The Grail War

by Richard Monaco

  “None that I know of, Lord Master,” came the tinny reply. “But under these conditions …”

  “All are crushed!” the leader boomed with sudden fury. “And all will be!” he raged at the fragment of a man visible through the opening.

  The wheeled fortress suddenly pitched violently and Clinschor rocked in his seat.

  Lohengrin felt a little giddy. He touched the side of his skull. It hurt. The blood was drying, thickening. The blow, he decided, had affected him … or was there some subtle narcotic in these incredible, stinging perfumes? His vision and hearing seemed to be aware of everything from a hushed distance … nothing seemed disturbing, all things seemed brightly possible … the world seemed to shrink to a toy he could hold within the expanding vastness of himself, a clay his hands could shape … He felt peaceful and almost closed his eyes, except Clinschor’s voice kept pulling him back to the moment.

  “Deaths feed the coming life as sacred sticks feed a sacred fire!”

  Sacred sticks? Lohengrin 'thought from his floaty heights.

  “Execute any man who turns back,” the master was commanding. Then he looked at Lohengrin. His eyes tracked back and forth, seeming feverish. He didn’t seem to hear the faint outcry beyond the padded, muffled iron where the knight was shouting.

  “Back? Turn back?! How can anybody turn back? The flames are behind us now!”

  Clinschor reached over and slammed a hinged, silk-padded wedge that slid neatly into the embrasure. The interior was suddenly shocked with silence.

  “Once a field is clear,” he said at Lohengrin, “we can plant as we choose.” His lieutenant must have looked puzzled, for the mighty leader went on to explain: “I’m hardened to death. I am not worried about how many must die. The survivors will be fit men.”

  Lohengrin sort of nodded. His brain felt hot and sluggish. He watched, fascinated, the almost colorless eyes of the conqueror, which seemed to flicker with fitful inner lights, went utterly empty, and, a moment later, were hypnotic, commanding … Lohengrin touched his own blurred eye lightly. He suddenly realized, distantly, that he would have to move his bowels soon. He wondered if it could be done without going outside.

  In answer to a sharp rapping, Clinschor flung open the small slit again.

  “What is it, Howtlande?”

  Lohengrin glimpsed the fat face framed in the soot-blackened helmet. All the gold and gems were blotted over. The streaked face was sweating. For some reason it was surprisingly cool inside, no doubt more wizardry.

  “Great master,” Howtlande was crying out, “my army is lost … lost …!” His eyes were wild. “Only a handful escaped … I — ”

  “Why are you alive, then?” the leader demanded.

  “I rode to report, I — ”

  “Has the road been located?”

  “I know not, master. In the confusion and burnings, I — ”

  “Fool!” he glanced at Lohengrin. “I remain surrounded by fools!” He stood up, swaying with the tilts of carriage and shouted through a speaking tube near the low, curved ceiling, “I want the road found! We have the map! No excuses!” He sat down facing Lohengrin again, frowning with an intensity of rancor that firmed his loose jowls. Pale fingers drummed and drummed on the table-top. Lohengrin had a fleeting impression that this all had begun as an act to overawe others and by repetition had become part of him … For a moment he felt a strange, abstract fear seeing himself mirrored in that perception as a walking, breathing collection of old poses and acts … He shook his head to try and clear it. It hurt. He definitely needed to relieve himself … the pitching motion, the cloying, sweet air … He tried to focus the still-blurred eye on the leader. The other clearly saw the pale fury of the face that seemed to hang suspended, leaning into the ruby-reddish light, mouth corners flickering with relentless inner tension.

  He doesn't care if everyone dies, Lohengrin thought … And then: Do I …? He blinked, still felt remote … struggled to his knees and stayed there, swaying. Clinschor seemed unaware of it, lost in some inner hollow-eyed concentration. Only the large, spidering fingers stirred.

