The Grail War (33 page)

“I lost it, Gawain,” Parsival murmured. He looked vaguely stunned.

“We’ll try, then,” Gawain repeated, without even pressing now. He waited. His voice broke slightly when he spoke next, and for an instant his friend thought he might cry, though he didn’t, half-whispering, “It’s all we have … to seek it is all we have …” The single eye was wild, misty, desperate. “There’s too much blood flowed … I could sink under in the blood … For what am I?” he suddenly cried. He snatched away his hood and showed in full daylight what Parsival had but dimly glimpsed two decades ago in the shadowed moonlight: the naked, raw half-face sheared from left eyebrow to point of jaw, teeth forever exposed in death’s mirror grimace, the rills of scarring … Parsival closed his eyes. “And you, Parsival, my friend, are cut as deep and badly … So I still say: to seek the Grail is all we have!” His friend was already nodding, not looking, although that was no entire relief because in the flesh’s darkness he could see the flames like the afterglow of a light. Ever since the river he could see the flames … and more … Gawain seemed to understand this. He grasped that his companion had changed, had been opened in some mysterious way.

Parsival felt the power flowing within him, the unfathomable strengths and tides … He sensed there may never have been a choice for him, that, like Gawain, he couldn’t even die because the power, like a great river, needed a channel to pour through …
But
, his mind insisted,
without
joy
…
I
could
have
power
over
the
whole
world
now
and
without
joy
…

“Yes,” he agreed, nodding, looking at the hazy day again, letting it in. “Yes.” He was feeling the strength swell and mount until he feared the flesh would burst asunder from the electric pressure, spurring his horse violently forward toward Prang on the hill. He’d seen him again, and the black nightmare shape that haunted him was seeking the same brightness, too; he realized that. He’d meet it where the brightness was. It was a race. He understood the urgency. The power had to meet the dark there. Nothing could prevent it; the power showed him that. He’d have to fight, the last fight, perhaps … He’d have to fight the black, shapeless shape and fight alone …

He passed Prang, thinking:
poor
young
lad
drawn
along
by
the
flood
like
the
rest
of
us
… And Gawain wouldn’t be there. He knew that, too … saw an image of everything, earth, sky, seas, all men sucked, swirled in a vast whirlpool into smoking, fuming, unguessed bottomlessness … “Yes,” he repeated back over his shoulder.

Wista was coughing, holding a damp rag over his nose and mouth as the smoke billowed. The horses were skittish. The wind shifted and, past Grontler’s shoulder, he glimpsed a sight that left him trembling: the stream that ran alongside the road was literally choked with the dead. The water oozed and flowed and spread to work its slow way around. A few drifted slowly, rolling a few feet at a time.

“Lord Jesus!” He breathed, muffled into the cloth.

Hundreds and hundreds … the water running red … and then the smoke closed over again.

“Lord Christ Jesus …”

Grontler looked grim and restless. He wore his cloth knotted behind his neck.

* * *

Alienor and the children were keeping to the hills, staying above the smoke and clinging fog that poured steadily across the lowlands and collected in the valleys. She thought the whole world must be burning.

They’d met a few panicked, soot-stained folk after leaving the man with the cart when his mules collapsed in the traces. Not long after, the strange knight (she never knew he was Parsival’s son) had spoken with them on the road.

She wished it might rain now that it was needed … At dusk the distant flames showed at the bases of towering black clouds, the smoke settling miles away and joining the vapors of the earth. The sun set a hideous, distorted blood-red behind the smoldering world …

They’d stopped to rest on a high hill in a deserted stone-and-log church. Even this high, the air was biting and reeking.

She was startled by an apparition at the glassless window. She was seated on a bench, where the children had curled up to sleep. It was an old woman’s face that was drawn and sucked inward around a toothless mouth. She had one blind, blasted, bluish-white eye and the other keen and penetrating as a cat’s.

Alienor crossed herself and stood up facing the tall, arched opening. The last lurid wash of twilight seemed to float the puckered features there.

“Praying to God, dearie?” the face asked neutrally.

Alienor was relieved and chided herself for unreasoning fear.

“Resting, grandmother,” she replied. “You’re welcome to share it.”

The toothless collapse of a mouth worked its gums.

“Time enough to rest in,” it said. “Where be ye bound, dearie?”

“South.”

“Ah. To London?”

“Aye.”

The red-and-black dusk glow deepened behind the face. A trick of shadow wiped away the good eye and left the glazed, blank one staring. Alienor wanted to terminate the conversation and lie down on the bench. Weariness was seeping into her, she vaguely thought, like water into soaking earth.

“Well,” the woman’s face said, “the stars have promised this.”

“All?” But Alienor was really too tired to care.

“And more still … But there’s some what know the secrets and will be safe enough, dearie.”

“No doubt …” Her eyes felt weighted. Too many days of struggle and strain and the horrors of the way. What was this old silliness talking about?
Let
her
be
done
,
in
St
.
Hyla’s
name
…

“Never pass up such a fine chance, dearie. For it means yer life be marked by the high stars.” The head nodded and the unseeing eye seemed to wink.

“Aye,” Alienor murmured “But I must rest a little …”

As she moved back to the bench, she heard the old voice telling her! London s burned down, dearie.

She was already on her back and falling rapidly toward sleep. The stinging smoke-reek was mixed in there with the general mustiness.

“Ye knew me not when ye saw me," the raspy voice said. And Alienor registered Only the first words, and then blank blackness blotted her out entirely …

A few scattered hailstones were cracking on trees, bouncing on turf, smashing on stones, and pinging off the armored riders. Out of the smoke and fire-glow of that fearful evening, soot was falling in a steady rain.

