The King Arthur Trilogy (33 page)

The forest and the mountains were his whole world, and the forest creatures were his friends. He knew where every vixen in his home valley had her lair and cubs, and could whistle so like a thrush or a blackbird that the birds would answer to his call. And he grew strong and hardy and brave and simple-hearted. One day he found an old battered spearhead lying where the winter rain had pulled down the earth between the roots of a tree. The shaft was rotten and crumbled at his touch, but when he bore it home and rubbed it up, the spearhead came up bright as new. He showed it to his mother, and a shadow came over her face as she looked, and over her heart as well. But she said nothing, and he honed the blade on a stone until it was keen enough to cut the wind, as the old man in the lost dream had once shown him how to do, and he found a straight ash sapling to make a new spear shaft, and he practised with it until
he could make it do whatever he willed. Then he turned hunter; but he never hunted for pleasure, only for food, as the animals of the wild hunted for food themselves.

But as the years went by and he grew towards manhood, Percival began to find something lacking in forest life. He needed other companionship than his mother’s and the wildlings’, he wanted other sounds than the birdsong and the wind in the trees and the voices of the hill-streams. He did not really know what it was that he wanted, but he wandered further and further afield in search of it.

And one spring day, wandering further from his home than ever he had been before, he came into a valley down which wound something that was like a deer-path, but many times broader and more deeply trodden than any deer-path that ever he had seen before.

And as he checked beside it, wondering, he heard sounds that were not any of the forest sounds he knew; and round the bend of the track, where it skirted a tangle of elder and wayfaring trees, came four shining figures mounted upon a dun horse and a roan, a grey and a bright chestnut. Percival knew what the horses were, for he had seen the wild Welsh ponies often enough, though these were far bigger and more splendid and high-stepping; and their riders seemed to be shaped like men – or at least, like himself – he had seen himself often enough in the pool under the old willow tree near
his home where the bitter dark willow-water was a fine medicine and the wild things came to drink when they were sick; but instead of brown skin and rough yellow hair, and the hides of animals, they each had some kind of hard shining skin – shining like the blade of his beloved spear – and the flash of gold and brilliant colours about them, so that it almost made him blink to look at them. And so with the clopping of their horses’ hooves on the beaten ground, and a jingling of chain-mail and harness, they came on towards him along the track.

‘God’s greeting to you,’ said the foremost rider when he drew level with Percival standing at gaze at the side of the track. And he reined in the chestnut, the others behind him, and sat looking down at the boy.

His head was bare, for his helmet hung at his saddlebow, and his mail coif was pushed back on to his shoulders. And Percival saw that his thick hair was grey, though he did not look to be old, and he had a strange crooked face that became all the stranger and more crooked when he smiled, and yet seemed to Percival very beautiful.

‘Nay, now,’ said the stranger, ‘pull your eyes back into your head, I pray you! Have you never seen our like before?’

Percival shook his head. ‘That have I not. And truth to tell, I do not know whether you be men from the world
of men or angels out of Heaven. My mother has told me about the angels in Heaven; and you are so shining-bright. She said that the angels are shining-bright.’

The others laughed, but not unkindly, and he of the crooked face said, ‘No angels we, alas! Though maybe there is something of the angels in all men, aye, and something of the Devil’s brood as well.’

‘Then if you are men –’ Percival began doubtfully. Memory was working in him; the half-lost memories of fine horses, and men who shone like this, that he had seen before. Suddenly the answer came to him. ‘Then you must be knights!’

‘We are knights indeed, and our fealty is to King Arthur, who made us knights of his Round Table.’

‘King Arthur?’ said the boy. ‘Round Table?’

‘Arthur Pendragon, the High King of all Britain,’ said the man with the crooked face, gravely now. ‘And the Round Table is the order of knighthood which he founded. We who are part of it are vowed always to fight for the right, to defend the weak from oppression, to keep our swords free from tarnish and at the service of Britain, to truly serve the Lord God.’

Percival was silent a long moment, looking up with shining eyes into the ugly face above him. Then he said, ‘I would be a knight.’

