Kingdom of the Grail

by Judith Tarr

  While they waited, they fell into their factions. Marric watched Roland watch them. He seemed to be idling about, roving the edges, catching snatches of conversation. But Marric thought that his ears were perhaps keener than most men’s were.

  Marric, whose ears were not even partly human, marked the three strains that ran through the babble of sound. He did not trouble to name those who sang the antiphons; there were so many, it did not matter.

  “Do you think,” asked a man in the blue and gold of Lyonesse, “that Carbonek can wisely choose a general for us? The king is dying, or for all we know is dead. The ladies in their shrine—they’re long sundered from the lands they rule. Surely we’re best fit to elect our own commander.”

  “No, no,” said a woman near Lord Huon. “It will be Morgan, or one of the knights of the Grail. They’re well fit to lead us.”

  “Or it will be someone else,” said a man of Poictesme. “The champion—”

  “There is no champion,” his companion said.

  “There was.”

  “He was lost.”

  “But if he comes back—”

  Roland had left the edges and woven though the clusters of conversation. Kyllan and Cait and Peredur had slipped into his shadow, as quiet and almost as subtle about it as the puca was.

  In the center, by the stone table, Roland stood still for a while. The babble was rising. People were arguing. One substantial faction was set to elect a general, with a handful of contenders for the office. The others looked ready to rise up in revolt.

  Roland sprang onto the stone. A few eyes turned to him, but most were caught up in contention. What was he, after all, but an outland captain?

  He drew the sword that he had brought out of Carbonek. It sang as he swept it up, a high fierce song. He whirled it flashing about his head and grounded it between his feet, point resting against the stone, cross-hilts gripped in his hands.

  The last of the babble died away. His eyes raked their faces. Marric felt the heat of that glance even from the edge of the gathering.

  He had not seen Sarissa move through the crowd, nor had he seen Morgan come there at all. Yet there they were, standing on either side of the dolmen.

  “My lords,” said Roland without raising his voice; yet they all heard him. “Princes and commanders of Montsalvat. I bring you word from Parsifal the king.”

  The silence was absolute.

  “I was chosen,” Roland said, “to be the champion of Montsalvat. This is the sword Durandal, which was wrought for that choosing. Now your king bids me speak for him. I will command this army. I will act as he would act, in his name and by his will.”

  Marric’s lips twitched. Elegant that speech was not, but Roland, Marric had noticed, was not one to speak when he could act.

  The same could not be said of the lords he faced. But he gave them no chance to raise their voices. “The enemy comes,” he said. “He’ll pass the borders of Carbonek in a hand of days—perhaps sooner, if he presses the march. There will be guards posted, and scouts in the outlands. The rest of us will wait for him here. How we wait, what order we take—I give you this day to advise me. But be quick, and be wise. There’s no time to waste.”

  “Ai,” said Gemma beside Marric. “He’s high-handed.”

  “Maybe it’s time someone picked them up and shook them,” Marric said.

  Her brows went up. “So that’s why the champion had to be an outlander. He’s not part of any faction. He can say what nobody else will dare to say.”

  “And he has that,” Marric said, tilting his chin toward Durandal.

  She nodded. She was frowning, but not with temper. She was watching Roland as she had since he came out of the castle.

  Roland stood on the dolmen, staring down either defiance or objections. He had come as a shock to too many of them. They all knew him, or knew of him: Huon’s young captain who had insisted that the levies be trained for war.

  He should have dressed as a prince, maybe. And maybe not. In plain clothes, with no mark of office but the sunlit shimmer of the sword, he was irrevocably of them, not unreachably high above them.

  “Advise me,” he said. “Reckon the count of your forces. Tell me what they can best do.”

  The babble rose to a roar again, voice vying with voice, each striving to out-shout the other. There were again three camps: those who would bring the war to the enemy in the empty lands, those who would take the Grail and retreat to the far reaches of the kingdom, and those who would make a single stand here, at Carbonek.

  Roland laid Durandal down on the stone and sat behind the shield of her, knees drawn up, chin on them, watching and listening, waiting them out.

