Pendragon's Heir (20 page)

Blanchefleur glanced to her right. There sat Nerys, eating but apparently not tasting the food, for she looked ahead into an unseen realm, silent and solemn. She turned to her left and saw the girl from Carbonek staring at her with excited awe.

“Welcome to Carbonek,” said Branwen.

“Thanks.”

“Dame Glynis said I might show you the castle.”

“Dame Glynis?”

Branwen’s hands fluttered. “She is the steward’s wife, and oversees the women. She does like to run everything, for the King will never say her nay, and his daughter, the Lady Elaine, is too ill to bother with household things. But we all like her, even if she is a mother-goose.”

Blanchefleur said, “The King has a daughter?”

“Yes, but she only came back to Carbonek a little while ago. We have not had a real Grail Maiden since she first went away.”

“She was the Grail maiden? Why did she leave?”

Branwen shook her head. “No one ever speaks about it. I asked once but Mother said it was gossip.”

“I didn’t know you could leave Carbonek.”

“Oh, yes, any time. Finding it is the hard part. Mother and I only stumbled upon it by mistake when we were lost, after the wild men burned our house down. It happened when Father went to visit the High King at Camelot, and we haven’t seen him since. I do miss him. Have you met Heilyn?”

“Heilyn.” Blanchefleur struggled to keep up with the girl’s quicksilver chatter. “No.”

“One of the squires here. One day, when the Grail Quest is achieved, he will go to Camelot and tell Father all about it, and Father will come and collect Mother and me. And I will see the flowers and fruit again on the apple-trees in the spring,” she went on, in a dreamy sing-song, “as I remember doing when I was small. There are no flowers here in Carbonek.”

“Never?”

“Never. But there are other things. There is the Grail, which is something, isn’t it?”

“I—”

“And do you see that chess-board?”

Blanchefleur looked over to the fireplace. “I know it well. Perceval was about to destroy it when I came in.”

Branwen giggled. “Well that you prevented him! For that is the chess-board of Gwenddolau son of Ceidio, and the pieces will play by themselves. It is one of the Thirteen Treasures of the Island of Britain.”

“How does it work?”

“I cannot tell. A wise smith must have made it.” Branwen shrugged. “I wanted Heilyn to take it apart to find out how, but King Pelles did not allow it.”

Beyond Nerys, on Blanchefleur’s right, stood the couch of the old King of Carbonek, who was speaking to Nerys in his weak, reedy voice. Blanchefleur turned to hear what she could of the old King’s words, but she only caught a snatch of them: “—there is nothing any of us can do, you understand. When the Grail Knight comes— ”

But the rest of his sentence was lost to her, for Naciens pushed back his chair and rose, beckoning to Blanchefleur, Nerys, and Branwen to follow him.

Naciens led them through the hall doors, down a passage, and up a long winding stair to a little low door at the top of a tower. Behind this door was a chapel jewel-coloured with stained-glass light. Tall slim windows walled the chapel on three sides. A low table stood near the eastern windows. Here rested the heavy wooden platter she had seen once before, now heaped with bread; above it on two hooks suspended from the ceiling hung the spear, dripping slow drops of blood which vanished before they reached the ground. Overhead, the roof soared high, seamed with narrow honey-coloured ribs, painted blue with gilt stars.

Not all the light in the room came through the windows. And indeed the tower was built more like a lantern than anything else, and the riotously coloured windows seemed meant less to let light in, than to pour light out. For beside the platter on the table stood the Grail itself, a heavy plain brass cup of unmistakeable age, covered in a scrap of white samite to temper and diffuse the blinding light within.

Blanchefleur hesitated, struck with abashment in the presence of so much light and beauty. But Naciens, moving to the table, called to them with a smile. “Come and eat.”

“Eat?” Blanchefleur lifted a hand against the light. “Of
these?
”

“Even of these.
Potestis bibere calicem quem ego bibiturus sum?
” he quoted. “It is not only your right, but your duty.”

She looked doubtfully at Nerys, and saw the fay’s hand gripping the lintel of the door with white finger-tips. She kept her eyes on Naciens, and made no sign to Blanchefleur, but there was longing in every line of her body.

