The Once and Future King

by T. H. White

  Agravaine, who knew that his nips before noon were disapproved of, asked politely: "Did you have a good day?"

  "It wasna bad."

  "It was a splendid day," exclaimed Gareth. "We entered her on the haut vollay with Lancelot's passager, and she was genuinely grey–minded. I never thought she would take to it without a bagman! Gawaine had managed her perfectly. She dropped into it without a second's hesitation, as if she had never been flying to anything but the heron, took a fine circle right round the new ricks by Castle Blanc, and got above him just to the Ganis side of the pilgrim's way. She…"

  Gawaine, who had noticed that Mordred was yawning on purpose, said, "Ye may spare yer breath."

  "It was a fine flight," he concluded lamely. "As she had handled her quarry, we thought we could give her a name."

  "What did you call her?" they asked him condescendingly.

  "Since she comes from Lundy, and begins with an L, we thought it might be a good idea to call her after Lancelot. We could call her Lancelotta, or something like that. She will be a first–class falcon."

  Agravaine looked at Gareth under the lids of his eyes. He said with a slow tone: "Then you had better call her Gwen."

  Gawaine came back from the courtyard, where he had been putting the peregrine on her block.

  "Leave that," he said.

  "I'm sorry if I am not suggesting the truth."

  "I care nought about the truth or not. All I say is, Haud yer tongue."

  "Gawaine," said Mordred to the air, "is such a preux chevalier that nobody must say anything wicked, or there will be trouble. You see, he is strong—and he apes the great Sir Lancelot."

  The red fellow turned on him with dignity.

  "I am'na muckle strong, brother, and I dinna trade upon it. I only seek to keep my people decent."

  "And, of course," said Agravaine, "it is decent to sleep with the King's wife, even if the King's family has smashed our family, and got a son by our mother, and tried to drown him."

  Gaheris protested: "Arthur has always been good to us. Do stop this whining for once."

  "Because he is afraid of us."

  "I don't see," said Gareth, "why Arthur should be afraid, when he has Lancelot. We all know that he is the best knight in the world, and can master anybody. Don't we, Gawaine?"

  "For masel', I dinna wish to speak of it."

  Suddenly Mordred was flaming at them, fired by Gawaine's lordly tone.

  "Very well, and I do. I may be a weak knight at jousting, but I have the courage to stand for my family and rights. I am not a hypocrite. Everybody in this court knows that the Queen and the commander–in–chief are lovers, and yet we are supposed to be pure knights, and protectors of ladies, and nobody talks about anything except this so–called Holy Grail. Agravaine and I have decided to go to Arthur now, in full court, and ask about the Queen and Lancelot to his face."

  "Mordred," exclaimed the head of the clan, "ye will do naething of the like! It would be sinful."

  "He will," said Agravaine, "and I shall go there with him."

  Gareth remained between pain and amazement.

  "But they mean it," he protested.

  Out of the moment of astonishment, Gawaine took the lead and forged into action.

  "Agravaine, I am the head of the clan, and I forbid ye."

  "You forbid me."

  "Yes, I do forbid ye; for ye will be a sair fule if ye do."

  "The honest Gawaine," remarked Mordred, "thinks you are a sair fule."

  This time the towering fellow swung on him like a shying horse.

  "Nane o' that!" he shouted. "Ye think I winna hit ye because ye are crookit, and ye take advantage. But I wull hit ye, mannie, if ye sneer."

  Mordred heard his own voice speaking coldly, seeming to come from behind his ears.

  "Gawaine, you surprise me. You have produced a sequence of thought."

  Then, as the giant came towards him, the same voice said: "Go on. Strike me. It will show your courage."

  "Ah, do stop, Mordred," pleaded Gareth. "Can't you stop this nagging for a minute?"

  "Mordred wouldn't nag, as you call it," interjected Agravaine, "if you didn't bully."

  Gawaine exploded like one of the new–fashioned cannons. He swung away from Mordred, a baited bull, and shouted at them both.

  "My soul to the devil, will ye be quiet or will ye clear out? Can we have no peace in the family ever? Shut yer trap, in the name of God, and leave this daft clatter about Sir Lancelot."

  "It is not daft," said Mordred, "nor shall we leave it."

  He stood up.

  "Well, Agravaine," he asked. "Do we go to the King? Is any other coming?"

  Gawaine planted himself in their path.

