Brastias met Bors and Ban, and turned the letters over to them, and everyone had a good laugh about Claudas's eight men and how terrible they were, and Bors and Ban agreed to come help Arthur out.
So Ulfius and Brastias returned to London. Arthur asked how it went, and they said it went well. Bors and Ban were coming! Arthur asked when, and Ulfius and Brastias said November.
I don't get the chronology here at all and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Arthur was crowned at Pentecost, which was around the first of June give or take a few weeks. Then at either the same Pentecost or the next one (or possibly the one after that) he met up with Team Lot & Mister 100, which took an unknown amount of time. Then he sent his knights to get help, and then the help was coming at the start of November (All Hallowmass is what Malory says specifically, and I assume that's either All Saint's Day or All Souls Day, so the first or second of November). But Arthur called this good news, so, I guess November is a reasonable time for Ban and Bors to show up and not many months too late.
Either way, November came, and Ban and Bors came with it. They brought a few hundred knights, and Arthur threw another big party with Sir Kay running the catering. It was such a big deal that Kay needed two knights to assist, Sir Lucan and Sir Griflet. Everyone was dressed up very nice, with Arthur, Ban, Bors, the Archbishop of Canterbury (still hanging around) and Sir Ector (who was after all Arthur's foster father) hanging out in a special gold VIP area.
This big party to celebrate Ban and Bors showing up with their hundreds of knights, it was besides an eating-and-drinking party a tournament party! Everyone did a bunch of jousts and mock combat. (JOUSTING TOURNAMENT 2!) Arthur divided everyone up into two teams, with the French and Benwick knights on one team and his own knights on the other.
First bout: Sir Kay's assistant caterer Sir Griflet versus one of the French, or possibly Benwick, knights, Sir Ladinas. It did not go well for Griflet; he went down stayed down after the first fall, which led everyone to worry he had died and that things had thus gone quite poorly for the beginning of the tournament. Sir Kay's other assistant caterer, Sir Lucan, went in and helped Griflet off the field, and gave him some orange slices and a new horse, and then the two of them started doing some two-on-two fighting with pairs of Continentals, boom boom boom, scoring many points and kicking tremendous amounts of ass. Also Sir Kay put together a six-man team that wallops all the other six-man teams! The lesson here is, don't mess with the caterers! Everyone cheered for the caterers; they were the heroes of the hour.
Sir Placidas, another knight, took Kay on one-on-one and beat him down, which caused Griflet to jump into the ring and by this point it was basically a pro wrestling match. Tensions got high, the refs stepped in and separated everyone, they all had a good meal and some drink and Arthur and Ban and Bors gave the caterers a trophy.
After the tournament adjourned, Arthur had a long sit-down with Ban and Bors and their brother Gwenbaus... did I not mention that Ban and Bors were brothers? And that they had a third brother who wasn't king of anywhere? Neither did Malory. Anyway, sit-down. Ban and Bors and Gwenbaus were there, and of course Arthur's two best knights at the time Ulfius and Brastias, and Merlin because you can't have a sit-down without Merlin.
The seven of them argued long into the night about how to deal with Team Lot & Mister 100. They went to bed and got up and argued more and then they went to church and then they argued more and then they had lunch and they argued more and finally they were all argued out and decided to go with Merlin's plan.
I assume it's Merlin's plan. All plans are Merlin's plans.
Plan follows: Merlin would take King Ban's signet ring back to Benwick with Sir Gracian and Sir Placidas. There, they would make a big deal of fortifying defenses against King Claudas. While Gracian and Placidas would settle in to repel any siege of Benwick that Claudas mounts, Merlin would return over the sea with the bulk of Bors's and Ban's men, the assembled combined army of France and Benwick. That was ten thousand men, a substantially larger number of men than has been tossed around in this story up to this point. A big pile of dudes.
Merlin was to take this sizable army over the Channel to Dover, secretly. He would then march them, secretly, across England and put them up, secretly, in Bedegraine, which is a forested valley where they would hide. Secretly.
And so the next time Arthur saw Merlin, he asked the wizard if he wasn't going to go ahead and make that trip to Benwick as they'd discussed.
"Hah!" said Merlin. "It's all set up. Already done!"
Arthur and the brothers marveled at how fast it happened.
