Work Text:
O God! If I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell
and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise.
-Rabi’a
It was a wet morning, and Sir Palomides was riding through the fog of the Cornish coast towards the great castle of Tintagel. I wish we could have Mr. White here to tell this part of the story. It would be all craggy cliffs and gulls soaring over the grey sea, and the mist hanging over the rugged, shrubby hedges on either side of the road. It would be wild and romantic, like Burne-Jones’s pictures of Sir Tristram.
But we can’t have Mr. White, and truth be told, he might be too English for the story you are about to read anyway. Looking at Palomides through the eyes of an Englishman might turn out to be like peering through a telescope while holding it the wrong way round. Through this particular telescope, you may behold the mysterious East, its harems packed with odalisques in silk, its Saracen raiders massed by thousands in the pass at Roncesvalles, and looming over it all the great idol Termagant, decked with gold and fire-red jewelry.
And even looking past all this pageantry, the East, to an Englishman, might scarcely seem homely or comfortable. Sir Gawaine, if he had ever gone to Jerusalem, as he always meant to do but never managed, would have burst out in a prickly heat under his collar by seven o’clock every morning and turned red as a boiled lobster by noon. Even Sir Lancelot, who was French, and tanned in the summer instead of going pink, would not have found it relaxing.
If you were to sweep this telescope of ours across the countryside, the peasants in the fields would come out as so many assassins sent out by the Old Man of the Mountain with daggers in their sleeves and little vials of poison tucked into their turbans. Some of the crusaders tried to be nice to them where they could, if only in the hope that they would convert, but there were plenty of others who had no scruples about killing and robbing. At the siege of Jerusalem, Raymond of Aguilers wrote that the blood flowed in the courtyard of the Temple Mount till it came up to his bridle reins— and remember, this was the great victory for which church bells rang all over Christendom.
Sir Palomides had a kind of telescope of his own, but it pointed the other way. If we examine King Arthur and his cozy little island through it, we might begin to see why he had so much trouble with the place for years and years. He was never quite warm enough, for a start. In the middle of a perfectly lovely summer afternoon, he would suddenly remember how it felt to sit in a shady terrace under a grape arbor, in the full heat of the day that makes everything still and languid, listening to a fountain trickling pleasantly beside him, and for a moment, he would catch his cloak about him as if his blood were frozen. Or he would be riding through a meadow like a millefleur tapestry, bursting with daisies and primroses, and into his mind would come all the different shades of red and tawny-brown of rocks in the desert, and how they used to glow under the dawn light coming up over the hills, and cry of the muezzins from their minarets, “Prayer is better than sleep, prayer is better than sleep!”
It was not just the color of his skin that was out of place in England (although Sir Tristram was rather beastly to him about it at times) but his thoughts. It is very hard for a man to fit in somewhere, if he feels he oughtn’t. And despite knowing very well that he could always get himself christened and settle down in a little castle next door to the Pellinores, or else sail back to the Holy Land and be a proper Saracen, he was always worrying himself sick about where he belonged, and the upshot was that he spent ages feeling he didn’t belong anywhere, and following the Questing Beast from one place to another, and making himself utterly miserable.
On this particular morning, he had noticed nothing of the Burne-Jones touches of the scenery. He felt wretched, and if he had raised his head sufficiently to see the fog, or the sea cliffs, he would only have grumbled that they made the road slippery and somebody ought to do something about it. He had rescued a damsel from one of the old raiding knights— this one’s name was Sir Goneries— and smote off his head, and the damsel had fallen instantly in love with him, which would have been all very well except that when he took off his helmet and introduced himself, she said very plainly that she had changed her mind, and if it came to being rescued by a paynim, she had rather not have been rescued at all.
“Well, er, yours truly must beg pardon,” said Palomides. “It’s too late to un-rescue anyone at the moment, though it might be possible to find another bad knight somewhere, if that would be of service.”
“And to think you tried to trick me into falling in love with you!”
“Nothing of the sort!” protested Palomides. Feeling that this was insufficient, he stammered on. “Yours truly is already spoken for, you know. By a rare— that is, a fair— a rare fair lady of beauty and bounty and, and mirth. And goodness. Also there is the Questing Beast to be, er, quested for. Immediately.”
He looked down at his brachet (he had gotten one from King Pellinore as a present when the old one had littered) and for a wonder, she pricked up her ears and began to tug at the leash as if eager to be off. It was probably a rabbit or something she was after— she had inherited all her dam’s muddleheadedness— but he could have kissed her for it.
