Pendragon's Heir (10 page)

While he sat musing, four knights came riding through the frosty air with a comfortable jingling of harness and with the breath steaming from their mouths as they talked and laughed. Sir Gawain was there with his cousin Sir Ywain, and Sir Kay, and King Arthur himself.

“Do you see that knight, sitting so listlessly staring at the snow?” said the King. “Do any of you know him?”

“His mount is familiar,” said Sir Gawain, and chuckled. “He must be asleep, or witless, or deeply in love. He has not noticed us.”

“Kay! Go and ask who he is,” the King said.

“I’ll stir him up, sire,” said Sir Kay, and he came jogging up to Perceval and cried, “Sir! Ho, sir! Yonder is the Pendragon of Britain, and he wishes to know your name.”

Perceval was aware of him, as if in a dream, and heard his voice, but not the words or the sense, and he did not lift his head or show any sign that he had understood. Sir Kay looked back to the King. “Hoy!” he suddenly shouted at Perceval.

Perceval, his eyes caught in the red and white and his mind in memory, still did not move, though he began to swim slowly to the surface of thought.

Kay waited a moment longer, and then lost his temper. “Answer me when I speak to you!” he said, and gave Perceval a clout on the head with his iron gauntlet.

Perceval came to himself then, boiling angry, reacting almost before he had a chance to think: swept up his spear-butt and with a satisfying
crack
returned the blow and laid Sir Kay senseless on the ground.

Then he looked up and saw the other three knights sitting there, watching. Laying his spear in rest he shouted, “Since it seems that nowadays a man must fight for a little peace and quiet, come on, all of you at once, if you wish!”

Gawain laughed, for he was fond of a bold speaker. “Sire,” he said to the King, “surely that is the boy you sent on the adventure of the Queen’s cup a while ago.”

“Then go and give him my greetings,” said King Arthur, “and perhaps now that he has beaten Sir Kay, he will let us pass in peace.”

So Sir Gawain rode up to Perceval, his spear upright for peace, and said, “Sir knight, over there is the High King of Britain, who wishes to speak with you. As for this knight, this is Sir Kay, and he is not always as mannerly as he should be.”

“I am glad to hear it is he,” said Perceval, unhelming. “I warned him I would repay him the blow he gave to the maiden at Camelot.”

“You charge a high interest,” said Gawain, chuckling. He searched Perceval’s face. “Your shield is blank, I see. What’s your name and lineage, sir?”

“My name is Perceval, as I told you before,” he said. “My mother’s name was Ragnell and I do not know my father.”

A look of delight danced in Gawain’s eyes, and then he laughed, a long peal of pure joy, and turned back to King Arthur and Sir Ywain. “But I do, I think.”

“Tell me!” Perceval urged, trotting his horse after. “Who was he?”

“My lord king,” cried Gawain in the same delighted roar, “Here is my son, Sir Perceval.”

8

The Holy Grail!—

…

What is it?

The phantom of a cup that comes and goes?

Tennyson

W
HEN THE ECHOES OF
P
ERCEVAL
’
S GOING
faded away, Blanche went back into the great hall of Carbonek and looked at the feast on the high table. More for something to do than because she felt particularly concerned about it, she divided the food into two parts and put half of it out in the passageway near the entrance, where it would be preserved by the autumn cold. Then she took her seat at the high table, but could not bring herself to eat. She was not hungry, and she did not want to eat in the cold and cavernous hall. She had seen it filled with light and music. She had sat at table with a companion more substantial than any of the whispering presences she half sensed in the shadows. Suddenly, and for the first time since she had come to Carbonek, she felt lonely.

She carried the rest of the food into her own little room, one of the few intact chambers in the castle. The room was dry and could be kept clean, but it was never completely warm or light even with the fire burning and her candle lit. Naciens had given her few necessities and no comforts: plain food, a change of clothes, sleeping-furs, and a book. Then he had gone off with his mule on some urgent errand, and Nerys had returned to the house in Gloucestershire to meet Sir Ector and arrange their departure, and Blanche was left alone.

