The Idylls of the Queen

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  It had happened before that a seat was empty because of murder and treachery, but the treachery did not often come about by poison. Mador, curse him, was already planning the epitaph for his cousin’s tomb, in which he would name Her Grace as a destroyer of good knights.

  Gawain’s gathering was to take place two hours after dinner. There was one other person I wanted to see before that: Dame Lynette.

  * * * *

  The court has more dames who pretend to sorcery than who can actually practice it. Most of those with any real skill choose to spend the greater part of their time elsewhere. Dame Lynette is the exception. She probably has more knowledge of necromancy than she lays claim to, but, like Dame Nimue, she practices what she has for purpose rather than display.

  I had enjoyed Dame Lynette’s company since she first came to court to find a champion for her sister and, on being presented with a kitchen-boy (who knew then that Beaumains was anything else?) very sensibly gave Beaumains, the King, and everybody within earshot a good tongue-lashing. She reminded me of my old nurse.

  She was alone in her chamber. Probably she had been at her prayers. “My lord Sir Gaheris has already gone to join his brother,” she told me. Since they kept separate chambers, the remark implied that he had been visiting her this afternoon, and that she chose to assume I had heard of it and come to find him.

  “I have no use for Gaheris right now.”

  “Have you any use for Lancelot now? Or did you not know they are planning a new search for him?”

  “They won’t all make their vows and fly away from London before I join them. I’d like to know if there’s any use in starting out.”

  Lynette whistled one of her brachets to her, took it into her lap, and began slowly stroking its hair. “If I could tell you there was no use in seeking Sir Lancelot, do you not think I would have told my husband?”

  “No,” I said. “I think you’d rather see him away from court knocking his brains loose on a wild-goose chase.”

  She smiled. “I will not say you are right. A wife should speak no ill of her lord, even though he deserve it. But I do not advise you to linger with me. Tongues clack, and Sir Gaheris can be jealous even of what he does not prize.”

  “My tongue can clack as loudly as anyone else’s. But call in your pages or your gentlewomen.”

  “Do you think my lord Gaheris would believe anyone who is devoted to me?” She shook her head. “If you insist on staying long enough for gossip to link us, I would rather it be a private chat.”

  With more than half of our court dames, that would have been an invitation to bed. With Lynette, it was an invitation to a game of wits. Her nails were long and sharp, her fingers heavy with studded rings that she deftly kept from tangling in the dog’s coat, and the small meat-knife at her belt was not strapped into its sheath between meals. Some tongues had even clacked to the effect that her marital troubles with Gaheris were more her fault than his.

  “Gaheris aside,” I said, “is there any chance of finding Lancelot in time to save the Queen?”

  “Now Heaven be praised, I have lived long enough to see a wonder. Kay wishes to find Lancelot! Why not champion her yourself, now you have the chance at last?”

  “Maybe I will. Let the mightier-than-thou take second place for once.”

  “Then do not come forward until the last moment, preferably not until the torch is at the faggots. Nothing will bring Lancelot back sooner than news that someone else is to fight for Dame Guenevere.” Lynette smirked as if she had hinted at some profound secret.

  “If someone else doesn’t play Meliagrant’s trick and ambush him on the way.”

  “Meliagrant’s prison did not keep him from appearing in time to absolve the Queen of the charge of sleeping with you.”

  “Meliagrant’s mistake,” I said, “was leaving Lancelot alive in his prison.”

  “Have a care, Seneschal. You will involve yourself in the death of Lancelot as well as in that of Patrise.”

  “Is he dead, then?”

  “My opinion would not make him less alive or less dead.”

  “I’m not asking for your opinion, Dame,” I said. “I’m asking for a little of your magic.”

  She rolled the dog over in her lap and began to rub his belly. “Magic is an idle toy. I have put it away with the other toys of my childhood.”

  “Your old man-at-arms can be grateful you didn’t put it away any earlier.”

