DIEU ET MON DROIT!

by

Eliot Fintushel

 

lamor woke early.  He tiptoed past Bleoberis, dead to the world.  He let his squire Edmond sleep where he lay, on a cot behind the stairs, and rode out of Camelot into open country, to think.

It was wrong, but human, to hate.  Christ himself was both God and human, so the fathers taught.  Christ overturned the moneylenders' table‑-he had not played the gentle lamb for them.  And this world was filled with such tables, tended not just by moneylenders but by every sort of malefactor, thieves with fine lineages, buggers in sackcloth, lying, gossiping chamberlains, Sir Rape‑Your‑Wife, Lord Stab‑You‑In‑The‑Back‑-and murderer kings.  Blamor hated them all.  They thought they ran the world, "mundus Caesare," swiping helpless lads like his cousin Anselm, but he would overturn their tables for them.

Blamor tethered his horse‑-and his anger‑-to an oak tree by a stream and went walking beside the water.  God dwelled in such places more than in the towns.  No king here but He.  How often in their childhood, Blamor had fled the dominion of firstborn Bleoberis‑-it chafed, even from him, who surely loved Blamor and had only Blamor's good at heart‑-to the woods!  The priests might get it wrong, seduced by power or papish gold, but not the wind and water!

In the rushing of the stream and the soughing of the leaves above was God's voice and his comfort.  Blamor followed the stream into a woods, leaping down among wet, dark rocks, a wattle of fallen branches, and scurrying things.  He picked and threaded his way, keeping the sound of the water close at his right when grasses and limbs obscured it.

Sometimes even the water sound dwindled to the loudness of his own thoughts, and then, willy-nilly, his brother's doggerel hung in his mind.  He shook his head, but it lingered.  He'd heard it coming from up in the garde-robe, accompanied by the sound of Bleoberis's piss as it sprinkled into the cellar, two stories down, through the hole in the garde-robe floor:

 

"Poor Anselm, on the bier you lie,

"Whom Agwisance with palsied eye

"Fewtered his cruel lance upon . . . "

 

Delicate lad, it had been suicide for Anselm to have gone to Ireland.  How should he train for knighthood who was hardly fit to squire?  He never should have stepped foot in a tilt‑yard, King Agwisance's or anyone else's!

 

"Wherefore my father's lesser son,

"Stricken to his saintly marrow,

"Appeached the king and gargled, 'Haro . . . !'

 

'Haro!'  I accuse!  What else was there to do once his brother Bleoberis had told Blamor of Anselm's murder?  Bleoberis, the elder one, had wanted to wait, to weigh things, he'd said, to politic a bit before breaking lances, but Blamor would never dilute righteousness with circumspection.  "Dieu at mon droit!"  God and my right:‑-justice for Anselm's killer!

God would secure the proper outcome without any politicking.  Wasn't Agwisance King Arthur's vassal?  He would have to face the charges or forfeit his lands.

A huge, fallen branch blocked his path, and Blamor picked his way around it.  At last Bleoberis had seen the truth of Blamor's plea, relented, and allowed Blamor, the passionate one, to go to Camelot to settle the matter by a contest at arms.

 

"Now must Ag to Camelot,

"Where he may brother Blamor gut,

"Or brother Blamor him may gut . . . "

 

Blamor recalled the words of Bleoberis's drinking friends, the "Black Monks" who helped him home from the Messe Des Fous on the brown hillside in Cluny: "Young devil, you embarrass even us!" they'd laughed, as Bleoberis improvised mock liturgies in Latin and French, "Don't stop, blood of King Ban, or we'll tell your Uncle Lancelot on you!"

 

" . . . Or brother Blamor him may gut

"And we Ag's benefice obtain

"For Ansy's broached and shattered brain

"Upon the noyous bloody lance

"Attributed to Agwisance."

 

'Attributed!'  Strange choice of words, but maybe Blamor had misheard it, charging up the steps of the burgher's house where they were staying in Camelot, afire with the news that Agwisance had arrived with his champion, a young knight named Tristram.  Or it could have been Bleoberis's Cluny wildness.  He was entitled to that‑-God needed all sorts of souls to work the salvation of his creatures.  Bleoberis was a bear of a man, thickly bearded, burly, with nostrils like oubliettes in his squat face.  But Bleoberis loved Blamor, blue-eyed and blond.  He even took joy in the younger brother's superior skill at arms: he told him so time and again!

"Here's the standings," Bleoberis had said, pulling up his leggings.  Behind him, on the garde-robe wall, a samite gown hung from a hook, and a vest and a fancy doublet under it, the stench of human waste proof against vermin.  Blamor stood panting and listening in the dark hallway.  "Agwisance is a little rat, and Tristram is Agwisance's lump of cheese."

"But, Bleoberis, I heard that Tristram once gave Sir Marhaus, Agwisance's man, a mortal wound; he left a sliver of his sword edge in Sir Marhaus's brain pan, so I heard, and sent him packing back to Ireland to die‑-and he kept Marhaus's shield and sword for souvenirs!

"They found a rune cut fresh in Marhaus's belly.  It's said he had it tattooed there for a spell against Tristram, but no one feared Tristram then!  I think Tristram did it, Bleoberis‑-black work, to disfigure a man and slay him!  Now he champions the Irish king!"

"Death was Marhaus's due, little brother.  The truth is, Marhaus was overrated, a milksop.  Ask anyone!  For us blood of King Ban's line, your cavalier triste is a squire's toady, and if you ever yield to him, by God, you shame us all, and I'll kill you myself."

Of course, Blamor would never yield!

The way cleared, the stream widened, and Blamor found himself under a mackerel sky, in a brisk dry wind, with the whole world now squinting, now widening its eye, as the sun beamed through the clouds or was lidded again.  As still in his soul as a monk or a dead man, Blamor stared down at the patchy green ahead of each next step.  More than seeing, he felt the changing light against his skin.  God's voice was in it as in the water and wind.

