Broaditch sat up, realizing the lurching motions had ceased. He barely noticed the girl’s voice or Pleeka’s raving.
Well, he thought, here we are somewhere but where and for what? By Mary, I may regret the answer more than the question …
“Give me your hands, Ali,” he told her, painfully moving his fingers. “I’ll free you now.”
Clinschor had insisted on riding inside the only other closed wagon. He’d had them lay bedding on the floor and drape the inside walls with hangings, tattered garments, rags, anything they had (to him they seemed the rare and perfumed silks of his past) until a soft, smoothly hushed interior was created. He further commanded a single chair (though it had but three gnarled legs) to be nailed to the floor facing the single slit window in the rear door he’d had them make by removing a single board and now he sat there in the muffled obscurity peering out at the grayish-pale morning, watching the narrow strip of already passed field and hillock and forest flow away …
He felt suffused by peacefulness. Rocked slightly with the long swaying tilts of the quite stable wagon — unlike the one where the captives rolled and tossed. His big, soft hands gripped his knees and his stomach griped with pain, ground and squeezed his first substantial meal in weeks. Burped. The gas pocket remained. Grew with slow probings. Pushed deeper. He drew unsteady breath and sweated from the pain. Understood he was being attacked magically again … Burped … Which one of them, his mind wanted to know. Then he knew this was the work of Morgana the witch! Snarled as he bent forward in agony. Clenched and unclenched his long, wide fingers on his knees … strained … cursed when he couldn’t move the wind. Pictured her pale redheaded face and began muttering a spell which he periodically broke off in fresh attempts to fart as lines of marching, dark-robed Truemen passed across the slice of vision before him. Groaned, strained and muttered …
Once I reach the fortress, he kept reminding himself, my power will know no limit! Then Morgana, you’ll see what you’ll see! Gritted his teeth and pressed his bony knees tight together. Still no relief … Stepped up the spell’s intensity. Thought of others who would suffer beyond imagination when his time came: that blond fiend who’d cast him from the shining heights into that freezing, deadly, stinking muck! That one, that wizard’s form who’d defiled him and drowned him into unconsciousness so he’d forget who he was because he could not be slain by them. Vast, immortal beings had charge over him and he felt their unseen presence always. Shut his eyes and called them, sensed them reaching to him from far, far below the earth’s surface in their great halls … Parsival had thrown him down and he sent them his image and asked for his destruction … Parsival and Morgana, he sent, concentrating, swaying.
“Destroy them, O mighty ones!” he whispered. “Destroy them!”
Tightened his hands, pale, bony, wide forehead clenched, not even feeling a long, hot push of gas bubble and fizz slowly from his narrow, bony hams …
Outside, John, tall, erratic-moving, brushed his wild, stiff hair back with a nervous hand. He was walking, keeping pace with the captives’ wagon. His captains in their shagginess and robes were close around him.
They were just crossing a thin drool of river where the waterflow barely topped the wash of smooth, pale stones.
“A month behind,” a short, red-haired, bulge-eyed man commented as the two wagons banged and scraped over the crumbling banks, “this ford were knee deep.”
“There’s been no rain since,” another put in, a stout longbeard. “And Lord God has sent us great heat.”
“To fulfill what was written,” John broke in. “The world shall perish in great heat.”
“Praise His name,” the first asserted, crossing himself and rolling his eyes with a strange seeming of joy.
“We are the reapers, brothers,” John went on, jerking along, elbows tipping out after each step, splashing through the spatters of water that felt sweet on his feet, “of all the burning earth.” He headed for Clinschor’s wagon on the other side. In the first touch of sun he felt like iron on an anvil.
“And,” said a quick-faced redhead, “He has sent His oracle of flame to guide us! Praise Him!”
“Amen,” added the second, blotchy-cheeked, blinking, moundishly formed.
“What do we do next, Father John?” red hair called over as they topped the far bank and headed into the pale, sparse trees.
“He goes,” another said from under his beard, “to consult with the angel.”
John glanced back. His eyes were like polished pebbles. But not bright. The light seemed unimpacted in them.
“Each sign,” he told them, “will be greater than the last.”
His expression showed nothing but determination, abstract, unswerving. He turned to the slit in the wood. He looked neither reverent nor afraid, just intent, expectant under his bushy white-stained hair. “God,” he told the slit in the wagon, “hath given us meat and drink in the parched desert.”
“What is it?” the muffled voice rumbled within.
And John quoted:
“Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God: That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses and they that sit upon them, and the flesh of all men both free and bond, both small and great!”
Broaditch had freed Alienor and was crouched over Pleeka, who was kneeling now, facing a crack in the wall.
“Will you stir yourself to save yourself?” Broaditch demanded. Nothing, no response.
“What ails him now?” asked Alienor, holding the children as they tilted and slid towards the back. Though they couldn’t know it they were mounting the embankment of the drying stream. The sun was a hammer on the exterior and the stale air thickened. They were all soaked in sweat. Leena was silent as the young boy, now. The creases of sunlight lit them dimly. “How fare you, child?” she asked Leena. No reply. “And you, boy?” she went on.
“I want to go home,” he said.
