Kingdom of the Grail

by Judith Tarr

  “Someone is ill-wishing her?”

  “Something touches on her spirit. Something dark; old and cold. It may not know or care what it does to her. It will take the child if it can, because that is its nature. She will prevent it if she can, because that is a mother’s nature.”

  “That is hardly work for a company of soldiers,” the queen mother said. “A company of holy women, perhaps. Or priests.”

  “Women,” said Sarissa. “Yes. Let them raise a wall of prayer about her, and sing psalms of joy and ease. See that she has sunlight and clean starlight, rest and peace, and no fear.”

  “And the thing that threatens her?”

  “I will find it,” Sarissa said.

  “Let me see to that,” said the queen mother.

  “Have you arts and powers, then?” Sarissa asked her.

  The queen mother lifted her chin slightly. She looked remarkably like her son the king. “Find it,” she said, “but when you do, you will speak with me before you act upon it.”

  “And if I do not?”

  “Would you dare?”

  “I will do whatever I judge best,” Sarissa said, “majesty.”

  They met eye to eye like a crossing of swords. Queen Bertha was a woman of great strength of will. But Sarissa had withstood greater powers than this.

  King Charles’ mother saw it. She would not bow, that was not in her, but she could permit herself to accept the inevitable. To salve her pride, she said, “You will stay here and attend the queen.”

  Sarissa had intended to do exactly that. But she said, “My tent, my belongings—”

  “Our people will fetch them,” said the queen mother. “You will live in the queen’s tent. Your own can be—”

  “No,” said Sarissa.

  The queen mother’s brows rose. That word, her expression said, was not often spoken in her presence.

  Sarissa smiled sweetly and said, “I will attend her majesty gladly, and see to her protection. But I will have my own tent, and my own things in it. My art,” she said through the uprising of the queen mother’s objection, “requires it.”

  “Please,” Queen Hildegarde said. Her voice was soft but clear, and for all its lack of force, it brought the queen mother about. “Please, Mother. Let her be.”

  “Well,” said the queen mother, a sharp eruption of breath. “Well! Have it as you will, then. If only you get better, and she sees to it.”

  “I will,” said Hildegarde. “She will. Is she not a famous healer in Spain, where the physicians are the best in the world?”

  In this part of the world, Sarissa thought, but she held her tongue.

  “And,” said Hildegarde, still with that sweet semblance of innocence, “you did summon her, Mother, out of fear for me. If we are to trust her, we must trust her in everything.”

  “We will trust her,” the queen mother said, as if her word made it law.

  CHAPTER 4

  “Teach me magic.”

  The king’s counselor looked up from the heaps of parchment over which he had been laboring like a common clerk. His face wore no expression at all, until he recognized the king’s son. Then it took on one that Pepin could not read.

  Pepin’s hands were clammy. He wiped them surreptitiously on his tunic, and stood as straight as he could. The hump that deformed his back was aching again, stabbing outrage at being forced to let him stand almost tall. He ignored it. What he wanted, he wanted with all his heart.

  Father Ganelon regarded him with a cold dark eye. “And why do you think,” he asked, “that a man of the Church would so far transgress as to teach you magic?”

  “They—they say,” said Pepin, stammering and hating himself for it, “that no one knows it better than you.”

  “They say? And who are they?”

  “People round about,” said Pepin.

  That was not exactly a lie. People did talk of anything and everything. They might talk of magic and of learned priests and of royal counselors, perhaps even in the same breath.

  Pepin was not going to tell the exact truth. That he had been walking past this tent in the evening, trying to go quietly as a hunter does, or a shadow. He should have been attending his father the king, but he had escaped—and something, some flicker of movement or glint of light, had made him pause. It was accident, maybe: a gust of wind lifting a tentflap, causing a lamp within to flare.

  Inside was a vision of wonder and delight, a golden paradise: a garden of flowers that transmuted into a flock of beautiful women—women in sheerest gauzy drifts of draperies, through which their bodies shone with a wondrous and tender light. Soft white breasts, sweet curve of hip, the exquisite turn of an ankle . . .

