Orlando Juvenescens- A Reverse History of the Knight

ORLANDO JUVENESCENS- A Reverse History of the Knight

In Memoriam Lodovico Ariosto 1474-1533

The stirrup made the knight. A man and a horse are separate creatures and the man chooses the trappings he puts on the horse. A man can ride a horse without bridle or harness or saddle or shoe. He can certainly ride without stirrups. But a knight cannot. A knight is a composite of man and horse. When the man dismounts at the end of the day he may still be addressed as “Good Sir Knight of…” but he knows he is really only a knight when he sits astride his charger. Then are chevalier and cheval one. They move as one. They charge as one. They fight as one. And the man who holds thirty pounds of lance in his hand and the horse baring its teeth are linked by the stirrup. The horse trots, canters, gallops, charges, and the man on its back rides to its rhythm. The horse may cover half a mile in barely a minute. In the opposite direction another man on another horse is travelling at the same speed. The men wait, their lances poised, steadied for the impact. For every action there is a reaction. On a frozen field there is the sudden clash of weapon and armour and knight. The stirrup is the balance and the balance is the knight. The stirrup secured the knight in his universe.

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In 1525 the man was old. His hair was white and thin on his scalp. He could no longer hold his lance properly for the arthritis in his hand. Painful gout attacked his feet for the years of boar and venison and hare. His breathing was shallow and his heart beat loud under his breastplate. He had escaped with his life from the parklands of Pavia but his squire and palfrey had perished and been left to the ravens. He had journeyed far in life and he had one journey left. He would return to France. There was no business left for him in Italy. He mourned the past and he scorned the future. He cursed the inventions of the modern age- the exploding weapon and the printed book that tied down his myths. And yet he lacked the strength unaided for his travels.

He had come to Milan to meet Lodovico, the writer who had travelled there from Ferrara for the book fairs. Lodovico’s star was high. The knight shivered by the brazier dying in the square. He wrapped his rabbit fur around his shoulders and pulled up his hessian boots. Starlings congregated around the roofs, a mass of chatter. Then he walked to the stairs that led up to Lodovico’s rooms.

Lanterns hung from hooks. Shadows fell on globes and astrolabes and water clocks. Lodovico greeted him with shy amicability. He beckoned the man through an arched gap in the wall where they entered a V-shaped chamber full of pictures and words. The left side was thick, the right side thin. Paper thin. As thin as one sheet of paper. The knight had entered a book and he was at the last page. The pages would slowly flick backwards.

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The world looked different on the return journey. An essence difficult to describe was present. The quality of this essence was dependent on the imagination of the writer. Since Lodovico was a fine writer the quality was high. The knight- for the man was reunited with his horse for this journey- was alive to this essence. He likened it to the view seen through an ever so slightly convex lens of the type he had once been shown.by a Franciscan peripatetic. There was enhancement but also detachment. The knight felt some invisible membrane that separated him from the world.

Time was difficult to gauge on this journey. But as he travelled through the Cisalpine regions of Lombardy he began to feel better. Hair was growing back on his scalp, his bones ached less and there were even stirrings in his groin that he thought had gone for ever. He passed the time of day with other travellers. He once or twice passed the time of night with girls in the villages he came to.

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Then one day he encountered a wizard who claimed possession of the powers of metamorphosis and disappearance, total or partial. And, by way of example, and before the knight’s eyes he became a lark pulsating on the thermals and a hovering falcon. He made his body disappear so that he was just a head and his head so that he was just a body. Then both disappeared leaving nothing. Then both returned.

“You are a wondrous magician” said the knight, “You must be Merlin”.

And at that the wizard rode away without further ado. And all the time the knight felt fitter and healthier and he tried to remember the contents of the book that he was travelling in for parts had been read to him once. He longed for a beautiful lady such as the ones he seemed to remember the book describing.

One day he passed by the side of a lake and heard terrible weeping. A forest came down almost to the lake’s edge and in the forest he saw a maiden wrapped in a blue cloak. Her head was buried in her hands and she wept piteously. The knight separated, ie the man dismounted from his horse.

