The Once and Future King

Chapter VIII

It was a cold wet evening, such as may happen even toward the end of August, and the Wart did not know how to bear himself indoors. He spent some time in the kennels talking to Cavall, then wandered off to help them turn the spit in the kitchen. But there it was too hot. He was forced to stay indoors because of the rain, by his female supervisors, as happens too frequently to the unhappy children of our generation, but the mere wetness and dreariness in the open discouraged him from going out. He hated everybody.

‘Confound the boy,’ said Sir Ector. ‘For goodness’ sake stop mopin’ by that window there, and go and find your tutor. When I was a boy we always used to study on wet days, yes, and eddicate our minds.’

‘Wart is stupid,’ said Kay.

‘Ah, run along, my duck,’ said their old nurse. ‘I han’t got time to attend to thy mopseys now, what with all this sorbent washing.’

‘Now then, my young master,’ said Hob. ‘Let thee run off to thy quarters, and stop confusing they fowls.’

‘Nah, nah,’ said the sergeant. ‘You ’op orf art of ’ere. I got enough to do a-polishing of this ber-lady harmour.’

Even the Dog Boy barked at him when he went back to the kennels.

Wart draggled off to the tower room, where Merlyn was busy knitting himself a woollen night-cap for the winter.

‘I cast off now together at every other line,’ said the magician, ‘but for some reason it seems to end too sharply. Like an onion. It is the turning of the heel that does one, every time.’

‘I think I ought to have some eddication,’ said the Wart. ‘I can’t think of anything to do.’

‘You think that education is something which ought to be done when all else fails?’ inquired Merlyn nastily, for he was in a bad mood too.

‘Well,’ said the Wart, ‘some sorts of education.’

‘Mine?’ asked the magician with flashing eyes.

‘Oh, Merlyn,’ exclaimed the Wart without answering, ‘please give me something to do, because I feel so miserable. Nobody wants me for anything today, and I just don’t know how to be sensible. It rains so.’

‘You should learn to knit.’

‘Could I go out and be something, a fish or anything like that?’

‘You have been a fish,’ said Merlyn. ‘Nobody with any go needs to do their education twice.’

‘Well, could I be a bird?’

‘If you knew anything at all,’ said Merlyn, ‘which you do not, you would know that a bird does not like to fly in the rain because it wets its feathers and makes them stick together. They get bedraggled.’

‘I could be a hawk in Hob’s mews,’ said the Wart stoutly. ‘Then I should be indoors and not get wet.’

‘That is pretty ambitious,’ said the old man, ‘to want to be a hawk.’

‘You know you will turn me into a hawk when you want to,’ shouted the Wart, ‘but you like to plague me because it is wet. I won’t have it.’

‘Hoity-toity!’

‘Please,’ said the Wart, ‘dear Merlyn, turn me into a hawk. If you don’t do that I shall do something. I don’t know what.’

Merlyn put down his knitting and looked at his pupil over the top of his spectacles. ‘My boy,’ he said, ‘you shall be everything in the world, animal, vegetable, mineral, protista or virus, for all I care – before I have done with you – but you will have to trust to my superior backsight. The time is not yet ripe for you to be a hawk – for one thing Hob is still in the mews feeding them – so you may as well sit down for the moment and learn to be a human being.’

‘Very well,’ said the Wart, ‘if that’s a go.’ And he sat down.

After several minutes he said, ‘Is one allowed to speak as a human being, or does the thing about being seen and not heard have to apply?’

‘Everybody can speak.’

‘That’s good, because I wanted to mention that you have been knitting your beard into the night-cap for three rows now.’

‘Well, I’ll be …’

‘I should think the best thing would be to cut off the end of your beard. Shall I fetch some scissors?’

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘I wanted to see what would happen.’

‘You run a grave risk, my boy,’ said the magician, ‘of being turned into a piece of bread, and toasted.’

With this he slowly began to unpick his beard, muttering to himself meanwhile and taking the greatest precaution not to drop a stitch.

