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

London, and using cannon."
"Cannon!"
"He met Arthur at Dover and fought a battle to prevent the landing. It was a bad engagement, half on sea
and half on land, but the king won. He won to land."
"Who wrote the letter?"
Lancelot suddenly sat down.
"It is from Gawaine, from poor Gawaine! He is dead."


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"Dead!"
"How can he write..." began Bleoberis.
"It is a dreadful letter. Gawaine was a good man. All you people who forced me to fight him, you didn't
see what a heart he had inside."
"Read it," suggested Bors impatiently.
"It seems that a cut which I gave him on the head was a dangerous one. He never ought to have
travelled. But he was lonely and miserable and he had been betrayed. His last brother had turned traitor.
He insisted on going back to help the KingтАФand, in the landing battle, he tried to strike his blow.
Unfortunately he was clubbed on the old wound, and died of it a few hours later."
"I don't see why you should be disturbed."
"Listen to the letter."
Lancelot carried it to the window and fell silent, examining the writing. There was something touching
about it, the hand being so unlike its author. Gawaine had hardly been the sort of person you thought of
as a writer. Indeed it would have seemed more natural if he had been illiterate, like most of the others.
Yet here, instead of the spiky Gothic then in use, was the lovely old Gaelic minuscule, as neat and round
and small as when he had learned it from some ancient saint in dim Dunlothian. He had written so
unfrequentiy since, that the art had retained its beauty. It was an old-maid's hand, or an old-fashioned
boy's, sitting with his feet hooked round the legs of a stool and his tongue out, writing carefully. He had
carried this innocent precision, these dainty demoded cusps, through misery and passion to old age. It
was as if a bright boy had stepped out of the black armour: a small boy with a drop on the end of his
nose, his feet bare with blue toes, a root of tangle in the thin bundle of carrots which were his fingers.
"Unto Sir Lancelot, flower of all noble knights that ever / heard of or saw by my days: I, Sir Gawaine,
King Lot's son of Orkney, sister's son unto the noble King Arthur, send thee greetings. "And I will that
all the world wit that I, Sir Gawaine, Knight of the Round Table, sought my death at thy handsтАФ and not
through thy deserving, but it was mine own seeking. Wherefore I beseech thee, Sir Lancelot, to return
again unto this realm and see my tomb, and pray some prayer more or less for my soul.
"And this same day that I wrote this cedle, I was hurt to the death in the same wound which I had on thy
hand, Sir LancelotтАФfor of a more nobler man might I not be slain.
"Also, Sir Lancelot, for all the love that ever was betwixt us..."
Lancelot stopped reading and threw the letter on the table.
"Here," he said, "I can't go on. He urges me to come with speed, to help the King against his brother: his

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last relation. Gawaine loved his family, Bors, and in the end he was left with none. Yet he wrote to