No More Learning

All the knights wanted to dash forward and blow the great horn that hung
beside the gate, but Arthur waved them back and went himself. He blew so
hard that the horn roared until all the grasses of the marshes flared
up, and out of the castle gate sallied a knight dressed from tip to toe
in blood-red arms, the Red Knight.

"Aren't you the king? " he bellowed, "the king that keeps us all with
such strict vows that we can't have any pleasures, a milky-hearted king?
Look to your life now! "

Arthur scorned to speak to so vile a man or to fight him with his sword.
He simply let the drunkard, stretching out from his horse to strike,
fall head-heavy, over from the castle causeway to the swamp below.

Then all the Round Table Knights roared and shouted, leaped down on the
fallen man, trampled out his face in the mire, sank his head so that it
could not be seen, and, still shouting, sprang through the open doors
among the people within. They hurled their swords right and left on men
and women, hurled over the tables and the wines and slew and slew until
all the rafters rang with yells and all the pavements streamed with
blood. Then they set the tower all afire and half the night through it
flushed the long low meadows and marshlands and lazily plunging sea with
its flames. That was how Arthur made the ways of the island safe from
one shore to the other.

Sir Tristram, not many nights after, reached Tintagil, where Isolt, the
White, lived in a crown of towers, where she now sat with the low
sea-sunset glorying her hair and glossy throat, thinking of him and of
Mark, her Cornish lord.

When Tristram's footsteps came grinding up the tower steps she flushed,
started out to meet him and threw her white arms about him.

"Not Mark, not Mark! " she cried.
"At first your footsteps fluttered me,
for Mark steals into his own castle like a cat. "

"No, it's I," said Sir Tristram, "and don't think about your Mark any
more, for he isn't yours any longer. "

"But listen," she cried, "to-day he went away for a three days' hunt, he
said, and that means that he may be back in an hour for that's his way.
My God, my hate for him is as strong as my love for you. Let me tell you
how I sat here one evening thinking of you, one black midsummer night,
all alone, dreaming of you, and sometimes speaking your name aloud, when
suddenly there Mark stood behind me, for that's his way to steal behind
one in the dark.

"'Tristram has married her! ' he hissed out and then this tower shook
with such a roar that I swooned away. "

"Come," cried Sir Tristram, laughing, "never mind, I'm hungry, give me
some meat and wine. "

So they ate and drank, talked and laughed about Mark with his long
crane-like legs, and Sir Tristram took a harp and sang a song. Then
while the last light of the day glimmered away he swung the ruby
necklace before Isolt.

"It's the fruit of a magical oak-tree that grew mid air," he cried, "and
was won by Sir Tristram as a tourney prize to bring to you. "

Flinging the rubies round her neck he had just touched her jeweled
throat with his lips when behind him rose a shadow and a shriek.

"Mark's way! " cried Mark, the Cornish king, and he clove Tristram
through the brain.

* * * * *

That very night Arthur came back from the North, and as he climbed up
the tower steps to go to the queen, in the dark of the tower something
pulled at him. It was little Dagonet.