“They’ll do what they must, for no man will they trust …” The song broke off and the jester sat there holding the lute loosely, still staring into the fog. “There’s little enough trade out in these lost parts,” he said conversationally, “so you can have her for a pair of coppers.”
Broaditch took a deep breath. “Ah,” he said, his voice breaking. Then he grinned at himself, staring through the partly opened door. He made out a dim gleam that must have been another lantern or candle.
“There’s others, as well, traveler,” the jester said, spitting again, watching the gob fly out into the shifting outskirts of the fog. “But Minra’s a pearl. You can have her suck it. You can ram it in her bung or her twiddie. Why, you can do anything you please with the little whore. What’s a pair of coppers to that, eh? That tasty child? Man o’ your years best take his pleasures while he may.” He strummed one final, cacophonous chord for emphasis. “You only taste your food in your mouth, which comes at the beginning. From then on it starts to be shit.”
“Well, jester of whores,” the other replied, breathing deep, resisting, even as his hand strayed to his leather pouch, where his farthings were stored, “all the more reason to eat sparingly.”
The fellow laid the tortured instrument aside and stood up, stretching.
“Your young one’s within,” he said. And to Broaditch’s interrogative frown, he explained, “He come by an hour before. Said to look out for a big, old wight.”
“Old?” Broaditch couldn't help but snort.
“He said that would be if the river devils spared you, as he doubted they would. He were sore afraid when he come. But Lottali, a slave princess of the distant East, a dusky heathen bitch woman who’d suck the juice from all your fruit, old wight …” He grinned now, tugging and cracking the joints of his fingers. “Lottali, as you just heard, brought him to peace and calm.”
Broaditch went up the steps. Well, he could have called out, but he was curious, anyway. No harm there. So he pushed inside, into a perfumed dimness. The sweetness drowned out, rather than replaced, a raw understink.
He blinked to focus. He saw heaps of silks, three dim bodies tangled in one mound, and Minra, totally nude now, was sitting across the way, chewing on what looked like a chicken wing. The round walls made him a little uneasy.
He watched Minra suck the grease from her surprisingly short fingers.
There were paintings on the walls he'd never seen the likes of: clearly foreign … exotically done in gold and silver, like a church mural … women and men wearing strange headdresses, bound up in acrobatic acts he first mistook for combats … He bent closer to follow the images: women with men (miraculously endowed, he thought) in a wonder of possibilities … he had to admit in the warm globe, smelling the reek and perfume, that incredible girl a reach away, these images left him a trace giddy … women woven with women, which didn’t so much shock as puzzle him … at first … Well, he'd heard of such things and no doubt they went on across the water … It certainly was interesting in here … He moved along the walls, leaning over the three he had taken to be asleep (two women and a man), seeing what seemed gods and devils now joining in an astounding mass copulation with children and beasts thrown in; he drew away, stunned, overloaded … He felt fear and excitement. The images stayed with him as he stepped back. He felt a touch on his left leg. Minra. She offered him a sweetly spiced mug of liquid. He took it, then realized he was trembling and sweating. It seemed to be brandy wine. He drank a searing gulp.
“I thank you,” he said, still reviewing that final picture, still seeing it …
But it's just the flesh, just the food served strange and spiced, but still only food …
“Why not sit?” she offered. Her voice was neutral as her expression. He wondered if anything or any man could really touch her heart, and then understood: she gives herself like all do, but gives herself somewhere else … to something other … Think what you like, every wight has an open place … even the devil, I don't doubt …
It was very warm and he was used to the stuffy smells now. He sat down but not too close to her.
“I might as well rest my bones,” he said, not directly to her. He felt those inscrutable eyes on him. “It’s too dark to go on now.” Even if I knew the way … Well, he’d solve that tomorrow …
“Ah,” she said.
“Where did those works of art come from?” he wanted to know.
“I know not … This be Flail’s wagon.”
“The jester?”
“Is he?”
“Well … what is your town, then?”
“Ah. What, indeed.”
“Where be you bound?”
“Should I trouble for that?”
