Summary
The second book of The Once and Future King begins with a depiction of the round tower inhabited by Morgause, the wife of King Lot of the Orkneys, and her four sons: Gawaine, Agravaine, Gaheris, and Gareth. The boys are recounting how Uther Pendragon, with the help of Merlyn's magic, abducted their grandmother. Morgause, for her part, has left the children to their own devices and is attempting a piece of minor witchcraft; she has boiled a black cat and is trying to extract a cat bone that will make her invisible, but soon grows bored with the endeavor.
Meanwhile, Arthur is settling into the demands of kingship, with the sarcastic Kay and the irritated Merlyn to keep him company. Arthur knows that he will need to face off against the gathered forces of King Lot, but is exhilarated by his first battles and by his new position of responsibility. Merlyn, however, attempts to sway Arthur from the position that Might defines Right. Instead, the magician wants Arthur to consider the human cost of war in general, and to appreciate a few realities of the hostilities with Lot—such as the fact that the hostilities are motivated by deep-seated ethnic feuds, and the fact that Morgause may be manipulating Lot into battle behind the scenes.
Back in their home territory, Morgause's boys consult their occasional mentor and educator, the war-minded St. Toirdealbhach, and amuse themselves by beating a couple of donkeys. Yet their rough-hewn community soon sees an unusual event: the arrival of a magic barge, which bears the knights Sir Grummore, Sir Palomides, and King Pellinore as its passengers. In the meantime, Arthur gathers Merlyn, Kay, and Sir Ector and tells them of a plan that he has formulated. It is Arthur's intention to fight one grand battle against Lot and the old-fashioned order that Lot represents; after emerging victorious, the young king will then invite the best of his realm's warriors to form a new order of chivalry. Under such an order, justice will prevail and Might will no longer be synonymous with Right.
The three knights who have landed in Morgause's territory have been diverting themselves by hunting unicorns, with Morgause herself as bait. (Apparently, a virgin is needed to lure a unicorn.) Morgause's boys decide to pursue a similar scheme, and Gawaine forces Meg the kitchen maid to come along on the excursion. The boys do, in fact, succeed in quickly luring a unicorn. However, the sight of the beast inflames the temperamental Agravaine, who confusedly states that the unicorn is offending his mother (when in fact the beast has simply put its head in Meg's lap). Agravaine kills the unicorn; the boys decide to bring its head back for Morgause. They bungle the entire operation and arrive with a mangled unicorn head that earns them little more than punishment.
Morgause nonetheless quickly disregards the visiting knights, devoting herself at least for the time to her children. This shift leaves King Pellinore in a difficult position. He is lovelorn, since he had struck up a close connection with the daughter of the King of Flanders but cannot seem to get in contact with her. Sir Grummore and Sir Palomides decide to divert King Pellinore by dressing up as the Questing Beast, the elusive creature that has often been King Pellinore's preoccupation and that King Pellinore left behind when he boarded the mystic barge. They create a two-man costume and even manage to get the downcast King Pellinore to venture out of Morgause's castle, but their plan is disrupted when the Questing Beast itself appears—and appears to fall in love with its counterfeit counterpart. The two knights make an escape, but the Questing Beast, seeking its presumed mate, settles down in the area around Morgause's castle. Fortunately, King Pellinore's beloved—a woman nicknamed Piggy—arrives at the scene both to comfort her sweetheart and to help drive off the Questing Beast.
While some of these events are unfolding, Arthur meets King Lot's forces (known alternately as the Eleven Kings and the Gaelic Confederation) at the Battle of Bedegraine. To ensure victory, Arthur decides not to adhere to some of the standard rules of engagement; instead, he will fight a total war against King Lot. The young monarch will not offer ransom, will train his forces on Lot's knights (not on less powerful troops called gallowglasses), and will disrupt the usual timetable by attacking at night. Lot's forces are surprised to see Arthur's troops arrive in the dark; the armies of the Eleven Kings nonetheless regroup and fight, but are finally broken when Arthur mounts an attack with the help of two French allies, King Ban and King Bors. In short order, Merlyn rides to Arthur, bearing news of Lot's surrender.
As The Queen of Air and Darkness draws to an end, King Pellinore and Piggy plan their future family, Sir Palomides becomes the new custodian of the Questing Beast, and Arthur celebrates his victory in his stronghold of Carlion. Morgause, however, has contrived a charm that she will use on Arthur: she travels to him and seduces him using a spancel, or a tape of human skin cut from a man's silhouette. White's narrator reveals in the book's final pages that Morgause is Arthur's half sister and that her son with Arthur, Mordred, will be linked to Arthur's destruction.
