The Legend of the King (25 page)

"Hello?" Dinadan called again. "If you're hiding somewhere, we mean you no harm!"

"That'd be in your best interest," said a gruff voice behind them, "since I've got an arrow aimed at your back. Who are you?"

"Just a minstrel and a holy man," Dinadan replied.

Now a new voice, a woman's, spoke from Dinadan's left. "Good Gog, it's Dinadan, isn't it?"

"I am Sir Dinadan," Dinadan replied cautiously. A sturdy young woman stepped out of the shadows, holding a small child in her arms, and Dinadan gaped at her. "Lynet?"

"Close. It's Luneta."

Dinadan leaped from his horse and hurried forward to embrace the daughter of his old friends Gaheris and Lynet. "Little Luney! You look just like—"

"I know, just like my mother. It's good to see you. I heard you were off in the Orient somewhere."

"I was, but I'm back," Dinadan replied, turning to see a tall lanky fellow in black clothes appear from behind a tree.

"Dinadan, this is my husband, Rhience."

Dinadan shook Rhience's hand, then called out to Bede and Palomides. "Come on in! They're friends."

Rhience raised one eyebrow. "I thought you said you were just a minstrel and a holy man."

Dinadan looked pointedly at Rhience's empty hands. "And I thought you said you had an arrow aimed at my back."

Rhience sniffed. "Just because
I'm
a liar doesn't make it all right for you to be one. Don't you know anything about moral theology?"

"No," Dinadan said.

"Lucky dog," Rhience muttered. "Could you unteach me sometime?"

Bede and Palomides approached the fire, and Dinadan turned back to Luneta. "And this is your child?"

"She is now," Luneta replied. "Her parents were killed by the White Horsemen. She almost died of hunger before we happened to find her."

"Happened," Rhience repeated softly.

Luneta shrugged. "Well, we had help. A friend named Robin took us to her."

"Heard of the chap," Dinadan said absently as he examined the child. She was a towheaded girl with very large eyes, perhaps three years old. "And what is your name?" he asked her.

Luneta and Rhience waited, but after a moment, Luneta said, "We don't know. She hasn't spoken yet."

No one said anything. Dinadan guessed that, like him, the others were wondering what horrors those huge eyes had witnessed. They gathered around the fire and shared their scanty provisions, then their stories, which was one thing, at least, that they all had in abundance. When they were done, Dinadan asked Luneta, "And where are you three going now?"

Luneta was busy coaxing the child to eat another scrap of bread, so it was Rhience who answered. "We've just been up north to Luneta's old home in Orkney, Sir Gawain's estates that her father managed. The lands and farms have been burned, but Orkney Hall's still standing, and the people are starting to rebuild and replant. Now we're on our way home, to my family estates near Chichester."

Bede looked puzzled. "A little out of your way on this road, aren't you?"

Rhience nodded. "We left the Great North Road to check on an old friend who lives in these parts, the good hermit Godwulf."

"Godwulf?" repeated Guinglain.

"Ay. You know him?"

Guinglain shook his head. "I never met him, but I've been to his hermitage." Then the young hermit said bluntly, "Godwulf is dead."

Rhience's lips tightened. "The White Horsemen?"

"Of course. But there's a new hermit there, and I'd like to see him again. We'll ride with you tomorrow."

The cavalcade of travelers arrived at Godwulf's hermitage shortly before dark the next day. A thin stooped man with graying hair and a shabby hermit's robe appeared from the one habitable structure in the clearing, a small, recently rebuilt hut with a nearly completed thatched roof.

"Brother Adelbert?" called Guinglain.

"Brother Guinglain?" the hermit replied.

Guinglain dismounted from his mule and embraced his fellow hermit. Then he introduced the others. Adelbert greeted them gravely, then said, "I'm glad you've come. My dinner has been ready this past hour and more, but I was so busy mucking wi' the house that I was putting it off. Will ye share my food?"

"Do you have enough to share?" Dinadan asked.

"If I have any at all, I have enough to share," Adelbert replied. "But there's enough for us all, if that's what you mean. It ain't much, just porridge, but it'll fill you. The miller down t'village is almost done repairing t'mill, and then we'll have bread."

