Kingdom of the Grail

by Judith Tarr

  The Franks were beginning to wake a little. They would look up suddenly, look about, shake their heads. Or one of them would begin to speak, seem to reconsider, fall silent again.

  Ganelon himself seemed unmoved. That was a mask: the army was the image of his strength, and it was struggling against the power of the Grail. One morning, evening, it was difficult to tell, he said to Pepin, “The Franks belong to you. Control them.”

  Pepin stared, struck briefly dumb. Ganelon’s eyes were bitter cold. Past startlement, past fear, Pepin knew the first dawning of elation.

  Twenty thousand men. Twenty thousand Franks, given to him as if they had been an outworn tunic. “May I do whatever I please with them?” he asked.

  “You will make sure that they follow me,” said Ganelon, “and that they fight for me when we come to the battle. There will be not one man lost, not one drop of blood shed. They will come whole and obedient to the field. But past that,” he said, “you may do as you like.”

  It was little enough, but there was still great pleasure in the thought of it. Pepin had barely turned away before he let the grin escape.

  He knew the spells. He had seen Ganelon work them, and assisted in the chanting. He was sure that he could remember exactly how to raise and hold them. It was easier in any case, because the binding was already made. He had only to strengthen it and turn it toward himself.

  It was evening, he decided. The sun was setting. Camp was made. Fires burned, pale in the mist. He was stiff from a long while—day, whatever—in the saddle, but he rode among the Franks, for no good Frankish prince would be seen afoot when he had a horse to carry him.

  Men should have been tending campfires and preparing the night’s meal. A few of them were doing that, but more were huddled together, muttering, shooting glances at the grey sky, or at the wall of grey cliff against which they had camped.

  “Spain,” Pepin heard one say. “We’re still in Spain.”

  “Italy,” said someone else.

  “The marches of the Rhine,” said a third.

  “So where’s the king?” demanded the first. “Where’s the lords all high and mighty, riding back and forth? Did they all get killed in the mountains—or did we dream that, too?”

  Aiee, thought Pepin. They were awake indeed.

  “Maybe we’re dead,” the second soldier said, “and this is hell.”

  “I don’t remember dying,” said the third.

  “Would we?” the second asked. “What else can this be? Have you seen what we march beside? I swear I saw a thing with fangs, and another with batwings. They’re devils. We’re in hell.”

  “Hell would be a long march to nowhere,” muttered the first man.

  Pepin had the spell ready to hand, the words on his tongue, the gestures half-begun. But something, some demon perhaps, held him back. He rode in among them.

  They barely moved to give space to his horse. They did not look on him in hostility, but neither did they bow to his rank or his name. He had seen such faces among rebels and newly subdued enemies. Never among Franks from the heart of the realm.

  He leaned on the saddle’s high pommel, looking from face to face. They stared insolently back. He smiled. “You’re not dead,” he said, “and you’re not in Francia, either. How would you like a war? A real war—one you can win.”

  “Another crusade?” said the first soldier with more than the hint of a sneer.

  “No crosses here,” Pepin said. “No lies. This war is real. There will be battle. There will be victors and vanquished. One army will stay on the field, bait for the crows. The other will take a great kingdom, great wealth, and a glorious prize.”

  “Loot?” the first Frank said. His eyes had brightened, but doubt had swiftly dimmed them. “One prize? What’s that?”

  Pepin paused. He had been a fool to let that slip.

  Make the best of it, he thought. “We’ll take a castle,” he said, “and a king, and nine beautiful ladies.”

  “Castle,” the man sneered. “King. Ladies. What good is that to us mudfoots?”

  “Gold in the treasuries,” Pepin said, “jewels, treasure uncounted. Women, too. All the loot we lost at Roncesvalles, all the loot we should have won in Spain, would barely fill one treasure-room in these vaults.”

  That won his argument for him. The lure of gold and the promise of battle swept them all up together.

