The Grail War

by Richard Monaco

  He kept imagining he glimpsed terrifying spectral shapes formed from the purple-violet flashings in his eyes, and in the echo of his own feet he heard others, and the drumming of his heart filled his ears with frightening rumbles until his senses became a terror to him that he sought to escape, plunging through this otherwise stone-silent, utter darkness …

  On and on … until he saw a distant gleaming. He couldn’t tell how far away it was. Part of his mind suddenly took a red-orange spot for a single, demonic eye glaring, and he almost stopped but didn’t … The passage was gradually widening again, and in his present state he believed this to be a very positive sign, going faster now with greater confidence, sure, for some reason, that he’d finally reached the end of his senseless winding through this absurdly designed fortress. Perhaps this was where they meant him to reach before showing themselves. This was clearly some kind of test … Yes, the watchers would soon show themselves … His senses were focused and stable again. Amazing what a single fragment of light could do. He felt brisk and confident as he stepped into the illuminated, round room and looked at the same three dark doorways again …

  On the hill above the castle, Valit and Irmree were crouched under a jut of shale cliffside, sheltered somewhat from the billowing, seething storm. His arm rested around her thick shoulders, and her plump, blue-eyed face pressed against his chest as one hand, very gently, with apprehension and tenderness, stroked the back and crooked fingers of his.

  The rain slashed past, spattering off the rock face, stinging where it caught their flesh. Her hand moved over and over, softly, almost wonderingly … He glanced at her, somehow puzzled — no, questioning. He frowned slightly. Then he turned his palm and grasped her firmly, kissed her flushed cheek, then, hesitatingly, her lips … He pulled back, looking still puzzled …

  * * *

  Broaditch stood a minute, heart racing, feeling sick and wobbly, frustrated, angry, and desperate. He looked wildly around the warmly lit chamber. Then, running, spear held out before him, he tore through another archway, going much too fast, tip sparking, giving a bare fraction’s warning as he twisted aside and rebounded violently from a wall, cracked his head, light flashing, staggering to another wall, realizing this was a dead end.

  He pressed himself against the stones and moaned under his breath.

  What have I done to myself …? It was madness to come here … I am full mad, yet not mad enough to be content with it …

  He slid down the rough wall to his knees and stayed like that, bearded face to the stone.

  I followed fever dreams … help me now … help me …

  “Help me,” he said aloud, voice ringing in the chamber. Stood up in one motion, straining into the darkness. “Speak to me!” He was shouting now. “You tormentors! Show yourselves! Speak! Guide me … I know you’re there … or am I truly mad and lost … ?” He paced in a nervous circle, the spear swaying loosely in his grip. “Help me, curse you! Get me out of this darkness!”

  He stood still and caught his breath in the pitch-black silence and, after a time, smiled to himself.

  “Ah,” he said calmly, “so it is, nothing but myself … In this my wits are whole and sound.”

  He gathered himself around his center of disgust, frustration, hopelessness, self-mocking outrage. He felt like a priest begging God to speak back to him in a human voice. He felt like a hypocrite-fool. He rocked back and forth, then gathered himself like a goaded bull, angry now only because there was no hope … no, not even angry — he just gave up, gave himself up so completely that nothing mattered in the slightest, not himself, nor darkness, nor time, nor place — no, nor wall, neither, and so he launched himself, as if he were free to move anywhere, and when he hit the bricks he smashed feet, shoulders, and forearms against them with all his strength and more and a strangely casual heart, and boomed, without hysteria, but with terrific force: “Open! Open! Open!”

  And the space in him that casually watched, calmly expected what swept the rest of him along as one, then another, brick bounced free, clunked on the other side and then several at once as the crumbling, rotted mortar gave altogether and the wall dissolved around him and he stood at the hole in a cloud of dust, squinting against (to him) the blinding lightning flashing from high up in what he gradually realized was a tremendous tower whose roof was invisibly high. The thunder was a vague, hollow ringing here.

  He went through and was casting about for a way out, walking carefully across the huge interior, telling himself he was never going to get involved in anything again, was going to live in Scotland, if he had to, with the savages and pretend to speak no language …

  The floor was smoothly tiled and he walked with a skating motion straight across the center, looking through the trembling shadows at the outside wall. He made out an archway. And then one foot slid and groped into space and he hopped frantically at the edge of what seemed to be a well ten feet across or a shadowed pit. He squatted down to gain his balance. He poked with the spear to test the depth and found it about two feet deep. The faint flashes didn’t reveal the shallow bottom.

