Kingdom of the Grail

by Judith Tarr

  But he had not forbidden Roland to fling aside a mob of men who had caught a young woman—a child—and thrown her down and wrenched her legs apart. The first had his trews down and his great red rod erect, thrusting at her, when Roland heaved him up and wielded him like a club, smiting down the lot of them.

  They fled like the dogs they were. The child lay stark with terror. When Roland stooped over her, she shuddered to the bone. Her eyes were blank. There was no thought, no reason there.

  His heart wept for her. He called such power as he had, gathered it in his hand, and poured it out over her small stiff body. He hoped that it brought her peace.

  As he gathered to rise, he paused. The sack went on about him. He was an island in it, a small space of stillness. Beyond it, men robbed and raped and looted. There was no sin here, no guilt, no awareness of good or evil. Only the raw desire.

  It could touch him if he let it. He could run wilder than any of them. The temptation was potent, almost irresistible. It had a slither in it, a slide of serpent’s scales.

  He neither turned nor raised his head. The corners of his eyes, the tightening of his shoulders, caught the shadow in shadow, the inhuman thing that watched him.

  He felt his lips curve in a smile. There was no mirth in it. It had an edge, like a sword. Calmly, steadily, he rose.

  The way he chose passed near the shadow. He took great care to seem oblivious.

  The force of the shadow’s temptation was stronger, the closer he came to it. His smile widened of its own accord, baring his teeth. He drew his sword, his bright Durandal. He felt in his middle the serpent’s laughter.

  Just as he drew level with the shadow, he dropped his wards. He let the madness in, the wild lust for blood. He leaped, whirled, stamped. Durandal bit deep in the demon’s heart.

  He met those flat and lidless eyes. There was laughter in them still, but turned upon itself. And no fear. He had sent it to nothingness, not to damnation. For an instant he seemed to see . . . relief?

  The creature’s long pale hands clasped the blade. Its mouth opened as if to draw in air. Softly, suddenly, and without a sound, it collapsed upon itself. A pallid serpent coiled about the sword.

  Durandal thrummed in Roland’s hand. Its song was high and fierce and exultant. The serpent melted into air.

  Roland stood in an empty street with his sword in his hand. Of the demon there was no sign, no scent, no track in the dust.

  Roland laughed, sharp and short. Two of the three ancient servants were gone, and at his hand. Ganelon would have even less cause to love him now.

  Durandal’s victory song had quieted. It submitted to its sheath. Roland turned about slowly. The tide of the sack had washed away from him. He was alone. The child was gone, the dead and wounded taken away.

  Down the empty street, from sunlight to shade and back to sunlight again, came walking a small grey cat. No lady followed it, maddening or otherwise.

  Tarik wove about Roland’s ankles, purring raucously. Higher praise he had never given. He sprang lightly to Roland’s shoulder, shifted and shimmered and gripped with a hawk’s talons, riding that armored perch back to the citadel.

  Pepin should have been attending his father. But he eluded the would-be nursemaids who came to take him in hand, gathered as many young rakehells as he could find, and went rampaging through the city. It was pure blood-red joy to sweep up one narrow twisting street and down another, driving shrieking infidels before him. His sword drank blood and tears. He plowed a Saracen furrow or two, or maybe three; he was not counting. He was simply living.

  The tides of pillage washed him up on the steps of a church not far from the citadel. He had found a hoard of gold in a small mean house with a small mean man in it—a miser if he had ever seen one. The miser had not lived to mourn his lost gold. Pepin was wearing the best of it: a massive torque, armlets as heavy as the sword he had broken over the miser’s turbaned head, and a belt of gold and great green stones. The rest he had cast into the street, laughing as men scrambled and fought over it.

  Weighted with gold, dizzy with wine he had liberated from a tavern, with his twisted back aching as it always did, he sat on the steps and watched the city’s fall. There were people inside the church, cowering and shrieking, and a priest’s drone struggling to rise above the racket. He took little notice of them.

