As he rode with loose rein the trees thinned suddenly, and the forest gloom rolled back over his head. Gorlois halted mechanically under the wooelshawe, and scanned the valley spread before him under the brown hollow of his hand. He had expected no such open land in this waste of wood—open land with water, a cottage, sheep feeding, and horses tethered under the trees. One of the horses tethered there was a black. The coincidence livened Gorlois’s torpid, sunburnt face with a cool gleam of intelligence. He sat motionless in the saddle and took the length and breadth of the valley under the keen ken of his black eyes.
The man swore a little oath into his peaked black beard. His face grew suddenly rapacious as he stared out under the hollow of his hand. He had seen a streak of red strike through the green wall far up the eastern slope that fronted him, a scrap of colour metallic with the hint of armour. It went to and fro under the distant trees like a torch past the windows of a church. Gorlois’s hand tightened on the bridle. He watched the thing as a hawk watches a young rabbit in the grass.
Betimes he gave a queer little chuckle, and turned his horse into the deeper shade of the trees. He began to make a circuit round the valley, holding northwards to compass the meadows. He cast long, wary glances into the wood as he went; tried his sword to see that it was loose in the scabbard; took his helmet from the saddle-bow, and let down the cheek-pieces from the crown. Before long he kicked his stirrups away, rolled out of the saddle, and tied his horse to an oak sapling in a little dell. Going silently on foot over the mossy grass, stopping often to stare into the sunny vistas of the forest, moving more or less from tree to tree, he worked his way southwards along the eastern slope. Streaks of meadowland and the glint of water showed below him, and he heard the bleat of sheep far away, and the tinkling of a bell.
Presently the murmur of voices came to him through the woods. He ventured on another fifty paces, then stopped behind a tree to listen. There were two voices, he was sure of that: one was a woman’s, and the other had the sonorous vibration of a man’s bass. Gorlois’s eyes took a queer, far-away look, and his strong teeth showed between his lips.
He worked his way on through the trees with the cautious and deliberate instinct of a hunter. The two voices gained in timbre, character, and expression. Their talk was no jays’ chatter; Gorlois could tell that from the emphasis of sound, and a certain dramatic melody that ran through the whole. Soon the voices were very near. Going on his belly, with his sword held in his left hand, he crawled like a gilt dragon through a forest of springing fern. He crawled on till he was quite near the two who stood and talked under the trees. Lying flat, never venturing to lift his head, he crouched, breathing hard through his nostrils and holding his scabbarded sword crosswise beneath his chin.
Gorlois’s face, scarred and drawn as it was, seemed as he listened a clear mirror for the portrayal of human passion. His black moustachios twitched above his angular jaw; his eyes took a rapacious and glazed look, and a shadow seemed to cover his face. He turned and twisted as he lay, and dug the points of his iron-shod shoes into the soft ground as though in the crisis of some pain. It was the woman’s voice that did all this for him. Every word seemed like the wrench of a hook in his flesh, as he cursed and twisted under the bracken.
Presently he lay still again, as though to listen the better. He could hear something of what was said to the man in the red harness, but the main drift of their talk was beyond him. Pelleas! Pelleas! He squirmed like a crushed snake at each sounding of the name. The bracken hardly swayed as he crawled on some twenty paces and again lay still, with his cheek resting upon the scabbard of his sword.
“Gorlois might die.”
Gorlois heard the words as plainly as though they had been spoken into his ear. A vast silence hung like thunder over the forest. Gorlois lay as though stunned with a stone, his dry mouth pressed to the cold steel of the sword. His eyes took a stubborn stare under the sweep of his casque. With gradual labour he raised himself upon his elbows, drew his knees up under his body, and lifted his head slowly above the sweep of green.
The ground fell away slightly from where Gorlois knelt in the bracken, and he could look down on the two who stood under the trees, while the fern fronds hid his harness. He saw a woman in violet and gold, her hair falling straight on either side of her face, and her arms folded crosswise over her breast. He saw also the knight in red harness, with his locked hands twisting above his head as in an agony, while his face was hidden by his arm. A passionate whisper of words passed between the two. Even when Gorlois watched, the man in the red harness jerked round and fell on his knees at the woman’s feet. Gorlois suddenly saw his face; it was the face of Uther the King.