The Once and Future King

Chapter I

There was a round tower with a weather-cock on it. The weather-cock was a carrion crow, with an arrow in its beak to point to the wind.

There was a circular room at the top of the tower, curiously uncomfortable. It was draughty. There was a closet on the east side which had a hole in the floor. The hole commanded the outer doors of the tower, of which there were two, and people could drop stones through it when they were besieged. Unfortunately the wind used to come up through the hole and go pouring out of the unglazed shot-windows or up the chimney – unless it happened to be blowing the other way, in which case it went downward. It was like a wind tunnel. A second nuisance was that the room was full of peat smoke, not from its own fire but from the fire in the room below. The complicated system of draughts sucked the smoke down the chimney. The stone walls sweated in damp weather. The furniture itself was uncomfortable. It consisted solely of heaps of stones – which were handy for throwing down the hole – together with a few rusty Genoese cross-bows with their bolts and a pile of turfs for the unlit fire. The four children had no bed. If it had been a square room, they might have had a cupboard bed, but, as it was they had to sleep on the floor – where they covered themselves with straw and plaids as best they could.

The children had erected an amateur tent over their heads, out of the plaids, and under this they were lying close together, telling a story. They could hear their mother stoking the fire in the room below, which made them whisper for fear that she could hear. It was not exactly that they were afraid of being beaten if she came up. They adored her dumbly and uncritically, because her character was stronger than theirs. Nor had they been forbidden to talk after bedtime. It was more as if she had brought them up – perhaps through indifference or through laziness or even through some kind of possessive cruelty – with an imperfect sense of right and wrong. It was as if they could never know when they were being good or when they were being bad.

They were whispering in Gaelic. Or rather, they were whispering in a strange mixture of Gaelic and of the Old Language of chivalry – which had been taught to them because they would need it when they were grown. They had little English. In later years, when they became famous knights at the court of the great king, they were to speak English perfectly – all of them except Gawaine, who, as the head of the clan, was to cling to a Scots accent on purpose, to show that he was not ashamed of his birth.

Gawaine was telling the story, because he was the eldest. They lay together, like thin, strange, secret frogs, their bodies well-boned and ready to fill out into toughness as soon as they might be given decent nourishment. They were fair-haired. Gawaine’s was bright red and Gareth’s whiter than hay. They ranged from ten years old to fourteen, and Gareth was the youngest of the four. Gaheris was a stolid child. Agravaine, the next after Gawaine, was the bully of the family – he was shifty, inclined to cry, and frightened of pain. It was because he had a good imagination and used his head more than the others.

‘Long time past, my heroes,’ Gawaine was saying, ‘before ourselves were born or thought of, there was a beautiful grandmother at us, called Igraine.’

‘She is the Countess of Cornwall,’ said Agravaine.

‘Our grandmother is the Countess of Cornwall,’ agreed Gawaine, ‘and the bloody King of England fell in love with her.’

‘His name was Uther Pendragon,’ said Agravaine.

‘Who is at telling this story?’ asked Gareth angrily. ‘Close your mouth.’

‘King Uther Pendragon,’ continued Gawaine, ‘let send for the Earl and Countess of Cornwall –’

‘Our Grandfather and Granny,’ said Gaheris.

‘– and he proclaimed to them that they must stay with him at his house in the Tower of London. Then, when they were at staying with him therein, he asked our Granny that she would become the wife of himself, instead of being with our Grandfather at all. But the chaste and beautiful Countess of Cornwall –’

‘Granny,’ said Gaheris.

Gareth exclaimed: ‘Sorrow take it, will you give us peace?’ There was a muffled argument, punctuated by squeaks, bumps and complaining remarks.

‘The chaste and beautiful Countess of Cornwall,’ resumed Gawaine, ‘spurned the advances of King Uther Pendragon, and she told our Grandfather about it. She said: “I suppose we were sent for that I should be dishonoured. Wherefore, husband, I counsel you that we depart from hence suddenly, that we may ride all night to our own castle.” So they went out of the King’s rath in the middle of the night –’

‘At dead of night,’ Gareth corrected.

‘– when all the people of the house had gone on sleep, and there they saddled their prancing, fire-eyed, swift-footed, symmetrical, large-lipped, small-headed, vehement steeds, by the light of a dark lantern, and they rode away into Cornwall, as fast as they could go.’

