And all the while, Andret watched.
One night in early summer, the Queen went early to her apartments, saying that her head ached, for there was thunder in the air, and she would be alone. And soon after, Andret saw that Tristan’s place in the King’s Hall was empty. Then he too slipped out. Soon after, a palace servant with a gold coin hidden in his closed hand came to the King with word that the Queen begged him to go to her instantly in her bower.
And when Marc came striding into the bower, brushing aside Brangian who tried to hold him back, he found Tristan and Iseult held close in each other’s arms.
Then the King’s wrath was terrible; all the more terrible because of his love for his Queen and his kinsman. And waiting for no excuses, he shouted up the guard. And Tristan, for all that he fought like a wildcat, was taken and dragged away, while the Queen was held captive in her own chamber – until next day they were brought before a council of the chiefs and churchmen and lawmakers of the kingdom.
And Iseult was condemned to die by fire, which according to the law of the land was the proper fate for a queen who had betrayed her lord, and Tristan was condemned to be broken on a great wheel.
By dawn on the appointed day all the preparations had been made; and great was the grief and loud the wailing throughout the land, for Tristan was the champion and the hope of Cornwall, and the Queen had made herself beloved in her husband’s kingdom as she had done in her father’s.
Tristan was to die in the morning, Iseult after noon, and so he was led out first by men of the King’s bodyguard. Now the chosen place of his execution was some distance from the castle; and on the way to it, they passed a little chapel set high on the edge of the cliff. And when they came to it, Tristan asked leave to go in and pray, saying that he had had no time to make his peace with God before they fetched him out that morning.
And after a little counsel-taking among themselves, the men agreed, and let him go in alone and unbound, seeing that there was no way in or out but the one door, and a high window that no man could get through, above the sheer drop to the rocks beneath.
But Tristan was a slight man and a desperate one, and he got through that window all the same, and dropped into a furze bush below the clifftop that caught and held him from the long fall; and by little and little, using every finger- and toe-hold among the black rocks, he worked his way along below the edge; until he came to a place where he could regain the clifftop out of sight of the chapel and the bodyguard watching its door. Then he set off back towards Tintagel.
He had not gone far, when round a tump of wind-shaped thorn scrub he came face to face with Gorvenal. They wasted no time in exclaiming nor in greetings. ‘Is the hunt behind you?’ Gorvenal said.
‘Not yet, I will tell you all later.’
‘Meanwhile, the sooner we are many miles from here the better. See – here are your sword and your harp. I could not bide in Tintagel, and I could not be leaving them behind me.’
Tristan took his sword and hurriedly belted it on. ‘Let you keep my harp for me until maybe I come for it,’ he said, and set his hand an instant on Gorvenal’s shoulder, and then walked straight on.
Gorvenal swung round after him. ‘Are you mad? This is the way back to Tintagel!’
‘I cannot leave Iseult to die in the flames,’ Tristan said. ‘I must save her or die with her.’
Gorvenal drew a deep breath. ‘Two swords are better than one. If you are for Tintagel, then so am I.’ And they went on together.
Soon they came in sight of the castle; in sight also of the Queen’s execution place outside the gates, with the pyre already built and the people crowding round. And they settled down behind some hawthorn bushes to wait. It was no good to make any plan; they could only trust that when the moment came, God would show them what to do. Presently the castle gates opened, and King Marc with the rest of his bodyguard came out. And at the same moment, down the woodland track behind Tristan and Gorvenal, came a small terrible company wearing the long hooded cloaks and carrying the wooden clappers that marked them for lepers.
Gorvenal drew aside, as all men did from such company, but Tristan knew that God was showing him the way, and stepped out into their path and spoke to the leader of the band. ‘Where are you away to, friends?’
‘To Tintagel, though with heavy hearts, to see them burn the Queen,’ the man croaked.
‘Would you save the Queen, if you could?’
‘That would we – and doubly, if it were made worth our while.’