‘Will it be as difficult to fly,’ asked the Wart when he thought his tutor had calmed down, ‘as it was to swim?’

‘You will not need to fly. I don’t mean to turn you into a loose hawk, but only to set you in the mews for the night, so that you can talk to the others. That is the way to learn, by listening to the experts.’

‘Will they talk?’

‘They talk every night, deep into the darkness. They say about how they were taken, about what they can remember of their homes: about their lineage and the great deeds of their ancestors, about their training and what they have learned and will learn. It is military conversation really, like you might have in the mess of a crack cavalry regiment: tactics, small arms, maintenance, betting, famous hunts, wine, women and song.

‘Another subject they have,’ he continued, ‘is food. It is a depressing thought, but of course they are mainly trained by hunger. They are a hungry lot, poor chaps, thinking of the best restaurants where they used to go, and how they had champagne and caviare and gypsy music. Of course, they all come of noble blood.’

‘What a shame that they should be kept prisoners and be hungry.’

‘Well, they do not really understand that they are prisoners, any more than the cavalry officers do. They look on themselves as being dedicated to their profession, like an order of knighthood or something of that sort. You see, the membership of the mews is, after all, restricted to the raptors – and that does help a lot. They know that none of the lower classes can get in. Their screen perches don’t carry blackbirds or such trash as that. And then, as to the hungry part, they are far from starving or that kind of hunger. They are in training, you know, and like everybody in strict training, they think about food.’

‘How soon can I begin?’

‘You can begin now, if you want to. My insight tells me that Hob has this minute finished for the night. But first of all you must choose what kind of hawk you would prefer to be.’

‘I should like to be a merlin,’ said the Wart politely.

This answer flattered the magician. ‘A very good choice,’ be said, ‘and if you please we will proceed at once.’

The Wart got up from his stool and stood in front of his tutor. Merlyn put down his knitting.

‘First you go small,’ said he, pressing him on the top of his head, until he was a bit smaller than a pigeon. ‘Then you stand on the ball of your toes, bend at the knees, hold your elbows to your sides, lift your hands to the level of your shoulders, and press your first and second fingers together, as also your third and fourth. Look, it is like this.’

With these words the ancient nigromant stood upon tiptoe and did as he had explained.

The Wart copied him carefully and wondered what would happen next. What did happen was that Merlyn, who had been saying the final spells under his breath, suddenly turned himself into a condor, leaving the Wart standing on tiptoe unchanged. He stood there as if he were drying himself in the sun, with a wingspread of about eleven feet, a bright orange head and a magenta carbuncle. He looked very surprised and rather funny.

‘Come back,’ said the Wart. ‘You have changed the wrong one.’

‘It is this by-our-lady spring cleaning,’ exclaimed Merlyn, turning back into himself. ‘Once you let a woman into your study for half an hour, you do not know where to lay your hands on the right spell, not if it was ever so. Stand up and we will try again.’

This time the now tiny Wart felt his toes shooting out and scratching on the floor. He felt his heels rise and stick out behind and his knees draw into his stomach. His thighs became quite short. A web of skin grew from his wrists to his shoulders, while his primary feathers burst out in soft quills from the end of his fingers and quickly grew. His secondaries sprouted along his forearm, and a charming little false primary sprang from the end of each thumb.

The dozen feathers of his tail, with the double deck-feathers in the middle, grew out in the twinkling of an eye, and all the covert feathers of his back and breast and shoulders slipped out of the skin to hide the roots of the more important plumes. Wart looked quickly at Merlyn, ducked his head between his legs and had a look through there, rattled his feathers into place, and began to scratch his chin with the sharp talon of one toe.

‘Good,’ said Merlyn. ‘Now hop on my hand – ah, be careful and don’t gripe – and listen to what I have to tell you. I shall take you into the mews now that Hob has locked up for the night, and I shall put you loose and unhooded beside Balin and Balan. Now pay attention. Don’t go close to anybody without speaking first. You must remember that most of them are hooded and might be startled into doing something rash. You can trust Balin and Balan, also the kestrel and the spar-hawk. Don’t go within reach of the falcon unless she invites you to. On no account must you stand beside Cully’s special enclosure, for he is unhooded and will go for you through the mesh if he gets half a chance. He is not quite right in his brains, poor chap, and if he once grips you, you will never leave his grip alive. Remember that you are visiting a kind of Spartan military mess. These fellows are regulars. As the junior subaltern your only business is to keep your mouth shut, speak when you are spoken to, and not interrupt.’