Memento mori! the light whispered to him.  Be mindful of dying!

A horse whinnied, and Blamor looked up.  A hundred yards away, violet brocaded silk swelled and rippled.  The fabric was stretched between tentpoles surmounted by huge gold pommels; even at this remove, Blamor could make out their figure‑-a hawk in flight bearing in its beak a small animal.

Agwisance!

Abruptly, the light and air stopped speaking to Blamor.  He felt himself blush.  He had been as if invisible, with God, and now he was skulking about the enemy's encampment, spying on the murderer‑king or, God forbid, seeking to strike a bargain with him‑-that's how it looked.  Blamor glanced in all directions to see if he might have been observed.  It flustered him: willy‑nilly he found himself trying to convince an imaginary judge of his intentions.  He had been out walking, purifying himself before God, preparing himself to be an instrument of His justice.  He had had no idea that the encampment of King Agwisance was nearby.

The judge was unconvinced.

Thoughts scattered, pulse jumping, he wanted to flee his body.  He began to reach back to untether his horse, but of course, he had left it half a mile behind.

Then he saw Sir Tristram.  He was taller by a head than Blamor; he walked as if supported from above, so lofty was his carriage and so graceful, even though he was wearing a cumbersome hauberk, all of woven silver links that flashed when the sun shone.  His helmet flashed as well, dangling from his hand by a chin strap.

Behind Tristram a huge black horse ambled.  It felt closer than Blamor knew it was‑-his eyes and heart had somehow separated and perceived the world at odds.  An awesome beast with fiery eyes, Tristram's mount snorted thunderously and shook its massive head.  Its mane flew up: sparks from a flint.  When it shuddered, the sweat sprayed and sparkled like St. Anthony's fire.  Tristram led his mount with clicks of the tongue.  Once or twice he petted the creature's neck, and it seemed to Blamor a supernatural act, like placing one's head in a lion's mouth.

Blamor felt paralysed, a sheep at the slaughtering block.  He stood stock-still, exposed and vulnerable in the middle of the field, like a post one tries arrows on‑-even rabbits and fowl knew to stay along the edge of a field for safety.  A hundred yards away, Tristram turned and rubbed his forehead against the black horse's lowered forelock‑-and at that moment Blamor realized that his brother had lied.

This knight was his death.

Inside Blamor the panic burst.  He felt all blood and lightning.  He thought nothing, decided nothing, but found himself running back through the woods, splashing in and out of the stream, pawing branches out of his way, charging into dark confusion, heedless of thorns and sudden ditches, falling, rising, scrambling, face and palms scratched bloody.

At last his foot caught on a rotting, fallen limb, and Blamor fell to hands and knees, the breath rasping like sobs in the back of his throat.  He stayed there, a hunted animal, panting and dripping mud.  As his breath grew less ragged, he began to hear a strange sound above the wind and water sounds‑-not the whinney of Tristram's mount and not the voice of God, but a sort of singing.

The singing became clearer as the hoofbeats of his heart grew dimmer.  At first, he could not understand the words; the singer's voice was thin and crackly, punctuated by little coughs, but gradually he made them out:

 

"Endurez, endurez les doux maux de mors!

"Plus genté de vous les endurent!"

 

It seemed to Blamor that he had heard that chant from one of Bleoberis's Cluny fous, but that the words had been "doux maux d'amer," sweet pangs of love, and not "de mors," of death.

 

Endure, endure the sweet pangs of death!

More gentlemen than you have endured them!

 

Blamor slaked the grime from his cheeks and stood.  Limping at first, he groped in whatever direction made the singing louder.  With the singing, the sound of water swelled‑-she was at the stream, then.  He followed the sound.  Perhaps Bleoberis had just been trying to guard his little brother from anxiety‑-les maux de mors, and nowise sweet!  Blamor squeezed through tangling, twisted vines and overgrown trees, ripping and chopping whatever got in his way.  It was Bleoberis, Bleoberis, Bleoberis choking him . . . !

 

"Endurez . . . !"

 

He stopped at the edge of a glade and leaned against two saplings, bowing them slightly as he gazed between them at the woman by the stream.  She sat on a flat rock, sewing, her work half‑hidden by the fall of her long hair, pale and dry as old flax.  Her own clothes were tatters, a gown once white, perhaps, stained ochre and patched helter-skelter with beetle spit and leaves that were veins and powder now.  She rocked back and forth from her skeletal waist as she guided the needle through her cloth, and sang.

In the seeing of her Blamor forgot himself.  He drew nearer.  It was a gambois the woman was sewing on, a knight's undergarment of quilted cotton; he'd never seen one so fine.  He came within a few yards of her.  She didn't notice, but sang on with a child's rapture‑-"Endurez, endurez les doux maux de mors!"‑-and rocked and stitched, and the stream burbled and sparkled below.  He came within a foot of her, and still she didn't stir.  "Plus genté de vous . . . "  She was not mending the garment, he saw, but embroidering letters and images in a circle with gold thread.  He was inches behind her.  He saw the shapes of shoulder bones beneath her pale skin, wrinkly as the skin on boiled milk.  From above, through rents in the gown, he saw her shriveled breasts.  He could smell her‑-pennyroyal and sulphur.  He drew closer still, leaning to see what she was writing.

His cheek touched her hair, nearly‑-and she stopped singing.  She clasped her knees together, folding the gambois in‑between and out of sight.  The needle dangled over one thigh at the end of a golden thread.

The sound of the stream.  The sough of the old woman's breath.  Clouds shuttering the sun: light and dark like a sweetness melting and vanishing in everything.

She turned her head.  "I was waiting for you, Blamor."

He trembled and shrank back, his heart pounding again.  "How do you know my name?"

