Arthur the King

by Allan Massie

Genres: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; General Fiction; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

A thrilling and highly original retelling of the Arthurian legend with a twist! It is the aftermath of the Roman occupation of Britain. Kings are now jockeying for position, for title, for land and for power. A young boy confounds the most famous knights of the realm when he pulls a jewelled sword from a cleft in a stone and claims the throne left vacant by the death of Uther Pendragon. In this new vision of the Arthurian story, Camelot is set on the River Tweed and Merlin who disapproves of his knights' yearning for battle and their quest for the Holy Grail. With great humour and energy, Massie has created a bold and original new tale from the stuff of legend.

Release date: December 8, 2011

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Print pages: 304

Sample

The winter sea was grey and the grass was grey and the stone of the little chapel on the hill was grey. Towards noon it began to rain, but still the rocks resounded to the clang of mailed feet as the knights strode from the yard where they had tied their horses to the stretch of level ground before the chapel. That stood on an eminence. There was a shallow valley beyond it and then the ground rose sharply again towards the outer ramparts of the castle.

A bier had been placed in the Great Hall and on it lay the body of the King, Uther Pendragon, the face visible that all might see that it was indeed the King who lay there awaiting burial when the frost released its hold on the earth.

But the knights paid little heed to the King whom they had been accustomed either to obey or defy. A dead king is a dead lion, no longer to be feared; the divinity that hedged him in life fled. Uther Pendragon was no more, and all Britain was held in suspense till his successor should be known.

A stone stood before the chapel and from a cleft in the stone protruded a sword, the hilt encrusted with jewels: rubies, amethysts, topaz. Uther Pendragon’s will was known: whoever should draw the sword from the stone was the rightful king. So all day long, knight after knight had made the attempt. Knight after knight had sweated and strained; and the sword remained fixed.

‘It is as tight as a Jew’s fist,’ muttered Sir Kay whose hands were bruised and bleeding from his struggle to release the sword.

‘Tight as a boy’s arse,’ growled his brother.

Trumpets sounded. The crowd parted and a squat, saturnine man, with a thick black moustache and a lower jaw that stuck out beyond the upper so that the two did not meet, advanced towards the stone. He wore a circlet of gold on his helmet and, as he clanged up the rocky path, he wiped his hands, thick-fingered and hairy, on the skirts of his tunic.

‘Who is it?’ some asked, ignorant men.

But Sir Kay, doing the honours on behalf of his father, the castellan, who lay in bed suffering a tertiary ague, stepped forward to greet the newcomer. He looked him boldly in the eye, but could not hold the steely gaze directed at him, and fell to his knee and kissed the hairy hand that was demandingly extended.

‘It is King Lot of Orkney,’ one said. ‘Surely he is the man will draw the stone.’

Others, now he was identified, nodded in agreement. King Lot’s reputation as a mighty warrior, who had cleared the northern seas of pirates, was known to all. Moreover, he was the husband of Uther Pendragon’s daughter, Morgan le Fay, she of the russet hair, eyes blue as cornflowers and figure of the pagan goddess, Venus Aphrodite.

King Lot looked neither to left nor right. He paid no heed to the murmurs of the crowd, which, however, now fell silent, in hushed anticipation, as when a champion of renown enters the lists. He brushed Sir Kay aside and approached the stone. He looked hard at the sword. He lifted his narrow black eyes to the heavens and his lips moved, as if perhaps he mouthed a prayer. He spat twice on his right hand and seized hold of the richly decorated hilt.

He pulled, but the sword did not move. He stepped back and frowned, then advanced a second time and resumed his grip. He tugged and heaved, and the sweat ran down his swarthy cheeks and his temples throbbed. He uttered a loud cry and, placing his left hand also on the sword, gave a sudden upward jerk. But there was no movement. ‘This is some trick,’ he said, ‘some witchery’ and turned, angry and disconsolate, away.

‘If Lot fails, then the sword cannot be freed and we shall have no king in Britain,’ a voice in the crowd was heard to say and a low murmur of dismay rose from the assembly.

