The Grail War

by Richard Monaco

  “Salt,” he said, half to himself.

  Grontler looked amused.

  “Don’t you care,” he said, “for the seasoning?”

  Wista was poking and digging in the crumbly soil. It glittered in his hands. The fields had been salted. Ruined. He looked up in outrage at the crafty veteran.

  “More orders?” he coldly asked.

  The man winked and spat out a crumb of food. The Saracen sat a little apart, eyes gleaming, inward, dour, remote.

  “Well, laddie,” Grontler said, “the great lords are doing the world like eating pig: after the slaughter, they salt and roast it.”

  Wista just looked at him with disbelief and outrage. He started to speak, then checked himself.

  “You’re on a fucked road, laddie,” Grontler advised, “you best get used to fast and fine. You ain’t in your fucked mom’s bath getting in a toe at a fucked time!”

  “But what sense does …”

  “Hah!” he came in, tilting his head toward the hard-faced, fanatical-looking son of the desert. “Do yer hear him? This youngblood wants to know answers.” He clucked, cocked his head to Wista. “He don’t speak our talk unless anybody curses him.” He nodded sagely. “Y’see?”

  Wista shrugged.

  “But,” he whispered to himself, “why spoil all this good land? For what cause?”

  “Why, the poor black bastard.” Grontler indicated the Moorish-tinted fellow with an expressive drinker’s eye. “He’s in a worse plight than you, yourself, eh? Or me, eh? Why, he don’t know the north winds in this land blow from the devil’s ice asshole.” He nodded, uncorking a stone jug. Wista felt the stinging aroma. Grontler sucked from the mouth and shuddered a little. “Ah,” he said, wheezing, “I freed this from a fucked priest …” He offered a taste to Wista, who declined. “Don’t let none of this trouble you, laddie.” He shook his head grimly enough. “What’s the fucked point of that, I ask? Hah?” He sucked at the brew again. “None,” he concluded. “We’ll all be mush and muck soon enough … Did y’ever see the dead in the field? Hah? With flies crawlin’ and buzzin’ in an’ out of the fucked head? Where the eyes used to be? Hah?!” He chuckled. Wista felt uneasy. He shook his head. “Weil, you will. And show me one fucked feller who don’t come to that end … Hah!” He corked the jug with a self-satisfied twist. “Fact is fact, like the wise wanger saith.” He gestured at the Saracen again, who was on his feet, impatient to be off, it seemed. He looked, to Wista’s imagination, like a brooding spirit of desolation. “What’s he doing here? What’s the good of it? Hah! Any fucked bastard can ask ass’s questions, laddie … And who cares? What fucked difference makes it if you die here or there?” He grinned and stood up, heading for the horses. “Ask the devil that while your fucked mouth is full of air.” He mounted and rubbed the animal’s neck. He looked confidentially at the boy. “Did you ever prod a sheep, laddie?”

  “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 c
ourse. 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

  “I lost it, Gawain,” Parsival murmured. He looked vaguely stunned.

  “We’ll try, then,” Gawain repeated, without even pressing now. He waited. His voice broke slightly when he spoke next, and for an instant his friend thought he might cry, though he didn’t, half-whispering, “It’s all we have … to seek it is all we have …” The single eye was wild, misty, desperate. “There’s too much blood flowed … I could sink under in the blood … For what am I?” he suddenly cried. He snatched away his hood and showed in full daylight what Parsival had but dimly glimpsed two decades ago in the shadowed moonlight: the naked, raw half-face sheared from left eyebrow to point of jaw, teeth forever exposed in death’s mirror grimace, the rills of scarring … Parsival closed his eyes. “And you, Parsival, my friend, are cut as deep and badly … So I still say: to seek the Grail is all we have!” His friend was already nodding, not looking, although that was no entire relief because in the flesh’s darkness he could see the flames like the afterglow of a light. Ever since the river he could see the flames … and more … Gawain seemed to understand this. He grasped that his companion had changed, had been opened in some mysterious way.

  Parsival felt the power flowing within him, the unfathomable strengths and tides … He sensed there may never have been a choice for him, that, like Gawain, he couldn’t even die because the power, like a great river, needed a channel to pour through … But, his mind insisted, without joy … I could have power over the whole world now and without joy
…

  “Yes,” he agreed, nodding, looking at the hazy day again, letting it in. “Yes.” He was feeling the strength swell and mount until he feared the flesh would burst asunder from the electric pressure, spurring his horse violently forward toward Prang on the hill. He’d seen him again, and the black nightmare shape that haunted him was seeking the same brightness, too; he realized that. He’d meet it where the brightness was. It was a race. He understood the urgency. The power had to meet the dark there. Nothing could prevent it; the power showed him that. He’d have to fight, the last fight, perhaps … He’d have to fight the black, shapeless shape and fight alone …

  He passed Prang, thinking: poor young lad drawn along by the flood like the rest of us … And Gawain wouldn’t be there. He knew that, too … saw an image of everything, earth, sky, seas, all men sucked, swirled in a vast whirlpool into smoking, fuming, unguessed bottomlessness … “Yes,” he repeated back over his shoulder.

  Wista was coughing, holding a damp rag over his nose and mouth as the smoke billowed. The horses were skittish. The wind shifted and, past Grontler’s shoulder, he glimpsed a sight that left him trembling: the stream that ran alongside the road was literally choked with the dead. The water oozed and flowed and spread to work its slow way around. A few drifted slowly, rolling a few feet at a time.

  “Lord Jesus!” He breathed, muffled into the cloth.

  Hundreds and hundreds … the water running red … and then the smoke closed over again.

  “Lord Christ Jesus …”

  Grontler looked grim and restless. He wore his cloth knotted behind his neck.

  * * *

  Alienor and the children were keeping to the hills, staying above the smoke and clinging fog that poured steadily across the lowlands and collected in the valleys. She thought the whole world must be burning.

  They’d met a few panicked, soot-stained folk after leaving the man with the cart when his mules collapsed in the traces. Not long after, the strange knight (she never knew he was Parsival’s son) had spoken with them on the road.