The Grail War

by Richard Monaco

  The smoke closed in again. Everyone was choking now and the attacking mass and scattered defenders crawled, ran, staggered, climbed into the maze of woods. Sparks were streaking through the clouds overhead and dropping all around.

  Once ignited, Parsival realized, this country would go up like a waxed torch. It was better not to consider the prospect. All this happened at the same moment he turned to confront the author of that terrific blow. Gawain was just striking in front of him. Parsival recognized Lancelot, stocky, splashed with mud, blood, and soot, jointed helmet flung wide.

  “We meet again!” he crowed.

  Sooner than mere chance would allow, Parsival thought. These events seem designed. The insight stunned him; he sensed something close to him like a wordless voice, substanceless form, movement …

  The hot fog and stinging smoke boiled everywhere now. Breathing was largely coughing and wheezing. Horsemen and foot-soldiers loomed and struck blindly at each other. Eyes streamed tears, as if friend and foe were touched alike. The fighting was resolving into a general flight. Parsival glimpsed fire starting ahead of him now; Lancelot was unimpressed.

  “Come, Parsival-Bird-Head,” he roared over the mad din. Chopped one of his terrific short strokes, which Parsival blocked again, losing a slice of shield.

  Gawain crossed between them out of a blinding swirl of flame and fumes.

  “Ride, Parse!” he yelled. “I’ll hold this lump-wit off!”

  “Who’s this?” Lancelot demanded, waving a hand in front of his eyes in an effort to see clearly.

  “You sack of shit!” Gawain announced. “Remember me?”

  “Gawain,” the massively squat knight responded, “so you live. Well, I never liked you and your smart mouth. I used to tell the great king you were wretched, and don’t imagine he did not agree!”

  “Be fucked, you dog mess!” Gawain yelled with a sneering laugh. “You’re too short to live!” And he swept in at the other, hiding his sword behind his shield, then violently lunging into and under Lancelot’s savage down-cut. Lancelot twisted away, hurt in the lightly protected space under the armpit (Parsival saw the flash of sparks and blood), and Gawain reeled wide, helmet split, but head intact.

  What matter, Parsival thought, reach the Grail or no, I'm trapped … we're all trapped …

  He spurred forward to join Gawain, who’d closed with Lancelot again, crashing through the smoldering brambles. The horses were wild with fear. Parsival saw Lancelot score, then Gawain. Then a stream of flame cut him off from them as he heard someone shouting a curse … Now swarms of men (he first took them for spirits of the dead, on foot, weaponless, blackened, eyes rolling, wild and white) swept around him like a mounting sea: falling, rolling, falling, crawling, giving one sustained sound, as if a single monstrous beast were howling in pain, a sound that seemed the tormented outpouring of all the wracked, bleeding earth … Incredibly, Parsival and his horse were partly lifted and carried on up through the flaming and blinding smoke, the smaller trees bending and snapping in this titanic human flood … He could see nothing now. He heard the blaze fluttering and exploding behind and advancing on the sides in cyclonic fire-storm wind that veered madly … Sparks arched out of the billows, rebounded from his armor, streaked down into the tidal mass of maddened troops …

  So there's no choice again, he thought, struggling to keep his charger upright as it slipped and stumbled over the soldiers trampled under as those behind clambered over the heads in front. He was almost thankful for the smoke obscuring the scale of all this. And is there ever a choice? And does it matter? He grunted, yanking the reins, balancing, standing in the saddle. He felt that mysterious movement again, somehow a soothing, though unimaginable, touch … felt (as the searing winds whipped, hot ashes rained, flames lashed, and the hosts became one bellowing voice of pain and terror) at ease, felt carried safely along, felt he could save himself, store his still-gathering power for the destination that the mass of all the world seemed lifting and bearing him onto.