As he rode along the track to Tintagel, all he could think of was that he ought to have lady-love— a love in the high, courtly manner, that he could write poems about, and fight on behalf of, and get nothing in return but maybe someday a kind word or two. If he had such a love, and it was well-known that he had one, he would never have to explain himself to a damsel ever again. In such a mood, he trotted along into a wood that grew dim and tangled on either side of the track. Tied to a tree in the middle of it was a woman.
“Look here,” he said. “Would you like— that is, do you think yours truly might be of some assistance?”
“Some assistance!” said the woman. Definitely a woman, unfortunately. She was far too old and sensibly dressed to be a damsel. “Any kind of assistance you might give would be much appreciated, to be sure. Perhaps if you think it over, you could come up with something.”
“The thing is,” said Palomides. “Yours truly is of a Saracenical persuasion, and understands that perhaps, under the circumstances, one would prefer not to be indebted to one of the faithful, which in your terms, of course, would mean an infidel, but either way, if you would prefer—”
“Don’t blither,” said the woman. “La Beale Isoud blithers. I came out here with some of the maids to avoid her— she was in one of her moods again— and then the maids said I was always her favorite, which is true, by the by, she plays favorites terribly, and they said it wasn’t fair and they were going to tie me to a tree as punishment. I would sympathize more with them if it hadn’t been for that last part. I didn’t ask to be her favorite.”
“Just to be clear, then, yours truly ought to untie you?”
“Ass!”
He took this as permission to cut her free, and she stood up, rubbing her wrists and ankles angrily.
“That’s better,” she said. “Call me Brangwaine. And you’d better help me up behind you— there’s plenty of room— and then there’s a nice little nunnery just down the road.”
“Not Tintagel?”
“If I’d meant Tintagel, I would have said so. The nunnery, please, and a few days of peace and quiet away from her.”
What Sir Palomides should have taken from this was that Tintagel was a place best avoided, and La Beale Isoud no more healthy a lady-love than a horned desert viper would have been. What he did take from it was that she was beautiful, and of high degree, and exceedingly demanding. And he resolved then and there to be in love with her, for it seemed she suited his purpose to a tee.
When he finally arrived to Tintagel Castle and sat down to an unimpressive dinner (King Mark being not only a coward and the most famous cuckold in Britain, but a dismally poor host to boot), La Beale Isoud was seated at the head of the table. The sight of her confirmed all his expectations. Malory calls her La Beale Isoud, of course, but you might have wondered if she were really quite plain, and had the the title merely a matter of convention, to distinguish her from Isoud White-Hands. Or you might have imagined her in the mold of Queen Guenevere, or Eleanor of Aquitaine: a woman who would be renowned for her beauty even as an elderly nun, not because of her face but because she was forceful and clever and self-possessed. La Beale Isoud was neither of these. Her beauty was not a mere epithet, nor a fact of her character. It was a fragile, delicate loveliness, like a blown-glass rose, or a cherry tree blooming in April.
The next step in his plan was to declare himself enamored with her, and in as striking a manner as he could. That would solve all his problems with damsels. It was the idea about dressing up as the Questing Beast all over again— he could never stop trying to solve small problems with bigger ones. It was not difficult to tell what to say to her; even as far down the table as he was sitting (having come in late, and being a paynim, he had not been seated with the quality), he could hear her complaining. Brangwaine wasn’t there to slice her meat, and the page who was doing it had murdered it all to shreds, and wouldn’t he cut a slice for her little lap dog and try not to tear at it so. Brangwaine wasn’t there to pour her wine, and her cup had gone dry ages ago. Sir Tristram would have known where Brangwaine was, but he had been terribly hard-hearted and gone off on a quest or something and left her all alone, with no true knights to attend her, and now Brangwaine had gone too, and she had no help at all.
And so he stood up and in front of the whole company declared, in the highest speech he could manage, “Madam Isoud, an ye will grant me my boon, I shall bring to you Dame Bragwaine safe and sound.”
She accepted his offer, of course, with no more thought than a trout taking a fly— she had been irritable all evening, and eager for any chance to make herself the center of attention. King Mark would have asked to hear the boon beforehand. But he hadn’t been listening. He spent his evenings swilling wine (the pages knew very well not to let his cup go dry), muttering into his beard, and eating bites of meat off the point of his knife, which, as the Book of Courtesy advises us, is not generally done in good company.
