The Once and Future King (#1-4)

by T. H. White

  ‘Ah, the puir churl,’ they said compassionately. ‘The sassenagh! The sable savage! Will he no’ come back again? Gie him anither drappie there. Ah, the braw splash!’

  Sir Palomides revived slowly, blowing bubbles out of his nose.

  ‘Where is yours truly?’ he asked.

  ‘Here we are, old boy. We got back safe. The Beast is outside.’

  Through the portcullis there came a sorrowful howling to bear out Sir Grummore’s statement, as it had been thirty couple of hounds baying the moon. Sir Palomides shuddered.

  ‘We ought to look out, to see if King Pellinore is comin’.’

  ‘Yes, Sir Grummore. Allow one sec. for recuperation.’

  ‘The Beast may have done him a mischief.’

  ‘Poor fellow!’

  ‘How do you feel yourself?’

  ‘The indisposition is passing,’ said Sir Palomides bravely.

  ‘Not much time to waste. It may be eatin’ him at this moment.’

  ‘Lead on,’ said the paynim, heaving himself to his feet. ‘Forward to the battlements.’

  So the whole party set off to climb the narrow stairs of the Pele Tower.

  Below them, looking small and upside down from this height, the Questing Beast could be seen sitting in the ravine which bounded the castle on that side. She was sitting on a boulder in it, with her tail in the burn, and looking up at the drawbridge with her head on one side. Her tongue was hanging out. Nothing could be seen of Pellinore.

  ‘Evidently she is not eating him,’ said Sir Grummore.

  ‘Unless she has eaten him.’

  ‘I hardly think she would have had time to do that, old boy, not in the time.’

  ‘You would think she would have left some bones or something. Or at any rate the armour.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘What do you think we ought to do?’

  ‘It seems bafflin’.’

  ‘Do you think we ought to make a sortie?’

  ‘We could wait to see what happens, Palomides, don’t you think?’

  ‘No leaps,’ assented Sir Palomides, ‘without previous looks.’

  After they had been watching for half an hour or so, the faction of the Old Ones grew bored with the lack of entertainment. They clattered off down the stairs, to throw stones at the Questing Beast off the top of the wall. The two knights stayed on the look—out.

  ‘This is a pretty state of affairs.’

  ‘Indeed it is.’

  ‘I mean, when you work it out.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Here is the Queen of Orkney angry about something on one side – I could not help noticing that she seemed a little queer about that unicorn – and Pellinore moping on the other. And you are supposed to be in love with La Beale Isoud, isn’t it? And now this Beast is after both of us.’

  ‘A confusing situation.’

  ‘Love,’ said Sir Grummore uneasily, ‘is a pretty strong passion, when you come to think of it.’

  At this moment, as if to confirm Sir Grummore’s opinion, a pair of enlaced figures sauntered along the cliff road.

  ‘Good gracious,’ exclaimed Sir Grummore. ‘What are these?’

  As they drew nearer, their identity became clear. One of them was King Pellinore, and he had his arm round the waist of a stout, middle—aged lady in a side—saddle skirt. She had a red, horsy face, and carried a hunting crop in her free hand. Her hair was in a bun.

  ‘It must be the Queen of Flanders’ daughter!’

  ‘I say, you two!’ cried King Pellinore, as soon as he had observed them. ‘I say, look here, what do you think, can you guess? Whoever would have thought it, what? What do you think I have found?’

  ‘Aha!’ cried the stout lady in a booming voice, archly tapping his cheek with her hunting crop. ‘But who did the findin’, eh?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know! It was not me that found her at all; it was she that found me! What do you think of that?

  ‘And do you know what?’ went on the King, in high delight. ‘None of my letters could possibly be answered! I never put our address on them! We hadn’t got one! I always knew there was something wrong. So Piggy got on her horse, you know, and came huntin’ after me by moor and fell! The Questing Beast helped her a great deal – it has an excellent nose – and that magic barge of ours, can you imagine it, must have had an idea or two in its head, for it went back to fetch them when it saw that I was upset! How nice of it! They found it in a creek somewhere, and here they are!

