The Grail War (2 page)

He heard the fellow’s strained grunt and the clink of steel as he recovered.

“I must try, curse you!” he thundered and zigged another savage cut. This time his target leaned into the armored horse’s flank and tossed him up out of the saddle by one leg. He rolled and banged over the stones. Parsival prodded the animal into a canter and watched it head away across the moors.

“I wit,” he called over to the fallen warrior, “I can walk on better terms than you.”

The horse jogged into and out of long, undulant strips of fog that streamed across the wild valley.

It was still raining when Broaditch reached Camelot.

He stood on the black, muddy track of chewed-up road near the great gate, leather hood over his head. The wind billowed the downpour; the hillside ran with mud. Puddles lay everywhere like ponds and there were rivers where the earth was level, whitish, boiling. Rivulets arced and spattered down the massive castle walls. His legs were muddy to the shins.

How many days of this? he was wondering. It had been well over a week. The earth seemed to be dissolving away. The fields were sunken, sodden, spring plantings rotting pale in the ground … rivers flooding all across the country … birds barely flew from limb to limb in the forests …

The gate was open. A sentry stood huddled, miserable, leaning on his spear. The vast courtyard was deserted. Broaditch, Oriental pipe clamped, reversed, between his teeth, plodded on inside without even a token challenge from the shivering guard.

Within he learned that the man he sought lived in the town outside the walls on the steep slope of the hill.

The fire in the long, low, stone and log room sputtered and struggled at fresh, wet logs. The steam hissed as they dried. The endless rain boomed at the hide-covered windows.

He stood before the lukewarm hearth, rubbing his damp hair and face with a rough woolen cloth. His bones ached. Time, he decided, was telling him something about age: there would always be a little pain.

He turned to face the brawny, long, dark, bald armorer who was squatting over a rough three-legged stool, long, powerful fingers working, polishing a sword that lay across his lap. He was surrounded by the iron tools of his trade.

“Well, Broaditch,” he said in a raspy voice, “hard to believe you stand before me. I knew not that you were living to this day.”

“Like your fire here, Handler,” the big, grayed, weathered man replied, “I struggle on with the little heat I have.” He yawned and stretched.

Handler cleared his throat with a great rattling hawking. Then he spat onto the lumpy dirt floor.

“The bread’s rotting in the bin,” he said. “I can’t offer you much.”

“If this goes on,” Broaditch suggested, “we’ll all learn to swim and feed like fish or else drown in the open air.” He eased himself onto the uneven, backless chair as little winces flickered across his gray-bearded, but still ruddy, face. “Already the first crops are lost. It’s the same wherever I’ve been.”

“The priests call it a judgment.” Handler looked angry and a little frightened, too.

Broaditch shrugged.

“So it always is,” he said ambiguously. “But naming is no cure for troubles.” His eyes smiled. “Else I would speak the name of my pain and my bones would be at peace.”

Handler’s long, slightly out-of-line face tilted impassively at him.

“I wonder,” he said, “that you found me. How many years have passed since we fought together?” Broaditch shrugged and said nothing. “My wife’s been gone these seven,” Handler went on. He cleared his throat again and worked his lips around his few remaining yellow stumps of teeth. “And I have one worthless son living here still … another in London town … a daughter married in the South, and two dead from fever …” He spat again, then went on buffing the steel across his knees. “I’m a damned grandfather,” he muttered. “I wonder that you found me taking breath.”

“I had word of you on the road. Anyway, you’ve prospered since the wars.”

The other grunted.

“Or so I believed myself,” he said, “until these recent days. Hah. With old Arthur gone and the kingdom fallen to the barons, there’s no law left in the land.” He spat. “Nor even war, to speak of, just damned raiding and kidnapping. I wonder that you went six miles with purse and life intact.”

Broaditch weighed a chunk of soggy, dark bread in his massive hands.

“I’ve less of both to lose,” he said, “than was once the case.”

“How many years since the fighting?” Handler frowned, eyes focusing away, as if into time itself. “Some twenty since the invaders came … My mother died nine before this day.”

“Is she dead, then?” Broaditch looked up from sipping at a battered pewter cup of home brew. “Old Mol? God rest her.”

“Aye,” Handler went on; “so if she was living last you knew, why, it’s been ten or more years.”

“About fourteen, I think. I could still swing an ax easily then. No creakings in the joints.”

“Aye,” agreed Handler, showing his blackened, spaced tooth stumps, “and you could smell out gold then. And I’d swear you were still too rich to go as a pilgrim in these bitter days. Is your red-haired woman a-living?”

Broaditch faintly smiled.

“She is,” he murmured. “And my three doves. But I don’t seek gold now, old friend.”

Handler shifted on his stool, buffing the long blade again with slow, careful strokes. His manner was watchful. He obviously assumed Broaditch wanted something.

“So you just walk to take the air, then?” he inquired, sarcastic.

“More like to take the water,” he was corrected. The ceaseless drumming on the roof paused a moment like a breath, then boomed on again. “I seek someone.”

“Ah?” murmured Handler expectantly.

“Sir Parsival, or maybe King Parsival. I know not how he’s called these days, or if he lives, for all of that.”

His friend knit his eyebrows and shook his head.

“Who can tell?” he said. “Word of even the greatest lords creeps like a worm in these sorry times.” He cocked his head to one side. “Why do you seek such a one?”

Broaditch shut his eyes. He held the cup in both his wrinkled farmer’s hands. He looked meditative.

“So?” Handler persisted. He cocked his dark face to one side, eyebrows furiously knit. Water was now sluggishly seeping in under the door, filling and soaking into the rills and craters of the uneven earthen floor.

Broaditch opened his eyes and shrugged.