He looked at her, bit his lip. He’d been in the stews more than once: to be stewed with drink, water, and women … but this was different.
“Want me to undress you?” she asked. She must have sensed his tension and conflict. “You may as well travel on with us, in any case. Flall …”
“Good old Flall.”
“ … says there’s war and destruction everywhere.”
“Then you are traveling wrong, as the smoke blows from the south.”
She shrugged.
“Will you undress now?” she persisted. She slipped one cool hand under his belt and reached down across his belly.
He half-turned and set one large, hard hand on her silky shoulder. There were faint pox scars on her cheeks, but he’d seen far worse a thousand times … She was beautiful. He ran his unchecked hand over her body almost as if he were molding her form, somehow in a potter’s or sculptor’s gesture rather than a lecher’s … or lover’s …
“Do you have money?” she asked.
He smiled. She was trying to undo the front of his baggy trousers. He leaned back and held her hand away, looking up at the shadowed bulge of ceiling. There was a picture there, too. Very like a church, in its way, he thought. The images were again haul to make out, but seemed to show men and women bound in chains to various instruments of torment while other men or demons (he couldn't be entirely certain and realized a lot of this might be drawn by his imagination) seemed to burn and whip and flay them … seemed … He squinted, but years of candle smoke had darkened it beyond certainty. Perhaps it was simply more sex. he reflected, bemused. But it surely looked painful …
“If you cannot fuck me,” she said conversationally. I can do what might please.”
“You’re a child, after all,” he told her, feeling deliciously sleepy and suddenly at ease.
“Ah. You want one of the older chips.”
“No. They’d be just women. You see that?”
Her face remained unaffected.
“You can look at the pictures,” she offered, “and do what all … or watch us others together … It won’t cost you more.”
Valit had just sat up on the mounds of covers across the way. A big-breasted black woman, sporting golden rings and circlets, was draped across his lap. A red-haired or blondish, over-round young matron was soothingly rubbing the Nubian’s feet.
“Broaditch?”
“The devil’s spared me,” he said, “but will they spare you yet?” He rubbed his eyes. “How came they to part you from a single farthing here?”
“Ah. Well, I struck a bargain — a bit of trade.”
“St. Michael defend their end of it!” Broaditch laughed. “That’s all I can say.”
“This be rare good fortune to come upon these folk,” Valit declared. “Did you fuck yet? What a rare time I had … A bit of good fortune after what's been, eh?”
“Mayhap so,” Broaditch murmured.
Except it may prove harder to escape from these than Balli … He felt sleep starting to close over him in the stuffy warmth … Am I truly chosen for something …? Is there any true proof …? Or are we all sad, poor bitch and bastards …? Without hope … aye … save for the pity … no, save for the mother that never quite dies in a woman and the father in every man an
d the child in all … there's that, there's always that, damn you … there's always that …
He sighed and let the darkness come sweetly washing over him … and fine pictures of saints or whores, either, won't help me … not a poor bastard without hope except for that glimmer of father and child…
He tugged Minra’s hand over to his lips and gently kissed it.
“God defend you, my child,” he barely said, and was asleep.
She just looked at him, his wide, browned, and ruddy face, quick, light eyes where the smile (when open) never completely died. She watched him wordless as he began to lightly snore. And she stroked his graying hair and touched his cheek once, quite tenderly. And she sat there as Valit sank back down between the other two.
She looked now at the dusky, barbaric woman across the musky dimness. Pale Valit was pressing his face to the purple-dark breasts, but she was looking back at Minra and smiling with lidded, knowing, sleepy-seeming eyes a smile ambiguous and profound…
Wista couldn’t sleep. The other two were curled up like true professionals in the shelter of a crumbling wall of what was once a rambling stone building.
The constant stinks and puffs of stinging smoke were almost too much for him, though it was less intense here than some other places they’d passed.
