Arthur Rex (7 page)

“Methinks,” said the young Arthur, “that merely to be a British king doth attract envy.”

And so they returned to the castle, and King Arthur sent to King Ryons an envoy with a message to the effect that he would never give him his beard nor allow him to take it without great resistance, and that if he tried to take it by force he would certainly fail and lose his own head into the bargain.

Now when King Ryons received this message he believed it a great impudence and he waxed wroth and did assemble a mighty host, with the which he embarked in a fleet of many ships and crossed the Irish Sea and, invading Wales, did arrive before Caerleon, where he drew up his army in array.

“Well, Merlin,” said King Arthur looking from the castle onto the vast field of lances and pennons that extended to the distant horizon, “Ryons was not dissuaded from his emprise, and here he has come to meet his death.”

“In furnishing which to him you must not feel regretful,” said Merlin. “The old Greek Stoics accepted passively the imposition of a greater power than their own, and that was wisdom in their situation. But a puissant king must be as stoical, and as wise, in exerting such power as he possesses—when such exertion is necessary.”

So King Arthur girt himself with Excalibur and taking up his lance Ron, he mounted his horse Aubagu, and ordering the drawbridge lowered, he proceeded at a deliberate walk to where King Ryons sat on his caparisoned charger before the vast army.

And coming to his adversary Arthur said, “You are Ireland, my lord?”

“Varlet, I am indeed,” said Ryons, who was an huge man with a great ginger-colored beard which projected from the opened visor of his helm, and his great horse was half again as tall as Aubagu. “Go and tell thy king I am come to take his head and, having that, his lands as well.”

“We,” Arthur said quietly, “are the king of all Britain.”

Ryons did stare at him awhile, and then he said in wonder, “Thou art but an infant. I came to beard a man.” He shrugged within his armor, making his breastplate creak on its straps. “Well, boy, give me thy fealty and I shall do thee no harm.”

“To you,” said Arthur, “we extend the same offer, my lord. But had you stayed where you belong, we should not have asked even that. Of your own volition you came here as invader: you shall leave as vassal or corse.”

Now King Ryons ground his teeth in ire. “Insolent boy! I have overwhelmed seven kings, and in homage to me they did flay their beards and give them me. Dost think a beardless varlet might defy me and keep his head? Defend thyself!”

Saying the which he threw closed his visor and pricking his steed galloped to a distance across the field, turned, and with lowered lance charged upon King Arthur. Therefore Arthur closed his own helm and gave the spur to Aubagu.

When the two kings met it was with a sound like unto a clap of thunder, for each lance met the opposing shield simultaneously, and both shields split from top to bottom and fell away in parts and the two lances broke in twain as well. But King Ryons was so distracted by his fury that he turned and charged again, though armed with but the stump of lance.

Now King Arthur drew Excalibur and when Ryons reached him, he leaned from his saddle and inserting the point of his sword between the greave on Ryons’ leg and the horse’s belly he did cut apart the leather that supported the stirrup, and Ireland’s foot in the heavy steel boot thereupon dropped free. And so was his center of balance altered drastically, and he fell out of the saddle and onto the ground.

Then King Arthur dismounted and raising his visor spake to the Irish king as follows. “You have done what valor would demand. Now leave our country with impunity.” And he offered his hand in aid of Ryons’ effort to rise from the earth, no easy achievement when suited in hinged steel.

But Ryons struck the hand away and, with much heaving and squeaking, he climbed onto his two feet and drew his sword. Then he spake to Arthur, at first incomprehensibly within the visor, but then lifting it he said, “By accident I have been unhorsed, but ’tis no inconvenience, for I should have had to be anyway afoot when I cut off thy head. Thou hast a final opportunity to submit to me as vassal. Therefore kneel now, and live hereafter.”

“My lord Ireland,” said Arthur, “in justice we must warn you that with our sword Excalibur we are invincible. ’Tis a magical weapon, given us by the Lady of the Lake, and it can cut lace or iron with equal ease. To use it against a mortal man armed with a conventional weapon would defy the principles of chivalry—unless he were warned against it, as you are now.”

“Chivalry, boy? What shitful rubbish is that?” asked Ryons, weighing the flat of his own great blade in his huge hands.

