"WHEN King Arthur heard of the coming of Guenever and the hundred knights with the Table Round, then King Arthur made great joy for her coming, and that rich present, and said openly, This fair lady is passing welcome unto me, for I have loved her long, and therefore there is nothing so lief to me. And these knights with the Round Table please me more than right great riches."
Le Morte D'Arthur
Sir Thomas Malory 1485
I have been fascinated by the tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table all my life. There are several versions of the tales, but the most complete is the collection that were drawn together in the fifteenth century by a fascinating fellow called Sir Thomas Malory, when he effectively wrote the first English novel Le Morte D'Arthur. It has the distinction of being one of the first texts to roll off William Caxton's printing press in 1485.
There is a magic about the whole King Arthur saga. The sword in the stone, the great wizard Merlin, the ideal of Camelot, chivalry, the Order of the Round Table and the quest for the Holy Grail, then add the tale of forbidden love between Queen Guinevere and Sir Lancelot, sprinkle it with human frailties, betrayal, and countless battles, duels, a monster or two and you have the timeless work of genius that is the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
It is the blueprint for all of those great fantasies that have followed it. The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, even the Harry Potter saga. And Camelot, of course, was associated with the late President JF Kennedy. Shortly after his state funeral, his widow, Jacqueline Kennedy gave an interview to Theodore White, a journalist, for an article to be featured in Life magazine. She compared her husband's presidency with the Camelot of King Arthur. It was a time of hope, when men were gallant, great deeds were done and when the White House was a place graced by writers, poets and artists. Her husband was a heroic figure, like a knight of old.
I have always been fascinated by the writer of that great book Le Morte D'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory. But actually, surprisingly little is known about him. We have no contemporary portrait, no personal effects, no artefacts. His memory is enshrined in his great work of 300,000 words.
There were six men of that name in the fifteenth century who are all contenders, but opinion favours Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, a manor near Coventry in Warwickshire. I personally like to think that is him, for it is not far from the home of that other giant of literature, William Shakespeare.
Sir Thomas was not a knight errant as he loved to depict his knights of the Round Table. He had a darker side and was imprisoned for a series of crimes ranging from attempted murder to theft and possibly even abduction.
On the other hand we know that he had been a Member of Parliament, a soldier and an adventurer. It was during his spells of imprisonment that he showed himself to be the literary genius that gave us King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
It is recorded that he was a man of singular martial prowess, for he broke out of prison on two occasions. Once, on July 27, 1451 he escaped and swam across the moat at Coleshill prison. On another occasion he broke out of Colchester by using great skill with a variety of weapons, including dagger, sword and langurs-de-boeuf, a type of halberd so named because it had a spiked head the shape of an ox-tongue.
Mystery and romance surround Sir Thomas Malory and he has intruded into my unconscious writer's mind several times and in several books. In my first western Raw Deal at Pasco Springs he incarnated as Tom Mallory, a gambler, one time lawman and adventurer. He again knocked on the door of my imagination and came in as the protagonist of The Apothecary's Quest, a medieval single due out on December 8 as an ebook.
The Apothecary’s Quest:
An Adventure of the Order of the Black Rose
ABOUT:
Apothecary Thomas Smythe has been betrayed by a fellow knight in the Order of the Hospitallers in a foreign war. Home in England once more, Thomas lives out his life as a simple apothecary. When he is summoned to attend Sir Percival Fitzroy, who has been taken ill, Thomas realizes that Lord Fitzroy has been poisoned.
A trap, set in motion by a craven knight from Thomas’s past, threatens to see him murdered, as well. But can he reach Sir Richard de Vere, a man he suspects may hold the key to the mysterious death of Lord Fitzroy—and will Sir Richard help him? For Lord Fitzroy has entrusted Thomas with a quest for the Order of the Black Rose, a secret society that could accept him as one of their own…or have him slain.
