Читать книгу The Idylls of the Queen - Phyllis Ann Karr - Страница 5

CHAPTER 2

Of Gawain’s Faction and Lancelot’s

“Sir, said they, here is a knight of this castle that hath been long among us, and right now he is slain with two knights, and for none other cause but that our knight said that Sir Lancelot were a better knight than Sir Gawaine.”

—Malory X, 55

I sent the rest of the pages out for more clean water. We would all want to wash our hands with greater care than customary. I hoped that her ladies would bathe the Queen, and that the younger pages, who had probably been poking around at the fruit, would remember to keep their fingers out of their mouths.

Mador cleared his own table with sweeps of his sword arm. Safere and Galihud carried Patrise’s body over and laid it on the cleared space. Composing his cousin’s limbs, Mador set up an Irish keening for him. The rest took their seats again. Here and there a low, uneasy conversation began. Coupnez brought the basin and ewer I had called for, and I began to wash my hands, looking around the tables in their semi-circular arrangement.

Why would anyone want to kill Patrise of Ireland this way? It made far better sense to assume that Patrise had eaten a piece of fruit intended for Gawain.

Gawain the Golden-Tongued and Golden-Haired—prince of chivalry, courtesy, manhood, and all the rest of it, who had fought his glorious way through four decades without catching a battle-scar on the face so many ladies loved—now sat with his broad shoulders hunched together, an uncustomary pose for him. God knows Gawain has been in his share of blood feuds over the years. He might have achieved the Grail if he had been less set, once on a time, on avenging the deaths of his father and mother. But Gawain always makes a point of striking his enemies down in fair fight. The idea that some traitor had tried to burst his insides with poison was going to turn several more of his hairs from gold to gray.

Revenge was not the only reason someone might have had to attack Gawain the coward’s way. It might also have been jealousy on behalf of Lancelot or one of the other few men who might still be considered Gawain’s rivals in glory. Gawain and Lancelot themselves have always been loyal friends: Arthur’s favorite nephew and Arthur’s greatest adventurer. But the respective followers of Lancelot and Gawain are not always so friendly. Bloody at worst and backbiting at best, the factions have plagued us since Lancelot first came across the Channel from France; and if Lancelot had not come, Gawain’s detractors would probably have attached themselves to Lamorak de Galis, Tristram, or anyone else who was on hand.

Those of Gawain’s supporters here present consisted chiefly of his four brothers. I hardly glanced at Gareth Beaumains, the next to the youngest, the favorite (Gawain’s, Lancelot’s, and almost everybody else’s), the wide-eyed and simple-souled, possibly the nearest thing to a saintly knight Arthur had left, unless you counted Bors de Ganis.

But Mordred, the youngest of all Lot’s sons, sitting there now at a nearly empty table, slowly turning his knife as if he were considering licking off the dried juice… What in Ihesu’s Holy Name had happened to Mordred? He had come to court at twenty years of age, honestly and eagerly, been dubbed knight at once and elected to the Round Table after a year, not solely, like more recent companions, on the strength of his kinsmen and friends. We all thought Mordred was on his way to being the best of the five brothers. The ladies delighted in him—high forehead, graceful nose, delicate lips, gold hair, strong back—handsome as Gawain and considerably younger.

Then, at twenty-two, he changed overnight. Popular speculation said his brains had been scrambled in the tournament at Peningues, where he fought like a devil and was almost left for dead on the field. But I had been friendly enough with Mordred during those first two, good years. His wit was much like mine even then. And I was one of the few to stay fairly close to him, as close as he allowed anyone to come. It was not his brains that had been scrambled, it was his soul. Tournament fighting alone, no matter how rough, does not do that to a man.

