by Lavie Tidhar
Or sometimes, more simply, the grail.
Something that fell down from the heavens, and into the prison of mortal men.
*
So this is, in a roundabout way, how Lancelot ends up in Britain.
‘Fight, motherfucker,’ Agravain says.
Lancelot rises. He assumes the Stance of the Weeping Willow.
Agravain launches at him with the Strike of the Grass Snake.
Lancelot merely sways. The attack passes harmlessly. Agravain, with a roar of rage, launches head kicks and face strikes, but Lancelot is a shaking curtain of branches, the knight’s attacks pass harmlessly through empty air. Lancelot expands little energy. He moves only enough to let the strikes miss. Agravain works himself up to a sweat. Lancelot sways on the balls of his feet like a dancer. The onlookers look on.
Money changes hands as they bet on the outcome.
‘Parting of the Red Sea!’ Agravain announces. This attack, from the School of the Sons of Zebedee, catches Lancelot by surprise. Where did the knight learn this? He is unable to avoid the strike, merely parries it back, and he and the knight face each other again.
Agravain grins.
‘Wasn’t expecting that, were you,’ he says. A statement of fact.
‘You are crude,’ Lancelot says. ‘With but rudimentary skills. Who was your master?’
Agravain’s smile widens and Lancelot doesn’t like the implication at all. Could another master have beaten him to this land and gone before him? Agravain, having had enough of talking, launches into Elijah’s Fist – the same technique that, it was said, the prophet had used to destroy the priests of Ba’al.
Lancelot counters with Ishtar’s Snare. He traps Agravain in a headlock and kicks his knee into the other man’s back.
‘Who trained you!’ he says. ‘These arts are not native to your country, knight.’
‘Go fuck yourself, foreigner!’
The cat watches them from under a chair, chewing on her slice of beef. Lancelot releases Agravain. The man, in rage, launches Apollo’s Fury and the kick sends Lancelot flying against the wall. He hits it with his back and drops to the floor.
This is ridiculous, he thinks.
But Agravain is already flying overhead, coming down to finish him with what looks like some twist on Solomon’s Cut of the Infant.
It’s time to finish this.
Lancelot twists sideways. He swipes his leg and catches Agravain on the way down. He spins round and locks onto the knight. He grabs him by the head and prepares to break his neck. There’s no art to this. It’s simple butchery.
He hesitates.
‘I have no cause to fight you,’ he says.
‘Arghghh!’
‘I could let you go.’
Cheers and curses among the onlookers. More money changes hands.
‘Kill him!’ someone shouts. They must have money riding on this particular outcome.
‘This is demeaning,’ Lancelot complains.
‘Arghahrg!’
He reaches a decision. He wraps his arm around the knight’s throat and squeezes hard, and Agravain’s body flops to the ground. Lancelot stands.
‘Is he dead?’
‘Just resting.’
‘Come on!’ someone says. The onlookers, having been denied their satisfaction, go back to their drinks.
Lancelot looks at Agravain’s waiting men. They shy away from him. He walks to his table, lifts up his mug, downs the rest of the beer. The cat comes slinking up to him and rubs against his shin. He picks her up, strokes her fur.
‘Here, kitty kitty,’ he says.
The cat purrs.
Lancelot leaves a handful of coins on the table and walks out of the door.
No one, he’s glad to notice, tries to stop him this time.
47
He makes camp a day’s ride north of Londinium. The cat had taken a liking to him. She’d purred and rubbed against him until he gave in to her unspoken demand and lifted her up to ride with him on the horse.
Now the cat curls by the fire. Earlier she went into the wood and came back with a water rat in her jaws. She offered to share but Lancelot politely declined.
He chews miserably on a piece of hard cheese and thinks perhaps he was too hasty in turning down the offer.
He’d spent the last of his money paying for the shitty beer at the Cameleopard’s Head.
What a fucking stinking shithole of an island, he thinks.
How had it come to that!
*
After Smyrna the master took them to summer amidst the ruins of Nineveh. The locals shunned the place, which they said was cursed. Lancelot found it peaceful.