‘It was a terrible ride,’ said Gaheris.

‘They killed the horses underneath them,’ said Agravaine.

‘So they did not, then,’ said Gareth. ‘Our Grandfather and Granny would not have ridden any horses to kill them.’

‘Did they?’ asked Gaheris.

‘No, they did not,’ said Gawaine, after considering. ‘But they nearly did so.’

He went on with the story.

‘When King Uther Pendragon learned what had happened in the morning, he was wonderly wroth.’

‘Wood wroth,’ suggested Gareth.

‘Wonderly wroth,’ said Gawaine. ‘King Uther Pendragon was wonderly wroth. He said, “I will have that Earl of Cornwall’s head in a pie-dish, by my halidome!” So he sent our Grandfather a letter which bid him to stuff him and garnish him, for within forty days he would fetch him out of the strongest castle that he had!’

‘There were two castles at him,’ said Agravaine haughtily. ‘They were the Castle Tintagil and the Castle Terrabil.’

‘So the Earl of Cornwall put our Granny in Tintagil, and he himself went into Terrabil, and King Uther Pendragon came to lay them siege.’

‘And there,’ cried Gareth, unable to contain himself, ‘the King pight many pavilions, and there was great war made on both parties, and much people slain!’

‘A thousand?’ suggested Gaheris.

‘Two thousand at least,’ said Agravaine. ‘We of the Gael would not have slain less than two thousand. In truth, it was a million probably.’

‘So when our Grandfather and Granny were winning the sieges, and it looked as if King Uther would be utterly defeated, there came along a wicked magician called Merlyn –’

‘A nigromancer,’ said Gareth.

‘And this nigromancer, would you believe it, by means of his infernal arts, succeeded in putting the treacherous Uther Pendragon inside our Granny’s Castle. Granda immediately made a sortie out of Terrabil, but he was slain in the battle –’

‘Treacherously.’

‘And the poor Countess of Cornwall –’

‘The chaste and beautiful Igraine –’

‘Our Granny –’

‘– was captured prisoner by the blackhearted, Southron, faithless King of the Dragon, and then, in spite of it that she had three beautiful daughters already whatever –’

‘The lovely Cornwall Sisters.’

‘Aunt Elaine.’

‘Aunt Morgan.’

‘And Mammy.’

‘And though she had these lovely daughters, she was forced into marrying the King of England – the man who had slain her husband!’

They considered the enormous English wickedness in silence, overwhelmed by its dénouement. It was their mother’s favourite story, on the rare occasions when she troubled to tell them one, and they had learned it by heart. Finally Agravaine quoted a Gaelic proverb, which she had taught them.

‘Four things,’ he whispered, ‘that a Lothian cannot trust – a cow’s horn, a horse’s hoof, a dog’s snarl, and an Englishman’s laugh.’

They moved in the straw uneasily, listening to some secret movements in the room below.

The room underneath the story-tellers was lit by a single candle and by the saffron light of its peat fire. It was a poor room for a royal one, but at least it had a bed in it – the great four-poster which was used as a throne during the daytime. An iron cauldron with three legs was boiling over the fire. The candle stood in front of a sheet of polished brass, which served as a mirror. There were two living beings in the chamber, a Queen and a cat. Both of them had black hair and blue eyes.

The black cat lay on its side in the firelight as if it were dead. This was because its legs were tied together, like the legs of a roe-deer which is to be carried home from the hunt. It had given up struggling and now lay gazing into the fire with slit eyes and heaving sides, curiously resigned. Or else it was exhausted – for animals know when they have come to the end. Most of them have a dignity about dying, denied to human beings. This cat, with the small flames dancing in its oblique eyes, was perhaps seeing the pageant of its past eight lives, reviewing them with an animal’s stoicism, beyond hope or fear.

The Queen picked up the cat. She was trying a well-known piseog to amuse herself, or at any rate to pass the time while the men were away at the war. It was a method of becoming invisible. She was not a serious witch like her sister Morgan le Fay – for her head was too empty to take any great art seriously, even if it were the Black one. She was doing it because the little magics ran in her blood – as they did with all the women of her race.