‘Lend me your cloak and clapper, and there will be no burning in Tintagel today,’ said Tristan; and to Gorvenal, ‘Have you any money?’ And he took the gold piece his friend brought from the breast of his tunic, and dropped it into the bandaged hand the leper held out for it.
The man took off his stinking rags, and Tristan flung them on, pulling the hood forward over his face. ‘Bide here in hiding, while I go on with your companions.’
‘I also,’ Gorvenal said.
‘No. If aught goes wrong, you must be still free, to get the Queen away.’
And he went on with the lepers, swinging his clapper and crying, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’
When they reached the execution place, the Queen had been brought out, and was being bound to the stake, the King standing by with a frozen face to see it done.
‘Come,’ said Tristan, to the sad creatures behind him, and they went towards the King, all men falling back to let them pass. And kneeling before him, Tristan cried out, making his voice dry and cracked, ‘Lord King, a boon!’
‘This is a strange time to come asking a boon,’ said the King in a voice of stone.
‘Not so strange, for we ask that you give us the Queen to be of our company.’
A gasp ran through the crowd. ‘If she is to die a shameful death, we can offer her one more shameful than the fire. Slower, but maybe uglier.’
And the lepers clamoured, ‘Give her to us! Give! Give!’
And the King’s stone face broke up in a sudden agony and he shouted to the executioners, ‘Cut her loose and give her to these creatures!’
Iseult began to scream and scream, and when Tristan sprang on to the pyre to seize her, she fought him like a wild thing, while all the crowd shouted in angry protest; and then she heard his urgent whisper in her ear, ‘Iseult, it is I. Do not betray me!’
She went on screaming, but she ceased to fight, as though accepting despair, and allowed herself to be dragged down from the pyre into the midst of the lepers, and away up the track towards the woods, while again the people parted to let them through.
When word of Tristan’s escape was brought to the King, his wrath was terrible, and he sent out the hunt for him in all directions. They found the lepers, but the Queen was no longer with them and they told how a terrible warrior had torn her from their midst and made off with her across his saddlebow. And of Tristan and Iseult they found no sign. They and Gorvenal had vanished as completely as rags of morning mist when the sun rises.
They held eastward and eastward away from Tintagel towards the sunrise, and so came at last to a little lost valley through which a stream threaded down from the high moors, shaded over by hawthorn and elder, and the small thick-set oak trees of the ancient forest reached up towards it from below. And between the moors and the forest the stream broadened into a little pool where the wild things came to drink at dawn and sunset.
‘Surely here we shall be safe,’ said Tristan. ‘We are full three days from Tintagel, and it is many years since the King hunted these hills.’
‘The hunting will be good here,’ said Gorvenal, ‘and we must hunt if we are to live.’
And Iseult said, ‘This is such a place as our valley in Wales. We shall be happy here – for a while.’
So they built a hut beside the stream, and Tristan and Gorvenal made themselves bows from forest yew, with strings braided from the red hairs Iseult plucked for them from her head, and went hunting when they needed food; while Iseult with her knowledge of
herbs gathered plants and leaves and berries that were good to eat.
And they were happy – for a while.
It was young summer when they came to the hidden valley, and three times the bracken turned to russet, and three times winter came and they huddled about the fire, while Tristan woke the music of his harp and sang to them the haunting story-songs of Lothian and Ireland. Three times the hazel catkins danced in the March winds, and the hawthorn was curdled with white blossom, and the blossom fell.
And then one evening on the edge of another autumn, Tristan and Iseult sat before their hut at twilight. They were alone, for Gorvenal had gone off on one of his long solitary hunting trips. And suddenly Iseult drew close against Tristan, and said, ‘Do you feel anything?’
‘A little stirring of the wind,’ said Tristan.
‘No, not that.’
‘A night moth brushed my cheek.’
‘No, not that.’
‘What, then, Iseult?’
‘A shadow,’ she said, ‘there is a shadow fallen over us. Hold me close.’
