The Grail War

by Richard Monaco

  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 … ?

  Parsival turned and went steadily on and on … The narrow way twisted, doubled back through this oppressive, dank forest … It reminded him of those wet lands where he’d ridden for weeks when he first set out for Arthur’s court in his rags and impossible innocence … so long ago now it seemed but a memory in a dream of a dream … so long ago that for a moment tears came to his eyes, remembering … Every play of shadow and light had seemed so vibrant then, had seemed to hint at the momentary unfolding of supernatural adventures …

  And now, here he walked, aloof in a world gone gray, having found even magic as dull as mud and wearying to pass through. Yes, he was steeped in magic like a herb in sauce, it had seeped into him with his years of fasting, prayer, and vast, cool distance from the shadow-play of life … Oh, he had learned many secrets, from Merlinus and others, powers … he had tried to follow the way to the true Grail, which he now believed was mistaken for a symbol, as well as for a reality … Gawain and the others thought it was a talisman or a weapon or the cup that had brimmed with Christ’s blood or secret words to win the world with … Ah, but he believed the Grail already pulsed in his heart and that he had to, somehow, unwrap the wrappings and free the golden fire to shine … And all he’d succeeded in was gaining power of flesh and will — the heart stayed dark … And, worse, the process had left him permanently open to the normally impalpable forces that prowled and lurked in sorcerers’ shadows …

  He was climbing steadily now and the sun was stronger. The rising, rocky ground was almost dry in places. The trees were thinned out and scrubby. He knew he was getting closer to his ancestral home. Several years had passed since he left his wife and children here. He wondered if he’d find them or if they’d returned to her lands in the southeast. He was remembering his childhood suddenly, and the memories were dense and rich, like a jewel wrapped in crushed rose petals … His mother: the slim, tall, youthful woman seemed to float in her shimmering flower beds beside the square-stone castle wall … mother …

  He crossed a pebbly stream bed and then began following it, twisting up the slope. Withered heather lined the sides among sharp outcroppings of dark rock. The place seemed familiar. He walked on, thinking back, and then had it, stood still and gazed around. He’d nearly died here, twenty years ago. Right here, or a few steps on, anyway, he’d lain in his rent and shattered armor, bleeding into the dry, stony earth, watching the day dim and reel around him, seeing the shadowy-seeming knight in jet-black steel (with bright crimson pulsing from the chestplate) lift his bloody mace and stagger another step closer to him, holding it, trembling, over his head, breath puffing and blowing gigantically … Parsival realized his helmet had been battered away and that even a moderate blow would kill him, but he could only watch from a great distance, feeling the outlines of a blissful peace beginning to enfold him … He’d felt like a child after a long, weary day … and then the knight, mace high, was pulled over backward by its weight and the last thing Parsival registered or could recall now was the distant clanging crunch of his fall …

  … He blinked himself back to the present. He walked on a few steps. The band of black horsemen had poured up this way and he’d fought them every inch and slew as in a dream. They had swept over him without seeming end. I must have died, he thought, smiling, bending, poking around in the loose stones … touched the steel he’d thought he spotted. He pulled a rusted, rotted mail gauntlet loose. Through the rents he could see yellow, bony fingers still clutched within it. He was amazed.

  He turned quickly, hearing a distant, approaching crunch and clink. Then he relaxed with a shake of his head. That stubborn knight still followed. For days he’d dogged his trail.