  Marric laughed silently. He skipped through the crowd, sprang up onto the stone table, sat exactly as Roland was sitting.

  After a moment, Sarissa understood. She grinned, sudden and rather startling, and followed suit. Then Morgan did it; then Cait, and Kyllan, and Kyllan’s two brothers; and from nowhere as it seemed, Turpin in his brown habit and his worn mail. That was as many of them as the stone table could hold.

  Lord Huon saw them first. He hushed those who were nearest, who would do as he bade. He drew their eyes toward the dolmen. His own were glinting. Only lordly courtesy would be keeping him from laughter.

  It took some little time, but at last there was silence, again. Again, they all stared at Roland. He stared back, his eyes as blank as coins.

  “It seems,” Lord Huon said, “that we have little to offer you.”

  Roland shook his head. His eyes cleared, focused. He said, “First tell me what our enemy wants.”

  That did not please many of them: they were muttering of village idiots and outland fools. But Huon answered, “He wants the Grail. He’ll devote all his energies to that. He won’t care how much of his army he loses, if only it opens the way to the shrine.”

  “Can the Grail be taken away from Carbonek?”

  Eye flashed to eye among the lords, but for a wonder they kept silent. They let Huon speak again for them. “The Grail can live anywhere it pleases. But Carbonek was built by its magic. If Carbonek falls, the Grail loses much of its power.”

  “But it will still be ours!” cried someone far in the rear.

  “If we take the Grail,” said Roland, “the enemy will follow us wherever we go. Where the Grail is, there is the war. So tell me. Is there any castle in this kingdom that is stronger than Carbonek?”

  “None,” said Huon. Even those who objected most strongly to that course were nodding—scowling, but agreeing.

  “So then,” Roland said. “The Grail will stay in Carbonek. Now advise me. How can we best defend both this castle and the Grail?”

  There was more order in it now, more plain courtesy. They spoke one by one, in order of rank, from Gwyn the prince to Gemma the commander of the levy from Greenwood—but Roland heard her with as much respect as he accorded the highest of princes.

  Idlers from the army had long since wandered in earshot of the commanders’ gathering. From the stone table Marric could see how many had come—an impressive number. Maybe all of them. Faces as far as he could see, and eyes, fixed on Roland.

  They settled it before the sun had sunk too far. The bulk of them would defend the castle and the shrine. They would bivouac not on these fields but beneath the castle itself, in a maze of caverns that descended far into the earth and stretched for a great distance under it. Magic of earth and fire were strong there. The light had held it for time out of mind, since even before the Grail came to Montsalvat.

  “That is all very well,” said the Prince of Poictesme, “but as strong as we may be if we all gather in one place, so much the easier will it be for the enemy to destroy us all in a single stroke.”

  “If the enemy takes the Grail,” Roland said, “nothing else will matter. Everything will belong to him, in this kingdom and every other.”

  That silenced them all. In the silence he said, “No, we should not make it too simple for him to come
to us. You will go, my lord, and my lord of Lyonesse, if you will. Watch the roads against the enemy’s coming. Harry him as he comes. Trouble him as much as you may—but not so much that you die of it. Weaken him before he comes to Carbonek.”

  Gwyn was too much the prince to break out in a grin of delight, but he was visibly pleased with his charge. Roland had hoped that he might be, he and the young lord of Lyonesse. They had the look of men who would prefer battle to the tedium of a siege. And, much more to the point of this war, each of them commanded a strong force of light horsemen and mounted archers.

  It was decided, then, and in a remarkable degree of amity. Roland said even less than usual. He played them all like a harp, and with a fine hand, too. When they parted to attend to their various duties and offices, Marric did not think that many of them guessed how much of their free choice was Roland’s doing.

  “And you reckon yourself a poor courtier.”

  It was not Marric who said that. It was Huon, pausing when most of the others had left. Those two, Marric thought, got on very well together. Maybe because Huon was not quite human either, and because he had known Roland the longest of all the lords.

