The Sword in the Stone
The Sword in the Stone
T. H. White
The extraordinary story of a boy called Wart – ignored by everyone except his tutor, Merlyn – who goes on to become King Arthur.When Merlyn the magician comes to tutor Sir Ector's sons Kay and the Wart, schoolwork suddenly becomes much more fun. After all, who wouldn't enjoy being turned into a fish, or a badger, or a snake? But Merlyn has very particular plans for the Wart.This edition of T.H White’s classic story includes a special “Why You’ll Love This Book” introduction by bestselling-author, Garth Nix.
Copyright (#ulink_9160ebb8-1a72-506b-ad11-977569b7f870)
First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd in 1938
This edition published by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2016
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
The HarperCollins Children’s Books website address is
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Text copyright © T H White 1938
Illustrations copyright © Robert Shadbolt 1998
Why you’ll Love This Book copyright © Garth Nix 2008
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Cover illustration © Manuel Šumberac 2016
T. H. White and Robert Shadbolt assert the moral right to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007263493
Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780007370740
Version: 2016-07-26
ForSir Thomas MaleoreKnight
***
“I pray you all, gentlemen and gentlewomen that readeth this book, from the beginning to the ending, pray for me while I am on live, that God send me good deliverance, and when I’m dead, I pray you all pray for my soul.”
Sir Thomas Maleore, Knight.
July 31
, 1485.
Why You’ll Love This Book by Garth Nix (#ulink_6ddba351-8b2e-5cc0-9319-df8e16209b71)
The Sword in the Stone is one of my favourite books, and one that I read again every three or four years – which confirms its position as one of the most significant books in my life. I have many hundreds if not thousands of books that I like very much and may have read twice, but the number of books that I continually go back to and have read at least half a dozen times is much more limited.
Writing this piece has made me think about why I keep coming back to The Sword in the Stone and why has it lasted so well, from my first reading at the age of twelve to my very recent reading at the age of forty-four (practically an ancient of days, or so my twelve year-old self would have thought).
So why do I keep re-reading The Sword in the Stone? Is it the brilliant way in which T. H. White mixes up the modern, the historical and the mythic? Absolutely. Is it the wonderful story, which though based on the legend of King Arthur offers so much more from between and behind the scenes of the myth? Definitely. Is it because of the characters, from the sympathetic but realistic portrait of an orphan boy who will one day become a king to that most creatively-invented wizard of any book, the living backwards through time Merlyn. Of course.
I love the book for all these things, and more. It is a book full of rich details that you don’t always notice the first time through, small asides and historical titbits that if you want to investigate will lead you into all sorts of fascinating stuff, from falconry to medieval hunting terms to satirical comment on 1930s British society, with side-trips through philosophy, sociology, zoology and doubtless several other ‘ologies.
But even though the book is packed with what might be called pre-Internet hotlinks to amazing information – and personally I was led to all kinds of other books by White – you don’t need to know or care about all the great depth of knowledge that underpins the novel. You won’t be put off by White’s cleverness or erudition, because the story comes first, and The Sword in the Stone is always a cracking good read.
Finally, all I can add is to say that ever since I was twelve, I have wanted a wizard’s workroom exactly like Merlyn’s, with everything that is described in the book, from the real corkindrill hanging from the rafters to the complete set of cigarette cards depicting wildfowl by Peter Scott. Those few pages describing Merlyn’s room offer a prime example of the genius of T. H. White, for in that scene he mixes references to his contemporary time of the 1930s with history, myth and legend. He makes it work and be real and true, and it is strong enough to stick in the mind of the reader not just while they read the book, but forever. I may not have managed to get a room like Merlyn’s, but I don’t really need to, because all I have to do is open up The Sword in the Stone, and I will be there, and can once again inhabit and enjoy one of the greatest and most influential fantasy novels of the last hundred years.
Garth Nix
Garth Nix is an internationally bestselling author of sci-fi and fantasy, his work includes The Old Kingdom trilogy and the Keys to the Kingdom series. Before becoming a full time writer, he worked as a book publicist, a publisher’s sales representative and an editor. Along the way he was also a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve. To date his books have sold millions of copies worldwide, and have won numerous prizes including the Aurealis award.
CONTENTS
Cover (#ud08545ec-5310-50b2-a01a-6d59269def51)
Title Page (#u92623de6-35a0-5e0c-8e53-b3ba985ec9d7)
Copyright (#u2aff1e6b-61a1-522f-9998-5c40e1f3ca1c)
Dedication (#uede8a9fe-3659-58a7-b46d-b62e45402451)
Why You’ll Love This Book by Garth Nix (#u3af10ca5-bd79-560c-a9db-c508e0519d33)
Chapter One (#ubdc03a76-aa07-5a57-906a-5d3a38c9c363)
Chapter Two (#ud8afb229-52c3-537f-b5a6-44833623b846)
Chapter Three (#u91b89c97-ea35-53bc-8e6f-68acddf61639)
Chapter Four (#u42f170f0-5662-5d93-b607-e41ad0ee01bb)
Chapter Five (#u38dbeeb5-2a9f-5087-896e-1807d4071656)
Chapter Six (#u882f9c00-640c-5f85-9582-9823766784f0)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
More Than A Story (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by T. H. White (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_561796b8-1fd5-5742-b6c3-011eb11a09dc)
On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology. The governess was always getting muddled with her astrolabe, and when she got specially muddled she would take it out on the Wart by rapping his knuckles. She did not rap Kay’s knuckles because when Kay grew older he would be Sir Kay, and the master of the estate. The Wart was called the Wart because it rhymed with Art, which was short for his real name. Kay had given him the nickname. Kay was not called anything but Kay, because he was too dignified to have a nickname and would have flown into a passion if anybody had tried to give him one. The governess had red hair and some mysterious wound from which she derived a lot of prestige by showing it to all the women of the castle, behind closed doors. It was believed to be where she sat down, and to have been caused by sitting on a broken bottle at a picnic by mistake. Eventually she offered to show it to Sir Ector, who was Kay’s father, had hysterics and was sent away. They found out afterwards that she had been in a lunatic hospital for three years.
In the afternoons the programme was: Mondays and Fridays, tilting and horsemanship; Tuesdays, hawking; Wednesdays, fencing; Thursdays, archery; Saturdays, the theory of chivalry, with the proper measures to be blown on all occasions, terminology of the chase and hunting etiquette. If you did the wrong thing at the mort or the undoing, for instance, you were bent over the body of the dead beast and smacked with the flat side of a sword. This was called being bladed. It was horseplay, a sort of joke like being shaved when crossing the line. Kay was not bladed, although he often went wrong.
After they had got rid of the governess, Sir Ector said, “After all, damn it all, we can’t have the boys runnin’ about all day like hooligans, after all, can we, damn it all? Ought to be havin’ a first-rate eddication, at their age. When I was their age I was doin’ all this Latin and stuff at five o’clock every mornin’. Happiest time of my life. Pass the port.”
Sir Grummore Grummursum, who was staying the night because he had been benighted out questin’ after a specially long run, said that when he was their age he was swished every mornin’ because he would go hawkin’ instead of learnin’. He attributed to this weakness the fact that he could never get beyond the Future Simple of Utor. It was a third of the way down the left-hand page, he said. He thought it was page ninety-seven. He passed the port.
Sir Ector said, “Had a good quest today?”
Sir Grummore said, “Oh, not so bad. Rattlin’ good day, in fact. Found a chap called Sir Bruce Saunce Pité choppin’ off a maiden’s head in Weedon Bushes, ran him to Mixbury Plantation in the Bicester, where he doubled back, and lost him in Wicken Wood. Must have been a good twenty-five miles as he ran.”
“A straight-necked ’un,” said Sir Ector.
“But about these boys and all this Latin and that,” added Sir Ector. “Amo, amas, you know, and runnin’ about like hooligans: what would you advise?”
“Ah,” said Sir Grummore, laying his finger by his nose and winking at the port, “that takes a deal of thinkin’ about, if you don’t mind my sayin’ so.”
“Don’t mind at all,” said Sir Ector. “Very kind of you to say anythin’. Much obliged, I’m sure. Help yourself to port.”
“Good port this,” said Sir Grummore.
“Get it from a friend of mine,” said Sir Ector.
“But about these boys,” said Sir Grummore. “How many of them are there, do you know?”
“Two,” said Sir Ector, “counting them both, that is.”
“Couldn’t send them to Eton, I suppose?” inquired Sir Grummore cautiously. “Long way and all that, we know.”
“Isn’t so much the distance,” said Sir Ector, “but that giant What’s-’is-name is in the way. Have to pass through his country, you understand.”
“What is his name?”
“Can’t recollect it at the moment, not for the life of me. Fellow that lives by the burbly water.”
“Ah, Galapas,” said Sir Grummore.
“That’s the very chap.”
“The only other thing,” said Sir Grummore, “is to have a tutor.”
“You mean a fellow who teaches you,” said Sir Ector wisely.
“That’s it,” said Sir Grummore. “A tutor, you know, a fellow who teaches you.”
“Have some more port,” said Sir Ector. “You need it after all this questin’.”
“Splendid day,” said Sir Grummore. “Only they never seem to kill nowadays. Run twenty-five miles and then mark to ground or lose him altogether. The worst is when you start a fresh quest.”
“We kill all our giants cubbin’,” said Sir Ector. “After that they give you a fine run, but get away.”
“Run out of scent,” said Sir Grummore, “I dare say. It’s always the same with these big giants in a big country. They run out of scent.”
“But even if you were to have a tutor,” said Sir Ector. “I don’t see how you would get him.”
“Advertise,” said Sir Grummore.
“I have advertised,” said Sir Ector. “I put it in the Humberland News and Cardoile Advertiser.”
“The only other way,” said Sir Grummore, “is to start a quest.”
“You mean a quest for a tutor,” explained Sir Ector.
“That’s it,” said Sir Grummore.
“Hic, Hac, Hoc,” said Sir Ector. “Have some more port.”
“Hunc,” said Sir Grummore.
So it was decided. When Sir Grummore Grummursum had gone away next day, Sir Ector tied a knot in his handkerchief to remember to start a quest for a tutor as soon as he had time, and, as he was not quite sure how to set about it, he told the boys what Sir Grummore had suggested and warned them not to be hooligans meanwhile. Then they went haymaking.
It was July, and every able-bodied man and woman on the estate worked all that month in the field, under Sir Ector’s direction. In any case the boys would have been excused from being eddicated just then.
Sir Ector’s castle stood in an enormous clearing in a still more enormous forest. It had a big green courtyard and a moat with pike in it. The moat was crossed by a strongly-fortified stone bridge which ended halfway across it: the other half was covered by a wooden drawbridge which was wound up every night. As soon as you had crossed the draw-bridge you were at the top of the village street – it had only one street – and this extended for about half a mile, with little white thatched houses of mud on either side of it. The street divided the clearing into two huge fields, that on the left being cultivated in hundreds of long narrow strips, while that on the right ran down to a little river and was used as pasture. Half of the right-hand field was fenced off for hay.
It was July, and real July weather, such as they only had in old England. Everybody went bright brown like Red Indians with startling teeth and flashing eyes. The dogs moved about with their tongues hanging out, or lay panting in bits of shade, while the farm horses sweated through their coats and flicked their tails and tried to kick the horseflies off their bellies with their great hind hoofs. In the pasture field the cows were on the gad, and could be seen galloping about with their tails in the air, which made Sir Ector angry.
Sir Ector stood on the top of a rick, whence he could see what everybody was doing, and shouted commands all over the two-hundred-acre field, and grew purple in the face. The best mowers mowed away in a line where the grass was still uncut, their scythes roaring all together in the strong sunlight. The women raked the dry hay together in long lines, with wooden rakes, and two boys with pitchforks followed up on either side of the line turning the hay inwards so that it lay well for picking up. Then the great carts followed, rumbling with their spiked wooden wheels, and drawn by horses or slow white oxen. One man stood on top of the cart to receive the hay and direct operations, while one man walked on either side picking up what the boys had prepared and throwing it to him with a fork. The cart was led down the lane between two lines of hay, and was loaded in strict rotation from the front poles to the back, the man on top calling out in a stern voice where he wanted each fork to be pitched. The loaders grumbled at the boys for not having laid the hay properly and threatened to tan them when they caught them, if they got left behind.
When the waggon was loaded, it was drawn to Sir Ector’s rick and pitched to him. It came up easily because it had been loaded systematically – not like modern hay – and Sir Ector scrambled about on top, getting in the way of the two assistants, who did all the real work, and stamping and perspiring and scratching about with his fork and trying to make the rick grow straight and shouting that it would all fall down as soon as the west winds came.
The Wart loved haymaking, and was good at it. Kay, who was two years older, generally stood on the edge of the bundle of hay which he was trying to pick up, with the result that he worked twice as hard as the Wart for only half the result. But he hated to be beaten by anybody at anything and used to fight away with the wretched hay – which he loathed like poison – until he was quite sick.
The day after Sir Grummore’s visit was hot, sweltering for the men who toiled from milking to milking and then again till sunset in their battle with the sultry element. For the hay was an element to them, like sea or air, in which they bathed and plunged themselves and which they even breathed in. The seeds and small scraps stuck in their hair, their mouths, their nostrils, and worked, tickling, inside their clothes. They did not wear many clothes, and the shadows between their sliding muscles were blue on the nut-brown skins. Those who feared thunder had felt ill that morning.
In the afternoon a terrible storm came. Sir Ector kept them at it till the great flashes were right overhead, and then, with the sky as dark as night, the rain came hurling against them so that they were drenched at once and could not see a hundred yards. The boys lay crouched under the waggons, wrapped in hay to keep their wet bodies warm against the now cold wind, and all joked with one another while heaven fell. Kay was shivering, though not with cold, but he joked like the others because he would not show he was afraid. At the last and greatest thunderbolt every man startled involuntarily, and each saw the other startle, until they all laughed away their shame.
But that was the end of the haymaking for them and the beginning of play. The boys were sent home to change their clothes. The old dame who had been their nurse fetched dry jerkins out of a press, and scolded them for catching their deaths, and denounced Sir Ector for keeping them on so long. Then they slipped their heads into the laundered shirts, and ran out into the refreshed and sparkling court.
“I vote we take Cully and see if we can get some rabbits in the chase,” cried the Wart.
“The rabbits won’t be out in this wet,” said Kay sarcastically, delighted to have caught him out over natural history.
“Oh, come on,” said the Wart. “It’ll soon dry.”
“I must carry Cully, then.”
Kay insisted on carrying the goshawk and flying her, when they went out together. This he had a right to do, not only because he was older than the Wart but also because he was Sir Ector’s proper son. The Wart was not a proper son. He did not understand about this, but it made him feel unhappy, because Kay seemed to regard it as making him inferior in some way. Also it was different not having a father and mother, and Kay had taught him that being different was necessarily wrong. Nobody talked to him about it, but he thought about it when he was alone, and was distressed. He did not like people to bring it up, and since the other boy always did bring it up when a question of precedence arose, he had got into the habit of giving in at once before it could be mentioned. Besides, he admired Kay and was a born follower. He was a hero-worshipper.
“Come on, then,” cried the Wart, and they scampered off towards the mews, turning a few cartwheels on the way.
The mews was one of the most important parts of the castle, next to the stables and the kennels. It was opposite to the solar and faced south. The outside windows had to be small, for reasons of fortification, but the windows which looked inwards to the courtyard were big and sunny. All the windows had close vertical slats nailed down them, but no horizontal ones. There was no glass, but to keep the hawks from draughts there was horn in the small windows. At one end of the mews there was a little fireplace and a kind of snuggery, like the place in a saddle-room where the grooms sit to clean their tack on wet winter nights after hunting. Here there were a couple of stools, a cauldron, a bench with all sorts of small knives and surgical instruments, and some shelves with pots on them. The pots were labelled Cardamum, Ginger, Barley Sugar, Wrangle, For a Snurt, For the Craye, Vertigo, etc. There were leather skins hanging up, which had been snipped about as pieces were cut out of them for jesses, hoods or leashes. On the neat row of nails there were Indian bells and swivels and silver varvels each with Ector cut on. A special shelf, and the most beautiful of all, held the hoods: very old cracked rufter hoods which had been made for birds before Kay was born, tiny hoods for the merlins, small hoods for tiercels, splendid new hoods which had been knocked up to pass away the long winter evenings. All the hoods, except the rufters, were made in Sir Ector’s colours: white leather with red baize at the sides and a bunch of blue grey plumes on top, made out of the hackle feathers of herons. On the bench there was a jumble of oddments such as are to be found in every workshop, bits of cord, wire, metal, tools, some bread, and cheese which the mice had been at, a leather bottle, some frayed gauntlets for the left hand, nails, bits of sacking, a couple of lures and some rough tallies scratched on the wood. These read: Conays IIIIIIII, Harn III, etc. They were not spelt very well.
Right down the length of the room, with the afternoon sun shining full on them, there ran the screen perches to which the birds were tied. There were two little merlins which had only just been taken up from hacking, an old peregrine who was not much use in this wooded country but who was kept for appearances, a kestrel on which the boys had learnt the rudiments of falconry, a spar-hawk which Sir Ector was kind enough to keep for the parson, and caged off in a special apartment of his own at the far end, there was the tiercel goshawk Cully.
The Mews was neatly kept, with sawdust on the floor to absorb the mutes, and the castings taken up every day. Sir Ector visited the mews each morning at seven o’clock and the two austringers stood at attention outside the door. If they had forgotten to brush their hair he confined them to barracks. They took no notice.
Kay put on one of the left-handed gauntlets and called Cully from the perch; but Cully, with all his feathers close-set and malevolent, glared at him with a mad marigold eye and refused to come. So Kay took him up.
“Do you think we ought to fly him?” asked the Wart doubtfully. “Deep in the moult like this?”
“Of course we can fly him, yon ninny,” said Kay. “He only wants to be carried a bit, that’s all.”
So they went out across the hay-field, noting how the carefully-raked hay was now sodden again and losing its goodness, into the chase where the trees began to grow, far apart as yet and parklike, but gradually crowding into the forest shade. The conies had hundreds of buries under these trees, so close together that the problem was not to find a rabbit, but find a rabbit far enough away from its hole.
“Hob says that we mustn’t fly Cully till he has roused at least twice,” said the Wart.
“Hob doesn’t know anything about it,” said the other boy. “Nobody can tell whether a hawk is fit to fly except the man who is carrying it.
“Hob is only a villein anyway,” added Kay, and began to undo the leash and swivel from the jesses.
When he felt the trappings being taken off him, so that he was in hunting order, Cully did make some movements as if to rouse. He raised his crest, his shoulders coverts and the soft feathers of his thighs, but at the last moment he thought better or worse of it and subsided without the rattle. This movement of the hawk’s made the Wart itch to carry him, so that he yearned to take him away from Kay and set him to rights himself. He felt certain that he could get Cully into a good temper by scratching his feet and softly teasing his breast feathers upwards, if only he were allowed to do it himself, instead of having to plod along behind with the stupid lure; but he knew how annoying it must be for Kay to be continually subjected to advice, and so he held his peace. Just as in modern shooting you must never offer criticism to the man in command, so in hawking it was important that no outside advice should be allowed to disturb the judgement of the actual austringer.
“So-ho!” cried Kay, throwing his arms upwards to give the hawk a better take-off, and a rabbit was scooting across the close-nibbled turf in front of them, and Cully was in the air. The movement had surprised the Wart, the rabbit and the hawk, all three, and all three hung a moment in surprise. Then the great wings of the aerial assassin began to row the air, but reluctantly and undecided, the rabbit vanished in a hidden hole, and up went the hawk, swooping like a child flung high in a swing, until the wings folded and he was sitting in a tree. Cully looked down at his masters, opened his beak in an angry pant of failure, and remained motionless. The two hearts stood still.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_4d707b50-31b2-5401-8900-2d6f5f1aba9f)
A good while after that, when they had been whistling and luring and following the disturbed and sulky hawk from tree to tree, Kay lost his temper.
“Let him go, then,” said Kay. “He’s no use anyway.”
“Oh, we couldn’t leave him,” cried the Wart. “What would Hob say?”
“It’s my hawk, not Hob’s,” exclaimed Kay furiously. “What does it matter what Hob says? He is my servant.”
“But Hob made Cully. It’s all right for us to lose him, for we didn’t have to sit up with him three nights and carry him all day and all that. We can’t lose Hob’s hawk. It would be beastly.”
“Serve him right, then. He’s a fool and it’s a rotten hawk. Who wants a rotten, stupid hawk? You’d better stay yourself, if you’re so keen on it. I’m going home.”
“I’ll stay,” said the Wart sadly, “if you’ll send Hob when you get back.”
Kay began walking off in the wrong direction, raging in his heart because he knew that he had flown the bird when he was not properly in yarak, and the Wart had to shout after him the right way. Then he sat down under the tree and looked up at Cully like a cat watching a sparrow, but with his heart beating fast.
It was all right for Kay, who was not really keen on hawking except in so far as it was the proper occupation for a boy in his station of life, but the Wart had some of the falconer’s feelings and knew that a lost hawk was the greatest possible calamity. He knew that Hob had worked on Cully for fourteen hours a day, over a period of months, in order to teach him his trade, and that his work had been like Jacob’s struggle with the angel. When Cully was lost a part of Hob was lost too. The Wart did not dare to face the look of reproach which would be in Hob’s eye, after all that he had tried to teach them.
What was he to do? He had better sit still, leaving the lure on the ground, so that Cully could settle down and come in his own time. But Cully had no intention of doing this. He had been given a generous crop the night before, so that he was not hungry: the hot day had put him in a bad temper: the waving and whistling of the boys below him, and their pursuit of him from tree to tree, had disturbed his never very powerful brains. Now he did not quite know what he wanted to do, but it was not what anybody else wanted. He thought perhaps it would be nice to kill something, just from spite.
A long time after that, the Wart was on the verge of the true forest, and Cully inside it. In a series of infuriating removes they had come nearer and nearer, till they were further from the castle than the Wart had ever been, and now they had reached it quite.
Wart would not have been frightened of a forest nowadays, but the great jungle of old England was a different thing. It was not only that there were wild boars in it, whose sounders would at this season be furiously rooting about, nor that one of the surviving wolves might be slinking behind any tree, with pale eyes and slavering chops. The man and wicked animals were not the only inhabitants of the crowded gloom. When men themselves became mad and wicked they took refuge there, outlaws cunning and bloody as the gorecrow, and as persecuted. The Wart thought particularly of a man named Wat, whose name the cottagers used to frighten their children with. He had once lived in Sir Ector’s village and the Wart could remember him. He squinted, had no nose, and was weak in his wits. The children threw stones at him. One day he turned on the children and caught one and made a snarly noise and bit off his nose too. Then he ran away into the forest. They threw stones at the child with no nose, now, but Wat was supposed to be in the forest still, running on all fours and dressed in skins.
There were magicians in the forest also in those days, as well as strange animals not known to modern works of natural history. There were regular bands of outlaws, not like Wat, who lived together and wore green and shot with arrows which never missed. There were even a few dragons, though they were rather small ones, which lived under stones and could hiss like a kettle.
Added to this, there was the fact that it was getting dark. The forest was trackless and nobody in the village knew what was on the other side. The evening hush had fallen, and all the high trees stood looking at the Wart without a sound.
He felt that it would be safer to go home, while he still knew where he was; but he had a stout heart, and did not want to give in. He understood that once Cully had slept in freedom for a whole night he would be wild again and irreclaimable. Cully was a passager. But if the poor Wart could only make him to roost, and if Hob would only arrive then with a dark lantern, they might still take him that night by climbing the tree, while he was sleepy and muddled with the light. He could see more or less where the hawk had perched, about a hundred yards within the thick trees, because the home-going rooks of evening were mobbing that place.
Wart made a mark on one of the trees outside the forest, hoping that it might help him to find his way back, and then began to fight his way into the undergrowth as best he might. He heard by the rooks that Cully had immediately moved further off.