  He stood up in it and wondered what purpose it served. Maybe someone ran small dogs around it or filled it with water for fish … It seemed as senseless as anything else to build this great hall around it …

  As he was walking to the other side, he stubbed his foot on something heavy. He felt the big toe begin to mountingly sting.

  “Bloody piles,” he muttered.

  What's this? A stone?

  He picked up a massive sphere about the size of a large apple. He was impressed by the weight. Well, why not? An empty castle — no, a huge empty castle all a maze within, a floor with a giant basin cut into it … a stupid ball of metal with … He peered at it in the erratic illumination and thought he distinguished crude-looking writing graven around it. He shook his head. Mayhap, he considered, this he the blinding light … gone a trifle dim … He grinned. He stuffed it into his belt pouch, which then tugged uncomfortably and banged against his thigh, and climbed back out of the “basin.” Headed for the archway, still looking around hoping for the sight of something … anything that might faintly justify those night visions of ineffable, golden luminescences streaming through the ethereal, prismatic castle … He almost bumped into a bent, straight-backed chair that sat before a three-legged table that was meant to have four. Otherwise, the hall appeared empty. He touched the table and it sagged and nearly fell …

  “Is this it?" he asked the faintly ringing room. “Is this anything?"

  He was dizzy as the strain suddenly caught up with him. Shut his eyes and rubbed his forehead. When he reopened them he stepped back with shock, stomach tensed: a tall, bearded figure wearing a thin crown was standing by the table. He recognized him: the cowled man in the boat …

  “Who are you?” Broaditch demanded.

  “Anfortas,” was the answer.

  “Are you a spirit?”

  “A fisherman.”

  “What do you want of me?”

  “Nothing more, for now.”

  Broaditch shut his eyes: reopened, he was alone again.

  Before he could pursue questioning the vacant air, he heard a faint clashing and turned around. Far across, on the other side, there was another archway. He could just distinguish it now that his eyes had adjusted. It had sounded like a sword being drawn. He crouched, listening … There seemed a glinting in the shadows when the lightning winked bluishly …

  Now, when I would be alone, you send me company … This was addressed to his vaguely defined image of the bearded sages hovering overhead (much as he’d pictured saints and angels in boyhood, all resembling the village priest), with the chiefest among them shutting one eye and squinting the bright blue other at him …

  He heard another metallic pinging from the deep shadows but no voices as he turned and headed, skated, in the diametrically opposite direction toward the nearer arch. He was thinking that he hadn’t come here to die for the possession of a metal ball,
even were it solid gold. He ran carefully and quickly. He skidded.

  The sudden jangling rattle of armored men chasing him was no surprise. But their speed was a shock. They followed wordlessly as he sprinted through the exit into a long, narrow chamber with an invisibly high roof as lightning tossed and crossed the shadows of old, upended furnishings and gleamed on the massed cobwebs he tore into, as if ripping a ghostly hole in the air … through a door, another long room … he skidded, startled by a long line of knights — empty shells! he realized, panting heavily now and wondering how much strength he had left … The dense ball bounced wildly, staggering his stride a little … rushed past a blurred succession of immense tapestries whose lightning-lit images were frozen into his awareness’s edge: a mounted warrior spearing what seemed a demon-faced dragon with overshadowing wings (in fragmented sequence) guarding the entrance to a cave … in the cave freeing a naked girl fettered to what seemed a huge, round table laden with fruits and goblets … climbing a steep, bare mountain peak beside the female figure, grasping a glowing star from the heavens … holding the star between them … into the next room (they all lay along the outside wall), where the picture covered the entire far wall, and he actually slowed to stare, astounded by the time and labor implied: the knight and maiden were faint outlines that seemed to have melted into the expanding star’s radiance, blended into a single flaming, and then he went through the doorway in the center (the vast tapestry fitted around it), and tumbled down a short flight of violently steep stairs and splashed into a cushion of water and mud, struggling on through the flooded courtyard under the seething, ripping sky again that seemed to reach down to pound at him personally, glancing back only once to see several silent, shadowy figures, darkly gleaming, rushing out in pursuit, as if riding a swift, fell wind …

  Alienor was lying on her back, with the two sleeping children, under an untreated sheep hide, feet to a low-burning campfire. The stars were very bright directly overhead, while in the distance she could see the incredibly coruscating storm display where the greenish, red, and black clouds covered the sky from end to end … The thunder was a vague murmur that blended with the sea sounds across the heath behind them …

  Lampic was looking at her. He sat near the quiet flames, long face painted on the night by the warm, yellowish glowing. He said nothing.

