The Once and Future King (#1-4)

by T. H. White

  The Indian Summer was within their grasp, gossip was silenced, discourtesy put down. The Orkney faction could only grumble, a distant and almost subterranean complaint. In the scriptoria of the abbeys, and in the castles of the great nobles, the harmless writers scribbled away at Missals and Treatises of Knighthood, while the limners illuminated the capital letters and carefully drew blazons of arms. The goldsmiths and silversmiths hammered away, with small hammers, at gold leaf. They twisted gold wire and inlaid interlacements of the wildest complexity on the crosiers of the bishops. Pretty ladies kept robins and sparrows for pets, or tried very hard to teach their magpies to talk. Housewives of a provident turn of mind filled their cupboards with treacle as a medicine for bad air, and with homemade plasters called Flos Unkuentorum for the rheumatics and muskballs to smell. They provided against Lent by purchasing dates, and green ginger of almonds, and herrings at 4s 6d the horse—load. Falconers and austringers abused each other’s hawks to their hearts’ content. In the new law courts – for Fort Mayne was over – the lawyers were as busy as bees, issuing writs for attainder, chancery, chevisance, disseisin, distraint, distress, embracery, exigent, fieri facias, maintenance, replevin, right of way, oyer and terminer, scot and lot, Quorum bonorum, Sic et non, Pro et contra, Jus primae noctis, and Questio quid juris? Thieves – it is true – could be hanged for stealing goods to the value of one shilling – for the codification of Justice was still weak and muddled – but that was not so bad as it sounds, when you remember that for a shilling you could buy two geese, or four gallons of wine, or forty—eight loaves of bread – a troublesome load for a thief in any case. In the country lanes the mere lovers, who were not gentles, walked in the sunsets with their arms round each other’s waists, so that they gave the impression of a capital X when seen from behind.

  Arthur’s Gramarye was at peace, and the joys of peace stretched before Lancelot and Guenever. But there was a fourth corner in the puzzle.

  God was Lancelot’s totem. He was the other person of their battle, and now He chose the final moment to step across the path. The small boy who looked in the kettle—hat, and who dreamed of well—water which always slipped away from his lips, had cherished an ambition to do some ordinary miracle. He had managed a sort of miracle, when he rescued Elaine from her tub by being the best knight in the world – before he was trapped by Elaine on that terrible evening so that he broke his taboo. For a quarter of a century he had remembered the night with grief, and it had been with him through all the searches for the Grail. Before it, he had thought himself a man of God. Since then, he had been a swindle. Now the time had finally come to a head, when he was to be forced to face his doom.

  There was a knight from Hungary called Sir Urre, who had received wounds in a tournament seven years before. He had been fighting with a man called Sir Alphagus, whom he had killed after getting these wounds – three of them on the head, four on the body and on the left hand. The mother of the dead Alphagus had been a Spanish witch, and she had put an enchantment on Sir Urre of Hungary, so that none of the wounds could ever heal up. All the time they were to go on bleeding, turn about, until the best knight in the world had tended and salved them with his hands.

  Sir Urre of Hungary had long been carried from country to country – perhaps it was a sort of haemophilia – searching for the best knight who would be able to help him. At last he had braved the Channel to reach this foreign, northern land. Everybody had told him, everywhere, that his only chance was Lancelot, and in the end he had come to seek.

  Arthur, who always felt the best of everybody, was sure that Lance would be able to do it – but he thought it fair that every knight of the Table should have a try. There might be a hidden excellence lurking somewhere, as had happened before.

  The court was at Carlisle at the time, for the feast of Pentecost, and it was arranged that everybody should meet in the town meadow. Sir Urre was carried there in a litter and laid on a cushion of gold cloth, for the attempt at healing to begin. A hundred and ten knights – forty were away on quests – stood round him in ordered ranks, in their best clothes, and there were carpets laid down, and pavilions set up for the great ladies to watch. Arthur loved his Lancelot so much that he wanted him to have a splendid setting, in which his crowning achievement could be done.

