The Grail War

by Richard Monaco

  “Oh,” she said, tearful, “you bastard …”

  “No,” he said.

  “Please.”

  “No. No, I cannot. Don’t you see that?”

  Because everything was in this. He didn’t care how he bound her because He knew the end would prove itself with lucid, simple beauty and peace. The idea of being alone now terrified him. He didn’t know what he’d do … didn’t know …

  “I cannot let you go,” he said. “I cannot …”

  She wept, silently, nuzzled his hand, tender and miserable.

  That night when he slipped under the quilts (that were beginning to need washing) in the uncertain light of a single candle, she kept her back to him. He moved into her warmth and lightly bussed her shoulder.

  “Mmm,” he murmured, stroking her long, bare arms and back. She didn’t respond.

  “Where are we going tomorrow?” she asked palely.

  “Are you ill, love?” He was concerned.

  “I think not.”

  “Your voice …” He broke off. He had never known a woman so rich with luster and life, and day by day she seemed to be fading. Rain was suddenly drumming on the tent roof and he sighed a curse. “Again,” he muttered. “I’m grown weary of the sound.” He frowned, thought fleetingly of Prang, Lohengrin … his dead wife and daughter … Gawain … Bonjio … He moved restlessly. He recalled he’d meant to ask Prang if he’d been at the tent flap several nights ago … realized it was impossible, at the same time … no doubt a vision from sleep …

  “Parsival,” she said quietly, “where will we go to tomorrow?”

  “Onward,” he replied, pulling her closer to him, putting his hand over her breasts, almost roughly.

  “Have a care,” she said, “you’re pinching.”

  He relented, then turned her around in his arms, untwisted her nightdress, and reached between her legs. He poked, not ungently. He found her wet enough and was puzzled and relieved. Her arms, almost unwillingly, came up around him.

  “I cannot help but be your whore,” she said flatly.

  He stopped.

  “That’s no pleasure to hear,” he told her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said and kissed him. “I know you love me.”

  “Unlea,” he said, narrowing his eyes, as if his expression would reinforce his moderate conviction, “hear me well. We make our way to London town and from there take ship to Brittany. I’ve been working out the plan of it. From there — ”

  “We have no silver and gold,” she broke in.

  “What? I thought … ?

  “I gave the few coins I had to the guards to seal their lips. I’m no thief to steal more from him I wronged.”

  “Wronged … ?” He sighed. “Say no more to me. I’ll find what we need.” He sat up, the covers falling away from his bare torso. He stared at the steady candle flame. The rain rattled steadily. Small leaks broke out here and there. He could hear the pit-pit-pit on the damp rug. He sighed. “I’ll — ”

  “How?” she wanted to hear, rolling over again so her back was to him and the slight illumination.

  “I don’t know yet,” he said impatiently. “Trouble me no more, woman.”

  Silence, except for the rain and dripping … She turned onto her back again, restlessly … sighed …

  “I’m miserable,” she said, rolling her head on the stained satin pillow. “I’m so miserable …”

  “Things will be good,” he insisted, looking down into her face now. “You love me. You said you love me.”

  “Yes,” she returned, “yes … ”

  “Then what? What!” He felt haggard in the faint, wavering stain of flame color. She kept her profile to him. “Tell me!”

  “I know not,” was the best she could do. She was weeping again.

  He was baffled, maddened almost. He took her by the shoulders, saw her wince with pain. He held hard, anyway.

  “Are you content?” she asked him, face turned away.