Thomas is still a knight, at heart—and there is only one honorable thing to do, no matter the cost to himself…
EXTRACT:
1
THE APOTHECARY
Newbold Revel, Warwickshire, England
June 1320
“Bless
you, Master Smythe! Bless you, sir,” said the woman as she dropped three
pennies into his hand before she picked up the small flask of medicine and pot
of balsam that he had prepared for her while she waited.
“You are welcome, Mistress Burke,” Thomas
Smythe replied with a smile as he deposited the money in the leather purse that
hung from his waist. “That balsam has the finest herbs plucked from the hedgerows
around Newbold Revel by myself under the full moon last Sunday. They are
infused with its healing power and will soothe the scrofulous rash that your
mother suffers from.”
“That it has already, sir. That
first pot almost cleared those horrid blisters on her face and I am sure that
this pot will take care of the rest.”
She stood and pursed her lips as she
turned her attention to the small flask of liquid in her hand. “But it is this
wonderful medicine that I am most pleased with, Master Smythe.” She suddenly
looked over her shoulder to make sure that no one else had sneaked into the
shop behind her. She shoved back in place a stray lock of hair that had escaped
from her cotton cap and leaned slightly forward to talk in hushed tones.
“It is a marvel, sir. It has given
my husband his manhood back and made him most frolicsome. I have great hopes
that before too long we may be blessed with a child of our very own after these
five years of marriage, when everyone was thinking that I was barren. And it
will be all thanks to your medicine, sir.”
Without warning, she shot an arm out
and hooked it round his neck, pulling him down towards her so that she could
plant a kiss on his bearded cheek.
Thomas immediately straightened and
took a pace backwards. Mistress Blake sighed and shrugged her shoulders
demurely.
“I am sorry if I embarrassed you,
but I just had to thank you, sir. You are the best apothecary we ever had, you
see. Far better than that old faker who almost drowned when they gave him a
ducking in the River Avon last summer.”
Thomas winced at the thought. He had, of course, heard about his unfortunate
predecessor’s fate when he first arrived in Newbold Revel, but from all he had
heard he thought it most likely that the old man actually had indeed been a
charlatan, a rogue who merely professed to having a knowledge of physic when in
actuality he had none.
Thomas, on the other hand, knew that his
treatment would have been of some help in calming her husband’s fears, and that
nature and her own womanly wiles would have done the rest. The truth was that
Mistress Mary Burke was a comely young woman, whom many a man would have been
proud to share a home and a bed with, yet for some reason her husband had been
unable to perform his husbandly duties. As a result, her family and neighbors
had thought her barren and unable to produce a child; she had thought herself
undesirable and became racked with guilt; and her husband had spent too much
time in the taverns of Newbold Revel, supping ale and making the problem
tenfold worse.
Hence she had come to Thomas Smythe
the local apothecary for what she thought was a love potion. It was in fact an
extract of pine together with dried and pulverized bullock’s testicles, an
extremely useful remedy for making a man’s nether regions congest with blood.
He stroked his thick black beard as he
took another backward step from her, for he was ever conscious that many years
previously he had taken a vow.
“I fear my profession is almost as
dangerous as that of a soldier’s,” he said with a rueful smile. “I would not
welcome a turn in the town ducking stool.”
“You’ll never be in any danger, Master
Smythe. Anyone can tell that you have a kindness and a goodness about you that
marks you out as a healer. We need you to make medicines for us. Let others
more suited to warfare be soldiers.”
When she had gone Thomas stood for a
moment rubbing his cheek, which felt as if it was glowing after the touch of
her lips. It was a feeling that he remembered from his youth, when he had
enjoyed the lifestyle of his rank and reveled in the company of the fairer sex.
Yet all that had been before he had gained his spurs and taken his vows.
Half
memories threatened to burst forth from where he had long ago suppressed them
and he shrugged them away as he usually did by beating his fist against his
left shoulder, where he bore an old sword wound........
Keith Souter is a part time doctor, medical journalist and novelist. He writes westerns as Clay More and crime as Keith Moray. He is the current vice-president of Western Fictioneers. His latest book The Doctor's Bag has just been published by Sundown Press.
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