But still other knights queued up to make the attempt. All in vain. For a moment it seemed as if the gigantic Sir Bedivere, a man built like an ox, had succeeded in causing the sword to shift position. But it was not so and he too fell back defeated. Another knight in black armour so strained and heaved that he dropped to the ground in a swoon and was carried lifeless from the stage.

A cold wind blew up from the sea, and it began to rain more steadily. The shades of night closed in. The crowd was commencing to disperse, when a quiet voice was heard to ask if one not yet dubbed a knight might nevertheless attempt to draw the sword.

The speaker was a youth, scarce out of boyhood. He was slight of build and pale-complexioned. His dark-brown hair was cropped coarsely short and his whole demeanour was modest. But he looked steadily at the stone from blue eyes fringed with long lashes, like a girl’s, and his lips were parted as if in expectation, revealing one broken tooth. There was a V-shaped scar on his forehead and he was dressed only in a blue-grey tunic, girdled at the waist and rucked up to show slim but muscular thighs.

The crowd laughed to see one so meanly dressed and insignificant of figure offer to draw the stone, and Sir Kay called out to the boy to be gone and not to waste everyone’s time. ‘This is a challenge for noble knights,’ he said, ‘not for beardless boys who should be attending to their lessons or their domestic duties.’

But the officiating priest intervened. Uther Pendragon’s will, he said, was clear: there was no limit to whoever should seek to draw the stone. The boy should have his chance.

So the youth stepped forward, amidst mocking laughter from the crowd. But he paid no heed to this. Instead, he looked composedly on the stone and on the jewelled hilt of the sword. The pink tip of his tongue protruded and he gave a quick lick to his lips. Then he placed his hand on the hilt and, without straining, drew the sword smoothly from the stone that held it and raised it high above his head. He lowered it to the ground and, resting his hands on the pommel, seemed for a moment to be abstracted in prayer.

A loud roar broke the silence of the gathering dusk.

‘We have a king, we have a king …’

The priest said, ‘What is your name, my son?’

The boy smiled. ‘In the castle kitchen where I work, they call me by many names, sometimes “Brat” or “Wat” or “Wart”, but I was baptised “Arthur”.’

‘Then long live King Arthur,’ cried the priest, ‘Arthur, King by the Grace of God.’

The crowd took up the cry, but was silenced when, first Sir Kay pushed himself forward, saying ‘this is tomfoolery, enough of it’ and then King Lot strode forward. He looked the boy up and down, and spat on the ground between his feet. ‘There is some devilry here,’ he said, ‘and madness too. Will you be ruled by some kitchen brat, got in a ditch of an unknown slattern? Will he lead you in battle against the Saxons? How he drew the sword, I know not, but that he did so by fraud, of that I am certain. You, boy,’ he said to Arthur, ‘come here.’

But Arthur smiled and did not move, looking calmly on the enraged King of Orkney, who, furious at this defiance (as he thought it) himself stepped forward and struck Arthur with his mailed fist, so that the boy fell to the ground and lay there, blood spurting from his mouth.

‘There is your king,’ Lot said, ‘grovelling in the dirt. Know this, that if you take him as your king, there will be war in Britain. I shall not rest till I have destroyed him and exposed this deception.’

Now this is the story as it is commonly told. It makes – you will agree – a fine tale, and when I first heard it in my childhood sung by a minstrel in Newark tower on the banks of the Yarrow Water, I delighted in it and had no reason to doubt that it was true. For it is well-known, and of frequent occurrence, that great heroes are often obscure in their youth, and must prove their mettle and assert their right by mastering a test which baffles other men. And it is indubitably the case that the young Arthur was thought to be of no significance till this day that he is said to have drawn the sword from the stone. He had served latterly in the household of a knight who goes by different names, but who was first the seneschal of that King Vortigern who rashly invited the Saxon kings Horsa and Hengist to settle in Kent (called, by some, the Garden of England) and who then served as Master of the Horse to Uther Pendragon himself. And in this household Arthur, whose parentage was unknown, was but meanly regarded. He was treated as a servant, confined to humble duties – cleaning tack, sweeping floors and the like. Nobody thought that he would become a famous warrior. Nobody thought that he would make a warrior of any sort and Sir Kay, who was the castellan’s son, often told him, between kicks, that he was fit only to be a servitor at table or a priest.

