The Quest of the Fair Unknown (2 page)

Then, as Beaufils watched with amazement, the man who still had a stick drew back his arm and bashed the other man in the back of the head. The stricken man fell forward, and at once the other man pulled a pouch from his companion's belt. "Even more if we doesn't split it, see?" he said. Then he turned and ran away over the plain, leaving the first man face-down in the dust at Beaufils's feet.

"Are you all right, boy?" called a new voice from some distance off. Beaufils looked up to see two men riding huge animals, larger than Glover, approaching rapidly across the plain. Beaufils could only stare. The men wore the oddest clothing he had ever seen, clothing that shone in the morning sun, and each wore a hat that covered nearly his whole head, but for an opening in front. Beaufils realized that these were the knight's outfits that his friend had described, and he smiled with delight. So people really
did
wear such ridiculous garments.

"Are you knights?" he asked, smiling broadly at the two men as they approached.

"Ay, lad, that we are," said the knight who had called out earlier. "I'm Sir Bors, and this is my brother, Sir Lionel. Are you hurt?"

"No," Beaufils said. "But it's kind of you to ask. Are you?"

"These bandits are growing brazen, attacking boys in broad daylight," Sir Bors said. "I'll wager you gave them a bit of a shock, though. I saw the whole thing from that hill over there, and I've never seen neater work. Who taught you to fight, boy?"

Most of this was incomprehensible to Beaufils, but he had other things on his mind anyway. "What beautiful animals!" he exclaimed, reaching out to caress the face of Sir Bors's beast as soon as it was near enough. "What strength! Pray tell me, is this a horse?"

Sir Bors gaped at Beaufils briefly before replying. "Ay. This is a horse. Have you not seen one before?"

Beaufils shook his head, still beaming at the animals. "My mother told me about them, but they're far more magnificent than I'd imagined."

The other knight, the one called Sir Lionel, swung easily from his horse's back and knelt over the prone form of the fallen man, who was beginning to groan softly. Sir Lionel took hold of the man's leather garment at the back of the neck, then jerked him roughly to his feet. "Thought you had easy pickings, didn't you?" Sir Lionel said roughly. The man only groaned louder and put his hands on the back of his head. "And justly served for your infamy, you were. Still feel like making a living by thievery? How'd you like to rob me, hey?" Sir Lionel released the man, who sank immediately to his knees and began whimpering. "Oh, stop groveling, you cur," Sir Lionel said, pushing the man roughly back to the ground.

"Why are you shoving that man?" Beaufils asked.

"Eh?" Sir Lionel said, casting a curious glance at Beaufils. "Didn't he just try to hit you?"

"Yes, he did," Beaufils said. "I didn't understand that either."

"The fellow's a bandit," Sir Lionel said. "He meant to take your mule and everything else you have and probably leave you dead."

"He meant to do all that?" Beaufils asked, astonished. He thought of what the man in the forest had said about wickedness in the world. "I see," he said thoughtfully. "That's worse than picking scabs, isn't it?"

Sir Lionel chuckled, and Sir Bors said, "Ay, it is. But the lad's right, Lionel. The fellow's received justice. What he thought to do to the boy has been done to him. No need to knock him about any more." Sir Bors turned back to Beaufils. "But you haven't answered my question: Who taught you to fight?"

"What do you mean?"

"The way you defended yourself with that cudgel. You'd make quite a swordsman, I'd say."

"You mean knocking away the other fellow's stick—cudgel, you say? Nobody taught me how; it just seemed the right thing to do."

"And so it was," Sir Lionel said, his eyes bright with laughter. He examined Beaufils appreciatively. "You're a likely looking lad. Good arms and shoulders. Judging from your leather jerkin, I'd say you were a woodsman."

Beaufils had never heard the term, but he liked it. "Yes, I suppose I am."

"I didn't know anyone lived off this way. Wild land, for the most part," Sir Lionel commented.

This didn't seem to require an answer, so Beaufils asked a question of his own. "Do you know the way to a place called Camelot?"

The two knights glanced at each other, then nodded. "Ay, lad," Sir Bors said. "We're from there ourselves. Are you going to Camelot?"

Beaufils smiled with pleasure. How simple everything had turned out to be. "You're knights from Camelot?" he asked, beaming.

