The Grail War

by Richard Monaco

  “What’s your name?” he finally called up.

  “What matter?” was the reply. “I have sufficient enemies. Enjoy your life,” he said, turning his horse around, “for so long as you keep it.”

  Lohengrin heard him ride off into the mist. After a while he clambered up the roadway. His squire waited, holding his mount.

  Lohengrin stood there for a moment before getting on the horse.

  “I’ll find him again,” he said seriously, “and stand on better terms without tricks.”

  Wista seemed puzzled.

  “Why fight again, sir?” he wanted to know. “You yourself say that a fight for no profit is for fools.”

  “So it is.” Lohengrin nodded as he mounted. “A sham, the fiction of chivalry and honor. Something for songs and stories, boy.” He leaned his sharp face and dark, magnetic eyes close to the other. “But it’s my one purity, you understand?”

  The squire shook his head.

  “No,” he admitted. “What purity do you speak of?”

  “To test my skill with death.”

  Wista took this in thoughtfully.

  “Why?” he still wanted to know.

  “Because,” was the answer as they started to ride on, “you live or die, win or lose, and there’s no lie in it. There’s decay in lies. And all else but this is a lie, boy.”

  * * *

  Broaditch, Handler, and Valit had found shelter in a narrow crack of a cave. They’d lost the road at dark, though it could not be far in any direction from where they were. The rain still fell steadily at the entrance and drained noisily away down the slope.

  There was no hope of finding wood for a fire, so they crouched miserably around the chill walls in utter darkness.

  Broaditch was contemplating the implications of an unusually foul odor in the cave. A wild beast? Long-dead prey? Offal? It was certainly a stench among stenches …

  “Well,” said Handler, “we’ll reach the town tomorrow. You’re welcome to stay at my daughter’s.”

  “I thank you,” Broaditch replies, “but I may not.”

  “You mean to go on with the world washing away looking for I know not what?”

  “If the world be about to wash away,” Broaditch answered, “then I’ll sink or float wherever I find myself.”

  “Why are you whimpering?” Handler asked his son. “Ah, it’s the damp here,” was the reply, through chattering teeth.

  “Here, boy,” Broaditch said, rummaging in his pack, “I’ve a dry blanket my wife rolled in hide for me.”

  “Alienor,” Handler’s voice said in the blackness. Broaditch found the blanket and passed it across the narrow chamber.

  “I miss her,” he remarked. “We fit together like mortar and pestle.”

  Handler chuckled.

  “Aye,” he agreed, “I understand such things. If I were you, I’d have stayed at home.”

  “We’re good friends. After so many married years, you become friends at last or hate until death.”

  “Well, with my woman, his mother, it were neither one nor the other.” He paused and reflected. “But she were a wonder to lie with, though. An’ I lay with more than one!”

  “So you did.”

  “Aye. An’ she, as well,” Handler said, “she were a woman, though she were never my friend.” He chuckled. Then he sighed with memory in his voice.

  He sighed as a raspy, penetrating voice cut suddenly through the darkness. Valit cried out involuntarily. Broaditch instantly thought in defense: he can't see us, either.

  Handler called out, “Who’s here?”

  “Impure of minds,” the voice intoned. “Dark are your worldly souls.”

  “Who speaks?” Handler demanded.

  “The pipe is played, but ye dance not,” the voice said grimly.

  “A hermit’s cell,” Broaditch murmured. “Forgive us, holy one,” he said, placating with a certain seriousness and calculated reserve. “We sought shelter from the rain.”

  The shrill voice spoke as if bodiless and unaffected as a ghost’s would be to any possible response to it.

  “The floods gather and ye heed not! Free thyselves from thy long chains of sin, feel thy shame, fall on thy knees and remain so for ten years, cry to the holy spirit ere thy complete destruction is accomplished!”

  “Damned fool,” Handler complained, “to startle honest men and use them so.”

  “Abase thyselves, wicked ones! Death gnaws at thy heels, his cold hand is on thy limbs, his chill breath fills thy nostrils.”

  “Then what use to pray, holy one,” Broaditch asked, “if there is no hope of salvation?”

  “Ah-ha!” cried the voice with glee and rancor. “Hear, O Lord, how the devil kneads the truth to bake his bread!”

  “Since God has left so many hungry mouths,” Broaditch snapped, irritated, “peace, hermit. I weary of sermons and misery.”

  “I’ll hear nothing said against God, Broaditch,” Handler’s voice, broke in.

  “God?” Broaditch wondered. “God is in your heart, not your words.”

  “The devil lives in yours,” the voice hissed.

  “Have you tinder for light?” Valit suddenly asked.

  “Aye, boy,” the voice declared, “a light brighter than the blaze of summer noon, and ye are the tinder.”

  “We don’t need one like that,” Valit said. “Even a candle end would do in here.”

  Broaditch smiled in the darkness. Who can burn words at need? he asked himself. If we could, we'd all bathe in warmth …

  As Lohengrin and his squire, Wista, were crossing the castle yard, the sun was suddenly out. It was a shock. Men stopped their work; people of every degree could be seen leaning out windows. A stout peasant woman toting a bale of wet sticks stood knee-deep in mud, her lips moving in prayer. Lohengrin looked up into the brilliant warmth and then, just as the standing pools began to steam, it disappeared …

  Well, he thought, it still burns in heaven.

  All around the people suddenly looked depressed and gray again.

  “At least the rain has let up,” his young light-haired squire remarked, tilting his handsome face around.

  Lohengrin grunted.

  “At least,” he paralleled, “we’ve come to where the gold is supposed to be. If there’s none in the sky, at least some will shine in my dark purse.”

  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.