The Knights of the Round Table

CHAPTER VII

Instead of going from Winchester straight back to London, we took a little run across to Salisbury. It was not so much that we wanted to see Salisbury, though it is a pretty place and has a fine cathedral, but I wanted to go to Stonehenge. To look at Stonehenge, I think, brings one nearer to the history and the legend of ancient Britain than anything else that I have ever seen. And if Stonehenge were nothing at all it would still be worth going to, for the ride to it from Salisbury is one of the prettiest in all England. There is no such remarkable scenery, perhaps, as is to be found in many another place, but on that day when we rode out there the fields were fairly blazing with flowers, red and yellow and purple, and the little gardens were almost too full of them to hold them all without spilling. It was just a free, open, country ride, with everything around looking peaceful and sweet and beautiful and happy.

And when you take that ride, if you trust to a driver who knows the way and where you ought to go, he will bring you soon to Old Sarum. It is a hill, with a thick double wall of earth and a ditch around it, and it was a Roman town once. Perhaps it was a British town or stronghold before that. It reminded us a little of Cadbury Castle, but it is a good deal bigger. It had a cathedral in it once, but for some reason or other the people began to get tired of living in it and moved down and made the town of Salisbury, and there a new cathedral was built, and Old Sarum came to be nothing at all any more but a great hilltop, with its walls and its ditch around it.

From Old Sarum we went on to Amesbury. I told the driver that I wanted to stay there for a little while. I think he meant to make a little stay, whether I had mentioned it or not, for he got ready to do it with less explanation than it usually takes to get a driver to do anything he is not used to. He stopped at the little hotel and gave the horse a drink, and we gave him enough to get something to drink for himself. Then we walked on toward the church and told him to follow us in a little while.

We had walked about in the churchyard for only a minute when we saw a man coming toward us. He proved to be the vicar, who had seen us and was coming to show us the church. He did show it to us and told us a great many interesting things about it which I cannot remember well enough to repeat them here. But I do remember that it was so old that I decided that there must have been a church here in King Arthur's time, and that perhaps some part of this very one was standing then.

"But where is the old abbey?" I asked. "Are there not some ruins of that left?"

We were outside the church now and were looking about at the fields and the trees. "Oh, no," the vicar said, "there is nothing left of the abbey now. It was very near where that large house is now. That is the house of Sir Edmund Antrobus. We can come nearer and look at it, if you like." So we went nearer and looked at it, and it was a handsome house, and then we went and stood on a little bridge across the Avon. It was a shady place and the water was clear, so that we could see the trout swimming in it, and we looked down the river under a green arch of trees that grew on the sides of the stream and sent their branches to meet above it. "I should like you to remember this place," I said, "because Queen Guinevere lived here for a long time. It is not time yet for me to tell you how or why, but I will tell you when the time comes, and till then I want you to remember how the place looks. Remember these fields and this river and these trees. I don't know, of course, whether they looked the same then, but they may have been not so very different. So think of Queen Guinevere sometimes standing on a bridge, just as we are now, or on the bank of the river, and looking down into just such clear water and up at just such cool, green, spreading trees. Remember that she lived over there where Sir Edmund Antrobus lives now, and that she walked many a morning, it is likely, across these very fields, to a church that stood where the church is now. That is all. Remember it till we come to the story about it."

By the time we came out to the road the driver was waiting for us and wondering what we had found to keep us so long. We got into the carriage and went on again, and nothing happened till we got to Stonehenge. Now I know that you don't want me to describe Stonehenge to you. If you want to know a great deal more than you do about it, you can find it in a good many big and learned books. What I wish I could do would be to make you see it, and I cannot do that. It is not much to tell about, but it is a wonderful thing to see. It seems to me to mean so much, standing there, so lonely, in the middle of Salisbury Plain – that great circle of half-smoothed stones – grand, sad, silent, older than history – a solid, real, noble thing, left to us from a time out of which we have little else but fairy tales. It was a huge circle of stones once, square pillars set on end and big blocks laid across them. Now many of them are lying on the ground, where they fell so long ago that some of them are half buried in it. Some way off from the circle is another tall stone, that they say the devil once threw at a monk. He was such a good man that the devil could not hurt him, but it struck his foot and took the print of his heel, and the print is there now, to prove the story. In the morning of the day of the summer when the sun goes highest in the sky, people come here to see it rise. I have never been here then, but they say that on that morning, if you stand over across the circle and look through one of the great stone gateways, you will see the sun rise exactly over the point of this stone that the devil threw at the monk.

