By Force Alone

by Lavie Tidhar

  ‘Two, three months back.’

  ‘Where did she go?’

  ‘North, lord,’ the boy says.

  Lancelot is shook. But he won’t think about this now.

  ‘So what do you want?’ he says.

  ‘Lord, I brought some cannabis, too,’ the boy says, eager to please. ‘Grown in the king’s own new fields outside the city.’

  ‘Alright.’

  The boy extracts the buds from a small string bag. Places them on a hot stone by the fire. The smell takes Lancelot back. His old master and the Order of the Seekers in their meetings liked to use it, just as the ancient Greek oracles were said to do. He breathes in. The cat blinks at him and settles head on paws.

  Lancelot likes the smell. The air released is soothing.

  ‘Well?’ he says.

  ‘Lord?’

  ‘I am no lord. And I won’t ask again. What is it you want?’

  ‘You are travelling north?’

  ‘So it would seem.’

  ‘Take me with you.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  The boy stares into the fire. ‘My king is there. I would go to him.’

  ‘So?’

  The boy raises dark eyes. He stares intently at Lancelot. ‘My king has need of men. Good men. Men like you.’

  ‘There are no good men,’ Lancelot says.

  ‘Sir. I would have you teach me.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I would that you were… I mean… If it pleases you to learn me—’

  ‘Boy!’ Lancelot says, shocked out of his stupor. The fumes of the cannabis really are most refreshing on the mind. He feels a pleasant heaviness in his limbs and his mind seeks flight in flights of fancy.

  ‘Of course, you’re right, it wouldn’t do,’ the boy says, abashed. ‘Only, master – I have never seen one fight as you did.’

  ‘What of this Sebile you mentioned?’

  The boy blushes. ‘Sir, we did more fighting of the other kind, if you take my meaning.’

  ‘She fucked you and she left you? Well good for Sebile. What did you give her that she needed?’

  ‘Sir?’

  Lancelot sighs. ‘She must have wanted something from you.’

  Thinks – she always did.

  *

  ‘This is bullshit,’ Iblis said. She and Lancelot had gone off on their own in the night as the master and his guests slumbered in drunken sleep.

  ‘What is it this time?’ Lancelot said grumpily. He and Iblis were both raised and trained by the master. They were like brother and sister – but siblings did not necessarily have to like each other. He thought she was a cold, nasty piece of work, who’d torture a man with hot blades just to see him cry.

  She thought he was a useless limp dick who couldn’t throw a punch to save his life.

  They both competed for the master’s good grace against each other – which was no doubt as the master intended.

  ‘He’s after another star stone again.’

  ‘Well, when wasn’t he?’ Lancelot said, yawning.

  ‘Some years back,’ Iblis said, ignoring him, ‘there was a year with no summer.’

  ‘Before my time.’

  ‘And mine. But nonetheless. It got very cold and a dense dry fog fell on the lands hereby.’

  ‘So? I’ve heard the master bring the subject up a couple of times already.’

  ‘More than a couple. It is high on Order’s list of Incognita Natura.’

  ‘Iblis, will you get to the fucking point already? Who gives a shit about something that happened before you were even born?’

  ‘While you were… incapacitated on your little winter retreat in Smyrna,’ she said, and he winced at the venom in her voice, ‘the master and I heeded the urgent summons of that prune-faced fuck-weasel over there.’

  ‘Leviticus?’

  ‘Yeah. Come quick, he said. Important news, he said. So we drop everything and schlepp half across Byzantium to New Rome, where they do a good line in Christianity and the emperor has a magical garden full of automaton trees and bird simulacra. We snuck in there one night to see it. It’s a shame you missed it.’

  ‘I was busy,’ Lancelot said. ‘You know how it is, when you’re having a good time in prison.’

  ‘Yes, well. Would have come for you sooner, only… Anyway, they have the Imperial Library and a whole culture dedicated to collecting shit. They have the Crown of Thorns and a piece of the True Cross and, if you go down to the market, there’d be half a dozen touts offering to sell you a shard of Jesus’s bone, a thumb or a locket of hair, with prices to suit all pockets. I swear, if you put all those pieces of Jesus together in one place you’d get a four-armed giant with seven fingers on each hand, five eyes and ten dicks of differing sizes. Which, you know…’

  ‘A girl can dream,’ Lancelot said.