Palomides came back with Brangwaine barely an hour later; the nunnery was not very far, and in fact, the hardest part of the quest had been the number of times he had been called an ass, and a cruel wicked man who would take an honest woman from the bosom of God and deliver her up to be blithered at. He entered the hall leading Brangwaine by the hand, and knelt down in front of King Mark.
“Sir,” he said, putting on the high speech again, “I promised your Queen Isoud to bring again Dame Bragwaine that she had lost, upon this covenant, that she should grant me a boon that I would ask, and without grudging, outher advisement, she granted me.”
“What say ye, my lady?” said the king.
Palomides began to gather that the king had not stopped drinking while he was away. He was speaking clearly enough, as some men who get drunk habitually can manage, but without seeming to pay much attention.
“It is as he saith, so God me help,” said the queen.
“Well, Madam,” said the king, “And if ye were hasty to grant him what boon he would ask, I will well that ye perform your promise.”
“Then,” said Palomides, “I will that ye wit that I will have your queen to lead her and govern her whereas me list.”
The entire room fell silent. Palomides began to feel the plan was working. He was being taken seriously, and would probably have to fight a duel or something, and it would add to his reputation no end. But while everyone else sat aghast, waiting for the outburst that surely had to be coming, King Mark did not seem overly concerned. He popped another bite of meat into his mouth and chewed at it, muttering something inaudible.
“Er,” said Palomides. “I couldn’t quite make that out.”
“Take her,” said the king. “Take her with the adventures that shall fall of it, for as I suppose thou wilt not enjoy her no while.”
“What?” said La Beale Isoud. “But he’s a Saracen!”
“Page,” said King Mark. “My cup is empty.”
There is not much to be said for King Mark, but he did have a plan to get his wife back, which was to make Sir Tristram rescue her. It was his typical kind of stratagem, and one which reflected very poorly on him. He was not, like Arthur with Lancelot, letting his friend do what he as king could not do himself. He and Tristram were not friends. He hated Tristram, but since none of the other Cornish knights had much skill at arms, he needed him more than he hated him. He would send him out again and again, against giants and robbers and once or twice an entire army of Saxons who had drawn up in battle array to ask for protection money.
He was both glad and sorry that Tristram came home victorious every time. He would have loathed paying the protection money, but the speeches of thanksgiving he had to make when he returned ate at him like a canker. In his heart of hearts, he would have paid the Saxons anything in his possession for the pure joy of seeing Tristram dead. But he kept on making use of his rival, and hating him, and telling himself the whole arrangement was ‘economical’ and therefore virtuous.
No sooner had Palomides and La Beale Isoud ridden out into the damp again than Mark sent for his champion. Tristram was out hunting, something he was especially good at. (Malory tells us several times that he wrote a book of venery, which was full of the etiquette of the chase and not very sound on actually catching anything. It was extremely popular, but Robin Hood would have turned his nose up at it.) He had to be fetched back, and then he insisted on bathing and being armed, with a shield with his proper device on it (Vert, a lion rampant or, armed and langued gules, in case you are wondering) so that everyone would know who he was.
While all this was going on, Palomides and La Beale Isoud were passing the night at a little hermitage. He was growing increasingly frustrated. When he had unrolled a little carpet from behind his saddle to make his evening devotions, she had chattered the entire time about what a pity it was that a brave knight should worship the devil, to which he had replied in as courtly a manner as he knew how. In the morning, she was all smiles again and asked him for little favors: he had given her his share of the hermit’s meager breakfast, and held her dainty little foot as she mounted her palfrey. But then as they rode along, she said airily that she hoped someday Sir Tristram could go on Crusade to Jerusalem, to kill ever so many infidels to prove his love for her, but that killing Sir Palomides would be almost as good.
“Don’t you think so?” she added.
“Yours truly could not say one way or the other,” said Palomides, trying to avoid sounding brusque. When at last he spotted a knight on horseback catching up with them, he was really quite relieved at the thought of being rid of her. Sadly, it was not Tristram himself but one of his hangers-on, called Sir Lambegus.
Palomides had been looking forward to fighting a knight of repute, to whom he could surrender La Beale Isoud without damage to his reputation. Faced with someone entirely out of his league, he gave in to his frustration in a rather ungentlemanly manner, throwing Lambegus over the crupper of his saddle and then, when he got up again, smashing him in the head with his sword, hard, so that he spent most of the next month in bed having dizzy spells. No sooner had he disposed of Lambegus than Sir Adtherp, who was an equally undistinguished combatant, insisted on trying to avenge him and was handled just as roughly in his turn.