  By twilight Parsival had passed the ruined wall, which was as far from home as he’d ever gone as a boy before he ran away to find King Arthur’s kingdom on the swayed back of his bent horse, Spavint. He’d traded Spavint for his first charger, Niva, at Camelot. Spavint had walked and wandered him in circles for weeks …

  The rounded, spilled stones here had been set in the days of the Pictish kings to hold back someone from something long lost and forgotten. Time went on melting and shifting the landscape. Parsival wondered who and how many had died in defense of whatever at this mysterious border … The twilight flowed in like a tide and the wall curved across the hill into a tantalizing obscurity, as if (he thought) you might encounter the long-lost phantoms by following it into the deepening mists of evening …

  A few steps farther on he felt something, a presence. He turned suddenly. A shadowy shape floated or stood back in the violet wash of fugitive light. He felt a strange, steady, pulsing tugging at the pit of his stomach. He used to assume it was fear until he learned it was a wizard’s way of touching things, that his inner perception was reaching out to finger or be gripped by forms unknowable to the daily senses.

  He paused and waited. He knew he was vulnerable. The price of his powers. The defense of ignorance secured the ordinary man. He began controlling his breathing, clasped his hands over his stomach. He focused his will there to create a kind of shield. This, he reflected, is another kind of jousting. And his legendary strength was no assurance here of anything.

  “You,” he called into the evanescent gleamings. No response. The figure seemed armored, the face a seamless reflection of vague shimmers. “You,” he repeated, “do you seek to bar my path?"

  The figure may have moved, walked smoothly as water flow, or drifted a little closer. There was a liquid shimmer of sword, which the knight apparently held at his side. Parsival still couldn't be certain if it was a substantial form or not. He wondered if the sword could cut living flesh … He wished his master were here: the frail monk Limus whose eyes could stun a strong man with a look. Limus, who’d pushed him half out of the world so that he could never be sure again of the borders of life and death … Limus, friend of Merlinus …

  The squat, blurry knight was flowing toward him now, rapid, silent, as if wind-borne, as if the fading twilight had condensed and exhaled this phantom. Parsival braced his body, feeling the onrush of terror and doubt, worked his breath as he'd been taught, felt the pressure of the figure’s coming, and as it reached him his perception exploded and he flashed a vast, dark, chilling, wing-like flutter so that for a moment he felt shrunk to a speck in a vast and resistless sea of obliteration and his thoughts cried: Lord God save me! Save me! And he vibrated like a storm-wrung leaf, and as a scream rolled up from deep within he suddenly, inexplicably, struck back and everything burst in an empty bubble of dream … He was trembling, shaken, and alone in the twilight … He realized this was but the beginning of these attacks or experiences or whatever they were …

  “So you finally stopped,” a voice suddenly said out of the darkness behind him. He turned, surprised. It was the stolid knight. Too much time had passed, he thought and, incredibly, he hadn’t sensed the young man’s approach. A soft glow of moonlight was replacing the sunset wash.

  “Where is your armor?” Parsival asked.

  The other shrugged.

  “I laid it aside,” he replied.

  Parsival smiled.

  “So as to creep up on me?” he wondered.

  “No. It avails me naught against you. And it wear
ied me.”

  Parsival nodded and started to walk on ahead, thoughtfully.

  “I cannot teach you what you wish to learn,” he remarked, following the faint trail. “Yet I might show you all the things I don’t know.”

  Why, he asked himself, had he been attacked? What or who would send those powers to harass him? He spoke over his shoulder to the young knight, who was treading at his heels in his faint moonshadow.

  “Who was the lord who sent you against me?”

  The young man hesitated, then said, “I am bound to keep my honor, sir, as I would now for your sake.”

  Parsival frowned, then nodded.

  “Keep it, then,” he said at length. “A thing so rare should be treasured.”

  In the wan shards of sunlight, Broaditch, Handler, and Valit passed through the grimy, grim gates of London town. The slimy streets were knee-deep in nameless muck. Nearby a mound of rotting fish had been ground under wheel, hoof, and foot. Broaditch was astonished. He’d known a stench or two in his time, and that holy hermit had been a very prince among the lords of stink, but this! God save them! The concentration and monumental excess of this stained collection of huts and houses was beyond natural imagination. Men must swim in the smells like fish in the sea …

  He clapped his handkerchief to his nose with a certain futility. Handler’s son was eyeing the wonders about him, Broaditch observed, with what might have been a certain surprising slyness. He wouldn’t have expected that quality, though he’d barely spoken twenty words directly to the boy. He was pondering a massive cart loaded with bound and sacked goods.