The night fell still as the small boy struggled with the brambles; but he went on doggedly, listening with all his ears, and Cully’s evasions became sleepier and shorter until at last, before the utter darkness fell, he could see the hunched shoulders in a tree above him against the sky. Wart sat down under the tree, so as not to disturb the bird any further as it went to sleep, and Cully, standing on one leg, ignored his existence.
“Perhaps,” said the Wart to himself, “even if Hob doesn’t come, and I don’t see how he can very well follow me in this trackless forest now, I shall be able to climb up by myself at about midnight because he ought to be deep in sleep then. I could speak to him softly by name, so that he thought it was just the usual person coming to take him up while hooded. I shall have to climb very quietly. Then, if I do get him, I shall have to find my way home, and the drawbridge will be up. But perhaps somebody will wait for me, for Kay will have told them I am out. I wonder which way it was? I wish Kay had not gone.”
He snuggled down between the roots of the tree, trying to find a comfortable place where the hard wood did not stick into his shoulder blades.
“I think the way was behind that big spruce with the spiky top. I ought to try to remember which side of me the sun is setting, so that when it rises I may keep it on the same side going home. Did something move under that spruce tree, I wonder? Oh, I wish I may not meet that old wild Wat and have my nose bitten off. How aggravating Cully looks, standing there on one leg as if there was nothing the matter.”
At this there was a quick whirr and a smack, and the Wart found an arrow sticking in the tree wood between the fingers of his right hand. He snatched his hand away, thinking he had been stung by something, before he noticed it was an arrow. Then everything went slow. He had time to notice quite carefully what sort of an arrow it was, and how it had driven three inches into the solid wood. It was a black arrow with yellow bands round it, like a horrible wasp, and its cock feather was yellow. The two others were black. They were goose feathers.
The Wart found that, although he was frightened of the danger of the forest before it happened, once he was in it he was not frightened any more. He got up quickly, but it seemed to him slowly, and went behind the other side of the tree. As he did this, another arrow came whirr and tock, but this one buried all except its feathers in the grass, and stayed there still, as if it had never moved.
On the other side of the tree he found a waste of bracken, six foot high. This was splendid cover, but it betrayed his whereabouts by rustling. He heard another arrow hiss through the fronds, and what seemed to be a man’s voice cursing, but it was not very near. Then he heard the man, or whatever it was, running about in the bracken. It was reluctant to fire any more arrows because they were valuable things and would certainly get lost in the undergrowth. Wart went like a snake, like a coney, like a silent owl. He was small and the creature had no chance against him in this game. In five minutes he was safe.
The assassin searched for his arrows and went away grumbling; but the Wart realized that, even if he was safe, he had lost his way and his hawk. He had not the faintest idea where he was. He lay down for half an hour, pressed under the fallen tree where he had hidden to give time for the thing to go right away and for his own heart to cease its thundering. It had begun beating like this as soon as he knew he had got away from the outlaw.
“Oh,” thought the Wart, “now I am truly lost, and now there is almost no alternative except to have my nose bitten off, or to be pierced right through with one of those waspy arrows, or to be eaten by a hissing dragon or a wolf or a wild boar or a magician – if magicians do eat boys, which I expect they do. Now I may well wish that I had been a good boy, and not angered the governess when she got muddled with her astrolabe, and had loved my dear guardian Sir Ector as much as he deserved.”
At these melancholy thoughts, and especially at the recollections of kind Sir Ector with his pitchfork and his big red nose, the poor Wart’s eyes became full of tears and he lay most desolate beneath the tree.
The sun finished the last rays of its lingering goodbye, and the moon rose in awful majesty over the silver treetops, before he dared to rise. Then he got up, and dusted the twigs out of his jerkin, and wandered off forlornly, taking the easiest way always and trusting himself to God. He had been walking like this for about half an hour, and sometimes sighing to himself and sometimes feeling more cheerful – because it really was very cool and lovely in the summer forest by moonlight – when he came upon the most beautiful thing that he had ever seen in his short life.
There was a clearing in the forest, a wide sward of moonlit grass, and the white rays shone full upon the tree trunks on the opposite side. These trees were beeches, whose trunks are always most beautiful in a pearly light, and among the beeches there was the smallest movement and a silvery clink. Before the clink there were just beeches, but immediately afterwards there was a Knight in full armour, standing still, and silent and unearthly, among the majestic trunks. He was mounted on an enormous white horse that stood as rapt as its master, and he carried in his right hand, with its butt resting on the stirrup, a high, smooth jousting lance, which stood up among the tree stumps, higher and higher, till it was outlined against the velvet sky. All was moonlit, all silver, too beautiful to describe.
The Wart did not know what to do. He did not know whether it would be safe to go up to this Knight, for there were so many terrible things in the forest that even the Knight might be a ghost. Most ghostly he looked, too, as he hoved meditating on the confines of the gloom. Eventually the Wart made up his mind that even if it was a ghost, it would be the ghost of a Knight, and Knights were bound by their vows to help people in distress.
“Excuse me,” said the Wart, when he was right under the mysterious figure, “but can you tell me the way back to Sir Ector’s castle?”
At this the ghost jumped violently, so that it nearly fell off its horse, and gave out a muffled baaaing noise through its visor, like a flock of sheep.
“Excuse me,” began the Wart again, and stopped, terrified, in the middle of his speech.
For the ghost lifted up its visor, revealing two enormous eyes frosted like ice; exclaimed in an anxious voice, “What, what?”; took off its eyes – which turned out to be horn-rimmed spectacles, completely fogged by being inside the helmet; tried to wipe them on the horse’s mane – which only made them worse; lifted both hands above its head and tried to wipe them on its plume; dropped its lance; dropped the spectacles, got off the horse to search for them – the visor shutting in the process; lifted its visor; bent down for the spectacles; stood up again as the visor shut once more, and exclaimed in a plaintive voice, “Deah, deah!”
The Wart found the spectacles, wiped them, and gave them to the ghost, who immediately put them on (the visor shut again at once) and began scrambling back on the horse for dear life. When it was there it held out its hand for the lance, which the Wart handed up, and, feeling all secure, opened its visor with its left hand and held it open. It peered at the Wart with one hand up, like a lost mariner searching for land, and exclaimed, “Ah – hah; whom have we heah, what what?”
“Please,” said the Wart, “I am a boy whose guardian is Sir Ector.”
“Charming fellah,” said the Knight. “Charming fellah. Never met him in my life.”
“Can you tell me the way back to his castle?”
“Faintest ideah,” said the Knight. “Faintest ideah. Stranger in these parts meself.”
“I have got lost,” said the Wart.
“Funny thing that. Funny thing that, what? Now Ay have been lost for seventeen years.
“Name of King Pellinore,” continued the Knight. “May have heard of me, what?” Here the visor shut with a pop, like an echo to the What, but was opened again immediately. “Seventeen years ago, come Michaelmas, and been after the Questing Beast ever since. Boring, very.”
“I should think it would be,” said the Wart, who had never heard of King Pellinore, or the Questing Beast, but felt that this was the safest thing to say in the circumstances.
“It is the burden of the Pellinores,” said the Knight proudly. “Only a Pellinore can catch it; that is, of course, or his next of kin. Train all the Pellinores with that ideah in mind. Limited eddication, rather. Fewmets, and all that.”
“I know what fewmets are,” said the Wart with interest. “They are the droppings of the beast pursued. The harbourer keeps them in his horn, to show to his master, and can tell by them whether it is a warrantable beast or otherwise, and what state it is in.”
“Intelligent child,” remarked King Pellinore. “Very. Now Ay carry fewmets about with me practically all the time.
“Insanitary habit,” added the King, beginning to look rather dejected, “and quite pointless. Only one Questing Beast, you know, what, so there can’t be any question whether it is warrantable or not.”
Here his visor began to droop so much that the Wart decided he had better forget his own troubles and try to cheer his companion up, by asking questions on the one subject about which King Pellinore seemed qualified to speak. Even talking to a lost royalty was better than being alone in the wood.
“What does the Questing Beast look like?”
“Ah, we call it the Beast Glatisant, you know,” replied the monarch, assuming a learned air and beginning to speak quite volubly. “Now the Beast Glatisant, or, as we say in English, the Questing Beast – you may call it either,” he added graciously, – “this Beast has the head of a serpent, ah, and the body of a libbard, the haunches of a lion, and he is footed like a hart. Wherever this beast goes he makes a noise in his belly as it had been the noise of thirty couples of hounds questing.
“Except when he is drinking, of course,” added the King severely, as if he had rather shocked himself by leaving this out.
“It must be a dreadful kind of monster,” said the Wart, looking at him anxiously.
“A dreadful monster,” repeated the other complacently. “It is the Beast Glatisant, you know.”
“And how do you follow it?”
This seemed to be the wrong kind of question, for King Pellinore immediately began to look much more depressed than ever, and glanced over his shoulder so hurriedly that his visor shut down altogether.
“Ay have a brachet,” said King Pellinore sadly, as soon as he had restored himself. “There she is, over theah.”
The Wart looked in the direction which had been indicated with a despondent thumb, and saw a lot of rope wound round a tree. The other end of the rope was tied to King Pellinore’s saddle.
“I don’t see her very well.”
“Wound herself round the other side of the tree, Ay dare say,” said the King, without looking round. “She always goes the opposite way to me.”
The Wart went over to the tree and found a large white dog scratching herself for fleas. As soon as she saw the Wart, she began wagging her whole body, grinning vacuously, and panting in her efforts to lick his face in spite of the cord. She was too tangled up to move.
“It’s quite a good brachet,” said King Pellinore, “only it pants so, and gets wound round things, and goes the opposite way. What with that and the visor, what, Ay sometimes don’t know which way to turn.”
“Why don’t you let her loose?” asked the Wart. “She would follow the Beast just as well like that.”
“She just goes right away then, you know, and Ay don’t see her sometimes for a week.
“Gets a bit lonely without her,” added the King wistfully, “following this Beast about, what, and never knowing where one is. Makes a bit of company, you know.”
“She seems to have a friendly nature,” said the Wart.
“Too friendly. Sometimes Ay doubt whether she is really after the Beast at all.”
“What does she do when she sees it?”
“Nothing,” said King Pellinore.
“Oh, well,” said the Wart, “I dare say she will get to be interested in it after a time.”
“It’s eight months anyway since Ay saw the Beast at all.”
King Pellinore’s voice had got sadder and sadder since the beginning of the conversation, and now he definitely began to sniffle. “It’s the curse of the Pellinores,” he exclaimed. “Always mollocking about after that beastly Beast. What on earth use is it, anyway? First you have to stop to unwind the brachet, then your visor falls down, then you can’t see through your spectacles. Nowhere to sleep, never know where you are. Rheumatism in the winter, sunstroke in the summer. All this beastly armour takes hours to put on. When it is on it’s either frying or freezing, and it gets rusty. You have to sit up all night polishing the stuff. Oh, how Ay do wish Ay had a nice house of my own to live in, a house with beds in it and real pillows and sheets. If Ay was rich that’s what Ay would buy. A nice bed with a nice pillow and a nice sheet that you could lie in, and then Ay would put this beastly horse in a meadow and tell that beastly brachet to run away and play, and throw all this beastly armour out of the window, and let the beastly Beast go and chase itself, that Ay would.”
“If you could only show me the way home,” said the Wart craftily, “I am sure Sir Ector would put you up in a bed for the night.”
“Do you really mean it?” cried King Pellinore. “In a bed?”
“A feather bed,” said the Wart firmly.
King Pellinore’s eyes grew as round as saucers.
“A feather bed!” he repeated slowly. “Would it have pillows?”
“Down pillows.”
“Down pillows!” whispered the King, holding his breath. And then, letting it all out in a rush. “What a lovely house your guardian must have!”
“I don’t think it is more than two hours away,” said the Wart, following up his advantage.
“And did this gentleman really send you out to invite me in?” inquired the King wonderingly. (He had forgotten all about the Wart being lost.) “How nice of him, how very nice of him, Ay do think, what?”
“He will be very pleased to see us,” said the Wart, quite truthfully.
“Oh, how nice of him,” exclaimed the King again, beginning to bustle about his various trappings. “And what a lovely gentleman he must be, to have a feather bed!
“Ay suppose Ay should have to share it with somebody?” he added doubtfully.
“You could have one of your very own.”
“A feather bed of one’s very own,” exclaimed King Pellinore, “with sheets and a pillow – perhaps even two pillows, or a pillow and a bolster – and no need to get up in time for breakfast!
“Does your guardian get up in time for breakfast?” inquired the King, a momentary doubt striking him.
“Never,” said the Wart.
“Fleas in the bed?” asked the King suspiciously.
“Not one.”
“Well!” said King Pellinore. “It does sound too nice for words, Ay must say. A feather bed and none of those beastly fewmets for ever so long. How long did you say it would take us to get there?”
“Two hours,” said the Wart; but he had to shout the second of these words, for the sounds were drowned in his mouth by a dreadful noise which had that moment arisen close beside them.
“What was that?” exclaimed the Wart.
“Hark!” cried the King.
“Oh, mercy!” wailed the Wart.
“It’s the Beast!” shouted the King.
And immediately the loving huntsman had forgotten everything else, but was busied about his task. He wiped his spectacles upon the seat of his trousers, the only accessible piece of cloth about him, while the belling and bloody cry arose all round; balanced them on the end of his long nose, just before the visor automatically clapped to; clutched his jousting lance in his right hand, and galloped off in the direction of the noise. He was brought up short by the rope which was wound round the tree – the vacuous brachet meanwhile giving a melancholy yelp – and fell off his horse with a tremendous clang. In a second he was up again – the Wart was convinced that his spectacles must be broken – and hopping round the white horse with one foot in the stirrup. The girths stood the test and he was in the saddle somehow, with his jousting lance between his legs, and then he was galloping round and round the tree, in the opposite direction to that in which the brachet had wound herself up. He went round three times too often, the brachet meanwhile running and yelping in the opposite direction, and then, after four or five back casts, they were both free of the obstruction. “Yoicks, what!” cried King Pellinore, waving his lance in the air, and swaying excitedly in the saddle. Then he disappeared completely into the gloom of the forest, with the unfortunate brachet trailing and howling behind him at the other end of the string.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_37866286-0b83-5b1a-a779-523de9614c07)
The Wart slept well in the woodland nest where he had laid himself down, in that kind of thin but refreshing sleep which people have when they first lie out of doors. At first he only dipped below the surface of sleep, and skimmed along like a salmon in shallow water, so close to the surface that he fancied himself in the air. He thought himself awake when he was already asleep. He saw the stars above his face, whirling round on their silent and sleepless axis, and the leaves of the trees rustling against them, and heard small changes in the grass. These little noises of footsteps and soft-fringed wing-beats and stealthy bellies drawn over the grass blades or rattling against the bracken at first frightened or interested him, so that he moved to see what they were (but never saw), then soothed him, so that he no longer cared to see what they were but trusted them to be themselves, and finally left him altogether as he swam down deeper and deeper, nuzzling his nose into the scented turf, into the warm ground, into the unending waters under the earth.
It had been difficult to go to sleep in the bright summer moonlight, but once he was there it was not difficult to stay. The sun came early, causing him to turn over in protest, but in going to sleep he had learnt to vanquish light, and now the light could not rewake him. It was nine o’clock, five hours after daylight, before he rolled over, opened his eyes, and was awake at once. He was hungry.
The Wart had heard about people who lived on berries, but this did not seem practical at the moment because it was July, and there were none. He found two wild strawberries and ate them greedily. They tasted nicer than anything, so he wished there were more. Then he wished it was April, so that he could find some birds’ eggs and eat those, or that he had not lost his goshawk Cully, so that the bird could catch him a rabbit which he would cook by rubbing two sticks together like the base Indian. But he had lost Cully, or he would not have lost himself, and probably the sticks would not have lit in any case. He decided that he could not have gone more than three or four miles from home, so the best thing he could do would be to sit still and listen. Then he might hear the noise of the haymakers, if he was lucky with the wind, and could hearken his way home by that.
What he did hear was a faint clanking noise, which made him think that King Pellinore must be after the Questing Beast again, close by. Only the noise was so regular and single in intention that it made him think of King Pellinore doing some special action with great patience and concentration, trying to scratch his back without taking off his armour, for instance. He went towards the noise.
There was a clearing in the forest, and in this clearing there was a snug little cottage built of stone. It was a cottage, although the Wart could not notice this at the time, which was divided into two bits. The main bit was the hall or every-purpose room, which was high because it extended from floor to roof, and this room had a fire on the floor whose smoke issued eventually out of a hole in the thatch of the roof. The other half of the cottage was divided into two rooms by a horizontal floor which made the top half into a bedroom and study, while the bottom half served for a larder, store-room, stable and barn. A white donkey lived in this downstairs room, and a ladder led to the one upstairs.
There was a well in front of the cottage, and the metallic noise which the Wart had heard was caused by a very old gentleman who was drawing water out of it by means of a handle and chain.
Clank, clank, clank, said the chain, until the bucket hit the lip of the well, and “Oh, drat the whole thing,” said the old gentleman. You would think that after all these years of study one could do better for oneself than a by-our-lady well with a by-our-lady bucket, whatever the by-our-lady cost.
“I wish to goodness,” added the old gentleman, heaving his bucket out of the well with a malevolent glance, “that I was only on the electric light and company’s water, drat it.”
The old gentleman that the Wart saw was a singular spectacle. He was dressed in a flowing gown with fur tippets which had the signs of the zodiac embroidered all over it, together with various cabalistic signs, as of triangles with eyes in them, queer crosses, leaves of trees, bones and birds and animals and a planetarium whose stars shone like bits of looking glass with the sun on them. He had a pointed hat like a dunce’s cap, or like the headgear worn by ladies of that time, except that the ladies were accustomed to have a bit of veil floating from the top of it. He also had a wand of lignum vitae, which he had laid down in the grass beside him, and a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles like those of King Pellinore. They were extraordinary spectacles, being without earpieces, but shaped rather like scissors or the the antennae of the tarantula wasp.
“Excuse me, sir,” said the Wart, “but can you tell me the way to Sir Ector’s castle, if you don’t mind?”
The aged gentleman put down his bucket and looked at the Wart.
“Your name would be Wart,” he said.
“Yes, sir, please, sir,” said the Wart.
“My name,” said the aged gentleman, “is Merlyn.”
“How do you do?” said the Wart.
“How do you do?” said Merlyn. “It is clement weather, is it not?”
“It is,” said the Wart, “for the time of the year.”
When these formalities had been concluded, the Wart had leisure to examine his new acquaintance more closely. The aged gentleman was staring at him with a kind of unwinking and benevolent curiosity which made him feel that it would not be at all rude to stare back, no ruder than it would be to stare at one of his guardian’s cows who happened to be ruminating his personality as she leant her head over a gate.
Merlyn had a long white beard and long white moustache which hung down on either side of it, and close inspection showed that he was far from clean. It was not that he had dirty finger-nails or anything like that, but some large bird seemed to have been nesting in his hair. The Wart was familiar with the nests of spar-hawk and gos, those crazy conglomerations of sticks and oddments which had been taken over from squirrels and crows, and he knew how the twigs and the tree foot were splashed with white mutes, old bones, muddy feathers and castings. This was the impression which he gathered from Merlyn. The old gentleman was streaked with droppings over his shoulders, among the stars and triangles of his gown, and a large spider was slowly lowering itself from the tip of his hat, as he gazed and slowly blinked at the little boy in front of him. He had a faintly worried expression, as though he were trying to remember some name which began with Chol but which was pronounced in quite a different way, possibly Menzies or was it Dalziel? His mild blue eyes, very big and round under the tarantula spectacles, gradually filmed and clouded over as he gazed at the boy, and then he turned his head away with a resigned expression, as though it was all too much for him after all.
“Do you like peaches?” asked the old gentleman.
“Very much indeed,” answered the Wart, and his mouth began to water so that it was full of sweet, soft liquid.
“It is only July, you know,” said the old man reprovingly, and walked off in the direction of the cottage without looking round.
The Wart followed after him, since this was the simplest thing to do, and offered to carry the bucket (which seemed to please the old gentleman, who gave it to him) and waited while he counted his keys, and muttered and mislaid them and dropped them in the grass. Finally, when they had got their way into the black and white cottage with as much trouble as if they were burglaring it, he climbed up the ladder after his host and found himself in the upstairs room.
It was the most marvellous room that the Wart had ever been in.
There was a real corkindrill hanging from the rafters, very lifelike and horrible with glass eyes and scaly tail stretched out behind it. When its master came into the room it winked one eye in salutation, although it was stuffed. There were hundreds of thousands of brown books in leather bindings, some chained to the bookshelves and others propped up against each other as if they had had too much spirits to drink and did not really trust themselves. These gave out a smell of must and solid brownness which was most secure. Then there were stuffed birds, popinjays, and maggot-pies, and kingfishers, and peacocks with all their feathers but two, and tiny birds like beetles, and a reputed phoenix which smelt of incense and cinnamon. It could not have been a real phoenix, because there is only one of these at a time. Over the mantelpiece there was a fox’s mask, with GRAFTON. BUCKINGHAM TO DAVENTRY, 2 HRS 20 MINS written under it, and also a forty-pound salmon with AWE, 43 MIN., BULLDOG written under it, and a very life-like basilisk with CROWHURST OTTER HOUNDS in Roman print. There were several boars’ tusks and the claws of tigers and libbards mounted in symmetrical patterns, and a big head of Ovis Poli, six live grass snakes in a kind of aquarium, some nests of the solitary wasp nicely set up in a glass cylinder, an ordinary beehive whose inhabitants went in and out of the window unmolested, two young hedgehogs in cotton wool, a pair of badgers which immediately began to cry Yik-Yik-Yik-Yik in loud voices as soon as the magician appeared, twenty boxes which contained stick caterpillars and sixths of the puss-moth, and even an oleander that was worth two and six, all feeding on the appropriate leaves, a guncase with all sorts of weapons which would not be invented for half a thousand years, a rod-box ditto, a lovely chest of drawers full of salmon flies which had been tied by Merlyn himself, another chest whose drawers were labelled Mandragora, Mandrake, Old Man’s Beard, etc., a bunch of turkey feathers and goose-quills for making pens, an astrolabe, twelve pairs of boots, a dozen purse-nets, three dozen rabbit wires, twelve corkscrews, an ant’s nest between two glass plates, ink-bottles of every possible colour from red to violet, darning-needles, a gold medal for being the best scholar at Eton, four or five recorders, a nest of field mice all alive-o, two skulls, plenty of cut glass, Venetian glass, Bristol glass and a bottle of Mastic varnish, some satsuma china and some cloisonné, the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (marred as it was by the sensationalism of the popular plates), two paint-boxes (one oil, one water-colour), three globes of the known geographical world, a few fossils, the stuffed head of a camel-leopard, six pismires, some glass retorts with cauldrons, bunsen burners, etc., and the complete set of cigarette cards depicting wildfowl by Peter Scott.
Merlyn took off his pointed hat when he came into this extraordinary chamber, because it was too high for the roof, and immediately there was a little scamper in one of the dark corners and a flap of soft wings, and a young tawny owl was sitting on the black skull-cap which protected the top of his head.
“Oh, what a lovely owl!” cried the Wart.
But when he went up to it and held out his hand, the owl grew half as tall again, stood up as stiff as a poker, closed its eyes so that there was only the smallest slit to peep through, as one is in the habit of doing when told to shut one’s eyes at hide-and-seek, and said in a doubtful voice:
“There is no owl.”
Then it shut its eyes entirely and looked the other way.
“It’s only a boy,” said Merlyn.
“There is no boy,” said the owl hopefully, without turning round.
The Wart was so startled by finding that the owl could talk that he forgot his manners and came closer still. At this the owl became so nervous that it made a mess on Merlyn’s head – the whole room was quite white with droppings – and flew off to perch on the farthest tip of the corkindrill’s tail, out of reach.
