The sword in the stone (11 page)

"One," said Hecate. "Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine

— "

But before the fatal Ten which would have counted him out, Merlyn reappeared in a bed of nettles, mopping his brow. He had been standing among them as a nettle.

The aullay saw no reason to change its shape. It rushed upon the man before it with another piercing scream. Merlyn vanished again just as the thrashing trunk descended, and all stood still a moment, looking about them, wondering where he would step out next.

"One," began Hecate again, but even as she proceeded with her counting, strange things began to happen. The aullay got hiccoughs, turned red, swelled visibly, began whooping, came out in spots, staggered three times, rolled its eyes, fell rumbling to the ground. It groaned, kicked and said Farewell. The Wart cheered, Archimedes hooted till he cried, the gore-crow fell down dead, and Hecate, on the top of her ladder, clapped so much that she nearly tumbled off. It was a master stroke.

The ingenious magician had turned himself successively into the microbes, not yet discovered, of hiccoughs, scarlet fever, mumps, whooping cough, measles and heat spots, and from a complication of all these complaints the infamous Madame Mim had immediately expired.

TILTING AND horsemanship had two afternoons a week, because they were easily the most important branches of a gentleman's education in those days. Merlyn grumbled a good deal about athletics, saying that nowadays people seemed to think that you were an educated man if you could knock another man off a horse and that the craze for games was the ruination of true scholarship — nobody got scholarships like they used to do when he was a boy, and all the public schools had been forced to lower their standards — but Sir Ector, who was an old tilting blue, said that the battle of Cressy had been won upon the playing fields of Camelot. This made Merlyn so furious that he gave Sir Ector rheumatism two nights running before he relented.

Tilting was a great art and needed an enormous amount of practice. When two knights jousted they held their lances in their right hands, but they directed their horses at one another so that each man had his opponent on his near side. The base of the lance, in fact, was held on the opposite side of the body to the side at which the enemy was charging. This seems rather inside out to anybody who is in the habit, say, of opening gates with a hunting-crop, but it had its reasons. For one thing, it meant that the shield was on the left arm, so that the opponents charged shield to shield, fully covered. It also meant that a man could be unhorsed with the side or edge of the lance, in a kind of horizontal swipe, if you did not feel sure of hitting him with your point. This was the humblest or least skillful blow in jousting.

A good jouster, like Launcelot or Tristram, always used the blow of the point, because, although it was liable to miss in unskillful hands, it made contact sooner. If one knight charged with his lance held rigidly sideways, with a view to sweeping his opponent out of the saddle, the other knight with his lance held directly forward would knock him down a lance length before the sweep came into effect.

Then there was how to hold your lance for the point stroke. It was no good crouching in the saddle and clutching it in a rigid grip preparatory to the great shock, for if you held it inflexibly like this its point bucked up and down to every movement of your thundering mount and you were practically certain to miss your aim. On the contrary, you had to sit quite loosely in the saddle with the lance easy and balanced against the horse's motion. It was not until the actual moment of striking that you clamped your knees into the horse's sides, threw your weight forward in your seat, clutched the lance with the whole hand instead of with your finger and thumb, and hugged your right elbow to your side to support its butt. There was the size of the spear. Obviously a man with a spear one hundred yards long would strike down an opponent with a normal spear of ten or twelve feet before the latter came anywhere near him. But it would have been impossible to make a spear one hundred yards long and, if made, impossible to carry it. The jouster had to find out the greatest length which he could manage with the greatest speed, and stick to that. Sir Launcelot, who came some time after this story, had several sizes of spear and would call for his Great Spear or his Lesser Spear as occasion demanded.

There were the places on which the enemy should be hit. In the armory of the Castle of the Forest Sauvage there was a big picture of a knight in armor with circles round his vulnerable points. These varied with the style of armor, so that you had to study your opponent before the charge and select a point. The good armorers — the best lived at Warrington, and still live there — were careful to make all the forward or entering sides of their suits convex, so that the spear point glanced off them. Curiously enough, the shields were more inclined to be concave. It was better that a spear point should stay on your shield, rather than glance off upwards or downwards, and perhaps hit a more vulnerable point of your body armor. The best place of all for hitting people was on the very crest of the tilting helm, that is, if the person in question were vain enough to have a large metal crest in whose folds and ornaments the point would find a ready lodging. Many were vain enough to have these armorial crests, with bears and dragons or even ships or castles on them, but Sir Launcelot always contented himself with a bare helmet, or a bunch of feathers which would not hold spears, or, on one occasion, a soft lady's sleeve.

It would take too long to go into all the interesting details of proper tilting which the boys had to learn, for in those days one had to be a master of one's craft from the bottom upwards. You had to know what wood was best for spears, and why, and even how to turn them so that they would not splinter or warp. There were a thousand disputed questions about arms and armor, all of which had to be understood. Just outside Sir Ector's castle there was a jousting field for tournaments, although there had been no tournaments in it since Kay was born. It was a green meadow, kept short, with a broad grassy bank raised round it on which pavilions could be erected. There was an old wooden grandstand at one side, lifted on stilts for the ladies. At present it was only used as a practice-ground for tilting, so a quintain had been erected at one end and a ring at the other. The quintain was a very horrible wooden saracen on a pole.