How he had come to that castle in the West, none knew or could remember. Though he had lived there, he had never lost the soft accent of the Scottish Borders; and, the Scots being regarded as rude barbarians, he was mocked and reviled for this reason too.

This, then, was the boy who drew the sword from the stone, though grown men, gnarled knights and mighty kings had failed. With your keen intelligence, my Prince, an intelligence which I am pleased to observe grows more sceptical by the month, you will doubt the story. It may, of course, nonetheless be true. Strange things happen, inexplicable by reason. That is incontrovertible. Nevertheless, if you suspect some deception rather than merely dismissing the tale, you may be right.

At the back of the story lurks the mysterious figure of Merlin. (He was by some accounts lurking in the churchyard too.) And Merlin takes some explaining. Who was he? What was he?

Geoffrey of Monmouth, author of The History of the Kings of Britain, a scribbler of matchless impudence, gives this account.

But first, a word concerning this Geoffrey. There are some – fools – who regard his work with the reverence properly due to great historians such as Livy or even Julius Caesar himself. But I should draw your attention to the judgement delivered by my old friend William of Newburgh, a man of unimpeachable rectitude. ‘It is very clear’, wrote William, ‘that everything this man Geoffrey wrote about Arthur and his successors, or indeed about his predecessors from Vortigern onwards, was made up, partly by himself and partly by others, either from an inordinate love of lying, or for the sake of pleasing the Britons’ – by whom my old friend meant the Welsh, a goatish people, some say, who stole their best songs and histories from my own Scottish Borderland.

Well, then, this is the story of Merlin as Geoffrey tells it, and of how he rose to prominence.

It happened in the days of King Vortigern, a Roman citizen belonging to an old British royal family, who had raised a rebellion against the Emperor Constantius and established his own independent kingdom. Then, because his rule was insecure, he invited the Saxons (as I have already said) to settle in Kent that they might guard the shores of Britain against other invaders. This was foolish; as well invite the wolf to guard the sheep against other beasts of prey. So, soon, the Saxons, despising Vortigern, turned against him, seized him, bound him with ropes and compelled him to surrender large parts of his kingdom to them in exchange for his life. All this is well attested and we need not rely on Geoffrey as our sole witness or authority.

Vortigern was now greatly dismayed and at a loss to know what to do. So he summoned his counsellors, whom Geoffrey styles ‘magicians’, even though it is clear from his own account that these were ignorant and foolish men who knew nothing of magic, which is an art or craft requiring deep study to be mastered. They advised him to build a strong tower into which he could withdraw if he lost all his other fortresses; and Vortigern, whose understanding of the art of war and of strategy was evidently poor, thought this advice good. He summoned his stonemasons and set them to work at the site he had selected in the mountains of north Wales. But, Geoffrey tells us, when they began to lay the foundations of their tower, however much they built in one day was swallowed up in the night, so that the work made no progress.

Vortigern then consulted his magicians again, as to what should be done. And they said he should seek out a lad without a father, then kill the boy, and sprinkle the stones and mortar with his blood. This being done, they said, the foundations would stand firm.

Now, though Vortigern was, by Geoffrey’s account, a Christian who had been distressed to learn that the Saxons worshipped pagan gods, Wotan (whom some call Woden), Thor and Freya, he nevertheless found this absurd advice to be good and acted on it, sending messengers throughout the country to search for such a boy. In a town called Kaermerdin, now Carmarthen, they happened on two lads who were quarrelling over their play. One struck the other, crying out that he was insolent to argue with him, since he (the speaker) was of royal blood, while as for the other boy, ‘nobody knows who you are, for you never had a father’. The messengers enquired further and were told that this was indeed the case, though his mother was a daughter of a Welsh king and now resided in a nunnery by the Church of St Peter.

So they fetched her, doubtless protesting, and brought her with the boy to Vortigern, who enquired of her closely how her son came to be born.