The master and Iblis trained in the arts of gongfu as Lancelot recuperated. He could hear the sound of their sparring as he fished in the Tigris. The river was wide and fast-flowing, and strange fish lived in its waters. As he grew stronger Lancelot took to diving barebacked into the wild current, battling with giant barbels and wily catfish. There were eels, too, swimming to the sea, slippery and numerous, and they parted around him as they passed.
He wished to learn the secret languages of eels. Their yearning for the distant sea moved him. Lancelot was loyal to his master and he would follow Joseph of Arimathea anywhere, and to the very ends of the Earth itself, but he could not find it in him to share the master’s obsession with the grail.
‘In the time of King Jabin of Hazor,’ the master told him, ‘a battle took place in which the Jewish sages say the stars themselves rebelled against the king’s general, Sisera. It is written that the stars in their course fought against Sisera. All but the inhabitants of Meroz, which the rabbis in the Midrash, some centuries later, explicitly identify as a star in the sky. Do you not see, Lancelot?’
His voice shook with passion when he spoke. The master was a passionate man. ‘And is it not said that in the earliest of days the Nephilim and the Sons of God walked freely on the Earth and intermarried with mortal kind? And furthermore—’
But Lancelot usually stopped actively listening at that point. It was all nonsense, anyway – he was pretty sure of it. Besides, as he pointed out to the master one time, if these sons of God were beings from another world, what did it make Jesus, he who they called the Christ?
At that the master huffed up somewhat, for he had a blind spot where Christians were concerned.
‘Keep watching the skies,’ he said ominously; and he would be drawn no further on the subject.
All through that hot long summer Lancelot recuperated. As his body healed he began to practise again, hesitant and weak at first, but then with new enthusiasm. Iblis was always there, fashioned by the master into a weapon. He’d called her the Lightning Sword, for she was as fast and as brutal as both blade and heavenly bolt. Together they sparred against each other, leaping from the top of one palm tree to the next, meeting in mid-air, using each other as ruthlessly as anything they ever did.
All through that long hot summer, members of their master’s order would arrive, in ones and twos, and always unexpectedly. They stole into the dead city of Nineveh like thieves, which many of them indeed were.
Grave robbers, Iblis called them. Creepy little men – they mostly were men – with dirty broken fingernails from digging in the dirt. They loved the abandoned old places of lost civilisations. According to the master, Nineveh was once the capital of one such empire. Supposedly it had once been as grand as Rome, if not grander, and its gardens were a marvel to behold.
To Lancelot the lost city just seemed desolate. When he wasn’t at practice with Iblis or serving the master and his guests, he took to wandering the ancient streets of the city. Not much remained of proud Nineveh. Its foundations had sunk into the ground and only the faint outline of what had once been avenues and houses remained. The wilderness had claimed Nineveh for its own. Trees and wild plants grew in abundance, and camels and goats roamed in search of feed. From time to time he’d see tigers, too, but he and they gave each other a wide, respectable space.<
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Once, he came upon what must have once been a palace of some sort. Columns half-buried in the earth even after centuries, the brickwork exquisite. An artist had chiselled bearded men fighting lions, soldiers on their horses holding spears. In a collapsed inner room Lancelot found a rotting chest, inside which were hundreds of coins, silver and copper and gold, bearing the profiles of nameless monarchs lost to the dust of time. Perhaps it had been a bank, once, he reflected.
He sat there, cross-legged in the vault, if that’s what it was, until the shadows of the evening fell and lengthened, and the darkness swallowed the city whole. At last he rose, and walked in the light of the moon, trespassing under the stars of that old, dead city.
Back in their camp the master was in a rare good humour. He had two members of his order with him: Tiberius, a burly ex-tribune from the legions and now, as far as Lancelot could tell, a roving bandit; and Leviticus, a scholar from the Imperial Library of Constantinople, a thin tall man with the nervous manner of a praying mantis. The men drank cups of rough red wine and sat around the campfire like soldiers planning their next campaign. Though mostly what they did was swap old war stories that were as improbable as anything Lancelot had ever heard. The men considered themselves scholars and learned, busy with unlocking the secrets of creation itself. In the pursuit of this unearthly knowledge they robbed graves and took on shady jobs; they lied and schemed and profited from war; they were unscrupulous, arrogant, immoral and fanatical.
