The Grail War (36 page)

“Where was the rest of the alliance?” Gawain wanted to know.

“I cannot say.”

“The bastards are everywhere,” another broke in, a stocky warrior, red-haired, helmetless, broken spear half-clenched, pointlessly, in his fist. “None could reform … All were swept away. I was with the Baron Leffacs and Tundril’s men … We were surprised and smashed to pieces …” He half-sobbed. “They burn and kill everything … everything, beast, fowl, or man …!” He snarled. “God strike them! They are from hell! Devils from hell!” He pressed his fist to his lips, trembled in the saddle, as if with fever. His armor rattled from the shaking.

“Look there,” Prang said, pointing north. A single knight was coming fast through the spill of grayish smoke that flowed over the field in advance of the great, black, inexorable tide.

Other stragglers, mounted and on foot, were coming out of the wooded hills, which were blotted out almost to their peaks.

As the newcomer halted, Parsival noted his plain armor. His round shield bore a single emblem and he was astounded, recognizing it: a dove-in-flight mark of the Grail knights. He’d seen it over twenty years ago at the castle that forever after had seemed a dream …

“Ride due north from here,” the newcomer said through his grilled helmet. “By the lake where the forest closes in again, we’re forming a defense line.”

“And who will hold back the flames?” Gawain wanted to know.

“The hand of God,” was the reply, “if He so wills.”

The knight rode up and down, peering at the men who were streaming from the woods. Parsival could hear fragments of commands and cajolements, “Courage, men … not lost … reform …”

“Well, Parse?” Gawain demanded of his brooding, meditating companion, who was now squinting through the stinging haze at a low hut set among a grove of old trees. He was sure he recognized the place. “What do we do?” Gawain persisted.

“Do?” cried Prang. “I know that I stand with the rest and flee no more! I fled enough for my entire life. No more of it!” His face was flushed and determined.

Gawain started to say something to him, then shrugged.

“No doubt,” he said seriously, “at this point to choose your own death is as wise a course as any else.”

“It's the right direction, in any case,” Parsival said, returning from his reverie.

“We throw them back into their own fires.” Prang was exhorting the limp-armed captain of knights. “Just so I see them roast ahead of
me
." He seemed relaxed finally, grimly chipper. Parsival noted. Well, for him, the obscurities, hints, hopes, and decisions were at an end …

Gawain leaned close as they spurred their horses into the general movement.

“Do we fight or go on?” he asked Parsival, who was steering closer to the hut and the trees. Now he recognized the orchards and the back fields. The freeman and his daughter — what was her name?
Ga
…
Gay
…?
Gai
? He couldn't get it back. He remembered her eye greenish-gold-brown, like the forest … He'd done something wrong, that was sure, couldn't get that back, either … He remembered her weeping … Why was there always the weeping? Was that all eyes were made for? Yes, that was the place. He pointed.

“Long ago,” he told Gawain, “I was saved there, by a man who made his living from the dead.”

“Well, if he be still hale, his future's assured and his fortune’s at the flood,” Gawain remarked.

“He was already rich,” Parsival said, “I think.”

“The place looks abandoned,” Gawain noted.

The door was down, the shutters open. A billy goat, chewing a tuft of something, half-emerged from the doorway and seemed to eye them shrewdly. The barn had fallen in.

I
never
understood
what
Gai
…
what
she
wanted
…
Perhaps
I
really
did
,
though
.
Mayhap
it's
always
the
same
for
all
…

“The lake,” he informed Gawain, “marks a beginning of the Grail country. I fled from there to this point sick with fear and fever.”

He’d wandered lost. He lived on forest roots and berries, and he’d ended up sick and vomiting as he rode. He’d nearly been killed by Orlius, the vengeful husband of Jeschute — whom he’d taken for a fever vision, and then fled frightened and hopeless, and from that time he was never able again to give total trust to anything, but always held something back, something just enough to spoil his family, taint his goals, and leave him blank and feeling false in hermit’s robes or whatever …
except
, he reminded himself,
to
Unlea
…
I
trusted
it
again
… He bit his lip, uneasy.
Or
did
I
? He shook off the question. The power still flowed. Whether he trusted it or not, he would let it carry him on this time to the end. Like Prang and Gawain and perhaps all the rest trapped here, he no longer feared the end, because at least
that
would come, with no more dread of worse later. And it
had
come. As ever promised, it had come …
The
power
brings
no
joy
, he thought again as they moved in the midst of the broken forces. Another knight with dove shield and pennant stormed importantly past. More soot was raining down. The men struggled on through the stinking smoke, alternately fading and taking firm form as the billows thinned and filled and coiled …

When Alienor and the children awoke in the little church, they greeted the same brackish daylight again, worse, if anything. From the rim of the hill only the vaguest blurring suggested that any landscape existed beyond a hundred steps.

She was wondering about the old woman as she got everyone packed up with their few possessions and scraps of food, soothing Tikla’s misgivings and reducing Torky’s morning crankiness.

“Momma,” Tikla asked, “can we go home, Momma?”

“In time, my dove,” she told her. “In time.”

As they were starting down the hill in what she hoped and guessed was the direction of London, someone shouted. She turned quickly, hand closing on the long dirk tucked under her shapeless leather dress.

A
mounted
man
, she thought, who came out of the fog tall and lean. As she was about to start the children running she recognized the cart driver Lampic. He was apparently mounted on his surviving mule. He hailed her, urging the beast up on the slope.

She noted that though he was sooty, muddy, and worn, he seemed fit enough. A lean, tough one. She knew the type. He’d be stronger than would seem possible.

