The Grail War (47 page)

“Close,” Valit ordered, and as she laced his codpiece with expert swiftness, Broaditch peered back down the bending trail. “Did you find what you sought?” Valit then asked, starting to gather his legs under him.

“I know not what I found, lad,” was the distracted answer. He thought he saw a dark form mounting the hill where the rain seemed to billow out like a great cape or pair of monstrous wings …
No
, he insisted,
fancy
,
but
fancy
. “I’ve been swift and fortunate and a fool alternately and all at once.”

Never taking his sight from the crest edge where the rain lashed furiously, yelling blown down to normal speaking tones, he pulled the dense metal ball from his pouch and displayed it to Valit.

“This was all I found,” he said.

“What did you expect?”

The older man shrugged for reply, thinking:
I
should
have
only
expected
to
remain
dull
of
wit
and
have
stood
no
disappointment
.

Valit took it, weighed it in his hand. He backed away a little from Broaditch, who squatted down, still intent on the way behind him, about convinced the great skull was a figment of exhaustion.

Valit was excited by the density. If it were gold! He trembled slightly. He had thoughts, flashes: pushing Broaditch over the slope to gain a head start … melting a little each year and living like a lord for a lifetime … He fumbled a square-bladed knife from his belt and scraped the surface, which peeled easily, dully. He hadn’t sat at the shoulder of Cay-am of Camelot for nothing and quickly determined it was a sphere of lead.

“Bah,” he muttered and dropped it in the mud. He wedged himself back under the rock ledge. “Here we stay until better weather,” he told Irmree, who seemed to understand in a general way and settled, with bovine solidity, beside him.

Broaditch prodded him with the spear butt. Valit screamed and writhed away, as if burned.

“Ah!” he cried.

Broaditch thought he must have struck a bruise or hidden wound.

“Stay here,” he cried, “and you’ll meet the devil.”

“Which devil …? Bah.” He rubbed his sore side.

Valit wasn’t overly impressed by the concerns of a man who’d dragged him across countless miles of madness to secure, in the end, a lump of lead for his pains. The fellow suffered from visions and angels … “More than riches,” indeed … Why there weren’t
even
riches to begin with … He embraced, snuggling Irmree, and began to consider other things he’d like her to perform to while away the time … His imagination was precocious and remarkable.

“Black knights, you ass!” Broaditch thundered at him, though the elements palliated the sound.

“It certainly be that,” Valit allowed, cocking a hide cap over his eyes.

There, something moved, gleamed in the last flash, back on the extreme curve of trail.

“They’re coming!” he shouted, at least tried.

“A certainty,” the comfortable young man agreed, pressing himself behind Irmree’s bulk fairly snugly with only feet exposed to the mad weather.
High
and
dry
, he thought,
as
the
saying
goes
…
The
sole
knight
we
met
not
only
wasn't
black
,
but
was
going
apace
the
other
way
from
here
… These reflections were comforting.

“You’re Handler’s son,” the older man expostulated. “At least he wasn’t a total idiot! We’ve passed through the thick and the thin and I owe you, boy, and you owe me!” In the afterimage of the last flash, he saw the outlines of approaching figures. No mistake now. The next flash glinted on steel … the following on an empty path, so they were now one bend away and would soon top the near crest.

“You’re mad, old man!” Valit shouted from behind the woman. “You’re bent by mummery and visions!” He patted her great rump as Broaditch stooped and replaced the leaden sphere in his pouch. “Take your ‘more than riches’ and flee the shadows!” He patted her again. “There is only this — this is real life. Nothing else! I only followed you to prove it so!”

Let
others
dream
, he thought with satisfaction.
I've
made
a
good
beginning
…
The
cow
you
tie
up
in
your
yard
is
the
cow
you
can
milk
.

Irmree was kissing his hand. She was content. He decided to try and sleep despite the howling gusts that stuttered and drummed and sucked at their shelter. Anyway, it couldn’t last forever. This was as snug a spot as he’d be likely to find, thanks to this woman’s useful bulk blocking the worse of it … He was quite satisfied, in his way: look at the uses she had already, and this was but the beginning … He closed his eyes and vaguely heard or imagined he heard Broaditch’s nagging shouts, but it all was fading and blowing away … He was sweetly weary and nestled his face between her pungent hams … Everything drifted off into the distant thunder roaring …
He added a vegetable garden to the cheerful stone house and a pond with plump geese …

Mayhap
they
won't
be
seen
, Broaditch thought without much conviction as he moved back toward where the path became the steep, walled road. The weight in his pouch swayed and bumped …

About now Parsival reached Clinschor’s deserted iron ball mired in the flooding road. The horses stood miserably in their traces. The door had been resealed. He peered in the slit but saw pitch-blackness only. The metal rang dully under the pelting downpour.

He was aware of the Nubian watching from the swampy undergrowth. He paid no attention. His senses were incredibly keen and effortless again. He went on, climbing, trotting rapidly despite his chain mail suit.

