The Idylls of the Queen Read online

  IDYLLS OF THE QUEEN

  Version 1.0.0

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1982 by Phillis Ann Karr.

  Revised edition copyright © 2013 by Phyllis Ann Karr.

  Cover art © Atelier Sommerland / Fotolia.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Wildside Press LLC.

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  FOREWORD

  The setting is Britain in the Fifth Century A.D.—but not a Fifth Century known to any of our history books. It is, rather, an attempt to recreate in modern language the anachronistic, semi-mystical era described by Sir Thomas Malory and his predecessors, when necromancy was as much a fact of life as was the constant need to do battle in the Holy Land, when it was not then as it is nowadays, for “such custom was used in those days, that neither for favour, neither for love nor affinity, there should be none other but righteous judgment, as well upon a king as upon a knight, and as well upon a queen as upon another poor lady.” (Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur, Book XVIII, CHAPTER 6.)

  I have sometimes used “Artus” and “Kex,” alternate forms in certain old romances for “Arthur” and “Kay,” as nicknames. In my mind, I always hear “Gawain” accented on the first syllable, the preferred way according to the older dictionaries I have consulted.

  “…I, Kay, that thou knawes,

  That owte of tyme bostus and blawus…”

  —Middle English Metrical Romance

  The Avowynge of King Arthur

  CHAPTER 1

  The Poisoning of Sir Patrise

  “And when he had eaten it he swelled so till he brast, and there Sir Patrise fell down suddenly dead among them.”

  —Malory XVIII, 3

  When Patrise put his head down on the table beside me and started groaning and twitching, my first thought was: and they call me the churl of this court.

  Then the bloating became obvious—at least to me; I was sitting beside him. He hunched up with a half-choked cry and collapsed, his face still on the table, and suddenly I guessed that the dark stuff dribbling out of his mouth was not wine.

  “Gouvernail,” I said.

  I suppose, since I did not shout or use sarcasm, the old squire failed to hear the exact tone of my voice. He came and tried to lift Patrise tactfully, assuming the knight had drunk too much. One hardly expects to handle death at a private dinner given by the Queen of the land.

  Patrise rolled away from Gouvernail, bumped Safere, and sprawled on the floor, his mouth still spewing blood.

  It happened too quickly. Talk took a few minutes to die away. The last conversation—Pinel’s stale speculation on how much of the heat Lancelot might actually have felt when Brumant the Proud was burned to cinders for sitting in the Siege Perilous beside him—went at least a breath-load of words after everyone else was quiet. (If I had been the one to talk about Lancelot at this particular dinner, I would not have been heard out so politely.)

  Gouvernail, bent over Patrise, looked up at me and shook his graying head.

  I glanced around at the other tables. Any chance for spiriting the body away as if the young knight had simply eaten and drunk himself into a stupor was gone. Besides, if it had been poison… “Gouvernail,” I said, “what happened?”

  “Internal swelling, I think, my lord. He… He seems to have burst inside.”

  “Poison, then,” said Mordred, who sat beside me at my right hand.

  At the head table, Her Grace screamed. Gawain supported her on one side, her cousin Elyzabel rushed up to support her on the other. I fought down a surge of jealousy and looked at the others. Everybody had stopped eating, of course. Pinel of Carbonek took a gulp of wine, then set his goblet down suddenly, as if he wished he had not drunk, and wiped his brown mustache and beard. Ironside and Bleoberis were sneaking the last bite of food out of their mouths. Probably others were as well. Safere, his chair overturned, was standing and staring down with his eyes like eggshells in his dark face. That pious pander Bors de Ganis had stepped aside to let Dame Elyzabel get close to Her Grace. Everyone else was glancing around as if trying to see who would burst next and praying it would not be himself. The dogs had caught the mood, and the only thing you could hear for a moment was their whining and tail-thumping, our breathing, and the Queen’s sobs.

  “Hand me that apple he was eating, Sir Seneschal,” said Mordred calmly.

  Patrise had let it roll out of his hand onto the table. I picked it up and handed it to Mordred. Delicately cutting a slice, he whistled to the nearest bitch. She came up, wagging her tail, snuffed up the piece of fruit from Mordred’s fingers—and a few moments later was thrashing on the floor coughing up blood into the newly-laid rushes. Astamore started up, one hand to his mouth, and looked for a moment as if he would rush from the room, but got control of himself and sat down again.

  “So now,” said Mordred, “the question is: was it that one piece of fruit only, or all of them? Brother Gawain, I believe the bowl was carried back to you. Will someone kindly fetch it here? Gouvernail? Dame Bragwaine? Dame Lore?”

  “No!” screamed the Queen. “No, you will not! Bury it—no, burn it!”

  “We must learn, dear liege lady.” Mordred began sectioning his own pear, so far untasted, and whistled for another dog. The dogs were nosing their dead comrade; a few started to howl.

  “No!” Dame Guenevere seized the bowl of fruit, turned, and threw it into the fire. Apples and pears spilled on the floor and table; she snatched them up and hurled them after the others. “Is it not enough? Will you kill them all? All our hounds and brachets, too?”

  The fruit sizzled, sending off an odor of roasting juices, laced with something more sickly. Dame Guenevere turned back to us, the flames leaping in strange colors behind her. “My lords! My good lords—all who have taken any, throw it onto the fire! All of it! At once!”

  No one moved. I grabbed the pieces of Mordred’s pear, deliberately walked around the room to the fireplace, and threw them into the flames.

  My right hand was sticky with pear juice. “Coupnez,” I said to the nearest page, “clean water.” Coupnez went for ewer and basin, looking, for once, very glad to have something to do.

  “That was a foolish deed, Sir Kay,” said Mordred. “Come, who else took a piece of it? Will you all play the fool, like our good seneschal?”

  Gawain reached down slowly and picked up the apple he had chosen for himself. His hand trembled. The whole court knew that apples and pears were Gawain’s favorite light food. At this time of year, the large bowl of fruit had obviously been served in honor of the King’s favorite nephew, although, with his usual over-insistence on courtesy, he had caused it to be passed around among the other guests first.

  “My God!” he said softly. “This was meant for me!” He looked at the Queen, weeping in Elyzabel’s arms, at Mordred, back at the Queen. Half-turning, he flung his apple into the flames. Then, in a low voice to the Queen—if the rest of us had not been so silent, we would not have heard him—“Madame, I fear for you.”

  “True, brother Gawain,” said Agravain the Beautiful. He went on, siding as usual, with Mordred, “It certainly looks as if it had been meant for you. But as you’ve just destroyed your own choice of the fruit, we can never know whether it was tainted also, can we?”

  “What difference if it was meant especially for Gawain?” Mador de la Porte was on his feet now. So were most of us, though not, it seemed, for the same reason as Mador. “Whether she meant to murder one or all, she did not care how many good knights died. And I have lost my cousin, madame, my good cousin and a noble knight, through your treason. A great knight he would have been of his arms in his time! Here I charge you, madame the Queen, with his death
!”

  Dame Guenevere stared at him, a wild, frightened look in those lovely gray eyes. She moved her lips as if to speak. Ihesu! to see her reduced to this!

  “Think, Mador,” I said quickly. “Twenty-four knights here, four ladies and Gouvernail to serve us, not to mention the cooks and scullions—it could have been any one of us trying to murder any other one of us!”

  “I rather like the idea of someone attempting to murder us all at a stroke.” Mordred leaned back in his chair and lifted his goblet to his mouth.

  “You have not lost a kinsman, neither of you!” Mador shook his fist at the Queen. “I will be revenged for his death, madame—by Ihesu and His Holy Mother, I will be revenged! If I must renounce my allegiance to do it, I will prove your treachery with my body!”

  Again Dame Guenevere tried to speak, but her cousin had to speak for her. “She will not lack champions, my lord Sir Mador!” Elyzabel looked around at all of us, her temper rising. This was the woman who had once brazened it out with King Claudas of France. “Which of you will champion the Queen, my lords? You do not all believe Sir Mador’s lies? Which of you will fight for her? Sweet Mother Mary, must I put on armor myself and prove that Heaven aids the just cause?”

  Palomides, who has fought in as many women’s quarrels as has Lancelot, and almost as many as Gawain himself, lifted his knife and drove it heavily into the table before him. “Good Dame Elyzabel, think not that we do not pray for the Queen’s innocence and happy deliverance. But it is not for us to fight in her cause.” The old Saracen sat down and buried his face in his hands. He was right. Whichever of us here present fought for the Queen as good as confessed himself her accomplice, a poisoner.

  All my life, I have craved and prayed for at least one more chance to fight for Her Grace, hating Lancelot, as I would have hated Gawain or anyone else who took her battle away from me time after time. And now, when Lancelot was not at hand to take it on himself, when God and Lancelot along knew where Lancelot had been for the last week, neither I, nor Gawain, Palomides nor Persant nor any of the rest of us were able to take up her quarrel!

  “There is cousin Ywain of the Lion, of course,” said Mordred, glancing around as if to take stock of who was here and who was not. “I rather wondered why he was not among us; dining with the King seemed rather a feeble reason. Or there is Sir Lucan the Butler—he knows food. We might perhaps entice the good Sir Pelleas up from the arms of the beautiful Nimue in their Lake retreat. Or we might send for Mark of Cornwall. As I remember, King Mark once defended himself very ably in an unjust cause.”

  “Damn you, Mordred,” I said. The Queen had fainted.

  Gouvernail and three of her ladies carried her away to her own chamber. Dame Lore of Carlisle remained in the small banquet room with us. Maybe she thought to defend the Queen’s interests here.

  I looked around, counting pages. “Where in God’s Name is Grimpmains?”

  “Sick, sir,” said Clarance, one of the older lads, looking none too well himself.

  “All right, Clarance,” I said, “go summon the King.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Of Gawain’s Faction and Lancelot’s

  “Sir, said they, here is a knight of this castle that hath been long among us, and right now he is slain with two knights, and for none other cause but that our knight said that Sir Lancelot were a better knight than Sir Gawaine.”

  —Malory X, 55

  I sent the rest of the pages out for more clean water. We would all want to wash our hands with greater care than customary. I hoped that her ladies would bathe the Queen, and that the younger pages, who had probably been poking around at the fruit, would remember to keep their fingers out of their mouths.

  Mador cleared his own table with sweeps of his sword arm. Safere and Galihud carried Patrise’s body over and laid it on the cleared space. Composing his cousin’s limbs, Mador set up an Irish keening for him. The rest took their seats again. Here and there a low, uneasy conversation began. Coupnez brought the basin and ewer I had called for, and I began to wash my hands, looking around the tables in their semi-circular arrangement.

  Why would anyone want to kill Patrise of Ireland this way? It made far better sense to assume that Patrise had eaten a piece of fruit intended for Gawain.

  Gawain the Golden-Tongued and Golden-Haired—prince of chivalry, courtesy, manhood, and all the rest of it, who had fought his glorious way through four decades without catching a battle-scar on the face so many ladies loved—now sat with his broad shoulders hunched together, an uncustomary pose for him. God knows Gawain has been in his share of blood feuds over the years. He might have achieved the Grail if he had been less set, once on a time, on avenging the deaths of his father and mother. But Gawain always makes a point of striking his enemies down in fair fight. The idea that some traitor had tried to burst his insides with poison was going to turn several more of his hairs from gold to gray.

  Revenge was not the only reason someone might have had to attack Gawain the coward’s way. It might also have been jealousy on behalf of Lancelot or one of the other few men who might still be considered Gawain’s rivals in glory. Gawain and Lancelot themselves have always been loyal friends: Arthur’s favorite nephew and Arthur’s greatest adventurer. But the respective followers of Lancelot and Gawain are not always so friendly. Bloody at worst and backbiting at best, the factions have plagued us since Lancelot first came across the Channel from France; and if Lancelot had not come, Gawain’s detractors would probably have attached themselves to Lamorak de Galis, Tristram, or anyone else who was on hand.

  Those of Gawain’s supporters here present consisted chiefly of his four brothers. I hardly glanced at Gareth Beaumains, the next to the youngest, the favorite (Gawain’s, Lancelot’s, and almost everybody else’s), the wide-eyed and simple-souled, possibly the nearest thing to a saintly knight Arthur had left, unless you counted Bors de Ganis.

  But Mordred, the youngest of all Lot’s sons, sitting there now at a nearly empty table, slowly turning his knife as if he were considering licking off the dried juice… What in Ihesu’s Holy Name had happened to Mordred? He had come to court at twenty years of age, honestly and eagerly, been dubbed knight at once and elected to the Round Table after a year, not solely, like more recent companions, on the strength of his kinsmen and friends. We all thought Mordred was on his way to being the best of the five brothers. The ladies delighted in him—high forehead, graceful nose, delicate lips, gold hair, strong back—handsome as Gawain and considerably younger.

  Then, at twenty-two, he changed overnight. Popular speculation said his brains had been scrambled in the tournament at Peningues, where he fought like a devil and was almost left for dead on the field. But I had been friendly enough with Mordred during those first two, good years. His wit was much like mine even then. And I was one of the few to stay fairly close to him, as close as he allowed anyone to come. It was not his brains that had been scrambled, it was his soul. Tournament fighting alone, no matter how rough, does not do that to a man.

  The next to the oldest of Lot’s sons, Agravain the Beautiful, whose face must have made a good number of women envious, was the only man among us who looked, not grieved or alarmed, but bored. As for Gaheris, who was at least making the effort to look commiserating, he had always seemed caught in the middle in more respects than age alone. Capable, blond, and handsome like all his brothers, he was the only one of them to be embarrassed by a slight deformity. His right arm was overlong. Aside from its length, it was well-formed and shapely, and his mother used to call it a sign that he had been especially formed to wield a weapon. Since her death, he would allow no one else to mention his right arm. But even now, well past the middle of his threescore and ten, he seemed not to have made up his mind whether to veer toward Gawain and Gareth or toward Agravain and Mordred. He did not gossip and preen himself like Agravain, and in his taciturn way he pursued justice as fervidly as Gawain; but he cultivated none of Gawain’s and Gareth’s social graces. Still, perhaps I
should have taken Gaheris for my courtly model. He was no general favorite, but because he kept silent instead of voicing his thoughts, no one spoke ill of his manners, either.

  These were Gawain’s brothers and supporters; and one of them, Gareth Beaumains, was more nearly in Lancelot’s camp than Gawain’s. Brandiles, the brother of Gawain’s third wife, seemed to stay apart from faction rivalry. The red-haired, six-fingered giant’s son Ironside and old, balding Persant of Inde were Gareth’s adherents rather than Gawain’s. Persant had never been a vicious man, simply a sporting fellow who fought all comers for the love of it and offered the survivors free hospitality. Ironside’s history was not so genial. While besieging Dame Lyonors in her castle, before Beaumains defeated and converted him, Ironside had hanged between thirty and fifty knights in their armor. Which was naturally forgiven him because he had murdered them in fulfillment of a promise made to an old paramour. If Kay the Churl were to mention Ironside’s early deeds after all these years of Ironside’s good behavior, the whole court would cry shame on Kay’s rudeness. But the jolly red giant had also sworn a vow, in those old days, against Lancelot and Gawain. He had never carried it out, but now Lancelot was missing and Gawain had barely escaped poison.

  Lancelot’s partisans outnumbered Gawain’s in the small banquet chamber this afternoon: Lancelot’s bastard half-brother Ector de Maris, fathered by King Ban, under the influence of Merlin’s magical aphrodisiac, during his stay in Britain; Lancelot’s French cousins Lionel of the lion-shaped birthmark, who had once tried to cut down his brother in hot blood; and Bors de Ganis, our last surviving Sir Saint, almost a virgin, the only man to have fully achieved the adventure of the Holy Grail and returned alive, who now sat in a posture befitting his reputation, hands clasped, blue eyes closed, and head bowed to show the tonsure-like cut of his grizzled hair; Lancelot’s British-born cousins, the twins Blamore and Bleoberis, who looked alike, acted in concert, and probably had the same dreams every night. Lancelot’s protege Breunor the Black-Haired and seldom-washed, otherwise known as Sir La Cote Male Taile or Ill-Fitting Coat—my own name for him; he went on wearing the name as stubbornly as he had worn the filthy, bloodstained coat of his father’s until he had avenged his father’s murder. Lancelot’s less dedicated partisans, Galihodin and Galihud, the princes of Surluse, who had slowly swung to Lancelot’s party from Gawain’s, but still maintained friendly relations, at least on the surface.