“Ah.”
“Yet,” said the girl, suddenly, “he has none. There’s naught there save blood and ashes.”
And then she was silently praying again. Pushing the red away from her eyes, looking away from the sunbrightness at the crevices that held tints of that terrible color of flame and bleeding. Shut her eyes tight and rapidly, hoarsely prayed …
“What are these Truemen,” Broaditch hissed, “that they follow a crackbrain killer half-dead of plague and hunger? Tell me that, by Christ!” He was angry with disgust.
“They’ll give him food and drink,” Pleeka said into the lurching wood. “Never fear.”
“Truemen, shit!” said Broaditch. “We have to escape.” He pressed his eye to the plankspace and winced at the sun’s impact. Finally made out, in the blinding day, lines of them marching across parched, nearly treeless fields, the wagon rolling almost evenly now in the baking heat. He wiped his eyes and stared again. Couldn’t see more than a narrow strip.
“Where did they come from?” Alienor asked Pleeka. He twisted around. His face flickered with tics.
“Ah,” he said.
She touched his forehead, his wiry hair.
“Poor soul,” she said, “you trusted them.”
“Ah,” he agreed. “Him.”
“Him?”
“John … For God was with him. He gave blessing to many … many …”
Broaditch half-turned to take this in.
“Blessing,” she murmured. She thought what a blessing it would be to sit under the trees at twilight after supper. Have long Bym come visit with his pipes and all sing and nibble sweetcakes while the children ran and played in the mysterious dimness feeling the amazing promise of time.
“He laid his hand upon me,” Pleeka said, “and I felt the grace of Lord Jesus pass into me …”
She kept her hand resting high on his skull. He was more or less kneeling before her.
“You can open your heart,” she told him, “if you choose.”
&nb
sp; “Ah … gracious woman,” he sighed, very sane for the moment.
She felt tears and pity. No one could ever become accustomed to real suffering, she believed. Any lost soul, like a starving child, touched what was lost in your own person and would bring any but a stone to hot tears.
“Poor, broken man,” she murmured.
“He had the power and the word.”
“John?” Why must there be such men that all believe them and they prove ever false? John … Men ought not to believe other men but seek good only in their private hearts and if they find it keep silent …
“Where are they taking us?” Broaditch demanded. “What will they do?”
Pleeka said no more. Rested his face in his hands as the stifling wagon sagged and swayed on and Broaditch sat down in furious frustration.
“Well then?” Alienor put to him.
“Let it come dark,” he said, at length, “and we’ll see what may be done.”
If he reasoned, they don’t kill us by daylight first …
XXIX
Skalwere wouldn’t admit he was beaten and frustrated. He padded on through the twists, dips and knotting of corridors until he found himself by an outside wall where a long sunbeam tilted across the straight dusty hallway that ran into empty obscurity. He peered through a windowslit and saw deserted fields with the sun well above the bluish shimmer of horizon hills. No sound floated up to him. Here, in the upper levels, he felt safe from those dark devils of the night. This place was barren, he realized, long unused …
And Howtlande would feel safe too. Somewhere up here. He padded on. Up a circular stair now, in a wide tower … came out in a bright room, crouched forward, noting tracks in the floordust, moving with a slight smile and gritted teeth towards a closed, canopied bed that sat between two sunbright windows. He squinted, held his hand up to the shining as he teased back the faded silk hangings with his spearpoint, saw the glare blurred figure lying there.
“Bastard coward!” he hissed.
Thrust in a violent spasm of contempt and fury, shouting:
“Sleep on then!”
Then knowing it was wrong even before he felt the weapon pierce the too-thin body and no blood gushed to the pale covers on the pale lord, because the bearded face had fallen in on itself and was past pale to waxy bluish, and the whole frame shook stiffly under the blow and flopped stiffly when he yanked the spearhead free and now the corpse lay starfished on the elegant bed. He saw that one hand was missing and that the flesh was desiccated without real rot (except the eyes were not good to study) and he thought:
Why didn’t they bury him? What Briton strangeness. Because he couldn’t know that this was Unlea’s husband, left unburied when the plague decimated the castle folk …
Snarling he turned because he’d felt it and knew he should have felt it sooner and was raging at himself, thinking:
He let you believe he’s altogether a fool!
The massive figure in the doorway was already taking dead aim with a bow virtually pointblank, weary, determined, spiteful, flabby.
But he’ll have to talk, the fat hog, trust him not to just dispatch a man …
“So, Skalwere,” Howtlande said, aiming steady, “you traitor. The quarry takes the hunter, it seems.” Waited, aiming. “What say you to that? Hm, treacherous one?” the Viking crouched and watched. When the finger let go the string he would twist. There was always a chance he might not be mortally struck. “Silent, are you? I followed you.” Nodded. The voice was just under hysteria, the other noted, waiting. His mouth tasted like metal. Dry. “All is not lost, Skalwere, that’s the point. Which is why I’m loath to slay you. What think you of that?”
He wants companionship, Skalwere thought. Fire damn you and let’s have done! He was concentrating too hard to speak.
“I say all is not lost,” Howtlande insisted. “We bide our time.
