The Once and Future King. T. H. White

you tell me the way back to his castle?’

      ‘Faintest idea. Stranger in these parts meself.’

      ‘I am lost,’ said the Wart.

      ‘Funny thing that. Now I have been lost for seventeen years.

      ‘Name of King Pellinore,’ continued the Knight. ‘May have heard of me, what?’ The visor shut with a pop, like an echo to the What, but was opened again immediately. ‘Seventeen years ago, come Michaelmas, and been after the Questing Beast ever since. Boring, very.’

      ‘I should think it would be,’ said the Wart, who had never heard of King Pellinore, nor of the Questing Beast, but he felt that this was the safest thing to say in the circumstances.

      ‘It is the Burden of the Pellinores,’ said the King proudly. ‘Only a Pellinore can catch it – that is, of course, or his next of kin. Train all the Pellinores with that idea in mind. Limited eddication, rather. Fewmets, and all that.’

      ‘I know what fewmets are,’ said the boy with interest. ‘They are the droppings of the beast pursued. The harbourer keeps them in his horn, to show to his master, and can tell by them whether it is a warrantable beast or otherwise, and what state it is in.’

      ‘Intelligent child,’ remarked the King. ‘Very. Now I carry fewmets about with me practically all the time.

      ‘Insanitary habit,’ he added, beginning to look dejected, ‘and quite pointless. Only one Questing Beast, you know, so there can’t be any question whether she is warrantable or not.’

      Here his visor began to droop so much that the Wart decided he had better forget his own troubles and try to cheer his companion, by asking questions on the one subject about which he seemed qualified to speak. Even talking to a lost royalty was better than being alone in the wood.

      ‘What does the Questing Beast look like?’

      ‘Ah, we call it the Beast Glatisant, you know,’ replied the monarch, assuming a learned air and beginning to speak quite volubly. ‘Now the Beast Glatisant, or, as we say in English, the Questing Beast – you may call it either,’ he added graciously – ‘this Beast has the head of a serpent, ah, and the body of a libbard, the haunches of a lion, and he is footed like a hart. Wherever this beast goes he makes a noise in his belly as it had been the noise of thirty couple of hounds questing.

      ‘Except when he is drinking, of course,’ added the King.

      ‘It must be a dreadful kind of monster,’ said the Wart, looking about him anxiously.

      ‘A dreadful monster,’ repeated the King. ‘It is the Beast Glatisant.’

      ‘And how do you follow it?’

      This seemed to be the wrong question, for Pellinore began to look even more depressed.

      ‘I have a brachet,’ he said sadly. ‘There she is, over there.’

      The Wart looked in the direction which had been indicated with a despondent thumb, and saw a lot of rope wound round a tree. The other end of the rope was tied to King Pellinore’s saddle.

      ‘I do not see her very well.’

      ‘Wound herself round the other side, I dare say. She always goes the opposite way from me.’

      The Wart went over to the tree and found a large white dog scratching herself for fleas. As soon as she saw the Wart, she began wagging her whole body, grinning vacuously, and panting in her efforts to lick his face, in spite of the cord. She was too tangled up to move.

      ‘It’s quite a good brachet,’ said King Pellinore, ‘only it pants so, and gets wound round things, and goes the opposite way. What with that and the visor, what, I sometimes don’t know which way to turn.’

      ‘Why don’t you let her loose?’ asked the Wart. ‘She would follow the Beast just as well like that.’

      ‘She goes away then, you see, and I don’t see her sometimes for a week.

      ‘Gets a bit lonely without her,’ added the King, ‘following the Beast about, and never knowing where one is. Makes a bit of company, you know.’

      ‘She seems to have a friendly nature.’

      ‘Too friendly. Sometimes I doubt whether she is really chasing the Beast at all.’

      ‘What does she do when she sees it?’

      ‘Nothing.’

      ‘Oh, well,’ said the Wart. ‘I dare say she will get to be interested in it after a time.’

      ‘It is eight months, anyway, since we saw the Beast at all.’

      The poor fellow’s voice had grown sadder and sadder since the beginning of the conversation, and now he definitely began to snuffle. ‘It is the curse of the Pellinores,’ he exclaimed. ‘Always mollocking about after that beastly Beast. What on earth use is she, anyway? First you have to stop to unwind the brachet, then your visor falls down, then you can’t see through your spectacles. Nowhere to sleep, never know where you are. Rheumatism in the winter, sunstroke in the summer. All this horrid armour takes hours to put on. When it is on it’s either frying or freezing, and it gets rusty. You have to sit up all night polishing the stuff. Oh, how I do wish I had a nice house of my own to live in, a house with beds in it and real pillows and sheets. If I was rich that’s what I would buy. A nice bed with a nice pillow and a nice sheet that you could lie in, and then I would put this beastly horse in a meadow and tell that beastly brachet to run away and play, and throw all this beastly armour out of the window, and let the beastly Beast go and chase himself – that I would.’

      ‘If you could show me the way home,’ said the Wart craftily, ‘I am sure Sir Ector would put you up in a bed for the night.’

      ‘Do you really mean it?’ cried the King. ‘In a bed?’

      ‘A feather bed.’

      King Pellinore’s eyes grew round as saucers. ‘A feather bed!’ he repeated slowly. ‘Would it have pillows?’

      ‘Down pillows.’

      ‘Down pillows!’ whispered the King, holding his breath. And then, letting it out in one rush, ‘What a lovely house your gentleman must have!’

      ‘I do not think it is more than two hours away,’ said the Wart, following up his advantage.

      ‘And did this gentleman really send you out to invite me in?’ (He had forgotten about the Wart being lost.) ‘How nice of him, how very nice of him, I do think, what?’

      ‘He will be pleased to see us,’ said the Wart truthfully.

      ‘Oh, how nice of him,’ exclaimed the King again, beginning to bustle about with his various trappings. ‘And what a lovely gentleman he must be to have a feather bed!

      ‘I suppose I should have to share it with somebody?’ he added doubtfully.

      ‘You could have one of your own.’

      ‘A feather bed of one’s very own, with sheets and a pillow – perhaps even two pillows, or a pillow and a bolster – and no need to get up in time for breakfast! Does your guardian get up in time for breakfast?’

      ‘Never,’ said the Wart.

      ‘Fleas in the bed?’

      ‘Not one.’

      ‘Well!’ said King Pellinore. ‘It does sound too nice for words, I must say. A feather bed and none of those fewmets for ever so long. How long did you say it would take us to get there?’

      ‘Two hours,’ said the Wart – but he had to shout the second of these words, for the sounds were drowned in his mouth by a noise which had that moment arisen close beside them.

      ‘What was that?’ exclaimed the Wart.

      ‘Hark!’