He was pacing along the rutted road in a light, misting drizzle that would have no effect at all on the omnipresent fires … He saw how the passing army had churned the earth to half-damp porridge …
Yesterday’s shocks haunted him. For a time he’d feared he might go mad, but finally steadied his whirling mind. He was beginning to feel anger, not hot, but chill and deeper than his thoughts could reach … The immense monstrousness of it kept looming over his intelligence: because men had different goals and crests and countrysides where they lived and a thousand senseless distinctions more that vanished like dream-stuff when they died and weren’t there yet when they were born, for these, he thought, these shadows, these pictures from sleep with no more to them than the raving demons of mad Jack-a-moors … for these the earth is being … is being … He couldn’t — wouldn’t — express it. His thought broke down and he stared as he paced a nervous circle on the road under the starless sky of smoke and clouds. He kept remembering again and again the blood and the dead and the ruins and wanted to scream with disgust and outrage, and muttered, instead, “Lord God, why do you draw me to the end of this bitter road?”
And he fell upon his knees there, clasped his hands, and desperately prayed, frantic, terrified … for a long time …
At some point he heard a moan, not far away. He fixed the direction and went a few strides from the road to where the same fouled stream Lohengrin had reacted to earlier trickled, stinking, on. He smelled death and stopped. He had no desire to view those dim forms heaped and tangled everywhere, as though the army in passing had simply churned them aside like a great, hellish plow …
But someone moaned in life and so he went another few yards and asked, “Who calls?”
The answering sound was almost at his feet. He stooped and saw a naked woman lying in the bloody mud where the stream had spread out from its choked bed.
She was not altogether nude, he noticed grimly. The tatters of the nun’s habit still partly clothed her. Her face shone somewhat in the wavering light from one of the many isolated fires burning themselves out in the vicinity, crackling steadily.
The spear thrust in her bosom gaped, but was caked over and barely bled. She was about to die, he realized.
He uncorked his water bag and dribbled a few drops on her chapped lips. She sighed her thanks. Her large, widened eyes stared far beyond him. He felt strangely ashamed to be seeing her body even under these conditions.
“What can I do?” he muttered distractedly. “What can I speak …? What … ?”
“Ah …” she whispered with a vague fluttering of breath. “There will be …”
“Will be? Will be what?” He was rooted to this moment, waiting for what might be said from behind death’s closing door. “What? Sister?”
“ … rain …”
“Rain, sister?”
“ … snow … then spring … the flowers …”
He sighed and gently stroked her face.
“Peace,” he whispered.
“No … the flowers come again … always …” Then he thought she was dead. Her eyes closed. “Peace,” he repeated.
“The heart is a flower …” she said and then was still. He remained there for a time. The flames crackled and the faint drizzle beaded on her face and shorn head …
By the time Parsival and the other two reached the end of the miles of spur and had to descend into the smoke and fog, they’d gained considerably on the vast armies that were advancing across the flaming country.
It was a blighted, dim dawn. The clouds in the sky were indistinguishable from the masses of smoke and drizzling black rain; snowed, wet, clinging soot. The winds were steady from the south and it seemed obvious that the forest fires in the brittle leaves and resinous firs were now beyond the control and intentions of the invaders. Gawain commented that they clearly were fleeing even as they attacked.
Parsival led them on steadily north, riding hard over difficult trails and untracked forest. They broke out into fairly open country by midday and met with a party of fleeing knights, nine in all: battered, soot-stained, bloody. The leader’s arm dangled loosely at his side; his steed limped. Gawain hailed them and they met on a crossroads on a rolling plain. Because of a vagary in the air currents, the fog was thinner here.
“Whose men are you?” Prang demanded.
The leader’s open helmet showed a blackened face streaked with the paleness of desperate agony.
“Whose men we were,” he said, his voice hoarse and strained. “We fought with Modred and Lady Morgan at Dale Creek …”
One of the other knights at this point simply crashed to the ground. The others were too exhausted to react.
“Where was the rest of the alliance?” Gawain wanted to know.
“I cannot say.”
“The bastards are everywhere,” another broke in, a stocky warrior, red-haired, helmetless, broken spear half-clenched, pointlessly, in his fist. “None could reform … All were swept away. I was with the Baron Leffacs and Tundril’s men … We were surprised and smashed to pieces …” He half-sobbed. “They burn and kill everything … everything, beast, fowl, or man …!” He snarled. “God strike them! They are from hell! Devils from hell!” He pressed his fist to his lips, trembled in the saddle, as if with fever. His armor rattled from the shaking.