By the time Sir Tristram actually showed up, Palomides was both tired and extremely irritated— a dangerous combination. There was none of the “what-knight-art-thou” and “for-the-honor-of-my-lady” sort of business that would have been usual under the circumstances. The two of them fewtered their spears and off they went.
Mr. White imagines jousting knights as lumbering together on massive cart horses, clad in ponderous iron casings like diving suits. But here again, I am afraid I must disagree with him. Perhaps this is the kind of thing knights of the old school, like Grummore and Pellinore, went in for— it is true enough that there are some relics of this type in the British museum, made, as far as we can tell, for the sort of tiltyard dilletante who did not mind being a bit blind and clumsy, so long as he could break a few lances without fear of being maimed.
Tristram and Palomides would not have been caught dead in that sort of armor. They were serious jousters, and each of them had spent a small fortune on the newest and most fashionable plate. Tristam’s was from Milan, and was decorated all over with cunning pleats and flutes which had been smoothed to the best possible shape for deflecting arrows and lance points. Palomides had ordered his from Isfahan, in Persia. It was inlaid with quotations from the Prophet (peace be upon him), and had a mirror finish where Tristram’s was burnished black, but otherwise there was not much to choose between them. Neither of them weighted much over thirty pounds, and by dint of constant training, the knights could move nearly as fast in them as they did in their shirtsleeves.
A sword-swing was perfectly harmless against proper plate, of course, but you mustn’t imagine that the two of them stood face to face and hacked at one another until somebody fell over from sheer exhaustion. Both of them knew a half dozen ways to defeat a man in armor. You could trip him or wrestle him to the ground and then draw your dagger and thrust it into his brain. Or you could use your sword like a giant whelk-pick to stab him in the weak spot just under his armpit, or behind the knee. Or else there was what the Germans called the murder blow, where you suddenly reversed your sword, end to end, and slammed the pommel into his helmet like a club. If you could have seen Tristram and Palomides fighting, it would have seemed very like a boxing match, with the two of them stalking and circling around each other, each jabbing and feinting to keep the other at a distance. And then every so often, one of them would step in close and there would be a flash of blows and counterblows almost too quick to follow (although a good knight could see every stroke before it landed), and when they stepped apart, their chests would heave under the armor and the sweat would run down their faces under the visored helmets.
Palomides was holding his own, but only barely, and he began to worry very much that Tristram was not going to do the decent thing, which would be to knock him over and demand that he yield upon his honor, but seriously meant to kill him. It was this that ruined him. You cannot fight and worry at the same time. Palomides was tired already. Now he began to think about how tired he was, and how fresh Tristram still seemed. Whenever he put his foot down wrong, instead of throwing his weight forward as he ought to have and shoving his opponent back to buy himself room, he tried to correct his stance by shuffling backwards. Slowly he began to lose ground, wishing at every exchange that he could turn his mind back off— he felt sure he could beat Tristram, if he weren’t thinking about it, and the more he thought this, the worse he managed.
But before he went down for good, or found his second wind, La Beale Isoud stopped them.
“You mustn’t kill him, Tris,” she said. “He would go straight to hell, you know, on account of being a Saracen.”
“What if yours truly were to win?” said Palamedes, trying to sound indignant through his shortness of breath.
“Oh, you know you wouldn’t. Nobody beats Tristram.” She smiled adoringly at her champion. “You were a dead man as soon as he drew his sword. Only he won’t kill you now, because I asked him not to. You should be grateful, you know, and kneel down and yield to me and so forth.”
“Oh, very well,” said Tristram, ill-humoredly. “If you’re sure it wouldn’t make a better story to kill him. I could just go ahead and do it, you know.”
Reminding himself of the courtly love scheme, and how much effort he had already put into it, and how stupid he would look if he threw it over at this point— Sir Dinadan, who fancied himself a minstrel, would probably make a song about it, and all the knights would sing it at parties— Palomides knelt down and yielded.
“Leave Cornwall and go to Queen Guenevere,” said La Beale Isoud. “Tell her that I send her word that there be within this land but four lovers, that is, Sir Launcelot du Lake and Queen Guenevere, and Sir Tristram de Lyonesse and Queen Isoud.”
It would serve you right if I did, thought Palomides, but he did not say so.
Palomides and Tristram hated each other after this, but the problem was that they kept meeting at tournaments. Arthur had encouraged these as a way to occupy any knights who hadn’t taken up his new idea of fighting for Right, and the idea was a natural fit for Tristram, who didn’t give two pence for Right, but wanted to be the best at everything, and be famous for it. Palomides, as usual, didn’t know what he wanted and so tried his hand at a bit of everything, all at the same time.
