Steven Millhauser - The King in the Tree

This rumor must not reach the Queen.

My cabin is small and dark, lit only by a lantern swinging on a hook. I steady my writing board with my hand as the shadows stretch and contract. Overhead I hear the creak of masts and stays, the howl of a high wind. So Thomas sails the sea to Lyonesse. .

It is the King who has sent me — to confirm the rumor. Ah, Thomas, Thomas, did you really believe that such a story could fail to blow through the court like a howling wind?

The Queen, when she heard, uttered a cry that is said to have caused men-at-arms on the wall walk to turn their heads. She refused to show herself for three days. When she appeared, tightly wimpled, her face thickly lacquered with skin whiteners and vermilion coloring, her gray eyes motionless, she looked like an artful statue contrived by Odo of Chester for the pleasure of a King.

A thud from above — a rolling rumble — cry of voices. Perhaps a barrel, tumbling across the deck?

The King’s decision to send me to Tristan surprised me at first, but upon reflection it seems necessary and even inevitable. The King, for whom Tristan has become a monstrous problem, a problem that he can never solve, sees in the rumored marriage a miraculous solution. His motive, born of despair, is hope. Tristan married is Tristan reformed, Tristan defeated. It is the death of Tristan’s treasonable passion for the Queen. The Queen is young, the King still vigorous; she will grieve, and after a suitable time she will begin to heal. She will understand that Tristan has turned from her irrevocably, that the King alone has loved her with an unchanging passion. All this I could read in his eagerness, his disturbing decisiveness. Already he is prepared to forgive Tristan everything, as if Tristan’s passion for the Queen were a transient, not very serious, entirely understandable, even praiseworthy episode of his unruly youth. He forgets that Tristan’s youth was far from unruly and was famous for loyalty and discipline. He further forgets that Tristan’s loyalty, his deep sense of honor, his purity of heart, his knightly vow, his devotion to chivalry, his absolute and unwavering trustworthiness, did not for a moment prevent him from deceiving everyone at court and satisfying repeatedly his desire for the Queen. As for the Queen, her love for Tristan has grown more desperate with each passing day. She does not appear to be gifted in renunciation.

On the last day, Brangane pressed into my palm a ring from the Queen, which I am to deliver to Tristan.

The Queen fearful, the King hopeful — and I in a ship at sea, rocked by a wind.

I write these lines in my bedchamber in Tristan’s castle. It is the day after my arrival. The chamber overlooks a cliff, high above the green-gray sea. Through my window I can look down upon the narrow shore and the uneven lines of waves. Far to the right, where the cliff juts forward, I can see a blue-black forest, a line of hills like teeth.

The rumor is true. I have met Ysolt of the White Hands. She is scarcely out of girlhood, and troubling in her young loveliness. Her most striking feature is the skin of her face, which seems to glow like a bowl of translucent ivory containing a candle. Her face is made for happiness. Her eyes are melancholy.

I know who she is, this lovely bride. She is Ysolt without unruliness, without all that bursts forth and disrupts the beauty of the other Ysolt. Tristan, whose life is in terrible disarray, has wedded himself to calmness, to perfection, to innocence, to everything that cannot move him deeply.

This afternoon, when we were alone, I delivered the ring entrusted to me by the Queen. He took it — looked at me— and suddenly bent his head to his hand and kissed the ring passionately.

He does not speak of his marriage.

Evening of the next day. Not until this morning did he ask for news of the Queen. As he spoke, his entire body grew tense, as if he had asked to be lashed across the face.

A servant has spoken to one of my servants. Tristan, it is said, lies beside his wife but does not touch her. She remains a maid.

An unhappy castle! But how could it be otherwise?

Across the sea, the Queen lies awake in the royal chamber. All night long she thinks of the new bride, of Tristan asleep in the arms of his wife. In Tristan’s chamber the King lies awake; he is thinking of the Queen alone in her chamber, of Tristan laughing with his bride. Here, in Tristan’s castle, Tristan lies restlessly beside the beautiful Ysolt, the Ysolt who is not Ysolt, who can never be Ysolt, who by daring to bear the name Ysolt has doomed herself to lie beside him untouched, unloved, and unforgiven. Ysolt of the White Hands lies white and motionless under the coverlet. Her hands are crossed over her breasts. Her eyes remain open in the dark.

This morning I went hunting with Tristan and a small party. Deep in the forest we found ourselves alone and dismounted to rest under the shade of a tree. At once, as if we were close companions, he began to speak of the Queen. Was this Tristan? — Tristan, who keeps his deepest words to himself, as though to speak were a form of cowardice? Never, he said, has he loved anyone else. He has tried to live apart from her, has tried to form a new life — all in vain. He suffers day and night, causes suffering to others — all because of this love, a love that consumes him like a poison, a sweet poison that flows through his body. Sometimes he imagines that she has forgotten him, in the arms of the King. Then, tormented though he is by jealousy, he is further tormented by self-anger, for daring to imagine her faithlessness. He would gladly die, were it not for fear of causing her pain. He has wronged Ysolt of the White Hands, whose sorrow is nothing but his own sorrow, planted in her breast and growing in her face.

At the end of it all, trembling from the force of his unaccustomed outpouring — looking wildly at me — he sprang to his feet and drew his sword. The blade sang against the metal of the scabbard like a knife sharpened against stone. As he stood over me, holding the blade not far from my head, I felt not only no surprise that he had decided to murder me — for hadn’t I heard what only the forest should hear? — but also no surprise that I should accept my death so readily, almost with gratitude.

“Thomas!” he cried, pointing the sword at his own throat. “Tell me she no longer loves me!”

Again I was struck by Tristan’s flair for the dramatic, his instinct for memorable moments. It occurred to me to ask myself, as I sat there — sat at his feet, in the forest — is it perhaps the solution? Tristan dead, Tristan out of it?

I gave him the assurance he sought and, rising to my feet, returned with him to our horses.

I do not mean that Tristan’s gesture was insincere. On the contrary, it sprang from the deepest part of his nature. It is simply that the heroic stance, the admirable pose, is the form most readily assumed by his passion. Tristan has always been drawn to whatever in life is high, dangerous, difficult, impossible. He must always excel, even if the only person he can exceed is himself. If he loves, he has to love more than anyone on earth has ever loved, he must love as if there were nothing else. Ceaselessly he must overcome obstacles, including the obstacle of his own rectitude.

Can his love of overcoming, his passion for reckless excelling — can this be what led him to betray his beloved King? For if he was going to betray at all, then he had to betray as deeply as possible, he had to betray down to the appalled depths of his honorable nature.

Things have taken a turn — a sudden, disturbing turn. And yet, when I consider events more calmly, was it not waiting there all along, this disaster, coiled in the heart of things like a destiny?

Yesterday, two days after our talk under the tree, Tristan and I again rode out with a hunting party. In the course of the hunt we separated into two groups. I spent the morning with the knights of my party, killing and cutting up six barren hinds and a doe, while sparing two fierce harts, for now is the close season for male deer. We fed our hounds bread dipped in warm blood. As we rode deep into the wood in pursuit of a wounded hind, one of Tristan’s men called out to us from a nearby ridge. It was from him that we learned the story.