  The knot of tension in his middle was gone. In the wrack and terror of the city’s fall, amid the roil of anger and fear, hate and blood-red lust, Pepin had found the key that had eluded him for so long. This darkest face of war had shown him the core of his strength, the heart of his magic.

  He had magic. After all, he had it. He amused himself as he sat there, striking sparks from the wood of the church door. With them he spelled a name in one of Ganelon’s long-dead languages, then a name beneath it in another, and so a third. The door groaned. Such names were never meant to be written in a holy place. Pepin grinned and tapped the door with a finger. It crumbled to dust. Its iron nails, and the bolts that had held it shut, fell clattering to the threshold.

  Eyes rolled at him from within. A cloud of incense gagged him. It came to him that he should have chosen a mosque; that these were Christians. Yet had not the Christians of Spain turned against the Franks and all the crusade? They had earned whatever he did to them.

  He gestured grandly. He meant but to dismiss them with princely hauteur, but the magic was still in his hands, crackling from his fingertips. It traced a pattern of fire in the air, gathered it together and flung it full in the midst of the huddled people.

  The church went up like a torch. Pepin was flung wide, his face and hands seared by the fire, and all the breath struck out of him. He slid to the foot of a wall and lay there, sure in his belly that he was dead.

  His breath came back too slowly, but it left no doubt that he was alive. Nothing lived in the church—nothing could live in that holocaust of fire.

  He stared at his hands. They were the same as ever, broad white hands with strong fingers, the image of his father’s. They grasped a sword reasonably well. They wielded a pen with more than ordinary skill—and that, his father had never been able to do, though he spoke now and again of learning to do it. But this, his father had not even dreamed of. To raise fire with a gesture. To kill.

  What need of a sword, or even an army, if he could do this? Such power he had been given, that he had not even known he had—kings would fall at his feet. Emperors. Prelates and popes. The whole world would bow before him.

  He sought the fire again. He went down to his center, but found only embers. His head reeled. It was a long while before he could stand, and longer before he could walk. If he had squandered it all, not even knowing—

  It was coming back already, growing slowly, but he could have no doubt of it. He had spent it for the moment, that was all. It would grow again, as seed grew in his manly parts. Had not Ganelon told him that magic had a price? It took somewhat from the wielder: some part of his spirit, his body, his strength or his youth.

  It was little enough to pay for such splendor. He pulled himself up, clinging to the wall. Once his knees had straightened, they held him not too badly. After a while he could walk.

  The sack had gone on past him. He had no desire, just then, to go on with it. He turned instead and walked back to the citadel, a walk that lightened as his strength returned, until he was striding as proudly as a prince should.

  He had learned in his lessons to find Ganelon with something other than eyes. That prickle in the skin led him up through the citadel, past guards who stared at him with envy—though not for his sorcery; he was still laden with looted gold.

  Past the region of guards, deep in the citadel, he found the clerks’ nest. Ganelon laired past even that, high up in a tower. The ascent to it was steep and dark, but Pepin had eyes for that now, and strength enough, though hardly more. The door at the top was unbarred, though he knew from times before that if anyone was not welcome, not heaven itself could gain him entrance
. Especially not heaven itself.

  He stopped in the door, to breathe and to take in what he saw there. Ganelon was standing in the room’s center. Light fell on him, but no sun had ever cast it. A shape lay huddled at his feet. After a moment Pepin recognized one of Ganelon’s not-quite-human servants.

  In a voice so soft it was barely audible, but strong enough to shiver Pepin’s bones, Ganelon said, “Tell me Timozel is not dead.”

  The creature at Ganelon’s feet—who must be Siglorel, the silent one—was true to himself: he returned no answer.

  “And who slew him?” Ganelon asked, soft and oh, so gentle. “Whose sword smote him into nothingness? What folly was on him, O my servant? Had he run mad?”

  Still, silence.

  Ganelon swooped down and hauled the creature to his feet. Siglorel came up bonelessly, as a serpent might. His eyes had forgotten their human semblance. They were round and yellow, lidless and cold, and their pupils were slits in the otherworldly light. His voice was a long chill hiss, and his tongue was forked. “It was his time,” he said.

