The Grail War

by Richard Monaco

  “ … 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.

  “Because more than one seeks your life. So much I feel free of oath to say.”

  The older man had stopped in the courtyard.

  “No,” he said, as if to a third party and startled Prang for a moment. “I won’t be drawn back into that.”

  “Eh?” Prang grunted. “What’s that, then?”

  “I won’t,” Parsival obscurely concluded and walked on through the inner walled yard, stepping carefully over and around the bodies, armored and unarmored. The raw blood stink was still in the air.

  “It seems it were a good fight,” Prang observed quietly.

  Parsival didn’t respond. They’d entered the main hall. He’d been expecting it since crossing the moat and now he finally faced it completely, let the pain and shock in to himself, and realized he would survive it. So it was that he said nothing after lighting a torch and looking at his wife and daughter sprawled together, hacked to bloody tatters. He said not a word. The sooty torch fire billowed around him, flipping his distorted shadow around the bare stone walls. Neither face was intact; his child’s was shredded. But the necklace he knew glinted around her neck. He bent and took it, gripped it in his powerful hands as Prang came up beside him.

  “Good Jesus,” he said.

  Parsival just stood there in the flame and dark, the golden chain swaying in his fingers.

  “I won’t,” he whispered and shut his eyes against a terrible outcry he felt gathering within him. He stood there for a long time … And then he felt the movements before he actually heard the faint scrape of steel. He instantly threw the torch across the hall toward the open archway behind them. He moved Prang quietly aside as the arrow thummed past and clinked dully on the far wall. The flames showed an armored, shadowy figure standing there, with others at his back.

  “So,” said Prang, drawing his blade.

  “Wait,” Parsival said, trembling with suppressed energy.

  The bowman and two or three other knights entered the chamber. Their faces seemed to fill and hollow out as the flames wavered.

  “It were well we waited,” the leader said, “eh, Parsival?” He seemed philosophic. “You may as well stand still and take it like a man, you and your friend there. No sense in ducking about like a stricken goose.”

  “Pick up one of these swords here, my lord,” Prang muttered aside, “and we’ll show them something.”

  “No,” Parsival said. “Follow me. There are at least twenty more without.”

  “Eh?”

  “And armored.”

  “How can you tell this?”

  “I can tell.” As the men advanced across the floor in the sputtering light of the thrown torch, the chief knight nocked a shaft and half-drew his bowstring.

  “Prepare yourselves,” he said.

  “Follow me,” Parsival hissed. And he ducked back and to the side as the second arrow zipped by, stooped briefly to snatch up a sword and ax from the litter on the bloody stones, and hurled the ax (without breaking stride) at the lead knight, who deflected the terrific blow with his shield (staggered back) into the man on his right, who screamed and went down in a flash of sparks. “Christ,” murmured Prang, “what a recovery.”

  “Lancelot,” Parsival called out, sure of it now.

  The stocky knight threw aside his bow, stooped, and tossed the torch into the center of the chamber, where the fitful light outlined all of them.

  “There is no escape,” he pointed out.

  Parsival seemed quite at ease. Prang noted. His own heart was racing as if the whole space echoed with ii “Why?” Parsival wanted to know calmly.

  “Because you’re surrounded.”

  “Why is it necessary?”

  “What does it matter?” Lancelot said, advancing. “Why bear yet another burden into hell?”

  The stricken knight on the floor was sighing now, very rapidly. Prang could see him kicking sporadically in the wavering shadows. Several more men had entered the place and were keeping close along the far walls, gradually circling to cut them off.

  Parsival was silent, unmoving, concentrating, trying now to touch Lancelot in the way he’d learned from the monks: to grip him invisibly with the hands of his soul, to throw off his timing. But he was solidly blocked. A wall of will held him away. He decided the man must have a talisman. His master had explained that a talisman collected power the way a cup held water, that the power could act as if the wizard himself were actually present to baffle spells and deflect attacks …

  “Tell me, Lancelot!” he demanded.

  “Now!” The legendary warrior signaled and he and several spearmen charged forward.

