Argument: Lathynarn escapes from the cage and acquires a squire. Armour, a sword and a steed follow after.Is this just to be a story – nothing more than event and event and half-arsed exposition?
List to list and A to B and what has happened must be, must be in order – chronology is the key to this matter… who wants to borrow a poem-shaped key?
Had convention been respected, I would have begun this riot-o’-fun two months down the line – in the thick of it, in the middle resolving to take a track back, as the media do, to start at a start of the story.
I chose not to, but hatched this straight from the egg – and what came before was never in the egg; I chose to take you with Lathynarn as he grumbled happy in his newly knighthooded joy; I chose to tell you how he said:
“Knighted!
(…under his breath as he lay beside me…)
Been made a knight.
Been taken in and recognised
as one of them, and shown
my true calling.
“What next?
To be a knight
and do those knightly things because
I choose to do, am told
to do by me.
“Some things
are done because
I am a knight, because I must
be born to be boldly
honoured and voiced.
“The crowds
cheered me as I
delivered the blow to the king.
They laughed as I swung it
for victory.
“Madness
in all those cheers…
Madness aimed at me and smiling –
mad for me, I for they,
a perfect world.
“Knighted!
Knighted. Knighted…
one of them, a knight in name
and crowd and cheering cloud
of growing fame.”
He has it bad – this knight love, this fame love – he dreams of Dear Celebrity.
(And what language was it those eejits spoke? Lathynarn, the King. “Arise poor Erik, I knew him, who else d’you know?” with whys and wherefores – some approximation of a past in the worst medium to cast it at the crowd of modern folk. They – and all these other types – speak their poetry to enable a shield, to ennoble the sword of their self to slice through to the world well-prepared to ignore them. It’s a voice I’ll never speak – a language never to be mastered – a speech of Dignity to ensure correct Celebrity – and true, I don’t speak the voice of an 8-year-old, but I am Narrator and Squire of Lathynarn – how else would I speak?)
We all slept, all 32, in the Chessmaster’s cage- a heap of boys in the cage to wait for, some months, the next game – the Chessmaster thinks body fat less aesthetic on the board than slim skeletons of boys, and our food was pushed through bars we could push through ourselves.
“Name knights
who have nothing
to claim for their own and I’ll name
you a knight absentia
et nullius.
“Escape
is a weak word
but, in principio, escape
is all I must aim for
less it’s too late.”
The clock struck thirteen times on its stuttering hands and Lathynarn’s hands reached out to the bars, gliding on purpose – to pull apart the bars, tin bars and hollow.
(We were never trapped in the cage, you see – sick Brian escaped to a room of his own five days a week for sleep, always sleep and never opening up.)
“You, boy.
(…Lathynarn hissed at me…)
come on with me.
I need a squire and you are free
as slaves are free to hire
for those like me.”
For those like me… for those like me… he spoke the voice of the King in telling me.
“Lathy,
sorry, Sir Knight,
who says I’m to be your squire?
I am the boss of me,
not little you…
“’Freedom
is a goodthing’ –
Steerpike said so, I remember
when he said so to me
a thing like that.
“Or no,
equality,
or similar – but I’m the same
as you are, Lathynarn.
Don’t forget it.
I stood and told him:
“Your voice
has changed – kinglike
and deeper, less like a chesspiece
more like a dirty face
wiped clean and bright.”
And I followed him through the bars while the others slept or slapped their neighbour – two waved us off thinking we’d return, but sick Brian shouted after:
“Oi, you’re
going too late –
he’ll return too soon to see you
gone from the cage too late –
back in the gate!”
No, sick Brian, let us go – Lathynarn has a fame to go handle and burn his brief candle to inferno – we will, I promise, see you later in Hell.
From the cage we slipped to the courtyard, by the stables to the cabbage patch – from the patch to the stream, stream to wood, wood hut, hut the bald man who sat lonely head in hand and lastly there: from bald man lonely head in hand to the King’s Museum all crumbled in ivy.
(Speed, it’s all speed to take us there in seconds.)
Rooks crawed a punctured accordion, settled on the roof and the beech tree beside, a rookery covered in winter light on rooks.
The Curator – moustache and violin case – sat by the counter, waved us in and read a speech, the dust apparent on his face:
“Room One:
the King’s childhood;
his father, the old King, understood
the need for Royalty
and Royal Blood.
“Room Two:
the King’s knighthood;
his teenaged years gone out to quest
from the familial
castle and nest.
“Room Three:
his adulthood;
a Queen, a Court, Knights a-plenty –
position claimed and won
and unempty.”
He walked us through busts and portraits of the ancestors who gave us our King and stressed the importance of their acts in giving us him – the massed battles funnelled to the smile on the video.
He pointed to displays.
“Photos
of the couple –
King and cold Queen at Balmoral
fly-fishing and hunting
for privacy.
“Here they
tumble to night
from tavern back when they were
prince and princess and young
and would always.
“Hear that?
The song playing
was composed for his first marriage
and all minstrels sang it
all days ever.”
A sigh, a limp, he returned to the door, took his fiddle from its case and fiddled some more, as he had done for years – soon he began to snore.
Lathy took to work – the childhood room of armour, sets arranged in a chronology of height – the history of the King as taken from his armour – aged two, too small, aged thirteen, unseemly for this new dwarfish knight.
“Take that,
boy, from the stand –
his seventh birthday party set.
It is green and golden,
with a red trim.”
I struggled down with it, and he struggled in.
“A sword
is needed next.
A dagger rather, some bladeling
suited to my stature.
Can you see one?
There, I moved to a stand where one dagger seemed to flat above the air, suspended between two shivers of glass.
“What keeps
it standing there?
Some force, or magic or… magnets?
Squire, take it down - hand
that sword to me.”
Assuming the stance of one who knows and reciting from a book of the scientific arts I had once been shown, I said:
“’We are
not sure they work
like you believe that they would work
but instead by liking
metal more so.
“It is
sharper power
of attraction, of charisma
in strict competition
in attracting.
“The pull
is pulled towards
the puller, the charismatic
one that never speaks words
but just pulls them.’
“I read
that in a book
Lathynarn – I read the pages
and took a thousand looks
at the workings.
“Magnets
work just like that –
here’s your dagger, or your sword.
Whatever you call it,
it’s for you now.”
The sword stuck to his new armour – no need for a scabbard I joked.
“Do they
(… he asked of magnets…)
have dignity?
Do they rise with royal standing?,
knightly honour? and proud
chivalrous aims?”
I nodded, yes, and presumed a mode of gravity.
“One rule –
be dignified.
Dignity, always Dignity.
Dignitas et Dignas,
Multimo Sic.”
I did not know what language or why.
For a shield we took the King’s sixth birthday – a design of a child, green-armoured and fighting – we agreed (he agreed) on a likeness.
And Jan’s plastic hobbyhorse from his chessboard knighthoodedness just would not do… on our way back to the castle, we took two ponies from the stables.
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