Читать книгу The Idylls of the Queen - Phyllis Ann Karr - Страница 9

CHAPTER 6

Of the Blood Feuds of the Sons of Lot

“Wit thou well, sir knight, said they, we fear not to tell thee our names, for my name is Sir Agravaine, and my name is Gaheris, brethren unto the good knight Sir Gawaine, and we be nephews unto King Arthur. Well, said Sir Tristram, for King Arthur’s sake I shall let you pass as at this time. But it is shame, said Sir Tristram, that Sir Gawaine and ye be come of so great a blood that ye four brethren are so named as ye be, for ye be called the greatest destroyers and murderers of good knights that be now in this realm; for it is but as I heard say that Sir Gawaine and ye slew among you a better knight than ever ye were, that was the noble knight Sir Lamorak de Galis.”

—Malory X, 55

Mordred met me on the way to chapel. “We are gathering together after the burial,” he said, cleaning his fingernails with the tip of his knife as we walked. “All those of us who, having been guests of the Queen, share in some degree the suspicion that has fallen on her fair, silvering head.”

“I’ve told you before, keep your evil-meaning tongue off Her Grace.”

“Ah, yes. I sometimes forget. We all love Guenevere, but some of us more than others, eh? Mador de la Porte is to be excluded from our meeting, of course.”

“Whose inspiration was this meeting?”

“Brother Gawain’s, naturally. Since all of us are prevented from defending the Queen, both because we are all under suspicion with her and because a few evil-minded ones among us suspect her ourselves, Gawain has had the incredibly novel idea that we should vow ourselves to another quest for our missing Lancelot. Who, sharing no kind of sympathy at all with Her Grace, could not possibly fall under suspicion of sharing any sort of plot whatsoever with her.”

Gawain’s idea. As usual, one or other of the great ones had taken the credit before me. “At least this won’t be the usual year-and-a-day quest, not counting the time spent coming back,” I said.

“I see no reason why it shouldn’t. A year and a day have never sufficed before to locate the noble Du Lac. Of course, if he is not found and brought back within… I reckon fifty-five days at the most that our King may claim custom and postponement… even Lancelot will be able to do little except clear the name of a small heap of ashes.”

“God damn you to Hell, Mordred!”

“Very likely.” It was his standard response whenever I, or anyone else, damned him. “Indeed, I have had it on the authority of a saint that my damnation is a fact already recorded wherever they record such matters. So you see, when I speak of Her Grace as a small heap of ashes, I have good reason to sympathize with that same small heap of ashes.” He turned his head to look at me, and for a moment his voice sounded sincere beneath the glaze of witticism. “I would prefer that the Queen not burn. Therefore I will join the new quest with a ready heart. But suppose whoever finds Lancelot is the true poisoner? Will he tell the great hero of the Queen’s danger, or will he find means to ensure that Lancelot stays away?”

“We’ll go in pairs.”

“And thus cover less country, which we would have little enough time to cover singly. Will you join the quest this time, Seneschal?”

“Even if it means traveling with you.” If we went in pairs, it would probably come to that in any case. Mordred and I could get along more companionably with each other, most of the time, than most other men could get along with either of us.

He nodded. “There is also the thought that we are misjudging our traitor. A man may wish to murder an enemy, and yet have no objection if another man desires to prevent an innocent dame from suffering for the deed.”

“A man could also confess and save a great Queen from taking his blame.”

“Ah, but poison is the coward’s weapon. Or the witch’s, of course. Returning to Aunt Morgan le Fay, have you thought that she may have another secret lover among us?”

“Weren’t you the one who reminded us that she’s been presumed dead for years?”

He shrugged. “I sometimes wonder if the line between life and death applies quite so strictly to folk like Morgan and Merlin as to the rest of us poor mortals. Who knows? Perhaps, from there beyond the grave, she took a fancy to our handsome young Sir Patrise and summoned him to her. But you haven’t been to see him laid out yet, I think?”

“I’ve had other things to do.” Though they had not accomplished much.

“I imagine many of us will watch with the corpse most of the night,” said Mordred. “Those of us, especially, who might have an uneasy conscience about his death… or might fear being thought to have an uneasy conscience.”

* * * *

I had planned to wake with the body only long enough for decency’s sake, but Mordred had a point. By tomorrow or the next day we would have scattered, so this would be one of my last chances to see them all, try to read their souls in their faces. Therefore I spent most of the night in the chapel, in a prie-dieu near the side, watching to see which of the twenty-two passed the longest time with Sir Patrise, and trying to determine who did it for love, who for piety, and who for an uneasy conscience.