"Sit you down before me, Blamor.  Don't you be afraid, now.  I only brought you here because my legs have gone too weak to take me there, and I've a gift for you.  A gift and a great gift!  Sit you down!"

He sat where she pointed.  He was not aware of going there, but found himself before her, on a slightly lower rock, facing her, his back to the stream‑-its sound could have been the rush of his thoughts or his blood or the wings of angels.  Now he saw the moonstones and sapphires mounted in little pendants of bone and of boiled, hardened leather.  She must have a dozen necklaces inside the ochre tatters.  Maybe, he thought madly, they are her children.

He fancied that she had heard his thought.  She reached toward him her chicken bone arm and, with an indulgent smile, caressed his head as if he were a child.  "Have they none of my ilk, then, in Brittany whence you come, Blamor de Ganis?  Have they no one to teach you the end you lean toward?  None to remedy your fatal pieties, Blamor?"

"No," he confessed.  She laughed‑-her laughter wounded him.  It threw Blamor inward, grasping for a principle.  He imagined he was reaching for a sacred scroll, but when he touched it, he felt the powder of moths' wings.  They pulsed, then separated and swirled inside his mind like snow.  "Well, of course, there is my brother . . . "

"Bleoberis?  Ah, poor thing, you know better now!  You've seen your death in a hauberk!  But never mind, I can save you.  It's why I've brought you to me.  Come closer and pull up your smock.  I want to see your belly, Blamor.  I want to write something there with a knife."

"You want to kill me?"

"No, that's a gift I cannot give you.  I want to save you, child, with a rune."

"I know you now!"  Blamor leapt to his feet.  "Witch, you sew spells into blouses or tattoo them on a knight's body, don't you?  Do you think I'd stoop to that?  It's my God and my right that give me strength, not your sort . . . !

"Your 'right'‑-if only you knew!"

" . . . And do you dream that a trick like that would get past King Arthur, madam?  Was it you who secreted a spell inside the cloak of the bishop's champion when the Earl of Salisbury brought suit against him?  Much good it did him!  He was found out before the contest, and the bishop forfeited his case‑-I wonder if he slew his witch after."

"King Arthur is not judge today, mannikin, though his is the right of ban.  King Arthur sojourns at Joyous Gard with Lancelot, your uncle.  King Carados and the King of Scots, at Arthur's request, will probe you for unlawful spells and talismans, will see you shriven, and will judge you recreant, victorious, or dead.  They will find no grimoire of mine before or after, though they flail you and stretch your hide in the midday sun, Sir Knight!  I know everything.

"Come to me.  See here the pretty ink I'll lay into the pretty cuts.  Don't you fear my gimlets now!  Plus genté de vous les endurent!"  A pouch of worn leather hung from a thong between her legs like a stiff furry scrotum.  Cooing to it, she worked the drawstring open and withdrew two small knives, narrow as boning knives, cruelly sharp, and a phial of purple dye.  "Come!  For naught, then, did I show you Sir Tristram and your death?  Aren't you afraid of that, you foolish pizzle‑mound?  That you should fear, surely, les doux maux de mors!"

"No!  I only fear injustice!"  The words had a dull ring to Blamor's own ear, as if spoken in an earthen cellar and by someone other than himself.  The old woman smiled so slightly that he could not be sure that he wasn't imagining it, and yet it cowed him.  Her eyes made him feel small, shut in, sealed in a hollowed rock, his insides draining and collapsing, no principles left, no thoughts even, but only the desiccating skin, as hot lead dripped in at the rims of the joined halves of stone, dulling, hardening . . .

"Oh, come!"  Her rebuke woke him from the daydream.

"Did you cut the rune on Sir Marhaus's belly?"

"It saved him!"

"But he died!"

"Not of Tristram.  Whoever says so lies!  Marhaus died his own death, days later, in Ireland.  My rune saved him!"

He was sweating.  He felt like a small child before her, like the child Bleoberis used to order about‑-Bleoberis, who had been king and pope to little Blamor.  What was it about her voice, dry leaves crackling in a fire, that turned his own thoughts to smoke?  He came to her.

"This is to humor an old crone.  This has nothing to do with my case.  Death is nothing to me."  He advanced toward her on his knees.  He couldn't stop trembling.

"Just as you say, Blamor dear, but death is everything."  She tucked the mystic gambois out of sight behind her, she lifted his smock, and she began to cut.

He winced.  "This will save me?"

"This will save you."

Light and shadow as the sun slipped higher through galloping clouds‑-Blamor was that slow winking, outside himself and time.  At some point, she said, "Oh, this is more better and more worthier than a lodestone on a sleeping lady's head or the pebble from a rooster's craw, be sure!"  Another time it was, "Endurez, endurez . . . "  And again, "Votre droit‑-if only you knew!"

The old woman nodded, sighed, and was tracing the completed circle of her rune with the point of a gimlet, when Blamor woke to a voice‑-Tristram's, he was certain‑-calling, "Elizabeth?  Elizabeth?"  He heard branches snapping, water splashing.  Blamor shot to his feet.  The old woman shrieked; her knife streaked blood, then fell from her hand.

Blamor ran.

 

n Camelot, a cripple with an arm and both legs bandaged together dragged herself along the street.  She was pulling a dead dog behind her at the end of an old rope she'd wrapped around her forearm.  Now and then she looked back at the carcass and grinned.

The brothers Blamor and Bleoberis were riding abreast to Arthur's castle, to the lists, to Agwisance's dies irae.  Behind Blamor and Bleoberis, squire Edmond walked, leading his horse, piled high with Sir Blamor's armaments.  Blamor subdued his soul with Holy Marys, like a surgeon's lackey sitting on the patient's chest.  Never mind the itch and tingle between navel and groin, where a rune and words may have been cut‑-don't think of that!  He no longer smelled, thank God, the ashes of burnt glasswort leaves soaked in vinegar and olive oil with which the hag had blotted her grimoire.

