The Grail War

by Richard Monaco

  The easing rain was coming almost straight down now. The thunder was rolling away to the north. There was a brief glisten of moonlight through a rent in the clouds. He saw Clinschor lying on his side, chest laboring, feebly wallowing, his one open eye glaring with unabated and unending fury, coughing and still, hopelessly, spitting and spitting …

  What a waste, he thought, starting to slog toward a rocky rise in the ground like a reef. The moonlight winked out and he turned to call into the deeper darkness under the cliff shadow, where he could no longer see the other, thinking: How silly … how silly …

  “You could have done so much else!” he shouted into the drizzling darkness. No reply. He shrugged. He hadn’t expected one. “Now, what will you do next?” he yelled over his shoulder. “The world can barely wait!”

  He reached the rocks at last and pulled himself free and knelt a minute to regain his breath. The drizzle was misting now. The clouds were clearing from the hill. Faint, silent flickers marked the fading storm …

  But in the bog he heard the muffled, hoarse, flat, powerful screech but couldn’t distinguish any clear words, just burbling fragments: “ … wawawawable … I … allabla … willwaa … baallaabaaab … forever-waw … wolblablablawol … nextblubbwaw … blablabo … blo …”

  Parsival stood up and started looking for a safe rocky track. The moon floated free for longer this time. The rain pattered vaguely. The air was clean above the burned odor.

  He went on without the least urge to look back. He could still hear the streams running down the hillside behind him. He felt expectant, ready … ready to start … ready …

  The moon was so clear and silent, he thought. The whole world and tomorrow waited … He was sore, cut, weary, but awake, shockingly awake, listening to everything: the freshening breeze, the distant crying of a night-bird, splashing and spattering of falling water draining through the steep forests, running, running, soaking into the charred lowlands …

  Broaditch opened his eyes (one was still blank) and saw the bright moon in a sky of scattered clouds that looked like beaten silver at the edges, going by very fast, shimmering among the reversed trees suspended above another moon and rushing sky … He shut them again, then felt the blood beat in his head. Reopened his eyes and understood: he lay on his back, tilted downslope, looking reversed at the flooded landscape. The country to the south seemed one vast, glimmering lake with occasional islands.

  He carefully righted himself. Overflows still trickled past him. He was at least one hundred feet below the path, he estimated, peering up and around through his right eye as he began to carefully work his way back up the treacherous slide.

  He wondered how long he’d been unconscious … He’d have dropped all the way down and drowned if he hadn’t hit this soft ridge and stuck …

  His head pounded and the wound on his face was throbbing. He lightly touched the sword cut, then realized, lying perfectly still, flattened to the mud-slope, the slice went across the eye he was looking through. The left one was blank. The rain had rinsed the blood away and it was unharmed … but what had blinded the other …? He remembered the incredibly brilliant, searing flash … had some difficulty arranging the scattered memory fragments … Had lightning really hit his eye? Had that lead sphere or whatever it was attracted it? It had split open, he was sure of that, and then something burst in an unbearable flash … At the knight … Lohengrin … at his head, the lightning must have hit his head. That was the only possible explanation he was interested in at the moment as he continued the long, inching climb flat on his tilted body … sliding up … balancing …

  Up on the road he found Irmree huddled under the overhanging rock face holding Valit in her arms and crooning or keening softly. Their blood was mixed and caked all over themselves. She was shivering. He covered her with some knight’s wet, torn cloak. The almost full moonlight was very bright and he easily found (as the memories replaced themselves) the imprint of where Lohengrin had fallen and must have lain until the rain dwindled to misting, because his tracks were clear heading north on the path toward where (not far ahead) it ran behind the wall. He found a bit of broken tooth there and what probably was a thinned splash of blood.

  Well, Broaditch thought, the lightning didn't kill him, nor the blow, either … But was it lightning …? What had that fire really been … ?

