The Grail War

by Richard Monaco

  “There may be fifty men out there,” he remarked, raising an eyebrow.

  Parsival buckled on the mesh sword belt and took up his father’s red-and-black-enameled helmet. The visor was missing, torn away. He remembered the story Broaditch had told him. They had just come back from the village together. The common man had found him hiding in a barn. He must have been twelve years old … He’d been watching a peasant festival day. His mother had forbidden it … He remembered standing on the hillside looking over the bright green valley. He remembered it had been spring but no longer recalled Broaditch’s name. He didn’t try to bring it back. “Your father fell in a joust,” Broaditch had said.

  “A joust?” young Parsival had wondered.

  “A noble sport, young sir. Not as light as a dance or as easy as sleeping in hay … A lance tip in the face is uncomfortable.”

  Parsival had made little of those remarks. “My father,” he’d said, looking off into the blue-green shimmer of horizon, “loved my mother — as I do.”

  “A lance tip in the face,” Parsival whispered, unconsciously, setting the helmet on his head. The cowl of his robe fit over it fairly well. His father’s name, Gahmuret, was worked in gold across the dome.

  They went out through the far end of the narrow chamber, Parsival holding the sputtering torch. They stooped through a low tunnel, mossy stones slippery under their steel-shod feet.

  “One death may be as good as another,” Prang said. “Why don’t we fly and take revenge when time and numbers favor us?”

  They came out beyond the moat. The moon was low, the night cool and misty. Still …

  “Why not?” Prang whispered, watching his teacher moving quietly along the grassy slope, parallel to the walls and a long, low growth of pines that-stood like a screen beside them.

  “I have to bury them,” was the quiet answer.

  Suddenly there were torches all around. About a dozen shadowy men came up the slope and through the trees, running, weapons glinting.

  Prang saw Parsival move: a blur, a flying shadow, a flashing of steel, spangs, crunchings, screams, sighs, sobs, curses, men scattering and falling like, he thought, rats before a striking cat. Before he could close with anyone, those who weren’t down were ducking and running and Parsival stood alone in the guttering light from the dropped torches, sheathing his sword. Prang’s heartbeat was rapid. The idea that he had sought to slay this man seemed humorous … The famous knight moved like a phantom and his every blow sheared plate, mail, and flesh. He’d never seen such work. Why would someone with such skill and power throw his sword away? What more could any knight have wished for?

  “My lord,” he said, a little breathless, “that was magnificent, my lord.” He stepped over a faintly moaning man-at-arms who still convulsively clutched his shattered spear in the tangle of his shadows.

  Parsival was walking again. His mail clinked softly. Prang followed with the long mace over his shoulder. Lancelot and the others were just coming out of the castle on horseback. Prang estimated fifty or more men, though he knew his fear was prodding his imagination. This was the end. He accepted it. A small army of mounted men with lance and ax … Life seemed very sweet suddenly. He found himself thinking how pleasant it had been a week or so ago eating pork pie, swilling ale, and talking with his comrades, lying and stretching points, describing old jousts and loves …

  Broaditch stood listening in the black street. He held his unsheathed dagger. He leaned on a tilted plank fence and strained to see what seemed to move up ahead … After a few moments he went on cautiously. He’d realized he had to get out of there fast and was picking his way back to the house. The streets were quiet: a few voices, distant shouts, and cries here and there …

  His legs were smeared to the knee with muck by the time he reached the door. River mist and fog were closing in. He sheathed his blade and tapped on the timber.

  The door opened a little on the latch and the wife said, “What now?”

  “Eh? I want to enter, woman.” He saw the dim firelight and smelled the musky warmth of the room. He wanted nothing more than to lie down, stretch out his bones, and sleep by the hot stones like a dozing cat …

  “Who are you?” she wanted to know.

  “Broaditch of Nigh. Who do you think? I left here with your kinsmen and husband not two — ”

  “Ah.”

  She swung the door inward.

