Pendragon's Heir (30 page)

Yet the buffet he received plucked him from the saddle and flung him to the ground with a wrenching force he had not thought possible. He lay stunned and sick, with hot blood running from his nose, while the stranger’s hoofbeats dwindled into distance.

Perceval clawed himself off the ground, surprised to discover that he was still whole. He staggered to his feet and called Rufus. Night was upon them now, and there was no chance of following the stranger knight to demand another match. So Perceval limped to the ruined manor, drank from its well and found a sheltered corner in which to spend the night.

The morning dawned bright and balmy, fresh with the scent of coming spring. Perceval woke, breathed it in, and felt suddenly young again, as young as he had felt two years ago when he left his mother’s house. He rolled to his knees, throwing off the cloak he used as a blanket, caught his breath and laughed a little at the bruises that ached when he moved, and found a strip of dried meat in his saddlebag to chew on.

Where had the stranger knight gone? Perceval buckled saddle, bridle, and bags onto Rufus and went back to the path. The knight’s hoofprints were clearly visible here, and he followed the trail all day, finally losing it in the tumbled stones by a river. That was a disappointment; but he thought the last of the trail pointed upstream, and he went up the riverside looking for a place to cross.

That night he came to a little cave in the side of the river-valley, where a spark of light suggested some inhabitant. He found there an anchoress who offered him a meal and a place to rest for the night. The food was better than anything he had eaten for days and the old lady was good company. At length he told her everything that had happened on the Quest, how long he had wandered without finding anything, and how he had finished by being unhorsed by a stranger. Then he saw that she was laughing, and his tale died away.

“Oh, my poor boy,” she said, “that was Sir Galahad. Did he have no shield of his own at the Feast of Pentecost? Yet now he rides with the shield of Joseph of Arimathea. He crossed the river at noon.”

“Oh,” said Perceval.

“Do not seek your chance to even the score,” said the old lady. “It was your injured pride that sent you after him to me. But your Quest is not to seek your own glory.”

“Then I will follow him still,” said Perceval, feeling himself flush red, “and ask for his fellowship upon this Quest.”

The anchoress said: “Follow as you will, for we must all follow someone. But take care, for temptations and evil enchantments await you, Sir Perceval. Only be humble, and pure of heart, and who shall say? You may yet come to the Grail Castle and find your heart’s desire.”

Perceval sighed and nodded, and choked his impatience down again. But in the early foggy morning as he departed, he felt the first glimmerings of a hope that had been missing the other day as he sweated above the dragon’s valley building a cairn for Sir Lamorak. It had maddened him to miss not only the Grail, but also the dragon. Yet he did not really wish to lie in Sir Lamorak’s place beneath the stone cairn, and the knowledge that there was a man in the world who could best him was oddly cheering. There was a just order of things into which he could fit; there were men above him, and men below. He was not alone, and if he was not the first to find the Grail, then perhaps by almighty grace he would be fifth, or tenth, or last—and it did not matter which.

So cheered and uplifted, Perceval rode on in a haze of contemplation through which ran like a scarlet thread the hope of his lady and the Grail. But then he rounded a bend in the road and almost walked his horse into the midst of a troupe of footmen who had formed a solid barrier across the road, and sat eating and drinking there as if they owned it.

“Oi! Sir knight!” shouted one. “What’s your name and errand?”

Perceval, in his surprise, did not answer. The man wore a sign he recognised, the badge of the argent dragon. But how could these be Sir Breunis’s men?

The mass of men before him moved like restless sea-water, hands clenched on bills and bows, bowls set aside, chinking spoils dropped back into bags and pouches. Perceval, suddenly alive to his danger, reined Rufus back a pace or two.

“Whom do you serve?” he challenged them.

“Saunce-Pité!” yelled one man. But their captain raised his hand.

“We ask the questions here,” he said. “What’s your name and errand?”

Perceval stripped sword from sheath. “If you do not know my bearings,” he told them, “then all you need know of me and my errand is that I serve the High King Arthur, and where I find his enemies unlawfully in his land, there do I slay them.”

He was answered with a shout and an onrush, and spurred Rufus upon them, striking left and right, each stroke biting home and biting deep. They pressed close against him, but fell like mown grass beneath his scything blade—and despite the bloody swath he carved, he fought smiling. There were little farms and villages that would dream on, undisturbed, beneath the winter moon because he struck true today. Thinking this, he had laid six men in the dust already when they slew his horse beneath him.

