The Idylls of the Queen

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “If you do not hush,” said Dame Nimue, who had come in behind us, “I will cast the spell of melancholia over all of you!”

  I hushed, not having overmuch taste to experience that again. Pelleas shrugged and sat on the bed, looking as if he believed his little wife had not really included him in the threat, but was willing to humor her. I think Gawain would have remained quiet without the threat. The minstrel finally stopped playing and sat cross-legged, trying to look deaf and dumb.

  “It is partly my fault,” Nimue went on. “Some memories stay greener than they should, especially in my Lake, where time seems shorter and yet life stays always much the same.”

  “Pelleas,” Gawain said heavily, “I tried not to betray you with Dame Ettard. But I cannot blame you for looking at the appearances and believing otherwise.”

  “It’s obvious that your understanding of betrayal in such matters and that of the rest of the world are somewhat at variance,” Pelleas said with a sneer.

  “Dame Ettard crept from her bed into mine that night, when I was already between sleep and waking. She had done so before, and I had… held her in stalemate, trying to work her affections toward you, as I had pledged you my word. That night… I am not sure.” Gawain shook his head. “She was a very beautiful lady, and my wits were dulled with sleep and wine. I had not meant to betray you. But you have Dame Nimue now. Can we not let the lady whom we destroyed between us rest in peace, as Sir Kay says?”

  “The lady whom we destroyed among us three,” Nimue corrected him.

  “Aye,” said Pelleas. “When the great Sir Gawain is the offender, he humbly craves mercy and the forgiving end of the feud. When he is the offended against, he does not rest until he has justice and blood.”

  Gawain flinched slightly, but kept his voice even. “I thank you, Sir Pelleas, for that insight. If you wish at any time to do battle, I will be at your command.… My lady Nimue, forgive me for disturbing your evening.” He bowed to them both, looked at me and gripped my shoulder—either to thank or forgive me for trying to come to his defense, I suppose—and went out.

  “Pelleas,” said Nimue, “you will not fight him.”

  “No. I will not fight Gawain, I will not fight Lancelot, I will scarcely even come to fight the common foe in my King’s battles, though my wife, the Damsel of the Lake, might stand by to keep me from harm! But I tell you this, Dame Nimue, we will not stay here one hour longer where that man Gawain is also!”

  “Fine,” I said. “I don’t remember asking you to join the company in the first place, Pelleas.”

  He glared at me, of course. “To be insulted by you! To hear the proud Sir Gawain—‘he did not at once recognize my device’—as much as to call me an insignificant knight—‘Ywain but followed his lead’—so he made himself the leader of better men than he—and now to be insulted again by the braggart whom every knight defeats, but who considers himself specially privileged for being the King’s foster brother! Dame Nimue, we leave at once!”

  I kept my anger under sufficient control to hold back the first remarks that came to my tongue and say instead, “You can go as soon as you like, Sir Most Important, and we’ll be glad to see your backside. But Dame Nimue stays.”

  “My wife comes with her husband, out of this company of rogues and churls.” In his anger, Pelleas had apparently forgotten which was the dominant partner in his marriage.

  And Dame Nimue humored him. “Of course, my lord. We will leave at once, love, as soon as our pavilion can be raised, and spend the night in some glade far from here.”

  “For the love of God and His Mother!” I said. “This is a matter of Dame Guenevere’s life! I brought you to save the Queen, Dame of the Lake, not to—”

  “Let Sir Lancelot save her!” said Pelleas. “Or his kinsman Bors. We will not stay here one moment longer. Nimue, give your orders and we ride ahead and let our people come after us with the pavilions.”

  “At least you’ll let me finish my conference with your wife?” I said.

  He started to refuse, but Nimue cut him off, speaking quickly and gently. “Give the necessary orders yourself, dear love—only leave Sir Gareth, Sir Pinel, and Sir Mordred the pavilions they are sleeping in, rather than take them down about their ears. They have done you no offense.” (Gawain and Ywain had managed courteously to refuse Nimue’s offer to lend them, also, one of her remarkably rich pavilions.) “I will be ready when our mounts are saddled.”

