The King Arthur Trilogy by Rosemary Sutcliff Page A

our fire on winter nights. There is nothing in the world that I would rather do than go to him and ask my knighthood at his hands and serve him. But why should he think me worthy? I am all untried.’
    ‘Maybe he will do it for the sake of the fighting that he and I saw together,’ said King Ban, who had sat quietly looking on.
    But Merlin said, ‘Tell him that Merlin sent you; and that it was the last thing he did before he went to find his long sleep under the hawthorn tree. He will give you your knighthood. And your place at the Round Table.’
    And the joy flashed in Lancelot’s ugly face like a bright blade drawn from a battered sheath.
    Merlin rose to go, and the Lady Nimue with him. But before she went, she drew close to Lancelot – so close that he thought it strange, remembering afterwards, that the goshawk did not bate from his fist nor strike at her – and she looked deep into his eyes, her own eyes changeful and water-bright, and again for a moment the mist seemed to rise and swirl inside his head.
    ‘You who were first Galahad and are now Lancelot,’ she said in a voice that made him see lake water lapping among feathered reeds, ‘when you come to Arthur’s court and receive your knighthood, let you take yourthird name as a gift from me, and call yourself thereafter Sir Lancelot of the Lake.’
    And when the mist cleared from his head, they were both gone.
    Then again Merlin and the Lady Nimue with him wandered through this place and that, across water and among mountains and through valleys and forests, Merlin teaching her the last of his magic as they went. And so they came at last to Cornwall, where King Marc now ruled in place of Duke Gorloise of Tintagel. And at the appointed time they came to the hawthorn tree, all curdled with white blossom and the scent of it coming and going like breath upon the evening air.
    And Merlin lay down under the tree with his head in the Lady’s lap; and she let down her straight dark hair so that it hung like a curtain about them both; and she made a singing magic. And listening to it, it was to Merlin as though he heard the humming of wild honey bees among the heather of the hills of his boyhood; and he sank into a sleep that was deeper and quieter than any sleep known to mortal man.
    And when she saw that he was deep sunk in his enchanted sleep, the Lady of the Lake arose, and made another magic; a dancing magic this time, woven with her footsteps about and about and about the hawthorn tree. Nine times she circled the tree, and as she circled, a cave opened among the roots, and the grass andthe stones and the twisted roots rose up and twined together and roofed it in, and closed the last opening, so that Merlin lay within, and nothing remained but the hawthorn tree growing on a stony mound, to show where he lay.
    ‘Bide there until your waking time,’ said the Lady Nimue when she had done, and she went her way.
    Now at about the same time, King Arthur rode hunting in the forest that stretched west of Camelot into the mountains, and with him for hunting companions were Sir Accalon of Gaul, and King Uriens the husband of Morgan La Fay – for despite Merlin’s repeated warnings that she was a witch and would do him any harm she might, Arthur loved to have his half-sister often about his court. They hunted for three days, making further and further west; and on the third day they put up a mighty hart, and hunted it so far and fast that, grievously, they all three killed their horses under them; a thing which can be done too easily in the heat of a long chase, a horse’s heart being willing beyond its strength.
    The day was drawing on to dusk, and they knew that the forest was no place for unmounted men at night, and so pushed on, hoping to find a hermitage or a charcoal burner’s hut. And so they came out from the trees on to the margin of a broad lake; and on the shore of the lake the hart that they had hunted also lay dead, the houndsall about it. They whipped