The Once and Future King (#1-4)

by T. H. White

  The charges began with the growing day.

  At a military tattoo perhaps, or at some old piece of showground pageantry, you may have seen a cavalry charge. If so, you know that ‘seen’ is not the word. It is heard – the thunder, earth—shake, drum—fire, of the bright and battering sandals! Yes, and even then it is only a cavalry charge you are thinking of, not a chivalry one. Imagine it now, with the horses twice as heavy as the soft—mouthed hunters of our own midnight pageants, with the men themselves twice heavier on account of arms and shield. Add the cymbal—music of the clashing armour to the jingle of the harness. Turn the uniforms into armour to the jingle of the harness. Turn the uniforms into mirrors, blazing with the sun, the lances into spears of steel. Now the spears dip, and now they are coming. The earth quakes under feet. Behind, among the flying clods, there are hoof—prints stricken in the ground. It is not the men that are to be feared, not their swords nor even their spears, but the hoofs of the horses. It is the impetus of that shattering phalanx of iron – spread across the battlefront, inescapable, pulverizing, louder than drums, beating the earth.

  The knights of the confederation met the outrage as they could. They stood to it, and fought back. But the novelty of their situation as objects of ferocity in spite of their rank, and also as a large body being charged with arrogance by a body numbering less than a quarter of their own – and being charged again and again into the bargain – this had an effect on their morale. They gave ground before the charges, still orderly but giving, and were shepherded along a glade of Sherwood forest – a wide glade like an estuary of grass with trees on either side.

  During this phase of the battle there was a display of bravery by various individuals. King Lot had personal success against Sir Meliot de la Roche and against Sir Clariance. He was unhorsed by Kay, and horsed again only to be wounded in the shoulder by Arthur himself – who was everywhere, youthful, triumphant, over—excited.

  As a general, Lot seems to have been a martinet and something of a coward. But he was a tactician in spite of his formality. He seems to have recognized by noon that he was faced by a new kind of warfare, which required a new defence. The demons of Arthur’s cavalry were not concerned with ransoms, it was now seen, and they were prepared to go on smashing their heads against the wall of his cavalry until it broke. He decided to wear them out. At a hurried council of war behind the line, it was arranged that he himself, with four other kings and half the defenders, should retire along the glade to prepare a position. The remaining six kings were sufficient to hold the English, while Lot’s men rested and re—formed. Then, when the position was prepared, the six kings of the advance guard were to retire through it, leaving Lot in the front line while they re—formed.

  The many split accordingly.

  Arthur accepted this moment of division as the opportunity for which he had been waiting. He sent an equerry to gallop for the trees. He had made a pact of mutual aid with two French kings, called Ban and Bors – and these two allies had come from France with about ten thousand men, to lend him aid. The Frenchmen had been hidden in the forest on either side of the clearing, as reserves. It had been in their direction that the King had tried to drive the enemy. The equerry galloped, there was a twinkle of armour among the leafy oaks, and Lot’s mind jumped to the trap. He looked only to the one side of the glade, where Bors was issuing already upon his flank, being unaware at present that Ban was on the other wing.

  Lot’s nerve began to collapse at this stage. He was wounded in the shoulder, faced by an enemy who seemed to accept the death of gentlemen as a part of warfare, and now he was in an ambush. ‘Oh, defend us from death and horrible maims,’ he is reported to have said, ‘for I see well we be in great peril of death.’

  He detached King Carados with a strong squadron to meet King Bors, only to find that a second equerry had sprung King Ban from the opposite side of him. He was still in numerical superiority, but his nerve was now gone for good. ‘Ha,’ he said to the Duke of Cambenet, ‘we must be discomfited.’ He is even supposed to have wept ‘for pity and dole’.

  Carados was personally unhorsed, and his squadron broken by King Bors. The advance guard of six kings was driven in by Arthur’s charges. Lot, with King Morganore’s division, faced about in order to hold King Ban upon his wing.

  The rebellion would have been ended on that day, with one more hour of daylight. But the sun set, coming to the rescue of the Old Ones, and there was no moon for that quarter. Arthur called off the hunt, judged accurately that the insurgents were demoralized, and allowed his men to sleep in comfort on their arms, with few but careful sentries.

