The houses
Almost everything that destroys Camelot is a family matter. Mordred is Arthur’s son by his half-sister. Gawain cannot forgive Lancelot because of his brothers. Galahad exists because the Grail’s guardians needed a knight and Lancelot was the wrong one.
These are drawn as descent rather than as a tidy family tree, because a tidy tree hides exactly the two relationships that matter, and both of them are drawn here as what they are.
Pendragon
The royal line, and the fault at the centre of it. Igraine's three daughters by her first husband give Arthur two half-sisters who will each, in different ways, be the end of him.
- Uther Pendragonking
- Igrainem. 1: Gorlois of Cornwall
- Arthurson of Uther and Igraine
- Morgausedaughter of Igraine and Gorlois
- Morgan le Faydaughter of Igraine and Gorlois
- Arthur × Morgausehalf-siblings, unaware — and the parents of Mordred
Orkney
The strongest bloc at the Round Table and the most destructive. Their loyalty to each other is unbreakable, which is precisely the problem: it survives every attempt to make peace.
- King Lot of Orkneykilled by King Pellinore
- Morgausem. Lot
- Orkney × Pellinore's linea blood feud that produces the murder of Lamorak
Benwick
Lancelot's kin, and the half of the fellowship that leaves with him. When the Round Table splits, this is the seam it splits along.
- Lancelot × Elaine of Corbenica deception arranged by the Grail's own household
The Grail kings
The line the French cycle invents to give the vessel a genealogy, running from the man who buried Christ to the knight who achieves the quest — and joining the Pendragon story exactly once, by deceiving Lancelot.
- Joseph of Arimatheawho caught the blood
- King Pellesthe Maimed King, wounded by the Dolorous Stroke
- Elaine of Corbenichis daughter
- Galahadwho achieves it, and asks to die
Igraine to Camlann in three generations
A woman is deceived by magic into conceiving a child, and the child is taken from her at a postern gate. Twenty years later he sleeps with a woman he does not know is his half-sister, and is told by a prophet that the resulting child will destroy him. He attempts to drown every infant born that month; one survives, and is fetched back to court.
On Salisbury Plain the two of them kill each other in the same movement — the father running the son through with a spear, the son thrusting himself up the shaft to reach him.
Everything in that sequence proceeds from a deception arranged in the first three chapters of the book, and the man who arranged it knew.The argument in full →