  Suddenly the voice boomed and filled the padded space: “I have sacrificed everything for this …! I accept all powers for myself.” He was shaking, Lohengrin saw, still kneeling, as if in prayer, as what he took for a fit began: Clinschor’s fists hit the boards with a crash and vibrated the rest of his body, his eyes rolled back, and his lips parted. An intricate, delicately worked golden goblet began to vibrate and clatteringly walked the length of the table to noiselessly drop, splashing a red stain of wine on the deep golden rug. “Pass all power through me!” he cried.

  Clinschor was chanting now, increasingly roaring until Lohengrin felt his body and head pounding in unbearable accord … He struggled first to stand, then to crawl away, telling himself it was the close, drugged air and the blow Wista had given him … weakened him … even as his swaying body started to pick up the rhythm of the maddening chant that seemed to suspend and drown out all else … and he felt himself starting to hoarsely bellow back, caught in the incredible crescendo (that the remaining free part of his mind believed would never stop, would mount beyond the threshold of death), and this could not be a human throat voicing what he now rocked and screamed in time with, faster, faster, faster.

  “ … row-row-row-row-row-row-row-row-row …”

  He was certain the massive, rolling fortress itself was ringing like a squat black bell with it, that the pitchings were no longer connected with the ground, that the earth had dissolved away and they were riding a river of darkness that irresistibly poured into the blazing world, driving all things back, sucking away their color, before passing through the Lord Master like dark light through a black lens, then slashing into the misty earth, laying everything darkly bare before them, and he seemed to see a shape of walls, towers sinking into that river of abyss, falling, dissolving … Lohengrin tried to cry out in terror, tried to twist away, but his own sound held him and he knelt and bobbed, as if in genuflection, and raged the incantation with total body and mind, foaming a little, his voice harsher and harsher, drawn into a continuous snarling as Clinschor vibrated with such intensity that one arm of his seat snapped and flew into the far wall and the black servant lay prostrate, hands pressed to his ears, muffling himself into the face-deep pile …

  Wista lay facing upward on the smoking ground. Violent winds whipped the choking fumes and dry trees. Sparks rained down, caught in his clothing, brushed his flesh, ignited his loose hair. He heard nothing but felt the terrible pressure of the heat all around. He seemed sunk in a pool of silence. With every racked breath, he felt the blood flow out of his chest. There was no pain, only the flames and silence …

  He accepted it all very naturally … understood … made no effort to move … was aware of the functions of his body separating, draining away … each eye blink seeming a miracle …

  Frell … he didn’t want to go to what waited yet, so his mind went to her … Would she survive? Marry? Bear children? Could he have made her pregnant? Then he tried to think about what he’d done or tried to do … and he would do it again, knowing the end, he’d follow Lohengrin into hell to strike at him because he'd seen too much … too much … he admitted he cared for him, too, but there was limit to all things, and right or wrong, he’d do it again … Someone had to because the wound that mattered may not have been made by his sword only … yes … he saw that, blinking … someone had to wound Lohengrin in a way no one ever had … but these things were already far away and seemed to belong to someone else … The fire and the silence were indistinguishable from his consciousness now and his roasting body was the flaming earth, too … He watched all this in perfect silence … But was she carrying his child …? His lips may have slightly moved even as his pooling blood streamed and his clothes flared … His lips tried to pray for her or to call to her … saw this lovely girl bearing away the moment, their moment, to let it grow and be nourished from her very self … that their joint life
and brief touch would move and breathe and grow and carry along its own magic time and pass into days and sights in an intimacy he could never know … And he knew (though there was really no he left to speak of, but simply this ambient understanding) that he died then, too, and before that and before that, that dying was to offer space to life and a shape of yourself … and the last thing was a picture that gleamed bright and vivid: green glow, blue skies, easy winds, fresh, opening fields of spring into hazy distances, smells, rich, fertile warmth (the flames faded to misty shadows), Frell sitting by a sky-shimmering stream where fish darted, flicked, and a bare-topped child stood with a willow wand staring through his reflection at the fleeting, clear and shadowed, sun-lanced, mysterious water, and was there himself, reaching into all of it, into them both like a wind of music — that was the last thing …

