The Once and Future King (#1-4)

  ‘Leave the boy, nurse,’ commanded Sir Ector, taking sides with the men against the women, anxious to re—establish his superiority after the matter of the cudgel. ‘Merlyn will see to him if he needs it, no doubt. Who is this Robin?’

  ‘Robin Wood,’ cried the boys together.

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘You call him Robin Hood,’ explained Kay in a superior tone. ‘But it is Wood really, like the Wood that he is the spirit of.’

  ‘Well, well, well, so you’ve been foragin’ with that rascal! Come in to breakfast, boys, and tell me all about him.’

  ‘We have had breakfast,’ said the Wart, ‘hours ago. May I please take Wat with me to see Merlyn?’

  ‘Why, it’s the old man who went wild and started rootin’ in the forest. Wherever did you get hold of him?’

  ‘The Good People had captured him with the Dog Boy and Cavall.’

  ‘But we shot the griffin,’ Kay put in. ‘I shot it myself.’

  ‘So now I want to see if Merlyn can restore him to his wits.’

  ‘Master Art,’ said the nurse sternly. She had been breathless up to now on account of Sir Ector’s rebuke. ‘Master Art, thy room and thy bed is where thou art tending to, and that this instant. Wold fools may be wold fools, whether by yea or by nay, but I ha’n’t served the Family for fifty year without a—learning of my duty. A flibberty—gibbeting about wi’ a lot of want—wits, when thy own arm may be dropping to the floor!

  ‘Yes, thou wold turkey—cock,’ she added, turning fiercely upon Sir Ector, ‘and thou canst keep thy magician away from the poor mite’s room till he be rested, that thou canst!

  ‘A wantoning wi’ monsters and lunaticals,’ continued the victor as she led her helpless captive from the stricken field. ‘I never heard the like.’

  ‘Please, someone tell Merlyn to look after Wat,’ cried the victim over his shoulder, in diminishing tones.

  He woke up in his cool bed, feeling better. The old fire—eater who looked after him had covered the windows with a curtain, so that the room was dark and comfortable, and he could tell by the one ray of golden sunlight which shot across the floor that it was late afternoon. He not only felt better. He felt very well, so well that it was not possible to stay in bed. He moved quickly to throw back the sheet, but stopped with a hiss at the creak or scratch of his shoulder, which he had forgotten in his sleep. Then he got out more carefully by sliding down the bed and pushing himself upright with one hand, shoved his bare feet into a pair of slippers, and managed to wrap a dressing—gown round him more or less. He padded off through the stone passages up the worn circular stairs to find Merlyn.

  When he reached the schoolroom, he found that Kay was continuing his First Rate Eddication. He was doing dictation, for as Wart opened the door he heard Merlyn pronouncing in measured tones the famous medieval mnemonic: ‘Barabara Celarent Darii Ferioque Prioris,’ and Kay saying, ‘Wait a bit. My pen has gone all squee—gee.’

  ‘You will catch it,’ remarked Kay, when they saw him. ‘You are supposed to be in bed, dying of gangrene or something.’

  ‘Merlyn,’ said the Wart. ‘What have you done with Wat?’

  ‘You should try to speak without assonances,’ said the wizard. ‘For instance. “The beer is never clear near here, dear,” is unfortunate, even as an assonance. And then again, your sentence is ambiguous to say the least of it. “What what?” I might reply, taking it to be a conundrum, or if I were King Pellinore, “What what, what?” Nobody can be too careful about their habits of speech.’

  Kay had evidently been doing his dictation well and the old gentleman was in a good humour.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ said the Wart. ‘What have you done with the old man with no nose?’

  ‘He has cured him,’ said Kay.

  ‘Well,’ said Merlyn, ‘you might call it that, and then again you might not. Of course, when one has lived in the world as long as I have, and backwards at that, one does learn to know a thing or two about pathology. The wonders of analytical psychology and plastic surgery are, I am afraid, to this generation but a closed book.’