“We see so little company,” explained Merlyn, wiping his head with half a worn-out pair of pyjama tops which he kept for that purpose, “that Archimedes is a little shy of strangers. Come, Archimedes, I want you to meet a friend of mine called Wart.”
Here he held out his hand to the owl, who came waddling like a goose along the corkindrill’s back – he waddled with this rolling gait so as to keep his tail from being damaged – and hopped down on to Merlyn’s finger with every sign of reluctance.
“Hold out your finger,” said Merlyn, “and put it behind his legs. No, lift it up under his train.”
When the Wart had done this Merlyn moved the owl gently backwards, so that the Wart’s finger pressed against its legs from behind, and it either had to step back on the finger or get pushed off its balance altogether. It stepped back. The Wart stood there delighted, while the furry little feet held tight on to his finger and the sharp claws prickled his skin.
“Say how d’you do properly,” said Merlyn.
“I won’t,” said Archimedes, looking the other way and holding very tight.
“Oh, he is lovely,” said the Wart again. “Have you had him very long?”
“Archimedes has stayed with me since he was quite small, indeed since he had a tiny head like a chicken’s.”
“I wish he would talk to me,” said the Wart.
“Perhaps if you were to give him this mouse here, politely, he might learn to know you better.”
Merlyn took the dead mouse out of his skull-cap – “I always keep them there,” he explained, “and worms too, for fishing. I find it most convenient” – and handed it to the Wart, who held it out rather gingerly towards Archimedes. The nutty little curved beak looked as if it were capable of doing damage, but Archimedes looked closely at the mouse, blinked at the Wart, moved nearer on the finger, closed his eyes and leant forward. He stood there with closed eyes and an expression of rapture on his face, as if he were saying grace, and then, with the absurdest little sideways nibble, took the morsel so gently that he would not have broken a soap bubble. He remained leaning forward with closed eyes, with the mouse suspended from his beak, as if he were not sure what to do with it. Then he lifted his right foot – he was right-handed – and took hold of the mouse. He held it up like a boy holding a stick of rock or a constable with his truncheon, looked at it, nibbled its tail. He turned it round so that it was head first, for the Wart had offered it the wrong way round, and gave one gulp. He looked round at the company with the tail hanging out of the corner of his mouth – as much as to say, “I wish you would not all stare at me so” – turned his head away, politely swallowed the tail, scratched his sailor’s beard with his left toe, and began to ruffle out his feathers.
“Let him alone,” said Merlyn, “now. For perhaps he does not want to be friends with you until he knows what you are like. With owls, it is never easy-come and easy-go.”
“Perhaps he will sit on my shoulder,” said the Wart, and with that he instinctively lowered his hand, so that the owl, who liked to be as high as possible, ran up the slope and stood shyly beside his ear.
“Now breakfast,” said Merlyn.
The Wart saw that the most perfect breakfast was laid out neatly for two, on the table before the window. There were peaches. There were also melons, strawberries and cream, rusks, brown trout piping hot, grilled perch which were much nicer, chicken devilled enough to burn one’s mouth out, kidneys and mushrooms on toast, fricassee, curry, and a choice of boiling coffee or best chocolate made with cream in large cups.
“Have some mustard,” said Merlyn, when they had got to the kidneys.
The mustard-pot got up and walked over to his plate on thin silver legs that waddled like the owl’s. Then it uncurled its handles and one handle lifted its lid with exaggerated courtesy while the other helped him to a generous spoonful.
“Oh, I love the mustard-pot!” cried the Wart. “Where ever did you get it?”
At this the pot beamed all over its face and began to strut a bit; but Merlyn rapped it on the head with a teaspoon, so that it sat down and shut up at once.
“It’s not a bad pot,” he said grudgingly. “Only it is inclined to give itself airs.”
The Wart was so much impressed by the kindness of the old magician, and particularly by all the lovely things which he possessed, that he hardly liked to ask him personal questions. It seemed politer to sit still and speak when he was spoken to. But Merlyn did not speak very much, and when he did speak it was never in questions, so that the Wart had little opportunity for conversation. At last his curiosity got the better of him, and he asked something which had been puzzling him for some time.
“Would you mind if I ask you a question?”
“It is what I am for,” said Merlyn sadly.
“How did you know to set the breakfast for two?”
The old gentleman leaned back in his chair and lit an enormous meerschaum pipe – Good gracious, he breathes fire, thought the Wart, who had never heard of tobacco – before he was ready to reply. Then he looked puzzled, took off his skull-cap – three mice fell out – and scratched in the middle of his bald head.
“Have you ever tried to draw in a looking-glass?” asked Merlyn.
“I don’t think I have,” said the Wart.
“Looking-glass,” said the old gentleman, holding out his hand. Immediately there was a tiny lady’s vanity-glass in his hand.
“Not that kind, you fool,” said Merlyn angrily. “I want one big enough to shave in.”
The vanity-glass vanished, and in its place there was a shaving mirror about a foot square. Merlyn then demanded pencil and paper in quick succession; got an unsharpened pencil and the Morning Post; sent them back; got a fountain-pen with no ink in it and six reams of brown-paper suitable for parcels; sent them back; flew into a passion in which he said by-our-lady quite often, and ended up with a carbon pencil and some cigarette papers which he said would have to do.
He put one of the papers in front of the glass and made five dots on it like this:
“Now,” he said, “I want you to join those five dots up to make a W, looking only in the glass.”
The Wart took the pen and tried to do as he was bid, but after a lot of false starts the letter which he produced was this:
“Well, it isn’t bad,” said Merlyn doubtfully, “and in a way it does look a bit like an M.”
Then he fell into a reverie, stroking his beard, breathing fire, and staring at the paper.
“About the breakfast?” asked the Wart timidly, after he had waited five minutes.
“Ah, yes,” said Merlyn. “How did I know to set breakfast for two? That was why I showed you the looking-glass. Now ordinary people are born forwards in Time, if you understand what I mean, and nearly everything in the world goes forward too. This makes it quite easy for the ordinary people to live, just as it would be easy to join those five dots into a W if you were allowed to look at them forwards instead of backwards and inside out. But I unfortunately was born at the wrong end of time, and I have to live backwards from in front, while surrounded by a lot of people living forwards from behind. Some people call it having second sight.”
Merlyn stopped talking and looked at the Wart in an anxious way.
“Have I told you this before?” he inquired suspiciously.
“No,” said the Wart. “We only met about half an hour ago.”
“So little time to pass as that?” said Merlyn, and a big tear ran down to the end of his nose. He wiped it off with his pyjama tops and added anxiously, “Am I going to tell it you again?”
“I don’t know,” said the Wart, “unless you haven’t finished telling me yet.”
“You see,” said Merlyn, “one gets confused with Time, when it is like that. All one’s tenses get muddled up, for one thing. If you know what’s going to happen to people, and not what has happened to them, it makes it so difficult to prevent it happening, if you don’t want it to have happened, if you see what I mean? Like drawing in a mirror.”
The Wart did not quite see, but was just going to say that he was sorry for Merlyn if these things made him unhappy, when he felt a curious sensation at his ear. “Don’t jump,” said Merlyn, just as he was going to do so, and the Wart sat still. Archimedes, who had been standing forgotten on his shoulder all this time, was gently touching himself against him. His beak was right against the lobe of his ear, which its bristles made to tickle, and suddenly, a soft hoarse little voice whispered, “How d’you do,” so that it sounded right inside his head.
“Oh, owl!” cried the Wart, forgetting about Merlyn’s troubles instantly. “Look, he has decided to talk to me!”
The Wart gently leant his head against the soft feathers, and the brown owl, taking the rim of his ear in its beak, quickly nibbled right round it with the smallest nibbles.
“I shall call him Archie!” exclaimed the Wart.
“I trust you will do nothing of the sort,” cried Merlyn instantly, in a stern and angry voice, and the owl withdrew to the farthest corner of his shoulder.
“Is it wrong?”
“You might as well call me Wol, or Olly,” said the owl sourly, “and have done with it.
“Or Bubbles,” added the owl in a bitter voice.
Merlyn took the Wart’s hand and said kindly, “You are only young, and do not understand these things. But you will learn that owls are the politest and the most courteous, single-hearted and faithful creatures living. You must never be familiar, rude or vulgar with them, or make them to look ridiculous. Their mother is Athene, the goddess of wisdom, and, though they are often ready to play the buffoon for your amusement, such conduct is the prerogative of the truly wise. No owl can possibly be called Archie.”
“I am sorry, owl,” said the Wart.
“And I am sorry, boy,” said the owl. “I can see that you spoke in ignorance, and I bitterly regret that I should have been so petty as to take offence where none was intended.”
The owl really did regret it, and looked so remorseful and upset that Merlyn had to put on a very cheerful manner and change the conversation.
“Well,” said he, “now that we have finished breakfast, I think it is high time that we should all three find out way back to Sir Ector.”
“Excuse me a moment,” he added as an afterthought, and, turning round to the breakfast things, he pointed a knobbly finger at them and said in a stern voice, “Wash up.”
At this all the china and cutlery scrambled down off the table, the cloth emptied the crumbs out of the window, and the napkins folded themselves up. All ran off down the ladder, to where Merlyn had left the bucket, and there was such a noise and yelling as if a lot of children had been let out of school. Merlyn went to the door and shouted, “Mind, nobody is to get broken.” But his voice was entirely drowned in shrill squeals, splashes, and cries of “My, it is cold,” “I shan’t stay in long,” “Look out, you’ll break me,” or “Come on, let’s duck the teapot.”
“Are you really coming all the way home with me?” asked the Wart, who could hardly believe the good news.
“Why not?” said Merlyn. “How else can I be your tutor?”
At this the Wart’s eyes grew rounder and rounder, until they were about as big as the owl’s who was sitting on his shoulder, and his face got redder and redder, and a big breath seemed to gather itself beneath his heart.
“My!” exclaimed the Wart, while his eyes sparkled with excitement at the discovery. “I must have been on a Quest.”
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_255d89e0-9c0b-5d4f-90d8-6fb249a1b0c4)
The Wart started talking before he was halfway over the drawbridge. “Look who I’ve brought,” he said. “Look! I’ve been on a Quest. I was shot at with three arrows. They had black and yellow stripes. The owl is called Archimedes. I saw King Pellinore. This is my tutor, Merlyn. I went on a Quest for him. He was after the Questing Beast. I mean King Pellinore. It was terrible in the forest. Merlyn made the plates wash up. Hallo, Hob. Look, we have got Cully.”
Hob just looked at the Wart, but so proudly that the Wart went quite red. It was such a pleasure to be back home again with all his friends, and everything achieved.
Hob said gruffly, “Ah, master, us shall make an austringer of ’ee yet.”
He came for Cully, as if he could not keep his hands off him any longer, but he patted the Wart too, fondling them both because he was not sure which he was gladder to see back. He took Cully on his own fist, reassuming him like a lame man putting on his accustomed wooden leg, after it had been lost.
“Merlyn caught him,” said the Wart. “He sent Archimedes to look for him on the way home. Then Archimedes told us that he had been and killed a pigeon and was eating it. We went and frightened him off. After that, Merlyn stuck six of the tail feathers round the pigeon in a circle, and made a loop in a long piece of string to go round the feathers. He tied one end to a stick in the ground, and he went away behind a bush with the other end. He said he wouldn’t use magic. He said you couldn’t use magic in Great Arts, like it would be unfair to make a great statue by magic. You have to cut it out with a chisel, you see. Then Cully came down to finish the pigeon, and we pulled the string, and the loop slipped over the feathers and caught him round the legs. He was angry. But we gave him the pigeon.”
Hob made a duty to Merlyn, who returned it courteously. They looked upon one another with grave affection and eagerness, knowing each other to be masters of the same trade. When they could be alone together they could talk and talk, although each was naturally a silent man. Meanwhile they must wait their time.
“Oh, Kay,” cried the Wart, as the latter appeared with their nurse and other delighted welcomers. “Look I have got a magician for our tutor. He has a mustard-pot that walks.”
“I am glad you are back,” said Kay.
“Alas, where did you sleep, Master Art?” exclaimed the nurse. “Look at your clean jerkin all muddied and torn. Such a turn as you gave us, I really don’t know. But look at your poor hair with all them twigs in it. Oh, my own random, wicked little lamb.”
Sir Ector came bustling out with his greaves on back to front, and kissed the Wart on both cheeks. “Well, well, well,” he exclaimed moistly. “Here we are again, hey? What the devil have you been doin’, hey? Settin’ the whole household upside down.”
But inside him he was proud of the Wart for staying out after a hawk, and prouder still to see that he had got it, for all the while Hob held the bird in the air for everybody to see.
“Oh, sir,” said the Wart. “I have been on that Quest you said for a tutor, and I have found him. Please, he is this gentleman here, and he is called Merlyn. He has got some badgers and hedgehogs and mice and things on this white donkey here, because we couldn’t leave them behind to starve. He is a great musician, and can make things come out of the air.”
“Ah, a magician,” said Sir Ector, putting on his glasses and looked closely at Merlyn. “White magic, I hope?”
“Assuredly,” said Merlyn, who stood patiently among all this throng with his arms folded in his necromantic gown, and Archimedes sitting very stiff and elongated on the top of his head.
“Ought to have some testimonials, you know,” said Sir Ector doubtfully. “It’s usual.”
“Testimonials,” said Merlyn, holding out his hand.
Instantly there were some heavy tablets in it, signed by Aristotle, a parchment signed by Hecate, and some typewritten duplicates signed by the Master of Trinity, who could not remember having met him. All these gave Merlyn an excellent character.
“He had ’em up his sleeve,” said Sir Ector wisely. “Can you do anything else?”
“Tree,” said Merlyn. At once there was an enormous mulberry growing in the middle of the courtyard, with its luscious blue fruits ready to patter down.
“They do it with mirrors,” said Sir Ector.
“Snow,” said Merlyn. “And an umbrella,” he added hastily.
Before they could turn round the copper sky of summer had assumed a cold and lowering bronze, while the biggest white flakes that were ever seen were floating about them and settling on the battlements. An inch of snow had fallen before they could speak, and all were trembling with the wintry blast. Sir Ector’s nose was blue, and had an icicle hanging from the end of it, while all except Merlyn had a ledge of snow upon their shoulders. Merlyn stood in the middle, holding his umbrella high because of the owl.
“It’s done by hypnotism,” said Sir Ector, with chattering teeth. “Like those wallahs from the Indies.
“But that’ll do, you know,” he added hastily, “that’ll do very well. I’m sure you’ll make an excellent tutor for teachin’ these boys.”
The snow stopped immediately and the sun came out – “Enough to give a body a pewmonia,” said the nurse, “or to frighten the elastic commissioners” – while Merlyn folded up his umbrella and handed it back to the air, which received it.
“Imagine the boy doin’ a quest like that all by himself,” exclaimed Sir Ector. “Well, well, well. Wonders never cease.”
“I don’t think much of it as a quest,” said Kay. “He only went after the hawk, after all.”
“And got the hawk, Master Kay,” said Hob reprovingly.
“Oh well,” said Kay, “I bet the old man caught it for him.”
“Kay,” said Merlyn, suddenly terrible, “thou wast ever a proud and ill-tongued speaker, and a misfortunate one. Thy sorrow will come from thine own mouth.”
At this everybody felt uncomfortable, and Kay, instead of flying into his usual passion, hung his head. He was not at all an unpleasant person really, but clever, quick, proud, passionate and ambitious. He was one of those people who would be neither a follower or a leader, but only an aspiring heart, impatient in the failing body which imprisoned it. Merlyn repented of his rudeness at once. He made a little silver hunting-knife come out of the air, which he gave him to put things right. The knob of the handle was made of the skull of a stoat, oiled and polished like ivory, and Kay loved it.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_7d2857aa-4a52-5daa-9174-d6fe1319547b)
Sir Ector’s home was called The Castle of the Forest Sauvage. It was more like a town or a village than any one man’s home, and indeed it was the village during all times of danger. Whenever there was a raid or an invasion, everybody on the estate hurried into the castle, driving all the beasts before them into the courts, and there they remained until the danger was over. The little wattle and daub cottages nearly always got burnt, and had to be built again afterwards with much profanity. For this reason it was not worth while troubling to have a village church, as it would constantly be having to be replaced. The villagers went to church in the chapel of the castle. They wore their best clothes and trooped up the street with their most respectable gait on Sundays, looking with vague and dignified looks in all directions, as if reluctant to disclose their destination, and on weekdays they came to mass and vespers in their ordinary clothes, walking much more cheerfully. Everybody went to church in those days, and liked it.
The Castle of the Forest Sauvage is still standing, and you can see its lovely ruined walls with ivy on them, standing broached to the sun and wind. Some lizards live there now, and the starving sparrows keep warm on winter nights in the ivy, and a barn owl drives it methodically, hovering outside the little frightened congregations and beating the ivy with its wings, to make them fly out. Most of the curtain wall is down, though you can trace the foundations of the twelve round towers which guarded it. They are round, and stuck out from the wall into the moat, so that the archers could fire in all directions and command every part of the wall. Inside the towers there are circular stairs. These go round and round a central column, and this column is pierced with holes for shooting arrows. Even if the enemy had got inside the curtain wall and fought its way into the bottom of the towers, the defenders could retreat up the bends of the stairs and shoot at those who followed them up, inside, through the slits.
The stone part of the drawbridge with its barbican and the bartizans of the gatehouse are in good repair. These have many ingenious arrangements. Even if you got over the wooden bridge, which was pulled up so that you couldn’t, there was a portcullis weighed with an enormous log which would squash you flat and pin you down as well. There was a large hidden trapdoor in the floor of the barbican, which would let you into the moat after all. At the other end of the barbican there was another portcullis, so that you could be trapped between the two and annihilated from above, while the bartizans, or hanging turrets, had holes in their floors through which the defenders could drop things on your head. Finally, inside the gatehouse, there was a neat little hole in the middle of the vaulted ceiling, which had painted tracery and bosses. This hole led to the room above, where there was a big cauldron, for boiling lead and oil in.
So much for the outer defences. Once you were inside the curtain wall, you found yourself in a kind of wide alleyway, probably full of frightened sheep, with another complete castle in front of you. This was the inner shell-keep, with its eight enormous round towers which still stand. It is lovely to climb the highest of them and to lie there looking out towards the Marches, from which all these old dangers came, with nothing but the sun above you and the little tourists trotting about below, quite regardless of arrows and boiling oil. Think of how many centuries that unconquerable tower has withstood. It has changed hands by secession often, by siege once, by treachery twice, but never by assault. On this tower the look-out moved. From here he kept the guard over the blue woods towards Wales. His clean old bones lie beneath the floor of the chapel now, so you must keep it for him.
If you look down and are not frightened of heights (the society for the Preservation of This and That have put up some excellent railings to preserve you from tumbling over), you can see the whole anatomy of the inner court laid out beneath you like a map. You can see the chapel, now quite open to its god, and the windows of the great hall with the solar over it. You can see the shafts of the huge chimneys and how cunningly the side flues were contrived to enter them, and the little private closets now public, and the enormous kitchen. If you are a sensible person, you will spend days there, possibly weeks, working out for yourself by detection which were the stables, which the mews, where were the cow byres, the armoury, the lofts, the well, the smithy, the kennel, the soldiers’ quarters, the priest’s room, and my lord’s and lady’s chambers. Then it will all grow about you again. The little people – they were much smaller than we are, and it would be a job for most of us to get inside the few bits of their armour and old gloves that remain – will hurry about in the sunshine, the sheep will baa as they always did, and perhaps from Wales there will come the ffff-putt of the triple-feathered arrow which looks as if it had never moved.
This place was of course, a complete paradise for a boy to be in. The Wart ran about it like a rabbit in its own complicated labyrinth. He knew everything, everywhere, all the special smells, good climbs, soft lairs, secret hiding-places, jumps, slides, nooks, larders and blisses. For every season he had the best place like a cat, and he yelled and ran and fought and upset people and snoozed and daydreamed and pretended he was a Knight, without ever stopping. Just now he was in the kennel.
People in those days had rather different ideas about the training of dogs to what we have today. They did it more by love than strictness. Imagine a modern M. F. H. going to bed with his hounds, and yet Flavius Arrianus says that it is “Best of all if they can sleep with a person because it makes them more human and because they rejoice in the company of human beings: also if they have had a restless night or been internally upset, you will know of it and will not use them to hunt next day.” In Sir Ector’s kennel there was a special boy, called the Dog Boy, who lived with the hounds day and night. He was a sort of head hound, and it was his business to take them out every day for walks, to pull thorns out of their feet, keep cankers out of their ears, bind the smaller bones that got dislocated, dose them for worms, isolate and nurse them in distemper, arbitrate in their quarrels and sleep curled up among them at night. If one more learned quotation may be excused, this is how the Duke of York who was killed at Agincourt described such a boy in his Master of Game: “Also I will teach the child to lead out the hounds to scombre twice in the day in the morning and in the evening, so that the sun be up, especially in winter. Then should he let them run and play long in a meadow in the sun, and then comb every hound after the other, and wipe them with a great wisp of straw, and this he shall do every morning. And then he shall lead them into some fair place where tender grass grows as corn and other things, that therewith they may feed themselves as if it is medicine for them.” Thus, since the boy’s “heart and his business be with the hounds,” the hounds themselves become “Goodly and kindly and clean, glad and joyful and playful, and goodly to all manner of folks save to the wild beasts to whom they should be fierce, eager and spiteful.”
Sir Ector’s dog-boy was none other than the one who had had his nose bitten off by the terrible Wat. Not having a nose like a human, and being, moreover, subjected to stone-throwing by the other village children, he had become more comfortable with animals. He talked to them, not in baby-talk like a maiden lady, but correctly in their own growls and barks. They all loved him very much, and revered him for taking thorns out of their toes, and came to him with their little troubles at once. He always understood immediately what was wrong, and generally he could put it right. It was nice for the dogs to have their god with them, in visible form.
The Wart was fond of the Dog Boy, and thought him very clever to be able to do all these things with animals – for he could make them do almost anything just by moving his hands – while the Dog Boy loved the Wart in much the same way as his dogs loved him, and thought the Wart was almost holy because he could read and write. They spent much of their time together, rolling about with the dogs in the kennel.
The kennel was on the ground floor, near the mews, with a loft above it, so that it should be cool in summer and warm in winter. The hounds were alaunts, gaze-hounds, lymers and braches. They were called Clumsy, Trowneer, Phoebe, Colle, Gerland, Talbot, Luath, Luffra, Apollon, Orthros, Bran, Gelert, Bounce, Boy, Lion, Bungey, Toby and Diamond. The Wart’s own special one was called Cavall, and he happened to be licking Cavall’s nose – not the other way about – when Merlyn came in and found him.
“That will come to be regarded as an insanitary habit,” said Merlyn, “though I can’t see it myself. After all, God made the creature’s nose just as well as he made your tongue.
“If not better,” added the philosopher pensively.
The Wart did not know what Merlyn was talking about, but he liked him to talk. He did not like the grown-ups who talked down to him like a baby, but the ones who just went on talking in their usual way, leaving him to leap along in their wake, jumping at meanings, guessing, clutching at known words, and chuckling at complicated jokes as they suddenly dawned. He had the glee of the porpoise then, pouring and leaping through strange seas.
“Shall we go out?” asked Merlyn. “I think it is about time we began our lessons.”
The Wart’s heart sank at this. His tutor had been there a month, and it was now August, but they had done no lessons so far. Now he suddenly remembered that this was what Merlyn was for, and he thought with dread of Summulae Logicales and the filthy astrolabe. He knew that it had to be borne, however, and got up obediently enough, after giving Cavall a last reluctant pat. He thought that it might not be so bad with Merlyn, who might be able to make even the old Organon interesting, particularly if he would do some magic.
