7

Gawain was wise; Merlin was a seer
Wise also but tangled in his words.
Wise Illtud spoke always from the heart,
Egregious in his heat at times, but then
He brought forth stores that honestly had planted.
Arthur trusted him and listened closely
But spoke to him apart from others, come time
For deeper delving, as if in Illtud's words
He apprehended arcane, winding meanings
That might diminish him in Camelot.

Evening was at hand, an amber sky,
When Arthur drew his cousin with him
Up to the fourth, the highest of the walls,
And in union they looked out.
          Arthur sat,
Laying his cloak aside, with Caliburn,
Heavy in its scabbard, upon the cloak,
And on the leather scabbard he laid his hand.
Scarlet plumes adorned his cap, nodding,
Trembling and dipping as he moved his head.
And he, like a wary and a handsome bird,
Poised to burst away in sudden flight,
Broke the silvered silence, the emollient air.

"Illtud, this is my sword. It has teeth for biting
But it has no words for scribes to lay on parchment.
It is dumb about one hot day's slaughter,
But all its crusted gems are tears of havoc.
What of dying could it not tell!
And of carnage it knows the sum.

"Where are the fat farms and the tumbled skies,
Falcon sailing, and sun up, and lark nesting?
Where the sheep that once were on those downs,
Flowing down the slopes like thick cream?
Where the mute, grey stones of the hamlets
And the strong, cheerful road crossings
Under that lordly sun who loves all roads,
And the relays of horses waiting there
Strong enough to whinny the land aside
And close with their riders from sea to sea?
Open days were then, before the Saxon,
And genial was the villa where I was bred,
Three days ride -- no more -- from the rock Tintagel.
The world was in blossom then.

"Then came the day when Vortigern betrayed
Our summering land not knowing that he did so
(And look, today my queen his daughter!).
Thereupon joy dashed away our comforts
And, turning in great grief, herself left.

"We are Romans, but naked without the legions.
Where indeed is all that we knew as boys
That seemed forever then and now is not?
Illtud, where is the rock from which we fished
The Avon, and quarreled to raise the bigger fish?
Behind that rock is danger now, not peace,
The snarl and whisper of the peering Saxon.
Abandoned are the villas, their names are lost;
Their stores and bins are empty; their folk are gone.
A land of war is Albion today,
And I, this land's champion through no choice,
Still know with all the certainty of fate
That no one, and not I, alone can tame
The growling beast that is the people here,
And recreate with golden bars of music
The murmuring yesterdays. Instead we hum
Witth muted cadences and sobbing notes
The future's elegies, so sad the sounds
The drip of rain comes merry to the ear.

"Saxons are all around us, dicing slovens,
Men with fists of stone and hang-dog heads,
Easy to kill -- but still they fill the land
Appearing everywhere like toads in spring,
Pouring out of hidden crevices,
Stepping bedraggled, wet from out each wave,
Knocking their swords upon their wooden oars -
And eyes like burning curses in each face.
Illtud, good cousin, with me you are
Among the few who fight and daily ride --
And all too few of us to save our Rome,
Our reach of roses. Learned are you, Illtud,
Tell me, why this? Is not Rome eternal!
Why this?"

Empire was for Arthur a word inscribed
On every hillside of his western home,
A fierce horse cut from sod, white chalk trampling.
Arthur read that word in legendary gold,
Would center on it a thousand years of blood,
A thousand labors, a thousand deaths, if such
Were needed for one chiliastic year.
Rome must endure -- all things must serve that end.
Wherefore his harsh query, like the kestrel's cry
As the bird windhovers over lonely moor.

Illtud ran his fingers through his hair,
And then touched Caliburn, the sleepless sword,
"Arthur, this sword is you. I do not know
Where it was found. You have never told.
Beautiful it is; every man alive
Would be its owner. But you alone can wield it;
I think that is a miracle, perhaps
An evil. It was a plaintive toy of Rome
Put into your baby hands to grow with you,
And then in distant days to be withdrawn.
Wear it and you are Arthur, but some day
The manly Christ will otherwise ordain.

"Arthur, king, the questions which you ask
Are wrong, mean nothing, spring no secrets,
Are dead like florets out of sullen soil.
Merlin might easily answer them, not I.
The manly Christ has set our world in gloaming
So the flowered soul must always bloom at night.
And who decries that but him who fears?"

Said Arthur,
"I fear nothing, cousin, only I am weary.
And being king, and count, and emperor,
As these may I not: ask in humbleness
What my cousin thinks and why he thinks it?"