  She felt weary, yet awake … and thankful in a way past thought or expression for this free moment of life …

  So when he finally moved over and lifted the edge of the hide, she understood and accepted and reached her strong-boned, warm hands around his back without a word because something more than just flesh ached for this, drew her sore body willingly, violently into his, silently rubbing, pressing, startling the man (she took note), and then, with a gasp, drawing him into the fierce grip of her need …

  Clinschor’s iron carriage was halted in the mud on the road that curved around the castle and joined the track that led to the great drawbridge over which a number of his black-and-silver riders had just passed, led by the fat Lord Howtlande.

  About the time his father was coming through the pine woods, Lohengrin was peering out the slit at the rain billowing over the battlements in the leaping light, inhaling the cool, wet-smelling air that drafted in.

  The shadows shook around the men and horses twisted and scattered in the rising mud and water among the trees, along the road, and on the field before the moat. He squinted to see: there was an arm hooked out of a deep pool stiffly brandishing a sword which rocked in the gale … a knight knelt, face forward under water, behind upraised … the long tangles of a disemboweled horse twisted, snake-like, in a rapid eddy of the mounting flood …

  Clinschor was pacing the round interior, hands clasped behind his back, shoulders hunched. He looked very old to Lohengrin when he briefly glanced back before staring out into the wild night again: he found the terrible scenes of mere hours before already effaced or fading … watched the handful of remaining troops huddling under the nearby pines … watched as a huge rider came clattering back across the drawbridge and splashed toward the conqueror’s metal shell.

  “The wretch was to deliver me the holy spear,”

  Clinschor was complaining to himself, silently observed by the big, white-rimmed eyes of his body servant. “If the traitor lives still, I’ll burn away his sight and … and cut out his heart and … and feed it to the dogs.” He nodded vigorously. “To the dogs!”

  By then Sir Howtlande had come to the slit, his bloodless, hawk-nosed face flickering strangely in the shifting luminosity, rain whipping into his open visor. He was shouting over the din and the results were faint. Clinschor came and leaned his ear close. Lohengrin gave room, looking on now from inches away at the flabby, frowning face.

  “What? What say you?” the leader demanded.

  “ … a big man, he … so the others gave chase …”

  “Speak!” The suddenly unleashed, incredible voice raged impatiently.

  “ … he fled … was no knight,” came the answering shout that was still smothered. “He held a spear, master.”

  “Catch him! Slay … no, bring him living to me! Living, do you hear!? Bring the spear and the filth to me!” Flecks of spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth. Lohengrin drew back farther. “Did any see the Grail?! Must I come in there myself? Have I not done enough? Must I run my own errands?!”

  “Master, we are searching!” the pale, shadow-wrought face replied. “This pest hole is deserted. I have all the guard searching, but I fear they fled with it.”

  Clinschor snarled and leaped back from the slit, clawed the air, spitting foam, shrieking with soul-shattering violence. “They cannot!! They cannot!! I wove spells to freeze it here; none of them could bear it away any distance!!” His eyes rolled in his head. Lohengrin could see the burst vessels, as if he were about to weep blood. “Fools!! Pigs!! Filth!!” He fell upon the floor and ripped and tore at the rug and silks, mumbling wordlessly in his fury while Lohengrin, heart speeding, backed on his knees along the wall. He noticed the Nubian seemed alert, but not over-concerned, as if inured to such displays. The Lord Master leader was presently stuffing fabric into his mouth, chewing, snarling, rending it to shreds, pounding his fists over and over on the floor until the iron wagon resonated like a bell …

  * * *

  At about the same moment Broaditch had just reached the tree. He felt them right at his back. He expected a blow between the shoulder blades at any instant. He heard the plopping splash of footsteps over the wind-billowed thunder.

