by Rice, Anne
He caught me in a suffocating swaddle of fabric. And suddenly I felt myself lifted off the floor, encased in a sack, and I knew we had left the tower!
I was head down, sick to nausea. It seemed he flew, carrying me on his back, and his laughter was now half blown away by the wind, and I could not free my arms. I could feel my sword, but couldn’t reach the handle.
Desperately I felt for my dagger, not the one which I must have dropped when I had been caught by him, but the other in my boot, and then having that, I twisted and turned towards the rough back on which I rode, bouncing and growling, and plunged the dagger through the cloth over and over again.
He gave a wild scream. I stabbed him again.
My whole body, inside the sack, was whipped up into the air, away from him.
“You little monster,” he cried. “You wretched impudent child.”
We descended sharply, and then I felt myself hit the ground, the rocky grassy ground, and I rolled over, tearing at the fabric of the blinding sack with my knife.
“You little bastard,” he cursed.
“Are you bleeding, you filthy devil?” I called out. “Are you?” I ripped at the sack, lost in it, rolling over and over, then feeling the wet grass with my naked hand.
I saw the stars.
Then the cloth was torn free of my struggling limbs.
I lay at his feet, but only for a moment.
6
THE COURT OF THE RUBY GRAIL
Nothing could have wrenched the dagger from my hand. I cut deep into his legs, bringing forth another riot of screams from him. He picked me up, indeed hurled me high in the air, and I fell, stunned, onto the dewy ground.
This gave me my first blurred but imperative glimpse of him. A great rush of red light illuminated him, a hooded and cloaked figure dressed as a knight, in long old-fashioned tunic and sleeves of shining mail. He twisted his torso, his golden hair tangling over his face, obviously in pain from the wounds inflicted on his back, and now stomped his wounded leg.
I rolled over twice, holding tight to the dagger, as I freed my sword sufficiently to draw it out of the scabbard. I was on my feet before he even so much as moved, and swung the sword with one hand, clumsily, but with all my force, hearing it smash into his side with a sickening moist slosh of a sound. The gush of blood in the bright light was horrific and monstrous.
There came his worst cry. He fell to his knees.
“Help me, you imbeciles; he’s a devil!” he screamed. His hood fell back.
I scanned the immense fortifications rising to my right, the high crenelated towers with their fluttering flags in the unsteady glow of countless lights, just as I’d glimpsed from the distance of the town. It was a fantastical castle of pointed roofs, sharply broken arched windows, and high battlements crowded with dark figures moving in silhouette as they looked down on our struggle.
There came rushing down the wet grass the figure of Ursula in a red gown, cloakless, her hair in long braids with red ribbon, rushing towards me.
“Don’t hurt him, I charge you,” she screamed. “Don’t touch him.”
A group of male figures, all got up in the same old-fashioned knightly tunics, down to their knees, with somber pointed steel helmets, followed her. They had bearded faces all, and ghastly white skin.
My adversary pitched forward on the grass, spouting blood as if he were a hideous fountain.
“Look what he’s done to me, look!” he shouted.
I stuck my dagger in my belt, grabbed the sword with two hands and went at his neck, letting a roar escape my teeth as I did, and saw the head roll over and over and down the hill. “Ah, now you’re dead, you’re bloody dead!” I cried out. “You murderous fiend, you’re dead. Go get your head. Put that back on!”
Ursula flung her arms around me, her breasts sealed against my back. Her hand imprisoned mine once more and forced me to bow the tip of the sword to the ground.
“Don’t touch him,” she screamed again, with a threat in her voice. “Don’t come near, I charge you.”
One of the others had recovered the shaggy blond head of my foe and held it up as the others watched the body twitch and writhe.
“Oh, no, it’s too late,” said one of the men.
“No, put it back, put it on his neck,” cried another.
“Let me go, Ursula,” I said. “Let me die with honor, will you do me that courtesy!” I struggled. “Let me free, to die in my own way, will you do that much?”
“No,” she said hotly into my ear. “I will not.”
