The Grail War (15 page)

“Fortune’s wheel,” he was saying, not smiling now, spurring his horse lightly past, the bloody spear resting across his lap, gesturing for his squire to follow, “astounds us all.”

He felt warm, comfortable, a little light-headed. A bold stroke. So far successful. It was a good game and would stave off those melancholy hours when he was done with combat, sex, chess, eating, and sleeping, those hours of staring into the blackness that was always there gnawing at the heart of the brightest day like flecks of sore and poison …

As they moved along the dimming path toward the castle, he tilted back to speak with the younger man.

“Well, Wista?” he demanded.

“I learned nothing, sir,” Wista replied, seeming vaguely curt.

“No trace of that great fellow, your sovereign hero and saint?”

“I know nothing of that. But there was no word of your father, sir.”

“So he no longer fasts and prays his days away in the sweet eye of God?”

“I know not. He may, for all I know, seek God in some other place.”

Lohengrin turned to face ahead into the dusk. A few stars already showed above the very tall, very massive battlements.

“My father,” he muttered, smiling, “and God.”

Later in the morning Parsival lay there watching thin fingers of sunlight grope slanting through the boards and probe the musty shadows of the barn. Unlea was dozing, tucked close beside him on the matted hay.

Now what was he going to do? The same question again. Always the same … The world outside without this woman in his life seemed bleak and relentless. And dead gray … He was suddenly afraid she might not care as deeply as he did. His stomach tensed with the thought, which was instantly almost unbearable. Why, was this the same Parsival, he wondered hopelessly, who’d put aside the frail vanity of ambition and strife and tried to feel the pulse of the steady, infinite heart, who’d seen human goals and achievements become a child’s snow-carved figure at the start of thaw …? Was this himself (who’d heard the eternal whisper once) in a near panic because a woman might have whims …? Why, his inner eye had learned to poke through the shadows that seemed mortal substance and … his powers … He frowned, said
no
to himself, then tried, concentrated on her, tried to hear and see her mind as he’d been taught … Nothing … He strained … nothing at all … He realized he probably had lost everything already. And he was ashamed of himself for the impulse.
Of
course
I’m
losing
them
, he thought.
I’ve
dropped
to
earth
again
…
no
wonder
monks
flee
from
women
… He smiled. And here she was, alive and close. He felt a peace and hope suddenly like an image from the sweet stream of endless dreams, of the infant sleeping at the full and tender breast …

He had to be with her now. Impossible as that was, he had to be with her. He blinked and sat up straight and eased his cricked back. He glanced into his lap at his limp organ, shiny with dried juices in its nest of dark, gold-tinted hair.

Look
at
you
, he thought.
Dead
flesh
…
What
passes
through
you
,
what
fire
to
raise
you
up
again
? He shook his head.
Your
time
comes
and
passes
quickly
…
Well
,
I’m
bound
to
her
and
you
are
the
key
to
the
fetters
and
to
her
gate
,
through
which
I
must
pass
…

And he thought that, perhaps for the first time, it was not merely the animal who wielded it …

“Awaken, my love,” he said, and then, relishing the sound with tender embarrassment: “Unlea.” He touched her lightly. “It’s full day without.”

She stirred.

“Ah,” she murmured, “you let me sleep long … in the eye of death.”

“Bonjio,” he said quietly.

She looked up at him.

“I’m not really afraid,” she said, “as you see.”

He nodded.

“What will you do?” he wondered.
What
will
I
do,
he thought.

She shrugged.

“You must say,” she told him.

He hesitated, tried to meditate. He kept asking his soul to ask
What’s
right
…?
What’s
best
…? Nothing. His years, his talks, his readings, his lives before (because his life had been so cut into sections) had provided nothing for this day and need.
What’s
right
?
What’s
right
?
What’s
right
!?

He kept staring at her now, as if the answer lay in the sweet curves of her face and those subtly changing eyes, whose briefest attention seemed precious in the fugitive gleam of a sunbeam … What did he want from her? he kept asking himself. After all, she was just another woman: flesh, blood, thoughts, and the food passing through came out as shit, not nectar … She hoped and feared and had ugly places in her secret thoughts like everyone else … would shrivel and die with the years and mark her passing with a set of crumbly bones … But these thoughts were reason without substance. And they were blown away by each hushed moment in the fullness of unstirred time, the glory and wonder of finding out what she saw, knew, and had known before, the world marvelously reflected through her, the new life of her flesh to his stunned, strong hands … He felt the calm of her nearness with the hinting fear that she could go at any time … saw with his naked heart that no one could love without willingly, rapturously embracing death …

“So I must say,” he repeated.

He remembered in a flash with sight, sound, smell, and something deeper, remembered the actual, tangible presence of the movement from childhood: a spring morning, fresh, drying, cool dew, sun and shadow startling, yellow flowers blinding on the hill, where the clouds and air and green lushness seemed a single flow and extension of his own rippling pulse, and only the stiff, darkened part of him walked on the tilted ground at all, and he could have cried out with each breath and heartbeat as he heard his mother singing, turned (as if the day simply flowed and engendered a new image in the gleaming air) and was blinded by her gown and the burning dandelions and buttercups at her feet, for a moment within the unimaginable soul of the day and so within her, too, felt her being like a floating cloud and needed no names … needed nothing … Suddenly, without seeming break, the song became her, saying, “Good morrow, son.”