  “ — hours ago.”

  “So soon done with your sport, then?” she asked. She stayed in the doorway, the fire glow behind her.

  “I’m weary, woman,” he told her. “I had little enough sport and the air is chill.”

  “Men are fools,” she informed him.

  “That well may be,” he replied, tired. “I’ve seen little to war with that opinion.”

  “Where are your fine pards?”

  “They lingered a little.”

  “Aye. So they did. Drunk with the whores, I ween.”

  “Woman, my teeth clatter in my head and spoil my speech. The cold bites me, I — ”

  “Who was your friend who came before asking for you?”

  And Broaditch said, “What?” He said this automatically looking to the left and right down the twisting lane.

  “A dull fellow,” she reflected, stepping back to admit him and wondering why he still stood there, frowning. “Big and thick of neck …”

  “He asked for me by name?”

  “No. He says: ‘Is he back?’ ‘Who?’ I says. ‘The big one with the beard on his face.’ ‘Where would you expect a beard to grow?’ I asked him. ‘No matter,’ says he. ‘Is he come back here?’ ‘No,’ I says, ‘he isn’t.’”

  The clammy fog was rising above his knees now. He shivered slightly, thinking of the night before him. Someone, he realized, must have known her husband at the stew and a few coins spread the knowledge wide …

  “‘Are you his friend, then?’ I asks. Ana the dull brute says, ‘Aye, that. His boon and hearty.’ ‘What name do I give?’ ‘What indeed,’ he says and goes off. The dull brute, that he was.”

  “My friend,” murmured Broaditch.

  “Come in,” she said, “before the damp does.”

  Back behind him he was certain someone had just moved close to the wall. He stepped past her and found his staff and traveling pack. She’d closed the door. He opened it again.

  “What’s this?” she wanted to know. “Off again?”

  “Say my farewells,” he said, moving cautiously outside again. “Accept my thanks, good woman.”

  She watched from the doorway as he moved quietly into the rising, thickening mist. She shivered and went back inside.

  One of the survivors apparently had just reached Lancelot. Parsival and Prang paused to listen behind the screen of pines.

  “We was set on, my lord!” the breathless man cried. “We was set on …”

  “What's this?” Lancelot demanded.

  “Many men, my lord … in the trees …”

  No doubt he was pointing, Parsival reflected. Now, what would the lumpy brain of Lancelot make of this information?

  “Many men?" The legendary knight was still taking it in.

  “Aye, my lord.”

  “I don’t like this,” Lancelot declared. “Who are these men?”

  “I know not, my lord.”

  “Many, you say?”

  “Aye!”

  “Shall I ride and see?" a knight offered.

  “I wasn’t told anything about this,” Lancelot decided. “I will see His Grace and then come back. They think I have no wits, eh? They think all I know to do is ride straight and crack heads. Come on!”

  And he led his band at a trot away down the hill toward the forest road.

  Parsival smiled, wry.

  “So he is become a dancing bear,” he said. “And who is ‘His Grace,’ I wonder?”

  “A Duke,” Prang said almost reluctantly.

  “‘What is a swallow?’ I ask. ‘A bird,’ he tells me.”
r />   “I am bound to say no more,” Prang muttered heavily.

  “His Grace,” Parsival said. “Very well. You can help me now if you choose.”

  Duke LaLong and a short, thin, middle-aged Lord Gobble with a pronounced limp, were walking across the castle yard beside a rutted puddle that resembled a motionless stream in the faint, sharp sliver of moon reflection that flowed through the stretched-out clouds.

  The little fellow had an ashen face and overlarge, protuberant eyes that rolled around, as if he were reading the night shadows.

  “He’s impatient,” he was saying in an insistent, shrill voice. “He must have results.”

  The Duke seemed uneasy and, though this fellow was of lesser rank, appeared surprisingly deferential.

  “What more can I do?” he wanted to know, stopping suddenly as they were splashing across the water, jerking his foot up with a shudder of disgust.