Blamor halted at the sight of the cripple.  "While some men eat themselves sick on dainties!" he muttered.  Bleoberis, oblivious, had skirted the impediment and ridden on a few paces.  He looked back and grimaced impatiently.  "Edmond, give the woman a few coins for a proper meal."

Edmond, with practiced equanimity, produced the coins and, wrinkling his nose, held them out to the crippled woman.

"What?  Should I let go my supper to receive your pittance?  Let an honest woman be!"  She dragged herself and her dog down the street.  People stepped over her.  Neither she nor they seemed to mind much.

Edmond shrugged, tossed the coins straight up, like a juggler, snatched them back, pocketed them again, and looked a question at his master.  Blamor winced, then looked away.  He clucked his tongue, pulled lightly at the reins, and caught up with Bleoberis.

Nearer the castle, the townspeople were bustling.  Piping and shouts, like wind across water, confused Blamor's prayers.  A few jongleurs luted and sang, each with his own little gathering, mostly of women.  In their rude, improvised songs, the jongleurs were already memorializing what had not yet occurred: in one song, Blamor could not help but hear, he was made king of Ireland, Agwisance fallen on his own sword and Tristram cleaved in two, coif to crotch, by a single sword stroke.

In others, Blamor was dead.

At tables along the street men played chess passionately, japing and arguing.  There were dice games in the square where merchants hawked vegetables, herbs, spices, wax, and caged fowl.  Men with monkeys and trained bears throated balleys.  In the streets, in and out of houses, clogging alleys, upsetting every ordered thing, children dashed and tussled.  Blamor held the reins tightly, hail Mary, full of grace.  Some cheered him.  Some pulled at his stirrups, and Edmond had to pry them off with kicks and slaps.  They wouldn't bother Bleoberis; his scowl cowed them.

Before he turned away, Blamor saw one raucous group of dice players, a few of them half‑naked, beside a pile of their clothes.  He heard one shout: "Hey, there's a better game!  That's your accuser, your Sir Blamor de Ganis there!  I'll give good odds he's recreant by nightfall‑-no, dead!  I say, dead!  Who'll take me on here?  Where's your money?"  In spite of himself, Blamor strained to hear what response that would bring, but there was none, pray for us sinners now and at the hour, amen.

They threaded the streets and cantered across the field before the castle, Edmond following at forced march with the armaments.  They crossed the bridge, passing under drab brick arches, inhumanly high, that seemed to radiate cold.  In that dark, Blamor shivered.

The chill didn't leave him until the moat and curtain wall were behind him, when his own anger warmed him up again.  King Carados and the King of Scots and their bailiffs stood and chatted in the guardhouse archway, and not at all grimly.  Bleoberis waved.  A bit behind those kings stood King Agwisance, looking ruffled and impatient, though at one point he said something that made the others laugh.

A wit then, thought Blamor ( . . . the fruit of thy womb, Jesus . . . ) and so much more a scoundrel, then, japing on Anselm's murder!

Sir Tristram emerged with his squire and joined the kings just as Blamor was dismounting.  Blamor's foot caught in a stirrup, making him hop to find his balance.  Edmond rushed to assist him, but Blamor held up his hand.  "Get away from me!  I know where my feet are!"

Bleoberis was already ahead of them, among the kings.  Their men tethered his horse for him, laughing with Bleoberis as he handed them the reins.  Perhaps they were all just nervous.

Blamor strode toward the assembly.  "Shall we wassail instead of jousting?  Your worships seem jolly enough!  Or shall we go whoring together, while the worms eat my cousin?"

Behind their beards Carados and the King of Scots paled.  The entire company stared at Blamor, stony-faced.  Only Agwisance stepped forward.  He was dressed as if to general, in breastplate and cape‑-an affectation, since Tristram was his surrogate.  His eyes were full of fire, and the unruly curls of his red beard gave him a fierce look.  He was Tristram's height and not the least bit afraid to march close enough to bite Blamor's nose if he wanted to.  "You wish I were a kitchen knave, don't you, so you could cry haro and have me flogged, or get my ear lopped off, or see me strangled in a noose, burned or pulled apart by four horses--gehenné!"

Four men approached Agwisance to calm him; of them, Bleoberis was first, laying a gentle hand on the king's shoulder.  Agwisance smiled contemptuously and shook his shoulder from under it.  "You are so self-righteous!  The whole affair is built on a falsehood.  I never touched the boy, and so my champion will swear in due course.  It was my Knight Constable, the boy Anselm's tutor at arms, who touched him with the butt of his lance, as was his right‑-touched him, merely, the puny child!‑-to speed him along his duties, and the boy died."

"Lies!"  What a wondrous antidote to fear was anger!  Blamor jettisoned his hailmary's on the spot and even forgot the burning at his loins.

"Knight," said Agwisance, "you are unworthy of your famous uncle.  Your Anselm was a maladroit who counted clouds when he should have been dressing his shield."

Bleoberis whispered to Blamor, "Save your fury for the lists, brother."

"Save my fury, Bleoberis?" Blamor said aloud, and his brother flinched.  "Where is yours?"

Bleoberis smiled obsequiously at Agwisance, then took Blamor's arm.  "Brother, you know I love you!"

A cool breeze seemed to accompany Tristram.  Suddenly he was standing at Agwisance's side‑-Blamor felt the drop in temperature before he saw the man.

"My lords and fellow worthies, perhaps we should swear our oaths in the chapel, and then to the lists where God will judge.  Gouvernail . . . !"  Tristram gestured toward the chapel, a long hall across a courtyard, beyond the looming keep; his squire bowed and started toward it with an armful of silver mail.