‘Maybe you will, one day,’ said the other, kindly.

‘What must I do to become a knight?’

‘Come to the King at Caerleon, and tell him that I sent you – I, Sir Lancelot of the Lake, who under him hold the Castle of Joyeux Gard beyond the mountains yonder. If you prove worthy, he will make you a knight, when the time comes.’

And bowing his head to Percival with as grave a courtesy as if he had been a duke, he rode on his way, and his companions after him.

And Percival remained standing on the edge of the track, hearing the beat of their horses’ hooves and the jingle of harness die away into the distance, with a strange mixture of feelings rising within him.

It was long after dark when he reached the charcoal-burner’s bothie that was home to him, and firelight shone from the doorway to meet him, and his mother was tending the supper cooking among the hot ash, fish that he had speared in the shallows of a hill pool. She looked up and saw his face, and a great stillness took her. But Percival had no time for stillness. The news that he carried was blazing within him.

‘Mother – I have met with men! At first I thought that they might be angels, for they shone as you have told me the angels shine, but they were knights. The one who seemed to be chief among them – Sir Lancelot of the Lake – told me that they were knights in the service of King Arthur of Britain, and he said that if I went to the
King and proved myself worthy, one day he might make me a knight, too.’

‘One day,’ said his mother. ‘There is time enough.’

‘No! Mother, you do not understand, I must go tomorrow – I must go to Arthur at Caerleon and show him that I am worthy to be a knight!’

‘You?’ she said desperately. ‘You, a boy out of the woods, clad in deerskins and carrying an old spear?’

And Percival squatted on to his heels beside her and put a big brown hand gently on her knee. ‘But that is not all I am, is it, Mother? I used to think that it was only a dream I remembered – shining men and great horses and my father with a golden circlet on his head – but when I saw them, I knew it was no dream.’

And his mother wept in her heart, for she knew that the time had come when she must lose him. But she put her own hand over his, and said, ‘No, it was no dream, your father was King Pellinore of Wales. But it is more than ten years since he was killed.’

‘Who killed him?’ said the boy, turned for a moment from his eagerness to be away after his knighthood and the great world by something that he saw in her face.

‘Sir Agravane and Sir Gaheris, in vengeance because he had first killed their father Lot, King of Orkney, though that was done in battle. And after, when your half-brother Lamorack would have avenged your father, they killed him also.’

‘When I am a knight,’ said Percival, ‘I will avenge my father and my half-brother on Agravane and Gaheris.’

But his mother cried out, ‘No! Oh, no! It was in part to keep you from the horror of a blood feud that I brought you here and bred you up far from the world of men! And now you would go to the very place where you will find them!’

‘Are they also at Caerleon?’ asked the boy after a moment.

‘They and their brothers Gawain and Gareth are knights of the Round Table.’

Then it seemed to Percival that the shining world of men, the world beyond the forest, was less simple than he had thought it would be. But even in the moment that he realised that, he remembered the strange crooked face of Sir Lancelot smiling down at him, speaking of the honour of knighthood, and knew that he wanted above all things in the world to be one of that company.

And he said, ‘Mother, as to the thing between our house and the house of Orkney, it must be as God wills. But I must go to Caerleon and to the High King. I know here –’ he put his free hand on his belly – ‘that it is the thing that I must do.’

So his mother sighed, and yielded. She had always known that the day would come, and the thing that he must do …

So early next morning that the birds were scarcely awake, Percival made ready to set out.

His mother took his face between her hands and kissed him for the last time, knowing that she would not see him again, and said, ‘Remember that your father was a true knight as well as a king, remember that I love you, and be worthy of us both. Have a care as to the friends you choose, and in whose company you travel, for you are simple-hearted, and so like to be over trusting. Let no woman ever have cause to cry out against you for your treatment of her. Pray to God daily as I have taught you, that He may be with you in all your ways, and I think that one day you will indeed be a knight, and the knight that you would wish to be.’

Percival promised, and returned his mother’s kiss, and picking up his spear from where it leaned against the doorpost, went his way.