His performance, as you might expect, was rather mixed. On one day, he might cut a swath through the melee or knock down one man after another in the lists, so that onlookers wondered whether he might be Percival or Lamorak or somebody important in disguise. On the next, he would be nervous and self-conscious. He would catch lances with the wrong part of his shield till he felt like the wooden Saracen on the quintain that he knew all his opponents had practiced with when they were children. Or he would overreach and do things that weren’t sportsmanlike. Once he was riding against Lancelot in the melee and cut his horse’s head off with his sword.
At the tournament I am going to tell you about, though, things had gone even worse for him. The melee was not really organized; at the beginning of each day, the knights would divide themselves into two teams, but without any firm organization beyond that. On this occasion, Palomides had arrived early, and taken the opportunity to join King Arthur’s team, together with Lancelot, and Gawaine and the Orkneys. Tristram, who came up later (he had been dallying with La Beale Isoud and lost track of time) should have been on the same side. He was certainly a good enough knight that they would have been happy to have him. Or he could have taken his Lion Rampant to the other team, with Sir Bors and Sir Ector and the King with the Hundred Knights, and everyone would have cheered his sportsmanship for taking the weaker part.
Instead, being Tristram, he refused to join the team Palomides was fighting for. On the other hand, he knew it was the best team, and felt ashamed not to be on the same side as Lancelot and the others, in case anyone might think he wasn’t as good as they were. So he ordered his squire to paint over his armor and his surcoat, and entered the lists as the Knight with the Black Shield.
For experienced knights, this kind of game made very little difference. Arthur knew at once who he was by the way he rode, and steered clear of him as best he could.
“Let him alone, Lance, or you’ll have to hurt him,” he whispered to his friend. “He’s in no mood for sportsmanship.”
But there were newly knighted men there, and a few from little castles out in the countryside, who had a hard enough time telling who to keep away from even with the heralds calling names out. For the Black Knight, they were so many sheep lined up for slaughter— Palomides had been having one of his good days, and Tristram was in mind to prove a point.
There were five brothers riding together in the melee (he could see they were brothers because they bore the same device on their shields, with marks of cadency to show the order they were born in). Tristram rode at them one after another. He hit the eldest with his lance full in the face, and the spear shivered to splinters with the impact. He should have known such a blow could be deadly— the same thing happened to Henry the Second of France, who died of it— but he rode on, dropping the spear butt and rushing at the second brother with his sword.
What the second brother ought to have done was to meet the charge with his shoulder and grapple Tristram off his horse, which is what Lamorak or Gaheris would have tried. Or if he hadn’t the strength for that, he might have turned tail and set his spurs in and run for it, which would have been unchivalrous, but sensible. Between these two alternatives he dithered fatally, so that Tristram hit him broadside on and knocked his horse over, with him underneath. He lay astonied, with the injured animal kicking and thrashing on top of him.
At this point, the other three brothers set themselves shoulder to shoulder and attacked Tristram together. They had some confused notion of clearing a space around their brother so they could finish off the wounded horse and drag it away, and Tristram might have given them ground without any danger. But they were trying to fight him, after a fashion, and the rules of the tourney made them fair game. If Lancelot had seen him drive at them, he would have said it was no worship and ill befitted a belted knight. But in the thick of the press, with men and horses going every which way, and shouting “To me! To me!” or “Ware!” or calling the names of their ladies, in hopes that they were watching from the stands, there was little danger of anyone noticing.
When the fight was finally over, the heralds went over the field. The eldest two brothers were dead, one with a splinter in the eye and the other one suffocated beneath the carcass of his horse. One of the younger three died within the hour, and the other two were so sore stricken that they had to be carried off to a monastery on litters.
Tristram, thinking nothing of this, carved his way on through the press like a madman, finally fetching up in front of Palomides and giving him three great blows on the helmet, so that his head swam. When King Arthur asked him afterwards how he came to get hurt, all he could say was that he had fought with Iblis, and no man.
This was on the last day of the tournament, and all the knights went their separate ways afterwards. Palomides wandered desultorily through the countryside with his brachet, his ears still ringing faintly, until eventually, he came upon a castle. There were two kinds of these, as far as knights-errant were concerned. Either the front of the place was decorated with all the shields of the knights who had been defeated and imprisoned there, in which case you had a stiff fight on your hands, or else the lord or lady would be very kind and hospitable, and possibly send you on an adventure. There were no shields in front of this one, so Palomides knocked and introduced himself, and was promptly asked to dinner.
