Bohort looked horrified. "How can you claim the Holy Grail is a feminine symbol?"
And I'm like, "Isn't it a treasure that all men seek?"
Joe goes, "Wellll, yes."
"There's more," I go. I was getting into this. I don't know if I got all my facts straight, though, 'cause like I was trying to remember what I learned from Miss Stickney in sophomore Women's Studies. "The Three Sisters are the counterparts of your divine Trinity. They show up everywhere: The Triple Goddess, the Norns, the three Graces, the three witches in MacBeth, the three cauldrons of Wise Blood that Odin stole, there's no end to it."
There was silence for a while. Finally Bohort spoke up. "It doesn't make any difference, anyway," he said. "Sir Galahad achieved the Saint Graal because he was the only knight of the Round Table who was still a maiden."
"Galahad?" I go. "Like a virgin?"
"Certes," goes Joe. "Only a person untainted by profane love may long to see such a holy relic."
"Well," I go, drawing myself up to my full height, which is impressive to these short little ancestors of ours. "I myself am a maiden and about as taintless as you can get. But if you tell anybody—anybody—I'll damn well tear your lips off." I had been meaning to lose my virginity, Bits, but I'd been busy, first with you know school and all, then with hacking apart green Martians and God knows what. Now it looked like hooray being a virgin was going to get me somewhere.
"As my brother said," goes Joe, "Sir Galahad achieved the Saint Graal, following which it was removed unto Heaven forever. Now and then someone like Lancelot will have a vision of it, but not physical contact."
"And who knows from visions?" I go. "Jeez, I've had some visions-"
"So in these latter days the Queste has another goal," goes Bohort.
I felt my eyes narrowing like suspiciously. "And what may that be?" "The Saint Nappie," goes Bohort. "The berry bowl used by Jesus at the Last Supper."
"Berry bowl?" I go. See, I was like fabulously dubious. "I don't remember berries at the Last Supper. I mean, if they'd had berries, they'd be part of the Catholic mass now, wouldn't they? Between the bread and wine?"
"I suppose," goes Bohort. "But I didn't say they had berries. I said they had a six-inch bowl. It is part of the Mystery what the bowl contained."
"Could've been rose water," goes Joe.
"Could've been Judas's petty cash bowl," I go.
Silence again.
"And the Saint Nappie?" I go.
"It is lodged on Earth, man wot not where. Perhaps it rests within the Castle of Seemly Joy, awaiting those who may find that holy shrine," goes Bohort.
I glanced from one to the other, a determined look on my face and the light of true conviction in my eyes. "Follow me, men!" I cried. I felt kind of like Gregory Peck in Pork Chop Hill. Ever since I first whooshed my way to Mars, I've known that I was born to command—and like not only command, but I was born to rule. I saw myself as a female Odysseus, wandering hither and yon in search of my own true love, fighting the worst battles against overwhelming odds and emerging all, you know, triumphant and stuff. Then someday I'd go found my own city and rule it benevolently until it was time for me to disappear magically and then there'd be all these like too strenuous to believe myths about where I was buried and how I was just waiting to return whenever my realm needed me no matter how many centuries had passed. See, I did too read that Joseph Campbell stuff. And I thought it was pretty dumb. I mean, don't you wonder what his wife thought about it all, huh?
Anyway. I had the feeling that there was something ho daddy weird happening around me because we'd been like making tracks for hours and I'd already been involved in one deadly combat, and I was still wide awake, I wasn't tired or hungry or thirsty, I didn't even have to pee. And jeez, Bits, you know my bladder's about the size of a walnut. So I had the feeling that I was caught up in some eldritch mystical Queste, on account of you never hear of like Sir Perceval having to stop and pee.
The trees—heavy oak action all around—arched over us like a green tunnel. It was shadowy and quiet—too quiet, like just before one of the camp counselors gets his head cut off by a chainsaw in a Friday the 13th movie. There was, as Mr. Stumpf would say, Gloomigkeit all over the place. Of course, I was concerned only for my fellow travelers, who did not have my strict and noble warrior woman code of behavior to fall back on. Yeah, huh.
Okay, like the road turned sharply to the right, and when we rounded the bend, there was this like rock right in the middle of our path. "Gladsome tidings!" goes Bohort. Like he was such an enthusiastic dude I wanted to slap him silly sometimes.
