Arthur Rex (3 page)

Saying the which she swathed herself tightly within the white robe, making an impenetrable mummy-wrapping like unto those of the kings of Egypt who when living bed their own sisters and have skins as black as night.

But if the king heard these exceptions to his purpose he gave no answer, being occupied, damnably, with the to him foreign fastenings of the duke’s garb, which did defy his fingers, and soon in frenzy he abandoned all restraint and tore himself altogether naked, dropping the tatters where they fell, and then he vaulted onto the bed, discovered the fair Ygraine within the white robe as lackeys unroll a carpet, and then he closed with her alabaster body as a ram doth address an ewe.

Now the fire had dwindled to powdery ash before Uther Pendragon did unjoin himself, though now much against the will of the fair Ygraine, but as after much killing even a king must rest, so in love, and he did stretch his limbs and cool himself and clear his throat and then, thrusting his tongue into the cavern of his cheek, he spake as follows.

“My dear Ygraine, I confess to thee that I am greatly relieved to find that thou hast been faithful to me—for no appetite that had been fed within the last fortnight could yet be so keen as thine.”

“Methinks,” said the fair Ygraine, “that absence hath also done thee a world of good, my dear Gorlois.”

And Uther Pendragon grimaced sternly to repress his gloat, and elevating himself upon one of the duke’s sharp elbows he said, “I never liked the gleam in the king’s eye which fell upon thee at the Easter festival at London.”

“The king, my lord?” asked the fair Ygraine, a faint flush introducing itself into her snowy forehead.

“The mighty and most puissant Uther of the Lion’s Head,” said himself. “Terror of the Paynims, Defender of the Faith, King of all Britain—”

“And most luxurious man, by reputation,” said the fair Ygraine. “Thief of Maidenheads, Ravisher of Chastity, Scepterer of Subjects—”

“Be thou not too severe upon thy sovereign,” said Uther, “whom we call Sire with respect to his divinely appointed role as father of his people. In submitting to him, a woman doth serve God.”

“Thy
wife as well, Gorlois?” asked the fair Ygraine with a peculiar flare of flawless nostril and stare of starry eye.

“Naturally!” roared Uther Pendragon, for an instant forgetting he was in the guise of the duke, and then with the quick wit which in combination with his keen sword had made him king, he said,
“Naturally
I should not assent to mine own cuckolding, not even by my king, to whom in all else I am a loyal vassal. But there are extraordinary situations of great extremity, enterprises of moment, pitch, pith—”

“In thine hot desire thou hast acquired a stammer,” said Ygraine in chiding affection, and she did cordially place her long white fingers upon the summit of his belly, which was the duke’s and as pale of wispy hair as the king’s own was black and bristly as the back of a boar.

“Prithee, one moment more,” said Uther Pendragon though he stirred at once. “Didst thou not enjoy the king’s look upon thee? Didst thou not sip from the cup he sent around to thee at table? Didst never nibble at the dainties he took from his own plate for thee? These were marks of high favor, my girl!” And transported by remembrance, he reached across and slapped the smooth globe of her damask bottom.

“My lord,” cried the fair Ygraine, recoiling. “Thou liest with the duchess of Cornwall, not with the great gross wench of the cook’s.”

“And by God I am the king!” roared Uther Pendragon. “That is, the
duke,
of course, the loyal vassal of the king.... I was merely putting myself in his place for a moment. With his eyes I seemed to see an answering light in thine own, there at Easter table. Methinks I saw good reason why when thine husband detected as much—that is, when
I
did—he led thee away from the festival without asking the king’s leave, making the great insult which occasioned this war.”

“One could not very well spit upon a titbit offered by a king,” said the fair Ygraine, soothing with her white hand her now rubicund ham. “One could not very well scowl into the smiling face of one’s sovereign, though his ultimate purpose were base lechery.”

“This was then but courtesy?”

“No more than,” said Ygraine. “But as much as I could manage, what with the utter revulsion inspired in me by that great hairy brute of a king.”

Now Uther Pendragon, who had continued to stir from the effect of her soft touch, did wither instantaneously and he would surely, if called upon to perform, have suffered from the old peculiarity to which he had made Merlin privy.

