Kingdom of the Grail

by Judith Tarr

  Ganelon had made sure that Charles found Gascons among the enemy dead, and fanned the fire of rage against them. But Charles was strangely recalcitrant about leading his army to a new war in Gascony. “In the spring,” he said. “By the time we come to Francia, it will be the beginning of autumn. We’ll disband the army, send them home to finish the harvest, give them a winter’s rest. Come spring they’ll be ready to fight again.”

  Ganelon was as oddly acquiescent to this as to the ambush that had failed. He bowed to the king’s will. He did not argue as Pepin would have, that the army was gathered now, ready now, and would be glad to take a swift revenge. He let the king march unhindered out of the mountains and into his own country.

  Pepin was powerless to speak if Ganelon would not. The court seemed a paler, duller thing with the Companions gone from it. Charles made no move to gather a second dozen of paladins. The various lords’ heirs were granted their new ranks and places, and Rheims had a new archbishop. But the king took none of them to his heart as he had their predecessors.

  It was not the sweet victory Pepin had dreamed of. Nor was he initiated into a new and greater order of magic. He was still Ganelon’s pupil, still writing letters and studying grimoires and practicing small spells and piddling workings. Ganelon did not need Pepin’s eyes any longer, now Roland was dead and the sorceress had vanished.

  She was not dead. Pepin looked for her in the silver basin, one day when Ganelon was out of his tent attending the king. He found her in the high castle where he had seen her before, standing on a tower, staring out across the empty peaks. She did not speak or move, though he watched her as long as he dared. Nor could he read her expression at all.

  On a night of stars but no moon, when the army had left the marches of Spain behind but before it dispersed to all its various nations, Pepin came late to his tent. He had been tasting the wines of Provence, fresh from the carts of the merchants who had been waiting for the army to descend from the hills.

  There was no lamp lit in the tent, no servant waiting to undress him. Yet there was light, pale and strange, and Ganelon sitting in it.

  Pepin stopped, reeling slightly, dizzy with wine. It was the wine that made him ask, “Do you need my eyes?”

  “I need you,” said Ganelon.

  “Now?”

  Ganelon raised a brow slightly. Pepin’s throat constricted in spite of itself. “The king will disperse the army when we reach Toulouse,” Ganelon said. “When he does that, you will ask his leave to go. Your soul is troubled, you will tell him. You have in mind a season of prayer and contemplation.”

  Pepin stared.

  Ganelon’s expression did not change. “When he asks where you will go, tell him that you go with me, and that we will cloister ourselves among holy monks in an abbey near Toulouse. He should little care which, once he hears my name.”

  “You’ll see to that?”

  Ganelon did not answer.

  “And we really will do that? There are monks who follow your way?”

  “There are monks in plenty, and priests, too,” said Ganelon, “and great princes of the Church.”

  “Popes?”

  “Even so,” said Ganelon.

  At Toulouse the court and palatium continued on its round of the kingdom, but the army dispersed into the fields and forests of Francia. Pepin asked for and won his father’s leave to go into retreat—more easily than he had expected, for the king was preoccupied. Word had come from the east. The Saxons were rising again. The spring’s campaign, Pepin could already see, would march east instead of westward into Gascony.

  Charles had dismissed his son almost absently, intent on matters of greater consequence. Once Pepin would have resented that. Now he was too eager, and too curious, to discover what Ganelon had in mind.

  They rode out of the walled city on a fair morning of autumn, Pepin and Ganelon and the silent Siglorel. Pepin was not permitted to bring a servant. He went in plain clothing, with only such baggage as his horse could carry. The sorcerer and his servant rode tall Spanish mules, and Siglorel led another laden with bundles, but none of them belonged to Pepin. Nor did Pepin receive an answer when he asked what was in them. He was to be condemned to silence, it seemed.

  Very well, then he would be silent. His skin quivered, his heart beat with anticipation of great things. Strong things. Workings of great magic.

