The King Arthur Trilogy (17 page)

This must be the Green Chapel, he thought, and green it is indeed; and no Christian chapel but some secret place of the Hollow Hills. And within it the Green Knight is making keen his weapon that must surely be the death of me this day.

But he set his horse to ford the stream at a place where it broadened and ran for a few yards shallow over a gravel bed, and came out close below the green mound; and there he dismounted and hitched Gringolet’s bridle to an alder branch. And standing in the strange grey light scarfed with mist, he called, ‘Sir Knight of the Green Chapel, I am here as I vowed, to keep our New Year tryst.’

‘Wait until I have done sharpening my axe,’ came the great booming voice he remembered, echoing from the
cavernous heart of the mound. ‘I shall not be long. And then you shall have the greeting that I promised you.’

And Gringolet pricked his ears and tossed his head and showed the whites of his eyes; but Gawain stood unmoving, and waited on.

And in a while the sound of scythe on whetstone ceased, and out from a patch of darkness beneath the hazel branches came the Green Knight, just as he had been when he rode into Arthur’s Hall a year and a day gone by, beautiful and terrible, and swinging lightly in his hand a long axe with a blade of green steel that looked sharp enough to draw blood from the wind.

‘Now welcome, Sir Gawain!’ he cried. ‘Three times welcome to so brave a knight! Now off with your helmet and make ready for the stroke I owe you for the one you dealt me in Arthur’s Hall a year ago last night.’

Gawain unloosed and pulled off his helmet, and thrust back the chain-mail coif from his neck. And taking a last look at the wintry world about him, he knelt and bent his head forward for the blow. ‘Strike, then,’ he said.

The Green Knight swung up his great axe, and as he brought it sweeping down, Gawain heard the whistle of it, as the crouching bird must hear the wing-rush of the stooping hawk. And despite himself, he flinched back and ducked out from under the blow.

The Green Knight stood leaning on the long handle of his axe, and grinned at him, the grin of some wild
thing out of the forest. ‘Can this indeed be Gawain of the bold heart? When it was you that swung the axe, I never flinched from
your
blow.’

‘Your pardon. My courage lacks the knowledge that I can set my head back on my shoulders when you have done with it,’ said Gawain with a flare of grim laughter. ‘But I will not shrink again. Come now, and strike quickly.’

‘That I will,’ said the Green Knight, and again he swung up the fearsome blade and again he brought it whistling down. But this time Gawain remained as still as though he had been one of the rocks of the stream-side. And the axe-blade missed his neck by the width of a grass-blade, and dug deep into the mossy turf beside him.

‘Strike!’ shouted Gawain. ‘It was no part of our bargain that you should play with me thus!’

‘Why, nor it was,’ agreed the Green Knight, ‘and now your head out a little further …’

And for the third time he swung up his axe, and swung it singing around his head, and brought it down. And this time Gawain felt a sting like a gad-fly on the side of his neck, and a small trickle of blood running down inside his coif, and the axe stood quivering in the turf beside him.

Then Gawain sprang from his knees and leapt clear, drawing his sword as he did so. ‘Now I have borne the
blow and you have drawn the red blood, and if you strike again, I am free of my vow and may defend myself!’

The Green Knight stood leaning on his axe and laughing a little; and suddenly Gawain saw that though his garments were still green, they were but the garments in which a man rides hunting, and he was not the Green Knight at all, but his kindly host of the past week. And then he saw that he was both.

‘Gawain, Gawain,’ said the knight, ‘you have indeed borne the blow, and I am in no mind to strike again. Indeed, had I been so minded, your head would have lain at my feet the first time I raised my axe.’

‘Why, then, this game of three blows?’ Gawain asked, breathing quickly.

