The Grail War (34 page)

“Aunt?” Modred yelled.

“Curse him! Curse him!” she screamed. Her red hair shook.

“Aunt, what …”

She stared wildly around at Gaf and the other lords.

“Bring me a head!” she shouted. “Anyone’s will do … anyone’s!”

“Aunt!”

Gaf and the bishop looked at one another.

“We’re taken in flank!” the former cried. “We must — ”

He reeled back (her wide eyes were seeing no one) as she drew and with terrific speed and perfect aim thrust her blade into his open visor and tilted him, howling, out of the saddle in a burst of blood and followed him to the ground, sliced his helmet loose (even as he struggled into his dying moments), and with several desperate chops hacked his head free. Gripping his dark, curly hair, she remounted and lifted it high.

“Magic for magic!” she shouted, snarling. “Magic for magic, you bastard! I'll not be beaten!”

Modred stared for a moment at the bleeding face, the shocked features, the eye that seemed still seeing (the other had been stabbed through), dimming as he watched … .

Then, gagging, he turned his horse and fled blindly into the burning forest …

His horse plunged into a sudden eddy in the charging waves of stabbing, spearing, hacking soldiers. As the smoke opened and closed, Modred saw men fleeing from one death to another: reeling from mace blows into spear thrusts: kneeling with upraised arms, begging for mercy as swords chopped them to shreds; tight clusters of desperate foot troops fighting hopelessly as wave after wave broke over them in flame and smoke and steel …

His panic had him mumbling and jerking the reins like a puppet, gurgling in fear as he crashed out of a roll of smoke, choking, wheezing, blinded, into a wedge of spearmen who closed in as he flung his blade and flailed and he screamed inaudibly in the blasting of battle and fire. They hamstrung his horse in a moment, and, leaping free, he was racing, tossing his sword away, tripping, rolling, crawling" and saved for now by another black, dense cloud … but he heard them following and he ran and fell and ran …

And he was still running, panting, scrambling along a stony gully now, his bejeweled armor baking him alive as a furnace of exploding fir trees hemmed him in to his right. Tripping on roots, slipping on stones, babbling breathlessly, he fled …

Above, to his left, swarms of black-armored knights and Saracens in their flowing robes and headdresses were hunting him …

The last image kept repeating in his brain: Morgan LaFay, in the flashing, darkening day, fading into blurring haze, holding the severed head aloft, steaming gore spilling down over her face, bare, up tilted to the rain of blood, rocking in steady rhythm, voice penetrating, in-canting into one chilling, hypnotic, seamless flood of sound that he could hear and feel over the bray and shriek of combat and the fire’s thunder …

There were mounted men a turn or two behind him, crashing along the dry wash. He felt his bladder go slack and warm … whimpered, tried desperately to scramble up the gully sides, failed, fell back, panting, trying to loosen his armor, searing his fingers on the steel, weeping and cursing … A great torching tree dropped and sealed the way behind, cutting off pursuit and dooming him as the flames ahead leaped across this narrowing crease in the unyielding earth, and he ran berserkly in mad spirals up and down the sides, up and down, like a frantic bug trapped in a hot kettle …

Broaditch sensed something moving behind him. He whirled, staff held at the ready. A lanky figure and what seemed a pair of down-turned horns emerged from the choking fogs holding what seemed a massive cudgel at his side. A few more steps and he saw him clearly: a middling young man in a fool’s cap and bells, dangling a lute.

So
, thought Broaditch,
so
…

“You’re a troop of entertainers,” he said by way of greeting.

The jester’s long faced looked sour.

“Some of us, big man,” was his answer, “but not all equally.”

“Well, sir, I could stand some gambols in these times, I swear.”

The jester set down his lute, leaning against the back steps of the wagon.

“I fear,” he said, “you’ve met me at the end of my wit and gamboling.” He sat down on the wagon steps. “Though I have one bit of humor left in me: the world’s burning down. So it’s like a suckling babe at the mother’s milk-heavy breast.”

“Forgive me,” Broaditch said, sitting down beside the fellow on the other edge of the step, “if I contain my side-shaking merriment.”

“It’s a riddle.”

The expressionless jester spat neatly out into the swirling clouds.

“So, then?” Broaditch rested his head on the plank door at their backs.

“Why, good sir, the world truly has what it most needs.”

Broaditch smiled faintly.

“You’re as hard a judge as the archangels,” he told him. “But where are you bound?”

“To entertain the dead.”

Broaditch guffawed and nodded.

“Why, sage?” He couldn’t resist.

“Two reasons: there are more of them …”

“Yes?”

“And more likely to be light of heart than the living.” He spat again. He never turned to look at Broaditch, who nodded grudging approval of the gloomy answer. “Where’s the rest of your troop?” he wondered. “Within,” was the reply, accented by a jerked thumb. Broaditch heard steady, rhythmical creaking sounds, then noticed the wagon was rocking slightly. He heard a low, muffled moan. For a moment he took it for pain, then smiled and said, “Well, that’s a music not made on a lute.”

“That is entertainment.” Deadpan.

“But not for the dead, I think.”

“Aye, for the dying.”

Broaditch stood up.

“Well,” he announced, “I’ll be off before I lose all hope. You’re a jester fit for the audience you seek.”

He was still not looking at Broaditch.

“How will you find your way? Now it’s nightfall and all the more obscure.”

The door of the wagon opened and a barefoot, rather pretty, long-haired, youngish girl wearing a parted chemise-like gown leaned there. Behind her in the darkness, the love-making sounds intensified.

