The King Arthur Trilogy (57 page)

‘Then at least leave the sentence a while before it is carried out.’

‘Until the seventh morning after it was passed,’ said the King. ‘And not a morning longer. That is for the Queen; and for Lancelot, whenever he be captured.’

But the truth was that he dared wait no longer, lest he weaken, and so bring to nothing the rule of law that he had fought all his life to establish in Britain.

‘Then God grant that I be not by to see it,’ said Sir Gawain.

‘Why so?’ said the King. ‘What cause have you now to love Sir Lancelot or the Queen? For her sake he slew your brother Agravane.’

‘Often enough I warned my brother Agravane,’ said Sir Gawain, standing hunched and stubborn as an ox in the furrow. ‘For well I knew what his ways would bring him to in the end. Moreover, they took Sir Lancelot fourteen against one, which is no fair fight. I will take up no blood feud for Agravane.’

But the King let the sentence stand.

And the days went by until it was the eve of the Queen’s appointed death-day.

And then the King sent for Gawain to the Great
Chamber high above the keep, where he was pacing up and down like a caged beast, and bade him make ready his finest armour, to take command next day of the escort that should bring Queen Guenever to the fire. ‘For after Sir Lancelot, you are the Captain of the Round Table, and the thing is for you to do,’ said he.

‘Yet I will not do it, my uncle and my Lord King,’ said Sir Gawain, ‘for I will not stand to see her die, nor will I have it ever said that I was with you in your council for her death.’

And looking at him, the King knew that Sir Gawain would die himself before he changed from that. So he sent for Gaheris and Gareth and gave them the same commands. ‘Do you both take command of the escort, and between you see the Queen securely guarded lest Sir Lancelot come to attempt her rescue.’ For an innermost voice within him said, ‘Surely Lancelot will save her, even now,’ while another said, ‘Yet that must not be, for if he rescue her and carry her away, and live, then indeed there will be civil war in Britain!’ And between the two, it seemed to him that he was being torn asunder.

The two younger knights looked at him in horror; and Gareth said, ‘Sir Lancelot knighted me!’

And Gaheris said, ‘He saved me from Sir Tarquine, and always he has stood as a friend to me!’

‘Nevertheless, you shall obey the orders of your king,’ said Arthur, and his voice grated in his throat.

They stood rigid before him, and Gareth was grey-white, as though he himself were being ordered to the stake. But they had sworn fealty to the High King, and the habit of obedience and discipline was stronger in them than ever it had been in Gawain. And at last Gareth said, ‘If that is your last word, then we must obey your orders, my liege lord, but we will not take up arms against Sir Lancelot, but go forth unarmed and in robes of mourning that the Queen may know to the end our love towards her.’

‘I am with my brother in this,’ said Sir Gaheris.

‘In the name of God then, make you ready, and go forth in whatever guise you choose,’ cried the King.

And Sir Gawain, with the tears trickling into his red beard, said, ‘Grief upon me, that I was born to see this day!’ And he turned and stumbled away to his chamber, his two brothers following.

And the King returned to his caged pacing up and down.

Next morning the Queen was led forth to the open space beyond the castle walls, where the stake waited for her with brushwood piled around its foot. And her queenly garments were stripped from her so that she stood up only in her white shift. And a priest was brought to confess her that she might be shriven of her sins. And then she was led towards the stake, and lifted up upon
the pyre, and bound there above the heads of the people. And all the crowd who had gathered there in sorrow or in triumph fell back, so that only her escort remained near at hand; and the two figures in their darkly hooded cloaks of Sir Gaheris and Sir Gareth.

And the King stood watching from the high window in the keep, as rigid as though he too were bound to a stake. And he never saw the blink of light three times repeated from the tower of the old church opposite, in the instant that the Queen was brought out from the castle; for all his gaze was fixed upon the open space below.

A great quiet had fallen over the crowd, and the executioner’s torch was already lit. And the King was listening for something, listening with an aching intensity that seemed to hold his very heart in check. And then he heard it – the drum of horses’ hooves, far in the distance but sweeping nearer at full gallop.

Riding day and night, with many changes of horse along the way, Sir Lancelot was back from Joyous Gard, with his own fighting men behind him. Everybody knew that it was Sir Lancelot; the youngest weeping page and the executioner pausing, torch in hand, the High King in his window, and the Queen bound to her stake. They knew, even before the bright arrowhead of horsemen burst out from the narrow ways between the houses into the crowded square. He and his men had lain up
in the woods overnight, while one of their number in an all-concealing cloak had entered the town and kept watch in the church tower, to signal with the sunlight on his shield the moment when the Queen was brought out clear of the castle walls.

The mailed arrowhead of horsemen drove into the crowd and through it, the early sunlight jinking on their weapons and harness; and the shouts and cries and weapon-clash and the trampling of horses’ hooves came up in a surf-roar of sound to the King in his high window; and below him the fight swirled about the pyre, small with distance but terrible. The executioner’s torch had gone down, to be trampled out beneath the horses’ hooves. He saw Lancelot’s blade rise and fall in desperate, slashing strokes, as he forced his tall destrier through to the pyre, and again the flash of Joyeux’s blade, this time slashing through the cords that bound Guenever to the stake. Far below, he saw the Queen hold out her white arms to her love, as Sir Lancelot reached from the saddle to fling a dark cloak around her. How like Lancelot, he thought, to remember that she would be stripped to her shift, and bring a woman’s cloak with him. Next instant he had caught her from her footing among the piled brushwood and dragged her across his saddlebow. Then, holding her close, swung his horse round and, with his own men closing all about him, was fighting his way out.

