Steven Millhauser - The King in the Tree

Baffled at every turn, outwitted time and again in his effort to find evidence of a betrayal he cannot bear to know, the King has discovered, as if by following some impulse deep in his being, the one way likely to accomplish the end he dreads and longs for.

The King watches. The court goes about its pleasures. Tristan and the Queen are the very picture of propriety. Nothing changes.

And yet I ask myself: is there not a change? It is like a summer day, a day like all other summer days, except that you feel, hidden in the heat of high afternoon, the first chill of autumn. Besides, there are signs.

I have noticed a new wariness between the Queen and Tristan. When they are together, they are no longer at ease: they avoid each other’s eyes a little too carefully, stand a little farther apart than before. The King’s speech before the Council has clearly taken them by surprise. They detect in it a threat that they haven’t yet been able to unmask.

The Queen, especially, seems tired and somewhat strained. Each night she obediently performs her conjugal duty in the royal bed. Each day she bows her head at mass, dines at the King’s left hand, walks among her ladies. Where is Tristan? What has become of their passion in the forest? Her life is a masque, a play. Everything vital in her is hidden.

Today, as I walked in the courtyard past the kitchen and the bake house, Brangane stepped from around a corner and pressed a note into my hand. I had not spoken with her since the banishment of the Queen and Tristan. When I looked up from the note, she was gone. I was to meet her in the Queen’s tower chamber after the bells tolled noon. The Queen would not be present.

In the sun-warmed chamber, aswirl with glittering dust motes, Brangane barred the door and turned to me. Her face looked worn, her eyes heavy; in the warm, agitated light, she looked as if she were growing old.

“The Queen is unhappy,” she said.

“The Queen”—I hesitated, choosing my words carefully— “has many reasons for happiness.”

There flashed from her a look — of disappointment, of disdain — that made me hate my courtier’s smooth phrases, even as I watched her youth come rushing in.

“Why,” I asked sharply, goaded by her look, “did she return to the castle?”

“The King summoned her.”

“She obeys the King?”

She hesitated for only a moment. “She has always obeyed the King.”

“Always?”

She looked at me boldly. “At her marriage she kneeled before the King as her lord. She left when the King banished her. She returned when he called her back.”

I had forgotten Brangane’s quickness. What she said was true enough, for that matter. I was turning over my reply when she said, “It was Tristan who urged her to return.”

“Because they had been discovered?”

“For the sake of her honor.”

I tried to imagine Tristan waking beside the Queen in the forest, seeing the King’s sword.

“Her honor is now restored.” Even as I spoke I regretted the barely suppressed scorn of those words, but Brangane had already leaped past them.

“I know her. I know Ysolt the Fair. I fear—” She paused.

“You fear she may do something?”

“I fear her unhappiness,” she said tiredly. Then: “The King watches her.”

“The King loves her.”

She ignored me. “You are close to the King. You know where he goes — when he goes—”

“You’re asking me to spy on the King?”

She looked at me with impatience. “I am asking you to see that no harm comes to anyone.” Already she was moving toward the door.

Only after she had left did it strike me that what she was asking wasn’t that I observe the King carefully, but that I report his movements to her, so that the Queen might be at liberty to — do as she liked.

At supper the King turned to me in a burst of boyish good spirits and cried, “Thomas! Why so melancholy?” I was about to answer lightly when I noticed the Queen looking at me. In that proud and sorrowing gaze I felt a confusion come over me, I could not speak, it was as if the word “melancholy” were opening inside me like a black blossom, until lowering my gaze to the edge of my plate I stared down like an awkward child, and I don’t know what would have happened if the King, still in high spirits, hadn’t suddenly cried out, “Tristan! A song for melancholy Thomas!” whereupon I recovered sufficiently to raise my eyes to Tristan, who was staring at the Queen.

The King, whose passion for the hunt can no longer be suppressed, has asked me to watch over the Queen in his absence. By this he means that I am to follow the Queen and Tristan everywhere. The King will leave tomorrow at daybreak and return at nightfall.

I have informed Brangane of the King’s plans.

When she tried to thank me, my head felt suddenly hot, and I became filled with such rage that I could neither see nor hear. I was aware only that she had drawn her head back, as if I had struck her in the face.

Where to begin?

In the heat of the noonday sun, I sometimes like to walk in the King’s garden. The white roses and red roses in their beds, the heartsease and columbine, the interlaced branches of the beech trees on the sanded paths, the leaden birdbath with its dark image of a falcon rising from the center, the arbor of purple grapes, the splash of the fountain from which water pours through the mouths of four stone leopards — all this soothes the troubled mind, soothes the body itself, which, like a tired animal, seeks out hidden and quiet places where it might lie down in the coolness of dark green shade. Here and there stand benches covered in soft turf, but I wandered into the thickest part of the garden, near the far wall. Among the fruit trees I lay down on the grass. The stone wall rose high above; through the green leaves and twisting branches I could see scarcely any sky. The King was hunting in the forest. The Queen had retired with her ladies. In the stillness of the garden I closed my eyes.

When I opened my eyes I saw the King’s face bending close to mine. I could not at first account for this. The King, I thought, had come to lie down beside me in the shade of the garden, as he used to do, in the days of his boyhood, when he liked to lie on his back in the grass and ask whether, in addition to each individual tree, there was a substance named “Tree” that had a real existence, and, if so, how that “Tree” differed from the particular tree before us. Then it struck me that I must be dreaming, since the King was hunting in the forest. But already I knew that I was not dreaming, the King’s face was sharp with urgency, his eyes fierce and sorrowful. He shook me roughly. “Thomas!” As I rose and began to follow him I had the sensation that the green shade, the paths, the fountain, the roses, the stillness of the hour — all were fading and dissolving behind me, like those images that stand hard and brilliant in the mind and, as the eyes open, waver and grow dim.

He led me across the courtyard to the Queen’s tower, from which a narrow door opened into her walled garden.

I followed him along a sanded path shaded by a row of almond and walnut trees growing on one side. We passed a fish pond, a small herb garden of sage, hyssop, marjoram, and rue, square beds of roses and marguerites, a grove of hawthorn trees. Here and there in the garden wall I saw recesses with turf seats shaded by branches on lattice frames. Toward the northwest corner stood a tall hedge, higher than my head, with an opening shaped like an archway. As the King stepped through the opening he drew his sword. Behind him I entered the hedge, passed along the sharply turning paths of a maze with hedgerows on both sides, and came at last to a grove of fruit trees, beyond which rose the garden wall.