  The little man went obliviously on, eyes still peering around, as if there were much to see. The Duke stooped and stared at something in the dark, greasy muck: some kind of furry animal, he decided, but precisely what was unclear. A little hand-like paw reached through the surface where he’d trodden the shapeless body down …

  The other was still limping on, saying, “Lord Master accepts no excuses. The stakes are too great. The hour is near, very near. Great things are about to happen … great things. He — ”

  “Listen,” LaLong called after, piqued, straightening up from the puddle, “I can do no more than what is possible. He must understand — ”

  Gobble whirled around, eyes suddenly fixed on the Duke, slightly twisted body bent in his direction.

  “I can tell you,” he interrupted at a fanatical pitch, “he has little interest in what is possible. I can safely tell you, Your Grace, that he means to have all of them dead who might know things that should not be known.”

  “First he wanted Parsival and his family living. Then the instructions were changed overnight and I have only your word that this was so. I should see the master myself, I — ”

  “You are free to do so, naturally,” the bent man said very quietly, “Your Grace.”

  His Grace remained uneasy.

  “Yes … yes,” he murmured. “But I, of course, have every confidence in you and there’s really no need to disturb him at such a critical time and — ”

  “Orders were changed,” the little fellow said fiercely, shrilly, as if this statement in itself had some profound, universal meaning. “He no longer required their information. He wants them all dead! All!” He trembled slightly.

  They just stood there on opposite sides of the standing water. The slight moon whipped in and out.

  “What of Lohengrin?” The Duke wondered.

  The other shrugged, twisted, uneven.

  “That is left in your hands, for now.” This was said without expression.

  “He knows nothing. He and his father shared nothing.”

  Gobble seemed to smile or at least part his lips, the Duke thought, sweating slightly.

  “The responsibility is yours, Your Grace, is it not? After all, the master has full confidence in you.”

  Was he still smiling? LaLong couldn’t tell. He thoroughly disliked this fanatical little spy, as he termed him. He was again regretting his whole involvement in this business, though it was far too late for that now … He stared down again at the dim, crushed blob at his booted feet … They claimed they were about to swallow the world, and he was out of choices … He suddenly spat into the dark pool and watched the faint, foamy white spin and drift …

  He would take his chances with Lohengrin for a while. He had to admit he liked him in a way. He saw something of his own overeager self in the skilled, arrogant warrior. You couldn’t simply waste your best tools because of these foreign fanatics and their notions … He spat again.

  Lohengrin looked absently down at the girl’s head, which rocked in his naked lap. The pleasure of her mouth on him, suckling, turning, withdrawing to a painful cool, then relieving him, taking it into her deep, sopping heat … the pleasure did not distract the cold line of his thoughts. Even as his body tensed slightly as his orgasm began to generate by degrees, he was asking himself how long they would continue to use him as a paid assassin. Did the Duke actually trust him so far as that? What reward did they plan to offer him, the son, after all, of a minor king?

  The woman’s head rocked faster and faster now and his muscles started to lock, his breathing tense, and he thought how, for a few moments, he would be helplessly gripped and wilted by the soft and relentless lips of a lady … He looked at her: the curls of unstrung dark hair, the beading sweat on her cheeks, shut eyes, the rhythmic working together of her thighs, her snorted breath, the sloshing of her mouth on his searing hardness … He showed his teeth in an involuntary smile with the distant thought that he was over the brink now, without recourse, he was falling down into the wild abyss of flesh and fire and he had not the slightest power over it, no more-than death … no more than death …

  Prang was sweating in the night chill. His tunic was open. He leaned on his spade as Parsival climbed out of the grave and stood silently looking down into the darkness of it. It gaped like a mute mouth. The setting moon stretched vague shadows on the grass.

  “I wish we could have done more with what was given to us,” he murmured.

  And Prang said, “What?” before he realized the great knight was talking to either his wife or child.

  “Regrets are like leaves in the dust.”

