A War That Began With a Snake

Malory's account of how the fighting at Camlann actually begins is one of the more quietly devastating details in the whole Arthurian legend. Arthur and Mordred have agreed to meet under truce to negotiate rather than fight, and Arthur, wary after a warning dream, orders his men that if any sword is drawn on either side, they are to attack at once, an instruction Mordred's side receives in mirror as well. During the parley an adder emerges from a bush and bites a knight on the foot; he draws his sword purely to kill the snake, with no thought of the truce at all, and the flash of steel catching the light is instantly read by both watching armies as the signal for treachery, and the battle neither leader wanted begins in earnest within moments. By the time the fighting ends, Malory tells us, all but four men on both sides lie dead on the field, among them nearly the entire remaining fellowship of the Round Table, a catastrophe brought about not by any grand betrayal in the moment itself but by an animal, a reflex, and two armies primed by suspicion to see attack in an innocent gesture. The scene gives the legend's climactic battle a bitterness no deliberate villainy could match: the kingdom does not fall to a plan, but to an accident neither side could have stopped once the truce's own precaution against treachery became the very thing that triggered it.