  Roland was still sitting on the stone table, though his companions had left it and were standing about. Huon leaned on the stone, arms folded atop it, regarding Roland with a crooked smile. “You have a gift,” he said.

  Roland shrugged, wriggling a little—the hard grey granite must be wearing through his backside. “I did what the king would have wanted.”

  “You did it well, too,” Huon said. “You look like him, you know; you have a feel of him.”

  “What, the fool whom pity made wise—and none too soon, either?”

  “Not quite a fool,” said Huon. “Maybe not yet wise, but closer than you were. May I offer a word of counsel?”

  Roland opened his eyes a fraction wider, and waited.

  “Don’t lose that. Don’t go all lordly. The people are your strength.”

  “Will lords follow me if I have too common a touch?”

  “Lords will follow power wherever they find it. But the people fight best, and strive most strongly, for the ones they love.”

  “Any number of lords would say,” Roland said, “that the common folk follow whoever is set over them—blindly loyal, because they can do no other.”

  Huon snorted softly. “They may dream, but when they wake, they find another truth. Remember it, son of the Grail. It may save your soul.”

  “Have I a soul to save?” But Roland spoke lightly, and not as if he either wanted or needed an answer. He sprang down from the dolmen, stretching till his bones creaked. Shoulder to shoulder, easy with one another, they walked out of the circle.

  CHAPTER 53

  Slowly the grey land changed into one both green and empty. The mists endured, and a slow steady rain that began every morning and drizzled damply until the early nightfall. The road stretched away ahead of them, wide, clear, and completely untraveled. Not even a bird broke the monotony of the sky.

  Pepin and his hellions, as they proudly had taken to calling themselves, had the vanguard. He ran scouts ahead because a good commander did, but he was a better scout than they: he could feel the land underfoot, and taste the air that blew past his face. It was all quiet, all empty. Nothing at all either met or threatened them.

  “The way is wide open,” he said to Ganelon when the army halted. It was perhaps midday. They had come to a wide slow river. The bridge across it was narrow, barely wide enough for the baggage wagons. There was no ambush, not even a troll under the bridge.

  Pepin had sent his men on ahead. He sat his horse beside Ganelon, who was riding something more like a horse than not; but claws clicked when it pawed the road, and its scaled tail swung slowly from side to side. Pepin’s gelding sweated and trembled but stood its ground. He stroked its neck to soothe it, and went on, “This looks like the gullet of a trap.”

  “It is.” Ganelon’s face was turned to the grey and dripping sky. Rain did not touch him; it parted and slid as from a shield of glass.

  “You’re not afraid,” Pepin said.

  The sorcerer laughed, a soft cold sound like water under ice. Day by day and night by night as they passed through this country, he had slipped free of the seeming that he had worn in Francia. The elderly priest of no particular distinction was long gone. This was a being of no age at all, ancient beyond the counting of years. His skin was pale and smooth. His cheeks grew no beard. His hair fell long and straight and pale as silver. His eyes were dark and deep.

  He had the beauty of a marble angel, though it was anything but insipid. He laughed at Pepin, and there was no pity in him at all, nor any glimmer of compassion. “I go where I most wish to go. They think to lull me, and so overcome me. Fools and children. I will have their Grail, and their souls, too.”

  Pepin suppressed a shiver. Ganelon needed him, he reminded himself, to take and keep the relic. He was safe until that was done. Afterward, he would find a way to make himself indispensable. Even, maybe, claim some of the power for himself. Would he not have earned it, after all?

  “We are close now,” Ganelon said through the hum of Pepin’s thoughts. “I feel it—Carbonek is near. Are your men suitably prepared?”

  “As much as any men can be,” Pepin said.

  “See that they are,” said Ganelon.

  All the while they spoke, the army crossed the bridge. Mist had risen on the far side, thicker than before. The vanguard had disappeared into it.

  Ganelon was unconcerned. Pepin kept a grip on panic, lest he seem a fool.

  They crossed last. Pepin’s gelding clattered over the stones. The soft click and pad of Ganelon’s mount was just audible. There was only greyness in front of them, a dank wall that had swallowed the whole of the army.

