The Once and Future King

Chapter VI

In Carlion everything was at sixes and sevens in preparation for the second campaign. Merlyn had made suggestions about the way to win it, but, as these involved an ambush with secret aid from abroad, they had had to be kept dark. Lot’s slowly approaching army was so much more numerous than the King’s forces that it had been necessary to resort to stratagems. The way in which the battle was to be fought was a secret only known to four people.

The common citizens, who were in ignorance of the higher policy, had a great deal to do. There were pikes to be ground to a fine edge, so that the grindstones in the town were roaring day and night – there were thousands of arrows to be dressed, so that there were lights in the fletchers’ houses at all hours – and the unfortunate geese on the commons were continually being chased by excited yeomen who wanted feathers. The royal peacocks were as bare as an old broom – most of the crack shots liked to have what Chaucer calls peacock arwes, because they were more classy – and the smell of boiling glue rose to high heaven. The armourers, accomplishing the knights, hammered away with musical clinks, working double shifts at it, and the blacksmiths shod the chargers, and the nuns never stopped knitting comforters for the soldiers or making the kind of bandages which were called tents. King Lot had already named a rendezvous for the battle, at Bedegraine.

The King of England painfully climbed the two hundred and eight steps which led to Merlyn’s tower room, and knocked on the door. The magician was inside, with Archimedes sitting on the back of his chair, busily trying to find the square root of minus one. He had forgotten how to do it.

‘Merlyn,’ said the King panting, ‘I want to talk to you.’

He closed his book with a bang, leaped to his feet, seizing his wand of lignum vitae, and rushed at Arthur as if he were trying to shoo away a stray chicken.

‘Go away!’ he shouted. ‘What are you doing here? What do you mean by it? Aren’t you the King of England? Go away and send for me! Get out of my room! I never heard of such a thing! Go away at once and send for me!’

‘But I’m here.’

‘No, you’re not,’ retorted the old man resourcefully. And he pushed the King out of the door, slamming it in his face.

‘Well!’ said Arthur, and he went off sadly down the two hundred and eight stairs.

An hour later, Merlyn presented himself in the Royal Chamber, in answer to a summons which had been delivered by a page.

‘That’s better,’ he said, and sat down comfortably on a carpet chest.

‘Stand up,’ said Arthur, and he clapped his hands for a page to take away the seat.

Merlyn stood up, boiling with indignation. The whites of his knuckles blanched as he clenched them.

‘About our conversation on the subject of chivalry,’ began the King in an airy tone.…

‘I don’t recollect such a conversation.’

‘No?’

‘I have never been so insulted in my life!’

‘But I am the King,’ said Arthur. ‘You can’t sit down in front of a King.’

‘Rubbish!’

Arthur began to laugh more than was seemly, and his foster-brother, Sir Kay, and his old guardian, Sir Ector, came out from behind the throne, where they had been hiding. Kay took off Merlyn’s hat and put it on Sir Ector, and Sir Ector said, ‘Well, bless my soul, now I am a nigromancer. Hocus-Pocus.’ Then everybody began laughing, including Merlyn eventually, and seats were sent for so that they could sit down and bottles of wine were opened so that it should not be a dry meeting.

‘You see,’ he said proudly, ‘I have summoned a council.’

There was a pause, for it was the first time that Arthur had made a speech, and he wanted to collect his wits for it.

‘Well,’ said the King. ‘It is about chivalry. I want to talk about that.’

Merlyn was immediately watching him with a sharp eye. His knobbed fingers fluttered among the stars and secret signs of his gown, but he would not help the speaker. You might say that this moment was the critical one in his career – the moment towards which he had been living backward for heaven knows how many centuries, and now he was to see for certain whether he had lived in vain.

‘I have been thinking,’ said Arthur, ‘about Might and Right. I don’t think things ought to be done because you are able to do them. I think they should be done because you ought to do them. After all, a penny is a penny in any case, however much Might is exerted on either side, to prove that it is or is not. Is that plain?’

