The Once and Future King (45 page)

The spring came slowly, the new menage settled down, and Elaine arranged a tournament for her chevalier. There was to be a prize of a fair maid and a jerfalcon.

Five hundred knights came from all parts of the kingdom to compete in the tournament – but the Chevalier Mal Fet knocked down anybody who would stand up to him, with a kind of absent—minded ferocity, and the thing was a failure. The knights went away puzzled and frightened. Not a single person had been killed – he spared everybody indifferently as soon as he had knocked them down – and, by the Chevalier at any rate, not a single word had been spoken. The defeated knights, jogging home with their bruises, missed the conviviality which usually happened on tournament evenings, wondered
who the taciturn champion could be, and talked superstitiously among themselves. Elaine, smiling bravely until the last of them had gone, went up to her room and cried. Then she dried her eyes and set out to find her lord. He had vanished as soon as the fighting was over, for he had got into the habit of going away by himself at sunset every evening – she did not know where.

She found him on the battlements, in a blaze of gold. Their shadows, and the shadow of the tower on which they stood, and all the spectres of the burning trees, stretched over the parkland in broad strips of indigo. He was looking towards Camelot with desperate eyes. His new shield, with the blazon of his incognito, was propped in front of him. The cognizance was of a silver woman on a sable field, with a knight kneeling at her feet.

In her simplicity, Elaine had been delighted by the compliment on the shield. She had never been clever. Now she realized, for the first time, that the silver woman was crowned. She stood helplessly, wondering what she could do – but there was nothing she could do. Her weapons were blunt ones, of soft metal. She could only use patience and hope and self—restraint, poor tools when matched against the heart—felt mania of love to which the ancient race was martyred.

One morning they were sitting on a green bank at the edge of the lake. Elaine was doing embroidery, while Lancelot watched his son. Galahad, a priggish, mute little boy, was playing some private game with his dolls – to which he remained attached long after most boys would have taken to soldiers. Lancelot had carved two knights in armour for him out of wood. They were mounted on wheeled horses, from which they were detachable, and they held their spears in fewter. By pulling the horses towards each other, with strings tied to the platform on which they stood, the knights could be made to tilt. They could be made to knock each other out of the saddle. Galahad did not care for them at all, but played with a rag doll which he called the Holy Holy.

‘Gwyneth will ruin that sparrow hawk,’ remarked Lancelot.

They could see one of the castle gentlewomen coming towards them at a great pace, with the sparrow hawk on her fist. Her haste had excited the hawk, which was bating continuously – but Gwyneth paid no attention to it, beyond giving it an occasional angry shake.

‘What is the matter, Gwyneth?’

‘Oh, my lady, there are two knights waiting beyond the water, and they say they have come to tilt with the Chevalier.’

‘Tell them to go away,’ said Lancelot. ‘Say I am not at home.’

‘But, sir, the porter has told them the way to the boat, and they are coming over one at a time. They say they won’t both come, but the second will come if you beat the first. He is in the boat already.’

He got up and dusted his knees.

‘Tell him to wait in the tilt yard,’ he said. ‘I will be twenty minutes.’

The tilt yard was a long, sanded passage between the walls, with a tower at each end. It had galleries looking down on it from the walls, like a racquets court, and was open to the sky. Elaine and the domestics sat in these galleries to watch, and the two knights fought beneath them for a long time. The tilting was even – each of them had a fall – and the sword—play lasted for two hours. At the end of this time, the strange knight cried: ‘Stop!’

Lancelot stopped at once, as if he were a farm labourer who had been given permission to knock off for his dinner. He stuck his sword in the ground, as if it were a pitchfork, and stood patiently. He had, indeed, only been working with the quiet patience of a farm hand. He had not been trying to hurt his opponent.

‘Who are you?’ asked the stranger. ‘Please tell me your name? I have never met a man like you.’

Lancelot suddenly lifted both gauntlets to his helm, as if he were trying to bury in them the face which was already hidden, and said miserably: ‘I am Sir Lancelot Dulac.’

‘What!’

‘I am Lancelot, Degalis.’

Degalis threw his sword against the stone wall with a clang, and began running back towards the tower by the moat. His iron feet threw echoes down the yard. He unlaced and tossed away his helm as he ran. When he had reached the portcullis of the gatehouse, he put his hands to his mouth and shouted with all his might:

‘Ector! Ector! It
is
Lancelot! Come over!’

Immediately he was running back towards his friend.