  Parsival plucked at Prang’s arm and they retreated quickly toward the stair, though three armored men waited there with leveled spears. Prang was certain they’d be held up long enough for the others to fall upon their rear. He was grimly amused to think he was suddenly on the other side of the fight and about to die for no reward and in obscurity to boot at the hands of the most famous knight in the world.

  Except, incredibly, the first attacker seemed to skid, as if on sheer ice, and fall even as he thrust so a way opened between the other two that Parsival smashed through, cutting one sweep over his head that sliced both spears short. Prang jumped over the strangely fallen man and followed his reluctant teacher. The man still struggled to gain his feet, as if he walked in grease. Prang had noticed nothing as he passed, he reflected, cutting one good blow on the upraised sword of the man at his heels …

  Once on the landing above, they raced down a twisting series of passageways until Parsival lost the pursuit. Prang followed by sound and an occasional moonlit glimpse as they passed embrasures … They stopped in a high, dim hall. There were columns leading to a pair of raised thrones on a dais.

  “I last looked upon my mother on this spot,” the older man said. “Sitting here … she bid me godspeed in the world … I was impatient to go. I thought I’d be back before too long …” He smiled faintly to himself and shook his head, then sighed.

  “Sir,” said Prang, “for God’s sake, let’s be off.”

  “There’s no hurry. I sealed the door behind us.”

  “What? I didn’t see that. Is this magic?”

  “There is no magic — only what you cannot understand at the moment.”

  It was like praying: you couldn’t explain why, you couldn’t grasp the mechanism of the underlying intelligence and movement of all life, but you could learn to trust it. You could throw it out from yourself and simply trust it. Like walking in the dark with shut eyes, your body could see for you if you totally gave yourself up to it …

  “Well?” Prang wanted to know.

  Parsival started walking again. They left the chamber. He remembered his mother’s face for a moment: pale, glowing, wordless, beseeching … wordless …

  Well, he knew he’d have to have blood now. The part of his awareness that was free saw it as absurd, that pain would lead only to pain and resolve nothing … But he had to have it now … the chains of custom …

  He stopped in a narrow cell. An iron-bound door was bolted shut and locked. A dim ray of moonlight fell there.

  “A way out?” Prang wondered.

  “Yes.”


  “Have you the key?”

  “There is none. My mother had my father’s weapons sealed here forty years ago.”

  “What? Was she mad?”

  “Some said so. But she was not.”

  Her subtle form floated between his eyes and the glaring world … blurred, dimmed its reality.

  “Cannot we be off?” Prang said, impatient. “For all we can tell, they may have surrounded the castle.”

  “I don’t think they have,” Parsival said, staring at the door. “You will have to stand up to Lancelot while I deal with the others.”

  “What? What are you saying to me?" Prang was incredulous.

  “Don’t try to win against him. Just stay alive for a few minutes. Turn and defend, keep turning and defending. If he finds you still he'll beat you flat.”

  Parsival reached and gripped the lock in his hands. He began to twist it. His body was relaxed, Prang noted, and his face peaceful, as if he prayed — and yet the metal began to bend, and then, after an interminable moment in which Prang’s heart pounded, iron and wood parted and the incredible warrior pulled the door open. He lit a torch with flint and they wound their way down a spiral stone staircase in a whisper of fine dust.

  Even well below ground level the stones were still smooth and dry. At the bottom they entered a passageway and then a low chamber, where the smoky flames gleamed and glimmered on a wall, hung with old, in-wrought armor and massive weapons.

  Parsival stood there a long, silent moment. Prang was testing the heft of a mace.

  “Your father must have been a strong man,” he observed with appreciation.

  Parsival was binding on a suit of red and gold chain mail. It mainly protected his torso and thighs. He tied his ragged robes closed over the steel.

  “This mace pleases me,” Prang said.

  “I recommend you throw it at Lancelot ere you come to grips,” the older knight advised. “I tell you, dance like a juggler for as long as you can.”

  Prang looked interested. A flame light hollowed his eye sockets and cheeks.