  ‘What did you do to him?’

  ‘Oh, I just psycho—analysed him,’ replied the magician grandly. ‘That, and of course I sewed on a new nose on both of them.’

  ‘What kind of nose?’ asked the Wart.

  ‘It is too funny,’ said Kay. ‘He wanted to have the griffin’s nose for one, but I would not let him. So then he took the noses off the young pigs which we are going to have for supper, and used those. Personally I think they will grunt.’

  ‘A ticklish operation,’ said Merlyn, ‘but a successful one.’

  ‘Well,’ said the Wart, doubtfully. ‘I hope it will be all right. What did they do then?’

  ‘They went off to the kennels. Old Wat is very sorry for what he did to the Dog Boy, but he says he can’t remember having done it. He says that suddenly everything went black, when they were throwing stones once, and he can’t remember anything since. The Dog Boy forgave him and said he did not mind a bit. They are going to work together in the kennels in future, and not think of what is past any more. The Dog Boy says that the old man was good to him while they were prisoners of the Fairy Queen, and that he knows he ought not to have thrown stones at him in the first place. He says he often thought about that when other boys were throwing stones at him.’

  ‘Well,’ said the Wart, ‘I am glad it has all turned out for the best. Do you think I could go and visit them?’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t do anything to annoy your nurse,’ exclaimed Merlyn, looking about him anxiously. ‘That old woman hit me with a broom when I came to see you this forenoon, and broke my spectacles. Could you not wait until tomorrow?’

  On the morrow Wat and the Dog Boy were the firmest of friends. Their common experiences of being stoned by the mob and then tied to columns of pork by Morgan le Fay served as a bond and a topic of reminiscence, as they lay among the dogs at night, for the rest of their lives. Also, by the morning, they had both pulled off the noses Merlyn had kindly given them. They explained that they had got used to having no noses, now, and anyway they preferred to live with the dogs.

  Chapter XIII

  In spite of his protest, the unhappy invalid was confined to his chamber for three mortal days. He was alone except at bedtime, when Kay came, and Merlyn was reduced to shouting his eddication through the key—hole, at times when the nurse was known to be busy with her washing.

  The boy’s only amusement was the ant—nests – the onees between glass plates which had been brought when he first came from Merlyn’s cottage in the forest.

  ‘Can’t you,’ he howled miserably under the door, ‘turn me into something while I’m locked up like this?’

  ‘I can’t get the spells through the key—hole.’

  ‘Through the what?’

  ‘The KEY—HOLE.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Are you there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Confusion take this shouting!’ exclaimed the magician, stamping on his hat. ‘May Castor and Pollux…No, not again. God bless my blood pressure…’

  ‘Could you turn me into an ant?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘An ANT! It would be a small spell for ants, wouldn’t it? It would go through the key—hole?’

  ‘I don’t think we ought to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They are dangerous.’

  ‘You could watch with your insight, and turn me back again if it got too bad. Please turn me into something, or I shall go weak in the head.’

  ‘The ants are not our Norman ones, dear boy. They come from the Afric shore. They are belligerent.’

  ‘I don’t know what belligerent is.’

  There was a long silence behind the door.

  ‘Well,’ said Merlyn eventually. ‘It is far too soon in your education. But you would have had to do it some time. Let me se
e. Are there two nests in that contraption?’

  ‘There are two pairs of plates.’

  ‘Take a rush from the floor and lean it between the two nests, like a bridge. Have you done that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The place where he was seemed like a great field of boulders, with a flattened fortress at one end of it – between the glass plates. The fortress was entered by tunnels in the rock, and, over the entrance to each tunnel, there was a notice which said:

  EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY

  He read the notice with dislike, though he did not understand its meaning. He thought to himself: I will explore a little, before going in. For some reason the notice gave him a reluctance to go, making the rough tunnel look sinister.

