Tales from Tennyson

by Baron Alfred Tennyson Tennyson

"Take these jewels of our Dead Innocence and make them a prize at a tournament."

"Just as you wish," cried the King, "but why don't you wear the diamonds that I found for you in the tarn, which Lancelot won for you at the jousts?"

"Don't you know that they slipped out of my hands the very day that he gave them to me, while I was leaning out of the window to see Elaine in the barge on the river? But these rubies will bring better luck than that to the lady who gets them, for they didn't come from a dead king's skeleton, but from the body of a sweet baby girl. Perhaps, who knows, the purest of your knights will win them at the jousts for the purest of my ladies."

So the great jousts were proclaimed with trumpets that blew all along the streets of Camelot and out across the faded fields to the farthest towers, and everywhere the knights armed themselves for a day of glory before the king.

But just the day before they were to be held, as King Arthur sat in his great hall, a churl staggered in through the door; his face was all striped with the lashes of a dog whip, his nose was broken, one eye was out, a hand was off and the other hand dangled at his side with shattered fingers.

"My poor Churl," cried the king, full of indignant pity, "what beast or fiend has been after you? Or was it a man who hurt you so?"

"He took them all away," sputtered the churl, "a hundred good ones. It was the Red Knight. He—Lord, I was tending sheep, my pigs, a hundred good ones, and he drove them all off to his tower. And when I said that you were always kind to poor churls like me as well as gentle lords and ladies, he made for me and would have killed me outright if he didn't want me to bring you message and made me swear that I would tell you.

"He said, 'Tell the king that I have made a Round Table of my own in the North, and that whatever his knights swear not to do mine swear that they will do; and tell him his hour has come, and that the heathen are after him, and that his long lance is broken, and that his sword Excalibur is a straw.'"

Then Arthur turned to Sir Kay the Seneschal and said: "Take this churl of mine and tend him very carefully as if he were the son of a king until all his hurts are healed," and as Sir Kay left the hall with the churl the king went on to Lancelot: "The heathen have been quiet for a long, long time, but now they are rising again in the North, and I will go with my younger knights to put them down, so as to make the whole island safe from one shore to the other. And while I go away, you, Sir Lancelot, will sit in my chair to-morrow at the tournament and be the judge there of the field. For why should you anyway care to go in again yourself, when you've already won the nine diamonds for the queen?"

"Very well," replied Lancelot, "if you wish, although it would be better if you would let me go off with the younger knights and you stay here with the others and watch the tournament. But, if not, all is well?"