They went out into the courtyard, into a sun so burning that the heat of haymaking seemed to have been nothing. It was baking. The thunder-clouds which usually go with hot weather were there, high columns of cumulus with glaring edges, but there was not going to be any thunder. It was too hot even for that. “If only,” thought the Wart, “I did not have to go into a stuffy classroom, but could take off my clothes and swim in the moat.”
They crossed the courtyard, having almost to take deep breaths before they darted across it, as if they were going quickly through an oven. The shade of the gatehouse was cool, but the barbican, with its close walls, was hottest of all. In one last dash across the desert they had achieved the draw-bridge – could Merlyn have guessed what he was thinking about? – and were staring down into the moat.
It was the season of water-lilies. If Sir Ector had not kept one section free of them for the boys’ bathing, all the water would have been covered. As it was, about twenty yards on each side of the bridge were cut each year, and you could dive in from the bridge itself. The moat was quite deep. It was used as a stew, so that the inhabitants of the castle could have fish on Fridays, and for this reason the architects had been careful not to let the drains and sewers run into it. It was stocked with fish every year.
“I wish I was a fish,’” said the Wart.
“What sort of fish?”
It was almost too hot to think about this, but the Wart stared down into the cool amber depths where a school of small perch were aimlessly hanging about.
“I think I should like to be a perch,” he said. “They are braver than the silly roach, and not quite so slaughterous as the pike.”
Merlyn took off his hat, raised his staff of lignum vitae politely in the air, and said slowly, “Snylrem stnemilpmoc ot enutpen dna lliw eh yldnik tpecca siht yob sa a hsif?”
Immediately there was a loud blowing of sea-shells, conches and so forth, and a stout, jolly-looking gentleman appeared seated on a well-blown-up cloud above the battlements. He had an anchor tattooed on his tummy and a handsome mermaid with Mabel written under her on his chest. He ejected a quid of tobacco, nodded affably to Merlyn and pointed his trident at the Wart. The Wart found he had no clothes on. He found that he had tumbled off the draw-bridge, landing with a smack on his side in the water. He found that the moat and the bridge had grown hundreds of times bigger. He knew that he was turning into a fish.
“Oh, Merlyn,” cried the Wart. “Please come too.”
“Just for this once,” said the large and solemn tench beside his ear, “I will come. But in future you will have to go by yourself. Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.”
The Wart found it difficult to be a fish. It was no good trying to swim like a human being, for it made him go corkscrew and much too slowly. He did not know how to swim like a fish.
“Not like that,” said the tench in ponderous tones. “Put your chin on your left shoulder and do jack-knives. Never mind about the fins to begin with.”
The Wart’s legs had fused together into his backbone and his feet and toes had become a tail fin. His arms had become two more fins – also of a delicate pinkish colour – and he had sprouted some more somewhere about his tummy. His head faced over his shoulder, so that when he bent in the middle his toes were moving towards his ear instead of towards his forehead. He was a beautiful olive-green colour with rather scratchy plate-armour all over him, and dark bands down his sides. He was not sure which were his sides and which were his back and front, but what now appeared to be his tummy had an attractive whitish colour, while his back was armed with a splendid great fin that could be erected for war and had spikes in it. He did jack-knives as the tench directed and found that he was swimming vertically downwards into the mud.
“Use your feet to turn to left or right with,” said the tench, “and spread those fins on your tummy to keep level. You are living in two planes now, not one.”
The Wart found that he could keep more or less level by altering the inclination of his arm fins and the ones on his stomach. He swam feebly off, enjoying himself very much.
“Come back,” said the tench solemnly. “You must learn to swim before you can dart.”
The Wart turned to his tutor in a series of zig-zags and remarked, “I don’t seem to keep quite straight.”
“The trouble with you is that you don’t swim from the shoulder. You swim as if you were a boy just bending at the hips. Try doing your jack-knives right from the neck downwards, and move your body exactly the same amount to the right as you are going to move it to the left. Put your back into it.”
Wart gave two terrific kicks and vanished altogether in a clump of mare’s tail several yards away.
“That’s better,” said the tench, now quite out of sight in the murky olive water, and the Wart backed himself out of his tangle with infinite trouble, by wriggling his arm fins. He undulated back towards the voice in one terrific shove, to show off.
“Good,” said the tench, as they collided end to end, “but discretion is the better part of valour.
“Try if you can do this one,” said the tench.
Without apparent exertion of any kind he swam off backwards under a water-lily. Without apparent exertion; but the Wart, who was an enterprising learner, had been watching the slightest movement of his fins. He moved his own fins anti-clockwise, gave the very tip of his own tail a cunning flick, and was lying alongside the tench.
“Splendid,” said Merlyn. “Let’s go for a little swim.”
The Wart was on an even keel now, and reasonably able to move about. He had leisure to observe the extraordinary universe into which the tattooed gentleman’s trident had plunged him. It was very different from the universe to which he had hitherto been accustomed. For one thing, the heaven or sky above him was now a perfect circle poised a few inches above his head. The horizon had closed in to this. In order to imagine yourself into the Wart’s position, you will have to picture a round horizon, a few inches above your head, instead of the flat horizon which you have usually seen. Under this horizon of air you will have to imagine another horizon under water, spherical and practically upside down – for the surface of the water acted partly as a mirror to what was below it. It is difficult to imagine. What makes it a great deal more difficult to imagine is that everything which human beings would consider to be above the water level was fringed with all the colours of the spectrum. For instance, if you had happened to be fishing for the Wart, he would have seen you, at the rim of the tea saucer which was the upper air to him, not as one person waving a fishing-rod, but as seven people, whose outlines were red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, all waving the same rod whose colours were as varied. In fact, you would have been a rainbow man to him, a beacon of flashing and radiating colours, which ran into one another and had rays all about. You would have been burnt upon the water like Cleopatra in the poem by Herédia. The reference may possibly be to Shakespeare.
The next most lovely thing was that the Wart had no weight. He was not earth-bound any more and did not have to plod along on a flat surface, pressed down by gravity and the weight of the atmosphere. He could do what men have always wanted to do, that is, fly. There is practically no difference between flying in the water and flying in the air. The best of it was that he did not have to fly in a machine, by pulling levers and sitting still, but could do it with his own body. It was like the dreams people have.
Just as they were going to swim off their tour of inspection, a timid young roach appeared from between two waving bottle brushes of mare’s tail and hung about, looking quite pale with agitation. It looked at them with big apprehensive eyes and evidently wanted something, but could not make up its mind.
“Approach,” said Merlyn gravely.
At this the roach rushed up like a hen, burst into tears and began stammering its message.
“If you p-p-p-please, Doctor,” stammered the poor creature, gabbling so that they could scarcely understand what it said, “we have such a d-dretful case of s-s-s-something or other in our family, and we w-w-w-wondered if you could s-s-s-spare the time? It’s our d-d-d-dear Mamma, who w-w-w-will swim a-a-a-all the time upside d-d-d-down, and she d-d-d-does look so horrible and s-s-s-speaks so strange, that we r-r-r-really thought she ought to have a d-d-d-doctor, if it w-w-w-wouldn’t be too much? C-C-C-Clara says to say so sir, if you s-s-s-see w-w-w-what I m-m-m-mean?”
Here the little roach began fizzing so much, what with its stammer and its tearful disposition, that it became perfectly inarticulate and could only stare at Merlyn with big mournful eyes.
“Never mind, my little man,” said Merlyn. “There, there, lead me to your poor Mamma, and we shall see what we can do.”
They all three swam off into the murk under the draw-bridge upon their errand of mercy.
“Very Russian, these roach,” whispered Merlyn to the Wart, behind his fin. “It’s probably only a case of nervous hysteria, a matter for the psychologist rather than the physician.”
The roach’s Mamma was lying on her back as he had described. She was squinting horribly, had folded her fins upon her chest, and every now and then she blew a bubble. All her children were gathered round her in a circle, and every time she blew a bubble they all nudged each other and gasped. She had a seraphic smile upon her face.
“Well, well, well,” said Merlyn, putting on his best bedside manner, “and how is Mrs Roach today?”
He patted all the young roaches on the head and advanced with stately motions towards his patient. It should perhaps be mentioned that Merlyn was a ponderous, deep-beamed fish of about five pounds, red-leather coloured, with small scales, adipose in his fins, rather slimy, and having a bright marigold eye – a respectable figure.
Mrs Roach held out a languid fin, sighed emphatically and said, “Ah, Doctor, so you’ve come at last?”
“Hum,” said Merlyn, in his deepest tones.
Then he told everybody to close their eyes – the Wart peeped – and began to swim round the invalid in a slow and stately dance. As he danced he sang. His song was this:
Therapeutic,
Elephantic,
Diagnosis,
Boom!
Pancreatic,
Microstatic,
Anti-toxic,
Doom!
With normal catabolism,
Gabbleism and babbleism,
Snip, Snap, Snorum
Cut out his abdonorum.
Dyspepsia,
Anaemia,
Toxaemia,
One, two, three,
And out goes He,
With a fol-de-rol-derido for the Five Guinea Fee.
At the end of his song he was swimming round his patient so close that he actually touched her, stroking his brown smooth-scaled flanks against her more rattly pale ones. Perhaps he was healing her with slime – for all fishes are said to go to the Tench for medicine – or perhaps it was by touch or massage or hypnotism. In any case, Mrs Roach suddenly stopped squinting, turned the right way up, and said, “Oh, Doctor, dear Doctor, I feel I could eat a little lob-worm now.”
“No lob-worm,” said Merlyn, “not for two days. I shall give you a prescription for a strong broth of algae every two hours, Mrs Roach. We must build up your strength you know. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
Then he patted all the little roaches once more, told them to grow up into brave little fish, and swam off with an air of great importance into the gloom. As he swam, he puffed his mouth in and out.
“What did you mean by that about Rome?” asked the Wart, when they were out of earshot.
“Heaven knows,” said the tench.
They swam along, Merlyn occasionally advising him to put his back into it when he forgot, and all the strange under-water world began to dawn about them, deliciously cool after the heat of the upper air. The great forests of the weed were delicately traced, and in them there hung motionless many schools of sticklebacks learning to do their physical exercises in strict unison. On the word One they all lay still: at Two they faced about: at Three they all shot together into a cone, whose apex was a bit of something to eat. Water snails slowly ambled about on the stems of the lilies or under their leaves, while fresh-water mussels lay on the bottom doing nothing in particular. Their flesh was salmon pink, like a very good strawberry cream ice. The small congregations of perch – it was a strange thing, but all the bigger fish seemed to have hidden themselves – had delicate circulations, so that they blushed or grew pale as easily as a lady in a Victorian novel. Only their blush was a deep olive colour, and it was the blush of rage. Whenever Merlyn and his companion swam past them, they raised their spiky dorsal fins in menace, and only lowered them when they saw that Merlyn was a tench. The black bars on their sides made them look as if they had been grilled; and these also could become darker or lighter. Once the two travellers passed under a swan. The white creature floated above like a zeppelin, all indistinct except what was under the water. The latter part was quite clear and showed that the swan was floating slightly on one side with one leg cocked up over its back.
“Look,” said the Wart, “it’s the poor swan with the deformed leg. It can only paddle with one leg, and the other side of it is all hunched.”
“Nonsense,” said the swan snappily, putting its head into the water and giving them a frown with its black nares. “Swans like to rest in this position, and you can keep your fishy sympathy to yourself, so there.” It continued to glare at them from up above, like a white snake suddenly let down through the ceiling, until they were out of sight.
“You swim along,” said the tench in gloomy tones, “as if there was nothing to be afraid of in the world. Don’t you see that this place is exactly like the forest you had to come through to find me?”
“Is it?”
“Look over there.”
The Wart looked, and at first saw nothing. Then he saw a little translucent shape hanging motionless near the surface. It was just outside the shadow of a water-lily and was evidently enjoying the sun. It was a baby pike, absolutely rigid and probably asleep, and it looked like a pipe stem or a sea horse stretched out flat. It would be a brigand when it grew up.
“I am taking you to see one of those,” said the tench, “the Emperor of all these purlieus. As a doctor I have immunity, and I daresay he will respect you as my companion as well. But you had better keep your tail bent in case he is feeling tyrannical.”
“Is he the King of the Moat?”
“He is the King of the Moat. Old Jack they call him, and some Black Peter, but for the most part they don’t mention him by name at all. They just call him Mr M. You will see what it is to be a king.”
The Wart began to hang behind his conductor a little, and perhaps it was as well that he did, for they were almost on top of their destination before he noticed it. When he did see the old despot he started back in horror, for Mr M. was four feet long, his weight incalculable. The great body, shadowy and almost invisible among the stems, ended in a face which had been ravaged by all the passions of an absolute monarch, by cruelty, sorrow, age, pride, selfishness, loneliness and thought too strong for individual brains. There he hung or hoved, his vast ironic mouth permanently drawn downwards in a kind of melancholy, his lean clean-shaven chops giving him an American expression, like that of Uncle Sam. He was remorseless, disillusioned, logical, predatory, fierce, pitiless: but his great jewel of an eye was that of a stricken deer, large, fearful, sensitive and full of griefs. He made no movement whatever, but looked upon them with this bitter eye.
The Wart thought to himself that he did not care for Mr M.
“Lord,” said Merlyn, not paying any attention to his nervousness. “I have brought a young professor who would learn to profess.”
“To profess what?” inquired the King of the Moat slowly, hardly opening his jaws and speaking through his nose.
“Power,” said the tench.
“Let him speak for himself.”
“Please,” said the Wart, “I don’t know what I ought to ask.”
“There is nothing,” said the monarch, “except the power that you profess to seek: power to grind and power to digest, power to seek and power to find, power to await and power to claim, all power and pitilessness springing from the nape of the neck.”
“Thank you,” said the Wart.
“Love is a trick played on us by the forces of evolution,” continued the monster monotonously. “Pleasure is the bait laid down by the same. There is only power. Power is of the individual mind, but the mind’s power alone is not enough. The power of strength decides everything in the end, and only Might is right.
“Now I think it is time that you should go away, young master, for I find this conversation excessively exhausting. I think you ought to go away really almost at once, in case my great disillusioned mouth should suddenly determine to introduce you to my great gills, which have teeth in them also. Yes, I really think you ought to go away this moment. Indeed, I think you ought to put your very back into it. And so, a long farewell to all my greatness.”
The Wart had found himself quite hypnotized by all these long words, and hardly noticed that the thin-lipped tight mouth was coming closer and closer to him all the time. It came imperceptibly, as the cold suave words distracted his attention, and suddenly it was looming within an inch of his nose. On the last sentence it opened, horrible and vast, the thin skin stretching ravenously from bone to bone and tooth to tooth. Inside there seemed to be nothing but teeth, sharp teeth like thorns in rows and ridges everywhere, like the nails in labourers’ boots, and it was only at the very last second that he was able to regain his own will, to pull himself together, recollect his instructions and to escape. All those teeth clashed behind him at the tip of his tail, as he gave the heartiest jack-knife he had ever given.
In a second he was on dry land once more, standing beside Merlyn on the piping drawbridge, panting in all his clothes.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_bc8c5a0c-111c-5d95-95ff-6649d76fc43e)
One Thursday afternoon the boys were doing their archery as usual. There were two straw targets fifty yards apart, and when they had shot their arrows at the one, they had only to go to it, collect them, and fire back at the other after facing about. It was still the loveliest summer weather, and there had been chickens for dinner, so that Merlyn had gone off to the edge of the shooting-ground and sat down under a tree. What with the warmth and the chickens and the cream he had poured over his pudding and the continual repassing of the boys and the tock of the arrows in the targets – which was as sleepy to listen to as the noise of a lawn-mower – and the dance of the egg-shaped sunspots between the leaves of his tree, the aged magician was soon fast asleep.
Archery was a serious occupation in those days. It had not yet been relegated to Red Indians and small boys, so that when you were shooting badly you got into a bad temper, just as the wealthy pheasant shooters do today. Kay was shooting badly. He was trying too hard and plucking on his loose, instead of leaving it to the bow.
“Oh, come on,” said Kay. “I’m sick of these beastly targets. Let’s have a shot at the popinjay.”
They left the targets and had several shots at the popinjay – which was a large, bright-coloured artificial bird stuck on the top of a stick, like a parrot – and Kay missed these also. First he had a feeling of “Well, I will hit the filthy thing, even if I have to go without my tea until I do it.” Then he merely became bored.
The Wart said, “Let’s play Rovers then. We can come back in half an hour and wake Merlyn up.”
What they called Rovers consisted of going for a walk with their bows and shooting one arrow each at any agreed mark which they came across. Sometimes it would be a mole hill, sometimes a clump of rushes, sometimes a big thistle almost at their feet. They varied the distance at which they chose these objects, sometimes picking a target as much as 120 yards away – which was about as far as these boys’ bows could carry – and sometimes having to aim actually below a close thistle because the arrow always leaps up a foot or two as it leaves the bow. They counted five for a hit, and one if the arrow was within a bow’s length, and added up their scores at the end.
On this Thursday they chose their targets wisely, and, besides, the grass of the big field had been lately cut. So they never had to search for their arrows for long, which nearly always happens, as in golf, if you shoot ill-advisedly near the hedges or in rough places. The result was that they strayed further than usual and found themselves near the edge of the savage forest where Cully had been lost.
“I vote,” said Kay, “that we go to those buries in the chase, and see if we can get a rabbit. It would be more fun than shooting at these hummocks.”
They did this. They chose two trees about a hundred yards apart, and each boy stood under one of them, waiting for the conies to come out again. They stood very still, with their bows already raised and arrows fitted, so that they would make the least possible movement to disturb the creatures when they did appear. It was not difficult for either of them to stand thus, for the very first test which they had had to pass in archery was standing with the bow at arm’s length for half an hour. They had six arrows each and would be able to fire and mark them all, before they needed to frighten the rabbits back by walking about to collect. An arrow does not make enough noise to upset more than the particular rabbit that it is shot at.
At the fifth shot Kay was lucky. He allowed just the right amount for wind and distance, and his point took a young coney square in the head. It had been standing up on end to look at him, wondering what he was.
“Oh, well shot!” cried the Wart, as they ran to pick it up. It was the first rabbit they had ever hit, and luckily they had killed it dead.
When they had carefully gutted it with the little hunting knife which Merlyn had given – in order to keep it fresh – and passed one of its hind legs through the other at the hock, for convenience in carrying, the two boys prepared to go home with their prize. But before they unstrung their bows they used to observe a ceremony. Every Thursday afternoon, after the last serious arrow had been fired, they were allowed to fit one more nock to their strings and to discharge the arrow straight up in the air. It was partly a gesture of farewell, partly of triumph, and it was beautiful. They did it now as a salute to their first prey.
The Wart watched his arrow go up. The sun was already westing towards evening, and the trees where they were had plunged them into a partial shade. So, as the arrow topped the trees and climbed into sunlight, it began to burn against the evening like the sun itself. Up and up it went, not weaving as it would have done with a snatching loose, but soaring, swimming, aspiring towards heaven, steady, golden and superb. Just as it had spent its force, just as its ambition had been dimmed by destiny and it was preparing to faint, to turn over, to pour back into the bosom of its mother earth, a terrible portent happened. A gore-crow came flapping wearily before the approaching night. It came, it did not waver, it took the arrow. It flew away, heavy and hoisting, with the arrow in its beak.
Kay was frightened by this, but the Wart was furious. He had loved his arrow’s movement, its burning ambition in the sunlight, and besides it was his best arrow. It was the only one which was perfectly balanced, sharp, tight-feathered, clean-nocked, and neither warped nor scraped.
“It was a witch,” said Kay.
“I don’t care if it was ten witches,” said the Wart. “I am going to get it back.”
“But it went towards the Forest.”
“I shall go after it.”
“You can go alone, then,” said Kay. “I’m not going into the Forest Sauvage, just for a putrid arrow.”
“I shall go alone.”
“Oh, well,” said Kay. “I suppose I shall have to come too, if you’re so set on it. And I bet we shall get nobbled by Wat.”
“Let him nobble,” said the Wart, “I want my arrow.”
They went in the Forest at the place where they had last seen the bird of carrion.
In less than five minutes they were in a clearing with a well and a cottage just like Merlyn’s.
“Goodness,” said Kay, “I never knew there were any cottages so close. I say, let’s go back.”
“I just want to look at this place,” said the Wart. “It’s probably a wizard’s.”
The cottage had a brass plate screwed on the garden gate. It said:
MADAME MIM, B.A. (Dom-Daniel)
PIANOFORTE
NEEDLEWORK
NECROMANCY
No Hawkers,
Circulars or Income Tax
Beware of the Dragon
The cottage had lace curtains. These stirred ever so slightly, for behind them there was a lady peeping. The gore-crow was standing on the chimney.
“Come on,” said Kay. “Oh, do come on. I tell you, she’ll never give it back.”
At this point the door of the cottage opened suddenly and the witch was revealed standing in the passage. She was a strikingly beautiful woman of about thirty, with coal-black hair so rich that it had the blue-black of the maggot-pies in it, sky bright eyes and a general soft air of butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth. She was sly.
“How do you do, my dears,” said Madame Mim. “And what can I do for you today?”
The boys took off their leather caps, and Wart said, “Please, there is a crow sitting on your chimney and I think it has stolen one of my arrows.”
“Precisely,” said Madame Mim. “I have the arrow within.”
“Could I have it back, please?”
“Inevitably ,” said Madame Mim. “The young gentleman shall have his arrow on the very instant, in four ticks and ere the bat squeaks thrice.”
“Thank you very much,” said the Wart.
“Step forward,” said Madame Mim. “Honour the threshold. Accept the humble hospitality in the spirit in which it is given.”
“I really do not think we can stay,” said the Wart politely. “I really think we must go. We shall be expected back at home.”
“Sweet expectation,” replied Madame Mim in devout tones.
“Yet you would have thought,” she added, “that the young gentleman could have found time to honour a poor cottager, out of politeness. Few can believe how we ignoble tenants of the lower classes value a visit from the landlord’s sons.”
“We would like to come in,” said the Wart, “very much. But you see we shall be late already.”
The lady now began to give a sort of simpering whine. “The fare is lowly,” she said. “no doubt it is not what you would be accustomed to eating, and so naturally such highly-born ones would not care to partake.”
Kay’s strongly-developed feeling for good form gave way at this. He was an aristocratic boy always, and condescended to his inferiors so that they could admire him. Even at the risk of visiting a witch, he was not going to have it said that he had refused to eat a tenant’s food because it was too humble.
“Come on, Wart,” he said. “We needn’t be back before vespers.”
Madame Mim swept them a low curtsey as they crossed the threshold. Then she took them each by the scruff of the neck, lifted them right off the ground with her strong gypsy arms, and shot out of the back door with them almost before they had got in at the front. The Wart caught a hurried glimpse of her parlour and kitchen. The lace curtains, the aspidistra, the lithograph called the Virgin’s Choise, the printed text of the Lord’s Prayer written backwards and hung upside down, the sea-shell, the needle-case in the shape of a heart with A Present from Camelot written on it, the broomsticks, the cauldrons, and the bottles of dandelion wine. Then they were kicking and struggling in the back yard.
“We thought that the growing sportsmen would care to examine our rabbits,” said Madame Mim.
There was indeed a row of large rabbit hutches in front of them, but they were empty of rabbits. In one hutch there was a poor ragged old eagle owl, evidently quite miserable and neglected: in another a small boy unknown to them, a wittol who could only roll his eyes and burble when the witch came near. In a third there was a moulting black cock. A fourth had a mangy goat in it, also black, and two more stood empty.
“Grizzle Greediguts,” cried the witch.
“Here, Mother,” answered the carrion crow.
