How Sir Mordred Did Battle With the Knight of the Glade

When Mordred set off from Camelot (alone, as was the done thing), he had spared few words regarding the aim of his journey. They would probably expect it was atonement, which was fair enough. Like all knights, he had his share to atone for. He left on a cold morning, saying a brief goodbye to his brother Agravain before riding out of the stalwart walls in the direction of nothing. Quests were always found by chance, far from home and, preferably, when lost. Mordred thought those conditions should be easy enough to accomplish, given what he was questing for.

It was generally believed that if one wanted to seek knowledge, one went on a quest. It had worked out for the Grail quest—eventually—so it should be good enough for any of the other, pettier mysteries of the world. Once, so Mordred was told, Merlin held the answers to all things, but he had disappeared just before Mordred’s birth and, so Mordred was told, this was for the best. Having lacked a Merlin all his life, Mordred had only one recourse: questing.

The High King’s rolling, abundant countryside was soon edged by forest, and Mordred knew that most of the really noteworthy quests had been found in forests and woods. Sir Owain, his cousin, had his great quest in a forest, and Mordred’s own eldest brother had sought the Green Knight in a forest, too. When he first heard the story Mordred had thought that Gawain sounded like a real idiot, hacking the thing’s head off like that. At any rate, where trees were to be found, quests seemed to be abundant as crab apples. He would have to walk his horse among the mossy trunks and thick underbrush, but it was just as well. Mordred had been riding in his armor, and he ought to give the courser a break from carrying him. Like his brothers he was tall and broad, especially as a boy.

When Mordred’s fourteenth birthday came and it was time for him to train as a squire, it took an unreasonable amount of cajoling before Queen Morgause would let him travel south from the wet and rocky Orkneys to the wet and verdant Camelot.

“You let all my brothers go, even Gareth,” Mordred had asserted.

“You’re my baby,” replied the queen.

“I’m the tallest and strongest boy my age.”

“You’re still my baby.”

The deeper Mordred pressed into the forest, the darker and closer his surroundings became. As the light faded he had no choice but to move even slower, until the idea of carrying on was patently unreasonable and he was forced to stop or risk slipping down a gully and cracking open his skull. It was at times like this that more fortunate knights would chance upon a magical castle or a pavilion occupied by a beautiful virgin, but for now Mordred had nothing but the base of a beech tree and his snorting horse for company.

Back at Camelot, his fellow knights and their ladies would be enjoying supper right now, dripping joints of meat and sugared dainties, savory pies and spiced wine. Benevolent Arthur would sit smiling at his place no higher than the others, equal in respect and united as brothers. Arthur liked to say that a round table had no head—and geometrically speaking Mordred couldn’t argue—but relationally, the head of the table will always be wherever the king is sitting.

Mordred sat beside his pitifully smoking fire, chewing a mouthful of stale barley bread and beginning to consider that he may have been rash in setting out. This was a problem he’d had lately. Quick words would slip from his mouth and Gawain would chide him to remember that courtesy was one of the knightly virtues, as though Mordred was still a squire who needed schooling. Once, Mordred asked him which of the virtues it was that caused Gawain to refuse their father’s crown, instead lurking in Arthur’s shadow in hopes of a greater advancement. Gawain had virtuously punched him in the mouth for that.

The fact that Gawain was Arthur’s heir by default was not considered an appropriate topic of conversation. Out of courtesy, Mordred supposed, for the king and queen. Despite being married since before Mordred was born, Arthur and Guinevere had produced no offspring as of yet. It wasn’t out of the question that it could happen, the queen still well within birthing age, except for the fact that in more than a score of years it hadn’t happened yet. It seemed a miracle would be needed to dislodge Gawain and his brothers from the direct line of succession, but the greatest miracle worker of their age was probably dead, and his only pupil was disinclined to aid Arthur in much of anything since she tried to assassinate him.

Peering out into the dark, Mordred tried to make out the shapes of the forest. Perhaps a green knight of his own was out there, just beyond the edge of the light, or a damsel would rush to him from the dark and beg him to free her brother from a dungeon. He squinted into the night until climbing moss looked like beastly fur, and faces appeared in the knots of trees.

Since he arrived at the seat of his uncle King Arthur, Mordred had spent hours in the crypt of St. Stephens pondering the stone face of his father under candlelight. He was seeking something of himself in it, or rather something of that face in his own. Mordred was the only son of Morgause who had never met King Lot, still in her belly when Pellinore cut the man down on the battlefield in Arthur’s name. Despite being in open rebellion, Lot had been buried with great honor alongside the other rebel kings. A savvy political move, Mordred thought, to gild over the bloodshed until no one remembered why the kings rebelled in the first place. Merlin himself had crafted the tombs, and the effigies were singularly lifelike. Mordred recognized diverse features of his brothers on the noble, bearded face, and from time to time he thought perhaps the line of his own nose resembled the cold stone, perhaps his brow. Perhaps it was a chin he shared, obscured by that magnificently crafted beard.

