Kingdom of the Grail

by Judith Tarr

  Sarissa leaned in close. “You will do nothing,” she said. “Say nothing, see nothing, remember nothing.” Her hand flicked. Rotruda gasped and crumpled.

  Roland caught her without thinking. He stared at Sarissa.

  She stared back. “You should have done this,” she said. “Why did you not?”

  “I didn’t think,” Roland said.

  “No,” she said. “You didn’t.” She took the bare plump body from his arms, with no more ceremony than if it had been a bundle of linen. “I’ll see to her.”

  “And imprison her again?”

  “Mother Abbess knows,” said Sarissa, “as does Sister Dhuoda. What can be done for this one, they will do. And if that is to find her a complaisant husband, they will do it.”

  “Does she know that?”

  “I doubt it,” Sarissa said. “She’s a child. Children only know what they want to know.”

  “I am glad you came,” Roland said after a slight pause.

  “I should think so,” she said.

  She took Rotruda away. Nor did she come back, though Roland waited. She had seemed angry, somehow. He did not know why—or maybe he did not want to know. He had done nothing to offend her, that he knew of; and he had certainly not betrayed her with this child.

  She did not come the next night, either, nor the one after that. He saw nothing of her, or of Rotruda, who seemed to have been sequestered among the nuns. Nor did rumor spread of either rape or sorcery. That danger at least they had averted.

  The nights were long, and his arms were empty. For he would not go to Sarissa, either. For her name and her safety’s sake, he let her be. Whatever rumors clung to him, whatever tales men told, none would attach to her. He would make sure of it.

  Duty was his refuge. On a day like every other day of that siege, not long after Sister Rotruda came to him in the night, he stood behind his king while Charles received an embassy under a banner of truce. The leader of the embassy widened eyes round the court. The emir Al-Arabi had been left, they thought, in Barcelona, holding it as best he could, in Charles’ name and in the name of the Caliph from Baghdad. And yet here he was riding out of Saragossa, looking as if he had never been a friend to the Franks at all.

  Roland paid little heed to the words they spoke. They were the same words that had been spoken over and over again. When Al-Arabi spoke them they were sharper, for he had begun all this. He had been the first ally, the one of them all who had seemed loyal.

  Now he too had turned against the king. He had come to demand that the Franks leave Saragossa and depart from Spain.

  “It was you who brought us here,” Charles said. “What brings you to repent?”

  “I acted in haste,” Al-Arabi said. “I failed to consult my people. That I regret. We ask you to go, my lord. This is not your war. My fault that I brought you here; my duty, now, to send you away.”

  “And if we won’t go?” Charles inquired.

  “As great as your army is,” said Al-Arabi, “it’s far from its own lands. It’s stripped all the forage within a day’s ride. Its provisions are beginning to dwindle. There will be none from my domains, and none from those of my allies. Whereas Saragossa is a great city, and strong. It can feed itself for a year and drink from its wells, while you starve outside the walls.”

  Charles’ face betrayed no despair, but others near him were not as strong of will. Surely his lords and counselors had been aware of the truth; but to hear it spoken made it more nearly real. They had but to look to see the city barred to them, the river fouled by their presence, the land stripped bare under the merciless sun.

  “If you go now,” said Al-Arabi, “you go with some pretense of victory. You came in honor, and fought as you could. Now it is time for you to return to your own country.”

  “No man commands me.” Charles’ voice was so low that Roland wondered if anyone else heard it. The easy, amiable semblance was gone. His eyes were fixed on Al-Arabi’s face. Roland had seen that color in enchanters’ fires, bluer than blue, too bright almost to bear.

  When Charles spoke for all to hear, he sounded calm, untroubled. “I thank you, sir. I will think on what you have said.”

  Al-Arabi bowed. “Think, indeed, lord king. But not too long. This land will not support your army for much longer.”

  “I will consider that,” Charles said civilly.

  The emir was dismissed. He went without apparent offense, walking with his retinue down the long silent line of Franks. Not one man spoke. Not one offered either welcome or hostility. They all simply watched him go.