  Ganelon stood in the midst of them, attended by three tall and motionless figures in antique armor. The nondescript priest of no particular age was dressed in a robe of light. It illumined his face, transformed it as the blossoms had been transformed into women. He had beauty here, and power. He was a creature of gleaming splendor.

  Pepin had gone away dazzled, but his mind had recorded every tiniest detail of that vision. It had stayed with him, obsessed him, until he gathered all his courage to approach the king’s counselor.

  He had never wanted anything as much as this. Not even to be king—though that too he wanted, to the heart of him. If this could bring that about . . .

  He was going to be refused. He could see it in Ganelon’s eyes. Ganelon was a priest, after all. Priests were forbidden the dark arts.

  “I know,” Pepin said in a rush, “what you can do. I know what you have done. If the bishops knew, or the lord Pope—he spoke to me, did you know? He was kind to me when we were in Italy. He said that maybe the Lord would make my back straight, if I prayed.”

  “Ah,” said Ganelon, and in that brief sound was a world of understanding. It shattered Pepin’s pretensions. It came near to breaking his courage.

  “So,” said Ganelon in the silence. “You threaten me, as a prince may do. Were your prayers not answered? Perhaps you were simply not patient enough.”

  Pepin held his temper in check, though it threatened to burst free. He was a prince. He was his father’s son. He could master himself, even in this twisted body that God had seen fit to give him.

  Ganelon nodded as if Pepin had spoken aloud. “You have pride enough. But have you discipline? Can you submit to another’s will—submit utterly, as if to the will of God?”

  “That is blasphemy,” Pepin said.

  The dark eyes flashed on him and struck him mute. “If you would master the powers of the elements, of earth and heaven and the realms below, you must learn to submit with all your being. Can you do that, prince of the Franks? Can you even begin to try?”

  “Can you?”

  Ganelon did not strike him down. He was rather surprised, and a little disappointed. He had hoped to see sorcery, a bolt of wrath or at the very least a crackle of lightning. “Pride is the destroyer,” Ganelon said coolly, calmly. “Remember that.”

  “I would rather remember words of magic.”

  “That is magic,” said Ganelon: “potent and ancient.”

  Pepin did not remember being sent away. He was in the tent with Ganelon and the heaps of parchment. Then he was not. Was that magic? He thought it might have been; but he had no memory of it.

  The next day his father sent for him. That was not uncommon. Charles liked to know where all his children were, always. But so soon after Pepin had approached Ganelon, it seemed ominous that the king commanded his eldest son to attend him.

  It did not begin badly. Charles was swimming in the river as he always did in the morning, his white body flashing through the dark water. There was the usual flock of hangers-on, gabbling like geese as they loitered on the bank or, if they were very bold or very foolish, swam in the river with the king.

  At Pepin’s coming, Charles called a greeting with every appearance of gladness, and surged up out of the water. Pepin could never look at him without a stab of—something. Jealousy? Ad
miration? Both? Charles was tall, straight, magnificent. He was everything that Pepin longed to be.

  Pepin’s mother said that he was handsome, but a mother would. His face was like his father’s, he knew that. His legs were long and strong, and his arms and hands. But his back was a poor crooked thing, twisting him altogether out of true.

  Charles never shrank from it. That much Pepin granted him. He laid an arm about it now, freely, and half led, half pushed Pepin to the little pavilion that stood near the river. In it was his bodyservant with cloths to dry him and sweet oil to rub on his skin and fresh garments to clothe him—for Charles never wore the same tunic after a bath as before. Charles was strange that way; obsessive. A little mad, maybe, but one did not say such things of the king.

  There was someone else there, too, sitting in a corner, silent, dressed in black. Those cold eyes were unmistakable.

  “Father Ganelon!” Charles cried as the servant began to dress him. “Come here, meet my son. Pepin, you know the good Father, yes? He’s been one of my wandering ministers for a long while, but now he’s back to serve in the court. I’ve asked him, as a favor to me, to teach you such things as a prince should know.”