  Broaditch led them into the vapors, up the tangled slopes and cuts. He couldn’t walk thirty feet in any direction without running into a netted thicket or gully or wall of massed trees … Valit and the woman were panting in his wake. He felt free and light, partly because he wasn’t going to think about this. He was done with worrying about the point of anything. He was going to react, plow ahead, and take it as it came …

  It seemed that every time he looked up, another impassable obstacle loomed through the mist smoke. Now he knelt on a ridge beside Valit, each helping heave Irmree up and over and she punctuated her gasping with Teutonic expletives … Next they had to shoulder her from between two trees … Then Valit had to be pulled from a freezing cold stream, where he’d sunk to his chin.

  Blinded (as the proportion of the smoke in the fog suddenly increased) for several minutes, they crept on all fours along a cliff face, sweating, inching forward, steaming clouds rising from vast depths, Valit continually committing himself to his maker, until Irmree (whose breasts and belly virtually touched ground as she crept) misplaced one knee and tripped, exclaimed, and rolled over and vanished as Valit cried out, “After all this trouble, I lose her like this!”

  And then he saw her stand up, as if floating in space, behind what turned out to be not a cliff, hut a curve of rock … finally, crawling again, this time over a rushing river on a fallen tree, which Broaditch remarked was to a footbridge what a straw was to a spear …

  On the far side they discovered they were actually on a road.

  It's possible, Broaditch thought, it's really possible, but, my God, how faith needs constant proof … It seems the weakest link between God and men, or it fades and flickers like a hero's fame … He followed this line: because faith expects, but a miracle is always a surprise. Whoever expects providence is eternally disappointed until he despairs and then with a shock he’s saved again …

  “Which way?” Valit said. Irmree was lying on her back, breathing immensely. Broaditch had just discovered this was a crossroads. He was smiling.

  “And now,” he said aloud, though for no particular reason, “it’s time to waver again.”

  “Which way?”

  “Well, lad,” he replied, “these vile, reeking clouds seem to come equally well down either road.”

  “Hark!” Valit said, cupping a hand to his ear. “What’s that?”

  “A horse,” Broaditch answered, reasonably, listening, “and I have little doubt a rider — a knight.”

  “Why so?”

  “Listen.”

  There was a faint pinging of steel in rhythm with the cantering clop-clop approaching down the left fork.

  Broaditch was unsurprised. For if he had been brought to this spot by all the forces of time and heaven, then this was inevitable. If, despite everything, the great machine was run on chance, it was just a meaningless rider and they were all lost in probably every possible sense … He smiled as the single horseman, sealed solidly in his armor, melted into view from the insubstantial flow.

  Broaditch’s expert eye noted the rider was holding a rather thin spear, for a knight. It seemed light even for a man-at-arms. He wore bright plate armor and his shield showed a single dove in flight, remarkably worked in gold.

  He halted the charger and threw back his visor.

  “How did you reach so far?” he said, surprised. “Is he with you? Is it possible? I am Sir Hinct. I have it, as you see …” They broke, frowning. “Name yourselves,” he suddenly demanded. “What is that sow doing there?” he asked, indicating Irmree. “Is she dead?”

  Valit squinted one eye slyly, then hedged forward.

  “Sir knight,” Broaditch said, careful, watchful, already convinced this meeting had a meaning. The knight seemed uneasy, guilty. “Sir knight, we are travelers looking for our destination.”

  “What destination is that, varlet?” The knight’s manner was changed. He was nervous and hostile now.

  “The castle.”

  “Hah. Which
castle, sirrah?”

  “When last I saw it” — which happened to have been in at least a dream, if nothing more — “it shown with a splendor beyond description.”

  “You speak well, peasant. Are you a schoolman out of robes?”

  Broaditch shook his head.

  “A traveler, merely, sir knight.”

  “So … well, know that I am a messenger of that castle and … Passed you any other on the road here?”

  Before Broaditch could explain that they’d just found the road, Valit was seizing his first opportunity with an expression of sly determination and affected sincerity. He sidled closer to the mounted man and said, “Sir, I can see you’ve a long way to go.” He pointed. “Consider that woman there, soft, I say, in all her parts. For a few silver coins she will …”

  “Silver what?” the man exploded.

  “Coppers, my lord, sir, mere coppers!” he instantly amended as wide-eyed Broaditch audited this exchange.

