The Princess, the Crone, and the Dung-Cart Knight Read online

So it was decided: the three of them would go on together. Ariel explained the two roads to Jean, and they determined that since Gawain and Terence had taken the left-hand fork, they should take the right. They gathered Sarah's gear and Jean's bundled armor (he said that it was faster walking without all of his gear fastened on) onto Sarah's horse, and there was still room for Sarah and Ariel to take turns riding. While they packed, Sarah stole several curious glances at Jean. He wore the clothes of a peasant but—like so many people she had met on this journey—was clearly something else. From his voice and his armor—ill kept though it was—he could only be a knight, but that did not fit the circumstances in which she had first encountered him. She had never heard of a knight who would do something so humiliating as to ride in a cart filled with dung or who could be so indifferent to insults, especially from the lower ranks of society. Even if he was a second-rate knight, though, he carried a sword. Perhaps he might be of some use, after all.

  VI

  The Hermit of the Tomb

  An hour after the three set off from the Dividing of the Ways, the dense forest thinned, and they began traveling over a moor. There was more light away from the woods, but the trail was hard to see through the heather, and shortly before noon it ended altogether, at a river. The river was just too wide and deep to cross, so they went upstream along the banks, looking for a ford.

  Soon they found what they were looking for: a wide, shallow, rocky spot in the river where the water never ran deeper than a person's waist. Sarah was on the mare, and Jean said to Ariel, "If you will sit beside Lady Sarah, my lady, I shall lead the mare across."

  "I don't mind the water," Ariel said.

  "The current may be swifter than it looks. Please, my lady," Jean replied.

  Ariel's dimples appeared, and she ventured a look brimming with laughter at Sarah, and Sarah suddenly remembered that Ariel was a water nymph. Ariel merely said, "Very well," though, and meekly climbed into the saddle beside Sarah. Sarah was suddenly struck with the absurdity of protecting a water nymph from a river—like guarding an eagle from falling off a cliff. It was thoughtful of Jean, though, even if it was unnecessary.

  Jean took the mare's reins and started into the water, but Ariel said suddenly, "Jean, should you not speak to this knight first?"

  For the first time, Sarah became aware of a knight on horseback, sitting still in the shadow of a tree on the opposite bank. The knight's visor was closed, and he held a long spear, like the one that had injured Sir Kai. "I see no reason to exchange pleasantries," Jean replied, still coaxing the mare into the water.

  "Knight!" the man across the river called. "I guard this ford, and I forbid you to cross it."

  Jean didn't respond with so much as a glance. He kept leading the reluctant mare forward.

  "You would be wise not to take this ford!" shouted the knight. Again, Jean gave no sign that he had heard. Sarah began to feel concerned. Jean was on foot and wore only half of his armor. If the other knight chose to enforce his command, there didn't seem much that Jean would be able to do.

  "Knight! Do not enter the ford against my order, or I shall be forced to strike you!"

  "Shouldn't you do something?" Ariel asked Jean hesitantly.

  "I am sure he will not hurt you," Jean replied, somewhat absently, leading the mare around a large rock.

  "I was afraid that he would hurt you, actually," Ariel replied. Jean only shook his head.

  The guardian knight pointed his lance at Jean and spurred his horse forward. Sarah caught her breath, but soon saw there was no danger. The other horse was as reluctant to enter the cold, swirling river as Sarah's mare had been, and the knight's grand charge ended weakly just a few feet from the bank, as his snorting and splashing and clearly disgusted mount stopped abruptly.

  "Go on, Bucephalus!" the knight called to his horse. "Charge!"

  Bucephalus tossed his head and gave his master a look that Sarah had no difficulty interpreting. Meanwhile Jean continued guiding the mare forward. They were two thirds of the way across now, almost within reach of the knight's lance. Jean turned to face forward and plodded on through the current.

  The knight stopped trying to urge his mount forward, sat up in his saddle, and said loudly, "Stay, Bucephalus!" Since the horse was already staying and clearly had no intention of doing anything else, this command might not have been strictly necessary, but the knight said, "Good boy," anyway. Ariel giggled, and Sarah rolled her eyes.

