The Sword in the Stone

“So-ho!” cried Kay, throwing his arms upwards to give the hawk a better take-off, and a rabbit was scooting across the close-nibbled turf in front of them, and Cully was in the air. The movement had surprised the Wart, the rabbit and the hawk, all three, and all three hung a moment in surprise. Then the great wings of the aerial assassin began to row the air, but reluctantly and undecided, the rabbit vanished in a hidden hole, and up went the hawk, swooping like a child flung high in a swing, until the wings folded and he was sitting in a tree. Cully looked down at his masters, opened his beak in an angry pant of failure, and remained motionless. The two hearts stood still.

CHAPTER TWO

A good while after that, when they had been whistling and luring and following the disturbed and sulky hawk from tree to tree, Kay lost his temper.

“Let him go, then,” said Kay. “He’s no use anyway.”

“Oh, we couldn’t leave him,” cried the Wart. “What would Hob say?”

“It’s my hawk, not Hob’s,” exclaimed Kay furiously. “What does it matter what Hob says? He is my servant.”

“But Hob made Cully. It’s all right for us to lose him, for we didn’t have to sit up with him three nights and carry him all day and all that. We can’t lose Hob’s hawk. It would be beastly.”

“Serve him right, then. He’s a fool and it’s a rotten hawk. Who wants a rotten, stupid hawk? You’d better stay yourself, if you’re so keen on it. I’m going home.”

“I’ll stay,” said the Wart sadly, “if you’ll send Hob when you get back.”

Kay began walking off in the wrong direction, raging in his heart because he knew that he had flown the bird when he was not properly in yarak, and the Wart had to shout after him the right way. Then he sat down under the tree and looked up at Cully like a cat watching a sparrow, but with his heart beating fast.

It was all right for Kay, who was not really keen on hawking except in so far as it was the proper occupation for a boy in his station of life, but the Wart had some of the falconer’s feelings and knew that a lost hawk was the greatest possible calamity. He knew that Hob had worked on Cully for fourteen hours a day, over a period of months, in order to teach him his trade, and that his work had been like Jacob’s struggle with the angel. When Cully was lost a part of Hob was lost too. The Wart did not dare to face the look of reproach which would be in Hob’s eye, after all that he had tried to teach them.

What was he to do? He had better sit still, leaving the lure on the ground, so that Cully could settle down and come in his own time. But Cully had no intention of doing this. He had been given a generous crop the night before, so that he was not hungry: the hot day had put him in a bad temper: the waving and whistling of the boys below him, and their pursuit of him from tree to tree, had disturbed his never very powerful brains. Now he did not quite know what he wanted to do, but it was not what anybody else wanted. He thought perhaps it would be nice to kill something, just from spite.

A long time after that, the Wart was on the verge of the true forest, and Cully inside it. In a series of infuriating removes they had come nearer and nearer, till they were further from the castle than the Wart had ever been, and now they had reached it quite.

Wart would not have been frightened of a forest nowadays, but the great jungle of old England was a different thing. It was not only that there were wild boars in it, whose sounders would at this season be furiously rooting about, nor that one of the surviving wolves might be slinking behind any tree, with pale eyes and slavering chops. The man and wicked animals were not the only inhabitants of the crowded gloom. When men themselves became mad and wicked they took refuge there, outlaws cunning and bloody as the gorecrow, and as persecuted. The Wart thought particularly of a man named Wat, whose name the cottagers used to frighten their children with. He had once lived in Sir Ector’s village and the Wart could remember him. He squinted, had no nose, and was weak in his wits. The children threw stones at him. One day he turned on the children and caught one and made a snarly noise and bit off his nose too. Then he ran away into the forest. They threw stones at the child with no nose, now, but Wat was supposed to be in the forest still, running on all fours and dressed in skins.

There were magicians in the forest also in those days, as well as strange animals not known to modern works of natural history. There were regular bands of outlaws, not like Wat, who lived together and wore green and shot with arrows which never missed. There were even a few dragons, though they were rather small ones, which lived under stones and could hiss like a kettle.

