Vintage Treasures: Ronald Welch’s Knight Crusader
Try not to lick your cracked lips. Don’t think of water. Listen to the Saracen arrows buzz past. Don’t flinch! Most of all, hold the line!
Grumpy old Sir Fulk can’t stand the heat. He raises his helm and ignoring the shouts of the other crusaders, waits while his son, Sir Joscelin, shares the last of his flask.
Whirrrrrrr! Thock!
An arrow takes Sir Fulk in the throat. There’s blood, there’s thrashing, and the old knight dies in the arms of his son, the effete Sir Joscelin.
Kurtzhau – age 6 – lets out a cry, as if he too were there, riding out under the baking 12th-century sun to face the army of Saladin. This is four years ago and I’m reading aloud from Ronald Welch’s Knight Crusader.
Now, Sir Joscelin — he of the camp voice, the silk clothing, perfumed handkerchief, the tough-as-nails young warrior who enjoyed winding up his conservative father with his decadent ways – charges out solo, determined on revenge.
Another cry from Kurtzhau. He draws up the covers. It’s Sunday morning, we’re reading in bed, and only now am I remembering that Ronald Welch, though nominally writing Children’s Fiction — he won the Carnegie medal for this — is ruthless with his body count.
Like the Crusader army, I’m caught in a cleft stick. If I stop, Kurtzhau won’t have closure. If I go on… well… Sir Philip, the hero, has a “character shield.” Let’s just say that his friends don’t.
Of the many useful terms suggested by John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, perhaps the most useful is the idea of ‘thinning.’ Clute sees certain archetypal patterns frequently recurring in fantastic fiction and thinning’s a part of that. It is the lessening that afflicts threatened fantasylands, a type of diminishment. It’s the fading of magic, the passing of the great old order. Sometimes, eventually, the greatness of the past is restored, though perhaps in a different form.