Pendragon's Heir (29 page)

“Curious,” Blanchefleur thought, and the thing slipped from her mind. She went a few steps down the stair, closed and locked the gate, and after a moment’s thought slid her hand between the bars to lay the key on the floor above, where it could be reached but not seen. Then she went down the stair to the terrace before the cathedral.

Here, murmuring across the grass, flowed the stream which watered the whole country. Blanchefleur bent down to drink from it. The taste was fresh, of course, but that seemed a bare and niggardly word: this was a freshness beside which all the water of the world forever after would taste stale and salt. At the first drop on her tongue she knew she would never drink again without remembering and grieving for Sarras, and so the sharp joy of that wonderful water came twinned from the first with sorrow.

When she straightened with dripping mouth, she saw Morgan on the other side of the stream on the edge of the terrace, outlined against the sky and distant countryside, which for a moment gave her the appearance of a giantess. At the sight of her aunt’s smile—thin and red, like blood running down the groove in a sword—hair prickled on the back of Blanchefleur’s neck.

Morgan said: “Well! I am here.” She folded her hands into her wide sleeves. “My master was displeased when I returned without your blood.”

Blanchefleur recoiled a step. “What did you tell him?”

“The truth.”

“What?”

“That I had driven a bargain with you, and lost.”

“And?”

“As I said. He was displeased.” Morgan’s eyes narrowed. “I begin to think I must cease to protect you from him.”

“No!” Blanchefleur blurted the word out with something like panic. Morgan burst into laughter.

“Oh, your face! Exquisite! Never fear, you may yet live to see his fall. But what have you done about him?”

“Done about him!” Blanchefleur gestured despairingly. “What
could
I do? Even if I had the courage, I would never know where to begin.”

There were orange-trees on the terrace, heavy with fruit. Morgan strolled to one of them, picked an orange, and dug her thumbnail into the flesh. “What is there to perplex you?” she asked. “Two words whispered in the right ears, and you should only have to sit back and watch the poi—watch the physic work. No one need ever know you had a hand in it.”

“If it’s so easy, why could you not do it?”

Morgan shook her head. “He would know at once whom to suspect. Besides, I have tried it once or twice already. No one believes
me
. Now, if the Grail Maiden said it—!”

“But I am so frightened of him, and I am trapped in Carbonek,” Blanchefleur said, tears starting to her eyes. “What could I say to harm him there? Would God I were as safe from him!”

Morgan looked at her incredulously. “You are too frightened to do this simple thing?”

“You are, too! What chance do I have? I am only a simple girl, and I have no skill in deception.”

Morgan spat an orange pip onto the grass and said, “If you can be so little use to me, I might as well kill you now.” And she drew a long, glittering knife like a stiletto from the jewelled sheath hanging at her belt.

Blanchefleur felt she had forgotten how to breathe. “Good aunt,” she whispered at last in a choking voice.

Morgan laughed. “Where is your Welsh pig-boy now?” She darted forward and caught Blanchefleur by the neck of her gown, lifting the knife to strike. Blanchefleur’s knees gave way; she sank to the ground and cried, “Aunt, please—”

“You refused to help me.”

“I’ll do whatever you ask!”

“I cannot use a chicken-heart like you.”

“Anything!”

The word broke painfully, violently out of her throat and hung on the air, echoing from the cathedral walls. Morgan checked, and a glint of craftiness struck from the depths of her eyes.

“Anything?”

Blanchefleur gritted her teeth shut and nodded.

With swift decision, Morgan dropped into a crouch by her side. “Then listen,” she hissed. “We may not have much time. There is a way for me to destroy this master whom I hate, who sent me to kill you. His downfall is assured, his death is certain. You need do nothing, only give me what I need to accomplish it.”

Blanchefleur looked at her in fascination. She felt horribly aware of that gleaming knife, so motionless when it had threatened her life, but now forgotten, clutched in a white-nerved hand that shook like a leaf.

“Yes,” she breathed. “Anything.”

“You want him gone as much as I do.”

“As God is my witness—”

Morgan clapped a hand over Blanchefleur’s mouth. “
Lilith!
Will you utter that name
here?
Now?”