  “Consider,” he said, thinking aloud, “how many folk must be fed herein … all in one place …”

  Broaditch gazed around the city walls, where heads and skulls sat tilted on spikes and bodies rotted in chains. They turned a corner. An old woman was squatting, ragged dress lifted, at the opening of an alleyway … A half-naked, blood-spattered, mud-covered boy was racing, splashing through the filth as three larger versions pounded in his wake, two brandishing staffs, one a dagger, coming on in silence and deadly purpose … Behind them a drunken man was dancing on a cart … The boy and his pursuers vanished into a twisting, narrow lane … People continued about their business: a pair of carriers staggered from their wagon into a building under a load of freshly killed pigs, the heads swaying, dangling … A man was broiling something on a stick over an open fire …

  Broaditch and the other two worked their way carefully along the slippery, sunken stones that served as a sidewalk. He glanced into a doorway where a man leaned against a wall in the shadows and a woman knelt before him as if in prayer or confession, except, Broaditch thought, she followed a strange catechism … A boggy steam rose steadily from the streets as the sunlight intensified.

  They passed a long row of dried salt fish hung under eaves to dry, when Handler said, “He lives near the river.”

  “Ah,” Broaditch responded, “who?”

  “My son, Luark, whom I seek.”

  “My elder brother,” Valit put in. “His brain is dented.”

  “Peace, you vicious rascal,” his father muttered. “A full pot don’t ring when you beat it.”

  “Was he born …” Broaditch touched his head.

  “Naaa,” sneered Valit, “he come by it from the king’s men. They caught …”

  “Peace!” And his father’s lopping backhand nearly caught the son in the face as he nimbly darted aside. “An empty pot makes noise enough!”

  “It’s true,” Valit insisted, keeping ahead and looking back, “he cut Odd Jack’s grain and …”

  “Heed not a fool’s tale,” Handler growled.

  “It’s truth. The king’s men cracked his head for his pains and so dented his wits.”

  “Ah,” disparaged Handler, “let me catch you and yours will sag a bit, I promise you. Heed him not. He’s a sly, lazy, shiftless …”

  They ducked against the nearest wall as a glopping of slops sprayed down close at hand. Broaditch saw the bucket being withdrawn from a second-story window. The lane slanted down toward the river, whose steel-gray sheen was visible through the spaces between buildings and huts.

  Broaditch had decided to spend the night with them and set out to discover Lohengrin in the morning. All he knew of Parsival at this point was composite rumor (virtually a tradition already) that he was living in a monastery and that he had the Grail with him, hidden because evil men sought to discover him and its secret.

  Well, Broaditch considered, evil often is just another word for your enemies.

  That afternoon Lohengrin was riding into the city, unarmored, with sword and dagger at his hip. He reined up his charger by a freshly painted red frame building. The windows were hung with black curtains.

  He crossed the foul, mucky street with a few long, bouncy strides and mounted the steps to the entrance. A carrot-faced townsman just entering jostled the hook-faced knight, who, with cold fury, shook him by the collar so that his knees rattled together.

  “Base scum,” he hissed, “heed your course.”

  He tossed him back with casual distaste and pushed through the rough plank door.

  “Ha,” the man called after him from the relative security of the street, “but base-born sluts are good enough for your noble pecker! You stinking muck-brain, your face looks like a soggy cod-piece!”

  He broke off muttering, taking a few lanky steps out of the path of a dog-cart as Lohengrin’s fierce, bushy-haired face was thrust from the doorway, glaring, then withdrawn silently as the door slammed shut.