But as it happened at the next moment a thunderous knocking was heard upon the door of the antechamber and calling, “Sire, Sire!” someone continued to knock.

And the king leapt from the bed, saying, “’Tis a courtier, with an impedimented speech, crying ‘Fire!’ Remain where thou art, in safety, whilst I go to see what burns.”

And he strode into the anteroom in his gross nakedness, flung open the outer door, and seeing old Ulfin, with a torch and no longer in the guise of Sir Jordan, he gave him a great wink and said, in false annoyance, “Villain, how dare you knock me up?”

And Ulfin said, “Sire, the duke of Cornwall is dead.”

“Is he now?” said Uther Pendragon.

“Having received an intelligence that you had left the field, Gorlois issued forth from Terrabil leading a host, the which, after a most bloody passage at arms, were defeated by your forces, Gorlois himself being among the fallen. Fleet courtiers have brought these news, and his head as well, which”—and here Ulfin did show his yellow old tusks in mirth—“is the spit and image of that which you do currently wear upon your shoulders, Majesty.”

“Indeed,” said Uther Pendragon in distaste. “Go thou and bring Merlin to transform me into my proper person.”

“Sire,” said Merlin, materializing from the shadows beyond Ulfin’s light. And in the next instant the king felt himself swell and widen, and warm with his own pelt of black hair on head, cheeks, ears, nose, chest, reins, and even shoulder-caps and small-of-back. And only then did he know modesty, concealing his massy groin behind two hands, saying, “Death to him who looketh upon his king’s nakedness.”

And Merlin and Ulfin did go away, and Uther Pendragon returned to the bedchamber, expecting the fair Ygraine to demonstrate her astonishment, but seeing rather that she did not.

“My dragon!” she cried instead, and uncovered herself from the white robe, and it was not until a long time later that Uther Pendragon was able to satisfy his curiosity as to her lack of wonder at his appearance as himself.

And when that time came, along with the first light of morning, he asked, “Didst thou know me from the first though in the mean form of thine husband?”

“I do not pretend to know how thou earnest by that guise,” replied the fair Ygraine. “But I did not recognize the manner as that of the late duke. ...Forgive me, I beg of thee, for failing to show more complaisance at the Easter feast, but Gorlois was a jealous man—though craving more for page-boys for his bed than me, but such is often the case.”

“O vile man!” cried Uther Pendragon. “Nothing is more loathsome than the crime of sodomy. This is evidence that he treacherously leagued himself in secret with the Saxons, for ’tis a notorious German practice. I shall have his head mounted atop Lud’s Gate at London for the populace to jeer at. But enough of this unnatural felon. Thou art now queen of Britain, or shall be when the archbishop of Canterbury solemnizes this arrangement.”

Now, in his happiness the king forgot altogether what Merlin had told him of the child he would plant this night, and next morning he and the fair Ygraine, accompanied by a great host (for all of the knights of the late Gorlois now swore fealty to Uther), traveled to London, a journey of many days which brought about the devastation of countless villages along the route, though they were friendly and British, owing to the need of such a vast army for food. Nor was a maidenhead spared above the age of eleven, though none was, for once, taken by Uther Pendragon, who was most satiated with the fair Ygraine.

And arriving at his capital city Uther Pendragon was good as his word. Having mounted Gorlois’s head atop Lud’s Gate, with the legend TRAITOR AND SOD beneath the ragged neck, he forthwith had the old archbishop summoned from Canterbury to marry him to the fair Ygraine and crown her as his queen.

Now, as was his wont, the archbishop used this occasion to speak at length on the necessity to wage war upon the remaining pagans on the British island and to deplore any mercy that might be shown towards them as an heretical practice that might well bring the pope’s excommunication of the offenders. Uther Pendragon thereafter went northwards with a vast host for to exterminate the savage Picts and the barbarous Scots, who were threatening to come across Hadrian’s Wall and do the same to the Britons.

Thus the king was away when the fair Ygraine began to thicken at her white belly and grow more abundant of pap and to acquire addictions such as cutlet of griffin and roc’s eggs.

But finally the day came when the queen was delivered of her child, by many of physicians and attendants, all of whom were afterwards put to death because they had seen the royal nether parts uncovered, and the babe was put into the hands of a wet nurse, who would also be disposed of when her job was done, along with her own infant and whichever other children had fed from the milk now being used to nourish a future king.