"Wait!"  King Carados spoke at last.  He was a squat, blubbery‑faced man with a bulldog's voice.  "It's not time for the chapel and oaths yet.  Arthur has enjoined us, me and Scots here‑-by God's grace and all that, of course‑-to preside at a trial by combat, and by Christ's bloody ankles, I'm going to see to it, jot and tittle."  He stared them down, one by one.  When Carados came to his fellow judge, the King of Scots, a big man, but pigeon chested, short of breath, and bald, Scots nodded like a man afraid of reproval.  Carados slapped him on the back, then turned to address Tristram and Blamor.  "Sir Knights, before any oath‑taking, we're to check your undergarments and secret places."  He motioned for the bailiffs to come near

Blamor felt faint.  The skin on his belly burned so hotly he thought the others must see flames or smell the burning flesh.  He couldn't look at Tristram!  Damn the hag!

"I will forego the examination of Sir Blamor," said Tristram, "if he will excuse me that same discomfiture."  The man was slick as a paynim's dagger.  Blamor strove to keep his mouth from dropping open.  "I trust him, sirs.  Are we not two honorable knights?"  Agwisance grumbled, but concurred.  Scots shrugged, and King Carados called his bailiffs off.

Tristram bowed, stepping backwards a few paces toward the chapel, then turned and continued walking after Gouvernail.  Carados blustered, "To the chapel, then!" but it was all anticlimax.  They marched across the bailey, past the keep, to the chapel.

Blamor lingered behind, staring after the tall knight.  Then, his blood rising, he galloped past the crowd to Tristram, who had overtaken Gouvernail now and led the pack with an easy powerful stride.

With ragged breath, Blamor slowed to match the pace of the taller man.  He caught Tristram's elbow, stopping him, making him look Blamor in the eye.  The witch's rune danced on Blamor's gut, sending shivers through him‑-could the thing that made him quake make him prevail?  "It moves me deeply how Christian ready you are to trust a knight whose skull you'd shatter for a traitor's patronage!"

Bleoberis, huffing, caught up to Blamor and Tristram.  "What the hell's going on?"

Tristram's face darkened.  "I'm no whore for patronage.  My father once wanted my stepmother killed, and I defended her."

With a dragon's rasp, Tristram exhaled slowly and became once again the alabaster column of a knight.  There was a slight catch in his voice, no more, when he said, "She was the only mother I knew, the only live one . . . "

Bleoberis japed, "'Only live one?'  You know the dead one?"

"My father couldn't stand the sight of me after that.  I went to live with Mark . . . "

"Only live mother he knew!" Bleoberis guffawed, nudging Blamor with his elbow.  "Aside from the dead one!"

Tristram fixed his grey eyes on Blamor.  "I know justice!  My live mother"‑-inclining his head ever-so-slightly, cuttingly toward Bleoberis‑-"my stepmother, tried to murder me, Blamor.  She wanted my inheritance for her son.  I saved her, and my father sent me away.  Don't talk to me about whoring for patronage!"

Bleoberis laughed.  "His father was out whoring when his live mother bore him and became a dead one!"

Tristram abruptly turned away.  He called to Gouvernail.  The squire trotted to his side and Tristram began to speak to him in a low voice.  Gouvernail nodded, nodded.  "Yes, sir!"

Bleoberis trumpeted, "He'll kill you, Tristram!  My brother will kill you!  This is the seed of King Ban you're trying to hoodwink with your sad tales.  Blamor'll give you something to be triste about‑-won't you, Blamor?"

Blamor clapped a hand over Bleoberis's mouth.

"Here, now!  Here, now!"  King Carados, red in the face and sweating like a pig, shouted after them, striding nearer.  "This isn't proper!  Damn me if this is proper!  You shut up now!  Say it with your lances, where God can decide, or Arthur'll scribe his judgement on our hides, me and Scots here‑-with a knife, in capitals.  Dieu et son droit, sirs!"

Bleoberis pried his brother's hand away.  "What's the matter with you?"

"This knight may well be my death.  Look at him!  He's an oak, he's an iron pike, and his steed is hellfire.  Why did you lie to me?"

Blamor watched his brother flap his lips, shrug, cock his head, and finally decide to be angry.  "This is the thanks I get!  You think that petrified foreskin of a man can stand against Lancelot's nephew, a knight of the Round Table?  You shame us, little brother!"  Bleoberis's high dudgeon gave place to an ingratiating smile.  He shook his beard at Blamor.  "No, Agwisance will lose everything, don't you see, and if we play our cards right, we'll have his fiefdom, you and I, and all its wine and wenches!"

"We?"  Blamor charged ahead of him to the chapel.

Bleoberis shouted after him, but Blamor kept right on walking.  There was a rage in his voice since that Blamor hadn't heard since their boyhood.  "That's right‑-insult your big brother!  You know, Blamor, they say that Cain was a bad boy, and God tattooed him and sent him east of Eden and all, but who knows?  Maybe 'twas a fine, healthy tattoo‑-and I hear east of Eden isn't a bad place at all.  Lots of wenches and wine there, I hear--and no goddam Abel to pull your chain, ey?"

The chapel doors were just now edging open; the priest emerged.  He stood on a stone landing, rubbing his hands together and blinking as if sunlight were new to him.

Bleoberis caught up to Blamor, laid his hand on his shoulder and cooed, "Just see you don't shame us, Blamor!"

 

 madman with a cross shaved on his head was chained to a railing near the cross.  Someone had dressed him in a choirboy's gown, but it would not stay on him long.  He clawed at it, drooling and blathering, sometimes making a sentence.  When the doors swung wide and daylight bathed him, he stood spread‑eagle against the lattice, blinking, as the priest had done.  His head jerked like a monkey's from nobleman to squire, inspecting each as he paraded in.

"Gawd . . . !" Carados threw up his arms.

"Gold!" aped the madman.

" . . . I mean, by the five wounds of Christ, is this necessary, father?"