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T. H. White
The extraordinary story of a boy called Wart – ignored by everyone except his tutor, Merlyn – who goes on to become King Arthur.When Merlyn the magician comes to tutor Sir Ector's sons Kay and the Wart, schoolwork suddenly becomes much more fun. After all, who wouldn't enjoy being turned into a fish, or a badger, or a snake? But Merlyn has very particular plans for the Wart.This edition of T.H White’s classic story includes a special “Why You’ll Love This Book” introduction by bestselling-author, Garth Nix.
Copyright (#ulink_9160ebb8-1a72-506b-ad11-977569b7f870)
First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd in 1938
This edition published by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2016
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
The HarperCollins Children’s Books website address is
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Text copyright © T H White 1938
Illustrations copyright © Robert Shadbolt 1998
Why you’ll Love This Book copyright © Garth Nix 2008
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Cover illustration © Manuel Šumberac 2016
T. H. White and Robert Shadbolt assert the moral right to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007263493
Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780007370740
Version: 2016-07-26
ForSir Thomas MaleoreKnight
***
“I pray you all, gentlemen and gentlewomen that readeth this book, from the beginning to the ending, pray for me while I am on live, that God send me good deliverance, and when I’m dead, I pray you all pray for my soul.”
Sir Thomas Maleore, Knight.
July 31
, 1485.
Why You’ll Love This Book by Garth Nix (#ulink_6ddba351-8b2e-5cc0-9319-df8e16209b71)
The Sword in the Stone is one of my favourite books, and one that I read again every three or four years – which confirms its position as one of the most significant books in my life. I have many hundreds if not thousands of books that I like very much and may have read twice, but the number of books that I continually go back to and have read at least half a dozen times is much more limited.
Writing this piece has made me think about why I keep coming back to The Sword in the Stone and why has it lasted so well, from my first reading at the age of twelve to my very recent reading at the age of forty-four (practically an ancient of days, or so my twelve year-old self would have thought).
So why do I keep re-reading The Sword in the Stone? Is it the brilliant way in which T. H. White mixes up the modern, the historical and the mythic? Absolutely. Is it the wonderful story, which though based on the legend of King Arthur offers so much more from between and behind the scenes of the myth? Definitely. Is it because of the characters, from the sympathetic but realistic portrait of an orphan boy who will one day become a king to that most creatively-invented wizard of any book, the living backwards through time Merlyn. Of course.
I love the book for all these things, and more. It is a book full of rich details that you don’t always notice the first time through, small asides and historical titbits that if you want to investigate will lead you into all sorts of fascinating stuff, from falconry to medieval hunting terms to satirical comment on 1930s British society, with side-trips through philosophy, sociology, zoology and doubtless several other ‘ologies.
But even though the book is packed with what might be called pre-Internet hotlinks to amazing information – and personally I was led to all kinds of other books by White – you don’t need to know or care about all the great depth of knowledge that underpins the novel. You won’t be put off by White’s cleverness or erudition, because the story comes first, and The Sword in the Stone is always a cracking good read.
Finally, all I can add is to say that ever since I was twelve, I have wanted a wizard’s workroom exactly like Merlyn’s, with everything that is described in the book, from the real corkindrill hanging from the rafters to the complete set of cigarette cards depicting wildfowl by Peter Scott. Those few pages describing Merlyn’s room offer a prime example of the genius of T. H. White, for in that scene he mixes references to his contemporary time of the 1930s with history, myth and legend. He makes it work and be real and true, and it is strong enough to stick in the mind of the reader not just while they read the book, but forever. I may not have managed to get a room like Merlyn’s, but I don’t really need to, because all I have to do is open up The Sword in the Stone, and I will be there, and can once again inhabit and enjoy one of the greatest and most influential fantasy novels of the last hundred years.
Garth Nix
Garth Nix is an internationally bestselling author of sci-fi and fantasy, his work includes The Old Kingdom trilogy and the Keys to the Kingdom series. Before becoming a full time writer, he worked as a book publicist, a publisher’s sales representative and an editor. Along the way he was also a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve. To date his books have sold millions of copies worldwide, and have won numerous prizes including the Aurealis award.
CONTENTS
Cover (#ud08545ec-5310-50b2-a01a-6d59269def51)
Title Page (#u92623de6-35a0-5e0c-8e53-b3ba985ec9d7)
Copyright (#u2aff1e6b-61a1-522f-9998-5c40e1f3ca1c)
Dedication (#uede8a9fe-3659-58a7-b46d-b62e45402451)
Why You’ll Love This Book by Garth Nix (#u3af10ca5-bd79-560c-a9db-c508e0519d33)
Chapter One (#ubdc03a76-aa07-5a57-906a-5d3a38c9c363)
Chapter Two (#ud8afb229-52c3-537f-b5a6-44833623b846)
Chapter Three (#u91b89c97-ea35-53bc-8e6f-68acddf61639)
Chapter Four (#u42f170f0-5662-5d93-b607-e41ad0ee01bb)
Chapter Five (#u38dbeeb5-2a9f-5087-896e-1807d4071656)
Chapter Six (#u882f9c00-640c-5f85-9582-9823766784f0)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
More Than A Story (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by T. H. White (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_561796b8-1fd5-5742-b6c3-011eb11a09dc)
On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology. The governess was always getting muddled with her astrolabe, and when she got specially muddled she would take it out on the Wart by rapping his knuckles. She did not rap Kay’s knuckles because when Kay grew older he would be Sir Kay, and the master of the estate. The Wart was called the Wart because it rhymed with Art, which was short for his real name. Kay had given him the nickname. Kay was not called anything but Kay, because he was too dignified to have a nickname and would have flown into a passion if anybody had tried to give him one. The governess had red hair and some mysterious wound from which she derived a lot of prestige by showing it to all the women of the castle, behind closed doors. It was believed to be where she sat down, and to have been caused by sitting on a broken bottle at a picnic by mistake. Eventually she offered to show it to Sir Ector, who was Kay’s father, had hysterics and was sent away. They found out afterwards that she had been in a lunatic hospital for three years.
In the afternoons the programme was: Mondays and Fridays, tilting and horsemanship; Tuesdays, hawking; Wednesdays, fencing; Thursdays, archery; Saturdays, the theory of chivalry, with the proper measures to be blown on all occasions, terminology of the chase and hunting etiquette. If you did the wrong thing at the mort or the undoing, for instance, you were bent over the body of the dead beast and smacked with the flat side of a sword. This was called being bladed. It was horseplay, a sort of joke like being shaved when crossing the line. Kay was not bladed, although he often went wrong.
After they had got rid of the governess, Sir Ector said, “After all, damn it all, we can’t have the boys runnin’ about all day like hooligans, after all, can we, damn it all? Ought to be havin’ a first-rate eddication, at their age. When I was their age I was doin’ all this Latin and stuff at five o’clock every mornin’. Happiest time of my life. Pass the port.”
Sir Grummore Grummursum, who was staying the night because he had been benighted out questin’ after a specially long run, said that when he was their age he was swished every mornin’ because he would go hawkin’ instead of learnin’. He attributed to this weakness the fact that he could never get beyond the Future Simple of Utor. It was a third of the way down the left-hand page, he said. He thought it was page ninety-seven. He passed the port.
Sir Ector said, “Had a good quest today?”
Sir Grummore said, “Oh, not so bad. Rattlin’ good day, in fact. Found a chap called Sir Bruce Saunce Pité choppin’ off a maiden’s head in Weedon Bushes, ran him to Mixbury Plantation in the Bicester, where he doubled back, and lost him in Wicken Wood. Must have been a good twenty-five miles as he ran.”
“A straight-necked ’un,” said Sir Ector.
“But about these boys and all this Latin and that,” added Sir Ector. “Amo, amas, you know, and runnin’ about like hooligans: what would you advise?”
“Ah,” said Sir Grummore, laying his finger by his nose and winking at the port, “that takes a deal of thinkin’ about, if you don’t mind my sayin’ so.”
“Don’t mind at all,” said Sir Ector. “Very kind of you to say anythin’. Much obliged, I’m sure. Help yourself to port.”
“Good port this,” said Sir Grummore.
“Get it from a friend of mine,” said Sir Ector.
“But about these boys,” said Sir Grummore. “How many of them are there, do you know?”
“Two,” said Sir Ector, “counting them both, that is.”
“Couldn’t send them to Eton, I suppose?” inquired Sir Grummore cautiously. “Long way and all that, we know.”
“Isn’t so much the distance,” said Sir Ector, “but that giant What’s-’is-name is in the way. Have to pass through his country, you understand.”
“What is his name?”
“Can’t recollect it at the moment, not for the life of me. Fellow that lives by the burbly water.”
“Ah, Galapas,” said Sir Grummore.
“That’s the very chap.”
“The only other thing,” said Sir Grummore, “is to have a tutor.”
“You mean a fellow who teaches you,” said Sir Ector wisely.
“That’s it,” said Sir Grummore. “A tutor, you know, a fellow who teaches you.”
“Have some more port,” said Sir Ector. “You need it after all this questin’.”
“Splendid day,” said Sir Grummore. “Only they never seem to kill nowadays. Run twenty-five miles and then mark to ground or lose him altogether. The worst is when you start a fresh quest.”
“We kill all our giants cubbin’,” said Sir Ector. “After that they give you a fine run, but get away.”
“Run out of scent,” said Sir Grummore, “I dare say. It’s always the same with these big giants in a big country. They run out of scent.”
“But even if you were to have a tutor,” said Sir Ector. “I don’t see how you would get him.”
“Advertise,” said Sir Grummore.
“I have advertised,” said Sir Ector. “I put it in the Humberland News and Cardoile Advertiser.”
“The only other way,” said Sir Grummore, “is to start a quest.”
“You mean a quest for a tutor,” explained Sir Ector.
“That’s it,” said Sir Grummore.
“Hic, Hac, Hoc,” said Sir Ector. “Have some more port.”
“Hunc,” said Sir Grummore.
So it was decided. When Sir Grummore Grummursum had gone away next day, Sir Ector tied a knot in his handkerchief to remember to start a quest for a tutor as soon as he had time, and, as he was not quite sure how to set about it, he told the boys what Sir Grummore had suggested and warned them not to be hooligans meanwhile. Then they went haymaking.
It was July, and every able-bodied man and woman on the estate worked all that month in the field, under Sir Ector’s direction. In any case the boys would have been excused from being eddicated just then.
Sir Ector’s castle stood in an enormous clearing in a still more enormous forest. It had a big green courtyard and a moat with pike in it. The moat was crossed by a strongly-fortified stone bridge which ended halfway across it: the other half was covered by a wooden drawbridge which was wound up every night. As soon as you had crossed the draw-bridge you were at the top of the village street – it had only one street – and this extended for about half a mile, with little white thatched houses of mud on either side of it. The street divided the clearing into two huge fields, that on the left being cultivated in hundreds of long narrow strips, while that on the right ran down to a little river and was used as pasture. Half of the right-hand field was fenced off for hay.
It was July, and real July weather, such as they only had in old England. Everybody went bright brown like Red Indians with startling teeth and flashing eyes. The dogs moved about with their tongues hanging out, or lay panting in bits of shade, while the farm horses sweated through their coats and flicked their tails and tried to kick the horseflies off their bellies with their great hind hoofs. In the pasture field the cows were on the gad, and could be seen galloping about with their tails in the air, which made Sir Ector angry.
Sir Ector stood on the top of a rick, whence he could see what everybody was doing, and shouted commands all over the two-hundred-acre field, and grew purple in the face. The best mowers mowed away in a line where the grass was still uncut, their scythes roaring all together in the strong sunlight. The women raked the dry hay together in long lines, with wooden rakes, and two boys with pitchforks followed up on either side of the line turning the hay inwards so that it lay well for picking up. Then the great carts followed, rumbling with their spiked wooden wheels, and drawn by horses or slow white oxen. One man stood on top of the cart to receive the hay and direct operations, while one man walked on either side picking up what the boys had prepared and throwing it to him with a fork. The cart was led down the lane between two lines of hay, and was loaded in strict rotation from the front poles to the back, the man on top calling out in a stern voice where he wanted each fork to be pitched. The loaders grumbled at the boys for not having laid the hay properly and threatened to tan them when they caught them, if they got left behind.
When the waggon was loaded, it was drawn to Sir Ector’s rick and pitched to him. It came up easily because it had been loaded systematically – not like modern hay – and Sir Ector scrambled about on top, getting in the way of the two assistants, who did all the real work, and stamping and perspiring and scratching about with his fork and trying to make the rick grow straight and shouting that it would all fall down as soon as the west winds came.
The Wart loved haymaking, and was good at it. Kay, who was two years older, generally stood on the edge of the bundle of hay which he was trying to pick up, with the result that he worked twice as hard as the Wart for only half the result. But he hated to be beaten by anybody at anything and used to fight away with the wretched hay – which he loathed like poison – until he was quite sick.
The day after Sir Grummore’s visit was hot, sweltering for the men who toiled from milking to milking and then again till sunset in their battle with the sultry element. For the hay was an element to them, like sea or air, in which they bathed and plunged themselves and which they even breathed in. The seeds and small scraps stuck in their hair, their mouths, their nostrils, and worked, tickling, inside their clothes. They did not wear many clothes, and the shadows between their sliding muscles were blue on the nut-brown skins. Those who feared thunder had felt ill that morning.
In the afternoon a terrible storm came. Sir Ector kept them at it till the great flashes were right overhead, and then, with the sky as dark as night, the rain came hurling against them so that they were drenched at once and could not see a hundred yards. The boys lay crouched under the waggons, wrapped in hay to keep their wet bodies warm against the now cold wind, and all joked with one another while heaven fell. Kay was shivering, though not with cold, but he joked like the others because he would not show he was afraid. At the last and greatest thunderbolt every man startled involuntarily, and each saw the other startle, until they all laughed away their shame.
But that was the end of the haymaking for them and the beginning of play. The boys were sent home to change their clothes. The old dame who had been their nurse fetched dry jerkins out of a press, and scolded them for catching their deaths, and denounced Sir Ector for keeping them on so long. Then they slipped their heads into the laundered shirts, and ran out into the refreshed and sparkling court.
“I vote we take Cully and see if we can get some rabbits in the chase,” cried the Wart.
“The rabbits won’t be out in this wet,” said Kay sarcastically, delighted to have caught him out over natural history.
“Oh, come on,” said the Wart. “It’ll soon dry.”
“I must carry Cully, then.”
Kay insisted on carrying the goshawk and flying her, when they went out together. This he had a right to do, not only because he was older than the Wart but also because he was Sir Ector’s proper son. The Wart was not a proper son. He did not understand about this, but it made him feel unhappy, because Kay seemed to regard it as making him inferior in some way. Also it was different not having a father and mother, and Kay had taught him that being different was necessarily wrong. Nobody talked to him about it, but he thought about it when he was alone, and was distressed. He did not like people to bring it up, and since the other boy always did bring it up when a question of precedence arose, he had got into the habit of giving in at once before it could be mentioned. Besides, he admired Kay and was a born follower. He was a hero-worshipper.
“Come on, then,” cried the Wart, and they scampered off towards the mews, turning a few cartwheels on the way.
The mews was one of the most important parts of the castle, next to the stables and the kennels. It was opposite to the solar and faced south. The outside windows had to be small, for reasons of fortification, but the windows which looked inwards to the courtyard were big and sunny. All the windows had close vertical slats nailed down them, but no horizontal ones. There was no glass, but to keep the hawks from draughts there was horn in the small windows. At one end of the mews there was a little fireplace and a kind of snuggery, like the place in a saddle-room where the grooms sit to clean their tack on wet winter nights after hunting. Here there were a couple of stools, a cauldron, a bench with all sorts of small knives and surgical instruments, and some shelves with pots on them. The pots were labelled Cardamum, Ginger, Barley Sugar, Wrangle, For a Snurt, For the Craye, Vertigo, etc. There were leather skins hanging up, which had been snipped about as pieces were cut out of them for jesses, hoods or leashes. On the neat row of nails there were Indian bells and swivels and silver varvels each with Ector cut on. A special shelf, and the most beautiful of all, held the hoods: very old cracked rufter hoods which had been made for birds before Kay was born, tiny hoods for the merlins, small hoods for tiercels, splendid new hoods which had been knocked up to pass away the long winter evenings. All the hoods, except the rufters, were made in Sir Ector’s colours: white leather with red baize at the sides and a bunch of blue grey plumes on top, made out of the hackle feathers of herons. On the bench there was a jumble of oddments such as are to be found in every workshop, bits of cord, wire, metal, tools, some bread, and cheese which the mice had been at, a leather bottle, some frayed gauntlets for the left hand, nails, bits of sacking, a couple of lures and some rough tallies scratched on the wood. These read: Conays IIIIIIII, Harn III, etc. They were not spelt very well.
Right down the length of the room, with the afternoon sun shining full on them, there ran the screen perches to which the birds were tied. There were two little merlins which had only just been taken up from hacking, an old peregrine who was not much use in this wooded country but who was kept for appearances, a kestrel on which the boys had learnt the rudiments of falconry, a spar-hawk which Sir Ector was kind enough to keep for the parson, and caged off in a special apartment of his own at the far end, there was the tiercel goshawk Cully.
The Mews was neatly kept, with sawdust on the floor to absorb the mutes, and the castings taken up every day. Sir Ector visited the mews each morning at seven o’clock and the two austringers stood at attention outside the door. If they had forgotten to brush their hair he confined them to barracks. They took no notice.
Kay put on one of the left-handed gauntlets and called Cully from the perch; but Cully, with all his feathers close-set and malevolent, glared at him with a mad marigold eye and refused to come. So Kay took him up.
“Do you think we ought to fly him?” asked the Wart doubtfully. “Deep in the moult like this?”
“Of course we can fly him, yon ninny,” said Kay. “He only wants to be carried a bit, that’s all.”
So they went out across the hay-field, noting how the carefully-raked hay was now sodden again and losing its goodness, into the chase where the trees began to grow, far apart as yet and parklike, but gradually crowding into the forest shade. The conies had hundreds of buries under these trees, so close together that the problem was not to find a rabbit, but find a rabbit far enough away from its hole.
“Hob says that we mustn’t fly Cully till he has roused at least twice,” said the Wart.
“Hob doesn’t know anything about it,” said the other boy. “Nobody can tell whether a hawk is fit to fly except the man who is carrying it.
“Hob is only a villein anyway,” added Kay, and began to undo the leash and swivel from the jesses.
When he felt the trappings being taken off him, so that he was in hunting order, Cully did make some movements as if to rouse. He raised his crest, his shoulders coverts and the soft feathers of his thighs, but at the last moment he thought better or worse of it and subsided without the rattle. This movement of the hawk’s made the Wart itch to carry him, so that he yearned to take him away from Kay and set him to rights himself. He felt certain that he could get Cully into a good temper by scratching his feet and softly teasing his breast feathers upwards, if only he were allowed to do it himself, instead of having to plod along behind with the stupid lure; but he knew how annoying it must be for Kay to be continually subjected to advice, and so he held his peace. Just as in modern shooting you must never offer criticism to the man in command, so in hawking it was important that no outside advice should be allowed to disturb the judgement of the actual austringer.
“So-ho!” cried Kay, throwing his arms upwards to give the hawk a better take-off, and a rabbit was scooting across the close-nibbled turf in front of them, and Cully was in the air. The movement had surprised the Wart, the rabbit and the hawk, all three, and all three hung a moment in surprise. Then the great wings of the aerial assassin began to row the air, but reluctantly and undecided, the rabbit vanished in a hidden hole, and up went the hawk, swooping like a child flung high in a swing, until the wings folded and he was sitting in a tree. Cully looked down at his masters, opened his beak in an angry pant of failure, and remained motionless. The two hearts stood still.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_4d707b50-31b2-5401-8900-2d6f5f1aba9f)
A good while after that, when they had been whistling and luring and following the disturbed and sulky hawk from tree to tree, Kay lost his temper.
“Let him go, then,” said Kay. “He’s no use anyway.”
“Oh, we couldn’t leave him,” cried the Wart. “What would Hob say?”
“It’s my hawk, not Hob’s,” exclaimed Kay furiously. “What does it matter what Hob says? He is my servant.”
“But Hob made Cully. It’s all right for us to lose him, for we didn’t have to sit up with him three nights and carry him all day and all that. We can’t lose Hob’s hawk. It would be beastly.”
“Serve him right, then. He’s a fool and it’s a rotten hawk. Who wants a rotten, stupid hawk? You’d better stay yourself, if you’re so keen on it. I’m going home.”
“I’ll stay,” said the Wart sadly, “if you’ll send Hob when you get back.”
Kay began walking off in the wrong direction, raging in his heart because he knew that he had flown the bird when he was not properly in yarak, and the Wart had to shout after him the right way. Then he sat down under the tree and looked up at Cully like a cat watching a sparrow, but with his heart beating fast.
It was all right for Kay, who was not really keen on hawking except in so far as it was the proper occupation for a boy in his station of life, but the Wart had some of the falconer’s feelings and knew that a lost hawk was the greatest possible calamity. He knew that Hob had worked on Cully for fourteen hours a day, over a period of months, in order to teach him his trade, and that his work had been like Jacob’s struggle with the angel. When Cully was lost a part of Hob was lost too. The Wart did not dare to face the look of reproach which would be in Hob’s eye, after all that he had tried to teach them.
What was he to do? He had better sit still, leaving the lure on the ground, so that Cully could settle down and come in his own time. But Cully had no intention of doing this. He had been given a generous crop the night before, so that he was not hungry: the hot day had put him in a bad temper: the waving and whistling of the boys below him, and their pursuit of him from tree to tree, had disturbed his never very powerful brains. Now he did not quite know what he wanted to do, but it was not what anybody else wanted. He thought perhaps it would be nice to kill something, just from spite.
A long time after that, the Wart was on the verge of the true forest, and Cully inside it. In a series of infuriating removes they had come nearer and nearer, till they were further from the castle than the Wart had ever been, and now they had reached it quite.
Wart would not have been frightened of a forest nowadays, but the great jungle of old England was a different thing. It was not only that there were wild boars in it, whose sounders would at this season be furiously rooting about, nor that one of the surviving wolves might be slinking behind any tree, with pale eyes and slavering chops. The man and wicked animals were not the only inhabitants of the crowded gloom. When men themselves became mad and wicked they took refuge there, outlaws cunning and bloody as the gorecrow, and as persecuted. The Wart thought particularly of a man named Wat, whose name the cottagers used to frighten their children with. He had once lived in Sir Ector’s village and the Wart could remember him. He squinted, had no nose, and was weak in his wits. The children threw stones at him. One day he turned on the children and caught one and made a snarly noise and bit off his nose too. Then he ran away into the forest. They threw stones at the child with no nose, now, but Wat was supposed to be in the forest still, running on all fours and dressed in skins.
There were magicians in the forest also in those days, as well as strange animals not known to modern works of natural history. There were regular bands of outlaws, not like Wat, who lived together and wore green and shot with arrows which never missed. There were even a few dragons, though they were rather small ones, which lived under stones and could hiss like a kettle.
Added to this, there was the fact that it was getting dark. The forest was trackless and nobody in the village knew what was on the other side. The evening hush had fallen, and all the high trees stood looking at the Wart without a sound.
He felt that it would be safer to go home, while he still knew where he was; but he had a stout heart, and did not want to give in. He understood that once Cully had slept in freedom for a whole night he would be wild again and irreclaimable. Cully was a passager. But if the poor Wart could only make him to roost, and if Hob would only arrive then with a dark lantern, they might still take him that night by climbing the tree, while he was sleepy and muddled with the light. He could see more or less where the hawk had perched, about a hundred yards within the thick trees, because the home-going rooks of evening were mobbing that place.
Wart made a mark on one of the trees outside the forest, hoping that it might help him to find his way back, and then began to fight his way into the undergrowth as best he might. He heard by the rooks that Cully had immediately moved further off.
The night fell still as the small boy struggled with the brambles; but he went on doggedly, listening with all his ears, and Cully’s evasions became sleepier and shorter until at last, before the utter darkness fell, he could see the hunched shoulders in a tree above him against the sky. Wart sat down under the tree, so as not to disturb the bird any further as it went to sleep, and Cully, standing on one leg, ignored his existence.