"No beer?" asked Rhience.

For the first time, Adelbert's solemn face cracked in a smile. "Ye knew Godwulf, then?"

Rhience's eyes were bright, with either tears or laughter. "Ay. I spent several months with him."

"He was a power of a man, wasn't he?" Adelbert said simply.

"Ay, that he was. A power of a man."

"As soon as I finish the hermitage roof," Adelbert said, "I'll start on t'brewhouse. I've found a village boy who used to tag along at Godwulf's heels when he worked, and he thinks he can remember how he did the trick. The lad'll be joining me up here once he finishes rebuilding his folks' farmhouse. But no, we've nothing brewed yet. Good water, though."

Dinadan dismounted slowly and watched while the others tended their horses and set about making their beds and building an outdoor fire. Luneta was walking the little girl around the clearing, talking brightly and pointing out birds and trees, ignoring the fact that every few feet in the courtyard, another mound of freshly turned earth marked a grave. Dinadan shook his head slowly. He could sense a slight lightening of the mood in his party, perhaps prompted by Brother Adelbert's talk of rebuilding, but he resisted it. It was too little. A rebuilt farmhouse and mill—what was that compared with the glory of the kingdom that just a few years ago had made England great? Dinadan thought of Arthur's magnificent castle at Camelot—now in ruins, according to Bede. He thought of the days of feasting or—even better—the days of judgment, when Arthur had listened to his people, then meted out true justice, marked with both wisdom and compassion. He thought of the great knights—Gawain and Lancelot and Tor and Bedivere and Kai and all the heroes of the land—who had ridden out on quests for justice, vying with each other in helping the helpless and crushing oppression. Now all that was gone. By any sane reckoning, England was in for generations of lawlessness and war. Was he to feel hopeful because a hermit was planning to rebuild a brewhouse? Because farmers were starting to work their fields again? Glory like Arthur's should not pass so quickly or be forgotten so easily.

"What is it, my friend?" asked Palomides, standing nearby. Dinadan shook his head. Like the child clutching Luneta's finger, he could find no words. Palomides didn't press him. Instead he said, "Come. Brother Adelbert is ready to serve our porridge."

Dinadan followed his friend to the fire and sat in silence as the others joined the circle. Rhience glanced up at him. "Say, Dinadan, I meant to ask you earlier. Was that a rebec I saw in your gear today?"

Dinadan nodded.

"Then you play?"

Dinadan paused, then nodded again.

"Maybe you could give us a tune after we eat."

The others looked expectantly at Dinadan, but he shook his head. "I can't."

It was Palomides who asked, "Why not?"

"I have no music left," Dinadan replied softly. He looked up and, one by one, met everyone's eyes. "Don't you feel it? For me, music is hope, but with the end of Arthur's reign, all the hope is gone. Haven't you been paying attention as we rode? England's in ruins. What took Arthur his whole life to build has collapsed in a few months, and where do you see hope for the land? Did you listen to yourself yesterday, Rhience? 'The fields are all burned, but at least the house hasn't been torn down.' Is that what we have left? That maybe the bloody wreck of England isn't quite as mangled and destroyed as it might have been?" Hot tears began coursing down his cheeks. "That's all we can say?
That's
our hope?"

Rhience looked somber, but he said, "No. I would say that our hope is in the people."

"What people?" Dinadan demanded. "The people are hiding in holes. We go days without seeing people!"

"We're people, aren't we?" Rhience asked quietly.

Dinadan rolled his eyes. "
We're
the hope of England? A couple of knights, a family, two holy men, and a singer of tales?"

Guinglain smiled brightly, and in a voice that for all its mildness seemed to ride the wind into the trees said, "Indeed, I had not realized we had so much. Now I am content. It is enough."

"Enough?" gasped Dinadan.

"More than enough. Knight, holy man, family, poet—it is all that any land could want. If the knight will be honorable, the holy man true, the family loving. And if the poet will sing. After all, someone needs to tell the story of Arthur."

"The story of Arthur is over," Dinadan said.