  That night they sheltered in an abbey, but it was not the one of which Ganelon had spoken. The monks here were ordinary enough, their abbot respectful of the king’s counselor but not visibly in awe of him. The place stank of holiness.

  Pepin was not pleased to discover that they would be expected to dine with the monks and to attend all the offices, even into the night. Barley bread and sour ale were excessively penitential. Droning through endless psalms came close to torment.

  Discipline, he thought. Discipline was the first virtue of a mage. Ganelon had taught him that. He was not perfect in it, but he had learned a little. He set his teeth, ate the hard bread and drank the terrible ale and suffered through the offices. In the morning they would go. Then he would discover what great thing had brought Ganelon out of Toulouse.

  In the morning they rose unholy early as the monks did. The skies had closed in with grey cold rain. The first storm of winter lashed the abbey’s walls. Damp sank into the stones. Pepin braced himself for another day of monastic discipline. But after the monks had sung their office, as he prepared to retreat to the cell he had been given, the demon Siglorel stopped him. The creature, silent as ever, beckoned him out of the cloister.

  The horse and the mules were saddled and waiting, though the rain continued to fall. Ganelon was mounted, wrapped in cloak and hood. Pepin opened his mouth to demand of him why he chose this moment to go. Could he not wait for the sun to come back? But a gust of rain struck his face like a cold slap. He wrapped his own cloak more tightly and scrambled gracelessly into the gelding’s saddle.

  Ganelon seemed to be in no distress. Did he even feel the rain? Siglorel was a demon; Pepin doubted that anything of earth could touch him. Least of all now that Roland was dead.

  Even in death Roland went on vexing Pepin. Pepin huddled into his cloak and wished himself in hell, where the fires at least might keep him warm.

  He came to himself with a start. He must have slid into a doze, as improbable as that was. Mist had closed about them. He could just see the rump of Ganelon’s mule ahead of him. He heard rather than saw Siglorel with the pack-mule behind him. Every sound seemed vast: the roaring of breath in his lungs, the hammering of his heart, the slip and clatter of hooves on stone.

  The road had grown steep and very narrow. It had no feel of a road in Provence. Had they ridden back to the Spanish March, then? In so little a time?

  For a sorcerer, all things were possible. Pepin sat up and gathered his scattered wits. His brown gelding plodded on as if sudden mountains and blinding mist were of no concern.

  The mist brightened. Pepin narrowed his eyes against the growing light. All at once he emerged blinking into the sorcerer’s garden.

  His horse, with a horse’s wisdom, lowered its head and began to graze in the blindingly green grass. The air was warm, so warm that Pepin began to shiver convulsively. He slid from the saddle, knees buckling, catching himself against the gelding’s shoulder.

  Ganelon paid no heed to him. The sorcerer and his demon servant had left their mules to graze as the gelding was doing, and stood over the pool that filled the garden’s center.

  It was larger, Pepin thought as he gained back somewhat of his senses. He let fall his sodden cloak and hood. His clothes were damp, but drying already. It was almost too warm, and he was dressed for raw cold in furs and leather. He stripped off his tunic and straightened as much as his back would allow, luxuriating in the coolness of his linen undertunic and the warmth of the air—twin wonders, twin marvels after the abbey’s discomforts.

  He approached the pool, walking steadier now. The water was full of visions th
at spread outward in spokes like a wheel. The center was this garden, and three figures in it, standing by a pool, in which was reflected . . .

  He stopped that before it spun him down into madness, drew his mind back sharply, raised his head and looked at the image from which the shadows came. More paths than ever led out of the garden. Each one, in sunlight or rain, bright day or night’s shadow, showed much the same: the camp of an army, or an army marching. Some of them he recognized. His father had sent them home from Toulouse. Now they marched again, with white set faces and eyes lost in the shadows of their helmets.

  And others he knew, too, by garb and nation: Gascons, Saracens, Christians of Spain. Still others were strangers, and many not human at all.

  He had grown up in camps of war. He knew how to count men and companies. And this was a great army—greater even than his father had mustered against the infidels in Spain. There were thousands of them. Tens of thousands. All bound by the same great spell. All marching toward a single place.