Mador, of course, waked the whole night with his cousin’s body. So did Bors de Ganis, kneeling almost as close to the corpse as Mador, but more silently. The court would have expected nothing less from the only knight to achieve the Grail and return alive.

Gawain was there all night, too, or most of it, with Gareth near him. Lancelot’s absence and Gawain’s near-escape from death by poison seemed to have brought Beaumains closer to his eldest brother, at least temporarily, than he had been for years. The middle brothers, Agravain and Gaheris, stayed only long enough to save appearances.

Persant of Inde spent quite a while, but it looked to me as if the old knight had dozed off on his knees, a good trick for a future hermit to learn. Gouvernail did not come until after midnight, probably having sensibly taken some sleep after seeing the remains of the dinner cleared up. When he came, he stayed near the back and I was not sure when he slipped out again—I probably dozed off myself for a few moments. The others seemed to have worked out some arrangement, two at a time for about an hour, then another pair to relieve them, almost as smoothly as monks in choir.

If they had in fact planned their order for watching, they had left me out of the conference. Also, most likely, Mordred. Maybe Pinel, too—he knelt through at least two changes of the watch. But Pinel, coming from Carbonek, was acceptable company to Bors, when he kept quiet (even Bors seemed to find Pinel’s theological theories tedious and unsatisfying).

All in all, I did not make an enlightening study of it. The candlelight and the angles made it next to impossible to read much in any man’s face and sometimes the Queen’s dinner guests were hidden among other knights, clerks, priests, and dames.

If Patrise had had a paramour, she kept herself well hidden to the last. He had sometimes carried the favor of Dame Lynette, Gaheris’ wife; but she was as free with her scarves and sleeves as she was strict with her body. If Dame Lynette’s honor had finally cracked… but Gaheris would not have attacked his wife’s lover with poisoned fruit that his own brother was likely to eat. Besides, King Lot’s sons were in the habit of avenging their family’s wrongs with lance and sword, and Gaheris was easily better than Patrise in the field.

It still being simplest to assume that mischance had led Patrise to take poison intended for Gawain, I tried to tally up the various blood feuds Gawain had been involved in over the years.

The longest and ugliest was that between the sons of Lot and the family of King Pellinore. Pellinore had slain Lot in the battle of Castle Terrabil, when Lot was leading the second rebellion against Arthur. Despite the loss of her newly-born Mordred—for a few years only, as it turned out—Queen Morgawse and her older sons had remained loyal to Arthur and took his part against that of their husband and father; but they could not forgive his death when they had wanted his defeat, pardon, and logical place among Arthur’s knights along with King Uriens and other former rebels.

Some of the witnesses claimed that Pellinore could as easily have taken Lot prisoner as killed him. A few even said they thought Lot was about to surrender, or had already surrendered; it was unlikely, considering Lot’s character—still, he had enough grievous wounds besides his cloven head, and finishing an enemy without taking time to hear his surrender would have been in keeping with Pellinore’s dogged singlemindedness. For all that, Lot’s death in battle probably should not have started the feud it did. We interred Lot and his fellow rebel kings with all honors and rich tombs, maybe a little too much—Arthur could hardly have buried his own foster-father with more dignity—and Pellinore, Lot’s killer, was the first to propose Gawain, Lot’s oldest son, for a seat at the Round Table. But Honor must be a shrew of a mistress. Lot’s sons waited for years, but at last Gawain fought it out with Pellinore one day, with nobody else around but Gaheris and the squires. Gawain saw to it that Pellinore got as fine a burial as Lot, and paid for part of the tomb and a century of Masses. If a rich tomb comforted Lot, it should comfort Pellinore, too.