It was much easier for him to find the Cornwall in his face than the Orkney, bearing the high cheekbones and gray eyes of his grandmother, his mother, and his aunts. At least, his aunt Elaine. The other he had not seen since childhood, and in his memory a veil hung where her face should have been. He was told often enough what she looked like. However, accounts conflicted: she was beautiful, more beautiful than her mother Igraine; she was a hideous hag who changed her appearance with vile potions; she was actually a fairy changeling and used glamours to look like a lady; she was perfectly average and can’t we all just stop talking about that woman once and for all? But they never did, much to uncle Arthur and cousin Owain’s chagrin. How could anyone forget about the woman who betrayed her brother and robbed him of his invulnerability? Everyone of a certain age had a story about her, and Mordred had collected them all. Sir Bedivere told him how even he had been fooled by her charms for a while, until she threatened to turn him to stone. Sir Lucan remembered her angelic singing voice. King Nentres, his uncle, said she seduced Merlin and stole his magic. Sir Kay claimed she had once tried to bed him and he refused her, though Mordred didn’t believe a word of it. King Uriens, her estranged husband, refused to speak of her at all.

Somehow morning arrived, dewy and primeval, and there was enough light to continue his journey through the wood. He forced down a little dried fish and resumed leading his horse through the perils of the undergrowth, shoulders stiff from sleeping under the tree.

Did quests come when you looked for them? Should he have couched his intentions in a hunting expedition to play coy with the spirit of aventure? Was there anything at all for him to find, or as the youngest son was it his lot to languish in honorable obscurity? Was he simply making an ass of himself leading his horse around hawthorn bushes?

Just as he was beginning to wonder if he had any hope of finding his way back out of the wood, walking backwards up an embankment to lead his horse over the incline, he found himself in an unexpected clearing. The dew had burned away in the temperate morning sun and lush green leaves made a canopy over a dappled glade, in the middle of which stood an unlikely stone well and an equally unlikely armored figure.

“Shit, it’s my quest,” he whispered to himself. Leaving the horse to nibble at the edge of the clearing, Mordred checked himself, making sure he had his sword belt and setting his helmet on his head before approaching. His stomach churned, though not quite out of fear. The knight of the glade stood stark-straight and unmoving, the plate of his armor rusted as though he had been standing in place for months if not years, and Mordred wondered with dismay if it wasn’t just an empty suit on some kind of stand.

“Name thyself.” The voice echoed strangely from within the suit, and Mordred halted.

“Sir Mordred of the Round Table. Who are you?”

“How many summers hast thou seen?” The voice echoed again, ignoring Mordred’s question. Oh well.

“Three and twenty,” answered Mordred, squinting to discern a face behind the visor.

“What is thy birthright?”

Mordred thought for a moment.

“I have none. I am the fifth of five sons.”

Moving for the first time since Mordred had seen him, the knight placed a gauntleted hand on the edge of the well.

“Those who doth speak truly may peer into the well. Those who speakest falsehoods must fight.” Moving efficiently despite the shrill protestations of the armor, the knight’s hand went to his sword.

“I haven’t lied,” insisted Mordred, jittery nerves burning away like the dew and indignation taking their place. “I am Sir Mordred. I know how bloody old I am and I know how many brothers I’ve got.”

The knight drew his sword with the same perfect efficiency of movement, and even Mordred knew the time for arguments had never arrived in the first place. He drew in turn and, without waiting, advanced.

It had been Mordred’s great honor to be taught the sword by Sir Lancelot, who had for some reason decided to take the Orkney whelp as his squire when he arrived at Camelot. This was the only thing Mordred could hold over his brothers, especially as Gawain had always seen himself the rival to the position of Arthur’s greatest knight.

“They make good strong men in the halls of Kirkwa, and this is my last chance to teach one how to be a proper knight myself,” he had said, with one of his rare, roguish smiles. Lancelot was a fair but demanding master, who impressed upon Mordred the value of perfection in form. His sword drills were merciless, and after the first week Mordred could barely lift a cup at dinner. After the first year, he could hold his sword at full extension for two minutes without wavering. Even Gawain had to admit that by the time Mordred was knighted he was a worthy protégé. Mordred wondered if Lancelot was already fucking the queen then.