The next to the oldest of Lot’s sons, Agravain the Beautiful, whose face must have made a good number of women envious, was the only man among us who looked, not grieved or alarmed, but bored. As for Gaheris, who was at least making the effort to look commiserating, he had always seemed caught in the middle in more respects than age alone. Capable, blond, and handsome like all his brothers, he was the only one of them to be embarrassed by a slight deformity. His right arm was overlong. Aside from its length, it was well-formed and shapely, and his mother used to call it a sign that he had been especially formed to wield a weapon. Since her death, he would allow no one else to mention his right arm. But even now, well past the middle of his threescore and ten, he seemed not to have made up his mind whether to veer toward Gawain and Gareth or toward Agravain and Mordred. He did not gossip and preen himself like Agravain, and in his taciturn way he pursued justice as fervidly as Gawain; but he cultivated none of Gawain’s and Gareth’s social graces. Still, perhaps I should have taken Gaheris for my courtly model. He was no general favorite, but because he kept silent instead of voicing his thoughts, no one spoke ill of his manners, either.

These were Gawain’s brothers and supporters; and one of them, Gareth Beaumains, was more nearly in Lancelot’s camp than Gawain’s. Brandiles, the brother of Gawain’s third wife, seemed to stay apart from faction rivalry. The red-haired, six-fingered giant’s son Ironside and old, balding Persant of Inde were Gareth’s adherents rather than Gawain’s. Persant had never been a vicious man, simply a sporting fellow who fought all comers for the love of it and offered the survivors free hospitality. Ironside’s history was not so genial. While besieging Dame Lyonors in her castle, before Beaumains defeated and converted him, Ironside had hanged between thirty and fifty knights in their armor. Which was naturally forgiven him because he had murdered them in fulfillment of a promise made to an old paramour. If Kay the Churl were to mention Ironside’s early deeds after all these years of Ironside’s good behavior, the whole court would cry shame on Kay’s rudeness. But the jolly red giant had also sworn a vow, in those old days, against Lancelot and Gawain. He had never carried it out, but now Lancelot was missing and Gawain had barely escaped poison.

Lancelot’s partisans outnumbered Gawain’s in the small banquet chamber this afternoon: Lancelot’s bastard half-brother Ector de Maris, fathered by King Ban, under the influence of Merlin’s magical aphrodisiac, during his stay in Britain; Lancelot’s French cousins Lionel of the lion-shaped birthmark, who had once tried to cut down his brother in hot blood; and Bors de Ganis, our last surviving Sir Saint, almost a virgin, the only man to have fully achieved the adventure of the Holy Grail and returned alive, who now sat in a posture befitting his reputation, hands clasped, blue eyes closed, and head bowed to show the tonsure-like cut of his grizzled hair; Lancelot’s British-born cousins, the twins Blamore and Bleoberis, who looked alike, acted in concert, and probably had the same dreams every night. Lancelot’s protege Breunor the Black-Haired and seldom-washed, otherwise known as Sir La Cote Male Taile or Ill-Fitting Coat—my own name for him; he went on wearing the name as stubbornly as he had worn the filthy, bloodstained coat of his father’s until he had avenged his father’s murder. Lancelot’s less dedicated partisans, Galihodin and Galihud, the princes of Surluse, who had slowly swung to Lancelot’s party from Gawain’s, but still maintained friendly relations, at least on the surface.

The Queen’s last five guests were harder to place by faction. Palomides and his brother Safere, the lean, scarred, dark-skinned former Saracens, might well end in Lancelot’s camp if an open split should ever come, but meanwhile they maintained neutrality. Aliduk, the honorable old fox of a Breton warleader, was another distant cousin of Lancelot; but Aliduk was only marking time with us until whenever his old liege lord Hoel of Brittany called him back from his more or less self-imposed exile. I had objected to Aliduk’s election to the Round Table on grounds that when he sailed home to Brittany we would be left with another Tristram situation—a companion permanently absent from his place—but as usual, when my opinion stands alone, it was ignored.