Added to this, there was the fact that it was getting dark. The forest was trackless and nobody in the village knew what was on the other side. The evening hush had fallen, and all the high trees stood looking at the Wart without a sound.

He felt that it would be safer to go home, while he still knew where he was; but he had a stout heart, and did not want to give in. He understood that once Cully had slept in freedom for a whole night he would be wild again and irreclaimable. Cully was a passager. But if the poor Wart could only make him to roost, and if Hob would only arrive then with a dark lantern, they might still take him that night by climbing the tree, while he was sleepy and muddled with the light. He could see more or less where the hawk had perched, about a hundred yards within the thick trees, because the home-going rooks of evening were mobbing that place.

Wart made a mark on one of the trees outside the forest, hoping that it might help him to find his way back, and then began to fight his way into the undergrowth as best he might. He heard by the rooks that Cully had immediately moved further off.

The night fell still as the small boy struggled with the brambles; but he went on doggedly, listening with all his ears, and Cully’s evasions became sleepier and shorter until at last, before the utter darkness fell, he could see the hunched shoulders in a tree above him against the sky. Wart sat down under the tree, so as not to disturb the bird any further as it went to sleep, and Cully, standing on one leg, ignored his existence.

“Perhaps,” said the Wart to himself, “even if Hob doesn’t come, and I don’t see how he can very well follow me in this trackless forest now, I shall be able to climb up by myself at about midnight because he ought to be deep in sleep then. I could speak to him softly by name, so that he thought it was just the usual person coming to take him up while hooded. I shall have to climb very quietly. Then, if I do get him, I shall have to find my way home, and the drawbridge will be up. But perhaps somebody will wait for me, for Kay will have told them I am out. I wonder which way it was? I wish Kay had not gone.”

He snuggled down between the roots of the tree, trying to find a comfortable place where the hard wood did not stick into his shoulder blades.

“I think the way was behind that big spruce with the spiky top. I ought to try to remember which side of me the sun is setting, so that when it rises I may keep it on the same side going home. Did something move under that spruce tree, I wonder? Oh, I wish I may not meet that old wild Wat and have my nose bitten off. How aggravating Cully looks, standing there on one leg as if there was nothing the matter.”

At this there was a quick whirr and a smack, and the Wart found an arrow sticking in the tree wood between the fingers of his right hand. He snatched his hand away, thinking he had been stung by something, before he noticed it was an arrow. Then everything went slow. He had time to notice quite carefully what sort of an arrow it was, and how it had driven three inches into the solid wood. It was a black arrow with yellow bands round it, like a horrible wasp, and its cock feather was yellow. The two others were black. They were goose feathers.

The Wart found that, although he was frightened of the danger of the forest before it happened, once he was in it he was not frightened any more. He got up quickly, but it seemed to him slowly, and went behind the other side of the tree. As he did this, another arrow came whirr and tock, but this one buried all except its feathers in the grass, and stayed there still, as if it had never moved.

On the other side of the tree he found a waste of bracken, six foot high. This was splendid cover, but it betrayed his whereabouts by rustling. He heard another arrow hiss through the fronds, and what seemed to be a man’s voice cursing, but it was not very near. Then he heard the man, or whatever it was, running about in the bracken. It was reluctant to fire any more arrows because they were valuable things and would certainly get lost in the undergrowth. Wart went like a snake, like a coney, like a silent owl. He was small and the creature had no chance against him in this game. In five minutes he was safe.

The assassin searched for his arrows and went away grumbling; but the Wart realized that, even if he was safe, he had lost his way and his hawk. He had not the faintest idea where he was. He lay down for half an hour, pressed under the fallen tree where he had hidden to give time for the thing to go right away and for his own heart to cease its thundering. It had begun beating like this as soon as he knew he had got away from the outlaw.

“Oh,” thought the Wart, “now I am truly lost, and now there is almost no alternative except to have my nose bitten off, or to be pierced right through with one of those waspy arrows, or to be eaten by a hissing dragon or a wolf or a wild boar or a magician – if magicians do eat boys, which I expect they do. Now I may well wish that I had been a good boy, and not angered the governess when she got muddled with her astrolabe, and had loved my dear guardian Sir Ector as much as he deserved.”

