A woman wakes him up in the middle of the night.  “Sir Percivale!  What are you doing here?”

There is no explanation as to who this woman is, or how she knows Percivale, or… anything.

“I do neither good nor great ill,” says Percivale, as though this is an answer to her question.

“Okay, listen, you know how you need a horse? If you promise to do me a favor to be named later, then I’ll lend you my horse.”

“I don’t see any possible downside to that offer!” cries Sir Percivale, and so we SMASH CUT to him riding off on this mystery woman’s mystery horse.  Which is a magic demon horse!  It travels crazy fast!  We’re talking two orders of magnitude greater than a normal horse.

This demon-horse takes Percivale careening around the countryside at ludicrous speeds, until he slams on the brakes just before the horse pitches him into a deep river, somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

“Whoa!” says Percivale.  “That river sure is deep and fastmoving!  It’s some boistous water.”  It’s such a sight, in fact, that Percivale makes the Sign of the Cross to himself, just to ward off any evil that happens to arise from the river.

And then — shocking twist! — the demon horse does not like the Sign of the Cross at all, and it bucks and throws Percivale flying.

“Augh!  Demon horse!” cries Percivale, who I guess had assumed the horse was a whimsical magical elf-horse, not a hideous demon-horse.  “Save me, Jesus!”

The demon horse is unwilling to eat Percivale while Percivale is praying, so Percivale just sits there and prays for hours and hours.  The sun comes up, eventually, and Percivale stops praying and gets up and looks around and discovers that he’s somehow been miraculously transported to a remote rocky island, closed with the sea nigh all about, that he might see no land about him.

“And then he went into a valley,” continues Malory without missing a beat.

“Wait, wait, wait.” I hold up a hand. “Hold on.  You just now said, just now, you said he was on an island surrounded by water.”

“There’s a valley on the island,” explains Malory.

It’s not worth it, I figure, so I just let it go.  “Okay, fine.  Whatever.”

And then Percivale goes down into the valley, where he watches a lion and a serpent fighting.  Naturally Percivale is rooting for the lion, so when he gets an opening he pulls out his sword and slashes at the serpent and helps the lion kill it, and then Percivale and the lion are friends.  Best friends!  There’s even an adorable lion cub, and Percivale plays with it for a while.

But eventually the lion leaves, and Percivale is all alone.  He prays for a while, which causes the lion to reappear, and then he falls asleep in lion’s arms, and has a marvelous holy dream.

NEXT: MARVELOUS HOLY DREAMTIME!