‘I bet I am more than a subaltern,’ said the Wart, ‘if I am a merlin.’

‘Well, as a matter of fact, you are. You will find that both the kestrel and the spar-hawk will be polite to you, but for all sake’s sake don’t interrupt the senior merlins or the falcon. She is the honorary colonel of the regiment. And as for Cully, well, he is a colonel too, even if he is infantry, so you must mind your p’s and q’s.’

‘I will be careful,’ said the Wart, who was beginning to feel rather scared.

‘Good. I shall come for you in the morning, before Hob is up.’

All the hawks were silent as Merlyn carried their new companion into the mews, and silent for some time afterwards when they had been left in the dark. The rain had given place to a full August moonlight, so clear that you could see a woolly bear caterpillar fifteen yards away out of doors, as it climbed up and up the knobbly sandstone of the great keep, and it took the Wart only a few moments for his eyes to become accustomed to the diffused brightness inside the mews. The darkness became watered with light, with silver radiance, and then it was an eerie sight which dawned upon his vision. Each hawk or falcon stood in the silver upon one leg, the other tucked up inside the apron of its panel, and each was a motionless statue of a knight in armour. They stood gravely in their plumed helmets, spurred and armed. The canvas or sacking screens of their perches moved heavily in a breath of wind, like banners in a chapel, and the rapt nobility of the air kept their knight’s vigil in knightly patience. In those days they used to hood everything they could, even the goshawk and the merlin, which are no longer hooded according to modern practice.

Wart drew his breath at the sight of all these stately figures, standing so still that they might have been cut of stone. He was overwhelmed by their magnificence, and felt no need of Merlyn’s warning that he was to be humble and behave himself.

Presently there was a gentle ringing of a bell. The great peregrine falcon had bestirred herself and now said, in a high nasal voice which came from her aristocratic nose, ‘Gentlemen, you may converse.’

There was dead silence.

Only in the far corner of the room, which had been netted off for Cully – loose there, unhooded and deep in moult – they could hear a faint muttering from the choleric infantry colonel. ‘Damned niggers,’ he was mumbling. ‘Damned administration. Damned politicians. Damned bolsheviks. Is this a damned dagger that I see before me, the handle toward my hand? Damned spot. Now, Cully, hast thou but one brief hour to live, and then thou must be damned perpetually.’

‘Colonel,’ said the peregrine coldly, ‘not before the younger officers.’

‘I beg your pardon, Ma’am,’ said the poor Colonel at once. ‘It is something that gets into my head, you know. Some deep demnation.’

There was silence again formal, terrible and calm.

‘Who is the new officer?’ inquired the first fierce and beautiful voice.

Nobody answered.

‘Speak for yourself, sir,’ commanded the peregrine, looking straight before her as if she were talking in her sleep.

They could not see him through their hoods.

‘Please,’ began the Wart, ‘I am a merlin …’

And he stopped, scared in the stillness.

Balan, who was one of the real merlins standing beside him, leaned over and whispered quite kindly in his ear, ‘Don’t be afraid. Call her Madam.’

‘I am a merlin, Madam, an it please you.’

‘A Merlin. That is good. And what branch of the Merlins do you stoop from?’

The Wart did not know in the least what branch he stooped from, but he dared not be found out now in his lie.

‘Madame,’ he said, ‘I am one of the Merlins of the Forest Sauvage.’

There was silence at this again, the silver silence which he had begun to fear.

‘There are the Yorkshire Merlins,’ said the honorary colonel in her slow voice at last, ‘and the Welsh Merlins, and the McMerlins of the North. Then there are the Salisbury ones, and several from the neighbourhood of Exmoor, and the O’Merlins of Connaught. I do not think I have heard of any family in the Forest Sauvage.’