  She sounded for the moment like the patient nincompoop Griselda, but maybe there was more iron, or magic, in her voice than I could hear, because Pelleas let us go out and off to one side while he went in another direction to start giving his orders to his wife’s people.

  “I can manage him more easily when we are away from Sir Gawain,” said Nimue. “By tomorrow Evensong I’ll have him back safe in the Lake, and by Evensong of the next day I will have rejoined you, myself alone. That will still be two days before the Queen’s trial, Sir Kay.”

  “And what about Gawain’s brothers and Astamore and Ironside?”

  “If Astamore means to murder Sir Gaheris, or Ironside Sir Agravain, he will probably have done so by now. If not, it is very likely they have been delayed by some natural causes and will join you before my return.”

  “If Ironside or Astamore meant mischief, four days may not be long enough to find them and their work, let alone two days. Dame Nimue—”

  “Can I let my Pelleas go off alone in this temper, ready to challenge Lancelot himself?”

  “You might recognize that your husband is a grown man and was considered one of the best young fighters of his time before you ever met him. If Pelleas can’t take care of himself for a few days—”

  “How much do you know,” she asked, “of what happened between him and Sir Gawain for the sake of Dame Ettard?”

  I thought I knew as much as anyone needed to know about it. Pelleas, on the rare occasions we had seen him at court, was always close-lipped about it; but we had all heard Gawain’s version, duly if unhappily reported along with the rest of his adventures.

  Gawain had found Pelleas battling ten knights at once in front of Dame Ettard’s castle; and, seeing that the young knight was winning easily, Gawain had refrained from helping him and thus diminishing his glory. He had, however, waited in case the tide of battle turned. To Gawain’s surprise, after defeating all ten hands-down, Pelleas had quietly allowed them to get up, disarm him, bind him under his horse’s belly, and take him into the castle. Gawain began to ride after them to try to gain admittance into the castle, but, learning from the folk of the town that this happened every day and Pelleas was always sent back outside shamed but physically unharmed, Gawain waited outside the walls instead.

  It seemed Pelleas was in love with the lady of the castle and for some reason thought the best way of proving his devotion was to defeat her knights every afternoon, to show he could do it, and then allow them to bind him and lead him before her like a booby, giving him the chance to see her face and enjoy her scorn for an hour. Small wonder she had little use for the mooncalf! If I had been in Gawain’s place, I would have counseled Pelleas that the lady was giving him a rather clear hint she had no use for his company and if he could not forget her and find someone else, he should at least learn to handle his love with a little more dignity and get along alone. But Dame Ettard had refrained from cutting off a few of his fingers or slitting his nose while she had him in her power, and both Pelleas and Gawain seemed to find this a sign that she secretly nourished some deep affection for her unwanted admirer and might yet be won. Gawain proposed that he take Pelleas’ arms and horse and ride to the castle claiming to have killed Pelleas. If that did not melt Dame Ettard in pity for the supposed defunct at once, Gawain would linger with her to persuade her gradually into a better state of mind toward Pelleas. Why, exactly, they expected they could coax the lady’s love into full bloom by making a fool of her with their interlude I cannot say, but Gawain was young and green himself at the time. Far fr
om melting in pity at news of Pelleas’ supposed death, the lady showed great delight. Maybe she suspected what they were up to; a man who could defeat ten other good warriors for his daily exercise was not likely to have given up his life and armor to a single knight, even a Gawain, without putting a few new dents in the armor and a fresh wound or two in its wearer. The charade went still further slantwise when Dame Ettard, like most of the other ladies in Britain who do not choose Lancelot instead, decided she was in love with Sir Gawain.

