The Horn at the Postern

by Chrétien de Troyes, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

This is a tale of a tongue and of a horn, and I, Chrétien of Troyes, who have set it in order, had it out of a little book that the sacristan of Saint-Loup lent me one winter and wanted back before Lent, so that I read it by a bad candle and in a hurry. The man who wrote the book had the whole of the matter and no notion of where it bent. He put the horn in the middle, as though it were one more thing that happened to a knight on the road, and the table at the beginning he left out altogether, and the table at the end he gave in two lines, like a man paying a debt he hopes will not be counted. I have put the table back at both ends. You will see why, or you will not, and if you do not, it is the fault of my jointing and not of the book.

At Disnadaron in Wales King Arthur kept the feast of Saint John, and because it was midsummer the tables were set in the orchard under the cherry trees and not in the hall, and the cloths were white, and the wasps came to the wine as they do. Among the knights who sat there that day was Gurvan of Penlan, a young man who held a castle by the sea on the coast of Cornwall, and beside the queen sat the lady of that castle, Ysmaine, whom he had married at Candlemas; and all who looked at her that day said that he had done well, and he heard them say it, which was the beginning of the trouble.

For when the talk went round the tables, as it does when the meats are done and the fruit has not come, of what each knight had of his lady, one a sleeve and one a ring and one a word given in a garden, Gurvan stood up with his cup in his hand, and he was not drunk, I will not give him that excuse, and he said that he could boast more than any of them, because his lady Ysmaine had never in her life refused him anything he asked of her, not in the hall and not in the—

He did not finish. He did not need to; the whole orchard had finished it for him, and the knights laughed, and some of them struck the boards with their knives, because it was a good boast and well spoken, and a boast is what a feast is for.

The queen did not laugh. She said, not loudly, to Ysmaine at her side, but so that the near tables heard it, that a man who praises at table what was given him in the chamber has spent a thing that was never his to spend, and that she was sorry for whoever's purse it had come out of. And that was a true measure, and the near tables heard it, and the laughter went down the way a fire goes down when you throw earth on it, from the nearest outward.

Ysmaine stood up. I tell you this as the book tells it: she did not weep and she did not go out, which would have been the easier thing, but she stood where the whole orchard could see her and spoke across the tables to her husband, and what she said was this. That since his tongue had given away at a feast what she had given him in private, it should give nothing more for a year: he was not to speak a word from that dinner to the dinner of Saint John next, not to her, not to the king, not to his squire, not to his horse, nor to any creature that has ears; and that if he spoke one word within that term, he might go on talking for the rest of his life, as much as he pleased, but not to a wife, because he would not have one.

Gurvan opened his mouth to say yes, and shut it again.

That was the first thing he kept, and the orchard saw him keep it, and some there say it was the first wise thing he had done since Candlemas. He knelt to her where he stood, in the grass among the fallen cherries, and put his hand over his mouth, and rose and bowed to the king and went out to the horse lines, and before none he was armed and gone; for a knight who sits a year silent at his own hearth is a knight sitting a year at his own hearth, and you know, lords, what the court calls that. He had to ride, and he had to ride without a name, since a name is a thing you say.

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Now hear what was sent to meet him, and in what order, because the order is not mine and it is not the book's either; it is the way a wood is made.

The first thing stood on the stone bridge at Corbel, three days out, and it was a knight in red-painted arms with a lance planted in the road, who kept the bridge, he said, for the love of a damsel who had asked it of him, and would let no man cross who did not either tell him his name and his lady's name or break a lance with him. Gurvan sat his horse and looked at him. The knight of the bridge asked him the second time, and the third, and grew angry, as a man will who is being looked at and not answered, and called him proud, and then something worse than proud, and took his lance out of the road.

They ran together on the bridge, which was too narrow for it, so that both horses scraped the parapet, and at the second course Gurvan put the knight of the bridge down on the stones and himself got down and came at him with the sword, and the knight gave back three paces and then went down on his knee and asked mercy, and asked, as is right, the name of the man he yielded to. Gurvan could not give it. Nor could he say the words a knight says when he grants mercy, which every squire has by heart. He stood there with the sword out, and the knight on his knee looked up at him through the ventail and plainly thought he was about to be killed for having asked; and Gurvan put the sword back in its sheath and held out his hand to him, bare, and pulled him up by it, and got on his horse and crossed the bridge.

That knight told it afterwards at more than one court, and he never told it without saying that he had been spared by a man who would not speak to him, and that he did not know to this day whether it was courtesy or contempt. I will tell you which it was, and it was neither: it was a term.

The second thing was harder, though there was no blood in it. He lay a week of rain at the house of a vavasor in the forest of Brechan, an old man with a good table and three sons, and the old man took him in gladly and was proud to have a knight under his roof; and on the third day, when the guest had answered nothing that was asked of him, not his country, not his lord, not whether he would have more of the eels, the sons began to say at table, in front of him, as though he were a post or a dog, that a knight who will not give his name has something in it he does not want known. The eldest said it was a murder, and the second that it was worse, and the youngest, who was fourteen, said it was likely he had run from a fight and been cried recreant and dared not say whose court had done the crying, and the brothers laughed, and the old man told them to be quiet, but he did not tell them they were wrong.

And Gurvan, who had put a knight down on the bridge at Corbel for less, ate his eels.

You will understand, lords, what it cost. A knight called a coward to his face has two answers, the word and the glove, and the glove is only the word thrown; he had neither. He sat there and the boy's guess sat on him, and it went out of that house with him, and I do not doubt it was told in that country for a year after. He left on the eighth morning, when the rain stopped, and he left his host a good horse-cloth for the keeping, folded on the bench, since he could not leave him thanks.

