the knight who hated love
the knight who hated love
this story mentions child abandonment & infant mortality, fair warning
this is based on a piece of arthurian legend about a woman with a wound that can only be cured by a faithful queen, which i’m pretty sure i read somewhere but of whose existence i can find no evidence. at the very least, the fidelity test is a common trope in arthuriana.
once upon a time there was a knight unlike every other knight of camelot in that he scoffed at love. maybe it was because he was a probable bastard, found wailing in the greenwood by peasants with no clues to his parentage but a gold ring worked in a love-knot tied by the corner of his swaddling-clothes. when the peasants weaned him they brought him to the king, who, finding him a likely child & seeing the ring as a sign of nobility, paid the peasants off & had him fostered at the court with his vassals’ sons.
he was talented in all arts of chivalry, & won more tournaments w no lady’s favor than the other knights did warded with a glove or girdle.1 but when the other knights were clustered around a troubadour listening to lais, or sighing in corners, this knight mocked them. he said that the love they spoke about was just a fair word for foul adultery; that poets never told how changeable love was, or how often it was a lie to convince ladies to let knights treat them like dairymaids, or how often the ladies knew it was a lie and only wanted the excuse. which would be nothing if not for the children of such love. how many young oblates at the monastery were lovechildren condemned by their parents’ shame to never know love themselves? & still that was better than other fates. he himself had been found in the greenwood; he was sure that other infants had not been found. he was not moved by his mother’s sacrifice of her love token, which she had probably wanted to get rid of anyway as incriminating evidence. he was unimpressed by his father’s gift of a ring that had proved no protection to his beloved or his son. if they had wanted to offer up an emblem for him they should have offered their good names & fair reputations to keep him safe—or at least practiced restraint. and how many untimely children had the courtiers treated like this themselves? but the court could laugh off his raillery until he began to suggest how many of them were not their father’s sons. then it was murmured that he needed a quest.
it was around that time that a sickly maiden came to camelot to ask merlin’s advice on her trouble. after a private conference he announced that she would never be well unless she stayed away from her father’s house until she had touched the hand of a faithful queen. better storytellers than your humble servant have recorded how merry queen guin wriggled out of this one. but the upshot was that the maiden would need to travel from court to court until she was cured, and she would need a protector on her way. a sly voice volunteered our inconvenient knight.
he roared with laughter & said a long journey was just what he needed, because he was sure that such a quest would not be short. that he had longed to see the world & that if the trip took the pair all the way to the sultan’s heavily guarded harems, they could stop in the holy land on the way back. for as little as he trusted poets, he trusted the one who said
If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true, and fair.the next morning the two of them set off, the maiden nearly as pale as her soft-stepping white mule.
their travel was slow & plodding, to protect the maiden’s delicate health. still our knight got a great deal of satisfaction out of his quest, unveiling the hypocrisy of chivalry in court after court. but even that got old after a while. & he, previously silent out of his hard-heartedness towards women, began talking to the maiden on their way, to alleviate the boredom.
at first she spoke little, and haltingly, often fatigued by simple conversation. but the sick love talking about their symptoms, and this drew her out, spiraling into stories that often seemed to have the strangest relationship to her sickness. and in response he found himself telling her about himself. their episodes at various courts, the fights & tournaments & other strange small adventures that knights errant always encounter on their quests, began to interest him less than their quiet times riding & talking.
she even seemed to be in slightly better health. not the wan & wasting-away woman he had started this journey with. slightly blooming, even.
love did not come upon him like the poets said. it wasn’t a sudden undeniable shock. only sidney complained in words our hero could agree with:
Not at first sight, nor with a dribbèd shot, Love gave the wound which while I breathe will bleed: But known worth did in mine of time proceed, Till by degrees it had full conquest got. I saw, and liked; I liked, but lovèd not; I loved, but straight did not what love decreed: At length to love’s decrees I, forced, agreed...
and, again unlike the poets said (the poets had a different meta back then) he realized that what he wanted to do was marry her. her continuing sickness didn’t matter. all the adulterous queens they had seen on their journey didn’t make him more cynical. he untied his loveknot ring from the little rag that remained of his swaddling clothes, & gave it to her with better intentions than it had ever been exchanged with before. they returned to camelot, where generous arthur set their wedding feast & camelot’s wise old ladies made their wedding bed. and the next morning she was as well as if she had never been sick.
the whole court marveled. had merlin been wrong in his diagnosis? but among the crowd that swarmed around her was an old dowager with failing eyes, who was now for the first time close enough to see the ring. she said that long ago she had seen that loveknot on her only child’s finger, & that when her daughter stopped wearing it, she refused to explain its disappearance & wasted away. not long after her daughter’s death her husband too had died from grief. this left her the dowager queen of a small kingdom, & though her subjects praised her for her wise judgments, they were plagued by brigands and outlaws. our knight was revealed as her grandson, and the true king of this stricken kingdom, and the formerly-sick lady was now herself a queen by this marriage, explaining her unexpected cure. arthur, hearing all this, sent him off to this people unprotected by any powerful man from other powerful men, to do his duty & to set the land in order.
this wasn’t such a surprise. sir gawain & sir lancelot had also excelled in fighting when on sigma male grindset.