  She had sent one of her men, years ago, to attack Gareth when he tried to bed her sister a fortnight or two before they were officially wedded. When Gareth cut his attacker into pieces, Lynette gathered up the pieces, put them back together like a broken crock, and mortared them with a magic salve of hers which restored the man to life.

  “What a fool I was in those days,” she said, “to think I could keep other folks’ morals pure with a few scraps of murder and magic. And the jest of it is that it was Gareth, the purest of the brothers, whom I meant to keep clean. I knew more of death than of life in my youth, did I not?”

  “At least you knew your own mind. I suppose you had only so much of that salve of yours to waste?”

  “I could have made more. It requires many days and much privacy, but where men devise means of killing, women can perhaps find worse ways to waste their time than in devising means of restoring life.”

  “Especially if they’ve been the ones to send men into the fight. Why don’t you make more of the stuff, Damosel Savage?”

  “If I did,” said Dame Lynette, “I might someday have to use it on my lord Gaheris.” After giving me a long look, she returned her attention to her brachet, this time fondling his ears. “Did you come to beg my magic salve against the… accidents… you are likely to meet with? Or did you come to learn where to find Lancelot?”

  “I’m not going to meet any accidents, and if I strike a man down, it won’t be so that I can help him up again.”

  “So you think you will find a man you can strike down? Will he be knight or churl?”

  “Is that a prophecy?” I said.

  She shook her head. “It is mere mortal prediction. I doubt that anyone can gaze into the future. Mage Merlin pretended to, but his prophecies can be interpreted however you will. Nor can I see into the past, except with my own memory. Perhaps Dame Nimue can pick other folks’ memories, but I cannot. I can sometimes see what is happening elsewhere at the moment it happens, but most of it is tedious and the rest might be better not to know.”

  “So, by your reasoning, if Lancelot is dead, it would be better not to know it, so we can squander our time looking for him?” I got up and started for the door. “Forgive me for asking you to interrupt the exciting routine of your monotony with a few moments of tedious magic, Dame.”

  “Seneschal.” She spoke quietly and sarcastically, like my old nurse. I turned back. She went on, “My magic is not as strong as you may think. If I were to look for Lancelot in a candle flame or bowl of still water, as you seem to be asking of me, it would take me many years and much luck to find him, and the image would be wavering at best. Even if I could tell you where he was to be found, he might no longer be there when you arrived. But I will make you a human prediction. Do not waste your time searching for the hero. Lancelot will come in time to fight Sir Mador.”

  “Something you know?” I said. “Or something you feel?”

  “Lancelot could not bear to let anyone else fight for the Queen, not even his own favorite cousin. And Sir Bors de Ganis has agreed to serve as her champion.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Of the Start of a Short Search to Locate Lancelot

  “My lord, said Sir Bors, ye require me the greatest thing that any man may require me; and wit ye well if I grant to do battle for the queen I shall wrath many of my fellowship of the Table Round. But as for that, said Bors, I will grant my lord that for my lord Sir Launcelot’s sake, and for your sake I will at that day be the queen’s champion unless there come by adventure a better knight than I am to do battle f
or her.”

  —Malory XVIII, 5

  “When did this happen?” I said.

  “Last night, as I understand it from Dame Elyzabel. The Queen sent for Sir Bors to her chamber.”

  It must have been after I had left. “Bors was one of her dinner guests, too, damn him!”

  “The King was there with them. I gather they both implored Sir Bors, but he was a long time consenting.”

  Somehow I kept from smashing my fist against the wall. “Why Bors? Why not me?”

  “I assume because Bors de Ganis may possibly be able to defeat Mador de la Porte. Besides, of all you who shared his last meal with Sir Patrise, who can ride above suspicion better than the saint who achieved the Holy Grail?”

  The saint who achieved the Grail. Anyone who did not happen to know that story might have mistaken the noble Bors de Ganis for a pander between his glorious cousin and the Queen. “With fifty days to get back into battle trim, I could beat them both together,” I said.

