The Once and Future King (#1-4)

by T. H. White

  Guenever was saying: ‘I can’t think how you could have done it.’

  ‘Neither can I, Jenny. I don’t even know that I did do it, except that everybody says so.’

  ‘Can’t you remember anything?’

  ‘I was excited, I suppose, and frightened about you. There was a press of people waving weapons, and knights trying to stop me. I had to cut my way.’

  ‘It seems unlike you.’

  ‘You don’t suppose I wanted to, do you?’ he asked, bitterly. ‘Gareth was fonder of me than he was of his brothers. I was almost his godfather. Oh, let’s leave it, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘I dare say he is better out of it, poor dear.’

  Lancelot kicked the log thoughtfully, one arm on the mantelpiece, looking into the ashy glow.

  ‘He had blue eyes.’

  He stopped, considering them in the fire.

  ‘When he came to court, he would not name his parents. It was because he had to run away from home, so as to come, in the first place. There was a feud between his mother and Arthur, and the old woman hated him coming. But he couldn’t keep away. He wanted the romance and the chivalry and the honour. So he ran away to us, and wouldn’t say who he was. He didn’t ask to be knighted. It was enough for him to be at the great centre until he had proved his strength.’

  He pushed a stray branch into place.

  ‘Kay took him to work in the kitchen, and gave him a nickname: “Pretty Hands.” Kay was always a bully. And then…it seems so long ago.’

  In the silence – while they stood, each with an elbow on the mantel and a foot towards the fire, the weightless ash shuffled down.

  ‘I used to give him tips sometimes, to buy himself his little things. Beaumains the kitchen page. He took to me for some reason. I knighted him with my own hands.’

  He looked at his fingers in surprise, moving them as if he had not seen them before.

  ‘Then he fought the adventure of the Green Knight, and we found out what a champion he was…

  ‘Gentle Gareth,’ he said, almost in amazement, ‘I killed him with the same hands too, because he refused to wear his armour against me. What horrible creatures humans are! If we see a flower as we walk through the fields, we lop off its head with a stick. That is how Gareth has gone.’

  Guenever took the guilty hand with distress.

  ‘You couldn’t help it.’

  ‘I could have helped it.’ He was in his customary religious misery. ‘It was my fault. You are right that it was unlike me. It was my fault, my fault, my grievous fault. It was because I laid about me in the press.’

  ‘You had to make the rescue.’

  ‘Yes, but I could have fought the armed knights only. Instead of which, I laid about me against the half—armed foot—soldiers, who had no chance. I was cap—à—pied, and they were in cuirbouillé, just leather and pikes. But I cut at them and God punished us. It was because I had forgotten my knighthood that God made me kill poor Gareth, and Gaheris too.’

  ‘Lance!’ she said sharply.

  ‘Now we are in this hellish misery,’ he went on, refusing to listen. ‘Now I have got to fight against my own King, who knighted me and taught me all I know. How can I fight him? How can I fight Gawaine, even? I have killed three of his brothers. How can I add to that? But Gawaine will never let me off. He will never forgive now. I don’t blame him. Arthur would forgive us, but Gawaine won’t let him. I have got to be besieged in this hole like a coward, when nobody wants to fight except Gawaine, and then they come outside with their fanfares and sing:

  Traitor knight

  Come out to fight.

  Yah! Yah! Yah!’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what they sing. It doesn’t make you a coward because they sing it.’

  ‘And my own men are beginning to think so too. Bors, Blamore, Bleoberis, Lionel – they are always asking me to go out and fight. And when I do go out, what happens?’

  ‘So far as I can learn,’ she said, ‘what happens is that you beat them, and then you let them off and beg them to go home. Everybody respects your kindness.’

  He hid his head in the crook of his elbow.

  ‘Do you know what happened in the last battle? Bors had a tilt with the King himself, and knocked him down. He jumped off his horse and stood over Arthur with his sword drawn. I saw it happen, and galloped like mad. Bors said: Shall I make an end of this war? Not so hardy, I shouted, on pain of thy head. So we got Arthur back on his horse and I begged him, begged him on my knees, to go away. Arthur began to cry. His eyes filled with tears, and he stared at me and said nothing. He looks much older. He doesn’t want to fight us, but it is Gawaine. Gawaine was once on our side, but I slew his brothers in my wickedness.’