Nobody answered.

‘Well, I was talking to Merlyn on the battlements one day, and he mentioned that the last battle we had – in which seven hundred kerns were killed – was not so much fun as I had thought it was. Of course, battles are not fun when you come to think about them. I mean, people ought not to be killed, ought they? It is better to be alive.

‘Very well. But the funny thing is that Merlyn was helping me to win battles. He is still helping me, for that matter, and we hope to win the battle of Bedegraine together, when it comes off.’

‘We will,’ said Sir Ector, who was in the secret.

‘That seems to me to be inconsistent. Why does he help me to fight wars, if they are bad things?’

There was no answer from anybody, and the King began to speak with agitation.

‘I could only think,’ said he, beginning to blush, ‘I could only think that I – that we – that he – that he wanted me to win them for a reason.’

He paused and looked at Merlyn, who turned his head away.

‘The reason was – was it? – the reason was that if I could be the master of my kingdom by winning these two battles, I could stop them afterwards and then do something about the business of Might. Have I guessed? Was I right?’

The magician did not turn his head, and his hands lay still in his lap.

‘I was!’ exclaimed Arthur.

And he began talking so quickly that he could hardly keep up with himself.

‘You see,’ he said, ‘Might is not Right. But there is a lot of Might knocking about in this world, and something has to be done about it. It is as if people were half horrible and half nice. Perhaps they are even more than half horrible, and when they are left to themselves they run wild. You get the average baron that we see nowadays, people like Sir Bruce Sans Pitié, who simply go clod-hopping round the country dressed in steel, and doing exactly what they please, for sport. It is our Norman idea about the upper classes having a monopoly of power, without reference to justice. Then the horrible side gets uppermost, and there is thieving and rape and plunder and torture. The people become beasts.

‘But, you see, Merlyn is helping me to win my two battles so that I can stop this. He wants me to put things right.

‘Lot and Uriens and Anguish and those – they are the old world, the old-fashioned order who want to have their private will. I have got to vanquish them with their own weapons – they force it upon me, because they live by force – and then the real work will begin. This battle at Bedegraine is the preliminary, you see. It is after the battle that Merlyn is wanting me to think about.’

Arthur paused again for comment or encouragement, but the magician’s face was turned away. It was only Sir Ector, sitting next to him, who could see his eyes.

‘Now what I have thought,’ said Arthur, ‘is this. Why can’t you harness Might so that it works for Right? I know it sounds nonsense, but, I mean, you can’t just say there is no such thing. The Might is there, in the bad half of people, and you can’t neglect it. You can’t cut it out, but you might be able to direct it, if you see what I mean, so that it was useful instead of bad.’

The audience was interested. They leaned forward to listen, except Merlyn.

‘My idea is that if we can win this battle in front of us, and get a firm hold of the country, then I will institute a sort of order of chivalry. I will not punish the bad knights, or hang Lot, but I will try to get them into our Order. We shall have to make it a great honour, you see, and make it fashionable and all that. Everybody must want to be in. And then I shall make the oath of the order that Might is only to be used for Right. Do you follow? The knights in my order will ride all over the world, still dressed in steel and whacking away with their swords – that will give an outlet for wanting to whack, you understand, an outlet for what Merlyn calls the foxhunting spirit – but they will be bound to strike only on behalf of what is good, to defend virgins against Sir Bruce and to restore what has been done wrong in the past and to help the oppressed and so forth. Do you see the idea? It will be using the Might instead of fighting against it, and turning a bad thing into a good. There, Merlyn, that is all I can think of. I have thought as hard as I could, and I suppose I am wrong, as usual. But I did think. I can’t do any better. Please say something!’

The magician stood up as straight as a pillar, stretched out his arms in both directions, looked at the ceiling, and said the first few words of the Nunc Dimittis.