The Grail War (7 page)

A second stone jug of wine was going around the rude table under the greasy, smoky tallow lamplight. Broaditch, Handler, Valit, his brother, Luark, his wife, and a burly neighbor with a missing ear were sitting around a tilted table. Luark was slit-eyed and scowling.

“Ah, those were the days,” the neighbor, Rova, was saying, “and no mistake about it.” He addressed himself mainly to Valit and Luark. Handler nodded agreement sagely.

“What do these young bloods know?” he asked, swilling down more acidic wine.

Broaditch smiled to himself, leaning back in a shadowy corner of the buckled, narrow room. He was sucking at his long Oriental pipe.

“So let it be my treat, b’God,” one-earned Rova said. He winked ponderously. “Pity the married man who has to hold by the hearth tonight.” He laughed.

Handler nodded through his semi-stupor. A dribble of wine was drying along the crease of his chin.

“Arr,” he said, “pity, pity,”

The wife tossed her square head and looked sour.

“Off to the bawds, are you?”

“What a notion!” Rova cried, laughing. “A great, solid man like Handler, there?”

“Aye,” she affirmed. “And will you have him back to his family with pox?”

“Do you hear that?” Rova boomed. “Why, I mean to treat them to nothing of hurt. But it’s a dull life without some loving, eh?”

“I hear there’s great profit in whores,” Valit said thoughtfully.

“Of a sort, boy,” Rova said, “though it be a profit that costs a man.”

“The boy means whoremasters,” Broaditch put in from his corner.

“I know not,” Rova exclaimed, “for every man who owns a wine shop falls sick with the drink.”

“And all bankers are fat,” declared Luark, “and who would not like it so?”

“That’s wisdom,” Rova said.

“Aye,” said the wife, “wisdom. From him, that’s eggs from a goat and milk from a chicken.”

“It were the blow to his head,” Valit assented, as if he’d been asked.

“Shut up,” Handler advised.

“Well,” Rova bantered, “it’s not me inflamed by the devil’s lusts.”

“You told me,” Valit protested, and Broaditch couldn’t tell if it was slyly, “you said you even put horns on the head of Christ.”

“What words are these?” the woman cried out, crossing herself.

“Well,” Rova said and smiled, “not every bride is true to flesh, much less an invisible husband.”

“You’re the devil’s carrier, Rova,” she said, crossing herself again.

“Well, stay off my cart, then,” was the retort.

“Leading men and boys to the whores,” she said, getting angry. “No wonder God drowns the world with such as you in it.”

“What does this mean?” Handler demanded, wobbling on his stool. “What is he saying?”

“That vows are not the soul of purity,” Broaditch put in quite seriously. These questions mattered to him more and more and were not to be put aside with easy cynicism or dull belief. Were the acts of the clergy of any importance to God at all? Did the reasonings of scholars affect the heart for good?

“Or their seal, either,” Rova said.

“You say,” Handler demanded, cocking his head to the side, “you say you have lain with nuns?”

“I lay with none who was chaste.”

Broaditch smiled.

“That covers all cases,” he said.

Rova laughed.

“Speak no more unholy things,” the woman said, “or leave this house.”

Handler was searching Rova’s face with narrowed eyes. He kept licking his lower lip. He was agitated.

“Well,” he insisted on knowing, “do you say truth or lie?”

“What?” Rova wondered.

“Nuns. Have you truly lain with nuns?”

She stood up.

“No more of this talk,” she said. “Is naught still holy?”

“I heard such tales,” Handler went on, “but — ”

“Enough!” she cried.

“Silence your wife, brother,” Valit said maliciously.

She raised an earthen crock.

“I’ll silence somebody,” she announced grimly.

Handler swayed on his stool.

“When I was young,” he declared, “things were not the same …” He shook his head. “Let me tell you this … you worked your lord’s land … you fought … no one but Jews and Italy-men would live in a town … things were different …”

“ … so the priest creeps close to the crack in the door,” Rova was saying as Broaditch, Handler, and Valit reeled up a narrow, mucky alley together behind him, “and sees the lord’s prong standing up straight as a club. So he next — ”

“Where be the damned place?” Handler demanded. “Must we wander in darkness forever?”

“No surprise in that,” Broaditch commented.

“Peace, brothers,” Rova declared, “salvation is at hand.”

Broaditch felt his drunkenness clamping firm and velvety around him. Well, why not? he kept asking himself. Why not steep himself in nonsense for a night? He’d grown so serious over the years. Why not act the fool on purpose for a change? So the saints didn’t do it, it seemed they didn’t want to, to begin with … Maybe the only sin is caring too much one way or the other …

“What is this place?” Valit asked.

“Why, you’ll soon see,” Rova replied, “for if you know not the art of it already, then tonight’s your night to be a man.”

Handler found this amusing. They’d reached a narrow door in the back alley. A shrewish voice was rending someone around a bend; elsewhere there was singing … They went through a second door into hot, wet air, with a smell of cooking food, cloves, perfume, and a sharp, faintly rank odor …

“Is this an inn?” Valit asked.

“Ah-ha,” said Rova, “yet none come to it to rest a night!” He turned to include Broaditch and Handler. “Now, when I stayed in the town of Naples, there was a stew there, the oldest and most magnificent in the country, with girls like angels from heaven … girls stolen and lured from the east, from the far north … He shook his head at the inexpressible wonder of it.

“Was that the high mark of your life?” Broaditch asked him bluntly.

“What’s that?”

“The finest house of whores. Was that the high mark of your life’s ambitions?”

“Could be worse,” Rova said, faintly defensive.

They had entered a high-vaulted chamber lined on either side with canopied beds. Huge wooden tubs of per-fumy, steaming water stood every few paces, with men and women soaping and splashing.

