The Once and Future King (10 page)

‘Merlin of the Forest Sauvage,’ said the peregrine, ‘what is a Beast of the Foot?’

‘A Beast of the Foot,’ replied the Walt, blessing his stars that Sir Ector had chosen to give him a First Rate Eddication, ‘is a horse, or a hound, or a hawk.’

‘Why are these called beasts of the foot?’

‘Because these beasts depend upon the powers of their feet, so that, by law, any damage to the feet of hawk, hound or horse, is reckoned as damage to its life. A lamed horse is a murdered horse.’

‘Good,’ said the peregrine. ‘What are your most important members?’

‘My wings,’ said the Wart after a moment, guessing because he did not know.

At this there was a simultaneous tintinnabulation of all the bells, as each graven image lowered its raised foot in distress. They stood on both feet now, disturbed.

‘Your what?’ called the peregrine sharply.

‘He said his damned wings,’ said Colonel Cully from his private enclosure. ‘And damned be he who first cries Hold, enough!’

‘But even a thrush has wings!’ cried the kestrel, speaking for the first time in his sharp—beaked alarm.

‘Think!’ whispered Balan, under his breath.

The Wart thought feverishly.

A thrush had wings, tail, eyes, legs – apparently everything.

‘My talons!’

‘It will do,’ said the peregrine kindly, after one of her dreadful pauses. ‘The answer ought to be Feet, just as it is to all the other questions, but Talons will do.’

All the hawks, and of course we are using the term loosely, for some were hawks and some were falcons, raised their belled feet again and sat at ease.

‘What is the first law of the foot?’

(‘Think,’ said friendly little Balan, behind his false primary.)

The Wart thought, and thought right.

‘Never to let go,’ he said.

‘Last question,’ said the peregrine. ‘How would you, as a Merlin, kill a pigeon bigger than yourself?’

Wart was lucky in this one, for he had heard Hob giving a description of how Balan did it one afternoon, and he answered warily, ‘I should strangle her with my foot.’

‘Good!’ said the peregrine.

‘Bravo!’ cried the others, raising their feathers.

‘Ninety per cent,’ said the spar—hawk after a quick sum. ‘That is if you give him a half for the talons.’

‘The devil damn me black!’

‘Colonel, please!’

Balan whispered to the Wart, ‘Colonel Cully is not quite right in his wits. It is his liver, we believe, but the kestrel says it is the constant strain of living up to her ladyship’s standard. He says that her ladyship spoke to him from her full social station once, cavalry to infantry, you know, and that he just closed his eyes and got the vertigo. He has never been the same since.’

‘Captain Balan,’ said the peregrine, ‘it is rude to whisper. We will proceed to swear the new officer in. Now, padre, if you please.’

The poor spar—hawk, who had been getting more and more nervous for some time, blushed deeply and began faltering out a complicated oath about varvels, jesses and hoods. ‘With this varvel,’ the Wart heard, ‘I thee endow…love, honour and obey…till jess us do part.’

But before the padre had got to the end of it, he broke down altogether and sobbed out, ‘Oh, please, your ladyship. I beg your pardon, but I have forgotten to keep my tirings.’

(‘Tirings are bones and things,’ explained Balan, ‘and of course you have to swear on bones.’)

‘Forgotten to keep any tirings?’ But it is your duty to keep tirings.’

‘I – I know.’

‘What have you done with them?’

The spar—hawk’s voice broke at the enormity of his confession. ‘I – I ate ’em,’ wept the unfortunate priest.

Nobody said anything. The dereliction of duty was too terrible for words. All stood on two feet and turned their blind heads toward the culprit. Not a word of reproach was spoken. Only, during an utter silence of five minutes, they could hear the incontinent priest snivelling and hiccoughing to himself.

‘Well,’ said the peregine at last, ‘the initiation will have to be put off till tomorrow.’

‘If you will excuse me, Madam,’ said Balin, ‘perhaps we could manage the ordeal tonight? I believe the candidate is loose, for I did not hear him being tied up.’