  “What …? I … ?” His eyes tracked back and forth. “How could I be? With you as you are … But it will be good, we have to try … I … I know it will be good …”

  Her eyes came to his at last. They seemed a little frightened. She said nothing through her parted lips, then went between his legs, gripped his sagged flesh, kneaded it, shut her eyes, as if on all facts and fears and waking things, because her face seemed asleep to him, lost in the faint flame, warm-edged shadows. Both her hands now worked together and he grew and firmed under her touch and she soothed: “Peace, my love … peace … peace, my sweet love …”

  And he let himself fall back with his face by her heels and he held both her feet, biting his lip, rolling his eyes, body arching rigid as her burning hands gathered irresistible momentum, and he heard himself gasp, and in flashes, as his head swayed, he glimpsed her serene face rocking slightly on the pillow, and for an instant it reminded him (though the thought was swallowed and lost whole) of his mother praying in a rapt, sweet, totally vulnerable, utterly remote calm …

  “Oh, good Christ!” he cried, bit his lip, opened his mouth, as if to bite and swallow something in the rosy, shadowed air, and her accelerating hands lifted him out of himself … “Aaaaah!” he cried. “Aaaaah …! Aaaaah …!”

  It was still raining steadily the following day. The river was a wide, gray-white, seething sheet. The earth was sodden and flooding in places. They were down to nearly level ground now, so Parsival assumed they were nearing the coastline. They went on side by side with the pack mule between them. The rain tinkled on his light mail links and boomed on the open helmet. The smell of damp, oiled steel always took the edge off his appetite. It was midafternoon and Unlea wanted to eat. As soon as they came to some shelter of pines or whatever, he’d oblige her, he’d just said.

  They’d spoken very little, otherwise. The weather was depressing. And he didn’t want to risk reopening last night’s wound …

  “I think we’re lost,” she suddenly announced from under her traveling hood.

  “Lost?”

  “Yes.”

  “But we’ve been following the river,” he protested.

  “It keeps turning.”

  “But it has to come to the coast in the end. It’s the way of rivers.”

  “You haven’t been able to see the sky for nearly two days together. I think we’re lost.”

  “Nonsense, Unlea,” he soothed. He wished she wouldn’t frown like that. It made her seem like a stranger, somehow …

  “I have a feeling,” she said.

  “Never fear,” he began, “I …” And broke off, reined up, halting the mule in the same movement. She stopped a pace or two on, the river behind her. He was staring through the rain at a line of trees that lay like a wall almost to the water’s edge. He felt the pressure in his stomach and knew someone or something very powerful was there. He immediately assumed this connected with the dark figure in the tent opening the other night. He bit his lip as he felt a prickling chill.

  Is it mortal or some other form? he asked himself.

  He didn’t want to stir up that other world anymore. Let it sink into the past.

  Broaditch and Valit had gone on into the dark woods for several hours, picking their way over ditches, around fallen trees and boggy streams. The swampy area was gradually yielding to dry country. As the moon was about down, Broaditch decided there was no point in pressing forward. Valit was wobbling, in any case.

  They sheltered themselves on a nearly bare hilltop among outcroppings of glacial rock. With their backs against cool stone, they could look back over the flat-lands. The sea was dimly visible in the starlight. Broaditch imagined he could distinguish the light in Balli’s hut; anyway, it was a single, wavering, faint reddish glint …

  Neither said much for a while. Then Broaditch broke the silence.

  “Well, lad,” he said, “you’re getting to see the world, in a certain way.”

  “Is that what it is, then?” Valit came back with, seeming in better spirits t
han was his wont.

  “I know the road home looks fair to you now,” Broaditch added, wishing he still had his eastern pipe for smoking herbs. He was unique in these lands, where only a few stray crusaders had imported hookahs from the infidels. Suddenly he shook his head and chuckled.

  “Was that so mirthful a remark?” Valit wanted to know. Broaditch noted he didn’t seem normally surly.

  “I was going over my last moments with our former host and lord judge.” He laughed.

  “That ain’t funny itself. I had no regrets leaving the mad bastard, I can tell you. As for the road home, I want none of it. I didn’t come this far to go back to nothing.”