In other words, as Iblis once said to him, dismissively – they were men.
‘Remember the black pyramids of Punt?’ Leviticus said. He rubbed his hands by the fire as though he could never get warm. Red wine stained his scholar’s tunic.
‘The fabled lost land of Punt!’ Tiberius exclaimed. ‘We were so young and handsome, were we not, Joseph?’
The master gave him a tolerant smile.
‘It was the Pharaoh Hatshepsut who first sent an expedition to Puntland,’ he explained to Lancelot. ‘The Foremost of Noble Ladies she was, and she ruled over a thousand years ago, before a Roman ever took a shit in a latrine or a Christian preacher ever bored a crowd. She sent her chancellor, Nehsi, a Nubian like you, Lancelot. With a fleet of ships they sailed across the Red Sea. They wished to lay claim to Punt but the Puntians told them where to stick it, didn’t they, boys?’
‘So say the ancient records,’ Leviticus agreed solemnly.
Tiberius waved an impatient hand bejewelled with fat rings. ‘For weeks we trudged,’ he said, returning to his story, ‘with only our slaves to carry our load. No ships for us, master Lancelot. And that land has long been lost, and its exact location forever unknown.’
‘But we had the map,’ Leviticus said. He puffed his chest up importantly. ‘Which I myself discovered, at no great cost, in the antiquities market of Thessalonica. A single sheet of papyrus from the great library in Alexandria itself. Snatched from the very fire!’
‘We all thought it a fake, of course,’ Tiberius said. ‘A special convocation of the order was summoned in Beirut. Our master then was Simon of Ararat, The Pigeon Fancier and Keeper of the Sailcloth Tatters of Noah’s Ark—’
‘Which I held once, I remember,’ Leviticus said. ‘Old and dirty it was.’
‘Because of the elephants,’ Tiberius said.
‘What elephants?’
‘The elephants on the ark.’
‘If the tatters really came from the ark,’ Lancelot’s master interjected gently. ‘I had always taken the story to be a distorted account of the vehicles of visitors from another world.’
‘Of course, Joseph. Of course,’ Tiberius said. ‘Anyway. There we were, in Beirut, the master poring over the precious map, and at last he pronounced himself satisfied as to its authenticity. And he selected us. We were young, then, and strong and handsome. We were mere boys! We felt we could do anything, back then.’
‘Anything,’ Leviticus said, nodding his head vigorously.
‘So onwards we went, across the sea, first by ship to Egypt and then in boats up the Nile for a while, and then we rode on camels. We tried to stay close to the Red Sea shores, but the sandstorms and the dust, and the heat – the cursed heat!’
‘And the camel men cursing and grumbling and running away—’
‘And nothing strong to drink for miles around, if you know what I mean—’
‘The villagers dirty and charging high prices—’
‘It was shit.’
‘No two ways about it.’
‘A cold bloody coming we had of it.’
‘Anyway.’
‘Anyway.’
‘We found it.’
‘But why?’ Lancelot said.
‘Why what, boy?’
‘What was so important about Punt?’
‘Ah…’
It was his master who intervened then. He leaned close to the fire and his face shone in its light. ‘Gold,’ he said, with quiet command.
‘Gold, master?’
‘It is the belief of our order that gold is extra-terrestris,’ the master said.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Gold is exceedingly rare on this earthly realm,’ the master said. ‘It is my belief that it is not natural to this world but is deposited here, in minute quantities, by falling star stones.’
‘I see.’
‘Punt was famously wealthy in gold,’ the master said. Explaining, as he always did. ‘Therefore…?’
‘Therefore you surmised it may be the site of a Lapis Exilis,’ Lancelot said.
‘Excellent,’ the master said. ‘Quite. Or…?’
‘A fallen sky chariot, master?’
