The Grail War (32 page)

“Hmm?” Wista frowned, puzzled.

Grontler guffawed.

“Sweeter than a lass’s hole.” He grinned, pointed. “Bet he's done them camels in the sand, eh? Ain’t you, you black sod?” The Saracen frowned, watchful of Grontler’s almost-mocking manner. “Well, I knew a feller who prodded a mare. That’s the devils truth, or God’s a pond frog.” They were moving back on the road. The haze was bright, the day chilly. “Well, he had a dangler the size o’ my arm. He stood on a stump with her all tethered fine …” He shook his head. “It were just like any other thing: he rams it home, gives a joyful cry, and she shat a load down the front of the poor bastard!” His mirth shook him in the saddle. “But that’s ever the way with love, ain’t it, boy?” The Saracen eyed him, watchful. “What a sight!”

Wista said nothing. He stared across the faded fields that he knew now were dry and dead beyond winter’s worst. Nothing green would start from that earth, no sparkle of flowers … He tuned out Grontler’s sounds and thought about nothing for a time as they passed through the hazy afternoon into a lingering, distant, charred smell that varied on the shifts of dampish breeze …

The hazy sky seemed to have joined a strange ground fog, so that a pale, grayish whiteness gradually closed in Broaditch and Valit at the center of a blank circle. And, Broaditch noticed, it seemed to be darkening, too, as they headed more directly south, although the sun was still high and the disk visible.

Open country now: long, almost flat, stony stretches of faded grass and scrubby trees.

Good
country
for
goats
, Broaditch mused.

Valit was staring around uneasily, frowning, skeptical.

“We’ll be needing them wizards and angels of yours,” he remarked, unsmiling.

“Never mind that,” Broaditch returned shortly. He was getting a little worried himself. This was promising to become the blindest march yet.
Sweet
Christy
his mind sighed.

“What tells you where we’re going?” Valit asked. “Not that I doubt at all, holy prophet.”

The holy prophet noticed a faint, disturbing smell on the southern breezes that stirred the fogs.

“You are free to go your own way at any time, lad,” he pointed out.

Valit was faintly amused, it appeared. Broaditch believed he’d felt, from time to time, what in another he would have been sure was warmth.

“But I am not guided by heaven,” that fellow asserted, “and this may be my sole chance while living … but so far,” he went on to reflect, “heaven seems to have led us to the center of a fog.”

“This is more common than you know,” Broaditch rejoined.

But
afternoon
? he asked himself.
It's
passing
strange
that
these
mists
should
swell
and
cling
like
this
…
I
swear
there’s
smoke
on
the
wind
…

“It has stink,” Valit said, “like a burned supper.”

That
would
I
deem
tolerable
, Broaditch mentally commented,
if
so
.

“We will no doubt wander in a circle,” Valit decided, straining to penetrate the curved, grayish, billowing wall that surrounded no more than fifty feet of clear field in any direction.

“Then we’ll sup with Balli, mayhap,” Broaditch teased. He enjoyed Valit’s responses to this subject.

“You
will
, I ween,” his companion hastened to say. “For I’ll dine with that dung-bag at his funeral feast and toast the working worms that draw him to smears and tatters.”

Broaditch grinned … He was just wishing his stick were an Aaron’s rod to part these curtains. It definitely was darkening, he noticed: streakings of sooty browns were thickening the mix to a gritty porridge.

So
,
then
, he said in his mind,
now
you've
led
me
here
.
Can
I stare
a
view
out
of
these
cloudy
shapes
?

He half-began to try, watching the folding and unfolding, the shifting outlines that imagination effortlessly filled. Too effortlessly. He glimpsed his wife’s face … a vast, warring host … a beatific profile … a long-jawed demon … crumbling castles and towns turning to smoke … dissolving landscapes … He shook his eyes free of the images, but one stuck. He blinked, but it stayed, seeming to congeal into ghostly substantiality thicker than cloud and fainter than flesh: a fairy coach drawn by godlike steeds; rounded sides like a keg; a sprightly, lean figure (
mayhap
Mercury
himself
, he thought,
with
peaked
,
winged
helmet
…) seemed to lightly cavort in the air just above the carriage, and what seemed lovely, glowing, ethereal goddesses leaned from the sides, long tresses hanging free and appearing half-mist …

“Look there!” he said, pointing with the staff.

“Where?”

The wall was blank again, closed over the images which he had an idea were meant to guide him.

“Nothing,” he muttered.

“What did you see?”

“Nothing. A trick of the fog … or eyes.”

“One of your angels?” When Broaditch didn’t respond, Valit said, “What point is there in going on? We might as well camp here … We should never have left the road … And what to eat? A rind of Balli’s cheese left and half a crust …

Broaditch had veered to the left and went straight on this new course. Valit shook his head.

“This is stark mad,” he declared. He stood there, but as his large companion started to dissolve into the heavy, blurring wall of smoke (as if he strode out of the world), he hastened after …

Broaditch had decided to aim for where he saw the “vision.”
Follow
them
, he’d said to himself a moment ago,
it's
as
good
as
any
other
misdirection
…

After an hour or so they were close to actual groping. Visibility was down to a few steps in any direction. And there was definitely a brackish smoke in the mists. It smelled, Broaditch agreed, like smoldering meat.

