Pendragon's Heir (34 page)

“Yet I could have achieved it indeed,” Lancelot said, “and mine is the greatest punishment that a man might suffer. I have followed too much the devices and desires of my own heart. And I shut myself out by my fault, by my own grievous fault.”

Blanchefleur sighed, and scratched for words. “Have you no part at all in heavenly mercies?”

The silence stretched out. “I may hope,” said Lancelot. But there was nothing hopeful in his voice.

After that, there was no more to say. They went back to the courtyard, where Gawain took his leave of her with the familiar fatherly gleam, while Lancelot bowed to her with the faultless courtesy that marked his every action. With her alone he seemed stiff and uneasy.

The knights dwindled to a tiny fleck on the road. Blanchefleur went back into the hall. With Gawain gone, the whole place seemed a little bigger, a little shabbier, a little emptier. She turned and went up the stair to the Grail Chapel, remembering some small tasks, some dusting and tidying, that had fallen due. But when she went into the blazing light of the lantern tower of Carbonek, she sat awhile on the floor, soaking up the light and the silence.

For the first time, she looked beyond the Grail Quest. Would the High King send for her? She thought again of her conversation with Gawain. At least he had believed her the true heir of Logres, she thought with a rush of gratitude, remembering the venom of Elaine. But if the opposite was proven? Would she meet with the same affection then?

What would it take to unleash the anger of Gawain?

Blanchefleur remembered the words she had said to Lancelot not half an hour ago—“Have you no part in heavenly mercies?”—and bit her lip and rose from the floor. There was work to do, she thought.

Dizziness hit her.

Now that it had come, she was surprised how little fear she felt. She clung to Carbonek just long enough to go to her knees. It was a bright, bright day; outside the chapel’s stained-glass windows, sunlight reached in to mingle with Grail-light. If she failed this time, the dark would come; perhaps this was her last chance to see the light. She looked on the Cup for three heartbeats, just to fix it in her mind, and then she let go and slipped away.

B
LANCHEFLEUR OPENED HER EYES ON GREEN
beech-leaves and piecemeal glimpses of the golden sky of Sarras. She picked herself up out of the grass and brushed off her dress, searching through the leaves for a landmark she recognised. Then high above and far off, through weaving branches, she saw the cathedral and its spire. It would be a long walk up the mountain.

Meanwhile, she stood beneath a beech tree in a sloping corner of Sarras. A stream full of bright watercress chattered through deep banks to her left. Gigantic trees surrounded her, their bark flecked with tiny shelf-fungi, and uphill a short way she glimpsed a moss-covered wall. She swished through white and green snowflake-flowers and followed the wall to an arched gate of wrought-iron. Laying her hand on the latch, she glanced back into the shadowed loveliness of the beech forest and saw a gleam of white.

After the first jolt of shock, she dropped her hand from the latch and waited calmly for the stranger to move a little closer through the trees, revealing a breadth and height distinctively masculine. Not Morgan, then. She took a breath and unclenched her jaw. Then he stood before her, and Blanchefleur looked up into the boyish young face of a knight, black-haired, earnest-eyed, bearing upon his white surcoat the device of a red cross.

She had never seen him before in her life, but she knew at once, not only that he was no threat to her, but also that in the long-ago spark of goodwill which had first imaged their lives, they had been friends as strong as brother and sister. It was fitting, now, to slip into that predestined love. She put out her hand with a smile and said, “Good morning.”

“
Is
it morning?” he asked, and took her hand and kissed it with an unselfconscious grace that reminded her of Lancelot.

“Doesn’t it smell like it?” She lifted the latch and they went through the gate into the garden beyond. “I’m Blanchefleur,” she prompted. “The Grail Maiden of Carbonek.”

Here there were no trees to block the view. Sarras rose terraced and riotous above them, more sublime in glory than even she could remember. At last the knight tore his slackjawed gaze away from the cathedral at the mountain’s dizzying peak and said to Blanchefleur: “I am Galahad, the Knight of the Grail.”

“I
knew
it!”

He laughed. “Tell me the meaning of this place.”

She remembered the words of the High King. “This is Sarras. The city on the hill. The pattern for Logres.”

Delight shone from his face. “The City! Oh, to leave Logres and walk these streets forever!”