"Yes."

"Then is one of you my father?"

The two knights looked at each other for a long moment. Sir Lionel's eyes were wary, and Sir Bors looked very solemn. At last Sir Lionel said, "Not that we know of, lad. Is ... your father a knight from Camelot?"

Beaufils nodded, and Sir Bors said, "Ride with us, boy, and tell us the story."

Pleased with the invitation, Beaufils leaped onto Clover's back, pausing only long enough to glance at the still-groaning bandit and ask, "Should I give this man his cudgel back?"

"No," the two knights said in unison. Then they were off. It didn't take Beaufils long to tell about his mother and her instructions for him to find his father at Camelot, and when he was done, both knights were silent for a while. Sir Bors was frowning heavily, but Sir Lionel looked amused.

"Tell me this, boy," Sir Lionel asked. "If you do find your father, what do you mean to do with him?"

"Do with him?"

"To speak plain, do you mean to punish him?"

"Why would I do that?"

"For leaving your mother to raise you all alone, of course."

Beaufils puzzled over this. He had lived in the forest among the creatures long enough to know how these matters usually worked, so Sir Lionel's question took him by surprise. "Should he not have done so?" he asked.

"No," Sir Bors said emphatically. "He should not! It was the deed of a coward."

"But why?" Beaufils asked. "A stag mounts a doe and leaves her with young, then goes away. The doe raises the fawns, not the stag. Is that not how people do it?"

Sir Lionel shouted with laughter. "A lad after my own heart! Faith, I like this boy's attitude!"

"Be still, Lionel," Sir Bors said sharply. "You are betraying your morals!"

"And so are you, my gloomy brother, I assure you," replied Sir Lionel with a grin. "Why are you so offended? Has the boy not spoken the truth?"

"We are not beasts; we are men," Sir Bors snapped. "We live by a higher law." He turned to Beaufils. "How old are you, son?"

Remembering his talk with the man in the forest, Beaufils replied dutifully, "Seventeen, maybe?"

Sir Bors frowned again, even more severely, and muttered, "It could be. It could be."

"Oh, for God's sake, brother," Sir Lionel said, rolling his eyes. "Maybe you were right all along and should have been a priest! Never a cat killed a mouse but that you felt guilty about it and tried to take the blame. Of all the knights of Arthur's court who were tomcatting about England twenty years ago, why should it be—?"

"But you can't deny that it might have been—"

"No more than you can prove that it
was,
" Sir Lionel said. "I've told you before, Bors: Exercise your distempered conscience somewhere else. It bores me." He turned back to Beaufils. "Did your mother tell you the knight's name?"

Beaufils shook his head.

"Then what was your mother's name?" Sir Bors asked.

"I don't know," Beaufils said. "I always just called her Mother."

"I think you're wasting your time, boy," Sir Lionel said frankly. "Your father could be any of two dozen knights I can think of who were, ah, active in those days."

Beaufils was surprised at this, but not discouraged. "Perhaps you're right. But I ought to ask anyway, I think. Can you show me the way to Camelot?"

"Ay, that we can, son," Sir Bors said.

"We'll even take you most of the way," added Sir Lionel. "We're on our way into Wales ourselves, but we can leave you on the Bristol Road, if that's all right with you." Since Beaufils had never heard of any of those places, they were all equally acceptable. He agreed readily, and they rode on together.

Beaufils parted from Sir Bors and Sir Lionel two days later, and by the time he left their company, he had learned a great deal more about knights. He knew, for instance, about King Arthur—a king was the leader of the whole tribe of people, like the dominant wolf in a pack—and how King Arthur sent his knights out to protect weak people from other people who might want to hurt them. Beaufils didn't understand why people would want to hurt others, but having met two bandits himself, he knew that there were such people. He learned that some knights abused the power of their weapons and armor to hurt the weak—Sir Bors called these people "recreant knights"—and that one of King Arthur's goals was to stop every recreant knight. Beaufils even learned the names of some of King Arthur's best recreant-knight-stoppers: Sir Gawain, Sir Lancelot, Sir Tor, and others.