"No, the events are over," Guinglain replied. "I'm talking about the story. There's a difference." He raised his small porridge bowl and said, "Brother Adelbert, would you help me serve this sacred communion?"

Adelbert hesitated, then admitted, "I'm ... uh ... to be honest, I'm not actually ordained."

"That's all right," Guinglain replied. "Neither am I. You make sure everyone's served, young and old, man and woman, knight and commoner. I'll say the words." Adelbert began ladling porridge from the pot, and Guinglain said, "This food we share is the bond of life and death, holding us together. Because ... because we remember those who have gone before us, because we will not forget to honor them, we are alive and we are together and we are one."

Rhience chuckled. "Ay. This porridge is a new covenant. Hoc est gruel."

Dinadan sipped his porridge, probably the worst-tasting thing he had ever put in his mouth, but it warmed his throat and stomach. Then he downed the rest in two gulps, scalding his tongue, and said, "Well, blast it, if we're going to have church, we ought to have a psalm. Wait here." Rising, he retrieved his rebec, tuned it swiftly, then said, "A hymn, a sacred chant. Let's see ... how about the holy tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?"

They separated the next morning. Rhience and Luneta returned to their home in Sussex, where they began the hard work of rebuilding a life and raising a beautiful daughter, whom they eventually christened Morganna. She learned to speak and then to sing like an angel. At Rhience's suggestion, Bede traveled north to help Luneta's steward Rowena oversee Gawain's family lands in Orkney. The last time Dinadan and Palomides visited them, Bede and Rowena had four sturdy children: Douglas, Elise, Lynet, and Terence. Guinglain returned to his hermitage, which Dinadan always thought was the loudest and busiest holy place in all England. As for Dinadan, he and Palomides rode the length and breadth of England—and every other nation—singing the tales of Arthur and his knights to everyone who would listen, in every language they could learn, for as long as they both lived.

Incipit liber Arturi

Twenty-five years ago, in college, I read several of the medieval romances about King Arthur and his knights and discovered to my astonishment that they were good. All my previous experience with King Arthur had been in obnoxious children's retellings in which all the knights were clean-shaven, cleft-chinned paragons of oppressive nobility and virtue. As for the ladies, they were even worse—simpering wraiths of soppy sentimentality. It was all enough to make one root for the dragons.

But, I found, the original stories of Arthur's court were nothing like that at all. The medieval romances of Chrétien de Troye and Sir Thomas Malory's
Morte d'Arthur
and the like were filled with real people with recognizably human characters who struggled with recognizable problems. In the real Arthurian legends, honor was not about keeping the rules of some code of chivalry. Honor meant standing by friends, admitting mistakes, forgiving insults, and keeping your word—even if it cost you dearly to do so. I immediately began planning how I would retell those stories to a new generation.

I wrote the first book in 1989 and found a publisher for it in 1996, and that began my Arthurian excursion. It was going to be a trilogy, but it got a bit out of hand. I kept reading more Arthurian tales, from England and Wales and France and Germany, and finding more stories worth retelling. Besides, everyone who knows Arthurian lore knows that the saga doesn't end nicely, and the more obscure legends I took on, the longer I was able to put off dealing with that messy conclusion.

But the end had to come eventually. I fretted for years over how to approach it—as did my readers, in fact. Many of you wrote, begging me not to make the ending as bleak as it usually is. Others wrote to ask that I return Squire Terence, my original hero, to his former place of prominence at the end. A clergywoman from New Zealand wrote to demand that I leave open at least
some
of the doors to the Other World when I finally finished the story. I hope I've done right by you all. I base my own stories on the original legends, and those legends only allow a certain amount of hope amid all their oppressive tragic inevitability. But there is hope nonetheless. Hope is often reclusive but always present, in all the Worlds that might be, even this one, and if I've done my job, you'll believe that with me.

In any case, dear readers, thank you. Thank you for sharing my excursion, joining my journey, laughing with me at absurdities (also to be found in all the Worlds that might be), and learning to care about the friends and lovers of my imaginings. I've rather enjoyed myself, all in all.

Gramercy,
Gerald Morris

The Legend of the King
and the Squire's Tales

Abbreviations for the previous books of the series: