The Grail War

by Richard Monaco

  Prang took a long, deep breath and glanced from the now silent lady back to the man. She had nodded again.

  “We must go on,” Parsival repeated, eyes intense and wide. “For love … for love … There’s no turning back.”

  “God shield you, then,” the young man feelingly declared. “I will be silent and say I’ve seen you not. And for her sake.”

  Because Bonjio doesn’t care to slay a second wife, Parsival thought.

  “No,” he said, taking a few steps in pursuit as Prang, with a bowing farewell to Unlea, turned his horse and headed back into the thickening night along the river bend. “No,” he repeated, not even caring if Prang heard him …

  He kept his back to her. She didn't speak. He watched the faint fire gleams on Prang's armor fade to a hinted afterglow beside the dimly silver rushing water.

  My God Lord Christ, he thought over and over, am I losing this, too …? Am I going to lose this, too … ?

  Broaditch felt the rasping first sawstroke of the ragged knife split his ear; felt the blood spurt and run down his cheek into his beard as he struggled in Balli’s soft, irresistible grip, feeling smothered in the overwhelming, rotting, fecal stink of the mad halfwit. He didn’t register the other voice at first as Balli drew back somewhat, blade still poised to saw again.

  “Hold!” was the shout. “Hold! You wit not the true law!”

  This, Broaditch noticed, seemed the right track, for he was tossed aside, bleeding, stunned, as Balli turned to face the newcomer. He was surprised to see Valit in the doorway, albeit ready to fly, yet theatrically and still arrogantly there.

  “Balli knows law!” the mountainous being cried in anger. “Balli has seen. Balli has heard.”

  My God in the highest heaven, Broaditch thought, but this creature is the whole world in more than his vast and unyielding size. He gasped and pressed his sleeve to his wound, which, while shallow, stung terribly. He's as senseless!

  “No,” Valit insisted, sneering, petulant, “he has a right you cannot fail to grant.”

  What? To cut his own ears off? Broaditch wondered. Better if he’d argued with the tort of a twenty-pound stone, he felt … though that might have won no judgment considering the knotted head in question, he dimly concluded.

  “Balli grants no rights!” was the reasoned reply. “You’re a thief yourself! Balli — ”

  “Balli me great arse,” Valit sneered. “You fat and witless shithole.” This seemed, for some cause lost on Broaditch, to check the giant again. “Be still and hear me! You say you must follow law?”

  “Balli follows law. Yes. So I take this thief’s ears and hands and — ”

  Ah, yes, Td forgotten the hands, thought Broaditch.

  “But he may call on God to judge the case, fat sack,” Valit pronounced, leaning almost jauntily against the door frame, the starry night at his back.

  “God?” Balli was uncertain.

  “The combat,” Valit said triumphantly. “He has the right.”

  “How?” Broaditch groped. “What? Whom?”

  “The combat?” Balli frowned, squinting up his single perpetually surprised-looking eye.

  “It’s truth,” insisted Valit.

  “Trial by combat,” Broaditch said, trying to regain his feet, “against this monstrosity?”

  Valit shrugged.

  “Well,” he said, “could you be worse off than at this moment, brave Broaditch?”

  “If so,” came the muttered reply as the brave finally got to his feet, “you’ve found the way.” He stood stolidly there, dabbing at his ear.

  Balli, for his own convoluted, fixed reasons, had to accept, and the prospect gradually was coming to please him. He nodded after a little time.

  “Balli is just,” he declared. “It shall be as you say. Balli has seen the knights do this combat …” He beamed, for the first time so far as Broaditch had witnessed, and the effect was not encouraging. “It shall be as you say. And you are his fighter!” he told Valit, who went white.

  “What?” he said. “I — ”

  Balli, with his terrible, fluid speed, had leaned over and yanked the young man inside.

  “Now choose weapon,” his roundness said. “Cudgel? Fine blade?” He held up the notched knife. “You choose. Balli has justice.” He was drooling a little, batting his reddened eye, pursed lips working like, Broaditch imagined, an anus, sucking in and out …

  He's the very world, Broaditch said to himself again.

  “There’s only one way to defeat the world,” he called to the terrified Valit, who looked wild-eyed at him. “And I thank you for coming in good time, young sir.”

  “What?” Valit wanted to know. “What way?”

  “Trick it and run. Else we fall overmatched by a mountain of vicious dullness.”

  “Choose!” Balli insisted, shaking the reluctant defender of the innocent by the shoulders. “Choose!”

  “Choose,” Broaditch confirmed gravely. “It matters little enough what. But choose as the world tells you.”

  Morgan LaFay was fully armored and rode better than a man, Sir Gaf remarked to himself. The bishop was convinced she wanted Arthur’s crown herself, but Gaf knew better: she had a purpose, a belief, a plan for the country, something Arthur had failed or refused. She never spoke of it openly, but he knew the idea was ever with her.

  The clouds were low, stretched out, gray. The leaves were going gray and brown now. A chill drizzle was falling, rattled faintly on the fallen leaves.

  Gaf glanced behind at the line of mounted and marching men. They’d gathered troops from half a dozen minor lords in the past weeks and more were promised. They were building a fair-sized army. The problem was there seemed to be no clear concentration of the enemy. In a way, no one was sure just who the enemy was: British warriors were apparently fighting isolated, savage raids with other scattered lords … and then there were the supposed masses of foreigners in the south …

  Morgan seemed confident: she’d said they’d engage a main body well before the first snows … Well, he reflected, that had to come from magic arts, because, speaking as a seasoned fighter, there simply was no solid intelligence of the enemy …

  “There’s nothing to go on,” he said to the armed bishop, who turned his fanatical glance and hooked, bristling eyebrows on him. “We hardly know where we’re riding or into what fate.”

  “God will make it plain, soon enough,” was the somewhat impractical (he thought) reply.

  “Well, well,” Gaf said, “she leads us, as if He whispered in her ear.”

  “The lady is a good Christian. She long since gave over her heathenish arts and necromantic studies.” The bishop nodded in full agreement with himself. “Unlike,” he added, “that false and conjurous Merlinus Magnus.”

  “Ah, Merlin,” Sir Gaf said, curious. “And what was his fate, pray? Has any of your listening priests heard? They say only Arthur knew how to summon him.”

  The prelate crossed himself, shifting in his saddle. The light rain beaded on his armor and frock.

  “That wizard,” he said uneasily, “lives with his father, the devil.”

  “But,” objected the other, “Arthur was a great and Christian ruler and would have had no traffic with — ”

  “The likes of Merlinus Magnus,” the other explained, “can deceive any mortal not armed and sheltered by His angels.”

  Sir Gaf considered a moment, watching the misty, drab forest flow past. Hooves and feet were muffled on the damp turf.

  “So,” he murmured, just loud enough for his religious companion to hear, “any of us might well be deceived by a witch of a warlock.” He smiled, not having to actually mention Morgan by name. He enjoyed the Bishop clearing his throat, looking uncomfortable and displeased.

  Frell had just said something resoundingly inconsequential, Wista realized. Recently this sort of thing mattered less and less to him. Without really thinking about it, he came to spend more and more time with her and found himself relaxed and often talking
freely. Well, she was pretty, he thought, looking at her profile again: delicate, haunted by nervousness, graceful …

  She sat beside him on a ram skin. They’d just finished an outdoor breakfast. The light rain had stopped; the earth and air were still dampish. A few strokes of sun broke through here and there and brought steam from the ground.

  He felt warm and blurry from the wine. He looked at her again: he liked her gentle hesitance, her flashes of warmth … Sometimes she seemed so foolish, and yet who was not in their turn?

  “So,” she was now saying, “have you had word of your lord, Lohengrin?”

  “Hmm?” Wista frowned. “Lohengrin …? No … nothing in a fortnight.” Impatient with talk, he impulsively took her hand and tugged her closer and she looked nervously at him across sudden inches.

