T. White - The Once and Future King

The dawn, the sea-dawn and the mastery of ordered flight, were of such intense beauty that the boy was moved to sing. He wanted to cry a chorus to life, and, since a thousand geese were on the wing about him, he had not long to wait. The lines of these creatures, wavering like smoke upon the sky as they breasted the sunrise, were all at once in music and in laughter. Each squadron of them was in different voice, some larking, some triumphant, some in sentiment or glee. The vault of daybreak filled itself with heralds, and this is what they sang.

You turning world, pouring beneath our pinions ,

Hoist the hoar sun to welcome morning’s minions .

See, on each breast the scarlet and vermilion ,

Hear, from each throat the clarion and carillion ,

Hark, the wild wandering lines in black battalions ,

Heaven’s horns and hunters, dawn-bright hounds and stallions .

Free, free: far, far: and fair on wavering wings

Comes Anser albifrons, and sounds, and sings .

He was in a coarse field, in daylight. His companions of the flight were grazing round him, plucking the grass with sideways wrenches of their soft small bills, bending their necks into abrupt loops, unlike the graceful curves of the swan. Always, as they fed, one of their number was on guard, its head erect and snakelike. They had mated during the winter months, or else in previous winters, so that they tended to feed in pairs within the family and squadron. The young female, his neighbour of the mud-flats, was in her first year. She kept an intelligent eye upon him.

The boy, watching her cautiously, noted her plump compacted frame and a set of neat furrows on her neck. These furrows, he saw out of the corner of his eye, were caused by a difference in the feathering. The feathers were concave, which separated them from one another, making a texture of ridges which he considered graceful.

Presently the young goose gave him a shove with her bill. She had been acting sentry.

‘You next,’ she said.

She lowered her head without waiting for an answer, and began to graze in the same movement. Her feeding took her from his side.

He stood sentry. He did not know what he was watching for, nor could he see any enemy, except the tussocks and his nibbling mates. But he was not sorry to be trusted sentinel for them.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked, passing him after half an hour.

‘I was on guard.’

‘Go on with you,’ she said with a giggle, or should it be a gaggle? ‘You are silly!’

‘Why?’

‘You know.’

‘Honestly,’ he said, ‘I don’t. Am I doing it wrong? I don’t understand.’

‘Peck the next one. You have been on for twice your time at least.’

He did as she told him, at which the grazer next to them took over, and then he walked along to feed beside her. They nibbled, noting one another out of beady eyes.

‘You think I am stupid,’ he said shyly, confessing the secret of his real species for the first time to an animal, ‘but it is because I am not a goose. I was born as a human. This is my first flight really.’

She was mildly surprised.

‘It is unusual,’ she said. ‘The humans generally try the swans. The last lot we had were the Children of Lir. However, I suppose we’re all anseriformes together.’

‘I have heard of the Children of Lir.’

‘They didn’t enjoy it. They were hopelessly nationalistic and religious, always hanging about round one of the chapels in Ireland. You could say that they hardly noticed the other swans at all.’

‘I am enjoying it.’

‘I thought you were. What were you sent for?’

‘To learn my education.’

They grazed in silence, until his own words reminded him of something he had wanted to ask.

‘The sentries,’ he asked. ‘Are we at war?’

She did not understand the word.

‘War?’

‘Are we fighting people?’

‘Fighting?’ she asked doubtfully. ‘The men fight sometimes about their wives and that. Of course there is no bloodshed – only scuffling, to find the better man. Is that what you mean?’

‘No. I meant fighting against armies – against other geese, for instance.’

She was amused.

‘How ridiculous! You mean a lot of geese all scuffling at the same time. It would be fun to watch.’

Her tone surprised him, for his heart was still a kind one, being a boy’s.

‘Fun to watch them kill each other?’

‘To kill each other? An army of geese to kill each other?’

She began to understand this idea slowly and doubtfully, an expression of distaste coming over her face. When it had sunk in, she left him. She went away to another part of the field in silence. He followed, but she turned her back. Moving round to get a glimpse of her eyes, he was startled by their dislike – a look as if he had made some obscene suggestion.

He said lamely: ‘I am sorry. I don’t understand.’

‘Leave talking about it.’

‘I am sorry.’

Later he added, with annoyance, ‘A person can ask, I suppose. It seems a natural question, with the sentries.’

But she was thoroughly angry.

‘Will you stop about it at once! What a horrible mind you must have! You have no right to say such things. And of course there are sentries. There are the jar-falcons and the peregrines, aren’t there: the foxes and the ermines and the humans with their nets? These are natural enemies. But what creatures could be so low as to go about in bands, to murder others of its own blood?’

‘Ants do,’ he said obstinately. ‘And I was only trying to learn.’

She relented with an effort to be good-natured. She wanted to be broad-minded if she could, for she was rather a blue-stocking.

‘My name is Lyó-lyok. You had better call yourself Kee-kwa, and then the rest will think you came from Hungary.’

‘Do you all come here from different places?’

‘Well, in parties, of course. There are some here from Siberia, some from Lapland and I can see one or two from Iceland.’

‘But don’t they fight each other for the pasture?’

‘Dear me, you are a silly,’ she said. ‘There are no boundaries among geese.’

‘What are boundaries, please?’

‘Imaginary lines on the earth, I suppose. How can you have boundaries if you fly? Those ants of yours – and the humans too – would have to stop fighting in the end, if they took to the air.’

‘I like fighting,’ said the Wart. ‘It is knightly.’

‘Because you’re a baby.’

There was something magical about the time and space commanded by Merlyn, for the Wart seemed to be passing many days and nights among the grey people, during the one spring night when he had left his body asleep under the bearskin.

He grew to be fond of Lyó-lyok, in spite of her being a girl. He was always asking her questions about the geese. She taught him what she knew with gentle kindness, and the more he learned, the more he came to love her brave, noble, quiet and intelligent relations. She told him how every White-front was an individual – not governed by laws or leaders, except when they came about spontaneously. They had no kings like Uther, no laws like the bitter Norman ones. They did not own things in common. Any goose who found something nice to eat considered it his own and would peck any other one who tried to thieve it. At the same time, no goose claimed any exclusive territorial right in any part of the world – except its nest, and that was private property. She told him a great deal about migration.

‘The first goose,’ she said, ‘I suppose, who made the flight from Siberia to Lincolnshire and back again must have brought up a family in Siberia. Then, when the winter came and it was necessary to find food, he must have groped his way over the same route, being the only one who knew it. He will have been followed by his growing family, year after year, their pilot and their admiral. When the time came for him to die, obviously the next best pilots would have been his eldest sons, who would have covered the route more often than the others. Naturally the younger sons and fledgelings would have been uncertain about it, and therefore would have been glad to follow somebody who knew. Perhaps, among the eldest sons, there would have been some who were famous for being muddle-headed, and the family would hardly care to trust to them.