“Perhaps,” said the Wart to himself, “even if Hob doesn’t come, and I don’t see how he can very well follow me in this trackless forest now, I shall be able to climb up by myself at about midnight because he ought to be deep in sleep then. I could speak to him softly by name, so that he thought it was just the usual person coming to take him up while hooded. I shall have to climb very quietly. Then, if I do get him, I shall have to find my way home, and the drawbridge will be up. But perhaps somebody will wait for me, for Kay will have told them I am out. I wonder which way it was? I wish Kay had not gone.”
He snuggled down between the roots of the tree, trying to find a comfortable place where the hard wood did not stick into his shoulder blades.
“I think the way was behind that big spruce with the spiky top. I ought to try to remember which side of me the sun is setting, so that when it rises I may keep it on the same side going home. Did something move under that spruce tree, I wonder? Oh, I wish I may not meet that old wild Wat and have my nose bitten off. How aggravating Cully looks, standing there on one leg as if there was nothing the matter.”
At this there was a quick whirr and a smack, and the Wart found an arrow sticking in the tree wood between the fingers of his right hand. He snatched his hand away, thinking he had been stung by something, before he noticed it was an arrow. Then everything went slow. He had time to notice quite carefully what sort of an arrow it was, and how it had driven three inches into the solid wood. It was a black arrow with yellow bands round it, like a horrible wasp, and its cock feather was yellow. The two others were black. They were goose feathers.
The Wart found that, although he was frightened of the danger of the forest before it happened, once he was in it he was not frightened any more. He got up quickly, but it seemed to him slowly, and went behind the other side of the tree. As he did this, another arrow came whirr and tock, but this one buried all except its feathers in the grass, and stayed there still, as if it had never moved.
On the other side of the tree he found a waste of bracken, six foot high. This was splendid cover, but it betrayed his whereabouts by rustling. He heard another arrow hiss through the fronds, and what seemed to be a man’s voice cursing, but it was not very near. Then he heard the man, or whatever it was, running about in the bracken. It was reluctant to fire any more arrows because they were valuable things and would certainly get lost in the undergrowth. Wart went like a snake, like a coney, like a silent owl. He was small and the creature had no chance against him in this game. In five minutes he was safe.
The assassin searched for his arrows and went away grumbling; but the Wart realized that, even if he was safe, he had lost his way and his hawk. He had not the faintest idea where he was. He lay down for half an hour, pressed under the fallen tree where he had hidden to give time for the thing to go right away and for his own heart to cease its thundering. It had begun beating like this as soon as he knew he had got away from the outlaw.
“Oh,” thought the Wart, “now I am truly lost, and now there is almost no alternative except to have my nose bitten off, or to be pierced right through with one of those waspy arrows, or to be eaten by a hissing dragon or a wolf or a wild boar or a magician – if magicians do eat boys, which I expect they do. Now I may well wish that I had been a good boy, and not angered the governess when she got muddled with her astrolabe, and had loved my dear guardian Sir Ector as much as he deserved.”
At these melancholy thoughts, and especially at the recollections of kind Sir Ector with his pitchfork and his big red nose, the poor Wart’s eyes became full of tears and he lay most desolate beneath the tree.
The sun finished the last rays of its lingering goodbye, and the moon rose in awful majesty over the silver treetops, before he dared to rise. Then he got up, and dusted the twigs out of his jerkin, and wandered off forlornly, taking the easiest way always and trusting himself to God. He had been walking like this for about half an hour, and sometimes sighing to himself and sometimes feeling more cheerful – because it really was very cool and lovely in the summer forest by moonlight – when he came upon the most beautiful thing that he had ever seen in his short life.
There was a clearing in the forest, a wide sward of moonlit grass, and the white rays shone full upon the tree trunks on the opposite side. These trees were beeches, whose trunks are always most beautiful in a pearly light, and among the beeches there was the smallest movement and a silvery clink. Before the clink there were just beeches, but immediately afterwards there was a Knight in full armour, standing still, and silent and unearthly, among the majestic trunks. He was mounted on an enormous white horse that stood as rapt as its master, and he carried in his right hand, with its butt resting on the stirrup, a high, smooth jousting lance, which stood up among the tree stumps, higher and higher, till it was outlined against the velvet sky. All was moonlit, all silver, too beautiful to describe.
The Wart did not know what to do. He did not know whether it would be safe to go up to this Knight, for there were so many terrible things in the forest that even the Knight might be a ghost. Most ghostly he looked, too, as he hoved meditating on the confines of the gloom. Eventually the Wart made up his mind that even if it was a ghost, it would be the ghost of a Knight, and Knights were bound by their vows to help people in distress.
“Excuse me,” said the Wart, when he was right under the mysterious figure, “but can you tell me the way back to Sir Ector’s castle?”
At this the ghost jumped violently, so that it nearly fell off its horse, and gave out a muffled baaaing noise through its visor, like a flock of sheep.
“Excuse me,” began the Wart again, and stopped, terrified, in the middle of his speech.
For the ghost lifted up its visor, revealing two enormous eyes frosted like ice; exclaimed in an anxious voice, “What, what?”; took off its eyes – which turned out to be horn-rimmed spectacles, completely fogged by being inside the helmet; tried to wipe them on the horse’s mane – which only made them worse; lifted both hands above its head and tried to wipe them on its plume; dropped its lance; dropped the spectacles, got off the horse to search for them – the visor shutting in the process; lifted its visor; bent down for the spectacles; stood up again as the visor shut once more, and exclaimed in a plaintive voice, “Deah, deah!”
The Wart found the spectacles, wiped them, and gave them to the ghost, who immediately put them on (the visor shut again at once) and began scrambling back on the horse for dear life. When it was there it held out its hand for the lance, which the Wart handed up, and, feeling all secure, opened its visor with its left hand and held it open. It peered at the Wart with one hand up, like a lost mariner searching for land, and exclaimed, “Ah – hah; whom have we heah, what what?”
“Please,” said the Wart, “I am a boy whose guardian is Sir Ector.”
“Charming fellah,” said the Knight. “Charming fellah. Never met him in my life.”
“Can you tell me the way back to his castle?”
“Faintest ideah,” said the Knight. “Faintest ideah. Stranger in these parts meself.”
“I have got lost,” said the Wart.
“Funny thing that. Funny thing that, what? Now Ay have been lost for seventeen years.
“Name of King Pellinore,” continued the Knight. “May have heard of me, what?” Here the visor shut with a pop, like an echo to the What, but was opened again immediately. “Seventeen years ago, come Michaelmas, and been after the Questing Beast ever since. Boring, very.”
“I should think it would be,” said the Wart, who had never heard of King Pellinore, or the Questing Beast, but felt that this was the safest thing to say in the circumstances.
“It is the burden of the Pellinores,” said the Knight proudly. “Only a Pellinore can catch it; that is, of course, or his next of kin. Train all the Pellinores with that ideah in mind. Limited eddication, rather. Fewmets, and all that.”
“I know what fewmets are,” said the Wart with interest. “They are the droppings of the beast pursued. The harbourer keeps them in his horn, to show to his master, and can tell by them whether it is a warrantable beast or otherwise, and what state it is in.”
“Intelligent child,” remarked King Pellinore. “Very. Now Ay carry fewmets about with me practically all the time.
“Insanitary habit,” added the King, beginning to look rather dejected, “and quite pointless. Only one Questing Beast, you know, what, so there can’t be any question whether it is warrantable or not.”
Here his visor began to droop so much that the Wart decided he had better forget his own troubles and try to cheer his companion up, by asking questions on the one subject about which King Pellinore seemed qualified to speak. Even talking to a lost royalty was better than being alone in the wood.
“What does the Questing Beast look like?”
“Ah, we call it the Beast Glatisant, you know,” replied the monarch, assuming a learned air and beginning to speak quite volubly. “Now the Beast Glatisant, or, as we say in English, the Questing Beast – you may call it either,” he added graciously, – “this Beast has the head of a serpent, ah, and the body of a libbard, the haunches of a lion, and he is footed like a hart. Wherever this beast goes he makes a noise in his belly as it had been the noise of thirty couples of hounds questing.
“Except when he is drinking, of course,” added the King severely, as if he had rather shocked himself by leaving this out.
“It must be a dreadful kind of monster,” said the Wart, looking at him anxiously.
“A dreadful monster,” repeated the other complacently. “It is the Beast Glatisant, you know.”
“And how do you follow it?”
This seemed to be the wrong kind of question, for King Pellinore immediately began to look much more depressed than ever, and glanced over his shoulder so hurriedly that his visor shut down altogether.
“Ay have a brachet,” said King Pellinore sadly, as soon as he had restored himself. “There she is, over theah.”
The Wart looked in the direction which had been indicated with a despondent thumb, and saw a lot of rope wound round a tree. The other end of the rope was tied to King Pellinore’s saddle.
“I don’t see her very well.”
“Wound herself round the other side of the tree, Ay dare say,” said the King, without looking round. “She always goes the opposite way to me.”
The Wart went over to the tree and found a large white dog scratching herself for fleas. As soon as she saw the Wart, she began wagging her whole body, grinning vacuously, and panting in her efforts to lick his face in spite of the cord. She was too tangled up to move.
“It’s quite a good brachet,” said King Pellinore, “only it pants so, and gets wound round things, and goes the opposite way. What with that and the visor, what, Ay sometimes don’t know which way to turn.”
“Why don’t you let her loose?” asked the Wart. “She would follow the Beast just as well like that.”
“She just goes right away then, you know, and Ay don’t see her sometimes for a week.
“Gets a bit lonely without her,” added the King wistfully, “following this Beast about, what, and never knowing where one is. Makes a bit of company, you know.”
“She seems to have a friendly nature,” said the Wart.
“Too friendly. Sometimes Ay doubt whether she is really after the Beast at all.”
“What does she do when she sees it?”
“Nothing,” said King Pellinore.
“Oh, well,” said the Wart, “I dare say she will get to be interested in it after a time.”
“It’s eight months anyway since Ay saw the Beast at all.”
King Pellinore’s voice had got sadder and sadder since the beginning of the conversation, and now he definitely began to sniffle. “It’s the curse of the Pellinores,” he exclaimed. “Always mollocking about after that beastly Beast. What on earth use is it, anyway? First you have to stop to unwind the brachet, then your visor falls down, then you can’t see through your spectacles. Nowhere to sleep, never know where you are. Rheumatism in the winter, sunstroke in the summer. All this beastly armour takes hours to put on. When it is on it’s either frying or freezing, and it gets rusty. You have to sit up all night polishing the stuff. Oh, how Ay do wish Ay had a nice house of my own to live in, a house with beds in it and real pillows and sheets. If Ay was rich that’s what Ay would buy. A nice bed with a nice pillow and a nice sheet that you could lie in, and then Ay would put this beastly horse in a meadow and tell that beastly brachet to run away and play, and throw all this beastly armour out of the window, and let the beastly Beast go and chase itself, that Ay would.”
“If you could only show me the way home,” said the Wart craftily, “I am sure Sir Ector would put you up in a bed for the night.”
“Do you really mean it?” cried King Pellinore. “In a bed?”
“A feather bed,” said the Wart firmly.
King Pellinore’s eyes grew as round as saucers.
“A feather bed!” he repeated slowly. “Would it have pillows?”
“Down pillows.”
“Down pillows!” whispered the King, holding his breath. And then, letting it all out in a rush. “What a lovely house your guardian must have!”
“I don’t think it is more than two hours away,” said the Wart, following up his advantage.
“And did this gentleman really send you out to invite me in?” inquired the King wonderingly. (He had forgotten all about the Wart being lost.) “How nice of him, how very nice of him, Ay do think, what?”
“He will be very pleased to see us,” said the Wart, quite truthfully.
“Oh, how nice of him,” exclaimed the King again, beginning to bustle about his various trappings. “And what a lovely gentleman he must be, to have a feather bed!
“Ay suppose Ay should have to share it with somebody?” he added doubtfully.
“You could have one of your very own.”
“A feather bed of one’s very own,” exclaimed King Pellinore, “with sheets and a pillow – perhaps even two pillows, or a pillow and a bolster – and no need to get up in time for breakfast!
“Does your guardian get up in time for breakfast?” inquired the King, a momentary doubt striking him.
“Never,” said the Wart.
“Fleas in the bed?” asked the King suspiciously.
“Not one.”
“Well!” said King Pellinore. “It does sound too nice for words, Ay must say. A feather bed and none of those beastly fewmets for ever so long. How long did you say it would take us to get there?”
“Two hours,” said the Wart; but he had to shout the second of these words, for the sounds were drowned in his mouth by a dreadful noise which had that moment arisen close beside them.
“What was that?” exclaimed the Wart.
“Hark!” cried the King.
“Oh, mercy!” wailed the Wart.
“It’s the Beast!” shouted the King.
And immediately the loving huntsman had forgotten everything else, but was busied about his task. He wiped his spectacles upon the seat of his trousers, the only accessible piece of cloth about him, while the belling and bloody cry arose all round; balanced them on the end of his long nose, just before the visor automatically clapped to; clutched his jousting lance in his right hand, and galloped off in the direction of the noise. He was brought up short by the rope which was wound round the tree – the vacuous brachet meanwhile giving a melancholy yelp – and fell off his horse with a tremendous clang. In a second he was up again – the Wart was convinced that his spectacles must be broken – and hopping round the white horse with one foot in the stirrup. The girths stood the test and he was in the saddle somehow, with his jousting lance between his legs, and then he was galloping round and round the tree, in the opposite direction to that in which the brachet had wound herself up. He went round three times too often, the brachet meanwhile running and yelping in the opposite direction, and then, after four or five back casts, they were both free of the obstruction. “Yoicks, what!” cried King Pellinore, waving his lance in the air, and swaying excitedly in the saddle. Then he disappeared completely into the gloom of the forest, with the unfortunate brachet trailing and howling behind him at the other end of the string.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_37866286-0b83-5b1a-a779-523de9614c07)
The Wart slept well in the woodland nest where he had laid himself down, in that kind of thin but refreshing sleep which people have when they first lie out of doors. At first he only dipped below the surface of sleep, and skimmed along like a salmon in shallow water, so close to the surface that he fancied himself in the air. He thought himself awake when he was already asleep. He saw the stars above his face, whirling round on their silent and sleepless axis, and the leaves of the trees rustling against them, and heard small changes in the grass. These little noises of footsteps and soft-fringed wing-beats and stealthy bellies drawn over the grass blades or rattling against the bracken at first frightened or interested him, so that he moved to see what they were (but never saw), then soothed him, so that he no longer cared to see what they were but trusted them to be themselves, and finally left him altogether as he swam down deeper and deeper, nuzzling his nose into the scented turf, into the warm ground, into the unending waters under the earth.
It had been difficult to go to sleep in the bright summer moonlight, but once he was there it was not difficult to stay. The sun came early, causing him to turn over in protest, but in going to sleep he had learnt to vanquish light, and now the light could not rewake him. It was nine o’clock, five hours after daylight, before he rolled over, opened his eyes, and was awake at once. He was hungry.
The Wart had heard about people who lived on berries, but this did not seem practical at the moment because it was July, and there were none. He found two wild strawberries and ate them greedily. They tasted nicer than anything, so he wished there were more. Then he wished it was April, so that he could find some birds’ eggs and eat those, or that he had not lost his goshawk Cully, so that the bird could catch him a rabbit which he would cook by rubbing two sticks together like the base Indian. But he had lost Cully, or he would not have lost himself, and probably the sticks would not have lit in any case. He decided that he could not have gone more than three or four miles from home, so the best thing he could do would be to sit still and listen. Then he might hear the noise of the haymakers, if he was lucky with the wind, and could hearken his way home by that.
What he did hear was a faint clanking noise, which made him think that King Pellinore must be after the Questing Beast again, close by. Only the noise was so regular and single in intention that it made him think of King Pellinore doing some special action with great patience and concentration, trying to scratch his back without taking off his armour, for instance. He went towards the noise.
There was a clearing in the forest, and in this clearing there was a snug little cottage built of stone. It was a cottage, although the Wart could not notice this at the time, which was divided into two bits. The main bit was the hall or every-purpose room, which was high because it extended from floor to roof, and this room had a fire on the floor whose smoke issued eventually out of a hole in the thatch of the roof. The other half of the cottage was divided into two rooms by a horizontal floor which made the top half into a bedroom and study, while the bottom half served for a larder, store-room, stable and barn. A white donkey lived in this downstairs room, and a ladder led to the one upstairs.
There was a well in front of the cottage, and the metallic noise which the Wart had heard was caused by a very old gentleman who was drawing water out of it by means of a handle and chain.
Clank, clank, clank, said the chain, until the bucket hit the lip of the well, and “Oh, drat the whole thing,” said the old gentleman. You would think that after all these years of study one could do better for oneself than a by-our-lady well with a by-our-lady bucket, whatever the by-our-lady cost.
“I wish to goodness,” added the old gentleman, heaving his bucket out of the well with a malevolent glance, “that I was only on the electric light and company’s water, drat it.”
The old gentleman that the Wart saw was a singular spectacle. He was dressed in a flowing gown with fur tippets which had the signs of the zodiac embroidered all over it, together with various cabalistic signs, as of triangles with eyes in them, queer crosses, leaves of trees, bones and birds and animals and a planetarium whose stars shone like bits of looking glass with the sun on them. He had a pointed hat like a dunce’s cap, or like the headgear worn by ladies of that time, except that the ladies were accustomed to have a bit of veil floating from the top of it. He also had a wand of lignum vitae, which he had laid down in the grass beside him, and a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles like those of King Pellinore. They were extraordinary spectacles, being without earpieces, but shaped rather like scissors or the the antennae of the tarantula wasp.
“Excuse me, sir,” said the Wart, “but can you tell me the way to Sir Ector’s castle, if you don’t mind?”
The aged gentleman put down his bucket and looked at the Wart.
“Your name would be Wart,” he said.
“Yes, sir, please, sir,” said the Wart.
“My name,” said the aged gentleman, “is Merlyn.”
“How do you do?” said the Wart.
“How do you do?” said Merlyn. “It is clement weather, is it not?”
“It is,” said the Wart, “for the time of the year.”
When these formalities had been concluded, the Wart had leisure to examine his new acquaintance more closely. The aged gentleman was staring at him with a kind of unwinking and benevolent curiosity which made him feel that it would not be at all rude to stare back, no ruder than it would be to stare at one of his guardian’s cows who happened to be ruminating his personality as she leant her head over a gate.
Merlyn had a long white beard and long white moustache which hung down on either side of it, and close inspection showed that he was far from clean. It was not that he had dirty finger-nails or anything like that, but some large bird seemed to have been nesting in his hair. The Wart was familiar with the nests of spar-hawk and gos, those crazy conglomerations of sticks and oddments which had been taken over from squirrels and crows, and he knew how the twigs and the tree foot were splashed with white mutes, old bones, muddy feathers and castings. This was the impression which he gathered from Merlyn. The old gentleman was streaked with droppings over his shoulders, among the stars and triangles of his gown, and a large spider was slowly lowering itself from the tip of his hat, as he gazed and slowly blinked at the little boy in front of him. He had a faintly worried expression, as though he were trying to remember some name which began with Chol but which was pronounced in quite a different way, possibly Menzies or was it Dalziel? His mild blue eyes, very big and round under the tarantula spectacles, gradually filmed and clouded over as he gazed at the boy, and then he turned his head away with a resigned expression, as though it was all too much for him after all.
“Do you like peaches?” asked the old gentleman.
“Very much indeed,” answered the Wart, and his mouth began to water so that it was full of sweet, soft liquid.
“It is only July, you know,” said the old man reprovingly, and walked off in the direction of the cottage without looking round.
The Wart followed after him, since this was the simplest thing to do, and offered to carry the bucket (which seemed to please the old gentleman, who gave it to him) and waited while he counted his keys, and muttered and mislaid them and dropped them in the grass. Finally, when they had got their way into the black and white cottage with as much trouble as if they were burglaring it, he climbed up the ladder after his host and found himself in the upstairs room.
It was the most marvellous room that the Wart had ever been in.
There was a real corkindrill hanging from the rafters, very lifelike and horrible with glass eyes and scaly tail stretched out behind it. When its master came into the room it winked one eye in salutation, although it was stuffed. There were hundreds of thousands of brown books in leather bindings, some chained to the bookshelves and others propped up against each other as if they had had too much spirits to drink and did not really trust themselves. These gave out a smell of must and solid brownness which was most secure. Then there were stuffed birds, popinjays, and maggot-pies, and kingfishers, and peacocks with all their feathers but two, and tiny birds like beetles, and a reputed phoenix which smelt of incense and cinnamon. It could not have been a real phoenix, because there is only one of these at a time. Over the mantelpiece there was a fox’s mask, with GRAFTON. BUCKINGHAM TO DAVENTRY, 2 HRS 20 MINS written under it, and also a forty-pound salmon with AWE, 43 MIN., BULLDOG written under it, and a very life-like basilisk with CROWHURST OTTER HOUNDS in Roman print. There were several boars’ tusks and the claws of tigers and libbards mounted in symmetrical patterns, and a big head of Ovis Poli, six live grass snakes in a kind of aquarium, some nests of the solitary wasp nicely set up in a glass cylinder, an ordinary beehive whose inhabitants went in and out of the window unmolested, two young hedgehogs in cotton wool, a pair of badgers which immediately began to cry Yik-Yik-Yik-Yik in loud voices as soon as the magician appeared, twenty boxes which contained stick caterpillars and sixths of the puss-moth, and even an oleander that was worth two and six, all feeding on the appropriate leaves, a guncase with all sorts of weapons which would not be invented for half a thousand years, a rod-box ditto, a lovely chest of drawers full of salmon flies which had been tied by Merlyn himself, another chest whose drawers were labelled Mandragora, Mandrake, Old Man’s Beard, etc., a bunch of turkey feathers and goose-quills for making pens, an astrolabe, twelve pairs of boots, a dozen purse-nets, three dozen rabbit wires, twelve corkscrews, an ant’s nest between two glass plates, ink-bottles of every possible colour from red to violet, darning-needles, a gold medal for being the best scholar at Eton, four or five recorders, a nest of field mice all alive-o, two skulls, plenty of cut glass, Venetian glass, Bristol glass and a bottle of Mastic varnish, some satsuma china and some cloisonné, the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (marred as it was by the sensationalism of the popular plates), two paint-boxes (one oil, one water-colour), three globes of the known geographical world, a few fossils, the stuffed head of a camel-leopard, six pismires, some glass retorts with cauldrons, bunsen burners, etc., and the complete set of cigarette cards depicting wildfowl by Peter Scott.
Merlyn took off his pointed hat when he came into this extraordinary chamber, because it was too high for the roof, and immediately there was a little scamper in one of the dark corners and a flap of soft wings, and a young tawny owl was sitting on the black skull-cap which protected the top of his head.
“Oh, what a lovely owl!” cried the Wart.
But when he went up to it and held out his hand, the owl grew half as tall again, stood up as stiff as a poker, closed its eyes so that there was only the smallest slit to peep through, as one is in the habit of doing when told to shut one’s eyes at hide-and-seek, and said in a doubtful voice:
“There is no owl.”
Then it shut its eyes entirely and looked the other way.
“It’s only a boy,” said Merlyn.
“There is no boy,” said the owl hopefully, without turning round.
The Wart was so startled by finding that the owl could talk that he forgot his manners and came closer still. At this the owl became so nervous that it made a mess on Merlyn’s head – the whole room was quite white with droppings – and flew off to perch on the farthest tip of the corkindrill’s tail, out of reach.
“We see so little company,” explained Merlyn, wiping his head with half a worn-out pair of pyjama tops which he kept for that purpose, “that Archimedes is a little shy of strangers. Come, Archimedes, I want you to meet a friend of mine called Wart.”