“We’ll put you next to t’other one,” said the host dourly. “It’s right kind of so many o’ ye to come, I suppose.”
He did not sound as if he meant it. Before Palomides had a chance to ask what he meant, he was ushered into the hall and seated at the head of the table, next to Sir Tristram, who looked no more pleased to see him than he was to see Tristram. However, the Book of Courtesy is very strict on fighting at the dinner table, and so both of them smiled at each other and began to make conversation in a stilted way. Tristram told Palomides he had done very well at the tournament and that it was a pity that the Black Knight, whomever he might be, had beaten him so badly on the last day. Palomides asked after La Beale Isoud, and Tristram said she was as adorable as ever.
“Just before I left, she was telling me to kill a giant or a dragon or some sort of ungodly thing for her.”
“Oh, how lovely.”
“Don’t suppose you could think of something ungodly? I haven’t come across any dragons, you see.”
“Not really, no. Yours truly isn’t much for ideas sometimes.”
The host, whose name was Sir Darras, seemed unconscious of any tension. He was picking at his food, and grumbled unintelligibly when spoken to, calling them both “laddie” interchangeably. His tabard was stained and his face half-concealed behind a shabby patchwork of beard.
Midway through dinner, Palomides whispered an enquiry at the attendant who was serving them. But the servant, seemingly as threadbare and taciturn as his master, made him no answer. He was trying his best to force down the last few mouthfuls of what had proven to be a cheerless and miserable supper when yet another knight burst into the hall. It was Sir Dinadan, who, as I said before, was a sort of minstrel. Tristram had made a pet of him and egged him on to compose insulting ballads about King Mark, full of jokes about horns and that sort of thing, which are funny in Shakespeare but deeply unkind when the butt of them is a real man and not an actor.
“Triss!” he said. “Fancy meeting you here! There are three knights outside from the tournament, questing for the Black Knight who took the prize and rode away without claiming it— the one who knocked down those five men from Castle Darras. Come hit them about a little, Triss, it’ll be ever so funny.”
Sir Darras looked up at this, and for the first time that night, a kind of alertness came into his expression. But Tristram saw nothing of this. He was already calling for his horse and armor. His squire (who had finished eating already and begun to pack his things away in an upstairs room) came running down with his shield and sword and harness all in a pile.
“Not that shield, idiot,” shouted Tristram. “Get me the lion! I want them to know who they’re dealing with.”
The squire ran back up the stairs, and then back down. Sir Darras followed him to the chamber, slipped inside, and took the leather cover from the black shield, and inspected it very carefully. And so it was that when Tristram returned, covered in mud and glory from the field, his host ushered him back in. There were attendants waiting to take his sword and his habergeon, and Sir Darras watched gravely as they unarmed him. When he was quite sure the sword was out of arms reach, he nodded, and they seized on Tristram all at once.
“It’s the dungeon for ye, laddie,” said Sir Darras.
“What?” cried Tristram. “What have I done?”
“Enough, ye wretch. It’s the dungeon for all of ye, wi’ yer smart friends an’ all.”
So they haled Sir Tristram down the dark steps into the dungeon, which was musty and poorly kept up— Sir Darras had been the kind and hospitable kind of host, before his five sons went off to the tourney, and not the kind with a pile of captured shields at his front door, so he had not seen much point to keeping a tidy prison. Palomides and Dinadan were already there.
“This is all your fault,” said Tristram to Palomides.
“In the humblest possible terms, yours truly was wondering whether it might be yours,” said Palomides, who sounded not at all humble.
“La Beale Isoud will never love you,” said Tristram cruelly.
“That isn’t the point. It’s courtly.”
“It’s pitiful.”
“Is it? What about creeping around behind King Mark’s back? What do you call that?”
“Whatever I like. Nobody in Cornwall dares touch me.”
“And what does she call it? Do you think she likes everyone knowing? Singing Dinadan’s songs at the table? Do you really?”
“You vile little beast,” said Tristram, a dangerous tone in his voice. “Say that again, if you like.”
“Yours tr—” stammered Palomides, and stopped. I may very well die in this foul pit, he thought, but God alone is God and I am sick of cowering.
“Fine,” he said. “I don’t love her at all, not really. I spent the entire time wishing you’d show up and take her back. She’s vain and stupid, and she blithers, and the two of you deserve one another.”
