The King Arthur Trilogy (50 page)

Percival lived just one year and three days after Sir Galahad, and then was laid beside his friend and his sister, in the church at the heart of the Sacred City of Sarras.

Then Sir Bors, being alone, put on his armour, and went down to the harbour and boarded a ship sailing
westward. And after many days at sea, he came to his own shores at last, and took horse for Camelot.

When he arrived there was great rejoicing, for it was full two years since Sir Lancelot had returned, and he had been the last, until now, of the Grail knights to come home; so that the King and his court had long ago given up Sir Bors as lost to them, along with Sir Galahad and Sir Percival.

He found his brother Lional there, and Sir Gawain with a scar on his head, and Sir Ector of the Marsh, and other old friends. But many more were lacking; and when they sat down to eat that evening, half the places at the Round Table were empty, and among those missing were many of the best who used to sit there. And of those who were there, many had wounds and scars, and most were changed in some way from what they had been before. And he thought that the high adventure of the Grail had been a costly one. He knew that the end had been victory, but he was too weary to see how.

When the evening meal was over, he sought out Sir Lancelot his kinsman. He had noticed that the older knight ate no meat and drank no wine at supper; and he thought that at the neck of his fine silken tunic he had glimpsed the rough edge of a hair shirt, and the redness of chafed skin beneath. He took him aside, up to the rampart above the castle garden, where it was possible to speak and be sure that no one else was by to
hear. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I bring you a message. Galahad got his soul’s desire, and died in my arms and Percival’s, for he had come into the heart of the mystery, where it is not possible for a mortal man to come, and yet remain mortal. And with his last breath he bade me greet you from him, and bring you his love.’

‘I wish I could have been with him,’ said Sir Lancelot, heavily.

‘So did he. So did we all. Often we spoke of you, and wished that you might be among us.’

‘There was a reason why that could not be,’ said Sir Lancelot, ‘a reason – a holding back … For it was not all mine to give … Not for me alone, to renounce, you see …’

His voice had grown absent and inward-turning, as though he spoke to himself within himself, and not to Bors at all. And Bors saw his eyes following something that moved below; and looking in the same direction, saw through the soft thickening light of the summer evening that the Queen had come into the garden.

Next day, when Bors was rested, the King sent for his clerks, who had taken down from each returning knight the story of his adventures on the Quest. And they took down Sir Bors’s story, which was the only one that went beyond Sir Lancelot’s and told of the last adventuring of Sir Galahad and Sir Percival and himself, and of the taking up to Heaven of the Grail.

And then the record was complete, and the King sent it for safe-keeping to the monks of the abbey library of Salisbury; that in future years the story of the Quest for the Holy Grail might not be lost to men coming after.

WHEN THE DARKNESS
crowds beyond the door, and the logs on the hearth burn clear red and fall in upon themselves, making caverns and ships and swords and dragons and strange faces in the heart of the fire, that is the time for story telling.

Come closer then, and listen.

The story of King Arthur is a long, long story, woven of many strands and many colours; and it falls naturally into three parts.

The first part tells how the father of Arthur, Utha Pendragon, with the help of the enchanter Merlin, won the fair Igraine to be his queen. And when their son Arthur was born, Merlin, knowing by his magic arts that Utha would die before he could count one grey hair in his beard, and that in the struggle for power among the nobles after his death his son would be trampled
underfoot, took the babe on the very night he was born, and carried him away and gave him to a certain quiet knight called Sir Ector, to be brought up along with his own son Kay until the time came for him to claim his destiny. But he did not tell even Sir Ector who his fosterling was.

And as Merlin had foreseen, Utha died when his son was but two years old, and the chiefs and nobles of the realm fell to struggling together for power; and the invading Saxons, whom Utha had driven out of Britain, seeing their chance, came storming in again.

And Merlin sorrowfully watched all this and waited, while in his foster-father’s castle Arthur grew from a child into a boy and from a boy into a young man. And when Arthur was turned fifteen, Merlin went to the Archbishop Dubricius in London, and told him certain things; and so the Archbishop called a great joust, and all the knights and nobles of the realm came flocking to take part. And when they were gathered, suddenly there appeared in their midst, in the garth of the great abbey, a stone with an anvil set upon it, and driven into the anvil and through it into the stone was a splendid sword. And about the stone was written in letters of gold:

‘Who so pulleth out this sword from this stone and anvil is the true-born King of all Britain.’

And when the knights and nobles had tried and failed to pull out the sword, Arthur, who was not yet even a knight, but had come to London as a squire to his foster-brother Sir Kay, drew out the sword as easily as from a well-oiled sheath.

Then Merlin told the long-kept secret of his birth, and it was known that he was indeed the son of Utha Pendragon and the rightful High King after him.

So Arthur was crowned by the Archbishop. And after, with Merlin always beside him, he gathered his war-host and in many great battles he drove back the Saxons and the Picts and the men from across the Irish Sea. And when eleven kings from the outlands and the mountain places along the fringes of Britain joined spears and rose against him, he quelled them also, and drove them back into their own mountains. And he made his capital at Camelot, and there he began to gather his court.