  It all seemed impossible, mad, nightmarish. He refused to think about it … He walked the other way and found the spear sticking straight up from the earth. He reached for it, then pulled his hand back without touching the shaft.

  I’ve one eye left, it seems. I'll try to keep the other by watching closely what I take up … He looked around, not quite smiling. You got me here … if you exist at all … for you never show yourselves at need … to do whatever had to be done, I suppose, for I know not even this much for certain … Now I only pray you never come out of your recesses … I’ll keep my good eye, thank you, from peering into dreams and lightning bolts! You have my vow on it!

  Because he was determined to go home — if it still existed. If there were one stone standing, he’d put another and another on it. He was limping and half-sighted, but, by heaven, he was going home! Let the nightmare go … He’d rest and then see about that poor woman … What was her name …? Irmree … Ah, poor Valit …

  He eased himself down until he was sitting with his back to the stony side looking out over the glimmering, flooded lowlands.

  He was going home, no mistake about it. Let be what was. He’d cross the desolate country and see what he had to see there, if he must, but he’d get home. He sighed and wished he still possessed that Oriental pipe … long lost … He sighed and yawned … The throbbing in his head was gradually subsiding. He stretched and yawned.

  Rest … then get on with it …

  He partly turned and rested his big hand on Irmree, patted and soothed her shoulders and neck with both his eyes closed. He tried to hush her keening as she pressed the young man’s body to herself.

  “Peace,” he told her gently. “Peace … rest … we ever keep our love, I’ve come to think, woman …” He nodded. “What we love, we ever keep …”

  Alienor was already up with the children when Lampic awoke. He took the situation in quickly. She’d just fed them by the fire. The boy was yawning and rubbing his eyes. The little girl was running on the grass, back and forth, trailing a length of string. The sun had just risen above the hills behind them, shining on the long wall of charred forest that undulated with the sloping countryside as far as could be seen in either direction. Here and there patches of smoky haze still smoldered.

  Tikla was hopping in a little circular dance, wriggling the string, singing. He watched Alienor’s fine-boned, hard, worn hands skillfully gathering and repacking the sack of dried food. She’d bound her hair back severely from her face and forehead. The streaks of gray and coppery red glinted in the pale, mild sun.

  The man understood and looked faintly rueful. He blinked, thought he’d try, anyway. He still felt a flush of springtime within himself. Anyway, just having survived was something that brought youth into his heart! And the night before …

  “So you be up and going?” he opened with.

  “As you plainly see,” she returned without showing anything one way or the other, “unless you come blind or your brain died in your sleep.”

  He slightly smiled.

  “I have family in the north,” he said, almost laconically. “The winters be hard, but there be compensations … I was a lad in the north country. There be compensations.” He watched her.

  “Then you must have younger bones still than I,” she informed him, still neither looking nor not looking at him. She stood up and slung the sack over her shoulder. “For the cold.”

  “Was it that bad, then?” He waited. Nothing. He smiled faintly. “I find you hardly old, lady Alienor.”

  “Lady, is it?” She had to smile and look at him now. “So you’ve raised my station. Be you a lord in low garment
s, then?”

  He smiled.

  “You’re a right lady, Alienor,” he told her, yawning and stretching, still alert to her reactions. “Say what you will.”

  He sat fully upright, covering hide falling away from his bare torso. His body was lean, corded, hairy.

  “So I met you,” he remarked, slightly petulant, “in the wrong season.”

  “Did you?”

  “But where will you go” — he gestured with his wiry brows — “with two chappies as you have and the world as it is?”

  “I came this far,” she said seriously, almost grim. “And I have family in the south — at least I had. My father was sour to my husband … A pause. “My broad wanderer …”

  “So he went off, then?” he asked hopefully.