Tristram bellowed incoherently. This will be bad, thought Palomides— a fight in the dark, bare-handed, with nobody to watch. I doubt Tristram is much of a proper knight, in the dark.
Tristram’s palms slapped at the floor as he struggled to his feet. Palomides heard an ugly thud, an outcry and a fall. Then silence.
“What’s happened?” he asked, hands still held up in front of him in case Tristram might be shamming.
“It’s the ceiling,” said Dinadan. “It’s low as anything down this end.”
“Well, he can get up, I won’t touch him. After a knock on the head like that, it would hardly be a fair fight.”
There was a shuffling sound as Dinadan scrabbled at the floor.
“I don’t think he can get up.”
“Is he breathing?” Palomides stumbled his way forward, feeling with his hands. Tristram was breathing, but the gasps came quick and shallow. There didn’t seem to be much blood; beyond that, it was hard to make anything out. After a minute, he sputtered as if about to speak, then spewed up a thin, acrid liquid, slimy with the remains of Sir Darras’s dinner. With nothing else to do, they turned him sideways and tore off a corner of Palomides’s surcoat to dab at his mouth.
“Is he going to die?” asked Dinadan raggedly.
“I’ve seen it happen. It’s a bad sign when they don’t get up.”
“What do we do?” Dinadan sounded helpless. It was a stupid question, thought Palomides, and then, being honest with himself, thought he would have liked to ask it as well.
“We wait,” he said instead. “We must be too far down for shouting to do any good. Someone will have to come down to… to feed us and clear away the necessaries, unless they mean us to die down here. And if they mean that, there’s no point anyway.”
They waited. In his mind, Palomides took himself again to the rocky wilderness of Palestine, to tamarisks in the dry watercourses which transformed, in springtime, into startling waterfalls of purple blossoms, to the Noble Sanctuary from which the Prophet (peace be upon him) ascended to heaven. At midday, the light on the golden dome of the mosque shone like the sun itself. He wished, hopelessly, that he had found some way to carry a piece of it off with him, a little piece of brightness he could have hung around his neck and looked at every so often, in secret. He wished he could see if Tristram were really dying. It was awful for a man to die down here in the dark, when the world had so much light in it.
He thought, just for a second, about what Tristram might be thinking, if his mind still moved inside his ringing skull. And for that second, I believe, he looked through the telescope the other way round, and saw all the lovely Burne-Jones eerieness of Cornwall as Tristram might have— the romance of the mist, and the lonely seacoast battered by waves, and the gulls crying— and longed with his whole being to see it again. It is a difficult thing to understand another man’s homesickness, but he did it, if only ever the once.
Sir Dinadan wept, Malory tells us, and so did Sir Palomides under them both making great sorrow. So a damsel came in to them and found them mourning.
In the end, it turned out, Sir Darras had no real stomach for being the wicked kind of knight whose dungeon was full of skeletons.
“It was a fair fight, I suppose, and either of them as like to kill t’other if they could. Get him up,” he told the damsel. “There’s a leech for him in t’upper room, should set him right soon enough.”
He paused, eyeing the other two suspiciously.
“What happened to the young wretch, anyway?”
“Gaol fever,” said Palomides. “From the foul air.”
“Was it? He took ill right quickly.”
Sir Dinadan nodded.
“That’s Tristram for you,” he said. “Has to be first at everything.”
Tristram’s story goes on from here, of course. It ends badly, as anyone with sense would have expected it to. The age had not yet come when a man like King Mark could be wholly content with being “economical”. But while Tristram rides away toward his long-ordained doom, Palomides goes— many places. Arthur makes him Duke of Provence, and he settles down for a while, until he comes back to help Lancelot hold off Gawain in their terrible final siege. Or he rides after the Questing Beast and never catches it. Or else he does catch it. Perhaps he kills it. Or perhaps they ride down to the blue ocean together, and take ship for sunny Palestine after all.
Malory and Mr. White both say that he was baptized at last, with Tristram as godfather. This, through their end of the telescope, is a happy ending, and let us all agree he deserves one. In some stories, he goes after the Holy Grail, and finds it, in the end, as impossible a quest as the other one. Let us agree also, he is no Galahad.
I will tell you a story, and you can decide what you think of it. On a sunny morning, a long time after Sir Darras’s dungeon, a long time before Lancelot and Gawain, Palomides was riding after the Questing Beast. It was a clear bright morning and the brachet was lolloping over the dewy fields with its tongue swinging redly from side to side, calling out joyously, “Wow, wow!” He was in a good mood, which was not spoiled even when they came to a stile and his mare balked instead of jumping, leaving the dog to run off into the distance while he patted the poor beast and spoke gently to her until she calmed down.