"Hey, I'm magic," answered Merlin. "I can do that."
Arthur gathered all his men together, an incredible twenty thousand guys! He set them up running border patrols along the river Trent. At this point Arthur and his buddies were all come at me bro with regards to Team Lot & Mister 100; all the preparations they could make were made.
Team Lot & Mister 100, meanwhile, were putting all their ducks in a row as well. They recruited one more king, which brought their total ranks up to eleven kings. They were all ready to get revenge for losing the battle at Caerlaeon. 11 to 3 was pretty good odds, though not as good as 10 to 1, which was what they had before the last round of draft picks. Would they be able to pull out a win while Merlin pulled for the other side? I'm guessing not.
But they didn't know that they were doomed, they were busy high-diving one another and bragging about who was bringing the most men to the field. The finalized roster of kings looks like this:
King Brandegoris of Stranggore, who drinks too much and promises too freely. Five thousand cavalry.
King Clariance of Northumberland, who has nothing to prove to anyone. Three thousand infantry.
Mister 100, who is young and everyone likes him, he's the Great Welsh Hope. Four thousand cavalry, plus one hundred knights I expect.
King Lot, Arthur's brother-in-law, who organized the whole thing. Five thousand cavalry.
The Duke of Cambenet, not technically a king but we don't mind. Five thousand cavalry.
King Uriens of Gore, Arthur's other brother-in-law, who has plenty to prove apparently, won't be outdone: six thousand cavalry.
King Idres of Cornwall, nothing interesting about him, five thousand cavalry.
King Cradelmas of nowhere in particular, nothing interesting about him either, five thousand cavalry.
King Agwisance of Ireland, I don't know why he's even getting involved, five thousand cavalry.
King Nentres, Arthur's third brother-in-law whom you probably forgot about, five thousand cavalry.
King Carados of nowhere important, five thousand cavalry.
(Because it wouldn't be an account of battles from a premodern era if there wasn't a stultifying list of which general brought how many triremes, that's why.)
I added those all up and I got fifty thousand cavalry, three thousand infantry, which goes to show you I'm not Malory because he tells us the correct total is fifty thousand cavalry and ten thousand infantry.
Anyway, they assembled and declared themselves ready to invade Arthur's land. Where to hit him first? Someone suggested the forest of Bedegraine as a likely spot. So they rode into the forest and whoops, there was a castle full of Benwick knights! Malory is very unclear as to whether this castle was built by Merlin using magic, or by the Benwick knights using Roman-era stockade engineering, or maybe there was always a castle there and Malory just forgot about it when he called Bedegraine a forested valley last chapter.
I was, at this point, sort of expecting for Merlin to have cast the original D&D version of mass polymorph. This was a high-level magic spell that temporarily transformed an army of guys into a forest, so as to hide them and confuse your enemies. It sounds reasonably plausible: Team Lot & Mister 100 would get there, they just see a forest, they'd be confused, they'd let their guard down, and then boom, the trees would turn back into the assembled French and Benwick knights and it's an ambush! But no, instead they merely held a protracted siege.
&n
bsp; So their invasion halted as it began. The knights of Benwick and France (those two great powers of the Continent) held off Team Lot & Mister 100, until King Lot was like, screw this, and left behind a skeletal force of men to engage the knights at Bedegraine while the rest of their army rode south with Mister 100 into Arthur's territory.
In which Arthur fights an incredibly bloody war
Mister 100 rampaged southward, along with all his allies who weren't laying siege at Bedegraine. Arthur and his brain trust had scouts keeping tabs on them; these scouts sent Arthur regular reports as to Mister 100's movements. It's hard to move fifty thousand guys at any kind of speed I guess, because Arthur always had plenty of time and warning and he burned up the land that Team Lot & Mister 100 moved into. As a result, they couldn't pillage and plunder and eat, food being most of what they'd be plundering. So things continued to head off the rails for Team Lot & Mister 100.
One night after around a week of this, Mister 100 had a dream. The dream ran like this: there's a nation full of shining happy people and towns and flowers. Then a tornado comes and chews everything up and everyone is sad. Then things get worse because a tidal wave washes over the nation and everything is washed away. So, in conclusion, everyone in the whole nation is sad and unhappy and