  For the first time Pepin heard men cheer his name, and salute him as commander. It was a heady sensation, glorious, wonderful.

  And he had cast no spell at all. The one he did cast, let them see the demons about them as men of sundry nations. Best, after all, that they not know the whole of the truth. They would follow him, and the hope of the Grail, and the promise of treasure. They need not see the faces of all those they marched with, nor understand what master they fought for.

  CHAPTER 47

  Sarissa started awake. Memory of warmth caressed her. She stretched her hand to the one who lay beside her.

  There was only cold emptiness and bitter absence.

  She had been dreaming of him again, of the sunlit days in Agua Caliente, when no anger lay between them, and the only doubts were hers. She could still remember the shape of him, the salt-sweet taste of his skin, how he loved to trace her breasts and belly with kisses.

  A sound escaped her, halfway between laughter and a sob. So brief a time she had had him, in all the years of her life, and those days had swelled to overwhelm the rest.

  She had driven him away. Her error, her folly had done it. She had not trusted him, though he proved over and over that he was stronger than his blood.

  Only the gods knew where he had gone. People were saying that the enemy had taken and corrupted him. She did not believe it. He had fled by his own will, under his own power. He had vanished from all awareness—save that she would have known, deep in her heart, if he had died.

  The enemy was coming. He had breached the outer defenses of the kingdom. He had entered the marches, the grey country between worlds. Men and demons followed him.

  “Open the way for him,” Nieve said. “Lure him in. Close behind him and destroy him.”

  The nine ladies gathered in a high chamber. It was in another tower than the shrine of the Grail. That one looked eastward to the sunrise. This looked north, to the winds of winter and the cold still light, and the enemy’s ancient stronghold beyond the world’s end.

  Here was a chamber of guard and watchfulness. Its center was a stone table, and on it a globe of crystal.

  They stood round the crystal, nine ladies, tall and short, dark and fair, beautiful and simply pleasant to look on. But to the eyes of the spirit they were all much the same: shining with the splendor of their magic, and bound inextricably to the light.

  In the crystal was the orb of the mortal world, blue and white, brown and green, hanging like a jewel in the night. At Nieve’s words the vision shifted. The world blurred. The night brightened to twilight, a shimmer of mist and magic, somewhat like falling water, and somewhat like the gleam on the face of a pearl.

  Darkness crawled across it. It wore the semblance of a serpent. Its scales were the bodies of men and demons. Its eyes were blind orbs, lit with a pallid light like the moon behind clouds. In its head was set a dark jewel.

  There was the enemy, commanding his army of slaves both mortal and otherwise.

  “He will break through our defenses,” Nieve said in her calm practical voice. “He’s too strong for us without the king to anchor our strength. If we let him think he’s defeated us before he actually has, he may grow overconfident. Then we may have some hope of driving him back.”

  “And,” said dark Inanna, “if he breaks through in a place of his choosing, he’ll ravage our country before he comes to Carbonek. We can offer him our weakness in a corner of the empty lands, and bring him direct here.”

  None of them took issue with that. They had been together long and long, guarding the Grail. What one thought, another might say, as easy,
as unconscious as the drawing of a breath.

  Sarissa, who had been apart from them for a year and more, could feel the bonds tugging at her, the weaving closing about her, drawing her into its warp and woof. She did not want to argue with a plan that was both simple and profoundly sensible. And yet she also did not want to be wholly at one with the rest. She wanted—she knew not what.

  Roland.

  She thrust that name aside, out of her mind, if never out of her heart. She said, “So let it be done. Let him wander yet a while, and fancy that he tests our defenses. We’ll weaken them slowly, open the way to him beyond the field of the standing stones. And when he comes—”

  “When he comes,” said Inanna, “we face him.”

  “And vanquish him, one hopes,” murmured the usually silent Liu. Her almond eyes were lowered, her ivory face serene.

  “We’ll do what we can,” Nieve said.