He was painted with a bright blue face and red beard and glaring eyes. He had a shield in his left hand and a flat wooden sword in his right. If you hit him in the middle of his forehead all was well, but if your lance struck him on the shield or on any part to left or right of the middle line, then he spun round with great rapidity, and usually caught you a wallop with his sword as you galloped by, ducking. His paint was somewhat scratched and the wood picked up over his right eye. The ring was just an ordinary iron ring tied to a kind of gallows by a thread. If you managed to put your point through the ring, the thread broke, and you could canter off proudly with the ring round your spear.

The day was cooler than it had been for some time, for the autumn was almost within sight, and the two boys were in the tilting yard with the master armorer and Merlyn. The master armorer, or sergeant-at-arms, was a stiff, pale, bouncy gentleman with waxed mustaches. He always marched about with his chest stuck out like a pouter pigeon, and called out "On the word One — " on every possible occasion. He took great pains to keep his tummy in, and often tripped over his feet because he could not see them over his chest. He was always making his muscles ripple, which annoyed Merlyn.

Wart lay beside Merlyn in the shade of the grandstand and scratched himself for harvest bugs. The saw-like sickles had only lately been put away, and the wheat stood in stooks of eight among the tall stubble of those times. The Wart still itched. He was also sore about the shoulders and had a burning red ear, from making bosh shots at the quintain — for, of course, practice tilting was done without armor. Wart was pleased that it was Kay's turn to go through it now and lay drowsily in the shade, snoozing, scratching, twitching like a dog and partly attending to the fun. Merlyn, sitting with his back to all this athleticism, was practicing a spell which he had forgotten. It was a spell to make the sergeant's mustaches uncurl, but at present it only uncurled one of them and the sergeant had not noticed it. He absent-mindedly curled it up again every time that Merlyn did the spell, and Merlyn said, "Drat it!" and began again. Once he made the sergeant's ears flap by mistake, and the latter gave a startled look at the sky.

"How's goat?" asked Merlyn lazily, getting tired of these activities. They had set free all Madame Mim's poor captives on the night of the great duel, but the goat had insisted on coming home with them. They had found him lurking on the edge of the battle ground, having galloped all the way back to see the fun and to help the Wart as best he could if Madame Mim should have proved the victor.

"He has made friends with Cavall," said Wart, "and decided to sleep in the kennels. It was funny at first, because Clumsy and Apollon thought it was cheek and tried to run him out. He just stood in a corner so that they could not nip his hocks, and gave them such a bunt each with his knobbly forehead that now, whenever he gives them one of his looks, they get up from whatever they are doing and go somewhere else. The Dog Boy says that Clumsy believes he is the devil."

From far off at the other side of the tilting ground the sergeant's voice came floating on the still air.

"Nah, Nah, Master Kay, that ain't it at all. Has you were. Has you were. The spear should be 'eld between the thumb and forefinger of the right 'and, with the shield in line with the seam of the trahser leg..." The Wart rubbed his sore ear and sighed.

"What are you grieving about now?" asked Merlyn.

"I wasn't grieving, I was just thinking."

"What were you thinking?"

"Oh, it wasn't anything. I was thinking about Kay learning to be a knight."

"And well you may grieve," exclaimed Merlyn hotly. "A lot of brainless unicorns swaggering about and calling themselves educated just because they can push each other off a horse with a bit of stick! It makes me tired. Why, I believe Sir Ector would have been gladder to get a by-our-lady tilting blue for your tutor, that swings himself along on his knuckles like an anthropoid ape, rather than a magician of known probity and international reputation with first-class honors from every European university. The trouble with the English Aristocracy is that they are games-mad, that's what it is, games-mad."

He broke off indignantly and deliberately made the sergeant's ears flap slowly twice, in unison.

"I wasn't thinking quite about that," said the Wart. "As a matter of fact, I was thinking how nice it would be to be a knight, like Kay."

"Well, you'll be one soon enough, won't you?" asked Merlyn impatiently.

The Wart did not answer.

"Won't you?"

Merlyn turned round and looked closely at the Wart through his spectacles.

"What's the matter now?" said Merlyn in his nastiest voice. His inspection had showed him that the Wart was trying not to cry, and that if he spoke in a kind voice the Wart would break down and do it.

"I shall not be a knight," replied the Wart coldly. Merlyn's trick had worked and he no longer wanted to weep: he wanted to kick Merlyn. "I shall not be a knight because I am not a proper son of Sir Ector's. They will knight Kay, and I shall be his squire."

Merlyn's back was turned again, but his eyes were twinkling behind his curious spectacles. "That's too bad," said Merlyn, without commiseration.

The Wart burst out with all his thoughts aloud. "Oh," he cried, "but I should have liked to be born with a proper father and mother, so that I could be a knight errant."

"What would you have done?"

"I should have had a splendid suit of armor and dozens of spears and a black horse standing eighteen hands, and I should have called myself The Black Knight. And I should have hoved at a well or a ford or something and made all true knights that came that way to joust with me for the honor of their ladies, and I should have spared them all after I had given them a great fall, and I should live out of doors all the year round in a pavilion and never do anything but joust and go on quests and bear away the prize at tournaments, and I shan't ever tell anybody my name."

"Your wife won't enjoy the life very much," said Me reflectively.

"Oh, I'm not going to have a wife. I think they're stupid."

"I shall have to have a lady-love, though," added the Wart uncomfortably, "so that I can wear her favor in my helm, and do deeds in her honor."