  It being summer, they set up a pavilion in the meadow. Here Pelleas, wandering around in his impatience one night, found Dame Ettard asleep in the same bed with Gawain. Those of us who knew of the delicate balance the young fool tried to keep between gallantry in talk and virtue in deed, and the tangles it got him into—like the affair with Bertilak of Hautdesert and his amorous lady—might have stopped to ask whether the situation was exactly as it seemed. Pelleas knew only that he had trusted a gentle-speaking stranger and the stranger had, to all appearance, betrayed him out of hand. So he left his naked sword lying across both their necks and rode home to get into bed alone and announce that he intended to die there of grief.

  It was about this time that the Damsel of the Lake came by, found Pelleas, and saw something in him as invisible to me as it must have been to Dame Ettard. So Damsel Nimue turned Pelleas’ love for Ettard into hate and caused him to fall in love with Damsel Nimue instead. They were married and went off to her Lake, with excursions now and then to court to get Pelleas the distinction—which he treats as an honor alone, ignoring the duties—of a seat at the Round Table, while Gawain came home in his usual state of guilt-ridden despondency whenever he considers his conduct anything short of ideal, to confess he had made a mess of things, testify that Pelleas deserved to be made a companion of the Table, and report that Dame Ettard, on waking to find that Pelleas could have killed her and had not, had finally, too late, conceived a love for him and died of it when he refused her in his turn.

  “In his courtesy, Gawain did not tell the whole truth of Dame Ettard’s death,” Nimue informed me now. “For it was suicide, although I persuaded her priests that she had not jumped, but fallen, from her tower, and thus gained her burial in hallowed ground and Masses sung for her soul. And the reason she jumped was not that she had come of herself to love Pelleas for his noble forbearance, but that I, in my proud triumph, and wishing to make her appreciate the prize I had won, cast on her the same spell of melancholy I cast on you a few nights ago, Sir Kay, mingled with a heightening of whatever small regard she might have had for him. I meant only to tease her a little and then lift my spell, but I was young and still new to my own craft. I must have cast a stronger spell than I had intended, or perhaps, never having read her memories, I had overestimated her strength of will to resist the despair.

  The Lady of the Lake shuddered a little, and for a moment I thought I saw wrinkles on her face and silver hairs among the dark brown ones she was wearing at the time, as if for that moment she had let slip whatever spell controlled her agelessness.

  She went on, “That is why, though Queen Guenevere’s life be at stake, I must consider my own husband the more important for these few days and ride with him to keep him from harm—not only for my own affections, but also for the sake of that love and remorse which poor Dame Ettard felt for him at the last, and which I myself had driven her to feel.”

  After a moment, I said, “You might try forgiving yourself.”

  “Though I forgive myself, still I must do what needs to be done.” She touched one hand to my cheek. Maybe it was some enchantment to calm me into letting her go without further argument, or maybe I would have let her go anyway by then—I felt nothing in particular at this touch. “If you will hurry and fetch me Sir Mordred’s tokens of his brothers Agravain and Gaheris,” she went on, “I will try to look for them on my way back, though I expect to find them already with you on my return.”

  Mordred was deep in sleep, and feeling out his pouch of mementos from the folds of his cloak was trouble enough without opening it to grope for Agravain’s tunic-threads and the sleeve Gaheris had worn in tournament, so I took the whole bloody pouch to Dame Nimue. Mordred was annoyed when he found out about it in the morning, but confessed he would probably have done the same thing in my place; and, as matters turned out, he finally got his pouch back whole, it having proved of no use to the Lady of the Lake after all.

  On my way back to my own bed, I bumped up against Nimue’s minstrel, adjusting his mule’s saddle.

  “I didn’t mean what I said about your twanging,” I told him. “You play a good harp, in the right time and place.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t offended, sir,” he replied. “But if I had stopped playing when I first should have, I would have been expected to leave discreetly at once, and it isn’t often we have the chance to see our lord Sir Pelleas in a temper.”

  He probably winked, though it was too dark to see his face. So much for making apologies.

