[Told by Sir John]

'Is King Arthur asleep yet?' whispered Erik.

'I think so,' I whispered back. 'But keep your voice low anyway.'

'What's he like?'

I thought about it. 'Not bad, as kings go. You know how some of them are like gobstoppers, changing colour as each layer is stripped away until there's nothing left, but he's like a stick of rock with "Arthur" written all the way through.' I had wondered at first why Arthur was so different from any king I'd ever met, and now I thought I knew. 'You see, he grew up not knowing that he was the heir, and nobody else knew except Merlyn, so he never had to stage a dramatic transformation from being A Wild Prince to being A Good King. Of course, he'd had his own sort of wildness, with being turned into animals and having adventures with outlaws and witches, but apart from that, most of his friends when he was young would have been honest people, like the kennel-boy and the austringer in his foster-father's castle, and the farm workers in the village. And there was no-one to tell him he shouldn't associate with commoners. So when he came to power, there was no-one he had to kick out of his way: no-one he was ashamed of knowing. And now that he's established and everyone knows what sort of king he is, he doesn't need to be ashamed of being friends with anyone, good or bad.'

'So, not the sort of king who has his palace laid out with an intricate system of traps, torture-chambers, and dungeons, and then tries to kill the inventor to stop him revealing the secrets?' Erik kept his voice carefully neutral, not letting on whether he thought this was a good thing or not.

'I don't think Arthur's into torturing anyone,' I said. 'He banned trial by ordeal years ago, and he's trying to have trial by combat phased out now, and replaced with trial by evidence.'

'So he might have a use for spying devices?' asked Erik eagerly. 'Does he know about Lancelot and Guinevere?'

'He doesn't really want to know,' I said, and then realised with a sinking heart that I could have put Arthur's peace of mind at risk. 'I might have let something slip the first time we met, but I was drunk and ill and I'm completely untrustworthy anyway, so he didn't pay any attention.'

'So if he doesn't want spies or torturers or assassins, what does he want me for?' wailed Erik, in real despair and fear. 'Why does he want any of us?'

'Just company, I think. Anyway, we'll find out when we get back to Camelot. It'll be good to have a proper bedroom, won't it? With a picture of The Return of the Prodigal Son on the wall.'

'And a coffin lined in red satin to sleep in,' said Erik longingly.

I hadn't expected this. 'You sleep in a coffin? What are you: a vampire?'

'Certainly not,' said Erik. 'I'm a normal man who just happens to sleep in a coffin on an island in a lake under the Opera House in Paris, for this is the house that Erik built! And now Cheiron's done a bit of cutting and stitching on my face, I'm even starting to look like a normal man!'

'What?' I burst out laughing. 'You look as though you've been knotted together out of three bits of mildewed string, with a pair of yellow marbles tied in for eyes. Is not your skin as yellow as a primrose, your hair worn away to three greasy wisps combed across your skull and two more to serve for a beard, and do you yet call yourself normal-looking? Are not your fingers as tendrillous as bindweed, your smile the grimace of a skull, and your laughter the shriek of a demon, and you expect to pass for normal?'

'Well, at least I'm not lying there like a beached whale, taking up all the room,' retorted Erik.

'And how much room do you need, when you're as withered as a strip of dried kelp?'

'You Strasburg goose!'

'You silverfish fossilised in the cliffs of Anglesey!'

It had been a while since I'd played Insults, as Arthur was always so courteous that it was hard not to be courteous in return. Back in Eastcheap, Hal and I had considered ourselves experts at the game. Robin, my page, had become quite good at it once he got over the idea that, as I was his boss, he was supposed to be respectful to me. Bardolph was hopeless, not because he was respectful, but because words weren't his strong point; and besides, as he was uglier than anyone I'd met (before I encountered Erik), nothing he could say about anyone else's appearance could match what we could say about him. Nym was a man of few words (to be precise, he knew one word, but wasn't sure what it meant), and Pistol couldn't talk except in quotations from other plays, usually Marlowe.

'You Obelix, you Michelin man, you barrage-balloon!' returned Erik, not playing badly for a beginner.

'You Lazarus coming from the tomb with the grave-cloths still on...' but at that point I was overtaken by a fit of coughing.

Under Eastcheap rules, Erik should have waited until I'd got my breath back, but instead he put in a string of terms I didn't quite catch, concluding with, 'You wineskin with the eyes of a dog and the heart of a hind!'

'That one wins!' I gasped, laughing. 'That's poetry!'

'It is, isn't it?' said Erik. 'The Iliad Book One, to be precise: Achilles describing Agamemnon.'

'Let's go to sleep now,' I said. 'By tomorrow, I'll have some better descriptions of you.'

'So will I for you. Well, goodnight, Whale.'

'Goodnight, Kelp.'

When I woke, Erik was already up, and there was a letter scrawled in red ink lying next to me. It read:

Dear Whale,

As a musician, my ears are the most important part of my body. Consequently, I object to being kept awake all night by someone who snores like a pneumatic drill. If you presume to snore again tonight, I will cut your throat.

Yours sincerely,

The Phantom

The letter was too glorious to keep to myself. Arthur and Cheiron were busy praying, so I went and showed it to Andrew and Malvolio first.

'His handwriting's terrible!' said Andrew. 'It's not even joined-up! Do you think it's written in real blood?'

I held the letter up to the sunlight. 'No, dried blood would be darker. Anyway, I shouldn't think Erik has enough blood in his body to spare any for ink, and if he'd bitten me to use mine, I'm sure I'd have felt it.' I fingered my neck for puncture wounds just in case, but didn't find any.

'We've got to report this to the King,' announced Malvolio. 'I don't like you, but I won't let you be subjected to death threats.'

