The Grail War (11 page)

He recalled all this, remembered how he drank deeply of the peace. How tense he’d been in those days, for a child, he reflected, how terribly tense …

He reached and plucked a berry, smearing the rich purple on his steel gauntlet, then sucking the sweetness off. He frowned suddenly as a memory ran past where he’d intended: he was spinning his sling in those vivid boyhood woods, the tug of the smooth stone whirling around his head, then released zipping at a bird perched blue, bright, gleam-eyed on a berry bush in the heavy sun just beyond the pine shadows. He’d seen the blurred track, the sudden splash of red as the little head exploded, and then came a feather or two flickering down, and he remembered the smile on his face as he hissed a thought over and over:
that'll
teach
you
something
…
that'll
teach
you
something
…
that'll
teach
you
…

He came alert, heard horses. So his information was correct. Very good. He was ready. This was no bird coming here … a what? … a capon, maybe. He almost smiled. Lohengrin had refused to turn away from that bird. He’d gone and looked at the headless, awkward ball of fluff caught in the brambles.
This
is
death
, he’d told himself.
It
will
happen
to
me
.

He blinked the memories away and stood carefully upright. He held the mace over his shoulder.

After
this,
he was thinking,
it
might
as
well
be
me
as
any
other
…
I
might
as
well
be
king
myself
as
some
dreaming
Duke
…
We
may
as
well
be
entertained
before
we
die
…

Modred sighed and wiped his sweaty face.

“Christ,” he complained, “is there an inn along this way?”

The ecclesiastic beside him looked remote. The knight shrugged.

“It may be, my liege,” he said “Within a few furlongs there’s — ”

He broke off as a knight, all in black and red, stepped from the muted sparkling of berry bushes and planted himself before them, long mace across his shoulder.

“You’ll lunch in hell, I think, Modred,” he said through his visor grate and followed this by springing forward with astounding agility and striking a round blow at the Prince’s head.

Modred screamed in fear and threw himself backward, virtually out of his saddle and stirrups, and the deadly blow slammed across his lightly mailed chest and gut and laid him out, winded, lying flat on his mount’s spine, head lolling back by the bushy, fly-tormented tail. The horse backed away as the other knight drew and struck at the assassin, who blocked the cut with ease on his shield and smashed another blow, this time catching the helpless Prince across the thigh.

“Ahhh-h-h-h,” he sighed as blood drained from the mushed flesh.

The rest of the stunned escort (about eight men) closed up now and the black knight knocked two aside before accepting that he’d have to withdraw with the job half done.

“You were but spared for a time,” he said, backing into the brush, “if, indeed you survive these hurts, you fat, oily dog.”

And he was gone.

“After him!” shouted the knight, but no one was overanxious. A moment later the escorting knight (the rest were men-at-arms) rode into the bushes, nervous, carefully probing with his sword …

Broaditch was trying to explain things to Alienor. She sat in her wicker chair on the sunny porch and shook her head at him.

“No,” she insisted, “it’s too late. You can’t come home to me now.”

“I am so weary, my love,” he protested, leaning against a post. “I long for my old joys back … I want to work in the fields and sit at supper with you.”

“No,” she told him, pointing across the fields, “look.”

A cloudy wall of deep darkness flowed slowly in from the horizon, blotting out all the green and blue and gold it touched, seeping the landscape to death, withering the afternoon …

And he shuddered awake as he was telling her: “But, love, my back aches …” And he found himself still drifting in the fog-bound boat, Valit snoring in the stern. Broaditch’s bones were cramped and damp. He sighed and looked around: dawn was faintly hinting the mist shapes and nearer waves. Then fear broke through his dense weariness as a low, dark boat came suddenly straight out of the fog at them.

He poked Valit with the end of his thick staff, but the fellow didn’t stir. This seemed strange, though he noted it only later.

“Are you dead from the sea air?” he wondered in a mutter.

This boat was odd: no one was visible at oar, tiller, or sail. A single figure in a conical hood and dark, full robe sat amidships.

A
craft
from
the
land
of
the
dead,
Broaditch thought,
or
else
I
dream
…

Closer now, he noticed the sail was furled and the boat was drifting like their own, but faster, which had given the impression it was under control. Still he wondered why it slowed alongside to match their direction and speed within easy speaking distance. The waves were steepening and Broaditch had an idea they were no longer in the middle of the river. He chose not to contemplate the implications just now. Anyway, he reassured himself that the sea current would drive them onshore once they cleared the river flow.

“Are you lost, too?” Broaditch called over as the other boat rose and tilted over them, then dipped as they went up

“I have no destination at the moment,” a resonant voice replied, “so I cannot be lost.”

“You could be lost to the light of God,” Broaditch surprised himself by saying.

The bass voice seemed to approve.

“Your own words have chosen you, friend,” it said out of the cowl folds.

The thwarts of both boats were inches apart now as they slid up and dropped and rocked in tandem, as though invisibly joined.

“Who are you?” Broaditch wanted to know. He glanced and saw that Valit still slept.

“A man in a boat.”

“A sailor?”

“Well, say that I fish.”