In the boiling water, the cat gave some horrible convulsions and a dreadful cry. Its wet fur bobbed in the steam, gleaming like the side of a speared whale, as it tried to leap or to swim with its bound feet. Its mouth opened hideously, showing the whole of its pink gullet, and the sharp, white cat-teeth, like thorns. After the first shriek it was not able to articulate, but only to stretch its paws. Later it was dead.

Queen Morgause of Lothian and Orkney sat beside the cauldron and waited. Occasionally she stirred the cat with a wooden spoon. The stench of boiling fur began to fill the room. A watcher would have seen, in the flattering peat light, what an exquisite creature she was tonight: her deep, big eyes, her hair glinting with dark lustre, her full body, and her faint air of watchfulness as she listened for the whispering in the room above.

Gawaine said: ‘Revenge!’

‘They had done no harm to King Pendragon.’

‘They had only asked to be left in peace.’

It was the unfairness of the rape of their Cornish grandmother which was hurting Gareth – the picture of weak and innocent people victimized by a resistless tyranny – the old tyranny of the Gaul – which was felt like a personal wrong by every crofter of the Islands. Gareth was a generous boy. He hated the idea of strength against weakness. It made his heart swell, as if he were going to suffocate. Gawaine, on the other hand, was angry because it had been against his family. He did not think it was wrong for strength to have its way, but only that it was intensely wrong for anything to succeed against his own clan. He was neither clever nor sensitive, but he was loyal – stubbornly sometimes, and even annoyingly and stupidly so in later life. For him it was then as it was always to be: Up Orkney, Right or Wrong. The third brother, Agravaine, was moved because it was a matter which concerned his mother. He had curious feelings about her, which he kept to himself. As for Gaheris, he did and felt what the others did.

The cat had come to pieces. The long boiling had shredded its meat away until there was nothing in the cauldron except a deep scum of hair and grease and gobbets. Underneath, the white bones revolved in the eddies of the water, the heavy ones lying still and the airy membranes lifting gracefully, like leaves in an autumn wind. The Queen, wrinkling her nose slightly in the thick stench of unsalted broth, strained the liquid into a second pot. On top of the flannel strainer there was left a sediment of cat, a sodden mass of matted hair and meat shreds and the delicate bones. She blew on the sediment and began turning it over with the handle of the spoon, prodding it to let the heat out. Later, she was able to sort it with her fingers.

The Queen knew that every pure black cat had a certain bone in it, which, if it were held in the mouth after boiling the cat alive, was able to make you invisible. But nobody knew precisely, even in those days, which the bone was. This was why magic had to be done in front of a mirror, so that the right one could be found by practice.

It was not that Morgause courted invisibility – indeed, she would have detested it, because she was beautiful. But the men were away. It was something to do, an easy and well-known charm. Besides, it was an excuse for lingering with the mirror.

The Queen scraped the remains of her cat into two heaps, one of them a neat pile of warm bones, the other a miscellaneous lump which softly steamed. Then she chose one of the bones and lifted it to her red lips, cocking the little finger. She held it between her teeth and stood in front of the polished brass, looking at herself with sleepy pleasure. She threw the bone into the fire and fetched another.

There was nobody to see her. It was strange, in these circumstances, the way in which she turned and turned, from mirror to bone-pile, always putting a bone in her mouth, and looking at herself to see if she had vanished, and throwing the bone away. She moved so gracefully, as if she were dancing, as if there really was somebody to see her, or as if it were enough that she should see herself.

Finally, but before she had tested all the bones, she lost interest. She threw the last ones down impatiently and tipped the mess out of the window, not caring where it fell. Then she smoored the fire, stretched herself on the big bed with a strange motion, and lay there in the darkness for a long time without sleeping – her body moving discontentedly.

‘And this, my heroes,’ concluded Gawaine, ‘is the reason why we of Cornwall and Orkney must be against the Kings of England ever more, and most of all against the clan Mac Pendragon.’

‘It is why our Da has gone away to fight against King Arthur whatever, for Arthur is a Pendragon. Our Mammy said so.’

‘And we must keep the feud living forever,’ said Agravaine, ‘because Mammy is a Cornwall. Dame Igraine is our Granny.’

‘We must avenge our family.’

‘Because our Mammy is the most beautiful woman in the high-ridged, extensive, ponderous, pleasant-turning world.’

‘And because we love her.’

Indeed, they did love her. Perhaps we all give the best of our hearts uncritically – to those who hardly think about us in return.