  Pepin lowered his eyes before the light in them betrayed him. Here was his answer after all. Here was his heart’s desire.

  To his father he said in a low calm voice, “I thank you, Father.”

  “What, no dancing in delight?” But Charles was laughing. “Come, boy, you’ve run half-wild since old Albrecht died. Now you’ll be a scholar again. You’ll learn your Latin and your Greek, and write a fair hand; and you’ll learn statecraft, too, and the arts of princes.”

  “Not the arts of kings?” Pepin heard himself say, just above a whisper.

  Charles’ ears were keen. “A king is a prince writ large,” he said. “Study well, and listen to my counselor. There’s much that he can teach.”

  Indeed, thought Pepin, still with his eyes lowered, pretending to be the sullen prince robbed of his freedom. But his heart was singing. Magic—he would have magic. He would learn more from Ganelon than his father would ever have conceived of.

  “I should have trusted you,” Pepin said to Ganelon. “I should have—”

  “Borel,” said Ganelon as if Pepin had not spoken. “Show my lord prince how I prefer my parchment to be scraped. And see that he grinds the ink suitably fine.”

  Borel was one of Ganelon’s kinsmen, people said, tall and silent as they all were, with a long pale face like Ganelon’s, and a fringe of colorless hair round a close-shaved tonsure. He did not meet Pepin’s glare as he began to show the prince what Pepin had learned from his first tutor when he was a child; and that was a fair number of years ago.

  It was a test, Pepin thought. Surely he was not expected to perform duties given an infant who had never set pen to parchment. Pepin could write. He could read. He was no great scholar but he was well enough taught. He knew how to scrape a finely tanned hide to write on, and how to make the ink, too, and sharpen the quill, and write the letters one by one in a fair round hand.

  They were very ordinary letters, too: the king’s correspondence, no more and no less. Pepin, it was all too clear, was not to be entrusted with secrets.

  Not yet.

  He endured it with gritted teeth. There was no magic in evidence here. Yet this was the same tent in which he had seen that vision of a garden. There was nothing inside but what one might expect to find in a priest’s dwelling: a narrow and ascetic cot, a small chest for belongings, a table and a lamp and a box of inks and pens, and two heaps of parchment, one rough and one scraped clean.

  No magical apparatus. Nothing at all that could be taken for such. There was not even a cross, as one might expect of a priest.

  Pepin had to trust. He had to cling to memory, and to knowledge that set in his bones. There was magic here, in this man. He knew it. He would find it, learn it. He had promised himself. He had sworn an oath in his heart.

  “Wanting is not enough,” said Ganelon.

  Pepin looked up in startlement. It was only the second day. He had expected it to be much longer before he was spoken to again. He had been scraping parchment and mixing ink, until he was given a new task: to copy a letter of rather stupefying banality, addressed to the priest of a village that Pepin had never heard of.

  Ganelon’s voice startled him out of it. He had been thinking of nothing, just then, but the shape of the letters, writing each one fair, and none wrong or out of place.

  “You must do more than want,” said Ganelon as if from the midst of a conversation. “You must will it with your whole heart.”

  “And how many eons will that take?” Pepin asked him.

  “You have an insolent tongue,” said Ganelon, but calmly.

  “I am a king’s son,” Pepin said.

  “You must forget that,” said Ganelon. “You must forget everything but desire. And when all is desire, forget that also, and become pure will.”

  “No spells? No incantations?”

  “Those come after,” said Ganelon.

  “But—”

  “That is the secret,” Ganelon said. “That is the truth.”

  “And you tell it to me now?”

  “I tell you that you may begin to know.”

  “Then you will teach me.”

  “I have been teaching you,” said Ganelon.

  Pepin’s heart swelled. “Then I will have it. I will have it all.”

  “If you are strong enough.”

  “I will be.”

  “Maybe,” said Ganelon.

