The Once and Future King: Part One

Sir Grummore Grummursum, who was staying the night because he had been benighted out questin’ after a specially long run, said that when he was their age he was swished every mornin’ because he would go hawkin’ instead of learnin'.

There were two little merlins which had only just been taking up from hacking, an old peregrine who was not much use in this wooded country but who was kept for appearances, a kestrel on which the boys had learned the rudiments of falconry...

He was dressed in a flowing gown with fur tippets which had the signs of the zodiac embroidered over it, with various cabalistic signs, such as triangles with eyes in them, queer crosses, leaves of trees, bones of birds and animals and a planetarium whose stars shone like bits of looking-glass with the sun on them.

He held it up like a boy holding a stick of rock or a constable with his truncheon, looked at it, nibbled its tail.

At this there was a simultaneous tintinnabulation of all the bells, as each graven image lowered its raised foot in distress.

There was nothing cruel about him, no ignoble passion.

“It is all right” said the Wart again, disgusted by the fuss, but fate was bent on punishing him, and the old lady was inexorable.

She sat between the roots of the lime tree, clad in a one-piece smock of green girded with a quiver of arrows, and her feet and arms were bare.

He saw the phalanx of arrows gleam like an eye-flick in the moonlight.

“You should try to speak without assonances," said the wizard. “For instance, The beer is never dear near here, dear,’ is unfortunate, even as an assonance...."

The repeating voices in his head, which he could not shut off—the lack of pri­vacy, under which others ate from his stomach while others again sang in his brain—the dreary blank which replaced feeling—the dearth of all but two values—the total monot­ony more than the wickedness: these had begun to kill the joy of life which belonged to his boyhood.

Even as he spoke, Wart noticed that the hound music was weaker and more querulous.

Every night at locking-up time, the sagacious old admiral would round up his domestic com­rades, whose leadership he had assumed, and would pru­dently assemble them in the proper place by his own efforts, as if he had fully understood the situation.

Sometimes King Pellinore could be descried galloping over the purlieus after the Beast, or with the Beast after him if they happened to have got muddled up.

They slept where they could, sometimes in the hut of some cottager who was prepared to welcome them, some­times in the castle of a brother knight who invited them to refresh themselves, sometimes in the firelight and fleas of a dirty little hovel with a bush tied to a pole outside it—this was the sign-board used at that time by inns—and once or twice on the open ground, all huddled together for warmth between their grazing chargers.