“I have no destination at the moment,” a resonant voice replied, “so I cannot be lost.”
“You could be lost to the light of God,” Broaditch surprised himself by saying.
The bass voice seemed to approve.
“Your own words have chosen you, friend,” it said out of the cowl folds.
The thwarts of both boats were inches apart now as they slid up and dropped and rocked in tandem, as though invisibly joined.
“Who are you?” Broaditch wanted to know. He glanced and saw that Valit still slept.
“A man in a boat.”
“A sailor?”
“Well, say that I fish.”
“Where are your nets and hooks … and baits?”
The other laughed, surprisingly mellow and relaxed.
“My fish,” he remarked, “know well enough when they’re caught.” Then the tones become forceful and grim. “If you survive the looming storm, you have a task laid upon you.”
“Are you a philosopher, sir?” Broaditch gripped the boat side as the waves steepened and tipped them. “How can you command me?”
“You command yourself. You are a man who only hides from truth because once you understand it you have no choice. You have hidden well, but the sea has brought you where your feet would not.”
Broaditch felt intensely alert, though a little dizzy from the gyrations of the waves. This was all so matter-of-fact, and he found himself accepting it in the same relaxed way it was being put across.
“Beware of your companion there,” the cowled man advised. “He is blind … you follow the brightness and heed nothing else. Find your way and you may pluck what is sacred from the devil’s lap.”
“Pluck what?”
“It has fallen to you to find what the greatest have lost.”
“But what? pluck what? … Am I asleep again?”
“When are you ever awake? When can you tell?”
“But what?"
“Would you know the Grail if you saw it?”
“So you’re a holy man? A master?” He was strangely amused by this, too. “A wizard?” Or a madman.
“What a burden to you these words are.”
“Am I far from shore, sir?”
“Farther than you think. If you survive the storm, then you’ll learn more. The wind and fury are close upon you.”
A black scud of cloud came whipping overhead and the boats heeled in a savage gust. Valit sat up suddenly as the other craft moved off into the wild mist and mounting seas.
“Surrender your life!” the man had shouted back through the veering winds. “And be sustained into the land of death, my broad and foolish fish!” And then the storm broke over them with astounding violence.
Broaditch shut his eyes and then opened them, as if to awaken. He wanted to think he’d been asleep.
“My God!” cried Valit. “We’re doomed!”
Perhaps I have done all I can ever hope to do, Parsival thought.
He stared through the narrow slit window at the setting moon. It was early morning. Prang was asleep across the corridor in his own room. They had come to the castle of a man who’d been Parsival’s companion at Arthur’s court for a time after the Kingdom had been partially re-established. Earl Bonjio. A short, dark, part-Spanish fellow … Arthur’s beard had gone silver and his hair was thin. His sister had come to live at Camelot and, it was said by some, supplied the steel for the spine of her brother’s prong … Well, Parsival remembered, he never really knew the king that intimately … Arthur was ever wary of him, for some reason … He remembered riding back from a tourney with Bonjio, the horses seeming to float through a mellow, grayish midsummer dusk, hooves virtually soundless on the yielding turf as sloping fields drifted by. They’d been drinking mead. Bonjio had just tossed away the empty stone flask.
“So,” the dark man was saying, “how did you elude Gawain?”
“When?”
“After you’d struck down the varlet, outside your castle. You said you were nude and had just finished with a woman and then were set upon.”
“Ah, yes.” Parsival remembered. “The details are unclear.”
Bonjio smiled. His dark eyes were very shrewd and watchful.
“Wine will blur them every time,” he remarked.
“No. It was the next day. I was sober …” — he frowned slightly — “and drunk, too …”
“Well?”
“I can’t explain this thing … but that was the best moment of my life …”
“What?”
Parsival stared across the field at the steep slope topped by Camelot castle. At that time the first peasant houses were going up on the ridge, and new crops sprouted and ripened on what were once jousting meadows.
“Anyway,” Parsival said after a moment or two, “Gawain and those men left. I went back to my wife.”
“Did you put on a robe, at least?” Bonjio grinned.
