The Grail War (10 page)

He took the young man’s arm and led him on into the dense, invisible tangles of limb and brush and bole.

“What do you want, Prang, before you die?”

After a few moments the knight answered: “Long life. Fame … to fight well … to have sons …”

“I have had all of those but the first.”

“Yes?”

His outstretched hand touched a tree and he pressed closer to Parsival as they went around the great roots.

“And I fear,” Parsival said, “and I long …”

“For love? How do you find your way here? Is it magic art?”

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps which?”

“Perhaps.” And Parsival said no more as they worked their way on and on through gullies and over ridges and rocks …

Broaditch was afraid. There was no moon now as he groped through the mucky, stinking lanes downward to the water. Now and then he glimpsed the magical silver moon gleaming between the squalid roofs. It was very late and very quiet. The houses were dark. The clammy fog was rolling in chest-high, like smoke, he thought, from a cold fire …

He held his quarter staff out before him like a blind man. He was listening intently. Danger always cleared the senses, he ruminated, sharpened the world, made each breath a gift … He heard distant dripping sounds, voices … a child crying … racking wheezes as he passed a shuttered window where someone lay sick or dying … Broaditch stumbled, stepped on something softly elastic, shuddered, then dimly saw a man at his feet drunk-asleep or dead … He stepped over the form and went on his way …

He came out of the last streets and stood looking at where wharves and ships seemed to drift away as the mists steamed and flowed past them. The marsh reeds lining the shore seemed phantasmal and ominous. The path curving into them could have been the road of shades … Echoes and faint splashes came across the unseen water …

He moved carefully, straining to distinguish outlines along the shore. He was hoping to locate a waterman willing (or with a reason) to sail upstream. But the area seemed deserted. Fear was cold at his back. He was certain someone, at least one, had followed him from the house.

He turned suddenly and crouched behind his heavy staff. He listened, but he heard only the creakings and muffled splashes as the moored vessels rolled and shifted on the tide … Somewhere out on the river a pair of voices were singing a sea chanty … Then he thought he heard a squishing step in the billowing fog just around the bend behind him.

He saw no reason to hold this ground and waded on through the muck along the river’s edge. He heard steps coming faster now.

No
you
don't
,
by
Mary
and
the
saints
, he thought, and he ducked down behind a cloudy fence of cattails. He waited, controlling his breath …

The feet were running now and a moment later a tall, lanky figure broke out of the gleaming mists, panting, wobbling a little, then stopping with a stagger. Broaditch stood up, recognizing Valit. His eyes rolled wildly. Broaditch was suddenly reminded of someone from the lost past: the lanky body, the terrorized look. Waleis, who’d died in the snow. The blood brought the image back, spilling from nose and mouth …

“What happened?” Broaditch asked, supporting him by the arms as Valit sagged to his knees in the mud.

“I …” — he gasped — “ … followed … it …”

“What are you saying?”

“I …”

“How were you hurt?”

“Hit me … back there … a man … he’s coming …”

“Why did you follow me?” Broaditch was staring around at the ghostly fog gleamings. “Can you walk?”

Valit nodded.

“Mayhap,” he whispered.

“Come, then.” And Broaditch led him back through the reeds to the edge of the river.

“He was a murderer,” Valit said.

“Hush, boy,” Broaditch said. He’d seen a long skiff drawn up on the bank through a thinning patch of mist and made for that.

“I want to go with you,” the young man whispered. “I …”

“Peace!” Broaditch hissed.

They tumbled into the boat and Broaditch poled away from shore with an oar. When a few yards out and melting into the mists, two men emerged and stood on the bank: dark, blurred blots. One seemed to be holding a sword. They said nothing and then vanished behind a billow of chill smoke …

“So close as that,” Broaditch murmured to himself.

They drifted for a few minutes on the flooding tide. Broaditch crouched in the bow, listening to every faint, echoing sound … After a time he moved carefully amidships and took up the oars. He plied them with great care and silence. They were drifting steadily, but he assumed the incoming sea would swing them inland against the sluggish current. His idea was to proceed upstream all night, hugging the far shore.