"What‑-Leo, your majesties?  Does he offend, sirs?  The man's absent his wits since his wife and children died of a fever, God have mercy!  I shackle him near the rood: let him see every mass, says I, and Christ will wipe his mind clean as ever a mother swiping her baby's buns.  I pray your lordships indulge poor Leo this favor‑-by your leave and by God's good mercy!"

"Goggle murky?" said Leo.  He started to weep, then stopped, all for no reason.

The King of Scots had been whispering something in Carados's ear.  Carados nodded.  "Puh!  I suppose I don't care, if nobody else does.  Just see he keeps out of the way and holds his piss."

The priest stroked Leo on his crisscross, then retrieved the reliquary from the altar, an ornate pewter box with sapphires set like fruits in branching, Italic swirls.  "Saint Sebastian's thumb bone," he said.

"Bastard's thimble!" said Leo.

Throughout the mass, Leo moved his head as a man would whose eyes were fixed in their sockets, darting to follow the wafer, the hand in benediction, the bowing head, or whatever moved most.  And Leo aped the words‑-his private Cluniac Messe Des Fous.

Tristram swore his mendacious oath‑-Agwisance's medacious oath‑-over the reliquary; then Blamor swore his contrary oath‑-or was it Bleoberis's mendacity he aped?  Then they kissed the Bible, each pronouncing his "Pax vobiscum," but Leo hissed, "Pox upon you!" and in a burst of lucidity, added, "Death, all!  All are Death's!"

 

hen to the lists.  Blamor sat on a carpet for Edmond to dress him in his mail and breastplate, pauldrons at the shoulders, poulaines at the toes, the iron skirt about his waist . . . 

"Is something the matter, sir?  Does it chafe?"

"Never mind.  Get on with it!"

As Edmond cinched, strapped and clapped him into his carapace, Blamor watched, as if from the grave, his judges, King Carados and the King of Scots.  They were settling onto their camp chairs in the loge, with the moat behind them and the midpoint of the field before them.  Agwisance sat nearby, and Blamor wondered if that could be quite right, for a party to the dispute to be so intimate with its judges.  It was too late for such a consideration, of course.

"The helmet, Edmond.  Try the vision slot."  For a moment, while Edmond adjusted his visor, Blamor thought he spied through the ventails another person in the judges' loge, an old, white‑haired woman standing behind them with a hand on each of their shoulders.  Then Edmond lifted the helmet off his head to make an adjustment, and she was gone‑-a flash from the metal, sunlight glancing off the moat.

Farther off, between the bridge and the northern rampart, a man and woman with their two raucous children struggled to stretch the fabric over a second loge.  It was the burgher whose house Arthur had expropriated for the brothers de Ganis.  He had brought a caged bird along, jugs of ale, and spice roots for the boy and girl to chew.  Just now, despite his ostentatious dress‑-brocade and ruffles‑-he was not looking so elegant.  When he reached up on tiptoe to pull the canopy snug, he hiked up his blouse, baring his navel in front and part of his backside behind.  His wife knocked the children's heads together and jabbered at the bird, trying to make it sing.  It would not.

Bleoberis stood midway between the two loges, at a polite remove, gazing coolly at the judges, the horses, and the men.  Bleoberis's last words to Blamor‑-to his back, actually, as Blamor strode to the lists, still trying to riddle out the precise extent of his brother's deceit‑-had been these: "Yield to the orphan knight, by God, and you shame us all, remember!"

Tristram had already mounted.  Gouvernail was handing up his lance with an adroitness that made Blamor anxious at his own squire's fumblings with thongs and hinges.  Tristram trotted his ebon charger crosswise at the far end of the marked field.  Good, gentle Tristram pulled suddenly at the reins to make it rear up and spit fire, it seemed like‑-an adolescent thing to do, but effectively terrifying.  What was it that happened to men when they mounted horses caparisoned for war?  Was it Death Himself, Mors, preparing les doux maux, taking possession of the man, as Blamor and Bleoberis had taken possession of the burgher's house?  The burgher's family cheered at Tristram's display; their little girl saluted with half a capon.

Edmond gazed at Sir Tristram.  Blamor had to lift his hand: "The other gauntlet, boy!"  The gauntlet placed, Blamor hugged Edmond and maneuvered himself to his feet and into the saddle, Edmond supporting him.  He thought of Jesus being hoisted on the rood.  That first precarious moment, finding his balance in the solitude of his iron casket, he felt nauseated, weak, no instrument of Death, but Death's breakfast.  His horse would not stand still; it kept dancing under him, making him twist and torque to stay in the saddle.  When he tried to think of Anselm, to squeeze out some revivifying anger, all that came was despair: the image of the sweet boy lying broken in the tilt‑yard, just as Blamor soon would be‑-but for the witch's spell.

Someone was thrusting something at him; Blamor took hold of it, and he saw that it was his lance, and he heard Edmond say, "God be with you, sir."

"Dieu et mon droit, Edmond!" was the unthinking response.

Now the warriors faced each other from opposite sides of the field.  Blamor located Tristram not by sight but by intuition.  He fixed the butt of his lance against the fewter, lowered it, and charged headlong, like a man leaping from a castle window.  His battle cry rang in his helmet like a falling man's scream.  Tears streamed from his eyes, blurring his vision.

Skeletal fingers curled around Tristram's pauldrons‑-Blamor could see them now.  He could see the straw-like hair whipping like a pennant behind Tristram's head.  It was the forest witch, cheating Blamor!  Between the drummings of the horses' hooves, he heard her cackle, "Endurez, endurez . . . !"

Now he understood who she was.  "Elizabeth!  Elizabeth!" Tristram had called to her in the forest.  She was Tristram's dead mother, and Blamor's death.