Here he held out his hand to the owl, who came waddling like a goose along the corkindrill’s back – he waddled with this rolling gait so as to keep his tail from being damaged – and hopped down on to Merlyn’s finger with every sign of reluctance.
“Hold out your finger,” said Merlyn, “and put it behind his legs. No, lift it up under his train.”
When the Wart had done this Merlyn moved the owl gently backwards, so that the Wart’s finger pressed against its legs from behind, and it either had to step back on the finger or get pushed off its balance altogether. It stepped back. The Wart stood there delighted, while the furry little feet held tight on to his finger and the sharp claws prickled his skin.
“Say how d’you do properly,” said Merlyn.
“I won’t,” said Archimedes, looking the other way and holding very tight.
“Oh, he is lovely,” said the Wart again. “Have you had him very long?”
“Archimedes has stayed with me since he was quite small, indeed since he had a tiny head like a chicken’s.”
“I wish he would talk to me,” said the Wart.
“Perhaps if you were to give him this mouse here, politely, he might learn to know you better.”
Merlyn took the dead mouse out of his skull-cap – “I always keep them there,” he explained, “and worms too, for fishing. I find it most convenient” – and handed it to the Wart, who held it out rather gingerly towards Archimedes. The nutty little curved beak looked as if it were capable of doing damage, but Archimedes looked closely at the mouse, blinked at the Wart, moved nearer on the finger, closed his eyes and leant forward. He stood there with closed eyes and an expression of rapture on his face, as if he were saying grace, and then, with the absurdest little sideways nibble, took the morsel so gently that he would not have broken a soap bubble. He remained leaning forward with closed eyes, with the mouse suspended from his beak, as if he were not sure what to do with it. Then he lifted his right foot – he was right-handed – and took hold of the mouse. He held it up like a boy holding a stick of rock or a constable with his truncheon, looked at it, nibbled its tail. He turned it round so that it was head first, for the Wart had offered it the wrong way round, and gave one gulp. He looked round at the company with the tail hanging out of the corner of his mouth – as much as to say, “I wish you would not all stare at me so” – turned his head away, politely swallowed the tail, scratched his sailor’s beard with his left toe, and began to ruffle out his feathers.
“Let him alone,” said Merlyn, “now. For perhaps he does not want to be friends with you until he knows what you are like. With owls, it is never easy-come and easy-go.”
“Perhaps he will sit on my shoulder,” said the Wart, and with that he instinctively lowered his hand, so that the owl, who liked to be as high as possible, ran up the slope and stood shyly beside his ear.
“Now breakfast,” said Merlyn.
The Wart saw that the most perfect breakfast was laid out neatly for two, on the table before the window. There were peaches. There were also melons, strawberries and cream, rusks, brown trout piping hot, grilled perch which were much nicer, chicken devilled enough to burn one’s mouth out, kidneys and mushrooms on toast, fricassee, curry, and a choice of boiling coffee or best chocolate made with cream in large cups.
“Have some mustard,” said Merlyn, when they had got to the kidneys.
The mustard-pot got up and walked over to his plate on thin silver legs that waddled like the owl’s. Then it uncurled its handles and one handle lifted its lid with exaggerated courtesy while the other helped him to a generous spoonful.
“Oh, I love the mustard-pot!” cried the Wart. “Where ever did you get it?”
At this the pot beamed all over its face and began to strut a bit; but Merlyn rapped it on the head with a teaspoon, so that it sat down and shut up at once.
“It’s not a bad pot,” he said grudgingly. “Only it is inclined to give itself airs.”
The Wart was so much impressed by the kindness of the old magician, and particularly by all the lovely things which he possessed, that he hardly liked to ask him personal questions. It seemed politer to sit still and speak when he was spoken to. But Merlyn did not speak very much, and when he did speak it was never in questions, so that the Wart had little opportunity for conversation. At last his curiosity got the better of him, and he asked something which had been puzzling him for some time.
“Would you mind if I ask you a question?”
“It is what I am for,” said Merlyn sadly.
“How did you know to set the breakfast for two?”
The old gentleman leaned back in his chair and lit an enormous meerschaum pipe – Good gracious, he breathes fire, thought the Wart, who had never heard of tobacco – before he was ready to reply. Then he looked puzzled, took off his skull-cap – three mice fell out – and scratched in the middle of his bald head.
“Have you ever tried to draw in a looking-glass?” asked Merlyn.
“I don’t think I have,” said the Wart.
“Looking-glass,” said the old gentleman, holding out his hand. Immediately there was a tiny lady’s vanity-glass in his hand.
“Not that kind, you fool,” said Merlyn angrily. “I want one big enough to shave in.”
The vanity-glass vanished, and in its place there was a shaving mirror about a foot square. Merlyn then demanded pencil and paper in quick succession; got an unsharpened pencil and the Morning Post; sent them back; got a fountain-pen with no ink in it and six reams of brown-paper suitable for parcels; sent them back; flew into a passion in which he said by-our-lady quite often, and ended up with a carbon pencil and some cigarette papers which he said would have to do.
He put one of the papers in front of the glass and made five dots on it like this:
“Now,” he said, “I want you to join those five dots up to make a W, looking only in the glass.”
The Wart took the pen and tried to do as he was bid, but after a lot of false starts the letter which he produced was this:
“Well, it isn’t bad,” said Merlyn doubtfully, “and in a way it does look a bit like an M.”
Then he fell into a reverie, stroking his beard, breathing fire, and staring at the paper.
“About the breakfast?” asked the Wart timidly, after he had waited five minutes.
“Ah, yes,” said Merlyn. “How did I know to set breakfast for two? That was why I showed you the looking-glass. Now ordinary people are born forwards in Time, if you understand what I mean, and nearly everything in the world goes forward too. This makes it quite easy for the ordinary people to live, just as it would be easy to join those five dots into a W if you were allowed to look at them forwards instead of backwards and inside out. But I unfortunately was born at the wrong end of time, and I have to live backwards from in front, while surrounded by a lot of people living forwards from behind. Some people call it having second sight.”
Merlyn stopped talking and looked at the Wart in an anxious way.
“Have I told you this before?” he inquired suspiciously.
“No,” said the Wart. “We only met about half an hour ago.”
“So little time to pass as that?” said Merlyn, and a big tear ran down to the end of his nose. He wiped it off with his pyjama tops and added anxiously, “Am I going to tell it you again?”
“I don’t know,” said the Wart, “unless you haven’t finished telling me yet.”
“You see,” said Merlyn, “one gets confused with Time, when it is like that. All one’s tenses get muddled up, for one thing. If you know what’s going to happen to people, and not what has happened to them, it makes it so difficult to prevent it happening, if you don’t want it to have happened, if you see what I mean? Like drawing in a mirror.”
The Wart did not quite see, but was just going to say that he was sorry for Merlyn if these things made him unhappy, when he felt a curious sensation at his ear. “Don’t jump,” said Merlyn, just as he was going to do so, and the Wart sat still. Archimedes, who had been standing forgotten on his shoulder all this time, was gently touching himself against him. His beak was right against the lobe of his ear, which its bristles made to tickle, and suddenly, a soft hoarse little voice whispered, “How d’you do,” so that it sounded right inside his head.
“Oh, owl!” cried the Wart, forgetting about Merlyn’s troubles instantly. “Look, he has decided to talk to me!”
The Wart gently leant his head against the soft feathers, and the brown owl, taking the rim of his ear in its beak, quickly nibbled right round it with the smallest nibbles.
“I shall call him Archie!” exclaimed the Wart.
“I trust you will do nothing of the sort,” cried Merlyn instantly, in a stern and angry voice, and the owl withdrew to the farthest corner of his shoulder.
“Is it wrong?”
“You might as well call me Wol, or Olly,” said the owl sourly, “and have done with it.
“Or Bubbles,” added the owl in a bitter voice.
Merlyn took the Wart’s hand and said kindly, “You are only young, and do not understand these things. But you will learn that owls are the politest and the most courteous, single-hearted and faithful creatures living. You must never be familiar, rude or vulgar with them, or make them to look ridiculous. Their mother is Athene, the goddess of wisdom, and, though they are often ready to play the buffoon for your amusement, such conduct is the prerogative of the truly wise. No owl can possibly be called Archie.”
“I am sorry, owl,” said the Wart.
“And I am sorry, boy,” said the owl. “I can see that you spoke in ignorance, and I bitterly regret that I should have been so petty as to take offence where none was intended.”
The owl really did regret it, and looked so remorseful and upset that Merlyn had to put on a very cheerful manner and change the conversation.
“Well,” said he, “now that we have finished breakfast, I think it is high time that we should all three find out way back to Sir Ector.”
“Excuse me a moment,” he added as an afterthought, and, turning round to the breakfast things, he pointed a knobbly finger at them and said in a stern voice, “Wash up.”
At this all the china and cutlery scrambled down off the table, the cloth emptied the crumbs out of the window, and the napkins folded themselves up. All ran off down the ladder, to where Merlyn had left the bucket, and there was such a noise and yelling as if a lot of children had been let out of school. Merlyn went to the door and shouted, “Mind, nobody is to get broken.” But his voice was entirely drowned in shrill squeals, splashes, and cries of “My, it is cold,” “I shan’t stay in long,” “Look out, you’ll break me,” or “Come on, let’s duck the teapot.”
“Are you really coming all the way home with me?” asked the Wart, who could hardly believe the good news.
“Why not?” said Merlyn. “How else can I be your tutor?”
At this the Wart’s eyes grew rounder and rounder, until they were about as big as the owl’s who was sitting on his shoulder, and his face got redder and redder, and a big breath seemed to gather itself beneath his heart.
“My!” exclaimed the Wart, while his eyes sparkled with excitement at the discovery. “I must have been on a Quest.”
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_255d89e0-9c0b-5d4f-90d8-6fb249a1b0c4)
The Wart started talking before he was halfway over the drawbridge. “Look who I’ve brought,” he said. “Look! I’ve been on a Quest. I was shot at with three arrows. They had black and yellow stripes. The owl is called Archimedes. I saw King Pellinore. This is my tutor, Merlyn. I went on a Quest for him. He was after the Questing Beast. I mean King Pellinore. It was terrible in the forest. Merlyn made the plates wash up. Hallo, Hob. Look, we have got Cully.”
Hob just looked at the Wart, but so proudly that the Wart went quite red. It was such a pleasure to be back home again with all his friends, and everything achieved.
Hob said gruffly, “Ah, master, us shall make an austringer of ’ee yet.”
He came for Cully, as if he could not keep his hands off him any longer, but he patted the Wart too, fondling them both because he was not sure which he was gladder to see back. He took Cully on his own fist, reassuming him like a lame man putting on his accustomed wooden leg, after it had been lost.
“Merlyn caught him,” said the Wart. “He sent Archimedes to look for him on the way home. Then Archimedes told us that he had been and killed a pigeon and was eating it. We went and frightened him off. After that, Merlyn stuck six of the tail feathers round the pigeon in a circle, and made a loop in a long piece of string to go round the feathers. He tied one end to a stick in the ground, and he went away behind a bush with the other end. He said he wouldn’t use magic. He said you couldn’t use magic in Great Arts, like it would be unfair to make a great statue by magic. You have to cut it out with a chisel, you see. Then Cully came down to finish the pigeon, and we pulled the string, and the loop slipped over the feathers and caught him round the legs. He was angry. But we gave him the pigeon.”
Hob made a duty to Merlyn, who returned it courteously. They looked upon one another with grave affection and eagerness, knowing each other to be masters of the same trade. When they could be alone together they could talk and talk, although each was naturally a silent man. Meanwhile they must wait their time.
“Oh, Kay,” cried the Wart, as the latter appeared with their nurse and other delighted welcomers. “Look I have got a magician for our tutor. He has a mustard-pot that walks.”
“I am glad you are back,” said Kay.
“Alas, where did you sleep, Master Art?” exclaimed the nurse. “Look at your clean jerkin all muddied and torn. Such a turn as you gave us, I really don’t know. But look at your poor hair with all them twigs in it. Oh, my own random, wicked little lamb.”
Sir Ector came bustling out with his greaves on back to front, and kissed the Wart on both cheeks. “Well, well, well,” he exclaimed moistly. “Here we are again, hey? What the devil have you been doin’, hey? Settin’ the whole household upside down.”
But inside him he was proud of the Wart for staying out after a hawk, and prouder still to see that he had got it, for all the while Hob held the bird in the air for everybody to see.
“Oh, sir,” said the Wart. “I have been on that Quest you said for a tutor, and I have found him. Please, he is this gentleman here, and he is called Merlyn. He has got some badgers and hedgehogs and mice and things on this white donkey here, because we couldn’t leave them behind to starve. He is a great musician, and can make things come out of the air.”
“Ah, a magician,” said Sir Ector, putting on his glasses and looked closely at Merlyn. “White magic, I hope?”
“Assuredly,” said Merlyn, who stood patiently among all this throng with his arms folded in his necromantic gown, and Archimedes sitting very stiff and elongated on the top of his head.
“Ought to have some testimonials, you know,” said Sir Ector doubtfully. “It’s usual.”
“Testimonials,” said Merlyn, holding out his hand.
Instantly there were some heavy tablets in it, signed by Aristotle, a parchment signed by Hecate, and some typewritten duplicates signed by the Master of Trinity, who could not remember having met him. All these gave Merlyn an excellent character.
“He had ’em up his sleeve,” said Sir Ector wisely. “Can you do anything else?”
“Tree,” said Merlyn. At once there was an enormous mulberry growing in the middle of the courtyard, with its luscious blue fruits ready to patter down.
“They do it with mirrors,” said Sir Ector.
“Snow,” said Merlyn. “And an umbrella,” he added hastily.
Before they could turn round the copper sky of summer had assumed a cold and lowering bronze, while the biggest white flakes that were ever seen were floating about them and settling on the battlements. An inch of snow had fallen before they could speak, and all were trembling with the wintry blast. Sir Ector’s nose was blue, and had an icicle hanging from the end of it, while all except Merlyn had a ledge of snow upon their shoulders. Merlyn stood in the middle, holding his umbrella high because of the owl.
“It’s done by hypnotism,” said Sir Ector, with chattering teeth. “Like those wallahs from the Indies.
“But that’ll do, you know,” he added hastily, “that’ll do very well. I’m sure you’ll make an excellent tutor for teachin’ these boys.”
The snow stopped immediately and the sun came out – “Enough to give a body a pewmonia,” said the nurse, “or to frighten the elastic commissioners” – while Merlyn folded up his umbrella and handed it back to the air, which received it.
“Imagine the boy doin’ a quest like that all by himself,” exclaimed Sir Ector. “Well, well, well. Wonders never cease.”
“I don’t think much of it as a quest,” said Kay. “He only went after the hawk, after all.”
“And got the hawk, Master Kay,” said Hob reprovingly.
“Oh well,” said Kay, “I bet the old man caught it for him.”
“Kay,” said Merlyn, suddenly terrible, “thou wast ever a proud and ill-tongued speaker, and a misfortunate one. Thy sorrow will come from thine own mouth.”
At this everybody felt uncomfortable, and Kay, instead of flying into his usual passion, hung his head. He was not at all an unpleasant person really, but clever, quick, proud, passionate and ambitious. He was one of those people who would be neither a follower or a leader, but only an aspiring heart, impatient in the failing body which imprisoned it. Merlyn repented of his rudeness at once. He made a little silver hunting-knife come out of the air, which he gave him to put things right. The knob of the handle was made of the skull of a stoat, oiled and polished like ivory, and Kay loved it.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_7d2857aa-4a52-5daa-9174-d6fe1319547b)
Sir Ector’s home was called The Castle of the Forest Sauvage. It was more like a town or a village than any one man’s home, and indeed it was the village during all times of danger. Whenever there was a raid or an invasion, everybody on the estate hurried into the castle, driving all the beasts before them into the courts, and there they remained until the danger was over. The little wattle and daub cottages nearly always got burnt, and had to be built again afterwards with much profanity. For this reason it was not worth while troubling to have a village church, as it would constantly be having to be replaced. The villagers went to church in the chapel of the castle. They wore their best clothes and trooped up the street with their most respectable gait on Sundays, looking with vague and dignified looks in all directions, as if reluctant to disclose their destination, and on weekdays they came to mass and vespers in their ordinary clothes, walking much more cheerfully. Everybody went to church in those days, and liked it.
The Castle of the Forest Sauvage is still standing, and you can see its lovely ruined walls with ivy on them, standing broached to the sun and wind. Some lizards live there now, and the starving sparrows keep warm on winter nights in the ivy, and a barn owl drives it methodically, hovering outside the little frightened congregations and beating the ivy with its wings, to make them fly out. Most of the curtain wall is down, though you can trace the foundations of the twelve round towers which guarded it. They are round, and stuck out from the wall into the moat, so that the archers could fire in all directions and command every part of the wall. Inside the towers there are circular stairs. These go round and round a central column, and this column is pierced with holes for shooting arrows. Even if the enemy had got inside the curtain wall and fought its way into the bottom of the towers, the defenders could retreat up the bends of the stairs and shoot at those who followed them up, inside, through the slits.
The stone part of the drawbridge with its barbican and the bartizans of the gatehouse are in good repair. These have many ingenious arrangements. Even if you got over the wooden bridge, which was pulled up so that you couldn’t, there was a portcullis weighed with an enormous log which would squash you flat and pin you down as well. There was a large hidden trapdoor in the floor of the barbican, which would let you into the moat after all. At the other end of the barbican there was another portcullis, so that you could be trapped between the two and annihilated from above, while the bartizans, or hanging turrets, had holes in their floors through which the defenders could drop things on your head. Finally, inside the gatehouse, there was a neat little hole in the middle of the vaulted ceiling, which had painted tracery and bosses. This hole led to the room above, where there was a big cauldron, for boiling lead and oil in.
So much for the outer defences. Once you were inside the curtain wall, you found yourself in a kind of wide alleyway, probably full of frightened sheep, with another complete castle in front of you. This was the inner shell-keep, with its eight enormous round towers which still stand. It is lovely to climb the highest of them and to lie there looking out towards the Marches, from which all these old dangers came, with nothing but the sun above you and the little tourists trotting about below, quite regardless of arrows and boiling oil. Think of how many centuries that unconquerable tower has withstood. It has changed hands by secession often, by siege once, by treachery twice, but never by assault. On this tower the look-out moved. From here he kept the guard over the blue woods towards Wales. His clean old bones lie beneath the floor of the chapel now, so you must keep it for him.
If you look down and are not frightened of heights (the society for the Preservation of This and That have put up some excellent railings to preserve you from tumbling over), you can see the whole anatomy of the inner court laid out beneath you like a map. You can see the chapel, now quite open to its god, and the windows of the great hall with the solar over it. You can see the shafts of the huge chimneys and how cunningly the side flues were contrived to enter them, and the little private closets now public, and the enormous kitchen. If you are a sensible person, you will spend days there, possibly weeks, working out for yourself by detection which were the stables, which the mews, where were the cow byres, the armoury, the lofts, the well, the smithy, the kennel, the soldiers’ quarters, the priest’s room, and my lord’s and lady’s chambers. Then it will all grow about you again. The little people – they were much smaller than we are, and it would be a job for most of us to get inside the few bits of their armour and old gloves that remain – will hurry about in the sunshine, the sheep will baa as they always did, and perhaps from Wales there will come the ffff-putt of the triple-feathered arrow which looks as if it had never moved.
This place was of course, a complete paradise for a boy to be in. The Wart ran about it like a rabbit in its own complicated labyrinth. He knew everything, everywhere, all the special smells, good climbs, soft lairs, secret hiding-places, jumps, slides, nooks, larders and blisses. For every season he had the best place like a cat, and he yelled and ran and fought and upset people and snoozed and daydreamed and pretended he was a Knight, without ever stopping. Just now he was in the kennel.
People in those days had rather different ideas about the training of dogs to what we have today. They did it more by love than strictness. Imagine a modern M. F. H. going to bed with his hounds, and yet Flavius Arrianus says that it is “Best of all if they can sleep with a person because it makes them more human and because they rejoice in the company of human beings: also if they have had a restless night or been internally upset, you will know of it and will not use them to hunt next day.” In Sir Ector’s kennel there was a special boy, called the Dog Boy, who lived with the hounds day and night. He was a sort of head hound, and it was his business to take them out every day for walks, to pull thorns out of their feet, keep cankers out of their ears, bind the smaller bones that got dislocated, dose them for worms, isolate and nurse them in distemper, arbitrate in their quarrels and sleep curled up among them at night. If one more learned quotation may be excused, this is how the Duke of York who was killed at Agincourt described such a boy in his Master of Game: “Also I will teach the child to lead out the hounds to scombre twice in the day in the morning and in the evening, so that the sun be up, especially in winter. Then should he let them run and play long in a meadow in the sun, and then comb every hound after the other, and wipe them with a great wisp of straw, and this he shall do every morning. And then he shall lead them into some fair place where tender grass grows as corn and other things, that therewith they may feed themselves as if it is medicine for them.” Thus, since the boy’s “heart and his business be with the hounds,” the hounds themselves become “Goodly and kindly and clean, glad and joyful and playful, and goodly to all manner of folks save to the wild beasts to whom they should be fierce, eager and spiteful.”
Sir Ector’s dog-boy was none other than the one who had had his nose bitten off by the terrible Wat. Not having a nose like a human, and being, moreover, subjected to stone-throwing by the other village children, he had become more comfortable with animals. He talked to them, not in baby-talk like a maiden lady, but correctly in their own growls and barks. They all loved him very much, and revered him for taking thorns out of their toes, and came to him with their little troubles at once. He always understood immediately what was wrong, and generally he could put it right. It was nice for the dogs to have their god with them, in visible form.
The Wart was fond of the Dog Boy, and thought him very clever to be able to do all these things with animals – for he could make them do almost anything just by moving his hands – while the Dog Boy loved the Wart in much the same way as his dogs loved him, and thought the Wart was almost holy because he could read and write. They spent much of their time together, rolling about with the dogs in the kennel.
The kennel was on the ground floor, near the mews, with a loft above it, so that it should be cool in summer and warm in winter. The hounds were alaunts, gaze-hounds, lymers and braches. They were called Clumsy, Trowneer, Phoebe, Colle, Gerland, Talbot, Luath, Luffra, Apollon, Orthros, Bran, Gelert, Bounce, Boy, Lion, Bungey, Toby and Diamond. The Wart’s own special one was called Cavall, and he happened to be licking Cavall’s nose – not the other way about – when Merlyn came in and found him.
“That will come to be regarded as an insanitary habit,” said Merlyn, “though I can’t see it myself. After all, God made the creature’s nose just as well as he made your tongue.
“If not better,” added the philosopher pensively.
The Wart did not know what Merlyn was talking about, but he liked him to talk. He did not like the grown-ups who talked down to him like a baby, but the ones who just went on talking in their usual way, leaving him to leap along in their wake, jumping at meanings, guessing, clutching at known words, and chuckling at complicated jokes as they suddenly dawned. He had the glee of the porpoise then, pouring and leaping through strange seas.
“Shall we go out?” asked Merlyn. “I think it is about time we began our lessons.”
The Wart’s heart sank at this. His tutor had been there a month, and it was now August, but they had done no lessons so far. Now he suddenly remembered that this was what Merlyn was for, and he thought with dread of Summulae Logicales and the filthy astrolabe. He knew that it had to be borne, however, and got up obediently enough, after giving Cavall a last reluctant pat. He thought that it might not be so bad with Merlyn, who might be able to make even the old Organon interesting, particularly if he would do some magic.
They went out into the courtyard, into a sun so burning that the heat of haymaking seemed to have been nothing. It was baking. The thunder-clouds which usually go with hot weather were there, high columns of cumulus with glaring edges, but there was not going to be any thunder. It was too hot even for that. “If only,” thought the Wart, “I did not have to go into a stuffy classroom, but could take off my clothes and swim in the moat.”