‘The first two blows that touched you not, these were for your promise truly kept, for the one kiss and the two kisses my wife gave to you while I rode hunting, and that you rendered up to me when I rode home at evening. The third blow that drew blood was for your promise broken, when you gave me her three kisses but not the green ribbons from her waist.’ He saw the look on the young knight’s face, and his great smile broadened. ‘Oh, I know all that passed between you. It was at my will that she tempted you, and had you yielded to her tempting, and dishonoured your knighthood and my house, then indeed you would now be lying headless at my feet. As for the green girdle, you took and hid it but for love
of your life. You are young, and he must be a sad man indeed who does not a little love the life God gave him. So now that I have drawn blood for it, I forgive you the girdle.’

Gawain pulled the green ribbon girdle from its hiding-place and held it out to him. ‘I am ashamed, none the less. I am unworthy of my place at the Round Table.’

‘Nay,’ said his host the Green Knight, with booming kindness. ‘You are only young with the life running hot in you. And did I not say that you are forgiven? There will be few knights at the Round Table with a better right to sit there than you. Keep the green girdle in remembrance of this adventure; and come back with me to my castle, that we may end the Twelve Days of Christmas in joy.’

But Gawain, though he put the green ribbons round his neck again, would not stay. ‘I must away back to my liege lord,’ he said. ‘But before I go, pray you tell me, noble sir, who you are, and how you came to be both lord of the castle where I have been made welcome and happy this week past, and the terrible Green Knight, who dies not when his head is struck from his shoulders?’

‘My name is Sir Birtilack,’ said the other. ‘I was minded to test for myself the courage of Arthur’s champions of the Round Table, having heard much of the High King’s court, even here in my northern wilderness. For the rest – question not the ways of magic.’

So they parted as dear friends who have known each other a lifetime. And Gawain rode back through the Forest of Wirral and the wild border country of Wales, until he came again to Arthur’s court, and his own place that he had fully earned among the foremost of the brotherhood of the Round Table.

IT BECAME KING
Arthur’s custom that at Pentecost, when all of the Round Table knights who were free to come gathered each year to his court at Camelot, that he would not sit down to dine until some strange thing had happened or some marvellous sight been seen or a quest begun.

And on one Pentecost, a while before noon, Sir Gawain, looking from a window of the Great Hall, saw three men enter the inner courtyard on horseback, and with them a dwarf on foot. The three men dismounted, and left their horses in the dwarf’s care; and as they turned towards the keep, one of the men leaned upon the shoulders of the other two; and he was taller than either of them by a head or more.

‘Here comes your strange happening, if I mistake not, my Lord King,’ said Gawain, turning from the window,
back to where the King and his knights were waiting; and in a few moments more, the three men came into the Hall, the young giant in the centre still leaning on the shoulders of the other two, as though he was maybe too weak from his own height to stand without them. All three were shabbily dressed and journey-stained, but the tall one, for all his seeming weakness, was the goodliest young man to look upon that anyone present had ever seen, brown-skinned and barley-haired, with eyes as clearly blue as the sky on a March morning; long limbed and broad of shoulder, and with hands that, for all their huge size, Sir Lancelot, looking at him, recognised at once for a swordsman’s hands and a horseman’s hands. And Sir Lancelot was a judge of such matters.

When the three of them had come the length of the Hall, and checked before the dais where King Arthur sat, the tall young man dropped his arms from the others’ shoulders, and stood up straight as a tilting lance. And without waiting for the King to speak first, he said, ‘Now God save you, my Lord King, and all your fair fellowship. I am come to ask of you three gifts.’ The corners of his wide mouth tilted upward. ‘Not unreasonable gifts, but such as you may grant with honour. And the first I will ask of you now, and the other two I will ask of you this day a twelve-months.’

‘Ask,’ said Arthur, who liked the look of the young man on sight, ‘and you shall have what you ask for.’

‘I ask that you give me food and shelter until the twelve months be up,’ said the young man.

‘Nay, lad, ask for something better than that.’

‘There is nothing that I want – until this day a twelve-months.’

‘So be it, then, food and shelter you shall have. For I never denied that to any man’, said Arthur. ‘And now, tell me your name.’