In a way he was uninterested in just what lay ahead. Details no longer concerned him because everything was the same problem. One need with a thousand faces and forms. Ten thousand fancies and shadows, but all grown from a single darkness. Only that darkness mattered, not which particular shape cast the shadow …

Up a ridge and out of the trees, bucking the down-slanting gusts, he could look back over the castle towers. He understood he was being drawn to the Grail. He smiled within himself. He was always being drawn to the Grail. It was one of the rules of the dream.

He accepted that, but the point was each heartbeat surprised him. Each breath was unlike all others. Each step brought a new world into view … He’d do what he must, yes, but the darkness that waited for him was incidental, even if it destroyed him — a possibility he considered perfectly likely … What mattered was the mystery netted in each flash of light, the contortions of wind sketching shapes in the gleaming rainfall … He still felt a little taller than himself, and that was a towering vantage point, he thought … because the light would also glisten in the air and on the very sword that cut him down, and each following moment would unfold the heart within the heart of time … He felt twelve years old, in a way, and twelve thousand: tireless, open, fascinated, reaching out in every direction, seeing deeper and deeper into the unending reaches of everything, touching with wonder — and in one corner of all this he had a chore to do, a moment to live, to act, and he would take all the power and awareness in him and make something with it, reveal something through it, show and be and be and show … because it was all so incredible and mysterious and exquisite and forever … He felt forever, breathed forever, and felt its pulse, and yet it was unbeat, unbreath, unlight, unshadow … He would never end because he swam in the waters of forever …

“Merlinus,” he said. “I know you can hear me. And you were right. I’ve finally come home. I could have stayed there to begin with.” He smiled, then trotted on, climbing, moving easily as the path zigged and narrowed, as if on calm flatlands …

Broaditch had dropped back about twenty-five yards and had nearly reached where the wall began parallel to the roadway when he caught a liquid shimmer of steel in a lightning flicker barely in time to throw himself aside as the broadsword arced with a silky rip a fraction from his neck. He’d forgotten, he’d forgotten, and was he going to die for that? For stealing this worthless spear he somehow had believed was going to guide him to that light from his dreams? What madness … and now to die with only a leaden lump to show for it, which even Valit had tossed away, he who clung to penny whores … What had possessed him to follow his dreaming to his destruction … ?

The knight advanced from the shadows, blade ready, helmet open. The rain foamed and thinly drummed over him.

“Put down the spear,” he commanded. The wind burbled and whistled through his armor. “Common oaf!”

The common oaf was backing up along the pathway, tilting the weapon for a desperate, hopeless (he believed) thrust.

“Put it down!” the man snarled.

Does
he
fear
it
? Broaditch asked himself.
Is
it
possible
?

He tried a tentative jab with emphasis on tentative, falling back a half-step even with the thrust. But he needn’t have bothered: the warrior winced backward and actually crossed himself.

“So, then!” Broaditch yelled, planting himself firmly.

“I have something here, have I?” He remembered the flash when he’d first touched it. He
knew
that was real and he had found the castle and … yet his mind kept trying to insist he’d struck his head and slept an instant … No, it had been the spear. Why keep fighting the simplest things off? “The holy spear, is it?” He knew the story: the Roman Longinus had eased Christ’s agony by spearing his side, and blood and water had run out, and the weapon had been transformed by the contact …

It
might
as
well
be
true
as
anything
else
, he thought, advancing half a step more as the knight said nothing. In the intermittent light he saw the dove crest on his steel chest.
This
fellow
believes
it
well
enough
…

Then he heard a mortal howl on the wind behind, overlapped by a high-pitched woman’s shriek just as he was thinking:
And
why
did
I
risk
drowning
myself
in
the
moat
and
ten
other
recent
deaths
to
hold
onto
this
thing
? And with the outcry:
Again
I
must
… Giving it up, all of it, the image of escaping fate and finding his family and a peaceful old age, already lunging fiercely at the knight’s face and seeing him retreat so fast that he slipped in the slick mud, went over backward, and went sliding down (
like
a
lad's
sled
) the steep-inclined road beside the curving wall, accelerating rapidly, rebounding off the sides, spinning, waving arms and sword wildly, careening around a bend and out of view. Broaditch was already running back the other way, thinking:
I
always
have
no
choice
…
always
… Heard another shriek.
No
doubt
they
find
her
charms
overpriced
. He was running.
No
choice
… It had to come to this, never mind mages, sages, portents, dreams, and the riptide of fate: it was himself in the end who sent him ever running the wrong way because he had no choice and the wrong way was always right …

He charged the last few yards, concentrating on his footing, flimsy spear cocked as once again his mind doubted everything and told him they’d brush this toy aside and chop him to the liver …

Always running one way, then the other, back and forth, bouncing and re-bouncing through life like a child’s wooden ball on cobbled streets …

He saw them seeming to jump and shift in each shock of light, metallic glitter and gleam, as the armor formed from the shadows. He concentrated on not slipping. There were so many … Had they seen him yet …? Closer … closer … If he could toss them off the road, they’d roll and slide to the seething bottom.