They crossed the courtyard, having almost to take deep breaths before they darted across it, as if they were going quickly through an oven. The shade of the gatehouse was cool, but the barbican, with its close walls, was hottest of all. In one last dash across the desert they had achieved the draw-bridge – could Merlyn have guessed what he was thinking about? – and were staring down into the moat.
It was the season of water-lilies. If Sir Ector had not kept one section free of them for the boys’ bathing, all the water would have been covered. As it was, about twenty yards on each side of the bridge were cut each year, and you could dive in from the bridge itself. The moat was quite deep. It was used as a stew, so that the inhabitants of the castle could have fish on Fridays, and for this reason the architects had been careful not to let the drains and sewers run into it. It was stocked with fish every year.
“I wish I was a fish,’” said the Wart.
“What sort of fish?”
It was almost too hot to think about this, but the Wart stared down into the cool amber depths where a school of small perch were aimlessly hanging about.
“I think I should like to be a perch,” he said. “They are braver than the silly roach, and not quite so slaughterous as the pike.”
Merlyn took off his hat, raised his staff of lignum vitae politely in the air, and said slowly, “Snylrem stnemilpmoc ot enutpen dna lliw eh yldnik tpecca siht yob sa a hsif?”
Immediately there was a loud blowing of sea-shells, conches and so forth, and a stout, jolly-looking gentleman appeared seated on a well-blown-up cloud above the battlements. He had an anchor tattooed on his tummy and a handsome mermaid with Mabel written under her on his chest. He ejected a quid of tobacco, nodded affably to Merlyn and pointed his trident at the Wart. The Wart found he had no clothes on. He found that he had tumbled off the draw-bridge, landing with a smack on his side in the water. He found that the moat and the bridge had grown hundreds of times bigger. He knew that he was turning into a fish.
“Oh, Merlyn,” cried the Wart. “Please come too.”
“Just for this once,” said the large and solemn tench beside his ear, “I will come. But in future you will have to go by yourself. Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.”
The Wart found it difficult to be a fish. It was no good trying to swim like a human being, for it made him go corkscrew and much too slowly. He did not know how to swim like a fish.
“Not like that,” said the tench in ponderous tones. “Put your chin on your left shoulder and do jack-knives. Never mind about the fins to begin with.”
The Wart’s legs had fused together into his backbone and his feet and toes had become a tail fin. His arms had become two more fins – also of a delicate pinkish colour – and he had sprouted some more somewhere about his tummy. His head faced over his shoulder, so that when he bent in the middle his toes were moving towards his ear instead of towards his forehead. He was a beautiful olive-green colour with rather scratchy plate-armour all over him, and dark bands down his sides. He was not sure which were his sides and which were his back and front, but what now appeared to be his tummy had an attractive whitish colour, while his back was armed with a splendid great fin that could be erected for war and had spikes in it. He did jack-knives as the tench directed and found that he was swimming vertically downwards into the mud.
“Use your feet to turn to left or right with,” said the tench, “and spread those fins on your tummy to keep level. You are living in two planes now, not one.”
The Wart found that he could keep more or less level by altering the inclination of his arm fins and the ones on his stomach. He swam feebly off, enjoying himself very much.
“Come back,” said the tench solemnly. “You must learn to swim before you can dart.”
The Wart turned to his tutor in a series of zig-zags and remarked, “I don’t seem to keep quite straight.”
“The trouble with you is that you don’t swim from the shoulder. You swim as if you were a boy just bending at the hips. Try doing your jack-knives right from the neck downwards, and move your body exactly the same amount to the right as you are going to move it to the left. Put your back into it.”
Wart gave two terrific kicks and vanished altogether in a clump of mare’s tail several yards away.
“That’s better,” said the tench, now quite out of sight in the murky olive water, and the Wart backed himself out of his tangle with infinite trouble, by wriggling his arm fins. He undulated back towards the voice in one terrific shove, to show off.
“Good,” said the tench, as they collided end to end, “but discretion is the better part of valour.
“Try if you can do this one,” said the tench.
Without apparent exertion of any kind he swam off backwards under a water-lily. Without apparent exertion; but the Wart, who was an enterprising learner, had been watching the slightest movement of his fins. He moved his own fins anti-clockwise, gave the very tip of his own tail a cunning flick, and was lying alongside the tench.
“Splendid,” said Merlyn. “Let’s go for a little swim.”
The Wart was on an even keel now, and reasonably able to move about. He had leisure to observe the extraordinary universe into which the tattooed gentleman’s trident had plunged him. It was very different from the universe to which he had hitherto been accustomed. For one thing, the heaven or sky above him was now a perfect circle poised a few inches above his head. The horizon had closed in to this. In order to imagine yourself into the Wart’s position, you will have to picture a round horizon, a few inches above your head, instead of the flat horizon which you have usually seen. Under this horizon of air you will have to imagine another horizon under water, spherical and practically upside down – for the surface of the water acted partly as a mirror to what was below it. It is difficult to imagine. What makes it a great deal more difficult to imagine is that everything which human beings would consider to be above the water level was fringed with all the colours of the spectrum. For instance, if you had happened to be fishing for the Wart, he would have seen you, at the rim of the tea saucer which was the upper air to him, not as one person waving a fishing-rod, but as seven people, whose outlines were red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, all waving the same rod whose colours were as varied. In fact, you would have been a rainbow man to him, a beacon of flashing and radiating colours, which ran into one another and had rays all about. You would have been burnt upon the water like Cleopatra in the poem by Herédia. The reference may possibly be to Shakespeare.
The next most lovely thing was that the Wart had no weight. He was not earth-bound any more and did not have to plod along on a flat surface, pressed down by gravity and the weight of the atmosphere. He could do what men have always wanted to do, that is, fly. There is practically no difference between flying in the water and flying in the air. The best of it was that he did not have to fly in a machine, by pulling levers and sitting still, but could do it with his own body. It was like the dreams people have.
Just as they were going to swim off their tour of inspection, a timid young roach appeared from between two waving bottle brushes of mare’s tail and hung about, looking quite pale with agitation. It looked at them with big apprehensive eyes and evidently wanted something, but could not make up its mind.
“Approach,” said Merlyn gravely.
At this the roach rushed up like a hen, burst into tears and began stammering its message.
“If you p-p-p-please, Doctor,” stammered the poor creature, gabbling so that they could scarcely understand what it said, “we have such a d-dretful case of s-s-s-something or other in our family, and we w-w-w-wondered if you could s-s-s-spare the time? It’s our d-d-d-dear Mamma, who w-w-w-will swim a-a-a-all the time upside d-d-d-down, and she d-d-d-does look so horrible and s-s-s-speaks so strange, that we r-r-r-really thought she ought to have a d-d-d-doctor, if it w-w-w-wouldn’t be too much? C-C-C-Clara says to say so sir, if you s-s-s-see w-w-w-what I m-m-m-mean?”
Here the little roach began fizzing so much, what with its stammer and its tearful disposition, that it became perfectly inarticulate and could only stare at Merlyn with big mournful eyes.
“Never mind, my little man,” said Merlyn. “There, there, lead me to your poor Mamma, and we shall see what we can do.”
They all three swam off into the murk under the draw-bridge upon their errand of mercy.
“Very Russian, these roach,” whispered Merlyn to the Wart, behind his fin. “It’s probably only a case of nervous hysteria, a matter for the psychologist rather than the physician.”
The roach’s Mamma was lying on her back as he had described. She was squinting horribly, had folded her fins upon her chest, and every now and then she blew a bubble. All her children were gathered round her in a circle, and every time she blew a bubble they all nudged each other and gasped. She had a seraphic smile upon her face.
“Well, well, well,” said Merlyn, putting on his best bedside manner, “and how is Mrs Roach today?”
He patted all the young roaches on the head and advanced with stately motions towards his patient. It should perhaps be mentioned that Merlyn was a ponderous, deep-beamed fish of about five pounds, red-leather coloured, with small scales, adipose in his fins, rather slimy, and having a bright marigold eye – a respectable figure.
Mrs Roach held out a languid fin, sighed emphatically and said, “Ah, Doctor, so you’ve come at last?”
“Hum,” said Merlyn, in his deepest tones.
Then he told everybody to close their eyes – the Wart peeped – and began to swim round the invalid in a slow and stately dance. As he danced he sang. His song was this:
Therapeutic,
Elephantic,
Diagnosis,
Boom!
Pancreatic,
Microstatic,
Anti-toxic,
Doom!
With normal catabolism,
Gabbleism and babbleism,
Snip, Snap, Snorum
Cut out his abdonorum.
Dyspepsia,
Anaemia,
Toxaemia,
One, two, three,
And out goes He,
With a fol-de-rol-derido for the Five Guinea Fee.
At the end of his song he was swimming round his patient so close that he actually touched her, stroking his brown smooth-scaled flanks against her more rattly pale ones. Perhaps he was healing her with slime – for all fishes are said to go to the Tench for medicine – or perhaps it was by touch or massage or hypnotism. In any case, Mrs Roach suddenly stopped squinting, turned the right way up, and said, “Oh, Doctor, dear Doctor, I feel I could eat a little lob-worm now.”
“No lob-worm,” said Merlyn, “not for two days. I shall give you a prescription for a strong broth of algae every two hours, Mrs Roach. We must build up your strength you know. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
Then he patted all the little roaches once more, told them to grow up into brave little fish, and swam off with an air of great importance into the gloom. As he swam, he puffed his mouth in and out.
“What did you mean by that about Rome?” asked the Wart, when they were out of earshot.
“Heaven knows,” said the tench.
They swam along, Merlyn occasionally advising him to put his back into it when he forgot, and all the strange under-water world began to dawn about them, deliciously cool after the heat of the upper air. The great forests of the weed were delicately traced, and in them there hung motionless many schools of sticklebacks learning to do their physical exercises in strict unison. On the word One they all lay still: at Two they faced about: at Three they all shot together into a cone, whose apex was a bit of something to eat. Water snails slowly ambled about on the stems of the lilies or under their leaves, while fresh-water mussels lay on the bottom doing nothing in particular. Their flesh was salmon pink, like a very good strawberry cream ice. The small congregations of perch – it was a strange thing, but all the bigger fish seemed to have hidden themselves – had delicate circulations, so that they blushed or grew pale as easily as a lady in a Victorian novel. Only their blush was a deep olive colour, and it was the blush of rage. Whenever Merlyn and his companion swam past them, they raised their spiky dorsal fins in menace, and only lowered them when they saw that Merlyn was a tench. The black bars on their sides made them look as if they had been grilled; and these also could become darker or lighter. Once the two travellers passed under a swan. The white creature floated above like a zeppelin, all indistinct except what was under the water. The latter part was quite clear and showed that the swan was floating slightly on one side with one leg cocked up over its back.
“Look,” said the Wart, “it’s the poor swan with the deformed leg. It can only paddle with one leg, and the other side of it is all hunched.”
“Nonsense,” said the swan snappily, putting its head into the water and giving them a frown with its black nares. “Swans like to rest in this position, and you can keep your fishy sympathy to yourself, so there.” It continued to glare at them from up above, like a white snake suddenly let down through the ceiling, until they were out of sight.
“You swim along,” said the tench in gloomy tones, “as if there was nothing to be afraid of in the world. Don’t you see that this place is exactly like the forest you had to come through to find me?”
“Is it?”
“Look over there.”
The Wart looked, and at first saw nothing. Then he saw a little translucent shape hanging motionless near the surface. It was just outside the shadow of a water-lily and was evidently enjoying the sun. It was a baby pike, absolutely rigid and probably asleep, and it looked like a pipe stem or a sea horse stretched out flat. It would be a brigand when it grew up.
“I am taking you to see one of those,” said the tench, “the Emperor of all these purlieus. As a doctor I have immunity, and I daresay he will respect you as my companion as well. But you had better keep your tail bent in case he is feeling tyrannical.”
“Is he the King of the Moat?”
“He is the King of the Moat. Old Jack they call him, and some Black Peter, but for the most part they don’t mention him by name at all. They just call him Mr M. You will see what it is to be a king.”
The Wart began to hang behind his conductor a little, and perhaps it was as well that he did, for they were almost on top of their destination before he noticed it. When he did see the old despot he started back in horror, for Mr M. was four feet long, his weight incalculable. The great body, shadowy and almost invisible among the stems, ended in a face which had been ravaged by all the passions of an absolute monarch, by cruelty, sorrow, age, pride, selfishness, loneliness and thought too strong for individual brains. There he hung or hoved, his vast ironic mouth permanently drawn downwards in a kind of melancholy, his lean clean-shaven chops giving him an American expression, like that of Uncle Sam. He was remorseless, disillusioned, logical, predatory, fierce, pitiless: but his great jewel of an eye was that of a stricken deer, large, fearful, sensitive and full of griefs. He made no movement whatever, but looked upon them with this bitter eye.
The Wart thought to himself that he did not care for Mr M.
“Lord,” said Merlyn, not paying any attention to his nervousness. “I have brought a young professor who would learn to profess.”
“To profess what?” inquired the King of the Moat slowly, hardly opening his jaws and speaking through his nose.
“Power,” said the tench.
“Let him speak for himself.”
“Please,” said the Wart, “I don’t know what I ought to ask.”
“There is nothing,” said the monarch, “except the power that you profess to seek: power to grind and power to digest, power to seek and power to find, power to await and power to claim, all power and pitilessness springing from the nape of the neck.”
“Thank you,” said the Wart.
“Love is a trick played on us by the forces of evolution,” continued the monster monotonously. “Pleasure is the bait laid down by the same. There is only power. Power is of the individual mind, but the mind’s power alone is not enough. The power of strength decides everything in the end, and only Might is right.
“Now I think it is time that you should go away, young master, for I find this conversation excessively exhausting. I think you ought to go away really almost at once, in case my great disillusioned mouth should suddenly determine to introduce you to my great gills, which have teeth in them also. Yes, I really think you ought to go away this moment. Indeed, I think you ought to put your very back into it. And so, a long farewell to all my greatness.”
The Wart had found himself quite hypnotized by all these long words, and hardly noticed that the thin-lipped tight mouth was coming closer and closer to him all the time. It came imperceptibly, as the cold suave words distracted his attention, and suddenly it was looming within an inch of his nose. On the last sentence it opened, horrible and vast, the thin skin stretching ravenously from bone to bone and tooth to tooth. Inside there seemed to be nothing but teeth, sharp teeth like thorns in rows and ridges everywhere, like the nails in labourers’ boots, and it was only at the very last second that he was able to regain his own will, to pull himself together, recollect his instructions and to escape. All those teeth clashed behind him at the tip of his tail, as he gave the heartiest jack-knife he had ever given.
In a second he was on dry land once more, standing beside Merlyn on the piping drawbridge, panting in all his clothes.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_bc8c5a0c-111c-5d95-95ff-6649d76fc43e)
One Thursday afternoon the boys were doing their archery as usual. There were two straw targets fifty yards apart, and when they had shot their arrows at the one, they had only to go to it, collect them, and fire back at the other after facing about. It was still the loveliest summer weather, and there had been chickens for dinner, so that Merlyn had gone off to the edge of the shooting-ground and sat down under a tree. What with the warmth and the chickens and the cream he had poured over his pudding and the continual repassing of the boys and the tock of the arrows in the targets – which was as sleepy to listen to as the noise of a lawn-mower – and the dance of the egg-shaped sunspots between the leaves of his tree, the aged magician was soon fast asleep.
Archery was a serious occupation in those days. It had not yet been relegated to Red Indians and small boys, so that when you were shooting badly you got into a bad temper, just as the wealthy pheasant shooters do today. Kay was shooting badly. He was trying too hard and plucking on his loose, instead of leaving it to the bow.
“Oh, come on,” said Kay. “I’m sick of these beastly targets. Let’s have a shot at the popinjay.”
They left the targets and had several shots at the popinjay – which was a large, bright-coloured artificial bird stuck on the top of a stick, like a parrot – and Kay missed these also. First he had a feeling of “Well, I will hit the filthy thing, even if I have to go without my tea until I do it.” Then he merely became bored.
The Wart said, “Let’s play Rovers then. We can come back in half an hour and wake Merlyn up.”
What they called Rovers consisted of going for a walk with their bows and shooting one arrow each at any agreed mark which they came across. Sometimes it would be a mole hill, sometimes a clump of rushes, sometimes a big thistle almost at their feet. They varied the distance at which they chose these objects, sometimes picking a target as much as 120 yards away – which was about as far as these boys’ bows could carry – and sometimes having to aim actually below a close thistle because the arrow always leaps up a foot or two as it leaves the bow. They counted five for a hit, and one if the arrow was within a bow’s length, and added up their scores at the end.
On this Thursday they chose their targets wisely, and, besides, the grass of the big field had been lately cut. So they never had to search for their arrows for long, which nearly always happens, as in golf, if you shoot ill-advisedly near the hedges or in rough places. The result was that they strayed further than usual and found themselves near the edge of the savage forest where Cully had been lost.
“I vote,” said Kay, “that we go to those buries in the chase, and see if we can get a rabbit. It would be more fun than shooting at these hummocks.”
They did this. They chose two trees about a hundred yards apart, and each boy stood under one of them, waiting for the conies to come out again. They stood very still, with their bows already raised and arrows fitted, so that they would make the least possible movement to disturb the creatures when they did appear. It was not difficult for either of them to stand thus, for the very first test which they had had to pass in archery was standing with the bow at arm’s length for half an hour. They had six arrows each and would be able to fire and mark them all, before they needed to frighten the rabbits back by walking about to collect. An arrow does not make enough noise to upset more than the particular rabbit that it is shot at.
At the fifth shot Kay was lucky. He allowed just the right amount for wind and distance, and his point took a young coney square in the head. It had been standing up on end to look at him, wondering what he was.
“Oh, well shot!” cried the Wart, as they ran to pick it up. It was the first rabbit they had ever hit, and luckily they had killed it dead.
When they had carefully gutted it with the little hunting knife which Merlyn had given – in order to keep it fresh – and passed one of its hind legs through the other at the hock, for convenience in carrying, the two boys prepared to go home with their prize. But before they unstrung their bows they used to observe a ceremony. Every Thursday afternoon, after the last serious arrow had been fired, they were allowed to fit one more nock to their strings and to discharge the arrow straight up in the air. It was partly a gesture of farewell, partly of triumph, and it was beautiful. They did it now as a salute to their first prey.
The Wart watched his arrow go up. The sun was already westing towards evening, and the trees where they were had plunged them into a partial shade. So, as the arrow topped the trees and climbed into sunlight, it began to burn against the evening like the sun itself. Up and up it went, not weaving as it would have done with a snatching loose, but soaring, swimming, aspiring towards heaven, steady, golden and superb. Just as it had spent its force, just as its ambition had been dimmed by destiny and it was preparing to faint, to turn over, to pour back into the bosom of its mother earth, a terrible portent happened. A gore-crow came flapping wearily before the approaching night. It came, it did not waver, it took the arrow. It flew away, heavy and hoisting, with the arrow in its beak.
Kay was frightened by this, but the Wart was furious. He had loved his arrow’s movement, its burning ambition in the sunlight, and besides it was his best arrow. It was the only one which was perfectly balanced, sharp, tight-feathered, clean-nocked, and neither warped nor scraped.
“It was a witch,” said Kay.
“I don’t care if it was ten witches,” said the Wart. “I am going to get it back.”
“But it went towards the Forest.”
“I shall go after it.”
“You can go alone, then,” said Kay. “I’m not going into the Forest Sauvage, just for a putrid arrow.”
“I shall go alone.”
“Oh, well,” said Kay. “I suppose I shall have to come too, if you’re so set on it. And I bet we shall get nobbled by Wat.”
“Let him nobble,” said the Wart, “I want my arrow.”
They went in the Forest at the place where they had last seen the bird of carrion.
In less than five minutes they were in a clearing with a well and a cottage just like Merlyn’s.
“Goodness,” said Kay, “I never knew there were any cottages so close. I say, let’s go back.”
“I just want to look at this place,” said the Wart. “It’s probably a wizard’s.”
The cottage had a brass plate screwed on the garden gate. It said:
MADAME MIM, B.A. (Dom-Daniel)
PIANOFORTE
NEEDLEWORK
NECROMANCY
No Hawkers,
Circulars or Income Tax
Beware of the Dragon
The cottage had lace curtains. These stirred ever so slightly, for behind them there was a lady peeping. The gore-crow was standing on the chimney.
“Come on,” said Kay. “Oh, do come on. I tell you, she’ll never give it back.”
At this point the door of the cottage opened suddenly and the witch was revealed standing in the passage. She was a strikingly beautiful woman of about thirty, with coal-black hair so rich that it had the blue-black of the maggot-pies in it, sky bright eyes and a general soft air of butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth. She was sly.
“How do you do, my dears,” said Madame Mim. “And what can I do for you today?”
The boys took off their leather caps, and Wart said, “Please, there is a crow sitting on your chimney and I think it has stolen one of my arrows.”
“Precisely,” said Madame Mim. “I have the arrow within.”
“Could I have it back, please?”
“Inevitably ,” said Madame Mim. “The young gentleman shall have his arrow on the very instant, in four ticks and ere the bat squeaks thrice.”
“Thank you very much,” said the Wart.
“Step forward,” said Madame Mim. “Honour the threshold. Accept the humble hospitality in the spirit in which it is given.”
“I really do not think we can stay,” said the Wart politely. “I really think we must go. We shall be expected back at home.”
“Sweet expectation,” replied Madame Mim in devout tones.
“Yet you would have thought,” she added, “that the young gentleman could have found time to honour a poor cottager, out of politeness. Few can believe how we ignoble tenants of the lower classes value a visit from the landlord’s sons.”
“We would like to come in,” said the Wart, “very much. But you see we shall be late already.”
The lady now began to give a sort of simpering whine. “The fare is lowly,” she said. “no doubt it is not what you would be accustomed to eating, and so naturally such highly-born ones would not care to partake.”
Kay’s strongly-developed feeling for good form gave way at this. He was an aristocratic boy always, and condescended to his inferiors so that they could admire him. Even at the risk of visiting a witch, he was not going to have it said that he had refused to eat a tenant’s food because it was too humble.
“Come on, Wart,” he said. “We needn’t be back before vespers.”
Madame Mim swept them a low curtsey as they crossed the threshold. Then she took them each by the scruff of the neck, lifted them right off the ground with her strong gypsy arms, and shot out of the back door with them almost before they had got in at the front. The Wart caught a hurried glimpse of her parlour and kitchen. The lace curtains, the aspidistra, the lithograph called the Virgin’s Choise, the printed text of the Lord’s Prayer written backwards and hung upside down, the sea-shell, the needle-case in the shape of a heart with A Present from Camelot written on it, the broomsticks, the cauldrons, and the bottles of dandelion wine. Then they were kicking and struggling in the back yard.
“We thought that the growing sportsmen would care to examine our rabbits,” said Madame Mim.
There was indeed a row of large rabbit hutches in front of them, but they were empty of rabbits. In one hutch there was a poor ragged old eagle owl, evidently quite miserable and neglected: in another a small boy unknown to them, a wittol who could only roll his eyes and burble when the witch came near. In a third there was a moulting black cock. A fourth had a mangy goat in it, also black, and two more stood empty.
“Grizzle Greediguts,” cried the witch.
“Here, Mother,” answered the carrion crow.
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T. White
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Детская проза
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The extraordinary story of a boy called Wart – ignored by everyone except his tutor, Merlyn – who goes on to become King Arthur.When Merlyn the magician comes to tutor Sir Ector′s sons Kay and the Wart, schoolwork suddenly becomes much more fun. After all, who wouldn′t enjoy being turned into a fish, or a badger, or a snake? But Merlyn has very particular plans for the Wart.This edition of T.H White’s classic story includes a special “Why You’ll Love This Book” introduction by bestselling-author, Garth Nix.