Valit was cross-legged, dabbing at his nose with a bit of rag, leaning against the gunwale. Broaditch spoke in a conversational whisper, bending his wide back steadily, rowing.

“Well, then,” he was just saying, “what sent you after me?”

The cottony fog streamed over them as the breeze freshened. Broaditch kept glancing over his shoulder, hoping for a glimpse of the far shore. He wasn’t sure how wide the river actually was at this point. “Did your father send you?”

“Him?” Valit was scornful, now wetting the cloth and applying it to his head. “Not likely.”

“Then why did you follow me? Or were you just strolling for pleasure, taking in the night fog?”

“Oh, me head,” he sighed as the cold water touched it. “A great club he done me with … I’ll have an ear like a potato …” He shifted around where he was, tipping the craft a little. “I saw you were clever,” he told Broaditch seriously, “and one as knew his way about the world … Sister-in-law said which way you went …”

“Ah. So you mean to adventure with a middle-aged pilgrim?” His elder was amused.

“Adventure, me arse,” was the measured reply. “Do I seem a mad knight or a fool in skins? But there’s more to you, Mr. Broaditch of Nigh, than just a pilgrim. I’d say you’ve got your purposes …” There was an air of great slyness about him now. “And can I ask you one thing?” He sat up straight, pressing the cloth to the side of his long head.

“All right, boy.”

“Who’s after you?”

“By name and face?” Broaditch was sardonic, then suddenly let his oars trail, listening. “Be still …”

There it was — a faint splish-splash not too far away; low voices … Could it be the other side already …? A bubbling and creaking and then a huge shadow loomed up out of the mist so that it took him a minute to realize it was twenty feet of sail. He hit his oars and pulled back out of sight. But he’d been heard or seen: a hoarse shout echoed from another off behind them. Broaditch had glimpsed men on the ship, dark and armed.

“So we’re bloody well done,” Valit muttered, scowling around. “I should o’ knowed better than what I knowed.”

“Be still,” Broaditch repeated.

The voices were directing one another, hollering. Two craft at least were in the hunt. They drifted … Broaditch lightly worked the oars from time to time … Suddenly the fog pulled away and a slim sailboat, tilted under short sail, was bearing straight down on them. Broaditch dug in the oars, pulled, cracked his muscles and back, puffed, feeling as though embedded in a sticky sea, straining as the boat seemed to rush headlong at them. He heard the hue and cry go up, saw men rush to the bows, point and shout … on … on … thunk! Ptuck! Punggg! Three arrows shook in the gunwale. Valit crouched in the bilge water like, Broaditch thought, a cringing dog … He felt the next arrow shot clip his hair as the shaft zipped out into the water.

Is
this
then
,
the
manner
of
my
death
? he wondered. And something seemed to say
no
within him. And then the smoky mist closed between them again. He heard other shots whiz past unaimed … heard muffled voices and creaking drift away into the night as he panted and struggled on … then stopped and brought in the oars.

“Why don’t you row?” hissed the young man from where he lay in the wet hull.

Broaditch gestured around.

“Point the way, then, lad,” he suggested. The fog rolled like a wall on all sides.

Valit sat up and looked around wildly.

“Christ’s wounds,” he muttered, “am I lost, then?”

“No more than I. Still, this fog should lift ere long.”

“You have this from God?” Valit asked with exasperated contempt.

“Hmm,” Broaditch grunted, sitting there, solid and patient, on the smooth-worn seat. Valit slumped back, brooding. He kept gently feeling his battered head and crushed ear, wincing. “You never told me what you seek, Valit,” Broaditch mildly asked.

“The far side of the river Thames, old man,” was the surly response.

“Mayhap you’ll find the bottom first,” Broaditch suggested, “if you mend not your speech.”