Suddenly he staggered, slipped, and only prevented himself from falling into a sluggishly flowing stream by sinking his stick into the goopy muck of the embankment.

“This were a good way to come,” Valit allowed.

They couldn’t see the other side,
if
one
there
is
,
and
this
be
not
an
arm
of
the
sea
. They squatted there for a few minutes.

“I’ll not be turned aside,” Broaditch said and spat into the stream, which had a foul, cloying smell. “No more of that.”

And, poking with his stick, he worked his way into the moderate current. Valit followed, resigned to everything.

It was fairly shallow, just over the knee as mean. The fog shut down to arm’s length, but the flow itself guided them.

Valit’s scream was a shock that spun Broaditch around to see the other thrashing and kicking, white-faced, terrified.

“It’s got me!” he cried. “Mother save me …! Mother …!”

And then Broaditch felt a heavy something strike him behind the knee. He whirled and his frantic staff poked, cut, lifted free a bloated, eyeless face and crooked, frozen arm. Bodies. A riverful of bodies. Dead and immersed long enough to partly decompose. How far had they flowed with this befouled stream?

Valit was charging, thrashing past him … suddenly going down, tripped by another, whose arms seemed to flail and grapple …

“It’s safe!” Broaditch called out. “They’re all dead!”

But Valit, half-swimming, half-running, had reached the far bank and was gone in the mist folds. Broaditch paused to stare as several corpses, whose age and sex was long lost to relentless process, rode steadily by …

So
many
, he thought,
Sweet
Mary
,
what
portends
this
?
Why
so
many
?
So
many
…

A dense mass like (he was thinking) jammed logs went past, slowly tumbling and spinning, forms bunched, stiffly reaching out through the vapors, as if struggling for place and advantage … A limb crossed his thigh and broke away from the force of his storming past and up the far bank, where he stood looking back, wild-eyed, feeling utterly trapped in the obscurity …

Am I
hard
upon
the
gates
of
hell
?

His nose itched from the smoke in the cold mist. He watched the bodies still passing, dimly, as if their numbers were inexhaustible, until he had to turn away and called after Valit, who was beyond the tight circle of his vision …

The three of them had been riding all day in the bright, hazy air through the still forest. The drying leaves rattled under the horse hooves. Gawain kept sniffing the wind and frowning. Prang rode beside him and Parsival followed a little to the rear. He had barely spoken since his recovery, and Gawain was leaving him in peace.

“What troubles you?” Prang wanted to know.

“A stench of death.”

“I smell nothing,” Prang said, sniffing.

Gawain glanced back at Parsival, whose face was fixed on the ground.

“Parse,” he called back, letting his mount slow slightly as the other looked at him, “do you smell it?”

His eyes weren’t quite looking at Gawain when he replied: “No — I
see
it.”

And Gawain nodded, shutting his single eye, briefly in something between a wink and a prayer.

“So,” he said.

“See what?” Prang demanded. He knew there was something private between the two older knights that he should understand. He felt excluded. He still wasn’t totally reconciled to Parsival … He also sensed something frightening and wanted reassurance that his stirring anxieties were needless … “What mean you?”

“Be patient, ladling,” Gawain told him. “Soon enough, I fancy, you'll discover all you need to know.”

“Where do you lead us?” Parsival asked. Prang found his voice remote, austere, and, in a strange way, disinterested.

“Nowhere,” was Gawain’s answer. “That’s up to you now.”

Parsival seemed to shiver slightly. He folded his arms across his powerful chest and looked back (Prang thought) at nothing.

“To chase one shadow after another?” he asked without really asking.

Now Prang picked up the smell.
Charred
meat
, he thought it to be. He squinted: vague threadings of smoke, almost too faint for sight, coiled sluggishly here and there along the leaves, fallen branches, and dead grass …

“To waste the rest of my days?” Parsival was saying, sighing, almost a moan. “I cannot even have … even have love … not even that …”

“Yes,” Gawain said, “we are both cut off from the sweet days … the springtime … forever … It’s lost, my friend, lost … forever …”

“Yes,” Parsival almost moaned, “Yes …”

“There’s smoke,” Prang put in from up ahead.

“The boy,” Gawain said, still staring at Parsival. “So there’s no choice, anyway. There never was, for you.”

“I loved her,” the sad knight said hoarsely. “And it’s ashes forever. I don’t even weep now … I don’t even do that …”

“You don’t want to hope.”

“It’s getting stronger,” Prang called back, riding on further to investigate. Even the leafless trees were too dense here to see far.

“That is true, too,” Parsival said. “I don’t care to hope.”

“Why live?”

“Because you pulled me from the water.”

“Well, then,” Gawain said, biting off the words, “go back and drown, then.”

“It’s not important enough.” And he meant it.

A long pause.

“Then it holds,” Gawain insisted. “You lead the way, because for sooth and all else we might as well
try
.” He touched Parsival’s cheek at arm’s length with almost a lover’s gesture. “We both know what lies ahead … but we might as well try.”

Parsival shut his eyes and sighed again.

“There must be a great fire before us!” Prang called back. He had mounted a small rise where the trees were thinned out