  “Well,” Broaditch said with some surprise, “I’ve got no better advice than that … And I thank you for coming back for me, lad.” He didn't add his surprise at that, either. He slouched down and stuffed his hide cap under his head. “No better, that is,” he concluded, “than to join me in the place where we’re most alone — I mean in slumber, Val.” Whereupon the massive man folded his arms and set himself for sleep. “I tell you this, young Valit-Varlet,” he added, eyes comfortably closed, “I need no more old wizards with whiskers full of hints and mad mischief. It’s home for me, and the devil with the devil’s own!” He sighed and shifted, trying to wedge himself down in a better way. “I say this much: I were wiser when much less I knew.” He yawned with a slight shudder.

  “What wizards was that?”

  “Hmm? None, my lad … none …” He yawned. “Just my own fevers, I expect …” Sleep waited warm, empty, and safe. He let himself slide down into it a little at a time … gradually faster … Thank Christ for sleep, he thought, for there the world ends for a sweet time …

  “I ain’t tired,” his companion complained.

  “You’re over-young,” Broaditch muttered, fading fast. “But the cure for that is inevitable …”

  God grant me, he prayed, mused, relief from the snakes and great, fat fellows with one eye …

  And this was the last thought for now, and restless Valit heard the first, buzzing snore commence …

  Except he was wrong this time: he felt uneasy, cold, and exposed … tried to turn and struggled down into himself for warmth and safety and realized he was standing up, somehow. He wanted to lie down and blot out the bright, silverish dawn light. He saw Valit sitting up, tapping the earth with a stick, brooding, and, without even being surprised, because he wasn’t precisely thinking, his mind in the strange silence of a dream, he saw a big man wrapped in coarse, muddy hides lying beside him, a lumpy, dead-looking hunk that he knew was himself an invisible wall away … Now he wanted to sleep desperately, and before he could act or move in any way he noticed a third figure (that resembled the old man in the boat) standing nearby with arms crossed over a grayly shimmering cloak. And Broaditch felt the wordless dream-voice say: “Do you recall us?”

  He instantly had an image of the bottom of a long tunnel lying on his face among naked, toiling workers in chains when he’d been a slave for Clinschor’s conquering hordes many years before … He’d escaped by feigning death, but for a time believed he had truly died and had spoken with mysterious beings … He gathered this bearded figure had been one of them. They had exhorted him to do something he never quite understood …

  “You were chosen then and now.”

  “But …”

  “There’s no time for indulging yourself. You are in the sea and had better swim.”

  “But …”

  And a moment later, without perceptible interval, he

  was looking down on a rugged terrain lit by the same sunless, silver-blue, even glow. He seemed high enough to see all the country and the gleam of distant ocean while at the same time scenes appeared close at hand and startlingly vivid. The bluish color sparkled everywhere like some underwater sunlight. He floated, feeling sweet and peaceful and tender and free … saw battalions of mounted knights moving along intricate paths to take up positions in the almost circular mound of hills and piney forests. Each figure seemed to radiate a warm, goldenish glow into the general washes of color … He perceived men working, felling trees and moving stones to block the winding roads, and then it seemed as though the sun were coming up through the misty, glowing earth itself, because in the heart of the land below there was a towering, hazy outline of what might have been a castle dissolving into a golden-white shining, a blinding radiance whose streaming beams seemed pressing to burst free from their compressed space and ignite the universal twilight … He found himself caught up in the play of light and drifted, watching the pulsing … drifted …

  “Stop dreaming. Pay attention to what is important!”

  But it was so beautiful, and all that he was, was past, and what he had done was done, and he strove somehow to soar higher and float (for the rays went freely straight up) into the rising flame of the melting castle … In a flicker it was stark night … No, the light was simply darkness, a darkness that sucked all illumination into itself, and he shivered and trembled and tried to escape, go back, wake up, anything … sleep … yes, that was it …! Go to sleep … sleep and escape …

  “Fool, pay attention!”

