The Grail War (49 page)

“But is it done?” Parsival questioned over the storm “Put up your sword.”

“Am I a fool? Listen …”

Parsival moved in as Howtlande (having learned something by observation) was cunning enough to thrust, not slash, except his hilt was effortlessly caught and his weapon tossed casually away, and in the same light, graceful pirouette, Parsival whipped the lord general around (as if in a dance turn) and tossed him into the last elite guard (whom Broaditch had seen rushing back to the rear moments before Lohengrin closed with him), the force of the fat knight bouncing the other into drenching, crackling space. The next blaze of lightning showed Howtlande lying flat on his back, shoulders out over the edge, teetering on the brink of the water-falling mudslide …

Valit strained to hold himself up on his elbows. He had a terror of dropping back because he sensed he would fall forever. He hardly felt everything spilling out of him now; he merely watched …
He saw a low black scud of cloud, seething with mad electricity, breaking over the hill, everything quaking in thunder, the sky splitting apart … He saw the black and red knight about to cleave Broaditch … dark … lightning light: Broaditch now holding something — his belt? It looked like his belt … dark … and as the raging cloud flooded over the hill, driving the rain sideways, electric blue-white violence nearly continuous, black-red skidded as he cut and his target was blown into the cliff face. The stooped man with the spear, robes flapping and shaking around him like shadowy wings, turned and began to rock rhythmically and chant, as if the night’s immense violence had entered into his throat, and the astonishing sound seemed to press the elements into its own pattern, wind, rain, and fire seeming to beat like a vast, steady heart, and Valit felt the waves pushing into him, blotting at his flickering vitality … The exploding night became a single, relentless voice … mounting … mounting … mounting … He saw Lohengrin in cloud smoke and wild light slashing and slashing at Broaditch, who spun and scrambled along the rock face, pinned by the clawing, beating wind, waving his belt overhead, around and around with the pouch attached, and it looked (to Valit’s failing sight) like he threw it and struck the knight's helmet just as a series of lightning bolts ripped blindingly into the hill and burst on the path with such fury that in the wake the storm seemed to pause and then come crashing back as everything went dark in the cloud, and he had an impression that the earth had opened under him and he was falling … falling …
Ah
, he thought,
so
it
is
this
… nothing … a brightness … a last image that seemed drawn by the last brightness: a house and walled garden under meltingly sunny skies, flowers or gold coins glittering on the rich grass, and he felt himself trying to reach for it, to be there, straining, and he was blown away out into darkness and a shuddering, glowing, silver-bluish sea …

Parsival bent and heaved himself into a wall of wind as that cloud exploded over them and the flashes became an unbroken disorientation. He felt more than driven rain and mud checking him, felt the pulse of the voice, and through the dark-light tumult saw a figure with a glowing spear, greenish-seeming flame flapping around him like wings, as the dream united with the world … saw (not with eyes) the dream figure chanting fire, swelling, haunting all time and time to come (because time was part of the dream), staining the future with the magnified sketch of this pale outline drawn into immensity like an insect flying close to a bright candle flame, playing a vast, ominous darkness over a chamber wall … like a shape of mounting smoke, a cloud, terrible, raging, insubstantial … this empty cloud floating through days and years and millennia, dimming, disturbing, poisoning the sleep of ages … Years flipped past like riffled cards, days, nights, dark-light-dark-light-dark-light, and he saw the stain of the ever-more fantastic cloud clawing over the changing landscape until the final form, like a pair of naked, grinding jaws, gaped over the smoldering world … He felt it pressing at him like a wind, clawing with frenzied lightning, looming up and up and up, swallowing, as its voice became a bellow, as the mouth thundered, howled, roared, blasted, and his body (though he couldn’t see it, lost in a dense cloud) shook and he was nearly wiped away, blown apart …
No
! he thought.
No
!
No
! He strained against the wall of dream and wind, against its sentient resistance. Dug in with feet and soul, pushed, inched, slipped, heaved and heaved and heaved at the center of the voice that tore and shredded him, arms flung forward to reach for the vague figure surrounded by the luminously burning immensity and then saw the spear flaming straight at him, twisted to avoid the point but was glued by the impossible wind and muck and it caught his side with a searing pain just as the full fury of continuous lightning blew the night to pieces, and something else, as if the sun had instantly risen through the dark earth’s crust, melting, coruscating, but heatless, shining through everything, lighting deep layers of rock, fires, great spaces, everything floating in its sweet, infinite suspension, burning lesser lights to glowing ghosts, light endlessly streaming from light, the figure before him a hinted, stooped, all but obliterated shadow, silent, fluttering, clouds wiped away, nothing, no form remaining in that single burst of radiance like a benediction pouring into the vast, dark, burned-out world … everything wiped away, the light already a mere afterglow shimmering everywhere, in all things, in burrowing worms … in storm-flung birds … little specks of shimmer (Parsival could see as the solid world resurfaced) in everyone … everywhere … even as the pain of his wound returned and time came closing back down over them …