  ‘Fuck you. Anyway, where was I?’

  ‘Constantinople.’

  ‘Right. New Rome my ass. And the hotels are extortionate. Still, it’s kind of impressive, if you’re visiting.’

  ‘You know, I have been there before,’ Lancelot said.

  ‘Right. When we robbed the vaults of the Bank of Justinus.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Well that was a shitshow.’

  ‘That it was,’ Lancelot said, wincing. They’d come up against David’s Gibborim, an independent outfit of Jewish exiles, paramilitaries who were – as it turned out – in charge of the bank’s security. They’d managed to get away, and Lancelot got a slash on his arm and Iblis couldn’t walk for a month, but the master got what he’d come for – whatever it was. Another artefact, something to prove definitively that some tribe beyond the Sahara was in communication with the Dog Star, or some such shit.

  ‘So what was the summons all about?’ Lancelot said.

  ‘Right, yeah. So this asshole Leviticus pulls another fast one on the master. A witness. Some dim-witted Brittonic slave that Leviticus acquired somewhere off some Germans. Saxons are all over that fucking island now, apparently. So off we trudge to fucking Constantinople. And out comes this eyewitness. Who tells the master, oh, that weather thing, that must have been the dragon what done it. So the master says, what dragon. And the man says, why, the dragon what flew over Britain that year. So the master gets all excited and he starts questioning the slave, and before you know it the man is drawing weird clouds, and Leviticus brings out an atlas and old maps of Britain when it was still at least partially civilised by the Romans, and they’re working out the angle of the sun and the direction of the wind and fuck knows what – I was surprised they didn’t call a fortune teller to augur the omens of success or otherwise in the entrails of chickens. And so.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Don’t you get it?’ Iblis said. ‘He wants to go there.’

  Lancelot laughed.

  Like the fool he was! He laughed.

  ‘Go where?’ he said.

  ‘To that island. Britain.’

  ‘Britain?’ He still couldn’t take it seriously. ‘But there’s nothing there! No one’s even been there for, well, years! It’s just some backwater shithole former colony the legions left just as soon as they could. I bet there isn’t even a decent toilet.’

  ‘Do you have any idea what it’s like, there?’ Iblis said. ‘Cold! Damp. Miserable. The natives are half-savages, the Germans are overrunning half the coastal areas, the native warlords are scrabbling like dogs over a rat, the roads are in disrepair, there are no working hot baths and there isn’t even a library.’

  Lancelot winced.

  ‘And it lies beyond the back of the fucking beyond,’ she said. ‘To get there we’d have to leave everything we know, cross savage Germania and Gaul, filled with ghost-chocked forests, warring pig-men, rain and snow, and if by some miracle we’ve done that we still have a sea crossing just to get to the fucking place. And who knows what’s actually out there.’

  ‘What’s your point, Iblis?’ Lancelot said. He felt a headache coming on.

 
‘My point, you stupid fuck, is that if you go there, you ain’t never coming back.’

  *

  He thinks about it now. Doesn’t want to, but does. That fateful conversation and its consequences. He strokes the cat. She purrs. Agravain is silent by the fire.

  ‘I have never taken on an apprentice before,’ Lancelot says.

  The boy speaks not.

  ‘One cannot serve two masters,’ Lancelot says.

  ‘Sir… My king has need of men such as yourself.’

  ‘So you keep saying.’

  ‘There’s work to do,’ the boy insists. ‘The king has enemies, and those enemies have hefty bounties on their heads.’

  ‘The Six Kings?’

  ‘Five, now. They say Urien is no more.’

  Lancelot considers.

  ‘Whose is the heftiest?’ he says.

  ‘Leir. He is the most dangerous.’

  ‘I’ve taken bounty work before,’ Lancelot says.

  ‘I rather thought you might have.’

  ‘Still. I have my own quest.’