  His lord sir nearly caught his crown with the spear haft, would have for a certainty despite Valit’s skittering backward, except that the warrior checked the swing (Broaditch observed) just enough to miss as a kind of afterthought.

  Why? He never meant to ease that blow, yet he did, Broaditch thought. After being offered the rent of Irmree in even foggy weather, I’d have used the pointed end if it came to that …

  “Out of my path, base-born scum,” the furious man snarled, rearing his horse as Broaditch, staying just at the rim of his range, leaned very lightly on his staff.

  “You have poor aim,” he commented, trying to carefully calculate the level of response he’d get. He upped it: “You must be ill-practiced, sir knight of the skinny lance.”

  “You bastard oaf! Learn to curb your tongue before your betters!”

  And with a snarl of social outrage he whipped up the spear, checked himself (for all his fury), and awkwardly went for his sword instead, changing hands, and something told Broaditch this was the beginning of why (again unless meaningless) he’d been herded, floated, and driven here …

  The knight contented himself with brandishing the blade, glancing nervously back the way he’d just come into the blank mists.

  “Constrain your tongue,” he advised.

  “You’ll never find him the way you’re going,” Broaditch tried, shrewdly, testing. “And what,” he went on, heart in mouth, “if you should lose what you bear?”

  The fellow’s gesture clearly revealed it was the spear that mattered: old, rusty-tipped, crudely fashioned.

  “The enemy is alert,” Broaditch lied on, bolder, watchful.

  “Why must you inflame him?” Valit interjected fearfully. He was poised to run, standing back by Irmree, who’d just risen to sit and stare dully.

  The knight was suddenly calm and leaned down in earnest.

  “And should I pass it on to you for safety's sake?” he asked quietly. “Before I am run down?”

  Broaditch knew his improvisation had gone wrong.

  “Is that your thought, sir?” he attempted.

  “You foul dog!” The horseman zipped a long, looping cut that nearly took his mark cold. The raised staff, as it was riven, barely deflected the stroke. Broaditch realized he could run into the murky curtain surrounding them, but that was wrong, because if they’d met for that invisible purpose, this was his single chance and function, and if he missed it he became just a wandering, disaffected, unsatisfied ex-serf and farmer probably doomed, anyway … this a wordless flash as he was already leaping (Valit shouting something far, far away at the rim of the moment) in and (nothing clever) simply shoving with all his remarkable strength and battle skill so that the knight tipped wildly, surprised, flailing the spear and sword in an attempt to right himself as his opponent reached under and smacked the charger’s testicles with one big fist and, staying close as it violently bucked, caught the spear with his other hand, whole body stunned by the contact, and (even as he rebounded from the horse’s massive mesh armor) for an instant he could look out from himself like an expanding bubble, seeing everywhere at once, and though everything in the world was moving, yet (to him) on an indescribable level, it was still and he had forever to be aware of each slightest movement: it. was terrifying and magnificent, and the fog smoke, and even the ground, became like clear, sparkling water to his vision; the knight was still falling from the horse, which was still charging away; Valit was on his knees, as if praying; Irmree stood upright … His vision expanded and he saw Alienor racing in a maze of flame, clutching their daughter to herself … Parsival on a struggling horse borne by a mass of panicked, blinded, roasting men … Everything was lit by a central radiance, as if the sun had fallen to earth and was shining through the surrounding woods, and he glimpsed the castle in the overwhelming light and the precise road that wound and doubled and crisscrossed from this point to there: that light lit worms crawling under the earth, insects in the bark of trees, swimming fish, high-flying birds that beat to escape the swirling smoke, and he saw the fire was nothing, all wispy, ineffectual … saw everything bathed in the streaming glow, and he had no fear for himself or any creature because he perceived they could all melt into this brightness where time was a shell of life, a faded shadow … He saw they were all safe forever, felt a joyful weeping everywhere, felt the flowers waiting in their seeds, the inner names of countless leaves to come … pictured himself floating through the transparent, shatteringly refracting walls, merging into the pulsing rainbowed golden heart that beat and beat and breathed living sparks into all flimsy, fluttering, staggering life … He knew he was seeing the Grail, the radiance of the Grail …

  The ground clubbed him hard. The spear rolled a foot from his grip. The knight was just hitting with a rolling, ringing crash. The hard, smoking world slammed back with a cold shock.