  Inside Roland, something took root and grew. The emir’s words had sown the seed. The endless, useless siege had nurtured it. Now it bore fruit.

  It was not a thing he could act on as yet. He must, like the king, take time to think, and consider all the sides of it. But his heart knew what he had to do. Whatever the cost. Whatever came of it.

  He spoke to no one of what he intended. He waited a day, then two and three. Charles also had kept silent, though his counselors pressed him to decide: whether to continue the siege or to break it and go. The engines continued to batter the unyielding walls. Men made sallies now and then, met flights of arrows or streams of boiling water or oil, fell back. Rumor spread that the king was contemplating a full attack, that he would storm the walls with engines and ladders. Yet another rumor whispered that he would win the city by treachery; that somehow an ally within the city would undertake to open a postern and so admit the Franks to the city.

  Roland saw no proof of either. He did see men tunneling near the walls, and new engines readied to batter at the stones. Charles had doubled the force of archers. They shot at any who showed his head over the battlements, and had driven all but the most foolhardy enemy into hiding.

  This could go on, as Al-Arabi had said, until the army starved. And what had Roland ever done but ride out foraging, accompany an embassy on a charge that failed, and stand guard over the king? Had he been named champion for this? What was Durandal for, then, if not to play a part in the winning of Spain? It had tasted Spanish blood, but precious little of it. Most of this war had been march and siege. There had been few battles, and none with any glory in it.

  Enough, he thought.

  The day he chose was distinguished from the rest by a drift of cloud in the waking sky, and a whisper of coolness—furnace-hot still by the measure of Francia, but distinct to bodies that had known for so long the true fierce heat of Spain. He took it as an omen. He attended Mass with the king as he had done every morning since he came back to the army. The whispers against him seemed little deterred by that, but he found it comforting. Nor did he ever see Sister Rotruda, nor the other nuns, either. They were keeping to themselves. And that, he thought, was well for them all.

  Today he prayed with more than his usual fervor. He heard the words that Turpin chanted, truly listened to them, rather than letting them wash over him in a blessed flood.

  Plead my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with me: fight against them that fight against me.

  Take hold of shield and buckler, and stand up for mine help.

  Draw out thy spear, and stop the way against them that persecute me: say unto my soul, I am thy salvation.

  Even the Mass favored him, and the clouds thickening, veiling the sun, softening its strength. He left the king to Olivier’s guardianship, murmuring of a need for rest, for he had been at his post since before dawn. Olivier eyed him a bit oddly, but let him go. His heart twinged. He should have shared this with his battle-brother. But if he was going to do it, he must do it alone.

  It was no simple matter to arm himself without aid, but he managed. When his armor was all on, shield and spear slung, he drew Durandal from his father’s scabbard, which he had never quite got round to discarding. He set the sword before him like a cross, knelt and pressed his brow to the cold smoothness of the blade. It sang to him, soft and clear. It knew what it was for. Was it not time, then, that he used it as it was meant to be us
ed?

  The sword’s song wove with another. On his breast the amulet burned and sang. The note they wrought between them was as keen as the sword and as ardent as the coin. It brought him to his feet. It made his heart strong, and set fire in his blood.

  The sword protested when he sheathed it. It wanted, needed blood. “Soon,” he promised it. It was not pleased, but it subsided. He was smiling as he left the tent, his first smile in long days. It was edged with steel, and hungry for blood.

  CHAPTER 25

  In the wake of Al-Arabi’s departure, the pounding of the siege-engines had redoubled. There were more riders crossing and recrossing the lines than there had been before, and companies of men moving from place to place, in part to aid the siege, in part to confuse the enemy.

  One armored man on a grey horse attracted little enough attention, even when he rode past the king’s council behind the rearmost rank of siege-engines, until some marked the device on his shield. The golden hawk had flown high in battle before this. At first a ragged cheer followed him; then men remembered the tales they had heard.

  None of them ventured to stand in his way. He was riding toward the walls—to inspect them, perhaps. It was only good sense that he should be armed and in full armor.

