by Jay Ruud
“If the wound was not judged to be mortal, how came he to die of it?” Sir Gareth voiced the question on everyone’s mind.
Still looking down, Dinadan shook his greasy locks and continued his tale. “His wound grew more evil-looking every day, and soon the leech that attended him concluded that the point that had pierced him had been poisoned. Sir Tristram grew weaker as the poison coursed through his body, and he began to despair of his life. Finally Tristram admitted where his only hope must lie: La Belle Isolde, Queen of Cornwall, is known to be the most skillful of all physicians in the arts of healing, especially of healing poison.”
“It’s true,” the now subsided Lancelot added. “Isolde of Ireland had cured him once before, when he nearly died from wounds received at the hand of her own brother, Marholt. She knows the healing arts better than any woman alive. If anyone could have cured him it had been her.”
“King Mark’s queen was his lover, though, was she not?” Sir Bors stated the obvious. “How did that request go down with his wife?”
Dinadan looked up at Bors and shrugged. “How would you think? To have her husband put his only hope for life on the woman who had been his lover for years before he married you: At the same time knowing that he married you only because of his friendship with your brother, and because by bizarre coincidence you shared the same name as his true love?”
“Women often have little voice in the choosing of their husbands,” Lancelot acknowledged, his eyes darting toward Arthur as he said it.
“But they still have the unreasonable expectation of being loved,” Sir Gareth chimed in, playing the innocent with his tongue in his cheek.
The king’s chamber was decorated on three sides by enormous tapestries depicting scenes from the life of the classical hero Hercules. Behind me was a graphic portrayal of the great hero capturing Cerberus, the ferocious three-headed dog of Hades. On the wall to my left was another weaving depicting Hercules slaying the Nemean Lion, clubbing the great beast whose skin was impenetrable to arrows. On the wall across from me, behind Lovel, was a tapestry showing the infant Hercules, attacked in his cradle by two enormous serpents sent by Hera. As I recalled, the queen of the gods was jealous of Zeus’s affair with Alcmene, and was bent on destroying the fruit of their union. But the tapestry showed the babe Hercules strangling a snake in each of his tiny hands. Another story, like this of Tristram and Isolde, full of love and jealousy. The door to the chamber opened through the fourth wall, and a large window let light into the room, which now slanted down toward the wall of the serpents.
Sir Dinadan now rose to his feet, moving into the light steaming down, and casting a shadow on the tapestry of Hercules and the serpents, and he continued his tale in a stronger voice. “Isolde of the White Hands,” he began thoughtfully, measuring his words to present as fair an account as possible, “clearly felt resentment about the means Tristram sought to save his life, but she wanted her husband alive, and said nothing against it when Tristram gave Kaherdin his ring as a token for Queen Isolde, and asked him to sail to Cornwall to bring her back. And so Kaherdin left, with Tristram’s request that he equip his ship with two sets of sails, one white and the other black. Upon his return to Brittany, Kaherdin was to fly the white sail if La Belle Isolde was on board, the black sail if he had failed to convince her to come. He wanted, you see,” Dinadan added, looking around the room, “to know his fate immediately upon the ship’s sighting, rather than wait for hours for the ship to dock.”
“Might it not have been more prudent for Kaherdin to send someone else on the journey, rather than leave his friend in the care of a woman he knew to be jealous of the project itself?” Sir Bors asked. Reasonably, I thought.
“Sir Kaherdin did not abandon his friend,” Dinadan continued. “I was still there. I was as close to Sir Tristram as any man. Jealous wife or not, I would have protected him from anything. But I could not protect him from the poison in his system or from the despair in his heart. Kaherdin left his castle and guard under the titular command of his sister Isolde, and Tristram in the care of me and his leech. The doctor, Master Oswald, saw Tristram several times a day. He warned me not to spend too much time in the chamber, for fear of wearing the patient out. His wife, of course, attended on him as well, though seldom in my presence and generally, it seemed to me, in a spirit of subdued resentment. As it happened, I was not with him when Kaherdin’s ship was sighted on the horizon, returning some seven days later. When a call went out from the city walls that a ship was in sight, I ran to the ramparts and looked out. It was still tiny against the blue sky, but I could see it clearly: the sails were white. Kaherdin was bringing Isolde to heal her lover.”
