The Nonexistent Knight Read Free Page A

know his name, the one all in white armor...”
    “Oh, not him again! If he doesn’t stick his nose everywhere—that nose he hasn’t got!”
    “What? Hasn’t got a nose?”
    “Since he can’t get the itch,” said the other of the two from behind the table, “he finds nothing better to do than scratch the itches of others.”
    “Why can’t he get the itch?”
    “Where d’you think he could get the itch if he hasn’t got a place to itch? That’s a nonexistent knight, that is...”
    “What do you mean, nonexistent? I saw him myself! There he was!”
    “What did you see? Mere ironwork ... He exists without existing, understand, recruit?”
    Never could young Raimbaut have imagined appearances to be so deceptive. From the moment he reached the camp he had found everything quite different from what it seemed.
    “So in Charlemagne’s army one can be a knight with lots of names and titles and what’s more a bold warrior and zealous officer, without needing to exist!”
    “Take it easy! No one said that in Charlemagne’s army one can etc., etc. All we said was in our regiment there is a knight who’s so and so. That’s all. What can or can't be as a matter of general practice is of no interest to us. D’you understand?”
    Raimbaut moved off towards the pavilion of the Superintendency of Duels, Feuds and Besmirched Honor. Now he did not let casques and plumed helmets deceive him. He knew that the armor behind those tables merely hid dusty wrinkled little old men. He felt thankful there was some one inside.
    “So you wish to avenge your father, the Marquis of Roussillon, by rank a general! Let’s see, now! The best procedure to avenge a general is to kill off three majors. We can assign you three easy ones, then you’re in the clear.”
    “I don’t think I’ve explained things properly. It’s Isohar the Argalif I’ve got to kill. He was the one who felled my glorious father!”
    “Yes yes, we realise that, but to fell an Argalif is not so simple, believe me ... What about four captains? We can guarantee you four Infidel captains in a morning. Four captains, you know, are equal to an army commander, and your father only commanded a brigade!”
    “I’ll search out Isohar and gut him! Him and him alone!”
    “You’ll end in the guardhouse, not in battle, you can be sure of that! Just think a little before speaking. If we make difficulties about Isohar, there are reasons. Suppose our emperor, for instance, is in the middle of negotiations with Isohar?”
    But one of the officials whose head had been buried in papers till then now raised it jubilantly. “All solved! All solved! No need to do a thing! No point in a vendetta here! The other day Oliver thought two of his uncles were killed in battle and avenged them! But they’d stayed behind and got drunk under a table! We have these two extra uncles’ vendettas on our hands, a terrible mess. Now it can all be settled. We count an uncle’s vendetta as half a father’s. It’s as if we had a father’s vendetta clear, already carried out”
    “Oh, dear father!” Raimbaut began to rave.
    “What’s the matter?”
    Reveille had sounded. The camp, in first light, swarmed with armed men. Raimbaut would have liked to mingle with that jostling mob gradually taking shape as squadrons and companies, but the moving armor sounded to him like a vibrating swarm of insects, buzzing like dry crackling husks. Many warriors were shut in their helmets and breastplates to the waist and under their hip and kidney guards appeared their legs, in breeks and stockings, because they were waiting to put on thigh pieces and leg pieces and knee pieces when they were in the saddle. Under those steel crests their legs seemed thin as crickets’. Their way of moving and speaking, their round eyeless heads, arms folded, hugging forearms and wrists, were also like those of crickets or ants. So the whole bustling throng seemed like a senseless clustering of insects. Amid them all,