  He waved his antennae carefully, considering the notice, assuring himself of his new senses, planting his feet squarely in the insect world as if to brace himself in it. He cleaned his antennae with his forefeet, frisking and smoothing them so that he looked like a Victorian villain twirling his moustachios. He yawned – for ants do yawn – and stretch themselves too, like human beings. Then he became conscious of something which had been waiting to be noticed – that there was a noise in his head which was articulate. It was either a noise or a complicated smell, and the easiest way to explain it is to say that it was like a wireless broadcast. It came through his antennae.

  The music had a monotonous rhythm like a pulse, and the words which went with it were about June – moon – noon – spoon, or Mammy – mammy – mammy, or Ever – never, or Blue – true – you. He liked them at first, especially the ones about Love – dove – above, until he found that they did not vary. As soon as they had been finished once, they were begun again. After an hour or two, they began to make him feel sick inside.

  There was a voice in his head also, during the pauses of the music, which seemed to be giving directions. ‘All two—day—olds will be moved to the West Aisle,’ it would say, or ‘Number 210397/WD will report to the soup squad, in replacement for 333105/WD who has fallen off the nest.’ It was a fruity voice, but it seemed to be somehow impersonal – as if its charm were an accomplishment that had been practised, like a circus trick. It was dead.

  The boy, or perhaps we ought to say the ant, walked away from the fortress as soon as he was prepared to walk about. He began exploring the desert of boulders uneasily, reluctant to visit the place from which the orders were coming, yet bored with the narrow view. He found small pathways among the boulders, wandering tracks both aimless and purposeful, which led toward the grain store, and also in various other directions which he could not understand. One of these paths ended at a clod with a natural hollow underneath it. In the hollow – again with the strange appearance of aimless purpose – he found two dead ants. They were laid there tidily but yet untidily, as if a very tidy person had taken them to the place, but had forgotten the reason when he got there. They were curled up, and did not seem to be either glad or sorry to be dead. They were there, like a couple of chairs.

  While he was looking at the corpses, a live ant came down the pathway carrying a third one.

  It said: ‘Hail, Barbarus!’

  The boy said Hail, politely.

  In one respect, of which he knew nothing, he was lucky Merlyn had remembered to give him the proper smell for the nest – for, if he had smelt of any other nest, they would have killed him at once. If Miss Cavell had been an ant, they would have had to write on her statue: SMELL IS NOT ENOUGH.

  The new ant put down the cadaver vaguely and began dragging the other two in various directions. It did not seem to know where to put them. Or rather, it knew that a certain arrangement had to be made, but it could not figure how to make it. It was like a man with a tea—cup in one hand and a sandwich in the other, who wants to light a cigarette with a match. But, where the man would invent the idea of putting down the cup and sandwich – before picking up the cigarette and the match – this ant would have put down the sandwich and picked up the match, then it would have been down with the match and up with the cigarette, then down with the cigarette and up with the sandwich, then down with the cup and up with the cigarette, until finally it had put down the sandwich and picked up the match. It was inclined to rely on a series of accidents to achieve its object. It was patient, and did not think. When it had pulled the three dead ants into several positions, they would fall into line under the clod eventually, and that was its duty.

  Wart watched the arrangements with a surprise which turned into vexation and then into dislike. He felt like asking why it did not think things out in advance – the annoyed feeling which people have on seeing a job being badly done. Later he began to wish that he could put several questions, such as ‘Do you like being a sexton?’ or ‘Are you a slave?’ or even ‘Are you happy?’

  The extraordinary thing was that he could not ask these questions. In order to ask them, he would have had to put them into ant language through his antennae – and he now discovered, with a helpless feeling, that there were no words for the things he wanted to say. There were no words for happiness, for freedom, for liking, nor were there any words for their opposites. He felt like a dumb man trying to shout, ‘Fire!’ The nearest he could get to Right or Wrong, even, was to say Done or Notre Done.