  Yes, the darkness was not total; he saw that now. There were outlines, crawling flickers of flame, like embers of a burned-out country, and the flashing far-near vision showed intermittent shadow-flashing glimpses: dark-armored men marching … burning towns and castles … smoke rising and spreading everywhere … the darkness was smoke blotting, drifting … He saw a beautiful knight lying on his back, as if asleep or preserved in death within a clear crystal dimly lit by flame glow … He wished he could help the knight break free as the smoke and fire closed in all around him … For an instant he thought he recognized the face, though greatly changed with age, and tried for a name in a state where names and words were not … The knight in full armor lay as if enchanted (he heard thunder that seemed to swell into a pulsing incantation), and he tried to call out his name to him to rouse him from what seemed a solid, blinding river of crystal … His sword lay beside him … The vision was rippling now, shaking like a sheet in wind, and he felt pulled and shocked and torn as the energy failed or was somehow attacked, and he glimpsed a man dipping his bare arm into a bowl of fire and removing a handful of flame that lit his long, wide, soft, bony, pale face and bright, cat-like eyes and up-curled moustache, standing in a strange, round room … no … prisoned in a blackened iron ball, and then the universe popped like a bubble and he woke up, sat bolt upright on the damp turf, thinking he was screaming and finding himself silent … The stars were silent overhead … the sea wind cool … Valit was snoring quietly …

  He just sat there for a time. His fingers were trembling slightly … He was heavy, dense, dull at first, then, gradually, lighter and lighter, until he suddenly feared he might lift into the air and repeat what he didn’t yet call a dream. He breathed deeply and slowly until he felt more controlled.

  He still wasn’t thinking thoughts: there were no words in his mind, no images, just the same flowing awareness that seemed to take in near and far as one … He felt the world moving, not physically, but in a flowing order where every movement melted into every other so there were no seams anywhere … sitting there, air bursting crisp and rich into his lungs, feeling his blood so fierce that, despite his aches and battered places, he stood lightly up with an urge to dance down the hillside and race back again, bounce and half-fly … Nothing was impossible … it was all true … He would do it, whatever it was, because he could ride the flow and reach the end, that the goal was intended for him before he was born, that time and nature had been moving toward this moment forever … He grinned, then laughed aloud, feeling as tall as the hill and as wide and inexorable as the world …

  He sat down again, feeling peaceful and ready to really sleep. He was starting to think again, but that was all right now …

  The goal, he thought. Well, he’d fill in the details tomorrow. Great Christ, but he felt well! I accept, he told someth
ing, the earth, air, night, I accept … He’d fill in the details …

  He shut his eyes and was instantly, sweetly asleep. He floated away …

  Morning was bright gray. Broaditch woke up feeling refreshed and not too chilled. His new energy seemed to have survived the night. He stretched deliciously and nudged Valit with his toe. He got a grumble and stir for his trouble, then a muffled curse.

  I’ll make an effort with him, he thought cheerfully. Every persons worth every effort … He smiled at himself for thinking that.

  “I accept,” he whispered. He stood up, shaking with a yawn, opened his codpiece and urinated against the rock, looking out over the blustery autumn day.

  “Wake up, lad,” he said. “Welcome to the first day of my life … and yours!”

  Valit had rolled over, blinking and bleary-eyed.

  “Dung and blood,” he muttered, rubbing his eyes. “Fields of scum …”

  “Ah, the cheery bird greets the morn!”

  By midafternoon Valit was trudging and Broaditch was musing. He’d cut a fairly straight sapling and made himself a staff that he swung, marching along over fields thick with berrybush and long grass. So far they’d passed no habitations. They were climbing gradually toward a low wall (they didn’t know it was Roman) which followed the curves of the landscape.

  “But where are we going?” Valit was saying, repeating.

  “Over there,” Broaditch said, pointing with the stick.

  “And then? I don’t understand what you said back there. Where — ”

  “Valit,” Broaditch said, ‘what do you want? What do you hope for?”

  “What?”

  “Come, come, you have ears.”

  After a few thoughtful paces, Valit said, “I trust no one.”

  “A happy condition,” Broaditch reproved.

  “With reason,” he nodded in dour self-confirmation, eyes fixed on the green-gray earth. “Yet I trust you, Broaditch, this far, since you helped me twice and I still ow you — not that I would stand to the depth with any to witness.”