  ‘But your pockets are empty, sir,’ the boy says shrewdly. ‘And a job’s a job.’ He looks sideways at Lancelot. ‘And two swords on the road are better than one. The north’s a savage place. Let me serve you, master.’

  Lancelot nods. But whether in assent or no he doesn’t say. He gets up from the fire and goes to his bedding under an ash.

  Bounty hunting, he thinks.

  And he thinks – fucking Germania.

  49

  His name was Parzival and the local chieftain, for whatever reason, wanted him dead.

  Germania. It really was as bad as Iblis had made it sound back in Nineveh. The forests were dark and there was snow on the ground and the maidens all had wrestlers’ arms. There was all kind of death magic in those forests and the trees were decorated with the swastika symbols of the Saxons.

  Fucking Germania. It was a miracle they’d made it out of there alive.

  What transpired after Nineveh was just as Iblis had predicted. The master had decreed one last voyage. One last attempt, he said, to find the grail. He had gathered them one day, in the ruined temple of Tiamat, and laid out his plan. He had maps and charts from the Imperial Library in Constantinople, and small treasure provided by the Order. He showed them the path they would need to follow.

  ‘From the coast there,’ he stabbed a finger at the map, ‘we can charter a ship to the island. The Germans have been raiding that part of the world for years – from what I hear they’ve even started establishing colonies. Once we get there we’ll track the original crash path of the star stone.’

  ‘But master,’ Lancelot protested, ‘we’d never make it there. This whole part of the world’s fallen to barbarity. It’s filled with hostile tribes. There’s no more Roman safety, no legions to keep the peace, the roads must be full of robbers, and you know the Germans’ reputation for mass murder.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ the master said. ‘They were merely protecting their lands against the Romans. And we are but humble travellers, boy. We’ve done this a hundred times and more. Why, in my youth, I had—’

  But before he could launch into yet another story, Iblis interrupted.

  ‘Master, is this wise?’ she said. She used her most reasonable voice. She could be many things to many people, when she wanted to. ‘The cold is bad for your bones, you know it is. And the road is long, and dangerous, and the climate inauspicious. Besides, didn’t you say you have always wanted to investigate the old sites of Sodom and Gomorrah? They are a far likelier site of a falling star stone, seeing as how they perished in flame from the heavens, and besides, the air of the great salt sea and the heat of the desert will do wonders for your lungs. Why don’t we—’

  The master looked at her coldly.

  ‘Are you calling me old, Iblis?’ he said.

  ‘No, master, I merely suggest—’

  ‘Suggest nothing!’

  It was the closest Lancelot had ever seen the master come to open fury.

  ‘I am Joseph of Arimathea, third of that name, Commander of the Inner Circle of the Venerated Secret Brotherhood of the Seekers of the Grail, Master of the Death Palm, Answerer of the Sphinx’s Riddle, Finder of Lost Punt, and all around fucking bad-ass. And you tell me I am too old? I will cross Germania if I have to tear the throat of every hearthweru and foederati between here and Colonia, if I have to fucking swim the sea to reach Britannia, and if I have to crawl through flame to find the fucking grail! So children, are you coming with me? Or will you be left behind, to wonder forever at the mysteries not solved, at the riddle not answered? For if you do not have loyalty, children, then you have nothing in this world, and I may as well kill you now, and spare you the agony of living without honour. So what will it be, Iblis? What will it fucking be!’

  Lancelot cringed. But Iblis stayed cool. ‘I am sorry, master. My worry for you has made me forget your awesome powers. We will follow you, gladly. Of course we will. And to the ends of the Earth itself.’

  ‘To the ends of the Earth itself, and beyond,’ the master said, and his eyes gleamed.

  ‘Beyond, of course.’

  ‘The heavens!’

  ‘Yes, master.’

  ‘Yes, master!’

  ‘Shut up! Now, both of you, go pack up your shit. I’m going to take a nap.’

  ‘Yes, master.’

  ‘Yes, master.’

  The master stormed off to his bedding.

  Lancelot and Iblis stared at each other.

  ‘I t—’

  ‘Don’t say it,’ Lancelot said.

  ‘I t—’

  ‘Don’t say it!’

  ‘I told you so.’