  “Sir Bors has agreed on condition that no champion ‘better than he’ appears,” Lynette went on. “Shall I ride with you and taunt you back into fighting trim? But you will not have fifty days now. You will have only a fortnight.”

  “Curse his bloody soul,” I said, and left before I destroyed something. What had possessed Artus and Dame Guenevere to go down on their knees to Bors de Ganis? Now? Hadn’t I promised we would find their hero Lancelot for them? Why cut the time out from under us like this?

  And who was the smug, self-righteous De Ganis to put himself above the rest of us who had been at the Queen’s dinner, as if the stink of suspicion that tainted everyone else could not touch him? Saints have fallen into corruption before—Judas began as a holy apostle.

  I went on to swear myself to the search for Lancelot—for all the good that would be to us now. Bors had done the Queen no favor. As long as she had no champion, Arthur could grant her the extra forty days to find one. Now that she had Bors pledged to her cause, “unless a better champion appeared,” her trial must take place on the earliest day appointed, giving us a fortnight from yesterday to find the elusive Lancelot du Lac.

  Of course, Bors and Mador were pretty well matched. It was possible Bors could defeat him—unless Bors had some reason not to want to save the Queen. But Mador’s defeat was not the foregone conclusion it would have been with Lancelot; and Mador would have the more battle frenzy to strengthen his arm.

  At least I could see who joined Gawain’s search effort and who stayed away. The only excuse a man could have for not joining us was if he believed the Queen guilty, and any fool who could believe that must know himself to be innocent. Therefore, the real traitor would have to be someone who joined the search for Lancelot, either to try to keep the Queen from burning without incriminating himself or else to cover his own escape from court.

  Unless Her Grace had been the true target all along, and the murderer wanted to see her burn. Or unless the murderer thought as subtly as I was thinking.

  Mordred’s “pleasant game.” Chances were that we could not save Dame Guenevere this way, but it was better than doing nothing.

  As a touchstone, however, the inspiration of counting shields came to very little. Besides Mador de la Porte, and Bors de Ganis, who had already cast suspicion on himself by agreeing to fight Mador, Lancelot’s own kinsmen stayed away in a body: Ector de Maris, Lionel, Blamore and Bleoberis de Ganis, as well as Lancelot’s old duckling Sir La Cote Male Taile, and Prince Galihodin of Surluse with his brother Galihud. I doubted that they, of all knights, were so convinced of the Queen’s guilt as not to seize on this new excuse to locate their glorious and beloved chief of the clan; more likely they were hatching a rival search effort of their own. On this assumption, I was almost surprised that for once Gareth Beaumains had chosen to join his own family instead of Lancelot’s, and that we had also gotten the Saracen brothers, Palomides and Safere. Maybe Lancelot’s faction was not quite so attractive to them without Lancelot’s person at the head of it.

  It was also possible that Lancelot’s kinsmen knew some secret the rest of us did not about the hero’s disappearance after his latest rumored quarrel with Her Grace.

  The old Breton fox Sir Aliduk was also absent from Gawain’s assembly, but he was still enough of a stranger among us that, whatever his private thoughts, it was hardly surprising if he remained completely neutral in the business.

  But if Gawain had attracted only half of the Queen’s guests, he had also gained a good pick of those who had dined with the King instead of the Queen: his cousin Ywain of the Lion, Griflet, Bedivere, Lucan the Butler—most of the best of the old guard, who remembered the days before Lancelot crossed the Channel. Also Sagramore le Desirous, Sir King Berant le Apres, Constantine Cadorson… and I later learned that old King Uriens and Yon the Wise might have taken our oath too, if Arthur had not requested them to sit with him as judges when the day came. (Yon was good on legal niceties.) We also had a few score non-Companions among us, some of them better knights than some of those who sat at the Round Table. Not everyone had swallowed Mador’s notion that the good Queen could suddenly turn into “a destroyer of good knights.”