She replied, ‘By the living God, my Lord King, I never had relations with any man to make me bear this child. But it happened that, in the nunnery I was sometimes visited in the evening, after dusk, by a being who took the form of a handsome young man with red-gold curls and a pleasing singing voice. Sometimes he held me in his arms and kissed me, and then he would vanish, though the door and windows remained closed. At other times, when I was alone, working on my tapestry, he would speak to me, though I could not see him. And, though invisible, his talk was all of love; and in this way he made me pregnant. So, my Lord King, you must decide in your wisdom who was the father of my son, for I swear to you, on the Holy Rood, that never otherwise, and in no other guise, did I have relations with any man.’

Vortigern scratched his head. (All the evidence suggests he was a man who was easily puzzled, a man out of his depth, who had assumed honours and a title that came his way by fortune and not merit.) He called on a wise councillor, a certain Maugantius, concerning whom Geoffrey knew no more than his name, who spoke as follows.

‘In the books written by our sages and in many histories,’ he said, ‘I have read of such mysterious births. Apuleius, in his treatise de deo Socratis, asserts that between the moon and the earth there live spirits, incubi, whom we term demons. Their nature is divided, part men, part angels, and when they choose, they take on the shape of men and have intercourse with women who, being like all the daughters of Eve suggestible and open to corruption, yield and indeed welcome their advances. It is my opinion that one such appeared to this woman and begot the boy.’

Then, as Geoffrey has it, the lad Merlin approached the King and asked why he and his mother had been brought there. Vortigern relayed the advice he had received from his magicians, with some relish for he was, men say, one of those who delight in the infliction of pain. If, however, he expected the boy to display terror at the thought of his imminent death, he was disappointed; Merlin smiled, grimly we may suppose, and said, ‘Call your magicians here and I shall expose their falsehood.’

So this was done, and when the magicians were assembled, Merlin spoke as follows.

‘Because you are ignorant men and do not know why your tower cannot be built, you have told the King that my blood should be sprinkled on the stone and mortar. I wonder what nonsense you would devise next when you found that that remedy did not work. But I have a simpler question for you, which, if you are in truth masters of magic, you must be able to answer. What lies beneath the foundations of your tower?’

To this they made no reply, for they did not know.

Then Merlin said, ‘My Lord King, now call your workmen and tell them to dig deeper. They will find a pool. That is why the foundations are not stable and the tower cannot be built.’

Such was his assurance that the King did as he was bid; and a pool was discovered.

Merlin said, ‘What, most learned magicians, lies beneath the pool?’

Again they were silent.

‘Drain the pool,’ Merlin said, ‘and you will find two dragons sleeping on a slab of rock.’

‘What dragons are these?’ the King asked, amazed.

‘The red dragon of Britain and the white dragon of Germany,’ Merlin said.

Now Geoffrey does not tell us whether these dragons were indeed discovered. Instead, he embarks on a long account of what he styles ‘the prophecies of Merlin’, in which the fate of the dragons is made to conform to the history of Britain. There is much truth in these prophecies, as you discover when you penetrate beneath the surface of the language and the deliberately opaque style.

And this should not surprise you, since, like most prophecies, these were invented retrospectively.

Nevertheless, though much in Geoffrey’s narrative is but sad nonsense, there is a substratum of truth and Merlin, as I shall relate, was a remarkable man and indeed, a worker of wonders and a cunning politician.

Some, ignorantly, term Merlin a mere magician, a practitioner of the most vulgar forms of the occult arts; and indeed, it is in this guise that the ridiculous Geoffrey displays him. Others, more imaginatively, state that he was a Druid, perhaps the last of the Druids, the priests who served the Britons at the time when the Roman legions first penetrated these isles. You have, my Prince, read the great Caesar’s account of these priests, who assembled in oak groves, foretold the future and conducted human sacrifices at the two solstices and, as some authorities assert, at the full moon also. But it is well known that the Druids were driven to take refuge on the Isle of Anglesey, which the Romans called Mona, and there perished in a sinful act of mass suicide. Therefore it is absurd to suggest that Merlin, who flourished several hundred years later, was one of these deluded men.

The truth is other.