Now that very day, far off in Tintagel, King Marc called for his horses and hounds to ride hunting next dawn. And he said to his Chief Huntsman, ‘I am weary of the old hunting runs. Are there no hills in Cornwall where we have not hunted before?’
‘There are the moors eastward beyond the Tamar River,’ said the Chief Huntsman. ‘It is many years since we hunted that way, so far afield.’
So the next day King Marc and his companions rode eastward – and three days later they set up their hunting camp below the high moors. They had good hunting, and killed three times, but when the hound pack was counted at evening, one of them was missing. It was a good hound, and the King’s favourite, and the Chief Huntsman called out some of his men and set off at once to find it.
All night long they searched until, a while before dawn, he came to a stream threading down from the high moors; and among the stream-side hazels and elders he caught the glimmer of a fire. He hitched his horse’s bridle over a low-hanging branch and turned upstream towards the light, meaning to ask whoever was up there if they had seen or heard a strayed hound.
He came to the last red embers of a fire and saw that it glowed before the doorway of a hut, and peering in, he saw a man and a woman asleep on the piled bracken of the bed-place. And the woman’s outflung hair was flame red in the dying firelight, and the naked sword lying ready to the man’s hand had a small piece broken out of the blade.
The Chief Huntsman turned away and went back to his horse and set out towards the hunting camp; and before he had gone three bowshots on his way, there was a rustling in the undergrowth and the lost hound came bounding out to follow at his horse’s heels.
The camp was still asleep when he reached it, but he roused the King’s squire, and went in to the King and told him what he had seen.
The King was silent a long moment when he had done; and then he said, ‘Bid them fetch my horse, for I would see this man and this woman.’
So the King’s horse was brought, and he and his huntsman set out. It was dawn when they came to the foot of the stream, and the King bade his huntsman wait with the horses, and went on alone up the stream side, his sword naked in his hand.
He came to the hut and looked in, and saw the two sleeping there in the grey dawn light. And he knew that he had only to step over the threshold and quickly use his sword, for they were completely at his mercy. He stood unmoving, looking in; and it seemed to him that he had never seen Iseult so beautiful, and his old love for her and for his kinsman knotted in his belly.
Then he stooped and took up Tristan’s sword and laid his own in its place, and he stripped off one of his hunting gloves and laid it lightly on Iseult’s breast; and he turned and went his way, sheathing the notched sword in place of his own.
When Tristan and Iseult awoke, they found the King’s sword and his glove, and knew that they were discovered. And Iseult would have fled again, leaving a sign for Gorvenal to follow. But Tristan said, ‘If we do that, now that he knows we are together, the King will surely hunt us down. And yet he found us here and could have slain us and did not.’
‘What does it mean?’ said Iseult.
And Tristan remembered how, on the day he brought Iseult to Tintagel, the King had taken her hands and said that they were cold but that his were large enough to warm them. And he said, ‘For you, it means a way back, and forgiveness, Iseult.’
‘And for you?’
‘The sword for me – it means that I must put myself at the King’s mercy.’
‘And will there be mercy?’
‘He would surely have slain me, else.’
‘We have been happy here – for a while,’ Iseult said.
And in a little, Gorvenal appeared, and flung down the buck that he had killed. And when Tristan told him what had happened, he too said that it was time to be returning to Tintagel.
So they went back.
‘You read my message,’ said the King, sitting in the High Seat in his Great Hall, when they stood before him.
‘We read your message,’ Tristan said, ‘and we came.’
‘That is well,’ said King Marc. ‘Listen now. I will take the Queen back into my Hall and into my heart. But to you, Tristan, I say that the world is wide. I give you three days to leave Cornwall behind you. Never come back!’
Tristan said, ‘In three days I will be gone from Cornwall. But if ever hurt or sorrow comes to Iseult at your hands, and I hear of it, I shall come back!’
Then Iseult spoke for the first time. ‘If I am to be your wife again, I must end what has been between my Lord Tristan and me, not leave it flying like a torn sleeve. Grant us a little time to take leave of each other.’