She hung a lit lantern on a peg beside the door and stood there. He bit his lip lightly, feeling a rush of tingling blood to his groin, looking at her smooth, bare legs, the dark blot under the long sweep of her belly, one smallish but purely rounded breast showing, inviting a bite, a lick, a caress, a pinch … He felt a little weak …
So
young
and
fair
, he thought several times.

Her large, dark eyes just looked at him, watchful, features expressionless so he couldn’t tell anything about her feelings. She was so casually lewd
and
in
her
middle
teens
at
best
… The jester stayed as he was, his back to her.

“That’s Minra,” he said. He lifted his lute and strummed the open strings, which were badly untuned. He seemed to enjoy the twanging, because a trace of a smile creased his lips. “She entertains.”

She was working her jaws slightly in a chewing motion. Then she opened her mouth and picked something from her teeth, which were unusually bad. even for those times: gaped, chipped, discolored.

The jester began to bang the strings in earnest, thumping the wood, rocking slightly. “The horrid sound smote my ears full sore.” Broaditch quoted to himself.

And then, as it became virtually unbearable, the worst happened and the fellow broke into unrestrained song. “She entertains, I ween; her ways are all obscene; her twiddle's quite unclean …”

And on in this charming wise, Broaditch later was to say, but he was held by the girl, whose mouth was shut again in the smoldering expressionlessness of her face and knowing eyes that went far beyond ideas of vice and hopelessness. He felt she had never imagined hope or good to begin with, so there was no pain or despair at their loss … He was a little afraid, because in a terrible way she was innocent … He'd never conceived of such a thing or the frightening beauty of it. He had a recurring impulse to prostrate himself before her, to embrace, devour, and worship that untouchable dark intensity … and another impulse in no way contradictory was to try and reach the innerness, the tender place somewhere within … He never had felt such a thing, never desired before to instantly immolate himself in such gulfs of frailty … He felt weak.

She rested one hand on her hip, fully opening the thin garment. There was a mild draft of warm air stirring the cloth, spilling from within. He assumed they must have hot stones in a crock inside. It was strangely painful to look up from her graceful feet along the young, round legs, dark wildness of groin, sheer sweep of open torso, graceful neck and oval, impassive, maddening face.

Not
Eve
,
Lilith
, he thought,
the
dark
one
…
daughter
of
the
dark
moon
…

He almost wanted to say “I love you,” but meaning he knew not what, dared not know what … and the dreadful song went on as she didn’t smile even a fraction, turned gracefully, and went back in, leaving the door open as a male voice cried out in the throes of sweetest dying.

“They’ll do what they must, for no man will they trust …” The song broke off and the jester sat there holding the lute loosely, still staring into the fog. “There’s little enough trade out in these lost parts,” he said conversationally, “so you can have her for a pair of coppers.”

Broaditch took a deep breath. “Ah,” he said, his voice breaking. Then he grinned at himself, staring through the partly opened door. He made out a dim gleam that must have been another lantern or candle.

“There’s others, as well, traveler,” the jester said, spitting again, watching the gob fly out into the shifting outskirts of the fog. “But Minra’s a pearl. You can have her suck it. You can ram it in her bung or her twiddie. Why, you can do anything you please with the little whore. What’s a pair of coppers to that, eh? That tasty child? Man o’ your years best take his pleasures while he may.” He strummed one final, cacophonous chord for emphasis. “You only taste your food in your mouth, which comes at the beginning. From then on it starts to be shit.”

“Well, jester of whores,” the other replied, breathing deep, resisting, even as his hand strayed to his leather pouch, where his farthings were stored, “all the more reason to eat sparingly.”

The fellow laid the tortured instrument aside and stood up, stretching.

“Your young one’s within,” he said. And to Broaditch’s interrogative frown, he explained, “He come by an hour before. Said to look out for a big, old wight.”

“Old?” Broaditch couldn't help but snort.

“He said that would be if the river devils spared you, as he doubted they would. He were sore afraid when he come. But Lottali, a slave princess of the distant East, a dusky heathen bitch woman who’d suck the juice from all your fruit, old wight …” He grinned now, tugging and cracking the joints of his fingers. “Lottali, as you just heard, brought him to peace and calm.”

Broaditch went up the steps. Well, he could have called out, but he was curious, anyway. No harm there. So he pushed inside, into a perfumed dimness. The sweetness drowned out, rather than replaced, a raw understink.

He blinked to focus. He saw heaps of silks, three dim bodies tangled in one mound, and Minra, totally nude now, was sitting across the way, chewing on what looked like a chicken wing. The round walls made him a little uneasy.

He watched Minra suck the grease from her surprisingly short fingers.

There were paintings on the walls he'd never seen the likes of: clearly foreign … exotically done in gold and silver, like a church mural … women and men wearing strange headdresses, bound up in acrobatic acts he first mistook for combats … He bent closer to follow the images: women with men (
miraculously
endowed
, he thought) in a wonder of possibilities … he had to admit in the warm globe, smelling the reek and perfume, that incredible girl a reach away, these images left him a trace giddy … women woven with women, which didn’t so much shock as puzzle him … at first … Well, he'd heard of such things and no doubt they went on across the water … It certainly was interesting in here … He moved along the walls, leaning over the three he had taken to be asleep (two women and a man), seeing what seemed gods and devils now joining in an astounding mass copulation with children and beasts thrown in; he drew away, stunned, overloaded … He felt fear and excitement. The images stayed with him as he stepped back. He felt a touch on his left leg. Minra. She offered him a sweetly spiced mug of liquid. He took it, then realized he was trembling and sweating. It seemed to be brandy wine. He drank a searing gulp.

“I thank you,” he said, still reviewing that final picture, still seeing it …

But
it's
just
the
flesh
,
just
the
food
served
strange
and
spiced
,
but
still
only
food
…