“Look there,” Prang said, pointing north. A single knight was coming fast through the spill of grayish smoke that flowed over the field in advance of the great, black, inexorable tide.
Other stragglers, mounted and on foot, were coming out of the wooded hills, which were blotted out almost to their peaks.
As the newcomer halted, Parsival noted his plain armor. His round shield bore a single emblem and he was astounded, recognizing it: a dove-in-flight mark of the Grail knights. He’d seen it over twenty years ago at the castle that forever after had seemed a dream …
“Ride due north from here,” the newcomer said through his grilled helmet. “By the lake where the forest closes in again, we’re forming a defense line.”
“And who will hold back the flames?” Gawain wanted to know.
“The hand of God,” was the reply, “if He so wills.”
The knight rode up and down, peering at the men who were streaming from the woods. Parsival could hear fragments of commands and cajolements, “Courage, men … not lost … reform …”
“Well, Parse?” Gawain demanded of his brooding, meditating companion, who was now squinting through the stinging haze at a low hut set among a grove of old trees. He was sure he recognized the place. “What do we do?” Gawain persisted.
“Do?” cried Prang. “I know that I stand with the rest and flee no more! I fled enough for my entire
life. No more of it!” His face was flushed and determined.
Gawain started to say something to him, then shrugged.
“No doubt,” he said seriously, “at this point to choose your own death is as wise a course as any else.”
“It's the right direction, in any case,” Parsival said, returning from his reverie.
“We throw them back into their own fires.” Prang was exhorting the limp-armed captain of knights. “Just so I see them roast ahead of me." He seemed relaxed finally, grimly chipper. Parsival noted. Well, for him, the obscurities, hints, hopes, and decisions were at an end …
Gawain leaned close as they spurred their horses into the general movement.
“Do we fight or go on?” he asked Parsival, who was steering closer to the hut and the trees. Now he recognized the orchards and the back fields. The freeman and his daughter — what was her name? Ga … Gay …? Gai? He couldn't get it back. He remembered her eye greenish-gold-brown, like the forest … He'd done something wrong, that was sure, couldn't get that back, either … He remembered her weeping … Why was there always the weeping? Was that all eyes were made for? Yes, that was the place. He pointed.
“Long ago,” he told Gawain, “I was saved there, by a man who made his living from the dead.”
“Well, if he be still hale, his future's assured and his fortune’s at the flood,” Gawain remarked.
“He was already rich,” Parsival said, “I think.”
“The place looks abandoned,” Gawain noted.
The door was down, the shutters open. A billy goat, chewing a tuft of something, half-emerged from the doorway and seemed to eye them shrewdly. The barn had fallen in.
I never understood what Gai … what she wanted … Perhaps I really did, though. Mayhap it's always the same for all …
“The lake,” he informed Gawain, “marks a beginning of the Grail country. I fled from there to this point sick with fear and fever.”
He’d wandered lost. He lived on forest roots and berries, and he’d ended up sick and vomiting as he rode. He’d nearly been killed by Orlius, the vengeful husband of Jeschute — whom he’d taken for a fever vision, and then fled frightened and hopeless, and from that time he was never able again to give total trust to anything, but always held something back, something just enough to spoil his family, taint his goals, and leave him blank and feeling false in hermit’s robes or whatever … except, he reminded himself, to Unlea … I trusted it again … He bit his lip, uneasy. Or did I? He shook off the question. The power still flowed. Whether he trusted it or not, he would let it carry him on this time to the end. Like Prang and Gawain and perhaps all the rest trapped here, he no longer feared the end, because at least that would come, with no more dread of worse later. And it had come. As ever promised, it had come … The power brings no joy, he thought again as they moved in the midst of the broken forces. Another knight with dove shield and pennant stormed importantly past. More soot was raining down. The men struggled on through the stinking smoke, alternately fading and taking firm form as the billows thinned and filled and coiled …
The Grail War Page 26