The King pointed to a log on the fire, already crumbling into white ash. ‘I give you until that log burns through.’ And he rose and went into an inner chamber. But they knew that from there he would hear when the log burned through and fell.
Then Iseult slipped from her finger a ring of heavy gold, curiously serpent-twined and twisted. ‘If ever you are in sore enough need of me,’ she said, ‘send me back this ring, and I will come to you. But beware how you send it, for if you do, then I will surely come, though it be the death of both of us.’
And Tristan took the ring and kissed it, and pushed it on to his finger.
And the burning log collapsed with a slipping and rustling and a last shower of sparks into the red heart of the fire.
In the Great Hall at Camelot, also, a log slipped on the hearth and fell with a shower of red sparks. And the voice of the harper fell silent; and even the dark wing-beating of the storm died away.
The High King sat gazing into the fire. Sir Lancelot stared at his own bony hands clenched on his knees, while one tear trickled down unheeded beside his ugly nose.
‘Is that the end of the story?’ asked the Queen, pitifully.
‘It seems so.’
‘What became of Sir Tristan?’
‘There was war in Lothian soon after, and his father was slain, and when he had driven out the enemy and avenged his father, he left Gorvenal to rule the kingdom. And now he wanders the world with his sword and his harp, and the heart-space empty within him, for Iseult’s sake.’ The harper moved to return his harp to its embroidered bag. And as he did so, the light jinked on the ring he wore; a heavy gold ring curiously twisted like a serpent.
‘Thank you for your harp-tale,’ said the King gently, ‘and welcome to Camelot and to our fellowship, Sir Tristan.’
A murmuring ran round the Hall, and then Sir Bedivere cried, ‘Look!’ and pointed. And when they followed the direction of his outstretched finger, they saw on the back of one of the empty seats Sir Tristan’s name glimmering in the torchlight in letters of new and burnished gold.
So Sir Tristan became one of the knights of Arthur’s Round Table. And for a while he came every year to the gathering at Pentecost, and other knights would bring back stories of his deeds up and down Britain and
in Less Britain across the Narrow Seas.
And then one year he did not come, and all the stories ceased.
Nothing more was heard of Tristan, until one day Sir Lional, returning from a quest that had taken him into Cornwall and back to his native Benwick in Less Britain, said, blunt and heavy with sorrow, ‘Sirs, I have seen Tristan’s grave.’
All faces in the Hall turned to him. ‘How did he die?’ said the King. ‘Is it known to you?’
Lional bent his head. ‘I gathered the story, a little here and a little there. It seems that in his wanderings in Less Britain, he came to the castle of King Hoel, who was sore besieged by one Duke Jovelin, because he would not give him his daughter, against her will. Tristan aided the King and his son Karherdin against Duke Jovelin, and when they had the victory over him, the King offered his daughter to Tristan in gratitude. He could not shame her in her father’s Hall, and they say she is very fair – she is an Iseult, too; Iseult of the White Hands, and – maybe he hoped for a little happiness …’
‘So he married her?’ said Guenever, half under her breath.
‘He married her, and he was a true and loyal lord to her, though he could not love her as she loved him … The old King died, and Karherdin was the new King; and there was deep friendship between him and Tristan. And in the end – there was some feud; something to do with a maiden Karherdin loved and who had been torn away from him; and in the feuding Karherdin was killed, and fighting at his shoulder Tristan was sore wounded.
‘And for all his wife’s tending, and the physicians whom she summoned from far and wide, the wound sickened and he grew weaker day by day.
‘He knew that his death was upon him, and that only one person in the world might save him. But whether she could heal him or no, he longed to see her face before he died. At last he sent for his squire and gave him Iseult’s ring, and bade him go to the Queen of Cornwall in secret and show it to her, and beg her to come if she would save his life. “And when you return,” said he, “if she be with you, cause your ship to show white sails; and if she will not come, then let the sails be black, for it will be time to put on mourning for me.”
The King Arthur Trilogy Page 19
