The Idylls of the Queen. Phyllis Ann Karr

“All right, King’s Nephew,” I said, “what pet surmises did you reach?”

      “None, as yet. But you may remember my notion—idle, perhaps—that a man with an uneasy conscience might watch the longest at his victim’s bier?”

      I nodded. “Mador, Bors de Ganis, your brothers Gawain and Gareth. A saint, a near-saint, the probable intended victim, and the dead man’s nearest kinsman. Persant stayed maybe half the night, too. I could hardly have chosen a less suspicious assortment.”

      “There was one other who stayed most of the night. Yourself, Sir Seneschal.”

      I thought about it for a moment and decided it was hardly worth the retort I was a little too tired to put into the right words. “And you, Mordred.”

      “And myself, intermittently. But the Queen has given me no cause to use poison.”

      I might have seized him by the throat, but he moved away. “If we are to play the game, Sir Seneschal,” he remarked, “we must begin with all the pieces. Pleasant dreams, King’s Brother.”

      I turned my back on him and walked away without returning the wish. He would come back to the subject later. He might even, eventually, have some thoughts to speak worth the hearing. Beneath that delight in pushing his listeners to the limit, he had a keen mind. If we traveled together seeking Lancelot, we would have time enough to talk things through, assuming we could keep from killing each other on the way.

      CHAPTER 7

      The Wife of Sir Gaheris of Orkney

      “And upon Michaelmas Day the Bishop of Canterbury made the wedding betwixt Sir Gareth and the Lady Lionesse with great solemnity. And King Arthur made Gaheris to wed the Damosel Savage, that was Dame Linet; and King Arthur made Sir Agravaine to wed Dame Lionesse’s niece, a fair lady, her name was Dame Laurel.”

      —Malory VII, 35

      I slept until prime and woke with the idea forming that if all else failed, I could act on one of Mordred’s hints and take the blame for the poisoning on myself. It would not be a glorious way to save the Queen, but it would be a surer way than for me to fight as her champion. Mador has kept himself in fighting trim, while, thanks to the other duties that have taken too much of my time, I am no longer the man of arms who killed two kings with one lance beside the Humber. If I fought the Queen’s fight against Mador and got myself killed, the only good result would be that I would no longer be there to watch her burn.

      In the end, it came to nothing; but for a time the idea of confessing had its charm—the ultimate in secret chivalry, if there can be such a thing as chivalry without glory. For a moment I considered making a confession at once and sparing Her Grace the weeks of doubt and uncertainty. But a mere confession of incompetence would carry no weight without some kind of proof, while the price of an open confession of malice aforethought would probably be death, without recourse, King’s foster-brother or not. I have never been suicidal, and the price of suicide is Hell.

      On the other hand, if someone would accuse me, if some line of reason or evidence would point strongly enough at me to persuade Mador to drop his accusation against the Queen and charge me instead, then I could fight my own combat cheerfully, win or die. There were still enough folk who remembered Arthur’s bastard Lohot, Dame Lyzianour’s son, and blamed me for treachery in his death, even though, in the lack of any other witness to the deed, no one quite dared accuse me in open court, especially with the King himself inclined to accept my word. It should not take overmuch to convince some gossipers that this new treachery also was my work. They might be whispering it already.

      The chief trouble with the scheme was that, although my taking the blame for Patrise’s death would save the Queen this time, it would leave the real traitor at large. Unless Patrise had been the intended victim, and the danger to the Queen only incidental, there would still be someone sneaking around court waiting for a new chance to strike against Gawain, or Her Grace, or maybe all of us in general. At best, it would leave unpunished a piece of scum who was willing to see Dame Guenevere burned for his own treachery.

      We had at least fifty-five days, time enough to reach Dame Nimue’s Lake and bring her back with three fortnights to spare, possibly even time enough to find Lancelot, if we had exceptionally good luck and he was easier to find than usual. I decided to keep my confession as a last measure, with the result that the secret, noble gesture died stillborn.

      Nat Torntunic brought me the rats and mice entrapped during the night—not as many as I had hoped, but they proved to be more than enough. I thought of turning the task of testing my bags of fruit over to Mordred, who would have enjoyed it; but he would probably have used cats and hounds instead of rats and mice, and I was not sure I could have trusted whatever results he told me. It occurred to me, rather late, that I should have marked exactly where each piece of fruit had come from; but, as it turned out, it would have made no difference. Not one of the mangy beasts burst its entrails and died from nibbling an apple or pear. The fruit in storage was safe. There had been no viper, no venomed earth. The stuff had been poisoned after being dug up.

      I could account for it from the time old Rozennik and her scullery-lads dug it up to the time Coupnez collected it, already arranged in its bowl, in the Queen’s antechamber. Gouvernail, Clarance, and others confirmed that there had been servants in the small banquet chamber from the time Coupnez brought in the fruit to the time the Queen and her guests arrived. Therefore, it must have been poisoned between the time Coupnez left the Queen’s apartment and the time he arrived in the banquet chamber. The little wretch had either taken it to someone—likely for the bribe of some silly trifle—or put it down somewhere while he played or dawdled. At this point, I was angry enough to have racked the truth out of him, Earl’s son or not, child or not, Arthur’s and the court’s outrage or not—but probably it would have done no good, since the greater chance was that Coupnez had set the bowl down and the fruit had been poisoned while he was not watching. It would hardly have been of much use to question Coupnez straitly if all he could confess was leaving his bowl of apples and pears unwatched for a few moments in a place where we should have had nothing to fear.

      I could envision someone creeping up behind Coupnez’s back with a long, thin, envenomed pin, or even a bag of ready-poisoned fruit to substitute for the good… but I could not envision the traitor’s face.

      During the burial I tried to watch all my fellow mourners, and thought I saw a few of them watching me, but with no better results than on the former occasions. Suspicious glances darted around like gnats at the meal afterwards, too, but if anyone else had any insights or revelations, he failed to share them with me.

      A seat at the Round Table can be empty in a number of different ways: because the man who used to sit there is known dead of battle wounds or sickness and his place has not yet been refilled; because he is presumed dead but nothing can be done about filling his seat until the fact of his death is documented; because he is away on some quest or errand but was alive at last report; because he has chosen to stay away from court at his own castle or on his own adventures, like that noble bladder of half-cooked valor, Prince Tristram of Lyonesse, or like Pelleas the occasional brilliant dabbler in knightly combat; because he is in infirmary or his own bedchamber with a wound sustained in the latest jousting or simply with an ague. The Siege Perilous is empty because Heaven allows no one else except Galahad to sit there, and Galahad only used it a few days before going off to his Grail and holy death. That Siege Perilous has been useless lumber for most of its existence, a permanent gap with a golden chain stretched from arm to arm across its seat to prevent accidents. We used to debate whether the chair was deadly in itself or because of its position at the Table—if it were removed, and another chair put in its place, would fire still fall on whoever sat in the new chair at Lancelot’s right hand, or would it fall on anyone who sat in the old Siege Perilous wherever that was placed, or would it fall on both chairs, or on neither? But although it is fine and noble to risk a few hundred men’s lives at a tournament, it has never been judged worth the risk of one man’s life to find out whether, by substituting another chair for the Siege Perilous, we could fill the gap and gain another Companion of the Round Table. (An animal would be worthless for the test. We used to have an old brindled cat in Carlisle that loved to jump up under