The Once and Future King (#1-4)

by T. H. White

  ‘It is nothing,’ said the Wart.

  ‘Nothing! Said he was a wolf, only the difference was a wolf’s skin was hairy on the outside, his on the inside. Rip up my flesh and try. Ah, for quietus, with a bare bodkin!’

  The bells rang for the second time.

  The Wart’s heart was thumping, and now the Colonel was sidling toward him along the perch. Stamp, stamp, he went, striking the wood he trod on with a convulsive grip at every pace. His poor, mad, brooding eyes glared in the moonlight, shone against the persecuted darkness of his scowling brow. There was nothing cruel about him, no ignoble passion. He was terrified of the Wart, not triumphing, and he must slay.

  ‘If it were done when ’tis done,’ whispered the Colonel, ‘then ’twere well it were done quickly. Who would have thought the young man had so much blood in him?’

  ‘Colonel!’ said the Wart, but held himself there.

  ‘Boy!’ cried the Colonel. ‘Speak, stop me, mercy!’

  ‘There is a cat behind you,’ said the Wart calmly, ‘or a pinemarten. Look.’

  The Colonel turned, swift as a wasp’s sting, and menaced into the gloom. There was nothing. He swung his wild eyes again upon the Wart, guessing the trick. Then, in the cold voice of an adder, ‘The bell invites me. Hear it not, Merlin, for it is a knell that summons thee to heaven or to hell.’

  The third bells were indeed ringing as he spoke, and honour was allowed to move. The ordeal was over and the Wart might fly. But as he moved, but as he flew, quicker than any movement or flight in the world, the terrible sickles had shot from the Colonel’s planted legs – not flashed out, for they moved too quickly for sight – and with a thump, with a clutch, with an apprehension, like being arrested by a big policeman, the great scimitars had fixed themselves in his retreating thumb.

  They fixed themselves, and fixed irrevocably. Gripe, gripe, the enormous thigh muscles tautened in two convulsions. Then the Wart was two yards further down the screen, and Colonel Cully was standing on one foot with a few meshes of string netting and the Wart’s false primary, with its covert—feathers, vice—fisted in the other. Two or three minor feathers drifted softly in a moonbeam toward the floor.

  ‘Well stood!’ cried Balan, delightedly.

  ‘A very gentlemanly exhibition,’ said the peregrine, not minding that Captain Balan had spoken before her.

  ‘Amen!’ said the spar—hawk.

  ‘Brave heart!’ said the kestrel.

  ‘Might we give him the Triumph Song?’ asked Balin, relenting.

  ‘Certainly,’ said the peregrine.

  And they all sang together, led by Colonel Cully at the top of his voice, all belling triumphantly in the terrible moonlight.

  The mountain birds are sweeter

  But the valley birds are fatter,

  And so we deemed it meeter

  To carry off the latter.

  We met a cowering coney

  And struck him through the vitals.

  The Coney was like honey

  And squealed our requitals.

  Some struck the lark in feathers

  Whose puffing clouds were shed off.

  Some plucked the partridge’s nethers,

  While others pulled his head off.

  But Wart the King of Merlins

  Struck foot most far before us.

  His birds and beasts

  Supply our feasts,

  And his feats our glorious chorus!

  ‘Mark my words,’ cried the beautiful Balan, ‘we shall have a regular king in that young candidate. Now, boys, chorus altogether for the last time’:

  But Wart the King of Merlins

  Struck foot most far before us.

  His birds and beasts

  Supply our feasts,

  And his feats our glorious chorus!

  Chapter IX

  ‘Well!’ said the Wart, as he woke up in his own bed next morning. ‘What a horrible, grand crew!’

  Kay sat up in bed and began scolding like a squirrel. ‘Where were you last night?’ he cried. ‘I believe you climbed out. I shall tell my father and get you tanned. You know we are not allowed out after curfew. What have you been doing? I looked for you everywhere. I know you climbed out.’

  The boys had a way of sliding down a rain—water pipe into the moat, which they could swim on secret occasions when it was necessary to be out at night – to wait for a badger, for instance, or to catch tench, which can only be taken just before dawn.