“I’ve not been so far behind as you might think, woman,” he said laconically. “But you kept a smart pace.”

Her eyebrows knitted slightly. His manner still bothered her. Just a little
too
familiar. Still, he’d been a help.

“We’re pleased to find you living, Goodman Lampic,” she said.

He grinned, showing uneven teeth in his askew mouth. His eyes were dark and warm. She recalled he didn’t panic. She felt a certain relief that he was back because she knew her determination might outlast her actual strength before very long.

Meanwhile, to the north (beyond the rough circle of the Grail country where the heirs of Arthur were gathering for a last stand) on the far side of those rugged hills (blocked valleys intercut with fordless streams, whose tortuous paths were now jammed by groups of warriors behind felled trees) the lee side, as the river of smoke broke over it and spread there, her husband was awake, too, in that windowless wagon rolling blindly on into the desolation she was struggling to escape.

Valit was half-dressed as Broaditch stood by the door swaying with the bumps and tilts of the springless vehicle.

“You’re a moon brain,” Valit told him, pointing at the nude women sleeping in the lantern’s flicker glow. The heavy woman was snoring beside the voluptuous Moor, who was half-wrapped in a silken sheet. “I thought of this before, in London. A man’s fortune might be made in this trade. And it might easily be improved in a dozen ways.”

“Well, Valit, my lad, why share this with me?” the other said, cracking the curved door and letting in a chilly draft and blurred, bleak light. He noted the murals were discolored and peeling away in spots. Minra was sitting up in the shaft of harsh daylight, blinking. Her eyes were swollen, mouth staying parted as she breathed. Her lips were chapped and dry.
Her
dreams
don't
rest
her
, he thought. She silently watched them. Valit finished dressing. He leaned down to murmur something to the heavyset woman. Then he twisted his face around to Broaditch.

“Isn’t it softer to bed in hay here,” he reasoned, “than wander to nowhere?”

“Stay and enjoy yourself, lad.” Broaditch opened the door and poised on the steps. He called around to the driver. “You … you, Flail!” He craned around the side and saw the cap and bells as the jester, with an unreacting, yet voracious, expression, peered back at him. “Rein up, will you?”

“You’ve had enough?” Flail yelled back, fog streaming around him, as if he smoldered.

“I’m bound a different way.”

“How can you tell in this weather?” He gestured around at the stained vapors.

Broaditch smiled with mild sarcasm.

“I steer from a cloud of smoke by day,” he called out, “and a pillar of fire by night.”

“And how d’you mark the cloud in this?” Flail pressured.

“That’s the full miracle of it.”

The wagon halted and the big pilgrim got down. He waved once as Minra came to the door and stood beside Valit, who hesitated as it started up again. When it was vanishing into the obscurity, he cursed and leaped down with a gunny sack over his shoulder and, to Broaditch’s wonder, was followed by the flaxen-copper-haired, round, and round-faced woman.

He waited for them as the wagon went on, its curved shape giving the impression that it simply rolled away, wheelless.

Valit looked, Broaditch thought, moderately pleased with himself.

“Has this maid captured your heart?” the older man asked, deadpan.

Valit shrugged.

“This be Irmree,” he explained. "She’s from the German wilds.” He raised his eyebrows, furrowed his forehead. “Cay-am of Camelot said me sooth: 'Better to own a spraddled mule yourself than hold the reins for a knight's stallion.’”

Broaditch began walking, shaking his head.

“So you’ve begun to make your fortune at last,” he commented, amused and amazed.

“It takes but a single hen to begin a flock.”

“If the rooster's handy." He rubbed his heard. "And in her case …” — he looked the ample lady over — “ … you start with a pair already …”

As they marched on into the fog. Irmree said, “Irmree.” She giggled and touched her expanse of bosom, which quivered and rolled from the impact to a disturbing degree. “Irmree,” she repeated, then smacked Broaditch’s behind with (he thought) a blacksmith’s vigor, giggling again.

“What amuses you?" he asked, wincing.

“Irmree,” she informed him, and he let the subject pass …

Lohengrin reached the crest of a long, rock-edged hillside that steeply leaped out of the clouded forest lowlands. He was directed to the circular, crumbled ruin of an ancient, hollowed-out fortress without a single section intact.

He sent his horseguard and captains to join the main body, which was here dimly visible moving out over a wide front through the thinning forest. The word was that the enemies were near … Everywhere tents were being struck; battle groups forming up; men at arms raging commands clarified by complex curses and extraordinary maledictions; men relieving their bowels and bladders or stuffing in last bites of bread and meat; falling and being driven into line; messengers galloping across the grain of march, voices dinning, rattle, clang, slog, crunch, brisk whinnies as the vast masses moved forward like a tide into the fluctuating, ghostly curtains …

Within the shattered ring of rough-hewn stones and bricks, he found a single set of steps leading down into the basements and lower levels. As he crossed the weed-overgrown interior courtyard with furious strides, he met the flabby-faced, fat, hook-nosed Baron Lord General Sir Howtlande of Bavaria, commander of cavalry army “Fang,” just emerging from below. Lohengrin knew he was jealous of his own rapid rise, but they were civil to one another.

Howtlande smiled widely and raised a meaty fist to the shoulder in salute.

“Greetings at the hour of triumph," he boomed, eyes like shrewd, black, humorless pits, “Sir Lohengrin, Your Grace."

“Yes," was the controlled answer. “Is the Lord Master here?"

Howtlande nodded, looking faintly uneasy and even more faintly, almost, contemptuous.