She had hardly noticed the solitude. She had been busy keeping house, or making camp, or whatever her life in this little room could be called. She had cooking, cleaning, and washing to do, and reading for when the time dragged. Above anything else, she had a firm and anchoring certainty that she was safe.

It had come to her on the night they had been hunted by Morgan, when Nerys sang on the hillside above Carbonek. It could not, of course, be compared to what she had felt a month or two back in her guardian’s house, before she learned of Logres or Guinevere or the Queen of Gore, before she had known any cause of dread. Now she had escaped dogs and the sword, she might with justice have feared a whole host of shapeless threats, and yet the battlements of Carbonek surrounded her like the walls of a warm house in a winter storm. Perhaps that was what fended off the loneliness.

She was reading by the fire in her room one dark afternoon a week after she and Perceval had seen the Holy Grail when she heard the sound of hooves in the hall. Was it Naciens, wandering back from another pilgrimage, or some other stranger? Blanche wrapped herself in a cloak, went very softly down echoing black corridors to the hall, and peeked through the doorway. There was Naciens, sure enough. As he pushed back his hood, drops of water in his long white beard twinkled as though it really was made of snow. Beside him, speaking quietly, there was a smaller, slighter figure holding a bay horse.

“Nerys!” Blanche called, and ran into the hall.

Nerys left off speaking to Naciens and turned with a smile to greet her.

“Are we leaving?” Blanche asked, as soon as courtesy allowed.

To her surprise, Nerys hesitated. She glanced at Naciens and said, “You understand that I can make no decisions on my own.”

He bowed his head. Blanche looked from one to the other with curiosity.

“I thought you had come to take me to Camelot.”

“I had,” she said with a reassuring smile, and changed the subject.

They dined well from fresh store Naciens had brought in his saddlebags—a pair of moorhens and new brown flour which Blanche baked into cakes on the hearthstones in her room.

Nerys watched her with silent surprise. Blanche, glancing up, saw the look on her face and thought it better than any praise.

“Naciens showed me how to do this,” she said.

“A month ago you couldn’t even build a fire,” Nerys said. “Now, you’re cooking on one.”

Blanche laughed. “It was rather dreary at first,” she said. “But I learned to manage!”

She meant to ask what Nerys had been speaking to Naciens about, but was forestalled again. Dropping her voice almost to a whisper, Nerys said:

“Have you seen
it?
”

A week ago, Blanche might have been tempted to respond, “Seen what?” simply to assert herself as a free-thinker slow to believe extraordinary claims.

But she
had
seen it.

“Yes.”

Nerys laughed, a little self-consciously, and tapped Blanche’s cheek with her forefinger. “Yet you look no different.”

“I am no different,” the free-thinker wanted to say. Instead Blanche smiled and shook her head and gave the fowls another turn. Even if she had wanted to, she could not have put her experience into words, not yet.

Nerys’s voice held years of longing. “Think of it, Blanche. The Holy Grail, here for the finding. Here for Logres. Naciens says the time is near.”

“Yes.”

“With the Grail,”—she was whispering now—“with the Grail, perhaps it can be done. A kingdom that shall never be destroyed…”

“Why, what are you talking about?”

Nerys quoted: “
Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra
.”

“But how?”

“How?” Nerys looked at her. “Didn’t you feel it?”

“How can I know what I felt?”

“That I cannot tell you.”

“But what did you expect?”

Nerys said: “They say that those who see the Grail are changed in will, so that they will in communion with the Divine will. Do you see now what it might mean for the Grail to come to Logres?”

Blanche stood up slowly from the fire, wiping her hands against the woollen skirt of her riding-habit. “No,” she said at last. “I felt nothing of that kind.”

Some of the light faded out of Nerys’s eyes. Blanche, seeing it die, felt a twinge of conscience. What had Nerys suffered in the last eighteen years of exile? She had given up home and friends and loyalties, fled across the worlds, served as guard and governess. …And now the time came to return home to all those things she loved, and Blanche, the only reason for her exile, neither understood nor cared for them. No wonder that when Nerys fell prey to melancholy, the very stars seemed to weep.

Blanche spoke bitterly. “It should have been you, not me.”

