Читать книгу The Idylls of the Queen - Phyllis Ann Karr - Страница 8

CHAPTER 5

Of a Search for a Serpent

“So when the king and the queen were together… Where is Sir Lancelot? said King Arthur; an he were here he would not grudge to do battle for you. Sir, said the queen, I wot not where he is, but his brother and his kinsmen deem that he be not within this realm.… What aileth you, said the king, ye cannot keep Sir Lancelot upon your side?”

—Malory XVIII, 4

Someone came in. I looked up to see Pinel and Astamore.

“They’re beginning to ask why you haven’t come to see Sir Patrise laid out,” said Astamore.

“My ears are offended by Mador’s banshee wailing.”

“It will seem suspicious if you don’t come.”

“Let it. Maybe he’ll come to his senses about the Queen and decide to accuse me instead.” If Her Grace were free of Mador’s arraignment, it would be a pleasure to fight for once in my own name.

Pinel sat down heavily. “They’ll suspect any of us who fail to wake with the body.”

“Then you’d better get back before they start to suspect you,” I told him.

Pinel shuddered. “I could have no wish to harm Patrise. Why would I have wanted to harm Sir Patrise? Why Sir Patrise, of all of us?”

“Why would the Queen have wanted to kill Gawain?” I replied. “Maybe age is catching up with Mador. He’s not thinking clearly. I suppose he wants everyone to touch the corpse and see who makes it bleed?”

“It’s bled several times,” said Astamore.

“Only a little, at the mouth. It was the jounce of carrying him.” Pinel looked around, found a goblet that was still upright and had a little wine in it, and took a drink. “Bleeding at the murderer’s touch only holds good when there’s an open, outer wound.”

I snorted. “Or when the ghost himself knows who murdered him.”

“Even so, the death is too fresh for the test to hold true, I think.” Astamore balanced his thin thighs on the edge of the board and began to fondle his ring absently. “We’ll return to the chapel soon. I doubt anything will make Sir Mador change his accusation.”

“Which could be as well for you, Astamore,” I said.

Aside from being slightly too close together, his black eyes were so much like his uncle’s that he might have been Bagdemagus’ bastard son instead of his nephew. “Your meaning, Seneschal?”

“The poisoned fruit was meant for Gawain. Not even Mador denies that. And Gawain killed your uncle Bagdemagus during the Grail adventures.”

I am not sure what I hoped to accomplish, or even whether I really believed at that point that Astamore was the traitor. Maybe I wanted to see how he would react, maybe I was looking for ways to divert suspicion from the Queen, or at least spread it out. Maybe I only needed another good quarrel.

“The world knows your tongue, Sir Kay,” said Astamore, letting his ring alone for a moment. “And the world knows your insults are meaningless, since you can speak in nothing else. Sir Gawain killed King Bagdemagus in misfortune, not in treachery.”

Pinel rubbed his chubby fingers together, as if limbering them for a lively hour with his harp. “But we don’t know that. We have only Sir Gawain’s word for what happened.”

Astamore turned his stare from me to Pinel. “And the testimony of both their squires, and that of the monks who tended my uncle in his last moments and buried him in their abbey. King Bagdemagus of Gorre was a generous knight. He did not blame Lancelot for killing his son Sir Meliagrant in fair combat, and his soul can hardly blame Sir Gawain for the misfortune of killing him in a joust of friendship.”

Pinel subsided, muttering, “We don’t even know the fruit was meant for Sir Gawain.” In contradiction to my comment earlier.

“We know the fruit was meant for Gawain,” I said, “especially at this season of the year. We don’t know the poison was meant for him. But if it was meant for someone else, the poisoner apparently wouldn’t have minded getting Gawain as well.”

Astamore started twisting his ring again. “An enemy of Sir Arthur. Some enemy of the entire Round Table.”

“No—no enemy of the Round Table,” Pinel broke in. “Who knew that anyone else but Gawain would have eaten the fruit so quickly?”

