The Grail War (40 page)

The ground clubbed him hard. The spear rolled a foot from his grip. The knight was just hitting with a rolling, ringing crash. The hard, smoking world slammed back with a cold shock.

He sat up, dazed, catching his breath, the horse already gone, a diminishing, muffled rattle of hoof-beats …

He hesitated, then shut his eyes and picked up the spear, waiting, holding his breath, afraid of it happening and not happening again … nothing … waited … nothing, just the smooth wood in his calloused fingers.

He stood up, motioned the other two to follow, and moved up the road the knight had emerged from. The noble gentleman was struggling, wobbling to his feet, shouting something too distorted by his headpiece to make out, hunting for his sword.

Then, as the three of them vanished into the mist and he began a halting pursuit, limping, he yelled, “Wait …! Come back, you filth …! Come back here …!”

Grontler gestured at a line of Saracens filing past into the swirling dark afternoon.

“You got to give the great lord his bloody due,” he opinioned to Wista. “He brought all them swart, fucked devils thousands of miles to die here. You got to give him his due.”

“Why are you here?” Wista suddenly asked.

“Eh? Why?” He twisted around in his saddle to ponder the young man. Both their faces were caked black.

“Why do you fight? What do you gain?”

“The pay, you simple bitch’s boy,” Grontler said affably. “What else, then?”

“Are they all here for pay?”

“How in hell do I tell that? They are unless they be fucked fools.”

“All this,” the young man murmured, “for pay?”

Grontler didn’t hear this. A moment later he spotted Lohengrin riding helmetless a little apart from a cluster of high-ranking lords. A mass of troops stretched away beyond them in the general, condensing haze.

Wista had mixed feelings and intense nervousness standing face to face with his busy-haired, hawk-faced lord. They’d just dismounted by a trickle of stream to give the mounts a drink and refill water-skins. The army was crashing through the forest all around through the deepening smoke haze.

“The beasts won’t touch it,” one of the knights was reporting to Lohengrin, who then strode a few steps to squint at the problem. He stripped off his gauntlet, stooped, and dipped his palm, then let the liquid run out through his fingers. Wista shuddered. The hand was stained dark crimson.

“The earth herself bleeds,” Lohengrin remarked, shaking his fingers, then wiping them on his sooty cloak. The result was a bloody mud and no improvement.

“I have seen such things,” Wista told him, coming close. This was his first chance to really speak since being ordered to fall in behind. “I … I cannot find a tongue to …”

“Peace,” Lohengrin said grimly. “I have seen the same things.”

“It is one thing to be cruel and murderous, as you were, but this …”

“Peace!”

“They are destroying everything … everything!”

“Not ‘they,’ Wista the wistful.” His sarcasm was a reflex. “Not they — we.”

“You dare to say so?” Wista was beyond being stunned, he’d thought. “You can accept … this …this …”

“Here you struggle on for words you have not, boy, consider …” He strode back and remounted. Wista was fascinated by the pale-streaked, black-bloody hand. He stared at it. He swung up onto his own horse, still staring. Lohengrin didn’t replace the mesh gauntlet yet and took up the reins with the smeared fingers. “ … consider this is the end of a world and the start of a new.”

Wista blinked himself out of his reverie but kept watching the hand in spite of himself: it seemed (and he felt wild and suddenly dizzy now) like claws with life of their own … His mind kept separating it from the arm and man, and it seemed to grip and twist independently … All the rest was closed in steel and this alone was flesh … He half-expected it to do some sudden, terrible thing … blinked hard but remained light-headed and anxious.

“New … ?” he wondered. “New what?”

“New world. A new world. A better one.”

“What?!” He snapped out of it violently. “Are you come mad, lord Lohengrin? What profit is there in …” He found his voice and words now, full, feral, outraged. “ … in this blood and ashes!? Have you power to order this?! What are you? A
thing
? A crawling thing unspeakable?! A devil? I thought you but cruel and mistook in the shadow of your great sire, but, God’s wounds” — Wista’s voice broke with weeping in his misery and fury — “God … but what are you? What
are
you! What?! What?! What?!”

Now lord general Lohengrin was fuming. He leaned out from his horse as it cantered, whooshing dead leaves as smoke puffed between them, alternately dimming and revealing their shapes to one another.

“Be still, weakling!” he yelled. “My father is a fool!” Then they both bent their heads against the smoke and coughed and wiped at their burning eyes. “I serve a man … a man with a holy passion who speaks for the gods themselves!”

“Gods? What heathen …”

“Be still!” Lohengrin’s voice was pitched ice-deadly. “We are unleashing the greatest powers and only the worthy will survive these days. This hour is the harrowing of the gods and the winnowing of the earth!” He had just quoted Clinschor without realizing it. He took them for his own words. Wista just stared at him now, dizzy, stunned, blinking, watching the stained hand gesture, hooking its fingers at the thickening air … He stared in silence as they rode in the massed, trampling, pounding van of the army. The wind was building up. It sucked and twisted and billowed the smoke. They all had to cover their faces now. Lohengrin clapped on his helmet.

Finally Wista cried out, had to: “Do you mean to destroy everything?!” he said over the wind, din of the troops, and the gradually mounting fire roar coming on from the side and behind. “Answer me!” he yelled.

They were a little apart from the others and the thickening clouds isolated them.

Wista wasn’t thinking now. His heart kept racing. His head jerked slightly, uncontrollably. He was giddy, trembling. He somehow knew if he thought at all he’d fall raving or weeping or flee without direction.

“Answer me, you bastard!” his voice shouted again.

He didn’t hear the muffled reply.