At that moment Naciens, having seen to the comfort of their beasts, came back into the room. Supper, although more satisfying than anything Blanche had eaten since the night of the Grail, could not overcome the sour taste left in her mouth from her conversation with Nerys. Yet what else could she have said? She had felt none of what Nerys described. And from the way Perceval had left Carbonek, it seemed plain that neither had he.

After supper, Naciens and Nerys left; no doubt, Blanche thought, to finish the conversation she had interrupted earlier. She was left to clean away the dinner things and brood. Nerys had returned to Britain. What would happen now? Would there be a chance to go back to the house in Gloucestershire, or was she trapped in Logres forever?

Blanche put another log on the fire and huddled into her furs, planning the best way to tackle Nerys. But when the elfin woman returned to the little warm room, her first words swept away every difficulty.

“We are going back to Gloucestershire in the morning,” Nerys said.

Blanche blinked at her, then lit up in a smile. “You really mean it, Nerys?”

“Yes, of course.” Nerys laughed.

A reprieve. Another chance. “Oh, thank you!”

“Only briefly, mind you. The rift between the worlds is mended, but Logres is still the best place for you now. But you certainly cannot stay here in Carbonek—not like this.” And she looked around the room with a shiver.

Blanche wondered what had happened to revive her spirits. As Nerys paced the room rubbing her hands and stamping her feet to work up some warmth, she seemed to shine like a lamp with happiness. But if there was a cause, she did not explain it, and at last she picked up the book Blanche had been reading that afternoon. “What’s this?”

Blanche felt a little embarrassed to reply. After all, she was only reading it because Naciens had left her with nothing else. “The
City of God
.”

“Oh, yes. I read it eighty years ago. What do you think?”

“It’s a good late example of Ciceronian rhetoric.”

Nerys paused a moment, and again the light dimmed. “Yes, I suppose it is,” she said, and after that, neither of them spoke until bedtime.

They left Carbonek early the next morning. Naciens rode his mule, and Blanchefleur perched on Florence’s hindquarters behind Nerys. The snow which had fallen on the night Perceval came had long since melted and the starkness of the dead trees and shattered stones in the valley was unrelieved by snow or bud. Blanche, looking at the barren rocks from the castle gates, had felt that it was the most horrible place she had ever seen. But now she was struck not so much by the desolation as by the fact that the Grail dwelt here: so much light and richness in the unrelieved desert.

The sublime light and music came into her mind again. She understood, she thought, why Naciens should choose to live in this wilderness with the lost people of Carbonek—a people so very lost that they, and the relic they guarded, could not even be seen by visitors to the castle without a special grace. But then, she wondered, why the desolation, if the Grail was as marvellous as they said?

Naciens led them out of the trees, up a narrow path climbing the steep wall of the valley. In a little over an hour they dismounted in the place where they had first met him under the overhanging rock.

Whether it had been there all along, or whether the side of the hill had opened since last time, Blanche could not tell. But now there was a narrow cleft leading into darkness among the rocks.

Naciens said, “We are out of the Waste of Carbonek now. But I think, if you come this way again, you will find us.”

Nerys held out her hand to Naciens. “Thanks, friend,” she said. Then, to Blanche’s discomfiture, she added, “Bless us before we go.”

When this had been done, Nerys walked ahead of Blanche and Florence into the cleft in the hill. It became darker and darker as they went, until at last the blue thread of sky above vanished completely. The next moment they had all stepped out of the wardrobe in the hall of the house in Gloucestershire.

Nerys took Florence’s reins and led her to the back door, now mended and replaced. When she opened it, Blanche saw that it was late evening, and the moon was shining.

She followed Nerys out onto the lawn. Here the air was mild, almost warm. The scent of roses and good rich earth rose around her. Somewhere in the orchard, a nightingale was singing.

Home
, she thought, and drank in the air. But what brought them here? What had changed Nerys’s mind?

Nerys was speaking to her, almost in a whisper. “Blanche, find Sir Ector and tell him we’ve returned. Don’t let the servants see you.”

Blanche turned back to the house. The curtains in Sir Ector’s study were drawn, but warm yellow gaslight streamed through the crack down the centre. Moving slowly, soaking in the mild air and delicious scents of autumn, she went to the French windows of the study and scratched on the door.