Kingdom of the Grail

by Judith Tarr

  “Oh, no,” said the smallest of the children, who had the largest eyes and the clearest sight of them all. “Not the roc’s cage. But the net, you’ll need.”

  “Just the net, then,” said Marric. The children ran to do his bidding—far more obedient than they were usually inclined to be, but then this was the most remarkable thing they had seen in most of their short lives. They would reckon that the sooner they had run their errand, the sooner they could be back again, staring at the stranger with the hawk’s mad eyes.

  He crouched against the tree’s bole, sitting oddly, as if he had forgotten how a man’s limbs bent and flexed. His toes curled as if to clutch a branch; his shoulders hunched, arms drawn in like a hawk’s wings. Tears were drying on his cheeks, glistening in a sparse growth of beard.

  Marric settled in to wait while the children fetched Gemma and her pack of burly sons. And, he reminded himself, the net. He was not at all certain that it had been wise to omit the cage, but small Brigid had a clear sight for such things. If she did not reckon it wise to cage this wanderer, then no doubt the net would suffice.

  In the event, it did—barely. The stranger was awkward in this shape, but strong, and grimly determined not to be confined. But Gemma’s sons overcame him, rolled him in the net and carried him, by then stiffly quiescent, down to the inn. Marric had had in mind to take the stranger to his own house, but he was overruled.

  “We have a room with a lock on the door,” Gemma said, “and no windows to let a winged thing out. And you laid the guard-spells yourself. He’ll be safer here.”

  Marric was not exactly sure of that, but he shrugged and let the innkeeper take command. Time enough later to win that battle. For the moment he saw one advantage in surrender: the innkeeper could see to taming the stranger enough to wash the sharp animal reek from him, though she was no such fool as to approach him with razor or cutting blade.

  He seemed to have exhausted his struggles once the net fell on him. Biding his time, Marric thought. He suffered through a bath and a lengthy combing, much more lengthy than it need have been—for all the emptiness of his face and the madness in his eyes, he was a handsome thing, and very well made. He only struggled once after he was netted: when Gemma tried to touch the amulet about his neck. She escaped with a bruise and a scratch or two, and a greater respect for his strength and quickness.

  Gemma took rather too much pleasure in making him as presentable as she could, plaiting his hair and, with visible regret, covering that fine white body in a tunic that fit him passably well: some lord’s left-behind, all fine linen and silken borders.

  “And right noble you look in it, too,” she said to him, stroking his hair that she had labored so long to clean and comb smooth. He endured the touch as he had the rest, without acknowledging her at all.

  “Poor thing,” she said. “No wits in you, and such a face to go with it.” And not only the face, Marric could see her thinking.

  While she fussed over him and plied him with dainties which he ignored, Marric sat in the corner and watched, pondering a number of things. Not least was the amulet, and the protection that it granted. Whatever manner of man this was, if indeed he was a man, he was or had been in the favor of great powers. Had he run from them, from some task that they had imposed? Or had they reft his wits from him in punishment for a great sin?

  When the Lady was ready, no doubt she would reveal the truth. For the moment, Marric sensed no evil in this man. Danger—yes, he could be thrumming with it. But of darkness Marric could find nothing.

  Word of the stranger had spread. The inn was remarkably full for so early in the day. When Marric lengthened an ear to listen, he discovered that they had invented a history for the stranger, as solid as if it had been true. He had come out of the wood, they said. He was cursed—or blessed—by the Lady, and he was mute as well as mad. They had also decided that he was either a beggar or a prince, and that a maiden’s kiss would cure him. One or two maidens, and several who Marric knew had not been maidens in some time, hung about the entrance to Gemma’s wine-cellar, where the stranger was confined.

  None of them had magic enough to pass the wards on the door, and Marric was on the other side of it, making sure that the wardings held. When Gemma came and went, which she did often, attempts to slip past her failed. Still one of them was determined enough to set off the wards; her screech pierced Marric’s heightened senses, and brought the stranger flailing to his feet.