"I am sorry," I said, "that I cannot tell you the history of Stonehenge, but I can tell you the story of it, if you care to hear it."

To be sure Helen cared to hear it.

"We shall have to go back, then," I said, "to a time long before King Arthur was born. Lud was the King of England. It was for him that London was named. Perhaps the two names do not sound very much alike to you, but you know names will get a good deal twisted, the best you can do. Lud had a brother named Levelys, who had gone over to France and married a princess and had become King of France. And about that time King Lud and his people began to have a great deal of trouble. There were three things that troubled them especially. The first was a race of people called the Coranians. I don't know where these Coranians came from or what they did to make themselves so troublesome, but there is no doubt that, for some reason or other, they did not get on well with Lud's people. And the worst of it was that there seemed to be no way to get rid of them. The reason was that they had such good ears. For they could hear anything that was said anywhere on the island, no matter how softly it was spoken, if the wind was the right way. And so no plan against them could ever be talked over without their finding out all about it.

"And the second trouble was a noise, a horrible scream, that was heard in every house in England on the eve of every May Day. It was so loud and so fearful that it frightened people half to death, and it went through them like a knife, and it chilled their blood and filled them with horror, and some of them went mad because of it.

"And the third trouble was that the King never could keep anything to eat in the house. No matter how much provision there was at night, it was all gone the next morning, and nobody could find out what became of it.

"Now, it occurred to King Lud that his brother Levelys was a very wise man, and that it would be worth while to go to France and see him and ask him if he could tell what ought to be done about all these troubles. So he got ready a fleet, very quietly, so that the Coranians should know as little as possible about it, and sailed toward France. And when his brother heard that he was coming he got ready a fleet too, and sailed from France to meet him. When they met they were very glad to see each other, and they got ready to talk about King Lud's troubles. Levelys was so wise that he knew just what Lud had come for, without being told, so he tried to find a way for them to talk without the Coranians hearing them. And he had a horn made of brass, and he thought that if they talked through that they could not be heard even by such ears as the Coranians had.

"But when they began to talk through it they found that whatever either of them said into it nothing would come out but angry and hostile words. Then Levelys knew that a demon had got into the horn. So he poured wine through the horn and drove the demon out. Then they found that they could hear through the horn much better. Levelys talked through the horn and told Lud that he would give him some insects that would kill the Coranians. He must put them in water and then he must call all the people of the island together and scatter the water over them. It would kill all the Coranians, he said, and it would not harm Lud's own people.

"As for the second trouble, that of the dreadful noise, Levelys said that it was caused by two dragons, that were fighting. 'When you go home,' he said, 'you must measure your island and find the exact middle of it. There you must dig a pit, and in the pit you must put a cauldron of the best mead, and you must cover the top of the cauldron with satin. Then you must watch till you see the two dragons flying in the air and fighting together. After a time they will grow weary with fighting and they will drop down upon the satin and sink into the cauldron. Then they will drink all the mead that there is in it and go to sleep. After that you must fold the covering of satin around them and bury them in the strongest place that you have.

"'And the third trouble,' Levelys went on, 'the disappearing of all your food, is caused by a great enchanter, who comes and carries it away. And the reason that nobody who watches ever sees him is that he casts spells over all of them and makes them sleep. But you yourself must watch, and you must have a cauldron filled with cold water beside you, and when you feel like sleeping you must get into the cauldron and the cold water will keep you awake.'

"When he had heard all this Lud went home. And the first thing that he did was to call all the people together, as his brother had told him. Then he sprinkled the water with the insects in it over all the people and it killed all the Coranians and did no harm to his own people.