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ said the Wart. ‘I’m sleepy.’

  Kay said. ‘Wake up, wake up, you beast. Where have you been?’

  ‘I shan’t tell you.’

  He was sure that Kay would not believe the story, but only call him a liar and get angrier than ever.

  ‘If you don’t tell me I shall kill you.’

  ‘You will not, then.’

  ‘I will.’

  The Wart turned over on his other side.

  ‘Beast,’ said Kay. He took a fold of the Wart’s arm between the nails of first finger and thumb, and pinched for all he was worth. Wart kicked like a salmon which has been suddenly hooked, and hit him wildly in the eye. In a trice they were out of bed, pale and indignant, looking rather like skinned rabbits – for, in those days, nobody wore clothes in bed – and whirling their arms like windmills in the effort to do each other mischief.

  Kay was older and bigger than the Wart, so that he was bound to win in the end, but he was more nervous and imaginative. He could imagine the effect of each blow that was aimed at him, and this weakened his defence. Wart was only an infuriated hurricane.

  ‘Leave me alone, can’t you?’ And all the while he did not leave Kay alone, but with his head down and swinging arms made it impossible for Kay to do as he was bid. They punched entirely at each other’s faces.

  Kay had a longer reach and a heavier fist. He straightened his arm, more in self—defence than in anything else, and the Wart smacked his own eye upon the end of it. The sky became a noisy and shocking black, streaked outward with a blaze of meteors. The Wart began to sob and pant. He managed to get in a blow upon his opponent’s nose, and this began to bleed. Kay lowered his defence, turned his back on the Wart, and said in a cold, snuffling, reproachful voice, ‘Now it’s bleeding.’ The battle was over.

  Kay lay on the stone floor, bubbling blood out of his nose, and the Wart, with a black eye, fetched the enormous key out of the door to put under Kay’s back. Neither of them spoke.

  Presently Kay turned over on his face and began to sob. He said, ‘Merlyn does everything for you, but he never does anything for me.’

  At this the Wart felt he had been a beast. He dressed himself in silence and hurried off to find the magician.

  On the way he was caught by his nurse.

  ‘Ah, you little helot,’ exclaimed she, shaking him by the arm, ‘you’ve been a—battling again with that there Master Kay. Look at your poor eye, I do declare. It’s enough to baffle the college of sturgeons.’

  ‘It is all right,’ said the Wart.

  ‘No, that it isn’t, my poppet,’ cried his nurse, getting crosser and showing signs of slapping him. ‘Come now, how did you do it, before I have you whipped?’

  ‘I knocked it on the bedpost,’ said the Wart sullenly.

  The old nurse immediately folded him to her broad bosom, patted him on the back, and said, ‘There, there, my dowsabel. It’s the same story Sir Ector told me when I caught him with a blue eye, gone forty years. Nothing like a good family for sticking to a good lie. There, my innocent, you come along of me to the kitchen and we’ll slap a nice bit of steak across him in no time. But you hadn’t ought to fight with people bigger than yourself.’

  ‘It is all right,’ said the Wart again, disgusted by the fuss, but fate was bent on punishing him, and the old lady was inexorable. It took him half an hour to escape, and then only at the price of carrying with him a juicy piece of raw beef which he was supposed to hold over his eye.

  ‘Nothing like a meal
y rump for drawing out the humours,’ his nurse had said, and the cook had answered:

  ‘Us han’t seen a sweeter bit of raw since Easter, no, nor a bloodier.’

  ‘I will keep the foul thing for Balan,’ thought the Wart, resuming his search for his tutor.

  He found him without trouble in the tower room which he had chosen when he arrived. All philosophers prefer to live in towers, as may be seen by visiting the room which Erasmus chose in his college at Cambridge, but Merlyn’s tower was even more beautiful than this. It was the highest room in the castle, directly below the look—out of the great—keep, and from its window you could gaze across the open field – with its rights of warren – across the park, and the chase, until your eye finally wandered out over the distant blue tree—tops of the Forest Sauvage. This sea of leafy timber rolled away and away in knobs like the surface of porridge, until it was finally lost in remote mountains which nobody had ever visited, and the cloudcapped towers and gorgeous palaces of heaven.