  ‘But why are we standing about?’ shouted the King. He was so excited that nobody else had time to talk. ‘I mean to say, why are we shouting so? Is it polite, do you think? Ought you two to come down and let us in? What is wrong with this drawbridge anyway?’

  ‘It is the Beast, Pellinore, the Beast! She is in the ravine!’

  ‘What is wrong with the Beast?’

  ‘She is besiegin’ the castle.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said the King. ‘Now I remember. She bit me.

  ‘And what do you think?’ he went on, waving one hand in the air to show that it was bandaged. ‘Piggy tied it up for me like one o’clock. She tied it up with a bit of – well, you know.’

  ‘Petticoats,’ boomed the Queen of Flanders’ daughter.

  ‘Yes, yes, her petticoats!’

  The King was convulsed with giggles.

  ‘That is all very well, Pellinore, that is all very well. But what are you goin’ to do about the Beast?’

  His Majesty was intoxicated with gaiety. ‘Ho, the Beast!’ he cried. ‘Is that the trouble? I’ll soon settle her!

  ‘Now then!’ he exclaimed, marching to the edge of the ravine and waving his sword. ‘Now then! Off you go! Shoo! Shoo!’

  The Questing Beast looked at him absently. She moved her tail in a vague gesture of recognition, then returned her attention to the gatehouse. The occasional stones which were being thrown at her by the Old Ones she dexterously caught and swallowed, in the maddening way which chickens have when you are trying to drive them off.

  ‘Let down the drawbridge!’ commanded the King. ‘I will attend to her! Shoo, now, shoo!’

  The drawbridge was lowered with hesitation. The Beast immediately drew closer to it, with a hopeful expression.

  ‘Now then,’ cried the King. ‘You rush in, while I defend the rear.’

  The drawbridge reached the ground and Piggy was speeding across before it touched. King Pellinore, less agile or more bemused by the gentle passion, collided with her in the gateway. The Questing Beast ran into them behind, knocking the King flat.

  ‘Beware! Beware!’ cried all the retainers, fish—wives, falconers, farriers, fletchers, and other well—wishers who were assembled within.

  The Queen of Flanders’ daughter turned like a tigress to defend her young.

  ‘Be off, you shameless hussy,’ she cried, bringing her hunting crop down on the creature’s nose. The Questing Beast recoiled with the tears springing to its eyes, and the portcullis crashed between them.

  In the evening a new crisis began to develop. It became obvious that Glatisant intended to besiege the castle until her mate had been produced, and, in these circumstances, the Old Ones who had brought their eggs to market refused to leave the gate without an escort. Eventually the three southern knights had to convoy them to the foot of the cliff, with drawn swords in their hands.

  In the village street St Toirdealbhach was waiting to receive the convoy, a raffish Silenus supported by four small boys. His breath smelt strongly of whisky and he was in tearing spirits, waving his shillelagh.

  ‘Not a one more stories,’ he was shouting. ‘Am not I going to be married wid ould Mother Morlan, and after having a fight wid Duncan this minute, and never more to be a saint?’

  ‘Congratulations!’ the children told him for the hundredth time.

  ‘We are all right also,’ added Gareth. ‘We are allowed to serve at dinner every day.’

  ‘Glory be to God! Is it every day, begor?’

  �
��Yes, and our mother takes us for walks.’

  ‘Well, there now. Praise youth and it will come!’

  The saint caught sight of the convoy and began to howl like an Iroquois.

  ‘Up the ribels!’

  ‘Be easy now,’ they told him. ‘Be easy, your Holiness. The swords are not for fighting with at all.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t they be?’ he inquired indignantly, and he proceeded to kiss King Pellinore and breathe on him.

  The King said: ‘I say, are you really going to be married? So am I. Are you excited?’

