The orphan boy "Wart," who will become King Arthur grows up in the shadow of Sir Ector's legitimate son and heir, the easily-bored and prematurely pompous, but essentially good-hearted Kay. The boys are "educated" in the ways of rural gentry: "Mondays and Fridays, tilting and horsemanship; Tuesdays, hawking; Wednesdays, fencing; Thursdays, archery; Saturdays, the theory of chivalry, with the proper measures to be blown on all occasions, terminology of the chase and hunting etiquette." Sir Ector is concerned that the boys will soon need a more formal tutor.

After a night on his own in the forest (seeking to recover the goshawk Cully lost by Kay's carelessness) Wart encounters his first questing knight, Sir Pellinore, and then finds his own peculiar tutor -- the magician Merlyn, who stares at the boy "with a kind of unwinking and benevolent curiosity." Merlyn is living backwards in time and his rustic home includes everything from taxidermied and live animals to weapons that "would not be invented for half a thousand years" to a set of the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. An owl, Archimedes by name, perches in Merlyn's conical hat, dropping its feces onto the magician's zodiac-embroidered robe.

[In Wart's easy acceptance of Merlyn's disheveled eccentricity, one sees perhaps a self-portrait of the White of "The Goshawk," whose Medieval hawking piqued the curiosity of local boys].

Merlyn gives Wart breakfast -- among his tableware is a walking mustard pot that, the magician complains, "is inclined to give itself airs" -- and the dazzled boy asks: "Would you mind if I asked you a question?" To which Merlyn, foreshadowing the teacher/student relationship to come, replies: "It is what I am for."








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