And then it was over, and the hoof-beats drumming away into the distance, no man following. And in the square below the castle walls the crowd were in a turmoil, and round the unlit pyre men lay dead on the stained and trampled ground. And still the High King stood as though captive in his window, torn between despair for what he knew must now come to Britain, even as Merlin had foretold, and a sick relief that Lancelot had saved the Queen.

A strange blackness came between him and the scene down in the square, between him and all the world, so that for a while he saw nothing more. But when the world came back to him again, he was still standing in the window, but holding to the deep stone transom, his forehead pressed down against his hand. And hurrying footsteps were blundering up the stair and into the chamber. He straightened himself from the window and turned, and found Sir Gawain standing before him, staring at him with blazing eyes in a terrible grey face.

Gawain said, choking on the words, ‘He has killed Gareth and Gaheris!’

‘Who?’ said Arthur. His head felt numb and would not think.

‘Sir Lancelot! He has killed Gareth and Gaheris! They are lying down there by the scaffold with their heads split open.’

The King shook his own head. He could not believe it; it must be that there was some mistake. ‘Not Gareth. Not Gaheris either. He loved Gareth best of all the Round Table after you – and me.’

‘They are lying down there with their heads split open,’ Gawain repeated; and it was as though he must fight to get enough breath to speak the words. ‘Lancelot killed them unarmed.’

‘Unarmed,’ the King said quickly, ‘and in those grey-hooded cloaks. He would have had no means of knowing them.’

‘Gareth was by half a head the tallest of your knights!’ said Sir Gawain. ‘By his height alone, no man could have failed to know him … I would not take up the blood feud for Agravane, but I take it up now for Gaheris and for Gareth. And I will not be laying it down again so long as the life is in me – or in Sir Lancelot of the Lake!’

And he flung himself down on a bench, his head in his arms, and wept gaspingly and agonisingly for the death of his brothers; and for the old love between himself and Lancelot that was now turned to hate.

And standing unnoticed in a corner, gentling his arm in its sling, Sir Mordred, who had come up behind Sir Gawain, smiled like one well content with the skilled work of his hands.

SIR LANCELOT CARRIED
the Queen away through the mountains to his own castle of Joyous Gard. And there he lodged her with all honour, as befitted Arthur’s Queen.

And at Joyous Gard there gathered to him Sir Ector of the Marsh, his half-brother, and his kinsmen, Sir Bors and Sir Lional, and many more, upward half of the Round Table, both for his sake and the Queen’s.

And King Arthur would fain have let all things rest a while, that hot blood might have space to cool, and time might sort out the good from the evil. But those knights who were still of his following, Sir Gawain foremost among them, were at him night and day that Sir Lancelot was his enemy and had carried off his Queen, and he should make war upon him as he would upon any other foe within his borders. And so at last the
High King sent out the summons to all his warhost; and marched upon Joyous Gard.

Sir Lancelot had word of their coming, and knew that it was Sir Gawain more than the King who was against him; for Sir Bors and the rest had told him of how he had slain Sir Gaheris and Sir Gareth, and warned him of what must follow. That had made bitter hearing, for he would have hacked off his own right hand before he knowingly did harm to either of them. But the
mêlée
about the stake had been too fierce to leave time for singling out two unarmed men among the surging press of knights and men-at-arms, nor for choosing where his sword-strokes landed, nor for noticing that one dark-hooded figure was taller than all the rest about the stake. He had had no time or thought for anything but cutting his way through to save the Queen. But truly, after Gawain and the King, he loved Gareth best of all the Round Table brotherhood; and his heart seemed bleeding within him for their deaths at his hand. Now there was blood feud between him and Sir Gawain, and grief for that tore at him also. But there was no time for bewailing what had come to pass, with the King’s war-host marching north against him.

So he gathered his fighting men and called in all the folk of the valley and the village beyond the gates, and their cattle with them, and penned all safe within the castle walls, and made ready in all ways that were
possible. And the King came and pitched his warcamp below the walls of Joyous Gard, so that all the valley round about was fluttering with the pennants of his nobles and their knights. And he laid siege to Joyous Gard.

For fifteen weeks the siege dragged on, while the summer passed, and the fields along the valley floor were white with barley and golden with wheat, and the great ox-wagons should have been bringing in the sheaves that the horses of the King’s war-host trampled down. But the castle was strong and well garrisoned and still well-supplied, and at the end of that time it was no nearer to falling than it had been on the first day.

And then on a day towards the edge of autumn, Sir Lancelot spoke from the ramparts with the King and Sir Gawain sitting their great warhorses below him in the open stretch between the walls and the camp.

‘My lords both,’ said Sir Lancelot, ‘you will gain no honour in this siege. You have sat here long and long, but you will not take Joyous Gard.’

‘And you will gain no honour skulking behind castle walls,’ flung back the King. ‘Do you come out and meet me in single combat, that we may end this matter. I swear that no other shall be with me.’

This was the thing of all others that Sir Lancelot had dreaded, and the chief reason why he had held back so long. ‘God forbid,’ he said, ‘that I should encounter with
the most noble king in Christendom, and he my liege lord from whose hands I received my knighthood.’

‘Out upon your fair language!’ cried the King, beside himself with grief that he could only bear by turning it into anger. ‘Know this, and believe it, that I am your enemy and always shall be; for you have slain my knights and borne away my Queen, and broken asunder the brotherhood of the Round Table and the Kingdom of Logres.’

‘The slaying of your knights, alas, I cannot deny,’ returned Sir Lancelot, ‘and among them those that were dear friends to me, for which the grief will be upon me all my days. But it was done in the saving of the life of your Queen, whom you condemned to the fire. From that fire it was, and not from you, that I bore the Queen away, as I have saved her from other dangers before now, and received thanks from both of you.’ And he leaned further out over the parapet and demanded, ‘My Lord King, look in your heart – would you indeed have had her burn?’