The Once and Future King. T. White H.
to the children. It was to tempt them to eat.
The place smelt like a grocer’s, a butcher’s, a dairy and a fishmonger’s, rolled into one. It was horrible beyond belief – sweet, sickly and pungent – so that they did not feel the least wish to swallow a particle of it. The real temptation was, to run away.
However, there were prisoners to rescue.
They plodded over the filthy drawbridge – a butter one, with cow hairs still in it – sinking to their ankles. They shuddered at the tripe and the chitterlings. They pointed their iron knives at the soldiers made of soft, sweet, smooth cheese, and the latter shrank away.
In the end they came to the inner chamber, where Morgan le Fay herself lay stretched upon her bed of glorious lard.
She was a fat, dowdy, middle-aged woman with black hair and a slight moustache, but she was made of human flesh. When she saw the knives, she kept her eyes shut – as if she were in a trance. Perhaps, when she was outside this very strange castle, or when she was not doing that kind of magic to tempt the appetite, she was able to assume more beautiful forms.
The prisoners were tied to pillars of marvellous pork.
‘I am sorry if this iron is hurting you,’ said Kay, ‘but we have come to rescue our friends.’
Queen Morgan shuddered.
‘Will you tell your cheesy men to undo them?’
She would not.
‘It is magic,’ said the Wart. ‘Do you think we ought to go up and kiss her, or something frightful like that?’
‘Perhaps if we went and touched her with the iron?’
‘You do it.’
‘No, you.’
‘We’ll go together.’
So they joined hands to approach the Queen. She began to writhe in her lard like a slug. She was in agony from the metal.
At last, and just before they reached her, there was a sloshing rumble or mumble – and the whole fairy appearance of Castle Chariot melted together in collapse, leaving the five humans and one dog standing together in the forest clearing – which still smelt faintly of dirty milk.
‘Gor-blimey!’ said Friar Tuck. ‘Gor blimey and coo! Dash my vig if I didn’t think we was done for!’
‘Master!’ said Dog Boy.
Cavall contented himself with barking wildly, biting their toes, lying on his back, trying to wag his tail in that position, and generally behaving like an idiot. Old Wat touched his forelock.
‘Now then,’ said Kay, ‘this is my adventure, and we must get home quick.’
But Morgan le Fay, although in her fairy shape she could not stand iron, still had the griffin. She had cast it loose from its golden chain, by a spell, the moment her castle disappeared.
The outlaws were pleased with their success, and less careful than they should have been. They decided to take a detour round the place where they had seen the monster tied up, and marched away through the darksome trees without a thought of danger.
There was a noise like a railway train letting off its whistle, and, answering to it – riding on it like the voice of the Arabian Bird – Robin Wood’s horn of silver began to blow.
‘Tone, ton, tavon, tontavon, tantontavon, tontantontavon,’ went the horn. ‘Moot, troot, trourourout, troutourourout. Trout, trout. Tran, tran, tran, tran.’
Robin was blowing his hunting music and the ambushed archers swung round as the griffin charged. They set forward their left feet in the same movement and let fly such a shower of arrows as it had been snow.
The Wart saw the creature stagger in its tracks, a clothyard shaft sprouting from between the shoulder-blades. He saw his own arrow fly wide, and eagerly bent to snatch another from his belt. He saw the rank of his companion archers sway as if by a preconcerted signal, when each man stooped for a second shaft. He heard the bow-strings twang again, the purr of the feathers in the air. He saw the phalanx of arrows gleam like an eyeflick in the moonlight. All his life up to then he had been shooting into straw targets which made a noise like Phutt! He had often longed to hear the noise that these clean and deadly missiles would make in solid flesh. He heard it.
But the griffin’s plates were as thick as a crocodile’s and all but the best placed arrows glanced off. It still came on. It squealed as it came. Men began to fall, swept to the left or right by the lashing tail.
The Wart was fitting an arrow to his bow. The cock feather would not go right. Everything was in slow motion.
He saw the huge body coming blackly through the moonglare. He felt the claw which took him in the chest. He felt himself turning somersaults slowly, with a cruel weight on top of him. He saw Kay’s face somewhere in the cartwheel of the universe, flushed with starlit excitement, and Maid Marian’s on the other side with its mouth open, shouting. He thought, before he slid into blackness, that it was shouting at him.
They dragged him from under the dead griffin and found Kay’s arrow sticking in its eye. It had died in its leap.
Then there was a time which made him feel sick – while Robin set his collar bone and made him a sling from the green cloth of his hood – and after that the whole band lay down to sleep, dog-tired, beside the body. It was too late to return to Sir Ector’s castle, or even to get back to the outlaw’s camp by the big tree. The dangers of the expedition were over and all that could be done that night was to make fires, post sentries, and sleep where they were.
Wart did not sleep much. He sat propped against a tree, watching the red sentries passing to and fro in the firelight, hearing their quiet passwords and thinking about the excitements of the day. These went round and round in his head, sometimes losing their proper order and happening backwards or by bits. He saw the leaping griffin, heard Marian shouting, ‘Good shot!’, listened to the humming of the bees muddled up with the stridulation of the grasshoppers, and shot and shot, hundreds and thousands of times, at popinjays which turned into griffins. Kay and the liberated Dog Boy slept twitching beside him, looking alien and incomprehensible as people do when they are asleep, and Cavall, lying at his good shoulder, occasionally licked his hot cheeks. The dawn came slowly, so slowly and pausingly that it was impossible to determine when it really had dawned, as it does during the summer months.
‘Well,’ said Robin, when they had wakened and eaten the breakfast of bread and cold venison which they had brought with them, ‘you will have to love us and leave us, Kay. Otherwise I shall have Sir Ector fitting out an expedition against me to fetch you back. Thank you for your help. Can I give you any little present as a reward?’
‘It has been lovely,’ said Kay. ‘Absolutely lovely. May I have the griffin I shot?’
‘He will be too heavy to carry. Why not take his head?’
‘That would do,’ said Kay, ‘if somebody would not mind cutting it off. It was my griffin.’
‘What are you going to do about old Wat?’ asked the Wart.
‘It depends on what he wants to do. Perhaps he will like to run off by himself and eat acorns, as he used to, or if he likes to join our band we shall be glad to have him. He ran away from your village in the first place, so I don’t suppose he will care to go back there. What do you think?’
‘If you are going to give me a present,’ said the Wart, slowly, ‘I would like to have him. Do you think that would be right?’
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Robin, ‘I don’t. I don’t think you can very well give people as presents: they might not like it. That is what we Saxons feel, at any rate. What did you intend to do with him?’
‘I don’t