At the mention of an ordeal the Wart trembled within himself and privately determined that Balin should have not one feather of Balan’s sparrow next day.

‘Thank you, Captain Balin. I was reflecting upon that subject myself.’

Balin shut up.

‘Are you loose, candidate?’

‘Oh, Madam, yes, I am, if you please; but I do not think I want an ordeal.’

‘The ordeal is customary.’

‘Let me see,’ continued the honorary colonel reflectively. ‘What was the last ordeal we had? Can you remember, Captain Balan?’

‘The ordeal, Ma’am,’ said the friendly merlin, ‘was to hang by my jesses during the third watch.’

‘If he is loose he cannot do that.’

‘You could strike him yourself, Ma’am,’ said the kestrel, ‘judiciously, you know.’

‘Send him over to stand by Colonel Cully while we ring three times,’ said the other merlin.

‘Oh, no!’ cried the crazy colonel in an agony out of his remoter darkness. ‘Oh no, your ladyship. I beg of you not to do that. I am such a damned villain, your ladyship, that I do not answer for the consequences. Spare the poor boy, your ladyship, and lead us not into temptation.’

‘Colonel, control yourself. That ordeal will do very well.’

‘Oh, Madam, I was warned not to stand by Colonel Cully.’

‘Warned? And by whom?’

The poor Wart realized that now he must choose between confessing himself a human, and learning no more of their secrets, or going through with this ordeal to earn his education. He did not want to be a coward.

‘I will stand by the Colonel, Madam,’ he said, immediately noticing that his voice sounded insulting.

The peregrine falcon paid no attention to the tone.

‘It is well,’ she said. ‘But first we must have a hymn. Now, padre, if you have not eaten your hymns as well as your tirings, will you be so kind as to lead us in Ancient but not Modern No. 23? The Ordeal Hymn.

‘And you, Mr Kee,’ she added to the kestrel, ‘you had better keep quiet, for you are always too high.’

The hawks stood still in the moonlight, while the spar—hawk counted, ‘One, Two, Three.’ Then all those curved or toothed beaks opened in their hoods to a brazen unison, and this is what they chanted:

Life is blood, shed and offered.

The eagle’s eye can face this dree.

To beasts of chase the lie is proffered:

TIMOR MORTIS CONTURBAT ME
.

The beast of foot sings Holdfast only,

For flesh is bruckle and foot is slee.

Strength to the strong and the lordly and lonely.

TIMOR MORTIS EXULTAT ME
.

Shame to the slothful and woe to the weak one.

Death to the dreadful who turn to flee.

Blood to the tearing, the talon’d, the beaked one.

TIMOR MORTIS
are We.

‘Very nice,’ said the peregrine. ‘Captain Balan. I think you were a little off on the top C. And now, candidate, you will go over and stand next to Colonel Cully’s enclosure, while we
ring our bells thrice. On the third ring you may move as quickly as you like.’

‘Very good, Madam,’ said the Wart, quite fearless with resentment. He flipped his wings and was sitting on the extreme end of the screen perch, next to Cully’s enclosure of string netting.

‘Boy!’ cried the Colonel in an unearthly voice, ‘don’t come near me, don’t come near. Ah, tempt not the foul fiend to his damnation.’

‘I do not fear you, sir,’ said the Wart. ‘Do not vex yourself, for no harm will come to either of us.’

‘No harm, quotha! Ah, go, before it is too late. I feel eternal longings in me.’

‘Never fear, sir. They have only to ring three times.’

At this the knights lowered their raised legs and gave them a solemn shake. The first sweet tinkling filled the room.

‘Madam, Madam!’ cried the Colonel in torture. ‘Have pity, have pity on a damned man of blood. Ring out the old, ring in the new. I can’t hold off much longer.’

‘Be brave, sir,’ said the Wart softly.

‘Be brave, sir! Why, but two nights since, one met the duke ’bout midnight in a lane behind Saint Mark’s Church, with the leg of a man upon his shoulder: and he howled fearfully.’

‘It is nothing,’ said the Wart.

‘Nothing! Said he was a wolf, only the difference was a wolf’s skin was hairy on the outside, his on the inside. Rip up my flesh and try. Ah, for quietus, with a bare bodkin!’

The bells rang for the second time.

The Wart’s heart was thumping, and now the Colonel was sidling toward him along the perch. Stamp, stamp, he went, striking the wood he trod on with a convulsive grip at every pace. His poor, mad, brooding eyes glared in the moonlight, shone against the persecuted darkness of his scowling brow. There was nothing cruel about him, no ignoble passion. He was terrified of the Wart, not triumphing, and he must slay.

‘If it were done when ’tis done,’ whispered the Colonel, ‘then
’twere well it were done quickly. Who would have thought the young man had so much blood in him?’

‘Colonel!’ said the Wart, but held himself there.

‘Boy!’ cried the Colonel. ‘Speak, stop me, mercy!’

‘There is a cat behind you,’ said the Wart calmly, ‘or a pinemarten. Look.’

The Colonel turned, swift as a wasp’s sting, and menaced into the gloom. There was nothing. He swung his wild eyes again upon the Wart, guessing the trick. Then, in the cold voice of an adder, ‘The bell invites me. Hear it not, Merlin, for it is a knell that summons thee to heaven or to hell.’

The third bells were indeed ringing as he spoke, and honour was allowed to move. The ordeal was over and the Wart might fly. But as he moved, but as he flew, quicker than any movement or flight in the world, the terrible sickles had shot from the Colonel’s planted legs – not flashed out, for they moved too quickly for sight – and with a thump, with a clutch, with an apprehension, like being arrested by a big policeman, the great scimitars had fixed themselves in his retreating thumb.

They fixed themselves, and fixed irrevocably. Gripe, gripe, the enormous thigh muscles tautened in two convulsions. Then the Wart was two yards further down the screen, and Colonel Cully was standing on one foot with a few meshes of string netting and the Wart’s false primary, with its covert—feathers, vice—fisted in the other. Two or three minor feathers drifted softly in a moonbeam toward the floor.

‘Well stood!’ cried Balan, delightedly.

‘A very gentlemanly exhibition,’ said the peregrine, not minding that Captain Balan had spoken before her.

‘Amen!’ said the spar—hawk.

‘Brave heart!’ said the kestrel.

‘Might we give him the Triumph Song?’ asked Balin, relenting.

‘Certainly,’ said the peregrine.

And they all sang together, led by Colonel Cully at the top of his voice, all belling triumphantly in the terrible moonlight.

The mountain birds are sweeter

But the valley birds are fatter,

And so we deemed it meeter

To carry off the latter.

We met a cowering coney

And struck him through the vitals.

The Coney was like honey

And squealed our requitals.

Some struck the lark in feathers

Whose puffing clouds were shed off.

Some plucked the partridge’s nethers,

While others pulled his head off.

But Wart the King of Merlins

Struck foot most far before us.

His birds and beasts

Supply our feasts,

And his feats our glorious chorus!

‘Mark my words,’ cried the beautiful Balan, ‘we shall have a regular king in that young candidate. Now, boys, chorus altogether for the last time’:

But Wart the King of Merlins

Struck foot most far before us.

His birds and beasts

Supply our feasts,

And his feats our glorious chorus!

‘Well!’ said the Wart, as he woke up in his own bed next morning. ‘What a horrible, grand crew!’

Kay sat up in bed and began scolding like a squirrel. ‘Where were you last night?’ he cried. ‘I believe you climbed out. I shall tell my father and get you tanned. You know we are not allowed
out after curfew. What have you been doing? I looked for you everywhere. I know you climbed out.’

The boys had a way of sliding down a rain—water pipe into the moat, which they could swim on secret occasions when it was necessary to be out at night – to wait for a badger, for instance, or to catch tench, which can only be taken just before dawn.

‘Oh, shut up,’ said the Wart. ‘I’m sleepy.’

Kay said. ‘Wake up, wake up, you beast. Where have you been?’

‘I shan’t tell you.’

He was sure that Kay would not believe the story, but only call him a liar and get angrier than ever.

‘If you don’t tell me I shall kill you.’

‘You will not, then.’

‘I will.’

The Wart turned over on his other side.

‘Beast,’ said Kay. He took a fold of the Wart’s arm between the nails of first finger and thumb, and pinched for all he was worth. Wart kicked like a salmon which has been suddenly hooked, and hit him wildly in the eye. In a trice they were out of bed, pale and indignant, looking rather like skinned rabbits – for, in those days, nobody wore clothes in bed – and whirling their arms like windmills in the effort to do each other mischief.

Kay was older and bigger than the Wart, so that he was bound to win in the end, but he was more nervous and imaginative. He could imagine the effect of each blow that was aimed at him, and this weakened his defence. Wart was only an infuriated hurricane.

‘Leave me alone, can’t you?’ And all the while he did not leave Kay alone, but with his head down and swinging arms made it impossible for Kay to do as he was bid. They punched entirely at each other’s faces.

Kay had a longer reach and a heavier fist. He straightened his arm, more in self—defence than in anything else, and the Wart smacked his own eye upon the end of it. The sky became a noisy and shocking black, streaked outward with a blaze of meteors. The Wart began to sob and pant. He managed to get
in a blow upon his opponent’s nose, and this began to bleed. Kay lowered his defence, turned his back on the Wart, and said in a cold, snuffling, reproachful voice, ‘Now it’s bleeding.’ The battle was over.

Kay lay on the stone floor, bubbling blood out of his nose, and the Wart, with a black eye, fetched the enormous key out of the door to put under Kay’s back. Neither of them spoke.

Presently Kay turned over on his face and began to sob. He said, ‘Merlyn does everything for you, but he never does anything for me.’

At this the Wart felt he had been a beast. He dressed himself in silence and hurried off to find the magician.

On the way he was caught by his nurse.

‘Ah, you little helot,’ exclaimed she, shaking him by the arm, ‘you’ve been a—battling again with that there Master Kay. Look at your poor eye, I do declare. It’s enough to baffle the college of sturgeons.’

‘It is all right,’ said the Wart.

‘No, that it isn’t, my poppet,’ cried his nurse, getting crosser and showing signs of slapping him. ‘Come now, how did you do it, before I have you whipped?’

‘I knocked it on the bedpost,’ said the Wart sullenly.

The old nurse immediately folded him to her broad bosom, patted him on the back, and said, ‘There, there, my dowsabel. It’s the same story Sir Ector told me when I caught him with a blue eye, gone forty years. Nothing like a good family for sticking to a good lie. There, my innocent, you come along of me to the kitchen and we’ll slap a nice bit of steak across him in no time. But you hadn’t ought to fight with people bigger than yourself.’

‘It is all right,’ said the Wart again, disgusted by the fuss, but fate was bent on punishing him, and the old lady was inexorable. It took him half an hour to escape, and then only at the price of carrying with him a juicy piece of raw beef which he was supposed to hold over his eye.

‘Nothing like a mealy rump for drawing out the humours,’ his nurse had said, and the cook had answered:

‘Us han’t seen a sweeter bit of raw since Easter, no, nor a bloodier.’

‘I will keep the foul thing for Balan,’ thought the Wart, resuming his search for his tutor.

He found him without trouble in the tower room which he had chosen when he arrived. All philosophers prefer to live in towers, as may be seen by visiting the room which Erasmus chose in his college at Cambridge, but Merlyn’s tower was even more beautiful than this. It was the highest room in the castle, directly below the look—out of the great—keep, and from its window you could gaze across the open field – with its rights of warren – across the park, and the chase, until your eye finally wandered out over the distant blue tree—tops of the Forest Sauvage. This sea of leafy timber rolled away and away in knobs like the surface of porridge, until it was finally lost in remote mountains which nobody had ever visited, and the cloudcapped towers and gorgeous palaces of heaven.

Merlyn’s comments upon this black eye were of a medical nature.