The moment he saw that death, his own, real and palpable before him, the rune on Blamor's loins began to spin and swell.  He fell through the rune into another world, into the world of a single heartbeat, a single breath, an infinite expanse of time hidden between the hoofbeats and between the numbered grains of the hourglass.  The jousting field became a vast, dark plain in which drab, hooded hunchbacks bore corpses on biers draped in black.  The dead were being carried to hollowed stones, where more hunchbacks sealed them in with lead and circled each stone, each corpse, with candles.  When one of the hunchbacks fell, others bore him to his stone and sealed him in and circled him with fire.  Sealed stones lay everywhere, everywhere there were biers on backs the shape of crosiers, and the earth sparkled everywhere with cold fire.  The horizon was a ring of candleflame, the witch's rune.

Another pulse.

The woman with bandaged limbs was sealing what remained of her dog into one of the stones.  She dripped molten lead into the seams of the split hollowed stone.  She became aware of Blamor's gaze, and she looked up at him as if he were the sky.  With her one good arm she pointed to another stone, and Blamor followed her gesture to a rock not yet quite sealed.  Its corpse's death seeped out the unsealed edge like light through the keyhole of a shut door: fever.  From a stone nearby, another's death shone, an ecstacy of pain: impalement on a spear, a warrior's death.  There were many more.

Another breath.

Heat lightning illumined the field, and Blamor saw that on every stone the same single word was chiseled, the word the thunder said, one of the four words the witch had cut below the rune on Blamor's skin:

 

DROIT

 

Another hoof beat.

The knights met.  The last thing Blamor saw before the impact was Sir Marhaus's shield, the one Tristram had taken from the Irish knight when he'd split the man's skull.  There was an explosion so intense that Blamor could not tell if it were sight or sound or pain he sensed.  Sparks flew up where the metal covering of Sir Tristram's lance point struck Blamor's breastplate.  He felt his chest collapse and breath and spit shoot out of him as he was propelled backwards over his horse's croup.  He crashed to the ground.

He landed on his heels, and then the momentum of his fall tumbled Blamor backward over his head, so that he ended with elbows and knees on the dirt, still holding his shield in one hand and, in the other, a few slivers of his shattered lance.

He saw stars, he felt his skin turn to stars: it wasn't pain so much as a sort of physical amazement.  By sheer will, he righted himself and drew his sword.  The witch had lied.  Bleoberis had lied.  Everyone had lied.  The rune did not shield Blamor; it damned him.  He felt the hag's arms like ropes around him, holding him still for Tristram's thrust.  His hand, its own animal, found the pommel of his sword‑-the feel of it surprised Blamor‑-and he pulled it from his scabbard.  He lifted his shield like a battle standard and brandished the sword high over his head.  "Fight me, you murderer's whore!"

His impulse was to thrust his blade twixt his own gut and groin to skin the tattoo off him.  Instead, he boiled, he screamed, and he made for Tristram, sword aloft, bellowing, threatening to cripple Tristram's horse with a mad swipe.

Tristram dismounted.  He swung the dead man's shield before him.  His sword was already in his hand, held at the angle of an executioner's ax.  Around Tristram's shoulder the forest witch glowered.

Inertia and blind rage carried Blamor forward.  In all those pounds of plate and mail, it would have taken more of a superhuman effort to stop than to keep on charging.  The heaving mass he nearly tripped over, he realized, was his own fallen horse.  Never mind!

Without quite knowing how he had got there, Blamor found himself squarely in the path of Tristram's blade.  He heard it clang against chain mail in the pit of his own raised arm, he heard it bite into the metal links, he heard a softer sound, like a butcher's stroke‑-he felt nothing yet‑-and he saw his death again, as sure and present as earth and rain.

Again, at the sight of it, he was in the witch's tattoo.  The dog woman was upset with Blamor: why had he peeked into the wrong stone?  It was the next one she'd meant to point to . . . and there was Anselm, dead, in a hollowed stone‑-DROIT‑-half‑sealed with lead and circled by candles.  His death spoke to Blamor from the stone:

 

The constable struck me to hurry me.  I fell.  My head hit a stone, and my life flowed away from me.  My soul endured the sweet pangs of death.  I saw the man shriek and call my name, but I was no more . . .

 

A hunchback finished sealing the stone.

Blamor felt sharp metal at his ribcage.  "Dieu!"  He retreated a step and held his shield before him like a cottage roof against an avalanche.  It was as thin as the lie that had brought him to Camelot.  Tristram hacked at it.  Blamor watched ridges form and light shine through small holes where the metal had wrinkled and split under Tristram's blade.  Now and then he was able to push Tristram's sword aside with a thrust of the shield, and so manage a swipe of his own.  Was it Tristram's blood or his own that spattered the tall knight's breastplate?  Hot, sticky blood flowed inside Blamor's armor too.  He smelled it.  He smelled his own death‑-and changed worlds.

Not fair!  Not fair! was all that Blamor could think, just as when he was a boy, playing soldier with Bleoberis and Anselm.  There were the three of them now, in the field of stones and candles, children again, fighting as they used to, with plantain spikes for swords: strike the tiny green flower from the enemy's spike, and you have killed him . . . !

 

. . . Anselm, skinnymalinks, all in a heap, with eyes blank and round as communion wafers, is staring up at his fractured spike.  Blamor sits on Bleoberis's chest, about to take the prize, when suddenly, with perfect aplomb, his brother says, "You can't win, you know," and Blamor, for the briefest moment, is so astonished and confused that Bleoberis throws him off, whacks the flower from little Blamor's spike, and declares himself champion.

"Not fair!  Not fair!"  But it is fair‑-Bleoberis convinces him of it, Bleoberis who always knows more and knows it first and has done it first, and Blamor always comes after, when Bleoberis has told him the way . . .

 

. . . When Blamor came to himself again, he found his shield in tatters.  He dropped it, freeing his left hand to grasp his sword arm above the elbow to steady it; Tristram's first blow had sapped half his right arm's strength.  Now Blamor's game must be to attack so ferociously that he'd have no need to defend.