What
can
I
do
?
What will I do
?
What
must
I
do
?

He nervously, unconsciously, drew his sword, seeing only the tube of black, slitted, faceless helmet turned toward him. His mouth was dry. He squinted into the smoke.

What
? he asked himself.

“What?” he said without knowing it.

“You have no time for foolishness,” Lohengrin bellowed, snapping the sooty visor open. “I give you …” — he coughed — “ … I give you this chance to join us …” — coughed — “ … I’ll bring you to
him
after the battle’s done.” He coughed and spat violently. Over the crackling explosions of flames there was now a roaring and unmistakable clashing that meant the enemy was engaged at last. “I must hasten,” Lohengrin said. “I have a fondness for you, lad, I …”

Wista thought:
No
!
No
!
No
! — as if the last remark was more than he could bear, so he was crying, too, and choking, feeling his own outpouring of affection and hate and madness, too, tears streaming into the soot and gagging smoke as he struck, rising in the long stirrups, flailing the blade down as he’d been trained, seeing the helmet’s dark metal spark and split, just perceiving a blurring as the knight rocked and seemed to shift himself but never saw the draw and automatic, irresistible counterstroke, that, at the last fraction, Lohengrin tried to check and twist into the flat of the blade, and then came a burst of pure white light, and a deep, spinning blackness yawned all around as his sense scattered and fluttered away … He never saw his teacher, bloody sword hanging down, staring through the blinding clouds, or heard him crying out: “Wista …! I cared for you …! I cared …”

Parsival drove his horse out of the press, over the heaps of struggling men that were jamming up between the trees into a solid wall of flesh, every mad effort wedging them tighter until in places (in the filling and emptying billows) they were packed motionless except for raving heads and outstretched, clutching, waving arms as those who tried to clamber over were gripped and held and drawn back to the swelling heap as the terrible heat pressed closer …

He barely struggled free: dying, frenzied men tried to hold onto the horse and his legs in an effort to be drawn along, and he’d had to slash himself free. He’d shut his eyes to do it. He was never going to simply surrender again.

He’d come out on a trail that wound up through the mounting hills. “The road you want always rises,” he remembered, with almost a smile …

Well
,
and
this
be
not
right
,
there'll
be
no
second
way
…

Behind the mass of fumes, the flames were flooding on and he hummed loudly to partly overcome the sound when they reached the tens of thousands of trapped men … hummed, and pushed on along the twisting way … He’d caught the first massed scream that become one voice and the sputtering bursting that sounded like a fat-rich boar on the roasting coals … He could not drown out the stinking wind that followed him or check the fires leaping ahead … saw blackened bird bodies that had rained down everywhere … was aware that virtually no one could be in front of him, just bare yards from the waves of fire, faint from the incredible heat …

He struggled around a bend, another, swaying in the saddle. There was no hope of distancing it in these thickets. A sheet of flame crossed before him. He hesitated, but there was no turning back. He spurred the near-hysterical animal straight in and through a flash of terrible heat, and half-roasted in his hot steel, he wobbled on the narrow, torturous path. Weariness hit him like a maul blow. He held on to the laboring beast at the edge of falling with each doubling and bump … Blinding flashes ripped through the clouds that he thought were his mind … He felt the invisible forces close to him, warring themselves, and he thought, vaguely, spinning, if his side lost, then the claws would get him … because he couldn’t resist that now … his eyes were sealed shut and swollen … Though he was a drained and battered shell of himself the power still flowed through him, and, able to see merely shadows with his right eye and nothing with his left, he was having flashes in color on that dream-like level: suddenly the landscape and sky would swell into shattering brightness, pulsing, rainbowed, and he seemed to see dark, fearful, clawed limbs and gaped-mouth shapes entangled with what appeared to be knights wearing crusted diamonds for armor, fluid, slashing, spearing, blocking … then smoke and flame would close in … another brilliant fragment … then the choking present, where his armor seared wherever it touched his flesh and scorched his undergarments …

Broaditch was just leading the other two around another serpentine bend and thinking:
it's
over
. And he cocked the flimsy spear.

“What? What?” Valit demanded.

“Look,” Broaditch said, pointing at the three armed and armored men standing in the narrow road ahead. The way was walled on the outside here (the cliff face to their left) and the warriors were shoulder to shoulder. He was puzzled, wondering how they could move freely enough to fight.

“What?” Valit repeated. Irmree whimpered.

“There, you ass!” Broaditch shout-whispered.

“Fog and smoke?”

Which was how Broaditch discovered his eyes were somewhat changed. He could see farther into the surrounding, irritating obscurity than before.

A few steps on and Valit froze, but by now Broaditch wasn’t worried. He went up to the men. All wore the dove crest; all were dead, faces netted with blood within smashed helmets. They’d been propped up like this to block the way. It must have been the work of the man behind. Of course, one or more of these might have been
his
companions …

As he tugged them loose to topple, banging, onto the stony surface, he realized one had been looking the other way, so there was no direction intended to their facing.

“What is?” Irmree asked fearfully, clinging to Valit, who was hardly a secure support at this point. “What is?”

“Shut yer hole!” that gentleman snapped nervously.

They went on, climbing steeply now. Broaditch was certain the knight was following and paused to cock his ears from time to time, but it was unlikely that, unless he stripped off his metal clothes, he could maintain their pace.

The climb stayed steep and the stones slid underfoot. That plus the thickening smoke had them all wobbling and puffing. Near the top Valit planted himself behind the woman and shoved as his partner tugged her arm from above while she muttered smatterings of several languages. Broaditch recognized the German, French, and English, but others were obscure.