‘The discoloration,’ he said, ‘is caused by haemorrhage into the tissues (ecchymosis) and passes from dark purple through green to yellow before it disappears.’

There seemed to be no sensible reply to this.

‘I suppose you had it,’ continued Merlyn, ‘fighting with Kay?’

‘Yes. How did you know?’

‘Ah, well, there it is.’

‘I came to ask you about Kay.’

‘Speak. Demand. I’ll answer.’

‘Well, Kay thinks it is unfair that you are always turning me into things and not him. I have not told him about it but I think he guesses. I think it is unfair too.’

‘It is unfair.’

‘So will you turn us both next time that we are turned?’

Merlyn had finished his breakfast, and was puffing at the meerschaum pipe which made his pupil believe that he breathed fire. Now he took a deep puff, looked at the Wart, opened his
mouth to speak, changed his mind, blew out the smoke and drew another lungful.

‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘life does seem to be unfair. Do you know the story of Elijah and the Rabbi Jachanan?’

‘No,’ said the Wart.

He sat down resignedly upon the most comfortable part of the floor, perceiving that he was in for something like the parable of the looking—glass.

‘This rabbi,’ said Merlyn, ‘went on a journey with the prophet Elijah. They walked all day, and at nightfall they came to the humble cottage of a poor man, whose only treasure was a cow. The poor man ran out of his cottage, and his wife ran too, to welcome the strangers for the night and to offer them all the simple hospitality which they were able to give in straitened circumstances. Elijah and the Rabbi were entertained with plenty of the cow’s milk, sustained by homemade bread and butter, and they were put to sleep in the best bed while their kindly hosts lay down before the kitchen fire. But in the morning the poor man’s cow was dead.’

‘Go on.’

‘They walked all the next day, and came that evening to the house of a very wealthy merchant, whose hospitality they craved. The merchant was cold and proud and rich, and all that he would do for the prophet and his companion was to lodge them in a cowshed and feed them on bread and water. In the morning, however, Elijah thanked him very much for what he had done, and sent for a mason to repair one of his walls, which happened to be falling down, as a return for his kindness.

‘The Rabbi Jachanan, unable to keep silence any longer, begged the holy man to explain the meaning of his dealings with human beings.

‘“In regard to the poor man who received us so hospitably,” replied the prophet, “it was decreed that his wife was to die that night, but in reward for his goodness God took the cow instead of the wife. I repaired the wall of the rich miser because a chest of gold was concealed near the place, and if the miser
had repaired the wall himself he would have discovered treasure. Say not therefore to the Lord: What doest thou? But say in thy heart: Must not the Lord of all the earth do right?”’

‘It is a nice sort of story,’ said the Wart, because it seemed to be over.

‘I am sorry,’ said Merlyn, ‘that you should be the only one to get my extra tuition, but then, you see, I was only sent for that.’

‘I do not see that it would do any harm for Kay to come too.’

‘Nor do I. But the Rabbi Jachanan did not see why the miser should have had his wall repaired.’

‘I understand that,’ said the Wart doubtfully, ‘but I still think it was a shame that the cow died. Could I not have Kay with me just once?’

Merlyn said gently, ‘Perhaps what is good for you might be bad for him. Besides, remember he has never asked to be turned into anything.’

‘He wants to be turned, for all that. I like Kay, you know, and I think people don’t understand him. He has to be proud because he is frightened.’

‘You still do not follow what I mean. Suppose he had gone as a merlin last night, and failed in the ordeal, and lost his nerve?’

‘How do you know about that ordeal?’

‘Ah, well there it is again.’

‘Very well,’ said the Wart obstinately. ‘But suppose he had not failed in the ordeal, and had not lost his nerve. I don’t see why you should have to suppose that he would have.’

‘Oh, flout the boy!’ cried the magician passionately. ‘You don’t seem to see anything this morning. What is it that you want me to do?’

‘Turn me and Kay into snakes or something.’

Merlyn took off his spectacles, dashed them on the floor and jumped on them with both feet.

