Kingdom of the Grail

by Judith Tarr

  “We do find one another congenial,” Charles said, “though there are some among my people who would object to that.”

  Al-Arabi flicked his hand, dismissing the thought. “Certainly they may protest, but the decision is yours to make. Are you not the king?”

  “King of the Franks,” Charles said a little too gently. “I rule by the will of the people. If they forbid this thing, I can’t legally do it.”

  “Will they forbid it,” asked Al-Arabi, “if you offer them the opportunity to advance on our lands as our armies once did on yours?”

  Charles’ brows rose.

  “Not,” said Al-Arabi, “that we will ever permit you to conquer us, but your aid of our Caliph against the rebel could be seen as a blow for Christianity against the infidel.”

  “That is subtle,” Charles said, “but dangerous. For you if we succeed too well. For me if my people discover the lie.”

  “What lie is there? A Christian king marches into a Muslim country to put down an insurrection. The Caliph’s loyal servants invite him; he comes on a mission sanctioned by both his God and Allah. If your more simple people need to be told only of God’s will, not of Allah’s—is there harm in that?”

  “Some would call that devil’s logic,” Charles said, but lightly. He tugged at his fair mustaches, frowning as he pondered. After a while he said, “Tell me what I have to gain from this, aside from my brother the Caliph’s thanks.”

  “Barcelona,” Al-Arabi answered, “and Gerona, and Saragossa, and all their peoples and territories, to hold under Frankish authority. A jewel in the crown of Spain, while my Caliph holds the rest.”

  “You would bow to me as your king?” Charles asked him.

  He looked Charles in the face—striking in a man of so gracefully indirect a people—and said clearly, “Yes. I would. But always in the understanding that I remain a follower of the Prophet, and of his heir the Caliph. You would rule me in the body, but in spirit I remain a Muslim.”

  “And if I demanded that you convert?”

  The dark eyes glittered. “As you converted the Saxons, my lord king? Well then, I would choose to lose my head. But you would lose Spain.”

  Charles laughed. His voice was light for a man so large, but his laughter was rich and full. Al-Arabi waited courteously for him to finish, and to explain. Which he duly did, through gusts of lingering mirth. “My lord emir, the Saxons were a pack of howling savages who worshipped trees and stones. You people of the Book, who know our Lord Christ and reckon him a prophet, may be somewhat confused as to doctrine, but you’ll never be converted by a headsman’s axe. You, we’ll teach by example, once we share a kingdom.”

  “Or we might teach you, and you’ll profess the Faith.”

  Charles’ grin was wide, mirthful, and he seemed completely certain that such a thing would never happen.

  They settled on it then, there between the two of them, though on the morrow there would be a council in which it would all ostensibly be decided. Charles would muster an army and come to the aid of the Caliph. The Caliph in return would make him lord and emir over selected cities of Spain. That would be made palatable to Charles’ good Christian people, though he would not lie to them—in that he was adamant. He might shade the truth. He would not twist it altogether.

  It was late when Charles left the emir’s tent. While he lingered there, the rain had blown away. The stars were out. The moon rode high. To Roland it seemed as bright as daylight.

  Most of the tent-city slept. There were still a few people about, seeking the privies or huddled about a campfire. None took much notice of the king.

  Roland was calm but alert, as a guard should be. If he used other senses than a man of more mortal heritage might, then all the better for the king’s protection.

  The corner of his eye caught a flicker in shadow. It was quick, light, supple. Its eyes gleamed on him, fixed for a moment, held with a sharp and piercing intelligence. Then it was gone, hunting some lurker in the night.

  Roland remembered to breathe again. It was only a cat, he told himself. It was not friendly, but neither was it hostile. It was as cats were: absorbed within itself.

  And yet he could not help but remember those eyes, how clear they had been in the dark, seeing through him as if he had been made of water. One creature in this place knew him for what he was—knew the whole of him, and not only the part that he allowed human eyes to see.