  “But without a king strong enough to bolster us, what hope do we have?” Freya demanded. “Truly—what hope is there?”

  “More than none,” said Nieve. “The champion may come back. The sword may do what it was wrought to do.”

  “Or not.” Freya’s white hand parted the air. A thing of forged steel took shape above the table. Durandal’s white pommel mirrored the eyes of the serpent within the globe of crystal. With a swift, fierce gesture, she thrust it into the globe.

  The crystal did not shatter. The sword’s blade sank into it as if it had been soft clay. It pierced the heart of the serpent.

  “An omen,” Clodia said. “May it come to pass.”

  Freya shook her head, tossing her wheat-fair braids. She turned on her heel and stalked away.

  Sarissa stared for a while at the place where she had been. Not so perfect a harmony, then, after all.

  The others left one by one. Sarissa, who had thought to escape first, found herself among the last. The sword remained in the crystal. The vision had faded with the breaking of the circle.

  Inanna reached to remove the sword. Sarissa stopped her hand. “No. Leave it. We need the reminder.”

  Inanna shrugged, sighed. When she was gone, Sarissa was alone.

  Durandal gleamed in the cold light. Sarissa brushed its pommel with her finger. She had a sudden, vivid vision of Roland’s face. His eyes were on something she could not see. She doubted very much that he was thinking of her.

  Alive, she thought. Alive and well. Though where, or what he did there, she was not able to discover.

  Turpin was down in the camp among the Franks, as he had been since Roland fled. He had come out of the Grail’s shrine with a great stillness on him. He had bowed low to the king, and left the castle without a word.

  But in camp among his people, he was as he had always been. He had told them the truth of their presence here, and they had accepted it, because it was he who said it. They had elected him their commander—Franks might do such things, if they were minded.

  Sarissa had spent rather more time among these men than might have been reckoned necessary. Many of them she had known since she came to Paderborn. They were at ease with the thought of her, even knowing what she was.

  In past days the levies had begun to come in. They camped farther down the long field, toward the green expanse of the valley, on either side of the king’s white road. The Franks regarded them with interest—accustomed to fighting in armies with strangers, some of whom might have been enemies only the season before. Though these were stranger than most that they might have fought with. Not all were human, and not all wore human faces.

  Sarissa stood with Turpin on a rise above the road, watching another lord of the kingdom bring in his army. This was the Prince of Poictesme, with a great force of mortal archers, and a rallying of wildfolk hopping and slithering and flapping behind them.

  “That’s nigh all of them, yes?” said Turpin. “Only one or two yet to come.”

  Sarissa nodded. “Only the lords of the farthest domains: Herne, Gwyn, Huon. Herne is close; he’ll reach us before the sun sets. Of the others we’re less certain, but they’ll come soon.”

  “And then, the enemy will come.”

  She looked into those quiet grey eyes. They had not been so calm before he saw the Grail. Nor had they seen so far or so clearly. “Then the enemy comes,” she said, “and the war we’ve all been waiting for.”

  “I’m ready,” he said. He stood easily, feet apart, hand on swordhilt, as warriors learned to stand; but the monk’s robe and the tonsure told another truth.

  The army of Poictesme camped in its allotted place down the valley. Sarissa saw it settled and its prince sent to the castle to speak with Morgan of the nine, who commanded the armies in the king’s incapacity. She went back to the Franks, ate and drank and slept among them. She did not dream of Roland that night. Instead she dreamed of rain, and of rivers running to the sea.

  She woke to a cool and misty morning, and a silver sun, and word running through the camps: Herne and Gwyn had come in together. Only Huon was yet to come. And the enemy had found the weakness that the nine had left for him, and pierced it. She felt in her own skin the pain of that violation.

  It was necessary. The road would bring him past empty lands and villages long deserted, burned and trampled in the last of his wars. No living place would suffer from his presence. No innocent creature would fall prey to his malice.