Analysis
Perhaps the most notable and must unusual feature of The Queen of Air and Darkness is how little attention—on a page-by-page basis—Morgause herself is given. Much of this second book of The Once and Future King is consumed by the misadventures of Morgause's sons, the early statecraft of King Arthur, and the comic disappointments of King Pellinore. The actual Queen of Air and Darkness appears, at least at first, to be something of an afterthought; however, there turn out to be a few justifications for White's oblique treatment of this segment's title character. Morgause is portrayed throughout as a negligent mother, a figure distant even from those who should be closest to her, and keeping the reader at a similar distance helps the reader to intuit and re-create how Morgause's children and acquaintances must feel around her. Nor does a distant approach to Morgause reduce her significance; somewhat like Excalibur in The Sword in the Stone, she appears in Arthur's life after much of her book has run its course and dramatically alters the course of Arthur's life.
Because White does not focus his attention solely on this book's title character, he opens The Queen of Air and Darkness to the possibility of a larger world-building project. He succeeds, in this respect, in lending new complexities to the tone and atmosphere of The Once and Future King as a whole. Despite intimations of danger and madness, there was not especially much that darkened the mood of The Sword in the Stone. However, the world of Morgause and her sons is a world that can seem thoroughly cold, savage, and tough, at least as its landscape is described. The intrusion of the English knights does little to change this aura, as one description of King Pellinore's misadventures makes clear: "In various parts of the landscape several dozens of bent and distorted Old Ones were intently examining the situation from the concealment of rocks, sandhills, shell-mounds, igloos and so forth—still trying vainly to fathom the subtle secrets of the English" (284). The English are inscrutable to the Orkneys, whose own rough world is very far in custom and temperament from the more hospitable world that formed men such as King Pellinore.
White also uses this second book of The Once and Future King to continue operating in a comic register. At times, in fact, not only Morgause and her sons but also Arthur and his court vanish completely from the narrative, so that White can fixate on the mishaps surrounding King Pellinore and the ersatz Questing Beast. Whether such prominent use of comedy is an asset or weakness of the book is, perhaps, best left to the judgment of individual readers. In terms of arguments in favor of White's humorous touches, it would seem odd for White to completely abandon comedy after the whimsies of The Sword in the Stone. (He seems, in fact, to be easing his way into a darker comic register with the bizarre, ironic scenes surrounding the murder of the unicorn.) In terms of arguments against, this is a book that presents both a maturing Arthur and, in King Lot, a formidable antagonist for the new king. To spend the middle stages of The Queen of Air and Darkness exploring King Pellinore's travails can seem like little more than a distraction from a more momentous conflict.
By the climax of this book, however, Arthur has arrived at the strategy that he will use to foster a new, civilized order: one final push to subdue the forces of Might and establish the rule of Right. The depictions of the battle are swift. The outcome (considering that Arthur will become a legendary king, and that White has two more books of Arthurian narrative left) never really seems to be in question. Yet the issue of repercussions remains. Arthur has invented total war, complete with surprise attacks and a disregard for civilities such as ransoms; it may not be so easy to convince his knights that such brutal tactics, once successfully used against a larger force, should never be used again. Moreover, even if Arthur's present forces disavow such uses of might, how will he convince aggressive members of the younger generations—such as Gawaine and Agravaine—that they should do the same.
As it turns out, the ominous nature of this book may offer one final justification for White's often oblique treatment of Morgause. With her ferocious sons and her casual witchcraft, she has all the signs of a threat to Arthur's reign—but exactly what kind of a threat remains unclear. After providing Arthur's family tree, White's narrator explains that Arthur's tale as a whole "deals with the reasons why the young man came to grief at the end. It is the tragedy, the Aristotelian and comprehensive tragedy, of sin coming home to roost" (312). Arthur, thanks to Merlyn's lapses, does not know exactly what is coming for him. By having Morgause haunt the narrative rather than dominate it, White makes her even more menacing. Readers unfamiliar with Arthur's fate have perhaps not seen enough of Morgause to predict how she will become Arthur's undoing; readers familiar with the grand narrative may know the events, but may not be able to predict how White will re-imagine this cunning, shadowy woman's ultimate role in Arthur's tragedy.