“Then she did come?” Sir Bors urged him on. “Were her arts not sufficient to defeat the poison?”
“She was never able to put them to the test,” Sir Dinadan sighed. “Word went forth that the ship was seen, and Tristram heard it in his sickroom. His wife and Master Oswald were with him when the report came, and he begged her to tell him the color of the sail. She paused for a moment, the leech told me, and then she lied. ‘Black. The sails are black,’ she told him. And at that word…he died.”
The silence that greeted this last revelation was profound. What, after all, could anyone say to that? The despair in which Sir Tristram must have ended his life was palpable to every one of us. At length, Sir Gareth pursued the questioning: “And what of La Belle Isolde? She had come all that way with Sir Kaherdin. What was her reaction when she learned she had come in vain?”
Sir Dinadan sighed again, even more deeply if that was possible. “She entered the sickroom an hour or so after her lover had expired, and his wife standing over him stony-faced. From what Master Oswald told me, La Belle Isolde fell to her knees, cradled Tristram’s body in her arms, raised her eyes to the heavens, and collapsed. She was dead in seconds. Dead of a broken heart.”
Lancelot was shaking his head. “It’s all too convenient,” he thought out loud. “Someone is to blame for this.” He brought his fist down hard on the table. “Someone is behind this and should pay for it. How do we know that Mark is not culpable in this? If so this is murder.”
For a moment the pallor faded from Dinadan’s face, and I saw in that instant a flash of the old, sardonic Dinadan that I had known as Tristram’s companion. With a slight uptwist of the left side of his mouth, he admitted “Mark is as likely to be behind this as not. He was subject to ridicule as a cuckold. I myself once wrote a song rhyming ‘Cornwall’ with ‘Horn all,’ and sent a troubadour to sing it to him. He was not amused.”
“I remind you,” the king’s deep baritone chimed in, “that King Mark is still my vassal, and the sovereign lord of Cornwall. I will not have him made the object of ridicule in my own castle.” It was the closest King Arthur ever came to showing anger, except on the battlefield. Lancelot nodded and sat back in his chair. There was little left to be said. Sir Tristram was gone and no one in that room had the power to bring him back. All we could do was bear our grief. The king dismissed Sir Dinadan with thanks, and the shaken knight left the chamber, to eat and to bathe and to get a good night’s rest.
When he had gone, Sir Gareth called to me. “Well, that’s unwelcome news. Gildas, come fill my glass. There is one thing we can say about this: Sir Tristram’s death has solved our other problem: there are now two vacancies in the fellowship of the Round Table. We can now put our young squire’s proposal into effect. We can induct both Mordred and Perceval into the fellowship next week at Pentecost.”
“Yes,” the king said distantly. “We can do that, I suppose.”
Chapter Two
An Irresistible Request
The lists of Camelot were located behind the keep, where a door opened into a long, narrow field some twenty yards wide and perhaps a hundred long, between the crenelated outer wall with its guard posts overlooking the moat, and the narrower castle wall within. Here was where knights and squires
trained several grueling hours a day: The knights to remain battle-ready, the squires, like me, to train for that day when we, too, like Mordred and Perceval in four days’ time, would be ready to kneel as the king placed Excalibur on our shoulders and we rose Knights of the Round Table.
This morning I had spent two hours slashing and parrying with Sir Gawain’s squire Lovel, trying to teach him the best way to defend himself as Florent had taught me in my first stumbling steps toward knighthood just a year or so past. But this afternoon Sir Palomides had set up a quintain so that the knights and their squires could practice their best jousting moves. He rode a great grey destrier, and I sat astride one of my master Gareth’s brown beauties.