He had not forgotten the things that she had told him last night; but the blackthorn was in flower, for it was Easter time, and as he went, the willow wren who is always the first to feel the coming day, began his faint silvery whisper-song, and then the thrush joined in, and the robin, and the linnets among the gorse in the open places. And the sun at his back sent his shadow streaming out long and eager before him; and Percival went on his way, travelling at the long loose-limbed wolf-lope that eats up distance; tossing up his spear to watch the early sunlight on the blade, and whistling joyously in answer to every bird in all the forests of Wales.

All day he walked; and at dusk he ate the food that his mother had given him, and lay down to sleep in a sheltered hollow between the roots of an ancient ash tree. And next morning before sun-up he was on his way again.

Well before noon on the fifth day he came to the gates of Caerleon. Never having seen such a thing before, he checked for a little, and watched the people coming and going through the archway under the great gatehouse; but nobody seemed to come to any harm, so after a while he walked through, and no harm came to him either. And the crowds in the narrow streets were only men and women like himself and his mother, though they wore garments of coloured cloth instead of skins, and some of them stared as he went by. And so he kept on walking up one street and down another, until he came to another gate arch, and again passed through. One of the men in the gateway asked his business, and he said that he had come to see the High King because he wanted to be a knight, and the men laughed, and one of them tapped his own forehead, but they let him through; and so he came at last to the entrance of the Great Hall.

Arthur and his knights were at their midday meal, and Sir Kay stood beside the King at the High Table, pouring wine into the golden cup in which, though Percival, watching from the shadows just within the doorway, could not know that, it was Arthur’s custom to pledge
his knights before it passed from hand to hand among those of the brotherhood present, until all had shared the same cup. It seemed to him that he had never seen anything so brilliant or beautiful as the crowded Hall with the spring sunlight slanting down through the high windows upon the tables where the knights and their ladies sat, with the King, his Queen beside him, under the gold-worked canopy at the high table. He gazed at the splendid distant figure, and thought how wonderful it must be to be one of his knights, and his gaze went up and down the tables in search of the strange face of Sir Lancelot.

But in the same instant, before the King had even taken the goblet from Sir Kay, there came a jingling tramp of mailed feet, and a man all in red-gold armour, glistening like a noon-day pheasant, came striding past Percival into the Hall and made for the high table, all men struck with astonishment to see him go by. ‘Hai! You wine-bibbing dogs!’ he shouted in a great voice. ‘If wine-bibbing be a part of knighthood, here stands a better knight than all of you!’ And he seized the cup from Sir Kay and drained it at one long gulping draught. Then, bellowing with laughter, he turned and strode out the way he had come, still gripping the precious cup. And they heard his horse’s hooves strike sparks from the cobbles outside as he galloped away.

Then the frozen stillness that had seemed to hold the
Hall in bonds snapped and Arthur sprang to his feet, and every one of his knights with him. ‘Now by my faith!’ cried Arthur. ‘Here is an insult that shall not go unpaid for! Who will bring me back my drinking cup?’

‘I will!’ cried a hundred voices. ‘Let
me
go!’ ‘Sir, I claim this quest!’

‘No!’ said Arthur. ‘For none of you, is this quest. The fellow is a churl, for all his golden armour, and not worthy to fall to a knight’s spear. Let one of the squires who seeks for knighthood ride after him. And if he returns with my goblet, and wearing the fellow’s game-cock armour, I will make him knight that very hour!’

Then Percival sprang forward from his shadowed corner. ‘My lord, King Arthur, send me after your cup! I was needing a suit of armour, and the golden gear that one was wearing will do me finely!’

They all looked at the speaker, seeing a tall, strong young man, brown as an acorn, thatched with shining yellow hair, but wearing only a deerskin and carrying a home-made spear. And Sir Kay, with his customary ill manners, let out a thin bark of laughter. ‘Here’s a fine champion for you, my Lord King! Pah! You stink of goats; get back to your herding, boy.’

‘No need for that,’ said the King to his Seneschal; and then to Percival, ‘Come, if we are to speak together, we cannot well do it with the whole length of the Hall between us!’