"Then he measured the island and found that the very middle of it was in Oxford. You can measure it yourself, on the map, if you want to find out whether the middle of it is really in Oxford. I don't say that it is, only that that was what Lud found. But I suppose he must have been right about it, for the rest of the experiment worked perfectly. That is to say, he dug the pit and put the cauldron in the pit and the mead in the cauldron, and the satin over the cauldron, and waited to see the fight of the dragons. And the dragons came and fought and fell down into the cauldron and drank up the mead and slept, and Lud covered them with the satin and buried them in Snowdon, which is a great mountain in Wales. I am sorry that we cannot go to Snowdon at present, for I know that it must be worth seeing.

"And finally Lud made such a great feast that there was sure to be a good deal of it left, and then he sat up to see what would become of it. He put on his armor and sat down and waited, and by and by he began to hear such sweet music that he could scarcely help going to sleep. But he got into the cauldron of cold water which he had ready, and that kept him awake. And at last there came a great man, dressed all in armor and carrying a big basket. He began to put the food into the basket and Lud began to wonder how he could do it, for it seemed to him that there was a great deal more of it than the basket could ever hold. But the man put it all in and then started to go away with it. Then Lud stopped him and made him fight with him. And Lud beat him and would not grant him mercy till he promised to be Lud's servant and to restore the value of all that he had ever taken from him.

"Now we come to the second part of the story. To get to it we have to come down a good many years, to the time when Merlin, the great magician and wise man of King Arthur's court, was a boy. We almost always think of him as an old man, with white hair and a long, white beard. But he was a boy once, just like anybody else. And a wonderful thing about it was that he knew just as much more than anybody else in the world when he was a boy as he did when he was an old man.

"There was a King of England named Vortigern. He had no right to be King of England, but he was. King Constantine had died not long ago, and had left three sons. They were Constans, Pendragon, and Uther. Vortigern, being very powerful at that time, had had Constans made King and he himself had become his chief adviser. Then he had contrived to get Constans killed and had been crowned as King himself. Pendragon and Uther were too young then to rule, and those who had the care of them had fled with them to France, because they knew that Vortigern would kill them too, if they stayed in England. And in France the princes lived and grew up to be young men.

"While they were doing that, Vortigern was having a good deal of trouble in trying to govern the kingdom that did not belong to him. He did it so badly that the people turned against him, and he had many enemies from abroad besides. At last he called his wise men together and they told him that there was nothing left for him to do but to build the strongest tower he could, in the safest place he could, and then stay in it and try to keep himself from his enemies.

"So Vortigern hunted all over the island to find the best place to build his tower, and he decided that the best place was Snowdon. But when his workmen began to build there was more trouble. No matter how much they built in a day, it all fell down in the night, and the next day they had to begin all over again. When that had gone on for awhile Vortigern called his wise men together again and asked them what was the matter.

"The wise men did not know in the least, but they tried to look wiser than they had ever looked before in their lives, and they said that in a few days they would find out. Then they got together, away from the King, and talked it all over and tried to make up their minds why the King's tower would not stand. I don't know all the absurd ways that they had of thinking that they found out things, but the one that they believed in the most was studying the stars. So they studied the stars as hard as ever they could, but not a thing could they find out from them about the King's tower and why it would not stand. But they were dreadfully scared by something else that they thought they saw in the stars. This was that every one of them would finally be brought to his death by a child who never had a father. Then one of them, who was a little brighter than the others, said: 'If we cannot do anything for the King, perhaps we can do something for ourselves. Let us try to kill this child who never had a father, before he kills us. Let us tell the King that we have found out from the stars that his tower will stand, if he mixes the mortar with the blood of a child who never had a father. Then he will find the child and kill him and we shall be safe."

"They all thought that this was a good plan, so they went and told the King that he must find a child who never had a father and mix his blood into the mortar. So the King sent out messengers in every direction to hunt for a child who never had a father. As I told you at first, Merlin was a child then, and perhaps you remember that I told you a long time ago that nobody ever knew who Merlin's father was, unless, as some people said, he was the son of a devil. Well, one day two of Vortigern's messengers came to the town where Merlin lived, and Merlin and some other children were playing in the street.