  “Oh,” she was saying, “I wonder that he left you behind …”

  “I’m not sorry.” Which was true: he didn’t want to have to deal with what was inevitable. The future loomed dark and amorphous over him … He had awakened one night from racking, chaotic dreams, panting with fear, feeling certain he was caught, bound to some fate beyond all will and choice, that he was an instrument … no, worse: no choice because he would himself refuse it … To do what? he’d wondered, but he was afraid he knew that, too. He wished he’d gone away before. Run … home … anywhere … He’d sat alone in bed with a pounding heart and realized he didn’t want to be alone … And beside her now he realized it again. Frell seemed a hope, a possibility … He thought of summers by the lake on his uncle’s manor. His father sent him there many times during his childhood. His father was always in service with no land of his own and his mother had died at his birth. The image of those summers suddenly came to him condensed into a single brightness and warmth of long days, sweet smells, floating on the lake, fishing in the reflection of green hills, swimming underwater among the wavering sprays of greenish light that seemed as though the sun were shining up from the bottom … fish flashing past and darting off into their secret recesses …

  He leaned over and kissed her again and (feeling almost a fear) held her long, firm arms and opened her lips with his, insisted with himself, insisted, stopped her in mid-sentence and felt, after a moment (with vague shame because of fear he couldn’t show for a motive), her come back soft, fluid, with a trembling yielding that told him how important this was, was going to be, that she already had known she was lost in it … concentrated himself into her summery taste and feel, lapsed his thoughts, felt only her presence, eased back on the warm fur, as if this could save him from all his tomorrows …

  He heard her saying, “Oh … my clearest … my dearest …”

  He reached her to him, as if he actually could save himself …

  Balli tossed them both into a pen full of goats, holding each by an arm. Broaditch told himself he was inured to stenches at this point. The goats bleated and stirred around. Valit was now backing through them, swaying under an outsized cudgel Balli had handed him. His chivalrous opponent was advancing, with his rolling gait, brandishing his own weapon, as if it were a twig.

  “Well, Broaditch,” Valit was saying as the goats swarmed around him so that he seemed waist-deep in a living stream, “what do you suggest?”

  Watching Balli’s puckered face, Broaditch tried: “We might both fly in different directions,” he called over from where he stood on a mound of filth with his back to the askew railings.

  “So he will surely have one of us,” Valit cried, gasping, ducking away from Balli’s first great, sweeping blow. The next swipe barely missed and Valit toppled over the back of a scrambling billy goat.

  Balli waded in, hurling animals aside, long club upraised.

  “Justice!” he bellowed in imitation of the knight’s war cry. “Justice!”

  Valit hurled his club with both hands: it glanced off the giant’s head without breaking it or his stride. The young man simply sprinted around the pen, falling over the terrified beasts, rolling, ducking, getting up, the swarming animals the only defense he had …

  Broaditch strained his mind. There had to be a way … had to be … What …? What …? Force was useless … Balli even had the speed on them for all his mass … Christ Jesus, it’s a miracle I have lived these past few days … He fingered his ear. The blood was finally clotted and stiffening. It hurt.

  “Justice!”

  Valit was now crawling under the huddled beasts, cursing without actual words, frantic, hopeless, maddened as the fleshy mountain plowed toward him, vast hams and hips spilling the mangy, bony creatures.

  Do I simply pray now? Broaditch wondered. Make a vow? Shrive myself and him with short shrift?

  He suddenly heard the young priest’s voice in his mind, the one who’d taught him to read. He remembered sitting on the cold stone sacristy floor, late-afternoon light slashing in the single slit window beyond which part of the outer wall of Queen Hertzelroyd’s castle showed; the year Parsival was born. He remembered listening, running an unconscious finger under his stained leather serf’s collar, absorbed, picturing the rocky valley, the two armies looking down, picturing himself as the young lord in the tale, the sheep-pard with his sling and stone facing the Philistine giant whose voice shook the pitiless, stony desert earth …

  And he thought he had it: though perhaps God or a messenger had stirred this memory at this moment. There were no stones in this foul pen that could do the job, even if he had the skill and force to crack that smooth knob of solid head … no … but … but … but …

  He tore off his cracked leather vest and rapidly knotted it to form a crude, wide sling.

