The Once and Future King (#1-4) by T. H. White

  ‘Why did you get tired of wars?’

  ‘’Twas thim same numbers had thim destroyed altogether. Who would want to be killing a mortal for what he didn’t understand, or for nothing? I took up with the single combats instead.’

  ‘That must have been a long time ago.’

  ‘Aye,’ said the saint regretfully. ‘Thim bullets I was telling ye about, now: the brains didn’t be much good widout they were taken in single combat. It was the virtue of them.’

  ‘I incline my agreement with Toirdealbhach,’ said Gareth. ‘After all, what is the good of killing poor kerns who do not know anything? It would be much better for the people who are angry to fight each other themselves, knight against knight.’

  ‘But you could not have any wars at all, like that,’ exclaimed Gaheris.

  ‘It would be absurd,’ said Gawaine. ‘You must have people, galore of people, in a war.’

  ‘Otherwise you could not kill them,’ explained Agravaine.

  The saint helped himself to a fresh dose of whisky, hummed a few bars of Poteen, Good Luck to Ye, Dear, and glanced at Mother Morlan. He was feeling a new heresy coming over him, possibly as a result of the spirits, and it had something to do with the celibacy of the clergy. He had one already about the shape of his tonsure, and the usual one about the date of Easter, as well as his own Pelagian business – but the latest was beginning to make him feel as if the presence of children was unnecessary.

  ‘Wars,’ he said with disgust. ‘And how would kids like you be talking about them, will ye tell me, and you no bigger than sitting hens? Be off now, before I beget an ill wish toward ye.’

  Saints, as the Old Ones knew very well, were a bad class of people to cross, so the children stood up hastily.

  ‘Och, now,’ they said. ‘Your Holiness, no offence, we are sure. We were only at wishing to make an exchange of ideas.’

  ‘Ideas!’ he exclaimed, reaching for the poker – and they were outside the low door in the twinkling of an eye, standing in the level rays of sunset on the sandy street, while his anathemas or whatever they may have been rumbled behind them from the dark interior.

  In the street, there were two moth—eaten donkeys searching for weeds in the cracks of a stone wall. Their legs were tied together so that they could hardly hobble, and their hoofs were cruelly overgrown, so that they looked like rams’ horns or curly skates. The boys commandeered them at once, a new idea springing fully armed from their heads as soon as they had seen the animals. They would stop hearing stories or discussing warfare, and they would take the donkeys to the little harbour beyond the sand—dunes, in case the men who had been out in their currachs should have made a catch. The donkeys would be useful for carrying the fish.

  Gawaine and Gareth took turns with the fat ass, one of them whacking it while the other rode bareback. The ass gave a hop occasionally, but refused to trot. Agravaine and Gaheris both sat on the thin one, the former being mounted back to front so that he faced the creature’s behind – which he thrashed furiously with a thick root of seaweed. He beat it round the vent, to hurt it more.

  It was a strange scene which they presented when they reached the sea – the thin children whose sharp noses had a drop on the end of each, and their bony wrists which had outgrown their coats – the donkeys scampering round in small circles, with an occasional frisk as the tangle bit into their grey quarters. It was strange because it was circumscribed, because it was concentrated on a single intention. They might have been a solar system of their own, with nothing else in space, as they went round and round among the dunes and coarse grass of the estuary. Probably the planets have few ideas in their heads, either.

  The idea which the children had was to hurt the donkeys. Nobody had told them that it was cruel to hurt them, but then, nobody had told the donkeys either. On the rim of the world they knew too much about cruelty to be surprised by it. So the small circus was a unity – the beasts reluctant to move and the children vigorous to move them, the two parties bound together by the link of pain to which they both agreed without question. The pain itself was so much a matter of course that it had vanished out of the picture, as if by a process of cancellation. The animals did not seem to be suffering, and the children did not seem to be enjoying the suffering. The only difference was that the boys were violently animated while the donkeys were as static as possible.

  Into this Eden—like scene, and almost before the memory of Mother Morlan’s interior had faded from their minds, there came a magic barge from over the water, a barge draped with white samite, mystic, wonderful, and it made a music of its own accord as its keel passed through the waves. Inside it there were three knights and a seasick brachet. Anything less suitable than these to the tradition of the Gaelic world, it would have been impossible to imagine.

