The Grail War (12 page)

Bonjio leaned over and touched his mailed arm. His eyes were intent, a little wild, as if the thought alone released anguish and need.

“Not as I,” he half-whispered. “How is it with you, Sir Parsival? No, tell me this …”

They were just passing the cart, a bony old woman gripped the reins and didn’t look aside from where she stared at the slow hooves.

“With me … ?” Parsival mused a moment. “I enjoy fucking as much as any other, I suppose …” He looked down over the sweet blue tinted valley as they climbed. The new grain sparkled and rippled. “It’s brief enough a satisfaction,” he added.

“It doesn’t eat you alive? It doesn’t make you reel with need?” Bonjio was very serious. “You never want to creep on your knees to suck the bare feet of a young maid?”

“Creep?”

Bonjio partly smiled. His eyes were lidded, sardonic, self-mocking, and serious.

“In a way of speaking,” he amended, “though I think I’d crawl on my belly like a serpent if it came to that.”

“I don’t understand,” Parsival said neutrally.

“Then I make you out as both lucky and unfortunate, great knight though you are.” He sucked in a deep, slow breath and shook his head, as if to clear it.

“I enjoy it,” Parsival reflected and repeated, “as much as the next man, I think.” He turned to the other. “Why is it so with you?”

“Ah,” said Bonjio, “why, indeed …” He uncorked the wine flask and tipped it up to his lips again. A crease of dribble showed like blood at his lips.

“Is that an answer?”

“No, I haven’t one.” He tucked away the drink. “I have only the burning.”

“That you can’t quench,” Parsival mused.

“That I can’t quench,” the other man agreed.

The moon was suddenly down behind the hills. He kept staring out over the lightless castle grounds. He felt his outrage loosening its hold on him like tired fingers … It took so much energy to hate … They were dead and that was that. He discovered he didn’t even want to kill Lancelot, not really, not deeply. He frowned. It would be no better, he reflected, than destroying the sword that slashed them. Lancelot was no more than a weapon. And it was done with … All these things seemed like shadows, like the play of vicious children caught and twisted in their ugly imaginings, which, after all, were just imaginings. Waking dreams … He sighed. What would one more dead man prove? …

He let his head rest on the cool stone of the window arch. He stood there weary and strong.

Should
I
weep
for
all
my
wasted
days
,
oh
,
God
?
I missed
my
way
so
many
times
.
Enough
for
many
men
…
I’m
dead
to
this
world
and
blind
to
heaven
…
I
but
mark
days
to
the
grave
…

A flash of color moved in his mind, bright, rich green trees flowing past, rocking with the uneven motion of the bony horse under him, climbing toward the massive castle wall that towered to a stunning height above the trees. The holy castle. And, he concluded, it might as well have been imaginary …

“Sir Parsival,” a lady’s voice said, and he turned.

It was the earl’s wife, Unlea, a light-haired, ripe woman, face and body very soft, eyes large and yielding. She had on a rose-pink, low-cut gown. Those eyes were always slightly widened, as if she were about to be amazed. She smiled a great deal and, as he’d noted, wasn’t an elaborate or coquettish sort of woman. He’d liked her immediately. He liked frank people.

Whenever he reached an impasse, he thought wryly, smiling, there was always a woman around. Perhaps they were the signposts to detours.

They looked at one another in silence for a while. She didn’t seem too uneasy.

“Well,” she finally said, biting lightly on her lower lip, “there is always pleasure.”

He rubbed his beard with a forefinger.

“Or war,” he replied, “or whatever you like.”

He just noticed she was holding a long, slender taper. The flame wavered and moved shadows, as of passing time, across her face.

“Or little things that hurt no one,” she added.

He sat down facing her on a stool and rocked back and forth. Then he was still.

“I have never, lady,” he found himself saying, “felt such an emptiness before or behind me.”

She came closer. Her feet were noiseless in furred slippers. A jewelless crimson chain circled her throat. He smelled a light perfume now.

“Why press yourself beyond the natural limits?” she wondered.

“What tells you I do?”

She shrugged.

“It’s clear enough, sir,” she informed him. “You’ve been a king, a priest, and God knows what else.”

He saw the castle again, vivid, solid in jewel-bright autumn air, the golden, flaming forest, the crisp breeze, the immense bronze gleaming gate across the moat starting to swing open. White, wild swans were on the green-black water, and the startling, towering clouds mounting above, framing the bright towers …

“God knows,” he said at length.

“Why not?”

“What?”

“Learn to play?” She was, he saw, quite serious.

“Play?” He frowned. “Like a lad? Ah, I played later than was the rule, they tell me.”

“No,” she corrected, “not child’s play.”

He studied her or tried to. He was thinking how he might have her. She was extraordinarily tender and easy-moving, he was thinking. Well, he was always easily attracted, though he didn’t creep on his knees, he thought, remembering her husband’s old expression. He wondered if he could have her, at that … The mating reflex came back, he noted, as if it had never been suppressed into ice in the monk’s mountains … He smiled faintly to (or at) himself again. In his mind he kept seeing the vast gate opening, a glimpse of walls, bright pennants, movement, sun, shadow …

“I’ve done all those things, as well,” he told her.

She shook her head, eyes widening a little.

“No,” she said, “I can see you never have.”

“Don’t speak foolishly, woman.” He frowned down at the dull stone floor.
She
isn’t
really
interested
, he thought.