“I suppose so … I haven’t seen Gawain since.”
“They say he’s in Ireland or across the channel.” Bonjio carefully wiped off and munched a piece of fruit. He sucked the juices with each bite.
“What happened to the woman?” he asked at length as they were just starting up the long hill on the dusty road. A peasant in a mule-drawn cart was laboring before them as slow as could be. “Wasn’t she the wife of a guest?”
Parsival was abstracted. The mellow day drew him deeper into memory.
“What? Who?” he wondered, blinking back.
“The woman you’d lain with.” Bonjio licked the wound his mouth had made in the ripe peach. “On the hillside.”
Parsival remembered.
“It’s been ten years,” he murmured, “nearly that …”
Bonjio cocked his head at him.
“Was she slain?” he pursued.
Parsival shook his head.
“I can’t recall her name,” he said, “but she came back later, wearing a shepherd’s cloak. She’d been battered a little but wasn’t so bad as I’d expected.” He smiled faintly.
“Liked her men, eh? Well, I can understand that, only too well.”
“That isn’t supposed to be possible.”
Bonjio nodded.
“So they say,” he admitted, “but I have such a desperate weakness myself that I can understand any other.”
Parsival was interested.
“Which weakness?” he wondered. “I lose count of mine.”
“Yes, yes … but for the flesh … the flesh!” He shook his head and worked the pit into his jaw and sucked it. “It makes me tremble. My soul is slit when I see a beautiful woman. I must have them, you understand.”
Parsival shrugged.
“Most men must,” he noted, “it would appear.”
Bonjio leaned over and touched his mailed arm. His eyes were intent, a little wild, as if the thought alone released anguish and need.
“Not as I,” he half-whispered. “How is it with you, Sir Parsival? No, tell me this …”
They were just passing the cart, a bony old woman gripped the reins and didn’t look aside from where she stared at the slow hooves.
“With me … ?” Parsival mused a moment. “I enjoy fucking as much as any other, I suppose …” He looked down over the sweet blue tinted valley as they climbed. The new grain sparkled and rippled. “It’s brief enough a satisfaction,” he added.
“It doesn’t eat you alive? It doesn’t make you reel with need?” Bonjio was very serious. “You never want to creep on your knees to suck the bare feet of a young maid?”
“Creep?”
Bonjio partly smiled. His eyes were lidded, sardonic, self-mocking, and serious.
“In a way of speaking,” he amended, “though I think I’d crawl on my belly like a serpent if it came to that.”
“I don’t understand,” Parsival said neutrally.
“Then I make you out as both lucky and unfortunate, great knight though you are.” He sucked in a deep, slow breath and shook his head, as if
to clear it.
“I enjoy it,” Parsival reflected and repeated, “as much as the next man, I think.” He turned to the other. “Why is it so with you?”
“Ah,” said Bonjio, “why, indeed …” He uncorked the wine flask and tipped it up to his lips again. A crease of dribble showed like blood at his lips.
“Is that an answer?”
“No, I haven’t one.” He tucked away the drink. “I have only the burning.”
“That you can’t quench,” Parsival mused.
“That I can’t quench,” the other man agreed.
The moon was suddenly down behind the hills. He kept staring out over the lightless castle grounds. He felt his outrage loosening its hold on him like tired fingers … It took so much energy to hate … They were dead and that was that. He discovered he didn’t even want to kill Lancelot, not really, not deeply. He frowned. It would be no better, he reflected, than destroying the sword that slashed them. Lancelot was no more than a weapon. And it was done with … All these things seemed like shadows, like the play of vicious children caught and twisted in their ugly imaginings, which, after all, were just imaginings. Waking dreams … He sighed. What would one more dead man prove? …
He let his head rest on the cool stone of the window arch. He stood there weary and strong.
Should I weep for all my wasted days, oh, God? I missed my way so many times. Enough for many men … I’m dead to this world and blind to heaven … I but mark days to the grave …
A flash of color moved in his mind, bright, rich green trees flowing past, rocking with the uneven motion of the bony horse under him, climbing toward the massive castle wall that towered to a stunning height above the trees. The holy castle. And, he concluded, it might as well have been imaginary …
“Sir Parsival,” a lady’s voice said, and he turned.