  Merlyn’s comments upon this black eye were of a medical nature.

  ‘The discoloration,’ he said, ‘is caused by haemorrhage into the tissues (ecchymosis) and passes from dark purple through green to yellow before it disappears.’

  There seemed to be no sensible reply to this.

  ‘I suppose you had it,’ continued Merlyn, ‘fighting with Kay?’

  ‘Yes. How did you know?’

  ‘Ah, well, there it is.’

  ‘I came to ask you about Kay.’

  ‘Speak. Demand. I’ll answer.’

  ‘Well, Kay thinks it is unfair that you are always turning me into things and not him. I have not told him about it but I think he guesses. I think it is unfair too.’

  ‘It is unfair.’

  ‘So will you turn us both next time that we are turned?’

  Merlyn had finished his breakfast, and was puffing at the meerschaum pipe which made his pupil believe that he breathed fire. Now he took a deep puff, looked at the Wart, opened his mouth to speak, changed his mind, blew out the smoke and drew another lungful.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘life does seem to be unfair. Do you know the story of Elijah and the Rabbi Jachanan?’

  ‘No,’ said the Wart.

  He sat down resignedly upon the most comfortable part of the floor, perceiving that he was in for something like the parable of the looking—glass.

  ‘This rabbi,’ said Merlyn, ‘went on a journey with the prophet Elijah. They walked all day, and at nightfall they came to the humble cottage of a poor man, whose only treasure was a cow. The poor man ran out of his cottage, and his wife ran too, to welcome the strangers for the night and to offer them all the simple hospitality which they were able to give in straitened circumstances. Elijah and the Rabbi were entertained with plenty of the cow’s milk, sustained by homemade bread and butter, and they were put to sleep in the best bed while their kindly hosts lay down before the kitchen fire. But in the morning the poor man’s cow was dead.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘They walked all the next day, and came that evening to the house of a very wealthy merchant, whose hospitality they craved. The merchant was cold and proud and rich, and all that he would do for the prophet and his companion was to lodge them in a cowshed and feed them on bread and water. In the morning, however, Elijah thanked him very much for what he had done, and sent for a mason to repair one of his walls, which happened to be falling down, as a return for his kindness.

  ‘The Rabbi Jachanan, unable to keep silence any longer, begged the holy man to explain the meaning of his dealings with human beings.

  ‘“In regard to the poor man who received us so hospitably,” replied the prophet, “it was decreed that his wife was to die that night, but in reward for his goodness God took the cow instead of the wife. I repaired the wall of the rich miser because a chest of gold was concealed near the place, and if the miser had repaired the wall himself he would have discovered treasure. Say not therefore to the Lord: What doest thou? But say in thy heart: Must not the Lord of all the earth do right?”’

  ‘It is a nice sort of story,’ said the Wart, because it seemed to be over.

  ‘I am sorry,’ said Merlyn, ‘that you should be the only one to get my extra tuition, but then, you see, I was only sent for that.’

  ‘I do not see that it would do any harm for Kay to come too.’

  ‘Nor do I. But the Rabbi Jachanan did not see why the miser should have had his wall repaired.’

  ‘I understand that,’ said the Wart doubtfully, ‘but I still think it was a shame that the cow died. Could I not have Kay with me just once?’

  Merlyn said gently, ‘Perhaps what is good for you might be bad for him. Besides, remember he has never asked to be turned into anything.’

  ‘He wants to be turned, for all that. I like Kay, you know, and I think people don’t understand him. He has to be proud because he is frightened.’

  ‘You still do not follow what I mean. Suppose he had gone as a merlin last night, and failed in the ordeal, and lost his nerve?’

  ‘How do you know about that ordeal?’

  ‘Ah, well there it is again.’

  ‘Very well,’ said the Wart obstinately. ‘But suppose he had not failed in the ordeal, and had not lost his nerve. I don’t see why you should have to suppose that he would have.’

  ‘Oh, flout the boy!’ cried the magician passionately. ‘You don’t seem to see anything this morning. What is it that you want me to do?’

  ‘Turn me and Kay into snakes or something.’