Sir Howtlande lay on his side shielding his eyes as the furious cloud burst over the hilltop. His head was still out over the steeply sloping cliff side, and he had as good a view as possible under existing conditions. He watched Parsival straining into the gale and slipping in the mud as Clinschor, a few scant yards ahead, was waving the silly spear around and booming (Howtlande thought) one of his prayers to hell or whatever they were that had always been such a mysterious business at headquarters for years … The great wizard, well, there he stood, armyless, about to be cast down by that terrifying, swordless, fair-haired warrior (whom he was sure he should have recognized), prancing in the rain and mumbling louder than any human being in recorded time, as if that would save his shanks from flaying …! How had he come to this? Why did he follow that loon there to end groveling in mud on a forsaken hilltop chasing a non-existent miracle …? Since the wind was too much, he decided to crawl back down the slope … Perhaps there were a few troops still living … He could rally them for whatever pillage was still possible in this ruined land …

He saw (with surprise) Clinschor hurl the spear with vigor and accuracy, ripping it into the knight’s body through the chain mail links. And the damned fellow stood there rapt for a long moment with the shaft wobbling from his flesh … a blinding contortion of electrical violence, and he even thought he made out Lohengrin on the next bend, a hinted shape through the wall of rain, fighting and falling down, he couldn’t tell if from a blow or bad footing … Then he watched the fair-haired warrior pluck the head from himself and raise the shaft as he charged with blurring speed straight at the Lord Master, and, incomprehensibly, Howtlande felt a trickle of pity for him, for an instant seeing just a weary, vision-haunted, lost, isolated, aging man surrounded by a lifetime’s ambitious imaginings, miserable, graceless, stripped by fate and fortune to a lone and meaningless death …

“Spare him, sir,” he muttered without hearing himself, then shook the feeling off as he refused to see the finish, starting to creep away, wallowing through the mire, the slightly abating downpour rattling and sloshing over his plates, crawling in from the crumbling edge, not seeing (because his shut visor was aimed at the treacherous path surface from inches away) the last black mute staggering ahead of him, hands wrenching futilely at his backward facing helmet, the grimacing jaws aimed opposite his reeling steps as he banged off the wall, wobbled in the wind, made furious tongueless sounds, twisted and banged the metal, punched his own head with steel fists, as if in a demon’s penance, then stepped straight into a fissure that cut across the trail and dropped silently into darkness … Puffing, Howtlande labored down, bridging himself over where the knight had just fallen like some wriggling, scale-plated primal life as he half-crawled, swam, and writhed and tried, from time to time, to lift himself and use his legs, but the terrible storm drove him flat again to twist on, blinded and choked by the froth of wind-lashed muck.,. thinking, when he thought at all, about the north country that he assumed was still untouched by the devastation … Yes, certainly, with a few stout lads much good work might still be done there to repair his fallen fortunes … yes … nothing was ever final. He’d rise again and be the wiser for it next time … yes … some were bound to be living …