Illtud waited. He waited a long time
Looking away in quiet, then sighed and said,
"Arthur, king and cousin, my speech is prickly
But not my heart. Like you I am a Briton,
Like you my heart is Rome -- but not like you
I cast my eyes across the plunging downs
And see a peace and you see war. I see
Away there to the north", and Illtud pointed,
"Michael's shrine, very far, quite distant
On a hill, on Glaston's hill, the Tor,
Thick reeds and peaty water all around,
And there I think I see men kneeling, praying,
Singing sweet songs to Christ who bends to hear.
I say from this great distance I behold it.
Perhaps you do not see it as I do.
Of your riders of your captains I am one;
Arthur, king, I too will smite the Saxon churl.
But where the end of smiting, this I ask?
I wonder; could the answer be out there
On Glaston hill and not in Camelot?"

Night drew on. Both ceased to speak, cousins,
King and captain, the two, content at last
With silence. So daytime slept and all the stars
One by one winked on, until a tent
Of light and silent glowing swept close in,
And, below, owls acknowledged and began to chucker.
From Camelot the king looked to the north
As if to see a dimmer sight than evening,
And Illtud looked at Arthur, at the king,
And Illtud said, "Let us leave these walls
And seek some sleep."

8

So the seasons.
So the springtime
Between the Mendips and the Polden hills --
A time of grass and the slow grazing of horses
And the twisting flight of colts in aimless pleasure
Circling their dams and throwing up their hooves.
The thorn tree blossomed in that faery May
Like the chiming of floral bells, like sweet sounds in color.
Camelot listened and was quiet
In that brief passage into summer,
In summer land.

But summer came and brought the Saxon,
Summer with its low curtained clouds
Dragging under them the winding lines of pikes
And the creaking carts piled with gear and baggage
And sacks of grain for planting -- also short swords
To claim, that summer, the British earth,
With spades and mattocks and iron hoes to dig it.
In those months the oxen trains pressed forward
Undulant seas of Saxons, unremitting,
Washing in viscous tides of people westward
Hungry for homes -- there were so many of them!

In those years Rome no legions had save Arthur.
Peril was all about. By day he fought;
By night he raced his horses, shades in shadows,
Like moths in endlessly fluttering dances,
Like cold, obsidian ghosts in stilted runnings,
Fleering and wailing at the moonlit foe.
His coming was always out of nowhere, a coming
Of maned horses, a dry, drumming sound
Growing in volume, a shock, and then a falling -
Each late summer a fever of surprises.

Everywhere the name of Arthur spread,
Caesar Artorius, greatest: British king
And soon-to-be ruler in all Albion.
He sat at the gates of the last Roman twilight;
His pennons rippled from Kent to far Penzance,
His shining lances pierced the far horizons,
And his great dukes in baleful clusters around him
Were each known and counted by the Saxons.

These men surrounded Arthur, a dark ring
Spinning and winding, a restless coming and going
Of men in search of conflict and a master.
Unquiet lives suited them and war's rhythms.
Once they had walked on the elegant tiled pavements
Of Roman Britain, young men of presumption
Who had then seen the birthday of the Saxon
As he hatched from his first egg in their island.
They had watched him grow, always edging westward
Until he passed beyond the ancient stones,
The Dance of Giants where Ambrosius was buried
And where the pensive forbears stood in circles,
Sarsen giants with linking collar stones.
Arthur's captains had seen the last legions
Set sail and, shining sadly on the sea,
Depart for Frankish ports. Thus were they left
As orphans. The mother, Rome, was dead.
They were her relict sons, the tiller, abbot,
The curial patron, the shepherd and the townsman.
All now needed Arthur and they saw him
As a red dragon shuttered in their island
Spinning around at sudden need to face
The four directions and the many strands,
Mercurial and ferocious, taught by Merlin.

9

Famed were Arthur's battles. They counted twelve,
But a score or more were set in gold and garnets --
Gouts of the carmine blood of thousands --
Each one sparkling in his diadem.
But those made little mark with him. He wanted
What no man knows, he least of all,
While all around him men rested in his care
Needing not to think. The perils ebbed
And flowed. One on one the years came crowding,
Pushing through time's breaches, holed on rocks
And left to tilt and topple in the surf,
Each day a wallowing craft at shore's edge, sinking.
This was high summer for the shout and the sharp blade.
Everywhere headlands swarmed with watchers
And all the postern gates were walled with fill.
Hillocks flared with fires. Ravens cried
And found congenial to their ways the ways Of men who scattered harvests of themselves
Broadcast in bloody fields. And sometimes peace --
For a month, perhaps a season, not once a year.

