The Once and Future King

Chapter II

On the battlements of their castle at Camelot, during an interval of peace between the two Gaelic Wars, the young king of England was standing with his tutor, looking across the purple wastes of evening. A soft light flooded the land below them, and the slow river wound between venerable abbey and stately castle, while the flaming water of sunset reflected spires and turrets and pennoncells hanging motionless in the calm air.

The world was laid out before the two watchers like a toy, for they were on a high keep which dominated the town. At their feet they could see the grass of the outer bailey – it was horrible looking down on it – and a small foreshortened man, with two buckets on a yoke, making his way across to the menagerie. They could see, further off at the gatehouse, which was not so horrible to look at because it was not vertically below, the night guard taking over from the sergeant. They were clicking their heels and saluting and presenting pikes and exchanging passwords as merrily as a marriage bell – but it was done in silence for the two, because it was so far below. They looked like lead soldiers, the little gallow-glasses, and their footsteps could not sound upon the luscious sheep-nibbled green. Then, outside the curtain wall, there was the distant noise of old wives bargaining, and brats bawling, and corporals quaffing, and a few goats mixed with it, and two or three lepers in white hoods ringing bells as they walked, and the swishing robes of nuns who were kindly visiting the poor, two by two, and a fight going on between some gentlemen who were interested in horses. On the other side of the river, which ran directly beneath the castle wall, there was a man ploughing in the fields, with his plough tied to the horse’s tail. The wooden plough squeaked. There was a silent person near him, fishing for salmon with worms – the rivers were not polluted in those days – and further off, there was a donkey giving his musical concert to the coming night. All these noises came up to the two on the tower smally, as though they were listening through the wrong end of a megaphone.

Arthur was a young man, just on the threshold of life. He had fair hair and a stupid face, or at any rate there was a lack of cunning in it. It was an open face, with kind eyes and a reliable or faithful expression, as though he were a good learner who enjoyed being alive and did not believe in original sin. He had never been unjustly treated, for one thing, so he was kindly to other people.

The King was dressed in a robe of velvet which had belonged to Uther the Conqueror, his father, trimmed with the beards of fourteen kings who had been vanquished in the olden days Unfortunately some of these kings had had red hair, some black, some pepper-and-salt, while their growth of beard had been uneven. The trimming looked like a feather boa. The moustaches were stuck on round the buttons.

Merlyn had a white beard which reached to his middle, horn-rimmed spectacles, and a conical hat. He wore it in compliment to the Saxon serfs of the country, whose national headgear was either a kind of diving-cap, or the Phrygian cap, or else this cone of straw.

The two of them were speaking sometimes, as the words came to them, between spells of listening to the evening.

‘Well,’ said Arthur, ‘I must say it is nice to be a king. It was a splendid battle,’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Of course it was splendid. Look at the way Lot of Orkney ran, after I had begun to use Excalibur.’

‘He got you down first.’

‘That was nothing. It was because I was not using Excalibur. As soon as I drew my trusty sword they ran like rabbits.’

‘They will come again,’ said the magician, ‘all six. The Kings of Orkney, Garloth, Gore, Scotland, The Tower, and the Hundred Knights have started already – in fact, the Gaelic Confederation. You must remember that your claim to the throne is hardly a conventional one.’

‘Let them come,’ replied the King. ‘I don’t mind. I will beat them properly this time, and then we will see who is master.’

The old man crammed his beard in his mouth and began to chew it, as he generally did when he was put about. He bit through one of the hairs, which stuck between two teeth. He tried to lick it off, then took it out with his fingers. Finally he began curling it into two points.

‘I suppose you will learn some day,’ he said, ‘but God knows it is heartbreaking, uphill work.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes,’ cried Merlyn passionately. ‘Oh? oh? oh? That is all you can say. Oh? oh? oh? Like a schoolboy.’

‘I shall cut off your head if you are not careful.’

‘Cut it off. It would be a good thing if you did. I should not have to keep on tutoring, at any rate.’

Arthur shifted his elbow on the battlement and looked at his ancient friend.

‘What is the matter, Merlyn?’ he asked. ‘Have I been doing something wrong? I am sorry if I have.’