‘Castor and Pollux blow me to Bermuda!’ he exclaimed, and immediately vanished with a frightful roar.

The Wart was still staring at his tutor’s chair in some perplexity, a few moments later, when Merlyn reappeared. He had lost
his hat and his hair and beard were tangled up, as if by a hurricane. He sat down again, straightening his gown with trembling fingers.

‘Why did you do that?’ asked the Wart.

‘I did not do it on purpose.’

‘Do you mean to say that Castor and Pollux did blow you to Bermuda?’

‘Let this be a lesson to you,’ replied Merlyn, ‘not to swear. I think we had better change the subject.’

‘We were talking about Kay.’

‘Yes and what I was going to say before my – ahem! – my visit to the still vexed Bermoothes, was this. I cannot change Kay into things. The power was not deputed to me when I was sent. Why this was so, neither you nor I am able to say, but such remains the fact. I have tried to hint at some of the reasons for the fact, but you will not take them, so you must just accept the fact in its naked reality. Now please stop talking until I have got my breath back, and my hat.’

The Wart sat quiet while Merlyn closed his eyes and began to mutter to himself. Presently a curious black cylindrical hat appeared on his head. It was a topper.

Merlyn examined it with a look of disgust, said bitterly, ‘And they call this service!’ and handed it back to the air. Finally he stood up in a passion and exclaimed, ‘Come here!’

The Wart and Archimedes looked at each other, wondering which was meant – Archimedes had been sitting all the while on the window—sill and looking at the view, for, of course, he never left his master – but Merlyn did not pay them any attention.

‘Now,’ said Merlyn furiously, apparently to nobody, ‘do you think you are being funny?

‘Very well then, why do you do it?

‘That is no excuse. Naturally I meant the one I was wearing.

‘But wearing now, of course, you fool. I don’t want a hat I was wearing in 1890. Have you no sense of time at all?’

Merlyn took off the sailor hat which had just appeared and held it out to the air for inspection.

‘This is an anachronism,’ he said severely. ‘That is what it is, a beastly anachronism.’

Archimedes seemed to be accustomed to these scenes, for he now said in a reasonable voice: ‘Why don’t you ask for the hat by name, master? Say, “I want my magician’s hat,” not “I want the hat I was wearing.” Perhaps the poor chap finds it as difficult to live backwards as you do.’

‘I want my magician’s hat,’ said Merlyn sulkily.

Instantly the long pointed cone was standing on his head.

The tension in the air relaxed. Wart sat down again on the floor, and Archimedes resumed his toilet, passing his pinions and tail feathers through his beak to smooth the barbs together: Each barb had hundreds of little hooks or barbules on it, by means of which the barbs of the feather were held together. He was stroking them into place.

Merlyn said, ‘I beg your pardon. I am not having a very good day today, and there it is.’

‘About Kay,’ said the Wart. ‘Even if you can’t change him into things, could you not give us both an adventure without changing?’

Merlyn made a visible effort to control his temper, and to consider this question dispassionately. He was sick of the subject altogether.

‘I cannot do any magic for Kay,’ he said slowly, ‘except my own magic that I have anyway. Backsight and insight and all that. Do you mean anything I could do with that?’

‘What does your backsight do?’

‘It tells me what you would say is going to happen, and the insight sometimes says what is or was happening in other places.’

‘Is there anything happening just now, anything that Kay and I could go to see?’

Merlyn immediately struck himself on the brow and exclaimed excitedly, ‘Now I see it all. Yes, of course there is, and you are going to see it. Yes, you must take Kay and hurry up about it. You must go immediately after Mass. Have breakfast first and go immediately after Mass. Yes, that is it. Go straight
to Hob’s strip of barley in the open field and follow that line until you come to something. That will be splendid, yes, and I shall have a nap this afternoon instead of those filthy Summulae Logicales. Or have I had the nap?’

‘You have not had it,’ said Archimedes. ‘That is still in the future, Master.’

‘Splendid, splendid. And mind, Wart, don’t forget to take Kay with you so that I can have my nap.’

‘What shall we see?’ asked the Wart.