  It closed about them. Pepin could still sense the earth underfoot, but it was shifting, heaving like the sea.

  He could just see Ganelon in the mist, riding calmly, his pale face gleaming like the moon through cloud. Pepin fixed on that light. His horse plodded peacefully onward. It did not care that the worlds were changing underfoot; that they were entering the realm of the Grail.

  Passing through that mist was like being flayed alive and rolled in salt. Pepin clutched the gelding’s mane, gasping.

  “Ward yourself,” said Ganelon’s voice, cold and calm in the mist.

  Pepin could not. He was blind with pain. It put to flight his wits; it burned away his newborn magic.

  Ganelon spoke the words, swift and almost contemptuous, raising the same protection over his faltering pupil that he had raised over the army. The pain vanished. The earth steadied. The mist melted into clear hard sunlight.

  Pepin stared blinking at a lofty wall of mountains. The road wound upward through green hills. Clouds wreathed the peaks, but the sun was bright and fierce.

  Ganelon beside him raised a hand, sighting along it. “There,” he said. “Carbonek.”

  It needed the sight of an eagle, as yet, but Pepin could just see the gleam atop a summit—lines too straight, too even to be unwrought stone. “They can see us coming,” he said. “I feel it.”

  “There are no surprises here,” said Ganelon, “though we may meet an ambush or two, for the game’s sake. We all know that this must play itself out.”

  “They weren’t strong enough to stop you.”

  “They let me come.” Ganelon sounded not at all perturbed by that. “Now go. Lead the van. If they begin the war, they will do it here, or close by here. Be vigilant. Bid your men be ready to arms.”

  Pepin kicked his gelding into a stiff, protesting trot. It was a long way from the rear to the van, past rank on rank of men and demons, all marching with sightless persistence. Ganelon’s will drove them—all but the Franks.

  After the mute hordes of slaves both human and otherwise, the rowdy mortal clamor of his own people was a relief. They were delighted to hear that there might be battle ahead. “Ambushes!” they declared. “Skir
mishes!”

  Some had been into the ale again. Pepin had begun to understand his father’s objections to drunkenness. But Charles could not do what Pepin could do, which was to lay a spell on the ale. Any man who drank more than his allotted pint would find himself abruptly and massively ill.

  Pepin smiled as he took his place in front. The mist was altogether gone. This was a bitter-bright land, all hard edges and sharp colors. It seemed inescapably sunlit, but he noticed how dark the shadows were. They were deep enough indeed, he thought, to hide an ambush.

  He had scouts running ahead, and the vanguard spread a little, but not so far that it could not come together quickly to stand against assault. The rearmost ranks marched just ahead of the army’s center.

  Not all his scouts were flesh and blood. He sent small winged thoughts, eyes of the mind, through the middle airs. That and the spell on the ale taxed him more than he had expected: he swayed in the saddle, but held on. The Grail—it was working on him, weakening him through the defenses Ganelon had raised for him. His stomach felt strange, as if he had drunk too much ale himself.

  He was strong enough. He stiffened his back as much as he could, and let his gelding slow to an amble. The first ranks of the vanguard passed him, protecting him with good Frankish steel. He set his spirit free to follow his eyes in the air.

  It was dizzying at first to see so many things, shifting and overlapping. He had not sent out this great a number before. He steadied himself as he had been taught, and put down the thought that he was overtaxing his strength.

  Green hills, stark teeth of mountains. Deep valleys, sudden silver gleam of rivers. There were no cities here, no towns or villages, no signs of habitation until one came to the castle. Beyond the castle—

  It was like a wall of air. He could pass just so far, and no farther. If he pressed, the wall only grew stronger.

  The kingdom was beyond the wall. He was not allowed to see it. That was very clear. It was as Ganelon had said: they were being permitted to pass.

  He drew back before the wall sucked him in and held him like a fly in amber. With an effort of will he focused on the eyes that were closer in, on the clefts and hollows of this tumbled country.