The magician uncurled his beard and blew his nose.

‘It is not so much what you are doing,’ he said. ‘It is how you are thinking. If there is one thing I can’t stand, it is stupidity. I always say that stupidity is the Sin against the Holy Ghost.’

‘I know you do.’

‘Now you are being sarcastic.’

The King took him by the shoulder and turned him round. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘what is wrong? Are you in a bad temper? If I have done something stupid, tell me. Don’t be in a bad temper.’

It had the effect of making the aged nigromant angrier than before.

‘Tell you!’ he exclaimed. ‘And what is going to happen when there is nobody to tell you? Are you never going to think for yourself? What is going to happen when I am locked up in this wretched tumulus of mine, I should like to know?’

‘I didn’t know there was a tumulus in it.’

‘Oh, hang the tumulus! What tumulus? What am I supposed to be talking about?’

‘Stupidity,’ said Arthur. ‘It was stupidity when we started.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Well, it’s no good saying Exactly. You were going to say something about it.’

‘I don’t know what I was going to say about it. You put one in such a passion with all your this and that, that I am sure nobody would know what they were talking about for two minutes together. How did it begin?’

‘It began about the battle.’

‘Now I remember,’ said Merlyn. ‘That’s exactly where it did begin.’

‘I said it was a good battle.’

‘So I recollect.’

‘Well, it was a good battle,’ he repeated defensively. ‘It was a jolly battle, and I won it myself, and it was fun.’

The magician’s eyes veiled themselves like a vulture’s, as he vanished inside his mind. There was silence on the battlements for several minutes, while a pair of peregrines that were being hacked in a nearby field flew over their heads in a playful chase, crying out Kik-kik-kik, their bells ringing. Merlyn looked out of his eyes once more.

‘It was clever of you,’ he said slowly, ‘to win the battle.’

Arthur had been taught that he ought to be modest, and he was too simple to notice that the vulture was going to pounce.

‘Oh well. It was luck.’

‘Very clever,’ repeated Merlyn. ‘How many of your kerns were killed?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘No.’

‘Kay said –’

The King stopped in the middle of the sentence, and looked at him.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘It was not fun, then. I had not thought.’

‘The tally was more than seven hundred. They were all kerns, of course. None of the knights were injured, except the one who broke his leg falling off the horse.’

When he saw that Arthur was not going to answer, the old fellow went on in a bitter voice.

‘I was forgetting,’ he added, ‘that you had some really nasty bruises.’

Arthur glared at his finger-nails.

‘I hate you when you are a prig.’

Merlyn was charmed.

‘That’s the spirit,’ he said, putting his arm through the King’s and smiling cheerfully. ‘That’s more like it. Stand up for yourself, that’s the ticket. Asking advice is the fatal thing. Besides, I won’t be here to advise you, fairly soon.’

‘What is this you keep talking about, about not being here, and the tumulus and so on?’

‘It is nothing. I am due to fall in love with a girl called Nimue in a short time, and then she learns my spells and locks me up in a cave for several centuries. It is one of those things which are going to happen.’

‘But, Merlyn, how horrible! To be stuck in a cave for centuries like a toad in a hole! We must do something about it.’

‘Nonsense,’ said the magician. ‘What was I talking about?’

‘About this maiden …’

‘I was talking about advice, and how you must never take it. Well, I am going to give you some now. I advise you to think about battles, and about your realm of Gramarye, and about the sort of things a king has to do. Will you do that?’

‘I will. Of course I will. But about this girl who learns your spells …’

‘You see, it is a question of the people, as well as of the kings. When you said about the battle being a lovely one, you were thinking like your father. I want you to think like yourself, so that you will be a credit to all this education I have been giving you – afterwards, when I am only an old man locked up in a hole.’

‘Merlyn!’

‘There, there! I was playing for sympathy. Never mind. I said it for effect. As a matter of fact, it will be charming to have a rest for a few hundred years, and, as for Nimue, I am looking backward to her a good deal. No, no, the important thing is this thinking-for-yourself business and the matter of battles. Have you ever thought seriously about the state of your country, for instance, or are you going to go on all your life being like Uther Pendragon? After all, you are the King of the place.’

