Upsetting the Round Table

THE GREAT CAPTAINS (302 pp.)--Henry Treece--Random House ($3.75).

Was King Arthur a gentleman, or was he a sort of Legs Diamond of the early Middle Ages? Was it the age of chivalry or the age of the shiv? Were the "parfit gentil knights" of the Round Table just a passel of paleo-Stalinist thugs? Henry Treece, English poet, critic and historical novelist (The Dark Island), wields a mean historic mace and it lands squarely on the romantic Arthurian legend of Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur. "Malory was wrong," says Novelist Treece flatly. He admits that his own hard-boiled debunking may be no less wrong, but Treece at least tunes his legend to the barbaric realities of 6th century Britain, with its Saxon seawolf marauders, its roving robber bands, its shattered relics of the Pax Romana, its poor riven land where man's hand was at his neighbor's pocket or throat.

Sweat at the Oak Bole. In Treece's version, King Arthur becomes Artos the Bear, a barrel-chested brute with blue dye on his cheekbones.* He is plowing his father's fields with a brace of bulls when blind old Ambrosius, one of the last of the Roman legionaries, by title the Count of Britain, stumbles upon him. By the old man's side walks Medrodus, his heir apparent, and at his side hangs a lustrous sword (Excalibur of old), sole remaining symbol of legal Roman power. No Lady of the Lake hands Artos the sword; he filches it. When Medrodus protests, Artos sinks the sword deep in an oak bole (instead of the anvil imbedded in stone of Malory's story), and after a grunt-and-sweat match, Medrodus fails to draw it out and Artos succeeds. Picking up a few tricks from the new company he keeps, Medrodus knifes old Ambrosius in the bath, and pricks his own veins in blood brotherhood with Artos, the new Count of Britain, who dubs him Medrawt.

The pair develops a quick sense of mission--to unite Britain. Novelist Treece supplies Artos with two Guineveres to Malory's one (but uses the Welsh, Gwenhwyfar). The first Gwenhwyfar is a flaxen haired homebody, his half sister as well as mother of his child. The second is a kind of dusky call girl from Byzantium, a Gwenhwyfar from home. Artos makes her amorous acquaintance in a shivery session atop one of the ancient slabs at Stonehenge. He takes her to wife, but inevitably the day comes when the Count of Britain must off to the wars to fight the advancing Picts. Artos leaves Gwenhwyfar in the hands--and ultimately the arms--of Medrawt.

A Mobile Museum. What revenge Artos takes when he returns to find himself cuckolded may be left to the discovery of readers whose hair does not curl easily. The props with which Author Treece outfits his plot appear to be as accurate as a mobile museum of medieval antiquities, and he is lavish with local color, mostly bloodred. Some will doubtless regret Treece's crockery-clattering upsetting of the old round table. But the fact is that while good King Arthur could exist only in storybooks, Artos the Bear has enough gristle-and-bone reality to have actually galloped across the misty dawn of British history.

*Says Britannus to Cleopatra in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra: "In war we stain our bodies blue; so that though our enemies may strip us of our clothes and our lives, they cannot strip us of our respectability."

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