I was absolutely powerless against her strength, no matter how soft the cushion of her breasts or how cool and soft her fingers. She had complete mastery of me.
“Go to Godric,” cried one of the men.
The other two had picked up the writhing, kicking, headless man. “Take him to Godric,” said the one who carried the head. “Only Godric can pronounce on this.”
Ursula let out a loud wail. “Godric!” It was like the howl of the wind or a beast, it was so shrill, so immense, echoing off the walls.
High up, against the wide gaping arched doorway of the citadel, his back to the light, there stood a slender elderly figure, limbs bent with age.
“Bring them both,” he called out. “Ursula, quiet yourself, lest you frighten everyone.”
I made a swift bid for freedom. She tightened her grip. There came the pinprick of her teeth in my neck. “Oh, no, Ursula, let me see what’s to happen!” I whispered. But I could feel the murky clouds rising about me, as though the air itself had thickened and was enfolding me with scent and sound and the sensuous force.
Oh, love you, want you, yes, I did and can’t deny it. I felt myself holding her in the high moist grasses of the field, and she lay beneath me, but these were dreams and there were no wild red flowers, and I was being taken somewhere, and she had but weakened me, pulled on my heart with the force of her own.
I tried to curse her. All around us lay the flowers and the grasses, and she said, “Run,” but this was quite impossible because it was not made of truth, but of fantasy and the sucking of her mouth on me and her limbs entwining me as if she were a serpent.
A French castle. It was as though I had been transported to the north.
I had opened my eyes.
All the accoutrements of a French court.
Even the dim sedate music which I could hear made me think of old-fashioned French songs sung at suppers in long-ago childhood.
I awoke, sitting cross-legged on a carpet, slumped over, and came to myself rubbing my neck and feeling about desperately for weapons which had all been taken from me. I nearly lost my balance and fell backward.
The music was repetitive and dull and pounding as it rose up from some faraway place below, with too many muffled drums and the thin nasal whine of horns. It had no melody.
I looked up. French, yes, the high narrow pointed archway that led to a long balcony outside, below which some great celebration was in noisy progress. Fancy French, the tapestries of the ladies with their tall cone-shaped hats, and their snow-white unicorns.
Quaint antique, like the illustrations in prayer books of courts in which poets sat reading aloud the boring and tedious Roman de la Rose, or the fables of Reynard the Fox.
The window was draped in blue satin covered in the fleurs-de-lys. There was old filigree crumbling about the high doorway and what I could see of the window frame. And cabinets were gilded and painted in the French style, decayed and stiff.
I turned around.
There stood the two men, their long tunics streaked with blood, and their mail sleeves coarse and thick. They had taken off their pointed helmets, and they stared at me with icy pale eyes, each a solemn bearded figure. The light positively glinted on their hard white skin.
And there stood Ursula, a silver-framed jewel upon the shadows, gazing down at me, her gown high-waisted and soft-falling and old-fashioned as their clothes, as though she too had come from some long-ago kingdom of the French, her snow
-white breasts bare almost to her nipples, beneath a rich full little bodice of flowered red-and-gold velvet.
At a desk, on an X-shaped chair, there sat the Elderly one, his age quite true to the posture I had glimpsed silhouetted against the castle light, and he was pale as they, of the same deadly white complexion, both beautiful yet awful and monstrous.
Turkish lamps hung on chains about the room, flames glittering deep inside them, giving off a hurtful light against my dazed eyes, and also a fragrance as of roses and summer fields, something alien to heat and burnt things.
The Elderly one had a bald head, as ugly as the unearthed bulb of an iris, upended and shaved of all root, and implanted with two gleaming gray eyes, and a long narrow solemn uncomplaining and unjudging mouth.
“Ah, so,” he said to me in a soft voice, lifting one eyebrow, which was scarcely visible except for the sharp arching wrinkle of his perfect white flesh. He had thick slanting lines for cheeks. “You realize you’ve killed one of us, don’t you?”
“I hope so,” I said. I climbed to my feet. I nearly lost my balance. Ursula reached out, then stepped back, as though she had caught herself in a breach of decorum.
