What Bedivere Kept

Everyone knows that Sir Bedivere failed the king twice. Arthur lay dying by the water after Camlann and told him to throw Excalibur into the lake, and twice Bedivere hid the sword in the reeds and came back and lied, and twice the king knew. The third time he threw it, and an arm in white samite rose to catch it, and drew it under.

What the stories do not say is that Bedivere was not only a coward those first two times. He was a thief.

The first time, standing in the reeds with the sword across his hands, he looked at the jewels on the hilt and thought of the widows of the men who had died that day, and with his dagger he prised one stone loose, a green one no bigger than a sparrow's eye, and put it in his glove.

The second time, he cut a lock of the king's own hair, which had caught on the crossguard when they carried him from the field.

He kept both for thirty years.

He became a hermit, as the books say, at the chapel where the ladies had brought the king's body. Pilgrims came, and in time some of them came asking about the sword. He told them the story as it is told now. He never showed them the stone or the hair.

In his last winter a girl came to the chapel alone. She was perhaps twelve, and she had walked from somewhere in the west, and she said her grandmother had sent her to fetch what the one-handed knight kept back. Bedivere, who had both his hands, laughed at that, and then stopped laughing, because the girl was looking at his glove.

He asked her grandmother's name. She said her grandmother had many names, and had lived on an island, and had once been queen of a country in the north.

Bedivere gave her the green stone. He found he could not refuse. But when she held out her hand for the lock of hair he closed his own hand over it and said no, the first honest no he had said to anyone since the lake.

The girl did not argue. She looked at him with an expression he did not understand until much later, which was pity, and she said, "Then he will have to come back for it himself."

She left the next morning. Bedivere died in the spring with the lock of hair in his fist, and was buried with it, because the monks could not open his fingers.

His grave is still there. People who believe the king will return sometimes leave flowers on it, and do not always know why.