Another search for Lancelot. Probably more questing-hours have been squandered by knights riding throughout Logres, Cornwall, the North, and the petty kingdoms of Wales looking for Lancelot, and likely as not getting lost themselves in the search, than for any other single cause, not excluding the Holy Grail. But it seemed that, since Lancelot’s arrival in this land, no one else must ever be permitted to fight for the Queen. And, curse his hangers, if the Queen’s safety was to be ensured, he was the best fighter to ensure it.
I found Gouvernail again and we chose a score of pursuivants to ride out at once and begin combing the country for the Flower of Knighthood, and twoscore more to start in the morning. Marshalling the knights as searchers would have to wait until after Sir Patrise’s burial.
I did not intend to stop with scattering pursuivants and knights around like ants looking for the hero of the world. Merlin was gone, but the enchantress who had taken him off our hands, who probably had all his skills and maybe a few of her own besides, and used them with considerably more restraint and less officiousness, was still among the living. Dame Nimue had always been friendly to us; and, since no one knew where Lancelot was anyway, I could just as easily search for him on the way to her Lake as anywhere else.
I returned to the death chamber. The tables were cleared away and the floor was already bare of rushes and swept clean. The fire was blazing up again, higher than before, with young Clarance watching it. “We scraped the dish out of the ashes and sent it to the silversmith, sir,” he reported, “with orders to melt it down completely and rework it. Master Gouvernail said best build up the fire here again and make sure all the fruit was well burned.”
“That blaze should do the work. You don’t have to put on more wood when that burns down. Do you happen to know which cellars the fruit came from?”
He shook his head. “No, sir. Someone from the kitchen—I’m not sure who, exactly—dug it up and carried it to the Queen. Her Grace wished to choose and arrange it herself, sir. And Doran—” (That was Coupnez’s real name.) “—carried the bowl here after Her Grace had arranged it.”
“As soon as your fire burns down,” I said, “find Coupnez and bring him to the kitchen. I’ll be wanting you, too.” Clarance was that rare bird, a reliable page.
I went down to the kitchen and found, as I expected, that everyone from Tychus Flaptongue and Chloda down to the mice had used the tragedy as an excuse to stop work for the more important business of gossip. Two or three scullions had little Tilda in tears, trying to use her kittens as tasters for suspicious scraps of food. Several more were clustered around old, one-eyed Rozennik, accusing her of bewitching the fruit when she dug it up. Grimpmains, who had recovered his stomach with wonderful speed, was sitting like a storyteller in a circle of rapt listeners, and Flaptongue was declaiming, in a voice that he probably hoped would reach the King himself but which in fact hardly carried above the clamor of his own kitchen, that no stew or soup of his seasoning had ever so much as given anyone wind-pains. What other mischief was going on I did not have the chance to see, since most of the noise and confusion stilled at my entrance.
I rescued Tilda’s kittens, ordered sound thrashings for her tormentors and those of old Rozennik, and told the entire kitchen staff that if the court went supperless that evening, so would they.
“Nay, then, sir,” said Chloda, who interprets the fact that she became chief cook a few days before I was made seneschal as grounds for questioning my judgment from time to time, “I doubt they’ll be in overmuch appetite for supper tonight, nor for livery neither.”
“Whether anyone has appetite for it or not, I want supper on the tables at the usual time, or you’ll go hungry tomorrow as well, if I have to brank every one of you myself. Now, what cellar did the fruit come from?”
Chloda folded her arms across her scrawny chest. “Nay, then, how would I know? I told Flaptongue to fetch it, or send folk to do it for him.”
“Flaptongue,” I said; and Tychus Flaptongue, who has been with us almost as long as Chloda and would probably be jealous if her were less afraid of responsibility, replied that he had sent Rozennik and helpers of her choosing to whatever cellar she liked.
The fruit pits were nearly emptied by this time of year, and it turned out that Rozennik and her helpers, Nat Torntunic and Wilkin, had visited several in order to find what the old woman considered a suitable bagful for Her Grace to choose from. Fortunately, they thought they would at least remember which cellars, if not which exact pits, they had visited. Leaving instructions for Clarance to follow us with Coupnez, we started for the storage cellars.
In the end, we visited all of them, since we found traces of digging in more pits than Rozennik and her scullions remembered. Wherever any ground seemed to have been recently turned, we dug in search of adders or their traces. We found none, but I took an apple or pear from each place we dug, except two pits that seemed completely emptied.
Clarance, pulling Coupnez along, did not find us until we were more than halfway finished with the task. The delay had been occasioned by Clarance’s trouble in locating the younger page. Although it was not the usual kind of work for noble-born pages, I set Clarance digging in my place with the scullions and watching for adder-traces, while I questioned Coupnez.
It was hard work—he seemed to think I was accusing him of poisoning the fruit, and I had to cuff him a couple of times and threaten him with being locked up alone overnight before I could get anything more than tearful and half-incoherent protests of innocence and pleas not to make him eat any fruit. What I finally learned, if it could be called learning, was that Coupnez had answered the Queen’s bell in her own antechamber, taken the bowl of apples and pears ready-arranged from her, and brought it at once to the small banquet chamber, where he had left it on a sideboard; and the chamber had already been full of servants setting things up.
Knowing Coupnez, I doubted he had gone straight from the Queen’s apartment to the banqueting chamber without stopping once or twice on the way to gawk at something or put his burden down and run or doze for a few moments. That, however, was his tale, and for once he kept to it. I suspected he was more afraid, this time, of being thought to have had anything to do with a knight’s death than of being punished for lying; but you can hardly rack a nobly-born infant, or even threaten him with more than a light whip, so in the end I had to accept his story and let him go without learning where or when he had loitered during his errand.
Having spent the afternoon in an unsuccessful quest for poisonous serpents, I left orders that all rats and mice should be left in their traps and brought to me alive early in the morning, instead of being killed at once. I locked the bag of fruit in my room and then, having already laid myself open to criticism from courtly tongues that would call it the first duty of a true knight to offer his last respects to a comrade’s corpse, I went to sup before visiting Sir Patrise in the chapel.
CHAPTER 6
Of the Blood Feuds of the Sons of Lot
“Wit thou well, sir knight, said they, we fear not to tell thee our names, for my name is Sir Agravaine, and my name is Gaheris, brethren unto the good knight Sir Gawaine, and we be nephews unto King Arthur. Well, said Sir Tristram, for King Arthur’s sake I shall let you pass as at this time. But it is shame, said Sir Tristram, that Sir Gawaine and ye be come of so great a blood that ye four brethren are so named as ye be, for ye be called the greatest destroyers and murderers of good knights that be now in this realm; for it is but as I heard say that Sir Gawaine and ye slew among you a better knight than ever ye were, that was the noble knight Sir Lamorak de Galis.”
—Malory X, 55
Mordred met me on the way to chapel. “We are gathering together after the burial,” he said, cleaning his fingernails with the tip of his knife as we walked. “All those