  “Hold on, Valit!” he cried. “Roll, curse it, roll, lad! Roll!”

  For the which the young man needed no encouragement: he was holding a bleating, terrified goatling up as a shield, ducking, scrambling, panting, tripping … Broaditch noted he wasn’t quitting so easily anymore. The lad was improving.

  He loaded the makeshift sling with hardened lumps of goat dung and frightened, slightly amused, infinitely determined, he shouted, “Balli! You! Balli!”

  He held the loaded sling behind his turned side. Valit had leaped for the fence in final desperation, where he was surely doomed. The trial’s scales were tipping against him, except that Balli twisted his head around in time to catch Broaditch coming through a cluster of noisy, terrified animals, winding the sling around and around his head, feeling an almost dreamlike feebleness. He was certain he’d gone daft, and so this was as good a way as any, and Balli’s incredible charge no doubt would have proved this true … A load of dung against this monster! The eye or nothing. But as Balli sprang, one oversized old billy with a solid set of horns had just had enough and elected to ram the vast hams (which wasn’t particularly effective) and then sink his long, gritty teeth into the swelling, bare flesh of buttocks under the loosely flopping hides and wrench and twist and tug and the giant howled (“Mayhap he had a boil there,” Broaditch commented later) and the immense roundness began to spin (like a top, in truth, Broaditch thought) and spin and spin in an effort to strike the animal, seething howls all the while, the goat gripping like a bulldog, centrifugal force whirling it almost straight out from Balli’s behind … Valit was already over the fence and going. When Balli flailed himself, slobbering and shouting, to his knees, reaching back in vain for the billy goat’s neck, Broaditch point-blank fired the load of dung (he knew he had gone beyond necessity’s dictates, but he gave no damn) into the fat, agonized face and blotted out the single eye and gaped mouth with a wad of shit. Then, deeming this sufficient, he climbed with dignity over the sagging fence and jogged steadily on behind Valit, who was fast disappearing into the moonshadowed forest on the crest of the hill.

  Once puffing among the dim trees, Broaditch started guffawing and shaking his head. He heard Valit crashing on ahead and Balli’s outraged cries drifting on the sea breeze up the slope. He knelt down, holding his sides, shaking, almost toppling over in a gush of relief and absurdity, staying on his k
nees past the point of absolute safety, repeating the image: the round face, round eye, round, bellowing mouth, thrashing futilely at the maddened goat, the sudden, clotted spat! that blotted out the face … He shook his head and held his sides …

  “Well,” Parsival was telling her, “I am no woodsman proper, though I can hold my own.”

  They were following the river, which was meandering roughly east toward the coast. He was fairly certain of that, though he had no clear idea of how far it was ahead. Unlea was just pressing him about it.

  “My flesh is full sore,” she told him, perched, bouncing sidesaddle in his wake. “My mare wearies.”

  “Yet I have no wish to be beset by your husband.”

  “Nor I,” she agreed. “Is it not past noon?” She shielded her eyes to consider the sun. The river was gradually slowing as they moved through more rounded, still densely forested country.

  “We’ll rest in good time,” he said back over his shoulder.

  The water was a rich, jeweled, cool blue under clear sky. The golden-grayed trees and bluish-green pines were a reflected hush all around. The ground was still damp.

  “Parsival,” she said decisively.

  “Yes, love?” he said, backlooking.

  “I …”

  “Yes?” He knew, had known, was waiting for this.

  “I cannot …” she said after a pause.

  He reined up and waited. Her palfry halted beside him.

  Helmetless, he looked at her, concentrated on her eyes. She was haggard, sad, windblown, but beautiful: soft, full lips, a speck of peeling, a faint streak of mud dried on her cheek, eyes like (he thought) a sunny summer glade … He reached out as from far away to relish the softness of her cheek with bare fingers …

  “I love you, Unlea,” he said quietly.

  “Yes,” she said. She shut her eyes. “When you touch me …” She gave a little flutter of a gesture. “When you touch me, I … I can do nothing …”

  “Then I won’t release you.”

  She seemed to silently plead while nuzzling his palm with her lips, and her arms came up to take his shoulders.