The dream of Fortune's wheel

On the night before the last battle Arthur has two dreams, and Malory gives them both.

In the first he is sitting on a scaffold in a chair fastened to a wheel, in the richest cloth of gold that could be made, and beneath him is deep black water full of serpents and worms and wild beasts. And the wheel turns, and he falls among them, and every beast takes him by a limb.

In the second, Gawain comes to him with a company of fair ladies, and tells him that if he fights Mordred tomorrow he will be killed and most of his people with him. The ladies, Gawain says, are women he fought for in righteous quarrels, and God has given them leave to bring him to warn the king. Take a treaty, he says. Offer anything. Delay a month, and Lancelot will come with his knights, and then you will win.

Arthur wakes and takes the advice. He sends bishops to negotiate, and Mordred agrees to terms — lands in Cornwall and Kent now, the whole realm after Arthur's death. The treaty is made, and both sides are drawn up in the field to conclude it, and both kings have given exactly the same order to their armies: if you see any sword drawn, come on fiercely and slay that traitor, for I in no wise trust him.

The image of the wheel is not Malory's; it is the heart of the alliterative Morte Arthure, where Arthur sees Fortune raise him to the summit of the world and then turn, and the poem's whole argument is that this is what happens to men who rise. It is the chronicle tradition's theory of the fall — not sin, not adultery, simply altitude.

Malory keeps the dream and puts it beside a warning that could have worked. Both are true at once, which is what makes his ending so much harder than either source.