  The exhausted army of his enemies, who had diced the night before, now spent the hours of darkness sleepless again, standing to arms or in their councils. Like all the highland armies that have ever marched against Gramarye, they were distrustful of each other. They expected another night attack. They were dismayed by what they had suffered. They were divided on the subject of capitulation or resistance. It was the brink of daylight before King Lot could have his way.

  The remaining infantry, by his orders, were to be turned off like so many cattle, to stray and save their naked legs however they could. The knights were to band themselves into a single phalanx to resist the charges, and any man who ran away thereafter was to be shot at once for cowardice.

  In the morning, almost before they were formed, Arthur was on them. In conformity with his own tactics, he sent only a small troop of forty spears to start the work. These men, a picked striking force of gallants, resumed the onslaughts of the previous afternoon. They came down at a hand gallop, smashed through the rank or broke it, re—formed, and came again. The dogged regiment withdrew before them, sullen, dispirited, the fight knocked out of it.

  At noon the three kings of the allies struck with their full force, in a final blow. There was the moment of intermingling with a noise like thunder, the spectacle of broken lances sailing in the air while horses pawed that element before they went down backward. There was a yell that shook the forest. After it, on the trodden turf with its hoof—marks and kicked sods and a débris of offensive weapons, there was an unnatural silence. There were people riding about aimlessly at a walk. But there were no longer any organized traces of the chivalry of the Gael.

  Merlyn met the King as he rode back from Sorhaute – a magician rather tired, and still unmounted. He was dressed in the infantry habergeon in which he had insisted on fighting. He brought the news that the clans on foot had offered their capitulation.

  Chapter XIII

  In the September moonlight several weeks later, King Pellinore was sitting on the cliff top with his fiancée, staring out to sea. Soon they were setting off for England, to be married. His arm was about her waist and his ear was pressed to the top of her head. They were unconscious of the world.

  ‘But Dornar is such a funny name,’ the King was saying. “I can’t think how you thought of it.’

  ‘But you thought of it, Pellinore.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yes. Aglovale, Percivale, Lamorak and Dornar.’

  ‘They will be like cherubs,’ said the King fervently. ‘Like cherubim! What are cherubim?’

  Behind them the ancient castle loomed against the stars. There was a faint noise of shouting from the top of the Round Tower, where Grummore and Palomides were arguing with the Questing Beast. She was still in love with her counterfeit, and still kept the castle in a state of siege – which had only been broken for a few hours on the day of Lot’s return with his defeated army. It had been a surprise for the English knights to learn that they had been at war with Orkney all the time, but it was too late to do anything about it, since the war was over. Now everybody was inside, the drawbridge was permanently up, and Glatisant lay in the moonlight at the foot of the tower, her head gleaming like silver. Pellinore had refused to have her killed.

  Merlyn arrived one afternoon in the course of his northern walking tour, wearing a haversack and a pair of monstrou
s boots. He was sleek and snowy and shining, like an eel preparing for its nuptial journey to the Sargasso Sea, for the time of Nimue was at hand. But he was absent—minded, unable to remember the one thing which he ought to have told his pupil, and he listened to their difficulties with an impatient ear.

  ‘Excuse me,’ they shouted from the top of the wall, as the magician stood outside, ‘but it’s about the Questin’ Beast. The Queen of Lothian and Orkney is in a frightful temper about her.’

  ‘Are you sure it is about the Beast?’

  ‘Certain, my dear fellow. You see, she has us besieged.’

  ‘We dressed up,’ bawled Sir Palomides miserably. ‘as a sort of Beast ourselves, respected sir, and she saw us coming into the castle. There are signs, ahem, of ardent affection. Now this creature will not go away, because she believes her mate to be inside, and it is of a great unsafety to lower the drawbridge.’

  ‘You had better explain to her. Stand on the battlements and explain the mistake.’

  ‘Do you think she will understand?’

  ‘After all,’ the magician said, ‘she is a magic beast. It seems possible.’