  She took Torky’s hand and turned toward the expanse of hazy desolation. On the horizon a few massive, smoldering clouds still towered and seemed to be drifting almost imperceptibly north. One was momentarily shaped by her fancy into a squat, roundish castle … and then, as she watched, it additionally suggested a sentient form, perhaps a hunching troll-man or a church carving of a massive demon … She blinked the images away, then turned her face back to the steady, warm sun pressure …

  “He went off,” she said. “But if he be yet living, he’ll come home … my broad one.”

  Lampic saw the way it was. He wasn’t even certain why he’d pressed so long. It wasn’t like him. He was an unmarried miller, fond of women to a fault, it had been said. It was not like him, but last night there had been a moment … a moment when he’d felt something that still lingered, mild and warm and tender in that morning …

  No doubt it was the relief from the past, terrible days, but … still, he’d felt something … she’d been there and they’d certainly shared something which still lingered …

  He stood up, long, angular, and nude. It was cold in the north, he reasoned. He tugged on his woolens, then worked into his heavy shirt. He said, “Did you feel it?” He fixed his eyes on her. He paused.

  She didn’t even bother to ask what. She didn’t have to. She looked at him with her dark blue, cold-sea eyes. And didn’t have to nod, either, though she did, once.

  “Last night?” he needlessly added.

  She just looked at him. He remembered the distant thunder of the storm becoming a continuous booming, the flashes lighting the earth and sky around them where they lay … he shook his head to himself … and he’d never had such a moment with anyone, and, he insisted, she could not have, either … it was impossible … This from a fellow known for such sayings in the villages as: “Women ease the strain a bit, but business, lads, be business!”

  “I’ll go with you,” he suddenly said, raising a hand against her protest to come. “I’ll not act, anyway … just for the company.”

  “No,” she said, walking now. He was bent over, spitting to clear his throat and blowing his nose into the turf. She gathered Tikla into her wake, heading for the burned, steamy, skeletal country.

  “I’ll follow along, then,” he found himself saying, coming on behind, lacing up the front of his rough shirt as he walked. “But you might wait and give a man time to piss … and break his fast.”

  She went on, back erect, steady, reaching into the sack as Torky ran ahead a little, and Tikla called after him, “You was scared of the fire, Torky … I heard you crying.”

  Torky didn’t look back. He had a stick and was cutting the air with it.

  “So?” he said.

  “I was scared worse,” she called to him. “I was.”

  “Take this back to goodman Lampic,” Alienor ordered, giving the girl a hunk of hard cheese.

  Think of the poor souls, she was thinking as the twisted, fallen, blackened, broken trees and mounds of stirring ashes loomed closer, who may he living still within … God keep and help us all …

  Tikla ran with short, weaving steps back across the twenty yards or so to where the long man followed, rubbing his face vigorously with his palms as he long-strode, carrying the food in both her cupped hands.

  We do what we can do and no more, she thought, glancing back to see him taking the cheese. Tikla’s hair shone in the rising sun. Their joined shadows reached to where she was. She turned to the front again. Torky was small and pale at the edge of the silent ashes and forest bones … What we can …

  She heard a bird calling but couldn’t see it. The sound seemed mellow as honey. She felt a spot of warmth within herself. She smiled, almost as if she nurtured a secret, a little spot of warmth that was like the singing bird, somehow …

  She lifted her free hand and lightly touched her hair, easing a few stray strands behind her ear. She heard Tikla saying something back there. She smiled again over the secret, soft flutter of a thing …

  “What we can,” she whispered under her breath, serious and light at once. And she went on.

  Broaditch was wading through the ankle-deep ashes, raising black dust among the charred, almost branchless trees. The sun was high and clear. The earth was still warm here and give the season a strange feeling of spring.

