The Once and Future King

Chapter XIII

In the September moonlight several weeks later, King Pellinore was sitting on the cliff top with his fiancée, staring out to sea. Soon they were setting off for England, to be married. His arm was about her waist and his ear was pressed to the top of her head. They were unconscious of the world.

‘But Dornar is such a funny name,’ the King was saying. “I can’t think how you thought of it.’

‘But you thought of it, Pellinore.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes. Aglovale, Percivale, Lamorak and Dornar.’

‘They will be like cherubs,’ said the King fervently. ‘Like cherubim! What are cherubim?’

Behind them the ancient castle loomed against the stars. There was a faint noise of shouting from the top of the Round Tower, where Grummore and Palomides were arguing with the Questing Beast. She was still in love with her counterfeit, and still kept the castle in a state of siege – which had only been broken for a few hours on the day of Lot’s return with his defeated army. It had been a surprise for the English knights to learn that they had been at war with Orkney all the time, but it was too late to do anything about it, since the war was over. Now everybody was inside, the drawbridge was permanently up, and Glatisant lay in the moonlight at the foot of the tower, her head gleaming like silver. Pellinore had refused to have her killed.

Merlyn arrived one afternoon in the course of his northern walking tour, wearing a haversack and a pair of monstrous boots. He was sleek and snowy and shining, like an eel preparing for its nuptial journey to the Sargasso Sea, for the time of Nimue was at hand. But he was absent-minded, unable to remember the one thing which he ought to have told his pupil, and he listened to their difficulties with an impatient ear.

‘Excuse me,’ they shouted from the top of the wall, as the magician stood outside, ‘but it’s about the Questin’ Beast. The Queen of Lothian and Orkney is in a frightful temper about her.’

‘Are you sure it is about the Beast?’

‘Certain, my dear fellow. You see, she has us besieged.’

‘We dressed up,’ bawled Sir Palomides miserably. ‘as a sort of Beast ourselves, respected sir, and she saw us coming into the castle. There are signs, ahem, of ardent affection. Now this creature will not go away, because she believes her mate to be inside, and it is of a great unsafety to lower the drawbridge.’

‘You had better explain to her. Stand on the battlements and explain the mistake.’

‘Do you think she will understand?’

‘After all,’ the magician said, ‘she is a magic beast. It seems possible.’

But the explanation was a failure – she looked at them as if she thought they were lying.

‘I say, Merlyn! Don’t go yet.’

‘I have to go,’ he said absently. ‘I have to do something somewhere, but I can’t remember what it is. Meanwhile I shall have to carry on with my walking tour. I am to meet my master Bleise in North Humberland, so that he can write down the chronicles of the battle, and then we are to have a little wild-goose watching, and after that – well, I can’t remember.’

‘But, Merlyn, the Beast would not believe!’

‘Never mind.’ His voice was vague and troubled. ‘Can’t stop. Sorry. Apologize to Queen Morgause for me, will you, and say I was asking after her health?’

He began to revolve on his toes, preparatory to vanishing. Not much of his walking tour was done on foot.

‘Merlyn, Merlyn! Wait a bit!’

He reappeared for a moment, saying in a cross voice: ‘Well, what is it?’

‘The Beast will not believe us. What are we to do?’

He frowned.

‘Psycho-analyse her,’ he said eventually, beginning to spin.

‘But, Merlyn, wait! How are we to do this thing?’

‘The usual method.’

‘But what is it?’ they cried in despair.

He disappeared completely, his voice remaining in the air.

‘Just find out what her dreams are and so on. Explain the facts of life. But not too much of Freud.’

After that, as a background to the felicity of King Pellinore – who refused to bother with trivial problems – Grummore and Palomides had to do their best.

‘Well, you see,’ Sir Grummore was shouting, ‘when a hen lays an egg …’

Sir Palomides interrupted with an explanation about pollen and stamens.

Inside the castle, in the royal chamber of the Pele Tower, King Lot and his consort were laid in the double bed. The king was asleep, exhausted by the effort of writing his memoirs about the war. He had no particular reason for staying awake. Morgause was sleepless.

Tomorrow she was going to Carlion for Pellinore’s wedding. She was going, as she had explained to her husband, in a manner of a messenger, to plead for his pardon. She was taking the children with her.

Lot was angry about the journey and wished to forbid it, but she knew how to deal with that.

The Queen drew herself silently out of the bed, and went to her coffer. She had been told about Arthur since the army returned – about his strength, charm, innocence and generosity. His splendour had been obvious, even through the envy and suspicion of those he had conquered. Also there had been talk about a girl called Lionore, the daughter of the Earl of Sanam, with whom the young man was supposed to be having an affair. The Queen opened the coffer in the darkness and stood near the moonlit patch from the window, holding a strip of something in her hands. It was like a tape.

The strip was a less cruel piece of magic than the black cat had been, but more gruesome. It was called the Spancel – after the rope with which domestic animals were hobbled – and there were several of them in the secret coffers of the Old Ones. They were a piseog rather than a great magic. Morgause had got it from the body of a soldier which had been brought home by her husband, for burial in the Out Isles.

It was a tape of human skin, cut from the silhouette of the dead man. That is to say, the cut had been begun at the right shoulder, and the knife – going carefully in a double slit so as to make a tape – had gone down the outside of the right arm, round the outer edge of each finger as if along the seams of a glove, and up on the inside of the arm to the armpit. Then it had gone down the side of the body, down the leg and up it to the crutch, and so on until it had completed the circuit of the corpse’s outline, at the shoulder from which it had started. It made a long ribbon.

The way to use a Spancel was this. You had to find the man you loved while he was asleep. Then you had to throw it over his head without waking him, and tie it in a bow. If he woke while you were doing this, he would be dead within the year. If he did not wake until the operation was over, he would be bound to fall in love with you.

Queen Morgause stood in the moonlight, drawing the Spancel through her fingers.

The four children were awake too, but they were not in their bedroom. They had listened on the stairs during the royal dinner, so they knew that they were off to England with their mother.

They were in the tiny Church of the Men – a chapel as ancient as Christianity in the islands, though it was scarcely twenty feet square. It was built of unmortared stones, like the great wall of the keep, and the moonlight came through its single unglazed window to fall on the stone altar. The basin for holy water, on which the moonlight fell, was scooped out of the living stone, and it had a stone lid cut from a flake, to match it.

The Orkney children were kneeling in the home of their ancestors. They were praying that they might be true to their loving mother – that they might be worthy of the Cornwall feud which she had taught them – and that they might never forget the misty land of Lothian where their father reigned.

Outside the window the thin moon stood upright in a deep sky, like the paring of a finger-nail for magic, and against the sky the weather vane of the carrion crow with arrow in mouth pointed its arrow to the south.