  But the explanation was a failure – she looked at them as if she thought they were lying.

  ‘I say, Merlyn! Don’t go yet.’

  ‘I have to go,’ he said absently. ‘I have to do something somewhere, but I can’t remember what it is. Meanwhile I shall have to carry on with my walking tour. I am to meet my master Bleise in North Humberland, so that he can write down the chronicles of the battle, and then we are to have a little wild—goose watching, and after that – well, I can’t remember.’

  ‘But, Merlyn, the Beast would not believe!’

  ‘Never mind.’ His voice was vague and troubled. ‘Can’t stop. Sorry. Apologize to Queen Morgause for me, will you, and say I was asking after her health?’

  He began to revolve on his toes, preparatory to vanishing. Not much of his walking tour was done on foot.

  ‘Merlyn, Merlyn! Wait a bit!’

  He reappeared for a moment, saying in a cross voice: ‘Well, what is it?’

  ‘The Beast will not believe us. What are we to do?’

  He frowned.

  ‘Psycho—analyse her,’ he said eventually, beginning to spin.

  ‘But, Merlyn, wait! How are we to do this thing?’

  ‘The usual method.’

  ‘But what is it?’ they cried in despair.

  He disappeared completely, his voice remaining in the air.

  ‘Just find out what her dreams are and so on. Explain the facts of life. But not too much of Freud.’

  After that, as a background to the felicity of King Pellinore – who refused to bother with trivial problems – Grummore and Palomides had to do their best.

  ‘Well, you see,’ Sir Grummore was shouting, ‘when a hen lays an egg…’

  Sir Palomides interrupted with an explanation about pollen and stamens.

  Inside the castle, in the royal chamber of the Pele Tower, King Lot and his consort were laid in the double bed. The king was asleep, exhausted by the effort of writing his memoirs about the war. He had no particular reason for staying awake. Morgause was sleepless.

  Tomorrow she was going to Carlion for Pellinore’s wedding. She was going, as she had explained to her husband, in a manner of a messenger, to plead for his pardon. She was taking the children with her.

  Lot was angry about the journey and wished to forbid it, but she knew how to deal with that.

  The Queen drew herself silently out of the bed, and went to her coffer. She had been told about Arthur since the army returned – about his strength, charm, innocence and generosity. His splendour had been obvious, even through the envy and suspicion of those he had conquered. Also there had been talk about a girl called Lionore, the daughter of the Earl of Sanam, with whom the young man was supposed to be having an affair. The Queen opened the coffer in the darkness and stood near the moonlit patch from the window, holding a strip of something in her hands. It was like a tape.

  The strip was a less cruel piece of magic than the black cat had been, but more gruesome. It was called the Spancel – after the rope with which domestic animals were hobbled – and there were several of them in the secret coffers of the Old Ones. They were a piseog rather than a great magic. Morgause had got it from the body of a soldier which had been brought home by her husband, for burial in the Out Isles.

  It was a tape of human skin, cut from the silhouette of the dead man. That is to say, the cut had been begun at the right shoulder, and the knife – going carefully in a double slit so as to make a tape – had gone down the outside of the right arm, round the outer edge of each finger as if along the seams of a glove, and up on the inside of the arm to the armpit. Then it had gone down the side of the body, down the leg and up it to the crutch, and so on until it had completed the circuit of the corpse’s outline, at the shoulder from which it had started. It made a long ribbon.

  The way to use a Spancel was this. You had to find the man you loved while he was asleep. Then you had to throw it over his head without waking him, and tie it in a bow. If he woke while you were doing this, he would be dead within the year. If he did not wake until the operation was over, he would be bound to fall in love with you.

  Queen Morgause stood in the moonlight, drawing the Spancel through her fingers.

  The four children were awake too, but they were not in their bedroom. They had listened on the stairs during the royal dinner, so they knew that they were off to England with their mother.

  They were in the tiny Church of the Men – a chapel as ancient as Christianity in the islands, though it was scarcely twenty feet square. It was built of unmortared stones, like the great wall of the keep, and the moonlight came through its single unglazed window to fall on the stone altar. The basin for holy water, on which the moonlight fell, was scooped out of the living stone, and it had a stone lid cut from a flake, to match it.