I righted myself, glaring at her quite ferociously and then at the bald Elderly one, who looked up at me with unbroken calm.
“Do you care to see what you’ve done?” he asked of me.
“Why should I?” I asked. But I did see.
On a great trestle-board table to my left lay the dead blond thief who had hefted me body and soul into his big cloth sack. Ah, the debt was paid in full.
He lay still, shrunken horridly, as if his limbs had collapsed upon themselves, and his bloodless white head, lids open on dark clotted eyes, lay against his roughly torn neck. What a delight. I stared at one skeletal hand of the being, which hung over the edge of the table, white and like some shriveling creature of the sea beneath a merciless sun on sand by the oceanside.
“Ah, excellent,” I said. “This man who dared to abduct me and bring me here by force, quite dead, thank you for the sight of it.” I looked at the Elderly one. “Honor demands nothing less. We don’t even have to talk of common sense, do we? And what others did you take from the village? The wild old man who tore at his shirt? The infant born small? The weak, the infirm, the sick, whatever they’d give you, and what do you give them in exchange?”
“Oh, do be quiet, young one,” said the Elderly solemn male. “You are courageous beyond honor or common sense, that’s plain enough.”
“No, it isn’t. Your sins against me demand I fight you with my last breath, you, all of you.” I pivoted and stared at the open door. The plodding music in itself sickened me and threatened to make me dizzy from all the blows and falls I’d suffered. “Such noise from below. What are you, a bloody court?”
All three men broke into laughter.
“Well, you’ve very nearly got it right,” said one of the bearded soldiers in a deep bass of a voice. “We are the Court of the Ruby Grail, that’s our very name, only we prefer that you say it properly in Latin or in French, as we say it.”
“The Court of the Ruby Grail!” I said. “Leeches, parasites, blood drinkers, that’s what you all are. What is the Ruby Grail? Blood?”
I struggled to remember the prick of her teeth against my throat without the spell which had always come with them, but there it was, threatening to swallow me, the drifting, fragrant memory of meadows and her tender breasts. I shook myself all over. “Blood drinkers. Ruby Grail! Is that what you do with all of them, the ones you take? Drink their blood?”
The Elderly one looked pointedly at Ursula. “What is it you’re asking of me, Ursula?” he put the question to her. “How can I make such a choice?”
“Oh, but Godric, he’s brave and fine and strong,” said Ursula. “Godric, if you but say yes, no one will go against it. No one will question it. Please, I beg you, Godric. When have I ever asked—.”
“Asked for what?” I demanded, looking from her solicitous and heartbroken face to the Elderly man. “For my life? Is that what you ask? You’d better kill me.”
The old man knew that. I didn’t have to tell him. There was no way I could be given mercy at this juncture. I would merely fling myself against them again, seeking to bring down another or another.
Suddenly, as if quite angry and impatient, the Elderly figure rose with surprising agility and grabbed me by the collar as he swept past me in a great graceful rustle of red robes, and dragged me with him, as if I weighed nothing, out through the archway and to the edge of the stone railing.
“Look down on the Court,” he said.
The hall was immense. The overhang on which we stood ran all around, and below there was scarcely a foot of bare stone, so rich were the hangings of gold and burgundy. The long table below hosted a string of Lords and Ladies, all in the requisite burgundy-red cloth, the color of blood, not wine, as I had believed, and before them glared the bare wood, with not a plate of food nor a cup of wine, but all were content and watching with cheerful eyes, as they chattered, the dancers who covered the great floor, dancing deftly on thick carpets as though they liked this padding beneath their slippered feet.
There were so many interlocking circles of figures moving to the throb and beat of the music that they made a series of arabesques. The costumes embraced a great nationality of styles, from the very French to the modern Florentine, and everywhere there were gay circles of red-dyed silk or the red field covered with flowers or some other design which looked very like stars or crescent moons, I could not quite see it.
It was a somber yet tantalizing picture, all of them in this same rich color which held sway somewhere between the putrid ghastliness of blood and the stunning splendor of scarlet.
