The boys had a way of sliding down a rain-water pipe into the moat, which they could swim on secret occasions when it was necessary to be out at night – to wait for a badger, for instance, or to catch tench, which can only be taken just before dawn.
‘Oh, shut up,’ said the Wart. ‘I’m sleepy.’
Kay said. ‘Wake up, wake up, you beast. Where have you been?’
‘I shan’t tell you.’
He was sure that Kay would not believe the story, but only call him a liar and get angrier than ever.
‘If you don’t tell me I shall kill you.’
‘You will not, then.’
‘I will.’
The Wart turned over on his other side.
‘Beast,’ said Kay. He took a fold of the Wart’s arm between the nails of first finger and thumb, and pinched for all he was worth. Wart kicked like a salmon which has been suddenly hooked, and hit him wildly in the eye. In a trice they were out of bed, pale and indignant, looking rather like skinned rabbits – for, in those days, nobody wore clothes in bed – and whirling their arms like windmills in the effort to do each other mischief.
Kay was older and bigger than the Wart, so that he was bound to win in the end, but he was more nervous and imaginative. He could imagine the effect of each blow that was aimed at him, and this weakened his defence. Wart was only an infuriated hurricane.
‘Leave me alone, can’t you?’ And all the while he did not leave Kay alone, but with his head down and swinging arms made it impossible for Kay to do as he was bid. They punched entirely at each other’s faces.
Kay had a longer reach and a heavier fist. He straightened his arm, more in self-defence than in anything else, and the Wart smacked his own eye upon the end of it. The sky became a noisy and shocking black, streaked outward with a blaze of meteors. The Wart began to sob and pant. He managed to get in a blow upon his opponent’s nose, and this began to bleed. Kay lowered his defence, turned his back on the Wart, and said in a cold, snuffling, reproachful voice, ‘Now it’s bleeding.’ The battle was over.
Kay lay on the stone floor, bubbling blood out of his nose, and the Wart, with a black eye, fetched the enormous key out of the door to put under Kay’s back. Neither of them spoke.
Presently Kay turned over on his face and began to sob. He said, ‘Merlyn does everything for you, but he never does anything for me.’
At this the Wart felt he had been a beast. He dressed himself in silence and hurried off to find the magician.
On the way he was caught by his nurse.
‘Ah, you little helot,’ exclaimed she, shaking him by the arm, ‘you’ve been a-battling again with that there Master Kay. Look at your poor eye, I do declare. It’s enough to baffle the college of sturgeons.’
‘It is all right,’ said the Wart.
‘No, that it isn’t, my poppet,’ cried his nurse, getting crosser and showing signs of slapping him. ‘Come now, how did you do it, before I have you whipped?’
‘I knocked it on the bedpost,’ said the Wart sullenly.
The old nurse immediately folded him to her broad bosom, patted him on the back, and said, ‘There, there, my dowsabel. It’s the same story Sir Ector told me when I caught him with a blue eye, gone forty years. Nothing like a good family for sticking to a good lie. There, my innocent, you come along of me to the kitchen and we’ll slap a nice bit of steak across him in no time. But you hadn’t ought to fight with people bigger than yourself.’
‘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. It took him half an hour to escape, and then only at the price of carrying with him a juicy piece of raw beef which he was supposed to hold over his eye.
‘Nothing like a mealy rump for drawing out the humours,’ his nurse had said, and the cook had answered:
‘Us han’t seen a sweeter bit of raw since Easter, no, nor a bloodier.’
‘I will keep the foul thing for Balan,’ thought the Wart, resuming his search for his tutor.
He found him without trouble in the tower room which he had chosen when he arrived. All philosophers prefer to live in towers, as may be seen by visiting the room which Erasmus chose in his college at Cambridge, but Merlyn’s tower was even more beautiful than this. It was the highest room in the castle, directly below the look-out of the great-keep, and from its window you could gaze across the open field – with its rights of warren – across the park, and the chase, until your eye finally wandered out over the distant blue tree-tops of the Forest Sauvage. This sea of leafy timber rolled away and away in knobs like the surface of porridge, until it was finally lost in remote mountains which nobody had ever visited, and the cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of heaven.
Merlyn’s comments upon this black eye were of a medical nature.
‘The discoloration,’ he said, ‘is caused by haemorrhage into the tissues (ecchymosis) and passes from dark purple through green to yellow before it disappears.’
There seemed to be no sensible reply to this.
‘I suppose you had it,’ continued Merlyn, ‘fighting with Kay?’
‘Yes. How did you know?’
‘Ah, well, there it is.’
‘I came to ask you about Kay.’
‘Speak. Demand. I’ll answer.’
‘Well, Kay thinks it is unfair that you are always turning me into things and not him. I have not told him about it but I think he guesses. I think it is unfair too.’
‘It is unfair.’
‘So will you turn us both next time that we are turned?’
Merlyn had finished his breakfast, and was puffing at the meerschaum pipe which made his pupil believe that he breathed fire. Now he took a deep puff, looked at the Wart, opened his mouth to speak, changed his mind, blew out the smoke and drew another lungful.
‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘life does seem to be unfair. Do you know the story of Elijah and the Rabbi Jachanan?’
‘No,’ said the Wart.
He sat down resignedly upon the most comfortable part of the floor, perceiving that he was in for something like the parable of the looking-glass.
‘This rabbi,’ said Merlyn, ‘went on a journey with the prophet Elijah. They walked all day, and at nightfall they came to the humble cottage of a poor man, whose only treasure was a cow. The poor man ran out of his cottage, and his wife ran too, to welcome the strangers for the night and to offer them all the simple hospitality which they were able to give in straitened circumstances. Elijah and the Rabbi were entertained with plenty of the cow’s milk, sustained by homemade bread and butter, and they were put to sleep in the best bed while their kindly hosts lay down before the kitchen fire. But in the morning the poor man’s cow was dead.’
‘Go on.’
‘They walked all the next day, and came that evening to the house of a very wealthy merchant, whose hospitality they craved. The merchant was cold and proud and rich, and all that he would do for the prophet and his companion was to lodge them in a cowshed and feed them on bread and water. In the morning, however, Elijah thanked him very much for what he had done, and sent for a mason to repair one of his walls, which happened to be falling down, as a return for his kindness.
‘The Rabbi Jachanan, unable to keep silence any longer, begged the