The Once and Future King. T. H. White

places.’

      ‘Is there anything happening just now, anything that Kay and I could go to see?’

      Merlyn immediately struck himself on the brow and exclaimed excitedly, ‘Now I see it all. Yes, of course there is, and you are going to see it. Yes, you must take Kay and hurry up about it. You must go immediately after Mass. Have breakfast first and go immediately after Mass. Yes, that is it. Go straight to Hob’s strip of barley in the open field and follow that line until you come to something. That will be splendid, yes, and I shall have a nap this afternoon instead of those filthy Summulae Logicales. Or have I had the nap?’

      ‘You have not had it,’ said Archimedes. ‘That is still in the future, Master.’

      ‘Splendid, splendid. And mind, Wart, don’t forget to take Kay with you so that I can have my nap.’

      ‘What shall we see?’ asked the Wart.

      ‘Ah, don’t plague me about a little thing like that. You run along now, there’s a good boy, and mind you don’t forget to take Kay with you. Why ever didn’t you mention it before? Don’t forget to follow beyond the strip of barley. Well, well, well! This is the first half-holiday I have had since I started this confounded tutorship. First I think I shall have a little nap before luncheon, and then I think I shall have a little nap before tea. Then I shall have to think of something I can do before dinner. What shall I do before dinner, Archimedes?’

      ‘Have a little nap, I expect,’ said the owl coldly, turning his back upon his master, because he, as well as the Wart, enjoyed to see life.

Chapter X

      Wart knew that if he told the elder boy about his conversation with Merlyn, Kay would refuse to be condescended to, and would not come. So he said nothing. It was strange, but their battle had made them friends again, and each could look the other in the eye, with a kind of confused affection. They went together unanimously though shyly, without explanations, and found themselves standing at the end of Hob’s barley strip after Mass. The Wart had no need to use ingenuity. When they were there it was easy.

      ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘Merlyn told me to tell you that there was something along here that was specially for you.’

      ‘What sort of thing?’ asked Kay.

      ‘An adventure.’

      ‘How do we get to it?’

      ‘We ought to follow the line which this strip makes, and I suppose that would take us into the forest. We should have to keep the sun just there on our left, but allow for it moving.’

      ‘All right,’ said Kay. ‘What is the adventure?’

      ‘I don’t know.’

      They went along the strip, and followed its imaginary line over the park and over the chase, keeping their eyes skinned for some miraculous happening. They wondered whether half a dozen young pheasants they started had anything curious about them and Kay was ready to swear that one of them was white. If it had been white, and if a black eagle had suddenly swooped down upon it from the sky, they would have known quite well that wonders were afoot, and that all they had to do was to follow the pheasant – or the eagle – until they reached the maiden in the enchanted castle. However, the pheasant was not white.

      At the edge of the forest Kay said, ‘I suppose we shall have to go into this?’

      ‘Merlyn said to follow the line.’

      ‘Well,’ said Kay, ‘I am not afraid. If the adventure was for me, it is bound to be a good one.’

      They went in, and were surprised to find that the going was not bad. It was about the same as a big wood might be nowadays, whereas the common forest of those times was like a jungle on the Amazon. There were no pheasant-shooting proprietors then, to see that the undergrowth was thinned, and not one thousandth part of the number of the present-day timber merchants who prune judiciously at the few remaining woods. The most of the Forest Sauvage was almost impenetrable, an enormous barrier of eternal trees, the dead ones fallen against the live and held to them by ivy, the living struggling up in competition with each other toward the sun which gave them life, the floor boggy through lack of drainage, or tindery from old wood so that you might suddenly tumble through a decayed tree trunk into an ants’ nest, or laced with brambles and bindweed and honeysuckle and convolvulus and teazles and the stuff which country people call sweethearts, until you would be torn to pieces in three yards.

      This part was good. Hob’s line pointed down what seemed to be a succession of glades, shady and murmuring places in which the wild thyme was droning with bees. The insect season was past its peak, for it was really the time for wasps and fruit; but there were many fritillaries still, with tortoiseshells and red admirals on the flowering mint. Wart pulled a leaf of this, and munched it like chewing-gum as they walked.

      ‘It is queer,’ he said, ‘but there have been people here. Look, there is a hoof-mark, and it was shod.’

      ‘You don’t see much,’ said Kay, ‘for there is a man.’

      Sure enough, there was a man at the end of the next glade, sitting with a wood-axe by the side of a tree which he had felled. He was a queer-looking, tiny man, with a hunchback and a face like mahogany, and he was dressed in numerous pieces of old leather which he had secured about his brawny legs and arms with pieces of cord. He was eating a lump of bread and sheep’s-milk cheese with a knife which years of sharpening had worn into a mere streak, leaning his back against one of the highest trees they had ever seen. The white flakes of wood lay all about him. The dressed stump of the felled tree looked very new. His eyes were bright like a fox’s.

      ‘I expect he will be the adventure,’ whispered Wart.

      ‘Pooh,’ said Kay, ‘you have knights-in-armour, or dragons, or things like that in an adventure, not dirty old men cutting wood.’

      ‘Well, I am going to ask him what happens along here, anyway.’

      They went up to the small munching woodman, who did not seem to have seen them, and asked him where the glades were leading to. They asked two or three times before they discovered that the poor fellow was either deaf or mad, or both. He neither answered nor moved.

      ‘Oh, come on,’ said Kay. ‘He is probably loopy like Wat, and does not know what he is at. Let’s go on and leave the old fool.’

      They went on for nearly a mile, and still the going was good. There were no paths exactly, and the glades were not continuous. Anybody who came there by chance would have thought that there was just the one glade which he was in, a couple of hundred yards long, unless he went to the end of it and discovered another one, screened by a few trees. Now and then they found a stump with the marks of an axe on it, but mostly these had been carefully covered with brambles or altogether grubbed up. The Wart considered that the glades must have been made.

      Kay caught the Wart by the arm, at the edge of a clearing, and pointed silently toward its further end. There was a grassy bank there, swelling gently to a gigantic sycamore, upward of ninety feet high, which stood upon its top. On the bank there was an equally gigantic man lying at his ease, with a dog beside him. This man was as notable as the sycamore, for he stood or lay seven feet without his shoes, and he was dressed in nothing but a kind of kilt made of Lincoln green worsted. He had a leather bracer on his left forearm. His enormous brown chest supported the dog’s head – it had pricked its ears and was watching the boys, but had made no other movement – which the muscles gently lifted as they rose and fell. The man appeared to be asleep. There was a seven-foot bow beside him, with some arrows more than a cloth-yard long. He, like the woodman, was the colour of mahogany, and the curled hairs on his chest made a golden haze where the sun caught them.

      ‘He is it,’ whispered Kay excitedly.

      They went to the man cautiously, for fear of the dog. But the dog only followed them with its eyes, keeping its chin pressed firmly to the chest of its beloved