There were still some things about knights that Beaufils thought strange, of course. The heavy armor they wore still seemed very impractical to him, for instance. Sir Lionel good-naturedly let Beaufils try on his armor one evening, and Beaufils privately thought that the protective covering of metal was not worth the bother. He felt like a turtle. Moreover, the knightly games that Sir Lionel called tournaments, in which knights bashed their best friends from horses, seemed very odd to Beaufils at first. But then Sir Lionel told how the ladies of the court all attended these games, and Beaufils understood. He had watched young bucks butt heads and cross antlers to impress females before.

At any rate, if Sir Bors and Sir Lionel were what knights were like, Beaufils was pleased that his father was one. He liked the brothers, though they were as different as they could be. He liked their wish to help others and their commitment to their promises (Sir Bors called this "honor"). So it was with a sense of pleasant anticipation that Beaufils rode alone down the road that Sir Lionel had told him would lead to Camelot and the chance to meet other knights, one of whom was his father. Growing up in his lonely forest, he had never been aware that he was missing anything, but now he found the company of other people to be delightful. Of course, not everyone he had met had been equally amiable, but by and large, people were great fun, and Beaufils could hardly wait to meet some more.

Beaufils met his next people that very evening. Riding through a wooded area at dusk, he smelled wood smoke through the trees and immediately turned Glover toward the scent. Soon he came to a small fire in a clearing. There was no one by the fire, but Beaufils saw at once that he had come to the camp of two knights. There were two neat bundles of gear, both containing some pieces of armor, and through the trees Beaufils could make out the outlines of two horses, tethered away from the fire. With a smile, Beaufils dismounted from Clover and called out, "Hello, knights."

The bushes to his left moved slightly, and a knight stepped into the clearing. Beaufils was unloading his few things from Clover's back, but he stopped to examine this new person with interest. Beaufils had noticed that people looked different at different ages. The man in the forest, with the white hair and the lined face, Beaufils now realized, had been quite old. Sir Bors and Sir Lionel had been older than Beaufils but younger than the old man in the forest. This knight, however, had smooth cheeks and shining black hair, and looked as if he were about Beaufils's own age.

"What are you doing, boy?" the young knight asked.

"Unloading my things, boy," Beaufils replied, smiling.

"What did you call me?"

"Boy. It's what you called me, isn't it?"

"Yes, but..." the young knight trailed off.

"Aren't we nearly the same age?" Beaufils asked.

"I suppose we are, but..." Again the young knight hesitated. "Why are you unloading your things?"

"It would be uncomfortable for Clover to bear them all night while I slept."

The young knight looked surprised. "Do you mean to camp here?"

"Yes," Beaufils replied. While he had talked, Beaufils had been looking around for the second knight. Now he located him, just a faint shadow hiding in the bushes at Beaufils's back. Beaufils was just about to say hello when the bushes rustled and the second knight leaped out, swinging his sword toward Beaufils's head. Beaufils was still unloading his gear and happened to have just picked up the cudgel he'd taken earlier from the bandit, so when the new knight swung his sword, Beaufils rapped it sharply to one side with his cudgel and stepped out of its way. The sword missed. The new knight said a word that Beaufils had never heard, then whirled around, raising his sword high above his head and chopping down at Beaufils again. Once again, Beaufils knocked the sword aside, and it dug into the earth by his feet. Beaufils put his foot against the flat of the sword, then stepped down hard, forcing the rest of it to the ground and out of the knight's grasp. The knight snarled at him and stooped down to grab the sword again, but then the first knight stepped between them. "What are you doing, Mordred? This boy has done you no harm!"

The second knight rose slowly to his feet, and the anger disappeared from his face, leaving behind an expression of innocent surprise. "Why, I saw him take up that club, and I thought he was about to strike you, Galahad. Why else should I have attacked him? Aren't you the one who said he might be a bandit?"

"I never said to attack him from behind!"

The two knights stared at each other for a tense moment, and then Beaufils began to laugh. "You thought I was a
bandit?
" The idea seemed very ridiculous.

"Yes, of course," the knight called Mordred said.

"It makes no difference what you thought, Mordred," the knight called Galahad said, still staring hard at the other knight. "To use a sword against a mere boy armed with only a stick is a craven deed. You are lucky you didn't hurt him, for that would have been a mortal sin."