Pinel of Carbonek had returned with Lancelot from the Grail Quest, but had rarely been seen in Lancelot’s company since. Elected to the Table on the strength of being a nephew of old King Pellam, the last of the Rich Fishers, Pinel’s favorite sport was talking. The only subject he kept quiet about was which of Pellam’s three brothers had actually fathered him; maybe he hoped the mystery would make other folk speculate about him as eagerly as he speculated about them. His voice would have been pleasant if it had been less loud. At the present moment, quiet for once in his life, Pinel sat at his table staring down into his goblet like old Merlin reading the future in a bowl of slime.

When Pinel first came to court, Astamore had been one of the earliest to strike up a friendship with him, and one of the most faithful in keeping to it, although lately he sometimes appeared to be trying to disembarrass himself of Pinel’s company. One thing that held them together was their skill with the harp, even if Pinel did seem insistent on playing duets mainly to display his own superior ability. But Astamore was ten years younger, had been at court five years longer, and had finally, acknowledging though not playing on his own high kinsfolk, won his place at the Table on his own merits.

Astamore’s worst fault was a maddening habit of turning his ring round and round on his finger—rather reminding me of Mordred, who had a habit of carving serpent-shaped rings out of wood in odd moments. Although Astamore’s ring, with its pretentious blue stone set in too much silver, looked more of a size for Ironside’s hand than Astamore’s, he claimed it did not interfere with his eating or harping; he did, however, hang it on a chain around his neck beneath his breastplate before putting on his gauntlets for battle. I was surprised to see that this afternoon, for once, he was not fondling his ring. Instead, he was prying nuts open with his knife, examining the nutmeats one by one, and then piling them up untasted on the table in front of him.

Gawain had killed Astamore’s uncle, King Bagdemagus of Gorre, during the Grail Quest.

Then there were the principal servers at our small, intimate dinner: Gouvernail, Elyzabel, Lore the Cupbearer, Bragwaine, and Senehauz. Gouvernail was a better man, in everything but might of arms, than his former master Tristram had ever been; and the only one of the four dames whose past might be as spotted as an honest knight’s was Bragwaine of Ireland, a silent, dark, aging woman, less handsome now than competent, who might know more than her share concerning plant juices and their use. Senehauz was almost as young as the pages, and as innocent.

As for the pages who had helped serve, I knew them all, both as individuals and as types of the young trouble-courters Lucan and I have helped train through the years. But even when the minds of pages, following the sterling example of their elders, run to revenge feuds, they do not usually run to poison. Besides, a page would not have thought of putting the stuff in the apples—he would have put it in the wine.

Had we a new cook or older scullion in the kitchen, anyone over ten years old who had been with us less than half a score of years, I would have wondered whether a spy had slipped in among the servants despite my watching. As matters stood, I knew my kitchen staff better even than I knew the pages, better than most of my fellow knights, and I would have fought to prove the innocence of the lowest scullion with as much assurance as I would have fought for the Queen herself… though not with a thousandth part of the reverence… if I could have fought for anyone in this case.

I glanced at Dame Lore, the one who had remained when the other ladies and Gouvernail bore away the Queen. Lore was standing at the other side of the fireplace, staring around the room. Turning her head slightly, she looked straight back at me.

Moving nearer so that we could hear each other above Mador’s wailing, I muttered, “Your opinion, Dame Cupbearer. Which of us poisoned the apple?”

“I have been trying to think which of you it was meant for.”

“And?”

Dame Lore is another cousin of the Queen, and her eyes are almost the same noble gray. “I believe it was meant for Her Grace.”

“Prove that,” I said, “and I’ll skewer the whoreson like a pigeon.”

“Will you, Seneschal?”

“I will.”

“I think not. Remember that poison is more the enchantress’ weapon than the knight’s.”

I stared back into the dying fire, remembering the different colors of the flames when Dame Guenevere had first thrown the fruit into them. “Morgan le Fay again?”

Before Dame Cupbearer could answer, the men nearest the door started standing up. In a moment everyone was on his feet. The King had come.