The Grail War (5 page)

He met the Duke in the archway to the throne room. They embraced and formally kissed.

“My lord,” Lohengrin said as they crossed the gleaming tiles toward a window seat, “you are well, I trust?”

“My stomach has not eaten me yet,” the Duke replied. He smiled faintly. His eyes and hair were matching gray. Even his skin had a grayish tint. He was thin as a razor and restless under his poise. They sat down together as a man served spiced wine and then quickly withdrew.

“Well,” Lohengrin remarked, “I still wait to be resolved, my lord.”

The Duke sipped his drink and stared vaguely out at the misty, dripping landscape beyond his swollen, overflowed moat.

“We’ll all die of congestion and shivers,” he said, “in this cursed damp long before the rains drown us all.”

“I have a few things to do still, before I die.”

“You’re an arrogant and impatient young killer.” The Duke sighed and stared at the flooded fields, saw a peasant on a raft out where last year’s rye had blown …” In the face of nature, as a wise priest said, these plots seem shadows.” In mind was an image of a sunken world with the bloated dead floating everywhere, himself on a high seat watching the water creep up to him … Still, we’ll all act our parts even into death as far as God allows …

“I long to be resolved,” Lohengrin said.

“Ah, yes?”

“In whose service do I truly stand?”

“You don’t think it’s me, then, in the lead?”

“No.”

“Why not, pray?” The Duke was curious enough to look away from the grim landscape for a moment.

“Your whole soul isn’t burning for it.”

“Is yours, young man?” When Lohengrin proposed no reply, the Duke went on: “If we are successful, you will soon learn. If not …”

“So that’s it,” Lohengrin said, his dark, fierce eyes leveled, “a falcon in the night. Tin to buy it by the flap of its wings alone.”

The Duke was gazing out again at the gray wash of land.

“Do what you must do.” he said mildly, “and earn your gold. But use caution.”

“Caution? I rarely offer my neck to any blade, my lord Duke.”

“Not in your fighting.” He turned to squint intently at the dark young man. “Don’t press to know what you need not.” Lohengrin could see the man was very uneasy, almost, he thought, afraid. “There are worse things than swords, young knight. And many.”

Lohengrin raised both eyebrows.

“What things?” he wondered, almost mocking.

“To cross a narrow bridge, look neither left nor right.” The Duke turned away again.

He's
afraid
of
something
, Lohengrin thought.
He
regrets
his
course
…
Strange
,
he
was
always
said
to
be
a
hard
man
…
Does
he
believe
the
last
judgment
is
upon
him
?
There
are
fools
enough
for
every
foolishness
…

“I’ll eat and sleep now, my lord,” he said, standing up, “with your grace’s leave.”

“You have it.” The Duke still stared and his sweaty fingertips worked slickly together.

“I’ll cross my bridges each in their time.” Lohengrin grinned. And he strode away. Still the Duke stared and sighed to himself, watching the water lap at the stones of his castle …

Lohengrin had forgotten her name in the two months since he was first here. She came into his chamber with a cup of hot wine. He was lying wrapped in a dark red robe. The steam from his bath was still in the air. She was very angry with herself, he noted, that she’d come unbidden. But she’d obviously been afraid to wait. She probably thought he was playing a cruel lover’s game. He almost smiled. A clever technique, he reflected, resulting from his having forgotten her altogether until this moment …

“My lady,” he said, not getting up, gesturing her forward.

She had bright teeth. Her lips were parted in love’s sweet pain as Lohengrin drove the spear of himself harder and deeper into her, pressing her hips down where she squatted over him. He was thinking with a certain detachment: How could you blame man for his fall since he carried the instruments of bliss between his legs? He smiled faintly as she cried out and rotated her sopping loins. He held himself back as far as he could and watched her, and then more urgent thoughts began stirring up from his carnal depths, images: two sluts in a tub licking one another’s breasts … two others together sucking a man’s genitals … ah, the beautiful whores … He rocked himself now in her time, faster and faster … beautiful whores … Free and helpless as it rose within him, lifted him, floated him, and he dug his hands into her arms and slammed her up and down. She gasped and rolled her eyes and cried out in pleasure and pain, begging, weeping, and he cried out as he fell, as it burst beneath and dropped him into sweetness and a flash of death.

“Bitch …! Ah, bitch …! ”

Flesh violent and anonymous, uncontrolled now, slamming, slamming, slamming, and he locked rigid and dropped beyond light or shape:

“You little whore … you have me, you little whore …”

Dim, gray, soggy dawn finally appeared at the cave entrance. Broaditch’s aches had condensed into a general numbness. He had sort of slept. The hermit’s voice had stopped some hours before daylight. Someone was snoring and moaning. The rain was a faint misting now. He sighed to his bones and shifted his solid body.

He was remembering the chaotic days, the deadly sickness stalking everywhere … twenty years ago … the lawless bands … the endless war devolving into fragments of outlaw horror as the great armies broke up and the land itself began to reek with the burning, bleeding, and decay … twenty years … and after struggling with pregnant Alienor (the child was lost in that first year before they found refuge) as far south as possible, reaching her father’s land only to find a drained mill pond, gutted ruins … and then joining the mercenaries … pillage, terror, fleeing, fighting among the scattered, wasted kingdoms … his sack of gold he’d gathered, buried, added to bit by bit … buying the farm in the far south … watching the three children grow up … the harvests … the contentments … the longing … all this in one moment of memory … then the pilgrimage to find the man he’d known as a boy, the “fool” who supposedly found the holy Grail, the perfection of God, something he’d come to insist upon believing and something (like so many others) he hoped to see, had to see, because he understood his life was rolling him to darkness as the snows caught in his hair and beard, as faces changed against the pulsing, ageless seasons …

So
, he thought, with his sardonic twinkle (that had never aged a day, either) in those ceramic-chip blue eyes,
here
are
you
,
you
old
heap
of
bones
and
meat
,
as
mad
as
ever
Parsival
was
himself
to
follow
ghosts
and
dreams
after
all
the
blood
and
mud
truth
you
learned
…

He gathered himself and struggled to his feet. He yawned immensely. The snores went on, then suddenly broke into a fit of coughing and spitting.