  This is the end of the book of Sir Lancelot, and now we are to see him for the last time in it. He was hiding in the harness—room of the castle, whence he could spy the field. There were plenty of leather reins in the room, hanging orderly among the saddles and the bright bits. He had noticed that they were strong enough to bear his weight. He was waiting there, hidden, praying that somebody – Gareth perhaps? – would be able to do the miracle quickly; or, if not, that they would overlook him, that his absence would not be noticed.

  Do you think it would be fine to be the best knight in the world? Think, then, also, how you would have to defend the title. Think of the tests, such repeated, remorseless, scandal—breathing tests, which day after day would be applied to you – until the last and certain day, when you would fail. Think also that you know of a good reason for your failure, which you have tried to hide, tried pathetically to hide and overlook, for five and twenty years. Think that you are now to go out, before the largest and most honourable gallery that can be assembled, to make a public demonstration of your sin. They are expecting you to succeed, and you are to fail: you are to publish the deceit which you have practised for a quarter of a century, and they will all immediately know the reason for it – that reason of shame which you have sought to conceal from your own mind, and which, when it has remembered itself in the silence of your empty chamber, has pricked you into a physical motion of your head to throw it off. Miracles, which you wanted to do so long ago, can only be done by the pure in heart. The people outside are waiting for you to do this miracle because you have traded on their belief that your heart was pure – and now, with treachery and adultery and murder wringing the heart like a cloth, you are to go out into the sunlight for the test of honour.

  Lancelot stood in the harness—room as white as a sheet. Guenever was out there, he knew, and she was also pale. He twisted his fingers and looked at the strong reins, and prayed as best he could.

  ‘Sir Servause le Breuse!’ cried the heralds, and Sir Servause stepped forward – a knight far down the list of competitors. He was a shy man, interested only in natural history, who had never fought with anybody in his life. He went over to Sir Urre, who was groaning from all the handling, and he knelt down and did his best.

  ‘Sir Ozanna le Cure Hardy!’

  It went on like that down the full list of a hundred and ten, whose gorgeous names are given by Malory in their proper order, so that you almost see the fine cut of their heavy brigandines, the tinctures of their blazons, and the gay colour in each panache. Their feathered heads made them look like Indian braves. The plates of their sabathons clinked as they walked, giving the firm, exciting ring of spurs. They knelt down, and Sir Urre winced, and it was no good.

  Lancelot did not hang himself with the reins. He had broken his taboo, deceived his friend, returned to Guenever, and murdered Sir Meliagrance in a wrong quarrel. Now he was ready to take his punishment. He went to the long avenue of knights who waited in the sun. By the very attempt to evade notice, he had brought on himself the conspicuous place of last. He walked down the curious ranks, ugly as ever, self—conscious, ashamed, a veteran going to be broken. Mordred and Agravaine moved forward.

  When Lancelot was kneeling in front of Urre, he said to King Arthur: ‘Need I do this, after everybody has failed?’

  ‘Of course you must do it. I command you.’

  ‘If you command me, I must. But it would be presumptuous to try – after everybody. Could I be let off?’

  ‘You are taking it the wrong way,’ said the King. ‘Of course it is not presumptuous for you to try. If you can’t do it, nobody can.’

  Sir Urre, who was weak by now, raised himself on an elbow.


  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I came for you to do it.’

  Lancelot had tears in his eyes.

  ‘Oh, Sir Urre,’ he said, ‘if only I could help you, how willingly I would. But you don’t understand, you don’t understand.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said Sir Urre.

  Lancelot looked into the East, where he thought God lived, and said something in his mind. It was more or less like this: ‘I don’t want glory, but please can you save our honesty? And if you will heal this knight for the knight’s sake, please do.’ Then he asked Sir Urre to show him his head.