  "Mordred, ye shallna go."

  "Who is to stop me?"

  "I am."

  "Brave fellow," remarked the icy voice, still from somewhere in the air, and the humpback moved to pass.

  Gawaine put out his red hand, with golden hairs on the back of the fingers, and pushed him back. At the same time Agravaine put out his own white hand, with fat fingers, to the hilt of his sword.

  "Don't move, Gawaine. I have a sword."

  "You would have a sword," cried Gareth, "you devil!"

  The younger brother's life had suddenly fitted into a pattern and recognized itself. Their murdered mother, and the unicorn, and the man now drawing, and a child in a store–room flashing a dirk: these things had made him cry out.

  "All right, Gareth," snarled Agravaine, as white as a sheet, "I know what you mean, and now I draw."

  The situation passed out of control: they began acting like puppets, as if it had happened before—which it had. Gawaine, at the sight of steel, went into one of his blind rages. He swung away from Mordred, burst into a torrent of words, drew the hunting knife which was all he carried, and advanced on Agravaine—these things simultaneously. The fat man, as if thrown back on the defensive by the impact of his brother's fury, retreated before him, holding the sword in front with shaking hand.

  "Aye," roared Gawaine, "ye ken fine what he means, my bonny butcher. Ye maun draw on yer ain brother, for ye ever speired to murder folk unarmed. The curse of the grave–cloth on ye! Put up yon sword, man! Put it up! What d'ye mean? Is it nae enough that ye should slay our mother? Damn ye, lay down yon sword, or hae the spunk to fight with it. Agravaine…"

  Mordred was slipping behind his back, with a hand on his own dagger. In a second the glint of steel flashed in the shadows, lit by the owl's eyes, and at the same moment Gareth jumped to the defence. He caught Mordred by the wrist, crying: "Now, enough! Gaheris, look to the others."

  "Agravaine, put the sword up! Gawaine, leave him alone."

  "Away, man! I can teach the hound masel'."

  "Agravaine, put the sword down quickly, or he will kill you. Be quick, man. Don't be a fool. Gawaine, leave him alone. He didn't mean it. Gawaine! Agravaine!"

  But Agravaine had made a feeble thrust at the head of the family, which Gawaine turned contemptuously with his knife. Now the towering old fellow, with the ferret–coloured temples, had rushed in and pinned him round the waist. The sword clattered to the floor as Agravaine went backward over the hippocras table, with Gawaine on top of him. The dagger rose in venom to complete the work—but Gaheris caught it from behind. There was a tableau of perfect silence, all motionless. Gareth held Mordred. Agravaine, hiding his eyes with the free hand, flinched from the knife. And Gaheris held the avenging arm suspended.

  At this complicated moment the cloister door was opened for the second time, and the courteous page announced as impassively as ever: "His Majesty the King!"

  Everybody relaxed. They let go of whatever they were holding, and began to move. Agravaine sat up panting. Gawaine turned away from him, drawing a hand across his face.

  "Ach God!" he muttered. "If but I hadna siclike waeful passions!"

  The King was on the threshold.

  He came in, the quiet old man who had done his best so long. He l
ooked older than his age, which was considerable. His royal eye took in the situation without a flicker. He moved across the cloister to kiss Mordred gently, smiling upon them all.

  Chapter III

  Lancelot and Guenever were sitting at the solar window. An observer of the present day, who knew the Arthurian legend only from Tennyson and people of that sort, would have been startled to see that the famous lovers were past their prime. We, who have learned to base our interpretation of love on the conventional boy–and–girl romance of Romeo and Juliet, would be amazed if we could step back into the Middle Ages—when the poet of chivalry could write about Man that he had "en ciel un dieu, par terre une déesse" Lovers were not recruited then among the juveniles and adolescents: they were seasoned people, who knew what they were about. In those days people loved each other for their lives, without the conveniences of the divorce court and the psychiatrist. They had a God in heaven and a goddess on earth—and, since people who devote themselves to goddesses must exercise some caution about the ones to whom they are devoted, they neither chose them by the passing standards of the flesh alone, nor abandoned it lightly when the bruckle thing began to fail.

  Lancelot and Guenever were sitting by the window in the high keep, and Arthur's England stretched below them, under the level rays of sunset.