Lohengrin slipped, his blade striking sparks from the shale wall, just missing the big swine again. But he wouldn’t miss
this
stroke, whirling his blade with all his cold anger and control; let him wave that pointless belt pouch at him all he pleased, the swine … except something blurred from the pouch like a shot from a sling through the sheets of frenzied rain and snapping, exploding clouds (he saw it come straight in the lightning winks), and then a slamming shock came through his open helmet, the crunch of bursting flesh and snapping bone, everything rammed in white pain back into his head, the bang of the impact resonating in his skull, a burst of sickening, stabbing, burning light, and he toppled into blankness, thinking, from infinite and lost spaces:
For
nothing
…
finally
and
for
nothing
… Then garble and then nothing …

The wind seemed to have a rhythm, Broaditch thought as he watched the lead ball zip into Lohengrin’s face plate. He’d thought (sinkingly) it was a miss, but the knight moved just in time to catch it on steel and flesh. In the time of a blink he saw it appear to split in two (
it
was
a
shell
, he began to think) and then an unbearable flame burst there, brighter than sun, and (he didn’t have time to actually think) a flare of rebounding lightning (he believed it must have hit Lohengrin at the same instant) lanced into his good left eye and overloaded mind and sight and he staggered, turned wildly, felt lifted free by the irresistible, cushioning wind, fell, somehow missed the narrow ground, had an impression he actually floated in a strange peace and tranquility on the immense updraft, and then dropped fast, cried out, falling … falling … then seemed to sail again, buoyed, and felt for a moment that he might rise and drift like an ecstatic man of cloud, on and on, forever soaring … soaring …

Parsival planted the spear in the boiling ground and dove after Clinschor without hesitation. He skidded and rolled down the frothing mudslide a foot or two behind the Lord Master (who’s leaped or been blown off the edge), as if invisibly linked in tandem as the shuddering updrafts puffed and slowed them somewhat … splashed through crisscrossing rills pouring down the incline, accelerating like sledders on the slick mud …

Parsival remembered childhood and pumped himself ahead with legs and body and actually gained an arm’s length and clutched Clinschor’s foot, and the belly-sliding world conqueror (the watery stuff sprayed from both of them like ships’ prows) writhed around and slashed with a dagger at his pursuer, only his eyes now showing in his mud-covered head … and then they zoomed over a last, sheer drop and fell apart, pounding into a slosh of mire and water with two terrific, sucking spumes …

Parsival had his legs first and stood looking for Clinschor … It had been exhilarating, breathless … He noted he still felt the afterglow of the light like a tingling in his body and being; he sensed something was forever changed within him but hadn’t seen just how yet, and his thinking couldn’t begin to scratch the surface … He looked with interest as a lump rose, straining from the ooze, looking like (he thought) the bog was rising, desperately trying to take a human shape, and rain washing the wobbling, emerging body added to this impression as arms and head melted into flesh …

He smiled, realizing the same thing must have just happened to himself. He wondered how the puncture in his side was doing. It didn’t hurt now and wasn’t bleeding badly …

He slogged with infinite slowness across the few feet between them. When Clinschor snarled and ripped the dagger at his face, he discovered his advantage of speed and skill were virtually eliminated under these conditions.

Do
I
perish
,
after
all
? he thought, curious, blocking the next cut but failing to catch the frenzied wrist. The panting man was wild and desperate, foam and mud dribbling from his lips as he spat and gagged and, rattling, cleared his throat. He was trying to make some kind of rhythmic noises, Parsival noted, but he’d swallowed too much booze. He made great gulping sounds in his chest, succeeded only in producing a series of slimy bubbles and then choked and puffed, waving the blade around in short, zipping arcs.

The rain was easing somewhat and the lightning strokes diminished; the hill was still lost in piling clouds.

“You ought to have kept your mouth closed,” Parsival told him over the lessening thunder.

Each step was incredibly slow as Clinschor, foaming and spitting, scraping his tongue over and over on his teeth, leaned and churned laboriously away. Parsival closed slowly, fending the frantic slashes. The mire sucked coldly at them.