"Just as the messengers came along Merlin struck one of his playmates. The boy cried out and asked Merlin how he dared to strike him, when he was the son of a great man and when Merlin never had any father. When the messengers heard that, of course they were interested at once. They asked about Merlin and they found that the story was indeed that this boy never had any father, so they told him that the King wanted him and that he must come with them. 'I am ready to go with you,' Merlin said, 'and I am not afraid, though I know that the King means to kill me. You could never have found me if I had not been willing that you should. I knew that you were looking for me and I struck the other boy so that he would say just what he did, to tell you that I was the child that the King wanted. I shall not let the King kill me and I shall tell him what makes his tower fall down.'

"Then the messengers went back to the King and took Merlin with them. When he came before the King Merlin said: 'My lord, you mean to kill me because your wise men have told you that my blood will make your tower stand. But they know nothing about it. Call them and let me question them and prove to you that they know nothing about it.'

"So the King called his wise men and Merlin said to them: 'What is under the place where the King wants to build his tower?'

"The wise men studied and whispered together and tried to look wiser than ever, but at last they had to say that they did not know what was under the place. 'Then I will tell you,' said Merlin; 'there is water under it; my lord, have your workmen dig down and see.

"So the workmen were set to digging and after awhile they came to the water. 'Now what is under that?' said Merlin to the wise men.

"And again they could not tell. 'There are two great stones under it,' said Merlin; 'draw the water off and see.'

"So they drew off the water and there were the stones, just as Merlin said. 'Now,' said Merlin to the wise men, 'tell the King what is under these stones.'

"And the wise men, who were getting pretty well scared by this time, could not tell. 'There are two dragons under the stones,' said Merlin; 'one of them is red and the other is white; when the stones are lifted they will fight and the red dragon will kill the white one.'

"The wise men had not another word to say and the King told the workmen to take up the stones. They took them up and, surely enough, there were the dragons. And, just as Merlin had said, they began to fight. People were fond of fights in those days and there surely never was a better one of its kind than this. But everybody who saw it felt that it could be seen better a little way off. They were a good deal relieved when Merlin told them that the dragons would not hurt any of them and would only kill each other. And no doubt it was a fine fight to look at. The dragons were horrible creatures, with snaky bodies and wings like bats and long, sharp teeth and claws. And they flew above the heads of the people and struck at each other with their claws and twisted about each other and tore with their teeth and breathed fire out of their mouths, and roared and shrieked till the air shook. And at last the red dragon killed the white one, and then he fell down to the ground, and in a little while he died too.

"'Now,' said Merlin, 'you can build your tower and it will stand. But what is to be done,' he went on, 'with these men who tried to make you kill me? Is it not fair, my lord, that you should give them to me and let me do whatever I like with them?'

"'That is fair,' said the King; 'take them and do with them what you like.'

"Of course the wise men were all begging Merlin for mercy now, and telling him that all they did was only because the stars had told them that he was to cause their death. 'That is true,' said Merlin; 'I know that you really thought that you saw that in the stars, but I know too that it was only because an evil spirit was deceiving you. He is a spirit who hates me and he made you see what you saw in the stars in the hope of destroying me. So it was not so much your fault, and I forgive you.'

"After that Vortigern built his tower and it stood. But he was not happy or safe in it long. The sons of the old King Constantine, Pendragon and Uther, who had been taken to France, were grown up by this time and they came over to England with an army, to get back from Vortigern the kingdom which belonged to them. To make a short story of it, they captured Vortigern's strong tower and killed him, and then Pendragon was King of England. But the country was not peaceful yet. The Saxons, who had come many times before, came still and tried to conquer the Britons. Then Merlin foretold that there would be a great battle on Salisbury Plain. There, he said, Pendragon and Uther and their army would fight with the Saxons and would beat them, but one of the brothers would be killed. He would not say which one, but he said that the one who lived must take his brother's name, besides his own, and be King of England, and he must build a monument to his brother on Salisbury Plain that should last forever.