the fruit had been poisoned while he was not watching. It would hardly have been of much use to question Coupnez straitly if all he could confess was leaving his bowl of apples and pears unwatched for a few moments in a place where we should have had nothing to fear.

  I could envision someone creeping up behind Coupnez’s back with a long, thin, envenomed pin, or even a bag of ready-poisoned fruit to substitute for the good… but I could not envision the traitor’s face.

  During the burial I tried to watch all my fellow mourners, and thought I saw a few of them watching me, but with no better results than on the former occasions. Suspicious glances darted around like gnats at the meal afterwards, too, but if anyone else had any insights or revelations, he failed to share them with me.

  A seat at the Round Table can be empty in a number of different ways: because the man who used to sit there is known dead of battle wounds or sickness and his place has not yet been refilled; because he is presumed dead but nothing can be done about filling his seat until the fact of his death is documented; because he is away on some quest or errand but was alive at last report; because he has chosen to stay away from court at his own castle or on his own adventures, like that noble bladder of half-cooked valor, Prince Tristram of Lyonesse, or like Pelleas the occasional brilliant dabbler in knightly combat; because he is in infirmary or his own bedchamber with a wound sustained in the latest jousting or simply with an ague. The Siege Perilous is empty because Heaven allows no one else except Galahad to sit there, and Galahad only used it a few days before going o
ff to his Grail and holy death. That Siege Perilous has been useless lumber for most of its existence, a permanent gap with a golden chain stretched from arm to arm across its seat to prevent accidents. We used to debate whether the chair was deadly in itself or because of its position at the Table—if it were removed, and another chair put in its place, would fire still fall on whoever sat in the new chair at Lancelot’s right hand, or would it fall on anyone who sat in the old Siege Perilous wherever that was placed, or would it fall on both chairs, or on neither? But although it is fine and noble to risk a few hundred men’s lives at a tournament, it has never been judged worth the risk of one man’s life to find out whether, by substituting another chair for the Siege Perilous, we could fill the gap and gain another Companion of the Round Table. (An animal would be worthless for the test. We used to have an old brindled cat in Carlisle that loved to jump up under the chain and nap on the Siege Perilous during our conferences. No one dared put his hand near the chair to touch her, but the dumb beasts are apparently absolved of evil intent in the sight of Heaven.)

  Every knight’s name appears on his chair in magical golden letters, but only if he is within a mile or two of the Table and acting as a Companion. If, for instance, he is alive and in the immediate area but has chosen to take another shield and fight against Arthur’s side in tournament, on the grounds that it will enhance his personal fame to fight with the weaker party, then his name will not appear on his chair at the Table. Another example of old Merlin’s craft, more showy than practical. If a man’s name disappeared at his death, wherever he was at the time, we would not have to wait months or years before electing someone else to his place. Lancelot’s name had faded now from the back of his chair, which might mean he was dead, or merely riding around incognito within three or four miles of London.