  She was needed in the castle. But she stayed among the armies. Morgan was a greater general than she, and Nieve far more accomplished in preparing for a siege. Whatever they needed of her, they could provide for themselves.

  She was running away—not as suddenly or completely as Roland had, but close enough. She did not care. She could make herself useful here: gathering the commanders, telling them all that was fit for them to know; rallying the troops. They needed her, she told herself, more than the castle did. They needed to see a great one of the Grail walking among them, giving them hope.

  CHAPTER 48

  Lord Huon was late to the muster. It was a long march, and the end of it much beset with storms of rain and sleet. The walls between the worlds had broken. Roland could feel the shards of them grinding in his spirit. The enemy was marching through the Grail’s kingdom.

  They could travel only as fast as men could walk, and as the earth would let them. Roland struggled to remember a soldier’s patience. There was time to teach his pack of raw recruits a little of what they should know; to give them some defenses in the battles that would come.

  The closer they came to Carbonek, the more difficult it was to go on. The road buckled and surged under their feet. Winds lashed them. Lightnings battled overhead.

  These children of agelong peace were strong of heart, bright and sturdy of spirit, but this was a hard road, with fear upon it and terror at the end of it. Messengers sent ahead brought back word from Carbonek: the enemy was far from it still, on another road than this; and the army had gathered. They were the last.

  That, Roland could credit. But that the enemy was far away, he was not so sure of. Sometimes the amulet on his breast would burn like fire. At other times, in the nights particularly, he would wake with a start, and shudder, as if something foul had passed through the tent.

  “There’s old darkness in the earth,” Marric said by the fire on a night without stars, a day or two out from Carbonek. “That great thing in the castle, it washes this country with light. But long before it came here, other things walked and burrowed and flew. Those that weren’t destroyed, that were only sleeping, will be waking now.”

  Roland had paused for a cup of heated wine and a loaf of Marric’s bread. He shivered in the cool of the night. “I feel them,” he said. “They’re moving through the earth.”

  “Are they?” Marric seemed surprised, though he covered it with close attention to his stewpot. “So,” he said as if to himself. “It’s in your bones.”

  Roland might have asked him what he meant, but Cait had come into the firelight. Her face was taut with worry. “Bran is s
ick,” she said.

  It was not Cait’s way to fret over trifles. Roland followed her to her own campfire. He was aware of Marric treading softly behind, but he did not look back. He was equally aware of the rumbling in the earth. Something had roused very close, almost beneath them. He had an instant’s awareness of jeweled claws and great gleaming teeth.

  Then he was bending over a young man from a village near Caer Sidi. He was a pale and withered thing, lying shivering on a pile of cloaks. His eyes were sunk in his skull.

  And yet Roland had seen him only yesterday, practicing with throwing-spears and throwing farther than anyone. He had won a wager with Cieran, a cask of Gemma’s ale. He had been a big ruddy creature, strong and proud of it.

  “When?” Roland asked Cait, though others were babbling, vying to tell him everything.

  Cait knew how to measure her words. “It started this morning,” she said. “We thought it was the ale. The rest of them got better. He didn’t. When the sun went down, so did he—just all at once, as if something sucked the juice out of him.”

  “Something did!” said a thin wiry boy with a nose almost as sharp as the bogle’s. “I saw it. I did! It was like a bat. It fastened on his neck. I scared it away—I yelled, I think. Nobody heard me. I thought it was a dream. That was last night, when it was still dark, and the sun hadn’t come yet. It must have come back when the sun went down again.”

  “Nursery tales,” Cait sneered.

  “No,” said Marric. “It’s real.”

  They all stared at him, a ring of white scared faces.

  “Is he going to die?” a voice asked, faint and frightened, from the back of the crowd.

  “Not if I can help it,” Roland said grimly. “Cait, send someone to Lord Huon, he needs to know. Marric, put up wards. See if there’s anyone who can help you. I’ll do what I can, once I’m done here.”