‘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 couple of hounds questing.
‘Except when he is drinking, of course,’ added the King.
‘It must be a dreadful kind of monster,’ said the Wart, looking about him anxiously.
‘A dreadful monster,’ repeated the King. ‘It is the Beast Glatisant.’
‘And how do you follow it?’
This seemed to be the wrong question, for Pellinore began to look even more depressed.
‘I have a brachet,’ he said sadly. ‘There she is, over there.’
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 do not see her very well.’
‘Wound herself round the other side, I dare say. She always goes the opposite way from 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, I 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 goes away then, you see, and I don’t see her sometimes for a week.
‘Gets a bit lonely without her,’ added the King, ‘following the Beast about, and never knowing where one is. Makes a bit of company, you know.’
‘She seems to have a friendly nature.’
‘Too friendly. Sometimes I doubt whether she is really chasing the Beast at all.’
‘What does she do when she sees it?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Oh, well,’ said the Wart. ‘I dare say she will get to be interested in it after a time.’
‘It is eight months, anyway, since we saw the Beast at all.’
The poor fellow’s voice had grown sadder and sadder since the beginning of the conversation, and now he definitely began to snuffle. ‘It is the curse of the Pellinores,’ he exclaimed. ‘Always mollocking about after that beastly Beast. What on earth use is she, 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 horrid 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 I do wish I had a nice house of my own to live in, a house with beds in it and real pillows and sheets. If I was rich that’s what I would buy. A nice bed with a nice pillow and a nice sheet that you could lie in, and then I 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 himself – that I would.’
‘If you could 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 the King. ‘In a bed?’
‘A feather bed.’
King Pellinore’s eyes grew 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 out in one rush, ‘What a lovely house your gentleman must have!’
‘I do not 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?’ (He had forgotten about the Wart being lost.) ‘How nice of him, how very nice of him, I do think, what?’
‘He will be pleased to see us,’ said the Wart truthfully.
‘Oh, how nice of him,’ exclaimed the King again, beginning to bustle about with his various trappings. ‘And what a lovely gentleman he must be to have a feather bed!
‘I suppose I should have to share it with somebody?’ he added doubtfully.
‘You could have one of your own.’
‘A feather bed of one’s very own, 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?’
‘Never,’ said the Wart.
‘Fleas in the bed?’
‘Not one.’
‘Well!’ said King Pellinore. ‘It does sound too nice for words, I must say. A feather bed and none of those 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 noise which had that moment arisen close beside them.
‘What was that?’ exclaimed the Wart.
‘Hark!’ cried the King.
‘Mercy!’
‘It is the Beast!’
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. He balanced them on the end of his long nose, just before the visor automatically clapped to. He 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 the 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 the one in which the brachet had wound herself up. He went round three times too often, the brachet meanwhile running and yelping the other way, and then, after four or five 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 into the gloom of the forest, with the unfortunate hound trailing behind him at the other end of the cord.
The boy 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 begin to 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 air. He thought himself awake when he was already asleep. He saw the stars above his face, whirling on their silent and sleepless axes, and the leaves of the trees rustling against them, and he heard