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

going this way and that, sometimes of red tile, sometimes of mossy stone, sometimes of slate. The place
was a town, not a castle. It was light pastry, not the dour unleavened bread of old Dunlothian.
Round the joyful castle there was the camp of its besiegers. Kings, in those days, took their household
tapestries with them on campaign, which was a measure of the kind of camps they had. The tents were
red, green, checkered, striped. Some of them were of silk. In a maze of colour and guy-ropes, of tent-
pegs and tall spears, of chessplayers and sutlers, of tapestried interiors and of gold plate, Arthur of
England had sat down to starve his friend.
Lancelot and Guenever were standing by a log fire in the hall. Fires were no longer lit in the middle of
the rooms, leaving the smoke to escape as best it could through lanterns. Here there was a proper
fireplace, richly carved with the arms and supporters of Benwick, and half a tree smouldered in the
grate. The ice outside had made the ground too slippery for horses. So it was a day of truce, though
undeclared.
Guenever was saying: "I can't think how you could have done it."
"Neither can I, Jenny. I don't even know that I did do it, except that everybody says so." "Can you
remember anything?"
"I was excited, I suppose, and frightened about you. There was a press of people waving weapons, and
knights trying to stop me. I had to cut my way."
"It seems unlike you."

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"You don't suppose I wanted to, do you?" he asked, bitterly. "Gareth was fonder of me than he was of
his brothers. I was almost his godfather. Oh, let's leave it, for God's sake."
"Never mind," she said. "I dare say he is better out of it, poor dear,"
Lancelot kicked the log thoughtfully, one arm on the mantelpiece, looking into the ashy glow.
"He had blue eyes."
He stopped, considering them in the fire.
"When he came to court, he would not name his parents. It was because he had to run away from home,
so as to come, in the first place. There was a feud between his mother and Arthur, and the old woman
hated him coming. But he couldn't keep away. He wanted the romance and the chivalry and the honour.
So he ran away to us, and wouldn't say who he was. He didn't ask to be knighted. It was enough for him
to be at the great centre until he had proved his strength."
He pushed a stray branch into place.
"Kay took him to work in the kitchen, and gave him a nickname; 'Pretty Hands'." Kay was always a
bully. And then ... it seems so long ago."
In the silenceтАФwhile they stood, each with an elbow on the mantel and a foot towards the fireтАФthe
weightless ash shuffled down.
"I used to give him tips sometimes, to buy himself his little things. Beaumains the kitchen page. He took
to me for some reason. I knighted him with my own hands."
He looked at his fingers in surprise, moving them as if he had not seen them before.
"Then he fought the adventure of the Green Knight, and we found out what a champion he was....
"Gentle Gareth," he said, almost in amazement, "I killed him with the same hands too, because he
refused to wear his armour against me. What horrible creatures humans are! If we see a flower as we
walk through the fields, we lop off its head with a stick. That is how Gareth has gone."
Guenever took the guilty hand with distress.
"You couldn't help it."
"I could have helped it." He was in his customary religious misery. "It was my fault. You are right that it
was unlike me. It was my fault, my fault, my grievous fault. It was because I laid about me in the press."