Tristram's blade flashed out at him again and again, his death again and again singing to him‑-but on the field of stones and candles he saw Tristram, cold and white, in his hollowed stone‑-DROIT:

 

I harped for my love, la Belle Isoud, Agwisance's daughter.  My uncle, her husband, crept behind me and slew me where I sat singing.  The sweet pangs of death I felt.  The last thing I heard was Isoud weeping . . . 

 

Blamor was the thunder over the field of stones.  He blasted the hunchbacks and set them scurrying.  Corpses tumbled from dropped biers, their dead limbs flailing at ghastly angles.  He didn't want to know these things.  The past was hard enough; now future things afflicted him as well.  Damn the witch!  Damn Tristram's undead Elizabeth!  Kill him!

"Kill him!" Bleoberis was shouting, and Blamor de Ganis realized that it was all over.  He lay broken in the tilt-yard dirt with Tristram's sword at his throat.  All that was left was to say, "I yield," but he woke to Tristram and the lists and Camelot already shaking his head no, already refusing to yield; just that much power remained to him, his second‑son's defiance, as the sawblade of Elizabeth's rune spun and cut at his power of will.

He heard Tristram speak to the kings, their judges: "I beg you, my lords, let me spare him for his uncle Sir Lancelot's sake."

King Carados and the King of Scots had left the shelter of their loge and ventured closer to the marked field.  Agwisance was with them.  "If Sir Tristram can forgive him, I suppose I will," the Irish king said.  "He fought like the devil, didn't he?"

"Yes,"‑-this was Carados's gravelly voice‑-"there's no need to kill the man.  God has judged by sword and blood, and de Ganis must see his error, as we all do, by Christ!"

"Kill him!"  Now Blamor realized it was he his brother wanted killed, and not Sir Tristram!  "Kill him," said Bleoberis, "rather than let Blamor declare himself recreant and shame us all.  Honor my brother by killing him!"  After a pause, he added, in a milder voice, "It's for love of him I say it," and Blamor closed his eyes.  Nothing mattered now.

"No!" barked Carados.  He murmured something nasty that Blamor could not quite hear, then trumpeted, "We three concur with Tristram.  Let the knight live."

But Sir Blamor de Ganis had already set upon a different, darker path.  While Tristram, battle weary, regarded the kings, still holding his sword at Blamor's throat, Blamor began to raise his head‑-it took straining at the belly to do it, invoking the long chain of muscles from groin to chin, and the effort made his skin burn again where the witch had written, "DIEU ET MON DROIT!"  He felt the cold metal touch his neck and press deeper.

Then, in the space between breaths, an odd glimmer caught his eye.  It was the gap in the edge of Tristram's blade, a foot or so from the point, where a sliver of iron had broken off in Sir Marhaus's skull.  In a second, his own blood would spurt up and fill it . . .

. . . But Sir Marhaus stopped him.  From his hollowed stone in a circle of candles, the dead knight spoke:

 

It was Tristram's blade, but my own death!  It came to me sweetly at last!  Mon droit!  Mon droit!

 

The witch's stone was empty, but her voice echoed in it, like the shimmer in a horn's bell when the breath has ceased:

 

I died before I could suckle my Tristram; such was my right.  Now I nurse him with the milk of death, him and all who break lances with him.  I put on my withered old body, shake the grave's muck from my wrinkles, and I make men wise.  Thus my soul endures the pain of bearing and losing my Tristram!

 

Other stones flew open, their dead men pushing them apart like dragons hatching.  Agwisance was there, and Carados, and Scots.  "Mon droit!  My right!" they wailed.  "My death is my only right, at last!"  And the burgher and his wife and their children, all dead at last, cried from their stones, "See!  Mon droit!"

Lancelot was there, and all the other knights, their bones poking through their skin like pens through wet parchment.  They pointed spectral fingers toward Bleoberis, and he, from his stone, said:

 

I found Sir Lancelot a monk at a hermitage between two hills where the Bishop of Canterbury sang mass, and he enjoined me to go to the Holy Land.  Many Turks I slew there with Sir Bors, Sir Ector and other Christian knights, but on a Good Friday, as I rode across Solomon's porch, my horse knee‑deep in Saracen blood, a paynim soldier slew me.  The sweet pangs of death came upon me, and I inherited my right, mon droit, this hollow rock, my death.

 

"Bleoberis!  Brother!" Blamor cried; his voice was the thunder.  "Are you done lying?  Is death the right you always boasted of?"  Bleoberis said nothing more, but pointed to a rock where Blamor himself peeked out‑-a corpse‑-and the dead Blamor said:

 

I was with my brother in the hermitage between the hills, at last, and I died with him on Solomon's porch, for the glory of God‑-this was my right!

 

Blamor de Ganis lay broken in the tilt-yard dirt with Tristram's sword at his throat‑-but his death was not yet due him.  He let his head fall back, and Tristram threw down his sword.  King Carados, the King of Scots, and Agwisance stood over him now, and the judges' bailiffs knelt to help him to his feet.  Edmond hurried to remove the heaviest pieces of armor, careful where blood might spring when a wound was freed of the pressure.  Tristram took his hand, and Agwisance came nearer.  Behind Agwisance, Bleoberis hovered, all darkness.

On his feet at last, Blamor fell into Tristram's arms, into the arms of the man who would die harping for his beloved.  Bleoberis, his fellow corpse at Solomon's porch, came nearer tentatively, and Blamor opened his arms to him.  Bleoberis, with a dark, confused look, suffered himself to be drawn in.

As they all embraced, Blamor spied through a rent in Tristram's hauberk, the embroidery on his gambois, "DIEU ET MON DROIT!" and his dead mother's rune.

"Forgive me!" Blamor said.