‘It could be a cadet branch, Madam,’ said Balan, ‘I dare say.’

‘Bless him,’ thought the Wart. ‘I shall catch him a special sparrow tomorrow and give it to him behind Hob’s back.’

‘That will be the solution, Captain Balan, no doubt.’

The silence fell again.

At last the peregrine rang her bell. She said, ‘We will proceed with the catechism, prior to swearing him in.’

The Wart heard the spar-hawk on his left giving nervous coughs at this, but the peregrine paid no attention.

‘Merlin of the Forest Sauvage,’ said the peregrine, ‘what is a Beast of the Foot?’

‘A Beast of the Foot,’ replied the Walt, blessing his stars that Sir Ector had chosen to give him a First Rate Eddication, ‘is a horse, or a hound, or a hawk.’

‘Why are these called beasts of the foot?’

‘Because these beasts depend upon the powers of their feet, so that, by law, any damage to the feet of hawk, hound or horse, is reckoned as damage to its life. A lamed horse is a murdered horse.’

‘Good,’ said the peregrine. ‘What are your most important members?’

‘My wings,’ said the Wart after a moment, guessing because he did not know.

At this there was a simultaneous tintinnabulation of all the bells, as each graven image lowered its raised foot in distress. They stood on both feet now, disturbed.

‘Your what?’ called the peregrine sharply.

‘He said his damned wings,’ said Colonel Cully from his private enclosure. ‘And damned be he who first cries Hold, enough!’

‘But even a thrush has wings!’ cried the kestrel, speaking for the first time in his sharp-beaked alarm.

‘Think!’ whispered Balan, under his breath.

The Wart thought feverishly.

A thrush had wings, tail, eyes, legs – apparently everything.

‘My talons!’

‘It will do,’ said the peregrine kindly, after one of her dreadful pauses. ‘The answer ought to be Feet, just as it is to all the other questions, but Talons will do.’

All the hawks, and of course we are using the term loosely, for some were hawks and some were falcons, raised their belled feet again and sat at ease.

‘What is the first law of the foot?’

(‘Think,’ said friendly little Balan, behind his false primary.)

The Wart thought, and thought right.

‘Never to let go,’ he said.

‘Last question,’ said the peregrine. ‘How would you, as a Merlin, kill a pigeon bigger than yourself?’

Wart was lucky in this one, for he had heard Hob giving a description of how Balan did it one afternoon, and he answered warily, ‘I should strangle her with my foot.’

‘Good!’ said the peregrine.

‘Bravo!’ cried the others, raising their feathers.

‘Ninety per cent,’ said the spar-hawk after a quick sum. ‘That is if you give him a half for the talons.’

‘The devil damn me black!’

‘Colonel, please!’

Balan whispered to the Wart, ‘Colonel Cully is not quite right in his wits. It is his liver, we believe, but the kestrel says it is the constant strain of living up to her ladyship’s standard. He says that her ladyship spoke to him from her full social station once, cavalry to infantry, you know, and that he just closed his eyes and got the vertigo. He has never been the same since.’

‘Captain Balan,’ said the peregrine, ‘it is rude to whisper. We will proceed to swear the new officer in. Now, padre, if you please.’

The poor spar-hawk, who had been getting more and more nervous for some time, blushed deeply and began faltering out a complicated oath about varvels, jesses and hoods. ‘With this varvel,’ the Wart heard, ‘I thee endow … love, honour and obey … till jess us do part.’

But before the padre had got to the end of it, he broke down altogether and sobbed out, ‘Oh, please, your ladyship. I beg your pardon, but I have forgotten to keep my tirings.’

(‘Tirings are bones and things,’ explained Balan, ‘and of course you have to swear on bones.’)

‘Forgotten to keep any tirings?’ But it is your duty to keep tirings.’

‘I – I know.’

‘What have you done with them?’

The spar-hawk’s voice broke at the enormity of his confession. ‘I – I ate ’em,’ wept the unfortunate priest.