Pellinore’s sons Aglovale and Dornar, and the bastard half-brother Tor, were ready to claim treason and challenge Gawain and Gaheris; but Lamorak, the best warrior of the group and the only one who could have defeated Gawain in single combat, acted like a man of sense, or at least it seemed that way at the time, and pretended that he wished to end the feud. Lamorak claimed it had been Sir Balin, not Pellinore, who killed King Lot. Agravain and Gaheris tried to give him the lie. There had been too many witnesses who testified after Terrabil that Pellinore struck the blow. But in the confusion of battle, and with Lot, Balin, and now Pellinore all three dead and most of the witnesses either dead, scattered, or no longer quite so confident of what they had glimpsed and overheard in the press, who was to say for sure any longer? Queen Morgawse at least, poor lady, believed Lamorak. So did Gareth Beaumains. Gawain did not believe him, but accepted his claim as an honest opinion and agreed to bury the past. As for Pellinore’s last known son, Percival the Pure, he showed himself more interested in baiting me and otherwise maintaining his high virtue than in the rights and wrongs of mundane family matters, and pardoned the sons of Lot out of hand.

Then Lamorak became the lover of Queen Morgawse, and one dark night in her chamber he struck off her head. Maybe he had planned it all along, or maybe they had some kind of lovers’ quarrel. Possibly Morgawse had learned something else about her husband’s death, or Lamorak something else about his father’s. Maybe it was some foolish jest that turned into a grisly accident. Whatever happened, Lamorak did not return to court at once to report it, but disappeared in the other direction, leaving his confused dwarf to discover the mayhem and gallop back to Camelot.

Gawain and his brothers, except Gareth, set out in pursuit, but saw nothing of Lamorak until he surfaced again at a tournament in Surluse, in borrowed armor and shield, trying to fight anonymously and bearing away the prize as calmly as if he had not left his paramour headless in her bed. Lot’s sons were able to corner Lamorak alone somewhere in the woods after the tournament.

There was talk afterwards that all four brothers must have fallen on Lamorak at once, that he could have defeated Agravain, Gaheris, and Mordred together, or Gawain alone, even when Gawain was in his full midday strength and filled with rage for the death of his mother. No one else was present except two squires Lamorak had picked up at Surluse, full of fresh hero-worship for the hero of the tournament, not well acquainted with what the battle was about, and therefore not overly reliable witnesses. They claimed that one or more of the attackers had killed Lamorak’s horse and then, after a battle of more than three hours, another one had cut Lamorak down from behind. The Surluse lads knew Gawain’s distinctive shield, gold pentangle on gules, but the shields of the other three are pretty much alike, lions and bends in various tinctures, so it remained unsure which was the backstabber, not that it much mattered. Gareth Beaumains disowned all his brothers for the deed.

Beaumains and the others who say Lamorak could not have been guilty of the death of Queen Morgawse, that something else must have happened to her, have nothing to go on but Lamorak’s reputation until then. And Lamorak’s reputation, like Lancelot’s, was built mainly on the might of his arm, the general opinion being that any man who can strike down ninety-nine out of a hundred other men in battle or tourney must therefore of necessity be a model of honor in every other respect as well. My own opinion was that if it had been Percival, there would have been some reason to inquire more deeply into what had happened in Dame Morgawse’s bedchamber; but since it was Lamorak, Gawain and his brothers could hardly be blamed for interpreting the matter as they did.

Lancelot, though claiming to believe Lamorak innocent, accepted the reasonableness of Gawain’s situation and stepped in to help Arthur enforce a kind of truce between Lot’s sons and Pellinore’s remaining kindred. Knights with no other interest in the affair than professed concern for honor and justice had a good enough excuse to refrain from attacking Gawain and his brothers by saying that they were sparing the King’s nephews for Arthur’s sake. Percival held gently aloof from the business and at length went away to achieve the Holy Grail and die with Galahad. Gareth Beaumains held haughtily aloof. Dornar managed to get himself killed in a joust that had nothing to do with the old feud, leaving only Aglovale and Tor alive of all Pellinore’s known offspring. They did not seem interested in digging up the bones of the old feud with anything but their tongues, from time to time, and neither of them had been at the Queen’s dinner. Tor was not even at court, having wintered in his own castle.

Of course, the fruit could have been poisoned by someone else besides those at the dinner, and Pellinore had left nephews and nieces, and maybe a few more bastard sons and daughters not yet identified. Brandiles, Gawain’s wife’s brother, was one of Pellinore’s nephews, being the son of Pellinore’s brother Alain of Escavalon, and Brandiles had been at the fatal dinner.