Find a new company of stout lads, you see? the point is to live! What do you say to that? You’re too good a fellow to waste.”
He’s all cunning and no heart at all, Skalwere thought Why wants he life, what savor can it have for such a one? No sense in waiting …
His chances seemed better than he’d imagined.
“And betray the next crew too?” he wondered, playing now.
“What use to merely add our deaths to the rest?”
“We all die anyway. It’s all in how you do it, Briton.”
Dipped his knees fraction by fraction.
“Then why did you flee the north, Skalwere? For honors sake?” He grinned.
“Never mind that. Shoot and be damned.” the spear shook in his hand but by the time he raised it he’d be hit.
“Why make pretense?” Howtlande asked, feeling on surer ground now. This was something well within his province. “We’re fine fellows to prate of honor and death.”
Skalwere ground his teeth and clenched his fists white with hate.
“Coward,” he managed to say.
“Yes, yes, and you were brave to flee your homeland.”
There was foam at the Viking’s lip corners.
“I flee no more,” he mouthed. It will be seen … it will be seen … “We’ll be alive,” Howtlande was saying, quite unheard now, “and the living have all the advantages …” and broke off because the little, stooped man was coming straight on, spear leveled, not even charging, not even trying, coming step by step, eyes popped, and Howtlande realized this vicious barbarian was walled off from any touch save death’s, knew his arrow couldn’t miss at this range and suddenly feared the demon within the other might not die, thinking this wasn’t just a man stalking out of the dusty sunbeams, but his own mined fate, and he could have wept thinking how nothing ever really worked for him, not at home or with that wipeass Clinschor … and now this … this … always thwarted …
“Damn you!” he screamed at the stupid madness of his sullen fate as this final, senseless-as-stone representative of unreason lurched towards him.
Skalwere, not hearing, mind going on and on:
No more … no more … here’s an end … let this be the final holmgang, myself with myself in the deadly circle … Bared his teeth and howled like a wolf and charged …
While far below, the knight in the cellar was leaning on a pillar in fetid, total darkness. He had no idea how many hours he’d been wandering. It had been faintly amusing at first as each attempt at a straight course failed and left him groping from pillar to pillar unable to reach a wall without circling, so that this chamber seemed boundless … His thoughts bothered him. They were too vivid in the silent blankness, memories flashed unbidden … far away ringings and whistling … random images as if he were about to fall asleep …
He decided to try again. Why not? He let go of the stone support and tried one step at a time. The blackness was an actual pressure. He went on, counting his steps this time, trying that, and had reached ninety, groping, heart racing when he struggled not to run because he knew he’d hit a pillar (they weren’t actually round and had sharp edges) and then lost count and heard himself shouting like a frightened child, the cries sucked to nothingness as though the dark were a sponge of all sound and movement and he felt the panic growing …
No echo … no echo …
How far could the walls be? His body had just started to run while his reason hammered at it repeating he’d seen the building by day and it wasn’t that big except the panic replied: You’re far under the earth by now there’s magic here you’re on the road to hell … there’s no bottom … He was running now, staggered as his shoulder glanced, ringing, off stone with a sparking scrape and still he ran … then stopped, seeing light … panting, seeing light up ahead … warm, reddish-yellow gleaming.
Torchlight … even if it’s killers I’d rather die in a fight …
Closer, the light was diffused. Blinked, strained his vision. No torches … the illumination was stronger at the edges of sight and it revealed no forms, neither roof nor earth nor support, nor his hand held up
to his eyes either.
Witchlight, his mind decided.
And then they were there, emerging without perceptible edges from the darkness, faintly reddish, squat, massive, hinted. He drew his sword.
“In Christ’s name,” he said, “keep your distance, I adjure thee!”
We know thee, Galahad, something somehow said without a voice.
“What? I have lost that name forever.”
Now it hath found thee.
“Who are you?” He strained but made out only rounded, almost limbs and perhaps skulls with possible eyes.
What you see, came the reply.
“I see almost naught.”
This is the bottom of the world, Galahad.
“No. This is a cellar.” He was afraid but fighting back. That gave him security. “A cellar.”
Flee as thou wiliest, all the world will hold thee here. All the weight of it above. We will deliver unto thee all its measures and secrets, Galahad, and make thee great among men.
“I want none of it.”
At thy feet are rare and precious gems. But stoop and toad thy hands, knight. Stoop! Stoop!
He found himself bending and gathering his hands full. Stood up and filled his pouch until it hung heavy at his armored side.
Believe in us!
He trembled, losing the fight … losing … He found himself nodding. Others had spoken of the Holy Grail …
might such things be real and close at hand? Was that why he was led here, was there truth and purpose in the world still? Could men be led in fact by beings from beyond the veil and childhood tales tell soundly and reason fail? Was his life to be born new henceforth? … Trembled. Was it possible?
But stoop now and take up the food of eternal life!
He did, gathered handfuls soft and warm, a caressing, rich and soothing to his hot hands.
“Yes,” he murmured, “yes … yes …”
Pass on and behold the glories of our kingdom!
And he realized he’d been still walking. How long he couldn’t tell. He was weary …
The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3) Page 15