“Who are you, gentle maiden, that cries so wretchedly?”

“I am Angelica and I have lost my Orlando”.

The man remembered. Angelica was the beauteous heroine of the book with long blonde hair and beautiful blue eyes.

“Cease weeping, Angelica” he said “And let me see your face.”

Angelica did as she was asked. No blonde-haired beauty greeted his eye. No blue eyes stared back at him. Instead he gazed on a plain, black-haired woman with pigtails, her skin an ochre hue, her eyes small and dark. Perhaps she was counted a beauty in her own domains but the man was rather set in his ways, even when travelling backwards.

“Angelica” he stuttered

“Angelica, Princess of Cathay” she replied

She began to look lovingly on him. He felt some overpowering spell begin to take hold of him. Angelica loved Orlando he recalled. And the book was the story of Orlando. But the book was now his story. Therefore…Horrified he leapt on to his horse and most ungallantly rode away as fast as he could.

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If he was Orlando then his horse was…Did not Orlando’s horse have a name? Oh what was it? Did it matter? It would be nice to know.

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Later the knight came to a hamlet. It was a scruffy affair with two or three pig farms and a most unpleasant midden. But in the central space, around which the farm buildings clustered, something caught the knight’s eye. It was a quintain, that contraption so beloved of knights for perfecting their jousting skills. Nobody was about. The knight set his visor. He balanced his lance. Then he started to trot forward. The trot became a gallop. Buit as he came near the quintain and was primed for the tilt the quintain revolved of its own accord hitting him before he hit it and toppling Orlando from Durandal. Durandal, the name came to the man just prior to the impact.

He remounted and tried again and again the quintain hit him first. The horse was becoming agitated.

“Easy, Durandal” he whispered.

Before he had a chance at a third tilt at the quintain he saw through the mist that was enveloping the hamlet a knight in white armour who was riding toward him. The other knight stopped and prepared his lance. Our knight readied himself for battle. The two knights charged at each other and again Orlando (as the man now regarded himself) crashed to the ground. He looked up at his conqueror encased in white armour so still and strong. Then from a distance came a hoarse shouting. The demeanour of this knightly paragon immediately changed and became disturbed. The rider quickly dismounted and began to shed the armour. Out of its shell stepped a pretty young peasant girl dressed in farmer’s buckram.

“Who are you?” asked the man.

“I am Bradamante, sister of Rinaldo and my lance will fell the finest knight”.

The shouting was growing louder and into view came, a ruddy and vigorous man of middle age with bristles hanging from his nostrils.

“Oh Papa” pleaded Bradamante, “I did not mean to wear that armour. I don’t know what came over me.”

And she began to rub that part of a girl’s anatomy reserved for punishment. Then she began to yell. Finally her father beat her during which she made no sound.

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The knight passed on through dense Alpine forests where snow hung from the ghosts of trees and the only sound was of the horse scrunching through the forest’s white floor. High in the mountains the man made camp for the night and lit a fire for warmth and protection. The horse was restive, digging circles in the snow with its hooves. Its eyes had gone wild.

“Easy, Durandal”, said the man, but this seemed further to agitate the beast.

Then far away on the thin night air the man heard a noise that seemed like some overdue echo of his own journeyings. And this was how his mind first dealt with the noise for the elevation and the blows and the strange experiences had dislocated his reasoning a little. But as the muffled steppings of the echo-horse intensified the man was eventually jolted from his illusion and he realised that another rider would soon be passing by. The horse gave a sudden piercing and sustained whinny.

“Hush, Durandal”, said the man.

He took his sword which was surprisingly hot to his touch and seemed to leap out of its scabbard as if of its own accord. Behind the fire he could see the red eyes of another horse and a rider whose features were hidden by the cloaks and hoods he wore against the cold.

“Who passes here?” asked our man.

The rider threw the hood back. There smiling at him was Bradamante. Durandal was still restless and again the man called out its name. And this made Bradamante laugh.