  He fell at once in a tangle of limbs, thrashing until Marric feared he would harm himself. Marric caught the thin wrists, hissing at the strength in them, and spoke a Word. The stranger stiffened, staring, yellow eyes fixed on Marric’s face. Did he see? Could he understand? Marric found no answer there, only walls and shuttered windows.

  The woman had made herself scarce. The stranger eased slowly. His eyes had not left Marric’s face. Marric suppressed a shiver. “There,” he said for lack of anything more sensible. “There.”

  The sound of Marric’s voice seemed to calm the stranger. His wild eyes closed. He turned his face away. After some little while Marric let him go. He stayed where Marric left him, as if there were no will in him, no wits and no memory.

  And yet somewhere, Marric was certain, however deeply buried, was a mind and a spirit. Marric was a mender of things that were broken. That was what he was for. He would find the spirit trapped in that witless body. He would bring it out. And then the Lady would do with them both as she pleased; and that was as it should be.

  CHAPTER 38

  He woke slowly from his long winged dream. Little by little he learned to walk as a man, and not to stretch his arms as if they could grip the air and lift on the breast of it. He grew, if not resigned, then accustomed to skin without feathers, mouth without sharp tearing beak. He learned to eat as men ate, forsaking the hot sweetness of blood, the quiver of meat still faintly, pulsingly alive.

  At first he lived in the damp dim room with its door that hissed and crackled with odd lightnings. But when he grew calmer and stopped fighting against this strangeness that had fallen over him, the brown man led him out into the wider world and let him taste the sunlight again. He never tried to run, though sometimes he did his best to fly. The earth bound him as always, and this unyielding flesh.

  Speech did not come to him. That the sounds men made had meaning, he understood well enough; with the passage of nights and days, he learned enough to please the woman with the wild red hair, and even the brown man, who watched him nearly always and seldom left him. But there was no desire in him to speak as they spoke. He made no sound at all, even when he stumbled and fell and burned his hands in the fire. The woman made a great deal of noise then, and others who were there clamored like a flock of jackdaws, but he crouched silent, with tears of pain running down his cheeks.

  The woman wept, too, after she had roundly beaten the man who, she seemed to think, had tripped him onto the hearth. But he needed no help to stumble; he was still unsteady on his feet, and inclined to forget that his wings were gone.

  The pain went away soon enough. The brown man took it, and much of the burning and scarring, too. The rest healed without a mark. The woman made even more noise over that, as if it could matter whether he carried scars or no. She called him her poor beautiful idiot, and her lovely witling, and stroked him as she did her smug red cat. But she did not kiss the cat, or comb and plait its hair as often as she could catch it, or dress it in odd and sometimes uncomfortable garments from an inexhaustible store.

  The woman had a name, a word that bound her spirit: Gemma. The brown man was Marric. The others too were possessed of names, some of which he troubled to remember, and some not.

  He had no name. There was none in him when he went looking, and no one saw fit to give him one. He was the witling or the idiot or the mad one. Sometimes a stranger called him Yelloweyes, but that was not his name. He never answered to it.

  Women were not made as he was made. They were determined to teach him the ways of it,
catching him when the brown man was not looking, sliding hands up his tunic to clasp the dangling thing that hung between his legs. They had soft heavy breasts where he had none, and rounded bellies, and nothing below but thickets of curling hair.

  One of them was teaching him a new thing one day, pressing his hand to her breast and slipping the other beneath her skirts, into a hot moist cleft that throbbed against his fingers. She moaned as he worked them into it, and arched her back. Her nipple was hard under his hand.

  All at once she was gone, and Gemma was belaboring her about the head and shoulders with the wooden laundry-paddle. He stood blinking, baffled, with an ache between his legs, and the stiff rod thrusting beneath his tunic.

  “Ah, lad,” said the brown man’s voice behind him, dry as old leaves, “what I’d give for the women to be fighting over me.”