“Where are your nets and hooks … and baits?”

The other laughed, surprisingly mellow and relaxed.

“My fish,” he remarked, “know well enough when they’re caught.” Then the tones become forceful and grim. “If you survive the looming storm, you have a task laid upon you.”

“Are you a philosopher, sir?” Broaditch gripped the boat side as the waves steepened and tipped them. “How can you command me?”

“You command yourself. You are a man who only hides from truth because once you understand it you have no choice. You have hidden well, but the sea has brought you where your feet would not.”

Broaditch felt intensely alert, though a little dizzy from the gyrations of the waves. This was all so matter-of-fact, and he found himself accepting it in the same relaxed way it was being put across.

“Beware of your companion there,” the cowled man advised. “He is blind … you follow the brightness and heed nothing else. Find your way and you may pluck what is sacred from the devil’s lap.”

“Pluck what?”

“It has fallen to you to find what the greatest have lost.”

“But what? pluck what? … Am I asleep again?”

“When are you ever awake? When can you tell?”

“But
what
?"

“Would you know the Grail if you saw it?”

“So you’re a holy man? A master?” He was strangely amused by this, too. “A wizard?” Or a madman.

“What a burden to you these words are.”

“Am I far from shore, sir?”

“Farther than you think. If you survive the storm, then you’ll learn more. The wind and fury are close upon you.”

A black scud of cloud came whipping overhead and the boats heeled in a savage gust. Valit sat up suddenly as the other craft moved off into the wild mist and mounting seas.

“Surrender your life!” the man had shouted back through the veering winds. “And be sustained into the land of death, my broad and foolish fish!” And then the storm broke over them with astounding violence.

Broaditch shut his eyes and then opened them, as if to awaken. He wanted to think he’d been asleep.

“My God!” cried Valit. “We’re doomed!”

Perhaps
I
have
done
all
I
can
ever
hope
to
do
, Parsival thought.

He stared through the narrow slit window at the setting moon. It was early morning. Prang was asleep across the corridor in his own room. They had come to the castle of a man who’d been Parsival’s companion at Arthur’s court for a time after the Kingdom had been partially re-established. Earl Bonjio. A short, dark, part-Spanish fellow … Arthur’s beard had gone silver and his hair was thin. His sister had come to live at Camelot and, it was said by some, supplied the steel for the spine of her brother’s prong …
Well
, Parsival remembered,
he
never
really
knew
the
king
that
intimately
… Arthur was ever wary of him, for some reason … He remembered riding back from a tourney with Bonjio, the horses seeming to float through a mellow, grayish midsummer dusk, hooves virtually soundless on the yielding turf as sloping fields drifted by. They’d been drinking mead. Bonjio had just tossed away the empty stone flask.

“So,” the dark man was saying, “how did you elude Gawain?”

“When?”

“After you’d struck down the varlet, outside your castle. You said you were nude and had just finished with a woman and then were set upon.”

“Ah, yes.” Parsival remembered. “The details are unclear.”

Bonjio smiled. His dark eyes were very shrewd and watchful.

“Wine will blur them every time,” he remarked.

“No. It was the next day. I was sober …” — he frowned slightly — “and drunk, too …”

“Well?”

“I can’t explain this thing … but that was the best moment of my life …”

“What?”

Parsival stared across the field at the steep slope topped by Camelot castle. At that time the first peasant houses were going up on the ridge, and new crops sprouted and ripened on what were once jousting meadows.

“Anyway,” Parsival said after a moment or two, “Gawain and those men left. I went back to my wife.”

“Did you put on a robe, at least?” Bonjio grinned.

“I suppose so … I haven’t seen Gawain since.”

“They say he’s in Ireland or across the channel.” Bonjio carefully wiped off and munched a piece of fruit. He sucked the juices with each bite.

“What happened to the woman?” he asked at length as they were just starting up the long hill on the dusty road. A peasant in a mule-drawn cart was laboring before them as slow as could be. “Wasn’t she the wife of a guest?”

Parsival was abstracted. The mellow day drew him deeper into memory.

“What? Who?” he wondered, blinking back.

“The woman you’d lain with.” Bonjio licked the wound his mouth had made in the ripe peach. “On the hillside.”

Parsival remembered.

“It’s been ten years,” he murmured, “nearly that …”

Bonjio cocked his head at him.

“Was she slain?” he pursued.

Parsival shook his head.

“I can’t recall her name,” he said, “but she came back later, wearing a shepherd’s cloak. She’d been battered a little but wasn’t so bad as I’d expected.” He smiled faintly.

“Liked her men, eh? Well, I can understand that, only too well.”

“That isn’t supposed to be possible.”

Bonjio nodded.

“So they say,” he admitted, “but I have such a desperate weakness myself that I can understand any other.”

Parsival was interested.

“Which weakness?” he wondered. “I lose count of mine.”

“Yes, yes … but for the flesh … the
flesh!
” He shook his head and worked the pit into his jaw and sucked it. “It makes me tremble. My soul is slit when I see a beautiful woman. I must have them, you understand.”

Parsival shrugged.

“Most men must,” he noted, “it would appear.”