She wished it might rain now that it was needed … At dusk the distant flames showed at the bases of towering black clouds, the smoke settling miles away and joining the vapors of the earth. The sun set a hideous, distorted blood-red behind the smoldering world …
They’d stopped to rest on a high hill in a deserted stone-and-log church. Even this high, the air was biting and reeking.
She was startled by an apparition at the glassless window. She was seated on a bench, where the children had curled up to sleep. It was an old woman’s face that was drawn and sucked inward around a toothless mouth. She had one blind, blasted, bluish-white eye and the other keen and penetrating as a cat’s.
Alienor crossed herself and stood up facing the tall, arched opening. The last lurid wash of twilight seemed to float the puckered features there.
“Praying to God, dearie?” the face asked neutrally.
Alienor was relieved and chided herself for unreasoning fear.
“Resting, grandmother,” she replied. “You’re welcome to share it.”
The toothless collapse of a mouth worked its gums.
“Time enough to rest in,” it said. “Where be ye bound, dearie?”
“South.”
“Ah. To London?”
“Aye.”
The red-and-black dusk glow deepened behind the face. A trick of shadow wiped away the good eye and left the glazed, blank one staring. Alienor wanted to terminate the conversation and lie down on the bench. Weariness was seeping into her, she vaguely thought, like water into soaking earth.
“Well,” the woman’s face said, “the stars have promised this.”
“All?” But Alienor was really too tired to care.
“And more still … But there’s some what know the secrets and will be safe enough, dearie.”
“No doubt …” Her eyes felt weighted. Too many days of struggle and strain and the horrors of the way. What was this old silliness talking about? Let her be done, in St. Hyla’s name …
“Never pass up such a fine chance, dearie. For it means yer life be marked by the high stars.” The head nodded and the unseeing eye seemed to wink.
“Aye,” Alienor murmured “But I must rest a little …”
As she moved back to the bench, she heard the old voice telling her! London s burned down, dearie.
She was already on her back and falling rapidly toward sleep. The stinging smoke-reek was mixed in there with the general mustiness.
“Ye knew me not when ye saw me," the raspy voice said. And Alienor registered Only the first words, and then blank blackness blotted her out entirely …
A few scattered hailstones were cracking on trees, bouncing on turf, smashing on stones, and pinging off the armored riders. Out of the smoke and fire-glow of that fearful evening, soot was falling in a steady rain.
Lohengrin was amazed: every wood and castle town they’d passed was ablaze or smoldering. The smoke and fog were closing in as though the whole earth were a cindering coal …
He knew they were very close to the main army now. They’d passed straggling detachments on the road and at the outposts.
He kept his visor closed against the ashes … As they rode, the obscure billowing gave way to brilliant, roaring flame and his eye slits framed several hundred foot-soldiers and clumps of black-armored horsemen in a cordon around a collection of burning huts. He glimpsed people in there, heard rending, shuddering screams, and when soot-black, seared villagers tried to escape, they were speared or driven back into the hellish streets to roast.
Lohengrin stormed over to the officer knights who were grouped a little behind the main action, overseeing the work. He snapped his helmet open and raged at them.
“What means this?!” he cried over the flame roar and howls of agony. “Who’s in command here?!”
A big, serious, long-faced fellow with a bent nose and steady eyes gazed from his own helm at Lohengrin.
“This is my command,” he said laconically. “Who in the hell asks?”
“Lord General Lohengrin! And I demand to know — ” The man was patient, calm, sure of himself.
“My lord,” the captain said, “I have my orders.” Lohengrin noted a number of his own men had stopped on the road and were looking on.
“Have you?”
“You might do well to attend to your own business, my lord,” the captain said, without pressure either way. But Lohengrin noticed he was glancing sidelong at one of the ever-silent black-and-silver knights, whom nobody (it was said) had ever seen without their grotesque visors tightly shut. There was a story they were sealed because the heads within were vacant skulls …
“If we slay everyone,” Lohengrin reasoned, “then whom have we conquered? If we lay waste the whole land, then what have we gained?”