He felt Rufus shudder as the cold steel went in. The noble beast, his since the quest of the Queen’s cup, went down with a scream. But the churl who had stabbed him fell also, head split by lashing hooves.

Perceval flung himself away from the wreck—fell, saw the rabble come running, and surged to his feet, gripping his sword. He had no time to lament the horse. In a moment he was surrounded, with nothing but his armour to protect his back, and he knew it was like to go hard with him now that he had lost his mount. But the son of Gawain was young, and strong, with the blood of mighty Orkney in his veins, tempered by the subtle and strange blood of Avalon. Taller than his father’s brothers, more terrible in battle was he, and though now a score of men came against him and pressed him on every side, still he fought, until the blood ran down his sword and splashed his arm to the elbow.

For all that, he was wounded and flagging when help came like iron-hooved thunder. A knight, all in white and red, sliced through the mob, scattering them right and left; then cut back again, his sword hissing in the teeth of the wind, until those he left alive broke and ran for the trees. Perceval saw his rescuer’s shield as the knight checked and turned and wheeled back to chase the survivors, and he knew it was Sir Galahad. Perceval followed at a stumbling run, calling Galahad’s name, but the Knight of the Red Cross vanished into the forest driving the rabble before him, and Perceval felt the ground heave and buck beneath him. He fell dizzily to his knees.

For a few minutes he rested there, gasping through clouds of pain, until his head cleared a little and he could climb back to his feet and cast up accounts. The sums came out discouragingly. He had his life, but little more.

He salvaged food and water from Rufus’s saddlebags, rested a while, bound up his wounds, and then walked away. Later, there would be wild beasts, wolves or lions, among the dead, and in the aftermath of battle, he was too feeble to fend them off.

At first, Perceval hoped to find a castle where he could beg a night’s lodging for charity’s sake, and perhaps bargain for a horse. But this was a deserted place, and the path soon gave out among stones and scrub. Night came dark and cloudy, howling with wind. Perceval wrapped himself in his cloak, wedged himself into the roots of a great oak, and swallowed cold food and water.

He intended to watch. The pain of his wounds, the cold and the rain, and the fear of wild things, whether beasts or men, should have kept him waking.

But suddenly, a crack of thunder made him start, and he opened his eyes on blackest night. A moment later there was a flash of lightning and he saw quite close to him a lady of towering height, muffled in dark robes, with eyes that glinted in the fitful moonlight. She led a black horse, richly furnished. The blaze of lightning stamped its image across his mind. Sir Perceval had seen horses worth a king’s ransom, great war-horses of the dying Roman breed, eager for battle, swifter than wind. But he knew that he had never seen one to match this horse.

“Sir Perceval,” the lady said to him, her voice lashing through the storm, “why do you lie here?”

He rose stiffly to his feet, trembling with cold as the wind caught him. “Be well, damsel. If I am in your way, I am sorry, but my horse is dead and I cannot travel fast.”

“You are wounded,” she said.

He lifted a palm in a gesture of resignation. “That also.”

“Then I take pity on you,” said the lady. “Only promise to do what I shall ask of you, and I will give you this horse. He will carry you to the ends of the earth.”

“Damsel, if it is a thing I may do with honour, you have only to ask and it is yours.”

Her voice in the darkness was oddly mocking. “Only care for him, and return him to me in my home.”

He would have given far more for the chance to sit such a beast, if only for an hour. “Gladly. Where is that?”

“He knows,” she said, rubbing the proud black arch of the neck. “He will bring you to me. There! He is yours.”

“My thanks,” Perceval said, and took the reins from her. She remained with a hand on its nose as he mounted with difficulty—it was a tall beast, and his wounds caught him as he moved. The horse stood still as graven stone until the lady took her hand from its head, and Perceval touched his spurs lightly to its sides. With a deafening scream, it reared into the air, so that Perceval loosed his feet in the stirrups to jump. But it came back to the earth safely, shied at a shadow, neighed again, and leaped forward.

Perceval had never thought such speed possible. He crouched low on the horse’s back to avoid being swept off, moulding his hands to its withers and rising in the stirrups a little to disconnect from its rippling back. The countryside blurred away.