  It was a battle royal. Gemma won it, returning battered and bruised but grimly triumphant. She caught the witling by the hand and drew him unprotesting into the inn.

  But when she tried to lead him to the corner where he spent his evenings, watching people in the inn and staying out of the way, he stiffened his knees and refused. Her breast was larger and softer than the other’s, and her secret place was hotter and moister, and her lips were fierce on his. She taught him then what the stiff and aching rod was for. It slid home like—

  Sword to scabbard.

  Man to woman.

  Soul to—

  Memory tugged at him, slipping away when he tried to grasp it. This thing, this dance of flesh, he knew—he understood. It had its rhythms and its cadences. Now fast, now slow. Now deep and strong, now soft and purringly languid. When the release came, it nigh felled him. But he remembered. He saw—

  Gemma’s face, slack with pleasure, and the flame-bright cloud of her hair. Her strong freckled arms held him close. Her sturdy legs clasped about his middle. He kissed her lips and her cheeks and her forehead, licking the salt sweetness of sweat.

  Tears were salt, too, but bitter. She did not shed many of those. She caught his face in her hands, stroking fingers through his beard. “My dear and lovely simpleton,” she said, both rough and sweet, “if you lay hand on another woman after this, I’ll geld you with a blunt knife.”

  She would not. But he had no words to say so. He kissed her instead, and would have done more, but she pushed him away. “Not now,” she said irritably. “Away with you, you randy thing, and earn your keep. We need wood for the fire. Find Kyllan, he’ll show you how to cut it.”

  Kyllan was her eldest son, the one who looked most like her, with his shock of fiery hair and his quick temper. But he was patient with the witling, and he understood without need of words. He taught the witling to wield the axe, and to cut and split the logs, and to carry them in and heap them just so, laid ready beside the hearth.

  He would have cut wood all day and half the night, if there had been enough of it. It was like lying with a woman. The heft of the axe in his hands, the flex and surge of muscles as he lifted it high and let it fall with force enough to cleave the heavy log, woke memories he had not known he had.

  He was sorry when the last log was split and cut and set atop the pile. His arms wanted to lift the axe again, but Gemma had come out to take it away from him. She led him in to a bath and a combing and, tonight, the shaving of his beard. He was not sorry to lose that, but when she advanced on his upper lip, he stopped her. She shrugged, yielded, laid the razor away in its box.

  Every night before this, he had slept in his corner by the hearth, curled in a heap of furs and tanned skins. This night she led him past that to her own shuttered box of a room. A bed nearly filled it, and the scent of her was rich in it. He reeled dizzily, tumbling with her into the soft featherbed. She laughed and wriggled and slid until he was secure inside her, and then he was laughing, too, but silently, with the pleasure of this thing that she had taught him.

  She slept quickly, once she had her fill of him. He lay awake. He did not want to be a hawk any longer. He was not altogether content to be a man, either, but if it gave him woodcutting, and this, then he could bear it.

  The woman rolled away from him, murmuring in her sleep. He let her go. His hand rose to his face, tracing the shape of the shaven chin, and tugging lightly at the mustaches. He wondered then what people saw when they looked at that face. Women seemed greatly pleased with it. Men were a good deal less so, but they did not recoil, either.

  Gemma had a mirror, a disk of polished bronze. He had seen her peering into it, one morning when he wandered innocently in. That was before he knew what women were. She had chased him out with much noise but little force, and forbidden him to enter again unless she let him in. Which now she had done, and he was glad.

  He found the mirror where it had been that morning, facedown on the chest by the bed. The slant of moonlight was bright enough for his eyes to see by. He held the mirror up between his palms, and stared at the face reflected darkly in it. A shift of his hands cast moon-silver across the bronze, brightening the image to an almost daylight sheen.

  He did not look like the people here. His skin was whiter than theirs, he had known that already, and none of them had hair so black. His face was sharper, his nose longer. One cheek was marked with thin parallel scars. His eyes were wide and yellow as the coins that Gemma took out sometimes to fondle and to marvel at. Gold was precious. Gold was richer than any other metal. His eyes were gold.