  The moat was flooding and the massive trunk was close to being floated free. He virtually shut his eyes and jumped, skidded, spun with forward momentum and managed to sustain falling (like a drunken man) almost to the other side and caught a flexible branch there as he went over and pulled himself from the water quickly, not feeling the chill yet, bracing himself (the first two were already coming across the log, bent into the terrific gusts, balancing, rocking, quick-stepping) and jabbing the spear (he still retained it) into the watery muck, heaved himself rhythmically until the great mass magnified its roll and the lead knight tumbled, screamless (he recognized the black-and-silver armor with a shock, but no surprise), splashed and vanished instantly, and the second, already falling, whipped his war ax as he lay virtually parallel to the foaming water (about to be dragged to the bottom by his steel outside), which flashed through the dancing light with terrible speed and accuracy, spraying through the gusting downpour so that if it hadn’t been for an extra blast of wind, the blow would not have simply glanced from his shoulder and spun him down … The others brought up short on the far side, dark, gleaming, blurry shadows, as the tree started to lift and turn in the rising water …

  Just about now Sir Howtlande was driving his drenched stallion back across the drawbridge and Clinschor’s squat, black ball of a coach heaved on, with straining horses pulling and common soldiers pushing under the ready swords of the few remaining black mutes. The half a dozen men slipped an
d strained in the knee-deep muck as the huge, wide wheels sloshed and sucked by inches along the lost road now defined only by the space between the lines of trees as the storm regathered itself and smote and smote and smote, branches snapping and flying past, whole trunks bending and going down … Over the whole outrageous wildness, the miserable men, pressing against the barely yielding iron bulk, over all terrible tumults, could hear a single voice, muffled, booming, ringing within, as if the dark metal had a giant’s tongue in the red, gleaming slit of its mouth …

  When Parsival got there, shin-deep in the body-littered water, the bridge was partly drawn, and as he prepared to jump the presence he believed he’d felt following, toying with him since he left the moors with Prang at summer’s end, was there.

  He held his shield of will up and let his awareness expand in a great sphere all around him until elusively, tantalizingly, a form seemed to shimmer before him above the earth near the castle gate. He couldn't be sure of the actual shape drawn in tints that suggested fire flickering behind a dark screen of smoke that the light and dark winking of the sky had no effect on … Then he recognized it with a shock that seemed to root him to the flowing ground, and the wind and water went away, became faint mistings, and the lightning became vague wispings from another world, a dream … He recognized but could not describe because the mind slid off and past with false attempts, roiling imaginings like faces and forms seen in clouds, painting images on the mere surface of that which was constantly changing … His mind tried to express a massively toad-like outline or an expanding, but dwarfish, shape or … he smelled death, heard weeping and wailing, felt utter chill fears crawling faceless and he wanted to bolt and scream and somehow knew if he broke or turned or lost focus for a fraction’s fraction he would be lost, and his body stayed locked there, draining his power out and out, felt himself floating a little above himself at the same time … witnessed death after death, burning rivers of blood, on whose shores skeletons were hanging, multitudes on gibbets, casting others into vast, lightless pits … He wanted to cry out: Mother! Mother! Save me, mother … save me … save me … mother!! Dark castles smoldered … fangs and jaws that gaped above the highest clouds closed on the world as crippled demons pranced, fish walked, great chickens leaped with human faces … monkeys paraded in priestly robes … a great snake flew slowly overhead … skeletons burning out eyes, lopping off ears … stuffing noses and mouths with clods of filth … flaying children … waving bloody banners, and everywhere the weeping, weeping, weeping, endless weeping … And suddenly as he was about to scream a scream that he knew would never cease once permitted to blast from within him, in that instant as his body cramped and shook violently, rattling teeth and bones and he felt himself sucked, draining away, he somehow leaped up over where he stood and his head seemed to poke into a pocket of serenity and silence (he seemed to see his body still standing in the mud below him) and his sight streamed like an irresistible light and poured through the cloudiness before him, baring and scattering the shapeless shapes, saw his mind dreaming and painting the dreams, and without using any energy at all, he (indescribably) opened his open eyes and was awake and the dreams drifted, hung a moment, then faded to thinning shimmers like a puff of smoke, and he heard himself laughing as the night came booming back and his body fell through the calm of his mind flat on its face and the splashing impact rejoined him to himself (he knew he couldn’t leave yet), and as he raised himself to his hands and knees, he knew those dreams were forever gone … and the streaming rain was a benediction washing away the residue of ten thousand yesterdays … He stood up and blinked and stretched. It was all gone and there was only the raging night pushing and pulling him. It was all gone …