It was the earl’s wife, Unlea, a light-haired, ripe woman, face and body very soft, eyes large and yielding. She had on a rose-pink, low-cut gown. Those eyes were always slightly widened, as if she were about to be amazed. She smiled a great deal and, as he’d noted, wasn’t an elaborate or coquettish sort of woman. He’d liked her immediately. He liked frank people.
Whenever he reached an impasse, he thought wryly, smiling, there was always a woman around. Perhaps they were the signposts to detours.
They looked at one another in silence for a while. She didn’t seem too uneasy.
“Well,” she finally said, biting lightly on her lower lip, “there is always pleasure.”
He rubbed his beard with a forefinger.
“Or war,” he replied, “or whatever you like.”
He just noticed she was holding a long, slender taper. The flame wavered and moved shadows, as of passing time, across her face.
“Or little things that hurt no one,” she added.
He sat down facing her on a stool and rocked back and forth. Then he was still.
“I have never, lady,” he found himself saying, “felt such an emptiness before or behind me.”
She came closer. Her feet were noiseless in furred slippers. A jewelless crimson chain circled her throat. He smelled a light perfume now.
“Why press yourself beyond the natural limits?” she wondered.
“What tells you I do?”
She shrugged.
“It’s clear enough, sir,” she informed him. “You’ve been a king, a priest, and God knows what else.”
He saw the castle again, vivid, solid in jewel-bright autumn air, the golden, flaming forest, the crisp breeze, the immense bronze gleaming gate across the moat starting to swing open. White, wild swans were on the green-black water, and the startling, towering clouds mounting above, framing the bright towers …
“God knows,” he said at length.
“Why not?”
“What?”
“Learn to play?” She was, he saw, quite serious.
“Play?” He frowned. “Like a lad? Ah, I played later than was the rule, they tell me.”
“No,” she corrected, “not child’s play.”
He studied her or tried to. He was thinking how he might have her. She was extraordinarily tender and easy-moving, he was thinking. Well, he was always easily attracted, though he didn’t creep on his knees, he thought, remembering her husband’s old expression. He wondered if he could have her, at that … The mating reflex came back, he noted, as if it had never been suppressed into ice in the monk’s mountains … He smiled faintly to (or at) himself again. In his mind he kept seeing the vast gate opening, a glimpse of walls, bright pennants, movement, sun, shadow …
“I’ve done all those things, as well,” he told her.
She shook her head, eyes widening a little.
“No,” she said, “I can see you never have.”
“Don’t speak foolishly, woman.” He frowned down at the dull stone floor. She isn’t really interested, he thought.
“I see more than you know,” she told him, reaching out and touching his head, stroking his fine, brownish-blond hair with glints of white here and there. “Poor Parsival.”
Her hand was very hot on his cheek. He half-consciously held it and brushed the fingers with his lips.
I feel so burned and stiff and chill … and I turn aside again … as if I actually knew where I was going in the first place …
The gate stayed partly open in his memory. He wasn’t even certain it was memory anymore. Time had eaten the drawn edges …
Lohengrin contented himself thinking he must have convinced Prince Modred to take a pilgrimage to Rome, at the very least. Too bad he hadn’t been able to kill him, but that was fate and a shying horse. He expected no pursuit and none came. He marched on through the sun-spattered undergrowth among golden wild flowers and buzzing bees.
He reached his mount, loosed it, and swung up. He considered his problem: most men were fools and full of fear. His own advantage largely lay in his lack of concern for what bound, or at least impeded, others. He believed he had no distracting feelings. He was concentrated. Aim truly, fight well, or die. And die, too. The rest was philosophy and poetry. He’d once watched a famous scholar, robes flapping, crawling and moaning over a steaming dung heap behind a barn. The church where he’d just lectured that morning stood across the cow yard, golden cross gleaming in the noon glare. He’d offended the local lord in some fashion, by some phrase or other, and so he crawled in the dung, gasping, choking, terrified as several men-at-arms followed him with their spears. His face and the side of his green robe were bloody.