“A code for, a mode of, knightly behavior, in which justice is conditioned by generosity, valor shaped by courtesy,” said King Arthur. “The vulgar advantage is declined. Dignity is preserved, even in a foe.”

“And is that all?” asked Ryons mockingly.

And Arthur saw fit to add, “Graciousness is sought.”

But King Ryons did guffaw in derision. “Thou art not only a boy, thou art a pompous ass of a boy! Hadst thou taken orders, thou shouldst already have been made bishop.” He raised his sword. “Now, boy, were I ‘chivalrous,’ I should not take advantage of a beardless varlet, I who have vanquished many powerful monarchs, giants, and fearsome beasts, I who by force of arms won my crown amongst the ferocious Irish, the most awesome warriors on the face of the earth, each worth ten Britons and twenty Saxons. But as it is, I am a king and not a bloody prating little preacher. Thy Lady of the Lake is a whore, and her sword will soon make my toothpick. Defend thyself!”

And King Ryons thereupon lifted overhead his sword, which was five feet long as he himself was seven feet tall, and then he brought it down in a two-handed cleaving of the air and with sufficient force to split an anvil.

But before the blade could reach him, Arthur stepped aside, making as he did so a horizontal stroke with Excalibur, so quick and deft that it was scarcely visible to the front ranks of the Hibernian host, and from the battlements of Caerleon, where his own forces were watching, it could not be seen at all.

Now Ryons’ blade penetrated the earth, at a slant, for half its length, and as Ireland braced himself to pull it forth, King Arthur returned Excalibur to its scabbard and did mount Aubagu.

At this Ryons opened his helm and called out, “Poltroon! Dost flee?”

Looking down upon him, but not so far, owing to the great height of the Irish king, Arthur said, “Shake your head, my lord.”

And Ryons did so, though more in puzzlement than to comply with the request, and his helmeted head did tumble off his neck and over his shoulder and plunge to the ground, where it rolled almost to the forefeet of Aubagu, who shied from it. And through the open visor Ryons’ face could be seen, the eyes and mouth frozen open in amazement. Meanwhile the huge body still stood erect and from the severed neck sprayed a fountain of blood which descended on the armor and enmantled it like unto a crimson cloak.

Then from the battlements of Caerleon sounded a mighty roar of exultation, and from the Irish host a vast groan of despair. Then all of Ryons’ army dismounted and fell upon their knees, and King Arthur went before them and addressed them as follows.

“Hibernians, ye have seen the necessary failure that will attend any invasion of Britain. Arise and go now, home across the Irish Sea, and no harm will come to ye.”

At which the Irishmen, all ten thousand of them as one, swore fealty to him and arose and went away as commanded.

But Arthur returned to the castle and he was melancholy of humor when he spoke with his wizard.

“Tell us, Merlin,” said he, “why do we feel no sense of triumph in this?”

And Merlin answered, “Well, is not triumph a childish feeling, Sire? Perhaps though you are still young in years you have already become old in authority.”

“Then,” said King Arthur, “the feelings which lift the heart must be alien to a king? There can be no joy in it, no exultation? Nought but duty?” He pondered on this matter. “We have learnt that our father was more or less a barbarian. But did he not have it better?”

“But,” said Merlin, “the era has changed.”

“If the truth be known,” said King Arthur, “we did admire the late Ryons for his ebullience, nay his very effrontery. He did wear his crown with a certain zest. Whereas we are afraid that he was right about us: we do tend towards pomposity. But we are young and yet beardless, and with Excalibur we are invincible in battle. How to be righteous without being sanctimonious we see as our problem.”

“If I may be so bold,” said Merlin, “it is not required for your dignity that you habitually use the first-person plural when referring to yourself. That you are the king and whatever you say is said by a sovereign and not a mere man is self-evident.”

“Yet,” said Arthur, “I am a man for all that. I must eat, sleep, and use the close-stool. What subjects look for in a king, methinks, are not reminders of their own baseness but rather that which is elevated above it. And speaking for myself, after a reign of two years, I must say that what a new king requireth is a constant reassurance of his own kingliness, especially if he hath yet to celebrate his eighteenth birthday and with no beard to frame his face. When I say ‘we,’ therefore, I am addressing myself foremost.”