I noted the sconces, candlesticks, torches galore. How easy it would be to set their tapestries afire. I wondered if they could burn, they themselves, like other witches and heretics.
I heard Ursula let out a little gasp. “Vittorio, be wise,” she whispered.
At her whisper, the man at the center of the table below—he who held that very high-backed chair of honor, which my father would have held at home—looked up at me. He was blond-haired, blond as the shaggy one I’d slain, but his long locks were pampered and silky on his broad shoulders. His face was youthful, far more so than my father’s yet plenty older than my own, and as inhumanly pale as all the rest, his searing blue eyes fixing upon me. He returned at once to his study of the dance.
The whole spectacle seemed to shiver with the hot smoking quaver of the flames, and as my eyes watered, I realized with a start that the figures worked into the tapestry were not the quiet ladies and unicorns of the small studious chamber from which we’d come, but devils dancing in Hell. Indeed, there were quite hideous gargoyles in the most violent and cruel style, carved beneath the porch all around, on which we stood, and I could see at the capitals of the branching columns that held up the ceiling above us more of the demonic and winged creatures carved into the stone.
Grimaces of evil were emblazoned on the walls behind me, across from me. In one tapestry below, the circles of Dante’s Hell climbed one upon another ever higher and higher.
I stared at the shining bare table. I was dizzy. I was going to be sick, lose consciousness.
“Make you a member of the Court, that is what she asks,” said the Elder, pushing me hard against the rail, not letting me free, not letting me turn away. His voice was unhurried and low and without the slightest opinion on the matter. “She wants us to bring you into our Court as a reward for the fact that you slew one of us, that is her logic.”
His glance to me was thoughtful, cool. His hand on my collar was neither cruel nor rough, merely simple.
I was a tempest of half-uttered words and curses, when suddenly I realized I was falling.
In the Elderly one’s grasp, I had fallen over the rail, and in a second descended to the thick layers of carpet below, where I was yanked to my feet, as the dancers made way for us on ei
ther side.
We stood before the Lord in the high-backed chair, and I saw that the wood figures of his regal throne were, of course, animalian, feline and diabolical.
All was black wood, polished so that one could smell the oil, and it mingled sweetly with the perfume of all the lamps, and there came a soft crackling from the torches.
The musicians had stopped. I couldn’t even see them. And then when I did, saw the little band quite high up in their own little balcony or loft, I perceived that they too had the porcelain-white skin and the lethal cats’ eyes, as they gazed down at me, all of them slender males, modestly clothed, and seemingly apprehensive.
I stared at the Lord. He had not moved or spoken. He was a fine, imperial figure of a man, his thick bulky blondish hair combed back from his face and falling, as I had seen before, in carefully combed locks on his shoulders.
His clothes too were of the old fashion, a great loose tunic of velvet, not a soldier’s tunic, but almost a robe unto itself, trimmed in darkly dyed fur to match its lurid color, and beneath it he wore big beautiful full sleeves ballooning out loosely over his elbows and then tapering around his long narrow forearms and wrists. A huge chain of medallions hung about his neck, each heavily worked circle of gold set with a cabochon stone, a ruby, red as his clothing.
He held one slender naked hand curled on the table, simply. The other I could not see. He gazed at me with blue eyes. There was something puritanical and scholarly about his bare hand, and the refinement and cleanliness of it.
Across the thick overlapping carpets, Ursula came with a quick step, holding her skirts in two dainty hands. “Florian,” she said, making a deep bow to the Lord behind the table. “Florian, I am begging you for this one, on account of character and strength, that you bring him into the Court for my sake, for my heart. It’s as simple as that.”
Her voice was tremulous but reasoning.
“Into the Court? Into this Court?” I demanded. I felt the heat rise in my face. I looked from right to left. I stared at their white cheeks, their dark mouths, which were all too often the color of fresh wounds. I stared at the blanched and colorless expressions with which they regarded me. Were their eyes full of demonic fire, or was it only that every other bit of humanity had been taken from their countenances?