Now you must know that Igraine, his mother, had borne three daughters to her first husband before ever she became Utha’s queen. And the eldest, Elaine, was married to King Nantres of Garlot, and the second, Margawse, was married to King Lot of Orkney, and the youngest, Morgan La Fay, was married to King Uriens of Gore. And the husbands of all of them were among the eleven outland kings.

Morgan La Fay was a mistress of black magic, and she sought always to do harm to Arthur her half-brother.
But it was Margawse who did him the sorest harm in the end. And this was the way of it: she was sent by King Lot, her lord, no one knowing who she was, to play the spy in the High King’s court; and she was beautiful, and nearly twice as old as he was, and skilled in the sweet dark ways of temptation; and so she made him love her for one night. Merlin could have warned him, but at that one unlucky time, when he was needed most, Merlin was away about affairs of his own. So the thing happened. And nine months later, back in her own far northern home, Queen Margawse bore a son, whose father was not Lot of Orkney, but her half-brother, Arthur of Britain. And she sent word to the young High King, telling him who she was, and that she had borne their child and named him Mordred, and that one day she would send him to his father’s court.

Then Arthur knew that he had done one of the forbidden things, and that because of it, in one way or another, he was doomed. But meanwhile he had a kingdom that must be ruled and a life that must be lived as valiantly and justly and truly and joyfully as might be; and this he set himself to do.

It was not long after that the sword which he had drawn from the stone, and which had served him well in all his fighting since, broke in his hand. And from the Lady of the Lake, he received another sword: the great sword Excalibur, faery-forged for a hero and a
High King, which served him all the rest of his days. And a while after that, he saw and loved Guenever, the daughter of Leodegraunce the King of Camelaird, and took her for his Queen.

Guenever brought with her for her dowry a mighty round table and a hundred of her father’s best and bravest knights to swell the strength of the High King’s own following. And the High King’s following was already strong, for champions were gathering to him from the farthest ends of his realm and even from beyond the seas. And so the brotherhood of the Round Table came into being; that great company of knights oath-bound to fight always for the Right; to protect the weak from the tyrants; strong to uphold the ways of justice and gentleness throughout the land.

Merlin saw only the beginning of that gathering, for his own fate was upon him, calling him down to his long enchanted sleep beneath a magic hawthorn tree.

So – the knights gathered, Sir Bors and Sir Lional and Sir Bedivere; from Orkney came Sir Gawain, the High King’s nephew (though he was but a few years younger than Arthur himself) and later his brothers Gaheris and Agravane and Gareth, for all the sons of Margawse left her as soon as they could draw sword – all except Mordred. And from the kingdom of Benwick across the Narrow Seas, came Sir Lancelot of the Lake, the greatest of all the brotherhood.

Each of them brought their own story, and men have told and retold them ever since; minstrels singing to the harp in a prince’s hall; monks in chilly cloisters writing upon sheets of vellum for the making of books; a Lancastrian knight called Sir Thomas Malory weaving tales and songs together in a narrow prison cell … Tales of Sir Lancelot and Elaine the Lily, of Sir Lancelot and the Queen; tales of Geraint and Enid, and Gareth and Linnet, and Gawain and the Green Knight; the long and tragic lament for Tristan and Iseult, the short and shining account of the coming of Percival. These and many and many more together make up the first part of the great story of King Arthur, which I have told in an earlier book,
The Sword and the Circle
.

Only a year after the coming of Percival, there follows the story of the Holy Grail, the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper, and which afterwards received His blood; and how the knights of the Round Table set out in quest of the Mystery, for their souls’ sake and the sake of the kingdom. And that retelling I have called
The Light Beyond the Forest
.

It is a strange story, of a forest that is not like other forests, and a maimed king and magic ships and a bleeding lance, and always the Grail moving ahead like a beckoning light among the trees.

One by one the knights died in their questing, or lost heart and turned homeward, until only four were left; Sir
Percival and Sir Bors, Sir Lancelot and Sir Galahad, his son. And of these four it was given only to Sir Galahad to fully achieve the quest, and in achieving it to die, for mortal man cannot come to the heart of the Mystery and yet live on in the world of men. And Sir Bors and Sir Percival, coming close behind him, achieved something of the quest, and lived on, Sir Percival for a year before he followed Sir Galahad, Sir Bors to return home. And Sir Lancelot, struggling valiantly and desperately behind them, failed the quest because of his love for Guenever the Queen, which he could not put altogether away from him, and so was allowed only a distant glimpse of the glory of the Grail and its meaning before he was turned back.

And so the great days, the shining days of the Round Table were over; and the long, many-coloured, many-stranded story of King Arthur Pendragon turns to its third part; the last and the darkest. The part which in this book I have called
The Road to Camlann
.

THE FLOWERING TIME
that had come to Arthur’s Britain with the Grail Quest was over and past, though for a while a golden quietness lingered like the little summer that comes sometimes when the days are growing shorter and the autumn is already well begun.

The knights had returned to sit at their old places at the Round Table – those of them who returned at all. But many of them did not come back, and among them some of the bravest and the best. And a new generation of young knights came in to take their places: men who had never known the early days, the shining days of high adventure, of young champions gathering about a young High King, with the battle to save Britain and champion the Right still in front of them.