  “That power was given me,” Ganelon said.

  “All power is not yours,” said Siglorel.

  Ganelon’s fingers locked about the pale throat. “You are mine,” he said. “You belong to me. By the pact we made long ago, in that name which no mortal dare speak, I seal your power to mine.”

  Siglorel could not blink. His stare was flat. His tongue flicked, tasting air.

  “You will slay that one,” Ganelon said. “You will do it now, tonight. You will take his soul and bear it down below, and chain it for everlasting.”

  The serpent-creature hissed. Pepin realized that he was laughing. “What, are you bidding me follow my brothers into the void? Gladly would I do that, but it will avail you nothing against that one.”

  Ganelon’s fingers tightened. The creature’s cheeks had gone somewhat dusky, but his expression never changed. “That is a child,” Ganelon said. “A boy. A mortal man’s son. How can you fear him?”

  “No fear,” said Siglorel, a bare breath of sound. “Go, look, see him with your eyes. See what he is.”

  “I know what he is,” Ganelon gritted.

  The hairless head shook. “Go and see,” said Siglorel.

  With a hiss of disgust, Ganelon let the creature fall. Siglorel dropped bonelessly, and lay like a dead thing. Ganelon stepped over him, seemed to forget him, left him unheeded behind.

  Pepin followed the sorcerer. It was a fool’s act, or a madman’s, but he was full of himself still. He was strong. He was invincible. Not even Roland could touch him.

  Roland was with the king, flaunting the royal favor in that way he had, as if it mattered nothing to him at all. Ganelon slipped in among the clerks, silent, all but invisible. Pepin, who had no such fortune—there was never any hiding his hump, or the face so like the king’s—chose to hide in plain sight, in a clutter of courtiers. If he stood just so, and wore his face just so, he could make it seem that he had been there from the beginning. Pepin the cripple, Pepin the fool, could never have been sacking cities or burning churches. Oh, no, not Pepin.

  He watched Ganelon watch Roland. The sorcerer’s face was as opaque as a wall of stone, but Pepin had learned to read stone. He saw how the long eyes narrowed, how the thin mouth tightened. The white fingers wove strands of air, mingling light and shadow under cover of his robe. He flung them like a net, invisible except to eyes that could see.

  Roland did not seem to move, but the net slipped past him, never touching him. For an instant Pepin saw no man at all but a figure of light, and on its breast a living star.

  He covered his eyes against the power of it. The fire he had raised was nothing to what lived in that shape of almost-mortal flesh.

  When Pepin could see again, he looked for Ganelon. He was almost surprised to find him. The sorcerer stood as if rooted. He had seen it, Pepin thought: the thing that Siglorel had willed him to see. What he thought of it, what he would do, Pepin could not tell. But he would learn. He was Ganelon’s eyes, and sometimes, now, his hands. Ganelon would use him again against Roland.

  It was not the revenge he had looked for. But it was better than none at all.

  CHAPTER 30

  The sack of Pamplona was the Franks’ farewell to Spain. Laden with its wealth and sated with its suffering, they rode into the mountains. Already their hearts were in Francia. If they could have flown, they would have done it, the sooner to be back again.

  Roland, who could fly if he chose, chose to be earthbound, to be human. He was the commander of the rearguard, protecting the king’s back. Charles had little fear of attack; Spain was as glad to be rid of him as he was to be rid of it. But they posted guards in the nights and sent out scouts by day, as an army should.

  The flat brown plain was far behind them. The mountains rose like a wall. Deep valleys plunged down beneath the mountains, dark and shadowed with trees. The road wound from ridge to forest and back again, from high harsh sunlight to green shade.

  When Roland had come down this way into Spain, he had ridden in joyous anticipation. Now, in what was not defeat but was not victory either, it seemed to him that the woods were full of eyes.