  Jean kept stepping forward. Now only about eight feet separated him from the guardian of the ford, and the knight lowered his spear again, pointing it directly at Jean's breastplate. Still Jean ignored it. Another step forward, and his armored chest actually touched the point of the spear.

  "Stop!" the knight said. Jean stepped forward, pushing against the lance with his breastplate, and the knight suddenly lunged forward. The thrusting spear made Jean stagger backward and almost fall. He caught himself, though, and resumed his forward march. The mounted knight had more trouble recovering. He almost lost his balance when he thrust and, struggling to keep his seat, nearly dropped his lance. By the time he had recovered, Jean was beside him, and the long lance was useless. Still holding the spear in one hand, the knight dropped his horse's reins and drew his sword. "Now shall you stop?" he demanded angrily.

  Jean only reached out with his left hand and slapped the other knight's horse sharply on the flank. Bucephalus twitched and jumped, then turned briskly and headed back to dry land, taking advantage of his slack reins to go where he wished. The knight, unable to balance himself with both hands holding weapons, fell off the horse with a splash.

  Jean pressed on, leading the mare up the bank to the other side. Beside them, Bucephalus rose dripping from the water. There was no sign of the knight.

  "Merde!" Jean muttered under his breath. He gave Ariel his hand to help her down from the saddle. "Hold the horse, if you please, Lady Ariel." Then he turned and strode back into the river, fished around in the eddies for a moment, then straightened up, clutching the struggling and gasping knight's breastplate with one hand and dragging him from the water. The knight had lost his lance—Sarah saw it floating away downstream—but he still held his sword. Jean dropped him in a heap on the riverbank, then reached down, roughly unfastened the knight's helm, and removed it.

  The knight was a young man, with hair that was so fair as to seem almost white and a faint mustache that grew only at the edge of the man's mouth and not under his nose. He probably would have been fairly good-looking, but his face was a faint shade of blue, and he was gagging. Rolling over on his stomach, the knight vomited up several pints of river. Jean watched until the knight had finished and was breathing again, then nodded and walked back to the mare. "Shall we go? The trail had been pointing eastward for the last hour, so we can continue in that direction."

  Sarah and Ariel nodded, careful not to stare at the limp form on the ground behind them. But then the knight began to make a strange sound, and Sarah realized that he was crying. Ariel touched Jean on the arm. "Can you not help him?"

  "I already saved his life, did I not?" Jean replied.

  "Yes, but can't you help him now?"

  Jean looked dourly at her, then said, "Me, I do not think so. But for your sake, I will try." He walked over to the sobbing knight and said, "Brother, what ails you?"

  "I have lost my honor."

  "If your honor was so slight as to be lost by falling in a river, then it was not worth having."

  "No," the knight said. "Not the fall! But you! You wouldn't even fight me! Am I so far beneath you?"

  "I am pressed for time," Jean explained. "I have not leisure to fight people I meet along the way."

  "You wouldn't even look at me!"

  "I did not want to encourage you. As I said, I have not the time. Besides, what if we had fought and I had defeated you? You would have lost your honor anyway, no?"

  "But no! To be defeated by another great knight is a feat worthy of note! Only to be ignored and t
hen pushed into the river, like a lackey—"

  "I didn't push you," Jean pointed out. "You fell."

  This didn't seem to be helpful. The knight burst into wracking sobs again, and Ariel said gently, "Jean."

  Jean looked back at her. "But he is so stupid, my lady!"

  At that, the knight stopped crying. "You dare to insult me!" he cried. Rising to his feet with difficulty, the knight lifted his sword and drove it into the ground between him and Jean. "I take such words from no man!" he said proudly. "Draw thy weapon, and I shall take mine as well!" It would have been a fine, dramatic gesture, Sarah thought, had he not driven his sword into the spot where a moment before he had emptied his stomach.

  Jean looked distastefully at the sword in the puddle, then shrugged, closed his right hand into a fist, and hit the knight in the face. The knight rocked backward, then sat down hard. "If it will give you pleasure and save your honor to be defeated, then let us make haste and defeat you," Jean said.