The fair, sarcastic young man glanced up, as if to weigh this remark, and decided to soften a little.

“I mean to make me fortune,” he said, “not plow a long grave in the fields for some lord.”

“Then you’d do better to stay in town here, would you not?”

“Poor in the city is poor in the country,” was the reply, “without even fresh air, old man.”

“And you have a third place to go? Under the earth or out to sea?”

But Valit was done saying much.

“What I know,” he said, “I know.” And he went back to sighing over his wounds.

“One thing I know,” Broaditch said, “old man that you say I am …” He eased himself into the boat’s bottom and stretched out to rest, fishing out his long-stemmed pipe from his leather pouch. “There’s a wind blowing you where it’s going to blow you, flap your silly sails as you will.” He sighed and sucked the cold stem. “This have I learned, boy.
This
have I learned.”

The roads were still soft under a bright, clean sun. The morning’s blue and green were soft, the earth steamy.

Modred was feeling ill. The swaying horse did nothing to ease it. Or, perhaps, the wine had been bad that morning.

“That bitch,” he muttered to the nearest retainer, Sir Gaf, a cousin of long-dead Sir Kay, adviser to Arthur, the father, by a serving maid, of Modred, who, at forty-one, was the closest approach Britain could make to an heir-apparent: balding, sweaty, pot-bellied and ever depressed.

“My lord?” Sir Gaf answered.

“That bitch aunt of mine. She looks no older than she did twenty years gone … Did you mark that?”

“I had not seen her in those times, my lord,” Gaf said, ever so faintly contemptuous.

“She’s a witch,” Modred declared. “Always was. My father, curse his cold heart, he knew it well … Morgana the bitch witch!” He shook his head. “I sickened on her dinner. I swear it!”

“My lord,” Gaf soothed, riding his mount a little closer to the prince-by-default as they worked their way along the overgrown road through berry thickets and dense brush. The hills were gentle and old here, trees scrubby. The earth had been burned out years before and was still gradually filling back. Twenty years earlier Clinschor’s barbarians had razed this countryside. “My lord, she is a wise and gentle lady in her way.”

“Bitch!”

“And her advice …” — he held the word and pause — “ … is sound.”

“Then it has the advantage of her food.”

“She means to raise you to your father’s throne.”

“I’m not my father. And I’ve troubles enough.”

“Britain could fall to the northern devils, my lord,” a third rider put in, a bishop by his vestments. “We need …”

“Then,” said Modred, “put young what’s-his-name in power and be damned!” He pressed his thick hands to his belly. “God’s mercy, I churn …” Sweat was running into his eyes. He wiped them. It was going to be a hot day, he thought. The weather was so uneven. This would be a miserable ride back to Kent … and these fools prodding him … He regretted now even putting on his light mail shirt. The sweat gathered under it. And the links always made him itch … No more of this, he decided, no more — no more plotting and riding all over the damned country. He’d not be used by the damned nobles and church … “I’ve been poisoned by that bitch,” he said, burping violently, tilting forward and burping again, tasting garlic and decay.

The air was still and shadows cool under the bushes. Blackberries glowed in the splintery sunlight.

He sat there enjoying the ripe scents. He toyed with his long mace where it lay across his armored legs. A composite moment from childhood returned to mind: sunny summer midafternoon eating with the family under the trees, shifting on the bench, bored, restless, watching his father slowly, painfully (he thought) eating and sipping wine, seeing his mother’s tense looks while her husband stared into space … She would start to speak and sigh and stop … Then she looked for one of the servants and at that moment Lohengrin spun off the bench, still chewing gristly meat, and raced down the sun-brilliant, dusty path into the woods, hearing his father’s voice behind him: “Why can’t he sit for five minutes? What kind of …” And his mother’s voice: “Would I could fly thus from you!” And then came his father again, louder, but the words were lost as he leaped a cool, rushing stream into deep pine shadows and hush, forgetting the two of them for the moment, as if they’d vanished from the earth …