The captain shrugged.
“I know not, my lord general,” he said, glancing over at the elite warrior again. “But the Lord Master must.” Was the man slightly, ever so slightly, mocking? His expression was perfectly bland.
“I doubt,” Lohengrin cried, raising his voice over a sudden swelling of screams, “he countenances this … this utter waste! I spoke with him … He’ll hear what’s being done in his name! I promise you that!”
As he turned to spur away, he heard the fellow’s last comment: “We all do what we must, lord general.” Lohengrin gagged as a gust of hot wind brought a reek of seared flesh … He galloped down the road, gesturing his lagging, uncertain men to follow on into the churning, fiery darkness ahead …
* * *
The sun was just setting as Parsival and Gawain sat their mounts beside Prang on the hill’s steep edge and looked out over the country ahead: a sea of flames was working its raging way from the southeast over the densely wooded landscape. The horizon was a sheer wall of blotting blackness. Heading roughly north, on both sides of the spine of range they were atop, was a hoard that seemed, to Parsival, dark, gleaming streams of antlike demons, as if the smoke which billowed and flowed over them was part of the invasion, was given off by their burning contact with the earth …
“Look,” Prang said. “But look …”
“This pales imagination,” Gawain muttered.
Parsival shut his eyes. Paused. Reopened. Before long, he was thinking, it would be the same with them either closed or staring wide. Flames …
“Well,” he said finally, the strength pulsing through him (and relieved, too, because now he could plunge ahead into the fire and steel). “Well, good sirs, I’ll hardly need to guide your steps.” He pointed northeast to an area the holocaust seemed to already half-surround. “We all seem bound the same way … Ride and follow!” he yelled, suddenly aiming his charger down the long hill spine that made a rugged high road in roughly the direction they wanted and would give them an edge in travel time.
“Whither does he lead us?” Prang wanted to know, calling over to Gawain as they followed.
Gawain spurred his thick-bodied horse and called back, amused and still stunned, too, by the panorama below.
“To the end of the earth,” he said. “Cannot you see that? My lad, this is the battle to possess the fairy dream!” He barked a laugh with almost a hint of hysteria in it. “The dream war! God shield us!” And farther on, he said to himself, “And one I believe in at last … with all my heart …”
All around now, lit only by its own fitful, tortured glow, the great cloud mounted upward … upward, massing like an unthinkable mountain range, dwarfing the world …
Broaditch saw a dim, hinted outline ahead in the sluggish, twilight smoke mist. He gripped his staff and plodded grimly on. His heart sped when he recognized the high, strangely rounded coach and steeds he'd seen before. Real, they were real! A mule snorted. He rapped the wooden sides with his knuckles when he got there … Not fairy wood, this …
He grinned at himself. A rough-planked traveling wagon. For jugglers and players …
Helmetless, Morgan was staring into the almost impenetrable haze, holding her mount ste
ady, frowning. Across the smoke-flooded fields, her army was charging parallel to the forest edge, ripping through the clouds into the lines of dim enemies that had just emerged from the valley into this prepared ambush. Modred, Gaf, and the bishop were close to her.
“We have them, lady,” Sir Gaf said, following the blurry action through his open helmet.
Modred was disturbed by her strained expression as the ghostly seeming troops collided in a churning obscurity of shouts, screams, and clashing steel. Horsemen were trailing billows behind, as if it were their own cloudy substance against which the overwhelming grinding sounds were the more terrible …
“What’s wrong, Aunt?” he demanded.
Her face was tensed, jaw trembling with effort as her mailed hands clawed at the air.
“Damn him!” she gasped, leaning forward, as if straining into an invisible wall as the troops lined up in reserve to their right along the forest wall suddenly seemed to sway, then sag inward as thousands and thousands broke from the trees directly into their flank, and the men and knights began to melt away like sand figures in a foaming surf …
“Aunt?” Modred yelled.
“Curse him! Curse him!” she screamed. Her red hair shook.