  Guenever, who was watching from her pavilion like a hawk, saw the two men fumbling together. Then she saw a movement in the people near, and a mutter came, and yells. Gentlemen began throwing their caps about, and shouting, and shaking hands. Arthur was crying the same words again and again, holding gruff Gawaine by the elbow and putting them into his ear. ‘It shut like a box! It shut like a box!’ Some elderly knights were dancing around, banging their shields together as if they were playing Pease Pudding Hot, and poking each other in the ribs. Many of the squires were laughing like madmen and slapping each other on the back. Sir Bors was kissing King Anguish of Ireland, who resented it. Sir Galahalt, the hault prince, had fallen over his scabbard. Generous Sir Belleus, who had borne no grudge for having his liver cut open on that distant evening beside the pavilion of red sendal, was making a horrible noise by blowing on a grass blade held edgewise between his thumbs. Sir Bedivere, frightfully repentant ever since his visit to the Pope, was rattling some holy bones which he had brought home as a souvenir of his pilgrimage: they had written on them in curly letters, ‘A Present from Rome.’ Sir Bliant, remembering his gentle Wild Man, was embracing Sir Castor, who had never forgotten the Chevalier’s knightly rebuke. Kind and sensitive Aglovale, the forgiver of the Pellinore feud, was exchanging hearty thumps with the beautiful Gareth. Mordred and Agravaine scowled. Sir Mador, as red as a turkey cock, was making it up with Sir Pinel the poisoner, who had come back incognito. King Pelles was promising a new cloak all round, on him. The snow—haired Uncle Dap, so old as to be absolutely fabulous, was trying to jump over his walking—stick. The tents were being let down, the banners waved. The cheers which now began, round after round, were like drum—fire or thunder, rolling round the turrets of Carlisle. All the field, and all the people in the field, and all the towers of the castle, seemed to be jumping up and down like the surface of a lake under rain.

  In the middle, quite forgotten, her lover was kneeling by himself. This lonely and motionless figure knew a secret which was hidden from the others. The miracle was that he had been allowed to do a miracle. ‘And ever,’ says Malory, ‘Sir Lancelot wept, as he had been a child that had been beaten.’

  EXPLICIT LIBER TERTIUS

  INCIPIT LIBER QUARTUS

  THE CANDLE IN THE WIND

  He thought a little and said:

  ‘I have found the Zoological Gardens of service to many of my patients. I should prescribe for Mr Pontifex a course of the larger mammals. Don’t let him think he is taking them medicinally…’

  Chapter I

  The addition of years had not been kind to Agravaine. Even when he was forty he had looked his present age, which was fifty—five. He was seldom sober.

  Mordred, the cold wisp of a man, did not seem to have any age. His years, like the depths of his blue eyes and the inflexions of his musical voice, were non—committal.

  The two were standing in the cloisters of the Orkney palace at Camelot, looking out at the hawks who sat beneath the sun, on their blocks in the green courtyard. The cloisters had the new—fashioned flamboyant arches, in whose graceful frames the hawks stood out with noble indifference – a jerfalcon, a goshawk, a falcon and her tiercel, and four little merlins who had been kept all winter, yet had survived. The blocks were clean – for the sportsmen of those days considered that, if you went in for blood sports, it was your duty to conceal the beastliness with scrupulous care. All were lovingly ornamented with spanish leather in scarlet, and with gold tooling. The leashes of the hawks were plaited out of white horse leather. The jer had a snow—white leash and jesses cut from guaranteed unicorn skin, as a tribute to her station in life. She had been brought all the way from Iceland, and that was the least they could do for her.

  Mordred said pleasantly: ‘For God’s sake let’s get out of this. The place stinks.’

  When he spoke the hawks moved slightly, so that their bells gave a whisper of sound. The bells had been brought from the Indies, regardless of expense, and the pair worn by the jer were made of silver. An enormous eagle—owl who was sometimes used as a decoy, but who was at present standing on a perch in the shade of the cloister, opened his eyes when the bells rang. Before he had opened them, he might have been a stuffed owl, a dowdy bundle of feathers. The moment they had dawned, he was a creature from Edgar Allan Poe. You hardly liked to look at him. They were red eyes, homicidal, terrific, seeming actually to give out light. They were like rubies filled with flame. He was called the Grand Duke.

  ‘I don’t smell anything,’ said Agravaine. He sniffed suspiciously, trying to smell. But his palate was gone, both for smell and taste, and he had a headache.