“Did you awaken, holy man?” Broaditch called back into the darkness. A snarled curse showed Handler was coming conscious. Broaditch chuckled.

“So,” he remarked, “you say your matins with your first breath, like birdsong.”

A rank, sickening reek suddenly flowed out of the damp innards of the cave as Broaditch fancied a great gobbet of decay burst loose deep in the intestines of some monstrous beast. Handler, cursing, emerged, closely followed by Valit.

“Did one of you just die and rot a moment ago?” Broaditch demanded, stepping out into the gray drizzle with the misty, wetly gleaming forest at his back.

The hermit came near the opening in a wash of stink and Broaditch considered that this was sanctity you could slice with a sword.

“Stay where you are,” he called to him. “We’re too sinful out here for your fragrance, holy one.”

The skinny, dim form had stopped just where the shadows began to thicken so that his flesh seemed half-consumed by darkness.

“Sinful creatures!” came the cry. “Remove thy impure stains from this sacred spot!”

Handler crossed himself. Valit squinted, still shaking himself awake. He seemed unimpressed, Broaditch noted.

“Bless us, holy one,” Handler said to the shadow in the cave.

“He who has touched no water since they baptized him,” Broaditch murmured, shaking his weary head.

“Let God give you a test!” the hermit cried. “Suffer, bruise thy flesh, tear the soul free from the body’s gripping cage!”

Handler suddenly knelt, facing the cave mouth. Valit inclined his head with a faint, almost (Broaditch thought) sly, smile on his lips. Broaditch turned and was already heading down the slope toward the woods.

Parsival was walking steadily, meditating on the fog and gleaming heath that spread out all around. He heard the panting, the clinking armor for a long time before the pursuing knight actually caught up. He never looked back. He could have felt the man even if he hadn’t actually heard anything. He could always do that now.

The knight kept pace just behind him, puffing. Parsival said nothing. They crossed a stream on a tilted, half-sub-merged log. Parsival’s step was sure and effortless, while the knight slipped and teetered.

“Christ!” the man called out. “Wait!” And he fell heavily, feet scrabbling desperately at the slick wood, into the cold, running stream, spluttering as the steamy fog boiled up.

Parsival stopped and looked back as the warrior struggled to his feet and stomped out of the water onto the muddy bank. He waited while the knight stood there dripping and raging, unscrewing his helmet, water pouring out of it and all the joints of his armor, he was young, stubborn-faced, eyes steel-gray chips.

“For God’s sake,” he said, coughing, “am I some nimble-footed jester to dance over trees like a squirrel?”

“When you track a wolf,” the older man advised, “Don’t expect him to keep to the paved way.”

“I don’t track you,” the young man announced. “You overthrew me.” He unbuckled his sword and tossed it in the mud at Parsival’s feet. “I am in your service.” Parsival smiled and raised an eyebrow.

“A custom,” he said, “met more in tales than in life in these times. Pick it up. I wish no man’s service.”

“I want to learn from you, sir,” was the stubborn reply. “I want to know how to stand naked with better defense than armor.”

“Go back.”

“I’ll follow you until one of us drops dead, sir.” Parsival turned and started walking, saying, “Unless I cross a few streams more.”

“Well,” was the angry response, “I’ll swim if I must.” He snatched up his weapon and shook the mud from the scabbard. “Damn you!” he raged at the tall, wide, receding back. “See if I don’t!”

With a fixed, grim look of infinite determination, he rebuckled his sword belt and began plodding into the foggy wake of his reluctant master.

Lohengrin stood nude, brawny, brooding by the embrasure staring out into the gray morning. A faint spatter of infinitely strained, pale sunlight flickered, with the tentativeness of a butterfly, on the moist stones.

He was holding his sword, twisting it idly. He turned away from the soggy view. Across the room the woman lay sleeping, snoring lightly in the tangle of covers.

He was wondering if the Duke really stood to gain the crown. He unconsciously ground his teeth, abstractly furious. Why was he always frustrated? What use was limitless skill with limited opportunity? And why did Lancelot, who had the brains of a fly, try to kill him? To run him out of the race? Whom did that ass serve?

He snapped and spun the blade in an explosive raging cut. He gritted his teeth.

Well, they’d see … they’d all see! By God, they’d bleed and see that, too …

He posed, holding the blade two-handed over his head. He forgot everything, even his anger now, easing into it, feeling himself flow out into the steel as if it were all one movement as he noiselessly turned and cut again, feeling a thrill in the release and the grace and force he expressed through himself …

Parsival looked back down the twisting dirt trail to where faint, strained sunlight glowed on the bend of dense trees. Yes, there the fellow was, still coming, struggling on relentlessly in his dulled armor. What did he want? What point in a few cheap tricks? How could a man who knew virtually nothing teach anybody else a thing? Well, let him keep coming and eventually he’d be discouraged … Or would he … ?