  With a roar of indignation, the knight crawled to his feet and gripped his sword. Jean slapped the man's hand away and knocked him down again. For the next two minutes—no more—Sarah watched the guardian of the ford bob up and down like a twig in a river. Jean never drew his sword and never seemed hurried. He parried the two or three feeble sword strokes that the knight managed to make by slapping the flat of the sword away with his bare hand. Jean's hands were even quicker than Sir Kai's, Sarah realized, and as she watched she noticed that Jean's feet were always in exactly the right position to give him perfect balance. At last, one of Jean's slaps actually knocked the sword from the knight's hand. Jean punched the knight once more, then picked up his sword and pointed it at the man's bare neck. "Do you yield?" he said wearily.

  The knight nodded, and Jean drove the sword back into the ground, in a clean spot, and turned away. "Let us go now. The day does not grow longer."

  They had gone only a few steps, though, when the guardian of the ford called out, "Sir Knight?" Jean stopped and looked back at the knight, who said, "Thank you."

  Jean closed his eyes briefly and replied, "It was nothing."

  "It was an honor to fight such a knight as you," the knight said.

  Jean nodded curtly, then turned back to the trail. As he walked, though, he said, "And to think that once I was a knight such as you. Incroyable!"

  He spoke these words softly, under his breath, but Sarah heard. She examined their companion with a new curiosity. She had had difficulty thinking of Jean as a real knight—her first picture of him, sitting amid the manure in an old farm cart, had probably been responsible for this—but his handling of the knight at the ford had altered her opinion. It wasn't that he had overcome the knight so easily, but that he had been so confident that he could.

  "You didn't seem afraid back there, when you fought that knight," she ventured.

  "Afraid? Of him?" Jean replied. His voice held no scorn, only mild surprise, as if it had never occurred to him that one might be afraid. "No, Lady Sarah."

  "You didn't even draw your sword."

  Jean shrugged. "A sword is a terrible thing. With a sword, one kills. I did not wish to kill."

  "Have you ever wished to kill?" Sarah asked. Jean did not answer, so after a moment, she said, "But you know how to fight with a sword, don't you?"

  "Some have said so," Jean replied.

  "Would you teach me?" Jean looked up at her, his blue eyes bright under his heavy eyebrows. "Sir Kai started to teach me, when he gave me this sword," Sarah added, "but then he was hurt."

  "No, I will not teach you. A sword is a terrible thing," Jean repeated.

  That evening, as their shadows began to stretch long before them on the heath, they came to a compact house built into the side of a small hill that rose incongruously out of the flatlands. The house was constructed of unhewn stones, closely fitted together and chinked with mud. Jean stopped and stared at the house, his eyes alight. "But how marvelous! See how beautifully it is built! Each stone in exactly the right place, as if designed for that spot and no other!"

  Sarah agreed that the house looked very snug and secure, but she didn't see what had drawn such admiration from Jean. There was not the slightest decoration anywhere, not even flowers in the bare yard. Whoever lived here was male, she decided, and immediately she was proven correct. A balding man in long black religious robes appeared at the doorway.

  "Good afternoon, travelers," the man said. His voice was gentle.

  "Good afternoon, Father," Jean said, bowing reverently.

  "Oh, no," the man said. "I am not a priest, only a humble dweller of the moors."

  "But your robe, is it not Benedictine?" Jean asked.

  "Yes," the man said. "I am a monk, although I live away from the brotherhood now, but I have not been ordained. In these parts, they call me Brother Constans."

  "Did you build this house?" Jean asked.

  The old man smiled. "I am still building it. It has been ten years already, and I think in another three years, I shall have my bedroom finished. But the guest room is ready. I hope you will stay with me this evening. The moors are cold after dark, when the wind rises, but there is always a fire at my hearth."

  With a bow Jean accepted, then turned to the girls. "I am Jean Le Forestier, and this is Lady Ariel and Lady Sarah."

  "My home is honored," Brother Constans said, sweeping the ladies a courtly bow that seemed out of place in his monkish garb.

  Ariel laughed delightedly. "But how graceful! Is that how they teach novitiates to bow at the Abbey now?"