  CHAPTER 3

  Sarissa left her tent in the early morning, just as the first grey light touched the reeds along the river’s edge. This country was so rich, so wet—water welling out of the ground and flowing in great slow rivers, pooling in lakes or sinking into marshes. Here where the Frankish king was building his city—did he know what power was in this place? Tenscore springs bubbled from the mountain’s foot, feeding a river that fed a greater river.

  Water in its softness could wear away stone. Water was great magic. Evil could not cross it. Dark things were washed clean in it.

  Sarissa went down to the lesser river, walking barefoot in the grass. It was delicious, wonderful, to do such a thing outside of a garden, on the edge of a wild wood.

  Tarik appeared out of the soft and misty air and wove about her ankles, mewing like the cat he seemed. He had a satisfied expression. The hunting had been good, it said.

  “Mice?” she asked him.

  He hissed. Snakes, he said. He licked his lips with a pink tongue, and yawned vastly, so that she might see the full armament of his teeth.

  “Snakes? Here?”

  He shrugged a cat-shrug, an insouciant flip of the tail. She walked slowly just behind him, her bright mood gone dark.

  The strength of wood and water restored her with startling swiftness. Even the oldest of old serpents could not thrive here, though he might slither and slink and do his best to corrupt the weak of spirit.

  The sky paled to silver and rose as she came down to the river. She bent to lave her face, to drink of the cold clean water. When she had had her fill, she knelt there for a while, breathing damp cool air, watching the sun spread light across the horizon.

  The river caught the flame of it. She trailed her fingers in water as bright as fire. It was clear here, and filling with light. Fishes darted; weeds swayed in the current. Farther out, where the river was deeper, the water darkened to black beneath the sun’s brilliance.

  Sarissa pulled off her boots and waded out into the icy river. The shock of the cold made her gasp, but she steeled herself to bear it. The current tugged at her. She rooted herself in the earth. The water flowed over her but could not move her. When it lapped her chin, she filled her lungs with every scrap of air that they could hold, and slipped into a strange dark-bright world.

  She swam as a fish swims, supple and swift, down and down into that realm of dim green shapes and rippling weeds, lit with sudden flashes of light: sun rising, fish leaping. She passed out of the sun’s light, but there was light below her, a gleam in the river’s darkness.

  Just as she knew that her breath must fail her, her outstretched hand touched the thing that lay on the river’s bottom. It was hard, colder than the water, and caught fast in a tangle of weeds and clay. She grasped the end of it and thrust against the current. Her lungs had begun to burn. But she would not let go.

  The earth fought for the victory, but the water in its current caught Sarissa and swirled her suddenly upward. Blind, half-unconscious, lungs afire, she burst into the light.

  She fell on the green bank with her prize caught beneath her. Out of the water it was a massive, icy-cold thing, but its heart was fire.

  She lifted herself to her knees. A sword lay in the grass. It gleamed as if it had come new from the forge, grey rippled steel like the water that had begotten it. Its hilt was plain silver without adornment, but for a white stone set in the pommel.

  As she knelt in front of it, Tarik flowed out of the river, licking cat-whiskers, flicking a fish’s tail that flowed and stretched and transmuted into a cat
’s. He inspected the sword with approval. The water had done well, his glance said, and the sun’s fire, forging a blade for a champion’s hand. If indeed there was a champion in the world, and if, once chosen, he would do what he had been sought out to do.

  Tarik, when he was a cat, had a cat’s irony. But it was a fine sword, as solid as earth, and as palpably real. Sarissa trusted that the same would be true of the man for whom it had been wrought.

  The young Franks were riding in a field beyond the river, a whole whooping pack of them, waging a mock war. Sarissa paused to watch. She let it seem that she was a youth of the Saracens, which won her stares but did not distract people as greatly as if they had known she was a woman. Those whose spears bore red pennons, she managed to discover, were the king’s Companions, and the rest, decked in blue, belonged to a great lord of the Franks.

  “If you’re one for a wager,” said the big fair man beside her, “lay your stakes on the Companions. They’ve Roland and Olivier with them today, and Turpin, too. Those three could conquer Spain by themselves if they had a mind.”