  ‘Forget your wickedness. It is Gawaine’s black temper and Mordred’s cunning.’

  ‘If it were just Gawaine,’ he lamented, ‘there would still be a hope of peace. He is decent inside himself. He is a good man. But Mordred is always there, hinting to him and making him miserable. And there is the whole hatred of Gael and Gall, and this New Order of Mordred’s. I can’t see the end.’

  The Queen suggested for the hundredth time: ‘Would it be any use if I were to go back to Arthur, and put myself on his mercy?’

  ‘We have offered it, and they have refused. It is no use going in the face of that. They would probably burn you after all.’

  She left the fireplace and drifted over to the great embrasure of the window. Outside, the siege works were spread below. Some tiny soldiers in the enemy camp were merrily playing Fox—and—Geese on a frozen pond. Their clear laughter came up, separated by distance from the tumbles which gave it rise.

  ‘All the time the war goes on,’ she said, ‘and footmen who are not knights get killed, but nobody notices that.’

  ‘All the time.’

  She observed, without turning: ‘I think I will go back, dear, and chance it. Even if I am burned, that would be better than having the Trouble.’

  He followed her to the window.

  ‘Jenny, I would go with you, if it were any use. We could go together, and let them cut our heads off, if there was any hope of stopping the war by that. But everybody has gone mad. Even if we did give ourselves up, Bors and Ector and the rest would carry on the feud – if we were killed. There are a hundred extra feuds on foot, for those we killed in the market—place and on the stairs, and for things through half a century of Arthur’s past. Soon I will not be able to hold them, even as it is. Hebes le Renoumes, Villiers the Valiant, Urre of Hungary: they would begin revenging us, and everything would be worse. Urre is horribly grateful.’

  ‘Civilization seems to have become insane,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, and it seems that we have made it so. Bors, Lionel and Gawaine wounded, and everybody raving for blood. I have to sally out with my knights and rush about pretending to strike, and perhaps Arthur will be urged against me, or Gawaine will come, and then I have to cover myself with the shield, and defend myself, and I mustn’t hit back. The men notice it, and say that by not exerting myself I am prolonging the war, which makes it worse for them.’

  ‘What they say is true.’

  ‘Of course it is true. But the alternative is to kill Arthur and Gawaine, and how can I do that? If only Arthur would take you back, and go away, it would be better than this.’

  She might have flared up at such a tactless suggestion, twenty years before. It was a measure of their autumn that now she was amused.

  ‘Jenny, it is a terrible thing to say, but it is true.’

  ‘Of course it’s true.’

  ‘We seem to be treating you like a dummy.’

  ‘We are all dummies.’

  He leaned his head against the cold stone of the embrasure, until she took his hand.

  ‘Don’t think about it. Just stay in the castle, and be patient. Perhaps God will look after us.’

  ‘You said that once before.’

  ‘Yes, the week before they caught us.’


  ‘Even if God won’t,’ he remarked bitterly, ‘we could apply to the Pope.’

  ‘The Pope!’

  He looked up.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Why, Lance, the thing you said…If the Pope was to send bulls to both sides, saying he would excommunicate us if we didn’t come to terms? If we appealed for a papal ruling? Bors and the others would have to accept it. Surely…’

  He looked at her closely, as she chose the words.

  ‘He could appoint the Bishop of Rochester to administer the terms of peace…’

  ‘But what terms?’

  She had caught her idea, however, and was on fire with it.

  ‘Lance, we two would have to accept them, whatever they might be. Even if they were to mean…even if they were bad for us, they would mean peace for the people. And our knights would have no excuse for carrying on the feud, because they would have to obey the Church…’

  He could find no words.

  ‘Well?’

  She turned to him with a face of composure and relief – the efficient and undramatic face which women achieve when they have nursing to do, or some other employment of efficiency. He did not know how to answer it.

  ‘We can send a messenger tomorrow,’ she said.

  ‘Jenny!’

  He could not bear it that she was allowing herself to be handed from one to another, no longer young, or that he was to lose her, or that he was not to lose her. Between men’s lives and their love and his old totems, he was left with nothing but shame. This she saw, and helped him with it also. She kissed him tenderly. Outside, the daily chorus was beginning.

