The Once and Future King

Chapter VIII

The plain of Bedegraine was a forest of pavilions. They looked like old-fashioned bathing tents, and were every colour of the rainbow. Some of them were even striped like bathing tents, but the most part were in plain colours, yellow and green and so on. There were heraldic devices worked or stamped on the sides – enormous black eagles with two heads perhaps, or wyverns, or lances, or oak trees, or punning signs which referred to the names of the owners. For instance, Sir Kay had a black key on his tent, and Sir Ulbawes, in the opposing camp, had a couple of elbows in flowing sleeves. The proper name for them would be manchets. Then there were pennons floating from the tops of the tents, and sheaves of spears leaning against them. The more sporting barons had shields or huge copper basins outside their front doors, and all you had to do was to give a thump on one of these with the butt-end of your spear, for the baron to come out like an angry bee and have a fight with you, almost before the resounding boom had died away. Sir Dinadain, who was a cheerful man, had hung a chamber-pot outside his. Then there were the people themselves. All round and about the tents there were cooks quarrelling with dogs who had eaten the mutton, and small pages writing insults on each other’s backs when they were not looking, and elegant minstrels with lutes singing tunes similar to ‘Greensleeves’, with soulful expressions, and squires with a world of innocence in their eyes, trying to sell each other spavined horses, and hurdy-gurdy men trying to earn a groat by playing on the vielle, and gypsies telling your fortune for the battle, and enormous knights with their heads wrapped in untidy turbans playing chess, and vivandières sitting on the knees of some of them, and – as for entertainment – there were joculators, gleemen, tumblers, harpers, troubadours, jesters, minstrels, tregetours, bear-dancers, egg-dancers, ladder-dancers, ballet-dancers, mountebanks, fire eaters, and balancers. In a way, it was like Derby Day. The tremendous forest of Sherwood stretched round the tent-forest further than the eye could see – and this was full of wild boars, warrantable stags, outlaws, dragons, and Purple Emperors. There was also an ambush in the forest but nobody was supposed to know about that.

King Arthur paid no attention to the coming battle. He sat invisible in his pavilion, at the hub of the excitement, and talked to Sir Ector or Kay or Merlyn day after day. The smaller captains were delighted to think that their King was having so many councils of war, for they could see the lamp burning inside the silk tent until all hours, and they felt sure that he was inventing a splendid plan of campaign. Actually the conversation was about different things.

‘There will be a lot of jealousy,’ said Kay. ‘You will have all these knights in this order of yours saying that they are the best one, and wanting to sit at the top of the table.’

‘Then we must have a round table with no top.’

‘But, Arthur, you could never sit a hundred and fifty knights at a round table. Let me see …’

Merlyn, who hardly ever interfered in the arguments now, but sat with his hands folded on his stomach and beamed, helped Kay out of the difficulty.

‘It would need to be about fifty yards across,’ he said. ‘You do it by 2πr.’

‘Well, then. Say it was fifty yards across. Think of all the space in the middle. It would be an ocean of wood with a thin rim of humanity. You couldn’t keep the food in the middle even, because nobody would be able to reach it.’

‘Then we can have a circular table,’ said Arthur, ‘not a round one. I don’t know what the proper word is. I mean we could have a table shaped like the rim of a cart-wheel, and the servants could walk about in the empty space, where the spokes would be. We could call them the Knights of the Round Table.’

‘What a good name!’

‘And the important thing,’ continued the King, who was getting wiser the more he thought, ‘the most important thing, will be to catch them young. The old knights, the ones we are fighting against, will be mostly too old to learn. I think we shall be able to get them in, and keep them fighting the right way, but they will be inclined to stick to the old habits, like Sir Bruce. Grummore and Pellinore – we must have them of course – I wonder where they are now? Grummore and Pellinore will be all right, because they were always kindly in themselves. But I don’t think Lot’s people will ever really be at home with it. That is why I say we must catch them young. We must breed up a new generation of chivalry for the future. That child Lancelot who came over with You-know-who, for instance: we must get hold of kids like him. They will be the real Table.’

‘Apropos of this Table,’ said Merlyn, ‘I don’t see why I should not tell you that King Leodegrance has one which would do very well. As you are going to marry his daughter, he might be persuaded to give you the table as a wedding present.’

‘Am I going to marry his daughter?’

‘Certainly. She is called Guenever.’

‘Look, Merlyn, I don’t like knowing about the future, and I am not sure whether I believe in it …’

‘There are some things,’ said the magician, ‘which I have to tell you, whether you believe them or not. The trouble is, I can’t help feeling there is one thing which I have forgotten to tell. Remind me to warn you about Guenever another time.’

‘It confuses everybody,’ said Arthur complainingly. ‘I get muddled up with half the questions I want to ask you myself. For instance, who was my …’

‘You will have to have special Feasts,’ interrupted Kay, at ‘Pentecost and so on, when all the knights come to dinner and say what they have done. It will make them want to fight in this new way of yours, if they are going to recite about it afterwards. And Merlyn could write their names in their places by magic, and their coat armour could be engraved over their sieges. It would be grand!’

This exciting idea made the King forget his question, and the two young men sat down immediately to draw their own blazons for the magician, so that there should be no mistake about the tinctures. While they were in the middle of the drawing Kay looked up, with his tongue between his teeth, and remarked:

‘By the way. You remember that argument we were having about aggression? Well, I have thought of a good reason for starting a war.’

Merlyn froze.

‘I would like to hear it.’

‘A good reason for starting a war is simply to have a good reason! For instance, there might be a king who had discovered a new way of life for human beings – you know, something which would be good for them. It might even be the only way of saving them from destruction. Well, if the human beings were too wicked or too stupid to accept his way, he might have to force it on them, in their own interests, by the sword.’

The magician clenched his fists, twisted his gown into screws, and began to shake all over.

‘Very interesting,’ he said in a trembling voice. ‘Very interesting. There was just such a man when I was young – an Austrian who invented a new way of life and convinced himself that he was the chap to make it work. He tried to impose his reformation by the sword, and plunged the civilized world into misery and chaos. But the thing which this fellow had overlooked, my friend, was that he had a predecessor in the reformation business, called Jesus Christ. Perhaps we may assume that Jesus knew as much as the Austrian did about saving people. But the odd thing is that Jesus did not turn the disciples into storm troopers, burn down the Temple of Jerusalem, and fix the blame on Pontius Pilate. On the contrary, he made it clear that the business of the philosophers was to make ideas available, and not to impose them on people.’

Kay looked pale but obstinate.

‘Arthur is fighting the present war,’ he said, ‘to impose his ideas on King Lot.’