"Pardonnez moi," I go, "but what is so gladsome about a boulder in the road?"
"Why, good my lady," goes Joe, "mark you not it is a magic boulder?"
"I mark nothing, pal," I go. "All I see is something that would rip the bottom out of any wagon wants to come by this place. And if that rock has been sitting here all this time without somebody digging it up and heaving it off to the side, I think probably no wagon ever did come by here. That leaves me with like one question: Then what is this road for, if nobody ever comes by here?"
"It is a magic stone, forsooth, and a magic road," Bohort took pleasure in assuring me.
"A magic stone. I spieth nothing in the way of an enchanted sword sticking out of it. Or am I too late for that?"
Bohort and Joe thought that was somewhat amusing and uttered like several ha ha's each. Then Joe goes, "Look thou not upon the stone, yet verily beneath it."
"Under the stone," I go. "Lemme see if I got this straight. There's something really neat under this stone. Like worms, maybe. Or Japanese beetles. Or a trapdoor into a vast and eerie subterranean wonderland of fabulous riches and you know nightmarish Lovecraftian gel-creatures."
Bohort looked at Joe, and Joe looked at Bohort. They were smiling, but answer came there none.
I grumbled a little and hoofed it over to the boulder. I did my rally best, putting my mighty thews to work rocking the stone. I prayed to the Goddess, or any one-third of her that might be listening, for sufficient strength, but it was like N. G. No go, Bits, at least. I can think of two or three other things N. G. could stand for, how come you can't? You should watch "Wheel of Fortune" every once in a while, that's what you should do, huh.
Well, it was like plenty clear that I wasn't going to roll that rock out of the road. I thought about the problem for a while. Then—in the famous words of my role model, Wonder Woman, "Praise Hera!"—I had a sudden insight, you know? Ever happen to you, Bitsy? A sudden insight? No, I thought not. So what I did was, I used my multi-talented sword as a simple machine—no, not a pendulum. A lever. Wasn't it Einstein who said, "Give me a lever and a house in the country and I can move the world?" Or something like that. What do you mean, "fulcrum?" I'll use your head for a fulcrum, you don't let me finish my saga.
Well, to make a long story come to an end, I clean and jerked that boulder out of the dirt. Then I bent way down to see what Bohort and Joe had been talking about. It was a dirty number-ten window envelope with a sheet of paper inside. I took the paper out and read it. It said:
Hello, pilgrim!
Welcome to Clue #1! You've evidently surmounted the great difficulties put in your way, and you are to be congratulated! Now, if you keep up your courage (and stay pure! Pure is the way to go, whatever your disgusting fleshly senses may counsel you) you will soon acquire that which you heartily desire! So here it is, the first important clue!
The Saint Nappie rests on a deep blue satin pillow in the Great Hall of the Castle of Seemly Joy.
All best, and may God bless!
I crumpled the sheet of paper and the envelope into a ball and tucked them away in my utility pouch. A true barbarian swordsperson may revel in slaughter and all that kind of thing, but one does not litter the forest-ho.
"Now what?" I go.
"Onward!" cried Bohort. "Onward to the Castle of Seemly Joy!"
"What about the boulder?" I go.
"Oh," Joe goes in what you c
all your offhand manner, "someone will be by to reset it."
"With a new clue underneath?"
Joe looked at Bohort. "If that is the Lord's will," goes Bohort.
"Uh huh, you bet," I go. "The Goddess wouldn't have any part of this nonsense."
Before we'd traveled much further, Joe put his hand on my arm. "Forgive me, good my lady. I have a garment which will profit you much to don. It will mark you well as a holy pilgrim, and you will receive therefore the aid and succor of our allies."
He held out to me the very white schmatte in which I am even now encladded. I didn't think much of it at the time. I mean, no designer label at all, even on the inside! These two guys had never heard of the Talbots catalog. They probably never even heard of Lane Bryant, for God's sake!