Blanchefleur swallowed her awe and dropped her hand. The light struck her full in the eyes.

“Then we are able.”

I
N THE FOLLOWING DAYS
B
LANCHEFLEUR SETTLED
into the rhythm of life at Carbonek, unsure what her work as the Grail Maiden might require beyond tending the chapel and holding herself ready for some future summons. Meanwhile she lodged in a tiny closet set into the wall of the Grail Chapel above the door, just big enough to house a mattress, a shelf, and a chest to hold her things, separated from the chapel itself by a heavy tapestry and a door. That tapestry, like everything else in the chapel, was wild with colour and images, depicting Christ sitting throned in heaven above the words
Data est mihi omnis potestas in caelo et in terra
.

She spent most of her time away from the Chapel, however, on a busy course of study—learning physics and surgery in the infirmary, where everyone was shocked to discover that she did not know how to set a bone; spinning and weaving in the solar, where her clumsiness with spindle or loom made watching her a favourite pastime; and reading chroniclers and philosophers with Naciens, in which alone she could show the beginnings of competence.

In Carbonek, for the first time in her life, Blanche Pendragon felt a dunce.

Caught in a constant stream of work, struggling to grasp a hundred new names and faces, with hardly a spare minute from morning till night, the past faded out of mind and Blanchefleur almost forgot everything that had gone before: the witch trying to kill her, the giant which had nearly succeeded, the question of her parentage and legacy, Perceval and the Quest…

Until one night not long before Christmas, when she awoke from troubled dreams to find herself standing in golden light on the peak of a mountain.

T
HE ROOM WAS BUILT OF STONE
seamed with gold, pointed and spired in unimaginable complexity like a finger reaching up toward heaven. There were window-openings, without glass, opening onto the sky above, but this was like no sky which Blanchefleur had ever seen. It was dull flat gold like the sky in an illuminated manuscript.

The three Signs, as Naciens had called them, were there on the east wall, but here their numinous glory clung to the sky and the whole land, so that they themselves appeared unremarkable. The old spear had a rusty stain on the blade which might have been blood, and the Grail was uncovered, for here it did not give out light but received it.

The chapel’s roof rested on window-outlining pillars which twined together like trees above Blanchefleur’s head. The floor, like that of Tintern Abbey in Monmouthshire, was covered in a thick living carpet of grass, and in the centre was an opening onto winding stairs. Blanchefleur went to one of the windows, and looked out, and caught her breath.

She stood in something like the steeple of a cathedral, looking down at a roofless church on the ground. This itself stood on the highest peak of a mountain covered with ancient buildings, so that the whole mass formed one labyrinthine city. Few of the houses and halls had roofs and from this vantage Blanchefleur saw that the same thickset velvet grass carpeted every floor. Instead of tapestries or stained-glass windows, instead of knotted carpets and curtains, the city was furnished with trees, vines, shrubs, flowers, fruits, and bulbs.

Down in the crossing of the cathedral a clear, bubbling spring welled from underground. It spilled from its basin and flowed through the open doors and across the terrace. It tumbled down the slope, joined by other springs. It threaded like silver ribbons through a thousand canals to water the whole city. Miles off, at the very foot of the mountain, it gathered itself together again into one splendid rush which split into four arms and flowed away through every kind of tree and flower, in each direction, until distance confounded the eye.

Blanchefleur stood wordlessly staring at the whole earth spread out at her feet. The majestic rivers, the riotous fecundity of the whole countryside, the mazelike intricacy of the city itself, full of arches, spires, courtyards, fountains, walls, windows, waterfalls, and buttresses, the dizzying height of mountain, cathedral, steeple, and spire, struck her immovable, speechless, and all but sightless.

She did not know whether she had been standing there five minutes or five days when at last she stirred her stiff body and went down the steeple stair. On the ground, wandering beneath the leaping arches of the great cathedral, it was the silence which struck her. The place was not ruined, but tended; roofs and windows had been left off, not because of decay or fire, but because in this country there would never be cold or storm.

