“Friend, where have you been?”
“Hunting a hart,” he said, “that wearied me. I would lie down and
sleep.”
So she lay down, and he, and between them Tristan put his naked sword,
and on the Queen’s finger was that ring of gold with emeralds set
therein, which Mark had given her on her bridal day; but her hand was
so wasted that the ring hardly held. And no wind blew, and no leaves
stirred, but through a crevice in the branches a sunbeam fell upon the
face of Iseult and it shone white like ice. Now a woodman found in the
wood a place where the leaves were crushed, where the lovers had
halted and slept, and he followed their track and found the hut, and
saw them sleeping and fled off, fearing the terrible awakening of that
lord. He fled to Tintagel, and going up the stairs of the palace,
found the King as he held his pleas in hall amid the vassals
assembled.
“Friend,” said the King, “what came you hither to seek in haste and
breathless, like a huntsman that has followed the dogs afoot? Have you
some wrong to right, or has any man driven you?”
But the woodman took him aside and said low down:
“I have seen the Queen and Tristan, and I feared and fled.”
“Where saw you them?”
“In a hut in Morois, they slept side by side. Come swiftly and take
your vengeance.”
“Go,” said the King, “and await me at the forest edge where the red
cross stands, and tell no man what you have seen. You shall have gold
and silver at your will.”
The King had saddled his horse and girt his sword and left the city
alone, and as he rode alone he minded him of the night when he had
seen Tristan under the great pine-tree, and Iseult with her clear
face, and he thought:
“If I find them I will avenge this awful wrong.”
At the foot of the red cross he came to the woodman and said:
“Go first, and lead me straight and quickly.”
The dark shade of the great trees wrapt them round, and as the King
followed the spy he felt his sword, and trusted it for the great blows
it had struck of old; and surely had Tristan wakened, one of the two
had stayed there dead. Then the woodman said:
“King, we are near.”
He held the stirrup, and tied the rein to a green apple-tree, and saw
in a sunlit glade the hut with its flowers and leaves. Then the King
cast his cloak with its fine buckle of gold and drew his sword from
its sheath and said again in his heart that they or he should die. And
he signed to the woodman to be gone.
He came alone into the hut, sword bare, and watched them as they lay:
but he saw that they were apart, and he wondered because between them
was the naked blade.
Then he said to himself: “My God, I may not kill them. For all the
time they have lived together in this wood, these two lovers, yet is
the sword here between them, and throughout Christendom men know that
sign. Therefore I will not slay, for that would be treason and wrong,
but I will do so that when they wake they may know that I found them
here, asleep, and spared them and that God had pity on them both.”
And still the sunbeam fell upon the white face of Iseult, and the King
took his ermined gloves and put them up against the crevice whence it
shone.
Then in her sleep a vision came to Iseult. She seemed to be in a great
wood and two lions near her fought for her, and she gave a cry and
woke, and the gloves fell upon her breast; and at the cry Tristan
woke, and made to seize his sword, and saw by the golden hilt that it
was the King’s. And the Queen saw on her finger the King’s ring, and
she cried:
“O, my lord, the King has found us here!”
And Tristan said:
“He has taken my sword; he was alone, but he will return, and will
burn us before the people. Let us fly.”
So by great marches with Gorvenal alone they fled towards Wales.