“Yes, mother.”

“What will you do today?”

He was mildly surprised. He felt drawn by the stream where it curved, shocking crystal blue, into the deep green, overhanging old woods. Every day he had been following it a certain distance, looking, learning, as the sunlight or gray tints shifted imperceptibly, and finally his mother’s voice would reach him and call him back out of that calm suspension and he’d discover he was hungry again … There was so much to see and smell and touch … never the same, each day wrote its own story of shape and shadow, insect flickerings, animal tracks, and glimpses … But today a thought kept troubling him.

“Mother?” he asked.

“Yes, Parse?”

She lightly stroked his fine, ash-blond hair.

“Mother, is there something …”

“Yes?”

“ … something I
ought
to do today?”

She shook her head, keeping her fingers tenderly on him.

“No,” she told him. “You have to say, my boy. When you say for yourself without fear, then you’ll speak from love and will do no hurt to anything. I cannot teach you goodness, Parsival.” She shook her head again and briefly shut her eyes. “Oh, and what the world waits to teach … oh, my son, what the world waits to teach you …”

He listened to those sweet sounds that didn’t really satisfy his questions. Then he went lightly down the resilient hill slope with the sweet-scented, sun-vibrant breeze in his face …

He remembered all this now in that single flash.

“So I must say again,” he said again, lifting her to a sitting position. “Am I still too poisoned by time to find a true tongue in my mouth?”

She was smiling, relaxed, dreamy.

“You are magical,” she said. “You’re my gift from the lands beyond sleep.” She kissed him with her over-soft, bruised, wet lips. “You …! How can I tell you what you are?”

“What will you tell your husband?”

She blinked. He was fascinated by the color and changing tints in her eyes.

“Ah, love,” she said, “I had better be practical.”

He smiled, helping her up and into her chemise and robe. He dusted off the hay as best he could. He picked it from her hair.

“Try only the possible, my love,” he remarked, “as a wise man once said.”

“Who was, no doubt, a priest of ice who never loved a whit.”

She kissed him again, lingeringly, as they stood there. He was a little wobbly.

“This is new to me,” he said.

“Love? At your age, sir?” She looked up into his face and stroked her long hands over his shoulders.

“I have learned a few things,” he told her, helping her down the tilted, splintery stairs to the musty floor of the barn. The cows lowed; chickens bawked and shifted. Outside the bell for morning mass was sounding. “In barns, particularly,” he concluded.

“The priest stirs,” she remarked as they came to the door, which stood ajar. Parsival squinted into the brightness: an old man was toiling across the muddy yard, a load of firewood tied to his shoulders. Farther off a bony man was kicking a stiff-legged, motionless mule. Two tiny red and blue birds suddenly landed in a bright swirl and nervously pecked the earth … then whirred away in a blink …”The serfs will be coming here shortly, I should think. I confess I am not expert in rustic ways.” She smiled to reassure him. “But I take walks some mornings dressed as I am. There’s less danger than you think — unless we make love again.” She smiled and watched him.

“Again?” He enjoyed the notion. “So I might meet my death either from love or your husband?”

“You? With your magic and strength?” She looked up into his face and nestled close into him. He held her cheeks in his hands and kissed and kissed and kissed … and she rubbed herself against him, as if drugged … He felt need like a hunger and thirst now just for her spicy taste and firm touch and the pulsing stir of his body, a hunger and thirst, he knew, that could never be assuaged … though it might cease someday …

Broaditch had decided to trust fate since, he reasoned sourly, there was no choice, in any case.

Valit was clinging to the side as the wind slashed and cracked and hammered the spray into them. Broaditch wondered if he’d stopped vomiting. The howling air isolated them. Even a shout was lost a foot away.

He kept an oar in, trying to hold the bow into the storm. He’d learned this fishing in his youth. He remembered the last storm he’d ridden out in a round-bottomed carrack, toppling and slipping over heaped herrings, tangling in loose nets, raging, struggling, bailing …

The waves seemed to be rearing up and up, lifting them with sickening speed, flipping the boat like, he thought, a loose plank. The oar bent as he braced against it … hummed … snapped, and they began spinning into sheets of breaking foam, calf-deep in chill water … He’d never known a storm like this for sheer rage and intensity … He saw Valit’s mouth moving, gaping, soundless, terrified … for a moment the boat was lifted free of the waves that were too huge to actually smash it, so they sailed out over an immense trough before falling to the bottom, which bounded up into a madly tilting crest again …

Broaditch wasn’t even afraid now. And except for stray words and images that moved volitionlessly through his mind, he wasn’t actually thinking.
Impossible
to
survive
…
so
it’s
over
…
so
it's
over
… He was merely waiting now, watching, holding on only because there was no good reason not to.

And the rain finally struck, sheeted, hissed, boiled over them, and the boundaries of sea and air dissolved. It was all one thing now and there was only tumult and heaving, slopping, sloshing, spinning … and then a deeper roar. He knew in a moment the rocky coast was close, and the frail, leaking, half-swamped craft was already leaping among the reefs and he fleetingly considered that simply to drown would have been so gentle … The roaring water exploded all around, the fog was blown to shreds, and gleaming black rocks, like (he thought) terrible teeth in the slash of mouth formed by the bay curve of cliffs, were about to grind and rip them to bloody tatters …