“It is not that sword that interests me, good sir knight.” she said “Though I am in truth a poor peasant girl I still imagine myself a knight and want another manly knight to be my lover on this cold winter’s eve.”

This speech moved the man in more ways than one and he spent that night attempting to make love to Bradamante. But once again effect preceded cause with the result that both lovers suffered considerable frustration and almost came to blows at the unfortunate order of events in their lovemaking. At last they gave up and after a period of uncompanionable silence they began to talk.

“Where did you get that beautiful suit of white armour?”

“From the knight who came wandering before you?”

“And what became of him?”

“I unhorsed him. My father beat me. And I rode after that knight too”.

“But what armour did you wear when you unhorsed him?”

“That of the knight before him.”

“Did not those knights take their armour when they left?”

“They never left.”

“Then where are they?”

“They are dead”.

“You killed them, for your armour. You…”

“No, I did not kill them. I spent the night with them as I am with you.”

“So how did they die?” and the man pronounced each word and left a pause before the next as if he did not want the question to end or to hear the answer to it.

“My father follows me and kills them and stores their armour which I put on and pretend that I am a knight when I think he is not looking. But he is always looking”.

And once again the man most ungallantly leapt on to the horse and made to ride away. But he felt his sword pricking him and he readjusted it whereupon the horse reared and whinnied and almost dislodged him despite his reassurances to it. The last words he heard from the girl were

“Why do you keep talking to your sword?”

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The knight travelled on through quieter pages. Perhaps he had been overhasty in leaving Bradamante as he did. On a night such as that in the high mountains he would have had ample warning of her father’s approach. And though he now remembered that Durandal was Orlando’s sword and not his horse he had not stopped to ask the name of the animal. So he just called him “boy” which seemed to suffice and the horse began to settle down.

Though he did not know it yet he was about to leave the book whose covers had sheltered him for so long. For Lodovio was an Italian and though he wrote for humankind his remit was growing weaker in the crisp air of the Cantons and as the knight began to slip back towards France his influence would be subsumed by other myths and other histories. But someone had to bid him farewell. A familiar figure rode towards him on a primrose-lined Alpine pass. It was the wizard.

“No” said the wizard, “Do not utter my name for you will make me cross again. Let me show you something.”

And before the knight’s eyes the wizard’s head again vanished. Some seconds passed before the knight realised that it had not really disappeared but was hanging from his horse’s tail.

“So you see I can also put last what should come first”.

“This is all trickery” said the knight “And very childish trickery at that.”

The wizard smiled urbanely.

“My apologies. I regretted my pranka little when I realised how bad you were with names. A problem still at your time of life. It will improve with youth. My name is Atlas- Merlin is from a different story though to my considerable annoyance he does creep into this one too.”

The knight said nothing.

“Now fare you well” said the wizard, It is time for you to return to your provenance.”

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The man was back in France and young again, in that first flush of youth that is so fleeting and so rarely revisited. His vigour was fully restored as was his hair and his memory. He knew the names of all his new companions and the names of all their horses. He lived again the glory of Poitiers when Charles Martel turned back those Saracens that threatened the very heart of Christendom. Before that there were no knights- just young men on horses who could neither couch nor tilt a lance. For something had been lost in the ride back through history. And that was the stirrup.

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Now he remembers less. He is a child again, eager to learn but lost to the future and heading back to some dark source. Merovingian and Goth pass by. A boat leaves the Camargue and sails across the tideless sea, past Italy where the last knight will fight in a millennium and a half, past islands where figs and lemons grow in shimmering heat, to another rocky shore. And at length there is a garden and a hill and it is dark in the afternoon. Three men on crosses, and a soldier stabs the middle one with something. A baby does not make connections. But there they are, the man with the spear and the man on the Cross, soldier and Saviour. Theirs is a temporary enmity and a fleeting intimacy. Together they will make the knight. Knight Temporal and Knight Spiritual. And the world will go on weeping.