So I took the raiment and garbed myself behind a set of bushes. I just like threw it on over my primitive but serviceable Ruler of the Everywhere gold bra and G-string. The white dress fit okay except it was snug across the you know ass, if we can speak freely. I would've liked to dab on a little Chanel #22—did I tell you I've moved up to Chanel now? Seems like I've never run into a single other warrior who wore Je Reviens. Not that I just follow the crowd or anything, Bits, but like who wants to be T. B. A. just because you smell wrong.
To Be Avoided, dear. Are you putting on fat between your ears, Bitsy? We used that one at Greenberg.
I'll be goddamned if I can remember what I was about to tell you. Maybe we can stop along here somewhere and have just the smallest little Bloody Mary? They're like just so good for you, too, you know, with all the vegetables and stuff. No? Too early? Ha, Bits, I think you'd positively freak if you saw how we savage fighters consume food and liquor shamelessly, in a free-flowing celebration of life and victory and not being pinned to the ground by a very sharp pointed thing.
Lemme see. Oh, yeah, like in another fifteen minutes or so we came to a falling down stone building. It looked like someplace the Vandals had lunch on their way to sack Rome, and they enjoyed the hospitality so much they made a point of trashing the place again on the way home. I looked at Joe and Bohort, and put forth the postulate that this, then, was the Castle of Seemly Joy, famed in song and legend.
They really shot me down, huh. "No, fair maiden," goes Bohort, "not so easily wilt thou arrive at that precious goal. This that thou beholdest is the Gladsome Abbey."
"Yeah, duh," I go. "It doesn't look so gladsome to me."
Joe shrugged. "There were more wonderful days, all long since," he goes. And like even if he didn't wink, he was implying it for all he was worth. I had to tread carefully here, Bits, 'cause I could sense Metaphorical Significance all over the place.
We went into the abbey, and boy howdy was I surprised that there wasn't any knightly dude in full battle array trying to stop us. There wasn't much of anybody, really. It looked worse on the inside: crumbling stone and fallen blocks, caved-in ceilings and shredded tapestries, scuffed and warped planking on the floor, rats scurrying around, and best of all nothing but moonlight to keep the orcs away.
We poked into one chamber after another and didn't see hide nor hair of any human residents. After we'd gone through ten or twelve rooms, I found a suspicious pool of light in one corner. I turned around and saw that a silver beam of moonlight glimmered through a chink high up on the wall. I could hardly believe our luck, that the moon just happened to be in position to illuminate the very corner that like just happened to also be indicated by a big, wide, bright red arrow painted about knee-high on an adjacent wall.
"How fortunate," goes Joe.
"Really," I go. "How about that."
"What do you think it means?" Bohort goes.
I just squinched my eyes shut in like, you know, mock pain. I didn't bother to answer him. Instead, I got fully into hacking away at the dry-rotted floor boards with Old Betsy. In like a few minutes, I'd biffed open a hole big enough to put my hand into, so I put my hand into it. What should I find but a small leather pouch with a drawstring cord! How thrilling, huh?
Joe goes, "I wot not what mayest in the bag be." Joe wot not a lot of things.
"Perhaps we'll find out," I go, giving them like this little up-on-Mount-Olympus sneer. I pulled the bag open, and inside was a golden key, wrapped in a piece of paper. The problem was that mice or whatnot had gotten to the bag and the paper long before I had. Now the paper said:
—key.
—may use it—
Good— —bless.
"What is it?" goes Joe.
I looked fully at him and did not blink. "It's a key, Joe," I go. "It's probably Clue #2. Maybe it unlocks something here in the abbey."
"Well, no," goes Bohort.
"How do you know that?" I go.
Bohort looked like a guy who had sent in his subscription money to Penthouse and started getting Architectural Digest by mistake. "It just doesn't look like it would, that's all," he goes. Pretty lame, huh?
So we bailed out of the abbey on account of I figured Bohort probably knew what he was talking about, even though he was just ever so grieved that he'd let it slip. We hit the Pearly Path again until we smacked up against the second Test.
It was a big hairy serpent. Oh my gawd, Bitsy, no, the snake didn't have like fur or anything. It was hairy. Hairy. It's slang, Bits. Oh, just figure it out. So anyway I go to work on the serpent, all the time fully realizing that this was a thinly disguised phallic threat to my maiden-hoodedness. Like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, huh? No big surprise that Eve was tempted by a big old charming male member, and like the mother of us all just couldn't resist. Of course, Bitsy, men wrote that book.