  Mountains reared against the sky. He knew those mountains, that sky. He had struggled through them twice, once going to and once coming from the Spanish war. And yet there was something strange, something new or different about them: the light on them, the height of them, the way they reached toward the sky.

  They were not earthly mountains. They were rooted in earth, borne up against heaven, but the light that shone on them was not the light of the sun. The moon that waxed and waned over them was higher, whiter, colder than the moon that he knew.

  Ganelon’s armies were swarming up those jagged slopes. The scope, the vastness of it, left him breathless. They were storming the walls of the world. He saw where gates had been: pillars of earth and stone, shards of light. Dark things poured over them to the lofty summits, and streamed down out of sight.

  “How well you see,” Ganelon said.

  Pepin started like a deer. The sorcerer stood beside him, who an instant before had been long strides away. Ganelon did not betray amusement, but his dark eyes glittered as he said, “You may still refuse to go.”

  “Go?” Pepin asked stupidly. “Refuse? What do you need me for?”

  “Your blood,” Ganelon answered. And as Pepin gaped at him: “Blood of kings, or of kings’ firstborn sons, has great power. Did I not teach you this?”

  “You’ll . . . drink . . . my blood?”

  Ganelon’s lip curled. His teeth were white and sharp. They did not fit his pale wise face at all—they would have been more at home in the jaws of a wolf. “That would be wasteful,” he said, “when your soul is so simply won. No, fool; great magic, great sorcery can work through you, through what you are and what you hope to be.”

  “Even in a twisted body?”

  “The Church will take no maimed or misshapen man for a priest,” said Ganelon. “My Master is less fastidious. Royal blood is royal blood. He little cares for the shape of the vessel that bears it.”

  Pepin laughed harshly. “Then I’ve well chosen my way, haven’t I? Will you make me a king? Will you do that, master sorcerer?”

  “If you prove yourself well in this war,” said Ganelon, “I may consider it.”

  “Or I may do it without you,” Pepin said.

  “You may,” said Ganelon without expression. “Gather your garments and your horse. Make ready to ride.”

  Pepin did not take orders well, but for once he was too eager to care. He did as he was bidden, was mounted and ready before either of the others had left the pool. There was nothing to keep them there, surely. Only armies marching and mountains looming toward the sky.

  “Come,” said Ganelon as Pepin began to lose patience. “Ride.”

  Pepin did not ask which path to take away from the pool. All were the same, he thought. All led to the same place, to the mountains and the armies. He chose one at random, turned his horse’s head toward it. Ganelon followed him without a word.

  CHAPTER 46

  The sorcerer’s army gathered on the far side of the mountains, beyond the wall of the world. It stretched far and far away across the bare hills, beneath the jagged crags. Men and beasts, demons and spirits of earth and air, met in companies but did not mingle.

  The spirits were bound with chains of air. The demons had sworn mighty oaths to the sorcerer, and so been enslaved. The men lay under a spell.

  The Franks thought they were still on the march, still traveling toward their own country. They were awake and aware, but the land they saw did not seem to be the land that met Pepin’s eyes. They knew him perfectly well; they bowed to him as the king’s son, and some of those who had trailed in his following were minded to do so again. But Ganelon forbade. “No princes’ follies here,” he said. “No mortal stupidity. This is war, not a royal hunting party.”

  Pepin snarled and pondered defiance. His blood warded him to a degree. Ganelon needed him too badly to damage him unduly.

  But he was far from his father’s protection, and he wanted this too much to cast it away. High magic, great sorcery—it was coming to him at last. There could be no working without him. Perhaps there could be no victory.

  All that Ganelon had not seen fit to teach Pepin, he taught him now: arts, castings, spells and dark workings. Pepin’s head reeled with all that he had to remember.

  And yet he could do it. He was good at it. The more he was asked to do, the more he could do. He had a gift.

  Ganelon did not like to admit it, but he could hardly deny it. “It seems you have magic after all,” he said, “and not only for the blood that is in you.”

