The Grail War (50 page)

“Do you understand what you have done?” Parsival asked him above the wind and fading rumbles. The flashes were becoming fainter, unspecific …

Clinschor’s teeth churned the muck in his blackened mouth. The rest of his bare head was washed clean at this point. He blew and spat gobs and popped his madly furious eyes in his frenzy to find his voice. Yet all he could do now was listen.

Parsival felt more than mere mud washing away from him, because if he actually had any special powers at his command, it never occurred to him to use them. Just to move and take air and see was awesome enough and magic for a lifetime … He felt comfortable and expectant as this bedraggled human being frothed and flailed at him. He’d have liked to rest, but that could come later. He understood what he had to do here and now. He smiled faintly … The rest would come in its own time. He felt washed down to just a very strong man confronting a terrified, tiring one in torn and sopping robes, pale chest heaving, almost fainting with the effort of each sucking movement, partly sitting on the bog at times, only his frenzy giving him energy now … thrashing … flopping (as Parsival finally took him by the fragile-seeming wrist), shouting, choking, screaming, belching out the clinging mud.

“Why did you do what you did?” Parsival demanded sternly, disarming and shaking him, surprised by his own sudden flurry of murderous energy and outrage, which was mainly disgust at the blind, ridiculous, banal, ignorant meaninglessness. “Why!? Why don’t you realize what you did!?” He was shaking him. “Why!?”

Couldn’t he see it? Now, after all the ugly, senselessness, couldn’t this raving creature understand anything? This soft, fitful, wriggling, clawing, biting …

“Do you understand?!” he boomed into the dripping, startled face and froze his vicious struggles for a moment. “Do you?!” He threw one stony fist into his chest over the heart and the hollow eyes bulged, muck just dribbling steadily from the lips …

Then he yelled again and lashed out, clawed Parsival’s face, leaving two burning streaks of blood across his cheek and got a word or two out at last: “ … wabla … bla … wormbla … wabllitfilth …!”

Parsival hit him in the face, saying, almost calmly, “You idiot.”

Clinschor’s head rocked as he was slapped once … again … he sagged, left eye already swelling shut.

“You blind, blind …
thing?
”

Clinschor closed his bleeding, foamy, muddy jaws over Parsival’s wrist where the light mail didn’t cover, screaming in a continuous, high-pitched, hissing wail, and the angry knight raised his hammer of a fist to break the pale, tendoned neck … And then it washed away, was over, too, and he simply plucked the head from his arm by the lank, sticky hair, lifted him free of the mire in one magnificent, muscle-cracking effort, swayed, and tossed him away to land farther out with a glopping splash.

The easing rain was coming almost straight down now. The thunder was rolling away to the north. There was a brief glisten of moonlight through a rent in the clouds. He saw Clinschor lying on his side, chest laboring, feebly wallowing, his one open eye glaring with unabated and unending fury, coughing and still, hopelessly, spitting and spitting …

What
a
waste
, he thought, starting to slog toward a rocky rise in the ground like a reef. The moonlight winked out and he turned to call into the deeper darkness under the cliff shadow, where he could no longer see the other, thinking:
How
silly
…
how
silly
…

“You could have done so much else!” he shouted into the drizzling darkness. No reply. He shrugged. He hadn’t expected one. “Now, what will you do next?” he yelled over his shoulder. “The world can barely wait!”

He reached the rocks at last and pulled himself free and knelt a minute to regain his breath. The drizzle was misting now. The clouds were clearing from the hill. Faint, silent flickers marked the fading storm …

But in the bog he heard the muffled, hoarse, flat, powerful screech but couldn’t distinguish any clear words, just burbling fragments: “ … wawawawable … I … allabla … willwaa … baallaabaaab … forever-waw … wolblablablawol … nextblubbwaw … blablabo … blo …”

Parsival stood up and started looking for a safe rocky track. The moon floated free for longer this time. The rain pattered vaguely. The air was clean above the burned odor.

He went on without the least urge to look back. He could still hear the streams running down the hillside behind him. He felt expectant, ready … ready to start … ready …

The moon was so clear and silent, he thought. The whole world and tomorrow waited … He was sore, cut, weary, but awake, shockingly awake, listening to everything: the freshening breeze, the distant crying of a night-bird, splashing and spattering of falling water draining through the steep forests, running, running, soaking into the charred lowlands …

Broaditch opened his eyes (one was still blank) and saw the bright moon in a sky of scattered clouds that looked like beaten silver at the edges, going by very fast, shimmering among the reversed trees suspended above another moon and rushing sky … He shut them again, then felt the blood beat in his head. Reopened his eyes and understood: he lay on his back, tilted downslope, looking reversed at the flooded landscape. The country to the south seemed one vast, glimmering lake with occasional islands.

He carefully righted himself. Overflows still trickled past him. He was at least one hundred feet below the path, he estimated, peering up and around through his right eye as he began to carefully work his way back up the treacherous slide.