Were there inhabitants? Blanchefleur remembered the silence of Carbonek when she first came there, and went on, out of the church and down the slope, into an endless maze of courtyards, halls, and gardens. All was hushed and still, but she had never seen such beauty either in building or gardening. Robed caryatides stood knee-deep in flowers, bent gravely beneath the weight of walls and balconies. Nothing here was dead or diseased; more than one hall she passed through mingled the grass with herbs that gave off a heady scent when trampled, and she saw pillars supporting twining tomatoes or grape-vines. Further on she wandered through an orchard rich with the scent of apricots, and then a courtyard with a deep pool surrounded by orange-trees and daffodils.

It seemed to be spring and autumn here all at once.

At last Blanchefleur came out into an open courtyard decked only with amber-red maples. She stopped and put a hand to her heart when she looked inside. There was a great red winged serpent—a dragon!—lying in loops and folds within the garden, and on the blood-slimed grass beside the dead monster’s severed head a knight was resting. He had thrown his helm and bloody sword aside, as well as his shield the colour of silver, which bore a dragon even brighter red than the one on the lawn. The knight sat with his bearded chin in his hand, but when Blanchefleur paused under the arch leading into the courtyard, he lifted his head and saw her.

Blanchefleur went toward him, a little timorous, but not fearful. He smiled up at her and she felt faint surprise to see his brown hair and beard now plentifully streaked with grey. Time had beaten, but not bowed, that head.

Even so, she remembered him well. It was the King from her dream of the meadow. Tears filled her eyes. It was true, after all. It was true, and all good dreams had come true in this land.

He watched until she stopped in front of him, her head bent before all the might and glory of the name of Arthur. Then he said simply, “You look like your mother.”

Guinevera, casta vera
, she thought, and for once she dared to believe it, and lifted up her eyes. “I do?”

“Very like.” He wiped his sword clean on the grass and rose, returning it to its sheath. “Well, my dear daughter, is it the Grail that brings you to Sarras?”

“Sarras?”

“It is one of the names of the City on the Hill. This City.”

“Then I suppose it must be the Grail that brought me here,” said Blanchefleur. “I thought I was asleep in my closet at Carbonek…”

“I know I am asleep in my chamber at Camelot,” returned the King.

The silence spun out a while, companionably. Blanchefleur marvelled how familiar the King seemed to her in manner and tone of voice, as if she had never left him or forgotten him. She sought for something else to ask, but all words had drained from her. What
did
one say to the High King of Britain, the august lord of Logres, the rumours of whose glory had blown through the wind between the worlds and become woven into all histories, even the ones in which he had no true part?

“Tell me what it means, sire,” she said at last. “This city.”

“It is our compass-point,” said the King. “Every polity is built on a pattern, Blanchefleur. And not just every polity, but every life, every family, the church in every village. Everything imitates something. The only question is, what
will it imitate? Something eternal, or something earthly?”

Blanchefleur turned her face to the peak of the mountain, where far above them the roofless cathedral shot up to touch the heavens.

“Sarras,” said the High King of Britain, “is the pattern for Logres. Some would say that Logres
is
Sarras, but that is an error. Sarras is more, immeasurably more than Logres; yet perhaps one day, Logres might hope to become a part, an outflung border, of Sarras.”

“By imitating it, you mean?”

The King nodded. “Yes.”

Blanchefleur tore her eyes from the dizzying peak above her and said: “But I have never seen anything like this in the waking world. How can we hope to achieve this?”

“Our hope is not in ourselves,” said the King. “And yet we have more hope than we did at the beginning of our labours. Remember what Augustine said about the City.”

“
Et de caelo quidem ab initio sui descendit
.”

“That was the passage I meant.” He fitted his shield onto his arm, and took up his helm. Blanchefleur, watching him, felt desolate.

“Are you leaving?”

“Yes.” He gestured to the headless dragon. “I have done what I came to do. But I have not been able to deal with every danger for you. Harden your resolve, dear heart.”

He passed his free arm around her shoulders and drew her to him.

“When I see you again in Logres,” she said, “will you remember this—Sarras?”

“Not when I am awake, dear heart.” Blanchefleur felt his lips brush the top of her head, and his arm released her.