“But Logres needs Sarras too. Doesn’t she?”

“Yes,” and Galahad gave a laughing sigh. “Time enough to quit the mortal life when I am called. But however many years lie before me, I will remember this,” and he turned his face again to the heights.

Blanchefleur felt a sudden flash of hope, “Why are you here in Sarras now? Have you come to help me?”

The way he wheeled toward her again, as if scenting danger, reminded her of Perceval. “Help you? Damsel, are you in danger?”

“Danger.” She bit a lip. “She almost killed me, in the autumn, and yet
danger
seems somehow the wrong word to use of anything in Sarras.”

“I understand,” Galahad said gravely. “Nothing happens here that is not meant.”

“And if she had killed me?”

“Then it would have been meant. But it was not.”

“And therefore no danger.” Blanchefleur tried for a moment to fit her mind around this, but there were corners and loose ends trailing out, and she had not the time to make them fit.

Galahad said, “This
she?
”

She gestured helplessly. “A witch. Trying to steal the Grail, and do—oh, horrible things! And I must prevent it…”

“Then this is for you,” Galahad said, and drew a knife from the pouch at his belt. It was an odd little thing, T-hilted and small enough to fit into a woman’s hand. Its translucent blade, only an inch and a half long, was bound with scrolling bronze wire to the bone hilt. “Have a care. Obsidian is sharper than anything else in the world, sharp enough to make sunlight bleed.”

Blanchefleur weighed the shadowy blade in a doubtful palm. “What’s it for? Not killing her, surely? I’d rather have your sword, if it came to that.”

Galahad laughed and linked his fingers protectively over his hilt. “The knife was given to me by an anchoress dwelling by a river in Dumnonia. She said nothing of killing.”

She wrinkled her brow at the knife. “Well, I’m glad of that. After last time, I have no wish to come within striking distance of that woman. I’m sure Morgan le Fay finds it much easier than I do to stab people.”

She sheathed the knife, tucked it into her pouch, and led the way through the garden into the streets. Questions itched on her tongue.

“Where are you, in the waking world? Are you far from Carbonek? Will you be much longer?”

But the Knight of the Grail shook his head. “I cannot tell.”

Her questions were all futile, of course. “I’m sorry, of course you can’t.”

“But I think it will be soon.” Eagerness snapped in his eyes. Before she could dredge up courage to ask the next question, he went on. “And yet I could wish it to be years in the future. So much of my life has been aimed toward this day. What shall I do when it is past?”

Blanchefleur looked at him with surprise. “Surely you came to do more than achieve the Grail.”

“Oh, surely,” he returned quickly. “That was never my whole purpose in the Quest.”

She puzzled over that for a moment as they went up the hill. Blanchefleur, looking at the pavement beneath their feet, once again noticed the absence of any shadow. Neither she nor Galahad, it seemed, could disrupt the serene light of Sarras.

Sir Galahad did not look at his feet. He walked with his head lifted up, enthralled by all the beauty that surrounded them. Blanchefleur opened her mouth to ask for news of Perceval and then hesitated. Surely it was unlikely that their paths would have crossed?

Galahad spoke while she was still wavering in her mind. “My mother—is she well?”

“Oh,” Blanchefleur said, halting. Galahad bent to look into her face.

“Dead.”

“Yes.”

He stood statue-still for a moment, looking at something on the road. Then he lifted his head and went on up the hill, walking more slowly. “Naciens told me she was ill. I had hoped to arrive in time.”

“I’m sorry.” Blanchefleur tried to remember what she knew of those last days. “Nerys took care of her, toward the end.”

With eyes narrowed against the light of Sarras, Galahad almost seemed to be searching the streets for something. He said, “I fear I do not know the lady.”

“No one could have cared for her more tenderly.”

They mounted higher in silence. Blanchefleur closed her eyes and saw once more the pallid face of the mother of Galahad, with the bitter lines scored into her face. At last the question almost burst out of her:

“Tell me what it means, Galahad—your birth.”

There was a question in his glance.

“Did it have to happen the way it did? How can you know you won’t be shut out of the Grail Chapel, like Sir Lancelot?” She swallowed, trying to dig deeper into the thing that troubled her. “How will such sinful people as your father, and my father, build
this?
” And she threw out her arms to encompass Sarras.