  ‘I say,’ said the voice of one of the knights in the barge, while they were still far out, ‘there is a castle, isn’t it, what? I say, isn’t it a pretty one!’

  ‘Stop joggin’ the boat, my dear fellow,’ said the second, ‘or you will have us in the sea.’

  King Pellinore’s enthusiasm evaporated at the rebuke, and he startled the petrified children by bursting into tears. They could bear his sobs, mingled with the lapping of the waves and with the music of the boat, as it drew near.

  ‘Oh, sea!’ he said. ‘I wish I was in you, what? I wish I was full of five fathoms, that I do. Woe, woe, oh, woe!’

  ‘It is no good saying Whoa, old boy. The thing will whoa when it wants to. It is a magic ‘un.’

  ‘I was not saying Whoa,’ retorted the King. ‘I was saying Woe.’

  ‘Well, it won’t whoa.’

  ‘I don’t care if it does or if it don’t. I said Woe!’

  ‘Well, whoa, then.’

  And the magic barge whoaed, just where the currachs were usually drawn up. Three knights got out, and it could be seen that the third was a black man. He was a learned paynim or saracen, called Sir Palomides.

  ‘Happy landing,’ said Sir Palomides, ‘by golly!’

  The people came from everywhere, silently, vaguely. When they were near the knights, they walked slowly, but in the remoter distance they were running. Men, women and children were scuttling over the dunes or down from the castle cliff, only to break into a crawling pace as soon as they were near. At a distance of twenty yards, they halted altogether. They made a ring, staring at the newcomers mutely, like people staring at pictures in the Uffizi. They studied them. There was no hurry now, no need to dash off to the next picture. Indeed, there were no other pictures – had been no others, except for the accustomed scenes of Lothian, since they were born. Their stare was not exactly an offensive one, nor was it friendly. Pictures exist to be absorbed. It began at the feet, especially as the strangers were dressed in outlandish clothes like knights—in—armour, and it mastered the texture, the construction, the articulation and the probable price of their sabathons. Then it went on to the greaves, the cuisses, and so up. It might take half an hour to reach the face, which was to be examined last of all.

  The Gaels stood round the Galls with their mouths open, while the village children shouted the news in the distance and Mother Morlan came jogging with her skirts tucked up and the currachs at sea came rowing madly home. The young princelings of Lothian got off their donkeys as if in a trance, and joined the circle. The circle itself began to press inward on its focus, moving as slowly and as silently as the minute hand of a clock, except for the suppressed shouts from the late arrivals who fell silent themselves as soon as they were within the influence. The circle was contracting because it wanted to touch the knights – not now, not for half an hour or so, not until the examination was over, perhaps never. But it would have liked to touch them in the end, partly to be sure that they were real, partly to sum up the price of their clothes. And, as the pricing was continued, three things began to happen. Mother Morlan and the auld wives started to say the rosary, while the young women pinched each other and giggled – the men, having do
ffed their caps in deference to the praying, began to exchange in Gaelic such remarks as ‘Look at the black man, God between us and harm,’ or ‘Do they be naked at bed—time, or how do they get the iron pots off them whatever?’ – and, in the minds of both women and men, irrespective of age or circumstance, there began to grow, almost visibly, almost tangibly, the enormous, the incalculable miasma which is the leading feature of the Gaelic brain.

  These were Knights of the Sassenachs, they were thinking – for they could tell by the armour – and, if so, knights of that very King Arthur against whom their own king had for the second time revolted. Had they come, with typical Sassenach cunning, so as to take King Lot in the rear? Had they come, as representatives of the feudal overlord – the Landlord – so as to make an assessment for the next scutage? Were they Fifth Columnists? More complicated even than this – for surely no Sassenach could be so simple as to come in the garb of the Sassenach – were they perhaps not representatives of King Arthur at all? Were they, for some purpose almost too cunning for belief, only disguised as themselves? Where was the catch? There always was one in everything.

