Sir Palamedes

Palamedes enters the legend as an outsider who refuses to stay one. In the great French prose romance of Tristan, composed in the thirteenth century, and in Malory's English retelling two centuries later, his father is King Esclabor, a Saracen - that is, a pagan of the East - who has lost his kingdom and come to Britain with his sons, where Arthur honours him as "the unknown knight." The sons, Palamedes, Safir, and Segwarides, all win places among the knights of the Round Table, but Palamedes sets a condition on himself: he will not be baptised a Christian until he has done seven true battles in the name of Christ. For years he rides as the most formidable unbaptised knight in the world, a man keeping a vow inside a vow, belonging everywhere and nowhere.

His first and strangest vow is the hunt. The Questing Beast is a monster of the deep forest: head of a serpent, body of a leopard, haunches of a lion, feet of a deer, and in its belly a noise like thirty couple of hounds baying, so that it is never silent and never still. King Pellinore, Arthur's champion, spent his whole life chasing it, and when Pellinore was slain in the feud with the house of Orkney, Palamedes took up the hunt as his own, swearing to follow the beast until he caught it or died. He never catches it. The beast runs through his whole story like a joke the universe is telling: at every tournament, in every forest, the yelping belly passes by, and Palamedes must drop his lance and ride after it, a knight enslaved to a monster that is half hunting horn and half ghost.

His second wound is love. At the court of Cornwall, Palamedes sees Isolde, the golden Irish princess, and loves her from that hour - hopelessly, for Isolde is bound by a love potion and by her whole heart to Tristan, the Cornish knight who is the finest harpist and fighter of his age. Palamedes becomes Tristan's shadow and rival: they clash at the tournament of Lonezep, where Palomides in his fury outfights almost everyone except the man he wants to beat; they duel in meadows and at gravesides; and Tristan, who could kill him more than once, always spares him, because Tristan understands exactly what it is to be destroyed by that same love. The rivalry is bitter but never base, and it ends in the strangest friendship of the cycle: when Palamedes has finished his seven battles, it is with Tristan beside him that he is baptised, the Saracen received into the faith with his rival as witness.

The last chapters are elegy. When King Mark of Cornwall, Isolde's jealous husband, murders Tristan as he sits harping, and Isolde dies upon his body, it is Palamedes who gives the grief of the whole Arthurian world a voice, composing the long lament for the two lovers that the romances preserve. His own beast meets its end in the Grail quest that follows, driven into a lake and drowned when the world is being made new; the old wonders pass, and Palamedes, now a Christian knight, rides on in Arthur's fellowship, one of the few men of his wild generation to grow old inside the story rather than be killed by it.