  Hail and rain seemed to fall in one solid sheet. The impact came on a gusting wind that hammered Parsival harder than a good jousting blow and he reeled in the saddle, metal ringing, leather cracking, charger plunging in terror as the smoke was washed away by an equally impenetrable, rattling deluge as trees and sky leaped and tilted in the crashing flare of lightning bolts that flailed the earth and ripped the air, and then his rearing mount, towering above him, caught a hissing blast on the head armor (saved the falling rider) that spasmed it, burst, and burned to the ground, while to him, as he sailed through raging space, heaven had exploded in one blinding ball of fury and his mind believed that since he was living and flying that all the power had run into him and that heaven’s thunders and lightnings would henceforth be gathered within his blood and bones … He blacked out only briefly when he hit the stony earth …

  He awoke struggling, gasping, trying to swim up to air from under the water that was drowning him (as if, his thought flashed, he was back before Gawain freed him from the stream bottom) opened his eyes, helmetless, the terrific rain beating, stinging his face, filling his mouth and nose. He sat up, coughing and spitting … A flood was already pouring down the hillside, cutting a stream channel into the twisting, narrow roadway.

  He stood up, rain spraying from back and shoulders and the coif of undermail that covered his head. He looked but couldn’t locate the helmet, his father’s … He looked around: as far as he could see (twenty-five to fifty yards, at best), the fire had been drenched and beaten out. A great mass of steam was rising, billowed and ripped by the gales.

  His strength, he discovered, was still there. He assumed he was very near the end now. This storm, no doubt, had just introduced the final act. He hadn’t died and wasn’t particularly surprised. Each event had carried him closer to whatever it was … The Grail? Was it really the Grail at all …? He couldn’t have said … It seemed absurd to consider, a vague idea, a dream … He was going on, because what he thought and didn’t think had nothing to do with it …

  Heading up the road, he leaned into the flying downpour, crossing flash floods that sprayed around his shins so that at times he waded up the hillside. He’d been called, he decided, so it couldn’t help but find him … He accepted everything now … Everyone was dead or forever lost to him, and what hadn’t burned was drowning: mother, wife, children, friends … the few friends … Unlea … all ghosts, all lost … so now with a kind of indifference (as if he were always dying and remote) he carried the power, perfectly sure this winding way would come out at the castle he blundered into and out of over two decades before … He passed a log barricade that had become a waterfall. A knight with the dove crest dangled there, upside down, legs somehow caught above, arms and body flopping in the rushing water. He wondered what had killed him … Lightning? The rush of water … ?

  He slogged on through the running mud into the slashing storm, digging steel-shod feet into the steepening slope, squinting ahead, hand flung up … and he kept seeing, as from a distance, a trembling, floating summertime of bluish fields and mirroring rivers, a startling world drenched with golden flowers that were like staring into the sun at times … As he climbed he watched those past days reel by: the boy in the coarse hides of a fool riding a bent, bowed horse into the mornings, long, scintillant blond hair stirred by the mild breezes, riding and melting into the concentrated color and lushness of the season, becoming an exhalation, a fullness, a glory forever, an awakening and glory forever …

  On impulse he turned off the road and climbed a short, steep, slippery cliff face. On top he was under a massed netting of towering pines that hushed the storm that lashed only high up in its branches. A few trickles and sprays were leaking through: the bulk of the ferocious downpour was outward. Through a break in the forest, he looked back and saw the still-unburned and fir-green ridges that sloped steeply down to the valley, where masses of steam and smolder spread wider and wider like a phantasmal sea under the monstrous clouds above. Far beyond he thought he saw a faint, traced line of reddish-gold that might have been the remotest of all sunsets. It was gone, covered again …