They crouched in silence under the golden sky. Morgan shook even harder, staring up, waiting. Not a breath moved in the air. At last she relaxed her strained vigilance and went on. “All will be well, once I have it. You may change your mind, if you like, and try to fight me. No one will say you did less than your duty. And remember that you are afraid of me,” she added, laying the knife’s blade against Blanchefleur’s cheek.

Blanchefleur felt the steel trembling and breathed: “Yes.”

Morgan’s voice dropped to the thread of a whisper. “You know the Thing I mean.”

“Yes.” Blanchefleur shuddered in her own time, a counterpoint against Morgan.

“Then come.”

They rose and went into the cathedral. Morgan gripped Blanchefleur by the arm, with the knife dangling from her other hand, but it seemed to Blanchefleur that she clung close more out of fear than an intention to do her injury. They reached the stair to the steeple in safety. Here, Morgan seemed to regain some of her nerve, and they went up the stair almost at a run.

They stopped at the trap-door. Morgan yanked at the lock and said, “The key! Quickly, now!”

“I have it,” said Blanchefleur, and her hand went to the little pouch that hung from her belt. Then she stopped.

“Oh, Morgan, and I am its keeper!”

“Yes, but hurry!”

“Tell me what you mean to do with it.”

“Not now!” Morgan’s whisper was almost a scream.

“Only tell me, and you shall have it!”

Morgan lifted her hands to her head in despair. “Listen, then! It is possible, with the right learning, to use the hair, or bone, or blood of a man to make another man—a, a
simulacrum
, a double.”

“Blood.” Blanchefleur felt her stomach turn over. “The blood in the Grail?
That
blood? A double?”

“Yes!” Morgan returned, and the smile that passed across her face struck ice into Blanchefleur’s veins. “But—
not heavenly
. Something so powerful that even my master could not resist it. And now I have the art of bringing a child to manhood within days. I cannot fail in this.”

Morgan’s words faded into the dusk of the stairwell. “The key,” she said, remembering.

Blanchefleur, who had been stooping close to Morgan, flung herself to her full height and laughed. The sound rolled up and down the tower and rang, to her tight-wound nerves, like thunder. But like thunder, it cleared the air.

Morgan remembered her knife, and lofted it. “Hush, hush,” she cried, but some premonition of defeat clouded her eyes.

Blanchefleur did not flinch. “Why, I don’t believe you have a master at all.”

“Give me the key!”

“Search me if you like. You won’t find it,” Blanchefleur said, holding out her hands with a smile. “Dear aunt, I have tricked you abominably, I fear.”

In the dim air of the steeple, amid a black halo of rioting hair, the whites of Morgan’s eyes shone ghastly-pale.

“It was foolish of me not to guess the truth at once,” Blanchefleur went on. “I only come to Sarras when I am brought, and I am only brought when the Grail is in danger. You never intended to kill me; you must have wanted the Grail. Had you come here for some other reason, you could have strolled through these garden-palaces until Doomsday without laying eye upon the Grail Maiden. No! In the end I saw it all. I only wanted to know
why
you needed the Grail.”

“Give me the key,” Morgan said again, but her voice was scratched and chipped like an ancient blade.

“Now that I know your plans?” she cried. “Dear aunt, be reasonable. You profess to have a master you hate already—yet you mean to create some sort of infernal prince, ten times worse?”

“I am desperate,” said Morgan, and she had gone beyond rage into calm.

“You are a liar,” said Blanchefleur contemptuously.

Morgan did not speak. Only, with viperish speed, she lifted her knife and drove it into Blanchefleur’s heart.

22

O they rade on, and farther on,

The steed gaed swifter than the wind;

Until they reach’d a desert wide,

And living land was left behind.

Thomas the Rhymer

S
IR
P
ERCEVAL HUNCHED DOWN UNDER HIS
spaulders and stared into the desolate valley through a drifting mist of rain. Summer and autumn had passed. Winter, although sometimes he had almost despaired of it, now seemed about to do the same. And in those months he had travelled up Wales and down again, and having crossed the Severn Sea near Caerleon now passed through Dumnonia in a mood of despondent stubbornness. At first, all those months ago, that wet summer morning when he had left Camelot, he had felt sure of finding the Grail within a month or two. Now Carbonek seemed so far away that he had ceased to be able to imagine arriving there at all. And yet time slipped by, and soon the year and a day set for the Quest would be over.