“Not even with my powers,” said Merlin, “can I provide you with a real beard, for only Nature can create hair. But I can place upon your chin the illusion of a beard, the which will serve your purpose until you can grow a real one.”

“But, Merlin,” asked King Arthur, “would this not be dissembling? If I am a true king, how might I wear a false beard?”

“’Twould not be false,” said Merlin sighing. “Magic, Sire, is that to which reason cannot be applied.” He cleared his throat. “’Tis another realm of being. A fish cannot converse with a bird, because each inhabits another medium, yet they both exist and in so doing share the universe. So with magic and reality.”

“Which fish?” asked King Arthur. “And which bird?”

“Neither,” said Merlin. “Both are real, but air and water are magical.”

And now King Arthur frowned and said, “How so?”

“They have no individuality,” said Merlin, “one drop of water, one breath of air being like every other of their kind. They have no duration, which is to say no beginning and no end, for if water leaveth here, it goeth there: so with air. The general amounts of both in all the world do never change. Finally, by application of fire, water changeth into air, to which if cold is brought, air changeth again into water.”

“This,” said King Arthur, “is alchemy, Merlin, and beyond my province. I must deal with men. Already I have learned that they come in all variations. To do perfect justice to them they must be dealt with individually. But a king hath not sufficient time to treat fully with every idiosyncrasy of each of his subjects, not to mention those persons who come from abroad to invade his realm, like Ryons, whose spirit I nonetheless admired.”

“But only,” said Merlin, “after you killed him.”

“Perhaps unjustly,” said Arthur, “with an invincible sword.”

“Without it you had been a boy of seventeen, and he seven feet high,” Merlin told his king. “But would you not nevertheless have faced him?”

“Certes,” said King Arthur, as if in wonderment at the question. “Doth a king have such a choice?”

“Well, some might,” said Merlin, “but you do never. Therefore you must not refuse the help of my magic, which at its most powerful could not misrepresent your character.”

And so did Arthur acquire a luxuriant golden beard, on loan so to speak from Nature until it was natural for him to grow his own. And having this, and Excalibur, he yet needed for his rule a Round Table, knights with which to furnish it, and the most beautiful woman in the world for his queen.

T
HEN ELEVEN KINGS FROM THE
north came into Britain for to attack King Arthur, and he fought the third war of his reign, the which lasted for three years.

Now during a respite between battles, his enemies having been repulsed in Wales and gone to the neighboring kingdom of Cameliard for to besiege King Leodegrance, a loyal ally of Britain by reason of his old friendship with Uther Pendragon, a beautiful lady came to Caerleon to seek asylum there. And little did King Arthur know that she was the wife of King Lot of the Orkneys, for she represented herself only as a woman in distress, though her secret purpose was to do harm.

Now Merlin’s powers were defied by women (unless they had already, as with Arthur’s mother the fair Ygraine, determined independently of him to follow a course that happened to serve his wishes), and therefore he could be of no service to King Arthur in this case. And King Arthur believed this lady’s account of how her castle had been overwhelmed by the hosts from the north, her husband its lord and all his men killed, and all resident females but herself ravished most foully, she alone escaping through a hidden postern in the wall.

And King Arthur was now twenty years of age, but he as yet had had no experience of females, and though when dealing with men he had put aside the pomposity that had been noted by Ryons just prior to that king’s losing his head, he returned to its use now, for this lady had long chestnut-colored hair of high gloss and an ivory neck that was bared to the division of her thrusting bosom, and her robe of pale-green velvet was as a second skin on a body of luxuriant health, which would not suggest that her castle had been so long under siege that she did suffer famine.

And she knelt rather more closely to the throne than even courtesy would require in a subject, and Arthur found that this proximity disturbed him strangely.

“We grant thy petition for asylum,” said he.

“And my castle, Sire?” asked the lady. “Shall I ever see it again?” Now the tears did well from her comely eyes green as emeralds, her snowy breast heaved in anguish, and she seemed to offer to swoon, so that Arthur rose and taking her hands brought her to her feet.