  “Truly?” Sarissa asked in wide-eyed innocence. “And which are they?”

  The Frank pointed them out with a sweep of the hand. They fought in front, all three abreast, in their bright mail and their well-worn helmets. Two were as broad and massive as the Frank who had told her their names. The third, who rode between the others, was not so tall, not so broad, but his spear thrust and swung foremost, and nearly always found a mark.

  They rode hard, and they laughed as they rode, sweeping down on their feigned enemies, swirling about them, casting them into disarray. But when the blue pennons were all fallen, the conquerors leaped from their horses and went laughing to the aid of men whom, just moments before, they had attacked with such vigor.

  Then at last they had faces, as helmets came off, tucked under arms or hung at saddlebow. Turpin and Olivier were Franks without a doubt, one brown, one golden-fair, but Roland came of a different blood. She had but a glimpse of him amid the crowd of his people, a swift impression of black hair, white skin, strong arch of nose. Then he was hidden behind Olivier’s broad back.

  Sarissa might have followed, intrigued by what little she had seen, but the king came then, the great lord of the Franks with his hair even fairer than Olivier’s, and his incongruously light voice. He was a fine figure of a man, was Charles, Frank of the Franks, a presence as bright and strong as any she had seen. If she had not known already that here was a king, now she would have been sure of it. He ruled in his court and before embassies. But in the gathering of his men he was most truly king.

  They did not crowd about him; they had no need to do that. He passed among them, slapping a shoulder here, clasping a hand there. Where a man was wounded, he stopped to see that all was well, and to give comfort if there was need.

  A king could heal by the power of his presence. Sarissa watched in a kind of pain. The sight of him brought memories, sorrows, regrets . . .

  She shut them away. She turned a little blindly, slipped through the edges of the throng, and left the men to their gathering. They had been a distraction, a diversion from her path. Now she returned to it as she should have done from the first.

  There were women in this city of tents and promises. Some were camp-followers, but many were women of respectable family, lords’ wives and sisters and daughters, and the queen and her women and—Sarissa had heard—a mistress or two of the king. The queen mother was there, too, Bertha who was said to be the elder image of her son, a woman as tall and broad as a man, with a man’s forcefulness, and no little share of arrogance.

  Among the women’s tents, Sarissa was careful to be a woman, walking as one, carrying herself as one. That was less difficult than it might have been in Spain: women here walked as boldly as men. Maybe they veiled themselves against the sun, but they did not do it to be modest.

  Sarissa’s foreign clothes and unfamiliar face attracted glances, but she sensed no hostility. Some of those she passed even smiled, and many stared in open fascination. Franks had no guile, people said in Spain. They were like children, honest to a fault.

  Children could be cruel, too, and treacherous. And they waged wars as terrible as anything among their elders.

  Not until Sarissa had almost come to the queen’s tent, set in the middle and raised higher than the others, did someone stop her. A woman stood in her way, tall and robust, with braids the color of wheat, and wide blue eyes. Her face was too blunt for beauty, snub-nosed and wide-mouthed, but Sarissa doubted that the men cared: her breasts were full and her hips broad, and she carried herself like a woman who well knows her own attractions.

  Sarissa had not felt dwarfed by the men of the Franks, though they towered over her. Yet in front of this woman she felt unwontedly small and slight. She straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin.

  “Are you the physician from Spain?” the woman asked. “Have you come to attend the queen?”

  Sarissa’s brows rose. “You were not expecting a man?”

  “We were expecting someone older,” the woman said in the blunt way of the Franks, “but if you have any arts, we would welcome them.”

  There was indeed a man of respectable years among the emir’s people, a physician from Saragossa, but the messenger who had come earlier in the day had not been led to him. Sarissa inclined her head to the Frankish woman. “Take me to her majesty,” she said.