  ‘Well, fuck,’ Lancelot said; with feeling.

  *

  Why this Parzival fellow deserved to be hunted was anyone’s guess. His mother died of heartache – some said poison – and his father ran off to marry some Nubian princess in a land called Zazamanc. This Parzival grew up in court and fancied himself a sort of knight. That seemed to mostly involve the usual highway robbery and protection racket. He married, but his betrothed, Condwiramurs, was left shortly after the nuptials with a child quickening in her womb and no husband to be found. As to what he actually did to piss anyone off, Lancelot truly didn’t know. Whatever it was, the chieftain in this part of the world really hated Parzival, and was offering a handsome reward for anyone who brought him back the man’s head.

  At this point of their voyage the master was rather poorly, and all three of them were short on funds. Iblis had taken to throwing knives at the trees. Lancelot, meanwhile, fostered closer inter-cultural relations between Byzantium and the lands of the Saxons, by making the acquaintance of a maiden named Orgeluse. There were places she expected him to put his tongue that he’d never even known you could go.

  ‘Shit eater,’ Iblis said.

  ‘Fuck you,’ Lancelot said.

  ‘If only,’ Iblis said. ‘Everyone here’s a pig.’

  ‘Your standards are too high.’

  ‘And you don’t have any.’

  ‘Silence!’ the master said. ‘This Parzival should be an easy job. Easy enough that even you two nincompoops can manage not to fuck it up. Hopefully. So go. According to the locals he’s holed up in something called the Red Castle, on the way to the coast. Which is where we should be heading anyway. I’ll follow you when I’ve… recuperated.’

  He coughed. He was not a well man anymore. Exposure to various dangerous metals on his many voyages had left Joseph of Arimathea with a skin as yellow as cheap parchment, no hair – not even eyebrows – and an increasing reliance on poppy juice. Which he was running low on. He was sweating now, and his hands shook. Lancelot felt sorry for him.

  ‘Yes, master,’ he said.

  ‘Gladly, master,’ Iblis said.

  She collected her knives, throwing stars and spear. Lancelot got his sword and his daggers. There was no point to using horses in the thick forests. He paid a quick goodbye call on Org
eluse, and left her with lingering regret, his clothes in disarray, a small food hamper and two bottles of decent red wine.

  ‘Alright?’ Iblis said acidly.

  ‘Lead the way,’ Lancelot said.

  Iblis melted quietly into the dark of the trees.

  Lancelot followed.

  *

  They moved like shadows, and not even the wild forest animals of those primordial woods noted their passing. They moved with an exhilarating rush of speed, leaping between trunks and from treetop to treetop, as wild as birds. Lancelot never felt more alive than when he was doing this, with no need for conscious thought, no reason beyond the pursuit of speed. As they fled through the dawn and into day and through to night again, all the ridiculous, deadly forces that had shaped his life melted away. For that brief time, he had no master.

  He was free.

  Lancelot and Iblis moved as one. They were perfectly coordinated, wordless in their communication, knowing each other’s minds by subtle clues in the shift of a toe hold, in the turn of an eye. They did not speak, they merely were. In that and that alone they were perfectly matched, entirely at peace with each other. They may hate each other, he thought, but they also made each other complete.

  The master and Iblis. They were the only family Lancelot knew.

  They sped through the dark of the forest, unwilling to slow down, unwilling to stop. They saw many strange things in the forest. A herd of aurochs, stealing through a clearing in the moonlight. A giant bear, fighting off a pack of wolves in deadly silence. A unicorn lapping at a spring. They saw witches dance around a fire, saw hunters with their faces masked in blood, stalking human prey. They did not stop. They were addicted to the rush of passing.

  At last they did have to stop, however. They found themselves on a precipice, under the awning of an ancient oak, with bats nesting in its branches. Sweat dripped down Lancelot’s face. Iblis, beside him, was breathing heavily. They had run until day and night blended into one.

  Below them was the castle.

  It was not, in truth, a castle. The Saxons’ architectural leanings did not go in the direction of Roman-style fortifications. What it was was—

  ‘A fucking burial mound?’ Iblis said. ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.’