At these melancholy thoughts, and especially at the recollections of kind Sir Ector with his pitchfork and his big red nose, the poor Wart’s eyes became full of tears and he lay most desolate beneath the tree.

The sun finished the last rays of its lingering goodbye, and the moon rose in awful majesty over the silver treetops, before he dared to rise. Then he got up, and dusted the twigs out of his jerkin, and wandered off forlornly, taking the easiest way always and trusting himself to God. He had been walking like this for about half an hour, and sometimes sighing to himself and sometimes feeling more cheerful – because it really was very cool and lovely in the summer forest by moonlight – when he came upon the most beautiful thing that he had ever seen in his short life.

There was a clearing in the forest, a wide sward of moonlit grass, and the white rays shone full upon the tree trunks on the opposite side. These trees were beeches, whose trunks are always most beautiful in a pearly light, and among the beeches there was the smallest movement and a silvery clink. Before the clink there were just beeches, but immediately afterwards there was a Knight in full armour, standing still, and silent and unearthly, among the majestic trunks. He was mounted on an enormous white horse that stood as rapt as its master, and he carried in his right hand, with its butt resting on the stirrup, a high, smooth jousting lance, which stood up among the tree stumps, higher and higher, till it was outlined against the velvet sky. All was moonlit, all silver, too beautiful to describe.

The Wart did not know what to do. He did not know whether it would be safe to go up to this Knight, for there were so many terrible things in the forest that even the Knight might be a ghost. Most ghostly he looked, too, as he hoved meditating on the confines of the gloom. Eventually the Wart made up his mind that even if it was a ghost, it would be the ghost of a Knight, and Knights were bound by their vows to help people in distress.

“Excuse me,” said the Wart, when he was right under the mysterious figure, “but can you tell me the way back to Sir Ector’s castle?”

At this the ghost jumped violently, so that it nearly fell off its horse, and gave out a muffled baaaing noise through its visor, like a flock of sheep.

“Excuse me,” began the Wart again, and stopped, terrified, in the middle of his speech.

For the ghost lifted up its visor, revealing two enormous eyes frosted like ice; exclaimed in an anxious voice, “What, what?”; took off its eyes – which turned out to be horn-rimmed spectacles, completely fogged by being inside the helmet; tried to wipe them on the horse’s mane – which only made them worse; lifted both hands above its head and tried to wipe them on its plume; dropped its lance; dropped the spectacles, got off the horse to search for them – the visor shutting in the process; lifted its visor; bent down for the spectacles; stood up again as the visor shut once more, and exclaimed in a plaintive voice, “Deah, deah!”

The Wart found the spectacles, wiped them, and gave them to the ghost, who immediately put them on (the visor shut again at once) and began scrambling back on the horse for dear life. When it was there it held out its hand for the lance, which the Wart handed up, and, feeling all secure, opened its visor with its left hand and held it open. It peered at the Wart with one hand up, like a lost mariner searching for land, and exclaimed, “Ah – hah; whom have we heah, what what?”

“Please,” said the Wart, “I am a boy whose guardian is Sir Ector.”

“Charming fellah,” said the Knight. “Charming fellah. Never met him in my life.”

“Can you tell me the way back to his castle?”

“Faintest ideah,” said the Knight. “Faintest ideah. Stranger in these parts meself.”

“I have got lost,” said the Wart.

“Funny thing that. Funny thing that, what? Now Ay have been lost for seventeen years.

“Name of King Pellinore,” continued the Knight. “May have heard of me, what?” Here the visor shut with a pop, like an echo to the What, but was opened again immediately. “Seventeen years ago, come Michaelmas, and been after the Questing Beast ever since. Boring, very.”

“I should think it would be,” said the Wart, who had never heard of King Pellinore, or the Questing Beast, but felt that this was the safest thing to say in the circumstances.

“It is the burden of the Pellinores,” said the Knight proudly. “Only a Pellinore can catch it; that is, of course, or his next of kin. Train all the Pellinores with that ideah in mind. Limited eddication, rather. Fewmets, and all that.”

