The Once and Future King. T. H. White

birds are sweeter

       But the valley birds are fatter,

       And so we deemed it meeter

       To carry off the latter.

       We met a cowering coney

       And struck him through the vitals.

       The Coney was like honey

       And squealed our requitals.

       Some struck the lark in feathers

       Whose puffing clouds were shed off.

       Some plucked the partridge’s nethers,

       While others pulled his head off.

       But Wart the King of Merlins

       Struck foot most far before us.

       His birds and beasts

       Supply our feasts,

       And his feats our glorious chorus!

      ‘Mark my words,’ cried the beautiful Balan, ‘we shall have a regular king in that young candidate. Now, boys, chorus altogether for the last time’:

       But Wart the King of Merlins

       Struck foot most far before us.

       His birds and beasts

       Supply our feasts,

       And his feats our glorious chorus!

Chapter IX

      ‘Well!’ said the Wart, as he woke up in his own bed next morning. ‘What a horrible, grand crew!’

      Kay sat up in bed and began scolding like a squirrel. ‘Where were you last night?’ he cried. ‘I believe you climbed out. I shall tell my father and get you tanned. You know we are not allowed out after curfew. What have you been doing? I looked for you everywhere. I know you climbed out.’

      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.