  Traitor knight

  Come out to fight.

  Yah! Yah! Yah!

  ‘There,’ she said, stroking his white hair. ‘Don’t listen to them. My Lancelot must stay in the castle, and there will be a happy ending.’

  Chapter X

  ‘So His Holiness has made their peace for them,’ said Mordred savagely.

  ‘Aye.’

  They were in the Justice Room, Gawaine and himself, waiting for the last stages of the negotiations. Both were in black – but with the strange difference that Mordred was resplendent in his, a sort of Hamlet, while Gawaine looked more like the grave—digger. Mordred had begun dressing with this dramatic simplicity since the time when he had become a leader of the popular party. Their aims were some kind of nationalism, with Gaelic autonomy, and a massacre of the Jews as well, in revenge for a mythical saint called Hugh of Lincoln. There were already thousands, spread over the country, who carried his badge of a scarlet fist clenching a whip, and who called themselves Thrashers. About the older man, who only wore the uniform to please his brother, there was a homespun blackness, the true, despairing dark of mourning.

  ‘Just fancy,’ Mordred went on. ‘If it had not been for the Pope, we should never have had this beautiful procession with everybody carrying olive branches and the innocent lovers dressed in white.’

  ‘It was a guid procession.’

  Gawaine’s mind did not move easily along the paths of irony, so he accepted the sneer as a statement of fact.

  ‘It was well stage—managed.’

  The older brother moved uncomfortably, as if to ease his position, but returned to the same one from which he had started.

  He said doubtfully, almost as if it were a question or an appeal: ‘Lancelot says in his letters that he killed our Gareth by mistake. He says he didna see him.’

  ‘It would be just like Lancelot to lay about him at unarmed men, without looking to see who they were. He was always famous for that.’

  This time the irony was so heavy that even Gawaine took it as it was.

  ‘I ween it dinna seem likely.’

  ‘Likely? Of course it isn’t. That was not Lancelot’s line. He was the preux chevalier who always spared people – who never slew a person weaker than himself. That was the high road to Lancelot’s popularity. Do you suppose he would have suddenly dropped this pose, to begin killing unarmed men regardless?’

  With a pathetic effort to be fair, Gawaine said: ‘There seems to be nae reason why he should have killed them.’

  ‘Reason? Was Gareth our brother? He killed him as a reprisal, out of revenge because it was our family that had caught him with the Queen.’

  More carefully, he added: ‘It was because Arthur is fond of you, and he was jealous of your influence. He planned it fair, to weaken the clan Orkney.’

  ‘He has weakened himsel’.’

  ‘Besides, he was jealous of Gareth. He was afraid that our brother would poach on his preserves. Our Gareth copied him, which did not suit the preux chevalier. You can’t have two knights without reproach.’

  The Justice Room had been prepared for the final pageant. It looked barren, with only two men in it. They were sitting in a curious way, one behind the other on the steps of the throne, which meant that they did not look each other in the face. Mordred looked at the back of Gawaine’s head, and Gawaine at the floor. He said with a slight choke: ‘Gareth was the best of us.’ If he had turned round quickly, he might have been surprised at the intentness with which he was being watched. The younger face was at variance with the music of its voice. If you had looked closely, you might have noticed that Mordred’s manner in the past six months had become stranger.

  ‘Dear fellow,’ he said, ‘and to be killed by the very man who had his faith.’

  ‘It will teach me ne’er to trust the Southron.’

  Mordred altered the pronoun with an imperceptible emphasis.

  ‘Yes, it will teach us.’

  The old tyrant swung round. He seized the white hand so as to press it, speaking with confusion.

  ‘I was used to thinking it was Agravaine’s mischief – Agravaine’s and yours. I thocht ye were over prejudiced against Sir Lancelot. I am ashamed.’

  ‘Blood is thicker than water.’

  ‘It is that, Mordred. A body may clatter about ideals – about right and wrong and matters of that ilk – but in the end it comes to your ain folk. I mind when Gareth used to rob the priest’s wee orchard, by the cliff…’

  He tailed off lamely, till the thin man prompted him.

  ‘His hair was almost white when he was a boy, it was so fair.’