  A long silence ensued and then Prang said, “Is it safe to tarry here?”

  Parsival didn’t look up.

  “What place is safe for any man?” he wondered aloud. He sighed and shook his head. “I have spent so many, many gifts … so many …” He looked up. “Well, fill this in and we’ll be off.” He took up his own spade and sunk it in the mounded dirt. “I am always leaving things unsaid. And then it’s too late to speak … My mother …” He tossed a shovelful of soil into the black slash in the earth. “And other things … other things …”

  Later the moon was on the horizon. They were moving steadily across a rolling plain.

  “You know,” Prang was saying, “I feared you meant to die in combat … out of grief.”

  They were just coming to the outskirts of a deep forest. A spur of dense trees stood like a wall before them.

  “Save your breath,” Parsival counseled. “Our troubles are not past.”

  Prang twisted around to stare back across the dim fields. He thought he could make out the shape of the castle on the line of distant hills.

  “I see nothing,” he said.

  “Be still!” his master hissed, suddenly motionless, facing the trees. Prang tried to control his breathing. He stared and listened and detected nothing … a sweet, rich scent rose from the earth … Then he thought a shadow moved, a blot, a darkness at the end of the field … or was it his eyesight’s strain …? His skin prickled and he unconsciously gripped Parsival's arm. He wanted to run. His heart was suddenly racing and he wanted to run …

  “What is this?” he hissed.

  “Peace,” said his teacher, leaning forward, seeming to concentrate intently. Then he stepped forward toward the shadowy edge of woods, slowly raising his long, wide sword above his head, as if an enemy stood before him. Prang saw none but still felt the chilling pressure, as if, as he later told it, an evil wind blew from the trees. He was actually on the verge of bolting and then found himself moving closer to Parsival, as if his body gave tangible shelter from the intangible … He could have taken oath that a blurred, shadowy something reached inexplicably from the night to clutch at him and he heard his voice choke on a scream as Parsival seemed to cut the vacant air with his blade once, a ripping flash, and stood still again, as if leaning on emptiness, and suddenly the moon had set and the dark pressed close against them …

  Giddy, blood pounding with terror and shock, he thought he heard the master knight say: “I am not as wea
k as that.”

  And then, as though a gate had parted, Prang staggered forward at his teacher’s back.

  “Was it a demon, my lord?” he asked finally, whispering.

  They were moving carefully into the woods. Prang kept stumbling, but Parsival held his arm.

  “Have you ever met a demon?”

  “No,” admitted the young knight, “unless it were tonight.”

  “Where do you think the devil lives?”

  “Why, in hell, sir. Where else but there?”

  “Where else?” Parsival agreed, helping the other over a knotted root in the cool, musty, thick later-summer woods. There was a faint scent still of rot from the rains. “But where to find his house, Prang?”

  “Is it not under the world where the eternal fires burn …? Lord Parsival, how can we fail to lose ourselves in this place? Shouldn't we wait for the morning’s light to …”

  “Prang,” declared his master, “heaven, hell, and the world are all one place.”

  “But I — ”

  “Peace, yet again, Prang."

  They stopped and stood intently listening. After a few moments Parsival relaxed.

  “It’s all right,” he ultimately said.

  Prang was cocking his head from side to side.

  “I hear no pursuit,” he said.

  “Pursuit? I feared no pursuit.” Parsival was slightly surprised. “Only what’s before us, young warrior.” He smiled in the unbroken darkness. “I never feared anything,” he reflected. “Then I came to dread death … then life … now something else altogether …”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He took the young man’s arm and led him on into the dense, invisible tangles of limb and brush and bole.

  “What do you want, Prang, before you die?”

  After a few moments the knight answered: “Long life. Fame … to fight well … to have sons …”

  “I have had all of those but the first.”

  “Yes?”

  His outstretched hand touched a tree and he pressed closer to Parsival as they went around the great roots.

  “And I fear,” Parsival said, “and I long …”