The Idylls of the Queen. Phyllis Ann Karr

to speak. Ihesu! to see her reduced to this!

      “Think, Mador,” I said quickly. “Twenty-four knights here, four ladies and Gouvernail to serve us, not to mention the cooks and scullions—it could have been any one of us trying to murder any other one of us!”

      “I rather like the idea of someone attempting to murder us all at a stroke.” Mordred leaned back in his chair and lifted his goblet to his mouth.

      “You have not lost a kinsman, neither of you!” Mador shook his fist at the Queen. “I will be revenged for his death, madame—by Ihesu and His Holy Mother, I will be revenged! If I must renounce my allegiance to do it, I will prove your treachery with my body!”

      Again Dame Guenevere tried to speak, but her cousin had to speak for her. “She will not lack champions, my lord Sir Mador!” Elyzabel looked around at all of us, her temper rising. This was the woman who had once brazened it out with King Claudas of France. “Which of you will champion the Queen, my lords? You do not all believe Sir Mador’s lies? Which of you will fight for her? Sweet Mother Mary, must I put on armor myself and prove that Heaven aids the just cause?”

      Palomides, who has fought in as many women’s quarrels as has Lancelot, and almost as many as Gawain himself, lifted his knife and drove it heavily into the table before him. “Good Dame Elyzabel, think not that we do not pray for the Queen’s innocence and happy deliverance. But it is not for us to fight in her cause.” The old Saracen sat down and buried his face in his hands. He was right. Whichever of us here present fought for the Queen as good as confessed himself her accomplice, a poisoner.

      All my life, I have craved and prayed for at least one more chance to fight for Her Grace, hating Lancelot, as I would have hated Gawain or anyone else who took her battle away from me time after time. And now, when Lancelot was not at hand to take it on himself, when God and Lancelot along knew where Lancelot had been for the last week, neither I, nor Gawain, Palomides nor Persant nor any of the rest of us were able to take up her quarrel!

      “There is cousin Ywain of the Lion, of course,” said Mordred, glancing around as if to take stock of who was here and who was not. “I rather wondered why he was not among us; dining with the King seemed rather a feeble reason. Or there is Sir Lucan the Butler—he knows food. We might perhaps entice the good Sir Pelleas up from the arms of the beautiful Nimue in their Lake retreat. Or we might send for Mark of Cornwall. As I remember, King Mark once defended himself very ably in an unjust cause.”

      “Damn you, Mordred,” I said. The Queen had fainted.

      Gouvernail and three of her ladies carried her away to her own chamber. Dame Lore of Carlisle remained in the small banquet room with us. Maybe she thought to defend the Queen’s interests here.

      I looked around, counting pages. “Where in God’s Name is Grimpmains?”

      “Sick, sir,” said Clarance, one of the older lads, looking none too well himself.

      “All right, Clarance,” I said, “go summon the King.”

      CHAPTER 2

      Of Gawain’s Faction and Lancelot’s

      “Sir, said they, here is a knight of this castle that hath been long among us, and right now he is slain with two knights, and for none other cause but that our knight said that Sir Lancelot were a better knight than Sir Gawaine.”

      —Malory X, 55

      I sent the rest of the pages out for more clean water. We would all want to wash our hands with greater care than customary. I hoped that her ladies would bathe the Queen, and that the younger pages, who had probably been poking around at the fruit, would remember to keep their fingers out of their mouths.

      Mador cleared his own table with sweeps of his sword arm. Safere and Galihud carried Patrise’s body over and laid it on the cleared space. Composing his cousin’s limbs, Mador set up an Irish keening for him. The rest took their seats again. Here and there a low, uneasy conversation began. Coupnez brought the basin and ewer I had called for, and I began to wash my hands, looking around the tables in their semi-circular arrangement.

      Why would anyone want to kill Patrise of Ireland this way? It made far better sense to assume that Patrise had eaten a piece of fruit intended for Gawain.

      Gawain the Golden-Tongued and Golden-Haired—prince of chivalry, courtesy, manhood, and all the rest of it, who had fought his glorious way through four decades without catching a battle-scar on the face so many ladies loved—now sat with his broad shoulders hunched together, an uncustomary pose for him. God knows Gawain has been in his share of blood feuds over the years. He might have achieved the Grail if he had been less set, once on a time, on avenging the deaths of his father and mother. But Gawain always makes a point of striking his enemies down in fair fight. The idea that some traitor had tried to burst his insides with poison was going to turn several more of his hairs from gold to gray.

      Revenge was not the only reason someone might have had to attack Gawain the coward’s way. It might also have been jealousy on behalf of Lancelot or one of the other few men who might still be considered Gawain’s rivals in glory. Gawain and Lancelot themselves have always been loyal friends: Arthur’s favorite nephew and Arthur’s greatest adventurer. But the respective followers of Lancelot and Gawain are not always so friendly. Bloody at worst and backbiting at best, the factions have plagued us since Lancelot first came across the Channel from France; and if Lancelot had not come, Gawain’s detractors would probably have attached themselves to Lamorak de Galis, Tristram, or anyone else who was on hand.

      Those of Gawain’s supporters here present consisted chiefly of his four brothers. I hardly glanced at Gareth Beaumains, the next to the youngest, the favorite (Gawain’s, Lancelot’s, and almost everybody else’s), the wide-eyed and simple-souled, possibly the nearest thing to a saintly knight Arthur had left, unless you counted Bors de Ganis.

      But Mordred, the youngest of all Lot’s sons, sitting there now at a nearly empty table, slowly turning his knife as if he were considering licking off the dried juice… What in Ihesu’s Holy Name had happened to Mordred? He had come to court at twenty years of age, honestly and eagerly, been dubbed knight at once and elected to the Round Table after a year, not solely, like more recent companions, on the strength of his kinsmen and friends. We all thought Mordred was on his way to being the best of the five brothers. The ladies delighted in him—high forehead, graceful nose, delicate lips, gold hair, strong back—handsome as Gawain and considerably younger.

      Then, at twenty-two, he changed overnight. Popular speculation said his brains had been scrambled in the tournament at Peningues, where he fought like a devil and was almost left for dead on the field. But I had been friendly enough with Mordred during those first two, good years. His wit was much like mine even then. And I was one of the few to stay fairly close to him, as close as he allowed anyone to come. It was not his brains that had been scrambled, it was his soul. Tournament fighting alone, no matter how rough, does not do that to a man.

      The next to the oldest of Lot’s sons, Agravain the Beautiful, whose face must have made a good number of women envious, was the only man among us who looked, not grieved or alarmed, but bored. As for Gaheris, who was at least making the effort to look commiserating, he had always seemed caught in the middle in more respects than age alone. Capable, blond, and handsome like all his brothers, he was the only one of them to be embarrassed by a slight deformity. His right arm was overlong. Aside from its length, it was well-formed and shapely, and his mother used to call it a sign that he had been especially formed to wield a weapon. Since her death, he would allow no one else to mention his right arm. But even now, well past the middle of his threescore and ten, he seemed not to have made up his mind whether to veer toward Gawain and Gareth or toward Agravain and Mordred. He did not gossip and preen himself like Agravain, and in his taciturn way he pursued justice as fervidly as Gawain; but he cultivated none of Gawain’s and Gareth’s social graces. Still, perhaps I should have taken Gaheris for my courtly model. He was no general favorite, but because he kept silent instead of voicing his thoughts, no one spoke ill of his manners, either.

      These were Gawain’s brothers and supporters; and one of them, Gareth Beaumains,