Speculating on all sides of any question at once—except a theological one—was a custom of Pinel’s. As I had told him to his face, his gadfly arguing was probably the reason King Pellam sent him away from Carbonek. They are said to like singleness of purpose there.

“The question is, who would not be likely to eat it.” I glanced at the dead bitch lying between the tables. “The bowl was heaped. No doubt enough for every man of us to have his choice.”

Astamore looked at the bowl in the fireplace. “We don’t know that every piece was poisoned,” he said carefully.

I thought of the strange colors the rest of the fruit had given the flames for a moment or two. Astamore played with his ring. Pinel rubbed at the short, honey-colored beard he wore to help hide his smallpox scars.

“Maybe they had simply gone bad?” Pinel said at last.

“An adder bit the tree when it was in bloom?” I said. “Or maybe someone pissed into the earth where the fruit was stored? God’s Blood, Pinel, go convince Mador de la Porte the fruit had simply gone bad and no one was to blame. I’m going to see if the corpse bleeds at my approach.”

Knights who were not even conceived when we fought the rebel kings at Bedegraine and Terrabil have won their shares of glory and sired a new brood of men, and in all those years of my seneschalling, no one has doubled over because of rotten meat or badly-stored food served at Arthur’s table. A rotten apple that a man could eat half down without noticing anything wrong until it suddenly burst his guts within a few moments? But first Dame Lore and now Pinel of Carbonek suddenly saw fit to insinuate that the fault was in the storing of the apples. God’s Wounds, if they were going to accuse me now, it might at least be of deadly malice, not of incompetence!

Once out of the death chamber, I found Gouvernail and told him to see to having the dog’s body burned and the rest of the room cleared and cleaned. New rushes for the floor, and burn the old rushes and all the left-over food along with the bitch.

“The common folk will think it a great waste,” said Gouvernail. “Especially in this thin season of the year.”

“Give them the scraps, and then when they find out about Sir Patrise, if they don’t know it already, the first urchin who gets stomach cramps from wolfing down his food too fast is going to cry poison. No. Burn it all, and scour the dishes with sand.”

He nodded and went about his work. Knowing my cooks and scullions, I doubted the remains of our dinner would go to waste. That everyone except Patrise was still alive proved nothing but the fruit had been poisoned, and that was already burned. Everything else would probably find its way, gingerly at first but with increasing greed, into greasy paunches in the kitchen when my back was turned. It did not matter, so long as there was no danger of further scandal because of a few coincidental pains in some commoner’s belly. The food would be reported burned, and Artus would be praised for taking care to safeguard his people from all possible danger.

* * * *

I decided to put off my visit to the chapel awhile longer. It seemed more important to beg a private audience with the Queen.

She was closeted alone with Arthur, but I insisted that Dame Elyzabel let me through the antechamber to pound on the door. It has its uses, being the King’s foster-brother.

Maybe they were just as glad of a third person. The remains of a quarrel lay heavy in the air. Arthur was poking up the logs in the fireplace. I went and knelt before the Queen’s chair.

Her voice was low. “You do not believe me guilty, also, Sir Kay?”

“Madame, I hold you the world’s Queen of virtue.”

She leaned forward, still twisting a sodden cloth in her left hand, and put her right hand on my shoulder. Command me, madame, I thought. Give me the word, and I’ll cleave Mador’s lying tongue into his breastbone, skull, helmet, and all. Let me save you again as I saved you on Humber bank, before any of us had heard of your French cock-a-dandy.

“Kay,” she said, “find me Sir Lancelot.”

“Madame,” I said, “the fruit may have been tainted somehow in storage. A viper…”

“Find us that viper, then!” said the King.

I nodded, kissed the Queen’s hand, and turned to go. Artus joined me at the door. “What ails her, Kay, that she can never keep Lancelot at her side?”

“What ails the rest of us?” I said. “You know him, Artus. Fickle as quicksilver. When has our Lancelot ever chosen to stay at court waiting to be needed when he could sneak away and seek a little more glory on his own? What makes you think it was the Queen’s fault he left us this time?”