  For answer, the holy man twined his arms round the King’s neck and drew him into Mother Morlan’s shebeen – not entirely to Pellinore’s satisfaction, for he would have liked to hurry back to Piggy – but it was obvious that a bachelor party would have to be held in celebration. The whole Gaelic miasma had faded like the mist it was – whether under the influence of love or of whisky or of its own nature as mist – and the three southerners found themselves accepted at last as individuals and guests, irrespective of the racial trauma, into the warm heart of the North.

  Chapter XII

  The battle of Bedegraine was fought near Sorhaute in the forest of Sherwood, during the Whitsun holiday. It was a decisive battle, because it was in some ways the twelfth—century equivalent of what later came to be called a Total War.

  The Eleven Kings were ready to fight their sovereign in the Norman way – in the foxhunting way of Henry the Second and of his sons – for sport and acquisition and without the real intention of doing each other a personal injury. They – the kings with the tank—like knights of their nobility – were prepared to take a sporting risk. It was the kind of risk which Jorrocks talked about. King Lot might have said with justice that the rebellion which he led against Arthur was the image of foxhunting without its guilt, and only twenty—five per cent of its danger.

  But the Eleven Kings needed a background for their exploits. Even if the knights had little wish to kill each other on the grand scale, there was no reason why they should not kill the serfs. It would have been a poor day’s sport indeed, according to their estimation, without a bag to count at the end of it.

  So the war, as the rebel lords had wished to fight it, was a kind of double battle, or a war within a war. On the outer circle there were sixty thousand kerns and gallowglasses marching with the Eleven, and these ill—armed levies of the Old Ones were inflamed against the twenty thousand foot—soldiers of Arthur’s Sassenach army by the tragedy of the Gael. Between the armies there was a serious racial enmity. But it was an enmity controlled from above – by nobles who were not sincerely anxious for each other’s blood. The armies were packs of hounds, as it were, whose struggle with each other was to be commanded by Masters of Hounds, who took the matter as an exciting gamble. If the hounds had turned mutinous, for instance, Lot and his allies would have been ready to ride with Arthur’s knights, in quelling what they would have considered a real rebellion.

  The nobles of the inner circle on both sides were in a way traditionally more friendly with each other than with their own men. For them the numbers were necessary for the sake of the bag, and for scenic purposes. For them a good war had to be full of ‘arms, shoulders and heads flying about the field and blows ringing by the water and the wood’. But the arms, shoulders and heads would be those of villeins, and the blows which rang, without removing many limbs, would be exchanged by the iron nobility. Such, at any rate, was the idea of battle in Lot’s command. When sufficient kerns had been decapitated and sufficient rough handling had been dealt out to the English captains, Arthur would recognize the impossibility of further resistance. He would capitulate. Financial terms of peace would be agreed on – which would yield an excellent profit in ransoms – and all would be more or less as it had been before – except that the fiction of feudal overlordship would be abolished, which was a fiction in any case.

  Naturally a war of this sort was likely to be hedged with etiquette, just as foxhunting is hedged with it. It would begin at the advertised meet, weather permitting, and it would be conducted according to precedent.

  But Arthur had a different idea in his head. It did not seem to him to be sporting, after all, that eighty thousand humble men should be leu’d against each other while a fraction of their number, in carapaces like the skins of tanks, manœuvred for the sake of ransom. He had begun to set a value on heads, shoulders and arms – their owners’ value, even if the owner was a serf. Merlyn had taught him to distrust the logic by which countrysides could be pillaged for forage, husbandmen ruined, soldiers slaughtered, so that he himself should pay a scathless ransom, like the Coeur de Lion of the legends.

  The King of England had ordered that there were to be no ransoms in his sort of battle. His knights were to fight, not against gallowglasses, but against the knights of the Gaelic confederation. Let the gallowglasses fight among themselves if they must – indeed, since there was a real aggression for them to settle, apart from the question of ransoms, let them fight to the best of their ability. But, as for his nobles, they were to attack the nobles of the rebels as if they were gallowglasses and nothing more. They were to accept no composition, observe no ballet—dancer’s rules. They were to press the war home to its real lords – until they themselves were ready to refrain from warfare, being confronted with its reality.