‘That I had rather not, until the proper time,’ said the strange young man.

‘It must be as you choose,’ said Arthur. ‘Yet I would be glad to know who you are, for you are one of the goodliest young men that ever I have seen.’ And he gave the young man over into Sir Kay’s keeping, bidding him to give the boy food and lodging as though he were a lord’s son.

‘Assuredly he is not that,’ said Kay with a sniff, ‘nor even a gentleman’s son, or he would have asked for horse and armour. I will give him warm lodging in the kitchen, and all the food he wants. And I make no doubt he will be as fat as a yearling porkhog by the time the year is out. And since he will not tell his name, I shall give him one; I shall call him Beaumains, Fairhands, for indeed I never saw bigger and finer hands – nor ones that looked less used to work.’

At this, Sir Gawain frowned deep between his red brows, for he too liked the look of the young man, and
did not much care for Sir Kay and his thin barbed wit; and Sir Lancelot said quietly, ‘I’d have a care there, Lord Seneschal, for the boy looks to me to have had other uses for his hands than chopping wood and turning a spit; and I’d not be surprised if one day he used them to make you regret that mockery.’

But Arthur said nothing, for he thought, The boy has the look of endurance about him. If he must come to his knighthood by the hard way, it is of his own choosing, and I dare say he will take no harm by it.

And Beaumains said nothing at all.

So for a full year he served in the kitchens, and the other scullions jeered at him because he did not know how to do the things that were easy and familiar to them – until he learned their skills himself, and then they learned the unwisdom of such jeering. And Sir Kay made his life a misery with petty punishments and waspish jests. Both Sir Gawain and Sir Lancelot offered to take him as their squire, even without knowing who he was; but he thanked them with a courtesy that was like the gentle courtesy of a great hound, and remained in the kitchens. He had his fill of food, and a warm place by the fire at night, but the only kindness he received was from the dogs, and from Sir Gawain who clapped him on the shoulder once or twice in passing, and from Sir Lancelot, who gave him three silver pieces at Christmas to buy a warm cloak. And in all the while, he
never returned evil words to Sir Kay, or complained, or seemed the least out of temper with his fellows, even when he tried, as he sometimes did, to teach them better manners by ducking one or other of them in the horse trough.

So the time drew again to the Feast of Pentecost.

And on Pentecost morning, as the knights were gathered in the Great Hall, a damosel came running, and knelt before the King and begged him for aid.

‘For whom?’ said Arthur. ‘For yourself? What is this adventure?’

‘For my sister, the Lady Lionese,’ said the damosel, ‘who is held captive in her own castle, besieged there by a cruel tyrant, the Red Knight of the Red Lands, who has laid waste her estates, and now demands that she gives herself to him.’

Almost before she had done speaking, Beaumains, who had been standing by the inner archway that led from the kitchen stair, came forward eagerly to stand before the King. ‘My Lord Arthur, I thank you for the food and drink and lodging that I have had in your kitchens this twelve-months past. Now I ask for the remaining two of the three gifts you promised me.’

‘Ask, then,’ said Arthur.

‘Sir, firstly I ask that you will give me the adventure of this damosel, for it is in my mind that I have earned it!’

‘In mine also,’ said the King, ‘and the third gift?’

‘That Sir Lancelot of the Lake shall ride with me until he judges that I have earned knighthood; for I would be made knight by him and by no one else.’

The King glanced questioningly at his friend, the foremost among his knights, and Lancelot nodded. ‘It shall be as you wish,’ said the King.

But the damosel had risen from her knees. ‘So I am to have none but your kitchen page to aid me, when here in your Hall sit the best knights in Christendom?’ And the colour burned in two fiery spots on her cheekbones, and her eyes were bright with angry tears. ‘Then keep your aid, for I want none of it!’ And she swept from the Hall, shrilly calling up the page who was walking her palfrey to and fro in the courtyard, and mounted and rode furiously away.