He saw how Tiberius and Leviticus exchanged glances then. It was the master’s secret obsession. For had it not been said that the Hebrew prophet, Elijah, rose up to the heavens on a chariot of fire? For if things could come down from the sky, could not something or, perhaps, even someone go up the same way? And what might such a person see up there, in the heavens?
It was folly, Lancelot thought. But he never spoke the thought out loud.
‘Yes,’ the master said. ‘Well, it was worth a try, anyway.’
‘And did you find it? Anything?’
He saw the other two men exchange glances again.
‘Whatever we found was inconclusive,’ the master said. It was another of his favourite terms. He used it often. To Lancelot it seemed clear that the master would never find what he sought. That it was in the realm of make-believe and story-telling, not reality. The world was the world, and that was all there was to it.
Perhaps it was then that the first seeds of what transpired were planted, or perhaps they began long before. Tiberius emptied his wine and burped. ‘We did find gold,’ he said. ‘Lots of gold.’
To him, it seemed to Lancelot, their mission therefore had been a success.
‘In those black pyramids,’ Leviticus said. ‘Smaller than the Egyptian ones, you see. But filled with precious artefacts for the afterlife which we, well, liberated, as it were. For our troubles.’
‘To finance the quest,’ the master said quietly.
‘Right, right. Exactly.’
‘There were a lot of corpses,’ Leviticus said.
‘Mummies,’ the master said.
‘Fucking mummies!’ Tiberius said. Then his head dropped on his chest and he began to snore.
*
Now he sits and stares at the fire. The pussy cat yawns. Lancelot turns a rabbit on a stick over the coals. He’d broken down earlier and gone hunting, though he doesn’t trust these foreign forests and their traps.
But now it’s good. He sits and listens to the quiet. Leaves rustling in the wind. Breathes in the sweet smell of wood smoke. The smell of roasting rabbit. His stomach growls. Go north tomorrow. Try and find some clues. Stick to the plan. Somewhere out there, there’s gold.
He tears a strip of meat. The fat burns his fingers. He sucks it off his fingers. It’s good, but the animal’s so bony. The cat yawns. He passes her
a morsel and she swallows it whole. He smiles at her. He listens to the quiet. The rustling of falling leaves.
The sound of a horse’s hooves, approaching. He cleans his hands. He reaches for the sword. The horse stops in the trees. He hears a rider dismount. Footsteps. Lancelot rises and turns in one smooth motion, the sword Secace in his hand.
Sees Agravain, standing half in shadow.
Says, ‘Surely, not again!’
48
‘I’m sorry, master.’ Agravain is bare-handed. He stands submissive. He says, ‘May I approach?’
‘I don’t see why you should.’
The knight reaches slowly for a side bag. Holds it up. ‘I brought sausages,’ he says.
‘…Then you may come.’
He watches Agravain. The man comes timidly. A brutish lad, a city rat of fair Londinium.
‘Stop.’
He searches him, but the boy’s clean.
‘Sit.’
‘Thank you.’
Agravain sits. He sees the cat. His eyes widen slightly.
‘Mistress,’ he says.
The cat purrs.
‘Well?’ Lancelot says.
The boy reaches into the bag. Brings out sausages, bread, small pickled onions, a side of ham, half a roast chicken.
Lancelot nods.
They eat.
The boy shares in the food but leaves the most of it for Lancelot. Lancelot offers more morsels to the cat. The cat licks the tips of his fingers, her tongue rough on his skin. She purrs.
‘What do you want, then?’
‘I never saw a man fight like you do.’
‘It was barely a fight,’ Lancelot says. ‘And someone, I presume, gave you some basic training in the arts. Who was it? I had asked you once before.’
The boy, of all things, blushes. ‘A traveller, from beyond the sea. She passed through Londinium—’
‘She?’
The boy nods.
Lancelot broods, but surely it is impossible.
‘Did she give you her name?’ he says at last.
‘She called herself Sebile,’ the boy says.
Lancelot stares at the fire. But surely it’s impossible, he thinks.
‘How long ago?’