Nevertheless, the feud between Lot’s family and Pellinore’s had not led to any new known bloodshed since Lamorak’s death. King Bagdemagus’ death at Gawain’s hands during the Grail Quest was comparatively fresh. It had not led to any outward demands for justice. Like Astamore, all of Bagdemagus’ other surviving daughters, nephews, and cousins claimed to accept it as a simple misfortune of friendly combat. But the honesty of a killing does not always keep kinsfolk from seeking justice or revenge, whichever you call it. Indeed, the more fair-minded we become about refusing to put a man through process of law for killing another in honest accident, the more we seem to force any revenge-seeking relative to work in secret. I liked young Astamore and did not find it pleasant to think of him as a poisoner; but the fact that a father like Bagdemagus could produce a son like Meliagrant showed there was treachery somewhere in the bloodline. Maybe it came from Bagdemagus’ parents, had lain fallow in their children, as sometimes happens, and could surface again in their other grandchildren as it had in Meliagrant. Meliagrant had seemed a good young knight, too, at first.

Bagdemagus was not the only man Gawain had had the misfortune to kill on the bloody Quest for the Grail. There was also Ywain the Adventurous, the namesake and bastard half-brother of Ywain of the Lion. Both Ywains were the sons of King Uriens and cousins-german to Gawain himself. If it had been Ywain of the Lion, Morgan’s son, that Gawain had killed, then Le Fay might have had reason to turn her love for her nephew into hate. But Queen Morgan had no reason that anyone knew to love her husband’s bastard; and both Ywain of the Lion and old King Uriens had forgiven Gawain, more readily than Gawain forgave himself, for the death of Ywain the Adventurous. So had The Adventurous forgiven his killer, too, before dying of his wounds.

In the matter of Ywain’s death, we had the testimony of Ector de Maris, Lancelot’s half-brother, to second Gawain’s own account. They had been traveling together for a time. Ector de Maris had no apparent reason to gild any tale to Gawain’s advantage. Therefore, when Ector’s recital was softer toward Gawain than Gawain’s own, it was probably the truth.

Gawain the Golden-Tongued, on the other hand, with his cultivated custom of speaking ill of nobody, might be capable of gilding a tale to the advantage of Ector de Maris or any other rival. And it was at about this point I began to suspect my own head was going unclear with wild surmise and lack of sleep. There were too many possibilities, too many possible traitors—and not enough, if you started with the premise that all of us, in theory, should be too honorable to attack a comrade with poison.

Revenge had to be the key. But revenge of whom? I kept the keys for the King, I wore my own key on my shield… why couldn’t I find the key to Patrise’s death?

Towards dawn, when I woke out of a doze in which I had been mixing up King Pellinore with his brother Pellam, the Maimed Fisher-King of Carbonek, I decided I had thought too much for the time being, and had better take a few hours of real sleep. As I straightened my stiff knees, I glimpsed a similar movement on the other side of the chapel.

Mordred had left the chapel early in the evening, shortly after his brothers Agravain and Gaheris. He must have slipped back in when I was dozing; it had been some time after midnight that I noticed him again, deep in the shadows on the far left, across from me. Now he rose and followed me out, joining me in the corridor.

“A pleasant game, is it not?” he murmured. “Not that it can save the Queen, of course. Mador will hardly withdraw his accusation on the strength of my surmises, or even yours. Still, it’s a pleasant game.”

Like Lore of Carlisle in the banquet chamber, Mordred must have been doing much the same thing as myself in the chapel. Why not? He had first suggested it. “All right, King’s Nephew,” I said, “what pet surmises did you reach?”

“None, as yet. But you may remember my notion—idle, perhaps—that a man with an uneasy conscience might watch the longest at his victim’s bier?”

I nodded. “Mador, Bors de Ganis, your brothers Gawain and Gareth. A saint, a near-saint, the probable intended victim, and the dead man’s nearest kinsman. Persant stayed maybe half the night, too. I could hardly have chosen a less suspicious assortment.”

“There was one other who stayed most of the night. Yourself, Sir Seneschal.”

I thought about it for a moment and decided it was hardly worth the retort I was a little too tired to put into the right words. “And you, Mordred.”

“And myself, intermittently. But the Queen has given me no cause to use poison.”

I might have seized him by the throat, but he moved away. “If we are to play the game, Sir Seneschal,” he remarked, “we must begin with all the pieces. Pleasant dreams, King’s Brother.”

I turned my back on him and walked away without returning the wish. He would come back to the subject later. He might even, eventually, have some thoughts to speak worth the hearing. Beneath that delight in pushing his listeners to the limit, he had a keen mind. If we traveled together seeking Lancelot, we would have time enough to talk things through, assuming we could keep from killing each other on the way.