  Pepin hugged the knowledge to himself. He was a sorcerer. He could raise demons, command spirits. He could bring down the lightning. When he chanted spells, the powers answered.

  When the time came, he would need no sorcerer’s help to make himself King of the Franks. He had as much power as he needed, and the skill was coming swiftly, day by day.

  For the moment he needed Ganelon. The sorcerer had not given him the secret of the garden, nor had he been able to discover it for himself. Without it he could not return to Francia.

  Time enough for that when he had learned all that the sorcerer would teach. And, he thought, when the war was won.

  War for the Grail. Much of what he learned was directed at that mighty instrument of power: winning it, holding it, mastering it. Ganelon’s army would break down the gates of the Grail’s kingdom and destroy the men and spirits who defended it. But when that was done, there was still the Grail to take and keep.

  For that, Ganelon needed Pepin. He needed a prince of blood royal, whose soul was his own still, who had not sworn himself to the powers of the dark. This was Pepin’s power and his protection. As long as Ganelon needed him whole and free, he was safe from the sorcerer’s malice, and that of his servants. Some of them might try, but he had learned spells to blast them where they stood.

  He took considerable pleasure in the refinements of the spells. Better, he thought, to leave the man alive, but take away his hands, or leave him without feet, or seal his lips and tongue so that he could not speak. Two or three such workings, and the rest bowed before him in awe and fear.

  Pepin Crookback was no laughingstock now, no object of pity or scorn. Nor would he ever be again.

  There was no counting days here between the worlds. The sun rose and set. The moon was born and died. They seemed to bear no relation to one another, nor were the days of equal length. Sometimes the day was endless, sometimes it flashed past in a moment. One night the moon was full, the next it was a thin sliver of new moon. Time was all strange here. The only constant was the breath in Pepin’s lungs, the beat of his heart, and the relentlessness of Ganelon’s teaching.

  One morning—or so the sun’s height told them, and its nearness to rising—the army rose and broke camp and marched toward the shimmer of the horizon. Pepin had had no warning. He woke late and was nearly left behind. He had to scramble his belongings together without benefit of servant. His horse was saddled and waiting, but there was no one to
strike his tent.

  He stood staring at it. Anger surged up in him. He called the spirits of air. They came in a whirlwind, swift enough almost to take him aback. He knew a moment’s flutter in the belly, an instant’s fear; but he was stronger than they. “Strike my tent,” he commanded them. “Bear it to the baggage-train.”

  They strained at his will, but he held firm. With a last rebellious wail, they did his bidding.

  The army was moving slowly, yet move it did. He mounted. Already the foremost ranks had vanished into a shimmer of mist. He spurred his horse after them.

  This was not hell, nor yet purgatory. It was, Ganelon said, a world beyond the world. The mist was the power of the Grail, obscuring their sight and confusing their minds. The earth flung up stones to trip feet and bruise hooves. Rivers snaked across their path, seeming to widen as they approached, and deepen and grow swifter, so that they were hard pressed to ford the roaring torrents. Mountains reared in front of them.

  But they pressed on. They camped when it grew too dark to see, whether with cloud or night. Their will did not falter, for it was Ganelon’s will. He ruled them all.

  This was not such an army as Pepin had known. There were no gatherings of lords and counselors. There was only one general, and that was Ganelon. Captains led at his pleasure. If any showed signs of chafing against the sorcerer’s rule, he vanished. Ganelon heard no one’s word but his own. His rule was absolute.

  Pepin was Frank enough to find that rather uncomfortable. A king could do whatever he pleased—but what if he needed advice? Or more to the point, what if he needed someone to take the blame for his mistakes?

  He held his tongue, learned his lessons, felt the power grow inside him. The farther they traveled into this strange dim country, the stronger, rather than weaker, he became. He could see the strain about the army, the bindings fraying. Now and then a demon or a spirit would escape. Some simply vanished. Others ran wild in the army, sowing havoc, until they were caught and either bound again or destroyed.