You will remember from my previous account1 that when Marcus escaped from the prison in Constantinople where he was confined he came, by the advice of his loyal friend Sir Gavin, to Britain, where he was received joyfully by the dying king at a city called Winchester and then reigned in his stead, this being after the feeble and lascivious and cowardly Emperor Honorius had withdrawn the legions from Britain.

Now it so happened that three cohorts of the Twentieth Legion based at Chester to guard the Irish Sea failed to answer the summons, perhaps because they had either become detached from the main body of the legion, or had been sent further north and so did not receive the order, or, as some say, because they mutinied, the soldiers refusing to leave their British women and murdering the legate who tried to enforce the imperial command. Be that as it may, they remained behind, and their centurions assumed full authority. Lonely and embattled, they survived with difficulty.

Marcus learned of this and sent Sir Gavin north to summon them to his colours. For these men, some by now gnarled and suffering from the aches and pains of advancing years, it was a great joy to learn that a true Roman was returned to Britain and established as Emperor. So they hastened south.

The boy Merlin was among them. He was the son of a centurion, by name Macro, and a woman from that part of what is now the Scottish Borderland called the Ettrick Forest. Some say the boy’s true name was Myrrdin, which is cognate with the French merde and means shitty. But this is not so; that was merely the nickname given him by the other children of the camp, who found the boy strange, dirty and disagreeable. In truth, he was by nature a solitary, such as other boys habitually fear and resent.

Were this fiction I would tell you of the remarkable powers he displayed even as a child. But since I write nought but sober truth, I must refrain from such invention. The young Merlin was distinguished only by his awkwardness, his stammer, his aversion from sociability, and by having one eye blue and the other brown. Moreover, he was given to sudden spasmodic gestures, nervous tics and a quite unusual clumsiness. It was perhaps because he was conscious of his oddity that he devoted himself with an extraordinary ardour to the service of Mithras, God of the Soldiers.

It was Lycas, formerly the bedfellow and lover of Marcus, now his closest friend and most loyal follower, who brought the boy Merlin to Marcus’s attention. He had noticed him soon after his arrival at the palace, and felt aversion, for he was a lover of beauty. But he also pitied him.

Then one day, descending to the courtyard, he came on a group of mean youths throwing stones at an aged mastiff which was chained there. He was about to reproach them when the boy Merlin, with a howl of rage or indignation, flung himself at the ringleader of the group who threw him off and then kicked him as he lay on the ground.

Lycas ran forward and struck the youth a sharp blow on the ear. He upbraided them as boors, rogues, wretches, so forcibly that all slunk off. Meanwhile the boy Merlin had crawled towards the dog and now cradled its bleeding head in his arms.

‘We must see to the dog,’ Lycas said, ‘and then to you.’

The boy Merlin was uncouth. Lycas, whose tastes had been refined by his association with Marcus and Artemisia, could not be easy with him. He seemed to him like a wild animal, a creature of the woods, caught in a hunter’s net, ready to bite even the hand extended to help him. And yet, as he said to Marcus, there was ‘something there’. If the boy’s blue eye was vacant, the brown gazed on the world with a passionate intensity. Days passed in which Merlin scarcely moved; he would lie on the rushes sucking his thumb or pressing himself against one of the mastiffs. The dogs alone seemed to understand him, to be at one with him. When, on other occasions, he spoke, in his awkward vulgar Latin, his words were gnomic.

It was blind Artemisia who took him in hand, insisted he be taught to read and write, corrected his Latin and had him instructed in the science of astrology. ‘He has rare qualities,’ she said, and in time others were compelled to assent. Moreover, she defended him from the priests who would have had him put to death as one who still honoured the pagan gods. But Artemisia said, ‘Though you declare that you alone have knowledge of the one true God, and follow the one true Faith, wise men in other times and other countries have spoken with equal certainty and been rewarded by their gods with success in all manner of ventures. So I have come to believe that there are many paths by which we may approach the truth and attain knowledge.’

When they heard this the priests would have charged Artemisia herself with heresy, but Marcus forbade them.