‘Lancelot! My dear, dear fellow! I was sure it was you. I was sure it was you!’

He began fumbling with the laces, trying to get the helm off with clumsy fingers. He snatched off his own gauntlets and hurled them, too, with a clash against the wall. He could hardly wait to see Sir Lancelot’s face. Lancelot stood still, like a tired child being undressed.

‘But what have you been doing? Why are you here? It was feared that you were dead.’

The helm came off, and went to join the rest of the discards.

‘Lancelot!’

‘Did you say that Ector was with you?’

‘Yes, it is your brother Ector. We have been looking for you for two years. Oh, Lancelot, I am glad to see you!’

‘You must come in,’ he said, ‘and refresh yourselves.’

‘But what have you been doing all this time? Where have you been hidden? The Queen sent out three knights to search for you at the beginning. In the end there were twenty—three of us. It must have cost her twenty thousand pounds.’

‘I have been here and there.’

‘Even the Orkney faction helped. Sir Gawaine is one of the searchers.’

By this time Sir Ector had arrived in the boat – Sir Ector Demaris, not King Arthur’s guardian – and the portcullis had been raised for him. He ran for the Chevalier, as if he were to tackle him at football.

‘Brother!’

Elaine had come down from her gallery and was waiting at
the end of the tilt yard. She was now to welcome, as she knew well, the people who were to break her heart. She did not interfere with their greetings, but watched them like a child who had been left out of a game. She stood still, gathering her forces. All her powers, all the frontier guards of her spirit, were being called in and concentrated at the citadel of her heart.

‘This is Elaine.’

They turned to her and began to bow.

‘You are welcome to Bliant Castle.’

‘I can’t leave Elaine,’ he said.

Ector Demaris said: ‘Why not? You don’t love her. You are under no obligation to her. You are only making yourselves miserable by staying together.’

‘I am under an obligation to her. I can’t explain it, but I am.’

‘The Queen,’ said Degalis, ‘is desperate. She has spent a fortune looking for you.’

‘I can’t help that.’

‘It is no good sulking,’ said Ector. ‘It seems to me that you are sulking. If the Queen is sorry for what she has done, whatever it was, you ought to behave generously and forgive her.’

‘I have nothing to forgive the Queen.’

‘That is just what I say. You ought to go back to court and follow your career. For one thing, you owe it to Arthur: don’t forget that you are one of his sworn knights. He has been needing you badly.’

‘Needing me?’

‘There is the usual trouble with the Orkneys.’

‘What have the Orkneys been doing? Oh, Degalis, you don’t know how it does my heart good to hear the old names. Tell me all the gossip. Has Kay been making a fool of himself lately? Is Dinadan still laughing? What is the news about Tristram and King Mark?’

‘If you are so keen about the news, you ought to come back to court.’

‘I have told you I can’t.

‘Lancelot, you are not looking at this realistically. Do you seriously think you can stay here incognito with this wench. and still be yourself? Do you think you can beat five hundred knights in a tournament without being recognized?’

‘The moment we heard about the tournament,’ said Ector, ‘we came at once. Degalis said: “That is Lancelot, or I’m a Dutchman.”’

‘It would mean,’ said Degalis, ‘if you insist on staying here, that you would have to give up arms altogether. One more fight, and you would be known all over the country. For that matter, I think you are known already.’

‘Staying with Elaine would mean giving up everything. It would mean absolute retirement – no quests, no tournaments, no honour, no love: and you might even have to stay indoors all day. Yours is not an easy face to forget, you know.’

‘Whatever it means, Elaine is kind and good. Ector, when people trust you and depend on you, you can’t hurt them. You could not treat a dog so.’

‘People don’t marry dogs, however.’

‘Damn it, this girl loves me.’

‘So does the Queen.’

Lancelot turned the cap round in his hands.

‘The last time I saw the Queen,’ he said, ‘she told me never to come near her again.’

‘But she has spent twenty thousand pounds looking for you.’

He waited for some time and then asked, in a voice which sounded rough: ‘Is she well?’

‘She is absolutely wretched.’

Ector said: ‘She knows it was her fault. She cried a great deal, and Bors told her she was a fool, but she didn’t argue with him. Arthur is wretched too, because the whole Table is upside down.’

Lancelot threw his cap on the ground and stood up.

‘I told Elaine,’ he said, ‘that I would not promise to stay with her: so I must.’

‘Do you love her?’ asked Degalis, cutting to the root.

‘Yes, I do. She has been good to me. I am fond of her.’