  He sat up, dazed, catching his breath, the horse already gone, a diminishing, muffled rattle of hoof-beats …

  He hesitated, then shut his eyes and picked up the spear, waiting, holding his breath, afraid of it happening and not happening again … nothing … waited … nothing, just the smooth wood in his calloused fingers.

  He stood up, motioned the other two to follow, and moved up the road the knight had emerged from. The noble gentleman was struggling, wobbling to his feet, shouting something too distorted by his headpiece to make out, hunting for his sword.

  Then, as the three of them vanished into the mist and he began a halting pursuit, limping, he yelled, “Wait …! Come back, you filth …! Come back here …!”

  Grontler gestured at a line of Saracens filing past into the swirling dark afternoon.

  “You got to give the great lord his bloody due,” he opinioned to Wista. “He brought all them swart, fucked devils thousands of miles to die here. You got to give him his due.”

  “Why are you here?” Wista suddenly asked.

  “Eh? Why?” He twisted around in his saddle to ponder the young man. Both their faces were caked black.

  “Why do you fight? What do you gain?”

  “The pay, you simple bitch’s boy,” Grontler said affably. “What else, then?”

  “Are they all here for pay?”

  “How in hell do I tell that? They are unless they be fucked fools.”

  “All this,” the young man murmured, “for pay?”

  Grontler didn’t hear this. A moment later he spotted Lohengrin riding helmetless a little apart from a cluster of high-ranking lords. A mass of troops stretched away beyond them in the general, condensing haze.

  Wista had mixed feelings and intense nervousness standing face to face with his busy-haired, hawk-faced lord. They’d just dismounted by a trickle of stream to give the mounts a drink and refill water-skins. The army was crashing through the forest all around through the deepening smoke haze.

  “The beasts won’t touch it,” one of the knights was reporting to Lohengrin, who then strode a few steps to squint at the problem. He stripped off his gauntlet, stooped, and dipped his palm, then let the
liquid run out through his fingers. Wista shuddered. The hand was stained dark crimson.

  “The earth herself bleeds,” Lohengrin remarked, shaking his fingers, then wiping them on his sooty cloak. The result was a bloody mud and no improvement.

  “I have seen such things,” Wista told him, coming close. This was his first chance to really speak since being ordered to fall in behind. “I … I cannot find a tongue to …”

  “Peace,” Lohengrin said grimly. “I have seen the same things.”

  “It is one thing to be cruel and murderous, as you were, but this …”

  “Peace!”

  “They are destroying everything … everything!”

  “Not ‘they,’ Wista the wistful.” His sarcasm was a reflex. “Not they — we.”

  “You dare to say so?” Wista was beyond being stunned, he’d thought. “You can accept … this …this …”

  “Here you struggle on for words you have not, boy, consider …” He strode back and remounted. Wista was fascinated by the pale-streaked, black-bloody hand. He stared at it. He swung up onto his own horse, still staring. Lohengrin didn’t replace the mesh gauntlet yet and took up the reins with the smeared fingers. “ … consider this is the end of a world and the start of a new.”

  Wista blinked himself out of his reverie but kept watching the hand in spite of himself: it seemed (and he felt wild and suddenly dizzy now) like claws with life of their own … His mind kept separating it from the arm and man, and it seemed to grip and twist independently … All the rest was closed in steel and this alone was flesh … He half-expected it to do some sudden, terrible thing … blinked hard but remained light-headed and anxious.

  “New … ?” he wondered. “New what?”

  “New world. A new world. A better one.”

  “What?!” He snapped out of it violently. “Are you come mad, lord Lohengrin? What profit is there in …” He found his voice and words now, full, feral, outraged. “ … in this blood and ashes!? Have you power to order this?! What are you? A thing? A crawling thing unspeakable?! A devil? I thought you but cruel and mistook in the shadow of your great sire, but, God’s wounds” — Wista’s voice broke with weeping in his misery and fury — “God … but what are you? What are you! What?! What?! What?!”