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continental troubles with the Vandals, Huns, Goths, and Visigoths. And soon did Rome itself fall to the barbarians. And when there was no war available on his own ground, Uther went across the British Channel and assaulted the Normans, the Burgundians, the Flemings, and those various savage tribes which lived along the Rhine. He killed many men and took many maidenheads wherever he went and was considered the greatest king of his time.
    Yet as the years went by he fell into a melancholy owing to his realization that the time of his reign was inevitably growing shorter, for no man could escape the tyranny of the tides, the phases of the moon, and the relentless seasons. And he came to find a sameness in his battles, for there was a limit to the ways in which he could ride his charger and swing his sword, and he had plunged so many spears into so many bodies and swiped off so many heads, that these experiences, once so gratifying, had become tedious. And so with females, of whom the wise man saith, Turn them upside down, they do look much the same, and the vile crime of sodomy was never to his taste, therefore when a pander once brought him a perfumed dancer from Egypt, and he removed its veils and found it a boy, he sent it away for emasculation and put the procurer to death.
    And whenever Uther Pendragon was away from Britain, a conspiracy was formed by his rivals, who were usually related to him by blood (some being his own bastards), to seize power in that land, and because the king would take along with him the greater part of the British fighting men, the traitors must needs ally themselves with the Anglo-Saxon Germans, and soon this alien and felonious people would establish themselves in the southeastern portions of his country, and Uther was constrained to fight for re-entry.
    Now having become queen, the fair Ygraine had no further aspirations except to Heaven, and she would closet herself with the archbishop of Canterbury to pursue religious matters such as the social hierarchy of the celestial kingdom and where she should be seated at God’s table on feast days, whether nearer to or farther from Him than the queen of Ireland, whom she considered her principal competitor. But when the old prelate in affixing around her swanlike neck a devotional medal did lower his yellowed claws within her bodice to tweak her proud breasts, the fair Ygraine dismissed him from her presence and subsequently studied in succession many another faith, the doctrines of Zoroaster from a Persian merchant of carpets, Judaism from an armorer (for the Jews had made that profession their own), and the worship of Druids, which is to say, for trees; and many more, as well; but finding them all wanting in some wise, she did settle on the religion of gluttony, in which one eats God in every bite, and she ate so much that her legs could not support her body, and she was carried about the palace on a litter borne by eight large footmen.
    So passed fifteen years from the time of Arthur’s birth, which neither the king nor the queen could remember with clarity, as they could scarcely remember the time when either had last seen the other, for when Uther Pendragon was in Britain he stayed mostly in the castle at Winchester, where he kept his dogs and horses in the great hall and himself bedded down on a pallet near them, for he had come to prefer the association with dumb beasts to that of men, while the stout Ygraine remained at London, now seldom leaving her chamber, where on a great bed she lay like unto a mounded white pudding with her eyes small as two currants.
    Now by this time few but old Ulfin, who was now ninety-six years of age, dared to approach King Uther, for the king was thought to have gone off in his reason, forsaking his kingly duties to share mutton bones with his dogs and doing himself the mucking out of the stable he had made of the hall, though not often enough, for piles of steaming dung were everywhere and reeking pools where his