“What use will the memory of that be to you,” Broaditch said, very sober for a moment.

“What use is any memory?” Rova wanted to know.

Broaditch was now contemplating tender hands soaping him in a hot bath. With age such pleasures became almost profound, he thought.

The richly gowned madam, in furs and silks, flanked by a stout ruffian, thick staff cocked over his shoulder, came grandly down the steamy aisle. Handler was uneasy.

“This place be not for the likes of us,” he muttered.

“Peace, friend,” Rova assured him. “So long as coin be in fashion here, so am I in fashion.”

“How did he come by his money?” Valit whispered to Broaditch, or perhaps only to himself, as Rova walked ahead, all smiles, to greet the puffy-faced woman. “It’s known he has more than one of his station rightfully should.” As he said this his face (or so it seemed to Broaditch) showed a strange, sarcastic, intense contempt, and that same, subtle slyness, as well.

“This place be not for the likes of us,” Handler repeated as his son looked at him with obvious scorn.

“Speak for yourself, old fool,” he muttered. “What might suit me, you’d never dream.”

Broaditch was just turning around. He’d just heard a deep moan from behind the curtains of a bed across the aisle. The sound smacked more of the rack than delight, he thought. It repeated over the music that was just starting again in some nearby chamber. Violas, reeds, and a tinny drumbeat. A grinding dance tune.

Handler suddenly sat down on a footstool, bent forward, and expelled one brief splash of vomit on the tiled floor. His son shook his head. Broaditch, after hesitating, parted and curtains and the general candlelight softly glowed on the scene within: a young nude woman lay beside a silver-haired, bony man (on the massive bed that could have slept half a dozen), whose eyes were very wide and unblinking, as if he stared at some wonder up in the canopy, a dagger tilted in his chest, rocking slightly, blood jetting weakly like a failing fountain. The blade flashed soft light over the bed, the terrified woman, and the harsh face still in the act of withdrawing behind the rear curtains.

Broaditch took in the bright, dark, snapping eyes, bushy hair, and instantly recognized him and instantly said, “Lohengrin!”

He stopped there, staring with an expression of weary resignation.

“Your mouth has just slain you and this slut, you blocky oaf.”

And he leaped forward in one terrible motion (and Broaditch’s mind thought:
this
is
death
.) across the mattress, snatching up the dagger (a sudden bloodjet as it came free), and striking a terrific claw-like slash at Broaditch’s throat that barely missed as the big man flung himself back with surprising agility, whipping free his own dirk, crouching, ready, in the aisle.

Lohengrin, leaning out, saw a number of interested spectators and pulled back, cursing and hissing at his escaped victim. “It would be better for you to cut out your tongue! If you speak, I will give you the worst death you could dream!”

The whore was trying to slip unobserved from the bloody bed, breathless with terror. Lohengrin, quite casually, with a vicious final twist, slammed the blade between her breasts, dropping her, with a vague, sighing outcry, to the sheets.

“Please … I want to live …” she murmured.

Lohengrin’s depthless eyes never left Broaditch’s face.

“Remember,” he said and moved back into the shadows through the rear curtains and was gone.

His escaped victim stood there a moment, then stooped forward to see to the girl, who had managed to crawl partway off the mattress, as if swimming face up where she now dangled, draining away onto the yellowish tiled floor.

“It came to nothing in the end,” Parsival was saying to the young knight called (he'd learned) Sir Prang. “I killed a host of men, won back my lands from my relatives with little difficulty … had a son … then a daughter …” They went on through the dim trees. The leaves rustled softly around them. “I turned to the spirit. I touched the least hem of its garment … then lost my grip … I even went to war again, oh, to keep away from home, I admit this … and so it came to be that I killed more men …” The woods seemed to be thinning out. Parsival intended to make a point of discouraging Prang, but, at the same time, he was glad of an ear after so many solitary months.

“I became a great fellow,” he continued, “as, no doubt, you’ve heard.” He smiled sarcastically to himself. “I stood high in the councils of Arthur after he regained his power and was never happy a day with it … And I came to my thirty-sixth year dulled by eating, sleeping, and fucking my fill. Why, I was so dulled that only the memory of the glory I’d touched as a boy had any life. So I joined the Irish monks, shattered my sword, and swore never to cease striving until I walked in that glory again …”

He broke off as they moved across a narrow, moonlit field that sloped up before them. The castle was a dim outline on the crest.

“Well,” he murmured, “I’ve come home again with more gray hairs and a dark heart.” He sighed.

“Sir,” said Prang, “you have already mastered more than …”

“No. I lost it. I lost the glory. Can’t you see that? Men who have never known it never miss it and so may endure their lives. But such as I lose both heaven and earth.” They climbed up the steepening, gleaming slope. Off to the left was the little village of huts. A single can-die seemed to shine down there. “You should understand this,” he said. There were no lights showing in the castle itself, he noted. What was it about a place where you spent childhood? A magic? An intensity that never fades …

“I don’t know about all you say,” Prang demurred, “but I want to fight as you fight. I want to learn that.”

“Why?” Parsival asked over his shoulder.
It
wasn't
that
late
, he was thinking, for no light at all to be showing … Perhaps they’d all gone away, for some reason …

The drawbridge was down, the gates open. They passed the first bodies there lying in the gleam and moon-shadows around the pitch-dark opening.

“Ah,” said Prang quietly, “they went after your family, too.”

Parsival knelt by the first man. The blank eyes gleamed in a bearded face.

“I knew this man,” he murmured. “He served with me under Arthur.”

“How long dead seems he?”

Parsival stood up and headed through the doorway.

“Not long,” he replied.

Prang touched the hilt of his sword and followed.

“Why do you say ‘they’?” Parsival wanted to know. He’d discovered he could not hear thoughts at will. When it happened, it happened.