“Aunt, what …”
She stared wildly around at Gaf and the other lords.
“Bring me a head!” she shouted. “Anyone’s will do … anyone’s!”
“Aunt!”
Gaf and the bishop looked at one another.
“We’re taken in flank!” the former cried. “We must — ”
He reeled back (her wide eyes were seeing no one) as she drew and with terrific speed and perfect aim thrust her blade into his open visor and tilted him, howling, out of the saddle in a burst of blood and followed him to the ground, sliced his helmet loose (even as he struggled into his dying moments), and with several desperate chops hacked his head free. Gripping his dark, curly hair, she remounted and lifted it high.
“Magic for magic!” she shouted, snarling. “Magic for magic, you bastard! I'll not be beaten!”
Modred stared for a moment at the bleeding face, the shocked features, the eye that seemed still seeing (the other had been stabbed through), dimming as he watched … .
Then, gagging, he turned his horse and fled blindly into the burning forest …
His horse plunged into a sudden eddy in the charging waves of stabbing, spearing, hacking soldiers. As the smoke opened and closed, Modred saw men fleeing from one death to another: reeling from mace blows into spear thrusts: kneeling with upraised arms, begging for mercy as swords chopped them to shreds; tight clusters of desperate foot troops fighting hopelessly as wave after wave broke over them in flame and smoke and steel …
His panic had him mumbling and jerking the reins like a puppet, gurgling in fear as he crashed out of a roll of smoke, choking, wheezing, blinded, into a wedge of spearmen who closed in as he flung his blade and flailed and he screamed inaudibly in the blasting of battle and fire. They hamstrung his horse in a moment, and, leaping free, he was racing, tossing his sword away, tripping, rolling, crawling" and saved for now by another black, dense cloud … but he heard them following and he ran and fell and ran …
And he was still running, panting, scrambling along a stony gully now, his bejeweled armor baking him alive as a furnace of exploding fir trees hemmed him in to his right. Tripping on roots, slipping on stones, babbling breathlessly, he fled …
Above, to his left, swarms of black-armored knights and Saracens in their flowing robes and headdresses were hunting him …
The last image kept repeating in his brain: Morgan LaFay, in the flashing, darkening day, fading into blurring haze, holding the severed head aloft, steaming gore spilling down over her face, bare, up tilted to the rain of blood, rocking in steady rhythm, voice penetrating, in-canting into one chilling, hypnotic, seamless flood of sound that he could hear and feel over the bray and shriek of combat and the fire’s thunder …
There were mounted men a turn or two behind him, crashing along the dry wash. He felt his bladder go slack and warm … whimpered, tried desperately to scramble up the gully sides, failed, fell back, panting, trying to loosen his armor, searing his fingers on the steel, weeping and cursing … A great torching tree dropped and sealed the way behind, cutting off pursuit and dooming him as the flames ahead leaped across this narrowing crease in the unyielding earth, and he ran berserkly in mad spirals up and down the sides, up and down, like a frantic bug trapped in a hot kettle …
Broaditch sensed something moving behind him. He whirled, staff held at the ready. A lanky figure and what seemed a pair of down-turned horns emerged from the choking fogs holding what seemed a massive cudgel at his side. A few more steps and he saw him clearly: a middling young man in a fool’s cap and bells, dangling a lute.
So, thought Broaditch, so …
“You’re a troop of entertainers,” he said by way of greeting.
The jester’s long faced looked sour.
“Some of us, big man,” was his answer, “but not all equally.”
“Well, sir, I could stand some gambols in these times, I swear.”
The jester set down his lute, leaning against the back steps of the wagon.
“I fear,” he said, “you’ve met me at the end of my wit and gamboling.” He sat down on the wagon steps. “Though I have one bit of humor left in me: the world’s burning down. So it’s like a suckling babe at the mother’s milk-heavy breast.”
“Forgive me,” Broaditch said, sitting down beside the fellow on the other edge of the step, “if I contain my side-shaking merriment.”