  But Turpin, watching from amid the king’s council, saw Roland and began to be alarmed. Roland had been too quiet of late. Brooding, Turpin thought. Those were ill things that were being said of him; he would have to be made of stone to be impervious to them.

  Roland rode past the foremost lines under the hail of missiles, into the no-man’s-land beneath the walls. It was not so far from the king as all that—just out of arrow’s range—but with the engines between and the enemy’s archers on the walls, it might have been the width of a world.

  The engines nearest him faltered as men saw him there. A thin rain of arrows fell from above. None found its target, nor did he appear to take notice.

  He sat still in the grey stallion’s saddle. Veillantif stood motionless. The arrows thinned and ceased their falling. The silence was spreading along the wall. They were all, both Franks and Spaniards, staring at Roland who sat his horse alone where no other man dared go. It looked, thought Turpin, as if he would raise the powers everyone said he had, and smite the wall into rubble.

  He moved suddenly, like a flash of lightning: drawing the shimmer of his sword, raising it to catch the sun. Not only Turpin gasped; but the walls did not come tumbling down. His voice rang out, too clear and too strong to be altogether mortal.

  He spoke in Arabic, but a soft voice rendered his words in Frankish for the king and for those nearest him to hear. Turpin started like a deer. The Lady Sarissa was standing there, in no perceptible fear for her life. She was dressed and armed as a man, but Turpin could never have mistaken that voice.

  Her face in the shadow of a Frankish helmet was still, her voice quiet. And yet somehow, in that calm and that stillness, every bit of Roland’s passion blazed like a fire in the dark.

  “Saragossa!” he cried. “Saragossa! You skulk in your walls. You cower in your citadel. Have you no champion? Is there no one who will come out to fight for you?”

  The walls were silent. Turpin saw no movement there. Wise, that. This could be a trap, after all.

  Roland spoke again, clearer and stronger than before. “Saragossa! I am the champion of Spain. I won your emir’s test of strength; I carry his sword. I slew the bull in the barren hills. Have you a warrior like me? Would he dare to face me?”

  “He’s gone mad,” one of Charles’ counselors said.

  They murmured among themselves, with much headshaking and clicking of tongues. But one of them was silent. Turpin might not have noticed, save that he was watching Sarissa, and she had turned her eyes from Roland. She was watching the one who stood somewhat apart, who did not speak. His whole spirit seemed fixed on the rider beneath the walls. Maybe it was the flame of the sword. Maybe it was the sound of that voice, taunting the people of Saragossa in their own tongue, with somewhat of the cadence of the muezzin’s cry.

  Ganelon had the look of a man in the midst of a revelation. His eyes were as wide as Turpin had ever seen them, strikingly dark in his pale face. It was as if he had never seen Roland before—or never known what he was.

  And why would the king’s counselor care who or what Roland might be?

  It was the same expression, Turpin realized with a small but potent shock, that Roland had worn a year and more ago in Paderborn, the first day Ganelon came back to court. Roland had been appalled by the sight of this man whom he could never have seen before. He had acted strangely, and said strange things; then he had gone away. Turpin had wondered at it for a while, then forgotten it, since he had never had an explanation. Somehow, it was beginning again—whatever was between those two.

  Sarissa’s eyes flicked from Ganelon’s face to the rider beneath the walls. In the same instant, Ganelon’s eyes flicked likewise. Roland had fallen silent. Shapes moved on the battlement: heads in helmets, heads in turbans. One bold man stood up so that he could be seen clearly. Turpin recognized the voice.

  “My lord Count,” Al-Arabi said in his stiff but fluent Latin. “Are you asking me to take back the sword?”

  “It is not yours to take back,” Roland replied in the same language.

  “If you know that,” said Al-Arabi, “you know what you are champion of. And this is not—”

  “If you have a champion for Saragossa,” Roland said, “I will fight him. Victor takes the city. Vanquished cedes the war.”

  “Did your king send you?” asked Al-Arabi.

  Roland did not answer that.