Lohengrin was amazed: every wood and castle town they’d passed was ablaze or smoldering. The smoke and fog were closing in as though the whole earth were a cindering coal …

He knew they were very close to the main army now. They’d passed straggling detachments on the road and at the outposts.

He kept his visor closed against the ashes … As they rode, the obscure billowing gave way to brilliant, roaring flame and his eye slits framed several hundred foot-soldiers and clumps of black-armored horsemen in a cordon around a collection of burning huts. He glimpsed people in there, heard rending, shuddering screams, and when soot-black, seared villagers tried to escape, they were speared or driven back into the hellish streets to roast.

Lohengrin stormed over to the officer knights who were grouped a little behind the main action, overseeing the work. He snapped his helmet open and raged at them.

“What means this?!” he cried over the flame roar and howls of agony. “Who’s in command here?!”

A big, serious, long-faced fellow with a bent nose and steady eyes gazed from his own helm at Lohengrin.

“This is my command,” he said laconically. “Who in the hell asks?”

“Lord General Lohengrin! And I demand to know — ” The man was patient, calm, sure of himself.

“My lord,” the captain said, “I have my orders.” Lohengrin noted a number of his own men had stopped on the road and were looking on.

“Have you?”

“You might do well to attend to your own business, my lord,” the captain said, without pressure either way. But Lohengrin noticed he was glancing sidelong at one of the ever-silent black-and-silver knights, whom nobody (it was said) had ever seen without their grotesque visors tightly shut. There was a story they were sealed because the heads within were vacant skulls …

“If we slay everyone,” Lohengrin reasoned, “then whom have we conquered? If we lay waste the whole land, then what have we gained?”

The captain shrugged.

“I know not, my lord general,” he said, glancing over at the elite warrior again. “But the Lord Master must.” Was the man slightly, ever so slightly, mocking? His expression was perfectly bland.

“I doubt,” Lohengrin cried, raising his voice over a sudden swelling of screams, “he countenances this … this utter waste! I spoke with him … He’ll hear what’s being done in his name! I promise you that!”

As he turned to spur away, he heard the fellow’s last comment: “We all do what we must, lord general.” Lohengrin gagged as a gust of hot wind brought a reek of seared flesh … He galloped down the road, gesturing his lagging, uncertain men to follow on into the churning, fiery darkness ahead …

* * *

The sun was just setting as Parsival and Gawain sat their mounts beside Prang on the hill’s steep edge and looked out over the country ahead: a sea of flames was working its raging way from the southeast over the densely wooded landscape. The horizon was a sheer wall of blotting blackness. Heading roughly north, on both sides of the spine of range they were atop, was a hoard that seemed, to Parsival, dark, gleaming streams of antlike demons, as if the smoke which billowed and flowed over them was part of the invasion, was given off by their burning contact with the earth …

“Look,” Prang said. “But look …”

“This pales imagination,” Gawain muttered.

Parsival shut his eyes. Paused. Reopened. Before long, he was thinking, it would be the same with them either closed or staring wide. Flames …

“Well,” he said finally, the strength pulsing through him (and relieved, too, because now he could plunge ahead into the fire and steel). “Well, good sirs, I’ll hardly need to guide your steps.” He pointed northeast to an area the holocaust seemed to already half-surround. “We all seem bound the same way … Ride and follow!” he yelled, suddenly aiming his charger down the long hill spine that made a rugged high road in roughly the direction they wanted and would give them an edge in travel time.

“Whither does he lead us?” Prang wanted to know, calling over to Gawain as they followed.

Gawain spurred his thick-bodied horse and called back, amused and still stunned, too, by the panorama below.

“To the end of the earth,” he said. “Cannot you see that? My lad, this is the battle to possess the fairy dream!” He barked a laugh with almost a hint of hysteria in it. “The dream war! God shield us!” And farther on, he said to himself, “And one I believe in at last … with all my heart …”

All around now, lit only by its own fitful, tortured glow, the great cloud mounted upward … upward, massing like an unthinkable mountain range, dwarfing the world …

Broaditch saw a dim, hinted outline ahead in the sluggish, twilight smoke mist. He gripped his staff and plodded grimly on. His heart sped when he recognized the high, strangely rounded coach and steeds he'd seen before. Real, they were real! A mule snorted. He rapped the wooden sides with his knuckles when he got there … Not fairy wood, this …

He grinned at himself. A rough-planked traveling wagon.
For
jugglers
and
players
…

Helmetless, Morgan was staring into the almost impenetrable haze, holding her mount steady, frowning. Across the smoke-flooded fields, her army was charging parallel to the forest edge, ripping through the clouds into the lines of dim enemies that had just emerged from the valley into this prepared ambush. Modred, Gaf, and the bishop were close to her.

“We have them, lady,” Sir Gaf said, following the blurry action through his open helmet.

Modred was disturbed by her strained expression as the ghostly seeming troops collided in a churning obscurity of shouts, screams, and clashing steel. Horsemen were trailing billows behind, as if it were their own cloudy substance against which the overwhelming grinding sounds were the more terrible …

“What’s wrong, Aunt?” he demanded.

Her face was tensed, jaw trembling with effort as her mailed hands clawed at the air.

“Damn him!” she gasped, leaning forward, as if straining into an invisible wall as the troops lined up in reserve to their right along the forest wall suddenly seemed to sway, then sag inward as thousands and thousands broke from the trees directly into their flank, and the men and knights began to melt away like sand figures in a foaming surf …