  ‘It stinks of Sport,’ said Mordred in inverted commas, ‘and the Done Thing and the Best People. Let’s go to the garden.’

  Agravaine returned tenaciously to the subject which they had been discussing.

  ‘It is no good making a fuss about it,’ he said. ‘We know the rights and wrongs, but nobody else knows. Nobody would listen.’

  ‘But they must listen.’ Small flecks in the iris of Mordred’s eyes burned with a turquoise light, as bright as the owl’s. Instead of being a foppish man with a crooked shoulder, dressed in extravagant clothes, he became a Cause. He became, on this matter, everything which Arthur was not – the irreconcilable opposite of the Englishman. He became the invincible Gael, the scion of desperate races more ancient than Arthur’s, and more subtle. Now, when he was on fire with his Cause, Arthur’s justice seemed bourgeois and obtuse beside him. It seemed merely to be dull complacency, beside the savagery and feral wit of the Pict. His maternal ancestors crowded into his face when he was spurning at Arthur – ancestors whose civilization, like Mordred’s, had been matriarchal: who had ridden bare—back, charged in chariots, fought by stratagem, and ornamented their grisly strongholds with the heads of enemies. They had marched, long—haired and ferocious, an ancient writer tells us, ‘sword in hand, against rivers in flood or against the storm—tossed ocean.’ They were the race, now represented by the Irish Republican Army rather than by the Scots Nationalists, who had always murdered landlords and blamed them for being murdered – the race which could make a national hero of a man like Lynchahaun, because he bit off a woman’s nose and she a Gall – the race which had been expelled by the volcano of history into the far quarters of the globe, where, with a venomous sense of grievance and inferiority, they even nowadays proclaim their ancient megalomania. They were the Catholics who could fly directly in the face of any pope or saint – Adrian, Alexander or St Jerome – if the saint’s policies did not suit their own convenience: the hysterically touchy, sorrowful, flayed defenders of a broken heritage. They were the race whose barbarous, cunning, valiant defiance had been enslaved, long centuries before, by the foreign people whom Arthur represented. This was one of the barriers between the father and his son.

  Agravaine said: ‘Mordred, I want to talk. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere to sit. Sit on that thing, and I will sit here. Nobody can hear us.’

  ‘I don’t mind if they do hear. That is what we want. It should be said out loud, not whispered in cloisters.’

  ‘The whispers will get there in the end.’

  ‘No, they won’t. That is what they won’t do. He doesn’t want to hear, and, so long as we whisper, he can always pretend that he can’t. You are not the King of England for all these years, without knowing how to use hypocrisy.’

  Agravaine w
as uncomfortable. His hatred for the King was not a reality like Mordred’s – indeed, he had little personal feeling against anybody except Lancelot. His attitude was more of malice at random.

  ‘I don’t think it is any good complaining about what happened in the past,’ he said gloomily. ‘We can’t expect other people to side with us when everything is complicated, and happened so long ago.’

  ‘It may have happened long ago, but that doesn’t alter the fact that Arthur is my father, and that he turned me adrift in a boat as a baby.’

  ‘It may not alter it for you,’ said Agravaine, ‘but it alters it for other people. It is such a muddle that nobody cares. You can’t expect ordinary people to remember about grandfathers and half—sisters and things of that sort. In any case human beings don’t go to war for private quarrels nowadays. You need a national grievance – something to do with politics which is waiting to burst out. You need to use the tools which are ready to hand. This man John Ball, for instance, who believes in communism: he has thousands of followers who would be ready to help in a disturbance, for their own purposes. Or there are the Saxons. We could say we were in favour of a national movement. For that matter, we could join them together and call it national communism. But it has to be something broad and popular, which everybody can feel. It must be against large numbers of people, like the Jews or the Normans or the Saxons, so that everybody can be angry. Either we must be the leaders of the Old Ones, who seek for justice against the Saxon: or of the Saxon against the Norman; or of the serf against society. We want a banner, yes, and a badge too. You could use the Fylfot. Communism, Nationalism, something like that. But as for a private grudge against the old man, it’s useless. Anyway it would take you half an hour to explain it, even if you did begin to shout it from the roof tops.’