He wondered how long he’d been unconscious … He’d have dropped all the way down and drowned if he hadn’t hit this soft ridge and stuck …

His head pounded and the wound on his face was throbbing. He lightly touched the sword cut, then realized, lying perfectly still, flattened to the mud-slope, the slice went across the eye he was looking through. The left one was blank. The rain had rinsed the blood away and it was unharmed … but what had blinded the other …? He remembered the incredibly brilliant, searing flash … had some difficulty arranging the scattered memory fragments … Had lightning really hit his eye? Had that lead sphere or whatever it was attracted it? It had split open, he was sure of that, and then something burst in an unbearable flash … At the knight … Lohengrin … at his head, the lightning must have hit his head. That was the only possible explanation he was interested in at the moment as he continued the long, inching climb flat on his tilted body … sliding up … balancing …

Up on the road he found Irmree huddled under the overhanging rock face holding Valit in her arms and crooning or keening softly. Their blood was mixed and caked all over themselves. She was shivering. He covered her with some knight’s wet, torn cloak. The almost full moonlight was very bright and he easily found (as the memories replaced themselves) the imprint of where Lohengrin had fallen and must have lain until the rain dwindled to misting, because his tracks were clear heading north on the path toward where (not far ahead) it ran behind the wall. He found a bit of broken tooth there and what probably was a thinned splash of blood.

Well
, Broaditch thought,
the
lightning
didn't
kill
him
,
nor
the
blow
,
either
…
But
was
it
lightning
…?
What
had
that
fire
really
been
… ?

It all seemed impossible, mad, nightmarish. He refused to think about it … He walked the other way and found the spear sticking straight up from the earth. He reached for it, then pulled his hand back without touching the shaft.

I’ve
one
eye
left
,
it
seems
.
I'll
try
to
keep
the
other
by
watching
closely
what
I
take
up
…
He
looked around, not quite smiling.
You
got
me
here
…
if
you
exist
at
all
…
for
you
never
show
yourselves
at
need
…
to
do
whatever
had
to
be
done
,
I
suppose
,
for
I
know
not
even
this
much
for
certain
…
Now
I
only
pray
you
never
come
out
of
your
recesses
…
I’ll
keep
my
good
eye
,
thank
you
,
from
peering
into
dreams
and
lightning
bolts
!
You
have
my
vow
on
it
!

Because he was determined to go home — if it still existed. If there were one stone standing, he’d put another and another on it. He was limping and half-sighted, but, by heaven, he was going home! Let the nightmare go … He’d rest and then see about that poor woman … What was her name …? Irmree … Ah, poor Valit …

He eased himself down until he was sitting with his back to the stony side looking out over the glimmering, flooded lowlands.

He was going home, no mistake about it. Let be what was. He’d cross the desolate country and see what he had to see there, if he must, but he’d get home. He sighed and wished he still possessed that Oriental pipe … long lost … He sighed and yawned … The throbbing in his head was gradually subsiding. He stretched and yawned.

Rest
…
then
get
on
with
it
…

He partly turned and rested his big hand on Irmree, patted and soothed her shoulders and neck with both his eyes closed. He tried to hush her keening as she pressed the young man’s body to herself.

“Peace,” he told her gently. “Peace … rest … we ever keep our love, I’ve come to think, woman …” He nodded. “What we love, we ever keep …”

Alienor was already up with the children when Lampic awoke. He took the situation in quickly. She’d just fed them by the fire. The boy was yawning and rubbing his eyes. The little girl was running on the grass, back and forth, trailing a length of string. The sun had just risen above the hills behind them, shining on the long wall of charred forest that undulated with the sloping countryside as far as could be seen in either direction. Here and there patches of smoky haze still smoldered.

Tikla was hopping in a little circular dance, wriggling the string, singing. He watched Alienor’s fine-boned, hard, worn hands skillfully gathering and repacking the sack of dried food. She’d bound her hair back severely from her face and forehead. The streaks of gray and coppery red glinted in the pale, mild sun.

The man understood and looked faintly rueful. He blinked, thought he’d try, anyway. He still felt a flush of springtime within himself. Anyway, just having survived was something that brought youth into his heart! And the night before …

“So you be up and going?” he opened with.

“As you plainly see,” she returned without showing anything one way or the other, “unless you come blind or your brain died in your sleep.”

He slightly smiled.

“I have family in the north,” he said, almost laconically. “The winters be hard, but there be compensations … I was a lad in the north country. There be compensations.” He watched her.

“Then you must have younger bones still than I,” she informed him, still neither looking nor not looking at him. She stood up and slung the sack over her shoulder. “For the cold.”

“Was it that bad, then?” He waited. Nothing. He smiled faintly. “I find you hardly old, lady Alienor.”

“Lady, is it?” She had to smile and look at him now. “So you’ve raised my station. Be you a lord in low garments, then?”

He smiled.

“You’re a right lady, Alienor,” he told her, yawning and stretching, still alert to her reactions. “Say what you will.”

He sat fully upright, covering hide falling away from his bare torso. His body was lean, corded, hairy.

“So I met you,” he remarked, slightly petulant, “in the wrong season.”

“Did you?”