  ‘Kay used to name him Pretty Hands.’

  ‘That was meant for an insult.’

  ‘Aye, but it was true. His hands were bonnie.’

  ‘And now he is in his grave.’

  Gawaine flushed to the eyebrows, the veins swelling at his temples.

  ‘God’s curse on them! I willna have this peace. I willna forgive them. Why should King Arthur seek to smooth it o’er? What business has the Pope within it? It is my brother that was butchered, none of theirs, and, God Almighty, I will have the vengeance!’

  ‘Lancelot will slip through our fingers. He is an oily man to hold.’

  ‘He shallna slip. We hold him this time. The Cornwalls have forgiven over much.’

  Mordred shifted on the steps.

  ‘Have you ever thought what the Table has done to Cornwall and Orkney? Arthur’s father killed our grandfather. Arthur seduced our mother. And Lancelot has killed three of our brothers, besides Florence and Lovel. Yet here we are, selling our honour, to reconcile the two Englishmen. It seems cowardly!’

  ‘Nay, it isna cowardly. The Pope may force the King to take his Queen, but there is nae word in his bulls about Sir Lancelot. We gave him sanctuary to bring the woman, and we will also let him go. But, after that…’

  ‘Why should we let him escape us, even now?’

  ‘By cause he has safe—conduct. Guid sakes, man Mordred, we are knighted men!’

  ‘We must not stoop to dirty weapons, even if our enemies do.’

  ‘Aye, just. We will let the boar have law to run, and then pursue him to the death. Arthur is failing: he will do our will.’

  ‘It is sad,’ said Sir Mordred, ‘how the poor King seems to lose his grip, since all this busi
ness started.’

  ‘Aye, it is sad. But he kens the difference yet of right and wrong.’

  ‘It is a change for him.’

  ‘Ye mean, to fail his powers.’

  ‘You guess so quickly.’

  His sarcasms were as easy as teasing a blind man.

  ‘He canna have it every way. He never should have sided with that traitor at the start.’

  ‘Nor married Gwen.’

  ‘Aye, the fault lies with them. It isna we who sought the quarrel.’

  ‘Indeed, it is not.’

  ‘The King must stand for justice. Even if His Holiness should make him take the woman to his bed, we have our right towards Sir Lancelot. Man, he has done strong treason when he took the queen, as well as when he slew our brothers.’

  ‘We have every right.’

  The burly fellow took the other’s hand again, the pale one in the horny sexton’s. He said with difficulty: ‘It would be woeful sore to be alone.’

  ‘We had the same mother, Gawaine.’

  ‘Aye!’

  ‘And she was Gareth’s mother too…’

  ‘Here comes the King.’

  The pageant of reconciliation had reached its final stages. With trumpets blowing in the courtyard, the dignitaries of Church and State began to filter up the stairs. The courtiers, bishops, heralds, pages, judges, and spectators were talking as they came. The cube of tapestry, an empty vase before, began to flower with them. It flowered with bald—faced ladies in headdresses which looked like crescents or cones or the astonishing coiffure worn by the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland. In bright bodices with their waists under their armpits, in long skirts and flowing sleeves, in camelin de Tripoli or taffeta or rosete, the delicate creatures swam into their places with an aroma of myrrh and honey – with which they had washed their teeth. Their gallants – young squires in the height of fashion, many of them wearing Mordred’s badge as Thrashers – came mincing in with their long—toed shoes, in which it was impossible to walk upstairs. At the foot of the steps they had slipped out of them, and their pages had carried them up. The impression given by the young men was mainly of legs in stockings – it had even been found necessary to pass a sumptuary law, which insisted that their jackets should be long enough to cover the buttocks. Then there were more responsible councillors in extraordinary hats, some of which were like tea—cosies, some turbans, some bird wings, some muffs. The gowns of these were pleated and padded, with high ruff—like collars, epaulettes and jewelled belts. There were clerks with neat little skull—caps to keep their tonsures warm, dressed in sober clothes which contrasted with the laity. There was a visiting cardinal in the glorious tasselled hat which still adorns the notepaper of Wolsey’s College at Oxford. There were furs of every kind, including a handsome arrangement of black and white lambs’ wool, sewn in contrasting diamonds. The talkers made a noise like starlings.