  Not all the eyes were hostile, but by no means all were friendly. Roland’s back tightened as he rode, last of all that long column. Nothing stirred behind, but his bones knew that there were watchers hidden in the trees and in the tumbled rocks of the peaks. The amulet on his breast was strangely heavy, and warmer than his skin, though not quite burning.

  This country was made for ambush. But whoever they were who watched the army, they were hidden from him.

  He wondered often if one pair of those eyes belonged to Sarissa. He had not seen her since the night before they sacked Pamplona. Tarik came and went as he pleased, but he answered no questions, nor offered explanations. His presence reassured Roland in an odd way. It was as if she had left the puca as a gift and a promise. Wherever she had gone, she had gone of her own free will. She had some duty, some task which she must perform. When it was done, she would come back.

  In the evening of the fifth day of the march into the mountains, when they camped in a valley somewhat broader and somewhat less densely wooded than the rest, Roland made his way through the trees to the center, where the king had pitched his tent. Charles was in council when Roland came, settling matters of the kingdom as he did every evening on the march. Roland settled quietly on the edges, watching and listening, doing nothing to attract notice.

  Ganelon sat close by the king. Roland did not recall that that had been so before this march. The counsel that he gave was wise enough, as far as it went: dispositions of lands and benefices, assessment of taxes and tribute, and the army’s dispersal once they came to Francia.

  But as Roland listened, knowing what Ganelon was, it seemed that he heard more than simple goodwill in those soft sage words. There was something in the way he spoke, in the pattern of lands and taxes and fighting men—as if he were gathering them. As if—

  It might be illusion. Ganelon had been the king’s emissary in the west and south, and particularly in Gascony. It was well within his purview to advise the king on matters of that domain.

  “Spain may be well pleased to be rid of us,” he said in his soft cold voice, “but it may also wish to assure that we never return. Gascony has been . . . difficult before. If it should ally with certain forces in Spain, there may be rebellion on your borders.”

  “You have sure knowledge of this?” Turpin asked.

  Ganelon’s expression did not change, but he managed to convey a clear sense of patience with the foolishness of children. “The Gascons are ever ready to cast off the Frankish yoke. Therefore, sire, I would advise, with due respect, that once you come over the mountains, you consider diverting a portion of your army thence.”

  “A clear victory would not sit ill with the people,” observed Riquier, who had been Ganelon’s fellow emissary among the Gascons.

  Charles nodded. “
Yes, I see that. But if I keep the men in arms once we enter Francia, after I promised them a return to their lands and their wives—”

  “So they will,” said Ganelon, “but with the pride of victory and the booty of the Gascons. Who, whispers say, are very wealthy of late, enriched with infidel gold. It may be that you find them waiting when you come out of the mountains.”

  “If they’re waiting for me,” Charles said, “I’ll meet them gladly.”

  Ganelon inclined his head. He seemed pleased.

  And why, Roland wondered, should that be? What did Ganelon have to gain from a Gascon war? Charles’ heart? His spirit? Or more—the strength of Francia?

  And there were eyes in the wood, and watchers on the mountaintops. What Roland had not felt in Spain, he felt here. Imminence. Danger, and the cold touch of death.

  His amulet had warmed to burning. Death, if that was what it was, passed over him like a gust of wind. In the moment after its passing, he raised his eyes full into Ganelon’s black and bottomless stare. It was like deep water. He could drown in it, if he had not been armored in light.

  Ganelon knew him. All of him. It came as no surprise, and roused no fear. It had been inevitable from the moment the old serpent entered the royal camp in Paderborn.

  Roland inclined his head the merest fraction. Ganelon moved not at all. And yet Roland knew that the lines were drawn. It had always been war between the old enemy and Merlin’s children. Now there would be battle—if not this moment, then soon.

  The council went on about lesser matters, without a decision as to the Gascons. Nor did Ganelon press for one. He could be patient; there were days of marching yet before the army descended into Francia.

  Roland left a little while before Charles dismissed the council. The sun had set; the swift night was falling. The king’s servants had prepared his bath, which he must have even in this remote place. Roland dismissed all of them.