A war-horse like the one on which I was mounted was a knight’s most expensive accoutrement, normally worth a knight’s entire salary for at least a year. The fact that Sir Gareth had two such prize animals said something about the fortune he had inherited, with his four brothers, from King Lot of the house of Orkney, in addition to the fortune his wife Lyonesse had brought to the marriage. I sat my horse close by Palomides, waiting for a break in the knights who were practicing their skill with the quintain. Sir Bleoberis and Sir Lionel, and Sir Ywain’s squire Thomas, were waiting in line, while Sir Safer, Palomides’ younger brother, was set to charge the wooden jousting dummy. Safer sat on a lighter Arabic steed, the kind he preferred from his home country, and after staring momentarily at the target, he gripped his lance firmly, proffering it straight ahead while squeezing it snugly against his side, and pounded toward the dummy some fifty yards before him. He lunged at the quintain with all the weight of man and horse behind the thrust, and his horse reached its top speed just as Sir Safer walloped the target, which spun around on its post so swiftly that Safer had a devil of a time scooting through and out of the way before the weighted sack of the quintain swooped down to pommel the area that Safer had just evacuated.
“Well done, brother!” Sir Palomides called, the sweat glistening on the Moorish knight’s dark features. Then he glanced at me out of the corner of his eye while Sir Bleoberis trotted up to take aim at the wooden jousting dummy. “Young Gildas,” he murmured in low tones. “You are one that I think will understand this, and my heart is anguished, I must open it to someone.”
I looked at the dark knight dumbfounded. He had never confided in me in this manner. It was true that I knew some personal things about him, as a result of investigations I had helped my lord Merlin to conduct in times past, but I had never considered my relationship with the Moor close enough to, as he said, open our hearts to one another. “My lord,” I answered abashed, “I am nothing but a low squire. Surely your brother or another knight…”
Sir Palomides squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head as if fighting off great pain. “I cannot show weakness to the others. But you, you are a sensitive soul. I know this. I know that you understand a deep and hopeless love, for you too have experienced this with regard to the lady Rosemounde.”
That slapped me in the face in a way I hadn’t expected. I mean, I loved Rosemounde without reserve, but I wouldn’t characterize my love as hopeless. Desperate, maybe, but hopeless? Wasn’t I in training to be a knight just now precisely because I had a sincere hope that knighthood would make me worthy of her? “Look, my lord, I don’t think that ‘hopeless’ is really—”
The painful wag of the head again. “I refer to the time when your beloved Rosemounde was betrothed to Sir Florent. That was indeed a hopeless time.”
I had to nod in agreement.
“You, young Gildas, may be the best equipped in all Camelot to understand my plight. You know, do you not, of my love for La Belle Isolde?” Ah. Now I could understand where this was leading. I was not sure I wanted it or was comfortable with it, but Sir Palomides was about to share his grief with me. It was true, I knew that Palomides loved Isolde—loved her, indeed, hopelessly, since her body belonged to King Mark according to the bond of marriage, and her soul belonged exclusively to Sir Tristram, according to the bond of true love, that love that never wavered. The love of Sir Palomides, I believed in all faith, was just as true, and just as never-wavering. But for me, it was embarrassing to see the big man brought so low.
“My friend,” he continued, his lower lip quivering with emotion, “she is gone. My Isolde has breathed her last. I suffered, it is true—no one knew how much—because her love was fixed only on Sir Tristram. I jousted with Tristram on many occasions, but he was a great knight. Fine. He deserved the most beautiful of ladies. I could resign myself to Tristram’s having her, and I could love her from a distance. But this new rival I cannot brook. How can I live if Death is the one now claiming her? Over such a distance no one can love. I tell you, Gildas, I want to challenge Death itself, as I once challenged Sir Tristram.”
“All the kingdoms of Arthur’s realm mourn with you.” I knew it was a ridiculous, and useless, thing to say to him. To the rest of us La Belle Isolde had been only a name, or a distant vision of regal beauty. No one, perhaps not even King Mark, felt her loss so personally as Sir Palomides. But there are no words in any human language that can console the inarticulate cry of the heart.
Palomides, though, as I knew from past experience, was a man of words. His deep feelings became poems, and this grief had moved him now to compose an elegy on the death of Isolde of Cornwall and Ireland.
“My friend,” Sir Palomides began, and I knew what was coming. “I have composed one last love poem for my dearest lady. Let me sing for you the last verses. It will help ease my heart.”
And without a word from me he launched into a troubadour song in his deep baritone voice. The words, as I recall them, went something like this:
My Love, you do me wrong
When you do not heed my song
As you wait within your tower in empty silence.
