by Yury Nikitin
Chapter 24
When Thomas came up into their room at the inn, the wonderer was lying on his bed, hands behind head. On the floor there was a big plate of fruit, a jug of wine. Judging by the apple stalks, the wonderer had gorged apples with their cores.
Oleg livened up at once. “Greetings, Sir Thomas!” he said cheerfully, waved his hand and even his right foot; probably it was a sign of ardent love and passion. “I see you visited all the taverns on the way… plenty of them, I recall. What the hell, where’s my youth? You must have missed no whore, a whole quarter of them here. Fine swarthy Asian wenches, plump Jewish women, cold girls of the North… You did the right thing. There’s only the dust and mud of roads ahead.”
“Curse that tongue of yours, sir wonderer,” Thomas said. He flopped heavily on the bench, his face exhausted, the red pressed-in stripe on his forehead filled with mud, big beads of sweat running down his face. “All the night long, I tried to get out of the back streets where you left me. Wherever I went, it was either a dead end… or a return to the same place!”
“How’s that possible?” Oleg gasped. “The inn’s but a step from where we were!”
“I saw it then,” Thomas explained in vexation. “When I got to a familiar street. Precisely, when I came to the inn’s gate… and even then I almost passed it by! Do you have anything more substantial than this food for goats?”
“I’ll send for meat,” Oleg replied hastily. “Don’t take your armor off. It suits you, I see now. You are so magnificent in it, so noble! I tracked the place of the chief malefactor. We need to take him quickly, before he thinks up a new foul trick to play!”
As Thomas ate the meat the servant brought them, he glowered at the wonderer. He knew the saying about the donkey that was not relieved of its load, as it was said to be decorating him. He felt dead tired, like never before, and wished greatly to undo his clasps and get out of the heavy steel armor. “One of the Seven?” he asked.
Oleg jumped, as though thrown up, came to the window. Thomas saw his back strained. “Yes,” the wonderer replied in a strangely hollow voice, without turning to him. “I hope he’s alone. And I’m afraid he is!”
Thomas choked, started to chew the hot meat slower, with more care. Strength returned to his tired body, flowed in with every slice he swallowed, but his fear of the unfathomable powers of magic was back too. Despite his strength and courage, the wonderer was no man of war. He failed to understand that it was impossible to break into a well-guarded house with less than a hundred well-armed soldiers. Who would allow such an attack within the capital city? To take a castle, they needed a thousand men. And if the master was adept at magic, one of the Seven Secret Lords, no host would do for him! “Will we break through the gate?” Thomas asked, doing his best to conceal his fear.
The wonderer paced up and down their small room, like a predatory animal in a cage, clenched his fists, rubbed the temples of his head. “The gate is always closed…”
“We’ll break it!”
“Do you jest? While we break the gate, the Secret One will sit by the window, drinking tea and pointing at us.”
“I think what he drinks is no tea,” Thomas replied with his mouth full, chewed it well and added, “Surely, a direct assault is impossible. What if we enter as traders? I don’t think he goes shopping. Rather the goods are brought to his place.”
“I doubt whether traders are allowed into the house itself.”
“What we need is to pass the gate!”
“Sure? The entrance door of the house can be even stronger. I know of such cases.” Thomas raised his eyebrows in surprise, and Oleg waved him away in vexation. “Sir knight, one can be born a seignior but not a hermit! In my young years, I’d climbed on towers, like a nasty monkey, jumped from masts… We could make it well from above! Pity it won’t work. We have to come by sea!”
“Is the house at the shore?”
“It’s rather a tower,” Oleg explained. “Though there’s a house too. However, if I got the signs right, we shall find our foe in the tower. It’s a more convenient place for observation.”
“Of us?”
Oleg winced. “Of stars, ebbs and flows of a tide, the phases of moon, the flocks of birds… In a word, we must try the way by sea.”
Thomas felt his hands cold. He moved an unfinished slice of meat away, sighed convulsively, and objected. “In a boat? We’ll be set with arrows before we row up. It’s no forest, neither bushes nor logs to hide behind. A crossbow bolt can even break my steel armor! And moorings are tall here, for guards to hide and endure an assault from the sea easily.”
Oleg ran about the room for a while, then hurled himself on the bed. The thick boards gave a plaintive creak. He turned onto his back, his broad palms darted behind his head. His eyes screwed up angrily at the whitewashed ceiling. “I see no other way! Neither do my charms. If we boat up as fishermen, we shan’t be met by a whole host. The mooring is only guarded by two men, though they are protected by its tall stone board. And two guards at the entrance to the tower! Only the four of them can see us!”
“Who’s inside the tower?” Thomas asked.
Oleg waved him away in annoyance. “A party of hired soldiers, but we have to think of getting out of the boat alive first! The guards will be against it, won’t they?”
Thomas suspected him of nervous irony. He scowled and replied gloomily, “We need to act very quickly. And accurately. But the main thing is that we’ll have to hit without warning! That’s prohibited by the knightly code of honor.”
“They’ll sock us without warning themselves! Once they see we are no fishermen.”
“They are one thing,” Thomas snapped stubbornly, “and we are another! We should not behave like them.”
Oleg twisted his mouth in a smirk but said nothing, sparing the knight. Being uncompromising is good for songs, but it’s no way to survive in real life. One who lived at least thirty years, as this valiant knight did, should not tell tales of his nonconformity: no fools here, only married men, as the Saracen say.
He put things into his bag methodically, looking over the walls and corners as though he knew he would never be there again. Thomas sighed, cursing the day and hour when he resolved to deliver the Holy Grail to his native Britain. that blooms like a garden without this miraculous cup as well. He tightened his belt, checked the sword in its scabbard, lowered and raised his visor, changing from an armored man to a solid metal statue.