  The ant finished fiddling with its corpses and turned back down the pathway, leaving them in the haphazard order. It found that the Wart was in its way, so it stopped, waving its wireless aerials at him as if it were a tank. With its mute, menacing helmet of a face, and its hairiness, and the things like spurs on the front leg—joint, perhaps it was more like a knight—in—armour on an armoured horse: or like a combination of the two, a hairy centaur—in—armour.

  It said, ‘Hail Barbarus!’ again.

  ‘Hail!’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  The boy answered truthfully: ‘I am not doing anything.’

  It was baffled by this for several seconds, as you would be if Einstein had told you his latest ideas about space. Then it extended the twelve joints of its aerial and spoke past him into the blue.

  It said: ‘105978/uDc reporting from square five. There is an insane ant on square five. Over to you.’

  The word it used for insane was Not—Done. Later on, the Wart discovered that there were only two qualifications in the language, Done and Not—Done – which applied to all questions of value. If the seeds which the collectors found were sweet, they were Done seeds. If somebody had doctored them with corrosive sublimate, they would have been Not—Done seeds,

  and that was that. Even the moons, mammies, doves, etc., in the broadcasts were completely described when they were stated to be Done ones.

  The broadcast stopped for a moment, and the fruity voice said: ‘GHQ replying to 105978/uDC. What is its number? Over.’

  The ant asked: ‘What is your number?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  When this news had been exchanged with headquarters, a message came back to ask whether he could give an account of himself. The ant asked him. It used the same words as the broadcaster had used, and in the same voice. This made him feel uncomfortable and angry, two emotions which he disliked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said sarcastically, for it was obvious that the creature could not detect sarcasm, ‘I have fallen on my head and can’t remember anything about it.’

  ‘105978/UDC reporting. Not—Done ant has a black—out from falling off the nest. Over.’

  ‘GHQ replying to 105978/UDC. Not—Done ant is number 42436/WD, who fell off the nest this morning while working with mash squad. If it is competent to continue its duties –’ Competent—to—continue—its—duties was easier in the ant speech, for it was simply Done, like everything else that was not Not Done. But enough of the language question. ‘If it is competent to continue its duties, instruct 42436/WD to rejoin mash squad, relieving 210021/WD, who was sent to replace it. Over.’

  The creature repeated the message.

  It seemed that he could not ha
ve made a better explanation than this one about falling on his head, even if he had meant to – for the ants did occasionally tumble off. They were a species of ant called Messor barbarus.

  ‘Very well.’

  The sexton paid no further attention to him, but crawled off down the path for another body, or for anything else that needed to be scavenged.

  The Wart took himself away in the opposite direction, to join the mash squad. He memorized his own number and the number of the unit who had to be relieved.

  The mash squad were standing in one of the outer chambers of the fortress like a circle of worshippers. He joined the circle, announcing that 210021/wD was to return to the main nest. Then he began filling himself with the sweet mash like the others. They made it by scraping the seeds which others had collected, chewing up the scrapings till they made a kind of paste or soup, and then swallowing it into their own crops. At first it was delicious to him, so that he ate greedily, but in a few seconds it began to be unsatisfactory. He could not understand why. He chewed and swallowed busily, copying the rest of the squad, but it was like eating a banquet of nothing, or like a dinner—party on the stage. In a way it was like a nightmare, in which you might continue to consume huge masses of putty without being able to stop.

  There was a coming and going round the pile of seeds. The ants who had filled their crops to the brim were walking back to the inner fortress, to be replaced by a procession of empty ants who were coming from the same direction. There were never any new ants in the procession, only this same dozen going backward and forward, as they would do during all their lives.

  He realized suddenly that what he was eating was not going into his stomach. A small proportion of it had penetrated to his private self at the beginning, and now the main mass was being stored in a kind of upper stomach or crop, from which it could be removed. It dawned on him at the same time that when he joined the westward stream he would have to disgorge the store, into a larder or something of that sort.