THE ROYAL HOUSE OF FRANCE - outriders poetry project

103
© 2009 Max Wickert
Our author 23 now turns to Bevis and Pulican and Drusiana. After they had left the road and fled to
the forest, it proved very troubling for Drusiana to ride, since the time was near when she would
give birth, for she had been with child for eight months and fifteen days when they left Montefeltro.
Also, as they went through the forest, they had not eaten for three days. Let all think now what poor
Drusiana, being pregnant, could do!
On the third day, Pulican killed a young deer, but they had no means of cooking it, for they had no
fire. By chance they came upon a little brook which contained many pebbles, and Bevis said to
Pulican: “Take up one of those black stones you see” (for these were flint stones). They went a little
further and came amid a great quantity of holm oaks, and one of these oaks was very thick, which
the wind had some time before broken and felled, and it was half rotten. Bevis dismounted and
disarmed. He drew his sword and with so belabored that black stone and rotten wood, that the
wood at last took flame and they made a great fire. Pulican skinned the deer and they roasted some
of its flesh and ate of it. They tied the rest to their saddle-bows and carried it with them, and they
took a large piece of the holm oak and carried it along also.
They traveled through that forest for fifteen days, never finding a human dwelling and eating the
venison and acorns and nuts and wild berries. Having at last found a spring of most clear and sweet
water, despairing of finding inhabited dwellings, they stopped to rest in that spot, for it was a
pleasant spot. They erected a pretty cottage for themselves and their horses, made of wood and
thatch, and they gathered up straw that was drying in the fields both for their horses and to sleep on.
There Drusiana felt the pangs of labor approaching, and for that reason more than any other they
there made their dwelling.
23 In typical late-medieval manner, Andrea occasionally introduces an unnamed “authority” whose account he is
supposedly following. In most Carolingian romances, this “author” is Bishop Turpin. (But see notes pp. [?] and
?].)