Читать книгу The Idylls of the Queen - Phyllis Ann Karr - Страница 11

CHAPTER 8

Of the Start of a Short Search to Locate Lancelot

“My lord, said Sir Bors, ye require me the greatest thing that any man may require me; and wit ye well if I grant to do battle for the queen I shall wrath many of my fellowship of the Table Round. But as for that, said Bors, I will grant my lord that for my lord Sir Launcelot’s sake, and for your sake I will at that day be the queen’s champion unless there come by adventure a better knight than I am to do battle for her.”

—Malory XVIII, 5

“When did this happen?” I said.

“Last night, as I understand it from Dame Elyzabel. The Queen sent for Sir Bors to her chamber.”

It must have been after I had left. “Bors was one of her dinner guests, too, damn him!”

“The King was there with them. I gather they both implored Sir Bors, but he was a long time consenting.”

Somehow I kept from smashing my fist against the wall. “Why Bors? Why not me?”

“I assume because Bors de Ganis may possibly be able to defeat Mador de la Porte. Besides, of all you who shared his last meal with Sir Patrise, who can ride above suspicion better than the saint who achieved the Holy Grail?”

The saint who achieved the Grail. Anyone who did not happen to know that story might have mistaken the noble Bors de Ganis for a pander between his glorious cousin and the Queen. “With fifty days to get back into battle trim, I could beat them both together,” I said.

“Sir Bors has agreed on condition that no champion ‘better than he’ appears,” Lynette went on. “Shall I ride with you and taunt you back into fighting trim? But you will not have fifty days now. You will have only a fortnight.”

“Curse his bloody soul,” I said, and left before I destroyed something. What had possessed Artus and Dame Guenevere to go down on their knees to Bors de Ganis? Now? Hadn’t I promised we would find their hero Lancelot for them? Why cut the time out from under us like this?

And who was the smug, self-righteous De Ganis to put himself above the rest of us who had been at the Queen’s dinner, as if the stink of suspicion that tainted everyone else could not touch him? Saints have fallen into corruption before—Judas began as a holy apostle.

I went on to swear myself to the search for Lancelot—for all the good that would be to us now. Bors had done the Queen no favor. As long as she had no champion, Arthur could grant her the extra forty days to find one. Now that she had Bors pledged to her cause, “unless a better champion appeared,” her trial must take place on the earliest day appointed, giving us a fortnight from yesterday to find the elusive Lancelot du Lac.

Of course, Bors and Mador were pretty well matched. It was possible Bors could defeat him—unless Bors had some reason not to want to save the Queen. But Mador’s defeat was not the foregone conclusion it would have been with Lancelot; and Mador would have the more battle frenzy to strengthen his arm.

At least I could see who joined Gawain’s search effort and who stayed away. The only excuse a man could have for not joining us was if he believed the Queen guilty, and any fool who could believe that must know himself to be innocent. Therefore, the real traitor would have to be someone who joined the search for Lancelot, either to try to keep the Queen from burning without incriminating himself or else to cover his own escape from court.

Unless Her Grace had been the true target all along, and the murderer wanted to see her burn. Or unless the murderer thought as subtly as I was thinking.

Mordred’s “pleasant game.” Chances were that we could not save Dame Guenevere this way, but it was better than doing nothing.

As a touchstone, however, the inspiration of counting shields came to very little. Besides Mador de la Porte, and Bors de Ganis, who had already cast suspicion on himself by agreeing to fight Mador, Lancelot’s own kinsmen stayed away in a body: Ector de Maris, Lionel, Blamore and Bleoberis de Ganis, as well as Lancelot’s old duckling Sir La Cote Male Taile, and Prince Galihodin of Surluse with his brother Galihud. I doubted that they, of all knights, were so convinced of the Queen’s guilt as not to seize on this new excuse to locate their glorious and beloved chief of the clan; more likely they were hatching a rival search effort of their own. On this assumption, I was almost surprised that for once Gareth Beaumains had chosen to join his own family instead of Lancelot’s, and that we had also gotten the Saracen brothers, Palomides and Safere. Maybe Lancelot’s faction was not quite so attractive to them without Lancelot’s person at the head of it.

It was also possible that Lancelot’s kinsmen knew some secret the rest of us did not about the hero’s disappearance after his latest rumored quarrel with Her Grace.

The old Breton fox Sir Aliduk was also absent from Gawain’s assembly, but he was still enough of a stranger among us that, whatever his private thoughts, it was hardly surprising if he remained completely neutral in the business.

But if Gawain had attracted only half of the Queen’s guests, he had also gained a good pick of those who had dined with the King instead of the Queen: his cousin Ywain of the Lion, Griflet, Bedivere, Lucan the Butler—most of the best of the old guard, who remembered the days before Lancelot crossed the Channel. Also Sagramore le Desirous, Sir King Berant le Apres, Constantine Cadorson… and I later learned that old King Uriens and Yon the Wise might have taken our oath too, if Arthur had not requested them to sit with him as judges when the day came. (Yon was good on legal niceties.) We also had a few score non-Companions among us, some of them better knights than some of those who sat at the Round Table. Not everyone had swallowed Mador’s notion that the good Queen could suddenly turn into “a destroyer of good knights.”

Gouvernail was there as well, waiting on the fringes, ready to pledge himself in spirit if not in word. I pulled him aside. Someone had to watch over my court duties for me.