Galahad lifted his face to the cathedral. “We cannot.”

Tears prickled her eyes. “Then why were we put on the earth?”

“To build Sarras.” He smiled when he saw her blank perplexity. “It is no contradiction. Our inability does not excuse us. But hammer and nails need not be perfect, if they are wielded by a perfect workman.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Can any workman use such crooked, broken things?” But her words fell unheeded in the warm air. The street was empty. The Grail Knight had gone.

Her first reflex was another jolt of panic. She remembered too well that Morgan’s first appearance had come immediately after the High King’s sudden departure. She dug into her pouch and folded her fingers around the crosspiece of the obsidian knife. The shadowy blade did nothing to comfort her. She was not trained to use this or any weapon, nor could she bring herself to imagine using it.

A little thread of frustration curled through her thoughts. Once, she had turned up her nose at Christine de Pisan’s recommendation that a lady ought to know the use of weapons. Now she stood in danger of her life, and by her ignorance was more likely to injure herself than her enemy.

The cathedral still loomed far above her on the mountaintop. Was Morgan already there, in the steeple? Blanchefleur broke into a run. Wing-footed, tireless speed greeted her efforts, but she mounted the hill and flung herself up the stair to the close-cropped green lawn of the cathedral with a breathlessness that came from fear.

She slid to a stop beneath the great doorway arch. No Morgan. She turned and scanned the terrace again with sudden doubt. Morgan
wasn’t
here? Had she come to Sarras only to meet Galahad, then?

Unless Morgan was already ahead of her, in the steeple.

She started across the lawn to the stair. She had covered only half the ground when the steeple erupted. There was a flash of flame, a belch of smoke, a blast that knocked her down on her face. The whole cathedral hummed like a bell that has been struck. One of the stone saints on the steeple’s spire toppled, tumbled head over foot for an agonising length of time, and then hit the ground with a dull
thump
that cracked off its serene and smiling head.

Blanchefleur choked, “Merciful heaven!” and staggered to her feet. Inside, the stair reeked of smoke and fumes and the smell of fireworks. But how did Morgan have
gunpowder?
She clutched the obsidian knife a little harder and pelted up the stair, coughing in the smoke. She lost count of the steps. Then the gate across the entrance to the place of the Grail suddenly loomed over her, and she fought herself to a stop just too late to avoid knocking her head against the iron.

She gripped the bars and shook them. Locked. Above, the wind had already blown much of the smoke away, but from the cramped steps below the trap she could not see the Grail. Only the great wooden table, blasted and blackened and swept clear, it seemed, of both Cup and Platter…

Blanchefleur reached up and groped at the ledge above the gate. The key was there where she’d left it last time, nestled into warm crackling ash that had once been grass. She snatched it and paused.

No flutter of clothing betrayed a presence above. No pursuing footstep echoed below. A whisper of sound dragged at her hearing, but then it came again and was only the wind. Blanchefleur waited no longer. She unlocked the gate, flung it back, and sprang into the chapel.

The place was scorched. The grass of the floor had turned to powder, where tiny fragments of bomb-casing still smoked and crunched underfoot. Blanchefleur barely heeded them. The Spear hung on its hooks, the length of its haft now charred and blackened. But the wooden table was empty.

She flung herself at it with a gasp like a sob, then scrabbled on the floor. Here was the platter, upside-down. The Grail had rolled beneath the table. Neither was even slightly harmed.

Blanchefleur collapsed to the floor, hugging the Signs, almost faint with relief.

Then a shadow spilled across the scorched grass, onto her lap. Blanchefleur jerked back with a cry as if she had been burned. Morgan stood not three paces away with her eyes fixed upon the Cup. Her feet were bare. And she had called that whispering motion the wind!

Blanchefleur put the platter down and rose up, clenching the Grail in her left hand and the sharp-enough-to-bleed-sunlight knife in her right. Morgan was breathing fast, her eyes bright with triumph, teeth showing. But she did not move.

“Give me the Grail.”

Blanchefleur lifted her knife. Morgan’s eyes slipped to that tiny blade and something damped the triumph in her eyes. Blanchefleur saw the infinitesimal quiver of the witch’s jaw, and tightened her resolve.