“Not even his kinsmen know where he is. She’s already asked them.”

“That’s nothing new. Most of the time Lancelot himself doesn’t know where he is.”

“Kex,” said Arthur, “Mador will not believe it was tainted by mishap unless he sees an apple drawn from the earth with a viper still clinging to it by the fangs.”

“You have other knights besides Lancelot.”

“And most of those who could have hoped to defeat Mador de la Porte were with you at the Queen’s dinner.” He shook his head and sighed. “If we still had Merlin among us…”

More than thirty years, and Artus still had not figured out that we were probably better off without the old troublemaker. “Merlin would have given us riddles, not answers. The old gaffer cared more about appearing mystical and mysterious than about deigning to state things clearly.” He had also made a few of his cleverly obscure prophecies that could be interpreted as slandering the Queen; and, since for all his supposed foresight he used to have a habit of turning up a day or so too late to save a person’s life, I was not sure he would have bestirred his white beard to save Her Grace anyway. “Have you sent out pursuivants to look for Lancelot?” I asked.

Artus shook his head. “See to it, Kex.… But Mador thinks his cause is right. He will fight like a mad lion.”

“Stall the combat as long as you can. Give her every extra day possible.”

“I will do everything in my power. All that the law allows.”

“You’ve twisted the law before. For the love of Ihesu, Artus, you won’t find another queen like Dame Guenevere. That witch of a look-alike is dead.”

I left him and reached the antechamber. Dame Elyzabel was preparing a heavily spiced posset for the Queen. I guessed, by the way she glanced up at me, that she had overheard at least part of what we said. Probably she had also overheard a good deal of the earlier argument between Arthur and Dame Guenevere. “Don’t worry,” I told Elyzabel. “We’ll find that fool Lancelot.” I left without waiting for her reply, if she intended to make one.

Another search for Lancelot. Probably more questing-hours have been squandered by knights riding throughout Logres, Cornwall, the North, and the petty kingdoms of Wales looking for Lancelot, and likely as not getting lost themselves in the search, than for any other single cause, not excluding the Holy Grail. But it seemed that, since Lancelot’s arrival in this land, no one else must ever be permitted to fight for the Queen. And, curse his hangers, if the Queen’s safety was to be ensured, he was the best fighter to ensure it.

I found Gouvernail again and we chose a score of pursuivants to ride out at once and begin combing the country for the Flower of Knighthood, and twoscore more to start in the morning. Marshalling the knights as searchers would have to wait until after Sir Patrise’s burial.

I did not intend to stop with scattering pursuivants and knights around like ants looking for the hero of the world. Merlin was gone, but the enchantress who had taken him off our hands, who probably had all his skills and maybe a few of her own besides, and used them with considerably more restraint and less officiousness, was still among the living. Dame Nimue had always been friendly to us; and, since no one knew where Lancelot was anyway, I could just as easily search for him on the way to her Lake as anywhere else.

I returned to the death chamber. The tables were cleared away and the floor was already bare of rushes and swept clean. The fire was blazing up again, higher than before, with young Clarance watching it. “We scraped the dish out of the ashes and sent it to the silversmith, sir,” he reported, “with orders to melt it down completely and rework it. Master Gouvernail said best build up the fire here again and make sure all the fruit was well burned.”

“That blaze should do the work. You don’t have to put on more wood when that burns down. Do you happen to know which cellars the fruit came from?”

He shook his head. “No, sir. Someone from the kitchen—I’m not sure who, exactly—dug it up and carried it to the Queen. Her Grace wished to choose and arrange it herself, sir. And Doran—” (That was Coupnez’s real name.) “—carried the bowl here after Her Grace had arranged it.”

“As soon as your fire burns down,” I said, “find Coupnez and bring him to the kitchen. I’ll be wanting you, too.” Clarance was that rare bird, a reliable page.

