—
Now Arthur opened the book to the title page and turned the volume sideways so he could examine the frontispiece. He had looked at it a thousand times; every detail of the woodcut was burned into his memory, but on days like this, when the modern world exasperated him at every turn, he loved nothing better than returning to this book and this image. The picture showed King Arthur and his knights seated at the Round Table. Arthur popped up through a circular hole in the center of the table, holding a lance and a sword. He had a large nose and an English mustache—without the extended handlebars. He wore a full suit of plate-mail armor—more Jacobean than Arthurian. On a bench encircling the table and draped with linen sat thirteen of Arthur’s knights, similarly mustachioed and armored. There seemed a general air of camaraderie among the knights. Most chatted with one another; one had his hand on another’s back. Arthur could almost imagine himself as one of the company. The caption for the woodcut listed thirty knights, with no indication of which of them appeared in the image. Every time Arthur looked at the picture he attributed different names to the figures. Today the knight sitting squarely in the center of the image, the only one with his back completely to the viewer, seemed more Lancelot than Kay. Sir Bors and Sir Gawain were certainly chatting in the bottom right corner. The hardest to put a name to was at the top of the picture, his face almost totally obscured by the feather streaming from Arthur’s helmet. Today he was Galahad, achiever of the Grail, sitting in the Siege Perilous.
Arthur turned the soft, worn pages and inhaled the scent of history. The paper was a pale brownish yellow, but the dark type was still as legible as it had been almost four hundred years ago. He had work to do today, so he just read a short passage from a chapter titled “How sir Galahad and his fellowes were fed with the Sancgreall, and how our Lord appeared to them, and of other matters.”
Then King Pelles and his sonne departed. And therewith it beseemed them that there came a man and foure Angels from heaven, clothed in the likenesse of bishops, and had a crosse in his hand, and the foure Angels beare him up in a chaire, and set him downe before the table of silver, whereupon the Sancgreall was.
The Sancgreall—the Holy Grail. Arthur closed his eyes and tried to picture the scene. Malory was not one for detailed descriptions, and he never wrote what the Holy Grail looked like, but to Arthur this meant the Grail could be whatever he needed it to be. Today it was an anchor, a solid link to a past that mattered and that, for Arthur, was as alive as the present—perhaps more alive.
—
When Arthur returned home that summer after his grandfather had introduced him to the stories of the Round Table, he had run straight to the library and checked out the only volume about King Arthur he could find—a 1911 book called King Arthur’s Knights: The Tales Retold for Boys and Girls. The title page claimed that the book contained “16 Illustrations in Color by Walter Crane,” but some disrespectful former library patron had removed the color plates. Arthur didn’t care; he was too busy falling in love with the stories.
King Arthur’s Knights had been the first book Arthur had read late at night under the covers with a torch, long after he was supposed to have been asleep. It was the first book that took him completely out of himself, his room, his home, and his hometown to a place that seemed both mythical and real, a place where magic was ordinary and heroes were plenteous. It was, he supposed, thinking back on it, the first book that showed him what reading was really all about.
At first Arthur had been drawn to the adventure in the stories—knights battling other knights, the king holding tournaments at Camelot. Then in his teenage years, the love stories began to be favorites—the great Sir Lancelot’s tragic love for Queen Guinevere, Tristram and Isoude drinking a love potion even while he was supposed to be wooing her on behalf of another. But the Grail stories had been a constant source of fascination. In the version of Malory that Arthur read as a boy, the story of the Grail was wonderfully vague, never explicitly stating what the Grail was or why Arthur and his knights were so determined to find it. It was unclear who possessed the Grail or why or what they did with it or even whether it was real or just a vision. Arthur had grown to love the mysterious nature of the Grail, but as a child it had fascinated and frustrated him in equal parts.
“What is the Grail?” Arthur had asked his grandfather the night after his first visit to the cathedral library as his grandfather read to him from an abridged version of Malory.
The popular legend of the Grail, his grandfather told him, was simple—the cup from which Christ served the wine at the Last Supper was taken by Joseph of Arimathea to the island of Britain. Arriving near what is now Glastonbury, Joseph pushed his staff into the ground and it flowered into a bush known as the Glastonbury Thorn. Joseph later buried the Grail under a nearby hill—the Glastonbury Tor—and a torrent of clean, fresh water sprang forth and flows from the spot to this very day. Centuries later, knights of King Arthur’s Round Table sought the Grail—a symbol of purity and perfection. In some versions of the tale, the Glastonbury Tor is also the Isle of Avalon, Arthur’s mysterious final resting place. In the late twelfth century, monks of Glastonbury claimed to have found the graves of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, but no one ever found the Grail.
Arthur might have thought the story of the Grail no more than a mysterious legend of a magical cup with healing powers—as fascinating, and as fictional, as Tolkien’s One Ring. But the first time his grandfather read him the Grail story from Malory, he laid the book aside and looked Arthur in the eyes.
“King Arthur, and Merlin, and Lancelot, and all the rest—in all likelihood they are only stories. But the Grail, Arthur—the Grail was real. The Grail is real. And I’m going to tell you a secret—a secret you must promise to share with no one.”
“I promise,” said Arthur breathlessly.
“I believe that the Grail is right here in Barchester.”
Arthur loved no one in the world more than his grandfather, and that kindly man rarely spoke as seriously as he did now.
“I’m getting too old for adventures,” said his grandfather, “but you have your whole life ahead of you. You must be the one to find the Grail. And you must keep it secret.”
“But why does it have to be a secret?” said Arthur.
“Do you trust me?” said his grandfather.
“Yes,” said the boy.