  Merlyn took off his spectacles, dashed them on the floor and jumped on them with both feet.

  ‘Castor and Pollux blow me to Bermuda!’ he exclaimed, and immediately vanished with a frightful roar.

  The Wart was still staring at his tutor’s chair in some perplexity, a few moments later, when Merlyn reappeared. He had lost his hat and his hair and beard were tangled up, as if by a hurricane. He sat down again, straightening his gown with trembling fingers.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ asked the Wart.

  ‘I did not do it on purpose.’

  ‘Do you mean to say that Castor and Pollux did blow you to Bermuda?’

  ‘Let this be a lesson to you,’ replied Merlyn, ‘not to swear. I think we had better change the subject.’

  ‘We were talking about Kay.’

  ‘Yes and what I was going to say before my – ahem! – my visit to the still vexed Bermoothes, was this. I cannot change Kay into things. The power was not deputed to me when I was sent. Why this was so, neither you nor I am able to say, but such remains the fact. I have tried to hint at some of the reasons for the fact, but you will not take them, so you must just accept the fact in its naked reality. Now please stop talking until I have got my breath back, and my hat.’

  The Wart sat quiet while Merlyn closed his eyes and began to mutter to himself. Presently a curious black cylindrical hat appeared on his head. It was a topper.

  Merlyn examined it with a look of disgust, said bitterly, ‘And they call this service!’ and handed it back to the air. Finally he stood up in a passion and exclaimed, ‘Come here!’

  The Wart and Archimedes looked at each other, wondering which was meant – Archimedes had been sitting all the while on the window—sill and looking at the view, for, of course, he never left his master – but Merlyn did not pay them any attention.

  ‘Now,’ said Merlyn furiously, apparently to nobody, ‘do you think you are being funny?

  ‘Very well then, why do you do it?

  ‘That is no excuse. Naturally I meant the one I was wearing.

  ‘But wearing now, of course, you fool. I don’t want a hat I was wearing in 1890. Have you no sense of time at all?’

  Merlyn took off the sailor hat which had just appeared and held it out to the air for inspection.

  ‘This is an anachronism,’ he said severely. ‘That is what it is, a beastly anachronism.’

  Archimedes seemed to be accustomed to these scene
s, for he now said in a reasonable voice: ‘Why don’t you ask for the hat by name, master? Say, “I want my magician’s hat,” not “I want the hat I was wearing.” Perhaps the poor chap finds it as difficult to live backwards as you do.’

  ‘I want my magician’s hat,’ said Merlyn sulkily.

  Instantly the long pointed cone was standing on his head.

  The tension in the air relaxed. Wart sat down again on the floor, and Archimedes resumed his toilet, passing his pinions and tail feathers through his beak to smooth the barbs together: Each barb had hundreds of little hooks or barbules on it, by means of which the barbs of the feather were held together. He was stroking them into place.

  Merlyn said, ‘I beg your pardon. I am not having a very good day today, and there it is.’

  ‘About Kay,’ said the Wart. ‘Even if you can’t change him into things, could you not give us both an adventure without changing?’

  Merlyn made a visible effort to control his temper, and to consider this question dispassionately. He was sick of the subject altogether.

  ‘I cannot do any magic for Kay,’ he said slowly, ‘except my own magic that I have anyway. Backsight and insight and all that. Do you mean anything I could do with that?’

  ‘What does your backsight do?’

  ‘It tells me what you would say is going to happen, and the insight sometimes says what is or was happening in other places.’

  ‘Is there anything happening just now, anything that Kay and I could go to see?’

  Merlyn immediately struck himself on the brow and exclaimed excitedly, ‘Now I see it all. Yes, of course there is, and you are going to see it. Yes, you must take Kay and hurry up about it. You must go immediately after Mass. Have breakfast first and go immediately after Mass. Yes, that is it. Go straight to Hob’s strip of barley in the open field and follow that line until you come to something. That will be splendid, yes, and I shall have a nap this afternoon instead of those filthy Summulae Logicales. Or have I had the nap?’

  ‘You have not had it,’ said Archimedes. ‘That is still in the future, Master.’