  The Orkney children were kneeling in the home of their ancestors. They were praying that they might be true to their loving mother – that they might be worthy of the Cornwall feud which she had taught them – and that they might never forget the misty land of Lothian where their father reigned.

  Outside the window the thin moon stood upright in a deep sky, like the paring of a finger—nail for magic, and against the sky the weather vane of the carrion crow with arrow in mouth pointed its arrow to the south.

  Chapter XIV

  Fortunately for Sir Palomides and Sir Grummore, the Questing Beast saw reason at the last moment, before the cavalcade set out – otherwise they would have had to stay in Orkney and miss the marriage altogether. Even as it was, they had to stay up all night. She recovered quite suddenly.

  The drawback was that she transferred her affection to the successful analyst – to Palomides – as so often happens in psycho—analysis – and now she refused to take any further interest in her early master. King Pellinore, not without a few sighs for the good old days, was forced to resign his rights in her to the Saracen. This is why, although Malory clearly tells us that only a Pellinore could catch her, we always find her being pursued by Sir Palomides in the later parts of the Morte d’Arthur. In any case, it makes very little difference who could catch her, because nobody ever did.

  The long march southwards towards Carlion, with litters swaying and the mounted escort jogging under flapping pennoncels, was exciting for everybody. The litters themselves were interesting. They consisted of ordinary carts with a kind of flag—staff at each end. Between the staffs a hammock was slung, in which the jolts were hardly felt. The two knights rode behind the royal conveyances, delighted at being able to get out of the castle and see the marriage after all. St Toirdealbhach followed with Mother Morlan, so that it would be a double wedding. The Questing Beast brought up the rear, keeping a tight eye on Palomides, for fear of being let down once again.

  All the saints came out of their beehives to see them off. All the Fomorians, Fir
Bolg, Tuatha de Danaan, Old People and others waved to them without the least suspicion from cliffs, currachs, mountains, bogs and shell—mounds. All the red deer and unicorns lined the high tops to bid good—bye. The terns came with their forked tails from the estuary, squeaking away as if intent upon imitating an embarkation scene on the wireless – the white—bottomed wheatears and pipits flitted along beside them from whin to whin – the eagles, peregrines, ravens and chuffs made circles over them in the air – the peat smoke followed them as if anxious to make one last curl in the tips of their nostrils – the ogham stones and souterrains and promontory forts exhibited their pre—historic masonry in a blaze of sunlight – the sea—trout and salmon put their gleaming heads out of the water – the glens, mountains and heather—shoulders of the most beautiful country in the world joined the general chorus – and the soul of the Gaelic world said to the boys in the loudest of fairy voices: Remember Us!

  If the march was exciting for the children, the metropolitan glories of Carlion were enough to take their breath away. Here, round the King’s castle, there were streets – not just one street – and castles of dependent barons, and monasteries, chapels, churches, cathedrals, markets, merchants’ houses. There were hundreds of people in the streets, all dressed in blue or red or green or any bright colour, with shopping baskets over their arms, or driving hissing geese before them, or hurrying hither and thither in the livery of some great lord. There were bells ringing, clocks smiting in belfries, standards floating – until the whole air above them seemed to be alive. There were dogs and donkeys and palfreys in caparison and priests and farm wagons – whose wheels creaked like the day of judgment – and booths which sold gilt gingerbread, and shops where the finest bits of armour in the very latest fashions were displayed. There were silk merchants and spice merchants and jewellers. The shops had painted trade signs hung over them, like the inn signs which we have today. There were servitors carousing outside wine shops, and old ladies haggling over eggs, and itinerant cads carrying cages of hawks for sale, and portly aldermen with gold chains, and brown ploughmen with hardly any clothes on except a few bits of leather, and leashes of greyhounds, and strange Eastern men selling parrots, and pretty ladies mincing along in high dunces’ caps with veils floating from the top of them, and perhaps a page in front of the lady, carrying a prayer book, if she was going to church.