Nobody said anything. The dereliction of duty was too terrible for words. All stood on two feet and turned their blind heads toward the culprit. Not a word of reproach was spoken. Only, during an utter silence of five minutes, they could hear the incontinent priest snivelling and hiccoughing to himself.

‘Well,’ said the peregine at last, ‘the initiation will have to be put off till tomorrow.’

‘If you will excuse me, Madam,’ said Balin, ‘perhaps we could manage the ordeal tonight? I believe the candidate is loose, for I did not hear him being tied up.’

At the mention of an ordeal the Wart trembled within himself and privately determined that Balin should have not one feather of Balan’s sparrow next day.

‘Thank you, Captain Balin. I was reflecting upon that subject myself.’

Balin shut up.

‘Are you loose, candidate?’

‘Oh, Madam, yes, I am, if you please; but I do not think I want an ordeal.’

‘The ordeal is customary.’

‘Let me see,’ continued the honorary colonel reflectively. ‘What was the last ordeal we had? Can you remember, Captain Balan?’

‘The ordeal, Ma’am,’ said the friendly merlin, ‘was to hang by my jesses during the third watch.’

‘If he is loose he cannot do that.’

‘You could strike him yourself, Ma’am,’ said the kestrel, ‘judiciously, you know.’

‘Send him over to stand by Colonel Cully while we ring three times,’ said the other merlin.

‘Oh, no!’ cried the crazy colonel in an agony out of his remoter darkness. ‘Oh no, your ladyship. I beg of you not to do that. I am such a damned villain, your ladyship, that I do not answer for the consequences. Spare the poor boy, your ladyship, and lead us not into temptation.’

‘Colonel, control yourself. That ordeal will do very well.’

‘Oh, Madam, I was warned not to stand by Colonel Cully.’

‘Warned? And by whom?’

The poor Wart realized that now he must choose between confessing himself a human, and learning no more of their secrets, or going through with this ordeal to earn his education. He did not want to be a coward.

‘I will stand by the Colonel, Madam,’ he said, immediately noticing that his voice sounded insulting.

The peregrine falcon paid no attention to the tone.

‘It is well,’ she said. ‘But first we must have a hymn. Now, padre, if you have not eaten your hymns as well as your tirings, will you be so kind as to lead us in Ancient but not Modern No. 23? The Ordeal Hymn.

‘And you, Mr Kee,’ she added to the kestrel, ‘you had better keep quiet, for you are always too high.’

The hawks stood still in the moonlight, while the spar-hawk counted, ‘One, Two, Three.’ Then all those curved or toothed beaks opened in their hoods to a brazen unison, and this is what they chanted:

                 Life is blood, shed and offered.

                     The eagle’s eye can face this dree.

                 To beasts of chase the lie is proffered:

                     TIMOR MORTIS CONTURBAT ME.

                 The beast of foot sings Holdfast only,

                     For flesh is bruckle and foot is slee.

                 Strength to the strong and the lordly and lonely.

                     TIMOR MORTIS EXULTAT ME.

                 Shame to the slothful and woe to the weak one.

                     Death to the dreadful who turn to flee.

                 Blood to the tearing, the talon’d, the beaked one.

                     TIMOR MORTIS are We.

‘Very nice,’ said the peregrine. ‘Captain Balan. I think you were a little off on the top C. And now, candidate, you will go over and stand next to Colonel Cully’s enclosure, while we ring our bells thrice. On the third ring you may move as quickly as you like.’

‘Very good, Madam,’ said the Wart, quite fearless with resentment. He flipped his wings and was sitting on the extreme end of the screen perch, next to Cully’s enclosure of string netting.

‘Boy!’ cried the Colonel in an unearthly voice, ‘don’t come near me, don’t come near. Ah, tempt not the foul fiend to his damnation.’

‘I do not fear you, sir,’ said the Wart. ‘Do not vex yourself, for no harm will come to either of us.’

‘No harm, quotha! Ah, go, before it is too late. I feel eternal longings in me.’