  “We have said all that we intend to say,” Al-Arabi said. “You are brave, lord Count, and there is no better warrior in Francia. But this war is not to be settled in single combat.”

  “Coward,” Roland said. “You know your man would lose.”

  “I am not to be provoked,” said the emir.

  “Is there no brave man in Saragossa?” Roland called out. “Is there no man who will fight for the honor of his city?”

  Round about the king, the muttering of counselors had grown louder. “Shall we send someone after him, sire? This is humiliating. This is—”

  Turpin stopped listening except to note the king’s silence. A smaller gate was opening within the great gate of Saragossa.

  There was confusion on the walls, the emir turning, gesticulating, but Roland seemed to have forgotten him. His laughter rang across the ranks of besiegers.

  The man who rode out was mounted on a Spanish charger, armored in the fashion of the infidels but not turbaned—he wore a simple helmet, as the Christian Spaniards did. Turpin recognized the splendid black horse even as the rider spoke in a battlefield bellow. “My lord of the Franks! Do you question my courage?”

  “Yours, O slayer of bulls,” Roland said, “never. Will you fight for Saragossa?”

  “I will fight for Spain,” said Diego, whom Turpin had last seen in the bullring of Agua Caliente.

  “That was to be my task,” Roland said.

  “Was it?” Diego bowed in the saddle. “You are more than I think you know. But you will not lead the Franks into Saragossa.”

  “I will defend our honor,” Roland said.

  “It does break the monotony of the siege,” Diego granted him. “As you can well see from the flurry above, I am not here on any lord’s behalf. But if you will, we may test one another. Sieges are dull and inglorious enough. Let us lighten this one as we may.”

  That was adroitly done, Turpin thought. It cost Saragossa nothing if Roland won, but it gave him the fight he was so eager for.

  But Roland was not a fool. “I am not here to play at war. I have come to fight or die.”

  “I am not entitled to take your life, my lord,” Diego said. He said it flat and clear. He bowed and withdrew, leaving Roland astonished in the shadow of the wall.

  Behind the line of the siege-engines, Charles spoke at last. “Turpin. Fetch him.
Preserve his honor as best you may, but get him back to me.”

  Turpin hardly waited to hear the last of it. He was off at a run. There were others behind him: Olivier, the Lady Sarissa.

  The wall was no more than arrow’s flight distant, but it seemed an endless way. Roland made no move to ride out of danger. He sat his stallion with his sword on his knee, and waited—to be shot, to be struck down by a flung stone, who knew?

  Well before Turpin and the rest reached him, the postern opened again. In the thunder of drums and the braying of trumpets, shrilling their battle-cry, a company of Saracens charged toward the lone horseman.

  Roland’s laughter sounded above even that, and the clear song of Durandal as he whirled it about his head. Veillantif rocked to his hindlegs and leaped forward. Saracens engulfed them both; but there was no mistaking the rise and fall of the sword.

  Turpin barely had breath to speak, but he found it somewhere, roaring across the lines: “Forward! Forward, you sons of whores! Montjoie! Montjoie!”

  He was unarmed—he had been at Mass, and then in council; he was still in episcopal robes. He snatched a sword out of a soldier’s hand and a spear from another, and flung himself into the fight.

  That was an army pouring out of Saragossa, giving them battle at last—and not at the orders of the emir, either, or the lord of the city. Those stood together atop the gate. For a while they tried to call their men back, but the warriors of Allah were deaf to them.

  It was close quarters, up against the wall, with the siege-engines behind and the bulk of the Franks unready or unable to come to the fight. Charles, like the infidel commanders, was taken aback, but he rallied sooner than they. He called for his horse and his Companions and rode down into the melee.

  Roland was in the thick of it. Turpin hacked and stabbed his way through, aware of two strong forces at his back. One was as familiar as his own right arm, Olivier singing a bawdy song as he fought. The other fought with flashing speed and breathtaking skill, wielding a sword as if she had been born to it. It was not, just then, astonishing that Sarissa could fight like a man, who dressed as one more often than perhaps she wanted Turpin to know.