  He turned the mirror facedown again and laid it on the chest, and sat in the patch of moonlight, staring into the dark with his eyes like golden coins. Gemma snored softly in the bed. His rod rose at the thought of her. He stroked it idly, for the pleasure of it, but his mind was not on it. Was this beauty, then, that he had? Did it matter?

  To her it did, and the other women. To him . . . no. She mattered. The weight of the axe in his hands, and the strength of his arms as he swung it up. The pleasure mounting in his middle, bursting hot and wet—that mattered. But a face, what was that?

  His lips felt odd. He was smiling. He was being absurd, and he knew it; and that made him smile the wider.

  He lay with Gemma, breast to her smooth naked back, and cupped her big soft breasts in his hands, and buried his face in the exuberance of her hair. It smelled of ale and smoke and woman. She murmured but did not wake, nor did she pull away. He sighed—yes, content—and let sleep take him.

  CHAPTER 39

  Witling or no, it seemed the stranger knew how to please a woman. Gemma had won him, and held him against all comers. He seemed content with that, though the women of the village were not even slightly pleased to have lost him.

  Marric watched with wry detachment. The boy cleaned up well, particularly once Gemma stopped dressing him like a painted poppet and gave him clothes fit for hewing wood and drawing water. He might grace her bed, but she had determined that he would earn his keep in more seemly fashion. He proved a strong hand with the axe, and a capable one with the horses: the old slow gelding who carried Gemma and her sons about on errands too far or too pressing for simple feet, and Marric’s brown pony that he kept at the inn, and the occasional patron’s mount.

  Then in the evenings he would sit in a corner of the common room by the fire, and though he never spoke, he seemed to listen to whatever people said. They took to talking to him, men and women alike, telling him their stories, sharing their secrets. His silence was like an open door. He seemed to understand: he never laughed or smiled, but his eyes would fix on their faces, and his expression shift subtly with the shifts of the story.

  Marric had long since reached certain conclusions about this stranger. He took his time in confirming them. When one day he caught the witling in the stable, he met steady golden eyes that had learned to smile, and lifted the unresisting hands. His thumb ran along ridged calluses, traced old scars. How strong those arms were, those shoulders and thighs, he knew already. He lifted a foot as if the boy had been a horse. As filthy as those soles were, barefoot in the stableyard, they were ne
ver as thickened or as hard as if he had spent his life afoot.

  This was a horseman and a swordsman, marked with scars of battle—many battles, from the look of him. He suffered Marric’s handling without resentment, though the smile had faded from his eyes. The black brows had drawn together in puzzlement.

  Marric put on a smile, which was real enough, and patted him until the frown smoothed away. “Good lad,” he said then. The witling smiled a little, baffled still, but seeming comforted.

  Marric wished that he could have said the same. It was no good omen to find a man of war here, where lord did not go to battle against lord, and no man raised hand against another. The young lords learned to fight because it was required of them, because they were guardians and defenders; but those who tested themselves in battle, did so far away among the kingdoms of the world. Never here, never in this realm, where the peace of the Grail had held for time out of mind.

  Not long after that, Lord Huon’s messenger rode into the village. He was one of the lord’s heralds in fine though travelworn livery, with a squire to bear his arms, and in his hand as he rode, a spear with a blood-red pennon.

  Everyone in the village who could walk or run or crawl had come to follow him. He halted before the inn, where the road was wide and clear, and people could gather to hear his proclamation. It was brief, and it struck hard. “War,” he said in his ringing voice. “War has come. Your lord bids you to the muster. Any man or woman who fails of obedience, let him pay the penalty.”

  Marric stood apart from the tumult that rose in the wake of that, searching faces, weighing hearts. None of these children had ever been called to the muster, not in all their years. Nor had their elders, or any of mortal blood. Most of them were grinning, dancing, laughing, as if war were a grand lark. A handful of idiot boys tumbled together in mock battle.