“I see more than you know,” she told him, reaching out and touching his head, stroking his fine, brownish-blond hair with glints of white here and there. “Poor Parsival.”

Her hand was very hot on his cheek. He half-consciously held it and brushed the fingers with his lips.

I
feel
so
burned
and
stiff
and
chill
…
and
I
turn
aside
again
…
as
if
I
actually
knew
where
I
was
going
in
the
first
place
…

The gate stayed partly open in his memory. He wasn’t even certain it
was
memory anymore. Time had eaten the drawn edges …

Lohengrin contented himself thinking he must have convinced Prince Modred to take a pilgrimage to Rome, at the very least. Too bad he hadn’t been able to kill him, but that was fate and a shying horse. He expected no pursuit and none came. He marched on through the sun-spattered undergrowth among golden wild flowers and buzzing bees.

He reached his mount, loosed it, and swung up. He considered his problem: most men were fools and full of fear. His own advantage largely lay in his lack of concern for what bound, or at least impeded, others. He believed he had no distracting feelings. He was concentrated. Aim truly, fight well, or die. And die, too. The rest was philosophy and poetry. He’d once watched a famous scholar, robes flapping, crawling and moaning over a steaming dung heap behind a barn. The church where he’d just lectured that morning stood across the cow yard, golden cross gleaming in the noon glare. He’d offended the local lord in some fashion, by some phrase or other, and so he crawled in the dung, gasping, choking, terrified as several men-at-arms followed him with their spears. His face and the side of his green robe were bloody.

“Show us your learning, why don’t ye?” a round-faced soldier mocked.

“Oh, he’s learned, he is,” another laughed, a lean redhead with a raw, swollen nose.

Lohengrin had been about fifteen at the time. His father had been away for several months in the Holy Land, it was reported. Lohengrin remembered his relief that his father was gone. No tension at home … He’d been exploring the countryside on his pony and had stopped in this town to buy bread and cheese.

The spearmen had surrounded the scholar on all sides.

“Go on,” one said. “Man must eat to stay alive, eh?”

This remark produced an astounding roar of laughter and approval that baffled Lohengrin until he saw the middle-aged, suddenly broken man, with a spear point pressing into his back, kneeling in the filth, cup a handful of dung and hold it, with shut eyes, before his face.

“That’s it, master!” encouraged the round face in greasy leathers and iron cap. “Eat your fill — you need share with no one.” Laughter.

“He dallies,” raw nose put in, grinning, showing yellowed stumps and gaps in his mouth.

“Kill him,” suggested another, jabbing his spear.

“Quiet, brother,” raw nose ordered. “He but most properly and piously says his grace.”

“Or makes his peace with God,” an on-looking farmer said.

“Him?” round face declared, hearing this comment. “Oh, he’ll eat his supper, all right, won’t he? There’s a good un. He wants to live to gather more wisdom.” His spear point prodded the man’s side. “The grovelin’ wretch!”

“I’d die first,” said another soldier, a young man with grim, flat features.

“That so, youngblood?” raw nose said. “Why don’t you take his place and see how death stirs your appetite?”

Youngblood looked grimmer and uneasy, Lohengrin noticed. Then suddenly he put his spear to the scholar’s throat.

“Go on,” he said, “and be done with it!”

“Or you’ll make him a new mouth, eh?” Round face liked this idea.

“Go on!” youngblood shouted.

The trembling man cried out: “God forgive me, but I must live!” And still with shut eyes, he pressed the rank handful into his mouth and fell forward, gagging.

“Keep chewin’, you grovelin’ wretch!” round face added.

The laughter died away fairly fast. Lohengrin was impressed. This was something he knew he’d never forget. As the crowd broke up, the young man, as the scholar was spitting and gagging, suddenly ran his spear through his stomach, a blank, contemplative look on his stolid face. The shocked man was pinned to the dunghill, gasping, blood trickling from his stained, choked mouth. He whimpered a little.

“You’d done as well, fellow,” youngblood said gravely, “never to have ate no shit at all.”

Lohengrin might have dated the formation of certain of his values from that afternoon. He recalled it, for some reason, riding, heading northwest on a dusty track of road.

A plan was forming, step by step. The Duke’s actual army was small. He himself had the doubtful loyalty of enough cutthroat knights and others to stand up to His Grace alone … So there was someone behind and above, as there always must be … someone with vast power who, for some reason, could not come into the open just now … Why not …? Who …? As he rode through the lengthening afternoon, he pondered the question: How many had the blood to even aspire to Arthur’s seat without having to hold it daily by sheer force …? Not many … And he’d already killed several himself, under orders … How many could be left …? They’d have to have blood at least as good as his own or his father’s … Nonsense, the old bastard had renounced everything. True he’d fought with Arthur and at the gates of Jerusalem for power, but that was long ago and out of despair, or so he said … But, still, suppose the pure great one was depressed enough to want to be in charge of the world again? He wondered if anyone else had thought of that … Well, he’d have to consider it as a possibility only, for now … Lohengrin needed more men. That was a simple fact. Most knights these days, as the saying went, had a bony horse, a one-eyed squire, and an elder brother enjoying the fief … In his own case, his father held what he had through his wife, and the only lands left to Lohengrin contained the old toy castle in the half-deserted north, where his father, Parsival, grew up with a few pock-faced serfs scraping the cold, arid soil. No, thank you! That was no gift, he thought — more of a curse … But there were many such partially disinherited men drifting around these days; that was a thought …