  The people of the circle closed in, their jaws dropping even further, their crooked bodies hunching into the shapes of sacks and scarecrows, their small eyes glinting in every direction with unfathomable subtlety, their faces assuming an expression of dogged stupidity even more vacant than they actually were.

  The knights drew closer for protection. In point of fact, they did not know that England was at war with Orkney. They had been involved in a Quest, which had kept them away from the latest news. Nobody in Orkney was likely to tell them.

  ‘Don’t look just now,’ said King Pellinore, ‘but there are some people. Do you think they are all right?’

  Chapter VI

  In Carlion everything was at sixes and sevens in preparation for the second campaign. Merlyn had made suggestions about the way to win it, but, as these involved an ambush with secret aid from abroad, they had had to be kept dark. Lot’s slowly approaching army was so much more numerous than the King’s forces that it had been necessary to resort to stratagems. The way in which the battle was to be fought was a secret only known to four people.

  The common citizens, who were in ignorance of the higher policy, had a great deal to do. There were pikes to be ground to a fine edge, so that the grindstones in the town were roaring day and night – there were thousands of arrows to be dressed, so that there were lights in the fletchers’ houses at all hours – and the unfortunate geese on the commons were continually being chased by excited yeomen who wanted feathers. The royal peacocks were as bare as an old broom – most of the crack shots liked to have what Chaucer calls pecock arwes, because they were more classy – and the smell of boiling glue rose to high heaven. The armourers, accomplishing the knights, hammered away with musical clinks, working double shifts at it, and the blacksmiths shod the chargers, and the nuns never stopped knitting comforters for the soldiers or making the kind of bandages which were called tents. King Lot had already named a rendezvous for the battle, at Bedegraine.

  The King of England painfully climbed the two hundred and eight steps which led to Merlyn’s tower room, and knocked on the door. The magician was inside, with Archimedes sitting on the back of his chair, busily trying to find the square root of minus one. He had forgotten how to do it.

  ‘Merlyn,’ said the King panting, ‘I want to talk to you.’

  He closed his book with a bang, leaped to his feet, seizing his wand of lignum vitae, and rushed at Arthur as if he were trying to shoo away a stray chicken.

  ‘Go away!’ he shouted. ‘What are you doing here? What do you mean by it? Aren’t you the King of England? Go away and send for me! Get out of my room! I never heard of such a thing! Go away at once and send for me!’

  ‘But I’m here.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ retorted the old man resourcefully. And he pushed the King out of the door, slamming it in his face.

  ‘Well!’ said Arthur, and he went off sadly down the two hundred and eight stairs.

  An hour later, Merlyn presented himself in the Royal Chamber, in answer to a summons which had been delivered by a page.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said, and sat down comfortably on a carpet chest.

  ‘Stand up,’ said Arthur, and he clapped his hands for a page to take away the seat.

  Merlyn stood up, boiling with indignation. The whites of his knuckles blanched as he clenched them.

  ‘About our conversation on the subject of chivalry,’ began the King in an airy tone…

  ‘I don’t recollect such a conversation.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I have never been so insulted in my life!’

  ‘But I am the King,’ said Arthur. ‘You can’t sit down in front of a King.’

  ‘Rubbish!’

  Arthur began to laugh more than was seemly, and his foster—brother, Sir Kay, and his old guardian, Sir Ector, came out from behind the throne, where they had been hiding. Kay took off Merlyn’s hat and put it on Sir Ector, and Sir Ector said, ‘Well, bless my soul, now I am a nigromancer. Hocus—Pocus.’ Then everybody began laughing, including Merlyn eventually, and seats were sent for so that they could sit down and bottles of wine were opened so that it should not be a dry meeting.

  ‘You see,’ he said proudly, ‘I have summoned a council.’

  There was a pause, for it was the first time that Arthur had made a speech, and he wanted to collect his wits for it.

  ‘Well,’ said the King. ‘It is about chivalry. I want to talk about that.’

  Merlyn was immediately watching him with a sharp eye. His knobbed fingers fluttered among the stars and secret signs of his gown, but he would not help the speaker. You might say that this moment was the critical one in his career – the moment towards which he had been living backward for heaven knows how many centuries, and now he was to see for certain whether he had lived in vain.