'Come on, it's only a joke!' I said. 'There was a pub I used to drink in where hardly an evening went by without people pulling out daggers, posturing, maybe scuffling a bit. It always looked as though people were on the point of murdering each other, but it never actually happened.'

'Never?' asked Andrew.

'Well – hardly ever,' I admitted. 'But Erik's more of an introvert, so what he's done is a sort of cautious equivalent.'

'Yes; it's called "taunting with the licence of ink," agreed Andrew.

'Well, I still think we should tell the King and Cheiron,' repeated Malvolio.

'Tell me what?' asked Cheiron, trotting over to join us. We showed him the note. He frowned at it. 'Dear Whale?'

'We were playing Insults last night,' I explained.

'Yes, I heard you,' said Cheiron, frowning. 'You do realise Erik is a bit sensitive about the way he looks, don't you? Having spent his childhood being exhibited as a sideshow freak, I mean?'

'We were only messing around!' I protested. 'Where I come from, it's a sign of affection.'

'I know that, and I'm sure Erik knew it last night. But by this morning, he might have decided that he's mortally offended. He's a bit volatile like that.'

'Are you accusing Erik of having no sense of humour?' I asked.

'No, I'm saying he has a very twisted sense of humour,' said Cheiron. 'His idea of a hilarious practical joke involves locking people in a hall of mirrors and then turning up the heating until they go delirious with heatstroke and dehydration, and hang themselves.'

'Oh, I've been through much worse than that,' I said.

'So have I,' said Malvolio. 'And I still don't think it was funny.'

'No, but everyone else did,' pointed out Andrew.

'Bullying doesn't become all right just because you call it a joke,' said Cheiron. 'And after all, Jack, even in your world the insults didn't always stay affectionate, did they?'

'Not always.' That was the point of the game: the risk that your friend who was haranguing you in jest today might have decided by tomorrow that he really did despise you and couldn't understand why he'd ever wanted to spend time with you. It was gambling with friendship at the stake.

'Well, then: save vituperation for those you can trust. I know you like Erik, and it's perfectly all right to let him address you as Jack rather than Sir John, but letting him describe you as a beached whale and a dog-eyed wineskin when you've known him less than twenty-four hours might be a bit premature. In the meantime, I'll have a word with him myself.' And Cheiron trotted off to where Erik was sitting in the shadow of a rock. We could hear Cheiron calling as he went: 'Erik, what did we agree about not killing people or threatening to kill people or driving people to kill themselves?'

The telling-off continued out of earshot for a few minutes, and then Cheiron came back. 'I think Erik's ready to apologise now,' he said. 'You might like to talk to him in private, but I'll stand a short way off, just in case he starts any more trouble.'

Erik was still sitting against the rock, writing something in an exercise book, and crooning, 'Thy rebuke hath broken his heart; he is full of heaviness, he is full of heaviness.' I don't know whether he was singing about Jesus, or about me, or about himself, but probably he was just singing it because he liked melancholy songs.

'What are you writing now?' I asked. 'More death threats?'

'No, I'm practising my non-psychopathic handwriting, to help me calm down,' said Erik, holding out the notebook to show me. He had copied out, from a book that Cheiron had lent him, a poem beginning 'When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes'. Erik's 'non-psychopathic' handwriting was only slightly neater than his 'homicidal maniac' style, and still not joined up, but it was in plain black ink, and the shape of the letters was probably intended to be italic. 'You mustn't think I'm illiterate,' added Erik, 'only I've spent so much of my life travelling that I'm more used to writing either Urdu, Farsi, or Arabic. I can write musical notation of course – so if they ever find my score for Don Juan Triumphant, they'll know what it should sound like, but not what they're singing. Do you know what, though? I've just noticed something about this poem I never realised before. Can you see it, too?'

I shrugged. 'Well, the version I knew was "When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,/ The trick is to come out with brazen lies."' (Not that this actually helped, of course, if the person who used to love you because your lies were such fantastically tall stories, untarnished by any hint of plausibility or consistency, that they were much funnier than reality could ever be, had now decided to associate only with honest people.)

'Look at the last two lines! "And thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings/ That then I scorn to change my state with kings." I used to think the poet was saying that he is loved and that that makes up for everything else, but maybe he's saying he remembers when he was loved, and that's enough. And I think Christine used to love me a little bit, at least when I was just the mysterious voice that taught her to sing, before she knew me as the creepy masked man who kidnapped her and held her hostage for a fortnight. I know she loved her boyfriend more – after all, they'd been best friends ever since they were children – but if I can remember that once she loved me even a little, that's better than nothing.

'You know what, though? Even after I let her go, she felt sorry for me because I was so ugly and lonely, and she used to come back and visit me sometimes. Well, until I kidnapped her again and threatened to set off a bomb and kill the two of us and her boyfriend, and everyone else in the building, unless she agreed to marry me – that did rather wreck our relationship. So after that, Christine and her boyfriend went away somewhere to get married, and I lay down in my coffin to die of a broken heart, like you, like all of us when the golden ones we've mentored no longer need us. Perhaps we're not so different after all.'

'We were opposites,' I said. 'I was like a planet, round, well-watered and full of life, as long as I could warm myself in the love of a bright star and have lesser moons to orbit me. You were like a meteorite hurtling friendlessly through cold space until you found something to smash into. But we've both finished up in the heart of Arthur's love, and that's something real, not just something to remember or long for. He doesn't need to love people because they're funny or musical, or hate them because they're old or ugly. He's just got so much love pouring out of him that it cascades onto everyone else. So don't worry, Erik, lad. We'll be all right. Anyway, let's go and see if breakfast's ready yet.'