  The queen was a young woman, strikingly so. She must have been hardly more than a child when she came to the king’s bed, for she had children of a good age, and another swelling her belly. This one wore at her, sapping her strength, so that she sat listless in her tent, shut away in the gloom and the flicker of the lamps.

  Sarissa took it in with a glance: the dark and musty space, the crowd of ladies and servants, the priest reading in a drone of Latin. There was so little air in that place, it was a wonder any of them could breathe. She swept the young queen into the sunlight, brought her blinking and stumbling to a place arranged as Sarissa ordered it: a chair covered with soft cloths and banked with cushions, set under the spreading branches of a tree. It was cool there, the air clean and sweet, and flowers scattered in the grass.

  Queen Hildegarde sank heavily into the chair, though she was barely swollen yet with the child. Her face was pale, her fair hair lank. She would be lovely when she was well, Sarissa thought, but she was wan and lackluster now.

  And yet she tried to smile, to speak strongly. “You’re very kind, lady,” she said, “but I hardly need—”

  A physician might interrupt a queen. Sarissa turned to the woman who had met her first, and said, “Fetch strong wine, the best that can be had, and bread to sop in it, and water heated to boiling. If you please.”

  The lady’s eyes flickered at that belated courtesy, but she did not refuse to obey. While she was gone, Sarissa saw to the queen’s comfort. The queen’s women and her priests stood back and stared. Not all of them were glad to see a foreigner—an infidel, as they thought—laying hands on their royal lady. But she submitted with a sweetness of spirit that must serve her well in contending with her strong-willed king.

  When the queen was settled as comfortably as she could be, with even a little color returning to her cheeks from the light and clean air, Sarissa knelt beside her and laid hands on the swell of her belly. One or two of the attendants started forward with a hiss of outrage. The queen’s word stopped them. “This is what she came to do. Will you stop her before she begins?”

  “She is presumptuous!” declared a plump fair child with a markedly righteous expression.

  “She is here at my summoning,” said a high imperious voice. The attendants blanched. The queen mother strode into the flock of them, scattering the slow or the unguarded, and stood over Sarissa and the queen.

  Queen Hildegarde smiled at her, tired but fearless. Queen Bertha swept a frown round the circle of attendants, till it came to rest on Sarissa. “So. It’s true. The famous healer of the Sara
cens is a child. How much knowledge can you carry in that head, girl?”

  “Enough,” Sarissa said. She still had her hands on the slight swell of the queen’s middle, sensing clearly the life within. It was strong, as it should be; whatever weakness beset its mother, the child knew nothing of it.

  She said so to the queen. She was not surprised to be answered by the queen mother. “Of course the baby is strong. It’s my son’s. Now tell us why the queen is weak.”

  That was not so simple. The wine and bread came, and the water. Sarissa sopped wine in bread and bade the queen eat them, which she did slowly, without appetite, but obediently enough. Sarissa poured the water into a cup that she carried at her belt, in which she had crushed herbs from her box of medicaments. Their scent was somewhat sweet, somewhat pungent, and rather more pleasant than not. This she bade the queen drink.

  Color rose almost at once to the pale cheeks. Queen Hildegarde sat straighter. She drew a breath; she let it go. She stretched and smiled. “I feel . . .” she said. “I feel whole.”

  Her women stirred and murmured. Queen Bertha caught Sarissa’s eye. That single glance caused the ladies to withdraw to a polite distance, and brought Sarissa in close. “Tell me,” the queen mother said. “What ails her?”

  “Nothing of the body, majesty,” Sarissa said. “The child is well.”

  “And its mother?”

  “Guard her. Pray if you will.”

  “She is in danger?”

  Sarissa frowned. “Perhaps not. But there is something here that saps her spirit. It’s recent, no? She was well before?”

  “It began soon after we came here,” said the queen mother. “Is it this place?”

  “No,” said Sarissa. “Oh, no. There is great healing among these waters. It would be worse for her if she were not here.”

  “Then what—”

  “I think,” Sarissa said slowly, “that you would do well to keep her under guard. Choose guards whom you can trust.”