At their looks, he changed the word.

‘I love her,’ he said defiantly.

The knights had been staying for a week, and Lancelot, listening hungrily to their Table news, was weakening every day. Elaine, sitting at the high table beside her lord at dinner, lived in a flow of conversation about people whose names she had never heard and about events which she could not understand. There was nothing to do except to offer second helpings, which Ector would accept without interrupting the anecdote of the moment. They leaned across her and talked and laughed, and Elaine busily laughed too. Every day Lancelot went to his turret at sunset – she had tiptoed away when she first found him there, and he did not know it was a discovered rendezvous.

‘Lancelot,’ she said one morning, ‘there is a man waiting on the other side of the moat, with a horse and armour.’

‘A knight?’

‘No. He looks like a squire.’

‘I wonder who it can be this time. Tell the porter to fetch him across.’

‘The porter says he won’t come across. He says he will wait there for Sir Lancelot.’

‘I will go and see.’

Elaine detained him as he went down to the boat.

‘Lancelot,’ she said, ‘what do you want me to do with Galahad, if you should go away?’

‘Go away? Who says I am going away?’

‘Nobody has said so, but I want to know.’

‘I don’t understand what you are talking about.’

‘I want to know how Galahad is to be brought up.’

‘Well, I suppose in the usual way. He will learn to be a good knight, I hope. But the whole question is imaginary.’

‘That is what I wanted to know.’

She detained him once more, however.

‘Lancelot, will you tell me one other thing? If you should go away, if you should have to leave me – would you be coming back?’

‘I have told you that I am not going away.’

She was trying the meaning of her words, as she made them, like a man walking slowly over a bog and feeling in front of him as he went.

‘It would help me to go on with Galahad – it would help me to go on living – if I knew that it was for something – if I knew that one day – if I knew that you would be coming back.’

‘Elaine, I don’t know why you are talking like this.’

‘I am not trying to stop you, Lance. Perhaps it will be best for you to go. Perhaps it is a thing which has to happen. Only, I wanted to know if I should see you again – because it is important to me.’

He took her hands.

‘If I go,’ he said, ‘I will come back.’

The man on the other side of the moat was Uncle Dap. He was standing with Lancelot’s old charger, now two years older, and all his accustomed armour neatly stowed on the saddle, as if for a kit inspection. Everything was correctly folded and strapped in the proper military place. The habergeon was rolled in a tight bundle. The helm, pauldrons, and vambraces were polished, literally by weeks of polishing, to that veneer or patina of light which is to be found only on things bought newly from the shop before they have been dulled by household cleaning. There was a smell of saddle soap, mixed with the unmistakable, personal smell of armour – as individual a smell as that which you get in the professional’s shop on a golf course, and, to a knight, as exciting.

All Lancelot’s muscles made an emphatic sortie towards the feeling of his own armour, which he had not seen since he left Camelot. His forefinger felt where the handle of his sword would use it for a fulcrum. His thumb knew the exact weight in ounces which it would have to exert on the near side of the fulcrum. The pad on the inside of his palm lusted for the gripe of the
hilt. His whole arm remembered the balance of Joyeux and wanted to wag him in the air.

Uncle Dap looked older, and would not speak. He only held the bridle and displayed the gear, waiting for the knight to mount and ride. His stern eye, as fierce as a goshawk’s, waited on his charge. He held out the great tilting helm silently, with its familiar panache of heron hackles and the silver thread.

Lancelot took the helm from Uncle Dap, with both hands, and turned it round. His hands knew the weight to expect – exactly twenty—two and a half pounds. He saw the superb polish, the fresh padding, and the new mantling set behind. It was of azure sarsenet, hand—embroidered in gold thread with the numerous small fleur—de—lis of ancient France. He knew at once whose fingers had done the embroidery. He lifted the helm to his nose and sniffed the mantling.

Immediately she was there – not the Guenever whom he had remembered on the battlements, but the real Jenny, in a different posture, with every lash of her eyelids and every pore of her skin and every note of her voice and every articulation of her smile.

He did not look back as he rode away from Bliant Castle – and Elaine, standing on the barbican tower, did not wave. She watched him going with a still—struck concentration, like somebody who, shipwrecked, gets as much fresh water into the little boat as possible. She had a few seconds left, to make her store of Lancelot that must last her through the years. There would be only this store, and their son, and a lot of gold. He had left her all his money, enough to bring a thousand pounds a year for life – in those days a huge sum.