  * * *

  A second stone jug of wine was going around the rude table under the greasy, smoky tallow lamplight. Broaditch, Handler, Valit, his brother, Luark, his wife, and a burly neighbor with a missing ear were sitting around a tilted table. Luark was slit-eyed and scowling.

  “Ah, those were the days,” the neighbor, Rova, was saying, “and no mistake about it.” He addressed himself mainly to Valit and Luark. Handler nodded agreement sagely.

  “What do these young bloods know?” he asked, swilling down more acidic wine.

  Broaditch smiled to himself, leaning back in a shadowy corner of the buckled, narrow room. He was sucking at his long Oriental pipe.

  “So let it be my treat, b’God,” one-earned Rova said. He winked ponderously. “Pity the married man who has to hold by the hearth tonight.” He laughed.

  Handler nodded through his semi-stupor. A dribble of wine was drying along the crease of his chin.

  “Arr,” he said, “pity, pity,”

  The wife tossed her square head and looked sour.

  “Off to the bawds, are you?”

  “What a notion!” Rova cried, laughing. “A great, solid man like Handler, there?”

  “Aye,” she affirmed. “And will you have him back to his family with pox?”

  “Do you hear that?” Rova boomed. “Why, I mean to treat them to nothing of hurt. But it’s a dull life without some loving, eh?”

  “I hear there’s great profit in whores,” Valit said thoughtfully.

  “Of a sort, boy,” Rova said, “though it be a profit that costs a man.”

  “The boy means whoremasters,” Broaditch put in from his corner.

  “I know not,” Rova exclaimed, “for every man who owns a wine shop falls sick with the drink.”

  “And all bankers are fat,” declared Luark, “and who would not like it so?”

  “That’s wisdom,” Rova said.

  “Aye,” said the wife, “wisdom. From him, that’s eggs from a goat and milk from a chicken.”

  “It were the blow to his head,” Valit assented, as if he’d been asked.

  “Shut up,” Handler advised.

  “Well,” Rova bantered, “it’s not me inflamed by the devil’s lusts.”

  “You told me,” Valit protested, and Broaditch couldn’t tell if it was slyly, “you said you even put horns on the head of Christ.”

  “What words are these?” the woman cried out, cros
sing herself.

  “Well,” Rova said and smiled, “not every bride is true to flesh, much less an invisible husband.”

  “You’re the devil’s carrier, Rova,” she said, crossing herself again.

  “Well, stay off my cart, then,” was the retort.

  “Leading men and boys to the whores,” she said, getting angry. “No wonder God drowns the world with such as you in it.”

  “What does this mean?” Handler demanded, wobbling on his stool. “What is he saying?”

  “That vows are not the soul of purity,” Broaditch put in quite seriously. These questions mattered to him more and more and were not to be put aside with easy cynicism or dull belief. Were the acts of the clergy of any importance to God at all? Did the reasonings of scholars affect the heart for good?

  “Or their seal, either,” Rova said.

  “You say,” Handler demanded, cocking his head to the side, “you say you have lain with nuns?”

  “I lay with none who was chaste.”

  Broaditch smiled.

  “That covers all cases,” he said.

  Rova laughed.

  “Speak no more unholy things,” the woman said, “or leave this house.”

  Handler was searching Rova’s face with narrowed eyes. He kept licking his lower lip. He was agitated.

  “Well,” he insisted on knowing, “do you say truth or lie?”

  “What?” Rova wondered.

  “Nuns. Have you truly lain with nuns?”

  She stood up.

  “No more of this talk,” she said. “Is naught still holy?”

  “I heard such tales,” Handler went on, “but — ”

  “Enough!” she cried.

  “Silence your wife, brother,” Valit said maliciously.

  She raised an earthen crock.

  “I’ll silence somebody,” she announced grimly.

  Handler swayed on his stool.

  “When I was young,” he declared, “things were not the same …” He shook his head. “Let me tell you this … you worked your lord’s land … you fought … no one but Jews and Italy-men would live in a town … things were different …”