  Pepin did not let himself grow angry or fall into doubt. He was sure. The magic was there for him to take. He would take it. And then . . .

  “First you must know how to begin,” Ganelon said. “Here, on the page. Ink on parchment. Letters. Words that signify nothing and everything. When you know what the words mean, then you have begun.”

  “Spells?”

  “Chains that bind the world. In the beginning,” said Ganelon, “was the word. That is truth.”

  Pepin shivered. This was nothing holy, his bones knew it, though the words came from Scripture. It was all the more alluring for that. “And can you unbind the world?” he asked.

  “That is what we do,” said Ganelon, “we who make magic.”

  “But are there not two sorts of magic? The dark and the light?”

  “They are all one,” Ganelon said.

  “But—”

  “No more questions,” said Ganelon. “Listen, and learn.”

  Pepin listened. He was not always certain what he learned, but that was the way of this art. For every man it was different. For every spirit, it showed a new face.

  Pepin was not content. It was not his nature. But happy—he was that. Yes, he was happy.

  CHAPTER 5

  A handful of days after the Saracens came to Paderborn, the king called all the lords and commons of the Franks to the great assembly. There in the field under the mountain’s knees, by the ever-running river, the gathered prelates of the Franks sang the high Mass, a great rite of invocation and adoration.

  When the chanting was still fading away, the plumes of incense scattering in a light wind, Charles told his people what message the embassy had brought. “Spain,” he said, “begs us come to its aid. Rebels have taken Cordoba. If we destroy that rebellion, great lands will be ours, and cities, fortresses, treasure . . .”

  He had them in his hand. Roland, standing behind him with the rest of the Companions, felt the force of the people’s faith in their king. They heard what they chose to hear. Spain—conquest—wealth. And for those who cared for such things, which was a great number, there was another thought, another desire: to restore an infidel country to the light of the Lord Christ.

  Those voices rose louder and ever louder. “In God’s name! God wills it!”

  Charles let them rouse themselves to a fever-pitch. If there were objections, questions, voices of reason, they were all drowned out in that tumult.
And that, thought Roland, was exactly as Charles wished it. Charles wanted Spain—wanted empire. If he won it so, then he was content.

  The emir Al-Arabi did not seem unduly dismayed. Nor would he be, since he himself had foretold that this would happen. Al-Arabi, like Charles, wanted what he wanted; nor did he care precisely how he got it.

  When at long last there was something like silence, Charles’ voice rose over it, clear and pitched to carry. “My heart is glad that you approve this, my people. We will bring the true Faith into Spain. We will ride in war over the mountains, and conquer a new land for the Lord.”

  This roar was nigh as long as the first. It ended in a slow sigh like a surge of the sea. As it faded at last, the emir spoke. His Latin was purer than many a priest’s, and there were priests to render it in the dialects of the Franks. Roland heard the overlapping of voices, Al-Arabi’s words rendered in a dozen ways, but all with much the same meaning.

  “In joy,” he said, “and in gratitude for the aid that you offer, I bid you all attend a feast. But first, if you will, in token of friendship, I offer a contest. Let your best warriors vie for the prizes: gold and jewels and the wealth of my people. And for the strongest, for him who conquers all, there is this.”

  He beckoned. A turbaned servant stepped forward. In his hands was a long narrow bundle wrapped in crimson silk. He shook loose the wrapping with a flourish, and laid bare a sword.

  It was a wondrous thing. Its hilt was plain silver, the pommel set with a white stone like the moon. Its blade rippled like water.

  The servant lifted it, holding it as a priest might hold a cross. The sun caught it and it flamed with white fire.

  Every man in that army loosed a long sigh of pure desire. None of them, not one, was proof against the light of that sword. It was beauty bare, perfect and deadly. It made Roland think of ice under the moon, and water in starlight. It was as pure and strong and dangerous as the highest of high magic.

  A shiver ran down his spine. A sword was a thing of power, and a truly fine one would carry strong spells and secrets of the maker’s art. But this was more.