The Once and Future King

Chapter XIII

Anguish of Ireland had once dreamed of a wind which blew down all their castles and towns – and this one was conspiring to do it. It was blowing round Benwick Castle on all the organ stops. The noises it made sounded like inchoate masses of silk being pulled through trees, as we pull hair through a comb – like heaps of sand pouring on fine sand from a scoop – like gigantic linens being torn – like drums in distant battle – like an endless snake switching through the world’s undergrowth of trees and houses – like old men sighing, and women howling and wolves running. It whistled, hummed, throbbed, boomed in the chimneys. Above all, it sounded like a live creature: some monstrous, elemental being, wailing its damnation. It was Dante’s wind, bearing lost lovers and cranes: sabbathless Satan, toiling and turmoiling.

In the western ocean it harried the sea flat, lifting water bodily out of water and carrying it as spume. On dry land it made the trees lean down before it. The gnarled thorn trees, which had grown in double trunks, groaned one trunk against the other with plaintive screams. In the whipping and snapping branches of the trees, the birds rode it out head to wind, their bodies horizontal, their neat claws turned to anchors. The peregrines in the cliffs sat stoically, their mutton-chop whiskers made streaky by the rain and the wet feathers standing upright on their heads. The wild geese beating out to their night’s rest in the twilight scarcely won a yard a minute against the streaming air, their tumultuary cries blown backward from them, so that they had to be past before you heard them, although they were only a few feet up. The mallard and widgeon, coming in high with the gale behind, were gone before they had arrived.

Under the doors of the castle the piercing blasts tortured the flapping rushes of the floors. They boo’ed in the tubes of the corkscrew stairs, rattled the wooden shutters, whined shrilly through the shot-windows, stirred the cold tapestries in frigid undulations, searched for backbones. The stone towers thrilled under them, trembling bodily like the bass string of musical instruments. The slates flew off and shattered themselves with desultory crashes.

Bors and Bleoberis were crouching over a bright fire, to which the bitter wind seemed to have given the property of throwing out light without heat. Even the fire seemed frozen, like a painted one. Their minds were baffled by the plague of air.

‘But why did they go so quickly?’ asked Bors complainingly. ‘I never knew a siege to be raised like that before. They raised it overnight. They went as if they had been blown away.’

‘They must have had bad news. Something must have gone wrong in England.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘If they had decided to forgive Lancelot, they would have sent a message.’

‘It does seem strange, sailing away at a moment’s notice, without saying anything.’

‘Do you think there can have been a revolt in Cornwall, or in Wales, or in Ireland?’

‘There are always the Old Ones,’ agreed Bleoberis numbly.

‘I don’t think it could be a revolt. I think the King was taken ill, and had to be carried home quickly. Or Gawaine might have been taken ill. That blow which Lancelot gave him the second time, perhaps it perched his brain-pan?’

‘Perhaps.’

Bors banged the fire.

‘To go off like that, and never say a word!’

‘Why doesn’t Lancelot do something?’

‘What can he do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘The King has banished him.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then there is nothing to do.’

‘All the same,’ said Bleoberis, ‘I wish he would do something.’

A door opened with a clatter at the bottom of the turret stairs. The tapestries swirled out, the rushes stood on end, the fire gushed smoke, and Lancelot’s voice, embedded in the wind, shouted: ‘Bors! Bleoberis! Demaris!’

‘Here.’

‘Where?’

‘Up here.’

As the distant door closed, silence returned to the room. The rushes lay down again, and Lancelot’s feet sounded clearly on the stone steps, where before it had been difficult to hear his shout. He came in hastily, carrying a letter.

‘Bors. Bleoberis. I have been looking for you.’

They had stood up.

‘A letter has come from England. The messengers were blown ashore, five miles up the coast. We shall have to go at once.’

‘To England?’

‘Yes, yes. To England, of course. I have told Lionel to act as transport officer, and I want you, Bors, to look after fodder. We shall have to wait until the gale blows itself out.’

‘Why are we going?’ asked Bors.

‘You should tell us the news …’

‘News?’ he said vaguely. ‘There is no time for that. I will tell you in the boat. Here, read the letter.’

He handed it to Bors, and was gone before they could reply.

‘Well!’

‘Read what it says.’

‘I don’t even know who it is from.’

‘Perhaps it will say in the letter.’

Lancelot reappeared before they had taken their researches further than the date.

‘Bleoberis,’ he said, ‘I forgot. I want you to look after the horses. Here, give me the writing. If you two start spelling it out, you will be reading all night,’

‘What does it say?’

‘Most of the news came by the messenger. It seems that Mordred has revolted against Arthur, proclaimed himself the Leader of England, and proposed to Guenever.’