  Gouvernail was there as well, waiting on the fringes, ready to pledge himself in spirit if not in word. I pulled him aside. Someone had to watch over my court duties for me.

  He protested. “Is it not more important to save Her Grace?”

  “Don’t worry. Bors de Ganis is seeing to that. He’d damn well better, after shortening her time from two months to a fortnight.”

  “The gentlewomen also are pledging themselves to the search,” the old squire went on. “I had planned to accompany Dames Bragwaine and Senehauz.”

  Gouvernail and Bragwaine were a favorite target for the Queen and everyone else who dabbled in matchmaking; but if they had let all this time go by since the deaths of their old master and mistress, the present fortnight was not going to make or destroy their own decision about formalizing whatever relationship they might have. “Gouvernail,” I said, “I need someone here I can trust. Someone who can see to the ordinary work and meanwhile keep an eye on any of our possible traitors who stay at court.”

  He hesitated a moment, then nodded slowly. I put my hand on his shoulder. “I’ve handed you two jobs. If you scent out the traitor here, get Dinas of Cornwall to take over the seneschalling for a while.” Dinas of Cornwall would have been as likely to take the oath with Gawain as with Ector de Maris and Lionel; so, not seeing Dinas here, I assumed he was keeping his hands clean of the whole affair. I had little use for a knight who would not bestir himself to help his lady the Queen; but Dinas used to be a seneschal himself, for King Mark, and not a bad one.

  And maybe, having already heard of Bors’ agreement to act as the Queen’s champion, Dinas of Cornwall had sensibly decided that trying to find Lancelot this time was too futile to be worth the effort. I would have stayed at court myself, rather than risk not being back by the day of the trial, if my chief motive had been to find Lancelot and not to summon Dame Nimue from her Lake.

  It seemed that Bors’ decision had not yet been generally known. When Gawain announced it, as if feeling himself honor-bound to ask for no oath from men who knew less than he did himself, the search lost about a third of the searchers. Even Constantine Cadorson shook his head. “Fourteen nights are not enough. Have messengers and pursuivants been sent out?”

  “Last night,” I said, “and more this morning. Threescore in all.”

  “I will send out more, chosen from among the best of my own men,” said Cadorson. “And I will ride out myself, for seven days, but I will do so without taking the oath.”

  “I’ll take the oath,” said Ywain. “Futile it may prove to be, but I would rather be bound to the quest than remain here to see such a great lady burn.”

  “If Sir Bors had not come forward, cousin,” said Gawain, choking a little on the words, “I would have asked you to remain and fight the Queen’s battle. I can think of no better
man.”

  “Maybe he should anyway, to spite Bors,” I said. “Sir Sangreal promised to step down if a better champion appeared, as I understand it.” If I could not fight for Her Grace myself, I would have preferred that one of Gawain’s kin did it than one of Lancelot’s.

  “Once I should have called myself the better knight of us two,” said Ywain. “But Sir Bors achieved the Holy Grail, and I did not.”

  “So, at least, Sir Bors informs us,” remarked Mordred, who sat whittling one of his ugly serpent rings. “But Bors may have other reasons to know the Queen innocent.” Finishing his newest ring, he slipped it on his finger, sheathed his knife, and stood. “Come, brother, if we are to swear this oath, let us swear in God’s Name and go to supper.”

  We swore, agreed to travel in pairs, and went to supper. No one openly brought up the reason for traveling in pairs—so that those of us who were most likely to come under suspicion could watchdog one another. Half a score of the younger knights left that same evening. It was a foolish, half-witted idea, starting out after the time of day when a man adventuring usually begins to look for his night’s shelter. They would either get hardly far enough from London to make much difference and then have to settle, likely as not, for bad cheer and a poor night’s rest; or travel all night in the dark and sleep for pure exhaustion in the daylight when they could have made better speed. They were idiots, and I envied them. I was ready to have started at once with them.