“Show us your learning, why don’t ye?” a round-faced soldier mocked.
“Oh, he’s learned, he is,” another laughed, a lean redhead with a raw, swollen nose.
Lohengrin had been about fifteen at the time. His father had been away for several months in the Holy Land, it was reported. Lohengrin remembered his relief that his father was gone. No tension at home … He’d been exploring the countryside on his pony and had stopped in this town to buy bread and cheese.
The spearmen had surrounded the scholar on all sides.
“Go on,” one said. “Man must eat to stay alive, eh?”
This remark produced an astounding roar of laughter and approval that baffled Lohengrin until he saw the middle-aged, suddenly broken man, with a spear point pressing into his back, kneeling in the filth, cup a handful of dung and hold it, with shut eyes, before his face.
“That’s it, master!” encouraged the round face in greasy leathers and iron cap. “Eat your fill — you need share with no one.” Laughter.
“He dallies,” raw nose put in, grinning, showing yellowed stumps and gaps in his mouth.
“Kill him,” suggested another, jabbing his spear.
“Quiet, brother,” raw nose ordered. “He but most properly and piously says his grace.”
“Or makes his peace with God,” an on-looking farmer said.
“Him?” round face declared, hearing this comment. “Oh, he’ll eat his supper, all right, won’t he? There’s a go
od un. He wants to live to gather more wisdom.” His spear point prodded the man’s side. “The grovelin’ wretch!”
“I’d die first,” said another soldier, a young man with grim, flat features.
“That so, youngblood?” raw nose said. “Why don’t you take his place and see how death stirs your appetite?”
Youngblood looked grimmer and uneasy, Lohengrin noticed. Then suddenly he put his spear to the scholar’s throat.
“Go on,” he said, “and be done with it!”
“Or you’ll make him a new mouth, eh?” Round face liked this idea.
“Go on!” youngblood shouted.
The trembling man cried out: “God forgive me, but I must live!” And still with shut eyes, he pressed the rank handful into his mouth and fell forward, gagging.
“Keep chewin’, you grovelin’ wretch!” round face added.
The laughter died away fairly fast. Lohengrin was impressed. This was something he knew he’d never forget. As the crowd broke up, the young man, as the scholar was spitting and gagging, suddenly ran his spear through his stomach, a blank, contemplative look on his stolid face. The shocked man was pinned to the dunghill, gasping, blood trickling from his stained, choked mouth. He whimpered a little.
“You’d done as well, fellow,” youngblood said gravely, “never to have ate no shit at all.”
Lohengrin might have dated the formation of certain of his values from that afternoon. He recalled it, for some reason, riding, heading northwest on a dusty track of road.
A plan was forming, step by step. The Duke’s actual army was small. He himself had the doubtful loyalty of enough cutthroat knights and others to stand up to His Grace alone … So there was someone behind and above, as there always must be … someone with vast power who, for some reason, could not come into the open just now … Why not …? Who …? As he rode through the lengthening afternoon, he pondered the question: How many had the blood to even aspire to Arthur’s seat without having to hold it daily by sheer force …? Not many … And he’d already killed several himself, under orders … How many could be left …? They’d have to have blood at least as good as his own or his father’s … Nonsense, the old bastard had renounced everything. True he’d fought with Arthur and at the gates of Jerusalem for power, but that was long ago and out of despair, or so he said … But, still, suppose the pure great one was depressed enough to want to be in charge of the world again? He wondered if anyone else had thought of that … Well, he’d have to consider it as a possibility only, for now … Lohengrin needed more men. That was a simple fact. Most knights these days, as the saying went, had a bony horse, a one-eyed squire, and an elder brother enjoying the fief … In his own case, his father held what he had through his wife, and the only lands left to Lohengrin contained the old toy castle in the half-deserted north, where his father, Parsival, grew up with a few pock-faced serfs scraping the cold, arid soil. No, thank you! That was no gift, he thought — more of a curse … But there were many such partially disinherited men drifting around these days; that was a thought …
The Grail War Page 9