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The third thing he met was the last, and the hardest, and I tell you plainly that if it had come first he would have failed it, because he would not yet have learned to look instead of ask.

It was a castle called the Two Waters, because it stood at the meeting of a river and a stream, on a spit of rock with water on two sides and a ditch on the third and a little postern gate on the side of the stream, where the women went down to wash; and it was held by a widow, the lady Hodierne, who had a son of nine and very few men, and a neighbour, Enguerran of the Marsh, who wanted her land and had said so. All this Gurvan learned by keeping his ears open at her table, which, a man who cannot talk soon finds, is a way of learning a great deal. She received him well. She asked him his name, and when he put his hand to his mouth she did not ask again, but had his bed made in the hall by the fire, with the dogs, as a guest's bed was, and said that whoever he was, a knight was welcome in that house, and more welcome that year than most.

He did not sleep well. A man who has not spoken for four months sleeps lightly; I do not know why this should be, but the book says it, and I believe it.

Some time after matins, when the fire was red and the hall dark, he heard the porter, a man called Gerbaut, go past the end of the hall with no light, which a porter going his rounds does not do, and go down the stair toward the stream side. Gurvan got up in his shirt and took his sword and followed him. At the bottom of the stair the porter set down a lantern he had been carrying under his cloak, and opened its shutter, and showed the light three times through the grating of the postern, and from across the stream, out of the alders, a light answered him three times; and then the porter set his shoulder to the bar of the postern, which was an oak beam as thick as a man's thigh, and began to draw it.

Lords, I have told you what the term was. Let me tell you now what was on the other side of it. If Gurvan cried out, the house would wake, and the bar would be shot home again, and the lady and her son and her few men would see the morning; and he would have spoken, within the term, and Ysmaine would be no more his wife than the river is. If he did not cry out, he was one man in his shirt with a sword against however many were in the alders, and the porter at his back, and the house asleep above him.

The book makes no pause here, between the bar and the term, and nor shall I, for there was none to make; he had been four months learning to look, and what he looked at now was on the wall.

Above the postern, on a peg by the watchman's stool, where it had hung, I suppose, since the castle was built, there hung a horn. The watchman was not on his stool. Whether the porter had paid him or made him drunk the book does not say, and I will not guess. It says there was a horn on the peg. Gurvan took it down and put it to his mouth and blew it, once long and twice short, and the sound of it went up the stair and through the hall and across the water, and every dog in the Two Waters began at once.

Then he put the porter on the floor with the pommel of his sword and drove the bar back with his shoulder as far as it would go, which was not all the way, and set his back against the gate and held it there, and he held it while the first of the men from the alders came through the stream and up to the gate and put their weight against it from the far side, which was not long, because the lady's men came down the stair with torches and spears and half their clothes, and the men in the stream heard them and went back into the alders, and there was no fight at all, which is the best kind.

In the morning the lady Hodierne, who had seen him at the bottom of the stair in his shirt with the horn in one hand and the sword in the other, asked him again what his name was, and he put his hand to his mouth again; and she looked at him a long while, and then she took the horn down from its peg, where they had hung it back, and gave it to him, and said that since he would not leave her his name he should take that, which had spoken for him when he would not. He knelt to her for it. It was all the thanks he had.

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Of the rest of the year the book gives eight months in a page, and I give them in fewer words: he rode through it, and did what knights do and said none of what knights say, and he had pris of it, though nobody knew whose.

On the eve of Saint John he came to Penlan. Ysmaine had not had a word from him in the year, which was the term, nor of him, which was not; she let him in and gave him water for his hands and set him at the table with her, and they ate together on the feast day, at noon, in the hall and not in an orchard, with the sea going on outside, and neither said a word until the dinner was done, because the term ran to the dinner and not to the day, and both of them knew it to the hour.

When the cloth was drawn she asked him whether he had kept it.

And now he could speak, and he told her: the bridge, and the vavasor's eels, and the boy who had called him a runaway, and last the Two Waters and the porter and the bar. He told her about the horn, and laid it on the table between them. I put it to you that he need not have done that. He might have told her of the porter and the bar and said that he had held the gate, and left the horn hanging on its peg at the Two Waters in the telling, and she would never have known; and I put it to you that a man who would do that had learned nothing from the orchard.

Ysmaine looked at the horn a long time. Then she asked him the one question that could be asked, which was what he would have done if there had been no horn on the peg.

He said that he would have cried out.

I will not tell you he said it at once. I will not tell you he paused, either. The book says only that he said it, and I have read that line by a bad candle more times than the sacristan of Saint-Loup knew, and I cannot tell you how long it took him.

She was silent then, as long as he had been silent at the vavasor's table, or it seemed so to him. And then she gave her judgement, which was hers to give and which I set down as she gave it, and do not argue with: that a horn is not a tongue, and that the term was kept; and that, as for the rest, she had never in her life refused him anything he asked of her, and would not begin now, and he might say so at any table in the world, since this time it was she who had said it.

Whether that was a third thing, found between the term and the gate, or whether it was only the horn, which God hung on a peg at the Two Waters and does not hang at every gate, I do not know, and the book does not know, and I have tried it both ways by the bad candle and it will not come down on either side. I tell you what she did. She took the horn from the table, and she had a nail driven into the wall of the hall at Penlan above her husband's chair, and she hung it there, so that whenever he sat at his own table after that, with guests at the board and the talk going round, it hung over his head.

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Christiānō Trecēnsī per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Chrétien de Troyes, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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