“I know what fewmets are,” said the Wart with interest. “They are the droppings of the beast pursued. The harbourer keeps them in his horn, to show to his master, and can tell by them whether it is a warrantable beast or otherwise, and what state it is in.”

“Intelligent child,” remarked King Pellinore. “Very. Now Ay carry fewmets about with me practically all the time.

“Insanitary habit,” added the King, beginning to look rather dejected, “and quite pointless. Only one Questing Beast, you know, what, so there can’t be any question whether it is warrantable or not.”

Here his visor began to droop so much that the Wart decided he had better forget his own troubles and try to cheer his companion up, by asking questions on the one subject about which King Pellinore seemed qualified to speak. Even talking to a lost royalty was better than being alone in the wood.

“What does the Questing Beast look like?”

“Ah, we call it the Beast Glatisant, you know,” replied the monarch, assuming a learned air and beginning to speak quite volubly. “Now the Beast Glatisant, or, as we say in English, the Questing Beast – you may call it either,” he added graciously, – “this Beast has the head of a serpent, ah, and the body of a libbard, the haunches of a lion, and he is footed like a hart. Wherever this beast goes he makes a noise in his belly as it had been the noise of thirty couples of hounds questing.

“Except when he is drinking, of course,” added the King severely, as if he had rather shocked himself by leaving this out.

“It must be a dreadful kind of monster,” said the Wart, looking at him anxiously.

“A dreadful monster,” repeated the other complacently. “It is the Beast Glatisant, you know.”

“And how do you follow it?”

This seemed to be the wrong kind of question, for King Pellinore immediately began to look much more depressed than ever, and glanced over his shoulder so hurriedly that his visor shut down altogether.

“Ay have a brachet,” said King Pellinore sadly, as soon as he had restored himself. “There she is, over theah.”

The Wart looked in the direction which had been indicated with a despondent thumb, and saw a lot of rope wound round a tree. The other end of the rope was tied to King Pellinore’s saddle.

“I don’t see her very well.”

“Wound herself round the other side of the tree, Ay dare say,” said the King, without looking round. “She always goes the opposite way to me.”

The Wart went over to the tree and found a large white dog scratching herself for fleas. As soon as she saw the Wart, she began wagging her whole body, grinning vacuously, and panting in her efforts to lick his face in spite of the cord. She was too tangled up to move.

“It’s quite a good brachet,” said King Pellinore, “only it pants so, and gets wound round things, and goes the opposite way. What with that and the visor, what, Ay sometimes don’t know which way to turn.”

“Why don’t you let her loose?” asked the Wart. “She would follow the Beast just as well like that.”

“She just goes right away then, you know, and Ay don’t see her sometimes for a week.

“Gets a bit lonely without her,” added the King wistfully, “following this Beast about, what, and never knowing where one is. Makes a bit of company, you know.”

“She seems to have a friendly nature,” said the Wart.

“Too friendly. Sometimes Ay doubt whether she is really after the Beast at all.”

“What does she do when she sees it?”

“Nothing,” said King Pellinore.

“Oh, well,” said the Wart, “I dare say she will get to be interested in it after a time.”

“It’s eight months anyway since Ay saw the Beast at all.”

King Pellinore’s voice had got sadder and sadder since the beginning of the conversation, and now he definitely began to sniffle. “It’s the curse of the Pellinores,” he exclaimed. “Always mollocking about after that beastly Beast. What on earth use is it, anyway? First you have to stop to unwind the brachet, then your visor falls down, then you can’t see through your spectacles. Nowhere to sleep, never know where you are. Rheumatism in the winter, sunstroke in the summer. All this beastly armour takes hours to put on. When it is on it’s either frying or freezing, and it gets rusty. You have to sit up all night polishing the stuff. Oh, how Ay do wish Ay had a nice house of my own to live in, a house with beds in it and real pillows and sheets. If Ay was rich that’s what Ay would buy. A nice bed with a nice pillow and a nice sheet that you could lie in, and then Ay would put this beastly horse in a meadow and tell that beastly brachet to run away and play, and throw all this beastly armour out of the window, and let the beastly Beast go and chase itself, that Ay would.”