Can it be you hear me not
As you lie upon your cot
For the life has left your limbs through wicked violence?
Oh God, take me away
I’ve no desire to stay
In this cruel world bereft of Beauty’s charms.
Take me back to those sweet days
When I mourned her haughty ways
And dreamt someday I might be in her arms.
For now, her smile, her eyes, cannot be found,
All hope is buried with her in the ground.
I waited a moment after the last note, watching the tears streak his quivering cheeks, and reached out once more with empty consolation: “My lord, this hopeless love is painful. There is no consolation in this world. Life is suffering.” I didn’t really believe that. I mean, yes, life is suffering. But it is so much more than that. The more, at this point, would not be visible to Sir Palomides, and there was no sense talking about it.
“One more thing, young Gildas,” Sir Palomides whispered, shaking off his grief momentarily. “It needs to be said. There is something that does not smell right in these fatalities. The manner of their deaths is all too neat, all too perfect. I swear there is something behind it.”
“Behind it? You mean…”
“I mean that there were strong forces that wanted both Tristram and La Belle Isolde dead. King Mark for one. And the jealous wife. I cannot believe these deaths were accidents.”
Before I had any real chance to process what Sir Palomides had said, Thomas was calling to me, “Gildas! Where’s your head today, boy? It’s your turn. You’re keeping actual knights waiting, and that’s not a good thing.” I looked up to see a number of faces glowering at me, most notably Sir Lionel, who was due to run at the quintain after me, and was trying to be courteous and give me my chance at the dummy, but was clearly beginning to resent being kept waiting by a mere squib of a squire. “Sorry, sorry,” I babbled as I maneuvered my horse into a position to charge the quintain. All the time my mind was racing. First Sir Lancelot, and now Palomides, both suggesting foul
play involved in Tristram and Isolde’s deaths. And both suspecting King Mark. Lancelot, of course, saw his own plight in Tristram’s, and naturally looked to the husband, possibly reflecting his own inner uncertainties. Sir Palomides was in love with Isolde himself, and so also focused on that which had kept her unattainable. Without Tristram to blame, he needed to impugn King Mark. The fact was, though, that Mark was my king. He was Arthur’s vassal, of course, and so I saw Arthur as my true lord, but Cornwall was my native land, and Mark was King of Cornwall. I did not want to believe he could be behind this. I did not want him to be so much of a villain.
My mind was still on what Sir Palomides had said as I readied my lance and kicked my horse, so I was a bit off balance when I struck the dummy, and the lance skirted off the edge of the wood rather than hitting it solidly. My instinct was to pull up and look back at the target as I passed through, and when I did I felt a heavy thump across my back, tumbling me in a somersault over the head of my horse so that I lay sprawled on my back in the dust, the horse dancing around me as he tried not to stomp me with his hooves.
“Hmmph,” came a voice from above. “At this rate you’ll never make a knight, Gildas of Cornwall.”
I squinted upwards and put my hand over my eyes to shade them from the sun, and recognized Sir Gaheris’s blond hair and blue eyes as he reached down to give me a lift up. He looked a good deal like his younger brother Gareth, but didn’t have Gareth’s playful smile or jocular disposition. “I’m sent by the queen,” he told me. “You are summoned into the royal presence, lad. Let Peter here take your horse back to the stable.” As I righted myself I noticed the thirteen-year-old page of the queen’s chamber, holding my horse and looking at me with big, expectant brown eyes. It was like looking at myself four years ago, when I entered Camelot in the same position as this boy, as page to Guinevere. A pang of jealousy pinched my heart as I watched him take my horse away. Did she open her heart to him the way she used to with me? Did she tell him her inmost thoughts? Or was I somehow special? Her sending Sir Gaheris to bring me to her even now suggested that might be the case. Why the king’s own nephew? Even if he was assigned as her personal guard this week, why send a knight at all? Couldn’t young Peter have summoned me just as well? Sir Gaheris’s involvement suggested something important was afoot that the queen wanted me to be part of. Or…perhaps I was just building myself up over nothing, and she just wanted to hear the latest gossip. Well, only one way to find out. “”Lead on, then, my lord,” I said with a quick nod. “I am at my lady’s bidding,” and I fell in behind him as he walked.