“Let it be, for now,” he said.

He raised the battered cup again and drank deeply. The water lapped around his booted feet.

* * *

Elsewhere, before the massive, rambling castle that overlooked the walled coastal town called London, the field had been prepared for a tourney, or, as one wag put it: “The mud’s been prepared.” The rain gusted steadily. A scattered audience huddled in the grandstand-like structure, where banners and garlands drooped and swayed heavily. A hide canopy kept the spectators fairly dry as knights on chargers and squires and suchlike on foot left their wind-rippled tents and plodded through the muck toward the lists. A trumpeter had just sounded a feeble blast into the drenching air.

The first pair of mounted knights moved into position, horses slogging knee-deep. A groom and two soggy pages crouched together under a tent flap, watching.

“By Christ,” muttered the groom, wrapped in his coarse furs and hides, “this is fools’ play.”

“How much longer could they wait?” a page commented.

“Sir Rador,” the other pointed out, “in white. He’s very strong. I saw him last year break a man’s back on the first spear.”

“It’s a day for frogs to joust ducks,” the groom grumbled.

Now the chargers were ready, lances lowered, shields braced, horse breaths steaming, and then the charge began as a bedraggled Lord stood forward on the bleacher benches and dropped a silk scarf into the foaming mud.

The combatants crashed toward each other more like boats than anything else, the groom thought. They came together in skidding slow motion and both lances glanced futilely off the other’s shield with a dull scrape.

“Nobly run,” the groom remarked.

Now they were plodding back before the apathetic onlookers, prepared to try again.

A tall knight in part armor came out of the tent and stood under the canopy behind the squatting trio. He had bushy, dark hair like wire and a slightly beaked nose. His eyes were sharp and sarcastic with a nervous, concentrated look.

“When do the merchants tilt?” he asked, his voice sudden and harsh.

The pages turned and stood up. The groom glanced back from his crouch.

“After the third matching, Sir Lohengrin,” said the first, a puffy-faced boy with a wart under his eye.

Lohengrin looked with disgust at the mud-spattered jousters struggling back to their starting positions.

“Call me then,” he ordered, turning to re-enter the tent. “This pains my eyes.”

Now the knights were heaving forward again, even more sluggishly churning the muck this time, rocking, bouncing, glopping, mounts grunting, the downpour dinning over them …

Broaditch stood up with Handler, staring at the flooding water that was pouring steadily over the sill.

“Blood and shit!” Handler cried as the door opened and there stood a pale, freckled youth with wideset, dull-blue eyes, snapping, reddish hair plastered flat around his head like a bowl.

“Father!” he cried. “Father, the hill is sinking down! The mud has already carried away the huts on the middle road!”

His father widened his eyes, then grunted.

“Quick!” the young man shouted, darting back out the door.

Broaditch and Handler followed into the endless downpour. The hill did seem to be sliding down toward them from under Camelot castle. A few disjoined homes were broken and tilted out of the muck like ruined teeth. The water and running mud-gravy streamed over their feet in a sluggish torrent.

“God save us,” Handler gasped.

Broaditch stood solid as oak.

“I’ll help you gather what you can,” he said sensibly.

Handler just stared in outraged disbelief.

“Is the whole world turning over?” he wanted to know, gusts of rain spattering into him. “Is this the second flood?”

“It’s to be fire, they say,” Broaditch corrected. “But any man may be mistaken, much less a holy prophet whose sight is too long for a single lifetime.”

The boy was heading across the flooding yard toward the valley.

“Valit!” his father shouted. “Come back here and help us, you oaf!” He shook his head and headed into the house, muttering, “What a son …”

Valit was heading back on the double. Broaditch and Handler were already inside, snatching up provisions and whatever else they could grab as the greasy muck, stinking from the barnyards and latrines it had sucked into itself, flowed like porridge through the door.

They were spattered to the chest, looking back across the valley, among a crowd of refugees, at Camelot hill, where the last of the town had been swept away. The castle itself still stood above like (Broaditch reflected) an old man’s long canine.

They were standing on the close-set paving stones of the old Roman road where young Parsival and Sir Roht the Red had first come in sight of Arthur’s fortress over two decades ago …

A lightly dressed, mud-stained knight was standing a little apart from the motley crowd taking in the relentless, slow-motion catastrophe. He was talking with a pretty commoner girl, barefoot, in a patched dress. Her teeth were bright, and even when she smiled. Broaditch watched her with a certain nostalgia. She could have been the daughter of a girl from old days … He smiled slightly. And then the knight mentioned a name that caught his full, present-tense attention. He moved a little closer to them.

“I could wait no longer,” the knight was saying. “Thrice the tourney was delayed by this cursed rain.”

“Ah, my lord,” she said, “and all these folk here washed out of their homes. What’s to become of us, then?”

The knight nodded vaguely.

“You people,” he said, “amaze me, the way you can survive ill fortune.”

She was partly looking at him, head slightly humble, deferential, with a faint smile on her lips.

“Aye,” she said, “but myself, I’m in sore need.”

He raised his wet eyebrows with aloof concern.

“Ah?” he murmured.

“My father and mother are dead. And my house is swept away.”

He nodded. He was partly looking back at her now.

“And you wouldn’t object to a warm roof right now? Hmm?”

“Oh, my lord, and how could I?”

“No,” he said decidedly. “Well, follow behind me.” He smiled faintly. Broaditch could see he was looking at her feet and legs, brown and shapely under the mud streaking. “Not too far behind me. We’ll see what may be done.”

“Oh, thank you,” she said, curtsying, “good, my lord.”

“Sir knight,” Broaditch said, and tilted his head forward slightly, not quite irreverently. The thin-lipped man regarded him distantly.