  ‘I have been thinking,’ said Arthur, ‘about Might and Right. I don’t think things ought to be done because you are able to do them. I think they should be done because you ought to do them. After all, a penny is a penny in any case, however much Might is exerted on either side, to prove that it is or is not. Is that plain?’

  Nobody answered.

  ‘Well, I was talking to Merlyn on the battlements one day, and he mentioned that the last battle we had – in which seven hundred kerns were killed – was not so much fun as I had thought it was. Of course, battles are not fun when you come to think about them. I mean, people ought not to be killed, ought they? It is better to be alive.

  ‘Very well. But the funny thing is that Merlyn was helping me to win battles. He is still helping me, for that matter, and we hope to win the battle of Bedegraine together, when it comes off.’

  ‘We will,’ said Sir Ector, who was in the secret.

  ‘That seems to me to be inconsistent. Why does he help me to fight wars, if they are bad things?’

  There was no answer from anybody, and the King began to speak with agitation.

  ‘I could only think,’ said he, beginning to blush, ‘I could only think that I – that we – that he – that he wanted me to win them for a reason.’

  He paused and looked at Merlyn, who turned his head away.

  ‘The reason was – was it? – the reason was that if I could be the master of my kingdom by winning these two battles, I could stop them afterwards and then do something about the business of Might. Have I guessed? Was I right?’

  The magician did not turn his head, and his hands lay still in his lap.

  ‘I was!’ exclaimed Arthur.

  And he began talking so quickly that he could hardly keep up with himself.

  ‘You see,’ he said, ‘Might is not Right. But there is a lot of Might knocking about in this world, and something has to be done about it. It is as if people were half horrible and half nice. Perhaps they are even more than half horrible, and when they are left to themselves they run w
ild. You get the average baron that we see nowadays, people like Sir Bruce Sans Pitié, who simply go clod—hopping round the country dressed in steel, and doing exactly what they please, for sport. It is our Norman idea about the upper classes having a monopoly of power, without reference to justice. Then the horrible side gets uppermost, and there is thieving and rape and plunder and torture. The people become beasts.

  ‘But, you see, Merlyn is helping me to win my two battles so that I can stop this. He wants me to put things right.

  ‘Lot and Uriens and Anguish and those – they are the old world, the old—fashioned order who want to have their private will. I have got to vanquish them with their own weapons – they force it upon me, because they live by force – and then the real work will begin. This battle at Bedegraine is the preliminary, you see. It is after the battle that Merlyn is wanting me to think about.’

  Arthur paused again for comment or encouragement, but the magician’s face was turned away. It was only Sir Ector, sitting next to him, who could see his eyes.

  ‘Now what I have thought,’ said Arthur, ‘is this. Why can’t you harness Might so that it works for Right? I know it sounds nonsense, but, I mean, you can’t just say there is no such thing. The Might is there, in the bad half of people, and you can’t neglect it. You can’t cut it out, but you might be able to direct it, if you see what I mean, so that it was useful instead of bad.’

  The audience was interested. They leaned forward to listen, except Merlyn.

  ‘My idea is that if we can win this battle in front of us, and get a firm hold of the country, then I will institute a sort of order of chivalry. I will not punish the bad knights, or hang Lot, but I will try to get them into our Order. We shall have to make it a great honour, you see, and make it fashionable and all that. Everybody must want to be in. And then I shall make the oath of the order that Might is only to be used for Right. Do you follow? The knights in my order will ride all over the world, still dressed in steel and whacking away with their swords – that will give an outlet for wanting to whack, you understand, an outlet for what Merlyn calls the foxhunting spirit – but they will be bound to strike only on behalf of what is good, to defend virgins against Sir Bruce and to restore what has been done wrong in the past and to help the oppressed and so forth. Do you see the idea? It will be using the Might instead of fighting against it, and turning a bad thing into a good. There, Merlyn, that is all I can think of. I have thought as hard as I could, and I suppose I am wrong, as usual. But I did think. I can’t do any better. Please say something!’