  CHAPTER 30

  Conversations at Astolat

  “But thus as Sir Tristram sought and enquired after Sir Palomides Sir Tristram achieved many great battles, wherethrough all the noise fell to Sir Tristram, and it ceased of Sir Launcelot; and therefore Sir Launcelot’s brethren and his kinsmen would have slain Sir Tristram because of his fame. But when Sir Launcelot wist how his kinsmen were set, he said to them openly: Wit you well, that an the envy of you all be so hardy to wait upon my lord, Sir Tristram, with any hurt, shame, or villainy, as I am true knight I shall slay the best of you with mine own hands.”

  —Malory X, 88

  I came out of our pavilion next morning to find Gawain already reassuring Sir Bernard that the reason two of his most honored guests had decamped in the night was in no way the fault of the noble hospitality they had met at Astolat. I added my reassurances and then left the field to Gawain before I said the ungracious words about Pelleas that he was carefully not saying.

  Neither of the missing pairs of knights had arrived yet, but it was still before Prime and probably too early in the day to look for them. I found Gareth alone in the woods a little beyond the encampment, sitting beneath a tree and holding a few crumbs of bread in his hand, outstretched on the moss.

  I sat down beside him. “Glad I found you alone. Even you sometimes find Pinel’s company a little wearing, eh?”

  “I’m alone,” Gareth replied, glancing at me, “because I hope to entice birds or small beasts to eat from my hand, and that requires perfect stillness.”

  I ignored the inference that my company was as unwelcome as Pinel’s would have been. “It’s no secret you never believed Sir Lamorak killed your mother, Beaumains. Why not?”

  The bread crumbs shook a bit in his hand. “Can you find no better way to destroy the peace of the morning than that, Sir Seneschal?”

  “I’m glad somebody finds it a peaceful morning.… All right, Beaumains, I’m sorry for bringing it up, but this thing’s been giving me bad dreams almost every night for—”

  “Remarkable it should give you nightmares. He was my friend, and she my mother. What were they to you?”

  “A good warrior and a gracious lady. Laugh if you like,” I went on, “but I’ve grown the feeling it’s tied up somehow with this present coil.”

  “It’s gossip like yours that keeps the remembrance of such deeds green.”

  “It is not gossip to ask someone close to the business, in all seriousness and for serious purposes, what he thinks may really have happened,” I said, wondering why I had a reputation for impatience.

  “I was not close to it. I was far from court when it happened. Had I been at hand, Sir Lamorak would not have met his death through treachery.”

  “If your brother Gawain had Lamorak cut down in cold blood, it’s the only treacherous thing he’s ever been known to do in his life.”

  “I did not say the treachery was Gawain’s,” replied Beaumains, following with a Gareth Beaumains’ leap of logic. “Though Dame
Morgawse was his only mother and I believe he sincerely thought Sir Lamorak had killed her. But he should not have allowed that noble knight to be cut down before he could tell what really happened.”

  “All right, so you think Gawain didn’t strike the treacherous blow himself, but allowed his brothers to do it for him. Any brother in particular?”

  “Any one of my other three brothers would have been capable of the deed. Or all three of them at once. And Gawain does not disapprove, for he says nothing of what happened when they entrapped Sir Lamorak.”

  “There are degrees of disapproval,” I said. “But who do you think killed your mother, if not De Galis?”

  “Perhaps some jealous would-be lover, perhaps one of my brothers’ knights who thought to please his lord by striking down Sir Lamorak unawares in bed and by mischance struck Dame Morgawse instead…”

  “And then compounded his mistake by letting Lamorak get dressed and escape, after all?”

  “If you can only mock my opinions, Sir Kay, why do you ask them?”

  “I’m not mocking. You just have a habit of taking anything that happens to come from Kay’s mouth as mockery. In fact, you may have a point, though I think I’ve heard gossips mention it before now. It was a very clean blow, but the murderer could have struck the wrong person and then been so stunned by his mistake that in his confusion he let the one he’d meant to kill escape. But maybe your brothers and their men had nothing to do with what happened in that room. It might have been one of Lancelot’s kinsmen who—”

  I’m not sure if he meant to throw his handful of breadcrumbs in my face or if his arm simply jerked and they came my way. “Lancelot! You accuse my lord Sir Lancelot?”