‘But she is married already,’ protested Bleoberis.

‘That was why the siege was broken up. Then, it appears, Mordred raised an army in Kent to oppose the King’s landing. He had given it out that Arthur was dead. He is besieging the Queen in the Tower of London, and using cannon.’

‘Cannon!’

‘He met Arthur at Dover and fought a battle to prevent the landing. It was a bad engagement, half on sea and half on land, but the King won. He won to land.’

‘Who wrote the letter?’

Lancelot suddenly sat down.

‘It is from Gawaine, from poor Gawaine! He is dead.’

‘Dead!’

‘How can he write …’ began Bleoberis.

‘It is a dreadful letter. Gawaine was a good man. All you people who forced me to fight him, you didn’t see what a heart he had inside.’

‘Read it,’ suggested Bors impatiently.

‘It seems that a cut which I gave him on the head was a dangerous one. He never ought to have travelled. But he was lonely and miserable and he had been betrayed. His last brother had turned traitor. He insisted on going back to help the King – and, in the landing battle, he tried to strike his blow. Unfortunately he was clubbed on the old wound, and died of it a few hours later.’

‘I don’t see why you should be disturbed.’

‘Listen to the letter.’

Lancelot carried it to the window and fell silent, examining the writing. There was something touching about it, the hand being so unlike its author. Gawaine had hardly been the sort of person you thought of as a writer. Indeed it would have seemed more natural if he had been illiterate, like most of the others. Yet here, instead of the spiky Gothic then in use, was the lovely old Gaelic minuscule, as neat and round and small as when he had learned it from some ancient saint in dim Dunlothian. He had written so unfrequently since, that the art had retained its beauty. It was an old-maid’s hand, or an old-fashioned boy’s, sitting with his feet hooked round the legs of a stool and his tongue out, writing carefully. He had carried this innocent precision, these dainty demoded cusps, through misery and passion to old age. It was as if a bright boy had stepped out of the black armour: a small boy with a drop on the end of his nose, his feet bare with blue toes, a root of tangle in the thin bundle of carrots which were his fingers.

‘Unto Sir Lancelot, flower of all noble knights that ever I heard of or saw by my days: I, Sir Gawaine, King Lot’s son of Orkney, sister’s son unto the noble King Arthur, send thee greetings.

‘And I will that all the world wit that I, Sir Gawaine, Knight of the Round Table, sought my death at thy hands and not through thy deserving, but it was mine own seeking. Wherefore I beseech thee, Sir Lancelot, to return again unto this realm and see my tomb, and pray some prayer more or less for my soul.

‘And this same day that I wrote this cedle, I was hurt to the death in the same wound which I had on thy hand, Sir Lancelot – for of a more nobler man might I not be slain.

‘Also, Sir Lancelot, for all the love that ever was betwixt us …’

Lancelot stopped reading and threw the letter on the table.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘I can’t go on. He urges me to come with speed, to help the King against his brother: his last relation. Gawaine loved his family, Bors, and in the end he was left with none. Yet he wrote to forgive me. He even said that it was his own fault. God knows, he was a right good brother.’

‘What are we to do about the King?’

‘We must get to England as quickly as we can. Mordred has retreated to Canterbury, where he offers a fresh battle. It may be over by now. This news has been delayed by storm. Everything depends on speed.’

Bleoberis said: ‘I will go and look to the horses. When do we sail?’

‘Tomorrow. Tonight. Now. When the wind drops. Be quick with them.’

‘Good.’

‘And you, Bors, the fodder.’

‘Yes.’

Lancelot followed Bleoberis to the stairs, but turned in the doorway.

‘The Queen is besieged,’ he said. ‘We must get her out.’

‘Yes.’

Bors, left alone with the wind, picked up the letter with curiosity. He tilted it in the failing light, admiring the zed-like g, the curly b, and the curved t, like the blade of a plough. Each tiny line was the furrow it threw up, sweet as the new earth. But the furrow wandered towards the end. He turned it about, observing the brown signature. He spelled out the conclusion – making speaking movements with his mouth, while the rushes tapped and the smoke puffed and the wind howled.

‘And at this date my letter was written, but two hours and a half afore my death, written with mine own hand, and so subscribed with part of my heart’s blood.

Gawaine of Orkney’

He spelled the name out twice, and tapped his teeth. Gawaine. ‘I suppose,’ he said out loud, doubtfully, ‘they would have pronounced it Cuchullain in the North. You can’t tell with ancient languages.’

Then he put down the letter, went over to the dreary window, and began humming a tune called Brume, brume on hil, whose words have been lost to us in the wave of time. Perhaps they were like the modern ones, which say that

                 Still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland,

                 And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.