After this, he had to follow the brachet by voice, out of the fields and along a little path into a wood, so that he came quite suddenly on a couple of knights in a clearing, armed cap-a-pie and waiting, quite obviously, for someone to tilt with. Ugh, he thought, this will take a good hour of the clock, and with the dog getting on well for once.
His mood lightened a bit to see that the man in front bore a shield Purpure, a lion-leopard argent, which Arthur’s heralds had announced just the year before as the arms of Sir Lamorak. The other man had his shield turned down, and was sitting under a tree waiting his turn.
“Hullo, Lam,” he said. “Fancy meeting you here! Look how tall you’ve gotten.”
“Uncle Pal! Mum and Dad were just asking about you. You haven’t been to Castle Pellinore for ages.”
“It’s the Beast, you see. She gets lonely if I leave her too long. Speaking of which, I was just getting after her—”
“Oh, do ride one pass with me. She can’t be that far away, you can still hear them both loud as anything.”
“Go on then,” said Palomides, sliding down his visor to cover his smile. He felt a kind of joyful astonishment that old Pellinore’s son could have gotten so big. He still remembered Lamorak as a chubby infant, trying to ride King Pellinore’s toothless old brachet around the courtyard with a toy spear in his hand. Now here he was, tall as a tree, and sitting like a good horseman, too.
They rode to opposite ends of the clearing, lifted their spears in salute, and leaned forward. There was no need for the spurs. The horses could tell as well as the knights what was coming, and looked forward to it as eagerly. Palomides, like many old men who have watched their friends’ sons grow up, thought it might be rather nice if Lamorak won. He felt sure the lad could beat him, but of course, the worst thing he could possibly do was let him win on purpose. That would be a mortal insult.
At the last instant, he made up his mind to try the difficult blow to the crown of the helmet. He was by no means trying to lose— it was Lancelot’s favorite stroke, after all, and he had been decent at it when he was younger— but he knew he might very well miss, and then Lamorak would beat him cleanly. He raised his point and took aim. Lamorak flew backwards, struck dead center, and landed with a whoop.
“One for Uncle Pal!” he cried. “That was jolly good! Look, your spear hasn’t even broken!”
“I’m sure you’ll have your revenge next time,” Palomides replied. “But I really must be going. The brachet—”
He looked past Lamorak and saw with disquiet, that the other knight had mounted his horse. He had a lance in one hand, and as Palomides watched, he pulled the shield from his back. The device it bore was a lion rampant or, armed and langued gules.
“Sir knight, defend thee,” said Sir Tristram brusquely.
“We might do this later,” said Palomides. “I am on a quest at the moment, in case you don’t know.”
“Keep well thyself, for thou must have to do with me anon,” said Tristram, still keeping to the high language.
Palomides felt— for a minute, he found that he didn’t know how he felt. Was he afraid of Sir Tristram? He had been before. He had been terribly afraid of being beaten. He had been beaten. Just at the moment, he couldn’t possibly care less whether Tristram won or lost.
Well then, suppose he was angry. Tristram was a bully and an adulterer and a prating, posing ass. It would be easy to hate him. But it seemed so futile, like a grown man creeping into the nursery to smash the ugly little doll that he had made the villain of his childhood adventures. He did not need to be the best knight, the way Tristram felt he had to.
So how did he feel? And suddenly it came to him: it was a beautiful clear morning, and he had been enjoying his ride. Not that he had forgotten the desert and the mosques and the fountains, or would have been unhappy to see them again. But he had been comfortable, just then, among the daisies and poppies that glowed like jewels in the grass, the thrushes piping in the hedgerows and the crows calling rudely from the treetops. He did not need to be anywhere else, or anyone else: God alone was God, and Palomides was Palomides, and all he really wanted was for Tristram to get out of his way.
“Guard thee, then,” he said, and perhaps the lightness in his voice took Tristram aback. At any rate, the two rushed together, and for the second time in as many minutes, he saw as if in slow motion the spear find its mark and the other knight slide from the saddle to land with a clattering jolt in the dust.
“Alight, an thou durst,” called Tristram. “Though thou have the better of me on horseback, thou shalt find that I abide like a knight on— why, where are you going?”
To which Sir Palomides made no answer, but ever followed the track of the Questing Beast.