In all this Arthur was a Caesar,
The one who never bent and could not lose.
Where he led, the Britons died for him.
His captains, casqued with plumes, thought little and did much,
Their cohorts dwindling, many their lives erased.

Dynas died in a field beside the Channel.
His eyes were blue and his hair the hue of wheat.
He was from Kent and cared for nothing else,
Wanting only his home there, long since burned.
He fought the best of any man when turned
Eastward to Kent, the lodestone of his heart.
When Arthur's troop faced down the Thames toward Kent
His was the fleetest horse. His ancient home
He never saw again.

          Marhaus of Ireland,
Young and brutal and full of folly died
Quietly at last of wounds long suffered.
When he could ride no longer men loved him more;
Crippled was he mild, and dying, grave -
Even Arthur wept to see him go.

Carados wandered through his life as men
Will do, orphaned when young and all untaught.
Except in crisis he was little worth
But then incomparable he, and Arthur's best.
He died on London's river, his boat in flames
Pressed in by Saxon craft and snowy swans.
Some said the swans were there to call him home.

Lyonel was pierced and died near Lincoln.
His was a heavy loss, for all the mounts
Were his; he bred and trained them all
For climbing in the Cotswald hills. He loved them,
Each mare and every foal, as more than men,
And he wept when any one of Arthur's men
Returned on foot. His favorite mount, a grey,
Was killed and buried with him.

          Mordred too
Was gone, by Arthur's will a threat
To London's bridge, a menace to London's walls
Left unguarded by the Roman legions
But now manned by serried, bristling Saxons.
Some day, so Arthur swore, this British Rome,
This second Troy and most august of cities,
Hardest of towns to hold, would fall to him
And the Thames would flow, a kinsman water,
Smiling to the sea. Mordred himself smiled
Leading away a troop of Arthur's best,
And for two summers he quartered near the city,
And for two summers presented not one lance
Against the Saxon. The men of Camelot,
Those remaining, pretended not to know
That he was Arthur's son -- their tongues were tied
And few there were to caution Arthur, point out
To him the danger of a distant son.

Others had grown old and died. Sagramour,
The shouter and the covetous, the one alone
Who kept his booty, boasting of his wealth,
He, Sagramour, left his last lance
Broken and blunted in a patch of woods,
Oaths roaring from his mouth, snagged and caught
In a bramble thicket by his golden belt:
Thick set with gems -- he died a proper death.

And Agravayne, whose mother was a Saxon
Captured in the early years, a lady
And still a priestess -- he took his quiet skills
Of talk and parley and modest words from her.
And he fell ill and shriveled up and died.

Dynadan the schemer stole a slave,
A Frankish girl, from Arthur. He was judged
To forfeit beard and hair and clean the stables,
And at every sally out of Camelot
To bring the captains each his mount; and so
He died by hanging -- once a noble captain.
His name was never mentioned, but Arthur brooded.

Different was Gawain's story, one without spite.
Gawain the Green they called him, they who knew
His years but knew him also as always young
And warm of heart. Of all men Arthur
Preferred him most, and offered him the choice
Of spoils and honors, gold harness, scarlet plumes,
Chased shields, and slaves, and none of that
Would he accept. "It is enough," he said,
"To be Pendragon's brother and Arthur's uncle,
And to fight for Rome with Arthur." In those late,
Contested summers Gawain's sword thrusts weakened
And he rode in pain far in the column's rear.

And then the two, Bedivere and Kay,
Twins in their mutual but unspoken love,
Yet in all respects unlike -- Kay the quaffer,
A tankard fit his hand as did a lance.
Lost in the uproar of his huge delights,
Jovial and ferocious, he lived a lot;
He weakened never but he gained no sense.
Bedivere the neat and serpentine,
Subtle in wit, as cutting to friend as foe,
His eyes glittered and his thin back hunched
As he sang war songs to the gallop.
Arthur counted them upon his wings
To right and left. like heavy daggers each,
Warriors most splendid and most cruel in battle.
They knew not wounds nor aging, and their boast
Was that they would not die but ride away
Some day, some year, lances flashing, together -
And joyously -- to heaven and Saint James,
Himself also a good fighter.