So I like lop the head of the snake and by golly two more grew back. I wasn't fighting a monster, I was fighting a literary illusion. I didn't have to lop any more heads to test my working hypothesis, so I went after the other end. I biffed off the snake's scaly tail, maybe eleven inches, enough for a whole 'nother meal if you'd wrap it in tin foil and put it in the freezer. Well, the snake didn't grow his tail back, so I whanged another chunk of tail, and then another and another. I kept slicing that two-headed son of a bitch until I had completed tail and was clearly into neck. The heads turned to watch what I was doing, and they were most evidently worried.
Finally, all I had left was this little V-shaped bit of monster, the two heads joined to maybe three inches of body. The heads just lay on the ground panting and looking pitiful. I left them like that, and we continued on our way.
"Excellent slicemanship!" Bohort goes. "You know that in my youth I myself carried a sword in the service of my king—"
"Arthur, would that be by any chance?" I go.
—yes, King Arthur," goes Bohort. "And I was a stalwart of his Table. But never in all my days have I seen a soul so skillful with a blade. Except Lancelot, of course. And Perceval and Galahad, too. And Gawain and—"
"Yeah, huh," I go. "That was the second Test. How many are there altogether?"
"Now, that too differs with every pilgrim," goes Joe. "Most usually there are three, however."
"One more test and one more clue, right?" I go. "Things in threes?"
"Things in threes," goes Bohort. "Mirroring the holy and glorious Trinity."
"The Triple Goddess," I go. I watched them shiver. It was like good for them now and then.
Jeez-o-man, Bitsy, I could tell that I was getting close to the end of this exploit. I've got a sixth sense for knowing that by now. No, it's not women's intuition. Women's intuition is a male sexist demeaning fraudulent counterrevolutionary concept invented to put a name on something men can't ever understand because of their stunted and wholly unromantic natures. If you buy into the intuition thing you might as well climb back on that pedestal they set up to trap your ass.
What do you mean, Bitsy, you like being on a pedestal? Hell, next time I come back from some mind-shattering adventure, I'll bring some of my pamphlets with me. God, honey, you need a little consciousness-raising. And a fanny tuck wouldn't hurt you, either, if I may make a per
sonal observation just between close friends.
Just never mind, okay? Just drop it, Bitsy, I'm coming to the gut-wrenching finale here. See, even though I guessed not more than two or three hours had passed, I noticed the sun trying to peep up over horizon. "What time is it?" I go.
"Dawn," goes Bohort. He was like ever so helpful.
I shrugged. If I could accept two-headed dreadful serpents, I could accept three-hour nights. Maybe I was in some warm polar region or something. It didn't make any difference. .I didn't have much time to like ponder, on account of there was a giant blocking our way on the Pearly Path. A big giant, Bitsy, resting his elbow on the crown of a mighty oak tree.
"The third Test?" I go.
"The third Test," goes Joe.
I chewed my lip for a few seconds. It looked like the giant was ready to give me all the time in the world. "Say," I go finally, "where are all those allies you mentioned? I mean, that's why I'm dragging around in this white outfit, huh?" A magical white outfit, too, Bits, 'cause it never got dirty and serpent blood came clean with just a damp cloth.
"Why, we are those selfsame allies!" goes Bohort.
"Yeah, duh," I go. They still looked like two fully rasped-out fugitives from the dumpster behind Ernest and Julio Gallo's place.
"Behold!" goes Joe. And right there he whipped off his hooded robe, and doggone if underneath it he was wearing a tunic and like pants made out of the same white threads I was wearing. Only he had a red cross on his chest. And suddenly he didn't look anywhere as old and unshaven as he had when I first met him. He was now a young blond guy with twinkling eyes and apple cheeks.
Don't you just hate apple cheeks, Bitsy? You can never trust a guy with apple cheeks, no matter how mythological he is.
And Bohort did the same, flanging away his shredded robe. The two dudes looked like brothers, all right. "Know you not our tales?" goes Bohort.
"Nuh uh." I knew I was going to hear 'em, though. I glanced up at the giant, and he smiled at me. He was still in no particular rush.
Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordperson Page 12
