"T. H. White - The Once and Future King" - читать интересную книгу автора (White T.H)

"What do you mean?"
"I mean that the pure and fearless Knight of the Lake, whom you have allowed to cuckold you and carry
off your wife, amused himself before he left by murdering my two brothersтАФboth unarmed, and both
his loving friends."
Arthur sat down on the bench. The little page, coming back with the ordered drink, bowed himself
double.
"Your drink, sir."
"Take it away."
"Sir Lucan the Butler says, sir, can he have some help to bring the wounded men in, sir, and is there any
bandage linen?"
"Ask Sir Bedivere."
"Yes, sir."
"Page," he cried, as the child went;
"Sir?"
"How many casualties?"
"They say twenty knights dead, sir. Sir Belliance the Orgulous, Sir Segwarides, Sir Griflet, Sir
Brandiles, Sir Aglovale, Sir Tor, Sir Gauter, Sir Giliimer, Sir Reynold's three brothers, Sir Damas, Sir
Priamus, Sir Kay the Stranger, Sir Driant, Sir Lambegus, Sir Hermmde, Sir Pertilope."
"But Gareth and Gaheris?"
"I heard nothing of them, sir."
Blubbering and still running, the red, mountainous man was in the room once more, He was running to
Arthur like a child. He was sobbing: "It is true! It is true! I found a man wha' saw it done. Poor Gaheris
and our wee brother GarethтАФhe has killed them both, unarmed."
He fell on his knees. He buried his sand-white head in the old King's mantle.


9
On a bright winter day, six months later, Joyous Gard was invested. The sun shone at right-angles to the
north wind, leaving the east side of the furrows white with frost. Outside the castle, the starlings and
green plover searched anxiously in the stiff grass. The deciduous trees stood up in skeleton, like maps of


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the veins or of the nervous system. The cow-droppings, if you hit them, rang like wood. Everything had
the colour of winter, the faded lichen green, like a green velvet cushion which has been left in the sun
for years. The vein-trees, like the cushion, had a nap on their trunks. The conifers had it all over their
funeral draperies. The ice crackled in the puddles and on the gelid moat. Joyous Gard itself stood up, a
beautiful picture in the powerless sunshine.
Lancelot's castle was not forbidding. The old-fashioned keeps of Arthur's accession had given place to a
gaiety of defence, now difficult to imagine. You must not picture it like the ruined strongholds, with
mortar crumbling between the stones, which you see today. It was plastered. They had put chrome in the
plaster, so that it was faintly gold. Its slated turrets, conical in the French fashion, crowded from
complicated battlements in a hundred unexpected aspirations. There were little fantastic bridges, covered
like the Bridge of Sighs, from this chapel to that tower. There were outside staircases, going heaven
knows whereтАФperhaps to heaven. Chimneys suddenly soared out of machicolations. Real stained-glass
windows, high up and out of danger, gleamed where once there had been blank walls. Bannerets,
crucifixes, gargoyles, water-spouts, weather-cocks, spires and belfries crowded the angled roofsтАФroofs