  He was heading roughly south, hoping to strike a road. Irmree had headed north after an incomprehensible speech. She’d kept her lover’s iron pinky ring. He’d seen her pull it free. He’d watched her walk away for a time … then turned away … The only sound in the muffled silence of the afternoon was the faint, dry whooshing of his steps …

  He blinked: something was gleaming in a mound of ashes. Bright silver. Coming closer, he saw it was a sword, melted almost shapeless except for the blackened hilt. Near it a blob of helmet was half-buried … Farther on his foot kicked against a plate chestpiece with no trace of even bones, much less flesh …

  He went on … wondered how many days it would take to walk out of this devastated zone …

  He paused once in hours, thinking he heard a bird call somewhere in the blasted forest. He listened intently … nothing repeated, if it had been real to begin with …

  The sun was slanting down behind the trees that seemed black scrawls against the sky as he topped a low hill and looked at where a slender crease of stream curved away, shockingly bright and clean on the powdered blackness. He realized that the rains must have washed it clear … It was a wonder of beauty to him. The sun spattered sparkling light reflections that flashed on the somber banks …

  He was following, winding with it at almost a stroller’s meditative pace when he saw them up ahead and shielded his eyes (his sight was equal again) against the brightness. He went on steadily toward them. They didn’t see him: the long, lean man was bathing his feet; the two children were wading; the determined-looking, copper-and-gray-haired woman was sitting a little apart, hands dexterously sewing a piece of garment while her eyes looked toward the quietly flowing water. His first reaction was that he thought he was going to like her. He liked her look, her worn, strong, attractive face, and it wasn’t until she turned her head (and the blue eyes locked on his) that he recognized her and understood again that there were really no accidents, that fate was simply guiding him out of the shadows this time, that the tide was lifting him …

  He stopped a few steps from her, not looking at anything else but those dark-sea eyes, which seemed richer than he would have believed, as if age deepened and warmed and worked them into jewels. She was blinking, that was all, blinking, and he couldn’t tell if she actually wept. It wasn’t necessary … He knew the man was watching him and that the children had stopped playing, but there’d be time for that. He was still taking in, relishing, the stunning moment, the richness … He didn’t want to speak yet.

  Her hands were motionless in the shapeless garment. He noticed everything, as if his senses were washed clean: the gleam of the thorn needle, the tracks of dark thread, the coppery tints of her hair, the lines in her face that (he understood) were simply shaped by what was inside, were the writing of the soul in time’s script and were beautiful … her breathing … he was afraid to speak …

  The
moment stretched out and then: “Well,” she said, without even smiling yet, though he was, “you might have let us know you were coming.”

  He smiled and stretched out his arms. Alienor, he thought, as if it now were certain.

  “How, woman?”

  She shrugged.

  “Sent a crow with word, I suppose,” she said, and now he saw the tears. The sun flashed on them. Her voice was suddenly a little husky. “You seem weary,” she said, not moving yet, as if she, too, were afraid to press the moment …

  He nodded, said nothing. He turned and looked at Lampic, who was watchful, feet still dangling in the stream. He looked at his children, standing knee-deep in the water with the incredible sunlight shatteringly enhaloing them, as if they stood at the heart of brightness, as if their bodies were shadows and the shimmering, soft glowing were their true substance.

  “My doves,” he finally said. He felt Alienor standing beside him, felt her strong hand firmly join into his. He heard her light, uneven breathing, felt her … felt her … The children still hadn’t moved and he remained held by the rippling glow … felt the warmth of her hand, gripped it, as if to press the two into one piece of flesh … He shut his eyes and reopened them. “Now it begins,” he said. “Now it begins …”

  Parsival was several miles north of the burned-out woods and had just reached an ancient, sunken road that curved away across the open fields into the glimmering, violet wash of twilight.

  He abruptly stopped and turned around. The wind was cool and he could distinguish a distant, faint, charred hint on the air … He was suddenly remembering his wife and daughter lying in the grave he and Prang had dug outside the castle, saw their pale forms … he’d washed off the dried blood … He confronted the image in his mind, as if he were actually facing them, because there was a message, a meaning: the fragile, silent women gazed, as if from a dream, wordless and profound, and then he understood and knew why he’d stopped — he had to find his son. Yes … he had to try and find his son … Lohengrin …