He protested. “Is it not more important to save Her Grace?”

“Don’t worry. Bors de Ganis is seeing to that. He’d damn well better, after shortening her time from two months to a fortnight.”

“The gentlewomen also are pledging themselves to the search,” the old squire went on. “I had planned to accompany Dames Bragwaine and Senehauz.”

Gouvernail and Bragwaine were a favorite target for the Queen and everyone else who dabbled in matchmaking; but if they had let all this time go by since the deaths of their old master and mistress, the present fortnight was not going to make or destroy their own decision about formalizing whatever relationship they might have. “Gouvernail,” I said, “I need someone here I can trust. Someone who can see to the ordinary work and meanwhile keep an eye on any of our possible traitors who stay at court.”

He hesitated a moment, then nodded slowly. I put my hand on his shoulder. “I’ve handed you two jobs. If you scent out the traitor here, get Dinas of Cornwall to take over the seneschalling for a while.” Dinas of Cornwall would have been as likely to take the oath with Gawain as with Ector de Maris and Lionel; so, not seeing Dinas here, I assumed he was keeping his hands clean of the whole affair. I had little use for a knight who would not bestir himself to help his lady the Queen; but Dinas used to be a seneschal himself, for King Mark, and not a bad one.

And maybe, having already heard of Bors’ agreement to act as the Queen’s champion, Dinas of Cornwall had sensibly decided that trying to find Lancelot this time was too futile to be worth the effort. I would have stayed at court myself, rather than risk not being back by the day of the trial, if my chief motive had been to find Lancelot and not to summon Dame Nimue from her Lake.

It seemed that Bors’ decision had not yet been generally known. When Gawain announced it, as if feeling himself honor-bound to ask for no oath from men who knew less than he did himself, the search lost about a third of the searchers. Even Constantine Cadorson shook his head. “Fourteen nights are not enough. Have messengers and pursuivants been sent out?”

“Last night,” I said, “and more this morning. Threescore in all.”

“I will send out more, chosen from among the best of my own men,” said Cadorson. “And I will ride out myself, for seven days, but I will do so without taking the oath.”

“I’ll take the oath,” said Ywain. “Futile it may prove to be, but I would rather be bound to the quest than remain here to see such a great lady burn.”

“If Sir Bors had not come forward, cousin,” said Gawain, choking a little on the words, “I would have asked you to remain and fight the Queen’s battle. I can think of no better man.”

“Maybe he should anyway, to spite Bors,” I said. “Sir Sangreal promised to step down if a better champion appeared, as I understand it.” If I could not fight for Her Grace myself, I would have preferred that one of Gawain’s kin did it than one of Lancelot’s.

“Once I should have called myself the better knight of us two,” said Ywain. “But Sir Bors achieved the Holy Grail, and I did not.”

“So, at least, Sir Bors informs us,” remarked Mordred, who sat whittling one of his ugly serpent rings. “But Bors may have other reasons to know the Queen innocent.” Finishing his newest ring, he slipped it on his finger, sheathed his knife, and stood. “Come, brother, if we are to swear this oath, let us swear in God’s Name and go to supper.”

We swore, agreed to travel in pairs, and went to supper. No one openly brought up the reason for traveling in pairs—so that those of us who were most likely to come under suspicion could watchdog one another. Half a score of the younger knights left that same evening. It was a foolish, half-witted idea, starting out after the time of day when a man adventuring usually begins to look for his night’s shelter. They would either get hardly far enough from London to make much difference and then have to settle, likely as not, for bad cheer and a poor night’s rest; or travel all night in the dark and sleep for pure exhaustion in the daylight when they could have made better speed. They were idiots, and I envied them. I was ready to have started at once with them.

“Then you must find another traveling companion,” said Mordred. “I have work to do here. And I doubt you will find another man fool enough not only to leave here tonight, but to spend his quest in your company, Sir Senseschal.”

“I could find another companion more easily than you could, Mordred,” I said.

“Now, perhaps. Once, of course, I had Lancelot himself as my mentor and companion.”

That had been during Mordred’s first two years of knighthood, before something happened to twist his soul out of shape about the time of the Peningues tournament. In fact, he had been traveling with Lancelot when they came to that tournament. From Mordred’s tone now, I wondered, as I had sometimes wondered before, if the great Hero had played some part in whatever happened to warp King Lot’s youngest son.

But Mordred was right that we could get a more profitable start in the morning, after a decent night’s sleep. I found Dame Bragwaine and bought one of her Irish herb concoctions to help me get that night’s sleep.

I awoke late—half of the sun was already showing above the horizon—cursed my squire Gillimer for not calling me at first cockcrow, and went to Mass with a headache and a black temper. I did not see Mordred until I was almost ready to leave without him. He found me just in time, waiting in the courtyard with Gillimer, our palfreys, and my charger Feuillemorte. Mordred was still in his tunic and light stockings.

“If you’re not armed, mounted, and ready to ride in a quarter of an hour, squire and all,” I said, “you can go to the Devil.”

“In my own good time, Seneschal. Meanwhile, calm yourself. I’ve had certain matters to see to before we could leave.”

“What ‘certain matters’?”

“Matters of some relevance to our game, Sir Kay. I’ll tell you of them as we ride. In the meantime, the doubt will give you something to occupy your mind while I ready myself for the road.”