  It was the Gramarye of the Middle Ages, which some people are accustomed to think of as the Dark Ages, and Arthur had made it what it was. When the old King came to his throne it had been an England of armoured barons, and of famine, and of war. It had been the country of trial by ordeal with red–hot irons, of the Law of Englishry, and of the sad, wordless song of Morfa–Rhuddlan. Then, on the sea–coast, within a foreign vessel's reach, not an animal, not a fruit tree, had been left. Then, in the fens and the vast forests, the last of the Saxons had defended themselves against the bitter rule of Uther the Conqueror; then the words "Norman" and "Baron" had been equivalent to the modern word of "Sahib"; then Llewellyn ap Griffith's head, in its crown of ivy, had mouldered on the clustered spikes of the Tower; then you would have met the mendicants by the roadside, mutilated men who carried their right hands in their left, and the forest dogs would have trotted beside them, also mutilated by the removal of one toe—so that they could not hunt in the woodlands of the lord. When Arthur first came, the country people had been accustomed to bar themselves in their cottages every night as if for siege, and had prayed to God for peace during darkness, the goodman of the house repeating the prayers used at sea on the approach of storm and ending with the plea "the Lord bless us and help us," to which all present had replied "Amen." In the baron's castle, in the early days, you would have found the poor men being disembowelled—and their living bowels burned before them—men being slit open to see if they had swallowed their gold, men gagged with notched iron bits, men hanging upside down with their heads in smoke, others in snake pits or with leather tourniquets round their heads, or crammed into stone–filled boxes which would break their bones. You have only to turn to the literature of the period, with its stories of the mythological families such as Plantagenets, Capets and so forth, to see how the land lay. Legendary kings like John had been accustomed to hang twenty–eight hostages before dinner; or, like Philip, had been defended by "sergeants–at–mace," a kind of storm troopers who guarded their lord with maces; or, like Louis, had decapitated their enemies on scaffolds under the blood of which the children of the enemy had been forced to stand. This, at all events, is what Ingulf of Croyland used to tell us, until he was discovered to be a forgery. Then there had been Archbishops nicknamed "Skin–villain," and churches used as forts—with trenches in the graveyards among the bones—and price–lists for fining murderers, and bodies of the excommunicated lying unburied, and famishing peasants eating grass or tree–bark or one another. (One of them ate forty–eight.) There had been roasting heretics on the one hand—forty–five Templars had been burned in one day—and the heads of captives being thrown into besieged castles from catapults on the other. Here a leader of the Jacquerie had been writhing in his chains, as he was crowned with a red–hot tripod. There a Pope had been complaining, as he was held to ransom, or another one had been wriggling as he was poisoned. Treasure had been cemented into castle walls, in the form of gold bars, and the builders had been executed afterwards. Children playing in the streets of Paris had frolicked with the dead body of a Constable, and others, with the women and old men, had starved outside the walls of beleaguered towns, yet inside the ring of the besiegers. Hus and Jerome, with the mitres of apostasy upon their heads, had flamed and fizzled at the stake. The hamstrung imbeciles of Jumièges had floated down the Seine. Giles de Retz had been found to have no less than a ton of children's bones, calcined, in his castle, after having murdered them at the rate of twelve score a year for nine years. The Duke of Berry had lost a kingdom through the unpopularity which he earned by feeling sorry for eight hundred foot soldiers who had been killed in a battle. The youthful count of St. Pol had been taught the arts of war by being given twenty–four living prisoners to slaughter in various ways, for practice. Louis the Eleventh, another of the fictional kings, had kept obnoxious bishops in rather expensive cages. The Duke Robert had been surnamed "the Magnificent" by his nobles—but "the Devil" by his parishioners. And all the while, before Arthur came, the common people—of whom fourteen were eaten by wolves out of one town in a single week, of whom one third were to die in the Black Death, of whom the corpses had been packed in pits "like bacon," for whom the refuges at evening had often been forests and marshes and caves, for whom, in seventy years, there had been known to be forty–eight of famine—these people had looked up at the feudal nobility who were termed the "lords of sky and earth," and—themselves battered by bishops who, because they were not allowed to shed blood, went for them with iron clubs—had cried aloud that Christ and his saints were sleeping.

  "Pourquoi," the poor wretches had sung in their misery:

  "_Pourquoi nous laisser faire dommage?