Perceval suppressed the quiver of urgency that crept into his mind at this, and thought: All the better. With fewer than four months left, if he was to find Carbonek at all, it must be soon.

Rufus, head down, plodded down the slope into the shrouded valley. Perceval shifted back in the saddle, shook water out of his right gauntlet, and hunched again into thought. It was more than a year since he had last seen the Heir of Logres. More than a year since his promise in Carbonek before the Grail’s coming, to serve her a year and a day—

How stupid his behaviour had been on that night of miracles! To turn his back on the Grail and run! Could that foolishness have anything to do with his difficulty in finding Carbonek now? God knew he had repented of it often enough.

—There was no way of knowing, and Perceval turned his thoughts back to Blanchefleur. The term of service had expired in the autumn, and when he next saw her he would return her silver moonstone ring, which even now he wore on a thin leather thong around his neck. But no matter, he would continue to serve her as long as he had it. And he could not help grinning as he remembered all the ruffians and brigands whom he had vanquished and, by way of penalty, sent to kiss the hands of the lady Blanchefleur and undergo the reparation she commanded of them. That was common enough; there was always a steady stream of knights coming to Camelot to kneel before one lady or another and declare that her champion had sent him to greet and wait on her. But the men he fought would not find Blanchefleur at Camelot. They must go on quest, in search of the Grail, and the benefit to their souls and to the peace of Logres, Perceval thought, must be tremendous.

He came back to the present to sniff the air. Some faint stench rose out of the valley to greet him. Perceval loosened his sword in the scabbard, gripped his lance, and went on more watchfully. Then he began to see them: bones, stripped bare and gnawed by gigantic teeth. Down here the fog lay thicker, threaded through the rocks and concentrated above the scummed stream at the valley’s nadir.

Perceval drew his sword. The stink grew: sulphur and rotting flesh and putrid eggs. Then there was a grey glint of scales through the mist, and Perceval came to a bend in the valley and saw the dragon. The massive coils of its body filled the gorge; its wings rose beyond sight into the sky, like iron towers.

Its fire was dead. The ravens were already at work on its eyes and tongue. They also clustered on the body of the knight that lay by its gaping maw, but their beaks rapped against mail and plate in vain.

Perceval shot his sword back into the scabbard and dismounted. From the festering smell, the knight must have been dead for weeks. Surcoat and plume had been scorched away; only the steel harness was left. His shield was split and blackened, but Perceval could trace the outline of the passant lion and crosslets of a man he knew.

“Sir Lamorak.”

The words hung heavily, like the foetid fog, on the air. Perceval went to the dragon and found Sir Lamorak’s sword thrust through the roof of the monster’s mouth, into its brain.

He dared not stay long in the valley, but lifting up the body bore it to higher ground and found a place to raise a cairn. When the stone mound was tall enough, he planted the knight’s sword at the top and hung the shield on its hilts. He paused and prayed awhile and then, throat dry and head aching, rode on looking for a place to rest.

Sir Lamorak at least would never find the Grail, he thought. Had he failed the Quest? Or had he found a better reward?

The rain drifted to a stop and the last light of day shone out beneath the clouds. Perceval rode down into the next valley, a place of gentle grassy slopes, budding apple-trees, and ruined stonework glimpsed through the undergrowth. He wondered who had lived there, before the dragon came.

Then he heard the clink of harness ahead, and looked up to see a horse and rider coming down the green path to meet him. The knight, too far away in the gloom to be seen clearly, reined in and settled his helm on his head. Perceval closed his hand on his lance, and for a moment the two knights sat facing each other.

“Will you joust?” asked the knight. Perceval did not recognise his shield: snowy
argent
, bearing a cross in blood-red
gules
.

“Gladly,” Perceval said, and they backed their horses and laid their spears in rest.

It never occurred to him that he might lose. A year ago he had matched Sir Lancelot, and now in the full tide of his strength, he thought he could stand against any knight of the world. As he laid his lance in rest and spurred Rufus into a gallop—the war-horse, weary with constant travel, nevertheless scented battle and charged eagerly—Perceval moved with practised precision, with the accustomed confidence of a strong arm and a true point.