LAMB-CLOUDS, AND THE SKY’S BLUE PASSAGES; AND then my own face, rather blurred. My big ears. My eyes, wide and alert. That’s all I could see to begin with.
And then, when I held up my seeing stone to the sun, this last day of June, I thought I could actually see through it. Like staring into a pond, down through the layers of water, beyond the spawn and the wrigglers.
But my stone is much, much more than a mirror or a pond. It is a world. I still keep it in the dirty old saffron cloth in which Merlin gave it to me, only now it’s even dirtier, and each time I look into it I see my namesake, King Arthur, or the knights of the Round Table. His fair fellowship.
Once upon a time I thought I was Arthur-in-the-stone. Sometimes what happens to King Arthur seems to copy what happens to me, but sometimes it’s the other way round. He and Ygerna, his blood-mother, have found each other, and I believe that in the end I will find mine. I’ve hoped the same hopes as Arthur, and feared the same fears. I’ve seen Arthur’s knights ride out, north and south, east and west, questing for the Holy Grail, and I’ve seen Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere naked to one another, joyful and sorrowful, and I keep wondering what will happen if the king finds out.
My stone is telling me something, if only I can work out what. Duty and sacrifice and honor and passion, insult and treachery: I’ve seen all those in my stone, and I see more all the time. From the day Merlin gave it to me, I’ve never gone anywhere without it.
When I stepped into our tent and looked into my stone again, the king was there. Sitting alone at the huge Round Table and staring into it.
A huge hunk of rock crystal. A hemisphere. It’s too heavy for even one hundred men to lift, so Merlin, the Hooded Man, must have spirited it to Camelot. Within the crystal there are nodules and black warts, cracks, splits. There are stars and dark holes. And there’s a mass of tiny threads, silver and shining, like gossamer on a misty autumn morning. It makes me think how everything in the world turns out to be connected, even if we don’t realize it is at first.
King Arthur stares, and then he gives a sudden start, and looks around. He can hear a voice, but he doesn’t know where it’s coming from.
“Where are your knights, Arthur? Where are they all?”
A man’s voice, dark with pain.
“Arthur! Your fair fellowship. Gone with the four winds. Is there no knight worthy to see the Holy Grail?”
I knew who it was the moment I heard him. King Pellam, Guardian of the Holy Grail, who was wounded by Sir Balin, pierced with the same lance that pierced Jesus through the ribs.
“Not one knight of the Round Table?” the voice demands, sorrowful and angry. “Can no man ride from here to Corbenic through this wailing world, and redeem the sin of Judas? Can no one ask the right question?”
King Arthur clenches both his fists. “What question?” he growls.
“The words that will heal me and save me from this agony,” the voice replies. “The words that will heal the suffering wasteland, and allow it to grow green again.”
Then King Pellam fell silent; my stone went blind.
I waited. I wrapped both hands around it. I stared so deeply into it that nothing else in the world existed.
The wasteland…All at once, I thought of Haket, Lord Stephen’s priest. He told me all Christendom is a wasteland, a wilderness of the spirit. He said people are taking the law into their own hands and behaving not as Christians but animals.
“Until we’re Christian not only in word but in deed,” he said, “how can we ever enter Jerusalem?”
But how can humans be perfect? We can’t, however hard we try. So it can’t be only through our own efforts that we will reach the Holy City, but also through God’s grace, because He wants us to chase all the Saracens out.