  Nous sommes hommes comme ils sont._"

  Such had been the surprisingly modern civilization which Arthur had inherited. But it was not the civilization over which the lovers looked out. Now, safe in the apple–green sunset before them, there stretched the fabled Merry England of the Middle Ages, when they were not so dark. Lancelot and Guenever were gazing on the Age of Individuals.

  What an amazing time the age of chivalry was! Everybody was essentially himself—was riotously busy fulfilling the vagaries of human nature. There was such a gusto about the landscape which stretched before their window, such a riot of unexpected people and things, that you hardly knew how to begin describing it.

  The Dark and Middle Ages! The Nineteenth Century had an impudent way with its labels. For there, under the window in Arthur's Gramarye, the sun's rays flamed from a hundred jewels of stained glass in monasteries and convents, or danced from the pinnacles of cathedrals and castles, which their builders had actually loved. Architecture, in those dark ages of theirs, was such a light–giving passion of the heart that men gave love–names to their fortresses. Lancelot's Joyous Gard was not a singularity in an age which has left us Beaute, Plaisance, or Malvoisin—the bad neighbour to its enemies—an age in which even an oaf like the imaginary Richard Coeur de Lion, who suffered from boils, could call his castle "Gaillard," and speak of it as "my beautiful one–year–old daughter." Even that legendary scoundrel William the Conqueror had a second nickname: "the Great Builder." Think of the glass itself, with its five grand colours stained right through. It was rougher than ours, thicker, fitted in smaller pieces. They loved it with the same fury as they gave to their castles, and Villars de Honnecourt, struck by a particularly beautiful specimen, stopped to draw it on his journeys, with the explanation that "I was on my way to obey a call to the land of Hungary when I drew this window because it pleased me best of all windows." Picture the insides of those ancient churches—not the grey and gutted interiors to which we are accustomed—but insides blazing
with colour, plastered with frescoes in which all the figures stood on tip–toe, fluttering with tapestry or with brocades from Bagdad. Picture also the interiors of such castles as were visible from Guenever's window. These were no longer the grim keeps of Arthur's accession. Now they were filling with furniture made by the joiner, instead of the carpenter; now their walls rippled doorless with the flexible gaieties of Arras, tapestries like that of the Jousts of St. Denis which, although covering more than four hundred square yards, had been woven in less than three years, such was the ardour of its creation. If you look closely in a ruined castle even nowadays, you can sometimes find the hooks from which these flashing tapestries were hung. Remember, too, the goldsmiths of Lorraine, who made shrines in the shape of little churches, with aisles, statues, transepts and all, like dolls' houses: remember the enamellers of Limoges, and the champlevé work, and the German ivory carvers, and the garnets set in Irish metal. Finally, if you are willing to picture the ferment of creative art which existed in our famous ages of darkness, you must get rid of the idea that written culture came to Europe with the fall of Constantinople. Every clerk in every country was a man of culture in those days—it was his profession to be so. "Every letter written," said a medieval abbot, "is a wound inflicted on the devil." The library of St. Piquier, as early as the ninth century, had 256 volumes, including Virgil, Cicero, Terence and Macrobius. Charles the Fifth had no less than nine hundred and ten volumes, so that his personal collection was about as big as the Everyman Library is today.

  Lastly there were under the window the people themselves—the coruscating mixture of oddities who reckoned that they possessed the things called souls as well as bodies, and who fulfilled them in the most surprising ways. In Silvester the Second a famous magician ascended the papal throne, although he was notorious for having invented the pendulum clock. A fabled King of France called Robert, who had suffered the misfortune to be excommunicated, ran into dreadful troubles about his domestic arrangements, because the only two servants who could be persuaded to cook for him insisted on burning the saucepans after meals. An archbishop of Canterbury, having excommunicated all the prebendaries of St. Paul's in a pet, rushed into the Priory of St. Bartholomew and knocked out the sub–prior in the middle of the chapel—which created such an uproar that his own vestments were torn off, revealing a suit of armour underneath, and he had to flee to Lambeth in a boat. The Countess of Anjou always used to vanish out of the window at the secreta of the mass. Madame Trote de Salerno used her ears as a handkerchief and let her eyebrows hang down behind her shoulders, like silver chains. A bishop of Bath, under the imaginary Edward the First, was considered after due reflection to be an unsuitable man for the Archbishopric, because he had too many illegitimate children—not some, but too many. And the bishop himself could hardly hold a candle to the Countess of Henneberge, who suddenly gave birth to 365 children at one confinement.