“It’s a riddle.”
The expressionless jester spat neatly out into the swirling clouds.
“So, then?” Broaditch rested his head on the plank door at their backs.
“Why, good sir, the world truly has what it most needs.”
Broaditch smiled faintly.
“You’re as hard a judge as the archangels,” he told him. “But where are you bound?”
“To entertain the dead.”
Broaditch guffawed and nodded.
“Why, sage?” He couldn’t resist.
“Two reasons: there are more of them …”
“Yes?”
“And more likely to be light of heart than the living.” He spat again. He never turned to look at Broaditch, who nodded grudging approval of the gloomy answer. “Where’s the rest of your troop?” he wondered. “Within,” was the reply, accented by a jerked thumb. Broaditch heard steady, rhythmical creaking sounds, then noticed the wagon was rocking slightly. He heard a low, muffled moan. For a moment he took it for pain, then smiled and said, “Well, that’s a music not made on a lute.”
“That is entertainment.” Deadpan.
“But not for the dead, I think.”
“Aye, for the dying.”
Broaditch stood up.
“Well,” he announced, “I’ll be off before I lose all hope. You’re a jester fit for the audience you seek.”
He was still not looking at Broaditch.
“How will you find your way? Now it’s nightfall and all the more obscure.”
The door of the wagon opened and a barefoot, rather pretty, long-haired, youngish girl wearing a parted chemise-like gown leaned there. Behind her in the darkness, the love-making sounds intensified.
She hung a lit lantern on a peg beside the door and stood there. He bit his lip lightly, feeling a rush of tingling blood to his groin, looking at her smooth, bare legs, the dark blot under the long sweep of her belly, one smallish but purely rounded breast showing, inviting a bite, a lick, a caress, a pinch … He felt a little weak … So young and fair, he thought several times.
Her large, dark eyes just looked at him, watchful, features expressionless so he couldn’t tell anything about her feelings. She was so casually lewd and in her middle teens at best … The jester stayed as he was, his back to her.
“That’s Minra,” he said. He lifted his lute and str
ummed the open strings, which were badly untuned. He seemed to enjoy the twanging, because a trace of a smile creased his lips. “She entertains.”
She was working her jaws slightly in a chewing motion. Then she opened her mouth and picked something from her teeth, which were unusually bad. even for those times: gaped, chipped, discolored.
The jester began to bang the strings in earnest, thumping the wood, rocking slightly. “The horrid sound smote my ears full sore.” Broaditch quoted to himself.
And then, as it became virtually unbearable, the worst happened and the fellow broke into unrestrained song. “She entertains, I ween; her ways are all obscene; her twiddle's quite unclean …”
And on in this charming wise, Broaditch later was to say, but he was held by the girl, whose mouth was shut again in the smoldering expressionlessness of her face and knowing eyes that went far beyond ideas of vice and hopelessness. He felt she had never imagined hope or good to begin with, so there was no pain or despair at their loss … He was a little afraid, because in a terrible way she was innocent … He'd never conceived of such a thing or the frightening beauty of it. He had a recurring impulse to prostrate himself before her, to embrace, devour, and worship that untouchable dark intensity … and another impulse in no way contradictory was to try and reach the innerness, the tender place somewhere within … He never had felt such a thing, never desired before to instantly immolate himself in such gulfs of frailty … He felt weak.
She rested one hand on her hip, fully opening the thin garment. There was a mild draft of warm air stirring the cloth, spilling from within. He assumed they must have hot stones in a crock inside. It was strangely painful to look up from her graceful feet along the young, round legs, dark wildness of groin, sheer sweep of open torso, graceful neck and oval, impassive, maddening face.
Not Eve, Lilith, he thought, the dark one … daughter of the dark moon …
He almost wanted to say “I love you,” but meaning he knew not what, dared not know what … and the dreadful song went on as she didn’t smile even a fraction, turned gracefully, and went back in, leaving the door open as a male voice cried out in the throes of sweetest dying.
The Grail War Page 25