I went down to the kitchen and found, as I expected, that everyone from Tychus Flaptongue and Chloda down to the mice had used the tragedy as an excuse to stop work for the more important business of gossip. Two or three scullions had little Tilda in tears, trying to use her kittens as tasters for suspicious scraps of food. Several more were clustered around old, one-eyed Rozennik, accusing her of bewitching the fruit when she dug it up. Grimpmains, who had recovered his stomach with wonderful speed, was sitting like a storyteller in a circle of rapt listeners, and Flaptongue was declaiming, in a voice that he probably hoped would reach the King himself but which in fact hardly carried above the clamor of his own kitchen, that no stew or soup of his seasoning had ever so much as given anyone wind-pains. What other mischief was going on I did not have the chance to see, since most of the noise and confusion stilled at my entrance.

I rescued Tilda’s kittens, ordered sound thrashings for her tormentors and those of old Rozennik, and told the entire kitchen staff that if the court went supperless that evening, so would they.

“Nay, then, sir,” said Chloda, who interprets the fact that she became chief cook a few days before I was made seneschal as grounds for questioning my judgment from time to time, “I doubt they’ll be in overmuch appetite for supper tonight, nor for livery neither.”

“Whether anyone has appetite for it or not, I want supper on the tables at the usual time, or you’ll go hungry tomorrow as well, if I have to brank every one of you myself. Now, what cellar did the fruit come from?”

Chloda folded her arms across her scrawny chest. “Nay, then, how would I know? I told Flaptongue to fetch it, or send folk to do it for him.”

“Flaptongue,” I said; and Tychus Flaptongue, who has been with us almost as long as Chloda and would probably be jealous if her were less afraid of responsibility, replied that he had sent Rozennik and helpers of her choosing to whatever cellar she liked.

The fruit pits were nearly emptied by this time of year, and it turned out that Rozennik and her helpers, Nat Torntunic and Wilkin, had visited several in order to find what the old woman considered a suitable bagful for Her Grace to choose from. Fortunately, they thought they would at least remember which cellars, if not which exact pits, they had visited. Leaving instructions for Clarance to follow us with Coupnez, we started for the storage cellars.

In the end, we visited all of them, since we found traces of digging in more pits than Rozennik and her scullions remembered. Wherever any ground seemed to have been recently turned, we dug in search of adders or their traces. We found none, but I took an apple or pear from each place we dug, except two pits that seemed completely emptied.

Clarance, pulling Coupnez along, did not find us until we were more than halfway finished with the task. The delay had been occasioned by Clarance’s trouble in locating the younger page. Although it was not the usual kind of work for noble-born pages, I set Clarance digging in my place with the scullions and watching for adder-traces, while I questioned Coupnez.

It was hard work—he seemed to think I was accusing him of poisoning the fruit, and I had to cuff him a couple of times and threaten him with being locked up alone overnight before I could get anything more than tearful and half-incoherent protests of innocence and pleas not to make him eat any fruit. What I finally learned, if it could be called learning, was that Coupnez had answered the Queen’s bell in her own antechamber, taken the bowl of apples and pears ready-arranged from her, and brought it at once to the small banquet chamber, where he had left it on a sideboard; and the chamber had already been full of servants setting things up.

Knowing Coupnez, I doubted he had gone straight from the Queen’s apartment to the banqueting chamber without stopping once or twice on the way to gawk at something or put his burden down and run or doze for a few moments. That, however, was his tale, and for once he kept to it. I suspected he was more afraid, this time, of being thought to have had anything to do with a knight’s death than of being punished for lying; but you can hardly rack a nobly-born infant, or even threaten him with more than a light whip, so in the end I had to accept his story and let him go without learning where or when he had loitered during his errand.

Having spent the afternoon in an unsuccessful quest for poisonous serpents, I left orders that all rats and mice should be left in their traps and brought to me alive early in the morning, instead of being killed at once. I locked the bag of fruit in my room and then, having already laid myself open to criticism from courtly tongues that would call it the first duty of a true knight to offer his last respects to a comrade’s corpse, I went to sup before visiting Sir Patrise in the chapel.