“If you could only show me the way home,” said the Wart craftily, “I am sure Sir Ector would put you up in a bed for the night.”

“Do you really mean it?” cried King Pellinore. “In a bed?”

“A feather bed,” said the Wart firmly.

King Pellinore’s eyes grew as round as saucers.

“A feather bed!” he repeated slowly. “Would it have pillows?”

“Down pillows.”

“Down pillows!” whispered the King, holding his breath. And then, letting it all out in a rush. “What a lovely house your guardian must have!”

“I don’t think it is more than two hours away,” said the Wart, following up his advantage.

“And did this gentleman really send you out to invite me in?” inquired the King wonderingly. (He had forgotten all about the Wart being lost.) “How nice of him, how very nice of him, Ay do think, what?”

“He will be very pleased to see us,” said the Wart, quite truthfully.

“Oh, how nice of him,” exclaimed the King again, beginning to bustle about his various trappings. “And what a lovely gentleman he must be, to have a feather bed!

“Ay suppose Ay should have to share it with somebody?” he added doubtfully.

“You could have one of your very own.”

“A feather bed of one’s very own,” exclaimed King Pellinore, “with sheets and a pillow – perhaps even two pillows, or a pillow and a bolster – and no need to get up in time for breakfast!

“Does your guardian get up in time for breakfast?” inquired the King, a momentary doubt striking him.

“Never,” said the Wart.

“Fleas in the bed?” asked the King suspiciously.

“Not one.”

“Well!” said King Pellinore. “It does sound too nice for words, Ay must say. A feather bed and none of those beastly fewmets for ever so long. How long did you say it would take us to get there?”

“Two hours,” said the Wart; but he had to shout the second of these words, for the sounds were drowned in his mouth by a dreadful noise which had that moment arisen close beside them.

“What was that?” exclaimed the Wart.

“Hark!” cried the King.

“Oh, mercy!” wailed the Wart.

“It’s the Beast!” shouted the King.

And immediately the loving huntsman had forgotten everything else, but was busied about his task. He wiped his spectacles upon the seat of his trousers, the only accessible piece of cloth about him, while the belling and bloody cry arose all round; balanced them on the end of his long nose, just before the visor automatically clapped to; clutched his jousting lance in his right hand, and galloped off in the direction of the noise. He was brought up short by the rope which was wound round the tree – the vacuous brachet meanwhile giving a melancholy yelp – and fell off his horse with a tremendous clang. In a second he was up again – the Wart was convinced that his spectacles must be broken – and hopping round the white horse with one foot in the stirrup. The girths stood the test and he was in the saddle somehow, with his jousting lance between his legs, and then he was galloping round and round the tree, in the opposite direction to that in which the brachet had wound herself up. He went round three times too often, the brachet meanwhile running and yelping in the opposite direction, and then, after four or five back casts, they were both free of the obstruction. “Yoicks, what!” cried King Pellinore, waving his lance in the air, and swaying excitedly in the saddle. Then he disappeared completely into the gloom of the forest, with the unfortunate brachet trailing and howling behind him at the other end of the string.

CHAPTER THREE

The Wart slept well in the woodland nest where he had laid himself down, in that kind of thin but refreshing sleep which people have when they first lie out of doors. At first he only dipped below the surface of sleep, and skimmed along like a salmon in shallow water, so close to the surface that he fancied himself in the air. He thought himself awake when he was already asleep. He saw the stars above his face, whirling round on their silent and sleepless axis, and the leaves of the trees rustling against them, and heard small changes in the grass. These little noises of footsteps and soft-fringed wing-beats and stealthy bellies drawn over the grass blades or rattling against the bracken at first frightened or interested him, so that he moved to see what they were (but never saw), then soothed him, so that he no longer cared to see what they were but trusted them to be themselves, and finally left him altogether as he swam down deeper and deeper, nuzzling his nose into the scented turf, into the warm ground, into the unending waters under the earth.