  Brother Constans's eyes wrinkled at the edges. "I have not always been a monk, my child." He turned his eyes to Sarah and smiled with evident pleasure. "Sarah," he said. "You are welcome, princess."

  Sarah stared. "Why did you call me that?"

  "It is what your name means, of course. Did you not know? But yes, I see you do." He led them into the house and showed Ariel and Sarah to what he called the guest room, where two pallet beds lay on the floor. Then he turned to Jean. "Come—how did you give your name again? Jean?—come outside, and I will show you my work."

  The two men went out a rear door, and Sarah, watching them through the door, saw the hermit showing Jean around a field littered with stones. He gestured about, evidently describing where the new room would be, and Jean began nodding and talking. It was the most Sarah had seen their escort speak since they had met him. A stir at her side caught her eye, and she looked over to see Ariel beside her.

  "What an odd man," Sarah said.

  "I like him," Ariel replied.

  Sarah agreed that the monk seemed nice enough. "But how strange," she said. "To build the guest room before building his own room. Surely he doesn't have that many guests out here."

  "You wouldn't think so," Ariel conceded. "I thought at first that it was just his polite way of giving up his own room to guests, but the guest room beds haven't been slept in for some time. The blankets had dust on them."

  "Dust?"

  Ariel nodded. "He probably never noticed. I suppose a holy man is still a man, after all. I shook your covers out already."

  "Thank you. So where do you think the hermit sleeps?"

  "Maybe on the floor," Ariel replied. "Or maybe there's another room behind that door."

  Sarah noticed for the first time a heavy oaken door built into the side wall, just where the house joined the little hill. "Do you think that the hill is hollow?" she asked.

  "But of course, Sarah," responded the monk, who had drifted near enough to hear Sarah's question. "The hill is not a real hill, you know. It is a house just like this one that I build, only much older. Would you like to see the inner room?" Sarah didn't reply, but the old monk seemed to take her silence as an affirmative, and he turned to Jean. "Come and see, my friend."

  Walking back into the house, Brother Constans took up a candle and lit it at the fire in the hearth. "Follow me," he said, "and see why I live alone out here on the heath." His eyes glinted, and he added, "Don't tell me th
at you haven't wondered." He opened the oaken door and led them into a spacious room with stone walls. In the flicker of candlelight, Sarah could see figures and words carved in the stones, but the words seemed to be in a different language. At the far end of the room was a large stone box, exactly the size of a bed.

  "This is a crypt," Jean said.

  "Yes," the old monk replied.

  "Who is buried in that tomb?"

  "No one yet."

  "Yet?" Jean's right hand rested casually on the hilt of his sword.

  "Don't be concerned," Brother Constans said with a chuckle. "I am not a madman who waits to kill travelers, like Procrustes in the story of the ancients. The tomb waits here as a hallowed resting place for one of the great heroes of the land, and I am its guardian until that time."

  "What hero?" Jean asked.

  "Sir Lancelot du Lac," Brother Constans said calmly. He rested one hand on the stone coffin and patted it fondly. "A great man indeed."

  Jean said nothing. To fill the silence, Sarah commented, "Someone told me that Sir Lancelot had gone away from the court. How do you know he isn't already dead?"

  "I know only what I am told. Sir Lancelot has more to do for England, deeds that will lift his name higher than it has ever been raised, and when he dies, he will be laid to rest here."

  "And when will that be?" Jean asked. His voice was very quiet.

  "That I was not told." The old man looked at Jean and smiled. "But if it is not soon, then it is to come someday. You did not think that Sir Lancelot would live forever, did you?"

  Ariel spoke for the first time. "Why were you chosen to keep this place, Brother Constans?"

  The monk turned back toward the door. "I'll tell you, but first, shall we have some soup?" He led them back into the new part of the house, where he pulled several wooden bowls from a cupboard and ladled soup into them from a pot that hung over the fire. Standing at his place at the small table, the monk bowed over his bowl, briefly and silently, then sat and looked at Ariel. "You see, my dear, Sir Lancelot is the reason I am a monk at all. It happened nearly twelve years ago, just after Sir Lancelot had taken Joyous Garde."