The knight of the glade made Lancelot’s form look like a page with a pitchfork. His blows were a blacksmith’s hammer, precise as a falcon in the dive. In no time at all Mordred was on the defensive, desperate to get a thrust past his guard. The few times he managed it, his blade rang across the rusty plate with no reaction whatsoever, his opponent insensible to Mordred’s efforts. The knight moved with preternatural perfection, never overextending or leaving a cut unfinished. He never shrank, or flinched, or showed any other sign of feeling in his action, like he fought entirely by rote. Even the most principled of swordsmen could be moved to some feeling or other. Even Lancelot, impeccable Lancelot, had his blind rages. Maybe Mordred had learned those from him, too.

“You are the two most unfortunate knights I have ever met.”

It was the way the priest had looked at them, so pitying and so familiar. On the road to Peningue they came upon him praying beside a tomb so ancient it was simply a pile of rocks. Lancelot had slowed his horse; Mordred would have kept riding, wished he had kept riding.

What the priest said next had made him do it, but it was also the pity in his eyes, the way he acted like he knew anything at all. Mordred’s sword was in the priest’s belly before he finished speaking, before Mordred knew what he had done.

“Such disgusting slander cannot go unanswered,” he muttered, wiping his sword on the grass. Lancelot didn’t punish Mordred, and had never spoken of it or what the priest had said to them. He wore enough sins of his own.

Mordred slipped in a patch of mud, falling to a knee, and it was then he discovered the strangest thing about the knight of the glade. The knight continued his perfect thrust straight through unoccupied air without diverting the way Lancelot, the way any skilled swordsman would. Curious, Mordred began feinting more, redirecting his movement in unexpected ways, and found time and again the knight had no ability to change course after initiating a strike. It was like fighting a book, the words already inscribed and immutable.

Discovering this, it was no hard thing at all to take off the knight’s head. The helmet rattled to the ground like an empty kettle, sans sang, sans tête. The armor collapsed in a heap, no joints inside to hold it to a human form. Mordred stared, taking a moment to be stunned and to catch his breath, then with no obstruction approached the well.

It was dark at the bottom—of course—faint glimmers of sunlight catching on the water below. Then the shapes began to move.

Caerleon Castle. A woman who is his mother is in bed with a youth who is not King Lot. Kirkwa Castle. A man stands unnaturally still, a man with a face Mordred knows better than his own. His mother’s scream. A man in black robes approaches, and she can do nothing. Thirteen infants are put in a boat. The boat is put to sea.

Mordred still had it in him to be pleased he didn’t vomit directly into the well. Spitting on the ground, he held himself up against the stacked stones, panting like he hadn’t already caught his breath.

“Did you find what you were seeking?”

At the edge of the glade stood a woman in all her finery, resplendent as a queen, and a veil lifted from a face in Mordred’s memory.

“Morgan. Aunt Morgan.” He pulled off his helmet, partially spattered on the inside with his sick. She approached like a beam of sunlight moving through the canopy, a wry and tragic smile on her face.

“My God, look at you. Exactly like I thought you’d be.”

“Was this you? Why do all of this?” Mordred gestured to the well and the heap of rusty plate. Morgan leaned on the stone wall with a shrug.

“I know you knights. You won’t listen to a fucking thing without a quest first.”

“The vision…” Mordred trailed off, the bile rising in his throat again.

“I’m truly sorry.” Morgan stared into the watery depths. Horror and rage frothed up inside Mordred, and he threw his sword across the glade to prevent himself skewering his aunt like the priest on the road.

“You lie! I refuse to believe something so vile!”

Morgan rose up, the sunbeam changing in an instant to hellfire, while all around the glade light dimmed as in a sudden solar eclipse.

“Arthur confided in me alone his sin of lust, and I did all within my power to stop his most evil of acts. I pulled your infant body from the Severn Sea and told your mother to lie to the world about your age. I hid you from that infernal sorcerer’s prophesy and your accursed father’s wrath. I very nearly killed him for it. Don’t you dare doubt me, boy, who am the reason you were not drowned with a dozen other infants over a king’s craven wickedness.”

It was when she stopped talking that Mordred realized he was on his knees.

“And what do I do? How do I go on, knowing this?”

Morgan calmed, kneeling in front of him.

“I made sure you would live to know the truth, but it’s not up to me what you do with it.”

Mordred stared down at the grass, and then his eyes landed on the empty helmet which lay a few feet off.

“How did you do it? How did you try to kill him?”

Morgan Le Fay settled on the ground beside him, her eyes, gray as a stormy sea, looking back into the past.

“I took something precious away from him.”