  Afterwards, he knew for certain now, it was to be the destiny of his life to deal with every way of twisting decency by threats of Power.

  So we may well believe that the King’s men were shriven on the night before they fought. Something of the young man’s vision had penetrated to his captains and his soldiers. Something of the new ideal of the Round Table which was to be born in pain, something about doing a hateful and dangerous action for the sake of decency – for they knew that the fight was to be fought in blood and death without reward. They would get nothing but the unmarketable conscience of having done what they ought to do in spite of fear – something which wicked people have often debased by calling it glory with too much sentiment, but which is glory all the same. This idea was in the hearts of the young men who knelt before the God—distributing bishops – knowing that the odds were three to one, and that their own warm bodies might be cold at sunset.

  Arthur began with an atrocity and continued with other atrocities. The first one was that he did not wait for the fashionable hour. He ought to have marshalled his Battle opposite Lot’s, as soon as their breakfast was over, and then, at about midday, when the lines were properly in order, he should have given the signal to begin. The signal having been given, he should have charged Lot’s footmen with his knights, while Lot’s knights charged his footmen, and there would have been a splendid slaughter.

  Instead, he attacked by night. In the darkness, with a warwhoop – deplorable and ungentlemanly tactics – he fell on the insurgent camp with the blood pounding in the veins of his neck, and Excalibur dancing in his hand. He had taken the odds of three to one. In knights he was wildly outmatched. A single King of the rebels – the King of the Hundred Knights – had with his own forces two—thirds of the total number to which the Round Table was ever to grow. And Arthur had not started the war. He was fighting in his own country, hundreds of miles within his own borders, against an aggression which he had not provoked.

  Down came the tents, up flared the torches, out flew the blades, and the yell of battle mingled with the lamentation of surprise. The noise, the slaughtering and slaughtered demons black against the flames – what scenes there have been in Sherwood, where now the oak trees crowd into a shade!

  It was a masterful start, and it was rewarded by success. The Eleven Kings and their barons were in armour already – it took so long to arm a nobleman that he was often accomplished over—night. If they had not been, it might have been an almost bloodless victory. Instead, it was an initiative, and the initiative held. The chivalry of the Old Ones fought their way from the ruined encampment, hand to hand. They managed to unite into an armoured regime
nt – which was still several times larger than anything in armour which the King could bring against them – but they were deprived of their accustomed screen of footmen. There had been no time to organize the gallowglasses, and such of these as did remain with the nobility were demoralized or leaderless. Arthur detached his own footmen, under Merlyn, to deal with the infantry battle which was centred round the camp, and he himself pressed on with his cavalry against the kings themselves. He had them on the run, and saw that he must keep them on it. They were indignantly surprised by what they considered unchivalrous personal outrage – outrageous to be attacked with positive manslaughter, as if a baron could be killed like a Saxon kern.

  The King’s second atrocity was that he neglected the kerns themselves. That part of the battle, the racial struggle which had a certain reality even if it was a wicked one, he left to the races themselves – to the infantry and to Merlyn’s direction, at the struggling camp from which the cavalry was already sweeping away. There were three Gaels to every Gall among the tents, but they were surprised and taken at a disadvantage. He wished them no particular harm – concentrating his indignation upon the leaders who had seduced their addled pates – but he knew that they would have to be allowed their fight. He hoped that it would be a victorious one so far as his own troops were concerned. In the meantime his business was with the leaders – and, as the day dawned, the atrociousness of his conduct became apparent.

  For the Eleven Kings had assembled some apology for an infantry screen, behind which to wait his charges. He ought to have charged this screen of terrified men, dealing them an enormous execution. Instead, he neglected them. He galloped through the infantry as if they were not his enemies at all – not even troubling to strike at them – pressing his charge against the armoured core itself. The infantry, for their part, accepted the mercy only too thankfully. They behaved as if it was not an honour to be allowed to die for Lothian. The discipline, as the rebel generals said afterwards, was not Pictish.