‘Never fear, sir. They have only to ring three times.’

At this the knights lowered their raised legs and gave them a solemn shake. The first sweet tinkling filled the room.

‘Madam, Madam!’ cried the Colonel in torture. ‘Have pity, have pity on a damned man of blood. Ring out the old, ring in the new. I can’t hold off much longer.’

‘Be brave, sir,’ said the Wart softly.

‘Be brave, sir! Why, but two nights since, one met the duke ’bout midnight in a lane behind Saint Mark’s Church, with the leg of a man upon his shoulder: and he howled fearfully.’

‘It is nothing,’ said the Wart.

‘Nothing! Said he was a wolf, only the difference was a wolf’s skin was hairy on the outside, his on the inside. Rip up my flesh and try. Ah, for quietus, with a bare bodkin!’

The bells rang for the second time.

The Wart’s heart was thumping, and now the Colonel was sidling toward him along the perch. Stamp, stamp, he went, striking the wood he trod on with a convulsive grip at every pace. His poor, mad, brooding eyes glared in the moonlight, shone against the persecuted darkness of his scowling brow. There was nothing cruel about him, no ignoble passion. He was terrified of the Wart, not triumphing, and he must slay.

‘If it were done when ’tis done,’ whispered the Colonel, ‘then ’twere well it were done quickly. Who would have thought the young man had so much blood in him?’

‘Colonel!’ said the Wart, but held himself there.

‘Boy!’ cried the Colonel. ‘Speak, stop me, mercy!’

‘There is a cat behind you,’ said the Wart calmly, ‘or a pinemarten. Look.’

The Colonel turned, swift as a wasp’s sting, and menaced into the gloom. There was nothing. He swung his wild eyes again upon the Wart, guessing the trick. Then, in the cold voice of an adder, ‘The bell invites me. Hear it not, Merlin, for it is a knell that summons thee to heaven or to hell.’

The third bells were indeed ringing as he spoke, and honour was allowed to move. The ordeal was over and the Wart might fly. But as he moved, but as he flew, quicker than any movement or flight in the world, the terrible sickles had shot from the Colonel’s planted legs – not flashed out, for they moved too quickly for sight – and with a thump, with a clutch, with an apprehension, like being arrested by a big policeman, the great scimitars had fixed themselves in his retreating thumb.

They fixed themselves, and fixed irrevocably. Gripe, gripe, the enormous thigh muscles tautened in two convulsions. Then the Wart was two yards further down the screen, and Colonel Cully was standing on one foot with a few meshes of string netting and the Wart’s false primary, with its covert-feathers, vice-fisted in the other. Two or three minor feathers drifted softly in a moonbeam toward the floor.

‘Well stood!’ cried Balan, delightedly.

‘A very gentlemanly exhibition,’ said the peregrine, not minding that Captain Balan had spoken before her.

‘Amen!’ said the spar-hawk.

‘Brave heart!’ said the kestrel.

‘Might we give him the Triumph Song?’ asked Balin, relenting.

‘Certainly,’ said the peregrine.

And they all sang together, led by Colonel Cully at the top of his voice, all belling triumphantly in the terrible moonlight.

                          The mountain birds are sweeter

                              But the valley birds are fatter,

                          And so we deemed it meeter

                              To carry off the latter.

                          We met a cowering coney

                              And struck him through the vitals.

                          The Coney was like honey

                              And squealed our requitals.

                          Some struck the lark in feathers

                              Whose puffing clouds were shed off.

                          Some plucked the partridge’s nethers,

                              While others pulled his head off.

                          But Wart the King of Merlins

                              Struck foot most far before us.

                                  His birds and beasts

                                  Supply our feasts,

                              And his feats our glorious chorus!

‘Mark my words,’ cried the beautiful Balan, ‘we shall have a regular king in that young candidate. Now, boys, chorus altogether for the last time’:

                          But Wart the King of Merlins

                              Struck foot most far before us.

                                  His birds and beasts

                                  Supply our feasts,

                              And his feats our glorious chorus!