  It was close to dark under the roof of spiny foliage. The great boles swayed and creaked. He felt he was getting close. He suspected these were the trees he’d seen from the window of the Grail castle when he’d tried to lean out and struck his forehead on the transparent glass, the first he’d encountered. He hummed faintly … Join the beginning and the end of roads, one fate was as good as another because … because they’d all been shadows, beautiful and dark, sweet and bitter, and he knew, finally, that he sought neither dream nor waking and aimed for a place no map outlined, no path led to, that all this warring of earth, man, and sky left untouched … He suddenly began to weep here, sheltered from the relentless torrents without, and his eyes ran tear after tear, and his mind repeated: I love them … all of them … all those pained, haunted, endlessly grieving shadows … It spoke from everywhere and nowhere … He wept with loving, but for no single memory, no solitary image … And so he walked in the silence of pines and with love, power, and sadness wept … wept …

  Unlea was watching her husband. She knew he was awake in the hushed, fading twilight. She sat by the window arch, looking toward the vaguely outlined bed, where he lay gaunt and pale, almost at death.

  She knew he was awake. Though he said nothing, she felt his eyes … The arm that ended too abruptly in silken bandages lay folded over his chest.

  “I’m here,” she said again, voice swallowed in the depths of the huge room. She didn’t expect an answer.

  She glanced through the window for a moment: saw the stretch of vague, glowing fields and the jet darkness gathered on the far horizon in vast clouds … The chamber was high in the tower and she could see (though the sun had already set) the faintly traced, widely curving river she’d finally followed home … Her eyes filled with lucent, glimmering, dimming illumination … The night bugs were beginning to drone in the distance … Then she turned back to the shadowed room that seemed murkier by contrast with the grayish glow outside.

  Whatever she was thinking or remembering, she only looked at the pale shadow of her husband and said, “I am here,” somewhat above a whisper. And she waited quietly in the hush of time and his silence …

  Alienor, the children, and lanky Lampic were walking parallel to the flank of the fire storm on the open fields. Where the trees ended drew a clear border to the desolation …

  The sky to the east was streaked with pale greenish-blue, and every so often a wink of honey-glowing sunlight flashed through. To the northwest they could see the tide of smoke advancing as an immense, overspreading, towering, swirling, mushrooming mass mounting higher than where the highest storm clouds themselves boiled, laced with lightning, all widening (she thought) like a dye stain in a basin of water as heaven and earth joined in black and red fury …

  As they climbed a rolling pasture, they could actually see the charred border of the fields like a line literally drawn …

  Broaditch saw the churning storm front, and as the first erratic winds whipped dry weeds and creaked branches, he knew he had to hurry, that the moment was desperat
e. He could just see a battlement above the pine woods that closed around the place, insubstantial and drifting in and out of view through the vapors, as if it alternately dissolved and re-manifested …

  “I must speed ahead,” he told Valit, who was squinting down the bending path. Irmree stood beside him.

  “There’s no going on this way,” Valit said. “It’s all burning up.” This was the first reasonable sight of the holocaust they’d had.

  “I’ll go alone. You wait here, if it please you.”

  “Aye. Or go chat with the murderous bastard behind us, eh?” Valit spat into the wind, then wiped his face. “You’d like that, eh?”

  “No.”

  He’s a boy when all’s said and done … an old friend’s son and a little piece of mine, too … with his fool ideas and dreams of profit … He smiled warmly. He gripped Valit’s arm. He’s much like the rest of us poor fools and bastards., … Why, what a world he has to face and how little of it will be left … for him … or my own …

  He thought again about his children. He remembered squatting with them in the sunlight under fresh skies, picking small stones out of the rough furrows where the wheat was in, their short hands poking in the rich, warm earth, their grave intentness: Tikla standing on the hill slope above the field near an ancient pair of large shade trees, leaping up and down, barefoot, half-naked, a scattering of white flowers at her feet, bouncing herself off the resilient turf, leaping, hair flying out, arms flapping, leaping as if she meant to fly (or wouldn’t have been surprised), playing bird, perhaps, up … up … up … again … again … again … abandoned to the air …

  He held Valit firmly by both shoulders and looked into his somewhat squinty face. He shook his windblown hair from his eyes.

  “God keep you, lad,” he said with thick-voiced emotion that surprised and puzzled Valit, though he nodded.