Perceval remembered the reins and pulled them, gently at first, to slow or turn aside. But the horse fought his hand with an iron mouth, neighed and gathered speed—how was it possible?—running smooth and straight as an arrow. Then suddenly they left the trees behind and flew across a stony waste, yet faster and faster; the wind plastered Peceval’s hair to his skull and shrieked in his ears, and he had to turn his head to open his eyes; and then he saw all things fall away behind him, and only the moon above kept pace.

The minutes went by as they rushed on, and became hours, and Perceval, exulting at first in that marvellous, sure-footed speed, perceived that the horse would never tire but went on unceasingly; it was certain this was not a horse of flesh and blood. And now he had travelled further in a handful of hours than in all the last week.

And Perceval began to fear, for if the beast would not tire, and if he could neither check it nor turn it aside, then beast or fiend he was at its mercy. So he put up his hand to shelter his eyes from the blast, and looked ahead. There was a river before them, deep and dark, running with a mighty current that churned and spun. The horse never paused or slowed, but gathered itself to leap into the torrent. Perceval yelled, kicked his feet out of the stirrups, and made the sign of the cross. With a horrible scream the horse checked and reared and Perceval had a heart’s beat of safety. He took it, flinging himself from the saddle and crashing down among the stones at the water’s edge. Then the horse plunged on, and Perceval lifted up his dazed head to see it borne away by the current; and was it only a trick of his bleared eyes, or did the water burn behind as it went?

“Surely the horse and the lady were both fiends, and would have carried me to Hell,” Perceval said to the cold night air, and trembled to think how close he had come to death. The rest of the night he spent wakeful by the water’s edge, sometimes praying, sometimes fixing his eyes on the imperceptibly lightening East. Yet in the aftermath of terror he felt more encouraged than ever. Surely, to be attacked in such a manner proved that he must be coming closer to the object of his Quest.

Morning came at last, and just as the sun’s rim touched and gilded the barren horizon, Perceval saw the lion.

Its hide was dusky in the half-light as it came prowling down to the water’s edge to drink. Perceval held his breath, watching its measured movements and the ripple of the cold dawn wind in its mane. Only when the lion suddenly raised its dripping muzzle did he see the intruder. It was a snake, coming down from the rocks, a gigantic beast; he doubted he could fit both arms around it. Despite its size, it moved soundlessly but for the rasp of its skin over the ground, and its beady eyes fixed on the lion.

The lion saw it, moved in and crouched down, growling in its throat and lashing its tail. The snake in answer reared up a diamond-shaped head, swaying warily from side to side. Then the lion sprang, all yawning red mouth and reaching claws. But quick as thinking, the snake threw a coil of its body around the lion, and they rolled together among the stones. The lion snarled and clawed, trying to get its teeth in its enemy’s neck; the snake moved easily, throwing another coil around the tawny body. Paws bound, the lion followed the serpent’s swaying head, snapping uselessly and growling with pain and anger. Perceval knew it would die quickly without help.

His whole body protested as he scrambled stiffly to his feet and made a fumbled cut at the snake’s tail. That got its attention. It flicked around to face him, hissing and spitting venom that smoked on his shield. All Perceval’s weariness fell from him, and he rushed forward with a good will. One furious blow, and the serpent fell to the ground lashing wildly, half beheaded; another, and the head left the body altogether.

The fire of battle left Perceval bent and exhausted, with pain sluicing through his body. He collapsed onto a nearby stone. The lion clawed its way out of the writhing coils and came to Perceval to rub against his hand, breathing out a deep and bone-shaking rumble that he thought might be a purr. Perceval slid off his gauntlet and buried his hand in its mane.

“We are the same, you and I,” he told it. “For by the grace of God we are both saved from the serpent’s belly.”

The lion rumbled a little more and then bounded away on heavy paws. It returned in another moment with a stone-grey rabbit dangling from its mouth, laid the animal at Perceval’s feet and a few minutes later, brought another. Perceval built a fire, cleaned the rabbits, and within an hour was eating the best meal of his life. The creatures were thin and wiry, but Perceval could not imagine anything tasting better. He gulped down the hot meat, licked his fingers, and left the fire to burn out among the stones. Then, slowly, with the lion following at his heels, he set off downstream. He had no idea where he was or how far he had come, but that, too, was a hopeful sign. Perhaps, here in the waste, at the end of all his means, he would find the Grail Castle.