But Merlin materialized at this moment, just as the nurse had bared her dug, the which to offer to the tiny gasping lips, and he seized the child and saying, “I claim my prize,” he vanished as quickly as he had come.

And the fair Ygraine, and all those present, did wonder at this strange event, but none would question the ways of Merlin, who had made prophecies, most of them dire, for the next fifteen centuries, at the end of which epoch “the star Saturn shall rain malignity upon the earth and destroy all humankind as if with a crooked scythe.”

So was Arthur conceived and born, and so was he taken away by Merlin for his upbringing.

N
OW MERLIN HAD NO FACILITIES
for caring for a babe, and therefore he took the infant Arthur to a remote part of Wales, to the abode of Sir Hector, the which was if not mean then modest, for this good knight was an honest man who had not profited by his service to the king except in honor.

And Merlin found Sir Hector at the kennels, where he threw offal from a basin to his slavering hounds.

Nor was Sir Hector amazed to see in such a homely place the white-bearded wizard carrying a naked pink infant, for in that day men of worship did not question the unlikely. “My lord,” said this honest knight, “I am at your service.”

“Sir Hector,” said Merlin, “I believe your wife is in milk currently. I hold here a child which seeketh nourishment and beyond that a good British upbringing for the next fifteen years, after which period has elapsed he will go on from you towards the achievement of a special purpose. Are you willing to provide this without question?”

“On mine honor as Briton and as knight,” Sir Hector did instantly reply.

“You are a worthy knight,” said Merlin. “One day you will know the value of your service and be well rewarded.”

But Sir Hector did frown as he pitched the remainder of what was in the basin to his dogs. “I do nothing for love of pelf,” he said stoutly.

“Or love of self?” asked Merlin with his unique sense of irony, quite foreign to the mortals of that straightforward time, and the question was as obscure to Hector as if it had been put in the language of the Danskers. “Well then,” the magician continued more soberly, “you are the foster-father of this child, and I ask you to raise him as though he were the proper issue of your own loins.”

Now Sir Hector would have taken the babe from Merlin, but his hands were foul from the bloody offal, and being no rude Saxon who would wipe his fingers on his breech he said, “I shall summon my old woman, who will attend to this matter.”

But saying, “’Tis done,” Merlin made the infant to vanish from the kennel yard and to reappear within the cottage, indeed within the very arms of Hector’s wife, a-sucking at her left pap whilst her own infant son, Kay, was feeding from the right, and she did start, so that little Kay was dislodged from the nipple and did mewl. But Hector’s wife, who had only just been delivered of her first-born, was much pleased to have its apparent twin, with hair as fair as Kay’s was dark, and therefore she did not wonder long at its appearance for fear it might be an illusion worked on her by some sprite or fiend of the sort that preyed on Welshwomen and as such be made to vanish as quickly as it had come should she question its reality.

Thus when Hector came in to eat his midday meal she said nothing of this strange event, but in silence served him up his leeks and potatoes.

“A wizard,” said Hector, “appeared to me at the kennels carrying a naked babe, the which he asked me to nourish and to bring up to young manhood. But, saying that, he vanished, himself and child as well. I tell thee, Olwen, I take this as a portent, with the hollow thunder we have lately heard in the mountains and at which the hair on my hounds’ backs doth rise and my horse doth seek to cover his dung like unto a cat, and near the lake is the spoor of a wyvern of a kind hitherto unknown in Wales. Indeed we may be at the advent of a most monstrous epoch, as foretold by Merlin.” He dropped his knife, with a great piece of leek on it, and uttered an uncharacteristically blasphemous oath. “’Swounds! The very wizard who appeared to me was Merlin himself!”

And he plucked up his knife and chewed the leek. “I tell thee, Olwen, this is passing strange.”

That good woman, saying nought, left the room, shortly to return with the new babe in her arms.

“Would this be it?” she asked.

“Or another very like,” said Sir Hector, spearing up a boiled potato.

“’Tis a pretty fool,” said Olwen, rocking the wee infant in her arms. “I expect that if we are to rear it for Merlin, he hath provided or will furnish the means for this, for being an honest knight thou art poor and with now still another mouth to feed.”