It's finally time for Arthur's coronation, held in the city of Carlion in Wales. The following smaller kings arrive: King Lot of Lothian and Orkney with five hundred knights, King Uriens of Gore (Morgana Le Fay's husband, if you remember) with four hundred knights, King Nentres of Garlot with seven hundred knights, the king of Scotland with six hundred knights, the king of Carados with five hundred knights… and finally, some dude who's merely known as "the King of One Hundred Knights". Seems a bit lame to have far fewer knights than any other king and not be known by your lands.
Arthur thinks they've come to celebrate, but instead they wanna murder him, for "being a beardless boy of low blood" not fit to be king (once again, Merlin's completely unnecessary adoption scheme bites Arthur in the ass). They lay siege to Arthur's castle. After fifteen days, Merlin arrives, and tells those kings, who apparently hadn't heard yet, that Arthur is actually King Uther's son and the true heir to the throne. Still, the kings aren't happy, and there's some serious fighting; eventually, Arthur wins the day by switching his regular sword for Excalibur, that suddenly lights up like a blow torch and blinds everyone around him, giving Arthur the upper hand.
Later, there is more warring. Arthur is joined by King Ban of Benwick and King Bors of Gaul with their knights. Other kings join the opposing forces, like the kings of Northumberland, Cornwall and Ireland (so many different kings!). It's just a lot of war at this point… I'm gonna skip quite a bit here. Kings Ban and Bors are apparently great fighters with great armies, so it made a really big difference to King Arthur that they joined him.
Eventually King Arthur's side has the upper hand, kills and drives back the enemy, and then kills some more… until Merlin suddenly shows up, dramatically, riding a big black horse, crying out that it's God's will that Arthur should spare the rest of his enemies, since they're retreating anyway. Also, Merlin says, they'll have their hands full during the years to come anyway, what with the "Saracens", trying to conquer Ireland. What is a Saracen, you may ask? Well, at the time of this book's writing, it meant Muslim. This little tidbit thus dates the Arthur saga: King Arthur became king around the same time as Muslims tried to conquer Ireland. You know, that time in history!
According to Wikipedia, the Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi does describe Ireland in his big book on geography from 1138, so I guess Muslims might have set foot in Ireland before that? Presumably, though, we would have records of some kind of large-scale Muslim invasion in medeival times. Anyway, I dub this the first ingredient in what will become a large steaming anachronism stew as we move on through the story!
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