Holy Church would, as you know, my Prince, be in accord with these priests who would have had Artemisia put on trial. But here in Palermo, you have Arab subjects who follow the rule of Mohammed, and hold Christ Jesus to be merely one of the prophets; and these followers of Islam, whom Christians style infidels, are faithful to their own faith and are often virtuous men abiding by your royal law. Therefore, be not swift in condemnation of those who take other paths, but judge men by their actions, not by the God or gods whom they worship.

Merlin adhered to the God of the Legions, Mithras, who is declared to be the Mediator between the unknowable God and the human race which suffers here below, the spirit of celestial light, who grants increase and abundance, watches over the flocks, and gives fertility and life.

And Marcus, listening to the boy’s words, protected him, for they might be true and besides, he remembered conversations he had had with those who worshipped Mithras. And so Merlin grew to strength and wisdom, and Marcus, who had now, in accordance with the wishes of the British, assumed the purple, sought his advice concerning all great enterprises. But often Merlin vanished, into the forests or the waste places, for months or even years; for it was his nature to reinforce his spirit in solitude.

1 The Evening of the World.

Britain flourished under Marcus’s rule. Great men lived contented on their estates. The corn was harvested in peace. White cattle grazed the meadows watched over not by armed guards but by a solitary herd boy. The hills resounded to the bleating of sheep. Trade revived, merchants travelled the road without fear and towns flourished. The Saxons, bloodily repulsed, no longer dared to raid and Marcus made treaties, forging bonds of friendship with the Scots and the Picts. Truly, it was a blessed time, and long remembered as such.

But Marcus could not forget that he was a Roman. There came a year when every night for a long week he dreamed of Italy and of white herds of mighty bulls washed clean in the sacred river of Clitumnus, being led towards the temples of the old gods of Rome, and he woke to memories of the city given over to the Goths. Surely, he thought, my work here is done, my nobler work scarce yet commenced.

Artemisia sought to dissuade him, Lycas also. ‘We are grown old,’ he said, ‘adventures such as you purpose are for the young and indeed, we enjoyed our fill of them in our youth.’

Marcus felt the force of his words; and yet his restless spirit could not be appeased. So he sent out heralds to summon all his barons, knights and vassals to assemble at Dover. And when they were come together – knights from the deep shires of midland Britain, archers from the Welsh mountains, sturdy pikemen from the Scottish Borders, and two legions drawn from the eastern counties and drilled to fight in the antique Roman manner, with javelin, short sword and shield – he addressed them as follows.

‘Soldiers, we are all children of Rome. I myself am a descendant of the great Aeneas to whom, as the poet tells us, the old gods promised empire without end. Those gods have departed; they live only in the dark forests of memory. That empire is now Christian, following the true faith in the one true God. And yet it has fallen on evil days. The wolf that was once guardian of Rome now despoils the city and litters in the places that were once holy. The successor to St Peter, assailed by barbarians, cries out to us for succour. The sword I now raise in his defence is the sword of the Lord of Hosts and Righteousness. I have therefore called you to a crusade, a holy war, to restore to all Europe the peace that is Roman, that Gaul and Italy and Spain may once again flourish as Britain now does. Whoever feels himself unworthy of this great cause, let him depart, for we shall be the stronger without him. But let all that remain resolve to march with me and do battle in a manner worthy of our ancestors and of Rome.’

When he had finished speaking, none departed, for all knew it were shame to abandon the Emperor. Yet Lycas felt that a bitterness was in the air, that there were poisonous weeds among the flowers. He knew a presentiment of doom, and that night Vortigern, Count of the Saxon Shore, slipped from the camp, and took with him King Lot of Orkney and all his men, for he saw that, with Marcus overseas, he could secure the throne for himself. And Lot went with him because Vortigern argued that Marcus was led astray by vanity and ambition to leave Britain undefended.

So some say the expedition was cursed from the first. Marcus, however, received the news of these desertions with equanimity. ‘The fewer men, the greater share of honour,’ he assured those who remained; and this satisfied many who were ardent for glory. But Lycas suffered, though he smiled in public.

They crossed over into Gaul and fought many battles against barbarians, and were victorious in all. Yet with each battle their strength was diminished, though their ardour grew. With each battle and with each mile that they advanced towards the mountains that lie betwee. . .