‘I have not thought very much.’

‘No. Then let me do some thinking with you. Suppose we think about your Gaelic friend, Sir Bruce Sans Pitié.’

‘That fellow!’

‘Exactly. And why do you say it like that?’

‘He is a swine. He goes murdering maidens – and, as soon as a real knight turns up to rescue them, he gallops off for all he is worth. He breeds special fast horses so that nobody can catch him, and he stabs people in the back. He’s a marauder. I would kill him at once if I could catch him.’

‘Well,’ said Merlyn, ‘I don’t think he is very different from the others. What is all this chivalry, anyway? It simply means being rich enough to have a castle and a suit of armour, and then, when you have them, you make the Saxon people do what you like. The only risk you run is of getting a few bruises if you happen to come across another knight. Look at that tilt you saw between Pellinore and Grummore, when you were small. It is this armour that does it. All the barons can slice the poor people about as much as they want, and it is a day’s work to hurt each other, and the result is that the country is devastated. Might is Right, that’s the motto. Bruce Sans Pitié is only an example of the general situation. Look at Lord and Nentres and Uriens and all that Gaelic crew, fighting against you for the Kingdom. Pulling swords out of stones is not a legal proof of paternity, I admit, but the kings of the Old Ones are not fighting you about that. They have rebelled, although you are their feudal sovereign, simply because the throne is insecure. England’s difficulty, we used to say, is Ireland’s opportunity. This is their chance to pay off racial scores, and to have some blood-letting as sport, and to make a bit of money in ransoms. Their turbulence does not cost them anything themselves because they are dressed in armour – and you seem to enjoy it too. But look at the country. Look at the barns burned, and dead men’s legs sticking out of ponds, and horses with swelled bellies by the roadside, and mills falling down, and money buried, and nobody daring to walk abroad with gold or ornaments on their clothes. That is chivalry nowadays. That is the Uther Pendragon touch. And then you talk about a battle being fun!’

‘I was thinking of myself.’

‘I know.’

‘I ought to have thought of the people who had no armour.’

‘Quite.’

‘Might isn’t Right, is it, Merlyn?’

‘Aha!’ replied the magician, beaming. ‘Aha! You are a cunning lad, Arthur, but you won’t catch your old tutor like that. You are trying to put me in a passion by making me do the thinking. But I am not to be caught. I am too old a fox for that. You will have to think the rest yourself. Is might right – and if not, why not, give reasons and draw a plan. Besides, what are you going to do about it?’

‘What …’ began the King, but he saw the gathering frown.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I will think about it.’

And he began thinking, stroking his upper lip, where the moustache was going to be.

There was a small incident before they left the keep. The man who had been carrying the two buckets to the menagerie came back with his buckets empty. He passed directly under them, looking small on his way to the kitchen door. Arthur, who had been playing with a loose stone which he had dislodged from one of the machicolations, got tired of thinking and leaned over with the stone in his hand.

‘How small Curselaine looks.’

‘He is tiny.’

‘I wonder what would happen if I dropped this stone on his head.’

Merlyn measured the distance.

‘At thirty-two feet per second,’ he said, ‘I think it would kill him dead. Four hundred g is enough to shatter the skull.’

‘I have never killed anybody like that,’ said the boy, in an inquisitive tone.

Merlyn was watching.

‘You are the King,’ he said.

Then he added, ‘Nobody can say anything to you if you try.’

Arthur stayed motionless, leaning out with the stone in his hand. Then, without his body moving, his eyes slid sideways to meet his tutor’s.

The stone knocked Merlyn’s hat off as clean as a whistle, and the old gentleman chased him featly down the stairs, waving his wand of lignum vitae.

Arthur was happy. Like the man in Eden before the fall, he was enjoying his innocence and fortune. Instead of being a poor squire, he was a king. Instead of being an orphan, he was loved by nearly everybody except the Gaels, and he loved everybody in return.

So far as he was concerned, as yet, there might never have been such a thing as a single particle of sorrow on the gay, sweet surface of the dew-glittering world.